USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Nahant > Some annals of Nahant, Massachusetts > Part 2
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In these days of easy travel and large steamships it is hard to visualize the magnitude of the exodus of over twenty thou-
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SOME ANNALS OF NAHANT
sand people in twenty years from comfortable homes in Eng- land to the American wilderness. Not a factor of life was as easy as it is today. Shelter, light, clothing, fuel, transporta- tion and food were mostly very different and far more trouble- some. The face of nature, that today seems not dangerous, then had real perils, and winter, wilderness and distance, if they only meant inaccessibility, carried enough of the thrill of adventure to satisfy any one and to daunt the timorous. Far different is it today, when the milk bottle is on every door- step with the daily punctuality of sunrise, and one can admire every spring the freshly painted billboard landscapes, and live by the side of the road and sell gasolene to the multitude.
CHAPTER II
THE INDIANS
THE many Indian tribes that inhabited North America prior to the coming of the white man were very different in their habits of life. Some were more or less wandering, and some were home-loving, with gardens and other accompani- ments of a home life. Some were warlike and some were peace- loving, though life in the wilderness, with neighbors not always pleasant, necessitated readiness for serious conflict on the part of all. The story of the Indians and their lives, and social and political methods, is interesting. Many tribes were developed far beyond the savage barbarian stage, with rites and ceremonies which, while pagan, were dignified and systematic, and showed an adherence to orderly methods, proving a civilization.
Boston and all the best localities anywhere around it were used by the Massachusetts tribe of the Algonquin Indians, who were between the Taratines and Pawtuckets on the north, and the Narragansetts and Pequots on the south and west. It is said they had a population of over a hundred and fifty thousand, and could muster three thousand warriors into the field of combat.
For the two score years before the settlement of Boston, vessels had been sailing the coast, fishing and trading, and they were not always honest. Kidnapping and other mis- treatments were too common. While the Massachusetts Indians were not naturally so hostile or warlike as many other tribes, there was reason for whatever dislike or retribution they might have shown or exercised. Here was a population, many times outnumbering the Puritans who were to come, who occupied the best places around Boston Harbor, and
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SOME ANNALS OF NAHANT
who might hardly be expected to give up their holdings with- out a struggle.
In two years this condition was changed. A plague came and "the country was in a manner left void of inhabitants." What this pestilence was is disputed. Many have called it smallpox, but Englishmen of that time knew smallpox. One in four was pock-marked. Yet Bradford called it an infectious fever, although he recognized and named smallpox when it raged among the Indians in 1733, seventeen years later. This plague began in 1616 and was ended in 1617. In 1621 Gov- ernor Winslow, from Plymouth, on an excursion to the interior, says, "thousands of men have lived there, which died in the great plague not long since." William Bradford writes they were not "able to bury one another and their skulls and bones were found in many places laying still above the ground, where their houses and dwellings had been, a very sad spectacle to behold."
"It was in this way," as that eminent Christian Divine and close student of the precepts of his Master, the Rev. Cotton Mather, charitably observed eighty years later, "the woods were cleared of those pernicious creatures to make room for a better growth."
The citation is from Charles Francis Adams, "Three Epi- sodes in Massachusetts History."
The Indians around Lynn and north of Boston as far as Maine were ruled by Nanapashemet, or the New Moon, one of the greatest Sachems in New England. His summer home was on Sagamore Hill in Lynn, which is the hill nearest Nahant. Nahant Street and Newhall Street go up a part of it, while the highest point lies between the two and east of Sagamore Street. Nanapashemet escaped the great plague of 1616 and 1617, but was killed by the Taratines from the North, in 1619, at Med- ford, where was his second house, or winter home. Governor Winslow visited it in 1621 and describes the late Sachem's house as a well-fortified place where he had tried to make himself safe against the deadly vengeance of his enemies.
