History of Winchester, Massachusetts, Part 16

Author: Chapman, Henry Smith, 1871-1936
Publication date: 1936
Publisher: [Winchester, Mass.] Published by the town of Winchester
Number of Pages: 498

USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Winchester > History of Winchester, Massachusetts > Part 16

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1 Sanford B. Perry was entered as counsel for Medford, but he appears to have made no argument.

2 Later for many years Clerk of the Senate.

3 "There was probably never a case in which there was such constant earnest and wholesale lobbying." Winchester Town Records, Vol. I, page 21.

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voir it had constructed on the summit of the mountain. This recession of territory to Woburn is indicated by the acute-angled break in the northern boundary line of Winchester, shown upon the map of the town.

The bill of incorporation had to face opposition on the floor of both House and Senate, but it passed by good majorities. On April 30, 1850 the Governor of the Commonwealth, George N. Briggs, set his name at the foot of the parchment, and Winchester achieved not individuality, for that it had long possessed, but independent corporate existence.1

No time was lost in organizing the town. Within twenty-four hours of the moment when Governor Briggs signed the bill of incorporation, a warrant signed by John A. Bolles, a Justice of the Peace, was issued, calling a meeting of the citizens of the town for the seventh of May. This meeting, the first town meeting in Winchester, was held at one o'clock in the afternoon in the vestry of the Congregational Church, the most commodious hall then available in the village. The meeting was devoted to the election of town officers. Deacon B. F. Thompson and Samuel M. Rice were nominated for Moderator, and Mr. Rice was elected by 80 votes to 69. For selectmen the meeting chose Deacon Nathan B. Johnson, Loring Emerson and Deacon John Symmes, all old resi- dents in the community and men highly respected both for char- acter and for sound sense. Deacon Symmes, who had never been sympathetic with the proposal to take him and his property out of Medford and plant them in the new town of Winchester, declined to serve; his place on the board was filled by Charles McIntire, a somewhat recent comer. "Why he was chosen or who were his backers" was to a contemporary observer something of a mystery.2 But he was a brisk, stirring man oftener engaged in speculation than in sound business, of pleasant manners and plausible speech, public spirited, but after a visionary, grandiloquent fashion that often brought him into differences with his harder-headed col- leagues. At this time and for some years afterward he owned and occupied the old Black Horse Tavern building, the grounds of

1 Somewhat fuller accounts of the events here summarized can be found in the Winchester Record, Vol. I, pages 312-332.

2 N. A. Richardson in Winchester Star, December 3, 1902, article on the first selectmen of Winchester.

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which he beautified with gardens and hedges at considerable expense. In later life he was unfortunate; his financial schemes went awry, and his shining dreams faded.

The first Town Clerk elected was Dr. David Youngman. He, too, was one of the more recent citizens of the town, but a loyal and useful one. He was a man of good education, and held a medical degree from Dartmouth College, but at this time he found business more profitable than practice. A few years before 1850 he had opened the first apothecary shop in Winchester. It was at first located in the basement of a house on Main Street near the Con- verse Bridge. In 1848 Dr. Youngman moved to the building recently built by S. S. Richardson just north of the railway tracks, and occupied in part by Sanderson and Taylor's store.1 Still later he established his shop in the Lyceum Building. He was a book- seller and stationer as well as a dispenser of drugs. Dr. Youngman was popular and intelligent; his command of sound English was of considerable value to the early selectmen when official papers were to be drawn. He could sing as well as he could write, and he was not only a pillar of the Congregational choir but a teacher of music as well, for he conducted a singing school on winter evenings in the vestry of the church. In 1856 the doctor sold his business in Winchester to Josiah Hovey and removed to Boston where he practised his profession for more than thirty years.2

It was in the house occupied by Dr. Youngman, which stood on Dix Street near the Congregational Church, that the first child was born in the town of Winchester. The parents, Mr. and Mrs. William A. Coburn, lodged with Dr. Youngman. The child was a boy. Dr. Chapin, who attended the birth, suggested to the father that it be named William Winchester Coburn. Mr. Coburn was not impressed with the idea, but a few years later the grandfather of the boy - the father having died - appeared before the Town Clerk and asked that Dr. Chapin's suggestion be carried out. The name was accordingly changed upon the Clerk's book, and William Winchester Coburn heads the continually lengthening roll of the native sons and daughters of Winchester.

