USA > Massachusetts > Worcester County > Westborough > The history of Westborough, Massachusetts. Part I. The early history. By Heman Packard De Forest. Part II. The later history. By Edward Craig Bates > Part 2
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8
EARLY HISTORY OF WESTBOROUGH.
There were other Indians in the vicinity, of whom the white men, on their arrival, purchased lands ; but they had already disappeared, to a considerable extent, before that time. For we remember that only eight years before the " Mayflower " touched Plymouth Bay there had been a pestilential fever all along the coast, which had decimated the tribes. And with the coming of the English the days of the natives were numbered. Not that the Pilgrims had any purpose of extermination, or even of conquest. They had even cherished the hope, as no small part of their object in coming to this wilderness, " to propagate and advance the Gospel of the Kingdom of Christ in those remote parts of the world." And no sooner were they freed from the necessity of using all their strength in se- curing a bare subsistence for themselves, than they took measures to civilize and Christianize the aborigines. As early as 1644 the General Court took cognizance of the matter, and ordered the county courts to take care of the Indians in their several shires. In the two succeeding years still more definite action was taken, looking toward the gathering of them into communities, and bringing them under religious instruction.
John Eliot was the leading spirit in this movement, full of zeal for the Christianizing of the red men; and as soon as the government indorsement was obtained, he began the work at Nonantum and Natick which has made his name a household word. By 1654 he had gathered the " praying Indians " into a colony at Natick, and was pe- titioning the General Court " that those Indians might be settled, who were scattered yet, in convenient places un- claimed by the English." The places indicated by him were some of them within or near the locality of our story. Naguncook was at Hopkinton; Hassanemisco, at Graf-
9
INDIAN HISTORY AND LEGEND.
ton; and a third settlement was on Okommokamesit1 Hill, just north of the present village of Marlborough. These Indians were partially civilized, and quite different from the wild forest-rangers who named hill and lake and stream. They had lost their picturesqueness; they had certainly gained something; but they were, at this stage in their development, a strange and uncouth compound of barbarism and civilization. Their teachers had committed the common mistake of trying to graft advanced English customs on undeveloped natures; and the result was a comical incongruity, like the blanket and silk hat of the modern Indian of the West. They had awakened their religious impulses, but their ethical knowledge was very slight, and they had no trained instincts. They had been forced to have a local government like that of the white men, in forgetfulness of the fact that it had taken the nur- tured English mind some centuries to arrive at the idea of self-government. They were organized into churches, and that too of the prevailing Congregational pattern, - which being a new thing, reasoned their teachers, and the best thing, must be the thing for the savage. They were taught to cultivate the land, - which was exactly the right thing, because the first in order in the development of the arts ; but they were bidden to live in houses like the white man, and wear his dress, and bear his English names; and these things did not fit them as yet. The chief of this Okom- mokamesit town was Onomog, of whom Gookin says, in his Cromwellian phraseology, that he was "a pious and
1 This name, like so many other Indian names, is spelled in various ways. Besides the above, which is the more euphonious, though probably a later form, I find Ockoocangansett, Ogkanhquokamus, and Ogquomkong- quamesut. The early settlers had a pretty severe struggle with the ordi- nary spelling-book; when it came to Indian names, they were apt to surrender at sight.
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EARLY HISTORY OF WESTBOROUGH.
discreet man, and the very soul, as it were, of that place." He died in 1674.
But however earnestly the friends of the Indian were la- boring for his elevation in the scale of manhood, the work- ing of other inevitable forces that accompany and help to make social progress had begun, and the Indian was already passing away before the higher skill and the wider ambition of English training. The law of the survival of the fittest was to have a signal illustration. The leaders of the colonies had the best of intentions toward the na- tives; Eliot and his assistants were unremitting in their efforts to do them good in body and soul,-but not all the colonists were like the leaders. We are too apt to gen- eralize vaguely concerning these ancestors of ours, and because the Plymouth Pilgrims were men of a high stamp, as statesmen and as Christians, to assume that all who came to the colonies were of the same type. But history does not bear us out in this assumption. There were adven- turers among the immigrants. There were men who be- came mischief-makers in the new towns; there were those who had to be sent back, to get them out of the way. And among those who remained, and who gradually pushed their way westward, there were those who cared little for any one's rights but their own, and who had as much share in making the life of the towns as those who were of a better mind. These men could not be made to look on the Indian as anything but an incumbrance, to be gotten rid of. The feeling that "the only good Indian is a dead Indian " did not originate in the Western plains, if the phrase did; and the broad meadows and produc- tive " planting fields" of the civilized Indians were too strong a temptation to the white man, who very soon contrived to possess them, and not always by the method
II
FIRST WHITE SETTLERS.
