mother church of all Charleston. The old town does not pin her faith
upon a single lion. The first time we found our way down Meeting street,
we saw a delicate and belfried spire rising above the greenery of the
trees in a distant churchyard. The staunch church from which that spire
springs was well worth our attention. And so we found our way to St.
Philip's. We turned down Broad street from St. Michael's--to commercial
Charleston as its namesake street is to New York--then at the little
red-brick library, housed in the same place for nearly three-quarters of
a century, we turned again. The south portico of St. Philip's,
tall-columned, dignified almost beyond expression, confronted us. And a
moment later we found ourselves within a churchyard that ranked in
interest and importance with that of St. Michael's, itself.
A shambling negro care-taker came toward us. He had been engaged in
helping some children get a kitten down from the upper branches of a
tree in the old churchyard. With the intuition of his kind, he saw in
us, strangers--manifest possibilities. He devoted himself to attention
upon us. And he sounded the praises of his own exhibit in no mild key.
"Yessa--de fines' church in all de South," he said, as he swung the
great door of St. Philip's wide open. He seemed to feel, also
intuitively, that we had just come from the rival exhibit. And we felt
more than a slight suspicion of jealousy within the air.
The negro was right. St. Philip's, Charleston, is more than the finest
church in all the South. Perhaps it is not too much to say that it is
the most beautiful church in all the land. Copied, rather broadly, from
St. Martins-in-the-Fields, London, it thrusts itself out into the
street, indeed, makes the highway take a broad double curve in order to
pass its front portico. But St. Philip's commits the fearful Charleston
sin of being new. The present structure has only been thrusting its
nose out into Church street for a mere eighty years. The old St.
Philip's was burned--one of the most fearful of all Charleston
tragedies--in 1834.
"Yessa--a big fire dat," said the caretaker. "They gib two slaves dere
freedom for helpin' at dat fire."
But history only records the fact that the efforts to put out the fire
in St. Philip's were both feeble and futile. It does tell, however, of a
negro sailor who, when the old church was threatened by fire on an
earlier occasion, climbed to the tower and tore the blazing shingles
from it and was afterward presented with his freedom and a fishing-boat
and outfit. Does that sound familiar? It was in our Third Reader--some
lurid verses but, alas for the accuracy that should be imparted to the
growing mind--it was St. Michael's to whom that widespread glory was
given. St. Michael's of the heart of the town once again. No wonder that
St. Philip's of the side-street grieves in silence.
In silence, you say. How about the bells of St. Philip's?
If you are from the North it were better that you did not ask that
question. The bells of St. Philip's, in their day hardly less famous
than those of the sister church, went into cannon for the defense of the
South. When the last of the copper gutters had been torn from the barren
houses, when the final iron kettle had gone to the gun-foundry, the
supreme sacrifice was made. The bells rang merrily on a Sabbath morn and
for a final time. The next day they were unshipping them and one of the
silvery voices of Charleston was forever hushed.
But St. Philip's has her own distinctions. In the first place, her own
graveyard is a roll-call of the Colonial elect. Within it stands the
humble tomb of him who was the greatest of all the great men of South
Carolina--John C. Calhoun--while nightly from her high-lifted spire
there gleams the only light that ever a church-tower sent far out to sea
for the guidance of the mariner. The ship-pilots along the North
Atlantic very well know when they pass Charleston light-ship, the range
between Fort Sumter and St. Philip's spire shows a clear fairway all the
distance up to the wharves of Charleston.
* * * * *
There are other great churches of Charleston--some of them very handsome
and with a deal of local history clustering about them, but perhaps none
of these can approach in interest the Huguenot edifice at the corner of
Queen and Church streets. It is a little church, modestly disdaining
such a worldly thing as a spire, in a crumbling churchyard whose
tombstones have their inscriptions written in French. A few folk find
their way to it on Sunday mornings and there they listen attentively to
its scholarly blind preacher, for sixty years the leader of his little
flock. But this little chapel is the sole flame of a famous old faith,
which still burns, albeit ever so faintly, in the blackness and the
shadow of the New World.
