USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Framingham > Memorial of the bi-centennial celebration of the incorporation of the town of Framingham, Massachusetts, June, 1900 > Part 12
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Good Parson Swift, on the sunny swell Where stood his meeting-house, slumbers well ; Yet they say, at midnight who ventures there May hear his voice, in appeal or prayer,
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Ring out as it rang when the dead and he Were parish and preacher, anciently, And a psalm float by ; - but the sounds they hear Are the sighs of the wind in a dreaming ear, For pastor and flock, on the sunny swell Where stood the first meeting-house, slumber well.
And now two hundred years have fled ; But the men of Framingham, living and dead, Have been true to country, and state and town, Winning, in war and peace, renown ; And her sons in Manila and Cuba, still Are brave as the soldiers of Bunker Hill ; And her daughters as loyal, through weal and woe, As the wives and mothers of long ago.
Fairer and nobler is Framingham Than in far-off days when the salmon swam Up from the sea to the lakes that lie Pleasant and cool the pine woods by ; For the toil of two centuries makes, at their close, The wilderness bloom and rejoice as the rose ! With the fortunate " South " to a city growing, And traffic and life through its highways flowing ; With the " Centre " charming for lawns and leas, For homes and river and stately trees ; With busy, beautiful Saxonville, Queen of the falls, the lake, the mill, - A region of loveliness, thrift and cheer, Is the town in its bright two hundredth year ! And while Cochituate mirrors the sky And over Waushakum the west winds sigh,- While her churches rise and her hearth-fires glow, In strength and honor may Framingham grow, And forever, the Bay State's diadem, With virtue, and valor, and beauty, gem !
THE PRESIDENT .- We selected for the Orator of the Day one who in his younger days was a pupil in our common schools, a graduate of the Framingham Academy and High
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School, who commenced the practice of his profession with one of the leading lawyers of the town, was an officer of the town, a member of the General Court, an officer in the War of the Rebellion, elected to an important office in the County of Middlesex, and although compelled by his official duties to reside in another part of the Commonwealth has always retained his interest in this town.
I have the honor to present to you as the Orator of the Day the Honorable Theodore C. Hurd, a resident of Winchester, but a citizen of Framingham.
ADDRESS OF HON. THEODORE C. HURD.
I preface my address with a brief reference to the settle- ment in America under the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
I do this with a purpose. Any study of the lives and characters of our ancestors would be incomplete which did not include the history of the years from 1629 to 1640, which was the period of the making of New England and the foundation of the highest civilization of America.
From 1602 to 1629 several attempts at settlement had been made under as many patents or grants.
The Plymouth settlement in 1620 was made under a charter from James I., but in 1629 the Pilgrims numbered only about 400.
The revised charter of "the Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay in New England " was attested by the King on the fourth day of March, 1629. It was purchased from Charles I., for 2000 pounds sterling and a fifth part of the gold and silver ore which might be mined.
In terms providing for the business of a corporation for trade and profit, it developed in operation a unique, civil, religious and political life.
It was the germ of an empire of American freemen.
The officers of the corporation were to consist of a Gov- ernor, Deputy Governor, and eighteen assistants, to be chosen annually at a "General Court " of the freemen, to be held on the last Wednesday of Easter term.
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It was expected that the corporation was to exist in Eng- land, and the first meetings of the General Court were held in London. It meets now on Beacon Hill, Boston.
To this " General Court " was delegated power "to estab- lish all manner of wholesome orders, laws, statutes, and ordinances settling the forms and ceremonies of government and magistracy fit and necessary for the plantation."
These powers were conferred in order "that the inhabitants therein may be so religiously, peaceably, and civilly governed as their good life and orderly conversation may win and incite the natives of the country to the knowledge and obedience of the only true God and Saviour of mankind and the Christian faith which in our royal attention and the adventurers free profession is the principal end of this plantation."
Now mark the outcome :
The very week in which Charles granted this charter he dissolved his parliament, and for eleven years there was no parliament in England. His father, James, true to his pro- mise, had "harried the non-conforming pilgrims out of his realm " and founded the Plymouth Colony.
