USA > New Hampshire > Hillsborough County > Bedford > History of Bedford, New Hampshire, from 1737 : being statistics compiled on the occasion of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the incorporation of the town, May 15, 1900 > Part 5
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But the length to which these remarks have extended, admonishes me that it is time to dismiss the subject and to take my leave. Still, I would linger at the parting, hesitate upon the farewell. Standing, as I do, in the midst of the friends of my youth, my schoolmates, and the playmates of my childhood, each face and each familiar name associated with some of the dearest recollections of my life, I would, before we part, gladly recount with you some of the events and revive some of the scenes with which we were so familiar in our earlier, younger, and brighter days. I would run with you again over the green fields to cull the wild flowers, or stray away into the pastures to gather the mountain-laurel, which blooms upon our native land as it blooms nowhere else. I would ascend the highest hill for a broader gaze upon the bright horizon which encircles us. I would plunge into the forest, or loiter along the meadow brook, or I would launch with you the light boat, for a sail upon the clear bosom of the ever-flowing Merrimack. Or, we could go back, if we would, in imagination, to our childish gambols. We could join in the sportive mirth of a Thanksgiving evening, or rejoice in the holy-day pastimes of the general election and the Fourth of July. We might revisit the old schoolhouse, and once more con over those sometimes irk- some but always most important tasks of elemental learning, which have so often puzzled and perplexed us.
Would we not, if we had the time, recall some of the scenes of the severe daily toil of our fathers? We might drive "the team afield " again ; and even put our hands to the plow once more. It would do us no harm. It was the honest and healthful employment by which they who brought us into life, earned their and our daily bread. Or, in the stillness of the sacred Sabbath morning, we might assemble at the old meeting-house and listen to him who was com- missioned to bear the message of peace to the upright in heart, and
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denounce with fearful indignation the unrighteous and the disso- lute.
We would recross the threshold of the dear old cottage, where first the light of heaven was revealed to our wondering eyes,-where we were nurtured and sustained by the fondness of a father, and where every wish was anticipated, and every want supplied from that overflowing fountain of kindness-a mother's love-which never fails but with the latest pulsation and the last breath of her with whom it dwells. And would we not, sad and sorrowful as might be the duty, repair once again to that hallowed spot of earth, " where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,"-the common burial-ground of our kindred and our friends; and, kneeling sol- emnly and prayerfully around the grave of a venerated father, or bending in unabated grief over the ashes of a sainted mother, should we not find consolation in the belief that their spirits, though released from the body, still lingered around, to hold communion with our own, -- that they may still be the unseen guardian angels to shield and protect us in all our trials and temptations while we live, and to beckon us to a happy immortality.
But I am unwilling to ask your further forbearance, and I will only beg leave, in conclusion, using the language of an eminent English poet, to repeat a sentiment to which I am certain all hearts will respond with the most cheerful alacrity :
" There is a land, of every land the pride, Beloved by heaven, o'er all the world beside; There is a spot of earth supremely blest, A dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest. Here woman reigns; the mother, daughter, wife, Strews with fresh flowers the narrow way of life; Around her knees domestic duties meet, And fireside pleasures gambol at her feet. Where shall that land, that spot of earth, be found? Art thou a man? a patriot? look around! Oh, thou shalt find, howe'er thy footsteps roam, That land thy country, and that spot thy home."
FESTIVITIES OF THE OCCASION.
The exercises having been performed, according to the order, a short recess took place, after which, the large assembly partook of the collation prepared, a blessing having been first implored by Rev. Isaac Willey of Goffstown. The duties of the table being con- cluded, the president of the day introduced the free and social ser- vices of the afternoon with some suitable remarks. In this short preliminary address, he gave some brief sketches of the principal pioneers of Bedford, such as Walker, Patten, Goffe, and others, and the foremost of her sons who entered the Revolutionary army imme- diately upon hearing of the battle of Concord, as did John Orr and
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others. As there will be brief biographical notices of individuals, embodied in the following history, it will be unnecessary here to anticipate this part of the volume; only one or two interesting allu- sions by the president will be given.
