USA > Massachusetts > Worcester County > Boylston > Centennial celebration of the incorporation of the town of Boylston, Massachusetts, August 18, 1886 > Part 2
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On this Centennial of the Town let us not stop to commune with ourselves alone. Let us here remember, with ever increas- ing gratitude and reverent honor, those noble ancestors of ours, whose wise forethought, whose labors amid privation and hard- ship, built the corporate existence of this town. To them we owe a debt which can only be repaid by gratitude for what they have done for us, by cherishing their memories and by living virtuous and honorable lives.
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To the celebration of the Centennial of the Town of Boylston its citizens bid us a cordial, hearty and open-handed welcome, one and all. Let us enter into the festivities of the occasion with earnestness and sincerity, thanking our kind friends of the town for the opportunity thus afforded us to gain an acquaintance with its present people and the descendants of the founders of the town.
Of the history of the town it is not mine to speak ; that task has been wisely allotted to one of the sons of Boylston, made such by that mysterious human bond analogous to that which the old chemists called " elective affinity ; " in other words, he mar- ried one of the daughters of the town, and thereby became one of its sons. I now have the pleasure and honor of introducing to you Henry M. Smith, Esq., of Worcester, as orator of the day.
HISTORICAL ADDRESS.
TEN years ago, at Philadelphia, with a pomp and circum- stance befitting a great occasion, our nation celebrated its one hundredth birthday. With wide-spread preparation and costly expenditure in assembling the material tokens of our century of progress, we passed in review before the enlightened peoples of the earth. Since then, there have been numerous occasions. similar in meaning, varying in prominence, but with a common interest. It has been a decade consecrated to the memories of our national past.
Two years ago, the neighboring city of Worcester turned the pages of her history of two hundred years. Since then Spring- field, and still later Albany, have reviewed their still longer periods.
The longest lapse of time that holds the records of an American community, at first glance, seems insignificant, meas- ured on the Old World's calendars. This year Lucerne cele- brates the five hundredth anniversary of the battle of Sempach, which secured Swiss independence. In England, within the present month, the town of Ripon observes its one thousandth birthday ; her chronicles go back to Royal Alfred and the Danish invasion.
But the Muse of History has no sneer for our American past, though its whole story is contained in these few generations of men. Within very recent years, history has reformed her methods and has begun to tell the story of the common people,- the massed experiences of average communities, in distinction
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from the embroidered chronicles of kings and great commanders. Our American anniversary celebrations, of the past ten years, have stirred deeply the fountains of our local annals.
The reader and the student of this, and coming time, can understand the order of facts and the meaning of our early days, far better than preceding generations could have done, though nearer to the events themselves. Never has history, and that philosophy of history, found richer treasures than have been supplied by our modern town historians.
We come together to-day, on this beautiful common, to cele- brate the one hundredth anniversary of this representative Massa- chusetts hill town. It has a character, possessed from its ear- liest past, which must be understood if we would understand this old Commonwealth, and the sources of the influence Massachu- setts has had upon other commonwealths. For us here to-day two dates stand opposed-1786-1886.
But, as in our national celebration, ten years ago, the event we commemorate is only in a limited sense initial. The nation was shaped in the colonial period, and tested and tempered in the red heat of the Revolution, before it began to live a separate existence. It had passed through a century and a half of expe- rience before 1776; an experience never again to be repeated by any of earth's people, the founding of a nation in the will derness.
The story of every town and hamlet that shared this early period of the nation is a page of national history.
The pleasant town of Boylston, with its story of one hun- dred years, the first century of its existence, had a history before 1786, a history that took in the life and labors of two preceding generations of her citizens. From this earlier date of 1786, as our mount of vision, let us take the backward look.
Boylston derives her greatest antiquity from motherly Lan- caster, from which came one-quarter of her territory, but she is chiefly the daughter of Shrewsbury, and grand-daughter of Marl- borough, who sending hither her sons one hundred and sixty years ago, is to-day represented here by a son of Boylston birth she has herself delighted to honor, the bearer of grand-motherly congratulations.
