USA > Massachusetts > Worcester County > Worcester > Rural retrospect: a parallel history of Worcester and its Rural Cemetery > Part 8
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It was wasted effort. Mr. Salisbury was not inclined to sell any part of his land for Cemetery purposes, and he told the committee so. Disheartened, they reported to the Board that they had "failed to accomplish anything."
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The trustees, splitting an infinitive in their anxiousness, were "des- perate to at least procure a small strip of land so that a barrier could be planted to conceal the ground from public exposure." Another com- mittee was named to approach the reluctant Mr. Salisbury.
It was months into the next year before Mr. Salisbury gave a definite answer. His letter was politely worded, but there were barbed implications. "I am unwilling," he wrote, "to be influenced by my private intent to the injury of a public object." In no subtle language he reminded that he "had already given some evidence of my good will." (He had donated part of the original land in 1838, and had been a trustee for twenty-nine years.) And elaborately he outlined the importance of this particular piece of land to his estate. This was, of course, unadulterated exaggeration, for a residential map of Worces- ter in that year shows that he owned at least two-thirds of the northern part of the City.
Mr. Salisbury then made a proposition-to sell a strip of land seventy feet wide from Grove to Prescott Street, at twenty cents a square foot. In addition, he would require that the Cemetery match expenses with him for the making of a road to run this whole distance, sharply separating the Cemetery from Salisbury land.
"Ridiculous," snapped the trustees.
"In view of such cost and of the fact that the corporation would be wholly unable to comply for the present, it was put on the table," conclusively wrote J. Henry Hill in the clerk's record book.
The unperturbed Mr. Salisbury didn't budge until four months later, when he offered to halve the price to ten cents a foot for forty feet of land. This the trustees considered, but did not accept.
Thirteen years later, the issue was still dangling. The Board, still wanting the land, voted to "draw up a memorial to be addressed to the Honorable Stephen Salisbury with design of obtaining an addi- tional strip of land on the southerly side for a dense, protecting orna- mental grove." Amenably, Mr. Salisbury agreed to sell for fourteen cents a square foot.
Then, unpredictably, he decided to dally no longer. Time had
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Stephen Salisbury II
mellowed tempers. Natural generosity took over the long-standing, touchy situation, and with a grand gesture, Stephen Salisbury pre- sented half of the coveted land as a gift.
The trustees entered a relieved "Thank you" in their records, and the proprietors reciprocated in their own way by promptly electing Mr. Salisbury's son, Stephen III, to the Board.
In the following year, the elder Stephen died. Although he had been married three times (the second time to the widow of Captain George Lincoln, the third to the widow of Edward D. Bangs) the son of
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his first wife, Rebekah Dean, was his only child. To that namesake son he left the details of a huge estate, the presidency of The Worcester National Bank and many other offices which Worcester folk seemed to think were the Salisbury's by right of inheritance.
It was a heavy load. Soon after his father's death, Stephen III declined re-election to the Cemetery's Board, "owing to the engage- ments and multiplicity of his duties."
A one-year term was not unusual at this time of Rural's history. These were the unsettled years. In one decade there were as many changes in trusteeship as there had been for forty years or as there were to be in the next fifty years.
There had been an almost complete change of trustees in 1868. In the next year, there had been a slight slip back to the old regime when Clarendon Harris (the former bookseller who had recently become president of the Five Cents Savings Bank) and Edward Earle (the manufacturer and former Mayor of the City) were reinstated. For eight years there were then no more changes, but in 1877 there began a ten-year period in which there was constant shuffling of Rural Ceme- tery's trusteeship. The new trustees were all prominent men, but few of them accumulated long-term service.
Timothy Bliss, a general contractor and street builder, died after a year of office. Other terminations by death were those of Edward Earle, Ex-governor Alexander H. Bullock, Doctor George A. Bates, and Daniel Waldo Lincoln.
Trustees in this transitory period included Harrison Bliss (the banker), Burton Potter (a lawyer), Henry A. Marsh (the cashier of Central National Bank who later became its president and Mayor of the City for three terms), Augustus Currier (an insurance executive), John Dana Lovell (who made a fortune in the agricultural warehouse and seed store business), Edward Vaill (manufacturer of folding chairs), William E. Rice (President of Worcester Wire Company), Nathaniel Paine (grandson of Judge Nathaniel Paine and cashier of City National Bank), and Silas Dinsmore (publisher of The Daily Transcript).
