USA > Massachusetts > Worcester County > Leicester > Topographical and historical sketches of the town of Leicester : in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts: furnished for the Worcester magazine and historical journal > Part 4
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There has been a respectable society of Friends in this town for a great number of years. In 1732, eight persons filed their certificate with the Town Clerk that they belonged to that persua- sion, who, either from a mistake in spelling, or to make an angry and execrable pun, calls them " those people called Quackers."t As no records are preserved of the early history of this society, we have not been able to trace it any farther than to the uniting of the families of these eight persons into a society. They had a house of worship, which stood where the present meeting house of that people stands ; but when it was erected, we have not been
* Among those who supplied the pulpit, was the Rev. Mr. Hill, who is now a deservedly acceptable and popular preacher, in New Haven, Conn.
+ Among the original number of those professing themselves Friends, in this town, was Mr. Ralph Earle, many of whose descendants of the same name, have belonged to this society, and been among the most respectable inhabitants of the town. Indeed, most of the members of this society, in this town, have been distinguished for their enterprise and intelligence, and have ever formed an useful and respectable portion of the population of the town, distinguished for their probity, hospitality, and wealth,
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able to learn. The society, having become numerous, and that house being old, and somewhat decayed, in 1791, they removed the old, and built the present meeting house, which, according to Whitney, is a " very good house for their way of worship." It is situate in the north part of the town, about one and an half miles from the Congregational meeting house. The house is commodi- ous, and of good proportions, although destitute of any thing orna- mental. The spot in which it stands is retired, and almost sur- rounded with forest trees; around it, repose in their "nameless graves," the ashes of those who have died of the society. Though we do not profess any particular attachment to their "way of wor- ship," we know of but few spots more calculated to awaken serious reflections than this. A solemn stillness reigns around it, and it seems as if it might be one of those few places where the cares of the world do not intrude. The society consists, at present, of about one hundred and thirty members, not all of whom, however, belong to Leicester.
In 1823, an Episcopalian society was gathered and formed, in the south part of Leicester, embracing the manufacturing establish- ment there, and several families from Oxford North Gore, and from Charlton. Among the most active in forming this society were, Mr. Anderton, whose name we have before had occasion to men- tion, Samuel Hartwell, Esq. and family, Francis Wilby, an English gentleman, resident in Boston, and several other gentlemen, with their families, who resided in the vicinity of the church .*
A very neat church for the use of this society was erected, by private subscription, and was consecrated by Bishop Griswold, on the last Wednesday in May, 1824. The Rev. Joseph Muenscher had previously been employed by the society, and it was now put under his pastoral charge. He is the present rector of this church, which is in a flourishing state. This was the first Episcopal church ever formed in Worcester County, and has had difficulties and dis- couragements to encounter, such as usually attend the formation of a new society. The church is situated upon the south side of the Stafford turnpike, about fifty rods from French River, and the Lei- cester and Saxon factories. Mr. Muenscher is a native of Provi- dence, and was graduated at Brown University. He studied The- ology at Andover, and was admitted to orders by Bishop Griswold,
* Among the most active of these was Mr. Hezekiah Stone, who liberally gave the ground upon which the church is erected, besides conferring other acts of liberality.
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in March, 1824, immediately after which, he took charge of the church in Leicester. His marriage with a daughter of the late Jo- seph Washburn, was, we believe, the first ever consummated in this county in Episcopal form.
