USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Gloucester > Memorial of the celebration of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the incorporation of the town of Gloucester, Mass. August, 1892 > Part 10
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Between the days of Conant and the coming of Blynman our his- tory has a dim, uncertain record. One hundred years ago, there was " an ancient manuscript " alluded to by the venerable Parson Forbes in a dedicatory address, which doubtless contained many references to this interregnum. But the valued document is no longer extant. Where these unknown settlers lived, who they were, what they did, is entirely matter of conjecture, except that they "met and carried on
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the worship of God among themselves." If they had a meeting house, as may be supposed from this reference to their religious habits, and also from an obscure record in our town books, it was somewhere on the elevation of land on the road to the Town Parish. If such were the site, there was a fitness in it, for from its roof - it had no belfry --- could be seen the ancient " Fisherman's Field," the winding of the tidal river, along which, at its upper and rockier end, some houses were afterward built, and the distant sand dunes of Coffin's Beach and Annis- quam. The harbor with its island, and Eastern Point - not lighted for many years afterward - with its pebbly coves, were also in sight, and wherever on the shore or among the hills those dwellers of 1633 and thereabout had their hamlet, the house erected for the worship of Almighty God stood over it as the symbol of protection and of peace.
In 1639 the General Court provides for the establishment here of Mr. Maurice Thomson and other fishermen. But Thomson does not come. A house is built for him, and one Rashley was chaplain here. Some travellers by sea in that early time in sailing by our harbor observed a house standing near the shore. But no occupant is at hand and the signs of human life are few. There is evidently no definite purpose or unity of interest. The time has not come for a permanent Gloucester.
Whatever reason may have existed for the disbanding of the settlers of 1623-24, and for the failure of their attempt to establish them- selves here, none of these causes could operate to intercept the new endeavor of 1642. Aside from the fact that for ten years or more there had been some families residing here, there is a host of additional items which make us conclude that the new intention will not fail. Towns and townships are in the air. There is a new and decided impulse in the life of the colony. The period of uncertainty has passed. Immigrations are more frequent. The people have become fixed in their ideas of progress. The winter with its frosty lines of disaster is gone, and although there is much of struggle ahead, the first songs of the summer are heard. The arrival of John Endicott, in 1628, with his company of sixty, gave permanence to the settlement of Salem, and after the royal charter was granted to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629 there came to Salem nearly four hundred persons more, so that by 1630, upwards of one thousand people had arrived in New England with the resolute purpose of making here their home.
In the year of our charter, Charlestown was settled, and in 1630 Boston and Dorchester and Watertown began their history, while Cambridge followed in 1631. These settlements gave an air of per-
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manence to the colony and each new hamlet fortified those which preceded it. Taxes were assessed for the general defence, and Water- town showed the true English mettle and declared itself genuine Yankee by asserting the immemorial right of objecting, on the ground that general consent must be had before a general tax can be levied. In 1633, we have the General Court and in 1636 the college, for by this time twenty villages had gotten local habitations and names, and four thousand people are in them, for whom due legislation must be made, and whose civic and social interests demand Christian learning as well as a Christian church. The attempt to wrest away from the settlers their rights of property has come to a failure, but Boston Harbor has been fortified and guns have been set up on Dorchester and Charles- town heights because the threat has been made to invade the liberties of this young republic. Endicott has expressed the defiant word of the colonists by cutting the cross of St. George from the royal flag, and the noble nature of Harry Vane has infused into the people something of the vigor which flamed in his own illustrious blood.
The spirit of colonization is abroad. The settlements of the Bay, not over populated, are lessening their own numbers to begin Windsor and Wethersfield and Hartford and New Haven. Here in our own county townships are springing up, every one of which makes more certain that which follows.
