USA > Massachusetts > Norfolk County > Milton > History of Milton > Part 18
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In 1779-80 Governor Hutchinson's real estate was sold by Massachusetts. It consisted of forty-three acres in Milton and six houses in Boston, and re- alized a total of 98, 121 inflated pounds. Certain pieces of his furniture have survived. His secretary desk belongs to the Milton Library, while the Milton Historical Society has a very beautiful gilt mirror. He also owned additional land in Rhode Island which was sold by that State in 1780-81.
Dorothy Murray was the daughter of James Murray, who remained a Loyalist and sought refuge with the British after the Concord fight. She had married the Rev. John Forbes, minister at St. Augustine, Florida, but con- tinued to live on the Brush Hill farm, which was left in trust jointly to her and her sister Elizabeth, who was later to marry Edward H. Robbins. Mrs.
6. What would he have thought had he known that a Virginian named Washington would be using this same coach at his Cambridge headquarters the next year?
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Forbes, although known by all to be a Loyalist, remained in undisturbed possession of the farm throughout the troubled period. Eventually, well af- ter the war, Judge Robbins bought Mrs. Forbes' half interest in the estate and lived there for the rest of his life. Apparently if a Milton Tory quitted his estate it was sequestered, but if he continued to occupy it and gave no cause for suspicion, he was left in peace, although assessed extra taxes. His- tory has told us of the tight cordon supposed to have been thrown around Boston by the besieging army of Provincials, but some letters of the Murray family give a very different picture. In the spring and summer of 1775 Bos- ton and Milton Murrays met on several occasions at the lines, each party ac- companied by a British or American officer to see that nothing improper was said. By the fall of the year regulations had become quite lax, and ves- sels sailed from Boston up the Neponset on occasions. Mrs. Forbes' aunt, the Loyalist Mrs. Inman of Cambridge, went visiting in Boston, and Mr. Murray made at least one trip out to Brush Hill, while Elizabeth went from Milton to Boston to attend a ball. In the early winter controls were tightened, but interviews were still allowed, and mail appears to have passed freely throughout the entire period of the siege.
During the remaining years of the Revolution the Town continued to be called upon at various times to produce a quota of recruits, and there was usually considerable difficulty in finding them. At times the Town took ac- tion to assist the families of absent soldiers, partly by collecting donations and partly by a tax levy. Salt was evidently very scarce, and unsuccessful at- tempts were made to establish a Town Salt Works, first at Squantum, and failing that on Cape Cod. Times were hard and many of the conveniences of life were lacking, but there is little in the records of Town Meeting to show it, or for that matter to show that a war was going on. The local militia con- tinued to function on the ancient home guard basis that had existed for al- most a century and a half.
By July of 1779 the depreciation of the currency had become very serious, and Town Meeting voted to observe the resolutions passed at the State Con- vention which had just been held at Concord. These were aimed at prevent- ing further inflation, and of course turned out to be just so much wasted ef-
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fort. In August Milton's citizens met and voted to establish a schedule of maximum prices for a variety of commodities and services. At this time pa- per money had depreciated to about one-twentieth of its 1775 value, but by early 1781 the Continental currency passed at only one-seventy-fifth of its face value. This of course worked great hardship on many, and tradition tells us of very difficult times here during these years. On the other hand Milton was still an agricultural community, and while many things such as sugar, molasses, tea, and even that essential commodity, rum, may have been lacking, it is certain that nobody starved. Life may have been hard and monotonous but it went on and could not have been too unpleasant, or re- cruits for the army would not have been so hard to find. By 1780 hard mon- ey was again in good supply, partly paid by the French for supplies, and partly from captures made by privateers.
