USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Newton > Tercentenary history of Newton, 1630-1930 > Part 7
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For a time Seth Bemis shared his interests with others
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in the Bemis Manufacturing Company, but during most of the time from 1830 until his death in 1850 he was in the saddle managing his own interests. He was succeeded in the manufacture of cotton and wool by his son, Seth Bemis, Jr., who ten years later sold the business to William Freeman and Company. Freeman already had purchased the dyewood business of the elder Bemis. In 1860 Free- man disposed of the industry to the Aetna Manufacturing Company, which made extensive improvements in woolen manufacture.
California Street was constructed in 1816 and ex- tended over the bridge at Bemis Factories, as it was called then. Parts of the bridge were carried away by freshets twice during the early part of the century. On California Street Celia Thaxter, the poetess, lived for a time. The presence of foreign laborers in the mills gave the village a shady reputation for illegal liquor selling until late in the century.
The country across the river from Newton spreads out like a fan as one rounds the great bend from Bemis to Upper Falls. Watertown gives place to Waltham, Wal- tham to Weston, and Weston to Wellesley and Needham. About 1825 a Waltham enterprise undertaken by Patrick Jackson was moved across the river nearly opposite the Waltham cotton factories. For about half a century the business prospered under the corporate name of the New- ton Chemical Company, occupying a large plant. The business was brought to an end in 1872. An important consequence to the town was the cession of about six hun- dred acres of land, including the chemical works, to the town of Waltham because the business was so closely con- nected with that town. This proved a serious loss in tax- able valuation when the Waltham Watch Company erected its extensive works.
At West Newton the thousand acre farm of the Fuller
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family had been divided long before the beginning of the nineteenth century. There were only eleven houses, how- ever, within the distance of a mile from the centre of the hamlet. Besides the second parish church the best known building was probably the tavern of Phineas Bond on Washington Street. There the officers of Burgoyne's cap- tive army were refreshed on their march through Newton to Cambridge, and there Lafayette slaked his thirst in 1825. Seth Davis later made it over into a boarding house, and subsequently it became a tenement. Not far away was Solomon Flagg's grocery store, where beverages were measured out in pewter tankards. Among the early resi- dents were Maj. Samuel Shepard, who sold his 1650 house to Deacon Park of Roxbury, who in his time turned it over to Isaac Williams, his son-in-law, whose grandson, Wil- liam Williams, was a signer of the Declaration of Inde- pendence. Dr. Samuel Wheat came to West Newton in 1713, and after twenty years of service as physician to his neigh- bors welcomed to his assistance his son, Samuel Wheat, Jr.
At Auburndale in the eighteenth century four large farms, those of William Robinson, Thomas Greenwood, Benjamin Child and Jonathan Williams, comprised most of the district. By 1800 seven proprietors averaged more than one hundred acres each. A few old houses were stand- ing which had been built before the Revolution, particu- larly the house of William Robinson, known for a time as Whittemore's Tavern, near the Weston bridge, and the house of Benjamin Child, later called the Washburn house, both plain but substantial two-and-a-half story frame houses. Another old house was the recent home of Alexander Shepard. He was one of the staunch advocates of economy and harmony in town affairs, a trusted ad- viser of the citizens during the Revolution, and a member of the state convention which adopted the Massachusetts constitution.
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About 1770 Shepard sold sixty acres with a house and barn to John Pigeon, who was prominent during the war. Pigeon had large land holdings, and in 1818 the town bought from him enough property for a poor farm and built an almshouse. There were kept twelve to fifteen derelicts of all ages, imbecile and insane, young and old, without discrimination. They were herded in the dining room where they listened to one of the town ministers weekly, but with that precaution they were looked upon as suspicious characters, likely to commit offences at any time. This attitude was still general when Auburndale objected to the presence of the institution there, and it was removed to Waban. But the time came when it was clear that such unfortunate persons as were unable to take care of themselves should be thought of as wards of the town, and should be given a real home and treated with kindness. After the Waban property became more valu- able land was bought on Winchester Street, Newton High- lands, and a city farm with comfortable and ample quar- ters was built near the river.