Having spoken of one of the first settlers, Mr. Robert Walker, he said :
I introduce to you his only surviving son, Robert Walker, now in the 89th year of his age. He says he has nothing to present to you but his gray hairs. I will endeavor to speak a word for him. In the Revolutionary war, the Tories of New Boston were contemplating burning Washington and his contemporaries in effigy, calling it " burning the pope." The Whigs of the same place were determined to oppose them, and they sent down to good old Bedford for some smart, active men to come and help them-and this is one of the lads that went.1
Alluding to the late Miss Ann Orr, he said :
At our first meeting to make appointments for the centennial, she was with us, and had the second appointment made, that to get the history of the Orr family. This she accomplished in good style. She had a desire to see this occasion. She was the mother of teach- ers in this vicinity. It is rare to find the person who was born and educated in Bedford, for the last half century, but that has been under her instruction more or less.
The president also spoke of the Hon. John Orr, one of the wor- thies of Bedford :
He was for many years, an elder of the church, justice of the peace and of the quorum, senator of the third district, councilor of Hillsborough county, and many years a representative from Bedford. His parents died when he was very young. I will give you his char- acter, by relating an aneccote he related to the Sabbath school at its first formation in May, 1818. He says : "I was bound out to Deacon Robert Walker, a farmer, until I should become twenty-one years of age. I thought my master and my mistress were too severe. After working hard all day I had to go after the cows. The cows went where they pleased. One had a bell on, which was of great service to. me. On one occasion I was treed by a bear, up in the woods, back of the schoolhouse we are in, and I should have had to stay all night, very likely, had not a girl [Rebecca Henderson ] run home and informed Mr. Walker, who came and relieved me. But the worst thing, and for what I disliked them the most, was, they made me get verses in the Bible and repeat them, to them. This I did not like, and I thought I would not stay, but would run off. One afternoon I started and ran some time until I was tired. I then sat down on a
1Names of the individuals who went to New Boston: Captain Thomas McLaugh- lin, Zaccheus Chandler, John Patten, James Walker, Robert Walker, Griggs Goffe, Joseph Goffe, James Grier, William Moor, Nathaniel Martin, and Josiah Gordon.
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log and began to think what I should say when I should get where I was going. They would not believe me. They knew Deacon Walker was a good man. I began to think about the Bible I had studied, and this is the text of Scripture that came into my mind, 'Servants, be obedient to your masters,' not only to the good and gentle, but to the froward. I knew the Bible said right. I was ashamed of my conduct. I got up from off the log, turned my steps home, and worked out my time. I think Deacon Walker was just the man I ought to have had. I think if anything ever did me any good it was studying the word of God. I believed it then, and I believe it now."
Colonel John Goffe was a man of some consequence in his day. He was the only son of John Goffe, Esq., who was the son of John Goffe of Boston, and probably a grandson of Major-General William Goffe, who left England in 1660-one of the judges who condemned King Charles I. Colonel John settled at the mouth of Cohas brook, the outlet of Massabessic pond, at the Merrimack river, about three miles below Manchester city. His occupation in early life was hunt- ing, which was the most delightful and profitable. He is named Hunter John in some of the old deeds. He was frequently in the French war, in 1756. He directed a letter to Governor B. Went- worth, showing the necessity of sending more troops about the fron- tier, where he then was, doing military duty on the Contoocook and Penacook. He was the representative of the town of Bedford and Amherst, and while in that capacity at Portsmouth, in 1777, he directed a most thrilling letter to his son John, the major.
The letter was then read.
The president then announced the first regular toast :
19th of May, 1750. Ever to be remembered by the descendants of Bed- ford ; the petitioners on that day received a charter of incorporation whereby they could support their religion, which was that, and that only, they petitioned for.
