USA > Massachusetts > Plymouth County > Bridgewater > Celebration of the two-hundredth anniversary of the incorporation of Bridgewater, Massachusetts, at West Bridgewater, June 3, 1856 > Part 4
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When a better system of religion or of practical
. Since preparing this address, I have been kindly furnished, by a worthy and distinguished member of the Edson family, Rev. Dr. Edson, of Lowell, with ex- tracts from two deeds, bearing date June 20, 1722, from Josiah Edson, known as "Justice Edson," son of Deacon Edson, named in the address. In one of these, he gives to the town of Bridgewater three parcels of land, " for the encouragement of n grammar school among them for ever; " and, in the other, he gives to the inha- bitants of the South Precinct a tract of land, " for the promoting and encouraging of learning among them, .. . towards defraying the charge of a school or schools in said precinct."
These lands were the foundation of the " Edson Fund," which, upon the divi- pion of the town, was distributed among its several parts.
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faith than this can be discovered, the world may begin to dispense with the old-fashioned notions of Robin- son and Brewster. And yet it was not because the men of that day were wanting in spirit or energy or enterprise. We find among them, not only those who were competent to guide in the affairs of the town, but leading spirits in the colony, - Hayward, a mili- tary leader, when to be such was evidence of courage and capacity and of public confidence and respect, as well as a magistrate and a judge ; the Bretts,* honored in church and state; Willis,; the first representa- tive in the colonial General Court ; the Edsons # and the Mitchells. These are but among the names upon which the memory rests, when it dwells upon the early history of this spot.
But, invidious as it might seem to discriminate between these names, it would be far more so, if, in speaking of those who gave a character to the first generation, and whose teaching and influence trained up those who were to be worthy to succeed them, I passed over the wives and mothers who came here into the wilderness to give to the spot
* William Brett was ordained ruling elder of the church soon after Mr. Keith. Two of his sons were deacons of the church; and another, Elihu, a magistrate and justice of the C. C. Pleas.
t John Willis was first deacon of Rev. Mr. Keith's church, and represented the town in the Plymouth General Court for twenty-five years.
# Deacon Samuel Edson came from Salem, and settled in West Bridgewater. The name was among the most distinguished of the early families in the town. Col. Josiah was graduated at Cambridge in 1730, and was one of the mandamus counsellors at the commencement of the Revolution.
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its strongest attraction, - the simple charm of home. They came here while the howl of the wolf was yet heard, from the deep forest around them, at midnight. Often and again did they clasp their little ones, with more than a mother's tenderness, as they saw the sha- dowy form of the savage stealthily prowling around their scattered dwellings ; or waited in fearful sus- pense for the return of a husband from those bold forrays in which they sought for the foe in his lair.
But history does not tell of a mother's courage that quailed, or a woman's fortitude that shrunk, amidst these dangers.
It was the lessons and trainings of such mothers that supplied the nerve which carried the colonies through the Indian and French wars, and found every man a soldier, and in arms, as the alarm-cry went out over hill and through valley on the 19th April, 1775.
In considering the elements of growth and prospe- rity of the town, I ought not to pass over in silence the early development of the mechanical enterprise and skill which have so long distinguished its inhabi- tants. Though essentially an agricultural community, the useful and practical arts seem early to have found here a favorable soil.
There is something in the exhibition of the mecha- nic arts so nearly akin to the exercise of creative power, that we can never witness it without interest. But how ought this interest to be enhanced, when we are told, as we are by the venerable historian of the
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town, that it was here the first small-arms ever made in America were manufactured, the first solid cannon cast and bored, and the first thread of cotton spun by machinery ; and that the first nail ever completely cut and headed by machinery, at a single operation, in the world, was made here ! *
Who will estimate the debt that the world owes to the ingenuity of Orrt and his associates, and the inventive genius of Rogers, followed up, as they have been, by the enterprise and skill of the dwellers amidst these rural scenes ? It has earned independ- ent competency for the citizen ; it has added count- less value to the nation's wealth; and, though the period of which I am speaking was but the dawning of that day which made New England a mechanical and manufacturing as well as a commercial people, it sup- plied one of the strongest elements of our national union, when it made one part of this great continent dependent upon another for the sources of its wealth and prosperity, as well as of individual comfort and luxury.
