USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Stockbridge > Stockbridge, 1739-1939; a chronicle > Part 9
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In 1761, the County of Hampshire was divided and Berk- shire incorporated. Of the new county Stockbridge was the most important settlement. As the century went on turn- pikes were laid down, the road map of western Massachusetts came out of the rough, foreshadowing its modern shape. Just
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where the Great Barrington road crossed the Plain going up to Pittsfield, stood Stockbridge's first public house. It was called the Red Lion Inn, and its large signboard sported a rampant red lion with a fine green tail. Silas Pepoon, a man of substance, owned it. There were eight bedrooms and a large ballroom upstairs, where all the Stockbridge functions took place. Later on, this ballroom was to become famous in Berkshire history, but at first it was probably used mostly for country dances, when from miles around the farmers' girls arrived on pillions, seated behind their beaux. The parties lasted till long after midnight. "There was dancing and merrymaking among the young people," mildly deprecated Mr. J. E. A. Smith, Pittsfield historian. "The ladies sipped wine and cider and . . . the more seductive flip, while the gentlemen indulged in even more fiery and exciting beverages."
When the parties were not going on, Pepoon handed out hot punches and rum toddies over the bar in the public room and discussed the terrible condition of the roads. The end of Main Street had a way of disappearing under water when the meadows flooded. The biggest item in the town expense account for years to come was to be the repairing of highways and bridges. Those who could not afford to pay highway taxes were allowed to make them up in work, at the rate of three shillings a day, if they were fortunate enough to own a team.
Cater-cornered to the Red Lion stood the village store. It belonged to Timothy Edwards, and had a fine porch running along its front, quite a fancy step for the Stockbridge of those days. The store part was towards the east, and the family lived at the other end of the house, so that Timothy, by merely going from one room to another, could change from village potentate to shopkeeper. Down the street on the village green, near the burying ground, the meetinghouse demanded
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attention, and alterations were being suggested. Stockbridge was growing steadily and needed more church room. New pews were put in, the building was reclapboarded and new windows inserted. Their church was the core of life to the early settlers and the marks of its care the sign of their vitality.
Meanwhile people were moving in. The same names took turn and turn about as selectmen, fence viewers, tithingmen, hog reeves, and sealers of leather. Lawrence Lynch, Stock- bridge's first Irishman, worked off his indenture to General Dwight and bought fifty acres of land at the foot of West Stockbridge Mountain, which is still known as Larrywaug. His first house soon proved too small for his fourteen children, and in 1800 he built another near by that has been the property of his family ever since.
Larry, so the story goes, had had a proud past in the old country, for his father was a baronet and owned a castle near Galway. But the young man had not liked his stepmother and enlisted under General Wolfe. There was little at the foot of West Stockbridge Mountain to mar the peace of growing old, save possibly the quiet depredations which went on in the vegetable garden, for the old Indian who had sold Larry the property could not bear to move away. He remained, a wistful neighbor in his tepee close by, occasionally helping himself to the Lynch cabbages.
The incoming English tide corresponded with the outgoing Indian one. When a dispute arose as to where the new meet- inghouse should stand, its removal to a site halfway up the Hill, although nominally a compromise between the citizens of the Hill and the Plain, was in reality the sign of English domination.
Although there may have been difficulty in deciding where to put the new meetinghouse, there was none about the building itself. Even the repairs to the old edifice could not compass Stockbridge's swelling pride. The town wanted
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"a decent and honorable house." It felt intensely respectable and wanted its respectability to shine before men. In 1782, £1,000 was voted for the building, which could be paid in money, grain, or neat cattle, as the case might be. In succeeding years more money was appropriated for the same purpose. When finally the meetinghouse was finished and topped off with a fine weather vane in the shape of a fish, it took all the equipages in town, its two coaches and Madam Abigail Dwight's chaise, a long time to get there. Lines of carriages came over the meadows from Curtisville. Some- times they tipped over going up the Hill, as the road was without a railing. Sometimes the dreary treeless stretch of what is now Church Street made the younger churchgoers so thirsty that they had to be excused in the middle of Dr. West's sermons to get a drink at the near-by spring.
