distinguished in the French and English war as the commander of Fort Massachusetts, in the northern part of Berkshire County. The site he occupied so overlooked both the northern and eastern valleys of Stockbridge that his house was made a fortification in the early and exposed times. The old well which was then dug in the cellar still remains, but the house was torn down a few years since. What was available of its materials was used, however, in building another house almost on the same site, which is now owned and occupied by Rev. Dr. H. M. Field, editor of the Evangelist. The high reputation of Dr. West as a reasoner and preacher, and especially the fame of his treatise on "Moral Agency," made his house for many years the resort of students preparing for the sacred ministry, and he may be said to have converted Stockbridge from a place for the instruction of rude savages into a place for the training of the most cultivated for the highest and most difficult office known among men. For a period of thirty-five years he was thus engaged. Among his pupils were Dr. Kirkland, afterward president of Harvard University, and Samuel Spring, who, more, perhaps, than any other man, was the founder of the Theological Seminary at Andover, which may thus be traced in its roots to Stockbridge. somewhat weak. But his face beamed with the unmistakable signs of character, and his speech was far from being contemptible. In the pulpit he was a very thunderer. No one listened to him without being impressed by the strength of his reasoning, and as an expositor of the Scriptures few have equaled him. The late Dr. Emmons, himself regarded as one of our acutest reasoners, said that Dr. West was the only man he was ever afraid of, and pronounced him the greatest divine whom he knew. Dr. West died in the year 1818, at the age of eighty-four. He was born in 1735, the very year that the Indians were gathered upon the Great Meadow, and the history of Stockbridge began. His one life, therefore, measured the growth of the place from its beginning, when a missionary, without a house and with only one white associate, stood up amidst their rude huts to teach the few Indian families living here in the wilderness, until it had become one of the most enlightened and distinguished towns of New England. The change thus wrought in a single lifetime was marvelous. Even when Dr. West was ordained at Stockbridge there were only about twenty log-huts at what is now the important place of Pittsfield. The whole country north of that point as far as the Canada line was a wilderness; and toward the west, while there were a few Dutch residents on the Hudson and the Mohawk, there were no English settlements between Stockbridge and the Pacific Ocean. When Dr. West closed his ministry Stockbridge was in the midst of a garden of civilization and cultivated beauty, and was known far and wide through the names of those of her residents already mentioned. About this time also the name of Sedgwick, now one of the peculiar names of Stockbridge, and which had been distinguished by the judicial and Congressional services of the Hon. Theodore Sedgwick, was getting an additional importance and renown from the writings of Catharine, his daughter, who was then beginning Dr. West was the most methodical of men. His boots and shoes, it is said, stood in the same place from year to year, and his hat, whip, and overcoat were always hung on the same nails. He was in the habit of visiting his friend Dr. Hopkins, of Newport, and so exactly did he plan his long journeys thither, though dependent upon his private conveyance, that his wife used to say that she knew as well when to have his tea ready for his return as though he had only gone down to the village for the afternoon. His place of residence was, on the whole, the most charming spot in all Stockbridge. It was on the point of the high ground which overlooks the village and the valley of the Housatonic from the north, and commands an unusually wide range of view and a combination of mountain, valley, and river scenery seldom equaled. The house he occupied was built by Colonel Ephraim Williams, the founder of Williams College, and honorably that career of authorship which has classed there. The old Dr. West estate, as has been her, with Irving, among those who first cre- mentioned already, is now owned by Dr. ated an American literature worthy the H. M. Field. The Hon. David Dudley Field, name, and who has endeared herself by the while owning his father's homestead, also pure and beautiful tone of her writings to a owns and occupies, as his summer residence, great multitude of her countrymen and to the beautiful estate which formerly belonged many abroad. The name of Hopkins also, to Sergeant, the missionary. Mr. Cyrus W. one of the early and honorable names of Field, more widely known than the others, Stockbridge, has more recently taken an ad- though not a resident now of Stockbridge, ditional lustre from the character and writ- is counted as one of her sons. When his ings of the distinguished president of Will-long and persistent but often baffled efforts iams College, and his hardly less eminent to link the continents with electric bands brother, Albert, who for forty years has occu- had been finally crowned with success, and pied the chair of Natural Philosophy and As- he had more than realized the promise to tronomy in that institution, and whose char- "put a girdle round about the earth in forty acter seems to have borrowed its peculiar minutes," no