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GENEALOGY COLLECTION
ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY
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HISTORY
OF THE
TOWN OF SOMERSET
MASSACHUSETTS
SHAWOMET PURCHASE 1677 ‘ INCORPORATED 1790
By
WILLIAM A. HART
Published By Town of Somerset 1940
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1
Acknowledgement
The previously published material on Somerset’s history is limited to an article on the town by D. Hamilton Hurd in his History of Bristol County, 1883 ; the History of Bristol County prepared in 1899 by the Fall River Herald News, the Taunton Gazette and Alanson Borden of New Bedford; the Avery Slade Sketches of Somerset, 1885; Miss Elizabeth H. Brayton’s book on the Brayton Homestead ; the Patience Brayton Memorial ; some brochures on Somerset churches ; and the columns of the former Fall River News and Fall River Globe, and the Fall River Herald News. In its early chapters the History of Swansea, compiled in 1917 by Otis D. Wright, is also in many essentials Somerset’s story. To all of these, and particularly to the History of Swansea for its list of Revolutionary soldiers compiled by the late John S. Brayton, this book’s indebtedness is acknowledged.
Especial acknowledgment must also be given to the manuscript of the lecture on Slade’s Ferry presented before the Fall River Historical Society by the late Herbert Skinner, and for other material in the Society’s records.
The chapter on the Wampanoag Indians is compiled from the encyclopedia of the American Indian, published by the U. S. Bureau of American Ethnology. Governor Bradford’s Journal is the source of Pilgrim references; and Capt. Benjamin Church’s autobiography of the facts and spirit of King Philip’s War. The list of Somerset vessel registrations is from the records of the Port of Dighton and Fall River, year by year from 1790 to 1940, with the list of foreign-going vessels confirmed and enlarged by the National Archives Project on Dighton-Fall River Ship Registers, 1789 to 1938. Carl C. Cutler’s Greyhounds of the Sea is this history’s authority on the clipper ship and the source of the lively account of the Raven’s epic race.
Acknowledgement
The previously published material on Somerset’s history is limited to an article on the town by D. Hamilton Hurd in his History of Bristol County, 1883; the History of Bristol County prepared in 1899 by the Fall River Herald News, the Taunton Gazette and Alanson Borden of New Bedford; the Avery Slade Sketches of Somerset, 1885 ; Miss Elizabeth H. Brayton’s book on the Brayton Homestead ; the Patience Brayton Memorial; some brochures on Somerset churches; and the columns of the former Fall River News and Fall River Globe, and the Fall River Herald News. In its early chapters the History of Swansea, compiled in 1917 by Otis D. Wright, is also in many essentials Somerset’s story. To all of these, and particularly to the History of Swansea for its list of Revolutionary soldiers compiled by the late John S. Brayton, this book’s indebtedness is acknowledged.
Especial acknowledgment must also be given to the manuscript of the lecture on Slade’s Ferry presented before the Fall River Historical Society by the late Herbert Skinner, and for other material in the Society’s records.
The chapter on the Wampanoag Indians is compiled from the encyclopedia of the American Indian, published by the U. S. Bureau of American Ethnology. Governor Bradford’s Journal is the source of Pilgrim references; and Capt. Benjamin Church’s autobiography of the facts and spirit of King Philip’s War. The list of Somerset vessel registrations is from the records of the Port of Dighton and Fall River, year by year from 1790 to 1940, with the list of foreign-going vessels confirmed and enlarged by the National Archives Project on Dighton-Fall River Ship Registers, 1789 to 1938. Carl C. Cutler’s Greyhounds of the Sea is this history’s authority on the clipper ship and the source of the lively account of the Raven’s epic race.
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Compilation of Somerset’s story in the main, however, rests upon community and family tradition and personal recollection. In total, those who have contributed its facts are far more in number than can here be recounted. Their help, together with the known willingness of all the community to give similar help if opportunity had been found to ask it, has created a background of goodwill which is gratefully recognized.
Individual acknowledgement should, however, be made to Mrs. Fannie Melvin for access to her wealth of data on Somerset personalities; to Mrs. Waldron Rogers and Mrs. Charles Sherman for their scrap books and booklets; to Charles E. Hathaway and Patrick Synan for details of the pottery era; to Rev. Felix S. Childs for the story of St. Patrick’s and to H. Freeman Bates for the story of the First Christian Church: to Charles S. Simmons, Miss Emma Eddy, Capt. Daniel B. Eddy, Miss Annie T. Costello, Adam W. Gifford, Edward Morrissey, Israel T. Almy, and Frederick S. Clarner for personal recollections; and to Francis “Dick” McGuire who contributed much of this book and ought to write another book himself.
