USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Stockbridge > Stockbridge, 1739-1939; a chronicle > Part 21
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structure of life should ever be seriously threatened. It was inconceivable that the quiet, sleepy village should not jog along forever, a succession of duties faithfully performed and innocent gaities enjoyed.
It is to be hoped that the ghosts are sleep-walking ghosts and that as they wander through the town they are safely wrapped in the dream of the Stockbridge they knew. Two minutes of consciousness would shatter it forever. Two minutes' realization of the busy, active, modern town would utterly confound them, and their exclamations of astonish- ment would be lost in the roar of the trucks up Main Street.
Epilogue
S TOCKBRIDGE is celebrating its two - hundredth birthday this summer, and realizes with a feeling half of regret, half of pride, that the town again has moved
on. It bears no resemblance today to those New England towns that the modern world has left behind to live on a nostalgic diet of past glories and faded gentility. Stockbridge has kept pace with the century and, if it has lost the gay intimacy of the old days, it is too eager planning for tomorrow to shed more than a passing sentimental tear over yesterday. If the four walls of the Casino could speak, they could tell the story as well as anyone in town. Born modestly in 1886, as a center for tennis and billiards, it grew in the early 1900's to be the pivot around which revolved not only the social but the artistic life of the village. Then, after a period of decline in the years following the World War, when it lost its prestige, it was moved the length of Main Street to the foot of Yale Hill, had its face lifted, and blossomed forth into a professional theater, able to call itself the Broadway of the Berkshires.
It was in the early years of the century that Stockbridge became talented. Daniel Chester French was working in his studio, adjoining Chesterwood, the house he had recently built. His majestic draped figure, The Republic, which had dominated the World's Fair in 1893, was still within an easy span of memory. Marie Kobbé was beginning to catch on paper, likenesses of children which would remain uncannily true to character and gesture thirty years later. Her friends, Lydia Field Emmet and Susan Metcalfe, built a house near
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the Kobbés' on Yale Hill. Miss Emmet was just becoming nationally known as a portrait painter, while Miss Metcalfe was giving her own charming interpretation to the songs of Brahms and Schubert. Young Walter Nettleton was paint- ing realistic snowscenes, and Robert Reid was beginning to sell his large canvases, flooded with sun and sentiment, to museums all over the country. Augustus Lukeman, a sculptor known for his imposing dramatic group, Women of the Confederacy, and his equestrian statue of Francis Asbury, was also at work in his studio.
Owen Johnson, the novelist, came to town at a time when fourteen-year-olders everywhere were flat on their stomachs reading Stover at Yale and The Varmint. Walter Prichard Eaton had bought a house, and Ruth Draper dropped into the village occasionally, experimenting with a talent that neither she nor anyone else took very seriously.
It was art with a small a. Stockbridge did not have to be laboriously educated to enjoy music and pictures and plays imported from the outside world, for it was spontaneously producing them without looking at itself in the glass to observe the effect. Talents great and small rubbed shoulders at the Casino. Everyone who could paint, and a good many who couldn't, exhibited at the annual picture shows which were inaugurated in 1909. There were song recitals by Miss Metcalfe with Professor Ulysse Buhler at the piano; Cortlandt Van Rensselaer, very formal and portentous in tails and a white vest, gave a reading on the Art of Heraldry, while Frank Crowninshield convulsed the audience by his irreverence.
Youthful high spirits boiled over into vaudeville shows which offered to the public no less than "4 Little Evas, 9 Hamlets, 4 Bloodhounds, 2 Tattoed Queens, 1 Real Snow- storm, 400 Imperial Corps de Ballet and a Boy Caruso, not to mention a Sword-swallower and the Stockbridge Armless
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Wonder." On another occasion, "Miss Ruth Draper in her celebrated money-logs" was followed by "the Crownie Brothers [who] in order to keep the Hall warm will turn on a little hot air." Jokes were definitely local. Everyone knew of Miss Tuckerman's passionate aversion to the chimes and her delight when they broke down one summer. Frank Crowninshield's announcement in an intermission that, owing to her unavoidable absence in Europe, Miss Emily Tuckerman would not be able to recite The Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight brought down the house. Unforgettable was the performance of Cranford. The actors just stepped in as they were, off the village street, to take their parts. Miss Adele Brewer, Miss Agnes Canning, Miss Agnes Goodwin, Mrs. Joseph Schilling, Miss Lizzie Norton didn't have to act at all, for nature had made them letter-perfect in their parts.
