USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Winchester > History of Winchester, Massachusetts > Part 4
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1 Wonder Working Providence, XXII.
1 Article "Woburn" by Cutter in The History of Middlesex County.
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
please the gallant captain by calling it Woburn? This may or may not be the true explanation; it is, however, the most plausible that has been suggested.
In this manner, then, was Woburn, twelfth town of the Massa- chusetts Bay Colony, settled and set on its course, containing within itself the greatest part of what was to become, two cen- turies later, the town of Winchester.
CHAPTER III
THE CONVERSE AND RICHARDSON FAMILIES
EDWARD CONVERSE built his house, as we have seen, "over against" the Cold Bridge across the Aberjona in the fall of 1640 or the spring of 1641. For nearly two centuries thereafter the region called Waterfield, which was eventually to become the town of Winchester, remained a quiet community of farms, lying midway between the slowly growing villages of Woburn and Medford. It had no church for quite two hundred years, no schoolhouse or "general store" for one hundred and fifty. There were, here and there, the gristmills essential to a farming community in the early days, a rural sawmill or two, and, as we shall see later, there were by the eighteenth century the humble beginnings of a shoe and leather industry already under way in this part of the town. But it was as a wide area of farm and forest land, with a few houses scattered about upon it, that we must picture our town for many years after the first house was built within its borders.
The district continued to be called Waterfield for a long time. Deeds are in existence dated late in the seventeenth century which describe the land conveyed as "lying in Waterfield." The name gradually passed out of use, however, perhaps because the region did not even have the unity of being a part of a single town. Until its incorporation as Winchester in 1850, the old "Waterfield" lay always in two, and most of the time in three, distinct towns. When Woburn was formed, the boundary between it and the mother town of Charlestown followed in general the line of High and Church streets down as far as School Street. Then it turned south- easterly, crossed the Aberjona, intersected Main Street near Pros- pect Street and ran up the hill into the "rock-field" of the Fells. All south and east of that line remained in Charlestown. Before many years Medford was formed into a separate town, and so much of the present Winchester as lay east of the Mystic Lakes became Medford territory. But the land west of the lakes and
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
south of the Woburn line still belonged to Charlestown until well into the nineteenth century, and was always known as "Charles- town End."
The greater part of the ancient Waterfield quite soon became divided between not more than ten or a dozen families; the majority of the sixty or more grantees of 1638 having sold their plots of land to those who decided to settle permanently there. There were
kill
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THE EDWARD CONVERSE HOUSE
five families in particular - the Converses, the Symmeses, the Richardsons, the Gardners and Johnsons - who not only came to own most of the Waterfield land, but remained for more than two centuries conspicuous in the history of the region, and have not a few descendants still living in the Winchester of 1936. Something should be said about each of these families, preeminent as they are among the founders of our community.
Edward Converse was a native of Northamptonshire in Eng- land. His family is said to have been of French origin, and ambi- tious genealogists have traced his line to Roger de Coigneries, a knight who "came over" with William the Conqueror in 1066 and
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CONVERSE AND RICHARDSON FAMILIES
was made hereditary constable of Durham Castle by that sover- eign.1 Edward Converse was born in 1590. He was a Puritan from his youth, and a member of John Winthrop's company, which crossed to New England in 1630. We have already heard of him in Charlestown, where he was a leading citizen and the first to con- duct a ferry between that town and Boston. We have heard of him too as a leader in the establishment of the new town of Woburn, where he became, with Captain Edward Johnson, the most influ- ential of its citizens. He was one of the two first deacons of the Woburn church, John Mousall being the other; he was a magis- trate, empowered to try "small causes"; he represented Woburn in the General Court, and for nineteen successive years, until his death in 1663, he was elected a selectman of the town.
This man, solid, substantial, enterprising, unafraid, had no sooner settled himself in his new home than he determined to take advantage of the little river that ran by his house to set up a grist mill for the convenience of the neighbors he hoped to have. He built a dam across the Aberjona a little below the present Con- verse Bridge, and the mill pond so formed remains today after nearly three centuries, an historic and beautiful feature of Win- chester's center. During the greater part of those three hundred years his dam stood and furnished power for a mill of some kind. Not until the last holder of the privilege, Mr. Arthur E. Whitney, sold the property to the town for park purposes in 1909 was the water wheel stilled forever.
