THE ROMANCE OF WEYMOUTH
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The paintings of John Constable, idyllic in their quietness, dewy in
their serenity--how many travelers, how many lovers of art, superficial
or profound, yearly seek out these paintings in the South Kensington
Museum or the Louvre, and stand before them wrapt in gentle ecstasy?
The quality of Constable's pictures delineates in luminous softness a
peculiarly lovely side of English rural life, but one need not travel to
England or France to see this loveliness. Weymouth, that rambling
stretch of towns and hamlets, of summer colony and suburb, possesses in
certain areas bits of rural landscape as serene, as dewy, as
idyllically tranquil as Constable at his best.
Comparatively few people in New England, or out of it, know Weymouth
well. Every one has heard of it, for it is next in age to the town of
Plymouth itself, and every one who travels to the South Shore passes
some section of it, for it extends lengthily--north and south, east and
west--being the only town in Massachusetts to retain its original
boundaries. And numbers of people are familiar with certain parts of it,
for there are half a score of villages in the township, some of them
summer settlements, some of them animated by an all-the-year-round life.
But compared with the other towns along this historic route, Weymouth as
a whole is little known and little appreciated. And yet the history of
Weymouth is not without amusing and edifying elements, and the scenery
of Weymouth is worthy of the détour that strangers rarely make.
"Old Spain" is the romantic name for an uninteresting part of the
township, and, conversely, Commercial Street is the uninteresting name
for a romantic part. It is along a highway stigmatized by such a name
that one gets the glimpses of a Constable country: glimpses of rolling
meadows, of fertile groves, of cattle grazing in elm-shaded pastures, of
a road winding contentedly among simple, ancient cottages, and quiet,
thrifty farms. These are the homes which belong, and have belonged for
generations, to people who are neither rich nor poor; cozy, quaint,
suggesting in an odd way the thatched-roof cottages of England. Not that
all of Weymouth's homes are of this order. The Asa Webb Cowing house,
which terminates Commercial Street within a stone's throw of the square
of the town of Weymouth, is one of the very finest examples of the
Colonial architecture in this country. The exquisite tracery and carving
over and above the front door, and the white imported marble window
lintels spin an elaborate and marvelously fine lacework of white over
the handsome red-brick façade. Although it is, alas, falling somewhat
into disrepair, perfect proportion and gemlike workmanship still stamp
the venerable mansion as one of patrician heritage. There are other
excellent examples of architecture in Weymouth, but the Cowing house
must always be the star, both because of its extraordinary beauty and
conspicuous position. Yes, if you want a characteristic glimpse of
Weymouth, you cannot do better than to begin in front of this landmark,
and drive down Commercial Street. Here for several smiling miles there
is nothing--no ugly building large or small, no ruthless invasion of
modernity to mar the mood of happy simplicity. Her beauty of beach, of
sky, of river, Weymouth shares with other South Shore towns. Her
perfection of idyllic rusticity is hers alone.
Just as Weymouth's scenery is unlike that of her neighbors, so her
history projects itself from an entirely different angle from theirs.
While they were conceived by zealous, God-fearing men and women honestly
seeking to establish homes in a new country, Weymouth was inadvertently
born through the misconduct of a set of adventurers. Not every one who
came to America in those significant early years came impelled by lofty
motives. There were scapegraces, bad boys, rogues, mercenaries, and
schemers; and perhaps it is entirely logical that the winning natural
loveliness of this place should have lured to her men who were not of
the caliber to face more exposed, less fertile sections, and men to whom
beauty made an especial appeal.
The Indians early found Wessagusset, as they called it, an important
rendezvous, as it was accessible by land and sea, and there were
probably temporary camps there previous to 1620, formed by fishermen and
traders who visited the New England coast to traffic with the natives.
But it was not until the arrival of Thomas Weston in 1622 that
Weymouth's history really begins. And then it begins in a topsy-turvy
way, so unlike Puritan New England that it makes us rub our eyes,
wondering if it is really true.
This Thomas Weston, who was a merchant adventurer of London, took it
into his head to establish a colony in the new country entirely
different from the Plymouth Colony. He had been an agent of the
Pilgrims in their negotiations with the Plymouth Company, and when he
broke off the connection it was to start a settlement which should
combine all of the advantages, with none of the disadvantages, of the
Plymouth Colony. First of all, it was to be a trading community pure and
simple, with its object frankly to make money. Second, it was to be
composed of men without families and familiar with hardship. And third,
there was no religious motive or bond. That such an unidealistic
enterprise should not flourish on American soil is worth noting. The
disorderly, thriftless rabble, picked up from the London streets, soon
got into trouble with the Indians and with neighboring colonists, and
finally, undone by the results of their own improvidence and
misbehavior, wailed that they "wanted to go back to London," to which
end the Plymouth settlers willingly aided them, glad to get them out of
the country. Thus ended the first inauspicious settlement of Weymouth.
