USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Pittsfield > The history of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, from the year 1876 to the year 1916 > Part 25
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
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
When the General Electric Company, in 1907, made the Pittsfield plant a component of its system, in name as well as actually, the development and progress of the local works be- came, of course, more definitely merged in the broader develop- ment and progress of the owning company; and the city realized more forcibly that the thousands of people employed in the Pittsfield shops were employed by an absentee, and not by a Pittsfield, employer. The growth of the establishment, and the quality and quantity of the output, could no longer with strict truth be ascribed to Pittsfield enterprise. Nevertheless, Pitts- field did not cease to regard them with a sort of parental pride, quite apart from the satisfaction caused by the contribution made by the company to the city's prosperity. It was remem- bered that the plant owed its origin to Pittsfield spirit, that in its
275
ELECTRICAL MANUFACTURING
vigorous and aggressive youth it had been financed by Pittsfield capital, and that Mr. Chesney, who, under the General Electric Company, still managed the works, had been a Pittsfield citizen since 1891, when he was the first manager of the concern. Partly due to this popular feeling, perhaps, was the fact that the works, long after their absorption by the General Electric Company, were locally called "Stanley's" as often as by the name of their new ownership.
William Stanley died at his home in Great Barrington, May fourteenth, 1916, while this book was in process of completion. He was born, November twenty-second, 1858, at Brooklyn, New York. Although he was a resident of Pittsfield for only a few years, beginning in 1890, his connection with Pittsfield effected the most marked change in its industrial character which had been experienced since the erection of the town's first woolen and cotton mills in the early years of the century, and the story of his life and achievements is a part of the story of the city.
Mr. Stanley, the son of a distinguished lawyer, was engaged in the business of nickel-plating in New York in 1879, when he fell under the notice of Hiram Maxim. That famous inventor was then chief engineer of the United States Electric Light Com- pany, and he employed young Stanley as his assistant. The employment was not long continued, but seems to have deter- mined Mr. Stanley's career. He devoted himself to the inven- tion and perfection of a method of exhausting the bulbs of incan- descent lamps, and in 1883 and 1884 he conducted his researches in a private electrical laboratory in Englewood, New Jersey. There he was discovered by George Westinghouse, with whom he made a contract for the use of his inventions. While he was in- vestigating the problem of increasing the distribution area of electricity by the alternating current, Mr. Stanley's health broke down; and, in 1885, he removed his residence to Great Barrington, in Berkshire. In the same year, he devised his electrical transformer. Foregoing paragraphs of the present chapter have alluded to the revolutionary success in the science of electrical engineering accomplished by Mr. Stanley in 1886 by his demonstration in Great Barrington of his alternating current system, and by him and his Pittsfield associates, Messrs. Kelly
276
HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD
and Chesney, in 1893 by the invention and construction of their polyphase, alternating current gencrator.
After terminating his active connection with the Stanley Electric Manufacturing Company, Mr. Stanley continued to re- side in Pittsfield until about 1898, conducting for a part of the time a small shop and laboratory on West Street for the manu- facture and designing of electrical instruments. His home dur- ing the final years of his life was in Great Barrington. He travel- ed widely, and many of the leading electrical engineers of Europe enjoyed personal acquaintance with him. He worked, felt, and lived alike at high tension. His mind was peculiarly restless and in unexpected directions acquisitive; the breadth and depth of his information were unusual; and it is improbable that any other Berkshire man of his time could talk so entertainingly. In almost any English-speaking assemblage, he could gather an audience that would long remember him.
The young men of his profession found that even a brief and casual association with him was a memorable stimulus. In the long life of Pittsfield, the city's association with Mr. Stanley was hardly more than brief and casual; nevertheless, the result was a stimulation which is not soon to be forgotten by the community.
CHAPTER XIX
LAW AND ORDER
T HE state first established a town police court in Pittsfield in 1850, by an act authorizing the appointment by the governor of one "person to take cognizance of all crimes, offences, and misdemeanors, whereof justices of the peace now have jurisdiction". Matthias R. Lanckton was commissioned as presiding justice of the new court; his successors were John A. Walker and Phineas L. Page. Sessions were held in a room provided by the town, sometimes on the lower floor of the town hall. In 1869 the court was transacting its business in a room in the Goodrich block on North Street, and was superseded then by the District Court of Central Berkshire, established by Chap- ter 416 of the Acts of 1869.
