USA > Massachusetts > Norfolk County > Brookline > History of the town of Brookline, Massachusetts > Part 11
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In that locality, a Dr. George Griggs built some time before the Revolution 'the long house,' sometimes called the 'Tontine.' It is uncertain whether he was the George Griggs who made an agreement in 1721 with William Heath and Joseph Craft to build a dam near Muddy River bridge. But it was his daugh- ter, Mary, who married Captain Wyman against her parents' wishes, and found that her parents were right. Her daughter became the wife of Dr. Downer, and the estate thus passed into other hands.
It was another line of the same name whose progenitor, Thomas Griggs, came to Roxbury before 1639, and whose son, Joseph, also a native of England, married Mary, the daughter of Griffin Craft, in 1653. Joseph lived in the part of the village which then belonged to Roxbury, and by his second wife, Hannah Davis, had five children. His sons were Benjamin, Joseph, and Ichabod.
Of Ichabod, at least, it is known that he had nine children including Thomas, Samuel, and Nathaniel, each the head of a family. An experience of Nathaniel's in 1799, when he was a young man of twenty-one, gives testimony to the neighborli- ness of the community and to the regard in which he was held. This is related in a letter dated in March of that year:
One day the week before last Mr. Nat Griggs went to Boston in the morning with his team and before he got back his House, furniture and Cloaths except what he had on his back were consumed by fire. His house was all finished but one Room. The carpenter had just begun to finish that and went over to Mr. Moses Griggs' to get some tools. It is said he was not gone more than ten minutes and when he came back the House was all in flames, - he left a window open and there was a little fire on the Hearth to smoke Bacon, and it's supposed the wind blew a train of shavings
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into the fire which caught the house. The Housekeeper was spinning in the kitchen but did not perceive the fire till the flames burst in upon her & she jumpt out at a window and lost all her cloaths but what she had on. But Mrs. Moses Griggs and Mrs. Tom Gardner have been around the town to collect Cloaths for her so I believe her loss is in part made up if not all .... When Mr. Griggs got home and found his House and all that was in it burnt up (except a few things in the cellar were saved) he was ready to sink. One hundred dollars of money was consumed some silver, some Bank Bills, the Silver was melted into small pieces like shot. But one of his Brothers and Ebby Davis went round the next morning with a subscription paper & people were very liberal, the more so because he was a very industrious young man. Judge Dana, of Cambridge, gave him eighty dollars, Major Gardner forty, Mr. Mason twenty and every body according to their ability. Some gave him Timber, some boards car- ried to the spot, some bricks, some lime, and in short he is to have a new house raised this week and expects to be mar- ried before long to Nancy Aspinwall. He was finishing his house for her when it was burnt.
A numerous and long-lived family, Miss Woods comments that 'in its various branches [it] has been always of high stand- ing in the town, having hardly ever been without one or more members holding some office of trust and honor either in the town or church.' The town records are full of references to George and Thomas Griggs, those names being particularly favored by the family; and ten of its members are specifically mentioned, most of them repeatedly, in the course of the cen- tury.
THE WHITE FAMILY
John White was one of the largest landowners who obtained his property by purchase. He is supposed to have come from England about 1638, and settled in Watertown, where his three sons were born. In 1650 he moved to Muddy River hamlet and bought a part, at least, of the Leverett grant, to which he added, over a period of thirty years, neighboring properties which at length built up his own estate to nearly three hundred acres.
Descendants of John White, Jr., his eldest son, moved away
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from the village, but representatives of the lines of Joseph and Benjamin White were still to be found in twentieth-century Brookline. According to Charles F. White, in a paper prepared for the Brookline Historical Society in 1903, the general dis- tinction might be made that Joseph's branch of the family lived in the southern and western parts of the town, around Warren and Heath Streets, while Benjamin's branch lived along Washington Street, either at the village or near the southwest slope of Corey Hill.
John White, Sr., had not been long in Muddy River before he was given public responsibility. In 1654 he was chosen to lay out the highway from Roxbury to Cambridge, and the next year he was constable. He was repeatedly a surveyor of high- ways and perambulator of town boundaries, a man respected in the community despite some difficulties, elsewhere related, which arose when he 'stopt up the highway.'
