EASTHAMPTON

By Jesse Halsey c1927

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“It has never quarreled a minister away.” So says Lyman Beecher of his loved church in Easthampton, Long Island, where he preached for a dozen years. It was his first pastorate, and, with all the fame that later came to him, it was his first love. The building in which he preached was torn down sixty years ago, but the old weathervane, dated 1782, that crowned the spire, is still preserved. Likewise, the old pulpit, used by Beecher for eleven years, and before that by his illustrious predecessor, Dr. Buell, for fifty-two years, can be seen in the rooms of the Historical Society in Clinton Academy in New York State. Here, too, is the communion table that stood before the high pulpit.

Beecher, while a student in Yale, had come profoundly under the influence of Timothy Dwight, the president, who loved him as a son. He came to Easthampton without a unanimous call, but soon won the confidence of everyone. The church, which was then one hundred and fifty years old, had had only three pastors. The first minister had received forty-five pounds a year, free taxes, his grain ground first at the mill on Monday mornings, and one quarter of the whale stranded on the beach. Beecher’s pay was three hundred dollars a year and his firewood. This was later increased to four hundred. He had no share in the whales, which was a lucrative industry on the east end of Long Island in those days, but several times he went off in the whaleboats for the chase.

The committee who selected Beecher wanted to get a man who could “break the heads of the infidels.” French skepticism was rampant in the village. He sailed in a sloop from New London with the little he had to carry “packed in a little white hair trunk which I brought with me on the pommel of my saddle.” His horse, which he brought with him, fell overboard during the voyage, but was rescued.

Easthampton has a broad Main Street fringed with elms. How large they were in his day, I cannot say, but the church stood at the head of the little pond that divided the village street. Adjoining it and fringing the pond, is the village cemetery. Just across the road is one of the several windmills that dot the landscape.

During his first winter a revival developed in which eighty were converted. He was an indefatigable worker, and within three yeas broke down nervously. He nursed himself back to health by fishing and horseback riding.

The churches, in those days, were supported by a general tax, as public schools are today. One man refused to pay his tax until the minister resumed his duties. His heifer was seized and sold by the sheriff.

Mrs. Beecher introduced the first carpet into the village. She spun the cotton brought from New London and had it woven. The carpet was then nailed down on the garret floor and she proceeded to paint it with an elaborate floral design, with colors of her own mixing. Deacon Tallmadge stopped at the parlor door when the new carpet was laid—“Can’t come in ‘tho’t steppin’ on it.”

Mrs. Beecher kept a school, with five young girls as boarders, besides her day pupils. From this pulpit Beecher denounced dueling. After studying the subject for six months, he wrote a sermon, preached from his pulpit, and then delivered before the Synod. This was shortly after Aaron Burr had shot Alexander Hamilton. “Duelling is a great national sin. The whole land is defiled with blood.” Beecher, then an obscure young man of thirty, by force of argument, forced a resolution condemning dueling from the Synod, which was far from sympathetic at the outside. He said that Synod was “the center of old-fogyism,” but he mowed it down and carried the vote of the house. The sermon was published and over forty thousand copies were distributed. This gave him a wide reputation. It started a serious effort “that affected the whole northern mind, at least, and in Jackson’s time it came up in Congress and a law passed disenfranchising a duelist.”

Settled nigh onto three hundred years ago, here is a bit of New York’s New England. The oldest school of academic creed is on its village street. The village common divides the main highway. Between its lateral branches is the town pond and the village cemetery. In other days the village church stood hardby. Two Dutch windmills flank it on the east and the “Home Sweet Home” of John Howard Payne’s boyhood looks south across the cemetery toward the ocean. This is New England at its best. Great over-reaching elms, all of them surely one hundred years in growth, arch the village street, which is twice the width of most main streets. Picket fences and old houses still have place. Toward the beach rail fences predominate, and carefully clipped hedges. The stretch of dunes east and west are overgrown with beach grass and bayberry and sumac.

A short three hours from New York are many cottagers. It stays unspoiled. Its Guild Hall and its artist colony fit into the old setting and, as in few places, the wholesome old traditions are maintained. To be sure, at one end of the village street are the places of business, some cheap and some pretentious, chain stores with their gaudy fronts, a movie house and the like; but these are in the minimum. At the north end of the village street is another windmill and a cemetery of a later date. Eliminate a quarter of a mile of necessary business and you have the atmosphere and the outlook of one hundred or more years ago. Off-shore whaling has disappeared. Whales seldom come and, when they do, they are not worth enough to excite the chase. But the memories of whaling are here and some of the old salts still live and will tell you tales of other days.

