History of Norfolk County, Massachusetts, with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Part 65

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 65

Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).

This was after the Revolution, but the simple ways of the fathers were still in vogue. It has already been mentioned that when Bray Wilkins, in 1692, at the age of eighty-two, came from Salem to Boston to pass election week, his wife, scarcely younger than himself, rode on the pillion behind him. But this | method of conveyance was not peculiar to those of Bray Wilkins' condition in life. A few years later, in November, 1700, the widow of Col. Edmund Quincy died. Judge Sewall went out to Braintree to her funeral from the old Quincy house, and he . contains one room paneled from floor to ceiling in

304

HISTORY OF NORFOLK COUNTY, MASSACHUSETTS.

solid St. Domingo mahogany. Originally it was a small dwelling, constructed on a plan not unusual in the tropics, with kitchen and all domestic arrange- ments behind the house and in a separate building. In itself it contained only parlors and sleeping-rooms ; but gradually it was added to, until the original house is now lost in the wide front and deep gabled wings of the later structure. In this house John Adams died ; and in the same room in it were cele- brated his own golden wedding, and the golden wed- dings of his son and his grandson.

. These houses and houses like these were the homes in Braintree of the landed gentry, during the long time in which there was in the community little property other than land. They were the manor houses of the period. Close to them stood the stable, the barn, the corn and wood and cart-sheds, the cider-mill, and all the other buildings belonging to the farm, which lay behind and around them. Nor were those farms merely the costly luxury of gentle- man-farmers. On the contrary, the owner of the house drew from the farm around it his chief sup- port. He lived upon its produce, for the more pro- lific soil of the West had not then beggared New England agriculture. From wood-lot to orchard the fruits of each acre were carefully gathered, and what was not sold was used in rude abundance at home. Yet the primitive simplicity of the life in those early homes can now hardly be realized. They had none of the modern appliances of luxury, and scarcely those now accounted essential to proper cleanliness or even decency. As dwelling-places during the less inclement seasons of the year, these houses were well enough, though the life was simple and monotonous to the last degree; but in winter there was little comfort to be had in them. John Adams during the last years of his life used to wish that he could go to sleep in the autumn like a dormouse, and not wake | generally valued at from a few shillings to as many until spring. The cold of the sitting-rooms was tem- pered by huge wood fires, which roasted one-half the person while the other half was exposed to cold drafts. The women sat at table in shawls, and the men in overcoats. Water left in the unventilated bedrooms froze solid, and entries, which could not be heated, had the temperature of ice-houses.

house, once the home of Parsons Fiske and Marsh. It was the simplest form of domestic architecture. A huge stack of brick chimney was the central idea in it, and about this the house was built. It was one room only in depth, and two stories in height. The front door opened on a narrow space, with rooms on either side, while directly opposite the door, and some four or five feet away, were the crooked stairs, sup- ported on the chimney. Behind this outer shell was a lean-to, the sloping roof of which, beginning at the rear eaves of the house, descended to within a few feet of the ground. In this were the kitchen and wash-room, and here, on all ordinary occasions, the family took their meals and the household work was done. Of the front rooms, one was the ordinary sitting-room and the other the best parlor, which, formal, unventilated, and uncomfortable, was entered only upon the Sabbath or great occasions, such as a funeral or a wedding or a birth. About these houses, which stood as a rule facing towards the south and as near as might be to the road, though rarely square with it, were the out-houses, sheds and barns neces- sary for carrying on farm or household work.

The wearing apparel and household furniture, as revealed through the Braintree inventories, speak also of a modest and almost Spartan simplicity. There seem to have been a few beds,-possibly one of feathers, but generally of wool or of corn-husks,- some bolsters, blankets, and coverlids ; but, except in the cases of the more wealthy, there is no mention of bed linen. Col. Edmund Quincy's two carpets were appraised at one pound. There was a table, and pos- sibly two; a few chairs, perhaps half a dozen, and, in the case of the rich, a scattering of cushions and covers to chairs, but stools were chiefly in use. Knives and forks are not mentioned until a compar- atively recent time, but pewter and earthenware is pounds. The kitchen utensils seem to have con- sisted of a brass and iron pot or two and some pans. In the house there would be a Bible, and possibly a few other books ; an old musket and sword ; a looking- glass now and then. The dress was of home-spun, and worn and reworn until there was nothing left of it. A hat would descend from father to son, and for fifty years make its regular appearance at meeting. The wearing apparel of a whole family would thus be stored away for generations, fashions never chang- ing; and accordingly it is a noticeable fact that wear- ing apparel constitutes the first, and generally one of the largest items of the inventories.

