USA > Massachusetts > Worcester County > Worcester county; a narrative history, Volume II > Part 41
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As bearing on Elihu Burritt's campaign for peace, and in recent years a growing friendship between the cities of Worcester, England, and Worcester, Massachusetts, the following letter, written in New Britain to an old Worces- ter friend in 1874, has interest :
"I am very happy to hear that the dear Worcester of my love and pride, where my public life was born, is going to revive the pleasant communion and fellowship with the old Worcester of Mother England with which I was somewhat connected nearly 30 years ago. During the Oregon controversy in 1846, when it was assuming a serious aspect, Joseph Crossfield, a Quaker of Manchester, originated a kind of direct interchange of sentiments on the
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subject between English and American towns through Friendly International Addresses. A great number of these addresses were sent from various towns in England and Scotland to our principal cities. These were all sent to me, or my care, and I had them printed on slips, and posted to several hundred newspapers scattered over the Union. One of these was from Edinburgh to Washington, bearing the names of Dr. Chalmers and the first men of that city. I took this on to Washington myself, and among others showed it to John C. Calhoun, who was deeply interested in it. At the same time I took with me an address signed by 1,600 ladies of the city of Exeter, England, to the ladies of Philadelphia, who sent a response to it, signed I believe by over 3,000 of their number.
"When I went to England in 1846 I took with me this response, and also that of our Worcester to the mother Worcester in England. Both were pre- sented at public meetings convened for the purpose, and excited the liveliest interest. I have copied out of the Christian Citizen volume for 1846 both communications of the two Worcesters, which will show you the spirit which they breathed and inspired. I do not know what has become of the original Address from Old Worcester. It ought to have been preserved in the archives of the city."
Jonas G. Clark, Founder of Clark University, 1815-1900-Jonas G. Clark, native of Hubbardston and founder of Clark University at Worcester, was the son of a farmer of independent means and received a sound common school education. He learned the trade of carriage-maker, and carried on that business, branching also into the hardware trade and manufacturing. He saw the opportunity to make money during the gold rush to California, not as a miner, but as a merchant, and in the 'fifties laid the foundation of a large fortune by dealing in miners' supplies. This he augmented on a larger scale in the reconstruction period following the Civil War, making large transac- tions in government securities and the purchase of New York real estate. His home property on Seventy-second Street, purchased in 1875, he sold for half a million dollars when he moved to Worcester in 1881 to establish a perma- nent residence.
There he conceived the plan of a great university where advanced post- graduate courses and original research might be pursued without going abroad, and in 1887 he founded Clark University, endowing it with two million dollars. The following year Dr. G. Stanley Hall came from Johns Hopkins University to be its president. Upon the founder's death in 1900, large additional sums were bequeathed the institution, including money for establishing a college department, and for a beautiful and complete library building and a generous endowment for the maintenance of the library. Of
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his university, Mr. Clark said: "Broad in scope, liberal in its methods, and comprehensive in its teachings, it must of necessity prove a powerful instru- ment in promoting the higher education and fuller development of the intel- lectual faculties of our people. Being placed, as we propose it shall be, in charge of the wisest and most accomplished scholars of the day, in several departments of science, literature and art, those seeking to avail themselves of its advantages will be brought in close relations with the best thought and most profound wisdom of the world today."
George Crompton, Inventor of the Fancy Loom, 1829-1886-George Crompton was born in England and came to America with his family when he was ten years old. He attended private schools and Millbury Academy. His father, William Crompton, was a mechanic and inventor. He had been in America only a year when, in 1837, his employers in Taunton asked him to produce a loom which would weave certain patterns, and the result was a great invention, the fancy loom.
After having some experience as a maker of pistols, young George Crompton went to Washington and procured an extension of his father's patent. Returning to Worcester, in partnership with Merrill E. Forbush, he began the manufacture of looms. Just as the business had begun to prosper in 1854, fire destroyed buildings and machinery. Mr. Crompton was advised to go into bankruptcy, but this he refused to do, and visiting per- sonally every creditor, he secured an extension of time. Dissolving his part- nership, he began again. Then came the outbreak of the Civil War and his business suffered, and he returned to the manufacture of pistols.
