USA > Massachusetts > Barnstable County > Falmouth > Suckanesset; wherein may be read a history of Falmouth, Massachusetts > Part 6
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Dr. Wicks' house on Palmer Avenue was sold to Dr. Croswell. This was long after the Revolution, as in 1824 the Charitable Society of Falmouth met at Dr. Wicks' house near the Green. After Dr. Croswell, Captain War- ren B. Bourne, maternal grandfather of Mrs. James Wood bought the house, and it eventually came to Mrs. Wood who now lives there (1930). Dr. Croswell, by the way, was a grandson of the Rev. Samuel Palmer.
Our picture of the Village Green at the time of the Revolution is now coming clearer. We can visualise it as an acre and a half of unfenced open ground defined by narrow dirt 'roads' where doubtless grass grew in ragged tufts. On it stood the meeting house '42 feet square' which had been built in 1749-50, and grouped about it were seven or eight houses, with the whipping post in the rear of the meeting house.
Here, upon the Green, were enacted many scenes of Falmouth's part in the birth of that democracy which is now in its one hundred and fifty-fourth year. Here, as early as October, 1774 the towns people met to appoint a committee of correspondence, Captain Joseph Robinson, Noah Davis and Nathaniel Shiverick, and to vote that ev-
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ery man from 16 to 60 be equipped with arms and ammu- nition. In November they appointed Joseph Palmer, John Nye, Abner Davis, Samuel Fish, John Grannis, John Bourne and Daniel Butler, Jr. "to see that the Continental Congress be adhered to." Joseph Palmer later became leader of one company of the town's militia and Captain John Grannis commanded the expedition for protection of the Elizabeth Islands, which two bits of information should be sufficient evidence of the patriotic and able ini- tiative of their fellow members of this committee whose names-Nye, Davis, Fish, Bourne, are still flourishing to- day in our community.
Perhaps the letter from the Committee of Safety at Concord, despatched to the patriots of Falmouth the day after the Battle of Lexington, was posted on the Green for all to see; certainly it must have been read in meet- ing and discussed on all sides for its spirit met a worthy answer in the conduct of the town during the next few years:
April 20th, 1775.
Gentlemen:
The barbarous murders committed on our in- nocent brethren on Wednesday, the 19th, have made it absolutely necessary that we immediately raise an army to defend our wives and children from the butchering hands of an inhuman soldiery who, in- censed at the obstacles they meet with in their bloody progress, and enraged at being repulsed from the field of slaughter, will, without the least doubt, take the first opportunity in their power to ravage this devoted country with fire and sword. We conjure you, therefore, by all that is sacred, that you give assistance in forming an army. Our all is at stake. Death and devastation are the certain consequences of delay. Every moment is infinitely precious. An hour lost may deluge your country in blood and en- tail perpetual slavery upon the few of our posterity who may survive the carnage. We beg and entreat, as you will answer to your country, to your own con- science and above all to God himself, that you will hasten and encourage by all possible means the en- listment of men to form the army and to send them forward to headquarters at Cambridge with that ex- pedition which the vast importance and instant ur- gency of the affair demands."
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This letter would have come by courier, spurring through the spring sunshine, horse and rider flecked with foam and bespattered with the spring mud, and we might wonder at the ready sympathy it awakened in a small town so far removed from Boston and Concord, with such scanty means of communication, until we realize that Falmouth itself was already suffering hostile acts from the British fleet cruising in the Sound and siezing sup- plies and cattle along the shore and on the Elizabeth Is- lands. The coastwise shipping was practically brought to a standstill by the dangers of capture at sea so that by May 1775 at a town meeting the men of Falmouth saw the necessity of laying in supplies against a dearth, and ordered Timothy Crocker, Joseph Parker and Nathaniel Shiverick to procure bread corn not exceeding one thous- and bushels to be stored in a safe place and sold to those who needed it or dispensed to those unable to pay for it. The same men were to procure a supply of firearms and empowered to get the money for these purposes on the credit of the town. Barachiah Bassett and Job Parker were added to the Committee of Correspondence and a night watch "to stand from 9 in the evening till sunrise" gives an idea of the early hours kept in those days when candles and pine knots were the only means of illumina- tion in the homes.
