Published by The History Press

Charleston, SC 29403

www.historypress.net

Copyright © 2009 by James L. Parr and Kevin A. Swope

All rights reserved

All images courtesy of the Framingham Historical Society and Museum unless otherwise noted.

Cover design by Natasha Momberger

First published 2009

e-book edition 2013

Manufactured in the United States

ISBN 978.1.62584.263.3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Parr, James, 1959-

Framingham legends and lore / James Parr and Kevin A. Swope.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

print edition ISBN 978-1-59629-565-0

1. Framingham (Mass.)--History. 2. Framingham (Mass.)--Biography. I. Swope, Kevin A. II. Title.

F74.F8P37 2008

974.4’4--dc22

2008042659

Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

CONTENTS

Preface: Out of the Muck of the Past

Chapter One. Native Americans and English: Frontier Life in Framingham

Chapter Two. Witches, Pirates and Speculators: Framingham Becomes a Town

Chapter Three. Rebels, Rioters and Spies: Framingham in the American Revolution

Chapter Four. Thunder Sent from Heaven

Chapter Five. Merchants and Abolitionists: Framingham in the Nineteenth Century

Chapter Six. Reform and Recreation: Framingham in the Victorian Era

Chapter Seven. Framingham in the Twentieth Century

Afterword

Bibliography

About the Authors

Preface

OUT OF THE MUCK OF THE PAST

In Woody Allen’s 1983 comedy Zelig, the main character Leonard Zelig possesses an abnormal psychological condition that allows him to transform his unassuming appearance to match the people around him. Zelig uses this unusual ability to enter the inner circle of celebrities and politicians of the 1920s and 1930s and, in mock documentary style, the film chronicles Zelig’s presence in some of the most important events of the time. We see Leonard mugging with Presidents Coolidge and Hoover, carousing with Charlie Chaplin, waiting in the on-deck circle while Babe Ruth takes his turn at the plate and waving frantically behind Hitler as he gives a fiery speech.

Framingham could be said to be the Zelig of American towns: never the main character or setting, but popping up again and again in the background of our nation’s most historic episodes. Casual students of American history are not likely to learn about Framingham’s connection to such events as the Salem witch trials, Boston Massacre, Battle of Bunker Hill, the antislavery movement or World War II. How many daily commuters on Framingham roads passing by the buildings, homes and neighborhoods in town are aware of the roles those sites played in the military, social and industrial history of America?

Only a careful reading of our town’s historical narratives would familiarize one with the visits to Framingham by Paul Revere, John Adams, Henry Knox, Henry David Thoreau, Stephen Douglas, Sojourner Truth, Milton Berle, Bob Hope, Helen Keller, Douglas MacArthur and many others. Patriots, abolitionists, reformers, poets, entertainers, soldiers, inventors and politicians have all come to Framingham, leaving behind a tale that still has the power to fascinate, educate and entertain. Many of these stories, like the treasure believed to lie at the bottom of a Framingham pond, have been buried and forgotten about for many years. Having uncovered these treasures, it is our intent to shine them up and share them with new generations of readers.

We would like to extend our thanks to our colleagues at the Framingham Historical Society and Museum, Dana Dauterman Ricciardi, Jane Whiting, Fred Wallace and Annie Murphy; Saunders Robinson and The History Press for expressing their enthusiastic support for a different kind of history of Framingham; the reference staff at the Framingham Public Library; Arthur B. House Jr. and the staff at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C., for providing a copy of the court-martial record of Lothrop White; Bacson, Inc. of Framingham; Edward P. Barry for his photography; Carl J. Loftesness for sharing his photos and stories of Camp Framingham; John G. Swope; Cara Lawrence; and Vin Cannato.

I would also like to extend my personal gratitude to my wife, Christine, who heard about the whole width and breadth of the history of Framingham without complaint and was always ready to read drafts and offer criticism when warranted; and finally, to my son Andrew, who showed up halfway through the writing of this book and, by being the most perfect baby ever, enabled his dad to finish it (almost) on time.

Kevin A. Swope

Chapter One

NATIVE AMERICANS AND ENGLISH

Frontier Life in Framingham

THE LEGEND OF HOUSE ROCK

A young boy in the 1820s was fascinated by a natural rock formation not far from his father’s house on the Worcester Turnpike in the western end of Framingham. There were two enormous slabs of granite about thirty feet long—one twelve feet high and five feet thick, the other seven feet high and four feet thick—leaning one atop the other at a forty-five-degree angle like the attic story of a house. The interior, five and a half feet tall at its peak, was blackened by countless fires over the years. Even then Native Americans from nearby Natick were known to shelter there for days at a time in the early summer while cutting white ash and walnut trees for use in making baskets. House Rock, as it was known, was just the sort of thing to capture the imagination of a young boy, as he thought of all the Indians who must have stayed there in the time before the English came.

The boy grew up to become the Reverend Josiah H. Temple, author of a history of Framingham published in 1887, when he was seventy-two years old. In that eight-hundred-page work, he devotes a dispassionate paragraph to describing his childhood playground of House Rock. In the absolutely authoritative tone that seemingly only a Victorian historian could muster, he scientifically lists the dimensions of the rock, precisely describing its appearance and suggesting its possible use by the Indians. One thing Temple left out of his scholarly account was its role as inspiration to the twenty-five-year-old author of “The Legend of House Rock,” written in 1840. Perhaps this was an act of modesty on his part, since Temple himself wrote the short story.

The Reverend Josiah H. Temple, the author of “The Legend of House Rock.”

Although clearly by the same man, the earlier work was written in a much more romantic voice. In it the narrator describes a band of Indians who came to House Rock every winter and stayed until the warmer weather arrived. Eventually the band had dwindled down to just one member, an old man named Nehoman. One day while out walking, the narrator encountered the solitary Nehoman, who related the tale of his people. Years earlier, Nehoman and his fellow Nipmuc warriors had attacked a band of Pequot, killing their leader. They waited and waited for the Pequot to exact the revenge for which they were known. But it never came, and the years went by peacefully. One winter while staying at House Rock, the men went out hunting and were forced to travel farther and farther away from their wives and children in order to find food. When they finally returned a month later, they were shocked and saddened to discover that a sickness had swept through the little settlement at House Rock, taking all of the children except one. The lone survivor was a young girl of twelve named Omena. A long, sad winter followed, but as the chilly winds faded and spring began to return to the land, the small group became more hopeful. Omena became a symbol of their survival and their future. She was loved and respected by all the tribe members, and her presence gave them courage and comfort. One day while preparing to depart House Rock for their summer home, Nehoman sent Omena down to the brook to pick some water plants. After a long time had gone by and the young girl had not returned, Nehoman rushed down to the brook, where he saw that his worst fears had been realized. There lay Omena, killed by an arrow, a Pequot bow and tomahawk on the ground next to her—left as a sign that the Pequot had finally gotten their revenge. The Nipmuc buried Omena under a stand of birch trees, and that very night they heard her voice whispering to them to “leave the Rock quickly; it must be our shelter no longer.” At that point, the narrator relates, Nehoman looked as though he would cry, but no tears came. The old warrior then stood up and left House Rock for the last time, never to return.

The actual story of what happened to Framingham’s Native Americans perhaps lacks the poetry of Temple’s story, but it is no less compelling and, in the end, may be just as poignant.

FRAMINGHAM’S FIRST RESIDENTS

The first human inhabitants arrived in what we now know as Framingham as early as 10,000 BCE. While archaeological evidence in the form of stone tools confirms their presence, little else can be definitely said about them. We do know that the area continued to be at least a seasonal home for Native Americans until the beginning of the 1600s. The land proved a rich and nurturing environment—its ponds teemed with eel, its streams with shad and alewife, while its hills provided quartz and quartzite deposits for making tools, its plains supplied rich soil to grow corn and its forests offered game to hunt.

We often think of the first European visitors to New England encountering what was essentially an untamed wilderness. This was not really true. While the tribes that populated the Northeast did not build cities like the Aztec, Maya or Inca civilizations of Central and South America, or even the mound-building societies of the American Midwest, they nonetheless left their own indelible imprint upon the land. This was true of the Native Americans who inhabited Framingham as well.

THE NIPMUC

At the time of first European contact, Framingham was part of the domain of the Nipmuc tribe, sometimes called the Nipnet. Their territory was centered on what is now Worcester County, Massachusetts, but also stretched from northwestern Connecticut to southern Vermont. They cleared fields for agriculture, fashioned weirs to catch fish, constructed forts to protect themselves from other unfriendly tribes, built villages of small huts to house themselves and traveled along an extensive network of trails carved out through the woods over the course of centuries of human habitation.

There were three principal native villages in Framingham. The largest was called Washakamaug, or “eel fishing place.” It was located on the plain between Farm Pond and Lake Waushakum in what is now downtown Framingham. The village is commemorated by a monument on the Park Street Common, the area’s last piece of open space, which at one time served as a native burying ground. A second village was adjacent to the falls at Saxonville. Here natives erected weirs to trap the fish that lived in the Sudbury River. The third encampment was near the shores of Lake Cochituate, where there was once evidence of a fort. Perhaps most significantly, they had carved out a trail through the area—the “Old Connecticut Path”—that linked Massachusetts Bay to the Connecticut River.

The first two villages were located in what have long been the two most densely populated areas of Framingham: downtown and Saxonville. But that should not be surprising. By and large, the same qualities made them attractive places for both natives and Europeans to settle, even if the two societies viewed and employed the land in different ways. In fact, often it was the improvements that the Indians had made to the land that attracted the Europeans. For example, when the Pilgrims arrived in 1620, they settled at Plymouth because it had previously been the site of a native village. It had a natural (if quite shallow) harbor, a high hill for defense and abundant fresh water, but just as importantly, there were fields already cleared for planting, a major consideration given all the other tasks necessary to establish a brand-new colony.

If Plymouth was a desirable place to settle, then why had the natives abandoned it? In the years following 1602, a number of European explorers had visited the New England coast—Bartholomew Gosnold, Martin Pring, Samuel de Champlain and Captain John Smith of Jamestown fame, among others. With them had come diseases to which the Indians had no prior exposure or immunity, and an outbreak of smallpox (or possibly bubonic plague) had greatly reduced their numbers, driving them to consolidate their tribes farther inland.

“Old Field” monument on the Park Street Common, site of Indian village of Washakamaug.

The Nipmuc were still occupying the villages in Framingham in the early 1630s when they traded much-needed corn to the newly established Massachusetts Bay Colony in Boston. Between 1633 and 1635, an outbreak of smallpox greatly reduced the number of natives in the Connecticut River Valley in central New England and led to an incursion of Mohawks from northern New York. The Nipmuc began paying tribute to the Mohawk, and retreated farther inland when the Pequot War between the colonists and the natives of southeastern Connecticut broke out in 1636, abandoning their encampments in Framingham and elsewhere in eastern Massachusetts.

So when John Stone’s family became the first English to settle within the bounds of present-day Framingham about 1647, they encountered not thriving villages of Nipmuc, but a few scattered and desultory native inhabitants. Indeed, the Stones settled near the falls at Saxonville, adjacent to the site of one of the abandoned Nipmuc villages.

JOHN AWASSAMOG, OLD JETHRO, OLD JACOB, CAPTAIN TOM AND NETUS

From the 1640s to the 1670s, as the first few families from the Massachusetts Bay Colony established homesteads in Framingham, there still was an Indian presence in the area, however reduced. Wuttawushan was a Nipmuc chief who traded with the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1621 and whose tribe made seasonal use of the Washakamaug village site in South Framingham. (The spelling of English names in the 1600s was not yet standardized, so it should go without saying that English renderings of Indian names can have widely varying spellings and pronunciations. We will try to stick to the most common spelling for the sake of clarity.) When he died, control of those lands passed to his nephew, John Awassamog. Awassamog continued to visit the area and received assistance in his old age from at least one of the white families, as evidenced by the deed in which his son Thomas surrendered his claim to the Eames family in the 1680s.

Other natives also continued to reside in the area. The family of Tantamous, or “Old Jethro” as he was commonly called among the English, lived on the east side of Nobscot Mountain in north Framingham. Like other Nipmuc, he was accustomed to a life of seasonal migration, and it was only late in life that he came to adopt a settled life more like that of the English settlers. Long after his death there continued to be a Jethro’s Meadow and Jethro’s Orchard east of Nobscot, and the remains of his cellar hole and granary could be seen as late as the 1880s.

It would be impossible to write about Native Americans in Framingham without mentioning Reverend John Eliot, “the Apostle to the Indians.” Eliot dreamed of converting the natives to Christianity and integrating them into English colonial society. He met resistance both from Indians who had no wish to join an alien culture as well as from settlers who were unwilling to recognize the natives as equals. Eliot established Natick, just to the east of present-day Framingham, as a town for “praying Indians,” as the native converts were often called. Included in these lands was much of what constitutes downtown Framingham today, east of Farm Pond and Mount Wayte, stretching north along the east bank of the Sudbury River to just south of Saxonville and Cochituate Brook.

One of Eliot’s earliest converts in 1646 was Aponapawquin, or “Old Jacob.” He lived on the Natick lands on a hill still called Indian Head, today a quiet residential neighborhood to the east of Prospect Street and north of Route 9 in Framingham. He also lent his name to Jacob’s Meadow, just to the east of the hill, now similarly covered by tidy lawns and comfortable houses. He later removed to the seventh praying Indian village established by Eliot, Magunkook, located on what today is the Ashland/Hopkinton town line. Another convert was Peter Jethro, the son of Old Jethro.

The most prominent of the Natick Indians was Wuttasacomponum, or “Captain Tom.” He was so well regarded by his English neighbors that he was commissioned an officer by the colonial government and commanded a regiment of Indian soldiers. In 1674, he moved west to the new village of Hassanamesit, in present-day Grafton. Almost equally at ease in white society was Netus, sometimes called William of Sudbury. Netus was a landholder in Sudbury, attended Reverend Edmund Browne’s church there and sent a son to be educated at Cambridge in preparation for college. This was not a wholly positive experience, however. He had understood that the costs of his son’s education would be borne by the Society for Propagating the Gospel in New England, a British organization dedicated to Christianizing the Indians. But when it failed to pay for the boy’s expenses, Elijah Corlett, the teacher, sued Netus and received title to three hundred acres in Grafton as compensation. Netus later settled in Natick.

It would be a mistake to overly romanticize this period in Indian-English relations. The overall trend was marked by a receding native population and a burgeoning white one, with settlers pushing steadily inland. Treaties and deals negotiated between the societies were inevitably conducted on European rather than native terms and therefore led to the ultimate benefit of the settlers. However warily they regarded one another, they did at least attempt to accommodate each other, if it was at times an uneasy peace. Yet even an uneasy peace was preferable to the devastation of war, as both sides were soon to learn.

KING PHILIP’S WAR

King Philip’s War, the most destructive of all the conflicts between the English settlers and natives, broke out in 1675. It shattered the nearly forty years of peace that had endured since the close of the Pequot War of 1636–37. It originated in the continuing friction between Philip, sachem of the Pokanoket of the Mount Hope peninsula in Rhode Island, and the leaders of the Plymouth Colony. Philip’s father was the sachem Massasoit, who is renowned for having aided the Pilgrims during their difficult early years in America. While in Massasoit’s time the alliance helped the Pokanoket and their Wampanoag allies fend off their more powerful Narragansett neighbors, by the 1670s the expansion of Plymouth into new towns closer and closer to Mount Hope meant that the white settlers posed an increasingly greater threat to Philip’s domain.

The long-simmering conflict erupted into open warfare with the Pokanoket raid on the town of Swansea on June 20, 1675. While deeply troubling, there was no reason for the few white families living in what is now Framingham to believe they would be directly affected. The area was in the Massachusetts Bay (not Plymouth) Colony, and the local natives were Nipmuc, not Pokanoket or Wampanoag, and most of them were Christian converts.

By midsummer, the forces dispatched from Plymouth successfully drove Philip and his allies out of southeastern Massachusetts, but they failed to capture him. More important, their efforts to intimidate neighboring tribes into remaining neutral had the opposite effect of pushing them into open alliance with Philip. The Narragansett began wreaking havoc on Providence in the Rhode Island Colony while, even more troubling, on July 14, 1675, the Nipmuc attacked Mendon in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

THE TRAGEDY OF THE PRAYING INDIANS

Any doubts as to which side the Nipmuc favored were answered in August 1675, when they ambushed an English expedition that sought to negotiate a treaty of neutrality with them and allowed Philip and his followers safe refuge at their village at Menameset (near New Braintree, Massachusetts). This put the natives settled in and around Framingham in an awkward position, to say the least. Most of them were Christian converts, and all lived alongside if not actively participated in white society. Yet their brethren had declared war upon that society. As a result, they were trusted by neither side.

So what happened to the Indians we met earlier in the chapter? John Awassamog, aged by this time, seems to have had the good sense or good fortune not to become ensnared in the conflict, probably staying with his son Thomas in the vicinity of Sherborn. The same could not be said of Old Jethro, Old Jacob, Captain Tom and Netus.

When the English settlement of Lancaster, eighteen miles to the north, was attacked on August 22, 1675, the praying Indians of Magunkook were suspected, and the village was seized by the English a week later. At their trial, the natives were able to prove their innocence by producing witnesses who testified that they had in fact attended Sunday meeting at Marlborough that day. Nonetheless, the village lay abandoned as some Indians remained imprisoned and others were relocated to Deer Island in Boston Harbor to keep them out of further trouble, while most (probably including Old Jacob) joined their neighbors at Natick. Old Jethro, though not a Christian, had decided to demonstrate his loyalty to the English by moving from his home on Nobscot Mountain to within the bounds of the praying Indian town of Natick.

During the autumn of 1675, King Philip’s War raged from Rhode Island to the Connecticut Valley to the frontier of Maine, but the vicinity of Framingham remained relatively quiet after the raid on Lancaster that August. At first the colonial government sought to isolate the praying Indians from their Nipmuc compatriots by forbidding them to leave Natick, whether to hunt game in the forests or harvest corn planted outside the borders of the town. This represented a considerable hardship, as their numbers had swelled with refugees from Magunkook. But to the Massachusetts Bay authorities, the mere continued existence nearby of such a large settlement of natives, Christian converts or not, represented a powder keg that could be ignited at any time.

On October 26, a detachment of soldiers from Cambridge swept through Natick to forcibly relocate all the natives to Deer Island. No provision of housing or food stores had been made for them there, although it was already the eve of a New England winter. Feeling betrayed by their fellow Christians, a number of natives whose only crime was to be Indian chose instead to take their chances with the Nipmuc and fled to the west, including Old Jacob, Old Jethro, his son Peter and Netus. Captain Tom also reluctantly joined the warring Nipmuc when a party of warriors arrived at Hassanamesit on November 1, gave the converts there the choice of joining with them or being attacked and told them of the fate of their friends at Natick.

The Indians interned on Deer Island suffered much that winter, but the disruptions and dislocations of war brought privations upon those natives who had fled Natick as well. On February 1, 1676, Netus assembled a party of about a dozen warriors (including Old Jacob) to retrieve the stores of corn from the abandoned village of Magunkook. But the granaries were empty. Suspecting the town had been pilfered by the English and unwilling to return empty-handed, Netus urged the party to continue three miles eastward on the path to the nearest white settlement to look for the missing corn. As they climbed the rise of Mount Wayte, they spotted two English children at the well a short distance from the Eames house.

THE EAMES FARM AT MOUNT WAYTE

According to historian Stephen Herring, there were probably no more than seven English families settled within the bounds of present-day Framingham on the eve of King Philip’s War. There were the Stones and their relatives who had long been established at what is now Saxonville; a little farther south were the Bent and Rice families not far from the ruins of the old Nipmuc village on the western shores of Lake Cochituate, the Bradish family at Nobscot and the Thomas Eames family on the southern slope of Mount Wayte. While the other families were clustered relatively close to each other, the Eames farm stood over three miles distant to the southwest. As Framingham had yet to be incorporated, the Eames family did not even think of themselves as living in the same town as the other settlers. All the other families attended Sunday services at the meetinghouse in Sudbury (located within present-day Wayland), but the Eameses traveled instead to Sherborn.

Thomas Eames had been born in England about 1618 and had come to the Massachusetts Bay Colony by 1636, when he served in the Pequot War, married a woman named Margaret and settled in Dedham by 1640. He resided in Medford from 1652 to 1659, and was living in Cambridge by the time he married his second wife, the widow Mary (Blandford) Paddleford, about 1662. Two years later they removed to Sudbury, where Mary’s father had been among the original settlers, and leased the “Pelham farm” in what is now Wayland. In 1668, Thomas Eames, fifty years old and “maimed in his limbs,” appealed to the government of Massachusetts Bay to grant him land for his service in the Pequot War as a youth. The colony did not grant him his request, but his petition caught the attention of Deputy Governor Thomas Danforth, who agreed to let Eames settle on part of his vast acreage at Framingham. By 1670, Thomas Eames set about building a homestead on Danforth’s land on Mount Wayte.

Thomas Eames’s 1668 petition that brought him to the attention of Deputy Governor Thomas Danforth.

Eames may have sought protection for his farm even before the Nipmuc raid on Mendon, as the council at Boston had sent four soldiers to be quartered at Framingham by July 22, 1675. On that date, two of the guards were reassigned to the Reverend Browne’s house at Sudbury. Thomas Eames, already ineligible for the militia due to disability, further petitioned the council to prevent his horses, which he required to ensure his own family’s safety, from being pressed into military service by the towns of Marlborough or Sudbury on the occasions when he and his family traveled there. “Divine providence having cast my lot in a place both remote from neighbors in the woods,” wrote Eames of his farm’s vulnerable position, “and in a place of no small danger in this day of trouble, when God hath so signally let loose the heathens against his people everywhere.” Yet when the fall and early winter brought no new attacks on the region, the council at Boston, already struggling to pay for the war, decided to withdraw the soldiers altogether.

In late January came word from two praying Indians who had returned from infiltrating the Nipmuc at Menameset that the English towns of Lancaster, Groton, Marlborough, Sudbury and Medfield were liable to be attacked in the coming weeks. This news is probably what spurred Thomas Eames to travel to Boston to seek ammunition and further assistance for himself and other nearby settlers. He was still in Boston on February 1, when Netus and his party arrived at Mount Wayte looking for the missing corn from Magunkook.

THE EAMES MASSACRE

Netus’s party seized the two Eames children at the well so that they would not alarm the others. Wannuckhow, also called William Jackstraw, one of the Magunkook Indians, later testified that he stayed back in the fields, probably guarding the two children, as the rest of the warriors approached the house. Inside, Thomas’s wife, Mary (Blandford) (Paddleford) Eames, a woman in her mid-forties, was engaged in the manufacture of soap at the hearth. We shall never know whether Netus intended merely to subdue the family while his band took corn and other provisions, or to take the family prisoner for possible ransom. All we know is that Mary Eames was determined not to be taken without a fight and threw the cauldron of boiling lye at her attackers, then tried to fight them off with whatever implements she had beside her in the kitchen. The enraged warriors killed her, along with several of her children. William Jackstraw’s sons Joseph and John later testified that they convinced Netus and Annecoeken, the two who had done the actual killing, to take the remainder prisoner, thus saving the lives of some of the children. Joseph further stated that he carried one of the Eames sons on his back. (How much credence one accords this testimony is open to conjecture, as it was given in a failed attempt to gain clemency for the three Jackstraws.) The warriors burned the house and barns, slaughtered the livestock and destroyed whatever stores they were unable to carry off with them.

Thomas Eames inventoried his loss as £330.012.00, a substantial sum for the time:

“An Inventory of the loss of Thomas Eames, when his house was fired by Indians at Framingham near unto Sudbury in the county of Middlesex, the first of February 1675–6.”

Imprimis—A wife and nine children.

Item—A house 34 feet long, double floores and garret, and cellar, and a barn 52 foot long, leantir’d one side and two ends

100.00.00

It. 4 oxen

024.00.00

It. 7 cows fair with calf

028.00.00

It. 2 yearlings

003.00.00

It. 1 bull

002.00.00

It. 2 heifers fair with calf

006.00.00

It. 1 heifer

002.00.00

It. 8 sheep fair with lamb

003.12.00

It. 30 loads of hay in ye barn at 8s. per load

012.00.00

It. 10 bush. wheate at 6s. p. bush.

