USA > Massachusetts > Worcester County > Worcester > Rural retrospect: a parallel history of Worcester and its Rural Cemetery > Part 7
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case of rain. One story and a wing had been added to the janitor's house. Over the whole structure a French roof had been placed; the little colonial counting house of Isaiah Thomas was no longer recognizable.
Shortly before Mr. Lincoln died, he had held a special meeting at his home (he was not well enough to leave the house) in which the momentous decision was made to buy a horse and cart, also to build a barn and possibly buy a one-horse hayrack. This was probably good news to the new janitor, John P. Stockwell. Up to that time, all Cemetery tasks had been done with wheelbarrows.
On such decisions (they seem minor now) the records of the Ceme- tery focus attention and importance, whereas the really pivotal actions are almost camouflaged by casual treatment.
In May of 1868, for instance, there is an agreement that the trustees "accept the invitation to participate in services in honor of soldiers who fell in the last war."
Trustees of Rural Cemetery did not know they were thus initiating a tradition of Memorial Day observances which have continued annu- ally as the community's chief gesture of remembrance.
Perpetual care, although it had no such name at the time, had been suggested in 1856. Its next mention was in 1860, only incidentally after the death of the treasurer, Samuel Jennison. The trustees had expressed appropriate tribute to him, then added a recognition (a bit late) of Daniel Waldo. Then, almost as an afterthought, they sug- gested that the care of Mr. Waldo's lot be assumed by the trustees. Moreover, they continued to vote, "for the time being and for all time hereafter, we will accept such gift or bequest from any proprietor of not less amount than one hundred dollars and will take and hold same in trust, faithfully to apply interest and income thereof from time to time to keeping in suitable repair lot and monument and fence and to improve same."
"Aunt John," Governor Davis' widow, was the first to avail herself of this privilege. Seven years later, the idea still had not won many supporters. A few names such as those of Levi Lincoln, Daniel
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Waldo Lincoln, and Pliny Merrick are mentioned as having paid their one hundred dollars, but graves continued to be sadly neglected by absent or indifferent proprietors, who under existing arrangements were just as free to neglect their lots as they were to repair them.
There were more and more straggly plots in the Cemetery and it was beginning, in spots, to resemble the unkempt cemeteries of a previous generation. In May of 1868 the trustees voted that the corporation would assume care of all lots when sold, and that the money for "permanent care" would be placed in a separate fund. A "cove- nant" would be given to each proprietor as evidence of these intentions.
The first lot with this stipulation was sold on June 8, 1868, to Thomas B. Robinson, and a pattern was thus established which has not been interrupted.
The fund was something else again.
JOHN DAVIS
The Governor John Davis lot in Rural, the first to receive Perpetual Care
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A Fraternal Spirit CHAPTER VII
ON A FRIDAY NIGHT, the week before Christmas in 1870, Superintend- ent James B. Blake went to the Worcester Gas Light Company to inspect minor repairs. It was very dark, but the lantern carried by his foreman gave enough light to see the work that had been done during the day. The two men passed through the offices, then into the purifying room. With a terrifying blast, gas, which had accumu- lated from an accidentally opened valve, found the little flame in the lantern. With less time than it takes to tell it, the building burst up toward the sky in a tumult of noise and fire.
James B. Blake was severely burned; two days later he died.
Mr. Blake not only had been superintendent of the Gas Works since 1852, but also had been Mayor of Worcester for six consecutive terms. He had been such a popular Mayor that although such men as Daniel Waldo Lincoln, Isaac Davis, and J. Henry Hill were his Democratic opponents, he defeated them so easily that no one had even bothered to run against him in the next two elections.
During his years of office Worcester's sewage system had been initiated, with the once-lovely Mill Brook going underground with the burden of the shame. The railroad tracks had been removed from the Common. A park with wild animals had been opened at Webster Square to stimulate travel on the horse railway cars. And Nobility Hill had been leveled from Southbridge Street to Pleasant Street. This, of all the projects, changed Worcester's looks the most.
James B. Blake's funeral was conducted in Mechanics Hall. The
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service was held on the coldest day of the year, but, according to the newspaper, "the biting cold did not keep the multitude at their homes, though not one-third of those gath- ered at the Hall could gain an entrancc." Edward Everett Hale officiated. Ex-governor Alexander H. Bullock gave the eulogy.
