USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 1630-1880. Vol. I > Part 3
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Of the prison we have no description, other than that it was surrounded by a yard. It stood where the Court House now stands, on Court Street. The artist has given in the procession of the Quakers across the Common as good a delineation of the spot at that time as the records afford us, - the rounded summit of Centry Hill, with the beacon on it, which finally gave it a name, and which was seventy feet or more higher than now ; the slope, broken in places by rocks (Sewall records getting build- ing-stones from the Common, at a later day) ; the elm, known in our day as the Great Elm, but even then very likely a sightly tree, and near which the executions, probably on one of the knolls, took place. The victims we know were buried close by.
Snow Hill, as Copp's Hill was then called, projected into the river much as the artist has drawn it, topped by the principal windmill of the town. Just by a little cove stood the house which William Copp, the cobbler, had built there, and near by was the water-mill, which, with the causeway across the marsh, forming the dam, had been built some years previous. - ED.
THE KING'S MISSIVE. 1661.
BY JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER.
T INDER the great hill sloping bare To cove and meadow and Common lot, In his council chamber and oaken chair Sat the worshipful Governor Endicott, - A grave, strong man, who knew no peer In the pilgrim land where he ruled in fear Of God, not man, and for good or ill Held his trust with an iron will.
He had shorn with his sword the cross from out The flag, and cloven the May-pole down, Harried the heathen round about,
And whipped the Quakers from town to town. Earnest and honest, a man at need To burn like a torch for his own harsh creed, He kept with the flaming brand of his zeal The gate of the holy commonweal.
His brow was clouded, his eye was stern, With a look of mingled sorrow and wrath : " Woe's me !" he murmured, " at every turn The pestilent Quakers are in my path ! Some we have scourged, and banished some, Some hanged, more doomed, and still they come, Fast as the tide of yon bay sets in, Sowing their heresy's seed of sin.
VOL. I .- D.
THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
" Did we count on this? - Did we leave behind The graves of our kin, the comfort and ease Of our English hearths and homes, to find Troublers of Israel such as these ? Shall I spare? Shall I pity them? - God forbid ! I will do as the prophet to Agag did : They come to poison the wells of the word, I will hew them in pieces before the Lord!"
The door swung open, and Rawson the Clerk Entered and whispered underbreath : " There waits below for the hangman's work A fellow banished on pain of death, - Shattuck of Salem, unhealed of the whip, Brought over in Master Goldsmith's ship, At anchor here in a Christian port With freight of the Devil and all his sort!"
Twice and thrice on his chamber floor Striding fiercely from wall to wall, " The Lord do so to me and more,"
The Governor cried, "if I hang not all ! Bring hither the Quaker." Calm, sedate, With the look of a man at ease with fate, Into that presence grim and dread Came Samuel Shattuck with hat on head.
" Off with the knave's hat!" An angry hand Smote down the offence ; but the wearer said, With a quiet smile : " By the King's command I bear his message and stand in his stead." In the Governor's hand a missive he laid With the Royal arms on its seal displayed, And the proud man spake as he gazed thereat, Uncovering, " Give Mr. Shattuck his hat."
KILBURN
THE MEMORIAL IHISTORY OF BOSTON.
He turned to the Quaker, bowing low : " The King commandeth your friends' release. Doubt not he shall be obeyed, although To his subjects' sorrow and sin's increase. What he here enjoineth John Endicott His loyal servant questioneth not. You are free !- God grant the spirit you own May take you from us to parts unknown."
So the door of the jail was open cast, And like Daniel out of the lion's den, Tender youth and girlhood passed
With age-bowed women and gray-locked men ;
And the voice of one appointed to die Was lifted in praise and thanks on high, And the little maid from New Netherlands Kissed, in her joy, the doomed man's hands.
xxix
THE KING'S MISSIVE.
And one, whose call was to minister To the souls in prison, beside him went, An ancient woman, bearing with her The linen shroud for his burial meant. For she, not counting her own life dear, In the strength of a love that cast out fear, Had watched and served where her brethren died, Like those who waited the Cross beside.
