hundred souls. The fortifications on Meeting-house Hill were
strengthened, and the house of the commander, Captain Wells, about forty
rods south, was palisaded. In May, 1703, Lord Cornbury, Governor of New
York, sent word that he had
[Illustration: PARSON WILLIAMS’S HOUSE, BUILT BY THE TOWN,
1707--STANDING 1898.]
learned through his spies of an expedition fitting out against
Deerfield. Soon after, Major Peter Schuyler sent a similar warning to
Rev. John Williams. These warnings were emphasized in July by news that
the Eastern Indians had made a simultaneous attack on all the
settlements in Maine, only six weeks after signing a treaty of peace
with the most solemn declarations of eternal friendship. Twenty soldiers
were sent here to reinforce the home guard, and all were on the alert;
two men, however, were captured October 8, and were carried to Canada.
On the alarm which followed sixteen more men were sent here. October 21,
Rev. John Williams writes, on behalf of the town, to Governor Dudley:
” ...We have been driven from our houses & home lots into the fort.
(there are but 10 houselots in the fort); some a mile, some two
miles, whereby we have suffered much loss. We have in the alarms
several times been wholly taken off from any business, the whole
town kept in, our children of 12 or 13 years and under we have been
afraid to improve in the field for fear of the enemy.... We have
been crowded togather into houses to the preventing of indoor
affairs being carryd on to any advantage, ... several say they
would freely leave all they have & go away were it not that it
would be disobedience to authority & a discouraging
[Illustration: DOOR OF “OLD INDIAN HOUSE” HACKED BY INDIANS.
NOW IN MEMORIAL HALL.]
their bretheren. The frontier difficulties of a place so remote
from others & so exposed as ours, are more than can be known, if
not felt....”
Nothing can add to this simple and pathetic statement.
The months dragged slowly on, and no enemy. The deep winter snows seemed
a safe barrier against invasion. The people, breathing more freely,
gradually resumed their wonted ways; but dark clouds loomed up, all
unseen, just beyond the northern horizon. In the early morning of
February 29, 1703-4, like a thunderbolt from a clear sky, an army of
French and Indians under Hertel de Rouville burst upon the sleeping
town, and killed or captured nearly all of the garrison and inhabitants
within the fort. Through criminal carelessness the snow had been allowed
to drift against the palisades, until, being covered with a hard crust,
it afforded an easy and noiseless entrance, so that the enemy were
dispersed among the houses before they were discovered.
The captives were collected in the house of Ensign John Sheldon, which,
being fired by the enemy only on their retreat, was easily saved, and
stood until 1848. It was popularly considered the only one not burned,
and has gone
[Illustration: TOMBSTONES OF REV. JOHN WILLIAMS AND HIS WIFE.]
into history as the “Old Indian House.” Its front door, hacked by the
Indians, is now preserved in Memorial Hall. By sunrise the torch and
tomahawk had done their work. The blood of forty-nine murdered men,
women and children reddened the snow. Twenty-nine men, twenty-four women
and fifty-eight children were made captive, and in a few hours the
spoil-encumbered enemy were on their three-hundred miles’ march over the
desolate snows to Canada. Twenty of the captives were murdered on the
route, one of them Eunice Williams, wife of the minister. The spot where
she fell is marked by a monument of enduring granite.
The desolated town was at once made a military post, and strongly
garrisoned. Of the survivors, the men were impressed into the service,
and the non-combatants sent to the towns below. Persistent efforts were
made to recover the captives. Ensign Sheldon was sent three times to
Canada on this errand. One by one, and against great odds, most of the
surviving men and women were recovered; but a large proportion of the
children remained in Canada. Many of their descendants have been traced
by Miss Baker, author of _True Stories of New England Captives_, among
them some of the most distinguished men and women of Canadian history.
The inhabitants of Deerfield gradually returned to their desolate
hearthstones and abandoned fields, and held their own during the war,
but not without severe suffering and a considerable loss of life. Peace
was established by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.
