USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Winchester > History of Winchester, Massachusetts > Part 6
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Almost all his life he was a magistrate, and it is said to his credit that though several persons were brought before him during the witchcraft delusion and accused of being witches, his common sense was too strong for him to permit charges in court to be laid against them. He was conspicuous in the colony militia, and saw some service in King Philip's War. Four of his grandsons took part in Captain Lovewell's famous fight with the Indians on the Maine frontier (1725), and one of them was killed there. Another, Noah Johnson, was the last survivor of the fight; he died at the age of one hundred, lacking only six months, in Plymouth, New
THE GARDNER-SWAN HOUSE IN 1936
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SYMMES, GARDNER AND JOHNSON FAMILIES
Hampshire. A third, Captain Seth Wyman, won distinction by his conduct of the little force of white men after Lovewell himself had been killed.
Major Johnson's house stood on Plain Street (now Cambridge Street), not far beyond the corner of Wildwood Street. As nearly as can be determined it was on the site of the Russell house, just beyond the Winchester Conservatories. The major was a wealthy man for the times; he owned nine hundred acres of land, much of it in what is now the town of Burlington. Several of his sons lived in that part of old Woburn, but his son William and his grandson of the same name lived in the old homestead until near the middle of the eighteenth century. Then the grandson sold the homestead to Thomas Belknap, from whom it passed to the Reed family who lived there through three generations.
Others of his descendants continued to live in the neighbor- hood, however. His son Josiah had a house on the lane that used to run off Cambridge Street opposite Wildwood Street, and was long known as Johnson Lane. Josiah in turn was the great-grand- father of Colonel Francis Johnson and Deacon Nathan B. Johnson whom we shall meet later as leading citizens of Winchester in the years just previous to the incorporation of the town; and a great- great-grandfather of Warren Johnson, whom some of our old citizens can well remember. As late as 1831 Ezekiel and Levi Johnson, who were of Major William's lineage, owned and occupied farms along Ridge Street to the west of High Street.
Captain John Carter, the second commander of the Woburn militia company1 and one of the original settlers of the town of Woburn, lived and owned the land between Richard Gardner and Major Johnson. His house may have stood on Plain Street (Cam- bridge Street), about halfway between the entrances to Calumet Road and Foxcroft Road. There was certainly an ancient Carter house standing there until about 1800, occupied by his descendant Simon Carter.2 His land lay on both sides of Plain Street and reached up to and beyond the top of Andrews Hill. An old family burial vault, built of heavy granite blocks, is still to be seen at the end of Indian Hill Road, though empty and dismantled. The 1 Capt. Edward Johnson was the first.
2 According to tradition, however, the original house was on High Street, not far from Ridge Street.
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Carters were long numerous in this part of the town, but the family is no longer to be found here.
This Captain John Carter was involved in 1658 in a suit for slander brought against him by Captain Edward Johnson, the dis- tinguished "father" of the town. Captain Johnson was the Town Clerk of Woburn until his death. In the year aforesaid, disputes arose about the accuracy of his records. It was charged that a committee of the town, appointed to lay out the road which we now call Church Street, had reported that it could not agree; but that Captain Johnson had nevertheless entered on the records the layout of the road as it exists today, though the town had taken no action at all in the matter. Other mistakes or omissions were alleged, and the townspeople appear to have been much stirred up by the dispute. Sides were taken, of course, and John Carter was an outspoken critic of Captain Johnson. On training day, in the presence of the whole militia company of which he was then lieu- tenant and Johnson was captain, he declared that the town records "were not worth a straw," and going further he added that a cer- tain lease which Johnson had drawn for a neighbor, was "knavishly drawn or knavishly intended."
This was serious talk; one of those who heard Carter sputter out his charges remarked that if they could be proved Captain Johnson might "lose his ears." To defend his good name Johnson brought instant suit for slander. The trial was held in Charlestown. Many of the men with whose names we have become familiar figured in it. Josiah Converse was a juryman. His father, the ven- erable Edward Converse, Richard Gardner and William Johnson were among the witnesses. The records bristle with affidavits; those of Edward Converse seem to show that he, like Carter, thought his old comrade Johnson had put into the records or left out of them what it pleased him to record or omit. In the end the jury found for the plaintiff. John Carter had to pay five pounds in damages besides the costs of the case; and on the next training day, standing before the militia company, he had to withdraw his charges and apologize for them. We can imagine that this affair agitated the infant settlement to its very depths, and may have aroused hostile feelings that were long in dying out.1
1 For an account of this trial, with the affidavits of witnesses, see the article in the Winchester Press for September 5, 1902. The case is on file in the Middlesex County Court Records.
