USA > Massachusetts > Hampden County > Ludlow > The history of Ludlow, Massachusetts > Part 34
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A fine selection played by the band sent a thrill of inspiration through 1 One of the four brothers whose pictures are shown on page 293.
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the audience, after which the exercises were formally opened, and the grand choir sang with a will "Strike the Cymbal" and "Home, Sweet Home." Rev. Daniel K. Banister, formerly a pastor in the town, next led the congregation in a fervent and earnest prayer. Rev. Simeon Miller, a native of Ludlow, read selections from the Scripture appro- priate to the occasion." The next exercise consisted of the singing of the Centennial hymn, composed for the occasion by the Rev. Alfred Noon, pastor of the Methodist Church, and the compiler of the town history. The grand strains in the old tune "Devotion" rang out like a chorus at the Peace Jubilee, as the whole audience united voice and heart in praise. Rev. C. L. Cushman, then pastor of the Congregational Church, next delivered the following address of welcome:
REV. MR. CUSHMAN'S ADDRESS OF WELCOME
Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: It has been said by some one that there is a class of rather solitary people, who, having reached a certain age, never more grow old. Perpetual youth is what they crave. But we, sir, are proud of our age. The old mother is, to-day, a centenarian, and yet she greets her children in the beauty and fresh- ness of a youthful maiden. We call you to note her youthful appear- ance. Standing at the opening of a second century, she never looked so fair, so unwrinkled, so youthful as now.
Despite the prevalent indifference to genealogy and to ancestry which so far influenced the early settlers that they neglected to pre- serve and transmit to us connected and reliable memorials of them- selves, it was somehow discovered that the town was reaching its one- hundredth birthday. With a quite marked unanimity of feeling it was thought that the event must not pass without a public recogni- tion in the shape of a family gathering of sons and daughters from far and near. The objects were the gathering into a connected form for preservation our hitherto fragmentary history, the renewal of old friendships, the awakening of a family pride in all hearts, the culti- vation of becoming reverence for the past, and the bringing of all who were born here into an acquaintance with the place of their nativity. It is a matter of regret that in New England there has prevailed -o great indifference to the men and to the things of the past. No peo- ple have so great reason to value their descent as the native-born citi- zens of our land. Yet, as a fact, no people on earth concern themselves so little about their ancestry, or, after the first degree, feel so little interest in consanguinity. In reply to the question whether such a one is a relative, the negative is given, simply because he is only a second
" The selections were Pel. SO: 1, 90: 1-6, 78. 1-7.
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cousin. If you ask one who was his grandfather he may be able to tell you, but if you ask where he came from you will quite likely be answered in some such dubious and traditionary form as the following : "I have heard my father say that his father came from the East or from the South," etc. This ignorance is, of course, the result of indifference. Let us rejoice that this indifference is beginning to be corrected.
We have projected this celebration, to-day, to help in breaking up this indifference. We do not claim that the 17th of June was the exact natal day. but near enough to it to warrant its use as such. We have, however, chosen it largely because there is no month like June, at least till golden-sheaved October comes. Nature is the universal attrac- tion. It has been well said the flowering time of the year is its fresh and virginal period, and surely there is none so enchanting. June is surely a gift out of the heavens. Birds and flowers, beautiful expres- sions of God's thoughts, make life charming. So, then, the mother has shown her good sense in inviting home her children when she herself is clad in almost celestial beauty.
We are here, to-day, as one family, brought together by this natal occasion, to visit the old family homestead. Let us feel like children, unbend and give way to the impulses of the hour.
