USA > Massachusetts > Barnstable County > Sandwich > Two hundred and fiftieth anniversary celebration of Sandwich and Bourne, at Sandwich, Massachusetts, September 3, 1889 > Part 3
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Do you wonder that such a stock has succeeded in New England - always -that these people here did build
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and maintain this town ? Do you wonder that this blood to-day is liable to its outbreaks, arrogancies - and sometimes cruelties, as in King Phillip's war? Do you wonder that in every generation of Sandwich -in your town meetings - which are the Alltings of the Teutonic races -the gather- ings of all the people - men have stood to their "Yea " or their "Nay." until the sun went down and the meeting went home, leaving the moderator and the town clerk to despair ? Or that inside and outside your meeting-houses, men and women have wrangled over mysteries that no man knows and few men have even studied, with a self assertion only justifiable in the Infallible ?
How came then these men and women here? What urged this singular, this dominant blood to emigrate across the Atlantic ocean and hide itself in a wilderness ? Let un- friendly critics answer what they like - vagrancy, lust of money, lust of power, incompatibility of temper as to other men, divorcing them from their native church and state - anything they choose or dare. I explain the why of their presence by saying that these men and women are Puritans. What is a Puritan ? The answer should be cautious, because in it one finds the key to the history of our republican insti- tutions, so far, and of many things otherwise hard to be un- derstood in the history of Plymouth Colony. Well then,- before the year 1300, that is before the printing press or the discovery of America, there were in North England a sing- ular set of men, of reformers we will say, called Lollards. All the great English reforms, they say, have come from North England, thanks perhaps to the Norse blood so plenty there. These Lollards were bred apparently in the homes of plain English country folk, and the head of them appears in history as John Wickliffe, priest at Luttersworth. How these men came no man exactly knows. " The wind bloweth where it listeth and we hear the sound thereof but cannot tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth." This body of English folk, 150 years before the reformation, made revolt against the church and, when punished by the secular au- thorities, grew bitter against the state. Indeed I know no bitterness in religious controversy so acute as theirs. Their tracts, copied with the pen and scattered through the land,
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and of late years made accessible to us in the publications of the Camden society, are chiefly wails and curses. The poems of Piers Plowman and of early English poets are colored with the like temper. The trend of their movement may be seen in the fact, that their great leader, Wickliffe, translated, for the first time, the Bible into Eng- lish. The movement was wild, often unled, given to falling into grotesque theories of communism, and into ways of thought which most sober minds to this day are unable to accept -the outbreak of a deep-seated instinct of the North England mind, veiled and limited by its ignorance - but yet an undoubted factor in the lives of the common people of England from before 1300 A. D. to the reformation in the 16th century. It was the men of this strain and of the com- mon people who, in the English reformation, still under the ban of English law, gave unexpected aid to sovereigns and great reforming prelates, less sincere and worthy often than themselves, and who never flinched from the stake or axe in maintaining reform. These men now found themselves rein- forced by new allies out of the upper classes, who proceeded to clarify the hot, fermenting and clouded liquor of their strange religious zeal with the learning of Cambridge and Oxford. In these Lollards lay the root of English Puritan- ism, and in the reign of Elizabeth the name Puritan appears to cover them all. It will be readily seen that Lollardism was a revolt against two corporate bodies- the English Church and the English State who punished for the Church; a refusal of the relations heretofore existing between the people and these corporate bodies; a demand for a new valu- ation of man as man; and for a new adjustment of every human being with those two great bodies, - ecclesiastical and political, which had dominated Englishmen from time im- memorial. It was inevitable in such a movement that the claims of the individual man should be magnified and multi- plied ; that he who had been governed was now to rule, and that the questionable grace and health, which had heretofore descended to him from a long line of kings and bishops, should now ascend from him, and that if thrones were to stand, the man upon it must represent the people and not a dynasty - a radical theory of pure democracy based upon a religious
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instinct, wise or otherwise, as time will tell. Here then was the root of English Puritanism. It is true that the new learn- ing and the new accessions to the old cause of the Lollards both checked and colored it, and that too not altogether wisely. For instance, the new Puritans of Elizabeth's age had accepted for their religious philosophy, the system of the foreigner and Frenchman Calvin, whose doctrine of elec- tion, to wit, that only the church of God could be on earth the sons of God, narrowed the broader Lollard doctrine that every man, because he is a man, is a son of God. Upon this doctrine of election both Pilgrim and Puritan built his com- monwealth and upon the wider basis, the Lollard temper in Quaker, Baptist, and all who resented the standing order which ruled men who were not allowed to rule themselves, protested until all men became equal before the law which is for all men. If there be any other than a surface distinction between Pilgrim and Puritan, it is that there was more of the old England Lollard temper at Plymouth than at Boston. This was the ancient treasure brought in earthen vessels - the Anglo Saxon idea of a pure democracy in Church and State and this is why our ancestors are standing in an In- dian trail - pilgrims to a wild which by their virtue they will make a shrine for all their generations. Let them pass on to their toil. They do not know all this. They have no idea that they are anything else than tired folk seeking a home. So often in our humble affairs the gods go with us and yet we think ourselves alone.
