History of Norfolk County, Massachusetts, with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Part 59

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

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memorial only as late as May, 1640. Since then his parish-both while it was the North Precinct of Braintree and afterwards as the town of Quincy- showed always a noticeable leaning towards a liberal theology. It was never orthodox. In this respect it was in sharp contrast with its sister church of the Middle Precinct, and the ministers of the two, never changing sides, more than once engaged in sharp doctrinal controversy. And so each successive pastor influenced the people, and the tendency of the people | operated back in the selection of pastors, until the old order of things passed wholly away. It is, therefore, no improbable surmise that, a little leaven in this case also leavening the whole lump, the seed sown by Wheelwright in 1637 bore its fruit in the great New England protest of two centuries later, when, under the lead of Channing, the descendants in the seventh generation of those who had listened to the first pastor at the Mount broke away finally and forever from the religious tenets of the Puritans.

But though the most prominent and distinctive, Wheelwright was not the only resident or land-owner at Mount Wollaston the course of whose future life was changed by reason of the Antinomian contro- versy. It will be remembered that, besides Codding- ton and Hough, the husband of Mrs. Hutchinson also had an allotment just south of the Neponset. The subsequent and most tragic record of the Hutchinson family is one of the familiar pages in New England history. It does not need to be rewritten here. It is sufficient to say that when at last, in the early days of April (March 28th, O. S.), 1638, Governor Winthrop ordered Anne Hutchinson to leave the Massachusetts jurisdiction, she went in a boat across the harbor to the Neponset, and there landed near her husband's farm in what is now North Quincy. She had until the close of the month to leave the province. This was the first stage of her journey. Her plan was to join John Wheelwright's family, who had not yet left their home, and go with them by water to Portsmouth. But her own husband had in the mean time found an abiding-place more to his liking in Rhode Island, where Newport now is ; so, changing their plans, the wife and children journeyed by land to Providence, and thence passed across to the island of Aquidneck.

Thither she was shortly followed by William Cod- dington, the immediate successor of Thomas Morton in the ownership of Mount Wollaston. And, sin- gularly enough, the record of every annual town- meeting in Quincy at the present time bears recur- ring evidence to the fact of this succession. Since the year 1640, a portion of Coddington's grant has

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been public property, and is spoken of on the first page of the Braintree records as " the school lands." Each year by a formal vote-the reason of which has passed into a meaningless tradition-the town of Quincy, as a tenant of the land thus held, appropriates to school purposes a sum of money as a nominal rent therefor. The memory of Coddington is perpetuated in the name of the school in which the children of the district in which Mount Wollaston lies are taught, and also in the name of the street on which the school- house stands.

Unlike Hutchinson and Wheelwright, Coddington was not banished. Angry with his former colleagues in office, and disgusted at the intolerance they had shown, he voluntarily shook the dust of Massachu- setts from his feet. Alone of the exiles he had stood high in the councils of the Massachusetts colony, for through years he had been its treasurer, and it was he who built the first brick house in Boston. He now went to Rhode Island, where, forty years later, he died full of honors. Thus the pastor Wilson, Ather- ton Hough, and the heirs of Edmund Quincy, alone among those to whom large allotments had originally been made at the Mount, remained in possession of them even as late as the incorporation of Braintree. The Antinomian controversy had unsettled every- thing. Of these three, Wilson was left victor in the theological arena; but, pastor of the church in Bos- ton all the remainder of his life, he gave small atten- tion to his farm in Braintree, nor was his name in any way further associated with the town. Quincy died in 1637 without having taken part in the Anti- nomian dispute. His allotment descended to his son, 1 There is in Winthrop an incident connected with this Stod- dard, and his performance of his duties as constable, singularly characteristic of early Massachusetts. The constables, being chosen by the General Court, were among the chief people in their several towns. In 1641, Francis Hutchinson, son of Mis- tress Anne, and a son-in-law of hers, one Collins, came to Bos- ton and " reviled the church." "They were both committed to prison ; and it fell out that one Stoddard, being then one of the constables of Boston, was required to take Francis Hutchinson into his custody till the afternoon, and said withal to the gov- ernor, 'Sir, I come to observe what you did, that if you should and the family, as will presently be seen, was from generation to generation closely associated with the towns into which the Mount was subsequently formed. From one of those descendants, a great-grandson of the first Edmund, and in his day the successor of Morton and Coddington as the owner of Mount Wollaston, Quincy at a later period derived its name. Atherton Hough, like Coddington, was a warm sup- porter of Wheelwright ; but, unlike him, he accepted | proceed with a brother otherwise than you ought, I might deal defeat quietly, and made his peace with the dominant faction. He remained in quiet possession of his sea- shore allotment on Braintree Bay, and died in 1650, leaving sons and daughters. The name has since be- come extinct.

