USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Pittsfield > The history of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, from the year 1876 to the year 1916 > Part 30
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Jarvis N. Dunham, a man of force in local affairs under the town government, was born in the Berkshire village of Savoy, May first, 1828, and died at Pittsfield, December second, 1891. He was admitted to the bar in 1856, and in 1862 made Pittsfield his home. In 1866 he became connected with the management of the Springfield Fire and Marine Insurance Company, and was its president from 1880 until his death; but he continued to be a resident of Pittsfield, was three times elected a representative of the local district to the General Court, and was a wise, effective, and eloquent counsellor at the town's public meetings. During the later years of his life, Mr. Dunham was a member of the directorates of the Agricultural National Bank, the Berkshire Life Insurance Company, and the Boston and Albany Railroad.
The most valuable officer of the Berkshire Agricultural Society in its halcyon days was Henry M. Peirson, who was born in Richmond, Berkshire County, in 1825 and came to Pittsfield about 1848. He was a dealer in hardware on North Street for almost half a century, in partnership for a part of that period with Dr. Stephen Reed and with George N. Dutton. The store which Mr. Peirson conducted still bears his name. He died at Pittsfield, May seventh, 1894. Mr. Peirson was an unassuming, conscientious, high-principled man, upon whom his associates in any undertaking were accustomed to rely for methodical thor- oughness. His long service as a deacon was of memorable assist- ance to the South Congregational Church.
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Pittsfield's oldest physician, at the time of his death, Feb- ruary ninth, 1895, was Charles Bailey, who was born in East Medway, Massachusetts, in 1821. He was educated at Brown University, and studied medicine at the Berkshire Medical Col- lege in Pittsfield. From the latter institution he was graduated in 1843. Six years later, having in the meantime been converted to homeopathy, he returned to Pittsfield, and there remained in active practice until he died. His mind was alert and acquisi- tive, and he never ceased to be a student; nor were his studies confined to his profession. Dr. Bailey's extended and observant travels were the means of obtaining for Pittsfield progressive ideas of various sorts.
Thomas P. Pingree, who was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1830, came to Pittsfield in 1853 to study in the law-office of Rockwell and Colt, wherein he afterward became a partner, having been admitted to the bar in 1855. He thus had the dis- tinction of being in intimate association, at different times, with such eminent Pittsfield lawyers as Julius Rockwell, James D. Colt, and James M. Barker. Mr. Pingree was a cultivated, aristocratic man of wide learning and exceptionally pure ideals. As a lawyer, he was not adaptable to changing conditions, and he clung proudly and immovably to the professional traditions in which he had been schooled. His death occurred at Pittsfield, February ninth, 1895.
John E. Merrill was born in 1820 at Pittsfield, where he died, June fourteenth, 1896. He was a grandson of Capt. Hosea Mer- rill of the Revolution, and until 1886 he lived on the farm which had been cultivated by his great-grandfather in the eastern part of the town in 1775. Mr. Merrill was often entrusted by the voters of Pittsfield with public office and was a prominent member of the Berkshire Agricultural Society.
A pleasant type of the old-time village lawyer was Lorenzo H. Gamwell, who was born in Washington, Massachusetts, in 1821 and died at Pittsfield, November fourth, 1896. He was admitted to the bar in 1848 and practiced law for many years in partnership with Samuel W. Bowerman. Affable and con- scientious in the conduct of business, he was elected to represent Pittsfield in the General Court, and was a respected counsellor in public affairs under the town government.
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George Y. Learned, a brother of Edward Learned, was born in West Troy, New York, in 1827, and on September fourth, 1897, hc died at Pittsfield. He came to Pittsfield first in 1853, and was there associated with his brother's manufacturing enterprises, of which for a short time he was a representative in New York. In Pittsfield he was popular in the fire department, and one of the volunteer companies was named for him. Mr. Learned was prominent in town politics and an efficient selectman under the town government. His disposition was sanguine, cheerful, and sympathetic. He was a member of the original board of trustees of the Berkshire Athenaeum, and at the time of his death was a city auditor of unusual competence.
