USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Concord > The history of Concord, Massachusetts > Part 9
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But we were by no means positive that the sparks would give anything supplemental to his statements, since we were sitting under his own timber trees, from whose ancient tops the very fuel we were then using had fallen, and we
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were well aware that nothing would work against Simon Willard's wishes if he made them known.
Besides, those sparks could not if they would depose about some things, for, although Nashawtuc overlooked much of the broad alluvial area between the river and the ridgeway, and about the hog pen walk at Annusnuc ; yet its highest point did not overlook every precinct, and there was many a settler beyond Flint's pond and over against Punkattassett, and across the "great fields" to the easterly, that it could not look down upon.
Every obstacle, however, was soon unexpectedly re- moved, for, as we were about seating ourselves on a log which we had just rolled before our fire, Nantatucket whose wigwam was just below us, the same Indian who years later deposed about the first Concord land deal, was seen coming along the hill path, having upon his back a bundle of candle wood, which in broken English he stated he had gathered from a clearing below the ridgeway, where some of the Hartwells, Bakers, and Healds lived.
For the sake of the sparks we begged some of the candle wood designing if need be to cast it occasionally on our fire, thereby, perhaps, to supplement Major Wil- lard's statements. Nor, as it happened, was this all the advantage that accrued to us from the arrival of Nantatuc- ket ; for, as he sat with us for fully a half hour smoking his pipe and talking, he greatly confirmed our supposition as to the early friendship existing between the Indians and English at Concord. He reiterated what Tahattawan had told when we sat in his wigwam on the evening of the Apostle Eliot's visit. With a native eloquence and true sin- cerity, he said that a mat was always spread by the settler's hearthside for any belated wanderer of the woods who might wish to occupy it, and the subjects of "Big Pray" (Parson Bulkeley) always extended to those of the Squaw Sachem and her sagamores every needed hospitality, whether of their snug cabin homes during the week or of their meeting house where they worshiped their "Kiton" on a Sunday.
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Nor was this all the good the English had done them; the dreaded Maquas (Mohawks) had ceased to visit them, and no longer was their dreaded war cry heard as a death knell along the meadows and over the midlands of the Musket- equid ; but peace prevailed, and the protection sought by the English in building their garrison honses, of which we had been informed there were several, was from predatory bands that might come from the East and North. After this statement, Nantatucket sat for a time quietly smoking his long stemmed pipe, then suddenly arose and exclaimed that he saw the canoe of Nepanum just coming around the bend below the fording place, and as they had arranged to go a spearing together on the Assabet that evening he would leave us.
Upon the departure of Nantatucket, Mr. Willard and myself engaged in conversation concerning the municipal management of the Concord colony in its incipient stages ; and the information which we have obtained from all sources upon this subject is the following, which we give as the substance of history on this subject.
In 1654, the town was divided into three parts desig- nated "quarters." These were known as the "North," "South" and "East" quarters, and the following are approx- imately their territorial limits.
The North quarter contained the land north of the "Great river" to the Assabet, including most of that about Annusnuc (Concord Junction).
The term "Great river" or "Concord river" was applied to that portion of the Musketequid below the confluence at Egg Rock. In this quarter were the following families : Heald, Barrett, Temple, Jones, Brown, Hunt, Buttrick, Flint, Blood, Smedley and Bateman.
The South quarter contained the land south and south- west of Mill brook, a small stream crossing the road near Concord square at the center to the southerly limit of the North quarter with the exception of three families. The following are the names of householders living in this
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quarter : Dean, Potter, Buss, Heywood, Hayward, Gobble, Woodhouse, Wheeler, Billings, Bulkeley, Stratten, Wigley, Dakin, Miles, Hosmer, Scotchford, and Wood.
The East quarter comprised the area between a line extending to the eastward from Concord Center toward Lexington to the great river, with the exception of a small tract between the latter limit and the old training field. In this ward were the families of Wheeler, Fletcher, Rice, Meriam, Brooks, Fox, Hartwell, Ball, Farwell, Taylor, Baker, Wheat, and Flint.
