USA > Massachusetts > Norfolk County > Needham > Needham's bicentennial celebration; a record of the exercises and a memorial of the celebration at Needham, Massachusetts, on the two hundredth anniversary of it's incorporation. Pub. by the Celebration committee; > Part 6
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Influenced, I will freely admit, by these arguments and illustrations, I subsequently prepared and delivered
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the address on the occasion in question,-I helped plant another milestone. 'All things come to him who waits,' and so, amid present indifference, my appeal then was to the next century, even to a century later than the twentieth. So now, in your own case, this town will presently celebrate its three hundredth anni- versary; indeed, it is just as certain that Needham either by itself or as part of some larger municipality, will be here and will celebrate in 2011 as it is that not one of us will be here then. And why may it not well be that in the year 2111, above our very gravestones crumbling, those dwelling here may again rest for a space as they come to the four hundredth milestone, and in doing so hunt up the record of this very day, now drawing to its close, just as twenty years ago I at Quincy hunted up the sermons of the Rev. John Hancock, dwelling for the moment with curiosity and deepest interest on that memorial of a remote past,- clasping hands, so to speak, across two centuries.
Yet while, in face of this presentation I then at Quincy withdrew my objections to a formal oration or historical address, I could not fail to reflect on what was appropriate to such occasions; nor can I now but revert in memory to an experience I at a later day had, when a distinguished gentleman from a distant State, in- vited to deliver an address on the centennial of a certain town in a neighboring county, instead of dilating on that which had an application to the family he was address- ing, or was appropriate to that place and such an oc- casion, somewhat surprised, and I am obliged to say, a little fatigued us, by a long and to a certain degree, interesting discourse upon some historical event which had, considerably over a century before, been connected with the development of a portion of the mighty West- the Ordinance of 1787, I think it was. Indisputably good in its way, what he said certainly did not concern
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the particular community then observing its natal festival-its peculiar day of fete. That experience it behooves me to bear freshly in mind to-night.
But, let me now again premise and distinctly re- peat, I am not here to instruct you this evening on your local history; that is a subject with which I pro- fess no familiarity. Moreover, did I attempt so doing I would be trespassing on the province of the gentleman who is to follow me. I shall dwell, therefore, as I have already told you, largely on generalities; and, to illus- trate what I mean by generalities, I will begin by going far back.
You have heard, possibly, of that advocate who in a court of law began his argument with a reference to Adam and the garden of Eden, and was met with a despairing appeal from the Court to begin at least with the deluge. But I propose to go back beyond the del- uge,-back even of Adam and Eden-far beyond both. They, in comparison, are of yesterday. The late Dr. Holmes was once asked by an anxious mother at what age the education of a child should begin; with that incisive wit always characteristic of him, the genial Autocrat replied, 'Madam, it should begin about a hundred and fifty years before it is born.'