Perhaps the minister wanted to make things easier for his flock. At any rate, he gave up the orchard ground which lay between his house and the meetinghouse, so that a road might be cut from the church over the Hill, sloping diagonally to meet Plain Street at the east end of the town. Even "the pedestrian villagers" used the new road, enjoying "its continu- ous views" and preferring it to "the burning sands of the plain." To accommodate them there was a long horse block outside the church and sheds for the horses. Sometimes the horses were tied to the fence at Asa Bement's near by. Tall pines grew in front of the church and there, always on time, was Dr. West, ready to greet his congregation. Inside the church, he bowed to the first families, seated in order of dignity in the pews just behind the choir, for the world was not left outside the door. Then he would read Dr. Watts's hymn, Ye nations round the northern sea, before climbing into the pulpit to begin his two-hour sermon.
The church was ugly enough, made of huge timbers and rickety shingles and painted white only on the outside. You
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could enter by three doors, from which stretched three aisles crossing each other at right angles. Another aisle ran clear around the church. There were three galleries and the deacons sat almost under the pulpit. As a special concession, the crotchety old bachelor, Dr. Partridge, who took care of Stockbridge for upward of sixty years, was allowed a pew of his own, which irreverent youth called the "partridge nest." It was a large open box, hung high over the central gallery, where he could keep his eye on the whole congregation. He was instructed to encourage singing as much as possible without going to the expense of hiring a teacher.
There were no carpets. No stove appeared for thirty years. Outside the winter winds blew so hard that the whole building shook and rattled, and the steeple had to be rebuilt on a smaller scale. When the next church was erected, the Hill church was torn down and carted away, so that nothing remains today but a few pine trees to tell the tale of so many years of pious Stockbridge going to its prayers.
Close by the meetinghouse was the town pound "to take care of strays," a necessary adjunct to any farming community where foals and yearling rams were constantly turning up in people's yards. A common pasture housed the village cattle, so people were careful to have their own particular mark. You could tell Josiah Jones's cattle anywhere by their "swallowtail, a hollow crop on the near ear, and a sloping piece cut off the top of the back ear." His son's marks were just the other way around, while Dr. West's stamp was a "short crop on both ears" of his cattle, sheep and hogs. These differences were important, for horses and cows had a way of getting out of the pasture, preferring the richer grasses of the unfenced burying ground and, in spite of town regulations, the swine would run at large.
By 1760, there were so many more whites than Indians in Stockbridge that an English school was necessary. Six pounds
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and ten shillings was voted for the purpose. By 1763, the selectmen were asked to find a teacher, and money appro- priated supported the school and teacher as long as it lasted. To eke out expenses the teacher lived in the community, first with one family and then with another, teaching in return for his board. A committee visited the school every once in so often and heard the children's examinations.
From now on money was voted conscientiously each year for the maintenance of the schools with a continuous upward trend, so that by 1800 the sum had reached $750. In 1764, the town ordered two schoolhouses, and wished also to "procure a suitable person to keep an evening school in town for instructing in psalmody." In course of time three school districts were established, one on the Plain, one up the Hill in the northeastern section of the town, and another in the northwestern section.
There was little or no opportunity for an elaborate educa- tion when the practical side of life demanded so much attention, and the early citizens of Stockbridge were men of all trades. A justice of the peace, who was also a member of the Legislature, who was also a speculator in land, who was also a trader, who was also a church warden, had scarcely time for the amenities. Even so, among Elijah Williams's papers, sandwiched between sheriffs' suits, accountings for the sale of iron, receipts for Indian land, and notices for the purchase of negro servants, are found several notebooks, full of early English and Roman history. How large a part Tarquin and Queen Boadicea filled in the life of this frontier businessman it would be hard to say, but there are the pages in close, fine handwriting about battles and the principal events of the Roman Republic.
