USA > New Hampshire > Merrimack County > New London > A centennial history, 1837-1937, Colby Academy, Colby Junior College > Part 3
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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32
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and requesting the newspapers to broadcast the news, he ended his preachment with a flourish, declaring: "A generous public, having a proper knowledge of their characters, frowns on the authors and their abettors in that nefarious affair, and unanimously loads them with detestation." Thus crime made its entrance into the highland Eden.
New London's winters are stern and more than once snow has lingered into May, but the year 1816 was dis- tinguished throughout the settled country as the year without a summer. The diary of Elder Seamans re- corded a snow storm on the sixth of June and on the eighth of July a killing frost. August brought severe drought and cold, and September reminded everybody that winter was ahead, as well as behind. But nature was more violently hostile five years later when she swooped down in a tornado and left ruin in her path.
It was on the ninth of September, 1821, after a sultry day that a summer tempest approached from the north- west. It played freaks with the obstacles that it found in its path across country from Vermont; swept across Cornish and Croydon to Sunapee Lake, where the waters of the storm and lake met and mingled. It entered New London on the west shore of the lake, uprooting trees in woods and orchards, smiting houses and leveling them to the ground, destroying harvests that were the fruit of weeks of toil, and threatening the lives of the people. The course of the storm took it through the south part of the town, across the slope of Kearsarge Mountain and down the valley to Salisbury and Bosca- wen. In New London it leveled everything in its path, leaving in its wake a damage to property of as much as nine thousand dollars but exacting little toll of life. It carried heavy articles across country which were found miles away from the place where they belonged. It struck terror to man and beast. Some time afterward a
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fire starting near Harvey's Mills burned over the devas- tated tract to Sunapee Lake, consuming the debris of the storm. People built again their ruined homes, re- paired the damage to orchards and woodlands as best they could, and resumed their customary ways in the community. Nearly a thousand persons were resident in New London according to the census of 1820, and the great storm only interrupted a period of prosperity which lasted for the next thirty years.
Meantime two matters that had been long delayed were brought to a conclusion. One was a controversy over the mill rights at Harvey's Mills. Levi Harvey had built the buildings on the land of a non-resident with an agreement signed by certain individuals that they would buy the land and protect him against any suits for damages that might arise from the flow of water from the millpond. After a few years the town had assumed the responsibility for Harvey's protection. Harvey at that time was one of the three selectmen and the other two men, Captain Samuel Brocklebank and Deacon Ebenezer Hunting, acting for the town, gave a bond to Harvey for his protection. Trouble arose eventually over the ownership of the land and the flow of water and the matter was taken to the courts. Harvey called upon the town for protection but it declined to take the re- sponsibility. Compromise proved impossible and the burden fell upon the two selectmen who had signed the bond in behalf of the town. Brocklebank was too poor to mulct for damages and Hunting received the full force of the action. His responsibility was only that of an agent of the town, and when Harvey had him arrested he refused to pay the amount demanded and went to jail. Those were the days when men languished in prison for debt, and though Hunting was an honored citizen and a deacon of the church he suffered from the technicality of the law and was kept in jail for twelve
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months. At the end of that time he despaired of justice, paid the bill and was discharged. Then he sued the town and when the case came before the New Hamp- shire Supreme Court in 1812 he won judgment and compelled the town to raise fifteen hundred dollars to meet his claim.
The second matter is another instance of the reluc- tance of the town to meet its reasonable obligations. New England towns have been proverbially penurious, and town fathers slow to undertake abnormal expendi- tures for the good of the town. In this particular in- stance the issue was over the completion of the meeting- house, which the town had voted to build but which after twenty-five years was still unfinished though in use. From time to time voluntary labor had been spent upon it. It had been plastered and a stove had been put in. Though there was little to steal a lock had been put on the door. It was a subject for prolonged discussion whether the town was under obligation to complete the structure. Not until 1818 was it decided to put an end to the discussion. At that time the town voted to en- trust three hundred dollars to Joseph Colby that he might attend to what was necessary. Thus after the lapse of thirty years the citizens of New London could take satisfaction in their first meeting-house.
Meantime, since the town had shifted the responsi- bility of the minister's salary to the Baptist church, a Baptist "society" had been organized to assume the responsibility of church finances. Public-spirited men might belong to the society even if they did not qualify for church membership. After the completion of the meeting-house certain members of the Baptist society at a special town meeting tried to get full control of the building for the society, and when they failed they be- gan to talk about building a new meeting-house of their own. The village was shifting its location from Summer,
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or Cemetery Street, to Colby Hill, and there would be an advantage in having the meeting-house there. The Baptists soon came to a decision to build where they still worship.
