USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Winchester > History of Winchester, Massachusetts > Part 5
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The Indians appeared, however, silently and without warning. There were only three or four of them; they were no part of Philip's war parties, but merely wandering redskins, excited by the news that their brethren to the south and west were on the warpath. They broke into the Richardson house, where the wife lay in bed with a lately born infant. A nurse who was caring for her, and a child of five, were the only others in the house. The savages toma- hawked mother and child at once. The nurse, who had snatched up the infant when the Indians appeared, ran out at the back door and tried to reach the garrison house across the fields. But the Indians were immediately in hot pursuit, and finding that they were gaining on her, she saved her own life by dropping the baby, whom the Indians killed as they had its mother and brother. Then they vanished as silently as they had come.
Samuel Richardson was working in a field not far from his house, having with him a twin brother of the child who had been murdered. Looking toward the house he "saw feathers flying about"- the Indians had ripped open the bed on which the mother lay - and, as we are told, "other tokens of mischief."1 He hurried home, but he was too late. The savages had gone, leaving the dead behind them. Mr. Richardson at once called together a party of neighbors - mostly relatives it is safe to say - and set off in chase of the Indians who had escaped into the rough country of the Fells. As night came on they saw three redmen seated upon a rock. They fired at them, and the Indians took flight. The white men were not rash enough to follow them in the darkness, but returning next day they found the dead body of an Indian not far from the rock.
1 Richardson Memorial, page 187; Sewall's History of Woburn, page 118.
THE TOWN HALL ACROSS THE CONVERSE MILL POND
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CONVERSE AND RICHARDSON FAMILIES
The massacre created a deep impression in the little settle- ment, the more because a year or two before an Indian, probably drunk, had killed a woman living in that part of Woburn that is now Burlington, of whom he had begged a drink of cider. But the uneasiness was unnecessary. There were no more Indian outrages in this vicinity even during the prolonged French and Indian wars that kept so much of New England alarmed during the first part of the eighteenth century.
Another Richardson whose exploits have come down to us was Zechariah, the grandson of Samuel of the massacre. It was in 1740 that Zechariah, then a young fellow of twenty, was ploughing some land near the river bank when he was set upon by a bear, who had, it was supposed, come down from Horn Pond Mountain to slake his thirst in the Aberjona. The bear was a large and savage beast; the man had no weapon but his heavy goad stick with which to defend himself. But with that he fetched the on-coming bear such a blow upon the skull as to stun him; and before the animal could get his wits together the determined Zechariah had cracked his head in earnest with repeated applications of the goad, and literally beaten his numbed brains out of his skull.1
The Converses built the first gristmill in Winchester, but the Richardsons built the first sawmill. This was set up toward the end of the seventeenth century by the second generation of the family. It stood upon what was long called Sawmill Brook, a stream that flowed down from the marshy meadow where the town's North Reservoir now sparkles in the sun. The brook crossed Forest Street - or the Stoneham road - where travellers had to ford it, and discharged its waters, which in winter and spring were con- siderable, into the Aberjona. Since the "Long Meadow" was turned into a reservoir, the brook has of course disappeared.2 But it served for many years to operate the old Richardson mill and turn out quantities of rough lumber that went into the frames of many a house and barn in the growing village.
There ought somewhere to be recorded the sad story of Tufts Richardson, a descendant of Ezekiel, who met his end by drowning himself in the Aberjona on November 16, 1826. Hardly six months
1 This surprising incident is recorded by N. A. Richardson in one of the articles of reminiscence preserved in his scrap book.
2 Except at such times as the North Reservoir overflows.
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
before, the young man had taken unto himself a wife with whom, however, he seems to have lived unhappily. We have it on the authority of his kinsman, Nathaniel A. Richardson, who was a small boy when the suicide occurred, that its cause was this: Tufts'
1936 22
THE JEDUTHAN RICHARDSON HOUSE
wife Mary had baked a number of loaves of brown bread, some of which turned sour before they were eaten. The young wife told her husband he must eat them up before any more loaves were baked. He refused; she insisted. In the end rather than eat the sour bread the harassed husband went out and threw himself into the river - perhaps the only case where a man carried his criticism of his bride's cooking to so desperate a length.1
I have spoken of the Richardsons as a prolific race. Perhaps the most striking example of their fertility was given by Deacon Jeduthan Richardson, himself, oddly enough, an only child. He was born in 1738, and he was a leading citizen of his day, often a selectman of Woburn, deacon of the old First Parish church, a large landowner, a good farmer, and a man looked up to and respected by his neighbors. It was Deacon Jeduthan who created the "island" in the Aberjona near the Woburn line; for he got per- 1 N. A. Richardson in Winchester Star, October 8, 1900.