of lawful purchase. There were those who protested against injustice; but even the brave and true men who have deserved only the gratitude of posterity were men who had been brought up on the Old Testament ideas rather than on those of the New. They believed that God had given this land to his saints, as he did Canaan of old, - and they believed that they were the saints; and brave and true as they were, according to their age, they did not always - especially when smarting from the cruel- ties of Indian warfare - see in the clearest light the claims of the original proprietor. If, as we read the story, we are tempted to be harsh with them for this, we have sev- eral more modern stories, like that of the Black Hills, by which we may temper our righteous wrath.
John Eliot's little colony on Okommokamesit Hill very soon found that it was to have English company. In the very same year (1654) that Eliot sent up his petition to the General Court "that they might be settled in this, among other places, unclaimed by the English," the first white man, one John How, is believed to have built his solitary cabin a little east of their planting-field. He came from Watertown, led by what motives it might be hard to say, but bent on separation from society. He was kind and friendly with his dusky neighbors, and from his superior knowledge came to be regarded by them as a sage and counsellor, and made a referee in their disputes. In Allen's "History of Northborough" an amusing illustration of this is cited. A dispute arose one day between two of the natives concerning the own- ership of a pumpkin, which had ripened in the field of one of the parties, while the vine that bore it had its roots in the other man's domain. Unable to solve so difficult a case of casuistry, they had recourse to Mr. How. He
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EARLY HISTORY OF WESTBOROUGH.
gravely heard the case, put on his wisest countenance, and ordered the disputed property to be placed before him. Then calling for a knife, he cut the pumpkin in two, and gave half to each, -to the unbounded admiration of the litigants.
But this life of patriarchal simplicity was of short dura- tion. It was only two years after the arrival of How (in May, 1656) that thirteen men of Sudbury - a town then eighteen years old - petitioned the General Court for a grant of land lying about eight miles to the westward. They had lived a good while in Sudbury, they said; their children were growing up, and needing land; their cattle were much increased; and, in short, “ wee are so straight- ened that wee cannot so Comfortably subsist as could be desired." There was no satisfying these pioneers in the matter of room. They felt crowded as soon as there were fifty families in a town. They could not find elbow-room on a farm of less than five hundred acres, even when they had in addition no end of meadow-land divided into lots for the common weal. Fifty years afterward the Haynes farm, lying to the west of Westborough, contained 1,686 acres in one place, and 3,200 in another; and yet the heirs were claiming from the General Court a modest settlement of 5,000 acres more. The settlers all cried with a naïve literalness, -
" No pent-up Utica contracts our powers, But the whole boundless continent is ours."
As a consequence, the spread of new towns westward was rapid. Boston was incorporated in 1630, and on the same day Watertown, including at that time Waltham and Weston. Three years later Cambridge, including Brighton and Lexington, became a town under the name of Newtown. In 1635 Concord, containing Lincoln and
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FIRST WHITE SETTLERS.
Acton, began its history; and Sudbury, including the fu- ture Wayland, followed in 1639. Thus nine years from the founding of Boston, and nineteen from the landing of the Pilgrims, brought the Englishmen to the borders of the "borough towns."
The population followed river-courses and sought the neighborhood of ponds, on account of the meadow-lands, which bore their crops of grass without cultivation while the settlers were carrying on the slower work of subduing upland and woodland to the plough. So, climbing the hills to the westward, these restless spirits coveted the fair lands that sloped away toward the sunset, and sent in their petition in this year of grace 1656. They obtained their wish, too, to the extent of " a proportion of land six miles square, or otherwise in some convenient form equiv- alent thereto, at the discretion of the committee, in the place desired, -provided, that it hinder no former grant; that there be a town settled with twenty or more families within three years, so as an able ministry may be there maintained."
