The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, Volume 1 | Page 8

stories and sketches were located here. That old seat of learning, Williams College, is situated among these foothills. In his summer home at Pittsfield, Longfellow wrote "The Old Clock on the Stairs"; at Stockbridge, Hawthorne builded his "House of the Seven Gables"; and Lydia Sigourney poetically told of "Stockbridge Bowl" with "Its foot of stone and rim of green." It was at Lenox that Henry Ward Beecher created "Norwood" and "Star Papers." Here Charlotte Cushman and Fanny Kemble came for many summers to rest and find new life. Harriet Hosmer had her first dreams of fame at the Sedgwick school. The Goodale sisters, Elaine and Dora, were born upon one of these mountainsides and both embalmed its memory in their poems. Dora lovingly sings:
Dear Berkshire, dear birthplace, the hills are thy towers, Those lofty fringed summits of granite and pine; No valley's green lap is so spangled with flowers, No stream of the wildwood so crystal as thine. Say where do the March winds such treasures uncover, Such maple and arrowwood burn in the fall, As up the blue peaks where the thunder-gods hover In cloud-curtained Berkshire who cradled us all?
Henry Ward Beecher said:
This county of valleys, lakes and mountains is yet to be as celebrated as the lake district of England and the hill country of Palestine.... Here is such a valley as the ocean would be if, when its waves were running tumultuous and high, it were suddenly transformed and solidified.... The endless variety never ceases to astonish and please.... It is indeed like some choice companion, of rich heart and genial imagination, never twice alike in mood, in conversation, in radiant sobriety or half-bright sadness; bold, tender, deep, various.
One has but to come into the midst of these hills to fall a victim to their fascination, while to those who were born among them there is no spot on earth so beautiful or so beloved. They have sent forth generations of men and women, whose fame is as imperishable as the marble and granite which form their everlasting foundations. Among the noted men who have gone out from the Berkshire region are William Cullen Bryant, Cyrus W. Field and brothers, Jonathan Edwards, Mark and Albert Hopkins, Senator Henry L. Dawes, Governor Edwin D. Morgan, of New York, George F. Root, the musical composer, Governor George N. Briggs, of Massachusetts, Governor and Senator Francis E. Warren, of Wyoming, the Deweys, the Barnards, a list too long for quoting. Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose grandfather was a Berkshire man, wrote:
Berkshire has produced a race which, for independent thought, daring schemes and achievements that have had world-wide consequences, has not been surpassed. We claim, also, that more of those first things that draw the chariot of progress forward so that people can see that it has moved, have been planned and executed by the inhabitants of the 950 square miles that constitute the territory of Berkshire than can be credited to any other tract of equal extent in the United States.
Of late years the world of wealth and fashion has invaded the Berkshire country and there are no more magnificent summer homes than those of Lenox, Stockbridge, Great Barrington and the neighboring towns.
The first of the Anthony family of whom there is any record was William, born in Cologne, Germany, who came to England during the reign of Edward the Sixth and was made Chief Graver of the Royal Mint and Master of the Scales, holding this office through the reigns of Edward and Mary and part of that of Elizabeth. His crest and coat of arms are entered in the royal enumeration. His son Derrick was the father of Dr. Francis Anthony, born in London, 1550. According to the Biographia Britannica, he was graduated at Cambridge with the degree of Master of Arts and became a learned physician and chemist. Although a man of high character and generous impulses, he was intolerant of restraint and in continual conflict with the College of Physicians. He died in his seventy-fourth year, and was buried in the church of St. Bartholomew the Great, where his handsome monument still remains. He left a daughter and two sons, both of the latter distinguished physicians. From John, the elder, sprung the American branch of the family. His son, John, Jr., born in Hempstead, England, sailed to America in the ship Hercules, from that port, April 16, 1634, when he was twenty-seven years old. He settled in Portsmouth, R.I., and became a land-owner, an innkeeper and an office-holder. His five children who survived infancy left forty-three children. One of these forty-three, Abraham, had thirteen children, and his son William fourteen, his son, William, Jr., four, his son David nine.
It was just before the beginning of the Revolution that this David Anthony, with his wife, Judith Hicks, moved