Being a trustee of Rural had developed into more of a burden than
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an honor. No longer did it represent the formality of sitting for a few hours at Board meetings to hear cheerful reports. Now there were heavy financial problems with which to wrestle, and no trustee was exempt from the responsibilities of them.
It was many years before all the problems were solved, and as usual, solutions didn't come whole.
The first step toward recovery came with the recognition that there was a problem. For too many years there had been a laissez-faire attitude suggesting "If we don't pay any attention, perhaps the situa- tion will go away."
Reports, from the year 1869 on, had been sketchy. This had not been entirely due to an exemplary laconic tendency. Often there had been no meetings at all, especially during the summer months. There had been one year when the trustees had tried four times to get a quorum for an annual meeting. At the last try, it had been possible only because one member came late.
By 1877 this desultory phase had passed. A surprisingly large group of proprietors came to the annual meeting with the express purpose of discussing the hitherto forbidden subject of the Cemetery's precarious financial situation, with special attention to the permanent fund.
It seems that no such fund had been set up at all. Since May of 1869, when a rule had been adopted to sell lots only with the provision of future care, $23,838 should have been set aside for that purpose.
But there had been a financial panic, the proprietors reminded each other, and Cemetery finances had not been endowed with special dispensation from loss. One long, realistic look told the unpleasant facts. All investments of the corporation totaled only $16,300, and this amount represented the general fund as well as the figmentary special fund. It had to be recognized, too, that although there had been a strong recommendation that all existing proprietors contribute a "gift" or "donation" toward permanent care, only fifty-five of the old proprietors had complied. This was a shamefully small percentage of the owners who had bought 1055 lots of the 1305 which had been set out since the Cemetery's incorporation in 1838.
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The proprietors voted for positive action. First they named a finance committee, then adopted constructive resolutions. Two funds there must be-stated these resolutions-even though it meant paring down general expenditures to a minimum. A sizable amount of money was then transferred from the general fund to a Repair Fund, which later was renamed the "Fund for the Perpetual Care of Lots." In 1884 the phrase of "Permanent Care" had been entirely replaced by "Perpetual Care," and by that time the fund had grown to a solid sum of $21,315.
In 1885 a completely new set of By-laws was adopted for Rural Cemetery. These accomplished one important and three incidental things. The date of the annual meeting was shifted from April to January. A provision was made for eight trustees-not seven-who were to be elected two by two, for four-year terms. (These trustees, not the proprietors, were to elect all officers.)
The main body of the By-laws concerned the Perpetual Fund. A sum of forty thousand dollars, according to the new rules, was to be set aside as a "guarantee of Perpetual Care." To be added to this amount was one-third of the money received when new lots were sold and any- thing the existing proprietors could be persuaded to pay for lots already owned. Giving intentions a solid sound, the By-laws firmly stated: "The principal of this fund shall be held as a sacred trust and shall never be used or appropriated for any other purpose." To make it even more impressive, this part of the By-laws was labeled as "Ir- revocable."
By 1888 Rural looked very different from the Cemetery of fifty years before when it had been incorporated. The grounds had more than doubled in size. The pond, which had inspired Levi Lincoln to paroxysms of rhetoric, had now been filled with loam and gravel. At the front of the grounds, Crescent Street, which at first had been true to its name in shape, now extended to North Street in a long, lazy line. Because the Horse Railroad Company had opened a route to the north of the city, many more visitors were regularly coming to the Cemetery. Near the entrance a small Waiting Lodge provided shelter for them while waiting for horse cars or friends.
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Horse car that traveled back and forth from Lincotn Square to Webster Square. Picture was taken just after the old Doctor Elijah Dix house, originally in back of elms, had been moved
The Waiting Lodge at front of Cemetery, where visitors waited for horse cars. Later this building became Rural's office
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In 1872 the Cemetery owned its first lawn mower. Eleven years later, a telephone was installed in the home of the janitor, Joseph S. Clark, who began his duties in 1880. The janitor still received $500 a year, plus his rent in the house across the street. In 1881, $50 was added to this salary with "the privilege of keeping another cow."