1 See page 143.

2 Dr. Youngman taught the village school for one term. According to "O. S. B." in the Winchester Star, August 31, 1900, "his hair was red, his temper hot," and he preferred the use of a rawhide whip on refractory pupils instead of more humane correctives."

TWO OF THE FIRST SELECTMEN NATHAN B. JOHNSON

CHARLES MCINTIRE

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Colonel Samuel B. White was chosen Treasurer of the town, Cyrus Bancroft, Ezekiel Johnson and Gardner Symmes assessors, Marshall Wyman, Zacheriah Richardson, Stephen Cutter and Marshall Symmes assistant assessors (seven assessors seem plenty for a town still so small), and Rev. John M. Steele, Frederick O. Prince and Charles Goddard were elected to the School Committee, whose important task it was to organize a complete school system for the town. The town was likewise supplied with the numerous apparatus of government common in New England towns of that day, represented by Constables, Tithing-men, Fence-viewers, Measurers of Wood and Bark, Field Drivers, Highway Surveyors, Surveyors of Lumber, Sealers of Weights and of Leather and a Public Undertaker. One misses only the Hog-Reeve out of the list.

A committee, headed by Oliver R. Clark, was also chosen to determine the number and location of the new schools which the town must build, and it is significant of the seriousness with which this matter of education was regarded that the committee recom- mended and the town voted to build four new schoolhouses at once in addition to the two already standing.1

The new town entered upon its existence debtless, for the expenses attendant on incorporation, amounting to some $500, had been met by subscription among the citizens who signed the orig- inal petition; but on the other hand it was faced with an empty treasury. It had a tax list, inherited from Woburn, amounting to some $3,000 - signifying a property valuation of about $400,000 -- but it would be some months before taxes could be expected to materialize. A considerable sum of money was no doubt due to Winchester from Woburn in settlement of Winchester's share in the public property - land, buildings and money - of the old town before its division. But that must await the slow process of assessment and mutual agreement. The town had therefore to borrow $1,400 at once, and its officers had to follow the policy of rigid economy for the first year. It was voted to "farm out" the collection of the taxes, instead of electing a Town Collector. The practice was an old one in New England towns; it was followed in Winchester until 1857, when the offices of Town Treasurer and

1 The history of the schools in Winchester is reserved for a separate chapter, Chapter XVI.

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Collector of Taxes were united. In accordance with it, bids were received for the privilege of collecting the tax money. Samuel Kendall agreed to undertake the job for 112 per cent of what he took in, and became the first Collector of Winchester.1 His remu- neration was modest. He must have got less than forty dollars for all the time and trouble and expense to which he was put; yet the next year Samuel S. Richardson underbid him and took the office for only one per cent of the total sum collected. He was succeeded after only one year by James Bridge, and he after the same interval by Nathaniel A. Richardson. None of these "farmers of the revenue" seem to have found the speculation sufficiently profitable to desire it a second time.

By December 3 the committee appointed to settle with Woburn for the public property jointly owned on the day of incorporation was ready to report to the town.2 By the arrangement that had been reached, each town was to have title to the public property within its present limits; in the case of Winchester that meant only a schoolhouse or two, half ownership in the burial ground behind the Congregational Church, and a small building on Vine Street in which for several years a "hand-tub" fire engine had been stationed. To the engine itself Woburn laid claim, and it was necessary for Winchester to purchase another similar piece of apparatus, which it presently did. The committee found that the value of the public property of old Woburn was $14,532.36, offset in part by debts of the town to the amount of $8,725.03. That left a balance of $5,807.33 of which Winchester's share was $1,370. That sum, therefore, was paid into the treasury by the town of Woburn, and the last formal- ity connected with the division of the old town was completed.

