USA > Massachusetts > Bristol County > Somerset > History of the town of Somerset Massachusetts : Shawomet purchase 1677, incorporated 1790 > Part 9
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In the closing year of Somerset's clipper era two brigs were being built by the firm of Chace Smith & Co. at Bowers Shore, which for their speed were counted among the windjammers of the day. These were the Ocean Wave, 289 tons; and the Rolling Wave, 297 tons. Both vessels had a long list of owners, the Ocean Wave being financed by thirty-nine Fall River business men and several from else- where; and the Rolling Wave by much the same group. William H. Shaw was master of the Ocean Wave and Seth Cole of the Rolling Wave. The vessels were built for the tea and other oriental trade.
The timber used in the ships of this time was mostly purchased in Somerset, Swansea and Rehoboth; some of it in Dighton. At busy times ten two-horse loads a day were required and seldom less than two. A ropewalk along Main Street and the Somerset Iron Works for making anchors were added to the town's industry by the demands of the
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yards. Much skilled labor was brought in, but Somerset was a shipbuilding and sea-going town and furnished most of what was needed. It is probable that half the male pop- ulation at this time found occupation either in building ves- sels large and small, or sailing them.
Many houses in the town date from this era; and it is said that all houses of this and earlier periods can be identi- fied by the fact that their front doors face the river.
Socially the period was notable. The great Jerathmel Bowers mansion was now the Somerset House, operated by Captain Howard Peterson, and was full winter and summer. Summer brought many well-to-do families from New York and even Boston and Providence to stay here where great captains, the national heroes of the day, could be met.
Among those who had been attracted by the life and beauty of the town was Captain John A. Burgess, who early in the period sailed into the harbor, liked it, and bought the Lloyd Bowers, formerly the Henry Bowers, house and gave it the name it still bears. His investment in the place included several of its smaller craft which he owned in part with local men or with Elisha, himself a captain. Captain John also bought a large farm running west from the water- front along the south side of North Street.
The California rush which had brought Somerset so much industry temporarily emptied it of adventurous young men. Two large Somerset contingents left in '49 and '50 joining with New Bedford gold seekers in chartering the ships Magnolia and Mallory. A few of these remained in California to settle down, among them Joseph Brown's son Benjamin. Franklin Simmons, Patrick Synan, Horace Slade, Edward J. Slade and John Hathaway were other local Forty- Niners; and Anthony S. Hathaway went directly from Somerset to the rich Sutter's Mill district. Most of these later returned to active part in Somerset life. Joseph Gibbs did not make a fortune in gold but in California as in Somerset he was a Gibbs and had soon established Gibbs' Ferry at San Francisco which he ran for some time before coming home.
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CLIPPER SHIPS II
The Somerset of this period was a port of commerce. In the background of the great clipper ships there was always the fleet of little vessels; and while the great ships were building, people of the present who know the story from their fathers insist that the shore from Village to Point never failed to have small vessels under construction all along its length.
It was these little ships, not the great industry, which spread the unquestionable average prosperity of the town in those days. A memorandum of the division of a year's net profit in operating the little 58-ton sloop Avon in the year 1827-1828 between Somerset and Albany shows these figures : Henry Gibbs, 5-8 $1877.03; Wheaton Luther 2-8 $740.66; Robert Gibbs, 1-8 $216.33. Total profit for the year $3,003.25.
With the late 1850's the registrations of big vessels and small drop off almost mysteriously. After the Rolling Wave in 1855 to 1860 there are but two local additions of large Somerset vessels. One of them, more properly a Fall River boat, is the schooner Iram Smith, 249 tons, with John McGiven master. And the other is the David Crocket, of the clipper class, built in Mystic and John A. Burgess master. In 1860, there is but one new registration, Benjamin Gibbs' 164-ton schooner Flight; and no other until Job M. Leonard registers the Brig Cordova, Captain Richard Hawes, for the Iron Works company, in 1862.
No new clippers were launched in America after 1857. Four new ships of clipper form may be credited to other ports in the next two years, but they lacked the lofty spars, immense yards and speedy hulls of the true clipper. Grand ships would be built again after the Civil War, and great captains would sail them; but shippers and owners, and insurance companies, saw to it that they were of more conservative type.