Three annoying problems confronted the trustees. The first con- cerned the dusty street at the front of the Cemetery; it constantly had to be watered. The second involved the considerable damage done to monuments by chemical gases from Washburn and Moen. The third resolved into a campaign of persuading proprietors to remove the old fences which bounded individual lots. In early years, fences of some kind had been obligatory. Even to join two lots with one fence had required special permission from the trustees. Now the wooden fences were rotten, and the iron fences were seldom, if ever, painted. The best remedy, urged the tidy trustees, was to remove them all. Gradually most of these old fences were taken away by obliging pro- prietors, but a few were fortunately left to lend a picturesque touch of antiquity.
During these years there came to the Cemetery two oddly con- trasting processions.
One of these occurred as a consequence of changing the whole of Worcester's railway system in 1877. Worcester has Judge Thomas Leverett Nelson to thank for this, for it was he who framed the Union Station Act, rerouting the various lines away from the center of the City and providing a Union Station at Washington Square. The old station on Foster Street was thus abandoned, and on its site H. H. Bigelow built a large skating rink to the delight of Worcesterites who had succumbed to the new roller-skating fad.
Foster Street and Mechanic Street, at that time, extended only as far as the Burial Ground, or the New Cemetery, as it was often called. This cemetery had been neglected in spirit and in deed. There had been no interments there since 1860, and very few for thirty years before that date. Many of the fences had been stolen for firewood, stones and monuments had been broken, and the grass had become nothing more than a thick growth of bushes and weeds.
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"Should the Foster Street extension from Main Street to Union Depot at Washington Square be constructed as now contemplated," informed the daily newspaper, "most if not all of the Mechanic Street Ground will have to be taken for the purpose, necessitating also the removal of all remains." Pine Meadow Cemetery, off Shrewsbury
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The Isaiah Thomas Tomb
Street (originally named Pine Street), similarly stood in the way of the Boston and Albany tracks that pushed impatiently toward the new station.
Twice before, Worcester's burial grounds had suffered the encroach- ment incidental to what was labeled as City progress. Even before Rural's incorporation, the seventeen graves marked only by heaps of stones at the corner of Thomas and Summer Streets had been covered over with a school and play yard. And now there were few Worcester citizens, as they strolled across the Common, who remembered that only twenty-five years ago the cemetery stones there had been laid flat and buried twelve inches under the ground-directly over the persons they were intended to memorialize. In only a few exceptions
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had families paid and arranged for removal of relatives to lots in other cemeteries.
This time the delicate situation was handled in wholesale fashion, at the expense of the City. All persons, it was announced, were to be transferred.
This distasteful disturbance actually occurred the following year. "It seems disrespectful," shuddered the fastidious, and there was a general wave of shock when it was realized that Isaiah Thomas and his tomb (the only one in the Mechanic Street Cemetery) would have to be moved. Isaiah Thomas, dead or alive, was still someone to be conjured with in Worcester, and far be it for anyone to insinuate an affront to his dignity.
The ambitious City was not long, nor overly, sensitive.
In May of 1878 Isaiah Thomas was moved from the Mechanic Burial Ground to Rural Cemetery. With proper ceremony, public services were held the following month in Mechanics Hall. From there a procession, under the marshalship of General Josiah Pickett, marched to Rural Cemetery to conclude the second burial of Isaiah Thomas.
There was no such aplomb or procession when George W. Richard- son was buried at Rural Cemetery.
Probably Worcester's history holds no sadder story than that of George Richardson. And because Mr. Richardson was so prominently identified with City affairs for so many years, the story has become Worcester's, as well as his.
With a background of a Harvard education (in the class with Oliver Wendell Holmes) and several years as a lawyer, George Richard- son served Worcester people exceedingly well in his long life of public service. He had first commanded attention by acting as aide to Governor John Davis. For twenty-four years he was president of the City National Bank. He was vice president of the Five Cents Savings Bank, Bank Commissioner of Massachusetts, High Sheriff of Worcester County, and for two terms the Mayor of the City. At one time or another he served as director of almost every business concern in Worcester.
