USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Shirley > Shirley uplands and intervales; annals of a border town of Middlesex, with some genealogical sketches > Part 9
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feel sure that the deficit in the school fund was not due to wilful negligence, and that there was a spirit of per- secution in those who took him to task.
The fourth physician, Doctor Hills, lived in the house just south of the present centre cemetery, which had once been used by Doctor A. G. Parker. Doctor Parker had changed it from the hip-roofed house which Captain MacIntosh had built to a gable-roof, and had added an ell and an office. Doctor Hills made some more changes, putting on a long ell. He took part in the great rivalry among the four doctors of the time. To impress the people he would, while in church, frequently have some one call him out. He would rush home, hitch up his fast horse, for he always had a fast one, and drive past the church on the run. Doctor Hills was a Newbury man and had been educated at the Maine Medical Col- lege. He came to Shirley from Townsend, where he had practised nearly twenty years. The doctor left his practice here in Shirley because death cut him off in his prime. He died in 1854 in his fiftieth year. Our Townsend historian chronicles of him that he had "more than ordinary natural abilities; was agreeable in his manners, fond of company, and enjoyed a good joke or a playful repartee."
Very human were all our doctors, and very interesting. The doctor, like the minister, stands out from the ma- jority, both because of his education and because of his nearness to the great events of life.
XI THINGS RELIGIOUS
ON ALMOST every New England village green, the old church still stands to vouch for the piety and strict god- liness of our ancestors, whose first anxiety was for things spiritual. We modern folk find it a difficult task to imagine the part religion and its attendant controver- sies played in the life of all our forefathers. Debate and litigation were rife on every hand. Men went to law in order to settle every difference and so tena- cious were they of their rights in all things, that many a man, obsessed by his sense of injustice, ruined himself rather than give in. It seems as if much of this contu- maciousness came from the tenacity with which they held their religious principles, which had been so hard fought for by their ancestors but a generation or two back, that the attitude of mind was still inherent. They had struggled for liberty, and liberty they would have, individual and national.
As a result of all this, almost the first thing a town or district did as a corporate body was to find a place for a church and burying ground. More often than not the distance of the church, to which they all went, was the very cause of the incorporation. Shirley, like many another growing town, felt that the Groton church was much too far away for most of them, and so made petition after petition to the General Court to be re- lieved. Very often after a church was built long
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years intervened before a minister was installed. During the interval the town was served from time to time by the neighboring clergy. But the longing for a church of their own was satisfied.
Here in Shirley they must have set to work on their church as soon as the district was incorporated, for only five months later they voted "to move the meeting house place from where the Comtee stated it about thirty Pole west to a white oak and heap of stones." They voted to pay nine pence a day for man and oxen for moving the meeting-house. As one reads this it does not convey the real picturesqueness which really per- tains to the scene. Probably all the male population turned out with their oxen, and drew the church on rol- lers bodily from one place to the other. They say it took seventeen pairs of oxen to drag the old Pound Hill School over the snow from its site at the corner of the roads to its last resting place, back of Dr. J. O. Parker's house. Two months later they voted to repair the meeting-house and also to determine how much land should go with it. The land belonged to John Page, who later sold the rest to Amos Dole, fifty-one acres "where the Meeting House now stands, except one acre around it and a two pole way to it." If you turn to the chap- ter on roads you will see a crude plan of where it stood. There you see the meeting-house facing the Parker Road, apparently not far from where Mr. Miller's house stands today, and down the Green Lane, Amos Dole's house, then called Hildreth House, whose cellar- hole you can still find. The burying ground for a year or so was in the acre around the church, but was soon moved when Groton granted us some of the Common land for that purpose.
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The first meeting-house was rough in the extreme. Some gave trees; the miller sawed the boards as his share; others gave time, and the raising must have oc- casioned a general jubilee. All house-raisings seem to have been the cause of great feasting and jollification and this, which belonged to all, must have been of vast impor- tance.
