USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Pittsfield > The history of Pittsfield (Berkshire County), Massachusetts, from the year 1734 to the year 1800 > Part 44
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The meeting-house was completed in 1793, although some of the minor details of the work may have been left until the next spring.
The marble " step-stones " - the same which still serve in their old place before the new church - were drawn by a long string of oxen, and with jovial escort, from quarries in Richmond, about the 1st of February, 1793; and horse-blocks were brought about the same time to aid the fairer worshippers in dismounting from their pillions.
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The first bell was a welcome new-comer in 1793. It was of the weight of seven hundred pounds only, but possessed a peculiarly silvery and musical tone, whose ringing echoes penetrated even to the summits of Washington Mountain in favorable conditions of the atmosphere. But the still-unsatisfied people must needs replace the tongue, which the maker had carefully adjusted to the strength of the sides, with one of heavier metal; and the experiment met the usual fate of overweening ambition.
The way being thus paved for a more ponderous successor, Col. Danforth -some extravagant propositions being set aside - was instructed to take the broken bell to some founder, and have
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STAFFDILG
SECOND MEETING-HOUSE, AND FIRST TOWN-HALL.
it cast anew, adding not more than three hundred weight of metal; so that the second bell weighed about one thousand pounds.
It was further voted, "in order to secure the more speedy execution of the work," that "those gentlemen who may subscribe and pay any sum of money in advance shall have credit therefor on their next tax; " another of the frequent evidences of the scarcity of money in a community in which produce was, nevertheless, so abundant, that it was able, about the same time, to respond liberally to the application of the selectmen of Boston for aid to those left destitute by " the great fire " in that town.
The fate of the old meeting-honse must not be omitted here. The intention of removing it to some convenient spot where it might continue to serve for a town-hall was abandoned; and a
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committee was appointed to sell it. But the sale was postponed so long that the old building became a source of danger to the new ; for, the space between them being barely sufficient to admit the mortar-bed which was placed there, the lime caught fire, and it was with difficulty the flames were kept from spreading. The removal being doubtless hastened by the narrow escape, the old building was drawn a little way to the east, when its rotten timbers came crashing to the ground. One account says the destruction was intentional, and that a rope was attached to the top of the building at which the people pulled " with a will."
Whether the old men who had aided in its framing shed tears over the fallen hall of so many grave deliberations, and the walls which had echoed to so many pious exhortations, - as their descend- ants did over the fallen trunk of The Old Elm, -is not recorded ; but the village urchins mounted the crushed roof in triumph, and held a gleeful jubilee over the deposed tyrant of their sabbath hours.1
In all the action of the town regarding the new mecting-honse, it is noticeable that there is not a single allusion to the sacred purposes for which it was designed, in record, report, or petition ; nor is there any indication that either the minister or the church was consulted in any matter connected with its construction. And it is still more remarkable, that there is no intimation, in the records of the church, of any knowledge on their part, that a work was in progress in which they naturally had so deep an interest, and for whose successful completion they doubtless often united in prayer. A similar statement is true with regard to the building of the first meeting-house; and, indeed, the records and papers of the town were always remarkably free from those pious phrases and professions with which public papers in Massachusetts were wont to be profusely interlarded.
Some minutes, however, might be looked for of provision for the dedication of the meeting-houses to divine service, either by the church or the town : but none has been found; and the only tradition of any, that is preserved, is of an account recently in existence which is said to have shown a generous consumption of the ingredients of punch.
1 Among the urchin crowd was Jared Ingersoll, afterwards one of the most gallant captains in the war of 1812, and now a venerable citizen of eighty-two years, who distinctly remembers the scene.
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There is abundant evidence, however, that their new house of worship was very precious in the eyes of the Pittsfield people of 1794, and that their hearts swelled with local pride as they introduced to its really beautiful interior the frequent strangers who were attracted to the town by the fame of its splendors.
Their regard for its neatness, if not for its sanctity, excluded town-meetings; and this resulted in the erection of a neat hall, as well as incidentally in a great improvement of the grammar- school.