* The first nails of this kind were manufactured by Samuel Rogers, of East Bridgewater.
t Hon. Hugh Orr, who was a member of the Senate in 1786, first manufactured small-arms and cannon here. He employed two brothers Barr to construct carding, spinning, and roping machines at his works in East Bridgewater, prior to 1786; and about that time, Thomas Somers, under direction of Mr. Orr, constructed other machines for carding, roping, and spinning cotton. About the same time, he em- ployed one McClure to weave jeans and corduroys by hand, with a fly-shuttle. " About 1748, he made five thousand stands of arms for the Province of Massachu- setts Bay, which were deposited in Castle William: nearly all, however, were carried off by the British when they evacuated the town of Boston."
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But I am reluctantly compelled to forego any further detail of the incidents in the early history of the town.
The opening of the second century of her history found the colonies embroiled in the last of the "old French wars ; " which was soon followed by the Sugar and Stamp Acts, and that course of measures which resulted in the war of the Revolution and the independence of our country.
But the century through whose vicissitudes she had passed had been working mighty changes in her condition.
The last of the " forefathers " and the "first-comers" had gone to their rest. The humble dwelling which Deacon Edson had reared here in 1646 had gathered around it near six hundred others, although the terri- tory had been shorn of its proportions by the incorpo- ration of Abington and Pembroke. The clack of the little mill which he had erected on "Town River," and which had fed these pioneers, had long been silent. The feeble church, which, under the guidance of Mr. Keith and Elder Brett, we had left struggling into life, had multiplied into five parishes, with their respective churches and pastors ; * while a population
. The South Parish was incorporated in 1716; and, at the time spoken of, Rev. John Shaw was its pastor. The East was incorporated in 1723; and Rev. John Angier was its pustor. The North was incorporated in 1738; and the Rev. John Porter its pastor. Titient Parish was incorporated in 1743; and the Rev. Solomon Reed its pastor; while the Rev. Daniel Perkins, the successor of Mr. Keith, was the pastor of the original parish.
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of near four thousand souls were scattered over this territory. Instead of sending, as she had done, for " a scholar that came out of England" to teach her schools, eleven of her own sons had themselves become scholars, and shared in the honors of our university.
All this, let us remember, had been the fruits, not of royal bounty, or even the distinguished advantages of superior local position. Her sons had brought with them no hoarded wealth, nor had any tide of successful foreign commerce enriched their coffers. They had gone through the struggles incident to the infancy, weakness, and poverty of such a settlement, had subdued a rugged soil, and had laid the founda- tions of a free and prosperous community too deep to be easily shaken.
And though this was followed by the long, wasting war of the Revolution, in which her resources were exhausted and her treasury bankrupt, there was within her a recuperative power which no difficulty could overcome, no adversity paralyze. She had within her a body of enterprising and intelligent men, - Pilgrims no longer, Puritans modified by the very world's respect which they had been winning, - who, severed for ever from the burdens and restraints of a foreign government, were now at liberty to give free play to the spirit that had descended upon them from the men of the " Mayflower."
But, before we venture to trace the effects of these
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causes in their results, I should be doing injustice to the men who took part in the events of the opening scenes of the second century of the history of this community, if I omitted to speak of these a little more in detail. I have referred to the progress that had been then made from its condition a century earlier. But we ought not to be misled by such comparisons.
It would be pleasant if we could look in upon the social condition of the men of 1756, - their houses, their style of living, and the inventories of their goods and estates, - that we might compare them with 1856.
Neither time nor means within my command will admit of my doing this beyond the briefest notice. But a single fact may serve as an indication of what such a comparison might show.
In 1756, a tax was laid upon carriages in the Pro- vince, for the encouragement of the manufacture of linen. And it appears that there was neither coach nor chariot in all the Old Colony, and only four chaises, not one of which was in Bridgewater; and only four " chairs" were owned within the town.
But it should be remembered that the pillion and the horse-block had not yet disappeared before the march of modern refinement.
