Historic Towns of New England

The more mixed composition of the population in the Middle Atlantic Colonies, for the same reason, inevitably caused a mixed type of government to be created there, in which the county or shire divided the authority with the town; while in the Southern Colonies the immigrants were of such a character, and the economic conditions so different from those in New England, that a more aristocratic form of government evolved, semi-feudal in its type, and the county, rather than the town, became the important minor political unit within the State, never, however, having a vigorous independent life, the colony and afterward the State becoming the source of authority and the end of government. Long years afterward, in the Civil War, the two types of government clashed, and the type prevailed which Thomas Jefferson praised and wished transferred to Virginia, for, said he:

“Those wards called townships in New England are the vital principle of their governments, and have proved themselves the wisest invention ever devised by the wit of man for the perfect exercise of self-government and for its preservation.”

It is well, however, to note, that Mr. Charles Borgeaud, the eminent Genevan historian, in his work on the Rise of Modern Democracy, disputes the Teutonic origin of the town-meeting, and contends that it must be credited to the democratic principles of the New Testament as interpreted and accepted, first by the Brownists of England, and held later by the Pilgrim Fathers and those of the Puritans who accepted the Independent form of church government, rather than to any principle of communal government first evolved by Teutons. He says:

“At the moment when the colonists of New England quitted the Mother Country, whatever was left of that old self-government which had been exercised by their forefathers was under the influence of the general movement, and was undergoing aristocratic transformation. The vestries, or meetings of the inhabitants of the parish, were being replaced by committees known as select vestries, which were originally elected, and then, before long, recruited by co-optation. Had the American colonists purely and simply imitated in their new country the system which they had seen at work in England, they certainly would not have founded the democratic government of the town-meeting. In order to explain their political activity, we must take into account, and that largely, their religious ideas. And we shall be naturally led to do this if we remember that, in the beginning, each settlement or town was, before all things, a congregation, and that the town-meeting was in most cases the same thing as the assembly of the congregation. In Virginia, where the colonists remained members of the Anglican Church, there was no town-meeting, but only select vestries as in England, and these had certainly lost all family likeness, if they really were related to the Thing and the Tungemot.”

In due time, when pioneers from New England found their way to the then virgin lands of Central New York, the valley of the Ohio, and the northern half of the vast valley of the Mississippi, they carried with them the political and religious ideals of New England. Where they were a large majority of the settlers within a given territory, or where at the time when its organic structure was forming they dominated it, the town was established as the political unit in the territory. Such was the case in Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Where New England settlers joined with those from the Middle States, or the border States of Kentucky and Virginia, they often found it necessary to compromise on a system in which the county and the town were peers, as in Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa. But, as experience has proved, the modified township system, as it is found in Illinois and Michigan, is more advantageous than the system of divided authority, and many of the Western States are gradually adopting it, California, Nebraska, and the Dakotas having recently made it either permissible or mandatory.

Nor are signs lacking that in the South, as its white population increases by immigrants from the North, as the patriarchal and pastoral type of civilization gives way to the modern industrial and corporate type, as cities and towns multiply, and local as well as State pride has free chance to develop, there will be an adoption of the modified township system and a gradual abolition of the county system.

Among the changes of the last half-century in New England, one notable one has been the tendency of the larger towns to adopt the city form of government as soon as it was deemed that the increase of population warranted the step and made it necessary. This fact, as well as the marked increase of urban population in New England,3 is counted by some students of her social development as indicative of retrogression, however inevitable. Certain it is, that if the town of Brookline, with its population of 16,164, and its property valuation of $64,169,200,4 and annual appropriations of more than $900,000, can still work the ancient machinery of the town-meeting without the slightest loss either of a pecuniary or a civic sort, other towns, with a smaller population and much smaller valuation of property, cannot reasonably claim that mere physical growth is any warrant for the change from a system so purely democratic to one less so and much more readily adapted to serve the ends of partisan bosses and those who batten at the public crib.