One moment they paused on their way to look On the martyr graves by the Common side, And much-scourged Wharton of Salem took His burden of prophecy up and cried : " Rest, souls of the valiant ! - Not in vain Have ye borne the Master's eross of pain ; Ye have fought the fight ; ye are vietors crowned ; With a fourfold chain ye have Satan bound !"
15
THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
.
The Autumn haze lay soft and still On wood and meadow and upland farms ; On the brow of Snow-hill the Great Windmill Slowly and lazily swung its arms ; Broad in the sunshine stretched away With its capes and islands the turquoise bay ; And over water and dusk of pines Blue hills lifted their faint outlines.
The topaz leaves of the walnut glowed, The sumach added its crimson fleck, And double in air and water showed The tinted maples along the Neck. Through frost-flower clusters of pale star-mist, And gentian fringes of amethyst, And royal plumes of the golden-rod. The grazing cattle on Centry trod.
xxxi
THE KING'S MISSIVE.
But as they who see not, the Quakers saw The world about them : they only thought With deep thanksgiving and pious awe Of the great deliverance God had wrought. Through lane and alley the gazing town Noisily followed them up and down ; Some with scoffing and brutal jeer, Some with pity and words of cheer.
One brave voice rose above the din ; Upsall gray with his length of days Cried, from the door of his Red-Lion Inn, " Men of Boston! give God the praise ! No more shall innocent blood call down The bolts of wrath on your guilty town ; The freedom of worship dear to you Is dear to all, and to all is due.
" I see the vision of days to come, When your beautiful City of the Bay Shall be Christian liberty's chosen home, And none shall his neighbor's rights gainsay ; The varying notes of worship shall blend, And as one great prayer to God ascend ; And hands of mutual charity raise Walls of salvation and gates of praise !"
So passed the Quakers through Boston town, Whose painful ministers sighed to see The walls of their sheep-fold falling down, And wolves of heresy prowling free. But the years went on, and brought no wrong ; With milder counsels the State grew strong, As outward Letter and inward Light Kept the balance of truth aright.
xxxii
THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
The Puritan spirit perishing not, To Concord's yeomen the signal sent, And spake in the voice of the cannon-shot That severed the chains of a continent. With its gentler mission of peace and good-will The thought of the Quaker is living still, And the freedom of soul he prophesied Is gospel and law where its martyrs died.
John Whitten
Bostan.
Heliotype Printing Co.,
STATUE OF JOHN WINTHROP.
SCOLLAY SQUARE, BOSTON.
THE
MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
prehistoric period and natural History.
CHAPTER I.
OUTLINE OF THE GEOLOGY OF BOSTON AND ITS ENVIRONS.
BY NATHANIEL SOUTIIGATE SIIALER, S. D., Professor of Paleontology in Harvard University.
T "HE topography, the soils, and other physical conditions of the region about Boston depend in a very intimate way upon the geological history of the district in which they lie. The physical history of this district is closely bound up with that of all eastern New England, so that it is necessary at the outset to premise some general statements concerning the geological conditions of the larger field before we can proceed to the description of the very limited one that particularly concerns us. In this statement we shall necessarily be restricted to the facts that have a special bearing upon the ground on which the life of the city has developed.
The New England section of North America-viz. the district cut off by the Hudson, Champlain, and St. Lawrence valleys - is one of the most distinctly marked of all the geographical regions of the con- tinent. In it we find a character of surface decidedly contrasted with that of any other part of the United States. While in the other districts of this country the soil and the contour of the surface are characterized by a prevailing uniformity of conditions, in this New England region we have a variety and detail of physical features that find their parallel only in certain parts of northern Europe, whence came the New England col- onists. This peculiarly varied surface of New England depends upon certain combinations of geological events that hardly admit of a very brief description. The main elements of the history are, however, as follows : -
VOL. 1 .- 1.