This court was erected in response to a petition signed by in- habitants of Pittsfield, Dalton, Lanesborough, Hinsdale, Wind- sor, Richmond, Hancock, and Peru; and those towns were em- braced within its district of jurisdiction. Among the Pittsfield signers of the petition was Judge Page, of the town's police court, who found himself out of office soon after the petition was granted; for Governor Claflin appointed, as the first standing justice of the District Court of Central Berkshire, Gen. Henry S. Briggs of Pittsfield. Until the county court house was com- pleted in 1871, the District Court held sessions in the wooden lecture room of the First Church, next to the town hall.
An historical sketch of a court of this description may be given, with more propriety than in the case of higher tribunals, by a characterization of the men who presided over it. When the court was erected, the grateful custom of the Commonwealth was to bestow civil office upon those who had served her well in the recent war between the states. Doubtless there were occa- sions when gratitude may have been invoked over-emphatically,
278
HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD
but Pittsfield does not present conspicuous instances of them. Certainly the town was unusually fortunate in the appointments of the two veterans of the Civil War who, for nearly forty years, presided over its District Court.
Henry Shaw Briggs, from the date of his admission to the bar in 1848 until the outbreak of the war in 1861, practiced law in Pittsfield. The son of Governor George Nixon Briggs, he was born in Lanesborough, August first, 1824, and was graduated from Williams College in 1844. He received his professional education at the Harvard Law School; in 1856 he was a repre- sentative from Pittsfield to the General Court; he was auditor of the Commonwealth from 1865 to 1869; and his legal training, as well as his personal character, made his appointment to the bench appropriate. No native of Berkshire achieved distinction more honorable than his in our great war. In 1861 he was cap- tain of Pittsfield's Allen Guard, a company of militia unattached to any regimental organization. He happened to be trying a law case in Boston on the April day when Governor Andrew ordered out the first contingent of Massachusetts regiments. Learning that one of them, the Eighth, lacked two companies, the Pittsfield lawyer, after court had been adjourned in the afternoon, hurried to the Governor and prevailed upon him to attach the Allen Guard to that command. In the morning the trial was re- sumed, but an advocate was missing. "Where is Mr. Briggs?" complained the presiding judge. "Captain Briggs, may it please the court," replied an attorney, "has gone to Washington at the head of his company".
On June tenth, 1861, he was commissioned colonel of the Massachusetts Tenth, recruited in the western counties and one of the six regiments then furnished by the Commonwealth to serve for three years. Having been sent to join the Army of the Potomac, the Tenth first went into action on May thirty-first, 1862, at the battle of Fair Oaks, Virginia, where Colonel Briggs was severely wounded in both thighs. As soon as he recovered, he returned to the front. In the meantime he had been pro- moted to be brigadier general for gallantry on the field. During the remainder of the war he served faithfully in Virginia, al- though his health was broken by the effect of his wounds. His
279
LAW AND ORDER
memory will always be visibly preserved in Pittsfield by the bowlder and the bronze tablet, which were dedicated in 1907, near the court house.
The District Court had General Briggs for its presiding jus- tice for four years. In 1873 he accepted the appointment by the United States government to be appraiser at the custom house in Boston. He retained, however, his home in Pittsfield, and there he died, September twenty-third, 1887. His wife, to whom he was married in 1849, was Miss Mary Talcott of Lanesborough.
The type of manhood represented by the first judge of Pitts- field's District Court may be understood by reading two letters, exchanged in Virginia in 1862. This was written by a youthful Confederate officer:
"To Col. H. S. Briggs, 10th Mass. Vols.
"Colonel: Having obtained from one of my men a medallion, containing, I presume, the likenesses of your family, I return it to you. Though willing to meet you ever in the field while acting as a foe to my country, I do not war with your personal feelings; and supposing the medallion to be prized by you, I take pleasure in returning it.
"M. Jenkins, Col. Palmetto Sharpshooters."
The following are extracts from the reply; and it will be ob- served that in the interval of correspondence both of these brave, gentle-hearted soldiers had been promoted.
