USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 1630-1880. Vol. I > Part 55
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51 | Part 52 | Part 53 | Part 54 | Part 55 | Part 56 | Part 57 | Part 58 | Part 59 | Part 60 | Part 61 | Part 62 | Part 63 | Part 64 | Part 65 | Part 66 | Part 67 | Part 68 | Part 69 | Part 70 | Part 71 | Part 72 | Part 73 | Part 74 | Part 75 | Part 76
" Valiant in the faith, a defender of the truth and of the churches in this land, both in the pulpit and with his pen," Welde had great influence with the magistrates, by whom he was frequently consulted, and was active in the persecution of Roger Williams and of Anne Hutchinson. Mrs. Hutchinson had affirmed that Welde and some other ministers did not preach a covenant of grace. The conspicuous part which Welde took in the cruel persecution ending in the excommunication and banishment of this gifted woman and her followers, places him in the same category with Laud and other perse- cutors for opinion's sake. While she was a prisoner in his brother's house in Roxbury, not even her husband or children being allowed to see her except with leave of the Court, Mrs. Hutchinson was exposed to the visitations of this "holy inquisitor," whose efforts to convince her of her error were wholly futile. It is a singular fact that the blood of these bitter foes event- ually commingled, a grandson of Welde having married a grand-daughter of the woman he had stigmatized as " the American Jezebel."
Nazing in Essex, England, of which we have before spoken, has the dis- tinction of being the birth-place of the apostle Eliot. He was educated at Jesus College, Cambridge, after which he taught a while in the grammar- school at Little Baddow, kept by that eminently pious and learned divine, Thomas Hooker ; and having determined to become a preacher, and finding little encouragement in England at that day for a Puritan minister, he took passage in the "Lion" for New England, arriving at Boston Nov. 2, 1631.
414
THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
Respecting the manner of his settlement in Roxbury, which took place not- withstanding Boston " labored all they could, both with the congregation of Roxbury and with Mr. Eliot himself," to secure his services, he tells us in his Church Record, -
"Mr. John Eliot came to N. E. in the 9th month, 1631. He left his intended wife in England to come the next year. He adjoyned to the church at Boston, and there exercised in the absence of Mr. Wilson, the pastor, who was gone back to Eng- land for his wife and family. The next summer Mr. Wilson returned, and by y! time the church at Boston was intended to call him to office, his friends were come over and settled at Roxborough, to whom he was foreingaged y! if he were not called to office before they came he was to joyne with them ; whereupon the church at Roxborough called him to be teacher in the end of the summer, & soon after he was ordained to y! office in the church. Also his wife came along with the rest of his friends the same time, & soon after their coming they were married."
The special merit of Eliot, and that which entitled him to be called the "apostle," lay in his zealous and unwearied efforts to Christianize the Indians. This, in the language of the charter of the Massachusetts Company, was declared to be " the principal cause of this plantation." Upon the colony seal an Indian with extended hands raised the Macedonian cry, "Come over and help us!" "That public engagement," wrote Eliot
John Eliot to a friend in 1659, "together with pity for the poor Indian and desire to make the name of Christ chief in these dark ends of the earth, and not the rewards of men, were the very first and chief movers, if I know what did first and chiefly move in my heart, when God was pleased to put upon me that work of preaching to them."
After acquiring the native language, a two years' labor, he began his missionary work at Nonantum, now Newton, whither he was accompanied by Rev. Thomas Shepard, of Cambridge, and Elder Heath and Daniel Goo- kin, of Roxbury, Oct. 28, 1646. He preached once a week alternately at the wigwams of Waban, at Nonantum, and of Cutshamokin, near Dorchester Mill, extending his labors also to various points on the Merrimac River, Martha's Vineyard, Lancaster, Brookfield, and the country of the Nipmuks, which included parts of southwestern Massachusetts and northern Connec- ticut. He was violently opposed by the sachems and pow-was, or priests, and in his frequent journeys into the wilderness experienced many privations. On one of these expeditions he tells us " it pleased God to exercise us with such tedious rains and bad weather that we were extreme wet, insomuch that I was not dry night nor day from the 3rd day of the week to the sixth, but so travelled and at night pull off my boots, wring my stockings, and on with them again." It was his maxim that the Indians must be civilized in order to their being Christianized. One season of hunting, he said, undid all his missionary work. He drew up for them a simple code of laws, urged upon them the necessity of industry, cleanliness, good order, and good
415
ROXBURY IN THE COLONIAL PERIOD.
government; and they soon began to be neat and industrious, to put aside their old habits, and to assume the manners of the whites.
