USA > Massachusetts > Barnstable County > Sandwich > Two hundred and fiftieth anniversary celebration of Sandwich and Bourne, at Sandwich, Massachusetts, September 3, 1889 > Part 2
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AT THE CASINO.
The immense building was profusely decorated with flags and bunting artistically arranged. Long before the hour arrived the large auditorium was completely filled by an appreciative audience.
The Middleboro Band furnished a selection, after which an eloquent invocation by Rev. S. F. Upham, D. D., LL.D., of Drew Theological Seminary, Madison, New Jersey, was offered.
Hon. Charles Dillingham, president of the day delivered the
ADDRESS OF WELCOME.
It has fallen to me to welcome you to the celebration of the Quarter Millennial Anniversary of the founding of Sand- wich. Two hundred and fifty years is but a short period in the world's history; but in the history of Sandwich it takes us back to within two years of the time when the " ten men from Saugus," with their wives and children commenced their struggle for existence on the shores of yonder bay, founding the first permanent settlement by Europeans in Barnstable county.
It is fitting that we should thus celebrate the day. It is fitting that we should pause at times, and turn our thoughts back upon the events of the past. What more appropriate season can there be, than the day which marks the very beginning of our existence as a municipality ?
Edward Everett in that eloquent oration at Barn- stable, fifty years ago to-day, said: "I do not know how
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the faculty of looking before and after, which belongs to us as rational beings, can be better employed than calling up to grateful recollection on appropriate occasions, the toils and sufferings of those, to whom, as a community, we owe our existence. It is a pious office to the past."
Let us then, while we celebrate with joy and gladness this day of our birth, give a passing thought, at least, to the memory of those Godly men and women, through whose trials and sacrifices, endured for conscience sake, and obe- dience to the Divine law, we to-day possess so goodly an inheritance.
Did time permit, we might speak of the patriotic stand the fathers took in resisting the oppressive laws of the mother country, the poverty and sore distress they endured during the seven long years of war which followed, and later when the country was rent and torn by internal strife, of the prompt action of our people in taking up arms in defence of the goverment which was purchased at such a price.
We cannot point to any remarkable growth in wealth or population. The attractions of the cities and the fertile prairies of the West, offering such fair promise of bettering fortune, have proved stronger, than the attachment to native soil or the ties of kindred.
Our sons and daughters are found in every state in the Union, from the shores of the Atlantic to the slopes of the Pacific ; carrying with them always, wherever found, those principles so dear to our fathers' civil and religious liberty ; planting side by side those symbols of New England's civil- ization, the church and the "free public school."
Two hundred and fifty years have passed and we have gathered here in commemoration of the event. We have come up, like Jews of old, to celebrate this, our fifth jubilee year. In behalf of the committee who has arranged this celebration, and the people of Sandwich, we bid you most welcome.
To the daughter town of Bourne, whose history is iden- tical with our own, that has responded so generously to our invitation, old mother Sandwich extends a most cordial greet- ing. We bid her God speed, and rejoice in her prosperity.
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To all the sons and daughters of Sandwich, who have come home to the maternal roof; to friends, neighbors and strangers; to the distinguished representatives of nation or state, who have honored us by their presence, to all our guests, from whatever quarter they have come, we bid you a cordial wel- come, and open to you our hearts and homes.
There are, doubtless, those within the sound of my voice, who will participate in celebrating the three hundredth anni- versary, fifty years hence. What the condition of our town or country may then be, 'twere not wise for me to predict, but we will hope that as now, it will be the home of a united, free and happy people.
Here the President introduced Rev. N. H. Chamberlain, of Bourne, as the orator of the day, who was given a hearty welcome by all present.
ORATION BY REV. N. H. CHAMBERLAIN.
FELLOW TOWNSMEN, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN :
Allow me, first of all, to congratulate you upon this, the 250th anniversary of the settlement of the ancient town of Sandwich. In paying homage to our venerable ancestors, we lay claim to our own heraldry among the peoples and honor ourselves and them. For they only are able to transmit a full civilization to posterity who are willing to learn wisdom at the graves of their forefathers. On memorial days like this, we break away from the cark and care of our temporal cir- cumstance and join the ceaseless procession of the human race, to thereby secure our immortality as a part of that vast host of man which is forever.