Lynn is founded in 1629 and Saugus comes in 1630. In 1634, our neighbor Ipswich had its true beginning, and in the same year the land about Andover was assessed for an inland plantation, and the inhab- itants there were to have three years' immunity from public charges and services of all kinds, military discipline alone excepted. Newbury was settled in 1635. Before 1637, many homes were established at Marblehead, and in 1639 Rev. Ezekiel Rogers and his company were at Rowley. Salisbury began its corporate life in 1640, and at this date the Honorable Court gives power to erect a village at Jeffrey's Creek, now Manchester. 1641 saw the settlement at Haverhill secured, and the same year Strawberry Bank and Dover were added to Massachusetts Bay. The first printing press had been brought into the colony, and thus the local news becomes general. There were signs of commercial life also, for in 1641 Governor Winthrop is quoted as saying that three hundred thousand pounds of dry fish were sent to market. It is time now for Cape Anne to be repopulated. The adjacent territory is well filled with settlers. There is a strong community of interest. The isolated hamlets live like neighbors. The two colonies exchange courtesies and citizens. The stars are in a benignant mood when the
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Rev. Richard Blynman and his friends in 1642 give the birth hour to our favored town.
In Chapter XX. of " Wonder-Working Providence," Mr. Edward Johnson, the author, gives the following quaint and graphic account of the settlement whose years of eventful history we commemorate this day. The chapter is headed thus : "Of the planting of the one and twentieth church of Christ at a town called Glocester." "There was another town and church of Christ erected in the Massachusetts Gov- ernment upon the Northern Cape of the Bay, called Cape Ann, a place of fishing, being peopled with Fishermen till the reverend Mr. Richard Blindman came from a place in Plemouth Patten called Green Har- bour with some few people of his acquaintance and settled down with them, named the town Glocester, and gathered into a Church, being but a small number, about fifty known. They called to office this godly reverend man whose gifts and abilities to handle the word is not inferior to many others, labouring much against the errors of the times, of a sweet humble heavenly carriage ; this town lying out toward the point of the Cape, the access there unto by land becomes uneasy, which was the cause why it was no more populated ; their fishing trade would be very beneficial had they men of Estates to manage it, yet are they not without other means of maintenance having good timber for shipping and a very sufficient builder, but that these times of com- bustion the seas throughout hath hindered much that work, yet there have been vessels built here at the town of late."
And now that Mr. Blynman and his followers are here, and the town has been incorporated and a clerk appointed and a body of com- missioners selected who shall have "jurisdiction in small causes " and the first colonial tax of six pounds and ten shillings has been levied and the municipal life has fairly begun, we may make a brief and inadequate summary of the first century of our history.
The beginning is feeble and the proportions are small. But there is movement along the whole line of the local life. The hundred years are full of critical periods, but resolute men are here, and there are to be no receding steps. The General Court orders that a loan of mus- kets be made to Gloucester, and George Norton, as the eldest sergeant of the militia, is directed to exercise the company in military drill. Arms are kept in every dwelling, and they are taken to the house of God on the Lord's Day. Each family is ordered to have a place for the " breeding of saltpetre," and the youth from ten to sixteen are to be trained to the use of small guns.
The boundaries of Gloucester and Ipswich and of Gloucester and
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Jeffrey's Creek are adjusted, and the meeting house is the base line front which the distances are measured. Seven or eight pounds are paid to satisfy the Indian claim, so that there shall be no injustice done the red man and no insecurity of title remain to affect the white. Highways are constructed for public travel. Saw and grist and fulling mills are built. The wood which seems to cover very largely the whole territory makes a staple for commerce, and that the forests may be preserved no family is allowed to cut more than twenty cords for its own use. In one year (1711) over five hundred cords of wharf wood are shipped to a firm in Boston. In another year (1706) thirty vessels laden with wood are sailing through the Annisquam.
