USA > Massachusetts > Norfolk County > Milton > History of Milton > Part 7
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.
History of Milton
mill at this period always had a special wheel, called a "flutter wheel" on ac- count of the noise it made, which was built into the foundations of the mill. In 1805 Edmund Baker installed the first wooden "tub" wheels used in this vicinity. This type of water wheel was the first crude ancestor of the modern turbine, and it was much less affected by icing conditions than was the old- fashioned undershot or overshot wheel. In 1817 the first iron "tub" wheels were put into the new paper mill built by Isaac Sanderson on the Milton side just downstream from the first paper mill. The old paper mill of 1728 was finally torn down in 1840. It was in this mill that Stephen Crane, Jr., had learned the papermaking art, and then taught it to his brother Zenas, who founded the great firm of Crane and Company. Dr. Jonathan Ware built a new mill on the old paper mill site, equipped with turbine water wheels and used it both as a grist mill and as a chocolate mill. It burned down in 1901.
Fish were unable to swim by the various dams in the Neponset, and by 1746 the up-river towns of Stoughton and Sharon5 started petitions to the Legisla- ture requesting that fishways be built at all the dams. The mill owners natu- rally were opposed to wasting water that would otherwise have given them more power, and managed to block any action at that time. The matter dragged along until 1789 when an act of the Legislature authorized the con- struction of fishways, but they were to be built at the expense of the up-river towns. Stoughton and Sharon naturally were all against this method of fi- nancing, and again nothing happened. At last in 1791 fishways were put in and kept open between the latter part of April and the end of May. It does not appear that fish of any size ever took advantage of the fishways, or, if they did, they successfully eluded the up-river fishermen. In 1799 a new dam was built in the Village and the fishway closed. This really aroused the anger of Stoughton, Sharon and the newly created Canton, and visiting del- egations, armed with axes and crowbars, descended upon the Neponset Vil- lage dams in the dark of the moon. Of course somebody talked, and the Mil- ton owners heard or suspected something, and organized their workmen to 5. Actually Sharon did not become a separate town until 1765.
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UPPER DAM 7.0 FT. FALL
LOWER DAM
4.0 FT. FALL
MILTON SIDE
DORCHESTER SIDE
.MILTON SIDE
DORCHESTER SIDE
GRIST 1634
.650
1650
675
1675
FULLING 1688
700
1700
SAW
1706
POWDER
1710
FULLING 1717
725
PAPER 1728
1725
BLEW
1744
UP
750
1750
SNUFF 1761
SAW 1765
CHOC. 1765
CHOC. 1770
1775
1775
PAPER 1790
1800
1800
CHOC.
WOOLEN 1813
GRIST 1812
L ?
1806
DYE & DRUG 1817
CHOC. 1825
1825
1825
GRIST &
CHOC. 1840
CHOC. 1850
1850 -
1850
1860 to 1890
WALTER BAKER & CO. CHOCOLATE, HENRY L. PIERCE, OWNER
FULLING 1757
-
POWDER 1674
History of Milton
act as a welcoming committee. Tradition has it that many an up-country visitor did not have to wait for his Saturday night bath, but took it then and there in the mill pond. I do not know how many of these forays were made, but there evidently were more than one. Recourse was again had to law, which was both unsuccessful and costly to the up-river towns, and the quest for fishways was finally abandoned for good.
When the water power at a dam is divided among two or more mill own- ers, it is an invitation to lawsuits. At Neponset Village there were various agreements among the proprietors which allocated the water with certain priorities in times of low flow, and these appear to have been observed. An- other factor which would cause trouble was the backing-up of water from a downstream mill into the tailrace of an upstream mill, and this became in- creasingly important as the desire for more power encouraged the utiliza- tion of all possible falls in a river. There was evidently a period of many law- suits on the lower Neponset during the years between 1822 and 1826, from which only the lawyers profited, and agreements appear to have finally been reached out of court.
Very early in the settlement of Massachusetts Bay the Neponset was uti- lized as a source of power for the corn mill, but it was not until some two generations later that the real value of the water power at Neponset Village began to be appreciated. Initially the progress of industrial development in the Boston area was slow, and the only mills were those needed to process the local products, the Indian corn and rye, and the homespun woolen cloth.
