USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Winchester > History of Winchester, Massachusetts > Part 2
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
her rule to extraordinary and unhappy conditions, must have been a woman of parts and character to have retained, as she did, her authority for some thirty years. She it was with whom Governor Winthrop, Increase Nowell and the Rev. John Wilson dealt when the settlement of this part of the country was undertaken, and they always treated her and spoke of her with respect. She married, after Nane- pashemet's death, the chief 1 L powwow or medicine man of the tribe, whose name was Webcowet, but seemingly sur- rendered to him none of her prerogatives. 10
The Squaw Sachem and her three sons were from the first ‹ friendly and hospitable to the A SITE OF INDIAN BURIAL PLAGE white man; they deeded land generously to them, and often visited their growing villages at Charlestown and Lynn. Sagamore John (to whose 1936 memory a simple but dignified SAGAMORE JOHN'S MONUMENT monument was erected not many years ago at the "ancient Indian burial place" which is now on Sagamore Avenue in West Medford, near the shores of Mystic Lakes) was a particular admirer of the white men's ways, and became, after a fashion, a Christian. He died of smallpox only three years after the settlement of Charles- town, but he made, as the Puritan chronicles tell us, an edifying end, and left his infant son to be brought up by the Rev. Mr. Wilson of the church in Boston. This child died soon after his father, it is believed, for nothing more is heard of him.
It was perhaps true that it was the good fortune of the colo- nists of Massachusetts Bay to have come upon the scene when the savage spirit of the Pawtuckets was broken by their misfortunes and when they were ready to welcome the newcomers as possible
VIEW OF THE UPPER MYSTIC LAKE The land in the background is the Squaw Sachem's Land
9
SQUAW SACHEM AND HER RED MEN
allies and protectors against foes of their own race. Both Cotton Mather and Sir Ferdinando Gorges did not hesitate to entertain the pious belief that it was by a special interposition of Providence that so many savages were cleared out of the way to make room for "God's people." Whatever the reason, however, it is pleasant to record the cordial relations that always existed between our forefathers and the gentle, friendly Squaw Sachem. Her memory is especially worthy of perpetuation among Winchester folk, for her favorite place of residence, as we learn from many early sources, was on the western shore of Mystic Lake within the present limits of our town. Her own particular lands, which she reserved for herself when she deeded so much territory to the settlers of Charles- town, stretched all the way up and down the lake shore, but her wigwam stood oftenest on the land of the old Swan farm, now the property of the Winchester Country Club, perhaps near the ever- running spring, which still bears the name of the Squaw Sachem Spring.1
There may be no better place than this, before proceeding to the story of the settlement of Winchester and Woburn by the people of Charlestown, to narrate briefly the story of the further relations of the Squaw Sachem and her family with the white men. Many years before her death - as early as 1636 in fact - the "Indian Queen of Misticke" had executed a deed, which is still to be seen among the records of Middlesex County,2 providing that those personal lands of hers spoken of above should after her death be the property of Jotham Gibbons, the young son of that Major Edward Gibbons who was among the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and later attained to the dignity and title of Major General. The deed makes it clear that the transaction was a gift and not a sale: "This I do without seeking to of him or any of his; [i.e. without solicitation by him;] but I receiving many kindnesses of them, am willing to acknowledge their many kindnesses by this small gift to their son." What these kindnesses were that had awakened so lively an emotion of gratitude in the Sachem's breast there is unfortunately nothing to show.
1 This spring is on the property of Mr. John Abbott, adjacent to the Country Club. A tradition, probably without any foundation, has it that the Squaw Sachem met her death (about 1650) by drowning in the brook that is fed by this spring.
2 Registry of Deeds, Book I, page 174.
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
The land in question stretched, as we have said, all along the western shore of the Mystic Lakes. Its northern boundary was a little south of the present line of Everett Avenue in Winchester; on the south it was bounded by Sucker Brook in Arlington (or Menotomy as it then was), just south of the present Summer Street in that town. Already in 1636 one Captain Cooke had built a gristmill on that stream, which is frequently referred to in the records of the time. At the Winchester end the Sachem's land ran some half mile up the slopes of Myopia Hill to its summit. At the other end it narrowed to a few rods in width at the brook.
