USA > Vermont > Windham County > Rockingham > History of the town of Rockingham, Vermont, including the villages of Bellows Falls, Saxtons River, Rockingham, Cambridgeport and Bartonsville, 1907-1957 with family genealogies > Part 36
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CHAPTER XIII
CREATIVE ARTS AND LOCAL FOLKLORE
DR. WM. C. T. ADAMS: WRITER AND TEACHER. Although Dr. Adams lived the last years of his life quietly in town, a familiar figure for many years, he had enjoyed an active and full life in many parts of the country, with many degrees after his name. Graduating from Wisonsin State Normal in 1895, he received an A.B. from Taylor University in Indiana in 1900 as well as Doctor of Philosophy in 1903. He received an A. M. from Upper Iowa University in 1905, an A.M. from Harvard and an LL.D. from Highland (Kansas) College. He began his educational career as superintendent of schools in Hunter, North Dakota in 1903 and became professor of Pedagogy at Upper Iowa University, 1904-1905 and professor of Philosophy and principal of Bellevue College Normal School 1905-1909 when he started a four year term as president of Highland Col- lege. Dr. Adams was outstanding in the educational field and was, at one time, a research student at Harvard and head of the educational department at Plymouth, N. H. Teachers' College. In 1921 he resigned to become superintendent of the Keene, N. H. schools, a position which he retained for 10 years. In 1931 he came to Bellows Falls as head of the social science department of the high school for four years during which period he also conducted a naturalization night school for prospective citizens there. At the end of his long career, he became care- taker at the Playground for several years. Along with his wide educational background, he was also well known as the author of the ADAMS' SILENT READING TESTS, DOUBLE RATING OF TEACHERS, PRACTICAL METHODS OF TEACHING GEOGRAPHY, EDUCATION IN ACTION and the lovely little book, INDIAN LEGENDS IN VERSE which, while never, he said, paying much money, gave him a wide readership. His poetry in lighter vein, as written for papers and magazines under the nom de plume, The Rustic Bard, for, like another great teacher Lewis Carroll, he found relaxation in writing for children. Moreover, Dr. Adams, to cap his many exploits, was an ordained Presbyterian minister, a member of the American Poetry Society, the National Educational Society, Harvard Chapter of Phi Delta Kappa and many other similar societies. Perhaps few local people realized the full extent of the importance of his life, as an enfeebled old man walked about the streets of Bellows Falls in the last years of his long life. He died in 1954 at his home on Atkinson Street.
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ORSON BEAN: DRAMA. Although this famous young man is not a native of Rockingham, being born in Burlington on July 25, 1928, he is the son of the late Marion Pollard Burrows. His given name is Dallas after his grandfather, Dallas Pollard, long a well-known citizen of Bellows Falls who was always active in local dramatic productions. Bean chose to work under an assumed name, choosing Bean, he said, because he was brought up in "Beantown" or Boston. His career started at an early age in Cambridge where he performed magic tricks before local groups and when drafted in W. W. II, was soon a "must" to entertain troops in Japan where he added monologues to his sleight-of-hand. Upon his return he began to write skits for night clubs and with New York as his goal, he performed in various places at starvation wages (he said that he lived on hot dogs and milk once for two weeks) until stage people began to hear about him and he found a spot in the Blue Angel night club for two years in New York. Soon important people became interested in him and he was cast in several plays which, however, eventually folded in the big city. John Murray Anderson's ALMANAC gave him his big chance with a monologue of his own and at this time he made his famous Newspaper Tree. This was followed by radio and TV shows with such celebrities as Helen Hayes and Boris Karloff (Arsenic and Old Lace.) and in 1955 he was an outstanding success in Boston in WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER? He has appeared on the Ed Sullivan TV show many times as well as other shows and today he has his own show on NBC. In 1955 he went to Hollywood to make the picture HOW TO BE VERY POPULAR but after four months decided that the atmosphere of movie stars was too artificial and he came home. Although his earnings by this time were no longer in the lower brackets, when his grandparents met him last year at the air- port, his luggage consisted of one paper bag. On July 2, 1956, he married Jaquiline De Sibour, daughter of Count and Countess De Sibour, after which he was called to Detroit to do a play and to Paris to make a film for NBC. Again in Hollywood, he did CHARLEY'S AUNT (which his grandfather once did in the old Barber Park Theater) with Art Carney. Bellows Falls can claim part ownership in Orson Bean.