At the same time the town ordered the raising of a company of minute men, to be paid two shillings a day for actual service, of which Major Joseph Dimmick of the Barnstable County Brigade was commander, with orders to have his militia men instructed in the exercise of arms two days a week. As our present Green was set aside in 1749 for "a meeting house lot and training field," undoubtedly Major Dimmick drilled his recruits here in the field about the meeting house and we may imagine that "Bassett's pretty daughters," Annie and Mercy, who were thirteen and eleven years old in 1775, peeped out of the front windows of the house that is now the residence attached to the Falmouth National Bank, to watch the farmer boys in knee breeches, shirtsleeves and hair clubbed in queue, learning to handle their heavy muzzle- loaders and march and countermarch under Major Dim- mick's direction. We imagine them peeping through the window instead of going out on the Green because of the new baby, named Love, who was born in the Bassett house that year, who probably required their presence to rock
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the cradle. We may be sure that on training days the Major's twelve year old son Prince Dimmick was well to the fore among the urchins who hung about the Green watching 'the soldiers' with envious eyes, and little Mercy Bassett watching from the window probably little dreamed that fourteen years later she would marry Prince Dimmick and go to live in the house on Main Street to- day called the Ryder house. A companion of Prince Dim- mick's on the Green watching the minute men at their maneuvres would surely have been young Stephen Swift, whose home was east of the present Poor Farm, near the Teaticket corner, for three years later when the British fleet attacked Falmouth, Stephen, then sixteen, was the fifer who piped the alarm for the home troops to man the breastworks at the foot of Shore Street.
Braddock Dimmick, eldest son of Major Joseph, was likely to have had less leisure for hanging about the Green to watch the minute men, for tradition has it that when the news of the Battle of Bunker Hill, June 17th, reached Falmouth, he and his father were plowing to- gether in the field, and the Major said, "Here, Braddock, you must look to the team; I must go." Braddock was then only fourteen, but, like most boys of those early days, capable of performing almost a man's duties.
In 1776 at town meeting, presumably held as usual in the meeting house, consent was voted that "the house of Representatives should enact such a constitution and form of government as shall most conduce to the safety, peace and happiness in this state" and Esquire Shiverick despatched to court with a copy of the town's proceedings.
There, if you please, is another picture connected with the Green, for the Shivericks dwelt at the foot of the Green, on the shores of the pond still called by their name and we may conjure up a vision of Esquire Shiverick in three-cornered hat and queue mounting a horse at his door with his wife bustling out with packages of cold meat and 'journey cake' to tuck in his saddle bags, and picture him as patting his pocket as he gathered up the reins, to make sure he had not forgotten his copy of the town's proceed- ings which he was to deliver at Boston. His route would probably have lain down through East Falmouth and through the forest to Sandwich and so up through Ply- mouth.
The outstanding figure of the Revolutionary period in Falmouth was General Joseph Dimmick, whose home
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was on East Main Street, said to have been in the old Ryder house which in 1929 was moved back to make room for the Jenney Gasoline Station.
He was a Colonel of militia when the Revolution broke out. With his brother, Lot Dimmick, he took an active part in capturing English privateers in these wa- ters. There is a tale of him summoned from his bed at midnight by the captain of a schooner that was bringing a cargo of sorely-needed corn from Connecticut when it was captured by the British off Naushon. The captain had escaped in a small boat and came to Dimmick for aid. Hastily getting together his brother, Lot and some twenty other men, Joseph Dimmick headed a flotilla of three whaleboats that pulled to Tarpaulin Cove before day- break, when they attacked the privateer and the schoon- er, defended by a prize crew. One Britisher was fatally wounded in the boarding of the schooner, and Dimmick's men drove off the prize crew and immediately got way on the schooner.
The privateer pursued them so closely that they had to run the schooner ashore on the west end of the Vine- yard, landing and holding off the privateer which could not approach because of the ebb-tide. Later Dimmick re-floated the schooner on flood tide and brought vessel and cargo safely to Woods Hole.
On another occasion Joseph Dimmick with twenty- five men in a small sloop set out from Woods Hole on hearing of two privateers anchoring at Holmes' Harbor (Vineyard Haven) with a captured schooner. Again he planned on a surprise at dawn, but was himself surprised when daylight revealed an English ship-of-war lying in the harbor. Undaunted, they slipped under the lee of the outer privateer, attacked and boarded the privateer lying further in before the ship-of-war could get into action. Retreat to Woods Hole being cut off, Dimmick ran for Oyster Island with his own vessel and the cap- tured privateer, from which 33 prisoners were sent to Boston.