Responded to by HON. HORACE GREELEY, of New York city : 1
Although, Mr. President, I had no intimation till an hour ago that I should be expected to speak on this occasion, and certainly could not have expected to speak to the sentiment we have just listened to, yet I gladly avail myself of your invitation. And although I feel that the entire subject which engages our thoughts this day has been fully discussed and well nigh exhausted by our orator, while the topic suggested by this sentiment has received the amplest jus- tice at his hands, I shall not fear that my words, though they seem but a feeble repetition of his, will fall on impatient or unwilling ears. You need not be told that the century which has elapsed since this town was first settled has been crowded with astonishing and memo- rable events; that the event which we are here met to commemorate carries us back to the days of Franklin's mechanical thrift and
1Horace Greeley was born just over the line of Bedford, in Amherst, the school he attended, and the better portion of his father's farm, being in Bedford, where he resided during a portion of his early years.
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Washington's boyhood ; that in 1750, this fair land of ours was, all, but a thin belt on its Atlantic border, a vast, unbroken wilderness, the haunt of savage beasts and savage men; that men now live, in whose childhood the woodman plied his axe and the ploughman turned his furrow on the soil of this town in imminent peril of the Indian's deadly rifle-shot; and that the mother and her babes in the primitive homes of Bedford, trembled with no unfounded terror when the nightfall brought not back to them the husband and father who had left them in the morning to pursue his daily avocation. Nor need I speak to you of the birth, the growth, the maturity, during the century whose close we celebrate, of those great principles of civil and religious freedom, for lack of which the world had suffered and sorrowed through so many years. The American and the French revolutions, so unlike in their features and results, are the two great political events of the past century, each shedding a bright though a peculiar radiance on the great truths respecting the rights of opinion, of a voice in the election of rulers and the enactment of laws, of the sanctions and limitations of power, and of the absolute freedom of worship, which constitute the fundamental, inalienable rights of man. "The rights of man!" a phrase now familiar as household words, but sounding strangely in the ears of the people, the toiling masses, of a single century ago. But now those words have a power unbounded by the actual enjoyment of free institu- tions. At their sound, the thrones of despotism totter at Vienna and reel in Paris ; even the dreary ice palaces of Russia begin to confess its power. No one can reasonably doubt that the last century has accomplished more than all its predecessors for the establishment of the great vivifying principle that civil and religious freedom is the inalienable right of all mankind.
So, too, in physical science. The steam engine, the steamboat, the steamship, the locomotive, the railway, the electric telegraph, are a few among the achievements of the century beginning with 1750. And how completely have they transformed, or are destined to trans- form, the whole industrial and social condition of man! A century ago, the journey hence to New York would have required a fort- night, and have subjected the adventurous traveler to great discom- fort and peril. But I did a day's work yesterday in New York, and must do another in that city before closing my eyes to-morrow ; such are the wondrous facilities of modern travel. That the telegraph has annihilated space is no metaphor, when a message sent from Halifax at noon of to-day may have reached St. Louis two hours before noon of this same day. The time is rapidly approaching when a vote taken in congress at dark will be announced in that day's evening papers at San Francisco, some hours earlier (by the sun or the clock) than it will appear to have occurred. Measured by events rather than almanacs, it is long enough since those few pioneers from Londonderry bravely ventured across the Merrimack and began to let daylight into the woods of what is now Bedford.
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The founding of New England, the history of New England, the people of New England, and especially the Puritan and Presbyterian ancestry of New England, have properly been the theme of your orator. I will not trespass on a field so well trodden before me, even though plainly invited by the sentiment you have asked me to respond to. Yet I may with just pride, as a son of New England, bear testimony to the character she has imprinted on her children who have migrated to other regions, who, impelled by her rugged soil and crowded homes, have wandered away in pursuit of fame, or fortune, or larger scope for usefulness, or opportunity to sow and reap in thankfulness the harvest of humble but contented toil. I have found them on the shores of Lake Superior and on the great rivers of the West .. I have met them as representatives of the fur- therest West and South in the grand council of the nation. Go where you will on this continent, and if you find activity and thrift, be sure there are sons of New England not far from you, and that they are not idle or inefficient. Visit the whaler in the Pacific, the packet ship at Canton, the mining "gulch " in California, or the lead " diggings" of the upper Mississippi, and you will find sons of New England in all, and wherever they constitute half the population, you may safely assume that it is not in position the lower half. If they dig few canals or grade few railroads, they yet cause many to be dug and graded, and show how the desired result may be surely attained with the smallest expenditure of labor. And although all communities have their unworthy members, of whom a part will find a change of residence advisable, and although jealousy and conscious inferiority in intelligence, industry, or morality have excited in many quarters a hostility to the "Yankees," which tries to hide its envious impulses beneath a mantle of contempt, yet I venture to say that there is no part of the Western world, where the Puritan race is known, in which the assurance, "I am descended from the first colonists of New England," is not a passport to confi- dence and consideration. So may it be to the end of time !
