USA > Massachusetts > Norfolk County > Milton > History of Milton > Part 5
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The bicycle had come into common use, and it and the street railway al- lowed America a freedom of movement vastly greater than it had ever before enjoyed. Eventually the growth in use of the automobile and rising costs forced one street railway after another into bankruptcy. Auto buses used the streets provided by the community and required no heavy investments and maintenance costs for tracks. They and the private automobile drove out the streetcar lines, which ceased operations in Milton in 1929, although the Mattapan-Brockton line continued for two more years.
The influx of former Boston residents and the increased transportation facilities were gradually changing the life and interests of the town from that of a self-centered country community into a city suburb. Farms were still being operated for a livelihood, and various little industries continued to flourish. There was also a growth in those services which ministered to the new wealth of the town. Milton, however, as becoming essentially a Boston suburb, depending more and more upon that city for its employment, shop- ping, and amusement. Local social and intellectual activities of course still continued, and in 1898 the Milton Woman's Club started its long and suc- cessful career.
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History of Milton
GheWhitney Mansion
IEW FROM VERANDA
ACROIX
A RAILROAD PRESIDENT'S MANSION OF THE 1880'S It formerly stood at Blue Hill Avenue and Robbins Street.
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The New Century
By 1900 Milton was a fully developed suburban town, of greater than aver- age wealth, and still retaining some purely summer residents, but with little local industry and with most of its interests and activities centering in Bos- ton. It still possessed, as it does today, certain characteristics and habits that made it a very good place in which to live.
Our town has the misfortune to be pierced by four main routes to the southeast and south, and has always been plagued by more traffic troubles . than have most of the other towns around Boston. By 1904 the automobile had commenced to make a real nuisance of itself. The editor of the Milton News in that year wrote in his paper, "There is hardly an hour when dozens of machines do not rush up or down the [Adams Street] hill." What would the poor man have thought had he been able to look ahead and see today's eight o'clock rush through the Village?
The police ran traps for speeding motor cars, often on Adams Street near Algerine Corner, but in those happier days they seem usually to have mere- ly warned the speeders and suggested that they mend their evil ways. Most roads were quite dusty and one of the motorists' little tricks was to coat their number plates with vaseline, thus ensuring complete illegibility within a very few miles. Officer Fallon took great pleasure in stopping such sinners and standing over them while they knelt and wiped their plates clean. Mil- ton had decreed a 10-mile-an-hour speed limit in 1904, but the bylaw was held void and the General Court passed an ordinance allowing motorists to proceed at a breathtaking and reckless fifteen.
The automobile remained something of a luxury until the period just af- ter the First World War, but by the early twenties ownership of a car was be- coming very widespread. This accentuated the move to the suburbs which, while it had existed in Milton since shortly after the Civil War, did not real- ly get under way until early in this century. There was still a lot of vacant land in Milton and the migration from Boston was light for many years.
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History of Milton
Thus there was little major effect upon the town that was apparent. It was only in the years after 1929, when the rapid transit system was put in opera- tion, that the full impetus of the rush to the suburbs was felt.
The Milton Woman's Club had been formed just before the turn of the century, at first as a group of those women who were interested in improv- ing the schools and influencing the School Committee. It shortly, however, joined the National Federation and became a normal woman's club interest- ed in social activities and good works. One of its early and most useful ideas for benefiting the community was the employment of a visiting nurse to as- sist those who could not afford necessary nursing service and care. The Mil- ton Social Service League was started in 1910, and seven years later the two undertakings were merged into the present organization.
The first ancestor of the Milton Hospital was the Convalescent Home es- tablished by Emma Ware in about 1886. The Unitarian Church gave the use of the old Academy House at the corner of Canton Avenue and Thacher Street, and Miss Ware raised the funds necessary to operate it as a summer rest home for poor women and children of Boston and Milton. Before long it was operated throughout the year. In 1905 the trustees under the will of Mary A. Cunningham, who had died the previous year, offered the use of the old Edward Cunningham house to the Convalescent Home. At this same period another group, under the leadership of Dr. M. Vassar Pierce, established a small hospital under the same roof. The two groups were soon merged into the Milton Hospital and Convalescent Home and became, practically speaking, entirely a hospital. In very recent years, after the com- pletion of the new building on Highland Street, the Cunningham house re- verted to its former use as a convalescent home, operated in conjunction with the hospital.
