USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Winchester > History of Winchester, Massachusetts > Part 17
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Winchester has always been tender to its fine old trees. Another handsome elm long occupied the very middle of Church Street just south of the corner of Common Street. When Church Street was Driver's Lane this tree had grown up along the edge of the road; and when it became necessary to widen the street in order to accom- modate the traffic, the town authorities, loath to sacrifice the old elm, ran the street around it and left it standing majestically in the middle of the roadway. The advent of automobiles made the tree a source of considerable danger, but the suggestion of doing away with it made by the selectmen, first in 1915, again in 1918 and again
1 Henry C. Robinson MSS. recollections.
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EARLY YEARS OF THE TOWN
in 1923, brought forth a storm of protests from the citizens which on both occasions saved the old elm from destruction. The Win- chester Star bristled with letters from tree lovers who could not bear the idea of parting with so lovely an ornament to the town, and public meetings, well attended, convinced the selectmen that the sentiment of Winchester was strongly against their proposal.1 The controversy made the old tree "the most famous elm in the State," but repeated accidents due to its presence in the very middle of a much-travelled highway at last effected a change in public feeling. Early in May 1928, the axe was, by the selectmen's order, laid at the root of the old elm, and Win- chester, with real regret, but without audible protest, saw it disappear.
I have already referred in passing to Lyceum Hall. This hall was built in 1851 on the spot where it still stands today, at the corner of Main and Mt. Vernon streets, albeit somewhat changed by alterations from its original appearance. Sumner Richardson was the builder. The owners, who supplied the money, OLD LYCEUM HALL were a number of gentlemen - Charles McIntire, John A. Bolles, H. K. Stanton, Asa Locke and Josiah Hovey among them - who thought the new town deserved a public hall and office building of some pretensions, and destined the hall primarily for the meetings of a local lyceum, of the sort so widely popular in New England in those years. The building was completed by the end of 1851. It was dedicated on January 7, 1852, when Mr. Bolles made some remarks suitable to the occasion, and was followed by Ex-Governor Briggs who delivered an address, we are told, on the subject of education.2
The building, Mr. Bolles assured his hearers, was in the Gothic style, meaning in this case no more than that the window frames 1 Winchester Star, October 8 and 15, 1915, April 23, May 6, 1918, October 13, 1922, May II, September 28, 1923.
2 Woburn Journal, January 17, 1852.
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
were not square but pointed. It was raised from the ground more than at present, with a high basement in which was space for several shops. A wide platform ran along the front; behind it were two stores and a hall, forty-eight by twenty-seven feet, which could be divided into two rooms by folding doors. On the floor above there was the main hall, which could seat four hundred and fifty persons, and four office rooms. On the top floor there were office or com- mittee rooms and a third hall of considerable size. The town was thus suddenly supplied with a quantity of room for public purposes that must have seemed magnificent to a community that had hith- erto had no meeting place except the Congregational vestry.
Mr. Bolles in his address dilated upon the decorations of the hall, including the windows of diamond panes of colored glass, the painting of the walls in "dry fresco, or distemper" and the orna- mentation of the ceiling, "worthy by itself of an evening's lecture," in "Arabesque or Moresco designs." Winchester seems to have plumed itself a good deal on its fine new hall; it awakened the admiration and envy of our neighbor, Woburn, for it made, as the Woburn Journal admitted, the public building in that town "look sorry indeed !"
Into this building several merchants promptly removed their stores - among them H. K. Stanton who was long in business in one of the basement shops as a grocer and dealer in "West India goods," and David Youngman, Town Clerk and apothecary. Dr. Youngman brought with him the collection of books belonging to the Winchester Library Association, which was already estab- lished in his old store across the tracks in S. S. Richardson's building.
The Association, the germ of our present Public Library, was founded March 20, 1848 as the South Woburn Library Association. A number of leading citizens were its originators - Deacon B. F. Thompson, John A. Bolles, Charles Kimball, Oliver R. Clark, Charles Pressey and others. Shares in the Association were sold for three dollars each, and each shareholder was assessed for annual dues of one dollar. Anyone not a shareholder could take out books by paying a dollar a year; the value of the shares, therefore, seems to have lain chiefly in the consciousness they gave of having sup- ported a worthy public undertaking.
