USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Newton > Tercentenary history of Newton, 1630-1930 > Part 2
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41
12
HISTORY OF NEWTON
are reminders of these early settlers. The Wards later occupied a building which had been constructed in 1661 for a garrison house near the present Newton reservoir. It was so used during King Philip's War. Afterward seven generations of Wards occupied it. John Ward was the first deputy from Cambridge Village to the General Court, and after 1679 he was selectman for nine years.
About the time that the Hingham families settled in Newton three members of the Prentice family arrived from England and obtained lands in Virginia. Captain Thomas Prentice later became military leader of the com- munity. He leased the Haynes grant and owned property in his own right west of Parker's holdings. James and Thomas Prentice, 2d, probably brothers, bought five hun- dred acres of land extending south from the cemetery to a point near the brook which now flows through the play- ground at Newton Centre. About 1660 Isaac Williams bought a farm of five hundred acres south of Richard Park. He was one of the prominent men of the second generation. About 1664 came John Spring to live opposite the new meetinghouse, and Gregory Cook purchased more than one hundred acres between the Edward Jackson estate and the weir lands in 1668. James Trowbridge bought eighty-five acres north of Bullough's Pond in 1675, and became a deacon of the church and a select- man. Thomas Wiswall moved from Dorchester and ob- tained the north part of the Haynes grant for himself, about three hundred acres, including the pond, which for a long time was called Wiswall's Pond, now Crystal Lake. John Kenrick moved out from Boston and went to the extreme south, obtaining his two hundred and fifty acres along the river beyond the Haynes grant in the section where Kenrick Bridge perpetuates his name.
As a rule persons who crossed the Atlantic and settled in America did not own large farms. Twenty to forty
I3
THE EARLY SETTLERS
acres was a fair average. But most of the first families which located on the south side of the Charles River in Cambridge Village were families of substance, and their farms were ample enough to maintain the numerous chil- dren who were so useful in the labor of the farm as they grew up. Most of the people who came to New England were young people or in early middle life, yeomen from the countryside and artisans and traders from the towns. They married young and were not afraid of hard work. Fathers taught their sons how to handle axe and scythe and hoe, and mothers were required by town ordinance to teach their daughters to spin a given stint for a certain number of weeks. The whole household expected to work from sun-up to sun-down in the busy season, and even hunting and fishing were less a pastime than part of the day's work.
The pioneers made clearings when necessary, hewed with their axes the logs for the first huts, and planted their grain among the stumps of the trees. As soon as fortune smiled upon them they replaced the log huts with frame houses, which were two stories on the front, but the long roof covered only a single story in the rear. The upper story often projected a foot beyond the lower for weather protection and defence against the Indians. For the same reason outside buildings were placed near the house. The house was built around a large chimney of stone or brick. The hearth in the large living room was the centre of the family life, and in the chimney corner the elders and their children found rest when the day's task was done.
All day every member of the family found occupation on the farm. The farmer provided his own forge, if he needed one. He fashioned his furniture as well as his buildings from the white pine of his forest stand, and tools and wagons from hickory stock. When winter lightened
14
HISTORY OF NEWTON
toil on the farm, it was time to visit the woodlot and cut cord after cord of firewood for the mammoth chimney mouths. Much of the clothing was made of leather for durability, while homespun fabrics were spun and woven for church and other social occasions. Women bore and nursed their children, fed hungry mouths and kept the house, washed and baked and spun and wove, moulded candles and manufactured soap, pickled meats and pre- served vegetables and fruit, and endured the privations of the frontier. In spite of the help of the children and of relatives who lived in the home many women succumbed to the hardships, and second and third wives frequently were buried side by side with the first in the graveyards.