The following is supposed to be a verbatim copy of the report of the committee appointed to execute rules and to regulate affairs relating to highways and bridges, and the subjoined are the committees, and the date of the report :
"The limits of each quarter (are) as followeth :
"The north quarter by their familyes are from the north part of the training place to the great river and all to the north sid thereof.
"The east quarter by their familyes are from Henry Farwels all eastward with Thomas Brooke, Ensign Wheeler, Robert Meriom, Georg Meriom, John Adams, Richard Rice. The south quarter by their familyes are all on the south and south west sid of the brooke except those before acsprest with Luke Potter, George Heaward, Mikel Wood and Thomas Dane, Signers Simon Willard, Robert Merion, Thomas Brooks, Thomas Wheeler, James Blood, Georg Wheeler, Georg Heaward, Thomas Bateman and John Smedly.
"The date of report 7tn of the Ist mo 1654."
It would be a matter of interest indeed could all the homesteads early established in their various quarters and by their several families be identified or located.
This however would be impossible, for time, seldom friendly to the perpetuity of even the most enduring mon- uments, easily brushes aside many of the frail landmarks such as "A small tree by the brook," "A pine stump by a stone heap," "A red oak sappling by a fox's burrow,"
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"Two short logs one of them with the bark stripped and abutting John Smith's brush fence." But apart from the uncertain and transitory nature of some landmarks and boundary lines, to trace original homesteads would be dif- ficult, because there prevailed at an early period among the grantees a desire for change, the result of which was that a land lot acquired one day might be exchanged the next, so that if an original house site could be identified, to deter- mine the original ownership of the land might be impossible.
But, furthermore, some early families at Concord, as before noticed, did not long remain there, for like gold hunters they sought new fields in hopes of betterment. They put their names on record and staked out lots, but selling and leaving them the lots were thereafter identified with new owners. Moreover, families died out leaving no issue, their names ceased to be heard among the living, and were read only upon the mossy surface of their tombstones ; their homesteads went to waste, their firesides were dis- mantled, and their cold hearthstones might form material for pasture walls.
Such are some of the processes by which change has been busy at Concord, and whereby old paths have been made to designate new ownership.
What all these changes have been we are unable to state, but many of them have been given by the historian Wal- cott, and it would doubtless be a difficult task to attempt gleaning anything valuable after him. But notwithstanding there have been many changes, it can, nevertheless, be said with safety that some families kept their homesteads from the first and passed them on to their posterity with little if any break in the old paternal boundary lines. So was it for over two centuries with the Hartwells, and to a certain extent with the Buttricks, Barretts, Miles, Healds, Dakins, Browns, Balls, Bakers, Hunts, Flints, Meriams, Brooks, some of the Wheelers, and a few others, most of which have long been associated with the original homesteads or with certain localities,
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At the time of a division of the town of Concord into quarters, measures were adopted for the making and main- tenance of highways and bridges. Commissioners for this work were appointed and the following were the names in the first list : "East quarter, Ensign Wheeler and William Hartwell. North quarter, John Smedley and Thomas Bateman. South quarter, George Wheeler, James Hos- mer, George Hayward and Sergent Buss." Each quarter was to make its rules and assess "rates," and in order to limit liability against the entire town, it was enacted that all damages arising from defective highways should fall upon the quarter where it was incurred.
As to where all the original highways were, and whither they went we cannot state, for like the sites of old home- steads, they have in many instances become obliterated. Some, however, are still in use, and some that are not in use may to some extent be traced by record or tradition.
Mr. Albert E. Wood, a civil engineer of Concord, and well acquainted with the topography of the town states that "Until the Bay road was built, which was a good while after the town was settled, there was no way to get to Concord except by the Virginia road." This road, according to the same writer, was reached by way of Middle street, Lexing- ton, which latter road he believes is the one followed by the early settlers as they journeyed from Watertown into the wilderness at Musketequid. This road, the same writer thinks, was laid out perhaps by a company of explorers who went forward and pioneered a path preparatory to the going forth of the Concord Colonists.