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SYMMES, GARDNER AND JOHNSON FAMILIES
Further up the hill than the Carter land, beyond the present crossing of High and Ridge streets, was the farm of James Locke. This man was the son of William Locke, another of the earliest settlers of Woburn, though he came there as a mere boy, in the care of his uncle, Nicholas Davis. William Locke's house was at the Four Corners on the road to Lexington; his son James was living on the farm in Winchester as early as 1699, when he bought it of James Converse, who then owned the land. James Locke was the ancestor of the many families of the name who have lived in Win- chester to the present day. His great-grandson Josiah built the interesting house with brick ends on High Street, near the corner of Ridge Street, in the early years of the last century. This house is remarkable for its old wainscotting, more than three feet in height, made of single planks of white pine, each cut from the heart of a great tree. Looking at them we can understand why the earliest name of this hill country, as shown by James Locke's deed of pur- chase, was Pine Mountain. What a magnificent forest of clear white pine it must have borne to furnish boards of that size and quality !
The Locke family is even more numerous in Woburn and Lexington than in Winchester. Its most distinguished son was Rev. Samuel Locke, who was president of Harvard in the years just previous to the Revolution.
There is extant a deed given in 1649 to prove that John Green, a leading citizen of Charlestown, had a house on Andrews Hill, probably on High Street, at the end of the present Arlington Street, since his Waterfield lot was at that point. What became of it we do not know further than that he sold it to one Thomas Knight. He does not figure again in Winchester history. His brother, William Green, also lived in this neighborhood, but his land and house passed on his death to his nephew, the second John Carter.
If the reader is surprised to find houses and cultivated farms so early in what seems - or did until recently seem - a remote and rather inaccessible part of the town, it must be remembered that the hill district was not in that day so very much harder to come at than the rest of the town. It was all a forest-covered coun- try except perhaps for part of the flat land between the Mystic Lakes and Winter Pond. What "roads" there were were at first
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
no more than blazed bridle paths, made as easily in one direction as another. There is, and always has been, some excellent farming country on the hills above our town; and it was good farming land and not level building lots or easy accessibility that interested our forefathers of three hundred years ago. Better roads on the lower land did, after a while, make land there more to be desired, but still better roads are now making the beautiful hill country easy to reach, and houses, many of them in wonderfully sightly situations, are fast spreading back over the old farms that Gardners and Johnsons and Carters and Lockes and Hutchinsons once tilled.
CHAPTER V
WATERFIELD IN THE SIXTEEN HUNDREDS. CHURCH AND STATE IN OLD WOBURN
THE old roads that served the early inhabitants of Winchester were no more than half a dozen in number, and it is proof of the wholly rural character of the neighborhood for many years that by 1800 only two or three tributary roads had been added. The earliest road of all was, of course, that which led from Medford, through the heart of Waterfield, to the village of Woburn. This road is represented today by Grove Street and Main Street, for Grove Street was at first the accepted way to Medford. It follows what was from time immemorial the Indian trail from the Mystic River to the Aberjona, round the shores of the Mystic Lakes. There is no record of the laying out of Grove Street and none concerning Main Street until 1646, but both must have been in existence before that, if only as bridle paths leading through the forest and marked by blazes on the sides of the trees.
On June 6, 1641 the Woburn records tell us that "a bridge was made across Horn Pond river, though the place was so boggy that it swallowed up much wood before it could be made passable;1 yet it was finished and called Long Bridge."2 This bridge, the con- struction of which was the occasion, as Sewall the Woburn his- torian says, for a day of fasting and prayer, could have been nowhere else than near the lower end of the Horn Pond outlet, then a far larger stream than it is today. The brook or "river" had not then been diverted to enter Wedge Pond as it now does; it flowed past that pond at the foot of the little hill leading to Cutter Village. The "Long Bridge" was quite clearly intended to carry over the stream the road from Charlestown and Medford to the newly determined site of Woburn Village. It was not precisely on the 1 Doubtless referring to the difficulty of building "corduroyed" approaches to the bridge.
