USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Holliston > Holliston, Massachusetts bi-centennial celebration, 1724-1924 > Part 2
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Herein lies the value of the new-comer. To the resources of assuredness, stability, wisdom and experience of the community, he brings the viewpoint of other locali- ties, faith, a willingness to work hard, enthusiasm and vision.
Who shall say whose part is the more valuable? When the mountain streams flows into the river and it in turn into the sea, who shall say which waters move the ships?
So let's not differentiate. Tonight we're neither new- comers, nor descendants of first settlers-just children of Holliston, at home. For whether our home is still here, or we have fared forth into other abiding places-the spell of our beautiful town, its memories and traditions, will ever make it for each of us-that "sunny hollow scooped out of the windy side of the world," the happy definition one has given to home.
In introducing the next speaker, Mr. Fisher remarked:
Between the years 1800 and 1809 there were born at Hampton, New Hampshire, four brothers who later, when they reached or nearly reached man's estate settled in Hol- liston. All had a large influence here. These brothers were the children of Odlin Batchelder, named William S.,
John, Benjamin F., and George. The first three became manufacturers of boots and shoes in this town. Each built his factory in his own dooryard, and each was soon sur- rounded by a little neighborhood of his own employees. There were no labor troubles in those days; their employees were treated as social equals, the relation approaching a copartnership. Every dollar these manufacturers earned was an honest dollar and benefitted materially every em- ployee and through them the whole community. William was the most prosperous, financially speaking, of the three brothers, and at his death left a larger property than any citizen of Holliston. It was all legitimately earned, and no one envied him. George, the fourth of the brothers, was a pioneer in the cultivation of the cranberry, well known to Cape Cod producers. His knowledge and intelligence were of great aid to the industry. No story about the Batchelders is complete without mention of dear John Mason Batchel- der, who so recently passed away. His knowledge of local history was complete. His writing bubbled over with humor. It could justly be said of him that he found "Tongues in the trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything."
I present the son of John Batchelder, the Hon. Francis Batchelder, of Everett.
Mr. Batchelder replied:
Judge Kingsbury has suggested that I address you on my recollections of the Batchelder brothers, who had such an important part in moulding the civic and industrial de- velopment of Holliston during the mid-century just past. As the youngest male descendant of that remarkable and virile race of men, born and reared in the old town, I am glad of the opportunity to pay tribute to the character and capacity of this family as I knew them in my youthful days up to the age of twenty-two. The outstanding assets of these early settlers were poverty and a father who taught them the details of thorough shoe making, with a good mother who bore the brunt of home training in the long absences of the father in his house-to-house itinerary, equipping whole famlies with shoes as was the custom in those primitive days.
During their boyhood, in that frugal home, on the slope of Mt. Kiarsarge, in Wilmot, N. H., that mother educated and trained them in the fundamentals of frugality, industry and integrity, which proved to be the main incent- ives of long and useful careers. Perhaps a clue to their attainment of success may be found in their selection of residential locations: William, chose the beautiful slope of
Phipps Hill; Benjamin, a picturesque knoll at East Hollis- ton; John, the high ground on the Medway Village road, and George, the elevation nearly opposite the M. E. Church. These selections were delightful for situation, excellent for healthful drainage and for business reasons were on main travelled roads; near enough for each other for relationship and far enough apart to satisfy the family characteristic of independence. These men paid tribute to no master and with their initiative, probity and diligence they were bound to succeed, each for himself; indeed, their self reliance was so marked that I never knew of any favor asked or ren- dered, nor any social visiting or confidences between the brothers.
William, born in 1800, was the pioneer and fully exercised his capacity for leadership, leaving home at the age of eighteen, establishing himself in business, the other brothers following, each walking the whole distance, and a few years later he brought the two younger brothers, who settled elsewhere and after working their way through college, adopted the ministry as a profession; later he brought down two sisters and his father and mother, build- ing for the parents a cottage on Prospect Street, where they lived the remainder of their lives; this cottage was dis- placed for the larger house, built by his daughter, Mrs. S. S. Nichols. William became wealthy for that period and for many years was president of the Holliston Bank and an important factor in the commercial prosperity of the town.