Inasmuch, however, as this was found to interfere with the grant to the Indians through John Eliot two years be- fore, the Court ordered the planters to reserve six thousand acres for the red men, and suit themselves as well as they could with the remainder. This they were reluctant to do, and at first stoutly rebelled, and reserved only a part of the required area; but Eliot so successfully championed his wards that in 1658 the Court ordered "that the Indian plantation be enlarged northerly until they have their full 6,000 acres; " and the English had to submit as best they might.
The land thus granted to the settlers was not at once incorporated as a town, but became known as the Whip-
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EARLY HISTORY OF WESTBOROUGH.
suppenicke, or, more commonly, the Whipsufferadge Plantation, from the Indian name of the hill which lies a mile or so south of Okommokamesit. But on the 31st of May, 1660, in answer to a petition of the Whipsufferadge planters, the Court confirmed the former grant, and in- corporated the settlement as a town, to be called " Marl- borow." It included what has since become Southborough, most of Westborough and Northborough, and a part of Hudson.
CHAPTER II.
1660-1676.
EARLIEST LANDHOLDERS WITHIN THE LIMITS OF THE PRESENT TOWN. - " KING " PHILIP'S WAR.
TO follow the history of Marlborough, which has al- ready been well written, is not in our purpose, except as it is interwoven with the first English occupa- tion of the lands which were afterward incorporated as Westborough. At the very beginning the settlers were attracted by its meadows and streams, toward the western part of their domain, even while they were trying to get possession of the Indian planting-field on the eastern hill. The thirteen families of 1656 had increased to thirty- eight in 1660, and a certain portion of the land, more or less centrally situated, was divided into "house-lotts," containing from fifteen to fifty acres; while the coveted meadows were apportioned among all the proprietors. Some of the names given to the meadows at that time have survived, - Stirrup Meadow and Cold Harbor Meadow in Northborough, along the streams which bear those names; Middle Meadow, which still lies, in all its original charm, to the west of the Northborough road, along the beginnings of the Assabet, and reaches to the foot of the first hill west of Westborough village; and Cedar Swamp Meadow, which was very likely at that time an open stretch to the east of the village. There were also a Crane Meadow and a Chauncy Meadow, whose situation it is not difficult to conjecture.
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EARLY HISTORY OF WESTBOROUGH.
The town business was begun, in September, 1660, in the usual manner of the time, by the order "That there bee a Rate made ffor Mr. William Brimsmead, Minister, to be collected of the Inhabitants and Proprietors of the town [for six months], at the rate of four pence per acre upon House Lotts, and three pence per pound upon Cattle." The next year a house was built for the minis- ter, and in 1662 a tax was imposed for building a meet- ing-house. But these orders were slow in taking effect. The people of the early settlements were chiefly eager to get their land subdued and their own houses built; being obliged by law to have a meeting-house and a minister at once, they conformed to the requirement by passing the proper votes at their first meetings, while they were often very slow in the fulfilment of them. More- over, in this particular case the proprietors had made some laws of their own, of undue severity, concerning the tenure of lands, requiring the owners to improve them within a very short time, and to pay heavy taxes, or else to forfeit their lands. Money was scarce, and the work of reclaiming the lands was arduous and slow; the result was an attempt to apply the law of forfeiture, which led to endless disagreement and litigation. It was not, therefore, till 1666 that a church was actually organized, over which Mr. Brimsmead, with some natural reluctance, was settled.
But meantime the taking up of lands in the western part of the town was going on. The very earliest trace of individual ownership in this section is of unusual in- terest. It was in 1654, the same year that saw the first white man's cabin in Marlborough, that the Rev. Charles Chauncy, pastor of the church in Scituate, - formerly vicar of Ware, Hertfordshire, England, which parish he
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EARLIEST LANDHOLDERS.
left on account of his Puritanism, - became the second president of Harvard College. The salary attached to the position was then exceedingly small; and in order that he might have the means of support, the General Court, poor in pounds sterling, but rich in lands, granted him several large tracts in the then unoccupied territory be- yond the settlements. Under such a grant he took up, in 1659, the year previous to the incorporation of Marl- borough, certain lands lying about the pond that bears his name to-day, which are thus minutely described in the surveyor's report to the General Court, Aug. 18, 1659:
"Whereas John Stone and Andrew Belcher were appointed to lay out a farme for Mr. Charles Chauncy, President of Har- vard College, we have gone and looked on a place, and there is taken up a tract of land bounded in this manner : On the East a little swampe neare an Jndjan wigwam, a plajne runing to a great pond, and from thence to Assebeth River ; and this ljne is circular on the north side, the south ljne runing circular to the south side of a peece of meadow called Jacob's meadow, & so to continew till it reach to the sajd Assebeth River."