Birthdays, whether of men or of towns, derive their dignity, in the eyes of the just, from the virtues and the uses of the life commemorated ; and the recount of a great life is a perpetual incentive to honor, in those who heed the lesson. . Certainly the story of a Pilgrim town like this, seven gener- ations long, must stimulate us all to a new sense of the dig- nity and duty of American citizenship and urge on the Pilgrim blood especially, wherever it may inhabit, to imitate the per- sistency and loyalty of their forefathers in behalf of man, of whatever color and whatever creed.
The ties which bind a man to his birth town and the ties which bind a man to his native land, interweave themselves
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together in the human conciousness and are always treated by the wise with respect. If the tie of our Fatherland be some- thing grander and more imperative the tie which binds us to our Father and Mother town is of necessity something more intimate and personal. For an incorporated town, is both by law and nature, an articulated and specified part of infi- nate space ; and as men articulate and break eternity with specified durations of time - such as days, years and centuries, so men break and articulate the surface of the earth, by towns, states, provinces, nations. Therefore what our native town does for us is this: out of this infinite space whose concave is a limitless globe, "this brave, overhanging firmament, this majestic roof, fretted with golden fire," as Hamlet phrases it, a town gives us a specific and named abode, with metes and bounds; our home where our cradles were, when our mothers put us asleep ; and where perhaps after work, by friendly hands, we are laid among our own, to cease from that strife of life, which, if it have any use or meaning, foretells a great peace, wherein we shall greatly love and greatly know.
Let us clearly understand each other at the outset. When a birthday is thronged, usually some one voices the general mind. By the courtesy of your committee, acting for you, I have been appointed, as a native of this town, in this passage of your festival, to speak for you as to the his- tory of Sandwich, and to voice the thoughts which naturally arise in the minds of its citizens on an occasion like the pres- ent. As your mouthpiece, as the mouthpiece of justly judging men, I am bound not to discolor, distort or exaggerate our town history, as to its trend or actual influence on public affairs. The facts involved in the history of this town will suffice to give it an honorable place in the history of this commonwealth and nation; and more no one will claim. I hope then that I may truly express your minds, when, first of all, (and for us all) I offer here our reverent and grateful salutations to the memory of the dead generations of Sandwich folk, who made this town, and out of whose loins so many of us are. Peace, rest and eternal happiness to them all. Next we salute those of our stock wherever scattered over the globe, unavoidably absent from this solem- nity, wishing that wherever the blood of Sandwich strain
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this day courses through human veins, our greeting of kin- ship and good will should reach. And next we send new salutations of a long-lived friendship to all those ancient towns of Plymouth Colony - and especially to our neigh- bors of the Cape ; towns which for more than two hundred years have wrought, toiled, suffered, won, and lived with us through wars, civilized and barbarian, and the crises of civil life, side by side in building up our civilization by the sea. Health, happiness and plenty in a pure peace to them all, " PER SECULA SÆCULORUM."
Nor should we, in this expression of relationship, over- look that little gray town by the sea, laid with its dingy brick houses for at least a thousand years along that river's bank, into whose waters the spires of Canterbury Cathedral almost throw their shadows - with its little gray Saxon church, of St. Clement's on the hill above, watching over this Cinque-Port of the medieval ages and Thanet island where Julius Cæsar landed and Augustine rebrought Christianity to Britain - the town near which some of our founders lived and from which we derive our name, Sandwich, on the river Stour, County of Kent, Old England.
With these salutations in your name, I approach my theme,
TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS OF SANDWICH LIFE.
