History of Norfolk County, Massachusetts, with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Part 76

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 76

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).

CHAPTER XXX.

QUINCY-(Continued).

MODERN QUINCY.

THE original migration from Old to New England ceased before 1840. No steady westward movement of population across the Atlantic again set in until the beginning of the present century, nor, even when it did set in, did it gain any great volume until after the year 1830. It was accordingly remarked by Pal- frey in his " History of New England" that probably there was no county in England where in 1825 the strain of English blood was so free from all foreign admixture as it was among the people of Cape Cod. Up to the year 1800 the same thing might have been said of Quincy. The original settlers bore all of them English names. There were scarcely any ex- ceptions to this rule, and such exceptions as there were-some eight or ten in two hundred and forty -indicated a French and possibly a Norman origin. Such were Decrow, Durant, Despard, and Deza ; Lamont and Lagaree ; Marquand and Quincy .. All of these names are recorded before 1728. A few Scotchmen, the prisoners of Dunbar, may have been landed in Boston in 1651, and been sent out to the iron-works; but, if such was the case, they did not leave a single " Mac" behind them in Braintree. In 1752 there was a small infusion of German blood,- "poor, suffering Palatines." But these people mostly went away ten years later to join more pros- perous communities of their own race at the eastward,

356

HISTORY OF NORFOLK COUNTY, MASSACHUSETTS.

and the Hardwicks (Hardwig), Brieslers (Briesner), then there was but small demand ; and this attempt and a few more only remained to perpetuate the soon shared the fate of the iron-works. The little capital ventured in it was lost. German face under Anglicized names. There were a certain number of negroes in the town,-sixty-six, But these were premature attempts at the intro- duction of strange industries. It was not so with ship-building. The dwellers along Quincy Bay, in common with all other sea-board Yankees, took nat- urally and kindly to the water, and from an early day the ship-yards throve at Braintree. In 1696 the " Unity" was launched at what is now Quincy Neck, and later the Haydens, Southers, and Josselyns were noted shipwrights. Their yards were at Bent's (now Quincy) Point, and there, in September, 1789, was launched the " Massachusetts," pierced for thirty- six guns, and intended for the Canton trade. This was supposed to be the largest ship, up to that time, built in the State. Her company for her first and only voyage from Quincy numbered seventy hands all told, forty-two of whom were seamen ; but her voyage was not a success, and she was sold in China to go under the Danish flag. But none the less, the Bent's Point yards in 1825 were prospering, and they con- tinued to prosper down to the days of Deacon George Thomas, who built clippers the names of which were famous in the California and China trade. Indeed, from force of habit apparently, Deacon Thomas went on building great wooden ships until he was more than fourscore years of age, and his country had ceased to boast a commercial marine. according to the census of 1765,-the descendants of slaves owned by the Quincys, Vassals, Apthorps, and Borlands; and in 1800 the vacant space made by the removal of an old stairway in the church was . by vote "appropriated for the use of the black people to sit in." In a few years more they had wholly disappeared. When, in 1792, the North Precinct of Braintree was set off as Quincy, the names appended to the petition were all English names,-names, nearly every one of which have ap- peared in the town-book for a century,-Cleverly, Newcomb, Brackett, Adams, Crane, Vesey, Spear, Savill, Bicknell, Quincy, Marsh, Beale, Glover, Crosby, Baxter, Sanders, Field, Faxon, Hayden, Bass, Tirrell, and Nightingale. They were Johns, Samuels, Ben- jamins, Fredericks, Daniels, and Ebenezers. Their wives were Marys, Anns, Elizas, with here and there a Mehitabel, a Patience, and an Abigail. Old, fa- miliar English patronymics all. An Irishman or an Irish name was as strange and as much a matter of wonderment as a Frenchman or a German, and more than an African or Indian. No mass was ever cele- brated in Old Braintree; and it may well be ques- tioned whether from the day when Sir Christopher Gardiner took flight in March, 1631, down to the year 1800 a single Roman Catholic ever dwelt in the The stone deposits of the town had, up to 1825, not been developed at all; but from that year the change dates. On behalf of the Bunker Hill Monu- ment Association, Gridley Bryant, of Scituate, then town. Indeed, when John Adams was writing his " Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law in Braintree" in 1765, he referred to a certain thing as being " as rare an appearance as a Roman Catholic, , bought a quarry in West Quincy, the stone of which -that is, as rare as a comet or an earthquake."

