USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Winchester > History of Winchester, Massachusetts > Part 15
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Another well-known Bostonian who lived in Winchester in the "early days" was Charles P. Curtis, Jr., whose house was on the southern shore of Wedge Pond near the foot of Curtis Street, which bears his name. It is the house, still standing, which was later known as the Firth house. Mr. Curtis was a lawyer of distinction, with his offices in Boston, and a relative of Benjamin R. Curtis, once Justice of the Supreme Court.
Still another newcomer to our town in the forties was Charles Kimball, a successful school-teacher in Boston, who proved to have a talent for political life and became at last sheriff of Middlesex County. He bought the house on Cambridge Street at the corner of the present Calumet Road, then owned by Loring Emerson. Mr. Emerson built himself another house on the opposite corner; it was later moved across the street and still stands at No. 130 Cambridge Street.
Other men whose residence in Winchester dates from this period were Charles Goddard, who first built on the sightly hillock where the house of the late D. N. Skillings stands, nearly opposite the Town Hall, Charles Pressey, H. K. Stanton,2 Joseph Shattuck, Charles McIntire, John A. Bolles, a distinguished lawyer who was in later years Secretary of the Commonwealth,3 Zebediah Abbott, R. C. P. Freeman, 4 A. H. Hayward and David Youngman.
None of these men had, of course, any sentimental attachment
1 From 1860 to 1888 he was organizing secretary of eight national Democratic Conventions.
2 Mr. Stanton used his initials only; his very remarkable name was Hatevil Killdevil Stanton. The Puritans themselves never devised a more singular one.
3 His house was on Dix Street, near the entrance to Glengarry.
4 His house was on the estate later owned by the late Edwin Ginn.
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to the old town of Woburn, of which this community had for so many years been a part. This same thing was true by this time of more than half the population of the village. There were sound reasons too why a new town should be created; South Woburn was growing fast and promised to grow faster still. It was the center of a district that had an individuality of its own, but which, strangely enough, lay in three different towns. The Symmes Corner neigh- borhood was within the limits of Medford; the southern part of the West Side below Church Street, after two centuries as a part of the ancient town of Charlestown, was now attached to the new town of West Cambridge, later named Arlington. The boundary lines of the three towns met at or near the corner of Bacon and Church streets. It was desirable - highly desirable - that this region should have unity of development and government; but it could have that only if it was formed into a new town.
There was, moreover, a growing feeling of hostility between the town of Woburn and its expanding southern extremity. A variety of incidents contributed to this end. Perhaps the first one, in point of time, was the wrangle over the "Surplus Fund." This fund was Woburn's share of the ostentatious distribution of money from the national treasury which Andrew Jackson ordered when, for the first and last time in history, the Government found itself with no national debt and a surplus on hand. Massachusetts got its share from Washington and offered to divide it among the sepa- rate towns. In Woburn there was a long struggle over what should be done with the money; for several years following 1837 the town meetings were torn wide open by the issue. Conservative citizens wanted it spent to pay the expenses of the town, and so to reduce taxes; but a very strong party demanded that the money be dis- tributed in equal shares among the voters.
The leader of this party was Jason Richardson, a strong-willed man who prided himself on being a friend of the people. He was for most of his life a resident of old Woburn but he comes momen- tarily into Winchester history, for it was he who built - and for a time occupied - the stone house on Forest Street now the residence of Mr. Gregory. Mr. Richardson was a teamster by occupation, and in the course of his travels about the country he collected the stones from which, when he had enough, he constructed the inter-
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esting old house. He was a firebrand in the town meeting, and kindled blazes of loyalty and of enmity alike by his rough eloquence. South Woburn, always conservative in sentiment, was opposed to his proposal to distribute the surplus money among the voters; the brothers Cutter, Deacons Thompson and Johnson, and Samuel S. Richardson were among the most determined of his opponents. In the end they carried the day, not he; but the long struggle left them very suspicious of the "radical" tendencies among the Woburn electorate.1
The secession of the South Woburn Church in 1840 caused some hard feelings, which were aggravated by a controversy between the two churches over the endowment fund which belonged to the Woburn church. This fund was considerable in amount, and it was, by act of legislature, confined to the uses of the old First Parish in Woburn. The members of the new church conceived, however, that, having been originally members of the Woburn Church, they had a moral claim on their proportionate part of the fund. At a meeting of the church in South Woburn April 11, 1842 Deacon Thompson and Loring Emerson were appointed to present this claim to the mother church. It was admitted that there was no legal ground for the request that the fund be divided, but a claim based on morality and justice, "stronger than human law," was asserted. The Woburn church, however, could not entertain that view of the case, and returned answer that it intended to retain the whole of the fund "to which by every principle of law it was entitled."