Nanapashemet had three sons, Wonohaquham, Monto-
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THE INDIANS
wampote and Wenepoykin, sometimes called Winnepurkit. The former was Sagamore in the Mystic River region, and was commonly known as Sagamore John. Montowampote was commonly known as Sagamore James. His wife one writer called Nahanta, and another says she was Wenuchus, daughter of Chief Passaconaway. They were married in 1629, when the Sagamore was twenty years old, and lived on Sagamore Hill in Lynn until 1633, when he and his brother, on the Mystic, were victims of the serious smallpox epidemic of that year. Montowampote is said by one writer to have journeyed to London in 1631, armed with a letter from Gov- ernor Winthrop chiefly to protest against his defrauding of twenty beaver skins. He was received there with respect, but could not stand the life or the food, and was glad to return to his clams and succotash in Lynn or Medford. Wenepoykin was born in 1616, the youngest son of the great chief Nana- pashemet. In 1633, at the death of his brothers, he became Sagamore of Lynn and Chelsea, and after the death of his mother in 1677 he was Sachem of all Massachusetts north and east of the Charles River. He was proprietor of Deer Island, which he sold to Boston. He was called Sagamore George, and sometimes George Rumney Marsh. This chief was taken prisoner in the Wampanoag War in 1676, and died in 1684, after returning from slavery in the Barbadoes to the home of a relative in Natick. His wife was Ahawayet, daugh- ter of Poquanum, who was Sachem of Nahant. The name "Nahant," like many others, appears to have been an old In- dian name, and not one given by the white settlers or explorers, although the whites often gave Indian names to places.
There is record of the name Mattahunt, and also of Fullerton Islands. But the name "Nahant" persisted. It is properly pronounced with soft "a" in both syllables, and often spoiled in mispronunciation. Charles A. Hammond, elsewhere men- tioned, has had exceptional opportunity for acquaintance with the Indian language of a western tribe, and from this deduces the reasonable theory that the original Indian name was "Na-an." The Indian fondness for the soft "a" and
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SOME ANNALS OF NAHANT
the Indian simplicity of language are shown in the sugges- tion of twins offered by the word in this form. It would be assumed that the twins would be Little Nahant and Great Nahant, but this might not be the case. Hammond points out that from the Indian vantage point on or around Saga- more Hill, Little Nahant would be blanketed by Great Nahant, and the twins would be Great Nahant and the Bass Point section, joined by the low-lying marsh land. This theory is interesting and plausible, even though no record neglects the two added consonants now in the name. These might, nevertheless, come from the inaptitude of the English language for soft-spoken syllables, and be a product of English occupation of the territory.
Whittier, in his legend "The Bridal of Pennacook," tells that Winnepurkit, as Sagamore George was often called, wooed and won Weetamoo, the daughter of Passaconaway. It ap- pears, however, to have been his brother Montowampote, Sagamore James, who married a daughter of the famous old chief, but her name was not Weetamoo. As Whittier tells the story Weetamoo was once escorted to her father's place, among the White Hills to the north, by a distinguished group of her husband's warriors. Later, when the visit was over, old Passaconaway sent for Winnepurkit to come and get his wife. The reply was abrupt, to the effect that as he had pro- vided escort one way the father should do like courtesy for the return trip. The old chief refused and there was a deadlock. The story tells that the distracted wife started off alone, and was lost in the rapids she could not master in her canoe. One of the several trails up Chocorua Mountain, the newest one, is named Weetamoo trail. Here appears to be the new woman stepping out and claiming a part of life's glory; but perhaps mere men named it, after all.
Poquanum is called Duke William by William Wood in his "New England's Prospect," and depositions in the Salem court records show that he was also known as Black Will. In 1630 he sold Nahant to Thomas Dexter for a suit of clothes and a plug of tobacco. In 1633 some vessels hunting for
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THE INDIANS
pirates found Poquanum on an island in Portland Harbor, and hanged him for the alleged murder of a white man, who, according to all accounts, deserved the killing. But before this Wenepoykin had mortgaged Nahant to a man in Charlestown for twenty pounds or so; and in 1630 a Swamp- scott farmer claimed to have bought Nahant, Swampscott and Sagamore Hill; this time Black Will sold again.
It may not be said that these transactions, and only a few among many have been cited, show dishonesty by the Indians. They were suddenly brought in contact with new ways, and some mortgage, deed, or court record or other thing meant nothing but confusion to them. The act of Black Will in taking vengeance on a white man does not prove much, either, in days and among people where other forms of law and order were unknown. Black Will may have been something of a rascal, but what has been told does not prove him so, and the Indian's association with the white man seems not yet long enough to acquire the latter's own brands of rascality and double dealing. In any event, Poquanum has been dead a long time and on the strength of the old saying he ought now to be a very good Indian. It may not be said, either, that the Indians were exceptionally ignorant of the values of their lands and livings. Indeed, not so many years later, as Van Loon says in writing of the Treaty of Westminster of 1674, the astute Dutch relinquished their hold upon New Nether- lands in exchange for peaceful possession of sugar-raising lands in Guiana. "They swapped New York Harbor for a swamp in South America." Curious things can happen in new lands.
