USA > Massachusetts > Worcester County > Worcester > Rural retrospect: a parallel history of Worcester and its Rural Cemetery > Part 10
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Charles A. Chase had been born near the Cemetery, in a historic house at the junction of Grove and Salisbury Streets. Many years
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BANCROFT
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George Bancroft monument, erected by the United States Government. Governor John Davis stone is at left
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after the Chase family had moved to Nobility Hill, his birthplace became the site for the Armory. His father, Anthony Chase, besides being secretary and president of the Worcester Mutual Fire Insurance Company, had been treasurer of Worcester County for thirty-four years, and in that office his son had succeeded him.
Robert Morris Washburn was secretary and treasurer of Rural for three years. Mr. Washburn, one of seven sons, was a grandson of Charles Washburn, the twin of Ichabod Washburn. At the time of his Rural position he shared a law office with his brother, Charles Grenfill Washburn (later a United States Congressman) in the Slater Building. Robert Morris Washburn himself created attention later as a member of the State Legislature. Afraid of no one or no issue, his wit and satire livened many a dull legislative session.
Mr. Washburn loved a good fight. In the middle of one violent debate, he shouted above the furor: "This is just what I like-a first class ROW." His humor was sometimes caustic, so much so that someone once remarked, "Bob Washburn would rather coin an epigram than keep a friend." But in his colorful way, he contributed so much intense honesty and brilliance that as late as 1956, a newspaper editorial commented: "He must not be forgotten; there is not likely to be another, which is our misfortune."
Typical loyalty to Rural through successive generations is no better represented than by the record of James P. Hamilton, the banker, and Charles A. Hamilton, his lawyer son. Both were Rural Cemetery's auditors. James P. Hamilton served for four years until his death on the very last day of the year of 1912, then his son succeeded him until his own death thirty-nine years later in 1951.
Through all the changes of Rural Cemetery, there had been one constant pull back to the past-Henry W. Miller. Except for two intervals, each lasting for a year, he had been a trustee since 1844 -- covering a span of forty-seven years. He died in 1891, at ninety-one years of age.
For over seventy years he had owned and managed a hardware store on Main Street, exactly where Daniel Waldo had first trained
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him as an apprentice. It was in 1886 that he had sold the business to Smith and Adams, two young men whom he himself had trained. But every day after he retired, he had visited his beloved old store.
It seemed to Henry Miller, and to everyone else, that he had had a good life. He found no slight satisfaction in the knowledge that both his daughters had married brilliantly. Ruth had married United States Senator George F. Hoar and Alice had married William W. Rice, former Worcester Mayor and United States Congressman for eleven years. Folks often said that Henry Miller was the most contented man in the world, that never once was he ever heard to wish anything to be different from what it was-making as eloquent an epitaph as anyone could ever wish to have.
Henry Miller had been one of the famous 1800 boys, mentioned in the first chapter of this book. George Bancroft had been another.
With coincidence too startling for explanation, Henry Miller and George Bancroft died in the same year, after ninety-one years of con- trasting-yet equally productive-living. George Bancroft had wandered far away from Worcester. Henry Miller had scarcely ever strayed away from his own doorstep. But each, in his own way, con- tributed a richness of heritage for Worcester to remember.
No man in the United States had been more respected than George Bancroft. He had spent most of his life in other cities, even in other countries, but when he died, his body was sent back to Worcester-his one true home.
Mr. Bancroft had always loved flowers, especially roses, and the profusion of floral remembrances that arrived in Worcester were appealingly appropriate. They came from every high officer in the land, even from President Harrison. One wreath, displaying the German colors, created conspicuous attention. It had come from William III, the Emperor of Germany, whom George Bancroft had known well during his years as United States Ambassador.
At 10:30 in the morning, when the hearse left the Worcester Union Station, the bells in all the churches and public buildings began to toll and continued their ringing until the procession of eight carriages
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reached Rural Cemetery. As the entourage passed the Court House, the Judge and members of the Bar came outside to stand with uncovered heads, paying their own silent tribute.