The mast-wrecking, hull-straining, man-killing pace of the old champions had proved their undoing. Many of them, like the glorious Sovereign of the Seas, sailed by George Hubbard Gardner of Gardner's Neck, lay piled on the rocks
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of lee shores dared once too aften; others were sold abroad to be re-rigged more conservatively. The Flying Cloud had been laid up two years. Other great beauties waited long for cargoes. When they got them they still sailed like race- horses. But the last great windjamming, record-making voyages were finished by 1859. The clipper days were over : in Somerset and everywhere.
Captain Hood finished his public career as Minister to the Kingdom of Siam to which he was appointed by President Franklin Pierce. He was the first foreign representative who refused to kneel before the King of that country, explaining to him that "Americans don't kneel to anybody." James Madison Hood was born in 1815 the son of John Hood and the descendant of several generations of Somerset shipmasters.
A singular souvenir of the fire which destroyed the Hood plant still remains. Two linden trees on Main Street, which in 1854 were young trees recently planted, were scorched on their east side by the flames of the fire,, but not destroyed. The folding over of the bark to cover the wounds thus made is still to be seen on both trees; and has been watched through the years by one curious in such matters who knew the original cause.
PROGRESS ASHORE
THE years 1815 to 1860 were as full of event and progress on land as they were at sea, with hardly any type of growth or enterprise lacking.
The Fall River cotton mills began in 1812, with Somerset capital prominent in their building. David Anthony, son of the David who had been receiver of John Bowers' estate, followed his investments in these to become the rising city's first bank president, at twenty-six a mill treasurer and ultimately president of the Fall River Gas Company. Year by year increasing amounts of money made in Somerset commerce went to build the fast multiplying mills, with Somerset's Slade and Brayton families ultimately becoming dominating factors in Fall River industrial and financial circles.
The mills returned the favor by furnishing for a time a new industry for Somerset. Until the spinning frame was developed, all yarn used in cotton weaving was made by hand. Cotton was brought to Somerset and all surrounding towns for the women to spin, and many a well-to-do home was sufficiently New England to be willing to add to its income in this way.
In 1827, Somerset became ambitious for its schools, and at a town meeting especially called for the purpose, re-divided the town into six districts and appropriated the large sum of about $1800 for school maintenance. In 1834, it enacted an impressive piece of pioneering by doing away with the perni- cious system of independent committees for each district and appointed a town "Prudential School Committee." This was half a century ahead of the State law. The 1834 Prudential Committee was Lemuel Chace, George B. Hood, Isaac Peirce, William Chace, 2nd., Samuel Gibbs and Jeremiah W. Anthony.
In 1831, the town petitioned the State Legislature to
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NOTABLE SOMERSET CAPTAINS OF FOUR ERAS
1
CAPT. WILLIAM BROWN
CAPT. JOHN A. BURGESS
CAPT. DANIEL BRAYTON EDDY
CAPT. SURBINAS P. MARBLE
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promote a railroad line connecting Boston with New York with the passengers transferring to boats at Somerset. The movement was launched at a town meeting on June 27 and Wheaton Luther was appointed to go before the legisla- ture with "a plan of Mt. Hope Bay and Taunton River," to show that Somerset was the logical rail and boat terminus for such a line.
This was fifteen years before the Bay State Steamboat Company, precursor of the Fall River Line, was initiated and its Boston-Fall River-New York service established.
The bridge and causeway across Broad Cove were authorized the next year, 1832, with the town agreeing to pay half the maintenance and repairs. This road and bridge were promoted by Captain William Cobb, of Dighton, who in 1866 built the Somerset railroad bridge.
This was the year of the plague. Cholera, brought on ships from the Orient, struck first at New York and spread rapidly. On July 3, 1832, a special town meeting appointed a committee "to guard the town against the distemper." Similar committee were appointed everywhere. Fall River raised a barrier across South Main Street at Tiverton and allowed no one who was not going immediately through the city to enter. Ropes and a guard were set up across Ferry Lane and only those Somerset persons whose health could be vouched for were allowed to pass. The discrimina- tion in favor of Somerset was due to the fact that Somerset farms and market gardens largely fed Fall River in those days.
