USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Winchester > History of Winchester, Massachusetts > Part 11
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The most distinguished native of Winchester territory to serve
1 Of date February 11, 1780, Wyman MSS.
2 Wyman MSS.
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
in the Revolution, perhaps the most distinguished of all time, was Colonel John Brooks, who afterward became major general of the State Militia and Governor of Massachusetts from 1816 to 1823. John Brooks was born in the house built by his grandfather Ebenezer at Symmes Corner in 1715, as was his half-brother Caleb, who like- wise made a name for himself on Revolutionary battlefields and gained the rank of captain there. John displayed unusual abilities from boyhood as well as a taste for military life, for he organized his playmates into a little company and drilled them with the strictness and severity of a veteran sergeant. His mother, ambitious that he should make use of his talents, got Dr. Tufts, the physician at Medford, to take the boy under his care at fourteen and educate him in the practice of medicine. In 1773, his seven years of appren- ticeship over, he became the physician at Reading. His professional duties were however interrupted by the outbreak of the Revolution. Brooks, young as he was, had been elected captain of the Reading minutemen. He served with his company at Concord and Bunker Hill, and made so good an impression on his superiors that he was given a commission in the Continental Army.
He served throughout the war, rising to the command of a regiment. He bore an honorable part at the battles of Long Island and White Plains, and the gallantry of himself and his regiment - the Eighth Massachusetts - at Saratoga was in no small degree responsible for Burgoyne's defeat there. Colonel Brooks was with Washington at Valley Forge, and won the confidence and affection of the commander-in-chief, who assigned him to assist Baron Steuben as inspector general in restoring and improving the dis- cipline of the army. At Newburgh in 1783 he still further endeared himself to General Washington by helping to frustrate the con- spiracy among certain officers to overthrow the Continental Con- gress and set up a kind of military dictatorship. '
After the war he returned to Medford and to the practice of his profession. But he was soon and often thrown into public life. President Washington appointed him United States marshal of Massachusetts; President Adams made him a major general in the United States army when a war with France seemed not unlikely in 1798. He was sent to the legislature several times; was adjutant general of the State during the War of 1812-though he,
GOVERNOR JOHN BROOKS
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WINCHESTER IN THE REVOLUTION
like other Federalists, opposed it - and ended his career with seven successive elections to the governorship.
The old house in which Governor Brooks was born was in later years associated with the name of another Revolutionary veteran, Captain John Le Bosquet, who married Mary Brooks - niece of the
THE BROOKS-LE BOSQUET HOUSE
governor-to whom the ownership of the house had descended. The house, which stood near the present corner of Main Street and Everell Road, was familiar to Winchester folk as the Le Bosquet house until it was torn down some fifty years ago. Captain Le Bosquet - his title was not a military one but gained on the high seas, where he long commanded a merchant square rigger -- joined the Revolutionary army at Cambridge, during the siege of Boston in 1775, when he was only fourteen. He was at first a fifer, but he soon discarded his instrument for a musket and served an enlistment of three years, which led him to Ticonderoga, Saratoga and Valley Forge.
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
He took to the sea after his discharge and went as cabin boy on a sailing vessel. His ship was captured by the British and taken as a prize into Halifax. Lying in the harbor, the American prisoners broke out of the hold while the captain of the prize crew was alone on deck, his men having been sent up the river to refill the water butts. It was no trick to subdue the officer and stow him away safely below. The Americans, among whom of course was young Le Bosquet, made their escape in a small boat and headed for Boston. But coming upon a larger craft, a sloop or "market-boat," outside the harbor, they boarded it, obliged the skipper to make an exchange of boats, and sailed away southward; they were lucky enough to reach Boston without mishap. Captain Le Bosquet fol- lowed the sea for many years, trading principally in the West Indies or to France. He witnessed the bloodshed of the French Revolution and made his own comment on what he saw by hanging a picture of Robespierre in his ship's cabin and drawing a brushful of red paint across its throat. During the War of 1812 he was again captured by a British man-of-war and kept in confinement for more than a year. The last twenty years of his life he passed continuously in Win- chester, and he was one of the most familiar figures on the streets of the little village, walking with a cane and limping somewhat, the result of a slight paralytic shock. He died in 1844, and the house and farm, after his wife's death a few years later, became Symmes property once more. It was bought by Marshall Symmes; the house remained standing until the widening of Main Street in 1881 ren- dered its removal desirable.1
Among the Winchester volunteers who saw Revolutionary service was Philemon Wright, who in later life was the first settler of what is today Ottawa, the capital city of Canada. Philemon's father, Thomas Wright, lived in a house long since disappeared, at the corner of High and Ridge streets, which was, indeed, locally known as Wright's Corner. After the Revolution was over and his father had died, Philemon Wright continued to live in the old house for some years. The grave of his little daughter Nabby, dead in 1792, was long to be seen near by. Philemon became interested in fur trading and went often to visit Canada to purchase furs. He saw and coveted the rich land along the Ottawa River, 1 Article by Luther R. Symmes, Winchester Press, Vol. II, No. 7.
