History of Norfolk County, Massachusetts, with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Part 36

Author: Hurd, D. Hamilton (Duane Hamilton) ed
Publication date: 1884
Publisher: Philadelphia, J. W. Lewis & Co.
Number of Pages: 1534

USA > Massachusetts > Norfolk County > History of Norfolk County, Massachusetts, with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men > Part 36

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Dr. Franklin showed his appreciation of the com- pliment by sending the town a valuable library of one hundred and sixteen volumes, selected by Rev. Richard Price, of London, a strong friend of Franklin's and of American liberty. Of these, mostly folio volumes, the most secular and sensational was " The Life of Baron Trench." These one hundred and sixteen seed volumes were subsequently increased by a social library to some five hundred, and have since multiplied-to three thousand or more, constituting the present Public Library, for which maintenance annual grants of money are made by the town.

Topography .- Franklin, in the limits of its orig- inal charter, included 17,602} acres, or 27.6 square miles ; lying longer north and south than its width east and west. It is twenty-seven and a quarter miles southwesterly from Boston by the New York and New England Railroad.

The earliest map of the territory of Franklin was made in 1735, by Samuel Brooks, surveyor, and is kept in the town office of Wrentham. It contains only the four ponds, Uncas, Beaver, Popolatic, and Long, two or three short streets, and the names of the

166

HISTORY OF NORFOLK COUNTY, MASSACHUSETTS.

first settlers. The outline of the West Precinct is dotted within it, and follows nearly the present boun- daries of Franklin. A later map is in the archives of the State- House at Boston, and is dated May 27, 1795. It was from surveys made by Amos Hawes and Moses Fisher in September, October, and November, 1794. Nov. 2, 1795, the selectmen were directed to have another map of the town drawn on parchment, but if this was done the map cannot now be found. In 1832 a map of the town was surveyed by John G. Hales and lithographed, in compliance with an act passed by the State Legislature in 1830. No survey has been made since by the town.

Charles River forms its northern boundary and re- ceives the overflow of the ponds that lie, like bits of broken mirrors, among its hills. Chief of these ponds are Beaver, Uncas, Popolatic, and Kingsbury's, with their outlets of Mine Brook, and Stop, or Mill River, drawing their surplus waters through Charles River into Massachusetts Bay and the sea. The geological formation of the town is sienitic, though very few ledges of rock appear on the surface. Traces of lime- stone have been found, and a deposit of amethysts, |

Its own hills and rocks have retained but few tra- ditions of their aboriginal owners and their deeds. Yet Indian Rock still records the story of the forty- two of King Philip's warriors, who stopped for a night and laid themselves down to sleep around its base. They had been on the war-path to Medfield, burning the houses of its settlers, and were on their way back to Narragansett. It is said a man named Rocket, in searching for a lost horse, found their trail, which he followed till he saw them asleep at Indian Rock. He hastened back to the settlement, and before daylight he was back again, with a dozen men in command of Capt. Robert Ware, to watch and take care of the sleeping murderers. When the Indians arose at day- light a dozen bullets quickly found their mark. Their punishment was so swift and fatal that only one or two escaped to tell others of the steady and sure aim of the white man. Hence came the name of the ledge, which still rears its monumental head above the trees some five hundred yards east of the Common. The Fourth of July, 1823, was celebrated on this rock, and its stony breast is still marked with the graven initials of the managers of that celebration. They then proposed erecting a commemorative monu- !

ment on the site, but Franklin did not care to revive such tragie memories, and the trees have now hidden even the path to Indian Rock.

Uncas Pond also holds the tradition that the wily Mohegan sachem, in some of his campaigns with the Pequots in this region, made the shores of this pond one of his occasional haunts, and the early settlers at- tached his name to the wood-sheltered sheet of water as a memento of the fact. But the settlement was too insignificant at the time of the Indian war to at- tract any massacres or conflagrations as befell its neigh- bors, Medfield and Wrentham, and it has to be content without its legends of savage warfare.

The Revolution .- The young town took her stand courageously beside her older sisters in the troublous times of the colonies. Instead of the horn of Ceres, she must grasp for a while the sword of Mars. Many of her men had been enrolled two years before among the five companies of minute-men formed within the whole town of Wrentham. Some of her inhabitants were among those who, on the first alarm from Con- cord, " marched from Wrentham on the nineteenth of April (1775) in the Colonial service." The ex- now exhausted. Green meadows, deep, shady valleys, ! igencies of the Revolution demanded many town- and sunny hills make the natural scenery of Franklin beautiful. It is one of the highest towns in the county, and from some of its elevated highways the blue hills of Milton and the round head of Mount Wachusett, in Princeton, are visible.

meetings. Thirty-one were held in the five years between January, 1773, and Feb. 16, 1778, this being the last before the separation of Franklin from Wrentham.

