USA > Massachusetts > Norfolk County > Milton > History of Milton > Part 6
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It is not my intention to itemize every mill built in Milton; the attached diagram should furnish an outline for those in the Village, and Edmund J. Baker's detailed study in the Dorchester Antiquarian Society's History of Dorchester will give further details to those interested. In about 1710 a sec- ond powder mill was built on the Dorchester side by Benjamin Everden, son of the first powder maker, at a new lower dam below the old corn mill, while the Rev. Joseph Belcher of Dedham, son-in-law of John Gill, appears to have built a sawmill on the Milton side of this new lower dam two or three years earlier. The corn mill was known for years as the Neponset Mill, and the lit- tle settlement soon was called Neponset Village, a name which lasted as late as 1826. By the early 1700's quite an important little industrial center had
1. It might be of interest to remark that many years ago in England the prototype of our com- mon spiral reel lawn mower was invented to trim the nap of teaselled cloth.
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The River
grown up, and this was materially augmented by the establishment in 1728 of New England's first paper mill.
Today only the very finest paper is made of rags,2 but until about a cen- tury ago all paper was composed almost solely of rag stock. Linen and cot- ton scraps were superficially cleaned and cut up into small bits, often against an old scythe blade set vertically in a wooden block, and then were moistened, piled up, and allowed to commence to rot. The scraps were then put in a wooden mortar and water added, while a power-driven pestle or hammer pounded the mass into a pulp. This rag stock was passed through a series of mortars and the water constantly renewed, thus cleaning the material and breaking it up into a mass of separate fibers. At a little later period the Hol- land beating engine was introduced. This completed the operation in a sin- gle oval-shaped tank in which a beating drum carrying knives revolved on a horizontal axis, but the first Milton paper mill must have had the old mortar and stamp equipment. The finished product of the beating process, which- ever method was used, was a liquid gruel of fibers suspended in water, of about the consistency of pea soup, and this was put in a large circular vat and warmed to about ninety degrees. The papermaker, a man of great skill, took his mold, which was a shallow frame of the size of the desired sheet of paper, its bottom formed by a piece of fine wire screen, and dipped it into the vat, thus picking up a quantity of the pulp which he distributed evenly over the mold by skillful manipulation. The water drained out through the screen, leaving a thin mass of interlocking fibers behind. The papermaker, again exercising great skill, inverted the mold over a so-called "felt", which actually was a piece of woven cloth, depositing on the "felt" the future sheet of paper which at this time was not unlike a very wet piece of newspaper, and of even less strength. A stack of "felts", each holding its thin load of wet pulp, was next put in a press, and great pressure was brought to bear through a screw with a long lever attached, thus squeezing out practically all the water. Each sheet now had enough strength and body to allow it to be stripped from its "felt", and hung over racks in the drying room, in the case of the Milton mill the second story, the walls of which contained many 2. This book is printed on rag paper.
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History of Milton
vertical hinged shutters such as are used today in Connecticut Valley tobac- co drying sheds. After drying, the paper was calendered by applying a sizing and smoothing the surface by hand rubbing with a stone or under a power operated hammer. Wooden rollers were beginning to replace the finishing hammer by the time that the Milton mill was built, and they may have been used here.
This was the basic papermaking process which still is used today, except that chemistry has allowed us to substitute cheaper materials (which result in shorter-lived papers) and the Fourdrinier machine has replaced the hand mold, press, and finishing methods with a single continuous process. The first Milton paper mill probably had a force of about three men and a boy, perhaps with a girl or two preparing rags and hanging paper on the drying racks.
The mill was financed by a small group of Boston merchants who leased the structure built by Rev. Joseph Belcher some twenty years before. They built a house adjoining it that was long known as the "Old Paper Mill House", and which lasted into this century before it was removed to make room for a Walter Baker storehouse. Henry Deering, one of the owners, managed the mill for a number of years, and in about 1737 Jeremiah Smith, who had come to Boston from the north of Ireland some twelve years before, replaced him. Smith gradually bought out all the various owners and even- tually secured the land and buildings.
The success of the operation was dependent upon the services of a good papermaker, and such a man was not always available. At one period the mill was able to produce only an uneven coarse paper of poor color, suitable merely for wrapping paper. John Hazleton, a British soldier on furlough, was foreman of the mill for a part of this period, but had to leave in 1759 when his regiment was moved away. James Boies, who had married a daugh- ter of Jeremiah Smith, induced Richard Clarke, an English papermaker, to come to the mill in 1760. In 1769 Smith took another son-in-law, Daniel Vose, into partnership, and then retired six years later. Meanwhile James Boies had set up a paper mill for himself at Mattapan in 1764, and Clarke went there with him.
