USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Winchester > History of Winchester, Massachusetts > Part 19
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No account of the war activities of Winchester would be com- plete without grateful mention of the work of the Soldiers Aid Society. This was composed of a large number of the women of the town, who met regularly during the war years, sometimes in pri- vate houses, sometimes in the Congregational vestry or a hall in the Lyceum Building, to cut and sew on all sorts of clothing for the soldiers and to roll bandages or prepare other hospital supplies to be sent to the front. Mrs. Charles P. Curtis, Jr. was its presi- dent, and Miss Caroline Ford, a daughter of Captain Ford, its treasurer. Mrs. T. P. Tenney, Mrs. Stephen A. Holt, Mrs. D. N. Skillings, Mrs. Harrison Parker, Mrs. Zebediah Abbott and Mrs. S. D. Quimby were among the ladies most frequently mentioned as active in the work of the Society. On February 5, 1863 there was a "levee" in Lyceum Hall, organized by the Soldiers Aid, to raise money for its use. It was a lively social affair, if the contem- porary accounts are to be trusted. All the time-tested expedients of "fairs" and "bazaars" to beguile money from the pockets of those who attended were employed, and the society profited to the amount of $200. An elaborate musical programme concluded the entertainment.1
1 Middlesex Journal, February 14, 1863.
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A report of the work of the Soldiers Aid Society made in January 1864 shows that up to that time it had collected $948.28 - of which $300 was a donation from a sympathizer in England, Mr. E. V. Ashton-and that it had made and sent to the Sanitary Commission for distribution to the army 37 quilts, 11 blankets, 107 pillow cases, 146 towels, 193 handkerchiefs, 110 flannel shirts, 259 cotton shirts and drawers, 250 pairs of knitted stockings, 66 sheets, 13 bedgowns, and a great quantity of lint, linen and cotton bandages, wines, jellies, books, stationery and miscellaneous sup- plies, besides boxes of food and delicacies to Winchester soldiers in the Forty-Fifth and other Massachusetts regiments.1 To this gen- erous total more was added during the closing year of the war.
It was during the war years that the city of Charlestown, in need of an additional supply of water, got from the legislature authority to put up a dam between the Upper and Lower Mystic Lakes,2 at the narrow point called "the Partings." In the lower lake the water was still somewhat brackish. Charlestown was to take its supply wholly from the Upper Lake, above the dam, reënforced by the still unpolluted waters of the Aberjona, which the dam would impound.
Work on the dam at the Partings began in 1863. It was com- pleted in the following year, and the water began to accumulate behind it. In the end the level of the old Upper Pond was raised by six feet, and a new Upper Pond was created by the flooding of the Symmes or Bacon meadow, through which the Aberjona had until then pursued its winding way. The mouth of the river, which had previously been at the "Narrows," just above the house of the Winchester Boat Club, retreated to its present position, and the Upper Lake took on the aspect it presents today. The former char- acter of the bottom is still recalled in late summer days, when a lusty growth of marsh grass can often be seen thrusting itself above the surface of the water at the shallow end of the lake near the river's mouth.
The Charlestown Water Commissioners did what they could to neutralize any damage that the rising water might cause to shore
1 Middlesex Journal, January 23, 1864.
2 Chapter 105, Acts of 1862.
.
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property by building up the bank of the lake whenever there was any danger of its being overflowed. But they were sued, as I have noticed above, by Mr. Everett, and had to pay substantial damages. They were sued also by Mr. John H. Bacon, who had a much better case than Mr. Everett, since his meadow land was irretrievably flooded. He was able, however, to recover a judgment for only $3,000 and there is no evidence that he ever took the trouble to collect that.
The raising of the water level by six feet rendered practically useless the water power at the old Symmes or Bacon dam, which stood a little way below the present Wedgemere Station, with at least two mill buildings upon it. One of these buildings was occu- pied by a Mr. Allen, who conducted the "Fibrilla Mills" for the making of fabrics from flax. The Charlestown commissioners had the right to remove the dam as an obstruction to their supply of water, and they finally did so; but at the instance, as it appears, of the Fish Committee of Winchester.
