USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Pittsfield > The history of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, from the year 1876 to the year 1916 > Part 3
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"Roll on, thou gorgeous Car of Progress, roll! Paw, steed! Tinkle the signal bell! Here's luck to thee, and to the men Who pay the bills! We hope that every trip Will have loads like the first, but with More money in them."
The introduction of the telephone did not attract so much local attention. This was in 1877, when in May, at the Academy of Music, a demonstration was attempted of the power of the newly devised instrument to transmit sounds from Westfield. The notes of a reed organ and of a cornet were faintly heard by a part of the Pittsfield audience; but transmission of the voice seemed a failure, and sapient scepticism made merry. About three hundred people had been attracted to the theater, a number in- sufficient to pay the expenses of the exhibition. The first prac- tical use of the telephone in Pittsfield was in March, 1878, over a linc between the Pontoosuc factory and the Pittsfield National Bank; and the first exchange was established in 1879. During the previous year, the Berkshire Life Insurance Company had
,
23
FIFTEEN YEARS OF TOWN LIFE, 1876-1891
installed, in its building, Pittsfield's first public elevator. The electric light was first exhibited in Pittsfield in 1881. In 1883, a few North Street merchants, headed by Alexander Kennedy, organized a small corporation for the purpose of supplying their stores with arc lamps. Ten lights of that sort were then in use; and in 1885 the street lighting committee of the fire district set up seven arc lamps for an experiment.
During the brief period of six years, then, both the commercial and the domestic life of the village had been modernized and made more comfortable by the introduction of telephones, public elevators, electric lights, and street cars. To these should be added the first establishment of a daily newspaper in Pittsfield. Nathaniel C. Fowler, Jr., began the publication of the Evening Journal on September twenty-seventh, 1880. Its birth was one of travail; the presses, when printing the first two numbers, were moved entirely by hand power, because of a breakdown of the mechanical equipment. Mr. Fowler's determination, how- ever, overcame many obstacles, and his paper was able to take at once a vigorous part, on the Republican side, in the national election which resulted in the presidency of Garfield.
The political complexion in national affairs of the town of Pittsfield in its latter days was consistently Democratic. Its vote in 1876 was for Tilden 1,236, and for Hayes 953; in 1880, for Hancock 1,211, and for Garfield 1,103; in 1884, for Cleveland 1,547, and for Blaine 1,099; and in 1888, for Cleveland 1,644, and for Harrison, 1,474. The balloting was accomplished at a single poll, and occasionally enlivened by somewhat boisterous episodes; but never to the point of turbulence or injustice. It was an era of noisy political campaigning, of strenuous oratory and frequent rallies, of torchlight processions and nocturnal parading by uni- formed "phalanxes," and "legions". During the presidential campaign of 1876, a local editor modestly reported that "one hundred torches filled the entire length of our spacious main boulevard with a sea of light". Residences and places of busi- ness along the line of march were illuminated elaborately upon such occasions. A procession in Pittsfield of Harrison's sup- porters in 1888 included over four thousand torch bearers, re- cruited from the county at large.
24
HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD
The town of Pittsfield by vote refused to license the sale of liquor only in 1886. Under the state regulations then existing, there were in 1876 fifty-four liquor licenses of various classes operative in the village; and this number did not decrcase for several ycars.
After 1876, the town's equipment of hotels was not materially altered, despite some public-spirited effort, until the enlargement of the American House, in 1887. On Summer Street, the inde- fatigable Abraham Burbank supervised the conduct of the Berk- shire House, to which direct access from North Street was closed in 1884 by the erection of one of his many business blocks; and he continued capably to direct in person the hotel, which bore his name, near the railroad station. The American House, owned by Cebra Quackenbush, was managed by G. H. Gale, and later by William St. Lawrence, who was succeeded in 1889 by the firm of A. W. Plumb and George W. Clark. During the summer vacations, the school buildings at Maplewood were used for hotel purposes by several landlords, including William St. Lawrence and Elisha Taft; in 1887, Arthur W. Plumb assumed the management, which he has long and successfully continued. In 1885, Elisha Taft leased the Robert Pomeroy residence on East Street, and conducted it as a hotel under the name of the Homestead Inn.