CHAPTER XXVI.

QUINCY-( Continued). OLD BRAINTREE.

THUS in November, 1637, the little settlement at the Mount, as it was still called, was once more thor- oughly disorganized. The place seemed to be under a sort of blight. First the magistrates had rooted out Morton and the Merrymount company, obliterating in so far as they could every trace of the earliest set- tlement ; and now they had also sent into exile a pastor and his parishioners, who had not a thing in common with Morton, except that they had sat down in the place from which he had been driven. But it was not long before the scattered settlers again began to show signs of continued existence. They were poor people, for there is no reason to suppose that any one of note or substance, except Wheelwright, had yet actually made his home in this region. Quincy and Hough, like Coddington and Wilson, lived in Boston ; and in Boston the Mount was looked upon as a remote, outlying dependency, to be reached conveniently enough by boat across the bay in sum- mer, but in winter practically inaccessible. From time to time large allotments were still made there to leading Boston personages. Benjamin Keayne, for instance, son-in-law to Governor Dudley, had meted out to him on his marriage, in February, 1638, " a great lot of meadow and upland," two hundred acres in extent, in what is now Braintree. Andrew Stoddard, a linen-draper, and at one time constable in Boston,1

with you in a church way.' For this insolent behaviour he was committed ; but being dealt with by the elders and others, he came to see his error, which was that he did conceive that the magistrate ought not to deal with a member of the church be- fore the church had proceeded with him. So the next Lord's- day, in the open assembly, he did freely and very affectionately confess his error and his contempt of authority, and being bound to appear at the next court, he did the like there to the satisfaction of all. Yet for example's sake he was fined twenty shillings, which, though some of the magistrates would have had it much less, or rather remitted, seeing his clear repentance and satisfaction in public left no poison or danger in his example, nor had the commonwealth or any person sustained danger by it." Savage's " Winthrop," ii.# 39-40.

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in 1640 received one hundred acres ; and in 1639, Edward Tyng, one of the wealthiest inhabitants of Boston, received two hundred and fifty acres. But these were exceptional grants to non-residents,-con- stituting them a landed gentry of the province after the English fashion,-and did not add greatly to the population or the prosperity of the region in which the grants lay, though the grantees may have sent out farmers or laborers to improve their lands. But large grants were not the rule. Another system was all this time being pursued towards "the common people," as they were called, who were coming over to New England in crowds. The custom was to allot these four acres a head for each person they brought with them ; and in the case of Boston the smaller allotments were made largely at the Mount. Twenty- six such are recorded in 1638, and fifteen more in 1639. Prior to the incorporation of Braintree one hundred and five such allotments in all had been parcelled out to families numbering five hundred and sixty-five per- sons, showing that the average family, including probably servants as well as children, was between five and six persons. But though these allotments are recorded, it cannot be inferred that all those to whom they were made actually settled at the Mount. On the contrary, the names of only a small portion of them are at a somewhat later period to be found in the town and parish records. The inference is that many received their allotments in one place, and, in those days of abundant land, preferred to settle else- where.

of the pastor and teacher. It was drawn up in the simple but not unimpressive form then in common use, and by virtue of it those entering into the com- pact-" poor unworthy creatures, who have sometime lived without Christ and without God in the world"- promised thereafter " to worship the Lord in spirit and truth, and to walk in brotherly love and the duties thereof according to the will of the gospel." In wit- ness of which, they made public profession of faith in presence of those assembled, and gave to one another the right hand of fellowship. It was the fifteenth church which had been gathered in the province during the ten years of settlement.

