Greenville

“ Greenville chewing wine-glasses at table makes no very pleasant figure, any more than a thousand other artists when they are viewed in the body, or met in private life; but his work of art, his finished tragedy, is an elegant performance; and I contend it ought not only to enliven men of the sword as they go into battle, but send back merchant-clerks with more heart and spirit to their book-keeping by double entry. ”

“ My Grandmother was born at Bristol, about the year 1630, and in the reign of King Charles the First. She came of a family noted for their long lives, and of whom there was, in good sooth, a proverb in the West setting forth that "Bar Gallows, Glaive, and the Gout, every Greenville would live to a hundred." Her maiden name was Greenville: she was baptised Arabella ”

“ It is situated about 1050 ft. above sea-level and is the trade centre of a large and fertile agricultural district, producing cereals and tobacco. It manufactures lumber, foundry products, canned goods and creamery products and has grain elevators and tobacco warehouses. In the city is a Carnegie library, and 3 m. distant there is a county Children’s Home and Infirmary. The municipality owns and operates its water-works. Greenville occupies the site of an Indian village and of Fort Greenville (built by General Anthony Wayne in 1793 and burned in 1796) . ”

“ Greenville on going to London, taking his daughter Arabella with him, to make interest with the Parliament, so that peril might be averted from his estate. For although his [51] son was in arms for King Charles, and he himself was a gentleman of approved loyalty, he had done nothing of an overt kind to favour King or Parliament. He thus hoped, having ever been a peaceable and law-worthy gentleman, to preserve his lands from peril, and himself and family from prosecution ”

“ I saw very few people that day. The Home Guards had done their work well, as the burned houses indicated on every side.
Late that afternoon I was told that I was approaching another village, but I need not go by the village if I did not wish to; I could turn to the left and cross the creek lower down, and both roads led to Greenville. I had no business in the town, so I took the left hand. Just before night I came to a deep, narrow, ugly looking little stream that had no bridge across it. Nobody [129] had been fording it. ”

“ He is surly and vindictive, and a man of strong prejudices, but thoroughly a patriot.”
There is in Greenville a spring which bursts out of a hill-side in sufficient volume to carry a mill. The country abounds in springs, some of a curious character. In Johnson County, in the mountainous northeast corner of the State, there is a subterranean reservoir of water, out of which issue in the night-time, during the spring months, numbers of small black perch, of a blind species, which are caught in traps at the mouth of the spring. ”

“ Folks ain't used to the new station yet, and the ticket agents are all bran' new too,—guess you got hold of a tenderfoot!"
"But Greenville will not 'do' for me," exclaimed Gilbert. "I want to go to Greentown."
"Well, get off at Lowell, the first stop,—you'll know when you come to it because this gentleman that wanted to go to Lawrence will get off there, and this young lady that was intendin' to go to North Conway. There'll be four of you; jest a nice party." ”

“ Mary's river, which is a branch of the Miami which runs into lake Erie; thence a westerly course to fort Recovery, which stands on a branch of the Wabash; thence southwesterly in a direct line to the Ohio, so as to intersect that river opposite the mouth of Kentucke or Cuttawa river. And in consideration of the peace now established; of the goods formerly received from the United States; of those now to be delivered ”

“ You walk on through Greenwich Village and you will expect romance to meet you. Even the distant clang of a cable car out in the city will not break the spell that is on you now. And if you have a spark of fancy, you will find your romance. You cannot walk a block in Greenwich without coming on some stony wall, suggestive alley, quaint house or vista or garden plot or tree. Everything sings to you there; even the poorest sections have a quaint glamour of their own. It gleams out at you from the most forbidding surroundings. ”

