USA > Massachusetts > Norfolk County > Bellingham > History of the town of Bellingham, Massachusetts, 1719-1919 > Part 2
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They had been feared for some years before, as appears from the following promise of those nearest to our town: "To the Honered Governr Depty Governor Magistrates and Deputies now sitting in the General Court at Boston Apr 29 1668. The humble submis- sion and subjection of the Native Indian Sagamore & people of Nepmuck, Inhabiting within the bounds of the Patent of Mass and neare adjoining unto the English Towns settled of Mendham (Mendon) and Marlborough. We being convinced of our great sins & how good it is to turn unto the Lord and bee his servants by praying and calling upon his name: We doe solemnly before God and this Courte give iurselves up soe to doe. Also wee, finding by experience how good it is to live under laws & good government & finding how much we need the pro- tection of the English, doe fully out of our own motion & voluntary choice subject ourselves to the government
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KING PHILIP'S WAR
of the Mass. To the Honored General Court; to the Honord Governor Deputy Governor & Assistants to be ruled and protected by them. And we doe humbly entreat that we may be favorably accepted." After nine names and signs is written: "These have subscribed in the name and with the consent of all the rest."
King Philip claimed to own the land in Dedham, and in 1669 he received twenty-two pounds eight shillings for that part which lay beyond Wrentham, later the principal part of our town. Probably men went there for meadow hay in summer, as they did to Wrentham. If any early settlements were made, they must have been abandoned when the people of Wrentham deserted their homes and took their families to Dedham; the Dedham selectmen had been warned by the General Court in 1673 to prepare for an Indian war.
The danger appeared in a murder there four years before the war began, though there is nothing to show that Philip himself knew of it. Young Zachary Smith, a traveler, spent the night at a house there in April, 1671, and was found dead in "Dedham Woods" the next day. Three Indian's had passed the same way after him that morning, known to the English there, calling themselves King Philip's men. They threw stones and called out insults as they passed. In a few days they were tried in court and one of them was convicted and executed on the gallows on Boston Common. This Indian was the son of Matoonas, sachem of the Nipmucks living at Pakachoag near Worcester. The best historian of the time remarked that this son of Matoonas, "being vexed in his Mind that the Design against the English intended to begin in 1671 did not take Place, out of mear Malice and Spight against them, slew an Englishman traveling along the Road."
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HISTORY OF BELLINGHAM
What is generally called the first attack of the Indians in this war came at Swansea, June 24, 1675, when eight or nine white people were killed. Then on July 14, only a few miles from our territory, four or five persons in the field were killed by Nipmucks at Mendon, and "their leader was Matoonas, a grave and sober con- stable of Sachem John." The next year he and other Nipmuck chiefs begged for peace in a letter to the Gov- ernor. A proclamation of pardon was issued for all Indians who surrendered, and Sagamore John came to Boston for that purpose. His surrender was accepted and he came again with one hundred and sixty followers asking mercy, and "he brought down bound with Cords Old Matoonas and his son Nehemiah Prisoners. This Matoonas his eldest Son had been tryed at Boston and executed about 5 or 6 years ago, and his Head fastened to a Pole, at one End of the Gallows."
Matoonas had been accused before of saying that he would take vengeance on the English for his son's exe- cution, but had denied it and been discharged. "But after King Philip began his Murthers in Plymouth Colony, this Salvage first appeared an Enemy to us, and slew the two first men that were killed within the limits of our Colony, to wit at Mendham. He was by the Council the same day adjudged to be shot to Death, which was executed in Boston Common by three Indians; and his Head cut off and placed upon a Pole on the Gallows opposite to his Son's that was there formerly hanged."
Next to Mendon, Medfield on the other side of our territory was the settlement most exposed to attack, and here the Indians had a great success. The pastor Mr. Wilson wrote an urgent letter on the danger to Boston February 14, 1676, and one hundred soldiers came to join the seventy-five men there who had arms. But on
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KING PHILIP'S WAR
February 21 early in the morning a man found an Indian in his barn, and ran to the garrison house with his family, leaving his buildings in flames. Probably this early sur- prise of the red man prevented even greater destruction by them, but thirty-two houses and other buildings were burned and seventeen persons were killed, including a man nearly one hundred years old who was burned. It is supposed that the soldiers had been dismissed at day- light. The town cannon was fired as a signal to Dedham, and at the second shot the savages rushed across the bridge towards Medway and then set it afire. In view of the town they then roasted an ox. This paper they left at the end of the bridge: "Know by this paper that the Indians that thou hast provoked to wrath and anger will war these 21 years if you will. There are many Indians left. We come three hundred at this time. You must consider that the Indians loose nothing but their lives, you must loose your fair houses and cattle."