"To Gen. M. Jenkins, "General. I beg to assure you of my high ap- preciation of the generous magnanimity and delicate courtesy of your act, and to thank you, with all my heart. You will pardon me if I say, in alluding to a paragraph in your note, that I cannot, without pain, contemplate the meeting as a foe, even on the field, one who has performed so honorable an act, and conferred on me so great a favor.
"I cannot say that I desire to requite the favor under similar circumstances, but I will assure you that, should any opportunity ever occur, I shall improve it with pleasure and alacrity. Until then, and ever, I shall hold you and your deed of kindness in grateful remembrance.
"Henry S. Briggs, Brig. Gen. Vols. U. S. A."
It was a matter of no slight importance to the community of Pittsfield, as well as to central Berkshire, that the authority of the new District Court should have been directed and personified
280
HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD
by a man of whom the citizens were so proud and fond as they were of General Briggs. His successor on the bench in 1873 was Joseph Tucker. Here again legal and governmental experience had uncommonly equipped a soldier of the Civil War for the performance of the duties of presiding justice.
Joseph Tucker, the son of George Joseph Tucker, was born in Lenox, August thirty-first, 1832. He was a graduate of Wil- liams College, in the class of 1851; and he studied law at Harvard and in the historic office of Rockwell and Colt, in the Pittsfield town hall. Admitted to the Berkshire bar in 1853, he practiced his profession in Detroit, St. Louis, and Great Barrington. From Great Barrington he enlisted, in 1862, in the Forty-ninth regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers. After the regiment was sent to Louisiana, Lieutenant Tucker was assigned to duty on the staff of General Chapin, the brigade commander; and in the ac- tion of Plains Store, May twenty-first, 1863, he received a wound which necessitated the amputation of a leg. At the close of the war, he resumed his law practice in Great Barrington. In 1866 and in 1867 he was state senator from southern Berkshire; and he was elected for four successive years, beginning in 1868, to the office of lieutenant governor of the Commonwealth. In 1873 he became a resident of Pittsfield, and three years later he was mar- ried to Miss Elizabeth Bishop, daughter of Judge Henry W. Bishop of Lenox.
Judge Tucker, then, was forty-one years old when he began his career as the magistrate of Pittsfield's court. His experience at the West, in the army, and at the state capital had broadened a mind naturally cosmopolitan, and had trained his knowledge of human nature to be so wide and tolerant that it could com- prehend many sorts and conditions of men. He soon acquired an almost uncanny knowledge of the currents, and crosscurrents, and undercurrents in the stream of Pittsfield life.
To the work of the court he devoted himself, for thirty-four years. The tribunal, in the minds of the people, came to mean Joseph Tucker; and his official title was popularly used as if it were his Christian name. Correction from his bench was quick and sound, but no more so than was his sympathy. Sometimes his obiter dicta might cause uncertain witnesses or unhappy coun-
281
LAW AND ORDER
sel to wonder at finding themselves outside the dock, but the autocratic court was seldom beyond the reach of a stroke of honest humor. With those brought to distress by mere weak- ness or ignorance, the judge was patient and helpful, for his sense of the humane mission of his office was as effective as was that of his duty to punish wrongdoing and apply justice to civil dispute.
Judge Tucker's value to the town and city of Pittsfield lay chiefly in the fact that a man of his caliber and stamp presided so long and so conscientiously over the District Court. In many other fields of service, nevertheless, his influence was notable. He was a prominent figure at town meetings, and over the last of them he was the moderator. He was long president of the Union for Home Work. For eleven years, and during a critical stage in the development of the public schools, he was the zealous and efficient chairman of the school committee. He was a trus- tee of the Berkshire Athenaeum. He was president of the Pitts- ficld Street Railway Company, and of the Berkshire County Savings Bank. At scores of public meetings, his earnest, pa- triotic addresses interested and moved his auditors. In private life, Judge Tucker was what Dr. Johnson would have called a "clubable" man; a lover of books, without being bookish; fond of good stories, good talk, good tobacco, good whist; one of that generation of friends who, with Robert W. Adam, William R. Plunkett, Morris Schaff, Dr. Jonathan L. Jenkins, and their kind, heard the chimes at midnight in the bright circle of their Monday Evening Club.
