USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Stockbridge > Stockbridge, 1739-1939; a chronicle > Part 22
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The obvious site for the Mission House was the land on which the Casino stood, and she was able to buy the property from the stockholders. The problem of what to do with the unwanted Casino building was solved by Walter L. Clark, a summer resident. He conceived the idea of moving it the length of the village street and starting a summer theater. Businessman and engineer through most of his life, Mr. Clark devoted his later years to the furtherance of artistic
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projects. He had already started the Grand Central Art Galleries in New York, and at the age of seventy he did a bust of Duse which he presented to Mussolini. Large, bold schemes roused all his qualities of enthusiasm and ability. Miss Choate gave him the Casino, and he bought a property at the foot of Yale Hill for its accommodation. With Austen Riggs, Daniel French, Alexander Sedgwick, and Norman Davis, Walter Clark founded the Three Arts Society. Their object was to make it an educational and non-profit-making organization, which would provide a summer season of professional theater and music, and continue the annual art exhibition. Opening in 1928, with F. Cowles Strickland and Alexander Kirkland as co-directors, the theater gave its maiden performance with Eva Le Gallienne and her company in Cradle Song. After that a cast, resident for the summer, has usually supported a visiting star each week. Laurette Taylor, Osgood Perkins, Ina Claire, Katherine Hepburn, Ethel Barrymore, are a few of the players that have walked across the stage of The Berkshire Playhouse during the last ten years. In 1931 a school for drama was formed in connection with The Playhouse where young hopefuls received two months' training. The Playhouse is one of the oldest of the summer theaters.
The four hundred and fifty persons, who come nightly during the season to fill the theater, are negligible compared to the "unarmed army" of over five thousand who came to the National Assembly of the Oxford Group in May, 1936. "America Awake," they shouted from the ancient peaks of the Berkshire Hills, "to absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness, and absolute love." Early history was paradoxically pressed into the service of "religion in modern dress," in a cavalcade that marched the length of the village street. Uhm-pa-tuth, Chief of the Mahicans, had been imported from Wisconsin, and in Indian regalia that Konka-
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pot would have envied led off the procession on horseback. It was said he never had ridden before. John Sergeant, Jonathan Edwards, and Mark Hopkins were followed by a covered wagon signifying Westward-ho, while a brand-new automobile bore the sign Eastward-ho. Then came the Oxford Group itself, 5,000 strong, and a grand finale of the flags of all nations borne aloft, preceded by no less than three brigadier generals.
If music, the third art of the Three Arts Society, never bloomed with the brilliance of the others, perhaps this can be accounted for by the establishment of music elsewhere. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge's Temple of Music at South Mountain, in Pittsfield, and the Sunday afternoon concerts during the summer, had given an impetus to the growth of musical culture from the public point of view. Even so, Henry Hadley's dream in the May of 1934 of a series of symphony concerts, enjoyed in a setting of moonlight and stars, seemed fantastic. Dr. Hadley was guest conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. He suggested the details of the dream to Miss Gertrude Robinson-Smith: sixty-five members of the orchestra to be imported from New York, and the whole countryside to be offered the oppor- tunity of enjoying the concerts in an open-air amphitheater. Miss Robinson-Smith, with the assistance of Mrs. Owen Johnson and Mrs. William Felton Barrett, undertook and performed in a few weeks the herculean task of the organiza- tion of committees and sub committees throughout the county to make such a dream come true.
Grave apprehensions were felt beforehand by the com- mittees as to the success of the three concerts that took place in August on the unoccupied Dan R. Hanna estate. But as the thousands of automobiles turned their headlights into the Hanna driveway that first evening, everyone drew a breath of relief. After another season at the Hanna farm
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under Hadley's leadership, he resigned because of failing health, and The Berkshire Symphonic Festival felt firmly enough ensconced in the public favor to approach Serge Koussevitzky and The Boston Symphony Orchestra. The summer of 1936 saw Dr. Koussevitzky's distinguished back presented to a capacity audience in a large circus tent on the Margaret Emerson estate. And the following year the Festival was established permanently at Tanglewood, not far from where Hawthorne's red cottage had once stood. But the ele- ments proved refractory that summer and, after an evening in which a Berkshire thunderstorm competed with Wagner's Ride of the Walkyrie, and won, it seemed imperative that the Festival be provided with a building.