Such are some of the outlines of the ecclesiastical history of the town of Leicester, which, though necessarily imperfect, are suffi- cient to show, that the inhabitants of the town have been highly favored, in general, in respect to the important interests of religious instruction. Many of their teachers have been eminent for their faithfulness and abilities ; and, on the other hand, the people have generally shown a good degree of liberality in contributing to the support of their clergymen. The utmost harmony and good fel- lowship has uniformly prevailed among the different sects and so- cieties in town, each extending to the others, that courtesy and confidence which become those professing the same faith, though differing, in some particulars, in their mo'de of worship and form of government. In the interchange of civilities, in the election of civ- il officers, and in almost all the relations of society and social life, no distinction is made between members of different societies. Each is left to worship God according to the dictates of his con- science; and the consequence has been, that the town has flourish- ed and prospered, while many, possessing equal natural advantag- es, have been distracted by intestine divisions, and lost that elevat- ed rank they might otherwise have held. 1746482
CIVIL HISTORY .- We feel no inconsiderable reluctance to at- tempt the civil history of this town, for the records have been found so imperfect, and the traditionary accounts so vague, that we are aware of our inability to do any thing like justice to the sub- ject, and that it must be extremely imperfect, even in relation to those portions that are the most interesting and important. But we have been able to glean enough from its records and the recol- lection of some of its aged inhabitants to furnish to a more patient and successful laborer a clue, by which to guide his future inves- tigations.
According to the Massachusetts Register, annually published in Boston, the town of Leicester is the fifth incorporated, in what is now the County of Worcester, and was incorporated, agreeably with the record we have before copied, in 1713. Whitney incor- rectly places this event in 1720, or 1721.
As early as 1721, the town had begun to exercise the powers of an incorporated town, by choosing all the officers belonging to
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such a town, and was, moreover, represented in the General Court of the Province, though no record of any choice is to be found un- til the next year, when the same men who represented them the year before were again chosen .*
The first Corn Mill in town was erected in 1722, and as an in- ducement to build it, the town voted that it should forever be exempt from taxation. It stood, as is believed, on the north side of the great post road, about half a mile from the meeting house.
Although quite a number of town meetings were held, and their transactions recorded, previous to 1724, we do not find his Majesty's name made use of, in any way, previous to that time, when a meeting was first called " in his Majesty's name." This, however, was rather the result of accident, or imperfect records, than from any want of loyalty, or from the preponderance of re- publican feelings ; since, at that day, loyalty and patriotism were convertible terms, and even at a later day, some of the leading men in town were distinguished for their loyalty.1
We have not been able to ascertain to what extent the inhabitants of the town suffered from the depredations of the Indians. They un- doubtedly shared in the horrors of the wars which the natives car- ried on against the people of the province. In 1726, the town was
* The Hon. John Minsie was the person elected. He was a leading man in town and appears to have been very respectable and influential. He re- moved from Roxbury to Leicester, and is usually stiled Judge Minsie in the records of the town. When or where he held that office, we have not been able to ascertain. He resided upon a tract of 500 acres, which he owned, around the Henshaw Pond, and was long remembered for having introduced the " White Weed," principally, we believe, on account of its beauty.
+ Among these, we would name with respect, the Hon. Thomas Steel, Esq. a native of Boston, who removed to Leicester and built a dwelling house about half a mile east of the meeting house which is yet standing (called the Southgate house.) He was liberally educated, and graduated at Cambridge, in 1730, and stands upon the catalogue of that year, when each student's name was arranged according to his relative rank in life, the fourth in order ; the first being the famous Peter Oliver, to whom the province afterwards owed so much of its difficulties and distress. Mr. Steel, was bred a merchant, and pursued that business till his removal from Boston to Leicester, where he also kept a store. He was, from 1756 to 1774, an associate judge of the Court of Common Pleas in Worcester County, and always remained firm in his loyalty to the King. It is noticable, that the most spirited resolutions of the town against the aggressions of the mother country, previous to 1770, are recorded in the town records in his hand writing -- a kind of involuntary trea- son that he dare not refuse to commit. Hle was wealthy when he first came to this town ; but owing to misfortunes, his wealth became very much reduc- ed. His influence, until the revolution, was, deservedly great ; for he was a man of intelligence and integrity. He was several times chosen to represent the town, in the General Court, and successively held most of the responsible offices.
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at the expense of erecting a garrison, as it was called, around the house of Mr. Parsons, to protect them from the attacks of the sav- ages. This was a little north east of the meeting house. There were other garrisons, for the same purpose, erected in other parts of the town. One of these, was near the dwelling house, belong- ing to the Henshaw family, near the Henshaw pond, and its outlines may be traced now. The house occupied by John King, Esq. in the south part of Leicester, upon the Oxford road, was also, as is believed, a garrison house, and marks of musket balls are yet said to be visible in parts of it, which can be referred only to the times of the Indian wars. Another garrison was near Mr. Jonah Earle's dwelling house.
