USA > Massachusetts > Hampden County > Ludlow > The history of Ludlow, Massachusetts > Part 35
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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40
There can be no doubt that the right of every man under our free government to sell his property when he pleases, even though it be the old homestead of his fathers, is a wise provision. Though the exercise of this right greatly modifies our local attachments, making them less a clinging to the soil, this is on the whole a great advantage. Fostered by our educational agencies, its tendency is to the cultivation of a nobler style of patriotism, a love that rises above mere matter and place, and cares rather for institutions and principles and life.
By frequent transfers of real estate it has actually come to pass that comparatively few occupy the houses and lands of their fathers. But if you live where the ancestors of your neighbor lived, somebody ole lives on the old homestead of your father's, and plucks the fruit from orchards which they planted, and mows the green fields which
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their skillful hands first brought under culture. These changes, then, in the ownership of real estate, are but the interchange of trusts com- mitted to us by our fathers, and it is all the same though the bound- ary line of towns comes between. Our obligation is none the less to enter into the labors of those who have lived and wrought before us.
He who has planted a tree, and by careful culture has made it fair and thrifty and fruitful, has a claim upon those who come after him that they shall take care of it, and, when it dies, plant another in its stead; and so, in general, of whatever improvements he has made dur- ing his occupancy. With peculiar emphasis is this true of all that con- tributes to make our homes beautiful. He whose industry and good taste have made his buildings and grounds a paradise, is a benefactor of the entire community, and of every pilgrim passer-by; and no man can with money purchase the moral right to lay them waste, of neg- lect them. Money may buy these goodly acres, but the beauty that covers them is the common heritage of all who have minds and hearts to enjoy it. To heathenize grounds that our fathers have Christianized is treason. However, then, the improvements of a century have come into our hands; whether by direct inheritance or by purchase, they are a trust to be kept faithfully, and transmitted to those who may follow us.
The advantages of life in the country, just as in the city, are, for the greater part, what we make them. But take our good country homes as we find them, or as they find us, and they will, I believe, all things considered, bear comparison with the best which the city affords. But it is what the country affords, more or less, that is ours, and the main chance with us is the faithful improvement of what we have.
Success is everywhere achieved by making the most of our own resources. If you please. it is the one talent of a country town, and not the five talents of the city, upon the improvement of which success is here conditioned. But perhaps our one talent may yield us as much substantial good as five talents in the city. It will, if we make the better investment, and take better care of the increase.
There are many things in which it were folly for the country to attempt to compete with the city.
The worshipers of mammon, the devotees of fashion, and all the giddy, fluttering throngs to whom a whirl of excitement is the daily or nightly necessity of life, may gain their ends and end their useless lives more readily in the city. Wealth, fashion, noise, with all their train of ambitions and vexations, find here in but inferior degree either their motives or their means. Some of the advantages of culture, too, it must be admitted, are generally more easily accessible in the city than in the country. The machinery of the city can turn out professional characters as well as sharpers of all kinds with much the greater facility.
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But the country can do without many of these. It is not polished instruments of any kind that is the world's great want. Professional training is well; but it is never the great essential. Look out for the man, and you will risk little to let the professor take care of himself. The grand aim of life everywhere should be the development and cul- tivation of manhood.
Now the first requisite to this is home and neighborhood. And in both these respects the country has the advantage over the city. One can scarcely know what the word neighborhood means till he has lived in the country. The word home has generally, too, in the country a breadth and depth of meaning which is rarely possible in the city. In the city, it means, additional to the family itself, for the greater part a hired house, or part of a house, a temporary abode, often little more than a business headquarters, with but slight local attachments. But in the country, home generally means possession as well as occu- paney. Often it means the old homestead, endeared by a thousand ten- der associations. And it means not only house, but also gardens, lawns, fields, trees, fruit and flowers, flocks and herds. In its fullest realiza- tion it is a place where two lives united in one were planted in youth, from which, fertilized by a pure love, other young lives have in due time sprung up around them. Be not afraid of this word planted. Man has not so grown out of relation to other forms of life in the king- doms of nature, that he can, without a great loss to himself, be tossed hither and thither, with no local attachments, all places being alike to him; and he never will at least in the present life. He need not indeed be attached to the soil like a tree which cannot be moved without endangering its life. But as the very means of insuring for him that vigor and strength of manhood which can withstand the trials of any clime, and make his life everywhere fruitful, his heart must have root- lets that take a strong and permanent hold upon home associations, and become intertwined inseparably with the happiness and prosperity of the people among whom were passed his early days. I do not say that a country birthplace and early home must always be more to him than any other place. It may or may not be the dearest of all places. It ought not to be in the case of those who afterwards have permanent homes in other places where families grow up around them. It must, however, be to them what no other place ever can be, the lovely dream- land of infancy, the charming fairyland of childhood, and a little later, a kind of borderland paradise, in which youth blossoms into young manhood and womanhood. Far from confining his life within narrow limits, these lifelong attachments to an early home become a con- dition upon which his life may ever after more freely and widely and securely expand itself. He whose infant life is thus planted in the soil of a good home, and whose life, thrice blessed with the culture of home, the school, and the church, all working in harmony, and
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inviting his faculties into free and happy exercise, is prepared in due time, as he could not be otherwise, to reach out his life in vigorous runners that shall take root, and make his life fruitful in places far remote.
