USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Pittsfield > The history of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, from the year 1876 to the year 1916 > Part 5
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This instance, albeit in a matter perhaps of minor import- ance, is illustrative of an essential advantage of the town meet- ing system, as revealed by a survey of the last fifteen years of the town government of Pittsfield. Any citizen, whether in or out of office, had his fair opportunity of impressing any plan of public betterment directly upon the voters. If his scheme was practieable, if he was a man of force, if he understood his fellow
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TOWN GOVERNMENT, 1876-1891
citizens, and if they understood him, then in Pittsfield he seldom failed to be of benefit to his town. This opportunity tended to attract every type of citizenship to the service of the community. It tended to make every man, in a sense, public-spirited, and to make him attentive to the counsels of wisdom and experience, which a Pittsfield town meeting usually enjoyed.
As a consequence, the record of this final decade-and-a-half of the town abounds in examples of unselfish, earnest, patient de- votion to the local welfare, and under the influence of these ex- amples something like a habit of public service was implanted among the Pittsfield men of those days. It is doubtful whether any officer of town or fire district was adequately remunerated; it is certain that for many important and laborious duties the town readily obtained the best of skilled service from its citizens without any remuneration whatever. Cumbersome and inexact the machinery of Pittsfield's town government may have been; but nevertheless, when the town expired in 1891, the newborn city fell heir not only to a solvent municipality, but also to a patriotic, hardy, and self-reliant civic consciousness.
CHAPTER IV
A GROUP OF TOWNSMEN
T" HE design of this chapter is to present sketches of some Pittsfield men whose lives ended during the final fifteen years of the existence of the town government, that is to say, between 1876 and 1891, while of other prominent and helpful townsmen, who died during the same period, biographical men- tion shall hereafter bc made in the treatment of particular topics.
The most distinguished citizen of Pittsfield in 1876 was Wil- liam Francis Bartlett, for he had then recently become a figure of national significance because of his eloquent, simple, Lincoln-like pleas for reconciliation between the North and the South. In the thirty-fifth year of his age, he declined offers from leaders both of the Republican and of the Democratic parties to place him in nomination for election as governor or lieutenant governor of the Commonwealth; and when he was thirty-six, he died at Pittsfield, which had been his home for most of the final ten years of his life.
He was born at Haverhill, Massachusetts, on June sixth, 1840, and was the son of Charles L. Bartlett. In 1861, he was a junior at Harvard College; in 1865, he was a brigadier general of volunteers in the Civil War, commanding a division of the Ninth Army Corps; and before his twenty-fifth birthday he was com- missioned a major general by brevet. Four times he was wounded; during the early part of his service he was maimed by the amputation of a leg; in 1864 he was captured and held in the Libby prison, where he contracted a cruel diseasc, which finally caused his death; nevertheless, the close of the war found him ready for duty. In 1862 he had come to Pittsfield to drill the Forty-ninth Massachusetts, a Berkshire regiment, with which he served for several months as colonel, and in 1865 he was married to Miss Mary Agnes Pomeroy, daughter of Robert Pom-
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A GROUP OF TOWNSMEN
eroy of Pittsfield. General Bartlett lived for a time in Dalton and in Pittsfield on East Street; in 1870 he built the house on Wendell Avenue, now numbered thirty-one, where he died, December seventeenth, 1876.
It was while he was a resident of Pittsfield that the complete heroism of his character was revealed to the nation. The ani- mosity toward the defeated and prostrate South, which was fostered by some politicians of that ignoble period of reconstruc- tion, was abhorrent to his purer patriotism, nor was it in his chivalrous soul to distrust brave men who had honestly laid down their arms. Public expression of sentiments like his was not then common. When he gave them utterance at the Har- vard commencement in 1874, he stirred the country with extra- ordinary force. "I firmly believe", said he, "that when the gal- lant men of Lee's army surrendered at Appomattox they followed the example of their heroic chief, and with their arms, laid down forever their disloyalty to the Union. Take care, then, lest you repel by injustice, or suspicion, or even by in- difference, the love of men who now speak with pride of that flag as 'our flag' ".