There is much truth in that; and it has a special application to our New England towns. I propose to apply it on this two hundredth anniversary. When did the education, so to speak, of Needham begin? When was its future destiny fixed for it? You will possibly be surprised when I tell you it began as near as can be ascertained about eight thousand years ago. In other words, there is a feature connected with these celebrations to which my attention has twice been called, though, so far as I am aware, no one but my- self has ever in these connections drawn attention to it; yet it is a thing which most vitally effects the whole
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present life of the place. How many in this audience, -intelligent, school-taught, lecture-going, browsers among the books of your Public Library,-how many, I say, of those here realize that in the case of your Needham of to-day, its products, its industries, the lines on which it has developed, and its modes of life, were all pre-destined? In other words, its future of to-day,-your present,-was fixed for it by events and processes slowly occurring during uncounted ages prior to the first records of the human race; but processes and events which, with a little observation and study, we can still approximately trace. They are inscribed largely and legibly on the face of the land, in its hills and valleys, rocks and soil, have we only patience to read the language and signs in which they are written. But let me find an illustration of what I mean in my own case,-the town in which I live, the place on which I dwell. Lincoln, in Middlesex county, is some twenty miles only from here. In the case of Lincoln, as in the case of Needham, the past divides itself into two por- tions,-the pre-historic, and the historic; and the historic is a mere fringe on the garment of which the pre-his- toric constitutes immeasurably the more considerable portion. Our records in Lincoln, yours here in Need- ham, our most remote traditions even, are but of yester- day. Ours, there, go back to 1744, a couple of centuries possibly at most, covering the lives of perhaps six generations of children of the soil. In the case of Need- ham, as in the case of Lincoln, behind that stretches a vast unknown,-a veritable time-Sahara. To the historian, properly speaking, that time-Sahara will remain forever a sealed book; but the geologist has to a degree explored it. It stretches back to that remote Ice Age which gave to Massachusetts, as a geographical expression, the character it bears to-day. Then was dictated in advance for each locality what should be
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the products of its soil, the vocations of its people, the lines of its thoroughfares, the phases of its development. So and then, commerce was decreed to Boston; a man- ufacturing industry for Lowell and Lawrence; agricul- ture for the valleys of the Connecticut and of the Con- cord. And, needless to add, if you here in Needham went intelligently back in your investigations, you would find in these peculiarities of the soil, drainage and climate the reason for the industries which have here grown up. In your homes, in your vocations, and in your goings to and fro in the field and the pasture, in locating a way or a mill, in choosing a site for a house, you do but follow the lines laid down for you in advance, whether the lines of least resis- tance, or those of beauty and of grace,-lines laid down for us here in New Enlgand long before the le- gend of Eden assumed shape in the minds and imagin- ations of the children of Israel.
Formerly this was not so. In the times of our fathers the scientific study of the earth, and of the physical changes it has undergone was undreamed of. The first chapter of the book of Genesis disposed of all that, and disposed of it summarily and finally. It was all delightfully simple. The earth was six thousand years old; it was created in six days, it and all its ani- mal life, including, of course, mankind; and all, whether animate or inanimate, pratically in the form in which we now know it. To question this legend was impious. The deluge of Noah was accepted as an historic fact. On the other hand, the actual occurrence of an ice age was a thing not yet dreamed of, even by the most ad- vanced and skeptical of scientists.
Formerly, the great ice age which gave shape to all this region, including your town of Needham, was supposed to have occurred hundreds of thousands of years ago. Become wiser now as the result of closer
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and more accurate observation, we know that, however long this ice age may have endured, it passed away and the earth hereabouts assumed its present shape at a comparatively recent date, some 8000 years ago per- haps. Prior to that, instead of being some ten or a dozen miles from the ocean, Needham was probably fifty miles from it, while its altitude above the sea was more than twice what it now is. Boston was then forty miles inland, and a large river with its affluents, predecessor of the Merrimac, drained the country hereabouts. Flowing down from the New Hampshire hills, it found an outlet, it is surmised, not where the Merrimac now empties itself, but through this, the town of Needham, and down the valley of the Charles. Then came the ice age, and during centuries unnum- bered, New England was what northern Greenland and the region about the pole now is,-one unbroken area of frozen matter, its surface dotted by boulders, mov- ing towards the southeast in silent, pitiless march. This indescribable desolation was, it is supposed, a mile or more in solid depth, overtopping the summits of your hills by several thousand feet. When all this region, the crest of Mt. Washington even, was sub- merged by this sea of ice, Needham lay here, crushed and mute under a superincumbent burden of to us inconceivable thickness and weight. Gradually, after a lapse of years concerning which we cannot even form an estimate, from causes which will probably never be ascertained, climatic changes came about, and the ice sheet began to melt away. Its frontier, at the period of greatest development, had been some forty miles east of Nantucket and south of Cape Cod, some 100 to 130 miles from Needham. Then as fold by fold it re- ceded, wasting away under altered climatic influences, the continent beneath it emerged, assuming as it did so a wholly new contour.
