USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Newton > Tercentenary history of Newton, 1630-1930 > Part 4
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John Staples, the first schoolmaster, was respected highly. He had come to Newton about 1688, and his farm occupied much of Waban, which earlier was a favorite hunting ground of the Indians. For many years he was one of the board of selectmen and served the town as clerk. In the First Church he was honored by an election to the board of deacons. In school hours he ruled his pupils from
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behind his high, narrow desk, while they sprawled uncom- fortably on backless benches. He set the copy for imita- tion in writing, ruled the foolscap paper, and sharpened goose-quill pens. On occasion he sent a boy into the bushes to cut a birch switch for the administration of dis- cipline. Master Staples seems to have tired of teaching after a time and gave himself to the work of his farm. He lived to the age of eighty-two, and died bequeathing seventeen acres of his woodland for the minister's fire and a sum of money to aid in the support of the poor.
Instead of entrusting educational matters to a school committee the voters decided annually in town meeting how much schooling should be provided, and left to a com- mittee or to the selectmen the employment of a teacher. Schools were a subject of frequent debate at the firesides and in town meetings, and each district demanded preced- ence. With the growth of population in the west part of the town citizens in that section began to talk about the obligation of the town to build a schoolhouse there. They complained that it was too far for their children to attend school either at the centre or at Oak Hill. Samuel Miller offered to open his house for school sessions. In 1720 the town made a grant of twelve pounds, and three years later decided to build a third schoolhouse, and Miller presented four rods of land for it. The people of the town had the privilege of sending their children to any one of the three schools. All of them were ungraded elementary schools, continuing for only a few weeks in the year.
Up to the middle of the eighteenth century the pro- vision for education was quite inadequate. In 1751 the town voted to employ schoolmasters for three schools, and winter sessions were held for the first time. In 1763 a school committee was elected, and it was voted to have four schools besides the grammar school. The school in Newton Centre was to keep open twenty weeks and two
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days, the northwest district fourteen weeks and two days, Oak Hill ten weeks and six days, and the southwest dis- trict six weeks and five days. Three years later there were five schools.
As late as 1762 the General Court found fault with Newton for not providing a grammar school. Forty years before such a school had been discussed, and it had been decided that it should be located "at ye opening of the way between the land of John Cheanay and Hannah Hides." Fifty pounds had been appropriated for a gram- mar school in 1761, but apparently the money was used for other schools. The selectmen defended the good name of the town as best they could. Then for several years a grammar school was kept in a private house, until it was voted in 1767 to have the sessions in the district school- house preferred by the school committee. By that time the fourth district school had been located at Newton Highlands. The latest building was of the same size as the first, with a hip roof and an immense chimney at one side of the room six feet wide and four feet deep. The structure fell out of repair to such an extent that umbrellas sometimes had to be used to protect teachers and pupils from the rain. For eight years before the Revolution the town tried the experiment of employing women teachers during the summer term, but it was thought best to return to the custom of hiring men. At the end of a hundred years from the organization of the town the largest sum appropriated for schools was one hundred pounds a year.
Those who could afford private instruction for their children patronized the earliest private schools. Judge Abraham Fuller kept the first of these in the west part of town sometime before 1760, and at his death left three hundred pounds for an academy in Newton. Judge Fuller was highly esteemed by his fellow townsmen, and served them as representative on many occasions. On his ances-
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tral acres he carried on the farm and manufactured malt liquors. He was reputed to have a voice that could be heard at Angier's Corner or Watertown when he called to his friends or workmen. A second private school was opened in the old home of Reverend John Cotton about 1765 by Charles Pelham, an educated man from Medford. He bought the hundred acres of land with house, barn and cider mill, which had been owned by the third minister of the parish, made his home there, and prepared pupils for Harvard College. He proved himself a patriot in the Revolution, though he had been educated in England, if tradition was correct.