Even the children were aware of the significance of the occasion. Each school in the City held "exercises." There was many a boy or girl who later remembered that solemn day, made all the more solemn by their assignments of looking up the facts about Bancroft's career and then reciting them to their classes.
Worcester's most famous citizen was welcomed home at last. Not since childhood days had he lived here. He had made a few brief visits-once to make a political speech, once to choose the burial spot in Rural for his family, sometimes to visit the American Antiquarian Society of which he was vice president. During one visit he had at- tended the Music Festival, and once he had made final arrangements for the $10,000 scholarship fund set up for deserving Worcester high school graduates.
Three Rural trustees were pall bearers at Mr. Bancroft's service- Edward L. Davis, Waldo Lincoln, and Nathaniel Paine. He had been an intimate friend of Edward's father, Isaac Davis; a school-boy play- mate of Waldo's grandfather, Levi Lincoln; and similarly a family friend of Nathaniel Paine.
Bestowing rare honor indeed, the United States Government erected a tall, imposing monument in Rural Cemetery in memory of George Bancroft and his service to the country as Historian, Diplomat, Cabinet member, and Ambassador.
As far as the Cemetery itself was concerned, these were the years of respectability, when tradition did its deep work of weathering. Mem- bership on its Board implied great honor but little responsibility. There seemed to be no need, certainly no urgency, for improvement or extension. No pun intended, the Cemetery had become a dead issue.
When it came to expanding, well, there was simply no place to go. Not long before President Edward L. Davis died in 1912 he mentioned this fact. As he said, "The present boundaries may be considered fixed, the area determined." In 1892 the grounds had been officially sur-
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veyed and determined to be just short of forty acres-thirty-nine and twenty-two hundredths, to be exact.
Mr. Davis, who was president for twenty-four years and trustee for thirty-four, continued his report by summing up the achievements of those years. He told of the backbreaking work of filling the pond and the introduction of water and a sewage system into the grounds. Of course, no report would have been complete without reference to fences, so Mr. Davis told of the new fences around the Cemetery which had been put in. He told, too, of the old iron and stone fences in the Cemetery which had been taken out. He spoke of the healthy condi- tion of the Perpetual Fund. Then, with singular satisfaction, he topped all accomplishments by the announcement that signs had been placed at the entrance of the Cemetery "excluding all automobiles from the sacred grounds." Serenity, at least in the Cemetery, would have its triumph in the social war against the mechanical monsters.
In these quiet years the greatest excitement in Cemetery affairs had probably been caused by the June bugs which descended one summer in bushel-basket quantities. There was also a spirited con- troversy with the City of Worcester about whether or not the house and grounds across the Street, where the janitor lived, should be taxed. The original charter had said that the Corporation was not "liable to taxation." So in 1889, when the City sent a bill for taxes, Cemetery trustees filed what they called a "friendly suit" to determine the legality of the charges. Rural was the victor, and by the rights outlined by Supreme Court was declared to be exempt from taxation.
One of the more spicy episodes of the period came when John Pratt died in 1895. Mr. Pratt had been a partner with his brother, Elnathan, in a business of market gardening. Their farm was on Salisbury Street. In fact, John Pratt had lived in the very house where George Bancroft had once lived. The Pratts had been one of the very first families to market milk and vegetables in the City and had become prosperous and influential.
Elnathan, in as crafty a respect for advertising as a guileless affection for his late brother, had a monument prepared for the family lot in
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ELNATHAN PRATT MARKET-CARDNERS
The Pratt stone which initiated a conflict between convention and commercial advertising
Rural. This monument listed the two names, John and Elnathan Pratt, and underneath as a prominent afterthought came the words: "Market Gardners." In someone's haste, a letter was missed.
Shuddering at the commercial suggestion, Rural's respectable trustees flatly refused to let the monument stand. For sixteen years the stone remained elsewhere and was not allowed to mark the grave until Elnathan himself died in 1911. Then, alas, it was too late to promote much gardening business.
One thing must be said to the credit of the trustees of this period: they finally got the records straight.