The building of vessels goes forward, and before the first century is done we read of "sloops, canoes, shallops, and boats," which either are launched here or are in use by our people. The first schooner is made here and here receives her quaint and original name. In 1698 a ship is built for the merchants of Boston. Shipwrights are numerous, and all over the town is heard the noise of sawing lumber, of hewing clapboards, of shaping hoop staves and wooden bolts. Both houses and vessels are small, but they are built on honor. Business is pro- moted by the opening of " the Cut," which work Mr. Blynman com- pletes, although the General Court, before his arrival, had made preliminary inspection of the same. Gloucester becomes a lawful port, and is made part of the district of Salem. The fisheries take a new life. Mr .. Dutch seems to have a flake yard at Planters' Neck (1651) and Mr. Duncan is dignified by the title of merchant, because he does an honorable business at the point still called by his name. Wharves are built at Stage Neck, and in the last year of the first cen- tury there are seventy fishing vessels owned by the people of the town. They do business along the shore, and they are engaged in foreign fisheries too at Cape Sable, with the sad and oft told story of death by wreckage and losses by the enemy who "make fearful depredations upon our poor fishermen." Mackerel are admitted to the realm of coinage and are used as a tender in the payment of debts. During the winter months trade is sometimes carried on with the Colonies at the South, and the crews are the men who spend the summers fishing in the Bay or at the Grand Banks.
The pirate fares ill in the hands of these men, who more than once force him to surrender and to lower his unholy flag. Wind and wave on these rough shores toughen the men of the Cape, and they fear nothing on land or sea. They are ready for military expeditions when they are wanted. They love their lowly homes, but they have a hardy
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sense about them and a mind which recognizes the need of stern qualities. Perhaps it was this rough and ready instinct which relieves us of the odium which befell Salem in connection with the witchcraft disorder, for although some of our people were arrested, none became victims of this unhappy episode of foolishness and crime.
Of course, we have an early burial place which for nearly one hundred years received the dust of all our dead. We have a ferry, too, from Trynall Cove to Biskie Island, which, under various forms, was kept in use for almost a century. The first almshouse was opened in 1719, and stood on the southeast side of Governor's Hill.
At different times the common land, both of field and forest, is given out to the settlers, under the judicial charge of the town meeting, which in 1725 makes the final apportionment of the remainder. We have our local inns and taverns, where all the people gather, good and bad, for the circulation of news and incidents of like quality with them- selves. The old Ellery House, in Town Parish, was kept by James Stevens, who, on one occasion, for entertaining the selectmen and furnishing them " licker" for a day, charges the town three pounds, eighteen shillings, two pence, after which convivial discussion of the public matters, the town votes that the selectmen "find themselves." In the famous campaign of 1675, Gloucester is not behind in paying its assessment of nine pounds, nine shillings, and sending into the field a quota of men estimated to be one third or one fourth of all the citizens able to bear arms, and in the Canadian expedition of 1690, so many of our men are engaged that Rev. John Emerson, in a letter, remarks that if some of them be not released, "we must all be forced to leave the town." " We have not men left to keep a watch." Such were the temper and the hardship of the times.
The interests of education are not neglected, for within two years of the beginning, Ezekiel Collins teaches penmanship and other branches of learning, and in doing this work imitates the early shoe- maker and tailor who go about from house to house. The schools have a capricious existence, and at times almost disappear. But the General Court does not forget its high trust as the custodian of all the duties of the people, and with faithful admonition prods the delinquent town whose all-sufficient excuse is its constant poverty. The meeting-house is house-general for all business, and here it is that the early school is kept, and when the first school-house comes into separate existence it is built on the easterly side of the church. The wages of the teacher are not great, say (1698) one shilling and sixpence a day, or, in the case of John Newman, of Wenham (1703-4), the town is to see him
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satisfied for his pains, and if he can collect anything from the young men whom he teaches to " wright and cipher," he is welcome to the extra perquisite. Joshua Moody (1709) is to teach " lattine if scholars appear." The town sends many young men to Harvard, two of whom graduate in 1689, and five others take their first degree before the century closes. And in turn many graduates of Cambridge teach in our early schools. It is probable they gave new impulse to learning, for Sandy Bay wants a school-house of its own in 1725, and ten years later the town is divided into seven districts, that the advantages of the school tax may be more evenly proportioned and enjoyed.
