USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Stockbridge > Stockbridge, 1739-1939; a chronicle > Part 19
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When a company of young men went off to fight, half the village followed them to the station. Women were busy as in the Revolution, but in a different way. "Nothing pleases me better," wrote Catherine Sedgwick, "than the zeal among our young women in working for the hospitals. We hear no gossip but the most rational talk about hospital gowns, com- fortable socks, and mittens. Our whole community, from
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Mrs. Kemble down to some of our Irish servants, are knitting."
As time went on anxiety took the place of enthusiasm. Bull Run, Fredericksburg, and the horrors of Libby Prison, like water beating upon rock, eroded hopes of a speedy victory. Catherine's letters, tremulous now with age, echo a sense of strain, grief over a nephew killed, belief in a righteous cause. Slavery and the Union had turned into daily reality. Far removed though the village was from the scene of action, the young men who did not come home brought the war to its very doorstep.
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Chapter XII
THE RESORT
I N the thirty years that followed the Civil War, Stockbridge became to the outward eye an entirely different village from the one in which Catherine Sedgwick had grown up. In 1893, she would hardly have known it, "with all the bright and sumptuous villas that have sprung up on every side." It was now a summer resort, and homespun subsistence farming and little manufactures tended to fade out as the business of summer came to be the town's livelihood. But so quietly and gradually did the change come about, that it was a long time before people realized that anything had happened. Intent upon pursuing the even tenor of its way, Stockbridge did not look up and see the new village until it, in its turn, had aged and mellowed and become the old village.
The first trains, that had heaved themselves up into the valley with such difficulty, had cut a new kind of channel of communication with the world. The stagecoach, clattering over the roads in the old days, had poured life into the manu- facturing interests of the town. The railroads, linking these interests to the large industrial centers, had the effect of draining that life off. Big business sweeping over the country through these new arteries swallowed up little business, and Curtisville was sidetracked. All its fine manu- factures fell into disrepair and the business depression of 1857 gave it a final push. The tanneries disappeared and Lester Avery's factories at Glendale languished and died.
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The trains of the second generation were larger and sturdier than the early pioneers. Importantly gushing forth cinders and black smoke, they roared up from New York, first stopping for breath at Stamford, where the passengers might partake of a refreshing cup of coffee or a plate of oysters. They were the "summer people" and must be coddled and catered to in every way, for henceforth they were to be the essential livelihood of the Berkshires. Clark W. Bryan, an enterprising promoter employed by the railroad interests, tempted the well-to-do city dweller into the country: "When travelers have the breezy hills of Berkshire for a destination [they are] often found wishing for the wings of the wind that the desired haven of rest and recreation may be reached with a loss of the least possible fragment of time." They were assured that a treat among wild and picturesque scenery awaited them, combined with all the refinements of a city life. There they could "draw closer the silken cord of social intercourse and yet throw loose some of its galling chains." There "nature ennobles by her greatness but never chills with a frown." There was nothing extreme about the Berkshires, nothing in the least uncomfortable.
The change that the summer people brought to Stock- bridge was gentler and less abrupt than the transformation of Lenox, where farm land rose from fifty to one thousand dollars an acre and Swiss Chalets, Tudor and Elizabethan castles, and even an imitation of the Petit Trianon, rose upon the astonished slopes of the hills. Money with fashion in its wake poured into Lenox and the scene in 1893 is glowingly described by Susan Teale Perry: ". .. superb roads that in the season are full of gay equestrians and dashing turnouts, handsome women holding the reins of prancing thorough- breds who drive over the hills with the groom sitting behind with folded arms. Beautiful children drive about in village carts, gayly talking and laughing, while the
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barefooted boy and girl of the farmhouse look on with covetous eyes."
The pace was slower in Stockbridge, the scale smaller, and it was admittedly less fashionable. "In Lenox they estimate their neighbors, in Stockbridge we esteem them," the village liked to tell itself. But the people who built the villas-or cottages, as they were sometimes misleadingly called-liked a generous and expansive way of life and could pay for it. The houses they put up were of the most durable materials. They were substantial affairs of stone, brick, and ironmongery, and one can fairly feel today the solidity of the incomes on which they were built. Matthew Arnold, looking at them through his monocle in 1886, found the "villa cottages original and at the same time very pleasing, but they are pretty and coquettish, not beautiful."
