USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Andover > Andover: symbol of New England; the evolution of a town > Part 3
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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39
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ORIGINS OF THE TOWN
John Frye from Basing, and Nicholas Holt from Romsay, and John Stevens was born in the farming community of Caversham, in Oxfordshire. But John Osgood, second on the list of both pro- prietors and church members, was from the parish of Wherwell, in Hampshire (Hants), only four miles from Andover, and must have known it well as his market town. The surmise that he was responsible for bestowing a name on the American Andover has much to sustain it. At any rate, Andover joined other New Eng- land communities, like Boston, Cambridge, Reading, Winches- ter, and Worcester, with namesake towns in Old England. The choice was popular, and there are now at least fourteen Andovers in the United States, including those in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Connecticut, not to mention Andover Junction in New Jersey. There are even Andovers in Iowa, Kansas, and South Dakota.
The name Andover, according to philologists, is a compound of a prehistoric place name An and the Celtic dwfr, meaning water. The English town dates back to Saxon times, and in 962 King Edgar held there a Witenagemot, or Parliament. It was then a manor held "of the King," and the inhabitants paid rents to the royal exchequer. It is mentioned in Domesday Book as a manor of William the Conqueror. By a charter of King John it was turned over in 1201 to the Burgesses, under certain restric- tions; and in 1559, in her so-called "Great Charter," Queen Eliz- abeth elaborately defined its municipal government under its own jurisdiction. In medieval times the town had its wool mag- nates and became an important center or mercantile exchange; but in the late eighteenth century, with the industrial revolu- tion, its manufacturing moved to larger centers, and it reverted to its status as a market town for surrounding farmers. Professor Charles H. Forbes, who visited it in 1926, described it as "an undressed, dozy town of agricultural leanings, housing about 8000 people," and added:
In the crowded center old shops sprawl and bump into each other, yet appear not to mind their jostling neighbors. The general aspect
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ANDOVER: SYMBOL OF NEW ENGLAND
is one of complacent content to let the rush of modern enterprise sweep by to other areas.
The Andover which John Osgood recalled in the 1640's, how- ever, must have been a busy place of considerable local impor- tance, with its broad High Street, its ancient "Star and Garter" Inn, its guild of merchants which had a profitable monopoly of trade, and its fine Saxon church. Not until the twentieth century was well along did anybody from the American Andover make a pious pilgrimage to its English prototype, and then it became evident that the Old World village belonged more to the past than to the present. Communications between the two towns have been in recent years both frequent and agreeable.
The English colonists even before their arrival had acknowl- edged the title of the Indians to the country around Massachu- setts Bay. Indeed the Massachusetts Bay Company had instruct- ed its agent, John Endecott, to investigate Indian claimants and satisfy their reasonable demands so that, to use their own words, "we may avoid the least scruple of intrusion." Josiah Winslow, governor of Plymouth Colony, was strictly accurate when he testified in 1676:
I think I can clearly say that before these present troubles broke out, the English did not possess one foot of land in this country but what was fairly obtained by honest purchase of the Indian propri- etors. Nay, because some of our people are of a covetous disposition, and the Indians are in their straits easily prevailed with to part with their own lands, we first made a law that none should purchase or receive of gift any land of the Indians without the knowledge and allowance of our court.
The Indians, however, accustomed to a free communal exist- ence, and with only a vague conception of the English theory of real estate holding, did not comprehend the far-reaching impli- cations of the paper transactions by which they transferred to strangers the land which they had regarded as their own privi- leged roaming space. Nobody except hostile warriers from oth-
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ORIGINS OF THE TOWN
er tribes had ever questioned their right to range as they pleased from the Atlantic to the Hudson. The New England red men did not realize what they were signing away, any more than the Manhattan Indians did when they "sold" their island to Peter Minuit for twenty-four dollars' worth of trinkets. It is easy to laugh at the gullibility of the ignorant savages, but they could hardly be expected to be familiar with the white man's un- scrupulousness in driving a bargain. The best that can be said for the Yankee system of acquisition was that it usually adhered to the traditional legal formalities.