From the first Dr. Youngman was the librarian, and the
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EARLY YEARS OF THE TOWN
modest collection of books was housed at the back of his shop. There it remained, under the care of himself or Josiah Hovey, his suc- cessor in business (except for a brief return to its original house in the little store in the Richardson building, which had become Miss Hannah Lane's millinery shop) until 1859. In that year, having attained to the dignity of some eleven hundred volumes, it was offered by the Association to the town to form the nucleus of a public library, and duly accepted.1
The Winchester lyceum, which occupied the larger hall in the new building with its public lectures and entertainments, for a number of years, had a certain amount of interesting history. The decade between 1850 and 1860 marked the heyday of that cele- brated American institution, the lyceum. Literary and scientific men of mark were in wide demand for the lectures arranged by town and village lyceums, and found in them the source of much of their livelihood. The Winchester lyceum offered to its public some of the best of these popular speakers. Among those who spoke in Lyceum Hall are found the names of Governor George P. Bout- well (who inaugurated the first season on January 12, 1851 with a lecture on "Inventions"), E. P. Whipple, Wendell Phillips, B. P. Shillaber (Mrs. Partington), Rev. Horace Bushnell, Thomas Starr King, Rev. D. C. Eddy, and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Dr. Holmes's lecture, delivered December 5, 1859, was the occasion of a rather heated controversy, which agitated not only Winchester but other parts of the Commonwealth as well. His subject was "The Chief End of Man," and the matter of his dis- course gave some offense to those of the evangelical religious denominations in the community, for it disputed the dictum of the Westminster Confession that "the chief end of man was to glorify God." The controversy in question actually began a year before the lecture was delivered in Winchester. Dr. Holmes had been adver- tised to speak in the previous course of lectures, but he was unable to fill his engagement. The well-known church paper, the Congre- gationalist, heard - and so declared - that a delegation from the Winchester Literary Association had visited him to request him not to deliver that particular lecture in their town; that Dr. Holmes
1 The collection taken over by the town contained also the books of the Win- chester Agricultural Library Association, formed in 1856, but very shortly merged with the older Association.
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
had replied "It will be that or nothing," and that the Winchester delegation had retorted "Then it will be nothing," and cancelled his engagement.1
This report was denied by the Literary Association,2 which asserted that the only reason Dr. Holmes had not appeared was that other engagements prevented him from coming to Winchester when he was expected; the difference on this question of fact stirred up much literary activity among those who like to write letters to the newspapers, and no little was heard of it in those forums of public opinion during that winter. In the December following Dr. Holmes did appear in Lyceum Hall and gave the lecture. As might have been expected, the controversy flared up anew, and the newspaper columns again glowed with heated discussions con- cerning the propriety or impropriety of his views. One party described it as an "able, interesting and profitable lecture" and congratulated the doctor on his "fair, candid and liberal spirit." 3 The other said the address was listened to with "impatience and indignation," and spoke severely of its "sneers and gibes, its dis- ingenuous witticisms, its unsound reasoning," and its generally offensive character.4 It was a tempest of some local violence while it lasted, for religious feeling ran high in that day, when the emo- tions of the great revival of 1858 were still deeply felt.
The Winchester Literary Association, which conducted the lyceum, was accustomed also to give an annual "exhibition" of its own at which local talent occupied the stage. Several pro- grammes are still in existence. They specify music by an orchestra, several vocal selections, solos, duets or quartettes, a number of patriotic or dramatic or humorous recitations and now and then a "dialogue" or "farce." The tickets were twenty-five-occasionally fifteen - cents, a reasonable charge surely; but the six lectures of the regular lyceum season could be heard for a course ticket costing only a dollar!