Such were what might be called the mansions of the colonial gentry, and such in Braintree they con- tinued to be until long after 1830. The gradual in- troduction of coal and new appliances for heating then revolutionized modes of life. The dwellings of the farmers were of another class, excellent specimens of which still remain in Quincy in the old Adams The food and drink in use in Braintree during the houses at Penns-hill, and in the so called Hardwick | first century or two of town life were as simple as the

305

QUINCY.

furniture. Indian corn-meal was the great standby ; and even as late as the earlier years of the present century flour was bought by the pound, and used only in the houses of the gentry. As bread made wholly of meal soon became dry, rye was mixed with it; and from long use rye was not uncommonly preferred to wheat. Fresh meat was rarely seen, but the well- to-do in the autumn of each year were in the cus- tom of salting down a hog or a quarter of beef, bits of which were boiled in the Indian porridge. Marshall notes in his diary that, in January, 1704, a hog weighing two hundred and sixty pounds cost him fifty shillings, and a quarter of beef, sev- enty-four pounds, cost him twelve shillings; and he at the same time mentions that provisions were then "more plenty and cheap than is frequently known, beef for six farthings per pound, pork at two pence the most, the best two and a half pence, Indian [meal] two shillings per bushel, mault barly at two shillings." Naturally the constant use of salted meat created thirst; and this thirst, the necessary conse- quence of what it is the custom to call a simple mode of life, led to that intemperance which was the bane of New England. The use of tea and coffee as bev- erages was not general until about the middle of the last century, and prior to that time the people drank water, milk, beer, cider, and rum. The excessive use of the last, and its demoralizing consequences, it will be necessary to speak of presently, and at length. . Meanwhile it will be noticed that Marshall in his short price-list mentions "mault barly" as the staple next in importance to corn-meal. A brewery was one of the earliest Braintree institutions, second only to the mill. The first was established by Henry Adams, the town clerk, shortly after 1640, and was afterwards carried on by his son. Later, cider seems to have supplanted beer as the every-day and all- day beverage, and the quantity of it drunk by all classes down to a late period in this century was al- most incredible. In the cellars of the more well-to- do houses a cask of cider was always on tap, and pitchers of it were brought up at every meal, and in the morning and evening. To the end of his life a large tankard of hard cider was John Adams' morn- ing draught before breakfast; and in sending direc- tions from Philadelphia to her agent at Quincy, in 1799, Mrs. Adams takes care to mention that " the President hopes you will not omit to have eight or nine barrels of good late-made cider put up in the cellar for his own particular use."

There were no shops, in the modern sense of the word, in Braintree or in Quincy prior to 1830. At the village store the more usual and necessary dry and

West India goods, as the signs read, from a paper of pins to a glass of New England rum, could be ob- tained. For everything else people had to go to Bos- ton, which they did on foot, on horseback, in chairs or carts, and by water. Marshall in his diary speaks of going to Boston as no unusual occurrence. In October, 1705, his father died ; in September, 1708, he lost an infant son; and in October, 1710, his mother. In each case he speaks of going to Boston the next day " to get things for the funeral." He was himself a mason and plasterer, but like most men of his time he seems to have turned his hand to any- thing by which he could earn a few shillings, for he was a farmer, a carpenter, a tithingman, a constable, and a coroner. The boot-maker, the cobbler, the mason, and the carpenter were all recognized mechan- ics, and earned a living by their trades. The usual wages of skilled labor were from sixty-five cents to a dollar a day. The busiest man in the town was the blacksmith, for not only were all the horses and oxen shod at his forge, but he was the general wheelwright, and maker and repairer of farm tools. Everything made of iron soon or late passed through his hands, and his shop, standing on the main street, was a cen- tral point in the movement of the town. For the rest, the peddler and the fishman were the chief purveyors both of news and of merchandise, and their horns were regularly heard on Braintree roads during the first two centuries of town life.