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THE UNSETTLED YEARS
Large, jovial, and handsome, he moved with great dignity through practically every honorary office the City societies had to offer. No one man was more popular than Mr. Richardson, and justly so. A polished gentleman, he graced every social occasion with a proud bearing, lightened by an irrepress- ible, friendly manner. He liked a drink and was not slow to say so, yet he so admirably restrained himself that not once during his years of being Mayor was he known to have a drink.
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There were scores of people to Alexander H. Bullock President: 1879-1882 echo the ironic observation of one who later said: "I should have trusted him even if he said he was planning to cheat me." He was that kind of man.
What actually went wrong was never brought out into the open. The first intimation that anything was wrong at all came in 1878 when there was a change made in the presidency of City National. Then from one source, another, and still others, there came rumors of exten- sive borrowing on the part of Mr. Richardson. There was talk of an impending arrest. To make things worse, Mr. Richardson suddenly left the City. Rumors multiplied the facts so fast that there was little charity left to divide the two.
His hurried exit was possible only because of quick action on the part of a loyal friend, Henry M. Witter, who fortunately was superin- tendent of the Boston, Barre, and Gardner Railroad. Hearing from a reliable source that there would be definite action against Mr. Richardson the following morning, Mr. Witter called his friend at 11:30 in the evening. (George Richardson was one of the very few
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Francis H. Dewey President: 1882-1887
Edward L. Davis President: 1888-1912
in Worcester who had a telephone in 1878.) Within an hour, Mr. Witter had hitched one railroad car to an engine and had started for the New Hampshire state line with George Richardson as his lone passenger.
Mr. Richardson lived as an exile (first in Peterboro, New Hamp- shire, then in New Brunswick) for the eight years before his death at the age of seventy. Once he wrote a letter in which he asked to come back to Worcester, to live in the poor house. Even this was denied by flint-hearted citizens, who, forgetting that vengeance belongs to no man, vowed if he ever came back he would die in jail.
When he did come back, it was not to jail but to Rural Cemetery, where a few loyal friends listened to formal words at his grave. General Devens, his brother-in-law, was there. So, too, were Doctor Joseph Sargent, J. Henry Hill, Edward L. Davis, Calvin Foster (his successor as president of the City Bank), and Nathaniel Paine, the cashier of the bank.
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THE UNSETTLED YEARS
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Thus ended the journey of a man who had been one of Worcester's most prominent citizens.
Never was anything dishonest actually proved against this man, and in later years there have been several indications that perhaps the allegations had no basis. But seventy years of a good life were thus ignored, canceled by the rumored mistakes of a few moments. The quality of mercy was severely strained, and there was no one to answer Sophocles when he asked: "Who is the slayer, who the victim?"
George Richardson had been a trustee of Rural Cemetery for twelve years.
In the same decade in which he died, Rural Cemetery lost not only several other trustees but also three of its presidents by death.
Daniel Waldo Lincoln, president from 1868 to 1879, was killed the following year in New London at the boat races between Harvard and Yale. Close by the banks of the river where the races were held, there were railroad tracks where platform freight cars had been ingeniously arranged with chairs for spectators. As the race progressed, the cars slowly moved along the route. At an exciting point of the race, Mr. Lincoln stood up, then lost his balance as the car started once again. He was thrown under the moving train and killed.
Alexander H. Bullock, Ex-governor, was elected president of Rural succeeding Mr. Lincoln. Mr. Bullock had also served long terms in both branches of the Legislature, had been a Judge, Mayor of Worces- ter, and President of the Manufacturers Mutual Insurance Company. On a cold evening in January of 1882, he was walking home when fatally stricken with apoplexy. His death came only two weeks after he had been elected president of the State Mutual Life Assurance Company. (Philip L. Moen finished the year's term, then Mr. Bullock's son, Augustus George Bullock, became president.)
Francis Henshaw Dewey succeeded Mr. Bullock and served for almost six years as president of Rural. (He was a trustee for twenty years.) He, too, was cut down with a quick stroke. When he died the trustees recorded the statement that "no man in our city touched the life of Worcester at so many points as Judge Dewey."
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He had been trustee, director, and president of many industries, banks, and associations, had served as State Senator, on the Common Council, and as a Justice of the Superior Court.
