History of Worcester County, Massachusetts : with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Vol. II, Part 111

Author: Hurd, D. Hamilton (Duane Hamilton)
Publication date: 1889
Publisher: Philadelphia : J.W. Lewis & Co.
Number of Pages: 1464

USA > Massachusetts > Worcester County > History of Worcester County, Massachusetts : with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Vol. II > Part 111

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In 1885 the foreign element had increased to 781, or about one-seventh of the people in town. About two-fifthis of the whole population is now of foreign parentage,-1144 are of Irish descent, and 163 have French Canadian parents. More than 200 others have parents born in the British Provinces. About thirty per cent. of the population is Catholic.

The average size of the 1033 families in town in 1885 was 4.72. They lived in 860 different houses, or only one and one-fifth families on the average in each house. The town is remarkably free from the large and crowded tenement-houses, so common in manufacturing communities. There are 136 farmers in town, employing about 200 laborers. Most of those working in the boot and shoe-shops are men and boys, while the majority of those employed in the straw-shops are females. The large number of women and girls who come from homes in Maine and other New England States to work in the straw- shops causes au excess of females over males of 292, or about 12 per cent.

There are many of Westborough's sons who have brought honor to her, but in this short sketch there is room to mention only a few.

Eli Whitney was born ou the farm uow owned by William H. Johnson, December 8, 1765. He, like the other farmers' sons, spent his early years in assisting his father, but he found many odd moments to give to mechanical experiments, and when a boy of four- teen he had won such a reputation as a skilled me- chanic that the surrounding country people brought

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to him any little jobs requiring more skill and knowl- edge than they themselves possessed. At sixteen his father furnished him with money to begin the manu- facture of nails. With the profits of his business and his salary as a school-teacher, he was able to go to college, and he entered Yale in 1789. This ended his life in Westborough. When he left college he went to Georgia, and there invented the simple piece of machinery with which his name is always asso- ciated. Lord Macaulay says : . " What Peter the Great did to make Russia dominant, Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton-gin has more than equalled in its relation to the progress and power of the Uni- ted States." Judge Johnson, of South Carolina, says that by the use of this machine "their lands are trebled in value." Mr. Whitney never enjoyed the benefits of his invention-the model was stolen from his workshop. But he became a wealthy man from the manufacture of fire-arms for the United States. Two miles from New Haven is a little town, which he built for his workmen, called Whitneyville. He died January 8, 1825.

Elijah Brigham was born July 7, 1751. He was a graduate of Dartmouth, and commenced the study of law, but finally settled in Westborough in company with Breck Parkman as a dry-goods merchant. He served Westbrook for many years as Representative to the General Court, Senator and Councilor ; for sixteen years he was judge of the Court of Common Pleas, and for eight years a member of Congress. He died in Washington, February 22, 1818.

Horace Maynard was born in the house now occu- pied by Darius Warren, Angust 30, 1814. He grad- uated at Amherst College-then went to Knoxville, Tennessee, as Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. He became one of the ablest lawers of the State. In 1857 he commenced his life in Con- gress, where he served for eighteen years. In 1875 he went to Constantinople as Minister Plenipoten- tiary. In 1880 he was appointed Postmaster-General in President Hayes' Cabinet. Doctor Washburn says of him : "He was first, last and always an American." His tall, gaunt figure, long black hair and striking features were well known in Westbor- ough, although he identified himself with the patri- otic people of East Tennessee, where he was their first citizen.

Westborough is situated on the Boston and Albany Railroad, thirty-two miles from Boston and twelve miles east of Worcester. The numerous hills are generally free from large rocks and ledges, and are often used for pastures. The highest elevation, "Fay's Mountain," rises seven hundred and seven feet above the sea-level, and is one of the principal points used in the topographical survey of the State at the present time, and is the only point in this vicinity where the copper bolt, marking one of the points used in triangulating the State about fifty years ago, now romains in place.

The large area of cedar swamps and meadows on the tributaries of the Sudbury and Assabet Rivers are a prominent feature in the landscape. The absence of outcrop from the underlying rocks interferes with an investigation of anything but the surface geology. A coarse-grained hornblendic gneiss and micaceous schist are common rocks. Some fine specimens of an- dalusite have been found on the "Fay Farm," near Whitney's Hill.