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I have said that the final emergence of the New England we know may have occurred at a comparatively recent period-not more than 8000 years ago. Yet in comparison with 8000 years how wretchedly small a few scant centuries of municipal life appear,- a fringe scarce bordering a garment of unmeasured size. When the emergence took place, the water sheds, because of the sheer weight imposed by the ice upon the crust of the earth, were no longer as they had been before, the brooks and streams finding new channels and out- lets. The interior had become the seaboard, and the old seaboard marked the edge of what are known as deep-sea soundings, some fifty miles beyond our present coast. In the further interior the contour of the con- tinent had undergone a total change. The former surface had been ground down or scraped away, the hills had been denuded, the valleys filled up. Almost everything had been displaced. When not gouged away, the soil had been bodily lifted up and carried into remote regions-the counties of Barnstable and Plymouth, or perhaps, borne still further on, had liter- ally been emptied into the sea.
I am not sufficiently familiar with the region here- abouts to venture even a surmise as to its former as- pect or the reason of its present conditions. I can, however, find an illustration in my own case which could probably be duplicated in any of the sister towns. In Lincoln the house in which I live faces a lake into which and from which flows a river, the Sudbury,-one of the two streams which lower down become known as the Concord, and as such meanders into the Merri- mac. The sheet of water before my windows is known as Fairhaven Bay. I live, in fact, at the bottom of what was once a glacial lake of very considerable size, Fairhaven Bay being the last residuum of what was left when the barriers dissolved and the glacial lake
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drained away. All this can be read, and I have daily occasion to study it, in every feature of the property on which I dwell. The soil reflects its origin; it is little but sand and marl, with here and there a boulder. It is filled with kames and hollows,-askers and sand- plains, as the geologists term them,-indicating points where glacial rivers deposited their sediment, or the ice, melting away, left a cavity in the earth. The trees and products of the soil reflect their origin. With no true pasture land, there is hardly any accumulation of loom. The oak and the pine in all their varieties are indigenous. From the time the ice receded the uses to which that territory could be put were fore- ordained. To those uses it is put to-day.
Unquestionably it is the same with Needham as with Lincoln. Study your soil and the contour of your town, and you read your destiny. Yet until within the memory of those now living this, so closely iden- tified with our daily being, was a study not conceived of as possible.
Passing on from that which is pre-historic,- from its vagueness, its immensity, and the well-nigh inconceivable duration and force of powers at work in it, to me in many respects far the more interesting of the two periods,-passing on, I say, from the pre-historic, we come to the historic, that of yesterday, in which Needham at last became known as such. For 8000 years or thereabouts the forest had covered the land, its sole occupants the wild man and its animal life. At last you appeared, and, in 1711, only two centuries back, the locality assumed the name by which you have since as a community been known.
On the 5th of November, 1711, the record tells us Needham, theretofore during almost a century part of Dedham, was incorporated as an independent political entity. But even 1711 takes us somewhat
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far back-back into that period of human tradition lying far beyond the memory of even the oldest of inhabitants. This fact is very forcibly brought home to us when we here in the 20th century recall, or try to recall, the events and historic characters associated with that earlier portion of the 18th. Familiar per- haps as household words, they yet come to us as echoes more or less faint, and generally a good deal more so, from a very remote past. 'Who lived then ?- What occurred?' In Europe, it was the age of Queen Anne in England, and Louis, fourteenth of that name, in France; it was the period of the wars of Marlborough,- the battle of Blenheim had been fought only seven years before Needham was incorporated; was less re- mote from the men of that period than San Juan Hill is from us. So far as the English tongue was concerned, Joseph Addison and Alexander Pope were the two great literary lights of the day; but, strange to say, the one book or name of that period which has come down to us as a veritable and indisputable household word is Robinson Crusoe. Daniel Defoe was fifty years old in 1711, and is now more alive to us than any event or name of Needham's natal period; while Robinson Cru- soe, coming into existence seven years later, in 1719, is now probably a familiar at every hearth-stone. But if we bear little of that time in memory, what little we do so bear is European. Our own history during the first half of the 17th century is a blank,-an absolute void. Who here, for instance, can give the name even of that Governor of provincial Massachusetts who af- fixed his signature to Needham's act of incorporation,- much more, who could give any account of him? Were his name given, who could mention a single one of his contemporaries? It is a forgotten time; generations have passed out of mind. Indeed the very grave-stones in your burying ground, dating from that period, have crumbled away, or ceased to be legible.
