History of Worcester County, Massachusetts : with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Vol. II, Part 14

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 14

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They were forty English families, who, with the nine who had bnt a short time preceded them, made up about fifty families. Most of them, perhaps nearly all, were born in the province, and were, therefore, Englishmen in the sense that they were born of English parentage in the English provinces of Mas- sachusetts Bay and Plymouth. If I should repeat their names many of you would hear your own names, and I should probably name few, if any, who have not some lineal descendant within sound of my voice. They came unheralded by any noise of trumpets, blazon of fireworks, or other demonstration of human interest. When their creaking carts, loaded with the scanty supply of furniture which was all-sufficient for the simple wants of their lives, rolled slowly np these hills and into these valleys, guided by marked trees through the primeval forests, with- out doubt the wolves and bears regarded the inva- sion as very important and revolutionary, and the owls peered down at night upon the fires of the set- tlers which looks of ominous conjecture.

But the human owls, seated in the high places of England, conld not see so far, and had no idea of what was taking place here, and in some hundred other places where the like things were transpiring. Outside the few towns whence they came (Sudbury, Concord, Wenham, Stow, Marlboro'), the event had absolutely no significance. When three or four years later the town was incorporated and christened with an English name, Governor Belcher may have men- tioned, in a letter to the Duke of Grafton, that he had named a little township after him up in the woods of central Massachusetts Bay, and his grace may have jocosely told it to his friend, Sir Robert

Walpole, the prime minister, of whose son Horace, the great letter-writer, the Duke of Grafton was the godfather. There is a remote possibility that the King himself, the "snnfly old drone from the German hive," may have mentioned it to the Duchess of Kendall as an item of news from the distant prov- inee. But the advent of our fathers to these fields had about as inch significance to the people of Eng- land, who supposed they themselves were making the history of the time, as the movements of a nomad tribe in Central Asia for a change of pasturage would have to us to-day. Nor have the circumstances of their coming attracted the attention of mankind since. The poet and the orator have not found in their special history a theme worthy their efforts. They did not flee from religions or political perseen- tion, nor traverse wide and stormy seas to find, on a desolate coast, an asylum in which to worship God according to the dictates of their own conscience. At the end of the first third of the eighteenth cen- tury, religious perseention of Protestants had ceased in England, and the first settlers in this town were in full sympathy and entire accord with the people of the communities they left, both in politics and relig- ion. If they endured hardships, they endured them in common with the early settlers of one hundred and twenty-five other towns in the province, settled and incorporated before ours. I shall not, therefore, claim that these early settlers of Hassanamesitt are to be selected and set on any pedestal over the heads of the primitive inhabitants of other towns. The greatness I claim for them they shared in common with many other similar communities of the same race and time, and it is sufficient glory that they are eminent among equals. But it detracts nothing from the intrinsic interest of their characters that the chief features they present are repeated in a hundred other communities. It detracts nothing from the import- ance of the experience they went through that it is not dissimilar to that of other neighboring peoples who settled other towns. The fact is, representative constitutional government was first invented and put into practical operation in this province, and it first manifested itself in the little autonomies of the towns. It is the people of one of these towns to which I would call your attention, and one where I believe will be found a remarkably pure and perfect type of the kind of communities which were then taking root everywhere in New England. They were representa- tive New Englanders of the first half of the eigh- teenth century, and as such were enacting the most important history which was then transpiring on this round earth. Indeed, what human interest attaches to the quarrels of Walpole and Bolingbroke, or to the corrupt sway of the former after his full accession to power; to the history of the Sonth-sea Bubble ; to the intrignes and uprisings of the exiled Stuarts to regain their ancient throne; to the petty wars of the first Georges, or to the endless plots and counterplots

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of Whigs and Tories, as compared with the scenes which were unfolding on this continent, and mainly within these old provinces, now Massachusetts, from 1720 to 1789? The men and women who came to Grafton to settle were, like their neighbors, the heirs and successors of those heroic meu and women who, in the preceding century, had encountered the first perils attendant on establishing a foothold for civili- zation on this continent.