Every town however small has its unfortunates and incapables. Newton had to deal with the problem soon after the eighteenth century began. The first method was to pass a vote in town meeting that a collection should be taken for the poor of the parish at the annual Thanks- giving Day service in the meetinghouse, to be admin- istered by the selectmen in outdoor relief. Doubtless neighbors had aided one another already on occasion. When special misfortune befell, as in the loss of cattle or the building of a home, a man's friends made him gifts or loans. Such methods gave way to more definite provision for derelicts. In 1731 it was voted to build a workhouse. Until the building should be ready one of the schoolhouses was used when the school was not in session, and the selectmen were charged with the obligation to put idle and disorderly persons to work. In 1734 five men were elected to be overseers of the poor. It was not until thirty years later that an appropriation of fifty pounds made possible the erection of a building for a workhouse. A master was placed in charge and the overseers drew up a code of rules and met monthly at the house for inspection. In the years that followed the town had trouble with its wards and early in the nineteenth century a new arrangement was made.
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A third need for which the town had to provide was more roads. New highways were constructed in dif- ferent parts of the town. Some of these were improve- ments of paths already in use; others were private lanes taken over by the town, sometimes with a recognition of certain privileges, as when it was voted "to accept the way of Stephen Winchester laid out, and he to have liberty to hang two gates." In 1713 a committee of the selectmen with three others was appointed "to settle and confirm the highways in town." They reported in due time that they had renewed the highway marks on the Dedham Road and the bound marks of highways on either side, and had laid out four new roads. Citizens paid off their taxes by working on the roads.
New roads and bridges multiplied through the 'forties and 'fifties. In 1751, as the chronicle quaintly expresses it, "a new way was laid out through the Fuller farm, begin- ning at the house of Josiah Fuller, at a rock in said Fuller's fence, on the south side of the way, thence to Cornet Fuller's land, widow Hannah Fuller, Joshua Fuller, to land of Thomas Fuller, deceased, to Jonathan Fuller and over the brook called Cheesecake Brook, two rods wide, from said Josiah Fuller's easterly to said brook." Two years later a new bridge nearly one hundred feet long was com- pleted over the Charles River between Newton and Weston, where there had been a ferry at first. Four new roads were built in 1756, most of them in the west part of town. Five years later Newton joined Waltham in con- structing a bridge over the river, and four years subse- quently the town voted to build half of Kenrick's bridge over the Charles. When the river was a boundary between two towns the bridges were sometimes queer structures. Until late in the nineteenth century the Weston part of the bridge over the river at Auburndale was a ramshackle structure, while Newton had constructed an arched stone
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bridge for its own part. The frequent construction of new roads and bridges was an evidence of the growth and pub- lic spirit of the community.
The relations between Watertown and Newton were friendly, and the early settlers depended on the older town for a mill and other conveniences. Newton inherited the arrangement made between Watertown and Cambridge which reserved the weir lands south of the river to Water- town, an arrangement which caused some friction at times, and later meant a considerable business loss to the town as the section between Newton Corner and Watertown bridge developed. The line between the two towns was adjusted by a joint committee in 1705. That and subse- quent adjustments resulted in the ownership of about one hundred and fifty acres by Watertown, on which lived about six hundred persons, and the land was valued at one million dollars. The Morse family lived in an old home- stead on a knoll above the street, and the name of Morse's Field became attached to the locality. Near the Water- town bridge were several places of note, and a number of notable persons were born near by.
On the Watertown side of the river was the printing office of Benjamin Edes, who did the printing for the Pro- vincial Congress during the Revolutionary disturbances. On the south side of the river was a house in which Paul Revere engraved his plates and printed the notes of Massa- chusetts issued by order of the same Congress. Opposite that house was the Coolidge Tavern, where the local committee of safety had its rendezvous in 1775, and the house was one of the numerous mansions honored over- night by the presence of George Washington. Two of the oldest buildings in the vicinity were the Seger house and the Coffin house. At a later time Anne Whitney and Harriet Hosmer, known to fame as sculptors, spent their childhood in the immediate neighborhood.
