USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Pittsfield > The history of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, from the year 1876 to the year 1916 > Part 27
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An entry on the record book, under the date of January seventh, 1875, is now curious. "Moved that ladies be admitted to our company as members, which led to some debate, as the idea seemed both new and novel. Still, a general feeling pre- vailed among those present for something of this character on account of the social influences attending such a movement, and it was Voted-that ladies be admitted to this company as hon- orary members". That this "both new and novel" scheme was carried into effect, does not appear. It was in 1875, too, that the company's clerk "advocated the formation of a glee club, with an instructor". The proposal may have been inspired by an offer made by William Renne in 1874 to give a prize of twenty-five dollars to the volunteer fire company which should excel in the singing of the hymn "Coronation" at a competition in the Methodist Church. This musical contest, however, the firemen disdained. The members of Number Two turned to an enterprise less me- lodious; and under the name of the "George Y. Learned Bat-
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tery" twelve of them were organized in 1876 as a squad of artil- lerymen, taking charge of a fieldpiece, which, for the purpose of firing salutes, had been purchased for $658 by a "Fourth-of-July Association" of citizens.
The S. W. Morton Company, Number Three, was long handi- capped by inadequate quarters and inferior apparatus; and, be- cause in its earlier days it was chiefly composed of employees of the railroad, its personnel was often necessarily changed and it therefore lacked solidarity. Its stalwart and energetic hose company, however, was always a valuable component of the department. From 1876 to 1887, the foremen of Number Three were Michael Fitzgerald, James Goewey, Terence H. McEnany, M. F. Doyle, M. J. Connors, John Powers, and James Reagan. In 1887 the company was rejuvenated by its installation in the new house on North Street. Between 1887 and 1891, the foremen were James Reagan, J. J. Bastion, and J. E. Doolan; the assistant foremen were John Kelly and James O'Connell; the clerks were J. J. Bastion, W. Carley, and James Cummings; and the treas- urers were Thomas Murray and Dennis Haylon.
The Greylock Hook and Ladder Company, characterized consistently by good discipline, had for foremen, after 1875, Chester Hopkins, P. Roberts, J. H. Granger, R. Crandall, San- ford Carpenter, E. C. Carpenter, Charles Miller, George W. Frey, and William McCarry. Its assistant foremen were P. Roberts, William Carpenter, Charles Miller, Sanford Carpenter, Chester Hopkins, John Corkhill, E. C. Carpenter, William H. Hunt, and P. H. Honiker. Its clerks were C. Watkins, C. H. Miller, James Burlingame, W. A. Harrington, Frank Robbins, W. G. Keyes, Frank Smith, and Dwight A. Clark; and B. F. Robbins, Lyman E. Fields and Michael Meagher served as its treasurers.
The company of Protectives, from its formation in 1883 to the formal disbanding in 1907, was animated by the enthusiasm natural to an organization of which the duty was unique and of which the membership was somewhat carefully restricted. In its early years, the company was encouraged both by Chief Engineer Willis and by the fire insurance authorities; and for this encouragement there seems to have been good reason. It
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cannot be denied that in the volunteer days of Pittsfield's fire department the rush of rivalry between the different hose and engine companies occasionally led to disregard of the protection of property, and that needless damage, through causes other than fire, was not quite uncommon. The members of the Protectives, having the authority of special police officers, were called upon to remedy such conditions. They were, in the first instance, drawn mostly from the George Y. Learned Company.
The captains of the Protectives from 1883 to 1891, were Theodore L. Allen, J. B. Harrison, and Edward S. Davenport; and the lieutenants were J. B. Harrison, Walter Watson, William P. Learned, and Frank W. Hill. Those who served the company as clerk and treasurer during the same period were James W. Dewey, James Denny, Frank W. Hill, and S. Chester Lyon.