Less pretentious houses of public entertainment were the Cottage and the Farmers' Hotels on West Street; and at the Fountain House on Depot Street, Rudolph Schmidt began, as early as 1875, a tenancy which continued for twenty years. There the visitor might find, as if transplanted from a German village, a temperate and old-fashioned bierhaus, militantly gov- erned by a quaint autocrat, whose humor, kindliness, and sturdy good citizenship caused genial memories of him long to be cherish- ed. The town's first restaurant conducted on lines morc metro- politan was the "Palais Royal", so-called, in the Academy of Music building.
The quantity of professional dramatic art exhibited in the Academy was not large, but its quality was excellent. With the exception of Edwin Booth, the most eminent contemporary actors played there, until about 1888, not annually, but with a
25
FIFTEEN YEARS OF TOWN LIFE, 1876-1891
regularity forbidden later to small cities and towns by the theatrical conditions of the country. During this period Pitts- field saw, for example, William J. Florence, Mme. Janauschek, E. L. Davenport, Dion Boucicault, William Warren, Margaret Mather, Rose Coghlan, Thomas W. Keene, John T. Raymond, Louis James, John McCullough, Marie Wainwright, Lotta, and Maggie Mitchell; Joseph Jefferson, who spent the day, under the escort of local fishermen, on a trout brook; Lawrence Barrett, who was a guest of Robert Pomeroy; and Mary Anderson, with whom some Pittsfield youngsters, helplessly demoralized by her fame and beauty, went coasting on the Church Street hill.
Theodore Thomas, in 1885, brought his famous orchestra to Pittsfield, and gave a concert at the Coliseum, with Emma Juch as the vocal soloist. The town was by no means unaccustomed to good public performances of the best music. The music school conducted for three years on Wendell Avenue until 1881 by Benjamin C. Blodgett was of exceptional merit and scope for a town of Pittsfield's size; and his artistic enthusiasm and ideals were able to affect the community beyond the circle of his pupils. The village owed to him its first hearing of an adequate per- formance of an oratorio, when, in 1879, he directed a production of "Elijah", in which members of the Harvard Symphony Or- chestra of Boston participated. Two years thereafter, Mr. Blodgett assumed the supervision of the musical department at Smith College. In 1889, Pittsfield citizens, among whom Edward S. Francis was prominent, organized the Berkshire Musical So- ciety, and promoted a series of concerts on a somewhat elaborate scale, and initiated at the Coliseum. The influence of James I. Lalor upon local appreciation of good music during this period was constantly uplifting; and under his leadership the musical services at St. Joseph's, where he was choir director, gave the highest enjoyment to the entire music-loving public as well as to his fellow churchmen.
To the pastor of the First Church, Rev. J. L. Jenkins, was due the inception of a charitable organization which shared with the House of Mercy the distinction of marking a change in the method of Pittsfield's philanthropy. The Union for Home Work was formed in 1878. For the relief of the poor in that
26
HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD
year, the community was paying about $7,000 through the town officials, and about $3,000 through the channels of private and parochial charitics. A temperance revival had resulted in the opening of a coffee room; and its managers had supplemented it by organizing a sewing class and a modest employment office. For these purposes, association on a larger scale was effected at a public meeting. It was declared that the Union for Home Work should seek the following objects: "The relief of the poor, the reform of the bad, the prevention and decrease of pauperism and begging at the door". The Protestant clergymen of the town, and two men and two women from each parish, constituted a board of management. The organization soon proved its practical value. A superintendent was employed, the head- quarters of the Union were established in a house on Dunham Street, and the work of the association was beneficently main- tained.
It may have been that the spirit of co-operation between the local churches, fostered by the Union for Home Work, had in it the suggestive germ which inspired the initiation in Pittsfield of the American Congress of Churches of 1885, and of several years subsequent thereto. The attention of the religious bodies of the country was awakened in 1883 by a circular letter, from seven Berkshire clergymen who represented the Episcopalian, Metho- dist, Congregational, and Baptist beliefs. It suggested a na- tional Church Congress, to bring together "men of freedom of conviction and largeness of view", who might unite, irrespective of church names, for Christian work in "social matters, such as temperance, divorce, and the relations of capital and labor". The signers were W. W. Newton, J. L. Jenkins, George W. Gile, C. H. Hamlin, T. T. Munger, George Skene, and J. M. Turner. The letter elicited a national response immediate and hearty A preliminary meeting was held at the American House in Pitts- field in June of 1884, when it was announced that the purpose of the movement was "to promote Christian unity, and to ad- vance the kingdom of God by a free discussion of the great re- ligious, moral, and social questions of the day." The first Con- gress assembled at Hartford in May of the next year, and other successful sessions were held at Cleveland, and St. Louis, but the organization was not destined to survive.
