USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Winchester > History of Winchester, Massachusetts > Part 25
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His proposal was to raise $150,000, to be contributed in approx- imately equal shares by the Park Commission, the city of Boston and the town of Winchester; to purchase and remove the commercial properties that encumbered the ground; and to improve the whole as a public playground and a natural park. The task was a difficult one; it required patience and diplomacy as well as enthusiasm, untiring persistence as well as careful planning. In November 1893 he induced the town at a special town meeting to create a board of park commissioners, of which, as a matter of course, he was made the chairman. He won the cooperation of the Metropolitan Commission and the Water Board of Boston, and received some promise of appropriations from both sources. So prepared he came before the March town meeting of 1894 to per- suade Winchester to carry out its part of the bargain.
He had a large following of voters whom he had personally won to his support. But the opposition was numerous and determined too. Not much of it was furnished by the interests whose prop- erties were to be taken. The railroad agreed to move its freight
1 In the Collections of the Winchester Historical Society.
2 Since become the Metropolitan District Commission.
3 The Mystic Lakes source was abandoned in 1898.
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yards north of the center, if and when it could get suitable land there in exchange. The Waldmyer family was willing to sell its tannery, which was only occasionally profitable. Mr. Emerson and Mr. Cutting were public spirited enough to leave their present locations and go elsewhere. But there were many who saw the whole plan as a blow to the industries of Winchester. They believed it doubtful whether the concerns bought out would ever be reës- tablished. They did not like the prospect of Winchester's becoming a residential suburb without prosperous industries of its own; and there was propaganda to persuade the workingmen of the town that the whole thing was a plan to throw them out of work and tax them for the luxury of a park that only the well-to-do wanted or would enjoy.
The town meeting was an extraordinary one. The veteran moderator, John T. Wilson, was in the chair. When the matter of the park appropriation was brought up, discussion at once grew hot. Mr. Manchester made his speech in support of a motion to appropriate $50,000 for the purpose specified. His speech was a good one, but the opposition had all their guns out. They attacked the plan from every side, laughed at the idea that Boston would ever make good its share of the money required and wept for the poor man who would have to pay for this bit of "fancy-work." Patrick Holland declared that the project was already driving work out of town, since the tannery would be running "full time" if it were not for the uncertainty of the situation, and predicted that it would cost $500,000 to prepare the place for the boys to play ball. The motion required a two-thirds vote, since it was for the appropriation of money. It did not get even a majority on the first vote; there were 105 in favor and 173 opposed.1
But the number of voters was small - hardly a third of the electorate. The advocates of the park were sure that a larger meeting would reach a different conclusion. They moved to recon- sider the vote just passed, and the meeting adjourned without voting on the reconsideration. The adjourned meeting on March 19 was the largest ever held in the town. Six hundred voters were present, and the meeting was tense with excitement. Mr. Man- chester spoke again at length, explaining in every detail his plan
1 Town Records, Vol. III, page 407.
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and marshaling all his arguments for it. His supporters followed him. Mr. Lewis Parkhurst, Mr. N. A. Richardson, Mr. John H. Carter, Mr. S. C. Small and others made speeches; the opposition found its voice chiefly in the person of Mr. W. J. Daly. As the meeting prolonged itself, it was clear that the cause of the park was gaining. Speaker after speaker came to Mr. Manchester's aid. It was voted to reconsider the vote of the previous meeting. When the final vote on a motion for the appropriation of the sum of $50,000 was taken it stood 490 ayes to 108 noes - a victory that was greeted with noisy applause.1
In spite of this personal triumph of Mr. Manchester, the project was delayed for almost another twelve-month. The Metropolitan Park Commission had its money ready, but the Boston City Council refused to spend its $65,000, as recommended by the Water Board; not until a new mayor and a new council came into office in 1895 was the order finally passed. In the meantime the option on the Waldmyer tannery expired, and could not be renewed. In order to save the situation, Mr. Edwin Ginn bought the property himself at a cost of $35,000, to be turned over to the town if and when the tri-partite agreement went through. Mr. Ginn, always conspicuous for public spirit, had already deeded to the Metropolitan Park Commission the land at the southern end of the proposed park and playground, which he owned. This is the land still called Ginn Field, bordered by Bacon Street, the Mystic Valley Parkway and the railway tracks. For many years the old town pound stood upon it near the spot where the Aberjona flows under Bacon Street.