Charles, by his cruel enforcement of the Act of 35 Eliza- beth, forced the best blood of England's yeomanry to the wilderness beyond the sea, and planted the stout-hearted Puritans in Massachusetts Bay with a charter he was never to recall and which was to develop the United States of America.
John Winthrop, who had been elected Governor, arrived in Salem harbor June 12, 1630, with the charter in his possession. Here he was greeted by Endicott and the sur- vivors of his colony of 1629.
Then began the wonderful exodus of the Puritans from the east counties of England. Knight and peasant, scholar, yeoman and artisan came to the New World in such numbers that, in 1640, when Charles was forced to call the long parlia- ment, the 22,000 Englishmen in Massachusetts Bay and 3,000 in Plymouth Colony had become 25,000 American citizens.
Said William Stoughton in 1688: "God sifted a whole nation that he might send choice grain into the wilderness." From this seed how splendid a harvest !
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Immigration almost entirely ceased in 1640.
The independents were too busy in their great struggle for independence at home.
Perchance the Stuart king builded better than he knew when he let them go, for Winthrop, and Endicott, and Saltonstall, and Dudley, and Vasall, and Harry Vane would have ridden with Cromwell at Edgehill, and Naseby, and Marston Moor.
For the next 130 years, till near the period of the Revolu- tion, immigration to New England did not amount to 1,000, and it is estimated by the best authority that the 25,000 New Englanders of 1640 have increased to over 15,000,000, a large fraction of the population of America.
Under this charter, within the measure of a score of years, these plain English emigrants, unlearned in the law, without pattern or precedent, formulated the New England idea of a state.
This idea insured the highest intelligent independence of the individual consistent with highest social and civil rights of every other member.
The development of this idea created through the sover- eignty of the state delegated to the towns the best system of local self-government ever devised or administered, and the existence and extent of error and corruption in state or municipal government today is measured by the lines of departure from this idea.
They paid 2000 pounds sterling for their charter of in- corporation, and could say who should be stockholders. Whoever came to dwell with them must submit to the same rule and law which they imposed on themselves.
If their ideas were high, they were their own. If their visions were prophetic, they were the prophets. They were not singing their songs in a strange land, they were tuning their harps on their own new Jordan. They were building a democracy, and took good care to leave no foothold for aristocracy.
They chose their parsons and their representatives to the General Court at the same town meeting, and reserved the right to criticise the theology of the one and the politics of the other.
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Their enthusiasm was not formative; it was born of an insistent personal independence in religion, and, by force of this rule, the theory of intolerance of the seventeenth century worked out the condition of liberality in the eighteenth.
Intolerant New England ? I commend the men and women who delight in this criticism to a study of the history of the closing years of the seventeenth century.
Is the standard of comparison to be found in Old Eng- land under the "Merry Monarch " Charles, or the bigoted James, whose vicious Chief Justice Jeffreys was holding blood assize, enforcing cruel laws against non-conformists, sending men to be hanged, drowned, and quartered at his pleasure, smothering a whisper of criticism in flames at the stake?
Two thousand dissenting ministers, under the Conventicle Act, in one year driven from their pulpits and homes, ban- ished from the realm, or languishing in prison.
Russell, Essex, Howard, Hampden, Sydney brought to the cruel block as martyrs to liberty of conscience. Claver- house and his dragoons dying red the heaths and moors of Scotland with the blood of brave men, saintly women, and innocent children at the bidding of a cruel archbishop.
Shall we cross the British Channel to France, where Louis XIV. was devastating his fair domain with fire and sword at the cruel behests of Jesuit priests, exterminating whole provinces in a fanatic war against Protestantism ?
Or shall I turn the pages of the history of Spain in these years for records of acts of toleration, where another Charles II. was wielding a brutal sword under the shadow of the standard of the church?
The world's story of crime cannot parallel the atrocities of Spain in the whole course of her efforts in establishing colonies in America. Her lust for gold shamed manhood, disgraced religion, and scarred the very face of Nature on island and shore.
Thanks be to God, the day of retribution has dawned !