Such an entertainment was advertised for March 25, 1858, but two days before that date posters were displayed about the village announcing the postponement of the affair, since the com-
1 The Congregationalist, January 1859.
2 Middlesex Journal, January 1, 1860.
3 Middlesex Journal, December 9, 1859.
4 Middlesex Journal, December 31, 1859.
FREDERICK O. PRINCE
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EARLY YEARS OF THE TOWN
mittee considered "that the Salvation of an Immortal Soul is of far more importance than literary excellence." 1 The explanation of this rather mystifying announcement lies in the great religious revival of which I just spoke. It was in full swing in the spring of 1858. The Congregational and Baptist churches were holding protracted meetings almost every night in the week, and scores were undergoing conversion. The power of the movement is shown by the fact that on July 4, 110 new members were received into the Congregational Church; 98 of them were the fruit of the revival services .It was, the Literary Association felt, no time for the relative frivolity of an "exhibition" while matters of such spiritual importance were toward.
The lyceum lectures, interrupted in war time, were aban- doned altogether as an annual institution about 1870, but the hall was none the less in frequent use for lectures, dances and entertain- ments until the building of the town hall in 1887; it was also the scene of the town meetings for no less than thirty-five years.
Some mention ought to be made - and this is perhaps an appropriate place - of the activities of the temperance folk of Winchester during these years. Following a period at the begin- ning of the century when tippling was quite general and the evils of liquor drinking clearly apparent, there arose in the thirties a strong movement not only in behalf of temperance but of absolute prohibition. Hardly a town or village in New England was without its temperance society, and the tide of public feeling grew so power- ful as to lead to the enactment of the famous "Maine law" in 1851, and a similar, though less stringent, prohibitory law in Massa- chusetts in 1855.
There was a temperance society in Woburn as early as 1828, and South Woburn men were active in it. In 1833 Deacon Nathan B. Johnson was its president and Deacon B. F. Thompson its treasurer, while Loring Emerson, Zachariah Richardson and Ezekiel Johnson - all from our part of the town - were of its board of directors.
There was a chapter of the Sons of Temperance in South Woburn (later Winchester) from 1847 to 1855, and there is also record of a Town Temperance Society founded November 21, 1851,
1 These posters are preserved in the collection of the Winchester Historical Society.
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
of which Dr. Chapin and Mr. J. A. Bolles, among others, were leaders. In 1858 another chapter of the Sons of Temperance was formed and led an active social as well as reforming existence for three years. It seems to have been discouraged by the refusal of the First Parish to let it use one of its vestry rooms for its meet- ings. The church fathers, we gather, thought it too social and not sufficiently serious-minded. While it lasted it afforded much simple, agreeable entertainment for its members. There remains record of one evening when, with facetious gravity, a pen and scissors were presented to Mr. E. A. Wadleigh, who was the editor of the Evening Star, to which occasional journal the Sons con- tributed their literary efforts, good, bad and indifferent.1
During these years, though the public sale of liquor for profit was forbidden in Winchester, there was a "liquor agent" appointed by the town to sell wine or spirits under certain definite restric- tions. There is extant2 the report of David Youngman who was agent in 1852. By this it appears that he laid in forty gallons of rum but sold only five of them; that he bought twenty-nine gal- lons of brandy, gin and wine and sold twenty-four of them; and that his total sales amounted to $84.15. This is surprising testi- mony to the inroads the temperance movement had made on the consumption of New England rum, once the staple of the Yankee taste in strong waters.3
On March 20, 1853 - a Sunday morning - the town of Win- chester experienced its first serious fire; the Congregational Church, built only twelve years before, was burned to the ground. The fire was discovered at eight o'clock in the basement of the building; it seems to have been caused by an overheated furnace. The flames spread rapidly through the partitions to every part of the meet- inghouse. Only the pew cushions, most of the hymn books and Sunday School library books, the pulpit furniture, a few settees and a clock were saved. A fine new organ, only four months installed, the church bell, and a clock given in 1850 by the women of Winchester were all destroyed. The loss was set at almost $15,000; the insurance was only $5,000.