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CONVERSE AND RICHARDSON FAMILIES
mission from the legislature to dig a canal to divert the waters of the river and get better power for a grist-mill which he built and operated. It was on the spot where Mr. Winn's watch hand factory stands today (1936). Jeduthan Richardson's house stood close by.
The good deacon was the father of eleven children and the grandfather of seventy-six. Nor was that all. His posterity con- tinued to increase until, when a very famous reunion of his descend- ants was held in 1868 at the old house, then occupied by his grand- son, Deacon Luther Richardson, there were three hundred and fifty persons present, and a roster of his living descendants pre- pared for the occasion showed some six hundred names. There are none of them now living on the old farm; the venerable house burned down some years ago; but his virile blood runs strong in at least a thousand Americans in different parts of the country - perhaps of the world.
The Richardsons have borne a great part in the history of Woburn and of Winchester. In 1769, of all the names on the Prov- ince tax list for Woburn, forty-two out of three hundred and thirty were Richardsons. More than twenty-five of the family have been selectmen of either the mother or the daughter town. Nine have been deacons of the old church Ezekiel, Samuel and Thomas helped to found in 1640. The name is scattered thickly over the lists of men who have served in the Colonial wars and those of the United States from the time when Nathaniel Richardson fell wounded in the Great Swamp fight of King Philip's War to the Armistice of 1918. We shall have occasion to speak of many of the family as we proceed in our story.
CHAPTER IV
THE SYMMES, GARDNER AND JOHNSON FAMILIES
So much has been said in the last two chapters of the historic relations between Woburn and Winchester that the reader may need to be rem nded that one-third of the present town of Winchester was never a part of Woburn. That is, however, the fact. All the land south of a line drawn down the center of Church Street and prolonged to the westward to the Lexington line, and on the east passing from School to Prospect streets across Manchester Field, remained at first in Charlestown, and in later years became a part either of Medford or West Cambridge (Arlington). The Symmes and Gardner families became the first settlers of this region, one to the east and north of the upper Mystic Lake, the other to the west of it.
As early as 1636 Charlestown had granted three hundred acres in Waterfield to the Rev. Zechariah Symmes, the minister of its church. The Rev. Mr. Symmes was, like Captain Edward John- son, from Canterbury in the English county of Kent, and had been a parson in the established church for twelve years before his Puritan convictions led him to migrate to New England. He was a good man, a renowned preacher and a leading figure in the Puritan theocracy of the seventeenth century. He was highly regarded by his Charlestown flock, and though it is recorded that one of his parishioners, a certain goodwife Ursula Cole, once declared she "had as lief hear an old cat mew as the Rev. Zechariah Symmes preach," it is also of record that the court subsequently fined her five pounds and the costs of the court or else to be publicly whipped, for her offence. It was not safe in those days to speak with dis- respect of a holy man's efforts in the pulpit.
The Symmes farm covered almost all of the present Winchester which lies south of the old Woburn line as just described and east of a line drawn about southeast from the corner of Bacon and Church streets to the old course of the Aberjona, now flooded by
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SYMMES, GARDNER AND JOHNSON FAMILIES
the water of the upper lake. The Rev. Mr. Symmes himself never lived upon it, but he must have cut hay upon its meadows by the riverside, for in 1658 we find him bringing suit against Thomas Broughton and Edward Collins of Medford, who had built a dam across the Mystic River in the neighborhood of Alewife Brook, whereby the water so rose upon his meadow that "his farm was incapable of maintaining his cattle in winter and part of the sum- mer." This was the same Edward Collins whom we have already seen accusing Deacon Josiah Converse of horse theft. He was, it appears, much of a thorn in the sides of our early town fathers. The suit was apparently compromised at the time, but seventeen years later another suit was begun, based on the same complaint. This time it came to trial and the estate of the Rev. Zechariah, who had recently died, profited to the amount of forty-one shill- ings in damages.1 It is possible, nay probable, that as early as 1658 Mr. Symmes' son, Captain William, was already living on the farm, which became his own on his father's death. It was stip- ulated in the will that he should pay over to his brothers and sis- ters a hundred pounds for their share in the estate; but although he had never done this up to the time of his own death, the other heirs agreed to resign their claim,2 and the farm came eventually into the hands of Captain William's son, who bore the same name.
