USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Wilmington > Town of Wilmington Annual Report 1860-1887 > Part 25
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* Born Feb., 1673, died Dec. 18, 1753, aged 80 years, 11 months. Sarah, his wife, died Feb. 13, 1771, in her 90th year. He must have spoken with some of the first settlers of Woburn -and of Wilimington. Men now living have spoken with his son.
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deep and rising so high. The majority of those people may have been poor : they sat down, perhaps, to what Common- wealth Avenue would consider coarse fare, - which, by the way, is often the best ; but their thoughts went beyond tables and pocket-books. They meant that the women and children should not be shut out all winter from the house which was the house of God and the soul. It is no small privilege to be able to look back to such an ancestry - better far than border ruffians and robber barons.
Well, then, here we have a number of serions-minded, sen- sible farmers, distributed over a wide surface, none of them with many near neighbors, and they are going to set them- selves up into a separate town. How will they begin ? Let us look and see. One of their number, Samuel Dummer, Esq ( who was, probably, a native of Newbury, and a near relative, possibly brother, of Leut. Governor William Dummer, founder, a little later, of Dummer Academy ), this Mr. Dummer has been authorized by the General Court to call the first town-meeting. Upon his summons the legal voters assembled "in the school- house," on the 20th of October, 1730. The site of the school- house I have endeavored to discover, but have got no further than this, that it was probably in the western or south-western part of the town. The oldest site that I hear of, is the north- west corner which the road that passes Mr. Lorenzo Butters' house makes with the road parallel with the Lowell Railroad.
Unfortunately, the first leaf of the town records is missing. The first words on the second leaf are, "the Word of God among us ; and it passed in the affirmative." They were going to have the " Word of God " here, for all to share, at all sea- sons of the year.
The next vote was, that this Word should be dispensed in the school-house until the town be provided with a better place. The third vote set apart sixty pounds towards the sup- port of the gospel [At this date, twenty-one shillings of the current money were reckoned equal to one ounce of silver ; hence this sum, if paid in currency, would be equal to $200, a little more than $57 in New England silver. ] Fourthly, they voted that the two ends of the town agree upon the site of a meeting-house, at the end of one week.
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Fifth, two deacons, John Harnden, a member of the Reading church, and James Thompson, of the Woburn church, were made a committee for providing preaching until March; and Deacon Harnden was requested to act as the town's "cash- keeper;" the town having neglected at the proper time to provide itself with a treasurer, supplies its lack in this way.
Then they proceeded to take measures for getting back the money they had paid toward the settlement fund of Rev. Mr. Jackson, colleague of Rev. Mr. Fox, at Woburn ; the appor- tioning of which settlement had apparently been hastened by the Woburn authorities, so as to levy upon Goshen before its separation had been consummated.
[For the benefit of the younger part of the audience, it may be well to explain here that in those days ministers were settled for life, and received, besides their yearly salary, a certain sum of money, or other provision, toward a house and its furnish- ing. This provision was styled " the settlement."]
After that, we find the town voting that the pay for work on the highway shall be three shillings a day for a man with a yoke of oxen and cart,- nominally half a dollar, in actual value not over one-third as much.
Next, we find them returning to the subject of the meeting- house ; the vote postponing the choice of a site for a week was reconsidered, and it was agreed to try to settle the matter at once. The town-meeting transferred itself to the neighborhood of the point which had been determined to be the center of the township, and, greatly to their own surprise, the citizens found themselves able to agree upon a site, to wit: on the rising ground about seventy rods southwest of Daniel Killam's house. It is now seventy-four rods from the upper end of the horse- sheds that front on the street to the corner of the North Read- ing road, at or near which this dwelling stood .*- " For which Christian and brotherly agreement," say the town records, "in a matter of such great moment, and which is generally of such lamentable consequence, to God be all the praise."
There can be no doubt that the heads of families went to
* That house must have been either the one now known as "the Col. Blanchard house," or a predecessor on the same corner, or else the small house that was standing a few years ago over the old cellar, still open, at the bottom of the hill, on the east of the road, some six rods further off.