Requested as I am to speak words of greeting in the name of my fellow-citizens and of the committee of arrangements, it gives me pleasure to reflect that if we have never been noted for great men and great things, we have at least taken care of ourselves and kept out of prison. Scarcely a name has been on the convict roff. The retirement of the town has been fitted to foster simplicity of feeling and of character. It has been a definition of a wise and pure life to live according to nature. Such a mode of living is well-nigh impossible in the crowded life of cities and large towns. The formalities, the spirit of caste and clique, the tyranny of opinion, make it hard for a man to be true to nature and true to himself. The soul becomes artificial without knowing it, ceases to think its own thoughts and forsakes truth for the voice of the ruling caste. In such cases and places, politeness is wont to be a rule committed to memory and not a prompting of nature. An external standard seizes a man and molds him into a thing of show and quite likely of falsehoods. Some one has somewhere said that simplicity and honesty are the gold of character, but surely how hard are they to keep, and how rare to find. Now these traits have always been nourished and perfected in this rural retreat, away from much of the gloss and falsehood which are wont to abound in the largest communities.
So, then, we congratulate ourselves that we have grown and sent out to other communities the best material, the very bone and sinew of which they are made. As such we welcome you home to-day, to view the rock whence ye were hewn. We are proud of you for the most part. Nobly did our town respond to the country's call. and
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many of her sons sleep beneath the Southern sky. Nobly has she always done her part. Nobly does she sustain the institutions of religion. In fact she has ever been true to high-toned principle.
The old town is much changed. Even her "woods and templed hills" fail to remain intact. Her fine farmhouses tell of thrift and comfort, if not of wealth and luxury. We promise more in the future. We are here, to-day, to assert anew our right to be, to take a new lease of life, to push ourselves nearer to the front in the family of towns. Before we surrender the trust by you committed to us, we propose to transmit it to posterity greatly enlarged. Everything betokens that the Ludlow of the future will not be the Ludlow of the past. Hence- forth we are to be connected with our city friends by iron bands; and, ladies and gentlemen, we shall be the head, while, by their own decree, they will be one of our dependencies. Or, for the moment, waiving that point, if we shall prove true to the confidence reposed in us, and if- if- our prevalent drouths shall not prove too much for us, we shall be the source and fountain. We propose to carry this uncoveted honor with becoming dignity and grace, and conspicuously to wear the spark- ling jewel so long as our rocks and hills shall endure.
My friends, this is a birthday party, and it is a solemn and impressive thought that we shall never see the like again. All of our names will be checked on the roll of living men before another. A gentleman was lately overheard declaring that he would have nothing to do with another centennial! We appreciate his sentiments. The next we shall keep on the eternal plains. We are then treading on sacred ground. Age is everywhere entitled to reverence and honor. The town never seemed so sacred as now. Reverence, faith, entire good will, become the hour.
In the name and in behalf of my fellow-townsmen, I bid you wel- come. We are glad to see you. Your presence does us good. We are glad you have not forgotten or lost your love for the old home- stead. We should have been recreant to real fraternal feeling if we did not invite you home and make ready our best for you. Whether the fatted calf is or is not made ready. I will not say, but I assure you there has been no stint in this getting ready. This is a hearty wel- come. With most cordial affection we greet you; glad to take by the hand many of you who have long been known to us as personal friends, we greet those most kindly, who, on returning, find themselves strangers in the land of their birth. We hail with gladness our gray-haired and venerable men who occupy a well-deserved prominence. A hoary head is surely a crown of glory if it be found in the way of righteous- ness. We know it was with unwanted pleasure that these, our venerable fathers, saw this movement set on foot. We rejoice in your presence here, to-day. Welcome! welcome! honored sires, fathers and mothers. brothers and sisters. Kindred, all, we bid you welcome home. We
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have come to talk of olden times. We have come to honor the dead, and to carry away with us, if we may, some benefit from such filial homage, for ourselves and for our children. How unwonted our emotions! We welcome you to the home of your carlier years, to the altars of your God, and to the graves of your kindred. Let us to-day press around the time-worn graves of our dead. Let the first sentiments of the heart prevail. Let friendship be renewed.
Welcoming one another to these assemblies on earth, and hailing this occasion for the expression of confidence and love; coming together by the will of God, may you with us be refreshed, and our thoughts run forward to that day when all the servants of Christ. com- ing from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south, shall meet together at the harvest home in the end of the world. So it is that our hopes of heaven enter into the welcome we once more give you. Modest okl town, may she more than ever be the love and delight of her sons and daughters!