It has already been stated that at the time the orig- inal church was gathered the town numbered about eighty families, representing a population of not far from 500 souls, living mainly within the limits of what afterwards became the North Precinct. When Braintree was incorporated, in 1640, the English emigration had already ceased, and for many years hereafter the coming of new families into the town was systematically discouraged. In 1682 the popula- tion was limited to " about ninety or a hundred families at the most." In 1707 there were seventy-two families in the North Precinct, and seventy-one in the rest of the town, or about 800 souls in all. During the next seventy years this population increased threefold, so that in 1776 the three precincts returned 2871 inhabi- tants. This was a stationary period, so that Quincy in 1800 had increased its proportion of this number only to 1081; which figures were again barely doubled in 1830, when they amounted to 2201. Thus in one hun- dred and ninety years the population increased only from 500 to 2200, or a little more than fourfold; while during the next half-century alone it was destined to multiply fivefold. As respects wealth, it appears to have been much the same; though the contrast be-

306

HISTORY OF NORFOLK COUNTY, MASSACHUSETTS.

tween the two periods was perhaps even more striking , increased from $300 to $750, and the total town and in wealth than in population.

There are few data upon which to base an estimate of the accumulated wealth of Braintree prior to the division of the town, in 1792. According to the census of 1876 the population of Quincy the year previous was 9135, and its valuation was in excess of seven millions of dollars, showing an accumulation of $600 to each inhabitant, irrespective of sex or age. It does not need to be said that these figures are very far from representing the real facts of the case. The appraisal was simply for purposes of taxation ; a sworn probate appraisal would have shown very different results. In 1830, with a population of 2200, the valuation was $813,000, or about $370 per head. The figures of the earlier periods are of no value as a guide. Turn- ing now to the basis of the annual town levy, it is possible to make a comparison of periods. In 1876 the total amount raised by taxation in Quincy was $116,000; in 1830 it was $4556.24. The increase was twenty-fivefold in a period of forty-six years.

In 1657 the amount paid to the two ministers was £110, and besides this there were other sums, of which no record remains, disbursed on account of the poor, the sick, and the insane. At the beginning of the next century the salary of Mr. Fiske was £90 a year. After the two precincts were divided the salary of Mr. Marsh, of the First Precinct, was £70; but Mr. Hancock's was £110. Then came the period of extreme currency disturbance, and Mr. Briant was to receive £62, which in the case of Mr. Wibird was, in 1755, raised to £100. This was before the division of the town; but, approximately, it may be said that the total North Precinct levy was in 1656 not far from £100, and a century later it had not increased to over £150.

In 1798 the question of a suitable salary for a col- league to Mr. Wibird was much discussed. A com- mittee gave it "as their most mature judgment" that it would be best for the town to pay its minis- ter annually such a sum " as will enable him to main- tain himself and family comfortably and with such decency as will do honor to the society that supports them." And the opinion is then expressed that the sum of $500 will afford a minister and his family " a decent support." Accordingly, in 1799, Mr. Whitney was settled in the town on a salary of $550. In the following year the entire amount raised for town and parish purposes was $3000. In 1810 it was $3200, and in 1820 it had increased to $4000. These figures reveal most strikingly the stability and evenness of the scale of expense through the long period covered by them. Between 1640 and 1820 the minister's salary |

parish levy from $350 to $4000. The increase through the first period of one hundred and eighty years was less than twelvefold ; while in the second period of forty-six years, it has been seen, it was over twenty- fivefold.

That, except during periods of war, the Braintree community increased its belongings steadily does not need to be said. Any community, every available member of which is brought up to do something, while its more active members work all day long every day in the week except Sunday, wasting nothing, utilizing everything, schooled from infancy in the severest economy and eternally striving to better its condition,-any community such as this, dwelling in a region not actually ice-bound or a desert, must accumulate from generation to generation. So the Braintree people accumulated. As each generation passed away it left more acres under cultivation, more houses, barns, and farm-buildings, more furniture and household comforts, more cattle, tools, and appliances. Yet this was all. Prior to 1830 there was no personal property in the modern sense of the word. Whatever the people had was in sight. There were no bonds or stocks locked away in safes. A few persons,-and they were very few,-having ready money amassed in trade, may have held some bank or turnpike shares ; but the people of country towns had as yet scarcely begun to be educated in this respect, and their whole idea of property was the ownership of land and buildings. Money was made in trade; and the moneyed man was he who, having amassed some ready cash, put it into goods, or loaned it out to others on good security, usually bond and mortgage.