The story of the town life of Sandwich, from 1639 till to-day may, as a matter of mere convenience, be divided in- to these four periods: I. From the incorporation of the town as a part of Plymouth Colony to the absorption of that colony into the Province of Massachusetts in 1692; II. From 1692, until the Revolution, 1776; III. The Revolution pe- riod 1776-1783; IV. From 1783 to 1889.
Some preparation had probably been made beforehand for the reception of these Pilgrim families - possibly some temporary booths, as the sheds are sometimes called in the old records, but we have no information. The farms had been allotted to each proprietor and each would go to his own as soon as possible. It is a tradition, and a certainty, that
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most halted a mile or so west of your present town centre in the neighborhood of what we all know as the Freeman place, and along what is now the back road, which runs north and westerly near Town Neck towards Sagamore. Some of your oldest houses and best lands are still there. As one in these days coming along these roads to your town sees over the hill- tops the chimneys and spires of Sandwich, and reflects that hereabouts were the first homes, one is reminded of that an- cient scripture so dear to the Puritan mind, " And he led the flock to the backside of the desert and came to the moun- tain of God, even to Horeb."
That they set to work speedily to clear, each man his own farm, may go without saying. It may not be without interest to note, in passing, the origin of your titles to your real estate here. In brief it was thus: the English crown claimed sovereignty here on the ground that its subjects had discovered the country - a rather flimsy title, one would say, but exceedingly convenient if the crown wished more land, and one then in vogue in Europe. Plymouth Colony inher- ited, so to speak, under the crown. But having a conscience, our fathers thought it fit to extinguish the title of the In- dians, whom they found in possession, by purchase from the Indian chiefs in form of an English deed. Whether they paid less or more, the transaction was orderly, and Governor Winslow's words in 1675 will stand as history, "Before the pres- ent trouble" (King Philip's War) broke out, the English did not possess one foot of land in the colony but what was fairly obtained by honest purchase of the Indian proprietors." Whether the Indian knew what he was selling, and thought to sell only a right, common to both parties, to fish, hunt and dwell in the land, as his fathers had, is quite another ques- tion, which, in King Philip's War, was settled with the sword, quite as our Civil War settled some things without appeal. Our forefathers certainly knew what they bought. From Plymouth Colony the Sandwich settlers bought, upon plain conditions and a fixed price, their right to the town, as propri- etors, each receiving land allotments according to what he paid, certain lands remaining in common, under control of the town, and as need was, divided among the citizens in the same ratio. The way your Town Neck is held to-day, is, I sup-
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pose, one of the last relics in New England of lands so iheld in common. No man could be a citizen but a church mem- ber, and church members might be cold or strange. From this, you may see, why both Sandwich and the colony would be very careful who were made citizens here, and why, if they differed, as to who should be citizens, as they did, there would be trouble, as there was. Everybody, parson as well as peo- ple, bought and sold land, which ranged from a shilling an acre, both up and down. In dividing estates among heirs a large piece of poor land was balanced by a small piece of good land and due allowance was made for ponds which went for nothing, and real estate in those days found a brisk mar- ket. The very next year after the incorporation of this town Andrew Hallett sold his farm, near the tack factory and gave this deed, " I, Andrew Hallett, of Sandwich, have sold unto Daniel Wing of the same town, and to his heirs and assigns forever my dwelling house in Sandwich with three acres of land joining to it and the corn now growing upon it, with the cow house (barn). It lieth between the land of George Shawson and William Newland; and two acres of land at Scusset ; and five acres of planting land near Spring Hill ; and four acres, wanting one quarter, of meadow near the Pine Neck -- and one acre and a half, lying in the Neck, being yet undivided : with all commons and all pasture and all profits and appertinences whatsoever, thereto pertaining. Witness my hand this twenty-eighth of July, one thousand six hundred and forty." He makes his mark - the witnesses are Edward Dillingham and John Wing and the clerk of rec- ord is Thomas Tupper.
