people taking place, and with the advent of new population sternly
discouraged, the growth of Weymouth was slow. Nevertheless, grow it
did, and it prospered. I have spoken of the long interval of one
hundred and twenty-five years between 1640 and 1765, an interval which
includes one-half of the entire history of the town, as a single
period. As such it can best be treated, for with Weymouth, as with
most other New England towns, it was the time of slow growth, the long
period of infancy. It was marked by few events of importance. In 1676
the terror of King Philip’s war swept over Weymouth, as it did over
all the other outlying settlements of the colony. That was by far the
most cruel ordeal through which Massachusetts has ever passed,--one,
of the deep agony of which it is not easy for us, removed from it by
two hundred years of time, to form even a dim conception. I shall not
pause to dilate upon it here, though, in a far less degree it is true
than many of her sister settlements, Weymouth then tasted the horrors
of savage warfare. Women were slaughtered and houses were burned within
her limits, and the losses she sustained were sufficiently severe to
induce the General Court to allow the abatement of a portion of her
tax. Again she was called upon to furnish her contingent of soldiers,
who doubtless played their part manfully enough at the storming of
Narragansett Fort.[61] Indeed, in every warlike ordeal through which
Massachusetts has been called to pass,--from the first struggle of
Miles Standish, in 1624, to the great rebellion, two hundred and
forty years later,--the ancient town may fairly claim that she has
contributed of her blood with no stinting hand.
But the war of King Philip was ended, and again Weymouth lapsed into
the old, quiet, steady, uneventful life. During the next ninety years
I doubt if anything more momentous occurred within her limits than the
burning of the town meeting-house, in 1751. That, however, was a very
remarkable year,--one still borne in painful recollection,--the saddest
in the whole history of Weymouth. It has indeed left its mark on the
records, where, under date of May 21st, 1752, in the town meeting that
day held, it was--
“Voted to send no representative this present year on account of the
great charge of building a Meeting-house, and the extraordinary
Sickness that has prevailed in the town in the year past.”
* * * * *
The meeting-house was burned on the 23d of April, and its destruction
was impressed on the recollection of those living in the vicinity by a
special circumstance. The fathers of the town had seen fit to utilize
the loft over the church as a magazine, and in it was stored the
supply of town powder to the very respectable amount of three barrels.
Naturally, at the proper moment, this brought the conflagration to
a crisis, making, as Parson Smith, the clergyman of the period, has
recorded, “a surprising noise when it blew up.” The event has also been
celebrated in contemporaneous verse by Paul Torrey, the village Milton:
Our powder stock, kept under lock,
With flints and bullets were,
By dismal blast soon swiftly cast
Into the open air.
The poet also intimates grave suspicions as to the origin of the
fire, and indeed hints at a personal knowledge of the incendiaries,
suggesting very radical measures for their destruction and extirpation:
O range and search in every arch,
And cellar round about;
Search low and high, with hue and cry,
To find those rebels out.
I’m satisfy’d they do reside,
Some where within the Town;
Therefore no doubt, you’ll find them out,
By searching up and down.
On trial them we will condemn,
The sentence we will give;
Them execute without dispute,
Not being fit to live.[62]
History does not record any satisfactory result as attending the poet’s
search, but in the succeeding year he was tuning his lyre to sing the
dedication of a new and more commodious edifice, erected in place
of that which had been destroyed. But the other disaster which made
memorable the year 1751 was far more terrible than the destruction
of any building the work of human hands. That year was marked by
a veritable slaughter of the innocents. Death stalked through the
town. Between May, 1751, and May, 1752, a terrible throat distemper
so raged among the children as to amount almost to a pestilence. In
October, 1751, alone, thirty died, and in all there perished some one
hundred and twenty. Out of a population of only twelve hundred, no
less than one hundred and fifty persons died in the town during that
twelvemonth.[63] During the succeeding year the disease gradually
disappeared, and has since been almost unknown in Weymouth. Rarely,
indeed, however, even in times of plague, has the death-rate exceeded
that of Weymouth in 1751-2.