There were two interesting actions taken by the Town during this period of currency depreciation. In the spring of 1780 it was voted to pay the Rev. Mr. Robbins his salary for that year, one-half in hard money and the other half in produce on the old prewar basis, certainly a most fair arrangement, as legally they could have settled on a depreciated basis. The minister, in his turn, could be generous, and he insisted upon returning one-third of the cash and of the produce to the Town. Such treatment of a well-loved clergy- man might not surprise one, but the other action of Town Meeting was quite extraordinary and unexpected. In May of 1782 a committee advised and the Town voted that those who owned old obligations of the Town of Milton should have them adjusted and refunded on a hard money basis at the pre- inflation face value. Such unusual and legally unnecessary repayment clear- ly shows that Milton wished to do the correct and honorable thing, even at a cost as much as eighty times as great as a payment made in the depreciated paper which complied with the letter of the law.
As time went on the Records of Town Meeting refer to the war less and less, but an entry in the spring of 1783 shows that it was not forgotten. In an unforgiving mood the Town voted that the Tories who had left Milton should never be permitted to return. There is nothing I have been able to find which showed that any male Loyalist ever made the attempt, but, un-
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less Milton was very different from other New England towns, I am sure that if one had tried he would have been allowed to come back again, and before very many years he would have been forgiven by most, though probably never by all.
There have been many wars since the Revolution, but they have little di- rect place in the history of this town. Men from Milton served in all of them, and during the three longest and greatest the rest of the townsfolk did their share with the Sanitary Commission, the Red Cross, and other similar relief organizations. In this we were really no different from hosts of other towns and cities throughout the country, and to recite what was done here would merely be to tell what happened in all other communities. We did our share, and in some ways more than our share, but so did many another town.
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First Things
D R. TEELE'S History of Milton made sweeping claims of many first things for Milton, grist mill, powder mill, chocolate mill, and slitting mill, as well as a number of other items such as the violoncello, the pianoforte, and the artificial spring leg. Unfortunately further research has shown that our claim of early mills can be upheld only in the case of the powder mill, and, with some reservations, the chocolate mill, since the rest are now known to have existed previously at other places. The first violon- cello I can learn nothing about, but I believe that Philadelphia anticipated us in the case of the pianoforte. I hold no brief either for or against the arti- ficial leg which Benjamin Crehore made and then repossessed in default of payment, but its manufacture led to nothing further. In the case of the first railway we have a real and uncontested claim, but it must be shared at least equally with Quincy, where the quarry which caused its construction was situated, and with Boston, which produced the capital to build it. Milton merely happened to be located between the granite quarry and the nearest point on tidewater. The first railway cars made in this country were built here by Willard Felt in his stone shop, which still stands today, fortunately just spared by an access road to the new expressway through East Milton. The building, at the corner of Adams and Squantum Streets, today is used as a residence.
Several of the firsts which can be proved came as the result of no interest or exertion on the part of Milton. Boston capital required water power on the Neponset, or transport through the town, and proceeded to produce the needed facilities on its own initiative. There were, however, two important
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R.R-CAR'IN.
AMERICA
firsts which deserve taking up in some detail, since one reflects great credit on the Town, and the other on a citizen of Milton. The smallpox vaccination drive of 1809 was initiated by and within the Town, and was carried out on a legally authorized basis. It was the first organized community health drive to be held on this continent. The Blue Hill Observatory was the work of one man, helped of course by capable assistants, but the whole project was con- ceived, executed, and financed by a citizen of Milton.
SMALLPOX VACCINATION
Today we think of smallpox as a disease which has practically disappeared from our land, but only a hundred and fifty years ago it was a most dreaded scourge which was feared by all. Fatalities were high, one in six or worse, and those surviving were usually disfigured to an unpleasant extent. The earliest treatise on medicine published in this country was a broadside writ- ten by Rev. Thomas Thacher, father of our Rev. Peter, in 1678. It described the then recommended methods of treating smallpox cases.
The practice of inoculation had been exercised in China from very early
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GROIX!