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FIFTEEN YEARS OF TOWN LIFE, 1876-1891
The closing in 1884 of the school for girls at Maplewood was an event which, although recognized as inevitable, occasioned no little sentimental regret among the older families in the town. The institution had been in existence for forty-three years. In its flourishing prime, it had been a valuable contribution to the prosperity of the village, and had added its tone of refinement to social life. It could not well compete, however, with en- dowed colleges for women, and the deterioration of its latter years was due perhaps to a lack of capital sufficient to maintain an establishment of its size through a long season of financial depression.
The period of business distress between 1870 and 1880 was burdensome to the textile manufacturers of Berkshire, and heavy failures in this branch of industry discouraged the people in both the northern and southern sections of the county. The textile mills of Pittsfield, on the contrary, were generally un- troubled, although the factory at Taconic was silent from 1873 to 1880. The next decade was one of returning activity. In 1890, the town's textile manufactories showed substantial gains, in spite of idle sets of cards at Barkerville and Pomeroy's. The mills of the Pontoosuc Company and of S. N. and C. Russell had held their own. Loss in local industry elsewhere had been coun- terbalanced by the success of W. E. Tillotson's new mill near Silver Lake, of the knitting shop of D. M. Collins and Company, of the manufactorics at Bel Air and Morningside of Pctherbridge and Purnell, and by the largely increased capacities at the mills controlled by Jabez L. and Thomas D. Peck on Peck's Road, by the firm of Tillotson and Power near West Pittsfield, and by that of Wilson and Glennon at Taconic.
It is, however, in the development of manufacturing enter- prises other than textile that this era is chiefly significant in the industrial annals of the town. The machine shops, for example, maintained on Mckay Street in 1872 by William Clark and Company, were becoming rapidly and soundly successful under the guidance of E. D. Jones. A. H. Rice and Company, on Robbins Avenue and later on Burbank Street, were busily rais- ing the quality and quantity of their output of braid. The brewery of Gimlich and White was establishing its excellent
28
HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD
reputation. In the vicinity of Silver Lake, the manufacture of shocs was prosecuted with diligence by Robbins and Kellogg, the Pittsfield Shoc Company, and the Cheshire Shoc Company, of which the last-named was induced in 1889, partly by the co- operation of local investors, to move to Pittsfield. In 1883, the Kellogg Steam Power building at Morningside was a curious bcehive, housing simultaneously somc of the machinery of the Bel Air Manufacturing Company, of the Pittsfield Tack Com- pany, and of the Terry Clock Company.
About 1879, George H. Bliss, then a resident of Pittsfield, in- vented a device for telephone signals, which was operated by clockwork attached to each instrument; and it was principally through his efforts in 1880 that the Terry Clock Company was organized, and that the three brothers Terry were persuaded to come to Pittsfield from Connecticut, where their ancestors had been some of the pioncr clock-makers in the United States. The new company soon became of importance to the town, not only because of the number of persons it employed, but also because of the extended sale of its product, which advertised the name of Pittsfield in many thousands of households. In 1888, the business was reorganized, under the title of the Russell and Jones Clock Company, and soon afterward it was discontinued.
The earlier career of the town's single paper mill, built in 1863 by Thomas Colt close to the Dalton line, was one of oddly contrasting vicissitudes. After a long period of idleness, the mill was purchased in 1876 by Chalmers Brothers and Baxter, a firm consisting of five brothers and their brother-in-law. They utilized the fine mill for the manufacture of paper for paper collars; nearly all the help employed, excepting the girls in the rag room, were the partners and members of their families, and the only large item of expense is said to have been the interest on the investment. In spite of this peculiar economical advan- tage, the venture did not prosper. In 1879 the property was bought by Crane and Company of Dalton; and the mill once devoted to the production of paper collars was expensively transformed into a manufactory of the most aristocratic paper, from one point of view, in the country-the paper used by the national government for its national bank bills and treasury
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FIFTEEN YEARS OF TOWN LIFE, 1876-1891
notes. The building was burned in 1892, and was immediately replaced by the present "Government Mill".