The Squaw Sachem remained undisturbed mistress of this plot of land until her death in 1650.1 Then, after some delay, Major General Gibbons took possession of the land in behalf of his son Jotham, who was then living in Bermuda. Presently we find Jotham, pressed for money, mortgaging the property to a well-to-do Boston merchant, Joshua Scottow. Then we learn that the land had been "redeemed" by Captain Samuel Scarlett, which means that he took over the mortgage. Scarlett was a sea captain and, as events proved, a friend of the Gibbons family. When Jotham Gibbons died, still a young man, in 1658, without having been able to pay off the mortgage, Scarlett became the virtual owner of the land, which was for many years known as "Scarlett's Farm."
But Scarlett was no farmer; he was off at sea the greater part of the time, and he leased the farm in 1658 to one Thomas Gleason. From that time, for several years, the property was in almost con- stant litigation. We find Gleason suing Henry Dunster, president of Harvard College and an executor of the estate of Captain Cooke (of the grist-mill), for trespass in sending men to cut hay on land along Sucker Brook to which Gleason laid claim. A little later he is bringing suit against Richard Gardner for encroaching on the "Squaw Sachem" land at the Winchester end. He won both suits, but was soon involved as defendant in a more difficult case. The town of Charlestown, through two of its citizens, Captain Francis Norton and Nicholas Davidson, undertook to dispossess Scarlett and Gleason entirely, and to get possession of the land for the town.
1 For this date see a deposition by Richard Church in the lawsuit of Scarlett and Gleason vs. Gardner.
II
SQUAW SACHEM AND HER RED MEN
The basis of this suit was laid in the conflicting wording of two deeds given by the Squaw Sachem during her life. The first, signed in 1636, to which we have already referred, disposed of her land to the Gibbons family upon her death. The other, signed April 15, 1639, was that in which she and her husband Webcowet released to Charlestown "all the land granted them by the Court excepting the farms and ground on the west of the two great ponds called Misticke ponds, from the south side of Mr. Nowell's lot, near the upper end of the lakes, unto the little runnel that cometh from Captain Cooke's mill. ... and after the death of Squaw Sachem she doth leave all her lands from Mr. Mayhew's house to near Salem to the present Governor John Winthrop, Sr., Mr. Increase Nowell, Mr. John Wilson and Mr. Edward Gibbons to dispose of . . . and for satisfaction from Charlestown we acknowledge to have received in full satisfaction twenty- and one coats, nineteen fathoms of wampum and three bushels of corn."1 A few months later the four men named in the deed made over all their interest in the land thus conveyed to the town of Charlestown, for which they had acted as agents. This deed, as we learn from the testimony of Rev. John Wilson, was signed "at the wigwam of the Squaw Sachem," which was almost certainly on land now in Winchester, either near the spring already mentioned, or, as Frothingham suggests in his History of Charlestown, near "Gardner Row," which was a later name for that part of Cambridge Street between Church Street and the upper Mystic Lake.
Now the representatives of Charlestown asserted that this deed was the legal one, since the earlier one had but one witness and was improperly drawn and dated, and they held that the land occupied by Gleason on lease from the Gibbons heirs was part of the grant here made to Winthrop, Nowell, Wilson and Gibbons in trust for the people of Charlestown. When the case came to trial in 1662 it appeared that there was still a third deed made by the Squaw Sachem and her husband November 13, 1639. This docu- ment confirmed that of 1636, named young Jotham Gibbons as heir to the land in dispute,2 and was accompanied by an explana-
1 Middlesex Deeds, Book I, page 175. It is the negotiation of this transfer of land, which included all of the present town of Winchester, that is commemorated by the mural painting in the Winchester Public Library.
2 Middlesex Deeds, Book I, page 176.
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
tion that this land was no part of that conveyed to Winthrop, Nowell, Wilson and Gibbons. This explanatory writing was sworn to in the presence of such distinguished men as Governor Win- throp himself, John Endicott and Richard Saltonstall. There was also a statement from the venerable John Wilson that he had never considered the Gibbons land to be any part of the territory con- veyed by the Sachem to the Charlestown men.