That is the real Charleston--the unexpected confronting you at almost
every turn of its quiet streets: here across from the shrine of the
Huguenots a ruinous building through which white and negro children play
together democratically and at will, and which in its day was the
Planters' Hotel and a hostelry to be reckoned with; down another byway a
tiny remnant of the city's one-time wall in the form of a powder
magazine; over in Meeting street the attenuated market with a Greek
temple of a hall set upon one end and the place where they sold the
slaves still pointed out to folk from the North; farther down on Meeting
street the hall of the South Carolina Society, a really exquisite aged
building wherein that distinguished old-time organization together with
its still older brother, the St. Andrews, still dines on an appointed
day each month and whose polished ballroom floor has felt the light
dance-falls of the St. Cecilias.
"The St. Cecilia Society?" you interrupt; "why, I've heard of that."
Of course you have. For the St. Cecilia typifies Charleston--the social
life of the place, which is all there is left to it since her monumental
tragedy of half a century ago. In Charleston there is no middle ground.
You are either recognized socially--or else you are not. And the St.
Cecilia Society is the sharply-drawn dividing point. Established
somewhere before the beginning of the Revolution it has dominated
Charleston society these many years. Invitations to its three balls each
year are eagerly sought by all the feminine folk within the town. And
the privilege of being invited to these formal affairs is never to be
scorned--more often it is the cause of many heart-burnings.
No one thing shows Charleston the more clearly than the fact that on the
following morning you may search the columns of the venerable _News and
Courier_ almost in vain for a notice of the St. Cecilia ball. In any
other town an event of such importance would be a task indeed for the
society editor and all of her sub-editresses. If there was not a
flashlight photograph there would be the description of the frocks--a
list of the out-of-town guests at any rate. Charleston society does not
concede a single one of these things. And the most the _News and
Courier_ ever prints is "The ball of the St. Cecilia Society was held
last evening at Hibernian Hall," or a two-line notice of similar
purport.
Charleston society concedes little or nothing--not even these
new-fashioned meal hours of the upstart Northern towns. In Charleston a
meal each four hours--breakfast at eight, a light lunch at sharp noon,
dinner at four, supper again at eight. These hours were good enough for
other days--ergo, they are good enough for these. And from eleven to
two and again from five to seven-thirty remain the smart calling hours
among the elect of the place. Those great houses do not yield readily to
the Present.
Charleston society is never democratic--no matter how Charleston
politics may run. Its great houses, behind the exclusion of those high
and forbidding walls, are tightly closed to such strangers as come
without the right marks of identification. From without you may breathe
the hints of old mahogany, of fine silver and china, of impeccable
linen, of well-trained servants, but your imagination must meet the
every test as to the details. Gentility does not flaunt herself. And if
the younger girls of Charleston society do drive their motor cars
pleasant mornings through the crowded shopping district of King street,
that does not mean that Charleston--the Charleston of the barouche and
the closed coupé--will ever approve.
* * * * *
On the April day half a century ago that the first gun blazed defiantly
from Fort Sumter and opened a page of history that bade fair to alter
the very course of things, Prosperity slipped out of Charleston.
Gentility, Courage, Romance alone remained. Prosperity with her giant
steamships and her long railroad trains never returned. The great docks
along the front of the splendid harbor stand unused, the warehouses upon
them molder. A brisk Texas town upon a sand-spit--Galveston--boasts that
she is the second ocean-port of America, with the hundreds of thousands
of Texas acres turned from grazing ranges into cotton-field, just behind
her. New Orleans is the south gate of the Middle West that has come into
existence, since Charleston faced her greatest of tragedies. And the
docks along her waterfront grow rusty with disuse.
She lives in her yesterdays of triumphs. Tell her that they have
builded a tower in New York that is fifty-five stories in height, and
she will reply that you can still see the house in Church street where
President Washington was entertained in royal fashion by her citizens;
hint to her of the great canal to the south, and she will ask you if you
remember how the blockade runners slipped night after night through the
tight chain that the Federal gunboats drew across the entrance of her
harbor for four long years; bespeak into her ears the social glories of
the great hotels and the opera of New York, and she will tell you of the
gentle French and English blood that went into the making of her first
families. Charleston has lost nothing. For what is Prosperity, she may
ask you, but a dollar-mark? Romance and Courtesy are without price.