The incorporation of the town followed hard upon the gathering of the church, for, at the following ses- sion of the General Court, that of May, 1640, the " petition of the inhabitants of Mount Wollaston was acceded to, and it was granted them to be a town, to be called Braintree." No satisfactory reason for the choice of this name has ever been given, nor is there any bond of connection apparent between the Suffolk Braintree, of New England, and the Essex Braintree, of Old England. The subject has more than once been discussed, but with no satisfactory result. The more probable explanation is also the most natural. In 1632 a company of Essex people had come out with the Rev. Thomas Hooker, afterwards the re- nowned pastor of the church at Hartford. Winthrop refers to them as " the Braintree company." 1 They first went across the Neponset, where they began a settlement ; and then, by order of the General Court, they moved over to Cambridge. When, therefore, eight years later, the place was incorporated as a town, a name was given to it, probably at Winthrop's sug- gestion, connected with that "Braintree company which had begun to sit down at Mount Wollaston." But there is no reason to suppose that any of Hooker's following had remained meantime on the spot.2

Nevertheless, a certain portion of these poorer peo- ple did go out and build dwellings south of the Ne- ponset, and at last a decisive movement was made towards the establishment of an independent church there. The chapel of ease arrangement, involving, as it did, dependency on a mother church, no longer sufficed for the spiritual needs of a growing popula- tion. The region had also stood as a sort of unoccu- pied gap of heathendom long enough ; for the Dor- The vote incorporating the town contained detailed reference to an agreement which had been effected between certain representatives of those dwelling at the Mount and the authorities of Boston. The vested interests of the latter place in the former had again been asserted, and the question thus raised proved one not easy to settle. There had evidently been much bickering. Appealing to the " enlargement" vote of 1634, it was contended on the one side that chester society, to the north, went back to June, 1630, while the societies of Weymouth and Hingham, on the south, dated respectively from July and Sep- tember, 1635. Without, therefore, waiting for a for- mal adjustment of all questions with Boston, on the 16th of September, 1639, those dwelling at the Mount, in the words of Governor Winthrop, "gathered a church after the usual manner, and chose one Mr. Tomson, a very gracious, sincere man, and Mr. Flynt, , Boston and Boston church were being shorn of their a godly man also, their ministers." In those primi- tive days the signing of a covenant was essential to a 1 Savage's "Winthrop," vol. i. pp. 87, SS. church gathering, and the Braintree covenant had ap- 2 See " Thayer Memorial," pp. 39, 40; Lunt's " Bi-Centennial pended to it the signatures of six persons besides those | Discourse," p. 66; Adams' " Braintree Address," pp. 26-29.

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proportions ; while on the other side a growing popu- | 7th day of the following October, William Cheesebor- lation asserted their natural rights. The result was ough and Stephen Kinsley appeared, and took their seats as the first representatives of Braintree, a compromise, the terms of which are by no means free from ambiguity. Under it all the lands in the new township seem to have been released from a lia- bility to taxation as a part of Boston, upon the pay- ment to Boston of a trifle over a shilling an acre on CHAPTER XXVII. the land " formerly granted to divers men of Boston upon expectation they should have continued still QUINCY-(Continued). with us," and three shillings an acre for every acre that had been, or thereafter should be, granted to any THE NORTH PRECINCT CHURCH. others not inhabitants of Boston. In other words, the actual settlers in Braintree were to pay into the Boston treasury a sum of money on their holdings in commutation. At the same time further large allot- ments at the Mount were made, including five hun- dred acres " for the use of the canoneere of Boston wheresoever he is, or shall be, in the service thereo, | from time to time," and " two thousand acres to be set apart for the use of (Boston) in the most conveni- ent place unallotted."

