USA > Massachusetts > Worcester County > Boylston > Centennial celebration of the incorporation of the town of Boylston, Massachusetts, August 18, 1886 > Part 3
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have already collapsed. The separate states paying their own representatives to that body, often omitted paying or grossly neglected representation Thus the congress from thirteen states which should have numbered fifty-six members fell to thirty-five. There was a bitter wrangle between contiguous states over ques- tions of trade, finance and of territory. Massachusetts closed her ports to British shipping, Connecticut threw her ports open to British vessels, but established imposts against Massachusetts. New York levied duties at Hell Gate on all Yankee crafts, on all hay and wood and supplies that crossed her borders from Connecticut, and on all market boats that came over from Jersey.
Jefferson writes from Paris to protest against the intention of Kentucky to separate not only from Virginia, but from the Union. Pennsylvania with blood and fire was raiding Connecti- cut settlers out of the historic valley of the Wyoming, and New Hampshire and New York were crossing bayonets on the soil of Vermont.
Massachusetts had trouble enough at home in the Shay Rebellion. The population of this state was about 350,000. All the states lay under the shadow of debt. Everywhere debtors were massed for mutual protection. Six years before 1786 the paper war issues of New England had ceased to circulate as money. Vagaries of legislation only made matters worse, and the attempt to set aside law brought confusion indescribable.
Worcester County had a population of a little over 50,000. There were entered on file in 1784 in the courts, 2000 actions for debt, and nearly as many the following year. There was a wild assault on property rights, upon law, and upon the lawyers as a profession. It was a sadly troubled page to be read even now. It was full of wide portents then. Washington wrote from his Potomac farm in terms most impetuous, asking if all that Massachusetts fought for in the Revolution, was to be thrown away.
Nor was the aspect of our affairs abroad more encouraging. Jefferson writes from Paris in 1786, where he had succeeded Franklin as minister: " American reputation in Europe is not such as to be flattering to us * * The whole English nation hates us. Hostility is more deeply rooted than through the
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war. England declines all arrangements with us. They declare that were Americans to ask to be taken back on the former foot- ing, the petition would be absolutely rejected."
Franklin gives a few more cheerful views in his letter in the same year to an Amsterdam banker. He says : "The English papers are sending all the United States to destruction. By their accounts you would think we were in the utmost distress, in want of everything, in confusion, with no government, and wish- ing for that of England. Be assured iny friend these are all fictions, mere English wishes not American realities. There are some few faults in our constitution, which is no wonder consider- ing the stormy season in which they were made. And for the best I never saw greater or more undubitable marks of public prosperity in any country. The produce of our agriculture bears a good price, and is all paid in ready hard money All the laboring people have high wages. Everybody is well clothed and well lodged, the poor provided for or assisted, all estates in town and country much increased in value. As to wishing for the English government, we should as soon wish for that of Morocco." This a picture out of the past worth preserving.
In 1786, this was a most thoroughly Protestant country. There were by their own report in 1784, only 32,500 Roman Catholics in the United States, of which only 600 were in New England, and 1700 in New York and New Jersey together, but there were 20,000 in Maryland, of whom 8000 were slaves.
In this year 1786, came the earliest scheme of colonization in the west. The first plan for the Ohio companies was shaped at Rutland in this county, in that year by Gen. Rufus Putnam and Joel Barlow. Not until 1786 was it made certain that the states would surrender to the general government their claims on the territory west of the Alleghanies. Connecticut made her concession in that year. This made the North-west territory a possibility. Massachusetts men embarked in this Ohio company had a prominent share in shaping the great ordinance of 1787, that dedicated the North-west to freedom.
And in this first colony ever planted on territory of the United States, were fifty persons from Rutland, carrying out from the heart of the commonwealth the lessons of its own past, and
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establishing at the very threshold of the new West of one hun- dred years ago, the faithful pattern of the New England township, and New England town government.