The original Symmes house was not, as many people suppose, at the corner so long identified with the family name. It stood near the northern edge of the Symmes grant, on land now included in Manchester Field; and near it, according to an old map of 1705 still preserved in the collections of the Winchester Historical Society, was the "dye-house" built by Captain William for dyeing home- spun cloth. His son William, about 1700, built another and larger house further down the river about where Lakeview Terrace is now (1936) and as the family increased in numbers a third house was built on the opposite side of the river, not far from the bridge by which the Mystic Valley Parkway now crosses it. During the eighteenth century this cluster of Symmes houses, so close to the Aberjona, caused many people to call the stream the Symmes River, and it is so named on several ancient maps.
1 Medford Historical Register, Vol. XIII, No. I.
2 Vinton, Symmes Memorial, page 19.
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
These farm buildings were a considerable distance from any highway, and they were reached by a cart path from Grove Street - the first road to Medford - which descended the hill somewhere near Grove Place and crossed the river by a rude bridge near the site of the Parkway bridge just referred to.
Captain William Symmes seems to have put a dam across the river not far from this point and built a mill, which is spoken of in the settlement of his estate. His son William certainly had a mill, probably a larger and better one, at this spot where he carried on the business of fulling and dyeing cloth. I shall have something to say about the interesting history of this mill privilege in a later chapter. Here it may be noted that the Symmes dam stood until 1864, when, on the taking of the upper lake as a source of water supply for Charlestown, it was destroyed.
Below the bridge and dam stretched a wide meadow, through which the Aberjona meandered to its union with the upper Mystic Lake at the "narrows," near the house of the Winchester Boat Club. This was the meadow over which the Rev. Zechariah went to law; it was for two hundred years a valuable haying field for the Symmes family. A little way to the northwest of the winding river a remarkable spring came up out of the meadow; it is shown and called the "Spring Pond" on the old maps. It is said to have been fifty feet across and thirty feet deep; perhaps the largest spring in this part of the country. It lies now beneath the water of the Upper Lake, some three hundred feet from the shore at Everett Avenue, but its fountain of water is doubtless still gushing upward as in days of yore.1
When the pollution of the lake by the wastes of tanneries, dye houses and gelatine factories in Woburn began, some forty or fifty years ago, it was possible to row out into the lake and determine the location of this spring by the congregation of numbers of pick- erel which sought this oasis of pure water amidst the desert of pollution, which could plainly be seen, crowded with fish, just beneath the surface of the lake.
In former times, indeed, the Mystic Lakes were notable fishing grounds. Pickerel, perch and bass were plentiful there. In the spring the Mystic River and the lakes were full of alewives, which
1 According to an old map of 1765, this spring was then on Gardner property.
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SYMMES, GARDNER AND JOHNSON FAMILIES
swarmed upward from the sea. These little fish also ascended the Aberjona and even found their way into Wedge and Horn Ponds; the dams being furnished with "fish-ways" for their accommoda- tion. An aged resident now long dead1 was wont to recall how Josiah Symmes, who occupied a part of the old farm along the river a hundred years ago and more, used to seine enormous numbers of alewives and sell them by the wheelbarrow load to his neighbors. Shad were also known to come up into the Mystic Lakes in the spawning season. It is many years since any fish have been able to survive in Mystic waters; but since the worst of the poisonous mill waste has been diverted to sewers by order of the State Board of Health, the lakes are clearing, and the experiment is being made of planting pickerel and perhaps other fish there. In course of time fishermen may once again find it worth while to visit them.
