USA > Massachusetts > Bristol County > Somerset > History of the town of Somerset Massachusetts : Shawomet purchase 1677, incorporated 1790 > Part 11
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The 1866 schedule of fares established rates of 30 cents
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HISTORY OF SOMERSET
for a one-horse rig; 40 cents for a two horse rig. Farm wagons, including an ox cart drawn by two oxen, were 40 cents; but 48 cents if drawn by two horses. A stagecoach drawn by two horses cost 45 cents, with 10 cents extra for each additional horse. A sleigh drawn by two horses cost as much as a stagecoach. A carriage with a dashboard cost ten cents more than one without.
A cow cost 12 cents, a sheep or a hog two cents. If there were more than ten, the rate per animal decreased. In all cases, the stipulated fare for human conveyance or animal was doubled between nine o'clock at night and an hour and a half after sunrise in the morning.
The ferry boat was called across the river at night by placing a lamp in the middle of the window of the ferry house on the side where a passenger waited. The boats were regularly berthed for the night on the Somerset side. There- fore a night boy was usually kept on duty at the Fall River ferry house. He was, under the system, paid by the two proprietors.
"Ferry house" was not, however, the name used by the proprietors for these waiting rooms, probably because there was a Slade dwelling at the Somerset end of the ferry which was regularly called so. The waiting rooms were called "shops." The shops were set back from the inner end of the docks and were exclusively waiting rooms, no tickets being sold there, since one of the many Slade-Brightman ways of avoiding overhead was never to have any tickets.
These shops were about eighteen feet square, roomy, cool in summer and well heated in winter by a large stove. They had plentiful seats and were never closed. These made them, winter and summer, a popular place for men to gather and talk politics and many can still recall such gatherings of their elders.
The ferry ran regularly from an hour and a half after sunrise to nine o'clock at night, seven days a week, the year round. Regularly, however, the captains would go home to supper and stay there until called by voice, or light, or by a fog bell on thick nights. For after-supper runs they would
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SLADE'S FERRY
seldom respond for a single foot passenger and would in any case delay as long as possible for a paying load to accumulate.
The two biggest business days of the year were regularly those of the circus and the Hornbine bake. But in its last twenty years the ferry did a large daily business beginning with Somerset gardeners on their way to the city to sell wholesale or peddle and continuing with the constantly in- creasing numbers who had business from Somerset and beyond with the thriving Fall River.
There are still those who can recall that it was a daily experience to wait in a line of fifty or more for accommoda- tions.
The time-honored right of Slade's Ferry as Somerset's leading ferry was never successfully menaced and only once seriously challenged. This was by a ferry company which sought to establish itself between Brayton's Point and Ferry Street in Fall River-being, in fact, the ferry which gave that street its name, rather than, as it generally supposed, the Providence, Warren and Fall River ferry which came afterwards.
This Brayton Point company bought a very fine boat which it named the Hope, the name being suggested by the Slade-Brightman's Faith, and strove hard with service and rates to rival Slade's. Faith prevailed, however, and per- haps public loyalty to the older institution, and the venture proved a serious loss. In a year or so the Hope was sold and the new ferry abandoned.
Three other ferries have been mentioned : the occasional sailboat from Steep Brook to Egypt Shore; the Chace sail ferry from Cusick's lane to Steep Brook; the Evans ferry from the Village to make connection with the "Old Road" line of the Fall River-Myricks railroad. There was inter- mittently a ferry from Somerset to the present location of the Fall River Country Club on the opposite shore. The Durfee, Varnum and Thurston shipyard located there after the War of 1812, gave this a temporary prosperity but it did not long remain a regular institution.
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The last surviving visual evidence of the Slade Ferry, other than the Ferry Lane which is now a Fall River Street, is the curving lane, no longer used but still marked by its old stone walls, which runs around the south side of the Dutchland Farms restaurant at the Somerset end of Bright- man Street Bridge. The course of this road, which led to the ferry dock, is obliterated by the state highway, but its terminus at the river side can still be traced on the slope just north of the bridge abutment.
Over this vestige of two centuries the original Slade cemetery enclosing the grave of William Slade, founder of ferry and town, keeps watch.
THE INDUSTRIAL ERA
T "HE thirty years following the Civil war saw a com- bination of industrial, maritime and commercial enter- prises that raised the town to new heights of activity and prosperity.