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Moreover, Boylston is the mother of West Boylston. Thus the labors of local annalists in four contributing towns, may be searched for the story of Boylston. It has been written into them all. A word as to the place of the hill towns in the order of her early settlements. The home government, so lavish in bestowing wilderness grants as to be willing to slice a continent from sea to sea, set a very liberal example for those who, under the first colonial charters, parted the wilderness with unstinted hands.
They give to individuals to reward service, or increase emolu- ment ; or demonstrate patronage to new settlements, or to church organizations. There were considerations still plainly to be dis- cussed, why the first settlers sought far and wide for the meadow lands ; the broad intervale that lay like rare oases in the else- where wilderness of woods and broken hills. These pleasing meads were ready to be occupied with little labor. They were richest in suggesting to the English settlers. They gave ready fodder for English stock. There were not many of these spots. they were wide apart.
Lancaster became the oldest town in this county for such a reason. They of Brookfield planted homes in a perilous region, thirty miles away from their nearest and only neighbors in Lan- caster, Springfield and Hadley, because they were in love with the " six miles square near Quaboag pond."
The heart of the future commonwealth was a region of rug- ged hills, deep veined by frequent streams whose currents clogged by the beaver and his fellows, turned the narrow valleys into dis- mal bogs. What is now Worcester county, seems to have come first into Massachusetts annals in 1633, when Governor Winthrop saw from an eminence in Watertown " a very high hill due West about forty miles off," and so old Wachusett got his first mention as sentinel among inland hills.
And when nearly one hundred years later there was the movement, which became successful in 1731, to form Worcester county, with thirteen towns, his Majesty's representatives met the proposition with discouragement, Governor Belcher demurring, and Thomas Hutchinson, afterwards Governor, but then a mem- ber of the General Court, strenuously opposing the project for the
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new county, declaring . the unpracticability of its ever making any progress for this hill country could never attract settlers."
Marlborough, settled in 1660, had her share in the red letter days of Indian troubles. At the end of King Philip's affair in 1676, she was still a frontier settlement with no town west this side of the Connecticut river, Lancaster, Brookfield and Spring- field having been wiped out. Marlborough herself had suffered sorely, for she was visited and burned in 1676, but her settlers began to come back the next year, and in 1680 had rebuilt their meeting-house, thatching it with straw. In 1688 they erected another in its place that stood until 1809, a worthy type of that permanence in doctrine which gave them in 1679 a church cove- nant that was used by the church until 1837. That was the brave, staunch old grand-mother of Boylston.
By 1706 Marlborough had so well strengthened itself that John Brigham and thirty others went out to establish Shrews- bury, and the borough towns began to be set off from her terri- tory, Westborough leading the list. Marlborough had voted con- cerning one of these off-shoots, as a rule for all, that if these outgoing settlers " see fit to build another meeting-house, and are able to do so, and maintain a minister then the division to be made."
Shrewsbury was liberally endowed, by the General Court, with a territory fifteen miles long, extending from Lancaster at the north, to Sutton on the south, and from three to four miles wide, lying between what was then Marlborough and Worcester. The committee appointed to lay out and apportion the tract fin- ished their labors in 1718.
But the general reasons, already referred to, as discrimina- ting against the hill towns, seemed for a time to weigh very strongly against the Shrewsbury township. Early chroniclers did not hesitate to declare that it was "" not a good parcel of land." It was rough and uneven. Its good lands had been so frequently and relentlessly burned over by the Indians, and inter- lopers from other towns, that vast tracts of forest stood blackened and ruined, in many places the soil itself being burned down to hard-pan.
One early writer declared that little use was ever likely to
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be made of it but " to pass over it to a better place." Write as the poets may of "the forest primeval," the condition of sav- agery cannot even care for its own forests. The woods of this region are far more dense and luxuriant to-day than they were when the red man kept them dwarfed and scrubby with forest fires.