In 1661, after twelve years' labor, Eliot's translation of the New Testa- ment into the Indian tongue was printed, the whole Bible being completed in 1663. The expense was principally borne by the English Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, at the head of which was the excellent Sir Robert Boyle, through whose influence £50 were annually paid to Eliot by the Society. Primers, gram- mars, psalters, catechisms, Bax- ter's Call, and other books in the Indian tongue followed; no pains were spared to teach the natives to read and write; and soon there were fourteen places of Praying Indians, as they were called, and eleven hundred souls apparently converted. In 1673 six Indian churches had been gathered. Then came Philip's war, the death-blow to the work upon which the apostle had set JOHN ELIOT'S CHAIR. his heart, and in which he had been nearly spent. In the course of the conflict some of the Praying Indians joined their countrymen, which so exasperated the English that those who remained could with difficulty be preserved from their ven- geance, and a breach was created between the two races that could never be healed. In 1684 the Indian towns had been reduced to four; the tribes steadily dwindled and finally disappeared.
Eliot was a founder and principal promoter of the grammar-school in Roxbury, and was zealous in his efforts for the establishment of schools throughout the colony. It is the testimony of two intelligent Dutch travel- lers who visited him in 1679, when he was seventy-five years old, that he was the best of the ministers they had yet heard. "He that would write of Eliot," says Cotton Mather, " must write of charity or say nothing." Besides
1 [This antique chair, having been preserved in a Roxbury family, was given to the late Rev. Dr. Harris, and rests at present in the First Church in Dorchester, and bears this inscription : "This chair once belonged to the Rev. John Eliot, of Roxbury, commonly called the Apostle to the Indians, and was used in his study. It was placed under the pulpit of this meeting-house (built in 1816 by the first parish in Dorchester)
by Rev. Thaddeus Mason Harris, D.D., for forty-three years its pastor, as a venerated me- morial." We are indebted to his successor, the Rev. S. J. Barrows, for a sketch of it. A bureau with the initials I. E. upon it, thought to have been Eliot's, belonged to the late Gen. W. H. Sumner, and is figured and described in the .V. E. Hist. and Geneal. Register, October, 1855, and January, 1858. - ED.]
416
THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
being the friend and protector of the Indian, he was the first to lift up his voice against the treatment accorded to the negro in New England, and offered to teach such in his neighborhood as might once a week be sent to him.
Frugal and temperate through a long life, he never indulged in the luxu- ries of the table. His excellent wife, who died three years before him, and who skilfully dispensed medicines to the sick in her vicinity, managed his private affairs, so that he might devote his whole time and strength to his public labors. The death of this venerable and Christ-like man occurred May 20, 1690, at the age of eighty-six. Had he been a Roman Catholic he would assuredly have been canonized. After the deccase of Danforth, Eliot's youngest son, Benjamin, was for some years his colleague. The church record kept by the apostle contains many curious and interesting particu- lars respecting the early inhabitants of the town.
That's two young man The Fish & Sam: Gary have ageres them for both by theire confation of Grift, & conversation in chrift, to by Golly have is. ceived to the full communion of the church .
John Eliot. Samuel Danforth
Rev. Samuel Danforth, a native of Framlingham, England, was brought over by Nicholas, his father, in 1634, and graduated at Harvard College in 1643. In 1649 he became Eliot's assistant, so continuing until ordained his colleague, Sept. 24, 1650. Here he continued until his decease, " neither the incompetency of his salary nor the provocation which unworthy men in the neighborhood sometimes tried him withal could persuade him to remove unto more comfortable settlement." Cotton Mather also tells us that he was very affectionate in his manner of preaching, seldom leaving the pulpit without tears; and, referring to his astronomical labors, a department of knowledge in which he excelled, quaintly adds, " several of his astronomical composures have seen the light of the sun."
" Non dubium est quin eo iverit quo stella eunt Danforthus qui stellis semper se associavit."
Ile published a particular account of the comet of 1664, and a series of almanacs. In the church records, under date of Nov. 19, 1674, Eliot writes this touching passage: "Our reverend pastor Mr. Samuel Danforth sweetly
417
ROXBURY IN THE COLONIAL PERIOD.
rested from his labors. It pleased the Lord to brighten his passage to glory. He greatly increased in the power of his ministry, especially the last sum- mer. We consulted together about beautifying the house of God, and to order the congregation into the primitive way of collections. My brother Danforth made the most glorious end that ever I saw."
