upon estates and faculty, one shilling, two pence, in the pound. The State tax of the town was £132; and that for the support of the minister, part of whose salary came from other sources, £58.

To raise the sum of £700 voted for finishing the meeting-house, a poll-tax of ten shillings, four pence, was assessed; which, if all had paid, from Charles Goodrich down to Hazle-Blossom, negro, would have produced £212. 7s. From estates and faculty, 2s. 9d. in the pound was levied; producing £496. 12s. 2d.

The heaviest real-estate tax-payers were as follows: Charles Goodrich, who owned more than a thousand acres in the east part, £10. 10s. 2d.; James D. Colt, who owned one thousand acres in the south-west, £9. 15s. 6d.; Heury Van Schaack, an Episcopalian, who was also assessed about £4. on personal property, £6. 15s. 6d. ; Daniel Hubbard, £5. 7s. 11d.; Hannah, widow of Col. William Williams, £5. 6s. 10d.; Nathaniel Robbins, £5. 5s. 6d.

The well-to-do farmers paid from one pound to four; but by far the greater portion of the assessments were reckoned in shillings. Oliver Wendell, Margaret Phillips (grandmother of Mr. Wendell Phillips), Catharine Wendell, and other heirs of the first purchaser of the town, paid about £4 upon one thousand two hundred and sixty-eight acres still retained by them; and the non-resident heirs of Col. Stoddard paid a proportionate tax upon about eight hundred acres. John Chandler Williams was assessed £3. 17s. 8d. on real estaté, 188. personal, and £1. 4s. Id. on faculty. This was the highest tax on faculty; the next being paid by Col. Danforth, who was postmaster, held other public offices, and was also in mercantile business. Col. Danforth also was honored with the largest assessment on personal property,- £7. On faculty, Daniel Weller, a tanner, paid £1. 2s.; Dr. Timothy Childs, 16s. 6d.; Thomas Gold, a lawyer, 13s. 6d.; Joel Dickinson, the masterbuilder of the meeting-house, 13s. 9d. Ministers of the gospel were exempt from taxation.

The sum of £600 thus assessed proved to be about one-third the whole cost of building; and as nearly one-third of that expense was defrayed by the application of the debts due the town, and from the sale of other property, a fair idea of the whole taxation for meeting-house purposes can be gained by doubling the items given.

The town in March, 1791, ordered the building committee to sell the "old Continental money and paper securities in the treasury for solid coin," and apply the proceeds to the purchase of lead for

the meeting-house. The paper securities consisted of loan-office certificates, whose "specie value, by the scale," was $93.40, and "Hardy's indents" to the amount of $48. The Continental money amounted to £3,097; which had been handed down in sealed packages from treasurer to treasurer, awaiting the revival of the national credit. The whole was now sold for the pittance of £40. 10s., as appears from the record; although — owing to the use of that last resort of a lazy pen, an "et cetera " the accounts do not show with absolute certainty whether the certificates were included in the sale.

The expenditure for lead was £39. 17s. 6d., and the freight upon it to Kinderhook was 12d.; so that this item seems to have been kept strictly within the appropriation.

From such various sources, means were obtained to meet the expenditures until they reached the sum of £2,188. 198. 6d.; which proved to be the final cost of the structure.

This increase to double the original estimate was perhaps attributable in part to the natural proclivity of architects to under-estimates of cost, but was chiefly due to the increased size of the building over that of the plan accepted by the town, to the purchase of a bell, and probably to the addition, in the enthusiasm elicited by the progress of the work, of some luxuries which were not at first contemplated. The house, without any authority so far as appears from the record, was built ninety feet long, exclusive of the projecting porch, and fifty-five feet wide.

Although we find no intimation of any voluntary contributions, such as would now be made for a similar purpose, yet the whole assessment was only the equitable distribution of a burden which the community, with the eager consent of almost all its members, had imposed upon itself; and doubtless the great majority were more liberal in responding to the requisitions of the committee than they would have been in private bargaining. Tradition is, indeed, full of the zeal with which the fathers of the town sought out the choicest products of their forests, for Berkshire woods were forests then, and the glee with which they brought them to the appointed spot.

Certainly the material contributed for the new temple, which was to be the pride and the pet of the town, was not only abundant in quantity, but of the best quality which the rich forests of the neighborhood could afford. The spring of 1790 found the open

space now occupied by the Park piled high with a still accumulating mass of stone, and such lumber as the valley has now not seen for many a long year.