The outlines of this original " Chauncy Farm " cannot be traced to-day from this description; the Indian wig- wam has disappeared, but the " great pond " - so named by the Indians - and " Assebeth River" remain, and suffi- ciently indicate the situation of the tract. When, in the following year, Marlborough was incorporated, the grant then confirmed to the settlers included this farm of President Chauncy's; and that the resident proprietors might not be prevented from occupying all the land within the boundaries of the town, the Court ordered " that Mr. Chauncy be by them repaid all his charges expended in laying out his farm in that place; and he hath liberty to lay out the same in any lands not formerly
2
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EARLY HISTORY OF WESTBOROUGH.
granted by this Court." Thus while the president's owner- ship passed away after a year's occupation, the name re- mained. Subsequently a settlement grew up about the pond, and was called Chauncy, or Chauncy Village, - which name it bore until it was incorporated as West- borough. It is singular that a century later all knowledge of this origin of the name had been lost, so that Mr. Park- man, the first minister of Westborough, could write as follows in 1767: "This town was formerly a part of Marlborough, and called Chauncy. It is said that in early times one Mr. Chauncy was lost in one of the swamps here, and that from thence this part of the town had its name. Two ponds, a greater and a less, are also called Chauncy, - most probably from the same cause." The Rev. Joseph Allen, of Northborough, first called atten- tion, in 1826, to the true origin of the name, which subsequent investigations of the State records have abun- dantly established.
In 1662 the General Court granted, on account of services rendered to the colony by his son John, then deceased, one hundred and fifty acres to William Hol- loway; and he seems to have taken up a section of land which was afterward known as the Holloway and Wheeler Farm, in the extreme north of Northborough. Land situated still farther westward had been in the possession of settlers before this time. In 1657 John and Josiah Haynes and a Mr. Treadway bought of Mrs. Parnell Nowell, widow of Increase Nowell, who was for many years Governor's Assistant in the Massachusetts Colony, 3,200 acres which lay in what is now Shrews- bury, but adjoining Northborough on the west. In 1664 this land was surveyed and formally allotted to them. John Haynes also bought of Joseph Robin, an Indian
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EARLIEST LANDHOLDERS.
proprietor, 1,686 acres adjoining Hassanemisco, and per- haps including some territory now in Westborough, be- yond the house of B. A. Nourse, on the New England Village road.
In 1671 the Marlborough young men began to sigh for more extended dominion, and sent up a petition to the General Court on the 31st of March, headed by Thomas King, and containing among others the names of Thomas Rice, John Fay, and Thomas and John Brig- ham, asking for a grant of lands situated forty or fifty miles south or southwest of Marlborough. As this was outside the jurisdiction of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, their request could not be granted, and they were advised to seek other lands on the Connecticut River. Foiled in this project, several of the number contented themselves with taking up farms in the west part of Marl- borough, which now or soon after acquired its popular title of "Chauncy." John Brigham, afterward known as " Dr." Brigham, son of the Thomas Brigham who came from England, obtained a grant of land situated north of the present village of Northborough and including the meadows about Howard Brook. This was in 1672, when he was twenty-eight years old. On this brook he built a saw-mill; and there he lived alone among the savages until their hostility drove him away. In the same year a grant was made to Samuel Goodenow and Thomas Brigham (brother of the John Brigham above mentioned), situated in the easterly part of North- borough. Samuel Goodenow's house stood near the spot where Stirrup Brook crosses the road from North- borough to Marlborough. Thomas Brigham lived on the Warren Brigham place, on the south road between Northborough and Marlborough. Another grant was
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EARLY HISTORY OF WESTBOROUGH.
made in 1672 to John Rediet, "west of Assebeth River, northwest of Chauncy Great Pond, bounded on the east by a spruce swamp," and another on "the Nepmuck road, that formerly led toward Coneticoat." The former of these grants, afterward the farm of Nathaniel Oake, who married John Rediet's daughter, belonged at a later period to the Rev. John Martyn and the Rev. Peter Whitney.
