USA > Vermont > Windsor County > Windsor > The centennial at Windsor, Vermont, July 4, 1876 : being a record of the proceedings at the celebration; and containing the address and poem then delivered; also a view of Windsor as it now is > Part 3
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In like manner the settlement of this town was contempo. raneous with those assertions of Parliamentary authority over America, which were the immediate occasions of our national inde- pendence. The attempt to wield despotic power in the name of Parliament, and through Parliamentary forms, - an attempt which for many years had been ripening in the principles and policy of British statesmen,-attained, at this period, its full development. It was on the 9th of March, 1761, that George Grenville, then opening his first budget in the House of Commons, gave notice of his intention to bring in, at the next session, a bill for imposing stamp duties in America. How this intelligence was received by the people of the Colonies, how they mingled with their indignant complaints prophecies of independence, how they became mad- dened by the news that the threatened bill had received, on the 22d of March, 1765. the royal assent and become a law, -how everywhere from Massachusetts to Georgia, the people, by every form of popular expression, gave utterance to their indignation, compelling stamp-distributers to resign their commissions, and the Parliament itself to retrace its steps, - these are the familiar recitals of that heroic period. It is more to our present purpose to refer to the fact that this outward turbulence was fruit and sign fof an intellectual and moral agitation not less profound, --- that principles of government took form rapidly in the popular mind, arousing the spirit of liberty, and giving to the intellectual per-
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ceptions and the instincts of men, that keen insight which ena- bled them to discern danger in ideas as really as in facts, and made them as eager to demand the renunciation of a principle as to re- dress a grievance. The indignant speech of Col. Isaac Barré, in the House of Commons, denouncing the injustice and enormity of British oppression, we are told by the historian, was within three months familiar in every New England town, suggesting those im- mortal associations, known as the Sons of Liberty. These were the ideas, these were the discussions, and this was the temper, which, in the decade preceding the Revolution, our acestors brought with them to the settlement of this town. These were the themes of which they talked when, suspending their labors in forest or field, they ate their frugal noon-day meal, or when, in the long evenings of their northern winters, they sat in neighborly converse around their hospitable hearths. This was their disci- pline for the honorable part which they bore in the Revolution, and contributed to give them that intellectual breadth and vigor, and that lofty devotion to liberty, which made the founders of the Re- public immortal.
Another of the outward occasions, reacting on the inner life and determining the character of our ancestors, may be found in that remarkable local controversy which gave being and independ- ence to the State of Vermont. This town was settled, and rose to consideration and influence, while that controversy was still pend- ing. Governor Colden of New York had issued a proclamation, claiming the Connecticut river as the eastern boundary of that somewhat ambitious province, and repelling the jurisdiction and the grants of Wentworth of New Hampshire, on this side of that river, as an impertinence and usurpation. Governor Wentworth, therefore, on the 13th of March, 1764, to suppress anxiety on a point so vital, issued in reply his famous proclamation affirming the rights of those who held lands under his charters. But the question was not to be so settled. Governor Colden had appealed to imperial intervention, and on the 20th of July, in the same year, the King in council issued the order, whose ambignous terms, favorable to the pretensions of New York, precipitated the question of titles, and opened that memorable civil war, which, surviving the Revolution, resulted after more than a quarter of a century of commotion, in the acknowledgment by New York of the independence of Vermont. I am not on this occasion to be
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the historian of that controversy, - I need not be. All Vermonters know the story by heart, - how, with the supposed support of the King, New York attempted to enforce its claims, sometimes by the illusion of soothing words, sometimes by the processes of civil tribunals, and sometimes by threats and force of arms, -how, when the authority of the King was supplanted by that of the Con- gress, New York invoked the shelter of Congressional approbation for the continuance of its warfare, weakening the common resis- tance to British domination, by its persevering attempts to impose its own yoke on the necks of our fathers,- how out of this tur- moil in which resistance and riot were wide-spread and character- istic, arose the fair fabric of social order, the birth of the State, and its assertion and maintenance of independence,- how the boundaries of the State expanded, now on the New Hampshire side, and now on the side of New York, until, extending from the interior hills east of the Connecticut to the lofty Adirondacks far west of Lake Champlain, they embraced double our original ter- ritory,- how treachery used the name and influence of Washing- ton to despoil us of these magnificent acquisitions by promises which were a delusion and a cheat,-how, in fine, against New Hampshire, against Massachusetts, against New York, against the Congress and against Great Britain, our fathers carried on their controversy to final triumph, not only winning their own in- dependence, but by the power of their arms and the skill of their diplomacy, contributing largely to the successful result of the Revolution itself ;- this, all this, period of heroes and demi-gods, all Vermonters know as the traditions of their households, and the epic of their hearts. I need not repeat the story. But it is to my purpose to remind you of the power of events like these in form- ing the character of the first generation of the inhabitants of this town. For more than a quarter of a century, - for one-fourth of the whole period of the town's existence, - these grave topics were of incessant and pressing interest, touching the very frame-work of society, the rights and security of property and the liberties of the citizen. ; Important as a political centre, distinguished as the place where the State government was matured and organized, this town felt the full force of these agitations, and grew up to maturity and strength marked by all those features of vigilance. courage and determination, which, among a free people, are the natural offspring of a period of commotion.