Romance and Courtesy still walk in her streets, in the hot and lazy
summer days, in the brilliancy of the southern moon beating down upon
her graceful guarding spires, in the thunder of the storm and the soft
gray blankets of the ocean mantling her houses and her gardens. And
Romance and Courtesy do not forget.
9
ROCHESTER--AND HER NEIGHBORS
The three great cities of western New York--Syracuse, Rochester,
Buffalo--are like jewels to the famous railroad along which they are
strung, and effectively they serve to offset the great metropolitan
district at the east end of the state. They have many things in common
and yet they are not in the least alike. Their growth has been due to
virtually a common cause; the development of transportation facilities
across New York state; and yet their personality is as varied as that of
three sisters; lovely but different.
Of the three, Rochester is the most distinctive; one of the most
distinctive of all our American towns and hence chosen as the chief
subject for this chapter. But Buffalo is the largest, and Syracuse the
most ingenious, so they are not to be ignored. Rochester is
conservative. Rochester proves her conservatism by her smart clubs, and
the general cultivation of her inhabitants. Certain excellent persons
there, like certain excellent persons in Charleston, frown upon
newspaper reports of their social activities. In Syracuse, on the
contrary, the Sunday newspapers have columns of "society notes" and the
reporters who go to dances and receptions prove their industry by
writing long lists of the "among those present." Buffalo leans more to
Syracuse custom in this regard. Rochester scans rather critically the
man who comes to dwell there--unless he comes labeled with letters of
introduction. In Syracuse and in Buffalo, too, there is more of a spirit
of _camaraderie_. A man is taken into good society there because of
what he is, rather than for that from which he may have sprung. So it
may be said that Syracuse and Buffalo breathe the spirit of the West in
their social life, while Rochester clings firmly to the conservatism of
the East. Indeed, her citizens rather like to call her "the Boston of
the West," just as the man from the Missouri Bottoms called the real
Boston "the Omaha of the East."
Take these cities separately and their personality becomes the more
pertinent and compelling. Consider them one by one as a traveler sees
them on a westbound train of the New York Central railroad--Syracuse,
Rochester, Buffalo--and in the same grading they increase in population;
roughly speaking, in a geometrical ratio. Syracuse has a little more
than a hundred thousand inhabitants, Rochester is about twice her size
and Buffalo is about twice the size of Rochester.
[Illustration: The Erie Canal still finds an amiable path through
Rochester]
Each of them is the result of the Erie canal. There had been famous
post-roads across central and western New York before DeWitt Clinton dug
his great ditch, and the Mohawk valley together with the little known
"lake country" of New York formed one of the earliest passage-ways to
the West. But the Erie canal, providing a water level from the Great
Lakes to the Hudson river and so to the Atlantic, was a tremendous
impulse to the state of New York. Small towns grew apace and the three
big towns were out of their swaddling clothes and accounted as cities
almost before they realized it. The building of the railroads across the
state and their merging into great systems was a second step in their
transition, while the third can hardly be said to be completed--the
planning and construction of a network of inter-urban electric lines
that shall again unite the three and--what is far more important to
each--bring a great territory of small cities, villages and rich farms
into closer touch with them.
In Rochester, a good many years ago, one Sam Patch jumped into the falls
of the Genesee. He first planned his spectacular jump for a Sunday, but
the citizens of Rochesterville, as the town by the great falls was first
known, objected strenuously to such profanation of the Sabbath. So Sam
Patch jumped not on a Sunday but on a Friday, which almost any
superstitious person might have recognized as an unfortunate change of
date; and jumping, he did not survive to jump again. But the point of
this incident hinges not on Fridays, but upon Sundays in Rochester. All
that was a long time ago, but she has not changed her ideas of Sabbath
observance very much since then--despite the vast change in Sunday
across the land. The citizens of Rochester still go to church on Sunday
and they "point with pride" to the big and progressive religious
institutions of their community. People in Syracuse, however, have
Sunday picnics and outings off into the country, while Buffalo has
always been known for its "liberal Sunday," whatever that may mean.
