Harper's New Monthly Magazine
November, 1871.

A New England Village.

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 be was ever afraid of; and pronounced him the greatest divine whom he knew.        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 bad 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 Co1lege and honorably 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.        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 825 | Previous Page | Next Page | | Berkshire County Home |