History of Norfolk County, Massachusetts, with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Part 69

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 69

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When the temperature of a bedroom ranges far . below the freezing-point, there is small inducement for the person who has slept therein to waste any unnecessary time in washing or dressing. So when Monday morning came, the visitor of the good old days would huddle on his clothes and go down, blue and shivering with cold, to the sitting- and breakfast- room, in which he would find a table spread with a sufficiency of food, neither well cooked nor well served. The salted meat and heavy bread made of Indian meal and rye he would wash down with draughts of milk or hard cider, though in a few houses tea vain for a newspaper, or a letter, or even a distant echo from the outside world. . Weary with the

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monotony of in-door life, the visitor might wander forth and watch for a time the hands on the farm as they hauled and split wood, husked corn, or tended the stock. Then he would find his way through the village. On the bare and dreary road he would meet only an occasional chaise or traveler on horseback, and an ox-cart or two loaded with cordwood or pro- duce; a few children might be on their way to or from the half-warmed school-house in which they huddled together on the long, hard benches, shivering for hours. Coming at last to the tavern, and driven into it in search of warmth and comfort, he would understand at a glance why the New Englander was intemperate. There, gathered around the great fire in the bar-room, would be a half-dozen or more rough, sinewy Yankees smoking their pipes, drinking flip, and talking politics. The room might be dirty, the language coarse, the air foul with tobacco, and scenes of drunkenness might occur, but here was an escape from tedium, and a natural craving for society and excitement was gratified. It was the one form of sociability open to the average New Englander through the long, comfortless winter hours of en- forced idleness.

With the tavern the circle would be complete, un- less the stranger also stopped at the village store. There again he would find the occupationless lounger seated on the stools or leaning against the counter ; and there also rum would be on sale, drawn by the glass or by the bottle from the barrels on tap at the rear of the room. The resources of the town would now be exhausted. It would only remain to return to the point of commencement, and, seated in the wooden chair, resume " Baxter on the Soul" or the " Tatler," or " Paradise Lost," before the great wood fire. And so it went on as generation followed genera- tion across the little stage. No change came ; nor was change either expected or desired. To use Burke's supremely happy phrase, it was the existence of a people " still, as it were, in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone."

CHAPTER XXIX.

QUINCY-(Continued).

THE NORTH PRECINCT ANNALS.

As generally understood, the political record of an old New England town is the narrative of the connec- tion of that town with the great current of external events. Yet, when so treated, it cannot but lose in

great degree both its individuality and its significance. The events of large historical moment which have oc- curred within the limits of any town are necessarily few, and those few belong to general history. In most cases they are already familiar, and to go over them in a purely local connection is but to repeat a story which has been sufficiently told. This is not the function of the town historian. His function is to develop, in so far as he can, whatever of individ- uality there may have been in a particular unit of a remarkable system. Having a general family resem- blance, just as the individuals composing a commun- ity resemble each other generally, each of the Massa- chusetts towns in the early days had also characteris- tics and peculiarities of its own. In making a portrait of the individual, the attempt of the artist should be to impress on his canvas the traits peculiar to that in- dividual,-not those which he had in common with all his neighbors. So in dealing with the New Eng- land town, its historian should cut loose as far as pos- sible from the general current of political events, and labor to bring into prominence that which made the town as a unit not altogether like its fellow units.

That which lends an especial interest to these towns was the complete freedom of their growth from all paternal or fostering care. For them there was no prophet, no chief, no lord, no bishop, no king. Those dwelling in them were all plain people. As such, they were neither guided nor protected from above. They stood on their own legs, such as they were; and there was no one to hold them up. Ac- cordingly, each town as an organized political body worked out its problems in its own way. Neither were those problems simple. On the contrary, it has already been seen that in the course of the first hundred and ninety years of muncipal life Braintree and Quincy had to deal in a practical way with almost every one of those questions which are wont to perplex statesmen. Religious heresies, land-titles, internal improvements and means of communication ; education, temperance, pauperism, and the care of the insane ; public lands, currency, taxation, and municipal debt,-all these presented themselves, and the people assembled in town-meeting had to, and did, in some fashion work out a solution of them. Nor, being wholly unaided, did they fail to do so. There was fortunately no inspiration in New England, nor did any saviours of society appear. It is needless to say that the solutions worked out were often rough, and superficial, and wrong. None the less they were the best of which those people were capable, and so best for them. They were working out their destiny in their own way, and paying for their experience as they

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went along. Their so doing marked an epoch in his- tory.

