USA > Maine > Oxford County > Norway > Centennial history of Norway, Oxford County, Maine, 1786-1886, including an account of the early grants and purchases, sketches of the grantees, early settlers, and prominent residents, etc., with genealogical registers, and an appendix > Part 40
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One of the principal agencies for rapidly populating and settling townships and for estab- lishing the permanent character and influence of town governments, has proved to be the sub- division of the territory into small freeholds owned by the individuals who occupied them, instead of large tracts held by companies or individual proprietors and occupied by tenants on payment of time rents in money or specific articles, as in the old country. The Plymouth colonists' seven years' arrangement to cultivate their lands in common, disclosed in two or three years of actual experiment, that they had drones among them, like those of today, will- ing to live on others' labor, and they then saw that such inducements to idleness must be withdrawn; and that if they would raise up an industrious class of people, the people must own their farms and not be compelled by necessity to spend their lives in cultivating and making thrifty farms with nothing to show for it. Hence, they, as was contemplated by the Massachusetts Colony, apportioned to every member of their little communities, as they were respectively settled, his proper share in the land in the town - a home-lot in the village, a farm-lot with certain rights in the common land which belonged to the whole.
This subdivision, added to the laws of equal descent of real and personal estate, tending to prevent the establishment of colossal estates and wealthy families, is among the most potent influences which has made New England the free, independent, thrifty, and happy people of which she feels so proud. The other mode, the evils of which are now so prominent in
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Great Britain, was tried for many years in Western New York, in the Rennesalaer lands which comprised what is now three entire counties, forty-eight by twenty-four miles in extent, and resulted, even within my recollection, in most serious moral and political evils. And to the amazement of New Englanders, so many of whom, with their leavening home-view, have spread throughout the great West, the awful curse of landlordism, and Irish at that, has already cast its blight upon thousands of acres in several of those new flourishing States.
Such a system of small freeholds is antagonistic to chattel slavery, since large plantations such as the Southern States contained, are the essentials to servitude; and it prevents even the suggestion of that spirit which reigned in the French Revolution.
To return, how was the right of private judgment of what the Scriptures taught - this idea of religious liberty which acknowledged no temporal head - that great inspiration which had so triumphantly "trodden the wine-press of so many battlefields "; how was that to be main- tained by those far-seeing men, whose ancestors, in the prosecution of their uncompromising purpose, had trampled upon those acts of parliament which forbade, on penalty of death, the translation, publication and distribution of the Scriptures in the English tongue? Among those early settlers of the Massachusetts Colony, one in every two hundred had as good an education as the great universities of England could furnish, and they appreciated the benefits of education. The logic of their action was irresistible. To read the Scriptures understand- ingly, intelligence was essential. Nothing short of the education of the rising generation could answer that end; and they turned their attention, at an early day, to provide the means therefor in connection with their religion. Hence within two or three years after land- ing, teachers were secured and paid in land. Schools followed; and within eight years after the settlement began, Harvard College was founded, and towns obliged to support schools.
Thus began that unprecedented system of schools, at which every child, male and female, had such opportunities as nowhere else in like magnitude existed. And the wisdom which characterized their other acts is seen in the detailed foundation work of this -schools sup. ported by a tax laid by the inhabitants themselves of their respective towns, to be taught by teachers selected by themselves and the money to be expended when raised, assessed upon their own property which might well afford to pay for the value and protection which naturally enured to it by being thereby situated in the midst of an educated and consequently a quiet and law abiding community.
And herein is seen how our Puritan ancestors adhered to fixed principles and not altogether to mere policy. The intolerance which had been so instrumental in driving them from their old homes, in turn made them stern and uncompromising with all opposition; and taking on the spirit of the age they thought themselves warranted in attempting, in the land which they had sought and therein established, an asylum for such as held like opinions, to check utter- ance and action not in accord with their own. And although they saw that free thought was inconsistent with intolerance and had broken the chains of the popish hierarchy, and was loosening and would probably prove fatal to the narrow and austere bonds which surrounded themselves, still they made it incumbent upon towns, long after Norway was settled, as your act of incorporation and the subsequent grant of lands therefor expressly declare, to support public schools as well as the ministry.