Nine years of quiet followed, in which the town prospered. The Indians
mingled freely with the people, bartering the products of their hunting
for English goods. A permanent peace was hoped for, but this hope was
blasted on the outbreak of the Eastern Indians in 1722. Incited by the
Canadians, the northern tribes joined in the war; and Father Rasle’s war
brought the usual frontier scenes of fire and carnage; the trading
Indians being the most effective leaders or guides for marauding
parties. Many Deerfield men were in the service, notably as scouts.
Inured to hardship, skilled in woodcraft, they were more than a match
for the savage in his own haunts and in his own methods of warfare.
In 1729, before the new meeting-house was finished, the people were
called to mourn the death of their loved and revered pastor, Rev. John
Williams, so widely known as “The Redeemed Captive.” His successor was
Rev. Jonathan Ashley, who was ordained in 1732 and died in 1780.
[Illustration: STEPHEN WILLIAMS, 1693-1782.
A CAPTIVE OF FEBRUARY 29, 1703-4.]
Rev. Stephen Williams, a son of Rev. John Williams, the first pastor,
was born in Deerfield in 1693, taken captive to Canada in 1704,
redeemed in 1705, graduated at Harvard in 1713, settled as minister at
Longmeadow in 1716, dying there in 1782; he was Chaplain in the
Louisburg expedition in 1745, and in the regiment of Col. Ephraim
Williams in his fatal campaign in 1755, and again in the Canadian
campaign of 1756. His portrait, reproduced on page 428, was painted
about 1748; it is now in the Memorial Hall of the Pocumtuck Valley
Memorial Association, within fourscore rods of the spot where the
original was born, and whence he was carried into captivity.
On the closing of Father Rasle’s war the settlement expanded; trade and
home manufactures flourished. Deerfield remained no longer the frontier
town of the valley, and the brunt of the next border war (of 1743) was
felt by the outlying settlements. The one sad blow upon this town fell
at a little hamlet called The Bars. August 25, 1746, the families of
Samuel Allen and John Amsden, while working in a hay-field on Stebbins
Meadow, with a small guard, were surprised by a party of Indians from
Canada, and five men were killed, one girl wounded and one boy captured.
This followed close on the fall of Fort Massachusetts, and danger of
French invasion was felt to be imminent. Active measures were taken for
defense; the forts were repaired and the woods filled with scouts.
The closing war with France found Deerfield more strongly bulwarked, and
still less exposed to attack. No blood was shed within her narrowed
bounds. Her citizens held prominent positions, and did their part in the
campaigns which resulted in the conquest of Canada and the consequent
immunity from savage depredations. The nest destroyed, the sting of the
hornets was no longer felt or feared. The last raid on Massachusetts
soil is described in the following mutilated despatch to the military
authorities in Deerfield:
“COLRAIN, March y^{e} 21, 1759.
“SIR:--These are to inform you that yesterday as Jo^s McKoon
[Kowen] & his wife were coming from Daniel Donitsons & had got so
far as where Morrison’s house was burned this day year, they was
fired upon by the enemy about sunset. I have been down this morning
on the spot and find no Blood Shed, but see where they led off Both
the above mentioned; they had their little child with them. I
believe they are gone home. I think their number small, for there
was about 10 or 12 came [torn off]”
The most important civil events of this period were the divisions of
the township. In 1753 the Green River District, which included what is
now Greenfield and Gill, was made a distinct municipality. The next year
the construction of a bridge over the Pocumtuck River at Cheapside was a
prominent issue; the discussion ended in establishing a ferry at the
north end of Pine Hill in 1758. That year the people in the vicinity of
Sugar Loaf petitioned the General Court--but without success--for
liberty to form a ministerial and educational connection with the town
of Sunderland, and to be exempted from paying certain town taxes in
consequence. In 1767 the inhabitants of Deerfield-Southwest were set off
into a town named Conway; and Deerfield-Northwest became the town of
Shelburne in 1768. The same year Bloody Brook people caught the division
fever, but it did not carry them off.
