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Chard Powers Smith - The Housatonic

Puritan River

     The Middle or North, Branch of the Headwaters is immediately the outlet of big Pontusac Lake, just north of Pittsfield City, and back of that is its inlet, called Town Brook, coming down from New Ashford through Lanesboro.  It assembles from three big springs on a hill called Brodie Mountain, and by the time it dives under near Route 7 it is a gay, racing stream.  But in its gravelly bed under the concrete bridge it performs the remarkable feat of disappearing from the face of the earth into subterranean courses.  About a hundred yards to the east a series of springs boiling up in a cow pasture suggest the return to the light of the lost river.  From there it heads southward in a leisurely way.

     The interest of the North Branch is less in the stream than in Pratt Hill, a spur of Greylock two miles southeast of the streams rising, that is the true head and beginning of the long chute of the Housatonic Valley.  From Pratt Hill the great groove down though the highlands, scarcely ten miles wide in these upper reaches, is spectacularly visible southward over Pittsfield for about a third of ots entire length, the Massachusetts third which I call the Upper Valley.  On the left another spur of Greylock runs south to merge, after it is penerated by the East Branch, into the eastern Rampart of the valley, at first long October Mountain, one of the biggest of the Hoosacs, and afterwards the Beartown Mountains, the Green Mountains, and other names that change in almost every new township.

     On the right are the taller Taconics, visible even under normal haze for thirty miles down to 2,700 - foot Mt. Everest. Or “The Dome” just north of the Connecticut line.  With Monument Mountain, jutting out from the Beartowns to overlap it, it forms a sort of titanic gateway through which the river spills southward into the Lower Valley, the crest of whose eastern wall, Canaan Mountain, is visible over Monument on clear days.

     Besides the eastern and western walls, there are visible from Pratt Hill the remnants of a medial range that once ran down the center of he valley and still puts up respectable large hills down through Lenox.  The one in the foreground is called Constitution Hill in commemoration of a famous bonfire and celebration which Lanesboro staged there in honor of its     illiterate delegate whose speech before the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention of 1787 is said to have carried the day for the Union.  Ten miles farther southward, South Mountain pre-empts the middle of the panorama, then Yokun Seat and Baldhead running down into Lenox.  There can be seen the first traverse horizon, the first abrupt drop in the central level of the valley, the first of the huge, geological steps by which it descends to the sea.  Above this horizon extrude the heads of Monument and Everett, sloping down to watch other to form the gateway to the South.

     For the most part the thirty three airline miles of the Upper Valley, especially the part south of Monument mountain are wide and flat, the mountains set far back on both sides, rising on the average about fifteen hundred feet above the valley floor.  The river drops from a thousand foot elevation in Pittsfield to about six hundred in Canaan, Connecticut, but since most of this drop is taken in a few, brief reaches, especially those which turn the paper mills in Lee, Housatonic, and Rising, the stream for most of this drop is taken in a few, brief reaches, especially those which turn the paper mills in Lee, Housatonic and Rising, the stream for most of this phase is sluggish and meandering.  Indeed it winds almost double the amount of its actual progress southward, frequently turning all the way back and biting into itself to make little islands.  Here in the flatlands is one of the best agricultural sections of the valley, which means one of the best in New England.

       The third part of the river and the valley, which I shall call the Lower River and the Lower Valley, begins at the Great Falls at Falls Village, in Canaan, Connecticut, about six miles south of the state line, and runs with only one major bend for some fifty-five crow flight miles down to Derby and Shelton, picking up many tributaries and increasing in width from about fifty to a hundred yards.  Throughout this stretch the mountains stand in close to the river that here runs by their picturesque precipices and through their gorges with a uniformly rapid current flecked with white water, through with only four falls and one rapids that require carries by canoers and fold boaters in normal times.  In rainey seasons, especially spring and fall, when the leaf covering is gone, the cliffs along the river, and along the distant mountains where they are visible, are draped with white bridal-veil falls of little streams and freshets, the nearer ones rustling high up the precipices like a forest wind.  The drop at river level is from about six hundred feet at Falls Village to the tide at Derby, and in the last reach the flow is wide and deep and majestic.  In the whole Lower Valley there are on the river only three industries large enough to be called factories, with a dozen or more hidden back in the hills.