I leave the inherent difficulties of the discussion in the hands of the just who will know how to weigh them. It in- volves reference to religious movements about which men have differed bitterly - none more so than our Pilgrim an- cestors themselves. The roots of Sandwich History have been analyzed at Plymouth Rock, again and again for more than fifty years by able orators, and whatsoever they spoke of truth, barring the circumstances of a locality, applies with equal force to every Pilgrim town. This is a part of the Pilgrim land and the glory or the shame of the Pilgrim history belongs to every Pilgrim town, as well as to Ply- mouth. They have lately graced Plymouth town with a new monument to retell the story of their fathers. Long may it look across the sea on which they came from England to
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found a greater empire in the West. And sometime (may it not be late,) so generous will be their reverence for their own history, they will insist with us that another monument at Provincetown shall retell the story of how the Pilgrims landed first on old Cape Cod, sailed along its shores, trav- ersed its wilds, were fed on its Indian corn, and finally buf- feted with storm and the winter's cold, found refuge in Ply- mouth harbor. Let me attempt then a little history and towards its roots. On exactly what grounds then, of reason and common sense, do you base an anniversary like this, and in memory of your fathers ? Not chiefly because many of you are their descendants who abide in the old home and filial piety is venerable in any man ; not because they were emi- grants here and suffered hardships, since others have fared as ill; not because they cleared these fields and built roads across them ; not because they built up this town with sober venerable houses, some of which remain; not even that they established schools, and churches. Not even filial pride nor affection - not even what I may call the form and circum- stance of the Pilgrim life lie at the roots of this day's honor. What then ? This Pilgrim town is entitled to its unwasting record, today and a thousand years hence as well, because here in the 17th century of our Lord came certain men who with their brethren elsewhere in this New England brought with them two root and kindred ideas which control this land and which are destined to control the future of man- kind - the ideas of religious and civil liberty - the idea that man is to bear his destiny in his own right hand unchained ; ideas which carry with them the corollary, late to be arrived at in our slow processes of human logic, that this world belongs of right and eternal fitness, not to hierarchies, ar- istocracies or dynasties but to the peoples of the world, and that there shall be no final peace on earth until man comes to his great estate ; brought these ideas here, I say, and made this town a cradle to nurse them in - guarded and defended that cradle; and when time was, gave with their brethren in the events of two centuries and a half to this nation these two ideas which dominate the land. I do not deny to any other man or any other set of men their just claim as fellow workmen in laying the foundations of this republic, nor am
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I ignorant of the toil and sacrifice elsewhere. I admit frankly that in many ways the Pilgrims were earthen vessels. I only insist that the treasure itself was sterling and out of that King's mint in whom is no variableness neither shadow of turning. I know that the Pilgrims did not even discover this treasure but inherited it as a trust - that most of them never knew the high price it would bear in this market of the West; that in their laws and social tempers they were perpetually crossing the trend of their own ideas - that in their movement, as so often happen among men, they builded wiser than they knew. What I maintain is that these men held and preserved more firmly, yes more fiercely than any other set of men of English blood the two root ideas from which this nations derives its institutions. I am the more anxious to be explicit here, because whenever there is a new and justifiable oration at Plymouth Rock there is sure to be a gnashing of the teeth elswhere, North or South, urban or rural. That the Pilgrims were not angels but only men, of- ten narrow, fallible, faultful men; that they were neither a force nor a law of nature and therefore liable to make mis- takes and wander from their own ideas-in short that the form and circumstance of what I now call for the first time in this address, Puritanism was temporal and full of errors may go without contradiction and even with a frank assent. But for any man in the light of history to assert among the wise that the Puritan did not bring with him the corn and oil and wine on which nations may feed themselves to great- ness, is as futile as though a man should snatch at the atmos- phere with his teeth, to rend it.
Allow me here, a moment, to remove a little obstacle from the mind of any exact and careful listener who may have noticed that I have just used the word Puritan as inter- changeable with Pilgrim. I have done it advisedly and as necessary to the freedom of my discussion. In my judg- ment the distinction now in common use, made between the Pilgrim and the Puritan, is one that so far as it is valid must deal with surfaces and temporalities. The substances and eternities of the truths they held were the same in each. The Puritan and Pilgrim were two chips from the same block. Only the Pilgrim wood was from the south or more
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sunny side of the tree. The Puritan was the genus; the Pilgrim the species. All men are human beings, yet some men are not blondes. In history the color does not count; the genus does. All Pilgrims were Puritans; but all Puri- tans were not Pilgrims. The heart of Massachusetts Bay and the heart of Plymouth Colony were of one blood. What matters it, if in their great civic and religious evolu- tion, the arc of the heart throbs sometimes differed. The Pilgrim and the Puritan prove their unity even by a diver- sity. I use the terms, henceforth within these limits, as in- terchangeable.