In 1602, when Gosnold visited our shores, he discovered land on Friday, May 14, according to Purchas' "Pilgrim." Sailing along the shore he anchored near a place he called Savage Rock. Bancroft, in his "United States History," and others have assumed this was Nahant. A boat went off to them containing eight Indians, all dressed in skins save one. This one wore a full suit of English clothes, which he could have obtained by trading. Maybe this was Duke William,
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SOME ANNALS OF NAHANT
and that when he traded with Farmer Dexter his suit was worn out and he needed another.
There is earlier mention, perhaps meaning Nahant, than this visit of Gosnold. Various writers, in citing the old records of Thorwald's visit to America, agree that probably Nahant was the place he praised. Returning from Rhode Island in the year 1004, after a two years' sojourn there, he "sailed Eastward and then Northward, past a remarkable headland, enclosing a bay, and which was opposite to another headland. They called this Kiarlarnes, or Keel cape" from resemblance to a ship's keel. This seems to have been Cape Cod. "From thence they sailed along the Eastern Coast of the land to a promontory which projected - probably Nahant - and which was everywhere covered with wood. Here Thor- wald went ashore with all his companions. He was so pleased with the place that he exclaimed - 'Here it is beautiful, and here I should like to fix my dwelling.'" There was fighting with the Indians and Thorwald was mortally wounded. He instructed that he should be buried on the headland, "and plant a cross at my head and also at my feet, and call the place Krossanes - The Cape of the Cross - in all time com- ing." If the Scandinavian records and traditions are cor- rect, the Northmen, as they were called, visited this country repeatedly in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
The various settlements soon tried to substantiate their claims to their land by getting deeds from the Indians, and this involved many depositions which are now of record. Yet all these dickerings, mortgaging, buying and selling naturally led to great confusion of ownership, much of which will become more evident as the story of Nahant is told. The town of Lynn was repeatedly obliged to defend its proprietorship in Nahant in court actions. Nahant at this time, according to William Wood in his "New England's Prospect," was "well wooded with Oakes, Pines and Cedars. It is, besides, well watered, having, besides the fresh springs, a great pond in the middle, before which is a spacious marsh. In this necke is a store of
Old Johnson Homestead
Gateway nearly opposite Town Hall entrance
Home of Joseph Johnson Formerly on Nahant Road
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THE INDIANS
good ground, fit for the plow; but for the present it is only used to put young cattle in, and weather goats, and swine, to secure them from the woolves; a few posts and rayles, from low water marks to the shore, keeps out the woolves and keepes in the cattle. One Black William, an Indian Duke, out of his gener- osity, gave the place in general to this plantation of Saugus, so that no other can appropriate it to himself."
The first white settlers in Lynn appear to have ensconced themselves in what is still recognized as Woodend, named for the Wood family, one of whom was this William Wood. Another "end" was Breed's End, down near what is now Breed Square, and there was Graves End. It is interesting to note the white settlement somewhere around the vicinity where today's Union and Chestnut Streets meet, while not very far away, on Sagamore Hill, around Sagamore, Nahant and Sachem Streets, was the Indian settlement. This sort of mostly peaceable infiltration occurred all around the Boston Harbor vicinity. Apparently the Indians, never so hostile as some Indian tribes, were terribly disheartened by their losses in the great pestilence of a dozen years earlier, and by their war with the Taratines. Nanapashemet was chief of a great tribe. His sons were chiefs of small groups, broken in spirit. Furthermore, they may have welcomed probable aid in beating off their fiercer war-loving enemies. A common enemy is a good uniter. In any event, the two sorts of settle- ments appear to have lived together, and to have done busi- ness together, in far greater harmony than the history of other places meeting other Indian tribes can show. What would have become of the Plymouth settlement of a half hun- dred or so people, in 1621, if the Indians had been numerous, strong, alert and jealous of encroachments?