ยท STEPHEN BELASKI: ARTIST. Stephen Belaski, a local boy, first won the Fontainebleu Scholarship in Boston, giving him a four months art study in the American Academy in France. He also studied for three years at the Vesper School of Art where a mural decoration made a great impression on the judges and was exhibited in the Bellows Falls High School in 1931. In 1935 he completed the large center panel, 20 x151/2 feet, for the school which was exhibited at the Fleming Museum in Burlington. The small panels were part of the group of three depicting the first Protestant sermon preached in Vermont by
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Rev. Williams to the Deerfield captives at the mouth of the Williams River in Rockingham in 1704. These were exhibited at the Wood Art Galleries in Montpelier and hung in the high school in 1935. The other mural done by Belaski and which also hangs in the front hall of the high school building, shows Abnaqui Indians spearing salmon at the Great Falls and was hung in 1940 after being exhibited in the state. Belaski also did six new panels of murals for the new Federal Building in Rutland in 1935. In 1938 he did a series of four panels for St. Michael's College in Winooski, Vermont, representing the birth of Catholicism in the state. That same year Elizabeth O'Brien of Rockingham painted wall panels of industries in Vermont for the Vermont building at the Eastern States Exposition with Belaski acting as advisor. In 1941 this gifted artist finished his second mural for the Officer's Club of Ft. Ethan Allen in Burlington, depicting Burgoyne's surrender to Gates at Saratoga. His previous mural portrayed Col. Knox transporting cannon from Ticonderoga to Bunker Hill. In 1945, while with the Army Signal Section of the Middle East, he won a ten pound prize for his entry of the best cartoon idea in a movie contest. He is unmarried and lives in Bellows Falls.
GEORGENE BOWEN: SOCIAL WORKER. The daugh- ter of the late Mr. and Mrs. George Bowen of Bellows Falls, Georgene graduated from B.F.H.S. in 1916 and attended the New England Conservatory of Music in 1917-1919 and from 1920-1924 was state executive secretary for the Massachusetts and Rhode Island League of Girls' Clubs. She attended Boston University of Religious Education and Social Service and the school of Japanese Language and Culture in Tokyo, serving there as a missionary from 1925-1937 when she returned to the United States before the outbreak of W. W. II, when she became a settlement worker in Hull House in Chicago, one of the first social settlements in the United States, founded by Jane Addams in 1889. She was also Executive Director in other settlements in Chicago and New York City from 1937- 1945. In 1946 she went to Philadelphia to promote, organize and direct a recreation and leisure time program for older people in that area, being employed by the Health and Welfare Council as Director of Recreation for Older People.
GENE CARR: ARTIST. In 1951, Gene Carr, famous artist, illustrator and cartoonist, was living in Bellows Falls where he remained for several years. Born on the Battery on New York Bay, he grew up to know such celebrities as John Barrymore, O. Henry, Damon Runyon, Eddie Cantor and Lillian Russell. Without any training, he learned to sketch arriving immigrants but his early ambitions were to be, not an artist, but an actor. Like many other talented people, he could never draw anything to please his art teacher and early in life he took a job after school with a news agency, working
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from 6 p. m. to 2 a. m. in a building with no elevators where he climbed countless flights of stairs delivering copy to different papers. At fifteen he had a job with the New York Evening Journal owned by William Randolph Hearst on the bulldog night shift. One of his duties was to see that illustrations reached the engraving room on time. Photographs were un- known, all pictures were pen and ink drawings and Carr's first cartoon happened when the sports editor failed to locate the illustrator of a wrestling match who was absent on a drinking bout. Carr offered to take his place and, pressed by necessity, the doubting editor took him on. Hearst was so impressed
with his work-although Carr had never seen a wrestling match before-that the young artist was transferred to the cartoon department which came out once a week with the Sunday American. He soon became one of the foremost purveyors of wit and comedy of his day, learning by the trial and error method. He became the inventor of the present-day comic strip when he dreamed up his popular Lady Bountiful character which was later played by Lillian Russell on the vaudeville stage of the old Weber and Fields Music Hall when Carr was only 16. The Carrs now live in Walpole, N. H.
