USA > Massachusetts > Worcester County > Worcester county; a narrative history, Volume I > Part 21
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Besides, some people are always discontented and love change; and exceeding freedom and prosperity nurse an untamable spirit. I have been told, not only by native Americans, but by English emigrants, publicly, that within thirty or fifty years, the English colonies in North America may constitute a separate state entirely independent of England.
"But, as this whole country is toward the sea unguarded, and on the frontiers is kept uneasy by the French, these dangerous neighbors are the reason why the love of these colonies for their metropolis does not utterly decline. The English government has therefore reason to regard the French in North America as the chief power that urges their colonies to submission."
That was in 1748. Fifteen years later "the chief power that urges their colonies to submission" had been destroyed. But the English government could not see it.
"At Worcester, a thriving village of a thousand people, or perhaps less, the whole town was immersed in politics," wrote Bancroft of the year 1755. "The interests of nations and the horrors of war made the subject of every conversation. The master of the town school, where the highest wages were sixty dollars for the season, a young man of hardly twenty, just from Harvard College, and at that time meditating to become a preacher, would sit and hear, and, escaping from a maze of observations, would sometimes retire, and, 'by laying things together, form some reflections pleasing' to himself; for he loved the shady thickets and gloomy grottoes, where he 'would sit by the hour and listen to the falls of water.' 'All creation,' he would say in his musings, 'is still liable to change' (says his diary). 'Mighty states are not exempted. Soon after the reformation, a few people came over into this new world for conscience' sake. This apparently trival incident may transfer the great seat of empire into America. If we can remove the turbulent Gallics, our people, according to the exactest calculations, will, in another century, become more numerous than England itself. All Europe will not be able to subdue us. The only way to keep us from setting up for ourselves is to disunite us.'
"Such was the dream of John Adams, while teacher in a New England free school. Within twenty-one years he shall assist in declaring his country's independence; in less than thirty, this master of the town school of Worces- ter, after a career of danger and effort, shall stand before the King of Great Britain, the acknowledged envoy of the free and United States of America."
CHAPTER XIX.
The Approach of the Revolution
In the critical decade which preceded the Revolution, as well as in the eight years of war, Worcester County had a very large share in the patriotic activities of the Massachusetts Province. Love of liberty became almost a religion. Love of country burned as a flame. Men and women joined in every possible form of constructive effort. In the beginning their purpose was only to retain the rights which England had granted them under their charters. They asked only that abuses be corrected. There was little or no thought of separation from the Mother Country. But the English King and his government piled one injustice after another upon the American prov- inces, and particularly on Massachusetts. They left nothing undone which would turn the minds of red-blooded freemen to rebellion. Their stupidity was colossal. Finally everywhere in Worcester County, in every village and hamlet in the province and in neighbor provinces, every able-bodied man of military age, which then was sixteen to sixty, was arming himself and train- ing in preparation for that inevitable day when he should fight. The inflex- ible resolution of the freemen was to retain their rights at any cost.
When that day came, on the nineteenth of April in 1775, and riders raced into the Worcester villages with the fateful word that the British were advancing on Concord, thousands of Minute-men and militia were ready, ununiformed, to be sure, and undisciplined, but fit and efficient for the task at hand. In Washington's army about Boston they numbered thousands. Hundreds of them fought at Bunker Hill and some of them died there. Through the long years of campaigning, in time of doubt and discourage- ment, biting anxiety and ever-increasing poverty, as well as when the Con- tinental Army was bringing the war to a glorious conclusion, the towns of Worcester County poured out their men and money in a lavish, continuous stream.