The course pursued in order to reach this road Mr. Wood conjectures was as follows : - "starting from Water- town, and going northerly through what is now Waverley, almost to East Lexington ; then bearing off to the left, and passing through the entire length of Lexington, by what is now called Middle Street, to the Lincoln line; then turn- ing a little to the right, so as to avoid Hobbs's Brook, upon a road which tradition declares to be very old, and
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crossing the present Lexington Road, coming by the Vir- ginia Road to Concord."
As a matter of course the "strate strete" or the road along the ridgeway from the public square to Meriam's corner is one of the oldest streets, since houses were erected upon it as before stated about 1635. Of this highway an early record says, "The highway under the hill therough the Towne is to be foure Rodes broad." Other old roads are the Woburn road, whose course was through the East quarter and toward the Shawsheen district (Bedford), the Watertown road in the South quarter of date 1638, the Sudbury road through the South quarter of the same date, the Billerica road from the Lexington road at Meriam's corner, 1660, or before; the Groton road (North quarter), 1699; and the "Old Marlboro road" and the road to Lan- caster. The origin of some of these is only a matter of conjecture. As a rule it is safe to conclude that they were started for communication with some point of importance, as a fording or fishing place, or an extensive land grant, or to find outlet into some leading thoroughfare. The ancient highway was usually a development from a blazed bridle path to a rude drift or cart way, and thence to the "county," or, as sometimes it was termed, "great road." Their widths range from the Indian trail, which Johnson states was "one foot broad," to a road from four to forty rods ; the latter being the width of a highway early laid out through the town of Sudbury.
One object of so much apparently superfluous space was, doubtless, to pre-empt the timber trees along the way for public purposes. In the formal or official laying out of the early roads it is not improbable that drift ways and paths that were private property were sometimes subsidized, so that what the record designates as "the laying out of a new way" or "a way", may have been only the formal appropri- ation or public recognition of an old one ; an instance of which may be the laying out of the Groton road over the
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North bridge in 1699, when, as we are informed, the roads of the North quarter were reconstructed or relocated.
It is probable, also, that in the formal laying out of the early roads old Indian paths were utilized. Such might naturally be the case with the road to Sudbury. Between the latter town and Concord there doubtless was consider- able communication, before the coming of the English, carried on by the aboriginal inhabitants of these as well as of other towns. The Indians at Natick and Nonantum, Kato and his family whose home was at "Wigwam hill" (Goodman's), in Sudbury, the natives dwelling in the vicin- ity of Cochituate pond, near the head of which was a fort and fishing place (Saxonville), all would know the most feasible route to the Musketequid and follow it, and the English would naturally take advantage of this in laying out their own roads. So it might have been with the "Old Marlboro road ;" perhaps it was the shortest course through the domain of Tantamous (Maynard) to Occogoogansett (Marlboro). The road to Lancaster or "the road that goeth to Nashaway" might have been the nearest way to Nashoba (Littleton), and many times may have been pressed by the soft moccasin of Nepanum before it was trodden by an Englishman. The road to Woburn may have been the trail to the home of the Squaw-Sachem at Mystic (Medford) and to the Shawhine fishing ground ; the one to the northerly, at the Blood farm (Carlisle), may have been the trail to Pawtucket Falls (Lowell) ; that to Watertown may have found outlet at Weston, then Water- town, in the "Old Connecticut Path," which ran into the interior of the Nipnet country toward the Indian village of Maguncook (Ashland), and to places beyond these ; to all of which villages the tribal relations of the Mus- ketequid Indians probably extended. Of the later and lesser highways of Concord, whether in use or disuse, we will say but little.
CHAPTER XIII.
Sites of Ancient Highways - Their Reminiscent Character - Vestiges of Old Homesteads - Earth Dents - Traces of Old "Tavern Stand"- Shoemaker's Shop, Laborer's Cottages, The Dame School.
B EFORE leaving the subject of old and disused high- ways, let us consider some suggestions that come to us; for as we remember that they were once well worn thoroughfares of the fathers, and the avenues of public intercourse, they furnish food for much thought.
