History of Norfolk County, Massachusetts, with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Part 55

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 55

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Capt. Lewis Smith was an honored man ; he was town treasurer for many years, and filled other offices of trust. He was accidentally killed by a falling tree at the age of forty-five, deeply lamented by a large circle of friends.

Julia (Battelle) Harding, and was born in Dover, Jan. 23, 1811. He graduated from Harvard College in 1833. He studied law in Daniel Webster's office in Boston, two years. Went to Chicago in 1835, to Detroit in 1837, where he remained in the practice of law till his death, Aug. 4, 1846.

The advantage of Dover over many towns in the commonwealth as regards climate, air, and situation was noted, and a record kept by Rev. Ralph Sanger during the first thirty years of his ministry. This record showed that one in four had lived to be be- tween seventy and eighty, one in seven to be between eighty and ninety, and one in twenty to be between ninety and one hundred. The record for the past thirty years would doubtless be as high.

It may be due to the sober and industrious lives of the people or the natural surroundings, or both com- bined ; certain it is few towns can show a higher rate for age or health. At the present time there are living in the town Mrs. Isaac Howe, aged eighty- two ; Mrs. Daniel Chickering, aged eighty-four; Mrs. Ann Miller, aged eighty-three; Mrs. Hannah Soule, aged eighty-six; Mr. Micajah S. Plummer, aged eighty-seven ; Mr. Moses Draper, aged . ninety-one years.

" Your fathers, where are they ? and the prophets, do they live forever ?" These were the words that formed the text of Dr. Sanger's discourse, preached at the close of a thirty years' ministry. And as we look back to the lives and labors of. our ancestors, well may we repeat, " Our fathers, where are they ?" Their lives were filled with toil, hardships, and priva- tions. A wilderness to subdue, foes to conquer, and homes to secure, was their allotted task.

Civilization and progress have reared their monu- ments. Colleges and churches greet us. The broad and beautiful fields are before us. Mechanics and artists have laid their trophies at our feet. What shall we do to honor the life that is now passing ?

There is yet a noble work to be done, and as we take up our daily tasks may we leave behind us mon- uments more pleasing and enduring than chiseled

Fisher Ames Harding was the son of John and | marble or costly temple.

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QUINCY.

CHAPTER XXIII.

QUINCY.

BY CHAS. FRANCIS ADAMS, JR.

THE MASSACHUSETTS FIELDS.

DURING the afternoon of Wednesday, Sept. 2 9, 1621, a large sail-boat, or shallop, as it was called, came into Boston harbor from the southward. The day was fine and the wind light, so that by the time those on board had reached the mouth of the Neponset, which to them seemed to be " the bottom of the bay," it was too late to do much in the way of exploration. They were complete strangers in those parts, and knew nothing of the disposition of the In- dians living there. Accordingly they did not deem it safe to pass the night on the main shore, but seeing a sheltered cove on the easterly side of Thompson's, or the Farm School Island, they came to anchor in it. Presently they landed, and rambled over the island. They found no inhabitants. Indeed the place was not only deserted, but there was nothing to show that any one had ever lived there. Calling it the Island Trevore, after one of their number, the party re- turned on board their shallop and passed the night.

In all there were thirteen of them. Ten were Eu- ropeans and three Indians, the latter having been brought along to act as guides and interpreters. Miles Standish, then a man of thirty-four, was in command, and among the others there is reason to believe were Bradford and Winslow, both of them afterwards gov- ernor of the Plymouth colony, as they were also its historians. The party had left Plymouth, then a set- tlement only eight months old, shortly before Tuesday midnight, and, taking advantage of an ebb tide, ex- pected to reach their destination at the Massachu- setts, as Boston Bay was called, betimes Wednesday morning. They found they had been misinformed as to the distance. So, the wind being light, the voyage had taken up almost the whole of Wednesday's day- light.

The night passed quietly. The next morning broke clear and fresh, and as the sun rose the whole shore and the seaward slope of the Blue Hills, covered as they then were with primeval forest, must have glowed in the mellow richness of autumnal tints. Opposite to where the shallop lay, and close at hand, rose the bold, rocky promontory since known as Squantum Head. Crossing the narrow channel they landed on the beach beneath the cliff; and, so far as

can now be known, it was here on the early morn- ing of Sept. 20, 1621, that a European foot first touched the soil of what is now the town of Quincy.

