USA > Massachusetts > Plymouth County > Marion > Lands of Sippican on Buzzards Bay > Part 5
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"Harry desiers that neither Tuspaquin nor his son be prest to sell the said lands by the English or whatsoever." Three centuries and the forest claims again Tuspaquin's lands.
The little center settlement was now the principal village; up the old roads they trudged to the meeting house. Some on horseback with the women on a pillion behind.
The Plymouth Road passed North East of Merry's Pond, where the flax was spread out on the shore. Intersecting this path was a long way passing by the center burying ground, called the "Rhode Island Path." The road past "White Hall" down to Sippican Village divided into the road to Mattapoisett village, and the road to Charles Neck laid out in 1705.
Both these old roads are now nearly lost in the woods, used only to haul out wood and logs from some family wood lots. The Great Neck Road was laid out in 1720. But along those roads they came two hundred years ago to meeting, to the center
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to trade, to the mills, transacting the business of the town's fourquarters at the "town meet."
The "Town meet" that for so many years was occupied by ways to get rid of crows and black birds and wild cats. They were such a pest that every male was obliged to bring in his quota every year to the town clerk, heads of four crows and twelve black birds by the last day of May.
In 1699 it was Peter Blackmer, the miller, who was the "town clerk" and who had the duty of counting the heads. The wild game didn't disappear rapidly as twenty years later, in 1722, there were 21 foxes brought in and twelve .wild cats. Wild cats and foxes both were paid for only if "the head of the beast was brought to one of the selectmen with both theire eares on to be cut off."
. In the "town meet" in May 1703 the dogs of Rochester were cursed for digging up the herring planted for fertilizer in the corn hills. "The great dam that this town hath in time passed suffered by dogs going at Liberty when alewives are planted in cornfields with Indian corn", and so all the Rochester dogs went limping from the 20th of April for 40 days in the year 1704 "haveing one of their fore feet fastened up to their neck so as to prevent them digging up of fish so planted." Their cornfields were precious. One of the first things built in a
village was the pound. A small enclosure with a very high stone wall around it with a gate, and all the "meat animals" that were loose in the village were taken into custody by the appointed pound keeper and money must be paid by the owner to get his animal out of jail. Only a few loose stones remain on the old pound lot on the Rochester road to show that the village once restrained its "Rames running at large." In 1722 "A Ram or Rames" must be posted in the five villages
"If in the village called the center at the hous of John Clapp
And if in the village called Sipycan at the hous of John Briggs
And if in the village called Sniptuit at the hous of Capt. Edward Winslow
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OYSTERS, KENT AND ROCHESTER
And if in the fresh meadow village & Weweantit at Isaac Bumpus his mill
And if at Mattapoisett at the house of John Hammond." And there you have the five villages of Old Rochester-Towne- in-New England.
Up in the big town of Boston, the Great and General Court and assembly of His Majesty's Province of the Massa- chusetts Bay in New England is looking after His Majesty's subjects. Samuel Prince, Esq. of Whitehall Rochester-Towne- in-New England is representative from his town in 1716- "Vast quantities of deer were destroyed last winter." "If you dont design they should be entirely destroyed some law must be made, for the preventing them being killed for a few years, and a weighty fine laid upon the offenders" and a bill is also introduced for "the more effectual destruction of wolves and dogs."
In 1717 Capt. John Ruggles, asks the court for 35 lbs. a month for protection of coast. He is owner and master of the sloop Mary and Freelove. The coast is infested with pirates and five pounds is offered for any pirate they shall kill and ten pounds for "each Great Gun they shall take in any Pirate's vessel."
In 1719 John Hammond is sent as representative from Rochester and in 1720, Samuel Sprague.
Still the lands of Sepecan, alias Rochester, reach almost to Plymouth.
A petition in regard to Wicket's Island presented to the House by Joseph Prince reads "that Nathan Wicket, an Indian may have liberty to sell or exchange unto him, an Island belonging to him lying off the Towne of Rochester" but Roch- ester is soon to begin to lose her children. In 1734 Matta- poisett wanted a meeting house of her own.