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Nor, indeed, is this in any way surprising; much less does it constitute ground for reproach. The mem- ory of that period, and, for that matter, of the first half of the eighteenth century, has been obliterated, first, by the succeeding period of greater historic interest connected with what is known as our Revolutionary troubles, and, next, by the period when Massachusetts, become a Commonwealth, as one of a sisterhood of states took part in the War of Secession. What is known, therefore, as the provincial period of Massa- chusetts,-that is the period from 1684, when the first charter was vacated, to 1780, when the present consti- tution was adopted, is a period of slow growth, distinctly lacking in everything which goes to the making of his- torical interest. A century of small things and small issues, the succession of men who then, by appointment from London, filled the office of Governor, has so en- tirely passed out of memory that, with the exceptions of Thomas Hutchinson and Major General Thomas Gage, not one could be named by the average Massa- chusetts inhabitant. In the case of Needham, a certain special interest does, however, as I have said, attach to Gov. Joseph Dudley, for his was the name affixed to your act of incorporation, passed in the ninth year of his administration. I propose consequently, for this reason, to exhume, as it were, Gov. Dudley, and say a few words concerning him. A son of old Thomas Dud- ley, who came over before Gov. Winthrop, and was in fact the first Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, Joseph Dudley, a graduate of Harvard, was in his day an accomplished provincial gentleman,-a man of ability and a man of note. In that one of the Legends of the Province House, entitled "Howe's Masquerade," Hawthorne has given us a description of him-brief, but graphic and to the point. As, in that tale, he came forward in the funeral procession of governors of New
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England, descending the staircase of the Province House to King George's funeral dirge, Hawthorne describes him as a man with a 'thoughtful, anxious, and somewhat crafty expression of face; and in spite of his loftiness of manner, which was evidently the result of an ambitious spirit and of long continuance in high stations, he seemed not incapable of cringing to a greater than himself.' First and last Massachusetts has numbered considerably over sixty Governors, whether of colony, Province or Commonwealth, and Joseph Dudley occupied the chair of state longest of them all. When he died in 1720-the year of the famous South Sea Bubble -the Boston News-Letter referred to him as having been 'a singular honor to his country, and in many respects the glory of it; early its darling, always its ornament, and in his age its crown.' Since then, however, the historians of our own time have dealt somewhat harshly with him; the last, and best informed thus summing up the man :- 'To judge Dud- ley's career by the accusations of his enemies would be manifestly unfair. To judge him in the light of the twentieth century, when the colonies have become in- dependent, would be equally unfair. As has been said, his life fell in the middle period, when dependence on England was diminishing and independence was not yet possible. .Though his character was lack- ing in greatness, and his actions were often tainted by self-seeking, though his aims were those of an Eng- lish official and his ideals opposed to those of his fellow- colonists, his long career proves him to have been capable as an administrator and efficient as a servant of the crown.'