About 1825 John Kenrick gave a fund of one thou- sand dollars to which he added seven hundred later, with the provision that half of it should be added to the prin- cipal until it amounted to three thousand dollars. Then it was to be invested at five per cent and the interest used to aid the poor. Three hundred might be loaned to any esti- mable person, with special regard for unmarried men. The town selectmen were to be trustees of the Kenrick Fund.
Altogether there were about one hundred and seventy- five houses in the town of Newton about the year 1800. The Shannon, then called the Blake estate, was valued at twice the sum of any other. The houses as a rule were inexpensive; the average valuation did not exceed $430.
The busiest parts of the town were Upper and Lower Falls, where manufacturing enterprises had been operat-
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ing in a small way for a hundred years. Yet Lower Falls had only about ten families living in the village at the opening of the century, and Upper Falls was smaller still. At Lower Falls the iron industry had been kept in opera- tion by Jonathan Willard until his death in 1772. An access of energy came to the hamlet in 1790 when John Ware of Sherborn, a veteran of the Revolution, bought fourteen acres of land and constructed the first paper mill at Lower Falls. It was primitive in method and employed but a few persons, but it was destined under other manage- ment to become an important industry. It was in the same year that Dr. Ebenezer Starr, son of a physician at Weston and a graduate of Harvard College, settled in Lower Falls and became the resident physician of that and neighbor- ing hamlets, practising for forty years. He married Ware's daughter, was liked among the people for his whimsical remarks in the sick room, and was honored by the town with an election to the Legislature and by his fellow Masons with the position of Master of his Lodge.
About the year 1800 William Hoogs, who had been operating a tannery for ten years, built the second dam at Lower Falls, and constructed another paper mill. The manufacture of paper became one of the leading industries of Newton, at Lower Falls, Upper Falls, and Bemis. Paper was enjoying an increasing demand for various pur- poses, including newsprint, stationery, wrapping paper, cardboard and bookbinders board. A few farsighted men saw a future in it, and with small capital made the begin- nings of an expanding industry. Paper machinery for the mills at Lower Falls was brought surreptitiously from Eng- land because like cotton mill machinery it could not be exported legally. Near the paper mill Ziba Bridges from Holliston bought a forge shop in 1807, and extended his business during the next twenty years.
These industries seemed to justify a country store.
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This was kept by John Pigeon, son of the patriot who had presented the town with two cannon at the outbreak of the Revolution. Lower Falls had an ambition to become the important part of the town. It boasted the first post office in Newton in 1816, and three times a week a stage ran to Boston and returned. In 1813 the Cataract Engine Company was organized for the protection of the vested interests of the hamlet. It was the first of the volunteer companies with hand tubs which were characteristic of Newton and other towns during a large part of the nine- teenth century. Hitherto every house had its two fire buckets and ladder, and by cooperative action when a fire occurred ineffectual efforts were made to save property. But it was all very primitive and useless in a factory fire. Legally the selectmen of the town had the power to appoint the members of the company, but it was virtually a vol- unteer organization. It was considered an honor to belong to it, and every member paid five dollars for the privilege. The company continued to serve the hamlet of Lower Falls until the town was ready to assume the respon- sibility.
Lower Falls also enjoyed the distinction of an Epis- copal church, the only church in the village for more than fifty years. Congregationalism predominated to such a degree in New England that it was only by slow degrees that any other denomination could gain strength. The prelacy out of which the Puritans had come was especially unwelcome. That fact readily explains why no Episcopal church had been constituted in the town of Newton in the eighteenth century. But in the year 1811 Episcopal serv- ices were started in the schoolhouse at Lower Falls, and so great was the interest in them among the people in the neighboring towns as well as in Newton that a parish organization was effected the next year. From the school- house the parishioners graduated presently into a hall, and
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enjoyed the services of Boston rectors and the contribu- tions of certain Boston laymen. One Boston merchant gave two acres of land for a church and cemetery on high ground above the river, and St. Mary's was built and con- secrated in 1814. The Freemasons and the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company assisted at the time of lay- ing the corner stone. The building was enlarged in 1838- 39, and a chapel was built in 1867. It was ten years before the church was able to have a minister of its own, but for the next thirty years Reverend Alfred L. Baury of Con- necticut built up the parish to permanent strength. In 1818 a Sunday school was organized, of which William Mills was the superintendent for forty years.