As soon as those composing the little party felt the pebbles of the beach under their feet, they began to look about for something on which they could make a morning's meal. Presently they found a number of lobsters, which the savages had caught and piled to- gether ready to be taken away, and these they quickly disposed of. They had no time to lose. So, as soon as might be,after breakfasting, they arranged to ex- plore the country ; for they had come not out of curiosity or a spirit of adventure, but to open relations with the natives with a view to trade. Accordingly two men were posted as sentries on the landward side of the cliff to secure the shallop from surprise, and then Standish, taking with him four others of the company and Squanto, one of the Indian guides, went inland. They had gone no great distance when they met an Indian woman, who was on her way to get the lobsters they had found. They told her that they had eaten them, and gave her something in return, with which she seems to have been well content, for she then pointed out to them where her people were. This would seem to have been on the other side of the Neponset, at Savin Hill or Dorchester Heights; for when she returned thither Squanto went with her, while the rest of the party retraced their way to the starting-point, and followed in the shallop. Their explorations, so far as the territory of what is now Quincy was concerned, were therefore limited to a brief morning's walk, and covered only a portion of the Squantum peninsula.

The remaining adventures of the party it is not necessary here to recount. They do not belong to the history of Norfolk County. It is sufficient to say that Standish and his companions visited the sachem Obba- tinewat and induced him to swear allegiance to King James ; then, guided by him, they went in search of the squaw sachem of the Massachusetts up the valley of the Mystic, and passed a delightful September day rambling among the Middlesex hills. Presently they returned in safety to Plymouth, full of admiration of the noble harbor and the fair country surrounding it which they had then for the first time seen, and " wishing they had been there seated."

Such was the first recorded visit of Europeans to Quincy, and the name of the peninsula which the party visited still stands as a memorial of the event. That it was then called Squantum is not certain, though the explorers not improbably did at that time give those names of Allerton and Brewster, which they have borne ever since, to points in the bay.

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HISTORY OF NORFOLK COUNTY, MASSACHUSETTS.

Squanto was the guide in their walk over the penin- their time in games and feasting. Indeed, the name of the tribe is supposed to have been derived from the small savin-crowned hummock, lying between the Fields and Squantum, and bearing in its shape some more or less fanciful resemblance to an arrow's head.2 It would thus appear that not only was the name of the commonwealth derived from a spot within the limits of Quincy, but it was within those limits also that the Massachusetts tribe found that common gathering-place which was to them what the Isth- mian fields were to the Greeks. The eastern slope of the Blue Hills and the shores of Quincy Bay were the cradle, the home, and the grave of the race. sula, and it has ever since been called Squanto's Chappel, and more recently Squantum. It is possi- ble that this was its Indian name, just as Neponset was the name of the river which separated it from the opposite locality known as Mattapan. The word, too, was one familiar enough in the Indian tongue, being an abbreviation of Musquantum, meaning he is angry, he is bloody-minded, and representing one of the Gods, apparently the God of wrath ; though by some authorities it is spoken of as the good or kindly God. But, practically, the name of the peninsula upon which Standish lauded does perpetuate for all time the memory, not of the Indian deity, but of the At one period, also, and that not long before the visit of the Plymouth explorers, the Massachusetts were a flourishing and warlike tribe. They occupied the whole of Eastern Massachusetts, north of what is now the Plymouth boundary, including the present counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Middlesex, and Essex. Nanepashemet was their last great sachem. He had waged war with the Taratines of the Penobscot in 1615, and was killed by them at his home in Medford Indian guide. It is also in every way proper that this should be so. If ever a human instrument was made ready by special providence for a given work of infinite moment, it was so made ready in the case of Squanto. It is scarcely too much to say that but for his timely intervention the Plymouth colony could not have survived the famine of its earliest winters. The Quincy peninsula is his memorial ; but his epitaph is found in the pages of Bradford, who wrote of him, , in 1619. In the days of this sachem, it is said, the Massachusetts could put three thousand fighting men into the field. Yet, prior to 1620, we get from the early records but few glimpses of them, and those broken and

on behalf of the Pilgrims, " He was their interpreter, and was a special instrument sent by God for their good beyond their expectation. He directed them how to set their corn, where to take fish and to pro- cure other commodities, and was also their pilot to bring them to unknown places for their profit, and never left them till he died." 1