Broken here and there by such episodes as these, the life of the little
settlement flowed on in the general even tenor of its way through the
lives of four generations of its children. It was an existence which
we now find it difficult to picture. Living as we do in the hurry
and bustle of the modern world,--having the record of human life in
both hemispheres daily spread before us,--moving with ease over two
continents,--in the neighborhood of cities and libraries and galleries
and theatres,--belonging to a civilization enriched with all the
accumulated wealth of centuries,--accustomed ourselves to large affairs
and dealing in millions where in the olden time they talked but of
thousands,--we, in the year 1874, can hardly stand here, and, looking
around from King-Oak Hill, picture to ourselves the life led in its
neighborhood a century and a half ago. To the intense lover of nature,
it is true, Weymouth probably then bore a more attractive aspect than
now it does, for nature had lavished its gifts upon it with no sparing
hand. Eastward the green islands studded the bay, round which the sea
sparkled with waters rarely vexed by the keel and never beaten by the
paddle,--to the north the town of Boston was hidden from sight as it
nestled at the feet of its hills,--to the west the Blue Hills loomed
up in their soft, misty beauty even as they do to-day, they alone
unchanged,--to the south stretched away the more level forest land in
which the beautiful Weymouth ponds lay quietly imbedded in their native
framework of virgin green, while around their shores the wolf still
lurked and the swift deer bounded. No long rows of piles then broke the
swift tide as it ebbed and flowed in the Fore River,--no tall chimneys
belched out black smoke on the eastern limit of the town,--no phosphate
factory at the foot of the Great Hill poisoned the sweet native
atmosphere, but the waves rippled on the beach, and rose and fell amid
the haunts of the seal and the sea-fowl, even as they did when Thomas
Morton of Merry Mount thus described the land: “And when I had more
seriously considered of the bewty of the place, with all her faire
indowments, I did not thinke that in all the knowne world it could be
paralel’d. For so many goodly groues of trees; dainty fine round rising
hillucks: delicate faire large plaines, sweete cristall fountaines,
and cleare running streames, that twine in fine meanders through the
meads, making so sweete a murmering noise to heare, as would even lull
the sences with delight a sleepe, so pleasantly doe they glide upon the
pebble stones, jetting most jocundly where they doe meete; and hand in
hand runne downe to Neptunes Court, to pay the yearely tribute, which
they owe to him as soveraigne Lord of all the springs.”[64]
During the early days of the settlement the township was covered with
a natural growth of timber, in which the oak, the elm, the chestnut,
the ash, the pine and the cedar were mingled; and through many years
the town records bear frequent trace of the jealous care with which
the townsmen preserved this great source of beauty and of wealth.[65]
As timber, however, became more valuable, the forests were encroached
upon, until in the third quarter of the last century they had been well
nigh destroyed. But, during the earlier years, as one stood on King-Oak
Hill, the whole broad panorama must have appeared an almost unbroken
wilderness of wooded hill and dale, and azure sea and verdant shore;
while here and there, few and far between, could have been discerned
the rude belfry of a colonial church; or the long, brown, sloping roof
and hard angular front of some farmer’s house, surrounded by barns and
buildings more unsightly than itself, protruded its ugliness amidst
the open fields upon which the cattle grazed or the ripening harvest
waved. Weymouth was not settled, as were many other towns, with a view
to village life, while out-lying farms stretched away to the outskirts
of the township,--here every free-holder seems to have dwelt upon his
land. The church and the burying-ground were the natural centres of the
olden town, but no village then or now has ever gathered about them.