All the folk were interested, for town meetings were held every two months to discuss and re-discuss the vital questions concerned. They voted first "to cover the frame on the outside," which means simply that the boards be put on perpendicularly, like many an unclap- boarded barn of today; that it be "ceiled up on the in- side, both floors be laid and the roof covered with long shingles, and that the work be accomplished before the middle of May next." Before the month was out they had had another meeting to discuss the shingle question, and those who believed in "short shingles" won the day. The church must have been without beauty and without comfort-a mere shelter from the heat and cold, winds, snow and rain-which degenerated with little change in after years into a useful and long-lived barn.
May came and found the building still incomplete, so it was voted to "board and shingle the meeting-house, and lay both floors and underpin the house." At the same time it was voted to hire three months' preaching and "to try for some other minister besides what we have had." These ancestors of ours were brutally frank in their condemnation of what they did not like, and they never feared to put the same into their public records.
After this the work on the church went merrily on as the
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summer weather thawed them out. The following year they finished the inside and voted to "glase the house"; they also paid William Longley for a "Pulpet and Sound- ing board which he brought from Groton."
There were no seats in the church but benches, which seem to have been put into the gallery even at first, for when a church was "seated," the first row in the gallery succeeded the first row on the floor in importance.
Preaching in the first ten years was enjoyed in the same desultory way as education. They would vote to "hire three months' preaching" in the same casual way in which they would vote to have a "woman school" for "six weeks the ensuing year." This was probably due to poverty in all the frontier towns, and was doubtless the outcome of great thought and sacrifice on the part of those who came to town meeting. All the time the good people were trying to find a permanent minister. They called numerous young clergymen, but one and all preferred to settle near Boston or some other large town. So over and over again their hopes were disap- pointed, and year after year they increased the salary as an inducement. The first year they offered £10; small to be sure, but great in proportion, as £15 was the total civil outlay for the year. It is hard for us to imagine a town so poor. At last, in 1762, after a heart-rending number of failures, the town offered Phinehas Whitney £66:13:4, twenty cords of wood, and a farm to live on if he would only come. In this case the inducement proved sufficient, and when he arrived he found things to his satisfaction, so that he stayed with his people for fifty years, until death overtook him early in the nineteenth century. So long has his influence
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lasted that the new generation now speak with rever- ence of "Priest Whitney," as of a man whom they have known.
The farm they bought for him was that of Robert Henry who had died leaving a widow, Eleanor. He was a Scotch-Irishman whose career in town was short and uneventful. The land lay just east of the Whitney land as we know it, and probably took in the land on which the house of Mr. F. A. Wyman now stands and nearly up to and along what we know as Parker Road. It was a convenient piece of land because it was near the site of the original church. On April 10th the town voted "to accept the land that the committee purchased for the District which was two thirds of the Real Estate of Mr. Robert Henry Decd and pay seventy three pounds six shillings and eight pence it being the first cost and also to pay the necessary cost that Capt. Harris and Lieut. Walker was at about the same." Mr. Whitney was not content with the land alone, for the same year he bought sixty acres and the buildings upon them of Jonathan Moors which adjoined the land the town gave him on the west. Here he built the house in which he lived so many years, facing Whitney Road, which then turned northerly over the hill to the old church site. This land was part of one of the very large grants in Shirley, that to Samuel Waldo, who founded Waldoboro, Maine. It was of four hundred and fifty acres, and bore the name of "Beaver Pond Farm." Priest Whitney's house was taken down about 1850 and re-established in the village, where, having served the first Protestant minister well, it then sheltered our first Catholic priest, Father Coté. Thereafter Priest Whitney's transactions in real estate
THE CHURCH IN 1800
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were continuous and many. It seems as if he had owned nearly every piece of land in town at some time or other.
Mr. Whitney's labors among his scattered flock were attended by such success that very soon his congregation outgrew the little church of which they had been so proud, and a new edifice had to be built. They chose a different site for it, and in 1773 built what is part of the present church on the Common, where the soldiers' monument now stands. In dry weather in the summer you can still see the outline of the old foundation, for the grass turns brown sooner there.