MARIAN HERTHA CLARKE: ENTERTAINER. Mar- ian Hertha Clarke is the daughter of the late Dr. and Mrs. Charles T. Clarke of Bellows Falls. She was born February 22, 1890 at the Clarke farm in Saxtons River, now owned by the Brooks-Shepards and which was the second house built in 1812 in Rockingham, on land purchased from Col. Bellows and cleared by the Clarkes, before Vermont became a state. She attended Bellows Falls grade and high schools, later changing to Vermont Academy where she graduated in 1909. In 1911 she graduated from the Leland Powers School of the Theater in Boston and toured the country as an entertainer, later serving in the field of radio, being associated for several years with the Boston Radio Stations in all phases of this work. She was the first woman news commentator in New England with a daily news feature from Boston. Retiring from active radio work in 1947, she became a lecturer on world events as reported by radio and TV and now resides at her home in Sharon, Mass.
GEORGE FRENCH: ARTIST. George French, whose great-uncle was William French, the first man killed in the Revolution in the revolt at Wesminster, made carriages and sleighs all his life until automobiles removed his business. He lived in Grafton for many years, working in his carriage shop and copying the wild flowers around him for the designs which he painted on his sleighs. In 1879, among the artist colony in Grafton, was William Bartholomew from Massachusetts who needed a guide. George took the job and in watching his new friend work, decided that this was what he wanted to do also. He obtained an easel and after many false starts and much ad-
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vice from Mr. Bartholomew, began to do saleable oils. . His first one sold in 1880 and until his death in.1924 at the age of 93, he was still painting and selling, without ever having taken a real lesson in his life. Many of his paintings are in possession of local people who purchased them and some are still owned by his. granddaughter, Miss Marion French.
HETTY GREEN AND HER FAMILY: FINANCIER. When Mrs. Matthew Astor Wilks, the former Hetty Sylvia Ann Howland Green who was always known as Sylvia, died at her home in New York on February 5, 1951, the last of the famous Green family was laid to rest in the old lot in Immanuel Cemetery in Bellows Falls. The last Green slept beside their famous mother who was once known as the richest woman in the world. -
Hetty Green was at once the pride and the pain of the town. She is remembered mostly in Bellows Falls for her eccentricities which ran all the way from a lack of plumbing in her house because "all her money was in the bank" to entering her son in the charity ward of a New York hospital and utilizing news- papers under her coat to obviate the necessity of buying a winter coat. The Greens lived in the big square yellow brick house on Church Street built by Capt. Hall in 1806 and later owned by Nathaniel Tucker who also owned the toll bridge and who was Mr. Green's grandfather. This house Edward Henry Green bought in 1879, a dozen years after he married Hetty,:a daughter of the whaling industrialist of New Bedford, Mass. and who inherited seven and a half million dollars when she was twenty-one. This landmark of the town with its lovely stair- case and penling, was later occupied for many years by care- taker Hugh Miller and his family. In need of repair, it was presented to the town by Silvia Wilks and torn down in 1940 to make way for a park and parking lot for cars. Today town- folks may rest here and look down the Connecticut River where once flatboats sailed, the same view which Hetty saw from her front porch. Hetty herself, wife of a wealthy tea merchant, died on July 3, 1916 at the age of 82 after several paralytic shocks at the New York home of her son, Col. Edward or Ned as he was called locally. Col. Edward Green lived next door to the office where for so many years his mother had sat behind her rosewood desk and kept her fingers on the pulse of Wall Street. She was carried home to lie between her husband and father, "buried north and south," leaving behind an estate of a hundred
million dollars. A Quaker, she had joined Immanuel Church in New York in 1912 at the age of 77 because, she said, she wanted to be buried in the Bellows Falls Churchyard. When, as a boy, Ned lost his leg in a sliding accident, rumor has it that it was buried here. For many years after Mrs. Green's death, people came from far and wide to view her grave, only to find that the wealthiest woman in the world had no headstone.
THE ROCKINGHAM DEPOT BRIDGE
THE HALL COVERED BRIDGE
THE JONES BRIDGE, SAXTONS RIVER
THE ARCH BRIDGE BETWEEN BELLOWS FALLS AND NORTH WALPOLE
SAXTONS RIVER IN WINTER, Covered Bridge, Mill and Church
WALK YOUR HORSES.
THE TUCKER TOLL BRIDGE, Replaced by the Vilas Cement Bridge
NEW BRIDGE IN SAXTONS RIVER
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Also for many years a bitter wrangle took place between New York and Vermont as to whom should benefit from the inheri- tance taxes, the Green family insisting that their residence had always been in Vermont (where taxes were lower). Actually, although still a legal resident and tax payer, Mrs. Green had not lived here for many years save for occasional summer visits when she opened the old house-but lived at a hotel. She had resided variously in Hoboken, the Plaza Hotel and at sundry rooming houses, often under an assumed name. Bellows Falls, by a majority vote, agreed to repudiate her citizenship if New York would abolish the crumbling eyesore of the old house on Church Street, a sorry monument to a famous woman. Al- though state and town both tried to prove Mrs. Green's resi- dence here, they failed in favor of New York and Texas and the town lost millions in taxes.