Even as late as 1780 there were but about some two hundred houses in
all scattered over the whole surface of Weymouth, and these were of the
plainest, simplest sort.[66]
The men and women who dwelt in them were in great degree cut off from
the whole outer world;--at least we would think so now. The roads were
few and bad; the chief one, still known as Queen Ann’s turnpike, is
said to have received its name, not from the sovereign of the loyal
colonies, but from the hostess of a little “four corner” inn upon it,
who was always known by that royal title.[67] Queen Ann’s turnpike was
the direct road between Boston and Plymouth, but the time of which I
speak was long before the stage-coach era, and the Weymouth man, whom
business called to Boston, went by water, or drove or walked there
over Milton Hill and Roxbury Neck. Nor was that journey to Boston
then devoid of danger. Early in the last century, for instance, it
is traditionally stated that a party, including two of the principal
citizens of Weymouth, while returning home by water from Boston,
were overtaken by a snow-storm and wrecked on one of the islands in
the bay; all perished, it is said, save Captain Alexander Nash and a
negro servant, through whose devotion his life was saved.[68] If the
tradition be true it should be added that Captain Nash’s descendants in
the present century have repaid the debt due to their ancestor’s slave
by long and eminent services in the emancipation of his race. But the
story at least illustrates the distance then existing between Boston
and Weymouth,[69]--a distance greater for every practical purpose than
that now existing between Weymouth and New York.
Between Old Spain and Quincy Point, or Wessagusset and Mount Wollaston
as they then were called, a ferry was authorized as early as 1635,
and the rate of ferriage was fixed at a penny for each person and at
threepence for each horse; two years later this rate was raised and
the ferryman of the day was licensed to keep a house of call. But so
far as the whole great outer world was concerned, the earlier dwellers
in Weymouth were, through four generations, what we should consider as
entombed alive. There was no newspaper,--there was no system of public
transportation,--there was no regular post,--between the colonies
themselves there was little occasion for intercourse, and Europe was
months removed. Those freemen who were elected deputies attended the
sessions of the General Court; and now and then the clergyman or the
magistrate took part in some solemn conclave of his brethren at the
capital or in a neighboring town. Of the young men, a few went with the
fishing fleet to Cape Sable, or sailed on trading voyages to the West
Indies or to Spain, thus catching glimpses of the outer world; but it
may well be questioned whether any Weymouth-born woman ever laid eyes
on the shores of the mother country during the first hundred and sixty
years of the settlement of the town.
The men and women of those five generations were a poor, hard-working,
sombre race,--rising early and working late,--laboriously earning their
bread by the sweat of their brows. There were no labor reformers then.
The men worked in the fields, the women in the house: the first tended
the flocks, or planted and gathered the harvest;--the last busied
themselves in the dairy and the kitchen, or at the spinning-wheel and
the wash-tub. It is a tradition of the daughter of Parson Smith that
with her own hands she scrubbed the floor of her bed-room the afternoon
before her eldest son, John Quincy Adams, was born. There was no
nonsense at least about that people; every one had work to do, and no
one, gentle or simple, was above his work.
For years there was a single school in the town, and the teacher was
annually engaged by a vote in the town-meeting.[70] Subsequently his
teaching was divided, the north precinct receiving eight months of his
time and the south four; but this arrangement not proving satisfactory,
the money raised for support of schools was finally divided between
the precincts in proportion to their tax, and they were left to
apply it each in its own way. But for us it is most curious to see
through all these years how small were the expenses of the town and
how large a proportion of the annual tax was applied to education.