Joseph White, a signer of the petition for Muddy River's independence of Boston, was the father of three daughters and five sons of whom the youngest, Samuel, was born in 1683. Like his grandfather, Samuel played a part in public affairs as a Justice of the Peace and a member of the General Court. He married, in 1712, Anne Drew, daughter of the local sawmill proprietor. Of their five children, only the two daughters lived to maturity. Anne married Henry Sewall, and Susannah, the elder daughter, became the wife of Deacon Ebenezer Craft. Susannah's daughter, also named Susannah, married John Heath of Roxbury in 1758, and they later came to live in the home which Samuel Sewall, son of Henry and Anne, had in- herited from his grandfather, Samuel White. Here then is a picture of the early intermarriage of the first families of the community, curiously paradoxical in that the Heaths were patriots as ardent as Samuel Sewall was a Tory.
Benjamin White, like his brother a signer of the famous peti- tion, was the joint heir with John and Joseph of an interestingly restricted property. Their father, at his death in 1691, made several specific bequests, and added, to his three sons,
a certain parcel of land containing 32 acres; acres [Ackers, the former owner] his lot; excepting four or five acres thereof, which is elsewhere given to my son Joseph; to be by them
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planted with an orchard to be improved for their eldest sons, to bring them up in good learning and upon failure of sons to their eldest daughters, to be reserved against their mar- riage .... And that what expense they shall be at in planting an orchard, or otherwise about the said land, shall be paid out of the income.
And the said land shall always be kept an orchard, by my sons or their heirs, which they shall keep clean from bushes. Further, I order that the aforesaid land shall be forthwith planted by my sons and their heirs, kept well pruned, and all dead trees supplied by living; a nursery being kept therein for that end.
I further will that those who are brought up to learning be kept at the college seven years.
There have been tales of tuition paid at Harvard in cows or other 'country pay' of the early days, but this example of an orchard intended to maintain the eldest sons of three branches of a family, during seven years of study, must stand unique. It seems in fact, to have gone far in educating the testator's grandsons before it was all transferred to Benjamin White, Jr., so-called, the son of Joseph.
Benjamin, Sr., son of the original John White, had five daughters and a son, Edward, who seems to have inherited something of his grandfather's desire for land. He added, in small lots, some seventy-five acres to the substantial estate his father left him. His inheritance included also a 'Black Servant,' for the possession of slaves was not exceptional in Brookline early in the eighteenth century. In fact Edward White bought a well-remembered servant in 1735, some eight- een years after his father's death. The purchase, which might as well have concerned a horse, was evidenced by a bill of sale in these terms:
Know all men by these presents that I Licestor Gros- venor Esqr of Pomfrit in the County of Windham in the Colony of Connecticutt in New England have bargained Sold and Delivered unto Captain Edward White of Brooklyn in the County of Suffolk in the province of the Massachu- setts Bay in New England a negroe man Servant named Cuffe of about twenty Seven or twenty Eight years of Age for the Sum of Eightey pounds of money to me in hand well and
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truly paid by the said Edward White and I the Said Licester Grosvenor Do hereby avouch the said negroe Servant to be my own proper Estate and that I have good right and full power to Sell and Deliver as aforesaid & Do hereby pro- mise that I will Secure and Defend the Said Edward White from any person or persons that Shall Claim any just right thereunto as witness my hand and seal this thirtieth Day of August in the year of our Lord one thousand Seven hundred and thirty five.
When Edward White died in 1769 he left to his daughters, among other property, a Negro girl. By the terms of his will, his mulatto servant, Cæsar, was to wait upon Mrs. White as long as she lived. Then Cæsar and Primus, whose sale was forbidden, were to live with whichever of Edward White's sons each of them preferred.
That the family had military inclinations is shown by the prevalence of titles among them. Benjamin White, Sr., had been known as sergeant and ensign; Edward became captain of the Brookline foot company, and major in Colonel William Dudley's regiment, under appointment by Governor Shirley; and Edward's son, Benjamin, was a captain. Captain Benja- min White became a selectman and assessor in 1762, and served for ten years; he also represented the town in the General Court for eleven years, and participated in the committee work pre- liminary to the outbreak of the Revolution. His son, Oliver Whyte, became Brookline's first postmaster.