This period of the villas was remarkable for the character of the men who built them. They were, for the most part, men who had achieved distinction elsewhere and come to Stockbridge to spend the summers of their maturing years, Unlike the literary group of an earlier day, they were no birds of passage, but had come with a view to settling down. Charles E. Butler had been one of the first arrivals. In 1859 he built Linwood whose unpolished-marble look of inde- structibility was not destroyed by the flimsy and fashionable gingerbread of the day. It stands on a lovely site overlooking a loop of the river as it winds to Glendale. Here he settled his family of six children. He married for a second time Susan, sister of Henry Dwight Sedgwick, of the third gener- ation of this family.
Arrogant, stern, and just-that was Mr. Butler. He was one of the most able figures of his day at the New York bar, but nevertheless is remembered as terrifying as he looked down from that awful eminence on little boys. "Well, did you bring your dinner with you? You may eat it in the coal
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hole!" This favorite greeting, to a nephew who came to Sunday lunch, was hard to take as a joke. He drove down to the livery stable one morning and, seeing a likely-looking lad polishing up the harness, sent word that he would employ that boy. Pulling his forelock, the boy hastily did as he was told and entered into Mr. Butler's service, where he remained for the next thirty years.
Mrs. Butler was the appropriate counterpart. She was gentle and loving, adored by her stepchildren and, indeed, the whole village. She often drove out in her two-seated open carriage. Isaac, the mulatto coachman, sat on the box, clearly the irreproachable family servant, his looped whip carried at just the correct angle. The horses, resplendent in shining harness and beaded wih foam, tossed their well-bred heads, and Hector, the spotted coach dog, ran underneath the carriage. It was a turnout that said to the admiring pedes- trian that there were other turnouts in the stable, equally good of their kind: a high carriage and a low carriage; a rockaway and a depot wagon; and, certainly, a smart brougham. It clearly bespoke the Butlers, the plutocrats of the village.
If Stockbridge was obliged to take Mr. Butler seriously, he in return took Stockbridge seriously. He and his neighbor, Mr. Southmayd, contributed largely to the building of two iron bridges at the west end of the town, which were called at the time "models of pontic architecture." In 1883, when the first Episcopal church was taken down, he gave a fine new church to the parish in memory of his second wife, who had died several years before. Charles McKim was the architect, but Mr. Butler stood at his elbow while he drew the plans. When the church was completed he told the assembled congregation that if it did not meet every aesthetic standard it was his fault, not McKim's. "My desire was," he said, "to
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build a church of an extremely enduring character." So it stands today, solid and permanent as Linwood itself.
Mr. Butler, curiously enough, was a Unitarian, and the Reverend Arthur Lawrence, rector for many years, always tactfully avoided preaching the sermon on Trinity Sunday, delegating this duty to his curate. Mr. Lawrence, a man of extraordinary good looks, was respected by his congregation- even its Unitarian wing-and warmly admired by the ladies. It was his conversation that Matthew Arnold found as inter- esting as any in Stockbridge.
Butler generosity did not exhaust itself in one generation and Mr. Butler's daughter, Virginia, will long be remem- bered for her kindness. A long cape thrown about her shoulders and a tall staff in her hand, she stumped about the village, an eccentric but veritable fairy godmother. Univer- sally kind, she had a particularly soft spot in her heart for dogs and Episcopal clergymen.
Charles F. Southmayd lived next door to the Butlers. It is said that he was in love with Mr. Butler's Junoesque daughter, Rosalie, and had therefore built himself a substantial willow cabin at her gates. There was a path that connected the two places, but Rosalie never availed herself of the opportunity it afforded and Mr. Southmayd remained a bachelor. He was a genius at the law and the very sub- structure of that most imposing of firms, Butler, Evarts and Southmayd. He wore black broadcloth small-clothes- buttoned with a square flap in front like a sailor's-a high, stiff, pointed collar with a stock, and looked like a Cruikshank illustration of a solicitor. He belonged to that school of thought, now vanished, that believed in living upon the income of one's income, and all his actions were marked by extreme legal caution. Although he owned an excellent pair of horses and a carriage, he rode to his office in New York in the latter part of his life in a cab. When questioned upon
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this point, he explained that it was because of the common- law rule of respondeat superior. "If I hire a cab and an accident occurs, I incur no liability. That falls upon the owner."