SHEER POL
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days, and it eventually spread westward to Turkey, and then to England. The Rev. Cotton Mather read of it in the Transactions of the Royal Society, and brought it to the attention of the Boston doctors in 1721, but they were all either indifferent or opposed to the method, with the exception of Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, who inoculated his own son with complete success. There was an epidemic of smallpox raging in Boston at this time, and there was much hysteria among many of the people who believed that inoculation would further spread the disease. Both Cotton Mather and Dr. Boylston were threatened with lynching, and Mather had a bomb thrown into his house, but fortunately it failed to explode. Two hundred and forty-seven people were inoculated by Boylston, and only six of these died.
This new method of securing immunity gradually became accepted be- fore many years had passed. Sometimes a group of congenial souls would form a houseparty in the country, all get inoculated together, and then en- joy a pleasant convalescence in each other's company. There were of course some fatalities, and disfiguration still took place, although usually to a lesser extent than from a regular attack of the disease. Inoculation consisted of in- fecting the patient with active matter taken from one suffering from the dis-
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ease in a mild form. The patient underwent an actual, but usually fairly in- nocuous, attack of smallpox. By 1800 the fatalities from inoculation were only about one in three thousand. This method was practiced in Milton at least as early as the time of the Revolution with the approval of the Selectmen.
In the last decade of the eighteenth century Dr. Edward Jenner, an Eng- lish country doctor, discovered that a person who had suffered from a mild disease called cowpox became immune to smallpox, and in 1796 he started his experiments by infecting an eight-year-old boy with cowpox matter tak- en from a sore on the hand of a dairy maid. His investigations were first re- ported in a pamphlet published in England in 1798, and in a Boston paper in 1799 through the medium of a letter from Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse of Cambridge, who vaccinated his son the following year. Dr. Waterhouse practiced this new treatment, and soon other doctors in this area were fol- lowing his lead. Milton's Dr. Amos Holbrook is known to have inoculated with cowpox virus, soon to be called vaccination after the Latin name of the disease, variola vaccina, for some years before 1809. The new method of course met with opposition and ridicule, and the number vaccinated in the Boston area during the first years of the last century remained quite small, probably only a few hundred.
A new influence now entered the picture. John Mark Gourgas, a Swiss, lived in England for some twenty years and became much interested in Dr. Jenner's work. His health forced him to leave England, and he came to Mil- ton in 1803. I cannot say whether Dr. Amos Holbrook already was practic- ing vaccination in Milton, or was encouraged to do so by Gourgas, but he certainly knew of Dr. Waterhouse's work. Gourgas further aroused the doc- tor's interest, and spread the knowledge of this new medical discovery among other citizens of the town.
Early in the summer of 1809 the threat of a smallpox epidemic appeared in the neighborhood of Boston, and on the eighth of July the Milton Select- men called a special town meeting "To see if the town will adopt measures for inoculating with the Kine Pock such individuals as have never had the Small Pox". We know nothing about the preliminary work that must have been done to persuade the Selectmen to take this action, or to convince the
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voters of its desirability, but the speed with which the entire affair was ap- proved, organized, and executed shows that it must have been carefully planned and prepared. It is most probable that Dr. Holbrook and Gourgas were the leaders, assisted most ably by Edward H. Robbins.
Town Meeting elected a committee of five, one of which was Gourgas, and authorized it to take such measures as it judged proper, and to report back to the meeting, which was adjourned until the latter part of the following August. The committee immediately secured certificates from several well- known doctors who had been giving vaccinations, had them printed and read and distributed at the Meeting House within a week and a day after the Town Meeting. Four days later vaccination was started at the old East School House near Hutchinson's Field, the people being brought there as the result of an organized drive conducted by a group of volunteer solicitors.
The operation was repeated the next day at the Scotch Woods School House, and the following day at Town Clerk James Foord's house on Brush Hill. Three hundred and thirty-seven people, from two months of age to over seventy, were successfully vaccinated. This represented more than a quarter of Milton's entire population. Most of the others had previously been vaccinated, inoculated, or had had smallpox naturally, and it was be- lieved that there were only some score of persons in the town not then im- mune to the disease.