Benjamin Thompson, a "learned schoolmaster and physician and ye renouned poet of New England," was son of Rev. William Thompson, of Braintree, where he was born in 1642. Graduating at Harvard in 1662, hc taught school in various places, and finally in Roxbury, where he died, April 13, 1714. His principal poem, "New England's Crisis," has in it a strong vein of vigorous satire, and contrasts the degencracy of his day with the good old times when,-
" Men had better stomachs at religion Than I to capon, turkeycock, or pigeon, When honest sisters met to pray, not prate About their own and not their neighbor's state."
Some of Thompson's verses are in the Magnalia, and in a poem pre- fixed to Hubbard's Indian Wars there are some sprightly and character- istic lines.
By far the most eminent citizen of colonial Roxbury was Thomas Dud- ley, founder of a family that furnished two governors, a chief-justice, and a speaker of the House, all of whom played conspicuous parts in the affairs of New England. Thomas Dudley, second Governor of Massachusetts, and one of the most eminent of the Puritan pioneers, was the son of Captain Roger Dudley, who was " slain in the wars." Brought up as a page in the family of the Earl of Northampton, he was afterward a clerk in the office of Judge Nichols, where he acquired a knowledge of the law that was highly useful to him in his subsequent career. His intelligence, courage, and prudence, already strongly developed, procured for him, at
the age of twenty-one, the captaincy of an English company which he led at the siege of Amiens under Henry of Navarre, and, later on, the stew- ardship of the estate of the Earl of Lincoln, which, by careful management, he succeeded in freeing from a heavy load of debt. A Puritan of the Puri- tans, and a parishioner of the famous John Cotton, he, with four others, undertook, although he was then fifty years of age, the settlement of the Massachusetts colony, and came over with Winthrop as Deputy-Governor in 1630. Dudley at first settled in Newtown, but removed to Roxbury to place himself under the ministrations of Eliot and Welde. In 1644, at the age of sixty-eight, he was chosen Sergeant-Major-General, the highest mil- itary office in the colonies. He was Governor in 1634, 1640, 1645, and 1650, and Deputy-Governor or Assistant in the intervening years, and from the time of his arrival until his death, which took place on July 31, 1653, in his seventy-seventh year.
VOL. 1 .- 53.
Y
418
THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
Dudley was a man of sound judgment, inflexible integrity, great public spirit, and exemplary picty. No one of his contemporaries was more strongly imbued with the intolerant spirit of his age, and he took a promi- nent part in the proceedings against Roger Williams, Wheelwright, Anne Hutchinson, and others. A Universalist church now occupies the site of the residence of one of the most intolerant of men. After his death these lines were found in his pocket : -
" Let men of God in courts and churches watch O'er such as do a toleration hatch, Lest that ill egg bring forth a cockatrice To poison all with heresy and vice. If men be left and otherwise combine, My epitaph 's I dy'd no libertine."
With Governor Winthrop the arbitrary and hot-tempered deputy had fre- quent quarrels. One of these, described by the former, terminated thus: " So the deputy rose up in great fury and passion and the governor grew very hot also so as they both fell into bitterness, but by mediation of the mediators they were pacificd." Their differences were finally and most appropriately ended at Concord, where each had a grant of land, and where the Governor yielded to Dudley the first choice. His daughter Ann, who married Governor Bradstreet, was famed in her day as a poct, a volume from her pen in 1650 being the first book of poetry published in America. Governor Joseph Dudley, his son, was a conspicuous actor in the later colonial and earlier provincial history of New England.
A brief survey of the town and some of its principal features at the close of the seventeenth century may not be unacceptable to the reader.
At the corner of Washington and Eustis streets is one of the oldest burial places in New England, the first interment in it having been made in 1633. The oldest remaining gravestone bears date 1653. Here, side by side with the apostle Eliot and Robert Calef, were laid the Dudleys, the Warrens, and others of lesser note. Here Lyon and Lamb lie down together in fraternal harmony, peacefully commingling their ashes with those of Pigge and Pea- cock, while near them reposes the dust of Pepper and Onion, -savory con- junction ! Inseparable in life, even in death they are not divided.1
On entering the cemetery the first tomb that meets the eye, and the one upon the highest ground, is covered with an oval slab of white marble, bear- ing the name of Dudley. In it were laid the remains of Governors Thomas and Joseph Dudley, Chicf-Justice Paul Dudley, and Colonel William Dudley, a prominent political leader a century and a half ago. The original inscrip- tion plate is said to have been of pewter, and to have been taken out and run into bullets by the provincial soldiers during the siege. Near the centre
1 So far as is known, the first instance of Adams, of Roxbury, when Mr. Wilson, minister prayer at a funeral in Massachusetts occurred of Medfield, prayed with the company before Aug. 19, 1685, at the burial of Rev. William they went to the grave.