Joseph Hodges Choate, a younger partner of Butler, Evarts and Southmayd, built his house upon the Hill in 1887. Urbane, handsome and clever, Stockbridge adored him and his witticisms were handed about like some particu- larly rich and delightful kind of sugarplums. "Did you hear what Mr. Choate said about the cemetery fence?" someone would say. "When he was asked to subscribe money for it, he said he thought it hardly necessary, as no one who was in wanted to get out, and no one who was out wanted to get in."
It was a constant source of pride and pleasure to read about him in the newspapers. There was the time in 1895 when he fought the constitutionality of the graduated income-tax law before the Supreme Court. It was his greatest case, performing as it did the incredible feat of making the Supreme Court reverse its former decision. The tax demanded that the rich man should pay proportionately far more than the poor man toward the cost of government. Stockbridge took an intense interest in the case, for not only did Choate argue it, but Southmayd was roused out of his ten years of retirement to write the brief. "Most men have five senses," Mr. Choate remarked, "but Southmayd has a sixth sense, very keen and powerful-a sense of property." It was delightful later, to read accounts of him when he was sent in 1899 as Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, and to pass around cartoons of Mr. Choate and Queen Victoria, or Mr. Choate leaning against the speakers' table, cultivating friendly international relations.
Matthew Arnold spent a few months in Laurel Cottage in 1886, an Indian-summer flowering of the literary group. He was thirty years too late to be welcomed by Catherine
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Sedgwick or to sympathize with Hawthorne about the disagreeable climate. "The heat is great in summer and in winter the cold is excessive," he wrote. However, his impression was in the main a pleasant one and he wrote back to his daughter, after his return to England: "You cannot think how often Stockbridge and its landscape come into my mind. None of the cities could attach me, not even Boston, but I could get fond of Stockbridge."
More people were coming all the time but not so fast or so many that they were not easily assimilated into the village friendliness. It was still many years before Miss Agnes Canning would return from her walk spluttering, "I don't know what Stockbridge is coming to. I saw two people in the street this morning whom I never saw before." The Lucius Tuckermans came in the '70's, buying from Mr. Thomas Wells the simple old farmhouse that stood where the Indian boarding school had been. Sprouting piazza and gable, it acquired a fancy name and became the villa, Ingleside. The Frederic Crowninshields came about the same time as the Choates. Mr. Crowninshield was the fore- runner of the artistic group that was to arrive a little later. Tall and spare, paint box in hand, he could often be seen making his way on his bicycle toward a view which he would reproduce in landscapes of meticulous fidelity.
Stockbridge was now giving every attention to its appear- ance, that it should be furbished out to match the elegance of the villas. A newspaper commented that it was too bad the tombstones should not be painted green, they showed so white and staring from the Hill. This concern for its good looks was not of recent date. As early as 1853 Mary Hopkins, own cousin to Mark, had founded a village improvement society which had the distinction of being the first in America.
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This forward-looking young lady had started out on her white horse, clad in a long black riding habit. Up hill, down dale she rode, now drawing up to argue with some citizen with a sluggish and unprogressive mind, now swooping down from the saddle to whisk up a bit of waste paper. The Laurel Hill Association was named for the knoll, behind the schoolhouse, which had been a gift to the town from the Sedgwick family in 1834, and here its annual anniversary meeting took place. In the early minutes it is stated: "Every person over 14 years of age who shall plant and protect a tree . . . or pay the sum of one dollar annually shall be a member of this Association." By 1866 so many young trees had been set out that the Laurel Hill minutes boldly predicted a day when "ye next generation [will] be able to ride through ye length & breadth of old Berkshire during ye heats of summer with all ye comfort of pedestrians beneath ye green & cool arcades of ye forest, & dust & wheels alone distinguish ye drive from ye stroll." In 1880 there was a scare from a malaria epidemic which seemed to be extending up the Connecticut and Housatonic valleys. Medical authorities in alarm argued that it was the excess of shade trees that had been planted. Of course, if this were so, the Laurel Hill Association was the first to agree that hygienic considerations must override all others and "ye axe must decimate our arborific darlings with ruthless surgery to ye point where aesthetics & safety may wed & be happy." Lawn mowers were coming into use, and Laurel Hill commented on the clipped English look the village was assuming and pointed with pride to the fact that the trees were trimmed, whose lower branches interfered with "ye head-gear of tall pedes- trians & umbrellas."
