Woods, made up of every variety of tree and shrub native to our latitude, where nuts grew and all kinds of small game abounded, where crows and now and then a hen-hawk built their nests, were in easy reach upon the slopes of the hills both to the west and east. Ledges of rock to the north were the lair of wildcats, a vermin so numerous seventy-five years ago as to be a serious pest to the farmers; and stone walls, where woodchucks retreated from the clover-fields and thought themselves safe, were the usual division-fences for the fields.
There were other things that were equally pleasing to a boy’s fancy, and perhaps equally influential in his education. The lakes, streams, and forests of the town had been the favorite fishing and hunting ground of the Indians; arrow-heads were occasionally picked up on the lake shore or turned up by the ploughshare upon the hillside; and, best of all, Mount Tom was one of the series of stations where blazed the signal-fires which the Indians of this region built to warn their brethren of the whole territory between the Housatonic and Naugatuck rivers of the approach of their enemies, the fierce Mohawks.
Litchfield, in short, was the paradise of a birth-place for any boy. It was paradise, school-house, gymnasium, church, and cathedral to Henry Ward Beecher. In it he experienced his sweetest pleasures, learned his best lessons, gained control of his powers, and offered his first worship. He breathed its pure air, climbed its rocks, wandered in its woods, wrestled with its winter storms, and in this way laid the foundation for that superb health for which he was remarkable through life.
With the hunger and inquisitiveness of a growing boy, he searched nature’s storehouse of fruits and nuts, which opens with the wintergreen plums and squaw-berries of the melting snow-time of spring, and continues, a house of plenty for all that know her secrets—partridges, squirrels, and boys—until the snow covers the ground in December, and so gained that habit of investigation into the things of nature, and of close observation, that distinguished him ever after.
He lay on the ground and looked up into the blue sky and the moving tree-tops for hours together, and listened to the voices of spring-time and eventide, and in this way, as he tells us, received the first distinct religious impressions that he remembered. His nature, which seemed closed almost to the verge of stupidity to the rules of syntax and the answers in the Westminster Catechism, was wide open and receptive to all the processes and influences of nature around him. He drank them in, and they became not only a vast storehouse of facts and images to which he resorted in after-life for illustrations, but, even more than that, a very part of himself. The tree that so often appeared in his sermons was made from those up whose trunks he had climbed, in whose shade he had lain, and to the whisperings of whose leaves he had listened in boyhood. The spring which so often served in illustrating spiritual truths was but the description of those that burst out from the foot of Chestnut or of Prospect Hill, and the flowers so frequently referred to in the pulpit or in private conversation were such as he had grown familiar with by the roadside, in the meadows or the forests of his country home. The moving of the great cloud-shadows across the fields of Litchfield, the blue of its skies, the reddening of its mornings and the gold of its sunsets, the flash of its sunlight upon the lake, its wealth of apple-blossoms, the exquisite beauty of its violets hidden away in fence-corners, the grace of its elm-branches, the ruggedness of its oaks, the strength of its rocks, the soft catkins of its willows, its meadow flower-garden of clover, daisy, and buttercup, the gorgeousness of its forests in autumn, the gurgle of its brooks, the song of its birds, the plaintive voices of its twilight, the gentle breathings of its August winds and the fierce rattle of its December storms, were all absorbed by his receptive nature and continually reappeared in his writings and talk of after-years. They added the grace and beauty native to them to all that he wrote or spoke, and were in part the secret of that charm in his words which attached and interested all alike. They did more than this: they prepared him to be an interpreter of nature to others, and, when he had become equally well equipped with a rich spiritual experience, they fitted him, as we shall see farther on, to be the reconciler of a spiritual faith and a material science.
It was not an unimportant thing, but one of God’s beautiful provisions, that Henry Ward Beecher was born in Litchfield, where there is more of nature to the square foot, as we believe, than in any other place on the globe; to learn his first lessons in the beautiful school of her flowers, birds, brooks, meadows, pasture lands, hill-tops, and forests.
“Dear old Litchfield! I love thee still, even if thou didst me the despite of pushing me into life upon thy high and windy hilltop! Where did the spring ever break forth more joyously and sing at escaping from winter, as the children of Israel did when that woman’s-rights Miriam chanted her song of victory? Where did the torrid summer ever find a lovelier place in which to cool its beams? What trees ever murmured more gently to soft winds, or roared more lion-like when storms were abroad?
“It was there that we learned to fish, to ride a horse alone, to do the barn chores, to cut and split wood, to listen at evening to the croaking frogs and whistling tree-toads, to go to meeting and go to sleep, to tear holes in new clothes; there we learned to hoe, to mow away hay, to weed onions, to stir up ministers’ horses with an unusual speed when ridden to water; there we went a-wandering up and down forest-edges, and along the crooked brooks in flower-pied meadows, dreaming about things not to be found in any catechism.”
Equally marked was Litchfield at that day for its social and moral as for its natural advantages. Its early settlers, mostly from the excellent stock from which the colonies of Hartford and Windsor were formed, were men of broad and liberal mould, and began their work upon this hilltop in a characteristic fashion. They laid out their streets and staked off the village common with such generous breadth that they remain the delight of residents and the admiration of strangers to this day. They made such liberal provision for education and religion that the settlement soon became noted for the excellency of its schools and the commanding influence of its pulpit.[1]
1. Out of sixty-four allotments into which the town was divided, one was to be given to the first minister, to be his and descend to his heirs for ever; a second was to be reserved for the use of the minister during his ministry, and a third was reserved for the benefit of a school. While as yet three houses, one in the centre of the present village, and one on either side a mile distant, were picketed and garrisoned for protection against the Indians, and while there were but sixty adult male inhabitants, they built their first church edifice, with a Sabbath-Day House for the better accommodation of the people.
The law-school of Judges Reeve and Gould, and the young ladies’ school of the Misses Pierce, made it an educational centre scarcely second in the breadth of its influence to any in the land, and attracted a class of residents of high social position.
Its courts gathered from time to time some of the leading members of the bar from the whole country, not for a few hours, as now with our railroad facilities, but for days and weeks together. All these things helped to create a very high order of public spirit—that force which, often wholly unregarded, is yet so powerful in moulding the character and giving direction to the life.
One other element in this communal influence must not be omitted—its intense patriotism. From the beginning to the close of the Revolutionary struggle the records of the county of Litchfield are stamped with the evidence of the most enthusiastic loyalty to the cause of the struggling colonies. At the time of the Boston Port Bill, Litchfield had forwarded a liberal contribution for the aid of the poor of that city. When the equestrian statue of King George, of gilded lead, was missing from the Bowling Green in New York, it was shortly found in the dwelling-house of Oliver Wolcott in this village, was melted down by his daughters and their friends, and furnished forty thousand bullets, which were sent to our soldiers in the field, to be afterwards forwarded by them, from the muzzles of their muskets, to the king’s Hessians, with the hissing compliments of the American colonies.
No town excelled her in the proportionate number or quality of the men she sent into the field (at one time every able-bodied man in the town being, it is said, at the front), nor in the suffering and loss which they endured.