A partly educated Indian called James the Printer, who had been apprenticed at that trade, had run away and joined Philip's men, and this proclamation was sup- posed to be his work. This attack on Medfield is said to have been led by "One-eyed John." At Groton after- wards he boasted that he had burned Lancaster and Medfield, and would burn Chelmsford, Concord, Water- town, Cambridge, Roxbury and Boston. "What me will, me do." He was hung in Boston the next September. Soon after this attack a Wrentham man named Rocket, searching for a stray horse, discovered a trail of Indians moving westward. He followed them till sunset, and watched the company of forty-two men encamp for the night. They were on their way home after the burning of Medfield. He returned quickly to Wrentham, the women, invalids and children were gath-
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HISTORY OF BELLINGHAM
ered into the fortified houses, and a little company of thirteen men marched out in the darkness. Their leader was Capt. Robert Ware, whose wife's nephew was John Metcalf, the first of his name to settle at Cary- ville in 1738. At daybreak when the Indians arose from sleep near a precipitous rock nearly all at the same time, they received the simultaneous fire of twelve guns, and many of them were injured also by jumping from the rock; twenty or twenty-four were killed, and the Wrentham men all returned home safe. Mr. Rocket received a pension from the State for the rest of his life.
The Indians came near our town again later, but accomplished nothing. There were about twelve families living at Bogastow in Millis, who had no white neighbors west and northwest of them nearer than the Connecticut River, only Mendon on the southwest, and to the east the Charles River and its swamps. Here Jonathan Fairbanks and his neighbors had built a house sixty or seventy feet long of flat stones "laid in dry mortar," of two stories with a double row of portholes lined with white oak plank, "superior to any fortress on the frontier." The upper story was for women and children, and there was a separate room for the sick. This house became a refuge for two generations, and not a few children were born here. When Medfield was burned there were probably fifty-nine persons in this house. They could see the smoke and hear the cannon. A Bogastow man was killed then, and his brother was scalped, but he recovered. The victim's wife bore a daughter named Silence when the sad news came, and died in a few hours. This orphan later married John Holbrook, who was an infant in the stone house at the time.
The Indians came the next day as was expected, and burned the houses on their way, but they soon went off.
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KING PHILIP'S WAR
Three months later they came again, and rolled a cart with blazing flax down a slope towards the fort, in order to kindle the thatched roof. It struck against a rock and stopped, and the Indian who ran down to push it forward was quickly shot. Then they retreated. Two months later they came again, but the settlers promptly scattered them.
There was no more fighting in this vicinity, though there were alarms for several years. On one of these occasions when the neighbors had assembled in the stone house, a woman was left alone with her baby a mile and a half away at twilight, and she was afraid to make the journey. She arranged her house to look as if deserted, went to the cellar, shut the trap door, and sat on the steps with the baby in her arms all night. This boy afterwards married a woman who could remember at the age of ninety-six having fled in childhood for safety to the same old stone house.
King Philip succeeded in uniting almost every tribe of the red men from Maine to Connecticut, and they began the war along a line of almost two hundred miles within three weeks. It lasted more than a year. Its greatest single battle occurred in December, 1675, when a thousand men marched from Dedham to a swamp stockade of the Indians in Rhode Island and triumphed after three hours' work. A thousand Indians and sixty white men were killed that day.
Another engagement was fought by Dedham and Medfield men the next July, when thirty-six white men and nine friendly Indians overtook and killed or captured fifty of the enemy. At this time Sachem Pomham was killed. "This Pomham after he was wounded so as that he could not stand upon his legs, and was thought to have been dead, made a shift (as the Souldiers were
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HISTORY OF BELLINGHAM
pursuing others) to crawl a little out of the way, but was found again, and when an English man drew near to him, though he could not stand, he did (like a dying Beast) in rage & revenge get hold on that Souldier's head, and had liked to have killed him, had not another come in to his help, and rescued him out of the inraged dying hands of the bloody Barbarian, who had been a great promoter of the Narraganset War."