After the destruction of their old haunt, the town-meetings were held in the "middle schoolhouse," which stood on the east of The Old Elm. This was exceedingly incommodious; and a meeting convened in it, and thus having a realizing sense of its utter unfitness for human occupation, appointed a committee to consider the most eligible mode of keeping a grammar-school, and to take into consideration the sale of the schoolhonse, and the erection of a new one, which might serve as a town-house.
The committee, consisting of J. C. Williams, Woodbridge Little, and Timothy Childs, reported that "a house ought to be built about forty-eight or fifty feet long by twenty-four or twenty-five wide, two stories high, with a flat square roof, a chimney at each end ; that on the lower floor there should be two rooms, one for the grammar and one for the district school; that the chamber should be fixed with convenient seats, rising one above another in the form of a gallery, with a proper arrangement for the seats of the moderator, selectmen, and town-clerk, somewhat as in the chamber allotted to the use of the House of Representatives. This might also be convenient for learning to sing in, and for making exhibitions on quarter-day."
The committee thought the expense might be £200, or perhaps £250; and they submitted a plan by which it might be defrayed without any tax on the town.
In accordance with this report, a building for a town hall and academy was erected on the present site of St. Stephen's Church. The cost slightly exceeded the estimate; and the old schoolhouse, which probably was considered too luxurious for a hog-pen and not good enough for a barn, did not readily find a purchaser ; but, by the aid of a tax of £75, the new town-house was completed and occupied by the March meeting of 1793.
The safety of the interior of the meeting-house being secured
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by the exclusion of the town-meetings, the exterior was protected by a by-law forbidding " any game of wicket, cricket, base-ball, bat-ball, foot-ball, cats, fives, or any other game played with ball," within eighty yards of the precious structure. As a matter of fact, however, the lovers of muscular sport were not absolutely ex- cluded from the tempting lawn of the "Meeting-house Common," as the letter of the law would have excluded them.
It was, indeed, their favorite resort; but Chandler Williams was ever at hand, with his voice of courteous warning, to ward off the threatened bombardment, when the danger to the meeting-house windows became imminent.
Another incidental result which followed the building of the meeting-house was a more decent respect for the burial-ground; so that a vote was passed that it " shall no longer be improved for a pasture." A neat white fence was built along the Park-place front ; and a curiously generous price was paid for a similar enclos- ure on North Street. In 1792, a committee appointed "to see if Dr. T. Childs might safely be permitted to build a medicine-store " on the west side of the meeting-house, reported that he might do so; and, upon their recommendation, the town granted to that gentleman, "a loan of the land " where P. Allen's bookstore now stands, to run as long as it should be used as a medicine-store, on condition that no family should ever live in it, and that the lessee should build, and keep in repair, a fence from the store to the corner of Park Place, similar to that with which it there connected.
It will thus be seen that the erection of the meeting-house, and the other buildings connected with it, in a few years created a marked alteration in the appearance of the centre of the village.
The meeting-house then built, having been injured by fire in 1855, was removed to the grounds of the Maplewood Young Ladies' Institute, and, having been slightly remodelled to adapt it to that purpose, is now the spacious and handsome gymnasium of that institution ; the only material alteration in its exterior being the substitution of an observatory for the belfry.
The town-house long continued to serve for public meetings, and the multifarious purposes to which such a hall is put in New- England villages.
In the school-rooms on the lower floor, troops of Pittsfield chil- dren obtained the greater part of their education ; and many now
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living in the town, with many more scattered far and wide, look back with pleasure to the days when their favorite sport of a sum- mer evening was hurling pebbles at the swallows that swept and circled around the cupola and chimneys of the old academy.
In 1832, this building gave place to the Episcopal Church, and, having been entirely remodelled and renovated, is now a handsome residence on East Street.
NOTE.