The Fish Committee was first appointed at the town meeting of March 27, 1861. E. A. Brackett, C. P. Curtis, Jr. and Francis H. Johnson were its original members. It was charged with the pro- tection of fish in the waterways of the town and the provision of means whereby several varieties of fish - in particular the ale- wives - might get around mill dams and ascend the Aberjona River. Fish were still plenty in the lakes, and the spring run of alewives was large enough to pretty nearly cover the surface of the river in good seasons.1
In the discharge of their duties the committee built a fishway at the Bacon dam, but they were in frequent trouble with Mr. Allen, who resented interference with his dam and was accustomed to close up the fishway whenever he wanted more water for his mill wheel. In disgust the Fish Committee appealed to the Charles- town Water Commissioners to remove the dam altogether. On May 7, 1864 Mr. McDonald, superintendent of the water works, accompanied by several workmen and equipped with a couple of kegs of gunpowder, presented himself at the Fibrilla Flax Mills.
1 The Fish Committee maintained an existence until the nineties of the last century, when the increasing pollution of the Aberjona and Mystic waters left it with no fish to protect. Beside caring for the fishways it occasionally planted young fish in the lake, and had control of issuing permits for anglers to fish there.
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The manager thereof was inclined to resist but he was gently but firmly led away by two of Mr. McDonald's men, the kegs of gun- powder were placed in position, and the ensuing explosion pretty completely wrecked the dam.1 For a short time a steam engine was employed to furnish power to the waterless mill, but it was soon abandoned and removed. The Bacons had previously removed their own felt business to a factory which stood where Lakeview Road now runs; and after that burned in 1880 they built and operated the mill still standing near the railway tracks below Wedgemere Station.
When, toward the close of the war, Dr. Ingalls determined to remove permanently from Winchester his place was taken by Dr. Frederick Winsor. A man of high'attainments and striking person- ality, Dr. Winsor quickly became "the beloved physician," skillful in his profession, active in the affairs of the community, admired and honored by all his townsmen. A graduate of Harvard College (1851) and Medical School, he first practised in Salem, and was for a time in charge of the hospital on Rainsford Island in Boston Harbor. He served as surgeon with the Forty-ninth Regiment during the Civil War and came to Winchester in 1864, buying and living in Dr. Ingalls's house at the corner of Main and Pleasant (now Mt. Vernon) streets. Behind this house was a garden and orchard extending back to the river bank, concealed from the street by a high board fence, and on this land Mrs. Winsor built a small house in which she kept a private school for girls, herself the teacher.2 Mrs. Winsor was as energetic and as cultivated as her husband, instant in every good work in the community, and the mother of a family of six fine children who inherited the talents and the charm of their parents. To mention only the most distinguished of them, one was Robert Winsor, the Boston banker, long the head of Kidder Peabody & Co., another was Frederick, founder and head- master of the Middlesex School at Concord, and another was Mary, the founder of Miss Winsor's School for Girls, a famous Boston institution for half a century.
1 Middlesex Journal, May 14, 1864; Medford Historical Register, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, page 67. Article by Moses W. Mann.
2 Recollections of Henry C. Robinson.
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DR. AND MRS. FREDERICK WINSOR WITH THEIR FAMILY
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In later years Dr. Winsor moved his house from the center up the hill to a new site on Vine Street. The house, altered beyond recognition and once damaged by fire, is that formerly occupied by the Knights of Columbus and now by the local lodge of Odd Fellows.
Dr. Winsor was an earnest Unitarian in religion, and instru- mental above all others in the formation of a church of that denom- ination in Winchester.1 After twenty-five years of an exacting medical practice, his health gave way. He visited Bermuda in the hope of finding benefit from its mild climate, but died there Feb- ruary 25, 1889, Jeaving behind him the fragrant memory of a busy and unselfish life, and mourned by the entire town as few of its citizens have ever been. His rather tall, spare figure and his keenly intelligent face, with its flowing beard and its bright, kindly, some- what quizzical eyes, remained - and for a few still remain - enshrined in the memory of those who knew and loved him.
