USA > Massachusetts > Norfolk County > Bellingham > History of the town of Bellingham, Massachusetts, 1719-1919 > Part 11
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15
Joseph Fairbanks was the great grandson of George Fairbanks the first settler of Bogastow (Millis), who with his neighbors built the famous stone house there for a refuge against the Indians in King Philip's War. He came to Caryville, bought land of the Metcalf family, and married Judge Stephen's daughter Mary in 1787. They had only four children. The younger son Jonas received the gristmill, while the older Elijah, my grand- father, kept the farm at the head of Pearl Street. Elijah had eight children, Jonas none, and Elijah's busy wife envied her idle sister-in-law who lived in such luxury that she even owned a special spider for toasting cheese.
The seven partners built the stone cotton mill as they planned, and one of them sold his seventh to the others the next year for $1250. In 1818 Joseph Fair- banks mortgaged his homestead to the West Parish of Medway, of which he was a member, for $900. Ten years later came a catastrophe, for the mill was burnt, and "he walked the floor all night."
The Bellingham farmers were satisfied with their experiment, and passed it over to men who gave their lives to the business. It was bought and started again
150
HISTORY OF BELLINGHAM
by Alexander Wright and Royal Southwick, two of the early manufacturers of Lowell, from the five remaining partners, and Joseph Fairbanks received $1071 for his three-sevenths share. The purchasers gave a mortgage of $2200, and two years later in 1830 they sold it to William White for $4800. He borrowed $1200 of the West Parish for this purchase, but in two years more in 1832, he sold to the Bellingham Cotton Manufacturing Company at North Bellingham, the factory and land of Joseph Fair- banks & Company, with water to run six hundred spindles to be taken before all other uses of this power, for $10,000.
In 1839, after the hard times, George Barber of Medway sued the Bellingham Cotton Manufacturing Company and got a judgment of $9741. He bought their Joseph Fairbanks property at a sheriff's sale for $7000, and held it till 1848, when he sold it to his son-in- law, William H. Cary, for $5000, subject to mortgages of $1700. Cary gave him a mortgage of $3000. In the hard times of 1857 he gave another mortgage, to Clark Newell & Company of Boston, of $10,000. He weathered the storm, and in 1862 he bought out the only other user of this water power, Jonas Fairbanks, for $1000. Only two years later, in 1864, he sold the mill finally, subject to a mortgage of $3700, to Joseph Ray for $20,000. He afterwards considered this price too low for the times.
George Barber and his two sons-in-law had held the mill for a generation. He was the great great great grandson of George Barber, one of the first settlers of Medfield, and born at Millis in 1772. He was a clothier and wool carder at Medway Village soon after 1800, and owned a small mill for dressing cloth that was built by Job Harding in 1795. The wool was carded into rolls about three feet long, to be spun and woven in farmers' houses, and then dressed, dyed and finished. He had
Cradle, flax wheel, distaff, woolen cloth loom, bellows, foot stove, wooden lantern, winding blades, etc.
ATTIC OF THE HOUSE BUILT BY JOSEPH FAIRBANKS IN 1803
-
1
151
THE MILLS
from six to ten apprentices, called the Barber devils, when various pranks occurred in the village. With two other men he built a cotton mill in Medway, which afterwards belonged to William H. Cary. In 1826 with Alexander Wright, one of the original carpet man- ufacturers of Lowell, he went to Europe and brought back a skilled mechanic to build cotton machinery. They built the second carpet mill in this country, and made thread lace.
Dr. Oliver Dean was another cotton manufacturer, who ran the Medway Village mill at one time, and he and George Barber built the great Cary house together, at the corner of Barber and Village Streets. Dr. Dean became later the superintendent of the Amoskeag Mills in Manchester, N. H., and he was the liberal founder of Dean Academy in Franklin. He gave away $400,000 in his lifetime, and endowed the Universalist Church there. Mr. Barber lived to be eighty-eight years old.
One of his nephews was Milton H. Sanford, whose father is said to have made in Medway the first cotton thread in America. He took up his father's business at his death, when only seventeen years old, and was a very prosperous manufacturer for fifty years.
George Barber's daughter Harriet married William White in 1830, the year in which he bought the Caryville mill. After his death she married William H. Cary in 1854, who had bought the same mill of her father in 1848. He came from Attleboro to Medway with his father in 1818, one of eleven children, and began to work in the office of William Felt & Company, cotton manufacturers, in Med- way. After three years in a store he was their agent for fourteen years, till they were burned out. He rebuilt and enlarged the Caryville mill and built three tenement houses there. After selling it he rebuilt the Eagle Mill,
152
HISTORY OF BELLINGHAM
Wrentham, and then bought the Rockville Mill for thread, yarn and sheetings. This he sold in 1871. He was in business for sixty years, and for over thirty years he produced annually from $75,000 to $100,000 worth of goods. He managed a larger property than any one else in Medway. He was chairman of a committee to grade the Air Line Railroad from Dover to Woon- socket. He was well and strong at eighty. He owned the Caryville mill for sixteen years, and when the post office was opened there in 1866 it was named for him.