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WORCESTER COUNTY
County's Population, 1765-75-At the opening of the pre-Revolution- ary period, in 1765, a Provincial census was taken, which placed Worcester County third on the list. Essex had 43,524, Middlesex 34,940, Worcester 32,857, and Suffolk 15,982. The population of the county towns follows :
Ashburnham* (estimated)
55I
Oxford
890
Athol
359
Petersham
707
Barre ("Rutland District"')
734
Princeton
284
Bolton
925
Royalston*
(estimated)
617
Brookfield
1,8II
Rutland
1,090
Charlton
739
Shrewsbury
1,43I
Douglas
521
Southboro
731
Dudley
748
Spencer
664
Fitchburg
259
Sturbridge
896
Grafton
763
Sutton
2,1 38
Hardwick
1,010
Templeton
348
Harvard
1,126
Upton
614
Holden
495
Uxbridge
1,213
Lancaster
1,999
Warren ("Western")
583
Leicester
770
Westboro
I,IIO
Leominster
743
Westminster
468
Lunenburg
821
Winchendon*
(estimated)
519
Mendon
1,838
Worcester
1,478
New Braintree
594
Oakham
270
Total.
32,857
*Northern tier towns 1776 figures; not shown in 1765 census.
In 1775, at the beginning of the Revolution, Worcester County was the most populous of the shires of Massachusetts with the exception of Essex. Its people numbered 46,763, of which only four hundred and sixty-two were blacks. Its growth had been wholesomely rapid. "The hill country" which had been sneered at as possessing no possibility of important settlement and therefore deemed unworthy of erection as a county, had outdistanced all save one of the older counties.
The population of Essex was 51,952; of Suffolk, comprising little more than the town of Boston, 28,101 ; Middlesex 40,821 ; Hampshire, comprising the present county of the name and Hampden and Franklin, 34,560; Plym- outh 27,393; and Bristol 27,241. The total population of Massachusetts, including Maine, was 349,094. Of these, 5,249 were blacks, most of them slaves. No complete census figures of the towns in 1775 are known to exist.
The Scene of Action-Worcester, chiefly because it was the county seat, but also because of its central geographical location, was the scene of most of the united activities of the shire in the feverish period preceding the Revolution. Apart from being the seat of the courts and having the county offices and jail, it was nothing more than a large country village, the center of a prosperous farming country. There was no manufacturing, excepting those small industries which cared for the immediate wants of the townspeople. This was not because of lack of mechanical skill and inventive ability, but
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THE APPROACH OF THE REVOLUTION
because of the ban which England had placed upon these activities in the Colonies, in the fear that they might grow to interfere with the trade of British manufacturers. In 1775 Worcester's inhabitants numbered about nineteen hundred. Its sister towns of Lancaster, Brookfield, Mendon, and Sutton were larger and richer.
Many stirring scenes were enacted there. County conventions met in tavern or courthouse to discuss and act upon questions of critical moment which arose from the tyrannical and maddening attitude of the governing power. Several of the later sittings of the courts aroused the people of every town to open rebellion, which, as they flocked to Worcester, manifested itself about the courthouse. The bitter strife between former neighbors and friends, Patriots and Royalists, had its most violent expression in the town, for it was the strongest Tory community in the province. Twice General Gage, the Provincial Governor, contemplated sending an expeditionary force of troops against Worcester, for punishment for rebellious spirit and conduct, and, on the second occasion, also for the destruction of military stores. The Minute-men and militia were under orders to march from every town in the shire the instant word arrived that the troops had left Boston, and the rendez- vous was the county seat. Because of the strategic position of the place, it was made an important depot of arms and ammunition and food, and other military equipment and supplies for the Massachusetts army.
A brief word picture of pre-Revolutionary and Worcester of Revolu- tionary days will give the reader a sketchy background for the many dramatic episodes which occurred there in those most critical years in American his- tory. The village lay chiefly along the Main Street which connected the prin- cipal centers, the Common on the south and Lincoln Square on the north. On the west rose the ridge along the crest of which are now Chestnut and Harvard streets, then covered with farmland and groves. On the east the land stretched away from the back gardens of the villagers to the meadows along Mill Brook. These were usually flooded in winter to form a narrow lake extending down the stream, and when this froze over the skaters made merry.
Main Street was broad until it approached Lincoln Square and skirted the edge of the natural slope of Court Hill, which then extended well into the line of the present thoroughfare. The terraced street of Court Hill origi- nated in a lane-like road which forked from Main Street at about where Thomas Street enters and extended along the slope to its termination at the courthouse.