   The fourth, or Tidewater, part of the river begins at industrial Derby and Shelton, where the gorgeous bluffs at the confluence of the Housatonic, the Naugatuck, and the ocean tides are ubiquitously disfigured and vilified by chimneys, smoke and slums.  From here down, the river widens between sycamore trees, salt marshes and fertile peneplanes for thirteen tidal miles to its food harbor at Stratford, and so between Milford and Stratford Points to Long Island Sound and the sea.

   Of the four parts of the valley, the central two, namely, the Upper Valley and the Lower Valley, constitute together about ninety of the valley’s hundred and fifteen miles of over-all length.  It is in this main central stretch, neglecting both the Headwaters and the Tidewater, that the qualities of the region re most apparent, the combination of graceful, wooded mountains and cultivated, wholly agrarian lowlands, of quiet wilderness surrounding long-settled farms and the villages that serve them.

   In the past, these conditions have been approximated in other river valleys in the east; but there is no other river valley in the populous parts of the country where they are preserved today to the degree that the Housatonic Valley preserves them.  The region is unique in having been occupied and farmed for three hundred years, in being closely flanked, east and west, by two of the earth’s most highly industrialized districts, in itself possessing the resources that at least equally invited exploitation, yet in having resisted it in a contest of forces that make up the drama of its history.  Twenty miles to the east the Naugatuck Valley clanks and reeks with “progress”.  Forty miles to the west the beauty of the Mohawk Valley and much of that of the Hudson Valle have disappeared under cities, smoke, chimneys, garnish highways, dumps, billboards, and summer slums.  Between and above them, the Housatonic, with water power greater than one and equal to the other, pours down its marble bed between iron hills, bordered by one of the two oldest real railroads in New England, one that was built to reach its superior resources.  And still the Housatonic remains almost as undeveloped by industry and commerce, its minerals almost hidden under forests, and its valley as green, agricultural, and thinly populated as in the eighteenth century.  Not a municipality of six thousand occurs in the main, central valley, and there are only twelve factories on the hundred and twenty river miles with hundreds of unused power sites between Pittsfield and Derby.  Only the hills and the farms and the villages remain, sequestered, scarcely changed from what they were when the white men first settled here to worship the Truth in their fashion.

Whether as a cause or a result of its continuing pristine state, an impressive number of people have, from the earliest days, followed intellectual pursuits in the valley, theologians, political philosophers, miscellaneous writers, educators, scientists, artists and musicians who have come here to escape from the outer world’s too insistent reminders of changeful time.  Some have been born here, but more have immigrated in maturity, and many have been merely regular summer residents.  The valley is less a cradle than a workshop for seekers of truth.  For the large proportion of them in its population, it can claim a very high place in America.

At the arbitrarily taken dates in 1820 and 1860, I have compared, with respect to the number and proportion of people in the Dictionary of American Biography, the valley of the Housatonic with that of the Charles.  Since the latter contained Cambridge and Boston, I presumed that it would embrace the most distinguished population in New England and so, at the dates taken, in America.  In the population of the Housatonic Valley I included seasonal residents who either owned or regularly rented property there, or who are known to have done some of their best work there.  For the year 1820, the Charles Valley shows more than double the proportion of distinguished residents than the Housatonic Valley does, Boston being then small and the Charles Valley rural.  But in 1860, when Boston was a big city and the Charles Valley had quadrupled in population, the still rural Housatonic region drew abreast of its eastern rival, where it has since approximately remained.

In the second table of figures for distinguished people are taken from Who’s Who for 1940.  The Housatonic Valley clearly leads the United States, as it does New York and Chicago.  It is a trifle behind the Charles Valley and well behind the smallish city of New Haven, where the Who’s Who-filling university had a greater influence on the ratio of distinction to general population than is the case in Boston.  If the inquiry e confined to the long, central, city less reach of the Housatonic Valley between Pittsfield and Derby, then its proportion of distinction exceeds that of any other region examined.

