BIOBOMBS
When I bring visitors to the Amherst College campus, I usually put them up at the Lord Jeffery Inn. The three-story structure is a prominent member of a row of immodest giants that look down on the Town Commons. Its whitewashed brick exudes New England charm in a self-important Yankee way. It does have some reason to boast. It stands in the middle of a favored hollow. In 1812, Noah Webster moved in at one end of the Commons, a block to the right of where the inn now stands. He was brought there by his stubborn determination to write a dictionary that would help unify a young country through a common language. Realizing that he had to choose between this dream and the worldly but pricey environs of New Haven, Connecticut, he reluctantly moved to the backwater town of Amherst, abandoning mainstream society for, as he put it, “a humble cottage in the country.” He joined about twenty-five other families whose life was organized around the Commons, which was then a gentle slope of birch trees on which grazing privileges were shared on a rotating basis by the town’s cows.At the Webster end of the Commons, just twenty steps from where the inn is now located, stood the one-room schoolhouse that so appalled Webster that he set to raising money to build Amherst Academy almost as soon as he arrived. Within three years the academy had been built a block uphill from the schoolhouse, just beyond the corner of the Commons. Webster postponed his dictionary by several more years to raise money for a college even more earnestly than he had for the academy, partly because he felt poorly treated by Williams College, which had rejected his proposal to affiliate with Amherst Academy. The episode started a usually friendly rivalry between Williams College and Amherst College, which continues to this day. The first austere buildings of Amherst College still stand at the top of a hill two blocks to the inn’s left, at the other end of the Commons from Webster’s “humble cottage.”In the year of Webster’s death a teenage Emily Dickinson, living a few doors down the road from Webster’s farm, could look out her bedroom window toward the Commons. Webster had returned to New Haven by that time, but Dickinson still felt his legacy as she walked alongside the Commons past the Webster farm to attend, somewhat irregularly, the academy. The legacy was also felt by the young poet Robert Frost and the young physicist Niels Bohr, at the other end of the Commons, as they struck up a friendship at the college a century after Webster busily raised money for a school that would link the Arts with the Sciences.The visitors invariably enjoy their stay at the Lord Jeffery Inn, but it seems as though they should be feeling apprehensive, just as they would if they sat down to eat at a diner called the Typhoid Mary Cafe. As a visitor pulls up a blanket on a cold winter night at the inn, he might remember that Lord Jeffery Amherst was the guy who is famous for giving smallpox-laden blankets to the Indians of western Pennsylvania.*50\225\2*