At the time of Standish's visit the territory since | which they lived. The most probable account of the origin of called Quincy was occupied by a poor remnant of the Massachusetts tribe of Indians, some forty to sixty in number. The sachem Chickatabot ruled over them. Some years before he had dwelt at Mount Wollaston, which had then been cleared and culti- vated, and the shell-heaps still to be found there- 1 abouts indicate that it was a favorite Indian resort. , which hill or hummoth is now in possession of Capt. John North of Mount Wollaston, and between it and the Billings, and lies in the shape of an Indian arrow's head, which arrow-heads were called in their language mos, or mons, with an o nasal; and a hill in their language is " wetuset," pro- nounced according to us " wechuset." Hence this great sachem's seat was called Moswetuset, which signifies a hill in the shape of an arrow's head, and his subjects the Moswetuset Indians, fromwhence, with a small variation of the word, the province received the name of Massachuset.'" Neponset, in that region since locally known as " The Farms," was, and still is, a broad, open plain called the Massachusetts Fields, supposed in the more flourishing days of the tribe to have been its gather- ing-place. It lay close to the water and the beach, which afforded an inexhaustible supply of those shell- fish of which the savages were inordinately fond ; and the tradition is that here the Massachusetts Indians met at certain periods of the year and passed

1 There is another and very absurd derivation of the name Squantum, suggested by the bold face of the rock at its seaward extremity, " from whence," wrote John Adams in 1762, " the squaw threw herself who gave her name to the place" ( Works, ii. 136) ; hence squaw's tumble, abbreviated into Squantum.

2 Neal, in his history (vol. iii. p. 315), says, "It was cus- tomary among the savages to give names to their little nations or clans from some remarkable hill, river, or spring about the name Massachusetts is that which I have received from the Rev. Mr. Billings, of Little Compton, by the hands of a learned gentleman of Boston. His words are these: 'The sachem, or sagamore, who governed the Indians in this part of the country when the English came first hither had his seat on a small hill or upland, containing perhaps an acre and a half, about two leagues to the southward of Boston, fronting Mount Bay, and backed with a large tract of salt-meadow ;

In the appendix to the " Report of the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society" for October, 1867, there is a paper on the name " Massachusetts." The Society referred the question to J. Hammond Trumbull, who, under date of Nov. 2, 1867, wrote as follows : " I should say, then, that ' Mas- sachusetts' was originally an Anglicized plural of a corrupt form (Massachuset), in which he who first used it blended, through ignorance of the language, the description of the place (m'sad- chu-ut) at the 'great hill' (or ' hills') with the tribal name of the Indians who lived thereabouts, M'sadchuseuck, ' great hill people.' "

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QUINCY.

distorted. In 1614, Captain John Smith had voyaged along the New England coast in an open boat, trading and exploring. He then saw something of the Massa- chusetts, and he described them as a " goodly, strong, and well-proportioned people," dwelling in a region which impressed itself upon him as " the paradise of all these parts, for here are many isles, all planted with corn, groves, mulberries, salvage-gardens, and good harbors." He speaks of the Indians, too, as " very kind, but in their fury no less valiant ; for upon a quarrel that we had with one of them; he only with three others crossed the harbor of Cohasset to certain rocks whereby we must pass, and there let fly their arrows for our shot till we were out of danger."

There can be little doubt, though it cannot be positively asserted, that in the course of this expe- dition Smith landed in Quincy and had dealings with the savages, for on the rude map of the coast which he then drew, " from point to point, isle to isle, and harbor to harbor," Quincy and Weymouth Bays seem to be clearly indicated. Neither could the appearance of a European trader in those waters, | master, whether induced by persuasion or compelled have been at that time an unusual event, for the har- bor was already well known and frequently visited. Indeed, Smith mentions the fact that a French vessel had preceded him only a short time before, effectually spoiling his market, so far as furs were concerned. It had left little in that way for him. But he then saw the tribe of the Massachusetts in the full pride of its savage strength. A "tawny" race of " tall and strong-limbed people," they were the possessors of " large corn-fields," dwelling in plantations which covered the islands in the bay. Apparently they were as prosperous as any New England tribe, and,

so far as Europeans were concerned, as peaceably | threshold of extinction. Yet never had they been so disposed.

