USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Winchester > History of Winchester, Massachusetts > Part 8
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This petition must have produced its effect, for shortly there- after we find William Johnson installed as captain and James Converse 2d no longer ensign, as he had been before. Johnson's term was a brief one, for within two years he withdrew to accept the office of major in the colony's service. His rival James Converse
1 Afterwards Major Converse, whose military exploits were rehearsed in Chapter II.
2 This whole interesting episode is described at length in a paper by William R. Cutter and Arthur G. Loring, read, it appears, before the old Winchester Historical Society and printed in the Winchester Press of October 25, 1901.
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was at nearly the same time made a captain, and despatched on frontier service to Maine, where, as we have seen, he greatly dis- tinguished himself.
These years from 1682 to 1690 were critical years for Massa- chusetts. They witnessed the loss of the old charter and the over- throw of the Puritan theocracy in which Church and State were firmly united, with the ministers the really controlling power. Massachusetts emerged a royal colony, no longer a Puritan com- monwealth maintained and conducted for and by the elect. It gained (against the will of many) the advantages of freedom of worship and a broader democracy.1 A town history is no place to go into the details of the long struggle, with all the political and theological passions it aroused; it does, however, illuminate the situation for us to find the forefathers of our town - Symmeses and Converses and Johnsons and Carters - involved in the bicker- ings and animosities of the time, over so simple a matter as the choice of a captain for the rural militia company. Major Johnson appears, as the character handed down to us by his contemporaries would lead us to expect, the earnest champion of the old order and the old charter. William Symmes, John Carter and James Con- verse, we may suspect, were less convinced of the righteousness of theocracy, and more disposed to revert to the views of pre-Puritan Englishmen as to the subordination of the Church to the State in civil affairs.
By 1704 we find Major James Converse acting as captain of the Woburn company in succession to those other two Winchester men, John Carter and William Johnson. It was a time of great uneasiness on the frontier, and Converse was kept busy impressing men from his company for service against the Indians at Groton, Lancaster, Marlborough and other towns further west. Once in mid-winter he was called upon to raise sixty men for service on the frontier. The snow was so deep that no one could go on horseback, or afoot except on snowshoes. The major himself had not been as far as his next-door neighbor's in a fortnight. He was at his wits end; there were no more than twenty or thirty pairs of snowshoes in the town. But he commandeered those, and filled up his quota
1 Those who are interested in following the story of the rise and fall of the old Puritan theocracy are recommended to read Brooks Adams's Emancipation of Massachusetts.
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with men on horseback whom he hoped somehow or other to get through to the posts where they were wanted. A letter of his is extant in which he gives voice to his irritation at having impossi- bilities required of him.
"I am poor and old," he writes, in humble exaggeration, "and I am made the perpetual drudge of my superior officers. Neverthe- less I am very ready and willing to do the utmost of my ability."1
Not many years thereafter a second militia company was formed in Woburn and a third in the "Precinct" which later became the town of Burlington; the number of citizens due for service had so far increased that they were too many for a single company. Men who lived in Winchester territory were often in command of one or other of the Woburn companies - Josiah Converse, James Richardson, Robert Converse, Ebenezer Converse, Samuel Belknap, all held the rank of captain in the years previous to the Revo- lution.
In time of actual war the whole of a militia company was not called into service. That would have meant drawing off the entire male population into arms; no one would have been left to till the fields or protect the women and children in case of danger. Instead a certain number of men were "impressed" or volunteered from each town, and they were placed not under their own officers but under commanders specially named for the occasion by the General Court. So we find Major Johnson, though only a lieutenant in his home company, in command as a major over a body of soldiers sent to Billerica to chastise some Indians who had massacred a number of settlers in that town during King Philip's War in 1675. And we have also seen James Converse, who at the time was not an officer at all in the Woburn company, named captain to conduct the defence of the garrison at Wells in 1694 and gaining promotion to a majority by his services there.