It is difficult to appreciate the electrical effect of a speech like that only ten years after the great war. Let an auditor testify. General Bartlett's biographer, F. W. Palfrey, thus describes the scene: "When Bartlett arose, and the first words uttered by his deep and manly voice were heard, and the audience be- came aware that they came from the shattered soldier whose tall and slender form and wasted face they had seen at the head of the procession as he painfully marshalled it that day, a great silence fell on the multitude. All felt that an event had taken place".
An event had taken place, indeed. As it had been given to Bartlett to embody the perfect chivalry of war, so it was given to him to embody the perfect chivalry of peace.
The next year, he was asked to participate in the observance of the centennial anniversary of the fight at Lexington. There he spoke in the presence of President Grant and many digni- taries; and there, with the shadow of death visible on his coun- tenance, he made another plea for his former enemies. "Men
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HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD
cannot", he said, "always choose the right cause; but when, hav- ing chosen that which conscience dictates, they are ready to die for it, if they justify not their cause, they at least cnnoble them- selves".
In the North, men began to turn to Bartlett as a representa- tive of their ideal of reconciliation. In the South, among the people against whom he had fought, he became a popular idol. Shortly after his Lexington speech, General Bartlett went to Richmond, where he had business interests. The Virginian vet- erans of Lee's army met him at the railroad station, unhooked the horses from his carriage, and drew it themselves through the streets. There is good reason to believe that, had his days been prolonged, the nation would have honored him with high office.
Whenever his enfeebled strength permitted, he was always ready to serve the town of his adoption; and he was prominent in the Pittsfield Young Men's Association, a warden of St. Stephen's Church, a member of the original board of trustees of the Berkshire Athenaeum, and of the committee which super- vised the erection of the Soldiers' Monument. General Bart- lett's influence upon the community life of Pittsfield was none the less powerful because it was gentle and unobtrusive. He bore himself so modestly that not all of his neighbors quite realized his greatness, nor could the village then perceive that his agency for good, so far as it affected Pittsfield, was more potent than that of many other valued citizens. It is apparent, how- ever, that few men so strongly uplifted the character of the town. As they grew older, the Pittsfield men of his generation cherished with increasing gratitude the memories of his quiet courage in physical distress and adverse fortune, his sweet and simple Christianity, and his flawless, clear-sighted, and intrepid pa- triotism; and in the city today the inspiration of his life is still a beneficent and active force.
In person he was singularly handsome, commanding, and, as in speech and demeanor, knightly. His grave is in the Pitts- field cemetery. The Commonwealth has placed a bronze statue of him in the State House; and the occasion of its unveil- ing in 1904 was graced by the delivery of an oration of truth and beauty by Morris Schaff, General Bartlett's fellow townsman in
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A GROUP OF TOWNSMEN
Pittsfield. Of the statue, a noble work by Daniel Chester French, a replica was presented to Berkshire County by the sculptor. This now stands in the armory on Summer Street. The city in 1911 honored one of its public schools by giving to it General Bartlett's name.
The public schools of the town lost an enthusiastic and help- ful friend in 1876, when, on September twenty-ninth, Charles B. Redfield died. He removed his residence from Albany to Pitts- field about 1867, purchasing the house on South Street which had been built by Dr. Timothy Childs, opposite the medical college. Mr. Redfield served the cause of free education in Pittsfield when it was sorely in need of supporters so enlightened and diligent. He was a leader of the committee charged with the ungrateful duty of initiating the town system of schools which superseded the district school system, then popularly admired. The task, however, was congenial to his progressive, active spirit and to his cultivated mind; and his energetic devotion to its accomplish- ment was productive of much permanent benefit to the town.
Thomas Colt, son of Ezekiel R. Colt, was born at Pittsfield, June twenty-eighth, 1823, and there died, November eighth, 1876. He was graduated from Williams College in the class of 1842. In 1856 he purchased an interest in the paper mill in the eastern part of the town, on the site of the present Government Mill, and in 1862 became its sole owner. The factory village there was named after him, Coltsville.
Mr. Colt presided at town meetings more frequently than did any other citizen in the town's history. He was a forceful, broad-minded, scholarly man, ambitious in the conduct of his personal business, and at the same time ready with strong sup- port for worthy community causes. The excellent Pittsfield Young Men's Association, for example, was in large measure financially sustained by him in his later years. In affairs of local government, his leadership was dignified and respectful of the town, which he greatly loved. Mr. Colt was an ardent and af- fectionate antiquarian, and the movement which resulted in the preparation and publication of J. E. A. Smith's "History of Pittsfield" was stimulated and directed by him.