Everywhere can be discerned vestiges of the great ice-pack covering the country during the glacial period. The elevations of the town, with the excep- tion of two or three, are typical drift deposits, with the prevailing lenticular or morainal forms of hills of that class. In various localities are found true mo- raines, with a local appellation of "hog backs." These moraines are products of the era of local ice action, following the recession of the great glacier. The boulder clay and modified drifts (both character- istic glacial- deposits), with several clay beds, are found within the town limits. A large area of swamp and plain land in this and adjacent towns in post- glacial times formed the bed of a large lake, in which were deposited the washings from the adjacent hills, transported to the lake by powerful streams. The shores of this great lake can be traced by the terrace levels found on the sides of some of our hills.

The streams on the western slopes of the town run into the Assabet River, while the central and eastern brooks run into the Sudbury River. The former river is for a long distance the boundary between Westborough and Northborough, while the Sudbury separates this town from Hopkinton.

The largest pond within our limits is Cbauncy, called by the Indians Naggawoomcom, the great lake. This covers one hundred and seventy-seven acres. There is a small pond in the southern part of the town called Cedar Swamp Pond, and near Boston Hill the dark and gloomy sheet of water, which still retains the name given to it by the Indians, Hocco- mocco. Mr. Parkman, in his brief sketch of West- borough, published in the Collections of the Massa- chusetts Historical Society, says that the name of Hobomak-their evil spirit-was given to it from some supposed infernal influence which a man was unhappily under, nigh that pond, from morning till the sun sat. Hon. Horace Maynard, while editor of the Amherst Horce Collegiansc, wrote for that paper the Legend of the Pond, as related to him by one of the old Indians who used to come to his father's house for cider. A beautiful Indian maiden, who had been won by the chief of the tribe in this vicin- ity, on the eve of her marriage, slipped away from the assembled company in a mischievous freak, and springing into her canoe, shot across the pond, in order to conceal herself in a natural bower at the farther end. Unfortunately she was seen by a former suitor for her hand, who, in a moment of passionate revenge, threw himself into the pond, swam quickly

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under the water until he reached the canoe, when with one agonizing shriek the Indian maiden was dragged beneath the surface. The chief on the op- posite shore had seen her disappear, apparently with- out human aid. In the course of a year he, too, fell a victim to the lover's revenge, but he was not per- mitted to find pleasure in his murderous acts. Every year, on the anniversary of the maiden's murder, he was impelled to go to the shores of Hoccomocco, there to embark in a phantom canoe, see his victim material- ize from blue flame and hear again her death-shriek. The third time, knowing it would be the last, he gathered his tribe about him, confessed his sins, em- barked in the fatal boat and disappeared in a vivid flash of lightning in the middle of the pond. After that, for many years, whenever an Indian passed the Hobomak, he threw in a stone on the spot where the warrior was last seen. And now at low water, the tradition says, the pile of stones may still be seen.

The writer of this sketch is indebted for much val- uable information to Rev. H. P. De Forest, formerly of Westborough, who has given much time to its local history, and to Mr. Edward C. Bates, now in Har- vard University. Mr. George K. Merrill has fur- nished facts relating to the geology of the town.

BIOGRAPHICAL.

REV. JOHN D. POTTER.

Rev. John Dyer Potter, the well-known evangelist, was prepared for college at Leicester Academy. He entered Yale College, where he remained three years, and instead of graduating he went to Williams College to have the benefit of the lectures of its distinguished president, the Rev. Mark Hopkins, D.D. He decided to enter the Gospel ministry, and pursued his studies in that direction with Dr. Nelson, of Leicester, and at the Theological Seminary, Andover. He was subsequently licensed to preach, and began his life- work, an evangelist, to which he felt that he was called of God. He commenced his labors at the national capital. After remaining here a few months he went to Old Hatfield, Hampshire County, Mass., where his efforts were crowned with very gratifying success. He also met with similar success at Daniel- sonville and Thomaston, Conn., also in Missouri, Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, Indiana, Michi- gan, Iowa and in New York and New England. His labors in Connecticut extended into one hundred and fifty towns. It may truthfully be said that Mr. Potter is one of the successful evangelists of the age. He is commanding in personal appearance, without any affectation of personal dignity. His address is earnest and magnetic. His mental discipline and study of men make his language clear, pointed, re- fined and, at times, truly eloquent. His views of the

great doctrines of the evangelical system are graphic- ally and explicitly stated, and his searching scrutiny of character, his exposure of sin and denunciation of " all ungodliness and every worldly lust," both in private life and public affairs, are unsparing, and yet there is no personal bitterness contained therein. Mr. Potter belongs to that honored line of evangelists pre-eminently represented by Whitefield, Nettleton and Finney, the Paul of modern evangelists.