1H1 MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
Le Vos Eiland district has been more frequently and perhaps for a Vengo a right time above the level of the sea than any other part of the myn with of the great lakes. This has permitted the erosive forces to wn the unchanged later rocks, thereby exposing over its surface the 1 1 yin, metamorphic beds on whose masses the internal heat of the with his exercised its diversifying effects. This irregular metamorphism on, about a great difference in the hardness of the rocks, causing them to wear down, by the action of the weather, at very different rates. Then the mountain-building forces - those that throw rocks out of their original horizontal positions into altitudes of the utmost variety - have worked on this ground more than they have upon any other region east of the Cordille- ras of North America. Again, at successive times, and especially just before the human period, and possibly during its first stages in this country, the land was deeply buried beneath a sheet of ice. During the last glacial period, and perhaps frequently in the recurrent ice times, of which we find traces in the record of the rocks, the ice-sheet for long periods overtopped the highest of our existing hills, and ground away the rock-surface of the country as it crept onward to the sea. During the first stage of the last ice period this ice-sheet was certainly over two thousand feet thick in eastern Massachusetts, and its front lay in the sea at least fifty miles to the east of Boston. At this time the glacial border stretched from New York to the far north, in an ice-wall that lay far to the eastward of the present shore, hiding all traces of the land beneath its mass.
These successive ice-sheets rested on a surface of rock, already much vani d by the metamorphism and dislocations to which it had been sub- Etel. Owing to the fact that ice cuts more powerfully in the valley's than on the ridges, and more effectually on the soft than on the hard rocks, these ice-sheets carved this surface into an amazing variety of valleys, pits, ind depressions. We get some idea of the irregularity of these rock-carv- ings from the fretted nature of the sea-coast over which the ice-sheets rode. When the last ice-sheet melted away. it left on the surface it had worn a layer of rubbish often a hundred feet or more in depth. As its retreat Was not a rout, but was made in a measured way, it often built long irregu- lar walls of waste along the lines where its march was delayed. When the ice-wall left the present shore-line, the land was depressed beneath the sea to a depth varying from about thirty feet along Long Island Sound to three or four hundred feet on the coast of Maine. The land slowly and by degrees recovered its position ; but, as it rose, the sea for a time invaded. the shore, washing over with its tides and waves the rubbish left by the ice-sheet, stripping the low hills and heaping the waste into the valleys. While this work was going on, the seas had not yet regained their shore- life, which had been driven away by the ice, and the forests had not yet recovered their power on the land ; so the stratified deposits formed at this time contain no organic remains. At the close of this period, when the land had generally regained its old position in relation to the sea, there were
3
OUTLINE OF THE GEOLOGY OF BOSTON.
several slight, irregular movements of the shore, - local risings and sink- ings, cach of a few fect in height. The last of these were accomplished in this locality not long before the advent of the European colonists; some trace of their action is still felt on the coast to the northward.
This brief synopsis of the varied geological history of New England will enable us to approach the similarly brief history of the Boston district.
Looking on a detailed map of southeastern New England, the reader will observe that Massachusetts Bay and Boston Harbor form a deep but rudely shaped re-entrant angle on the coast. If the map is geologically colored, he will perceive that around this deep bay there is a fringe of clay slates and conglomerates, or pudding-stones. Further away, making a great horse-shoe, one horn of which is at Cape Ann and the other at Cohasset, the curve, at its bottom near the Blue Hills, includes a mass of old granitic rocks. This peculiar order of the rocks that surround Boston is caused by the existence here of a deep structural mountain valley or synclinal, the central part of which is occupied by the harbor. Long after the formation . of the Green Mountains, at the time just after the laying down of the coal-beds of the Carboniferous age, this eastern part of New England, and probably a considerable region since regained by the sea, was thrown into mountain folds. These mountains have by the frequent visitations of gla- cial periods been worn down to their foundations, so that there is little in the way of their original reliefs to be traced. They are principally marked in the attitudes of that part of their rocks that have escaped erosion. The Sharon and the Blue Hills are, however, the wasted remnants of a great anticlinal or ridge that bordered the Boston valley on the south side. The Waltham, Stoncham, and Cape Ann Bay granitic ridges made the mountain wall on its north side. Narragansett Bay and Boston Harbor are cut out in the softer rocks that were folded down between these mountain ridges. The lower part of the Merrimac valley is a mountain trough that has been simi- larly carved out, and there are others traccable still further to the northward. This mountain trough is very deep beneath Boston ; a boring made at the gas-works to the depth of over sixteen hundred feet failed to penetrate through it. If we could restore the rocks that have been taken away by decay, these mountain folds would much exceed the existing Alleghanies in height.