003.00.00

It. 40 bush. rye at 4s. 8d. p. bush.

008.00.00

It. 210 bush. of indian at 3s. p. bush.

031.00.00

It. Hemp and flax in ye barn

001.00.00

It. Fire arms with other arms and ammunition

006.00.00

It. Butter 20s., cheese 40s., 2 barrels and a half of Pork and 4 flitches of bacon

013.00.00

It. Carpenter’s and joyner’s tooles

005.00.00

It. 2 great spinning wheels and 2 small wheels 4s. 4s. for cards

001.00.00

It. 6 beds 3 of them feather beds and 3 flock, 6 rugs, 12 blankets

012.00.00

It. 1 chest of lynen, with ye sheets and shifts

010.00.00

It. A livery cupboard with what was in it

002.00.00

It. My wife’s linen and wearing apparel, and children’s clothing, and my own cloathing, with cloathing that was my former wife’s

025.00.00

It. Pewter, brasse, and Iron ware

014.00.00

It. Churns, and other dairy vessels, with other wooden lumber

005.00.00

_______

Total

330.012.00

The accounts of that day are fragmentary and contradictory. Having said that, the nine children most likely at the Eames farm along with their ages and probable fates were: Mary Eames (age thirty, killed); Zachariah Paddleford (age eighteen, captured and escaped); Edward Paddleford (age fifteen, killed); Thomas Eames Jr. (age twelve, killed); Samuel Eames (age eleven, captured and escaped); Margaret (age nine, captured and ransomed); Nathaniel (age seven, captured and escaped); and Sarah (age five) and Lydia Eames (age three), one of whom was killed and the other captured and never redeemed. Mary was the daughter of Thomas Eames’s first marriage and Zachariah and Edward Paddleford were the children of Mary (Blandford Paddleford) Eames’s first marriage to Jonathan Paddleford of Cambridge, while the six youngest were the children of both Thomas and Mary. One particularly disturbing aspect of the whole incident was that the warriors and their victims were almost certainly well known to each other. They had lived in proximity prior to the war, and Netus had attended Sunday meeting at Sudbury with the Eameses’ closest white neighbors, the Stones, Rices and Bents. By not killing all the children, the natives ensured the survivors would later be able to identify their attackers.

Nineteenth-century engraving depicting the Eames massacre.

One contemporary account mentions the wife of one of Thomas Eames’s sons dying the day after the attack. This actually may have been Thomas’s unmarried daughter Mary—it is possible she had been scalped and left for dead, only to survive for one more agonizing day. We do know that one of the sons was with the band of Nipmuc who attacked Sudbury on April 21, 1676. Samuel Eames escaped his captors, traveling across unfamiliar territory in the direction of the rising sun. On May 12, he came across plantains, an herb called “English Foot” by the natives because it was cultivated by settlers and did not grow wild, and realized he had arrived in the vicinity of an English settlement. Two days later, Margaret and either Sarah or Lydia Eames were seen at a native camp at Turner’s Falls, Massachusetts; by June they were reported “at a great hill about middle way between Wachusett and Pennacook [Concord, New Hampshire].” Zachariah Paddleford had escaped by August 24, 1676, when he was listed as a soldier on the rolls of Captain Joseph Syll’s company dispatched to fight the natives in western Massachusetts. Nathaniel also seems to have escaped, possibly in company with Zachariah. Margaret was eventually ransomed back from Indians in French Canada, a not uncommon occurrence, and reportedly later married one of the men who had participated in the expedition to redeem her. It is said that the youngest captive daughter remained with the tribe that took her in, content to continue living the only life she could remember. This was known to have happened in other instances and is entirely possible.

TWILIGHT OF THE INDIANS

In the months following the attack on the Eames farm, the Indians seemed to grow bolder. On February 10, 1676, they attacked Lancaster and forced the abandonment of that town. The Nipmuc and Narragansett attacked Medfield eleven days later. Marlborough was attacked on March 16 and again on March 26, destroying much of the town. Perhaps the most impressive native victory was at Sudbury on April 21, the assault witnessed by one of the Eames boys, where the main English force had been routed. By the beginning of summer, eleven English towns had been abandoned altogether, including Lancaster and Groton, while Marlborough was maintained solely as a military base.

In truth, the natives were rapidly losing their ability to continue with the conflict. They had smaller populations, were less able to withstand the losses from combat and lacked the infrastructure to maintain large bands of warriors in the field for indefinite periods of time. Quite simply, food was running out. They also learned that when they withdrew farther inland away from the English, other tribes were ready to pounce on their newly vulnerable positions. King Philip himself discovered this when his band of warriors was set upon by the Mohawks near Albany, New York. By June, after a year of fighting, many of the tribes were looking to cut a deal with the settlers.

One by one, the Framingham Indians died or fell into the hands of the English. Netus died in the second attack on Marlborough in March; his cohort Annecoeken was killed shortly thereafter. On June 9, an English expedition sweeping through the hills west of Natick yielded Captain Tom, captured on the hill on the border between Natick and Framingham that still bears his name. (Today, somewhat more prosaically, it is the site of a Jordan’s Furniture store.) Tom was said to be relieved to be back in the company of the English, but his captors were skeptical of his story that he had joined the Nipmuc only under duress. So it was on June 19, 1676, that a man who was once so trusted by the government of Massachusetts Bay that he was commissioned a captain in the militia was condemned to death by that same authority. The Reverend John Eliot thought it a grave miscarriage of justice and spent the final day praying with his old Indian friend. Captain Tom was hanged at Boston on June 22, 1676, alongside another Natick Indian, John Auttuck, the probable ancestor of Crispus Attucks, whom we shall meet in a later chapter.

On July 25, 1676, a party of 180 Nipmuc who had sued for peace surrendered to the colonial authorities at Boston, including Old Jacob and probably all three Jackstraws. Perhaps on the basis of testimony by the newly returned Zachariah Paddleford, the eldest of the captive Eames children, warrants were issued for the arrest of Joshua Assatt, John Dublet (a son-in-law of Old Jacob) and the Jackstraw father and sons. The three Jackstraws were brought in for interrogation before magistrate Thomas Danforth in August. Danforth’s interest in the case went beyond his official capacity—as the owner of the land at Mount Wayte, it was he who had encouraged the Eames family to settle there in the first place. (Danforth had also lost a son, Thomas Jr., at the Great Swamp Fight with the Narragansett in December 1675.) In any event, the Jackstraws’ pleas that their actions had in effect spared the lives of some of the Eames children fell on deaf ears. Three natives, presumably the Jackstraws (although the record does not explicitly name them), were executed for the crime on September 21, 1676. Netus’s widow was sold into slavery, but it is unknown whether any of the other assailants were ever tried for their crimes.

We do know that at least two of Netus’s party were eventually pardoned. Joshua Assatt served as a scout for the English in their campaigns against the Indians in western Massachusetts and presumably earned his pardon through loyal service. Old Jacob, the former resident of Indian Head, also was spared, although the reason is not known.

Peter Jethro also survived the war, serving as a double agent for the English. On September 1, 1676, he convinced a large party of natives to surrender at Cocheco (now Dover), New Hampshire, with a false promise of amnesty. Among those so duped were his own father, Old Jethro, who was executed that same month, and the rest of his family (excepting Peter), who were sold into slavery. Peter Jethro was still living at Natick as late as 1688.

The war in Massachusetts wound down shortly after King Philip himself was killed in August 1676, although the conflict in Maine continued to drag on until the Treaty of Casco was signed a year later.

NATIVE AMERICAN LEGACY IN FRAMINGHAM

King Philip’s War had a tremendous influence on the future course of Framingham. Thomas Eames died in 1681, fewer than five years after the massacre. But he had already secured a huge grant of land from the Natick Indians in compensation for his losses. The property included virtually all of present-day Framingham east of Farm Pond and Mount Wayte, south of the old Musterfield and north of Route 135. By 1678, he and his surviving sons had returned to Framingham and built their houses and farms on this new property. Ironically, the massacre had ensured that the name of Eames would remain a common one in the town for the next two hundred years.

The war all but ended any native presence within the future bounds of Framingham itself. The native village at Magunkook was never resettled, and the land was eventually leased to the proprietors of a new English town named Hopkinton. Although greatly reduced in number by the war and their winter of hardship at Deer Island, the Natick Indians did return to their homes. Among those who lived at Natick were two of Netus’s warriors, Old Jacob and John Assatt, whose presence so nearby never ceased to anger and torment the surviving members of the Eames family. The number of natives dwindled over the years, and they lost their most powerful advocate when Reverend Eliot died in 1690. Natick remained an Indian town until 1762, when whites took over its governance, although much of the land remained in trust for the natives for quite some time afterward.

Eames massacre monument placed on Mount Wayte by the descendants of Thomas Eames.

Framingham’s native inhabitants may be gone, but they are not forgotten. They remain alive in the names of Captain Tom’s Hill, Indian Head, Lake Waushakem, Lake Cochituate and others. They are inextricably a vital part of the town’s history; their presence did much to influence the future bounds, settlement and development of Framingham, both directly and indirectly.

What of House Rock itself? The site where it and the grove of birch trees that Josiah Temple said marked Omena’s final resting place once stood is now the property of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, consumed in the construction of Exit 12 fifty years ago. But House Rock itself had ceased to exist before Temple had even penned his story—his neighbor Jonas Clayes saw that the two enormous slabs of granite were perfect for fashioning into millstones.

Chapter Two

WITCHES, PIRATES AND SPECULATORS

Framingham Becomes a Town

SETTLERS AND SPECULATORS

The story of the English settlement of Framingham is that of settlers and speculators. With only a couple of exceptions, these were by and large two entirely distinct and separate groups. The people who were awarded grants of land generally did not live in Framingham, nor did they intend to. Some of them may have never even set foot inside the bounds of the future town. Ownership of land was the most tangible sign of wealth in a rapidly growing colony. The trick was to get in early before a township was settled, but not so early that one would have a large amount of capital tied up in land that no one would be interested in living on (or, more important, buying or at least leasing) for decades. Then as now, the real estate market could be cyclical, liable to periods of both boom and bust.

In Stephen Herring’s memorable phrase, Framingham was “the hole in the center of the doughnut.” Most of the surrounding towns had been settled and incorporated beforehand: Concord (1635), Dedham (1636), Sudbury (1639), Natick (an Indian town, 1650), Marlborough (1660) and Sherborn (1674). The outbreak of the English Civil War in the 1640s marked the end of the “Great Migration” of Puritans to New England. Thereafter, growth in the Massachusetts Bay and other colonies would have to come about through natural population increase rather than mass emigration of new settlers from England. This natural population growth was significant—New England’s comparatively healthy climate, agricultural economy and ready supply of new land meant that its citizens lived longer than elsewhere in the British Empire and had large families with significant numbers of children surviving to adulthood. As these children started families of their own, they pressed out to the frontiers in search of land to farm. But time was needed for the children of the immigrants of the 1620s–1640s to reach adulthood, which explains why there was a relative pause in the settlement of new towns after the flurry created before 1650.

Establishing land ownership was not always straightforward, even after one had been granted land. Since the new land grants were inevitably on the unsettled frontier, the authority making the land grants usually had not actually seen, never mind surveyed, the land in question. So there were often overlapping claims, defined by nonsensical, contradictory or nonexistent physical features, depending how accurately the area had been mapped, if at all. (The most extreme example of this phenomenon was the colonial governments of New York and New Hampshire each granting land in what is now Vermont.) Furthermore, there were often claims by Native Americans to the area. Sometimes it took decades of lawsuits before the courts finally sorted out who owned what.

One way to protect one’s claim to the land was to buy out anyone with a competing claim, however legitimate or dubious that claim might be. We find in the Middlesex County records quitclaim deeds from various Indians in the 1680s surrendering their claims to Thomas Danforth, even though he had already been granted the land twenty years earlier by the colonial government of Massachusetts Bay.

THE GRANTEES OF FRAMINGHAM

The landholders had various motives for acquiring their respective land grants. Some turned around and immediately sold off the property for ready cash, some sought to rent out the land short-term while waiting for the value of the property to increase, while others sat on their grants for years without acting on them.

The first grantee was Mrs. Elizabeth Glover, widow of the Reverend Josse Glover, who had died at sea en route to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1639. Her six hundred acres, granted in 1640, were located at the extreme northeast corner of present-day Framingham, while the adjacent six hundred acres granted at the same time to her soon-to-be second husband are now part of Wayland. This second husband was Henry Dunster, first president of Harvard College, who leased and then sold his land to Edmund Rice, founder of that name in the region. (Rice received his own grant in 1652 nearby in Framingham, settled by his descendants and known as “Rice’s End” for many years.)

If Glover’s grant was presumably intended as a form of death benefit for losing her pastor husband before even reaching New England, the Dunster grant was more characteristic—a form of payment for services rendered to the colony. For example, Thomas Mayhew was granted land in Framingham in 1643 as payment for building a bridge in Watertown. Evidently neither he nor his heirs were particularly excited about the land, as it was not formally laid out until 1714. (By that time most of Framingham had already been claimed, so Mayhew’s grant formed an odd panhandle to the west that was absorbed into Southborough upon its creation in 1727.)

Others who received land in Framingham for services rendered were the Reverend Edmund Browne of Sudbury, who was granted a meadow in 1654; Richard Russell, who was granted five hundred acres in South Framingham in 1657 in consideration of his role as the colony’s treasurer; Elijah Corlett, the Cambridge schoolmaster who had previously sued Netus, received two hundred acres in 1659; and Colonel William Crowne, who received five hundred acres in 1662 for his work lobbying on behalf of the colony in England. In 1658, Richard Wayte was granted three hundred acres in compensation for his service in the war against the Pequot more than twenty years earlier. He only held the land for the few years it took to have it laid out and sold, but the hill he owned still bears his name today—Mount Wayte.

Except for the Rices, none of the above grantees ever resided in Framingham. Some of them, such as Corlett, sold out directly to the Stone family, the first English settlers of Framingham, who resided at “Stone’s End,” or present-day Saxonville. Most of the other property eventually wound up in the hands of the largest grantee, the deputy governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Thomas Danforth, about whom we shall learn more later.

GOOKIN AND HOW’S PURCHASE

As we saw in the previous chapter, a large portion of contemporary Framingham east of the Sudbury River was originally part of the domain of the Natick Indians. About 35 percent of this land was granted to the Eames family in 1677 in the wake of their losses in King Philip’s War. The remainder was bought from the Indians in 1682 by partners Samuel Gookin of Cambridge and Samuel How of Sudbury.

There are a couple of aspects of this transaction that might cause the modern observer to arch an eyebrow. Samuel Gookin’s father was Major General Daniel Gookin, Indian commissioner of Massachusetts Bay. The elder Gookin was an associate of the Reverend John Eliot and acted as a sort of trustee for the Natick Indians. That his son was buying land from the natives whose interests he was bound to protect might be said in the very least to raise the appearance of a conflict of interest, if not outright charges of an insider deal. Furthermore, although the boundaries were ill-defined, the original purchase was said to encompass about 200 acres. But in a court ruling in 1695, Gookin and How were awarded a total of 1,700 acres in acknowledgement of the vague description of the bounds of the original tract and the numerous payments Gookin and How had made to the Natick Indians over the years, effectively subsidizing them. (The Native Americans could have actually done worse—Gookin and How were denied an additional 1,000 acres they sought east of the Eames family’s land; otherwise the Natick Mall and other northwestern portions of that town might today stand in Framingham.)

THOMAS DANFORTH, FATHER OF FRAMINGHAM

Thomas Danforth was baptized at Framlingham, England, on November 20, 1623, the fourth of seven children of Nicholas and Elizabeth Danforth. Elizabeth died in 1629, and in 1634 Nicholas sailed with his children to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They settled in Cambridge and he bought out the holdings of several neighbors who were departing to found Hartford, Connecticut. Almost as soon as he had arrived, Nicholas became one of the proprietors of the town and a member of the colony’s general court. Nicholas only lived a few short years in New England, dying in April 1638, age forty-nine years.

He had been wealthy enough that all his orphaned children were well provided for. Thomas, the eldest son, naturally took over his father’s business interests. He became a freeman (voter) of Cambridge when he was still only nineteen years old and married Mary Withington on February 23, 1644. He quickly achieved prominence, serving as treasurer of Harvard College from 1650 to 1669 and steward of the college until 1682. Like his father, he became a representative to the general court in 1657 and then became one of the governor’s assistants and magistrate from 1659 to 1679, at which point he became deputy governor of the colony, a position he held, with a brief interruption, until 1692.

Shortly after he became an assistant, Danforth acquired a grant of 250 acres of land in Framingham. How he first became interested in the area is unknown. His younger brother Samuel had been a member of the second graduating class at Harvard College in 1643 and had followed the wish of their late mother that he enter the ministry. He was ordained an assistant to the Reverend John Eliot at Roxbury in 1650 and remained at that post until he died in 1674. Through his brother Samuel, Thomas Danforth would have known all about Eliot’s work with the Indian converts at Natick, so perhaps that is what drew his interest.

Two years later, in 1662, an additional two hundred acres were laid out. At the same time, Danforth exercised his right to purchase an additional ten pounds’ worth of land. Ten pounds was not a huge sum, even in 1662, but in this case it was enough to purchase virtually the entirety of what is now Framingham that lies west of the Sudbury River, plus a portion of northern Ashland. In all, it amounted to some fourteen thousand acres. Shortly afterward, he bought out Richard Wayte, adding an additional three hundred acres, including Mount Wayte, and Richard Russell’s five hundred acres as well.

Soon after his acquisition of the properties, the area became known as Danforth’s Farms, and that name and the year 1662 remain emblazoned on the town seal to this day. Perhaps in an act of modesty, by the 1670s Danforth had begun to refer to the settlement as “Framlingham,” named after the town of his birth in England. (Almost immediately the “l” was dropped from the spelling, following the common American practice of changing the spelling to represent more accurately how a word was pronounced.) If the earlier grantees had received plots of land roughly the proportions of a good-sized farm, Danforth’s holdings now virtually added up to an entire township. And that is precisely what he had in mind.

JOSEPH BRADISH, FRAMINGHAM PIRATE

Danforth’s dream of the town of Framingham was remarkably slow in arriving—ten years after his land purchases, only two additional families had moved to the area. One was the Eames family, whom we met in the previous chapter; the second was the Bradish family. Joseph and Mary Bradish had moved from Sudbury to the north side of Nobscot Mountain, not far from the home of the Indian Old Jethro, by 1672. The outbreak of King Philip’s War three years later was probably what prompted the family to move to the safer confines of Cambridge, although they eventually returned to live in Sudbury. They inhabited Framingham long enough for a son, Joseph Jr., to be born here in December 1672. (Incidentally, the document reporting his birth to Middlesex County, along with those of several of the Eames children, is the only known official use of the British “Framlingham” spelling.)

Not much is known of the younger Joseph’s youth except that he went to sea. He was a boatswain’s mate on the four-hundred-ton, twenty-one-gun, armed merchant ship Adventure that left London, England, bound for Borneo in March 1698. Six months later, after rounding the Cape of Good Hope, the ship stopped for water at an island in the Indian Ocean. While most of the officers were ashore, the crew mutinied and set sail, choosing Bradish (not yet twenty-six years old) as captain. They decided to split among themselves all the money, jewels and goods the ship carried for trade, and headed for Bradish’s home waters of New England. In March 1699, they landed at Montauk, Long Island, whose inhabitants were widely known to be not above trading with pirates. There Bradish stashed his share of jewels for safekeeping while he hired a coastal pilot and headed for Block Island. The Adventure was much too large and conspicuous a ship to go unnoticed for long. When the first party he sent to Newport to buy a smaller sloop was imprisoned by suspicious authorities there, Bradish managed to bribe a passing coastal trader for use of his vessel, and the Adventure’s crew scuttled it and scattered with their share of the cargo to various southern New England ports.

Most of the pirates were eventually captured and the cargo recovered. Bradish himself was apprehended in Deerfield, Massachusetts, perhaps hoping that if he headed inland and made for the frontier he could escape his notoriety. On April 8, 1699, he and one of his companions were thrown into the jail at Boston, waiting for the local authorities to consult with the royal government back in London about what should be done with them.

Some accounts state that the Boston jailer, Caleb Ray, was a kinsman of Bradish, others that he was merely incompetent. In any event, on Midsummer’s Night, June 24, Ray’s maid, Kate Price, assisted Bradish and his one-eyed compatriot, Tee Witherly, in escaping, and the three headed north. A Kennebec Indian sachem, Essacambuit, who had come to Boston to negotiate a treaty with the colonial government sought to ingratiate himself with the authorities by letting them know where Bradish, Witherly and Price could be found. The three were captured at Saco, Maine, and returned to the Boston jail on October 26, 1699. By this time Caleb Ray had been relieved of his duties, and the prisoners were clapped in irons to prevent their making another run for it.

By chance, the three pirates shared the jail with Captain William Kidd of New York, who had been imprisoned several months earlier. While Bradish was unambiguously a pirate, Kidd’s case was somewhat more complicated, as he had crossed the muddy line between privateer and pirate. Nonetheless, the two were both sent back to England, departing Boston on February 3, 1700, aboard the man-of-war Advice, which had been dispatched by the British admiralty expressly for that purpose. They also shared the same fate at the end of a hangman’s noose.

THE LEGEND OF LEARNED’S POND

The long-held tradition in many New England towns that “Washington slept here” is rivaled only by claims of pirate gold buried by the notorious Captain Kidd. Although they were unknown to each other before their imprisonment, Bradish and Kidd’s names became linked in the public consciousness as the two most infamous pirates of their era. Both first landed at Long Island before proceeding to New England, both brought treasures of jewels and coins ashore with them and both were transported back to England on the same ship to be hanged. So it should not be surprising that Bradish’s local roots may have inspired Framingham’s own legend of pirate gold buried on the shores of Learned’s Pond in the south part of town.

The earliest written reference to the legend of Kidd’s gold is in Reverend William Barry’s 1847 history of the town. Barry tells of a trunk of money submerged in Farm Pond that would occasionally rise to the surface, only to disappear when approached by any would-be treasure hunter. The Barry account predates a remarkably similar legend of Walden Pond recalled by Henry David Thoreau in his 1854 classic Walden. Reverend Josiah H. Temple expanded the tale in his 1887 history of Framingham, changing the setting to Learned’s Pond, attributing ownership of the trunk to Captain Kidd and describing in great detail the midnight ritual that would break the spell cast on the chest and release its treasures. A third version of the tale based on Temple’s account was written as a poem in 1897 by Clara Augusta Trask, a prolific writer of poetry, dime novels and newspaper columns who lived on Main Street not far from the pond. Trask’s flowery Victorian verse names Nathaniel Pratt as the last treasure seeker to attempt to recover the trunk, only to have it disappear into the dark waters when he lost his courage, leaving it for future generations to consider.

Early twentieth-century postcard of Learned’s Pond.

“KIDD’S CHEST OF GOLD—A LEGEND OF LEARNED’S POND”

By Clara Augusta Trask

If to my story listening ears you kindly will incline,

I’ll sing the legend of the lake hidden in woods of pine—

Cradled amid the fern-clad hills and fed by living springs;

And here the sun shines warm and bright, and here the wild bird sings,

And boding ravens flap their wings on leafless birch and oak,

And shock the sylvan silences with harsh, discordant croak.

By Learned’s pond, tradition says, in years long gone before,

The Captain Kidd who “sailed and sailed” the high seas o’er and o’er,—

Who robbed and plundered all mankind, and never mercy shew,

With black flag nailed against the mast, above a pirate crew,—

Sought out this lake, and sank within its waters calm and cold,

And placed thereon the pirate’s “charm,” a chest of yellow gold!

The legend goes that, oftentimes, this chest arose to view,

And showed its gruesome mystery unto a favored few,—

And ancient crones to wondering ears the tale full oft would tell,—

How awed and thrilled by the strange sight, none dared to break the spell,

But fled in terror from the place, nor dared they to look back,

Lest pallid ghosts should wave their hands, and follow on their track.