E. B. PHILLIPS.

Late in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, near the easternmost corner of England, at Rainham, St. Martin's, was born "George Phillips" (son of Christopher), who, graduating at Caius College, Cambridge (A.B. 1613, and A.M. 1617), was one of the clergymen of the Church of England whose Puritan convictions led them to join Governor Win- throp's party, which sailed from England April 12, 1630, to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He was " Minister " on the Governor's ship, " Arbella," which landed just two months later at Salem.

Watertown was one of the earliest settlements made by these colonists, and of the church there George Phillips was the first pastor. The thirty acres al- lotted to him included part of what is now Mount Auburn Cemetery, and which, rising in gentle wooded slopes above the Charles River Meadows, remains to this day probably inuch as it looked to its first white owner. He spent the remaining fourteen years of his life at Watertown. A man strong in his opinions, he was, perhaps, the founder of those forms of church and town government peculiar to New England. Certainly he was, in the first years of the colony, almost the only advocate of the represen- tative assemblies that have since been the most char- acteristic features of her civil and ecclesiastical gov- ernment.

Theophilus, the son of George, spent his life at Watertown. With the first settlers of Worcester County came Joseph, grandson of the English emi- grant, and opened a farm on the summit of the high hill to the south of Worcester, now partly in Auburn, partly in Oxford. Joseph's son, Jonathan, was a farmer of Sturbridge, a soldier in the cam- paign of 1758 against the French and Indians and deacon of the Baptist Church.

Ebenezer Humphrey, born in 1756, the son of Jonathan, was long a physician at Charlton, and served as surgeon in the patriot army at Saratoga. His son, Ebenezer Morgan, born in Charlton in 1792, lived the last sixty years of his life at Westboro', and at the age of eighty-one resigned his position as agent of the railroad company, which he had occu- pied for nearly thirty years. In 1818 he married Ann Maria Brigham, daughter of the Hon. Elijah Brigham and Sarah Ward Brigham, and grand- daughter of Gen. Artemas Ward, the first commander

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of the Continental Army at the siege of Boston, and descended in the fifth generation from John Cotton, the contemporary and friend of George Phillips.

They had two children-Elijah Brigham and Har- riet Maria. Elijah Brigham Phillips, the subject of this sketch, was born in Sutton August 20, 1819. Soon after his birth his parents removed to Westboro'. Like so many other ambitious New England boys of that time, after attending the town schools, he studied a year at the neighboring academy, Leicester, and thence, after passing a short apprenticeship in a vil- lage store (Charles B. Davis', at Old Concord), he went "down to Boston " to seek his fortune. He was destined to become the most distinguished rail- road manager of Worcester County birth.

When nineteen years of age he commenced his railroad career as a receiving-clerk at the freight sta- tion of the Boston and Worcester Railroad. It is notable that young Phillips and one other man were able to do the work for the office, which handled all the railroad commerce Boston then had with the country to the west of it, while to-day the similar work requires a force of several hundred. This was indeed the infancy of the railroad. Only nine years before the first train propelled by steam-power had been run in England, and it was only during the pre- ceding five years that the first steam roads running out of Boston had been finished to Lowell, Worcester and Providence. No one then appreciated how com- pletely this new agency was to readjust and enlarge individual and national life. It is estimated that forty per cent. of the present wealth of Europe would have been impossible without railroads. Even more dependent upon its steam arteries has been the growth of this country. A new force was put into the service of man. Here arose the great problem of how the new power should best be applied, where it it should act and how it should be controlled. All this was to be decided each year in greater magnitude and with increasing complications. This young man starting life in the Boston freight-office, ambitious, energetic, untiring, devoted to his task, was for more than fifty years to grow with this growth, and be an active part in it, first as subordinate, later as administrator. Al- ways anxious to be useful wherever wanted, he be- came thoroughly familiar with the details of the transportation of passengers and freight, and of the accounts which they occasioned. Successive promo- tions followed until he was given charge of the freight business of the company at Boston. In the summer of 1852 he was master of transportation when offered the superintendency of the Toledo, Norwalk and Cleveland Railroad, then building in Northern Ohio. He removed to Norwalk in October, 1852, and his office and home were removed to Cleveland in the fall of 1853.