Mr. Blake's pallbearers were his predecessors as Mayor: Phinehas Ball, Daniel Waldo Lincoln, P. Em- ory Aldrich, Wm. W. Rice, Isaac Davis, George Richardson, and John S. C. Knowlton.
Later, in a gesture of unusual dcference, the City Government erected a monument in Rural Cem- ctcry in memory of James B. Blake.
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Seven years after Mr. Blakc's death, Worcester had another ex- plosion of a different kind. This time everyone was prepared. The Pinkerton Mausoleum trouble started with a little hole no bigger than a person's finger in the Lyndc Brook Dam. Worcester folk watched and waitcd for two breathless days until the whole wall crumbled with a dcafening roar, spilling seven hundred and sixty million gallons of water on the south part of Worcester. Thc mills in Cherry Vallcy and Jamesvillc suffercd the most, but because the water's force collapsed other smaller dams in its path, there were full cellars cven in the middle section of the city.
It is no small wonder that lives were not lost. Hundreds of people had hurried to the dam to watch the spectacle. Not wanting to miss the
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final break, many had even stayed there for the whole night. Fore- knowledge, however, proved to be the City's best defense. Its only losses were material ones, and Worcester considered itself fortunate.
For days there were rumors elsewhere that Worcester had been completely wiped out.
It had had its Lynde Brook Dam disaster, the depressing Panic of 1873, and a severe epidemic of smallpox. But Worcester was far from ruined. It is surprising that it did so well, considering the odds. But labor and material were cheap, and there was an overflow of idealistic theories. Worcester intended no interruption in its building of Tomorrow's city.
Worcester was experiencing its most intense motivation of gre- garious impulse. As never before, people were becoming conscious of one another. During the '70's and until 1900, the predominant characteristic of Worcester life was the fraternal spirit. In thirty years' time, more than fifty significant social groups were founded.
At a later date this organizational energy petered out, even to the point where people rebelled at the suggestion of another association. An interesting exception was the Herman Club of the early 1900's. This was a group to which scores of Worcester business men paid a handsome initiation fee to belong. (It has never been quite clear what happened to this fee.) For this sardonic club there were no meetings, no officers, no annual dues, no by-laws. Its only privilege was to raise the hand in mock salute and say to another member, "Hi, Herman."
But this was several decades later. For the time being, Worces- ter folk loved their societies, and formed another at the slightest provocation.
These organizations included such lasting groups as the Worcester County Musical Association, the Young Men's and Women's Christian Associations, the Worcester Natural History Society, the Worcester Woman's Club, the Shakespeare Club, and the Worcester Society of Antiquity (Worcester Historical Society).
No organization was more prominent, or more useful in this wordy
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era, than the Young Men's Rhetorical Society. Clark Jillson was its president for many years. This remarkable man was an inventor, an editor, a poet, and scholar of antiquity. For three terms he was Mayor of Worcester.
The Masonic Order had been established in Worcester by Isaiah Thomas in 1793. As early as 1844, a group of men (one of them was Joseph S. Wesby, a bookseller and binder) had organized the first Odd Fellows lodge.
Soon afterwards, an Odd Fellow, Doctor Joseph Bates, who was also a Rural Cemetery trustee, was called in to treat a construction worker on the Worcester and Nashua Railroad. This man later died, but no one claimed his body. It was known that he was a member of the Odd Fellows in New York, so at Doctor Bates's suggestion, the Worcester group held a funeral and bought a lot in Rural for this itinerant worker. From that day, this lot became known as the "stranger's lot."
The Odd Fellows, as did the Masons, multiplied in numbers during the '70's and '80's. Alfred S. Pinkerton, a Worcester lawyer who had become prominent in the State Legislature and as president of the Senate, became even more famous when he was elected the inter- national leader of the Odd Fellows.
Worcester experienced an eventful day in 1872 when for the first time the Public Library building on Elm Street was opened. George F. Verry, law partner of Francis Almon Gaskill before the latter became Judge, was Mayor of the City at the time.