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Watertown very early appointed fish reeves to guard the fishing rights of the town, which were valuable while the shad and alewives remained plentiful. The General Court in 1805 gave Newton the exclusive right to take fish within its own town limits, and for forty years the town regularly auctioned off annually the right to catch the fish, thus thriftily profiting from its natural resources. Towns as far upstream as Medfield and Sherborn felt themselves cheated out of their natural rights when the towns farther down restricted the migration of the fish in the spring.
The only place where the people regularly met together was at the meetinghouse. About the end of the seven- teenth century the church recovered the harmony and poise which it had lost after the death of Reverend John Eliot, Jr. Reverend Nehemiah Hobart, son of the min- ister at Hingham, had come to Newton in 1672, and proved to be a wise and constructive leader. His popularity insured a long pastorate of approximately forty years. He married a daughter of Edward Jackson and had a family of six daughters. His father-in-law gave him thirty acres of land as his wife's dowry, and he built a homestead which stood at the present corner of Centre and Cabot Streets. His ministry included the period of the separation of New- ton from Cambridge, and the war with the Indians known as King Philip's War. During that period the growth of the community made a larger meetinghouse necessary. It was located across the street from the first structure, and was completed in 1698. Old-fashioned square pews were provided for most of the attendants, and were assigned "according to dignity and taxes," a method in use until the nineteenth century. The committee appointed to make the allotment found it a delicate matter to please everybody.
Accessory to the meetinghouse were the noon houses and the stocks. The noon house was a plain building about
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thirty feet square, built at public expense or by a group of persons to accommodate churchgoers between the morn- ing and afternoon services. In the cold meetinghouses the people became badly chilled, but in the noon house they could bask in the warmth of the great fireplace in the middle of the room, satisfy their hunger with bread, cheese and cider, chat with their friends, and fill the footstoves with live coals before returning to the sanctuary. Several noon houses were located within easy reach of the meet- inghouse in Newton Centre. Later, when they had become unnecessary they were fitted up for tenants. The stocks, which a state law required, were located about ten rods from the church. They were awesome instruments of punishment, made of oak and iron and about eight feet in length, with holes through which the delinquent thrust his legs and thought of his misdeeds, while the boys jeered at him and more sober citizens looked at him askance. There is record of church stocks in Newton as late as 1773.
In the Puritan communities of New England the min- ister was the leading citizen in the town, its social and political mentor as well as its spiritual guide. If reason- ably satisfactory to his parishioners he remained for a life- time in one parish, and moulded the characters of a gen- eration of townsfolk. Reverend Nehemiah Hobart was scholarly, a member of the corporation of Harvard College and at one time vice-president, and his people admired and loved him, yet he found it difficult to collect his salary during the first part of his pastorate. His stipend had been fixed at sixty-five pounds a year when he was called to the church, but cash was scarce and part of the minis- ter's due was paid in kind. Yet a minister's family in Massachusetts might find it as inconvenient to receive his salary in grain as a Virginia parson to have his in tobacco, which was at one time the custom in that colony. In 1679 the town agreed not to pay Pastor Hobart any more of his
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salary in barley after the first of February. Barley was cultivated in Massachusetts for malt liquor, but there was a limit to the amount of liquor that one family could con- sume. In 1690 the minister submitted to the town an account of £23 18s. 6d., which was due him from the church, offering to cancel the balance if the town would pay him ten pounds. The town acceded to the suggestion, and he acquitted it of further responsibility for the old account. Nehemiah Hobart ranked high among his con- temporaries as a winning preacher. He was honored at his funeral by the attendance of the governor with his coach and four.
Early in the eighteenth century several families living near the Roxbury line found it difficult to go so far to attend church in Newton, and they appealed for release from ministerial taxes in order that they might go to Rox- bury. It was a question whether it would not be advisable to locate the meetinghouse at a more central point which would be more accessible for families living several miles away. The town appointed a committee to measure the town and find the centre, but the committee thought a change unwise because Newton Centre was not well pro- vided with connecting roads. The General Court was brought into consultation and its advice was to leave the meetinghouse where it was, and to permit families on the Roxbury frontier to affiliate with a more convenient church. Eventually eighteen hundred acres were set off from Newton to Roxbury.