At one of these meetings, held at Wrentham June | 5, 1776, one day less than a month before the Dec- laration of Independence, a paper of instructions to their representatives to the General Court was, "after being several times distinctly read and considered by the town, unanimously voted in the affirmative with- out even one dissentient." This paper is inserted as a sample voice of the times, indicating the clear and decided convictions of that day, and the hopelessness of attempting to dragoon such study yeomanry into duty :

" GENTLEMEN,-We, your constituents in full town-meeting, June 5, 1776, give you the following instructions : Whereas, Tyranny and oppression, a little more than one century and a half ago, obliged our forefathers to quit their peaceful habita- tions and seek an asylum in this distant land, amid an howling wilderness surrounded with savage enemies, destitute of almost every convenience of life was their unhappy situation; but such was their zeal for the common rights of mankind that they (under the smile of Divine Providence) surmounted every difficulty, and in a little time were in the exercise of civil gov- ernment under a charter of the crown of Great Britain. But after some years had passed and the Colonies had become of some importance, new troubles began to arise. The same spirit which caused them to leave their native land still pursued them, joined by designing men among themselves. Letters began to be wrote against the government and the first charter soon after destroyed. In this situation some years passed be-

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FRANKLIN.

fore another charter could be obtained, and although many of the gifts and privileges of the first charter were abridged by the last, yet in that situation the government has been tolera- bly quiet until about the year 1763, since which the same spirit of oppression has risen up. Letters by divers ill-minded per- sons have been wrote against the government (in consequence of which divers acts of the British Parliament made, mutilat- ing and destroying the charter, and wholly subversive of the constitution) ; fleets and armies have been sent to enforce them, and at length a civil war has commenced, and the sword is drawn in our land, and the whole united colonies involved in one common cause; the repeated and humble petitions of the good people of these colonies have been wantonly rejected with disdain ; the prince we once adored has now commissioned the instruments of his hostile oppression to lay waste our dwellings with fire and sword, to rob us of our property, and wantonly to stain the land with the blood of its innocent inhabitants; he has entered into treaties with the most cruel nations to hire an army of foreign mercenaries to subjugate the colonies to his cruel and arbitrary purposes. In short, all hope of an accom- modation is entirely at an end, a reconciliation as dangerous as it is absurd; a recollection of past injuries will naturally keep alive and kindle the flames of jealousy. We, your con- stituents, therefore think that to be subject or dependent on the crown of Great Britain would not only be impracticable, but unsafe to the State. The inhabitants of this town, therefore, in full town-meeting, unanimously instruct and direct you (i.e., the representatives) to give your vote that, if the Honorable American Congress (in whom we place the highest confidence under God) should think it necessary for the safety of the United Colonies to declare them independent of Great Britain, that we, your constituents, with our lives and fortunes will most cheerfully support them in the measure."

Sept. 15, 1774, soon after the encampment of Gen. Gage on Boston Common, Wrentham voted to buy two cannon " of the size and bigness most proper and beneficial for the town," and ordered them to be made fit for action. Ammunition was also bought, and men were armed and trained in military exercise. The last vote of the whole town touching the war previous to the incorporation of Franklin, Feb. 16, 1778, was the acceptance of a committee's report, that the full quota of the town, "being the full seventh part of the male inhabitants of the town," had been secured.

The First Meeting of the town of Franklin was called by Jabez Fisher, justice of the peace, and was held Monday, March 23, 1778, at 9 o'clock, A.M. The requisite town officers were chosen. They were Asa Pond, town clerk; Asa Whiting, treasurer ; Samuel Lethbridge, Deacon Jonathan Metcalf, Asa Whiting, Hezekiah Fisher, Ensign Joseph Hawes, selectmen ; and Ensign Hawes was representative to the General Court. The Committee of Correspondence, who looked after the affairs of the war, were Capt. John Boyd, Deacon Daniel Thurston, Lieut. Ebenezer Dean, Capt. Thomas Bacon. After adjournment they meditated for a month upon the new State Con- stitution, preparatory to an intelligent and wise de-

cision. Money as well as men were furnished often and heartily, and the town bore with marked una- nimity the heavy expenses of the Revolution as well as the depreciation of the currency as their home part of the price paid for liberty.