The death, on January twentieth, 1898, of William J. Coogan, deprived Pittsfield prematurely of a valued citizen. The son of Owen Coogan, he was born in the town in 1850. Mr. Coogan was appointed postmaster of Pittsfield in 1887; and was again appointed in 1895. He served the public with scrupulous fidel- ity. His nature was of that loyal and sunny sort which makes many friends; and his influence among the younger Pittsfield men of his time was beneficial to the community.
The mercantile success of Moses England, who died in Pitts- field, December twenty-fifth, 1898, was destined to have an im- portant effect upon the business life of the city. Mr. England was born in Bavaria in 1830. He first came to Pittsfield in 1857; and thereafter, with the exception of two years from 1874 to 1876, he was a Pittsfield resident. In 1886 he retired from the dry goods business which he established on North Street, and which has since been greatly expanded by his sons. Mr. England was quiet, earnest and home-loving, and he won the respect of his Yankee neighbors at a time when the village of Pittsfield was by no means cosmopolitan.
Almiron D. Francis, who died in Pittsfield, December twelfth, 1899, was born in the town, May eleventh, 1807. His great- grandfather was Captain William Francis, a member of the first town government in 1761, a stalwart officer in the Revolution, and the respected village leader of the "West Part." Mr. Fran- cis from 1852 to 1865 conducted the machine shop established by Gordon Mckay, and afterward devoted himself to real estate
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operations. Kindly and reliable, he was for more than forty years a deacon of the First Baptist Church, of which his father had been one of the founders. Although he never held political office, his influence in public affairs was valuable, and his advice therein, as well as in private matters, was often sought by his fellow citizens.
The legal talent of Andrew J. Waterman obtained for him the distinction of serving the public for more than thirty suc- cessive years as register of probate, as district attorney, and as attorney general of the Commonwealth. He was born in North Adams, June twenty-third, 1825, and in 1854 was admitted to the Berkshire bar. Having become register of probate in 1855, he retained that office until 1881. In 1872 he removed his home to Pittsfield, the newly established county seat. In 1880, 1883, and 1886 he was elected district attorney, and in 1887 was chosen attorney general of Massachusetts. In the latter high position he served for four years. Mr. Waterman died on October fourth, 1900. He was a hard working lawyer, who owed his success to patient labor rather than to aggressiveness, and who faced legal antagonists and difficulties with unruffled calmness rather than with showy fervor; long experience in the probate office had im- parted to him, perhaps, a judicial, rather than a combative, cast of mind. Before a jury, or on the public platform, he spoke with dignity and effect. His political following in Pittsfield was trustful and spirited, and he was the Republican nominee for mayor in the first city election in 1890. His acquaintance with the people of Berkshire was unusually large and intimate; and his plain manner of living, simple enjoyments, and industrious habits were in accord with the best of the county's old-fashioned traditions.
During the later years of the town, the most consistently active participant in town meetings was Oliver W. Robbins, who was born in Pittsfield in 1812 and there died, July seventeenth, 1899. He was a farmer in the eastern part of the town until about 1853, when he made his home in the central village. In 1869 he established a shop for the manufacture of shoes, in which he was soon joined by Charles W. Kellogg as a partner. The Robbins and Kellogg shoe factory, near Silver Lake, was one of
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Pittsfield's important industries for a considerable period. The development of real estate on Jubilee Hill also contributed to Mr. Robbin's prosperity. In town or fire district meetings he was a rugged economist. Often the voters were merely amused by his protests, but sometimes they were judiciously heedful of them, and sometimes the town was a gainer because of his untiring, honest, and fearless vigilance, and because the voters were atten- tive to his favorite dictum-"Somebody has got to pay for these things." Mr. Robbins represented Pittsfield in the lower house of the General Court, and in his old age was elected to the state senate.
Another figure of prominence at town meetings, although he never held public office, was William Renne. He was born in Dalton in 1809, and he lived in Pittsfield from 1830 until his death, March tenth, 1901. Mr. Renne patented and manufac- tured a medicinal remedy, which had an extensive sale, and he invested largely in local real estate. A public-spirited and thoughtful citizen of many ideas, he was the leading supporter of the Methodist Episcopal Church at a period financially critical in its history.
Of distinguished Pittsfield ancestry, John Allen Root was born in Pittsfield in 1850, and there died, October sixteenth, 1902. He engaged actively in local politics, and represented Pittsfield in the state legislature. For many years he was clerk and treasurer of St. Stephen's parish. In any office he was pains- taking and reliable, and his popularity was especially marked in the volunteer fire department and in fraternal orders.
