USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Stockbridge > Stockbridge, 1739-1939; a chronicle > Part 20
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ears of corn, bits of harness, and other useful things hung from the ceiling at the back of the shop. Customers used to have little books in which purchases charged were noted down and balanced at the end of the month. Between them and the Red Lion Inn (it was just The Hotel in those days) stood the bank as now, very respectable with its classic portico, and with the same respectability inside, affected by people who deal with money, as being a noble occupation. Old Mr. Daniel Williams was the benevolent first citizen of the village. It must have been his successor, who dressed very carefully, was carefully barbered, and walked with dignity to and from his house which was at the end of Main Street. At the time of midday dinner, Mr. Kimball could always be seen, proceeding with high respectability to his house and, at the end of an appropriate period, going back again. But old Mr. Williams belonged to an earlier gener- ation, of what we like to think of as pure American, venerable, benevolent, quietly philosophic and yet with a certain canny aptitude for business.
"Mr. Gourlie and his two sisters lived in the house opposite the hotel and cater-cornered from the Episcopal Church. They were little people-the brother about five feet high, the two ladies shorter, and one shorter than the other-she was the little Miss Gourlie. A friendly family of skunks lived under the house. Mr. Gourlie gave to the village the fountain of the cat and dog fighting. He was a bookish man, and early of a June morning, I suspect on a little constitu- tional before breakfast, he would walk up and down the village street, one hand under his coat-tails, the other holding a stick, with which he gesticulated freely as he spouted: "That is the question, whether it is better-" or "Farewell, the tranquil mind, farewell content-" or "He was perfumed like a milliner and twixt his finger-" for he knew his Shakespeare by heart and he liked the grand passages that
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seemed to add a cubit to his stature, as he strode slowly along.
"Farther down towards the station Mr. J. Z. Goodrich lived. Our curiosity as to what Z stood for was never satis- fied, though there is something in the theory that you learn a good deal about an American, when you know what his middle initial stands for. Mr. Goodrich had served in the Legislature. He must always have been a deliberative man, suspicious of quick minds, and inclined to spend much time in considering whether to put a comma, or a semi-colon. He was a safe, good man, very remote from the Jimmy Caffrey type-dignified, dull. Boys suspected that his house must be a gloomy place to live in. Life treated him inadequately, his understanding failed and, after forty or fifty years of married life, he insisted upon keeping up les convenances which he feared had been disregarded, by a second marriage ceremony with his wife. He gave the Library to the town, a most successfully ugly little building, which (at least in those days) depressed the librarian, and made people speak in unusually sad and muffled tones when they came for books.
"Around the little corner beyond the library stood the tin- smith's shop, kept by Mr. John Van Deusen. He had an aspect like El Greco's favorite model, a grave, solemn, half mystical face, with a long beard. He was very apostolic, the most striking-looking man in town, tall and gaunt, and wearing a shop coat, that must have resembled those the apostles wore on Sundays. Soldering was a most momentous matter, something like a funeral, in his eyes. You couldn't have imagined that he came from the same race as Franz Hals. Possibly his ancestors were Walloons.
"There was Mr. Root, the tax collector. He should have been a Canterbury Pilgrim, for he was quite as worthy as the Reeve of a portrait by Dan Chaucer. He was a little over medium height, but looked taller because of his lean and
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withered appearance, suggestive of a hop pole in November. His cheeks were wrinkled, his brow furrowed, his lips com- pressed-designed by the Almighty from the beginning to be a tax gatherer. His overcoat, not very new, fitted him close, and his pockets never bulged, but lay flat as if to say, "See how empty these humble receptacles of Uncle Sam's dues are." As I look back, though ignorant of our fiscal system, I think he must have collected only the town's taxes, but he gave the appearance of collecting village, town, state, federal, international taxes, as he walked down the street past the cemetery. He liked to walk past it, as if to illustrate the close bond between death and taxes-and he was the only man whom Jimmy Caffrey did not detain for a colloquy. It is likely that Jimmy's dues were small-ordinary humanity often clings to small things-but Mr. Root was inexorable. It was impossible to separate the man from his office, he seemed to have been molten and poured into it, or metamor- phosed by some fiscal God into a tax collector, like Daphne into a laurel. I never knew where he lived, or if he had any human ties. He seemed like a creature of fiscal mechanism, set to a certain stride, to call on certain fixed days, to grin a sardonic smile when the taxed suggested something other than immediate payment. He always had a lonely look, but that was to be expected. Who but sextons, hangmen, unfrocked dentists, or outlaws would hobnob with a tax collector? If, by any kindly chance, he had a wife, a brother, or sister at home, I do not doubt that once within doors-his cap on one peg, his worn overcoat on another, his boots off, his feet stretched towards the fire, a glass of comforting whisky and a newspaper-he became human once again, and that Terence would have dropped in with pleasure for a chat."
