USA > Massachusetts > Norfolk County > Milton > Three hundred years of Milton 1662-1962 > Part 2
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Benjamin Crehore, 1832
I AM Ben Crehore, mechanic. I can make almost anything from an artificial leg to a piano or a power loom here in my little shop in Neponset Village at the lower falls in Milton. Today they are starting to call it Milton Village. It is a busy place with all its mills, woolen, paper, chocolate, grist, saw, and the dye and drug grinding mill. Then there are the paper mills at the upper falls at Mattapan, and the cotton mill and machine shop where Pine Tree Brook comes into the Neponset. Several people in Town, such as Artemas Kennedy and Josiah Bent, are baking water crackers and this has grown into quite a business.
The village covers both banks of the Neponset and much of it is on the Dorchester side, but we really feel that we are all one village, even if we do go to different town meetings. Another center has recently grown up in Milton, the East Village, where the Granite Railway, the first railway built in America, crosses the road that goes south over Milton Hill and on to the South Shore. The railway was built to carry granite for the Bunker Hill Monument from the quarries in Braintree down to tidewater where Gullivers Brook empties into the Neponset. Then barges carried the stone on to Charlestown. The quarries are very active these days, and some have been opened up here in Milton. So you can see what a busy town we have become. We may not be very big, for we have only about 1,600 people, but we are growing.
There are some pretty rich men in Milton today, such as Lawyer Asaph Churchill, Caleb Hobart, the meat and wool dealer, and General
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EAST MILTON SQUARE, ABOUT 1860 Looking toward Quincy. Granite Railroad car is crossing Adams Street.
Moses Whitney with his tannery. These men all made their money in business or the law, but Squire Nat Tucker up on Hillside Street is a really wealthy farmer with hundreds of acres of land and investments in banks, turnpikes, and shipping, as well as many thousands loaned out on mortgages.
Some Boston people come out here for a while in summer and several families now take in summer boarders. Madame Forbes, the widow of Ralph Forbes, whose mother was Dorothy Murray of Brush Hill, spends her summers in the house on Milton Hill her son Captain Robert Forbes built for her, and I think that soon she will live here the year round.
There is quite a squabble going on in our church these days. A lot of people want to make it Unitarian, and there have been one or two at- tempts of some of them to break away and set up another church. So far this has not gotten anywhere, but it looks now as though there would soon be a split in the old parish.
.R.CABIN. AMERICA
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Terence Fitzsimmons, 1841
I AM Father Fitzsimmons, and I have just established the first Catho- lic parish in this region. We meet in the old Stone Church in Granite Village, East Milton they are starting to call it, but we are planning to build our own church next year. We really are a mission of the South Boston parish, and my parishioners live all over the South Shore, even as far away as Plymouth. So you can well see that I have a big area to cover in my visits to my people.
MILTON VILLAGE IN 1865 Looking up the hill from the bridge.
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Nathan Martin, 1860
I AM Nathan Martin, postmaster in Milton. I keep a store on Adams Street in the village, but I first came here as a schoolteacher half a century ago. So I have seen many changes in the town in my time. Milton Academy was chartered by the Commonwealth in 1798, and it was intended to be a sort of high school for all of Norfolk County. It did not work out that way however, and the Academy really became the town high school, although there usually were a few out-of-town schol- ars who boarded with some of the Milton families. The school building was up on the little hill in back of the Unitarian Church.
We always used to have town meeting in the old meetinghouse, but after the Unitarians took over the parish they would not let the town meet there any longer, so we built a one-story town hall alongside the church. The people of the parish who remained Congregationalists built their new church on the other side of the town hall, and this be- came in many ways the center of the town. About 2,700 people live in Milton today.
A great event in our history was the coming of the railroad to the village in 1847. The paper mills needed a better way of shipping their product, and the chocolate business was starting to grow. The first chocolate had been made here in town just before the Revolution, but the business never amounted to much, although several people engaged in it at one time or another. Dr. James Baker started making chocolate in 1780 and his son Walter carried on the business until his death a few years ago. Then Henry L. Pierce, Daniel Vose's great-grandson, took over the little factory. It has now grown very considerably and Henry is starting to make it the biggest business in Milton.