If the raising of men be your chief aim, men whose lives shall be a blessing, whether they have their mission in your quiet town, or are called to other fields of duty, you have, then, no occasion to envy the dwellers in cities. And we need not fear to extend this comparison of advantages with our city neighbors. If their larger material wealth can build more elegant houses and furnish them more sumptuously than you, you can surround your homes with attractions in the form of lawns and flowers and trees, which may well excite their envy. If they can build finer schoolhouses than you, see that you have as good teachers, and you can build men as well as they. If they worship in costlier temples of granite and marble than your means can afford, you may offer as acceptable worship in your modest and not less taste- ful churches. Nor need your prayers and praises be restricted to these temples made with hands. They may go up daily,
From that cathedral, boundless as our wonder, Whose quenchless lamps the sun and moon supply, Whose choir the wind and waves, whose organ thunder, Whose dome the sky.
If the libraries of the city are not easy of access to you, yours are the more inspiring volumes of nature, spreading out for you on every hand their eloquent pages. If you can but rarely visit the galleries of art found in the city, nature's grand museum, filled with the work of the Divine artist, is open to you freely at all times, open to all who have eyes to see. If you may not so often in the country hear words of wisdom from the silver-tongued orator, or music from the great masters, for those who have ears to hear your wooded hills and vales are vocal with richer melodies.
To make the most of our advantages, however, requires us not to be proud of them and satisfied with them, but steadily to increase them. To this end your fruitful soil is an unfailing source of supply. You do not expect to find here buried mines of gold. But even more won- drous is the wealth that slumbers in these lands. They scarcely need your bidding to yield with each returning summer in infinite variety their boundless profusion of grasses, flowers, foliage, and fruits. And this it is in your power to increase almost without limit. Where now the earth sends up the thistle, you can cause it to send up the bearded grain. Where weeds have full possession of the soil, it will presently reward your care with the luscious strawberry, or with flowers fragrant and beautiful. Where the ground is cumbered with thorns, we find it
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ready under the hand of culture to grow the apple, the pear, the peach, the cherry, the grape, and the plum.
But plant not always in hope of speedy returns. Plant for genera- tions and centuries. By all means plant trees; multiply your groves, that shall be more to coming generations than to yourselves. Nog- lected fields wait only your planting and culture, to produce thrifty and fruitful orchards for you and the generation after you. The grounds that front your dwelling are waiting only for you to put in the tiny seed or tender sapling, to bless the next Centenary with the thrifty maple, the graceful ash, the evergreen pine, the stately elm, and the giant oak.
Carry the same spirit of improvement with you everywhere. Leave all good things that come into your hands-buildings, grounds, fences, roads better than you found them. At the same time clear away that which is not good. Above all, make your school and churches the best and best sustained, the most truly liberal as well as earnest, and keep them always abreast with the times in every real improve- ment. When the city gets the start of you in a good cause learn from it, and so make it your tributary. From the exhaustles fountains of your highlands you are to supply Springfield with living water. Draw upon her in return from whatever fountains of health she may have for you. No people can afford to live within themselves. A breed- ing in and in policy is always one of degeneracy. If we draw only from the fountains of our own life we shall presently find that the currents of life run low and languidly. Therefore constantly seck fresh currents of life from abroad. Welcome all new ideas and new things which are good. So may you steadily add to all your resources of power, mul- tiply the advantages of life, reflect honor upon your worthy ancestors, and transmit the goodly heritage received from them, not only unim- paired, but with a generous increase to those who live after you. Above all, may you hope to raise up for the future a generation of men worthy of the name. And this cannot fail to carry with it prosperity in every- thing good. To your lasting honor may these results appear when a hundred years hence a happy and intelligent people shall gather here to celebrate the second Centennial Jubilee of Ludlow, perhaps under the shadow of the very trees of your planting.
After the choir had again sung, Rev. J. W. Tuck, of Jewett City, Conn., gave the Historical Address, in these words:
HISTORICAL ADDRESS
Thoton I cannot claim the honor of my nativity with you, citizens of Ludlow, yet I am not a foreigner or stranger here. These fields and forests, so green to-day, are more familiar than those on which I first opened my eyes; these venerable oaks around seem as much
J. Meloster Juck
Historian of Centennial
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like old friends as those others under which I sat in childhood; and in many of these open countenances I read the checkered history of a majority of your families, as well as much of my own for sixteen of the best years of my life. A few rods from this place of our gathering, six of my children were born, and the precious dust of half that same family now sleeps in yonder cemetery, side by side with dear departed ones of your own stricken households.
