Among the unchartered institutions of the New England town, none has had a greater influence than its general “sitting-down” place, where, by common consent, the leaders of all classes gathered. It was to the town what political and social clubs are to the city; it was an exchange place, a go-as-you-please Lyceum, a modern market-place, where the newspapers of the day were criticised, where affairs of Church and State had to be discussed, where politics and politicians were weighed, ticketed, and shelved for future reference, and where neighborhood events were gone over and approved or disapproved. War, domestic or foreign, and its generals, were subject to this trial by jury. The jury consisted of lawyers, doctors, bankers, merchants, farmers. Party-leaders of every shade of opinion—Whigs (later Republicans), Democrats, Abolitionists (brass-mounted, or not mounted at all), Prohibitionists, Independents—all met here on common ground. It was an intelligent, earnest crowd, always good-natured, whose “give and take” was without circumlocution or apology.
In no town in Litchfield County, I fancy, was there quite such a sitting-down place as the store of Mr. Levi S. Knapp on Bank Street in our own town of New Milford, which was conducted by him until his death at the age of ninety-three, and, afterward, by his son, Gerardus Knapp. The place was known to everybody in the towns around. During the Kansas-Nebraska troubles in the late “Fifties,” a witty neighbor christened it “Topeka Hall”; and the name was accepted as quite the proper thing. For a half century, “Topeka Hall” was an informal congress, where earnest men threshed out the problems of the hour. As our late Governor Andrews said of it, “It was the place where the world was wound up.” Had it been honored by a historian, like the late George William Curtis, and a Harper’s Magazine for record, its quips and repartees might have furnished the “Easy Chair” with abundant and amusing copy; and its “wise saws and modern instances” would fairly have covered the history of the town. While its good stories made fun for the day, the place became, none the less, an educator of public opinion, and wielded an influence second to no institution in the town.
The remarkable longevity of the men who assembled there is worthy of special record, covering, as it does, the greater part of the nineteenth century. Below is a list of several of the prominent men, and their ages at death. It is a matter of regret that a more complete list cannot now be made:
| Albert N. Baldwin, 80. James H. McMahon, 68. Henry Merwin, 77. Robert Ferriss, 87. | Eleazer T. Brewer, 81. Cyrus Northrop, 95. Robert Irwin, 88. Ezra Ferriss, 90. |
| Joel W. Northrop, 74. | |
And, living with us to-day, the only survivor of the older men, Mr. Alanson Canfield,[8] who will be one hundred years old on the eighth day of October, 1907.