’Twas said if three men silent stood, and fixed their steadfast eyes

Upon the chest, they might, perchance, secure the wondrous prize,—

If on its lid an iron key the boldest one might lay,

Before the sand-glass ran the hours of eventide away,—

And as the story ran, no power save this could break the spell,

And who had heart to brave the test, no mortal tongue could tell!

Nathaniel Pratt was the last man whose awestruck eyes beheld

The mystic chest rise into view, by his strong will compelled,—

But startled by the uncanny sight, Nat’s heart stopped with a thud,

And instantly that chest sank down, “and squiggled in the mud!”

So ran Nathaniel’s plaintive tale, and his fond hopes grew dim,

Because that golden coffer was no longer in the swim.

Now listening hearers, warning take, and lovers pray be shy

Of Learned’s pond, when evening shades steal down the darkening sky,—

For Captain Kidd, who “sailed and sailed, and spied three ships from Spain,”

Is watching still his treasures hid on land, and on the main,

And if you broke the magic spell laid on this chest of gold,

The pirate’s ghost might drag you down in Learned’s waters cold.

THE WITCHES OF SALEM END

Even after peace returned to New England with the end of King Philip’s War in 1677, the growth of Framingham was limited mostly to the natural population increase of the families that had already taken up residence there. It took another epochal event, again with Thomas Danforth playing a leading role, to spur the next influx of new settlers.

One of the most infamous episodes in the early history of New England was the Salem witchcraft delusion. It began in January 1692 in the household of the Reverend Samuel Parris of Salem Village, now the town of Danvers but then still a part of the town of Salem. Parris’s daughter and niece were tormented by unusually severe fits and apparitions. After an examining doctor determined witchcraft to be the probable cause, adult relatives and neighbors began championing the girls’ case. By the end of February, they lodged complaints that they were tormented by the Parris’s Indian slave, Tituba, and neighbors Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne.

Local officials began holding hearings in meetinghouse—large, freewheeling affairs where the afflicted, accused, magistrates and interested neighbors all had their say. Gradually the case grew in scope, with more accused witches, including from Salem proper, as well as from neighboring towns such as Ipswich and Andover. By April 1692, the situation had escalated to the point that the government of the Massachusetts Bay Colony had become involved, with deputy governor Thomas Danforth presiding over hearings along with six of his councilors, including the eminent judge and diarist Samuel Sewall.

Accusations of witchcraft were hardly unknown at the time—six had been hanged for the crime in the Massachusetts Bay Colony prior to 1692, while there had been several other investigations and significantly larger numbers had been executed in the far more populous English homeland. Indeed, Matthew Hopkins, termed England’s “Witch Finder General,” had brought accusations against more than one hundred women in the county of Suffolk during 1645 alone, including eleven from Danforth’s birthplace of Framlingham.

The Salem witch trials came to dwarf even Hopkins’s best efforts: historian Mary Beth Norton has calculated that eventually 144 people faced legal action, 54 of whom confessed, 19 were hanged (including five men), 4 others died in jail and 1 man was crushed to death in an unsuccessful effort to make him enter a plea. These events have sparked endless fascination and a multitude of books and articles with innumerable theories seeking to explain the cause. For our purposes we shall focus on the cases of three sisters—Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Clayes and Mary Esty.

The three were the daughters of William and Joanna (Blessing) Towne. William and his family had come from Yarmouth, Norfolk County, England, in 1639, settling in Salem by 1640 and removing to nearby Topsfield in 1651. Rebecca had married Francis Nurse and settled in Salem Village, where they reared eight children. In 1692, she was seventy years old and a member of the church in good standing. She was the first of the sisters to be accused, in March 1692, and it was a sign of things to come that so established a member of the community could be named as a witch. Initially she was visited by a delegation of church members, including her brother-in-law Peter Clayes, who returned a favorable report on her conduct. Nonetheless, a formal complaint was levied against her on March 23, 1692, and she stood before the community the next day to face an inquiry.

As Rebecca was questioned by magistrate John Hathorne, members of the community began to shout forth accusations. Henry Kenney stated that he had been seized since she had entered the meetinghouse, and Ann (Carr) Putnam stated that she could see the apparition of “the Black Man” (the devil) whispering into Nurse’s ear. When the accused woman continued to profess her innocence, Putnam collapsed into fits on the floor and was carried from the building by her husband. Hathorne later cut his interrogation short due to the excessive commotion and noises that Nurse’s presence elicited among those afflicted by “witchcraft” in the room.

Sarah Clayes was the next of the sisters to stand accused. Twenty years younger than Rebecca, she had been born in Salem, married Edmund Bridges and had five children. After his death, she married Peter Clayes. (The Clayes name has had a variety of spellings—Cloyes, Cloyce, etc.—but we will use “Clayes” for the sake of clarity.) She was examined at the hearing on April 11 presided over by Thomas Danforth. The first witness declared that Clayes, in spectral form, had choked him and demanded he sign her book (to sign away his soul), to which Clayes interjected that he was a liar. She maintained her defense for a time, but once the third accuser, Abigail Williams, had declared that Clayes had been a “deacon” at a witches’ sacrament at her uncle’s house, she seemed to lose heart. Clayes requested a glass of water and then slumped to the floor, while an observer noted that her spirit must have “gone to prison to her sister Nurse.” As at her sister’s hearing, the session was disrupted by a number of the afflicted experiencing fits and spectral visions that they attributed to the witches in their presence. Sewall later wrote in his diary that he was much affected by the demonstrative suffering of the victims, and one might presume that Danforth shared the same reaction.

Ten days after her sister Sarah’s hearing, Mary (Towne) Esty was said to have been among a company of nine witches in spectral form seen gathered on a hill in Salem Village. Esty actually resided with her husband Isaac in neighboring Topsfield, but the fact that two of her sisters had already been imprisoned for witchcraft no doubt hurt her case. The next day she was interrogated, while those who accused her enacted scenes of great torment and mimicked her movements, as if entranced. Judge Hathorne rejected her claims of innocence against the seemingly overwhelming evidence he saw before him. The validity of the charges was further buttressed by the confessions of some who had previously been accused. Their confessions were no doubt prompted by the knowledge that those who confessed to the crime of witchcraft demonstrated by their confession that they were now free of the control of evil spirits, and their lives were therefore spared. The confessors were then forced to name their accomplices, offering seemingly concrete proof of the existence of a genuine conspiracy of evil in the land. It was only those who maintained their innocence to the end who received no mercy.

By sheer coincidence, a new royal governor arrived at Boston in May 1692, bearing a long-awaited new charter and dissolving the existing colonial government. (This was also the measure that brought the previously independent New Plymouth Colony under the jurisdiction of the Province of Massachusetts Bay.) This meant that Thomas Danforth was no longer deputy governor. The extent to which Danforth had supported the witchcraft prosecutions early on is debatable, although he had certainly been a willing participant by presiding over the hearing in April. There is no doubt, however, that once the Court of Oyer and Terminer was established in May to try the cases, he became one of its fiercest critics. The dissolution of the court five months later, and Danforth’s reappointment to the position of magistrate, played a significant role in winding down the crisis. While some cases continued to percolate through the legal system until May 1693, there were to be no more executions, and the climate of public opinion shifted with remarkable rapidity so that the entire episode was soon widely viewed as a shameful miscarriage of justice.

House built by Peter and Sarah Clayes on Salem End Road.

In 1697, Judge Samuel Sewall publicly repented of his role in the trials. His friend Thomas Danforth’s actions spoke of his own feelings, as his land in Framingham soon became populated with members of the families of the three Towne sisters. Between 1693 and 1699, the names of Towne, Clayes, Bridges and Nurse entered into the rolls of the community, and the street along which they settled still bears the name Salem End Road to this day. Though derelict and neglected, the house that Peter and Sarah (Towne) (Bridges) Clayes built still stands there as well. (Jonas Clayes, who fashioned House Rock into grindstones, was their great-great-grandson.)

But Danforth’s act of charity came too late for Sarah’s sisters—Rebecca (Towne) Nurse had been hanged on July 19; Mary (Towne) Esty had been among the final group sent to the gallows on September 22.

FRAMINGHAM FINALLY BECOMES A TOWN

Whether it was the influx of the Salem settlers, or perhaps the end of his term as deputy governor, by 1693 Danforth had shifted his focus back to developing Framingham into a town. Other new families had recently secured land from him whose names—Frost, Haven, Mellen and Winch—would continue to populate the town for decades, if not centuries, to come. Framingham was finally growing, and Danforth sought to plan for its future.

The model he used was the English one. Instead of selling his land outright, which he had sometimes previously done, he would instead lease it out on a 999-year basis as a means of ensuring perpetual income for himself and his heirs.

As he thought about how the town would take shape, he reserved three large parcels of land. The first was 140 acres for the building of a meetinghouse and the establishment of a minister, located in a swath running along the west bank of the Sudbury River from the Old Burying Ground on Main Street, curving around the base of Bare Hill (site of today’s Framingham State College) back along Maple Street. The second was a large block of undetermined acreage composing the entire southwest corner of Framingham, to be used as a commons for grazing or woodcutting by those who leased Danforth’s land. (This would not include those settlers who had already bought or been granted their own land, however, such as the Eames, Stone or Rice families.) The third reserved tract was 600 acres on the south side of Doeskin Hill and Nobscot Mountain, to be reserved for the exclusive benefit of Danforth and his heirs. The remainder of Danforth’s land would be leased out to new settlers.

By the mid-1690s, Framingham was populated by more than forty families, and the settlers made their first halting attempts to form an independent town. Due to the piecemeal way Framingham’s land had been granted, the forty families were not at all united in their desire for a new town. Danforth’s lessees, such as the Salem End families, were interested in his vision coming to fruition, as were many of the other settlers. But the town of Sherborn laid claim to the cluster of farms that were now laid out along either side of what is today Concord Street in downtown Framingham—indeed, the area became known as “Sherborn Row”—made up of the next generation of the Eames family and those families who had bought land from them. Sudbury was willing to relinquish the settlers who lived on the northern fringes of Framingham, but those families had already contributed to the building and upkeep of the ministry of that other town and would have preferred to remain within their bounds. Further complicating matters was a tax dispute between the Framingham settlers and the Province of Massachusetts Bay.

Nonetheless, all these issues were eventually overcome, and by an act of the provincial government, Framingham was incorporated as a town on June 25, 1700. Danforth’s dream, nearly forty years in the making, had been realized. Unfortunately, he was not able to celebrate his achievement, having died the previous November at the age of seventy-six.

THE FIRST MEETINGHOUSE AND THE CREATION OF FRAMINGHAM CENTRE

One good way to stump someone is to ask them where Main Street in Framingham is. Unless they have lived in town for a while, chances are they have no idea that it is the stubby little street that runs east from the Minuteman statue at Buckminster Square before terminating at Route 9 a few blocks later. They may never even have been on it. But there, on a slight rise within the bounds of the Old Burying Ground, was where Framingham’s first meetinghouse was erected in 1698, two years before the town’s incorporation.

If today it seems a somewhat obscure and out-of-the-way place to locate the center of town life, in 1698 it was even more so. About the only thing that Framingham’s scattered clusters of residents had in common then was that none of them lived anywhere near what we now call Framingham Centre. But since it was more or less centrally located within the geography of the town, it was at least an equally inconvenient location for all the town’s inhabitants. Furthermore, it lay closer to the settlers at Sherborn Row than Sherborn’s own meetinghouse, thereby bolstering Framingham’s case in the long-running border dispute with the town to the southeast. So it was on this rather inauspicious note that the village that would remain the civic and cultural center of Framingham until the twentieth century was created.

Even so, Main Street’s time in the sun was fleeting. In 1735, a new meetinghouse was built on the east side of Edgell Road, just to the south of the site of the Plymouth Church across from the Centre Green. Three quarters of a century later, Main Street effectively became a side street with the construction of the Worcester Turnpike (today’s Route 9) in 1810.

THE DUBIOUS LEGACY OF JOSEPH BUCKMINSTER

The creation of Framingham was primarily a moneymaking operation for Thomas Danforth, and he probably never would have gotten the opportunity to buy so much land at relatively low cost had he not been a high-ranking official in the colonial government of Massachusetts Bay. Nonetheless, one cannot help but admire his sense of noblesse oblige, his genuine civic-mindedness, his role in curtailing the Salem witch crisis and his concern for others demonstrated in his actions toward the Eames and Salem End families in particular.

These virtues are cast into particular relief when one considers the career of Danforth’s de facto successor, Joseph Buckminster. Buckminster was born July 31, 1666, at Muddy River (now Brookline), Massachusetts Bay Colony. He was only two years old when his father died; perhaps the resulting economic insecurity of his family while he was growing up contributed to the development of his subsequent character. The Reverend William Barry, an early chronicler of Framingham, reports that he was “a man tall and athletic of great physical power, and of a resolute spirit.” To say he possessed a resolute spirit may have been an understatement.

Buckminster first appeared in the story of Framingham in May 1693. Thomas Danforth, over seventy years old and still residing at Cambridge, had decided that he could no longer personally supervise the leasing of land at Framingham. Therefore, after setting aside the three reserved tracts of land noted above, he leased the remaining available land to Joseph Buckminster and his partner Joseph White of Roxbury. They, in turn, would sublet the land to families wishing to actually settle at Framingham. This partnership quickly ran into problems, as Buckminster and White failed to keep up their payments to Danforth. Buckminster evidently convinced Danforth that White had been the one at fault, as the two struck a new lease agreement on March 25, 1699. When Danforth died eight months later, Buckminster was left to his own devices.

If one were charitable, one might be inclined to state that Buckminster had been handed a vague mandate that, when accompanied by the negligent oversight of Danforth’s heirs, may have led him occasionally to exceed the bounds of his authority. But the overall pattern of Buckminster’s actions bespeak of such bad faith, greed and general cantankerousness that it is difficult to endorse such a conclusion. One need only consider that all three of the land tracts set aside by Danforth eventually became embroiled in a lawsuit stemming from Buckminster’s mismanagement.

Due to poor construction or maintenance, or possibly both, after only twenty-seven years the 1698 meetinghouse was in danger of falling down. Despite the wishes of approximately two-thirds of the residents to rebuild on the same site, Buckminster was steadfastly opposed. He lived in the north part of the town, on the southeast corner of Millwood and Winch Streets, and wished the building located nearer his own residence. When the town voted to go ahead anyway, a supply of lumber was cut and delivered to the old site; Buckminster obdurately took possession of the timbers and used them to erect a barn on his own property. This ignited a ten-year debate and engendered numerous lawsuits and acts of the legislature before a new meetinghouse was finally erected farther north on the Framingham Centre Common. In the process, Buckminster successfully managed to confiscate 35 acres of the land Danforth had originally set aside for the ministry when he argued that the court should recognize the original estimated acreage (140), rather than the original boundaries (which actually contained 175), set forth in Danforth’s deed. Buckminster’s son, Colonel Joseph Buckminster Jr., then built his house and tavern on this newly acquired acreage west of the old meetinghouse.

If Buckminster’s handling of the ministerial lands seemed self-serving, his stewardship of the six hundred acres on Doeskin Hill and Nobscot Mountain held in trust for the Danforth heirs was nothing short of fraudulent. The land was held in common by Danforth’s heirs, and Buckminster had bought out the rights of some, but not all, of the heirs. Since the land had yet to be divided, he had no authority to dispose of any of the property, yet he sold off the best parcels for his own gain. His base criminality was exposed when it was discovered he had destroyed a tree marking the southeast border of the property and then marked a different tree more than a mile away in order to try to conceal his misdeeds. The Danforth heirs eventually sued Buckminster, and though he lost at every stage, he fought them tooth and nail. Even after Buckminster himself died at the age of eighty in 1747, his son continued to hold out. Finally, the land was divided for the Danforth heirs’ benefit in 1767, twenty years after Buckminster’s own death, twenty-five years after the lawsuit began and a full sixty-eight years after Thomas Danforth’s death.

The fate of the Commons was similar. Buckminster had begun settling families on this commonly held parcel as early as 1693, when he directed the Salem End families to erect their farms there. (Since Danforth’s policy was to let families live rent-free for a number of years while they established themselves, Buckminster presumably did not want to allow them to settle on any land on which he might be able to charge someone else rent right away.) Once again lawsuits ensued, although this time Buckminster’s son, Colonel Joseph, had had enough of losing lawsuits and wisely agreed to settle.

The actions of its progenitor notwithstanding, the Buckminster name eventually became both a prominent and well regarded one in the town. Similarly, despite the divisions and acrimony of its early years, in the first three quarters of the eighteenth century Framingham grew into a reasonably prosperous farming town on the fringes of the British Empire, before events just beyond its borders shattered that world forever.

Chapter Three

REBELS, RIOTERS AND SPIES

Framingham in the American Revolution

A TOWN OF FARMERS

Framingham on the eve of the American Revolution was a small agricultural town. In the 1765 provincial census, the town had 205 houses containing 234 families and a total population of 1,313. While a huge increase over the mere 7 families who were living here in 1675, this was roughly similar to the population of the surrounding towns—Marlborough had 1,287 people, Concord 1,564, Sudbury (which still included Wayland) was a bit larger at 1,773, Sherborn smaller at 643 and Natick smaller still at 511. (Boston, by far the largest town in the province, had 15,520 residents.) Almost the entire population lived on farms—even those men who had other professions such as miller, carpenter, tavern keeper, shoemaker or blacksmith were generally also farmers.

The surnames of the town officeholders in the early 1770s were largely familiar ones—Major Lawson Buckminster, Captain Josiah Stone, James Clayes Jr., Captain Joseph Eames—plus a few whose families were relative newcomers to Framingham, such as Major John Trowbridge, Daniel Sanger and Deacon William Brown. Yet perhaps the most prominent of Framingham’s sons to gain fame in the era of the Revolution was not culled from the ranks of these town fathers, although he was in fact owned by one of them.

CRISPUS ATTUCKS, MARTYR TO THE REVOLUTION

Those who lacked the means to own their own farms worked as laborers for others. At the bottom of society were slaves. Although small in scale compared to the South, slavery continued to exist in Massachusetts until it was outlawed just after the Revolution in 1783, when a court ruled it incompatible with the freedoms guaranteed in the new state constitution of 1780. In 1765, there were twenty-five African Americans living in Framingham, although it is unclear how many were free and how many were slaves.

That some of them were slaves there is no doubt. There had been slaves in Framingham at least as early as 1716, when Jone Jackson, a slave owned by John Stone, sought her freedom. There were never large numbers of slaves in the town, just one or two owned by each of the wealthiest families, and their duties could vary widely. It did not resemble the gang labor employed in agriculture in the South that we often picture when thinking of slavery, though the institution was certainly no less abhorrent.

Not much is definitely known about the life of Crispus Attucks. He is believed to have been half African American and half Native American and a descendant of John Auttuck, a Natick Indian who was hanged alongside Captain Tom during King Philip’s War in 1676 (see Chapter One). Local lore has it that he was born in the vicinity of Hartford Street in what is now Framingham, although at the time it lay within the bounds of Natick. On October 2, 1750, the following advertisement ran in the Boston Gazette:

RAN-away from his Master, William Brown of Framingham, on the 30th of Sept. last, a Molatto Fellow, about 27 Year of Age, named Crispas [sic], 6 Feet two Inches high, short curl’d Hair, his Knees nearer together than common; had on a light colour of Bearskin Coat, plain brown Fustian Jacket, or brown all-Wool one, new Buckskin Breeches, blue Yarn Stockings, and a check’d woolen Shirt. Whoever shall take up said Run-away, and convey him to his abovesaid Master, shall have ten Pounds, old Tenor Reward, and all necessary Charges paid. And all Masters of Vessels and others are hereby caution’d against concealing or carrying off said Servant on Penalty of the Law.

It was said that other than this one incident, Attucks had a good relationship with his master, Deacon William Brown. He was deemed “a good judge of cattle,” and Brown gave him broad discretion to conduct business. He later became a sailor in the coastal trade, supposedly with Brown’s blessing, although it is also possible he simply ran away to sea.

What is known is that in early 1770 Crispus Attucks was in Boston, waiting to ship out on a boat bound for North Carolina. He recently had come from New Providence, in the Bahamas, but contemporary newspaper accounts all emphasized that he hailed from Framingham. The city Attucks came to was filled with discontent, with British soldiers stationed there since 1768, charged with enforcement of a series of ever-changing revenue laws that had been flouted by the colonies since the Stamp Act riots of 1765.

The British government was trying to fund the debt it had acquired in waging the Seven Years’ War, as well as establish the principle that Parliament had the power to levy direct taxation on its colonies in North America. Since the colonies had benefited directly from the war through the conquest of Quebec and the removal of the French threat on the continent, Parliament thought it reasonable that they be asked to shoulder some of the costs of the war. On the other hand, the colonists believed the sole power to tax lay with their own colonial assemblies since they had no representation in Parliament. They felt they possessed the same rights as his majesty’s subjects living in Britain, and yet they were being treated like a conquered country, with the British regulars acting as an army of occupation. So while it has sometimes been observed that the actual financial burden on the colonies was small—and most of the duties were indeed repealed shortly after they had gone into effect—both sides were standing on principle, important principle, about what the rights of the British subjects living in America really were.

It was into this cauldron that Crispus Attucks, a sailor on shore leave with abundant free time, plunged himself fully on the evening of March 5, 1770. There had already been unrest in Boston—an eleven-year-old boy named Christopher Seider had been killed eleven days earlier, shot by a British customs service officer who had fired his musket into a mob throwing rocks at his house. At about nine o’clock, a scuffle broke out in the street between British soldiers and young boys armed with sticks, one of whom was wounded in the arm by a cutlass. Soon a crowd assembled at the customhouse, taunting the sentry and pelting him with snowballs and ice. A squad of eight soldiers came to his aid when a second group appeared, led by a “stout mulatto” brandishing a cordwood stick, charging up from Dock Square on the waterfront. This was Attucks, who—according to John Adams, an attorney defending the British officer from manslaughter charges—was bold and strong enough to grab one of the British muskets by the bayonet and throw the soldier to the ground. It was at this point that the soldiers opened fire. Attucks and Samuel Gray were the first to be hit, Gray dying immediately, Attucks surviving long enough to be brought into a nearby house before expiring. Three others also died—Samuel Maverick, Patrick Carr and James Caldwell. That night has gone down in history as the Boston Massacre, a key event galvanizing Patriot opposition to British rule.

There has been much argument about Attucks over the years—whether he was a hero or a bully, whether he was a leader or the leader of the crowd or simply the man standing at the front, whether he was the first to be shot at the Boston Massacre and so on. But much of the debate seems to miss the point; he was a man from Framingham who challenged British power in one of the pivotal events of our history and paid the ultimate price. As such, in 2000 the town rightly honored his memory by naming after him the bridge over the Sudbury River on Old Connecticut Path, just south of the Deacon William Brown house where he had worked as a slave 250 years before.

SPIES AT BUCKMINSTER’S TAVERN

Relations between Britain and its American colonies continued to deteriorate following the Boston Massacre. Parliament eventually removed all the duties it had imposed, except for the one on tea, which remained as a mostly symbolic gesture emphasizing that Parliament had a right to impose such taxes on British colonies. At the same time, the British East India Company, faced with a surplus production of tea, was granted the exclusive import right for the colonies. This effectively undercut colonial merchants, who were no longer legally allowed to import tea, but prices had been driven so low that even with the added tax, British East India Company tea was still cheaper than the tea brought in illegally by colonial smugglers.

In response, the colonies responded as they had to all previous duties—they boycotted all goods that Britain had taxed, in this case tea. Boston, as always, went a little further, and on December 16, 1773, Patriots there dressed as Indians raided three ships on the waterfront and dumped all the tea overboard. In response to the Boston Tea Party, as it became known, England adopted a series of increasingly punitive measures during 1774, including closing the port of Boston, until the tea that had been destroyed was paid for.