Nor had there as yet been anything to cause the influx of a new population. Even down to 1825 the industries of the town had not multiplied. It was still the old farming community already described, -a community made up of those who tilled the soil, and those who supplied the tillers' wants. More than a century and a half before an iron foundry had been established in "the Woods," as what is now West Quincy was called, but it had soon col- lapsed, and only beds of cinders and slag and old bits of petrified foundation on the banks of Furnace Brook marked where the experiment had failed. Even the tradition of it had died away, and as late as 1710 the region thereabout was the haunt of deer and the bear. Again, shortly after 1750, the poor refugees who settled at Germantown had sought to gain a living by making glass. But such glass as they made was of the coarsest description, for which even

had already been examined and approved by Solomon Willard, and which has since been known as the Bunker Hill Quarry. The fame of Quincy granite was now to spread far and wide. Not that the exist- ence and durable character of the stone had not long been known; but up to this time it had only been worked on the surface. The coarse, rough, glacier- tumbled boulders which lay scattered over the north and south commons had alone been used. King's Chapel was built of this material between 1749 and 1752, and later the famous old Hancock mansion on Beacon Hill. At that time they had so little con- ception of the extent of this syenite formation, that in Braintree much alarm was felt lest the use of the stone for buildings in other towns would exhaust the supply. For years the subject was discussed at each town-meeting, and new measures of ever-increasing stringency were devised to avert the threatened dearth. In 1753, immediately after

357

QUINCY.

King's Chapel was finished, a vote was passed for- bidding the removal of any more stones at all from the commons until otherwise ordered. If the drain went on unchecked there would not be enough stone in Braintree for the township's own use! The difficulty seems to have been that, with the tools then in use, they were unable to work into the rock. The King's Chapel stone, it is said, was broken into a degree of shape by letting large iron balls fall upon the heated blocks. At last, upon one memorable Sunday in 1803, there appeared at New- comb's Tavern, in the centre of the North Precinct, three men, who called for a dinner with which to properly celebrate a feat they had just successfully performed. The fear of the tithingman had not re- strained them, and they had split a large stone by the use of iron wedges. Their names were Josiah Bemis, George Stearns, and Michael Wild. It was indeed a notable event, for the crust of the syenite hills was broken.

Quarries were then opened, but at first only slowly and in a small way. The men did not yet know how to work the rock, nor had they the necessary tools and appliances. Such stone as was taken out was roughly dressed for use as door-steps, foundations, and gable walls. There were two problems still unsolved : one related to handling and dressing the rock, the other to its carriage. Both of these problems Willard and Bryant solved. Neither of these two remarkable men were Quincy born. Willard came of Maine stock transplanted to Petersham, in Worcester County ; and Bryant was of that Scituate family which seventy- five years before had furnished Braintree its active- minded minister. While Willard laid open the quarry and devised the drills, the derricks, and the shops, Bryant was building a railway.

This famous structure was an event not only in the history of Quincy, but in that of the United States, and in every school history it is mentioned as the most noticeable incident in the administration of the younger Adams. In Braintree a feebler effort in a similar direction had already been made, but without success ; for in 1824, Joshua Torry, an enterprising citizen of the town, had planned a canal from the neighboring tidal basin nearly to the centre of the town. A committee reported strongly in its favor, and work was even begun upon it; but it proved too expensive an enterprise for that time, and had to be abandoned. Still the idea bore fruit ; for the next spring another and more feasible project was devised of converting the old Town River, as it was called, into a canal up to the point where John Adams, as surveyor of highways, had, in 1760, built across it

his historical bridge. It was an attempt at slack-water navigation. A charter for a joint-stock company was secured, and the people went into the project with spirit. In 1826 the work was finished at an outlay of ten thousand dollars. The scheme did not prove a success. The canal, it is true, was used ; but the busi- ness afforded no profit, and years afterwards the affairs of the company were wound up with a total loss of its capital.