The second, which was undertaken shortly after by Robert Gorges, broke
up the following spring, leaving only a few remnants behind. Sir
Ferdinando Gorges, who was not a Spaniard as his name suggests, but a
picturesque Elizabethan and a kinsman of Sir Walter Raleigh, essayed
(through his son Robert) an experimental government along practically
the same commercial lines as had Weston, and his failure was as speedy
and complete as Weston's had been.
A third attempt, while hardly more successful, furnishes one of the
gayest and prettiest episodes in the whole history of New England.
Across the somber procession of earnest-faced men and women, across the
psalm-singing and the praying, across the incredible toil of the
pioneers at Plymouth now flashes the brightly costumed and
pleasure-loving courtier, Thomas Morton. An agent of Gorges, Morton with
thirty followers floated into Wessagusset to found a Royalist and
Episcopalian settlement. This Episcopalian bias was quite enough to
account for Bradford's disparaging description of him as a "kind of
petie-fogie of Furnifells Inn," and explains why the early historians
never made any fuller or more favorable record than absolutely necessary
of these neighbors of theirs, although the churchman Samuel Maverick
admits that Morton was a "gentleman of good qualitee."
But it was for worse sins than his connection with the Established
Church that Morton's name became synonymous with scandal throughout the
whole Colony. In the very midst of the dun-colored atmosphere of
Puritanism, in the very heart of the pious pioneer settlement this
audacious scamp set up, according to Bradford, "a schoole of atheisme,
and his men did quaff strong waters and comport themselves as if they
had anew revived and celebrated the feasts of y^e Roman Goddess Flora,
or the beastly practises of y^e madd Bachanalians." The charge of
atheism in this case seems based on the fact that Morton used the Book
of Common Prayer, but as for the rest, there is no question that this
band of silken merry-makers imported many of the carnival customs and
hereditary pastimes of Old England to the stern young New England; that
they fraternized with the Indians, shared their strong waters with them,
and taught them the use of firearms; and that Merrymount became indeed a
scene of wildest revelry.
The site of Merrymount had originally been selected by Captain Wollaston
for a trading post. Imbued with the same mercenary motive which had
proved fatal in the case of Weston and Gorges, Captain Wollaston, whose
name is perpetuated in Mount Wollaston, brought with him in 1625 a gang
of indented white servants. Finding his system of industry ill suited to
the climate, he carried his men to Virginia, where he sold them. When he
left, Morton took possession of the place and dubbed it "Ma-re-mount."
And then began the pranks which shook the Colony to its foundations.
Picture to yourself a band of sworn triflers, dedicated to the wildest
philosophy of pleasure, teaching bears to dance, playing blind-man's
buff, holding juggling and boxing matches, and dancing. According to
Hawthorne, on the eve of Saint John they felled whole acres of forests
to make bonfires, and crowned themselves with flowers and threw the
blossoms into the flames. At harvest-time they hilariously wasted their
scanty store of Indian corn by making an image with the sheaves, and
wreathing it with the painted garlands of autumn foliage. They crowned
the King of Christmas and bent the knee to the Lord of Misrule! Such
fantastic foolery is inconceivable in a Puritan community, and the
Maypole which was its emblem was the most inconceivable of all. This
"flower-decked abomination," ornamented with white birch bark, banners,
and blossoms, was the center of the tipsy jollity of Merrymount. As
Morton explains: "A goodly pine tree of eighty foote was reared up, with
a peare of bucks horns nayled on somewhere near to the top of it: where
it stood as a faire sea mark for directions how to find out the way to
mine host of Ma-re-mount." Around this famous, or infamous, pole Morton
and his band frolicked with the Indians on May Day in 1627. As the
indignant historian writes: "Unleashed pagans from the purlieus of the
gross court of King James, danced about the Idoll of Merry Mount,
joining hands with the lasses in beaver coats, and singing their ribald
songs."
It doesn't look quite so heinous to us, this Maypole dancing, as it did
to the outraged Puritans. In fact, the story of Morton and Merrymount is
one of the few glistening threads in the somber weaving of those early
days. But the New England soil was not prepared at that time to support
any such exotic, and Myles Standish was sent to disperse the frivolous
band, and to order Morton back to England, which he did, after a
scrimmage which Morton relates with great vivacity and doubtful veracity
in his "New English Canaan."
This "New English Canaan," by the way, had a rather singular career.
Morton tells in it many amusing stories, and one of them was destined to
a remarkable perpetuity in English literature. The story deals with the
Wessagusset settlers promising to hang one of their own members who had
been caught stealing--this hanging in order to appease the Indians.
Morton gravely states that instead of hanging the real culprit, who was
young and lusty, they hanged, in his place, another, old and sick. In
his quaint diction: "You all agree that one must die, and one shall die,
this young man's cloathes we will take off and put upon one that is old
and impotent, a sickly person that cannot escape death, such is the
disease on him confirmed, that die hee must. Put the young man's
cloathes on this man, and let the sick person be hanged in the other's
steade. Amen sayes one, and so sayes many more." This absurd notion of
vicarious atonement, spun purely from Morton's imagination, appealed to
Samuel Butler as worthy of further elaboration. Morton's "New English
Canaan" appeared in 1632. About thirty years later the second part of
the famous English satire "Hudibras" appeared, embodying Morton's idea
in altered but recognizable form, in what was the most popular English
book of the day. This satire, appearing when the reaction against
Puritanism was at its height, was accepted and solemnly deposited at the
door of the good people of Boston and Plymouth! And thus it was that
Morton's fabricated tale of the Weymouth hanging passed into genuine
history along with the "blue laws" of Connecticut. One cannot help
believing that the mischievous perpetrator of the fable laughed up his
sleeve at its result, and one cannot resist the thought that he was
probably delighted to have the scandal attached to those righteous
neighbors of his who had run him out of his dear Ma-re-mount.