Thus the whole accumulation of the hundred and ninety years from 1640 to 1830 in a community like that of Braintree and Quincy was at home and on the surface. It showed for all it was worth. Ac- cordingly, when John Adams returned to Braintree in 1788, after a ten years' absence in Europe, he spoke of the increase of population as " wonderful," and was amazed at the plenty and cheapness of provisions ; but he added " the scarcity of money is certainly very great." And again John Quincy Adams coming back to Quincy to his father's funeral, after years of absence, spoke with deep feeling of the changes he noticed as he sat in his father's place in the old church, but he added "it was a comforting reflection that the new race of men and women had the external marks of a condition much improved upon that of the former age." Yet it may well admit of question whether the entire accumulation of that village com- munity in those two centuries, lacking only ten years,

307

QUINCY.

amounted to over a million and a half of dollars. Al- lowing for the goods and money which the original set- tlers brought over with them, this estimate supposes an average annual accumulation in the case of Brain- tree of only some $7000 a year. For an industrious community of from 500 to 2000 souls this seems small. And yet it is difficult to see how in the ag- gregate it could have been larger. In 1830 there were not over 400 families in the town. The official valuation of their wealth, well understood to be an underestimate, exceeded $800,000. Supposing it was in reality $1,500,000, the amount above stated, each family would on the average have had property of some sort worth $3750. In view of the fact that absolutely no one in Quincy was then more than well- to-do, and many families had nothing, living from hand to mouth, it does not seem possible that this average could have been exceeded.

In referring to the Braintree community prior to 1830, constant mention has been made of the class of landed gentry, whose presence influenced in a marked degree the character and development of the town. This class, it has been observed, was the legit- imate offspring of the old English land-owners; and in early Braintree there was one family more curiously typical of it than could elsewhere be found in New England. In fact, the record of the Quincy family is probably unique even in the larger field of American history. Dwelling at the close of two centuries and a half on the same land which the original ancestor in this country bought of the Indian sachem who ruled over the Massachusetts Fields when Standish first landed at Squantum, the Quincys have in every generation maintained the same high public level. Never perhaps rising to the topmost prominence, either official or intellectual, the family record has yet in both respects been exceptionally uniform and sus- tained. That record is part of the history of the town which took its name from one member of the family.

Church." In 1633, being then in his thirty-second year, Edmund Quincy came to New England, a com- panion of John Cotton, landing in Boston on the 4th of September. He was almost immediately made a freeman, and his name is found afterwards not infre- quently in the records of Boston. He died in 1637, shortly after the allotment at the Mount had been made to him. He and Governor William Coddington were of nearly the same age, and the grant of land to the two lay undivided for two years after Quincy's death. It may, therefore, be surmised that they were personal friends, and not impossibly it was Edmund Quincy's premature death which alone, in the Anti- nomian frenzy, prevented his sharing Coddington's troubles, and perhaps his exile. Though he died young, he left his name to a son and the name of his wife to a daughter. From a descendant of the latter sprang the Sewall family, and in her memory also the stormy, western cape of Narragansett Bay was called Point Judith.

The second Edmund Quincy, born in England in 1628, unlike his father, lived to a full old age. He is the " Unckle Quinsey" of Judge Sewall's diary, whose death is recorded on the 8th of January, 1698, as that of " a true New England man, and one of our best Friends." It was he who built the house at Braintree, and between the years 1670 and 1692 he repeatedly represented the town in the General Court. A magistrate and the lieutenant-colonel of the Suffolk regiment, he reproduced the type of the English country gentleman in New England ; and just as the former had gone up to the Long Parliament ripe for rebellion against Charles I., and half a century later had joined William of Nassau in the overthrow of James II., so Edmund Quincy, when Andros was " bound in chains and cords, and put in a more secure place," became naturally one of that Committee of Safety which carried on the government of the prov- ince until the charter of William and Mary was granted.