In 1903 Pittsfield was deeply affected by the death of her most eminent citizen, Henry L. Dawes. As congressman and senator, he had represented the Commonwealth for thirty-six years at Washington. The governor, formally advising the General Court of the death of Mr. Dawes, said with truth that always he "exhibited that devotion to the welfare of humanity and that persistency in championing the cause of the weak which illustrate the true spirit of Massachusetts." Henry Laurens Dawes was born in Cummington, Massachusetts, Octo- ber thirtieth, 1816. After graduation from Yale College in 1839, he studied law at Greenfield, Massachusetts, and was ad-
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mitted to the Hampshire County bar in 1842. In 1844 he was married to Miss Electa Sanderson of Ashfield. He practiced law in North Adams and, beginning in 1848, he was sent to both branches of the state legislature. In 1853 he was appointed to be district attorney, and so served until 1857, when he was elected to the lower house of Congress. There he remained for eighteen successive years, and in 1876 he began a continuous service of the same duration as a United States senator. He had made his home in Pittsfield in 1864, where he died, February fifth, 1903.
So far as the performance of his public duties permitted, he continued his legal practice, and with distinguished success, for he was a learned lawyer and a forcible, conscientious advocate; and he was invited by Governor Claflin and again by Governor Washburn to a place on the bench of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. But the capitol at Washington was, of course, the theater of his most important activity. The retire- ment of Mr. Dawes from the Senate in 1893 marked the end of a period of uninterrupted legislative work equaled then by that of no other living American. As a national legislator, he had faced the gathering storm clouds of the Civil War and the awful tem- pest which broke from them; he had grappled with the desperate difficulties of reconstruction; he had seen the population of the country grow from twenty-two to seventy millions; he had voted upon the admission of sixteen states to the Union; and he had taken a helpful part in solving the complicated problems involved in this expansion. His circle of acquaintance had included nine presidents-Buchanan, Lincoln, Johnson, Grant, Hayes, Gar- field, Arthur, Cleveland, Harrison; and at the funeral of Presi- dent Lincoln he was chosen to be a pall-bearer.
For thirty-six years, few important public measures had been proposed of which the affirmation or defeat in Congress had not been influenced by him, but the remarkable legislative career of Mr. Dawes can be described only briefly in these pages. In the House he was at the head of the committee on elections from 1859 to 1869. In the next Congress he was chairman of the committee on appropriations. In 1871 his leadership of the majority in the House was formally recognized by the appoint-
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ment to be chairman of the committee on ways and means, and in that position of high responsibility he served for four years. His principal work in the Senate was at the head of the committee on Indian affairs. These duties, and many others, were per- formed with tireless industry and with vigilant devotion to the public good.
His labors in behalf of the Indians won for him perhaps his greatest distinction. During his service of sixteen years as chairman of the Senate's committee on Indian affairs, he pro- cured the appropriation of nearly $16,000,000 for the education of Indians and for the establishment of about eighty Indian schools. As a result of his efforts, a law was passed which pro- vided a free and secure homestead farm for every Indian who would take it, with a title deed guaranteed at the end of twenty- five years. Furthermore, the law carried with it full rights of citizenship to such Indians as availed themselves of its offer. "Older readers" said the Springfield Republican in 1893, "will remember the mark which he (Mr. Dawes) made in the popular branch of Congress, and will be disposed to insist that the later work should not be permitted to overshadow the earlier. Yet by so much as the moral is greater than the material, valuable as was the service rendered as representative in the business in- terests of the nation and the course of retrenchment and econ- omy, does the last outweigh the first, even after the support given to the cause of the Union be reckoned in."
In spite of his national prominence, he was the most unpre- tentious of men; but there were three of his achievements, he once humorously remarked, which he wished to be recorded in his epitaph-that he had moved the first appropriation for the weather bureau, the first for the fish commission, and the first for filling in the notorious "old canal" at Washington.