With the appropriation of Boston's share of the necessary money, the success of Mr. Manchester's labors was assured. It needs no argument today to prove the wisdom of his views. The beautiful playground (appropriately named for the man who created it) is an indispensable means of healthful and whole some recreation for the boys and girls of the town; and the long expanse of green below dotted with trees and traversed by the winding stream of the Aberjona gives Winchester a natural, unconventional- ized park in the very center of the town which is the envy of many another community.2
1 Town Records, Vol. III, page 411; Winchester Star, March 14, 1894.
2 See the Park Commissioners' Report for 1897, in which there is a full account of the evolution of the playground.
THE SITE OF MANCHESTER FIELD IN 1890
MANCHESTER FIELD IN 1936
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A final word must be added about Mr. Manchester, who did not long survive his great service to his fellow citizens. Always in delicate health and an untiring worker both in his profession and in the public service he wore himself out within five years. He was the first park commissioner of Winchester, and town counsel; he represented the town in the legislatures of 1896 and 1897. He was appointed to the Metropolitan Park Commission in 1898, but his final illness was already upon him. He died of tuberculosis in his childhood home at Randolph, Vermont, November 27, 1899. In 1931 a tardy memorial to him was set up on Manchester Field, a little way in from Waterfield Road. It consists of a large and shapely boulder bearing a bronze tablet on which is inscribed, after Mr. Manchester's name and an enumeration of his public offices, these words: "He was a loyal benefactor of the town; a man of vision and of a sacrificial spirit; a lover of children and of nature."
The preparation of the park and playground area thus acquired took a good deal of time. The removal of the railway freight yards was delayed for two years, while the directors of the road were looking about for a satisfactory piece of land for its purposes. It finally found one just beyond Swanton Street, and the tracks were removed thither. The tannery and the other old buildings were pulled down, but the ground required a great deal of filling and preparation in order to secure a well-drained and perfectly level surface. Some more filling was necessary at Ginn Field where the ground was marshy and subject to occasional overflow from the river. The Aberjona itself was dredged and its channel was made straighter and deeper by moving it somewhat to the eastward. This work was all undertaken by the Metropolitan Commission which had built the parkway; for the town had voted to lease the entire area to the commission for nine hundred and ninety-nine years. After the opening of Manchester Field with its fields for baseball, football and field hockey, and its quarter-mile running track, it was found desirable for the town to resume control of the playground in order to police it more efficiently, and to reserve it for the use of Winchester young people, which could hardly be done as long as the land was the property of the Metropolitan Commission. By friendly agreement, the town took back from the commission a lease of Manchester Field for ninety-nine years, and
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is in the peculiar but apparently satisfactory position of occupying part of its own territory on lease from a party to which it has previously leased it !
Manchester Field is of course the arena on which all the more important exhibitions of out-door sports in Winchester take place. It is oftenest used by the boys and girls of the High School. There are played the baseball and football games between the school teams and their rivals from the neighboring towns. The contests with Arlington and Woburn are in the estimation of players and spec- tators the most significant of these, and draw the largest crowds; but all the games of both baseball and football in the Mystic Valley League to which Winchester formerly belonged and the Middlesex League of which it is now a member, have been well attended. On this field also are held the track and field meets in which the school takes part, and the field hockey games, which have of late years become so popular with athletically inclined girls. In this sport the Winchester girls have made an enviable record, as they have also in tennis. No town, unless it be Brookline, has sent so many school- girl tennis players of class into the annual competitions as Win- chester.