The third of the indispensable and ever-present institutions found in every New England town or village is the public school, open to all and supported by all. Roman Catholic, Protestant and Jew, Caucasian and African, French Canadian and Irish, Italian and Portuguese, English and German, mingle in the school-room and learn the essential likeness of each to the other, their common and peculiar gifts, and their common duties to God and the State. No man in the community is so rich or aristocratic as to escape taxation for support of the school, even though his children may never darken the doors. No man in the community is so humble or so poor as to be debarred from sending his children to the highest as well as to the lowest grades. Unsectarian in the sense that they derive support from taxpayers of all sects and inculcate the dogmas of none, secular in the sense that religion is not a part of the curriculum, they ever have been a bulwark to the cause of religion, partly by reason of the example of the teaching force, who usually are men and women with religious faith as well as mental attainment, and partly because they have developed the rational powers of men, and thus enabled them to discriminate between superstition and truth. Beginning, in the more favored and advanced communities, with kindergarten instruction for young children, and not ceasing until the youth or maiden is prepared to enter the college or university, the State and the town, co-operating together, make it possible for every parent to give to his children, or for every ambitious or friendless boy or girl to secure for himself or herself, at the public expense, a thorough preparatory education. Nor is there any item of his yearly tax bill which the typical New Englander pays with greater alacrity and more certainty of belief as to its equity or economy than his annual contribution for popular education. For it is ingrained in his very being, woven into the texture of his life, to believe, as Garfield said, that “next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.” Moreover, being shrewd as well as a man of high principles and a lover of learning for its own sake, the New Englander is convinced that it pays to be educated, and to have educated neighbors and children. His reasoning takes this form: The more children in the schools, the fewer youths and adults in the jails and poorhouses. The better informed the mill operatives, the larger the output of the mills. The higher the standard of living, the larger the demand for the product of the soil and the loom, and the better the home market. The more intelligent the voter, the less the seductive power of the demagogue and the “political boss.” In short, the New England people have always believed, and still believe, what the inscription on the Public Library in Boston declares:

THE COMMONWEALTH REQUIRES THE EDUCATIONOF THE PEOPLE AS THE SAFEGUARDOF ORDER AND LIBERTY

That the policy has been a wise one, is indicated by New England’s share in the various struggles for liberty which the country has seen, the stability of all her institutions, her exemption from disorder and industrial disputes which culminate in violence, her inhospitality to “boss rule” in politics, and the thrift and prosperity of her citizens.

Historically speaking, the “public school” is a very ancient New England institution. Boston had one as early as 1635, and in 1647 the General Court of Massachusetts enacted:

“That to the end that learning may not be buried in the graves of our forefathers, it was ordered in all the Puritan colonies that every township, after the Lord hath increased them to the number of fifty households, shall appoint one to teach all children to write and read; and when any town shall increase to the number of one hundred families, they shall set up a Grammar School, the master thereof to be able to instruct youth so far as they may be fitted for the University.”

Nine years earlier, in 1638, the same body had founded a college (Harvard) at Cambridge, in order, as they said, that “the light of learning might not go out, nor the study of God’s word perish.” These two acts of the General Court may be reckoned as the germs from which has developed that system of secondary and higher education which has given Massachusetts the place of leader in the history of education in America.

In 1645, Connecticut passed a law similar to the earlier Massachusetts statute of 1642, but not until 1701 was Yale University founded at New Haven. Rhode Island did not have a system of popular education until just as the eighteenth century was closing. New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont accepted the Massachusetts methods and ideals, with some minor variations.

Devout as were the founders of New England, it followed inevitably that they should establish institutions where their children might obtain a distinctly religious training as well as a general education. Thus, for a long period of New England history, the Christian academy, under denominational control, flourished just as it does now in the West, and for much the same reason. As the public-school system has expanded, as town after town has added the high school to the primary and grammar school, as sectarian fences have toppled over or ceased to be restrictive, the academy of the old type has ceased to play the part it once did in New England life. But, in any survey of the history of education in New England, it should not be overlooked. Many excellent institutions of this type still survive to meet the demands of those persons who either distrust the public high school, or else are unable to send their children to one, owing to residence in towns where the school system has not developed to that extent. But, as a rule, the New England boy and girl, no matter what the social station or wealth of his or her parent, still “derives his or her preparation for college or life from the community in which he or she lives.” And, as Phillips Brooks said in his address at the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Boston Latin School:

“That is the real heart of the whole matter… It constitutes the greatest claim of the public-school system. It represents the fundamental idea of the town undertaking the education of her children… It educates the thought of law and obedience, the sense of mingled love and fear, which is the true citizen’s true emotion to his city. It educates this in the very lessons of the school-room, and makes the person of the State the familiar master of the grateful subject from his boyhood… It is in the dignity and breadth and seriousness which the sense that their town is training them gives to their training, that the advantage of the public-school boys over the boys of the best private schools always consists.”