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In the HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, February 16, 1776. HEREAS this Colony cannot be Supplied with a Sufficient Quantity of
W PAPER for its own Consumption, without the particular Care of its In -. habitants in faving RAGS for the Paper-Mills : Therefore,
RESOLVED, That the Committees of Correfpondence, Infpection, and Safety in the feveral Towns in this Colony be, and they hereby are required imme- diately to appoint fome fuitable Perfon in their refpective Towns (where it is not already done) to receive RAGS for the Paper-Mills : And the Inhabi- tants of this Colony are hereby defired to be very careful in faving even the fmalleft Quantity of Rags proper for making Paper, which will be a further Evidence of their Difpofition to promote the Public Good.
Sent up for Concurrence. In Council, Feb. 16, 1776.
WILLIAM COOPER, Speak. Pro. Tem. Read and Concurred, PEREZ MORTON, Dep'y. Sec'y.
Confented to, by the Major Part of the Council. A true Copy, Atteft. PEREZ MORTON, Dep'y. Sec'y.
PAPER-MILLS,
At the SLITTING-MILL, in MILTON.
In Compliance with the foregoing RESOLVE, and 'to Encourage the
PAPER-MANUFACTURE,
W E now propofe to give Three Coppers per Pound for all white Linnen, and Cotton and Linnen RAGS, fuitable for making WRITING-PAPER ; which is Three Pence O. T. per Pound more than has been given :--- Alfo, One Copper and an Half per Pound is now given for Check and courfe Rags, and Two Coppers for Canvafs, that is either made of Hemp or Flax ; and Half a Copper a Pouxd for old Ropes and Junk .-- - Ropes and Junk that are too bad for Ozkum will make good Paper.
( It is therefore hoped, that more Attention will be paid to this Affair in future, both from a Principle of Patriotifw: and Frugality. The prefent alarming Situation of the Colonies, renders it entirely needlefs to point out the Utility of eftablifting this, and every Kind of Manufacture among us ; and if cach Family will but lend their Aid, to encourage this Bufinefs, by faving their Rags, there may be a Sufficiency of Paper made here, and entirely pre- vent the Importation of that Article into this Country.
*.* Any Gentlemen, Traders, or others throughout this Country, that will fo far promote the Intereft of AMERICA, by receiving Rags for the aforefaid Purpofe, fhall be paid Ten per Cent. Commiffions, and neceffary Charges of Tranfportation, either by Land or Water to faid Mills : And the fmalleft Favors gratefully acknowledged by their very Humble Servants,
HUGH MCLEAN AND TO E SO LD at faid MILL, all Sorts of PRINTING
P A
P E R,
Witing ditto, London Brown, Whitifh Brown, Bonnet Paper : Likewife Prefs Paper for Clothiers, for glazing and goodnets fuperior to any made in America, and not inferior to the beft made in England.
CASH given for RAGS by
SALEM : Printed by E. RUSSELL, Upper End of Main-ftreet : Who gives CAsu for all Kinds of Cotton and Linnen and Check RAGs, for the Ufe of the above PAPER-MILLS.
BROADSIDE OF 1776 (American Antiquarian Society)
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The River
By 1728 Neponset Village was a major industrial center, and one proba- bly exceeded by none on this continent. At the original upper dam there was a grist mill and a fulling mill on the Dorchester side, and a powder mill and another fulling nill in Milton, while the lower dam had a second powder mill on one side and the paper mill on the other, a total of six separate mills. A few years later, in 1744, the upper Milton powder mill blew up, as most powder mills seem to have done sooner or later, taking the fulling mill along with it. The upper inill site in Milton then remained unoccupied for almost twenty years, something rather unusual in those days when water power was of such importance.