In the summer there has usually been a ball club recruited from the young men of the town to occupy the field on Saturday after- noons. They have played under a variety of names. At their best in the twenties, under the management of George Leduc or of Edward P. Mckenzie, they were known by the unpretentious name of the Town Team; but they have offered plenty of good clean sport to the enthusiasts of Winchester. There is usually also a Twilight League of less expert players, who perform on one or another of the town playgrounds at the evening hour which daylight saving has added to the midsummer day.
It had been part of the original plan to get rid of the old and none too sightly Whitney mill which stood across Walnut Street1 from Manchester Field at the same time that the field was built. This mill - it was rather a well-equipped machine shop - occu- pied the very site of Edward Converse's old gristmill, erected in 1641, immediately below the bridge across the Aberjona at the 1Now Waterfield Road.
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center. The Boston Water Board was persuaded by Mr. Man- chester to ask for enough money in addition to its other contribu- tions to buy and remove the old building. But the Boston City Councillors refused to supply the amount necessary to meet Mr. Whitney's terms, and the project was abandoned. By 1911, how- ever, the people of Winchester had become convinced of the advantage of improving the aspect of the center by the removal of the old machine shop. At the town meeting of June 12, 1911 it voted almost unanimously to purchase the Whitney property and to issue bonds to the amount of $90,0001 for that purpose. The purchase was made, Mr. Whitney removed his business to a new building on Main Street beyond the railway crossing, and the land was improved as we see it today. In this transaction Mr. Lewis Parkhurst was instrumental. Before it was certain that the town would take the property, he had taken an option on Mr. Whitney's land and mill; his rights were assigned to the town when it voted to pay Mr. Whitney's price.
In connection with the improvement of the Whitney land, the town wisely decided to replace the two old stone bridges crossing the Aberjona on Main Street and on Waterfield Road with new bridges, wider, more substantial and of more architectural preten- sions. Herbert J. Kellaway, a well-known engineer and landscape architect, was employed to draw the plans and direct the work, which was carried out during the summer of 1914. The bridges are graceful round arches, built of concrete; the Main Street bridge, suitably named the Converse Bridge, carries a roadway seventy feet wide. At the same time the old dam which had seen two cen- turies and a half of service was torn down, and in its place was built the semi-circular dam just above the Converse Bridge, over the six steps of which the water of the Mill Pond pours itself in a picturesque cascade.
The park commissioners of Winchester like its water commis- sioners have been among its leading citizens, devoted to a high ideal of public service. D. N. Skillings, Jr. and Louis Goddu were Mr. Manchester's only colleagues. Among those who have since given time and enthusiasm to the office are J. F. Dorsey,
1 Eighty-seven thousand dollars was the sum paid to Mr. Whitney. Town Records, Vol. V, page 139.
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Nicholas T. Appolonio, Preston Pond, Charles A. Lane, Jere A. Downs, Edmund H. Garrett, F. F. Carpenter, Dr. Clarence E. Ordway and Maurice F. Brown. For the last twenty years Freder- ick C. Alexander and George T. Davidson have continuously been members of the board, and during the last ten years William S. Packer has been their colleague. For most of this time Mr. David- son has been the able and devoted chairman of the board. The fact that the men named have had so extended a service and so harmonious an organization, has made it possible for the board to develop a consistent policy for the extension and improvement of the park system. That policy has had two chief aims: the estab- lishment of as many playgrounds as possible in the different parts of the town, and the improvement and beautification of Winches- ter's many waterways, a natural feature of great attractiveness, which, through neglect, had become, until the turn of the century and later, a glaring illustration of lost opportunities.
First, then, the playgrounds. Of these there are now four. Leonard Field, on upper Washington Street, near Cross Street, was first laid out in 1915 on land purchased by the town. It was origi- nally called the Highland Playground; its present name was bestowed upon it in 1920 in memory of Augustus M. Leonard, a Winchester young man who fell on the field of battle in France, two years earlier. The field, which was enlarged by the addition of the old Washington School lot when the new school was built in 1924, reaches all the way from Washington Street to the Aber- jona River and contains more than seven acres. There are tennis courts and a baseball and football field upon it; and since the improvement of the course of the river - of which more will be said later - created a good-sized pond at the foot of the field, an artificial beach of sand has been built which offers excellent bathing to the children of the Highland district.