Rural Parish A.D. 1800

For McCormick Speaking | c1948

By Jesse Halsey

East Hampton lies well toward the east end of that sand-spit known as Long Island, which like a sperm whale has its head anchored toward Manhattan and throws its double-pronged flukes a hundred and thirty miles out into the Atlantic. Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale, made a journey down the Island in 1800 and leaves a report of his impressions in his journal. One of the objectives of his long trek by horse-back and coach along the sandy trails through the scrub oaks, and dunes, and beside the water roads, was a visit to his former pupil Lyman Beecher, then the minister at East Hampton. A deep mutual affection existed between the young parson and his old professor. Beecher was thoroughly grounded in Dwight’s type of theology—liberal for its time.

The East Hampton Church, like several of its neighbors, was founded in the 1640s. They were called individually, The Church of Christ in East Hampton, Southampton, Southold, and so on. Congregational of necessity at first, by 1800 they were Presbyterian, at least in name, and Long Island Presbytery was one of the constituents of the first Synod (1717). These churches were closely allied geographically, ethnographically, culturally, financially, and every otherwise with New England; most of their ministers came from Yale college.

East Hampton Parish consisted of 300 souls scattered in several hamlets and centering in “the village” which sprawled around the Church. This stood near it on the east side of the Town Pond, the cemetery, and the Common. Across the street stood the Clinton Academy, the first of its kind in New York state. The steeple of the church, the cupola of the academy, and three towering Dutch windmills dominated the skyline. Scraggly elm trees, long since become stately, bordered the wide village street; sandy in the summer, a quagmire of mud in the springtime.

The manse, a gray-shingled salt-box house stood hard by the church. Its wide-planked floors like all other in the town were powdered with clean white sand from the ocean beach. The minister’s bride had received a gift in money from an uncle with which Beecher bought a bale of cotton. This, spun and woven into fabric, Mrs. Beecher determined to make into a carpet. She tacked it to the attic floor and on it painted a bright floral design of roses. This in due season was fitted to the living room floor. Soon after Deacon Talmadge made a call. As the deacon hesitated to enter the preacher said, “Come in, deacon, it is made to walk on.” The old deacon threw up his hands and exclaimed, “All this, and heaven too?”

“Wide was the parish, with houses far asunder,” as Chaucer says of his parson, but like his prototype Beecher, on horse-back and on foot, covered the territory between the village and the Springs, on Montauk 15 miles away where dwelt the remnants of an Indian tribe. With the fervency of youth and the zeal of the old time religion, the pastor went his rounds visiting and “holding meetings.” The trip to the Indian settlement entailed a toilsome journey across a trackless waste of sand called Nappeague, the ocean on one side and the bay that opened into Long Island Sound on the other. Here along the route in season there were wild grapes, blackberries, huckleberries, beach plums, and cranberries: with these the preacher kept his growing household well supplied.

Beecher was also an ardent fisherman and no mean hunter. There were several brooks along the trails through his parish and he would often bring home fish for supper, as he always carried tackle in the pockets of his long-tailed coat. On one occasion he hooked some fish, slipped them into the big pocket of his Sabbath coat, and forgot them until he appeared in the pulpit on the next Lord’s Day, when as he extracted his handkerchief, the remnant of the fish were revealed.

The young minister introduced the country-side to horticulture. Like Jonny Appleseed, he started trees, budded them, developed an orchard and taught his parishioners and neighbors to do the same.

The duel in which Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton called forth great indignation throughout the states. Beecher wrote a sermon condemning the practice, and after submitting it to his friend Lyon Gardner (the owner of a large island adjoining the mainland which had been entailed from his ancestors since 1638) preached it in his own pulpit, and again at a meeting of Synod in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, and in new York City, where it gained newspaper publicity. This, historians say, was the beginning of the active agitation that led to legislation that outlawed the practice. Moreover, it gave the young country minister a national reputation.

Beecher had been preceded in his pastorate by Dr. Samuel Buell who served nearly sixty years. It was he who converted Sir William Erskine, the British general in command during the occupation of Long Island by the British. The conversion was not from Anglicanism to Presbyterianism, but to the patriot cause so that the general resigned his commission and went back to England. Dr. Buell had promoted several successful revivals and this, both in his day and in Beecher’s, was the criterion of a successful ministry. Moreover, Dr. Buell practiced what was known as “the half-way covenant,” that is, children were universally baptized regardless of whether their parents had communicant church connections or not. Beecher did not believe in this practice and frankly said so. This led to at least minor frictions with his deacons and congregation. Nonetheless, the young minister went from strength  to strength, and for ten years, with a series of revivals and by consistent pastoral ministrations built up his church in membership and influence, and his own influence in the Presbytery, and his reputation throughout the Island and southern New England.