The actual settlement of the town of Sandwich dates from April 3, 1637, when as appears from Plymouth records "it is also agreed by the court that these ten men of Saugus, Edmund Freeman, Henry Feake, Thomas Dexter, Edward Dillingham, William Wood, John Carman, Richard Chad- well, William Almy, Thomas Tupper and George Knott shall have liberty to view a place to sit down and have suffi- cient lands for threescore families, upon the conditions pro- pounded to them by the governor and Mr. Winslow." On- ly three of these names, Freeman, Dillingham and Tupper, still appear here. The same year came fifty other under- takers, as the new citizens were called, chiefly from Lynn, or Saugus, Duxbury and Plymouth, most of them bringing their families, and a Pilgrim Church was set up the same year un- der the care of Rev. William Leverich. The names of these men which are still here are, Allen, Besse, Blackwell, .Bod- fish, Bourne, Briggs, Burgess, Ewer, Fish, Hallett, Harlow, Holway, Landers, Nye, Skiffe, Wing. In a list of persons between the age of sixteen and sixty liable in 1643 to bear arms, these other Sandwich names appear, Ellis, Gibbs, Swift. In 1654 in a subscription for building a town mill first appear the names Tobey, Bassett. The next year (1655) in a subscription to build a new church appears the name of Perry. The Popes I think came later on; the Fes- sendens at the settlement of their ancestor Rev. Benjamin Fessenden in 1722, and are, as they well know, out of Kent. Freeman sums up this matter of the permanency of names, so far as it has any scientific value by saying, "the names of some fifteen of the earliest settlers have with the addition of
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a few others, soon succeeding, been the prevailing patronym- ics to the present day."
A trading post, not a settlement, had been established in the west part of Sandwich at Manomet as early as 1627 for facilitating trade between Plymouth and the Dutch of New York and in that year the Dutch Secretary De Razier had paid a visit to Plymouth in a business way, going by Scusset Harbor and bringing sugar, linen stuffs etc. Pieces of glass bottles are the chief relics of late years which have been picked up at this fort; a homely fact which illustrates probably the Dutch, - and possibly the English.
This town was incorporated and became a civic part of Plymouth Colony in 1639, some two years after its actual settlement and the same year sent its deputies to assist in the Pilgrim government. In order of time it was the fourth town in the Colony. The reason why the incorporation of this town was thus delayed, as against usage, was probably this, allowing for the caution and tenacity with which the Plymouth people always held to their vested rights in their own territory, the jealousy with which they shared them, and the need there was in their political crises which were al- ways upon them, to look out that no set of men, hostile to their colonial policy, should have any hand in ruling, as an incorporated town would have,- the men who came here first, were not only men from abroad in Massachusetts Bay, but as affairs in the earlier years of this town shows, men resolute, self-reliant, impatient of restraint, even beyond ordinary Pil- grim measure; men who would make their own mark and swear by it at whatever cost, and who did put their mark up- on this town and left it there till now. I fancy they came here to worship God and make money, thinking a frontier town, as this was, a singularly convenient and likely place wherein to be let alone. That is why the incorporation of this town was two years late. Miles Standish ran the lines of this town when Plymouth ordered it to be laid out-that mysterious and incongruous Pilgrim of whom Hubbard writes " A little chimney is soon on fire, so was the Plymouth Cap- tain, a man of very small statue yet of a very hot and an- gry temper." It is safe to say that the lines were run exact- ly as Miles saw fit.
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I may not suppose that there were omens in it, but the fact is that the settlement of this town was preceded by a storm and followed by an earthquake ! I quote the storm from Gov. Bradford to show you one color on the land to which your forefathers came. "In 1635 a mighty storm, sea rose twenty feet and many climb into the trees. Blew down many thousands of trees, tearing up the stronger by the roots, breaking the higher pines in the middle and winding small oaks and walnuts of good size, as withes. It began south- east and parted towards the south and east and veered sun- dry ways. The wrecks of it will remain a hundred years." The shock of the earthquake, June 1, 1638, " was so violent in some places that movables in houses were thrown down and people out of doors could scarcely retain a position on their feet." ..
How exactly our fathers reached this town, then a wild, we cannot say. Any bulky furniture of theirs must have come by sea, and probably into Scusset harbor, since years after, both Sandwich and Plymouth are complained of for not keeping the road between them suitable for man and horse. Wagons there were none, and years after the settle- ment, before we were blessed with a mill, there were Sandwich folk who trudged all the way to Plymouth town and back with a sack of corn to grind, and as late as Judge Sewall's time the travel was on horseback and most of the way, along the beach at the foot of yonder sand bluffs. It may reasonably be supposed that most - men and women and children with their cattle, came along the Indian trail and would get their first view of their new home somewhere at the curve of the Cape, in the neighborhood of the pres- ent meeting house in Sagamore.