Mrs. Francis Cunningham (Mary Forbes) left practically her entire estate to three trustees who were directed to utilize it in accordance with their best judgment for the benefit of the inhabitants of the Town. Their decision was to establish a park. They bought the large estate of Mrs. Cunningham's nephew and converted the barn into the present gymnasium, which was opened in 1906. In the course of the next few years further attractions were
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(above) MILTON VILLAGE Looking north down the hill in about 1900.
(below) KERRIGAN'S CORNER View from roof of High School in about 1910. Note the open trolley car-they were most pleasant in summer.
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The Story of the Town
added and Jesse B. Baxter was appointed manager of the park, a position he ably filled for over forty years.
The year 1912 brought the 250th anniversary of the establishment of the Town of Milton and a rather ambitious celebration was carefully planned by a committee appointed by the Town, and was most successfully accom- plished. Competitive sports of many kinds were engaged in at several places in the town, with specially designed commemorative medals awarded as prizes. A large platform was built against the north side of the First Parish Church, and various exercises held there. Later in the year an elaborate pag- eant of episodes in the history of the town was presented on Hutchinson Field against the background of the river and the marshes, in those days a much more attractive setting than it is today. It was directed by Joseph Lin- don Smith, and utilized several hundred Milton people of all ages as actors.
It was proposed in 1913 that the old wool-shop pond, formerly known as Davis Pond, and later called Turner's after the proprietor of the ice business conducted there at that time, should, with the surrounding land, be bought by the Town and made into a park. The proposal was turned down by Town Meeting and met a similar fate when the idea was resurrected seven years later and proposed as a war memorial.1
In 1913 Milton took the first step in an attempt to preserve its character as a residential town of home owners. Town Meeting in that year accepted and put in force the State Tenement House Act, which prevented the erec- tion of any "three decker" houses. That was as far as controls of this nature were to be applied for many years to come. An attempt in 1922 to restrict the building of two-family houses to certain specified areas represented an incomplete and somewhat inequitable regulation which was defeated by the voters. The first zoning restrictions, which allowed only single-family houses and regulated further expansion of business areas, were enacted in 1926, but it was not until twelve years later that a broad all-inclusive zoning plan was adopted.
1. It is interesting to note that one of the most determined opponents of the measure, Felix Rackemann, said in 1913: "Do not buy an ice business, wait, there is no hurry, but sooner or later the Town should buy the property." How right he was time has proven, when over forty years later the Town secured the property for less than a third of the price demanded in 1913.
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History of Milton
Throughout the early years of the century the granite business had grad- ually been losing its battle with concrete, and by the time of the First World War quarrying and stonecutting had largely entered the limbo into which they had been preceded by many another undertaking of the Victorian age. It was not to be many years more before the electric refrigerator and artifi- cial ice sounded the doom of the local ice pond, and the ice-cutting opera- tion, one always most interesting to watch, disappeared from our town. The chocolate mills continued to prosper and a very few little factories and shops were in operation, but Milton of the twentieth century was fated to be a res- idential and not an industrial town.
The great snowstorm of February 1920 hit Milton a heavy blow. It came at a period when the automobile had replaced the horse to a very consider- able extent, but methods of snow removal had not moved with the times. Today truck snow plows have little difficulty in keeping ahead of even a hea- vy storm, but in 1920 there were only horse-drawn plows, slow and without sufficient power. This storm brought many drifts that were five feet deep, and both the railroad and the streetcar lines went completely out of busi- ness. Rail service was restored in a matter of days, but the trolleys gave up entirely and two cars were abandoned on Central Avenue near Valley Road and lay embedded in snowdrifts until released a month or more later by the spring thaw. The streets were finally cleared after a fashion within about a week of the storm, but the few remaining sleighs and pungs, plus snowshoes and an occasional pair of skis, were what had kept the town going for the first few days. Food supplies became short, and the Fire Department issued a warning that it could not be expected to answer fire alarms in many parts of the town.