They had drunk deep of the spirit of the great con- flict with the Stuarts, which ended with the revolution of 1688, whereby the liberties of Protestant English- men everywhere, as they believed, were forever estab- lished. In the first place, they were men of eminently sound, practical common sense. You cannot open a page of their records, or trace the faded leaves of the church proceedings without receiving the impression at the outset and carrying it with you to the end, that first of all here was a race of men perfectly sound- minded, level-headed, and intent upon the practical affairs of life. This Saxon good sense and business capacity is the chief feature of their character, subor- dinating all others. I know it is common to ascribe to colonial settlers of pre-revolutionary days, and to these our fathers, as the predominant trait of their characters, devotion to religion. I do not dissent from the estimate which gives that element a promi- nent and controlling place. But in religious zeal they have been surpassed by many races. I believe our good friends the Catholics of the Irish race have, on a thousand fields, shown a devotion to the faith of their fathers as great as any the early settlers of this country ever displayed. And Spaniards and French- men and Netherlanders and Germans and Turks and Africans have, in all times, displayed a zeal which would rival and eclipse that of our fathers who settled here. When Mr. Wilson, in the excellent discourse I before referred to says, that these "grave pioneers, cherishing the same religious zeal which characterized the primitive colonists of New England, made it their first care to provide for the worship of God; that their first vote at their first meeting relates to the selection of a proper situation for the house of prayer," he tells but half the story, and the impression conveyed is misleading. They do first attend to the building of a meeting-house. The fact is so. But it is also a fact that precisely that was the first condition in their deed, to wit: that they complete a meeting-house in three years. Their whole title depended upon that strict condition. Like business men, therefore, they set about doing the thing necessary to be done at once to prevent a forfeiture. It was an act most character- istic. But it was characteristic of sensible men of affairs, who exactly understood the nature of their grant, and went about complying with its conditions. It was a practical business transaction, and the record of the second meeting of the proprietors at the house of Nehemiah How, here in Hassanamesitt, on April 19-30, 1728, one hundred and fifty-seven years ago to-

morrow, when they adjourned once and again, and examined and re-examined the proposed sites and shifted from one to the other until, after mature con- sideration, they were satisfied that the location would be "accommodable," furnishes a strong illustration of the very trait of character I am now insisting on, a sturdy practical sense, the faculty to adapt means to ends. I should be sorry to be misunderstood. These pioneers, as a general thing, were professors of, and profound believers in, religion. The conditions on which their grant was made undoubtedly received their hearty concurrence. But none of them were re- ligious zealots, and they were not all of them saints, and they knew their own hearts too well to pretend to be, and neither they nor the General Court felt it to be safe to trust the institution and maintenance of religious worship to anything less secure than the express and rigid condition of the deed itself. The policy of maintaining the ordinances of religion, as well as public education, was the settled policy of the provinces, and these emigrants believed in it. There was nothing impulsive or sensational in their conduct, but all was well considered, deliberate and eminently worldly wise.

They were, moreover, an industrious people. They came here as a chief end to better their material wealth ; to get on in life.1 Mr. Brigham has noted at how extravagant an estimate they held their lands, and how they gloried in the idea that they should leave so valuable an inheritance to their children. He reckons ill who leaves out of the account of the early New England settlers the fact that they were intent upon honest gain. They desired and expected to increase their stores, and to acquire moderate inde- pendence. Love of money is said to be the root of all evil. but the hope of acquiring it has sustained many brave hearts in the midst of trials. The early settlers in this town, like most of their contemporaries, had a dim consciousness of the coming greatness of this country. Of course, they knew nothing of the vast resources that lay slumbering in the heart of the con- tinent, and had no correct notion of the real wealth in store for the succeeding generations. But they believed in the boundless productiveness of the soil, and indulged visions of remuneration for their toil of a kind and degree destined never to be realized. They were, indeed, a deeply religious people. They were Puritans without being fanatics. They were Congregationalists and Calvinists. It is evident, however, as well from their church covenant as from the dissensions and differences of opinion which arose within a few years, that they held the tenets of their creed with liberality and a tolerant spirit, and with some conception of the rights of others, as well as their own, to private judgment in matters spiritual. They were, for the age in which they lived, progres-