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WINCHESTER IN THE REVOLUTION
which was then in the heart of the wilderness. He procured a large grant from the Canadian government, and in 1800 sold his farm at Wright's Corner and with his brother and two neighbors named Merrifield travelled north by sleigh to establish himself on his new property. Josiah Locke purchased the Wright farm and a few years later built the large house with brick ends which still stands on High Street.
Philemon Wright cleared his land on the Ottawa, built a mill to grind his grain (for until he did so he and all the settlers along the Ottawa had to carry their grain all the way to Montreal to be ground) and became a man of consequence. He made something of a fortune in timber and was before his death a member of the Parliament of Quebec. The city of Ottawa stands today as part of his original grant, though it was a part he had disposed of long before.1
Enough has hardly been made of the difficulties of life under which the people of our own town labored, along with those of every other state and town in the country, during the closing years of the Revolution and for ten years thereafter. These difficulties were the result of the enormous financial cost of the war (for a nation relatively so poor) and the entire collapse of the existing monetary system. Taxes were exorbitant when the means of the people at large are considered. In the year 1780 no less than eight dif- ferent taxes were assessed on the people of Woburn, including of course the residents of this part of the old town, and these in addition to the regular town tax, which was formerly the chief tax to be collected. They all amounted to more than $40,000 in "lawful money" or coin and they were divided among not many more than three hundred taxpayers, almost all of them farmers, who saw little enough money at any time. And so small was the value of the paper currency that the taxes for this year, 1780, expressed in paper, amounted to no less than a million and a quarter dollars!
Under these conditions prices rose to such alarming heights that an attempt was made to "peg" them by legal action, and in this town it was enacted that these prices should prevail:
1 See article in Winchester Star, May 25, 1899.
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
"West India Flip, 12 shillings a mug New England rum, 10 shillings a mug A common dinner, 15 shillings Oats, 45 shillings a bushel Day labor 36 shillings a day Shoeing a horse all round £3, 12S.
A team carrying a ton weight 18 shillings a mile
Carpenters or masons, 56 shillings a day Men's shoes, 18 dollars a pair
Women's best leather shoes, 84 shillings For making a pair of shoes, 48 shillings"
And so on. Anyone who violated these regulations by charging more than was allowed, should be "accounted an enemy of his country, have his name published in the newspapers of Boston, and be cut off from all intercourse and dealings with other inhab- itants of the town." As usually happens, these man-made resolu- tions proved impotent in the face of economic forces. Prices continued to rise, and there is no record that anyone was ever punished in the manner prescribed above. At the end of the war paper money was worth so little that the town of Woburn directed its treasurer to "dispose" of all the bills in the treasury, provided he could get a dollar in coin for as little as a hundred and fifty dollars in paper.
Financial worries bore so heavily on everybody that there was a good deal of quiet sympathy with those farmers in the western part of the State who lost all patience, and attributing their distress to the government, flamed out into the insurrection called Shays's Rebellion in 1786. The town of Woburn actually voted "not to give any aid or assistance" to the State in recruiting men to put down the insurrection," and "not to make any pay or allowance to any persons that hired or went of their own accord" on such service.1
But in spite of difficulties and hardships the sturdy people of our neighborhood came successfully out of them. By prudence and economy in public and private affairs, by working a little harder and pulling the belt in a little tighter, they won through until the formation of a solid government under the Constitution of 1788
1 Woburn Records, Vol. XI, page 67; Vol. XI, page 154.
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WINCHESTER IN THE REVOLUTION
and the establishment of a sound and stable currency, which made industry and enterprise again profitable, encouraged thrift and savings, and gave a certain and dependable value to the wages of labor and the products of the soil or the workshop.