The hamlet of Upper Falls had had its small mills of Clark and Parker and Bixby for a hundred years, but its industrial prosperity began when Simon Elliott of Boston in 1778 bought part of the Parker property and built a snuff mill, enlarging it later by adding four buildings. The old custom of taking snuff was common, and Elliott's manufacturing enterprise proved very profitable. The owner bought considerable land on both sides of the river and built a homestead and farm buildings. After twenty years he was paying a tax on a property valuation of $8,730, and owned one of the three carriages then used in Newton. In 1809 Elliott bought water privileges from Bixby below the snuff mill, but five years later he sold his entire property at Upper Falls to the Perkins brothers of Boston for twenty thousand dollars. At that time the plant included four snuff mills, a wire mill, a screw factory, a blacksmith shop, an annealing house, and a gristmill with water rights and a farm and buildings. Elliott might be called the first capitalist on the south side of Newton.
The new owners of the Elliott Mills erected a plant for cotton manufacture after tariff difficulties had been adjusted, and commenced making sheeting as their
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specialty. In order to produce their own machinery they established a foundry. Otis Pettee of Foxboro was invited to become superintendent of the works, and in that way the man who had so much to do with building up the indus- tries of Upper Falls became acquainted with the village. The Elliott Manufacturing Company, as it was called, was an enterprising firm, anticipating the later industrial practice of supplying its own accessories. It manufac- tured thread for its own use, and succeeded so well with its mill machinery that it expanded that part of the busi- ness for public sales. Though its sales prices were not excessive, the company was able to make good profits, because the cost of manufacture was low. The best work- men received a wage of only a dollar and a half a day, and the day was long. From 7.30 a.m. to 7 p.m., with three- quarters of an hour for dinner, was the working time in winter, while the summer working day began before break- fast at five o'clock. Gradually the hours were reduced to twelve, to eleven, and to ten, but labor in the field had been long and arduous, and the early manufacturers could not see why men should not work equally long indoors with machinery.
At Turtle Island below the snuff mill Jonathan Bixby owned a dam and sawmill which were constructed in 1783. Sixteen years later he sold that property to the Newton Iron Works Company of Boston. The company engaged Rufus Ellis, one of the owners, to superintend the con- struction and operation of a rolling mill. It imported the best of raw material from Sweden and Russia, and soon was producing twelve hundred tons of nails annually and two thousand tons of other iron products, much of which was sold in the South.
The Worcester Turnpike ran along the edge of the hamlet and provided better transportation. A stage con- nected Upper Falls with Boston by way of Newton Centre.
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A volunteer fire company was organized in 1820, and had the use of a hand engine owned by one of the mills. Four years later the organization provided shafts and a harness for horse traction. This was needed especially on long runs to neighboring towns. None of the towns were adequately equipped and on the occasion of serious fires outside help was called in.
The hamlet added a church to its other institutions. Religious sentiment crystallized in the building of a meet- inghouse which was completed in the year 1828. The Elliott Manufacturing Company encouraged the enter- prise by donating the land and paying three-fifths of the three thousand dollars which the building cost, while Rufus Ellis paid the remainder. The church was a com- munity church with no denominational affiliation. Its name as chartered by the Massachusetts Legislature was the "Upper Falls Religious Society." The preaching was chiefly by Unitarian ministers for five years, and then the building was sold to the Methodists, who organized a church of fifty-three members in 1832 and started a Sun- day school. The denominational organization proved more vigorous than the liberal society. Within a few years it was necessary to enlarge the building, a clock and a bell were added, and later a vestry. When the church was built that part of the village was pasture or woodland, with few houses east of Chestnut Street. High Street was not con- structed until 1834. In 1848 horse sheds were built with the regulation that they were not to be used on week days.