That this reply not only disappointed, but irritated, the South Woburn petitioners is apparent from the spirited tenor of the resolu- tion they passed, spread upon their records, and forwarded to their brethren in Woburn:
"Resolved: that we believe the claim which we have presented to be a just one, which will stand before a tribunal more impartial than the one that has refused us; and that we believe our brethren of the parent society, when they are brought to act in accordance with the divine precepts 'to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things which are God's,' and 'all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even the
1 Woburn Journal, May 24, 1888.
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same to them,' will recognize our claim, and cheerfully grant it."1 There the matter rested; but not, it is very likely, without some heartburnings.
In 1845 another incident added some fuel to the waxing blaze. The people of the village, tired of having no means of passing between Washington Street and the center, petitioned the county commissioners to lay out a public way to be called Pleasant Street, over the route we know today as lower Mt. Vernon Street. It was an improvement long needed, for vehicles coming down Washington Street could reach the center only by driving all the way up to its junction with Main Street and then turning sharply north; at least half a mile of unnecessary travel. Even foot passengers were exposed to the same inconvenience until Sumner Richardson, who lived where the Winchester Savings Bank now stands, thoughtfully built a rough footbridge across the Aberjona, which enabled them by using a path across the field to follow a short cut to the center.
For some reason, however, the selectmen of Woburn fought the plan; perhaps they did not want to spend the town's money for a new street in South Woburn. At all events they attended the hearing before the county commissioners, which was held in the little railway station, in a hostile mood, and Bartholomew Richard- son, one of their number and a passionate, free-spoken man, became so abusive that one of the commissioners threatened him with a libel suit.2 The petition was granted and the street built, but one more item had been added to the account of South Woburn against Woburn.
We have it on the authority of Nathaniel A. Richardson, who was deep in politics most of his life and at this very time Collector of Taxes for Woburn, that personal and partisan politics also entered into the picture. Woburn was a strongly Democratic town, but South Woburn was almost solidly Whig. Ambitious men from our end of the town found it hard to rise to local office; they relished the idea of a new town soundly Whig in politics, and the Whig members of the state legislature were of a mind to assist them in their plans. So when in 1848 the Whig party came into power in Massachusetts it seemed an auspicious moment to push forward the project for
1 Winchester Record, Vol. III, page 52, article by Rev. George Cooke.
2 N. A. Richardson's Scrapbook, article published in Winchester Star, March I, 1901.
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creating this new town out of the adjacent parts of Woburn, Med- ford and West Cambridge, which were tributary to the thriving village of South Woburn. The theory is plausible; politics figures in nearly everything in a democracy. By 1849 then, forwarded by all the influences we have named, the moment for incorporation was ripe for accomplishment. The moment was at hand. Winchester as an independent town was awaiting its birth.
CHAPTER XII
THE TOWN OF WINCHESTER IS BORN
"THE inhabitants of South Woburn and vicinity are hereby requested to meet at the Vestry of the Congregational Church on Monday Nov. 26th at 61/2 o'clock P.M. to take into consideration the subject of petitioning the Legislature for an Act of Incorpora- tion into a separate Town; or to do anything in relation to the same.
South Woburn Nov. 20, 1849."