As their name implies, the Quincys were of Norman stock. The probability is that an ancestor came over This Edmund Quincy left two sons,-Daniel, the child of his first wife (Joanna Hoar), sister of the president of the college, and Edmund, whose mother (Elizabeth Gookin) was the widow of John Eliot, Jr. Daniel Quincy was the father of that John Quincy, of Mount Wollaston, in whose honor the town of Quincy subsequently received its name. Of him it will be proper, therefore, to presently speak at length. Ed- mund, his younger half-brother, inherited the father's house and farm, and presently married Dorothy Flynt, already referred to as the common origin of that re- markable progeny, in which lawyers, statesmen, ora- with William the Conqueror and fought at Hastings ; and a century and a half later the signature of a " Saer de Quincy" was affixed to the great charter of King John. When in the early years of the seventeenth cen- tury the Puritan movement spread through England, Edmund Quincy and his wife, Judith, were living on an estate which the husband had inherited from his father, another Edmund Quincy, and which was at Achurch, near Wigsthorpe, in Northamptonshire. Himself a Puritan, when another Edmund Quincy was born in 1627, the local record shows that the child was " baptized elsewhere and not in our Parish | tors, poets, story-tellers and philosophers seem to vie

308

HISTORY OF NORFOLK COUNTY, MASSACHUSETTS.

third Edmund Quincy passed nearly his whole life in the public service. Graduating in 1699, in 1713-14 he represented Braintree in the General Court, and became afterwards a member of the Council. Colonel of the Suffolk regiment, he was made one of the judges of the Superior Court, and in 1737, at the age of fifty-six, he was selected as the agent of the province to represent it before the English govern- ment in the matter of the disputed New Hampshire boundary. Reaching London in December, in the following February he was a victim of prevention, for he died from inoculated smallpox. He was buried in the graveyard which held the dust of Milton and Bunyan. The General Court of Massachusetts caused a monument to be there erected to him as lasting evidence that he was " the delight of his own people, but of none more than of the Senate, who, as a testi- mony of their love and gratitude, have ordered this epitaph to be inscribed."

Judge Edmund Quincy had two sons, Edmund and Josiah. A portion of the land at Braintree came into the possession of Josiah, and it was he who per- petuated the family, though the old mansion passed into other hands. A Boston merchant and success- ful privateersman in his earlier life, the first Josiah Quincy passed his later years at Braintree, dwelling for a time in a house which stood on the " Hancock lot." This house was burned in May, 1759. In it John Adams, when a man of twenty-three, was wont to spend many evenings, and it was by mere chance that he did not marry one of its daughters. The methods of passing the time there did not always commend themselves to him. "Playing cards the whole evening. This is the wise and salutary amuse- ment the young gentlemen take every evening in this town. Playing cards, drinking punch and wine, smoking tobacco, and swearing. . . . I know not how any young fellow can study in this town."

In his turn Josiah Quincy was colonel of the Suf- folk regiment, and he was also through many years a warm personal friend and correspondent of Dr. | wards Braintree. When William Coddington left Franklin. A man of active, inquiring mind, his only experience in public life was in 1755, the year of Braddock's defeat, when he served as a commis- sioner of the province in arranging joint military operations with the sister province of Pennsylvania. He left three sons, the youngest of whom, named after himself and known in history as Josiah Quincy, Jr., rose rapidly to distinction, and had he not died at the early age of thirty-one, could hardly have failed to be one of the prominent political characters

with each other in recognized eminence. More dis- of the Revolution. With John Adams he defended tinguished than either his father or grandfather, the | Captain Preston after the so-called "Boston Mas- sacre," and in 1774, when scarcely thirty years of age, he was the confidential agent in London of the patriot party. Dying on shipboard, almost in sight of his native New England coast, Josiah Quincy, Jr., left behind him an infant son, whose long and honor- able life, beginning before the Revolution, outlasted the war of the Rebellion. But President Josiah Quincy, of Harvard College, though he lived all his life on the family-place at Quincy, always identified himself with the city of Boston. His history and fame are not part of the record of the town which bore his family name.

Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.

History of Norfolk County, Massachusetts, with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Part 65

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