Within the peninsula of Boston, the seat of the old town, these older rocks that were caught in the mountain folds do not come to the level of the sea. They are deeply covered by the waste of the glacial period. But in Roxbury, Dorchester, Somerville, Brookline, and many other adja- cent towns, they are extensively exposed. They consist principally of clay-slates and conglomerates, - a mingled series, with a total thickness of from five to ten thousand feet. The slates are generally fine-grained and flag-like in texture, their structure showing that they were laid down in a sea at some distance from the shore. The conglomerates were evi- dently laid down in the sca at points near the shore; and they are proba-
4
THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
bly the pebble-waste resulting from a glacial period that occurred in the Cambrian age, or at a time when the recorded organic history of the earth was at its very beginning. These rocks represent a time when the waters of this shore were essentially destitute of organic life. In the whole section we have only about three hundred feet of beds among the lower layers that hold any remains of organic life; and these remains are limited to a few species of trilobites, that lived in the deep sea. From the slates and conglomerates of the Cambridge and Roxbury series the first quarried stones of this Colony were taken. The flagging-slates of Quincy, at the base of Squantum Neck, were perhaps the first that were extensively quar- ricd. A large number of the old tombstones of this region were from these quarries. The next in use were the similar but less perfect slates of Cam- bridge and Somerville; and last to come into use were the conglomerates and granites, that require much greater skill and labor on the part of the quarryman to work them.1 At first the field-boulders supplied the stone for underpinning houses and other wall-work; so that the demand for gravestones was, during all the first and for most of the second century of the existence of the town, the only demand that led to the exploration of the quarry-rocks of this neighborhood. Indeed, we may say that the exploration of the excellent building and ornamental stones so abundant here has been barely begun within the last two decades.
Although the rocks of this vicinity are extensively intersected by dykes and veins, - those agents that in other regions aid the gathering together of the precious metals, - no ore-bearing deposits have ever been found very near Boston. There is a story that a very thin lode of argen- tiferous galena was opened some fifty years ago in the town of Woburn, about eight miles from Boston, out of which a trifling amount of silver was taken. But, unlike the most of the other settlers in this country, the Mas- sachusetts colonists seem never to have had any interest in the search for precious metals, and we know of no efforts at precious metal-mining in the eastern part of this Commonwealth until we enter the present century. The craze for gold and silver, which seems almost inevitable in the life of the frontiersman, was unknown in the early days of New England.2
Although the general features of the topography of this district are determined by the disposition of the hard underlying rocks, the detail of all the surface is chiefly made by the position of the drift or glacial waste left here at the end of the last ice time, but much sorted and re-arranged by water action. If we could strip away the sheet of glacial and post- glacial deposits from this region, we would about double the size of Boston Harbor and greatly simplify its form. All the islands save a few rocks, the peninsulas of Hull and Winthrop Head, indeed that of Boston proper, would disappear; with them would go about all of Cambridge, Charles-
ED.]
2 [Captain John Smith, speaking of his voyage on our coast in 1614, says he came "to take
1 [Cf. Shurtleff's Desc. of Boston, p. 189 .- whales and make trials of a mine of gold and copper ; " but he added the alternative, " if those failed, fish and furs were then our refuge, to make ourselves savers," - and so they proved. - ED.]
5
OUTLINE OF THE GEOLOGY OF BOSTON.
town, Chelsea, Everett, Revere, a large part of Malden, Brighton, Brook- line, and Quincy. Charles River, Mystic River, and Neponset River would become broad estuaries, running far up into the land.
The history of the making of these drift-beds is hard to decipher, and harder still to describe in a brief way. The following statement is only designed to give a very general outline of the events in this remarkable history.