The depreciation of money was rapid and severe in its results upon values. In July, 1781, the ratio of paper to silver was as one to forty ; in September of the same year, one to one hundred and fifty. In the following February the town paid £400 for ten shirts to Deacon Joseph Whiting, who, of course, would not overcharge.

The patriotic little town looked sharply after its home enemies. It voted to report all Tories to the proper court. It directed the soldiers' families to be " supplied with the necessaries of life at a stipulated price at the town's cost." They voted not to deal commercially with any who did not conform to the scale of prices recommended by the Concord conven- tion of 1779. They furnished their quota of beef for the army-thirty-three thousand nine hundred and eight pounds-in eighteen months, taking almost the cattle on a thousand hills. They voted in 1779 -when the money credit of the government was rapidly sinking-that all who had money to lend, should "avoid lending to Monopolizers, Jobbers, Harpies, Forestallers, and Tories, with as much caution as they avoid a pestilence," and rather to lend to the Continental and State treasuries. There was the irrepressible spirit of liberty here.

Franklin has not preserved any muster-rolls or other data to make up a list of its soldiers in the Revolutionary war. From the muster-rolls of Wren- tham preserved in the archives of the State one can select the residents of Franklin proper only by simi- larity of name. But an examination of these rolls shows that they do not include all who should be on them, for the names of many men whose military record is known from other sources are not-on -the lists. Of the five companies of Wrentham, under the command of Capts. Oliver Pond, Benjamin Hawes, Samuel Kollock, Elijah Pond, and Asa Fair- banks, the last two of the companies were mostly of Franklin names, as follows :

Capt. Asa Fairbanks' Company.

Asa Fairbanks, captain. Asa Metcalf, private.

Joseph Woodward, lieutenant.

Matthias Haws,

John Fairbank. ..

Joseph Haws,

James Gilmore, sergeant.

Joseph Streeter, ..

Joseph Hills, 66

David Wood, corporal. Peter Adams, private. John Clark,

John Adams,

Nathan Wight,

Philemon Metcalf,

Asa Whiting,

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HISTORY OF NORFOLK COUNTY, MASSACHUSETTS.

Jesse Ware, private. Abijah Allen, private.

Peltiah Fisher,

Jonathan Hawes,

Isaac Heaton,

John Pearce,

Peter Fisher,

Will Man,

Elisha Harding, 66

Ebenezer Dean,

Levi Chaffee,

Matthew Smith,

William Sayles, 66

Asahel Perry,

James Smith,

John Clark, Jr.,

Joseph Harding,

Joseph Hills, 66

William Gilmore,

Aaron Fisher,

Ichabod Dean, 66

Joseph Guild, 66

Capt. Elijah Pond's Company.

Elijah Pond, captain.

Asa Pond, lieutenant.

Benjamin Pond, private. Timothy Rockwood, "

Jonathan Bowditch, 2nd lieu- tenant.

Elias Ware,

Elisha Bullard, 66

Robert Blake, sergeant.

Daniel Thurston,

Timothy Pond,

Nathaniel Thayer,

Duke Williams, corporal.

Peter Darling,

Simeon Fisher, 66

Amos Bacon, drummer.

Elisha Partridge, 60

Nathan Daniels, clerk.

Simeon Daniels,

Elisha Rockwood, private.

John Allen,

Abijah Thurston, 66

James Fisher,

Robert Pond,

John Metcalf,

'Zepha Lane,

Elisha Pond, 66

Eleaz. Partridge,

John Richardson, 66

Joseph Ellis,

Elisha Richardson,

In Capt. Cowell's company, of Col. Benjamin Hawes' regiment, sent on a secret expedition, 23d of September, 1777, occur the names of Michael and Timothy Metcalf and Benjamin Rockwood, Frank- lin men.

There were at least seventeen Ponds that flowed from Franklin into the American army and are not recorded. One, Elisha Pond, escaped one night from the old Sugar-House at New York, where he had been imprisoned and nearly starved by the British. Another Pond, Pennel, " died Dec. 16, 17-, in York harbor on board a guard-ship, supposed to be poisoned by ye British doctors." So his only record says, writ- ten in stone in the City Mills graveyard. Philip Blake was blacksmith and commissary to a portion of the American army on Dorchester Heights, and was afterwards in Sullivan's retreat on Rhode Island, but his name is not on any roll. Some of the lists must have been lost. John Newton, an English soldier, impressed on board a British man-of-war, escaped from his ship in Boston harbor by swimming three miles on a dark and stormy night. He reached the shore too exhausted to walk or stand; but when rested, he fled towards Dedham. He was met on the way and was asked, " Who are you ?" He only answered, " John-going !" and he went on, beyond curious querists, until he reached Franklin. His first as- sumed American name he kept, and his descendants still live in Franklin with the name modernized into 1