Justus Merrill linked the town of Pittsfield impressively with
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HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD
its historic past. His father, Capt. Hosea Merrill, was a Pitts- field veteran of the Revolution; and Mr. Merrill in his youth had been an official at the military cantonment on North Street, near the present Maplewood, where British prisoners were held during the second war with England. Mr. Merrill was born in 1792, and died at Pittsfield, August nineteenth, 1879. Like his father beforc him, he was a typical Berkshire farmer of the old- fashioned, conscientious sort, of assistance in town affairs and cultivating with contentment his ancestral acres on the southern shores of Pontoosuc Lake.
The death of George W. Campbell, on February thirteenth, 1880, marked the passing of the second Pittsfield generation of the men of a family to whose restless cffort the prosperity of the village had been much indebted. Mr. Campbell was born in Pittsfield, July fourth, 1804. His father, David Campbell, was the landlord of a tavern on Bank Row. In that center of town activities Mr. Campbell spent his boyhood, and witnessed the meetings preparatory to the cstablishment of the early textile factories of Pittsfield. In 1825 the Pontoosuc Woolen Manu- facturing Company was formed, and Mr. Campbell was one of its promoters, remaining actively connected with the enterprise un- til 1841. From 1853 to 1861 he was president of the Agricultural Bank. He was a friend of Horace Greeley, and not dissimilar to the great editor in that he combined a certain childlike simplicity with worldly knowingness and quaint idiosyncracies. Possessing little of the nervous, eager temperament characteristic of his father and his brothers, he stood in public and business affairs for a conservatism often valuable to the community.
While the brilliant career of Jamcs D. Colt at the bar and on the bench ornamented the Commonwealth, his career in the public and social life of the town of Pittsfield was no less bright and memorable. James Dennison Colt, son of Ezekiel R. Colt, was born in Pittsfield, October eighth, 1819, and there died, August ninth, 1881. He was graduated in 1838 from Williams; in after years he was a trustee of the college, and a president of its alumni association. Admitted to the Berkshire bar in 1842, he formed a partnership with Julius Rockwell.
It was not long before the law firm of Rockwell and Colt,
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A GROUP OF TOWNSMEN
having offices on the lower floor of Pittsfield's town hall, ac- quired a sort of institutional importance in Western Massachu- setts. A position on the bench of the Superior Court was offered in 1859 to each of the members of the distinguished partnership. Mr. Rockwell accepted, but Mr. Colt remained in the practice of an advocate, steadily advancing his reputation throughout the state as a learned, adroit, and eloquent trial lawyer. In 1865 he was appointed a justice of the Supreme Judicial Court. Ill health enforced his resignation a year later. In 1868, however, he was able to accept a reappointment to the bench of the same high tribunal, which he continued to adorn until his death. He was married in 1857 to Miss Elizabeth Gilbert of Gilbertsville, New York.
He was, in the words of Chief Justice Gray, "the most popular of judges", although his spirit was inflammable, readily taking fire at opposition or difficulty. Judge Colt's associates on the bench appear to have valued him especially because of his quick scorn for chicanery, and for his thorough understanding of questions of state and municipal government. To the writing of the opinions of the court he habitually devoted an unusual amount of thought and labor, for he was naturally a speaker rather than a writer. His judicial duties, therefore, were pecul- iarly onerous.
He shouldered the burden of them with unsparing fidelity; and with equal fidelity he was always ready to concern himself with the best interests of his native town. He served as a se- lectman, as a member of almost countless town committees, and as a representative of Pittsfield in the state legislature. No man could more effectually inform or enliven a town meeting. Wise, humorous, and nimble-minded, of large frame, portly aspect and broad features, he knew well how to sway an audience of Yankees. Once, at a meeting of the Pittsfield fire district, it was moved to appropriate a considerable sum of money to install a telegraphic fire alarm. Numerous speakers supported the motion. The ubiquitous agent of the fire alarm installation company was in the hall. "This man", said Judge Colt, pointing at him, "this man proposes to sit for years in the First Church belfry, like a spider, and spin his great web of wires over our helpless village,
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HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD
but here is onc little fly who doesn't intend to be caught". The motion was uproariously defeated.