Although J. Z. Goodrich gave the building, it was Nathan Jackson who set on foot the movement to have a library,
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when in 1863 he offered $2,000 if the town would raise half that amount. The sum was doubled. Madam Dwight, the widow of the senator, gave the land for the building, which was across the street from her house. She made the provision that the building should be set far enough back not to inter- fere with her clear line of vision down the Main Street. The Library opened its doors to the public in 1864. The town appropriated $300 for its expenses, a librarian was engaged at $20 a month and the trustees congratulated their fellow- citizens on the prospect of this "immediate addition to our means, of Social, Moral and Religious Happiness." By 1880 the library had branches in Curtisville and Glendale, and it was noted in the annual report that the readers in these communities generally selected works of a solid character. Were they reading the works of Jonathan Edwards and Stephen West? Religion was still at a high premium but the cut of its coat had changed in a hundred years. Dean Stanley of Westminster Abbey, on a visit to Henry Field, preached in St. Paul's Church. He relegated Edwards to the shade of nineteenth-century oblivion. "Nothing can be gleaned," he said, "from the thorny speculations with which on this spot the most famous of American divines in the previous age laboured to build up the hard system of Calvin." Dr. West would have been surprised to find the Scripture and Doctrine of Atonement presented to the library as having "more value as a relic than for use."
Culture meant Europe, and travelers brought back books of photographs which were put on display. Three volumes of Picturesque Europe were gifts of Madam Dwight. "This elegant work will remain on ye table for ye inspection of visitors and will prove an unfailing source of gratification to all who have ye opportunity of examining it."
Two years after the Library opened, the village saw the meteoric rise of the wood-pulp industry. It was the first
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manufacture of the raw material for making paper out of wood in this country, and was also to be the swan song of Curtisville. Albert Pagenstecher, a well set-up and enterpris- ing German, came up from New York to visit Mr. Hoffman. While strolling through Curtisville, the same thought came to him that had occurred to Elnathan Curtis so many years before. Here was unused water power; why not try an experiment? He imported from Germany the machines that had just been invented for making wood-pulp. Frederick Wurtzbach brought them over and set them up in a new building completed for their reception. The Smith Paper Company in Lee consented to try out the new material, and it immediately proved successful. For over a year Curtisville held the monopoly on wood-pulp, but the growing demand for it necessitated more water power and more mills. Until 1883 Curtisville turned out its small share, and enjoyed a last business boom before Wurtzbach left to become manager of the larger mills in Lee. Curtisville lapsed again into obscurity until the summer people rediscovered it, admired the view, and Curtisville became Interlaken.
Here John E. Parsons of Lenox, turned the old tavern into St. Helen's Home, a vacation house for city children. David Dudley Field, by then a benign old gentleman, used to make it the object of his afternoon drives. With grandfatherly benevolence he would sit on the piazza and trot the children upon his knee. Mr. Field lived on the top-most peak of the Hill, in a fine house he had just completed, and was enjoying an old age devoted largely to good works. He gave the Ice Glen to the town and offered a Chimes Tower, with clock and bells, in memory of his grandchildren. Stockbridge, always doubtful of innovation, was alarmed. "It would be ugly and quite unnecessary and the chimes would be a daily nuisance," said the conservative faction. "But consider the generosity of Mr. Field in so handsomely remembering the
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old town where he was a boy," retorted the opposition. It was the sort of quarrel that the village has always loved to settle its teeth into. Bonnets passed haughtily past other bonnets-not speaking-and sharp arguments took place over the teacups. The chimes party won out and the tower was put up, a massive structure built to withstand the tests of time. In his deed of gift Field stipulated that the bells should be rung for half an hour at dusk from apple-blossom time until frost. From that day to this, where once the full- throated voices of the Indians were raised up in Dr. Watt's hymns, the chimes ring out Old Black Joe and Swanee River to mark the end of the summer afternoon.