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But the peace of 1763 issuing in the settlement of the New Hampshire grants, - the assertions of Parliamentary authority is- suing in American independence, - the contest with New York issuing in the organization and independence of Vermont, how- ever much influencing the character and condition of our ances- tors, were in their own nature temporary causes. The settlement of this town was coeval with other movements, less immediately and less noticeably potent, but more enduring in their influence, and destined in a century to effect unprecedented changes in the character of civilization itself. As our ancestors felt the first, so their children have felt the continuous force of those movements. If our ancestors were on the outermost fringe of the regions in- habited by the English colonists, they were homogeneous in char- acter with their fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, neigh- bors and friends, whom they had left behind in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Intercourse of families was frequent, and was con- tinued to a period within the memory of persons now living. "Blood is thicker than water." The settlers brought with them the very names of the towns from which they came, and re-created in these wilds the municipal institutions to whose spirit they were trained. The mould of old society was recast complete in identi- cal forms, and Vermont was not inaptly styled the "New Con- necticut." Great movements, affecting the whole English mind of their time, reached, therefore, and stirred our ancestors in the common mass, determining not alone their drift and bent, but the destiny of their posterity. Let us go back, then, and contemplate some of the signal forces which came into play with our own his- toric period, and have operated in the great changes of a century.
I take first the religious, because it is most central and most powerful in determining the character and destiny of society. The tendency of the English mind in the earlier part of the eight- eenth century was to stagnation. The political torpor of the pe- riod of Walpole had its counterpart in the realm of religion. Po- litical corruption had its other self in religious decline and indif- ference. Churchman and Dissenter were alike in spiritual sleep. The deadness of Old England was the almost equal paralysis of New England. Then it was that there and here, as if by the same breath of the Almighty Spirit, a new life was kindled, whose glow spreading benificently from heart to heart, was to change the face of the world. John Wesley, the leader and organizer, George
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Whitefield, the great preacher, and Charles Wesley, the seraphic singer, represent in Old England the origin of the new movement, as in New England do Jonathan Edwards, the unmatched meta- physician and theologian, leader of the Congregationalists, and Isaac Backus, leader and historian of the Baptists. The settle- ment of this town was coeval with the no longer disputed sway of this movement. Its force was felt here, in the character of the original churches of the town, the dear Old South, mother of us all, formed by the very first settlers, and the Baptist formed under the shadow of Ascutney in 1784 .* Its force was felt throughout the State, determining the type of prevailing religious thought and feeling, entering into the most vital sources of character, and contributing as a chief cause to the distinctive elements of Ver- mont life. As in Old England so in New, that movement inter- penetrated all Protestant Christianity, established or dissenting, giving birth to those forms of evangelical and philanthropic activ- ity which have sheltered orphans, which have softened the severi- ties of prisons, which have suppressed the slave-trade, and which now encircling the world with missions, carry everywhere the gos- pel with Anglo Saxon migration, raise barbarous tribes to civiliza- tion, and lift up the cross amid the old idolatries of India, China and Japan. Religious in her own life and manners, Vermont, true to her ancestral training, has been 'in full sympathy with the most fruitful forms of Christain life and activity. The faith which watched over her cradle has been the inspiration of her history.