Upon occasions of dignity, his addresses werc marked by an eloquence at the same time classical and nervous; for his tem- perament was sensitively and delicately organized, and it found no right expression in conventional phrases.
He loved to meet humankind and to see people enjoy them- selves. In social life he was the most unjudgelike of men. It is related of him that, on a railroad journey, his storics and his jovial good nature would often kcep a carfull of passengers in hilarity for fifty miles. His face, his voice, and his wit were known nearly as well in Boston as in Berkshire. But of Judge Colt it is to be observed, as it is of many Pittsfield men of his generation, that hc reserved his best for the village of his birth and for the community wherein he had grown to maturity. The business of lawyer and jurist often carried him far afield, he was a favorite in distant and distinguished circles of society, but his home town never ceased to command him; nor did he ever seem to lack satisfaction in giving to it the full value of his publie training, his legal and political sagacity, and his rare talent for the amenities of social intercourse.
Among the Pittsfield manufacturers upon whom once de- pended the welfare of the town, the foremost for a number of years was Theodore Pomeroy, who was born in Pittsfield, Sep- tember second, 1813, and died there, September twenty-sixth, 1881. After the death of his father, Lemuel Pomeroy, in 1849, he assumed the management of the prosperous woolen mills of L. Pomeroy's Sons, on the west branch of the Housatonic. With him as co-heirs of this property were two younger brothers, Rob- ert and Edward, but neither of them had much liking for the cx- acting daily cares of a manufacturer, so that Theodore by their choice carried on the business. Eventually he became sole owner.
A strongly intelligent man, Mr. Pomeroy mastercd his voca- tion with the thoroughness of an earnest student of law or medi- cine, and to his theoretical knowledge he united sound commer- cial sense. Success seldom deserted him. His chief duty in life, as he conceived it, was to keep his looms at work and his wage-
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A GROUP OF TOWNSMEN
earners contentedly employed, and from this task he could not be diverted. With the traditional Pomeroy grace of person, he had inherited an imperious manner from his father, that perfect type of village magnate, of whom a friend said that "there would be no living with Lemuel Pomeroy, if he were not almost always right." Theodore Pomeroy's influence in the town was for so- briety of thought and action. His powerful hand ever strove to preserve an equable balance of community interests. He was, for an example, a constant and devout supporter of the Con- gregational faith; nevertheless, the Roman Catholic church of Pittsfield found an early temporary shelter under the roof of one of his buildings, and he contributed liberally to the cost of build- ing St. Joseph's.
Zeno Russell was another Pittsfield woolen manufacturer who aided in upholding reliably the town's industrial prosperity. He became one of the managers in the firm of S. N. & C. Russell after the death of Charles L. Russell in 1870, having been for many years the bookkeeper in the factory's office. The son of Solomon L. Russell, he was born in May, 1834, and died at Pitts- field, November tenth, 1881. Mr. Russell was a methodical, thoughtful, high-principled man, and a long-time deacon of the First Church.
John C. Parker, who was born in Pittsfield, February fourth, 1822, and there died, December eighth, 1881, was prominent in the town as a faithful administrator of public or private trusts. He was elected selectman in 1867 and consecutively from 1875 to 1880. He was a member of the well-known Parker family of the "West Part", and inherited exceptional aptitude and fond- ness for hunting and fishing. This made him more familiar than was any other man of his time with the topography and natural history of Berkshire; in these matters he was a sort of official village referee, as well as in local tradition and neighbor- hood anecdote.
Alonzo E. Goodrich was another popular selectman of the town, wherein his great-grandfather, one of its early settlers, had been a selectman in 1793. Mr. Goodrich, a carpenter and con- tractor, was a sergeant in Pittsfield's Allen Guard, responding to the first call for troops in 1861. Born in 1815, he died at Pittsfield, February twenty-fifth, 1881.
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HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD
The story of the industrious and upright career of Solomon Lincoln Russell and of his notable services to Pittsfield has been gratefully and appropriately told in J. E. A. Smith's second volume of the chronicles of the town. To that tribute it is necessary here to add merely the record of Mr. Russell's death. It occurred at Pittsfield, January eighth, 1882. Born at Ches- terfield, Massachusetts, February fourth, 1791, and a resident of Pittsfield since 1826, he was in 1882 the town's oldest citizen; and the end of his honorable life deeply affected local sentiment.