Two interesting evidences of the temper of the times are supplied by the records of action taken in the town meetings of Woburn. One was the adoption of instructions to Captain Samuel Belknap - whom we have often met in this narrative and who was the town's representative in the General Court in 1783. He was instructed (with courteous reference to his well-known "recti- tude of conduct, and his firmness against persuasion through flattery, intimidation by menace, or corruption by sinister views or personal emoluments") never to consent to the resettlement in Massachusetts of any who had been hostile to the Revolution, "whether known as Tories, Conspirators or Refugees." These men were not to be admitted again to the country, or compensated for the property they had abandoned when the war began.1 The instructions (drafted perhaps by Colonel Loammi Baldwin) are rhetorical, but full of fire. They leave us in no doubt concerning the sentiments of the patriot forefathers toward the Tories.
The other episode occurred during the discussion in town meeting of the new constitution for the State of Massachusetts, to replace that under which the colony had been governed. The meeting accepted the constitution in great part, but voted that there should be no sort of property qualification for the suffrage, and - mark this - that all ordained ministers of the gospel and all attorneys at law should be excluded from the State legislature! 2 This was the expression of the dislike of a stubborn farming popu- lation for being governed by the cleverness of professional men. Ministers have not, as a matter of fact, often offered themselves as candidates for political office; but how different would be the composition of our twentieth century legislatures if the prejudices of the Woburn and Winchester farmers had prevailed, and the legal profession been barred - for better or worse - from seats therein!
1 Town Records, Vol. X, page 294.
2 Woburn Records, Vol. X, page 24.
CHAPTER IX
WINCHESTER IN 1798. THE MIDDLESEX CANAL
IN 1798, on the occasion of the imposition of a direct tax on the people of the states by the United States government, Massa- chusetts required each of its towns to survey its territory and pre- pare a map thereof, and to make a record of all the real estate then subject to assessment. The record of Woburn real estate, still pre- served among the Wyman collection of manuscripts, makes it pos- sible to get a very correct idea of what the settlement that was to become Winchester looked like at the end of the eighteenth cen- tury.
There were, it appears, about thirty-five houses within the boundaries of Winchester as we know it, which means a popula- tion of not much above two hundred. The families who occupied them were, with but two or three exceptions, descendants of the men who had settled Woburn one hundred and fifty years ago; most of them had lived for four, five or even six generations on the very land on which their houses stood. There were seven Rich- ardson houses, five Symmes houses, three Gardner houses, three Wymans, one or possibly two Carters, two Lockes, one Converse and two Johnsons.1
Among these families were three comparatively recent comers concerning whom a few words may be said. About the middle of the century, Hezekiah Wyman, a distant cousin of the Wymans we have seen settled on the east side of Main Street, came from old Woburn to live on Plain or Cambridge Street on the West Side. We have already made his acquaintance; he was the famous "white horseman" whose exploits on the day of Lexington and Concord
1 The list includes Ebenezer Brooks, Capt. Joseph Brown, Simon or Samuel Carter, "The Dean house," Henry, Edward and John Gardner, Benjamin Converse, Simeon Gould, W. C. Hunt, Frederick and Francis Johnson, Darius Ingraham, Thomas Hutchinson, Jonathan and Josiah Locke, Edmund Parker, Jacob Pierce, Daniel Reed, Col. Bill Russell, Jonathan, Joseph, Caleb, Jeduthan, Abel, Zechariah and Rebecca (widow of Benjamin) Richardson, Caleb Swan, John, Josiah, William, Samuel and Zechariah Symmes, Samuel Thompson, Daniel, Paul and Nathaniel Wyman.
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WINCHESTER IN 1798
have been related. His house was in the old Johnson neighborhood, not far from the corner of Cambridge and Wildwood streets, but on the opposite side of the way. He bought and owned a great part of the level land on which so much of the West Side is now built. That land was often called Wyman Plains in after years. After Hezekiah's death it was owned by his son Daniel, and by his grand- sons, Marshall, William and George, influential citizens all, whose family name has been perpetuated by a succession of schoolhouses
1
THE THADDEUS PARKER HOUSE
on the West Side, the most recent of which stands today on Church Street, below Fletcher Street.