The First Church was, of course, the church of Mr. Blynman and his followers ; but his sensitive nature could not bear the affront of evil- minded men, and soon he took his departure from the town. The charm of his gentle spirit drew many of the settlers away with him, but the fire on the sacred altar does not languish.
Great as had been the wisdom and efficiency of the pastor during the eight or nine years of his service, there was too much indepen- dence in the people to allow his departure to imperil the cause of religion. A religious tumult often quickens the vigor of dilatory saints. Ten acres of land are at once set apart for the teaching elders and, as if to give a kind of permanence to the relation, one half an acre for a dwelling house and land on the marsh besides.
William Perkins is soon here to minister to the people, and when, after a brief stay, he removes to Topsfield, it appears that Thomas Millet and William Stevens have charge of the spiritual interests of the town. Then Rev. John Emerson ( 1661) is installed in due form, and new stability invests our ecclesiastical life, for his ministry of forty years sees his congregation increase three-fold.
The pastoral career of Mr. White, his successor, seems equally happy, for although the West Parish and the North Parish at Annis- quam are set off, and preaching, at least for a part of the year, is main- tained at Sandy Bay, and the old First Parish is divided, all during his ministry, yet the year which dates the close of the first century finds his church with a membership of two hundred and sixty.
The same stalwart spirit which contested the encroachment of the mother country, one hundred years afterwards, comes to the surface in 1688, when the selectmen, standing in a vicarious service for the whole town and expressing the mind of the entire people, make common cause with their neighbors of Ipswich and other towns against the cruel, unprincipled, and defiant government of Andros. For four long, harsh years the people of this colony lost their right of self-government.
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James the Second, that fantastic and foolish king, had denied to the people the privilege of choosing their governor, and had appointed this man who, with aid of a part of his council, less than a majority, swept, with the odious breath of the Stuarts, into temporary oblivion the whole body of laws and customs the people had adopted. The taxes were burdensome and unjust, and resistance in an open and bold form was made to them. Some of the leaders in this courageous movement were imprisoned. One officer escaped with a fine. But the sentiment of the people was a unit, and the town paid without a murmur, in a day when the resources of the villagers were limited, the whole expense incurred by its officers, amounting to above forty-two pounds. Such was the first offering Gloucester laid on the altar of freedom.
During the century of which we are speaking, the population had received gains and suffered losses by the various events incident to our New England settlements. Mr. Babson gives it as his opinion that about one third of those who came with Mr. Blynman remained in the town and found here their final resting place.
Of the early settlers, thirty had their homes at the Harbor and forty lived on the "neck of house lots," in what is now "up in town." Soon after 165 1, we find people at or near Little Good Harbor Beach, at Walker's Creek, at Little River, at Fresh Water Cove, and at Annisquam.
In 1656, Haraden is permanently located at Annisquam, and between 1695 and 1700, Babson has land at Straitsmouth, and Richard Tarr and John Pool are neighbors at Sandy Bay. In 1742, the popu- lation is supposed to be fourteen hundred. Losses in war, and heavy and heart-breaking losses at sea, have diminished the people. Besides, numbers have gone to Portland (1727-28) to encourage the settlement there, and New Gloucester is largely peopled from our families (1736).
We must have had additions, too, else it would not be possible to account for the growth, for in 1690 it is thought that there were but ninety men fit for military service. The harbor had eclipsed the set- tlement on the river, and in 1738 it had become the more important factor in our commercial as well as in our social life. It had been a century of trial and pain ; poverty had lessened the vigor of many a frame and dampened the fire of many a heart, and death had taken many a valuable man. But the life had been continued and the growth had gone forward. The work of the modest and patient Blynman had not been in vain.
A study of the phases of life in the colonial age, as developed,
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not only in Gloucester, but also in all the towns of the Bay, and in Plymouth as well, and, in fact, wherever any of the roots of this epoch can be traced, reveals the characteristics of that early era of New England.