It is hard to see how Charlestown had any case at all. Yet it won two decisions in the County Court. But Gleason was a fighter. Though he was only a lessee, the land belonging to Captain Scarlett who was far away at sea, he carried his case to the Governor and Assistants sitting as a court of last appeal. This time he won and saw his persecutors assessed forty shillings for the costs of the appeal. This just judgment was rendered October 20, 1663; it put an end to all disputes regarding the true ownership of the Squaw Sachem land.
It is disappointing to learn that Thomas Gleason, who, although only a tenant of the farm, had put up so sturdy a fight against those who wished to spoil his absent landlord of his pos- sessions, within two years got himself into a dispute with Scarlett over the cutting down of some trees, and had to move off the land in consequence.
The proof of Scarlett's friendly association with the Gibbons family and of his purchase of the mortgage on the Squaw Sachem farm to prevent it from falling into less considerate hands is found in the provisions of his will. He was killed in 1675 by an explosion on board his ship, then lying in Long Island Sound. When his will was probated, it was learned that he had bequeathed the farm to Love, the only daughter of Jotham Gibbons. She was still living in Bermuda, the wife of a man named Prout, and by a second mar- riage she became the wife of the Rev. John Fowle, also of Bermuda. The farm remained in her possession or that of her husband until 1706, when it was equitably divided among her eight children. They lost little time in turning it into cash, and through various transfers that part of it which lay in Winchester found its way into the hands of the Swan, the Gardner, the Wyman and the Reed families.
The only one of the Squaw Sachem's sons who survived her
I3
SQUAW SACHEM AND HER RED MEN
was Sagamore George, "No Nose," as we hear him called in later years, though whether the deformity suggested was his from birth or was the result of accident we have no way of knowing. His Indian name was Wenepoykin; you will find him made a central figure in John Greenleaf Whittier's poem, "The Bridal of Pennacook," though he is there only by virtue of the fact that his name fitted the verse-maker's needs better than that of his brother Monto- wampate (otherwise Sagamore James), who was the real hero of the story. Wenepoykin had reason to regret the generosity of his mother and brothers to the palefaces, for we find him again and again petitioning the General Court and bringing suits at law to get possession of certain lands in Saugus which he claimed should have come to him on his brother John's death, but which various white men (among them Robert Keayne, first captain of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company) had seized and occu- pied. He never got any satisfaction, and that so far soured him toward the white men that he went on the warpath at the time of King Philip's War, was taken prisoner and sold into slavery in the West Indies. Somehow or other he got his freedom, for we find him back in Massachusetts among the "praying Indians" of Natick at the time of his death in 1684. He was the last sachem of the Paw- tuckets. His people, reduced in numbers as we have seen by war and pestilence, had before this been pushed quite aside and dis- persed by the expanding colony of Massachusetts Bay. Few were left alive after the bloodshed of King Philip's War, and they were wanderers, and in the thrifty Puritan phrase "vagabonds," with- out homes or tribal association. It is a familiar story. In like man- ner the red men were everywhere vanishing before the advance of European civilization. But there is no little pathos in this ending, in obscurity and wretchedness, of the line of that dignified and attractive figure, the Squaw Sachem, who wished to be known as the "friend of the white man."
For many years after the dissolution of the Pawtuckets as a tribe, single Indians or small bands of them were familiar sights in the vicinity of Winchester. Even as late as the early part of the last century parties used to appear in the summer time, paddling up the Mystic River and the lakes to visit the scenes that had been familiar to their ancestors. They were particularly attracted
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
to the vicinity of the Squaw Sachem's last home, and we have it from one of the Swan family that they often paid pathetically friendly visits to the farmhouse which stood so near the Sachem's spring. Sometimes they spent two or three months encamped on the shores of Horn Pond. Where they wandered to when winter came on is not known.