1 Middlesex Journal, November 19, 1859.
2 In the collections of the Historical Society.
3 But in 1859-60 the Liquor Agent's sales amounted to $700.
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FIRE AND FLOOD
The fire burned furiously, for there was a brisk wind. The Winchester hand engine, "Excelsior," was wholly unable to deal with it, and sent out a call for help, to which three engines from Woburn, three from Medford, one from Stoneham and two from West Cambridge responded. They came too late to save the church building, but they were of service in preventing the fire from spreading to neighboring buildings. As it was, the wind carried sparks and blazing shingles far afield. The roof of Lyceum Hall caught several times, and so did three or four dwelling houses near by, but the firemen attended to these incipient blazes very promptly.1
The blow was a severe one for the parish to bear, but it was met with courage and devotion. Plans were at once made for the building of a larger and finer church on the little hilltop. The story of that edifice, which still stands today, will be found in the chapter on the church history of Winchester.2
On the belfry of the new church, when erected, there was placed a handsome town clock, which still, after eighty years, overlooks the town. The manner of its acquisition was a little curious. One of the selectmen of the day, Mr. N. A. Richardson, recalls how he found at the post office one day in June 1854 a letter addressed to the Board of Selectmen. He put it in his pocket unopened, and carried it about with him till the next meeting day of the board. Opened at last, it was found to contain a $500 bill, which the writer - who signed himself "A Resident of Massa- chusetts"- wished to offer anonymously for the purchase of a town clock. The clock was bought, and by arrangement with the committee of the new church placed upon its belfry "to be the property of the town, cared for by the town and under the control of the town at all times, according to the wishes of the donor."3
The identity of that donor remained a secret for many years. Not until after his death was it disclosed that Mr. Ebenezer Smith, who lived in 1854 on Church Street at the corner of Wildwood Street, was the generous soul who had determined, as his original letter put it, that "Winchester should have a town clock as good in every respect as the clock on the Old South Church in Boston."
1 Woburn Journal, March 26, 1853.
2 Chapter XVI.
3 Winchester Record, Vol. II, page 168.
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
The fire that destroyed the Congregational Church was not the only serious one during this period. On April 8, 1855 the fac- tory buildings at Bacon's dam, near the Wedgemere Station, one of brick and one of wood, as well as a tenement house and a cottage that stood hard by, were burned to the ground, with a loss of at least $15,000.1 Again the gallant Excelsior No. I was supported by four engine companies from Woburn and one from Stoneham,
.
THE SAMUEL RICHARDSON HOUSE
but nothing was saved. And a few years later, October 21, 1857, the house and barn of N. A. Richardson of Washington Street went up in flames, and was "utterly consumed." Fire engines were of very moderate efficiency in those days, though in the case of Mr. Richardson's property it was said that an incendiary had touched it off in three or four places at once. This Richardson house was one of the oldest then standing in the town. It was built by a Samuel Richardson early in the eighteenth century.
1 One of the mills at Bacon's dam was again burned April 6, 1861, but again rebuilt.
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SOCIAL AND COMMUNITY LIFE
Having been scourged by fire, the town was next menaced by water. It was on the sixteenth of February 1855 that the great Winchester flood occurred. We have an excellent account of it furnished by an eye witness, Dr. David Youngman.1 He awoke that morning to find the cellar of his house not only full of water but "running over." He started for his store and found the water well over the tops of his high rubber boots. It was fourteen inches deep over the railroad crossing, and the current sweeping down Main Street was so strong that he found it hard to make headway against it. Between the rising ground where the Unitarian Church now stands and that at Cutter Village everything was under water from one to two feet. Francis H. Johnson actually rowed a boat from the Harrison Parker mill at Converse bridge right through the center to Cutter's Mill.
The cellars of stores in the center were all flooded; in one there floated about "a motley collection of coal, molasses, butter, pota- toes, cheese, apples, salt pork, salt fish, onions, turnips, wood and cabbages"- samples of the entire stock in trade. A bridge over the Aberjona, near the Bacon felt mill, was carried away, and road and railway tracks badly washed out. The flood subsided as rap- idly as it rose. Next day the center was dry land again, though it was some time before the cellars of the houses and stores could be pumped out.
The flood was caused by an extremely heavy rain and thaw which raised the water of Wedge Pond and the river to unusual heights and by jams of floating ice at the culverts under the rail- way at Wedgemere Station2 and at the old canal aqueduct where the river entered the Upper Mystic Lake. These prevented the discharge of the water which promptly "backed up" into the center. The damage caused by this twenty-four hour flood was consider- able; by compensation it gave Winchester residents something to talk about for years.
