Noyes Academy Part 7
- Alisa Kline
- Feb 28
- 8 min read
Dragging the corpse
August 11, 1835 found Noyes Academy lying dead in the street, mere feet from the land on which she had been built. The men who killed her reassembled early because this day too was to be one of hard labor. They had spent the night in Canaan, mostly drunk, fed by Joseph Dustin, an abolitionist, under pressure from the mob.
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Joseph Dustin was an abolitionist; he did not go to the hauling the first day. He fed the company to the amount of $16.44, which the town paid. The second day Mr. Blodgett requested him in behalf of the town, to prepare a dinner for the crowd. He killed a beef and cooked it all. It was eaten and paid for, by the selectmen out of the town treasury.
The destructors’ oxen also spent the night in Canaan and were fed hay, by Gorden Burly, to the tune of $15 also paid for out of the Canaan town treasury. Burley was a wealthy Canaan farmer/businessman who had for a while operated a store on Canaan Street. He was the brother-in-law of lawyer William Weeks who gave legal cover to the Noyes destroyers.
I can write with confidence about the cost of the hay eaten by those oxen because the group who led the destruction of Noyes Academy presented the town with an invoice detailing costs incurred while destroying the school, or as they put it, abating the nuisance.
There is such a weird disconnect between the lawlessness of the mob that destroyed Noyes Academy and the dot-your-i’s-and-cross-your-t’s, receipt-brandishing gang leading the whole thing. These were men careful of their reputations doing something flagrantly illegal. But they had cloaked themselves so tightly in their own righteousness and the tissue-thin pretense of a “legal town meeting” that they acted as though they, not the school’s proprietors had the law on their side. Passions against the school had been inflamed to such a degree that those who broke the law did so with the cheers of their neighbors in their ears.
The night of August 10th had not passed quietly in Canaan. Wallace writes of a light-complected girl who arrived as a student that fateful day.
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She arrived at noon on the first day of the attack upon the house and went to board with Mrs. Harris. That night there was much riotous noise in the street. The mob had their grog, and many of them had doubled their rations, which made them forget to go home; and some of them forgot they ever were gentlemen.
They traversed the village shouting ribald expressions and coarsely threatened to attack the house that sheltered those two young girls. There were resolute men among the abolitionists but during that sad day of disorder they had advised themselves that it would be prudent to remain in the background.
There was real danger for the abolitionists. It took real courage to place themselves between the mob and the young girls boarding at the Harris home.
Col. Thomas Hill lived in the house long the residence of Dr. Wheat, a stately man, tall and resolute. He called upon Col. Isaac Towle, a man of good presence, and equally resolute. These two went to a woodpile and hewed out two clubs sufficiently large as to need but one blow upon an assailant. They posted themselves about the house and remained until morning.
Probably the darkness made cowards of these prowlers. Several times they came near but they neglected to make any attack. It was an anxious night in more than one house.
Many of the male students boarded with George Kimball who was out of town when the violence erupted. Some of the male students staying at Kimball’s house were rescued by our author William Wallace’s seventeen-year-old brother Oscar:
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He [Alexander Crummell] had not been in Canaan since the night Oscar Wallace had driven him and [Thomas] Paul down the Lebanon road, out of town to escape the dangers which threatened their lives, and they were real, for he related how one man had discharged a pistol through the door of the Cross house at the Corner where they roomed and boarded with the family of George Kimball.
On August 11, the destroyers of the school returned to their task. During the overnight, they had obtained stronger chains. Progress on the 10th had suffered because the chains used to drag the building from its foundations kept breaking.
Page 275
The chains were weak, doubled they were still weak. A swift messenger was dispatched to the Shakers at Enfield and to Lyman’s Bridge at Lyman for the cables used there. He returned before morning. Tuesday, the 11th, the progress of destruction was more rapid. The chains held firm when the order was given “to straighten the team.”
A little before noon they had reached our store where they halted in front, and at once demanded that a barrel of rum should be rolled out or they would demolish the doors. Mr. C. and myself thought it best to yield to their threats, but William said “No, he would sooner die than yield an inch to these fanatical villains.”
He backed himself against the door, determined to resist to the last. But he was removed after much struggling, and they had the rum. Do you believe we did not wish it might be hell fire to their bodies?
William Allen Wallace, the author of Canaan’s town history was not in Canaan when Noyes Academy was established and destroyed. The information in his History comes from letters and diaries from the period. The above is one of the first-person accounts Wallace seems relies on.
Canaan Town Historian Donna Zani Dunkerton and I agree that the Mr. C. mentioned above is Nathanial Currier one of the Noyes founders. There were several stores on Canaan Street that sold rum, but only one was run by a man with the initial “C.” I have a further interest in that I want to know whose first-person account is being quoted here. I suspect it was written by Wallace’s older brother James. At the time of Noyes, he was a clerk in a store on The Street, but not Currier’s store. Below, we will run into William Wallace’s mother, apparently at the Currier home.