How our fathers managed to clear their farms, build their houses, and worship God on the Sabbath day, all in one life-time, is a mystery. They had pluck and stuck. That Barnstable woman, a widow, on record, who, at seventy-five years of age breaking up a piece of new land and holding her- self the plow, and when brought up against a stump, and thrown by the shock quite over it, yet recovering herself and going on as usual, is perhaps an extreme type of the people, who cleared Sandwich fields. No one, I think of the earliest houses here, or on the Cape now remains, a fact which would seem to show that these houses were rather frail structures.
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The fact that in 1644 the Sandwich meeting-house was called "old " and had to be repaired is sufficient proof. The houses of which we have account were generally set by compass, north and south, with the front south for the winter sun, and so on clear days serving as a sundial to mark noon, (for there were no watches) or on a south-easterly hill slope away from the wind and near a spring, and were of two grades, accord- ing to the wealth of their builders. The poorer class of houses were all small, substantially of one room with a fire- place, in the middle, an oven on the back side often built out doors, except when the house itself, as often happened, was built into the hill bank for warmth and security of the fire place, few windows and fewer doors and less furniture. The timber was cut in the woods and sawed by hand and the cost of a house was chiefly the labor on it. The sill was laid on the ground, the floor was laid on sleepers below the sill which projected into the room all round, and served as a seat for children and to stow away household driftwood. Into this sill beam they bored two parallel rows of holes, some six inches apart. In these holes they set upright poles sharpened at either end, the upper end entering the plate above. They filled in the space between these poles with stones and clay to make firm walls and then they thatched the roof with what we call hereabouts "creek stuff" or "thatch." I should call a house like this a cabin - but it was not a " log cabin." In proof that this house penury is not over colored, I have only to cite from your own town records of 1650, when it was agreed upon by the town that there shall be a levy of £5 for Mr. Leveridge" (the first minister) to pay for removing and parting of his house with boards which was long since promised to be done for him by the town." If the parson lived in substantially an unpartitioned barn, his parishioners probably fared no better. Such houses in-
deed were not expensive. Andrew Hallett's house in Barn- stable in 1643 was "latched, thatched and daubed," as the phrase was, for £5. Considering the greater purchasing power of money then, and yet this was a very cheap house. But perhaps I can better show you how the forefathers lived, hereabouts, by describing one of the better houses built in Barnstable in 1642 and taken down some sixty years ago,
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when the timbers were found to be as sound as ever. This was a larger house, 22 feet front ; 26 feet rear ; front room 16 feet square; low in the walls, with a summer beam across the front room, parallel with the front wall ; a kitchen back, and a bedroom in north-east corner, with low walls and floor some two feet above the other floors to make room for the cellar underneath. There was also a front chamber over the main room reached by a ladder and with a small fire-place in it. The rest, I fancy, above stairs, was garret. The front chamber was usually reached by a ladder and the kitchen back stairs were often a round pine log rising at an angle of some 45 degrees from the kitchen floor with cleats nailed on it or notches made in it, by which people mounted to their beds under the eaves. Persons proposing that feat of life and limb, ought to have had clear heads and to have been home early. The walls of a house like this were built very much as those I have heretofore described. But there was no plas- tering in any house hereabouts till after 1700. Yet the daub- ing with clay would make a house comfortable. The fire- place was the main feature of all such old houses. It was 8 feet wide, 4 feet deep and 5 1-2 feet high, so that a tall house- wife could go to her oven in the right-hand corner without stooping. There was a hook on each andiron to hold the spit, on which to roast meats. The narrow mantle-piece of wood was the whole length of the fire-place and the broad hearth was of flat stones from the field. The chimney was of rough stones up to the chamber floor, and from thence of cobwork, i. e., of sticks fastened or framed together and daubed inside and out with clay and sometimes mortar. From the shell heaps of the Indians they made admirable lime, and laws were passed at an early date to prevent the carrying shells out of the colony for that purpose. There was no glass in these houses, but oiled paper was used instead. The front roof was always shorter than the back ; the second story often projected over the first in a broad cornice. They were often added to by Cantos. The house I last described, in 1825 covered more than four times its original ground. Bet- - ter houses in rare cases came in, as men had more money and more leisure, before 1700. Bricks of a very large size made their appearance, and sawed lumber from Scituate,