By the beginning of 1775, tensions were near the breaking point. British troops controlled Boston, but reports filtered in to the new military governor that colonials were creating stores of arms and ammunition in several towns in the Massachusetts countryside should an armed rebellion arise. The governor, General Thomas Gage, decided he should send out a reconnaissance party to scout out the countryside so that a detachment of British soldiers could be sent to seize the supply depots once spring came to New England.

On Thursday, February 23, 1775, three men set out from Boston bound for Worcester: Captain William Brown of the Fifty-second Regiment of Foot, Ensign Henry de Berniere of the Tenth Regiment of Foot and Brown’s “batman,” John. (A batman was an enlisted soldier assigned as a servant to an officer.) They were charged with noting the topography of the road and best routes, fordable streams, defensible positions, places where a unit could camp for the night—anything that might prove of possible military value. They were also to make maps and sketch prominent features as well as road junctions so that the soldiers could find the route and know what to expect along the way. What followed was not destined to go down among the annals of the great acts of espionage in military history.

The three, “disguised like countrymen, in brown cloaths [sic] and reddish hankerchiefs round our necks,” were to pretend to be surveyors so as not to arouse suspicion. The prospect of two British officers, along with a servant, traveling the Massachusetts countryside in early 1775, sketching major roads, claiming to be surveyors somehow not arousing suspicion seems comical in retrospect, regardless of how like “countrymen” they dressed.

The first day passed without incident. The travelers noted that Cambridge was “pretty with a brick college” and that neighboring Watertown was a big settlement by American terms, but would rank only a village in England. (That Cambridge was home to Harvard College was somehow news to the Englishmen, and their comparisons of Watertown to an English village spoke volumes about how much the three were proverbial fish out of water in the Middlesex countryside.) They came upon a tavern just over the line in Waltham, where they decided to stop for dinner and stay the night.

The tavern was owned by Colonel Jonathan Brewer, a native of Framingham who had served in the French and Indian War before moving to Waltham in 1770. Brewer was an ardent Patriot, and while the officers were looking over their day’s work, Brewer’s black female servant brought in dinner. Making conversation, they offered the bland observation that this was “a fine country.” They were stunned when the servant replied, “So it is, and we have got brave fellows to defend it; and if you go up any higher you will find it so.” Flummoxed, they paid their bill and immediately set out again to find somewhere else to spend the night. They subsequently learned from their batman, who had spoken to the woman, that she had recognized Brown as a British officer from the Boston garrison and immediately surmised what these “surveyors” were up to, especially after she had seen that they had sketched a map of the road through Charlestown and Cambridge.

Their cover blown, the spies briefly considered returning to Boston. What kept them going was not their sense of the importance of their undertaking, nor military discipline, nor indeed their sense of duty to king and country—rather the realization that they would become the laughingstocks of the Boston garrison should they return in disgrace having so utterly failed in their mission. So they resolved to press on, although from now on they would try to hide their surveying from passersby and maintain a new cover story that they were sailors on shore leave out touring the New England countryside as a means of stretching their legs. This new alibi seems hardly more credible than the old one, as one would expect to find idle sailors in the grogshops along the Boston waterfront rather than traipsing about rural Massachusetts in February.

After traversing Waltham, they stopped for a drink at the Golden Ball tavern in Weston. (This structure still stands, preserved as a historic site.) Here they were pleased that the proprietor, Elisha Jones, proved less inquisitive than the innkeepers of Waltham, and they arranged to stay the night. The owner lit a fire in their chamber, and when the travelers asked for coffee, he replied that they could have whichever they wanted, coffee or tea. The offer of tea was a loaded question in those days of the boycott, so the soldiers immediately knew their tavern keeper was a Loyalist friend, and they took great comfort in talking to him. (One wonders whether they might have been alarmed that virtually everyone whom they encountered immediately recognized them as British soldiers on a scouting mission, but if this worried them, they did not voice such concerns.)

The next day was “rainy and frosty”—no doubt miserable weather in which to walk, and they made it only to Colonel Joseph Buckminster’s tavern in Framingham. The tavern was located on the northeast side of what is now Buckminster Square and was operated by Buckminster’s son Thomas (grandson of the first Joseph Buckminster, who was discussed at length in Chapter Two). By an odd coincidence, Thomas’s older sister was the wife of Colonel Jonathan Brewer, the Waltham tavern keeper. The travelers were not impressed by the accommodations: “On our entering the house we did not much like the appearance of things; we asked for dinner and they gave us some sausages,” but they found that their hosts, especially the colonel’s wife, were mollified by their “prais[ing] every thing exceedingly,” so they stayed the night.

The next morning they hit the road for Worcester and, after making a wrong turn at Westborough, reached the Isaac Jones tavern there by 5:00 p.m. When they woke up the next morning, the landlord offered them tea for breakfast, once again indicating the ineffectiveness of their efforts to travel incognito, although they were at least staying with a friend of their cause. As it was Sunday, they dared not travel should they raise the suspicions or ire of the devoutly churchgoing New Englanders. That night the proprietor said they had visitors, but the spies refused to see them. The next morning they learned from Jones that they had been Loyalists from Petersham who reported that all the Loyalists there had been disarmed, and that the Loyalists in Worcester could expect the same fate shortly. Finally recognizing the danger of their whereabouts and mission being so well broadcast, they were not much comforted by Jones’s assertion that “only a few friends of the government” knew they were in town.

On Monday, February 27, 1775, the party headed back to Framingham, arriving at Buckminster’s tavern at about 6:00 p.m. There they saw a most interesting sight—the Framingham militia drilling on the town green not far from the tavern. The spies admitted that they “did not feel very easy at seeing such a number so very near us; however, they did not know who we were, and took little or no notice of us.” (It is interesting to note that Framingham seems to have been the only place where the spies were not immediately recognized as such, although it is certainly possible that they were recognized but not confronted.)

While it has sometimes been stated that the spies were much intimidated by the militia’s show of force, once they became assured of their own personal safety they did not seem overly impressed: “After they had done their exercise, one of their commanders spoke a very eloquent speech, recommending patience, coolness and bravery (which indeed they very much wanted).” When they further note the commander’s quoting “Caesar and Pompey, brigadiers Putnam and Ward, and all such great men,” one can almost hear the sarcasm accompanying the idea that militia commanders Putnam and Ward belong in a pantheon with the classical generals. After the drill, the members of the militia came into the tavern “and drank until nine o’clock, and then returned to their respective homes full of pot-valor.”

The next night the spies returned to the Golden Ball in Weston, where their host implored them “not to go any more into the country.” Brown and de Berniere decided to ignore this warning, as indeed they had every other indication that their mission had been hopelessly compromised almost from the moment the pair had left Boston. The next day, March 1, they decided to scout out a more northerly route to Worcester through Marlborough, although they whiled away the morning at the tavern waiting for a storm to lighten up before resigning themselves to the inclement weather and setting off at noon in the ankle-deep snow. They had made it almost the whole sixteen miles to Marlborough without incident when a rider approached and began questioning them. They reluctantly revealed that they were from Boston and intended to visit “a friend” in Marlborough. Their inquisitor then rode ahead of them toward the town. As they entered Marlborough, people came out of their houses into the snowy late afternoon to watch the two make their way to the home of Henry Barnes, a merchant, magistrate and Tory. A baker accosted them and once again questioned the men’s intentions before letting them pass.

Once they arrived at Barnes’s house, they began to explain to him that they were British officers in disguise, only to be told that not only did he know who they were, but the whole town did as well, and had been expecting their arrival since a rider had seen them leave Worcester two days earlier. They soon discovered that the baker who had questioned them was a well-known Patriot and was harboring in his house an army deserter, a drummer boy named Swain who had fled Captain Brown’s own company a month earlier. It soon became apparent that their plan to have dinner and rest for a few hours before heading back was imprudent, and they were snuck out of the house and shown a back road to take. Soon after their departure, a mob gathered at the Barnes house and, disbelieving of his explanation that his visitors were relatives of his wife from Pennsylvania, set off in pursuit of the two.

They escaped due to a wind-driven snow that discouraged their pursuers and covered their tracks. The exhausted men stopped only once between Marlborough and Weston, climbing a hill overlooking the Sudbury River near the causeway (present-day Route 27 between Sudbury and Wayland) to eat their soggy bread washed down with melted snow. Once they were on the causeway, some riders approached them but did not stop, and they immediately decided a column of soldiers crossing via this route would be too vulnerable to attack. If Gage’s men were to march to Worcester, they should go through Framingham instead. After spending one more night at the Golden Ball, the spies finally took the advice of nearly every Loyalist they had encountered and went back to the Boston barracks.

Upon reading their report, General Gage worried that the forty miles to Worcester was too far for the lightning raid he envisioned and gave the colonials too much time to martial their forces. So on March 20, de Berniere and Brown set out again, surveying the route to another possible target, this one closer to Boston. They evidently had learned little about concealing their identities, for almost as soon as they arrived in Concord at the home of Daniel Bliss, Esquire, Bliss received a note that he should immediately vacate the town on penalty of death for harboring Tory spies. The two headed back to Boston, joined by the newly homeless Bliss. (According to historian David Hackett Fischer, Bliss was the only Concord Loyalist to have his property confiscated throughout the entire war.) Their trip had not been for naught, however; it was Bliss who showed the two the road through Lexington and recommended it as the best passage to Concord.

FRAMINGHAM MEN AT THE BATTLE OF LEXINGTON AND CONCORD

When the British columns left Boston on the night of April 18, 1775, they did not march west through Framingham to Worcester, but indeed took Bliss’s route to the northwest, hoping to capture Patriot leaders at Lexington and seize an arms cache at Concord. Nonetheless, the Minutemen Captain Brown and Ensign de Berniere had seen mustering at Framingham played a role in the events of the next day.

Ensign Henry de Berniere’s company of light infantry was in the vanguard, leading the columns along the roads he had mapped a month earlier. His men were among those who advanced on Lexington Green with orders to disarm the colonial militiamen who had assembled there to challenge them, when the “shot heard ’round the world” was fired, marking the start of the conflict that became known as the American Revolution. His company suffered only one man wounded at Lexington and continued to lead the column to Concord, arriving there between 9:00 and 10:00 a.m.

The alarm reached Framingham at about 8:00 a.m. on April 19, several hours after the skirmish at Lexington. Church bells began ringing and the alarm guns were fired. The town’s three companies—under the command of Captains Simon Edgell, Micajah Gleason and Jesse Eames, respectively—assembled at Framingham Centre. The companies departed by about 9:00 a.m., although it seems likely that militiamen from the farther corners of the town continued to straggle after the main body of men on the road to East Sudbury (now Wayland) for some time afterward.

The three Framingham companies marched northeast through Sudbury to Lincoln, taking the high ground at Brooks Hill that overlooked the road the British regulars were already taking back from Concord. Their plan to ambush the retreating column was foiled either by their having been spotted by the British soldiers or perhaps some undisciplined premature firing on their part. Nonetheless, the Framingham men, alongside several companies from Sudbury, inflicted heavy casualties on the English vanguard that was forced to charge up the hill so that the main British column could pass without being fired upon. Ensign de Berniere’s men, clearing a path for the main force, took the brunt of the fighting, and he later wrote “all the hills on each side of us were covered with rebels…so that they kept the road always lined and a very hot fire on us without intermission.” As the Tenth Foot returned to Lexington, ammunition was low and discipline began to break down. It was only the arrival of a relief column from Boston that prevented a complete rout of the British forces. One wonders whether Ensign de Berniere realized that the very same Framingham Minutemen he had so scornfully dismissed as amateurs six weeks earlier were among those inflicting such heavy casualties upon his regulars.

After this engagement, the Framingham companies joined the harassing action that pursued the retreating expedition all the way back to Charlestown. The lopsided nature of the fight can be illustrated by the fact that not a single Framingham man lost his life that day and only one—Daniel Hemenway—was wounded. Other men from the town had tales to tell of that day. Ebenezer Hemenway shot a British soldier named Thomas Sowers near Merriam’s Corner in Concord and took his gun home as a souvenir, while Noah Eaton was reloading his gun behind a rise when a British soldier came before him and started to reload his own gun. Thinking quickly, Eaton raised his own gun to his shoulder and demanded that the regular surrender, which he did, only to realize he had been tricked. The soldier told Eaton that he would have been able to reload his gun much quicker than the Framingham man, as the British were equipped with cartridges, rather than having to manually load a musket the way the colonials did.

There were 153 Framingham men who responded to the Lexington alarm—about 10 percent of the entire population of the town, an impressive number constituting about half the number of men above the age of sixteen, many of whom would have been too old or otherwise infirm for military service. Many on the list of those who served that day bear the names of families we have already discussed—two Clayes, two Nurses, two Buckminsters, two Havens, three Browns, three Winches, four Hows, four Rices, five Stones, nine Eameses—but also on the list is the singular name of Peter Salem, a private in Captain Edgell’s company.

PETER SALEM, FORMER SLAVE AND MARKSMAN

Peter Salem, also sometimes called Salem Middlesex, was born a slave to Jeremiah Belknap of Framingham. He was admitted as a member of the church in 1760. Shortly before the Revolutionary War, he had been sold to Major Lawson Buckminster, son of Colonel Joseph and grandson of the first Joseph Buckminster. After his service as a Minuteman during the Lexington alarm, he enlisted in the regular army less than a week later and continued to serve in varying stints for much of the rest of the war. (Since slaves could not enlist, Buckminster must have already given him his freedom in order to serve in the army.)

He spent much of the war as body servant to Colonel Thomas Nixon. According to most accounts, it was Salem’s shot that fatally wounded the British commander Major John Pitcairn at the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775. (He is also thought to be the African American figure depicted in the lower right-hand corner of John Trumball’s famous painting of the battle.) He served with distinction until the end of the war and was present at the Battle of Saratoga, Valley Forge, the Battle of Monmouth, as well as other engagements. In 1783, he returned to Framingham, married Katy Benson and built a house to the east of Sucker Pond, near the present-day intersection of Fairbanks Road and Route 30. He removed to Leicester, Massachusetts, about 1793. He never found much success as a farmer, but earned a living as a basket weaver and caning the seats of chairs. By all accounts, he was a much-liked member of the community and often told tales of his service alongside Colonel Nixon in the war.

Peter Salem monument in the Old Burying Ground.

When the aged Salem was no longer able to earn enough to support himself, the town of Leicester sent him back to Framingham. As the latter was his native town, it was deemed responsible for caring for him under the poor laws of the period. Tradition records that Salem’s contributions were not forgotten and Framingham welcomed him home. He died in 1816, aged about sixty-five years, and his remains were interred at the Old Burying Ground on Main Street. Many decades after his death, the town erected a monument on the site to preserve the memory of its African American Patriot.

THE NIXON FAMILY IN WAR AND PEACE

Colonel Thomas Nixon, who was Peter Salem’s commanding officer, was one of three Nixons to serve in the Revolutionary War. The most prominent was General John Nixon, Thomas’s older brother.

General John Nixon was born at Framingham on March 1, 1727, shortly after his father Christopher had moved there from parts unknown and married Mary Seaver of Sudbury. John first enlisted in the army at the age of eighteen, serving in the expedition that captured Louisburg from the French in 1745. He served extensively in the French and Indian War, participating in many campaigns between 1755 and 1762, and retired as a captain. In 1757, he bought land on the north slope of Nobscot Mountain, just over the Sudbury line, but continued to attend church in Framingham and had all his children baptized there. He commanded a company of militia from Sudbury at the Battle of Lexington and Concord, and five days afterward he was commissioned a colonel. He commanded a regiment of three hundred men at the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775, and was severely wounded there and had to be carried from the field. By August, he had recovered sufficiently to be promoted to brigadier general, a rank he held for the remainder of the war. His first command was at Governor’s Island in New York Harbor, but his brigade withdrew to the Hudson Valley after Washington’s army was defeated at the Battle of Long Island in 1776. He saw his most extensive combat during the pivotal Saratoga campaign in 1777, where the rebel victory helped convince France to join the war. After the war, he resided briefly in Framingham before returning to Sudbury. He eventually removed to Middlebury, Vermont, where he died at the age of eighty-eight in 1815.

Colonel Thomas Nixon was born in Framingham on April 27, 1736, and married Bethiah Stearns, eventually inheriting her father Timothy’s extensive estate on the northeast corner of the intersection of Edmands and Nixon Roads. This property in the northwest part of Framingham remained in the Nixon family for generations. He followed his brother into military service during the French and Indian War in 1755–59 and declined the command of a regiment of the Framingham militia in 1774, instead electing to serve under his brother in the Sudbury company. Similarly, he became a lieutenant colonel in his brother’s regiment and then a regimental colonel in his brother’s brigade. After the war, he returned to Framingham before dying on a voyage to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1800.

Thomas’s son, Thomas Nixon Jr., was born on March 19, 1762, in Framingham. He enlisted as a fifer at the age of thirteen in Captain David Moore’s Sudbury company and saw action at Lexington and Concord. (His recorder and pages of sheet music are in the collection of the Framingham Historical Society and Museum.) He served in the army from 1777 to 1780 and again from 1782 to 1783, having only reached the age of twenty at the war’s end. After the war, he built a house that still stands on part of his father’s estate and became a prominent member of the community in his own right, serving as captain of the militia as well as selectman. He died on January 4, 1842.

His son, Warren Nixon, born March 9, 1793, if anything, gained even greater standing in the town, serving as teacher, surveyor, selectman and justice of the peace. He was a talented draughtsman and drew the first truly comprehensive map of Framingham in 1832. At the time of his death in 1872, there was perhaps no more esteemed and distinguished resident. A few years prior, the town had presented him with an embossed Bible in recognition of his contributions to Framingham over the course of his long life. But his rough-and-tumble father, who had spent his teenage years as a fifer in Washington’s army, had not been so impressed with Warren’s bookishness. The following advertisement appeared in the National Aegis, a Worcester newspaper, on May 15, 1811:

NOTICE. The Subscriber will be very much obliged to any person who will give him any information relative to his Son WARREN NIXON, who left his home on the 21st of March last in a very unexpected and unaccountable manner. He has from his youth been exceedingly attached to literary pursuits, and it is believed, has, in some degree, injured his brain. He is about eighteen years of age, about five feet seven inches high, light complexion, with very full light blue eyes. His Father will be much rejoiced to see him return to his home, and will do every thing [sic] in his power to render him contented and happy. Those printers who will have the humanity to insert the above, will confer a favor on the disconsolate Parent. THOMAS NIXON. Framingham.

That Warren did eventually return home and prospered perhaps should be a comfort to the disconsolate parents of teenagers everywhere.

JOHN ADAMS INSPECTS GENERAL KNOX’S ARTILLERY TRAIN IN FRAMINGHAM

When George Washington took command of the Continental army in July 1775, it consisted almost entirely of Massachusetts and other New England men who had surrounded General Howe’s British regulars in Boston since the Battle of Lexington and Concord. The British had expelled the Patriots from Breed’s and Bunker Hills in Charlestown, but at a considerable loss of life. As the two sides settled down to a long siege, the British control of the seas meant that they could hold out in Boston indefinitely. Meanwhile, one of Washington’s primary goals was to turn the collection of militiamen he had inherited into a proper army.

To that end, Washington appointed Henry Knox—twenty-five years old at the time—as commander of the artillery, such as it was. Since artillery was the only thing that might drive the English out of Boston, it was important to amass whatever he could find. Knox immediately came up with the idea of transporting the large number of mortars and cannons that had been captured at Fort Ticonderoga when it had been seized by Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys in May 1775. The only problem was that Ticonderoga stood on the shores of Lake George in upstate New York—three hundred miles to the west, and on the other side of the Berkshire Mountains. Washington gave Knox the go-ahead and authorized an expenditure of £1,700 for the purpose.

Knox arrived at Ticonderoga in early December 1775 and immediately set about assembling the large number of oxen, wagons, sleds, sledges, etc. needed to transport the dozens of field pieces and ammunition. The journey was arduous and took much longer than the three weeks Knox had estimated. That Knox was able to do it at all given the terrain he encountered, using mid-eighteenth-century technology, was an engineering marvel.

According to General William Heath, Knox arrived at the army’s headquarters in Cambridge on January 18, 1776, and the artillery train, at that point near Springfield, Massachusetts, was ordered to halt in Framingham. We know the artillery was at Framingham a week later. Patriot leaders John Adams and Elbridge Gerry were on their way to attend the Continental Congress in Philadelphia and stopped for dinner (a midday meal in this case) on January 25, 1776, at (where else?) Buckminster’s tavern. Adams noted in his diary that afterward “Coll. Buckminster…shewed us, the Train of Artillery brought down from Ticonderoga, by Coll. Knox.” The two then proceeded to supper at “Maynards,” presumably the old Jonathan Maynard tavern on Maple Street, which by this time was operated by his son Joseph, although historian Stephen Herring suggests they may have gone to William Maynard’s on Salem End Road just east of the junction with Temple Street, before heading to Worcester the next morning.

Monument memorializing the passage of the Knox artillery train through Framingham. Photo by Edward P. Barry.

It makes sense that the artillery would be held up in Framingham, a sufficient distance away from Boston, so as not to tip off the British before they were able to be deployed. The guns were kept at the houses along “Pike Row,” a line of properties that began at the Pike-Haven house (still standing) on the corner of Grove and Belknap Streets and extended eastward. The oxen were said to have been kept at the Hemenway (later Whiting) farm on Brook Street, in a barn that burned down in 1958. Just how long the artillery remained in Framingham is open to conjecture, although the first deployment in positions surrounding Boston did not begin until late February.

In the end, the cannons served their purpose: once the colonists had taken Dorchester Heights (in what would now be termed South Boston), they commanded Boston, and the British withdrew from the city on March 17, 1776.

LOYALISTS IN FRAMINGHAM

Not everyone in Framingham supported the Revolution, of course. Although since Patriots dominated the town, as they did Massachusetts and New England in general, most of those who harbored doubts about the rebel cause largely kept those thoughts to themselves.

One Loyalist created a great many headaches for Colonel Joseph Buckminster, by then in his late seventies. Commodore Joshua Loring of Roxbury, who had commanded the British naval forces on Lake Champlain during the French and Indian War, left his home on April 19, 1775, never to return, as he could not bear the thought of abandoning the flag and king he fought for in his distinguished military career. His young son John Loring joined the Royal Navy at the age of fourteen but was soon captured by the rebels and imprisoned in the jail at Concord. His prominent uncle Obadiah Curtis interceded and, given the boy’s youth, he was released into the care of Curtis’s father-in-law, Colonel Buckminster in Framingham, sufficiently far from the sea to avoid getting into further trouble. That Buckminster was a Patriot was unquestioned; two of his sons were officers in the militia and fought at Bunker Hill, while his son-in-law Colonel Jonathan Brewer was an officer in the Continental army. Nonetheless, Buckminster soon found himself in an awkward position, caught between his sense of family obligation and the anger of his friends. Loring persisted in taunting Buckminster’s Framingham neighbors, calling them “rascally rebels” and worse, and the enraged townsmen threatened to demolish Buckminster’s home for harboring the young Tory. It was no doubt with a great sense of relief that Buckminster saw Loring leave town in 1776 as part of a prisoner exchange. John Loring went on to a distinguished career in the Royal Navy, attaining the rank of commodore and seeing extensive service during the Napoleonic Wars.

Framingham’s most prominent Loyalist was Nathaniel Brinley. He leased the old Joseph Buckminster property on Millwood and Winch Streets beginning in 1760. Although the farm was a large one and a source of income for Brinley, he apparently maintained it as a summer estate and a seasonal residence. (The farm employed a large number of servants, both white and black, including one Daniel Shays, who became famous for leading a revolt against the state government in 1786.) When the war broke out, the Brinleys were at their residence in Boston, but four months following the British evacuation in March 1776 Nathaniel was arrested. His only offense seems to have been that he had signed an address to Governor Gage, which his wife later maintained had been done only under duress. The authorities in Boston decided that to be on the safe side he should be confined to Framingham. Not only had he already been at least a seasonal resident of the town, but as in the case of John Loring, Framingham was securely in Patriot hands and safely distant from the coast.