1 See curious pamphlet on New England, by Rev. - Higginson ; 1 Mass. Hist. Coll., First Series, 117.

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HISTORY OF WORCESTER COUNTY, MASSACHUSETTS.

sive. I am strongly inclined to think that there was a greater degree of liberality of views among the original settlers in respect to religious matters at first than later. After the divisions which arose in 1745 and 1746 in regard to Mr. Prentice, the first pastor, that happened which usually happens is case of reli- gious schism. Each sect draws the lines of its pecu- liar belief more rigidly than before, and the minor differences which occasioned the division become the principal and sacred essentials of doctrine.

At any rate, we know that the church creed was revised and made more definitely Calvinistic under the second minister, Mr. Hutchinson, in accordance with the views of that very able and most logical and uncompromising sectarian. That these people were of a courageous disposition, worthy of their ancestors and of their posterity, needs no evidence to verify. They inherited from their fathers the courage of war- riors, and it is not unlikely that some of the first founders of the town had faced the enemy in battle. The war of the Spanish succession, or Queen Anne's War, which broke out in 1702, and continued a num- ber of years, so far as this country is concerned, fell with especial fury upon the colony of Massachusetts Bay. The neutrality of the Five Nations protected New York and the central colonies. The province of Massachusetts Bay was desolated, and for her (says Bancroft) " the history of the war is but a catalogue of miseries."

All along the borders of Maine, then a part of Massachusetts, the cloud of war hung black as death. And, nearer home, Deerfield was burnt and its inhab- itants massacred in 1704, and Haverhill shared the same fate in 1708. For eleven years the war raged till the treaty of Utrecht in 1713. The troubles re- specting the eastern boundaries of the province, which arose about 1720, with the tribe of Abenaki Indians, lasted about four years, and the Indians, who had embraced the Catholic faith under the teachings of the Jesuit Rasles, waged a war with Massachusetts, animated on both sides with much religious zeal (a circumstance which does not often mitigate the sever- ities of war), which resulted in the success of our colony. These conflicts may have engaged the per- sonal participation of some of our settlers, and at any rate had made them familiar with the wrinkled front of grim-visaged war from their youth.

We can know but little of the personal appearance and daily life of these ancient pioneers, who first bore into your fair territory the seeds of civilized life. No photograpber's art has preserved the lineaments of a single face. For the most part they were too poor to employ the brush of a painter to fix on the canvas the fleeting lines of their features, even if an artist had ever visited the region. I am bound to believe, however, that the men were of well-knit and vigorous frames, and possessed of no small share of manly beauty, and the women well endowed with the comely graces and endearing charms of their sex.

asked the grounds of this belief, standing among the descendants who bear their features by inheritance, I should answer, "Si monumentum quaeris, circumspice." If you want the proof look about you. It would be instructive and curious, if time permitted, to go into an examination of their daily lives, as affected by the implements, appliances and facilities they could com- mand in the performance of their labor, and in pro- viding the necessities of existence.

We, who live in this age of curious inventions and elegant devices of convenience, designed and adapted to facilitate labor and render delightful domestic life, can with difficulty realize the rude and scanty tools and implements and barren facilities with which they prosecuted the labors of the house and farm. In the article of dress, if we had the power to recall and materialize the ancient worthies who assembled in yonder old meeting-house one hundred and fifty years ago; if we could look in upon them as through a window, what a source of infinite amusement and in- terest their quaint figures would excite !

A brilliant writer, describing a period fifty years later, gives a lively picture of the dress of the New England farmer: "If the food of such a man was plain, so were his clothes. Indeed, his wardrobe would by his descendants be thought scanty in the extreme. For meeting on a Sabbath and on state occasions during the week, he had a suit of broad- cloth or corduroy, which lasted him a lifetime, and was at length bequeathed, little the worse for wear, with his cattle and his farm, to his son. The suit in which his neighbors commonly saw him, the suit in which he followed the plough, tended the cattle and dozed in the chimney corner, while Abigail or Com- fort read to him from 'Edwards's Sermons,' was of homespun or linsey-woolsey."1 I am inclined to think this picture would be applicable to the farmers who settled Grafton, after deducting the broadcloth, corduroy and "Edwards's Sermons." And yet they were by no means destitute of all ideas of refine- ment, and most of them had seen glimpses of some of the elegancies of life.