To begin with, the very tracing of them is interesting to one possessed of an antiquary taste, or who is a lover of Nature, for there may be frequent and pleasant surprises. It may be a rare flower whose presence was detected by its fragrance, and as the eager explorer thrusts away the black- berry vines to examine it more closely, or to pluck it as a trophy, he may discover the crank of an old hand mill last turned by Goody Gobble and left stranded when the tide of travel went out. As he pursues his way, which in its devious course at one time takes him through meadows green and pastures pleasant or along merry brooksides, and at another leads him a tangled and tiresome chase through woodlands wild and up and down defiles that are shadowy and deep, he may at length find himself seated by a fox's den with no living object in sight except a few ferns and blueberry bushes, while within easy reach is the rusty noz- zle of a blacksmith's bellows last used at the Village forge.
But perhaps the greatest attractiveness of the old and disused highways is in the suggestiveness of the house
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sites upon them. Indeed, it may be by the aid of the mounds and earth dents that mark them, that the entire course of an obsolete way can be traced ; for although in many cases they are matters of record, yet so remotely were they traveled that Nature has quite claimed them, and in some instances so covered them with trees and grasses that it may be said they have reverted to the origi- nal owners by "prescriptive right." But the house sites may betray them, and to ferret out these sites and sit beside them ; to muse upon their possible or probable history ; or to search for some significant object that will break the spell of their mystery and give hint as to who lived there may be as interesting as to trace the roads themselves. And in some cases it is quite as difficult, for time is never friendly to relics of any kind, and Nature strives energet- ically and promptly to cover the scars that are made upon her, as is clearly seen by the incoming of vegetation even upon a sandy railroad embankment.
Notwithstanding, however, all efforts to the contrary, man's work long defies Nature's best attempts to obliterate it, and if no traditions or records of the Colonial age were extant, it might perhaps be distinguished by the things now and then discovered in the mouldering debris, where stood the old farm house, the barn, and the rude work shop. Among the tell-tale objects of a durable character are cellar walls, old door stones, bits of metal broken from miscella- neous culinary articles, and crumbling brick work ; while in the vegetable world and quite as lasting in their perennial upspringings are "gill run over the ground," patches of plantain, a few clumps of catnip, the red sorrel struggling among a few sickly lilies, a stunted lilac, a rose bush or two, an ancient pear tree, and perhaps as indestructible as anything, the yellow tufted cypress, and old maid's pinks.
But let us consider more closely the subject of house sites, and as we do so let us at times leave the realm of actuality, and as we stand by these wayside souvenirs, while not overstepping the possible and perhaps the probable,
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consider some old time customs and superstitions, and modes of living and of dress : and in this manner, it may be, feast our fancy upon the fictitious counterparts of what occurred in the half forgotten long ago.
That depression, about which are the fragments of old bricks with the blackened mortar still upon them, marks the spot where was born and died an "old inhabitant" who was foremost in town affairs. The path to his door now covered with "mouse's ear" was trodden much, because everybody respected him and he kept open house for the country side. In the intercolonial wars he and his son fought side by side, and when the war was over both came back. At length the old man died ; the son left the farm, the road went into disuse, the house to decay, and this is the last of it. If you listen at the early twilight just as the witch hour comes in you may hear something, for that ghostly looking poplar whose leaves tremble so may be sheltering some sprites who will tell the history of that house, which history may be that intemperance had to do with its loss and decay; the moral of which is that in every place and among every people alcohol is destructive rather than constructive.
Near that leek covered ledge by the barberry bush may have been an old time tavern stand. The sign that swung before it said : "Entertainment for man and beast," and the landlord's license was "to sell strong water." In the accom- plishment of these objects, the keeper of this "Ordinary" was much assisted as well by the villagers as by the occa- sional traveler, in that some of the former were always ready for the latter to "stand treat," and it may not be too much to suppose that more than one stone on the wall opposite has been surreptitiously thrust upon the "steel- yards" and weighed, and afterwards returned to its place, in order to insure a safe bet on its weight for the drinks, which bet was made with some unsuspecting teamster.
The usual village loiterer was there also, tempted by the odor of the tap room, and with an eager expectation that
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he would be benefited by its scant leakage, if he now and then groomed a teamster's horse or made the hostler's bed in the "bunk."