Joseph Dimmick received his commission as Major in 1775; as Colonel in 1790; as Brigadier-General in 1794 and served as lieutenant of militia under General Aber- crombie at Ticonderoga. For twenty five years he was High Sheriff of Barnstable County, as well as State senator for three years just before the War of 1812.
On April 2, 1779 a fleet of ten British vessels came
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over from Newport to make a raid on Falmouth. They stopped the night at Tarpaulin Cove and some of the officers went ashore to a tavern there whose host, over- hearing their conversation, sent a rowboat and messenger to give a warning in Woods Hole.
At day break when the British fleet appeared off Fal- mouth, they found trenches dug on the shore near the Old Stone Dock, on the present Surf Drive, with Colonel Joseph Dimmick in command of a determined body of defenders. Tradition has it that Stephen Swift, a six- teen-year-old lad, whose home was east of the present town infirmary, where the cellar foundations are still visible, near the Teaticket-Falmouth Heights corner, was the fifer whose piping set the step and stirred the spirits of the Falmouth troops on that day. The British landing party lay on their oars at discovering this defence, and in the end rowed ignominously back to their vessels and sailed off.
One account of this battle states that the fleet, con- sisting of two schooners and eight sloops, maintained a cannonade of cannon-ball, double-headed shot, grape shot from eleven in the morning until dark, about five o'clock; and that their landing party consisted of 220 men in ten small boats, which were repulsed successfully by about fifty of the Falmouth militia.
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CHAPTER VIII
JACKSON'S WOODEN HEAD
I T IS impossible for us to exaggerate the hold that re- ligion had on our forefathers, for the church to them might have been called the cornerstone of their civic and individual lives. The church rate was laid on each taxpayer by vote of the town, and the town concurred with the church society in inviting the minister to settle among them. As late as 1805, an order for a Quaker to be relieved of contributing to the Congregational Church was voted.
In 1780, impoverished though they were by the war then going on, the town and church settled a new min- ister, the Rev. Isaiah Mann of Scituate. The previous incumbent, the Rev. Zebulon Butler, who had succeeded the venerable Rev. Samuel Palmer at his decease in 1775, had not been a worthy addition to the community. He was a Nantucket man, and soon after his coming, charges involving his moral character were brought against him, and the agitation therefore finally decided Mr. Butler to resign in July 1778, whereupon he returned to Nantuck- et and became a manufacturer of snuff.
Isaiah Mann was but twenty one years of age when he was ordained pastor of the church on the Green. He married Zipporah, daughter of Isaiah Nickerson of Fal- mouth, and died in 1789, much beloved to judge by his epitaph :
"Those gifts and graces filled his heavenly mind
Which made him loved, revered by all mankind.
He wisely taught his little flock the road .
To glory, honour, happiness and God.
He lived and died a man of virtuous life Lamented by his people, friends and wife.
Peace to his sacred dust which here must lie
Till roused to reunite the soul in yon ethereal sky."
In the nine years of his ministry, twenty-nine com-
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municants had been added to the congregation, and after his death, in town meeting it was voted "to give Mrs. Mann the improvement of the schoolhouse lot this year, and the rye growing on the hill lot and the firewood that is cut."
The Rev. Henry Lincoln who followed him was also an inspiring leader of the church and the fruit of the ministry of these two men is our present beautiful Con- gregational Church.
Mr. Mann died on April 2nd, 1789. On June 18th, the Rev. Henry Lincoln of Hingham, who had graduated from Harvard three years previous, was invited to supply the pulpit. We are entitled, from subsequent events, to draw the conclusion that on his visits to Falmouth to preach in the meeting house on the Green, Mr. Lincoln was entertained at the home of Deacon Timothy Crocker, which faced the meeting house. Mr. Lincoln's sermons and personality pleased the church members, who on November 19th gave him a pastoral call, which he ac- cepted Dec. 31st, and on Feb. 3, 1790, he was inducted as pastor.
The young man's personality had proved equally pleasing to the worthy Deacon and his daughter Susan- nah, for they were married on March 27th, 1790, a very few weeks after Mr. Lincoln had moved to Falmouth. Deacon Crocker, as dowry for his daughter built the house at the corner of Main and Gifford Streets, now (1930) owned by Dr. Pattee, which was for thirty years there- after the Congregational parsonage.