Eliel Saarinen drew the tentative plans for the music shed, but it was Joseph Franz of Stockbridge, a member of the Board of Trustees and an engineer, who adapted his drawings to the plan that was actually used in building it. Fan-shaped and covering an acre and a half of land, the shed seats 5,700 people. While the roof, supported by slender steel columns, protects the audience from sun and rain, the sides are open, so that the illusion of being out-of-doors is preserved. It is the largest structure in the world having natural acoustics, so that sound travels without the use of amplifiers.
The Berkshire Symphonic Festival has established Stock- bridge as the site of a summer music festival for a national- even an international-audience, and its publicity carries the name of the Berkshire Hills and its advantages-"cultural, historical, educational, and scenic"-all over the world. Notices of the Festival, inviting the world to Stockbridge, appear in the symphony orchestra programs of Chicago, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Cleveland, San Francisco and Montreal, to mention only a few. Thomas Cook and The American Express Company enclose with their own "litera- ture" folders of the Festival. "The trip is worth the trouble,"
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says The New Yorker, "because the Berkshires are all they are supposed to be, and so is the Symphonic Festival." Thirty-six thousand people attended the concerts in 1938.
The Boost-the-Berkshires motif, first sounded in the Jubilee of 1844, again taken up in the railway advertisement in the 1880's, has now reached its full crescendo. At the Jubilee it was the industrial success of the Berkshires, its institutions and its scenery that were matters of self-congratu- lation. In the later period the comforts and amenities of the not-too-high hills, the conservatively purling streams were stressed. But the twentieth century has thrown itself into a very frenzy of boosting. The buildings and even the former actors in the drama itself have become copy. Fanny Kemble compared the scenery to Italy, but a modern commentator compares the Chimes Tower to the Campanile in Venice. Simple-hearted John Sergeant preaching to his Indians, unpretentious Catherine Sedgwick and her long-forgotten novels, and Mark Hopkins's rugged simplicity-all clearly labeled history, culture, education-are grist for the mill of publicity.
On the other hand, there still exist some of the crotchets that have always distinguished the town. There is the same intolerance of innovation. Each new venture meets the old cat-and-dog-fountain clash of opinion. When the American Legion put up signs at the entrance of the main roads into the village saying, "Welcome to Stockbridge," an old lady was heard to remark with finality: "There isn't any use putting those signs up. We never have liked strangers in Stockbridge, and we never will."
The same strands twist in and out of the fabric of two hundred years of life. There is always the link with the outside world, always a core of village integrity kept intact. In the eighteenth century it was the Indians who caused a flutter in London drawing-rooms; in the nineteenth century
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Cyrus Field linked the two continents; in the twentieth century it is The Berkshire Symphonic Festival. A refreshing breeze from outside forever blows into the valley. Williamses, Dwights, Lynches, Sedgwicks, Carters, Palmers, Fields and Choates still take their parts in the play against the eternal backdrop of Monument, Bear, and West Stockbridge Mountains. There is nothing new under the sun.
Notes
CHAPTER I
Page 1
JOHN SERGEANT'S GRANDFATHER, JONATHAN SERGEANT, was a native of New Haven. He was one of a group of men to oppose the union of the two colonies of New Haven and Connecticut, because Connecticut allowed the more liberal church membership of the Halfway Covenant. Connecticut even went a step further and allowed men not connected with the church to vote in civil affairs. To Jonathan Sergeant and his friends this seemed like a fatal compromise and they moved to New Jersey to settle the town of Newark. Here Jonathan became a boatman on the shores of the Passaic River. The Sergeants were humble people and do not figure among the elders, deacons, or ministers of the new settlement. John Sergeant was born in 1710. His father dying while he was very young, his mother married a Colonel John Cooper, who provided for his education and sent him to Yale College in 1725.
Page 12
WHEN SERGEANT AND BULL MADE THE TRIP TO HOUSATONIC there was no road at all, but only an Indian trail. The fol- lowing year, 1735, a rough road was laid out by the colony of Massachusetts from Westfield through Blandford, Otis, Mon- terey and Great Barrington, to the New York line. This was known as the Albany road. The new road led to the settle- ment the same year of the townships of Tyringham, New Marlborough, Sandisfield, and Becket. Until 1738 this road
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was passable only on horseback, but in that year John Sergeant and Timothy Woodbridge, with eight other settlers on the Housatonic, at their own expense and with great difficulty, succeeded in getting the road to Westfield im- proved to a point where sleighs could travel over it in winter.
Page 19
MR. SAMUEL HOPKINS'S Historical Memoirs Relating to the Housatonic Indians (1753) gives the first known account of the making of maple syrup. He described in detail the Indian method of getting their sugar from the trees and suggested it as a possible American industry. (See Bibliography.)