“ It was in a grotesque hidden courtyard of the Greenwich section, for there in my ignorance I had settled, having heard of the place as the natural home of poets and artists. The archaic lanes and houses and unexpected bits of square and court had indeed delighted me, and when I found the poets and artists to be loud-voiced pretenders whose quaintness is tinsel and whose lives are a denial of all that pure beauty which is poetry and art, I stayed on for love of these venerable things. I fancied them as they were in their prime, when Greenwich was a placid village not yet engulfed by the town ”

“ One morning, our friend, Miss S., was kind enough to accompany us to Greenwich, where, you know, is the Hospital for disabled sailors of the British navy. The day was warm and lovely, like what we call the Indian summer in America. We took an omnibus to London Bridge; from thence we proceeded by railway, and in a few minutes were in Greenwich. We entered the magnificent old Park, and wandered about for a long time, to our hearts' content, among the venerable old trees, admiring the graceful deer that were enjoying themselves all around us. ”

“ Stepney, Hampstead, Westend, and Peckham fairs have been crushed by the police, that ‘stern, rugged nurse’ of national morality; and although Greenwich fair continues, it is any thing but what it used to be. Greenwich, however, will always have a charm: the fine park remains—trees, glades, turf, and the view from the observatory, one of the noblest in the world—before you the towers of these palaces built for a monarch’s residence, now ennobled into a refuge from life’s storms for the gallant defenders of their country, after their long and toilsome pilgrimage—then the noble river ”

“ But Greenwich, too, is beautiful,—a spot where the art of man has conspired with Nature, as if he and the great mother had taken counsel together how to make a pleasant scene, and the longest liver of the two had faithfully carried out their mutual design. It has, likewise, an additional charm of its own, because, to all appearance, it is the people's property and play-ground in a much more genuine way than the aristocratic resorts in closer vicinity to the metropolis. ”

“ Greenwich was at all times a resort for those who could afford it, an exclusive and beautiful country region where anyone with a full purse could go to court health and rest among the trees and fields and river breezes. It was destined to become the most popular, flourishing and prosperous little village that ever grew up over night. Those marvellously healthy qualities as to location and air, that fine, sandy soil, made it a haven, indeed, to people who were afraid of sickness. ”

“ We dare to think as uptown wouldn't dare,
Blazing our nights with arguments uproarious;
What care we for a dull old world censorious,
When each is sure he'll fashion something glorious?"
So we find that the romance of Colonial days still blooms freshly below Fourteenth Street and that people still rush to the Village to escape the world and its ways as eagerly as they fled a hundred years ago. But the third and last point of unity is perhaps the most striking. Always, we know, Greenwich has refused rebelliously to conform to any rule of thumb. ”

“ Undoubtedly the Warren place was the largest and most important one out there, and for a time to "go out to visit at Greenwich," meant to go out to visit the Manse. For years the Captain and the Captain's lady lived in this beautiful and restful place with three little daughters to share their money, their affections and their amiable lives. Thomas Janvier's description of the house as he visualises it with his rich imagination is too charming not to quote in part:
OLD ST. JOHN'S. "Still faces on Varick Street, sombre and unaltered, a stately link between the present and the past." ”

“ Gouverneur Morris, Simeon de Witt and John Rutherford were appointed by the city to take charge of this task, and, as one writer points out, they did not do it as badly as they might have done, nor as we are inclined to think they did when we try to find our way around lower New York today. The truth is that Greenwich had grown up, and always has grown up ever since, in an entirely independent and obstinate fashion all its own. ”

“ Then there is that curious quality about Greenwich so endearing to those who know it, the [Pg 176] quality of a haven, a refuge, a place of protected freedom.
"It's a good thing," said a certain brilliant young writer-man to me, "that there's one place where you can be yourself, live as you will and work out your scheme of life without a lot of criticism and convention to keep tripping you up. The point of view of the average mortal—out in the city—is that if you don't do exactly as everyone else does there's something the matter with you, morally or mentally. ”