Between Norwalk and Toledo there stretched an almost unbroken forest of heavy timber, for a large part through the Black Swamp, where, during the

first months that trains ran, the rails frequently dis- appeared below the black mud. All this has long been converted into a rich farming country. The road ran parallel to the shore of Lake Erie, and this, with the connecting roads, which were finished about the same time, competed with a line of fine steamers for the host of travelers then moving from the New England and Middle States to the farther West. It was one of the first instances where the railroad proved its superiority to the best water facilities, and a few years of ineffectual struggle forced the steamers to relinquish the passenger business to the railroad, and thenceforward only freight-steamers plied upon the lake. In 1858 Mr. Phillips was recalled to Mas- sachusetts as superintendent of the Boston and Wor- cester Railroad. This position he filled during the years of the war, when troops and supplies were con- veyed in large quantities from Boston, which was the mustering-point for eastern New England. It was upon a train of the Boston and Worcester Railroad that the advanced regiment of the great Northern hosts (the Sixth Massachusetts) first took cars and started for the seat of war. In September, 1865, Mr. Phillips assumed the presidency of the Michigan Southern and Northern Indiana Railroad, lying be- tween Chicago, Toledo and Detroit, and having a mileage of five hundred miles, then one of the largest in the United States. This company had been in poor condition, but now it had-entered upon a very prosperous era of improvement, both physical and financial.

Mr. Phillips was hardly established in his new office when he had to deal with a powerful strike, or- ganized by the locomotive engineers. The engine- men over the whole road (with the exception of one man) refused to perform their duties. Mr. Phillips thought their position indefensible, filled their places with new men and vindicated the discipline of the road. Mr. Phillips made large purchases of land in Chicago for stations and yards for the company and built the handsome passenger station, which was de- stroyed in the great fire of 1871 and then rebuilt. Among his staff were Charles F. Hatch, afterwards general manager of the Eastern Railroad, and of the Chicago, St. Paul and Omaha Railroad; Charles Paine, later general manager of the New York, West Shore and Buffalo Railroad ; C. P. Leland, still au- ditor of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Rail- road, and Henry Pratt, now treasurer of the Michigan Central Railroad. The Michigan Southern and Northern Indiana Railroad Company was consoli- dated, May 8, 1869, with the Lake Shore Railway to form the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Rail- road, extending from Buffalo to Chicago, with about one thousand miles of road, and with Mr. Phillips as the first president of the new corporation.

Mr. Phillips was a warden of Christ Church, Chi- cago, when, in 1869, the bishop of Illinois brought Charles Edward Cheney, the devoted rector of that

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6. 1 2. Philip

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church, before an ecclesiastical court for the omission of a word in the baptismal service. Mr. Phillips' conscientious love of justice led him to enter vigor- ously into the defense of his rector, and as senior warden he took a leading part in the subsequent appeal to the Civil Court, where the decisions of the former conrt were pronounced invalid. The proceed- ings, however, led to the formation of the Reformed Episcopal Church.

Mr. Cheney's counsel was Melville W. Fuller, now Chief Justice of the United States.