The invitation, therefore, of your honorable Committee of Arrange- ments to address you at this memorable period of your history, I regard as a call to come home again, to revisit the scenes of former years, to review the pleasant memories of the past, to shake friendly hands, and gather up inspiration from a new brief communion to go on in life's journey with Christian courage, that we may finish our course with joy.
But personal and particular reminiscences belong chiefly to the speakers that will follow me; and while I may indulge in some that have fallen especially under my observation, yet the broader though less luminous field of your local history has been marked out for my survey in this Centennial Anniversary of your town. I am aware of the more than ordinary difficulties of my undertaking, difficulties growing out of the comparative meagerness of your early district records, and also because of a lack of startling incident and adventure, such as may be found in the central, populous places whose history covers a much longer period, but which can never obtain with a younger and scattered population, devoting themselves exclusively to the quiet pursuits of agriculture. While, therefore, Ludlow cannot boast of many great and astonishing things, of bloody battle-fields, of Indian burnings and massacres, of giving presidents, senators, and governors to the country, yet, if it be not assuming too much, in the words of another, -- "She can, so far, claim the merit of never having done anything that she or her mother town need be ashamed of." We will take this as no faint praise. Though it be true, as publicly preannounced of this celebration, that this town has not a great deal of history all to herself, may it not be added, neither has she the failing of coveting and contending for that in her chief places, which is as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal, and from which much claiming to be history frequently comes? No, her ambition is of a higher type; her preference for the more useful, the practical, the permanent. Hence of her sons it may be said, they are industrious, virtuous, sturdy yeomen; and her daughters, they are fit to be the wives and mothers of husbands and children that are "known in the gates, and who sit among the elders of the land."
With so much that is apologetic, and congratulating you, fellow- citizens, friends, and former townsmen, for the auspicious circumstances of this day, and the pleasing unanimity with which you enter on this Centennial, forgetful of political and denominational preferences, 1
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now waive for the present all other things, and give precedence to a brief narrative of the good old dame that has just rounded out her first hundred years, and yet is none the worse for wear, nay, is more vigorous and comely, and even Christian than ever. May we not, then, those of us who are adopted children, as well as you who were to the manner born, like the loyal subjects of gracious sovereigns, say now with united voices, Live. O mother! Live forever! Live on, firm in principle, fair in countenance, of a truly healthy growth, and holding honorable place with a friendly sisterhood of towns around!
"What's in a name?" is sometimes asked. Enough, perhaps, to claim a moment's thought as we pass along. The name first on our lips to-day, and inscribed on the banner floating highest in the breeze above this assembled multitude, though not euphonious, as some have said, yet is not unpleasant to the ear, and, we doubt not, is of honor- able origin. While we have no certain clue to its history, yet it seems to me the most plausible theory among several is, that its derivation may be traced to a prominent English republican living previous to and during the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell Edmund Ludlow, a member of Parliament and at popular leader of the people in these stormy times, against the encroachments of the crown. Though he was one of the king's judges, yet he was, even then, a thorough, con- sistent republican, and afterward an earnest supporter of the bill for the abolition of the House of Peers. It is not unreasonable to sup- pose that his name, associated as it was with genuine republicanism like that of John Hampden, his contemporary, a name afterwards given to designate your county, should, for like reasons, have been previously joined to one of its towns .*
SETILA. MENI
The first settlement with specific date in this part of Springheld, called Stony Hill, was made in 1751 by Capt. Joseph Miller, who came from West Springfield, and pitched his tent on the banks of the Chicopee River, near where Elihu J. Sikes now lives, whose wife is a direct descend- ant of his of the fifth generation. But there were already several families here, supposed to have been on the ground a year or two; those of Aaron Colton, James Sheldon, Shem Chapin, and Benjamin Sikes. Ebenezer Barber came in 1756, locating himself on the place now owned by David 1. Atchinson, and Jonathan Lombard followed in 1757. In 1707, Joshua Fuller, whose descendants are numerous, moved into the place, and settled on what is known as the Dorman farm [now owned
* See page 52.
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by Charles M. Foster], near the Methodist chapel. James Kendall came in 1769, from Ashfield. Most of these names, together with those of Jones and Burr, representing families still living here, are found in the earliest records of Springfield .* Their present numbers, and the places of honor and usefulness they have filled through so many gen- erations, evince the extraordinary vitality and vigor of the stock from which they sprang.