To return to the Symmes farm itself, it included nearly all of what present-day Winchester knows as Rangeley. This was for genera tions pasture land, and as was common in those days, when wool for household spinning and weaving was so much in demand, a large flock of sheep usually browsed there. It is a tradition in the family that in the winter of 1790 an early snowstorm, coming unex- pectedly, overwhelmed the sheep. The storm proved a real bliz- zard; the sheep, to escape the wind, took refuge in a draw or gully which can be seen today behind the houses in Central Green. There they were buried under enormous drifts; but the warmth of their breath melted breathing holes through the snow, and when, after several days of search, they were found and dug out of their imprisonment, all except one or two were found alive and unharmed.
We have not the space to trace all the lines of the Symmes family, which has so multiplied upon the soil where it was planted some three hundred years ago that, besides furnishing pioneers to other towns and states further west and even to Canada, there remain today (1936) fourteen male citizens of the name in Win- chester, and an undetermined, but very large number, in whose veins the Symmes blood flows. But there are some who should be particularly mentioned.
Captain John Symmes, of the fifth generation, served with great credit in the Revolutionary War with a company from Med-
1 Hon. Nathaniel A. Richardson.
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
ford. After he came home in 1780, he, apparently the first of the family, moved up the hill and built himself a house on Grove Street near its junction with Main Street, the spot that has ever since been called Symmes Corner. He built a wheelwright shop there, too, and a blacksmith shop, where he is said to have made wagons for the use of the army. His son, also named John, con- tinued his father's business and built the old house beneath the spreading elm tree where Grove and Main streets meet. It was a
HOUSE OF CAPTAIN JOHN SYMMES
grandson of this John, christened Francis Edward Symmes, who on the early death of both parents was adopted by his mother's brother, Rev. Edward W. Clark, and his name changed by law to Francis Edward Clark. Grown to manhood, this boy also became a clergyman, and is known in every corner of the world as the founder and "father" of the great Christian Endeavor Society.
Marshall Symmes, a son of Captain John and a brother of John, Jr., was long a blacksmith in the shop at the corner of Bacon and Main streets,1 and he built in 1817 the house with the brick ends still standing not far from that corner and still occupied by his descendants.
Thomas Symmes, a third brother, met a strange death in the
1 Bacon Street did not exist in 1817, except perhaps as a cart path; it was not laid out until eight years later.
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SYMMES, GARDNER AND JOHNSON FAMILIES
year 18II. It was in December; snow lay on the ground. Thomas had gone with an ox-sled to Turkey Swamp (where the South Reservoir is today) to cut timber. In the afternoon he prepared to return home. Coming down the hill, the sled, heavily loaded with logs, slewed from the path and crushed the man between it and a tree. He was almost instantly killed; when a searching party found him at eight in the evening he had been dead several hours. The oxen were still standing quietly, chewing their cuds. They must have stopped at the driver's command just as he was caught and killed.1
Zechariah Symmes, a cousin of these brothers, moved just across the line into Woburn; we shall hear of him again as a one- time proprietor of the historic Black Horse Tavern.
Little by little the three hundred acres of the Rev. Zechariah have contracted as the estate has been divided among his descend- ants and parts of it sold to others. Most of the old farm is today thickly covered with the dwelling houses of the town, though cer- tain acres are still owned in fields or house lots by members of the family, and a good sized portion was until comparatively recent years farmed by Samuel S. Symmes, of the eighth generation of the family in Winchester.
There are two transfers of property that should be noticed here as of special importance. One is the sale in 1715 by William Symmes the second, of a large part of his land that lay east of Main Street to Ebenezer Brooks of Medford. This land ran right up to Symmes Corner itself, and Brooks built his house there nearly opposite to the spot where stands the brick-end house that Marshall Symmes built a century later. In this house was born Dr. John Brooks, who was Governor of Massachusetts from 1817 to 1823, one of the most distinguished natives of Winchester. It later became the property of Governor Brooks's niece, Mary Brooks, who married a Captain Le Bosquet, and it was long known as the Le Bosquet house.2 It disappeared fifty years ago, but the flag- stone covering its old well can be seen today on the lawn of the house that took its place.
1 This historian is indebted to Samuel S. Symmes for much interesting material concerning this family. See the Winchester Record of January 13, 1933.