I like to think of the three basic mills, grist, saw, and fulling, as the "home- spun mills". They were necessary to a normal and reasonably efficient civili- zation based primarily on the level of the farm. They allowed an economy of labor in the processing of the essentials of a comfortable agricultural life, and, when complemented by the blacksmith and a supply of iron bars, they fulfilled all the basic needs of the community. Mills other than these three represent, to some extent at least, an approach to an industrial civilization. As I previously explained, Milton had no real need of the second of these "homespun mills", the sawmill, because of lumber brought from down East
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VILLAGE MILLS, ABOUT 1865 View from Eliot Street a little west of High Street. The second "Old Stone Mill" is in center of picture. Gannett's grist mill at extreme right. Most of the buildings seen are in Dorchester.
The River
by water. If we consider the powder mill as being purely fortuitous, the ad- venture of Boston capitalists, and not really the result of normal develop- ment, we can say that until 1710, when the slitting mill appeared, Milton's mills were of the "homespun" variety, and that industry was initiated on this river during the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Six years earlier the first "industrial" mill appeared on the neighboring Charles River, an iron works, and this date can perhaps be taken as the starting point of the rise of industry, as opposed to hand-powered crafts, in the Boston area.6
Industrial growth continued on both rivers, but the Neponset gained and maintained a lead over the Charles, at least until the time of Jefferson's Em- bargo. The Milton paper mill represented a successful attempt to produce locally, and solely from local materials, an essential article which hitherto had necessarily been imported from abroad. Moreover the mill produced, not for the locality alone, as did the "homespun" mills, but for a much larg- er area. The snuff mill and the chocolate mills did the same, as they pro- duced for the Boston market, but were located in Milton because of the wa- ter power opportunities. Thus the Village was becoming an industrial cen- ter, finally accomplished in its most complete form when Henry L. Pierce combined all the mills and all the water power into a single industrial unit. Well before that time, however, we had a highly industrialized river extend- ing from the Sumner dam near Brush Hill to tide water, with all of its mills, except the grist mill, producing for other than local consumption. By 1812 the Neponset furnished power to a most important industrial development. It is possible that it may have been equalled and even slightly exceeded in size by the industry of the Blackstone River at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, but otherwise I have found no record of any rival worthy of serious consid- eration. The great industrial awakening of this country came during and af- ter the War of 1812; before then little industry existed, and that only in a few areas, of which the Neponset Valley was probably the most important. Soon the Industrial Revolution was sweeping along the Atlantic Seaboard, and great establishments such as the Lowell textile mills were springing up
6. Edward P. Hamilton, "Early Industry Of The Neponset And The Charles", Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc. 1954, gives further data on these old mills.
81
History of Milton
on the major rivers. Milton, however, had already utilized its water power to the fullest extent, and no further growth was possible. The Milton mills thus became of minor consequence, and only the coming of the steam en- gine and later of electric power would allow them, as the Walter Baker Chocolate Mills, again to become of industrial importance.
Walter Baker died in 1852, and his stone chocolate mill on the Dorches- ter side was taken over by his brother-in-law, Sidney B. Williams, who lived only for another two years. Henry L. Pierce, who had been a clerk for both Baker and Williams, hired the mill in 1854 and carried on the business. He was the son of Jesse Pierce of Stoughton, who had taught at various Milton public schools from 1814 to 1818. Col. Pierce, for he was commanding offi- cer of the 2nd Massachusetts Regiment in 1815, started a private school in the front yard of today's 69 Canton Avenue in 1819. He married a grand- daughter of Daniel Vose, and returned to Stoughton in 1824. His son Henry came back to Neponset Village, living on the Dorchester side, while the younger son Edward, after completing his training as a lawyer, settled in Milton, where he was moderator of the Town Meeting for many years, as was later his son, Charles S. Pierce.
Henry L. Pierce made a great success of Walter Baker and Company, of which he remained the sole owner, and eventually he took over all the little mills in Milton Village, and incorporated them into his great chocolate fac- tory. After Dorchester was merged with Boston, Mr. Pierce served twice as mayor of that city, and later as a congressman. He made a great fortune, most of which he left to Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technolo- gy, and the Museum of Fine Arts. After his death in 1896, Walter Baker and Company became a corporation owned largely by residents of Milton, but it was finally sold in 1927 to the General Foods Co.