2 Woburn Records, Vol. I, page 4; Sewall's Woburn, page 18; Arthur E. Whitney in Winchester Record, Vol. II, page 426.
57
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
present route of Main Street, however. In ancient times, before the raising of the old Converse mill dam had flooded so much of the low land where Black Ball Pond now lies, the road lay nearer to the Aberjona.1 Blind Bridge Street is a remnant of the old way down to the Long Bridge. In later years we find this crossing of the Horn Pond outlet universally called Blind Bridge, perhaps because the growth of trees and underwood about it concealed it from the traveller till he was right upon it.
The entire road from Woburn through Winchester center to Medford was more carefully laid out in 1660. It was to be four poles or rods in width, though its beginnings as a forest path are indicated by the "blazed trees" which here and there are men- tioned as defining its course. By this time Grove Street was no longer the only way to Medford; the new highway branched off at Symmes Corner to follow much of the present route to Medford. It did not, however, follow that route to Winthrop Square, but reached Medford High Street by way of what is now called Woburn Street, somewhat to the west of the square.
Another very early road was that long called Richardson's Row; it was of course the only way for the settlers at the north- eastern end of Winchester to get to Converse's gristmill and Charlestown. It must be remembered that in the early days roads were used mainly as a means of getting either to the gristmill or the church. Farms were self-contained units then; they supplied the food, fuel and the clothing for the family; for people dressed in woolen garments made from yarns spun at home from the wool of their own sheep. Their corn had to be ground for them, however, and they had to go to church - or thought they had. Most roads, therefore, led either to a mill or a meetinghouse; and in December 1647 we find the town of Woburn laying out a road so that the three Richardsons and their families might more conveniently get to church. This road was substantially the present Cross Street. It was not a much-travelled road, and for many years there were bars to be taken down or a gate to be opened about halfway
1 The location of the old road and the Long or Blind Bridge is shown clearly on a map of the Abel Richardson farm, surveyed in 1831 by Loammi Baldwin, Jr. This map is in the collections of the Winchester Historical Society. The subject is some- what controversial, however. W. R. Cutter, in the Winchester Record, Vol. III, page 16, upholds the view that the Long Bridge was on the present Pond Street, at the outlet of Horn Pond.
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WATERFIELD IN THE SIXTEEN HUNDREDS
between Richardson's Row (Washington Street) and Main Street.
It was as early as 1643 that three men of whom we have already heard much, Edward Converse, Ezekiel Richardson and Captain Cooke of Cambridge, were chosen to lay out a road from Woburn to Cambridge. It was also recorded that this was a way for those living in the west of Woburn to get to Captain Cooke's gristmill, which the reader will perhaps remember from its situation at the further end of the Squaw Sachem land.1 This road they called Plain Street; we know it today as Cambridge Street. A few years later the present Pond Street was located in order to shorten the distance from Woburn meetinghouse to this road.
In 1646 the town of Woburn voted to lay out a road from the "King's Ford" by Edward Converse's mill to Plain Street. It was in connection with the location of this road, which today we call Church Street, that the distressing controversy arose which led, as narrated in the previous chapter, to John Carter's being mulcted five pounds for slander.2 For almost two hundred years this high- way was known as Driver's Lane, because it was a convenient way for folk to drive their cattle to pasturage on the Town Common in the vicinity of Winter Pond. It seems not to have been much used for other purposes. There were no houses built upon it for a very long time; and one of the witnesses in the Johnson-Carter suit is quoted as urging his fellow citizens to use it more "in summer as well as in winter, lest it be lost to our children "- an illuminating evidence of the infrequency of travel in those days of isolated farms, rough and ill-kept roads, and clumsy, uncomfortable wheeled vehicles.