JOHN CHANDLER WILLIAMS was born at Roxbury in 1755. His father having been reduced in fortune, he repaired to Berkshire, then the land of promise for the ambitious poor, and, at the age of eighteen, held the office of deputy-sheriff, probably through the influence of his distant relative, the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. When he first entered Pittsfield, a handkerchief held all his worldly possessions.' His term of office was brief; for, in 1774, he entered Harvard College, where he was sup- ported by his own exertions, aided by his mother's family, the Chandlers of Worcester, and graduated in 1778. He, with many of his college-mates, was at the Battle of Lex- ington. On the 30th of April, the Provincial Committee of Safety summoned him to attend them, to be employed as an express. On the 23d of May, they furnished him with an order for horses and other necessaries " for his journey, he being in the coun- try's service." On the 27th of June, his account of £4. 4s. 6d., as " a rider in the ser- vice of the Colony," was allowed. The mission thus obscurely alluded to was, in part at least, the successful search for Gov. Hutchinson's letter-book, and other records of public moment, which were found in his country-seat at Milton Hills.2
It curiously happened that Chandler afterwards married the daughter of Col. Israel Williams, Hutchinson's Tory friend and correspondent, who was involved in serious trouble by the discoveries at Milton Hills.
Mr. Williams, after graduating at Harvard, studied law with Hon. John Worthington of Springfield, and commenced practice at Pittsfield in 1782. " As a lawyer," says Rev. Dr. George T. Chapman, " his standing was more than respectable. His mind was richly stored with legal knowledge; and of that knowledge he availed himself with the noble determination to be useful rather than splendid. . . . He acquired the esteem of the court, the bar, and the jury : he so ingratiated himself in the confidence of the community around him by the integrity of his conduct as to be proverbially eulogized as ' the honest lawyer.' "
He did not, however, confine himself to the practice of the law, but opened a store, which he conducted successfully, on the south side of the Park, where, soon after his removal to Pittsfield, he purchased the property which now lies on each side of Williams Avenue, and extends west to South Street, upon which the gambrel-roof mansion, now known as the Newton House, had then been just built.
His wife, Mrs. Lucretia, the preserver of the elm, was, as has been stated, the daugh- ter of Col. Israel Williams, who commanded the Hampshire militia in the last French and Indian War, and was one of the most noted loyalists of the Revolution. Madam Lucretia inherited the Williams blood in all its pride and vigor. "She was," says the historian of the family, " a woman of uncommon spirit and most uncommon brilliancy of wit and intellect; always the centre of the circle in which she moved, and the point
1 This is stated in the " History of the Williams Family " as being the case on his final settlement in Berkshire, which is clearly an error.
2 Letter of Hon. E. A. Newton, in " History of Williams Family."
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of attraction in all companies. She had a keen perception of the ridiculous; and the coxcomb, the frivolous, and the vicious received their due reward at her hands; but she was most kind and tender to the deserving." The most devoted of daughters, in the trouble which her father's political course brought upon him she was his chief solace and sustainer; and, when he was confined in Northampton jail as an enemy of his country, she, although but a girl of seventeen years, carried him his food daily from their home in Hatfield; submitting, for the sake of this sacred duty, to curb even her proud spirit under the annoyances and indignities inflicted by coarse and suspi- cious jailors. Naturally, her affections were not conciliated to the Whig party by this treatment; and, while she lived, she considered herself a subject of the English Crown, and invariably spoke of the war of the Revolution as " the Rebellion."
Some notable displays of the Williams spirit are related of her in Pittsfield. The house which Mr. Williams purchased on his removal to that town was originally sur- rounded by a fine growth of buttonwoods, then a favorite shade-tree. But the busband and wife agreed in preferring the more stately and graceful elm; and it was agreed, that, at some time, the buttonwoods must give place to their betters; but dread of the naked aspect which the place must for a while bear, postponed the change from year to year. But one spring, Mr. Williams set off for Boston to attend to his duties as a legislator; and, on his return, his wife triumphantly pointed him to a lawn as bare of forestry as his smoothest meadow. There was nothing to do but to introduce the long-desired elms. And to this incident, together with the skill used in selecting from the widely differing varieties of the elm, is due the noble colonnade of trees which now shade the new Court Square.