419
ROXBURY IN THE COLONIAL PERIOD.
of the ground is the PARISH TOMB, in which are the remains of the pastors of the First Church, including the apostle Eliot; and upon a slab of white marble are inscribed their names and periods of service.1 Among the in- scriptions in this old burial-place, one of which-that of John Grosvenor-is accompanied with a coat-of-arms, are the following : -
" SUR SPE IMMORTALI YE HERSE OF MR. BENJ. THOMSON LEARNED SCHOOLMASTER, & PHYSICIAN & YE RENOUNED POET OF N. ENGL. OBIIT APRILIS 13, ANNO DOM. 1714 & ATATIS SUx 74. MORTUUS SED IMMORTALIS. HE THAT WOULD TRY WHAT IS TRUE HAPPINESS INDEED MUST DIE."
" Here lyes interred ya body of William Denison Master of Arts & Representative for ye town of Roxbury about 20 years who departed this life March 22d. 1717-18 ætatis 54.
Integer atque Probus Deus Patria que fidelis Vixit nunc placide dormet in hoc tumulo."
"Here lyeth buried ye body of Mr. John Grosvenor who dec'd Sept. ye 27th in ye 49th year of his age, 1691." 2
"The Free Schoole in Roxburic" originated in 1642 in a bequest by Samuel Hagburne of 20s. per annum, " when Roxburie shall set up a free schoole in the towne." In August, 1645, some sixty of the principal inhab- itants, "out of their religious care of posteritie," and considering " how necessary the education of their children in literature will be to fit them for publicke service in succeeding ages," bound themselves to the payment of certain sums yearly for the support of a free school, and in 1646 pledged their houses, barns, orchards, and homestcads to carry out their purpose. For near a century the school was managed by seven feoffees, £20 to £25 per annum being allowed the teacher. One of these, Mr. John Prudden, in 1668, engaged at £25 per annum to instruct the children " in all scholasticall morall, and theologicall discipline, ABCDarians excepted." The standard of admission must originally have been of the simplest, since in 1728 it was so raised that only such were received as could spell common easy English words. The grammar school became a Latin school when, in 1674, the legacy of Mr. Bell became available, but of eighty-five scholars in 1770 but nine were students of that tongue.
I [See papers regarding the Eliot tomb in given in the N'. E. Hist. and Gencal. Register, vols. vii., viji., xiv. Cf. Shurtleff's Description of Boston, p. 270; F. S. Drake's Town of Roxbury, P. 95 .- ED.]
N. E. Hist. and Gencal. Reg., July, 1860; F. S. Drake's Town of Roxbury, p. 100. - En.]
2 [Inscriptions from this ancient ground are
420
TIJE MEMORIAL JHISTORY OF BOSTONN.
Of John Eliot's active agency in the establishment of this school, and the high reputation it thus early enjoyed, Rev. Cotton Mather says: "God so blessed his endeavors, that Roxbury could not live quietly without a free school in the town. And the issue of it has been one thing that has almost made me put the title of schola illustris upon that little nursery ; that is, that Roxbury has afforded more scholars first for the college and then for the public than any other town of its bigness, or if I mistake not of twice its bigness, in New England."
In 1663 the town gave for the use of the schoolmaster " forever," and " not to be sold or given away," the wood and timber on ten acres of its common land. In 1680 the parents were ordered to supply the school with fuel, either half a cord of wood or 4s. for each child, excepting those who were too poor. This custom continued down to the close of the last century.
The liberality of its founders and the generous gifts of Thomas Bell and others have made the " Roxbury Latin School," as it is now called, one of the best endowed institutions of learning in New England. Nine generations of Roxbury boys have imbibed freely at this fountain of learning, a goodly number of whom have reflected credit on their alma mater. "Father Stowe " and Joseph Hansford are the earliest mentioned of its teachers. Among those of a later date we find the names of Benjamin Thompson, " renouned poet of N. Engl. ; " Joseph Warren, the patriot and martyr, and Increase Sumner, afterwards Governor of Massachusetts, both natives of Roxbury ; William Cushing, afterwards a Justice of the U. S. Supreme Court ; Samuel Parker, afterwards Bishop of the Diocese of Massachusetts ; and Ward Chipman, subsequently President and Commander-in-Chief of New Brunswick.