In the midst of the alarm a shipload of well-to-do New York families fleeing the cholera arrived at Fall River. Newport had already refused them admission. Fall River turned them away. In despair they headed across the bay to Somerset. Somerset's committee on health seem to have found no objection to their landing. The refugees were taken in by families who welcomed the financial income, and they remained until winter had freed New York of the plague. Fall River had numerous casse of cholera and some twenty deaths. Not a case of it appeared in Somerset.
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The enterprise of young Joseph G. Marble attracted attention the next year, 1833, when he launched his Charles- ton Packet to serve two stores he had set up, one in Somerset and one in Charleston, South Carolina. The profit of carry- ing New England manufactures to a store in the South and bringing back southern commodities to sell in Somerset was obvious. Captain Marble combined general freighting and passenger carrying in his packets, of which he soon had two; and grew to be the town's wealthiest merchant, one of its most influential citizens-and a confirmed bachelor.
The building known to recent generations as the Deardon Block was Joseph G. Marble's store. William Deardon began as clerk in the Marble store, married a sister of Joseph and Surbinas, and when Joseph died, in 1885, succeeded to the business. He put in the store front and raised the building to three stories, the upper two being tenements.
What might be named the Great Oyster War arose the next year. This resulted from a program of the selectmen to control the oyster business of the town. It was an im- portant matter. Somerset oysters were excellent and had a good market in cities as far away as New York. A warrant for a special meeting called for April 30, 1834, is for the purpose of protesting "the unlawful acts of the selectmen" in: 1. taxing five cents a bushel on oysters; 2. giving an exclusive privilege for taking oysters; 3. charging for permits to transport oysters out of town. These acts, it was charged, had no foundation in law. The resulting meeting reached a compromise allowing residents to take oysters from beds within a specified distance of shore.
In 1835, another captain opened a grocery store in the Village, and operated it until his return to coastal trade, ten years later with the same conspicuous success that he did everything else in a long and varied life. This was Captain Nathan Davis, 2nd., better known to his times and the generation since as Deacon Davis.
Son of Captain Jonathan Davis of Freetown, Nathan sailed with his father in the coasting trade at the age .. of
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eleven, and at seventeen was himself commanding the sloop Mary. Before he was twenty, he had joined with Joseph Simmons in building the sloop Ranger of which he became master; and shortly afterwards built his sloop Temperance, famous because he had it christened with water instead of wine. It is said that liquor of any kind was never drunk aboard the Temperance; and it is certain that in later years each of his five seafaring sons captained her in succession for unfailing profitable years.
The sons were the famous quintet of captains : Nathan S. and Elijah (Danger Davis) of the Fall River Line; Amos, lost at sea, and Joseph F. and Cornelius A. builders and masters of great sailing vessels in the 1870's and 1880's.
Nathan Davis' popular title of Deacon Davis came from the fact that he was fifty-two years a deacon of the First Baptist Church of Somerset, and devoted his life zealously to living in accordance with that office. He gave much time to working and preaching among the Indians of Gay Head and Cuttyhunk and was greatly esteemed by them. Prosper- ing in everything he undertook, Deacon Davis became, before he died in 1886, one of the wealthiest and most respected men of the town.
Mills in Fall River continued to multiply. In 1835, the American Print Works began operation. Fall River's population in 1830 had been 4159. In 1840, it was 6738. In 1850 it reached 12,500. Somerset-born Lloyd Earl moved across the river and joined with Rehoboth's Danforth Horton in building, before his career was ended, twenty mills, the Granite Block, since burned, the City Hall whose walls are the walls of the present building, the waterworks, the brick First Baptist Church, and many fine homes.
Most of the Somerset promoters of Fall River retained their land; their homes, at least as summer residences; and their interest in the affairs of the town. Some families prominent in the new city's business went there to live; and some who found employment in the mills. Somerset's loss of population, however, was not significant and has long since been repaid by families moving from Fall River into Somerset in its later residential periods.
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In 1838, Somerset made a second constructive move on behalf of its schools. On December 5, a town meeting voted that non-resident landowners should be taxed along with residents for the support of the schools. The number of school families in 1827 had been 205. By 1844, it had grown to 238; by 1852, to 277. Taxes in these years were not col- lected, but paid voluntarily to the town treasurer, with four percent discount if paid in sixty days after assessment. Beginning in 1840, the discount for many years was six per cent.