The last of the Indians to live hereabout was an old squaw who went by the name of Hannah Shiner. Brooks, the Medford historian, says that she lived at one time in West Medford in the same house with a mulatto man "of high character" who was called Tobey.1 In later years, however, she lived by herself in a hut beneath an overhanging rock on the edge of Turkey Swamp in the Middlesex Fells. Her old dwelling place is now covered by the waters of Winchester's South Reservoir. In this secluded spot she existed, one hardly knows how; her only means of support what she could beg or make by the sale of the grass baskets she wove with no little skill. It is said that at one time she had her home in a shanty-like house near the corner of Church and Bacon Streets in Winchester2 and was a familiar figure in the streets of the village. Hannah had, unluckily, an extravagant fondness for rum. She met her death while under the influence of that fiery liquor, in December 1820, having fallen from a bridge over the Aberjona at Winchester center, and drowned. The bridge was doubtless that on Main Street where the Converse bridge now is; there was then no other in existence in that vicinity. The poor woman's body was found and taken into the house of Abel Rich- ardson, which stood hard by, and she had a funeral at which the Rev. Mr. Chickering preached from the text "And hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell upon the earth,"3 a sentiment to which Hannah Shiner, had she been able to hear it declaimed, might have thought her white neighbors had been a little slow in subscribing.
With her interment the last Indian, so far as we know, dis- appeared from the Mystic Valley.
1 Brooks, History of Medford. Medford Hist. Register, Vol. XIII, No. I.
2 Cooke, Winchester Record, Vol. I, page 274.
3 Medford Hist. Register, Vol. XIII, No. I.
CHAPTER II
WHITE MEN ON THE ABERJONA FIRST SETTLEMENT AT WATERFIELD. WOBURN INCORPORATED
IT would be interesting if we could be quite sure what English- man or Englishmen first saw or set foot in the land which now forms the town of Winchester. It was certainly not John Smith, for his exploration of Boston Bay in 1614 was confined to the actual shore line; he did not penetrate far into the interior. But it is very possible that Edward Winslow and Myles Standish, con- spicuous leaders of the Mayflower colony at Plymouth, viewed, if they did not visit, the valley above the Mystic Lakes. It was in September 1621 that these men and eight others, guided by three friendly Indians, one of whom was Squanto, who was the inter- preter and useful handy man in all the Pilgrims' dealings with the Indians, sailed out of Plymouth harbor in a small shallop and laid their course northward. They were sent to spy out the region about the head of Massachusetts Bay, to try to establish friendly rela- tions with the Indians there, and if possible to do a little trading. Standish, the "Captain" as the Pilgrim chroniclers always called him, was in command of the little expedition.
It was the twenty-ninth of September, a time of year when the New England country is at its loveliest, that the shallop entered Boston Bay and came to anchor somewhere off the head- land of Squantum in Quincy. The next day a party went ashore. They found a heap of lobsters that the Indians had caught, and partook heartily of them. Then they pushed on, and soon came upon a frightened Indian woman, who, reassured by Squanto, directed them to the wigwam of a chief named Obbatinewat. This fellow, who seems to have been a skulking savage, was terrified out of his wits for fear of the Tarratines, whose annual raid for the loot- ing of the unfortunate Massachusetts tribes he was daily expecting. He told Standish and Winslow of the Squaw Sachem, who was also, he said, his enemy, but was the chief sachem of those parts.
I5
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
The Plymouth men determined to make search for her. They crossed the bay in their shallop, landed the next day, probably in Charlestown, and marched, according to their own guess, five or six miles into the country. It is hard to trace their course, for they do not describe it in any detail. But they did find, at the end of their march, both the "home" of the dead Nanepashemet where he lay buried, as they were told, in a grave covered with a frame of poles, and his stockaded fort on the top of a hill.1 This would seem to correspond with the description of Nanepashemet's pali- sade on Rock Hill in Medford. If Standish and Winslow went no farther than this, they were at a spot from which they could look down over the Mystic Lakes and up into the valley where Win- chester now stands. It is pretty certain that they did not go farther, for having found some of the natives there, they spent their time talking with them and trading for beaver skins.
They asked for the Squaw Sachem, but were told that she was not then in the neighborhood, so they gave up their search for her, marched back to their shallop and presently sailed back to Plym- outh, taking with them a goodly store of beaver fur. They were, as Bradford tells us, much delighted with the beauty and fertility of the land they had seen and "wished they [the Plymouth colo- nists] had been there seated."2 But the Pilgrims, who felt they had been led to their home in Plymouth by God's hand, and who were perhaps too canny to risk trouble by moving to a spot which (it was very possible) might already have been granted to some one else, determined to stay where they were. Bradford comments piously : "It seems the Lord, who arranges to all men the bounds of their habitation, had appointed it [the pleasant land along the Charles and the Mystic] for another use."