George adopted horticulture as a vocation and he was widely known as a high grade cranberry grower. His outlet for the generous instincts of his heart was in pro- viding assistance to a college education for numerous young men. Benjamin and John followed the elder brother in the shoe manufacturing business. These sturdy men became vitally interested in the civic, moral and religious upbuild- ing of the town and each created a community of his own, where contentment and good citizenship was the prevailing sentiment of numerous employees.
Judge Kingsbury said to me tonight, "They passed prosperity around," and a more fitting eulogy could not be uttered. Benjamin, born in 1801, settled in East Medway, (now Millis), engaging in the shoe business in a limited way, and John, my father, worked for him and lived with him. Now Benjamin's young wife had an attractive younger sister, known as "The Belle of Boggestow," who very much desired to attend the Masonic Ball, to be held on St. John's Day, June 24th, 1826, but father, who was reputed to be her fiance, declined to accompany her (per- haps for financial or puritanic reasons), and to pique him,
she suggested the opportunity to a rival, who produced the necessary livery equipment and the pair drove by, the rival with a triumphant smile and she, with a toss of the head, while the deserted hero dangled his legs from a fence, where he was sitting, meditating over his vanished dream; however, his wits were working over-time and his loss was soon forgotten in the courtship begun in the Mason home- stead overlooking Boggestow Pond, where lived that gentle and lovable maiden who became his wife. He, within two years, built the house on Norfolk Street, in Holliston, and installed her as mistress on his wedding day, where she reared her children. He had completed the shoe shop also, that employed all his energies in a succeeding half century of manufacturing usefulness.
Much might be written of my father's many accom- plishments and eccentricities, but the limited time for an address on such an occasion as this demands an immediate close. Allow me to say, that during two score years of close acquaintance with him, I never heard of a dishonest act on his part, nor an unclean word from his lips. A simple and effective eulogy of this worthy quartet of pioneers may be found in a little quatrain of my boyhood days, which has just come back to memory, after more than a half century, and which I recited as my valedictory reci- tation, before a small audience, including an august school committee, preparatory to my entering the High School, in the Fall :
"John Littlejohn was stanch and strong,
Upright and downright, scorning wrong;
He gave good weight and paid his way;
He thought for himself and said his say."
In introduction of the following speaker, the Chairman said :
Cutler has been a great name in Holliston for a cen- tury or two, Jonathan being the surname that prevailed in the family for several generations. One of these Jonathans was conspicuous in the history of his day as housing the Methodists in the infancy of that church. The cellar of his house is still to be seen on Underwood Street, overgrown by Balm of Gilead trees, which in certain seasons breathe their gentle perfume over the passerby. At the time of the Revolution, Col. Simeon Cutler appears to have been, if not the first, with the very first of our citizens. Among his immediate descendants are counted the Hon. Elihu Cutler, the father of the. Hon. Elihu, Jr., the grandfather of Elbridge Jefferson and Arthur Hamilton, three genera- tions of distinguished men. One of the descendants of
Col. Cutler was Simeon Morse Cutler, always known as Morse Cutler, who came to middle age at the time of the Civil War. In 1861 he was elected a member of the Board of Selectmen, became chairman in 1862, and served as such during the remainder of the war period. It was a most trying and laborious duty, and one who filled the place, with all its perplexities, as well as did Mr. Cutler, should not be forgotten in this Two Hundredth Anniver- sary. Deacon Uriel Cutler, his brother, was the senior deacon of the First Church here for many years and is remembered by ancient citizens of the town as an honored, intelligent and worthy citizen. The Cutler family is entitled to be heard, and I introduce Professor Uriel Waldo Cutler, of Worcester, a loyal son of the town and of Deacon Uriel Cutler.
