USA > Massachusetts > Bristol County > Somerset > History of the town of Somerset Massachusetts : Shawomet purchase 1677, incorporated 1790 > Part 6
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April of their last year's possession of the Island, 1779, witnessed the greatest war tragedy that befell within the territory of the future Somerset. This was the capture of Obadiah Slade, Theophilus Luther, and four others whose names were nowhere recorded, and their transfer to the British ship Jersey, where they ultimately died.
Obadiah Slade lived on the Point. His labors on behalf of the Revolution had been bold and unresting. For four years he had spent his energies securing the contribution of supplies and money to the cause, encouraging enlistments, and aiding soldiers and their families. British attention had been often centered on his activities. Alarmed friends had repeatedly warned him of the danger. But he persisted.
In the middle of an unusually cold April night a de- tachment of British attacked his house, turned his family
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THE REVOLUTION
out of doors without giving them, time to dress, set the. house afire and marched Slade off half clad. The others taken at the same time were apparently an incident of the raid. None of them ever came back from the misery of the Jersey. How long they lived to bear it is not known. A tablet in Swansea. town hall commemorates them, together with Joseph Brown, captured from an American privateer.
Joseph Brown, resident in the Purchase close to its western line, was the son of William Jr., and the grandson of the John Brown who gave the land in 1719 for the church of Christ, Swansea. He was only twenty when he died in the Jersey. He would, if he had lived, have been the uncle of Marcus A. Brown who was the first selectman of Somerset to be elected from the south end of the town.
Directly following the ravaging of the Obadiah Slade home it was voted by the town to set up a guard on each of the necks "for the safety of the good people of the town." This night watch patrolled all shores for several months beginning in May, was for a time relieved, and again re- newed later in the year. The pay of the guards was "Four dollars per night, or if they choose two dollars with rations and Continental wages."
The valuation of rations at two dollars per night em- phasizes one of the sharpest problems of the Revolution. By the beginning of the next year, 1780, the town was pay- ing three hundred pounds, Continental money, as a bonus to all who would enlist for six months ; later in the year four hundred pounds. The bounty was next raised to seven hundred pounds, then to a thousand pounds. In dollars this sounded like , five thousand. But the next step upwards was higher. The bounty was made one hundred twenty silver dollars.
Whether in Continental paper or silver the financial drain on the town was severe. At one meeting there was voted, "Eleven thousand seven hundred and sixty dollars for the purchase of horses to send to Taunton by order of the General Court." In the same year there was voted "four thousand pounds to buy blankets, according to order of the Court, and to pay necessary expenses."
The years 1780 and 1781 saw men from the town still
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HISTORY OF SOMERSET
being enlisted under quotas for the Continental army on all its fronts from the Hudson to Yorktown, until in all 441 men accredited to Swansea had been enlisted. The final levy on Massachusetts was for two thousand men. Swansea responded with enlistments that came within two of filling its quota, a much better average than that of many com- munities.
Seven years after the Revolution, when the first United States census was taken, thirty-six veterans of the Revolu- tion were heads of families residing in the new town of Somerset. The list of these is given here. The complete roster of Swansea enlistments, in which other Somerset names and ancestors can doubtless be traced, will be found at the end of the book.
Anthony, David
Hoar, Gideon
Bourn, Francis
Luther, Caleb
Bowers, Jonathan
Luther, David
Bowers, Capt. Philip
Mason, Job
Brayton, Israel
Manchester, Stephen
Brayton, John
Marvel, Benjamin
Brown, John
Marvel, Thomas
Chace, Silas
Morse, William
Chace, Silas Jr.
Peirce, Preserved
Chace, Ebenezer
Peirce, David
Chace, Allen
Peirce, Mial
Cummings, Noble
Reed, Nathan
Cummings, John
Sherman, Capt. Peleg
Davis, James
Sherman, Gideon
Eddy, Lieut. Obadiah
Slade, Capt. Philip
Gardner, John
Slade, Ensign, Jonathan
Gibbs, Benjamin
Wilbore, William
Goss, Thomas
Noble Cummings lived to be the last original resident of the town of Somerset to draw a Revolutionary pension.
RECONSTRUCTION
A LTHOUGH the preliminary treaty ending the Revolution
was signed on the last day of November, 1782, Wash- ington chose the following April 19, 1783, the anniversary of Concord and Lexington, to proclaim the war at an end and discharge the army.
