the new moon in the clear sky, and the evening star. I remember that the
man who drove me up from the little station to the big hotel on the
hill, while I filled my lungs with Rutland air, proved to be the hotel
proprietor himself, and, which was much better, proved--and proved it
much more the next day--to be the very prince of local antiquarians. He
had himself written a history of Rutland for a history of Worcester
County, and there was nothing that he did not know. If there was
anything, then the good village minister--he has been to Marietta since,
and is president of the Rutland Historical Society--had read it in some
book; or the town clerk knew it; or Mr. Miles remembered it--who was to
Rutland born, and whose memory was good. So in the dozen pleasant visits
which I have made to Rutland since, I have not only taken mine ease with
the benevolent boniface, but have taken many history lessons on the
broad piazzas and the hills.
[Illustration: THE OLD RUTLAND INN.]
The boniface will tell you, sitting in the corner looking toward
Wachusett, how, in 1686, Joseph Trask, _alias_ Pugastion, of Pennicook;
Job, _alias_ Pompamamay, of Natick; Simon Pitican, _alias_ Wananapan, of
Wamassick; Sassawannow, of Natick, and another--Indians who claimed to
be lords of the soil--gave a deed to Henry Willard and Joseph
Rowlandson and Benjamin Willard and others, for £23 of the then
currency, of a certain tract of land twelve miles square, the name in
general being Naquag, the south corner butting upon Muschopauge Pond,
and running north to Quanitick and to Wauchatopick, and so running upon
great Wachusett, etc. Upon the petition, he will tell you, of the sons
and grandsons of Major Simon Willard, of Lancaster, deceased--that
famous Major Willard who went to relieve Brookfield when beset by the
Indians--and others; the General Court in 1713 confirmed these lands to
these petitioners, “provided that within seven years there be sixty
families settled thereon, and sufficient lands reserved for the use of a
gospel ministry and schools, except what part thereof the Hon. Samuel
Sewall, Esq., hath already purchased,--the town to be called Rutland,
and to lye to the county of Middlesex.” The grant was about one eighth
of the present Worcester County, comprising almost all the towns round
about. When the new Worcester County was incorporated, Rutland failed of
becoming the shire town, instead of Worcester, by only one vote--and
that vote, they say in Rutland, was bought by a base bribe. The
antiquarian taverner will point his spy-glass toward Barre for you, and
tell you it was named after our good friend in the House of Commons in
the Stamp Act days; toward Petersham hill, back of it, where John Fiske
spends his summers, and tell you about Shays’ Rebellion; toward
Hubbardston, and tell you it was named for an old speaker of the
Massachusetts House of Representatives; toward Princeton, and tell you
it perpetuates the memory of Thomas Prince, the famous old pastor of the
Old South Church in Boston, founder of the Prince Library; toward
Paxton, and tell you about Charles Paxton, who was something or other;
toward Oakham, and tell you something else. He will tell you that Holden
is so called after that same family whose name is also honored in Holden
Chapel at Harvard College; and he will probably point to Shrewsbury, on
the hill away beyond Holden, and talk about General Artemas Ward, whose
old home and grave are there.
He will tell about the first settlers of Rutland, respectable folk from
Boston and Concord and other places, and how many immigrants from
Ireland there were, with their church-membership
[Illustration: VIEW OF RUTLAND CENTRE FROM MUSCHOPAUGE HILL.]
papers in their pockets. He will tell you of Judge Sewall’s farm of a
thousand acres in the north part of the town, and of his gift of the
sacramental vessels to the church; of the five hundred acres granted to
the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company; of how the road through the
village was laid out ten rods wide, and so remains unto this day; of the
call to the “able, learned, orthodox minister,” Joseph Willard, in 1721,
and how he was “cut off by the Indians”--shot in the field north of the
meeting-house--just before the installation day, so that Thomas Frink,
“an able and learned, orthodox and pious person,” was called instead.
Presently there was “a coolness in affection in some of the brethren”
towards Mr. Frink, because two fifths of the church-members were
Presbyterians, over against the three fifths Congregationalists, and
“contrary to his advice and admonition communed with the Presbyterians
in other towns.” The upshot was a split, and a Presbyterian church in
the west part of the town. These Rutland Presbyterians seem to have come
from Ireland--they were of the same sort as those who founded
Londonderry, New Hampshire just before; and some of them were so
tenacious of their own ordinances that they carried their infants in
their arms on horseback as far as Pelham to have them baptized in good
Presbyterian form.