The opening of the Old Colony Railroad branch from Myricks to Fall River, in 1845, made a great change in the travel habits of Somerset. A railroad connection now lay just across the river, with trains stopping at "Somerset Junction" to leave and take on passengers by a ferry from the Village. In the Civil War period, the Village in conse- quence of this connection became a considerable army depot.
Steamboats by this time were mingling commonly with the sails on the Bay. The Bordens' Fall River-Provi- dence line of 1828 was followed in 1845 by the steam propel- ler Eudora running regularly to New York with William Brown of the Egypt Browns as captain. In 1846, the Bay State Steamboat Company, with the steamers Bay State and Massachusetts, was operating, and William Brown now captain of the Bay State. The Empire State, 1848; and the State of Maine, 1850, followed, with the Metropolis in 1854.
In 1853, Somerset had a steamboat line of its own, with the steam propeller Albany running between Somerset and Albany, under Surbinas Marble, who was the company's organizer. The Albany made its first trip on July 15 of that year. The Fall River News of the next day thus noticed the event : "The steam propeller Albany, 230 tons burthen, has been purchased by certain parties in Fall River, Newport, New York and Albany, and is designed to run between Fall River and Albany as a freight vessel. She will touch at Oliver Chace's wharf in Tiverton, at Newport and New York. S. P. Marble is captain of the Albany, and N. B. Borden
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& Co. are her agents in Fall River. The Albany started on her first trip from this port yesterday."
The Albany's business proved so good that she made her trips the following year with barges in tow. Captain Surbinas already owned a fleet of three sailing vessels: the Chief, the Susan and Mary and the Black Hawk, in the coastal trade. These vessels he sold later, during the Civil War, to the government, operating one of them through the war.
The year of Surbinas' steamer line saw the establish- ment of Somerset's first industry other than pottery and shipbuilding. This was the Somerset Iron Works for the manufacture of anchors and other large forgings at the loca- tion of the later "lower works" of the Mt. Hope Iron Com- pany ; the approximate site of Jonathan Bowers' shipyard.
This Anchor Works, as sometimes called, was managed for the first two years by William Sampson; and then, in 1885, was reorganized as the Mt. Hope Iron Works under the management of Job M. Leonard whose family, with the Russell's, had been making iron for four generations at Raynham.
Job M. Leonard, born in Raynham in 1824, was the descendant of both the Henry Leonard and the Ralph Russell who in 1652 established at Raynham the first iron-works on this continent. Choosing Raynham because the meadows abounded in bog iron and ample woods were granted them for cutting wood for charcoal, this firm had early achieved a reputation which it kept throughout the Colonial and national period, as is testified to by the fact that it was chosen to make the anchors and other ironwork for the frigate Constitution, "Old Ironsides." Job M. was descended from Russell Leonard, of the second generation of the Raynham partners.
Not originally destined by his family for the iron-mak- ing industry, he went to school in Taunton, worked on the farm and at sixteen, entered business for himself. At twenty- six he organized the East Bridgewater Iron Works, and at the age of thirty he sold out his interests there and the next year bought and reorganized the Somerset Iron Works,
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making his wife's father, Albert Field, president. In the period after the Civil War his two companies, the Mt. Hope Iron Works and the Nail Works, as it was commonly called, were the largest factor in Somerset's industrial chapter.
In 1854, the year of the Hood shipyard's destruction by fire, the Boston-Stove Foundry was established on a portion of the site which the yard had occupied.
As the year 1860 came in, the town's population, some- what reduced by the discontinuance of shipbuilding and the dispersal of its unattached labor to find other occupation, was 1791. Of this number, 1215 lived in the Village between North and South Streets, a New England seaport town with its hillside of white houses topped by church spires, and its Main Stret with its "Captains' Row" of fine mansions looking out across a slope of scattered stores, shipchandleries and dockside warehouses to keep track of what shipping came and went.
Between South Street and Slade's Ferry the residents numbered 368 largely centered around Egypt where the Somerset Pottery had incorporated for $25,000 and John D. Cartwright, town clerk from 1833 to 1861 and keeping his records in notable handwriting, had added his grocery to that section's business.