place was more ready to parsereneness and saintliness from his converse ticipate in the general rejoicing and conwith the stars. gratulation, and no place felt more honored by the event, than Stockbridge; and now she feels that instead of being in the midst of the wilderness, and shut out from light and civilization, as she was a hundred years ago, one of her sons has placed her in the very centre of the world's thought and movement. Nor would the mention of Stockbridge, in its later days, be complete without allusion to another name which has reflected its light upon this village from different walks of life and literature. As with the Sedgwicks, so with the Fields, Stockbridge has become their historic home. Rev. David Dudley Field became the pastor of the church here only about a year after the death of Dr. West, and proved himself the worthy successor of that eminent man. He was the pastor of the church eighteen years, and after filling the like office in another place fourteen years returned to Stockbridge as his chosen home, where, only recently, he has died at an advanced age. Distinguished as a preacher and as a devoted student of history, his sons have been even more widely distinguished in various callings and professions. They have clung also to the old village home. Two of them, and the family of a third one, recently deceased, have their residences CYRUS W. FIELD. Nathaniel Hawthorne resided in Stockbridge for some time. It was here that he wrote "The House of Seven Gables." There is still to be seen on a window-pane in the room which he used as his study this inscription, "Nathaniel Hawthorne, February 9, 1851." This little room could only be reached through the kitchen, and had a single window overlooking the "Stockbridge Bowl," as the beautiful lake in the background was named by Miss Sedgwick. Fanny Kemble Butler called it the "Mountain Mirror." From Hawthorne's retreat he could see visitors approach on the road from Lenox, and on such occasions he frequently made good his escape by passing out unnoticed into the woods by the lake side. The house in which Hawthorne lived at Stockbridge is every year visited by hundreds of people from all parts of the world-from England especially. Herman Melville had a residence within an easy drive of Hawthorne. In 1851 Henry James, the novelist, purchased a residence in Stockbridge. We spoke, at the outset of this article, of the combined attractions of nature and art which Stockbridge presents. The old Indian designation of the place as the "Great Meadow" indicates its characteristic feature as being an unusually wide expanse of river bottom in the midst of surrounding mountains. The peculiar conformation of the mountain ranges in this vicinity compels the Housatonic to change at Lee its southerly course for an eastern, and to keep this general direction through almost the entire breadth of the town of Stockbridge. There are indications also that what are now the meadows were once the bed of a lake, which, by some convulsion of nature, has since been drained off. However this may be, hardly MONUMENT MOUNTAIN, WITH GRAYLOOK IN THE DISTANCE. any meadow scenery can be more beautiful than that which one beholds as he looks down from Sergeant Hill and traces the Housatonic as, with many a graceful turn, it winds lingeringly and lovingly along between its enameled banks. Certainly there needs only to be added to this lovely picture of tranquil beauty the setting which is given by the background of encircling mountains wreathed around it in various shapes, like some boldly carved frame of oak around a delicate water-color, to fill the eye and soul of the beholder with a feast of beauty. And then the individual mountains them ICE GLEN. again. Giant hem locks and other trees have now grown upon and among these rocks, and covered the sides of the great rift to the very top. The place is wild and impressive in the extreme. You step at once from the warm, sunny pasture-ground without into a cool, dark grotto or labyrinth. The transition is sudden and complete. You go now over and now under the great masses of rock piled, as by the hands of Titans, one upon another. Now you cross from side to side upon a bridge made by some fallen hemlock, so beautifully matted with its enveloping mosses that you hesitate to touch it with the foot selves have each their several and special | lest the wood-nymphs cry out at your invaattractions. Monument Mountain, which sion and pollution of their halls. Now you lifts itself on the southern border of the are fain to slide down the smooth face of a town as the grand mountain feature of the rock, steadied by your climbing-staff, and ocplace, with its eastern wall of bare perpen-casionally you pause to look up from some dicular rock to which not a tree can cling-depth, and catch, as from a well, a glimpse how many know something of it since Bryant has enshrined it in his verse! From its summit one looks off upon the Catskills, and his eye sweeps from old Graylock on the north to the Litchfield hills in Connecticut, while around and beneath him the land lies like a garden of beauty. "It is a fearful thing To stand upon the beetling verge, and see Where storm and lightning, from that huge gray wall, Have tumbled down vast blocks, and at the base Dashed them in fragments, and to lay thine ear Over the dizzy depth, and hear the sound Of winds, that struggle with the woods below, Come up like ocean murmurs. But the scene Is lovely round; a beautiful river there Wanders amid the fresh