Anthony Colby and David Everett became responsible for the new construction. The pews were sold in ad- vance according to the old custom, in the year 1826 the corner-stone was laid, and building went on through the summer. At Christmas time the church accepted the new meeting-house from Colby and Everett. Early in January, 1827, dedicatory exercises were held, and the one hundred and seventeen members of the church had the satisfaction of exclusive possession. After the completion of the new meeting-house Josiah Brown, who owned the land on which it stood, gave a deed to Colby and Everett for one hundred and ten rods of land in consideration of seventy-five dollars, with the proviso that it should be under the control of the society as long as it should be used as a meeting-house. The society continued to function until near the end of the nine- teenth century, when by legislative act the society was abolished and the church was enabled to take over the real estate and invested funds.
Some of the older members had an affection for the old building across the valley. In the early days people had even crossed Lake Sunapee and walked to the meeting-house in order to participate in the worship. For five years, therefore, Sunday services were held al- ternately in both buildings until the old bonds were loosed and the people were content with the new.
The new meeting-house had box pews like the old building, but instead of seats on all four sides all the seats faced the pulpit and the choir towards the street. New pews, which are still in use, were substituted of a modern orthodox sort when the auditorium had to be lengthened to accommodate Academy students, and the
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pulpit was placed at the opposite end from the choir. For many years thereafter the audience faced the minis- ter respectfully during most of the period of worship, but turned its back upon him during the hymns out of respect to the choir.
A month after the dedication of the new meeting- house Reverend Oren Tracy of Randolph, Massachu- setts, was called to be the second pastor of the church. Elder Seamans had become unable to continue as pastor, and he died at his home in New London in 1830. Rev- erend Joseph Davis, a resident preacher, had acted as stated supply for several years, but now that a new build- ing was available it was thought best to settle a new minister. Elder Tracy was a recent graduate of Water- ville College, reputed to have pulpit ability and an agree- able personality. He was duly examined by a council and installed in the fall of that year. He gave himself enthusiastically to the business of getting acquainted with the people of his parish and before long found him- self in the midst of a revival which added about eighty new members to the church. This event made an im- pression upon the town and Tracy's ministry was re- garded as a decided success, except for his temperance activity. After nine years he resigned the pulpit at New London and settled at Newport.
The most influential member of the Baptist church was Anthony Colby, the son of Joseph Colby, who had made his home on Colby Hill when the boy was eight years old. Receiving a common school education in the New London schools, he lacked the advantages of col- lege training, but he was endowed with native ability and he soon became successful in business and a leader in town and church. He was instrumental in bringing about a number of improvements in the town. One of these was better means of transportation. A stage line was planned to connect Hanover, where Dartmouth
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College was located, with Lowell in Massachusetts, and on a day in 1832 the whole town was excited to see the coach pass through New London on its one hundred mile journey. From that time it served daily the needs of the community for travel and the mails until the railroad was built through Potter Place in 1846. Had it not been for engineering difficulties a railroad would have been constructed to enter the town from Sunapee, but the plan was abandoned.
Another enterprise in which Anthony Colby was the silent partner was the organization in 1835 of the manu- facturing firm of Phillips, Messer and Colby. This com- pany laid the foundation of the scythe manufacturing works, which at a later date under the efficient manage- ment of Nahum T. Greenwood gave employment to scores of workers and built up the hamlet of Scytheville. By 1880 the company, from which Colby and Messer had withdrawn, was selling ten thousand dozen scythes a year besides five thousand dozen axes and one thousand dozen hay knives, a business worth one hundred thou- sand dollars a year. Scytheville grew slowly from the time when Farmer Gay constructed a dam at the outlet of Pleasant Lake. In 1836 a road was put through from Scytheville to Wilmot Flat. Through the middle of the century the village prospered with the activity of the scythe works, but transportation costs led to the aban- donment of the enterprise in 1888.
So passed the first fifty years of the town's existence. It had grown from an uninhabited country to a popula- tion about as large as at any time since then. It was an agricultural community with no large manufacturing enterprise except the scythe works at a time when lower New England was coming to depend for its prosperity on its factories. It shared in the business depression of the thirties; the citizens discussed warmly whether President Jackson was to be charged fairly with the blame. Democ-
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racy had come to the chief seat of authority in a whirl- wind of power and the people were to have their reign for good or ill. Meantime the population of the nation was increasing fast. New Englanders were moving west and the hill towns of New Hampshire and Vermont were losing those who still possessed the spirit of ad- venture and independence. The East, which had repre- sented the bulk of the nation in 1820, was losing some- thing of its pre-eminence in politics and in agriculture, the staple industry of the country.
Although public attention was being attracted more and more to the West it was the East that still possessed the social institutions that had been developed in colo- nial days. The forge and the factory, the bank and the business office, the church and the school, flourished in the East. In the West they were small and scarce. Even a town like New London had most of these. Primitive though its beginnings had been and limited its resources, its people knew the value of the culture of the mind and spirit. It had provided for religious needs in the old and new meeting-house. It had laid the foundation of an educational system in its district schools. It was now to become the laboratory of an educational experiment which would improve the means of education for its own boys and girls, and would place New London on the educational map of the state of New Hampshire.