The records show that fifty-eight Woburn men served in King Philip's War in 1675-76, in addition to Major Johnson and Captain Carter who acted as officers. Four Richardsons, John, Joseph, Samuel and Nathaniel, and Thomas Pierce are the names that appear clearly to be those of Winchester men. Lieutenant William
1 W. R. Cutter and A. G. Loring, Collections of the Winchester Historical Society, printed in Winchester Press, Vol. II, No. 3.
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Symmes was among those who served from Charlestown. He also, as we know, was a resident in Winchester territory. Several of these men were present at the Great Swamp fight in Rhode Island, fought December 16, 1675. This was the battle in which the power of Philip was broken and his fortified stronghold was taken and burned. Several hundred Indians were killed; more than eight white soldiers lost their lives, and a hundred and fifty were wounded, one of whom was Nathaniel Richardson of our town.
There is no evidence that any other dwellers on Winchester land except Major James Converse saw important service in King William's War (so called) from 1688 to 1698. Thomas Pierce and John Richardson, who appear to have lived within Winchester bounds, were, however, among the twenty-four Woburn men who served in Sir William Phips's ill-fated expedition against Quebec in 1690, and Captain James Richardson, a descendant of Thomas, whose homestead in later years was in the vicinity of what is now the Mystic Valley Parkway, just east of Washington Street, is said to have won credit and his military title in "employment against the Indians in Maine."
Men from our community took a very active part in Captain Lovewell's famous fight with the savages on that same Maine frontier in 1725. This dramatic little battle - there were only thirty-four white men engaged - occurred during one of those occa- sional outbursts of violence which punctuated almost a century of irritation along the northern frontier of New England, where the English settlers were in continual friction with hostile Indians who fought with French encouragement. Captain Lovewell's band was not a regular military force; Lovewell, who was a Dunstable man, raised it to take advantage of a rather barbarous offer of £roo for every Indian scalp delivered in Boston, which the Great and Gen- eral Court of Massachusetts made in 1724. He and his company of volunteers thereupon set out on a profit-making campaign and returned from one expedition into New Hampshire with ten scalps, for which they duly collected the generous sum of £1,000.
In April 1725 he and his men set forth on another raid into the Indian country. They made their way unmolested as far as the Saco River in what is now the town of Fryeburg, Maine, a town named for the chaplain of the Lovewell band, who died of
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the wounds he received in the battle I am to describe. By this time their numbers were reduced to thirty-four, several men having been left as a rear guard at Great Ossipee Pond, New Hampshire. Of these Noah Johnson,1 Thomas Richardson, Timothy Richardson, Ichabod Johnson, Josiah Johnson and Ensign Seth Wyman bear names familiar in the history of Woburn and Winchester. The three Johnsons and Ensign Wyman were all grandsons of Major William Johnson of whom we have heard so often.
By the morning of May 8 they had reached the shores of a good-sized pond, called Lovewell's pond to this day. Hearing a gun discharged and catching sight of a single Indian standing on a headland that projected into the pond, the party started in pursuit of him, leaving their packs with provisions and spare ammunition at their camp. They caught their Indian, but in their absence a band of Indians more numerous than themselves discovered their camp, seized the baggage they had left behind, and laid a careful ambush for the returning white men. Into this ambush they fell; Captain Lovewell and nine others were killed almost at the first volley. The rest, led by Seth Wyman, who now took command, took what shelter they could, with the waters of the pond behind them to prevent an attack from the rear. For ten hours a desultory fight went on, both redskins and white men shooting from behind rocks and trees. One of the white men, John Chamberlain of Groton, in the course of the fight came face to face with Paugus, a famous chief of the New Hampshire Indians. The two men, glaring at each other, loaded, primed and fired their muskets at the same moment. Paugus fell dead; his bullet creased Chamber- lain's skull as it passed.
The Indians withdrew at nightfall; forty or more of the seventy who comprised their party were left dead on the field. Fourteen of the colonists were killed or died of their wounds. One was miss- ing and never heard from; another whose name is charitably con- cealed was a deserter. The survivors made their way to the "fort" they had left on Ossipee Pond, but the men stationed there, alarmed by the report of the deserter, who represented that the entire company of white men had been wiped out, had decamped
1 Noah Johnson had moved to Dunstable. When in later years land in the pres- ent town of Pembroke, N. H. was granted to survivors of Lovewell's fight he removed thither and died in New Hampshire when almost a hundred years old.