THE original Braintree settlement was along the shore of the bay, and on the upland and in the val- leys adjacent thereto. Only by slow degrees did popu- lation work its way back among the hills and interior valleys. In 1708 the church of Braintree was di- vided, and the original settlement became the North Precinct. In 1792 this North Precinct was set off from the rest of the town, and became Quincy. The present town of Quincy, therefore, was the original Braintree ; and subsequently, for more than eighty

This agreement was made on the 11th of January, | years, the history of the North Precinct of Braintree 1639, some five months before the General Court is the history of Quincy. acted on the petition to incorporate. And when the The original Braintree church, then, until 1708 was the one church of the town ; from 1708 to 1792 it was the North Precinct church; from 1792 to 1820 it was the Quincy church. The revised Consti- tution of Massachusetts went into effect in 1820. Under its provisions a complete separation of church from state took place ; but the habits of the people were fixed, and several years elapsed before this change in the organic law began to produce its full results.1 At first people went on attending divine worship in the meeting-house of their fathers. In Quincy it was ten years before another meeting-house was built. Accordingly, the sole church of the Brain- tree of 1639 was still the sole church of Quincy until court did act, it made a further proviso that, if the inhabitants of the newly created town failed to fulfil the covenant they had entered into, it should be in the power of Boston to recover what was its due by action against the Braintree people, collectively or in- dividually. That the burden thus imposed on Brain- tree was an unusual and most oppressive one does not need to be said. It was the case of a poor, struggling community being compelled to buy out alien vested interests in the soil, which never ought to have ex- isted. Accordingly, at a later time it proved a fruit- ful source of heart-burnings and litigation. Never- theless the arrangement, favorable or otherwise, seems to have been the best that it was possible to effect, | 1830.

and under it Braintree came into existence as an in- dependent political community in May, 1640. Those dwelling in the new town were also made to realize at once that political privileges carried with them corresponding obligations, for by the same court they were assessed twenty-five pounds in a total levy of twelve hundred pounds. In payment of this levy silver plate was to be received at five shillings the ounce, " good old Indian corn, being clean and mer- chantable," at five shillings the bushel, summer wheat at seven shillings, and rye at six shillings. In which of these several staples the whole or any portion of this earliest tax levy was paid nowhere appears. But that it was paid admits of no doubt ; and at the next session of the General Court, held in Boston on the

The society had then worshiped in four successive buildings, the last of which was in 1830 almost new, having been finished only two years before. Built of stone, it was called a " temple," and it replaced an old New England meeting-house which for ninety-six years had stood on the training-field in the centre of the town. Thus, when this meeting-house of 1732 was removed in 1828, the visible emblem which con- nected the modern with the colonial town may be said

1 So fixed was the belief that obligatory support of a church was essential to its continued existence that the late Judge Story voiced a very common sentiment when, at the time the amended constitution took effect, he expressed the opinion that in twenty-five years there would not be a church open in Mas- sachusetts in which the old religious services would be held.

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to have disappeared. The connecting link between two chains was broken. The period, therefore, of one hundred and eighty-nine years which elapsed after the gathering of the First Church of Braintree, and before the pulling down and moving away of the third meeting-house in Quincy, must historically be consid- ered by itself. It was not the less one and the same period because during it the colonies were severed from Great Britain, and Quincy was severed from Braintree. So far as the people were concerned who lived at what in 1635 was known as the Mount, these were both political changes. They hardly in any way affected the occupations of those people, or their modes of life and thought, or their social and material condition. The real elements of change in all these respects were not political ; nor had they begun to make their presence felt when the eighteenth century came to its close. Thirty years later it was no longer so. The Granite Railway was built in Quincy in 1826 ; the first Massachusetts railroad company was incorporated in 1830. These events marked epochs. They from top to bottom altered that at the Mount, which French and Indian wars, and wars of independ- ence, and church and municipal divisions had scarcely affected at all.