What nobler testimony than this could I bear to the faith of New England,-so distinguished by reverence for God and independence of the power of man? What could I say for that faith which her innumerable churches and schoolhouses, her teachers, missionaries, and martyrs will not have said before me ? The common schools of our vast country, so rapidly increasing, are grafts from hardy Pur- itan stock. The graduates of these thickly clustered schoolhouses are teaching throughout the continent. The Rock of Plymouth is not merely the corner-stone of our gigantic edifice of civil and re- ligious freedom; from it, as from the rock smitten by the divine lawgiver of old, gush the streams which still gladden and vivify the liberties of the world. The marriage of order to liberty-of loyalty to freedom-had its earliest exemplifications on the soil of New England, and her town-meetings are to this day the most orderly and striking examples of practical democracy in the world. Who
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does not see that the independent congregation, choosing its own pastor and settling its own creed, is the block whereon the township has been molded-that it is to the existence of "a Church without a Bishop " that we are indebted for "a State without a King"? Whatever the faults of the primitive faith of New England, I have never heard it accused of quenching the innate aspiration for liberty, nor of paralyzing the arm raised in resistance to despotism and tyranny. And in an age so pervaded and electrified by the spirit of change,-an age of movement, progress, revolution,-of change from which creeds and theologies are not exempted, let us rejoice in the assurance that the God of our fathers still rules over the universe, and that faith in His being, His goodness, His wisdom, His omnipotence, is not and cannot be supplanted nor superseded by any device of man; that error is transient and truth immutable; that the more signally man triumphs over brute nature, the nearer he is brought face to face with the uncreated cause; and that when continents shall have been girdled and rivers enslaved by the genius of man, he must still bow in humble reverence at the footstool of his Creator, and recognize that no elevation above the lower beings can lessen the infinite distance which separates him from the Great Father of All, nor limit his absolute dependence on God. And so, as knowledge shall increase, and science extend her dominion, and intellect multiply her triumphs, our race shall more and more recog- nize its helplessness in the hands of Omnipotence, and turn to the faith of our fathers for guidance and solace through life and assur- ance in death of a radiant and blissful immortality.
The president then announced the second regular toast :
19th May, 1850. Thanks to God, our religious institutions are still with us, and we most earnestly pray they may be the first, and above all other things, supported by us and our posterity.
Responded to by REV. MR. DAVIS of Amherst :
I respond with pleasure to a sentiment which so expresses the real desire of my heart, and the more so because I may be regarded as representing another denomination. I have always rejoiced in the delightful harmony subsisting between the Presbyterian and Con- gregational churches of New Hampshire. We have heard much to- day of the trials and privations of the early Scotch settlers in this country. In the history of their conflicts, we had a repetition of the same adherence to religious convictions-the same faith in God and in God's word-which so marked the planting of the Puritan churches. I have listened with delight to the eloquent remarks of the gentleman who has preceded me, but I wish to hold up more distinctly, the great thought that the movement which resulted in the settlement of these Presbyterian townships was a religious movement. The persons engaged in it possessed a living faith in God's word, and their desire and prayer was that their children might enjoy the same blessing. For this reason they prized the catechism, the Sabbath, and an educated ministry, and they placed
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little reliance on any other means of religious training. Herein is the secret of the virtues of their descendants.