Today we can go into Boston in half an hour, and some people go to town every day to their work. If you want to save a little money and are not in a great hurry, the Dorchester Avenue horse-car line will also take you into the city. Several Boston men have built summer places here in Milton, and John M. Forbes now lives here all the time, riding to his Boston office on horseback every day.
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سبعهـ
CHILDREN AT THE CENTER SCHOOL, 1885
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Mary A. Cunningham, 1900
I AM Mary Cunningham, daughter of Ralph B. Forbes, and my brothers were John M. Forbes and Captain Robert B. Forbes. I have lived here on Milton Hill for over eighty years and have seen many changes in the town. The country village of my girlhood has become a suburb of Boston, with most of the people working in the city. The trains run into town from the village every hour, and there are others from East Milton and Readville, where the Brush Hill people go. It is very easy to run into the city for dinner or the theater and to get back home again that evening. Many Boston people who first had summer places here have found that it also is a good place in winter, and they now live here all the year round. As a result of this influx Milton has become a very wealthy town with many big estates. Henry L. Pierce died a few years ago, but his great chocolate mills were sold to a corpor- ation formed by Milton residents. They are flourishing today and give employment to many Milton and Dorchester people. Mr. Pierce made a great fortune and left most of it to Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Museum of Fine Arts.
I am all alone in the world today and so in my will I have left my money to the people of Milton. I have chosen three trustees to administer the trust, and I have given them a free hand as to how they spend the income. We have talked it over at various times, and I think that they will probably establish a park, with a gymnasium, tennis courts, and bowling alleys. Thus my money should give health and pleasure to the residents of Milton for a great many years to come. Perhaps they will call it Cunningham Park.
I must say a word about that great and good man, my brother John. He made a great deal of money in the China trade, and later in railroads and other such undertakings, and he was always most generous with it, but almost always secretly, so that few people realized the extent of his charities and his assistance to others. He was an abolitionist, but not an extreme one, and his services to the Union during the Civil War were of great value to the country.
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MILTON VILLAGE Looking north down the hill in about 1900.
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BLUE HILL AVENUE, ABOUT 1890 Looking south toward junction with Brush Hill Road.
KERRIGAN'S CORNER View from roof of High School in about 1910. Note the open trolley car-they were most pleasant in summer.
DRUGS
EAST MILTON SQUARE Looking toward Quincy, about 1915.
My other brother, Robert, loved the sea. When only seven, he and his mother were on a vessel captured by a British frigate, and, when a French ship was sighted, the lad was allowed to fire one of the British cannon at the enemy. He went to sea at thirteen, and captained his own ship before he was twenty. Some ten years later he became a merchant in the China trade. He was one of the solid men of Boston, but more ad- venturous than most, for he kept up his love for salt water, volunteered as captain of the relief ship which in 1847 carried food from Boston to an Ireland starving from the potato famine, and as an old man shot buffalo on our western plains.
A. Lawrence Rotch, 1910
M TY NAME is Rotch and I study clouds and the weather. My people were from New Bedford, but my father started coming here in summer nearly sixty years ago and began to operate an experi- mental farm as a hobby. He and a friend were the first to bring Jersey cattle to America.
I became much interested in weather and the upper atmosphere while studying at the Institute of Technology. As soon as I graduated in 1884 I established the Blue Hill Observatory so that serious study could be undertaken in this field. Until that time the science of meteorology had made little progress, and its study was limited to what could be learned from ground observations of temperature, humidity, and wind direction and velocity.
We started our work by measuring the altitude and movement of the various kinds of clouds, and then I got the idea of using kites to carry recording instruments up into the clouds themselves. Except for a few balloon ascensions almost no observations had ever been made of upper- air temperatures and humidities. We devised a special form of box kite to carry our instruments, and we succeeded in getting them up as high as three miles. The kite string was a fine steel piano wire, and several
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MR. ROTCH AND WEATHER BALLOON About 1895
kites were generally ganged together. Sometimes a string of kites would break loose and drag the wire over an electric power line and blow out the fuses in the power station. Once the wire got tangled in the driving wheel of a locomotive and finally stopped the train !
Fortunately for my work my father left me quite well off and I was able to finance the operation of the observatory, as well as to travel very considerably in Europe while continuing my studies of meteorology.