A permanent peace being settled and an unstable currency fixed on a firm
cash basis, business projects multiplied, and Deerfield became the
centre of exchange and supply for a large territory. The mechanics, or
“tradesmen” as they were called, and their apprentices, rivalled in
numbers the agricultural population. Here were found the gunsmith,
blacksmith, nailer and silversmith, the maker of snowshoes and
moccasins, the tanner, currier, shoemaker and saddler, the pillion,
knapsack and wallet-maker, the carpenter and joiner, the clapboard and
shingle-maker, the makers of wooden shovels, corn-fans, flax-brakes,
hackels, looms and spinning-wheels, cart-ropes and bed-lines, and pewter
buttons, the tailor, hatter, furrier, feltmaker, barber and wigmaker,
the cartwright, millwright, cabinet-maker, watchmaker, the brickmaker
and mason, the miller, the carder, clothier, fuller, spinner, weaver of
duck and common fabrics, the potter, the gravestone-cutter, the cooper,
the potash-maker, the skilled forger who turned out loom and plow irons,
farm and kitchen utensils. There were doctors and lawyers, the judge and
the sheriff; storekeepers were many, and tavern-keepers galore. To all
these the old account-books in Memorial Hall bear testimony.
Many leading men held commissions from the King in both civil and
military service. These were rather a distinctive class, holding their
heads quite high, and when the Revolution broke out they were generally
loyal to the King, making heavy odds against the Whigs. But new leaders
came to the front, who, so far as they had character and force, held
their own after the war, and the old Tory leaders were relegated to the
rear.
At the opening of the Revolutionary War the parties were nearly equal in
numbers; on one yea and nay test vote there was a tie. Excitement ran
high. In 1774 the “Sons of Liberty” erected a Liberty Pole, and at the
same time a “Tory Pole,” whatever that might be. The mob spirit was
rampant. Through it the fires of patriotism found vent; but it was
always under the control of the leaders, and its most common office was
to “humble the Tories,” and compel them to sign obnoxious declarations
of neutrality, or of submission to the will of the Committees of Safety
and Correspondence. A Tory of this period wrote: “Oh Tempora, all nature
seems to be in confusion; every person in fear of what his Neighbor may
do to him. Such times never was seen in New England.”
In October, 1774, a company of minute-men was organized here as part of
a regiment under the Provincial Congress. November 14, staff-officers
were chosen. David Field, colonel, and David Dickinson, major, were both
of Deerfield. December 5, the town raised money to buy ammunition by
selling lumber from its woodland. January 5, 1775, an emissary from
General Gage was here, advising the Tories to go to Boston. “The
standard will be set up in March,” he said, “and those who do not go in
and lay down their arms may meet with bad luck.” He was discovered, but
had the good luck to escape a mob; another agent who came a few days
later was not so fortunate.
But the culmination of all the secret machinations and open preparations
was at hand. April 20, at a town-meeting, votes were passed to pay wages
to the minute-men for what they had done; “to encourage them in
perfecting themselves in the Military Art,” provision was made for
“practicing one half-day in each week.”
The voters could hardly have left the meeting-house, when the sound of a
galloping horse was heard, and the hoarse call, “To arms! To arms!”
broke upon the air. The horse bloody with spurring and the rider covered
with dust brought the news of Concord and Lexington. The half-day drills
had done their work. Before the clock in the meeting-house steeple
struck the midnight hour, fifty minute-men, under Captain Jonas Locke,
Lieutenant Thomas Bardwell and Lieutenant Joseph Stebbins, were on the
march to Cambridge. This company was soon broken up; Captain Locke
entered the Commissary Department, while Lieutenant Stebbins enlisted a
new company, with which he assisted General Putnam in constructing the
redoubt on Bunker Hill, and in its defense the next day, the
ever-glorious 17th of June. One Deerfield man was killed and several
were wounded.
Independence Day should be celebrated, in Deerfield, June 26, for on
that day in 1776 the town
“Voted that _this Town will (if y^{e} Honorable Congress shall for
y^{e} safety of y^{e} United Colonies declare them INDEPENDENT of
y^{e} Kingdom of Great Britain) Solemnly Engage with their LIVES
and FORTUNES to Support them in y^{e} Measure_, and that y^{e}
Clerk be directed to make an attested copy of this Vote and forward
y^{e} same to Mr. Saxton, Representative for this town, to be laid
before the General Court for their Information.”
Here was treason proclaimed and recorded, and every voter was exposed to
its penalty. Ten days later the Continental Congress issued the
world-stirring Declaration of Independence.