The long period from 1640 to 1830 was therefore with the Massachusetts towns the primitive period,- that of formation. Though it led directly to the present, it had little in common with the present. Nevertheless, during that period five generations lived on the soil, and were buried in it. Concerning them, there was, as a rule, little more to record. A simple, laborious, unaggressive race, they were born and died ; each following generation was much the same as the generation which preceded it. With similar utensils, they cultivated the same fields. They dwelt in houses built on the same model, and pre- served the same domestic and social customs. Wealth and population increased slowly. The outer world made itself little felt in the remote village commu- nity ; and the village community in no way influenced the outer world. Few elements of change existed, and accordingly little change took place. The Quincy of 1820 was only the Braintree of 1640, a little more thickly peopled and a little more prosperous.

The social and material conditions of the town during this period of one hundred and ninety years will be treated in another chapter. Meanwhile the year 1830 brought the early theological period to a close. Up to that time the history of the parish was practically the history of the town, and until 1820 town and parish were legally one. The history of the church must, therefore, first be told.

In September, 1739, the Rev. John Hancock, father of the patriot and then the North Precinct minister, preached two century sermons in the meet- ing-house removed in 1828, but which then was new. In one of these sermons he said. - " This is the third house, in which we are now worshipping, that we and our fathers have built for the public worship of God." There is reason to suppose that the second of these three houses was built in the year 1666, as the quaint old weather-vane which surmounted it is still in existence, and bears that date. Of the first Brain- tree meeting-house-that in which Fiske and Flynt, and, possibly, Wheelwright preached,-no record or description remains. Built before 1641, it is alluded to as a landmark on the second page of the Braintree records. It stood on a rising ground just south of the point where the road which connected Boston with Plymouth-the old colonial coast-road- crossed a brook, then and subsequently called the Town River.

At the time this meeting-house was built the road could have been hardly more than a well-beaten trail, for it was not formally laid out until at least seven years later, in 1648. The brook, which | for some distance higher up had forced its way through a well-nigh impenetrable tangle from which the larger forest animals had hardly vanished, and which yet swarmed with reptile life, here flowed over a hard gravel bottom between two converging bits of upland. It was a fording-place,-a natural point . of crossing. For that reason the meeting-house was put there. It was a point convenient for those living on both sides of the water-course.

The meeting-house stood in the open, and when the " country highway" from Weymouth to Dorchester was formally laid out, in 1648, it here diverged, passing the building at both its ends, for it faced east and west. The diverging ways then shortly turned and joined again. At no great distance from the front of the meeting-house, looking westward, lay the tangled bottom through which the Town River sluggishly crept. Beyond this, and half a mile or so away, rose the rough, heavily-wooded granite hills. To the east there stretched a broad, and comparatively level, upland plain in the direction of Hingham and Weymouth. This also, at no great distance, was broken by the underlying syenite, which thrust itself boldly up in savin-covered heights. About a third of a mile further up the Town River stood the mill of Richard Wright, to whom a monopoly in grinding corn had been conceded; and from this mill, leaving the church on the left, there ran a way to the land- ing-place on the Town River, near the sea-shore.

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Such in 1640 was the centre of the town, and these were the only thoroughfares in it.

In the humble church edifice, which, nevertheless, was " as fair a meeting-house" as that people could provide, William Tompson, " a very holy man, who had been an instrument of much good at Accomenti- cus," was formally ordained as its first regular minis- ter. At that time the gathering of a new church was a great event in Massachusetts,-another candle was lighted in the tabernacle. Nor was it a thing of fre- quent occurrence. That at Braintree, it has been no- ticed, was only the fifteenth since the settlement, and, while three had been gathered in 1635, one only, that at Concord, had been added to the number in 1636 ; another, that at Dedham, in 1638; and none at all in 1637. The gathering at the Mount also was a special occasion. A true church-one in which none but orthodox doctrines were to be preached- was to be established in the Antinomian hot-bed. The last vestiges of the banished Wheelwright's teach- ings were to be eradicated. The event was one of exceptional interest.

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History of Norfolk County, Massachusetts, with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Part 59

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