In the early days the highways were let out by the year for pasturage, and were generally fenced across to keep in the cattle. In 1652 a commit- tee was appointed to stake them out and settle all questions respecting them. Among the twenty highways laid out in 1663 were those now known as Washington, Roxbury, Tremont, Dudley, Perkins, Centre, and Warren streets, and Walnut Avenue, four rods wide; and Parker, School, Boylston, Eustis, Dennis, Albany, Green, Heath, and Ruggles streets, two rods in width. The highway over the Neck, long known as " the town street," or Roxbury Street, now Washington, was frequently covered with water in the spring, rendering it almost impassable ; and in it, during violent snow-storms, travel- lers sometimes lost their way and perished with the cold. The common, an extensive tract of wild land near the centre of the town, now forms a portion of the beautiful Forest Hills Cemetery.
The old Training Field, containing seven acres, formed the eastern por- tion of the triangle lying between Washington, Eustis, and Dudley streets. Captain John Underhill's company, composed of the freemen of Boston and Roxbury, trained here on the first Tuesday of every month. Underhill's ensign was Richard Morris, one of the founders of the Ancient and Honor-
421
ROXBURY IN THE COLONIAL PERIOD.
able Artillery Company, " a very stout man and experienced soldier." The Roxbury company, of which Joseph Weld was the first captain, was in 1636 included in the regiment, of which Winthrop was colonel and Dudley lieut .- colonel. There were ten Roxbury men in the expedition under Stoughton against the Pequods in 1637. In 1762 the old Training Field ceased to be public property.
For more than a century the Greyhound tavern was the principal public- house in Roxbury. It stood on Washington Street, opposite Vernon, and was torn down during the Revolution. Its position on the only road leading out of Boston-there were then no bridges-made it a noted resort in the days when public meetings, festive gatherings, and other assemblages of a political, social, or business character were usually held in such places, and, being famed for the excellence of its punch, it was much frequented by the convivial spirits of Boston and vicinity.
While tolerating the sale of wine and beer, drunkenness was severely dealt with by our Puritan fathers, who taught and practised the duty of self-control. March 4, 1633, the Court orders that "Robert Coles for drunkenness by him committed at Roxbury shall be disfranchised, weare about his necke & soe to hange upon his outward garment a D made of redd clothe & sette upon white; to contynue this for a yeare and not to leave it off at any tyme when he comes amongst company under penalty of XLs. for the first offence & V. pounds the second, & after to be punished by the court as they think meet; also he is to weare the D out- wards and is enjoyned to appear at the next General Court & to contynue there until it be ended."
From the earliest period leave was granted to " draw" wine and to brew and sell "penny beere." In 1678, soon after the close of the Indian war, intemperance had grown so prevalent that the town voted that neither wine nor liquors should be sold at any ordinary, and that there should be but one ordinary in the town. This prohibitory enactment did not long remain in force.
The old school-house stood where the brick edifice, erected for the school in 1742, still stands in what is now Guild Row. The mansion built by Governor Dudley, famous in colonial and provincial days for the number of distinguished guests it had entertained, stood where the Universalist Church now stands, and was taken down during the siege of Boston. Its sightly and eligible location renders it quite probable that it was the spot selected by Pynchon for his own residence, and the fact that his departure occurred at the same time as Dudley's settlement in Roxbury serves to strengthen the supposition. Between it and the old school-house ran Smelt Brook, and adjoining it on the west was Meeting-house Hill and the church. Fronting it on the east was the home of John Eliot, whose garden extended along the north side of Dudley Street, across what is now the lower part of Warren Street, to the Training Field. Along the town street in the direction of Boston, the earliest settled part of Roxbury, were the homesteads of Weld,
422
THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.
Heath, Denison, Bowles, Hewes, Hagborne, Peacock, and Captain John Johnson. Deacon Parke and the Williamses were on the Dorchester road (Dudley Street) ; Cheney, Leavens, and Bugbee on the Braintree road (Warren Street) ; Lamb, Gore, Pierpont, and Craft on the road to Cani- bridge (Roxbury and Tremont streets). South of Meeting-house Hill were the homes of Alcock, Newell, Morrill, Porter, and Dane. Ruggles, William and Peleg Heath, Philip Eliot, Seaver, and Bell were on the Ded- ham road (Centre Street) ; while at Jamaica Plain and beyond were Curtis, Brewer, May, Mayo, Polley, Thomas, Davis, Lion, and Bowen.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.