For sake of truth, it must be admitted that there had been lapses in regard for records. The original intention had been good. In the By-laws a provision had stated that all names and dates of interments should be entered in a book. But soon after 1839 there had come an interval of five years when no new names at all were written in Rural's own Book of Remembrance. In 1844 the trustecs resolved that there should be more faithfulness in this respect, but in 1860 it was necessary
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to jack themselves up on this point again. At that time, an exhaustive and successful effort was made to gather the necessary data from City Hall and mortician records.
This was all very well. But the unkindest cut of all came in 1895 when a disgruntled workman de- liberately threw away all records for the previous twenty-seven years.
Again an assistant was hired to make tireless efforts to ferret out the missing information. This time a card catalogue arrangement (the same effective system still in ex- Ernest Hansen. Superintendent: 1924- Secretary and Treasurer: 1924- istence) was started. The cards were securely locked in the "com- modious safe" that had been bought in 1891, and the policy of treasuring records was once and for all firmly established for Rural Cemetery.
In 1924 a trustee committee was formed consisting of President William Trowbridge Forbes, George T. Dewey, and Chandler Bullock "to consider the future of the Corporation."
They did it better than they knew. They not only considered it, but assured it, when at the next meeting Ernest Hansen was elected superintendent to fill the place vacated by William Bryant. A few months later Mr. Hansen was also elected secretary and treasurer.
Things began to happen. It seemed to Ernest Hansen that there was no better place than a cemetery in which to bury status quo.
It was he who gave Rural Cemetery a future as well as a past.
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Search for Security
CHAPTER XI
LATE ONE BUSY JUNE MORNING IN 1955, Worcester's sirens screamed in alarm. In less than three minutes, the streets of the City were deserted. A few cars were parked alongside the curbs, but there was no person to be seen.
The nation was testing its defense facilities with "Operation Alert, 1955," a mock enemy attack by nuclear weapons. Fifty-nine cities were involved.
The newspaper that evening reported what had happened in Worcester. Pretended enemy planes had flown over the City and had dropped a simulated bomb just above Lincoln Square. Carrying the pretense of devastation a step further than planned, the bomb significantly even touched the edges of Rural Cemetery.
No incident could more dramatically suggest the changes that had occurred since those earnest days at the beginning of the century when Americans had set out to reform the world.
The massed idealism of a whole country had gone into the waging of World War I. It had been a war to end all war, and when that objective had failed, the dreams had crumbled, too. The first reaction to failure had been a giddy one, the next a corrupt one.
It had taken the jolt of the 1929 crash to wake the nation. Then through the struggling years of a long depression there had been time for sober thoughts, initiating another surge of reform. But again there had been the tumultous interruption of a world war. This time there had been no illusions. The one objective had been to get the bad
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business over with as soon as possible. But when it was theoretically over, people began to wonder if a world war is ever actually over. Some of the boys who served in World War II barely had time to greet their families before they were called back to share in the dispute of Korea.
America's goal at one time had been to grow. Growth had been superseded by the lure of Prosperity, and Prosperity had soon become greedy for Power. The nation had reached all three objectives- Growth, Prosperity, and Power. Before the abrupt halt of immigration in 1935, the country had grown to the point where thoughtful students sometimes despaired of its ever again achieving a homogenity of national consciousness. America had become prosperous, much more than any other land in the world, but at the same time its citizens had become skeptical of the gold they held so precariously. The country had become powerful, but even as its people had admired the Power, it had changed in their hands to Responsibility.
Now the search was for Security-in every area, both material and spiritual-but definitions were hotly debated and seriously questioned. Great atomic forces had been leashed to protect the land, yet men and women were more anxious than ever. Legislation had insured economic security, yet old people still worried. Great grants had boosted educational and recreational facilities, yet youngsters remained unsatisfied.
Worcester had followed these general trends. It had grown, it had prospered, it had had its share of power. Now, in 1955, it had joined the mass push for security.