Not that the intercourse between the traders and the natives was at that time of a satisfactory, or always of a friendly character. On the contrary, the Indians were, after their nature, cunning, cruel, and vindictive, while the traders were coarse, reck- less, avaricious. In their way they were worse than the savages. They were wholly unscrupulous in their methods of dealing, for not only did they rob and cheat, but they sold the savages rum and weapons. Outrageous cases of wholesale kidnapping also were not infrequent. Smith accordingly had his skirmish with them at the Cohasset rocks in 1614, and a year or two later the anchorage off Pattuck's Island was the scene of a terribly tragic incident. It would seem that a French vessel had looked into the har- bor. As she lay at anchor under Pattuck's, appa-

rently unsuspecting, the savages conceived the idea of capturing her. Their plot was simple enough, and its very simplicity probably made it the more dangerous. Throwing a quantity of furs into sev- | eral canoes, they paddled out to the anchored vessel. Their bearing was wholly friendly, and no weapon was to be seen ; but beneath their robes, belted about their loins, they carried their knives. Coming quietly alongside, they flung their furs on the deck of the trader ; and then in the usual way proceeded to chaffer over the price. Meanwhile, with Indian cunning, they watched their opportunity. Suddenly the sig- nal was given, and they thrust their " knives in the Frenchmen's bellies." The surprise was complete. Most of the vessel's crew seem to have been dis- patched out of hand; but the master, less fortunate than the others in that he was only wounded, con- cealed himself in the hold, whither the savages did not dare to follow him. There for a time he hid. Meanwhile the captors cut the vessel's cable, and the tide swept her on the beach, where she " lay upon her side and slept." Presently the unfortunate by pain, hunger, and despair, came on deck. He, too, was killed. Then, after the sachem had divided among his followers everything which could be taken away, the stranded vessel was fired and destroyed. A number of years later, in 1631, an early settler in Dorchester, while laying the foundations of a house, turned up under a deep covering of soil several French coins. Not improbably they were a part of the plunder taken from the unfortunate trader nearly twenty years before.

When the capture of this French vessel took place the tribe of the Massachusetts were already on the prosperous or so powerful. Indeed, there is a legend that they held in wretched captivity some two or three Europeans, of whom in the intervals of servile-labor they made savage sport. One of these had saved a book, supposed to have been the Bible, in which he often read; and learning at last the language of his captors, he rebuked them and predicted God's wrath upon them. But they laughed at his threats, boast- ing that " they were so many that God could not kill them."

It was their numbers which in all probability led to their destruction. The filthiness of the Indian and the Indian village does not need to be here described. It is sufficient to say that New England savages lived more like swine than like human beings, and their habitations, reeking with smoke and alive with ver- min, were surrounded with every description of decay-

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HISTORY OF NORFOLK COUNTY, MASSACHUSETTS.

ing matter. As a race they were not less susceptible to epidemics than were Europeans. It necessarily followed that increase of numbers meant an increase of those conditions which are sure to breed disease, and the breaking forth of pestilence became a mere question of time. In 1615 the tribe was in its most flourishing state ; in 1616 a terrible mortality devel- oped itself which raged for two years, and then seems to have worn itself out for want of fresh material on which to feed. It left behind only a crushed and broken-spirited remnant of the Massachusetts. No- where does the pestilence seem to have done its work more pitilessly. What is now Quincy seems to have been swept almost clear of inhabitants. Chickatabot was driven from his plantation at Passonagessit, as Mount Wollaston was called, and apparently took refuge at Squantum. Of his followers few survived ; for the wigwams were " full of dead corpses," and " they died in heaps as they lay in their houses ; and the living that were able to shift for themselves would run away and let them die, and let their carcasses lie above the ground without burial. For in a place where many inhabited, there hath been but one left alive to tell what became of the rest. The living being, as it seems, not able to bury the dead, they were left for crows, kites, and vermin to prey upon. And the bones and skulls upon the several places of their habitations made such a spectacle after my com - ing into those parts, that as I traveled in that forest near the Massachusetts, it seemed to me a new found Golgotha."

Such were the marks of the great pestilence of 1616-17, as seen by Thomas Morton when he first visited Quincy in the summer of 1622, less than a year after Standish and his party had visited Squan- tum.1

CHAPTER XXIV.

QUINCY-( Continued).

MERRYMOUNT.

