USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > History of Middlesex County, Massachusetts : containing carefully prepared histories of every city and town in the county, Vol. I > Part 64
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From the enlistment of Joel A. Hunter, the first volunteer to represent Chelmsford, until the close of the war, there went forth from this town, in all, two hundred and twenty-nine soldiers, of whom twenty-two never returned to receive the gratitude of their fellow-townsmen ; but their names are not forgotten, and the people of Chelmsford shall remember them to all future time. Their names are as follow : Albert E. Pike, Albert S. Byam, Henry Spaulding, James H. Barton, James Jack- son, John T. M'Cabe, Henry W. Davidson, Patrick Barrett, Thomas Cochran, George E. Reed, George B. Lamphere, Patrick Derry, George Curtis, Web- ster C. Decatur, Jonas V. Pierce, James Gray, Peter McEneaney, Henry H. Ingalls, Charity L. Dunn, Colman S. Farwell, Philip Whelan, and Elijah N. Day.
Shall not there be another monument erected, which shall bear the inscription, cut into the na- tive granite, " The children did guard that which their sires had won " ?
The town of Chelmsford is to-day a place of nuch active life, containing about 2,400 inhab- itants, presenting a valuation of nearly a million and a half dollars, and still, though having lost much territory by the annexation of Middlesex Village and farms adjacent to Lowell in 1874, con- tinuing to hold her station as one of the largest towns in the county. There are 14,160 acres of land that are taxed, with 9,299 acres of farm- ing lands, of which 2,246 are cultivated. The 138 farms have a total valuation of $650,899, and their products reach the sum of $128,459 an-
1 Allen's History of Chelmsford.
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nually. In addition to the railroads mentioned that pass through the northern village, the road of the Framingham and Lowell Company traverses the town and brings the healthful pulsation of modern life to the old centre village. With these excellent railway facilities the prospects of Chelms- ford seem bright for future development of her agricultural and mechanical industries.
Chelmsford has not wanted for native sons or resident citizens to uphold her fair name in the various walks of industry and honorable profes- sions. She has been thus represented, at home or elsewhere, by Ebenezer Bridge, Hezekiah Paekard, Wilkes Allen, John Parkhurst, Andrew Beattie,
in divinity ; by Nehemiah Abbot, Oliver Barron, Timothy Harrington, Matthias Spaulding, Rufus Wyman, John C. Dalton, John C. Bartlett, and the distinguished surgeon, Willard Parker, in med- icine ; by Jonathan William Austin, Samuel Dex- ter, Asahel Stearns, the late eminent professor of law at Harvard, Joel Adams and John Richard- son Adams, Nathaniel Wright, Edward St. Loe Livermore, Josiah G. Abbott, and the celebrated antiquary, John Farmer, in law and in literature ; by Colonel Jonas Clark, Samson Stoddard, Colonel Ebenezer Bridge, General Benjamin Pierce, Gen- eral Benjamin Adams, and others, in the military service of their country.
CONCORD.
BY REV. GRINDALL REYNOLDS.
THE FIRST FORTY YEARS.
S EPTEMBER 2, 1635, " It is ordered, that there shal be a plantacion att Musketequid, and that there shal be 6 myles of land square to belong to it; and that the inhabitants there- of shall have three yeares imu- nities from all public charges, except traineings. Further that, when any that plant there shall have occasion of carryeing of goods thither, they shall repaire to two of the nexte magistrates, where the teames are, whoe shall have power for a yeare to presse draughts att rea- sonable raytes, to be payde by the owners of the goods, to transport their goods thither att season- able tymes ; and the name of the place is changed and hereafter to be called Concord."
With this order began the legal existence of the first inland town of Massachusetts. A few thin settlements had already been planted along our rocky coast. Some bold colonists had gone up the Charles, as far as the tide runs, and established Watertown. But this was the first venture into the true forest country. It is curious to note how powerfully it affected the imagination of contem- poraries. " And last of all Concord - was set-
tled - right up into the woods," chronicles Hub- bard. " In desart depths where wolves and beares abide," writes Johnson. And then he describes the twelve miles' journey from Watertown, "through watery swamps, through thickets, where the hands were forced to make a way for the body," much as one might now depict the hardships of an expe- dition of many hundreds of miles into an untrodden solitude. The characteristics of the spot chosen for settlement, then as now, were its rivers and the broad belt of level green in which they flowed. Through the southeast corner of the grant crept the sluggish South Branch, meeting in the centre the swifter Assabet, and together forming the true Concord River. From these streams stretched wide meadows rising into gently undulating plains. Considerable elevations on the eastern and western borders broke the monotony, while in the centre Punkatasset, sloping down to the main stream, and a beautifully rounded little eminence now known as Lee's Hill, but then as plain North Hill, filling the triangle made by the junction of the two branches, gave to the scenery a quiet grace. But natural beauty was not the attraction; rather the great meadows, yielding their increase without man's labor, and the plains already cleared by the Indians' rude culture.