Rutland had her minute-men, and fifty of them were at Bunker Hill. She
had some hot town-meetings between the Stamp Act time and Lexington, and
passed ringing resolutions and some stiff instructions to Colonel
Murray, her representative to the General Court, whom more and more she
distrusted, and who, when the final pinch came, declared himself a Tory
out-and-out, and fled to Nova Scotia, leaving Rutland “by a back road,”
to avoid a committee of the whole, which was on its way to visit him.
To tell the truth, this Tory Colonel, John Murray, must have been the
most interesting figure ever associated with old Rutland, save General
Rufus Putnam himself; and, curiously enough, the Putnam place had
belonged first to Murray,--the house being built by him for one of his
married daughters, all of Murray’s lands and goods being confiscated,
and this house falling into Putnam’s hands in 1780 or 1782, probably at
a very low figure.
He was not John Murray when he came to Rutland, but John McMorrah. He
came from Ireland with John and Elizabeth McClanathan, Martha Shaw and
others, his mother dying on the passage. He was not only penniless when
he set his foot on the American shore, but in debt for his passage. “For
a short time,” says the chronicle,” he tried manual labor; but he was
too lazy to work, and to beg ashamed.” He found a friend in Andrew
Hendery, and began peddling; then he kept a small store, and later
bought cattle for the army. Everything seemed to favor him, and he
became the richest man that ever lived in Rutland. “He did not forget
Elizabeth McClanathan, whom he sailed to America with, but made her his
wife.” She lies, along with Lucretia Chandler, his second wife, and
Deborah Brindley, the third, in the old Rutland graveyard. “He placed
horizontally over their graves large handsome stones underpinned with
brick, whereon were engraved appropriate inscriptions.” He had a large
family, seven sons and five daughters; and the oldest son, Alexander,
remained loyal to America and to Rutland when his father fled--entering
the army and being wounded in the service. Murray became a large
landholder and had many tenants; he was the “Squire” of the region. He
grew arbitrary and haughty as he grew wealthy, but was popular, until
the stormy politics came. “On Representative day,” we read, “all his
friends that could ride, walk, creep or hobble were at the polls; and it
was not his fault if they returned dry.” He held every office the people
could give him, and represented them twenty years in the General Court.
He was a large, fleshy man, and, “when dressed in his regimentals, with
his gold-bound hat, etc., he made a superb appearance.” He lived in
style, with black servants and white. “His high company from Boston,
Worcester, etc., his office and parade, added to the popularity and
splendor of the town. He promoted schools, and for several years gave
twenty dollars yearly towards supporting a Latin grammar school.” He
also gave a clock to the church, which was placed in front of the
gallery, and proved himself a thoroughly modern man by inscribing on the
clock the words, “A Gift of John Murray, Esq.”
All these things your loyal Rutland host will tell you, or read to you
out of the old books,--where you can read them, and many other things.
And he will take you to drive, down past the Putnam place, to the field
where a
[Illustration: BRITISH BARRACKS.]
large detachment of Burgoyne’s army was quartered after the surrender at
Saratoga. The prisoners’ barracks stood for half a century, converted to
new uses; and the well dug by the soldiers is still shown--as, until a
few years ago, were the mounds which marked the graves of those who
died. Three of the officers fell in love with Rutland girls, and took
them back to England as their wives. Yet none of their stories is so
romantic as the story of that vagrant Betsy, whose girlhood was passed
in a Rutland shanty, and who, after she married in New York the wealthy
Frenchman, Stephen Jumel, and was left a widow, then married Aaron
Burr.