Gowen. John Adams, ancestor of the Adams family, was also a victim of English impressment who found a home among the Franklin patriots. David Lane, afterwards called McLane, and a native of Attle- I borough, came to Franklin, and married a wife in 1786. Ten years after he started for Canada as gen- eral of a secret project, said to be originated by the French minster to this country, to incite the Canadians to revolt against Great Britain, and thus to aid the United States. McLane's directions were to raise men in Quebec and seize the garrison and then cap- ture the city. But McLane was betrayed by one of his men and taken as a spy. He was publicly executed on the glacis outside the city walls of Quebec,-the last and probably the only instance in America of the ancient brutal mode of hanging, drawing, and quartering a traitor. McLane was, with- out doubt, more an unhappy lunatic than a criminal. But the spirit of those days was full of animosity and cruelty. The later wars of the Republic will find mention farther on.

The Second Meeting-House .- The war was at last ended, and the country had won for itself inde- pendence, and settled down to repair damages. The old town question soon presented itself again,-whether to repair the house of worship or build anew. There were evidently two opinions in the town, for April 26, 1784, two hundred pounds were voted to buy material for a new building. But October 3d of the next year the opposition carried the day, and the constable was ordered " to pay back the money col- lected for the meeting-house and return the tax-bill into the town clerk's office, and that the town clerk pull off the seal of the warrants and write on the back that they are null and void ;" and secondly, " that a committee view the meeting-house and report what is best to be done to repair it." As a result, £6 2s. 10d. were spent in patching the shingles, sup- plying glass to the upper windows, and boarding up the lower. But this putting of new cloth upon the old garment was an economy of short duration. A new meeting-house became more and more a visible necessity.

One question towards it had been settled January, 1784, in regard to the fixedness of the centre of Franklin. Two surveyors and three chainmen had, at a cost of £26 3s. 4d. (of which £1 12s. 11d. was for "lickquer"), discovered that "forty-seven rods from the centre of the west door of the meeting-house where it now stands" was the same unmoved centre found fifty years ago near the same Morse's mud- pond.

On Dec. 17, 1787, Deacon Samuel Lethbridge, Asa

Samuel Pond,

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FRANKLIN.

Whiting, and Ensign Joseph Whiting presented the following report which was accepted, and a larger site for the new building than the Thomas Mann's acre was bought :

" We have agreed with Mr. John Adams for the wedge of land lying between the way from the meet- ing-house leading to the Rev. Nathanael Emmons and the way from the said meeting-house to Ensign John Adams', being nine acres, at £1 10s. per acre ; also thirty-eight rods of land west of said way at the same rate ; also one and a half acres in the hollow south of the old meeting-house at three pounds. And of Nathaniel Adams one hundred and forty rods of land east of the way from said meeting-house leading to Mr. Emmons at the rate of £1 10s. per acre. Also a road three rods wide through his improved land, beginning at the road from John Adams', Jr., to go a straight course between his house and well to the land above mentioned, for which he is to receive as a satisfaction eight pounds in money and the acre of land on which the meeting-house now stands, with the road that is now wanted, in by his house, to said acre."

Two years later (1789) fifty-nine and a half rods lying north of the new meeting-house were bought at sixpence per rod. This lot completed the nine acres, of which the present Franklin Common was a part. This land, when first bought, was covered with a dense growth of pitch-pines, standing with their feet firmly planted among small bowlders. It cost sixty dollars and ninety-one cents to clear this untamed spot and cover it with grass. Three sides of this wedge-shaped nine acres were afterwards trimmed with slender Lombardy poplars. They were planted April 6, 1801, by William Adams, according to a previous vote of the town. Some twenty years afterwards the south end of the Com- | mon was sold for building sites, and on the centre lot Dr. Amory Hunting built a house in front of the old gun-house, since removed. After the meeting-house had been moved to its present site and reversed, the town bought the Common of the parish and com- mitted it to the care of a voluntary association. This association has bordered it with hardy trees, crossed it with walks, and surrounded it with a durable fence.

A plan for the new meeting-house was presented by a committee of thirteen, and accepted by the town December, 1787. Its dimensions were as fol- lows : Sixty-two feet long and forty wide, with a porch at each end fourteen feet square. It had fifty-nine pews on the floor and twenty-one in the gallery, be- sides the singers' and boys' seats. The centre of the house had at first long benches on each side of the

main aisle, afterwards exchanged for narrow pews. The frame still lives, unaltered in size, within a new covering.