The land for the Palmer Street Playground at the lower end of Wedge Pond was bought by the town in 1917. The field, about half the size of the Leonard Playground, has been developed chiefly for tennis. There are eight courts in use and room to add several others. One of the park commissioners, Mr. William S. Packer, has interested himself deeply in the encouragement of tennis, and in teaching boys and girls to play the game well; with the result
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that Winchester has had perhaps a larger number of accomplished tennis players among its school children than any other town in the state. Another bathing beach has been built where the play- ground borders on Wedge Pond, and is in constant use during the summer.
The Loring Avenue Playground dates from 1925. It is situated at the northern end of the town, not very far from the Leonard Field but on the opposite (or western) side of the river and the railway tracks. It contains a little less than four acres, has a very excellent playing surface on which there are tennis courts and a ball field, and like Leonard Field it is supplied with playground equipment and used for supervised play through the summer months. On many days considerably more than a hundred children are to be seen enjoying themselves there.
A fourth field not yet named and only lately completed is on made land at the upper end of Black Ball Pond, where for many years an unsightly town dump had been maintained. This little sheet of water had become so filled with sediment as to be only three or four feet deep. It was dredged to a depth of twelve feet, and the dredged material, placed on the foundation of the dump, was used to create the playing field and also a strip of park land along the western shore of the pond. The work was done partly by labor employed by the town with its own relief funds, but chiefly as a project of the Federal Emergency Relief organization. It was completed in 1935. The field boasts an excellent baseball diamond and football field.
The most remarkable service of the park commissioners to the town of Winchester has been in the far-reaching improvement of the Aberjona River and its tributary waters, so as to create new beauty in place of unsightliness and healthful conditions in place of unsanitary ones. The desirability of this work was apparent as long ago as 1900. The Aberjona in Winchester is a quiet, not to say sluggish, stream; its current, almost nonexistent at times, flows between banks that above the Mill Pond at the center are hardly above the water level. This characteristic has always been accentuated by the presence of the mill dam at the center, for the greater part of the natural descent between the Woburn line and the Mystic Lakes is confined to the fall at the dam; the upper part
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of the river had no force sufficient to keep its own bed cleared. It overflowed continually in the spring and after heavy rainfalls, and much of the land along its course above the ponds at the center became water-logged marsh, an ideal breeding place for millions of mosquitoes. When to this was added the mill wastes and dye refuse of factories farther up the stream in Woburn, the deterioration of the placid meadow brook the forefathers knew was complete.
The Park Board began modestly by acquiring a small piece of land at the foot of Nelson Street on Judkins Pond, clearing it of old buildings and turning it into an attractive spot of green, con- nected with the center of the town by a footpath along the eastern shore of the pond, on land taken for the purpose. The war inter- vened to delay progress, and for some years thereafter the town was reluctant to undertake the supposedly expensive regeneration of the Aberjona valley which the Park Board proposed. But the project was not allowed to sleep. Mr. Herbert J. Kellaway, the engineer and landscape architect whose treatment of the Whitney mill property and the bridges at the center had recommended him to the confidence of the town, was employed to prepare a plan for the improvement of the ponds, the riverbanks and Horn Pond Brook - quite as much neglected as the river - and it was pre- sented to the town meeting, but wisely not forced upon it. Per- suasion went forward. The Board of Health and the Planning Board added their approval to the Park Board's plans. Mr. Lewis Parkhurst, always deeply interested in the park system since he had stood at Forrest Manchester's right hand in the creation of the original park and playing field in 1894, showed again his civic spirit by offering, after the town had purchased a strip of land on both sides of Horn Pond Brook, to clear the course of the brook which had for years been encumbered by refuse thrown into it by careless householders of the neighborhood. This he did, at a large expense to himself, in 1925.