The first financial statement of Winchester, made at the town meeting of 1851, is worth quoting, if only for comparison with the cost of government today. The town received in taxes $2,550 out of a total of $3,001 committed to the Collector. It had the $1,370 paid in by Woburn. It had borrowed $1,400, mostly in sums of $200 or $300 loaned to it by private citizens. That was all its revenue. It had spent $4,116.63, of which $1,253.29 was for main- taining the schools of the town and $1,030 for the land and building

1 Winchester Town Records, Vol. I, page 44.

2 Winchester Town Records, Vol. I, page 64.

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of a little schoolhouse on the hill near the corner of High and Ridge streets, and the land for a schoolhouse in the Rumford district beyond Cutter Village. No money at all was laid out on roads. The principal items of the "incidentals" that made up the total of $4,116.63 were the support of the poor, $112; salaries of town officers, $611.50; expenses of buildings for schoolhouses, $510.91, and the purchase of and repairing a hearse, $188.1 Thus simply and economically was instituted the government of a town which, with its population increased by ten fold, had in 1933 a revenue and an expenditure of considerably more than a million dollars.

The steady growth of the village is clearly indicated by the rapidity with which its taxable property increased. In 1850, as I have just remarked, the tax list committed to the Collector amounted to one dollar over $3,000. By 1852 it had more than doubled, and the expenses of the town had grown to $11,819.52; in 1856 the taxes committed had risen to $10,132 and by 1861 to $13,643. During most of this time expenses exceeded revenue, as was to be expected in a new town, with the essential equipment of local government to be created. We find the town borrowing considerable sums, once $6,000 from the State of Massachusetts, again sums of from $1,000 to $4,000 from banks in Lowell or Charlestown, and often giving its notes to its own citizens. Charles Kimball, for instance, advanced $600 on June 15, 1852 and $500 more six months later; Samuel B. White, Jr. lent the town $200 on June 8, 1852, and Josiah Locke lent it $900 on August 18. In 1853 S. B. White took the town's note for $400, Horatio Symmes lent it $500 and Lydia W. Symmes $600.2 And so on. By 1860 Winchester had a debt of $14,000, minute as it seems to us, but sufficiently large in the view of the citizens to urge them to plead in town meeting for even greater prudence and thrift in the matter of expenditures.

At the meeting of August 19, 1850, at which resolutions of sympathy were adopted and sent to the widow of Colonel Win- chester, lately dead, the town took up the matter of school building seriously, and voted to appropriate $4,000 to erect four new build- ings, one on Andrews Hill (just referred to), one on the West Side near Marshall Wyman's on Cambridge Street, one on the East Side

1 The hearse was kept in the most southerly of the horse sheds behind the Con gregational Church, to which a door had been fitted.

2 Annual reports of Winchester for 1853 and 1854.

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on Cross Street near Washington Street, and one in the "Rumford" district near Caleb Richardson's house on Main Street.1

On November II, at the annual state election, Frederick O. Prince was elected the first representative of Winchester to the legislature. Mr. Prince was reelected in 1851, and he was succeeded in 1852 by Zachariah Richardson. At this same meeting a com- mittee was chosen to report on the advisability of building a town hall. Within a month this committee reported that if such a build- ing were erected it should include accommodations for a high school; a structure seventy-four by forty-six feet would be large enough, said the committee, and it could be built for $5,000 exclusive of the cost of the land. This sum, modest as it appears, was considerably more than the Colonel Winchester gift of $3,000, which many citizens had thought might be used in building a town hall. The matter was, by the meeting, referred to a new committee, of which Henry Cutter was chairman.

This committee went diligently to work; by December 18, 1850 it was ready to report to an adjourned town meeting in favor of a piece of land on what is now Dix Street opposite the present loca- tion of the Calumet Club. It could be bought for $2,200, said the committee. But the expenditure of this sum, with $5,000 additional for a building, frightened the voters, already committed to spending on schoolhouses a lot more money than there was in sight. More- over, preparations were then being made by certain citizens to put up a fine large business building at the corner of Main and Pleasant streets - the long-familiar Lyceum Building - and it was to con- tain a public hall large enough to accommodate town meetings for some years to come. Taking all these considerations into account, the town meeting voted in the laconic language of the Clerk's report "not to build."2 Winchester was to wait almost forty years for its town hall.