The Winchester Light Guard was a conspicuous feature of town life in the decade of the fifties. It was organized on March 27, 1851 with a membership of some sixty or seventy men. F. O. Prince, 1 Woburn Journal, February 21, 1855. See also Winchester Record, Vol. II, page 184.
2 Then called Mystic Station.
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
who was the leading spirit in the formation of a military company in Winchester, was its first captain. The Light Guard was pres- ently mustered into the state militia as Company E of the Fifth Regiment. When Captain Prince was promoted in May 1853 to major (and later to lieutenant colonel) of the regiment he was succeeded in the command of the company by Wallace Whitney, and he in turn by William Pratt.
At the request of the company, the selectmen provided an armory for its use, and appropriated $75 to furnish it. The armory was on the upper floor of a two-story building called the "silk factory," because Mr. W. W. B. Lindley had for a time carried on there the manufacture of silk thread. This building stood in Main Street on the northerly side of the railway tracks opposite the Wakefield house, to which reference has been made.
The Light Guard had a rather brief existence; I have never seen its uniform described in detail, but a passing remark of John A. Bolles, made in a speech at the tenth anniversary of the town, seems to indicate that it was a brilliant one. "No trace," said Mr. Bolles, "remains of the Guard unless it be some scarlet costume that glitters in this morning's gay procession."1 But for a time it gave a dash of color to the sober life of a New England village. "The ever-popular Winchester Light Guard," says the Woburn Journal, commenting on its appearance in an elaborate celebration of the Fourth of July in 1852. That was a great day in Winchester. There was a parade, with a band and the glittering Light Guard escorting a long procession of school children and citizens, not for- getting the Sons of Temperance. There was a public meeting at which Mr. C. P. Curtis, Jr. read the Declaration of Independence, and Rev. Mr. Steele delivered an oration; and odes written for the occasion by Mr. Durivage and Mr. J. C. Johnson, the organist of the Congregational Church, were sung. Then there was a great picnic at Bacon's Grove by the Aberjona, and primitive fireworks in the evening.
By 1855 the Light Guard was in decay. Interest flagged; membership fell off. The means to pay the cost of its maintenance could not be found. On March 27, the fourth anniversary of its establishment, it was disbanded. Its place in the regiment was taken by the recently organized Lawrence Light Guard of Medford.
1 Winchester Record, Vol. I, page 343; Vol. II, page 327.
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SOCIAL AND COMMUNITY LIFE
A few Winchester men then and in later years, enlisted in the Woburn Mechanic's Phalanx. No other regular militia company has existed in the town since 1855, except for a year or two during the World War.
An interesting Winchester institution at this time was the industrial school which was maintained for several years in the large house built by Rev. Mr. Steele on what is now Highland Avenue. This school was a charity for orphaned or neglected girls of Boston. It was supported by a society of Boston women, among whom we find such well-known names as Mrs. A. H. Everett, Mrs. P. C. Brooks, Mrs. F. Gordon Dexter, Mrs. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mrs. J. L. Bowditch and Mrs. S. Parkman. Mrs. C. P. Curtis, Jr., herself a resident of Winchester, was one of the board of managers. The Steele house, then (1855) vacant, was thought suitable for the purposes of such a school. Mrs. Daniel Sharon, a very capable woman, whose descendants still live in Winchester, was appointed matron, and we gather from an annual report of the school still preserved1 that she was a satisfactory one. The girls were to be given simple training in "household labor" as well as a common school education. There were twenty-five or thirty girls in attend- ance during the four or five years that the school remained in Winchester. They were marshalled to the Unitarian Sunday School by Mrs. Sharon on every Lord's Day, and formed the backbone of that infant institution. About 1859 the school was removed to Dorchester.
In 1853 Winchester was greatly excited over the prospect of another line of railway, which was projected to run through the town. This was the "Stoneham Branch" so-called, which was chartered May 15, 1852, with a capital of $100,000. The idea was to give Stoneham, then without rail connection with Boston, access either to the Boston and Lowell or the Boston and Maine tracks. The natural course would have been to make connection with the Lowell road at or near Winchester, as was finally done. But some one conceived the plan of carrying the tracks through Winchester and Medford, and joining the Boston and Maine road at Medford Square. A number of Winchester people were interested, for the town was then out of sorts with the Lowell road which had recently
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