Ensign H. Kellogg, for nearly half a century a picturesque figure in the front rank of the town's leaders, died at Pittsfield, January twenty-third, 1882. He was born in the Berkshire town of Sheffield, in 1812, and in 1836 was graduated from Amherst College. In 1838 he came to Pittsfield to practice law, but the profession did not permanently attract him, and he gradually abandoned it. By his marriage in 1841 to Miss Caro- line Campbell, he became allied to one of the town's influential families. He was chosen president in 1861 of the Pontoosuc Woolen Manufacturing Company, and in 1866 of the Agricul- tural National Bank, both of which important offices he retained until his death. His public career may be said to have begun in 1843, when he was first elected representative from Pittsfield to the General Court at Boston. Thereafter Mr. Kellogg was so elected in 1844, '47, '49, '50, '51, '52, '70, '71, and '76; he was twice speaker of the lower house; in 1853, '54, and '77, he was elected to the state senate from his Berkshire district. During the final years of his life he served under an appointment by President Hayes as the United States member of the interna- tional commission which met at Halifax to adjust disputes re- garding the Canadian fisheries.
The New England of Mr. Kellogg's youth and maturity was fond of speech-making, and it was as a speech-maker that the town knew him most familiarly. His presence was distinguished, his voice melodious, and his courtesy unfailing. Always an ar- dent student of literature, he had stored his mind with poetical, historical, and classical allusion. His oratory and his informal conversation were wont to take soaring and eagle-like, but not aimless, flights; and he could adorn the discussion of even a
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A GROUP OF TOWNSMEN
commonplace subject, such as might arise in a political caucus or a town meeting, with genuine eloquence.
His circle of intimate acquaintance among the prominent men of the Commonwealth was very large, and it was as large and intimate among the people on the farms and at the looms of Pittsfield, for he was approachable, democratic, and, like his literary idol, Charles Dickens, a sympathizing appreciator of quaint and strongly marked human types, wherever he found them. He was fond, also, of the graces of life-of music and pictures. By minor social conventionalities he was often amus- ingly unfettered. When he desired to fish a favorite trout stream, or to devote twenty-four successive hours to a favorite novel, he was not ordinarily to be prevented, and on the former Dickinson farm in the northeastern part of the town, a broad tract of pasture and woodland purchased and by him named "Morningside", he built a miniature Swiss chalet, where he could, when he wished, seclude himself from over-importunate men of affairs.
The benign influence which he had upon Pittsfield was due to his personality, to the trust of the people in his knowledge, right feeling, and integrity, rather than to sustained exertion of his brilliant powers. Mr. Kellogg's political friends, and indeed he had in Berkshire few political enemies, were accustomed to complain because he seemed to content himself, so far as effort on his own part was concerned, with political offices lower than the highest in the gift of the Commonwealth. But his tempera- ment, if one may here apply a modernly abused term, was es- sentially artistic, and it shaped his life in its own way, among his books and his neighbors.
George P. Briggs was the oldest son of Governor George Nixon Briggs and was born at Adams, March fourth, 1822. He died at Pittsfield, March twenty-sixth, 1882. Mr. Briggs was a graduate of Williams and was a member of the Berkshire bar, but after the death of his father he turned to agriculture and conducted the Governor's cherished farm on West Street. He was, like his father, a valued supporter of the Baptist Church. His nature was gentle, scholarly, and companionable, and among
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HISTORY OF PITTSFIELD
his Pittsfield contemporaries, by whom he was much beloved, he was noted for the breadth and quality of his information.
The career and character of Edwin Clapp were exhibitive of those sterling qualities of citizenship which made the village of Pittsfield self-reliant. His lifelong industry was devoted to only one business, and his practical public spirit to only one community. He was born on May first, 1809, in Pittsfield, where he died, July twenty-seventh, 1884. His father, Jason Clapp, was a famous builder of coaches and carriages; his large shop was on the present Clapp Avenue, and there Edwin Clapp labor- ed contentedly, honorably, and successfully for more than half a century. He filled, with faithfulness and hard-headed common sense, many positions of financial responsibility; and his almost constant service on the town's special committees testifies to the popular estimate of the value of his homcly wisdom. With the fire department he was intimately identified, for he was elccted foreman of one of the volunteer engine companies every year from 1846 to 1883. He was stalwartly independent in speech and judgment, and contemptuous of pretension.
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