USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Andover > Andover: symbol of New England; the evolution of a town > Part 2
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These copper-colored inhabitants of what is now Essex Coun- ty were ethnologically members of the Massachusetts division of Algonkin stock. The opinions of archaeologists differ as to whether these tribes originated on the North American conti- nent or reached it from Asia across Bering Strait. The significant fact is that they must have dwelt for several thousand years in New England. At least one hundred village sites have been un- covered in the lower Merrimack Valley, all of them containing artifacts and prehistoric objects of a crude type. One burying ground was opened recently in West Andover, on the Merrimack River, a mile or so above Lawrence. Within the primitive tomb were the skeletons of men, women, and children wrapped in hemlock bark, one of them of such huge size as to suggest that it might be that of a chief or sachem. On the Shattuck farm, three miles above the great dam at Lawrence, is the most inter- esting Indian village in this region. Very few relics have been found at any distance from water. Fish in those days were plenti- ful both in the sea and in the streams, and the country abounded in wild fruit and nuts, as well as flocks of pigeons, duck, geese, and other edible fowl.
Of the habits of these natives before the coming of the whites we know very little. Dr. Henry F. Howe, in his excellent book, Salt Rivers of the Massachusetts Shore, writes, "The curtain of aboriginal mystery is only gradually being raised from our dense ignorance of these early American peoples. No one is living who remembers them in anything like their original way of life. Early colonial observers wrote of them primarily as enemies, and were
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ANDOVER: SYMBOL OF NEW ENGLAND
for the most part little interested in their tools and handicrafts, save as they could turn them to their own uses." Most of our meager information, continued Dr. Howe, is "from random notes scattered among the rather dreary diaries and religious tracts of colonial Massachusetts, written by people who were not themselves especially concerned with Indian lore." Even the painstaking research of archaeologists will probably not add very much in the future to our knowledge of Indian thought, culture, and manner of daily existence.
Contemporary descriptions of the natives emphasize their mercurial and carefree temperament, which made them some- times appear childlike. Lechford, in his Plaine Dealing, or News from New England (1642), portrayed them as "proud and idle, and given much to singing, dancing, and playes." No doubt they deteriorated rapidly as their tribal routine was interrupted and their lands occupied by the whites. Dr. Warren K. Moorehead, a student of the subject, has written regarding the Essex County Indians, "Whereas they were at first upstanding, self-reliant peo- ple, as they came into contact with and were subjugated by our people, they lost self-assurance and became a dissipated and broken race. As a whole, the Indians gained little or nothing through European contact. All the advantages accrued to the white man." Some converted Indians were taken into the homes of the settlers and even labored in the fields. But the majority of the red men were far from resembling Rousseau's Noble Sav- age or Cooper's Uncas. Their habits were filthy, and their con- cepts of morality were inconsistent with the Puritan ideal of disciplined self-control. Under the stimulus of "fire water" they grew quarrelsome and parasitic. In short, their conduct and way of life seemed to the early white settlers to be barbarous. To the colonists at Andover they were from the beginning a menace, and the bloody Pequot War of 1636, no matter who was at fault, was hard to forget. The time was to come, at the close of the sev- enteenth century, when the savages were to become dangerous
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"THE LAND ABOUT COCHICHAWICKE"
enemies, whose attacks on the dwellers near Cochichawicke might be expected on any summer evening.
In 1634, when Cochichawicke was first mentioned in the Col- ony Records, much of its land must have been covered with vir- gin forest, composed of tall pine with some hard wood on the ridges. The settlers naturally looked for a sheltered location on a south slope, protected from winter winds and near a stream or lake. The Indians had their own method of clearing ground for sowing by burning the underbrush each autumn, and to white men accustomed to physical labor the business of making pas- ture out of forest was not too arduous. After the trees had been cut down to within two or three feet of the ground, the stump was burned, and what was left of the roots was allowed to rot until it could easily be dragged out. With the advent of horses and oxen the process was, of course, much simpler. I have watched it in all its stages within the last ten years at La Patrie, a little Canadian village just north of the Maine boundary line. The method has altered very little since the 1640's, except that motorized tractors have expedited the clearing.