The most extraordinary industrial enterprise of this period of the town's history was conducted in 1887 on Depot Street, where an alchemist, who seems to have stepped out of the Middle Ages, set up a shop for the conversion of scrap iron into copper. He was a skilled metal-worker, who had served long and com- petently for the Terry Clock Company, and he was able to con- vince a local capitalist that he had discovered the mighty secret of transmutation. The local capitalist, accordingly, provided for him a medieval-looking laboratory, with mysterious vats, retorts, and all the machinery of Cagliostro. One day, while the alchemist was at dinner, the capitalist became overeager, and searched for copper in a bubbling vat, with the assistance of a lighted candle. The results were a violent explosion of gas, the flaying of the capitalistic countenance, the instant with- drawal of financial support, and the collapse of the business.
In 1885, the Edison incandescent electric lamp was intro- duced to Pittsfield, through its use at Christmas time in the jewelry store on North Street of F. A. Robbins. It is probable that many people thought that the new light was merely an ad- vertising scheme for the holiday season; it is certain that no- body realized the far-reaching influence which it was destined to exert upon the prosperity and even upon the character of the town. The result of Mr. Robbins' trial of the device was the formation, in 1887, of a second electric lighting company, called the Pittsfield Illuminating Company; and of this small corpora- tion the president was William Stanley, Jr., whose home was then in Great Barrington.
The local field was obviously not large enough for two electric lighting concerns, and in 1890 a consolidation was effected, under the name of the Pittsfield Electric Company. William A. Whittlesey, who had recently become a resident of the town, was the treasurer; and he built, on the corner of Eagle Street and Renne Avenue, a brick building for the company's plant. The upper floor was utilized by Mr. Stanley as a laboratory. He assembled a small group of young, zealous, and brilliant elec- tricians of his own stamp; and in 1890, at his suggestion, a few
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HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD
loeal stockholders organized upon a modest capital the Stanley Electrie Manufacturing Company and went into the business of making eleetrieal transformers in a small, wooden building on Clapp Avenue. There the seed was sown which was to germi- nate and grow into Pittsfield's greatest industrial activity-the manufacture of electrical machinery.
It is a strange eoineidenee that the date of the beginning of this industry was also the date of the end of the town of Pitts- field and of the birth of the eity. To say that the eoineidenee was other than fortuitous, would be, of course, wholly fantastie; nevertheless, it is true that a certain progressive spirit, evideneed by the ehange in 1891 to a eity form of government, was quieken- ed by the advent of the keen, cosmopolitan men whom the new industry attracted to Pittsfield. The birth of the company was a peculiarly fitting eonelusion to the period between 1876 and 1891, which this chapter has briefly surveyed.
Sinee the abandonment of his musket factory by Lemuel Pomeroy in 1846, Pittsfield's manufacturing had been praetieally confined, for nearly half a century, to the making of woolen and cotton cloth; and during the Civil War, and the deeade there- after, the town's chief material dependenee was the prosperity of its textile manufacturers-of men like the Barkers, the Stearnses, the Russells, the Pomeroys, Edward Learned, and Jabez L. Peek. The notion that any other industries might be consider- ably developed seems not to have been apprehended until about 1880, when the manufacture of shoes began to be important. However, a general condition of immobility had been produced. Agricultural interests, if not moribund, were at best infirm. When the "woolen business" slaekened, the community twirled its thumbs, and waited plaeidly for better times. Pittsfield's banks had beeome concerned largely with upholding the textile mill owners, and Pittsfield's merchants had become dependent largely upon the running of the looms.