In 1833 certain Baptists joined in building a meeting- house for themselves, after two years decided that the experiment was justified, and organized a church of over fifty members, all of whom had belonged to the church at Newton Centre. Special religious interest in the com- munity, fostered by the Baptist and Congregational churches at the Centre, seemed to show that an evangelical
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church would be welcome, and the Baptist and Methodist churches were a response to the opportunity. Marshall S. Rice was the principal supporter of the Methodist enter- prise, and Jonathan Bixby opened his house for meetings and paid a third of the expense of the Baptist chapel.
As long as Newton remained open country with farms and a few scattered hamlets, there was no division of the people into rival political and social groups. But New England towns, marked out to include a certain amount of territory without special regard for the growth of natural centres of population, tended to form small nuclei about which gathered a few houses, one or two stores, and per- haps a small industry, like a blacksmith shop, gristmill, or forge shop. Such hamlets were likely to develop local rivalry, and in matters relating to the whole town a spirit of jealousy was likely to appear. Town appropriations were watched carefully lest one section of the town should benefit more than another with school and highway advan- tages. Often such sectional feeling or the distance of one part of town from another resulted in the division of towns into two or more independent parts. Through most of the nineteenth century northern and eastern, southern and western parts of town were dropping away, giving themselves new names, and organizing as full-fledged civic entities.
Newton did not escape this tendency to division. The growth of the town in hamlets along the circumference with the absence of any centrally located nucleus of popu- lation aggravated the difficulty so commonly felt. For a hundred and forty years church and cemetery had been located fairly near the centre of the town's population, but though the first schoolhouse was placed near by and it might be expected that the common interests of the town would crystallize there, very few persons lived in the vicinity, and to ride thither from the Corner or the Falls
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was to go into the woods. The difficulty of proper super- intendence of the whole town led to the discussion of a division, and a committee was appointed to divide the town into wards. This was in the spring of 1807. The subject continued to vex the town for forty years, and more than once a division into two parts was imminent. But in the end the wise decision was reached to maintain the unity of the old town. All parts had shared in the struggles and the achievements of colonial days, and all wished to keep their share of the old name and reputation.
The result of the first discussion in 1807 was the sub- division of the town into seven wards, each of which was to choose one selectman and two surveyors. This seemed to meet the needs of the moment, and it was some years before the matter became again acute. But soon after 1830 discussion was renewed and increased in acrimony as time went on. Various lines of division were suggested, but it was impossible to reach any agreement. No hamlet would surrender any existing or prospective advantage. The principal proposition was to separate north side and south side. The building of the Boston and Worcester
Railroad in 1834 intensified this discussion. The West Parish was an existing organization which suggested a centre at West Newton, and Newton and Newtonville along the line of the railroad could join conveniently with West Newton. The old village institutions were at Newton Centre or in that direction, and though it was less popu- lous than the northern hamlets, Highlands and Upper Falls would gravitate to that centre. At one time it was proposed that Lower Falls be ceded to Weston or Need- ham. Certain town corners actually were ceded to Rox- bury and Waltham. Plainly it was a time of decentraliza- tion of interest.