What happened in the case of Andover is fully reported in the Colony Records and is worth quoting here, if only to show what was the customary procedure:
At a General Court at Boston, 6th 3d mo. 1646, Cutshamache, Sagamore of ye Massachusetts came into ye Corte & acknowledged yt for the sum of 6 pounds & a coat which he had already received, he had sold to Mr. John Woodbridge in behalfe of ye inhabitants of Cochichawicke now called Andover all his right interest & privi- lege in ye land 6 miles southward from ye towne, two miles eastward to Rowley bounds be ye same more or less, northward to Merrimack River, p'vided yt ye Indian called Roger and his company may have liberty to take alewives in Cochichawicke River, for their own eat- ing; but if they either spoyle or steale any corne or other fruite to any considerable value of ye inhabitants there, this liberty of taking fish shall forever cease, and ye said Roger is still to enjoy four acres of ground where he now plants.
Unfortunately nobody knows what Cutshamache looked like or what authority he possessed beyond the resounding title of "Sagamore." The fact that his name appears on other documents requiring Indian cooperation would indicate that he was a con- venient agent for the General Court to use. Indeed the History of Dorchester asserts bluntly, "This chief appears to have been a mere tool in the hands of the colonial government, used for the purpose of deeding away Indian lands and acting as a spy upon the movements of neighboring tribes." The word "stooge" is
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ANDOVER: SYMBOL OF NEW ENGLAND
perhaps a little harsh, but Cutshamache does seem to have per- formed the functions of an Indian collaborator. Just how much he had ever been associated with the Cochichawicke district will never be known. But so far as the Colony courts were concerned, the title for that extensive area passed over to the Andover pro- prietors, twenty-seven in number, and was assigned legally ac- cording to their desire and the Colony regulations.
The Puritans, determined to hold the Massachusetts Bay ter- ritory under the grant made by the English King James I, could hardly have done anything else. Their agreement, although it smacked of sharp practice, was better than taking and holding the land solely by force of arms. Nothing they could have offered an entire Indian tribe as a quid pro quo would have been very much to the advantage of the redskins. Few people, however sympathetic with the aborigines, would maintain that the world would have been better off if the white race had never come to North America or if it had been the French or the Spaniards who had taken over Massachusetts. From the strictly ethical as- pect the problem is puzzling, particularly if one considers only the welfare of the individual Indian, his squaw and children. My own opinion is that the behavior of the Puritans in acquiring the land, although marked at times by arrogance and even de- ceit, was for the good of humanity.
For the benefit of the uninformed it may be stated that the "alewife" is a "shad-like fish of the herring family, abundant on the Atlantic coast." As for Roger's Brook, it still runs, a rather attenuated stream which, however, after heavy rains has been known to flood its banks and damage property. There was once also a Roger's Rock, near the South Meeting House. These facts would suggest that the Indian Roger had his headquarters along the Shawsheen River not far from the present center of Andover village. After this purchase of land, nothing is recorded regard- ing Roger and his "company." They evidently lived at peace with the white intruders, and a few undoubtedly worked as serv-
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ORIGINS OF THE TOWN
ants in the fields and houses. Sarah Loring Bailey reported in 1880 that persons then living remembered a woman named Nan- cy Parker, who was said to have been the last surviving Indian in that vicinity. This complete disappearance of a race is a strange phenomenon in history, as unusual as the extinction of the heath hen or the passenger pigeon. The filthy habits of the Indians were a continuing obstacle to miscegenation.
Shortly after the purchase of the land from Cutshamache, An- dover was duly incorporated as a township, the exact date being May 6, 1646. What contemporary opinion thought of the new plantation may be gathered from a paragraph in Edward John- son's The Wonder-Working Providence of Sion's Saviour in New England, written in both prose and doggerel verse and published anonymously in 1654 in London:
About this time there was a town founded about one or two miles distant from the place where the goodly river of Merrimack receives her branches into her own body, hard upon the river of Shawshin, which is one of her three chief heads. The honored Mr. Simon Brad- street taking up his last sitting there hath been a great means to fur- ther the work, it being a place well-fitted for the husbandman's hand, were it not that the remoteness of the place from towns of trade bringeth forth some inconveniences upon the planters, who are in- forced to carry their corn far to market. This town is called Andover, and hath good store of land improved for the bigness of it. They soon gathered into a church, having the reverend Mr. Woodbridge to instruct them in the wayes of Christ, till he returned to England, and since then have called to office the reverend Mr. Daynes, for whose further incouragement the promises of the Lord for protect- ing, providing, increasing and continuing, even the very least of his churches, going on according to his precepts, are abundantly mani- fested in his word.