A Literary Address, with reply to the Greeting, occupied the next half hour. Prof. Lorenzo White', then of New Salem, later principal of Vermont Methodist Seminary and Female College, opened his oration with a few pleasant words not in the manuscript, saying that although not a native of the town he had come within its limits when a boy of four, and received all his early training in its society and schools. Then followed the Address, as follows:
ADVANTAGES OF LIFE IN A COUNTRY TOWN
THE address of welcome to which we have just listened may seem to one who has come to see what we are doing to-day as nothing more than a formality in the carrying out of a prearranged programme. Doubtless your words of greeting have been spoken according to a prescribed order of exercises in the celebration of your Centennial. But in this you have only conformed to a higher law to which we owe allegiance at all times. The order of the day obeys the spirit of the day. To us, who are here in response to your invitation, these words are full of meaning. They come to us freighted with pleasant memo- ries-memories, in the case of many of us, fragrant with the loves and joys of childhood. We are glad to be here, and to feel that we are at home with you. Our esteemed friend who has so well spoken your greetings to us returning wanderers, skilled though he be in the use of words as a fine art, could not, if he would, cheat us with fine phrases. We have heard his voice with gladness because it harmo- nizes with all the other voices about us. He has but rendered into graceful English the greetings wherewith these hills and valleys and
B Deceased.
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brooks with which we were once so delightfully familiar had already welcomed us the same old hills and vales over which and through which we so often roamed in childhood, and the same loved brooks where we fished and bathed and frolicked, and in which we built res- ervoirs that always served their purpose well, and did no harm. Smiles and looks of welcome, too, we receive on every hand from old school- mates and playfollows the same boys with whom we always had good times, and the same girls whom we boys used to think the fairest and best. They do not look just as they used to, and we are not sorry, for they point us with pride to their daughters, who are as fair as ever they were, and who wonderfully bear their likeness, while they them- selves have just changed in the order of a happy development. They seem only to have been born into a freer and larger and grander life. They have just outgrown the bloom of girlhood, and have put on the riper, richer charms of womanhood, and most of them of wifehood and motherhood. And we boys, as we feel ourselves to-day if we have been true to the charter of virtue love them as much as we loved them when they were girls, with the love that every true man has a right to cherish towards every true woman with whose acquaintance he is
Even the children of to-day, many of them, do not seem strangers to us. Their telltale faces show their ancestry. They are so like the faces of their fathers and mothers, and grandfathers and grand- mothers, that I often know them as soon as I see them, and the chil- dren quickly know those who know them. These rushing hours speedily make us old friends with them. But we find yet other friends here who pleasantly remind us of the good days of yore. These grand old trees which stood here when the old men of to-day were boys, trees which even the greedy ave has not dared to destroy, wave their greeting to us in the morning breeze, and from their wide-spreading branches. clad in richest foliage, come the greetings of the birds, caroled in their sweetest songs, while all about us, too, even the wayside and hillside Bowers, looking up to us lovingly, claim us as their friends and bid us welcome. And well they may. Though these birds and flowers are not just the same that we used to know and love, they are so marvelously like them that they must be the children undegenerate of the very old birds and flowers of our childhood through a line of I know not how many generations. The mother bird has, from year to year, taught her offspring the same sweet songs, and the mother-plant with unerring care has transmitted to the baby-plant the same exquisite taste and skill in displaying its charms and diffusing its fragrance.
It was a happy thought or hit with you to select the charming month of June, when Nature has just arrayed herself anew in her most beautiful attire, as the time of year for holding these exercises; for these blessed children of nature have a right to join with us in the celebration of our
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Centennial. They were okl citizens here long before the first visit of our ancestors to this continent. They welcomed our fathers here a hundred years ago with the same melodies, the same gorgeous display of their charms, the same wealth of fragrance, with which they welcome us to-day.