They are too marked to escape notice, and they are too interesting to be ignored on an occasion like the present, although they have been frequently rehearsed.
The first colonists were original in their conceptions of civil or public life. They had no models to follow, and hence they were pio- neers in social appliances as well as in the graver matter of religious methods. They did not lean on the town or the State to precede, but they themselves preceded by their own unique ideas, and thus they brought communities and commonwealths into being, and, these, gov- erned by the same simple but uniform impulses, swing into line, and before we are aware, the individual and the local collective bodies are moving under a singularly harmonious form of administration. The town meeting was not at first by statute, but by popular suggestion. It came out of the good sense of the people. To discuss measures which were of common concern, seemed to them an aboriginal right, and the debates which were carried on informally at the homes, where the set- tlers met by day, or in the evening, if the Indian was not near, were lifted by a process of development into a popular assembly in which the debate became general, and no public issue could pass to its final adjustment until due and perhaps undue deliberation had been had concerning it. Before the Plymouth men had been in the land one year, they had had three or four town meetings, and had passed laws for the civil and domestic peace of the colony. Their large and perhaps at times informal assemblies not only gave outlet to the alert sugges- tions of people who were born to think, but they incidentally conferred a dignity on the town itself. It was not with us as in Virginia, where the county seems to have taken the precedence, and the town life is obscured. But the local government was first, and then in due time came the county, invested with such powers as the colonies by statute bestowed upon it. It is said that John Adams told a Virginian that if his people would adopt town meetings, training days, town schools, and ministers, they might have a New England in Virginia. (FISHER.)
In claiming for the New Englander the conception of the town meeting as the arbiter of the public life, it is not forgotten that the ancient Anglo-Saxon, and indeed the Roman and Grecian states, recog- nized the power of the people in large bodies as giving authority to measures of general moment. But the England out of which came
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the men of the Bay knew no such methods of giving momentum to local affairs. The king by divine right had usurped the manifold powers of the people. Government was not even an aristocracy in which the best men came to power. The crown was as likely to fall on the head of an imbecile or a roue as on that of a divinely ordered man. And the weaker he was mentally or morally, the more grinding would be the burden of his ill-descended power. All modern monop- olies, however oppressive, are antedated and outdated by this huge and bitter monopoly of one by which the king declares, " The State, - it is I." The method of government by the whole people, forgotten in the mother realm, and unknown in France, was the revived device of the colonial immigrant. So earnest was he in this conviction that had it been possible he would have governed the colony by an assembly of all the people.
The spirit of contentment under grievous experiences, which marked the life of the early settler, has been noted as most significant. But his purpose was not one of adventure, else when misfortune befell him, or when he had failed to find the river which flowed over sands of gold, we should hear the moanings of disappointment or the minor song of a broken hope. Adventure is in search of what it can find. It is a superficial spirit as compared with the intent of those who are laying the foundation in the wilderness of a spiritual or a civil repub- lic. Perhaps the Dorchester Company was looking too eagerly for dividends, and perhaps it was this which made insecure the fortunes of the men of 1623.
But Mr. Blynman and his company had another purpose. It was not to discover territory - it was to find room in which the conscience might set free its aspirations, repressed under the ecclesiastical bond- age of a restrictive age, that the immigrant came. He was here, as a Moslem would say, "By the Will of God," and seeing the divine hand in the impulse, he could find the divine face in the cloud. No shaft which misfortune sends can make a bleeding wound in such a spirit.
Says Governor Bradford, "It is not with us as with men whom small things can discourage, or small discontentments cause to wish themselves at home again."
The dreary winter piled high its hills of snow; the frost came early to wither the hopes which lay in ripening grain or lingered with capricious grimness to cut down the beginning of the vernal year ; the wild beast made havoc with the poultry and the sheep; the stealthy Indian crept down through the sombre timber to invade the holy peace of the hamlet above which the God of the beginning nation had
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