Rochester has always frowned upon that sort of thing. She has the same
point of view as her Canadian neighbor across Lake Ontario--Toronto--a
city which we shall see in a little time. Rochester rather cleaves to
the old-fashioned Sabbath; even her noisy beach down at Ontario's edge,
which has always served as a sort of Coney island to western New York,
has been a thorn in the side of her conservative population. If you want
to stop and consider how the old-fashioned Sabbath of your boyhood days
still reigns at the city at the falls of the Genesee, recall the fact
that in one street that is bordered by some of the town's largest
churches the trolley cars are not operated on Sundays.[C] In
Philadelphia you will remember they used years ago to stretch ropes
across the streets in front of the churches at service times. But
imagine the possibilities of that sort of thing in New York, or Chicago,
or San Francisco.
[C] A recent rerouting of the trolley cars in Rochester has
left this particular street without regular service most of
the days of the week. The fact remains, however, that for
many years the Park avenue line had its terminal loop
through Church street. On the Sabbath that terminal was
moved bodily so that churchgoers would not be annoyed. E. H.
* * * * *
Syracuse is famed for the Onondaga Indians and for James Roscoe Day. The
Onondaga Indians are the oldest inhabitants, and a great help to the
ingenious local artists who design cigar-box labels. No apologies are
needed for Chancellor Day. He has never asked them. He has taken a
half-baked Methodist college that stood on a wind-swept and barren hill
and by his indomitable ability and Simon-pure genius has transformed it
into a real university. For Syracuse University is tremendously real to
the four thousand men and women who study within its halls. It is a poor
man's college and Chancellor Day is proud of that. They come, these four
thousand men and women, from the small cities and villages, from the
farms of that which the metropolitan is rather apt indifferently to term
"Up State." To these, four years in a university mean four years of
cultivation and opportunity, and so has come the growth, the vast hidden
power of the institution upon the hill at Syracuse. She makes no claim
to college spirit of surpassing dimensions. She does claim individual
spirit among her students, however, that is second to none. As a
university--as some know a university--the collection of ill-matched
architectural edifices that house her is typical; but as an opportunity
for popular education to the boys and girls of the rural districts of
the state of New York she is monumental, and they come swarming to her
in greater numbers each autumn.
So much for the hill--they call it Mount Olympus--which holds the
university and those things that are the university's. Now for downtown
Syracuse; for while the city's newer districts are ranged upon a series
of impressive heights, her old houses, her stores and her factories are
squatted upon the flats at the head of Onondaga lake.
We all remember the pictures of Syracuse that every self-respecting
geography used to print; salt-sheds running off over an indefinite
acreage. We were given to understand that Syracuse's chief excuse for
existence was as a sort of huge salt-cellar for the rest of the nation.
Nowadays nine-tenths of the Syracusans have forgotten that there is a
salt industry left, and will tell you glibly of the typewriters,
automobiles, steel-tubing and the like that are made in their town in
the course of a twelvemonth.
They will not tell you of one thing, for of that thing you may judge
yourself. Life in Syracuse is punctuated by the railroad and the canal.
The canal is not so much of an obstruction unless one of the cumbersome
lift-bridges sticks and refuses to move up or down, but that railroad!
Every few minutes life in Syracuse comes to an actual standstill because
of it. Men whose time is worth ten or fifteen dollars an hour and who
grow puffy with over-exertion are violently halted by the passing of
switch-engines with trails of box-cars. Appointments are missed. Board
meetings at the banks halt for directors--directors who are halted in
their turn by the dignified and stately passage of the Canastota Local
through the heart of the city.