Whence came this " fierce spirit of liberty " which Burke saw in our ancestors - this spirit of independence disclosed in some general place of assembly where free speech prevails ? Historians concur in finding its germs among those fierce tribes of Teutonic barbarians - the Angles, Saxons and Jutes - in Schleswig between the Baltic and North Seas. A feature
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which it is said struck Tacitus, was "their hatred of cities, and their love, even within their little village settlements, of a jealous independence." "The bulk of their homesteads," says the English historian Green, "were those of its freemen distinguished by noble blood, from whom their leaders in war-time, or rulers in peace were voluntarily chosen, but whose noble blood conferred upon them no legal privileges above their fellows, the actual sovereignty within the settlement residing only in the body of its freemen. Their homesteads clustered around a moot-hill or a sacred tree where the whole community met to administer its justice and frame its laws." In after years they erected and used a common building for their assemblages and free discussions, on the inner walls of one of which, in the city of Nurem- burg, built in 1619, it is said "runs the significant legend " (which we may all do well to remember): "Eins manus red ist eine halbe red, man soll die teyl verhoren bed"-" One man's talk is a half talk; one should hear both sides."
The Saxons, after two hundred years' conflict, conquered Britain, carrying with them these germs which found some exemplification in the English boroughs and thence through the Puritans to New England where they became developed, practicable realities.
Hence, unconsciously to our forefathers, came the town-house wherein the people gathered as they have ever since, to discuss, settle, and provide for all their municipal wants. In early times the meeting-house was used for the purpose and in very many towns is so used to-day. " The New England town-house," says a late writer, " means not merely that the people are the reason and remote source of governing power, but that they are themselves the governors. Every man who enters a New England town-house and casts his vote knows that that expres- sion of his will (if counted), is a force which reaches, or may reach, the legislature of his State, the governor in his chair, the national Congress and the president in the White House. He feels an interest, therefore, and a responsibility which the voter in no other land feels; and the town-house is an education to him in the art of self-government which no other country affords ; and because of it, the town is an institution teaching how to maintain govern- ment, local, State, and general, and so bases that government in self-interest and beneficial experience, that it is a pledge of security and perpetuity as regards socialism, communism, and as it would seem every other revolutionary influence from within."
Those men of calm resolve, stern courage, uncompromising spirit, deep convictions, high hopes, and lofty virtues, developed by self-sacrifice and great tribulations, are the race from which sprang the early settlers of Norway; and such are the seeds which they planted and the means and facilities which they created for their cultivation and preservation by their descendants.
Do those "who laugh at scars and never felt a wound " say I have passed over their bad traits - their bigotry, their intolerance, their tyrannical manner of managing church and gov- ernment, denying the franchise to such as belonged not to their communion; that no king ever exercised greater domination over the church, and no hierarchy ever more relentlessly encroached on the civil government, resulting in a most thorough union of Church and State for many years ?
While my role today is not that of their defender, and especially of their theology, I remark in extenuation.
So far as the franchise is concerned - they confined it to sect and we to sex - which is the narrower ?
No people in those days, though they had notions of temperance in some things, ever dreamed of total abstinence from all that intoxicates. No people then, though they had seen
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and cowered at the lightning's flash, ever dreamed that our dwellings could be safely lighted by its brilliant chandeliers, or that it could be made to take the place of the sun in our streets, and to send our messages around the world as rapidly as light, if not as thought. So while our ancestors had crude notions of religious liberty, such as did not conflict with their own views, still actual, genuine, civil, and religious liberty in all its comprehensiveness had never dawned upon their minds, or those of any other people. And we might as justly charge them with the evils which have resulted from the absence of total abstinence, or the inconveniences and want of facilities which the present knowledge of electricity has overcome, as to hold them responsible for the consequences of their notions of liberty. They came to the wilder- ness to establish, cultivate, and enjoy unabated their own conscientious views, and resorted to all expedients to protect themselves therein. For many of their acts looking towards such protection, measured by the standards of this last part of the nineteenth century, we find no justification. But considered with the history of their times, the circumstances which sur- rounded them, their character, situation, wants, the enemies they had to encounter, the -fruits of their acts, their unprecedentedly rapid advancement, their prodigious success - and he is a bold man who would dare declare that their plan as it was developed by their unquestioned self-sacrifice, their patience, long-suffering, and unshrinking courage, did not disclose great practical wisdom.
They were no amateurs ; for the real, tough, untamed spirit of what is now the foundation of our civil and religious institutions was in their blood; and while their very faults were the suckers which sprouted out from the main trunk of their virtues cultivated to an extreme extent, they improved on all those so called radical reformers who push their particular truths out to their utmost logical conclusion, regardless of other equally great truths ; for our ances- tors promulgated along with their extreme religious views, those educational and free civil rights which based on like authority run parallel therewith, and have proved powerful antidotes thereof.
Pure Christianity could not, of course, be expected among men of such times. As that crystal spring of water is pure and limpid when it bubbles from the crevice of the rock up there on the side of Pike's hill, but as it overflows its basin and trickles along down the hill, it takes on the color and taste of the soluble earthy substances through which it flows and percolates; so the Christian religion, as it flowed out of its pure source in the " Sermon on the Mount," since it is something concerning which mankind not only reasons, but hopes and fears, loves and hates, takes on the hue of the mind and heart through which it comes. For . in the language of the " Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," " whatever comes from the brain, carries the hue of the place it comes from, and whatever comes from the heart, carries the heat and color of its birth-place."
