To the north of Hartford is a fertile intervale, the rich meadows of
Mattaneag, where the Connecticut River pours down the Enfield Rapids,
and the diverted water flows through a canal formerly used to take the
river-craft around the obstruction, but now giving ample power to many
paper and other mills at Windsor Locks. The original colony was
started here by John Warham, said to have been the first New England
pastor who used notes in preaching. He sustained the "blue laws," but
his colony to-day is a great tobacco-growing section, through which
the Farmington River flows down from the western hills. At South
Windsor, John Fitch, the steamboat inventor, was born. The Hazardville
Powder Works, one of the greatest gunpowder factories in the world,
are beyond, and also Thompsonville, a prodigious maker of carpets, and
then the boundary is crossed into Massachusetts. Just north of the
line, the Connecticut River sweeps grandly around in approaching
Springfield, built on the eastern bank, and spreading for a long
distance up the slopes of the adjacent hills. It is a busy
manufacturing city, with sixty thousand population and an important
railway junction, where the roads along the river cross the route from
Boston to Albany and the West. This was the Indian land of
Agawam--"fish-abounding"--to which the Puritan missionary William
Pynchon led his hardy flock in 1636, and the statue of Miles Morgan, a
noted soldier of the early time, representing the "Puritan," stands,
matchlock in hand, in heroic bronze on the Public Square. Springfield
is noted for its great firearms factories, having the extensive works
of the Smith & Wesson Company, and also the United States Armory. This
enormous Government factory, making rifles for the army previously on
a large scale, quadrupled its output during the Spanish War of 1898.
It occupies an extensive enclosure on Armory Hill, up to which the
surface gradually slopes from the river, giving an admirable view over
the city. The chief buildings stand around a quadrangle, making a
pleasant stretch of lawn, with regular rows of trees crossing it.
There are a few old cannon planted about, giving a military air, and
here are made the Springfield rifles. During the Revolution most of
the arms for the American army were made here, and the cannon were
cast that helped defeat Burgoyne at Saratoga. In the Civil War the
main works were constructed, and they ran day and night for four
years, making nearly eight hundred thousand rifles for the Union
armies. The Arsenal, a large building on the western side of the
quadrangle, contains two hundred and twenty-five thousand arms,
tastefully arranged, and rivalling the collection at the Tower of
London. This armory is the chief industrial establishment of
Springfield, and Longfellow has thus described its great Arsenal:
"This is the Arsenal. From floor to ceiling,
Like a huge organ rise the burnished arms;
But from their silent pipes no anthem pealing
Startles the villages with strange alarms.
"Ah! what a sound will rise, how wild and dreary,
When the death-angel touches those swift keys!
What loud lament and dismal Miserere
Will mingle with their awful symphonies!
"I hear even now the infinite fierce chorus,
The cries of agony, the endless groan,
Which, through the ages that have gone before us,
In long reverberations reach our own.
* * * * *
"Were half the power that fills the world with terror,
Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts,
Given to redeem the human mind from error,
There were no need of arsenals or forts:
"The warrior's name would be a name abhorred!
And every nation that should lift again
Its hand against a brother, on its forehead
Would wear for evermore the curse of Cain!
"Down the dark future, through long generations,
The echoing sounds grow fainter and then cease;
And like a bell, with solemn, sweet vibrations,
I hear once more the voice of Christ say 'Peace!'
"Peace! and no longer from its brazen portals
The blast of war's great organ shakes the skies!
But beautiful as songs of the immortals,
The holy melodies of Love arise."
At Springfield the Agawam River flows from the westward into the
Connecticut, and along its broad bordering meadows comes the Boston
and Albany Railroad. This is one of the Vanderbilt lines, crossing
Massachusetts from the Berkshires to Boston, and it was among the
earliest railways built in New England, being in construction from
1833 to 1842. The project while zealously pushed was then generally
derided as chimerical, the Boston _Courier_ of that time saying the
road could only be built at "an expense of little less than the market
value of the whole territory of Massachusetts, and, if practicable,
every person of common sense knows it would be as useless as a
railroad from Boston to the moon." Yet it was built, and prospered so
much that, to break its profitable monopoly, Massachusetts had
afterwards to bore the costly Hoosac Tunnel on the only available
route, to provide a competing line. The railroad climbs up the
Taghkanic range from the Hudson River Valley, crosses the Berkshire
Hills, going through Pittsfield and over Hoosac Mountain at an
elevation of fourteen hundred and fifty feet, then coming down a wild
and picturesque defile made by a mountain brook flowing into Westfield
River, which in turn flows into the Agawam. It is a route of
magnificent scenery, gradually leading from a mountain gorge to a
broadening intervale, where it passes the fertile Indian domain of
Woronoco and the pleasant town of Westfield, noted for its whips and
cigars. Then the winding reaches of the Agawam lead through broad
meadows and past many mills to Springfield. The various streams around
the Armory City, like so much of the clear waters elsewhere in
Massachusetts, are largely devoted to paper-making, and eastward from
Springfield the railroad ascends the valley of the swift-flowing
Chicopee, meaning the "large spring," among more paper-mills. This is
a vast industry developed by the pure, clean waters of Central
Massachusetts. Farther eastward, however, the character of the mills
changes, and at Brookfield shoemaking villages appear, while elsewhere
there are textile and leather factories. Brookfield was the
birthplace, in 1818, of the noted female agitator Lucy Stone, its
Quaboag Pond furnishing the water turning the mill-wheels, and then
flowing off through Podunk meadows by the Sashaway River to the
Chicopee. At Spencer, not far away, was born in 1819 Elias Howe, the
inventor of the sewing-machine. Farther eastward the railway route
leads to Worcester, and thence to Boston.