There was another fall in the river at what we today call Mattapan, but ยท was then known as the Upper Mills. Shortly before 1709 Ezra Clapp, Manas- seh Tucker and three others built a grist mill at this fall. Two years later this group permitted David Colson, a fellmonger, or dealer in hides, to erect a mill for processing skins just below the grist mill. The fulling stocks were, and today still are, also used in processing some kinds of leather, and what Colson built was essentially a fulling mill. The record is not entirely clear, but I am almost certain that these two mills were on the Dorchester side. Shortly after 1711 Jonathan Jackson, a wealthy Boston merchant, bought most and perhaps all of this property. He dug a canal, or "trench" as it then was called, on the Milton side, and part of its outline can still be seen today, downstream from the Blue Hills Parkway. This was a different type of water power development from that used in Neponset Village where the mills were near the dams and short wooden flumes carried the water. At the end of the canal Jackson built a rather uncommon mill, an iron-slitting mill. He also built a large house nearby where he could live in summer and keep his eye on the mill. This house lasted until quite recent times, when it was removed and the Metropolitan Police Station built a little south of its site.
A slitting mill was an iron-processing mill, which fabricated the product of the forge.3 The trip hammer of an iron forge turned out an iron bar, per- haps half an inch thick by three inches wide and some six feet long, and
3. There is a very carefully executed reconstruction of a slitting mill at the Saugus Iron Works restoration, opened in 1955. It is well worth a visit.
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History of Milton
could not make it much smaller in cross section. The blacksmiths and nail- makers, on the other hand, wanted iron flats of perhaps a quarter-inch thick and one or two inches wide, and nail rods an eighth to three-sixteenths square. The slitting mill took the bars as they came from the forge, and by first passing them while red hot through a pair of rolls, and then slicing them lengthwise by a set of power-driven rotary shears, turned out the small strips and nail rods that were desired by the consumers. A slitting mill could service the output of several trip hammers, and they were usually built in the near vicinity of a group of forges. In this respect the Milton mill was an exception, for no iron was produced in the neighborhood.
The Mattapan slitting mill burned in 1742, but was evidently rebuilt, for there are records of its operation in 1757, and it or a later mill was in use in 1769, but was closed shortly thereafter. It has been claimed that this was the first slitting mill in the country, but this is not correct, the slitting mill at the Saugus Iron Works preceding it by many years.
The grist mill and the fulling mill on the Dorchester side were sold by the Jackson estate, and in 1772 Andrew Gillespie altered the fulling mill into a snuff mill, but the business soon failed and the property was taken over by James Boies and Hugh McLean, who built a chocolate mill there in 1779.
James Boies bought the Jackson property on the Milton side in 1764, and built a paper mill, as well as repairing or rebuilding the old slitting mill. The latter mill, however, did not pay, and he built another paper mill in its place about 1769 or shortly thereafter. Boies and Richard Clarke jointly owned the first paper mill, while the second was owned and operated by Boies and Hugh McLean. There was also a small chocolate mill on the Mil- ton side. This all sounds quite involved and gives one the impression of a large group of mills here at Mattapan. Actually, in 1770 for example, there was probably only one building on the Dorchester side, while there were two in Milton, perhaps a third little one housing the chocolate mill, or this might equally well have been in a shed attached to one of the paper mills. There were two low dams and a canal over two hundred yards long.
In 1782 one of the Mattapan paper mills and the chocolate mill burned to the ground. The paper mill was rebuilt, and a new chocolate mill erected on
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the Dorchester side of the river. This last mill was changed into a paper mill in 1817, and then there were in all three paper mills, one in Dorchester and two in Milton. These mills passed through various hands until by 1828 they were all owned by Tileston and Hollingsworth, who continued to operate them until 1881.
James Boies had married a daughter of Jeremiah Smith of the Neponset Village paper mill, as had Daniel Vose, while Hugh McLean married a daughter of James Boies. Thus the mill owners of both the upper and the lower falls were closely tied together by marriage, and a little later Edmund Baker, son of Walter, was to further the ties by marrying a daughter of Dan- iel Vose.
John McLean, son of Hugh, did not remain in the papermaking trade, but moved to Boston and set up as a merchant, eventually making a fortune, and leaving large bequests to the Massachusetts General Hospital, then in its early youth, and to Harvard. The McLean Asylum was named after him.
Returning to the lower falls at Neponset Village, we now find three new kinds of mills appearing in the period just before the outbreak of the Revo- lution. In 1761 Andrew Mckenzie, a merchant of Boston, bought some land on the Dorchester side just downstream from the fulling mill, and put up a snuff mill. I have been able to learn very little about old snuff mills beyond the fact that the tobacco was ground into a dust in wooden mortars, prefer- ably made of sycamore, by power operated pestles. Records of snuff mills on the Charles River at a slightly later period speak of mills with five mortars each, and it is very probable that the Milton mill was about the same size. This little snuff mill ran for nearly thirty years, and then was replaced by another paper mill, the second built in Milton Village.