Appreciation is also due to the Fall River Historical Society for permission to copy rare sketches in its pos¬ session; to Customs Officer Warren C. Herrick for mani¬ fold courtesies in the use of his office and records for research; to Ernest L. Peirce for books, photographs and hours of personal guidance about the town; to Henry J. Harvey for reading the manuscript; to Harold J. Regan for reading the manuscript and for untiring aid in the study of town records; and to Fernald L. Hanson for faith in this history when it was only an idea and confi¬ dent cooperation thereafter.
W. A. H.
Contents
THE FIRST WHITE MAN
The Norsemen — Cortereal, Verrazano, Gosnold, John Smith — Winslow and Hopkins at Mt. Hope — Short Rations — John Hampden — The Great Cure — Main Street’s Mystery House.
SHAWOMET LANDS
The Wampanoag Town — Boundaries — Food, Sugar, Salt, Medicine — Wampum — Prosperity — Children and Games — Oratory — Tribal Philosophy — 'Character — Mental Ability.
KING PHILIP’S WAR
Philip’s Character — Ideas of Property — Outbreak of War — Captain Church — Weetamoe — Death of Philip — Cost of War — Result — Anawan and Church — Surviving Tribes.
SHAWOMET PURCHASE
Land Forfeited to English — The Lottery — The Pur¬ chasers — Division of the Purchase — Constable Eddy — Purchasers’ Record — Spelling of Shawomet — First Comers.
1675—1775
Homebuilding — Crops — Building the Stone Walls — Orig¬ inal Roads — Meaning of the Docks — Jonathan Bowers — His Sons — William Slade Begins the Ferry — A Church and A School.
NOTES ON FIRST CENTURY
The Cliff Dwellers — Quaker Indians — Thomas Buffing¬ ton — Toussaint L’Ouverture — Miles’ Bridge Lottery — The First Schoolmaster — Weetamoe.
FRIENDS’ MEETING HOUSE
Swansea Quarterly Meeting — The First Building — A Quaker Meeting — Long Pastorates — Ministers — Patience Brayton — Her Anti-Slavery Campaign — Petition to George III.
THE REVOLUTION
The Assonet Raid — The Lexington Alarm — -Guards at the Ferry — Attack on Fall River — The Rhode Island Cam¬ paign — Ruin of Henry Bowers — Capture of Obadiah Slade — -Prison Ship — Roster.
RECONSTRUCTION 63
Revival of Commerce — Jerathmel Bowers — Somerset Incorporated — First Town Meeting — -First Officers — The Name of Somerset — -Mrs Jerathmel Bowers of Somerset Square, Boston.
THE NEW TOWN 71
Population — Heads of Families — First Churches — A Great Fleet — John Bowers’ Garden — -Failure of John Bowers — The War of 1812 — Hurricane — The Year With- • out a Summer.
THE DAYS OF SAIL 81
The New Fleet Grows — Down to Joseph Brown’s at Egypt — The Stage Coach Arrives — The Packets — Steam¬ boats — Whaling — Herring Fisheries — The Railroads Come Nearer.
CLIPPER SHIPS 91
Somerset Captains — The Mexican War — The Clipper Ship — The Clipper Captain1 — Hood Shipyard Begun — The Rosario — The William Nelson — The Raven — Raven Records and Race.
CLIPPER SHIPS II 99
The Governor Morton — Launching the Morton — The Archer — The Rip Van Winkle — Revenue Cutters and Lightships — The Mischief Capsizes— Hood Yard Burned —
S. F. Dickinson — The Clipper Passes.
PROGRESS ASHORE 107
Fall River Builds Cotton Mills — Prudential School Board — Cholera Ship — The Davis Captain — Myricks and Fall River Railroad — Job M. Leonard — Steam Ferry Boats.
CIVIL WAR YEARS 115
Town Meetings — The Moore House — Bounty Jumpers — A Railroad on Brayton’s Point — Bealky Shipyard — Cyrus M. Wheaton Post G. A. R. — O’Neill’s Beach — Roster.
SLADE’S FERRY 125
Beginnings — Two Ferries in One — Horse Boats — The Faith — The Weetamoe — Ferry Finances — Ferry Rates — Competition — Slade’s Ferry Bridge — The Ferry Stops.