Thither in October, 1635, came twelve or four- teen families. Following the narrow Indian trails,
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or cutting their own path, after a toilsome march they reached their new home. A little east of the centre of the six-mile grant was a triangular plain, mainly included between the river, the Mill Brook, and the broken ground on the eastern bor- der, and on which the present village of Concord stands. A long ridge, nowhere rising to the dig- nity of a hill, and at whose base the Lexington road now runs, skirted the plain on its northern side. Into this ridge the settlers burrowed and built rude huts, passing a tedious winter, half blinded with smoke, half drenched with rain, “yet in their poore wigwames they sing Psalmes, pray and praise their God." Very early Rev. John Jones, with a number of families direct from Eng- land, joined them. Still later there were other accessions. The real leaders were Peter Bulkley and Simon Willard. The first, the minister of the town for twenty-three years, was the son of an emi- nent minister of Bedfordshire, and was educated at St. John's College, Cambridge. In his frontier home he clung to his scholarly habits, publishing in 1646 The Gospel Covenant, a work of high re- pute in its day, and solacing his old age with the composition of Latin verses. An ample fortune was lavished upon his poorer neighbors, and he left a property which had shrunk to one quarter of its original bulk. Simon Willard was from Horsmanden in Kent. A yeoman by birth, he engaged in trade, and in 1634 came with a good estate to New Eng- land and settled in Cambridge. But the friendship which he contracted for Mr. Bulkley led him to remove to Concord. For twenty-four years he was the leading man in the new town; its deputy, town-clerk, first military officer, and probably se- lectman. In later life he was an assistant, -a post of state authority which included almost every possible function, legislative, judicial, or execu- tive. As for the other settlers, they were largely people of means and good position, who sacrificed home to conscience.
In 1637 the General Court gave the settlers per- mission to purchase their lands of the Indians. A powerful tribe, pitifully reduced by war and disease, occupied the region between the Charles and the Merrimack. Squaw Sachem, of Medford, ruled over the remnant ; of which Tahattawan, with a few families, lingered near the fishing-grounds at Con- cord. Under a great oak in the public square Si- mon Willard and others met the Indian chiefs. A few suits of clothes for the head' men, some hoes, hatchets, knives, and cloth for their followers, con-
tented them ; and a tract, extending three miles, north,- cast, south and west, corresponding to the original grant, was conveyed. Efforts were made to convert these savages. Willard became their recorder. Finally, Tahattawan and his followers, moved by the kindness of the whites, embraced Christianity. The chief requested that they might have a town near by, " for if the Indians dwelt far from the English they would not care to pray." Nashobah, now Littleton, became an Indian town. When King Philip's War broke out, but fifty-eight of these people were left. Sixty years later one Indian woman, old and blind, Sarah Doublet, was their single known representative.
The Mill Brook meadows, fronting the ridge, and the great plain and meadow, extending back of it to the river, and beyond Bedford line, were the first lands cultivated. How these lands were divided, must, with the loss of the early record, remain much a matter of conjecture. Probably the village was divided into lots, while the great flat behind it was held in common, with an owner- ship proportioned to the contribution to the com- mon weal. Almost to our day this flat has been known as " the Great Common Fields." A paper dated March 1, 1690-91, signed by forty-one persons, owners of the Great Fields, agrees that said field shall be enclosed in one fence, and culti- vated upon equitable conditions.