In the first years of the nineteenth century Spain was the mistress of more than a half of the present area of the United States, but today the stars and stripes float over every foot
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of her soil on this continent, and with that flag comes the promise of peace and content, reviving industry, aspiring life, and a blessed hope for civil and religious freedom.
How splendid a vindication of the American idea, the New England idea, the Puritan idea, - that one Harvard graduate is the governor of Cuba, another the superintendent of her public schools, an Amherst graduate and Middlesex boy chief magistrate of Porto Rico ; and this month the gates of every hall in the University of Cambridge, a college which was founded by vote and grant of the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636, are thrown wide open for the free support and education of fifteen hundred teachers from the island which, two years ago, never knew a public school.
Try our forefathers by the crucial test of a judgment upon their works. Know them by their fruits.
Do bigots and intolerants build schools and churches, set type and print Bibles ?
The first legislation of the Bay Colony established schools and churches in every village ; and the colony, the province, and the Commonwealth has ever since, in all matters of education, been a light to lighten the nations.
She has opened wide the door of common, high, normal, industrial, and technical schools to all her children, and com- manded them to enter therein1.
The first to establish a system of free public libraries and free school-books, she has banished illiteracy, and made her suffrage dependent on ability to read and write.
She is foremost in legislation for the protection of civil and industrial life.
While restraining vice, she strives to uplift the vicious.
She tenderly shelters the unfortunate poor and insane.
Her laws are a shield of protection to the children of toil.
While her sons and daughters have peopled a great belt of our country, stretching to the very western limit, building new towns, and cities, and states, she has received into her fold an immigrant population of every race and creed, who now yield to the same old traditions and conditions of respect and obedience to the rule of her law.
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The grand old Commonwealth, ridiculed in the same breath as the home of intolerance and heresy and the school of ism and theory, the country, in every emergency, calls on her for men of action and measures of relief, and her sons and daughters are now, as ever, in the "color guard" of the army of national progress.
And now, forgetting ourselves- forgetting the Framing- ham of today, I ask you to come with me for an afternoon stroll in the Framingham of June, 1700. Cochituate, Wau- shakum, Farm and Learned's Ponds lie glistening in the sunlight ; Stoney Brook and Singletary, unvexed by dam or wheel, flow their clear waters into the Sudbury or Hopkin- ton river, which winds through untilled meadow and virgin forest at the foot of Bare Hill, which rises from a wooded plain, without a habitation in view, where now clusters the goodly village of Framingham Centre.
No stately spire rises from this plain,- no vision of mansion or cultured field,-only God's sunshine, the sweet scent of pines and the swaying of great trees in the summer wind.
No man dwells on the scene to which so many of us come home today to the dear old hearthstone of our childhood.
Visit with me the falls of the river and shores of Cochit- uate, and greet the Stones, and Bents, and Rices, and Drurys, and Walkers, and Haynes, and others of the "Sudbury farmers," or, as they call themselves, the "out-dwellers from Sudbury." Follow along the old Connecticut Path, and find Eames, Pratt, Gleason, Haven, Learned, and the dwellers on Sherborn road. Take the path on the west side of Farm Pond, over Mellen's Neck, and there is the little settlement of eight families who came from Watertown with Mellen and Whitney.
The Nurse, Clayes, Bridges, Elliott, and Parker families are at Salem End.
They preferred the perils of the western wilderness to the dangers of witchcraft trials in old Essex.
The Pikes, Winches, Eatons, Frosts, Hemenways, Walkups, Jennings, and a few others on the "Marlbury" road and the slopes of Nobscot and Doeskin.
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We have seen them all; some sixty families of good Eng- lish stock born on American soil. They are the children of the immigrants of 1630-1641. I find only five of the early settlers from 1646-1676 who were born across the sea.
What manner of man do we meet? Stern of visage, but kindly of heart; formal of speech and of dignified mien ; thrifty without meanness, just if not generous ; honest with- out policy and of splendid courage; sparing not the rod of discipline, yet shrinking from no self-sacrifice; affectionate in deed rather than in word ; loyal to the core, but a rebel on just provocation ; intolerant, perchance, because he had not been tolerated; God fearing, yet fearing God; exultant in self-degradation ; a sinner by conviction, while a saint in daily life. But who shall say that this man when he walked alone through the perils of the forest or bared his head with reverence under the stars of his lonely night did not feel and know that he was near his God and that God was very near to him.