On an August afternoon in 1907, the whole town repaired to the Casino to celebrate Mrs. Mary Jane Pitkin's eightieth birthday. Mrs. Pitkin was niece of the poet, William Pitt Palmer, and was a repository of Stockbridge lore. Genera- tions of children had trudged up the Hill to the old Palmer homestead to listen to stories, or look in the ancient secretary in the parlor for the secret drawer. Sometimes they were allowed the run of the attic, and dressing up in the ancestral hoop skirts they played at the history of Stockbridge. Over 400 of her friends gathered for the birthday party. There was an orchestra from the Red Lion Inn and Mrs. Plumb presented a gigantic cake, a frosted facsimile of the Chimes Tower itself. Miss Lucy White recited a poem written in honor of Mrs. Pitkin, reminiscent of an earlier day when occasional verse had adorned every social gathering. Every- one came, everybody danced and drank pink lemonade, and the grand finale was achieved when Mrs. Pitkin, light of foot and graceful as the youngest girl, led off a Virginia reel.
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It was a gay, light-hearted time, redolent of a certain innocent worldliness. The ladies with their hourglass figures and mountainous hats ornamented receptions and luncheons. Plenty of good, rich food was invariably served. Mrs. Crowninshield was a combination of great kindness and intense sociability, and loved to entertain. Every detail of her parties was carefully planned in advance; just the right choice of food, and the candles, under their red silk shades, shining discreetly on immaculate linen and silver. When she went out, she was appreciative of her hostess's sense of the well-oiled wheels on which a dinner or luncheon should run. One day she attended a lunch party where all went with desirable smoothness until the poor hostess was taken acutely ill of convulsions. Mrs. Crowninshield was all bustling, warm-hearted efficiency, administering home remedies and finally getting the poor lady off to the hospital. When she arrived home she was hot and flustered. She lay on the sofa while she volubly described the whole episode to her son, Frank. He was full of sympathy and said, "But Mamma, I never heard of anything so awful. When did all this happen?" "Well, fortunately, my dear, it was after the dessert."
Alexander Sedgwick inherited his father's house, and scraped off the Victorian veneer to reveal the plain colonial lines. An Edwardian elegance was added, which was the contribution of his generation. Following close in his father's footsteps, he made Stockbridge his profession and became president of the Laurel Hill Association. On Anni- versary Day he stood in the rostrum, an immaculately dressed figure with a boutonnière which perfectly expressed the exotic blooming of his personality. The audience held its breath with mingled amusement and apprehension. Where would the wit, darting about like forked lightning, strike? Would the involved sentences, so brilliantly caparisoned with metaphor and adjective, contain the necessary weight of
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noun and verb to bring them to earth at all? Sitting behind him on the rostrum designed by Mr. French, would be the speaker of the afternoon, flanked by the distinguished gentle- men of the village. There would be Richard Rogers Bowker, gray-bearded and earnest-eyed. He was the founder of the American Library Association and president of the Stock- bridge Library. Mr. Choate would be there, benignly smiling, and perhaps Dr. Charles McBurney, the eminent surgeon from New York, who had built Cherry Hill a number of years before.
In 1904, Dennis Morrissey changed his carriage shop into a garage and bought a touring car to rent out. The first automobiles began to cavort past the Casino, heavy as poor jokes. The ladies sat erect on the back seats, muffled in dusters and dark veils in which isinglass was sewed in for the eyes. Alexander Sedgwick was usually prostrate under his White Steamer, investigating a mechanism that was to remain mysterious to him to the end, while his more conservative friends drove by with carriage and pair at a rather osten- tatiously brisk pace. Jack Swann, in an effort to make his monster conform to the best equestrian tradition, attempted to leap a fence near the Tuckerman bridge and landed in a confused heap of mechanism in an adjoining meadow. But it was not until 1914 that the village realized the automobile had really come to stay, when the Fire Department adopted an automobile engine, abandoning forever the Jerrys and Toms, whose flowing black manes and clattering hoofs had heightened the excitement of local fires.