The generations that grew up under their tuition were well in- structed in the doctrines of the Bible. I cannot properly illustrate the value of their example in each of the particulars now suggested without encroaching on the time which may be better occupied by others. As much has been said of Scotland and the kirk, I may be permitted to add, that we are not only indebted for the use, but somewhat, also, for the excellence of the catechism, to Presbyterians. The catechism, as you know, was made in England, yet the Scotch had a hand in it, as one anecdote will show. It appears that in the composition of the catechism, the Westminster divines first agreed upon a list of questions to which answers were to be furnished after- ward. Having agreed upon the questions, the framing of the an- swers went on quite smoothly, until they came to the fourth, "What is God?" Numbers proposed replies, or amendments to the replies, but every attempt to describe or define the author and the object of worship failed to satisfy the assembly; they were evi- dently brought to a stand in their labors, when one of the Scotch commissioners, Alexander Henderson, " Clarum et venerabile nomen," modestly rose and read that incomparable definition begin- ning, "God is a Spirit," etc., which was unanimously adopted as the answer of the question. Henderson and his associates made other contributions to this work, which had done so much to impart pre- cision and spirituality to our conceptions of God and the doctrines of religion.
In regard to the estimation in which these Presbyterian churches have held the ministry, I am constrained to say that their example has furnished a constant reproof to the innovations and changes which so extensively prevail in other congregations.
Permanence in the ministry is an element of strength. In its in- fluence on the community, it is closely allied to reverence and those order-loving virtues-contentment, perseverance, and the thrift of Godliness-which make a happy and united population. Most of our churches are taking sorrowful lessons in another direction. A few days since, the speaker entered on the seventh year of his ministry. With the recurrence of the anniversary of my settlement, my thoughts naturally turned back to the fathers and brethren who in- ducted me into the sacred office. Of the ten settled pastors of this immediate vicinity then present, one only continues in the same field of labor; that one, is this brother before me, so esteemed and beloved as your pastor. In commendation of the better usage of the Presbyterian churches, I conclude with an invocation of con- tinued spiritual blessings on the pastors who keep their flocks and the flocks that keep their pastors.
Several songs were prepared by natives of Bedford, to be sung at the table, but were omitted for want of time. As they are not dis-
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creditable to the Bedford muse, they are inserted. The following is one of them :
SONG.
Here we meet, a gath'ring number, Hovering round the festive board; Near to where our fathers slumber, Ever to be long rever'd. Youth's elastic step is bounding, Hoary age is moving slow; While hills and dales and all surrounding, Speak one hundred years ago.
The wild flow'r blossom'd on the mountain, Snuff'd its fragrance in the breeze; While below, the gushing fountain Murmured 'neath the forest trees. Naught was seen but flowery wildwood, When the stormy winds did blow ; These our fathers in their childhood Saw one hundred years ago.
But how changed the situation Since the lapse of many years; Forests, faltering, lose their station, Sink, and verdant fields appear. Now the white man scales the mountains, Wandering ever to and fro, By the red man's lakes and fountains, His, one hundred years ago.
See the high and cloud-capp'd steeple, Mutely stand and gaze around- See the enterprising people, Listening to the gospel's sound. All but bids us think who gave it, Who such seed did early sow, Calling upon us to save it, Sown, one hundred years ago.
To our fathers, who did sever This, our home, from forests wild, Be our grateful thanks forever, On their monumental pile. Let us ne'er forget their trials, As they stemm'd the tide of woe, Glorying in the hand that brought them Here, one hundred years ago.
The president then announced the third regular toast :
Our Parents-Long, long left us, gone to reap their reward of glory-with gratitude we remember them; may we ever practice their virtues, and teach them to our children by precept and example.
Responded to by REV. MR. CLARK, of Manchester :
Mr. President: Were an apology admissible on an occasion like the present, I should certainly offer one and instantly retire. I sincerely regret that the sentiment to which I am called upon to respond was not put into the hand of a son of New Hampshire ; I am her son only by adoption. And yet, I flatter myself, I am by no
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