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Later on we used small free balloons to carry our instruments. They of course could ascend much higher than our kites, but many were never recovered and the data was lost. Perhaps some day we can make a very light wireless set that will send the data back as it is recorded. The work we did here in Milton, particularly our kite observations of the upper atmosphere, was of great help in advancing the world's knowledge of weather behavior and the movement of the upper air masses.
Charles S. Pierce, 1948
I AM Charles Pierce, and I have lived in Milton all my life. For over a quarter century the town elected me moderator, and as a boy I used to go to town meeting and watch my father serve in the same office. So you can well see that I must know something about the town and its government over the years. My lifetime has seen many changes. When I was a small boy one got around town either on foot or in some sort of horse-drawn vehicle, but the bicycle was just coming in, and the last year of the old century saw the first streetcar line in Milton. In the early days of the 1900's most people used the streetcar lines daily. A network of them covered all this region, and one could go to the North Shore or to Cape Cod with ease. The Village, the town hall and churches, Cun- ningham Park, East Milton, and Mattapan were all brought close to- gether by the electric streetcar. The great growth of the use of the auto- mobile and changing times eventually put an end to streetcars in Milton shortly after the first World War, but they had served a most useful purpose.
The really great change came to Milton after 1929, when the shadow of the coming depression began to be seen. Soon some of the larger estates became available to the speculative builder, and at the same time the new rapid transit system gave an added inducement to city people to move to Milton. They soon poured in. The remains of the old sub-
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PICNIC ON BLUE HILL IN THE GAY NINETIES
urban village disappeared, and Milton became largely a bedroom town for those who worked in Boston.
Of course my particular interest was always that of following the de- velopment of our town government and doing what I could to improve it. The moderator is in a position where much can be done to promote good government, if he thinks of his position only as one of opportunity for serving the town, and not as just a step toward his own political advancement. The great expansion of the services furnished by the local government has added many duties to those originally carried out by the selectmen and a few other officials. Some of these former duties, and some that did not previously exist, are now carried out by committees of citizens who devote a part of their time to serving the town without pay. Some are elected, but many are required by law or by the vote of
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the town to be appointed by the moderator. Most people perhaps think that all the moderator has to do is to run the annual town meeting, but actually, if he does a really conscientious job, he will spend much time and many evenings in deciding what people should be put on the various committees that he must appoint each year.
I believe that New England town government is the best form of local government there is. Once a year the voters assemble to elect their offi- cers, to instruct them where necessary, to vote the amounts of money to be spent, and hence to assess their own taxes upon themselves. It is the only remaining form of government in which the voter still exercises direct control. Growth of the town forced a change in 1928 from the old open town meeting to one composed of a limited number of elected vot- ing representatives, and with all citizens remaining free to have their say in the meeting. Despite this change the spirit of the old Milton town meeting has been preserved unchanged. I hope that Milton will always retain its present form of government.
EDWARD P. HAMILTON
Charles F. Batchelder, 1962
I AM Charles Batchelder, and I am Chairman of our Tercentenary Committee. I came to Milton thirty years ago because I liked the town, and I am one of those whom the late Charles Pierce appointed to the Warrant Committee. For over twenty years I have served the town in various capacities and have made many friends through the simple process of working with them on numerous town projects. These friend- ships have been my chief reward for my public efforts. My work with the large group of men and women who have helped to set up and run this tercentenary observance has further broadened my circle of friendships, and has deepened my appreciation of a community where so many citi- zens of diverse interests share the common interest of the good of the town. To them I express the thanks of the town.
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What you have just seen and heard might be called a series of ghostly flashbacks. Through these "ghosts" we have tried to tell the town's story in brief and simple form. I appear before you as the living repre- sentative of the town in its three-hundredth year. I will not inflict upon you any ghostly and fleeting statistics of the Milton of 1962. They are all in the record. I do, however, wish to stress the fact that the qualities of friendliness, co-operation, and pioneering portrayed by these ghosts of the past continue in the living Milton of today. We hope that you have enjoyed the celebration and that you always will, as we do, take pride in our Town of Milton.