Modern improvements were making rapid inroads upon the town and electric lights appeared along the streets in 1908, in spite of Stephen Field's remonstrance that they made it look like a city. But there had been one innovation to which Stockbridge, or at least half of Stockbridge, strenuously objected. The town would never agree-as the cat-and-dog
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fountain was there to affirm. In 1902, The Berkshire Street Railway Company proposed to run a trolley down Main Street. This issue roused all the best fighting blood in town. The "trolleyites" claimed the trolley would carry children to school, and would bring in desirable business. The "anti- trolleyites," passionately denouncing The Berkshire Street Railway and all its works, cried that the town would be , ruined. The Berkshire Courier headlined its article on the controversy, A Hot Time in Stockbridge. Stephen Field wrote in dismay from Europe: "I heard ... that an outside corporation having its own interest and the town's destruction at heart had applied for the rights above-mentioned. But having implicit faith in the integrity and patriotism of the old- time families of the town, the Carters, the Palmers, Sergeants, Seymours, Sedgwicks and many others too numerous to mention, the matter gave me no great uneasiness. Imagine, therefore, my distress at finding that you are seriously consid- ering the matter . . Why is there but one Stockbridge? Is it not because our fathers made it so? They planted these trees, arranged these parks . . . You are now petitioned by some of the descendants of these worthy men to undo what they by years of toil helped to create, to allow the invasion of our beautiful street by a so-called trolley. Such a proceeding would at once change our town from 'the only Stockbridge' to a dull commonplace station on a second-class trolley railway." Finally, it was Alexander Sedgwick, in whose character there was a strong element of the cat-and-dog fountain, who led the "anti-trolleyites" to victory. It was he who held at bay the encroaching forces of The Berkshire Street Railway, when the track was completed right up to the Lee-Stockbridge boundary line. The town raised $18,000 to pay for the property rights and an extra bridge, and the trolley took the route along by the river.
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These were the years when the men who were to be the leaders of the village of today were embarking upon their careers. Young Allen Treadway was trying his political wings. In 1900, he became Moderator of Town Meeting, an office he has held to this day. Watching him wield the gavel with parliamentary precision at the annual meeting, Stockbridge reflects with pride on the steps which led to his present position. He was elected to the Massachusetts State Legislature in 1904, and became a member of the State Senate in 1908. He served as President of the Senate in the years 1909, 1910, and 1911. The following year he was elected to Congress from the First Massachusetts district, where he has served ever since, specializing in the subjects of taxation and tariff and supporting Republican platforms and policies.
John C. Lynch was holding positions of responsibility in The American Telephone and Telegraph Company, in which he was to rise to Assistant Vice-President before his retirement in 1931. During the years before his death in 1937, Mr. Lynch was the much-loved first citizen of the modern Stockbridge. The Library, the theater, The Berkshire Symphonic Festival, the Housatonic National Bank were only a few of the interests to which he gave unsparingly of his energy and intelligence.
In 1907, Dr. Austen Fox Riggs came to live in Stockbridge. He had spent his vacations in the village since his marriage to Dr. McBurney's daughter Alice, but now ill health forced him to give up his association with a busy medical office in New York and live in the country the year around. During the years spent in the practice of general medicine, Dr. Riggs had been struck with the fact that almost three-quarters of the patients who came to his office belonged to a category that the doctors could do nothing for. They occupied a borderland between general medicine and psychiatry. There was nothing
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physically wrong with them, and yet clearly they were ill. The size and nature of the problem these cases presented had long interested him and he now felt he had an opportunity to study them by the trial-and-error method. People began to come to Stockbridge to consult him, driving up from the station in a horse-and-buggy and boarding around in houses in the village. Other doctors became interested and came to work with him, and as the years went by and Stockbridge came to mean Riggs to an ever increasing number of people, the methods of treatment which are used today gradually evolved. By 1914 the work was outgrowing the informal basis on which it was run, and Dr. Riggs was working on a plan to put it on a more permanent and useful basis. How- ever, after the entry of the United States into the World War everyone's energy and money were focused across the sea and the Austen Riggs Foundation had to wait.