He died in Pittsfield, November twenty-eighth, 1907. Even in the later years of his life, when many men of his age, of his re- finement, and in his circumstances, would have found the daily routine of municipal magistracy irksome and perhaps unworthy of their labor, he obeyed, in soldierly fashion, his high ideal of its consequence. He had become the people's familiar and steadfast representative of civic order and right citizenship; and the District Court, inspirited for more than thirty years by his strong character, grew to be rather a living force than a mere piece of legal mechanism.
The successor of Judge Tucker was Charles Eugene Burke,
282
HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD
who received the appointment December fourth, 1907. Judge Burke was born in Glastonbury, Connecticut, January fifth, 1854, and died August fifth, 1913, having presided over the local court not quite six years. His youth was one of toil and poverty; but so stout was his ambition that while working as a mill hand at Barkerville he contrived to fit himself for college; and he was graduated from Williams in 1884. Two years later he was ad- mitted to the Berkshire bar. His practice of the law was charac- terized by unflagging industry and rewarded by patiently achieved success. Before his appointment to the bench, most of his professional experience had been in civil cases, and in office consultation. In the conduct, therefore, of the increasing civil business of the District Court, Judge Burke was able at once to prove the solid value of his legal scholarship, while to the proper and humane performance of the other branch of his judicial duty he applied himself with the samc solicitude. He was a charitable, kindly-natured, unassuming man, wliose honorable life had been a hard but always winning struggle. To many local philan- thropic movements he gave his assistance; and death removed him at the time when he seemed to be entering upon a larger field of usefulness to the community through his faithful work in the District Court.
Judge Burke was followed on the bench by Charles L. Hib- bard, who was appointed in 1913 and is the present standing justice.
The first clerk of the District Court, John M. Taylor, resigned the office after service of less than a year. The clerk for a few months following was Melville Eggleston; and he was succeeded by Walter B. Smith, whose earliest official entry on the court records was made in September, 1870. Captain Smith was born, February seventeenth, 1828, at Newmarket, New Hampshire; but at the outbreak of the Civil War he was a resident of Pitts- field. His war record, made as a member of the Tenth, the Twentieth, and the Thirty-seventh regiments, was extraordinary. He was three times cruelly wounded, he returned five times from the hospital to the field, he was in twenty-one important battles, and the dawn of peace in 1865 found him in Virginia and ready for more fighting, undaunted as a gamecock. Nor is that homely
283
LAW AND ORDER
simile otherwise inappropriate, for his stature was curiously slight. He was a brother of Joseph E. A. Smith, the poet and local historian. Captain Smith was clerk of the District Court for forty-two years. His life was beset by private cares, his strength was torn by the infirmities resultant from his old wounds, but he endured all with quiet courage, and the com- munity held him in respect and affection. He died in Pittsfield, July thirteenth, 1912, having in the same year resigned his posi- tion as clerk of the District Court. His successor was Thomas F. Conlin, the present clerk, who assumed the duties of the office in May, 1912.
A small, single-storied, wooden building, which stood on a portion of the land occupied by the present police station on School Street, was in 1876 the headquarters of Pittsfield's police force. It had been erected in 1862. The printed report of the selectmen thus advised the voters at town meeting in that year:
"The town will see that article 13 calls them to decide whether they will build a Station House and Lockup. The Lockup for the purpose of retaining or restraining those who are quarrelsome and disturbing the peace in and about the public streets; and a Station House for lodging a class of unfortunate transient poor, who are wandering about the country, seeking, as they allege, employment. Experience has taught the Board that both of these are necessary. The first, and perhaps the best way is for the town to procure, if not already the owner, a piece of land near at hand to build a tenement sufficiently large for the accommodation of a small family, and to attach to this tenement a Lockup and Station House, giving the family the use of the house and lot for superintending and taking care of the inmates of both. Another is to build a stone building, fireproof, or as nearly so as possible, on the northwest corner of the Town Lot, south of the road leading past the Baptist Church to the Pon- toosuc Engine House".