The City of Worcester, in the last part of the 19th century, gave emphatic attention to fraternal matters, but did not neglect the funda- mental problems such as those pertaining to community health. A more distinguished list of physicians would be hard to find. It included Leonard Wheeler, Lemuel Bliss Nichols and his son, Charles Lemuel, David Harrower, Thomas H. Gage and his son, Homer, and Henry Clarke. There was also Doctor John Oliver Marble, Ethan Allen's son-in-law, who lived in the old Allen mansion on Murray Avenue. Doctor William Workman became as famous for his hobby as an inter-
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One of Worcester's oldest stores, Barnard, Sumner and Co., in 1865 during peace celebration at conclusion of Civil War. Former name, Chamberlin, Barnard and Co., is above the store
national authority on Himalaya as he did for his profession. His wife, Fannie (daughter of Alexander H. Bullock), was equally well known as an explorer, author, and lecturer. She held the world's record for women mountaineers.
One doctor, Frank H. Kelley, was Mayor of the City. It was he who established the Board of Health and served as the first president of the City Hospital which was opened on Prince Street in 1881. Nine years carlier, George Jaques had presented four acres of land as a site for this hospital building.
To this eccentric, generous bachelor, George Jaques, Worcester owes much. In 1833 he came from Connecticut to buy part of the old Chandler farm at the south of Worcester. He was a school teacher, a writer for local journals, a horticulturist with a nursery of fruit and trees, and one of the founders of the Horticultural Society.
With few material needs, this lonely man saved a great deal of money, and with every dollar he saved he became more obsessed with
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the idea of leaving it to Worcester. He was a man who really loved his home town. First he gave the land, valued at $35,000, for the site of the City Hospital. Then, when he dicd, the bulk of his cstatc was left for its maintenance.
The hospital as a corporation had started in 1871, in the Abijah Bigclow house on Front Strcet. Thrcc ycars later, when Mr. Jaques died, it moved to his house on Wellington Strcct where it staycd until the new building was ready for occupancy.
In the settling years after the Civil War, scvcral Worcester storcs wcrc started. They have served as permanent foundation stoncs for the City's mercantile stability. It was in 1870 that William H. Sawycr started a lumber business very near the place where Captain John Wing had built Worcester's first saw-mill on Mill Brook. Henry Salem Pratt, who had been a salesman for A. P. Ware, became his partner in the clothing business in 1865. This firm, which had started by making clothes for the retail trade as carly as 1857, developed into one of the largest such businesses in Massachusetts. Richard Healy, from Ireland, opened a women's storc of cloaks, suits, and furs on Main Street in 1882.
The history of Barnard, Sumner, and Putnam goes back as far as 1819 to the store founded by Benjamin Butman. By 1834, after several changes, the store had introduced a dry-goods line and Henry H. Chamberlin had become part owner of the business. Mr. Chamber- lin became associated with two of his clerks, Lewis Barnard and Georgc Sumner, in 1850, but the name continued as the H. H. Chamberlin and Company. In 1853 the firm became known as Chamberlin, Barnard, and Co., then in 1857 as Barnard, Sumner and Company. There were still more changes, for the partnership of Otis E. Putnam was also later represented in the name of the store. These three men- Barnard, Sumner, and Putnam-were recognized as "up to date" merchants in their five-story building on Main Street. Also on Main Street, in 1873, John C. MacInnes opened a store which excelled in displays of drcss goods, silks, and fine fashions.
Into a magnificent new five-story building built farther down on
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Main Street by Jonas Clark, two men moved their business in 1882. After many decades, the name of Denholm and Mckay has now acquired an impersonal sound for Worcester shoppers-something like "Boston and Albany" or "hither and yon." This name actually represented two capable men-William Alexander Denholm from Dundee, Scotland, and William C. Mckay, a Boston man. Their "dry and fancy goods store" was known as the largest establishment of its kind in New England outside of Boston and Providence. It was situated on the recently-leveled Nobility Hill, on the same spot where Benjamin Butman, then Doctor Joseph Sargent, had once lived.
Pleasantly, for those who savor old-time associations, most of these businesses have maintained their original names to the present day.
Jonas G. Clark did not need the building on Main Street or the one on Front Street, both bearing his name, to guarantee that he be remembered in Worcester. Also heralding his name, Clark University stands today because of this man's keen interest in higher education.