After 1880, this somewhat over-complacent attitude showed signs of healthful ehange. The generation of older manufactur- ers began to pass away, and necessary changes in the ownership and control of some of the textile mills eaused profitless intervals of disorganization. The younger business men sought oppor-
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FIFTEEN YEARS OF TOWN LIFE, 1876-1891
tunity in other fields of endeavor. The banks, increased in number by the chartering of the Third National in 1881, culti- vated a less restricted clientage. Progressive merchants dis- played willingness to contribute toward the encouragement and importation of new enterprises. In 1890, the town, to use a Yankee phrase, was "yeasting" again, after a season of industrial sluggishness.
The leaven was not without its effect upon social life, but in this respect Pittsfield surrendered its village traits with reluctance and perhaps with obstinacy. By no means had they been com- pletely surrendered in 1891. The increase of population in fif- teen years had been only about five thousand; the newer ele- ments had altered its social character only slightly. Strangers were sometimes amused, sometimes annoyed, to find that the geographical isolation of the town among the hills was still re- flected in the self-contentment of its pleasant and cultivated so- ciety, proud of the strides forward which had been taken in the administration of public charity, the maintenance of public edu- cation, the acquisition of public improvements and conveniences, and the development of new industries.
Nor did the town lack a laureate. It was at this period that the community was exhilarated by the earnest poetical efforts of a respected citizen and capable manufacturer of step-ladders, who published a collection of his memorable verses; the quota- tion of a single stanza shall here suffice.
"If Berkshire County was a wheel Pittsfield would be the hub, of course.
It's truly called the county seat,
Her attractions and location are hard to beat".
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CHAPTER III
TOWN GOVERNMENT, 1876-1891
T HE chief interest which may be claimed for a description of Pittsfield's town government, during its final fifteen years, springs from the fact that for a part of that period Pittsfield was the largest community in the country conducting its public affairs according to the New England town meeting system. Though essays on the origin, theory, and practice of this familiar method of municipal government exist in an abun- dant store, the particular case of Pittsfield seems to warrant at- tention, because the town clung to the town meeting system for so many years after it was large enough to be a city.
In 1876, the gigantic and audacious peculations of the Tweed ring in New York had not only dismayed the people of the United States, but discredited for a time the city form of govern- ment throughout the country; and under these circumstances New England towns congratulated themselves with especial zest upon their possession of the town meeting system. To doubt its complete efficacy for good was to doubt the worth of self- government. The town meeting, as conducted in Pittsfield, was apparently the very exemplification of the democratic ideal, for with equal privileges of vote and voice the citizens assembled to legislate upon local affairs, to make appropriations for high- ways, schools, and contingent expenses, to elect and instruct the town officials, to revise and accept the jury list, and to transact any business not beyond the limit of their self-made warrant, previously published, under which the meeting was convened. It could erect special committees of its own, and could be ad- journed only at its own pleasure.
The objects of consideration were multifarious. At the Pittsfield town meeting in 1876, it is of informal, but not in- credible, record that Oliver W. Robbins, a vigilant guardian of
CORNER OF NORTH AND WEST STREETS, 1915
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TOWN GOVERNMENT, 1876-1891
the public weal, held the floor upon seventy-eight different oc- casions. The meeting might, and did, thoughtfully decide com- plicated questions of financial, governmental, or educational policy, and then proceed, with equal fervor, to discuss the wis- dom of illuminating the clock on the Baptist Church. Articles in the Pittsfield town meeting warrants of those days testify that the voters were as cheerfully ready "to see if the town will ask the legislature to extend to women who are citizens the right to hold town offices and to vote in town affairs on the same terms as male citizens", as they were "to see if the town will authorize the school committee to transport scholars from the Sikes Dis- trict to the Tracy District for an experiment"; and the esthetic value of vocal music was debated with no less pertinacity than was the right method of building sluiceways.
Such a system could not fail to be broadly instructive. It taught each voter a lesson in practical government by accustom- ing him to the methods of public deliberation, and it informed him plainly of his duties and rights as a citizen. He could ac- tually see that his vote affected, not only the community vaguely as a whole, but also himself, immediately and personally. He had directly shared, for example, in selecting the assessor, who determined the amount of his tax, and the collector, to whom he paid it; the juryman, to whom his most important interests might be confided, and the constable, who was charged with the maintenance of the peace of the Commonwealth around his dwelling; and, in the fire district meeting, he had helped to choose the men whose duty it might be to save that dwelling from destruction.
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