Many timid souls tried to dissuade the Puritans from coming to these shores and from staying here after they had arrived. Rob- ert Ryece wrote to his friend, John Winthrop, "How hard wyll it bee for one browghte up among bookes and learned men to lyve in a barbarous place, where there is no learnynge and less cyvillytie." A gentlewoman of the Bay Colony, remarking that those who had praised the climate must have written in "straw- berry time," added, "The air of the country is sharp, the rocks many, the trees innumerable, the grass little, the winter cold, the summer hot, the gnats in summer biting, the wolves at mid- night howling, etc." John White confessed that "the Muskitoes indeed infest the planters"; but he should have added, in the words of the sturdy Governor Bradford, that "they are too deli- cate and unfite to begine plantations and colonies, that cannot endure the biting of a muskeeto; we would wish such to keepe
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ANDOVER: SYMBOL OF NEW ENGLAND
at home till at least they be musketo proof." The settlers at Cochichawicke were made of stern stuff and did not allow depri- vations and discomforts to make their lives miserable. Neither Indians nor mosquitoes-however spelled-kept them from founding their Andover.
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CHAPTER III
Origins of the Town
T HE Charter of the Governor and Company of the Massachu- setts Bay in New England was dated March 4, 1629; and in the next spring eleven ships bearing John Winthrop, the char- ter, and rather more than nine hundred men, women, and chil- dren found a safe anchorage in an American harbor. Settlements already existed along the shore from Cape Cod to Cape Ann, in- cluding Salem, where Roger Conant and later John Endicott, with their followers, were located. Winthrop's group took up land at Boston, Charlestown, Watertown, Medford, Lynn, and Dorchester, and soon other vessels arrived to swell the popula- tion. As soon as the coastal villages were well established, a few of the more enterprising immigrants undertook to investigate the interior, to find out what lay to the west. Andover was the direct consequence of this spirit of combined curiosity and pioneering.
The exact day and place where the first permanent residence . was made within the borders of the two Andovers will never be determined. We shall never learn who first cleared the land and planted a crop and built a shelter. We do know that some active men wanted more room and perhaps a home away from the sea.
Cochichawicke was known at least as early as 1634, and some sturdy adventurers may by that date have constructed squatters' cabins on the land. But no permanent settlement could be made in Massachusetts Bay without a formal grant from the governor and General Court. This necessity brought on the scene the first authentic person to be in any way identified with Andover his-
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tory-the picturesque individualist, Nathaniel Ward, a man of ability and distinction.
A graduate of Cambridge and a clergyman who had been im- prisoned for two years because of his nonconformity. Ward came to Massachusetts Bay in 1634, at the age of fifty-five. There he shortly became the first minister of the town of Ipswich (former; ly Agawam), then the most remote and isolated part of the Col- ony. His career, which has been entertainingly described by Samuel E. Morison in his Builders of the Bay Colony, was uncon- ventional and spectacular; and his satire, The Simple Cobler of Aggawam, written in Massachusetts but published in London in 1647, has been described by Morison as "a serious but witty ar- gument against religious toleration, arbitrary government, and extravagant fashions." One essential requirement for a Puritan "plantation" was a resident clergyman, and Ward was, therefore, qualified to be a leader in a new settlement.
On December 22, 1639, Ward wrote his friend, John Win- throp, asking "that you would not passe your promise nor give any incouragement concerning any plantation at Quichichacke or Penticatt, till myself and some others either speake or write to you about it which shalbe so soone as our conseilles and con- trivalls are ripened." It would be folly to be troubled by the in- consistent spelling of Ward, who was really a well-educated per- son. What finally crystallized as "Cochichawicke" was obviously susceptible of quaint spellings-and received them! Indeed the variations are almost infinite.
In a letter written four days later, Giles Firmin, who had mar- ried Ward's daughter, explained to Winthrop more in detail the family motives:
My father law Ward since his sonne came over is very desirous that we might sett down together, and so that he might leave us together if God should remove him from hence, because that it cannot be ac- complished in this Towne, is very desirous to gett me to remove with him to a new Plantation. After much persuasion used considering my want of accommodation heere (the ground the Towne having
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ORIGINS OF THE TOWN
given me lyinge 5 miles from me or more) and that the gains of Physick will not find mee with bread; he besides apprehending that it might bee a way to free him from some temptations, and make him more cheerful and serviceable to the country or church have yielded to him herein. As I desire your counsell, so I humbly request your fa- vour, that you will be pleased to give us the liberty of choosing a plantation; we think it will bee either Pentuckett or Quichichchek, by Shawshin.