After the ice had lain for an unknown period over this region, climatal changes caused it to shrink away slowly and by stages, until it disappeared altogether. As it disappeared it left a very deep mass of waste, which was distributed in an irregular way over the surface, at some places much deeper than at others. At many points this depth exceeded one hundred feet. As the surface of the land lay over one hundred feet below the present level in the district of Massachusetts Bay when the sea began to leave the shore, the sea had free access to this incoherent mass of débris, and began rapidly to wash it away. We can still see a part of this work of destruction of the glacial beds in the marine erosion going on about the islands and headlands in the harbor and bay. The same sort of work went on about the glacial beds, at the height of one hundred fect or more above the present tide-line. During this period of re-elevation, the greater part of the drift-deposits of the region about Boston was worked over by the water. Where the gravel happened to lie upon a ridge of rock that formed, as it were, a pedestal for it, it generally remained as an island above the surface of the water. As the land seems to have risen pretty rapidly when the ice-burden was taken off, - probably on account of this very relief from its load, -the sea did not have time to sweep away the whole of these islands of glacial waste. Many of them survive in the form of low, symmetrical bow-shaped hills. Parker's Hill, Corey's Hill, Aspinwall, and the other hills on the south side of Charles River, Powderhorn and other hills in Chelsea and Winthrop, are conspicuously beautiful specimens of this structure. Of this nature were also the three hills that occupied the peninsula of Boston, known as Sentry or Beacon, Fort, and Copp's hills. Whenever an open cut is driven through these hills, we find in the centre a solid mass of pebbles and clay, all confusedly intermingled, without any distinct trace of bedding. This mass, termed by geologists till, or boulder-clay, is the waste of the glacier, lying just where it dropped when the ice in which it was bedded ceased to move, and melted on the ground where it lay. All around these hills, with their central core of till, there are sheets of sand, clay, and gravel, which have been washed from the original mass, and worked over by the tides and rivers. This reworked boulder-clay constitutes by far the larger part of the dry lowland surface about Boston : all the flat-lands above the level of the swamps which lay about the base of the three principal hills of old Bos- ton - lands on which the town first grew -were composed of the bedded sands and gravels derived from the waste of the old boulder-clay. These terraces of sand and gravel from the reassorted boulder-clay make up by
0
THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
far the greater part of the low-lying arable lands of eastern Massachusetts; and of this nature arc about all the lands first used for town-sites and tillage by the colonists, - notwithstanding the soil they afford is not as rich nor as enduring as the soils upon the unchanged boulder-clay. The reason these terrace deposits were the most sought for town-sites and cul- tivation is that they were the only tracts of land above the level of the swamps that were free from large boulders. Over all the unchanged drift these large boulders were originally so abundant that it was a very laborious work to clear the land for cultivation ; but on these terraces of stratified drift there were never boulders enough to render them difficult of cultivation. The result was that the first colonists sought this class of lands. One of the advantages of the neighborhood of Boston was the large area of these terrace deposits found there. There was an area of fifteen or twenty thou- sand acres within seven or eight miles of the town that could have been quickly brought under the plough, and which was very extensively culti- vated before the boulder-covered hills began to be tilled.
After the terrace-making period had passed away, owing to the rising of the land above the sea, there came a second advance of the glaciers, which had clung to the higher hills, and had not passed entirely away from the land. This second advance did not cover the land with icc; it only caused local glaciers to pour down the valleys. The Neponset, the Charles, and the Mystic valleys were filled by these river-like streams, which seem never to have attained as far seaward as the peninsula of Boston. This second ad- vance of the ice seems to have been very temporary in its action, not hav- ing endured long enough to bring about any great changes. At about the time of its retreat, the last considerable change of line along these shores seems to have taken place. This movement was a subsidence of the land twenty feet or more below the former high-tide mark. This is shown by the remains of buried roots of trees, standing as they grew in the harbor and coast-lands about Boston. These have been found at two points on the shore of Cambridge, a little north of the west end of West Boston Bridge, and in Lynn harbor. Since this last sinking, the shore-line in this district shows no clear indications of change.
With the cessation of the disturbances of the glacial period and at the beginning of the present geological conditions, the last of the constructive changes of this coast began. Hitherto mechanical forces alone had done their work on the geography of the region; henceforward, to the present day, organic life, driven away from the shore and land by the glacial period, again takes a share in the constructive work. This is still going on about us. The larger part of it is done by the littoral sca-wecds and the swamp grasses. Along the estuaries of the Saugus, Mystic, Charles, and Ne- ponset rivers there are some thousands of acres of lands which have been recovered from the sea by these plants. The operation is in general as follows: The mud brought down by these streams, consisting in part of clay and in part of decomposed vegetable matter, derived from land and
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