THE INDUSTRIAL ERA 135
The Railroad Comes to Somerset — Mt Hope Iron Works —
Irish Settlers — The Nail Works — Successors — The Stove Works — The Coal Docks — Brilliant Polish — Egypt Industry — Strawberries.
THE POTTERIES 145
Beginnings — The Sloop Warren — Somerset Pottery Co. Founded — The Little Potteries and Their Locations — Turning — Firing — Marketing — Clay — Tile — Last Days.
THE INDUSTRIAL SCENE 155
A Generation of Captains — New Fleets — The Village in Its Prime — Racing for Customers — Livery S tables' — The Trolley Arrives — Brightman Street Bridge — Hood Li¬ brary — Fall River’s Boom.
•
WORLD WAR 169
Universal Conscription — Registration and Draft — Liberty Loans — Influenza — Progress of the War — Victory — Brothers — Deaths — Welcome Home — American Legion —
World War Memorial — Roster.
THE GOLDEN AGE 181
Looking Backward — A Town of Homes — The Era of Building — Water Works — Parks Shellac Co. — The Mon- taup Co — Clifford M. Holland — Three New Churches —
Horse Show — The Hurricane.
SOMERSET IN 1940 195
Statistics — Departments — Town Buildings — Schools — Somerset High School — Recreation — Town Officers! —
Roster of Town Clerks.
THE CHURCHES 201
Introduction — South Somerset Methodist Episcopal — Christian Congregational — St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic — Federated Church: Baptist, Methodist, Epis¬ copal, Congregational, Founders — Buildings — Pastors.
LOCAL NAMES IN SOMERSET 222
Origin and Location.
SOMERSET VESSELS 225
Description, Owners and Masters — 1790 to 1815, Coastal and Foreign — 1815 to 1865, Coastal and Foreign — 1865 to 1940, Coastal and Foreign — The Last Commercial Sail.
REVOLUTIONARY WAR ROSTER 245
Enlistments from Swansea, including Shawomet Lands, the later Somerset.
Illustrations
Map of Somerset
Purchasers’ Record
Map of Shawomet Purchase
Jonathan Bowers House
Henry Bowers-John A. Burgess House
John Bourne House
Mrs. Jerathmel Bowers
Jerathmel Bowers House and Garden
Marble House
Captain Andrews House
Clipper Governor Morton
Somerset Captains William Brown John A. Burgess Daniel Brayton Eddy Surbinas P. Marble Slade Homestead
Somerset Village 1887
Pottersville 1887
Schooner Governor Ames
World War Memorial
Somerset High School
Selectmen 1940
Fernald L. Hanson Adam W. Gifford Israel T. Almy
Tanker Phoenix Ashore
Insert Frontispiece Insert — 22-23 32 54 54 64 70 82 82 98 108
124
136
146
156
168
180
194
224
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THE FIRST WHITE MAN
JT may be that Leif, son of Eric, built his “Leifbooths” at Mt. Hope in the year 1000 and wintered there. Norwegian scholars believed it, and the schoolbooks for three generations told us so. Few, if any, now believe that the Dighton Rock is a record of the discovery of Vineland. But a Vineland there certainly was.
Thorwald, another son of Eric, in 1002 and 1003, spent two winters at Leifsbooths. Thorfall, who sailed in 1007, named Cape Cod “Wonder Strand” (Furdustrandir) , Martha’s Vineyard “Stream Isle” (Straumey), Buzzards Bay “Stream Firth” (Straumfiordr) , and Mt. Hope “Hop.77
So goes the story which Norwegian historians have worked out from the unquestioned fact that in the year 1000 Leif the Lucky and his sons began a series of voyages to America. Some interpret their discoveries as being in Green¬ land; others that they were Nova Scotia; Maine is sure that it was that coast; and Marblehead and Boston historians have identified their harbors with Leif’s and Eric’s exploits.
There is no doubt that at Hop (Mt. Hope) Thorfall in 1007, leaving his fellows to winter elsewhere, wintered with eight men and his wife, who there bore him what may well be the first white child born in the New World, named Snorre. The next fall the Skrellings, as they called the Indians, attacked them. Thorfall and his family removed to Stream- firth (Buzzards Bay) and there stayed until little Snorre was three years old.
If Mt. Hope was not Thorfall’s Hop, nobody has proved it. It is a fascinating possibility.
After Leif and his sons, it would take five hundred years for the pen of history to record more definitely. But it then began to write with ever increasing speed the chapter that would culminate in the name Somerset.
i
2
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
In 1497, John and Sebastian Cabot cruised to the coast of New England. The next year they explored the coast patiently from Maine to Cape Hatteras, and saw and described Narragansett Bay, whether they came up its Mt. Hope arm or not.