Looking back over the record of three hundred years, it seems impossible to seize upon any single causes as the reason why forces of destruction, why, in spite of inviting natural resources, the example of neighboring regions, and the tendencies of the industrial age, the beauty of the landscape, the strong intellectual tradition, and the stable agrarian economy without either squalor or great wealth have remained.  The contest has often been close, though in the past the opposing forces were rarely aware of each other and their rivalry.  Today they are very much aware of the issue, and, strengthened by the most recent immigration, the forces that desire to preserve the valley are probably the stronger.  For another century or more the valley may well remain what the Indians first called it, “Hous-aton-uck,”  the Place-beyond-te-mountains, the place where you climb up over the Litchfield Hills or the Berkshires and come down into a wide land where  the symbols of eternal truth lie quietly around you yet, and the Great River still flows untroubled by the values of the outer world.

In view of these qualities, I might have given this story of the Housatonic the subtitle “River of Truth.”  But, because the Puritans were the first truth seekers here and started the tradition of te valley flowing, and becaue their affirmative qualities have been in large part preserved both in the native Yankees and in the successive invasions of intellectuals, I have called it Puritan River.  The word “Puritan” has for so long been used negatively, and ignorantly, to denote blue-nose intolerance that it is time to recall its real and affirmative significance.  The essential quality of the Puritan was that he lived in, or hoped he lived in, what he called the State of Grace.  In Calvinist theology this meant that he had been assigned a part, however tiny, in the magnificent cosmic drama of the creation, the fall of man, his redemption and salvation.   In immediate fact it meant that he was a Platonist, finding reality in an idea in his mind or imagination, and directing his life in accordance with the idea.

Besides its platonic quality, there were at least three important features of the “inner light,” this “heart religion,” this domination of life by an idea, which continue to distinguish it today in those who follow it in their fashion.  First, it was attainable only through disciplined thought-- every Puritan was, in his degree, an intellectual.  Second, it was an individual matter, having nothing to do with any priest, bishop or other authority.  Third, the satisfactions accompanying the grasp and application of the inner idea wee likewise in the mind, and were in contrast to the gratifications of sense and vanity in the material world.  All three of these qualities have distinguished the residents of the valley in the past and continue to distinguish them, whether they are ministers, farmers, villagers, merchants, writers, educators, scientists, painters, sculptors or musicians. 

     In passing I would like to record a few specific protests against the strange reputation latterly given the Puritans by blackwashing historians who make a profession of detracting New England.  To begin with, the real Puritan was not, as now universally believed, primarily interested in anybody else’s conduct.  Conduct was a secondary matter with him.  It was important only as an indication of the presence or absence of the State of Grace, for it was the latter upon which the qualification for church membership was based.  Once you had achieved this state, it was presumed that your conduct would take care of itself.  It was only in the two main periods of the Puritan decay—one between about 1675 and 1725, and especially the final one called “Victorianism”—that the descendants of the Puritans concerned themselves with conduct for its own sake and so became touched with smugness, propriety, snobbery, and the ensuing hypocrisies.

The warrant for the accusation of intolerance which has fondly been pinned on the Puritans by America’s Europe-flattering apologists is largely derived from a work of irritated fancy touching the fictitious “Blue Laws of Connecticut,” composed by one Reverend Samuel Peters, an Episcopal minister, a Tory, and a faintly picturesque liar.  He was used a little roughly by the Sons of Liberty in 1774--he claimed that his robe was torn—fled to England, and composed his authoritative work.  He makes much of capital crimes and “bloodie” cruelty generally.  A few facts in rebuttal will suffice. 

     In 1602 England had 31 capital crimes; and the number gradually increased to 223 in 1819.  In 1656 Massachusetts and New Haven colonies had 16 each, and Connecticut Colony 14; and the number decreased thereafter In all three colonies.  Of the other American plantations, New York and Virginia, while more modern in this respect than England, were less so that the Puritan establishments.

     As for witchcraft, the delusion of it possessed the whole Occidental world in the sixteen, seventeenth, and part of the eighteenth century that there were a hundred thousand executions in Europe, perhaps one in five hundred of the average population during the period.  Until 1697, when the mania ended in America—though not abroad, there were either nine or eleven executions in Connecticut, one of the doubtful ones being of Goody Bassett of Stratford, the only case in the valley.  During the same period there were thirty-two executions in Massachusetts, making a maximum total of forty-three, or one in about seven thousand of the average population of the two colonies.