This great storm marked the beginning of the end of the streetcar lines in Milton. The line from the Village by the High School and Library on to East Milton was kept in operation for a few years longer by means of an annual subsidy furnished by the Town. The Blue Hill Street Railway, however, gave up the ghost and the Brush Hill Transport Company brought the first passenger buses to Milton in 1920. In this same year a centuries-old taboo finally succumbed to changing times, and Sunday sports were allowed un- der permits issued by the Selectmen.
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The Story of the Town
The Sacco-Vanzetti murder case is largely forgotten today except by those who still try to make the two men into martyrs, but it aroused tremen- dous interest and many animosities at the time. The two men were convict- ed, and after appeals and reviews were finally executed in mid-July 1927. Lewis McHardy of Pleasant Street had served on the jury which tried the pair, and at almost the exact hour of their execution his house was bombed by some fanatic. Neither he nor any of his family was hurt, but the house was so badly damaged that it had to be torn down and a new structure built. The citizens of the town immediately started raising funds to make good the losses of the family and well over fifteen thousand dollars were contributed, mostly but not entirely from local sources.
. In this same year Walter Baker & Company was sold to the Postum Com- pany (now General Foods), and an enterprise which had been owned locally since the time of the Revolution passed into the hands of strangers.
In this series of brief period sketches I have tried to give an idea of what our town was like at these various times in its history and of how it was gradually evolving into its ultimate form. We have seen Milton change from a hamlet of farms to a lusty little mill village surrounded by a prosperous farming community, and then to a wealthy town containing the large estates of many former residents of Boston. We leave it now, in 1929, a large and very well-to-do commuting suburb of Boston, connected to the city with several highways and a metropolitan transit system. The last phase, that of more recent years, was the breaking-up of many of the large estates into house lots, and a great increase in population with all of its attendant prob- lems. The story of this I shall leave to the pen of some future historian.
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The River
1 T HE Neponset River was a most important factor in the history of Mil- ton. Initially it was something of a nuisance, the first important obsta- cle to travel on the Plymouth path, and it was large enough, particu- larly in freshet time, to make its crossing a serious matter. The river was such a barrier that it became the southern limit of the Bay Colony for several years, and it was only after the first bridge was built that any settlements were made on the farther shore.
The other aspect of the river, and one which was to become of ever-in- creasing importance, was that of its water power. Throughout the history of this country man has always turned to machinery to lessen his tasks. In the South, due to slave labor, this was somewhat less marked, but in New Eng- land this tendency developed to a very great extent. The falls of the Nepon- set at Unquity offered an almost ideal situation for water power: the river was large enough to promise a good flow even during relatively dry periods, yet it was small enough to harness without too extensive a dam. Moreover the power site was directly on the trail to the South Shore, and it was prac- tically at tidewater, allowing easy shipment by water.
In 1634 Israel Stoughton secured permission from both the Town of Dor- chester and the General Court to erect a corn mill at Unquity. He was re- quired to build and maintain a bridge, and he was allowed to build a weir and take alewives which were to be sold at a regulated price. The grist mill furnished a most welcome service to Dorchester, and rendered unnecessary the laborious hand grinding or pounding hitherto used. It has often been
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History of Milton
stated that this was the first New England corn mill, but I regret to say that this is not true. We have it on the authority of Governor Winthrop himself that there was a corn mill in Roxbury in 1633, and there probably was an- other at Saugus at this same time. Watertown also built one in the latter part of 1634, a month or two after the one at Unquity.