This notice, posted here and there about the village, was the first open step taken toward the incorporation of Winchester. But the ground had been carefully prepared through several months or perhaps a year of quiet neighborhood discussion and what would today be called propaganda. The meeting was largely attended; the sentiment was very strong in favor of the formation of a new town.1 A petition had been previously drawn up, ready when signed, for presentation to the legislature. Within a few days there were 185 signatures, probably more than seventy per cent of the legal voters in the community. Ebenezer Parker's name led the list, John A. Bolles stood second, and B. F. Thompson, F. O. Prince, S. B. White, David Youngman, O. R. Clark, Sumner Richardson, Nathan B. Johnson and the Cutter brothers followed close behind. The meeting at the Congregationalist vestry chose Samuel S. Rich- ardson, Oliver R. Clark and John A. Bolles a committee to present the petition to the legislature. In all these preliminary undertakings the petitioners leaned heavily on the advice and leadership of Mr. Bolles, who, though a recent accession to the community, was a lawyer of marked ability and one of the most enthusiastic advo- cates of incorporation. It was at his suggestion that the petitioners lost no time in securing counsel to represent them at the State House, and that they chose Albert H. Nelson, the leading lawyer in Woburn, to discharge that duty.
Mr. Nelson was a Whig, and so predisposed - if Mr. Richard-
1 Winchester Town Records, Vol. I, pages 1-5.
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COL. WILLIAM P. WINCHESTER
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son's view of the political influences at work in the matter is correct - to favor the creation of the new town. He had been a state Senator, and was before many years to become Chief Justice of the Superior Court of the Commonwealth. He understood all the intricacies of legislative procedure, was well known and liked at the State House, and was capable of presenting the petitioners' case most forcibly. When he accepted a retainer of $50, with $200 to follow if the petition were granted, it was felt on all sides that the committee who engaged him had done a very shrewd stroke of business.
What was the new town to be called? It was necessary to find a name to insert in the petition to the legislature, but there was no agreement on the question. At a meeting held December 17, 1849 a trial ballot showed votes for Harmony, Linden, Alton, Winthrop, Wyoming, Mystic, Sheffield, South Woburn, Waterville and Columbus. On a second ballot South Woburn had six votes, Waterville thirty-three, and Columbus thirty-five. A change of only a few votes would have bestowed the high-sounding name of Columbus on the infant town.1 But the question was not forced to a decision, and a committee consisting of Deacon Thompson, Mr. Bolles, Harrison Parker, Samuel B. White, S. S. Richardson, Francis H. Johnson, Josiah Hovey and Charles Pressey was named to submit a list of names to an adjourned meeting one week later.
At that meeting Deacon Thompson submitted a report which read :
"Since the appointment of your committee, circumstances have occurred (of a character which renders it improper to do more than allude to them) which induce us, instead of reporting a list of names, to recommend that a committee be chosen who shall be empowered to choose a name and insert it in the petition to the legislature. These circumstances are both personal and pecuniary, and promise to be of material importance to the welfare and con- venience of the new town and its citizens."
What had happened during the week was that F. O. Prince had told the committee he felt sure that if the new town should be named Winchester, it might expect a handsome sum of money from Colonel William P. Winchester of Watertown, in recognition
1 Winchester Town Records, Vol. I, page 6.
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of the compliment paid to his family name. The meeting did not adopt the suggestion of its committee, as it stood; it voted that six names should be presented for consideration, but it significantly voted to add Mr. Prince to the committee.
After a brief deliberation the committee returned with these names: Appleton, Winthrop, Avon, Channing, Waterville and Winchester. There was no special fitness in any of these names except perhaps Waterville, and no strong sentiment in favor of any of them. Mr. Prince's words, which had by this time been repeated among the audience, contributed a stronger argument for the name of Winchester - in itself a melodious and attractive name - than could be advanced for any of the other five. The meeting voted to instruct the committee of three already appointed to present the petition to the legislature, to select a name from the six suggested and insert it in the petition. It was taken for granted that Win- chester would be chosen, and so in due time it happened.1
There has always been a spice of mystery about the circum- stances attending the choice of this name for our town. Colonel Winchester was a successful merchant in Boston, a wealthy man for that time, highly respected and widely popular. He was for several years colonel of Boston's crack volunteer regiment, the Independent Corps of Cadets, whence his military title. He was hospitable in the extreme; he had built in Watertown a rather splendid mansion overlooking the Charles River, where he meant to entertain largely, and he owned a yacht, The Northern Light, on which he delighted to welcome his many friends.2 Neither he nor his family, however, had any previous association with our town.