The second of the movements, coeval with the origin of the town, ' and becoming a permanent force in its history, to which I have ad- verted, may be termed the literary. Above the capitol at Rome stands the old church of Ara Coeli, where once stood a temple of Jupiter. On the 15th of October, 1764, the autumn of the year of the settlement of Windsor, Gibbon "sat musing amid the ruins of the capitol while bare-footed friars were singing vespers" in that ancient shrine, - and there, amid the melancholy monuments of do- cay, he conceived the idea of his great work on the Decline and
* Without other information I adopt the date of Apslund. The Rev. John Peak became pastor of the church in 1735. The removal to the village of this congregation ceeurred in 1814, under the ministry of the Rev. Joehus Bradley. They met in the Court House until the building of their church which was completed and dedicated in 1815.
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Fall of the Roman Empire, of which the first volume appeared in 1776. I make this reference not alone for the coincidence of the dates, but because the appearance of this work belongs to an era in the literature of our language. Goldsmith's sad life had come to its end in 1774. Hume died in 1776.' Robertson, John- son and Burke were in the midst of their power and activity. To this period belong the speeches of Chatham, the invectives of Jun- ius, the rhetorical Lectures of Blair, and the Criticism of Kames. In 1776 Cowper, emerging from insanity, turned to poetry, and
" from a maniac's tongue was poured the deathless singing."
Burns had written his earlier poems, and was soon on the high- road to immortal fame.
Now it is to my present purpose to say that the new literary ac- tivity of that period, with the return of peace, sent its welcome influences into these wilds, and helped to form the first generation who were natives of this town. Our ancestors, catching the new intellectual spirit, added the best books of the period to the best of periods preceding. To Shakespeare and Milton, Addison and Pope, they added Goldsmith and Gibbon, Cowper and Burns. Then came Byron to be the rage as are Tennyson, Longfellow and Low- ell now. The Circulating Library was necessarily the great re- source, and I remember the wonder with which, in my childhood, I looked on the long lines of books which still crowded the library shelves in the office of Luther Mills. It was before the period of great manufacturing and commercial towns, and the distinguished culture of the period was then more than now in interior country villages. Windsor was so early a centre of political influence, of wealth and refinement, that it may have been special among the towns of Vermont for its intellectual development ; and yet, I am certain, from my knowledge of other towns, that it was no more than first among equals. The distinguished physician before me at this moment (Dr. Edward E. Phelps) was, like myself, a Wind- sor boy, and when I say that it was from my mother, a Windsor woman, born in 1783, with a Windsor education only, and married at eighteen, that I learned to revere Addison, to love Cowper and Burns, and how to study Shakespeare, he will bear witness that I do not relate an experience which was uncommon. Our fathers and mothers had come within the current of their time, and they were borne along by its sweep. They read fewer books, but they read good books and read them better. The young men and young
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women of Windsor who closed the eighteenth or opened the nine. teenth century, passed under the best culture of the period, and assured to their children of the later generations the more power- ful influences of the intellectual movement then awakened and ad- vancing.
And, finally, the settlement of this town was coeval with those scientific discoveries and practical inventions which an hundred years ago opened the new period of the world's material progress. The discoveries of Franklin in electricity had preceded this period. Priestley discovered oxygen in 1773. The spinning-jenny of Har- greaves, invented in 1764, and the spinning-machine of Arkwright, invented in 1768, brought out the mule of Crompton in 1776. In 1763 James Watt began the improvements in the steam-engine which settled its universal applicability, and in 1779 Oliver Evans had advanced these improvements to some of their still most com- monly used forms. The application of steam to navigation was in process of experimenting, and its application to machinery, to multiply a thousand fold the products of human industry, was al- ready assured. Not less important in the sphere of social science, in that interior department of thought which controls the outward industry of man, and makes it available for the common benefit of the race, was the appearance, in 1776, of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, -of which, let me add, my own copy is an ancient Wind- sor copy, a part of my Windsor inheritance, here read and studied by a Windsor man born in the eighteenth century, still living, and absent from this assembly to-day under the extreme infirmities of old age .* It was a period of marvellous intellectual activity, in which the human mind was seeking, on the one hand, universal truths and laws, and on the other, under new forms, the subjection of nature to the wants of man. Oliver Evans and Robert Fulton +
* The Hon. William G. Hunter.