The Village had its various little local industries, such as the large tan- nery owned by General Moses Whitney in the early 1800's, and the carriage shop of Strangman & Co. of later years, but they were hardly different from similar operations in many another New England town. As the years went on, the lower Neponset became a paper-mill river, except for the chocolate mills at the mouth, and continued as such until newer methods of power
82
The River
production and greatly increased demands for power made the little water- falls of the Neponset of relatively minor economic value.
It was said in an earlier chapter that the bridge at Neponset Village was for many years the only one across the river. It was probably in about 1733 that the first public bridge was built at Mattapan, although the mill owners prob- ably had one for their own use somewhat earlier. There was, of course, also a short bridge over the canal, or so-called "trench", which fed the water to the mills. At the lower end of the Fowl Meadows there had been some sort of farm bridge, called Hubbard's, in the early 1700's, and in 1759 the ancestor of the present Paul's Bridge was erected. The oldest part of today's bridge dates from 1850, when a two-arched stone bridge was built at the joint ex- pense of Milton and Dedham.
The first bridge at today's Neponset Circle was erected as a toll bridge by a private company in 1803 or 1804, and became a public highway in 1858. The growth of Railway Village, today's East Milton, as the result of the ex- panding granite business, led in 1837 to the building of the first Granite Avenue bridge.
The old bridge in Milton Village, built in about 1660, was finally replaced in 1765 by a new one on the site of today's bridge. The Dorchester and Mil- ton Branch Railroad Co. was building its line to Milton and Mattapan in 1847, and the level of Adams Street was raised in order to put the track in a short tunnel. This required that the bridge should be raised some four and a half feet, and two new stone arches were built which are still in use today. The railway bridge across the Neponset was of course built at this same time.
All the bridges below Adams Street were and still are drawbridges,7 al- though there is little occasion to open them today. Water traffic was of great importance in the early days, and the Town Landing in tidal waters right in the Village was of great assistance to the commercial growth of the town. The earliest landing was at Gulliver's Creek in the marshes at East Milton, and part of Squantum Street was originally built to connect it with Adams Street. There is an interesting little story in connection with this landing. 7. Except for the Expressway bridge now building.
83
History of Milton
Some fifty years ago a sewer was being constructed along Adams Street, and the excavations near the end of Squantum Street turned up some limestone rocks containing fossils. These were taken to William L. W. Field, then bi- ology master at Milton Academy, and later to be its headmaster for many years. Mr. Field had them identified at Harvard as coming from only one single place in the entire world, the valley of the River Seine in France. Long years ago some little brig had loaded ballast at Le Havre or nearby, and had finally discharged it at the Gulliver Creek landing place, whence it was carried to help fill a mudhole in Adams Street.
There was another landing farther up the river at the foot of today's Forbes road, where an old stone jetty can still be seen. This was really more of a shipyard than a landing place, I believe. The uppermost and most im- portant of the landing places was at the head of tidewater in the Village, where the remains of Godfrey's Coal Yard and the Yacht Club now are. This was formally established by law as a Town Landing in 1658 and was in ac- tive use for many years. Ships of fair size could come from overseas right up to the landing, if they watched the tide, but I am sure that by far the major part, if not all of the traffic, consisted of little coasting craft. Such little ships, sloops, ketches, brigs, and snows, with some schooners as time went on, were well able to go beyond soundings, and I believe that many a load of West Indies goods, sugar, molasses, and rum, came direct from Jamaica to Daniel Vose's wharf at the landing. From there Vose's wagons carried the goods to the various country stores up the Neponset Valley. His store at Milton tidewater was an important wholesaling establishment that served a large portion of the area to the south and to the west.