There were occasional setbacks to the beauty campaign. A bill presented to the town authorities to make them respon- sible for the removal of the Canada thistle from the highway
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was killed "apparently by the pressure of other (tho scarcely less important) reforms." Cattle were recalcitrant and refused to go straight to pasture in a businesslike manner but strayed and nibbled about in the streets and private gardens to the vast annoyance of the citizens. Tidy Court was a Laurel Hill institution and sat in judgment upon the reckless litterer of waste paper, old bottles and banana peels. Streets, spruced up and planted with trees, must have names to match. The Plain called itself Main Street, imitating every other town in the country. Church Street replaced the ignominious Poverty Lane, while Pine Street climbed up the historic old Hill.
One feels the steam-roller energy of Mrs. J. Z. Goodrich, née Mary Hopkins, behind many of these refurbishings. Whether it was twenty kerosene lamps to light the street (only on moonless nights) in 1868, an awning over the speaker's head on the rostrum on Laurel Hill, the first flat- arch constructed bridge in existence, built at her own expense, or a piece of George Washington's coffin presented to the Library, nothing was too big or too little to call forth her powers. The Laurel Hill Association, her child, let not a Canada thistle grow under its feet. Perhaps she is best remembered by something still to be mentioned. Feeling it appropriate to memorialize in some way the old owners of the soil, she raised enough money in 1877 to erect a stone- shaft obelisk-shaped by nature -- on the ancient burying ground of the Indians. "The Burial place of the Housatonic Indians, the Friends of our Fathers" was cut into the base of what is known today as the Indian Monument.
If it was a model village-"a mecca of refinement, litera- ture, morality and religious," according to a flattering newspaper-the Laurel Hill Association was the embodiment of all its virtues. Once a year in the late summer, Stockbridge, in its best sprigged muslin, climbed the lovely little knoll to
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celebrate its Anniversary Day. This was the peak of the summer season, the climax of another year of self-improve- ment and everyone turned out to enjoy it. Young blades struck attitudes against trees as they bent whispering over beribboned bonnets of an appropriate age. The elderly and infirm sat in carriages on the outskirts of the crowd and the youngest children were brought to toddle uncertainly from one group to another beneath the checkered shade of the great trees. The band played, and a "literary treat" was provided to an audience which enjoyed an infinite appetite for oratory. In 1871, when Mrs. Rev. Dr. Field, "the first lady speaker upon our rostrum," had delivered a delightful address of three-quarters of an hour on "The Country Life of Woman" the afternoon had just begun. Five clergymen followed each other in not very rapid succession, "after which further exercises were discontinued in favor of some Terpsichorean practice on ye turf by ye more youthful portions of ye assembly." The burden of the distinguished speakers' song was always the same, and when one of them stated that Stockbridge was not so very different from Heaven, he found an echoing response in every heart.
Henry Dwight Sedgwick was president of the Laurel Hill Association for many years. He abandoned the law in New York in 1880 to come home and make a life of agreeable leisure his profession. This Mr. Sedgwick had gone so far afield as to marry his own first cousin. He was the most benignant of men, a gentler edition of the Judge, with all the harsh lines and uncomfortable angles smoothed out and softened down. He lacked, also, some of the Judge's practical sense. He had trusted his money to a plausible fellow in New York who had promptly made off with it, with the result that he was forced to practice a strict economy as best he could. Once, because he could get it at a bargain, he bought a large consignment of note paper with a mourning band.
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BOARDING TABLE
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THE RESORT
The family was obliged to use it for years, loudly complaining that no one would die. He acquired also an odd assortment of gloves with no thought for the sizes, and his children were provided for years with very durable but ill-fitting gloves.
The plain old Sedgwick house was put into Victorian dress, painted dark brown on the inside with a piece of stained glass here, a piece of statuary there, and what looked to the children like a series of chocolate drops geometrically arranged on the parlor ceiling. But it retained its essential character, bursting with children as it always had, and lavish with hospitality. As in the earlier generation it was a link between the world outside and the village within its Cranford frame.