It would be interesting to know from what temptations Ward would have been freed by moving away from Ipswich. But at any rate the plan so clearly favored by the troubled Dr. Firmin was informally approved, and Ward himself wrote that he had "more than 20 families of very good Christians purposed to goe with us." On May 13, 1640, the General Court gave its approval, and everything would seem to have been arranged, with Nathan- iel Ward designated as the spiritual shepherd of the new flock. Unhappily, however, Ward's health had now become a matter of consideration. On November 11, 1640, he wrote to Winthrop, who had suggested that Haverhill might also be a possibility:
I acknowledge I am tender and more unfitt for solitariness and hardship than some others especially at this time through many colds and seeds of the bay sickness I brought from thence yet if God and counsell cast me upon any work or condition I should labour not to wayve his good providence. I hear there is no private room there, little provision and not a woman to dresse meat or wash linen, and the chief of the men are like to be absent for the most parte att their homes.
Ward was clearly too old and infirm to participate in any fur- ther pioneering ventures. In his stead his son became the first minister of Haverhill, and he remained in Ipswich, where, by appointment from the General Court, he drew up in 1641 the so-called "Body of Liberties," the first code of laws to be promul- gated in New England. In 1647, he returned to England, where he settled in the ministry at Shenfield and died in 1652, at the
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age of seventy-four. Andover thus narrowly missed having among its founders the wittiest colonist of his generation.
The enterprise at Cochichawicke was not, however, to be abandoned. On March 22, 1641, Mr. John Woodbridge, a New- bury man also interested in the project, wrote a long letter to John Winthrop, pointing out that some "Rowley men" were scheming to snatch "100 acres of meadow" away from the Co- chichawicke plantation, and that Mr. Rogers, the minister of Rowley, had assumed that his grant extended well into the area which Woodbridge and his Newbury associates were hoping to secure. Woodbridge asked Winthrop to advise him whether he should go ahead and trust to the judgment of the court regard- ing the disputed territory or should abandon his plans. He point- ed out that something should be done quickly "because some of our company have sold themselves out of house & home & so de- sire to bee settled as soon as may be." He added, "I think I must resolve to better myself."
The motives underlying these maneuvers by Ward and Wood- bridge were frankly acquisitive. They were not seeking seclu- sion or an opportunity to meditate away from their fellows. Their reasoning was simple. At Ipswich and Newbury they were without good land for their needs and cravings, and they wished to be better off. Having "viewed ye place," they fixed their minds on Cochichawicke, because it afforded the best unpre-empted area available. As was inevitable when two or three groups want the same territory, jealousies arose between them and the "Row- ley men." Self-interest, even with Christians, is a powerful mo- tive in human conduct, and the Puritans were certainly not lacking in a normal eagerness to improve their condition.
These early colonists, moreover, were no penniless and un- discriminating ne'er-do-wells, but persons of good social standing and prestige in their native English villages and accustomed to comfortable living. Wishing to establish permanent homes for themselves and their posterity, they naturally looked around for arable soil, for locations which had some charm, and indeed for
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ORIGINS OF THE TOWN
all the facilities which would make existence not only tolerable but attractive. We can imagine that the wives and mothers had something to say about the choice. Thus their explorations and planning all had a practical end. These Puritans were not hunt- ing something lost behind the ranges, but rather a home where they could, so to speak, "spread out." This explains why their efforts to establish new townships were so often dominated by mundane considerations and why their preliminary investiga- tions were so thorough.
This John Woodbridge, who was to become the first minister of Andover, was a vigorous young man with the best of social, educational, and political connections. Trained for the ministry at Oxford, he had been expelled without a degree because of his refusal to sign the Oath of Conformity and had emigrated in 1634 to New England. There he settled at Newbury, where his uncle, Thomas Parker, was shortly to be pastor, and where he held several positions of minor responsibility such as town clerk, selectman, and deputy to the General Court. That he soon con- sidered a move to the interior is indicated by a vote of the Gen- eral Court on September 6, 1638, allowing him and several oth- ers to "begin a plantation at Merrimack." Nothing came of this, however, and within a few months Woodbridge married Mercy, daughter of Governor Dudley, thus becoming the brother-in- law of Simon Bradstreet. He now considered resuming training for the profession of the ministry, but accepting the advice of his father-in-law and his uncle, took up schoolmastering for two years. He is mentioned in 1644 as a teacher at Boston Latin School. Doubtless at the same time he was refreshing his ac- quaintance with theology and religion, preparing himself for ordination.