We found in our own time, in the days of Bleeding Kansas, a close and perilous comparison between the civilization of the North and South. But the struggle was one that began a hun- dred years ago, and the New England founded in the West in that elder day, rested on bed rock, and saved the nation to freedom.
The year of 1786 is remarkable as the opening era of the great advance in material development. In this year Massa- chusetts laid the foundation of her splendid line of manufactur- ing industries by the state aid that brought out the first jenny and stock card in this country.
In 1786 John Fitch's first steamboat was tried on the Dela- ware. In 1787 Noah Webster had begun by public lectures his mission of the naturalization of the English tongue in America. In 1786 the great Methodist church of America, organized two years before as one flock in Christ by Welsey's orders, had be- gun to put forth direct efforts for the emancipation of slaves.
In 1786 the modern spirit of evangelical missions was awakened in England by William Carey. The first impulse to the great work of missions began in America with the opening of the century. These events and circumstances give an interest to the year 1786, which saw Boylston a separate town, no dull unmeaning sky arched above her.
The name is derived from one of the eminent Boylston fam- ilies of Boston, who seemed to have stood for excellent exam- ples in public spirit when the nation well founded was to become a nation fitly adorned. The head of this family made a muni- ficent gift to Harvard College. The first gift of Ward Nicholas Boylston to this new town in 1797 was £40 to be kept as an accumulating fund for such use as the donor should subsequently direct.
The town was faithful to its trust through twenty-eight years, when the patron visiting the town in 1827, found his gift had grown to $1000. He died the following year and by his will directed that the sum of $300 should be given to bring the
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total fund to $1450, for which in 1830, the town built the sub- stantial and permanently useful granite structure, its Town Hall and school building. But the relation of church and town was to work one more territorial change.
It came when the town found it necessary to build a new meeting-house. A warm controversy took place as to its loca- tion. In all these scattered rural communities in that period, the first inquiry regarding the site of the new meeting-house, was " Where is the exact centre of the town." Other towns helped with committees and surveyors. Often the point when found proved unsuitable, or was changed by some prudential reason. It so happened in this case. The central point was found half a mile from where we now stand, but with a wisdom that has always defended itself, the committee decided to fix upon this summit for common and meeting-house ; the earliest meeting-house having been built on a lower site near the burying ground. As in other New England towns we owe to the meeting house lot nearly all we have of the modern public square. All the more honor to Boylston's fathers that this noble common was bought, and not a free grant. There was a sufficient power in votes to sustain the action of the locating committee. The town having bought the present common, built the second meeting-house in 1793, on the site occupied by yonder white school house.
In 1795, Ezra Beaman and his neighbors, after an effectual protest drew off and formed with parts of adjoining towns the second parish of Boylston, Sterling and Holden, which in 1808 became West Boylston.
I can but believe this separation was necessary to save this rural town. Its inhabitants have always been widely dispersed farmers. Inevitably, the strongest nucleus of population was forecast for the intervale region in the west and north parts of its territory. It could never have become strong on this hill. which as happened in many other towns, might have become " the Old Common " with the stronger village centre of Boylston established at some lower level.
I believe it was well to save the town of Boylston to itself, and its very triumph over the Beaman party, strong and zealous
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as they must have been, shows that the town stood well on its foundations.
Early records say of its inhabitants and first settlers that they were always frugal, industrious and temperate. This is what good Pastor Sumner had to declare of his Shrewsbury flock in his half century sermon in 1812, and he came among them in 1762. Rev. Peter Whitney of Northborough, whose history of Worcester County is a model of its kind, writing of Boylston. his next adjoining town, in 1793, and he had been more than a quarter of a century an observer, says : " It may be styled a rich town for they are not only clear of debt, but, have several hun- dred pounds in their treasury. There are sure indications of
wealth and prosperity among them. Here are some large and good farmers as perhaps anywhere in the country, who keep great stocks of cattle. The people raise all kinds of country produce especially beef, pork and grain, butter and cheese, vastly more than they consume, and carry more into the market perhaps than any town of its size and numbers."