But the territory that became Boylston, held grants of land older and of different derivation from the Shrewsbury grant, or the portion set off from Lancaster. In 1655 the church in Malden received from the General Court a grant of nine hundred acres. The name is perpetuated in the Malden Hill, a prominent feature in your western landscape. Ward, in his History of Shrewsbury, calls this a " pretended grant," but it is referred to in the Malden town records, in 1736, as the "Town Farm in Worcester or Shrewsbury," and action was taken to protect the rights of the town thereon, it having been invaded by squatters.
In 1659, another grant, still more closely a Boylston posses- sion, was the six hundred and fifty acres given to Richard Daven- port, ancestor of a long and well-known Boylston family, from one of whose descendants you are to hear to-day. Davenport was a man of note, a commander at Castle Island, where he was killed by lightning in 1665.
Of this Davenport tract there remains the interesting me- mento and monument in the tree still standing in the road, below the Clarendon Mills toward Clinton, which was made the start- ing point by the surveyors of the tract two hundred and twenty- seven years ago, and is referred to as " a great white oak." It is twenty feet seven inches in circumference at the ground, and one of the few historic trees of this region. Its trunk is said to be well filled with iron spikes hammered stoutly home by Ezra Beaman's own hand, to induce all future woodmen to " spare that tree."
In the grant to Shrewsbury the provision appears, "that they have at least forty families settled, with an orthodox minis- ter within the space of three years, for whom allotment of land was to be made, and another for the use of the school." Towns thus founded were sure to be divided, and again divided, when- ever distance measured on blazed tracks, or cart paths through
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the woods, made church going a burden, too hard for endurance, by any neighborhood whose numbers were sufficient to set up a church of its own.
The founding of Shrewsbury went forward in the spirit of those days, the central point and mainspring, a meeting house, and a godly minister. Very little can be told of the early his- tory of what is now Boylston. The farm, later held by Rev. Ward Cotton, was occupied a number of years before any other settlement in the vicinity of the meeting house, and the com- mon.
Several settlers by the name of Keyes came to a large tract of land in what is now the south part of Boylston, as carly as 1720.
Among the settlers immediately, or within the first few years were those who bore the names of Brigham, Sawyer, Ben- net, Starr, Bigelow. Hastings, Taylor, Ball, Newton, Keyes, Temple, Flagg, Howe, Bush, Davenport, Wheeler, Andrews ; and these names, or nearly all of them have always had a familiar Boylston sound. As the the first settlers in the northwest part of this town, William and Nathaniel Davenport, descendants of the first owner came, in 1736, to the Davenport tract, portions of which were occupied by the eighth generation of the family.
The first settlers in the territory that became Boylston, divided their attendance at Lord's Day services between Shrews- bury and Lancaster, finding their way through forest bridle paths and fording the streams as they came to them, realizing what their neighbors of Bolton, about the same time, in their petition to the General Court, called the " making the Sabbath, which should be a day of rest, a day of the hardest labor."
There are those who affect to sieer at the pious considera- tions that guided the founding and division and growth of our New England towns.
Benjamin Franklin will not be deemed a bigot of his time. In his recently published correspondence is given his letter writ- ten in 1787, to one presumably a Governor of Georgia, wherein he praises in high terms the New England method of establishing the settlements, with the meeting house and schools expressly secured as central features. He declares this is " excellent for
.
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mutual protection, for the advantage of schooling to their children, for securing morals by the influence of religion, and for mutual improvement by civil society, and conversation," in comparison with which he declares that " In our way of sparse and remote settlements the people are without these advantages and we are in danger of bringing up a set of savages of our own color."
So well did what is now Boylston defeat the inauspicious earlier auguries derived from its rough hills, that in 1742 it at- tempted to secure a formal separation from Shrewsbury, urging as a reason, distance from the meeting house. This town might have been 144 years old at the present time but for the opposi- tion of Shewsbury and Gov. Shirley's petulant veto. He objects to the multiplication of towns as being as undesirable in his majesty's interests for it meant an increase of representatives that might be troublesome. Instead of a separate town it became on December 1:, 1742, the North Parish of Shrewsbury.