Emigrating westward, the pioneers from New England carried with them the public school, the academy, and the college. Connecticut’s settlers in the Western Reserve, Ohio, took with them conceptions of duty in this respect, which profoundly affected the future history of the commonwealth. Ohio has come to be, in this later day, what Virginia was in the early history of the country – “The Mother of Presidents” – and has more colleges within its borders than any State in the Union. It was a Massachusetts soldier, Gen. Rufus Putnam of Rutland, a Congregational clergyman, Rev. Manasseh Cutler of Hamilton, Massachusetts, and an Ipswich, Massachusetts, lawyer, Nathan Dane, who founded Marietta, Ohio, and induced Congress to put into the epoch-marking Ordinance of 1787 governing the Northwest Territory, this remarkable declaration and article:

“Religion, and morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

As early as 1797, Muskingum Academy was founded in the territory conceded, and in due time came Marietta, Oberlin, Wabash, Illinois, Knox, Beloit, Olivet, and Ripon Colleges, all Christian institutions within the territory originally governed by the Ordinance of 1787.

Precisely similar has been the record of New England emigrants beyond the Mississippi. Wherever they have settled and shaped the civic ideals, whether in the Dakotas, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, or in California, there they have laid the foundations of a free public-school system, and of academies and colleges controlled by Christian educators and trustees. Nor do they cease to believe in the academy and the college now that the competition of the State university in the States of the interior and the West is so intense, and the reliance of the treasuries of these Western Christian institutions upon the gifts of their friends in New England increases rather than abates.

Impressed with the need, in all sections of the country, of a well-instructed and intelligent electorate, and convinced that the South was too poor to provide for itself the schools that its unfortunate illiterate whites and blacks needed, New Englanders early began to contribute to the support of academies and colleges in the South. Not always welcomed by the ruling class, the pioneers in this work persevered, and many of them have lived long enough to receive the thanks of those who at first despised and scorned them. Millions of dollars have gone from New England for the founding and support of such institutions as Berea College, Kentucky; Atlanta University, Georgia; Hampton Institute, Virginia; Fisk University, Tennessee; and Tuskeegee Institute, Alabama. Three New Englanders, George Peabody of Danvers, Mass., John F. Slater of Norwich, Conn., and Daniel Hand of Guilford, Conn., have given between them $5,100,000 in bequests or donations for the establishment or assistance of schools, colleges, and training schools for teachers in the South. The Peabody Education Fund, from 1868 to 1897, distributed in the South, from its income alone, a sum amounting to $2,478,527.

Nor is New England’s influence, educationally speaking, limited to the United States. The educational system of Honolulu is based on New England models. Robert College, near Constantinople, has spread the principles of Christian democracy in Church and State, as they are held by New Englanders, throughout Bulgaria and the Balkan states, and given ideals to the Young Turkey party in the land where the Sultan is dominant. The Huguenot Seminary in South Africa was distinctly modelled after Mt. Holyoke Seminary, and its first teaching staff was made up of New England women educated at Mt. Holyoke. Wherever American Protestant missionaries have gone and established schools and colleges in Asia, Africa, or Europe, almost invariably the master spirits, the men and women who have given character to, and established the ideals of, the institutions, have been graduates of the New England colleges and academies, even if not New-England-born.

Subtract from the history of education in the United States, during the latter half of the century just closing, the influence of four men, Horace Mann, Henry Barnard, Charles William Eliot, and William Torrey Harris, and you take from it the best that it stands for to-day. All of these men were born in New England. All were reformers. All showed great administrative ability. All lived to see their radical views find general acceptance. Horace Mann did his greatest work in remodelling the public-school system of Massachusetts. Barnard did a similar work in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin, but his greatest service to the cause of education was his masterly editing of the American Journal of Education, from 1855 to 1881. Eliot has transformed the curriculum of Harvard, the oldest university of the North, has resolutely contended for the largest measure of election by the student in his selection of studies, his personal conduct, and his personal attitude toward God, and he has made “Veritas” in very truth the appropriate motto of the leading American institution of learning. Harris, as an interpreter of the philosophy of education, both in his many writings and more numerous addresses, has lifted the popular conception of the profession of teaching to a loftier and more rational plane, while his control of the United States Bureau of Education since 1889 has given it a standing abroad, and a measure of utility at home, which it is gratifying to contemplate.

Few towns in New England possess more charm, whether of nature or society, than the towns in which her long-established institutions of learning have taken root, flourished, and dominated the life of the community. New Haven, Cambridge, and Providence are all cities now with a heterogeneous population and large manufacturing interests, and they each contain thousands of inhabitants to whom Harvard, Yale, and Brown are of as little practical benefit or concern as if they were situated in remote Hawaii or Porto Rico. Nevertheless, the chief glory of each of these large towns is its institution of learning, and to each there come added beauty of life and elevation of tone because of the presence within its borders of so many thirsty and hungry students and highly educated and apt instructors. It would be idle, however, to claim, for instance, that Cambridge to-day is quite as unique and charming in its simplicity and purity of life, or quite as classic in its atmosphere, as it was in the days when the town was a village, when the university was a college, and when thought and manners were as ideal as James Russell Lowell in his essay, Cambridge Thirty Years Ago, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson in his latest book, Cheerful Yesterdays, picture them.