Converse was of course farmer as well as miller. His land abutted on the south that granted to Zechariah Symmes, the min- ister of Charlestown. It included all the present town center, and came by purchase to extend some distance northward up Main and Washington streets and on the west side too, in the direction of Winter Pond. The land along lower Mt. Vernon Street including the site of the Town Hall was, by tradition, his sheep pasture; the town common was part of his cornfield. Beside his house, and in course of time overshadowing it with its widespread branches, stood a famous elm tree. This tree stood until age and a crack in its trunk, which made it dangerous, obliged its removal in 1841. A loyal historian of Winchester celebrates it as the largest elm in 1 Henry D. Lord in Winchester Record, I, 208; Stearns History of Rindge, N. H.
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
New England and asserts that it was no less than thirty-five feet in circumference.1 Whether it was really so much larger than the great elm at Lancaster may be doubted, but it was beyond ques- tion a magnificent tree. It must have been well-grown when Edward Converse planted his house beside it, for less than fifty years there- after, old Judge Samuel Sewall mentions it in his diary and tells of breaking a journey from Woburn to Boston to sit beneath its shade and enjoy a leisurely talk with Edward's son, Lieutenant James Converse.
Toward the end of a busy and honorable life, Converse got himself into trouble with the king's officers in Boston by reason of his stanch Puritanism. In 1662 Charles II, having recently been restored to the throne, despatched to his "loyal colony" of Mas- sachusetts Bay a letter, meant to be gracious in tone but demand- ing two things the Puritans were by no means ready to grant. One was that "all persons of honest life and good conversation" should be admitted to take communion in the churches, according to the Book of Common Prayer. The other was that all persons of good character and sufficient property should be permitted to vote at all elections in the colony. These requirements seem reasonable enough today; but the Puritans who had established a church open only to those who held their particular doctrines, and a state the voters in which must be members of that church, did not think so. The king's letter was received with consternation. Isaac Cole, a Woburn constable, refused to post it publicly, as was his duty, and was arraigned in Court for his refusal. Converse, still a deacon in the church and a selectman of the town, was accused of having "spoken disrespectfully" of the letter, calling it "mere popery," and he too was arrested and brought into court.
A trial was held, but neither Cole nor Converse was con- victed. The judges found that Converse's language was not dis- respectful, and discharged him without having to pay the costs of his trial. This is good evidence that whatever the old Puritan said, the magistrates, who shared his opinions, thought well said, and that they were determined he should not suffer for it.
Edward Converse died in 1663, well past seventy. His will
1 Winchester Record, Vol. I, page 56, article by O. R. Clark, who measured the tree himself.
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CONVERSE AND RICHARDSON FAMILIES
and the appraisal of his estate are still to be found in the Middlesex records. The inventory is especially interesting as showing the careful value attached, in that day of small things, to even the most trivial - as we should think - of household possessions. It is too long to be reproduced here in full,1 but these items are char- acteristic:
Quishions (cushions)
5 shillings
Handkerchiefs
7 shillings
A frying-pan
3 shillings 6 pence
Nailes
2 shillings 6 pence
A hat and a pair of mittings
5 shillings
One fire shovel and tongs
4 shillings
Four spoons
I pound 10 shillings
Two sieves
2 shillings sixpence
I lanthorn (lantern)
I shilling 5 pence
And so on. One can tell from this list exactly what the house and outbuildings of a prosperous colonist of 1660 contained - for Edward Converse was prosperous as things went then. The value of his estate added up to 827 pounds 5 shillings and 6 pence, an amount of which $25,000 would hardly be the equivalent today.
He left three sons and several daughters. His sons all con- tinued to live on the land bequeathed them in his will. Josiah, the eldest, owned a house built for him by his father, which stood on what is now Church Street, near the northerly corner of Church and Main streets. Josiah followed in his father's footsteps; he was a deacon, a selectman, the chairman of the first board of "tithing men" (whose duty it was in those days of moral if not of eco- nomic regimentation to "have oversight of their neighbors and see that they have good order in their business"), and was otherwise a good and responsible citizen.