In 1867 Mr. Ray sold the property of eighteen acres to Moses Taft of Uxbridge for $30,000. He was born there in 1812, near the first woolen mill in town. His father, Luke, the fifth from Robert Taft of Mendon in 1680, set up a spinning jenny of twenty spindles in his own house in 1816, and Moses wound bobbins at seven years of age. In 1824 his father started a mill of twenty power looms and made satinets. The son worked there while he went to school, and took charge of it at eighteen. After the hard times in 1837 he paid all his debts. He owned mills in Burrillville, Uxbridge, Blackstone, Douglas, Ashland, Putnam, etc.
In 1871 Moses Taft sold one-third of the property to C. H. Cutler for $11,000. Cotton cloth had always been made up to this time, and satinet since then. Mr. Cutler was born in Ashland in 1834. He worked first in his father's gristmill, and then at Uxbridge and Mil- ford. In 1864 he was superintendent at the South Mil- ford mill of Thayer & Sweet. Among his papers is one that says: "Feb 25 1864 South Milford. We have this day agreed to make domet flannels as we have been doing for Moses Taft, he finding wool and warps. Aldrich & Cutler." Mr. Aldrich was then superintendent at Cary- ville. Soon after this the two men exchanged places, and
1
2
3
4
5
THE CARYVILLE MILL ABOUT 1870 WITH THE TENTER BARS FOR STRETCHING AND DRYING CLOTH
1 Jonas Fairbanks 2 C. H. Cutler
3 Old Sawmill
4 Calvin Fairbanks
5 Boot Shop
-
153
THE MILLS
the South Milford mill burned in 1868. Mr. Cutler was a just and kind employer, and a good citizen, well liked by all who knew him. In 1876 he began to have a cough, and on this account in 1878 he moved to Colorado Springs. There he bought a house and was planning to start a grocery business with his son-in-law, when he died. The Caryville mill property was assessed in 1879 at $33,150.
Mr. Cutler's successor as superintendent was William A. McKean, who lived here from 1868 to 1899. In 1885 Moses Taft's grandson Edgar Murdock bought some of the stock of Taft, Mckean & Company. Addi- son E. Bullard bought his first stock in 1880. He had entered the office as bookkeeper in 1875. The other owners were then Moses Taft, Herbert Taft and William A. McKean. In 1889 the mill had seven sets of machinery.
In 1899 the owners were Taft, Murdock and Bullard. When Mr. Murdock died the others bought his stock, and in 1904 they were incorporated with the name of the Taft Woolen Company.
Of the present company Harold W. Bullard is pres- ident and superintendent, and Addison E. Bullard is treasurer, with a controlling interest. The capital is $220,000. There are nine pickers, fourteen sets of cards, one hundred and eighty-four narrow looms and three thousand four hundred and thirty-two spindles. Three steam boilers and a water wheel of seventy-five horse power were lately used, but in 1818 the mechanical power was changed to a five hundred horse power electric generator, with the equipment for buying as much more current from the Edison Company. The company owns thirty-eight tenements and employs two hundred and sixty persons. It made in 1918 two million three hundred and ninety thousand nine hundred and
154
HISTORY OF BELLINGHAM
fourteen yards of Union Cassimeres and Satinets. During the recent war three hundred persons were at work, the mill was run at night, and it spun forty-three thousand one hundred and forty pounds of silk yarn for cartridge bags.
THE RED MILL
Cotton or woolen manufacture was begun where the Red Mill stood, at the next water privilege on Charles River above the North Bellingham mill, probably in 1852. There had been a dam there for over fifty years, for Laban Bates sold Dr. John Corbett in 1783 two lots on Charles River with the right to erect a dam across it where the old sawmill dam was, and keep the water up to a certain stone. In 1800 Amos Ellis sold to David Jones the right to flow his land to make a pond, and a half acre for a mill yard. In 1832 for $450 Simeon Barney sold to Henry C. Lillie, a member of Adin Ballou's Hopedale Community and the superintendent of its manufacturing department, this property, inherited by his wife Mary from David Jones, with the flowage rights granted by Amos Ellis in 1800. In the same year Thompson Thayer sold to Dwight Colburn for $2250 about five acres with a saw and gristmill on the new road over Charles River and an acre on the south side of it, referring to the deed of Bates to Corbett in 1783. Thayer had bought a mortgage on the property some time before, and foreclosed it. The next year Lillie sold what he had bought of Barney to Colburn for $522. Mr. Colburn bought nine acres of Elias Cook the next year for $650, seventy acres the next year from Martin Rockwood for $1400, and sixty-seven acres the year after from David Foster for $1800. He manufactured woolens and once had sixty hands.