Henry Martyn Field lived near his brother on the Hill. He had remodeled an old farmhouse for his French Henriette into a cottage that would have astonished its original owner. Gambrel and gable deeply disguised The Castle where Ephraim Williams had planned and plotted over a hundred years before. Here Field composed innumerable travel books. Summer Pictures from Copenhagen to Venice and From the Lakes of Killarney to the Golden Horn were best sellers running to twenty editions over the years.
David Dudley and Henry Martyn, secure in successful careers, made a suitable background for Stephen Field, the logical nephew of such uncles. His achievement was to mark the arrival of the modern world, although the village did not pay much attention to it. In 1879, he came back from California to settle down. He was at this time a rising young inventor and had just completed the first long-distance tele- phone line from San Francisco to the summit of the Sierras.
Scientific inventions failed to make a dent in Stockbridge. Even the spectacular long-distance telephone failed to impress a village that looked upon the telephone itself as a new- fangled contraption, useful perhaps in cities. Stephen was just Jonathan Field's boy, grown out of a practical-joking
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boyhood into a burly, genial man, measuring up to the typical Field build of over six feet tall. The neighbors were not particularly impressed with his tinkering in the barn behind his house and, when he invited them over to his back yard one August afternoon to try out a horseless trolley, they were not unduly excited. With skepticism they regarded a small object four feet high and ten feet long, equipped with seats for two, and a gigantic headlight. The tracks gleamed in the sun as they curved around Field's ample lawn, and the first man to climb in beside him winked at the crowd as he jocularly advised Field not to go too fast. Rapidly and efficiently it spun around the lawn amid the plaudits of the company. Field explained that the current was supplied by a third rail placed between the tracks, and was taken up by a shoe which fitted the bottom of the car. He went on to predict that the electric car would be the modern means of transportation. That night, as the neighbors discussed the matter over the evening meal, it was agreed that this was fantastic. It was simply an amusing toy, but certainly very clever of Stephen.
Working quietly in his laboratory for over thirty years, Stephen Field changed the daily life of Stockbridge and of the world beyond. A man takes a trolley to his office in the morning (or he did until recently) . He goes upstairs in an electric elevator, glances at the stock ticker, and puts in a long-distance call. That evening he may send a night message on the way home from the theater, where he has taken the complicated machinery of stage-lighting for granted. His day, at all these points, has been touched by the genius of Field. And yet he has probably never heard of him.
While Field was still perfecting his trolley, the 'go's arrived in a whirl of bicycle wheels and Gibson Girl sailor hats. If one admired the height and luxuriance of the trees planted by the Laurel Hill Association, it was deplorable that the
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Housatonic River was now for the first time sullied by modern plumbing, those waters that Fanny Kemble had declared so pure they should only be used for the baptism of children. The cows that had stared for so long into their translucent depths were now deserting the pastures along the river for sequestered upland meadows. The giant willow tree on South Street, with its staircase and platform with seats for forty people, was gone. It had held the village in its arms in every mood, and flirtations and secrets and story-telling had mingled with the sibilant whispering of its leaves. Even the Stockbridge band, called "Yellow Birds" because of their gay uniforms, sometimes climbed up to surprise the native inhabitants of the old tree, with cornet and cymbal and brass. The little white post office with classic portico and pillar, that once had boasted that it was the first in the county, had gone. The elm had been young then that now looked scornfully down from its magnificent height on the new nonentity of a post office. The elm was the village engagement list.
"You shall read of an auction, a concert, a ball, Of taxes requiring attention. Of a strawberry cramming at Music Hall, Of the bank or a Laurel Hill meeting or call To a caucus or temperance convention."
Any citizen having a grievance vented it in a notice pinned to its seamy side. "The gentleman who left his hat in Mr. Hoffman's melon patch last night can recover it by calling."