From old records it is told that, previous to 1808, not less than three thousand bushels of rye with about the same quanti- ties of corn and oats were produced in the town. During the winter season the farmers carried large quantities of rye meal to Boston, about forty miles, for which they realized $1.25 per bushel. At that time large quantities of cider were made from native fruit, grafted trees being unknown. There were thirty cider mills in town. And Boylston cider must have been in good repute. In 1786 when Rev. Mr. Crafts was ordained in Princeton one Adonijah Howe, as a special town messenger, was sent to this town " for cider and plates," and on another errand to West- minster " for knives and forks."
What a clatter of merry-making comes from the ordina- tion dinner out of the past. Our early fathers and mothers were by no means a gloomy generation. One carly witness of life in a northern Massachusetts town says " we were as poor as mice, but as merry as grigs." In fact they may have been too jolly, especially at ordination dinners, for in 1759 the grave Council of the Royal Governor of this province addressed the
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clergy a solemn blast of censure against this tendency to jollity and feasting on such occasions.
Other than farming, Boylston has very little of industrial his- tory. In the early day there were saw mills, and grist mills. fill- ing mills and forges, and she has always had Sawyer's Mills ; but the streams ran past her feet, and a thousand cattle were on her hills. She found her soil strong and deep, and good husbandry was and remains her specialty. She did have her share, indeed, in the household industries of the period in the last century when New England domestic manufacture was nearly equal to the ordinary wants of the inhabitants for clothing and common supplies.
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They had few wants that could not be met by home and vil- lage craft. The mechanical industries of this county were in embryo but were already forecast by men of wonderful skill and ingenuitv, with whom Shrewsbury began to abound when she led the way in watches and rifles, and ploughs. Boylston has been content with her farms. She was prosperous as a farming town even when farming industry illuminated by modern agricultural science was still in the future.
I have no doubt that some of the early prosperous agricul- turists of this region looked askance at book-farming and learned societies. And there were some very good results of farming in the older day. In the middle of the last century some of the large farmers of New England kept one hundred cows. In one case in Rhode Island, about, 1760, a herd of seventy-three cows gave ten thousand pounds of butter in five months, an average of nearly one pound from each cow per day.
It was not until late in the last century, that there began to be much discussion as to the improvement of live stock. In the matter of horses, saddle animals were highly valued, but the ox was the farm team. Pleasure vehicles were made impossible by the state of the early roads. Into one of the northern towns of this county came a " pleasure wagon," so-called in 1812, as a curiosity. The stage-coach was not born in England until late in the last century, and in this region the days of coaching only began with the completion of the Boston and Worcester turnpike in 1810. Good roads first brought the call among the country
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people for good trotters, and the descendant of Justin Morgan, foaled at Springfield, Mass., in 1793, began to stir the dust at the close of the last century.
The first county agricultural exhibition ever held in the country, was the work of Elkanah Watson, at Pittsfield in 1810, to show off three Merino sheep, and the Merino sheep fever a little later had a tremendous run. But there were three earlier less fortunate Merinos, that deserved a better fate. These were two ewes and a ram, brought direct from Spain in 1793, by a Boston citizen, who gave them to a friend in the country. That friend " simply ate them up," and he himself remembered the circumstance a few years later, when he paid $1000 for a Merino ram.
Boylston as a farming town has been fortunate in its loca- tion. It is said that a central point on a line drawn through the state from north to south, rests on a Boylston hill. So that in the Heart of the Commonwealth this must be the " Heart of Hearts." This rural town rests like an emerald on the bosom of a county throbbing with manufacturing industries, inspired by local inventive skill. You may search the world in vain to find so closely set a galaxy of such eminent names as Bigelow, Whitney and Blanchard, sons of Worcester County, and of this neighborhood.