And the modest wife of our friend, sharer of his toil and privation ; a cheery partner in his solitary life; anxiety her daily companion; fear of beast or savage haunting her sleeping and waking hours. Far from neighbor or friend, her life to bake and brew, to weave the cloth, and fashion the garment.
How fervent the devotion that suffered her to forget the comforts of her old home; how splendid the faith that con- quered regrets for the pleasant paths her feet had trod, and gave her visions of the free and happy homes they were building for their children and their children's children.
In the wilderness came their cry : " O God we have heard with our ears and our fathers have declared unto us the noble works that thou didst in their days and in the old time before them," and truly did their Lord "arise, help and deliver them."
The Framingham of today is the fruit of their labor and the fruition of their hope.
Our friends were matter-of-fact people, by force of circum- stances and situation. The stress and surge of life left its mark on face and character. They were plain of speech and
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practical of thought. There was scant food for poetry in their life, when their primer of imagination was the match- less rhythms of the book of Job or the exultant psalms that David sang to the Hebrews, and their sole taste of fiction the great allegories which Bunyan penned in Bedford jail.
There was not probably a volume of Shakespeare in the settlement, and they would not have read it if there had been. Addison had not penned the " Spectator," Emanuel Sweden- borg, a boy of twelve, had not dreamed of the New Jeru- salem. Jonathan Swift had not written those tales which are at once nursery classics and masterful satires. Pope was a schoolboy. Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards were in their cradles. They had never heard of the "Vicar of Wakefield " ; for them "no curfew bell had tolled the knell of parting day." But Martha Hemenway was keeping a dame school at her house, and teaching the boys and girls to read and write.
They had not Stern, or Sheridan, or Burke, or Sam Johnson for models, but I commend you to read their several petitions for acts of incorporation, which you will find in Mr. Temple's History of Framingham, for samples of good English.
They were Puritans, and were working out the vital principle of Puritanism, the right of every man to stand face to face with God, and to be judged only by him.
Their fathers had fled from Presbytery and bishop. They sought liberty in civil as well as religious life. Liberty to think, liberty to speak, liberty to read, liberty to interpret, liberty to dissent, liberty to rebel. Their independence worked out a strength and sturdiness of character which begot a race of strong-minded, resolute men.
Consider their surroundings. They were the frontier settlement on the west, nothing beyond them but the lodge- ment in the Connecticut Valley.
The strife with the Indians had only ended with the death of King Philip in 1676.
The time was too short to have effaced the vivid memory of the massacre of the Eames family on the slope of Mount Wayte, within a stone's throw of the spot on which we stand today.
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The farmer went afield or the family ventured from home only under the protection of the musket.
With danger lurking in the shade of every wood, was there occasion for merry-making and jollity ?
They were pioneers - each house erected by the owner, with help of neighbor, from the logs hewn by his own axe.
The field for grain was to be redeemed from the forest. Was there time for recreation and social pleasure ?
Their Lord's day service was held in the plain, bare meet- ing-house, without the inspiration of lengthening nave and aisle, the shadow of fretted column, or the softened light through cathedral glass.
No solemn organ's peal to lift the soul from self. They sang the paraphrased psalm or a hymn from the Bay psalm book as lined out by the deacon.
They were not saints, and did not claim to be. Neither did they admit the claim of others to canonization. They acknowledged themselves sinners, and sometimes appeared to be proud of it, but they would insist on the right to work out their own salvation in their own way; though slow, perchance, to accord the like privilege to others.
William Blackstone, the first settler of Boston, said, with a good round oath, that lie would as soon be ruled by Lords Bishops as by Lords Brethren.
We must remember that their spiritual ancestors when banished from England found refuge at Geneva and sat at the feet of John Calvin.