After the death of Daniel Vose in 1807 the river traffic became much less, until it was revived by the granite business. King's Chapel in Boston was built of Quincy granite between 1749 and 1752, but this came from boulders lying on the surface of the Quincy Commons. Quarried granite was first produced in 1815, but the real start of the trade came in 1825 when the Bunker Hill Monument was undertaken. It was only after 1803 that tools and methods of quarrying the hard rock had been developed. Gridley Bry- ant of Scituate was the master builder at the laying of the cornerstone of the
84
The River
monument, and he conceived the idea of constructing a railway to get the stone blocks from the Quincy quarry to scows in the Neponset River, whence they could be towed to Charlestown. He obtained a charter from the Massa- chusetts Legislature in 1826, and built the three and a half miles of track in six months. The original rails were of wood, faced on top with iron plates, but these later were replaced with granite tracks carrying iron plates. The first cars were made with four very large wheels, and the granite blocks were carried on a low platform hung below the axles. These cars were built in the stone house which is still standing on the northeast corner of Adams and Squantum Streets. The railroad ran downhill most of the way, and the trip was made largely by gravity, assisted in places by the horses, who would af- terwards pull the empty cars back up the grade. Such railroads had long been common in England, but this was the first in America, and while Quin- cy and Milton must share equally in the claim, the true credit for it belongs to Gridley Bryant, its designer, and perhaps quite as much to the man who had the courage to make the construction possible, Col. Thomas Handasyd Perkins. His sister Margaret married Milton's Ralph Bennet Forbes, and was the mother of Robert Bennet (Commodore) Forbes, John Murray Forbes, and Mary A. Cunningham, who established the Trust Fund which operates Milton's Cunningham Park.
The stone for Bunker Hill Monument came from the Quincy quarry, where Solomon Willard was devising new methods to get out the granite, but most of it was cut to size and finished in sheds located in Milton. This new industry resulted in a settlement springing up almost overnight at to- day's East Milton Square. It was called Railway Village, and was the place where the Granite Railway crossed the Plymouth Road. The business of the Granite Railway Co. continued for many years, and the railroad itself lasted until about 1866. It was abandoned for a short time, and then bought by the Old Colony Railroad Company, who in 1871 opened the Plymouth Branch over part of the old roadbed. Little if any actual quarrying was done in Mil- ton until almost 1840, but there were cutting sheds in the Village and its vicinity, as well as in East Milton.
The granite business had brought many alien workers to the quarries and
85
History of Milton
stonesheds, some newly arrived immigrants, but many transient workers from New Hampshire, who came to this vicinity each spring for a season's work. Most of these men worked and lived in Quincy, where they exercised a very considerable force in politics, voting more or less as a block in Town Meeting, despite the fact that they were really non-residents. Milton appears to have been spared this problem, but did suffer from one which, if actually minor in nature, was a source of considerable annoyance. Sixty or seventy years ago Quincy granted no licenses to sell liquor, nor did Milton. Every Saturday scores of husky stonecutters and quarrymen, yearning to "wet their whistles", marched from Quincy over Adams Street and Milton Hill to the nearest source of the cup that cheered, which was Hotel Milton, in Dor- chester where the Walter Baker Office Building now stands. So far no harm was done, but when the homeward trek started, troubles began, and many a Milton matron looking out of her window on the Sabbath morning would see a quarryman still sleeping it off on her lawn, or draped over the stone- wall. That is why today you still see some Adams Street walls with sharp stones forming their tops. Inebriated stoneworkers were probably the major cause for establishing the first Milton police force.
There was shipbuilding of some sort on the Neponset as early as the middle of the seventeenth century, but we have no detailed knowledge about either the vessels or their builders. Certainly the boats were small in size, probably intended only for coastal traffic and local fishing. Nehemiah Bourne, who owned much of the land on Milton Hill north of Adams Street, and who la- ter became an admiral under Cromwell, very probably was connected with early shipbuilding on the Neponset. Anthony Newton, who lived near Gul- liver's Creek, was probably a shipwright, as were Walter Morey and Nicho- las Ellen. One would assume that their vessels were so small that they were built in and around Gulliver's Creek in the vicinity of the landing place lo- cated there. Robert Badcock came to Milton in 1648, and two of his sons, Enoch and George, became shipbuilders. Samuel Sewall wrote in his diary for 2 September 1695: "This day Mr. George Badcock, Ship-Carpenter, falls from a ship he was helping to build at Charlestown, breaks his neck and
86
The River
three of his ribs, of which he dies. His brother dyed in the spring at Milton, by a like fall; which renders it very awful-". Evidently those were ships of some size, or a fall would probably not have been fatal. Enoch Badcock's shipyard was at the foot of Forbes Road where the old stone pier is still to be seen. His son, William, followed the same trade, and may have continued to operate the yard.