The Granite Railway was both a more famous and a more successful scheme. Its projector, Gridley Bryant, has given his account of how he came to construct it and of the obstacles he had to over- come :

" I had, previous to [the laying of the corner-stone of Bunker Hill Monument] purchased a stone-quarry (the funds being furnished by Dr. John C. Warren) for the express purpose of procuring the granite for constructing this monument. This quarry was in Quincy, nearly four miles from water-carriage. This suggested to me the idea of a railroad (the Manchester and Liverpool Railroad being in contemplation at this time, but was not begun until the spring following) ; accordingly, in the fall of 1825 I consulted Thomas H. Perkins, William Sullivan, Amos Lawrence, Isaac P. Davis, and David Moody, all of Boston, in reference to it. These gentlemen thought the project visionary and chimerical; but, being anxious to aid the Bunker Hill Monument, consented that I might see what could be done. I awaited the meeting of our Legislature in the winter of 1825-26, and after every delay and obstruction that could be thrown in the way, I finally obtained a charter, although there was great opposition in the House. The questions were asked, ' What do we know about railroads? Who ever heard of such a thing ? Is it right to take people's land for a project that no one knows anything about ? We have corporations enough already !' Such and similar objections were made, and various restrictions were imposed ; but it finally passed by a small majority only. Un- favorable as the charter was, it was admitted that it was ob- tained by my exertions ; but it was owing to the munificence and public spirit of Colonel T. H. Perkins that we were in- debted for the whole enterprise. None of the first-named gen- tlemen ever paid any assessments, and the whole stock finally fell into the hands of Colonel Perkins. . . . I surveyed several routes from the quarry purchased (called the Bunker Hill Quarry) to the nearest tide-water, and finally the present lo- cation was decided upon. I commenced the work on the first day of April, 1826, and on the seventh day of October follow- ing the first train of cars passed over the whole length of the road."

At the time Bryant's work excited an almost un- equaled interest throughout the country. It was, in fact, a pioneer American undertaking, the originator of which had closely studied that English railway literature which was then coming into existence. Although Stephenson had already, in a rude way, in- troduced locomotive steam-power on the Stockton and Darlington road, Bryant made no attempt at anything of that sort. Indeed, had he done so he would have ruined his enterprise. His views were confined to horse-power, and he built an improved tramway rather

358

HISTORY OF NORFOLK COUNTY, MASSACHUSETTS.

than a modern railroad. The really memorable thing about it was his ingenuity in devising the appliances necessary to its successful operation. These were very remarkable, including as they did the switch, the portable derrick, the turn-table, and the movable truck for the eight-wheel railroad car. All these contrivances subsequently passed into general use ; and the movable truck having six years later (in 1834) been patented by other parties, became the subject of a litigation which occupied the courts for five years and cost, it is said, some $250,000. Though the claim of Bryant as its inventor was sustained, he had no legal right to royalty on its use, nor did he ever receive anything from it. He died quite poor in 1867.

The Granite Railway, including its branches, was four miles in length, and cost fifty thousand dollars. It began at the quarry end with an inclined plane, by means of which eighty-four feet vertical fall was here accomplished in three hundred and fifteen feet of gradual descent. The road then dropped gently down to tide-water level by grades of sixty-six, thirteen, and twenty-six feet to the mile. As the traffic was all in the direction of these grades, single horses could of course move with ease just as heavy loads as the structure would bear; the only difficulties being to retard the loaded cars going down and to draw the unloaded cars back. The road was constructed of stone sleepers, or ties, eight feet apart, upon which were laid longitudinal wooden rails, protected by strap-iron plates three inches wide and one-fourth of an inch thick. The wooden rails were subsequently replaced by stone. This railway was operated, always by horse-power, for about forty years. At last, it having then been for a time in disuse, its franchise was purchased by the Old Colony Railroad Company. The ancient structure was completely demolished and a modern railroad was built on the right of way. This was formally opened for traffic on Oct. 9, 1871, forty-five years and two days after the original open- ing in 1826. There is a certain historical fitness in the fact that, through the incorporation of the Gran- ite Railway into the Old Colony Railroad, the line which connects Plymouth with Boston has become the original railroad line in America.

After 1825 the granite business of Quincy devel- oped rapidly. Three years later the old 1732 meeting- house in Quincy gave place to that more modern struc- ture which is still the central building in the town, the large monolith columns of which mark the ad- vance which the Quincy stone-cutters had then al- ready made. In the same year the Tremont House in Boston was built ; the present United States Court-

House, then the Masonic Temple, followed in 1831, and the Court Street Court-House four years later ; then came the Boston Custom-House, begun in 1837 and completed in 1849, with its thirty monolith col- umns, each forty-two tons in weight. As they were finished these were carried to Boston over the Plym- outh road, for the turnpike bridges would not support the weight ; and as the carts made specially to carry them, drawn by a long train of oxen and horses, passed slowly through the town, they were for years objects of deep popular interest and local pride.