Beside him as he did so stood a young aid, called the handsomest officer in the Continental forces, Hodijah Bay- lies of Dighton, who would soon open the first United States customs office of the district including Somerset.
It was an omen. Somerset's route to post war recovery was to build vessels and start shipping. At the village Joseph and Gideon Robinson, who had been Benjamin Bowers' fore- men, took the lead and once more there were ships on the ways at the old Bowers yard. Plane and saw, hammer and caulker's mallet were simultaneously resounding on all the shore. The eye could hardly rest on a stretch of it without seeing a vessel under construction. In the ten years to 1793 fifteen vessels were built on Shawomet's shores; five more in the single year of 1794. Similar figures applied to other towns of Mt. Hope waters. By 1812, there were fully 150 vessels owned and operated from this bay.
Both cargoes and markets were ready for them as fast as they came off the ways, new or repaired. In the years of the Revolution the British had destroyed or captured more than 1700 vessels, one sixth of them from Massachusetts, and forced many more to interne. The whole Atlantic coast, particularly the South, the West Indies, Bermuda, was in need of the food and commodities New England could fur- nish. Even Nantucket had been so short of staples as to verge on starvation, and so lacking in firewood as to suffer bitterly.
The things these regions needed in food stuffs waited on the shores of the Old Colony. With the disbanding of
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HISTORY OF SOMERSET
MRS. JERATHMEL BOWERS From The Portrait by Copley
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RECONSTRUCTION
the army a big market was gone. Industries seeking to re- cover had to find an outlet. Raw materials for these indus- tries were needed ; and molasses, sugar, tobacco, rum, fruits, rice, tea, coffee demanded.
Among those from the area of the soon-to-be Somerset investing in ships in the first years were John Shaw, William Wilbur, Samuel Read, Antipas Chace, Francis Boar, Jr., Preserved Pierce, Job Chace, Lloyd Bowers, William Law- ton, Henry Gibbs, Samuel Gibbs; Obadiah, Ebenezer and David Peirce; Jesse, Isaac, Collins, Isaiah and Philip Chace ; Obadiah Austin, Barzillai Walker, Daniel Eddy, James Chace, Francis Brown, Henry and John Pettis, Benjamin Davis Jr., Joseph Moore, David Anthony, Stephen and Samuel Anthony; Preserved, James and Joseph Sherman.
Many names would be added to this list in the succeed- ing years. And much of the capital which would later trans- fer to Fall River's cotton mills was earned in Somerset commerce.
Outstanding among those prospering in the new com- merce was Jerathmel Bowers, none of whose brothers would have him for partner and whose father had refused to aid him with home or capital. Jerathmel had prospered in spite of them. The war, says one reminiscence, had ruined every business man in the town except Jerathmel. To him it had brought prosperity. He was now the town's "rich man."
Tradition credits Jerathmel Bowers as being the first to realize the possibilities of shipping livestock to the West Indies. In it he prospered beyond all others, and soon his ships were reaching out to Europe and China as part of that great fleet which raised New England to commercial leadership of the world. At his death in 1794 Jerathmel Bowers would leave a fortune of $600,000, a great sum for that period.
Under the impetus of this revival of commerce Shaw- omet Lands rose safely through the new United States' con- struction period. Unemployment and need there was aplenty among tradesmen, sailors long without ships to sail in, and farmers who had sacrificed homes and farms through mort-
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HISTORY OF SOMERSET
gages made to carry them while they served the Colonies or for other reasons tried to bridge the war depression. Records of the town of Swansea in the first years after the war are replete with expenditures for the care of these.
But the town did generously and its people refused al- most entirely to be drawn into Shay's rebellion of 1786 which was taken up so strongly by other communities, one neigh- boring town furnishing several companies of volunteers for that strange but perhaps understandable outbreak.
Soon the houses of Shawomet from Point to Cove were being repaired and painted, new homes, some of them among the finest the town has had, were being built. "The harbor was a favorite stopping place for merchant vessels, many of them coming in for repairs and supplies. Somerset be- came a chief distribution point in New England for foreign goods. Trees were planted, streets and townways improved; labor was in great demand, men coming from points far and near in search of work. Prosperity presided."