Not content with what had been done locally, the Selectmen sought fur- ther fields to conquer, and sent out a circular letter to the ministers and se- lectmen of all the other towns in Norfolk County. This reported Milton's vaccination campaign, encouraged the other towns to follow suit, and offer- ed them a free supply of cowpox virus. Largely and perhaps entirely as the result of this letter some three hundred people were vaccinated in Dorches- ter, and several other towns called town meetings to consider the matter.
Justifiably pleased with what had been accomplished, our Selectmen next wrote a long letter to Governor Gore, reciting all that had been done, and suggesting that it would be most desirable to establish standing committees in all the towns in the State to make vaccination available on an annual ba- sis. They requested that he, as Governor of Massachusetts, should under-
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take the establishment of such an over-all program. No answer was received until a second letter had been sent by the Selectmen in November, when Governor Gore returned a platitudinous reply which said little and side- stepped the issue in a graceful fashion.
Toward the end of August the committee appointed at the July town meeting reported back to the Town on its various actions, and requested that a formal test should now be made of the efficacy of the vaccinations giv- en. A special town meeting was held the next month and the committee di- rected to carry out such a test. By this time Dorchester, Canton, Stoughton, and Sharon had become interested in the proceedings, and were planning their own local vaccination campaigns. Stephen Horton's house, which stood near the end of today's Horton Place, off Pleasant Street, was rented as a hospital, and the owner was hired as "hospital master". In the presence of various witnesses and a committee from Canton, twelve children who had been vaccinated in July were inoculated with active smallpox virus. The six who are listed in the records of Milton births were from five to eleven years old, with one girl of seventeen. Fifteen days later the same witnesses exam- ined the children and found that none had been infected in the slightest de- gree. This should not have been very surprising because a similar experi- ment conducted several years previously by Dr. Waterhouse had shown the same result. Nevertheless, very considerable courage and determination were required to make such a trial on one's own children. On 30 October 1809 Town Meeting voted that there should be an annual vaccination held every June, and that a permanent Committee for Vaccination should be elected yearly. Among the duties of this committee was that of using all its energies and influence in persuading all to be vaccinated, for mandatory vaccination was still far in the future. This committee was continued in exis- tence for many years, until eventually the Board of Health took over its du- ties. As a final step, the Town, through its representative, introduced a bill into the General Court which provided that vaccination should be made available on an organized basis throughout the State.
Milton's vaccination drive was the first attempt by any community on this continent to better the health of its inhabitants by an organized campaign,
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MR. ROTCH AND WEATHER BALLOON About 1895
PICNIC ON BLUE HILL IN THE GAY NINETIES
First Things
and the State law which resulted from the initiative of our town was the first such ever enacted by a democracy. To my mind a community effort of this sort, which led the way to a better and more healthy life, is much more de- serving of credit and praise than is the claim, largely unsubstantiated, I fear, that Benjamin Crehore built the first pianoforte in this country.1
BLUE HILL OBSERVATORY
Abbott Lawrence Rotch was the son of Benjamin S. Rotch, who had owned a large summer estate in Milton for many years. The younger Rotch gradu- ated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1884, and in that same year commenced building the stone observatory on the top of Blue Hill. The new observatory was established in February of the following year as a pri- vate laboratory for the study of meteorology, and was operated as such, solely at the expense of Mr. Rotch until his death in 1912, when it was left to Har- vard, accompanied by an endowment.
The study of the upper air was still much in its infancy in the 1880's, and there was ample room for a great deal of experiment and research. To a very considerable extent meteorology up until then had been limited to ground observations of temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, and wind di- rection and velocity. Scientific knowledge of conditions at higher altitudes was, except for observations made in the course of a few balloon ascensions, very nebulous.
Practically no work had been done in this country on the heights and movements of clouds, and very little abroad. By the means of theodolite oper- ators communicating with each other by telephone, Mr. Rotch succeeded in determining the altitude, direction, and velocity of the various types of clouds under different weather conditions. Stratus clouds were found to have an average altitude of perhaps two thousand feet, while cirrus, the highest, ran to about thirty thousand. These studies were carried on here
1. This is not in the least intended to disparage Crehore, who was a very able mechanic. Oddly enough Milton never gave him any credit for his invention of a power loom, which, while even- tually supplanted by Lowell's loom, was perhaps the first such machine to operate with any de- gree of success, and was of far greater importance than pianofortes or artificial legs.