I have been furnished, through the kindness of the Register of Deeds in this county,* - for from every
ยท William S. Russell, Esq.
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man, who ever had his home in Bridgewater, I have been sure of sympathy and aid, - with four invento- ries of estates from the probate-office: one from Ply- mouth, and another from Bridgewater, of a hundred years ago ; the other two from the latter town, of an earlier date, one of which was of the Rev. Mr. Keith, in 1719.
Though it would be taxing your indulgence too far to give these in detail, permit me to glance at them, that we may see, for a moment, how far the luxuries of our fathers fell short of the necessaries of our own day.
The total of Mr. Keith's property - for preaching and property do not seem to have run in the same channel any more in that day than in this - amounted to a hundred and sixty-seven pounds eleven shillings, thirty pounds of which was his library, and seventy- two pounds household furniture, including one looking- glass ; which might lead one to infer that he found the reflections on original sin, free agency, and the decrees which these ponderous tomes of polemical divinity suggested, far more suited to his taste than the reflection of his own benevolent countenance from the only mirror that his house afforded.
In the inventory of good Deacon Atwood, of Ply- mouth, in 1755, we cannot but be struck with an illus- tration of the proverbially superior thrift and foresight of the second over the first officer of every church.
Though possessed of more than ten times as much
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estate as the venerable pastor of Bridgewater, he seems to have had a taste somewhat in contrast with that of the latter, and tending rather to looking-glasses than books; for we find he possessed three of the former, valued together at six pounds sixteen shillings and eightpence; while his whole library was ap- praised only at fourteen shillings and sixpence. And, while not a cent of silver-ware graced the cupboard of the pastor, the deacon was possessed of five large and three tea spoons of that precious metal.
This inventory, too, shows the change that had come over the spirit of the age, from the times of Carver and Standish, when every man was a soldier, or even that later period, when the church itself was turned into a fortress ; for we find, as the only relics of his martial equipment, " one sword " and " one gun- lock."
But, instead of carnal weapons, we find him the possessor of one "negro man; " and that, while the good man's pew in his meeting-house was esti- mated at but twenty-three pounds six shillings and eightpence, this negro man, with the " negro bed " he occupied, were valued at forty-one pounds one shilling and fourpence.
Of the remaining inventory, that of Nathan Ames, of Bridgewater, in 1756, amounting to five hundred and twenty pounds, five shillings was the sum total of his library ; while one looking-glass served the entire family, and one pillion was the only vehicle of trans-
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portation for the fairer members of it to church or to tea-parties.
In neither of these four inventories do we find either a watch or a clock. In neither of those of Bridgewater was there an article of silver-plate, even to a teaspoon. Nor was there, in either of the four, a carpet of any kind. And the nearest approach to a piano, in any of them, was the spinning-wheel, the hum of whose music was heard in every household in that day.
And yet we may judge, from a comparison of sta- tistics, that her growth had been constant and healthy, and had more than kept pace with her sister towns.
In 1696, she stood, in the rate of taxation, the forty-eighth in the Province; in 1721, she had grown to be the sixteenth in valuation; in 1755, she stood the ninth in the Province, and above any other town in Plymouth County ; and, in 1775, had risen to be the eighth in valuation in the whole Province of Massachusetts Bay.
And if we look, for a moment, at the part she took in the war of the Revolution, we shall find that she never withheld the fruits of her prosperity from the common cause in which they were engaged.
Let us bear in mind, that at no time during the war did her male population, above the age of six- teen, and able to bear arms, probably exceed a thou- sand.
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I am unable even to approximate the number of her troops which were in the service under the call of the Province and State; but I have been shown seven requisitions for the Continental service, made upon the town from 1779 to 1781, which amounted to four hundred and twelve men in this space of three years.
When we remember what a large proportion of the productive labor of the town was thus withdrawn, we shall the more readily appreciate the extent of the burden which fell upon those who remained at home.
Making allowance for the depreciation of money, they must have paid, in 1776 and 1777, more than three thousand dollars in money.