Discouragements came early. The plains were sandy, the meadows wet, the hay poor. Cattle "fed upon such wild Fother died." Sheep and horses fared no better. Men, tenderly brought up, lost their all. Eleven months after the settlement there was a plan to abate Billerica Falls. Eight years later the General Court appointed a commis- sion to consider the matter. Mr. Jones (perhaps because he had a disagreement with his colleague, perhaps because the support of two ministers was difficult) went to Connecticut, taking one seventh of the people, and every new town north or west had Concord people in it. Some were for abandoning the settlement. Then, in 1659, Mr. Bulkley died, and the same year Mr. Willard moved to Lancaster. Those were dark days. "Some faint-hearted sol- diers sold their possessions for little, leaving behind only fifty families "; so that a law was passed for- bidding any one to leave the frontier towns of Concord, Sudbury, and Dedham, without the select- men's leave. But the tide soon turned. Up to 1654, though some, like Simon Willard, who built a mansion near the foot of Lee's Hill, had pushed
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out, the inhabitants lived " chiefly in one straite streame under a sunny banke in a low levell": that is where the first winter found them. But that year new and better lands were divided. As before, the ground near the centre was apportioned to individuals, while the outlands were held in common. From this time there was a steady im- provement. Acton, and probably a part of Little- ton, under the title of Concord Village, were added to the original grant, and the Blood Farms, a tract of two or three thousand acres now in Carlisle, were in 1685 definitely annexed. This was the time of greatest territorial enlargement. All of the pres- ent Concord and Acton, and a considerable portion of Bedford, Carlisle, Littleton, and Lincoln, were included in the town bounds.
If now we could see Concord as it was at the close of its first forty years' life, we should find but one public building, the meeting-house, - the true centre of a Puritan town, its place of public business and of public worship. It was built in 1673, to replace that which stood for forty years " on the hill neare the brook on the easte of Good- man Judgson's lott." Its site was on the church green a little west of the modern building. It was a square house, with a luthern window on each side of the roof, and a cupola on the centre of it, - in short, a duplicate of the old Hingham meeting- house, built seven years later. Around it was clustered a little village of perhaps four hundred people. Four roads connected this village with the outer world : the old road to Boston through Watertown ; that from Merriam's Corner to Bed- ford and Billerica ; the way across the Great South Bridge and Derby's Bridge, which for one hundred and forty years alone gave access to the southern part of the town and the western settlements ; and, finally, the road over the Old North Bridge, which for an equal period was the single line of commu- nication with the northern districts and the upper towns. There was a little iron-foundry in the southwest corner of the town, smelting bog-ore, and probably a grist and saw mill. This was the whole manufacturing interest. The law required a common school for fifty families, and a grammar school if there were a hundred. But the official report of John Smedley, Sr., and Thomas Dakin, in which they say that " as for schools we have in every quarter of our town men and women that teach to read and write English, when parents can spare their children and others to go to them," indicates that in the hard struggle for subsistence
education took the second place. Originally Mr. Bulkley was teacher and Mr. Jones pastor. But after the removal of the latter, Mr. Bulkley took the whole charge. His son and successor, Edward Bulkley, did the same until 1667, when the in- creasing numbers and his decreasing strength led to the appointment of Rev. Joseph Estabrook as colleague. "The covenant with the Rev. Pastor and teacher was for eighty pounds apicce annually." So stood the old town at the close of its forty years, yet wrestling with the difficulties of frontier life, but slowly gathering all the elements of mate- rial and spiritual prosperity.
KING PHILIP'S WAR.
THE first forty years were simply years of strug- gle with the wilderness. The terrible Pequot War broke out, indeed, within eighteen months of the settlement. But it was far off. It soon closed; and it brought the land rest for forty years.