Captain Benjamin White died in 1790, five years after his first wife, who had been Elizabeth Aspinwall. Here again, two of the founding families had been linked, and their mingled blood was to distinguish the generations that followed, for more than a century.
THE WINCHESTER FAMILY
There was an ample representation of Winchesters in eight- eenth-century Brookline. The family appears to have had a dual origin in the community, for Alexander Winchester re- ceived twenty acres in the 'great allotments' of 1638, and John Winchester, born in England in 1611, and an emigrant to Bos- ton in 1635, settled first at Hingham, and in 1655 bought a
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farm of one hundred and twenty acres in Muddy River. It does not appear which of these was the Winchester chosen constable in 1659, but there seems to be no further record of Alexander.
John married Hannah Searles, who came from a place near his old home in England, and their children were John, Mary, Jonathan, and Josiah. He served as surveyor, constable, and tithingman; and his son John, born probably at Hingham in 1644, held a variety of offices in Muddy River, and was Brook- line's first representative in the General Court.
The next generation brought Henry and Elhanan Winches- ter. Elhanan and his son, also Elhanan, were much concerned with religious affairs, and the younger man developed from a precocious child into an able preacher who successively em- braced a number of sects and served churches in Connecticut, South Carolina, Philadelphia, and England.
The Winchesters of Brookline were a numerous family, with homes in various parts of the town. At one time they owned most of Corey Hill, and within the period of the eighteenth century, nearly thirty of them are mentioned once or many times in the records of the town.
It has been possible to catch glimpses of home life and social customs in connection with some of the families mentioned in this chapter. The Winchesters provide another item, in this ad- vertisement respecting an indentured servant, which appeared in The Boston News-Letter for September 5-12, 1720:
Ran-away the 7th Currant, from his Master Stephen Win- chester of Brookline, an Irish Man Servant, Named Edward Coffee, about Twenty years of Age, middle Stature, full fac'd, down Look, flat Nose, a scar in his Forehead above his Right Eye; he had on and carried with him a light col- oured broad cloth Coat, a cinamon coloured Chamblet Coat, an Osenbrigs Shirt, and a patch'd Holland Shirt, Cin- amon coloured Breeches, with silk puffs tied at the Knees with Ferret Ribbon, gray yarn Stockings, and one pair of woosted, new round to'd Shoes with wooden Heels, a stuff Gown, a Castor and an old felt Hat, a Wig tied with black Ribbon, a black leather Belt; he carried also away with him a chestnut Sorrel Hourse, fourteen hands high, paces well, a round skirted Saddle, with blue cloth Housing. Whoever
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shall take up the said Runaway and Horse, or either of them & Convey to the above said Stephen Winchester at Brookline, or to the Prison keeper in Boston, so as his Master may have both or either again, shall have Forty Shillings Reward, and necessary Charges paid.
It is evident that Stephen Winchester was not paying for this at a modern want-ad rate per word. It is also apparent, one suspects, that the horse is a matter of greater concern than the missing servant, though of course the indentured workers were virtually in the position of slaves, until their time was served. The master owned his servant's time, and Stephen Winchester was only following the custom of the times when he advertised to procure the man's arrest, whether the horse had been stolen or not.
To list the Winchester participation in town affairs would re- quire an extensive appendix in tabular form. At meeting after meeting, two or three men of that name are elected to perform various duties, from those of surveyor and assessor, to those of constable and selectman, to say nothing of their service on in- numerable committees. One can scarcely help wondering if the town could have been run, without the Winchesters.
THE BOYLSTON FAMILY
Certainly no family of the eighteenth century brought more of distinction to the town of Brookline than did the Boylstons. Dr. Thomas Boylston, first of the name to settle there, was born in Watertown in 1644, the son of Thomas Boylston who came from England in 1635. The doctor participated in the Nar- ragansett Indian war, and in 1665 married Mary Gardner of Brookline, in which town he settled. His son Peter was a signer of the petition for the setting up of Brookline as a separate town.
Of Peter's twelve children several made important contribu- tions to America. Susanna became the wife of John Adams of Braintree, and the mother of John Adams, second president of the United States. She was a woman distinguished for her intellectual accomplishments rather than her devotion to house- hold duties, in a time when education among women was rare
,
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and their place was considered to be thoroughly and emphati- cally in the home.