On September 2, 1865 the Woburn Journal chronicled the purchase by Mr. D. N. Skillings of five acres of land "between the railroad and Church Street." This was the nucleus of the estate which, though now much built upon, is still known by the name of Rangeley, which Mr. Skillings gave it. This land in spite of its nearness to the village center had long been neglected - it is hard to see just why. It was in 1865 pretty well overgrown with pine and hardwood trees, locally called "Collins's Woods," from the name of a former owner - the Thomas Collins from whom the Congregational Church bought the land for its meetinghouse. Mr. Skillings cut down much of the wood, bought additional land to the south - a part of the old Symmes farm - and developed the whole into a charming park-like estate, which still retains a great deal of its quiet, natural unspoiled beauty, though so near to the heart of the town. He set up a substantial and costly stone wall along the entire frontage of the estate on Church Street and built near the lower end of his property a mansion house, greatly admired by his fellow citizens, which has only lately been pulled down.
As time went on, Mr. Skillings built several other houses 1 See Chapter XVI.
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within the limits of his property which he sold or leased to those whom he wished to be his neighbors. He also put up a building behind his own residence for the use of the Adelphian Club, a lively social institution of the day, which, on taking possession of its new quarters, was rechristened the Back Log Club. Its membership included many families of the town - men and women, old and young - and during the months from October to June its hall was in frequent use for literary and musical entertainments, dances, and dramatic performances. The Back Log Club flourished for nearly twenty years - a very delightful center for the social activities of a town still small enough for everyone to know every- one else, and for all to take their pleasure together.
At about the time that Rangeley was developed, Mr. Abijah Thompson, a son of Deacon B. F. Thompson, and, with his brother Stephen, the Deacon's successor in the tannery business, conceived the idea of a somewhat similar estate on the level land along the Aberjona at the foot of Mystic Avenue. He went to some expense in filling and grading the land but in the end gave up the project, perhaps because he found the site too low, perhaps because it was too near the railway freight yards and commercial establishments on what is now Manchester Field. He built instead on Church Street; the house still stands at the corner of Glen Road. The only memorial of his original project is the brick work at the head of the little island in the Aberjona, built as a support to a bridge to give access to the proposed estate.
It was during the years immediately following the Civil War that the game of baseball began to spread like wildfire over the country. The first game reported as having been played in Win- chester was that of October 10, 1868, wherein the Eagles of Woburn triumphed over the Clippers of Winchester by the score of 31 to 26. But a year earlier we find the Winchester correspondent of the Woburn newspaper much exercised over the way in which the public was "running wild" over the new sport. "The youngest boy," he complains, "hardly able to handle a bat, up to full-grown men, all are full of this one idea. . . . The community has baseball on the brain. Many serious results are likely to ensue from playing this game. We have just read of a Troy printer, who while playing baseball threw back his arm with such violence as to break the
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bone short off near the shoulder .... Besides it is a question whether these gatherings of young folks have a beneficial effect upon their morals ... by inducing betting which is apt to be attendant on such exhibitions. We do not wish to ... disparage the game, but let it be confined within reasonable limits. ... Let us hope the newspapers may not be surfeited with accounts of ... these trials of skill." 1
So spoke sober sentiment in Winchester in 1867. What would Mr. Wadleigh, who wrote the words, say, if he could witness a "World Series" game of seventy years later! In spite of the alarm with which he viewed baseball the sport quickly became popular in Winchester. The Mystic Ball Club was organized, and played frequent games with teams from other towns on "Bacon Field" near the corner of Church and Bacon Streets - the land through which Stratford Road now runs. The Woburn Journal if not "sur- feited" with accounts of these games, certainly recorded not a few of them. Bacon Field remained the arena for out-door sports until the development of Manchester Field in the nineties. Since that splendid field was made, it has been the scene of all the important baseball and football games played in Winchester.
An incident of the sixties that made a deep impression on the townspeople was the explosion of the boiler of the locomotive "Essex" while it was standing on the crossing at the center. This accident occurred on the afternoon of January 29, 1866. The Essex, which was drawing a freight train toward Boston, had been brought to a stop at the Winchester station, which then stood beside the crossing, as the reader has been told more than once. The engineer was leaning from his cab talking with the flagman at the crossing, when with a terrific roar the engine boiler burst. The engineer and fireman were tossed out of the cab, but escaped with some scalding from steam and boiling water. The flagman, Robert Connor, was less fortunate. Pieces of flying metal almost cut his head from his body; he lived only a few hours.