It was at this period of his career that his latent inventive genius asserted itself, and he went over his father's invention and perfected it, bringing it to the most exacting needs in the weaving of fancy cashmeres. This was the first of many inventions. In the course of his life, Mr. Crompton took out two hundred and twelve patents.
Resuming the manufacture of looms in their perfected type, Mr. Cromp- ton again met reverses in the panic of 1877. But he overcame the embarrass- ments which he suffered in common with other industrialists, and built up the great Crompton Loom Works, whose products were known and used everywhere that fine fabrics were woven. When he died he was sole owner of the business, which afterwards was consolidated with that of the Knowles Loom Works, as the Crompton & Knowles Loom Works, whose great plant in Worcester is the largest in the world for the building of fancy looms.
Mr. Crompton's exactitude in financial and business affairs was the sub- ject of frequent comment. It was illustrated by an incident related by his biographer : "During his earlier business years he once found pay-day
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approaching and no funds to meet it. He at once started on a collecting tour. The evening before pay-day found him with money in his pocket, but on the wrong side of the Connecticut River, swollen with a spring freshet and filled with large cakes of ice, and no bridge in the neighborhood on which to cross. He hunted until he found a boatman with a small boat who was willing to risk his life for an adequate compensation, and the two started across the river. It was several hours before they landed on the opposite shore, at a long distance below the starting point, and completely wet through, but Mr. Crompton's men were paid before night on their regular pay-day."
"Honest John" Davis, Governor of Massachusetts, Congressman, United States Senator, 1787-1864-John Davis was born in Northboro, the son of a well-to-do farmer. He attended the village schools, and when sixteen years old became a teacher in one of them, there earning enough money to enable him to attend Leicester Academy and prepare for college. He graduated from Yale in 1812, studied law, was admitted to the bar in 1815, and began his practice in Spencer. But the following year he removed to Worcester, which being the county seat offered greater opportunities in his profession. Presently he was one of the leading lawyers of Worcester County. At various times he was a law partner of Levi Lincoln, Charles Allen and Emory Washburn.
In 1824 he was elected on the Whig ticket Congressman for the South District of Worcester County, and held his seat through successive reëlec- tions until January, 1834. He was distinguished as the advocate of the "American System" of protection to home industry. His speeches were widely read, among them those on the bill of 1827 to increase the duties on wool and woolens; on the tariff bill of 1828; on the 1830 bill for the more effectual collection of imposts ; and in answer to McDuffie of South Carolina in 1832.
Mr. Davis was elected Governor of Massachusetts for the year 1834, and was reelected the following year. In 1835 the Legislature elected him United States Senator, which office he held for fourteen years. In the Senate his fame as an orator and statesman grew apace. A million copies were printed of his speech of 1840 in opposition to the sub-treasury. Likewise he earned the sobriquet of "Honest John Davis," which speaks for itself.
Governor Davis, as he was best known in after life, was a contemporary of Clay, Calhoun and Webster. It has been written in comparison: "If one reads for mere pleasure, he will be more gratified by the glowing fervor and sparkling wit of Clay, the subtle metaphysics of Calhoun, or the concise and demonstrative logic of Webster. But if he reads to gain a detailed knowledge of the question under debate, he will find Mr. Davis more instructive perhaps
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than either, certainly more logical than Clay, more practical than Calhoun, and more minutely instructive than Webster."
Mr. Davis' mansion on Lincoln Street was a mecca of distinguished peo- ple of the day. It was there that Charles Dickens was entertained and as he afterwards wrote, watched the Sabbath break, and the church-goers travers- ing "the distant thread of road" on their way to worship. As years advanced the Governor led a quiet life, but with interests which broke the monotony of retirement, among them his orchard and garden, and the affairs of the Ameri- can Antiquarian Society, of which he was the president.
