Charles Carleton Coffin
Copyright© 2025 by William Elliot Griffis
Chapter 28: The Home at Alwington
It was a remarkable coincidence that Mr. Coffin was to exchange worlds and transfer his work in the very year in which the issues of the Civil War were to be eliminated from national politics, when not one of the several party platforms was to make any allusion to the struggle of 1861-65, or to any of its numerous legacies. In this year, 1896, also, for the first time since 1860, Southern men, the one a Confederate general, and the other a Populist editor, were to be nominated for possible chief magistracy. Mr. Coffin, with prescience, had already seen that the war issues, grand as they were, had melted away into even vaster national questions. He had turned his thoughts towards the solution of problems which concerned the nation as a whole and humanity as a race. His historical addresses and lectures went back to older subjects, while his thoughts soared forward to the newer conditions, theories, and problems which were looming in the slowly unveiling future. In literature he turned, and gladly, too, from the scenes of slavery and war between brothers. With his pen he sought to picture the ancient heroisms, in the story of which the people of the States of rice and cotton, as well as of granite, ice, and grain, were alike interested, as in a common heritage. In Alwington, surrounded by old and new friends, genial and cultured, he hoped, if it were God’s will, to complete his work with a rotunda-like series of pen pictures of the Revolution.
This was not to be, though he was to die “in harness,” like Nicanor of old, without lingering illness or broken powers. While he was to see not a few golden days of A. D. 1896, yet the proposed pictures were to be left upon the easel, scarcely more than begun. The pen and ink on his table were to remain, like brushes on the palette, with none to finish as the master-workman had planned.
Months before that date of February 18th, on which their golden wedding was to be celebrated, Mr. and Mrs. Coffin had secured my promise that I should be present. Coming on to Boston, I led the morning worship in the Eliot Church of Newton, which is named after the apostle of the Indians, the quarter-millennial anniversary of the beginning of whose work at Nonantum has just been celebrated. In the afternoon, I had the pleasure of looking into the faces of three score or more of my former Shawmut parishioners in the Casino hall in Beaconsfield Terrace.
Mr. Coffin had, from the first, fully agreed with the writer in believing that a Congregational church should be formed in the Reservoir district, which had, he predicted, a brilliant and substantial future. He was among the very first to move for the sale of the old property on Tremont Street, and he personally prepared the petition to the Legislature of Massachusetts for permission to sell and move. Afterwards, when the new enterprise seemed to have been abandoned, he listened to the call of duty and remained in Shawmut Church. When he became a resident in Brookline, feeling it still his duty to work and toil, to break new paths, to make the road straight for his Master, rather than to sit down at ease in Zion, he cast his lot in with a little company of those who, though few and without wealth, bravely and hopefully resolved to form a church where it was needed. On November 3d, they first gathered for worship, and one year later, November 4, 1896, the church was formed, with Rev. Harris G. Hale as pastor, and taking the historic, appropriate, but uncommon name, Leyden. Their first collection of money, as a thank-offering to God, was for Foreign Missions.
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