A row of lofty trees lined Main Street on either side. Scattered along the way were one and two-story store buildings, and the comfortable resi- dences of well-to-do families. Each house had its grass and flowers and
Wor .- 13
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WORCESTER COUNTY
sometimes pear trees at the front, and the barn for the family horses and cows, and vegetable garden and orchard at the rear. Fences enclosed the yards to keep out roaming cattle.
There were several inns on the street. The Heywood Tavern, old even in that day, was on the site of the Bay State House. Set back from Main Street, where is now the Elm Street Theatre was the King's Arms Tavern, congre- gating place of the Royalists, but also the meeting place of memorable con- ventions of the aroused Patriots. Its sign, bearing the hated insignia and swinging from a post at the curb, went up in fire and smoke in a great bonfire built on the Common by jubilant citizens, the night of the day the news of the Declaration of Independence reached Worcester and was read from the west porch roof of the meetinghouse by Isaiah Thomas. A few hundred feet south of the Common, was Tory Jones' Tavern, which came under the ban of the Patriots, but not until much mischief had been hatched there by Royalist plotters.
No street or lane branched from Main Street on the west side in all the distance from Lincoln Square to the Hardwick Road, as Pleasant Street was known. Front Street was the Grafton Road, the southerly boundary of the Common was South Street, now Franklin Street. South of the Common, Main Street was the Connecticut Road, which extended on through Leicester, and on it were few houses within the limits of Worcester, excepting those of the infrequent farms.
The unfenced Common was a mowing, not a lawn, but there were great elm trees along its borders. At its west end was the meetinghouse of the First Parish, later to be known as the Old South Church, the only place of worship in the village. Facing it across Main Street was the stately home of Sheriff Gardner Chandler, a Tory, who held loyalty to the King above loyalty to his province and its people. He was blessed in being one of the very few prominent Royalists who escaped banishment and confiscation of property. His previous high standing, his service in the French and Indian War, coupled with a degree of docility in meeting the demands of the Patriots, won for him the tolerance of the community.
Not so, Colonel James Putnam, who lived across from the Common at the corner of Main and South streets, last of the royal attorney-generals of the province, chief justice of the Inferior Court of Common Pleas, and one of the eminent American lawyers of his time. He was an uncompromising Royalist, and a powerfully active one, and had deeply offended his Patriot neighbors. He refused to recant his views and sympathies, and finally was driven to seek safety in Boston, as one of a detested triumvirate-Ruggles of Hardwick, Murray of Rutland and Putnam of Worcester. He was never to see his pleasant Worcester home again, for he fled from Boston with
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THE APPROACH OF THE REVOLUTION
Gage's army, lived for a time in England, and rounded out his days in New Brunswick where he was made a counsellor and a justice of the Supreme Court.
Military activities centered on the Green in the rear of the meetinghouse. Here the Minute-men and Militia did their drilling, which, as the war-cloud grew darker, was every day but the Lord's Day. The little building in which the town stored its cannon was near by. The liberty pole, emblem of patriot resolution and intention, was raised on the Green.
The burying-ground, surrounded by a high stone wall, occupied the south- east area of the Common. The graves are still there. Over them are the ancient slate headstones. But they are not uplifted that men may read their inscriptions and note among them the names of men who fought and died in the War of Independence and in the French wars that came before. Years ago, though in modern times, the slabs were laid flat beneath earth and sod, which conceals knowledge that God's Acre still exists. The people of Worcester pass over it by hundreds daily, unknowing that beneath their feet lies the dust of a brave and devoted generation.
There was no town hall-stores and houses were grouped about the Common. Their occupants looked across Grafton Road and South Street upon the Green. Extending around Harrington Corner was the famous two-story business block, the Old Compound, in which a number of mer- chants had their stores. On the second floors of the store buildings were the offices of lawyers and others.
Lincoln Square in 1765-75-Lincoln Square, then commonly called the North Square, had much the same area as that of today, but there the resem- blance ends. No greater contrast could be found than that afforded by the scene as it must have been in those old days, and the present beautiful pano- rama of the westerly side of the square, with the classic purity of the mag- nificent Memorial Auditorium in the center, the pleasant Colonial lines of the Boys' Club at the right, the Worcester County Courthouse at the left, and in the foreground the heart-stirring memorial to the men who died in the World War, with the flag of the United States of America flying trium- phantly above it.