By 1789 many in this prospering sector felt that its area was so singularly identical with the boundaries of the original Shawomet Purchase that its destiny as a town separate from Swansea was self-evident. The idea was not new. Petitions for separation from Swansea had been introduced in town meeting as early as 1720 and voted down; and again with the same result in 1724. Now, in 1789, separation was attempted again. By a close vote the motion was defeated in town meeting, but the hand- writing was on the wall.
Jerathmel Bowers had been representative from Swan- sea to the General Court in 1781 and 1783. In the latter year, on written complaint of the selectmen of Rehoboth and certain Swansea citizens he had been tried by Bristol County Court of Sessions, found guilty of being a British sympathizer and ordered to resign from the Legislature. The verdict also prohibited him from holding any future office under the Commonwealth. Tradition imputes revenge as Jerathmel's motive in working for the separation of Shawomet Lands from Swansea. Such may be the case.
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RECONSTRUCTION
History likes a simple explanation. But there had to be at least a majority of Shawomet Lands' sober and influential men in favor of such action to make it effective. At a dis- tanceof a century anda half the separation looks logical. The joining of Shawomet Lands with Swansea had never be- come organic. No more convincing evidence of this can be found than the almost complete failure of original families in either part of the early town to transfer residence across the boundary lines of the original grants.
A difference of interest between two areas, one pre- dominantly agricultural the other predominantly and flourishingly commercial, lay beneath the separation which was decreed by the General Court of Massachusetts on February 20, 1790 in the following resolution :
"An act for incorporating that Part of the Town of Swanzey known by the name of Shewamet, in the County of Bristol, into a Separate Town by the Name of Somerset.
"Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representa- tives in General Court assembled, and by the authority of the same. That the lands hereafter described and bounded as follows, viz; Northerly partly on Dighton and partly on the ancient Swanzey line; Easterly, on Taunton Great River so-called; Southerly, on Lee's River, so-called; Westerly, partly on Lee's river and partly on the ancient line of Swanzey, including all the lands formerly known as Shewa- met Purchase, however otherwise the same may be bound- ed, with all the inhabitants thereof, be and hereby are in- corporated into a town by the name of Somerset, and the said Town is hereby invested with all the powers, privileges and immunities to which towns in this Commonwealth are or may be entitled agreeable to the Constitution and Laws of this Commonwealth.
"And be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, that the inhabitants of the said Town of Somerset shall pay all the arrears of taxes which have been assessed upon them, together with their proportion of Debts now due from the said Town of Swanzey, and so in proportion shall receive all dues and town stock whatsoever from the said Town of Swanzey, and that all persons who were born on the said
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HISTORY OF SOMERSET
Shewamet Purchase who may hereafter become chargeable for support and have not gained a legal settlement in any town shall be the proper poor and charge of the said Town of Somerset, and that in the apportionment of all charges between said Towns, together with the poor now at the charge of Swanzey, the same shall be provided according to their proportion in the present valuation; and be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, that the in- habitants of the town of Somerset shall forever hereafter support and keep in repair their proportional part of a bridge known by the name of Miles' Bridge in the propor- tion that the Town of Swanzey and the Town of Somerset now pay on the present valuation.
"And be it further enacted by the authority afore said, that Samuel Tobey, Esq., be and he is hereby Empowered to issue his warrant Directed to some principal inhabitant re- quiring him to warn and give notice to the inhabitants of the said Town of Somerset to assemble and meet at some suitable place in the said Town, to choose all such town officers as towns are required to choose at their annual town-meetings in the months of March or April annually."
In accordance with this act Samuel Toby, who was justice of the peace, notified Preserved Peirce and other inhabitants to meet and elect town officers.
The meeting was held "at the schoolhouse near Capt. Robert Gibbs," on December 15, 1790, and the following of- ficers were chosen :
Moderator, Jerathmel Bowers; Town Clerk, Jonathan Bowers; Selectmen, Assessors and Overseers of the Poor, Daniel Wilbur, David Luther, and Theophilus Shove; Treasurer, Preserved Peirce; Constables, Jonathan and Aaron Baker; Fence Viewers, Captain Job Slead and Allen Chase; Field Drivers, Philip Bowers and Daniel Chase, Jr .; Hog Reaves, Peleg and Nathan Chase; Surveyor of Timber and Plank, Thomas Marbel; Cutter of Staves, Ezra Chase.
However deepseated and basic the causes that had played into Jerathmel Bowers' hands the first town meet- ing was his day. On May 15, three months after the town's incorporation, he had been elected its first representative
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RECONSTRUCTION
at the General Court. Now he was elected moderator of the new town. And it was he that had named it.