St. Edmundsbury, in old Suffolk, where Robert Browne first preached
independency, has an air so bracing and salubrious that it has been
called the Montpellier of England. Old Rutland might well be called the
Montpellier of Massachusetts. Indeed, when a few years ago the State of
Massachusetts decided to establish a special hospital for consumptives,
the authorities asked the opinions of hundreds of physicians and
scientific men in all parts of the State as to where was the best place
for it, the most healthful and favorable point; and a vast preponderance
of opinion was in behalf of Rutland. On the southern slope, therefore,
of Rutland’s highest hill the fine hospital now stands; and until people
outgrow the foolish notion that a State must have all its State
institutions within its own borders,--until Massachusetts knows that
North Carolina is a better place for consumptives than any town of her
own,--there could not be a wiser choice. The town is so near to
Worcester, and even to Boston, that its fine air, broad outlook and big
hotel draw to it hundreds of summer visitors; and latterly it has grown
enterprising,--for which one is a little sorry,--and has water-works and
coaching parades.
The central town in Massachusetts, Rutland is also the highest village
in the State east of the Connecticut. From the belfry of the village
church, from the dooryards of the village people, the eye sweeps an
almost boundless horizon, from the Blue Hills to Berkshire and from
Monadnock to Connecticut, and the breezes on the summer day whisper of
the White Hills and the Atlantic. It is not hard for the imagination to
extend the view far beyond New England, to the town on the Muskingum
which the prophetic eye of Putnam saw from here, and to the great States
beyond, which rose obedient to the effort which began with him; it is
not hard to catch messages borne on winds from the Rocky Mountains and
the Pacific.
[Illustration: THE RUFUS PUTNAM HOUSE.]
Just at the foot of the hill,--to the west, as is fitting,--stands the
old Rufus Putnam house, the church clock telling the hours above,
Wachusett looming beyond the valley, the maples rustling before the
door, to the west the sough of the pines. Its oaken timbers are still as
sound as when Murray put them in place before the Revolution, each
clapboard still intact, the doors the same, the rooms but little
altered. Could Putnam return to earth again and to Rutland, he would
surely feel himself at home as he passed through the gate.
In 1893, when the enthusiasm re-inforced by our Old South lectures on
“The Opening of the West” was strong, I wrote these words about the
Rufus Putnam house:
“This historic house should belong to the people. It should be
insured against every mischance. It should be carefully restored
and preserved, and stand through the years, a memorial of Rufus
Putnam and the farmers who went out with him to found Ohio, a
monument to New England influence and effort in the opening and
building of the great West. This room should be a Rufus Putnam
room, in which there should be gathered every book and picture and
document illustrating Putnam’s career; this should be the Ordinance
room, sacred to memorials of Manasseh Cutler and all who worked
with him to secure the great charter of liberty; this the Marietta
room, illustrating the Marietta of the first days and the last,
binding mother and daughter together, and becoming the pleasant
ground for the interchange of many edifying courtesies. There
should be, too, a Rutland room, with its hundred objects
illustrating the long history of the town,--almost every important
chapter of which has been witnessed by this venerable
building,--with memorials also of the old English Rutland and of
the many American Rutlands which look back reverently to the
historic Massachusetts town; and a Great West library, on whose
shelves should stand the books telling the story of the great oak
which has grown from the little acorn planted by Rufus Putnam a
hundred years ago. We can think of few memorials which could be
established in New England more interesting than this would be. We
can think of few which could be established so easily. It is a
pleasure to look forward to the day when this shall be
accomplished. It is not hard to hear already the voice of Senator
Hoar, at the dedication of this Rufus Putnam memorial, delivering
the oration in the old Rutland church. Men from the West should be
there with men from the East, men from Marietta, from the Western
Reserve, from Chicago, from Puget Sound. A score of members of the
Antiquarian Society at Worcester should be there. That score could
easily make this vision a reality. We commend the thought to these
men of Worcester. We commend it to the people of Rutland, who,
however the memorial is secured, must be its custodians.”