The cross that the worthy Josiah had to bear was the tem- porary stigma cast upon him of being nothing more nor less than a horse thief. His accuser was Edward Collins, a well-to-do inhabi- tant of Medford, who bought and lived in the Governor Craddock house there after Craddock's death in England. Collins declared that Josiah had sent one James Thompson to take out of his field
1 Those who are interested can find the entire inventory in the Winchester Record, Vol. II, page 58.
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
a mare and a colt belonging to Collins. He produced witnesses who swore to the identity of the animals, two of his own serving men and two others who had owned the mare before it was sold to Collins. One of them, Markham by name, testified that he knew the mare well and had branded her with an M while he owned her. The mare's tail, mane and ears had been cropped, he said, since he saw her last but there was no mistaking her. To the charge of stealing the horse there was thus added the implication that Con- verse had tried to cover up his offense by mutilating his booty.
Converse of course denied all charges and brought witnesses in his defence; one of them was his nephew James, of whom more will be heard later. They swore that the mare and colt were known to be Converse's property, that there was no mark of a brand on her and that she was a good two years younger than Collins admitted his horse to be. The jury, however, found for the plain- tiff. Josiah had to return the mare and her colt to Collins and pay the costs of the suit.
But, having got the mare, Collins could not keep her. She persisted in running away and returning to the Converse barn or pasture. Six months after the first trial - in December 1670 - we find that Deacon Converse (as he was soon to be) had got the case reviewed. A number of new witnesses appeared - among them our old friend Thomas Gleason of the Squaw Sachem farm. They were all certain the mare was not the one Collins had owned; there was no brand on her, they had inspected her teeth and found her younger by two years than the Collins mare - and there was the testimony given by the animal herself, who simply would not acknowledge the Collins farm to be her home. The jury, attend- ing to all these things, reversed the first decision and gave back to the relieved Josiah his mare and his reputation.
The Converse gristmill was left by the father Edward to be owned jointly by his oldest son Josiah and his youngest son Samuel, to go in the end to the "longest liver;" while Samuel was bequeathed the old house by the Aberjona. But only six years after his father's death, Samuel met his own end through a shocking accident. The coroner's inquest found that he was "cutting ice from off the water- wheel of the corn mill, and over-reaching with his axe, was caught by his coat with some part of the wheel .. . whereby his head was
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CONVERSE AND RICHARDSON FAMILIES
drawn down till it was sucked in between the water-wall and the water wheel." He cried out to stop the wheel, but it was too late. His head and chest were crushed; he died within half an hour; it was February 20, 1669.
The second son, James, lived in a house he built on Church Street as it now is, just north of the old Prince School lot.1 This man was always called Lieutenant James, from the rank he held for some thirty years in the Woburn militia company. He saw some military service in King Philip's War and was often elected a deputy from Woburn to the General Court. He lived to a great age, as many of his family did in after years; he was ninety-five when he died in 1715.
His son, Major James, was even more distinguished. Major James lived in a house that stood to the east of Winter Pond, probably where Wildwood Street now runs. He was again and again elected to the General Court and was once Speaker of the House; but his chief fame came from his defence of the garrison at Wells, Maine, from an attack by Indians. This occurred in 1692, during one of those frequent frontier struggles with the French- men from Canada which disturbed New England history for a century, and ended only with the conquest of Canada by General Wolfe in 1759. This particular war was called King William's War; it was waged along the frontier in Maine. James Converse, then a captain of militia, was sent northward in 1690 to command the little garrison at Wells. After a year or two of fighting, the Indians, who, with French encouragement, had dug up the hatchet, agreed to make peace and promised to deliver some thirty Englishmen, whom they had taken prisoners, to the Storer garrison house where Converse commanded. A party of officials from Boston, headed by the deputy governor of the colony, Danforth, proceeded to Wells to receive the prisoners and conclude a final peace.
But the Indians, persuaded, they afterward declared, by the French, broke their agreement. Only six prisoners were returned, and the Indian chiefs themselves did not appear as they had prom- ised. Instead, some two hundred Indians made a sudden attack on the garrison house on June 9, 1691. Captain Converse was ready
1 For the location of the Converse houses, see a letter by A. C. Vinton, Esq., printed in W. R. Cutter's rare book, Historic Sites of Old Woburn.