Mr. Cutler's remarks were as follows:
The foundations of the Present are in the Past. It is not vanity, on occasions like this, to test these foundations. It is only prudence to find out what foundations we of the Present have to build upon, the sort of structure these foundations were designed to receive. The qualities of those who established Holliston's traditions and of those who have begun the superstructure, so far as they have been worthy and intelligent builders, are our guides in shaping our plans; they stand as our supervising architects for such structure as we may raise. How those, on the very ground we tread, whether red men or white, worked and thought and loved and aspired affords a natural, an almost inevitable and very practical subject for thought and inquiry.
If, in response to the kind invitation of the Committee in charge of today's programme, I undertake to say a few words as a representative of the Cutlers of Holliston, it will not be done in order to gratify any family pride or to boast of any family achievement. I believe the Cutlers have done their work well in the Past, but they have looked forward to better things to come, "lest they, without us, should not be made perfect." But only as their high quali- ties may be representative of the spirit of the earlier citizenship of our town am I justified in calling your atten- tion on this occasion to those of my stock, who, on these hills and meadows and along these streams, have finished their course and kept the faith.
My suggestion of the water-courses of Holliston brings to mind the mill-site near Metcalf Station developed by that vigorous, clear-headed, public-spirited progenitor of all the Holliston Cutlers, an historic spot, already dry and
deserted and unknown to most of us. Here Jonathan Cutler worked out his problem of existence, under condi- tions we should think intolerable, but he knew his work and he did it, in good Carlyle fashion, and what more can be expected or desired of any of us or by any of us? He it was who, alone at his mill one mid-winter day, slipping on the slanting run-way, was carried down through a hole and far out under the ice. His great strength of arm and force of will enabled him to swim about beneath the ice till he found the opening, and so, unaided, climbed out to day-light.
Like other families of our town, the Cutlers were gen- erally loyal patriots in Revolution times, but there was one who was a non-resistant. When the officers came to confiscate his goods and take him to jail, he was asked, "Whose are these cattle in your pasture?" " 'Every beast of the forest is mine,' saith the Lord, 'and the cattle upon a thousand hills,'" was the ready reply of this diligent Bible reader. But he sacrificed his cattle, and died of prison fever a little later. This exception only emphasises the fact that this early family was rather conspicuously represented in the Revolution. In the later wars also, and in the responsibilities of public office the Cutler name has been by no means missing. We shall not cease to regret that the life of young James Cutler had to be so prematurely sacrificed, five years ago, in connection with the World War. Another grand-son of the original Jonathan married Nabby Morse, from the next neighboring farm, a grand- daughter of Deacon Timothy Leland, who, more than any other, should be remembered as a town father. This young husband and husbandman bought himself a farm on Brush Hill, in Sherborn. Thither, when ready to establish his home, he drove through the center of Holliston his wealth of cows and sheep and hogs, the numbers of which are no longer on record. A gossipy woman of the village, who might better have been at her work, whose name, like the numbers of the caravan, has been lost from the tradition, noted and counted from her kitchen door the passing pro- cession. Twenty-seven years afterward, when this same Cutler had sold his Brush Hill farm and was moving back through Holliston, to occupy the ancestral home of his wife, left desolate by the death of Esq. Morse and his Leland wife in the same week, this same obervant woman was at her door and made count of the very same numbers of live- stock in the Cutler caravan as had been taken to Sherborn in 1809, and remarked upon the lack of increase. She failed to note, however, that seven children were brought back, and three were left behind in the little Brush Hill burying ground.
Incidents like these may seem trivial, but life is made up very largely of little things, and history is but life inter- preted.
How well these early generations met their difficulties on these twenty square miles we call Holliston, on soil not especially favorable for those fundamental industries that yielded them a livelihood. But they accomplished their tasks, and that under circumstances that we of the Present could hardly face with the fortitude and poise they showed. They dug wells for us without dynamite for blasting or metal for piping. They made us roads without stone- crushers or steam-rollers, though they piled up the stones into stone-walls all ready for the crusher. They were poor roads, perhaps, but they served the purpose in an age when it had not been discovered that civilization required high- power devices for making murder easy and suicide a form of recreation. They usually lived to good age, as the inscriptions in the grave-yard show, without modern safety appliances and surgical skill, though one early Cutler was struck by lightning in her own kitchen door-way, with an iron sauce-pan in her hand.