The probable explanation is that Mr. Prince, who was inti- mately acquainted with Colonel Winchester, feeling that Win- chester would be a dignified and musical name for the proposed town, conceived the idea that the colonel might be delicately flattered by the selection of his family name, and that his generosity, on which it was pretty safe to count, might be invoked for the benefit of his namesake. Certain it is that Mr. Prince engineered
1 Article in the Winchester Record, Vol. I, page 312. Many of the documents referred to are preserved in the collections of the Winchester Historical Society.
2 This yacht was designed by a yacht builder of Danish birth, Louis Winde, who was in later years a resident of Winchester, and the father of Henry J. Winde, long one of the Cemetery Commissioners of the town.
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the whole affair and is entitled to the credit of attaching so pleasing a name to our town.
It may be said here, perhaps a little prematurely, that upon the incorporation of the town Colonel Winchester addressed to the newly elected board of selectmen, this letter:
To Messrs. Nathan B. Johnson, Loring Emerson,
Charles McIntire, Selectmen of Winchester.
Gentlemen, I am informed that the name Winchester was given to your town at the request of its inhabitants, in compliment to me. No compliment could be more flattering, and I beg leave, through you, to return my cordial thanks therefor. But as I am not content with a mere verbal expression of the high honor con- ferred upon my family name, I beg leave to present to the town the enclosed sum of Three Thousand dollars, to be appropriated to the erection of a Town Hall or any other proper object of municipal expenditure.
With my best wishes for the lasting prosperity of the town of Winchester and its citizens,
Believe me, very truly,
Your obedient servant, Wm. P. Winchester.
Boston, May 25, 1850.
It had been hoped to receive Colonel Winchester at the town meeting at which this letter was read. A violent rainstorm pre- vented him from attending, and a committee was appointed to invite him to visit the town on a later and fitting occasion, and to entertain him in a suitable manner while here. But he never enjoyed the hospitality of the town, for on August 6, 1850 he died untimely of a typhoid fever, aged only forty-nine years.1
In following the train of events that grew out of the choice of a name for the embryo town we have got ahead of our story; we must return to December 1849. It must not be supposed that the community of "South Woburn and its vicinity" was unanimously
1 On December 27, 1900, Colonel Winchester's son, Mr. Thomas B. Winchester, presented to the town a portrait in oil of his father, which is now hung in the Public Library. He also gave the town a massive solid silver punch bowl lined with gold, which had been presented to Colonel Winchester by Boston friends in memory of "the pleasant hours passed with him on board his yacht Northern Light." This hand- some bowl is preserved in the rooms of the Winchester Historical Society in the Public Library.
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in favor of creating a new town. There was strong opposition by a minority, and the minority included most of the families on Indian or Andrews Hill and along Cambridge Street in the western part of the town. This section was separated by a considerable distance from the center and maintained its attachment to the old town of Woburn. Dana Fay, who lived on Cambridge Street, not far within the proposed boundaries of Winchester, was the active leader of this minority. He drew up and circulated a petition protesting against the division of Woburn, and obtained no less than fifty-one signatures. These included those of the Lockes and Johnsons and other families living on the Hill and of several Richardsons, Hadleys and others who lived at the extremity of the new town toward the northeast. It was indeed mostly signed by what Mr. Bolles called "border men," who had not yet felt the gravitational pull of the growing village at Winchester center.
The advocates of incorporation were none the less anxious to conciliate this opposition, and went to some pains to win Mr. Fay over,1 not, as it appears, with much success. In the meantime the legislature had assembled, the petition of the inhabitants of South Woburn who wished to be set off as a separate town of Winchester had been received, and referred to the Committee on Towns, and notice of that fact had been served on the Town Clerks of Woburn, Medford and West Cambridge. A town meeting was accordingly summoned to meet in Woburn on February 7, 1850 to see what action the town would take regarding the petition. The South Woburn voters were present almost in a body. They understood that most of the leading men of old Woburn resented the petition, and were firmly opposed to the division of the town, but they counted on their own numbers and enthusiasm, on the arguments which their spokesmen Deacon Thompson, Mr. Bolles and Mr. O. R. Clark were prepared to present and on the good will of many Woburn folk to commit the town to a peaceful consent to the separation. At first it seemed that their hopes were to be justified. After a full and free discussion, in which both sides were amply presented, Mr. Clark's motion that "the town is willing the prayer of the petitioners be granted" and that the terms of separation, which must be just and equitable, should be agreed on by a com-
1 See letter to Mr. Fay printed in Winchester Record, Vol. I, page 197.
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mittee of six, three from each part of the town, was passed by a satisfactory majority. A committee of five was named to select the committee provided for in Mr. Clark's resolution and went into executive session.