It was also by advice of the General Court that the Newton church chose Reverend John Cotton as a suc- cessor to Nehemiah Hobart in 1714. His salary was fixed at eighty pounds a year and a gratuity of 150 as a special inducement to settle. He was a great-grandson of Rev- erend John Cotton, minister in Boston in the first years of the colony. Like his predecessors in the Newton pulpit,
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FIRST CHURCH, AT NEWTON CENTRE
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the junior Cotton was a graduate of Harvard College, but he was only twenty years old when he was invited to New- ton. When he came to settle the whole town turned out in procession to meet him, an event which must have im- pressed him with the importance of his position. John Cotton remained the Newton minister for forty-two years until his death in 1757. He bought land of the Hobart heirs, married a wife from Boston, and raised a family of eleven children. His tombstone records that he was "a faithful, wise, and learned pastor," with conspicuous ability in preaching and prayer. One can seem to see this exemplary divine, gowned in his Puritan gown and bands, preaching the terrors of the law after the great earthquake of 1727, and as a consequence admitting fifty penitents to church membership in the course of four months. A second revival movement swept New England when George Whitefield, the eloquent English evangelist, toured the Atlantic seaboard, and in 1742 more than one hundred new members were added to the Newton church.
The question of the location of the meetinghouse had not been settled by the advice of the General Court. So much difference of opinion developed that the church again had recourse to the Court. The result was the pur- chase of land from Nathaniel Parker and the building of a meetinghouse in 1720-21 on the present site of the First Church in Newton Centre, and a decision to sell the old building to the town of Waltham. The purchasers took it down and moved it to Waltham, where it stood until the Revolution. The church still had trouble with the citizens near the Roxbury line, insisting on taxing them ministerial rates and even appealing to the General Court to intervene.
The death of John Cotton in 1757 necessitated the choice of a successor. In those days of long pastorates it was a serious matter to make a selection, and the church went about it with deliberation. After voting to raise
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money by subscription to defray the expense of the Cotton funeral, the town appointed a committee of three deacons and two others to supply the pulpit at the expense of the town. Six months later town and church concurred in an invitation to Mr. Jonas Merriam, who was duly ordained and installed, the town paying the costs of ordination to the amount of thirteen pounds. Since an ordination was a festive occasion when liquor flowed freely and hundreds of people were in attendance, the sum does not seem exces- sive. The salary of the new minister was set at eighty pounds a year, and the town set apart a day annually for cutting him a winter supply of wood. In reply to the call of the church the young minister wrote diplomatically about his salary. He said: "I desire no more for my sup- port than will enable me to live comfortably, and to dis- charge the duties of my situation without too much worldly encumbrance, so on the other hand I doubt not that I may depend upon you for such further assistance as you should judge necessary for my comfort." He was visited by a committee of the town to come to an initial agreement and to ascertain "in what way and manner he would choose to come into town and also to wait on him into town accord- ingly."
The ministry of Jonas Merriam was not especially eventful. His dwelling house was burned with the loss of the church records, but the church helped in the erection of a new house, and the list of church members and most of the history of the church was restored from the memory of the oldest citizens. During his pastorate the church adopted a progressive policy in the use of modern hymns, endeavoring to make a wise use of both old and new. The temperament of the minister was mild, and his preaching was not particularly effective, but he continued to serve the church until consumption ended his life in 1780 after a ministry in Newton of twenty-two years. The town paid
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the expenses of the funeral according to custom, including thirty-one pounds for beer and fuel for cooking. The long- est ministry in the history of the church followed. Rev- erend Jonathan Homer came to Newton in 1782, remain- ing fifty-seven years. The history of his pastorate belongs therefore mainly in the nineteenth century.