Nor were all who were classed among the Puritans of the colonial or later age, necessarily good and sincere men. None has occasion to question the deep sincerity of a sect when few in number and proscribed; for as persecution and suffering were essential to make perfect the sinless one, so the same purifies and develops the large virtues of sinful man. But when its numbers have become the swollen majorities of a community and its power and influence have become established, and its short-sighted devotees hold out to the world its favor as the stepping stone and highway to honor or wealth, worldlings enter its folds, learn to talk its language, outwardly conform to its ritual; but that with the heart and character of such, even in our own time, its principles have but little to do, our State prisons fully bear witness.
But admitting everything that respectable historical authority has ever laid to the charge of
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the Puritans in New England, and it is but dust in the balance compared with the meeting- house, the school-house and the town-house, and their respective fruits - free altar, free lips, and free family - and how quick the stains bleach out and disappear. No people can with- hold the most grateful remembrance of such incalculable services, even if those who render them, like the great King of Israel, " had some stains of the times about thein."
You are the descendants of this race of mighty ideas. Are you as good as they, and worthy sons of worthy sires? Not unless you are as much better than they as your great oppor- tunities ought to make you.
Although the early settlers of Norway belonged to the revolutionary and constitutional age which was the beginning of our national manhood, they were the descendants of the colonial period, which has been denominated "that charmed, eventful infancy and youth of our national life." While they looked upon the towns which they created as the unit of the government, prior to and behind the town was the family - and family meant something to every inmate of it. Marriage was not then looked upon as " an egg that might addle or hatch according to circumstances." No "doting mother shied her daughter " at those quasi speci- mens of humanity which rollick at the top of modern society like foam on the waves of the sea, known as " dudes." That fungus of modern growth had not then been invented. Marriage was inspired by that " love which educates the heart, and not by that caprice, which when the honey-moon is passed, turns to cold indifference which is more cruel than hate," a love predicated of home, were it ever so homely, which made the wifely heart grow tender and warm with an ever present thought of home. Young men and women took upon them- selves the marriage vow without any mental reservations, and never had any thought other than that the union was for life. And while they acquainted themselves with the rules of addition and multiplication, division, unless the divisor were death, never entered their minds. The illusions of the serpent of divorce, except for the scriptural cause, had not then made so many devious paths into the garden of wedded hearts. The malaria of fashion had not poisoned the young wife. She saw her duty in being a helpmate to her industrious though poor husband, and joyfully labored through each live-long day for their mutual good.
A brief allusion to persons, and I will relieve you.
No citizen of Norway, while a citizen, ever represented his district in Congress ; none was ever a candidate. They seemed not to be fully aware that an M. C. was otherwise than ex-officio, the greatest as well as best man in his district. No one of them seemed to realize that the district could not longer survive without such a self-sacrifice on his part as to " allow his friends to urge his candidacy."
I could name fifty men whom I found here in 1848, of middle age or more, who, in my opinion, based upon quite an extensive acquaintance throughout the State, would compare favorably with a like number selected in any other town of the same population. Some of them have faithfully and intelligently filled important offices in the county as well as in the legislative and executive departments of the State; and very many of them so carefully, dis- creetly and intelligently performed the complicated and important duties of town officers, that the name of Norway nowhere appears in any of the seventy-seven volumes of Maine Reports.
I should like to briefly sketch the characters of each of these men and show the present generation how, in various ways, they with others who could never be induced to hold any public office, have impressed their character and salutary influence upon the town through its municipal management - demonstrated by the absence of any embezzlement of public funds- in its commercial business, its churches, educational and reformatory institutions; whose
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influence will live, speak and be unconsciously felt, long after their names shall have passed from the memory of rising generations. But time will allow a brief allusion to but three.
The image and character of one of these are engraven upon my heart and memory with peculiar distinctness. He and my father were college boys together at Harvard, and were bound together, during their long lives, by the strongest ties of faith and personal friendship. They were both of the old Puritan stock, and were themselves Puritans in faith and in all that made Puritans worthy of remembrance and imitation. When I first came to Norway and ever after, his invariable kindness and solicitude for the welfare of the son of his college-mate, and his kindly feelings of professional brotherhood expressed to me in numberless ways, created in me the highest respect and the deepest and most lasting feelings of gratitude. He repre- sented his town in the General Court several times, and held the office of County Attorney eighteen consecutive years; and every one of his indictments save one proved a terror to the evil doer against which it was directed. He was a man of large stature and of the old time, gentlemanly, dignified mien. He possessed great good sense and a large fund of dry humor, which, on proper occasions, he dealt out among his acquaintances, thereby giving the highest zest and relish to social intercourse. As a member of the profession he was a pacificator rather than a promotor of dissensions among his townsmen. He was for many years agent of the town and never paid his taxes by involving his town in lawsuits. He had a clear, logical mind and a sound discriminating judgment. He possessed such a well balanced judicial turn of mind and disposition, such a profound knowledge of the law, and such an uncompromising integrity as would have been an ornament to the Bench which his cousin adorned so long, and was very frequently selected by his professional brethren as arbitrator in cases of complicated law and fact. The State contained within its borders no man who deserved and received greater respect than Levi Whitman.