The church records state that Mr. Lincoln was of- fered a salary of 60 pounds annually and the use of the parsonage but the family records and traditions of the Lincolns affirm that the Pattee house was Susannah Crocker's dowry.
Susannah's elder brother Captain Joseph Crocker had married in 1785 Martha, daughter of Colonel Joseph Dim- mick who lived with old Deacon Timothy Crocker in the house facing the Green. There is an anecdote concern- ing the son of Susannah (Crocker) and the Rev. Henry Lincoln.
In 1834 the old frigate Constitution, then lying in Charlestown at the U. S. Navy Yard had been furnished with a wooden figure head of President Andrew Jackson, 1829-37. There was much opposition to this, some parties disliking the use of the effigy of a living person, others
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voicing the old sailors' superstition about the bad luck of having a masculine figure head.
William and Henry Lincoln, both born in Falmouth, in the house today occupied by Dr. Pattee, at the corner of Main and Gifford Streets which was built by Captain Timothy Crocker as a marriage portion for his daughter, Susanna in 1790 at her wedding to the Rev. Henry Lin- coln, were partners in a firm of ship merchants in the West Indies trade on the Old Central Wharf, Boston.
One June morning, in 1834, these merchants were talking in their office with Captain Samuel Worthington Dewey. a former Falmouth boy, who had just completed a voyage to the West Indies in command of a vessel be- longing to the firm, with a cargo of sugar. The conversa- tion turned on the 'desecration of the Constitution' as the ardent Whigs of the day termed it, and Dewey remarked that he had a great mind to go over some dark night, and cut off Andrew Jackson's head. William Lincoln, joking- ly replied "Dewey, if you will do that, I'll give you a hun- dred dollars."
The partners thought no more of it, but Dewey made a trip to the Navy yard reconnoitering and decided that the mad scheme was feasible.
One dark and rainy night, July 22nd, 1834, in the midst of a thunder storm, Captain Dewey, provided with a gimlet and saw, rowed himself from Battery wharf in a flat bottomed skiff over to the Constitution which was lying at the wharf about ready to go to sea. He was lucky enough to find a rope dangling to which he made fast his skiff and swarmed up the side, entering a port hole on the gun deck. In the dark, evading the sentries, he made his way forward to the bridle-port under the bowsprit, through which he climbed out and made his way upward to the spar deck. From here he could actual- ly see the marine sentry pacing the deck, by the flashes of lightning, and the sentry often approached within four feet of him.
Dewey found foothold on the bowsprit, bored the gimlet into Jackson's head as a handle and attacked the throat with his saw. At the first incision he struck a cop- per bolt running perpendicularly to the top of the head, but commencing again near the chin, he succeeded in severing the head. He took the precaution to fasten the gimlet by one end of his handkerchief made fast in a buttonhole of his coat.
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He managed to elude the vigilance of the sentry and make his way back to his boat with his burden, finding the boat almost full of water as he had tied it beneath the outlet of the lee scuppers and the rain had been fall- ing fast while he worked.
As quietly as possible he bailed out the boat with his hat, cut her loose and drifted until far enough away to take to his oars.
The head he brought back and deposited in the wood- shed of his mother's house (she kept a boarding house on School Street).
The next morning the town was in an uproar, and Capt. Jesse D. Elliott, commandant of the Navy Yard, who had first conceived the idea of paying a compliment to President Jackson by putting his figurehead on the Con- stitution which was being retimbered and fitted under his charge at the yard, was highly annoyed at the disappear- ance of the president's wooden head.
Capt. Dewey judged it prudent to move' the head again to the residence of Henry Lincoln, senior partner of the firm in the West end, where it was secreted in a champagne basket. The $100 was duly paid Captain Dewey, several Whig merchants joining with William Lin- coln to make up the sum; and a dinner was given in Con- cert Hall for a few trusted members of the Whig party, including Parker H. Pierce and others, at which the head of General Jackson was placed on a dish for the center- piece, like John the Baptist's head on the charger.
Later the head was the piece de resistance at a ban- quet in the Astor House, New York where it was said Daniel Webster presided, and afterwards Nicholas Biddle sponsored it at a feast in Philadelphia.
Captain Dewey ultimately took it to Washington and with cool assurance handed it over to the Secretary of the Navy, McLane, receiving a receipt for it as "returned property of the U. S."