It was during the ministry of Jonas Merriam that the West Parish was organized. For more than a hundred years the First Church had been the only place of worship in Newton. People sometimes grumbled because they had to go long distances to church, for the citizens came to- gether from all parts of the town. When the first meeting- house was built there were probably only three farms in West Newton, those of John Fuller, Isaac Williams and Richard Park, but families had multiplied. About 1760 the inhabitants of that part of town seemed so far away that they began to plan for their own church. Contribu- tions were solicited, a lot of land was purchased, and a meetinghouse was built in 1764, measuring 43 x 30 feet. Meantime the neighborhood engaged a minister to preach on Sunday and teach the public school. Thereafter unsuc- cessful petitions followed for release from paying church rates to the First Church, until in 1778 a petition to the General Court resulted in the setting off of an independent parish. A line was drawn through the town from the cor- ner of the weir lands to Upper Falls, and the people had the privilege within six months of choosing which parish they would belong to. At that time about sixty families were in the West Parish, including some from Auburn- dale, Nonantum, Lower Falls, most of Newtonville, and Waltham south of the river. The minister's salary was eighty pounds in money and fifteen cords of wood.
On the twenty-first of October, 1781, twenty-six persons dismissed from the First Church were organized as the West Parish Church. Joseph Ward and Joseph
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Jackson were chosen deacons, and Alexander Shepard, Jr. was named clerk. The new church asked for part of the communion set of the old church, and the request was granted to the extent of four pewter tankards and one pewter plate. A Boston church made a present of a pulpit Bible, and a Boston deacon, father of the minister, gave a christening basin and two flagons and two dishes for the communion set. The minister was Reverend William Greenough, a graduate of Yale College, who was installed in 1781. William Greenough was a gentleman of the old school. He preached in gown and bands after other min- isters changed the fashion. He was tall and thin, and he persisted in wearing smallclothes and shoe and knee buckles, and was so much an object of curiosity when he visited Boston that the boys followed him about. For fifty years he preached religion after the Congregational way, without being attracted to the more liberal Unitarian opinions which were sweeping a hundred Congregational churches from their ancient moorings during the period of his pastorate. During the fifty years about one hundred members were added to the West Newton church.
Privileged though the Congregationalists were as the "standing order" in Massachusetts, some persons were not satisfied with their conservatism on certain points. As a body with traditions they were not friendly to revival methods of evangelists like Reverend George Whitefield, and when that English preacher swept human emotions as a cyclone mows down a field of grain, the old-fashioned churches and ministers distrusted that kind of religion. The result was that here and there friends of the revival movement withdrew from the churches which to them seemed spiritually cold and organized separate "New Light" churches. One such was in Brookline, where Jon- athan Hyde, a kinsman of the Newton Hydes, was their minister. For a short time Newton too had a separate
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church, with Nathan Ward as pastor, but before long a majority of the church came to hold Baptist opinions and the church broke up.
A few Newton residents were already members of Baptist churches elsewhere, including Jonathan Willard and his daughter of Lower Falls and Noah Parker and his family of Upper Falls. They could not conscientiously sanction the Congregational practice of baptizing infant children, and they opposed the parish idea with public support of the church. To them a church should be com- posed only of those who were grown to years of under- standing and experience of personal religion, and should be independent of state control or assistance. At times by special legislation Baptists were relieved from paying taxes for the support of the parish churches in Massachusetts, but it was not until 1776 that Newton Baptists were thus exempted. At that time a remnant of the former Separate church used to meet in private houses on Sunday, led by laymen unless a travelling minister was present.
On the edge of Newton towards Roxbury lived El- hanan Winchester and his family. One of the sons with the same name became an eloquent Baptist preacher, and through his influence thirty-nine Baptists came together in 1780 and organized the First Baptist Church in Newton. Articles of faith were adopted which were more practical than doctrinal, including a statement that "a woman hath no right to act either in teaching or governing in the church, while we would by no means exclude them from the right of unbosoming themselves to the church either in the case of grief or joy."
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