It is in the towns and town records of Massachu- setts, therefore, that the historical unit of America is to be sought. The political philosopher can there study the slow development of a system as it grew from the germ up. The details are trivial, monoto- nous, and not easy to clothe with interest. Yet the volumes which contain them are the most precious of archives. Upon their tattered pages, yellow with age, the hardly legible letters of the ill-spelled words are written in ink grown pale with age, but they are all we have left to tell us of the first stages of a politi- cal growth which has since ripened into the dominant influence of the new world. Nor is it too much to imagine that when the idea of full human self-gov- ernment, first slowly hammered into practical shape in the New England towns, and as yet far from per- fected, shall have permeated the civilized world and assumed final shape, then these town records will be accepted as second in historical importance to no other form of archives.

house or cottage "within the libertys" of Braintree without the consent of those " chosen to dispose of the towne's affairs ;" and a heavy money penalty is imposed on every sale of lands to any except " such as the townsmen shall approve on." Next, though an interval of more than two months intervenes between it and the last order, is a regulation which foreshadows all future municipal ordinances in relation to fire de- partments ; every house-owner is ordered " to have a ladder to stand up against his Chimney" as a security against fire.

But it has already been mentioned that in the earliest colonial period town-meetings in the modern sense of the word were not regularly held, and no record was made of the action taken by the selectmen, who seem to have been agreed on in some informal way. Acknowledgments, transfers of land, and per- mits to take stone and timber from the commons were entered of record in the town book ; and yet a dozen pages of it were not filled in as many years. The machinery of government was organized slowly, and only under the pressure of actual need. Nothing was done that did not have to be done. But at last, in March, 1673, when the town was already a third of a century old, it was voted that thenceforth on the first Tuesday of March and the last Tuesday of October there should be general meetings of "the whole inhabitants" to make choice of their town officers and to agree upon all things that might con- cern the common welfare. Even then, for twenty years more, no record of these meetings was kept, nor were the names of the town officers entered in the book. Their election seems to have been held matter of common knowledge, and they met at each other's houses. This continued to be the case until after the Revolution of 1688, during which Brain- tree heartily sympathized in the movement which overthrew Andros. It was in 1693 that the list of town officers first appears, and from this time for- ward the machinery of town government was com- plete. The officers chosen were five selectmen, a town clerk and a commissioner, two constables, five tithingmen, and eight viewers of fences. The next year surveyors of highways and field-viewers were also chosen, and the first specific appropriation was not build another in convenient time." The site of | made. It amounted to £9 13s. in colonial money, the pound being $3.33, and it is instructive in its details. It reads as follows :

The first page of the first town book of Braintree bears the date of 1640. It is only legible in part, for, as was naturally to be expected, it is worn and mutilated by rough handling through two hundred and fifty years. Yet there is a singular fitness in the opening heading. It is in these words, "The Schoole Land." Then follows the memorandum of a conveyance that year made, under which a portion of the tract origi- nally allotted at " the Mount" to William Coddington passed into the hands of the town as common lands, and was by it devoted to be the support of a school. The first recorded act of Braintree, therefore, was to make a provision for common-school teaching ; nor is the fact already alluded to unworthy of second men- tion, that the land thus set apart has even to the pres- ent time paid an annual rent for the purposes to which it was then dedicated. The second entry, made in the following year, is for the encouragement and pro- tection of home enterprise. A monopoly in grinding corn is secured to Richard Wright so long as the mill he had built remains in the hands of him and his heirs, " unlesss it evidently appear that the said mill will not serve the plantation, and that he or they will this mill, and the stones which went into its founda- tion walls, are still pointed out. Next a right of way | is recorded. Then follows a provision setting a pre- "five pounds to John Belcher's widow's maintenance, and thirty shilings to Thomas Revill for keeping William Dimble- bee, and twenty-five shilings for the ringing of the bel and sweping the meeting-hous in the year 1694, and eight shilings for mending the pound, seven shilings to William Savill for cedent for all that legislation against aliens coming in to the land which has from time to time found a place upon the American statute book. This has been already referred to. Strangers are forbidden to build | dimblebe's cofin, and eight shilings to constables for warning