Jonas Clark had been born in Hubbardston. His business career had started with the management of a group of hardware and furniture stores in the East but had matured later in the West. Shortly after the Gold Rush he had taken a ship, laden with mining supplies, around Cape Horn and thus began accumulating his great fortune. When the Civil War came, he had established a business in New York and made large investments in Government securities and real estate. In 1881 he had come to Worcester and had built a pretentious home on Elm Street.
The remainder of Mr. Clark's life was spent in studying the needs of this country in respect to education. He inspected many European universities, then outlined his plans for founding a school in Worcester. In 1887 he bought land on South Main Street. Clark University, Worcester's first graduate school, was opened October 2, 1889. In addition, Mr. Clark gave two million dollars to keep it open.
Worcester Academy, the City's oldest secondary school, had had a shaky time of it. It had been owned for a time by Eli Thayer, then had moved to the old building of the American Antiquarian Society
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on Summer Street where it stayed for fifteen years. Somehow it had struggled along, never making financial ends meet. In 1869 Isaac Davis, the president of its board, bought the old Dale Hospital on Union Hill and literally saved the Academy by firmly establishing it in these buildings. In 1874 he made further provisions for the Academy's solvent continuance by gifts of investments and real estate.
Worcester's zest for educational and cultural institutions had admirably matched its enthusiasm for industrial progress. In many other communities this was not always so. Too often the pattern had been the expedient, "Let's get rich, and worry about the culture later." From the moment Worcester started to grow, it had been fortunate in its men and women who felt responsibility for preserving and encouraging the refinements of social development.
But although Worcester was known in the '80's primarily for its cultural institutions, it was also hailed-actually all over the world-as an industrial leader. At that time, Washburn and Moen was employ- ing four thousand men and immensely enjoying its prestige as a pioneer in the wire-making industry. Rice, Barton, and Fales Machine and Iron Company, one of Worcester's oldest firms, was also widely known. Osgood Bradley, with his traditions of carriage making, achieved new recognition by manufacturing the revolutionary sleeping cars, with his sons, Henry O. and Osgood, Jr., as partners. Edward Thayer, considered an expert judge of woolen goods and of cotton, had extensive interest in many mills, and was rated as one of the most prominent manufacturers in the United States. Martin Van Buren Jefferson, in his mills of Drydensville, which was later named Jefferson in his honor, was also well known for his woolen mills. Mr. Jefferson was a resident of Worcester, president of the Quinsigamond National Bank, a State Representative and Senator.
The Richardson Manufacturing Company, in whose management Edwin P. Curtis was active for fifty years, was noted for its mowing machines and agricultural implements. Samuel R. Heywood was making boots and shoes in a factory that was one of the largest and best equipped in the country. Joseph H. Walker (who in 1888 was elected
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to the United States Congress) was recognized as another leading boot and shoe manufacturer. T. K. Earle Manufacturing Company, which made card-setting machines for the textile industry, was known as the most extensive establishment of its kind in the United States.
Jerome Wheelock had earned world-wide fame with his steam engine and the many other inventions pertaining to it. In 1875 he had received the Gold Medal of Progress given by the American Insti- tute, and in 1878, the grand prize of the Paris International Exposition. Mr. Wheelock's inventive ability was turned to the city's advantage when he once devised a system of ventilation and demonstrated it with an installation in Mechanics Hall.
One of Worcester's most prosperous businesses was the Worcester Corset Company. Its colorful dictator was David Hale Fanning.
With two dollars and a half in one pocket and a small Bible in another, the sixteen-year-old orphaned David, intent on making his fortune, had walked away from Jewett City. Eventually he arrived in Worcester, and here, as well as in other nearby towns, he worked as a factory hand. Once he even wandered as far away as Cleveland. But shortly before the Civil War he came back to Worcester. He tried to be a soldier, but because of a minor physical defect, he was rejected for active service.
David Hale Fanning then took a look around to determine his next move. It was not a long look, but it was a thorough one. He was young, young enough to look in the right direction, and he was quick to observe that the fashion of hoop skirts was at its peak. An oppor- tunist, David quickly invested the money he had so carefully saved in the building of a small plant to make hoop skirts, and named his establishment the Worcester Skirt Company.