It is quite likely that after a few years, at least, on the Sabbath and important occasions, some of the more well-to-do among them may have displayed gar- ments more attractive than the ordinary sheepskin deerskin, or coarse knee-breeches and frock. Some of the ladies may even have possessed a gown of silk. At any rate we shall presently see that there was one such garment in town. The periwig, which so scandalized the clergy of the preceding century, had established itself in fashion, and doubtless might have been seen here early, if not at the very first. Their education was not contemptible, as the records of their proceedings amply show. They had bad the benefit of the long-established policy of the colony,

1 McMaster's " History of the People of the United States," vol. 1. pages 18, 19.

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GRAFTON.

which made public education the corner-stone of the State. They were familiar with Scripture and fa- miliar with learned preaching. Que of the condi- tions of their grant was that they should maintain a learned Orthodox minister. They complied with the condition by calling and settling in December, 1731, the Rev. Solomon Prentice, a young graduate of Harvard in the class of 1727, a classmate of Gover- nor Hutchinson, of Massachusetts Bay, and Trum- bull, of Connecticut.

In the following year the young minister married Sarah Sartell, of Groton, and his wife, sixteen year> of age, is said to have been well qualified by her learning and ability to assume the important posi- tion of a pa-tor's wife. I have unmistakable evi- dence that even in those rude and primitive days, in the infancy of the settlement, the minister's wife was not wholly unacquainted with, nor indifferent to, the elegancies of refined life. For, among my heir- looms, I possess an ample fragment of an elegant dress which was the property of that lady. One tra- dition in the family describes it as her own wedding dress, but the better authenticated account is that it came from an aunt of hers, and was worn by its former owner at the Court of George Il.

However that may be, it was undoubtedly worn by the fair lady herself, who was, I imagine, as well by her position as by her accomplishments, the leader of society here in those primitive days. As I look upon its beautiful texture, as perfectly preserved as when, one hundred and fifty years ago, it graced the person of the youthful lady, when I see its unfaded and lovely hues,-a bright canary-colored satin, elegantly brocaded with flowers,-I am struck with the transi- tory nature of the things we here pursue. By the aid of this talisman I am enabled to look into the

Dark backward and abysm of time,

and behold one of the figures that moved over these scenes when the curtain of history first rolled up and disclosed this section of the world's stage. For nearly a hundred years, after a long life, the mother and grandmother of a numerons posterity, she has slept in yonder ancient cemetery. There remain of her memory only a few fleeting and uncertain traditions, scarcely more in extent than the nearly obliterated inscription upon her tombstone. All the rest has fallen silent and is swallowed up in oblivion, but the frail and beautiful adornment which set off the charms of the stately young minister's wife remains. No shade of the cunningly-wrought design has become in the least dimmed with age. Every line of the delicate tracery, and every lovely variation of color, lives as clear as on the day it left the loom. Venera- ble ancestress ! I salute you across the gulf of years ! Is it possible to believe that this delicate fabric, this tegument which became so intimately connected with her destiny, is all that survives of her, that all the rest is exhaled like the perfume of the flowers which

bloomed a hundred years ago? No ! at least she and her contemporaries, whose lives we are now trying to recall, live in the beneficent influence they exerted. It is not alone by hereditary transmission that the qualities and pecularities of one generation reappear in another. We are creatures of imitation. The manners and individual peculiarities of a strong per- sonality are reproduced by force of the instinct to imitate ; and as some individuals of every generation are contemporaries of the next succeeding, the traits and habits of a vigorous and original character are continued and transmitted from age to age. The frail memorial, the curiously-wrought fabric, is but a symbol of the graces of personal character which do not perish even from this life, when the tenement of clay dissolves, but survive

