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REYNOLDS HISTORICAL GENEALOGY COLLECTION
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ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 01095 5125
SUCKANESSET
WHEREIN MAY BE READ
A HISTORY OF FALMOUTH MASSACHUSETTS
BY THEODATE GEOFFREY
--
£
UCKANESSET
Wherein may be read
A HISTORY of FALMOUTH
MASSACHUSETTS
1001
1779150
1030
BY
THEODATE GEOFFREY
1
T1223MAX HTOOMJJAL & YHOT28
SUCKANESSET
F 84427 .33
Geoffrey, Theodate, pseud.
Suckanesset; wherein may be read a history of Falmouth, Massachusetts, by Theodate Geoffrey. Falmouth, Mass., Printed at the Falmouth publishing co., inc., 1930; 5 p. 1., 16S p. front .. illus., plates, ports. 23cm.
CHELF CARD
1. Falmouth, Mass .- Hist.
30-15037 Library of Congress F74.F3G34
: 21095 Copy 2.
Copyright
1 23001
974.49
F84427.33
Copyright 1928, 1930 by Dorothy G. Wayman All Rights Reserved
Printed at The Falmouth Publishing Co., Inc. ,1930
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PREFACE
T HE Undeserted Village is my own name for Fal- mouth ever since I first saw the town, on Memorial Day, 1923, with the old elms flinging a lace-like green tracery of young leaves against the spring sky on the Village Green, with creamy dog wood blossoms spangling the roadside shrubs, with purple panicles of lilacs filling the air with incense.
On that day the Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts came to Falmouth to do honor, with all the townsfolk, to a World War hero who was to be decorated with the Distinguished Service Cross. It was "Connie" Collins' day-Private Cornelius; P. Collins, Company C, 165th Infantry, 42nd Division; cited for ex- traordinary heroism in action near Meurcy Farm, north of Chateau-Thierry, France, July 29, 1918.
I was a stranger then. I did not know Private Collins; I had never seen Falmouth before. The pagean- try of the incident fired my imagination, and set me to thinking of the history of a township, founded by Pilgrim stock on the site of an Indian village, that had con- tributed its heroes to the War of American Independence, that had been bombarded by British guns in the War of 1812, that had sent its quota to preserve the Union in the War of the Rebellion; and now in 1923, after two hundred and sixty years of community existence, was celebrating perpetuation of an heroic tradition in the latest American war.
Since then I have come to Falmouth to live, and come to love the town for its charm of atmosphere; but I have never lost the perspective of that Memorial Day morning. The chapters that follow are not so much a detailed history of Falmouth, as a picture of a typical American township.
There are other villages like this Undeserted Village of Falmouth, scattered through the country, too often dismissed by the casual tourist as rural backwaters in which the current of civilization runs sluggishly. Rather
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are they the deep pools in which the very springs of our civilization rise.
In the Undeserted Village survive the highest ideals of the democracy in which our country was founded and in which it must persist to resist decay. Here frugality, pride in honest labor, the love of home and little children, and participation for public welfare are the tests of a man's standing in the community. Throughout success- ive generations, through changing economic conditions, in spite of time and the injection of alien stocks, in this village traditional virtues have been perpetuated; and only a wise man could say whether heredity has leavened the mass, or education has molded it; or some intangible genus loci of environment has wrought the work.
Falmouth has a beautiful natural setting. Here are acre upon acre of fertile soil and miles of rambling roads between cleared fields and farms; rolling hills covered with wild profusion of scrub oak or stunted pine; mucky swamps where wild azalea grows or cranberry vines creep; pine-fringed ponds where white pond lilies float; rolling sand dunes pegged down with beach plum and Indian pea while scented bayberry, sweet fern and wild roses riot, watched by sentinel cedars where soil meets sand.
Once the Undeserted Village drew its living chiefly from the blue water that now on long beaches, now in deep fiord-like bays, defines and limits the township. The great white houses around the Green and along Shore Street were built from the proceeds of long whaling voyages or trading enterprises in clipper ships; but the tin oil can and the steel freighter blighted those under- takings and the whirl of mechanical spindles in industrial cities was a mercenary lure to the youth of the town; while a wealthy leisure class discovered the charm of the village as a summer resort.