He possessed little of the art of elocution. His speech per- suaded because it was that of a logical, sensible, earnest man, who had mastered his subject with extraordinary thoroughness. By birth a farm boy, with the hard work of a farm the portion of his early youth, Mr. Dawes always retained habits of industry and of plain living, and seemingly an indifference to the ac- cumulation of property, except as the means of culture and simple
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comfort. His nature was domestic. He liked his neighbors and he craved their good opinion, and to young people he was par- ticularly kind. In Pittsfield he was as attentive to his civic duties as he was in Washington to the mighty concerns of the nation; and there is still to be seen a record book of the Water Street school district, kept by "H. L. Dawes, Clerk", while he was an eminent congressman.
His old age, spent in his home on Elm Street, was happy and serene. He busied himself with literary work, published some magazine articles of political reminiscence, and delivered a course of lectures at Dartmouth College; and he preserved to the last his interest in local affairs, especially in those of the Berk- shire Athenaeum, of which institution he was one of the original trustees and for which he suggested to Thomas Allen the erection of the present building. Tributes of respect and regret from many men of high station, including the President of the United States, were elicited by his death; but more in keeping with his temperament seemed the testimony of his own townsfolk to the honor and affection in which they held him.
George H. Laflin, born in Canton, Connecticut, in 1828, spent the years of his early manhood in Pittsfield, whence he removed to Chicago in 1863. After 1888, however, he made Pittsfield his summer home and was a liberal contributor to several local charitable institutions, conspicuously to the House of Mercy. Mr. Laflin died in Pittsfield, July twenty-fourth, 1904.
The removal of the county seat to Pittsfield in 1868 caused several of the county officials to become citizens of the town, and among them was Henry Walbridge Taft, who had then been for twelve years clerk of the courts. He was born in Sunderland, Massachusetts, November thirteenth, 1818. At the age of nineteen, he went to Lenox to edit a newspaper; but he studied law instead, was admitted to the Berkshire bar in 1841, and in 1856 was appointed clerk of the courts to fill the unexpired term of Charles Sedgwick. Mr. Taft thereafter was continuously re- elected to that office until he declined the nomination in 1896, having served for forty years. The date of his death was Sep- tember twenty-second, 1904. Mr. Taft remained to the end of
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his days a legal official of that sort which many are fain to declare is the old school. His respect for the work, the ceremonial etiquette, and the traditions of courts of law was profound; his legal scholarship was exceptional; and he performed his official duties both with exactness and with singular personal dignity. He was long an officer of the Berkshire Athenaeum and a deacon of the First Church, and he served the business community in such positions of trust as the presidency of the Third National Bank. Of a sociable and mellow nature, he liked to tell humorous anecdotes and to write humorous verses. Mr. Taft was an enthusiastic antiquarian, and an enlivening leader of the Berkshire Historical and Scientific Society.
Edward D. Jones was born in the Berkshire town of Otis in 1824, and died at Pittsfield, December thirtieth, 1904. As early as 1850, when he was a resident of East Lee, Mr. Jones was a well-known manufacturer of paper mill machinery. In 1867 he became connected with the machine shop then conducted by Clark and Russell on Mckay Street in Pittsfield; and the later development of this plant, under the ownership and direc- tion of Mr. Jones and of the company which now bears his name, was a notable example of enterprise and business sagacity.
Of unremitting industry and application, Mr. Jones allowed himself few avocations, and political service was not among them. In 1887, however, he was elected a state senator; and he was a member of the city's first board of public works, so serving for eight years. He was peculiarly well-adapted for the latter office, being by temperament and habit a doer. The Methodist Episcopal Church enjoyed the advantage of his sup- port. In partnership with Solomon N. Russell, he placed the town under obligations to him by improving North Street by the erection of Central Block, and he was instrumental in en- couraging some new local industries of no little importance to the general welfare.
It was only ten years after the death of Judge Colt in 1881 that Pittsfield was again honored by the appointment of one of its citizens to the bench of the highest legal tribunal in the Commonwealth. James Madison Barker was born in Barker- ville, in the western part of Pittsfield, October twenty-third,
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1839. His father was John V. Barker. In 1860 James M. Barker was graduated from Williams College, and in 1863 was admitted to the bar in the county of Suffolk. His wife, to whom he was married in 1864, was Miss Helena Whiting, of Bath, New York. Shortly after his admission to the bar, he be- came a member of the law firm of Pingree and Barker, which may be said to have been the direct descendant of the partner- ship of Rockwell and Colt; he represented Pittsfield in the state legislature; and he was a particularly efficient clerk of the town and the fire district. His interest in local municipal government was constant, and he always was a conscientious and influential participant in town meetings.