1154053
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
for them for, having suspected treachery, he had sent for reinforce- ments, and got thirty-five men with plenty of ammunition from Essex County. The Indians were beaten off, but their chieftain, Madockawando, by no means accepted defeat, and boasted, as Cotton Mather informs us, that he would come back next year and "have that dog, Converse, out of his hole."1
He was as good as his word in the matter of coming back, for a year and a day from the date of the first attack some four hun- dred yelling savages appeared before the little garrison house, this time led by a French officer, Labocree by name. Mather has left us a delightfully spirited account of the fight that followed. Con- verse had only fifteen soldiers with him in the garrison, to which a number of settlers from the neighborhood had fled for shelter. There were as many men aboard three little vessels lying in the river, lately arrived from Boston with ammunition and supplies.
The Indians attacked in full force, but Captain Converse's two or three small cannon were too much for them. They then turned their attention to the sloops in the river, and tried in every. way, by shooting "fire-arrows" and sending blazing rafts adrift, to set them on fire. But they had no luck; their rafts drifted ashore instead of against the sloops, and the men on board put out what- ever flames the arrows started. The Indians then attacked the garrison again, and they were so many that some of the garrison suggested surrender; to which Captain Converse replied that he would "lay the man dead who should so much as mutter that base word again." The second attack failed like the first; Converse's cannon were so well served that the Indians were mowed down in great numbers and Labocree, the Frenchman, was slain.
The redskins next tried what taunting the colonial captain with cowardice would do. They dared him to come out and fight in the open field. Converse told them he would be a fool to bring out thirty men to fight three hundred, but offered to fight thirty to thirty if the rest of the Indians would keep out of it. To which, as Mather reports, Madockawando made the following delicious reply: "Nay, mee own; English fashion all one fool, You kill mee, mee kill you? No; better lie somewhere, and shoot a man when he no see; that the best soldier."2
1 Mather, Decennium Luctuosum, in his Magnalia.
2 Mather, Decennium Luctuosum, in his Magnalia.
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CONVERSE AND RICHARDSON FAMILIES
But there was no chance of that kind of fighting; and the Indians, discouraged, as the savages usually were by the failure of their surprise attack, presently went off whooping and yelling, taking with them one unfortunate white man whom they had cap- tured and meant, no doubt, to kill by torture.
This episode made a great noise in the colony of Massachu- setts Bay. James Converse was made a major and given command of all Massachusetts troops in the district of Maine. When at last peace was made with the Indians, he was one of the commissioners to sign the treaty, at Casco Bay. This sturdy son of Winchester died four years before his father at the early age - for a Converse - of sixty-one years, leaving behind him a highly honored name.
Some members of the Converse family remained on the family land until the nineteenth century came in. Benjamin, the last of the name in this town, died in 1824, and his house, which stood near the northern end of Rangeley, was sold to Ebenezer Parker, whose name twenty-five years later was to head the petition for the incorporation of Winchester.
The land in the northeastern part of Winchester, including the Highlands, was all occupied from the first settlement of ancient Woburn by the three brothers Richardson - Ezekiel, Samuel and Thomas. Ezekiel, the eldest, was the only one of the three to come to New England with the emigration of 1630; he was one of the first board of selectmen elected in Charlestown in 1634. His broth- ers followed him thither, probably in 1636, for in the following year we find all three named among the "freemen" of the colony. Though comparatively young men, the Richardsons were of impor- tance from the first. All three were named among the commis- sioners from the Charlestown church to serve in setting up a new church and town in Woburn. They were settled by 1642 on adjoin- ing farms in Winchester. Ezekiel's house was near the corner of Cross and Washington streets, about where the Second Congrega- tional Church now stands; his land stretched westward toward the "high rocks," as the elevation south of Cross Street was called. Samuel lived nearer the present center of Winchester, near the cor- ner of Stone Avenue, but on the west side of Richardson's Row. Thomas's house was on the east side of the Row near the corner of
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
Fairmount Street, where the old John S. Richardson house stands today.1
The brothers all raised large families, as did many of the descendants. One town was by no means large enough to hold them all, and they spilled over into old Woburn, Stoneham, Chelmsford, Dracut and Sutton, Massachusetts, and thence scat- tered widely over the country from Maine to the Mississippi Valley. But a surprising number of them remained loyal to the original home of the family. At one time there were eight Richardson fam- ilies living along the country road that in after years became Wash- ington Street, and that road was naturally and appropriately known as Richardson's Row. The name was preserved until the town of Woburn, some hundred years ago, saw fit to name it in commemoration of the Father of his Country rather than in mem- ory of the Fathers of the town. But long afterward the street was still Richardson's Row in the mouths of Winchester people.