In 1654 Major Willard led a little force, partly from Concord, against Ninigret, a petty chieftain living where Rhode Island and Connecticut touch on the shores of the Atlantic. But the cunning savage hid himself in impenetrable swamps, and the expedition returned. Disastrous war replaced peace when Philip of Pokanoket, in the month of June, 1675, assaulted Swanzey. Driven from its original seat, the war entered upon its second stage by the rising of the Nipmucks, a tribe occupying Central Massachusetts. Captain Edward Hutchin- son of Boston and Thomas Wheeler of Concord were despatched to Brookfield, July 28, with twenty troopers, mainly from Concord and its vicinity, to secure the neutrality of this tribe. Through the credulity of their Brookfield friends they fell into an ambush, and Captain Hutchinson was mortally wounded, and Captain Wheeler and son severely so, and Samuel S-nedley, Jr., of Con- cord and seven others killed; to which must be added Henry Young of Concord, shot during the siege which followed. The survivors, gu ... 1 by friendly Indians, reached a fortified house, where, under the conduct of Lientenant Simon Davis of Concord, they withstood a desperate assault, and at the last extremity were rescued by their old neigh- bor, Major Simon Willard, with forty-six Middle- sex troopers. By October the outer girdle of towns west of Concord had been abandoned. Two months later the Narragansetts rose from a treacherous truce. Then occurred that terrible
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struggle in the depth of a New England winter, | The vexed question of jurisdiction over the Blood known as the Narragansett Swamp Fight. Ten Farms, in 1685, was peaceably settled. The next year Hon. Peter Bulkley and Captain Thomas Henchman bought half of Nashobah of its native owners. Concord, like other towns, found her rights threatened by the tyrannical measures of Governor Andros, and, like them, did her part in the revolution which followed, by sending a com- pany to Boston under Lieutenant John Heald. Concord men were in that fight. "George Hey- ward was slayne," and Abraham Temple and Thomas Brown - probably the town-clerk - wounded. By March, 1676, the inner girdle of towns -Dunstable, Groton, Lancaster, etc. - had also been largely abandoned. Concord had not escaped without loss. Ten men going to the help of Sudbury were waylaid and killed. At Of the seventy-four years from 1689 to 1763, forty-four were given to six wars, in which the barbarities of savage warfare were strangely mingled with the scarcely less atrocious measures of their civilized brothers. King William's War broke out in 1689. How great the fears were is evident from the order of 1690, that Captain Simon Davis of Concord shall impress a company of forty troopers and thirty foot soldiers to defend the frontier from Dunstable to Marlborough; that forty men shall be in each frontier town for a main guard; and that two hundred and fifty to four hundred shall always be ready, " for a flying army," to pursue the enemy. The attacks made upon Bil- lerica, Dunstable, Andover, and Groton -in the last of which in one day, in 1694, twenty were killed and fifteen led into captivity - prove that these fears were not groundless. And the petition of Thomas Brown that he may be reimbursed for a horse lost in 1697, while he was by order of Colonel Tyng pursuing Indians, shows that the flying army was not inactive. least four others were slain on their farms or while going to them. Captain Timothy Wheeler had already been authorized to impress a gunsmith ; and the General Court now declared Concord to be a frontier town, which must daily send out a scout- ing party, and keep men ready to go to the help of other towns. One painful episode of the war was the treatment of the Nashobah Indians, who, by order of the court, had removed to Concord. A poor remnant of fifty-eight men, women, and chil- dren, they were living soberly, quietly, and indus- triously with John Hoar, who alone would take charge of them, when Captain Samuel Moseley broke into their home, scattered their property, and seizing them hurried them to what Gookin calls " their furnace of affliction " at Deer Island. This Captain Moseley was an old West Indian buc- caneer, and an officer of desperate courage. He commanded one hundred and three volunteers, of whom twelve were pirates pardoned to fight In -. dians. Fit instruments for an unjust deed ! The war closed with the death of Philip in August. Concord would hardly be called one of the great sufferers ; yet in fourteen months it lost one sixth of its men, and so much property that fifty pounds of its taxes were remitted, and eighteen of its hun- dred families received help from " the Irish Char- ity," -a fund collected in Ireland to help those in New England who had suffered from Indians. Still, the town was. "zot so poor as to forget higher duties, as in is lowest estate, in 1658, it gave five ponuds for five years to Harvard College ; so, in 1 .15, out of its poverty it subscribed forty-five pounds to help build the second Harvard Hall.
FRENCH AND INDIAN WARS. 1689-1763.
FROM the close of King Philip's War to the accession of King William few events of interest are recorded. During that war, or shortly after it, and perhaps as a result of it, many families of means and influence made Concord their home.
In 1703, after six brief years of rest, the dread- ful Queen Anne's War began ; as dreadful for Indian raids as King Philip's. Penhallow records the names of one hundred and sixty-six persons killed or captured in 1703 in the little settlements on the Maine coast. And in the single county of Hampshire over two hundred shared the same fate ; while nearer home, Dunstable, Marlborough, and Groton again suffered. This condition of affairs demanded of the adjacent towns constant vigilance. Captain Bulkley of Concord commanded a com- pany all through the war, passing as needed from place to place, and displaying such activity as to receive special mention from Penhallow. In the successful expedition of 1710 against Port Royal, Moses Wheat, William and Thomas Robbins were present, and how many more the imperfect records make it impossible to say.