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the Town, and five shilings for the exchang of a Town cow to Samuel Speer, and ten shilings to Thomas Bas for dept for ringing the bell formerly, this to be raised by rate." a suitable and reasonable line of division, distinction, or limitation. . . . That said line be lovingly agreed upon and settled (if it may be)." Edmund Quincy In a general sketch such as the present it would not be profitable to enter into the petty details of legislation through monotonous years. They repeated each other. Regular votes were passed in relation to the church, the commons, the school ; and at times the dissent of certain freemen from the action had was noted. One Samuel Tompson especially seems to have opposed all outlays of an educational character. Cer- tain large issues always loomed up as the engrossing | questions of the time, upon the solution of which the common mind was fixed. Now it would be the matter of title and determined resistance to the pre- tensions of Boston land claimants ; then the division was chosen moderator, and then ensued an angry and exciting debate, for the record reads that " after the warrants were read there were some immediately that did declare against the dividing of the town, and that they did refuse to Joyne with said Inhabitants in that affair, and requested that it might be entered with their names in the Town Book." The names were then recorded ; and it is a significant fact that three at least of those names belonged to persons then active in organizing the Episcopal church. They ap- parently desired no settlement of religious disputes which did not cover their own case. But the division of the town into separate parishes was none the less of the town into precinets would force itself to the | effected, and this absorbing issue was disposed of. front. The village theatre of 1700 was in fact ex- actly like the national theatre of 1850, excepting only that it was not so large. As the tariff and bank issues in the latter were succeeded by the dis- union issue, so in the former the question of title was followed by the demand for parochial division. The title question has already been sufficiently referred to, but a few words more may be given to the division of the town into precincts as illustrating the methods of the time. It has already been stated that the freemen of the two sections were so wrought up over this issue that they by no means abstained from angry words, and almost came to blows. For a time the battle raged over the amount of the minister's salary. Then an overt act was resolved upon, and the frame of a new meeting-house was raised. Finally a joint committee of eight, four being selected from each of the two precincts, was sent to " discourse with Mr. Fiske one with another, and bring report to the town whether there can be any proposals made that may and shall be complied with on either side that may be for the peace and satisfaction of both parts of the town." It was a committee of representative men, for Edmund Quincy served upon it, and it went on an errand of peace ; but, as registered, it has now a war- like ring. Upon it were a lieutenant-colonel, two cap- tains, one cornet, two sergeants, besides " Lieut. Deacon Savel." One only bore no military designation, plain " John Ruggles, senior." This was in March, 1708.

Town government was now thoroughly organized in Braintree ; and, for purpose of illustration, the record of a single year will not be uninstructive. Take, for instance, that of 1710-11. During those twelve months, from March to March, three town- meetings were held, one in March, one in May, and one in November. At the March meeting town offi- cers were chosen, and a special committee was ap- pointed " to go and search the records at Boston with reference to the grant of the six thousand acres of land by the General Court to the town of Braintree." Twenty shillings were also voted to Joseph Bass as a suitable compensation for two years' service as town treasurer. At the May meeting the delegate to the General Court was chosen, and also a sealer of leather. At the November meeting a levy of thirty pounds was ordered to defray the town charges for the current year. Provision was then made for the increase of the town herds, and an appropriation of six pounds was made therefor. The schoolmaster, " Mr. Adams," was then " impowered to demand a Load of wood of each boy that comes to school this winter." From this impost it will be noticed that girls were ex- empted. It was then further voted that "twelve pounds be raised for John Penniman, of Swansey, provided that the Town be forever cleared of him." Finally, a further order was passed by the North Precinct freeholders that Mr. William Rawson should have " liberty to build a Pew for himselfe and Family where the three short seats of the women's be, and so to joyn home to the foreseat of the women's in the old Meeting-house at the southwest end." To this same Mr. Rawson, it may be added, there had ten years before been conceded " the privilege of making a seat for his family between or upon the two beams

Apparently the committee did not " discourse" in vain, or perhaps the Rev. Mr. Fiske proved a suc- cessful peacemaker ; for steps were soon taken towards effecting a peaceful division. By December matters had been so far advanced that a special town-meeting was called, as the warrant ran, " then and there to consult and consider about, and if possible to fix upon ! over the pulpit, not darkening the pulpit."