Dwight Colburn was born in Dedham, 1798, and
,
THE CARYVILLE MILL IN 1919
155 -
THE MILLS
died in 1874. He worked in boyhood in a mill of his father's, and continued the business for himself in Holliston and at the Red Mill. He was engaged in boot manu- facture also, in Bellingham and Milford, where his sons were prominent in the same line. In religious convic- tions he was a follower of Adin Ballou. His grand- daughter has been the Bellingham Town Librarian for twelve years.
Mr. Colburn owned the water privilege at Box Pond also for some years, and when he sold it finally in 1839, he reserved the right of flowage for his mill below on the same river. Soon after the hard times in 1837 he went to Milford, and in 1841 he sold to Bates & Arnold, owners of the North Bellingham mill, his stone cotton factory with all the property connected, for $2500. They owned both mills for twenty years, till 1860, when these went to their creditors, Newell & Daniels.
The next year Newell & Daniels sold to F. B. Ray the Colburn privilege, reserving the lower Bates & Arnold cotton mill with the rights belonging to its pond and to the Beaver Pond water that flowed into it, for $2250. In 1887 Joseph G. Ray sold to the Norfolk Woolen Company the Colburn privilege deeded by Dwight Colburn to Bates & Arnold in 1841, subject to a mortgage from F. B. Ray to J. G. Ray given in 1868, for $3000.
Rags were prepared to make feltings here for many years.
THE SOUTH MILFORD FACTORY
Dr. John Corbett asked the town for permission to build a dam and sawmill here in 1755, and was refused; the first mill in Mendon, then almost one hundred years old already, was on the same road hardly a mile away. But his great grandson, the third Dr. Scammell, sold to Pen-
156
HISTORY OF BELLINGHAM
niman, Scammell & Company in 1812 for $1200 land on both sides of the turnpike from Mendon to Boston and on both sides of Charles River "for a manufactory now building" together with the right to flow his land, to keep the pond two feet higher than the sills of the factory. The firm consisted of eleven persons, with Maj. Samuel Penniman at its head. He was the son of Land- lord Samuel Penniman who kept the tavern opposite the Green Store at South Milford. It was licensed in 1778. He was born in 1717, had three wives, and died in 1807. Maj. Samuel Penniman was born in 1773 and died in 1845. Besides his woolen business here he collected straw braid for miles around in all directions and made bonnets. "The Bellingham woolen and cotton manufactory"
is mentioned in a history of this industry as one of the earliest to be incorporated by the State. This was done in 1814, and its capital was fixed at $15,000. Its agent in 1824 was Amos Hill. A sale of its shares in 1823 indicated a value of $8000, and another in 1827 of $10,300.
In 1831 the company mortgaged its stone factory, brick dyehouse, weaving and storehouse, carpenter shop, etc., with the land, to Armsby & Witherell of Boston for $3000, with an agreement to sell them three-fourths of all its products. The agent in 1836 was Mr. Holbrook. In 1837 the mill had two sets of machinery, and made twenty-four thousand yards annually, worth $62,000. Not long after the panic of that year, in 1840, Moses Whiting of Milton got a judgment aganst the company of $25,937. There were then four dwelling houses besides the factory and other buildings. Mr. Whiting kept the mill nearly twenty years, and sold it in 1859 to Chilson & Fisk of Milford for $4000, who sold it again the next. year to Thayer & Sweet of Hopkinton for $3000. In 1864 they made domet flannels for Moses Taft, and he;
THE SOUTH MILFORD MILL, BUILT IN 1812, BURNED IN 1868
157
THE MILLS
furnished wool and warps. Mr. Cutler was the agent here then, and he exchanged places with the Caryville agent, Mr. Aldrich. The mill was burned in 1868. In 1881 W. A. McKean of Caryville bought the land and remaining houses for $3250. In 1893 he sold it to the Seaberg Manufacturing Company, but it was not used, and passed to Taft, Murdock & Bullard of the Caryville mill in 1895.
The pond is called Factory Pond on old maps; it is full of water yet, the dam is good, and the three-story stone factory still stands with about half of its walls left and two good-sized elm trees towering up from within them, a remarkable ruin after fifty years.