Leaving him whose name is affixed to the parch- ment which converted Needham from being a Precinct into being a Town, and passing to other topics most usually dwelt upon on these occasions, I now want to
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propound some queries. 'Why,' I would first like to ask, 'is it that such extreme prominence is in anniver- sary addresses almost invariably given to times and episodes connected with wars and military operations?' Take for instance your own case :- Needham boasts a corporate and continuous history of 200 years. This, as such things go, is a very respectable antiquity; and during that time its women have never heard an In- dian's warwhoop, or seen the smoke of an enemy's camp- fire. In point of fact, no war or its operations, its successes or its reverses, since the death of him known in our annals as King Philip, has exercised any direct influence on Needham's history, or affected to any appreciable extent the town's development. King Philip met his death in 1676. In the War of Secession as in Queen Anne's War, in the French wars, and in the War of Independence, though in far less degree com- paratively to population and resources in the War of Secession than in any one of the others named, Need- ham doubtless was called on for contributions in ma- terial, in money, and in men. But after those struggles, as during them, Needham's life moved on absolutely undisturbed in the even tenor of its wonted way,- quite unchanged. The same type of people lived in their customary manner, pursuing the established oc- cupations; generations were born, went to school, were married and had offspring, grew old and died, as their fathers and mothers had done before them, as their sons and daughters were to do after them. A few of the younger men-possibly one in ten of the entire population-responded to the long-intervalled calls to arms; but of the great, far-away events in which those men took part only echoes reached the town; and yet what the town did in connection with those memorable but distant events becomes in every address and in every historical narrative the staple of the story. This,
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I submit, is not as it should be. In fact, it has in it no local coloring at all.
Thus with Needham as with other Massachusetts towns, the expeditions and battles, whether of 1711, of 1775 or of 1861, and the sufferings and sacrifices incident thereto were not momentous factors of fate. We remember very freshly the conflicts and anxieties of the Civil War,-monuments commemorating those of the town who fell in it are seen on almost every training ground,-and most properly there seen; for, since 1865, we have waxed numerous and rich ;- but, if the his- torical truth were uncovered, it would probably be found that the great, though wholly abortive, Quebec expedition of 1711-then very real, now sunk in abso- lute oblivion-came home to Needham closest and hardest of all those trials. Then it was that an expedi- tionary force of some 60 vessels, destined to carry 10,000 men, was assembled at Boston, and Governor Dudley by proclamation called on the selectmen of the towns to send in each day meat and vegetables sufficient for their sustenance. An issue of bills-of-credit,-the irredeemable paper money of the provincial period- was made; a levy of military efficients was ordered; a price was put on provisions; and the authorizing of a naval press-gang was seriously considered. Recourse to measures such as these, except in the matter of paper money, was never had during either the war of Inde- pendence or the Civil War. And four months later when the expedition, overwhelmed by disaster, re- turned in defeat, we read that 'the consternation, as as well as the disappointment, was extreme.'
And yet, all this to the contrary notwithstanding, as I view and interpret the record of the two centuries which have since elapsed, there has occurred in them, so far as Needham is concerned, but one very consider- able event, far reaching, all pervading in its influence,-
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but one event dividing by a line of demarcation-a line clear and unmistakable the old from the new. The year 1834 was by this made memorable.
Happening on the 7th of July seventy-seven years ago, who among Needham's inhabitants now living remembers that occasion? Doubtless some such there are among your octogenarians; but I greatly question if one is here present. It so chances, however, that over the life-time of a generation ago I had occasion to look up the incidents of that day and to write an account of what took place. This I propose now to contribute to your celebration-a leaf, and an import- ant one, in Needham's local history.
Throughout the year 1833 the railroad from Bos- ton to Worcester had been in course of construction; and one day, in the latter part of March, 1834, the first locomotive ever used in Massachusetts was set in motion. The readers of the Boston Daily Advertiser were then advised that 'the rails are laid, from Boston to Newton, a distance of nine or ten miles, to which place it is proposed to run the passenger cars as soon as two locomotives shall be in readiness, so as to ensure regularity. One locomotive, called the Meteor, has been partially tried and will probably be in readiness in a few days; the second, called the Rocket, is waiting the arrival of the builder for subjecting it to a trial, and the third it is hoped will be ready by the first of May.' The last name locomotive, the Rocket, had been constructed in the shops of the Stephensons at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in England, and "the builder" whose arrival was thus anxiously looked for must have been an English mechanic specially sent out to super- intend the putting of it in operation.
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