THOUGH visited by the Plymouth explorers in 1621, the territory of Quincy remained unoccupied by Europeans for nearly four years longer. Chicka-

tabot lived apparently on the southwesterly slope of the Squantum headland,2 in a sheltered nook which can still be identified. It has already been mentioned that his following did not in number exceed three- score. North of the Neponset the sachem Obbati- newat may have ruled over as many more. South of the Monatoquit, in what is now Weymouth, dwelt Aberdecest with the poor remnant of his people. After the plague, therefore, the country was practi- cally uninhabited. It was given up to wild animals. A few years before considerable portions of the more fertile uplands had been under rude Indian cultivation. With the ravages of the pestilence this ceased, and speedily the cleared ground had become covered with a young growth of forest trees. Of the original aspect of the country nothing now remains except the sea-shore and the wooded sides of the Blue Hills. All else has been transformed. In 1620 the region was an almost unbroken wilderness. The hills and uplands were covered with a heavy growth of native timber, in which the oak, the elm, the hickory, the chestnut, the ash, and the maple were intermixed with pine, hemlock, and cedar. The undergrowth also was heavy, making it difficult to force a way through the forest except by the beaten trail. The lowlands and valleys, where brooks now flow in straight channels cut since the settlement, were then impenetrable tangles through which sluggish streams found a devious way. Densely wooded with swamp timber, over which grapevines and creepers grew in profusion, these tangles were the home of the beaver, the otter, and the mink, and the refuge of deer, the wolf, and the bear. While the shore was alive with birds, the sea swarmed with fish. In the autumn almost innumerable wild turkeys filled the woods, in which grouse and partridge were found in profusion, together with geese, quail, woodcock, and snipe. The beaches, alive with all manner of shore birds, from the duck to the sanderling, seemed underlaid with shell-fish. Lobsters swarmed in the shallow waters.

2 Tradition points out the small hummock, already referred to, between Atlantic and Wollaston as the place where Chicka- tabot dwelt. It is so spoken of in Whitney's "History of Quincy" (p. 29). But after personal examination of the ground, Mr. Henry W. Haynes, the archaeologist, was unable to find there any trace of Indian occupation, and he asserted that the utter absence of fresh water made such an occupation wholly improbable. At the cove in Squantum, referred to in the text, he found not only a spring of fresh, clear water close to the shore, but also a large shell heap, numerous Indian im- plements, and other indications of permanent occupation. He confidently fixed, therefore, the dwelling place of an Indian sachem, presumably Chickatabot, in the immediate neighbor- hood of the present summer residence of Mr. G. F. Burkhardt.

1 It is not necessary in a local history to discuss the nature of the great pestilence. It is a subject, moreover, on which the medical authorities have been unable to reach any definite con- clusion. See " New English Canaan" (Prince Society edition), 133, n. It is sufficient here to say that, whatever it was, it swept the territory, subsequently organized into the township of Braintree, almost wholly clear of Indian occupants.

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QUINCY.

Further out were found boundless halibut, cod, and mackerel ; while in the spring the streams were so packed with alewives that it seemed to the first set- tlers that " one might go over their backs dry-shod." Of bass Thomas Morton wrote that he had seen a school of them sufficient to load an hundred ton ship stranded in Black's Creek at the going out of the tide. The region was a sportsman's paradise, and a devoted sportsman first occupied it.

But this did not take place until June, 1625. Meanwhile the neighboring territory on the other side of the Monatoquit-that portion of the town- ship of Weymouth since known as Old Spain-had been twice occupied, In July, 1623, came Weston's party of adventurers, who went away in a body in the succeeding March. They had been succeeded in the following September by the Robert Gorges colony, a small remnant of whom still remained there after their leader went home to England in the spring of 1624. But this is a portion of the history of Wey- mouth, and relates to Quincy only from the fact that Thomas Morton, a few years later the first settler at Mount Wollaston, apparently came over with Andrew Weston in June, 1622, and passed a large portion of that summer at Wessagusset, as Old Spain was then called, returning to England in September. An eager sportsman, Morton was gifted with a keenly appreci- ative sense of the beautiful in nature, and he went away deeply impressed by what he had seen of the country on the south side of Boston Bay. He had come to it while it shone with the freshness of June, and, roaming through its unoccupied forest wilderness during the months of July and August, he had gone away just as the full ripeness of the summer was mellowing into autumn. Accordingly it had seemed to him an earthly paradise, and he could not find language glowing enough to do justice to it :

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History of Norfolk County, Massachusetts, with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Part 55

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