In 1927 a Waterways Improvement Committee was consti- tuted by the town. Charles E. Greene was chairman and Mr. Davidson and Mr. Alexander of the Park Board were motive forces in it. The committee approved the Kellaway designs and urged the town to put them into immediate execution. As a first step the town voted to purchase the land at the corner of Lake and Main
SITE OF THE PARK SHOWN BELOW AS IT WAS IN 1930
A PARK ON THE ABERJONA AS IT IS IN 1936
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streets bordering on Wedge Pond. Several dilapidated buildings that covered the ground were pulled down and a small but attrac- tive bit of park land resulted, ornamented with a rock garden in the middle, and affording the passer-by on Main Street a lovely glimpse of Wedge Pond and the wooded shore opposite.
Singularly enough it was the financial depression of 1929, which ruined so many projects, that breathed life into plans for improving Winchester's waterways. In the following year a committee was formed to raise by private subscription $48,000 to be spent in pro- viding work for the unemployed. Frederic S. Snyder was chair- man of it and Mrs. Henry A. Hildreth secretary. The required amount was raised without difficulty, and it was spent with great wisdom in dredging and deepening the old Converse mill pond at the center and in facing the banks of the pond and the little island near its eastern shore with a substantial stone riprap. The pond was always potentially charming; the work of the committee made it emphatically so, and provided an unanswerable argument for the use of town funds for similar purposes.
The depression continued; so did the need for work relief. Money was raised both by private subscription and by vote of the town to begin work on the Kellaway plan. Mr. Parkhurst had fore- handedly picked up land all along the course of the Aberjona where it flowed through the marshes, between Cross Street and Black Ball Pond and was ready to turn it over to the town at the price it cost him. In 1932 the town at various times appropriated $75,000 for unemployment relief, and in 1933 it voted even more, almost all to be spent on the work on the waterways. In 1934 some $60,000 more was raised and spent on the rapidly developing project.
In the fall of 1933 the federal government entered the picture and, through the Civil Works Administration and later the Emer- gency Relief Administration, contributed sums amounting to about $100,000 for specific items of the waterways programme, including virtually all the work around the shores of Black Ball Pond.
The transformation brought by all this expenditure, under the careful direction of the park department, is astonishing, though it can be fully appreciated only by those who are familiar with the conditions that existed in 1930. Beginning at the Woburn line the river has been dredged, straightened and for some distance led
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into a new and deeper channel. The old marshlands have been filled and raised, with results agreeable to all except the mosquitoes which used to breed there, but which are now homeless. Three new ponds have been dug out along the course of the river, small but attractive; below each there is a dam to maintain the level of the water in them. Two new bridges have been built where the river crosses Washington Street. The swampy area to the west of the railroad tracks, once a part of Black Ball Pond, but pretty com- pletely filled with mud brought down by the river current, has been cleaned out and given once more the aspect of a pond, some- times called Aberjona Pond. From thence the water is taken by a single culvert, under the tracks to Black Ball Pond, somewhat reduced in size, but immeasurably improved in appearance by the construction of the playing field and strip of park already referred to.1 Railroad Avenue has been extended along this green strip to join Spruce Street at the upper end of the pond.
One can now walk the entire length of the Aberjona in Win- chester, over roads or excellent footpaths, much of the way over land that only five years ago was an impassable morass. Much remains to be done in the way of planting to develop the beauty of the new-born park land. But the essentials of the improvement are there, and they bear testimony to the vision and good judgment of the town authorities, who used the necessity of finding work for the workless to create something of permanent utility and beauty.
The water of the river, no longer contaminated by refuse, and con- ducted between clean and well-kept banks, is regaining its purity.
For this desirable result the Winchester Board of Health must receive its full share of credit. Under the chairmanship first of Dr. Clarence J. Allen, then of Dr. Mott A. Cummings and finally of Dr. J. Harper Blaisdell, it waged a long and sometimes discouraging campaign to oblige manufacturing concerns outside the town to stop emptying offensive wastes into the Aberjona. Its protests, reënforced by the work the town of Winchester had undertaken to keep its own skirts clean, so far as the river was concerned, were finally effective. The State Board of Health issued the necessary orders in 1930, and a new sewer was built by the city of Woburn to take care of the material which had hitherto been conveniently
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