THE CHILSON FACTORY
Besides the four textile mills on Charles River there was a small cotton factory at Hoag Lake on Peter's River, where the same family had lived since 1699, when William Chilson bought three cow common rights in the land bounded north by Charles River and south by Attleboro and the Pawtucket (Blackstone) River. Martin Chilson employed twelve persons here at one time, and when he drove a span of horses to Providence, the neighbors thought it must cost him as much as $2 a day. In 1828 he gave a mortgage for $2500 on twenty-five acres with his "cotton factory mill," machinery, etc. The end of the story came in 1834, when he surrendered to Rila Scott and Paul Chilson as trustees for a number of creditors, two houses, two barns, the cotton house, blacksmith shop, shed, etc., with about ninety acres where he lived, with the water power and all his personal property, fire engine, two horses, chaise, broad cloths, calicoes, W. I. goods in his store, unfinished wagons, hay, tools, furniture,
158
HISTORY OF BELLINGHAM
etc., together with the claim on the American Insurance Company for the fire in his factory.
THE BOOT BUSINESS
In 1793 Col. Ariel Bragg at Hayden Row began to make shoes with forty pounds of leather and four calf- skins. He made twenty-two pairs, carried them to Providence and sold them for $21.50. Many men took up the same work in towns in this vicinity. In 1828 a two-horse baggage wagon went from Milford to Boston twice a week; in 1874 six hundred persons produced a million dollars' worth there. The first boot factory at Medway Village was started by Clark Partridge in 1837.
Edwin and William Fairbanks of Caryville learned the business at Hayden Row, and began it in a shop on their father's place in 1848. They built a shop midway between their own houses about 1851. After Edwin sold out to his brother and moved to Cambridge in 1864, William moved it to where the house of Charles Fisher is now, and built an addition making it one hundred and twenty feet long. About ninety men were employed, and made heavy boots for the army and for miners in the West. Work was given out to be done by men at their homes, and finished here. It went to all the surrounding towns. Seven thousand cases of twelve pairs each were produced in a year. Mr. Fairbanks died in 1875, a man liked well by all who knew him. Dr. Ide's son wrote of him, "His life among us has given emphatic proof that a good name is rather to be chosen than great riches." The boot shop was burned the next year after his death, with a loss estimated at $100,000, and the business was never begun here again. In 1864 more men in town worked on boots than in any other occupation.
159
THE MILLS
Dwight Colburn had a smaller boot shop at South Milford, William Paine one at Crooks' Corner, and there were others at the center of the town where a few neighbors worked together.
Agricultural tools were made by Jerald O. Wilcox, 1800-1891, who settled in Rakeville in 1848. He began to make rakes and forks at twenty-seven years of age, and his business came to include cards for woolen mills and many farming tools, and his customers were found in many countries. His product in one year was $18,000, and he employed about twenty men.
Before Mr. Wilcox came to Rakeville it is said that revolving pistols were made near there by Benjamin and Barton B. Darling. There were six iron furnaces in New England in 1731, and guns were made in Boston in 1740. Joseph Fairbanks had a trip hammer shop at Caryville in 1813, where he probably used ore from the iron mine in Mine Woods between North Bellingham and the Center. As early as 1737 John Metcalf sold one-twentieth of one hundred acres in Bellingham, one- twentieth of the iron ore in it and one-twentieth of a mine on land of John Bartlet. Bog ore from the North Bellingham mine was used at Taunton for making loco- motives, but not later than 1860. A whetstone quarry near the Franklin line was worked for some years. About forty years ago Harvey Grant built rowboats in the south part of the town. Adams Barber, Jr., had a small tannery on Peter's River at Crooks' Corner.
CHAPTER XI
THE CHURCHES, 1819-1919
THE town had voted to buy a pew in the meeting house for the use of the new minister, Rev. Abial Fisher, when he came, and his service began with good prospects of success. In 1822 he preached two Century Sermons which were published together, with this explanation: "When a century had passed after the incorporation of this town, a design was formed to exhibit the outlines of its history; but Providence prevented the execution." The first gives the history of the town, the second the lives of the four Baptist ministers.
There had been some disagreement in the church about the singing, even in Mr. Alden's time, but no open quarrel. The organ which the town had put into the meeting house had improved the singing, but one of the deacons, a member of the choir, now objected to it. The record says: "A solemn sadness overspread the pious breast, and Zion decked herself in ashes." He insisted that the church should vote on his proposition that the Bible does not allow such an instrument of worship, and the vote was against him. He then began to stay away from the services, and was excluded from membership for continued absence. The clerk, one of the same family, was treated in the same way.