It is needless to go on enumerating the buildings thereafter constructed of Quincy granite. For years it was regarded as the best known material for con- struction, and it was chiseled into the most delicate shapes. A new school of taste then grew up which saw that the stone was not only hard and cold, as well as durable, but that it was wont to outlive its useful- ness. The great Boston fire of 1872 showed also that, growing brittle when exposed to heat, it would shatter under streams of water. A change accord- ingly came about. The stone passed out of use for architectural display, and was adopted in monumental work. At the present time nearly three-quarters of the Quincy granite dressed is used in cemeteries ; and there is something about it, whether it be hardness or durability or its coldness of color, which seems to make it specially appropriate for these modern cities of the dead.

Meanwhile, the quarry business speedily revolu- tionized the town. Its influence was everywhere felt,-in habits, and modes of life and thought, and in politics. One by one the old traditions gave way. Business was no longer done as formerly. Firms grew up possessing large means and employing many laborers, and a steady tide both of wealth and popula- tion set in. As compared with the figures of similar growth which has gone on during the same time at the great commercial centres of the country, the fig- ures representing the growth of the Quincy granite business are not large. Boston and St. Louis, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco have accustomed the minds and eyes of modern Americans to indus- trial strides of a wholly different scale. These cities deal in workmen by the thousand and in products by the million. Against such exhibits no New England town can have anything to show which would cause surprise. The figures amount at most to the modest statistics of a prosperous trade. It is so with Quincy granite. In the hard, slow work of producing it no large fortunes have been made, no crowded commu- nities have grown up. On the eastern slope of the Blue Hill range, where in 1825 the Milton and

359

QUINCY.

Quincy woods still stood, there is now a village con- taining a population larger than was the population of Quincy then. The creaking of the derrick, the blows of the sledge, and the click of the hammer are every- where heard from the week-day morning to its night ; and from year's end to year's end the blocks of split and chiseled syenite pass out in a steady stream. Yet in the great aggregates of modern life it all represents but the labor of a few hundred men, and the well- earned return on the not large capital of a dozen en- terprising firms.1

But stone working was not the only new industry which about 1830 began to make its influence felt in Quincy. For more than a century and a quarter there had then been one tannery in the town, and at a later day there were several. The earlier tanneries were strange, primitive establishments. The vats were oblong boxes sunk in the ground close to the edge of the town brook at the point where it crossed the main street. They were without either covers or outlets. The beam-house was an open shed; within which old, worn-out horses circled round while the bark was crushed at the rate of half a cord or so a day by alternate wooden and stone wheels, moving in a circular trough fifteen feet in diameter. In the early years of the last century the prices were as primitive as the methods ; for while green hides sold for three pence and dry hides for sixpence, the man- ufactured article brought but twelve pence. Then and long afterwards the dress, especially of the work- ing classes, was largely composed of leather, out of which as a material leggings and breeches, coats and shirts, were made, as well as shoes and gloves. Working in leather was therefore one of the common vocations in all New England towns.

Consequently, as markets and means of communica- tion developed, it was natural that the Quincy people should drift into shoemaking. They did so as mat- ter of course, and as early as 1795 the business had taken root. Noah Curtis was its founder, and in that year he made nine hundred and fifty-one pair of shoes, paying for such as were hand-sewed two dollars a dozen pair. Not until 1822 was the Southern trade opened. By 1830 the Curtises had built up a large and profitable business, and the census of seven years later showed that in 1837 no less than forty-six thousand pair of boots and shoes were manufactured in the town. In 1856 the Curtises alone made forty- eight thousand pair of boots, giving employment to

four hundred hands. For a time it seemed not im- probable that Quincy might vie with Brockton, Lynn, or Marlborough as a great centre of this industry ; but the war of the Rebellion dealt a heavy blow to its trade, and the rapid development elsewhere of ma- chine-made work left the old-fashioned Quincy meth- ods far behind. Accordingly, after 1860 the business as a whole did not grow in Quincy as it grew else- where.