Page 22
EPHRAIM WILLIAMS was descended from Robert Williams, probably a Welshman, although on this point there is some divergence of opinion. We know certainly that he sailed from Norwich in 1638. His wife, Elizabeth Stratton, was at first unwilling to come to the new country, but it is said she had a strangely vivid dream-that if she came she would be the mother of a line of powerful and influential men. That her dream came true is evidenced in the history of western Massachusetts, for in every new enterprise we find the hand of at least one member of this energetic family. Robert Williams settled in Roxbury and his son, Isaac-the father of our Ephraim-seems to have been a man of substance, for he lived on an estate of 500 acres in what is now the town of Newton. He had eight children by his first wife, and mar- ried again in 1680 Judith Cooper, to whom he was greatly devoted. She seems to have been a most unscrupulous character. He had four children by this second marriage, the youngest of whom, his mother's favorite, was Ephraim. She persuaded Isaac to draw a most outrageous will leaving the bulk of his large estate to Ephraim, and almost entirely
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ignoring the other eleven children. This was the more unfair as most of Isaac's property had come to him through his first wife's father. Naturally the other children protested this will, and Judith lived to see it ruled as invalid by the judge of the Probate Court, and her beloved Ephraim left with only the old homestead and 100 acres of land. At the time he enters this history, in 1737, he was a man in the full vigor of middle age. He married twice. His first wife, Elizabeth Jackson, had borne him two sons, Ephraim and Thomas, and she dying in childbirth with Thomas, he had married Abigail Jones, by whom he had seven more children. He must have made a good thing out of the 100 acres of his inheritance, for we know that he was a man of some means when he arrived in Stockbridge in 1737.
CHAPTER II
Page 29
MR. FRANK PARKER STOCKBRIDGE tells of a tradition in his family, that the name of the town came from his ancestor, Charles Stockbridge. The story goes that he set out from Scit- uate in 1680 and established a trading post with the Mahican Indians on the banks of the Housatonic River in that year. So that when John Sergeant arrived some fifty-odd years later, the Indians whom he found called themselves "Stockbridge Indians," and when the town was incorporated it adopted the name of Stockbridge. Although Deane's History of Scituate establishes Charles Stockbridge as being an Indian trader with posts strung throughout the New England wilderness, there is no contemporary record that mentions him as having one on the Housatonic River. Indeed, we have found no mention of his name at all. Therefore, after an examination of all available documents, the Timothy Woodbridge theory, while based only upon probability, is a far more convincing explanation to the present writers.
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CHAPTER V
Page 101
THE EXACT DERIVATION OF LARRYWAUG OR LARRYWANG has never been finally settled. The Larry, of course, is from Larry Lynch. The waug is believed to have been corrupted from wang. Mr. Walter Prichard Eaton in the magazine Stockbridge (Vol. I, No. 7, p. 8) suggested that wang, a mid- dle English word meaning meadow or large field, was applied to Larry's piece of land by the first English settlers. In the next issue of the magazine, Mr. Walter Patterson contributed to the discussion. He had heard from an old man, when he himself was a small boy, that the name came from the Indian word wang, meaning store. Mr. Eaton concludes, there is a word, wangin, said to be of Indian derivation, meaning sup- ply magazine or store of the camp.
CHAPTER VII
Page 156
IT WAS WILLIAM EDWARDS, SON OF TIMOTHY, who planted the great elm tree in front of his house, now the house of Mr. Allen T. Treadway.
Page 158
A YARN BEAM is a beam upon which the warp threads in weaving are wound.
Page 160
EDWARD BELLAMY in his historical novel The Duke of Stockbridge placed Perez Hamlin as the son of a Stockbridge farmer, but the standard histories go no further than men- tioning his name.
Page 161
MUMBET was an institution in the Sedgwick family. Her real name was Elizabeth Freeman and she and her younger
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sisters had formerly been slaves in the household of John Ashley in Sheffield. One day their mistress, in a fit of temper, had flung a heated fire iron at the younger girl. Elizabeth, to shield her, put a protecting arm out and received the full force of the blow. After this she left John Ashley, who went to law to recover his property. Such presumption, he con- sidered, was clearly outrageous, since slavery was a well-recog- nized institution. Elizabeth asked Theodore Sedgwick to defend her. He won her case by appealing to the authority of the new Bill of Rights recently adopted by the state, which contained the pregnant phrase, "All men are created free and equal." His contention was that as there were no slaves in Massachusetts, Ashley could neither own one, nor collect indemnity upon one.