Another resident of Winchester territory who had come so lately that his house was described in the 1798 list as "almost new" was Edmund Parker. His family were numerous along Cambridge Street in the direction of the Four Corners, "the Parker neighbor- hood" it was called. But Edmund was the first of the name to cross what was later to be the Winchester line. His house stood on the southeasterly corner of Pond and Cambridge streets, and was long a familiar landmark in that part of the town. His elder son
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
Edmund later built the house which still stands on the other corner of Pond Street. His younger son Thaddeus, who followed his father's trade of wheelwright, lived in the old house till his death in 1889 at the age of 95 - "the oldest man in Winchester," it was said. Not many years later the house caught fire and burned to the ground. The cellar hole is still to be seen on the high bank beside the road.
The third family of which I speak was that of the Swans, who lived in Richardson's Row, near the present corner of Nelson Street. They were not related to that other family of Swans who lived on the farm now occupied by the Winchester Country Club and one of whose members bought the Edward Gardner house on Cambridge Street, already referred to as probably the oldest house now standing in our town. Caleb Swan was from Charlestown. His father's house was one of those burned during the British bom- bardment of Bunker Hill. His mother was Joanna Richardson of the old Winchester family of that name, and it was in consequence of his inheritance of a large amount of land here that Caleb Swan moved to Richardson's Row. This Swan family was remarkable for its taste for the profession of medicine. One of Caleb's brothers was a physician; his nephew, Dr. Daniel Swan, was for forty years the beloved physician of Medford. Caleb, his son, was the Dr. Caleb Swan long settled in Easton, Massachusetts, and all four of Dr. Caleb's sons were physicians likewise. The family long ago disappeared from Winchester.
It is interesting in looking over the real estate record of 1798 to see how many houses are set down as having "shoe-making shops" connected with them. For a good many years, beginning about 1770 and lasting until 1840 or even later, the making of shoes was a very thriving industry in South Woburn, as the Win- chester end of the town now began to be called. There was, of course, no factory in the modern sense of the word. Shoemaking machinery was yet to be invented. The leather was cut, the soles shaped, the leather fitted to the last, and the soles and uppers pegged or stitched together by hand. The work was necessarily slow, and could give employment to a considerable number of per- sons. Woburn was already known as a "leather town"; tanning and currying leather was carried on there back in the eighteenth
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WINCHESTER IN 1798
century, and it is not surprising that the business of turning the leather into shoes flourished in the same neighborhood. Woburn, South Woburn (Winchester), and Stoneham were all full of the little domestic shops. So, too, were Lynn, Reading, Haverhill, Amesbury and other Massachusetts towns. Women as well as men found employment; they did much of the stitching and bind- ing at home. Lucy Larcom, the New England poetess, has painted in words a little picture of such a worker, Hannah, whom she sees "at the window, binding shoes."
The shoe shops here in Winchester were usually small build- ings, perhaps twelve feet square, standing beside, or in the rear of, the owner's house. One who learned his trade in one of them has described them for us. "The shoemaker had a low seat made of plank, on one end of which he sat with his tools at his right hand. There were a lapstone and hammer to pound the soles hard and smooth, a knife, an awl, a long stick to polish the bottoms by fric- tion, a shoulder-stick to smooth the heels and the sides of the soles, paste, gum, flax thread, and wooden pegs to hold the shoes together. A day's work was from morning until ten at night. From four to eight pairs could be made in a day; the usual wage was a dollar a day. At night a single tin or glass lamp, filled with whale oil, hung from overhead and swayed in front of the workmen."1
Sometimes the owner worked alone; more often he employed two or three young men who worked with him. Sometimes the shoemakers supplied their own materials and took the finished shoes into Boston to sell to the wholesale dealers; sometimes they worked on contract for stores that dealt in especially fine custom- made shoes. Sometimes the Winchester shoemakers did nothing else; sometimes they worked a farm as well and worked at their trade at odd times. Altogether the shoe industry must have brought quite a little money into the village; it was indeed the chief source of ready money for our Winchester folk a century and more ago.