Worcester had persistently increased in population for almost two hundred years before it stopped growing. By 1945 the census had reached 200,000, and for many years the number gravitated around that peak. This halt in growth was due in part to the restrictions imposed by the immigration quotas set up in 1935. But much of it was due to inclination. There had been a time when it was considered fashionable to congregate in cities. The rich had liked to live extrava- gantly and prominently, so they had lived in the city where they could
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Hurricane havoc in Rural, 1938
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EVERGREEN AVE
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Taylor mausoleum. Path sign typifies simple choice of names for Cemetery streets
have an audience. But by 1955 the stage was empty. The rich were no longer performing, and the audience had grown weary of watching. The Country Club philosophy had done its work. Often forcing suburban towns to face urban problems, people in droves had moved to the country.
In this new preference for all things rural, Rural Cemetery was in high fashion, although by its function it could not be truly said that it had ever gone out of style.
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Worcester had become known as an industrial city, with a post- World War II emphasis on diversification. The City had kept a sharp eye on technological developments. It had helped to produce the theories and practices common to mass production and mass distribu- tion. There were statistics showing that Worcester people had tucked away more money in savings banks, and spent less, than the average American citizen-a fact which might trouble a sales executive a great deal but bothered the thrifty Yankee not a bit.
The City's greatest losses had been suffered not in financial depres- sions but at the hand of Nature, who slapped hard at Worcester several times in a short twenty-year period. Disaster followed disaster, starting with a flood in 1936 and ending with another in 1955. There were hurricanes, three of them, and even a tornado which cost ninety-five lives and fifty-six million dollars' worth of damage.
In the hurricane of 1938 Rural Cemetery, just a hundred years old, took the birthday beating of its life. With mighty close figuring, the wind was off schedule by only two weeks from the very day in September when the Cemetery had been dedicated a hundred years before. It was such a noisy and destructive celebration that the birthday itself was completely forgotten. Next morning the place was a shambles with splintered fences and broken monuments. Not a road was passable, not a tree undamaged. Like groggy giants, almost five hundred uprooted trees lay sprawled over the tombstones they had broken when they fell. Most of these trees-maples, oaks, and ash-had been standing on faithful guard for over a hundred years. Some of them had been planted as late as 1899, when six hundred new trees had been placed on the Cemetery grounds.
In another hurricane, sixteen years later in 1954, Rural sustained a greater loss, this time by the death of one of its trustees, Harry R. Davis.
Mr. Davis was the son of Harry Phillips Davis (prominent in the technical development of the nation's radio industry) who married the daughter of Ransom C. Taylor, Worcester's wealthy realtor. After he died, Mr. Taylor's interests had been carried on and even extended by his son, Forrest W. Taylor, who was also a trustee of Rural
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Cemetery for twenty-five years. For many years, Forrest Taylor had been known to have paid the highest tax of any person or any corpora- tion in the City. He had owned property in five states, but his interests were primarily concentrated in Worcester with estates on Front, Main, Pleasant, Bridge, Spring, Grafton, Providence, and Water Streets.
Mr. Taylor's last building project, the Medical Arts Building, was ironically the place where his nephew, Harry Davis, died in the hurri- cane of 1954. This building, as was much of the Taylor estate, had been left in trust for Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Many Worcester institutions had similarly become endowed through bequests of loyal and generous citizens. The example had been set by early men such as Isaiah Thomas, Daniel Waldo, Ichabod Washburn, and Stephen Salisbury III. Gifts of a later generation bore such names as George Jaques, Jonas G. Clark, Edward L. Davis, David Hale Fanning, Edward A. Goodnow, and George Henry Whit- comb. The Higgins and Gage families must also be listed among the City's chief benefactors. This beneficence was climaxed by the George I. Alden trust set up at the time of Mr. Alden's death in 1926. He had been one of the founders and presidents of Norton Company. By 1955, because of his posthumous generosity, many millions had been contributed to civic and educational institutions.
The families that had been Worcester's leaders in the early days were still represented in the City, but their leadership was not so voluble nor so noticeable. Their quietly sedate routines were inter- rupted mainly when Worcester had a needy cause to support or a cultural project to promote.