“ Stroll around the block that is squared by the present Charles, Perry, Bleecker and Tenth streets some day, look at the brick and stone, the shops and boarding-houses,—and try to dream yourself back into the eighteenth century, when, in that very square of land, stood the Captain's lovely country seat. In those days it was something enormous, palatial, and indeed was always known as the Mansion or Manse. This is, of course, the basis for the silly theory that Greenwich got its name from the estate. ”

“ Shall we take a turn about Greenwich Park presently? The days are still short, and you are not so far from your house at Greenwich as you would be at Kensington.’
I consented, and then we stood at the window, looking at the scene of the river from the docks, talking about Will and the sea-life and such matters until dinner was ready. I longed to hear him say that he loved me. The language of his eye was not satisfying enough. I wanted him to take my hand and ask me to be his wife. I had thought my appetite good until I sat down, and then I could not eat. My heart beat fast. ”

“ But what of the spirit of Greenwich? The truth is that first and foremost Greenwich is the home of romance. It is a sort of Make Believe Land which has never grown up, and which will never learn to be modern and prosaic. ”

“ It does not welcome tourists, though it is hospitality itself to wayfarers seeking an open door. It is the Village, and it will never, never, no never be anything else—the Village of the streets that wouldn't be straight!
Janvier, who has already been quoted extensively, but who has written of Greenwich so well that his quotations can't be avoided, says: "In addition to being hopelessly at odds with the surrounding city, Greenwich is handsomely at variance with itself."
New York, and especially Greenwich, grew by curious and indirect means, as we have seen. ”

“ Of course the best known of the Greenwich magazines is The Masses, owned by Max Eastman and edited by Floyd Dell. It has, in a sense, grown beyond the Village, inasmuch as it now circulates all over the country, wherever socialistic or anarchistic tendencies are to be found. But its inception was in Greenwich Village, and in its infant days it strongly reflected the radical, young, insurgent spirit which was just beginning to ferment in the world below Fourteenth Street. ”

“ At night, Greenwich is all alive—life is out of London and in the fair. But let the traveller who has to return to town beware. The road is full of horses and vehicles, driven by drunken men and boys; and, for four or five miles, you can imagine that a city is besieged, and that the inhabitants are flying from the sword. ”

“ I like to believe that ugly things are slipping farther and farther from Our Village, that honest romance and clean gaiety are rather the rule there than the exception, and that, perhaps, the day will sometime dawn when there will be no more need of the shame of prisons in Greenwich Village.
The early social growth of the city naturally centred about its churches. Even in Colonial days conservative English society in New York assembled on Sunday with a devotion directed not less to fashion than to religion. We must not forget that America was really not America then, but Colonial England. ”

“ Greenwich was our first Connecticut town, a charming introduction to a new state: highroad and streets thickly tree-lined, and once, when we lost ourselves at a turning, we passed exquisite houses in lovely gardens. There was a divine smell of ozone-haunted seaweed in the air, for Greenwich is on Long Island Sound, with gold-green [Pg 231] sedgy shores, and everybody is rich or richish. Surely, though, the people are not "exclusive" in that selfish way I hate, for in this part of the world they can prowl all over each other's lawns; they have hardly any fences. ”

“ Greenwich, you see, maintains its old and honourable repute—that of being a resort and shelter and refuge for those upon whom the world outside would have pressed too heavily.
There is no one who has caught the inconsequent, yet perfectly sincere spirit of the Village better than John Reed. In reckless, scholarly rhyme he has imprisoned something of the reckless idealism of the Artists' Quarter—that haven for unconventional souls. ”

“ Coming from New York, and after you have left New Haven quite a distance behind, you reach Greenburg. Greenburg is on the west bank of the river and is something of a town. It has a good many factories of various sorts; factories for silverware, brass tubing, clocks and builder’s hardware. There are others beside, and a big boat-building yard where they turn out gasoline launches. Whenever you come across a launch whose engine bears the inscription, “Wissining Launch and Engine Company,” you may be certain that it came from Greenburg. ”