The town seems to have been troubled in its fiscal concerns for some time after its settlement. The inhabitants, immediately upon their removing here, assumed the expenses of schools and the support of a minister, which, together with the necessary high- ways they were compelled to make, rendered their expenses bur- densome ; especially, as much of the land in town became, in the course of years, either the property of a few individuals in town, or of those, who, residing out of it, were exempt from the burdens of the resident proprietors. They lived too, at a time when false no- tions of wealth and public economy prevailed. An unhealthy, and almost worthless currency, had inundated the state, and the gener- al complaint of a scarcity of money prevailed throughout the prov- ince. The inhabitants of this town, in common with the majority of the people of the province, were deceived into an opinion that the difficulties under which all were laboring might be removed by new emissions of paper money, which must ever be worthless, when it ceases to be the representative of real wealth, and so re- deemable that its nominal, may become its actual value, at the will of the holder. In 1727, an emission of £60,000 in paper money, was made by the Legislature, and loaned to the people of the prov- ince, the interest arising from which was to go towards the sup- port of government. This town appointed trustees to receive its proportion of this grant and to loan it to the inhabitants, so that no one should have more than ten, nor less than five pounds.
The question as to the value of the currency, from time to time, in the early history of New England, though interesting and important in a historical point of view is attended with too much labor and difficulty and would occupy too much time for us to attempt to set- tle. Its fluctuations were so frequent, and its depreciation often VOL. II. 13
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so great, that what, at first sight, may seem enormous sums, when reduced by the scale of depreciation, for the time being, dwindle into comparative insignificance. The depreciation of the money was not so great, before the year 1745, as it afterwards was. The only criterion which we possess to ascertain any thing like its stand- ard value is, a comparison of the prices of labor and produce at different times, during our history. In 1726, four shillings per day, were allowed by the town for labor upon a "garrison" they were then building. In 1754, two shillings per day for men, and one shilling for a yoke of oxen were allowed upon the highways. In 1774, three shillings per day for men were allowed. In 1780, so rapid had the money depreciated, that six pounds per day were paid for labor on the highways. In 1775, the delegate in the Provincial Congress from this town, received five shillings per day for his services. The same sum was paid, in 1788, to representa- tives in the General Court, while Senators had five shillings and sixpence, and Counsellors six shillings, per day. The compensa- tion of members of Congress from this State was fixed, that year, at four dollars per day. The next year, this town gave their rep- resentative but four shillings per day. In 1790, labor on the high- ways was fixed at three shillings per day, and the next year, at two. In the year 1752, one pound, lawful money, was paid for boarding a school master six weeks; and in 1779, the member of the convention that formed the Constitution, from this town, paid one hundred and eighty two dollars per week, for his board. In 1780, the ratio of depreciation of the old money was, as 40 to 1.
In 1776, a committee was appointed, agreeably to a resolve of the General Court, to fix the prices at which labor, produce, &c. then stood, and this estimation must have been made in reference to a currency then at par. The list of articles, prepared and re- ported by this committee, was very large, and we will only trans- scribe a few items from the report, for the purpose of comparing them with the same articles at the present day. Labor, per day, in the summer, was estimated at three shillings ; and in the winter, at half that sum : by the year, at twenty pounds. Men's shoes, at eight shillings per pair; horse hire, at two pence per mile : shoe- ing a horse, five and sixpence ; a good gun and bayonet at eighty four shillings; Indian corn, at three shillings; Rye, at four and sixpence ; wheat, at six shillings per bushel: Butter, nine pence ; Beef, three and a half pence per pound; salt pork, at eight pence, per pound : and " Toddy and Flip" at one shilling " per mug."
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The depreciation of the currency was not confined to the emis- sions from this state. In 1785, five dollars of the Rhode Island currency, and eight dollars of that of New Hampshire, were worth: but three shillings here. But we are approaching too extensive a subject for our means or time to master, and must therefore leave it for some curious and patient antiquarian.