The Committee of Safety in Framingham took its responsibility to secure Brinley quite seriously. It placed him in the custody of John Fiske, who resided on the southeast corner of Walnut and Main Streets. Not only did he have to labor on Fiske’s farm, but he was also not allowed to stray more than twenty rods from the dwelling house without being accompanied by Fiske and was denied the use of pen, ink and paper. When his wife appealed that his treatment in Framingham went far beyond his sentence, the council in Boston clarified that Brinley was to be confined within the borders of the town but not otherwise restrained. The Committee of Safety appealed this ruling to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, citing that Brinley had expressed his Loyalist leanings and must have had advance notice of the British march on Lexington, as he had moved his family and most of his furnishings out of Framingham in the weeks before April 19. The response to this appeal was more ambiguous, stating only that Brinley was to remain under the jurisdiction of the Committee of Safety in Framingham.

Meanwhile, Brinley had been transferred to the farm of Benjamin Eaton and placed under the additional burden of not being allowed to speak to anyone, including his wife, unless Eaton himself or another member of his family was present. Finally, after about a month, the Massachusetts Council and House of Representatives acting in concert took pity on the beleaguered Brinley and sent him to his kinsman Francis Brinley of Newport, Rhode Island, requiring only that he post £600 bond. Brinley’s Tory leanings could not have been that strong; unlike most Loyalists, who fled to England or Canada, after the war he settled in Tyngsborough, Massachusetts, where he died in 1814 at the age of eighty-one. His old property in Framingham, which he had never actually owned, continued to be known as the “Brinley Farm” for generations.

THE ORDEAL OF JONATHAN MAYNARD

Jonathan Maynard was born on January 22, 1752, the son of Jonathan and Martha (Gleason) Maynard. His parents’ house was located on the north side of Salem End Road, a few hundred yards to the east of the Temple Street intersection. His grandfather, also named Jonathan Maynard, had moved to Framingham from Sudbury in 1713 and established a tavern in the house that he bought from John Towne that still stands on the north side of Maple Street. (Towne was the nephew of the three sisters tried as witches at Salem whom we met in Chapter Two.)

Jonathan graduated from Harvard College with the class of 1775, just in time for the outbreak of the American Revolution. He was still in Cambridge in April 1775, and therefore missed the Battle of Lexington and Concord, unlike his older brother William and cousins John and Needham Maynard, who were Minutemen from Framingham. He enlisted within the week, however, and served alongside the three of them at the Battle of Bunker Hill in June of that year.

Maynard served in the army throughout the war. He participated in the Battles of Stillwater and Saratoga, but the most famous incident of his military career occurred at the little-known Battle of Cobleskill in central New York on May 30, 1778. There Mohawk and Tories under the command of Chief Joseph Brant burned the settlement to the ground, and Maynard’s unit, which was trying to relieve the settlers, was driven back with heavy casualties. The rest of his company was killed but, as he was a lieutenant and wore a sword, he was taken captive and brought before Brant himself. According to lore, the chieftain had determined that Maynard would be burned alive, but as he was being tied to the stake, the Masonic symbols on his arms became visible. Brant recognized Maynard as a fellow Freemason and stayed his execution, instead conveying him as a prisoner to British-held Quebec. There he remained for well over two years until he was exchanged on December 26, 1780. He was promoted to the rank of captain before finally leaving the service on November 19, 1782.

Variations of this tale are told about three other American officers. According to various Masonic and Revolutionary histories, Colonel John McKinstry, Major John Wood and Lieutenant Thomas Boyd all employed the lifesaving Mason’s distress signal to avoid a horrid death at the hands of Chief Brant. While we will not try to evaluate the credibility of the stories regarding the other officers, there is some evidence supporting Maynard’s tale.

House built by John Towne, nephew of convicted witch Sarah Clayes; it later became the Jonathan Maynard tavern.

Mohawk chief Joseph Brant.

Captain Jonathan Maynard.

We know through official army documents and contemporary diaries that Maynard was indeed captured at the Battle of Cobleskill on May 30, 1778, in a fight against Brant’s Mohawk and was held prisoner until 1780. Maynard had joined the Masons the previous winter along with a number of fellow officers while bivouacked outside Albany. Perhaps what is the strangest part of the tale is easiest to believe—that a Native American chieftain could have been a Mason. For Brant was no ordinary Mohawk; he had been educated at the Indian school conducted by Dr. Eleazer Wheelock, who went on to found Dartmouth College; he was well traveled in the white world and had recently returned from a trip to Europe, where he was presented to the Court of St. James. He was already a legendary commander, so it is not impossible to believe that he might have joined the order while in England.

In the very least, Maynard seems to have told the tale himself during his lifetime. The memoir of Neal Dow, the Civil War general and national temperance leader who married a granddaughter of Jonathan’s older brother William, recounts Dow’s having visited the old man in Framingham during the summer of 1830. (Interestingly, Dow relates the story of the ordeal as a tale of how Maynard’s hair had turned white almost overnight as a result of the scare put into him by his near execution.) In his biography of Brant published in 1838, William L. Stone published the excerpt of a letter telling of Maynard’s account written by George Folsom, an attorney in Worcester from 1830 to 1837. It seems likely that Folsom may have known Maynard personally. Furthermore, Folsom was well respected as a historian, having been an early contributor to the American Antiquarian Society, chairing its publications committee and, after 1838, the New York Historical Society.

After the war, Maynard returned to Framingham and married Lois Eaton on May 30, 1784. He erected a house on the west side of Pleasant Street, just north of the intersection with Maynard Road, which still stands today. He soon became one of the town’s most prominent citizens, serving at one time or another as justice of the peace, selectman, town clerk, state representative, state senator and Framingham’s first postmaster. In his will, he designated half a township in Washington County, Maine, be granted for the benefit of Framingham Academy.

Perhaps it was a sign of gratitude toward the institution that saved his life when Maynard played a key role in the founding of the Middlesex Lodge of Masons in Framingham. He served as the lodge’s first master and offered the large third floor of his home as a meeting place for many years. The most notable meeting occurred during that first year at the Maynard house when Paul Revere himself, in his capacity as grand master of the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts, presided over the formal installation of officers on November 25, 1795. Maynard died on July 17, 1835.

The Captain Jonathan Maynard house on Pleasant Street.

THE LEGACY OF THE REVOLUTION IN FRAMINGHAM

To a remarkable degree, given its proximity to these great events, the town of Framingham emerged from the Revolution relatively unscathed. Individual lives were changed, surely, but it had not wrought the devastation and wrenching changes as had King Philip’s War a century earlier.

The new Massachusetts constitution ended slavery for good in 1783, but there had never been that many slaves in Framingham (although two of them played remarkably prominent roles in the Revolutionary era). Unlike in some communities, there was not a significant displaced Loyalist local elite—only poor Nathaniel Brinley was forced from town, and he had been a renter, not an owner, and evidently not that ardent a Tory at that. The war had been the formative experience for a new generation of leaders, but most of them—Buckminster, Maynard, Nixon, Trowbridge, et al.—already came from well-established families.

In the end, Framingham was still a quiet farming town. The coming nineteenth century, with its new technologies, new immigration, (mostly) peaceful revolutions in transportation, markets and the first hints of a consumer culture, would do far more to change everyday life in Framingham.

Chapter Four

THUNDER SENT FROM HEAVEN

WEIRD WEATHER

While the previous chapters have dealt with the acts of men and women, no history of Framingham would be complete without also chronicling what the insurance industry calls “acts of God.” Given the Puritan heritage of most of Framingham’s earliest English settlers, it was not a phrase taken lightly.

Today’s weather watchers have an amazing amount of resources available to them for predicting meteorological events. Up-to-the-minute satellite and radar images can be accessed by Internet, television and even cell phone. Every winter storm is treated as a major blizzard by TV forecasters, with continuous coverage beginning days before the first flake ever falls. Over the centuries, Framingham’s citizens have endured momentous, even catastrophic weather events without even a moment’s warning, beginning with the first settlers in the seventeenth century. Hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, ice storms, lightning and even earthquakes have plagued Framingham for over three hundred years.

Aftermath of the ice storm of January 21, 1921, in Framingham Centre.

THE REVEREND JOHN SWIFT

Framingham’s earliest weather chronicler may have been its first minister, the Reverend John Swift. The twenty-one-year-old Milton native was ordained October 8, 1701, although he had been preaching in the town for a year prior. The town then set about providing him with a house and fenced-in pasture on the ministerial land set aside by Thomas Danforth, encompassing the east side of Bare Hill to the Sudbury River. Nevertheless, Swift often had to confront the town elders, as the town was not always prompt or thorough in living up to the letter of its agreement to furnish the minister with firewood or other payment in kind. Despite these hardships, he was apparently never tempted to move, as he was still serving as Framingham’s minister when he died on April 24, 1745.

Reverend Swift made many weather observations in his journal over a ten-year period, limiting his descriptions to either short passages or one or two words, sometimes in Latin, even when the event called for a more detailed account. For example, a storm in February 1717 that dropped six to seven feet of snow on Framingham and is today considered one of the worst storms of the eighteenth century was simply noted by Reverend Swift in his journal as “deep snow.”

On the evening of October 29, 1727, an earthquake that has since been estimated at a magnitude of 5.5 on the modern Richter scale struck the Northeast from Maine to Philadelphia. Eyewitness accounts across the state give great detail to the event. The quake struck shortly after eleven o’clock at night with a noise like booming cannons. It lasted for about two minutes, shaking chimneys loose and causing windows and doors to fly open. Cattle ran across fields bellowing in confusion and fear; dogs barked wildly in homes and in the streets. In Boston and surrounding towns, terrified citizens gathered in churches, seeking reassurance from their ministers that the quake was not a punishment or judgment from an angry God. For weeks following the quake, pastors preached about its meaning and the lessons to be learned from such an event. A forty-five-page sermon delivered in Boston the Sunday after the tremor by Boston’s Reverend Cotton Mather was later published and sold under the grand title “A Short Essay to preserve and strengthen the Good Impressions Produced by Earthquakes on the Minds of People that have been Awakened with them, With some Views of what is to be Further and Quickly look’d for.” Incredibly, a tremor felt in Amesbury, Massachusetts, in October 2007 and measuring 1.8 on the Richter scale is believed to have been an aftershock of the 1727 quake felt 280 years later.

And what did the Reverend John Swift scribe in his journal on this fearful day? A short Latin phrase loosely translated into: “Between ten and eleven at night the earth moved in a dreadful and intense manner.”

THUNDER SENT FROM HEAVEN

On June 3, 1777, John Clayes, a prominent farmer and great-grandson of accused witch Sarah (Towne) Clayes, agreed to assist Framingham’s new minister Laban Wheaton in the purchase of a horse and gathered several friends together at his farm on Salem End Road to look over the animal. While the skies on that late spring day were slightly overcast, they gave no warning of the tragedy that was about to occur. One of the friends, Selectman Peter Parker, mounted the horse and took it for a short run across the field and back as a few drops of light rain fell. After Parker dismounted, the forty-two-year-old Clayes grabbed the reins and, in an instant, was on the ground, dead. A bolt of lightning had struck the horse, traveled through the animal into the earth and knocked the entire party to the ground. The lightning had also killed the horse, as well as eighty-one-year-old Abraham Rice. Peter Parker, Simon Pratt and Pratt’s young son Ephraim were injured, Parker and the elder Pratt severely so. The event provided citizens of the day an opportunity to contemplate the deeper meanings of life and its unexpected sorrows. A contemporary account of the incident was published “to this world of sorrow and death as a momento [sic] for the improvement of life.” An elegy written by Framingham schoolteacher and poet Lydia Learned helped promote the idea that the victims were being punished by God for conducting business on the Sabbath, although the tragedy actually occurred on a Tuesday:

Gravestone of lightning victims John Clayes and Abraham Rice, with verse by Lydia Learned. Photo by Edward P. Barry. Gravestone of lightning victims John Clayes and Abraham Rice, with verse by Lydia Learned. Photo by Edward P. Barry.

Oh may you all both far and near

Who of this dispensation hear

Now harken to the call of heaven

And take the warning God has given

Surprising death to you soon may

Come in some unsuspecting way

Pray that all make it their care

For sudden death now to prepare

My trembling heart with grief o’erflows

While I record the death of those

Who died by thunder sent from heaven

In seventeen hundred seventy-seven

Almost a century and a half later, another lightning strike hit Framingham, again with tragic results. Members of the Massachusetts Volunteer Militia had just completed a ceremony on the old Musterfield on the afternoon of August 17, 1917, when a storm of biblical size suddenly broke over the camp. A bolt of lightning struck the center of the parade ground, knocking fifty soldiers to the ground. Corporal Edward P. Clark of Natick and Private Patrick J. Sullivan of Framingham were killed instantly and a dozen others were seriously injured. Several of the injured were revived by the use of a “pulmotor,” an early artificial respiration device. The erratic nature of lightning caused an unusual injury to Sergeant Martin Fair of Natick, who was left with the shape of a cross burned into his arm after the strike.

THE OLD BURYING GROUND

Peter Clayes and Abraham Rice, the two men killed by lightning in 1777, were buried in the Old Burying Ground, under an unusual double gravestone with the first few stanzas of Lydia Learned’s poem carved into it.

The Old Burying Ground on Main Street, sometimes called the Church Hill Burying Ground, is situated on a shady hill overlooking the Sudbury River. Rows of gray slate stones tipping at various angles line the grassy paths, the occasional American flag designating the grave of a war veteran. At first glance, the graveyard looks like a typical one found across New England; a closer inspection reveals stories behind the stones that are unique to Framingham.

The burying ground was laid out next to the new meetinghouse in 1698, although the oldest surviving stones date back to 1704. It is possible that the first graves were marked with wood, simple boulders or not marked at all. Sometimes a grave was covered with a large stone rectangle called a “wolf” stone, placed there to keep out scavenging animals. Eventually, the meetinghouse was relocated and the graveyard became the municipal burial ground. The town hired Samuel Barton as the official gravedigger, paying him three shillings per adult grave dug. Until the town purchased a hearse in 1794, coffins were carried to burial services on the shoulders of male mourners. One of the primary responsibilities of the caretaker was to keep the grass neat and tidy. This job could entail chasing cows away, as caretaker Jonathan Maynard was called upon to do, or supervising sheep as they pastured in the burial ground keeping the briers down, as Lawson Buckminster was paid to do in 1826.

The stones in the burial ground are adorned with a variety of symbols. From ominous winged skulls to peaceful angels, hopeful fingers pointing skyward, willows and urns, the carvings reflect the changing attitudes toward death over the centuries. Many of the names carved on the markers are the same as those found on street signs and public buildings across town—Buckminster, Eames, Hemenway, Maynard. The oldest stone in the graveyard is marked simply with the date of death, September 25, 1704. Some local historians have speculated that this grave may be that of Salem refugee Sarah Clayes, who died that year. Eighty-one soldiers who fought in the Revolution are buried here, including, of course, Peter Salem, the hero of Bunker Hill. Most of the other figures we have met in the preceding pages were also laid to rest here: Jonathan Maynard (1752–1835); Deacon William Brown (1723–1793), who had owned Crispus Attucks; Thomas Nixon Jr. (1762–1842), the Revolutionary War fifer; Jonas Clayes (1788–1856), who fashioned House Rock into millstones; and the Reverend John Swift (1679–1745), the town’s first minister, whose table monument occupies a special position in the graveyard on the spot where the pulpit had stood in the original 1698 meetinghouse.

The “recycled” gravestone of the Twitchell children. Photo by Edward P. Barry.

An ornate wrought-iron fence surrounds the plot of the Buckminster family, signifying their wealth and prestige in town. At its center, raised above the other stones, is the monument to Colonel Joseph Buckminster (1697–1780), who played such a memorable role in town affairs, as chronicled in these pages. Also inside the plot is the relatively recent and unusual stone of Joan Buckminster Marcy, who died in 1942 at the age of fourteen. Atop the flat bronze marker inscribed with her name and birth and death dates is the statue of a whimsical bronze turtle.

Not far from the Buckminster plot is the poignant grave of the Twitchell children. Susanna, Anna, Calvin and Cynthia, ranging in age from one to eight years, all died within a two-day period in December 1776. Over the years, time and weather heaved the marker so that another, upside-down inscription began to appear. Eventually the whole stone was uprooted from the ground, revealing the entire surface. The bottom of the Twitchell stone is in fact the top of a stone that may have been reused by the carver after making a mistake. A winged angel and the partial inscription “Here lies deposited the remains of” are carved into the curved end of the stone. Such “recycled” stones are fairly common in old New England graveyards.

THE SMALLPOX GRAVEYARD

Not all of Framingham’s dead were interred in town cemeteries. Many families chose to bury their loved ones close to home in pastures and woodlands, especially in the sparsely populated north side of town. When former farmland began to be developed for housing in the mid-twentieth century, contractors and town officials had to deal with the problem of these random, isolated graves. The existence of a smallpox graveyard was no secret in 1964 when the Lanewood subdivision was being built off Pleasant Street. Finding the graves and relocating them was a different story.

Framingham experienced an outbreak of smallpox in 1793. As we have already seen in the tragic case of the four Twitchell children, the spread of fatal contagious diseases was a constant threat in the era before modern medicine. Most of these devastating outbreaks probably went unrecorded, especially if they only affected a household or two. There were some larger ones—the first four months of 1754 brought a “fatal distemper” to the region, which became known as the “Great Sickness.” It was especially lethal in Holliston, where it killed fifty-three, but it also struck Framingham. Smallpox itself had already come twice before in the decades prior to the 1793 outbreak—in 1764, when it was carried back by the returning servicemen from the French and Indian War, and in 1777, when it was probably likewise brought to the town by the extensive travel occasioned by the Revolution.

The 1793 case was traced to a single individual, David Butler of Peterborough, New Hampshire. He was brought to Framingham by Abijah Parmenter, to whose wife Butler was related, in order to be treated for “dropsy” by Dr. Kittredge. After no improvement was seen, another doctor was sent for, who “scarified him, and drew away a considerable quantity of water.” Two weeks after this “treatment,” Butler came down with smallpox. Eventually seventeen people were afflicted, including Revolutionary War veteran Samuel Angier, whose remote Pleasant Street home was designated as a “pest house” by town officials in an attempt to quarantine the disease. In all, six people died, including Cyrus Woolson, who had served in the Revolution with Angier. The six victims were buried in a common grave near the home, far removed from the center of town, where they lay undisturbed for almost two hundred years. (Interestingly, a seventh person was buried alongside them—Nancy Coolidge, who had committed suicide, and therefore presumably could not have been buried in the consecrated ground of a normal graveyard.)

In 1964, a local developer announced plans to build a subdivision on the old Thompson pasture where the graves were known to be located. Town Veterans Benefits officer John Murtaugh then enlisted the help of public works employee Alec Turner in finding the graves. Two stone markers commemorating the war service of Woolson and Angier were easily found, but these stones did not mark the actual burial site.

After carefully scraping away thin layers of earth in the vicinity of the markers, the men began their search. In the end, they were able to find only two sets of remains. The bodies were reinterred in the Soldiers’ Lot at Edgell Grove Cemetery, although there was no way to determine whether they were actually the remains of the two soldiers.

THE EDGELL GROVE CEMETERY

Over the years, a number of other graveyards came into use in Framingham. The Old South Burying Ground was opened in 1824, Edwards Cemetery in Saxonville in 1829, St. George’s Cemetery (the first Catholic cemetery in town) in 1860 and St. Tarcisius in 1918, among others. Yet only one rises to historical significance based on its design and not only on the identities of the individuals buried there—the Edgell Grove Cemetery.

In the nineteenth century, burial grounds began to be known by the more comforting term “cemetery,” from the Greek meaning “sleeping place.” Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, laid out in 1831, was the country’s first “garden” cemetery. Garden cemeteries were beautifully landscaped with park-like features such as ponds and ornamental trees, providing an Eden-like final resting place for the dead and a tranquil, inspirational spot for the living. In 1848, Framingham opened its own version of the garden cemetery at Edgell Grove. The cemetery was consecrated on October 13 of that year, an occasion marked by bands, the officiation of four ministers—Birdsey G. Northrup (Edwards Congregational Church in Saxonville), Increase N. Tarbox (Hollis Evangelical Society, now the Plymouth Church, Congregationalist), Chester Field (Methodist) and Jonathan Aldrich (Baptist)—all Protestants. There was also the singing of a special hymn written for the event by Elizabeth (Willard) Barry, the wife of William Barry, the town’s former minister and author of the town history published in 1847.

The land had been procured from Colonel Moses Edgell, grandson of Simon Edgell, who had led a company of Minutemen to the Battle of Lexington and Concord. Moses Edgell, a founder of the Framingham Bank, the first in town in 1833, and later the Framingham Savings Bank in 1846, would later also provide funding for the Edgell Memorial Library at Framingham Centre. Another member of the original committee was Warren Nixon, the skilled draughtsman, surveyor and “runaway son” of Thomas Nixon. Both Edgell and Warren Nixon were buried here, along with the members of most of Framingham’s established families for the next one hundred years and beyond.

Edgell Grove is normally the serene and beautiful environment envisioned by its planners, but it became a scene of chaos and devastation when the hurricane of 1938 toppled dozens of trees on its grounds. That storm was but the most destructive of many to hit Framingham over the years.

THE “WHIRLWIND” OF 1741

September 22, 1741, was the first recorded instance of a tornado striking Framingham. According to the Boston Weekly News-Letter, “a very severe Wind (or Whirlwind) hapned [sic] there, with Thunder, Lightning and Rain, the like not known in that Part of the Country; it took a large Piece of Timber of 40 Feet in length, and 13 Inches square lying on the upper side of a Bridge…and carried it some Distance…; and passing along to an Orchard it tore down 25 Apple Trees, and took off the Roof of a Barn, and broke down a great deal of the Fence” before proceeding to Sudbury.

THE “HURRICANE” OF 1787

On August 15, 1787, Middlesex County was hit by a storm of enormous strength and destructive power. While contemporary headlines speak of the “hurricane” that struck that day, the storm was most likely an unusually large and sustained tornado that developed over Hartford, Connecticut, before heading north and leaving ruined homes and fields in its wake.

The tornado hit Framingham in the late afternoon, carving an eight-mile path of destruction in the northern part of town and destroying or severely damaging orchards, crops, fences, large trees, stone walls, houses and barns. The incredible power of the tornado is evidenced in the damage done to the home of two elderly sisters named Shattuck. After tearing the roof off the neighboring Fairbanks home, the powerful winds destroyed the home of the Shattucks, lifting Widow Shattuck and her sister out of the house and carrying them several hundred feet away, where they sustained serious injuries. Two children sleeping in the same home when the storm struck were found over three miles away, still slumbering peacefully on the featherbed that carried them on the wind. Witnesses also reported seeing a hay cart, complete with its team of oxen, load of hay and young driver, lifted into the air and carried over one hundred feet away before crashing to the ground. The “hurricane” plowed through several other towns before finally dissipating near Rochester, New Hampshire.

THE “GREAT BLOW” OF 1815

The “Great Blow” of September 23, 1815, is described in detail by Josiah Temple in his 1887 history of the town. The hurricane caused great damage not far from the Temple home and, although he was barely six months old at the time, the event was most certainly recorded and retold at Temple family gatherings for years to come. Large white pines several feet in diameter were snapped off and torn from the ground by the roots in a one-mile path taken by the storm. The storm caused considerable damage from Providence to New Hampshire. Steeples across New England were blown over and Boston’s waterfront was especially hard hit. The “Great Blow” would soon fade from memory, and no other hurricanes would hit the town for over 120 years.

THE GREAT NORTHEAST HURRICANE OF 1938

In September 1938, Framingham experienced a storm of such ferocity that even the reserved Reverend Swift would have been compelled to write a few sentences about it in his journal had he witnessed it. The Great Northeast Hurricane of 1938 was the most powerful and destructive storm to hit New England in modern history. Over 680 people were killed, and property damage reached $400 million. Although weather forecasting technology had advanced tremendously since the “Great Blow” of 1815, Framingham residents were no better prepared for this storm than their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century counterparts would have been. Some weather historians cite the incredible speed of the hurricane after passing North Carolina as a factor in the lack of preparedness. Others blame the U.S. Weather Bureau, which predicted the storm would head out to sea. Whatever the cause, the citizens of Framingham were taken by surprise when the onslaught began in the late afternoon of September 21.