Besides these principal ways there grew up a few others. High Street, a prolongation of Driver's Lane, gave access to the farms on the west side hills, and Ridge Street, originally a mere cart path, reached the Johnson houses to the west and the Hutchinsons to the east. Forest Street was long a crooked farm lane, until the need for a direct road to the village of Stoneham presented itself. There is no evidence of its being laid out officially until 1850. Bacon Street, logical as its course seems to us, did not exist until 1825. There were no other streets or roads added for well on two hundred
1 See Chapter I, page 9.
2 See Chapter IV, page 54.
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
years from the first settlement of Winchester. A map drawn in 18311 and preserved today shows little more in the way of high- ways than one made in 1650 would have shown.
In addition to maintaining its own roads and bridges, Woburn was long obliged to bear its share in maintaining the "great" bridge over the Mystic River at Medford. Malden and Reading were under the same obligation, the argument being that since the bridge was essential to the citizens of the three towns who wished to go by road to Boston they should lend a hand in keeping it in repair. Woburn did so without complaint for nearly fifty years, but then the feeling arose that Medford should be responsible for all the bridges within its own limits as other towns were. Woburn accordingly ceased to make payments when called upon, and was cited to appear in the County Court to answer a "presentment" with regard to the affair. This happened first in 1691, and the town, still refusing to pay, it happened again in 1693. The town's representative, Sergeant Matthew Johnson (a South Woburn or Winchester man), protested that Woburn was illegally assessed; since the law provided that "bridges should be mended by those towns in whose precincts they lie."
The Court, however, listened with favor to the plea of Med- ford that long custom was in this case the equivalent of law, and ordered Woburn to pay or be fined five pounds. This led to an appeal, and to Matthew Johnson was added Lieutenant James Con- verse, 2d (another Winchester man and the hero of the Indian fighting at Wells) as one of the town's agents in the case. The Court considered the case again, but held to its first decision. Woburn had to pay, and to keep on paying for its share of the cost of repairing the Mystic Bridge until 1761, when, by an agreement with the town of Medford, Woburn paid a lump sum of £200, and was released from any further responsibility for the bridge. By way of indicating the serious depreciation of the colonial currency (to which reference will be made later in this chapter) it may be noted that the £200 voted by the town is stated in the agreement to be the equivalent of only £26, 13 shillings and 4 pence of "lawful money" or coin.2
1 A map of the town of Woburn surveyed and drawn by Bartholomew Richard- son in compliance with a State requirement.
2 Woburn Records, Vol. VIII, page 466.
THE BOAT CLUB COVE FROM THE AQUEDUCT
6I
WATERFIELD IN THE SIXTEEN HUNDREDS
The reader must by this time have some picture in his mind of the original Waterfield, since become the town of Winchester, as it appeared in the years previous to 1700. It is still a forest-clad region, in that picture, pine and spruce and hemlock predominating on the high land and hard woods on the valley floor. Here and there among the trees clearings are to be seen, laboriously made for corn and pasture land, and in each clearing stands a house - not much more than a dozen or fifteen in all.1 A few rough roads con- nect the scattered farms, and on the winding Aberjona there are two small mills, the Converse gristmill at the center and the Symmes mill not far from Mystic Lake. The nearest church is two miles or more away at Woburn Common.
The woods are still full of wild beasts, bears are common, and wolves are a continual menace, for they prey savagely on the harm- less, necessary sheep, on the wool of which the settlers depend for all their homespun clothing. Liberal bounties on wolves were paid by the town of Woburn from the first. The records abound in payments - usually of ten shillings, which is equivalent to fifteen dollars or more of present-day money - to citizens who had delivered a wolf's head, "with the ears," to the town treasury.
Labor was hard and unremitting upon these farms, as it has always been in New England farm households. It was especially severe in the early days, because the cultivated land had still to be cut out of the stubborn wilderness and painfully cleared of rocks and tree stumps, because the pioneer was without the improved tools and labor-saving contrivances his descendants possess, and because there was added to the housewife's duties the spinning and weaving of woolen cloth for the homemade blankets and clothing. On Sunday there were the church services, which everyone who was physically able was supposed to attend. Indeed they were glad to attend them, not only as a religious duty but as a social oppor- tunity - almost the only one offered to see and talk with their neighbors.