The Indians also had a superstitious dread of the white man, and some of them believed the strangers held the demon of the plague at their disposal, and had let him loose upon the red man in those dreadful disease years. This kept the toma- hawks quiet for a while. They cursed the settlement at
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SOME ANNALS OF NAHANT
Plymouth, but did nothing else, although the Narragansett tribe tried conclusions once by sending in a bundle of arrows wrapped in a snake skin, with the reply that most histories tell about. The location at Plymouth seems to have been a fortunate accident. It was for a time the safest from attack. Further south were the Pequots and the Susquehannocks, who were more powerful and more ferocious.
The incident of the purchase of Nahant by Thomas Dexter of Chief Poquanum, or Black Will, is commemorated on the town seal of Nahant. This, according to the town records, was designed by the selectmen and accepted at the annual town meeting on March 13, 1875. The selection of a subject never seemed fortunate, for Dexter's title to Nahant was suc- cessfully contested by the town of Lynn, because Poquanum, in his ignorance, had obtained money several times by mort- gaging or selling Nahant. It is said that he gave the place to Lynn in the outset. Yet as a curious and rather spectacular happening it will serve as a point of interest. Town seals are rarely designed by great artists.
There is an Indian legend of Swallows Cave, on Nahant, which is told in print, for example, in the "Manuscript" for November and December, 1827. This little magazine does not seem to have qualities which would endear it to modern readers, and the story takes the length of a short magazine article to tell a simple, brief tale. A party of Narragansett Indians on the war path were driven out of the village of Lynn in King Philip's War, and fled over the beach to Nahant, taking refuge in what is now called Swallows Cave. The writer uses this name, but says it should be called Indians Cave. A witch woman in Salem, called "Wonderful," told the settlers where these Indians could be found, and when an attack was about to begin this same woman appeared and drew the white defenders of their homes off with dire fore- bodings and tales of trouble. She persuaded them to treat with the Indians and make peace. The effort was successful because the Indians had unwittingly fled to a small peninsula,
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THE INDIANS
a sort of cul-de-sac, from which there was no escape. The entire band of red men agreed to return to their own tribal homes and fight the white men no more, and they were allowed to depart in peace. Apparently the story can be classed with many another, and carefully labelled interesting, if true. In so far as age is a merit, the tale was in print over a hundred years ago.
CHAPTER III
THE FIRST OF LYNN
LYNN was an early Massachusetts settlement. It originally included Saugus, Lynnfield, Reading, Swampscott and Na- hant, and was known as Sawgus, or Sawgust, until 1637. A 1647 Almanac gives a list of towns with dates, and says that Lynn began in 1629. The first white men known to have been inhabitants of Lynn were brothers, Edmund and Francis Ingalls. A family record says the former came from Lincoln- shire in England to Lynn in 1629. Another account says they came to Salem in 1628 and moved over to "Sawgust" the next year. Edmund was a farmer and settled on what is now Fayette Street near Goldfish Pond. He was drowned, says Lewis in his "History of Lynn," in 1648, by falling with his horse through the Saugus River bridge on Boston Street. He had nine children, six of whom were born in England. They and their mother recovered damages from the General Court, "there being a court order that any person soe dyeing through such insufficiency of any bridge in the Country" should be paid compensation. Here, almost at once after the establish- ment of a government, is a form of public liability set up.
Francis Ingalls lived at Swampscott and was a tanner with the first tannery in New England, on Humphries Brook. Then came William Dixey, who was an employee of Isaac Johnson, and who says in a deposition of July 1, 1657, that he and others "met with Sagamore James and some other Indians who did give me and the rest leave to dwell there or there- abouts, whereupon I and the rest of my master's company did cutt grass for our cattell and kept them upon Nahant for some space of time; for the Indian James Sagamore and the rest did give me and the rest, in behalf of my master Johnson,
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THE FIRST OF LYNN
what land we would; whereupon we sett down in Sawgust and had quiet possession of it by the aforesaid Indians, and kept our cattell in Nahant the summer following." Lewis enters his coming under date of 1629, from which 1630 is per- haps the first year cattle were kept on Nahant. Dixey later moved to Salem.
William Wood came to Lynn in 1629 and lived there about four years during which he wrote "New England's Prospect." He went to London, where his book was published in 1634. He says he wrote "because there hath been many scandalous and false reports passed upon the Country, even from the sulphurous breath of every base ballad monger."