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with most of the provisions. Sixteen men led by Ensign (later Captain) Wyman made their way back to Dunstable by forced marches of terrible hardship through the forest wilderness. Four others, whose wounds would not permit them to keep up with the main party, struck out for the English settlements at Saco and Berwick. Only two of them arrived there; the other two, one of whom was Chaplain Frye, died on the way.
Of the eighteen men who returned alive only nine had escaped painful and serious wounds. Wyman and Thomas Richardson were among these nine. Ichabod Johnson was among those killed.1 Noah Johnson, Timothy Richardson and Josiah Johnson were all severely wounded and bore the marks of the battle through life.
We have no evidence that any from our part of old Woburn were enlisted in the expedition of New England colonial troops which, under the command of Colonel William Pepperell, took the fortress of Louisburg from the French in 1745.
In the French and Indian War which lasted from 1755 to 1763 a number of soldiers from Winchester territory were engaged, mainly in General Abercrombie's campaign for the capture of Montreal by way of Lakes George and Champlain. Among them we recognize the names of Josiah Johnson, William and Ebenezer Locke and several members of the Richardson family, one of whom was Abel Richardson, who became by purchase the owner of the old Converse house and mill. Of him we shall have more to say later.
Abel Richardson was a member of Captain Osgood's company of Colonel Nicholl's Massachusetts regiment, which marched in 1758 to support the British regulars in Abercrombie's campaign against Fort Ticonderoga, then in the possession of the French. The unmilitary appearance of the colonial troops on this occasion was a source of much merriment to the British officers at Albany. "It would have relaxed the gravity of an anchorite," wrote one observer, "to have seen the descendants of the Puritans marching through our streets ... some with short coats, some with long, some with no coats at all, in colors as varied as the rainbow; some with their hair cropped like Cromwell's soldiers, others wearing
1 His father Edward Johnson, who lived in Burlington, is said to have died of grief at his son's loss.
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wigs whose curls flowed ... about their shoulders. Their march, their accoutrements ... furnished great amusement to the wits of the British army."1
One of those wits was a medical officer named Shackburg. He exercised his gift of humor by composing a set of doggerel verses, set to a lively air, the origin of which is obscure. Dr. Shackburg called his production "Yankee Doodle." He is said to have gravely recommended the tune to the principals as a "celebrated martial air," and he and his witty friends were beyond measure delighted when the militiamen fell for the joke and began diligently to per- form "Yankee Doodle" upon their fifes and drums. The joke was turned against its authors not much more than twenty years later, when Cornwallis surrendered his troops at Yorktown to the merry music of Captain Shackburg's satirical song. It is something to remember - is it not - that a Winchester man (and perhaps more than one) was present at the birth of the oldest of American patriotic tunes, though whether he wore a long coat or a short one, and whether his hair was cropped or hidden beneath a wig we do not, alas, know.2
One very serious effect of these frequently repeated and almost continuous wars with the French and the Indians was the burden of debt it left on the colonists of Massachusetts Bay. War is always costly; to a poor and struggling community it is pretty nearly ruinous. Sir William Phips's expedition to Quebec cost a great deal of money, to no purpose. The year after it broke down, the colony or province tax was increased by £24,000, an immense sum for those simple days. Woburn's share went up from £32 in 1689 to £532 in 1691, and the hard-working farmers along the Aberjona suddenly found their tax bills twenty-three times what they were accustomed to pay. Let Winchester taxpayers of today try to imagine what that must have meant! It was at this time that the colony, in order to pay its bills, was driven to issuing the unsecured or ill-secured notes called bills of credit, a device to which it had to resort again and again during the eighteenth century as the accounts for other military ventures were presented, until as we 1Historical Collections, Farmer and Moore, Vol. III, pages 217-218.
2 A very interesting diary of this campaign was kept by Lieut. Samuel Thompson of Woburn; it is printed in the Appendix of Sewall's History of Woburn. The cam- paign was a failure, but in the very next year General Wolfe took Quebec, and Canada passed into the hands of the English.