However, driven out he was: the Maypole about which the revelers had
danced was hewed down by the stern zealots who believed in dancing about
only one pole, and that the whipping-post. Merrymount was deserted.
Certainly Weymouth, the honey spot which attracted not industrious bees,
but only drones, was having a hard time getting settled! It was not
until the Reverend Joseph Hull received permission from the General
Court to settle here with twenty-one families, from Weymouth, England,
that the town was at last shepherded into the Puritan fold.
These settlers, of good English stock and with the earnest ideals of
pioneers, soon brought the community into good repute, and its
subsequent life was as respectable and uneventful as that of a reformed
_roué_. In fact there is practically no more history for Weymouth. There
are certainly no more raids upon merry-makers; no more calls from the
cricket colony which had sung all summer on the banks of the river to
the ant colony which had providently toiled on the shore of the bay; no
more experimental governments; no more scandal. The men and women of the
next five generations were a poor, hard-working race, rising early and
toiling late. The men worked in the fields, tending the flocks, planting
and gathering the harvest. The women worked in the houses, in the
dairies and kitchens, at the spinning-wheel and washtub. The privations
and loneliness, which are part of every struggling colony, were
augmented here, where the houses did not cluster about the church and
burial ground, but were scattered and far away. This peculiarity of
settlement meant much in days where there was no newspaper, no system of
public transportation, no regular post, and Europe was months removed. A
few of the young men went with the fishing fleet to Cape Sable, or
sailed on trading vessels to the West Indies or Spain, but it is
doubtful if any Weymouth-born woman ever laid eyes on the mother country
during the first hundred and fifty years.
The records of the town are painfully dull. They are taken up by small
domestic matters: the regulations for cattle; running boundary lines,
locating highways, improving the town common, fixing fines for roving
swine or agreeing to the division of a whale found on the shore. There
was more or less bickering over the salary of the town clerk, who was to
receive thirty-three pounds and fourteen shillings yearly to keep "A
free school and teach all children and servants sent him to read and
write and cast accounts."
Added to the isolation and pettiness of town affairs, the winters seem
to have been longer, the snows deeper, the frosts more severe in those
days. We have records of the harbor freezing over in November, and "in
March the winter's snow, though much reduced, still lay on a level with
the fences, nor was it until April that the ice broke up in Fore River."
They were difficult--those days ushered in by the Reverend Joseph Hull.
Through long nights and cold winters and an endless round of joyless
living, Weymouth expiated well for the sins of her youth. Even as late
as 1767 we read of the daughter of Parson Smith, of Weymouth--now the
wife of John Adams, of Quincy--scrubbing the floor of her own
bed-chamber the afternoon before her son--destined to become President
of the United States, as his father was before him--was born.
But the English stock brought in by the Reverend Hull was good stock. We
may not envy the ladies scrubbing their own floors or the men walking to
Boston, but many of the best families of this country are proud to trace
their origin back to Weymouth. Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont; then
New York, Rhode Island, and Connecticut attracted men from Weymouth.
Later the Middle West and the Far West called them. In fact for over a
century the town hardly raised its number of population, so energetic
was the youth it produced.
As happens with lamentable frequency, when Weymouth ceased to be naughty
she also ceased to be interesting. After poring over the dull pages of
the town history, one is sometimes tempted to wonder if, perhaps, the
irreverent Morton did not, for all his sins, divine a deeper meaning in
this spot than the respectable ones who came after him. One cannot read
the "New English Canaan" without regretting a little that this
happy-natured fellow was so unceremoniously bustled out of the country.
Whatever Morton's discrepancies may have been, his response to beauty
was lively and true: whatever his morals, his prose is delightful. All
the town records and memorial addresses of all the good folk subsequent
contain no such tribute to Weymouth, and paint no picture so true of
that which is still best in her, as these loving words of the erstwhile
master of Merrymount.
"And when I had more seriously considered the bewty of the place, with
all her fair endowments, I did not think that in all the knowne world it
could be paralel'd. For so many goodly groves of trees: dainty fine
round rising hillocks: delicate faire large plaines: sweete crystal
fountains, and clear running streams, that twine in fine meanders
through the meads, making so sweet a murmuring noise to heare, as would
even lull the senses with delight asleep, so pleasantly doe they glide
upon the pebble stones, jetting most jocundly where they doe meet; and
hand in hand run down to Neptune's court, to pay the yearly tribute
which they owe to him as soveraigne Lord of all the Springs."
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