One of the things that lured settlers up the valleys of western Massachusetts to risk the dangers of the frontier was the prospect of getting away from the Puritans. Charlemont was first settled just before 1740 but didn’t become a town until 1767 because the settlers kept delaying building a church and calling a pastor.
The soldiers who had fought for freedom in the Revolution would not return home only to be dominated once again by an aristocracy of Puritan divines and wealthy deacons. The wilderness settlers and the Revolutionary soldiers that came after them were the spiritual and political descendants of the Separatist Congregationalist pilgrims who were first driven out of England to Leyden (the Netherlands) and then landed in Plymouth, not of the Puritans, hierarchical Anglicans in Calvinist drag, who settled Massachusetts Bay, and believed, in contrast to most of Christendom that the “Offices of Christ” — Prophet, Priest, and King — were vested in the local congregation.
The location of the convergence of the Kingdom of God and the human community was not in the Vatican, not in the British Parliament, not in some august gathering of Christian theological aristocrats, but in the common people who were gathered in local congregations in local communities. The meanings of citizenship in the Kingdom of God and citizenship in the human community merged here into an idea and an emerging reality of citizenship that was full of the dignity and the responsibility of self-governance.
This rich notion of citizenship emerged first in Europe after the Protestant Reformation as a yearning. It animated the French revolutionaries who called each other “Citizen” but who finally could not produce a social and political reality to match their dream. The creation of that reality awaited the coming together of a populace that had recently fought to liberate itself with plenty of very cheap land in America.
It was in the small agricultural communities that resulted, barring the emergence of significant disparities of wealth, that this citizenship could flourish. And the churches in these communities, no matter their denominations, nurtured a common ethic for the rich and responsible neighborliness it required. It was in Heath that I first heard the word “neighbor” used as a verb.
Heath was my first parish. When we arrived in 1970, there were still 11 working dairy farms. Four of the matriarchs of the old farming families were still living and a vital force, but the patriarchs were all gone. There was a palpable sadness in the air in both the church and the community. It took me a long time to figure out what it was about, because it wasn’t as if individuals or families were any sadder than anybody anywhere else, but it was the community that was sad.
The way of life that had persisted since its founding was passing away and the quality of citizenship it had nurtured was in danger of following it into oblivion. I’ve heard that at the time of World War II, there were still 50 working dairy farms in Heath, that provided a living for the families that worked them. When we came, there were 11. When we left in 1975, there were six. Now the matriarchs are gone and there are no more working dairy farms.
But the disappearance of the dairy farms provided for the reappearance of cheap land, which, starting in the ’30s, allowed for the development of a remarkable summer community of theologians and clergy, who, unlike most vacationers, actually went to church, allowing them entree into the communal life of the town. The third and fourth generations of some of those families still reside in Heath, either in the summer or year-round and are, along with the descendants of the old farming families, inheritors of the rich tradition of ethical neighboring that had evolved there.
The cheap land also allowed for the influx of “back-to-land’ people in the ’70s, who came looking for the reality of community that still existed in Heath, and were willing to do whatever work there was to do in order to stay here. Some of them entered into the life of the town, learned the art of neighboring, slowly earned the trust of the older residents, and thereby also assumed their mantel of citizenship for another generation.
Now, there’s no more cheap land, and most of our children will not be able to carry on this tradition because there is so little employment for them here. I’ve had the sad privilege of being able to listen in as Heath Education Task Force struggled to find a way forward for the children and parents of the Heath School. As they came to grips with the reality that the school had to be closed and another alternative had to be found, “the dignity and the responsibility of self-governance” and “a common ethic for the rich and responsible neighborliness” began to dawn on them and emerge from them, and so from the Selectboard, and so from the people at the town meeting.
I ended up feeling hopeful for us all.
Rev. Mick Comstock is a retired United Church of Christ minister who has served churches in Heath, Stockbridge, Boston, Charlemont, and Jeffersonville, Vt. He has also served several churches in Massachusetts and Vermont, as interim pastor. He and his wife, Linda, live in Shelburne Falls.