Finally in August, 1676, Captain Church, the best leader against the savages, found Philip on the edge of a swamp at midnight, and stationed a white man and an Indian in pairs all about the place. Philip came rushing out at dawn half dressed and was shot. He fell on his face in the muddy water with his gun under him, "and a doleful great naked dirty beast he looked like," says Church. The dead chief was beheaded and quartered according to the English law against treason, after this address by the Indian who did it: "You have been one very great man. You have made many a man afraid of you. But so big as you be, I will now chop you to pieces." His remarkable hand, "much scarred by the splitting of a Pistol in it formerly," was given to his executioner to exhibit, "and accordingly he got many a Penny by it." His head was exposed on a pole at Plymouth, on a day for public Thanksgiving, and remained there nearly twenty-five years. His wife and child, like some of the other captives, were sold for slaves in the Bermudas.
This was the end of the man who had struck such a terrific blow at the young settlements. Of five thou- sand men of military age in Massachusetts and Plymouth colonies one in ten was killed or captured, besides many women and children. Of eighty or ninety towns in eastern New England forty were badly burned, and a dozen
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KING PHILIP'S WAR
totally destroyed. More than half the towns in what is now Massachusetts suffered devastation. No help from England was asked or given, but the Connecticut colony sent a gift of a thousand bushels of corn. Over one hundred thousand pounds was spent on military forces, which was said to be more than the entire personal property of the inhabitants.
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CHAPTER III
SECRETARY RAWSON AND HIS FARM
EDWARD RAWSON, the first white owner of Caryville and North Bellingham the Puritan Secretary of the Colony of Massachusetts, whose portrait hangs in the Registry of Deeds in Boston, was born in England in 1615. He married Rachel Perne, granddaughter of a sister of Edmund Grindal, a famous Archbishop of Canterbury, who was too friendly to the Puritans to please Queen Elizabeth, so that she suspended him from the duties of his high office for several years. Edward Rawson's mother was the sister of John Wilson, the first minister of Boston.
The young couple came from England to Newbury, Mass., in 1637, and he was the second town clerk there for nine years. He became a selectman and a judge, and a member of the General Court at the age of twenty- three. After serving as clerk of the General Court, he became Secretary of the Colony in 1650, and held that high office till his death. Johnson's "Wonder Working Providence " says: "Mr. Edward Rawson, a young man yet employed in Commonwealth affairs a long time, being of ripe capacity, a good penman and eloquent inditer, hath been chosen Secretary of the Colony." His position now required him to live in Boston, and his house stood on Bromfield Street, which was called Raw- son's Lane till 1800. He sold house lots there bordering on the Common. His salary gradually rose from twenty
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Security
Grand Rangon 1615-1693
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SECRETARY RAWSON AND HIS FARM
pounds to eighty pounds, and his family increased to twelve children. He was one of the twenty-eight persons who left the First Church in 1660 to form the Old South Church. He served as a steward for the English Society for Propagating the Gospel especially among the Indians. One thing to be regretted in his long and honored life was his zeal in persecuting Quakers, for his name often appears as their accuser, but he may easily have thought this a part of his duty as Secretary, whatever his own inclination was. He published two little books, "Rev- olution in New England Justified," and "The General Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts."
Edward Rawson's eighth child was Rebecca, who lived only ten days, but the ninth was also named Rebecca, and her sad, true story is the main interest in the poet Whittier's romance, "Margaret Smith's Journal." She was born in 1656, and carefully educated. She was called "one of the most beautiful, polite and accom- plished young ladies of Boston, tall and graceful, with a pleasant wit." An authentic picture presents her to us in a very elaborate dress. A very pleasing young man appeared in town, who gave his name as Sir Thomas Hale, Jr., the nephew of the famous Chief Justice of England. He soon became her suitor, and they "were married in the presence of near forty witnesses" in 1679 and sailed away with many fine clothes to England. After landing there they went to the home of one of her relatives, and early the next morning he took the keys of their trunks, which were not yet brought from the vessel, and said that he would return for dinner. When the trunks came, they were empty, and she never saw him again. On inquiring at the inn it was found that his true name was Thomas Rumsey, and that he had gone back to his wife at Canterbury. In Boston it appeared
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HISTORY OF BELLINGHAM
later that he had borrowed two hundred and fifty pounds of John Hill, the Colony Treasurer. A witness in court there testified that the same man had engaged to work for him one year as a bookkeeper in 1679. He said his father had died leaving him four hundred pounds a year. Later he reported that he was a nobleman and that his mother, Lady Hale, sent him bills of exchange, and that his father's estate was so large that "he durst not report it, for he would not be believed." Such stories as these he made use of to "put a cheat on Mr. Edward Rawson, to accomplish his abominable villainy and deceive him of his daughter."