Dorothea Lynde Dix, Who Made Humane the Care of the World's Insane, 1802-1887-Dorothea Lynde Dix was born in Maine, but passed her girlhood in Worcester and Boston. Much of her upbringing was in the home of her grandfather, Dr. Elijah Dix, on Court Hill, Worcester, a stern man, of powerful will and much ability. The girl's Boston life was in the Washington Street mansion of Madame Dix, her grandmother. Both homes were austere to the point of grimness.
Characteristic of Dr. Dix was his response to the threat of a lawless group of Worcester men whose enmity he had incurred. They plotted to waylay him by night and beat him, in the hope that they would drive him from the town. One evening a messenger called at his door and summoned him to the bedside of a person who, according to the caller, was desperately sick. Other members of the band lay in ambush. The doctor had been warned, but did not hesitate to accept the message at its face value. Throwing open a window, he called to his man, "Bring round my horse at once, double shot my pistols in the holsters, give the bulldog a piece of raw meat and turn him loose to go along." The intrepid doctor was not molested.
Young Dorothea was early seized with a desire to teach, and was only fourteen when she opened a private day school in Worcester, which met with success. The following year she opened a similar school in Boston, and this grew to be of considerable importance, and was profitable financially. Then the death of her grandmother left the girl with a small fortune which insured her well being throughout her lifetime. In the meanwhile, contact with the Emersons and William Ellery Channing had given her much which she had missed as a child and young girl.
It was in 1823 that she heard of the deplorable condition of insane inmates of the Cambridge jail. Her visit to that institution which followed was the beginning of a crusade which was pursued with no abatement of zeal for many years, and which revolutionized the treatment of mental cases in almost every State in the Union, and to a large extent abroad. At Cambridge she
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found much that was unspeakably horrible and cruel. For instance a demented white woman who was kept chained to a stake in the care of a malformed negro. She went to the newspapers with her stories of what she had seen and what their representatives would see were they to follow her example and investigate. She visited every jail and practically every almshouse in the Commonwealth, and assembled a vast mass of testimony and statistics which revealed beyond possibility of dispute the need of extremely radical changes. Armed with this material she memorialized the Massachusetts Legislature which did not delay long in bringing reforms. One of the first steps was the establishment of the Summer Street Insane Hospital, then known as the Worcester Lunatic Asylum. Instead of receiving treatment which men would not accord their beasts, the unfortunate mentally afflicted began to live in sanitary surroundings, in wholesome comfort, under medical care. Many a man and woman, believed to be incurably insane, responded to humane treatment and returned to the world as normal persons.
Miss Dix did not stop with her Massachusetts campaign. She traveled from State to State investigating conditions, reporting them to legislative bodies and arousing public sentiment. Seldom were her appeals denied. State after State established asylums. Her words were pregnant with truth.
"Go to your cells," she told the General Assembly of Mississippi, "and dungeons of your poorhouses and your jails. In imagination, for a short time, place yourselves in the condition of the imprisoned, neglected maniac ; enter the horrid, noisome cell; invest your shrinking limbs with the foul, tattered garments which refuse a decent protection; cast yourselves upon the loathsome heaps of filthy straw ; find companionship, if your drear soli- tude is ever broken, with the gibbering idiot, or the base criminal, the aban- doned felon ; listen to your own hideous shrieks and groans or to the cries and wailings of wretches as miserable as yourself ; call for help and succor and release, for blessed words of soothing and kind offices of care, till the dull walls weary in sending back the echo of your moans : then, in recalling self-recollection, if the mind is not quite overcome under the imagined misery of what, alas ! is real, long-suffered distress to others, return to the conscious- ness of your sound, intellectual health, and say if any exertions, and sacri- fices, any labor, any cost, are too much or too great for arresting the strong, steady increase of insanity within your borders !"
The untiring reformer, in spite of a constitution frail from her girlhood, accomplished extraordinary feats of travel, for that day of the early railroads and the stagecoaches. In a letter she told of covering 32,470 miles in the period from June, 1844, to August, 1847-over 10,000 miles a year, in a series of pilgrimages from city to city, State capital to State capital. Her
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crusade extended into the Canadian provinces, and in 1854 she was in the British Isles where she visited the institutions where the insane were kept. She persuaded the Scottish Parliament to establish adequate hospitals, and her influence was felt all through Great Britain in ameliorating the conditions surrounding mental patients.