The soil of New England except in the river intervales was not fertile enough to produce large crops without hard labor and generous enrichment. Cattle were kept partly for that purpose. They were brought over as early as room could be found for them on ships that swarmed with immigrants. Good breeds were prized. Sheep were pas- tured on the common lands, and bounties were paid for killing the wolves which were numerous. The care of the animals, added to the physical labor of moving and lifting the soil and cultivating and harvesting crops, gave to the new Americans callous hands and tired muscles. Much of the ground must be cleared. Trees must be cut down and brush cleared away. It was back-breaking work to remove the boulders which the glaciers had strewn over the land and to pile them into stone walls; to burn and pull the stumps in the clearings; to guide primitive ploughs over rough and often rocky land. Besides these handicaps was the difficulty of getting good seed from England, of adapt- ing Old World grains to New World soil, and of learning new crops from the Indians. Indian corn was the principal crop of the colony; its grains could be grown among the stumps of the trees. Other native crops taken over from
I5
THE EARLY SETTLERS
the Indians were squashes, pumpkins, and beans. New England comes honestly by its love for the succulent bean baked in the old Dutch ovens. To preserve the seeds which were planted in the fields a bounty was offered for the heads of blackbirds, jays, and "gray-headed" wood- peckers. Settlers learned from the Indians to plant a fish for fertilization in every hill of corn, and the town penalized the owner of a dog that dug up and carried off such fish. Such regulations indicate the importance of agriculture to the colonists. But they learned the value of carrying firewood, hay, and vegetables to the Boston mar- ket, and Newton farmers more than made both ends meet.
In the absence of good roads and near neighbors families were isolated from one another, but the members of the same family lived in close intimacy. The kitchen was the centre of the colonial household. The whole family gathered there where they could keep warm in the winter evenings; from there they went reluctantly to cold bed- rooms when dozing by the hearth fire was not enough. Even by firelight their tired hands busied themselves with homely tasks, and cider was on tap after the importation of nursery stock made apple culture possible. Hard and unremitting toil did not oil the machinery of family life, and sometimes that life was unhappy, sometimes undis- ciplined. But to the Puritan life was meant to be disci- pline and stern struggle. There was little time for relaxa- tion, except as one found it in the jug of hard cider or rum, and that lacked the flavor of social fellowship until the inns were established. Then the ordinaries had to be regulated rigorously to keep them orderly and their habitual cus- tomers reasonably sober.
The scattered families of Cambridge Village depended on the older village by Harvard Square for their social institutions. Local government centered there, the church was there, and the only schools for decades were there.
16
HISTORY OF NEWTON
The first provision for local need at the Village was a grist- mill, then a sawmill. Until then, unless one went out of town, it was necessary to use hand mortars for grain and to fashion lumber by hewing with the axe, but such proc- esses were slow and tiresome. The presence of water power in the river and on the brooks invited the erection of mills. The first gristmill in Newton was built by Lieut. John Spring on Coldspring Brook near Bullough's Pond. The owner had been living in Watertown for thirty years, but in 1644 he settled in Newton opposite the old ceme- tery, and his farm extended back westerly to the brook. John Spring was a substantial citizen. He not only ground the grain of the farmers, but he held town offices and was representative to the General Court. It is supposed that he gave the land for the second meetinghouse, which was across the road from the cemetery near Spring's house. In imagination one can see the Jackson and Hyde boys riding the horse path along the Dedham Road with sacks of corn slung over the backs of the horses, turning off near the cemetery at Mill Lane, and finding at the mill Joe Fuller and Tom Park from the west farms. It is even possible that all of them found time for a dip in the old swimming hole before their return.
The first sawmill was in another part of town. East of the present Dudley Road not far from Baldpate Hill was a tract of moist woodland which even into the nine- teenth century was a resort for bears and smaller game. In that vicinity Erosamon Drew of Brookline bought sixty-four acres in 1683 and at the Brookline boundary on Palmer Brook which flows from Hammond's Pond through the Great Meadow, he built a sawmill which supplied lumber for the whole district. Drew made another con- tribution to the public with huckleberry wine of home manufacture, which attracted customers and gave his house the name of Huckleberry Tavern.