A very frenzy of building had seized the town a few years before, and in 1884 it was equipped with town offices of pressed brick, the interior finished in beaded pine. The building was considered to be very "neat and tasteful in architectural design." In 1883, a Methodist church had been erected on the corner of Church Street, through the gen- erosity of Mrs. Henry D. Cone, wife of the last local business magnate. The Cones lived in a Swiss villa flanked by
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greenhouses at the eastern end of Main Street. He was a John Jacob Astor on the Stockbridge scale, president of the Owen and Hurlbut paper mill of South Lee and of the model factories he constructed at Housatonic. He had dreamed of making Housatonic a railroad junction between Boston and Philadelphia and had secured control of a part of the line to that end. But the big railroads paralleled his route, and disaster overtook him and his model factories in the panic of 1893. So passed the last incarnation of Elijah Williams.
The Casino, a social club, had been built in 1886, with Charles McKim as architect. The Stockbridge House, run by Mrs. Plumb, was expanded in 1884 and again, after it burned down, in 1896. This time it was built to accommo- date two hundred persons and reverted to its old Revolution- ary name of the Red Lion Inn. A new boarding house, the Edwards House, had taken over the Hoffman schoolhouse. It stated in an advertisment that Stockbridge was a "veritable wheelman's paradise" and boasted that any summer's day would see from two to twenty wheels stacked in the yard. The bicycle craze was on.
There was discussion between the high-spirited younger generation and their more pedestrian-minded elders about bicycles being ridden on the sidewalk. Complaints were pinned to the post-office elm of damages incurred to the dignity of elderly gentlemen. Mr. Gourlie's morning con- stitutional was rudely interrupted by a rapid bicyclist shouting coarsely, "Hi Johnny, get out of the way." Mr. Choate observed that Ellery Sedgwick, "that giant performer on the wheel came into collision with Professor Boyeson's back and made a large dent in the same." When one of the Choate boys descended precipitantly from the seat of his high bicycle into Mrs. Doane's baby carriage, a petition was drawn up appealing to the selectmen to prevent the riding of bicycles on the sidewalks. Alexander Sedgwick, young and
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very dauntless, saved the day. He persuaded his father to compose a counter-petition which he presented at every house in the village until he secured enough signatures to defeat the non-sporting element.
While all young Stockbridge was bicycling gaily if unsteadily down Main Street, Joe Choate brought home from Canada three implements of the exciting new game of golf. Tomato cans formed the first three holes, measured off with precision in the meadows along lower Church Street. On this course Joe Choate practiced the strokes which in 1898 were to win him honors in the National Championship with a record low score of 175. The game soon outgrew the tomato cans and became established on a nine-hole course below the Congregational church, in the meadows from which the last cow had now vanished. In the same summer of 1895, the Stockbridge Golf Club was formed. Here the Vardons of the day performed, and Cortlandt Van Rens- selaer who, Mr. Choate said, looked as if he had swallowed first a mattress and then a poker, closely followed the play. The day that Joe Choate was defeated by a foreigner from New Haven, "Corty," importantly slapping his pocketbook, declared that he would have given it and all it contained to keep the cup at home! Matches took place between Stock- bridge and Great Barrington, whose team, resplendent in red coats and long stockings, arrived in a four-in-hand brake. It was invariably and satisfactorily beaten. The golf was atrocious and wonderful.
A few years later, Rachel Field, author of tomorrow's best- sellers, was trudging dutifully up Yale Hill to attend Miss Adele Brewer's school for young ladies between the ages of four and fifteen. It was at Hillside, the house she shared with her sister, Miss Emelia Brewer, halfway up Yale Hill. They were the daughters of the Reverend Josiah Brewer and Emelia Field. Stockbridge was thoroughly familiar with
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Miss Adele and Miss Emelia and Miss Alice Byington, who lived with them and helped run the school. Pupils still remember the Swiss music box tinkling out a faintly martial air to which the younger children marched in, bowing for. mally to Miss Brewer before they took their places. Fractions were taught with pins on Miss Emelia's bed, and line upon line, precept upon precept were learned literally at Miss Byington's knee, as she sat surrounded by poetry books. Part of the Stockbridge legend is the story of Miss Emelia Brewer and the telegraph pole. It was the first sit-down strike in history. When the telegraph company proposed to plant a pole in front of her house, she refused permission point-blank. In spite of her remonstrances the men went ahead and spent a day digging a ditch for the offending pole which they proposed to put in the next morning. Miss Emelia waited until they had left, then picked up her bed, walked right out, placed it over the hole, and lay down for the night. It was a strategic position, and when the workmen met the eye of the embattled spinster in the gray light of the early morning, they hastily abandoned the idea of placing a telegraph pole anywhere within range of Miss Emelia.