The building was carried on with characteristic energy and finished in July, 1788, seven months from the acceptance of the plan. The cost, as ren- dered by the committee to the town, March 7, 1791, was as follows :

d. f.

Lumber at Boston

Carting from Boston

Rum, sugar, molasses, and lemons at Boston

Lickyuers bought at home.

Cost of raising the house. 26

Nails and other iron-ware at Boston

Nails and other iron-ware at home ..

Painting, tarring, and glazing Boards, clapboards, and shin- gles at home.

Plastering and whitewashing

Underpinning the house ..

Boarding the workmen

Carpenters' work.

233

round the house

Window-weights

Cost of the curtain (behind the pulpit ).

Expenses of the committee ...

Total

£726

3 4 2

DONATIONS.

Hezekiah Fisher, to purchase the glass

Nathaniel Thayer

Jonathan Wales

Josiah Hawes

Nathan Man

(So added in the original) £ 35 8 8 3

Total of class-tax

Received from sale of pews ...

622

Interest on securities for pews.

From the old house.

£943

18 1 1

Total cost of meeting-house, £1054 9 2 1

Or, at the then value of paper currency, $3514.86.

This bill was not accepted as readily as the plan had been ; but examination of the charges by an auditing committee, March 10, 1794, showed that £18 5s. 5d. more were due to the committee than they had charged. The honest town voted that this balance should be paid, with interest for four years, and receipts in full were exchanged. The bill probably included the cost of preparing the land. In 1806 the east porch was raised into a belfry to re- ceive a clock and bell, which had been given to the parish, costing seven hundred and forty-five dollars. The bell has never told the name of the giver, nor the clock-hands pointed to the time or place of its record, and none of the living know the generous donor or donors.

....

Door - stones and paving

£ 8. d. f.

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HISTORY OF NORFOLK COUNTY, MASSACHUSETTS.

In 1830, while workmen were painting the belfry, they spattered the bell, whereon some bright genius among them, thinking to better the matter, painted the luckless bell all over. Under this covering the voice of the bell was almost silenced,-it was supposed forever. It was thereupon sent to the foundry at East Medway in exchange for a heavier one. The dumb bell came forth from the fiery furnace freed from the smothering paint and musically toned as ever. It now tells the people of Paxton the times of public assemblings.

The second house was used for fifty-two years, when it was moved about eighty feet directly north, and turned a quarter round, with its belfry towards . long gallery fronting the pulpit, in which nothing the south. The old square pews were exchanged for modern slips, and all the congregation were seated in platoons with their faces toward the pulpit. In 1856 the interior walls were frescoed.

Upon the completion of the third and present Con- | the new singers. The boys had seats in the south- gregational meeting-house, the second, which was in its turn the old, was sold and deeded, through Davis Thayer, Jr., to J. L. Fitzpatrick, and by him trans- ferred to the Right Rev. J. J. Williams, now arch- bishop of Boston, for the use of the Catholic congre- gation. The last sermon in it before its sale was preached by Rev. Luther Keene, the pastor, in which he stated that in its eighty-four years of service there had been 8736 Sabbath sermons preached from its pulpit, which had been in the charge of 13 ministers ; 900 infants received the rite of baptism ; and unnum- bered dead reposed in it while the last services for them were being held before burial.

Before the doors of the old sanctuary are closed after the last service held in it before its alteration in 1840 (which was the funeral of Dr. Emmons), let us reproduce its interior as described by one who re- members it well: "What picture can produce its interior ! Its high box pulpit and impending sound- ing-board, hung by a single iron rod an inch square ; the two pegs on each side of the pulpit window, on one of which sometimes hung the old pastor's blue- black cloak, and on the other always his three-cor- nered clerical hat! By no means omit the short little preacher in the pulpit, with clear, sharp eyes, justify themselves for their absence. Even after the bald, shining head, small, penetrating voice, and manuscript gesture ; the square pews, seated on four sides, with a drop-seat across the narrow door, and the straight, cushioned chair in the centre for the grandmother, filled every one with sedate faces over which gray hairs usually predominated. The open space before and below the pulpit, where in winter a massive wood stove reared its iron head and opened its square mouth to be filled morning and at noon

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History of Norfolk County, Massachusetts, with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Part 36

Author: Hurd, D. Hamilton (Duane Hamilton) ed Publication date: 1884 Publisher: Philadelphia, J. W. Lewis & Co. Number of Pages: 1534

Author: Hurd, D. Hamilton (Duane Hamilton) ed
Publication date: 1884
Publisher: Philadelphia, J. W. Lewis & Co.
Number of Pages: 1534