During 1914 and 1915, no one considered that the war was going to affect Stockbridge materially. The clash of the great powers on the other side of the Atlantic was terrible, but it was very far away and very exciting. The horrors of modern warfare had not yet divested the conflict of an aura of gold lace and glory associated with battle fought in so high a cause. Grown people did not feel so very differently from the child who wrote home from France to her parents in August, 1914: "War seems so much more here than it ever would at home. I never realized how bad it was, and always thought the part when war is first declared the boring part of a novel. Now everything you read about is coming true and as I see it all around me I almost feel as if I were in the book. I am so glad to be here, for think how exciting it is for me I do not think that any war at home could possibly excite me as this does. America is so huge and so cut off from other lands and anyway the army seems a detached body of people you do not particularly care about and war
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could hardly touch us in any but a small way . . . " During the winter of 1915 the ladies rolled bandages and made surgical dressings for the Red Cross, and the flags of the Allies fluttered under the elms. An appeal was read out in St. Paul's Church from the American War Relief Clearing House in Paris, for the cure of soldiers who had developed tuberculosis in the trenches. The sum of $132 was raised for Victor Cortyl, "the Stockbridge soldier," as he was called. It was a twentieth-century equivalent of the excitement over the Italian exiles, and the Fair for Kossuth in 1857.
By 1917, however, the excitement that had been mounting for the last two years, reached fever-pitch when the United States joined the Allied forces. No sacrifice was too great to win this war that was forever to end wars. Mr. Choate, now the grand old man of New York, was appointed by the Mayor as chairman of the Committee of Citizens to receive the French and British Commissioners on their visit to the United States in May, 1917. He waved aside his doctor's advice that the round of speeches, dinners, and receptions would prove too much for his strength, and went through the four exhausting days with his usual dignity and grace. His welcome to the Commissioners, his words of confidence in the ultimate outcome of the conflict, aroused intense enthusiasm in the crowds that listened to his speeches. The wit that the public had come to expect gave the usual high polish to his sincerity and gave no indication of the mortal fatigue he was feeling. On the last night of Balfour's visit Mr. Choate asked him and Dr. Bergson and a few others to dine with him at his house. After dinner he said he would like to propose a topic of conversation to his friends. Everyone thought he was going to speak of some phase of the war, but he spoke quietly into the expectant silence: "Gentlemen, let us discuss the immortality of the soul." A few days later Mr. Choate was dead.
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The summer of 1917 in Stockbridge presented the same scene of concentrated war activity that was to be found in every town, large and small, the country over. Perhaps there was an added intensity that was inherent in its bones; Stockbridge always does things a little harder than other places.
The Casino was called in to do its bit, and like a good old trooper threw itself into this new part: no more jokes and amateur theatricals, but crowded meetings to raise money for the Red Cross. In an evening $8,000 was collected, while altogether $20,000 was raised during that one drive. Walter Nettleton donated a peaceful Berkshire snowscene and Marie Kobbé the proceeds from five children's portraits. There was an exhibition of food under the auspices of the Food Conser- vation Committee with Mr. Henry McBurney as chairman to show Stockbridge "how to put the cook on the firing line." A table in charge of Miss Marion Hague displayed delicious food-stuffs made entirely from beans raised in Berkshire County, while another exhibit, in charge of Mr. David Dudley Field and Miss Agnes Canning, showed wild vegetables and fruit that could be used for food. Brilliantly colored posters lining the walls of the Casino shouted captions such as "A fine job for Mars. A decisive Battle of History is being fought in the Vegetable Garden."
Liberty Loan subscriptions climbed from $38,800 in the first drive to $130,000 in the second, and to $203,000 in the third. One hundred and forty-nine local young men regis- tered in the Federal draft on June 5th and the town turned out to say good-by. Allen T. Treadway gave them a farewell party the night before they left. There was a dinner at Heaton Hall after which they marched down to the Town Hall, escorted by the Stockbridge cadet band. The Red Cross provided each soldier with a comfort kit, and the Congregational Church gave wrist watches to those of their
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members who went. The next morning they were given breakfast at the Red Lion Inn, and drove away to Camp Devens accompanied by Mr. Treadway and the Selectmen. History repeated itself with a difference, for Main Street could remember that other early morning in 1775 when a group of farmers' sons had started on the long walk to Lexington with only the heart-felt prayers of Dr. West to bid them Godspeed.