Ezekiel's descendants have been less numerous in the town than those of the two younger brothers; most of his sons went early to the founding of Chelmsford and Dracut. It is worth noticing, however, that his daughter Phebe married Henry Baldwin of Woburn, and became the ancestress of a notable family, including Loammi Baldwin, the distinguished soldier and engineer, whose statute stands today before the beautiful mansion house of his family in North Woburn, one of the oldest and finest examples of colonial architecture in Massachusetts.
Ezekiel was in his early years in Charlestown something of a partisan of Mistress Anne Hutchinson, that brilliant woman whose "heretical" views concerning the "inner light" and the unimpor- tance of good works and righteous conduct in the absence of a mystical reliance on the grace of God, stirred up such a commotion among the Puritans, clergy and laity alike. He was a signer of the petition protesting against the severity of the clergy toward Rev. John Wheelwright, Mrs. Hutchinson's friend and co-believer, and in consequence got himself into serious trouble, for after the ban- ishment of Wheelwright and Mrs. Hutchinson, the ministers and magistrates proceeded vigorously against the signers of the peti- tion. Several were exiled or warned to leave the colony and others
1 W. R. Cutter, Historic Sites of Old Woburn.
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CONVERSE AND RICHARDSON FAMILIES
were disfranchised. Ezekiel Richardson, less conspicuous than these, succeeded in making his peace, returned to orthodoxy, and was not further troubled.
Ezekiel Richardson died in 1648, still a comparatively young man. His widow, Susannah, married, not long afterward, Henry Brooks, whose house stood just outside the limits of present-day Winchester, near the corner of Main Street and Lake Avenue, Woburn, and much of whose farm lay within our Winchester boundaries. This worthy and capable woman, Goodwife Brooks, was widely known in her day for her skill as a nurse, and especially for her success in restoring to life and health a young Indian girl who had been scalped and tomahawked. The case was this:
During the summer of 1670 a party of inoffensive Indians who lived in this vicinity were set upon, not far from Chelmsford, by a band of savage Mohawks who had travelled in their war paint all the way from their homes in central New York, and laid an ambush into which these local redskins had the misfortune to fall. Most of the party were killed; this young girl of whom I speak was left for dead, her skull crushed in by a tomahawk and her scalp removed. After the Mohawks had gone, a few of her friends who had escaped returned and found her still breathing. They carried her to the nearest white settlement, whence she was brought to Woburn for Goodwife Brooks to exercise her skill upon her.
The girl lived in the Brooks house four years, gradually mend- ing in health and strength. Mrs. Brooks attended her with unfail- ing care and devotion. She removed a number of pieces of bone imbedded in the girl's brain and had the satisfaction of seeing the scalp close over the gaping wound. In the end the girl recovered completely; the hair, however, never grew upon the spot from which the Mohawks had torn the skin.
When the delicacy of such a case is considered, the constant danger of infection and the necessity of treatment that can fairly be called surgical, it must be admitted that this frontier Puritan woman, without instruments, antiseptics or medical training, acquitted herself nobly.1
It was at the house of the second Samuel Richardson, son of the founder Samuel, that the Indian massacre of 1676 occurred,
1 See W. R. Cutter, Historic Sites of Old Woburn, page 13.
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
the only episode of its kind in the history of our town. It was at the time of King Philip's War, when the savages made their last futile stand against the steady advance of the white man's settle- ments in eastern and southern Massachusetts. Samuel Richardson had borne arms in that war, but at the time of the massacre, April 10, 1676, he was at home preparing his fields for the spring sowing. His house stood on the present Washington Street, not far from the corner of Irving Street. A little north of it was a house that had been prepared for a garrison house, in case the infant settlement should be threatened by Indian attack.
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