In 1847, Slade's Ferry put on its first steam-power boat, the Faith, and Cory D. Brightman, its Fall River partner, donned a beaver hat for his duties as purser west- bound and pilot east-bound.
South of the Ferry and on the Point were 208 resi- dents, divided among 58 homes. The Point, except for an occasional small vessel building here and there along the shore, had remained as agricultural in appearance and in fact as in the days when Wilburs, Slades and Braytons had first settled it, over a century and a half before. The next three years saw a change in this with Somerset's first rail- road crossing the neck from Lee's River to a ferry terminal which still remains on Brayton's Point, and a little later the establishment of a marine railroad and shipyard industry that outlived all others in town.
THE CIVIL WAR YEARS
IN April 15, 1861, President Lincoln issued his call for 75,000 men to reduce the rebellion of the South which had culminated with the fall of Fort Sumter. Somerset selectmen immediately warned a town meeting for April 27 which duly met and made two appropriations.
One was the sum of $5000 "to be expended in furnishing uniforms for the military company which may volunteer their services to the Federal Government in the present crisis in our national affairs."
The other was the sum of $3000 for the town to pay a bounty of $25 to each volunteer and to guarantee volunteers $26 a month for each month in active service inclusive of government pay, together with such board as might be thought necessary. The military company to be thus supported by the town was not to exceed 50 men.
The committee appointed to carry out these enactments was: William P. Hood, Henry E. Marble, George P. Rice, Daniel Wilbur and Alfred Pratt. On a second motion there were added to this committee Joseph G. Marble and Job M. Leonard.
The meeting was then adjourned for one week and adjournments followed throughout the war period so that in effect there was a town meeting each week for the first two years of the war, and monthly if not more frequent meetings through the last two.
The expectation of a military company from Somerset did not materialize. Regiments were recruited by counties with quotas assigned to each community so that while the larger cities might and did have companies predominantly local, Somerset men were scattered through many units and cannot be traced as a group either by regiment or company.
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In August of 1862, a meeting was held "to make up our quota of the 300,000 called for by the President," and an en- listing committee appointed consisting of William P. Hood, Joseph N. Smith, George F. M. Forrester, Benjamin Cleave- land and William Lawton Slade. The sum of $2700 was voted for bounties and pay. The next week, the sum of $6000 was voted to pay bounties of $200 to nine-months volunteers.
The next month, September, 1862, saw the draft in effect and a town meeting voted a bonus, not specified, for men to take the place of those drafted who did not want to go.
In 1863 and 1864, the town was paying $125 to every- body who enlisted, making up the minimum pay of $26 a month, and supporting soldiers' families to the number of forty-one. In addition, it voted to reimburse all those who had advanced sums in the nature of bounty to enable men to volunteer. The total annual expense of the town for these war purposes was greater than any single item in Somerset's history up to that time.
Registration of militia for home guard service, made under the Massachusetts law of the time, had totaled more than 200 annually up to 1865. In that year a reserve militia company was formed by State order wth the state divided into districts. Somerset was in District No. 75, with Joseph Gibbs captain, and 352 reservists enrolled .
Somerset had 116 men in active service in the army and navy during this war, in addition to those employed on vessels from this port chartered by the Government. The roster of those who enlisted from the town is given at the end of this chapter.
That portion of Somerset's commerce which was with the South was stopped by the war entirely, several vessels making their final delivery of cargoes at great risk and dashing home empty. With the increasing railroads taking so much of the northern coastal business it had previously carried, the coastal fleet had double cause to be idle and loss of income from shipping cost Somerset more than its war relief.
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Some vessels from Somerset undoubtedly were included in the great "Stone Fleet" assembled at New Bedford in 1861 and sailed to the mouth of Charleston harbor where it was sunk, effectively blocking that harbor for the balance of the war. But no list has been found identifying them.
The idle vessels were many and the Boston Stove Foundry was not prospering, but the new Mt. Hope Iron Works was active and the Village had this and other reasons to make it a lively place. The ferry from the Tryworks wharf to the railroad at Somerset Junction became a regular route for troops from West of Taunton, bound for the South by way of the Fall River line. Though not ever a major transfer point, there were often companies encamped at the Village with their officers put up at the former Jerathmel Bowers house, and there was a stirring military aspect about the place.
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