Throughout the night, eighty-seven-mile-per-hour winds tore up the town. Shortly after the storm began, a 230-foot radio antenna operated by the State Police was blown over. In Saxonville, the steeple of the Methodist church and the smokestack of the Roxbury Carpet Company were toppled. The Framingham Normal School’s May Hall lost its distinctive pitched roof and turrets, now seen only in old photos and on the town seal. The statue of the Civil War soldier that stands in front of the Edgell Memorial Library was knocked off its pedestal when a large maple tree fell on it. Roofs and windows of houses, churches and businesses were smashed and destroyed in large numbers. Miraculously, only fourteen storm-related injuries were reported at Framingham Union Hospital, none of them serious.

It was the tree population in town that suffered the worst damage. A few days after the storm, the Public Works Department estimated that 4,500 trees had been felled in cemeteries, parks and along highways in Framingham. The number of trees lost on private property added to that total, with over 125,000,000 trees knocked down across the state. For the next few weeks, the sounds of axes and saws were heard in every neighborhood in town as the cleanup progressed. Firewood from the downed trees was later distributed to needy families by the Board of Public Welfare. Just one week after the storm, the Framingham News reported that things were getting back to normal with little evidence left that a hurricane had ever struck. But those who lived through this “Big Blow” would never forget its effects, and the loss of so many trees that had stood for decades would alter the town’s landscape forever.

OTHER NOTABLE STORMS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Several other storms of note struck Framingham in the twentieth century. An ice storm in 1921 caused extensive destruction but created a surreal, almost dream-like landscape in the town. Hurricane Carol in August 1954 caused damage similar to the 1938 storm, but on a much smaller scale. Once again, roads flooded, storefronts and signs were smashed and hundreds of trees were felled, causing power outages. Hurricane Diane struck a year later, dumping a record twelve inches of rain on Framingham, flooding roads and homes in low-lying areas as well as along the Sudbury River and washing out several bridges. The Blizzard of 1978, a strong nor’easter, struck so swiftly that February that it led to the memorable image of hundreds if not thousands of abandoned cars buried in snow on Route 128. Locally, it brought traffic on the Massachusetts Turnpike and Route 9 to a halt for days, as Framingham was virtually shut down along with the rest of eastern Massachusetts.

Flooding on Central Street after Hurricane Diane, 1955.

Flooding on Winter Street after Hurricane Diane, 1955.

An early and accurate forecast does not always guarantee an appropriate and well-thought-out response, as evidenced by the events of December 13, 2007. The first flakes came down that day almost to the minute predicted by television forecasters, with a moderate eight inches falling between 2:00 and 8:00 p.m. School officials in Framingham and surrounding towns dismissed students and staff early to get a jump on the snow and the thousands of commuters who regularly travel the town’s roads and highways. Unfortunately, local businesses and state officials had the same idea, releasing workers at the same time. Within minutes, Framingham’s main roads became hopelessly gridlocked, preventing plows from clearing them. A two-minute drive from the south side of town to the north took over two hours, and commuters traveling to nearby towns arrived home long after dark, having spent up to five or six hours in their cars as the snow fell.

Chapter Five

MERCHANTS AND ABOLITIONISTS

Framingham in the Nineteenth Century

THE LITTLE RED STORE AT FRAMINGHAM CENTRE

In 1781, when the formal end of the American Revolution was still two years away, a small but not insignificant event took place in the quiet environs of Framingham Centre, just south of the common. In that year Daniel Bridge, felt maker and hatter, constructed a tiny shop where the Esty Block now stands on Route 30. No one could have known it then, but Bridge’s modest “little red store,” the earliest structure built exclusively for commerce in the village, was the first sign of the commercial and industrial development that was to come in the nineteenth century. This quiet agrarian town would slowly but steadily become a little bit less of both.

THE MILLERS OF STONE’S END

The first “industrial” structures in town were the mills built by the Stone family, the earliest settlers of Framingham. As related in Chapter One, they lived in what is now known as Saxonville, but for a long time before was called “Stone’s End.” John Stone established the first corn mill at the falls by 1659; his son Daniel established a sawmill at the same site sometime shortly thereafter. Daniel’s grandson Micah Stone built the first fulling mill, necessary for the manufacture of cloth, on an island in the Sudbury River by 1735.

As the town’s population expanded, other grist- and sawmills were built in other sections of the town, although always dependent on a stream or river for power, of course. One of these neighborhood gristmills was constructed after 1748 by Deacon William Brown, the owner of Crispus Attucks, just east of where Old Connecticut Path crosses Cochituate Brook. William’s son built an adjoining sawmill there about 1795. Deacon Brown had also built a fulling mill about 1775 at a separate location, this one farther down Cochituate Brook to the southwest of his house on the opposite side of the Old Connecticut Path bridge. The Brown family’s two mill privileges on Cochituate Brook would prove remarkably important to the industrial development of Framingham.

THE FRAMINGHAM MANUFACTURING COMPANY AND THE WILLIAM KNIGHT CARPET FACTORY

In 1811, a limited liability stock company was formed to purchase the old Brown mill privilege east of Old Connecticut Path. The Framingham Manufacturing Company, as it was called, was probably the first corporation of any kind to exist in town, and the company immediately began to erect a cotton mill on the site. The mill grew rapidly, attracting a number of families whose children worked there, opened a store and employed their own blacksmith. Though the company did a large volume of business, it never proved especially profitable, and the proprietors put the factory up for sale in 1821. It was acquired by an I. McLellan of Boston, who continued to operate it for a number of years until the factory burned down in 1834. The privilege was eventually acquired by William H. Knight in 1844.

Knight, a native of England, had first come to Framingham in 1824 to work as superintendant of the Saxon Factory. After briefly relocating to Connecticut, he returned in 1828 and purchased the privilege to Deacon Brown’s old fulling mill. There he erected a carpet factory that, in contrast to the cotton factory nearby, was almost immediately successful. He bought a second privilege on the brook to build a larger carpet works in 1839, and in 1844 bought out the old Framingham Manufacturing Co. site. At his peak in 1845, Knight employed 191 men and 41 women in three factories along Cochituate Brook. And yet the next year he was out of business—the City of Boston bought out Knight’s interests in all three factories in order to construct the Cochituate reservoir. Before one gets too teary-eyed for Knight, he walked away from the deal with $150,000 for his troubles—a considerable fortune for the 1840s.

THE SAXON FACTORY

The largest and most long-lasting of the mills of the early nineteenth century was the Saxon Factory. In 1822, its proprietors bought out the land on both sides of the Sudbury River at Stone’s End. There they erected a large cotton woolen factory. By 1832, they were operating five separate mills at the site with 246 employees. They were bought out by the New England Worsted Company in 1837, which then changed the focus of its manufacture to worsted carpet yarns and woolen blankets. In 1858, the entire operation was purchased by Michael H. Simpson, beginning sixty years of family ownership. Simpson changed the name to Saxonville Mills and immediately profited by the coming of the Civil War three years later, when his factories churned out uniforms and blankets for the Union army.

It is impossible to overstate the impact the mills had on Stone’s End, which soon became known as Saxonville. (The Saxon Factory itself owed its name to the Saxony breed of sheep, whose wool was processed by the mills.) Saxonville was a company town and, in the hands of the Simpson family, this was not a bad thing. Simpson employed a paternalistic form of management and oversaw nearly every aspect of life in the village. He lived in the town in his early years, as did many members of his family after him, although he eventually built a new mansion house across the line in Wayland after he remarried. He developed parks and looked after the interests of his employees. The only downside to this model of corporate benevolence is that it relies upon both the goodwill of corporate management and the profitability of the corporation. Both took a decided turn for the worse after the Simpson family sold the mills in 1917—but that was a long time in the future.

In the meantime the factories, as well as the construction of the reservoirs and aqueducts for the Boston water supply, brought a whole new population to Framingham—Irish immigrants. St. George’s Church in Saxonville, the first in Framingham, was dedicated June 1, 1847.

THE ENTERPRISING WHEELER BROTHERS

By and large, the ownership of the factories established in Saxonville in the early 1800s had one common element: none of the owners resided in Framingham. Except for the Wheeler brothers—Abner, Benjamin and Eliphalet—that is. The three were from nearby Lincoln, Massachusetts. In 1798, Abner became the first to move to Framingham, opening a general store in the little red shop at Framingham Centre that had been built by Daniel Bridge seventeen years before. He eventually bought the Framingham Hotel nearby and maintained it as a village institution for years. He was also an original proprietor of the Saxon Mills and an investor in the Worcester Turnpike. In the twentieth century, his stately home, located at the junction of Main Street and the turnpike (now Route 9), became a well-known restaurant, the Abner Wheeler House, before eventually being demolished for a strip mall development. Shrewd businessman that he was, perhaps he would have understood.

Brother Benjamin Wheeler was just as enterprising. He came to Framingham in 1801 and opened his own store, eventually filling the void left by his brother when the latter became a hotelier. The Wheeler store was a Framingham Centre institution for generations, later being run by his son, Increase Sumner Wheeler. Benjamin was a trustee of Framingham Academy for nearly forty years, a founder of the Framingham Manufacturing Co., a temperance advocate and even saw to the planting of shade trees along the lanes in the Centre that lent the area its pristine bucolic feel in photographs taken in the late nineteenth century. He prospered so well that he purchased the Brinley Farm, the former estate of that famous Loyalist and, before him, the original Joseph Buckminster. The stone doorstep to his store is embedded in the lawn in front of the Framingham Historical Society and Museum as a memorial to the man who was so long a trustee for the academy that was once housed there.

The third brother, Eliphalet, came last to Framingham, in 1816, building a house on the west side of the Centre Common that still stands today. He boasted a lower profile than either of his brothers, although he was also a proprietor and one-time superintendant of the Saxon Factory, before serving as deputy sheriff for many years. The enterprising Wheeler brothers did as much as anyone to establish Framingham Centre as the heart of the town’s economic life in the first half of the 1800s.

TWO TURNPIKES, ONE RAILROAD

If the factories of Saxonville ensured that village as the industrial heart of Framingham, the establishment of the Framingham Bank in 1833 in Framingham Centre seemed to put a final seal on the village becoming the center of commerce (as well as government) for the town. Yet it was at that very moment that the Centre’s shrewdest businessmen, the Wheeler brothers, inadvertently ensured that it was South Framingham that would become the actual center of town business within a few short decades.

The Worcester Turnpike Corporation was chartered in 1806 to build a toll road between Roxbury and Worcester, a distance of approximately forty miles. The surveyors of this turnpike took to heart the principle that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line; even looking at a map today, the contemporary Route 9 from Brookline to Worcester, which follows the path of the old turnpike, is a remarkably straight road.

Yet by sticking so close to geometric principles, the Worcester Turnpike Corporation created two major problems for itself. First, a straight line took no account of the topography of the route. The pike went up and down numerous hills that could have easily been circumvented—not an important concern when one’s customer is driving a car on an interstate, but a definite disadvantage if one’s customer is walking, riding a horse or driving a wagon or carriage. More important, the route led directly over Lake Quinsigamond before entering Worcester. The corporation spent countless thousands of dollars building three bridges over the narrow, but quite deep, lake, the first two having broken apart and sunk in fairly short order.

Second, the straight route passed through only one town center—Framingham Centre. This is no doubt what drew the interest, and the dollars, of the Wheeler brothers. But it meant that unless one were going directly to Worcester, Framingham or Boston, the turnpike might not necessarily be the shortest or most convenient route to get to any other town along the route. Since the turnpike was charging money for the privilege, this was an important consideration. These factors, combined with the practice of “shunpiking”—when one is walking or riding a horse, it is remarkably easy to step off the turnpike for a few hundred yards to avoid a toll house—meant that the Worcester Turnpike Corporation was always in a precarious financial position. By 1826, it was already seeking to give portions of the road back to the local towns so it would no longer bear the burden of maintaining the most unprofitable stretches of highway.

That is why it is even stranger that the Central Turnpike Corporation was founded in 1824, seeking to build a toll road between Boston and the Connecticut line, where it would connect to another turnpike to Hartford. This road followed the current path of Route 135 through South Framingham. The road was completed in 1830, and the portion through Middlesex County, including Framingham, was abandoned only six years later, indicating what a colossal financial disaster the Central Turnpike had been for its investors.

When the Boston and Worcester Railroad was chartered to build a route for the new “iron horse” through Framingham, its organizers approached the proprietors of the Worcester Turnpike with a proposal to buy their right of way. It made the most sense for the train station to be in Framingham Centre and, as we know, the turnpike is in a straight line from Boston to Worcester. But the Wheeler brothers still had hopes of realizing a profit from the turnpike, feared the competition from a railroad and blocked the laying of track through the Centre.

So the railroad turned to the Central Turnpike Corporation, which was only too happy to find out that somebody was willing to give it money for something, and the line to Worcester passed through South Framingham in 1834, the full line to Worcester completed in 1835.

Thenceforth, South Framingham would develop at a rapid rate due to access to a direct rail connection both east and west, while the Centre began to languish. A spur line was connected to Saxonville in 1846, the growth of which, due to the factories and abundant waterpower already there, was not negatively impacted by its lack of access to a direct rail route. Framingham Centre finally got its own spur line in 1850, which terminated at the present site of Trolley Square east of the Centre. A later line ran to the west of the Centre and did eventually connect to points north, but by then it was too late.

The turnpikes had been great successes at road building but abject failures at making money. Framingham Centre benefited greatly from being the sizable community directly on the turnpike and Route 9 continues to be a central axis through town today, but in the coming decades nothing would top the power of having a direct rail connection to Boston.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOUTH FRAMINGHAM

One of the first manifestations of the economic impact of the railroad was the growth of the straw braid industry. The braiding of straw had begun literally as a cottage industry in Framingham about 1800, with individual women braiding straw to be sold for the manufacture of hats. Those who first engaged in this business were scattered across Framingham—Mary (Swift) Bennett lived about where the Massachusetts Turnpike crosses Concord Street south of Saxonville, Mary (Eames) Rice lived a bit farther south on what is now Cherry Street and Benjamin Wheeler soon became a major merchant in the straw braid and bonnet business, sometimes realizing $30,000 a year from his business, chiefly in the American South. But as the business became bigger and factories were built in the 1830s and 1840s, they were almost all located in South Framingham—on Park Street and Concord Street—all not far from the rail depot.

HARMONY GROVE

While manufacturing and commerce clearly benefited from the coming of the railroad in 1835, the rail connections also helped turn Framingham into a recreational destination for people across New England. Harmony Grove, one of the first family parks in the country, was opened on the eastern shore of Farm Pond in 1846. Owner Edwin Eames laid out walking paths on the four-acre site and built a boathouse, a dance pavilion and a one-thousand-seat outdoor amphitheatre. Eventually the park would cover fifteen acres. A branch of the Boston and Worcester Railroad ran right through the grounds, and it became a popular destination for boating, fishing, picnics and games. The amphitheatre was frequently used for large civic gatherings, including all sorts of civic, religious and reform organizations. The most significant of these was the annual rally of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, held there from the Grove’s opening in 1846 until 1865.

Antislavery was by no means a universally popular cause, even in Massachusetts, where slavery had been prohibited since 1783. Many thought abolitionists were unnecessarily stirring up trouble, or that slavery was unfortunate but it was up to the individual states to decide, or that there were simply many more pressing issues of greater importance. There was also, no doubt, plenty of racism. Yet, for the most part, Framingham proved a tolerant venue for the abolitionists.

An 1852 view of Harmony Grove, from Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion.

The Framingham Anti-Slavery Society was founded on the day after Christmas 1837 at a meeting in the vestry of the Hollis Evangelical Society (later Plymouth Church) at the Centre. Its first president was Ebenezer Stone, with other officers including Ezra Hemenway, Edmund Capen, Charles Parkhurst, William P. Temple (uncle of Josiah, the historian), Joel Tayntor, Dana Bullard, Lawson Rice and Perisan H. Vose. The one hiccup occurred when the Middlesex County Anti-Slavery Society tried to hold a meeting on October 16, 1853, at the Framingham Town Hall (still standing on the Centre Common, now called the Village Hall). Although they had arranged to use the hall in advance, the selectmen had gotten cold feet, decided not to unlock the building and made themselves scarce. Dr. Henry O. Stone tracked down the chairman of the selectmen, who agreed that the group should be allowed to meet and found the caretaker to let them in. Meanwhile, the meeting had commenced outdoors on the common.

The Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society’s annual rally on July 4, 1854, was an event of national significance. The speakers constituted almost a “who’s who” of the abolitionist cause—Wendell Phillips, Sojourner Truth, Henry David Thoreau, Lucy Stone and Stephen S. Foster. But it was William Lloyd Garrison, whose Boston newspaper The Liberator had been dedicated to promoting abolitionism for over twenty years, who made the biggest headlines.

The country was in turmoil over the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act a month earlier, which sought to eliminate the national debate over slavery by leaving the matter up to the individual states, but instead inflamed both sides. Particularly hated was the Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed escaped slaves to be arrested in free states and returned to their masters in the South. Garrison declared his belief in the words of the Declaration of Independence that all men were created equal and then burned a copy of the fugitive slave law, along with a judicial decision enforcing it, because they contradicted this sentiment. When he went on to condemn the United States Constitution as “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell,” and burned it as well, he went further than even many of those in attendance were willing to go. His actions sparked both condemnation and praise across the nation and were one more step toward driving a deep fissure through the heart of the nation over slavery.

LUCKY LOTHROP WIGHT

The Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861 thrust America into the Civil War. Thousands of volunteers from across the nation enthusiastically enlisted in the cause, including over five hundred from Framingham. One of those volunteers was a young man named Lothrop Wight. Son of a prominent real estate owner in town and Framingham Academy graduate, the twenty-three-year-old Wight mustered in as a second lieutenant with the Sixteenth Massachusetts Volunteers in July 1861. After a short trip to Boston, the regiment traveled on to Fort Monroe, Virginia, for training. Within a short time, Wight found himself battling not for his country, but for his career as a soldier.

During the course of training at Fort Monroe, Lieutenant Wight had become unhappy with the leadership of his captain, Henry Lawson, and had filed charges against him. Confident that Lawson would be found guilty and removed of his regimental command, Wight began voicing that opinion to the soldiers serving under him. Over the course of several days in October, the lieutenant was heard to have called Captain Lawson a “damned fool.” He also remarked that if the regiment were to go into battle, Lawson would be relegated to the rear of the company and he, Lieutenant Wight, would be called upon to lead the troops. A sergeant in the company looking for extra blankets was told by Wight to take Captain Lawson’s, because “he wouldn’t be needing them much longer.” Not surprisingly, the arrogant and downright insubordinate words of Lieutenant Wight caused charges to be filed against him, and soon he was on trial under general court-martial for, among other infractions, “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.” Several of Wight’s men testified against him, and he was promptly found guilty of all charges and “cashiered out,” or dishonorably discharged, in November 1861. The charges against Captain Lawson were not pursued, and he continued to serve in the Sixteenth Massachusetts Volunteers until he died of disease at Chancellorsville, Virginia, in October 1864.

Lothrop Wight.

Lothrop Wight was given another chance to prove that he could be a good commander. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy in June 1862 and served with distinction on several ships for the duration of the war. Wight’s various positions of command on the ships Wachusett, Vanderbilt and Mendota included officer of the watch, acting master’s mate and acting chief. While serving on the Vanderbilt, he crossed the oceans of the world hunting down the Confederate ship Alabama, with no luck. The crew of the Vanderbilt did, however, capture three blockade runners during its yearlong chase.

It was while serving on the USS Mendota, however, that Wight proved himself in battle and earned a place in Framingham legend. The Mendota had been patrolling the James River throughout 1864, supporting the Union attack on the Confederate-held city of Richmond, Virginia, and was regularly assaulted by artillery on the shore. In one particularly intense attack at the end of July, Wight was hit by a Confederate bullet. Miraculously, the bullet struck a penny that Wight was carrying in his pocket. The bullet made a large indentation in the penny, fusing its silver metal to the copper of the coin and saving the life of the lucky lieutenant. After the war, Wight became a florist in Wellesley Hills, where he lived quietly until his death in 1918. The lucky penny that saved his life was passed down to his granddaughter, who donated it to the Framingham Historical Society and Museum in 1976.

The penny that saved the life of Lieutenant Wight.

Framingham boasts another Civil War sailor with a strange tale; yet this sailor did not fight under the Stars and Stripes, but under the flag of the Confederacy.

A REBEL ON UNION AVENUE

By the time he arrived in Framingham from Post Mills, Vermont, in 1898, Thomas Chubb had already lived a life of adventure and achievement. Shortly after his birth in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1839, Chubb and his family moved to Galveston, Texas, where his father, also named Thomas, began a successful shipping company. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the Yankee-born Chubb men served the Confederacy proudly. The elder Thomas captained a blockade runner, the Royal Yacht. Thomas the younger was a commander on several different ships and was eventually captured near the end of the war. He obtained his freedom by paying a substantial fine.

After the war, Chubb contracted yellow fever and was advised by doctors that his health would only improve if he moved north—back to the area of his birth and the home of the victorious Union army. He arrived with his family in Post Mills, Vermont, in 1868 and, not surprisingly, got a chilly reception from the local citizens. Chubb soon became fast friends and business partners with local entrepreneur William Marsten. Together in the early 1870s they founded a successful fishing rod manufacturing company. The Chubb factory produced the first machine-made rods in the world, which were renowned and coveted for their superior quality. Chubb’s rods and other fishing products were promoted heavily, the distinct star logo and Chubb’s bearded visage appearing in hundreds of newspaper and magazine ads across the country. Eventually the people of Chubb’s adopted home came to accept and even respect him, so much so that he successfully ran for several local offices before being elected to both the Vermont house and senate.

By 1898, the successful sailor, businessman and politician needed a change. His fishing rod factory had burned and been rebuilt several times. Although it was still successful, Chubb sold out and moved south to Framingham, where he bought a house on Union Avenue. He later built a house on Warren Avenue and became active in town affairs. Every summer he would return to Post Mills to spend time with his Vermont acquaintances. In the summer of 1910, Chubb was gathered with friends, saying his usual goodbyes before his trip north. Before departing, he startled his friends by revealing a strange premonition he had. He told them that he would not be returning to Framingham; that he would die in Post Mills and be buried next to his wife on the ninth of July. Chubb was so sure of his premonition that he packed his most treasured possession—a Confederate flag. Within a few days of departing Framingham, Thomas Chubb’s prediction had come true. He was laid to rest in Vermont on the very day he had predicted, his head resting on the Confederate flag under which he had fought so many years earlier.

Nineteenth-century magazine advertisement for Chubb fishing rods. Courtesy of James L. Parr.

THE “BATTLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC”

During the nineteenth century, Washington’s Birthday was a holiday celebrated with nearly as much patriotic fervor as Independence Day. Parades, fireworks, military displays and speeches were all popular forms of entertainment on February 22 each year.

The 130th anniversary of Washington’s Birthday in 1862 took on new meaning as the nation was nearing the end of its first year in the Civil War. A proclamation by President Lincoln urged Americans to include in their public observances a reading of Washington’s farewell address to his troops. Framingham’s program was held at the Plymouth Congregational Church on the town common, with Normal School principal George Bigelow reading the Washington speech. Several poems and hymns were also included in the program, one of them a stirring tribute and call to victory for the Union entitled “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” written by Julia Ward Howe and recently published in the Atlantic Monthly. At the end of the program, for the first time in public, Howe’s lyrics were sung to the now familiar and often parodied tune. Little did the audience in Plymouth Church know the depth of meaning that would later become attached to this song as the war dragged on for three more years.