Just a year from the time these words were written, the pleasing plan
and prophecy--more fortunate than most such prophecies--began to be
fulfilled. It was a memorable meeting in old Rutland on that brilliant
October day in 1894. Senator Hoar and seventy-five good men and women
came from Worcester; and Edward Everett Hale led a zealous company from
Boston; and General Walker drove over with his friends from Brookfield,
his boyhood home near by,--the home, too, of Rufus Putnam before he came
to Rutland; and when everybody had roamed over the old Putnam place, and
crowded the big hotel dining-room for dinner, and then adjourned to the
village church, so many people from the town and the country round about
had joined that the church never saw many larger gatherings. The address
which Senator Hoar gave was full of echoes of his great Marietta
oration; and when the other speeches had been made, it was very easy in
the enthusiasm to secure pledges for a third of the four thousand
dollars necessary to buy the old house and the hundred and fifty acres
around it. The rest has since then been almost entirely raised; the
house has been put into good condition, and is visited each year by
hundreds of pilgrims from the East and the West; and a noteworthy
collection of historical memorials has already been made,--all under the
control of the Rutland Historical Society, which grew out of that
historic day, and which is doing a noble work for the intellectual and
social life of the town, strengthening in the minds of the people the
proud consciousness of their rich inheritance, and prompting them to
meet the new occasion and new duty of to-day as worthily as Rufus Putnam
and the Rutland farmers met the duty and opportunity of 1787. In the
autumn of 1898, there was another noteworthy celebration at Rutland.
This time it was the Sons of the Revolution who came; and they placed
upon the Putnam house a bronze tablet with the following inscription,
written by Senator Hoar, who was himself present and the chief speaker,
as on the earlier occasion:
“Here, from 1781 to 1788, dwelt General Rufus Putnam, Soldier of
the Old French War, Engineer of the works which compelled the
British Army to evacuate Boston and of the fortifications of West
Point, Founder and Father of Ohio. In this house he planned and
matured the scheme of the Ohio Company, and from it issued the call
for the Convention which led to its organization. Over this
threshold he went to lead the Company which settled Marietta, April
7, 1788. To him, under God, it is owing that the great Northwest
Territory was dedicated forever to Freedom, Education, and
Religion, and that the United States of America is not now a great
slaveholding Empire.”
Many such celebrations will there be at the home of Rufus Putnam, and
at the little village on the hill. Ever more highly will New England
estimate the place of old Rutland in her history; ever more sacred and
significant will it become as a point of contact for the East and West;
and in the far-off years the sons and daughters of Ohio, Indiana,
Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin will make pilgrimages to it, as the
children of New England pilgrimage to Scrooby.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
SALEM
THE PURITAN TOWN
BY GEORGE DIMMICK LATIMER
Salem is what historical students would call a _palimpsest_, an ancient
manuscript that has been scraped and then rewritten with another and
later text. By careful study of the almost illegible characters and
sometimes by chemical treatment, great treasures of the ancient
learning, such as Orations of Cicero, the Institutes of Gaius and
versions of the New Testament, have been discovered under monkish rules
and medieval chronicles. Such a charm of research and discovery awaits
the historical student in this modern, progressive city. The stranger
within our gates is at first impressed by the many good business blocks,
the elegant residences amid beautiful lawns on the broad, well-shaded
streets, the handsome public buildings, many of them once stately
mansions of
[Illustration: GOVERNOR ENDICOTT’S SUN-DIAL AND SWORD.]
the old sea-captains, and a very convenient electric-car service that
makes the city a famous shopping-place for the eastern half of the
county. But here and there the visitor comes upon some memorial tablet
or commemorative stone, some ancient cemetery or venerable
building--faded characters of an earlier text--that brings to mind the
great age of Puritanism or the only less interesting era of our town’s
commercial supremacy; while if he enters the Essex Institute to see its
large and valuable historical collection, it is modern Salem that is
obliterated and the stern poverty and austere piety of the Fathers that
stand out distinctly. With what interest he will look at the sun-dial
and sword of Governor Endicott, at the baptismal shirt of Governor
[Illustration: THE FIRST MEETING-HOUSE, 1634-39.]
Bradford, and at the stout walking-stick of George Jacobs, one of the
victims of the Witchcraft Delusion! The ancient pottery, the old pewter
and iron vessels, the antique fowling-pieces and firebacks, the valuable
autographs of charters and military commissions and title-deeds--all
these survivals of the seventeenth century help to reconstruct that
Puritan settlement under the direction of Endicott and Bradstreet, of
Higginson and Roger Williams. Or if the visitor has entered the Peabody
Academy of Science, rich in natural history and ethnological
collections, it is the proud record of commercial supremacy at the
beginning of this century which the old palimpsest reveals. As he
studies the models of famous privateers and trading-vessels, the oil
portraits of the old sea-captains and merchant princes, the implements
and idols, the vestments and pottery, they brought
“From Greenland’s icy mountains,
From India’s coral strand,”
he can easily imagine himself back in the days when Derby Street was the
fashionable thoroughfare and its fine mansions overlooked the beautiful
harbor, the long black wharves with their capacious warehouses and,
moored alongside, the restless barks and brigantines for the moment
quiet under the eyes of their hardy and successful owners.