The explosion was heard all over town. It broke almost every pane of glass in Lyceum Hall and in the stores around the center. Pieces of boiler metal littered the Common and were even thrown
1 Woburn Journal, October 5, 1867.
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as far as the Congregational Church grounds. If the boiler had given way a minute later the loss of life might have been considerable, for the passenger train from Boston was approaching the station and would shortly have come to a stand right beside the "Essex."
In 1872 the location of the railway station, which had stood for more than thirty years beside the crossing in the center, was moved some eight hundred feet to the south, where it stands today. With the increase of traffic both by rail and highway, the old situ- ation had become something of a nuisance, for the frequent trains that stopped there could not but block the crossing completely a good many times in the day. The new station - today the old station - aroused in the minds of Winchester folk of 1872 a degree of admiration which, after sixty years of experience with the build- ing, seems to us a little excessive. But it was a commodious and not ill-looking structure, and it was perhaps, as it was hailed, “an ornament to the town."1 Common Street on both the easterly and southerly side of the Common was built at the same time to give access to the new station.
This desirable result was not attained, however, without some bitter factional fighting in the town meetings. The railway company had bought the property where the station now stands after con- sultation with a committee of the town, of which Mr. Skillings was chairman, and Mr. Joy, Mr. Metcalf, Mr. Dwinell, Mr. Ham and Mr. Woodbury were members. A party in the town which wanted the station on the easterly side of the track and nearer the crossing at the center, pretended that Mr. Skillings had used underground influence to get it put near his Rangeley property. He replied, reasonably enough, that the new location would hurt his property rather than help it, and the railway directors insisted that they had selected the site for the station because no land nearer the center was offered them at any but exorbitant prices.
The matter was fought out in half a dozen town meetings, at some of which there was much disorder and no little angry talk. One argument was that the new station would be so near the Thompson tannery that nobody could wait on the platform with- out holding his nose; and that would seem to have been the only good ground for protest against the railway's decision. In the end
1 Woburn Journal, August 24, 1872.
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the railway held all the cards. It had bought the land, and would build nowhere else. If the town did not like it, it could put up with the old station with all its inconveniences. Faced with this dilemma, the opposition - which for a time seemed to control the town meetings - had to give in with what grace it could, and the tempest died away amid sultry grumblings in the newspaper.1 The station arose just where the railway directors and Mr. Skillings' committee had agreed it should.
1 See Woburn Journal for April 2, 1870 and April 1, May 6, June 10, July II, December 9, 1871.
CHAPTER XV
WINCHESTER IN THE SEVENTIES THE STORY OF THE WATER SYSTEM. THE BANKS
BY 1870 Winchester had increased its population to 2,646. Its industries were prosperous. There were three tanning or leather- working plants in the town: the Thompson tannery near the rail- way station, the Alexander Mosely tannery at Swanton Street - since become that of Loring and Avery and then of Beggs and Cobb - and a small leather-working shop on Walnut Street, of which Warren Johnson was the proprietor. John H. Bacon was still making felt near the Mystic Station,1 and the Whitney Machine Company was making a variety of complicated machinery in the mill at the center, where Edward Converse had built his dam. In the same building Charles Porter made knives and curriers' tools. Cowdery, Cobb and Nichols were making piano cases and piano actions at the old Belknap privilege on Horn Pond Brook and the Cutters were still sawing mahogany at their mill lower down on the same stream. Zebadiah Abbott was cutting ivory for piano keys in a little shop at the center, and Alexis C. Cutting, a newcomer to Winchester, had established a thriving business in lumber and in hemlock bark, which he sold to the tanneries, with a yard near the railway tracks on what is now Manchester Field. James H. Winn had just established (1868) a factory for manufacturing hands for watches, by a patented mechanical process, on the site of the old Jeduthan Richardson mill off Washington Street north of Forest Street. That factory, the only one of its kind in the country, is still in the hands of his sons.