There are no wagons in town, only ox and horse carts and a riding chair or two. It is too far to ride horse back in the winter weather to meeting. That same year a part of Rochester is joined to the Agawam Plantation; and in 1739, 60 years after that April day when the riders came up the Sandwich path to Sepecan, the town of Wareham is set off.
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In 1741 and again in 1742 the Kings' Ship came into the Bay and sent warrants to the captain of the militia to impress men into the King's service. Some of the men ran away and some bought themselves off ..
The little villages grew slowly; they were no longer the property of proprietors.
Once in a while somebody's name looks out from an old diary or church record.
March ye 2nd day 1749. Squire Fearing of the new Town of Wareham writes "a complaint came to mee of Joseph Savery of Rogester cursing Ensin Ebnezer Burg two times and hee paid his fine twenty shillings old tener to mee Israel Fearing, Just. of Peac."
Penitent Joseph Savery "of Rogester" comes over the road with "ensin Ebnezer Burg," the Ensin probably with fire in his eye, and when Squire Fearing gets through there wont be any cursing of the "Ensin" in "Rogester" for some time to come. Affairs will go better on the old Muster Field.
But the training of troops must go on as the mother country across the sea claims her children in her trouble on the new continent.
During the French and Indian war in 1758-1760 many men of Rochester served in Captain Bradford's company in Canada. It is said, that in hospital records at Crown Point are Rochester names.
And some Evangeline might have found her Gabriel in Rochester-Towne, because in the old town book is written "Cloath for the french" and for "Keeping the old French."
On May 29, 1758 Peter Crapo, fifteen years of age, a volunteer from Rochester met the company at Eligar Clapp's at Middleboro, which "a little after sunrise commenced its march to the battle of Ticonderoga where General Lord Howe was slain."
CHAPTER V
TITHING MEN AND THE NEW ENGLAND PRIMER
"In Adam's Fall We sinned all."
NEW ENGLAND PRIMER.
The men, women and children of the early days in Roches- ter-Towne-in-New England, lived, moved and had their being in a terrible little world of storms, comets, droughts, devils and witches, sternly watched by the all-seeing eye of Jehovah who could be calmed and appeased and made to change weather, and all other happenings, by his little toiling children beseeching and fasting and prostrating themselves in a contrite and humble fashion.
Any sort of calamity was laid to the avenging hand of a mighty God who was strong in punishment.
When the settlement of Dartmouth was almost blotted out during the King Philip's war, the settlers were scolded severely by the court, and told
"to live more compact together the better to defend them- selves, and the better to attend the publicke worship of God, and ministry of the word of God, whose carelessness to obtaine and attend unto, we fear, may have been a provocation of God thus to chastise theire contempt of his gospell, which wee earn- estly desire the people of that place may seriously consider off, lay to heart, and be humbled for, with a sollisitus indeavor after a reformation there of by a vigorous puting forth to obtaine an able dispenser of the word of God amongst them, and to incur- rage him there in, the neglect where of the court, as they must not and God willing they will not p'mitt for the future."
"And that noone shall for the future, erect any house or cottage without speciall lycense given him in any place soe far
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remote from the publicke worship of God as that they can not comfortable attend the same."
The Court made a ruling that no more new settlements could be formed unless there were enough people to form a congregation for public worship.
By 1695 the law was strict. Every town must have a meeting house.
The Church of the "First Comers" was the church of England. One of the most cultured men of the English Church, whose life was affected by the "harrying" of King James, was the good pastor of the "Pilgrims", John Robinson, who was never to come to the new home of his people.
He signed "seven artikes" in regard to the Virginia colony that his small group wished to help establish.
The first reads as follows-
"To ye confession of fayth published in ye name of ye church of England & to every artikell there of wee do with ye reformed churches where wee live & also elsewhere, assent wholy." He says:
"For myself I believe with my heart before God, and profess with my tongue, and have before the world, that I have one and the same faith, hope, spirit, baptism, and Lord which I had in the church of England and none other."
In fifty years the descendants of the "First Comers" had adopted and adapted from the many new comers of many minds, ideas until the Orthodox religion of New England was born. The hard cold winters, Michael Wigglesworth's "blazing poem", "The Day of Doom", the New England Primer, the gran- ite boulders, the Indian wars, helped in the forming.