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their homes bearing pleasant news to the wives, the aunts and the grandfathers who had not been present at the town-meeting. It was better than could have been expected. Curiosity was not soon satisfied. We may be sure that before people went to bed that night many questions had to be answered as to how it all happened ; what various persons said, and especially certain individuals, famous for differing from their neighbors. People could hardly persuade themselves that the matter was really settled. And it was not. We find indeed no proof of after difference in the records of the town, but under the date of June 16, 1731, we read in the records of the General Court, that "a petition from inhabitants of Wilmington, headed by James Symonds and James Proctor, is presented, declaring that the people of that town are 'much divided as to the site of their meeting-house ; '" and asking a committee of both Houses to settle the matter. So Daniel Epes, James Wilder and others are made that committee, and on Dec. 30, 1731, present their report, to wit : " The most proper place is at a heap of stones, on Mr. Benjamin Johnson's land, placed by the committee four poles distant from the center of the precinct, south-easterly." According to one supposition respecting the spot here called " the center," this heap of stones was a little east or north-east of the house now occupied by Mr. James Skilton; according to another supposition, a few rods still further east. The Gen- eral Court had thus ordered the house to be put some fifty or sixty rods west of the site first chosen. So much the Goshen part of the town had won by their fourteen months' worriment. But even the General Court could not still the busy waters of Wilmington talk. Again, on Thursday, June 8, 1732, not six months later, and just one year, lacking a week, from the Symonds' petition, a second petition, headed by Simon Thomp- son, prays that the meeting-house may be placed just sixty poles (instead of four poles) easterly of the center; and the court granted that it stand fifty-six poles easterly ; and there, at last, it stuck. And with good reason, I think we all agree ; for four rods further easterly would have set its eastern end hard upon the slope near the present receiving tomb. The names of none of the three men who are on record as at the head of these petitions appear on the tax-lists of that day.
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We note in this bit of history that there were people here a hundred and fifty years ago who had leisure to be dissatisfied. Here they come to view, uneasy fellows, their number and quality wholly forgotten, but only this remembered, that when the town had come to an unexpectedly happy agreement, much to its comfort and to its credit, they would not be content, but must needs stir dissatisfactions ; and the result is, that after one year and eight months the meeting-house stands upon the site first voted. They had their labor for their pains.
This little narrative brings to mind a scrap of more modern Wilmington history, that also affords a specimen of the need- lessness of many town disputes, and of the shrewdness that sometimes settles them, spreading likewise a quiet laughter over the town, that still breaks out again among the story- tellers of successive generations. I hear it said that when the second meeting-house was to be built, there was quite an ener- getic movement to transfer the site some fifty or sixty rods, to the neighborhood of the present flag-staff, the place, in fact, which had been designated by the General Court eighty years before. On this little matter, there being a good deal of com- bativeness in town lying idle, and a large power of talk, the whole town was able to come into a highly agitated condition, - the people angry as people can only be over nothing at all. In this state of affairs a town-meeting assembles. It is largely attended. All are on tiptoe to see what is going to happen, and the malcontents are determined that at all events the house shall not be rebuilt on the old lot; when very deliberately the leader of the conservatives rises, and says that for his part he is tired of controversy, and does not mean to continue it. He shall go in for moving the meeting-house to a new place. And he had made up his mind for putting it further south, as far down as anybody wanted it, and on the east side of the roud. These closing words awakened universal astonishment among the opposite party and intense opposition. " We don't want it on the east side !" they cry. "We won't have it on the east side ! We'd a great deal rather it should stay where it is!" " Very well ; suit yourselves. I have nothing to say about it." " Mr. Moderator!" shouts somebody at exactly the right mo- ment, "I move that we put it on the old spot." And so it was
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carried. A good many farmers, you can safely believe, laughed to themselves as they twitched the reins that day on the way home from town-meeting.
I have now carried you as far into the beginning of our town as the time permits. On a future occasion I propose to invite as many of you as may be within easy reach, to study the process of getting a meeting-house placed on this hill, and of securing a minister for its pulpit. Then, jumping a few years, we will watch the slow rising and the progress of that thunder-storm, the Revolutionary War, as seen from Wilming- ton, and will take note of the way in which that struggle brought itself home to these retired households amid these woods and fields.
It would be out of character for descendants of the fathers whose acts we have been studying to dismiss this subject without some reflection upon traits and differences of those former times.