Nevertheless, the presence in the town of this in- dustry, together with that of stone-cutting, greatly influenced its character. The population underwent a radical change. A new race, of different blood and religion, had come in. The native New Englander seemed to pass out of the fields into the shops, and men of foreign blood took his place. In 1830 the Congregational meeting-house, though then called " the Stone Temple," and the Episcopal Church were still the only buildings in the town in which religious services were held. Mass had once or twice been observed in dwelling-houses. In 1831 a Universalist society was organized, and in 1832 they built a church. In 1834 another church was built by an Evangelical Congregational society ; and a third by the Methodist Episcopals in 1838. The Roman Catholics were still without a building. There were now many of that faith in Quincy, but they were emigrants and they were poor ; the narrow but traditional prejudice against them and their faith, also, was strong and hard to be outgrown. About the year 1839 an occasional Mass was cele- brated in the small West Quincy school-house; but those were the years when, under the combined Native American and anti-Catholic feeling, Massachusetts was in a dangerous mood. The Mount Benedict Monastery in Charlestown had not very long before been destroyed by a mob; and now in West Quincy those of the district who held other religious views expelled the Catholics from the school-house. For- tunately, better counsels and a kinder feeling prevailed, and after a short time the services were renewed there ; nor were they again disturbed. In the autumn of 1842 St. Mary's Church in West Quincy was con- secrated, and eleven years later, in 1853, St. John's Church was finished, standing almost on the spot where the Episcopal Church, removed twenty-one years before, had stood for a century. Another Catholic chapel was erected in the North District of the town in 1874. In 1842 there were about one hundred Catholics in Quincy; in 1884 there were more worshipers in the three Catholic churches than in all the other eight churches of the town com- bined.

If the multiplication of sects and churches after

1 By the State census of 1875 there appeared to be thirty- seven establishments in Quincy in the granite business in all its branches. They represented a capital of 8588,200, a yearly product valued at $775,884, and employed 617 men.

360

HISTORY OF NORFOLK COUNTY, MASSACHUSETTS.

1830 was considerable, that of schools was still more so. In the matter of education the state of things had, indeed, then become such that it was obvious a change of system must be made. The old centre grammar school could no longer be made to suffice. Its condition and methods have already been de- scribed, and in 1827 the school committee, of which

school-houses. The neighborhood school system was thus definitely fixed upon.

That this should have been so was in some respects unfortunate, but it was probably necessary. It was a mistake naturally incident to government through town-meeting. Town-meetings are not inspired. Having fortunately no infinite wisdom to guide and Thomas Greenleaf was then chairman, reported the | dwarf them, they go stolidly on, working their way whole number of children in all the schools as four in perfectly human and commonplace fashion through almost infinite waste and failure to a certain degree of success. The process is slow and expensive. Ac- cordingly, the policy as respects its schools fixed on by Quincy in the town-meeting of March 8, 1831, remained its policy for over forty years. From an educational point of view it was altogether wrong. The school was near the child's home, but at the school the child learned the least possible. The grading of scholars was out of the question, and in- competent teachers wasted their time trying to im- part a little knowledge to many children of various ages. A more wasteful system could hardly have been devised. From the money point of view it did not cost much, for in 1827 the annual appropria- tion was $3 for each scholar, and the neighborhood system only increased it in 1831 to $3.67. In 1840 it had fallen to $2.89, and it was only $3.81 in 1850. Not until 1868 did the annual cost per scholar in- crease to over $10. The town had then grown up to the neighborhood system, for its population was hundred and sixty-one. Of these, twenty-five only- nineteen boys and six girls-were over fourteen years of age, so early even at that late period did the schooling stop. In order to relieve the centre of an excessive attendance, two winter schools under mas- ters-called in the reports " men's schools," to dis- tinguish them from the old dames' schools for chil- dren-had been opened, the one at Penn's Hill, or the South District, the other at Bent's Point, or the Oldfields District. This measure had failed to bring the wished-for relief. The increase of scholars from the other districts was such that the centre school throughout the winter had an average attendance of one hundred and forty. Crowded into a single school- room, these seven-score children of all ages were taught by one master, who was paid five hundred dollars a year, aided by one female assistant, who was paid one hundred and twenty dollars. Under these circumstances the committee of 1827 suggested, not " for immediate adoption, but for deliberate consid- eration," the idea of building a second school-house. | about 7000, and there were 1534 children in the schools. They had for years been more or less graded, and a somewhat better instruction was pos- sible.

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 76

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