In 1778 and 1779, they contributed each year, in shoes, stockings, and shirts, for the army, a number next to Boston itself; and the beef which they fur- nished upon requisition for the army, during 1780, must have amounted to more than five thousand dollars, at the rated value which it bore in the market.
I have mentioned these, not as showing the aggre- gate of her sacrifices, but as samples of what this town, in common with the whole of Massachusetts, contributed towards achieving the independence of our country.
I would gladly turn to the rolls of the Provincial and Continental troops of that period, and point out
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the names standing there; or go to the files of our treasury-office, and there sum up the amounts of money which were paid into the public chest by the people of this town to carry on that war.
But time will not admit of this; nor, if it did, would it do justice to the individual actors by whom it was contributed.
It is little more than an abstraction to tell how many men or how much money this or that town fur- nished during the Revolution.
We must go on to the farms and into the dwellings of the people of these towns to understand who were these men, and whence came this money. Mothers giving up their sons to the dangers of the field, and the still more fearful perils of the camp; husbands leaving to their wives the double task of the farm and the household, - are but among the incidents of these local histories. There is not a dwelling-house in any of these ancient towns, which was standing when that struggle began, that could not tell of days and nights of incessant toil, of self-denial, and patient, unrepining self-sacrifice on the part of its inmates, as, year after year, new burdens were imposed upon their feeble, wasting resources.
But I cannot dwell upon this point of our subject any farther than to say, that posterity will never know as they ought that the war of the Revolution was quite as essentially fought, and victory achieved, through what was done within these humble dwell-
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ings by the wives and mothers of that race, as by the prowess of arms and the courage of the battle- field.
From scenes like these, I turn to the changes which the century that was then opening has wrought within this community.
We sometimes forget how brief is the period within which, in our own country, great revolutions are effected. We measure the periods of early Eng- lish history by centuries and by ages, - the six hundred years of the Roman dominion, the four hundred of Saxon rule, and the long succession of cycles and years before the human mind began to expand and grow free in the dawning light of civili- zation.
But here there are those still living in our own Commonwealth, within the space of whose life is embraced one-half of the entire period of this people's history.
And yet what changes do its social and economical statistics present !
The goodly territory for which, as its original title- deed shows, there were paid seven coats, nine hatchets, eight hoes, twenty knives, four moose-skins, and ten and one-half yards of cotton, has been multiplied into four thriving, independent communities. Its sons have gone out to people other regions, and swell the num- bers of other communities ; while its population has grown to more than three times the number which it
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contained when the century began. Wealth has been gathering here in a still greater ratio, till its aggre- gate has almost reached the sum of five millions of dollars. Her schools have multiplied, till fifty-three are open for the education of her twenty-three hun- dred children, besides three academies for the higher branches of instruction, and a normal school to give completeness to the system.
And if, in addition to these, we seek to measure the results of her manufacturing and mechanical industry, the statistics just published by the Legisla- ture exhibit an aggregate of more than two million of dollars by the year.
There may be richer communities, there may be regions where Nature has been more lavish in her beauties and her bounty, there may be localities bet- ter known to fame, than that where we are now assembled; but where need we look for more certain elements of social and individual comfort and inde- pendence and happiness than are shared upon this portion of the heritage of a free people ?
If, compared with some regions of ripe fertility, its soil be hardy, it breeds no miasma to paralyze or poison the arm that tills it.
If the breeze that sweeps over it be at times piercing and chill, it brings no pestilence in its train to blanch the ruddy glow of health. And if, under circumstances like these, the world has high claims
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upon those who have shared in the benefits and advan- tages which are here enjoyed, I greatly misjudge, or we should find, if we were to pursue the inquiry,; that they have not been unfaithful to the trust with which they have been charged.
Delicacy forbids me to speak of the living by name, however glad we might be to honor the men who have shared the public confidence and our own. Of its citizens, five have represented this district in the Congress of the United States .* Another of her sons, after twenty-four years' service in the halls of Con- gress, closed his public career as the second officer of the Commonwealth, and has come back to finish a long and useful life amidst the scenes where that life began. +
And there have been others to whom it would be grateful to allude, who have stood before the public as the honored exponents, in church and commonwealth, of the tone of morals, and measure of intelligence, which have characterized this community.