The records show that the North Parish began to pay for · preaching on the first Sabbath after being set off. Before June the meeting house was begun, and in October the church was organized and the first minister ordained, though the sanctuary had neither floor, windows nor doors, pulpit nor pew.
Nineteen male members and sixteen female members were dismissed from the mother church in Shrewsbury. "The minis- try lands lying within the North Parish " were set off to be " always for the use and improvement of the minister that may be settled in the north part aforesaid," and in consideration of the " right and interest in the meeting house," in Shrewsbury £32 10s. lawful money were to be paid over "when the North Parish, erected and covered a suitable frame for a meeting house for the worship of God among them."
These facts are honorable to the founders of these hill com- munities. The spirit of the pious Pilgrims was brought here undiminished in meaning, though the first colonial period had passed away.
The story of events before the organization of a separate town in 1786 comes from scanty records and must be briefly told. The most painstaking research by the competent historians in this region, and these are numerous, gives very little, a glimpse
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here and there, of the home life of the rural community in the early part of the past century.
We might be sure however, that life was not dull, nor un- thoughtful, which called for so constant and vivid struggle for common things and common needs. It did not lack excitement, for it was not sheltered by the walls of modern life, nor could it be called narrow, forced as these settlers were to share the cares of government in such a nation-building as this carth has only once seen, and shall never see again.
In this there would seem to have been very little Indian history. In the grant from and through Shrewsbury, no Indian name appears, all aboriginal titles having been extinguished by the General Court. In the northwest part of the town of Boyl- ston, set off from Lancaster, the Indian associations were more direct, and, here is presented almost the sole incident of Indian war adventure to an inhabitant of this town; the often told experiences of Thomas Sawyer in 1705, carried off in an Indian raid, and ransoming himself and his companions in captivity by building a saw mill for the Canadian authorities.
Nevertheless, with the first settlers in this region, the whole story of Indian troubles was still comparatively fresh. Sudbury fight lived in the memory of the elders, or with a generation only once removed. The fresh romance of the Rice boys captured by a war party in 1704, in a Marlborough meadow, was sure to be kept alive by the fact that the lads were adopted by the Indians, and one had become a sachem.
Though no Indians ever actually brought disturbance to the settlement on and about this hill, the constant dread remained through many of these earlier years. There were two garrison houses, defenses on the north and east, in this immediate vicin- ity, another in the west part of the town near Stony Brook. The farmers carried firearms to church and field. The slender news channels of the day were kept vivid with Indian rumors.
Nor was the reason wholly withdrawn. In 1747 we find the town of Rutland petitioning the General Court to fortify their town against the common enemy, and all the able bodied men were drawn by the Selectmen for scouting.
In 1747, John Fitch (who gave his name to Fitchburg), was
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carried off to Canada by a French and Indian war party. Holmes finely suggests the clinging tenacity of the Indian terror, when the venerable grandmother of a Boston household, on the day of the Bunker Hill fight, in her frenzy of alarm at the heavy din, is made to exclaim,
"Are they Indians ? Are they Indians ?"
It is told of a Boylston housewife of the early time, that having hung her dinner pot on the crane, she ran off to Marl- borough in a sudden panic, returning a year after to find her kitchen affairs just as she had left them.
Surrounded as we are by the eternal means and stimulants to education, and accepting them as indispensable in our time, we are not to forget how good a school of development, in all that is noble and enduring, was supplied by the conditions of the New England settlement, in the middle period between the retirement of the savages and the establishment of separate national existence.
With Indian wars and rumors of wars, with the old French wars, that made no small drafts in these communities, there was a constant drill and training in citizen watch and ward. Arms were never out of their hands, nor preparation for defense long absent from their minds. Shrewsbury shared in 1745 in the expedition to Louisburg and Cape Breton. Men of Shrewsbury, and what is now Boylston, were present at Crown Point in 1755.
Two sons of Phineas Bennet, a settler in 1740 in the west part of this town now West Boylston, were both killed in the disastrous " morning fight" at Ticonderoga in 1758. Then came the Revolutionary war in which Boylston shared the nota- ble annals of Shrewsbury.