From this ungrammatical hodgepodge one gets the impression that Andover, although founded under good auspices, was re- garded as being somewhat remote from more civilized centers
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ANDOVER: SYMBOL OF NEW ENGLAND
such as Salem and Watertown. But no township sponsored by John Woodbridge and Simon Bradstreet could be insignifi- cant, and it was not long before its quality became well known throughout Massachusetts Bay.
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CHAPTER IV
Life in the Early Settlement
M OTORING today through the crowded business center of Andover or the mill section of North Andover, the trav- eler finds it difficult to visualize the quiet township of the 1640's. Fortunately, however, the area in the vicinity of North Andover common, now dominated by the heroic-sized statue of Bishop Phillips Brooks, is so little altered that we can readily see how the original settlement was laid out. The present Unitarian Church is not far from the site of the first meeting house, and the old burying ground has hardly changed. The topographical landmarks are, of course, still there, as they were in Bradstreet's day-Prospect Hill and Sutton's Hill and the ridge where the Kittredge House is so conspicuous. Great Pond and Haggett's Pond and the Shawsheen River are not much different from what they were three centuries ago.
The first white child born in Cochichawicke, before it had taken the name of Andover, was Nathan Stevens, son of John Stevens, who had emigrated with his wife, Elizabeth, his mother, Alice, and his brother, William, together with two young serv- ants, to these shores in 1638. The story of this rugged family is typical of the place and time. John Stevens had been a farmer in Oxfordshire, and on his arrival here took up his residence at Newbury, where he hoped to continue to cultivate the soil. When, however, he found that his status entitled him to only three acres, he resolved to move inland, where the land was less arid and he could secure more of it. Accordingly, leaving his mother and brother in Newbury, he moved with some of his neighbors, being the fifth settler in Cochichawicke in point of
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ANDOVER: SYMBOL OF NEW ENGLAND
time. The fact that Nathan Stevens was born in 1642 indicates that by that date some family life had been established in what we now call North Andover.
John Stevens prospered, and when he died in 1662, in his fifty-seventh year, left a considerable property appraised at 462 pounds, four shillings. Among the specific items were six cows, eight oxen, a heifer and three yearlings, one horse, "a stocke of bees," a large number of brass and iron kitchen utensils, plenty of bedding, as well as "a house, barnes, upland, & meadow and corne upon ye ground." He was survived by his wife, six sons, and two daughters. His Stevens descendants are still leading citi- zens of the town which he helped to create.
It is a pity that some one of these early settlers-John Osgood or John Stevens or, better still, Mrs. Bradstreet-did not keep a line-a-day book or write back to relatives in England gossipy letters thought worthy of preservation. We have a few wills and deeds, but many documents have been lost or destroyed over the years, and from the Andover settlers we have almost no informa- tion regarding living conditions. Thus any reconstruction of those days is necessarily a composite of meager details drawn from many sources.
These ancestors of ours were not far removed from ourselves in tastes and temperament, and they had thoughts and misgiv- ings and sensibilities like our own. They were no ignorant and inexperienced peasants. They came from a land where people had applauded the plays of Shakespeare and where a young man named John Milton had recently composed some of the finest lyrics in any language. Their parents must have told them tales of the Spanish Armada, and they had their own pride in the prestige of England. They were content to undergo privations, believing that they ultimately would build in America a New England worthy of the Old England which they had voluntarily left.