I cannot help remarking here that the fashions of Nature do not change, except only as culture develops them more perfectly, and com- bines them more skillfully, and I am sure none of us would have them change otherwise. Ought we to imitate Nature in this respect, think you, and to hand down the same fashions from generation to genera- tion? Not certainly till human taste shall be so cultivated as to give us fashions true to Nature, and even then there will be room for new combinations in infinite variety. Is it not just here that Nature sug- gests to us the true solution of the fashion problem? But this only in parenthesis.
On this very year of our Centennial, Iceland celebrates her millen- nial. Who shall say that the robins, the bluebirds, the violets, the roses, the daisies and their numerous kindred of other names, and along with them the trees as well the maple, the elm, the pine, and the oak have not this same year a good right to celebrate the millen- nial of their occupancy of these loved retreats? Pioneers and teachers they were to our fathers, and they are to us; prophets, too, are they of a better time coming, if we will learn from them their lessons of taste and purity, and sweetness and strength. A millennium they foretell just as glorious as we will make it. Divine sovereignty in the case is the assurance of God's blessing upon our honest and well-directed efforts.
Considerable are the improvements even in this country town which a hundred years have wrought. Providence has, through the fidelity, the hardship, and the wisdom of our fathers, committed to us the trust of these cultivated lands, these pleasant homes, these churches and schools-in a word, the advantages, such as they are, of life in a country town. What have we to do to transmit these blessings to those who shall come after us, and to multiply them so as to make the future what it should be? is the question, then, which the occasion gives us with such emphasis that I need offer no apology for making it the starting-point of a few suggestions.
The inspirations of the glad Centennial day awaken, I doubt not, a desire among the people of the town to act each a good part in his day, and may well culminate in an ambition satisfied with nothing less than the best things -a steadily-increasing prosperity for your goodly town, and the brightest and happiest future for the genera- tions coming.
Indulge me, will you not? in saying we to-day as much as I have a mind to. for I have always loved to think of myself as one of you, and
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in this I know I am not alone among those who are counted as guests here to-day. While we have found homes in other places, our hearts are not bounded by the limits of our new homes. We do not have to give you up to make room for new friends. In coming here we are like married daughters, who, returning each Thanksgiving day to their father's with their new recruits of young life, always speak of going home.
The first Centenary of the town of Ludlow to-day becomes historic, and we are all anticipating with much pleasure the address which shall more fully make it our own by unfolding to us its records and its le's- sons. It is in the light of the present as well as of the past that on this day we look forward. And our path is a plain one. If we would make the future bright and prosperous, such as shall give us a claim on the gratitude of those who may follow us, then we have simply to be true to this goodly inheritance received from our fathers.
But to be true to this sacred trust, to make the most of our advan- tages, we must shun the perils which experience has taught us our lin- bility to meet.
It is wise, then, that we pause just here for a moment amidst the rejoicings of our Centennial Jubilee, and face the dangers against which even the comparative security of country life is not always proof.
It would be out of place here to rehearse the catalogue of sins which are everywhere the peril of careless lives. I must take for granted that those whom I have the honor to address to-day, are chaste, temperate, upright, industrious, and frugal. If any of them are not so, they ought to be, and by all means they had better be. But life, even on this higher plane, where crime is rare, has its failures. Indeed, every plane of life, till you rise to Heaven itself, has its evils to be avoided, and the higher you go in the scale of being, the more deplorable is the ruin which these threaten.
Hence, it now and then comes to pass in the country, that just at the point where intelligent industry with frugality has won thrift and competency, and has thus reached the plane of the highest financial independence that mortals ever can attain, there begins to spring up in the family an ambition for city style. I am warranted, if I mistake not, in taking for granted that the good sense and good blood of the thrifty farmers of Ludlow are generally a guaranty against this evil. This foolish ambition, however, is singularly blinding to its victims, and a word of caution even to the wise may not be out of place.
It need not be urged that attempts at imitation are generally failures, and that the actors besides are very likely to cut awkward figures. It is said that the young men of Byron's time who thought to imitate his genius, only got so far as to make themselves ludicrous by mimicking his limping gait and more limping morals. So it commonly happens that would-be imitations in the country of city life turn out to be only
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apings, and that, too, not of that which is worth copying, but of the weak- nesses and vices of the city -- the shoddy parade and slavish subserviency to position and power of those who have not learned to wear the honors of city life with good grace.