Having been in 1874 appointed to a commission for revising the statutes of Massachusetts, he both enlarged his reputation for legal ability and cultivated that erudite knowledge of statu- tory law which was afterwards of essential help to the work of the judiciary of the Commonwealth. In 1882 he was appointed a justice of the Superior Court. To the bench of the Supreme Judicial Court he was promoted in 1891. There he served with honor and usefulness, until his death in Boston, October second, 1905.
Judge Barker was a member of the board of trustees of Wil- liams College, an incorporator, and a trustee for more than thirty years, of the Berkshire Athenaeum, and an officer of the Berkshire Life Insurance Company for nearly the same length of time. His value to these institutions, and to many others, was that of a calm and even-minded counsellor, neither to be easily deceived by vain optimism nor to be easily discouraged by difficulty. His bearing was distinguished, and his counte- nance was at once refined and forceful. He was generously en- dowed with the art of oratory, and from the platform he spoke with both manly fire and pleasant stateliness of diction and de- meanor. His ideals of civic duty and political rectitude had been purely conceived, and he took care to express them in words dignified as well as convincing. It was as a favorite public speaker, indeed, that he was best known, especially in his later years, to Pittsfield citizens.
A diligent scholar and a faithful lover of books, Judge Barker
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was no less a lover of nature and of life in the open. He was fond of a day with his shotgun or his fishing rod, and of the com- panionship of camp and hunting lodge. It was his custom to make excursions through parts of New England seldom seen by the casual traveler, and there to gather experiences and observa- tions of rural ways and quaint character, which his pen would describe charmingly for the entertainment of his friends. For friendship his genius was rare, and the lives of many Pittsfield men of his generation were warmed and brightened by it.
William A. Whittlesey, becoming a resident of Pittsfield in 1886, exemplified in many ways the cosmopolitan spirit which was at that time beginning to assert itself in the town. He was born at Danbury, Connecticut, February twenty-first, 1849, and was educated at Marietta College. In 1874 he was married to Miss Caroline Tilden, a niece of Samuel J. Tilden of New York. Mr. Whittlesey's earlier commercial experience was gained in Detroit and in Wisconsin. When he came to Berkshire he was in the prime of a manhood exceptionally vigorous, and so cir- cumstanced that he was able to give financial support to his faith in Pittsfield and Pittsfield's future.
The possibilities of the industrial use of electricity were not then commonly imagined. Upon the imagination of Mr. Whittlesey, however, in whom the dreamer and the practical man of affairs were curiously blended, these possibilities laid strong hold. He was one of those who effected a fuller development of the business of supplying electrical light and power by the amalgamation in 1890 of the two local electrical lighting com- panies into the Pittsfield Electric Company. For the new company he built, as his own venture, a central station. These transactions brought him into touch with William Stanley; and it was through the medium of Mr. Whittlesey's brisk voice that most people in Pittsfield first heard of the project of the Stanley Electric Manufacturing Company. Although the chief en- deavors of his business career in Pittsfield were devoted to for- warding the interests of these two corporations, Mr. Whittlesey's public spirit caused him to engage in several other useful under- takings.
In 1897 he was a representative from Pittsfield to the General
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Court, and for the two years following he was a prominent and valuable member of the Massachusetts senate; but he was too mercurial, perhaps, to be a politician in the ordinary and limited meaning of the word, and he freed himself very easily from the ob- ligation of party ties when he felt that his party was wrong. Openly impulsive, possessing a handsome and commanding presence, endowed with unusual energy of mind and body, he was able readily to impart his enthusiasms. His advocacy of a cause, whether in business, in politics, or in social life, meant immediate action of some sort. Thus by nature sensitive and enthusiastic, frank and impetuous, Mr. Whittlesey was so con- stituted as to attract, and to be attracted by, the companionship of young people. It may be doubted if he was more proud of any of his achievements than he was of the fact that for a decade he was president of the Pittsfield Y. M. C. A., and that he was of proved value to the association, having come to it at a time of some travail and having left it with an invigorated membership and a home of its own. He died at Pittsfield, December fifth, 1906.
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