¡ There is a curious tradition of the connection of Vermont and New Hampshire with the history of steam navigation. The tradition. is that about the beginning of this century there were two brothers Morey, Sam- uel and Ithamer, living, the former at Orford, N. II., and the latter at Fairlee, Vt.,-Samuel with a remarkable genins for invention, and Ithamer a skillful mechanic. The universal applicability of steam had already been demon . strated, and among those who undertook its application to navigation was Samuel Morey. Under his direction Ithamer built a steamboat, which actu - ally navigated the waters of the Connecticut between Orford and Fairlee. 3
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gained imperishable renown by their early and superior success in this country in the use of steam, and an English youth with an American heart, Samuel Slater, apprentice of Strutt and Arkwright, came over instantly from his apprenticeship, in 1789, bringing a whole cotton mill in his head, to establish cotton manufacturing in Rhode Island, with the most perfect success, at the end of the year 1790. *
In such a period Windsor was planted. On the distant front- ier, unfavorably situated by lack of large water-power for great manufacturing enterprises, and destined to lose in rivalry with towns of superior local advantages, Windsor felt the sweep of the common movement, and while the first generation of her sons were still at the zenith of their activity, sought to repair the lacks of nature by improving the navigation of the Connecticut, and gathering up the waters which descend from the slopes of Ascutney. The waters of the Connecticut, diminished in the steadiness of their volume by the opening of the country, made the struggle for improving navigation hopeless. "The old flat- boats of our ancestors one by one disappeared. A disappointed and melancholy horse-boat, as complicated in its machinery as the wheels of Ezekiel's prophecy, went to decay on Phelps' meadow, and a solitary steamboat, constructed, as a western boatman would be likely to say, "for the navigation of heavy dew," once found its way to Windsor to tantalize the hopes of our citizens. It was
Of this steamboat, which had its machinery in the bow, Samuel took the model to New York and showed it to Fulton, who was experimenting towards the same end. Fulton was pleased with the work, and suggested to Morey to change the machinery to the middle of the boat. This he returned to Fairlee to do, and this he actually did do, and then took his model again to New York, to find that Fulton had made use of his ideas and was ahead of him. He returned home disappointed, and with a sense of injury. Such is the tradition as given to me. Mr. J. H. Simonde, of the Windsor House, informe me that he himself has seen in Fairlee pond the remains of Morey's boat.
* Besides the cotton mill, young Slater brought in his memory from Eng- land the Sunday-schools of Robert Raikes, then just established. For his own work-people he established a Sunday-school at Pawtucket as early as 1792 or 1793, giving it, however, a more permanent character in 1796. This was the first Sunday-school in New England. The Sunday-schools of Windsor were established at the old South in 1816, at the Baptist in 1818, at the Epis- copal Church in 1819, and at the Methodiet in 1868.
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not till a later day, fresh in the recollection of many, that Paine and Follett, themselves to fall under the weight of their burden, became leaders of the great enterprises which were to bring the fruitful advantages of the railroad to Windsor, and to put Ver- mont into the common relations of American industry and pro- gress.
I have thus, fellow-citizens, sons and daughters of Windsor, attempted to set forth before you some of the events, coeval with the settlement of this town, in which our ancestors had a deep, personal concern, and which reacted immediately on their charac- ter, and to indicate some other movements coeval, more general in their operation, which, as permanent canses, have contributed to shape and determine the destiny of succeeding generations. It would be an agreeable task, if it were a task possible for this hour, to record with minuter exactness the deeds of our ancestors which illustrated their character, and to trace their influence in a completer history of their children, But I am not to attempt his- tory, and must make only such further historical references as may aid the imagination in filling out a picture necessarily incom- plete.
