Left to right; John Fawley, great-grandson of Chief Justice Stone; Lauson Cashdollar, grand-nephew; Caroline Ely, great-granddaughter and wife of Lauson, Marcia Cashdollar.
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FITTING TRIBUTE
Bridge named for former
Supreme Court chief justice
By NICOLE S.COLSON
Banner Staff
CHESTERFIELD -
It seems only fitting the Chesterfield Arch Bridge be named for Harlan Fiske Stone.
The Chesterfield native was 16 years old,'when the first bridge was built across
the Connecticut River at that site connecting Vermont and New Hampshire in 1889.
By the time flooding took it down in 1936 and the arch bridge was built the following year,
Stone was an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. This past Sunday, his grandson,
Harlan Fiske Stone 2nd, was given the honor of unveiling a plaque with his grandfather's
likeness dedicating the bridge to him.
NICOLE COLSOt:ll Banner Staff
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Remarks from the dedication made by
Tim Butterworth, NH State Rep.
Dedication Sunday, Sept 12, 2010
My name is Tim Butterworth, and I’m honored to be a part of this celebration today. We’re going to get in touch with our historical roots a bit today, honoring Chesterfield’s most famous resident, meeting his descendants, and we’ll spend a little time talking about the nuts and bolts of the structure in front of us.
This is a special spot on the river, a sharp corner with a stone ledge across from us, and the deep clay bank on this side. It’s easy to see why they built the bridge here. Before the dam was built down in Vernon in 1909, this would have been running water, not a backed-up mill pond. The river flooded in the Spring, draining 11,000 square miles, but by this time of year you could probably walk across it in many places. This is a deep and narrow corner of the river, and Moses Smith, our first settler would have had to paddle hard getting a canoe up through here in November, 1761.
Before the bridge there were 2 ferries just north of here, Gilson’s Ferry and The Norcross Ferry, and above that is Catsbane Island, where the Indians crossed after defeating Sergeant Taylor's detachment at the mouth of Broad Brook in July, 1748.
There was a suspension bridge here before this one, built in 1888. Those were the years of the big log drives, from 1869 to 1915, from the Connecticut Lakes almost 400 miles to Hartford, Connecticut. Smaller bridges were sometimes knocked down by the logs. The loggers didn’t mind - they didn’t like bridge abutments that caused log jams. When word went out in 1915 that it would be the last drive, there were 3,000 men working for Connecticut Valley Lumber up by the Lakes. In the spring, the 500 rivermen in their caulk boots, who had been in the woods all winter, and 65 million feet of logs, all came around this bend into Brattleboro. They brought good business to the towns, but folks were advised to lock up their daughters. That bridge washed out in the flood of 1936.
After our newest bridge over there was finished, and the The Chesterfield Arch Bridge Beautification and Preservation Society started working on ways to turn this abandoned structure into a welcoming entrance to New Hampshire and a Chesterfield roadside attraction, they wanted to dedicate it to a citizen of Chesterfield, and Justice Harlan Fiske Stone seemed like the perfect choice, right for the town, right for the history of the bridge, and right for our times today, too. Justice Stone probably saw the old suspension bridge being built when he was 16, and he was a young man during the time of the log drives. He was on the Supreme Court in DC when this bridge - his bridge - was built, in 1937, dealing with challenges to the New Deal legislation recently passed by President Franklin Roosevelt to get us out of the Depression. There are a lot of historical connections.
I’d like to introduce a colleague of mine in the NH House. We’re fortunate to have a Representative who is also an avid preservationist and specifically a student of old bridges. Representative Steve Lindsey has some information about the construction of the Chesterfield Arch Bridge.
It was common in the old days when this bridge was built for a local poet to memorialize the event in verse. Our next speaker is Neil Jennesse who will read a poem that Chesterfield resident Roy Piper wrote for the old Arch bridge.
I’ve been driving by the Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone historic marker in the center of town for years, and hearing stories about him, so I’m delighted that we’ll finally get to meet his descendants, and hear from someone who actually knew him. Please welcome our guest of honor today, Harlan Fiske Stone II.
Thank you for those words, Mr. Stone. And now we have one more responsibility for you, if you would step over here to side of the bridge.
Before we finish the ceremony today, and invite everyone to the refreshment table, I would like to say a few words of thanks for the people who made all this happen.
· America Legion Band, from Brattleboro. They’ve certainly made this a memorable event.
· The Vermont Department of Corrections, who do the maintenance and clearing on the Vermont end of the bridge.
· Pierre Saba, the owner of the Riverside Motel, who is responsible for the upkeep and landscaping at this end of the bridge.
· The United Foods International Green team, which donated the four granite benches and six barrels of flowers.
· I’d like to recognize Dan Elder, a descendant of the Justice’s mother’s family, the Butlers. They lived in our part of town south on Rte. 63.
· I also want to recognize Carl Schmidt, one of the people involved in saving our sister bridge, The Samuel Morey Memorial bridge between Orford, NH and Fairley, Vt.