The best of the whole story is the fact that these early Hollistonians made Character while making a living, made character through making a living as the means, for work well done is itself an essential means of education. Char- acter is the end and aim of all work and worship, of pro- fession and recreation and schooling.
"We are all blind until we see That in the human plan Nothing is worth the making, if It does not make the man.
Why build these cities glorious If man unbuilded goes ? In vain we build the work, unless The builder also grows."
-Edwin Markham
And character is contagious. A real case of the disease is pretty sure to be communicated. A Holliston Cutler, already inoculated with the germ, uncertain where he belonged in the social system, drifted, as a young man, into business in New York City. His firm soon failed, but he had meanwhile secured a wise friend in one of the city's eminent clergymen, who advised young Cutler, as a tem- porary matter till a new business opening appeared, to tutor a few boys for college examinations. Out of this small group of New York boys, under Arthur Hamilton Cutler, as tutor, grew a famous fitting school, and Theodore Roosevelt was its first graduate.
The blending of the Cutler name with the names of other Holliston families, through marriage, all down the decades has been an important fact in our local history. Reference has just been made to the connection with the Lelands, a connection that has repeated itself at least six times over in these two centuries of town biography. The intermarriage with the Morses, just over the line, as it then was into Medway, has also been suggested. Besides, into this Cutler stock has been merged the blood of the Perrys and Rockwoods and Littlefields and Loverings and Clarks and Travises and Bullards and Eameses and Danielses and Adamses and Fiskes and of many other familiar local names, to make up some of the strongest human forces in our local development. For it is the people that make a community, or mar it, rather than, chiefly, its natural resources. Holliston folks have been and are, for better or worse, the dominant fact about Holliston. Without means at hand for verifying any positive statement in this connec- tion, I venture the thought that, probably, seventy-five years ago, there were more Cutlers on the voting list of Holliston than of any other family name. If history is the essence of innumerable biographies, then in studying for these few minutes the Cutlers of the Past, we are near the sources of Holliston history.
In 1847 the work of constructing the Milford Branch line of the Boston & Albany Railroad had progressed as far as Holliston. The great task of opening the deep cut brought to the town many new residents. A large number of new dwellings resulted, as well as a quickened spirit of progress, and it was the enterprise of a Cutler that provided these homes. It was this same Cutler who built the old Win- throp House, an ornament to the town in its day and cal- culated to be a very useful institution under proper manage- ment, sadly missed since its burning. The later attempt to supply the lack resulted in a far less dignified and appro- priate structure, also burned, and the long unoccupied cellar-hole calls loudly for a generation of citizens with the enterprse of which James Cutler had abundance and of capital, which he lacked.
Contemporary with him was his oldest brother, Elihu, whose name is more to be honored than that of, per- haps, any other one man in our local history. He began his career in the wheelwright business of his father, Col. Simeon Cutler. In the spirit of his grand-father, of the old Metcalf Station mill, he manifested his mechanical ingenuity and his business capacity in the building up of several industries, using the water power at hand and giving employment to the growing population. He was, in his life- time, given much of the recognition that was his due, a
rather unusual fact, for he was repeatedly elected to town offices and to both branches of the General Court. He was also a Trial Justice, and was entrusted with the settle- ment of many estates. He was a man of sound judgment, of dignity and poise and efficiency and integrity, such as any generation of any community may consider itself for- tunate to have so freely and generously at its service.
Not many Cutlers have become preachers,-five or six, I think, conspicuously the gracious orator of this evening. They have practiced the Christian virtues, rather more than they have preached them, doing their full part in sustaining the institutions of religion at every opportunity. The Cutler name has not been made conspicuous by being before the Courts of Justice or in the sensational columns of the news- papers. Through the generations they have sent their quotas to college, and have known how to supplement such schooling as was available with such indispensible educa- tion as comes to an open and eager mind through the discipline of life well lived. One of the most intelligent and effective citizens Holliston has produced, one who gave a very efficient and right-minded daughter to be the wife of a Cutler of the second generation, could neither read nor write ; yet he kept complicated accounts as an honored and trusted town officer and successful man of affairs.