Good use was, however, presently found for the $3,000 in the Winchester Fund, a use which, as Mr. Prince thriftily pointed out, would not exhaust the fund but employ it as a public loan, to be in time returned to the treasury. This was the purchase of land for a cemetery, and the preparation of it for that purpose. A cemetery

1 Winchester Town Records, Vol. I, page 49.

2 Winchester Town Records, Vol. I, page 73.

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was sure to be urgently needed, and almost at once. The yard behind the Congregational Church, owned partly by the church and partly by the town, was small and could not be much enlarged. If a proper piece of land was secured, enough money could soon be raised by the sale of lots therein to restore the money taken from the Winchester Fund. So it was argued and so it seemed good to the town, which voted on September 15, 1851 to use the Winchester money for that purpose.1 The land had already been selected; out of half a dozen pieces offered to the town, a committee of ten, headed by John A. Bolles, had chosen a lot of ten acres owned by Gardner Symmes on the gravely hill then covered with a low growth of pine, "over against Wedge Pond."2 This was the nucleus of the beautiful Wildwood Cemetery of which Winchester has so much reason to be proud.

The site was an admirable one. It was quiet and retired; not only was the soil well adapted to the purpose designed, but the land, with the wide prospect it commands, its diversified surface and its frequent changes of level, has lent itself perfectly to the well- considered plans of planting and landscaping which have made Wildwood so peaceful and beautiful a city of the dead. The town is to be congratulated on the wisdom and good taste of those who placed it where it is.

By the summer of 1852 the new cemetery was ready for occu- pancy. A lot plan had been prepared, paths and roadways built, and a street constructed from Church Street to the cemetery gates.3

The cemetery was duly consecrated on September 15, 1852. The exercises included prayers by Rev. Mr. Robinson of the Congre- gational Church, and Rev. N. A. Reed, the minister of the Baptist Church, an address by Rev. Dr. Rollin H. Neale, a Baptist clergy- man of Boston, and original hymns by Francis A. Durivage and Mrs. H. J. Lewis.

In 1853, arrangements having been made with the First Parish church and the owners of lots in the old burying ground behind that church, the bodies there interred were removed to Wildwood, where they now lie side by side with those of the generations that have succeeded them.

1 Winchester Town Records, Vol. I, page 106.

2 Winchester Town Records, Vol. I, page 92.

3 Now lower Wildwood and Willow streets. It was a "private way," not accepted as a public street until 1864.

CHAPTER XIII

THE EARLY YEARS OF THE TOWN FIRE AND FLOOD. SOCIAL AND COMMUNITY LIFE

An excellent idea of the dimensions of the Winchester of the 185os and of the extent of its development can be had from the accompanying map of the village, made in 1854 by H. F. Walling, with the financial guarantee of the town. Of all the streets laid down upon the map only Main, Washington, Forest, Cross, Pleas- ant, Pond, Church, Bacon, Grove, Cambridge, High and Fruit streets (the latter now Hutchinson Road) were accepted town ways when incorporation occurred. The others, which a glance at the map will identify, though several of them passed then under names now unfamiliar or else had no names at all, were private roads built by citizens to develop their property, which had been cut up into building lots as the need for houses arose. Many of them, particularly on the slope of the hillside east of Main and Washing- ton streets, began as wood roads or cart paths, made by the original owners of the farms along those two main roads, in order to reach their woodlots or pasture lots on the hill. As late as 1860 for example, Herrick Street was such a rough cart path, leading up through the hardwood growth to the edge of the Middlesex Fells.1

These simple streets of the fifties, sixties and seventies of the last century were laid out, graded and roughly surfaced by private citizens who had land to sell to would-be householders. They have been taken over, one by one, by the town - when improved to a certain standard - and maintained as public "town ways." In the first years, when macadam was unknown and surface drainage unheard of, it was a simple matter to construct a passable roadway at moderate cost. When Wildwood Street was put through from the Cemetery Road to the junction with Cambridge Street in 1852, the property owners were glad enough to build the whole street, fully