Historians have differed regarding the motives which led the Puritans out to the almost unknown. Those who attribute the
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AV
The Moody Bridges House, in North Andover, dating from about 1680
The Benjamin Abbot House, in Andover, dating from about 1680
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LIFE IN THE EARLY SETTLEMENT
Great Migration of the 1630's to a longing for religious freedom have never been entirely refuted. It is also true that some came to better themselves financially and that others were driven by a desire for adventure. All of the immigrants seem to have wanted land; and when they were disappointed with their allotment in the coastal towns, they moved, like John Stevens, to less crowded localities. The first settlers at Cochichawicke were seeking, not more religious liberty but good soil for farming and plenty of it. They moved to Andover for precisely the same reasons which led some of their descendants in the nineteenth century to ride in Conestoga wagons beyond the Mississippi on the long trail to the Rockies and beyond. The lebensraum motive is one of the most powerful in human society.
The area comprising any new township in Massachusetts Bay Colony was granted by the General Court to a group of named proprietors whose property it legally became and who were re- sponsible in general for its distribution. In the case of Andover the destruction of the early records has led to some confusion, but we have a broad idea of what happened. The charter of each town stipulated that grantees were "to provide and maintain amongst them an able and orthodox minister, and were to build a meeting house within three years." Having allotted land for the church, the minister's house, and a burying ground nearby, the Andover proprietors then set aside level ground for a com- mon, where flocks and herds could be pastured and guarded with a minimum of difficulty. They then assigned in the vicinity of the meeting house "home lots" of from four to ten acres each, the size depending on the wealth and social importance of the prospective occupant. Just how this delicate matter was adjusted is not clear, but the process inevitably stirred up jealousies. Cer- tain designated forests were reserved for all the citizens. Finally each owner of a "home lot" was given also meadow, tillage, and woodlands in the more remote sections of the township, this sec- ondary allotment being in proportion to the size and value of his village lot. Thus a proprietor might own a "home lot" near
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ANDOVER: SYMBOL OF NEW ENGLAND
the meeting house, a meadow half a mile away, and perhaps an- other even more remote field which he could plow for his corn. It was by no means a complete democracy, for some settlers were from the beginning assigned more land than others. Moreover the indentured servants, who were numerous, seem to have had no share in the communal arrangements.
As usually happens with any group based on the communal system, many changes in ownership eventually took place. Some of the improvident or unfortunate had to sell their possessions, which the more diligent and shrewd acquired. Richard Barker, for example, bought large tracts around Great Pond, and we know that members of the Stevens and Frye families built up over the years extensive estates. At first the express permission of the town fathers had to be secured for the occupation of the outlying meadows and woodlands, which were regarded as too far from the village center and therefore vulnerable to attack. But the pressure from the increasing population was so strong that, when the roads became more passable and the danger from Indian raids diminished, several of the proprietors moved into areas to the south and west, where they cultivated a larger acre- age, and built in what they thought to be a more advantageous location. In this manner the present town of Andover, as distin- guished from the present town of North Andover, was originally settled.
After the preliminary division into "house lots" had been ac- complished, some land was left over for the needs of the com- munity as a whole, like the three training fields specifically de- scribed in 1718 as available for military drill-one of them "by the South meeting house." Not until well into the twentieth century had most of the arable territory passed into private hands, and even today the North Andover common continues to be the property of the town and is utilized as a public park. Because of the rather informal circumstances of its original al- lotment and settlement, the section comprised in twentieth- century Andover never had a common as extensive as that in the
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LIFE IN THE EARLY SETTLEMENT
North Parish. By the close of the seventeenth century, however, this south part of the township was displaying an individuality, independence, and aggressiveness which the residents of the plantation around Cochichawicke could not possibly ignore.
Most of the land so freely assigned to the original proprietors has, of course, increased in value, and some of it is still held by their direct or collateral descendants. Few of the grantees were not better off in America than they would have been had they stayed in England. It would be interesting if a comparison could be made on an economic basis between those families today whose ancestors remained in Cambridgeshire or Wilts or Hants and those whose forebears undertook the great adventure over- seas. Many of the Americans have done very well indeed.
The process of adjustment to new conditions for these early Andoverians was necessarily gradual and controlled to some ex- tent by the seasons. Although the Puritans as a group were not averse to hard work, they now were subjected to privations such as they had never known. The first trips of mere exploration were followed by more practical expeditions for the purpose of studying the soil and the topography. At that stage the pioneers used the streams for easy transportation, but eventually they had to make their way, heavily laden, through wild and rough coun- try, cutting their own trails. Once they had received and ac- cepted their grant, they moved westward from Newbury and Ipswich, carrying with them the tools for creating temporary shelter.