Meanwhile the region near Cochichawicke Brook, with its "faire spring of sweet water," was being slowly settled, although few names emerge out of those unchronicled years. On June 14, 1642, the General Court made a grant of lands along the Shaw- sheen, Concord, and Merrimack rivers, on condition that they
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build a settlement, but also "so as it shall not extend to preju- dice Charlestown village or the village of Cochitawit." This seems to imply a township already in existence; but it is not clear how, with the well-known insistence of the court that each group of settlers must have its own minister, a village could have sprung up at Cochichawicke without a clerical leader. The Gen- eral Court also, on May 10, 1643, divided the Bay Colony into four shires, thus creating Essex County. The eight towns includ- ed, with the date of their incorporation, are as follows: Salem (1629), Ipswich (1634), Newbury (1635), Lynn (1637), Rowley (1639), Gloucester (1639), Enon (1643)-shortly to be rechris- tened Wenham-and Cochichawicke, which was named last, pre- sumably because it was the most recently organized. Unlike the others, it had not yet been incorporated.
Miss Sarah Loring Bailey, indefatigable and thorough in her researches, discovered a deed under date of August 13, 1643, by William Hughes, of New Meadows [afterwards Topsfield], of certain lands and stock to "Richard Barker of Cojichichicke," which would appear to be still another variant spelling of Co- chichawicke. The transaction specified "3 yearling heifers, 2 yearling bulles at twelve pounds, ten shillings, two kine at tenne pounds, 4 calves at 3 pounds, one house & house-lot of 7 acres broken up and unbroken-up with all the corne." Any farmer who owned this property must have been well-established, but I have been unable to add anything to this isolated record.
While Cochichawicke was thus taking visible shape, John Woodbridge had been equipping himself for his future respon- sibility to it. Hubbard, in his General History of New England, written about 1682 but not printed until 1815, has an interest- ing paragraph describing some of the difficulties connected with Woodbridge's ordination:
September 9, 1644, two churches were appointed to be gathered, the one at Haverhill, the other at Andover (both upon Merrimack River). They had given notice thereof to the magistrates and minis-
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ORIGINS OF THE TOWN
ters of the neighboring churches, as the manner is with them in New England. The meeting of the assembly was to be at that time at Row- ley (the forementioned Plantations, being then but newly erected, were not capable to entertain them that were like to be gathered there on that occasion). But when they were assembled, most of those who were to join together in church fellowship at that time re- fused to make the confession of their faith and repentance, because, as was said, they declared it openly before in other churches, up- on their admission into them. Whereupon, the messengers of the churches not being satisfied, the assembly broke up, before they had accomplished what they had intended. But in October, 1645, mes- sengers of churches met together on the same account, where such satisfaction was given that Mr. John Ward was ordained pastor of the church of Haverhill, on the north side of the said Merrimack, and Mr. John Woodbridge was ordained pastor of the church of Andover, on the south side of the same.
Cotton Mather, in his Magnalia, states that Woodbridge was ordained by the hands of "Mr. Wilson & Mr. Worcester," at a moment when the town of Andover was "then first peeping in- to the world." According to the Reverend William Symmes, in an historical sermon, Woodbridge was the first person to be or- dained a minister of the gospel in Essex County, and the second in all New England. Cochichawicke at last had its own clergy- man and could be regarded as a legally organized community.
At about this time Woodbridge's brother-in-law, Simon Brad- street, then living in Ipswich, had become interested in Cochi- chawicke. Born in 1603, Bradstreet had been educated, like John Harvard, at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Having been made in 1629 an assistant or director of the Company of Massachusetts Bay, he sailed with Winthrop in the following year to New Eng- land. Two years earlier he had married Anne Dudley and was thus closely associated with the chief promoters of the Massa- chusetts enterprise; but he seems also to have had resources of his own. In 1634 he joined John Winthrop, Jr. in the founding of Ipswich, formerly Agawam. From that date until his death in
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1697, he was one of the ruling oligarchy in the Bay Colony, con- tinuing as an assistant for half a century.