1 MSS. of Henry C. Robinson.

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CHAPTER XIII

THE EARLY YEARS OF THE TOWN FIRE AND FLOOD. SOCIAL AND COMMUNITY LIFE

An excellent idea of the dimensions of the Winchester of the 185cs and of the extent of its development can be had from the accompanying map of the village, made in 1854 by H. F. Walling, with the financial guarantee of the town. Of all the streets laid down upon the map only Main, Washington, Forest, Cross, Pleas- ant, Pond, Church, Bacon, Grove, Cambridge, High and Fruit streets (the latter now Hutchinson Road) were accepted town ways when incorporation occurred. The others, which a glance at the map will identify, though several of them passed then under names now unfamiliar or else had no names at all, were private roads built by citizens to develop their property, which had been cut up into building lots as the need for houses arose. Many of them, particularly on the slope of the hillside east of Main and Washing- ton streets, began as wood roads or cart paths, made by the original owners of the farms along those two main roads, in order to reach their woodlots or pasture lots on the hill. As late as 1860 for example, Herrick Street was such a rough cart path, leading up through the hardwood growth to the edge of the Middlesex Fells.1

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half a mile in length. The town did not officially "accept" it as a town way until 1870.

Highland Avenue was in some sort an exception, at least as far as its southern end was concerned. It began like the others in a suc- cession of little private ways which were united into a street that ran from Mt. Vernon to Forest Street as early as 1874. The exten- sion from Mt. Vernon to Main Street was in 1897 laid out by the County Commissioners, in order to complete the through way from the county road from Medford to the Stoneham road.

An aged native of Winchester,1 who well remembers the streets of this period, says of them, "They were topped with unscreened gravel taken from a convenient pit, drawn in tip-carts to the location under repair, and leveled with shovels. It was the intention to remove at the pit all stones beyond a certain size, but a good many, much too large to be driven over with comfort, found their way on to the street surface. The newly spread gravel was not rolled; the passing traffic was expected to smooth the surface. All vehicles used the middle of the streets, and created ruts sometimes several inches deep.

"The gravel was soon ground into a fine dust; in dry weather, when the wind blew or a vehicle passed, a cloud of dust arose and filled the air. . . . After a rain the dust turned to mud and it was hard to cross a street without getting one's footwear plastered with it."

Almost every house in the village was surrounded by the neat picket fence of our daddies; both fence and house were usually painted white. As time went on, the more well-to-do residents manifested their solvency by erecting fences of ornamental iron- work supported at regular intervals by blocks or posts of granite. Behind these fences the grass grew luxuriantly in the door yards; it was before the invention of lawn mowers. Sometimes a householder would mow his grass at haying time in order to make use of the same for the sustenance of the family horse or cow. Others never disturbed the growth from spring to fall. The fences therefore were not only a conventionally proper means of asserting a reasonable privacy for the families that dwelt behind them. They served the useful purpose of keeping wandering animals out of the tempting patches of grass. Swine no longer ran at large in the streets as they

1 Mr. Henry C. Robinson.

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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER

had not so many years before, but there was some laxity about keeping horses and cows strictly tethered. Moreover flocks of sheep and bunches of cattle frequently passed over the main roads on their way to or from the stockyards and livestock markets of Som- erville or Brighton. It was highly desirable to keep these animals out of dooryards along the way, and sometimes pedestrians crowded off the street by the advancing herd had to dodge hastily through a gate into the safe refuge which these fences offered.1

A conspicuous object in the center was the old elm, which stood squarely in the middle of Pleasant Street where it entered Main Street. This tree, said to be an offspring of the famous old Converse elm, was a splendid specimen nearly a hundred years old; it was so affectionately re- garded in Winchester that no one would hear of its being cut down when Pleasant Street was laid out in 1845, and it remained stand- ing, an object of beauty though an obstacle to traffic, for some fifty years thereafter. A large stone watering trough for horses stood just in front of it; that too THE CHURCH STREET ELM was removed when the tree was at last cut down.

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History of Winchester, Massachusetts, Part 16

Author: Chapman, Henry Smith, 1871-1936 Publication date: 1936 Publisher: [Winchester, Mass.] Published by the town of Winchester Number of Pages: 498

Author: Chapman, Henry Smith, 1871-1936
Publication date: 1936
Publisher: [Winchester, Mass.] Published by the town of Winchester
Number of Pages: 498