Historians have commonly cited Mumbet's case as the deathblow to slavery in Massachusetts, but George H. Moore, LL.D., in his Notes on the History of Slavery (New York, 1866) , awards this palm to the case of Nathaniel Jennison vs Quock Walker, where the slave sued his master for assault. In 1874, Chief Justice Gray, of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, in citing Dr. Belknap's opinion (given in Massachusetts Historical Collections, Series 1, Vol. IV) before the Massachusetts Historical Society upholds Mr. Moore's contention.
After gaining her freedom, Elizabeth spent the rest of her life in the Sedgwick household, brought up the children and nursed their mother when she was ill. Her epitaph, written by Catherine Sedgwick, expresses what she meant to them:
"She was born a slave and remained a slave for nearly thirty years. She could neither read nor write, yet in her own sphere she had no superior nor equal. She neither wasted time, nor property. She never violated a trust, nor failed to perform a duty. In every situation of domestic trial, she was the most efficient helper, and the tenderest friend. Good Mother, farewell."
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Page 163
MINOT SPEAKS OF "THE BARBAROUS PRACTICE" adopted by the rebels in deliberately putting their captives in front of them. David Dudley Field and Electa Jones, however, who quote from a man present at the encounter, maintain that Hamlin's party did not have time to reason such a plan out. They were surprised by the government forces, hid behind their prisoners to load their muskets and, overcome with terror, ran away instead of coming forward as they had intended.
CHAPTER VIII
Page 167
The Western Star was removed to Lenox in 1828 and named The Berkshire Star and County Republican. In 1851, it moved to Pittsfield as The Massachusetts Eagle and is the paper that is known today as The Berkshire Evening Eagle. From 1841 to 1843 another paper was published in Stockbridge called The Weekly Visitor and for a while a temperance paper was brought out at the same time.
Page 178
BERKSHIRE MEN SAW SERVICE during the War of 1812 in the Ninth and Twenty-first Regiments, of which the former was called the "Bloody Ninth."
Page 180
THE CONNECTICUT WESTERN RESERVE was a tract of land granted to the natives of Connecticut.
HIRAM H. PEASE was something of a wag and asked that the following verse be inscribed upon his tombstone:
"Under this sod and under these trees, Lies the body of Hiram H. Pease. The Pease are not here, but only the pod, He has shelled out his soul and gone up to God."
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CHAPTER IX
Page 184
A SEPARATE SCHOOL DISTRICT for Curtisville was established in 1837 and a "select school" started there several times.
Page 193
THE VILLAGE REWARDED DAVID DUDLEY FIELD'S PHILOSOPHY on the occasion of the burning of his house and gave him $1,400 for a new one which he built upon the site of that which had been destroyed.
Page 196
HARRY HOPKINS accepted a position as engineer to survey a railroad in Pennsylvania. He died in 1834, at Richmond, Virginia; all his charming brilliance snuffed out before its time.
CHAPTER X
Page 221
G. P. R. JAMES gave a clock to the Episcopal Church which was the first public timepiece in the town. In 1932, The Reverend George Grenville Merrill had its works renewed by the same company which had originally installed them.
CHAPTER XI
Page 226
THE CHAPEL OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD at South Lee is part of the Episcopal parish and has been supplied by rectors of St. Paul's Church in Stockbridge since 1856.
The non-sectarian Union Chapel in Glendale was organ- ized in 1876 and has been supplied ever since by ministers of the different Stockbridge churches.
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Page 227
ABOUT 1812 THE NAME OF THE RED LION INN WAS CHANGED to Stockbridge House. In 1897, when the present building was erected, it was known alternately as Plumb's Hotel, the Stockbridge Inn, as just The Inn, but eventually resumed its original designation. Among its owners were Jonathan Hicks, Eliada Kingsley, and Robert E. Galpin. Henry L. Plumb bought it in 1862, and since then it has remained almost entirely in the Plumb family. Today it is owned by Allen T. Treadway, Mrs. Charles Plumb's nephew, and is operated by his son, Heaton I. Treadway.
Page 229
OTHER SIMILAR CONCERNS were the Hunter Paper Company and their successors, Messrs. Chaffee & Callender, who em- ployed forty hands in 1885 and turned out 12,000 tons of jute valued at $150,000.
Page 232 THE CATHOLIC CHURCH was actually erected in 1860.