Soldiers sometimes stopped there on their way to or from "Old Ti" and Crown Point, and swapped stories, and talked of the war ; and the neighboring farmers of a winter evening or a wet day sat before the fireside in the bar room and smoked their cob pipes and talked crops, taking good care to leave with the landlord no more than their good will when they went away, for a nine pence with them was stronger than appetite ; as money usually came hard in those days, and to make both ends meet was a matter of econ- omy and close management.
By the bushy lane where that large boulder is encircled by the low savin bush as if to save it from the encroach- ments of all larger vegetation, may have stood the shop of a shoemaker. There, bits of old leather, curled and wrinkled by long exposure to sun and weather, show that this son of Crispin was a careful craftsman, for those stitches that grin and glisten are well set, and the shrunken awl holes even yet show their shapeliness. There by that burdock is the remnant of a "tongue boot." The leg is stiched to the instep leather in a well rounded seam, which indicates that the ancient shoemaker had regard to both stoutness and symmetry.
In a barn that stood back of this building the minute men drilled, and on winter evenings the yeomanry met there and went through the "manual of arms" with their mittens on, while the cows lowed in the stalls and longingly looked to the haymow in the wish that a loose lock might be thrown them.
Beyond the roadbend on the rising ground and half concealed by that hazel clump, may have stood the cottage of a laborer who worked for "four and sixpence" a day "making it fair weather." Near that bush was his garden, where he worked at early evening and of a stormy day. Here and there a few turf bound herbs as sage and rue still
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disclose it, and if time has not been too relentless, the fra- grance of a few grass pinks or the flash of a sweet williams blossom may reach you. In the adjacent bog by that cone shaped musquash's nest he cut his peat, and the straggling hop vines that vainly strive to entwine themselves about that wild cherry tree are the poor remnants of once produc- tive vines which the laborer relied upon to "work his beer."
Just beside the runway there by the bank, was a "Dame school," which we will suppose was kept by Goody Doro- thea Dean in the northwest chamber of her sister's hus- band's farm house, the parents of each pupil sent to her paying six pence a week for tuition, she having her rent free. Here, we will suppose that the good dame taught year after year, and sang the same old song of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, as the winter snows came and the spring suns melted them away, until her life became as dry and methodical as the simple rules with which she dealt, and every hue of her once fair face was faded, and there was little left to tell of the former fresh- ness which once made her a favorite among the village beaux.
It was not hard work that had shrivelled the fair features of Goody Dean, although she did everything that was required of her, and was a painstaking little body, doing her duty in every detail and to the last moment by the "noon mark ;" but the humdrum of her experience was what wore on her, for it was day after day the same thing without special incident or episode, except now and then the entrance of some new comer, who, although too young to enter even the simple curriculum of a Dame school, had been sent by an overworked mother in order to make one less child to be under foot in the cheeseroom. This monotony was not peculiar to the school of Dorothea Dean, for this school taught in the northwest chamber of her sister's husband's house was as good as any of the Dame schools. But education was at a low ebb in that
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period. The financial circumstances of the colonists were straightened. An intense conservation prevailed and only the practical was then popular. As they could do without grammar better than they could do without corn they raised corn. As their meeting house educated in matters relig- ious, and much secular knowledge was not considered essen- tial, they let the latter take care of itself, and were fairly content if they could read, write, and "cast accounts" in whole numbers, as mathematics were then styled.
So it was that Goody Dean and her Dame school were up to date, and her pupils were abreast of the times ; and although both were in the doldrums of the days of a juice- less pedagogy, yet neither expected anything better nor looked beyond what that northwest chamber afforded. The mistress went her simple round of duties day by day with a punctiliousness that was commendable and in exact accord with the staid circumstances that surrounded her. Her work was to a large extent manual, and that of her pupils was formal and imitative. There were quills to be sharpened, rules to be written, and learned by rote, and re- cited, courtesies to be taught and carefully practiced, in- struction in sewing to be given, and the children to be kept quiet on the tripod or made to sit straight on the backless bench.
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