[Illustration: GOVERNOR SIMON BRADSTREET.]
Thanks to the historic spirit and the painstaking, loving labors of her
citizens, Old Salem is easily deciphered under the handsome, modern,
progressive city of thirty-four thousand inhabitants with factories,
electric plants and Queen Anne cottages. Thanks to the genius of her
distinguished son Nathaniel Hawthorne, the interpreter of the Puritan
spirit, an invisible multitude of figures in steeple-hats and black
cloaks and trunk-breeches, with here and there some gallant whose
curling locks and gay attire are strangely out of place in the sober
company, may always be suspected on the sleepy back-streets with their
small, wooden, gambrel-roofed houses, or musing under the ancient
willows in the venerable cemetery since 1637 known as “The Burying
Point,” where were laid the bodies of Governor Bradstreet and many
another Puritan. There are few American cities in which it is so easy
to feel the influence of a great past and to call up the images of
Puritan minister and magistrate, for in Salem we are surrounded by their
memorials, the houses they built, the church in which they first
worshipped, their charter and title-deeds, their muskets and firebacks,
even the garments they wore.
[Illustration: GOVERNOR JOHN ENDICOTT.]
Salem really dates from 1626, when Roger Conant and a little band of
English farmers and fishermen, in discouraged mood, left the bleak shore
of Cape Ann and came to this region, then called by the Indians
Naumkeag, a large tract of land, heavily wooded to the westward, and at
the east running in irregular, picturesque manner out into Massachusetts
Bay. Hither came in September, 1628, Captain John Endicott and a hundred
adventurers, bringing with them a charter from the English company that
claimed ownership of this territory, and many articles of English
manufacture to exchange with the Indians for fish and furs. Endicott
had been appointed Governor by the company, and immediately began to
display the strength of character and readiness in resource that
justified the wisdom of the directors and made him during his lifetime
one of the commanding figures of the Bay Colony.
It was a busy time for these serious immigrants, who came in the fall
and had to make hurried preparation for the winter. Behind them extended
the vast, unknown forest, tenanted by savages and wild beasts, while in
front stretched the three thousand miles of salt water they had just
traversed. They built houses, they felled trees, they made treaties with
the Indians, they hunted, fished, and ploughed the land they cleared.
Apparently little had been done by Conant and his discouraged friends,
but they had left a “faire house” at Cape Ann which was now brought to
Naumkeag for the Governors use.
Some of the colonists were actuated by love of religious freedom and
some by hopes of gain. A strong hand was needed to enforce order and to
give the settlement that religious character which its founders desired.
It was found in Endicott, then in the prime of life, sternest of
Puritans, quick of temper, imperious of will, and fortunately of intense
religious convictions.
[Illustration: THE PICKERING FIREBACK.]
Hawthorne is the poet of the Puritan age. After reading the events of
that memorable century in Felt’s _Annals of Salem_ and Upham’s _Salem
Witchcraft_, the student should turn to the pages of the romancer for
vivid pictures of the Puritan in his greatness of spirit and severity of
rule. In _The Maypole of Merry Mount_ Hawthorne has shown us, as only
this Wizard of New England could, the dramatic moment when Endicott,
accompanied by his mail-clad soldiers, presented himself at Mount
Wollaston, near Quincy, and abruptly ended the festivities of the young
and thoughtless members of the colony whom the lawless Morton had
gathered around him. Nor would the portrait of Endicott be complete
without the touch that shows him, in fierce anti-prelatial mood, cutting
out the blood-red cross from the English flag, for which daring deed the
General Court, fearing trouble with the home government, condemned him,
then ex-Governor, to the loss of his office as assistant, or councillor,
for one year.