Most were no doubt on foot, some women with babes, on pillions and a swarm of little folks, boys and girls on foot, tired and dusty, yet alert and wonderful at the trail and what lay at the end. People who go to the front or the frontier in this world, must endure hardness and the Puri- tan emigrant seldom flinched from a toil or a foe. The Rev. Stephen Bachelder, at the age of seventy-six, travelled the whole distance from Lynn to Yarmouth, more than a hun- dred miles, at an inclement season of the year, on foot,
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a weary, restless spirit, ever liable to Puritan wrath and ever ready with a return blow, dying excommunicate at eighty.
Now in imagination let us stand aside, with uncovered head, while this group of our forefathers and foremothers take their first survey of what is to become their home. We shall not disturb or distract their emotion with voice or vis- ion, wrapped about as we are with the veil of two hundred and fifty years. What do they see? On their left the same sea which then as now, washes the shores of the England they have left - King over this globe's two-thirds, and vassal prone as the highway of the people to the mastery of the generations of those " who go down to the sea in ships." Before them - first the north contour of the Cape circling east and north in its mighty arc, until lost in the grey mists beyond ; - next the walls and buttresses of the white beaches with here and there great patches of timber on them - then the salt marshes with their creeks winding at flood tide like silver threads to the harbour, very much as they do now ; - and everywhere else around, the wild, the unbroken forest crowning the hill ridges which create and back the amphi- theatre in which your town is set, a forest then so stately that for generations after, men on horseback shall ride through it unhindered; - no house, no church spire to greet, not a cleared field, no home except it be the wigwam whose smoke through the wigwam's top, rises thin and blue against the pine leaves ; solitude,- no movement of man or beast, ex- cept it be when a deer or wolf crosses their trail or an In- dian slinks away from this humble cavalcade of pale faces, or an eagle floats lazily over Sagamore hill and the white winged gulls at your harbour's mouth, restless and queru- lous as ever, - these and liberty.
While they look, let us look at them. Believe me it is . a singular spectacle. I invite now no man to look upon it who does not reverence man in history ; no one who is indif- ferent to that awful genesis of humanity by which the men of the East have attained to this empire of civilization in the West. Base indeed would he be who would enjoy a civiliz- ation won by the sacrifices and heroisms of his ancestors and forgot them at the feast. First of all then who are these men and women in this sand trail, facing this wild? Of
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what stock are they ? - since blood in men and brutes always counts and accounts for conduct and careers. They are of English stock. What is that? All that is, no man can tell you. These men and women - white emigrants in the red man's land are by origin Asiatics; of a barbarian stock out of that teeming cradle of Central Asia, north of the Him- alaya mountains - whence in three great migrations - Celtic, Teutonic, Slavonic - came the peoples of Central and Northern Europe. These people are of the second -- the Teutonic hordes, kin to the German tribes on whom Cæsar tried the short swords of his legions, and who after defeats smote down the latter Roman Empire to build upon its ruins in a thousand years a better ;- strangely mixed too with that kindred Norse or Scandinavian blood of North Europe, the sailor blood I take it, of modern ages - that Danish blood out of the Viking's ships which ravished North England many times to a desert and then repeopled it ; the blood of that William Conqueror and his Normans made a trifle more gra- cious in sunny Normandy, who eight hundred years ago with men in his ranks with names still heard in your streets, upon that hill ridge at Hastings and near that ancient apple tree of history, late in that unsparing battle where with locked shields the Saxons had stood and won all day, until the up- shot arrows of the Normans down falling with fate upon their proud but stricken heads, broke at evening through their fence, smote down Saxon England, to give her the new dynasty of the Plantagenets and perhaps a grander future ; yes - that blood so stubborn, wilful, proud and masterful, that when the same William Conqueror was carried to his grave, a common Norman man stood forth, forbidding burial, because that grave was dug in his father's land, which this King had, against law, taken : that blood so law-abiding, that they who bore the corpse yielded to justice and bought, with the King's money, an honest grave elsewhere, that England's conqueror might share a clemency never to be denied the poorest Saxon serf who wore that day his master's Norman collar - as our dogs do -Danish, Norman, Saxon, Teu- tonic - English blood.
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