To the last syllable of recorded time.1

The pastoral relation of Mr. Prentice was dissolved in 1747 by reason of tronbles which had been brew- ing for two or three years. I do not propose to enter upon the subject of those troubles. It is enough to say that no impeachment of the integrity of Mr. Prentice was attempted, but it was his orthodoxy alone which was brought in question. It is essential for me to say that the records of this controversy, faithfully set down in the beautiful handwriting of Mr. Prentice himself, discloses a people of great inde- pendence of thought and character, desirous to do right, but by no means to be deterred by authority from asserting their just privileges and opinions. Mr. Prentice was succeeded by Rev. Aaron Hutchinson, a man of great power and great eccentricities, who re- mained till 1772, and in 1774 Rev. Daniel Grosvenor succeeded him. A lady friend of mine has given me a brace of anecdotes told to her by Mr. Grosvenor himself, one of which well illustrates his sense of the humorous and his dislike of insincerity.

Mr. Grosvenor was dining with a lady of his par- ish, who was a cook of exquisite skill, and she placed before the pastor a delicious pie, of some kind, and as she helped him to a piece of it, she remarked that the hoped he would accept a piece of her poor pie. The minister tasted it with great gravity, and said, "Poor pie! why, I call it a very passable pie." Whereupon the good lady was in high dudgeon. She declared she never took more pains with a pie in the whole course of her life, and she did not be- lieve there was ever a better pie made. Fishing for a compliment, she got caught with her own hook.

On another occasion the reverend gentleman

1 I regret that a story so destitute of probability as that relating to the domestic discord between Mr. and Mrs. Prentice, which Mr. Howe deemed worthy of a place in his excellent address, should have received an indorsement so respectable. The frequency with which tho story has been applied to ancient couples, who were divided in opinion npon the special tenet of the Baptists, renders it quite too stale for adaptation to the cultivated and refined first pastor of Grafton and his intelligent and spirited wife.

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HISTORY OF WORCESTER COUNTY, MASSACHUSETTS.

called upon one of his parishioners, who, it being upon a washing day, and her dinner not being just what she would desire to invite so august a personage as the minister to partake of, did not mean to extend to him the courtesy of an invitation. But the lady's mother, who was of the family, nevertheless asked Mr. Grosvenor to stay. He accepted, and when his young hostess apologized for the quality of the re- past, her mother made the following observation, which Mr. Grosvenor thought quite notable. She said there was no occasion for any apology ; for, if Mr. Grosvenor was a good man, he would be content and thankful even with a poor dinner, and, if he was a bad man, it was good enough for him.

I have read a sermon preached by Mr. Hutchinson at Newbury in 1767, and the reply by him to certain strictures thereon, by the Rev. John Tucker, pastor of the first church in Newbury. This famous eccle- siastical controversy related to the necessity of infant baptism in order to insure salvation. It is hardly necessary to say that Mr. Hutchinson maintained the affirmative of that proposition. His discourses are marked by great familiarity with Scriptural texts, much classical learning, fine controversial skill, and by a logic which may fairly be described as of deadly precision. Admit his premises, and you cannot es- cape his conclusions.

Mr. Hutchinson, like his great contemporary, Dr. Samuel Johnson, coupled with great learning and ability, the manners of a bear. The president of the day,1 who is the repository of all the history and anecdotes connected with the antiquities of the town relates a story of Mr. Hutchinson, illustrating his manners : He was dining at a conference of minis- ters, and helped himself to so large a portion of the pudding that there was little left on the platter. Thereupon one of his neighbors at the table helped himself from Mr. Hutchinson's plate, and, when re- monstrated with, remarked that he always helped himself from the largest pile.

I do not find in the ancient records of the town, anything to show whether the young settlement con- tributed men to the expedition which resulted in the brilliant conquest of Louisbourg in 1745. To this enterprise, which owed its conception and execution to the energy of Governor Shirley, this province con- tributed more than three thousand men, and it is probable that in the ranks were found some residents of this town.

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History of Worcester County, Massachusetts : with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, Vol. II, Part 14

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