17
THE EARLY SETTLERS
The church was more important than sawmill or grist- mill to men and women who thought of themselves as souls rather than bodies, and the year that John Spring built his house opposite the site of the old cemetery, the Village people erected a meetinghouse of their own and planned for the graveyard around it. Religion was a prime factor in Puritan colonization, and next after making a living it was the chief interest of the people. Most of the early settlers clustered in villages about the meetinghouse, and even those who were scattered on the farms were required by colonial law to observe the Sabbath strictly from sun- down on Saturday evening, and to attend church for long and tedious hours, even in fireless meetinghouses in the dead of winter. The religion of the Puritans, like their meetinghouses, could hardly be called comfortable, and the psychological effect could hardly be heartening. But the Puritan believed in the sovereign will of God and the responsibility of man to conduct his life properly. He prized repentance of sin as good for the soul, and he did not expect to enjoy his religion as a modern man would think of enjoyment. He insisted on high moral standards for himself and his children, and while they were cate- chized and disciplined at home he was subject to discipline in the church.
In old England every town had its parish church, and every person in the community was as much identified with the church as with the town. The Church of Eng- land was the custodian of religion as the state was the cus- todian of life and property. Only a few persons like the Pilgrims had ventured to separate from the Church of England and organize their independent congregations, establishing the Congregational principle that only spirit- ually worthy persons should be admitted to church mem- bership. The Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay colony had conformed to the established religion in England, and
18
HISTORY OF NEWTON
when they came to New England they brought with them the idea of the close relation of church and state. They did organize separate congregations of a Congregational sort after the Pilgrim pattern, but they could not accept the principle of Roger Williams that church and state should be entirely separate. They made Congregation- alism the legal pattern of colonial religion, and gave full citizenship to members of Congregational churches only. For several decades they would not permit the organiza- tion of any other churches. As at home in England they expected every town to have its church, and they con- sidered parish affairs in town meetings. The General Court exercised authority over the churches as over the towns.
A church had been organized promptly in the pali- saded town of Cambridge, and when families settled south of the river they still attended church in that village. Jacksons and Prentices, Hydes and Fullers, rode horse- back or tramped with the youngsters the necessary miles. As settlement increased south of the river a sentiment grew for a separate precinct of the town with its own church. In 1656 the people were meeting for worship in the house of Edward Jackson, and they asked the Cam- bridge church to remit their parish taxes, since they lived at a distance and expected soon to organize a church of their own. When Cambridge refused to grant the request, the people of the Village appealed unsuccessfully to the General Court, but they were determined to have their own place of worship, and about the year 1660 they erected a meetinghouse on the land given by John Jackson. Then the Court freed those who lived four miles from the Cam- bridge meetinghouse from paying rates to the Cambridge church.
In 1664 about forty men and as many women became the charter members of the new church in Cambridge Vil-
19
THE EARLY SETTLERS
lage. They represented a constituency of about thirty fam- ilies. According to Congregational principles the church had the right to choose its own minister, deacons and rul- ing elder. The church invited John Eliot, Jr. to be its first minister. He was the son of the Roxbury divine who had been a pioneer missionary to the Indians on Nonan- tum Hill and elsewhere. The son had graduated from Harvard and had assisted his father in his missionary labors. He gave promise of satisfying the needs of the Newton congregation and he was ordained by the church on the same day that the organization was completed. His father and Reverend Richard Mather of Dorchester, one of the leading ministers of the colony, assisted in the ordination services. The church selected for its ruling elder Thomas Wiswall, who recently had come from Dor- chester and settled in the south part of town. His func- tion was a disciplinary one, and it was important because church discipline was regarded by the Puritans as of the highest importance. For its first deacons the church selected John Jackson, its benefactor, and Samuel Hyde.
The original meetinghouse disappeared long since, but a simple shaft was erected in 1852 to mark its site. Around it lies God's acre, where one after another of the early settlers were borne to their long home. In spite of hard labor and rigorous climate and the necessity of adjust- ment to different conditions of life from those to which they were accustomed, most of the settlers of Newton lived to old age. Eleven of the first eighteen lived to seventy-five years or more. John Fuller, the fourth settler, died in 1698 at the ripe age of eighty-seven.