But the old canal is going to go some day--when the State's new barge
canal well to the north of the town is completed--and perhaps in that
same day Syracuse will have a broad, central avenue replacing the
present dirty, foul-smelling ditch. Some day, some very big Syracusan
will miss an appointment while he stands in Salina street watching the
serene Canastota Local drag its way past him. That missed appointment
will cost the very big Syracusan a lot of money and there will be a
revolution in Syracuse--a railroad revolution. After that the
locomotives will no longer blow their smoky breaths against the fronts
of Syracuse's best buildings and grind their way slowly down Washington
street from the tunnel to the depot, for the railroad which operates
them stands in the forefront of the progressive transportation systems
of America, and it is only waiting for Syracuse to take the first
definite step of progress. Some day Syracuse--Syracuse delayed--is going
to take that step. Only a year or two ago the Chicago Limited held up
the carnival parade--and therein lies the final paragraph of this
telling of Syracuse.
She is a festive lass. Each September she rolls up her sleeves, her
business men swell the subscription lists, her matrons and her pretty
girls bestir themselves, and there is a concert of action that gives
Syracuse a harvest week long to be remembered. By day folk go out to the
State Fair and see the best agricultural show that New York state has
ever known--a veritable agricultural show that endeavors not only to
furnish an ample measure of fun, but also endeavors to be a real help to
the progressive owners of those rich farms of central and western New
York. By night Syracuse is in festival. Do not let them tell you that an
American town cannot enter into the carnival spirit and still preserve
her graciousness and a certain underlying sense of decorum. Tell those
scoffers to go to Syracuse during the week of the State Fair. They will
see a demonstration of the contrary--Salina street ablaze with an
incandescent beauty, lined with row upon row of eager citizens. The
street is cleared to a broad strip of stone carpet down its center and
over this carpet rolls float after float. These in a single year will
symbolize a single thing. In one September we recall that they
represented the nations of the world and that the Queen of Ancient
Ireland wore eyeglasses; but that is as nothing, the policemen in Boston
are addicted to straighteners, and Mr. Syracuse and Mrs. Syracuse, Miss
Syracuse and Master Syracuse stand open-eyed in pleasure and go home
very late at night on trolley cars that are as crowded as the trolley
cars in very big cities, convinced that there possibly may be other
towns but there is only one Syracuse.[D]
[D] Let it be recorded in the interest of accuracy that the
fall festival of 1913 was not given--much to the
disappointment of Mr. Syracuse, Mrs. Syracuse, Miss Syracuse
and Master Syracuse. It is hoped, however, that the festival
has not been permanently abandoned. The loss of its
influence would be felt far outside of Syracuse. E. H.
All of which is exactly as it should be. Syracuse's great hope for her
future rests in just such optimism on the part of her people. And in
such optimism she has a strong foundation on which to build through
coming years.
* * * * *
Buffalo is not as frivolous as Syracuse. She cares but little for
festivals but speaks of herself in the cold commercial terms of success.
If you have ever met a man from Buffalo, when you were traveling, and he
began to tell you of his town, you will know exactly what we mean. He
undoubtedly began by quoting marvelous statistics, some of them
concerning the number of trains that arrived and departed from his
native heath in the course of twenty-four hours. When he was through,
you had a confused idea that Buffalo was some sort of an exaggerated
railroad yard, where you changed cars to go from any one corner of the
universe to any other corner. When your time came to see Buffalo for
yourself, that confused idea returned to you. Your train slipped for
miles through an apparently unending wilderness of branching tracks and
dusty freight cars, past grimy round-houses and steaming locomotives,
until you were ready to believe that any conceivable number of trains
arrived at and departed from that busy town within a single calendar
day.
If you have approached her by water in the summertime you have seen her
as a mighty port, her congestion of water traffic suggesting salt water
rather than fresh. When we come to visit the neighboring port of
Cleveland we shall give heed to the wonderful traffic of the inland
seas, but for this moment consider Buffalo as something more than a
railroad yard, a busy harbor, or even a melting-pot for the fusing of as
large and as difficult a foreign element as is given to any American
town to fuse. Consider Buffalo dreaming metropolitan dreams. The dull
roar of Niagara, almost infinite in its possibilities of power, is
within hearing. That dull roar has been Buffalo's incentive, the lullaby
which induced her dreams of industrial as well as of commercial
strength. And much has been written of her growing strength in these
great lines.