Like the first church it was not built without diffi- culty, for, though the building was erected in 1773, they began to discuss it much earlier. James Parker went to town meeting the last day of December, 1770, "to find ye Sentre of Land to Build a meeting house and they agreed to do ye same." It is too bad that Parker did not live at the Centre at that time to tell us more fully how the work progressed, but he does help us somewhat to see what happened. The committee met on the twenty-first of January, 1771, and "pitched upon a spot." From the context we gather that they brought the lum- ber to build, and then something happened, for on Feb- ruary 26, 1772, "ye meeting house fraim went off at Vendue at Oh Sall at 133 old tent." After this Parker becomes more interested for in August he took the con- tract to board and shingle the building for £58 old tenor. In 1773 the work actually progressed. In May, Parker carted "4000 boards with oxen for Haskell for New Meeting House." By August it was nearly done, and Parker, Deacon Longley, and William Little were ap- pointed to seat it. They met again and again through
12
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October and November, and finally on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1773, they had their first meeting in the new church. The next day they celebrated by having an "artillery," whatever that may have been, at the old meeting-house. On the twenty-ninth the deeds for the pews were issued.
The new site was on land that Groton had deeded us for a training field and burying ground. The church was forty by fifty feet, according to the vote of the town on May 21, 1771. This second church was built with much less controversy and bitterness than the first, for there was now a minister to take the initiative and calm heated discussions. The outside was perfectly plain, much like a modern barn except for the windows, and there were small doors instead of a great one, one at each side and one on the front. It is hard to say whether the apse in the rear was there or not, but the building had no tower.
Inside, the same general plan was held to as in the former church. Galleries ran on both sides, but now the town had so grown in prosperity that box pews were built by many. The minister's pew was "on the right-hand side" of the pulpit, and the wealthier citizens were grouped around the walls. Each man built his pew according to his taste and the size of his family, so that there was little uniformity. The rest of the floor space was filled with benches.
They sold almost everything they could from the old church. In 1773 they voted that the selectmen sell the windows of the old church "at vendue, at a time, they in their discretion think best." The six square pews in the gallery were also sold in the same heartless
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fashion. The vendue was not very successful, it would seem, because it took so long to get rid of the material. On the thirty-first of January, 1774, they attempted to sell the frame of the old meeting-house, but seem to have had no bidders, as the sale was put off till the fourteenth of February. Parker makes no record of what took place on the fourteenth, so that we do not know whether it was then or later that it was taken down and moved to its last resting place, to become a barn. The barn was finally burned, and so nothing remains of our earliest meeting-house.
The following year they voted to have a "good-ball pump in the district well by the meeting-house," and somewhere they built horsesheds, for they are mentioned in an early deed and in the layout of an early road. Then with great dignity the town voted to "turn the road" that ran by Priest Whitney's house so that it would run to the new meeting-house, for his greater convenience.
Some twenty years later, in 1792, the church was reseated in more modern style. Pew ground could be bought, and a carpenter and his hands came to put in pews. On March 31, Parker went up "to ye Meeting- house to see ye pews building." They finished on April fourth, and Parker adds to his day's doings, "the men that made the new pews finished & stayed at my house all night; paid Leighton off."
It was not until 1804 that a tower was added to the new church, which made a useful portico for the front door. The tower was about a third as wide as the church, in the form of a square projection. You can trace its lines now in front by seeing where the clapboards
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were pieced. On the map of 1830, in the town hall, a picture shows that it apparently had three windows on each side, one above the other, and two above the front door. There were three doors at this time, one in front and one at either side. The two side doors were garnished by very lovely porches with plain Doric columns. One of these porches came to grace the back of Mr. C. A. Longley's broom shop when the removal of the church to a sloping site made side doors impossible.
The porches and the belfry took a little over two months to build. As Parker had moved to the Centre he was an interested spectator and he records the progress of the work.
1804. June 16. Hands at work on the belfry &c.
June 30. Lock & I put up part of my fore yard fence. A great number of Hands at work on the Meeting House Belfry & porches.
July 5. The people raising the Belfry. A Number of Hands went on slow, poor roapes.
July 6. They finished raising the porch.
August 31. They finished Raising the rest of the Belfry or cupelo; all of it with out dammage &c.
The meeting-house was first painted on July 4, 1810.