But, while I have spoken of the local incidents and events, I have not attempted to follow into other communities, and upon wider or more distant spheres of action, the many who have gone out from the bosom of such a mother.
. Rev. Dr. Reed, Hon. Nahum Mitchell, Hon. William Baylies, Hon. Aaron Ho- bart, and Hon. Artemas Hale, the three last of whom were present on this occasion. t Hon. John Reed, for many years of Yarmouth, which district he represented In Congress.
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But go where you may, - into the country, or the populous marts of commerce ; to the east or the west ; through peopled regions of the old States, or the forest-homes and cities and villages of the new, - we find her sons, or her sons' sons, doing battle by the side of the hardy, the wise, and the strong men of the land. I find them healing the sick, preaching in the pulpit, and pleading at the bar, - on the bench, and in the halls of legislation. I see them reaping the fruits of industry and skill on the farm and in the workshop, and sharing the rewards of com- mercial enterprise and prosperous industry in a thou- sand forms.
I follow them also into the fields of literature, read the deep thoughts and treasured lore of the scho- lar, and feel my blood tingle and my soul refreshed by the inspired pages of the poet.
Do you ask for names with which to fill this pic- ture, and with which to justify the language in which I have indulged ? It was the son of a Bridgewater father,* who, when the fate of the British treaty hung in doubtful poise, and the cloud of war rose dark over an impoverished nation, in tones of eloquence that have never been surpassed, rolled back that cloud, and gave to his country peace and prosperity,
* Hon. Fisher Ames was the son of Dr. Nathaniel Ames, who removed from Bridgewater to Dedham, and a lineal descendant from one of the early settlers of the town.
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that made her great among the greatest nations of the earth.
And, if time permitted me to speak of the men of my own profession here, the name of OAKES ANGIER would stand out prominently among the number by the acknowledged eminence he attained at the bar of the old colony .*
Take up the catalogue of those who, on the bench and in the councils of the State and nation, have held places of honor and trust, and count up how many of the names that you find there you have read in those records, and upon the mossy headstones which tell where your own kindred are sleeping, - the Shaws, the Haywards, the Whitmans, the Mitchells, the Reeds, the Ameses, the Forbeses, and the San- gers.t
* The following extract, from an epitaph which is inscribed upon a monument in the ancient cemetery in West Bridgewater, is from the pen of the late Hon. Judge Davis : -
" OAKES ANGIER, Esq., BARRISTER-AT-LAW, departed this life, Sept. 1, 1786, in the forty-first year of his age, and here lies interred.
" Withi a mind vigorous and penetrating, assiduous and indefatigable in busi- ness, he soon arrived to eminence in his profession.
" Seventeen years' practice at the bar, with fidelity, integrity, and ability, established his reputation and improved his fortune, but too fatally injured his con- stitution in the meridian of life."
Judge Davis, Lieutenant-Governor Robbins, and the late Hon. Pliny Merrick, father of Judge Merrick, of the Supreme Judicial Court, were among those who studied law in his office.
t Without undertaking to enumerate these, it may be proper to name Chief Justice Shaw, grandson of the Rev. Jolin Shaw; Hon. Ezekiel Whitman, late Chief Justice of Maine; Hon. Charles E. Forbes, late Judge of our Supreme Court; and Hon. George P. Sanger, Judge of the Court of Common Pleas, the grandson of Rev. Dr. Sanger.
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And as I glance at the roll of the present Congress, and find a name there three times repeated, I shall hardly be charged with indelicacy if I recall the part which the first who bore it took, after his traditionary connection with the Massachusetts colony had ceased, as one of the Duxbury men, in the event which we are now commemorating .*
Or, if we look for what her sons have done in the fields of literature, though time forbids me to dwell upon so pleasant a theme, - while we have no cause to fear that poesy will not be found this day wedded to a name now familiar here, - if I speak of the past, I have only to open upon that sublime triumph of genius over death itself, the "Thanatopsis," to know that one at least of the " Poets of America " has but added renown to a name which is associated with the memory of the dwellers upon this spot.t
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