Somerset, the new town's name, had been chosen as a compliment to Jerathmel's wife, who had been Mary Sher- burne and who had lived in Boston on Somerset Square. He had, it is told, wished to name the town Sherburne in her honor ; but there was already a town of that name, the town now called Nantucket on the Island of Nantucket. Hence the second choice.
A charming lady, of fine family, the inheritor of twenty thousand pounds in her own right, dispensing hospitality gracefully and liberally at the great house (the later Peter- son House) which Jerathmel had built on Main Street, she was the popular "first lady" of the community. There is no recorded dissent at naming the town in her honor.
The portrait of Mary Sherburne Bowers reproduced in this history is from the famous "Portrait of Mrs. Jerathmel Bowers" by Copley in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, called the most beautiful portrait in the museum. Painted probably in 1763 or 1874, the portrait was acquired by the Museum in 1915 from Mrs. Mary Isabel Jencks, widow of Mrs. Bowers' great-great-grandson.
"She wears a white dress, the neck of which is trimmed with gold braid. Her sacque is purple, her dark hair orna- mented with flowers and pearls. The rose at her bosom is pink," says a volume on the work of John Singleton Copley.
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HISTORY OF SOMERSET
Ci
55
brick
wall
Sunken Garden
House
Main Street
JERATHMEL BOWERS' HOUSE WITH JOHN'S GARDEN
THE NEW TOWN
THE new town of Somerset in its year of incorporation had a population of 1125 divided among 188 families, count- ing bound and indentured servants as part of the family they served. Of this population, 1055 were white; 70 were bond servants, mostly negroes and Indians, serving in 18 dif- ferent families. There were no slaves.
The town had been set off in time to be recognized as a unit in the first Federal census, which began in 1790 ,and which listed and published the head of every family in the United States, together with the number of males and fe- males in each, the number under 16 and over, and the number of servants and slaves.
The list of families, and their size in the year of Somer- set's birth, will complete this chapter. Examination shows that in this list 15 family names comprise 781 persons, or about 75 per cent of the town's residents. The Chace family alone totaled at this time 180 individuals ; Slades were next with 63. Descendants bearing the name of eleven of the original purchasers still lived here.
Comparison of the 1790 census figures shows that of each hundred living in Swansea at the date of separation Somerset had taken away 43. At a Somerset town meeting on May 7, 1791, it was decided that the new town ought to pay thirty-six pounds on each hundred of the pre-separation Swansea debt; and the same proportion on the poor charges. In view of the figures of Somerset's population it looks at this distance as if somebody in the new town engineered a good deal.
Early town meetings, which as a rule were held monthly throughout the year, are given over in the main to financial problems of this sort, and it was not until April 6, 1795, that a Somerset meeting got around to voting a town house "25 feet by 30 feet for the use of the Town of Somerset."
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HISTORY OF SOMERSET
This first town house was built on what was destined to remain the town lot for all future years, being located near Centre Street, north of the present Town Offices.
It would appear that this site was suggested by its near- ness to the tentative "center" established by the Proprietors' schoolhouse "near Captain Gibbs" where the first town meeting, December 15, 1790, was convened. This, as noted, was just south of the present Pottersville School.
The next year, 1796, the town built its first schoolhouse under the town charter.
This was located on Palmer Street, near the north-west corner of the present Palmer Street Cemetery. In subsequent years the building was several times moved to points more central for the growing school population; and finally to the south end of the Village where, after many years of service, it was bought and made into a cottage by Captain David P. Davis.
By 1796, Nathaniel Lyons, a mechanic, had begun church meetings at his own home which resulted in 1803 in the organization of the second church in the area, the First Baptist Church.
A little later in its first services, but a year earlier in its organization, was the Methodist Episcopal Church, the first in South Somerset. With this group, preaching was begun in 1800 by invited ministers. The church was organized in 1802 and built in 1804, the same year as the First Baptists' building.
These religious and educational activities were the results of the continuance of that wave of growth and pros- perity which had launched the new town. It was still expanding on its second commercial era, building ships, manning them, and freighting them near and far.
In 1790, there was a launching of historical significance. This was a fine ship of 270 tons ; which Jared Chace had been building when the new town received its papers. In honor of the event Jared named his sloop the Somerset.