The staple cereal of New England was Indian corn, and it required crack- ing or grinding before it could be eaten. If cracked in a wooden mortar it be- came hominy grits, but this could not be made into bread. When pounded long enough about one-third of the corn may be reduced to a flour, but the process is laborious and wasteful. For baking purposes the corn must be ground into meal, and this was best done between a pair of circular mill- stones, one of which revolved above the other. They did not quite touch each other when running, and the clearance was adjustable, thus determin- ing the degree of coarseness of the meal produced. The stones were usually from four to five feet in diameter, although some of the older ones ran as much as six feet. The grinding face carried a series of grooves which facilitat- ed the operation. The earliest millstones had grooves which spiralled across the grinding surface; later the system of straight grooves came in. The lower stone was bedded in the floor of the mill, and up through its center protrud- ed the end of a vertical revolving iron shaft which supported and turned the upper stone. This runner stone, as it was called, had a hole of some nine or more inches diameter cut through its center, called the eye, and this was bridged with an iron cross piece, the ryne, which was hung on top of the re- volving shaft, thus centering and driving the upper stone. Grains of corn were dropped into the eye of the upper stone by a feeding mechanism, and emerged around the periphery of the stones as meal, which, when passed through a sieve to remove the husks, was ready for use. A corn mill such as this was not difficult to build, and the only expensive item was the stones. They could be made of granite or other local rock, but much better mill- stones were brought over from England and France. In later years quarries were found in America which produced excellent stones but not as good as the imported.
Unquity's little corn mill stood in what was then really wilderness, but
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The River
Dorchester almost at once built a road to it, and the first settlements across the Neponset started at the same time. There were, however, no houses other than that of the miller built near it for a long time to come.
The Neponset mill, as it then was known, ground its grist for almost forty years before any real change occurred. In 1659 two Dorchester men prom- ised the Town to build a fulling mill before the end of the following year, but the project fell through.
At last in 1674 another mill was built at the Unquity end of the grist mill dam. It was a gunpowder mill, and, so far as I have been able to determine, it was the first one in New England and probably the first in America. The Massachusetts Bay Colony records contain a great many references to gun- powder, and in 1642 all the towns were directed to make saltpeter, one of the ingredients. In 1648 Edward Rawson, a prominent magistrate and long the Secretary of the Colony, was granted land and £5 for "his expenses and damages sustained in provisions to make gunpowder." Next year the record reads: "stock of powder-have taken care that a supply may be made." There is nothing to prevent one making small quantities of gunpowder by hand methods, and from these entries it would seem clear that some had been made prior to building the powder mill at Milton. I believe, however, that any such minor and sporadic manufacture does not prevent Milton from claiming the first powder mill. In 1676 Edward Randolph, who came over as a Royal agent and was for many years a source of much annoyance to Puritan New England, reported: "At Dorchester, seven miles from Bos- ton, is a powder mill in good repair, well wrought-The powder is as good and strong as the best English powder-".
The mill was built by a small group of Boston capitalists, two of whom are of particular interest to Milton. The Rev. Thomas Thacher, minister of the Old South Church, was the father of Peter Thacher, our first regular minis- ter, and the Rev. John Oxenbridge was soon to become Peter's father-in- law. Another member of the group was Capt. John Hull, the Colony mint master who made the Pine Tree shillings, and who was the father-in-law of Samuel Sewall the diarist. Walter Everden operated the mill, and gradual- ly bought up the shares of the proprietors until he became the sole owner.
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History of Milton
Powder was always a desirable commodity in this country, and the outbreak of King Philip's War in 1675 was to make it even more so. The process of manufacture was a simple one. Charcoal, sulphur, and saltpeter were ground up and mixed while wet. After drying, the resulting cake was broken up in- to a powder, which was then passed through a number of sieves of graduat- ed coarseness, sorting the finished powder into the various sizes desired; the largest for cannon powder, the smallest for priming the pans of the firelocks, as the muzzle loading flintlocks were then called. The little mill would not have been very different from the corn mill, and it is possible that the same sort of grinding stones were used, as they later were in a powder mill in Canton. Power operated stamps were an effective alternate mechanism, and perhaps more usual.
Peter Thacher's diary in June of 1681 records his going to the raising of the Widow Gill's Mill, and the Dorchester records of the year before state that this lady was granted permission to cut Town timber to use in the re- pair of her mill. She was then the owner of the corn mill, her late husband, John Gill, having bought it from the Stoughton heirs in 1673. The land on the Milton side of the river east of the highway also belonged to her, and she may have built a new mill there, but I am inclined to think that this opera- tion in 168 1 was the reconstruction of the old 1634 corn mill.