Bradstreet was secretary of the Colony from 1630 to 1636, served as a member of many important committees, and was chosen in 1643 as one of the five representatives from Massachu- setts to meet with Connecticut, New Haven, and Plymouth re- garding the formation of the New England Confederation. For forty-three years he was one of the two commissioners from Massachusetts, and finally was governor from 1679 until 1686, during a very critical period. In his political views he was re- garded as a "moderate," and although he could on occasion be stubbornly orthodox, he refused to follow John Endicott and John Cotton in their theological fanaticism. His portrait-one of the few existing from that century in America-shows a gen- tleman who conveys the impression of both firmness and benevo- lence. Not in any sense brilliant, he was rugged, durable, and trustworthy. The tribute of his wife, Anne, to his tenderness and devotion, has no parallel in American literature:
If ever two were one, then surely we. If ever man were loved by wife, then thee; If ever wife was happy in a man, Compare with me, ye women, if you can. I prize thy love more than whole Mines of gold, Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that Rivers cannot quench,
Nor aught but love from thee, give recompense. Thy love is such I can no way repay, The heavens reward thee, manifold I pray.
Then while we live in love, let's so persever, That while we live no more, we may live ever.
We do not know just when the Bradstreets took up their resi- dence in Cochichawicke. Simon Bradstreet, their second son, born in 1640, recorded in his Diary for 1651, "My father was re- moved from Ipsw. to Andover, before I was put to school." In 1644, apparently, the elder Bradstreet built a mill on Cochicha-
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ORIGINS OF THE TOWN
wicke stream near its conjunction with the Merrimack, but all traces of it long ago disappeared. The probability is that by the autumn of 1644 the Bradstreets had transferred their possessions from their fine mansion in Ipswich to a more secluded and sim- pler dwelling in Andover. The historian of Ipswich, Thomas F. Waters, commenting on the departure of Anne Bradstreet, says with pardonable local pride, "No wonder her pen faltered in the solitude of her Andover farmhouse."
By this date, however, Cochichawicke was far from being a dismal wilderness. Numerous settlers seem to have accompanied Bradstreet to the new location. The names of all the freeholders, "in order as they came to town," appear in the earliest existing volume of the town Records, as follows, with the minister heading the list:
Mr. Bradstreet
John Osgood Joseph Parker
Richard Barker
John Stevens
Nicholas Holt
Benjamin Woodbridge
John Frye Edmond Faulkner
Robert Barnard
Daniel Poor
Nathan Parker
Henry Jacques
John Aslett
Richard Blake
William Ballard
John Lovejoy
Thomas Poor
George Abbot
John Russ Andrew Allen
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ANDOVER: SYMBOL OF NEW ENGLAND
Andrew Foster Thomas Chandler
The first ten members of John Woodbridge's church are as follows, in the order of their signing:
Mr. John Woodbridge, teacher
John Osgood Robert Barnard
John Frye
Nicholas Holt
Richard Barker
Joseph Parker
Nathan Parker
Richard Blake
Edmond Faulkner
Some of these names, like Bradstreet, Woodbridge, Russ, As- lett, and Jacques, are not to be found in the current Andover telephone directory. Others, like Osgood, Stevens, Holt, Foster, and Abbot, have been carried on to the present time. It takes a sturdy and prolific stock to maintain itself for ten or eleven generations.
By 1643, according to Professor Morison, "there were a score of towns and churches in the jurisdiction of Massachusetts Bay, with over sixteen thousand people, more than all the rest of Eng- lish America put together." Lynn, Newbury, Ipswich, Rowley, and, of course, Salem, were already thriving villages. They had been given simple names, remembered from the English scene, and the settlers at Cochichawicke were not long content with the tongue-twisting and unspellable Indian word which they had inherited. Everybody must have been happy when the settle- ment was rechristened as "Andover," or, as it often appeared in the Records, "Andiver."
We know very little regarding the geographical origins of the freeholders of Cochichawicke, except that they were from south- ern England. Daniel Poor is said to have come from Wiltshire,
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