SLOW PROGRESS
For more than a score of years after the arrival of the pioneer set- tlers in the eastern, or Stony Hill, district of Springfield, the increase of the population, owing to a variety of circumstances, was very grad- ual. Persons coming from a distance, seeking new homes in this part of the State, preferred planting themselves in the villages, and remain- ing there, on account of their greater safety, and also that they might the better enjoy the advantages of religion, of education, and social life. With reluctance they went out to take up new lands at a distance: and only the most venturesome, and such as had but small possessions at home, would do it. It is no disparagement of the carly inhabitants of this locality, to say they were poor in this world's goods, and adven- turers here, seeking to better their seanty fortunes. Their hardships, therefore, were many and great.
ORGANIZATION AND STRUGGLES
At the end of the first quarter of a century, or in the year 1774, the population of the place having reached two or three hundred, measures were taken and perfected for the organizing of a new town, which was denominated in the act of incorporation separating it from Springfield, the district of Ludlow. It was thought the measure would give a new impetus to the prosperity of the place by adding largely to its numbers, and furnishing the people with superior advantages of every kind. But the expectation was not one to be realized then, since the date marks a period in our country's history, distinguished for the beginning of hos- tilities between the home government of Great Britain and her American colonies. Just previous to this the tea had been destroyed in Boston harbor, in consequence of which Parliament had passed an act inter- dicting commercial intercourse with that port, and prohibiting the landing and shipping of any goods. This oppressive bill was followed by the passage of others more odious still, and a general state of alarm prevailed throughout Massachusetts and all the colonies. In a twelvemonth afterwards, the war of the Revolution opened in the fight on Lexington Green, followed by the famous battle of Bunker Hill, on the 17th of June, 1775. The news of these battles arrived in this part of the State two
* See pp. 30-41.
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days after their occurrence, though neither telegraph- nor railroads were then known, and immediately several companies of men, well armed and equipped, were dispatched on their long and toilsome march to the seaboard. Others were organized as minutemen, and constantly drilled, preparatory to being called into the service.
I speak of these things here, not to impart information, but as sug- gestive of those dark and troublous times a hundred years ago, and as accounting for the slow growth of the new settlements in this part of the State, and particularly outside the larger towns. Men do not go forth into the wilderness in large numbers, nor engage extensively in agricultural pursuits, when the trumpet of war is sending it- echoes through the land, and the young and brave are summoned to the bat- tle-field. Drawn from their homes, then, they dwell in camps and sicken in hospitals, or fall in the deadly strife.
EARLY TOWN MEETINGS
The first town meeting in Ludlow was held almost immediately after its organization, at the dwelling-house of Abner Hitchcock, where Lucius Simonds now lives, and at the second meeting a few weeks after, a committee was chosen to secure the services of a minister for the people. This seems to have been the universal practice of the father- of New England, as soon as they could count up forty or fifty families within a reasonable distance, to provide themselves with the ordinances of religion, and enter into church relations with one another. Even before that, when they might not number more than a score of persons. they would initiate measures looking to their spiritual necessities.
You can find at the City Hall in Springfield, in the first book of records, an ancient document signed by only eight persons, the first little band of immigrants that arrived on the banks of the Connecticut River in the spring of 1636, written thus:
Wee intend, by God's grace, as soon as we can, with all convenient speede, to procure some Godly and faithful minister, with whom we purpose to join in church covenant, to walk in all the ways of Christ.
Like the Pilgrims on landing at Plymouth, their first thought was a recognition of the band that had led them, and a humble, public con- fession of the Mighty God, whom they loved and feared.
At another town meeting, held in less than three months from the first, a committee was chosen to find the center of the town, that they might build a meeting-house thereon. It was in their heart to build a house for the Lord at that time; but nine years intervened before the work was accomplished. The delay is easily accounted for, in the break- ing out of the Revolutionary war, the calling into the army of their avail- alle young men, and taxing their small pecuniary resources to the utmost
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to furnish equipments, ammunition, and rations. What prevented their increase in numbers also laid an embargo on their religious pros- perity ;* so that the very first tax levied, which was $20, lawful money, instead of being appropriated to their wants as a community, had to be diverted to the exigencies of the public peril. But it was done cheerfully. The patriotism of the people in this western part of the State was not a whit behind that of their brethren in the eastern counties, and all were ready to make the greatest sacrifices for the common safety. Stockings and shoes had to be made in the different families for the soldiers, since these articles could not be bought in one place as now, and blankets in many instances were taken from the beds then in use. Tax followed tax and requisition followed requisition for seven long years, reducing their means of support until nothing seemed left them but a depreciated paper currency. The worthlessness of this, though it was nearly all they had, some votes on the records made at that time will show. 1 quote as examples:
Voted to raise the sum of $11,500 to buy grain to pay the three and six months' soldiers, in addition to their stated wages; also, to raise $32,000 to pur- chase beef for the state.
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