In the gay hyperbole of the 'go's it was to be expected that even a burglar should be extradimensional, and the one who roamed the village in the summer of 1893 was no ordinary thief but a Gentleman Burglar, who sent delicious thrills down all the ladies' backs. They were fascinated by his low, cultivated voice and charming manners, when he made his professional calls in their bedrooms in the dead of night. Although he covered his victims with a cocked revolver and his eyes gleamed cold and inscrutable over the finely hem- stitched handkerchief that covered the lower part of his face, he made the strongest appeal to their sympathies, and they declared that they would hate to see him "taken up." Mrs. Swann, a daughter of Mr. Butler, was so touched by his
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replacing a ring she especially prized, and selecting, at her suggestion, one far less valuable that she attempted to reason with him over the foot of the bed. "Don't you think you might choose some other employment?"she asked. She was answered by an icy stare from under the delicately-arched eye- brows. All handsome and distinguished-looking males were under suspicion, and it was even remarked as a coincidence that the Rectory and the Sedgwick house were almost the only houses unvisited by the burglar. As for Mr. Southmayd, he engaged a night watchman with a dinner-bell. At last the burglar was apprehended through his excellent taste in the matter of cigars. The paper bands of a special brand smoked by the rector of the church in Lenox were discovered in the bottom of a buggy he had stolen from William Pitt Palmer. The ladies' hearts missed a beat when he was arrested, and it was a crushing disappointment when he turned out to be a laborer who had done some of the stonework on Mr. Choate's house a number of years before.
These are some of the ghosts who walk today beneath the village elms and haunt the houses where they lived their leisurely and sober-paced lives. The Gentleman Burglar just escapes detection as one turns on an electric light in a dark passage in the Martin Inn, once Mrs. Swann's house. The rustle of Mrs. Sedgwick's book muslin is audible on summer evenings as she glides down the path from the old house to the rectory to discuss church affairs over a mild scotch and soda with Mr. Lawrence. One can almost see Miss Carrie Wells's plump, upholstered figure and corkscrew curls behind a stack of books in the old wing of the Library, and Miss Emelia Brewer and Miss Alice Byington, in very large bonnets, bowing out either side of a very small carriage driven by Tom Carey. Are Mr. Southmayd's and Mr. Butler's two top hats, bowing and talking to each other the
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length of the village street of a Sunday morning, completely imaginary?
There was no lavish display in the way money was spent in Stockbridge. The whole village boasted only three coach- men in livery, yet almost everyone kept a carriage. There was the leisure that comes from comfortable incomes-plenty of time for picnics, and for drives about the countryside, with a tea basket in one hand and the Golden Treasury in the other. There were archery parties, tennis, boating on the river, and an occasional expedition to Lebanon in the livery stable's one four-in-hand for the young leg-of-mutton sleeves and their beaux, the stiff round straw hats. Leisure was a business seriously undertaken.
Very strong was the summer people's sense of noblesse oblige. The villas had their solid foundations deep in Berkshire soil. Their owners had not built them lightly, in any sense of the word, for they were certain that their chil- dren, and their children's children would be there after them, leading the same tranquil, kindly lives. Noise had not been invented, nor hurry, nor disorder. Perhaps the serenity of this period is rather deceptive. People and events as we look back on them have a tendency to arrange them- selves into charming daguerreotypes, posed for the camera. Unhappiness and frustration, which show their familiar faces in the old diaries and letters, were sternly repressed under the smooth front that was uniformly presented to the world.
Yet the essence of the Stockbridge these people represented was unlike that of the usual small town. It had none of the cramped, enclosed feeling of a New England village and none of the snobbishness of a resort, but was a unique blending of the two. One saw here the world in village focus and its bouquet was composed of an intense spirit of place with the spacious point of view of people of the world and a strong feeling of continuity. It was inconceivable that the economic
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