In 1511, Miguel de Cortereal, Portuguese navigator, explored this coast, and left among the various inscriptions on Dighton Rock, as the late Prof. Delabarre thought, his name and the date. Many accept this scientist’s detailed and careful studies as conclusive. If they are, Mt. Hope Bay and the Taunton river were definitely entered by the White Man, in 1511.
Certainly, soon thereafter there was a White Man and a great ship in our waters. For the Florentine Verrazano, sailing in 1524, definitely and surely anchored for a few days at Newport, discovered Block Island, and explored Mt. Hope Bay and the Taunton river sufficiently to record that a ship could sail far up its course and that thereafter it might be navigated by “small shallops.”
The White Man was getting nearer. When young Bartholomew Gosnold arrived with his merry men in 1602 for a summer’s stay on No Man’s Land, which he named Martha’s Vineyard after his little daughter, he found that Dutch and French trading vessels had become rather frequent visitors to these waters and that the tribal seat of the Wampanoags at Mt. Hope was a favorite trading point of theirs.
The attitude of the Indians showing fear and dislike of the White Man, when, 18 years after Gosnold, the Pilgrims arrived, was explained by them as arising from ill-treatment at the hands of these traders. There is no question that they were in these waters, and had landed both on the Cape and on Mt. Hope. There is no reason why they should not have landed at the populous Indian town reaching from Brayton’s Point to Broad Cove, one of the six great villages of the Wampanoags.
Gosnold, in the interval of collecting beaver skins and cedar lumber with which to pay his uncle for his voyage,
THE FIRST WHITE MAN
3
and his evenings of games with the Indians of Sakonnet and Westport, sailed into every bay and inlet from Nantucket Sound to Long Island Sound. He doubtless included Mt. Hope Bay as he included Narragansett Bay in these investiga¬ tions.
The names of voyagers to the New England shore now became too numerous to follow. In 1606 the Plymouth Company, not to be confused with the Plymouth colony, settled on the Kennebec but got only suffering and failure for their pains.
In 1614, Capt. John Smith, hero of the Pocahontas story, voyaged along New England and made a map of its coast and islands. A schoolboy today could draw a better one, but it included Narragansett Bay, and had the name of New Plymouth where our Plymouth is today. The Pilgrims had one of his maps with them when they arrived, and it was Capt. John Smith and not they who named their settlement.
The Pilgrims landed at Plymouth on December 21, 1620, with 102 persons. Barely six months later, two of them would become the first White Men of record to set foot on Somerset soil.
The men were Edward Winslow, who would later become governor of Plymouth, and Stephen Hopkins, who had had a son Oceanus born on the Mayflower on the way over. They were bound for Mt. Hope on a courtesy visit to the Wampanoag chief Massasoit and incidentally to learn the extent and numbers of the Wampanoags and the details of their Mt. Hope stronghold.
We cannot know exactly the route these men traveled, but three different Pilgrim colony records furnish much detail concerning it.
They were guided by Squanto, a Wampanoag Indian, who had been three times to England before the date of the Pilgrims’ arrival. It was he who had greeted them when they landed with the memorable words “Welcome, English¬ men.” He had been at school a year in England, spoke English well, was at the moment in favor with Massasoit, and altogether was a godsend to the Plymouth settlers. When
4
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
he died, the following year, of the Indian disease of nose¬ bleed, he was sincerely mourned in all the colonial records.
Squanto guided them northwesterly through the present region of Middleboro to a “knowne ford” of the Taunton river. Here they stopped for the night, sharing the food they had brought with them with the several Indians who had attached themselves to the party. This was a mistaken generosity which taught them something. It was nearly two days before they had another meal.
Next morning they crossed the river and turned south following its course closely and noting that it was cleared and had formerly been cultivated land all the way. But the farms were deserted and grown up to weeds and the frames of the numerous Indian houses stood matless and untenanted. Bradford’s journal recounts the situation and the reason vividly :
“They found ye soyle good, & ye people not many, being dead & abundantly wasted in ye late great mortalitie which fell in these parts aboute three years before ye coming of ye English, wherin thousands of them dyed, they not being- able to bury one another ; ther sculs and bones were found in many places lying still above ground, where their houses & dwellings had been ; a very sad spectackle to behould.”
The Indian trail they followed from the Segreganset river south is perpetuated in the present route of Elm Street. This old trail, winding its way from the Taunton ford to Gardner’s Neck, therefore crosses the present Somerset territory bringing the first recorded White man into our boundaries.