It is hard for the modern reader to realize how closely the
1 We have the tithing lists of 1680, from which the number of families living in our Winchester territory can be pretty well determined. They include those of Josiah, James, Sr. and James, Jr. Converse, Samuel, Stephen, Isaac and Nathaniel Richard- son, John Carter and his son John, William and Matthew Johnson, John Holton, Thomas Pierce, Henry Gardner and William Symmes.
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HISTORY OF WINCHESTER
Puritan church and the Puritan town interlocked. The church was the town, and the town was the church. No one could vote if he were not a member of the church in good standing. No one could even move into town and get land to live on unless he was accept- able on grounds of religious orthodoxy. If anyone was negligent about attending church the town authorities were instantly down on him. If anyone entertained unorthodox beliefs, as some of the Woburn people did on the subject of infant baptism about 1670, he was arrested by the civil authorities, and if he resisted admoni- tion he stood in danger of going to jail. Henry Dunster, an early president of Harvard, lost his position and eventually found it advisable to move out of Massachusetts Bay into the Plymouth colony, because he sympathized with the views of the Baptist denomination and would not have his infant children baptized.
The town officials kept a very careful oversight over the morals, the conduct and the religious practices of the townspeople. It is not surprising to find the Selectmen fining William Deane for "excess in drinke" three shillings four pence, or John Johnson, junior, for a like offense ten groats.1 Drunkenness has ever been matter for exemplary punishment. But it is a little unexpected to find the Selectmen summoning John Carter before them, "animad- verting" upon him for misspending his time, and admonishing him to "improve his conduct for the future, or else he might expect some other course would be taken." And they were continually having up one Hopestill Foster, who seems to have been a very objectionable type of Yankee, for "inordinate wages," for "oppres- sion"-which means overcharging-in making brads for Josiah Converse, or for a similar offence in making "streak nayles" for Matthew Johnson.2
It was part of the Selectmen's duty to see that people went to church, behaved themselves there - and elsewhere - and brought up their children properly. Much of this responsibility they later delegated to the tithing men; but they were still expected to make the rounds of the parish at irregular intervals and examine the young children in their catechism, in order to see whether their parents were giving them proper instruction. Education in religious
1 Town Records, Vol. II, page 74; II, page 147.
2 Town Records, Vol. II, page 458.
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CHURCH AND STATE IN OLD WOBURN
doctrines was regarded as far more important than in such matters as reading, writing and arithmetic. A good many of the people had to make their marks when it came to signing their names to a document; probably very few of them could not have stood a questioning on the Shorter - or even the Longer - Catechism.
The minister of the church was a town officer called by the town, and in most cases settled for life, or "good behavior"! Every head of a family in town had to pay taxes toward his salary, whatever he thought of the man or his doctrines. If he was in arrears the town officials fell upon him and could distrain and sell his property to the required amount. For many years after the founding of the colony these taxes were paid cheerfully; but after 1700 the austere faith of the fathers was on the wane. Many families began to demand the right to differ from the orthodox doc- trines if it seemed good to them to do so, and to resent the com- pulsion of paying the salary of a minister whose theology or whose personality they did not like. Rev. John Fox, the third minister of Woburn, was, toward the end of his life, often forced to appeal to the courts and even to the legislature to compel the payment in full of his salary.
The history of the Woburn church has been told with so much loving circumstantiality by the Rev. Samuel Sewall, historian of that town, that it need not be repeated here in all its detail. Some outline of that history ought, however, to be given. For a full two hundred years - until 1840 - it was the church attended by all who lived within the present bounds of Winchester, excepting only the Symmes families and a few others to whom portions of the Symmes land were sold. This land, the reader will remember, was in the town of Medford, and churchgoers from that district usually went either to the Medford or the West Cambridge (Arlington) church.
The first minister at Woburn was the Rev. Thomas Carter, who remained in the office for forty-two years. Toward the end of his life the Rev. Jabez Fox was his associate, and after Mr. Carter's death Mr. Fox succeeded him and occupied the pulpit until his death in 1703. During the ministry of these two early pastors the church seems to have been in general harmonious and prosperous. By 1672 it had grown so much in numbers that the original meeting-
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