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saw in the previous chapter the paper currency of Massachusetts approached more and more close to zero in value. The French and Indian War cost £818,000 sterling and nearly £500,000 had to be paid by the colony out of its own narrow funds. The result was another increase of taxation almost fourfold in amount. That the burden was borne with so little complaint is evidence of the sturdy character of the people, who were willing to sacrifice not their lives only but their property - of which human beings are often more thrifty - in order to defend their independence against a persistent and dangerous enemy.
We have seen our forefathers clearing the wilderness, culti- vating the soil, laying out roads, building churches - and some- times squabbling passionately over their ministers - setting up mills, training a soldiery and making war. What, meanwhile, were they doing for the education of their young? Surprisingly little, in view of the venerable tradition that New England was built on its churches and its schools. As a matter of fact, education - except for those young men who were destined to become clergymen - was long taken very casually by our ancestors. There is no record of any public school in Woburn until 1673, when "Goodwife Converse"-not the wife of any of our Winchester Converses but of a distant kinsman, Allen Converse - was engaged to teach the small children their ABCs for the magnificent remuneration of ten shillings! For many years this was the stand- ard wage of the good women who from time to time were engaged for the purpose. There were no schoolhouses. The women taught the small fry that presented themselves in a room in their own houses, and school kept for only a few months in each year.
Little was taught save reading and writing and the simplest rules of arithmetic; the instructors had no further knowledge them- selves. What the children in the Waterfield part of Woburn did for an education we cannot tell. They lived two miles or more from such small educational opportunities as the town offered, for the school was kept in Woburn center. It is not likely that many of them trudged so far every day, though children made less of walking long distances to school in the early days than they do today.
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The probability is that most of the boys and girls of our com- munity in the seventeenth century - and much of the eighteenth - learned to read and spell and write at their mother's knee, or at most in a little "dame school," kept by some worthy widow or spinster in one room of the family house, in exchange for a small fee paid by the parents of the children she instructed. Such schools were common in early New England; they persisted even into the nineteenth century.1 There may have been some in the rural settlement that was eventually to become the town of Winchester, but they have left no record.
It is certain that the people of an old New England farming community neither asked nor expected more than the rudiments of education. If a man could read, write and cipher a little, it was enough. In 1686 Woburn had grown to have one hundred families, and was by law required to keep a "grammar school," but it was several years before even a single scholar offered himself for more advanced instruction. As late as 1704 the grammar schoolmaster was rarely expected to be in attendance except at such times as the County Court was sitting - in order to guard against having the town "presented" by the grand jury for failing to maintain such a school as the law required. For however indifferent the colo- nists might be with regard to primary schools, they never forgot that grammar schools were essential to an educated ministry, and the clergy - who still controlled the government - were careful to see that no town shirked its obligations under the law in that direction.
Gradually the grammar school of Woburn acquired pupils and came to have settled and often competent masters. In 1713 a schoolhouse - the first in the town - was built at the center, though it was paid for by private subscription and not with public money. It was a small building of course, furnished with rough wooden benches and a great flag-bottomed chair in which the master was enthroned. But for a good many years - quite regu- larly until 1742 at least, and occasionally thereafter until 1760 - the grammar school did not always abide in the new schoolhouse. Woburn, when Burlington was still a part of it, as well as the