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It is a noticeable fact that there is no trace what- ever of the Indian wars to be found in the Braintree records. The entries just referred to were of the year 1710. The Indian wars were then over, and the questions which occupied the public mind were those usual to periods of peace. It does not need to be said that Braintree could not have escaped its share of the burdens of that severest New England trial when, and when only in its whole history, the enemy was at almost every door. The long struggle with the French was carried on at a distance. So far as Massachusetts was concerned, it entailed heavy drafts for men and money ; but no camp-fire smoke was seen or hostile shot heard within the colony's limits. The forays of the Revolution were limited to the coast and one short march to Concord. The war of 1812 caused for Massachusetts nothing more than needless alarms along the sea-coast. The war of the Rebellion was fought at a distance. Not so the In- dian wars. The struggle then, where it was not actually over the hearthstone, was at the threshold. Braintree was one of the more fortunate towns. Though a few wretched Indians lingered within its limits down even to the middle of the next century, the great plague of 1616 had within Braintree limits done its work thoroughly. Rum and smallpox fin- ished the little it had left. Accordingly, Braintree was never called upon, even in King Philip's war, for anything more than men and money.

The first draft of this kind was in August, 1645. A war with Passacus and the Narragansetts was then threatening, and Maj .- Gen. Gibbons, he who had been a companion of Morton's at the Mount Wollas- ton of the old Maypole days, was sent out in com- mand of a force of two hundred men. Braintree, Weymouth, and Dorchester were ordered to furnish three horses, with saddles and bridles, "to be at Boston by seven o'clock in the morning, the 18th of this 6th month," to accompany Gen. Gibbons ; and it was Mr. Tompson, of the Braintree church, who was selected " to sound the silver trumpet along with his army." Among the commissary stores of this ex- pedition,-" Bread, tenn thousand; beif, six hogs- heads ; fish, tenn kintalls," etc.,-" strong water, one hogshead ; wine at your pleasure ; beere, one tunn." These preparations proved too much for the savages. They succumbed before a blow was struck.

Again in 1653, the commissioners of the confed- eracy of New England colonies " conceived them- selves called by God to make a present war against Ninigret, the Niantic sachem," and the next year it fell to Massachusetts to raise one hundred and eighty- three soldiers, foot and horse, to go forth in that

cause. Braintree's quota was four men. Simon Willard, of Concord, was in command, and he mustered his force at Dedham on the 9th of October, 1655, and led it off through Providence to the shores of Long Island Sound. In fifteen days he was back at Dedham, having accomplished a military prome- nade.

Twenty years later came King Philip's war, and Braintree is said now to have received a scratch from the wildcat's claw. An insignificant Indian raid occurred, and four persons were killed,-" three men and a woman. The woman they carried about six or seven miles, and then killed her and hung her up in an unseemly and barbarous manner by the wayside leading from Braintree to Bridgewater." In conse- quence of the alarm occasioned by this raid a sort of frontier post was established on the Bridgewater road, and Richard Thayer, who had been "impressed" as one of the Braintree contingent, was put in charge of it. This individual has already been mentioned as a claimant of Braintree lands under an alleged Indian grant. It has also been stated that as a military commander Richard Thayer seems to have been in- strumental in spreading many false alarms. He claimed the credit of capturing one John Indian, who was "so feeble and weake that he came creeping under the fences, and not able for any action, being without arms." But his participation in this last exploit was by others denied. Nevertheless he after- wards brought in that bill for services and disburse- ments at this time, amounting to thirteen pounds, which has already been mentioned, and which the " Military Committee of Braintree" disallowed. In 1675 the town was called upon to furnish nineteen men for active duty, seven of them mounted. These figures now have an inconsiderable sound, and con- vey but a slight idea of the stress of war. Yet a call for nineteen men was to Braintree of 1675, with its eighty families, as heavy a draft as a call for 325 men from Quincy in the Rebellion of two centuries later. . The largest number who went out from the town in any one year of that Rebellion was 304 in 1861.

In 1690 came the French war, and Braintree was called upon to furnish thirteen men for the ill-fated Quebec expedition under Sir William Phipps. The | fate of these men was hard. The town records tell it in a way not to be improved upon :

"The 9th of August there went soldiers to Canada, in the year 1690, and the smallpox was abord, and they died six of it ; four thrown overboard at Cape Ann, Corporal John Parmenter, Isaak Thayer, Ephraim Copeland and Ebenezer Owen, they ; and Samuel Bas and John Cheny was thrown overboard at Nantaskett."