Looking back upon the early town is like looking at the present one through the large end of a telescope. A definite social, economic, and political foundation is there, but in
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embryo. It is as if the Williamses, the Dwights, the Wood- bridges and the Joneses carried upon their stout persons all the implications of the civilization that was to be. The stage had so few actors that those few had to play all the parts. The same figures appear again and again, doers and done-by, in the scene. There is hardly a paper signed in the town for any purpose whatsoever where the names of Samuel Brown, Josiah Jones, Elnathan Curtis, Asa Bement and Timothy Edwards do not appear. They appoint each other, arrest each other, excommunicate each other, trade with each other, and pretty well manage to keep the wealth and executive and political power of baby Berkshire in their own firm hands. When in 1761 Governor Bernard was faced with the appoint- ment of four justices to the Court of Common Pleas, no one was in the least surprised that Joseph Dwight, Timothy Woodbridge, William Williams and John Ashley were chosen. Elijah Williams was made sheriff, then a post of con- siderable dignity. It was a family party-nearly everyone related to everyone else. By marriage as well as by ability, the persistent minority kept themselves on top.
The trading of the day, like the social system, was in miniature. It was compact, closely welded together. Dom- inating it, emerging from yellowed account books and bills of sale, is the figure of Elijah Williams, son of Colonel Ephraim. As a boy at college, the letters he had received from his father, urging him to make good use of his time, to improve himself while he had the opportunity, must have borne some fruit. From the passage in which old Ephraim urges complete dedication to God, shortly followed by the statement that he had "a vastly better scheme" for his brother "than buying in the Jerseys," young Elijah must have absorbed that mixture of piety and shrewdness which is New England's acknowledged contribution to the world. Elijah quickly discovered a business future in the little settlement of Queensborough,
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named for King George's queen, on the other side of the mountain, west of Larrywaug. There he founded some iron- works, opened a store, and saw to it that roads were built and the minister paid. In 1774, he obtained its incorporation as the town of West Stockbridge from the General Court and carried the deed home from Boston in his pocket. Years afterwards it was difficult to establish whether West Stock- bridge was a town at all, for Elijah had lost the Act of Incorporation. Small wonder, since he had so many things to do!
His trading must have begun even before that, for in 1762 we find a bill from him to David Van Schaack for "rum, coffee, sugar, pepper, nutmeg, indigo, tea," and two years later Van Schaack in his turn asks for money upon Elijah's account, and we find that he has bought "linen, one handkerchief, pipes," and, among other items, "blue coating, 5 yards. 3 dozen buttons, which you may return if they don't suit. I expect others next week."
Now, for the first time, the Van Schaack brothers loom large in Stockbridge affairs. They, too, were gentlemen traders, solid Dutchmen who lived at Kinderhook and were to suffer during the Revolution for their Tory sympathies. Henry afterwards bought a house and settled down in Pittsfield.
Trading was interspersed with polite intercourse and gave an excuse for passing the time of day. Henry Van Schaack insists upon inserting stockings with other goods as a present to Elijah; Mrs. Van Schaack asks for a saddle of venison and cranberries from him in return.
Elijah's financial transactions carry us out of the world of dollars and cents into a child's arithmetic book. Actual money being scarce, trade was carried on by a process of barter, so Robert Hefflin asks Elijah for cloth for one pair of trousers "and you shall have the ashes as soon as I can get them to you." Elijah exchanges a yoke of oxen and a cow for fifty acres of
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land. Another of his accounts with David Van Schaack places upon the debit side "buttons, wheat, gloves, tea, locks, rings, tape, thread, ale, molasses and nails, sugar, chalk and garters." And upon the credit "oxen, and an English plough, appletrees and currants." So buttons and currants, garters and frying- pans were bandied about in a sort of ring-around-a-rosy of mutual benefit, the complex needs of human beings squeezed within the narrow margin of what a single trader could supply. "A cask of as good a hogshead of Antigua rum as ever was sent to your place" comes to Elijah, while Van Schaack writes, "Your curtains are finished." Theodore Sedgwick complains, "wrote for the black britches Patern and not Drawers. You sent the Drawers but not Trimming which beg you would send." And Elijah charges Nicholson, "to making a shirt for Indian Henry 5 shillings." Credit was easily obtainable. Bearers of notes to Elijah ask to be paid a certain amount upon account, often some one else's. Accounts were settled every once in so often in goods or land, if actual money was not available.