Cannot you imagine yourself sitting, on a Sunday morning, on the inner front seat of the north-east gallery of the meeting- house, looking down into the pulpit and watching the people as they come in ? And cannot you also think of yourself as 'having completed this inspection, at the end of the service, by hastening round to the front of the house, and again watching them as they came out, as they mounted their horses or took seats in their wagons ? In such a picture of imagination what differences have struck you ?
In the first place, you must have noted the large number of sturdy frames and ruddy faces among both men and women. You can see to-day how these have repeated themselves in great and in great-great-grandsons and daughters. They were more numerous then, because the women breathed better air in their houses, and most of the men lived athletic lives out under summer suns, and in winter amid fragrant pines. Some faces, indeed, kindled with a warmer color than it has been my lot even once to see here, which might be styled West Indian or New England, according to its source. You would have dis- covered more rheumatic, wrinkled, decrepit people than now. For there were more who grew old early, owing to the harder work, to the general absence of underwear, even in the coldest weather, and to various exposures, within doors and without.
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Old men would put forth shaking hands in greeting; aged women would be helped up the doorsteps, and chins would come nearer to noses than young people of our day have ever seen : for dentistry had not been invented, and the apology for it, found possibly in cities, was costly and very clumsy, as even fifty years later General Washington found, to his sore discomfort.
In the meeting-house you would have been struck with the marked gravity of the adults, with a dignity and sometimes a set solemnity of aspect. There is less now of personal author- ity and consequence, less of a certain kind of reverence, and of the beauty of mien and expression which these sentiments give ; but on the other hand there is less of an air of formality, of awk- ward diffidence, and of rudeness and levity among the young.
You would certainly have been struck with the general plain- ness of attire ; almost the whole congregation being clothed in garments of homespun, made up in the family, often clumsily, or with the imperfect skill of some dressmaker or tailoress from among the neighbors; the women having comparatively few touches of bright color, and a few of the gentlemen with quite as many such touches as any of the ladies. But it was clearly a self-respecting and sturdy folk that drove their own horses to meeting on those Sundays.
If you reflected then upon what you saw, and thought it all out, how it had come to pass that these people were assembling in that house, built of lumber from their own wood-lands, put together by their own hands, you saw that the idea was in them which took John Winthrop and his fifteen hundred across the water; that this people were bent on worshiping God according to the teachings of the Bible, and distinctly not according to rules laid down for them by some other authority near or far. You would see on further thought that this, be- fore you, is a bit of that new England which sagacious men had provided on these shores for a refuge and a defense. Freedom to serve God and one another according to the Scriptures! this was in their blood and their bones. In no other freedom did they see any use. For this they were ready to die. This they bequeathed ; and it is the greatest secular inheritance that can be found in all the earth. These people knew well that this is lost if either their political or their spiritual liberties are lost.
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Forty years before they had rebelled against Andros. Forty- five years later they will rebel against George III. To-day the same spirit actuates their children. It is one people through all these two hundred and fifty years. This church stands, one and the same church, its name, as of old, simply " The Church of Christ in Wilmington," the one church of the town, still its truest center. Around us here are the graves of the fathers ; many of their children are by our side ; many others are scat- tered abroad.
I am sure that we all are here to-day in oneness of spirit,- grateful for the fathers' pious memory, thankful for the good providence which permits us all to nourish our hearts with these thoughts of the former days, of the good men and women whose footprints abide a blessing within the soil that bears their sons; and resolved, that the heritage of lofty purpose which we have received shall be handed down to those who come after us,- the love of that just and sacred liberty which the fathers loved, the liberty to serve God and one another in accordance with the teachings of the Bible, together with the love of that other, secular liberty, likewise sacred,- that gov- ernment of the people, that is " for the people and by the peo- ple," in town, county, state and nation, the one substantial public outward bulwark of whatsoever is thoroughly good. I am sure that to this, you all say, Amen! Keep your Amen ever living in both your hearts and acts.
And now, in testimony to this oneness, let us join in singing the hymn : -
(SABBATH HYMN BOOK, 1111.) God bless our native land ! Firm may she ever stand, Through storm and night ; When the wild tempests rave, Ruler of winds and wave, Do thou our country save By thy great might !