Stores were increasing in number. George P. Brown had suc- ceeded to the drug store formerly conducted by David Youngman and then by Josiah Hovey, and he had likewise succeeded them as Town Clerk, which office for years was a kind of perquisite of the town apothecary. He was the postmaster, too, and the post office
1 Now the Wedgemere Station.
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was located in his store in the Lyceum Building until its removal in 1880 to the newly built Brown and Stanton block, which still stands on the corner of Mt. Vernon and Main streets where Dr. Ingalls and later Dr. Winsor had lived. Mr. Brown was one of the builders of this substantial business block; the other was Jacob H. Stanton, Jr., who a little before 1870 had opened a grocery store on the western side of the railway tracks.
Newcomers, men of substance and soon to become leading figures in the town, were continually moving to Winchester. Only a few can be mentioned, but there are some that cannot be over- looked. One was Emmons Hamlin, a member of the famous firm of Mason and Hamlin, the piano and organ builders. Another was James F. Dwinell, prosperous coffee merchant and founder of the Dwinell, Wright Company. A third was Moses A. Herrick, who was engaged in various enterprises but at this time was the treasurer of the iron works at Nashua, N. H. Highly successful in business, he built himself a handsome house on the hillside above Main Street, which was approached by the street that now bears his name. John T. Wilson, an able Boston lawyer, who was often called on to serve as Moderator for the town meetings - and in those days they often stood in need of being "moderated" - was a fourth. A few years later came the Pond brothers, Handel, Shepard and Preston. Handel Pond was a partner in the Ivers and Pond Piano Company. Shepard died before he was thirty, and Preston was for years the treasurer of the Dennison Manufacturing Company. All three brothers were musical, and Handel Pond was the sponsor of a number of concerts in Rangeley Hall - as the Back Log Club house was sometimes called -at which some distinguished artists appeared.
In the seventies J. Foxcroft Cole, the famous landscape painter, came to Winchester to live and built the first house on what is now Everett Avenue, near its junction with Bacon Street. From his studio came a score or two of charming pictures of Winchester scenery, painted on the shores of the Mystic Lakes, the banks of the Aberjona, or the higher land of the "old Symmes farm." The natural beauty of Winchester has attracted many artists since that day. Edmund L. Garrett, another famous painter of landscapes, lived for some years in Lagrange Street; H. Dudley Murphy, emi- nent in both oils and water colors and especially perhaps for his
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beautiful flower paintings, long had his studio and his home on Highland Avenue. W. H. W. Bicknell, one of America's foremost etchers, still (1936) lives in Arlington Street next to the grounds of the Country Club. Otis Philbrick, painter and teacher of art, is a Winchester resident. Gerrit Beneker and Ettore Caser are other well-known artists who have for a time made the town their home.
About 1877 a young lawyer, just married and admitted to the bar, Samuel J. Elder by name, chose Winchester to be his home, and in the next forty years became one of the town's most dis- tinguished citizens and a leader at the Boston bar. He represented the town in the legislature and many Winchester citizens still remember his kindly, genial nature and his persuasive eloquence, which rarely failed in town meeting to win a majority for the causes he espoused. As his means increased he built the handsome house on Myopia Hill, which he called "Grey Rocks"; at this house Mr. Elder's contemporary at Yale, William H. Taft, President and Chief Justice of the United States, was often entertained. It is now (1936) occupied by his son-in-law, Rev. Howard J. Chidley, pastor of the Congregational Church.
A distinguished resident of Winchester in the eighties and early nineties was General John M. Corse. Few officers had a more bril- liant Civil War career than he; he won laurels at Vicksburg, Chatta- nooga and in the Atlanta campaign during Sherman's march to the sea. His greatest exploit was the successful defence of Allatoona Pass in the latter campaign, when with a force very inferior in numbers he beat off one Confederate attack after another, until he was relieved by reinforcements. It was to General Corse on this occasion that Sherman sent his famous message "Hold the fort; I am coming," which became the refrain of a very popular gospel hymn. From 1886 to 1891, while he was living in Winchester, General Corse was postmaster of Boston - and a highly efficient one. He died on April 27, 1893, his fifty-eighth birthday, in the large house originally built and occupied by Mr. D. N. Skillings at Washington and Walnut streets, now the Parkway.
Perhaps a word should be said here of a familiar Winchester character of those days, "Uncle" Solomon Fletcher. Mr. Fletcher had been in his youth and middle life in the business of manufactur- ing shoes; he was foreman of S. S. Richardson's large shop in Woburn
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