This triple problem of developing a new means of livelihood, of recruiting population, of preserving the in- tegrity of honest American ideals, has faced towns every- where in the older sections of our country.
In some places the fight has been frankly abandoned, the villages have drifted into weed-grown, poverty-strick- en desuetude. In others industrialization has brought in its wake a tide of immigration that swamped native standards.
It is because the Undeserted Village has evolved a new means of economic prosperity, has absorbed with a
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PREFACE
noteworthy degree of assimilation its quota of alien im- migrants, has looked unmoved on the frivolity or luxury of the summer influx; retaining a community character of frugality, decency, honesty and independence, that the town becomes significant.
"Ill fares the land to hastening ills a prey Where wealth accumulates and men decay; Princes and lords may flourish or may fade, A breath can make them as a breath has made; But a bold peasantry, their country's pride, When once destroyed, can never be supplied"
said Oliver Goldsmith of his "Deserted Village", but this old Cape town has escaped his melancholy prediction. The old original stock, the hardy first settlers have taken in new blood, shaped it to the old tradition, and in- corporated it into a body dedicated unwaveringly to high standards.
The regularity of life, its calm and poise are evidenced by the number of men advanced in years but active in public life. Arteries seem not to harden; nerves apparently fret not, in the Undeserted Village. As these lines are written, in November 1929, Falmouth has a town clerk and treasurer, William H. Hewins, who will be 90 years old next March but walks to his office twice a day; a chief of police, Herbert H. Lawrence who is seventy-one years old; a chairman of the board of selectmen, Arthur Underwood; a Moderator of the town meetings, George E. Dean; Water Commissioners, Eugene E. C. Swift and Charles Hadley all drawing on towards their three score and ten, but vigorous and active still in their interest in their work. Yet the town is by no means run by grey- beards; in the various departments one finds an upstand- ing lot of fine, hard-working, clean-living young men.
The Undeserted Village after three centuries of corporate existence is still in the Golden Age where honest, homely virtues thrive and the Golden Calf has won no worshipers. Man, not money, is the master in this peaceful town where people spend wisely for comforts but are not tempted by luxuries that breed effeminacy and discontent. It is the kind of a town that stands for democracy at its best, and leads us to seek in its history the secret that has perpetuated its spirit through the changes and despite the contagions of civilization's progress.
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I would acknowledge the cordial co-operation shown me by Mr. William H. Hewins, Town Clerk and Town Treasurer for many years; the Rev. Henry H. Smythe, President of the Falmouth Historical Society who has placed the resources of that association at my disposal; Mrs. Kate J. Watson, Mrs. T. L. Swift, Mrs. Kathryn Swift Greene, Mr. George E. Dean; and my friends who have helped to make this book possible. Permission to reproduce the fine photographs of Mr. Fred L. Geggatt and Mr. Fred S. Howard is gratefully appreciated.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Track of the Norsemen .
1
II. Gosnold's Coming · .
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.
8
III. A Runaway 'Prentice .
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·
16
IV. In Quaker Drab
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23
V. Duly and Legally Assembled .
·
33
VI. The Village Green
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41
VII. Privateers and Prizes 53 .
. VIII. Jackson's Wooden Head 62 .
IX. The Two Friends .
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73
X. Live Oak and Elm Trees 83 .
XI. Whalers of Falmouth 97 . .
XII. The Awashonks Massacre .
. . 109
XIII. Preaching of the Word . 131 ·
XIV. Sheep to Strawberries
143
XV. Summer's Tranquil Spell .
· 154
XVI. Fortunes of the Years ·
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162
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CHAPTER I
THE TRACK OF THE NORSEMEN
V ILJHALMUR STEFANSSON, the noted Arctic ex- plorer, who has studied the old Norse sagas, com- bining knowledge of their language with personal acquaintance with our icy shores in answer to our query as to whether the Norsemen appeared to have visited Cape Cod, wrote, under date of January 3, 1927: "On the whole I think you will come to the conclusion that no places can be exactly identified with reference to the Norse voyages at any place south of the St. Lawrence River or Nova Scotia. Even if historians should come to the general view which some have held that the voyages extended even as far south as Virginia, it is reasonably certain that no exact spots will be identified unless there happens to be an archaeological discovery upon which to base it."