In 1809, with Robinson Crocker and William Gifford, Samuel Dewey was appointed to school committee. In 1810 this Samuel Worthington Dewey taught a singing school in Falmouth attended by the elite of the town, such as Love Shiverick, who married Silas Jones; Martha Dimmick, who married Thomas Lawrence; Harriet Palm- er, Ansel Nye; Mary Palmer, Dr. Samuel P. Croswell; Mary Crocker who married Capt. William Bodfish; Abigail Brown, Jonathan Dillingham, 2nd William Shiverick.
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Dewey's father was a captain in U. S. Army in com- mand of Fort Independence, Boston Harbor. After his death, his widow (who was a Hallett from Cape Cod) kept a boarding house in Boston where William Lincoln board- ed and saw much of Dewey then mate of Brig Delta, a New Orleans packet. Later H. and W. Lincoln, ship owners, gave Dewey command of Brig Falcon on a trading voyage to Pernambuco prior to the Jackson episode.
The statue of General Jackson ultimately came into the possession of Jonathan Bowers of Tyngsboro who placed it in a garden on the shore of Lake Mascupic, un- der a canopy in a pleasure resort maintained by Mr. Bow- ers, called Willodale. It was sold for more than $10,000 in 1925 at an auction by the sons of Jonathan Bowers. The buyer's name was Max Williams. At that time the head was on the statue, but a deep crack running around the throat showed where it had been removed and subse- quently replaced.
In 1791 began a movement looking towards a new meeting house. One party desired repairs and alterations made to the structure built in 1750, but another group wished to build a new meeting house. The pros and cons were debated in town meeting for several years, but the outcome is easily predicted when we see that who favored a new meeting house were such substantial, forceful characters as Gen. Joseph Dimmick, the Revolutionary leader, Deacon Timothy Crocker, Selectman from 1768- 82 and, 1799, Representative to the General Court.
Perhaps we may credit the Rev. Henry Lincoln with enlisting these gentlemen on the side of the new meeting house, for Capt. Timothy Crocker was his father-in-law, and General Joseph Dimmick's daughter married Joseph Crocker, brother of Mr. Lincoln's wife, Martha.
One bone of contention in regard to building the new meeting house was its location, for the town had grown so at the East End that there was much talk of construct- ing the new building in a more central location.
The strength of the support inspired by the Rev. Henry Lincoln may be guaged by the fact that the con- troversy was amicably settled by building two meeting houses, and this at a time when the whole country was feeling the pinch of poverty after the Revolutionary War. The second was the present East End Meeting House, built in 1797, which was served by the Rev. Henry Lincoln and not set off as a separate parish until 1821.
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In 1795, in town meeting, it was voted to build, and. work was completed in 1796, under a committee comprised. of General Joseph Dimmick, Dr. Francis Wicks, Benjamin. Sanford, John Lawrence, David Swift and Sylvanus Davis. The four corner pews were reserved for the poor and the remainder sold at auction, as was the custom. So gener- ous was the support, that after paying for the erection of the church, a balance remained which the town voted to expend for a bell.
Worthy Captain Timothy Crocker, father-in-law of the beloved young minister, Henry Lincoln, however of- fered to donate the bell, and eventually the town voted to divide the balance unexpended among the pew-holders.
The bell was contracted for with the excellent bell- founder of Boston, one Paul Revere, and we may imagine that in those days when practically every man had done his share patriotically towards the late war the good peo- ple of the church had no idea that a century and a half later one of the most cherished possessions of their society would be the receipt for payment signed by Paul Revere become famous by reason of Longfellow's unforgettable verses. William Dawes, ancester of both Calvin Coolidge and that Dawes who was Coolidge's vice-president, made as long and as arduous a ride on the night of April 18th, 1775, but no one wrote a poem about him!
The receipt for the Paul Revere bell reads as follows: W. H. F. Lincoln
Boston, Nov. 30, 1796
Bo't of Paul Revere One church bell cents $ Weight 807 lbs @ 42 338.94
Received payment by a note PAUL REVERE
It still hangs in the belfry of the Congregational Church in its new location facing the Green, although when mounted, it stood on the Green, about opposite the house of Dr. Wiswall (1930).
The leader of the church choir was accustomed to tune his bass viol to the pitch of the Paul Revere bell, which was originally C sharp, although after it was cracked, the pitch fell to C flat.
In 1799, the town "voted to set up ringing of the bell" and thereafter at six of the morning, the bell called the town to the labors of another day; at noon it notified
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