The first burials were those of the young minister and his wife. The church had expected to strike its roots deeply and to grow in strength during the years of its first pastor's life. But he had preached the Fast Day ser- mon in Cambridge, and had taken a cold which resulted
20
HISTORY OF NEWTON
in a hemorrhage of the lungs. His death followed in the fourth year of his pastorate. The church felt the loss keenly. It became disheartened and divided in sentiment, and several years passed before it could decide on a new minister. When a young man settled over a parish it was expected that he would remain for life, and it was an important matter to select the right man. Elder Wiswall exercised his disciplinary office but he could not stop the dissension. Ecclesiastical councils of friendly churches and even the General Court took a hand. Pulpit supplies had to sue for their pay, so great was the confusion and dis- cord. At length Reverend Nehemiah Hobart was invited to the pastorate, and he restored harmony and remained with the church for forty years.
The state, which was so closely allied with the church, kept a watchful eye upon the colonists. When the welfare of the infant colony depended so much on individual con- duct, social discipline was necessary. The charter gave the citizens of the colony power as stockholders of the Company to choose officials. Control was vested in a governor and court of assistants. When settlement began the scattered colonists could not meet together, and the assistants promptly voted that every town should dele- gate two or three persons to confer about taxation, and within a few years the representatives of the towns had become the General Court, or legislature, of the colony.
It was the General Court which restricted the suffrage to Congregational church members. It was the General Court which required the minister to read the Sunday laws to his congregation twice a year, while the town offi- cials appointed an inspector for every ten families to see that the law was obeyed. Any persons who were noisy on the Sabbath were to be carried to Boston or to the county seat and put into the cage in the market place pending trial. The General Court in 1634 forbade any
2I
THE EARLY SETTLERS
person to take tobacco publicly, or privately before stran- gers, under penalty of eleven shillings. Three years later it was ordered that no person should be allowed to sell cakes and buns except at funerals and weddings.
Every community had a town government of its own for the management of local affairs. The bounds of the town were marked out by the General Court; no new town could be admitted to the body politic without the consent of the Court. Town government was administered by several selectmen, usually men of experience and reli- ability resident in the community, who were the general managers of town affairs. Less important officials also were elected at an annual town meeting held in the spring, one or more constables to keep order, and poundkeepers to arrest stray cattle and put them in the pound, where their owners could recover them. Regular town meetings were held monthly when the voters gathered at half past eleven at the ringing of a bell, lunched at public expense on an eightpenny meal, and attended to current exi- gencies. Absentees lost their dinner and were fined a meas- ure of wine, and none were permitted to leave the meeting.
Since the people on the south side of the river, which soon was called Cambridge Village, were within the bounds of the town of Cambridge, they were subject to its juris- diction. But the Village people received recognition when Edward Jackson was chosen as one of the delegates of the town to the General Court, and at one time he was one of the selectmen. Eleven years after a separate parish had been organized, Edward Jackson, with his brother John, instigated a movement in 1672 to set off the Village as a separate town. The spirit of local independence led to many such divisions of town as population increased, and Jackson, who often acted as land surveyor, was sure that the district would grow populous, and he believed that it was to the advantage of the south side that the people
22
HISTORY OF NEWTON
should have their own local government. Cambridge was reluctant to lose the Village, and in 1673 the General Court judged it advisable that the Village should elect one constable and three selectmen of its own number every year, but continue to pay taxes as a part of Cambridge for school, bridge and deputy expenses. The Village contributed to the expense of the great bridge which connected Cambridge with Brighton.