Their minds were stamped with scenes depicted in the "Description of the Great and Last Judgment."
The sheep, God's elect, on one hand, and the goats, those not destined to be saved! And the little children! Infants, who although they had had no chance, because of "Adam's fall", were lost. However they were allowed "The easiest room in Hell!"
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Minister's Rock - "Where the first settlers found cleared Indian fields"
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The court tried to appease this God of New England by days of fasting and prayer.
They were puzzled sometimes for a reason for God's wrath. It was the New England "pride and wantonness." It was the Lord "whipping New England worlddyness".
The 2nd Indian war came "as a judgment and testimony of God against the wearing of periwigs."
On Oct. 3, 1682, the General Court, Hinckley, Governor, prays that "God would sanctify his hand in that epedemicall disease & distemper of the colds and coughs in the country, as alsoe his afflicting hand upon his children that hath been so mortall to many in divers places; and that henceforth cease forever his anger and restore and continew health everywhere."
The Court decreed days of fasting and prayer that Jehovah should see that his children paid him due honor.
Forty years, and it is moved that a "Day of Publick Prayer with fasting be in a short time appointed and solemnized throughout the several Townes of the Province, upon the various occasions thereof and particularly the awful Frownes of Heaven in its distressing early Drought."
And a century later the Rochester Church records read Aug. 9, 1770 "Being a day set apart by ye ch for prayer & fasting on account of a severe drought."
So "Publicke worship" began as soon as possible in Sepecan when the weather permitted, with the people clustered around Minister's Rock.
It was six years before there were enough people to war- rant petitioning the Court for a settled minister. An uneasy distrust of the Indians had kept some families away. In 1683 there were sixty families and a small meeting house had been built near the "Rock" on Little Neck, and Samuel Shiverick, a Huguenot who had fled from France, was asked to preach.
Shiverick is sometimes called the "Mete Man", sometimes the "meek man." Perhaps as he went about collecting the shill- ings for his pay he was "meek." They raised a house for him and gave him the use of "the ministry lands," "ten akers of upland" about his house, and he planted and plowed and got in his "hey", and so made a living.
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The proprietors who didn't live in Sepecan, at first had to pay four shillings a year towards the minister's support. He was supposed to collect two shillings from all land owners who were "livers". The second year the little meek minister had to collect ten shillings from each family, but as time went on two persons were appointed to collect the minister's salary, and if the people didn't pay, the amount was taken out of their estates.
The first little meeting house cost 20 pounds, It was soon vacated and sold and finished its days as corn cribs.
The Whipping Post was generally set in front of the meeting house but we hope it wasn't needed in Sepecan as long as the meeting house stood near Minister's. Rock at the head of the harbor.
Mr. Shiverick was a lay preacher and when the new meet- ing house was raised, the Reverend Samuel Arnold was called. He was given more land and a share of meadow and upland if he would promise that he would stay until he died.
From the fording places on the Sepican & Weweantit Riv- ers coming over from Plymouth and Sandwich, far up from where the bridge is now, for miles, and where the Sepecan cart road came out (Dexter's Lane) and the Rhode Island Path came over, settlers had taken up acres and acres of land and were building houses and forming a new community. This was about where Rochester Center is now. The Quakers, who had been hounded ever since they had landed in 1656, whipped and scourged and banished, had found a haven in Sandwich, and many under the leadership of John Wing and Savory Clifton had come to Sepecan and were at peace on the Indian fields on the rivers and harbor. Sepecan was no "bloodie Boston."
John Wing's name remains on Great Neck today in Wing's Cove, and descendants of Savory Clifton held many acres of farm land until 1900.
The Quaker grave yard is opposite the Methodist Church where a small tablet reads
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"Within this enclosure lie the Remains of 326 Friends 200 by 67 ft."
They were sometimes very annoying, as they would not support the minister and the meeting house, and often came into other meeting houses and interrupted the services; but there is no record of persecution in Rochester and today the little white meeting house on the road to Mattapoisett reminds one of the Quakers on the Sepecan lands.
Samuel Arnold, who had promised to remain as minister for his life exchanged some of his land, "40 akres sea-lots be- longing to his own shear with Savory Clifton and had instead there of taken up 40 acres granted to each whole shear at a meeting of the purchasers held July 13, 1697."