Peter's second child was Zabdiel, born in 1680, and himself destined to win fame in the field of medicine. Smallpox had been an unhampered scourge at intervals in the New World since its appearance in the West Indies in 1607. An epidemic had been responsible for wholesale destruction among the Massachusetts Indians shortly before the arrival of the first New England settlers, who were fortunate in finding considerable areas of cleared land with no one to till them.
In 1721 the disease was widespread in Boston. That same year Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, sometime resident in Tur- key, introduced into England the practice of inoculation which she had learned among Turkish women. Papers written on the subject by a Dr. Timonious came to the attention of Cotton Mather some five years earlier, and it was in his mind that if an epidemic threatened Boston, this new treatment ought to be tried.
Mather consequently approached Dr. William Douglas and Dr. Del Hond, then leading physicians in Boston, and urged them to use inoculation, which was said to assure recovery of nearly all patients treated, while under the system of allowing the disease to run its course, about a sixth of its victims usually died. Possibly resenting the incursion of a minister into the field of medicine, perhaps merely prejudiced against innova- tions, these doctors refused to experiment.
Then Dr. Mather went to Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, who lis- tened with interest and determined to try out the treatment. On June 27, 1721, he inoculated himself and two slaves. When the experiment proved successful, he began employing it in his practice.
It was a procedure which required the greatest courage and conviction. The Boston medical men denounced it as danger- ous, Benjamin Franklin led the newspapers in asserting that when death resulted after inoculation it was nothing less than murder, and ministers began to preach its violation of divine law. Although Dr. Robey of Cambridge and Dr. Thompson of Roxbury followed Zabdiel Boylston's lead, his situation was fraught with serious danger.
HOUSE ON BOYLSTON STREET OPPOSITE THE OLD RESERVOIR, BUILT BY DR. ZABDIEL BOYLSTON
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A populace aroused by misapprehension of the truth con- cerning the doctor's work, threatened his life, so that he was compelled to attend his patients secretly, by night, and in dis- guise. Men sought him, they said, to hang him; and an attempt was made to bomb his house, where he lived for two weeks con- cealed in a secret room.
Nor was the campaign of violence directed against the doctor alone. Cotton Mather had stood staunchly by him, had done much to quiet other ministers in their bitter sermons, and had encouraged the inoculation of his own nephew, ten-year-old Nathaniel Walter. The Boston News-Letter for November 13-20, 1721, reports 'a late Awful and Tremendous Occurrence fallen out in Boston,' where young Walter was lodging at Mather's house
under the Small Pox, received and managed in the way of Inoculation. Towards Three of the Clock in the Night, as it grew towards the Morning of Tuesday the Fourteenth of this Instant November, some unknown Hands threw a Fired Grenado into the Chamber of the Sick Gentleman: The weight whereof alone, if it had fallen upon the Head of the Patient (which it seemed aimed at) would have been enough to have done part of the business designed. But the Granado was charged with Combustible matter, and in such a manner, that upon its going off, it must probably have killed the Persons in the Room, and would have cer- tainly fired the Chamber & soon have laid the House in Ashes; which has appear'd Incontestible to them that have since Examined it. But the Merciful Providence of GOD so ordered it, that the Granado passing thro. the Window, had by the Iron in the middle of the Casement, such a Turn given to it, that in falling on the Floor, the Fired Wild-Fire in the Fuse was violently shaken out some Distance from the Shell, and burnt out upon the Floor, without firing the Granado. When the Granado was taken up, there was found a Paper so tied with a Thread about the Fuse, that it might outlive the breaking of the Shell; wherein were these words: 'Cotton Mather I was once of your meeting; But the Cursed Lye you told of ... you know who; made me leave you, you Dog, and Damn you. I will enoculate you with this, with a Pox to you.' This is the Sum of the matter, without any Remarks upon it.
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With all this opposition, Dr. Boylston inoculated 286 persons in the course of the year, of whom only six died, while of 5759 smallpox victims who had the usual treatment, 844 succumbed. The mortality was approximately 2.1 per cent under inocula- tion, and 14.6 per cent under conventional care.