Stockbridge was set in its ways, and as late as 1880 still thought itself more or less a farming community. A pig, a side of beef, and a barrel of cider were still the staples of a Berkshire winter, with the canned delicacies of last summer's work standing in solid rows upon the cupboard shelves. Pittsfield and Great Barrington were still beyond the horizon for shopping and entertainment, and fun was home- made, except on the occasions when itinerant theatrical troupes came to Music Hall. Uncle Tom's Cabin was sure to be played once every two or three years, and a magician in full evening dress with suspicious black whiskers could always delight the audience by pulling silver dollars out of some farmer's hair.
One of the children who passed his boyhood in the Sedg- wick house, remembers some of the familiar figures of the time:
"Mr. Hofmayer must have come from Germany, for he bore the aspect of one of those Central European inhabitants, of Bohemia or Ruthenia, who look to be not remotely descended from the Kobolds. His hair was black, his eyes
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were black, his beard was black, and there was a kindly look of triumphant disinclination to remove the appropriate blackness from his forehead, nose and cheeks. He was always friendly, smiling, radiating that pleasant sense of savoir vivre that Americans born have never learned. He was at times, as I remember, a cobbler, at times a fishmonger, with a little cart; it may have had bells, but I don't remember. There was something of the spirit of Christmas in him; he would have made an excellent Saint Nick.
"Jimmy Caffrey was an Irishman. Short, bandy-legged, I fear he suffered from rheumatism, and his occupation was that of hedger, one of the race of swanked hedgers that carry me back to the graveyards of Old England and, I suppose, of southern Ireland. He had a grand pair of clippers, albeit a little rusty, and clipped the graveyard hedge. That hedge must have been very fertile, for I can't remember seeing him cut anything else. He was always there on summer days, benevolent and a bit of an artist in his own eyes, but ready to chat. He was very short and I can't guess how he managed to clip the tops of the hedge; that must have been the problem that occupied his mind, as he stood ruminating thoughtfully, on those little bandy legs of his, and why he welcomed the distraction of a conversation with any passerby, man or boy.
"At the end of Main Street by the cemetery (where Jimmy Caffrey the hedger worked), Mr. Waters, the postmaster lived, in a little typical New England house. He had a wife, as I remember, and two daughters, the elder very pretty. When I read The Vicar of Wakefield this family comes to my mind; Mr. Waters was a sweet-tempered, philosophic little man, who was very obliging about letters and took life as it came. He had a little thin beard, and reddish lids to his eyes, and his ways were gentle. Next to the little post office by the Episcopal Church, a glorious great tree spread its branches over and far beyond both post office and drugstore.
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The drugstore was kept by Mr. William B. Clarke. I don't know his history. He was always more prosperously dressed than Mr. Waters, and had a more competent manner, but one liked better the gentle, deferential, kindly, and a little bewildered outlook on life that the postmaster showed. I think that Mr. Clarke had a license to sell beer or liquor, or both, and there used to be serious discussions about morality and the village going to the dogs, when empty bottles, which might have come from anywhere, were found of a Sunday morning, lying alongside the street under the stately elms, of which the village was so proud.
"Beyond Mr. Clarke's nearer the Lee end of the Main Street, also marked by a noble tree, was a hideous building where Mr. Dean had a nondescript shop of dry goods and groceries on one side and on the other were offices, I think. Upstairs Sticks Rathbun, the barber, a pleasant youngish man, with a ruddy complexion and a wooden leg, always stimulated, according to the best tradition among barbers, conversation, on the weather, on local politics or local gossip, or prospective sales of houses or cows or pigs. Waiting customers sat round with friends blessed with leisure, especially on winter days, and talked and spat and were very sociable.
"Across the street next to the bank was Mr. George Seymour, the grocer, who also sold (or am I thinking of Mr. Henry Plumb's shop, next door to Mr. Seymour?) fish hooks, cat-gut, sinkers and fish poles, and candy in a glass case at the end of the counter. Mr. Seymour had healthy red cheeks, liked to smoke, was pleasant and courteous to everybody. So was Mr. Henry Plumb, who looked a good deal like Uncle Sam, but he left one with the feeling that he was a little disquieted within, that he entertained apprehensions -- vague but ever-present-of poor business ahead, of diminishing customers, of sickness coming to the village. Hams, onions,
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