Within the first third of its history Windsor had become the first town in the State, first in wealth, and distinguished for the public character of its leading men. Here, in 1777, at the very moment of Burgoyne's proud and menacing advance, was framed and adopted the Constitution of the State. Here often met the historic men of Vermont,- one-eyed Col. Tom Chittenden, the cool Washington of our troubled conncils ; Tichenor, the fine gentleman ; Ira Allen, restless projector, ambitious of literary dis- tinction ; Royal Tyler, jurist, poet and wit ; Stephen R. Bradley, sagacious and imperious statesman, and other notables whom I have not space to mention. Legends of the Parmelee House (you call it in its changed condition the Ascutney House) pre- serve traditions of their mirth and revelry as they turned from themes of state concern to mingle socially with their Windsor friends. A commercial centre, likewise, here were chief mer- chants, such as Allen Hayes and Generals Curtis and Forbes, who gained fame and fortune in Windsor.
With growing wealth came the power to gratify a cultivated taste. The old architecture was the best of its time. The Par- melee House was built in 1786. Its spacious, open porch,
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with stately pillars, and its arched and corniced dancing-room (all gone now) were early signs of advancing luxury. The principal dwellings, with ample grounds and abounding foliage, were large and handsome. Old South, erected in 1798, was, in its original form, a fine specimen of the church architecture which New Eng- land had developed from the English models of Sir Christopher Wren and his pupils. It has been sadly marred by the changes which contracted its dimensions. The Baptist Church, reared in 1815, chiefly at the expense of General Forbes, was rather substantial than elegant,- and yet its original pulpit, lofty and enclosed, copying the ancient pulpit of Dr. Baldwin's church in Boston, was in the most perfect style of its day. Long ago the pulpit gave place to modern inventions, and now that the old church itself has been abandoned for one more modern and con- venient, I may claim the forgiveness of a sigh that the shrine to which my infant feet were led, consecrated by the memory of my parents, remains no longer to welcome my return. The Episcopal Church, built about 1820, not strikingly ecclesiastical in its type, has always seemed to me, nevertheless, a creation of genius, simple and harmonious in its beauty, and rarely equalled in structures of its class. The first ornamental trees of the village were in the spa- cious grounds about the dwellings. Of these some were already ven- erable in my boyhood. I think the lofty trees in the Lane, just as you cross the railroad, were planted about 1813. There was a passion for tree planting from 1817 to 1820 which I well remember. Then were planted large numbers of maples in the streets. In 1817 my father brought in his hand from General Stone's plain, and planted the pine whose lofty trunk and shaggy head you of this generation have been accustomed to see at the north-west cor- ner of the Parmelee House, which then, changed to private dwell- ings, had become his residence. I miss it to-day, and feel a pang at its loss. The gardens of Windsor were beautiful at an early period. Mr. Everett's, so justly your pride, had its rival soon after the war of 1812, in the garden of Capt. Dunham. These all were signs of the enltivation of taste in Windsor ;- and as the transition to society is easy and natural, it is fitting for me to say that, with knowledge of society in my own and in other lands, I have nowhere met men and women of more gentle breeding and manners than I recall with my memories of Windsor.
Windsor has been distinguished by eminence in the profes-
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sions. The gentleman ( Dr. Phelps) who declined to preside over our festivities to-day that he might take his place among his com- rades of the war, brings from a remote period in the history of the town a professional name, and honors Windsor by his own il- lustrious professional life. When the Rev. Leland Howard, the Baptist pastor, whose genial spirit and pure character made him a favorite with all Windsor people, had retired from his first min- istry here, he was succeeded in 1823 by Romeo Elton. John Wheeler had succeeded Bancroft Fowler at the Old South, and George Leonard was still rector of St. Paul's. Windsor was at the height of its learning and refinement, and it was the pride of its citizens that the scholarly culture which adorned its pulpit at that time raised it to pre-eminence among the towns of New Eng- land. And the bar of Windsor was not less distinguished. It was eminent before the close of the eighteenth century. It has embraced members distinguished as jurists and advocates, - men who have occupied the bench and filled civil stations with honor. To-day, yours more than half, by descent or marriage, and by residence in the most beautiful part of the year, are great lawyers, acknowledged leaders of the bar of the United States, one of whom by the acclamations of his countrymen, speaks at this hour in Philadelphia the praise of our liberty to the ear of the world .*
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