We know little about what sort of craft were first built along the Nepon- set. Dr. Teele says that shallops of thirty to forty tons were built near Gulli- ver's Creek. The term "shallop" is most indefinite, and covers almost any small craft from a whaleboat to a small sloop. I do not believe that we will be very far from the truth if we think of the early shallops built here as being es- sentially large ship's boats without a deck, and with a single mast carrying a square sail. Such a vessel was suited to the immediate needs of the times, hauling goods around the Bay area, working up and down the tidal estuar- ies, and fishing along the shore. In short, it was a handy work boat, small enough to row when necessary, and large enough for most local require- ments. This would be quite a bit smaller than Dr. Teele's "thirty or forty tons", a size probably not reached until a little later when decked pinnaces were undertaken. By the end of the 1600's most of the vessels built here were probably little sloops and ketches, say from forty to sixty feet on deck, and of sixty to a hundred tons. In 1693 Enoch Badcock built the ship Mary and Sarah, at a cost of £540. 15s. od. This price would indicate a burden ap- proaching two hundred tons and a length of perhaps eighty feet on the deck. This was a good-sized ship for the period, able to go anywhere on the seven seas. In 1709 Gov. Dudley reported to the Lords of Trade that there were only twenty ships owned in Massachusetts that were over a hundred tons. It would thus appear that the Neponset was then producing vessels as large as those built anywhere in the Bay area.
We have no further details covering Neponset shipbuilding until we come to 1765 when Daniel Vose and Joseph Fenno built a schooner and a brig, quite an accomplishment for two young men who had only recently started in business for themselves. Within a year or two Fenno was knocked over- board by the boom of one of these craft while tacking up the Neponset, and
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History of Milton
SEAVIEW. From MAILTON HILL
VIEW FROM ADAMS STREET AT HUTCHINSON'S FIELD, 1885
was drowned. Again for a number of years we have no knowledge of any shipbuilding, but this was the Revolutionary period, and it seems probable that little if any work was done. In about 1785 Daniel Briggs, shipbuilder of Pembroke, came to Milton, and lived for many years in a house on Adams Street opposite the head of Churchill's Lane. He set up a shipyard where the Badcocks had formerly operated, and over a period of thirty years built a total of thirty-three vessels, many of them of considerable size. Briggs' largest ship was too much for the Neponset, and he moved his operations over to Quincy for its construction.
Six of the ships he built in Milton were over three hundred tons, good- sized vessels for the period; the largest, the Huntress of 1811, was almost four hundred tons, and one hundred and ten feet long. His last ship, the Milton, built in 1815, became a New Bedford whaler in 1831, and was registered as late as 1883, when she was sold abroad and all further record
88
The River
lost. That, so far as I have been able to learn, was the end of shipbuilding in Milton.
For many years there has been no real traffic on the Neponset. The com- ing of the railroad and the gradual disappearance of the coastwise shipping marked the beginning of the end. The granite business gradually lessened, smaller items were shipped by rail, the Granite Railway ceased operations, and soon there was nothing to export that required water transport. As long as coal remained in general use it came to Godfrey's Wharf by water, but the advent of oil as a fuel eventually changed this. A certain amount of lumber still comes by water to the yard of Barney and Carey at the Granite Avenue bridge, but this is the last feeble remnant of the old river traffic, once so im- portant to Milton Village. The Neponset at tidewater today is merely a place where pleasure boats are moored, waiting for a weekend or a holiday before venturing out into the waters of Boston Bay.
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The Schools
T is surprising how little we really know of the Milton schools in the early days. The first records of the Town are scanty and brief, but, except for years 1672-73, 1684, and 1687-88, there is record of a Town Meeting in every year since 1666. I have been unable to find mention of either school or schoolteacher until March of 1700, a date 66 years after Milton's first settle- ment and 38 years after its establishment as a Town.1 From this time on, ref- erence to schools appears relatively often in the records, and before long practically every year. Milton of course must have had some sort of school- ing from the very first, and it probably followed the general New England pattern of the period.
The Massachusetts ordinance of 1642 required that all children and ap- prentices should be able to read and to know the capital laws and the princi- ples of religion. Thus we have from the earliest times a basic requirement of literacy. In 1647 another law was passed which required every town of 50 families to have a teacher, and one of 100 or more a grammar school. This last was not at all what the name connotes to us today, but was a college pre- paratory school, teaching Latin and Greek to boys who could already read and write.2 It was probably not until about 1700 that Milton had the 50 fam- ilies which necessitated a school, but the basic law of literacy still applied.
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