Here is the covenant of their first church : " We do, under a soul-humbling and abasing sense of our utter unworthiness of so great a privilege, accept of God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost for our God in covenant with us, promising that we will walk together in a Church State, as becomes saints, according to the rules of his holy word, submitting ourselves and our seed unto the government of the Lord Jesus Christ, as king of his Church."
These are the freemen whom the General Court of the province incorporated in June, 1700, as the " Inhabitants of the Town of Framingham," to establish on the southern frontier of Middlesex county a town which shall work out in
Old Town House Erected 1808
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a body politic, in the spirit of the Bay Colony Charter of 1629 and under the lines of the Body of Liberties of 1641, the development of the " New England idea."
Let us see how they did it.
At their first town meeting, August 5, 1700, they chose the necessary town officers and voted money to build a meeting-house.
At the second town meeting they appointed a committee to see if Mr. John Swift would abide as their minister, and he did abide for forty-four years.
March 31, 1701, they voted to gather ten pounds in money, by way of rate, for furnishing the meeting-house.
In 1702 they built a pound for wayward cattle.
In 1703 they built stocks for wayward men, and, as was the custom, they set them before the meeting-house.
In 1706 they voted that Deacon Joshua Hemenway should be their schoolmaster for the year ensuing.
They established " dame schools," and these dames in the quiet of their own homes gathered the young children of their respective neighborhoods for instruction in "reading, writing and sewing."
Primitive kindergartens at Salem End and Stone's Mills and on the sunny slope of Nobscot fourscore and two years before Froebel was born.
Upon the breaking out of Queen Anne's War in 1702, they built four garrison houses, and a sentinel was posted on Bare Hill during the time of public worship on the Sabbath, to give aların in case of the appearance of savages.
In the early years they had laid out many roads, most of them leading to the meeting-house.
I cannot resist a quaint quotation from Temple's History : " The record of its highways is the history of the material growth, public spirit, and the relative importance of a town. When its roads radiate from a common centre, and that centre is the meeting-house, you will commonly find an intelligent, moral and religious as well as thriving com- munity. Where the roads mainly lead through or out of town, they give sufficient warning to strangers to continue their journey."
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In 1735 the new meeting-house was built on the north- east side of the Centre common. A committee of seven was appointed to provide for the raising. A part of this provision was "one barrell of rum, three barrells of cyder, and six barrells of beer, for such only as labor in the raising."
The town was called upon for its quota of soldiers in the several French and Indian wars, and the response was always prompt.
I cannot detail the active part the citizens took in the approaching struggle of the American Revolution.
The town records are full of patriotic sentiment and action. One hundred and fifty-three minutemen and militia marched to Concord and Cambridge on April 19, 1775.
In 1792 the Framingham Academy was established. I could not excuse to this audience a neglect to refer to this, one of the first in time and reputation of the older system of schools for higher education.
It became the centre of educational life for this section of the state. It was a helpful inspiration to the social and literary life of the town in all the years of its existence.
A host of grateful pupils still live to acknowledge their debt of gratitude, and we may be pardoned if we indulge in the privilege of age, and insist that modern schools have made but questionable advance upon the methods of the academies of earlier generations.
As early as 1785 steps were taken to establish a public library.
The last acres of the "common lands" were sold, and the proceeds were invested in books; another instance of ini- tiative, rather than imitative, municipal action, which helped to make our town an acknowledged leader in the last century in the higher development of town life.
From this humble beginning, supplemented through these later years by private gifts and public appropriations, flows now the stream of daily beneficence to every household from the open doors of your free public library.
The town was early divided into districts, and provision made in each for a grammar school.
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I know there are many in this audience, either home- dwellers, or men and women who have gathered at our jubilee from their new home in other states, whose memory goes back to these district schools with appreciative gratitude.
If there was time I should welcome the opportunity to recall reminiscences of old No. 4 and No. 5, and bring back to you the days when the rivalry between these schools was an added incentive to the best development of our study.
We went out from their plainly furnished rooms boys and girls well instructed in the scope of the education of those days,-an education whose limitations were more than corrected by the thoroughness attained in practical lines.
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