Ezra F. Beal started in life as many young men of his day did - with no patrimony save that disciplinary poverty which has aided in filling this country with so many men known to history. He learned a trade, and by his great industry and force of character became a master-builder, as numerous large and expensive public and private buildings in Portland and along the entire length of the Grand Trunk Railway in this State amply attest. He was a man of great public spirit. He loved Norway, and every business enterprise which tended to aid his town and village, found in him a wise and warm advocate, and to the encourage- ment of which he most liberally contributed not only by his energetic influence, but by his means as well. He was a man of much more than ordinary intelligence which he developed during his whole life by constant reading and studying of good books. He took untiring interest in his church, opening wide his plethoric pocket-book in its support. He had expe- rienced the great good resulting from a long life of temperance and sobriety and in his large commerce with the world had observed the miseries of intemperance. Hence every reforma- tory organization which looked to the support of temperance, received his most zealous and active encouragement. Few men in the county surpassed him in well directed energy, industry and in any virtue which enters into the composition of a noble, high-minded, patriotic citizen.
When I first saw the third person to whom I wish to allude, in 1848, he was a tall, slim, erect, gray-headed man, and had already traveled for thirty years, on horseback, up hill and down dell, through every school district for twenty-five miles around, and continued for a quarter of century thereafter, to administer to the sick and dying, rich and poor, with like diligence and punctuality. No man or woman had the audacity or malignity to question his skill, intelligence or goodness of heart.
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Some few years ago, while holding the September Term of Court, in a beautiful village of the shire of a neighboring county, the docket having fallen through one afternoon, I improved the opportunity to stroll through the light growth, up the hill at the south end of the village, to the large, cleared pasture on the summit connected with the farm there, where I met the farmer. As I stood there, drinking in the beauty of the lovely afternoon and taking in the exquisite landscape of village, farmhouses, and forest for miles around, commenting on the sere foliage so peculiar after a summer drought, my eye caught a waving line, a few feet in width, of dark green foliage, soaked with the freshness of June, and extending as far as my eye could reach. I called the attention of my new acquaintance to the same, and asked him the cause. " Old brook," was his laconic answer. I don't recollect crossing a brook on my way up here, said I, and I must have crossed that strip of green. "No," he rejoined, "you crossed no brook today; but my father, who inherited this property from his father, has told me many times, that when he was a young man he had heard his father say that before the old growth was cut away and the clearing made, a brook ran down the hill there and flowed along where you now see the green foliage in such marked contrast with that which has been scorched by the drought of the past summer; that when the forest was felled and cleared away, the brook began and continued to dwindle, until it finally disappeared from the surface, and even its old bed had become filled up by the leaves and mold which had fallen and gath- ered there since ; but that the deep roots of the trees which have sprung up there in the old bed reach down among the old mosses and moisture and still keep its memory green.
So many a year will have "fled with those beyond the flood," and the tooth of time will have long obscured his name upon the head-stone which marks his last earthly resting-place, before the households along the highways and by-ways of Norway and the adjoining towns, where Asa Danforth made his visits of mercy, will cease to recollect and refrain from repeat- ing the stories which their fathers and mothers have told them of what beams of sunshine on his face and what healing on his wings, he brought into their sick homes.
THE DINNER.
Dinner was served in Norway Concert Hall and was an immense affair. The tables were bountifully spread and the great multitude ate and were satisfied. An overture was played by the consolidated bands, and an Original Ode, by Mrs. Elliot Smith, was sung to the tune of Old Hundred.
A hundred years ! a hundred years ! Of human joy, and human tears, Have rolled away and left behind, The wealth of toil, and worth of mind.
Our hills, where now the church spires rise. Were crowned with forests dense, where cries Of beasts of prey and savage men, Echoed from mountain, hill, and glen.
Our fathers came,-toiled,- fell asleep ! They sowed the harvest which we reap; And we this glad memorial bring, In this Centennial that we sing.
Thrice have our hills with war's alarms Echoed since then, to arms I to arms ! Brave men went bearing Stripes and Stars ! Came -wearing victors' plumes, and scars.
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