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The newcomers had first to clear the land, a process which in- volved some arduous labor. Accustomed to the comparatively mild winters in the south of England, they had never seen a for- est with snow two or three feet on the level and sometimes blown into drifts which blocked doorways and windows. Under such conditions mere existence was very difficult. The Pioneers' Vil- lage constructed at Salem for its tercentenary celebration shows how the white settlers progressed from primitive living condi- tions to a kind of crude comfort. For a few weeks they sought
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ANDOVER: SYMBOL OF NEW ENGLAND
refuge wherever and however they could; then they put up wooden huts with thatched roofs similar to those in English coun- try villages; and finally, when sawmills were available, they erected habitations which, if not completely stormproof, of- fered some degree of warmth and protection.
Family life centered naturally in the kitchen, where the house- hold gathered for meals as it does today on the farms in New Hampshire and Vermont; and the fireplace was used for both heating and cooking. Everything eaten or worn had to be pre- pared by the women from raw materials furnished by the men, and the division of labor was almost automatic. Eating utensils for some time were rare, and many families cherished with pride a silver spoon or two brought from the home country. Sheets, calico, and featherbeds, pots of copper and brass, were regarded as precious and invariably mentioned item by item in the early wills. By the middle of the century, however, pewter became fairly common in prosperous households, and ships were bring- ing to this country an increasing supply of domestic goods. Fur- thermore, gristmills, sawmills, and brickyards were soon in regu- lar operation. The evidence indicates that the transition from privation to comfort was achieved with amazing rapidity.
What helped most, no doubt, was the increase in livestock. The Puritans brought with them in their Great Migration not only seeds and seedlings but also sheep, cattle, and some horses. Well-to-do farmers soon were using horses for transportation back and forth to market. Simon Bradstreet usually rode on horseback to the meetings of the General Court in Watertown or Boston.
Conditions may be better understood, perhaps, if we consider a typical case, that of an early resident in the south district, Ben- jamin Abbot (1661-1703). He was the eighth child of George Abbot, one of the original Andover grantees, who, according to tradition, was a native of Yorkshire. About 1685, Benjamin built for his bride, Sarah Farnum, a homestead on the bank of the
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LIFE IN THE EARLY SETTLEMENT
Shawsheen River. Probably the oldest house now standing with- in the present town limits, it is in sound condition and reveals much about the architecture and methods of construction of its period. It is a two-and-a-half-storeyed farmhouse, with a long sloping northern roof. The substantial front walls contain, be- tween the inner and outer wood sheathing, a layer of bricks, covered with a crude plaster mixed from clay and crushed shells and straw. The rooms on the ground floor, including the kitchen, are centered around a huge plastered chimney which permits a fireplace in every room-a necessity in those days. Some of the oak timbers in the ceiling are fifteen inches square and contain long hand-wrought nails, hammered out on the blacksmith's an- vil. The barn is even larger than the house, with ample space for livestock, hay, and tools. A nearby elm tree, long the noblest in the township, was blown down in the hurricane of September, 1938. This dwelling, which remained in the Abbot family until 1933, is still occupied, a convincing proof of the rapidity with which early Andoverians moved in their approach to pleasant living. It proves also that the southern section of the township had developed into a thriving community, fully as attractive for residential purposes as "the land about Cochichawicke."
Long before this old Abbot house was finished the Massachu- setts Bay Colony had become a populous and self-sufficient state. It had fought a successful border war with the Pequot Indians and had repelled skillfully, by a combination of delay and de- ception, attempts by enemies in England to take away its char- ter. It had displayed in America the same kind of intolerance to which its members had been subjected in their native country and had shown to nonconformists like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson a cruelty of which only bigots could have been capa- ble. It had developed the most efficient of modern theocracies as well as the most ruthless of oligarchies, with a legal code based on the Old Testament. But it had also, in 1636, founded a col- lege destined to become one of the chief glories of New England,
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