Before she made this pilgrimage she suffered the great disappointment of her career. In 1848 she had petitioned Congress, asking for the grant of five million acres of public lands, the proceeds of the sale of which were to be set aside as a fund for the care of pauper insane, the income to be divided proportionately between the then thirty states on the basis of their popula- tion. Two years later she renewed her petition, but increased the desired land area to 12,225,000 acres, almost 20,000 square miles, of which ten mil- lion acres would be for the benefit of the insane, the balance for the blind and deaf and dumb. One would not have expected any Congress to grant so great an amount of land for any purpose, even in the days when the Nation owned immense areas of wild country. Yet so persuasive was this great reformer, that the measure passed both House and Senate by substantial majorities. Then came the bitter blow. The bill was vetoed by President Franklin Pierce as an unconstitutional measure.
Returned to America, Miss Dix set out on a campaign to get still larger State appropriations for her insane charges. In this way she happened to be in the South at the outbreak of the Civil War, which was a fortunate cir- cumstance, or perhaps an act of Providence. For there she learned of the historic conspiracy, which included the seizure of the National capital and its archives, the assassination of President Lincoln, and the declaration that the Southern Confederacy was the government de facto of the United States. Miss Dix revealed her secret to Samuel M. Felton, a prominent railroad man, Federal agents and Pinkerton detectives corroborated every word she had spoken and the plot was frustrated. President Lincoln was transported to Washington with protective measures carried through with infinite care, and the conspirators fled in terror from the city of Baltimore where the Great Emancipator was to have been murdered.
Miss Dix next offered her services to the War Department as a nurse. Instead she was made superintendent of nurses for the entire army, a post of greatest responsibility and unceasing labor. Hanging in Memorial Hall at Harvard University are two great flags, which were bequeathed to the univer- sity under Dorothea Dix's will. She had refused all money offered her for her war services. So Secretary of War Stanton had these flags especially made and presented them to her as a token of the Nation's appreciation of what she had done for her country.
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Alice Morse Earle, Writer on Old New England, 1851-1911-Alice Morse Earle, pioneer student of the social and domestic life of Colonial New England, and author of a long series of books in which the results of her patient and long-continued research are set forth, was born in Worcester as Alice Morse. She was educated in the Worcester High School and Dr. Gan- nett's School at Boston, and at the age of twenty-two married Henry Earle of Brooklyn, New York.
She was still a girl when, unknown to her family, she sent her first story, The Sabbath in Puritan New England to the Youths' Companion. It was promptly accepted, and was afterwards printed in elaborated form in the Atlantic Monthly, and again as a book under the same name, which made one of the record sales of its year.
Her other books are China Collecting in America (1892) ; Customs and Fashions in Old New England (1893) ; Diary of a Boston School Girl, written by Anna Green Winslow and edited by Mrs. Earle (1894) ; Costumes of Colonial Times (1894) ; Margaret Winthrop (1895) ; Colonial Dames and Good-wives (1895) ; Curious Punishments of By-Gone Days (1896) ; Colon- ial Days in Old New York (1896) ; In Old Narragansett (1896) ; Home Life in Colonial Days (1898) ; Child Life in Colonial Days (1899) ; Stage Coach and Tavern Days (1900) ; Old-Time Gardens (1902) ; Sun Dials and Roses of Yesterday (1902) ; and Two Centuries of Costume in America (1903).