At about this same time a committee looked into the question of building a sawmill "above the house of Daniel Elder", somewhere upstream from the existing mills, but no action was taken. The Dedham sawmill remained the nearest one to Milton for many years, and there is an interesting reason for this. Very early in the history of New England the lumber trade developed along the fall line of the New Hampshire and Maine coasts. Logs were driven down the rivers to sawmills located on the falls at tidewater. The sawed lum- ber was then shipped in little sloops to all the markets along the Massachu- setts coast. This operation lasted for centuries, and as recently as 1940 I have seen little sailing vessels unloading lumber from down East, in this case Nova Scotia, at a lumber yard located at the Granite Avenue bridge on the Neponset. In more recent years the trade has been by small motor ships, and sail has gone forever. Farther inland, away from tidewater, there was a
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The River
need for sawmills, and they became very common, every town having at least one and often several.
"Went to Neponset ... to see the fulling mill lately set up, and direct for the right fitting and ordering of it," says Sewall's diary for 3 August 1688. This mill adjoined the powder mill built fourteen years before, one of whose owners was Sewall's father-in-law John Hull, thus accounting for the diar- ist's interest in the mill.
Its construction was a great convenience to the neighborhood, for the fulling mill in Roxbury had up to now been the nearest one. Woolen cloth when it comes from the hand loom is not unlike burlap in that each thread is separate, and the cloth lacks body. The fulling operation shrinks and com- pacts the cloth. It can be accomplished by treading the cloth in a pail of soapy water with bare feet, but it is much easier to let a machine do it in- stead. The fulling stocks, which usually were driven by water power, con- sisted of a pair of great wooden mallets, hinged at the upper ends of their nearly vertical shafts or handles, the mallet heads resting against a loose bundle of woolen cloth enclosed on the three sides and the bottom of an in- clined wooden tub. The mallets were raised alternately by cams on the wa- terwheel shaft, and allowed to drop against the wet and soapy cloth in the tub. The shape of the mallets and the tub were such that the cloth was con- stantly turned and shifted. When sufficiently fulled the cloth was stretched to dry on tentering frames, similar to but larger and much longer than the frames we use today to dry and stretch curtains. The tentering frames were covered with a considerable number of little L-shaped nails, one sharp end driven into the wood, the other used to catch the edge of the cloth, and hold it stretched while it dried. These little nails were called tenterhooks, a word we have all heard, but the origin of which we probably never knew. A piece of heavy woolen cloth might be fulled in the stocks for as long as a week, day and night, and might shrink as much as half, both in length and width. Fuller's earth was used to remove grease and oil from the cloth, and thus obtained its name.
This was the basic fulling operation, but the operator, usually called a "clothier", in many cases also dyed and further finished the cloth. After
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History of Milton
fulling, the nap was often raised by stroking it with teasels, a sort of burr, and then was trimmed with large shears.1 The three essential village mills, which well might be called the mills of the age of homespun, were the corn mill and the fulling mill, with the sawmill for all places except those getting their lumber by water from down East.
During the closing years of the seventeenth century no great change took place in the mills, but something of a little village grew up around the Mil- ton lower falls. There is very little that we can learn about the size of the set- tlement in those days. It was essentially an industrial one. The miller of the grist mill had a house, there was a watch house on the Dorchester side, built during King Philip's War to provide a guard at the powder mill, and there was a house for the employees of the powder mill on the same side of the riv- er. Possibly there was another little house in connection with the fulling mill, but that probably was all. There was no store and no tavern on the Mil- ton side, nor, I believe, on the Dorchester shore. Both towns were devoted essentially to farming and there was as yet no incentive, other than that re- sulting from the use of the water power, to cause settlement there. A little later we find the shipping possibilities of the river leading to mercantile ac- tivities, but there is no indication of any at this period, although a Town landing had been established on the Milton side.
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