The stone rejected by the builders of Gov. Belcher's day. one hundred and fifty years ago, has become the head of the cor- ner of Massachusetts industries. Worcester County stands to-day among the first few counties of the United States in agricultural wealth. Where stands its peer, when its mechanical industries seek comparison ? Yet they said of this hill country, it " could never make a figure-could never attract settlers." The beaver in the day of the wilderness knew where to find descending waters ; so, all up and down our valleys, the early mill-wheels followed in the beaver's track, and the flumes started where he built his dams.
President Dwight's Tour gives a very sunny and delightful picture of Worcester County about the year 1790, with busy mill- streams on every side among pleasant farms,
We are not called upon here to rehearse the oft-told tale of
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the wonders of the nineteenth century, the advance in mechani- cal industry and applied science, nor even the progress in hus . bandry. But we may well note that nothing has ever superseded, or brought a lighter value to the farmers' occupation, and the share that those whose interests are solidly in the soil, have had in the building of the nation, and its maintenance.
The founder of these Massachusetts towns were careful, patient and watchful. This thing is evident from Boylston town and church records while these records were united. They went into public affairs with intense fidelity. The building of the first meeting-house called for no less than fourteen precinct meetings; the matters of the second meeting-house in 1791 and years fol- lowing, occupied no less than twenty town meetings.
Public service has never needed civil service reform so little, the duties of good citizenship have never been anywhere so well exemplified, as in the New England town system.
Boylston has always been a good and kindly nursing mother to her sons. This region is the abundant source of the best vital forces. Health and vigor are the possession of those who, untainted by vice, drink in the full influence of these hills, and the breezes that sweep over them. The hill towns of Worcester County, have always favored the longevity of their inhabitants. Within the year 1885, there were thirty-nine deaths in Worcester County of persons who had passed the age of ninety years ; several of these had nearly completed the century.
Here stands the church organization, founded with the town, and it remains the only church organization, and it retains the faith of the fathers. The great body of the people of the county, from the beginning till after the Revolution, belonged to the Congregational denomination. In 1783 there were forty-seven towns in this county, with a church of the congregational order in every town, and there was in 1881, a similar church in all these towns except two.
The history of a church is no more the history of the town, but the rich fruits of the early care of the fathers remain, though the system has passed away. In Boylston from the first estab- lishment of its separate meeting-house the influence of this church and the succession of its pastors, eminent in character
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and attainments, has given a constantly uplifting force to public sentiment in this community. Pastor Morse, notwithstanding his tenacious adhesion to the cause of the king, is nevertheless to be honored with the fact that, for the first twenty-five years of town and parish life, he was one of the ablest ministers of this region. The united periods of settlement of Mr. Morse and three of the succeeding pastors-Fairbanks, Cotton and Sanford- cover one hundred and one years of ministerial influence of the best and choicest type. All were broad and scholarly men.
To the late Rev. William H. Sanford, whose pastorate fills a period of twenty-five years, from 1832, belongs the credit awarded to him by both church and town, of bringing to a happy issue the affairs of a most difficult and disturbed period. In his time, and guided by his skill and carefulness, the third meeting-house was built, the present structure, first occupied in 1835.
Boylston has from the first been heedful of the care of her youth and early realized the measures of early instruction, in- wrought into her original plan. It was doubtless as true here in the earlier day as was said of Princeton by her historian Russell : " Any one need but run his eye over the old records of births in the Town Clerk's office to be convinced that half a dozen familes constituted a very respectable school district." Though the num- ber of her college-bred sons, since the first settlement of the town, falls short in comparison with those who have sought other call- ings. the list is respectable, while Boylston has sent far and wide, men of sagacity and good business qualifications. She has furnished two Mayors to Worcester, and a numerous array of Worcester business men, of success in their vocations, and excel- lent citizens ; good men, noble women.
This community, earnest in the outset, and faithful in the narrower ways of earlier life, has not shrunk from any of the duties and sacrifices this century has imposed. Boylston gave eighty-one of her sons to the armies of the Union in the great rebellion, and seven of these laid down their lives that the nation might live.