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III NEW LONDON ACADEMY. 1837-1853
A HILL town in New Hampshire in the year 1835 was a small world in itself and it lived to itself. It was local in its interests, if not provincial. People lived on their ancestral acres, which hard labor had won from the wilderness, and they never went far from home. Their children grew up in town, went to the district school together, fell in love with one another and were married. Most of them made their homes on neighboring farms, raised such crops and animals as they needed for themselves, and exchanged their produce for the few things that they could not provide for them- selves. Their interests were limited almost entirely to family and neighborhood affairs. If they lived back on a hillside farm two or three miles from a village, they might not get to store or mill oftener than once in a fortnight, especially in the winter.
In spite of such isolation few persons in New London lived like hermits. Though their intercourse was almost entirely with neighbors, chatting by the fireplace or over the stone wall, swapping recipes, and sometimes nursing one another or a quarrel, they could not get away from the community in which they lived. Everybody had to pay taxes, to send their children to school, to serve as hog reeve or fence viewer or poundkeeper if the towns- men should so elect. Many of them belonged to the church or the Masonic lodge. Their children were in the same schools. They met on special occasions, such as weddings and funerals, school exhibitions and church conferences.
Nor were the people of New London unrelated to the
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world outside. From time to time young men went down to one of the larger towns or cities to engage in business, for not all the boys were content with agriculture. Young women married and went away to homes in other states, perhaps to the beckoning West, and their letters home gave their parents an interest in distant happen- ings. Individuals rode out of town on the stage-coach on business errands to Concord or even farther away, and came back after a few days with news from outside. Those who stayed in New London heard or saw the stage- coach bustle in daily with mail and passengers and drive away to make connections elsewhere. The Dartmouth boys rode through to and from Hanover, making the small boys envious of the big fellows. Once a year the town voters felt themselves a part of the whole state when they cast their votes for governor and for the man who should go as their representative to Concord, and every two years they expressed their preferences for a state representative in Congress. On such occasions as these citizens were aware that they were Americans as well as townsmen.
Through the voluntary fellowship of the church people were helped to be less provincial. Their main interest naturally was in the concerns of the local church, like the building of the new meeting-house and calling a successor to Elder Seamans, but there was the kinship of a common faith with other churches of the same de- nomination. The New London church was one of ten or twelve Baptist churches grouped in the Newport Baptist Association, which held an annual meeting of delegates from the various churches of the Association. There they listened to reports from other churches, their gains and losses, successes and failures, hopes and fears. They listened to reports from foreign missionaries in Asia, since American Baptists had organized a foreign mission society in 1814, which was operating in Burma
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and was about to expand into Assam and the Telugu country of India. The delegates brought back to the church on the hill the additional news that was told them about the evangelists of the Baptist Home Mis- sion Society, which had been founded recently in 1832. They thrilled over tales of such men as Peck and Rod- gers who were keeping pace with the Methodist circuit riders in the new West, riding all day, putting up over- night at a frontier cabin, gathering a few neighbors to preach to them, stopping long enough to form a tiny church or Sunday school, if there were a few who would sustain it, doing their best to plant the Gospel before paganism or Catholicism should get a grip on the in- terior country. The Baptists of New London could ap- preciate the need of such evangelism out there in those river bottoms and on those broad prairies where so many of the rural folk of New Hampshire were going in the decade of the 'thirties. And their imagination was stirred by those dusky hill folk of faraway Burma who were welcoming the Christian Gospel. The women of the New London church organized a missionary society of their own in 1814, which celebrated its long history when the church observed its centennial in 1888. When a collection was made in the church for missions, men and women gave their bit to help the good work along. So knowledge and sympathy were enlisted and broad- ened.
The Newport Association was not the only tie that bound New Hampshire Baptists together. Just as every town was included in the political organization of the state, so every church was a part of a religious organiza- tion that was statewide. The Baptists formed their state organization at first for missionary purposes. Because of the need of evangelists in the newer and unchurched parts of New Hampshire they organized the New Hamp- shire Baptist Domestic Missionary Society in 1819 to
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send out itinerant preachers, as Seamans had journeyed up the Connecticut Valley before he settled at New Lon- don. Five years later the Missionary Society was broad- ened in scope and transformed into the New Hampshire Baptist Convention. Such state conventions included other interests of the churches besides missions, though their primary purpose was a missionary one. The second session of the Convention in 1826 was held at New London, where it was organized completely with a con- stitution and duly elected officers.