Two years before Judge Dewey's death, his son, George T., was elected as clerk and treasurer of the Cemetery corporation. At that same time the word "secretary" was first substituted for "clerk." (There had been two other clerks since J. Henry Hill had resigned in 1881-Edward L. Davis and Burton Potter.)
As treasurer, George Dewey succeeded Nathaniel Paine. Mr. Dewey was a "natural" in this position, if experience were the primary requisite. This busy lawyer was treasurer of six companies. He was also general counsel for Washburn and Moen, president of Worcester Electric Light Company, and vice president of Graton and Knight.
George Dewey also became a trustee of Rural to finish his father's term in 1887, but it was Edward L. Davis who was elected president at the next annual meeting.
As a son of Isaac Davis, Edward Davis had a prodigious heritage to uphold, but his activities proved to be just as diversified and pro- ductive as his father's had been. Edward Davis was a lawyer and manufacturer, treasurer and principal stockholder of Washburn Iron Company, director of numerous railroads, vice president of several banks, president of the Worcester County Musical Association, a Councilman, Mayor, and State Senator. During his sixteen years as member of Worcester's Park Commission, he succeeded in extending the park system to every section of the city. At one time he donated sixty acres of land at the Lake for development of a park for which Horace H. Bigelow also contributed property. On a high hill in this park Mr. Davis erected the massive stone tower which has become a landmark.
Edward L. Davis was president of Rural Cemetery for twenty-four years. He made it an era all his own.
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This quiet scene shows the brownstone Gothic mausoleum of the Crompton family at the right. In background at center is the Kennedy mausoleum
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1888-1925
A Bigger City, A Better City CHAPTER IX
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY didn't slip quietly through the door of 1899 and find 1900 on the other side. Bugles had been blaring for years in anticipation of its arrival. Eager hands had been waiting to turn the key, to open wide the door. And when the new century finally tumbled through, there were new horizons waiting for it in every direction.
By no coincidence is the familiar phrase "the turn of the century" seldom applied to any but the twentieth century. The fact is that no other century ever turned quite so completely.
This was true for the world in general, for the United States in particular, and certainly relatively true for Worcester.
The most perceptible factor of this change was the switching of population from one side of the Atlantic to the other. For a period of fourteen years almost a million persons arrived annually at American ports. These people came from every direction, forming a mass of expectant, bewildered humanity.
Worcester's percentage of growth was never as great again as it had been in the middle nineteenth century when the Irish had come to town. But numberwise, the City grew in unprecedented fashion from 1870, when the population was just over 40,000, to 1925 when it leaped to 190,000.
Worcester's new citizens came from the mid-European countries, from Finland, Denmark, Greece, Italy, and Poland. There were Russian Jews, French Canadians, Englishmen, and Armenians. But especially, by Yimminy, there were Swedes.
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A BIGGER CITY, A BETTER CITY 1888-1925
In 1868 there had been only one Swedish person in Worcester-a piano tuner. But by 1910 the Swedes numbered 30,000 and comprised one-fifth of the City's total population. Worcester boasted the largest Swedish representation of any city in America in ratio to its size, and the third largest of any city in the world, with only Stockholm and Gothenberg surpassing it in this respect.
A community that had suddenly absorbed 30,000 Swedes as well as 120,000 persons of other nationalities could hardly expect to retain its old identity. Interestingly, all these new people lived not in the fringing areas of Worcester, but in the City itself. This reflected the general trend of urbanization which was creating American cities almost overnight. Of the thirteen million persons representing the increase in United States population in fourteen years, eleven million were crowding together in cities.
In the congestion that resulted, cities necessarily had to grow sky- ward to relieve the pressure at the edges. Worcester began to sprout with awkward three-deckers and apartment houses. It began to build tall office buildings, "business blocks," and "industrial blocks." With- in fifteen years Worcester acquired its State Mutual, Graphic Arts, Slater, Burnside, Park, Asher, Osgood Bradley, and Ellsworth build- ings. In 1913, with the most brilliant public ceremony the City had ever witnessed, the Bancroft Hotel was opened on Franklin Street. New England's largest and best equipped hotel at the time, the Ban- croft was erected through local incentive and by local finance.
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