On Burgoyne’s invasion in 1777 a company under Captain Joseph Stebbins
and Lieutenant John Bardwell marched for Bennington. They were too late
for the battle at Walloomsack, and found the meeting-house filled with
Stark’s Hessian prisoners. But they had their share in the work and
glory of rounding up and capturing the proud soldiers of Burgoyne.
Deerfield had statesmen as well as soldiers. May 1, 1780, the town met
to consider the new Constitution of Massachusetts; the clerk read the
instrument “paragraph by paragraph with pauses between.” After due
discussion, a committee was chosen to “peruse the Constitution ... and
make such objections to it as they think ought to be made.” Three
town-meetings were held, the committee reported, and finally a vote was
passed “not to accept the third Article in the Declaration of Rights,”
and that a candidate for governor must “Declare himself of the
Protestant Religion” instead of “Christian Religion.” The term of eight
years instead of fifteen was voted as the time when the Constitution
should be revised. With these changes, our civic wisdom approved of this
important State paper.
Deerfield did her full duty in furnishing her
[Illustration: George Fuller
1822-1884.]
quota of men and supplies through the war. Occasionally, in the later
years of the struggle, the Tories temporarily obstructed the necessary
town legislation. Some of these soon found themselves behind the bars,
and others in enforced silence under penalty of like restraint. The
minister, Mr. Ashley, who had been firm in his loyalty, died in 1780,
and the Tories lost one of their strongest supports. Not until 1787
could the town unite upon his successor, when Rev. John Taylor was
ordained. The uprising called Shays’ Rebellion did much to harmonize the
warring factions, as all united to put it down. Three companies, under
Captains Joseph Stebbins, Samuel Childs and Thomas W. Dickinson, were
sent to the field of action.
From this time, harmony prevailed, and the career of the town was that
of an industrious, hard-working, prosperous, intellectual people.
Libraries and literary societies were established, which are still
flourishing. Deerfield Academy was founded in 1797, and endowed largely
through the liberality of the citizens. Its influence was felt for
generations, as its pupils from far and wide were scions of leading
families. Among its faculty and graduates may be named men of national
reputation, in the scientific, the historical, the ecclesiastical, the
military, the artistic and the industrial world.
Failing health obliged Mr. Taylor to resign;
[Illustration: BUFFET FROM PARSON WILLIAMS’S HOUSE.
NOW IN MEMORIAL HALL.]
and in 1807 the Rev. Samuel Willard succeeded him in the ministry, when,
in the separation of the Congregational churches, Deerfield led the van
on the liberal side.
The political storms of the first two decades of the century raged here
with strength and vigor. In the War of 1812 a “Professor of the Art of
War” was added to the faculty of the Deerfield Academy, and a Peace
Party circulated their protesting publications.
Deerfield was early at the front in the antislavery agitation, and in
the war lost some of her best blood. The names of her dead in that
righteous war are carved on a fitting monument pointing aloft from the
midst of her ancient training-field.
One great attraction in the old town is the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial
Association, chartered in 1870. It owns and occupies the old academy
building, which it secured when the new Free Dickinson Academy was
established in 1878. Its museum occupies the entire structure, and
contains an exhaustive, characteristic collection of the implements,
utensils and general household belongings of the colonial days; and also
of the original lords of the valley, the Pocumtuck Indians.
In the ante-railroad days, Cheapside, at the head of Pocumtuck River
navigation, was a thriving business village, with large imports of
foreign wet and dry goods, and large exports of lumber, woodenware and
brooms; Deerfield was long famous for its stall-fed beef, as many a New
York and Boston epicure did testify; but the advent of the iron horse
soon brought about the departure of the fall boat, and the passing of
the stall-fed ox. The old town is no longer a centre of political power,
or of trade and manufactures. The generous additions of territory to her
original Grant have been bestowed upon the children of her loins, now
flourishing towns about her. The advent of factories has absorbed one by
one her multifarious mechanical industries. Her young men and maidens
are seeking elsewhere spheres of action in fields till now undreamed of.
