{"id":2272,"date":"2013-11-10T12:34:53","date_gmt":"2013-11-10T16:34:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/willistonblogs.com\/archives\/?p=2272"},"modified":"2015-10-31T22:28:09","modified_gmt":"2015-11-01T02:28:09","slug":"the-old-neighborhood-1844","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/willistonblogs.com\/archives\/the-old-neighborhood-1844\/","title":{"rendered":"The Old Neighborhood, 1844"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"campus<\/a>
“View of Williston Seminary, East Hampton, Mass., Showing Part of the Village, with Mount Tom in the Distance.” [Click to enlarge.]<\/figcaption><\/figure>The image above is of an 1844 lithograph by Edmund Burke Kellogg and Elijah Chapman Kellogg of Hartford, Conn.\u00a0 The Kellogg brothers were prolific publishers of scenic, historical, and sentimental prints, active from 1830 until 1900, second in popularity only to the rival firm of Currier & Ives.\u00a0 The print measures 18 x 14 inches, and was published in two states, the color lithograph shown here, and a monochrome version.\u00a0 (Our reproduction leaves off the lengthy title for no better reason than the entire sheet would not fit on the Archives’ scanner.)<\/p>\n

It is probably the earliest published image of Easthampton; certainly of Williston Seminary.\u00a0 The vantage point is West Street, on the bluff above the Manhan River, which is visible in the middle foreground.\u00a0 At this time none of the later construction\u2014Shop Row, the Town Hall, etc.\u2014had even been contemplated.\u00a0 Open land, most of it the village common, ran right down to the riverbank.<\/p>\n

The original 1841 Seminary Building, informally known as the White Seminary or “White Sem.,” stands at the far right.\u00a0 The other immediately identifiable landmark is the First Congregational Church at the center.\u00a0 It was built in 1836.\u00a0 The print shows the church in its original location, but later in 1844 Samuel Williston payed the cost of moving the structure back 50 feet, so that it would line up with the present and future Seminary buildings.\u00a0 In 1866, to make way for the construction of North Hall, Williston would again move the church to a location north of the Common, where it stood until fire took it in 1929.\u00a0 The White Seminary met a similar fate; it burned in 1857, to be replaced by South Hall.\u00a0 (For contemporary accounts of the conflagration, see “The Great Seminary Fire<\/a><\/strong>” and “Abner Austin Fights the Fire<\/a><\/strong>.”)<\/p>\n

Other buildings are harder to identify with accuracy.\u00a0 The white house at the far left is almost certainly that of the Principal, Luther Wright.\u00a0 Edward Hitchcock, class of 1845, and teacher of natural science at Williston from 1850 to 1863, places it there in a description of the grounds included in a 1902 memoir of his Easthampton days.1<\/sup>\u00a0 But the appearance of the structure is somewhat different than in the 1845 print below.\u00a0 We may need to allow the artists a certain license, the more so since the Kellogg Brothers’ sense of relative size, and perhaps perspective, seems somewhat skewed.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The campus a year later, showing Principal Wright’s house, the First Church, English (Middle) Hall, and the White Seminary. Drawn and engraved by O. H. Throop, 1845.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Hitchcock mentions three houses directly opposite the church, which may be the buildings in front of the church in the 1844 image.\u00a0 He describes a saw mill \u2014 could that be in the left foreground?\u00a0 But it seems too far from the riverbank.\u00a0 Hitchcock also notes that the burying ground was across the street from the White Seminary.\u00a0 The Kelloggs have drawn the gravestones only as a vague grey area.\u00a0 Perhaps superstition, or marketing concerns, militated against a more explicit rendering.<\/p>\n

Most problematic is the building to the left of the White Seminary.\u00a0 Edward Dibble2<\/sup> reports an 1842 structure used as the “Town Hall,” that was moved and appended as a chapel to the First Church when that structure was relocated in 1866.\u00a0 Abner Austin<\/a><\/strong> refers to it in his account of the 1857 fire, suggesting that it stood quite close to the White Seminary.\u00a0 The reference cannot be to the present Easthampton Town Hall, which was not built until 1869.\u00a0 Ensign Hosmer Kellogg (no relation to the lithographers), in his dedicatory address for that building,3<\/sup> places the original town hall on the Seminary campus.\u00a0 Nonetheless, it does not appear in the 1845 engraving, nor does a photograph of the chapel in Dibble’s account resemble the building in the 1844 image at all.\u00a0 It seems far more likely that the building represents the future English Hall, probably under construction at the time the Kellogg brothers were making sketches for their lithograph.\u00a0 They could not have known what the finished building would look like.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The cornerstone from “White Sem.,” now incorporated into a present-day Williston Northampton building. Readers: who remembers where this is?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

1<\/sup>Typewritten extract (1941) from a notebook in the Edward (AC 1849) and Mary Judson Hitchcock Papers, Amherst College Archives. Edward “Doc” Hitchcock (1828-1911) went on to a distinguished career as Professor of Hygiene and Physical Education at Amherst.<\/p>\n

2<\/sup>Edward F. Dibble, A Burning and Shining Light: the Congregational Church in Easthampton, 1785-1985.<\/em> [Easthampton, Mass.: Easthampton Congregational Church, 1985?]<\/p>\n

3<\/sup>Address of Hon. E. H. Kellogg of Pittsfield, Mass., together with other exercises connected with the Dedication of the Town Hall, at Easthampton, Mass., June 29, 1869.<\/em>\u00a0 Easthampton: Frank A. Bartlett, Printer, 1869.<\/p>\n

Comments?\u00a0 Questions?\u00a0 Answers to the cornerstone question?
\nPlease use the link below.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The image above is of an 1844 lithograph by Edmund Burke Kellogg and Elijah Chapman Kellogg of Hartford, Conn.\u00a0 The Kellogg brothers were prolific publishers of scenic, historical, and sentimental prints, active from 1830 until 1900, second in popularity only to the rival firm of Currier & Ives.\u00a0 The print measures 18 x 14 inches, … Continue reading The Old Neighborhood, 1844<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[53,125,397,25],"tags":[258,277,276,278,272,279,271,5,102],"class_list":["post-2272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campus-and-building-history","category-easthampton-history-2","category-local-history","category-williston-seminary","tag-abner-austin","tag-edmund-burke-kellogg","tag-edward-hitchcock","tag-elijah-chapman-kellogg","tag-first-congregational-church","tag-henry-perry","tag-manhan-river","tag-samuel-williston","tag-white-seminary"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/willistonblogs.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2272"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/willistonblogs.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/willistonblogs.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/willistonblogs.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/willistonblogs.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2272"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/willistonblogs.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2619,"href":"https:\/\/willistonblogs.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2272\/revisions\/2619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/willistonblogs.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/willistonblogs.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/willistonblogs.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}