But, before use could be made of it, a preliminary of no little difficulty remained to be settled. The vote, that the location of the new meeting-house should be determined by disinterested non-residents, seems to have been disregarded; for on the 5th of April, 1790, David Bush, jun., in behalf of a committee, reported that in their opinion "the meeting-house front door should face the south; that it should stand on the same ground that the old meeting-house covered; that the front sill should be on the north line of the highway; that the west side of the house should be about three feet west of the west side of the old meeting-house; and that the committee would have been willing to have carried it still farther west could it have been done without incommoding the monument of the late Col. William Williams."1

The meeting-house was located within a few feet of his monument, and, if it had not been in the way, would doubtless have been placed with only a small court-yard between it and North Street. The monument now stands south-west of St. John's Lake, in the new cemetery.

The report was adopted; but the location thus fixed was distasteful to a portion of the citizens, for a reason which curiously illustrates the delight which was anticipated in gazing upon the new building. Placed upon the proposed site, it would not be visible from the greater portion of West Street, while, if carried southward into the highway, the more ornamental portions would delight the eye of the traveller from the west on his way to church or to market; nay, some of the more favored denizens of that region could daily, in their homes, revel in the contemplation of its graces, perhaps-who could tell?-be made better Christians by this constant reminder of sacred things.

Twenty-three voters principally those personally interestedaccordingly requested a town-meeting, and were able to carry a vote to place the meeting-house seven feet further south than had been previously determined.

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But for this it was necessary to fell the tall and graceful elm fairer than any work of man's hand — which had been spared by the first settlers for its conspicuous beauty.

1 Col. Williams died in 1785.

It must have even then entwined itself in the affections of many of the people; but its destruction seemed inevitable, and the first strokes of the axe had already wounded its devoted trunk, when it was saved by the spirited opposition of a noble woman.

It happened, by a fortunate chance, that, at the close of the Revolution, the handsome mansion on the site now between Park

Square and Williams Avenue had been purchased by John Chandler Williams, a gentleman of culture and refined tastes, who was also blest with an equally gifted wife.

It may well be imagined with what feelings they watched the impending destruction of the splendid old relic of the forest, which formed so unique an ornament of their neighborhood. So intense was the excitement of Mrs. Williams in view of the intended sacrilege, that she appeared upon the scene, and, finding the most passionate entreaties vain, threw herself between the tree and the axe, and at last procured a postponement of the work of destruction until the matter could again be considered by the town. The elm treasured the kindly act in its heart; and when it fell, full of years and honors, the tradition of its romantic salvation was found corroborated by the scars of three axe-strokes embedded in its annal of 1790.

The immediate danger past, Mr. Williams completed the good work which his wife had begun, by proposing to give to the town,

for a common, so much of his land south of The Elm as they would leave of space between that point and the meeting-house. The generous offer was accepted; and thus Pittsfield acquired the ground for the beautiful little park now so attractive by its graceful circlet of elms and its sparkling fountain, and so hallowed by patriotic memories.

The first entry in the construction account for the meetinghouse—it was a charge for the inevitable rum— was made on the same 10th of May, when the site was finally determined; and thenceforward the work went briskly on under the direction of Col. Joshua Danforth, John Chandler Williams, and Daniel Weller, who in March had been elected a building-committee.

Col. Bulfinch of Boston, an architect of repute, furnished the designs, in accordance with which the new building became one of the finest specimens of those well-proportioned, cheery, wooden structures, with Grecian ornamentation, which, very similar in their general character, were about that time scattered through the more thrifty villages of New England; the contemporaries of those homes of stately comfort, the square, flat-roofed, and balustraded mansions, of broad halls and spacious parlors, like those erected in Pittsfield by Henry Van Schaack and Ashbell Strong. Capt. Joel Dickinson, a skilful mechanic, was selected as masterbuilder, and took charge on the 18th of April.

The site selected was upon a ledge of hard, light-gray limestone, or marble, with a silicious intermixture ingrained; and the cellar, even under the costly edifice which now occupies the spot, is a very rude affair, excavated by enlarging the crevices of the rocks. So thin was the overlaying soil, that few graves had been made in it.

May was spent in preparing the foundation; the principal expenditures noted being for rum, powder, wedges, and fixing sheds. Rum, from the laying of the foundation to the dedication, was a large item in the construction accounts. One charge, a fair specimen of many, was "£4. 8s. for three hundred and fifty-two rations of rum in five weeks." The house was raised and covered, and probably painted and glazed, in 1790. Allusion is made to the raising in the record of a meeting in October in that year, which voted three shillings a day extra pay to David Ashley and Butler Goodrich for extraordinary services.

1 See note at the end of this chapter.