Some of the conspicuous opportunities which the department had of proving its usefulness between 1876 and 1891 may here be recorded, although several have been mentioned in other chapters. The most prolific single field of action for the firemen during this period was afforded by the barns and stables, suc- cessively built to the south of the Burbank Hotel on the site of the present railroad station. The hotel stables were burned three times-on December thirty-first, 1880, when the thermom- eter registered a temperature of twenty degrees below zero, on October fourth, 1883, and on October first, 1885. The list of destructive fires elsewhere includes those at the old medical college building on South Street, on March thirty-first, 1876; at the Pomeroy "satinet mill", on December fifteenth, 1876; at the "lower stone mill" at Barkerville, on January tenth, 1879; at the Weller buildings on North Street, on April twenty-third, 1881; at Abraham Burbank's upper brick block on North Street, on March sixth, 1883, and again on August first, 1888; at the lower Pomeroy mill, on December eighth, 1885; at Booth and Company's woodworking shop on First Street, on March sixth, 1886; at C. H. Booth's silk mill, near River Street, on August tenth, 1888; at James H. Butler's lumber yard on Fenn Street, December nineteenth, 1888; and at the Bel Air mill on upper Wahconah Street, on February fifteenth, 1890.
So far as can be ascertained from the chief engineers' reports,
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which were made annually in April, the department responded to 259 calls between April first, 1876, and December thirtieth, 1890. The lowest number of alarms recorded in any departmental year was eight, in 1877-1878; the highest was thirty-two, in 1885-1886.
Finally, before leaving the subject of the department under the town and fire district government, it is to be said that the memories and much of the spirit of the volunteer period have been faithfully and pleasantly preserved by the Pittsfield Veteran Firemen's Association. Having its home on School Street, in the house formerly occupied by the Housatonic Company, this large association has been the means of maintaining many com- panionships and many traditions of other days.
The reorganization of the department under the ordinances of the city government proceeded rapidly. In 1892 the mem- bership of each company was reduced to fifteen; and in 1905 a revision of the fire department ordinances became effective which prescribed fourteen men in the department on permanent duty, and fifty in the "call force". In 1915 the permanent force numbered thirty-five, and the call force eighteen. Under the city government, the successive chief engineers, with the years in which they took office, have been George W. Branch (1891), William F. Francis (1896), Lucien D. Hazard (1907), and William C. Shepard (1911).
The city lost little time in providing new headquarters for its remodeled fire department. The present central fire station, of brick, facing the head of School Street, was erected in 1895, and after the dedication of the building, on September twenty-fourth of that year, all divisions of the Pittsfield fire department were, for the first time in its history, suitably housed. In 1906 a brick station was completed on Tyler Street at Morningside; thither was removed the apparatus kept in the department's North Street house, which was then abandoned. In 1913 the wooden station at West Pittsfield, tenanted by a volunteer company, was damaged by fire and in the following year it was restored and en- larged.
The West Pittsfield Company appears to have been formally organized as a part of the city department in 1905, after which
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its foremen were A. N. Parker, Fred Jones, William T. Quinn, and Joseph Merriam. A steam fire engine was assigned to it in 1913. Other volunteer companies have existed from time to time in the outlying factory villages and at the General Electric plant, equipped with hose reels and hand engines.
The facilities afforded by the central station made more readily possible the stabling of horses by the department. They were first purchased in 1896, and in 1898 dependence was no longer placed upon the livery stables. A chemical engine was added to the apparatus in 1899; in the following year three wagons were used, carrying a combined chemical and hose equip- ment, and, though many fires thereafter were extinguished by the chemical engines, an additional steamer was purchased in 1909. An automobile fire truck was first utilized in 1911; in 1912 the department was equipped with a so-called "aerial ladder truck," propelled by a gasoline and electric motor; com- bination chemical and hose motor trucks were provided in 1914; and in 1915 the use of horses was completely given up.
The purchase of the aerial ladder was hastened by an extra- ordinary series of disastrous fires on North Street in 1912, be- ginning with the one which burned the Academy of Music in the early morning of January twenty-eighth. Spreading to ad- jacent buildings on the north and east, this conflagration was the most savage and spectacular in the experience of the city. It was followed, on February ninth, 1912, by the burning of two blocks on the west side of North Street, above Summer Street; and on February twenty-third by a destructive fire in the block on the west side of North Street below Summer Street, which was again attacked by fire on July fourteenth. The total fire loss for the year, insured and uninsured, was computed to be $328,000. The department responded to 160 alarms.