· We owe thanks to all the legislators who helped endorse the bill and support it through both the house and senate, and to the governor for signing it. There’s Representatives Steve Lindsey, Henry Parkhurst, Bill Butynski, Dan Carr, and our Senator Molly Kelly. Now we’re hoping they can help us find funds somewhere to paint it.
· And finally, most importantly, for the people who pulled this all together:
On his 1831 travels around America, Alexis de Toqueville, famously wrote,
“IN no country in the world has the principle of association been more successfully used or applied to a greater multitude of objects than in America. There is no end which the human will despairs of attaining through the combined power of individuals united into a society.”
And nowhere is that better shown than with The Arch Bridge Beautification and Preservation Society which has made all this happen today. What deToqueville didn’t say was that mostly this work gets done by women, with a few men around to back them up.
Over the last two years this volunteer society cleared the bridge of debris and weeds, planted flowers, and hauled water to the site daily.
They arranged the purchase of the beautiful plaque from Caldwell & Ward Casting Co of Jamestown, N.Y., and they arranged this dedication ceremony.
In the coming years the group plans to place stripped down and restored cars filled with flowers on the bridge. The group feels this will get the bridge the attention it deserves, that it will serve as a tourist attraction and compliment the Welcome Center to be built less than a mile from the bridge next year.
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Our Grandfather, the Chief Justice
By Harlan Fiske Stone II
Distinguished speakers and guests, it is a great pleasure to have lived long enough to take part in today’s dedication of the Justice Harlan Fiske Stone Memorial Bridge here in Chesterfield.
Justice Stone had two sons, and they gave him five grandchildren. Four are still living, and all are here today. With me are Peter Stone of Cambridge, Massachusetts; Cynthia Ely of Washington, D.C.; and Phoebe Liebig of Culver City, California; and I have come from New York City. Representing the fifth grandchild, the late Doris Fawley, is her younger son, John Fawley of Bainbridge Island, Washington. Also with us are Caroline Ely of New York City, a great-granddaughter, and Lauson Cashdollar of Beaver, Pennsylvania, a grand-nephew.
The Stone family has had a very long history in Chesterfield, back to 1778 when the Revolutionary War soldier Peter Stone moved here from Massachusetts. Justice Stone started his life on the family farm at the edge of Chesterfield in 1872. When that farm boy completed his education at Amherst College and Columbia Law School, he returned again to Chesterfield for Agnes Harvey, whom he married in her family’s front parlor in 1899. Agnes’s family lived in the big house at the crossroads in the center of Chesterfield, known as Harvey’s Corner because of her family’s local prominence.
I was 11 years old when Justice Stone died in 1946. From my very early years I remember especially his magical trick of making the lid of his pocket watch spring open by blowing on it. I never noticed that he was pressing the stem of the watch to release the catch that held it closed.
Today we also remember Justice Stone for a number of special Supreme Court cases during his 16 years as an associate justice and five years as the chief justice. In his 1938 majority opinion in the Carolene Products Company case, involving interstate shipment of altered milk, he included his famous footnote that made the distinction between commercial rights and individual rights to protect minority groups. This footnote, foreshadowing many later civil rights cases, has been described as one of the six most important landmarks in the history of the Supreme Court.
In 1940 Justice Stone was on the losing side of the court’s 8 to 1 ruling that the Gobitas children must salute the flag during the pledge of allegiance at school, even though it was against their religious beliefs as Jehovah’s Witnesses. When the Supreme Court reversed its decision in a similar case three years later, Justice Stone’s lonely dissent had become the majority view. Many years after that, when my wife Helen and I were looking after my parents in the 1990s, we often had to park our car in the only nearby garage in their Brooklyn neighborhood, close to the World Headquarters of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Jehovah’s Witness who happened to manage that garage always found room for our car after he realized we were Gobitas Stones
In 1942, with Stone presiding as chief justice, the Supreme Court ruled that a military tribunal convened to prosecute eight Nazi saboteurs had the legal jurisdiction to try them as enemy belligerents. The Nazi saboteur case involved one of the most famous military trials held in this country.
Justice Stone lived at a time when the politics of government were much more bipartisan. A lifetime Republican, he was elevated to the position of chief justice by President Roosevelt, a Democrat. The first recommendation for the 1948 Stone commemorative postage stamp came from New Hampshire’s State Democratic Committee. When the U.S. Post Office Department said it was too busy printing other scheduled stamps, the Stone stamp was personally ordered by President Truman, also a Democrat.
The last time many people came to Chesterfield to honor Justice Stone was in 1948 for the dedication of a memorial plaque in the front yard of the Stone farmhouse. On that same day the commemorative stamp went on sale for the first time in the Chesterfield Post Office.
The image on the Stone stamp comes from a portrait photo by the famous photographer Karsh, which our grandmother, Agnes Harvey Stone, selected as her favorite picture of our grandfather. I learned before coming here that the same image in relief is the central element of the memorial plaque for this bridge. We grandchildren are very proud to take part in the ceremony to unveil this plaque. Our special thanks to the Chesterfield Arch Bridge Beautification and Preservation Society, which has worked so hard to make this memorial to Justice Stone a reality.
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