Elijah dealt not only with the neighboring Van Schaacks, but with the world outside Berkshire. His West Stockbridge iron was sold in London; his potash also found a market there. Iron was priced at £20 per ton. Nathaniel Hazard of Philadelphia, between arranging shipments of this com- modity, gives advice as to how to grind flour "so as to make it white and lively." William Imlay, in trade in New York, writes that he is anxious to serve the West Stockbridge magnate, offering to take no commission if he is paid in goods. He sends ingratiatingly "a piece of Tear Nought for Tryall, which we think must suit you as you employ a great number of laborers." But Elijah was not merely interested in his laborers' clothes. This homespun manufacturer in a pioneer- ing town got his woolen goods from England. "It is of importance to stores in the country," writes Nathaniel
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Hazard, "to have their coarse woolens, such as coatings, bear- skins, friezes, baizes, as early as possible in the fall." He expected his consignment shortly and "nothing but the loss of the ship can in reason disappoint us."
But Elijah, magnificent as he was, had his difficulties. Mr. Imlay has to dun: "The very great disappointments we meet with in collecting our debt really distresses us. I therefore make no doubt but that you will exert yourself as much as possible to give us all the assistance you can. We flatter our- selves that from the great crops in your neighborhood that your remittance will be very considerable." This hope however, was destined to disappointment. Other letters follow: "We cannot extend our credit more than one year." And the year following: "We can hardly hold our heads above water." They were in a "truly distressed condition."
Imlay's distressed condition did not prevent Elijah from buying land in Pittsfield that same year, also "one black mare with a white face . . . and one black horse, white face, no white feet." Nevertheless, though his mind may have been upon his live stock, Elijah really did sell his land to pay his debts, and succeeded in paying nearly all of them. He kept an account book in his pocket of those who owed him money, and in justice to him it should be remembered that that account book includes nearly all of the names in Stockbridge at the time.
From the midst of fusty business transactions, Elijah's private life stands out in relief, dealt with in the matter-of-fact fashion of the eighteenth century, upon which the glasses of the present day focus so much more naturally than lenses dimmed by the sentimentality and blurred by the disapproval of the century which comes in between. Mr. Smith, in all the conscious morality of the Victorian era, deplored the degeneracy of the times. "With the amelioration of manners," he wrote, "went the decadence of morals."
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In this connection, there may be a sinister coincidence: In 1762, Elijah bought a gold necklace from Paul Revere, which cost him £18, and two years later one Mary Willson com- plained in the Great Barrington court that she was delivered of a bastard male begotten by Elijah Williams, and sued for his support. What is more, she got it; which is one case where intrenched privilege did not work, for Elijah was a powerful man. Whatever happened to Mary and the bastard male is lost in the shuffle of more important events, but there is a chance mention of Widow Mary Willson's house in Stockbridge and perhaps she ended her days in a spurious respectability. Elijah went on his way unabashed. A suit for which the materials billed were "scarlet cloth, shalloon, gold vellum lace, fustian, two pairs of leather pockets and lining for breeches . . . velvett for the collar, and a pair of gold straps," the whole amounting to £12. 3s. 9d., did not exactly hide his impenitent light behind a bushel. Later Imlay refers to an order of "cloth for a suit," and hopes that his (Elijah's) "wedding will be productive of the most perfect felicity." So apparently Elijah forgot about Mary and let us hope she forgot about him.
Moral emphasis changes with the centuries. There was little fuss made over Mary Willson, yet David Crocker "Unnecessarily travelled on the Lord's day by setting out in the daytime on horseback to go to Lee and rode through a part of West Stockbridge, all of which is contrary to law." And among Elijah Dwight's memoranda there is a warrant of arrest "for hitching up a horse upon a Sabbath."
The community was a patriarchal one. Planting, reaping, herding of sheep and cows, taking the corn to be ground at the grist mill on Yale Hill followed upon each other's steps in dutiful round. Hazard might tempt Elijah with woolen goods imported from England, but these were unheard-of luxuries for most of the village, where all the work of clothing the
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family was done at home. Only the tailoring was sent out- very often to the "she tailors" whose business it was to cut and sew. Frontier democracy early made itself felt in the difficulty of obtaining domestic servants, and most women did a good deal of their own work. There were the great awkward pots to put on the cranes in the big fireplaces, the unpainted floors to keep clean, the candles and soap to be made. When physical work was over, there was the ever-present question of saving one's immortal soul. Dr. West, who was just beginning to be well known, gave all his time to this matter.