John Fiske, the historian, in his work, "The Discovery of America," says:
"On the whole we may say with some confidence that the place described as Vinland was situated some- where between Cape Breton and Point Judith. It should be said that some scholarly investigators hold that all the conditions of the descriptions of Vinland in the sagas are met by the shores of Labrador and Newfound- land, although the weight of opinion is in favor of the New England coast. No genuine Norse remains have ever been discovered in New England."
Thus the historians. Yet we ourselves in 1926 saw in Buzzards Bay a small craft, not over thirty feet long, undecked, which with five men had crossed the Atlantic from Bergen, and whose prow curved up in the quaint and spirited likeness of a dragon, even as those of the Viking vessels of yore. Having seen this reminder of long ago, we were curious to read again the old sagas of the Norsemen, and we copy out for our readers that
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part which treats of the discovery of Vinland, wherein are many points which coincide most strikingly with the country in our vicinity.
Leif, the son of Eric the Red, of Brattahild, visited Biarni Heriulfsson (at Greenland) and bought a ship of him and collected a crew, until they formed alto- gether a company of thirty five men. One of the com- pany was a German named Tyrker.
They put the ship in order and when they were ready they sailed off to sea and found first that land which Biarni and his shipmates found last. They sailed up to the land and cast anchor and launched a boat and went ashore and saw no grass there. Great ice mountains lay inland back from the sea and it was as a (tableland of) flat rock all the way from the sea to the ice mountains and the country seemed to them to be entirely devoid of good qualities. Then said Leif it has not come to pass with us in regard to this land as with Biarni that we have not gone on it. To this country I will now give a name and call it Helluland. ;
They returned to the ship, put out to sea and found a second land. They sailed again to the land and came to anchor, launched a boat and went ashore. This was a level wooded land and there were broad stretches of white sand where they went and the land was level by the sea. Then said Leif, this land shall have a name after its nature and we will call it Markland.
They returned to the ship forthwith and sailed away upon the main with north-east winds and were out two 'doegr' before they sighted land. They sailed toward this land and came to an island which lay to the north- ward off the land. There they went ashore and looked about them. They went aboard their ship again and sailed into a certain sound which lay between the island and a cape, which jutted out from the land on the north and they stood in westering past the cape. At ebb tide there were broad reaches of shallow water there and they ran the ship aground there and it was a long dis- tance from the ship to the ocean, yet were they so an- xious to go ashore that they could not wait until the tide should rise under their ship but hastened to the land where a certain river flows out from a lake. As soon as the tide rose beneath the ship however, they took the boat which they conveyed up the river and so into the lake where they cast anchor and carried their ham-
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THE TRACK OF THE NORSEMEN
mocks ashore from the ship and built themselves booths. there.
They afterward determined to establish themselves: there for the winter and they accordingly built a large. house. There was no lack of salmon there either in the river or the lake and larger salmon than they had ever seen before. The country thereabout seemed to be possessed of such good qualities that the cattle would need no fodder there during the winters, and the grass withered but little. The days and nights there were of more equal length than in Greenland or Ice- land.
Leif said to his companions I propose now to divide our company into two groups and to set about an ex- ploration of the country, one half of our company shall remain at home at the house while the other half shall investigate the land and they must not go beyond a point from which they can return home ev- ery night.
One evening Tyrker, the German was belated, but when Leif and twelve others went to search, they met him returning in excited mood. Leif addressed him and asked Wherefore art thou so belated, foster father mine? In the beginning Tyrker spoke for some time in German rolling his eyes and grinning and they could not understand him but after a time he addressed them in Northern tongues. I did not go much further than you and yet I have something of novelty to relate. I have found vines and grapes.
A cargo sufficient for the ship was cut and when the Spring came they made their ship ready and sailed away, and from its products Leif gave the land a name and called it Wineland.
The next year Thorvald, brother of Leif made a trip.
Now Thorvald with the advice of his brother Leif prepared to make this voyage with thirty men. They put their ship in order and sailed out to sea and there is no account of their voyage until they arrived at Leifs- booths in Wineland.
They laid up their ship there and remained quietly during the Winter supplying themselves with food by fishing. In the Spring however, Thorvald said they should put their ship in order and that a few men should take the after boat and proceed along the western coast.
They found it a fair, well-wooded country. It is but
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a short distance from the woods to the sea and there were white sands as well as great numbers of islands and shoals. They found neither dwelling of men nor lair of beasts but in one of the westerly islands they found a wooden building for the shelter of grain. They turned back and arrived at Leifsbooths in the autumn.
