The Press., 1905-03-01
THIRTY YEARS AGO.
Items of local interest taken from the columns
Of The Press, thirty years ago.l
March 4, 1875.

OF Tn0 FF066s Unity years agO.1
March 4, 1878.
The Winter School In. the Street" Forty
one Years Ago.
By REV. @. HAMMOND, Monsoon
The appended catalogue Of the
Street school, (Stafford), for the win
ter Of 1884. will interest those who
find in it their own names. It sug-
gests also, by way of preface, the
great changes in the entire town,
since that time, as to individuals,
families and neighborhoods.
In 1898 hardly a dwelling house
was on all the area, now the site of
the Springs village. The Springs
House stood alone in it's dignity
Built near the beginning of che GEN.
fury, it was for years a noted place
of fashionable resort. Its proprietor
was DR.. Samuel Willard, physician
of high respectabilitv. graduate of
Harvard college, and the son Of Rev
John Willard, D. D. of Stafford.
Rev. DR.. Dwight of Yale college in
his travels of New England visited
the Springs in 1907, and particularly
described their medicinal virtues, and
complimented the efforts of Dr. Will
lard in making the place serviceable to
the public. DR.. Willard died in 1921.
Several years since. saw an ancient
engraving of the house and its sur
roundings. which must have been
made as early as 1910. This engrav-
ing then seemed to me an exact rep
rcsentation of the Springs Hotel, and
it's landscape, as I remember it forty
years ago. .....--..~~ ..
The manufactures of that time were
chiefly of iron reduced from it's native
ore beds in the region. Not one of
the present factories had then been
built, but there were three blast fur
naces in operation. If the men en-
ployed in them were not "men of iron
mould, - it is certain they moulded
great deal of iron.
The chief business of the town was
agriculture, an occupation then hon.
eyed, as it ever ought to be, by all
citizens. The farmers found employ
ment part of the year in making
charcoal for the furnaces. Although
the demand for charcoal was great,
yet the price of wood was cheap, be-
lug from 81 so to $175 per cord for
the best quality. s
DR.. Dwight described the east par
ish of Stafford in his travels, in 1907,
as closely built village upon a
street running north and south over
very elevated ground, and as having
one church without steeple.'' DR..
Dwight visited Stafford the very year
in which Rev. Dr. Willard closed his
long passionate of half century, lack
ing just one month. He mentions
one marvel we have never heard of
from any other source, that "a few
years since, a small volcanic explo-
sion took place in one of the hills,
about three miles west of the spring. -
Have modern biologists discovered
any traces of that little volcano?
To call Stafford Street a village, in
any period of it's history, is mis-
homer; for it was always street of
farms, and of good farms too, both as
to size and quality.
Other localities, in recent times,
have become real, compact villages,
not closely built The sites of
these villages have been chosen, be-
cause of business which has made
them centers of population, whose
habits and modes of life are wholly
diverse from those belonging to a
farming community.
The irresistible social forces, which
have called into being so many New
England villages, cannot assail the
forces of strength which ensures the
vitality of the farming interest.
If the natural strength of the soil
remains, then the Street may contin-
ne to be just what it has always been
and what it was always destined to
be, and what it will never fail to he,
the residence of farmers who may
thrive in all the future as their pre-
decessors have in the past, according
to the measure of their industry and
intelligence. @
In 1888 there we're two meeting
houses in the Street, and these long
ago disappeared. 1t is supposed that
every one of the ten churches now in
the town have been built since that
date.
Forty .one years ago not railroad
existed in New England. and now the |
are riddled for miles in ex-
tent to make way for the tramp of
the iron horse The Street was then
in the line of great stage route from
Hartford to Boston by way of Wor-
cester, and heavily loaded stages daily |
passed each way. But the glory of
all that business has utterly passed |
away from the Stafford hills and 9TH
er country towns. Indeed, an old |
fashioned country stage is likely to
be as curious relic of antiquity, as
the spinning wheel and domestic loom
Of our grandmothers have already be-
come.
The old school house still stands on
that eminence from whence nearly
every dwelling in the district can be
distinctly seen. 1t has been moved,
indeed, few rods from it's former
site, and we suppose it's interior ar
have been modernized-
but in it's general appearance it re-
mains as it was in it's prime, when it
was one of the largest, and doubtless
one of the best school houses of the
county. The old church never had
4 steeple, but the old school house,
long its contemporary, had both