At the time of the Revolution, the rough, partly grass-grown ground sloped from east and west down to the banks of Mill Brook, which crossed the Square on the line of Prescott Street. Its clear waters emerged from meadows whose grasses and wild flowers grew to the edge of the stony bed, and passed on by Tim Bigelow's blacksmith shop to disappear over a little fall in meadows below.
Lincoln Street was the Boston Road, which was a section of the Con- necticut Road connecting Boston and Hartford. It entered the township by
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WORCESTER COUNTY
skirting the extreme upper end of Lake Quinsigamond, then commonly called Long Pond, crossing the headwater tributary brook on a rude bridge. At the Square was Worcester Bridge, known far and wide by the name, a rough and narrow structure, but amply serving its purpose. Beside it was the ford into which mounted travelers rode their horses to water them, and wagoners paused to soak their wheels when over-dry spokes and rims threatened to loosen. In times of freshet the brook overflowed its banks, inundating the lower areas of the Square.
Four roads only entered the Square. Besides the Boston Road, Salisbury Street was the highway to Holden and the towns beyond. Summer Street was Back Street, a rough and hilly way, which originally was the path to the first burying-ground, and later was extended as a convenient short cut to the Grafton Road. The fourth road was the village street. Highland Street, Prescott Street, Belmont Street and Union Street did not exist.
The Salisbury mansion, which a few years ago was moved from the Square, had been built in 1770, and the general store of the first Stephen Salisbury was where today is the railroad station. The homes of "Tory John" Chandler and Rufus Chandler stood a short distance up the hillside to the east. Between the courthouse and the entrance of the Holden Road was a grassy triangle extending out into the Square, and on it was the little school- house where John Adams had taught the boys of the town. -
The Square had its thrilling early romance. On its south side was the blacksmith shop of Timothy Bigelow. Just around the corner on Main Street, its garden backing up to the smithy yard, was the house where lived Anna Andrews, orphan daughter of Samuel Andrews, and the richest heiress of the village. Anna was a pretty girl, and Tim Bigelow, from all accounts, a handsome upstanding young man, more than six feet tall, possessed of much ability and energy, and a strong will. The young people naturally saw one another frequently, and it is not difficult to imagine their conversations over the dividing fence. They fell in love, and "plighted their troth," as they probably expressed it.
But Anna was not of age. She lived with her guardians who refused flatly to give consent to the match. They deemed it unsuitable that patrician and wealthy Anna should throw herself away on the village blacksmith. They forbade all intercourse between the lovers. But they did not know the resources of Tim Bigelow. One night in 1762 the girl eluded her guardians, and the twain mounted fast horses and fled to Hampton in New Hampshire, a hundred miles away, the Gretna Green of runaway Massachusetts lovers of the eighteenth century. They returned as Mr. and Mrs. Bigelow.
Over the bridge, a short distance along the west side of the Boston Road was the little jail, and to the north of it on the same side, the Hancock Arms Tavern, favorite gathering place of the Patriots. Further along the road, to
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the crest of the hill, were the homes of some of the most important people of the day, among them Timothy Paine, one of the Mandamus councillors, and Royalist to the core. With him lived his son, Dr. "Billie" Paine, the town's physician and druggist, as staunch a Tory as his father.
It was at this mansion that John Adams met his match in a game of wits with Madame Paine. On a day before the tension between Whigs and Tories reached the breaking point, he was the guest at a dinner given in his honor by Mr. and Mrs. Paine, and there were present some of his former pupils of the village school. When wine was served, the host proposed the toast, "The King!" Several of the Whigs hesitated. They did not care to drink the health of King George. A tactful word from the future president of the United States persuaded them, and everyone drank the toast.
Then Mr. Paine suggested that Mr. Adams propose a toast. With a seri- ous face he gave them "The Devil!" Mr. Paine's face flushed with anger, but before he could retort Mrs. Paine laid her hand on his arm and said, "My dear, as the gentleman has been so kind as to drink to our king, let us by no means refuse to drink to his." And so the Devil was toasted.