Many people were getting new lots and building near the vast holdings of Samuel Prince, the rich man of the Colony, so when the question came up as to where to "sett" the next meeting house on May 13, 1698 the "sirveyors" report that "according to Power given them from the purchasers" they "have surveyed and laid out a shaded place convenient for the setting of a meeting house for the publick worship of God it being the southerly part of that wood lott which first be- longed to Mr. William Peabody, and being thrown up by Mr. Ichabod Wiswill & John Rouse (see p 23) the aforesaid sir- . veyors having taken up the westerly half of s'd woodlot to ly and remain the ministry & a competent part not less than ten akres of S. end there of to ly and remain unimproved by any manere of tillage for a burying place & training field & to sett a meeting house upon as aforesaid."
On May 10, 1698 the town had "voted to build a meeting house at cost of s'd town," but it wasn't until Feb. 2, 1699 that the exact spot for the new meeting house was decided upon, where the ayes had it that the meeting house should be "sit on the Westerly sid of the Long Bridg." So on the cart road down to Sepecan which was so swampy that a long stretch of corduroy road bridged over the wet places, was set the new meeting house with the burying ground and training field near -thus forming the new center of the town.
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And the burying ground and the training field remain to this day and even some of the old sunken logs of the "long bridg," but the site of the meeting house is lost.
There was some difficulty in raising the money, and on July 12 they voted "to pay for the meeting House by a free will offering if that would amount to the sum of fifty pounds."
Samuel Prince, the big land owner, Peter Blackmer who built the mill, and who also as town clerk had received gory heads of wolves and destructive birds, and Mark Haskel who had come in a hurry from Salem, his horse galloping quick and fast to escape serving as juryman at a witchcraft trial, were the committee men who had the building of the House on their hands. It was a very proper meeting House with "a pulpit and flours and seats and girts for 3 galerys with 3 seats a pew and windows as the undertakers shall see convenient.". "It was 24 by 26 ft. and 10 ft. between joints, with a gable on each side."
Very soon the house wasn't large enough and it was ex- tended at the back and seats built "nye the pulpit stairs for An- tiant parsons to sett in." The prominent members built their own pews on beams over the galeries, and there was no mistake as to ownership. In some towns people were fined large sums for "setting in a seat belonging to others." The Squire of the settlement didn't wish, when he strode into his exalted place with his brood behind him, to find some unimportant person occupying a corner of the three seats around his square en- closure. "Seating the meeting" was a perplexing job but when it was done, a strict law took care of offenders against the decisions.
By June of the new century the records are bustling with the great "chang arising in s'd town of Rochester."
A real democracy on the way. The "town meet" is be- coming more important. The proprietors are less powerful. The town votes to raise money for "a town stock or Treasury out of which the town taxes shall be paid, as the Law-directs by order of the Selectmen." They still have charge of the meeting house and vote on that same June day to employ a woman "to sweep the meeting house once in 15 days, or so often as shall be ocation for sweeping of it to keep it Deasent."
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By Oct. 13, 1703 Minister Arnold has organized his church-
"It has pleased our gracious God to shine in this dark corner of this wilderness and visit this dark spot of ground with the day spring on high, through his tender mercy to settle a church according to the order of the Gospel."
Old Minister Arnold besides preaching and burying the dead, had to farm, and teach ambitious boys who wanted to go to Harvard College, and pull teeth, and give out opium, and saffron, and elder, yellow dock, and snake root to suffering parishioners, when their home stock failed to relieve.
He lived five years after he had organized his congre- gation, and the people looking about saw young Timothy Ruggles, Mister Timothy Ruggles because he had graduated from Harvard College. He was educated, he could preach to them. Sermons were the principal part of the meeting, so he was "Treated with & duly incoraged in order to a Settlement."
The town gave him a farm of seventy acres, besides the use of the "ministry lands," and an annual salary of thirty pounds which was afterwards increased to one hundred pounds.
They had set their hearts on Timothy. He was a gentleman and a scholar. They were proud of him. He was a great grandson of Thomas Dudley, second Governor of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay.