The smallest number of alarms recorded in any one year dur- ing the quarter-century after 1890 was twenty-one in 1891, and the largest was 219 in 1914. In the latter year the per- sistence of an incendiary, who was finally restrained, taxed the vigilance of the department. After 1890, some of the more serious fires, besides those mentioned in the preceding paragraph, were in the Brackin block on North Street, July fourteenth, 1891,
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and in Bridge's livery stable on Columbus Avenue, in the same year, on November thirteenth; in Wright's wooden block on North Street, February seventeenth, 1898; in the Whittlesey- Sabin building on Cottage Row, February nineteenth, 1905; in the Riley block, on the north corner of Depot and North Streets, December twenty-sixth, 1909; and in the building next north of the Berkshire Life Insurance Company's building, Jan- uary thirty-first, 1914.
CHAPTER XXI
NEWSPAPERS
T WO newspapers, the Pittsfield Sun and the Berkshire County Eagle, were published in Pittsfield in 1876. They were weeklies; of the Sun the day of issue was Wednesday, of the Eagle, Thursday. Founded in 1800 by Phineas Allen and conducted by him and by his son, Phineas Allen, 2nd, for seventy-two consecutive years, the Sun had been a political tract rather than, in the modern sense, a newspaper. Even so late as 1870 it resembled a village journal of the early part of the cen- tury, devoting nearly all of its space to national or state affairs, rigidly and often savagely partisan, and abstemious to the point of prudery in dealing with the everyday news of the town. Its founder was a stern precisian and an uncompromising Democrat, and of Phineas 2nd it was believed that he shaped his editorial policy solely by doing what he judged his father would have done under similar circumstances. The result was that the Sun was, for those days, an old-fashioned newspaper in 1872, when Phineas Allen, 2nd, turned over the ownership to a relative, Theodore L. Allen. The latter, in August of the same year, sold the paper to William H. Phillips, then of North Adams.
The Sun at the time of its purchase by Mr. Phillips was printed in a brick building, the Allen block, on the east side of lower North Street, on the site now numbered twenty-four. It had been housed on this land since 1808, having previously to that year had homes on the west side of North Street, on East Street, and on Park Square, "in Mr. Griswold's elegant new building west of the meeting house".
Mr. Phillips had already acquired newspaper experience, and in a school less conservative than that of the Phineas Allens. Under his management the Sun bestowed its rays more than formerly upon local happenings, and showed evidence, whether
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for good or cvil, of modern reporting. Its format was the un- wieldy blanket sheet, so-called, of four pages. This was altered by Mr. Phillips to one of eight pages, with six columns to a page. The advertising rate was announced in 1876 to be cighteen dol- lars for the single insertion of a column. The yearly subscription was two dollars. The circulation in Berkshire outside of Pitts- field was considerable and the regular correspondents from the smaller towns were fain to include much sound Democratic doc- trine in their weekly newsletters. Indeed, the contributors to the paper and its readers throughout the county had grown to constitute what was in effect a county political machine. This the new proprietor may have suspected before he acquired the Sun. At any rate, Mr. Phillips soon offered himself as a candi- date for office, and in 1874 he was elected to the state senate. During the absence of the owner in Boston, the acting editor of the paper was Hiram T. Oatman, who had first come to Pittsfield in 1874 to be the superintendent of the Sun's press room.
The next proprietor of the newspaper was Horace J. Canfield of Stockbridge, whose name first appears as owner in the issue of January second, 1878. Mr. Canfield was also a member of the General Court, and he also engaged, as his acting editor, Mr. Oatman, who had in the meantime seceded temporarily to the Eagle office. The Sun remained in the possession of Mr. Canfield until 1882, but his personal conduct of the paper was intermittent. In August, 1878, he leased it to a partnership composed of James L. Ford and John P. Clark. Mr. Clark was a Pittsfield printer, and Mr. Ford was a youthful journalist trying his wings, which afterward bore him to a point of no slight cleva- tion in the region of book and magazine authorship in New York. The publishing lease of Messrs. Ford and Clark expired in Feb- ruary, 1879, and in March of the same year Samuel E. Nichols became, under Mr. Canfield, publisher and editor of the Sun. Mr. Nichols, simultaneously with editing and publishing the newspaper, conducted the former Allen book store, to which he had added a department for the sale of pianos and music; and he seems to have assumed too many burdens. In 1882 he was financially crippled, and Mr. Canfield was ready to dispose of the Sun or perhaps to discontinue it.