At this moment the time arrived for the departure of the last train for South Woburn (for by 1850 the branch railroad line to Woburn had been built and was in operation). The South Woburn voters, or most of them, thinking their point gained, and not relishing the idea of a two mile walk home if the train were missed, rushed for the station. Their departure suggested to the Woburn strategists the possibility of upsetting the decision that the meeting had reached. Mr. Horace Conn, a leather manu- facturer and a leading man in Woburn, moved that a committee be raised to attend on the legislature and oppose the petition tooth and nail. Ruled out of order until the committee had reported, his motion nevertheless threw the meeting into great disorder. Dis- putes over parliamentary procedure, recriminations, and angry personal differences kept the hall in an uproar. In the end Mr. Conn made, and succeeded in carrying, a motion to reconsider the vote by which the prayer of the petitioners was approved, and the meeting hastily dissolved.
At a later meeting, which the South Woburn voters, angry at being overreached, did not attend,1 the town of Woburn voted to fight the petition and to engage counsel to appear before the legis- lature. Mr. John C. Park was accordingly chosen for this duty, and to him was subsequently added Mr. B. F. Hallett, a Woburn lawyer of note, who was, according to Mr. O. R. Clark, a "wheel- horse of the Massachusetts Democracy." 2 The note of partisan politics is again struck.
In the meantime the legislative mill was grinding steadily along. The Committee on Towns, to which Winchester's petition had been referred, came out from Boston to view the scene, and the members were impressed with the reasonableness of the desire of the inhabitants of the new center of population for a separate municipal existence. Hearings before the committee began in
1 The conduct of the first meeting was "alike disorderly and dishonorable," says the Winchester Town Record, Vol. I, page 17, in an entry made probably by Mr. Bolles.
2 Winchester Record, Vol. I, page 324.
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February; several were held in order that the matter might be freely discussed. Woburn was the only one of the three towns affected to offer determined opposition to the petition for incor- poration;1 but the committee was served with a remonstrance signed by the selectmen of Medford and ninety-three citizens of the town, and with another signed by eighty-nine "inhabitants" of West Cambridge. Besides these there was the petition of remon- strance already referred to, presented by fifty-four residents of the proposed town led by Dana Fay, and another bearing the names of nine men - among whom were Deacon John and Marshall Symmes and John H. Bacon - praying, as citizens of Medford, that they be not included in the new town.
The Committee on Towns was, however, from the first friendly to the ambitions of Winchester. Its chairman, Stephen M. Gifford of Duxbury,2 was openly in favor of incorporating the new town. Whether or not it was a coincidence that Mr. Gifford and a majority of his colleagues were Whigs, and that Whigs were most active in promoting the incorporation, is a question that it is not now easy to answer; Mr. N. A. Richardson who was in the thick of things was sure that it was no mere coincidence, and very likely he was right.3 At all events, Mr. Gifford's services were so highly appre- ciated by the people of the new town that they attached his name in gratitude to one of the first of the new schools they built; there was a Gifford School in Winchester until very recent years.
The cause of the new town did not suffer at the hearings. Its counsel, Mr. Nelson and Mr. John A. Bolles, were superior in tact and ability to Mr. Hallett, who represented Woburn, and their presentation of the case for Winchester was admitted to be very effective. In the end the committee reported a bill incorporating the town, according to the prayer of the petitioners. The bounds fixed by the bill were those which exist today, except in one par- ticular. Originally the greater part of Horn Pond Mountain was included in Winchester; but in 1873 enough was reannexed to Woburn to give that city effective control of a high-pressure reser-
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