I imagine that Mrs. Wallace (another abolitionist) and her oldest local son James were sheltering with the Curriers. There was a violent rampaging mob in the street and it was their blood being howled for. I doubt they all stayed peacefully in their various houses.
The next bit of the Wallace history isn’t from a letter, it is in Wallace’s narrator voice. I love the delicacy of referring to his mother as Mrs. Wallace. I wonder if this part of the story needs no quoted source because it is a tale with which his mother regaled him through the years.
Another scene occurred here worth relating. Mrs. Wallace came out of the house, mounted the fence, and began to harrangue that crowd as only an earnest woman can when the spirit moves her. She was telling them some very wholesome truths, when Mr. C. came up and seizing her from behind, carried her into the house exclaiming, “Get into the house and shut up your mouth. Don‘t you see, if you get ‘em mad they’ll pull my house down too.”
Any person, man or woman, who, passing quietly along the street, then, did not hurrah with them, was insulted by those ruffians from Enfield, Hanover and Dorchester.
Mrs. Wallace is our author’s mother and her house was beyond the location to which Noyes Academy was dragged. The fence from which she was haranguing the crowd was in front of Nathanial Currier’s house, half a mile closer to Noyes.
The school slowly moved down the street, attended by her riotous mob.
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Having rested and refreshed themselves the crowd were in no better humor than before. The rum had not made them peaceable. The team was hitched up and “straightened” with loud imprecations and curses and progressed slowly.
When they were about opposite Parson Fuller’s house, they rested for water. Mrs. F., a very plucky woman, when she saw the intent to use her water bucket, rushed out and cut the rope, thus dropping the bucket into the well, and declaring loudly that “her bucket should not be polluted by the touch of such foul lips.”
The men spoke to her with oaths and threats, she replied “She had been used to such acts for some time past she would be disappointed if they ever repented of their crimes or became gentlemen.”
There were not many who stood in opposition to the mob. Mrs. Fuller was almost alone in this. Reverend Fuller, her husband, had replaced the beloved Reverend Foster as leader of the Congregationalist Church in 1833. His tenure in that position did not extend much beyond the Noyes riot. He wrote a letter of recommendation for mob leader Jacob Trussell to another Congregationalist Church after his excommunication in Canaan. Trussell was excommunicated over his destruction of Noyes Academy. After this miscalculation, Fuller’s position became untenable. Most of the supporters of Noyes were Congregationalists.
He paid for his misunderstanding and also for his wife’s cheeky impudence.
Page 270
There was an occasional ripple on the surface, the most considerable of which was the animosity shown to Rev. Mr. Fuller, for the part his wife took on the day of the “Great hauling,” when not having the fear of the mob before her eyes, she audaciously removed the bucket from her well, and thus prevented these misguided souls from slaking their thirst.
Mr. Fuller was repeatedly warned by ghostly looking messengers upon white horses at the dead of night, that unless he recanted his Anti-slavery principles ere the approaching 10th of October he would be severely dealt with. There is no evidence to show at that time, at least, that Mr. Fuller heeded those solemn warnings.
Canaan Street today is surprisingly like Canaan Street whenNoyes was dragged down her. The Currier House is still there, so is George Harris’s house (then) next door. Harris was another founder of Noyes. The Currier store is across the street and currently houses apartments. The Meeting House is still there along with the Congregationalist Church.
When the railroad came through Canaan in 1847, it declined to travel all the way up the steep hill to where town stood. The train stayed down and town moved down to meet it. Canaan became where the train was and Canaan Street got frozen in time.
Today, the path traveled by Noyes Academy as it was dragged down The Street behind a hundred oxen (or was it 50, or 75?) is a lovely promenade with a wide sidewalk that stretches from the Congregationalist Church, past the still empty gap where Noyes once stood, all the way to the Meeting House which is across the street from the Historical Museum which is, for all intents and purposes Noyes Academy. It is an 1839 replica of the original which burned in that year. Still in the spot to which she was dragged.
It is both easy and hard to imagine Canaan Street full of oxen, drunken rioters, and general onlookers.
This day was hotter than the preceding, yet with redoubled ardor these men persisted in their crime, until they hauled the house on to the corner of the Common, in front and close by the old church. They arrived upon the spot just at dark, so completely fagged out, both oxen and men, that it was utterly impossible to do anything further.
There it stands, shattered, mutilated, inwardly beyond reparation almost, a monument of the folly of and infuriated malice of a basely deceived populace.
Four weeks from last Thursday, they are to assemble again to draw it upon the spot chosen by the selectmen for its location. Many aggravating circumstances accompanying this transaction cannot be related here. The Institution is broken up. The aggressors declare boldly that they fear no retribution at the hands of the law. They rely upon public opinion and the authorities to sustain them in taking the accomplishment of their unlawful wishes into their own hands.
This is the bill the destroyers presented the town for their labor.
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