That use, as it soon appeared, was its occupation by the more numerous and prosperous company of Puritans, who were to estab- lish the colony of Massachusetts Bay. It was in 1930 that the people of this state celebrated with much dignified enthusiasm the tercentenary of that colony. But as a matter of fact its roots reach deeper than that. It may be said to have issued directly from a venture of certain Puritan merchants of Dorchester in the west of
1 Mourt's Relation, which is in part the Journal of Bradford and Winslow.
2 Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation.
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FIRST SETTLEMENTS
England, who despatched a ship's company to these shores to establish a trading colony on Cape Ann as early as 1623. The ven- ture proved unprofitable, as so many similar ones did in the very early history of New England, and before long the Dorchester merchants withdrew their support. The settlers they had sent over did not all return to England, however. Some of them, guided by Roger Conant, a stout Puritan who had first come over to Plym- outh but had abandoned the Pilgrim colony because he did not altogether like their complete separation from the Church of Eng- land, moved to the present site of Salem, then called Naumkeag. There they settled down to make what they could out of the wilderness.
Meanwhile John White, the Puritan rector of Dorchester, had an inspiration. Why not preserve the colony abandoned by the merchants as a bad commercial speculation, and make it over into a community of earnest religious believers, a refuge in the new world for the Puritans who were already finding life hard and per- secution imminent under the rule of King Charles? He presented his ideas to leading Puritans all over England, and they found general favor. White and his friends were able to get a grant of land from the Council of New England reaching from three miles north of the Merrimac to three miles south of the Charles. Acting promptly, in order to get a foothold on their grant before anyone else laid claim to it, they sent over a party of sixty persons, of whom "Master John Endicott was the chief," to join the settlers already at Naumkeag. It was September 1628 when this company arrived. There was some discussion at first between the "old planters" and the new arrivals, but a friendly agreement was soon reached, and the significant name of Salem, which means in Hebrew "peace," was bestowed upon the settlement.
At home in England the movement John White had started grew fast. More and more influential Puritans became interested; more and more recruits professed themselves eager to go to New England. In March 1629 the king was persuaded to grant a charter creating a corporation to be known as the Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay. That same year another company, this time four hundred in number, with abundance of cattle, tools and ammunition, emigrated to Salem under the leadership of Rev.
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
Francis Higginson. The next year came the great exodus. John Winthrop and Thomas Dudley, earnest Puritans and men of wealth and high standing in England, were chosen Governor and Deputy Governor of the newly chartered company, and they set sail in April 1630 at the head of a little fleet of ships laden with eager colonists. Before the end of the year seventeen vessels had brought more than a thousand new settlers, rigid Puritans all, to Salem harbor. John White's dream was most effectively realized.
All was not well with the new colony, however. There had been no little sickness and some deaths aboard the flotilla that brought Winthrop and the others to Salem; there was much scurvy among the passengers. Arrived at Salem they found sickness there too, and a scarcity of provisions for so many. During the summer and fall there were about two hundred deaths. Among them were the Rev. Francis Higginson, and Isaac Johnson and his wife, the Lady Arabella, who was, we are told, the sister of the Earl of Lincoln. Johnson was the richest of all the company, which contained a good many well-to-do men, and his loss was deeply felt.
Because of crowded conditions at Salem, and because, too, Winthrop thought it not the best place for the chief place of the colony, the newcomers had no sooner landed than they began to scatter. Some went to the peninsula called by the Indians Misha- wum, but now renamed Charlestown, others to Shawmut, which was to become Boston, still others to make settlement at places they named Roxbury, Dorchester, Lynn and Watertown. It is with Charlestown, which was literally enough the mother-town of Winchester and of Woburn, Malden, Somerville, Everett, Medford, Burlington and Stoneham as well, that we are to concern ourselves.
The first settlement of Charlestown was in 1629, for in that year a number of those who had come over to Salem with the Rev. Mr. Higginson's party removed, with Governor Endicott's per- mission, to Mishawum, as Charlestown Neck was called by the Indians. Among them were the brothers Sprague, who were later the founders of Malden, and Thomas Graves. This Graves was an ·"engineer" of some reputation in England. It was his task to lay out the new settlement at Mishawum, to stake out building lots, determine where the streets should be, and superintend the build- ing of houses, among them a "Great House" which was to be the
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