The other anecdote is no less characteristic of the times, and of the parties con- nected with it. It seems that a notorious demagogue had incurred the wrath of Thomas Allen, jun., by circulating some slander against his father; whereupon the younger Thomas, in accordance with a custom now passed away, lashed the offender across The Park and down East Street. Now, it happened that the houses of Chandler Williams and the Rev. Mr. Allen stood opposite each other at the head of that street; and, as the whipped and the whipper passed between, Madam Williams appeared at her gate, and, handing out a new whip, cheered on the excoriation with, " That's right, Tom! Give it to him well! Lay it on to the rascal ! " ·
While, across the way, the venerable pastor stretched out his hands, crying, " Thomas, my son, forbear; forbear, Thomas, my son."
And Thomas, more gallant than dutiful, obeyed the lady.
Mr. and Mrs. Williams lie buried in the lot of their son-in-law, the late Hon. E. A. Newton, in the Pittsfield cemetery.
Com leWilliams
29
CHAPTER XXV.
STRUGGLE FOR THE EQUALITY OF RELIGIOUS DENOMINATIONS,
[1772-18II.]
State of the Law. - Appropriations for the New Meeting-House resisted. - Bap- tists, Shakers, Episcopalians, and Methodists. - Protest of the Dissenters. - List of Dissenters in 1789. - Inquisition into Religious Faith. - Henry Van Sehaack appeals to the Courts. - The Decision. - State Laws for the Support of Religious Worship remodelled. - Pittsfield Parishes.
THE means of defraying the cost of the new meeting-house were not raised without creating the usual village dissen- sions; and, as usual, these divisions formed a part of the struggle to make practical that equality before the law, which, although theoretically proclaimed by the Declaration of Rights, was still, in practice, denied, especially by the prevalent construction of the article in that instrument concerning the support of the institu- tions of religion.
In accordance with the new fundamental law, as well as with the ancient colonial statutes, towns in Massachusetts were constituted religious parishes, charged with the maintenance of public worship, and were required to compel the attendance upon it of such of their inhabitants as could conscientiously unite in the established exercises.
Against the incorporation of this portion of the colonial system into the institutions of the new Commonwealth, there had been an earnest but unavailing protest. Two classes of men had, in the Revolution, combined on the patriotic side, - those who would resist every encroachment, from whatever quarter, upon civil liberty or the natural rights of the individual, and those who simply desired to protect the ancient status of the Congregational and republi- can Colony against the attacks of Episcopal and imperial Brit-
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ain. It was inevitable, therefore, that, the contest with the mother country being over, a new division of opinions should arise upon matters in which the spirit and practice inherited from colonial times seemed oppugnant to the liberty of the citizen. And thus a new struggle commenced, influenced more or less on both sides by selfish interests and personal prejudices, but nevertheless with a foundation of principle at bottom.
Two points of difference appeared, even before the colonists had any other assurance of success than the confidence which true men have in a just cause and in themselves, -protest being made against African slavery, and the compulsory support of public worship; the Baptists and Friends leading in the opposition to the latter.
The members of these denominations carried their efforts to effect a change into the constitutional convention of 1779, and there made a vigorous effort to do away with the whole system of State interference with religious matters, but in vain. Indeed, John Adams, as early as 1774, in an interview concerning this matter at Philadelphia with certain Pennsylvania Quakers, who wished to make it an element of national politics, had said somewhat petu- lantly, that he "knew they might as well turn the heavenly bodies out of their annual and diurnal course, as the people of Massachu- setts from their meeting-house and Sunday laws."
The substance of the old statutes was therefore retained in the Declaration of Rights, which empowered the towns to tax polls and estates for the support of the public worship, which they were required to maintain, with the proviso that the tax-payers of a dif- ferent religions denomination from that held by a majority of the town might require their assessments to be paid to teachers of their own faith, if there were any such, upon whose ministration they usually attended when in health ; otherwise the payments to be made to the religious teacher or teachers of the parish in which they were levied.