The melody to which Howe set her lyrics is said to have come from the camp meeting circuit of the early 1800s. The tune had earlier been appropriated by soldiers of the Massachusetts Militia stationed at Fort Warren on George’s Island in Boston Harbor. When a fellow soldier named John Brown died while stationed at the fort, his comrades invented various lyrics to the old tune in tribute, one of the lyrics being “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.” The song and its new lyrics became popular in Boston, where Julia Ward Howe was living at the time. Many residents mistakenly believed the song to be about the abolitionist John Brown, who had been arrested and executed for his raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. In true folk-tune tradition, new verses were anonymously added and passed on.

Cover of 1862 program that featured the first public singing of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Page from 1862 program with words to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

While touring army camps with her husband in Washington in November 1861, Julia Ward Howe and her companions were heard singing the John Brown song with some of the Union soldiers. A friend suggested she write new lyrics to the tune, and the next morning Mrs. Howe dashed off the lyrics in one sitting, knowing even then that something special had just been created. The song became a national anthem for the war effort and was revered to the point that, in 1863, a New York school principal was fired for refusing to sing the song with her students as directed by the school board.

Julia Ward Howe made several appearances in Framingham after the war, including the recitation of a poem to a crowd of two thousand suffrage supporters gathered at Harmony Grove in 1874. In June 1900, Mrs. Howe was invited to speak on the subject of character during a celebration of the town’s 200th anniversary held at the Grace Congregational Church on Union Avenue. During the program, a group of schoolchildren had the unique privilege of singing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” to an audience that included the song’s author, in the same town where it had first been sung publicly thirty-eight years earlier.

A BRAND-NEW FRAMINGHAM

By the end of the Civil War in 1865, Framingham had been transformed into a completely different town than it had been at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Not only had its population almost tripled since 1800—from 1,625 to 4,665—but it had grown much more diverse, with new Irish Catholic immigrants added to the old Yankee population. It was now a town of railroads and turnpikes, with two industrial villages at Saxonville and South Framingham that had not previously existed, and even the relatively sleepy Centre was a much more dynamic place. The explosive growth would only accelerate over the next forty-five years as the population reached 12,948 by 1910 and included even more new immigrant groups from Southern and Eastern Europe. But the pattern for this growth had already been established.

Chapter Six

REFORM AND RECREATION

Framingham in the Victorian Era

THE INDOMITABLE SPIRIT OF REFORM

The reform spirit that had fed the abolitionist movement did not entirely dissipate after the Civil War. Instead, the energy was fed into new movements—temperance, women’s suffrage, prison reform, education and religious enlightenment, among many others. If the business of Framingham undoubtedly remained business during the Victorian era, this chapter will examine a different side of the community, one striving for moral improvement or diversion, sometimes both at the same time. The reader may rest assured that we will get back to business in the next chapter.

THE SHERBORN REFORMATORY

The facility that is today known as the Massachusetts Correctional Institute–Framingham began its life in a different town with a different name. Originally known as the Massachusetts Reformatory Prison for Women, it was established in the town of Sherborn in 1877. When the town of Framingham annexed 565 acres of north Sherborn in 1924, it also acquired the women’s prison and its colorful history.

The Sherborn Reformatory was the first women’s prison in the country, begun by social reformers with the intent of actually changing the lives of its inmates rather than merely incarcerating them. To accomplish this mission, the women were put to work on the four-hundred-acre farm that surrounded the imposing brick prison building. A variety of vegetables and grain crops were grown, and pigs, cows, sheep and poultry were also raised. For a time, the inmates raised silkworms, which spun their cocoons in the 128 mulberry trees planted expressly for that purpose. A shirt-making industry was also operated on the grounds. Receipts from the sale of the prison’s products were used to cover operating expenses.

Sherborn Reformatory (now MCI–Framingham) in a nineteenth-century view.

Another crucial component of the inmates’ reformation was the grading system used to encourage and reward hard work and good behavior. Upon entering the institution, inmates were assigned a grade, or division, from one to four. Inmates in the higher divisions were given more comfortable rooms and privileges, such as letter writing and tea taking. Some inmates in Division 4 were sent out to work as domestics in local homes. A point system, much like a report card, was used to keep track of an inmate’s progress, allowing her to gain more privileges as she moved up through the divisions.

One of the first superintendents of the reformatory was Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross. Miss Barton had been deeply immersed in her Red Cross work in the spring of 1883 when the governor of Massachusetts, retired General Benjamin Butler, asked her to take over the superintendent’s position. Although she was reluctant to leave her Red Cross mission, Barton felt a fierce loyalty to Butler, who had strongly supported her as she ministered to the wounded and dying on the battlefields during the Civil War. After taking a tour of the facility, she agreed to take the position, but only for six months. Although the facility had been open for only six years at the time Barton took over, it had already earned a national reputation as a model for reform. Clara Barton’s short stewardship only reinforced that reputation.

Her tenure there was marked by kindness and empathy toward the women, many of whom she viewed not as criminals but as victims of poverty, alcohol and the social double standards of the time. She treated them with a respect and human dignity they had never experienced before. Her reputation as the “Angel of the Battlefield” during the Civil War inspired awe in the prisoners who met her as she walked the hallways and gave talks in the chapel. Upon their release, many inmates tearfully promised her they would turn their lives around. Barton also made improvements to the prison’s educational, governmental and business systems. She stayed two months longer than she had agreed to, returning to the American Red Cross in early 1884.

Barton was succeeded by Mrs. Ellen Johnson, who held the post for fifteen years until her death in 1899. Despite several unfortunate incidents over the years, including a series of prisoner riots in 1888, Johnson ran the reformatory with efficiency and compassion and is remembered as one of the most successful and innovative reformers of the nineteenth century.

CATTLE ANNIE AND LITTLE BRITCHES

Two of the reformatory’s most notorious residents arrived in the fall of 1895 from the wilds of Oklahoma. Anna McDoulet and Jennie Metcalf, better known as “Cattle Annie” and “Little Britches,” were only fifteen years old, but they were already experienced criminals. As members of the Bill Dalton outlaw gang, the tobacco-chewing, gun-toting teens stole horses, sold whiskey to the natives and acted as lookouts during robberies. Jennie was arrested after a shootout in which she easily handled a pair of massive six-shooters. Because of their youth, both girls received relatively light sentences of two years at the Sherborn Reformatory, where they would learn “womanly duties” and “get accustomed to the civilized, proper style of life.” Their arrival in Sherborn brought crowds of people to the prison gates, hoping to get a glimpse of the “Oklahoma Girl Bandits” at work in the fields. After spending about a year farming, doing laundry and other chores, the girls were released, having turned their lives around at Sherborn. Although there are conflicting accounts of their lives after they were released, their criminal careers were well behind them. The girl outlaws remain a part of Wild West lore to this day. In 1981, Hollywood produced a movie loosely based on their adventures called Cattle Annie and Little Britches, starring Diane Lane, Amanda Plummer and Burt Lancaster.

THE CHAUTAUQUA ASSEMBLIES AT LAKEVIEW

The names Mount Wayte, Methodist Campground, New England Chautauqua, New England Sunday School Assembly and Lakeview all refer to the hilly area located to the northwest of Farm Pond. Originally named for Richard Wayte, the Boston resident who was granted three hundred acres by the Bay Colony in 1658, we recall it as the site of the infamous Eames massacre of 1676, as related in Chapter One. Nearly two hundred years later, in 1871, the Methodist Church purchased forty-five acres and established a summer campground there, which they named “Lakeview.”

Camp meetings were a popular summer diversion offered since the early 1800s, gaining in popularity after the Civil War. The first camp meeting at Lakeview began rather humbly in August 1872, with five hundred participants staying in tents and attending daily scripture readings, prayer services and hymn sings. By the next summer, several wooden cottages had been built and the facility included mail service, a bookstore and a barbershop. Over the next few years, both the crowds and the campus grew, and in 1880, the first meeting of the New England Chautauqua Assembly took place. The Chautauqua Movement was begun in 1874 by two Methodist ministers who intended to advance the social, physical, moral and intellectual lives of its members. The name came from New York State’s Lake Chautauqua, where the first assembly took place. Assemblies were held each summer across the country, and the campground at Lakeview was the headquarters for the New England Assembly.

Map of the Chautauqua grounds at Lakeview, 1895.

Beginning in mid-July, trains would arrive at the Lakeview station at the foot of Mount Wayte, depositing hundreds of families and individuals from across the country. Carriages would then transport the attendees to the campground for their Chautauqua experience. The sounding of the Chautauqua bells at the top of the hill would signal the start and the end of each day’s activities. While the main focus of the meetings was religious in nature, many cultural and educational lessons were offered during the ten-day sessions. Each week featured special theme days, such as Temperance Day, National Day, GAR (Grand Army of the Republic) Day and Children’s Day. Temperance lectures and workshops were a regular part of each year’s program. A four-year program of study was offered under the title of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle (CLSC). Graduation ceremonies for each CLSC class were held in the Hall of Philosophy, with participants marching under a colorful banner bearing their class year. A program from the 1898 assembly contains a variety of offerings including chorus training, concerts, prayers, roundtable discussions, classes in “Physical Culture and Elocution” and lectures on “The Indians, their Haunts and Homes with Glimpses from Prairie and Mountain,” “The Gold Mine and Miners of Nova Scotia” and temperance. While most of the instruction and lectures were given by local ministers and lecturers, several prominent speakers addressed the crowds at Lakeview over the years, including former president Rutherford B. Hayes in 1892 and African American educator Booker T. Washington in 1896.

Ticket booth at Lakeview.

Congregational Sunday school tent at Lakeview.

Outdoor auditorium at Lakeview.

Chautauquans boating on the Sudbury River.

The presentation of such erudite lessons and activities needed an appropriate setting, and over the years the collection of quaint tents and cottages was transformed into a campus of grand halls and spacious auditoriums. The Greek-inspired Hall of Philosophy, dedicated in 1896 and modeled after the Parthenon, stood on the summit of Mount Wayte. An open-air auditorium could comfortably seat five thousand, with room for an additional five hundred people in an adjacent pavilion. Lectures and classes were conducted in the four-hundred-seat Normal Hall. Baptist, Congregational and Methodist social halls were available to those church members who wished to use them. Over one hundred cottages were nestled under the oaks and maples, bearing such nature-inspired names as Sunrise, Oak Dell and Twin Tree. Attendance at the annual meetings began to drop off in the twentieth century, and at the end of the 1917 assembly organizers were scrambling to sell tickets to the following year’s events. On November 11, 1918, Armistice Day, the bells at the top of Mount Wayte were rung for the last time, and the property was eventually sold off.

After the sale of the property in 1918, the entire Mount Wayte area fell into disrepair. Many of the cottages burned down or were demolished, and all of the campus buildings were gone within a short time. Today a handful of cottages still stand on Mount Wayte Avenue, some still bearing their distinct Victorian gingerbread decorations. Similar cottages in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, also built as part of a Methodist campground, have been designated National Landmarks and a thriving Camp Meeting Association still holds annual summer encampments there. The Chautauqua Movement itself lives on in its birthplace in Chautauqua, New York, where modern pilgrims can still attend a ten-day program of arts, education, religion and recreation. The spirit of the Chautauqua Movement even spawned a short-lived Disney version of the assemblies. In the mid-1980s, then Disney CEO Michael Eisner, inspired by visits to the original Chautauqua near his wife’s home in upstate New York, began developing the Disney Institute at Walt Disney World in Florida. Starting in 1996, the Disney Institute offered educational and arts programs at a luxury hotel on the shores of a private lake within the Disney World compound in Orlando. But attendance at the institute never met expectations, and the program was phased out in 2001.

THE “HOLY ROLLER RIOT” OF 1913

Over the years, the Lakeview site had also been used by various other organizations, including the Salvation Army and the Odd Fellows. One particular group, the Pentecostal Disciples of the Latter Reign, arranged to lease the property for several weeks in 1913 for a camp meeting. The leader of the group was sixty-nine-year-old Madame Maria Woodworth Etter, a Pentecostal preacher and faith healer. Mrs. Etter had spent over thirty-five years traveling the country, holding meetings in tents with crowds of twenty thousand or more. Often, Mrs. Etter’s followers, after experiencing the healing power of God, would fall to the ground writhing and speaking in tongues, thus earning the nickname “Holy Rollers.”

The Holy Rollers began their prayer meetings at Lakeview in early August. The meeting had been going on for several days when word spread throughout town that amazing healings and cures were taking place at Mount Wayte. Within no time crowds at the campground grew from two hundred to two thousand, and a near riot ensued. The Framingham Police arrived to break up the crowd and ended up arresting Mrs. Etter and several of her staff on the charge of obtaining money under false pretenses. After posting $300 in bail, Mrs. Etter appeared in the courtroom of Judge William Kingsbury, who would decide whether to pursue the charges against the faith healer.

A parade of witnesses gave testimony for both sides, with many in support of the preacher. One woman who claimed to be a cousin to President William McKinley had traveled all the way from Pennsylvania in order to be healed and testified that Mrs. Etter had restored her ability to walk. Other witnesses claimed to be healed of drunkenness, deafness and muscular ailments. A blind eighteen-year-old Saxonville boy named Joseph Tuttle attended the meeting one night and took the stage in hopes of regaining his sight. Church ministers rubbed Tuttle’s forehead, eyes and legs while shouting, “Come out devil, come out!” and “Hallelujah!” When asked by the prosecutor what happened next, Tuttle replied, “Nothing special.” Other witnesses testified that Mrs. Etter had pleaded for money to cover travel expenses, and that her assistants had warned that anyone testifying against her would have the wrath of God come down upon them. Doctors for the prosecution believed that Mrs. Etter used hypnotism to lead her followers into believing that miracles had occurred. After four days of testimony, Judge Kingsbury dismissed all charges and the Holy Rollers left Framingham for good. Maria Woodworth Etter continued preaching until her death in 1924. Today she is regarded as an important voice in the Pentecostal movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and many of her writings are still in print.

FRAMINGHAM AT PLAY

There were other ways of passing the time in Framingham that were perhaps less high-minded than the Chautauqua assemblies and Methodist meetings at Mount Wayte. Some pre–Civil War attractions soldiered on into the postwar era. Harmony Grove continued as a family-oriented destination for speeches and lectures as well as recreation, although Mount Wayte soon surpassed it in both size and appeal, and the Grove closed in 1877. Its once picturesque grounds were fully redeveloped into rail yards and housing lots by 1900.

Agricultural fairs had always been a staple of entertainment in such a farm-rich town and continued to be so for many more decades. In 1868, the South Middlesex Agricultural Society moved its annual fair to a twenty-four-acre site on the Sudbury River in South Framingham. The event was held over two days each September after the harvest was taken in and was a local institution for nearly fifty years. Framingham was still primarily an agricultural town in the early twentieth century, and the livestock exhibitions and produce displays at the fair were always the main attractions. Horses, hogs, cattle, sheep and poultry were exhibited and judged in the large barns and stables. Prizewinning fruits and vegetables were displayed and sold. Farmers showcased their skills behind the plow in friendly but spirited competitions, and a greased pig chase with the winner taking home the pig was always a hit with the crowd.

The fair also offered a variety of nonagricultural activities over the years, including bicycle and foot races, baseball games between local teams and dog shows. At times the fairgrounds resembled an old-time carnival, complete with sideshow attractions such as giant lizards and a skeleton man. Visitors in 1873 were treated to a balloon ascension by the amazing Professor King.

The highlight of each year’s fair was the afternoon of horse racing on the half-mile track. From time to time, the races would feature a head-to-head match between horses owned by two of Framingham’s “country squires,” John Macomber and John Bowditch. Macomber owned a 220-acre estate called Raceland on Salem End Road, where he had his own race track installed in 1927 after the fairgrounds closed for good. Horse racing continued at the Macomber track until 1935, when parimutuel betting was legalized in Massachusetts.

Macomber was the president of the Massachusetts Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (MSPCA) for forty years, and along with his prized horses he kept show dogs, a donkey and even a monkey at the estate. After the horse racing ended, he continued to hold large events at the estate including Kennel Club shows, antique automobile rallies and the Millwood Hunt Club’s Annual Horse Show. In June 1950, Macomber hosted a celebration of the town’s 250th anniversary at Raceland. Twenty-five thousand guests attended a concert given by the Boston Pops under the direction of Arthur Fiedler. Upon Macomber’s death in 1955, the bulk of the property was left to the MSPCA, which operated an animal life center there from 1971 to 1984.

The track at Raceland, the estate of John Macomber.

John Bowditch was the son of E.F. Bowditch, who had begun the Millwood Hunt Club on his 660 acres in north Framingham in 1866. The elder Bowditch introduced English-style fox hunting to Framingham, with imported foxhounds tracking actual foxes across his vast property. The fox hunt continued off and on until about 1912. In 1922, John Bowditch revived the traditional fox hunt, but quickly switched over to the more humane drag hunt, in which hounds followed a scent laid down over the trails by a volunteer. For many years the club sponsored a horse show, and in 1966 it celebrated its 100th anniversary. But within three years the club had disbanded, a casualty of increased residential development in the northern part of town.

Although the equine and agricultural spectacles that entertained generations of Framinghamites ended years ago, many of the venues at which they took place have been preserved as parkland or protected conservation areas. The Middlesex South Fairgrounds were transformed into the town’s Bowditch Field, complete with running track, football field and bleachers built by the Works Progress Administration during the Depression in the 1930s. A portion of the Macomber property along Salem End Road was developed into housing after the MSPCA closed down its operations in 1984, but the town acquired a parcel of 57 wooded acres that today is open to the public as the Macomber Conservation Land and Trails. The fields and forests that once echoed with the braying of hounds hot on the scent in the days of the Millwood Hunt are now host to leashed pooches and their owners strolling the paths of the 820-acre Callahan State Park.

THE MARATHON COMES TO TOWN

Since its inaugural run in 1897, the Boston Marathon has had several route changes over the twenty-six-mile course, but the path to victory has always taken runners down Route 135 through the heart of Framingham. The two-and-a-half-mile section of the course that runs through town is relatively flat and only three miles from the starting line, so it lacks the drama of Heartbreak Hill in Newton or the excitement of the finish line in Copley Square. But that does not stop the thousands of spectators who line Waverly Street every Patriots’ Day from enjoying the race. In 1907, one such crowd got more excitement than it anticipated when bystanders witnessed an event that affected the outcome of the race and has since become a part of Marathon lore.

Marathon fans had been talking for weeks about the upcoming race, with special interest paid to Tom Longboat, a nineteen-year-old Canadian phenomenon. Longboat, a full-blooded Onondaga from Ontario, was picked by many to win the eleventh running of the prestigious event. Framingham fans looking for a thrilling race were not disappointed on that cold, snowy day when the first pack of about ten runners made its way down Route 135, with Tom Longboat sharing the lead. As the group approached the Waverly Street railroad crossing, a most unexpected and potentially dangerous thing happened—a freight train slowly rumbled down the tracks approaching the intersection. The lead group saw the train and put on a burst of speed, crossing the tracks just moments before the train passed by. The next pack of runners was not so lucky. They had to run in place for nearly a minute while the train lumbered across the road. When the route was finally clear, it was too late. None of the runners in the second group was able to make up the time and distance, and young Tom Longboat won in record time, becoming a Canadian national hero. Local runner Hank Fowler of Cambridge, who was one of the runners held up by the train, hinted that he may have done better than his second place finish had the train not interfered.

CABBAGE NIGHT

Long before trick-or-treating caught on as a Halloween tradition, the evening of October 31 was chiefly celebrated with pranks, mischief and fortunetelling. A Boston Globe article from 1907 describes large groups of rowdy teenage girls “throwing stones and tin cans against houses,” “screeching and yelling and disturbing sick people” and responding to requests to calm down with “hooting and blasphemy.” Years later, in the 1930s, harmless Halloween pranks had escalated to the point of outright vandalism not only in Framingham, but across the nation as well. Locally, hundreds of young vandals terrorized the streets, letting air out of tires, breaking streetlights, stealing street signs and ringing doorbells. The town responded in 1936 by holding a large Halloween party on the old fairgrounds. Hundreds of costumed children enjoyed a parade, contests and games, and for the first time in several years, police reports of vandalism decreased. The party was so successful it was moved to Nevins Hall in the Memorial Building and was an annual event for many years.

Determined pranksters would not be stopped, however; they simply shifted their shenanigans to the night before Halloween, when police patrols were less frequent. The October 30 night of mayhem was called Cabbage Night in Framingham, and was similar to celebrations held in other parts of the country under names such as Mischief Night, Gate Night and Devil’s Night. Cabbage Night has its origins in an old Scottish tradition. All Hallow’s Eve had long been a night on which young ladies tried any number of fortunetelling techniques in order to learn more about their future spouses. Walking down the stairs backward while looking in a mirror, floating walnut shells in water and bobbing for apples were all surefire ways to get a glimpse into one’s romantic future. The close examination of a cabbage pulled right out of a neighbor’s patch could foretell the attributes of a potential husband. Once the cabbage had served its purpose, the only logical thing to do with it was to throw it against the neighbor’s door and run really fast, thus beginning a long tradition of Halloween pranks. Framingham teens observing Cabbage Night skipped the fortunetelling and stuck with the vegetable throwing, adding it to their already large repertoire of tricks. While other communities in the area observe the night before Halloween in similar fashion, Framingham is one of the few towns to attach the vegetable-themed moniker to the celebration. Perhaps the name choice was an unintended tribute to the town’s rich agricultural past.

Chapter Seven

FRAMINGHAM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

DENNISON MANUFACTURING AND R.H. LONG

As the twentieth century dawned, South Framingham continued to prosper. It was where the newspapers were located, where most retail establishments opened their doors and where you could catch the train to Boston. There was a veritable building boom as large office blocks, schools, churches, the armory and banks were all built downtown.

Most of all, it was where the manufacturing jobs were. The Dennison Manufacturing Company took over the moribund works of the Para-Rubber Company in 1897, located right along the rail lines. The maker of boxes, labels, tags, crepe paper and the like soon became the town’s largest employer and remained so until late in the twentieth century. As a result, Framingham earned the nickname “Tag Town.” The Dennison family moved to town and soon demonstrated that their public-minded ideals matched those of the Simpson family when they had ruled Saxonville. Dennison was run on progressive ideals as to workers’ rights, employee ownership and quality of work life. Henry Dennison became a national figure, especially during the New Deal years, with his innovative ideas as to how worker and capital could cooperate and profit together. In 1945, a delegation even proposed that Dennison’s estate off Edmands Road in north Framingham would be an ideal site for the headquarters of the newly formed United Nations, given Framingham’s excellent transportation facilities and relative proximity to both Boston and New York. It took only a moment for Dennison to picture what this would mean for his peaceful estate and convince the delegation never to raise the question again.

Another large manufacturer was the R.H. Long Shoe Company. Richard Long prospered in the shoe trade, but he had other interests as well. He ran for governor of Massachusetts as a Democrat, only to lose soundly to future president Calvin Coolidge. (He did not even carry his hometown of Framingham, although he came closer than any other Democrat did in that era.) In the 1920s, he decided to jump into the automobile business back when any number of amateur mechanics started building their own cars in garages with hopes of making it big. Long’s Bay State automobile was undoubtedly a handsome vehicle, and several thousand were made before he pulled the plug on the operation in 1926.

THE NEW IMMIGRANTS

The following article regarding a crew working on the abutment of a bridge over the railroad tracks at Park’s Corner in South Framingham appeared in the Framingham Tribune, May 16, 1891:

The Italian quarters at Park’s corner…burned at noon Friday…There was a barn worth about $300 and a cottage house worth about $400. Both were occupied by the Italians, nearly fifty in number, and stood very near the [Boston & Albany] railroad tracks, and it was supposed that the stable, covered with tar paper, took fire from the sparks of a locomotive. The stable was burning at or before 11 o’clock in the morning, and before some of the occupants came home to dinner at noon the house was all on fire. Both were totally destroyed…

The Italians had been loafing a week on account of a misunderstanding about prices, but had been paid off, and went to work again Thursday morning, the day before the fire. They had consequently spent little of the money that they had received, and some of them claimed that they lost their money in the fire and others lost clothing. One Italian lost a watch and chain and another a new suit of clothes just bought. The Italians were thrown into utter consternation and confusion by the fire, and their excitable natures were seen in full play by the spectators. Many of them were crying at the loss of their goods. They left the place in a body, and all went into Boston on an early afternoon train, and will probably not work in Framingham again, so that others will have to be engaged to finish the job.