The Peace of Utrecht brought only nominal relief, for the Indians, alarmed by the steady advance of the whites, and stimulated, as the Eng-
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lish believed, by the French missionary Rale, began ! them. Ile retreated ; but on the banks of the afresh to make bloody incursions. The remarkable West River, where Londonderry now stands, was overtaken by one hundred and fifty Indians. He was himself surrounded and had his belt ent by a flying hatchet, but finally succeeded with twelve men in reaching Fort Dummer. Of the six who fell, four were from Concord. He lived to com- mand a company in Governor Shirley's expedition against the French forts and settlements in Maine, and died soon after his return. The French and Indian War was a war of distant expeditions and had few incidents of local interest. It is sufficient to say that in all these expeditions -to Acadia in 1755, to Fort Edward and Crown Point in 1756, and at the final capture of Ticonderoga - the town was largely represented. events of the war were the taking of Norridgewock, the death of Rale, and Lovewell's Fight. A halo of romance has gathered around this fight ; but, at the core of it, it was simply the unfortunate close of an expedition undertaken from the not very romantic motive of receiving £ 100 for each Indian scalp taken. Concord furnished nine of the forty- six men who marched out of Dunstable, and Lieutenants Robbins and Farwell were descendants of her first settlers. Lovewell's expedition has been kept in memory because of its tragic fate. But in reality it was one of many. On the Massa- chusett's rolls are found at least seven such com- panies, and in all of them Concord names. Nor did Lovewell's, fate discourage brave men. Only four months after his death eighteen persons, some of whom had been in the disastrous fight, asked leave to form a company, and suggested that David Melvin was a suitable person to command.
The one event of the Spanish War of interest to New England was " the expedition in 1741 against his Catholic Majesty in the West Indies." To this expedition Concord furnished Colonel Jonathan Prescott and eighteen others. The affair was mis- erably mismanaged ; disease set in, and but three of the eighteen reached home. The War of the Austrian Succession opened in 1744. Its crown- ing glory was the capture of the stronghold of Louisburg by an army of farmers and fishermen. To that army Concord sent Captain David and Lientenant Eleazer Melvin, both survivors of Love- well's Fight, and a dozen more. The captain was wounded, and, after twenty years of hardship and peril, came home to die. His brother Eleazer kept bright the family record. Returning from the successful siege, he went back to his old business of Indian scouting, and led a company in 1746 to join the expedition against Canada, and made what was called " the long march " into the very borders of the enemies' country. The next year he was stationed with fifty men at Northfield, to protect the frontier. In 1748 he recruited a new com- pany of rangers, mainly from his native town, and through the spring of that year he was at Fort Dummer, near Brattleborough. With eighteen men he started from that post on a scout through the woods, to Crown Point. When he reached Lake Champlain two canoes came in sight, and though he was but a mile distant from the enemy's fort, he imprudently permitted his men to fire upon
The peace of 1763 brought permanent relief from the French and Indians. The households could sleep in safety. The great drafts, which seemed to include all the able-bodied, were at an end. It is wonderful to note how, in the face of almost perpetual warfare, the town had grown. In 1652 there were but fifty families. In 1680, directly after King Philip's War, there were one hundred. That hundred had more than doubled in 1706 ; and in 1764, in the domain once Concord, there were 2,700 people. The mere statement speaks volumes for the courage and vigor of those who subdued the wilderness.
The historiau calls the period we have traversed the dark time of education. Probably with truth. The Concord records indicate that the schools were of no very high order, that they were scantily sup- ported, and that, as the report of 1680 says, they were attended " when the parents could spare their children." The gift of Captain Ephraim Flint of £100 to Harvard College, and Captain Timothy Wheeler's bequest of three acres of land and the house standing on the same for the furtherance of learning, shows that there were those who looked beyond the burden of the present hour to the higher needs of a community.
The ecclesiastical history of the period was stormy. Rev. Edward Bulkley died January 2, 1696, at a great age, after a fifty-three years' min- istry. His colleague, Rev. Joseph Estabrook, followed him September 16, 1711. Rev. Jolın Whiting became pastor May 14, 1712, but was dismissed in 1758, "causes of difference having arisen." Rev. Daniel Bliss, a preacher of great earnestness and power, succeeded him the next year. But the change did not bring peace. It
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