and fertile meads, The paradise he made unto himself, Mining the soil for ages. On each side The fields swell upward to the hills; beyond, Above the hills, in the blue distance, rise The mountain columns with which earth props heaven." On the east, and quite near the village, is the high range of Bear Mountain, and a walk of less than a mile brings one to Ice Glen, so called, a rift in this mountain nearly half a mile in length. The whole side of the mountain seems to have been rent asunder and tilted over, and then huge boulders as large as houses thrown into the cleft to keep the sundered parts from coming together of the blue sky, never more "deeply, darkly, beautifully blue" than from such a point of view. To go through this glen, so wildly beautiful, is an event long to be remembered. Its grand rocks can not be forgotten. Its ferns and mosses will keep their greenness and grow in memory for a lifetime. It is but the walk of a few minutes from the northern opening of the glen to a beautiful eminence which the Housatonic seems to have cut off from Bear Mountain, and left right in the midst of the village as a little bit of wildness and natural beauty furnished for the convenience of invalids and little children. This is Laurel Hill-so called from the abundance of the kalmia, which grows upon its sides in great beauty. The hill is, perhaps, a hundred feet in height, and separated from the main street of the town only by an intervening meadow of an acre or two in extent, upon which, with an unusual felicity of position, stands the village academy. Half-way up the hill, on its western side, is a plateau large enough to accommodate two thousand people. This plateau is backed on the east by a perpendicular wall of rock thirty feet or more in height. And here, amidst the tall trees kept Such was the start of the library at Stockbridge only half a dozen years ago. A purchase of two thousand volumes was made at the outset. A beautiful stone building was erected for them. When its doors were opened the public saw and felt that they had a treasure in their possession. The town at once assumed the payment of a librarian's services, and enabled the managers to open the library to the public every day, instead of but once a week, as had been expected, and as is so often the case with village libraries; and so almost at once the library became a manifest power in that com free from underbrush, the villagers are ac-ily, in order to live and do the proper work customed to meet on occasions of public and of a library, must be of considerable size, social interest. Especially it is used by the in most cases, at the outset. It must be Laurel Hill Association, which takes its large enough to make a decided impression name from the hill, and has for its object upon the public by the variety and richness the beautifying of the town by causing art of its contents. It must be large enough and taste to lend a helping hand to nature. to have a value which shall make all feel This it does by keeping the village streets that it is worth caring for, worth preservin good condition, bordering them with ing, and worth making constant additions nicely graveled walks, kept clean and well to. In such a case a proper building will graded; by planting rows of trees for shade be likely to be provided, a librarian will be along all the highways of the town; by keep-secured, who will make the care of the books ing the village cemetery in proper order; and, not secondary to that of groceries or dryin general, by encouraging a spirit of taste goods; and, what is more, the sight of such among all the inhabitants. It spends hun- a feast will stimulate the mental appetite of dreds of dollars annually in this work, and the community, and the taste of the feast every year, in August, it holds its anni- will cause them to secure its continuance. versary upon the hill itself. A rostrum of earth, covered with turf, is built against the wall of rock of which we have spoken, and which acts as a sounding-board for the help of the speaker. From this rostrum the secretary of the Association reads the record of its doings for the past year. The election of officers then takes place. An oration, and usually a poem, are then recited to the listening auditors. Afterward impromptu speeches are made by one and another, and the good work is thus encouraged for another year. It is the great day of the year in this New England village. Closely allied to the Laurel Hill Associa-munity. The town would not be willing tion, though not such a peculiarity of Stockbridge, is another institution, which ought, at least, to be mentioned. This is the public library. A village library, to be sure, is no new thing; and yet a truly successful library is somewhat rare. The history of too many has been somewhat like this: one or two hundred dollars expended in the purchase of a few books, so few that they were not worth the care of a special custodian or a building specially adapted to their preservation, and so were thrust into the corner of some post-office or grocery store, where, after a little interest and attention on the part of the public, and a little gratuitous service on the part of the postmaster or grocer, the books were neglected, forgotten, and lost. A good village library, especially in these days, when books of some sort are found in every fam now to give it up for ten times what it has cost. It is the crowning embellishment of the most beautiful of Berkshire villages. THE PUBLIC LIBRARY, STOCKBRIDGE. |