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Note on the Maps
The following maps attempt to present a graphic picture of the town from 1662 until 1857. I have shown on each map all the roads that appear from the records to have existed at the approximate date chosen, and all the houses that I can locate with what I believe is a reasonable degree of accuracy. In most cases I have assumed that a house once built continued to exist and thus the houses of one map are shown on the succeeding one. As an important new road first appears I have noted against it the name by which it, or that road of which it today constitutes a part, is now known. In order to prevent cluttering up the maps with too many names I have not repeated these street names after their first appearance. The three maps previous to that of 1831 are reconstructions, and as such represent my best judgment, assisted by all available data. They cannot, however, be considered as entirely correct, although I do believe that they give a good general idea of the state of the town at the various periods selected. The last two maps are repro- ductions of actual contemporary maps with a few minor additions.
E.P.H.
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GRIST MILL
BRUSH HILL
Canton Ave)
NEPONSET
MINISTERIAL HOUSE
- MEETING HOUSE
DANIEL'S TAVERN
(Churchill's Lane)
TOWN LANDING
WOLF PITS IN THIS AREA
(Adams St.)~
BLUE HILLS
MILTON About 1662 Pop. Est. 200-250 There were about 40 houses then in the Town. This map locates 32 of them. While those shown are not all precise, they are at least in the general vicinity. Sources : Ellen F. Vose, A. K. Teele, John A. Tucker, Milton Records
GRIST MILL
BRUSH HILL
- POWDER MILL & FULLING MILL
(Brook Rd.)
NEPONSE
(Canton Ave) )
POUND O
(Vose's Lane) (Centre St.)
- BADCOCK'S SHIPYARD
- MILLER'S
TAVERN
(Squantum St.)
(Pleasant St.)
BLUE
HILLS
....
MILTON About 1700
Pop. Est. 350-400 There were about 64 houses then in the Town. This map locates 5 1 of them. While those shown are not all precise, they are at least in the general vicinity. Sources : 1700 Tax List, Ellen F. Vose, A. K. Teele, John A. Tucker
REV. PETER THACHER
(Brush Hill Rd.)
MEETING HOUSE-
UPPER MILLS (Mattapan)
PAPER & SLITTING MILLS
GRIST, SAW, CHOCOLATE & PAPER MILLS (Also Fulling & Snuff on Dorchester side)
BRUSH
NEPONSET VILLAGE
HILL
DANIEL VOSE'S
HOUSE & STORE
(Robbins St.)
(Reedsdale Rd.).
GOV. HUTCHINSON
BENT'S
NEPONSET
POUND (1729?)
TAVERN-
S. H.
S. H.
CEMETERY
+(Highland St.)
(Gun Hill St.)'
& S. H.
HILLS
(Hillside St.)7
& S. H. = SCHOOL
MILTON
About 1770 Pop. 900-1,000 There were about 125 houses then in the Town. This map locates 117 of them. While those shown are not all precise, they are at least in the general vicinity. Sources : E. J. Baker, Ellen F. Vose, A. K. Teele, John A. Tucker.
....
BLUE
PAPER MILL
PAPER MILLS
COTTON MILL (Dorchester)
(Blue Hill Ave.)
GRIST, CHOCOLATE, PAPER, DRUG & DYE GRINDING MILLS
DR. GLOVER'S TAVERN
NEPONSET
s.
1774 POUND -2
ATHERTON TAVERN
(Centre St.)
ALGERINE
CORNER
BILLINGS TAVERN
BENT'S CRACKERS 1801-
NEW STATE
+GRANITE RAILWAY
-
, SMALLPOX HOSPITAL
1809
BLUE HILLS
UUS. H. WOODS
MILTON 1831 Pop. 1600
Source : E. J. Baker's 1831 Survey. E. P. H. Feb. 1954
S.H.
S. H.
POOR HOUSE
-
(Randolph Ave.)
SCOTCH
>
FAIRMOUNT Ceded to Hyde Park 1868
Hills Parkway)
(Blue
NEPONSET
-2830
TOWN FARM
{Granite Ave.)
+-(Hartland St.)
BLUE HILLS
MILTON 1857 Pop. approx. 2660
Source : Mss. Map, No name of maker.
E. P. H. Nov. 1955
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