CHAPTER XII
Page 237
THE WOOLEN MILLS AT GLENDALE were run by J. Z. Good- rich for many years. In 1880, F. W. Adams bought them from him and in 1885 they were still doing a thriving business.
Page 250
DANIEL WILLIAMS moved from Groton to Stockbridge in 1776, as is testified by the special permit quoted in Chapter VI. His son was Cyrus who kept the store. Daniel Williams was Cyrus Williams's nephew. This family is not to be confused with the Ephraim Williams family.
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Page 252
ALTHOUGH MR. NATHAN JACKSON originally came from Tyringham and he had passed his life in New York amassing a handsome fortune, still a number of strings tied him up with Stockbridge history. At the time he offered the town the money to start a library, he was at the age when elderly gentlemen like to reflect upon the past. His great aunt had been the mother of Ephraim Williams (founder of Williams College) and his great grandfather had had the early train- ing of that genial and promising child in the years before the family left Newton and came to Stockbridge. Moreover, when Mr. Jackson himself was a small boy and had been sent over from Tyringham to enjoy the superior educational advant- ages of the East Street school, he had attracted the favorable attention of that great democrat, Barnabas Bidwell. He patted the child on the head and presented him with the bewildering sum of one dollar. This he invested in sheep and his flock grew and prospered until in 1832 he sold it for $1,596. With this money he hastened to New York and invested in uptown lots in the city, whence sprang the Jackson fortune, the story of the famous "Bidwell dollar," and indirectly the Stockbridge Library.
In 1937, Miss Mary V. Bement gave a new wing to the Library. She is a direct descendant of Asa Bement who came to the village in the revolutionary era. The family moved west about the middle of the nineteenth century and lived for many years in Evansville, Indiana. The new wing is connected to the old by an entrance hall, the money for which was left in a bequest to the Library by Joseph H. Choate. The work undertaken in 1937 was under the direction of the office of Ralph Adams Cram.
Page 256
STEPHEN FIELD'S NAME was well known in the U. S. Patent Office where more than two hundred of his inventions were
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listed. The hotel annunciator, the electric elevator, the first central station for light and power, the police patrol tele- graph, and electrical stage illumination were a few of his outstanding inventions.
Page 257
IN ADDITION TO THE BUILDINGS AND MONUMENTS mentioned in this chapter, the Soldiers monument was erected in 1866, and the Jonathan Edwards monument in 1872.
EPILOGUE
Page 269
STOCKBRIDGE WAS THE LINK between Lee and Great Bar- rington, and the natural route was down the Main Street to the Red Lion Inn and then south across the river. The route which the trolley line eventually took left the main highway a quarter of a mile west of the Lee-Stockbridge boundary, crossed the river and ran along to Laurel Hill, where it crossed the river again, making the trolley accessible to the village near the station.
Page 273
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO ASCERTAIN how many Stockbridge men actually saw fighting in France during the World War, but 101 were enlisted in the service.
Page 274 Population figures:
1800 population 1,261
1860 population 2,058
1905 population 2,077
1925 population 1,830
1936 population 1,921 (latest definite figure)
Bibliography
The following books have been the chief sources used in the preparation of this history :--
Stockbridge, Past and Present, by Electa F. Jones, Spring- field, 1854.
History of Berkshire County, Massachusetts, revised and corrected by J. E. A. Smith, New York, 1885.
A History of the County of Berkshire, by Gentlemen of the County, Pittsfield, 1829.
Life and Letters of Catherine M. Sedgwick, edited by Mary E. Dewey, New York, 1871.
Origins in Williamstown, by Arthur Latham Perry, LL.D., New York, 1896.
R. H. W. Dwight Collection.
Historical Memoirs Relating to the Housatonic Indians, by The Reverend Samuel Hopkins, Boston, 1753. Reprinted 1911. (Extra No. 17 of the Magazine of History, with notes and queries.)
Mark Hopkins, by J. H. Denison, New York, 1935.
Acts and Resolves of the Province of Massachusetts Bay.
The rest of the material used is listed under separate chapter headings:
CHAPTER I
Gazetteer of Berkshire County, Massachusetts, Part First, Syracuse, 1885.
A History of Deerfield, Massachusetts, Vol. I, by George Sheldon, Deerfield, 1895.
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Historical Discourses Relating to the First Presbyterian Church in Newark, by Jonathan F. Stearns, D.D., Newark, 1853.
Lee, A Centennial and A Century, compiled by The Rever- end C. M. Hyde and Alexander Hyde, Springfield, 1878.
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