For her our prayer shall rise To God above the skies ; On him we wait. Thou who art ever nigh, Guarding with watchful eye, To thee aloud we cry, God save the State !
SECOND ADDRESS.
SECOND ADDRESS.
FELLOW-TOWNSMEN AND FRIENDS : -
In the address which it was my privilege to deliver on the town's one hundred and fiftieth anniversary, I was able to furnish some account of the characteristics of the early times and of the circumstances and doings of the first town-meeting. To-night I begin where I then left off.
THE MEETING HOUSE.
The second town-meeting was held Dec. 3, 1730, also at the school-house ; John Harnden, Sen., Moderator. At this meeting it was voted to build a meeting-house 46 × 30 × 20, " the body of the house to be all of oak, and the plank to be full inch and a half thick, and the two end principals to be of oak, and all to be of oak but the middle principals."
Mr. Samuel Eames, Mr. Daniel Pierce, Daniel Eames, Samuel Walker, and Benjamin Harnden were appointed a building committee. But the people of the town were to have the privilege of furnishing materials, at the following prices : -
£ s.
The oak plank, 1} in. thick, @
3 5 per 1000 2 5 4 .
Good merchantable pine boards, @ Shingles, @ .
1 5 ..
White-pine clap-boards, @
Pitch-pine, 66 1
3 2 10 ..
Silver was now 21s. per ounce.
The third town-meeting was held Feb. 2, 1730-31; Mr. Daniel Pierce, Moderator. At this meeting, further details respecting the new building were provided for.
The fourth meeting was the regular annual meeting for 1731, held March 2; Mr. Samuel Dummer, Moderator. The follow- ing are some of the officers chosen : -
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Selectmen. - Deacon John Harnden, Deacon James Thomp- son, Mr. Samuel Eames, Lient. Benjamin Harnden, Mr. William Butters.
Town Clerk. - James Thompson.
It is worthy of note that Joshua Thompson was elected Clerk of the Market, an officer unknown to recent times, but sworn, as I understand it, to aid in regulating the prices of labor and commodities according to any laws made upon those matters.
It was also voted, "That the hogs shall go at liberty this year," as was regularly done, indeed, for very many years after- ward, and every year two " hog-reeves," answering for hogs to the shire-reeves, or the sheriff's, for men. A hog-reeve is a hog- sheriff or constable.
No one who visited New York thirty years ago but must remember how the swine used to follow the odorous gutters of that city and of Brooklyn. But there were no fields of corn and no kitchen-gardens there for these gourmands to devour ; and one who ponders the old records of Wilmington is led to wonder whether the swine-police could have been so much more omnipresent than city police were ever known to be, to have guarded effectually the root and corn crops of all the town.
Only two other officers were elected at that March meeting, - Stephen Wasson and Samuel Walker, " tithing-men." And here. for the benefit of the younger portion of my hearers, let me interrupt again the regular order of this discourse to tell something about this office, which was once very important, but has died out. The name carries us far back into Anglo-Saxon times, when every ten families constituted a tithing, all those families being responsible for the acts of every member. To make this plan effective, the duty of looking after all these persons was laid upon one man, called a teodling-mann, whence comes our tithing-man. Originally, this officer was obliged to have an eye open for all sorts of crimes; the ten households must pay all fines imposed by reason of a wrong of any of their members who could not be caught and punished in person. They constituted, you see, a kind of mutual insurance society against crime. But a hundred and fifty years ago the tithing- man was simply expected to put a stop to any Sabbath-breaking
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and to superintend the behavior of children in the meeting- house. As families came to sit together in pews, this duty fell to parents, and the ancient office is now everywhere laid aside. But persons are listening to me who in their boyhood stood in awe of the long rods of these stern guardians of propriety. Deacon Morrill tells how he has seen a tithing man go to a boy who had been misbehaving, shake him, and set him down roughly all by himself.