The right of control, in religious as in other matters, pertained to the majority of voters, whatever their creed, provided it were Protestant and Christian. The Baptists, Friends, and Methodists were, however, opposed to the exercise of this right on principle, and the Episcopalians from policy; so that it was stated, with probable correctness, in the constitutional convention of 1820, that the Congregationalists alone had availed themselves of it, while by
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many even of that denomination it was looked upon with dis- favor.1
Thus stood the law and public sentiment when the people of Pittsfield, in November, 1789, undertook to build the new meeting- house. But, in order to fully understand their bearing upon the subject of the new enterprise, some account is necessary of those in Pittsfield who dissented from " the standing order," as the dom- inant sect was called, and formed a considerable body of Baptists, Shakers, Episcopalians, and Methodists, perhaps numbering between two and three hundred souls in all, although represented by only thirty or forty tax-payers.
The Baptist faith was introduced into Pittsfield by Elder Valen- tine Rathbun. The reader is already familiar with the character of this gentleman as a political leader in Revolutionary times, when he was in excellent accord with Rev. Mr. Allen, except when his zeal incited him to even more radical measures than those which his Congregational brother favored.
His active and ardent temperament manifested itself in religion as in politics, rendering him restless and perhaps unquiet in pursuit of divine truth, and subject to quick sympathies, which sometimes led him astray, but of a sincere piety, which forbade him to persist in conscious error. He had received neither a classical nor theo- logical education,- which might perhaps have preserved him from the delusion into which he fell for a time, - but has left evidence that he was not entirely unfitted for the office of a preacher, either in natural gifts, intellectual culture, or general information. Those who put faith in the indications of character afforded by chirogra- phy would attribute to him a nervous organization of extreme re- finement and delicacy.
Shortly after his removal to Pittsfield, Mr. Rathbun began to hold meetings in his own house, and soon won to his faith several of his neighbors, who, in 1772, united themselves in a society of Baptists, or Anabaptists, -as they were more commonly called, from the prominence which their refusal of infant baptism held in the popular idea of their creed.
The new sect flourished for a while, but soon met with a sad in-
1 The proposition to abolish it was introduced into the convention of 1820 by Dr. H. II. Childs, a Pittsfield Congregationalist, who championed it with ability and most persistent zeal, both in that body, and, when it was lost there, before the people, until it was finally carried in 1833.
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terruption to its prosperity. In 1780, Mother Ann Lee, the Shaker prophetess, set out on her famous proselyting tour from Watervliet, N.Y., to Harvard, Mass. On their way, the apos- tolic party visited New Lebanon and Hancock, in which vicin- ity a most remarkable "revival of religion" had prevailed during the preceding year, having commenced in the fall of 1779 at New Lebanon, - then a part of the township of Canaan, -under the auspices of four women, exceedingly "gifted in prayer," who sent out their sweet influences from private houses, but most powerfully from "Darrow's barn," which stood where the Shaker Village at New Lebanon now does. These women, and other persons, chiefly Baptists, embraced the Shaker faith; so that when " Mother Ann, and the elders with her, " in 1780, appeared upon the field so ripe for their reaping, the excitement was un- bounded ; and thousands flocked together from the neighboring towns in New York and Massachusetts to listen to her novel and marvellous doctrines.
It was not strange that a man like Mr. Rathbun should be car- ried away by the contagious enthusiasm of the hour, or that he should be fascinated by the new doctrines, among which the neces- sity of "personal purity " and " the mortification of the flesh " were prominently taught. It is not unlikely, also, that his sensitive and nervous mental system, which had been for years held at its extreme tension by his active duties in regard to the cruel contest with Great Britain, may have been ready to re-act to the other ex- treme of holding all war to be sinful. But, if the conversion of Mr. Rathbun to the Shaker faitli is not unaccountable, it is still less strange that he soon found the practices of his new associates unsatisfactory, and hastened to renounce his connection with them, and publish a book opposing their creed, but more especially in denunciation of their practices.
Not content with this endeavor to repair the mischief in which he had been led to take part, Mr. Rathbun, in the March meet- ing of 1781, moved and carried a resolution appointing a commit- tee to devise " some measures to take with those people known as Shakers," who, it seems, in his opinion, were exceeding the bounds of even Baptist toleration.
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