The "Witch of Wall Street" as she was sometimes called, said that she received her first lessons in money making from reading her father's and grandfather's financial papers with them, often upside down, a trick which she retained all her life. She helped her father with his books and when he died in 1865 he left nine million dollars of which she said that she got "only five million." But her natural astuteness and remarkable business ability enabled her to multiply her money many times before she died. At that time a trust fund was released of a million dollars to be devided among the lineal descendants of Mrs. Green's great-grandfather Gideon Howland of Dartmouth, Mass. which would run into the sixth generation and included "a small army of heirs." In 1917, her daughter Sylvia Wilks wrote a book called THE HETTY GREEN HEIRS, portraying the romance of the fortune made in the whaling industry and which was released after Hetty's death, for distribution among 450 heirs. Unlike her comtemporaries Vanderbilt, Mellon, Rockefeller and Ford, Hetty left no art, no books or mansions but a hundred million dollars of "liquid assets" (Age of the Moguls, Holbrook). Hetty's own will, found after her death in a cabinet drawer along with several cakes of soap, left several tax-free bequests including one to a Bellows Falls woman, Mrs. Herbert Bancroft, Sr., formerly of Bellows Falls. Besides other inheritances, both of Hetty's children received jewelry, furniture and portraits to be divided between them. Also more than a million dollars worth of stocks and bonds were left in trust for ten years. Becuase of her strange capacity for planning details far into the future and, some said, anxious to atone for any privations which Sylvia may have suffered in the past, Hetty willed the income from this fund to Sylvia each month for ten years when she would receive the capital. Upon the death of one child, the residue of the estate should go to the remaining heir. Edward died in 1936. For a woman whose financial sagacity was world famous, it is interesting to note that in 1908,
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in order to save $3,000-$4,000 in what she insisted was an exorbitant fee, she spent several times that amount in the courts.
Upon Hetty's 78th birthday, she announced from her office in New York that her secret of health and longevity was due to her habit of chewing baked onions. She had no use for woman suffrage, then rearing its ugly head, for woman's place, she con- tended, was in the home. She herself remained active in a man's world until the end. Although neighborhood tales carried the idea that her husband died without proper care in the yellow brick house, Hetty insisted that "she took care of her husband and his stomach and he lived to be 83 years of age." She often laughed about people who wrote her, asking to buy her old black reticule for luck. There are still those who remember the eccentric old lady sweeping about the village in her long black skirt in an age when even a dust ruffle did little for gowns of the period. But Hetty used to stop to have her skirt washed at Wheeler's Laundry "just the bottom part" while she waited. To those who wonder how much enjoyment she received from her money besides the excitment of making it, there are those who tell of the good she did for those who needed help. But tales of her parsimony seem to loom above the others. Patrick J. Keane remembers when she used to come to his meat and grocery market to buy broken cookies, which came in bulk, because they were cheaper and that she always returned her berry boxes for the nickel refund. Dewey, her dog always got a free bone, too, but these were economies shared by everyone and remarkable only when practiced by a millionairess. When in New York, she ate her 15c dinners at a "cheap eatery on Pie Alley," a basement cafe, a favorite spot for photographers and newsmen to gather.
Ned, a good natured, big man, promised his mother never to marry until he was forty. In 1917, the year after she died, at the age of 49, he married Mable E. Harlow of Chicago and the wedding was a society event with a honeymoon on a palatial yacht which was the "talk of the town," and a high spot in the rotogravure section of the city papers. Ned, now a big rail- road man, rode from Chicago to Highland Park in the smoking car to claim his bride and his ticket cost him fifty-eight cents! His wife, like Sylvia's and Hetty's husbands, had to sign away any interest in the Green money. Colonel Green owned several homes, at Dartmouth, Mass., Miami and Texas where he had large holdings and became an enthusiastic floriculturist with many acres under glass, specializing in orchids. He was, it is said, the only happy member of the family as Sylvia, like her mother, spent her life in preserving the family fortune. At one time he was the youngest railroad president in the country for when he was 25, his mother discovered that a branch of a Texas railroad in which she owned stock, was about to be sold to satisfy its creditors so she promptly bought the whole thing,
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lock, stock and barrel, installing her son as president. He evidently inherited his mother's sagacity as he turned the "streak of rust" into a paying proposition. And when he was not running railroads, he was organizing baseball and tarpon fishing clubs. He got fun out of life. In 1922 he became vitally inter- ested in the new miracle of radio and at Dartmouth, erected a large experiment station "the most complete broadcasting sta- tion in the country." This was for the "free use of worthy amateurs lacking means to work out their ideas-and for college professors to put their theories into effect." He offered prizes for "revolutionary discoveries." So were some of the Green millions put to a use never dreamed of by Hetty and doubtless aided materially in furthering the progress of the new miracle of the air. (Quotes from Boston Sunday Herald, October 29, 1922.)