In 1866, the railroad drawbridge from Somerset to Fall River shore was completed and on November 24, the Boston and Newport railroad, as this part of the Old Colony system was first called, opened. The bridge was in its time the longest bridge in New England. The creosote tank in which its spiles were treated before being driven can still be seen in its original location, on the shore of Oakum Bay, the cove south of the railroad sta- tion.
The location of the railroad station was well chosen. It faced a railroad cut made through the sandy hill flank- ing the river, which was later levelled to accomodate the spur tracks of the railroad's great coalyard. The rail- road bought for its station, right-of-way, and sidetracks four acres of land from Captain John A. Burgess, and the Captain donated four acres additional; and the town accepted and laid out Old Colony Avenue.
In the year the railroad came, 1866, the Iron Works plant was destroyed by fire. Its owner, Job M. Leonard immediately rebuilt it on a larger scale, with modern equipment, and operated it until 1871 when he sold it to the Parker Mills of Wareham, who made Oliver W. Washburn their local manager and agent.
This first Mt. Hope Iron Works had been started, as noted, in 1853 as the Somerset Iron Works to make anchors and ship forgings, with William Sampson as agent and treasurer. The shipbuilding decline in Somerset and else- where had closed it, and in 1855 Leonard had bought and fitted it up for the making of nails and as a rolling mill. He brought with him labor from Taunton, Raynham,
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WIEW OF SOMER SET MASSACHUSETTS 1887.
SOMERSET CENTRE IN THE POTTERY DAYS
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THE INDUSTRIAL ERA
Bridgewater, Middleboro and other iron towns, together with special types of workers from as far away as New Jersey.
This importation of iron workers brought Somerset's first influx of Irish families.
First of these, whose families have now been in Som- erset upwards of a century were, according to present recollection :
Thomas Brennan, Patrick Costello, John Cusick, Patrick Driscol, John Hollihan, James Hinchey, Thomas Murray, Charles Riley, John Synan, Cornelius Sullivan, James McShane, William Smith, John Kilroy, Matthew Morgan, Michael and Patrick Flannagen, John and Tho- mas Marion, Martin Keon, Jesse Lewis, William Ryan.
James Tracey was early here, but he was on a farm, not in the Iron Works. Farm owners by this time were also the family of John Lynch, first Irish comer to the town, whose date of arrival appears to be fixed by his first job which was on the construction of the cellar of the Village Methodist Church, erected in 1841. Grave doubt was expressed by curbstone opinion as to the pro- priety of a pagan working on a Christian church and finally critics told the newcomer what they thought. John countered with vigorous debate and the next morning proved his christianity by bringing to work with him his Bible with his name stamped on it in gold.
Other known dates of arrivals are Thomas McGuire, 1869; Frank Corrigan, 1871; Alexander Walsh, 1872; John Waldron, before 1873; Thomas H. Walsh, 1875; and John Morrissey, 1876.
Brothers of John Lynch who early came here were James and Dennis. Dennis became the owner of farm land in Pottersville which later he sold as part of the site of the Montaup plant. His son James had meanwhile become an electric engineer in charge of plant installa- tion for the General Electric Company; and it was his curious fortune to be sent to Somerset by his company to install great modern electric machines on the farm where he grew up as a boy.
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Among other early comers whose descendants are part of the foundation of modern Somerset may be listed also, with such information as is available; John Burns; Philip, Daniel and James Cronan; John Driscol, Patrick Harrington, James Kennedy, Daniel Keefe, Patrick Lorri- gan, James McMahon, Andrew McGann, James McCauley ; John, Michael and Edward Moffitt; Daniel Murphy, John and Jerry Regan, and Patrick Scanlon.
Thomas Quillan, whose family came from Providence and who grew up here and became a construction engin- cer, came back to Somerset in the days of his success as engineer in charge of the construction of its two great bridges: the second Somerset railroad bridge, and the Brightman Street Bridge.
Daniel O'Neil, a veteran like the Brayton Point O'Neills, of the Civil War, was the last survivor of the ill-fated United States Frigate Cumberland, rammed and sunk off Newport News in March of 1862 by the Con- federate iron-clad Merrimack which shook the North with terror until Erickson's Monitor silenced her. The brave crew of the Cumberland, says history, worked their guns until, with a hole in her side "you could drive a horse and wagon through," she sank with a final roar. Daniel O'Neil was one of the few survivors rescued as they swam for safety.