It was in Shrewsbury, ten months before the Boston Tea Party, that a travelling pedler was made to surrender to be burned forthwith, thirty pounds of the prohibited herb, before this banned by town decree. It was Shrewsbury in 1744 that Ross Wyman called his Blacksmiths' Convention at Worcester, pledging their king of all the crafts, in that day, to do no work for the tories.
Our centennial national reviews have flashed a broad clear
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light on the revolutionary epoch, to show that it was no sudden fervor but had strengthened in many neighborhoods and through many channels, in more than one generation. And when it came, it came to a people who had learned the art and spirit of defense, and shrunk not from self assertion.
But Boylston had her especial and equal share at the very threshold of the contest with the mother country. It was a struggle between parish and minister, after twenty-five years of mutually honored and happy relations. From Ward's history of Shrewsbury it appears that all the persons suspected of too much loyalty except one were inhabitants of this North Parish.
Among these five martyrs under suspicion was Rev. Mr. Morse, the first pastor of the church, a learned and widely-read man, staunch and immovable, who would continue to pray in public for the kirg, queen and royal family, until his people and townsmen called him to account, disarmed him and prevented him by a show of force from entering his pulpit. They could not drive him away, but they used his steely loyalty to whet the edges of their patriotism.
These are but shallow students of the Revolutionary period, who do injustice to the position and motives of men who were in that time held by circumstances of trust, and tie, to impulses as genuine as ever bound the subject in loyalty to his king.
The greater is the honor and reverence due to the patriots of that time, from this fact that the loyalists of regions like our own in Worcester County, were men of mark and strength who gave way not as reeds bend, but as strong oaks break. Rev. Mr. Morse lived at the close of the era of greatest ministerial dignity, and authority. For a quarter of a century he had ex- ercised the authority of the New Testament bishop,
All the more striking, the patriotism of these Boylston men who did their duty, though the red line of excision ran through their own pulpit.
It is only from the meagre and scattered annals assembled from various towns of this region, that we gain a glimpse of the burdens and privations of the Revolution, and the resorts forced upon the poorer communities to adjust patriotism to poverty. As an instance in the town of Ward, now Auburn, in this county,
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Thomas Todd, one of the town quota, accepted as bounty from his town " eighteen calves of middleing value, the calves to be kept and cared for free of charge for the three years term of service."
Boylston had her share, as part of Shrewsbury, in the honors that fell to their townsman, General Artemas Ward, a member of the Second Provincial Congress, appointed Comman- der-in-Chief of the Armies of Congress, until a greater than he appeared, even Washington. And Boylston had more exclusive- ly for herself, Ezra Beaman. One cannot read very far in the annals of that time, in this region without coming upon his name. It stood out as prominently as his great wayside inn, the Bea- man Tavern overlooking the beautiful intervale of what is now West Boylston, for more than a century from 1764, one of the best known inns of New England. The largest land-holder of his section, lion-like and masterful in action, Ezra Beaman's name is continually repeated in town and church records. It was his grasp that laid hold on Pastor Morse. It was his com . pany that was prompt in field. He was in service near, though not on duty at Bunker Hill fight.
To Capt. Ezra Beaman, on Feb. 18, 1775, came a letter of acknowledgement from John Avery of the " Committee of Dona- tions," at Boston, for fifty-three bushels of rye and corn sent by the North Parish of Shrewsbury, " for the distressed inhabitants of this poor devoted town who are groaning under the rod of despotism ; " so reads the missive. The names of forty pension- ers of the war of the Revolution are given in Shrewsbury annals.
The growth of the North Parish of Shrewsbury, even in the trying period of the Revolution, kept alive its long cherished ambition (defeated 1742) to be a separate town. It was accom- plished in 1786, the occasion we this day commemorate. It was a wonderful birth year, one of the most important and the most critical in the history of America. It seemed as if the free and generous spirit of devotion that had sustained the American colonies had actually burned itself out, and lay smothered in its own ashes.
The separate and disjointed provinces were jarring (almost warring) with each other. The Provincial Congress seemed to
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