But this evil is sure in due time to cure itself. Fifth Avenue style in a farmer's home never fails to show itself, sooner or later, to be as absurd as would be the attempt to devote our New England lands to the raising of tropical fruits. We have all seen enough of this mistake to understand its results. It means heavy and steadily-increasing debts, irredeemable mortgages, bad dreams, haunted rooms, forfeited credit, seedy garments, an aspect of decay within and without, a general unhingement of manhood and womanhood, and then bankruptcy, or else that which is worse-an old age oppressed with intolerable burdens.
The failures of country life are chiefly traceable to causes working nearer the other extreme of society. Not in the excesses of taste and style lurks the demon that oftenest plays first tyrant and then destroyer in homes of industry. As the foremost or parent evil among upright and energetic farmers, I incline to place the tendency of both men and women to become working machines, appendages, the one sex to the soil and the other to the house. I do not refer now specially to the overwork so common that breaks down the constitution and shortens life; for even in the country dissipation doubtless slays more than work does, and when overwork brings premature death, that is not the great evil in the case. But your mere workers may be philosophers enough to adjust the daily demand on their strength to the daily supply, and so drag out the full measure of their days, though whether they do or not is of comparatively small account. The abominable thing is, that man should be degraded to the rank of the instruments which he wields. The curse lies in the debasing not in the shortening of life.
The first result of this all work and no play is to make Jack a dull boy, and next a dull man, if he lives to be one, who, because he is more a machine than a man, drops naturally into the old ruts of his fathers, is incapable of accepting improvements, but plods blindly on, absurdly seeking to perpetuate ideas and customs which the world has outgrown, mistakes narrowness for independence, stupidity for constancy, penu- riousness for economy, shows but slight appreciation of the beautiful, pays his church dues as a kind of future life insurance demand. regards money expended for books and pictures as wasted, and the education of his children as useless, save only as the outfit of a drudge like himself. Call this an extreme case, if you please. I mean it as such. But remem- ber that sins invariably lead to extremes.
Extremes are not always reached in a day. But let a man only con- sent to be a mere working machine, and to make his wife and children the same, or no matter if the wife leads in the case, and in due time this very extreme will be gained, if not in his day, then in his children's.
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But let him not flatter himself that he is becoming rich. Such a man is not a possessor at all. The farm or the shop, from first to last, owns him, and works him as its slave. If we would escape these results, then we must shun the sin which leads to them.
Our fathers were hard workers, it is true, and we cannot say that they were always wise; but it is the evidences which we see to-day of the subordination in a good degree of work to the higher purposes of life, that inspires for them our respect and gratitude. They not only made for themselves homes of comfort, and caused their lands to yield for them the supplies demanded for physical life, but they also early founded churches and schools, and cheerfully sustained them from their scanty and hard-earned means. Not least among the leg- acies which they have left to us is their own example of self-sacrifice in behalf of their children. They did their part well, and thus made it our duty to show that the oft-repeated claim of New England farmers, "we build schoolhouse- and raise men," is no idle boast.
To be true to the fathers, our first duty is to be men. I've, then. the good things of life, and let them not use you.
Be a free man, not a slave. Make your homestead not your work- shop, nor your prison, nor your world, all which terms in this connec- tion mean about the same thing; but make it what home should be. as beautiful as your means will permit; at all events, make it within doors and without so bright and cheerful, and so warm and radiant with love, as to charm the faculties of your children into joyous and healthful exercise. And you may be assured the work will not suffer as the result. Make work a delight, a fine art; infuse into it the play clement; give brain and heart their natural right of dominion over muscle, and we can do a third more work, and do it better, with only the wearingss that makes rest sweet and dreams pleasant. And then. too, home, in its industrial character, will become what heaven designed it to be, a gymnasium for the free and happy development and training of mind and body.
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