1 For a description of such a school, which existed as recently as 1860, see Old Salem Days, by Eleanor Putnam.
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greater part of present-day Winchester and Wilmington, was a town of magnificent distances, and it was thought no more than fair that the school should be moved about from time to time into the outlying quarters of the town so that scholars from those dis- tricts might for part of the year at least find it conveniently located for their attendance. Now and again, therefore, its sessions were held for a month or two in some house within our Winchester borders, a part of which had been hired for the purpose by the town selectmen. Thus in 1728 the records show that school was held for a time at Thomas Belknap's, which was on Main Street, near the northern border of the present Winchester. At another time it was accommodated at Sergeant Thomas Reed's on Cam- bridge Street. In 1738 it was held "in the southerly part of Rich- ardson's Row, the selectmen to state the place"; and in 1742 it "took up" at Mr. Ebenezer Converse's in lower Church Street.1
This migratory school-keeping was obviously something of a hardship on the schoolmaster, and the town, in recognition of that fact, usually voted that the inhabitants of the districts into which he had to move must supply him with a horse "on which to ride to meeting," if they wished to entertain the school. Once, at least, we find Master James Fowle, a teacher widely respected and beloved in Woburn for many years, as much for his force of character and powers of discipline as for his book learning, petitioning the town for some increase in his salary "in consideration of the fatigues he hath had by reason of there being so many removals of the school." He failed to get his allowance, but the general appreciation of the injustice to both teacher and pupils involved in the system led to its permanent abandonment not long afterward. After 1760 the grammar school kept only in the schoolhouse at the center, or in another that had been built in the "precinct," which later became the town of Burlington.2
Meanwhile what was being done for primary instruction in the town? Little enough. For many years Woburn ceased altogether to appropriate money for that purpose - not even the beggarly ten shillings that had formerly been paid to "Goodwife Converse"
1 Woburn Records, Vol. VII, page 267.
2 For information about Woburn schools much dependence is placed on a careful article on the subject prepared by Rev. Leander Thompson and printed in the Woburn town reports for 1876.
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and her successors. It is clear that during all the years between 1707 and 1760 parents who wanted their children to learn to read and write had to maintain a little private school by subscription. True, the cost cannot have been excessive, to judge by the terms that the town had driven with its female school teachers in earlier days; probably two or three pounds, or a little more after the cur- rency had begun to depreciate, was all the mistress of a dame school could expect, and divided among ten or a dozen families that sum would not make education unduly expensive.
But in 1761 the town meeting awoke to its responsibilities at last. Money was appropriated for the "grammar and other schools in the town," and one fourth of the amount, or £roo in the depre- ciated currency of the day, was to be "divided equally between the extreme parts of the First Parish, provided they hire some suitable person to keep a school ... for their children." The same vote was passed pretty regularly thereafter, and as the southern part of: Woburn - the district which is now Winchester - was specifically mentioned we may suppose that some sort of public school was maintained here after 1761. There was no schoolhouse at first - none was built before 1794. The kitchens or best rooms of this farmhouse or that in the neighborhood must still have served as a schoolroom. The teacher was perhaps the same worthy goodwife or widow who had taught the little private school. The money for her pay, collected from the town treasury, was disbursed by the neighbors who had engaged her services, and there is therefore no existing record on the town books concerning the names of the teachers or the places where they taught. A school system worthy of the name was still to come, but at least after one hundred and twenty years, the little village by the Aberjona had a public school!
CHAPTER VII
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MEMORIES. THE BLACK HORSE TAVERN
WE saw a few pages back that the Woburn grammar school, during its migratory period, was held for a time in 1728 in Mr. Thomas Belknap's house. That introduces us to a family which was conspicuous in Winchester history during the eighteenth cen- tury. Thomas Belknap, the first in our town, was a native of Boston and a glover by occupation. He removed to Woburn in 1698 and bought the land known as the "Forty-pound Meadow," which stretched northward along the road which is now Main Street, from a point not far from the line that now divides Woburn from Winchester. His house was on the Winchester side, where the old house of Mr. James Russell still stands, at the corner of Main Street and Russell Road. Belknap also bought from members of the Converse family land on the westerly side of the road running up to Horn Pond. The brook that flows out of the pond to the Aberjona ran through Belknap's land, and he soon made use of its waters by building a dam, digging a ditch or canal, and putting up first a fulling mill and then a grist-mill along this ditch. The mill privilege thus established is, next to those of the Converse and Symmes families already spoken of, the oldest in Winchester, and it was continuously used for water power for almost two hundred years. The dam and the mills stood near the foot of Canal Street where the buildings of the Eastern Felt Company are located today. They remained in the possession of one or another member of the Belknap family - Samuel, the son of Thomas, or William and Samuel, his grandsons,1 and Josiah his great-grandson - until 1787. Not long afterward the family disappeared from Winchester; several of its members removed to Newburgh, New York, and from this branch were derived two distinguished soldiers,
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