Catherine Beecher, the oldest daughter, was herself a pioneer in education, writing extensively in magazines and books, not only about pedagogical theory but practical methods, including kitchen arrangements—with drawings attached. Years afterword, when most of the family had become farmers, in writing to her brother, Charles, she tells many interesting things about the East Hampton home where she was born. “Strict discipline—‘Mind your mother’; ‘Quick!’; ‘No crying’; ‘Look pleasant!’ These were words of command, obeyed with almost military speed and precision. This strong government was always attended with overflowing sympathy and love.”

The parson’s chief daily recreations were frolics with his children. “I remember him more as a playmate than in any other character during my childhood.” He was fond of playing pranks, for his amusement as well as that of the children. Once he swung Catherine out of the garret window by the hands to see if it would frighten her, which it did not in the least. Another time, as he was running past a washtub he ducked her head into it to see what she would do. “He taught me to catch fish and I was his constant companion, riding in his chaise in my little chair to the villages around where he went to hold meetings,” she writes. “As I grew older I began to share his more elevated trains of thought. By this intellectual companionship our house became in reality a school of the highest kind in which he was all the while exerting a powerful influence upon the mind and character of his children.”

The ocean was nearly a half-mile from the house. The roar could be heard any hour of the day or night and white sails could be seen from the windows. On the occasions of a northeast storm, members of the family often went down to watch from the shelter of the beach banks. There was a cranberry marsh between the village and the beach, and the dunes were covered with beach plums in season.

The children who in summer constantly played on the beach often played tag with the surf—“Sometimes we were overtaken and drenched. “ As they learned to swim they were taught to watch out for the “sea-poose” made by two waves meeting from opposite directions then creating a sort of suction-vacuum in their furious race back to the ocean.

With the other villagers they watched for the “weft” when a whale was sighted off-shore. The first to see it removed his coat and waved it, ran up along the beach-banks shouting, “Whale off!” “Whale off!” “When it came its strange wild notes poured out over the town. It seemed as though I could almost fly so great was my excitement,” wrote one of the children. Once, at least, the preacher went off with a village crew chasing a whale ten miles to sea.

Beecher was fond of hunting the wild birds—ducks and geese—which came in profusion every spring and fall. He once took his two boys, William and Edward, with him to fish for eels and “they brought back nearly a cartload of them.” They gathered beach plums by the bushel and these, with quinces and cranberries, were the common table sweetmeats.

Because of straightened finances, Mrs. Beecher kept a school for young ladies. The boarding pupils lived with the family; two English girls, one from Honduras, and several from Island villages as much as fifty miles away, all lived with the family. Mr. Beecher had learned to play the violin while in college and for the benefit of the girls “every day played the liveliest airs, but if any of the girls began to take a dancing step, he would make the violin give a doleful screech and thus ended every attempt to dance.”

One of the girls, Eleanor Lawless from Honduras (“as wild and untamed as her name”) brought a piano with her, the first ever seen in the village. No wonder that the house was filled with wondering and delighted listeners. The manse overflowed with young people and “father’s constitutional mirthfulness developed itself more freely than ever afterwards.”

During his pastorate Beecher was seriously ill for over a year, unable to preach and journeyed as far as Baldston Spa looking for a cure. His salary was promptly paid, however, and the deacons took responsibility for the conduct of the services. Toward the end of the year, Deacon Fithian refused to pay his tithe. “Why is it,” asked the deacon, “that ministers are so greedy for money? “That,” replied the minister, “is the only way to save the souls of some of their parishioners, they are so greedy themselves that we have to take it from them!”

A series of revivals attended Beecher’s ten year pastorate: “times of refreshing from the Presence of the Lord.” On one occasion one hundred were added to the membership of the church. The Infidel Club that was in the town, headed by a school teacher and a doctor, quietly broke up under the influence of Beecher’s logical preaching and his friendly ways that included the doctor and teacher on fishing and hunting trips.

Methodist evangelicals were “undermining” the (stolid) Presbyterian constituency here and there on the Island. One such itinerant drove into East Hampton. Beecher immediately went to the tavern, took the preacher home with him, entrained him royally, rang the church bell that evening, and loaned him the pulpit. Next morning the Methodist brother was seen leaving town, driving back toward New York, the last visit of a Methodist during Beecher’s time.

Family obligations (four children were born) led Beecher to ask for an increase in salary, which the congregation refused. He then moved to Litchfield, Conn., where Henry Ward and Harriet (Beecher Stowe) were born. The old church building is gone long since, though Beecher’s high pulpit is preserved in the Clinton Academy. The old windmills remain and one of them still grinds grist.

Beecher and his family went on from strength to strength—Litchfield, Boston, Lane—so that at his funeral in 1860 the officiating minister (Rev. Bacon) could say with some truth that the country was made up of “Saints, Sinnerx, and Beechers.”