To study the American college town at its best, unsullied by the grime of industrialism and the temptations and conventionalities of city life, one must go to hill-towns like Amherst and Williamstown, Massachusetts, or Hanover, New Hampshire. But even there, standards of living and conduct among students and instructors have been changed and influenced by the habits and ideals of the universities and the cities. Hence, to see the American college town in all its pristine simplicity and beauty, one now has to go to the new New England, and visit such institutions as Oberlin, Beloit, Knox, Iowa, and Colorado colleges, concerning which, and others of their type, Mr. Bryce writes:

“They get hold of a multitude of poor men who might never resort to a distant place for education. They set learning in a visible form, plain indeed and humble, but dignified even in her humility, before the eyes of a rustic people, in whom the love of knowledge, naturally strong, might never break from the bud into the flower, but for the care of some zealous gardener. They give the chance of rising in some intellectual walk of life to many a strong and earnest nature who might otherwise have remained an artisan or storekeeper, and perhaps failed in those avocations.”5

New England has a railroad mileage greater in proportion to its population and area than any section of the United States. Indeed, it is greater than that of any European country. In 1895, there were 11.77 miles of railroad for each one hundred square miles of territory, and 14.11 miles for each ten thousand inhabitants, the proportion in Massachusetts rising to 26.35 miles for each one hundred square miles. The same year, the number of employés engaged in railway traffic in New England was 60,593. On January 1, 1840, New England had only 426 miles of railway. January 1, 1895, it had 7,398 miles of road, which reported gross earnings of $82,845,401, and 116,069,178 passengers transported during the previous year.

The significance of these facts is apparent to the casual traveller through New England as well as to the economist. Nerves of steel and iron have bound urban and rural populations together, made the cities and towns accessible to the inland trader, farmer, and producer, and the country districts accessible to the wares of the merchant and manufacturer, and to the lover of nature. Suburban residence for the urban toiler has been made possible and cheap, while New England, as a whole, has been transformed from an agricultural and seafaring section to one with great and most varied manufacturing interests. Boston has come to be next to the largest centre for exports in the country, and the commercial and industrial as well as the intellectual capital of New England.

From the standpoint of æsthetics, the railroad station in the average New England town is a monstrosity, although in all fairness it should be said that within a decade there has been a notable improvement in this respect. But from the standpoint of economics and social science, the railway station is subordinate only to the church and the school in its service to society; and the degree of civilization in any community may be accurately computed by the volume and variety of the traffic done with its station agents. If one is desirous of studying the New England town, let him frequent the platforms of the railroad station and the freight-house, ascertain how large a proportion of its inhabitants leave town daily to do business in the adjacent city, how many travel even farther in pursuit of pleasure or on business, how many depart on outings that imply thrift and a desire for recreation and rest. Let him study the bulk of the raw material as it comes from the wool-markets of Europe and America, from the cotton fields of the South, and from the mines of Alabama, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota, and then inspect it as it goes forth again, converted into manifold forms of useful tools, machinery, fabrics, etc., and he will not lack for data respecting the status of the community. If he finds that pianos, organs, books, pictures, the latest devices of sanitary science, bicycles, etc., are arriving, he may justly infer that the inhabitants are in touch with the outer world and eager to take advantage of the latest discoveries of men of science. Nor is it imprudent to assert that such a study made in the average New England town will indicate economic wants, and their satisfaction, such as no communities elsewhere can display.

Compared with other sections of the country, New England has railroads which are better supervised by the States, more honestly constructed, capitalized and administered, and more responsive to public needs. Concentration of power and responsibility in the hands of the few goes on apace in New England, as well as elsewhere, so that now there are only four railway corporations of much importance in New England. But, through such governmental agents as the Massachusetts Board of Railroad Commissioners (organized in 1869, and the model for similar bodies elsewhere in the nation), the people still retain the whip-hand, still protect the rights of individuals, communities, and investors, and bring about those reductions in fare and freight charges, and those improvements in service, which public welfare and safety demand.

No attempt – however brief or superficial – to describe the life of the New England town of the last decade of the nineteenth century, especially in the States of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, could justifiably fail to note the transformation – economic, physical, and social – which the bicycle and trolley electric railroad have wrought in the life of the towns of those States.