2 Captain Le Bosquet was an interesting character, of whom more will be said in Chapter VIII.
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
The other important sale of land was made more than a hun- dred years later when most of the Symmes land west of the Aber- jona was sold to Robert Bacon, whose family have long been well known in Winchester. With the land went the mill privilege on the river which Mr. Bacon used for some years in his business of making felt for hats. It was at this time - 1825 - that Bacon Street was cut through from Main to Church streets, the first highway across the old Symmes farm, and it was only a year or two later that Mr. Bacon built the handsome house with brick ends which stands on the Mystic Valley Parkway, offering to the traveller a gracious welcome to Winchester.
The land on the opposite side of the Upper Mystic Lake and south of Church Street was, as I have already mentioned, the origi- nal grant of three hundred acres to Increase Nowell. He never built upon it, and after his death it was bought - in 1659 - by Richard Gardner, whose descendants lived upon it, or parts of it, for almost two hundred years. Gardner was living in Woburn - or Winchester as it now is - as early as 1651. His first house was near the western shore of Winter Pond; the cellar hole, partly filled with old brick, evidently made in England, and the straggling remains of the hedge he planted were visible there as late as 1857. But after buying the Nowell farm at "Charlestown End" he moved thither and built a house not far from the corner of Cambridge Street and Glen Road ..
Richard Gardner had many daughters but only one son, Henry; but Henry had four sons, and with his death the division of the land and the gradual dispersion of the family began. One of the four sons, John Gardner, went to Harvard, became the minis- ter of Stow, and sold his portion of the estate, which was far up on the hill, on what is now Country Club and adjacent property, to the Hutchinson family.1 He was the father of Henry Gardner, Treasurer of the Commonwealth in Revolutionary times, and grandfather of Henry J. Gardner, once Governor of Massachusetts.
The family, though living in Charlestown, was much associated with Woburn. Their names are constantly found on Woburn docu-
1 An interesting article about the Hutchinson farm, much of which remained in the family for two hundred years, may be found in the Winchester Star for June 9, 1899. It was written by the late T. M. Hutchinson.
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ments; Richard was one of the jury of inquest in the sad death of Samuel Converse. They owned a pew in Woburn meetinghouse, and Henry Gardner of the fifth generation was a deacon in that church. He died childless in 1838; the somewhat dilapidated house in which he lived is still to be seen near the corner of High and Arlington streets. His mother lived to be nearly one hundred, and used often to tell of watching the smoke of the battle of Bunker Hill
THE GARDNER-SWAN HOUSE IN 1900
from the summit of Andrews Hill when she was a child of ten or eleven. Another member of the family was Captain Joseph Gard- ner, a leading citizen of Woburn, whose old house still stands near the Four Corners on the road from Woburn to Lexington. He was often a selectman and a deputy to the General Court.
One by one the branches of the Gardner family died out or moved away from the ancestral farm. Edward Gardner, a cousin of Deacon Henry and Captain Joseph, died early, and his house and land were sold to John Swan. The house now almost two hun- dred years old, but restored and improved, is that now occupied
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
by Mr. F. Patterson Smith on Cambridge Street near the foot of Swan Road. It is the oldest house now standing in the town.
The last of the name to live in Winchester was Samuel Gardner of the sixth generation. In 1858 he sold the only remaining part of the ancient Increase Nowell farm to Hon. Edward Everett, who built there on the shore of Mystic Lake the mansion which still (1936) stands there, but may not long remain. Samuel Gardner himself removed to Reading.
Richard Gardner had in 1650 two neighbors, whose farms like his stretched from the level land through which Plain Street (now Cambridge Street) ran, back over the fertile hill country to the southward. One was Major William Johnson, third son of Captain Edward Johnson, the distinguished son of a famous father. William Johnson was eminent both in the military and political life of Woburn and of the colony of Massachusetts Bay. He was for six- teen years Town Clerk, a member of the General Court, and at two different times one of the Assistants to the Governor, which means that he was not only a member of what may be called the Senate of the colony but also of its highest court - the Court of Appeals as we might call it today. He was removed from this office during the regime of Sir Edmund Andros, who was sent over to New England by King James II to reduce the obstinately inde- pendent Puritan colony to proper submission. While Andros remained here, Johnson was one of the "Council for the Safety of the People," which directed the opposition to King James's tyran- nical policy, and after the deposition of Andros in 1689 Johnson resumed his seat among the Assistants.
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