In December, 1870, Mr. Phillips entered into part- nership with Charles L. Colby, of Boston, which was afterwards merged into the Phillips & Colby Con- struction Company, for the purpose of building the Wisconsin Central Railroad, projected to run in Wis- consin from Menasha and Portage City to Ashland, on the southwestern shore of Lake Superior. The line from Menasha to Stevens Point (sixty-five miles), and from Portage City to Stevens Point (seventy-one miles), passed through a thinly-settled farming coun- try, but from Stevens Point to Ashland (one hundred and eighty-six miles), it traversed a forest uninhabited save by lumbermen. At that time Northern Wiscon- sin, comprising all that lay north of a line drawn from Green Bay to St. Panl, was a dense forest of nearly twenty million acres undisturbed by farms or railroads. The Wisconsin Central was one of those typical American railroads, not built to serve an already exist- ing community, but destined to open an entirely new country for the use of mankind. A land grant of one million five hundred and seventy thousand acres was the incentive for its construction and experts prom- ised rich iron lands upon its upper part. Both these promises were only partially fulfilled. Much delay was made in the delivery of land titles, and only after a dozen years of exploration was the rich ore found, and then where a branch road of thirty miles was re- quired to reach the ore-beds. In the life of Mr. Brassey, the most famous of English railroad con- tractors, is no record of an undertaking of such diffi- culty as that which confronted the Phillips & Colby Construction Company. They projected a railroad from end to end of this great area of wilderness, in a country where the winters were long and the forest growth so thick that the soil remained a wet mire al- most the whole season that work was possible. Men and supplies all had to be sent in from Stevens Point or enter from the Ashland end after a circuit of four hundred miles by lake from Chicago, and it was nec- essary to first prepare " tote " roads for their passage through the woods.

The great fire of 1872 in Boston and the panic of the next year crippled the capitalists, who furnished money for the enterprise, which by these losses was delayed and rendered much more difficult. The line was completed in June, 1877. From 1874 on Mr. Phillips made his home in Milwaukee. He operated the Wisconsin Central until 1878, when he removed

to Chicago, intending to rest for a year, but he was shortly after appointed by the United States District Court for Southern Illinois receiver of the Grayville and Mantoon Railroad (now part of the Peoria, Decatur and Evansville). This company he reorganized and improved. June 1, 1879, upon his election as presi- dent of the Eastern Railroad of Massachusetts for a second time, he removed from the West to Boston. In this office he spent three and a half years of in- creasing prosperity for his company. Its lease to the Boston and Maine corporation was much discussed, and in 1883 that company leased the Eastern Rail- road. Mr. Phillips believed that the resources of the latter company were not then sufficiently appreciated for it to obtain the terms which were warranted by its merits. Along the north shore it commanded a very exceptional passenger business; in Boston it owned large and very valuable terminal grounds of increasing value, to the Boston and Maine as well as to itself, and it owned practical control of the Maine Central, which gave both roads connection with Maine and the provinces. In 1879-80 he served with Judge Colburn, of Dedham, and Mr. Samuel M. Fel- ton, of Philadelphia, as a commission to arbitrate be- tween the State and the Fitchburg Railroad Com- pany.

During the early months of 1883 Mr. Phillips de- voted himself to the management of the Toledo, Cincinnati and St. Louis Railroad. What has been called the "war of the ganges" had waged during the preceding years. Volumes had been written, the technical journals had teemed with its debates-the Prussian Government made elaborate investigations. Several of the earlier roads built with a width of six

feet between the rails had been narrowed to the com- moner gauge of about four feet and nine inches. Why should not this in turn be superseded by one of three feet ? About 1875 three local roads had been started with this narrow gauge from Delphos, a small town in Northwestern Ohio. By a singular series of extensions and accretions with short pieces of similar road the Toledo, Cincinnati and St. Louis Railroad had, in 1883, gathered under one manage- ment upwards of eight hundred miles of narrow- gauge road, comprising a main line from Toledo through Delphos. to St. Louis ; a stem from Delphos extending south to Dayton, where it branched into two lines, one going to Cincinnati and the other to the iron and coal fields of Welleston and Ironton, in the southeastern part of the State. Mr. Phillips was not a believer in the narrow gauge, but the road had such small capitalization and commanded such valua- hle territory that, had sufficient capital been forthcom- ing, the property could have been made profitable.

In 1883 Mr. Phillips was elected president of the Fitchburg Railroad, then extending from Boston to the Connecticut River, and running its trains over the State road to North Adams. This mixed man- agement of the Hoosac Tunnel and the forty miles of

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road owned by the State, as part of the same enter- prise, was very unsatisfactory, and for years many had deprecated the State ownership.

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History of Worcester County, Massachusetts : with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Vol. II, Part 111

Author: Hurd, D. Hamilton (Duane Hamilton) Publication date: 1889 Publisher: Philadelphia : J.W. Lewis & Co. Number of Pages: 1464

Author: Hurd, D. Hamilton (Duane Hamilton)
Publication date: 1889
Publisher: Philadelphia : J.W. Lewis & Co.
Number of Pages: 1464