At the time of his disposal of the Mt. Hope Iron Works it appeared to be Job M. Leonard's purpose to re- tire from business. But by 1874 he had changed his mind and erected another plant on the shore north of the first mill, on the approximate site of the Hood shipyard. Out of his previous experience he evolved a new and more efficient works to produce nails, tack plate, and a high quality of shovel plate for Ames' shovel works in North Easton. Somerset shovel plate built the Union Pacific Railroad. The capacity of the new mill was 4000 barrels of nails a week besides plate for shovels and spades.
The rolling mill for this second plant was located on the flat, filled area south of the now ruinous Nail Mill
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THE INDUSTRIAL ERA
and east of the dry-walled embankment topped by Main Street. Except for bedstones here and there and a quan- tity of brick fragments scattered about, no trace of this rolling mill now exists.
This is in part because it was demolished in 1881 when Leonard bought back the original Mt. Hope Works and became owner of both. The depression or "panic" of 1873 had, by 1878, gotten in its work on the Parker Mills and they had suspended. Leonard repurchased the old plant and joined the two under what was in reality the Mt. Hope Iron Works, although the south plant was - designated as the Old Colony Iron Works.
Locally, the south plant was from that time known as the Lower Works and the north plant as the Upper Works. It is the Upper Works to which old inhabitants refer as the Nail Work. The Nail Works cut small nails, the Lower Works large nails, with the rolling for both done at the Lower.
The Mt. Hope Iron Works employed at times as high as 500 men, and the Nail Works was employing some 150 when in 1905, a year after the death of his son, Henry B., who had actively assisted him in the management, Job M. Leonard died. Russell H. Leonard, son of Henry, elect- ed the law as his career, though destined to become the president of the great Pepperill Cotton Mills. Before the end of the year the Mt. Hope had closed.
Several programs and projects for reopening the two plants failed. Late in 1905, the Lower Works were pur- chased by the Union Horseshoe Company of Rhode Island, and machinery for making horseshoes installed. Disagree- ments were reported among the proprietors and the busi- ness never opened.
A second firm, believing that iron could be recovered profitably by new methods from the Mt. Hope's old slag heaps and mixed with new metal, started at the Upper Works in 1912 to dig into these heaps and manufacture window weights. The product proved unsatisfactory and the project was abandoned.
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The Nail Works were then taken over by a firm which planned a paper pulp mill, treating old paper to produce cardboard and the like. The mill today is filled with machinery bought and installed for this paper mill; but it was never operated.
There was talk of promoting a stamping plant to make bedsteads and other iron furniture. This did not materialize. The Nail Works remain idle. The lower, original plant is at the present time occupied by one of the town's active industries, the Parks Shellac Company which manufactures bleached shellac, the only plant of its kind in New England.
The Stove Foundry, started in 1854 as the Boston Stove Foundry, did not weather the hard times of the Civil War. Its financial difficulties discouraged the Boston owners and they sold the plant to Captain John H. Luther and William P. Hood, the firm's Boston representative.
William P. Hood had had early business training in Somerset as confidential clerk and business manager for James M. Hood, the shipbuilder. Although born in Prov- idence, he was of old Somerset stock, being the grandson, as was also James M. Hood, of Captain John Hood, com- mander of Somerset's contingent in the War of 1812. From the date of his first investment in the Stove Foun- dry his leadership in Somerset business, industrial and civic affairs grew steadily. Real estate was one of his interests and before his death he became Somerset's most extensive real estate owner and its largest individual tax- payer.
In his later years he resided in Fall River where he was associated with his son in the insurance business which is one of the interests of his grandson, Preston H. Hood. His public life, which was active, included the chairmanship of the Somerset Bcard of Selectmen for many years, and a term in the State Legislature. It was William P. Hood who developed the Hood Farm.
Shortly after Hood and Luther acquired the stove foundry, they sold it to a Boston syndicate for other
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THE INDUSTRIAL ERA
manufacturing purposes. The plans of this syndicate were not realized and Hood repurchased the plant and promoted the organization of the Somerset Co-operative Foundry Company in which many former employees of the plant joined with citizens of the town.