Even such a demonstration, however, did not at once ter- minate the opposition, but Dr. Boylston's accounts of his work brought him an invitation from Sir Hans Sloane, physician to George I, to describe his methods to London doctors. He had actually preceded the English medical men in making practical use of the Turkish discovery, and in recognition of his achieve- ment was made a Fellow of the Royal Society. After a year and a half, he returned to his home in Brookline, and on retiring from the practice of medicine devoted himself to farm life and the breeding of fine animals, especially horses, which he trained and rode himself even when he was well past eighty. Before his death at the age of eighty-seven, inoculation for smallpox was in general use.
Thomas Boylston, a brother of Zabdiel, had a son named Thomas who became a wealthy London merchant and a bene- factor of Boston, and a daughter whose son became Admiral Sir Benjamin Hallowell. Another of her sons retained his mother's name from choice, and as Ward Nicholas Boylston gained a fortune in London, before returning to make his home in Roxbury and later in Princeton. He was a generous donor to Harvard College and the Boylston Medical Society and Library.
There was another Thomas Boylston, son of another of Zabdiel's brothers, who endowed a professorship at Harvard, and sought unsuccessfully to provide for an eventual gift of the old Brookline homestead to the First Church there.
Dudley Boylston, still another of Peter's dozen children, was born about 1688, and became the husband of Elizabeth Gard- ner of Brookline. His home came into the hands of his son Joshua, who remained a bachelor until he was nearly 55. He was a member of the Board of Selectmen in 1783, and attended their annual dinner at the Punch Bowl Tavern. Eleazer Baker was landlord, and had the assistance of his sister Abigail, an alert, competent woman of forty or thereabouts.
Miss Harriet F. Woods relates that Mr. Boylston was asked
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why he had never married, and replied that he could find no one who would have him. Then Abigail Baker spoke up and said she would have him, and on her assurance that she meant it, he told Squire Sharp to publish the bans the next Sunday morning. The squire passed the matter off as a joke, was severely criticized by bachelor Boylston, and attended then to this duty. The wedding was duly celebrated at seven o'clock of a Monday morning in Parson Jackson's 'best fore-room,' after some slight delay due to the groom's failure to obtain the necessary certificate, and the union appears to have been a successful one.
THE CLARK FAMILY
James Clark is described as 'of Muddy River' in 1669, al- though his settling there is not accounted for. His son, Samuel Clark, born in 1654, was a wheelwright, and as a young man a participant, with his unfortunate neighbor, Robert Sharp, in the Canadian expedition of 1690.
Samuel's son, Samuel, was a carpenter, builder of Brookline's first meeting-house, and a deacon in the church. The elder Samuel was a surveyor of highways in 1696, and the younger was chosen clerk of the market in 1760, marking the beginning of modest public services.
A third Samuel died before he was forty, but left a son of that name who remained a resident of Brookline, although his mother seems to have married and removed to the town of Ward. This fourth Samuel Clark became a deacon in the church, and the father of Deacon Joshua, Caleb, and Samuel Clark, the fifth. When he died in 1814, his Brookline home passed to Caleb Clark who, as field driver and surveyor of highways, carried on some of the work of his ancestors.
This, then, was one of the sturdy, necessary families of the century, perhaps less in the public eye than some of their neighbors, but immensely useful to the community.
THE GODDARD FAMILY
The Goddards were another family who maintained a long tradition of public service in Brookline. Their most conspicuous part, however, was played in the Revolutionary War.
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Genealogical research has traced the name back to the time of the Norman Conquest. The first Goddard in America was William, a London grocer, who came to Boston in 1665, and soon afterward settled with his wife and three sons in Water- town, where he served as a teacher. It was his second son, Joseph, born in London in 1655, who married Deborah Tread- way, and in 1680 made his home in Brookline, where he bought the property of William Marean, son of Dorman Marean, who was one of the original grantees of Muddy River.
Joseph Goddard had a son John, and a grandson of the same name who was born in 1730, and rendered extraordinary serv- ices to the patriot cause in 1775 and afterward. For a long time he appeared to be a sort of perennial moderator of the town meeting. This man's eldest son, also named John, was born in 1756, and became a doctor, but on account of the state of his health determined to go into business as an apothecary. This notably un-military pursuit was the means of involving him in a long train of troubled adventure. After the Revolution he became a citizen of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he attained such standing that he was elected Governor of the State, and one of its senators at Washington, but he declined both offices. Two of his sons became Swedenborgian ministers, and a grandson named Warren Goddard followed that calling in Brookline.
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