The town meeting of 1862 adopted neither of these sugges- tions, but appropriated $1,000 for a new lockup. The selectmen built one for $880.12. The structure which the new station superseded had stood on the north side of the present School Street, behind the Baptist Church, and had been destroyed by
284
HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD
fire in February, 1862. Thence an immured bard once addressed a poem to the chairman of the selectmen, beginning:
"The Lockup is a lonely place, It sets a man a-thinking Of all the shame and deep disgrace Brought on himself by drinking".
The loneliness of the place was unrelieved even by the presence of an official custodian, and resulted in a miserable and shocking tragedy in the fire of 1862, when a prisoner lost his life.
The proximity to the village of large drill camps of recruits for the Civil War made advisable unusual attention to the preser- vation of order. There was no organized police force, in the modern sense of the term. The town annually chose constables, and the selectmen sometimes themselves applied the physical hand of the law. Watchmen were hired by the town govern- ment upon particular occasions; six men, for instance, were au- thorized as peace officers "in the time of the draft". The watchmen ordinarily employed were the constables, who received extra pay for their added duty. Upon the list of watchmen and constables appear with regularity the names of Jabez W. Fair- banks, James L. Brooks, Timothy Hall, and Samuel M. Gunn.
The most conspicuous material agent for a long period in the preservation of the peace of the village was Timothy Hall's re- doubtable cane, wielded by one who transacted his business with something of the grim resolution of the ancient Covenanter. Mr. Hall was born at Cummington, Massachusetts, in 1800 and died at Pittsfield, November tenth, 1882. For forty-five suc- cessive years, after 1837, he served either as a local constable or deputy sheriff. He was fearless, muscular, and determined; even after he had grown old, he was a man whom to obey was wise; and his notion of official rights and duties was not narrow.
Samuel M. Gunn was born in Pittsfield, June seventh, 1808, and there he died on June fourth, 1908, three days before his hundredth birthday. He formed an extraordinary link with the pioneer days of the village, for his great-grandmother was Mrs. Solomon Deming, whose monument in the little burial ground on Elm Street bears the inscription that it was "erected by the town of Pittsfield to commemorate the heroism and vir-
285
LAW AND ORDER
tues of its first female settler, and the mother of the first white child born within its limits". Mrs. Deming died in 1818, when Samuel M. Gunn was a boy of ten years; and, in his old age, he was able to recall in the twentieth century one who, before the Revolution, had defended her home against Indian marauders in Pittsfield, and circumstantially to recollect local affairs from the time when the central village possessed only twenty-three dwell- ings. But it was not for these reasons alone that Mr. Gunn was held in esteem by the town and city. He was a good type of the self-respecting Yankee farmer, helpful to his neighbors, and ready to carry his share of the community's burdens.
The selectmen's report made in April, 1868, says: "The ex- pense incurred for Watchmen the last year is somewhat larger than previous years, owing to the frequent robberies and petty thieving. The selectmen have employed two persons to watch during the night since about last November". This date marks the first appearance in Pittsfield of what may be considered a police force on regular patrol duty. Those who served upon the force during its first five months of existence were E. B. Mead, Abram Jackson, and John R. Cole; and among its members in years immediately subsequent were Selden Y. Clarke, George W. Phillips, Daniel Barry, and Charles B. Wat- kins. In April, 1868, George Hayes was appointed a watchman, and in 1869 the selectmen created for him the double office, of which the title was as imposing as his girth, of "Turnkey of the Lockup and Special Constable in Attendance on the District Court of Central Berkshire".
From 1868 until 1876 George Hayes was chief of the town's police, although not officially so designated until 1875. Under his ponderous supervision, the little squad of policemen was not characterized by a high state of discipline. Modern equipments, however, seem to have been introduced. The reports of the se- lectmen are evidence that in 1870 the town bought belts and "clubs" for the force, and in 1872 purchased dials for a night watch clock from "Shrewd, Crumb, and Co."
The town meeting, it should be understood, continued to elect constables. John M. Hatch was so chosen in. 1875, and was further entrusted by Chief Hayes with the captaincy of the
286
HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD
night watch. In this position he comported himself so actively that at the next election of constables he was defeated at the polls by those who preferred less interference with their pastimes after sunset. To their dismay, the selectmen at once appointed Hatch chief of police. He took the office in April, 1876, and held it until June, 1881; and to him, under the selectmen, fell the task of first organizing in the town a permanent police force for service day and night.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.