    In the matter of “cruel and unusual punishments,” the Puritans were also much farther advanced out of medievalism than the mother country, and somewhat more liberal than New York and Virginia.  The same was true of the use of torture to extract evidence.  Nowhere in America in America were the Nazi horrors of the British Star Chamber even remotely rivaled, least of all in the New England colonies.

     Of all the accomplishments of the Puritan-baiters, none is more groundless than the reputation they have given them for religious intolerance.  Here, as in all things, they can be truly pictures only against the background of their times, not ours.  Religious toleration as we know it today was upheld by no sate in the early seventeenth century.  The Puritans did not flee from ghastly legalized persecution in England in order to establish that yet unknown principle—which one of their number, Roger Williams, was going to be the first to promulgate and practice.  Nor did they claim that their settlements were havens for any sects but their own.  They undertook certain privation and possible violent and early death in order to worship God in their own way, and once they had hewn out their settlements, they asked only to be let alone.  There was plenty more wilderness available.  Let the Quakers and Ranters and Baptists found their own settlements, instead of meddling with those who had already established theirs with great hardships. 

     The British law the Puritans fled from was far more cruel to heretics than the laws they adopted.  It imprisoned all nonconformists, banished them after three months if they did not make public confession and submission, and killed them “without benefit of clergy” if they failed to obey the sentence of banishment or returned after their initial departure.

     The laws if Virginia and New York against heresy were milder than those of Great Britain, but more stringent than those of New England.  Massachusetts, like Virginia, killed Quakers who, having been twice banished, returned the third time.  Connecticut—which incidentally included all of the settled part of the Housatonic Valley until after religious tolerance had become universal—never had any law against heresy at all.  The extent of intolerance, as actually practiced by all the Puritans against people of different faiths, was stated in the law of New Haven Colony.  It recognized freedom of private conscience, but forbade “broaching, publishing or maintaining any dangerous errour or heresie, or shall endeavour to draw, or seduce others thereto,” the punishment being normally fine or banishment.  That is, every man’s private belief was his own affair, but when he began to preach any unorthodox “errour” and so threatened what the Puritans at great pains and danger had built, then they invited him either to desist or to leave.

     In passing, it may be worth noting why the Puritans, like the rest of the Anglo-American world, were particularly severe against Quakers.  The reason was that in the seventeenth century the Quakers were something quite different from the promoters of peace and brotherly love who are now universally admired.  Their quietism did not appear till a century after, and in the period of Puritan settlement they were, for the most part, an ignorant and militant sect whose members made a practice of attending other meetings—especially Puritan meeting—for the avowed purpose of disrupting them.  To this end they habitually violated ordinary decorum, keeping heir hats on, heckling the minister, and sometimes breaking into his sermon to harangue the congregation.  It is understandable that this made them unpopular.

     In our modern intolerance of the founders of our country, we would do well to inform ourselves concerning the times in which they lived.  We would also do well to recall that they actually believed in and tried to live by a great religious faith.  They were tolerant as they could be and maintain their integrity.  We, having no faith, can be tolerant of anything except faith, with a tolerance that is empty.

     But the importance of the record of the Puritans is not to rebut their detractors; it is to remind us of their positive contributions to America and the world.  By the 1620’s, when they began coming to America, their principle of religious individualism was already expanded to include political individualism was already expanded to include political individualism.  In the earliest expressions of the first American Puritans and in the governments they founded, the doctrine is established that no man is to be governed but by his consent, that governments comprises a contract or “covenant” between the rulers and the governed, and that when the former break the contract the latter have the right to take up arms in defense of their freedom.  By the middle 1630’s, Massachusetts and Connecticut had embodied these principles in instruments which, after that of their neighbor Plymouth Colony, were the first of America’s series of written constitutions.  Between these instruments and the correspondence of the men who drew them we find all the basic doctrines and much of the language of the great documents of a century and a half later.

     At the same early period the theory of individualism was being applied as local democracy, first, in the religious congregationalism and, second, in the expansion of the principle to the town meeting where likewise majority vote prevailed.  The now popular assumption that until some quite recent date all of New England except Rhode Island was theocratic—that is, limited the vote to church members—is contrary to fact. 

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