In the south part of Chauncy, which is now West- borough, Thomas Rice is reported to have been the first settler. His house stood in the rear of the Christopher Whitney place. Just when he came is uncertain; but he was here in 1675, and his house was garrisoned during King Philip's war. He was born June 30, 1654, and was the son of Edmund Rice, who came from England. His first wife, Mary, died in Watertown May 13, 1677, and in 1681 he married his cousin, Anna Rice. He was twenty- one years old in 1675, and it is probable that he married his first wife and built his rude dwelling at the foot of the hill but a very short time before that. Whether there were other settlers as early as this within the present limits of Westborough is uncertain. The "Fay Farm," in the western part, - a portion of the irregular outline of which has determined the shape of the town in that locality, - was certainly occupied very early, and seems to have been in the possession of some of the Brighams before it passed into the possession of John and Samuel Fay; but as it had no garrison in 1675, there were probably at that time no dwellings on it.
The year 1675 is memorable throughout this region. It saw the most serious clash that ever occurred between the settlers and the aborigines in New England, and the set- tlement here received a check that was almost fatal. The
21
KING PHILIP'S WAR.
relations between the English and the Indians on Okom- mokamesit hill had never been severely strained up to this time. The whites had, indeed, always begrudged the Indians their allotment of six thousand acres, but they made no further attempts to encroach upon it, probably feeling sure that it would soon fall to them for lack of inhabitants. For while the English settlement was rap- idly growing, the Indian town was passing away. In 1674 - it contained only ten families and fifty persons. Major Gookin, in his queer, Puritanic English, and with the · grotesque use of Scripture then prevalent, sums up the situation thus forcibly: "This town doth join so near to the English of Marlborough that it was spoken of by David in type, and our Lord Jesus Christ the antitype, ' Under his shadow ye shall rejoice;' but the Indians here do not much rejoice under the Englishmen's shadow, who do so overtop them in their number of people, stocks of cattle, &c., that the Indians do not greatly flourish or delight in their shadow at present."
This was inevitable. While the intelligence and skill of the Englishman made him an unequal competitor in the struggle for life, the Indian was not yet ready for any large success as a cultivator of the soil. He could only rise to that higher grade of life by slow degrees and with infinite patience of training on the part of his teachers. This the average settler was by no means prepared to give. The missionary work had to be done by a few enthusiasts, and they were unequal to the task.
But a more serious collision than the natural one be- tween ignorance and skill was impending. While no con- flict was likely to arise with the Indians of the'“ praying towns," the rest of the aborigines were by no means
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EARLY HISTORY OF WESTBOROUGH.
subdued. They had thus far dealt kindly enough with the new-comers, raising no objection to selling them all the lands they desired, for a few petty objects of barter which their simple barbaric souls craved. But Dr. Ellis has recently called attention to the probability that they did this with the idea that it was only a joint owner- ship that the white man sought. They were not in the habit of using their lands for tillage, and did not see why the two races might not live in peace on the same soil. It was a surprise to them to find that English owner- ship meant their exclusion. In 1643 and 1644 all but one of the sachems of eastern Massachusetts had formally submitted to the Government of the colony, so that all the territory from the Merrimac to Taunton River and west- ward to Brookfield was under colonial rule. But Philip of Mount Hope had never submitted. He alone saw that the sale of land to the English meant the driving out of his race. He and his Pokanokets had long been the terror of Plymouth Colony, and at length it was rumored that he had persuaded the Nipmucks to become his allies. If that were so, it was a serious matter for our pioneers. The new town of Marlborough was a frontier post con- taining not quite fifty families. Situated on " the Con- necticut road," it was the intermediate station between Boston and the settlements on the Connecticut River. Eastward were Sudbury and Concord, communicating, through Lexington and Watertown, with Boston. North- ward were only Lancaster and Groton. On the southeast the nearest town was Medfield. Southward was Mendon and the Indian towns of Hassanemisco and Maguncook. Westward the country stretched away unoccupied, save by Indians and wild beasts, to where the newly incorpo- rated town of Brookfield rose out of the wilderness. In
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