The deserted bride lived in England for thirteeen years, supporting herself and her daughter by painting on glass and similar arts, determined not to be dependent on her relatives there. "Finally, after countless requests, she consented to return to Boston for a visit." One of her relatives in England had children, and she left her daughter with that family. She sailed with an uncle of hers in a ship that he owned, and they arrived at Port Royal, Jamaica. While they were there, in 1692, a great earthquake swallowed the ship and part of the town. Her uncle happened to be ashore at the time, and he alone of all the ship's company was left to tell the tale.
The eleventh child of Secretary Rawson was Grindal, born in 1659, and graduated at Harvard College in 1678. On that occasion the President said, in Latin, speaking to the three leading men in the class: "The third, some- what high-sounding, is Grindal Rawson; sprung like- wise from a most illustrious stock; for his honored father holds a high place in the State, the very pious and orthodox John Wilson, a truly apostolic man, was his grandmother's brother, and the Right Reverend Edward Grindal,
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SECRETARY RAWSON AND HIS FARM
Archbishop of Canterbury, a most saintly man and in the Archbishopric little less than a Puritan, his great great grandmother's brother. And may God grant that in learning, holiness and excellence of character he may resemble both Wilson and Grindal." He studied theology with his brother-in-law, the minister at Weymouth, and preached his first sermon at Medfield with great success. After only two months' preaching in other places, he went to Mendon in 1680, where he was permanently settled in 1684. His salary was fifty-five pounds and one cord of wood for every forty-acre lot in town, and he was to keep the house and lot which he then occupied. He married his second cousin Susannah Wilson of Medfield, and they had twelve children. His wife wrote that he was invited to other places larger than this "of about 20 families recovering from a tedious war. But these few sheep in the wilderness lay much upon his heart." Five years before he came, the Indians had burned every building in town, and all the inhabitants had fled. He served there faithfully for over thirty-five years, till his death at sunset on a Lord's Day in 1715, and so for a gener- ation more of our first settlers knew him as their pastor than any other man.
He divided his large town into five districts and preached in one of them every Friday, and catechised the children there. At one time the Quakers and Independ- ents of Rhode Island threatened him seriously; it would be a great triumph for them to drive out the young min- ister, the son of the old Puritan secretary. They held opposition meetings at their end of the town for a year or two, and had two or three public debates with him, but finally "they grew weary" and left him and the town in peace.
He learned the language of the Indians in nine
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months "though 2 years were usually required," and "preached to their good understanding." He made it an article of his church covenant not to sell them rum, and the only man tried by him for breaking that covenant had committed that offence. There is an interesting printed report of an official visit to the Indians of Southern Massachusetts which took nearly all of June, 1698, by "Grindal Rawson and Samuel Danforth, Preachers to the Indians in their own tongue." The next year he printed a book of one hundred and sixty small pages in the English and Indian languages alternately, whose intro- duction says:
"It was an effect of this holy zeal that caused your- selves Honorable and Reverend to command me the Service of Translating The Confession of Faith made by the Churches in Boston in 1680 into the Indian Language, a work never yet attempted by any.
"From my chamber in Brantrey Nov 4 1699."
"There was never a Council in all the Neighboring Towns but he was at it. Also his voyage as Chaplain with the fleet to Canada and his Half Year in service at Nantucket (with Indians) will not be soon forgotten. His flock increased from 20 to over 100 families. He was a great peacemaker: in 35 years he had no considerable difference."
His wife wrote: "He was the greatest observer of the Lord's Day that I ever took notice of."
In 1709 he offered to board free a Latin schoolmaster for the town, so that fitting for college became a part of public education in this town perhaps earlier than anywhere else in Massachusetts.