It would be impossible to fix the actual state of the depreciation at different times ; since it was so rapid, and withal so fluctuating, that a person was chosen by this town, in 1786, to report, as often as once a week, to the inhabitants, the value of the paper money and public securities.
The early records of the town are quite imperfect, and only a partial account of the transactions they purport to record, can be. gleaned from them : we can, therefore, hardly pursue a correct chronological order in relating those circumstances which we have been able to gather respecting its history. Many of the votes passed and some of the officers chosen are not perfectly obvious in their necessity or policy. We can hardly conceive the necessity for a " clerk of the market" in a place where none bought, and few sold any thing of a marketable character, yet that office, as well as that of deer-reeve, was regularly filled for a great many years after the incorporation of the town. Another officer who was chosen annually for many years, but, though a statute officer, is now discontinued, was a "warden." The best solution of this was offered by an elderly gentleman, of whom we enquired the use, that coming from Old England our fathers wanted to have every thing here as they had left them at home.
The inhabitants were troubled, for many years, by the proprie- tors of the lands, most of which then lay common, taking cattle from abroad to pasture upon these common lands ; and in order to pre- vent this, they levied a tax of ten shillings per head, upon all cat- tle so taken to be fed; and a still more singular vote was passed, that all rams running at large should be " free plunder," and any one who should take such, might have them, for his own.
Although, as we have seen, the people of the town must have been far from wealthy, for many years after settling here, they were not burthened with taxes for the support of the poor until 1745, when provision was made for the support of a poor child that happened to be in need : not many years after, a small sum was appropriated to help a poor man to provide himself with a cow. It is impossible now to ascertain the precise amount which
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has been expended for the support of the poor of the town since that time. We may safely assert, that from five to eight hundred dollars are annually expended, for this purpose, at present.
The people of the town were affected, in common with those of the whole of New England, by the early wars with the French, and furnished men, from time to time, to aid the expeditions which were carried on by the Province. The meagerness of the records leaves us in uncertainty, as to the numbers actually engaged in these wars, from this town. But when the Grand Canada expedition, as it was called, was planned by Governor Shirley, in 1746, to drive the French from their North American possessions, this town furnished men for the army then raised, and, as an additional compensation for their sacrifices, their taxes were abated by the town.
Every thing favored a prevalence of loyal feelings among the people of New England, at this period, and in Leicester, no less than in other parts of the country ; some of its most leading men were natives of Great Britain, and had all the ties of kindred, be- sides the natural feeling of attachment to the place of their birth, to bind them to the mother country. Richard Southgate, and Dan- iel Denny, both of them influential men in their day, were natives of Coombs, in Suffolk county, in England .* They left Coombs in June, 1715, and arrived in Boston in September. The next year, Southgate went back to England and returned with his family, and Dr. Thomas Prince, who had been the clergyman of Coombs, and was afterwards settled in Boston, the venerable annalist of New England. They arrived in Boston, in July, 1717; in the March following, Southgate and family, and Denny and family, removed to Leicester. Mr. Denny settled upon the farm, still in possession of the family, about two miles south east from the meeting-house. He was a brother of Dr. Prince's wife, and of Major Denny, as he is called, who settled, about the year 1728, in Maine, where he be- came a man of wealth and influence, being, at the time of his death, first Judge of the " court of pleas," and president of the court of sessions in the county of Lincoln.f
* Richard Southgate was born in 1673, and died at the age of 88 years, in 1758. Daniel Denny was born 1694, and died April 16, 1760, at the age of 66 years.
tRichard Southgate had two sons, Stuart and Richard : the first, the father of the Hon. Robert Southgate, of Scarborough, Maine, and of the late Capt. John Southgate, whose family still reside in Leicester. The children of Richard were more numerous, and one branch of his family only, bearing his name, remains in Leicester-the children of his son Isaac.