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where were saw mills ; diamond-shaped glass, set in lead; front stairs, and sound, fat chimneys, plaster, wood finish and more rooms. Yet there are few houses, even of this later date, re- maining either in Barnstable or Sandwich. Perhaps the Bourne house, fronting your common, built, I suppose, by Hon. Meltiah Bourne, who married in 1692-93, for his bride, probably about that time, is as good a specimen as any ex- tant in this town. The old square, fat, dignified houses about your lower mill pond and along the Falmouth road are all, I take it. after 1700, and some after the Revolution. It is a great pity that specimens of our old houses cannot be pre- served in every Pilgrim town, if necessary, at the public ex- pense and oversight as public monuments. Posterity will miss them bitterly; and neither they nor we can re-create the Pilgrim antiquity.
Now a word as to your ancient meeting-houses. Your first meeting-house, several times repaired, was rather small, looked probably very much like a thatched barn, with oiled paper windows and wooden shutters ; and all traces of it have disappeared. It stood near the site of the present meeting- house of the first parish ; was used, as was the house which succeeded it, for your town meetings, which opened with prayer, as did all the military drills, and was the centre of the town activities. In front of it and at the junction of the roads was the market place where bargains were made, goods delivered or exchanged. The old market place very much resembles the one at Plymouth, and the one at Barnstable at the west foot of Meeting House Hill, at the junction of roads there, and looks at least in size and location very much as any market place in the country towns of England of that date. House building of all kinds improved as property accumulated, and your second meeting-house on the same site was a much better and larger building erected in 1756. After all its enlargements and during all its years it looked the very beau ideal of a Puritan meeting house - certainly as broad as long and must have been a comfortable homelike structure. The plan shows galleries and doors on three sides - the pews were square with seats on hinges so as to be lifted up when the worshippers stood in prayer, two tables, I suppose for hymn books, in the middle, the deacon's seat un-
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der the pulpit, with square pews each side the pulpit, and round the four sides of the house ; to the honor of our fore- fathers, behind the front or transverse aisle before the pulpit, and running the whole width of the building, on the right of the main aisle, as one looked from the pulpit, seats for aged women, and on the left, seats for aged men. The galleries were also rich in aisles with square pews round the sides with front seats for men and women, divided as below. The male and female singers sat in the choir separate in the same order, at the end opposite the pulpit and the two corner pews farthest from the pulpit, with the like division of the sexes, were given over to Indians, negroes and mulattoes. After the enlargement of 1756, the pews, having sold for more than the outlay, a steeple was ordered, and a new bell; also that doors be put to the seats below; curtains be placed at such windows as are exposed to the sun, and that a place be pro- vided for the colored people, that they be not allowed to sit below, or on the stairs. Mordecai Ellis and Joshua Fish were appointed " to take care of the young people who are often very rude on the Lord's day, and when any do offend return them to a Justice of the Peace to be dealt with according to the law." It appears that two young misses were fined in 1767 for laughing in meeting, and afterward upon petition the town remitted the penalty. I need only to mention as I paas on, the meeting-house built at Scusset about 1725, the fruits of a very curious schism in Sandwich parish, parts of which, not long ago, served as a barn door in Pocasset, and the timbers of the building, some time after 1800, were used to build the meeting-house on the hill at upper Pocasset.