Imagine then a number of delegates from sixteen churches wending their way to New London hill, some in chaises, some on horseback, a few perhaps by stage- coach; see them alight at the hospitable door of the Colby mansion and receive a cordial welcome from Joseph Colby as they pass within. Listen to the presiding officer as he calls the company to order, and a business session is held with all the decorum that those leisurely times could afford. Share in fancy the viands and the liquid refreshments that dinner afforded, and look in again on the afternoon session when the committee re- ported articles of incorporation which were adopted, and Joseph Colby, Esquire, was elected president of the reorganized Convention for the ensuing year. Then bid them good-bye as they take horse and carriage and me- ander down from the hill where they had enjoyed con- genial fellowship for a day.
Such an occasion brought home to the members of the local church a sense of their connection with a de- nomination which reached out in its endeavors to the far corners of the earth. Thus the New London church found itself at the center of a series of concentric circles, the Newport Association of churches in the near-by dis- trict for the inner circle, the New Hampshire Baptist Convention for the regional circle, and the Home and Foreign Missionary societies for the outer circle.
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NEW LONDON ACADEMY. 1837-1853
Unfortunately these broadening influences that came through the church did not reach a majority of the people in town. Some other connection was needed, some means that would stir the imaginations and whet the ambitions of the young people especially to know more of the world in which they lived but of which they knew so little. No agency could do so much to relate every boy and girl to the world outside the community as could the school. The local district school was ele- mentary and limited in its influence, but if it did no more than teach pupils how to read, it opened up to them the pages of books and magazines and newspapers, and through these they made contact with the lives and thoughts of other people. Education was the door to an understanding and appreciation of the world about them. The majority of the pupils in the schoolhouses at Low Plain, Burpee Hill, and the rest may have droned through their lessons and most of them may never have looked into a book after they left school, but always there were a few who were eager to know more. But the modern high school was not yet. This situation ex- plains why it happened that educated men and thought- ful women in the towns of New Hampshire became interested in the academies that were springing up here and there, and why churches and associations were will- ing to contribute to their support. These academies supplied the need of a higher education than the district schools could give.
Among these academies was the New Hampton Lit- erary and Theological Institution. It originated in 1821 as a local school with George Richardson, a Dartmouth graduate, as the first principal. 'Although he remained only four years, he gave the school its start, gathered sixty pupils, and then turned over the reins to a Con- gregational minister. The local farmers did not show much interest in the school but there were persons in
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other towns who appreciated its value and wished it to succeed. One of its patrons suggested to the New Hamp- shire Baptists that they give it backing, and since the leaders of the State Convention were sympathetic they approved the suggestion. In 1825 the Convention turned over to New Hampton one hundred and thirty dollars and seventy-five cents, which was half of all the money that it raised during the year. At its New Lon- don meeting the next year the Convention adopted a resolution that it considered "the education of pious young men for the ministry to be an object of great importance," and recommended the matter to the churches. Article Four of the by-laws which were adopted read: "At each annual meeting the Convention shall elect by ballot five trustees and five overseers of the New Hampton Institution to act in connection with others appointed by the proprietors of said Institution." In order to reinforce the claims of the school upon the churches the Convention inserted a paragraph in an Address to the churches, reminding them of their obliga- tion to contribute to this charity and congratulating them on the opportunity. "Confidently relying on your aid," said the Address, "students will here be prepared by an acquaintance with the learned languages and the elementary parts of science to enter other literary or theological institutions with advantage. We are happy to say that this Institution is now in operation, and un- der the care of one whose qualifications are known and approved. We cannot at present form an estimate of the good which may result from it. But relying on the faith- fulness of Him whose glory we wish to promote, we recommend it to your vigilant and unremitting atten- tion." The churches were the more inclined to con- tribute as a consequence of a revival in the school which brought nineteen students into church membership and led two of them to continue their studies at Waterville
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College. Reverend B. F. Farnsworth, editor of the Christian Watchman of Boston and a Baptist, became principal of the school. New academy buildings were erected and the attendance increased. A "female de- partment" was started in 1829 with Martha Hazeltine as lady principal, who served in that capacity for nine years until she was succeeded by Sarah Sleeper.
New Hampton Institution was intended as an acad- emy for both sexes, and it grew rapidly in numbers and influence. By 1831 three hundred and twenty-six stu- dents were swarming in the village, many of them board- ing with the families of the town. Many boys and girls on New Hampshire farms were hungry for an educa- tion. They were willing to put up with poor accom- modations, to work for their schooling, if necessary, and to study hard. New Hampton was located centrally and they flocked in from the villages round about. Al- though boys and girls were accustomed to study together in the district schools, it seemed best to the directors of the early New England academies that boarding halls at least should not be too near together. At New Hamp- ton the two sexes were properly segregated in buildings some distance apart, as Dwight L. Moody separated Mount Hermon School and Northfield Seminary by the Connecticut River.
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