In the last century, before the War of Independence destroyed all
measure of value, £120 ($420) of the old tenor, so called, was the
average annual levy, and of this five-sixths went to the support of
the schools. Expenditures on other accounts were necessarily very
small. Until the year 1760 the highways were repaired by the labor
of the people of the town, who, for this purpose appear to have been
equally assessed. As, however, the disparity in wealth became greater
and this burden heavier, the system was changed, and in 1760 every
person paying a poll-tax was called on for a day’s labor, which was
assessed at 2_s._ 1_d._ (35 cents), and those who also paid property
taxes were further called on for as many additional days’ labor as
2_s._ 1_d._ were contained in the amount of their property tax.[71]
The sparsely settled character of the town obviated all necessity of a
fire department, though an entry in the records as early as 1651 gives
a curious glimpse into the habits and dangers of a community before
the blessed invention of lucifer matches. An order was then made by
the selectmen, in consideration of “the great loss and damage that
many & many a time doth fall out in this Towne by fire,” and because
“no effort has been made to restrayne the carringe abroad of fiery
sticks ... in mens hands, which is exceeding dangerous especially when
the wind is high,”--in view of these facts the town fathers, under a
penalty of twenty shillings for each offence, proceeded to forbid any
one between March and November from transporting “any fire from one
place to another than in a pot or other vessell fit for such a purpose
and close covered.”[72] Until the present century, however, this
ordinance seems to have been regarded as sufficient protection against
the dangers of conflagration, thus cutting off that heavy item of
modern town expenses; while, so far as salaries were concerned, volumes
are contained in the following clause with which the vote of 1651,
defining the duties and powers of the selectmen, closed;--“Sixthly--Wee
willingly grant they shall have their Dynners uppon the Towne’s charge
when they meet about the Towns affayres.”[73]
The town government of those days was, indeed, the simplest government
conceivable. There were the clergyman (for parish and town were one),
the school-master, the selectmen, the deputy, the constable and the
pound-keeper. In the earliest days it was even simpler yet than this,
for frequent meetings of the whole town were called. But even then it
was speedily found that this led to abuses,[74] and, in 1651, a system
of two regular town meetings in each year was adopted, and the powers
of the selectmen were specifically defined.[75] The continuous record
of these meetings through more than a century, at once reveals the
slow, unconscious growth of a great political system, and supplies the
amplest evidence of the sameness of a colonial village life. To the
student in the science of government these volumes of the Weymouth
town records are replete with interest. In them the growth of a system
from the root up may be studied. As an observing man turns over the
ill-spelt, almost illegible pages, they grow luminous in their bearing
on many of the most distressing problems of the age. As Gibbon, from
an experience among the yeoman militia of England, derived a certain
comprehension of the legionaries of Rome,--so the early records of
the New England towns make it most manifest to us why the horrors of
1793, and the later excesses of the Commune, are possible in France,
and why nothing other than a republic is now possible in New England.
In these records we see parliamentary institutions stripped of their
non-essentials and reduced to first principles;--we see that the New
England town-meeting democracy was the purest and simplest government
of the people, for the people, which the world has yet produced. Here
is a perfect equality, controlled by an almost iron law of usage.
Year after year every question of common concernment is settled in
general town-meeting by a vote of the majority, after a free and full
discussion, conducted in perfect deference to a rude parliamentary
law. The greater number rules, but the minority ever asserts its
rights, which are always freely conceded. The protests of the _contra
dicentes_ make a part of the records; the final appeal is made to the
courts of law; the idea of an ultimate resort to force is never even
suggested, much less discussed. Thus, through our town records, we are
made to realize that republican government is in New England a product
of the soil and not an exotic,--in France it is a graft; with us it
is the stem. The growth of this germ from the town-meeting to the
General Court, from the General Court to the Continental Congress, and
from that to the Government of the United States, and thence back to
the great cardinal fact of force,--all this is for others to trace.
Meanwhile, here to-day, we stand on a record of two hundred and fifty
years of pure democracy,--the deep, underlying tap-root of whatever is
good in America. And indeed that record relates not to great things. It
tells us of the daily life of our fathers. It deals not with theories,
but with practical issues. The earlier generations did not realize
that they were evolving a system, when they made regulations for the
preservation of the town timber and the use of its common grounds; to
check the roving propensities of its hogs, and to prescribe the liberty
of the rams or the number of the parish bulls. Yet such was the fact,
and the whole developed system of our National Government of to-day may
be read in little in the Weymouth town records of over a century past.
To-day’s jealousy of the foreign producer is there evinced towards
those inhabiting the neighboring towns,--they must not partake of the
privileges of Weymouth. The protective system began with the beginning.