I wish, however, to point out the fact, novel to some of you, that the first meeting-house built in the English fashion, that is of sound and lasting material, was one curiously enough, for the Indians at Herring River, on that sporadic hill standing alone, and backing west on the river where are still rows of Indian graves in the grass, and the foundation lines of this house still visible, built at the expense of Judge- Samuel Sewall, of Boston, by Edward Milton, carpenter, and under the supervision of Capt. Thomas Tupper, then and long after a missionary to the Indians. The description and details of this building are in the Diary and Letter Book of
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Judge Sewall, lately published by the Massachusetts Histori- cal Society. Let me read a few extracts.
Sept. 26, 1687. To Edward Milton, carpenter at Sandwich.
Capt. Thos. Tupper tells me that he hath bargained with you to build a convenient, comfortable meeting-house for the natives at Sandwich ; the dimensions about four and twenty foot in length, about eighteen foot broad, with two galleries to be finished for thirty pounds, not above one-third in money. Now if it may in any way forward the work, I do engage that upon the finishing of the work, you shall not miss of your pay. I am your friend and servant, SAMUEL SEWALL.
April 13, 1688, Elder Chipman visits me and tells me that the Indian meeting-house at Sandwich is raised.
To Mr. Edward Milton, July 9, 1688.
I received yours of the 3d inst. In answer to it, say that upon Capt. Tupper's sending me word that the house is ceiled as it ought to be, I will pay you five and twenty shillings in money to you or to your order. If it be not well filled between the clapboards and the ceiling, I doubt the house will be cold.
Dec. 3, 1690.
S. S.
Writ to Edward Milton at Sandwich to finish the meeting- house there, by making and well hanging the doors, clapboarding in the inside well and filling the walls with shavings or other suitable matter for warmth, making the gallery stairs ; and I would pay him 4os money. Writ to Mr. Faunce, of Plymouth, and Jno. Otis of Barnstable, to glaze well the meeting-house which Capt. Tupper saith is about 60 foot of glass and I would pay in money as glaziers are paid in Boston. Capt. Tupper to certify that the work was done.
N. B. Send 1000 of clapboards nails.
Sept. 14, 1691.
Writ to Capt. Thomas Tupper to hasten finishing the meeting- house. Inclosed Edward Milton's affidavit.
Standing thus among the old meeting-houses reminds us that in our Pilgrim civilization, the church was the very heart of the state, and so far as the Pilgrim conscience set things spiritual above things material, the state existed for the church, and for a time there was the most intimate union of church and state known in history. This fact of a church so dominant, colors the whole civic life of ancient Sandwich
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and determined its municipal regulations. The Puritan, after he had made a law, enforced it, on the ground that any law become a dead letter on the statute book, helps kill respect for law. Several of the leading men of this town, not two years after its settlement, and scattered on farms all the way from Sagamore to Scorton Hill, were fined for not wiring their swines' snout ; not because the swine had done mischief, but that the law might suffer no damage. These fines were paid. It was ordered that any person denying the scriptures to be a rule of life should be flogged at the discre- tion of the magistrates, saving only life and limb. The law fined in the Colony a man 10s. for drinking overmuch; 12s. for a man's smoking on the highway ; 30s. for Sabbath break- ing and set one hour in the stocks; for working on Sunday, a man was whipped severely at the whipping post; a man for selling beer at two pence per quart, worth only one, was presented by the Grand Jury ; while yet another, for selling a pair of boots and spurs for 15s. which cost him only 10s., was fined 30s. Laws like these enforced in some towns now, would, I fancy, make several empty purses and sore backs. There was a law in both colonies substantially to this effect ; " Whereas divers person unfit for marriage, both in regard to their years and also their weak estate, (that is, too young and lacking shekels) some practising the inveighling of men's daughters, and maids under guardianship, contrary to their parents and guardians liking, and of maid servants without liberty of their masters ; therefore, it is decreed that if any man make motion of marriage to any man's daughter or maid, without first obtaining leave of her parents, guardian or master, he shall be punished by fine not exceeding £5 (the price of a cow) or corporal punishment, or both, at the discretion of the court." I suppose a law like this made trouble for the callow swains, but must have been a real com- fort to the Pilgrim matrons with marriageable daughters. That law also was put in force, even in the case of a govern- or's daughter. There was no law against the daughters pro- posing. Then as now they were a law unto themselves. There was also a Sandwich law forbidding a young man to marry unless he had killed his quota of blackbirds, demanded by the town. That was a hard one - for the birds and the
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