The article illustrates how novel the residents of Framingham found the presence of Italian laborers in their town. We are informed that the men had been “loafing” for a week during a pay dispute. The taciturn Yankees marveled at the “excitable natures” of the workers, although given how much they lost, and given how little they probably had, their emotional response seems entirely justified under the circumstances. That the fifty men were quartered in a cottage and a barn did not seem to raise any eyebrows. The most concern expressed by the reporter was in consideration of who would now complete the construction of the bridge abutment.

If Italians were unquestionably alien to Framingham residents in 1891, objects of wonder and scorn, within twenty years they had become a part of the community. They took many of the new jobs in construction or at the Dennison, Long or other factories. They dominated the neighborhood south of Waverly Street (Route 135) and west of Winthrop, which became known as “Tripoli.” The Christopher Columbus Society was founded in 1908, St. Tarcisius Church was dedicated a year later and Columbus Hall on Fountain Street was opened in 1911. Perini Construction, founded in Ashland in 1894, relocated to Framingham in 1931 and immediately became one of the largest construction firms in the region. In the American immigrant tradition, by 1938 the Italian community had achieved sufficient sway within the town that the square in front of Columbus Hall was renamed Columbus Square. Though the Italians were the largest group, they were joined by Greeks, Eastern European Jews and many other ethnicities living side by side in South Framingham.

SOUTH FRAMINGHAM IS FRAMINGHAM NOW

By 1910, South Framingham had been the tail wagging the dog for decades, as the more vibrant, populous part of town. No one confused “downtown” with the rustic Main Street at Framingham Centre. In 1913, the post office made this change official—the “South Framingham” post office became the “Framingham” post office, while the old Framingham post office was now designated “Framingham Centre.” Somehow this bureaucratic ruling put the official imprimatur on a change that had been eighty years in coming. In 1928, the construction of the Nevins building as the new town hall at the junction of Union Avenue and Concord Street further ratified the changing of the guard. (Still, the main branch of the public library did not move downtown until 1979.)

THE MUSTERFIELD

Framingham’s central location on the railroad line and Worcester Turnpike, along with its abundance of open land, compelled the state of Massachusetts in 1873 to locate a training ground here for the Massachusetts Volunteer Militia (today’s National Guard). State law required each militia unit to spend a week in training, and Framingham’s camp was one of several across the state. About 115 acres of former farmland once known as Pratt’s Plain situated west of Concord Street and south of the Worcester Turnpike (Route 9) were cleared and developed into the training facility. Several permanent buildings were constructed along Concord Street, including an arsenal, magazine and commandant’s house and barn. The fields that had been farmed for nearly two hundred years were graded and cleared for a parade ground. The first militia units arrived at camp on August 7, 1873. The facility was originally called Camp Henry Wilson, after the Natick cobbler who became Grant’s vice president, but over the years it took on new names with each new muster of soldiers. Eventually townspeople began referring to it simply as the Musterfield.

A typical encampment lasted one to two weeks. Volunteers would spend that time with their unit marching, drilling and training. The soldiers were housed in white tents that were pitched in perfect lines across the open fields of the camp. Often units would participate in war games and maneuvers in the forests on the north side of town. Nathaniel Bowditch, brother of the Millwood Hunt Club’s John Bowditch, often made the vast lands surrounding his “Lilacs” estate available for the exercises, even moving his large herd of prize cattle off of their pasture to accommodate the military.

Residents of the town were often invited to watch parades and drills. A one-day pass would allow visitors to watch inspections, cavalry formations, rifle demonstrations and reviews. The highlight of each summer’s encampment was Governor’s Day, when the sitting governor of Massachusetts would visit the camp to review the troops. For many years, the governor was chauffeured from the train station to the camp by resident Daniel Cooney in his horse-drawn open carriage.

The arrival of the governor at the Musterfield would be signaled with a salute of seventeen or more guns. Crowds as large as five thousand joined the state leader in watching the day’s activities. Events included cavalry parades, band concerts, shooting contests, formal parades and even wrestling. As many as two thousand soldiers would participate in the festivities, representing various militia divisions including cavalry, infantry, ambulance corps, signal corps and artillery.

Bird’s-eye view of Camp Framingham, 1885. Courtesy of Framingham Public Library.

Regimental colors, Camp Framingham.

Encampment at Camp Framingham.

The military pomp observed at the Musterfield was not reserved only for celebrations and festive occasions. In 1887, residents were witness to one particular military ceremony of great sadness and poignancy. Private Denis Donovan of Boston had drowned in Learned’s Pond after going swimming on a hot July day. A few days later, his fellow soldiers escorted his flag-draped coffin down Concord Street to a waiting train while softly singing “Nearer My God to Thee.”

The summer encampments were interrupted only when the Musterfield was used as a staging area for militia units preparing for war. Soldiers gathered in Framingham in 1898 for the Spanish-American War, in 1916 for the Mexican border conflict and again in 1917 for World War I. The final encampment took place in the summer of 1919, ending an almost fifty-year-old Framingham tradition.

AIRMAIL AND ASPARAGUS

The wide, flat parade ground of the Musterfield property was put to a new use in 1920 when the U.S. Army Air Service established an airfield there. Although in operation for only a few years, the airfield was the site of several interesting and exciting aviation events. Commercial aviation was so novel at the time that the public eagerly anticipated and reveled in any and every episode involving planes and pilots.

Perhaps the most historic event at the airfield was the first airmail delivery to New England, in October 1921. Lieutenant Reuben Curtis Moffat piloted a plane from Washington, D.C., to Framingham, carrying mail that was then delivered to Boston by truck. The delivery of a more unusual cargo a few months later made headlines across the country, demonstrating the public’s insatiable hunger for all aviation-related news.

On May 17, 1922, a group of more than fifty reporters, photographers and curious residents assembled on the airfield anxiously awaiting the delivery, by plane, of a shipment of asparagus from New Jersey. Included in the waiting crowd were representatives of the governor and the commissioner of agriculture, who had promised both Governor Channing H. Cox and Boston Mayor James Curley a side dish of fresh asparagus on their tables at lunchtime. When the scheduled landing time of noon had come and gone with no sign of the plane, officials at the airport became nervous that something had gone wrong with the flight. Minutes turned into hours and the aircraft and its precious cargo had still not arrived. Finally, at three-thirty, the plane was spotted in the skies south of Framingham and the remaining crowd let out a cheer. But their excitement quickly turned to confusion and concern as they watched the plane turn and head east to Boston. Two quick-thinking pilots on the ground saved the day by hopping into their own planes and flying after the errant asparagus, directing the New Jersey pilot to a perfect landing on the old Musterfield.

Several months later, a pilot and his passenger were killed as they tried to land on the airfield. On July 22, Harvard medical student and pilot Zenos Miller, along with his brother Ralph and friend Dr. Clarence Gamble, took off from Framingham on the first leg of a cross-country flight to California. The plane was circling the airfield when it unexpectedly went into a spin and crashed in a fiery explosion in the swampy area adjacent to the landing strip. Several pilots on hand pulled the men from the flames, but Zenos Miller and Dr. Gamble both died. (Ralph Miller suffered only minor injuries.) For many years after the crash, neighborhood boys would explore the area for the wreckage of the plane that local legend held was still submerged in the swamp.

Routine activity at the airfield consisted of cargo and passenger flights, with barnstorming pilots offering five-dollar plane rides to thrill-seeking passengers. One such pilot was Framingham native Arthur “Ray” Brooks, a World War I veteran who had shot down six enemy planes, earning him the title of “Ace,” as well as the Distinguished Service Cross. Brooks’s wartime SPAD XIII plane was restored and placed on display at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Brooks also had the distinction of being the nation’s longest-lived flying ace from the Great War, succumbing to old age in 1991 fewer than four months shy of his ninety-sixth birthday.

PLANES TO AUTOMOBILES

A second, more successful airport began operations in the southern part of town in 1929 on farmland owned by Teddy Gould. The official opening of the Gould Farm Airport took place on November 8 and 9, 1930, with almost ten thousand people in attendance. Spectators thrilled to airplane races and stunts, and over seven hundred people took rides, most likely their first ever, in the many aircraft gathered at the event. Over the next sixteen years, various aviation companies offered both cargo and passenger service out of the Gould Farm location. Air shows and meets, as well as demonstrations of military aircraft, were held on a regular basis. All activity at the airfield came to a sudden stop, however, in 1942 when World War II forced the closing of all civilian airports located within twenty-five miles of the coast. After the war, town officials were working on a plan to make the site a municipal airport when Teddy Gould sold the land to General Motors, ending Framingham’s almost thirty-year association with the aviation business. GM built an assembly plant on the site, which operated until 1987.

CAMP FRAMINGHAM IN WORLD WAR II

With the closing of the army airfield, all significant military activity on the Musterfield ended. In the 1920s, the Massachusetts State Police took over a portion of the site, where they built their headquarters and a training academy. With the exception of a small staff headquartered in the commandant’s house to oversee the remaining buildings and facilities, the rest of the property lay vacant and neglected. The attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s entrance into World War II in December 1941 would change all that and create one final chapter in the Musterfield’s long military history.

America was a country on edge in the early days of the war, especially in coastal communities, where citizens and local governments worried about possible enemy air attack. Measures were taken to reduce potential targets for German bombers. Blackouts were enforced across Massachusetts. The golden dome of the statehouse in Boston was painted a dull gray to make it hard to find at night. Even large civic gatherings such as Fourth of July fireworks and parades were canceled. In Framingham, the skylights of the Edgell Memorial Library were painted over and an observation post on the roof of the Memorial Building was manned by volunteers who kept watch for enemy aircraft. Other citizens volunteered as air raid wardens to supervise blackouts, and air raid sirens were installed throughout the town. It was in this atmosphere in the spring of 1942 that Framingham residents noticed increased activity on the old campground. Although the work was clandestine, many questions were answered on May 21, when a convoy of trucks and equipment rumbled through town and entered the Concord Street gates. The convoy was made up of soldiers of the 131st Combat Engineering Battalion, which had been assigned to Framingham as part of the coastal defense system.

Old and rusting equipment was hauled away as construction began on new buildings. The soldiers were housed in tents for the next six months while more permanent structures were built, including barracks, supply depots, armories, a headquarters building and a base theatre. But these new buildings were not army regulation. Camp Framingham was the site of a camouflage experiment. The entire base was designed and built to look like a typical New England village from the air, in order to fool any enemy pilots who might attack. Soldiers were housed in “barracks” resembling colonial homes; the attached garages were actually shower and latrine facilities. The double chimneys and the shingled roofs were fake. The whole area was landscaped with bushes and flowers so as to blend in with the surrounding neighborhood. The soldiers even strung clotheslines in the “yards,” and would often awake to find some prankster had strung up women’s undergarments during the night. The battalion headquarters looked like a school; the theatre was built as a church and was in fact used for religious services for the soldiers.

The soldiers from the 131st spent their days inspecting coastal defenses and working on various construction projects. The regimental band attached to the battalion was kept very busy; within a few days of their arrival, they played in the town’s Memorial Day parade and were active for the next year and a half, performing at dozens of ceremonies and activities in towns from Marlborough to Boston. The town welcomed the soldiers with enthusiasm and made every effort to make their stay a pleasant one. A servicemen’s recreation room set up in the basement of town hall included ping-pong tables and a small library. One hundred soldiers from the camp attended a welcome dance in town hall in July. A blackout had been ordered for the town that night, causing the soldiers and their invited guests to dance by the light of the moon shining through the windows. Each soldier was allowed to bring his own guest, but if he attended alone, the dance committee promised to “supply attractive girls selected by the sponsoring organizations.” Not surprisingly, many romances developed at these gatherings and several weddings between Framingham girls and servicemen resulted.

World War II barracks built to resemble neighborhood homes. Courtesy of Carl J. Loftesness.

The same view today. Photo by Edward P. Barry.

Off-duty soldiers walked through the army woods to swim in Learned’s Pond just as volunteers from the Massachusetts Militia had done decades before them. The walls of the church/theatre were decorated with a mural of scenes from Framingham history, and the soldiers were entertained with movies and occasional live performances by celebrities such as comedian Milton Berle and Bela Lugosi, star of the 1931 movie Dracula. The bulletin board in the mess hall was filled with notices placed there by Framingham families inviting the young soldiers to a home-cooked meal with a friendly family. The battalion stayed in Framingham until September 1943, when they shipped out and eventually made their way to the Pacific theatre, serving with distinction in Guam and the Philippines.

A NEW LIFE FOR THE OLD MUSTERFIELD

After the war, both the town and the state developed much of the old Musterfield property for a variety of purposes. Many of the original army barracks were remodeled as single-family homes and used as veterans’ housing, while additional apartments were built to ease the postwar housing shortage. On Concord Street, War Memorial Park was dedicated in 1952 to all of the soldiers from town that had fought in the nation’s wars, beginning with the Revolution. The focal point of the park is a sculpture of Freedom by Boston sculptor Emilus Ciampa. Across from the park the Middlesex District Courthouse was built. The National Guard maintained its presence in the area when it built a new armory on the former site of the commandant’s house. New streets were laid out and named after significant battles of World War II. The battles of Corregidor in the Philippines, Oran in Algeria, Guadalcanal in Japan, Anzio in Italy, Normandy and St. Lo in France and Pearl Harbor in Hawaii are all memorialized in the streets of the neighborhood that is still known as the Musterfield. Another new street, Flagg Drive, was named after Framingham High graduate Charles Flagg, who was killed at Iwo Jima. The multipurpose church/theatre would have a new life as an actual church many miles away from Framingham. After a devastating fire ripped through the Brant Rock section of Marshfield, Massachusetts, in 1941, the parishioners of St. Ann’s by-the Sea were left without a church. Arrangements were made to transport the former Camp Framingham building to Marshfield, where it was used for services for ten years until a new church was built. Today it still stands and is used as the parish center.

The World War II–era theatre/church at the Musterfield.

During the Cold War, the same fears of enemy attack that had earlier prompted army barracks to be disguised as neighborhood homes during World War II brought about the development of the State Emergency Operations Center (SEOC), commonly known as “The Bunker.” Operated today by the Massachusetts Emergency Management Association (MEMA), the bunker was dedicated on November 16, 1963. The underground bunker was built as a headquarters for state government in case of nuclear attack. Covering nearly an acre of land on Route 9, the bunker is equipped with enough food, water, medical supplies and emergency air supply for three hundred people to survive for thirty days without outside aid. It is built of reinforced concrete with steel blast doors designed to withstand a twenty-megaton bomb blast.

The former parade ground has changed the least since the days when young men trained and drilled there in decades past. It is now used as an athletic field and was named after Framingham teacher, coach and athletic director Frank Galvani.

CUSHING HOSPITAL

Across town, American soldiers were welcomed to Framingham under vastly different circumstances than at Camp Framingham. Cushing Hospital was opened as a military hospital in January 1944 and was quickly occupied by hospital staff and the many wounded soldiers under their care. Named for accomplished army surgeon and medical pioneer Dr. Harvey Cushing, the huge complex occupied over one hundred acres across from Farm Pond. The first large influx of wounded soldiers to arrive at the hospital came with the D-Day invasion of France in June 1944. Over the next few years, almost fourteen thousand soldiers were cared for at the facility.

Long after the war, a group of secret documents was declassified by the government, and a curious incident at Cushing was brought to light. The nonmedical staff of the hospital during the war was primarily made up of local women who worked in the kitchens and laundry rooms of the huge complex. But the outside maintenance of the facility was done by German and Italian prisoners of war, who were transported from the stockade at nearby Fort Devens. In December 1944, an inspector from the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps arrived at Cushing to investigate reports of fraternization between civilian female kitchen employees and POWs. Witness interviews revealed that several of the women had fallen in love with several of the POWs, leaving them love letters and gifts such as a hairbrush kit purchased at the hospital’s Post Exchange. One witness claimed to have overheard a coworker remark about a particular German prisoner, “He can put his shoes under my bed any night.” Although investigators interviewed several witnesses and took fingerprints off the hairbrush kit, they apparently did not find the evidence reliable enough to pursue the matter further, and the investigation was dropped.

Mess hall at Cushing Hospital.

After the war, the facility served first as a veterans’ hospital before the Korean War put it back in the business of taking wounded soldiers from the New England region. On July 26, 1951, General Douglas MacArthur, who had recently been dismissed by President Harry S. Truman from his command of the forces in Korea, made a visit to Framingham, including a stop to visit the patients at Cushing. Helen Keller was yet another distinguished visitor during this era.

By the late 1950s, Cushing was briefly mothballed before becoming a state hospital for the elderly. Thirty acres were set off for use by the town for the Barbieri Middle School in the 1970s. The hospital was finally closed for good in 1991 by the state, and another thirty acres of the original property were developed as an assisted living facility. The rest of the grounds are maintained by the town as parkland. The only significant building remaining from the original hospital complex is the chapel, which was saved after vigorous lobbying by local groups. The chapel was renovated and rededicated in 1999 and is still used for weddings and funerals.

Flag ceremony at Cushing Hospital.

FRAMINGHAM SINCE WORLD WAR II

The last sixty years have brought new challenges and opportunities to Framingham. Downtown’s economic base has faded since the 1950s, with the general decline of American manufacturing and the loss of the two biggest employers, Dennison and General Motors. The department stores and shops of downtown vanished long ago as well.

Yet the story of Framingham since 1945 has not been one of decline. Just as in the nineteenth century, Framingham’s central location and status as a transportation hub remains unchanged. The construction of the Massachusetts Turnpike in the 1950s opened the town up as a home for commuters to Boston, or to the thriving companies along the Route 128 beltway. The town’s population, which stood at 23,214 in 1940, shot up to 64,048 by 1970 as the northern half of the town especially was filled with brand-new ranch homes housing the young families creating the postwar baby boom. Route 9 became a retail mecca, with the opening of Shopper’s World, the first modern shopping mall east of the Mississippi, in 1951. Even as manufacturing has ebbed, new companies such as Staples, Bose and TJX clothing retailers located their headquarters here. Even the downtown, in definite decline by the 1970s, was revived by a new influx of Brazilian immigrants, so that by the late 1990s it was as unusual to see a vacant storefront on Concord Street or Union Avenue as it was to see a building without a Brazilian flag draped in a least one window.

The changes the twenty-first century will bring to Framingham have yet to be seen. Will the recent crackdown on illegal immigration rob downtown of its vitality and return it to the dark days of the 1970s? Or will it be replaced by a new energy from an as yet unknown source?

AFTERWORD

What is it that elevates a historical incident from documented fact to folklore? Perhaps it is the passage of time—the most recent stories in this narrative took place shortly after World War II. Another factor may be the odd, sometimes circumstantial connection these stories have to the better-known names and events of American history. Good folklore contains a healthy amount of triviality, mystery, humor, exaggeration and quirkiness. Another characteristic of legends born from fact is the disappearance of the context in which the episodes took place. Everyday events achieve mythical status when their settings have been torn down or modernized and the social customs and beliefs of the day have drastically changed. It is difficult to picture a vast, shady outdoor amphitheatre, filled with proper Victorian families enjoying a temperance lecture, while standing near the town incinerator that now occupies the site.

Doubtless, Framingham has witnessed events that fit these criteria over the past sixty years and continues to do so today. These newer stories are now undergoing the aging process that the older ones have already completed, slowly transforming from interesting sidebars in the day’s headlines into legend. When the process is complete, future readers will have many new chapters to enjoy in the ongoing chronicles of Framingham legend and lore.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bacon, Oliver N. A History of Natick, from Its First Settlement in 1651 to the Present Time. Boston: Damrell and Moore, 1856.

Bakeless, John. Turncoats, Traitors and Heroes. Philadelphia and New York: J.B. Lippincott, 1959.

Barrows, S.J. The Reformatory System in the United States. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1900.

Barry, William. A History of Framingham, Massachusetts, Including the Plantation, from 1640 to the Present Time. Boston: James Munroe, 1847.

Burton, David H. Clara Barton: In the Service of Humanity. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.

Butterfield, L.H., ed. Diary and Autobiography of John Adams. 4 vols. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961.

Callahan, Raymond J. Framingham Historical Reflections. Edited by Marth Dewar and M. Joan Gilbert. Washington, D.C.: McGregor and Warren, Inc., 1974.

Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983.

Dow, George Francis, and John Henry Edmonds. The Pirates of the New England Coast 1630–1730. Salem, MA: Marine Research Society, 1923.

Dow, Neal. The Reminiscences of Neal Dow: Recollections of Eighty Years. Portland, ME: The Evening Express Publishing Co., 1898.

Dyer, E. Otis. A Warren Road Neighborhood. Taunton, MA: William S. Sullwold Publishing, 2006.

Fischer, David Hackett. Paul Revere’s Ride. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Gage, Thomas. General Gage’s Instructions of 22d February 1775. Boston: J. Gill, 1779.

Heath, William. Heath’s Memoirs of the American War, Reprinted from the Original Edition of 1798. New York: A. Wessels Co., 1904.

Herring, Stephen W. Framingham: An American Town. Framingham, MA: Framingham Historical Society, 2000.

———. South Middlesex: A New England Heritage. Northridge, CA: Windsor Publications, Inc., 1986.

Hosmer, Jerome Carter. The Narrative of General Gage’s Spies. Boston: Bostonian Society, 1912.

Jackson, Louise. “Witches, Wives and Mothers: Witchcraft Persecution and Women’s Confessions in Seventeenth-Century England.” Women’s History Review 4 (1995): 63–84.

Kaplan, Sidney. The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution 1770–1800. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1973.

Lackmann, Ron. Women of the Western Frontier in Fact, Fiction and Film. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1997.

May, John Joseph. Danforth Genealogy. Boston: Charles H. Pope, 1902.

Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.

Payne, Samuel B., Jr. “Was Crispus Attucks the First to Die?” New England Journal of History 57 (2001): 1–10.

Perley, Sidney. Historic Storms of New England. Salem, MA: Salem Press Publishing and Printing Company, 1891.

Phillips, David E. “Negroes in the American Revolution.” Journal of American History 5 (1911): 143–46.

Quintal, George, Jr. Patriots of Color: African Americans and Native Americans at Battle Road and Bunker Hill. Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 2002.

Russell, Howard S. Indian New England Before the Mayflower. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1980.

Sabine, Lorenzo. Biographical Sketches of Loyalists of the American Revolution with an Historical Essay. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1864.

Schultz, Eric B., and Michael J. Tougias. King Philip’s War: The History and Legacy of America’s Forgotten Conflict. Woodstock, VT: Countryman Press, 1999.

Seitz, Don C. Under the Black Flag. New York: Dial Press, 1925.

Silverman, Jerry. Songs and Stories of the Civil War. Brookfield, CT: Twenty-First Century Books, 2002.

Stark, James H. The Loyalists of Massachusetts and the Other Side of the American Revolution. Salem, MA: Salem Press Co., 1910.

Stevens, Benjamin Franklin, ed. General Sir William Howe’s Orderly Book. London: Benjamin Franklin Stevens, 1890.

Stone, William L. Life of Joseph Brant-Thayendenega, Including the Indian Wars of the American Revolution. New York: George Dearborn, 1838.

Temple, Josiah H. History of Framingham, Massachusetts, 1640–1885. Framingham, MA: Town of Framingham, 1887.

Thomas, M. Halsey, ed. The Diary of Samuel Sewall 1674–1729. 2 vols. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973.

Tourtellot, Arthur Bernon. William Diamond’s Drum: The Beginning of the War of the American Revolution. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959.

Wood, Frederic J. The Turnpikes of New England. Boston: Marshall Jones Co., 1919.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

James L. Parr is a teacher at the McCarthy School in Framingham. He has developed several programs on local history for use in the classroom, as well as for the Framingham Historical Society and Museum. He resides in Framingham.

Kevin A. Swope is a historian and genealogist at the Framingham Historical Society and Museum. He lives with his family in Wayland, Massachusetts.

Visit us at

www.historypress.net