In 1765 a sawmill appears-up until now the one at Dedham had been the nearest, save for the one Belcher may have operated for a few years. The early American sawmill, and they seem to have been very much the same from Maine to Virginia, was a long narrow shed with a tight roof, but with side walls usually only partly boarded up. A straight saw blade some six feet long was stretched vertically in a frame which a water wheel drove up and
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History of Milton
down in vertical guide slots. The log to be sawed was fastened with iron ""dogs" to a long narrow carriage sliding along on a track, and advanced against the saw blade by a simple ratchet arrangement. The Milton mill had a single saw, but some larger mills drove gang saws which cut several boards at each pass of the carriage. All early mills had these vertical up-and-down saws, the circular saw not coming into use until about 1840. While the Mil- ton sawmill was in process of construction some malicious persons sabo- taged it, but the damage was quickly repaired. This mill was built on the still unoccupied site where the powder mill had blown up years before.
A notable event took place in 1765. A man named John Hannon, who said he knew how to make chocolate, appeared in Milton. Edward Went- worth and Henry Stone, both residents of Stoughton, who were building the sawmill, added to the structure an annex suitable for making chocolate, and thus was introduced to Milton an odor which has now lasted for one hundred and ninety years, and which brings back homesick memories to all former residents of the town. The process of preparing the cocoa bean was quite simple. After cleaning, the beans were roasted, and the thin outer shell cracked and removed by a winnowing process. The remaining kernels were ground between a pair of stones very similar to those used for corn, and the resulting paste made into chocolate by adding sugar and perhaps vanilla. This paste might on the other hand be made into cocoa by removing the fatty cocoa butter, and drying and pulverizing the remainder.
It has long been claimed that this was the first chocolate mill in North America, and this is probably correct if we mean a power operated mill. Chocolate could, however, be prepared in relatively small quantities by hand methods, and the Boston Gazette, 5-12 September 1737, advertised an "engine to grind cocoa" which would cost much less than those commonly used, and would prepare one hundred pounds of beans in less than six hours. It is evident that chocolate had been made in this area long before the Milton mill started its operation. In 1751 it was being made and sold in Boston at twelve and fourteen shillings a pound.
In 1768 Hannon moved his mill to the other side of the river into Preston's fulling mill building, where a run of stones and one kettle were installed.
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HANNONS
CHOCOLATE Mark'd opon cach @ ke J. H. N. Warranted fure, and ground exceeding fine.
Whoa may be had any Quanit from sont. mou ton for din or Lock, andis? Mills in MILTON
N. B. Mthe Chocelere doet not prove stod, the Money will be returned.
HANNON'S CHOCOLATE WRAPPER About 1770 (State Street Trust)
MATTAPAN PAPER MILL Date unknown, but probably around 1800. Photo taken about 1895.
The River
This burned down in 1775 and he returned to his old location on the upper dam on the Milton side. Meanwhile in 1773 he had married Elizabeth Gore of Boston, and managed to get along with her for six years, but it finally be- came too much for him. He gave out word that he was sailing to the West Indies to buy chocolate, but actually headed back to the green fields of Erin and never was seen again. Nothing daunted, Elizabeth tried to continue the mill under the management of the apprentice, Nathaniel Blake, but he oculd not stand it either and walked out on her. Daniel Vose then took over both the mill and the apprentice, and Elizabeth disappears from our knowledge.
By the time of the Revolution Neponset Village was a major industrial center. At the upper dam, just upstream from the Plymouth Road, there were on the Milton side the sawmill with its attached chocolate mill, owned at this time by Barlow Trecothick, and leased to Daniel Vose, who later was to buy it, while at the opposite end of the dam there were the grist mill, a fulling mill and a snuff mill. The lower dam below the bridge supplied the paper mill on the Milton side, while on the other end where Benjamin Ever- den had run a second powder mill before he removed to Canton in 1757, there now stood another fulling mill, which also contained Preston's choco- late mill. Thus we find grouped together in Neponset Village eight little manufacturing establishments, small in size it is true, and probably not em- ploying more than a score or so of workmen in all, yet representing for the time and place a very important segment of the industry that existed in America in that day.