When our men of middle age were school boys, it seemed as if the military spirit had gone out of our communities. The treasured firearms of revolutionary memory, the sword of the
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ancestor of brave days of old, clung to the walls of the farmer's home, or were gathered in antiquarian collections. But their suggestions seemed far remote from any dangers or duties of our time. Bird o' Fredum Sawin, indeed, found out in the Mexican war why " baggonets wuz peaked," but New England set a light value on the school and did not greatly heed the lesson.
Forty years ago the militia service held a doubtful place among sober-minded citizens, as furnishing in muster fields and Cornwallis days, only serious perils for the youth and those more feeble in the face of temptation. And this dread supplied one of the first terrors of the gathering to arms in 1861, the possible evils of a disbanded soldiery at the end of the conflict. But Boylston, like other communities, re-absorbed into civil life her sons, when our armies gave them back, as rain sinks into the mellow earth, the sublimest proof history has yet furnished among the lessons of the Republic, that enlightenment and civil- ization, with the Bible and the common school as guiding forces, need not impair the sterner qualities that are the bulwarks and defenses of the State.
Boylston has been faithful and sympathizing in the leading reforms and benevolent measures of the eras as they arrived. Her best public sentiment was early enrolled on the side of Eman- cipation. Her cider mills gave way promptly before the advance of Total Abstinence. It is worth much for Boylston to liave en- rolled among its townsmen for over forty years one whose life was so fully freighted with usefulness for his age and time as that of Jolin B. Gough.
He came among you a young man, yet old in the experiences of the woe of drunkenness, with life prospects apparently blighted by the drunkard's cup, with heart and nature scarred by grief and shame ; with a sadness that was never quite parted from in the brightest portions of his illustrious career.
From his wide mission tours, in this land or in foreign lands, it was to Hillside he came back to recuperate in a town he loved to call his own And when he went out for the last time to return in life no more, liis remains were brought to Hillside to receive the world's tribute of grief and affection, that came flash- ing across continents and under seas.
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One hundred years have brought great changes to the world and to the race from whom the earliest settlers of these hills was derived. At the end of the reign of Charles Il, two hundred years ago, the English colonists in America numbered 200,000. In two hundred years their increase has been two hundred and fifty fold. In the century, whose close we celebrate to-day, the United States has increased its territory ten fold.
The iuflux of a population, alien in blood and purposes from the early founders of the nation, has nearly all taken place within these hundred years. They share our destinies and will share in shaping them. " We march to fate abreast."
In one hundred years the Anglo Saxon race, in whom rests the world's hope, has grown from six to one hundred millions. It now comprises one-fifteenth of mankind ; it rules one-third of the earth's surface, and one-quarter of the people. Within the century the world has been belted by the emigrant and the adventurer. Let Alexander weep,-there are no more wilder- nesses to be conquered, no more virgin lands to be explored.
Seventy years ago a Boylston pastor preached a clear and ringing discourse on the topic of Missions, and his plea, in 1816, for Christian Evangelization of the new West as a national necessity, reads like the most vivid Home Missionary appeal of to-day, notwithstanding the New West of Pastor Cotton's time lay far on this side of the Mississippi. " After me the deluge," shouted the infamous favorite of a licentious king, and the red deluge broke on France nearly one hundred years ago.
" After us those for whose estate and welfare we shall be held accountable," was the motto of the founders of this hill town, and well has their pious care been answered.
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After the oration, in introducing the Poet of the Day, the President of the Day said :
Our youth is passed amid the illusions of poetry, and in the natural order of events on occasions like this, sober fact usually comes first and the poetry afterward. This is following custom, and it may be that the custom is based upon the facts of life after all, because the illusive poetry of childhood soon evaporates before the actual facts of life, and then comes the real inspiration of life in its sober realization of the just proportion, which the chastened mind converts into real poetry. To-day, following the instincts of our feelings, we desire to be filled with the real inspiration of this occasion, and therefore we have called in the art of the poet.
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