But Old Deerfield still retains much of her best. Still, as of old, she
is an intellectual centre. Still beautifully situated, she lies in the
embrace of the broad green meadows, with here and there a gleam of
silver from the sinuous Pocumtuck. Her ancient houses, shadowed by
towering elms, hoary with age, her charming wooded heights, her
romantic gorges and tumbling brooks, her restful quiet, her famous past,
all in harmony with the thought and feeling of her inhabitants, still
attract alike men and women of letters, the artist and the historical
student.
[Illustration]
NEWPORT
THE ISLE OF PEACE
BY SUSAN COOLIDGE
The Isle of Peace lies cradled in the wide arms of a noble bay. Fifteen
miles long and from four to five miles in width, its shape is not unlike
that of an heraldic dragon, laid at ease in the blue waters, with head
pointed to the southwest. From this head to the jutting cape which does
duty as the left claw of the beast, the shore is a succession of bold
cliffs, broken by coves and stretches of rocky shingle, and in two
places by magnificent curving beaches, upon which a perpetual surf foams
and thunders. Parallel ridges of low hills run back from the sea.
Between these lie ferny valleys, where wild roses grow in thickets, and
such shy flowers as love solitude and a sheltered situation spread a
carpet for the spring and early summer. On the farther uplands are
thrifty farms, set amid orchards of wind-blown trees. Ravines, each with
its thread of brook, cut their way from these higher levels to the
water-line. Fleets of lilies whiten the ponds, of which there are many
on the island; and over all the scene, softening every outline, tingeing
and changing the sunlight, and creating a thousand beautiful effects
forever unexpected and forever renewed, hangs a thin veil of shifting
mist. This the sea-wind, as it journeys to and fro, lifts and drops, and
lifts again, as one raises a curtain to look in at the slumber of a
child, and, having looked, noiselessly lets it fall.
The Indians, with that fine occasional instinct which is in such odd
contrast to other of their characteristics, gave the place its pretty
name. Aquidneck, the Isle of Peace, they called it. To modern men it is
known as the island of Rhode Island, made famous the land over by the
town built on its seaward extremity--the town of Newport.
It is an old town, and its history dates back to the early days of the
New England colony. City, it calls itself, but one loves better to think
of it as a town, just as the word “avenue,” now so popular, is in some
minds
[Illustration: THE OLD STONE MILL.]
forever translated into the simpler equivalent, “street.” As the veiling
mists gather and shift, and then, caught by the outgoing breeze, float
seaward again, we catch glimpses, framed, as it were, between the
centuries, quaint, oddly differing from each other, but full of
interest. The earliest of these glimpses dates back to an April morning
in 1524. There is the cliff-line, the surf, the grassy capes tinged with
sun, and in the sheltered bay a strange little vessel is dropping her
anchor. It is the caravel of Vezzerano, pioneer of French explorers in
these northern waters, and first of that great tide of “summer visitors”
which has since followed in his wake. How he was received, and by whom,
Mr. Parkman tells us:
“Following the shores of Long Island, they came first to Block
Island, and thence to the harbor of Newport. Here they stayed
fifteen days, most courteously received by the inhabitants. Among
others, appeared two chiefs, gorgeously arrayed in painted
deer-skins; kings, as Vezzerano calls them, with attendant
gentlemen; while a party of squaws in a canoe, kept by their
jealous lords at a safe distance, figure in the narrative as the
queen and her maids. The Indian wardrobe had been taxed to its
utmost to do the strangers honor,--coffee bracelets and wampum
collars, lynx-skins, raccoon-skins, and faces bedaubed with gaudy
colors.
[Illustration: NEWPORT IN 1795.]
“Again they spread their sails, and on the fifth of May bade
farewell to the primitive hospitalities of Newport.”[67]
Wampum and coffee bracelets are gone out of fashion since then, the
application of “gaudy colors” to faces, though not altogether done away
with, is differently practised and to better effect, and squaws are no
longer relegated by their jealous lords to separate and distant canoes;
but the reputation for hospitality, so early won, Newport still retains,
as many a traveller since Vezzerano has had occasion to testify. And
still, when the early summer-tide announces the approach of strangers,
her inhabitants, decking themselves in their best and bravest, go forth
to welcome and to “courteously entreat” all new arrivals.