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over several years in the 1880's and early 1890's, and constituted a great contribution to the science of meteorology.
Mr. Rotch travelled abroad a great deal, maintaining close contact with scientific progress in Europe. The Observatory was operated in his absence by assistants, the best known of whom was H. Helm Clayton, eventually to become meteorologist. In addition to the many experimental studies carried on at various times, all normal weather observations were continuously re- corded and analyzed. At one period the Boston weather forecasts, which were then being made from Washington, were so poor that Mr. Rotch is- sued his own daily predictions to the Boston newspapers.
The next major study undertaken was the measurement of temperature and humidity in the upper air. Balloons and kites had been used for this purpose at various times and places since as early as 1749, but very little had been accomplished. Benjamin Franklin's well-known experiment with a kite could be called a meteorological one, but it was only an experiment. Work with kites was begun here in 1894 and continued for many years. Mr. W. A. Eddy of New York came here to fly the first kite which carried a reg- istering apparatus made by Mr. Ferguson of the Blue Hill staff. It is of inter- est to note that in 1895 a photograph was taken of Blue Hill from a kite- borne camera.
The final form of kite used at the Observatory was a development of the Hargrave box kite. It was nine feet high and almost as wide, with a weight of eleven pounds. The clock-driven recording apparatus was largely of alumi- num and weighed relatively little. A fine steel piano wire was used for a kite string. It was only three hundredths of an inch in diameter, but had a strength of three hundred pounds. A series of kites was normally used, one or two at the extreme end to carry the recorder, and others spaced at inter- vals along the line to carry part of its weight. The wire usually ran at an an- gle of some fifty to sixty degrees with the ground, and much more wire was required than the altitude actually reached. In one experiment, for example, the kites, wire, and instrument weighed one hundred and twelve pounds, reached a height of over two miles, and pulled an average of a hundred and fifty pounds at the Blue Hill end of the wire. It was soon found desirable to
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have a small steam-driven winch with which to pull the kites down. The vi- cinity of the winch was always an exciting place, even when no thunder- storm was near, for sparks were normally produced whenever the kites were above some seventeen hundred feet. The greatest altitude ever reached here was a little under three miles. The wire broke on numerous occasions, and it then became a problem of recovering the lost kites, which almost always turned up promptly, but not always with the instruments. A lost kite could make real trouble by dragging its steel wire across a transmission line and blowing the circuit.
Blue Hill's most unusual achievement was that of stopping a New Haven train near South Braintree. In February of 1913 a string of kites, carrying three miles of wire, broke away and sailed off into space. They soon came down, however, but with the piano wire strung across the railroad tracks. A locomotive somehow caught the wire around one of its axles, and reeled it up as it went along until the wheel was bound fast and the train slowed to a halt. It must have been a delightful job to have gotten the tough piano wire off the axle.
Mr. Rotch and Mr. Clayton made various balloon ascensions and at times carried on tests with free balloons carrying recording instruments. On ac- count of Milton's proximity to the ocean, sites farther to the west were gen- erally used for points of release. In 1910 six free balloons were let go from Pittsfield in connection with studies on Halley's Comet. Three were recov- ered, two lost, and the sixth eaten by a cow, which I regret to say was unable to digest it and so was translated to greener pastures. It was not until long af- ter Mr. Rotch's death that the meteorological balloon really came into its own, and this was only made possible by the advent of short-wave radio transmission.
The radiosonde was the name given to the electronic weather reporting balloon in its early days. Various experiments had been made with it in France shortly after the First World War, and slightly later in Germany. In 1935 Blue Hill, in observance of its fiftieth anniversary, started experiments on the radiosonde, and this was the first successful work done in this country. A hydrogen-filled rubber balloon carried a small and very light ra-
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