At about this same period the Mattapan dam was supplying power to two paper mills, a snuff mill, a chocolate mill, and possibly also a grist mill. There was opportunity for a second dam above Mattapan, a little upstream from where Brush Hill Road swings away from the Neponset, at the place where the Tileston and Hollingsworth Hyde Park paper mill is located to- day. The records are a little confused, but it appears that this dam, known as the Sumner dam, was built just before the Revolution, and furnished power at one time or another before 1800 to a paper mill, a sawmill, a grist mill and a chocolate shop. Before many years the paper mill absorbed all the others.
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History of Milton
In 1793 Jeremiah Smith Boies, grandson of Jeremiah Smith, built a new dam about halfway between Mattapan and Central Avenue, while Daniel Vose and John Capen built another a short distance below it. A bitter law- suit resulted. Boies moved his dam upstream a little to a point opposite the end of today's Capen Street, and built paper, chocolate, and grist mills on it. Mark Hollingsworth came from Delaware to work in the paper mill, and he was shortly joined by Edmund Tileston who had learned the papermak- er's trade in Milton Village. By 1805 the pair were in partnership, and, the mill burning down that year, they moved upstream to the paper mill on the Sumner dam, which today still serves the firm of Tileston and Hollings- worth, paper manufacturers. The old dam remained unused for some years after the fire, but in 1811 the Dorchester Cotton and Iron Works built a mill for carding and spinning cotton. This company bought out the Capen dam near today's Central Avenue, and put up a second cotton mill and machine shop. Finally in 1826 the Capen dam was raised sufficiently to flood out the dam of the 1811 factory which shortly became Liversidge's starch factory, and remained there until a relatively few years ago. Thus by 1826 we have arrived at the condition that exists today, two dams at the Lower Mills, the up- per flowing back to the tail water of the Central Avenue mill, which in turn backed up its water to the lower of the Mattapan dams, no longer used today.
The Dorchester Cotton and Iron Works at Central Avenue burned about a hundred years ago, and a paper mill was built there in about 1863 by Tile- ston and Hollingsworth. This was known as the Eagle Mills, and it too was partly destroyed by fire in 1907, at which time it was sold to Walter Baker and Company.
The snuff mill on the Dorchester side in the Village was torn down in 1790 and a new paper mill built in its place. This mill passed through sever- al hands, and was leased to Tileston and Hollingsworth for many years. Eventually it was bought by Henry L. Pierce and incorporated into Walter Baker and Company. It was about forty feet by twenty-eight in size with two floors and an attic. At the lower dam on the Dorchester side the Preston chocolate mill continued to operate until it too was absorbed into Walter Baker and Company.
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The River
The sawmill on the upper dam on the Milton side passed into the hands of Daniel Vose in 1792. Stone in 1766 had sold his share to Wentworth, who at about that same time executed an indenture with Daniel Leeds, then owner of the grist mill on the Dorchester side, binding himself and his heirs never to build a grist mill on the Milton side. Despite this, a grist mill ap- peared there before many years had passed, apparently included in the old sawmill structure. In 1817 the building was sold to Francis Brimley, who al- tered it to grind and process drugs, medicines and dye-stuffs. He also fixed up a machine to saw veneers, supposedly the first sawed by power in this country. In 1827 the mill burned down, but was soon rebuilt, and the drug and dye business continued. In 1850 it was replaced by two new mills, one chocolate, the other grist, the former operated by Webb and Twombley and the latter by the Gannett family until both were finally taken over by Walter Baker and Company.
We do not know very much about what these old mills looked like, except that we can be sure that the grist mill differed very little from some still run- ning today in Virginia.4 I think that most of them looked not unlike small barns, but had more windows. Probably they had only a single story, except for the paper mills, which had two. In 1813 Edmund Baker built a forty foot square stone mill with three floors, but I believe that until after the Civil War all the other mills in the Village were of wooden construction.
The water wheels were of the old-fashioned kind made of wood, and al- most certainly of the undershot variety. Snow and ice were a source of great annoyance to mill owners who operated such wheels in New England, and they sometimes enclosed them within the mill building or inside a lean-to shed in order to secure more protection from the weather. Examination of Mather Withington's crude map of the Village in 1793 leads me to believe that Daniel Vose's paper mill then had its wheel within the buildings, but that the other mills had them built outside, except for the sawmill. Because of the relatively high speed needed for the up-and-down saw, this kind of 4. The mill which I believe is the best example still in existence of a small Colonial grist mill is the one at Stratford Hall in Virginia. The Sturbridge Village mill is of a later period, while the mill built by Henry Ford near the Wayside Inn is about as unlike a typical New England Village grist mill as it was possible to make it.
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