In the following Summer Thorvald set out toward the east and along the northern coast. They were met by a high wind off a certain promontory and they were driven ashore there and damaged the keel of the ship, and were compelled to remain there for a long time and repair the injury to their vessel. Then said Thorvald to his com- panions I propose that we raise the keel upon this cape and call it Keelness, and so they did.
Then they sailed away to the eastward of the land and into the mouth of the adjoining firth and to a head- land which projected into the sea there and which was entirely covered with woods. They found an anchorage for their ship and put out a gangway to the land and Thorvald and all of his companions went ashore. It is a fair region here said he and I should like to make my home. They then returned to the ship and discovered on the sand in beyond the headland three mounds. They went up to these and saw that they were three skin canoes with three men under each. They thereupon di- vided their party and succeeded in seizing all the men but one who escaped with his canoe. They killed the eight men and then ascended the headland again and looked about them and discovered within the firth certain hillocks which they concluded must be habitations. They were then so overpowered with sleep that they could not keep awake and all fell into a heavy slumber from which they were awakened by the sound of a cry uttered above them and the words of the cry were these: Awake Thor- vald, thou and all thy countrymen if thou wouldst save thy life.
A countless number of skin canoes thereupon ad- vanced on them from the inner part of the firth where- upon Thorvald exclaimed, We must put out the warboards on both sides of the ship. Then ensued a battle with the savages, in which Thorvald received an arrow beneath his arm which wounded him so sorely that he was buried on the headland on which he had said earlier he would like to make his home. Afterwards his companions re-
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THE TRACK OF THE NORSEMEN
joined their mates at Leifsbcoths and returned to Green- land the following Spring.
A little later Karlsefni 'who was a very wealthy man' took a company of sixty men and five women out to Leifs- booths, and cattle, intending to form a colony. At Leifs- booths they were soon provided with food, as a whale was driven ashore there and they secured and flensed it. They gathered wood and grapes and in the Spring set up barter with the savages or Skrellings as the Norsemen termed them. These brought 'grey furs, sables and all kinds of peltries.' Karlsefni forbade his men to trade their weapons with the savages, and instead taught the savages to drink milk, for which they gladly exchanged their wares. Eventually, however, the Norsemen and Skrellings fought, the Norsemen being victorious, and re- turning to Greenland.
One other party went out, but quarrelled with much bloodshed among themselves, and when the survivors re- turned to Greenland, it is not recorded that any parties went to Wineland to Leifsbooths.
This account is a translation from the Saga of Eric the Red written in the fourteenth century and refers to voyages made by the Norsemen about the year 1000. It is noteworthy that one Adam of Bremen who visited Den- mark between 1047 and 1073, while living men could still speak of the voyages of the Norsemen, describes a land called Vinland beyond Greenland in which he says that corn grows without cultivation. We know well that one of the first things observed by the Englishmen who came to Cape Cod in 1620 was the Indian corn.
If we take into consideration such points in the Saga of Eric the Red as the 'western islands' and 'the certain sound which lay between the island and a cape' together with the broad reaches of shallow water; the whale that drifted ashore, the mild winter when 'the grass withered but little' and the wild grapes and corn; then it takes no great stretch of the imagination to conceive that Leif and his men came into Vineyard Sound past No Man's Land and sailed up to one of the bays on the Sound with the narrow entrance and broad bay inland which they might have called 'a certain river flowing out of a lake.'
From some such bay on the Sound, Thorvald would have found, as he says, white sands as well as great numbers of islands and shoals to the west, and by "sail- ing away to the eastward of the land and along the
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northern coast" he would have rounded Cape Cod and so met the savages at a headland which projected into the sea there as Manomet does.
We can not tell, after one thousand years, but when we remember how the "Leif Erikson", replica of the Viking model sent from Bergen to the SesquiCentennial Exposition, sailed through the Canal and down Buzzards Bay, surely we may at least wonder if 1926 was the first time that these shores have seen the dragon-prow of the Norsemen's boats.