No longer were there priorities for privilege or possession. Life was geared for the convenience of the majority-with drugstore sand- wich counters, tourist travel services, paper-backed books, and self- service supermarkets. The great equalizing elements of taxes, high wages, and easy credit had leveled the standards of living. The flashy cars, gleaming kitchen gadgets, and television sets were more often the emblems of the mildly rich, or even sometimes the very poor, than they were of the very rich. The old families retreated farther back
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into the shadowy stillness of the wide, high houses they had inherited from their ancestors, content, with treasured heirlooms and remem- bered decorums, to let someone else fuss over the mechanics of this fast- paced American civilization.
Superficially, the old days would soon have few reminders. Worces- ter was having a drastic face-lifting at many sections of the City, especially at Lincoln Square, Washington Square, and Salem Square. Stores and parking lots were playing musical chairs, with stores moving toward the suburbs and parking lots sprouting up in the center of the City. The new Massachusetts toll road and Worcester's air terminal on a high western hill signified the tremendous changes in transporta- tion that had occurred within the last thirty years. A new Court House going up, rumors of Mechanics Hall coming down-both were signs of a City-wide renovation.
The urge for City house cleaning was indicative of a deeper drive. This time it was not so much in the nature of dictatorial reforms out- lined for the neighbors. It was rather a constructive attempt to work together for mutual advantage, toward what seemed, at the moment, to be right.
Never before had people cared so much. There were signs that perhaps this honest concern might dissipate the problems of materialism in a flood of spiritual goodwill. There were high hopes that Man's good judgment, in time, might catch up with his ingenuity.
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CHAPTER XII
"A HORSE AND A BADLY RUN-DOWN CEMETERY" was the way Ernest Hansen remembered it twenty-five years later.
He was not far wrong. It was even a sick horse.
When in 1924 Ernest Hansen took over the responsibility of Rural Cemetery, there was little with which to work. To make things even more difficult, there was no money with which he could hope to make immediate improvements. Funds were dangerously low, with the general fund nine thousand dollars in debt. The only concession the trustees made to his new regime was to buy a Ford truck to replace the unsteady horse.
Ernest Hansen did the obvious things first, using whatever resources the moment had to offer. He straightened out the records, tidied the grounds, organized the work schedule. He adapted a plot card system which indicated, at a glance, all pertinent details about the purchase, deaths, dates, markers, and location of every lot in the Cemetery. Then he numbered each of these lots on a cement marker, and on that marker indicated the kind of care to which the lot was entitled. He substituted flat stones for the old stone posts that had protruded from the corners of almost every lot presenting an obstacle course to the lawnmowers. He also introduced a plan whereby concrete vaults
Left: Ellen Rogers Kennedy Memorial Chapel
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were to be substituted for the wooden boxes that had always been used. This automatically cut down the cost of Cemetery upkeep.
Ernest Hansen's background was admirably helpful in his new job. Before and after his years at Massachusetts Agricultural College, he had worked in a nursery, the C. R. Fish and Company. But more important than his knowledge of things horticultural was his enthusi- asm. This he expended in lavish quantities. Another thing in his favor was that he was young, just twenty-eight years old, and not afraid to toss tradition out the window if it interfered with efficiency.
One time he unwittingly carried this too far. In glancing through the Special Care file, he noticed a card with no stipulation for Per- petual Care. The name was Daniel Waldo, but that didn't mean any- thing special to him. With an impatient gesture, the new efficiency man efficiently snatched the card from the file, and instructed his men henceforth to ignore the Waldo plot.
It's a wonder Daniel Waldo himself didn't hear the gasp of shock from the horrified trustees. In short order, Ernest Hansen was thor- oughly indoctrinated with the complete history of Rural Cemetery.
At the time, he had just six helpers. He appointed one of them, William Moore, as foreman. Mr. Moore eventually accumulated fifty-three years of Cemetery service. Milton Dunn, who later retired after thirty-two years, was another dependable worker. John Steven- son, an Englishman of extremely good nature, was still another.
But Ernest Hansen's best help, everyone would agree, came from his quietly energetic and capable wife, Elizabeth. With a scrutiny developed in former years at the Registry of Deeds, and an organiza- tional ability encouraged by her training as a librarian, she struggled with the hapless records, introducing order into a hundred years of casual recording.
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