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A few Democrats came to the rescue of their historic organ, and in March, 1882, the Sun Printing Company was incor- porated to purchase the Sun and the printing plant. The presi- dent and treasurer of the company was John F. Allen, a son of the Phineas Allen who had founded the paper in 1800. With Mr. Allen on the first board of directors were William R. Plunkett, Francis E. Kernochan, Horace J. Canfield, and John G. Holland. It was their immediate good fortune to be able to give to the paper an editor who could inject into it a strong and racy indi- viduality.
James Harding was born in Nutsford, England, July eigh- teenth, 1843, and when he was a boy his parents settled in the Massachusetts town of Lee. There he found newspaper em- ployment on the Gleaner and as the correspondent from Lee of the Berkshire County Eagle; and by the Eagle he was summoned to Pittsfield in 1868 to be a member of its regular staff. He re- mained with the Eagle until 1882, when he became editor of the Sun, and in that position he labored for twenty-four years. On September sixteenth, 1906, he died at Pittsfield.
Mr. Harding, while a vigilant gatherer of news, was essentially a humorous writer, and one of those humorous writers who, in Thackeray's words, "appeal to a great number of our other faculties, besides our mere sense of ridicule". His pen could readily excite mirth, and it could as readily excite scorn or sym- pathy. He had taught himself a vivid, exuberant style, which sometimes led him into excesses of plain speaking and of invec- tive; but in his later years this style was tempered, and many articles appearing in the Sun during that period of Mr. Harding's editorship, some of which were appropriately reprinted in a memorial volume after his death, testify to his cheerful and charitable philosophy and to his tenderness of heart.
Meanwhile, however, the competition by two local dailies increased against the veteran weekly, so far as the timeliness of the publication of news in Pittsfield was concerned, and on the other hand a flood of cheap weekly periodicals, with attractive premium lists, began to inundate the rural districts, where the generation brought up to regard the Sun as a sort of household fixture was passing away. In the face of these conditions Mr.
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Harding wrought valiantly and, while his health permitted, successfully; people read the Sun not so often to be informed of the news as to be interested and usually amused by Mr. Harding's way of recording and commenting upon it, and the Sun became for the community a week day preacher, while it endeavored at the same time to fulfill the purpose of a newspaper. Pictures were introduced, and various magazine-like departments were included, many of which were written, and written with literary artistry, by Mr. Harding under different pen names. In 1905 the Sun absorbed a periodical called Berkshire Resort Topics, and thus a new department, devoted to the doings of summer visitors, became a valuable addition to the paper.
But the Sun had been so developed that it was, after all, James Harding himself; and eleven days following his death the last number was issued, on September twenty-seventh, 1906. The paper had been in course of continuous publication for 106 years.
The last number was published in a building on Renne Ave- nue, whence the Sun Printing Company migrated from North Street and where at present it actively carries on its business of job printing. John F. Allen, the first president, retained that office until his death, April twenty-third, 1887. He was born in Pittsfield on August twenty-sixth, 1841, and he inherited his father's loyalty to the town and high ideals of journalism. He was succeeded in the presidency of the Sun Printing Company by William Mink. Mr. Mink was born in Rhinebeck, New York, in 1832, came to Pittsfield in 1855, and entered the employ of the Eagle, in its composing room. He was a sergeant during the Civil War in the Thirty-fourth regiment of Massachusetts infantry. Resuming his trade after the war, Mr. Mink became probably the most expert printer in the county, and his secession with his friend Mr. Harding from the Eagle to the Sun in 1882 had much to do with the rejuvenation of the latter paper. He was a popu- lar figure in town life and especially in Grand Army circles. On March thirtieth, 1896, he died at Pittsfield.
Theodore L. Allen, now the president of the company, suc- ceeded Mr. Mink in 1896, and has since served continuously with the exception of a few months when Oliver W. Robbins was presi-
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dent. Major Charles T. Plunkett was treasurer and business manager from 1896 to 1899, and was followed in those offices by S. Chester Lyon, who was able to assume also many editorial duties. Mr. Lyon withdrew from the employment of the com- pany when the publication of the newspaper ceased. Among other valuable assistants to Mr. Harding in the editorial room was Henry T. Mills, who worked therein from 1888 to 1893.
