Morning journal and courier., 1881-01-05
aoarnaI artb Goarier.
Wednesday Morning, Jan. 5, 1881.
Local News.
Annals of Guflford Institute.

was bne institute Want6dE ' what an aD- surd question this ought to be- It looks the gift-horsd in the mouth, but it has been asked and must be answered. Many poor town would have jumped at the chance of it, but old Guilford is not child to beeasily cajoled she has always wide difference of opinion on the best of subjects. Plenty of people, honestly born and bred, looked upon the new granite building as an interloper, that had already defaced the landscape, an- initiated the picturesque Stone place, and was further likely to take John from the farm, Mary from the dairy, and very serious 1y cut down Guilford exports. Hard-headed men with large farms, unruly cattle and small boys growing up, would have been blind not to see the introduction of a new disturbing element, when shortly, instead of Buck and Bright, their own flesh and blood would be jumping the fences and making off into the world, leaving them to repair damages as best they might. The old-style inhabitant, who had not forgotten early vanities of his own, and who like any wise man, knew more out of books than he could find in them, must have thought with alarm of the romantic conceits which little learning would be sure to introduce into weak young heads. Other some feared that Jesuitical bookcraft or scientific heterodoxy might creep in under symbols of learning; and thus from various sides the new institute may well have been looked upon as a doubt | full gift, from which, as from the Trojan horse, plaques might issue, as bad in their way as the Greeks, or those of Egypt. l hot civ day on a wooden bench with the English alphabet could not alone make better farmers, oystermen or housekeepers l All very true-and if between Quinnebaug and Mulberry, there had been no such | thoughts as these, Guilford would have been ! either more or less than human. And fur ther, taking the field at large, it is an open l question whether letters increase one's use ! and happiness in full proportion with the time and toll expended upon them. ''Oh, | that I had never known my letters !' cried the Abbe Lamennais, after enjoying the ripest l fruits of learning and searching all knowl- | edge to it's source 'fWould to heaven that knew not how to write, said the young Elm peror Nero, as he sat signing death-war- rant, while yet signing death-warrants had not made him cruel Nero. It is no secret | that famous writers to-day find that letters l 'don't pay," and it is the common history of l authors, discoverers and inventors, that they have toiled for name and reward and have died without the sight. | One says: 'sHalf the knowledge 1 of the world is mere assumption,' and an. l other doubts whether education civilization | and all the other botherations (sic) are of any use." Without stopping here to take a side, but putting away letters, schools and hoard. | ed tonnes, it has been remarked that in all ages men have somehow solved the essential problems of life without help of the school. k1.-k world has ever seen have not depended on academies, nor drawn their inspiration from the alphabet This, too, is all very true and I promise you Guilford has always had her full quota of natural born philosophers who have illustrated the penetrating force o1 genius, independent of scholastic routine the gift of nature and not of academic for nlulas.
 It is creditable to the founders of the In stitute that they did not balk at these anc other as subtle reflections which must have risen to their minds. In spite of the evi forebodings of pessimists and misanthropes in spite of the fear of exciting the envy anc | jealousy of other towns around-which tC | peaceloving Guilford must have been lio1 in the way-they resolved to go forward.
 From the earliest history of the tow1 young men of gravity and of curious rumi hating mind, perhaps little weak in th' back, have from time to time sickened of tht hayfeld and salt-marsh, and throwing uI their pitchforks and heavy meadow shoes have taken to the village dominies Witt smatterings of mathematics and dead Ian
 guages they have marched off in due cours,
 to college and to the more laborious career O
 the professions. Taught from Monday t.
 Sunday in the seant college of some Guilfort
 parsonage, the Ruggleses, the Collinses, tn
 Duttons, the Dudleys, the Fowlers, tn
 Eiots the Leetes, the Todds, the Halls tn
 Hills, the Hubbards, the Wards, have gon | II. C..
 down. It was the poky slowness of his un
 cle Lot Benton's red oxen, here in Guilford
 that sent Lyman Beecher out into the world
 I have indirectly put the question whethe
 at the founding of the institute there were an,
 such genuises, oppressed with farming ant
 canvassing the prospects for sedentary ca
 reer. It has always been found there are a
 good fish in the sea as ever came out of it At the island, in the borough and on the hill
 around, and especially in that fertile section
 the upper plains (Nut Plains) and as notabl,
 in the forest regions of the north (the Sugar
 Loaf countrY) there were those with the mak
 ing of men in them, who would at all hazard
 have pushed and scrambled their way out in
 to the world and to these the institute ros up like a beacon and was godsend. Indeed , there was at that time all over town rare
 good crop of young men and maidens, ripen ing up, who would shortly have been shipped | off to the shops and towns of neighborins
 
 on the ground and indicated as plain as could be better market for produce of such fint quality.
 It has been often found true enough that the best furnishing of school and apparatus is as naught where there is no interest nor demand for them. The precise amount ot capacity that could be spared for education in and about Guilford was yet a problem but enough has been said to show that the experiment was worth making, that the In stitute was not set in a desert nor cast like a pearl before swine; that to all appearances the gift, which might have gone to Madison | or to Branford, as much needing it, was well given to Guilford as likely to make good | use of it.
 Having settled, sufficiently for the present, the question whether Guilford Institute was l wanted, I proceed with my story. For l aught that has been said so far it mighs be | surmised that Guilford Institute fell out of l the sky. It more literally sprang out of the | ground. The cause, however, must be | sought further. We are puzzled in our day over forty things whose source and origin are unknown ;-whence the Gypsies? how the Il pyramids what the lost arts are samples | of questions that balk inquiry. There | should be no such uncertainty about the | origin of Guilford Institute, which has al- ready done more for the world than the l whole rabble of Gypsies, and is for that req l son alone more venerable than Cheops or the I Sphinx.
 Mrs. Sarah Brown Grifing, widow of Ma thaniel was born as long ago as June 3, 1767, | in the old Brown mansion, which was for merly itself a sort of Sphinx on Guilford Green, and in the revolution gave shelter and succotash to Lafayette and his gay French l men. And when was 1767 :? Fox, Pitt, Burke and Walpole were on the English stage and l George III. had taken (176O) the British l throne. Those authors who form the staple of modern English classics were not born Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge. Southey, Lamb, Landor, De Quincey, Byron, Shelley and the rest. Frederick the Great had just wound up (1763) his seven years war with Maria Theresa of Austria. Napoleon, with | his rich olive complexion and oval face, had not begun to be born. Mrs. Grifing, then | little Sally Brown, was out of the cradle and courtesying to Guilford Green, when the dan gerous Corsican was first swaddled and rock 1 ed in 1769 Washington was young man, Hamilton boy and John Quincy Adams baby There was in the wide world no Calhoun, no Daniel Webster, no Lyman Beecher, nor Roxanna Foote, nor Parson Brainerd. They rode on billions, l hatcheled hax hauIed wood into the fra