Once a month in the summer, I lead Walking Tours of Justin Morrill's Strafford homestead.  Strafford village includes many significant buildings that were either built by or connected to Senator Morrill, which can teach us much about the life of this long-serving legislator and author of the Land Grant College Acts.  Among these buildings are his birthplace and boyhood home, his father's blacksmith shop, the 1799 Strafford Town House where Morrill went to church and Town Meeting, the store where he got his first job as well as the store he would eventually own here. He also built the town’s first library, which he later gave to the Town; another library built in his memory to hold his art collection and books for the benefit of the town; and, finally and most notably, his gothic revival-style Homestead and caretaker's home.  The tour ends at the Morrill mausoleum in the cemetery above his birthplace.

At the end of the tour, I read from a eulogy by Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr., which he gave at the mausoleum, during a symposium on Morrill in 1998. Coffin speaks below to the standards set by Senator Morrill.

"At least three things make the memory of Senator Morrill so important to our village. The first and most obvious is a lifetime of integrity.  Morrill set a standard for the kind of life all of us should lead. Any transparent sham, any self-righteous ignorance with a desire to censor, cruelty of any kind -- all these in our village would represent a reproach to Morrill's memory.

Likewise in the affairs of state while compromise has integrity, selling out has none. Morrill never sold out and today would be appalled at the me-first political climate which leaves little room for larger considerations of the common good.

Secondly, Senator Morrill recognized both the importance of roots and that the point of roots is to put forth branches. Today there are so many cosmopolitan. sophisticated people who have branches but no roots. And then there are those with deep roots in native soil who have never grown branches. Morrill showed us how roots and branches combine.

Think of the farm tools in his barn and the paintings in his house, not to mention the architecture itself. Think of his love of learning and his love of learners.  As noted, his own education was thwarted in childhood, but not for a minute forsaken.  And precisely because he had to leave school so early, he wanted others to have the formal education he was denied.  Hence the land grant colleges, hence his interest in two libraries, the one in Strafford, the other the Library of Congress.

And lastly, I think of Morrill's faith.  It was not so much a religious faith, although for the last 30 years of his life he attended a Unitarian church in Washington. Rather his primary faith was in the basic goodness he sensed in the U.S., the citizens of the United States.  It was a faith he never lost, not during the dark days of the Civil War, nor during the corrupt times that followed. He kept his faith despite the evidence, knowing that only in so doing did the evidence have any chance of changing.  His deepest desire was that we not sell ourselves short.

And we shouldn't. Let us resolve to honor his memory by furthering his highest hopes, his hopes for his native Strafford, his hopes for the country he loved and served so well."

2023 Walking Tours

The 2023 Walking Tours of Justin Morrill's Strafford will take place on the following Saturdays: June 17, July 15, August 19 and September 16th.  All tours start at 11am from the Justin Morrill Homestead.