Mr. Richardson, from whose recollections I have quoted, has left us a surprising list of the little shoe shops that were in operation in what is now Winchester, one hundred years ago. He names thirty-five, and when it is remembered that there were less than
1 N. A. Richardson's Scrapbook. Article printed in the Winchester Star.
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
seventy houses in the village then, it will be seen to what an extent the community depended on the trade of St. Crispin. Richardson's Row was lined with shops; a dozen members of this family are mentioned as having been shoemakers at one time or another dur- ing this period. Among them were Deacon Calvin, Deacon Nathan, and Deacon Luther Richardson. Twin brothers, Caleb and Joshua Richardson, sons of Joseph, who built the gristmill on the Horn Pond Brook where the Cutter mill later stood, made shoes on Main Street, opposite Swanton Street in the old house, occupied until late years by Mr. George Stratton. Joshua was killed - in 1807 - by the collapse of a house frame on which he was working. The house was being built by Major Clapp of Woburn. Four men died as a result of the falling of the frame, and many others were badly hurt. The accident made a great stir in and around Woburn; it was many years before people ceased to talk of it.
Job Miller, a Revolutionary veteran, and his son-in-law John Eaton had a shop near Prince Avenue. Paul Wyman, the store- keeper of the town, had one; so did Samuel B. White (later Colonel White), Joseph and Horatio Symmes and many more. The old Sharon house, which still stands near Black Horse Terrace on Main Street, was originally Calvin Richardson, Jr.'s shoe shop, before it was built over into a dwelling house. On the west side of the town Edmund Parker had a good-sized shop on Cambridge Street opposite Pond Street where an old blacksmith shop now stands. Colonel Bill Russell, another Revolutionary veteran, who lived in the house - really much older than it appears - at the corner of Calumet Road and Cambridge Street, eked out his farm income by making shoes, and so did several members of the Wyman family farther up the road. But enough of this, lest our list grow more tiresome than Homer's catalogue of ships! .
One building which did not appear on the tax list of 1798 deserves mention nevertheless. It was the schoolhouse on Rich- ardson's Row, near Harvard Street, the first schoolhouse ever to be built on Winchester soil. It was erected in 1794 at a cost of £28 17s. 6d., the town of Woburn having awakened to its respon- sibilities and appropriated money to build schoolhouses in nine separate districts of the town. Winchester, as we know it, fell into two of these districts. The Richardson's Row school, which
THE SYMMES HOUSE AT SYMMES CORNER
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WINCHESTER IN 1798
drew scholars from East Woburn as well, was placed as stated; the West Side school, completed at the same time, was located on Cambridge Street in what is still a part of Woburn; it accumu- lated pupils from the Four Corners in Woburn to the Charlestown line at Church Street.
These schoolhouses were, of course, primitive academies of learning. What they were like we may learn from the recollections of Rev. Leander Thompson, the Woburn antiquarian, who learned his ABCs in a similar school in North Woburn. "The school," he says, "was twenty feet square and eight feet high. On one side there was a small porch, and two small windows were on each of the four sides. The house was unpainted, dirty, dingy. Close by the door, on the right, stood the teacher's high desk. No maps, no pictures, no blackboards. No globe and no bell were on the teacher's desk; instead a very significant ruler and a well-remem- bered rod.
"In the center of the room stood a large shaky 'box' stove, generally kept stuffed with wood. Often it was red hot; the stove pipe which went straight up and out through the roof was then quite musical. Immediately round the stove and only a few feet from it, on three sides, was a very narrow plank seat for the youngest scholars. The seat had a high perpendicular back ... and nothing in front on which to rest hand or head. Sometimes the poor little sufferers, exposed to the suffocating heat, rolled from their seats to the floor, to the great amusement of the more wakeful scholars.
"Just above and closely connected with this 'little seat' was another (three sided) row of seats with a plank desk, if so it could be called, for the middling scholars. These seats had no backs .... Behind them and higher still were the seats of the oldest pupils - often in winter, young men from eighteen to twenty-one years of age - with its continuous desk against the wall of the house. The occupants usually sat facing the wall, their backs turned to the rest of the school. Their benches had no backs unless, for relief or mischief, a scholar turned about, placing his back against the desk and resting his feet on the 'middlers' seat in provoking proximity to their persons. ... None of these plank seats were over seven and one-half inches wide."1
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