That the town was a patriotic centre can be learned from the part it took in the Revolution, but it was also public-spirited and particularly advanced in movements for education. Not only did the first law school in America have its beginnings in this little town, and the first school for the higher education of women, but in the Monitor for 1798 we read of a public library as having been in existence for some time. The bookstores not only advertised themselves in the weekly papers, but also the new books as they came to their shelves. There was a “Litchfield Lyceum” with its lectures, debates, and weekly meetings, and still farther, in 1831, we find a notice which proves that even at that early date the movement toward manual training was taking shape in the thought of these broad-minded men. A society was incorporated October 27, 1831, and a notice was published to the subscribers for stock in the “Manual Labor High School of Litchfield County. Committee: Frederick Wolcott, Lot Norton, Orange Merwin, Tertius D. Potter and Solomon Rockwell.” Preparations were to be made for the choice of location, necessary buildings, etc. Also about this time we find advertised a select school for business students, mathematics, and the languages, kept by M. R. Deming. In 1789, long before the temperance movement in which the Rev. Lyman Beecher became so prominent, a temperance pledge was drafted and signed by many people. The original pledge was republished, with other articles bearing upon the same subject, in the Litchfield Enquirer of September 26, 1833. A few of Miss Pierce’s scholars boarded in her own house, built in 1803, but there was no boarding school in the modern acceptation of the term. The rest of the pupils boarded with different families throughout the town, as did also those of the law school. There were some years as many as one hundred or more belonging to each school. Imagine these now quiet streets with red coaches rattling through them, with signs of importer, publisher, goldsmith, hatter, etc., hanging on the shops, with young men arriving on horseback to attend the law school and divide their attention between their studies of the law and studies of the pretty pupils of the “female academy.” Then there were some gay bloods from the south so much at home in the town that they disported themselves in pink gingham frock coats! So said an eye witness.[15] To complete the picture, there was the daily procession of school girls taking their exercise to the sound of flute and flageolet, and surely it was a lively scene. Henry Ward Beecher was born in Litchfield in June, 1813, on the upper part of this very North Street, and was prepared for college by Miss Pierce. He gives such a graphic and interesting picture of it in his “Life” that it is well to let our readers see the locality as he saw it: [Illustration: PL. V.—MISS PIERCE’S HOUSE, BUILT IN 1802 ]