There is one Cutler, still living, who, if able to be present at this Bicentennial observance, would enjoy much himself and could contribute largely to the interest of the exercises, because of his experience in the affairs of our time, as well as because of his historical knowledge and scholarly attainments. Unfortunately he has been called too soon back to his work as professor of history in the University of Porto Rico. I refer to Rev. Frederick Morse Cutler, Ph. D., who also holds the rank of Captain in the United States Army. He was born and educated in New York, but was much in Holliston in his boyhood. He should be cordially remembered on this occasion.
One of the college men Holliston has sent out to a high career was Elbridge Jefferson Cutler, grandson of Elihu Cutler, Esq., before mentioned. He won distinction as a Harvard professor and as a poet before his untimely death, in 1870. It would be stimulating to our patriotism to review here and now some of his war poems, in which he reveals much of his high thought and sincerity of feeling, and to think over his brief career as teacher and as student of life and letters. But I have no right to monopolize the minutes of this evening's programme to that extent. My school-boy memory goes vividly back to that awesome December day when he was borne from our Congregational Church to his burial in the near-by cemetery. I doubt if that historic
building has ever held a more eminent assembly of men of learning and character than came together to do honor to this townsman of ours. There has been placed in my hands a letter recently written by President-Emeritus Eliot, a class- mate of Professor Cutler, in which he shows his warm and active appreciation of his qualities more than a half-century after his death, even though the professor of 1869 was inclined to oppose some of the new ideas of the then young college president. I can quote only two or three passages from this remarkable letter. "Professor Cutler was an admirable scholar and a conscientious, interesting and exact teacher, who commanded the respect and admiration of most of his students." "His mind like his body was deli- cate, dainty and sensitive. His mental and moral interests were deep and strong." "His life was short and full of fine promise, but not of fulfilment."
As already suggested, lives of individuals and of fam- ilies of individuals become built into the spirit of the ccm- munity past recovery as a personal matter. If you seek Cutler biography, look about you in the town whose devel- opment is in these days under review. Through Cutler migrations also the name and influence of Holliston has been broadcasted the country over. The special New England qualities of integrity, sound judgment, executive ability, independence in opinion, which I like to think of as Cutler qualities, have best manifested themselves in business careers near and far. Many of these it would be pleasant to recall at this time, but "what," Mr. Chairman, "shall I more say, for the time would fail me to tell of Gideon and of Barak, and of Samson, and of the prophets, who . wrought righteousness, obtained promises, . . . out of . weakness were made strong." Among these prophets we may include many in your family line, and in mine. Through them, the Past at least of Holliston is secure. What of the Future
Mr. Fisher, in introducing the next speaker, said:
A grand veteran of the Grandest Army of the Republic is with us tonight. We do not propose to tell his age, but will give a hint which perhaps may be a guide. More than sixty-five years ago he took the star part in a pantomime in this very hall. We are sorry that arrangements for his birth in Holliston were not seasonably made. Hopkinton has the honor of being his birthplace, but he did not allow more than a year to pass before he adopted Holliston as his home, and he has been a loyal adopted son ever since. He served through the whole Civil War with distinction, and recently has been chosen Junior Vice Commander of the
Grand Army of the Republic in the Commonwealth of Mas- sachusetts. We salute Comrade Henry W. Comey, now of Danvers.
Capt. Comey gave the following reminiscences of old School days :
In 1846 Unionville, a village in the east part of Hop- kinton, was incorporated as the town of Ashland. A part of Holliston was included in the territory set off for Ashland, taking a large part of school district No. 1, as we shall see when we call the roll of the families in the district. It is of this school district that, as I recall it from the years 1844 to 1850, I shall speak.
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