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Two more of the thirteen, making eight in all, died shortly after reaching home. Yet, according to the Rev. Cotton Mather, "during the absence of the forces the wheels of prayer in New England had been continually going round." From the beginning this expedition had not been popular in Braintree. The young men had refused to be impressed, and Col. Edmund Quincy, on whom had fallen the duty of supplying the contingent called for, had been forced to write to old Governor Bradstreet, then the head of the provisional government, that there were among those impressed in Braintree " but two or three who will go. I can do no more, without there be some sent for, and made example to the rest. To behold such a spirit is of an awful consideration."

motion was rejected. The warrant for the next town- meeting contained an article for the townsmen "to consider of, debate upon and agree about an answer to the petition of Edmund Quincy, Esq.," relating to a driftway through his land. And now a committee was appointed. Six months later, at a meeting held on the 28th December, Col. Quincy was chosen moderator, and this committee made its report. It was brief, but significant. They " were of opinion That the Records on the Town's Book Relating to an high- way or Town driftway through the Lands of the said Quincy, etc., as may appear on Record baring Date February the 15th, 1714-15 be erased, made void, and be as tho' it had never been. And it was then voted that the report of said Committee should be accepted with the Town." Subsequently, March 17, 1731, this way was regularly laid out and accepted.

The French and Indian war was followed by a long period of quiet ; and after the division of the Brain- tree church had been effected there was little for the Other questions, which through this period contin- ually occupied the attention of the town in a mild way, related to the six thousand acre grant, the unau- thorized taking of stone from the commons, the growth of the timber upon them, a political division of the town, and, above all, the obstruction caused to the passage of alewives up into the Braintree ponds by the dam in the Monatiquot at the old iron-works. The freemen seem never to have been able to agree as to what should be done with the land grant, so they wrangled and debated over it, never reaching any definite conclusion. It was their land question of the day ; but, like most such questions, it is devoid of in- terest now. As respects the stone on the commons, there is an entry in the record of a special town- meeting held to consider the subject, on the 30th De- cember, 1728, which is characteristic, and has in it a touch almost of humor. The meeting came together and chose a moderator. The record then proceeds as follows : town to agitate itself over. Accordingly for many years the records contain not much that is noticeable. The town organization, so far as offices were concerned, was complete after 1700, and an amount was annually appropriated to meet necessary expenses. This sum steadily increased, though its increase was caused probably as much by the fluctuating value of colonial paper money as by the needs of a wealthier commun- ity. In 1701, for instance, the rate was forty pounds ; about 1725 it averaged year by year over ninety pounds ; in 1750 it was in the neighborhood of one hundred and sixty pounds ; and when the Revolution- ary troubles began it had grown to two hundred and fifty pounds. The minister's salary was not in- cluded in any of these levies, as after an early period the precinct rate was kept separate from the town rate. Townways were now laid out more frequently. The old coast road of 1639 was still the sole land route to Boston, but in February, 1715, " a Town Driftway (not to by open) one rod and halfe wide" " After which they proceeded to act upon the first article or clause in the warrant, and after sundry votes were passed Pre- liminary or Introductory to an order or by-law concerning the stones, which seemed by those votes to be the thing designed, a vote for confirmation of what had passed was called for; but it passed in the negative, and so the whole affair was brought to a non pluss. The other articles in the warrant were discoursed on but no vote passed thereon. After which some persons declar- ing their judgment that it was improper or at least unneces- sary to Record the votes that had passed, seeing the things could not be effected ; a vote was asked whether the votes that had passed should be put on record, and it passed in the nega- tive." was laid through Col. Edmund Quincy's farm, on the line of what nearly a century later became the direct turnpike road across the Neponset. This action of the selectmen, though requested by Col. Quincy, seems to have led to a question between him and the town. He was then the leading inhabitant of Braintree, serving as delegate to the General Court, acting as moderator of the town-meetings, and referred to in the records as the Hon. Col. Edmund Quincy, Esq. He now made a claim against the town, and at a meet- ing held on the 23d of March, 1719, it was " pro- One Capt. Peter Adams had acted as moderator of this meeting in the absence of Major John Quincy, and it is apparent that he had not proved equal to the position. At the next town-meeting, held a month pounded by the moderator whether the town would choose a committee to treat" with him as to compen- sation for any damage he might have sustained on account of the way laid out through his lands. The | later, the question of dividing the town was brought

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History of Norfolk County, Massachusetts, with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Part 69

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