In the same year he preached the Election Sermon before the Governor and the General Court at Boston, and it was printed. He mentioned sins of "Apostasy
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SECRETARY RAWSON AND HIS FARM
from the faith and practice of the fathers. Places live without the Settled Means of Grace. Profanity is com- mon. The Sabbath is Horribly Profaned and polluted. Ignorant prophane and prayerless families abound. The shameful and worse than Brutish sin of drunken- ness is seen. How little care there is, especially in country towns, for the liberal education of children! Many such towns study Tricks and Shifts to evade the School Laws. Behold, behold O New England, the Cause thy God hath to be angry with thee!"
His gravestone, still to be seen in Mendon, was erected by a vote of the town twenty-eight years after his death, so that his life and public service might not be forgotten.
Erintal Rawson 1659-1715
The large family of Edward Rawson was not sup- ported by his salary alone, but he was also granted land at various times by the General Court. One such tract lay unincorporated for a long time, and became almost as well known as the towns which surrounded it, under the name of Rawson's Farm.
It was confirmed to him by the General Court as follows in 1685:
"In answer to the humble motion & request of Edward Rawson who having purchased a small tract upland & meadow of Thomas Awassamoage son & heire of the late sagamore John Awassamoage by him reserved and is Invironed with the bounds of Deadham Meade- field Mendon & Sherborne as in sayd Awassamoages sale The Court grants and doe Grant & confirm the said
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HISTORY OF BELLINGHAM
tract of land to the said Mr. Edward Rawson his heirs Assigns allowing the Sale of the sayd Thomas Awassa- moag not interfering with any former grant."
He sold three hundred acres of it, and gave his oldest son William eight hundred acres during his lifetime. Though he owned over six thousand acres of land in all, he sold and distributed to his children so much that his estate was found insolvent at last. The first item in his inventory was: "740 acres of wast land lying between Medfield and Mendon £37" (about twenty-five cents an acre). This remainder was sold by his administrator, William Rawson, in 1701, to three men, William Hayward and Thomas Sanford of Swansea and Thomas Burch of Bristol, Hayward paying one-half and the others one-fourth each. They also bought the eight hundred acres of him the year before. The whole Farm was described in this deed as surveyed and laid out by Cap- tain Thomas Thurston of Medfield, "Bounded with Charles River Mendon & Sherborne and Touching in a point upon Medfield, which whole tract contains 1840 acres more or less." This territory included Caryville and North Bellingham and with a smaller area beside it on the west taken from Mendon, made about a third of the new town of Bellingham; the other two-thirds to the south was common land of the town of Dedham.
CHAPTER IV
THE TWO PIONEERS, BAPTIST AND QUAKER
THE men of Dedham went to their common land in both Wrentham and Bellingham in the summer to get hay from the meadows several years before King Philip's War, and Wrentham was incorporated as a town in 1673. After only two years that war came, and the settlers had to abandon their new homes and go back to Dedham as they had already done twice before, in fear of the Indians. In Bellingham no settlement had yet been made, as far as can now be known. There is only a vague tradition of a fort or house of refuge from Indians just north of the North Bellingham Cemetery. The overthrow of the Indians was so complete that the English soon recovered from their fears, though a few scattered red men remained, in some cases required to live with certain white as guardians. Though every house in Mendon was burned in December, 1675, and the people fled through Bellingham towards Boston, yet half of them returned, and six children were born there in the next two years.
The colonists of the other towns began to spread out again, and in 1691 the Dedham selectmen sent two men to examine the land that afterwards became Bell- ingham. They reported "Jan ye 4th 1692 ye Land neer Mendham (Blackstone was then a part of Mendon) and Wrentham is not worth ye laying out in a Devident" (for division). But on June 7, 1698, "the proprietors
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HISTORY OF BELLINGHAM
of the common or undivided lands of Dedham" met by appointment and were informed by another committee that they contained about twenty-one hundred acres, and they agreed to draw lots of about one hundred acres each. "Jacob Bartlat did move for liberty to take up his proportion in the place where he has Sat down & made Sum Improvement this was voted provided con- venient highways be reserved. Nicolas Cook likewise moved . . to take up about fourty acres of land in part of his proportion neer his own land this was voted." These two men may be called the pioneers of the town, and each has an interesting story.
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