In 1911 the Colonel was paying income taxes on five million dollars annually and in 1930, together with Sylvia, built the Hetty Green Hall at Wellesley College to replace one burned some years before. In 1936 he came home to Vermont to sleep with his family in the lot behind the church which the Greens had helped to build more than 150 years before. His widow died in Miami in 1950. In 1909, Sylvia, when thirty-seven, married the 63 year old Matthew Wilks, great-grandson of John Jacob Astor. To recompense Mr. Wilks for the usual prenuptial financial arrangement, at her death, Hetty left him a substan- tial bequest. He died in 1926 and Sylvia, the last of the Greens, died without issue and joined her family in the churchyard in 1951, a lonely recluse who left, among many bequests, funds for the million dollar hospital in Bellows Falls and half as much to Emmanuel Church. Her jewelry was divided among her friends including the late Father John Currier of Emmanuel Church, an old friend who probably influenced her in her local bequests; also Miss Helen Guild, a close friend. Although not in Bellows Falls since 1940, Mrs. Wilks had always contributed generously to local institutions.
So the saga of the Wizard of Wall Street had its beginning and end and the town of Rockingham will always remember gratefully the Green family. The younger generation will see only the fine new hospital, one of the best in the state. They will not see the ghost of a shadowy old woman behind it. The yellow brick house is gone and in its place now stands the Hetty Green Municipal Park and parking lot of which even Hetty, with her brilliant, farseeing mind, could never have conceived. She would probably have said that cars were a waste of money and stuck to her old horse David. Six maple trees were planted by the village in the pleasant park. Several hundred dollars were paid by the town for shrubbery, much material coming from the Fanny Mason farm in Walpole and planted under the direction of Clarence Bodine and Mr. Hooper, a retired
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landscape gardener. Additional plantings of lilacs, hydrangeas, syringa, privet hedges and bulbs were set out by the Garden Club.
HELEN G. GUILD. Miss Helen Guild was the daughter of George O. and Martha Aldrich Guild and for many years a beloved music teacher in Bellows Falls to which work she dedi- cated her entire life, living in the family home on Westminster Terrace for many years alone before her death. Graduating from B.F.H.S. in 1897, she studied music for years with Mrs. Thomas Tapper of Boston, later with her at the Institute of Musical Art in New York; harmony with Mr. Tapper. After Mrs. Tapper's death, she studied with Louise Parkhurst of Boston who was a pupil of Myra Hess, noted pianist. All of Helen Guild's education was earned by herself. Failing eye- sight impeded her work during her later years and she died in 1955, mourned by the entire town, most of whom had grown up under her patient tutelage.
MELVIN ADAMS HALL. The son of William A. Hall, founder of today's successful Casein Co., Melvin Hall was brought up in the big house, later owned by John Babbitt at the corner of Westminster and Hapgood Streets. He became a successful author, writing, among other things, BIRD OF TIME and JOURNEY TO THE END, both published by Scribner's. He also had a distinguished career in the army and in 1949 was living at "La Grangeotte," Vezelay, France.
GERTRUDE SIMPSON HAYES. Miss Hayes, daughter of Lyman S., is one of the early pioneers in this country in the nursery school field. She instigated the first movement in Syracuse, N. Y. for the study of the pre-school child and es- tablished in 1926 the first nursery school in that city. This school, the University Hill School for Pre-school Children, has functioned continuously to the present day under her director- ship and many of the city's most outstanding citizens started preparation for their careers under her guidance. This school co-operates with Syracuse University's School of Education in training students for teaching in the nursery school field. In 1955 she received the Post-Standard Award as Woman of the Year for Achievement in Education.
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