In the earlier days bounties are offered for the ears of wolves, but
later, as the wilderness is subdued, these are dropped from the record
and the crow and the blackbird are proscribed in their place. Now and
again we find the town entering on some system of encouragement to a
new branch of industry, making a grant of land therefor;[76] but the
herring fishery and the passage of the alewives into Great Pond have
left, perhaps, the deepest mark on the town records. The annual passage
of the fish up the Back River was an event in the life of Weymouth,
exciting the liveliest interest in old and young. For this really
great boon the town was indebted to Adam Cushing, one of its prominent
citizens in the provincial times. Mr. Cushing died in the year of the
great sickness, 1751, and seems to have been a truly remarkable man.
About 1730 he bethought himself of bringing some herring, during the
spawning season, over from Taunton River to the Great Pond. He did
so, himself superintending the work of transportation, and seeing to
it that fresh water was properly supplied to the fish. It would seem,
therefore, that through him Weymouth may claim a place of one hundred
and forty years’ standing in the interesting history of pisciculture in
Massachusetts.[77]
These records also reveal to us very clearly what a singularly
conservative race our ancestors were,--in this respect how different
from their children. They clung very close to authority, to tradition
and to precedent. The conditions by which they were surrounded
changed but slowly, and they themselves changed more slowly yet. What
volumes, for instance, in this respect, are contained in this single
fact:--in 1651 the town, in six brief articles, defined the powers of
its selectmen, and more than sixty years later, in 1712, I find the
following entry in the records: “Voted the Selectmen the same power
they had granted in the year 1651.”[78] Again, to cite another example:
Weymouth then, as now, had among its citizens a James Humphrey, and,
under date of March 12th, 1781, I find this entry: “Voted--That the
thanks of the Town be given to the Honᵇˡᵉ James Humphrey Esqʳ. for
his faithful services as a selectman in the Town for more than forty
years past.” Unlike so many of her sister towns, the Weymouth of to-day
has never, even yet, learned enough of the science of true republican
government to “rotate” its town officials. When they have had a man who
was willing to serve them well and faithfully, they have actually kept
him in office. The James Humphrey of the last century served the town
“over forty years”; the James Humphrey of this has already served it
nearly twenty-five.
I do not know if it indeed was so, but to me the very nature of the
New England world seems to have been less cheerful in those earlier
days than now. Not only was life less joyous, but nature wore a
harsher front. I have spoken of the great sickness of 1751, and how
it desolated Weymouth; but epidemics seem to have been far more
prevalent during the last century than in this. The fearful scourge
of the small-pox has left its pit-marks on every page of early New
England history, and when, in 1775, a chronic dysentery prevailed
to such an extent that three, four and even five children were lost
in single families, a Weymouth woman writing from the midst of the
general distress could only say “the dread upon the minds of the
people of catching the distemper is almost as great as if it were the
small-pox.”[79] Yet in 1735 the diphtheria raged, as well as in 1751.
Their winters also seem to have been longer, their snows deeper, their
frosts more severe than ours. In 1717 there was a great snow-storm,
famous in New England annals. The country was buried under huge drifts,
which swept over fences and houses, reducing the whole colony to one
white, glittering desert. Weymouth disappeared with the rest, and the
event was of sufficient importance to cause a memorandum of it to be
inserted in the records.[80] In other years we hear of the harbor
freezing over in November; and on the 26th of March, 1785, the winter’s
snow, though much reduced, lay still on a level with the fences, nor
was it till April 7th that the ice broke up in the Fore River.[81] I
doubt whether any man now living has witnessed a like occurrence.
A severer climate and harsher visitations seem strictly in keeping
with the character of the people. The religious element which led
to the settlement of New England still strongly asserted itself in
the life and customs of the colony. Wealth had hardly yet begun to
exercise its subtle influence upon it. Indeed, though almost all were
prosperous there was little of what can properly be called wealth in
the community, but there was equally little poverty. The people lived
in rude abundance, and I do not believe that during the first hundred
years of the history of Weymouth as many persons received public aid
of the town. Certainly the method of dealing with pauperism, where it
occasionally appears in the records, was primitive in the extreme, and
scarcely commends itself to modern theories.[82] But as a rule there
appears to have been a strikingly equal division of such property
as the people had, which lay almost wholly in their cattle and their
lands; accumulation had scarcely begun.