The courthouse, now a residence on Massachusetts Avenue, was the most conspicuous building on Court Hill, and there were several residences between it and the junction with Main Street. One was the home of Dr. Elijah Dix. A few days before Concord and Lexington Dr. Joseph Warren brought his four motherless children there from Boston that they might be safe in the care of his good friend, and there they were on that seventeenth of June when their noble and gallant father fell at Bunker Hill.
Worcester did not have a postmaster until Isaiah Thomas came to Worcester in 1775 and took the office. There had been but one post a week, as a rider traveled over the road from Boston to Hartford and New York which required seven days in either direction. Thomas improved this service greatly by establishing a system of postriders from Worcester to Boston, Salem, Providence, Fitchburg, Sutton, and other county centers. His prin- cipal motive was the quick distribution of his Massachusetts Spy and Oracle of Freedom, Patriot newspaper, which kept the people of the shire informed of the happenings of the world in which they were interested, and particu- larly with the progress of the war.
A century and a half ago had a person stood anywhere within the village of Worcester, on the Common, the Main Street, or at Lincoln Square, and gazed beyond the buildings in any direction, he would have seen nothing but hillsides covered with mowings and pastures and woodlands, with here and there a farmhouse and its outbuildings-a tranquil landscape, suggesting only prosperity and peace. But the atmosphere about him would have been heavily charged with rebellious and war-like feeling, which gave expression in stern faces and ominous words.
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WORCESTER COUNTY
In Revolutionary times the roads were still for the most part rough and crude. The day of the stagecoach and post-chaise had not arrived. There was an occasional passenger vehicle for town use and even for longer dis- tances. Heavy carts when the roads were open, sledges in winter, usually drawn by oxen, hauled freight between the towns and wood and produce from the farms to the villages. But as a general thing, people traveled in the saddle. It could not have been otherwise, for much of the year the roads were almost impassible for vehicles. In the winter they were blocked with snow, in the spring of the year and in wet weather they were deep with mud. When the county men came to Worcester to participate in public affairs, they were mounted on horses, or, as soldiers, marched afoot.
The Stamp Act and the Boycott-At the close of the French and Indian War, England wasted little time in carrying forward her plans for taxing her American Colonies. She had already taken to herself a monopoly of the provincial trade, to the exclusion of American ships as well as those of foreign countries. She had practically stifled manufacturing. But the blow which aroused American indignation to white heat was the Stamp Act, which was taxation without representation. With it began the movement which resulted in the independence of the Colonies and the creation of the United States of America.
News of the new import tariff reached Boston in 1767. It spread like wildfire over Worcester County, with inflammatory effect everywhere. A copy of resolutions adopted at a great Boston meeting was received by the board of selectmen of every town. The next Legislature recommended a boycott of British manufactured products, urged the establishment of domestic manufactures, and condemned King and Parliament in clear and definite terms.
The only dissenting vote in the legislative body was that of Timothy Ruggles of Hardwick. His reasons for dissenting were, first, "because in all countries manufactures are set up at the expense of husbandry, or other general employment of the people, and if they have not peculiar advantages over husbandry, they will by discouraging the latter, have an injurious effect." Second, "that manufactures here must encounter insurmountable obstacles from the thin population and high price of labor ; and would be detrimental, by taking hands away from agriculture and the fisheries." General Ruggles was evidently in desperate straits to find a sound argument.
The towns one after another adopted a pledge to which a large majority of the inhabitants eagerly subscribed, based on the resolutions adopted by the Legislature, of which the following was typical: "In order to prevent the unnecessary exportation of money, of which the Province hath, of late, been drained, the subscribers would, by all prudent means, endeavor to discounte-
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nance the use of foreign superfluities, and encourage the manufactures of this Province. And whereas the Parliament of Great Britain has passed an act imposing duties on sundry articles for the purpose of raising a revenue on America, which is unconstitutional and an infringement of our just rights and privileges ; and the merchants of this Province having generally come into agreement not to import goods from Great Britain, a few articles excepted, till that act is repealed, which in our opinion is a lawful and prudent measure, we will not at funerals use any gloves except those made here, or purchase any article of mourning on such occasion, but what shall be absolutely necessary."
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