Another complication was furnished by the separa- tion of church and state, which became effective in Massa-
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chusetts after 1833. The proprietors of the old meeting- house in the first parish objected to the continued use of the building for town meetings, and advocated a town hall. At various town meetings held for several years proposals and counter proposals battled for a hearing, votes were taken and reconsidered, impassioned debate mingled with bitter recrimination, and old friends lost their affection for one another because of the wrangling. In the winter of 1833-34 a vote was passed in town meet- ing to build a town hall near the powder house of Newton Centre. Those who were interested to have it there hur- ried lumber to the spot next day, but the weather inter- fered to delay building, and before it was accomplished the town changed its mind again. This time the decision was to build one town house opposite the old Baptist meetinghouse by Wiswall's Pond - a building which later was moved to the centre of the village and became Lyceum Hall - and to buy Fuller Academy at West Newton to make a hall suitable for town assemblies, and to hold town meetings alternately at those two places. This decision quieted the acute controversy, but did not end all agita- tion. In 1842 the question of town division was referred to the Legislature, and that body reported in favor of such action. This brought out again all the guns of debate. Before the town meeting of 1844 a petition was circulated in hope of influencing favorable action in March. The proposal at the time was to divide between East Parish and West Parish approximately along the line of Cold- spring Brook, thus leaving the Corner with the Centre and Upper Falls and allowing it to retain the name of Newton while the West Parish would take the name of West New- ton. At the meeting majority and minority reports were made by a committee previously appointed. Sentiment seemed to be running against any division and the major- ity report favoring a single town house at West Newton
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was accepted. Five years later the old meetinghouse of the West Parish was purchased for $1,800 and made over into a town hall. Echoes of the controversy were still heard occasionally, but in 1855 the townspeople agreed by vote "that the inhabitants of Newton will oppose any and all measures for the division of the town; and that they will regard with disfavor the disturbance of their peace and harmony by the further agitation of the subject."
IV BROADENING HORIZONS
BEFORE the people of Newton had decided whether their interests were sufficiently close to keep their town unity, they had to consider their relations with com- munities outside. From the beginning Newton was con- nected intimately with Cambridge and Watertown. Wal- tham and Needham were near neighbors. Weston and Newton each contributed part of the bridge over the river after a ford had become too inconvenient. All the towns of the vicinity found their natural centre in Boston, where farmer and tradesman, importer and manufacturer, met and exchanged goods and ideas to their mutual profit. But the demands for intercommunication were not strong enough to make towns build intertown highways, if they promised to be expensive. It was left to private associa- tions to construct toll roads called turnpikes. The Worces- ter Turnpike was an example of this. It never paid the proprietors, and finally they succeeded in getting rid of it to the towns through which it passed, but like the natural highways which were popular during the same period the turnpikes supplied an important need of transportation and communication in the days before the railroads.
, State roads were not yet thought of. The American state was still in its infancy. Massachusetts towns sent their trusted delegates to the General Court, but their citizens were indifferent to the interests of the whole state now that the period of acute conflict with Great Britain was over.
Still more difficult was it to cultivate a national con- sciousness. A fringe of colonies along the Atlantic sea-
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board had won their independence from transatlantic domination, and had federated as the United States of America. But every state was jealous of its own rights as the people of the towns were impatient of state interfer- ence. Each section of the country looked upon a national issue like the War of 1812-15 from the point of view of its own advantage, and by that judgment New England had no interest in waging the conflict. Not until the Civil War of 1861-65 presented in concrete form the issue of national union was there a realization of the value of unity. So long does it take to broaden the social horizon from the family to the neighborhood and the community, and from the state to the nation. It had taken Europe long centuries to learn national values and loyalties; it was not surprising that it took European colonials in America eighty years to form their federation of states and then cement them into a nation.
Newton was but one of numerous agricultural com- munities scattered through the thirteen colonies which was proud of its part in the Revolution and had accepted with some misgivings the new government which had been adopted in the constitutional convention of 1788 and which Massachusetts had agreed to ratify. But now that the states were joined in a national federation there was a wider relation to be reckoned with. As Newton moved into the nineteenth century changes were already at work in national politics and in international relations. The nation was becoming more democratic. The Federalist party which had succeeded in organizing the United States had become so unpopular during the administration of John Adams that it lost the national election of 1800 to the Republicans. They boasted of the democracy of the administration of Thomas Jefferson, and followed the leadership of the rural South. In the European conflict between France and her enemies led by England American
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