They allowed him to give the dimensions of the house they raised for him. He furnished the "glasse and nails", and it was set on the road to Sepecan below the meeting house. By 1714 the meeting house was too small. Useless to put on an addition, and so in three years a new meeting house was built on a spot, now a grassy plot, opposite the gates of the Rochester Center Cemetery. From this time the meeting house doesn't occupy time at the town meeting, it being looked after by the parish.
The new meeting house was "40 ft. by 35 ft. and 20 ft. between joints." The pews were much better looking than those in the old meeting house. Those had been built by the owners according to their individual ideas and were evidently of different heights and some not well made. The new pews
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were "al of a haith and bult workmanlike." There must have been a striking difference in the appearance of the meet- ing house interior or the clerk wouldn't have set it down in his little fine handwriting for us to see two centuries later.
Over the highway "two rods wide" that had been laid out near the meeting house of 1705-up the way that "leads southerly to Matapoisit," and the cartway "from the meadows upon and near Charles Neck," over the Country Road from Great Neck around Merry's Pond, from the Fresh Meadow village down Weweantit way and from Sepecan Landing they wind along afoot, horseback and in carts every Sabbath Day morning.
How fresh and wonderful the air on those forest roads on a June morning!
All the week from sun rise to sunset they have toiled, and now dressed in their humble homemade clothes they come to the meeting house. Some because they must or be out- lawed; most of them because they like the meeting of friends and neighbors. The men swap stories about crops and cattle, drive shrewd bargains; while the women talk of spinning and weaving and children, and quilts and new pat- terns for coverlets, or shudder as they talk in scared whispers of "the truble at the Hascels" because the daughter put the brooms under the chair.
It is as though a fog lifted and one saw the little brown figures moving in the mist of years.
And the tithing men are on hand to look after unruly boys, and restless girls and nodding parents. Tithing men, who at first had the care of ten families and ten Indians under an overseer. Tithing men whose duty it was to pry into one's family affairs and find out what the family spent for living, so as to check up on their contribution to the meeting house. Each man had a long staff knobbed on one end and with a tick- ling rabbit's foot or fox tail on the other. One end was for people awake and the other for those asleep.
In the winter time after the long cold ride from the other villages to the center, even the frigid air of the close meeting house was conducive to drowziness, and in summer with the
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branches waving across the open windows, with bees and flies lazily humming and the minister's voice droning on for an hour, the brush end of the stick was often needed. The only time some hard working old settler woke up during the meet- ing time was when he shook himself awake and moved decor- ously up to the deacon's seat to put down his tithe towards the support of the meeting house.
Mr. Ruggles got tired of going over on Great Neck to look after a part of his farm and there it is on the records how in the year 1720 Samuel Sprague, Benjamin Hammond and John Briggs asked the Court
"That whereas their first Proprietors and Purchasers Laid out a Ministerial Lot which is in several Divisions and not so advantageous to the minister as if it were intire, praying they may be empowered to make Sale of said Lot (22) in the sev- eral Divisions there of in order to make a purchase of one Farme for the Ministerial use agreeable to the intent of the first Proprietor, in separating one intire share of Land for the use of the Ministry."
And Mr. Ruggles kept on preaching and the people came to meeting; the tithing men did their duty and the years brought more people, important people who wanted prominent seats, and in 1733 "Certain people" were given permission to build pews on the beams above the galleries, and it took 10 tithing men sometimes to keep order! Why shouldn't it! Crowded into the building are the respectable men and women of five villages to say nothing of the children and dogs!
And besides there is the room of refreshing near the meeting house! The Tavern!
On the frosty Sabbath mornings after a long cold ride over from Mattapoisett village, a long cold service in a frigid meeting house, made more ice cold by the feeling that you may not be one of the elect, how thoroughly warming to the body and soul to gather in the tap room of the nearby tavern with your old friends, around the roaring fire in the big fire place and have a respectable man of the settlement, a moral man and a man of property, fill up the mug with hot toddy or a sizzling flip. And how hard to stir from the warmth in time
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for the second sermon, but out everybody must go! The tav- ern must be cleared during meeting or there will be trouble for the good tavern keeper. But how good the tavern drink and how good the tavern fire, and when you talked over the happenings of the week with this one and that one, how much one could imbibe!
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