This precinct arrangement did not suit the Village, and the people petitioned the Court again in 1678, objecting to certain taxes and complaining that they needed a local school. Cambridge protested, but the process of separa- tion was carried out gradually. A town meeting was held by the Village in 1679 and a board of selectmen and a constable were elected, but Cambridge continued to keep its jurisdiction until in 1688 the Court required Cam- bridge to show cause why the Village should not be com- pletely independent. The selectmen of both reached an agreement that in lieu of certain past obligations the sum of five pounds in merchantable corn should be paid by the Village "in full satisfaction of all dues and demands . . . from the beginning of the world to the eleventh of June, 1688," with an understanding that Cambridge people should have free use of the highway from the Village meet- inghouse to the Falls. Then on December 4, 1688, the Court declared the Village independent. Without any explicit authority the people generally spoke of the new town as New Cambridge and so wrote it into their deeds, but in 1691 the General Court on petition from the Village ordered that the future name of the town should be New- town, a name which Cambridge had long since ceased to use. For convenience it became customary to use the shortened form of Newton, and after 1766 it was so written in the town records.
When Newton became a separate town its area was
23
THE EARLY SETTLERS
about thirteen thousand acres. The river formed a natural boundary from Brighton at one end to the Dedham bounds on the other. At least sixty families were living in the new town, nearly all of them original settlers or their sons and daughters. The principal occupation was still farming, but craftsmen were to be found among their number. Isaac Beach, a carpenter, was one of the signers of the petition for secession. John Wilson, a wheelwright, lived near the Roxbury line, and John Mirick, a turner, was in the east part of the town.
The principal settlements were in the north part of town, extending south from the river, and in the region of Oak Hill. The roads were most convenient in these local- ities, and the necessary mills were within reach. The con- struction of roads was one of the earliest tasks of the settle- ments. The Indians had their cross-country trails, and paths connected one farm with another, but farmers needed roads to go to meeting and to mill. Back in 1653 the town of Cambridge had appointed Edward Jackson and two other citizens to lay out necessary highways on the south side of the river, and during the next thirty-five years several roads were projected. The Roxbury Road, which connected Roxbury with Watertown, was most con- venient for getting to the Watertown mill, and the earliest houses were built there. The Dedham Road was the con- necting link from the Roxbury Road at the point of Nonantum Square to Newton Centre and beyond, the route of the present street. The main crossroad was the Sherborn Road, which ran from the Brookline boundary past Hammond's Pond to the south of Wiswall's Pond, where it coincided with the Dedham Road for a time and then diverged toward Lower Falls, where it crossed the river at a "wading place."
After Newton became an independent town it resur- veyed the old roads and made new ones. Besides the main
24
HISTORY OF NEWTON
thoroughfares, which at best were only rude country roads, deep with snow and mud much of the year, were less important ways across country. After the meetinghouse had been located, Cotton and Mill Streets were necessary for access from east and west. The Natick Road passed through Edward Jackson's farm and a branch of it con- nected with the Fuller farm. Similarly the present Ded- ham Road turned southeast from the South Burying Ground and gave access to Oak Hill, with a branch to the Kenrick farm. Pound Lane followed the course of Cypress Street under Institution Hill, with a cattle pound at the corner where the Newton Centre Unitarian Church stands.
Before Newton became a separate town the Indians had removed elsewhere, but from the beginning of settle- ment the English colonists had to take the Indians into their reckoning. It was an Indian who met the first ex- plorers on the river and advised them to choose their friends carefully. It was the Nonantum Indians who lived as neighbors to the first settlers. The Indians first lived near the river, as Indian relics indicate. In 1858 the skel- eton of an Indian was found buried in a sitting posture facing east down the river, and near by was an Indian totem and other belongings. But soon they made a settle- ment on the slope of Nonantum Hill. Swept though the country had been by an epidemic which carried off so much of the Indian population, the red men were a menace to the security of the settlements. In times of peace the colonists dickered with Waban, the Indian headman, over the pasturage of cattle. In times of danger they built a blockhouse or two as a precaution against an Indian out- break. There were two possible methods of dealing with them. They could be exterminated by warfare, as the Pequots in southeastern Connecticut were wiped out by a colonial expedition, or they could be conciliated as they
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.