The officers of the Somerset Co-operative Foundry Company, who by no means constitute the entire number of its participating investors, were: William M. Bartlett, president; William Palmer Marble, treasurer; Edmund A. Davis, clerk; R. C. Woodward, foreman. The directors were: R. C. Woodward, Thomas Dudley Marble, D. A. Skinner, E. A. Davis, John O. Babbitt, Cornelius A. Davis, John H. Luther, William P. Hood, G. W. Nye and W. P. Marble.
The Co-operative Company continued in business until 1892 when William P. Hood purchased the property and organized in company with John D. Flint of Fall River and Frank S. Stevens of Swansea, the Somerset Stove Foundry Company, of which he was treasurer and business manager at the time of his death in 1906. The management was then taken over by his grandson Alfred W. Tallman whose father, William H. Tallman, had long been superintendent and who continued until the plant was sold during the World War to a Connecticut firm which revamped the plant but never operated it.
In 1872, the railroad opened its great Somerset coal docks which in a few years were handling 200,000 tons annually and constituted a conspicuous industry for the next twenty-eight years.
The Somerset docks were a transshipping plant to which coal from Pennsylvania was brought by vessels to be unloaded and put on the railroad for Taunton, Boston and other points north.
There were three docks, two west of the railroad bridge serving the railroad and one east of the bridge serving the Staples Coal Company of Taunton. The length and capacity of these wharves cannot be judged from the tide-worn remains of today. Those west of the bridge could accomodate four barges at a time and were
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frequently full. They were served by four derricks which brought the coal out of the vessel in containers shovelled full by workmen in the hold. The containers or buckets were dumped into coal cars run down on the docks. A fifth derrick served the Staples dock which accomodated two barges.
Two shifting engines were kept busy placing and hauling away the cars and two others were on hand to haul the two coal trains which pulled out each day. Trains and shifting kept four locomotives crews busy, with another crew at the roundhouse. Adding those employed in handling and unloading the vessels the docks altoget- her furnished work for about fifty men.
A considerable sandhill or bluffs lying east of the through tracks was cut down to make room for the round- house, which was at the southern extremity of the yard and for the spur tracks to accomodate empty cars and those filled and waiting to be made up into trains. Nine such side-tracks were required. All rails and ties of the coal yards have long since been taken up, as was the main track about 1937, but their location can still be traced.
Still evident also is the grading for the new level above the original railroad bed when the first drawbridge of 1866 was replaced by a new bridge, built in 1907 to 1909 at a higher level. The draw of this second bridge was operated by machinery. The first was worked by handpower.
The agents in charge of the docks for the railroads from 1872 until they closed in 1900 were James Hyde, William E. Thrasher, William H. Woodman and G. Wal- ter Simmons. In addition to the coal which was the dock's chief business, there were frequent cargoes of iron and moulding sand. The spur tracks of this yard were utilized, and their number somewhat increased, during the early years of the New England Oil Company's refining plant in Fall River, afterwards the Shell Oil Company, which used them as a storage yard for their tank cars.
No product of Somerset's industrial age carried the name of the town so far or so favorably as the "Brilliant"
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THE INDUSTRIAL ERA
metal polish manufactured in a shop under the old Music Hall on Main Street by John 1. Pierce, Frank M. Trafton, Elmer Gardner and Henry B. Leonard.
Flat, round tin containers of this polish, a waxy paste of pale yellow color, announced on the outside of the cover: "Brilliant Paste Metal Polish. Also put up in Liquid Form. Warranted Not to Contain Acid. Registered. The Most Wonderful Brilliant Metal Polish in the World. Apply with cotton waste or Canton flannel, rub firmly, then wipe dry with a clean cloth. F. M. Trafton, Boston, Mass., U. S. A." Inside the cover the same inscription was repeated with the difference that the company's home ad- dress is given: H. B. Leonard & Co., Somerset, Mass., U. S. A."
According to the recollection cf many users of this polish, the glowing description on the box was well de- served, and Brilliant had a large sale.
Slightly north of this modest plant, at this period, Benjamin Reed and William Thrasher operated the Steam Mill, which was the incongruous name for a small grist mill. The Steam Mill, the Somerset Postoffice building, several dwellings and everything else on the east side cf Main Street north to the stove foundry were destroyed by the conflagration long referred to as "The Fire of 1874." A second fire at the same section of Main Street in 1803 destroyed Music Hall, and a third in 1939 destroyed the DeCambra barn.
The pottery industry which gave its name to Potters- ville, and which was at its height in this industrial era, is treated in the following chapter. There was, towards the end of the period, another Pottersville industry, the Hathaway Casket Factory.