Seven or eight years later the deacon who had led in the discipline of this one, followed the same path him- self. He first refused to pay his share of the expense of
160
Joseph Г. Makey
1808-1891
161 -
THE CHURCHES, 1819-1919
a singing school maintained by the church. The pastor rashly remarked that he considered it as bad to refuse to support public worship as to drink too much rum. He apologized for this, but the quarrel grew till eight members left the church, including another deacon. The one who began the trouble left town saying that "he would get out of Bellingham, something that the devil never did."
Besides these troubles Mr. Fisher had others even greater. The Baptist Church never included more than a minority of the town, and probably his temperament was not well suited to his trying position here. In February, 1821, thirty-two persons signed an agreement to form a new religious society of the Congregational denomination, adopted rules and elected officers, and twenty-seven men subscribed $59 for their purpose.
There was also a Universalist society which usually met in the south part of the town. About 1750, some of the South End people joined the Six Principle Baptist Church of Elder Josiah Cook in Cumberland, later became Universalists and seceded from it, and built a meeting house of their own, which remained unfinished. Stephen Metcalf's map of Bellingham in 1794 shows the "Universal Meeting House." It was later used by Wright Curtis for a tavern. The Universalist Church of Woonsocket was formed in 1829.
In May 1821 the town chose a committee of nine men representing the three societies to report whether the meet- ing house was the town's property and who should use it. They found that it belonged to the inhabitants of Belling- ham and that "six years ago (before Mr. Fisher came) there was but one society in town, all meeting in the same house together for religious worship, attending on the same preaching although somewhat different in sentiments, yet social, friendly and liberal feelings were inculcated.
162
HISTORY OF BELLINGHAM
Now there are three societies all wishing to meet in the same house but not at the same time, nor hear the same preaching, no there is a retarder, uncharitable sentiments are inculcated, old friends are alienated, one fears another, hard feelings are excited, which renders it unpleasant, and shows the need of some compromise." They proposed that each society should use the house for a part of the time, till all are willing to meet together. The town accepted this report and voted that the Universalist and Congregational societies might use the house on the third and fourth Sundays of each month, and the Baptists on the other Sundays.
The immediate cause of this action had come the month before, when Eliab Wight and John Bates, two members of the Baptist Society's prudential committee, on a Sunday, instead of getting the key from the selectmen, broke open the front door in order to hold their service. Besides this vote in town meeting, the town sued Wight and Bates for trespass. The case reached the Supreme Court in 1823 and the decision came the next year, nearly three years after the deed. The Baptists had to pay five dollars for trespass, one hundred and seventy- seven dollars for costs, and their expenses in all amounted to about six hundred dollars. The record of the case in the highest court fills about fifteen pages. The relation of the town and the church was so close and so little understood that even the witnesses from the ten men who built the building did not agree whether it belonged to the town or the Baptists.
Meanwhile both Universalists and Congregation- alists were trying to establish themselves. The former had been meeting at the distant South End, but wanted to use the meeting house. By the advice of their leader and friend, Adin Ballou of Hopedale, they met now in
163 -
THE CHURCHES, 1819-1919
the tavern opposite. In 1823 on the third Sunday in April, when the Universalists could use the building by the town's vote, Mr. Fisher preached from the steps to a crowd of Baptists in both forenoon and afternoon, while the others used the tavern. A month later one of the Baptists got into the building by a window on Saturday night, and unlocked both the entry door and the outside door. Mr. Foster, the tavern keeper, who had the key, dreamed three times that this was done, and then took his lantern, found the doors unlocked and put up a bar and a new lock. The Baptists held their morning service at the steps and the Universalists in the tavern as before. But at noon some of the Baptists told the other party that they might hold their afternoon service inside. When the selectmen opened the doors, Mr. Fisher with a crowd of his people rushed in. Mr. Ballou asked the selectmen not to open the inner door, and then asked Mr. Fisher to explain his action. He replied that the town had not a right to this house and could not grant its use to the Universalists. Some of his people proposed to retire, but he and others stayed. While Mr. Ballou and the selectmen walked up the main aisle, towards the pulpit, Mr. Fisher rushed up a side aisle, ran up the stairs and said: "Let us begin the worship of God by singing." His people began to sing and Mr. Ballou and his party went back to the tavern. He wrote a pamphlet about the contest, "The Furious Priest Reproved." In his autobiography he says: "I can see nothing to be ashamed of. I said, 'Let the doors be opened and if Mr. Fisher does not conduct himself decently, I certainly shall, and I will publish his doings to the world.' Mr. Fisher lost the respect of people generally."
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.