Rear Admiral Ralph Earle, U. S. N., Chief of Ordnance in World War, Originator and Designer of Railroad Guns, and Father of North Sea Barrage, 1874-Rear Admiral Ralph Earle, U. S. N. Retired, presi- dent of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute from 1925, and Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance from December 26, 1916, until after the close of the World War (May 3, 1920), was born in Worcester, and graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1896. He saw active service in the Spanish War, as navigating officer of the converted yacht Hornet, which was stationed throughout the entire war in Cuban waters and participated in the two battles of Manzanillo. His long naval career was a distinguished one, including the posts of commander of the Naval Torpedo Station at Newport, the Naval Proving Ground at Indian Head, Maryland, and command of the battleship Connecticut. Its culmination was his service as Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance during the entire period of participation by the United States in the World War. The citation which accompanied his award of the Navy Distinguished Service Medal suggests the greatness of his accomplishments, which played no insignificant part in the successful conduct of the war :
Wor. 50
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"For exceptionally meritorious service in a duty of great responsibility as Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance. In this capacity he accomplished the origination of the mine barrage across the North Sea known as the Northern Barrage, the making of a type of mine entirely new to mining warfare, the conception and execution of the fourteen-inch navy railway battery operations carried out in France, the supply of a safe and reliable depth charge in suffi- cient quantities and on time, and other Naval Ordnance projects carried out during the World War."
Admiral Earle conceived the Northern Barrage which would completely block the North Sea from Scotland to the Norway coast against the passage of German submarines and other craft. A secondary short barrage at the Straits of Dover would close the only other entrance from the North Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. The problem of an efficient, dependable mine, which must be of a revolutionarily new type, was beset with difficulties, and time was short. It was the spring of 1917. Looking backward, it seems incredible that these Navy men, in so short a period, could have carried through the study, design and test which resulted in filling all the difficult requirements, among them quick-loading mine cases, anchors adapted for use in far greater depths of water than any hitherto contemplated (in places 1,100 feet), and of greater ruggedness and reliability; an assembly of anchor and mine which permitted their planting as a unit, accurately and at high speeds ; and a firing device widening the danger zone of each mine, so that it would explode not only when struck by a submarine, but also when a submarine passed close by. The manufacture of one hundred thousand of these mine units was accom- plished in a manner to insure complete secrecy, for the parts were distributed among a hundred factories. The assembling followed, and the loading of each case with three hundred pounds of TNT, and the delivery to the mine bases on the Scottish coast. The mine laying, in cooperation with the British Navy, began in the summer of 1918. In October the last mine was in place. The barrage was completed-two hundred and thirty miles long, and from fifteen to thirty-five miles wide. The cost to the United States was $80,000,000. It was a most profitable investment, for seventeen German submarines were destroyed, and the imprisonment of the rest of the submarine fleet saved many an Allied ship from ruthless destruction. Moreover, the Northern Barrage, and its small counterpart in the Straits of Dover, contributed much to the breaking down of the morale of the German submarine crews, and to the greater mutiny later, which prevented a proposed last desperate sortie of the German Grand Fleet.
The supplying of the Navy with depth charges with which to carry on against the submarines, was another great responsibility vested in the Bureau of Ordnance. The British had developed a depth charge, but the bureau did
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not consider it safe, under the American Navy standard. Without delay an improved type was designed, and large scale manufacture begun, and prompt delivery made overseas to the craft which were engaged in this branch of warfare.
The 14-inch Naval Railway Batteries, which worked devastatingly against strategic positions far back of the German front were exclusively Admiral Earle's idea. During the summer of 1917 he became convinced that a way must be found by means of very powerful long-range naval guns not only to reply to the Leugenboom batteries which were bombarding Dunkirk, but also to bombard German supply and concentration positions behind the front and thus effectively hinder the enemy's preparations for attack. To fulfill the mission and be absolutely effective, it was evident that the batteries must be, in the first place, completely mobile, and, secondly, entirely independent not only of any artillery base but of all other organizations. Not only the guns themselves, but the rolling repair shops, the cars for the machine shops, ammunition, cranes and wireless outfits, as well as the barracks for the per- sonnel, must form an absolutely self-sustaining unit, capable of going any- where and operating with highest effectiveness without the help of any other organization, either American or Allied, excepting as regards French rail- ways. To provide such a unit was the problem. The 50-caliber 14-inch guns for such a new novel mounting were available, having a range up to twenty-four miles.
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