This factory, located on the east side of Riverside Avenue where that street makes a causeway across the head of the Cove, was begun by Ira A. Hathaway in 1892, when Hathaway succeeded Joseph Shove, undertaker, who had an establishment on Prospect Street near Buffinton where he built his own caskets. Feeling ill one day when he was at work on a casket Joseph Shove said, "If I
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HISTORY OF SOMERSET
don't finish this, have Ira Hathaway do it. He is a good cabinet maker." The words were prophetic. Hathaway finished the casket and continued in the work for some ten years, erecting the casket shop recently demolished.
Ira A. Hathaway was expert in the making of violins of all sizes including bass viols, and in one instance, a violin small enough for a four-year-old granddaughter. Some of his finest instruments were made from the wood of trees grown in his own yard on Riverside Avenue. He was also a skillful builder of boats, using the lower floor of his shop, which was at the water's edge, for boat stor- age.
In Pottersville also, from the Civil War on, was the shoe shop on Read Street operated by Levi Slade who, it was said, made shoes that "never wore out." The Slade shop is now part of the house owned by Peleg Almy, num- bered 1893 Read Street.
The Town of Somerset at this period was selling, as it had since early after its corporation, two fishing privi- leges in its tidal waters; one from Read's Cove south and the other from the same line north. These privileges in the 1880's took from one to two million pounds of fishing annually. With the oyster beds which had produced the esteemed Somerset oyster since Revolutionary times, the town's fishing industry was worth from $5000 to $6000 a year.
Finally in this wide variety of productivity was straw- berry growing. The years 1880 to 1900, before refrigera- tor cars had flooded northern markets with early, and ultimately year-round, berries, were New England's straw- berry-raising era. Somerset's part in this rose to great figures. Agents at the Somerset railroad station often in the strawberry season had to handle twenty thousand crates a day. This was in additon to wagon shipments, north, west and south, where Somerset strawberries were asked for by name. Avery P. Slade, writer of the Somerset Sketches, and, among other services to the town, one of the founders of the Bristol County Agricultural Society, introduced the commercial growing of strawberries into Somerset.
THE POTTERIES
POTTERY was made in Somerset for just over two cen-
turies, beginning with a family pottery at the Village making articles for household use as early as 1705, and continuing until the years of the World War when lack of a type of water filter which had formerly come from Germany was supplied by Charles E. Hathaway, at the town's last pottery near the present Luther Avenue.
Who set up and operated the 1705 pottery is not known; but long tradition says it was the Chace family, which brought the craft of potterymaking from England, and which a century later became the founders of the great Somerset Pottery Company.
From supplying its owners with needed earthenware utensils the first pottery went on to supply the neighbor- hood, and by the time of the Revolution had a still wider market established. The first vessel of the future Somer- set captured by the British was the sloop Warren, owned by Clark Purington of Swansea-Somerset and George Shove and William Boyce of Dighton, and loaded with crockery for Newport.
The British captured the Warren just outside of New- port, used it for two months as a despatch boat, and then stripped it of its gear, beached it, and, by an act of un- usual consideration, notified the owners where they could find it. On going to inspect it they found that its load of crockery was still in the hold, but damaged by break- age to the extent of eighteen pounds, ten shillings. This amount, on the ground that Shove and Purington were Quakers and therefore non-combatants, they tried to col- lect from the British "Commissioners appointed by Act . of Parliament for enquiring into the losses and services of American Loyalists." Possibly the Commissioners had heard of the third owner, or they may have heard of
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:
TAUNTON
RIVER
TOWN HALL
SOMERSET ASTIPAS
CHRISTIAN CHƯA
VIEW OF
OTTERSVILLE,
MASSACHUSETTS 1807
THE IRON WORKS - THE STOVE WORKS - AND THE COAL DOCKS
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THE POTTERIES
Clark Purington's enlistment in the Revolutionary forces. The claim was never paid.
The first authoritative date and location of a pottery in Pottersville appear in a deed dated in 1815 which places one owned by Clark Chace at the site ultimately occupied by the Somerset Pottery. In 1840, this Clark Chace's three sons, Clark, Leonard and Benjamin G., joined in build- ing there the plant which gave Pottersville its name, im- ported glazers from England and advanced their product from the original earthenware to the hard and shiny- surfaced stoneware.
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