After the war, the feeling of optimism that was prevalent throughout the country found its small reflection in Stock- bridge. The same child who had written at the beginning of the war, voiced the hope of her generation: "We have won our righteous cause. The Reconstruction we will have to face! A gigantic picking up-rather like how tiresome it used to be on Christmas afternoon when we had to tidy up the general mess. But it is quite a splendid thing to think of in one way, for everyone will be trying to make the world a better place and keeping it a better place. Humanity would be very debased indeed, if we weren't all better people now, when we think of the price of the noblest young men's dying by which we enjoy our liberty and all our present victorious security. We can't possibly be as extravagant or selfish as if there had not been this war."
The "mess" was far away from rich, comfortable little Stockbridge, which could devote its energies to growing and putting on still more weight.
In 1919, Dr. Riggs put into execution a plan that was to prove mutually beneficial to the town and to his work. In 1914, a patient on leaving had given him a check for $50. "Here is a little check," she said, "for you to use, so that some- one who could otherwise not afford this treatment can have it." This check was the nucleus of a fund which grew amazingly. It has never been solicited and has been the voluntary contribution of grateful patients. With this
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money it was possible to remodel a house on Main Street into an inn, and build a "shop" for occupational therapy. In 1929, the work had outgrown the existing inn, and the property on the corner of Main and Sergeant (formerly known as Casino) Streets was acquired. Here, where Jonathan Edwards once sat and wrote The Last End of God in the Creation of the World, on a series of half-moon-shaped bon- net patterns carefully sewed together, the new Foundation Inn stands. Since 1919 more than 6,000 patients have been treated, and 1,700 of these have been treated either free or at reduced rates. There are also clinics, one for children and another for adults, in Pittsfield, which are supported by the Foundation, and which serve not only Pittsfield but Stock- bridge and the rest of the county.
The Foundation obviously brings prosperity to the village, a prosperity that is irrespective of seasons. Apart from the number of people actually employed by the inns, the "shop" and the doctors' families, the patients themselves patronize the local stores, their relatives stay at the hotels, and they sometimes even become so enamoured of Stockbridge that they buy or rent property. They are a familiar sight, as they circulate briskly about the countryside with the unmistakable look of "an hour's walk" in their eyes that spells Riggs to the initiated. If they are sometimes loath to come in the first place, they are sometimes sorry to leave when the time comes. Tom Carey, who drives the only horse-and-buggy in the village, once was driving a patient to the station. She dis- solved in tears at the thought of her departure. Tom Carey has seen many patients come and go. "Cheer up, lady," he said. 'You'll be back soon." On another occasion, a lady patient, whom he had driven out for dinner, instructed him to call for her at ten. "Half-past nine in Stockbridge," he corrected firmly. Tom knows his Foundation.
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At the time when the first Foundation Inn was being built, the old Casino was definitely out of the running. Stockbridge could now take all of Berkshire for its playground, and if the golf links and comfortable clubhouse did not suit, there were Lenox, Lee, Pittsfield, and Great Barrington, all similarly equipped, or one could easily motor south into Connecticut.
The Casino's tennis courts were not as good as those at the Golf Club, and people who had once taken an active part in its social life had either died, moved away, or ceased to take much interest. The annual art exhibition, enlarged to accept pictures and sculpture from all of Berkshire, was the only event of importance that took place there. Behind its fine McKim façade with the three rounded arches, it put a brave face on its poverty and, like an aging gentleman who brushed the hair carefully over the bald spot, it paid its bills and reflected a little sadly on the past.
It was in 1926, when its fortunes were at their lowest ebb, that Miss Mabel Choate acquired John Sergeant's house and decided to move it down out of the wind and weather on the Hill to Main Street. She wished to make it a museum and a memorial to her father and mother, and restore it as nearly as possible to the house John and Abigail Sergeant had known. There, among other relics, she has recovered from the remnants of the tribe in Wisconsin the wonderful Bible that first came to Stockbridge in 1743, a present from the Court of St. James's to the Mahican Indians.
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