When summoned to Stockbridge, Dr. West was chaplain of Fort Massachusetts. One of the Williamses, perhaps, had heard the young man well spoken of, and suggested his taking the place Jonathan Edwards's call to Princeton had left vacant. West had come originally from Tolland, Connec- ticut. He had graduated from Yale in 1755, and after that had taught school and studied theology at Hatfield. He was licensed to preach by the Association of Ministers in Hamp- shire in 1757, just a year before he came to Stockbridge.
West was not an impressive figure, being small of stature and plain of face, but he never rose to preach without trembling, and there was great fire of eloquence in his words. His boots were always shined, his collar with the white band adjusted as it should be. His one weakness-a pride in his legs, which were firm and shapely-made him wear the old- fashioned knee breeches long after most people had discarded them. He stood very straight, all the five feet of him, and "his eye was ever ready to flow with gentle pity and tender sympathy."
Upon his arrival Dr. West found himself in a delicate position. His kindly nature led him towards Arminianism, a doctrine which softened Calvin's hard and fast rule of pre- destination, by admitting the possibility of conditional salvation. The tradition of the Stockbridge church was now
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of the more orthodox Edwards brand. Arriving at his new parish, and anxious as always to do the right thing, conscious too of the extremely prickly skin of New England congrega- tions (they were taxed for their minister, gave him firewood and intended to get their money's worth), West doubtless cast about for orientation. In his quandary it was natural for him to turn to Dr. Samuel Hopkins. He took to driving over to Great Barrington in his two-wheeled top carriage. His hat and whip were always laid out for him the day before, that he might not be a minute late in starting. The Reverend Dr. Hopkins returned the visit, his large ungainly form the only unordered object in West's immaculate study. St. Bernard and pug dog, they spent hours discussing the weighty theological abstractions of the times. Could church member- ship be claimed by the children of church members? Dr. West, always charitable, hoped that it could, but Hopkins was adamant. To allow "meer membership," as opposed to "believing membership," to entitle you to the benefits of grace was opening the door of the Pandora's box of theological troubles, which he and Edwards had had such a time stamping out.
So the long afternoons wore on. Phantasms of heresies, Arminianism, Socinianism, Pelagianism, and that new horror, Unitarianism, beat their wings in the good doctors' faces, while they gave all the weight of their trained minds to hair- splitting questions which were to lose all their meaning for the generations to come. The more Dr. West talked to Dr. Hopkins, the more strongly he fell under his relentlessly logical conception of God. There was no sentimental sloppi- ness about this doctrine and West was careful to be exact in everything.
As Hopkins's theories gained ground upon the little doctor, he grew more and more humble. He was convinced of his own depth of sin and walked from the Plain to the Hill and
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back again, wondering why, when he had undertaken the charge of others' souls, he had so neglected his own. The conflict of his spirit became agonizing. Perhaps his stubborn human nature took a long time to accept gladly the belief that he would probably burn forever after his ministry had ceased. He had not reached the stage where he could under- stand why, under the circumstances, God was so particularly merciful. Of what avail is punctuality, the neatness of his ways, and the kindness of his heart against the fearful odds of his ultimate undoing?
But at last he received "a good hope through grace." One Sabbath, a pious old woman in the village remarked that Dr. West was a new man, and he himself dated his conversion from that moment. Perhaps he lifted up his eyes unto the hills. From Bear Mountain and Monument came his help. He experienced the identification of his will with God's, whose service is perfect freedom, which constituted the psychical phenomenon of conversion.
He dates the improvement of his character from then on. How wicked, one wonders, was he before? And it is strange that the wholesale adoption of such a horrible doctrine could have a softening effect upon his soul. "I dreaded him," wrote Catherine Sedgwick, "and certainly did not understand him in my youth. He was then only the dry, sapless embodiment of polemical divinity. It was in my mature age and his old age that I discovered his Christian features and found his unsophisticated nature as pure and gentle as a good little child's."
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