But we must return to the building of the meeting-house. The house was placed where the horse-sheds opening on the road now stand, its front line a rod or rod and a half only from the present carriage-track. Its length (46 feet) was parallel with the road ; its breadth (36 feet) carried it back as far as the present front of the sheds, or perhaps to their rear line. It had a door on each end, with a front door towards the road, opening into the main aisle (or alley, as the town-records call it), which ran straight to the deacon's pew, with its communion-table, and the pulpit. It had two rows of windows, like an ordinary dwelling, running round three sides ; but in the rear only the round-topped pulpit-window and one to right and left. The pulpit was high, and was reached, probably, by two flights of stairs, the deacon's seat between them, on a level with a broad stair, or landing, some two or three feet above the floor.
On Jan. 6th, 1731, the town voted that the seats be arranged in two bodies, divided by the middle alley, and that Mr. Samuel Dummer have a suitable lot for a pew east of the pulpit, pro- vision having already been made for a minister's pew. .
April 21, 1732, it was voted that the body of seats for the men - i. e., on the left or west side of the middle aisle - " be one foot and a half larger than the body of women's seats ; " that "the middle alley be three feet wide ; " that " banister seats be upon each end of the house ; " " an alley from each door to the stairs " leading to the gallery ; " that "the north- east corner be filled with seats," - that is, the space from Mr. Dummer's pew to the north wall ; " and that there be a table upon the men's side." But it stands on the record of this meeting that " Daniel Going entered his dissent from the above written vote about the form and model of the seats in the meeting-house," for this reason (and I think we shall agree
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that he had a good one), " because he liked it not, and thought it not best."
Permission to build horse-sheds was given at the meeting in May ; and two men were made a special committee for putting up the galleries, which must be finished by the last day of Sep- tember. On the 18th of July, 1732, the work was so far advanced that the town passed the following vote, which reads as though it had been drawn up by a lawyer: " That if the workmen do fulfill, do and perform each of the conditions by the workmen particularized yet to be done to complete the work of the meet- ing-house, within the space of seven weeks next ensuing, the conditions fulfilled, the town votes their acceptance of the house." The sum of thirty pounds was also voted to meet the expense of the galleries, and a committee appointed to receive a certain bequest towards the cost of the building.
Imagine yourself coming from the north along this way. When you are at the top of the hill yonder, the road before you descends into a deep hollow. Fairly on the summit of the rise beyond stands an unpainted building, parallel with the highway, having a door in the end and another towards the road, with three (or four) windows each side of it, a similar row at the height of the second story, and others in the end towards you. These windows, not large, have small diamond- shaped panes and open inward on hinges. You enter. The walls are somewhat roughly plastered, but there is no ceiling. Directly before you is an aisle leading straight to a pulpit, the floor of which is six, or very likely eight, feet, and the top nine or ten feet high ; above, a nicely paneled sounding-board, shaped something like a marquee tent, projects from the wall. There is an elevated pew directly in front of it, about two and a half or three feet above the floor, - "the deacon's seat." The house is filled with strong benches having backs, and there is a row of seats. all around next the walls; those at the ends railed off with balusters from two aisles running to the stairs, in the two front corners which lead to the galleries that go round three sides of the building. The galleries have pan- eled fronts, topped off with a rail and little balusters eight or ten inches high. All the interior as well as exterior of the house is unpainted.
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The two bodies of seats, you notice, are unequal ; that on your left extending eighteen inches (or one seat) farther to- wards the rear of the house, having in front of them a table near the wall, but no turned corner-benches. When service begins you find all the men seated on that side, all the women on the other ; while most of the boys and younger men are ranged in the west gallery, with a tithing-man watching over them, and carrying a long, slender rod. On the left of the pulpit, as you face it, is the minister's pew, and on the right a pew built by Samuel Dummer, Esq. There is no record of others. The gallery is furnished with seats like those of the floor. The " quiristers." elected as often as needful in town- meeting, sit in the gallery directly opposite the minister, the bass singers fenced off from the women by the division between the two parts of the gallery, but the tenors sitting on the women's side, behind them. The sopranos sometimes " filled the whole front." Directly below the pulpit, on the first seat of the middle aisle, are the Selectmen, and on the opposite side their wives ; next come the very aged men, and on the opposite second seat their wives; on the third are some of the more wealthy and respected of the townspeople, and their wives across the aisle to their right ; and so the quality tapers down until against the front walls are the young men who have recently graduated from under the tithing-man's rod.
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