The late Joseph Story Fay, who came to Woods Hole as a Summer resident, first purchasing the Fay property there in 1852 evolved an ingenious theory, which he pub- lished in 1882 in a monograph entitled "The Track of the Norsemen." The main contention was that the word 'hole,' common in this vicinity as a name for a small harbor, came from the Norwegian "holl" meaning little hill, and that the Indians learned from the Norsemen to so speak of the headlands about the harbors:
In 1875, the male residents of Woods Hole petitioned the Post Office Department to change the spelling, and from October, 1875 until the 1890's the village was known as "Woods Holl" and is so shown on old maps, and in the postmarks of old letters.
Mr. Fay contended that the Norsemen "sighted Cape Cod and entered Vineyard Sound in rounding Monomoy Point" where they found "on the right a high sandy hill, overlooking a land-locked anchorage called Powder Hole -a score of miles further along, across the Sound on his left he would have seen the hills now called Oak Bluffs and under their lee a deep bay and roadstead long known as Holmes' Hole, now changed to Vineyard Haven-cross- ing over to the mainland again, a little further west he would have come to the bold, but prettily rounded hills forming the south-western extremity of the Cape, and, behind them, the sheltered and picturesque harbor of Wood's Hole. Proceeding thence towards Narragansett Bay, along the south coast of Naushon, prominent hills on the west end of that island slope down to a roadstead for small craft and passage through to Buzzards Bay, called Robinson's Hole :- the next island is Pasque, and between its high hills and those of Nashawena is a pass- age called Quick's Hole. Now these several localities are unlike each other, except that all have hills in their vicinity, serving as distinguishing landmarks. And why
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is not the word Hole, as applied to them, a corruption of the Norwegian word Holl, meaning hill?"
"It seems to confirm the views here advanced that in no other part of this continent, or of the world, where the English have settled, is to be commonly found the local name of Hole, and yet here, in a distance of sixty miles, the thoroughfare of these bold navigators, there are no less than five such, still extant. How can it be explained, except because it is "the track of the Norse- men?"
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CHAPTER II
GOSNOLD'S COMING
A LTHOUGH famous mariners and unnamed adven- turers and fishermen visited New England and Cape Cod in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the one who is indubitably linked with our own Falmouth is Bartholomew Gosnold. Gosnold it was, indeed, who gave its name to Cape Cod, on account of the numbers of that variety of fish found in its vicinity; and a vernacular poem by Benjamin Drew gives a humorous account of the naming:
There sailed an ancient mariner, Bart Gosnold was he hight;
The Cape was all a wilderness When Gosnold hove in sight.
The hills were bold and fair to view And covered o'er with trees.
Said Gosnold, 'Bring a fishing line While lulls the evening breeze.'
'I'll christen that there sandy shore From the first fish I take;
Tautog or toadfish, cusk or cod, Horse mackerel or hake.'
Quick Gosnold hauled: 'Cape-Cape-Cape Cod! Cape Cod!" The crew cried louder,
'Here, steward, take the fish along And give the boys a chowder!".
Bartholomew Gosnold sailed from Falmouth, Eng- land, on March 23, 1602, in the ship "Concord", built and owned in Dartmouth, with Bartholomew Guilbert as second officer, and a crew of 32 men. Gilbert Ar- cher and John Brereton .of the "Concord's" comple- ment have left records of the voyage. They went by way of the Azores, passed the outskirts of the Sargasso
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Sea and on May 14 reached land, where many savages put out to meet them in canoes. These savages had a smattering of English words and some articles of European clothing, having doubtless come in contact with the European fishermen who frequented the Grand Banks.
On the 18th of May the Concord came in sight of a great point of land, which they first called Shoal Hope, but later styled Cape Cod. Gosnold landed here, finding much sand, many berries as yet unripe, and a friendly young Indian with plates of copper in his ears. They sailed southward, seeing the shores filled with Indians running along the beach "as much admiring us," and some of the natives came out and boarded the vessel, be- ing found timid but inclined to be thievish, says the his- torian. Eventually they came to what is now Noman's Land, which Gosnold named Martha's Vineyard; Gay Head they saw, and called it Dover Cliff; and on May 27, passing around a ledge of rocks in Buzzards Bay, which they named Gosnold's Hope.
Gosnold and his men had intended to found a colony, and they selected a small, uninhabited island for this pur- pose, naming it, in honor of their sovereign, Elizabeth's Isle, which today we call by the Indian name of Cutty- hunk.
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