The Sun's Republican antagonist, the Berkshire County Eagle, was printed in 1876 in the Noble building, on the east corner of West Street and Clapp Avenue. It was a paper of four huge pages, each page being nine columns in width and measuring in length thirty inches. The proprietors, both of whom edited the Eagle more or less actively, were Henry Chickering and William D. Axtell. This firm had owned the paper since 1865. In 1876 the Eagle seems to have been more alert and more informative of local occurrences than was the Sun of the same period; but like the Sun it was an important wheel in the county machinery of its political party. One of the proprietors, Mr. Chickering, had been postmaster of Pittsfield since 1861, when he succeeded in that position his rival editor, Phineas Allen, 2nd, of the Sun; and he was at all times influential among Republicans in the western section of the state.
Henry Chickering died in Pittsfield, March fifth, 1881. He was born at Woburn, Massachusetts, September third, 1819, and in 1855 came to Pittsfield from North Adams, where he had owned and conducted the Transcript, and whence he had been elected to the governor's council in 1852. An astute and ener- getic politician and identified with the Republican party since its formation in Massachusetts, he believed that the Eagle, in which he first bought an interest in 1853, should be primarily a partisan organ. He continued to be the town's postmaster from 1861 until his death.
After Mr. Chickering's death his interest in the Eagle was acquired by William M. Pomeroy, who remained Mr. Axtell's partner until March first, 1883, when he was succeeded by John B. Haskins. On December first, 1885, Mr. Axtell bought out Mr. Haskins, and became sole owner of the concern.
In the meantime the Eagle's establishment had been weaken-
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ed by the withdrawal of James Harding and William Mink, the reorganized Sun had become a vigorous competitor, and the re- cently launched daily, the Evening Journal, was slowly gaining strength. Mr. Axtell was an unusually excellent printer, but he was neither by inclination nor by regular experience an editor. Under his ownership of the Eagle, much, although not all, of the editorial work was entrusted to other hands, which appear not to have been uniformly vigorous. When he died, the paper was little other than an unprofitable load upon a well-conducted job printing shop.
William D. Axtell was born at Westhampton, Massachusetts, July twenty-second, 1820, and his death occurred at Pittsfield, March twenty-fifth, 1887. He came there in 1842, with the Massachusetts Eagle, which was then removed from Lenox, and he remained in Pittsfield until 1853, conducting for a part of the time an independent printing office of extremely high merit. In 1853 Mr. Axtell went to Northampton to be foreman of the printing plant of the Hampshire Gazette, and in 1865 returned to Pittsfield as a partner of Henry Chickering in the ownership of the Berkshire County Eagle. He was a man of soberly old-fashioned and quiet literary tastes, with an old-fashioned respect for the art of printing, in which he had made himself extraordinarily proficient.
The issue of the Eagle of May nineteenth, 1887, announced that the property had been sold by the administrator of Mr. Axtell's estate to Marcus H. Rogers, whose name was not un- familiar to Berkshire newspaper readers. He had conducted the Berkshire Courier in Great Barrington from 1865 to 1879, and was known to be a progressive and capable editor. Signs of this were soon perceptible in the appearance of the Eagle, as well as in its contents. New machinery and new type were installed, and the antiquated blanket sheet of four pages was abandoned and replaced, with the issue of January fifth, 1888, by a more conven- ient format of eight, smaller, seven-column pages. By these alterations the paper was greatly improved, but the new owner remained in control hardly long enough to take advantage of them. In February, 1889, he sold the Eagle to Moses Y. Beach, of New York.
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NEWSPAPERS
Mr. Beach, who had obtained his newspaper training on the New York Tribune under Whitelaw Reid, continued as editor and proprietor of the Eagle until 1891. In the issue of March nineteenth of that year announcement was made that the paper had been bought by A. A. Hill and F. A. Howard, formerly of the Haverhill Gazette, and Kelton B. Miller and Samuel Dodge of Pittsfield. Of the Eagle Publishing Company, then incorporated, the president was Mr. Miller and the secretary and treasurer was Mr. Howard.
The publication of a daily edition of the Eagle, with tele- graphic news, had perhaps been contemplated by Mr. Beach, who at all events perceived that Pittsfield had outgrown the sort of country weekly which his newspaper represented and had bent effort to impart to it something of a more cosmopolitan tone. His successor, the Eagle Publishing Company, was soon able to complete the transformation. The first number of the Berkshire Evening Eagle was published on May ninth, 1892. It was a four- page, daily paper, and subscribers to the weekly were informed that on Wednesdays they would be supplied with an eight-page edition bearing the former name and presenting, as theretofore, the news of other towns in the county. The paper remained politically Republican.
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