The year 1630, when John Winthrop, the first Governor of Massachusetts, came to Boston, saw many people added to Lynn. Among them was Allen Breed, the ancestor of the family still well represented in the city, and with descendants on Nahant mentioned elsewhere. The Allen Breed Chest is an antique of the Essex Institute in Salem. Thomas Dexter was another early comer, of whom more must be said because of his connection with Nahant.
Dexter owned eight hundred acres of land on Saugus River. He was known as Farmer Dexter, and he seems to have pros- pered, although his claims to the whole of Nahant were over- ridden in the courts. He was one of those men who seem destined, as James R. Newhall said, "to make a sensation wherever they are." He was of a fairly irascible disposition, and an early incident was a quarrel with Governor Endicott of Salem over the proper season for pruning a pear tree, per- haps the immortal pear tree brought over by the Governor, and in recent years still pointed out on the Endicott farm in Danvers. In 1632 he was bound over to keep the peace, and again he was set in the bilboes and disfranchised and fined for speaking disrespectfully of the government; also he was fined for being "a common sleeper in meetings." There seems no doubt that Dexter was a man of enterprise. One of his schemes was for a stone breakwater to protect Long Beach and give easier access to Nahant. Colonial authorities were
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SOME ANNALS OF NAHANT
indifferent to the plan, and others thought the undertaking too great. In another scheme he carried over in boats a con- siderable quantity of good soil to Egg Rock. Then he wanted to straighten Saugus River. But with all his speculative schemes he was a useful and worth-while citizen of old Lynn, who gets this attention here because so many of his plans had to do with Nahant. Newhall tells much more of Dexter, but his accuracy is questioned.
This year also saw Christopher Lindsey here, an employee of Thomas Dexter, usually called servant in those days. Lindsey kept his master's cattle on Nahant, and a hill was once called Lindsey's Hill. E. J. Johnson says Lindsey lived on the hillside westward from Bass Beach until his death. Many think Spouting Horn hill was "Lindsey's Hill." He died in 1668. He was wounded in the Pequot War, and a petition to the court in 1655 states that he "was disabled from service for twenty weeks for which he never had any satisfaction." He was awarded three pounds, and here is an example of very early attempts at compensation for injuries in war. Lewis says Lindsey's daughter Naomi was the wife of Thomas Maule of Salem, the famous Quaker who was indicted for publishing a book maintaining the truth as he saw it. Then he published the "Persecutors Manual," in which he said he had been five times imprisoned, three times deprived of his goods, and three times whipped, besides many other abuses. The way of the transgressor of general public opinion was hard at times. Today many people spend more money than they have to avoid a contumely, real or imagined, which seems severe, although it does not include whipping or other corporeal inflictions.
Altogether, about fifty men and their families came to Lynn in 1630 and settled in desirable parts of the town, oc- cupying from ten to two hundred acres or more, upon which they were practically squatters. Before the land was strictly divided and fields fenced, cattle were kept together in one drove and guarded by one man called a hayward. The sheep, goats and swine were kept on Nahant and tended by a shep-
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THE FIRST OF LYNN
herd, or more than one. These shepherds, of whom Dixey and Lindsey seem to have been two, apparently lived on Nahant, perhaps with their families. The impermanent nature of these occupations, however, not only precluded them from being called real settlers, but made any accurate record or present-day knowledge of them on Nahant quite impossible.
The'se early residents of Lynn had town meetings every three months for the regulation of their public affairs. They cut wood in common, and drew lots for the grass in meadows and marshes. "The chiefest corn they planted, before they had plows, was Indian grain, and let no man make a jest of pumpkins, for with this food the Lord was pleased to feed his people to their good content till corn and cattle were increased." They cultivated fields of barley and wheat, using much of the former for malt for beer. A malt house was an important adjunct of these settlements. Water was rather a dangerous drink in England in those days of some crowding and no sanitation, and the beer-drinking habit was fixed and was brought along to the new country.
The first houses were rude structures covered with thatch or bundles of sedge or straw. A common form was eighteen feet square, with a sleeping chamber under the roof reached by rude steep stairs more like a stepladder. Better houses were built two stories high in front, sloping down to one story in the rear. Burnt clam shells were used for lime for plaster- ing. Windows were small, opening outward on hinges, and with very small panes. People burned about twenty cords of wood a year, and ministers were allowed thirty cords.
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