While the Somerset was the first vessel to be launched from the town of Somerset, the honor of the first registra- tion from the town goes to the Hibernia, owned by John
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THE NEW TOWN
Shaw and Francis Brown. Second was the sloop Swallow, owned by Antipas Chace, Francis Boar, Jr., Peleg Mason of Swansea, and Samuel Reed who was also her master. The Swallow was later bought and sailed by Henry Gibbs.
The schooner Harmony was registered in 1791 by Preserved Peirce; the Parthenia by John and Joseph Gardner, with Edward Mason her master, the same year ; and in the next year the sloop Hannah with Lloyd Bowers and William Lawton owners, Lawton master; while Sheffel Weaver was sailing the sloop Union for Samuel Gibbs and the Peirce family.
These were all Somerset-built vessels. So also were the registrations the next year of the large schooner Ranger, Isaac Chase master; the sloop Dolphin, Abiathar Austin owner and master; the sloop Delight, Philip Gardner master; the schooner Adventure, Joseph Northam master ; and the sloop Sally, Francis Brown master.
Before the war of 1812 had closed down on these shores, 48 vessels had been built in the new Somerset to sail under Somerset registry, numbers not traceable had been built and sold to other ports, and twelve built elsewhere had been bought by Somerset owners and added to the Somerset fleet. This gave Somerset by the end of 1812 sixty vessels registered from the town. The figure is no measure of those that were going and coming between Somerset and other ports.
While this commercial greatness was still climbing, Somerset in 1804 received a shock in the failure of the Bowers business. Jerathmel had died in 1796, leaving his daughters well provided for and his only son, John, the bulk of a $600,000 fortune. By extravangances so pic- turesque that they have become a part of the town's tradition John had managed, spite of the efforts of David Anthony, his manager, and Billings Coggeshall, his chief accountant, to deplete both income and capital until, in a bare eight years, he brought the firm to bankruptcy.
For the moment, the failure, which was large, caused some local financial distress, the sale and transfer of several vessels and a consequent halt in the employment of many
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HISTORY OF SOMERSET
on land and at sea. Yet on the whole the town hardly paused in the onward march which had given it the strength and ambition to withdraw from under the paternal roof of Swansea and set out for itself.
Prosperity and work to do were virtually universal. Money was being made by nearly everybody from ownership of vessels, or employment aboard them, or by participation in the trade which their cargoes represented. Some of these cargoes were made up of Somerset products such as lumber in various forms, farm produce, and an occasional load of pottery. But the overland wagons were on the road again, taking goods unloaded at local wharves northward and northwestward to inland centers and even to Boston, and returning with cargoes of New England manufactures for southern and West India ports.
Not all Somerset vessels regularly made Somerset port. An owner himself, or his master, took a vessel out in the spring with what load he could get, or in ballast, to Provi- dence, Boston, Philadelphia, or lesser northern ports and began the season's business of freighting from port to port as fortune or skill directed, not coming home until as late in the fall as he dared to challenge ice and winter storms.
Or he might not come home at all but winter in some southern port doing what business he could from there. This would not average much since the majority of the New England fleet would also be wintering south. Darien, Georgia, was the favorite winter port for vessels from Mt. Hope waters since they could always find there the familiar craft and faces of their home neighborhood. For many years it was said that if during the winter you wanted news of Assonet, Freetown, Dighton or Somerset you would do best to write to Georgia for it.
The social life of Somerset in these new years reached its height for all time, if reminiscences can be believed. Recorded details are fragmentary. John Bowers may have led the pace with a vast fortune slipping through his fingers and a rich and beautiful wife from Newport. Two uncles had married into the great land-owning Tabor family of Old Dartmouth; two sisters had married well socially in
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THE NEW TOWN
Providence and Boston and another in the Village to Francis Borland. The great house on Main Street was the scene of extravagant hospitality but Bowers', Brayton's, Slade's Eddy's, Walker's, and the town's other well-to-do families had extensively intermarried in this and previous generations and their homes in all sections of the towns, many of them the finest in the town's history, were open to a notable social life.
It was at this time that John Bowers' garden, the most elaborate that Somerset has ever possessed, was built. Chroniclers of the beautiful gardens which were charact- eristic of early New England consider it notable. There is no detailed description of its wonders. The plan reproduced herewith by Luther Gardner, Somerset artist, is by courtesy of the Fall River Historical Society from a drawing in its possession.
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