But hoops went the way of all fads, with corsets following them into fashion prominence. David Hale Fanning was not choosy. Corsets, he figured, were just as good as hoops, and covered an equally good subject. Promptly he converted his factory to the making of corsets, and became known as a pioneer in this industry all over the world. Indeed, his plant became the largest corset-making factory in the world.
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Jefferson Mausoleum
Mr. Fanning was always the president of his company, taking exaet interest in every minute detail of its operation. Years ahead of the benefieent trend, he initiated many employee benefits. He went to such lengths in proteeting the health of his workers that he provided not only a hospital ward for them, but also a special water supply. A modest man, he lived unassumingly on Woodland Street, surrounded by his gardens of chrysanthemums of which he was inordinately fond, and literally gave away most of his money. He gave it for parks, for
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colleges, for Hahnemann Hospital, churches, schools, the Grand Army (he could not even qualify as a member), and civic institutions, notably the Girls' Trade School.
In addition to these prospering industries, there were others that were just taking their first unsteady steps. In 1880 two young boys with the oddly rhyming names of H. Winfield Wyman and Lyman F. Gordon graduated from W.P.I. Their fathers, superintendents of Crompton Loom and Knowles Loom, soon set them up in the business of making small forgings. Their small wooden factory was located on the cheapest property in South Worcester, known as the Island, through whose swampy land ran the heavy-laden Mill Brook.
In 1885 seven men in a pottery shop on Water Street incorporated as the Norton Emery Wheel Company. Two years later, they moved to a small building in a section north of the City known as Barbers. In this factory, as also in Washburn and Moen, the first Swedes ever to come to Worcester were employed.
In 1877 William E. Rice, of Washburn and Moen, organized the Worcester Wire Company in South Worcester. And Charles Grenfill Washburn, the grandson of Charles (Ichabod's twin brother), started the Wire Goods Company on Union Street in 1880.
As communities introduced their first water systems, an urgent need was presented for some satisfactory method of measuring water consumption. One of the first meter companies of the United States, the Union Water Meter Company, was formed in 1869 by two Worces- ter inventors, Benaiah Fitts and Phinehas Ball.
Yes, Worcester was making for itself a solid reputation. At the same time, it was supplying its share of gifted men to the nation. George Bancroft had become Secretary of the Navy, Minister to England and to Prussia, and had written a many-volumed history of the United States. George Frisbie Hoar had become a United States Senator, and in 1880 had served as Chairman of the National Republi- can Convention. General Charles Devens had become a Judge of the Superior Court, then in 1877 the Attorney General of the United States as a member of President Hayes' Cabinet.
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Two inventions were introduced to Worcester in the '80's. One was the telephone-the other, the electric light. Few there were to realize the implications of either. For a while, Worcester was a con- glomerate mixture of the old and the new. Wires strung along the roofs of several downtown buildings made it possible for only a few persons to indulge in the telephoning novelty. And although in 1885 there were 76 electric street lights, there were still 702 gas lamps and even 1373 oil lamps.
But those 76 electric lights glowed with impatient promise. Their potential power would again change the City.
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The Unsettled Years
CHAPTER VIII
THEY SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER than to make Stephen Salisbury angry. But apparently that's just what the proprietors of Rural Cemetery did when in 1868 they overlooked him and several other old- timers in the election of trustees.
Snubbing Stephen Salisbury, in Worcester, was approximately the same thing as cutting off your nose to spite your own face. This was something it didn't take long for the Cemetery Board to find out.
It was only a matter of months before the trustees recognized their urgent need of owning a piece of land which belonged to Mr. Salisbury. With recent acquisitions, the Cemetery grounds covered about thirty- five acres. On three sides there was no more stretching to do, because public streets-Grove, Prescott, and North-established firm bounda- ries. The only direction to move at all was toward the south-where Mr. Salisbury owned the land.
Soon after the meeting at which Mr. Salisbury was replaced as trustee, a rumor was circulated that he intended to clear the area south of the Cemetery for building purposes. Hurriedly a Cemetery committee was formed to "wait upon Mr. Salisbury." This land, they explained to him, was not only desirable but almost indispensable to the Cemetery.
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