Daniel Denny had two sons, Thomas and Samuel. Both of them we shall
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The precise number of men furnished by this town during the several French wars, as they were called, cannot now be precisely ascertained ; that it was never backward in furnishing its quotas, the facts which are recorded of those times, and their promptness in subsequent calls, most clearly prove.
One man yet survives, at the advanced age of 86, who was a soldier from 1756 to 1761, and was in the memorable affair of Fort William Henry, in 1757, when so many English and Americans were massacred by the savages of Montcalm's army. His name is Knight Sprague, a native of Hingham, from which place he march- ed, in 1756. The next year, he was with Col. Bradstreet at the taking of Fort Frontinac, on Lake Ontario. His memory is yet ac- curate and tenacious. Fort William Henry was surrendered, ac- cording to his account, about 10 o'clock on Wednesday morning, and the English were detained till the next morning and guarded by the French. As soon however as the army had left the fort, to take up their march, according to the terms of capitulation, the Indians rushed upon them, and began to strip and kill the prison- ers. Sprague escaped, after being partially stripped .- His captain was stripped naked, as were many women, he passed, in his flight, towards Fort Edward. Of the half company to which he belonged, fifteen out of the fifty, were killed, that day. Munro, the British commander, as represented by Sprague, was a dignified man of about fifty years of age. Montcalm was a fine looking man, extremely well formed, and very active and graceful, but small in stature.
The inhabitants of this town early felt, and boldly expressed, an opposition to those acts of the mother country which tended to cur- tail the liberties of the colonies. At this day, it is difficult to real- ize, in all their forces, the feelings of the colonists from 1763 till their independence was acknowledged. History has done them justice as a nation, and eulogies upon the prominent leaders in that struggle have preserved their names and handed them down to pos- terity with a lustre which time cannot dim. But injustice must, of necessity, have been done to those no less deserving men, who, in the private circles, the village meetings, and the smaller assem- blies of the people, kept alive that sacred flame that burned so
have occasion to mention hereafter. The son of Thomas was the late Col. Thomas, and father of the present Thomas Denny. Samuel had several sons, among whom, was the Hon. Nathaniel P. Denny. These families have ever held a highly respectable station in society, and had deserved in- fluence in town.
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brightly through the land. It is surprising to read, on the records of obscure villages and towns, resolutions and sentiments that would have done credit to the hall of Congress. We do not speak un- guardedly. Resolutions are now preserved in our town records, which were prepared and acted upon in the years of the American revolution, that only want the name of a statesman as their author, to make them rank in interest and importance with those which have been so generally and justly admired. In this town, though its population must have been small, though its inhabitants had en- joyed none but ordinary means of education, and though, as it is believed, no one, except their clergyman, of the whig party, had ever enjoyed the means of a public education, and many of the foremost men were even destitute of a good common education, its records cannot now be read, without exciting admiration at the knowledge and discrimination of political principles and of public wrongs and injuries which those records evince.
The town were in the habit of giving to their representatives instructions upon those topics upon which they felt the most inter- est. This began in 1765, when John Brown was chosen their rep- resentative in the General Court of the Province. A committee was then appointed to draft resolutions, of which, Daniel Henshaw was chairman ; the report was presented to the people, in town meeting, and there accepted. It will be impossible to do justice to any of these papers, by the few extracts we shall be able to give, but their length renders the entire insertion impossible.
The state of the controversy, at that time, is too well known to need a recapitulation of its history here, in order to understand the sketches we shall give. The contest about taxing the colonies was high ; the stamp act had been passed; and the popular excite- ment had extended so far, in Boston, as to lead to the destruction of Governor Hutchinson's house by the mob. The instructions to Capt. Brown, alluded to " the then critical juncture of time and af- fairs," and expressed the expectation that their representative will maintain " their natural rights ; their rights as Englishmen, which derive to them as subjects of Great Britain, and those granted them by charter." They charge him to be frugal of the money belong- ing to the government, and to be strictly careful that it be not drawn out of the treasury, but by appropriation of the General Court ; as any other course would be, virtually, taxing the people contrary to the constitution, and in subversion of one of their dar- ling rights. They speak of the levying taxes, and the "stamp act,
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