With the belfry came a bell, presented in grandiloquent language by our very self-satisfied gentleman farmer, Wallis Little. So grandiloquent and self-satisfied was his letter of presentation that the town's acceptance shows quite plainly that the people felt the gift too useful to refuse, but they would not add by much enthusiasm to the bumptiousness of the donor. It is one of the few joys of reading old town records to find bits of human nature like this cropping out of the dry transcripts of a town's routine business. Later a new bell was given by two citizens who did not feel so self-satisfied. The old bell
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was sold, and the money went into repairs and expenses. Leonard Moody Parker and Thomas Whitney, who gave the new bell, made a rather curious proviso in their gift. They made it a condition "that if the town shall not ring it, the First Parish may. In case they fail to ring it any other religious body may." The bell was given just after the great Unitarian-Congregational schism had passed over the town, and it makes one a little suspicious that the Unitarian wing at that time showed signs of weakness.
Our sympathies are almost always likely to go out to the "under dog," and of this class I think those who, in olden times, were disciplined by the church are conspicuous examples. Our fathers' minds worked so differently from ours; their sins were not ours; their methods were not ours; and their frankness was much greater. In 1785, Captain Harris would not come to communion, and all the town stayed after church to appoint a committee to find the reason. The committee reported that "Cap" Harris absented himself because of some difficulties in his mind respecting ye chh not taking notice of an objection wh was made by L+ Powers a number of years since against ye Cov being propounded to Cap. Hazen." They go on to say that as Captain Harris has been assured that discipline will be main- tained henceforth, he "is now in Charity with this Chh. and begs their Charity towards him." And look- ing back in the records we find that this grievance of Captain Harris's had burst into flame after a quies- cence of fourteen years! And the church at that time had voted unanimously to dismiss the complaint. We can but wonder what quarrel stirred our valiant captain to make so public a retribution upon his fellow-citizen.
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In 1779 the church was again stirred by delinquency in its membership, a delinquency which had far greater consequences than the quarrel between our two cap- tains. This was the Shaker schism which has given a picturesque touch to our town for generations.
One who knew our meeting-house some seventy-five years ago writes: "I wish I were an artist and could give a sketch of the dear old church as I remember it in its first improvement with the three porches &c and the interior-its blue pillars supporting the galleries, on one, in white paint, '1773.' The aisles and pews seem familiar as I look at them through this long space of
time. . One of the customs that passes before me as a reality now is, that the men at the close of the service were the first to leave the pews and walk solemnly out, then the women followed.
"The earliest recollection of our church music is when the bass viol was the principal instrument, played by Mr. David Livermore most vigorously as though he enjoyed it, then the double bass which he also played many years, having the addition of flute and violin and other instru- ments occasionally. In the choir Mr. Isaac Hall, I think must have been the leader, as he sang bass and beat time most emphatically, entering into the spirit of the occasion. I am not certain that the audience rose during the singing but did in the prayer."
She gives one other picture of the church-going habits of the time: "My grandfather Holden went to church in the square-topped chaise with grandmother always, the children, two sons and two daughters, in a wagon behind. In the cold weather, with no heat in the church, a foot stove which was always replenished at our house,
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gave her warmth till noon, when the coal cup was again renewed. They always ate their noon lunch at our table, bringing it with them." She adds that her uncle, Wilder Dodge, who was a carpenter, took a pew as part payment of his work in building the pulpit. He also took many of the old panelled doors of the old pews and used them in his house as ceiling, as panelling, and in various other capacities. In this remodelling the church was added to by squaring out the jogs left between the tower and the church, and putting in the stairways to the gallery in the new space.
In 1851 the church was moved to one side of the training field. The land sloped away to the rear, and the side doors could only be reached by long flights of steps, so the cross aisle was done away with, along with the box pews, the high pulpit, and the sounding board.
Through all these changes, except the last, Priest Whitney held to his labors, gathering his flock Sunday after Sunday as he grew older and feebler. Sometimes, apparently he could not come. In 1806, James Parker, Jr., writes in his diary: "August 3. I went to meeting; Esq Tom [Mr. Whitney's son] red the Discourse." Perhaps his late sorrow may account in a measure for this, for his wife had died about six months before. Lydia Parker wrote to her brother, Leonard Moody Parker, in November, 1805, describing the last hours of Mrs. Whitney. Leonard was a student at Dartmouth at the time. "I am sure I do not know where to begin. I think I saw in my father's letter that you wished to know the particulars respecting Mrs. Whitney's death on Wednesday. The priest return'd home on that day; she was taken unwell & on thursday she was derang'd
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& did not know anything more till death clos'd her eyes on Friday afternoon about two o'clock. The Minister is in Tollourable health & spirits, as to the girls they bear it with greater fortitude than I could have expected. this day I am to go & see them & spend a few days. I shall have about the same time that I used to. Clar * is in love with Rider. L. Jonson is a comming at Thanksgiving."
Mr. Whitney himself died in 1819, beloved and re- spected by all, a type of man who has had very much to do with the upbuilding of the intellectual life of the country towns in New England and the northern states. For, say what you will, our northern country towns have, and always have had, a reading population; our district schools in the old days fostered a love of reading, and there is scarcely a household now of the old stock where you will not find many magazines. We are constant users of such public libraries as are to be reached by us, and here are the birthplaces for many a great magnate who goes forth to the city to lead in literature, science or business. For this, such men as Mr. Whitney have been responsible, because they set the community an example of intellectual life, and stood high above their people, respected and honored.
Mr. Whitney was succeeded after some years by the Rev. Seth Chandler, who was also endeared to his people through a very long tenure of office, ably carrying on the standard of culture and refinement. Ralph Waldo Emerson visited him, and a chamber in his house is still pointed to with pride, as that where Emerson slept.
* Clarissa Whitney, aged sixteen. She married Henry Isaacs of Mason, N. H.
COL. THOMAS WHITNEY
REV. SETH CHANDLER
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It's the southwest chamber, large and commodious, with a lovely view over the fields to the woods and the sunset beyond. Mr. Chandler was a reader and kept in touch with the theology of his day. Mr. Charles B. Fairbanks who was assistant librarian at the Boston Athenaeum in 1848, kept a memorandum from day to day to jog his memory. The entry for August 28, 1848, has an interest for Shirley people:
Appleton's Ordination sermon imp (Peabody.
Waterhouse's Principle of Vitality.
Two of Lathrop's Disc.
dl'd to Rev. S. Chandler.
Shirley.
Care of
Whitney & Fenno Milk St.
The Columbian Centinel for January 7, 1818, gives an interesting item: "In Shirley on New Year's Day Rev. JACOB WOOD, over the Ist Universal church and society in that town. The charge and an excellent discourse was delivered by the Rev. Mr. TURNER of Charlestown from 2 Tim. ii, 15; and the installation prayer and fellow- ship of churches by the Rev. Mr. DEAN of this town. The services were solemn and impressive, the music good, the day pleasant, and satisfaction complete."
Here is recorded the second division in religious wor- ship which gradually broke up the old town-wide gather- ing-together. The church, dedicated the year before with "solemn" service, stood on a bluff on the south side of the Catacoonemug, facing north. The land had been owned by Squire James Parker, and was part of the original home lot of our first settled schoolmaster, David McLeod. The church, now used as Odd Fellows
JOHN EGERTON'S HOUSE, CENTRE ROAD
.
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Hall, stood where the Universalist Church now stands, and was according to Mr. Chandler "uncouth" and "unattractive." When the Fitchburg Railroad was put through in 1846, Shirley Village began to grow, and the church was remodelled to its present dignified, simple, and attractive form. As the interior has been entirely changed, perhaps Mr. Chandler's description will not be amiss, for many of you will read this book because it is new, forgetting how very good Mr. Chandler's history really is. "It contained forty-four pews, and a gallery for the choir. It was surmounted by a tower, in which hung a fine toned bell. It was ornamented with a pulpit of choice mahogany and supplied with an elegant communion table and chairs. It had fixtures for illuminating the interior when required for evening services. The aisles and floors of the pews were uniformly carpeted, and the pew seats were fur- nished with comfortable upholstering." Mr. Munson gave the church an organ, and the one which it replaced went to the Orthodox Society, and was in use there for many years.
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