Corbitant would have been their ferryman from the Neck to Mt. Hope. That was his business, sachem though he was. His tribe, or sub-tribe, was small and therefore, though he did not like Massasoit, nor get on with him well, he staid very closely under his wing. It was probably too early on this visit, or on the second visit the following year, for Winslow to see toddling around Corbitant’s house a little daughter by the pet name of Weetamoe, meaning “Sweet¬ heart.” No revelation of the future would have made him take note of her if he had.
THE FIRST WHITE MAN
5
Massasoit was not at home, but he was sent for and soon arrived. He greeted them with great pleasure and immediately donned with pride the red coat they had brought him for a present. Then they sat down to talk. Having had no food since the night before at the ford, they watched hungrily for the hour of the evening meal. It came, but no meal was served. Many braves joined them around the campfire, and they had more talk, and played several games, but no supper appeared.
Somebody behind the scenes must have been scurrying round because at a late hour an Indian arrived with a small fish. But all partook of it and the individual share was small. Then from somewhere Massasoit scraped up a handful of parched corn. This was the final course and they went to bed. The next morning was even worse. There wasn’t even a small fish and some parched corn. Massasoit was visibly embarrassed, but both Red Man and White acted like gentlemen. There was more talk, farewells as brief as the hungry Pilgrims dared make them, and Winslow and Hopkins left.
As soon as they were on the mainland, the two Pilgrims sent a swift runner to Plymouth for someone to meet them with food, and making a forced march themselves they met the food shortly after they had recrossed the ford. They got home the third night of their adventure, very tired and still hungry, but they had learned much, including the wisdom of taking food with them when they went to visit Indians.
And White Men had set their foot at last upon Shaw- omet Lands, the future Somerset.
Winslow visited Mt. Hope again the next year, following the same route, but accompanied this time by “Master John Hampden,” who was spending a year at Plymouth and desired to see King Massasoit’s people and state. There is no proof that this was the great John Hampden, the merchant whose refusal to pay Charles I’s ship tax made him forever a hero in the fight for the people’s rights as against the tyranny of kings. But historians feel sure that
6
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
it was he; and that he had come to Plymouth to study the great experiment in liberty which was going on there. He had not yet made his famous defiance. History would not have noted his departure from England on such a visit.
It is, therefore, altogether probable that Somerset lands, whose later inhabitants have unfailingly stood firm and fought for liberty, were early consecrated by one of the great liberty-lovers of the English race.
On this second visit Winslow found that Massasoit had plenty of food on hand and indeed too much. He had made the trip because word had come that there was a Dutch ship ashore at the foot of Mt. Hope and that Massasoit was dying. By the time he arrived the Dutch ship had worked itself free and gone, but Massasoit appeared to be in extremis and could only greet Winslow faintly with “Farewell, Winslow, I shall never see thee again.”
By a judicious use of an emetic and a purge, together with sitting by Massasoit all night and feeding him with a thin gruel of water and cornmeal, Winslow brought him through, to the wonder of all the tribe and the definite cementing of the Massasoit friendship that would last for forty years, until his death in 1661.
This was the “great cure” celebrated in colonial history. Its singular outcome is that it brought to Bristol County the first domestic fowl the region had ever had. For when it appeared that Massasoit might revive if fed properly, Winslow despatched a runner to Plymouth for a pair of fowl with which to make a broth. The runner made the trip by water and land to Plymouth and back in a single day. The birds he brought happened to be a male and a female : and the canny Massasoit, now feeling almost well, decided to keep the pair alive and go to raising hens.
There now remained for someone to be the first White Man to settle in Somerset. It was fifty years before he came, by all appearance, but who he was, or why he came or what he did for a living will never be known. Whoever he was, he lived in Somerset Village. When Henry Bowers, Somerset’s great merchant of Revolutionary times, was laying out
THE FIRST WHITE MAN
7
Main Street, in 1765, his workmen came upon the foundation of a house or cabin, of which the last stick above ground had disappeared, but with an underground tunnel leading from the cellar to the river waterfront some distance away.
Evidently this tunnel was for escape in case of Indian attack. It was too early in the country’s history to need it for smuggling. As for Indian attack, there was nothing of the sort among the Wampanoags up to the time of Massasoit’s death in 1661 ; no threat of it under his elder son Alexander; and nothing but threats from his successor Philip up to the outbreak of 1675. It seems probable, there¬ fore, that the elaborate and laborious work of excavating so long a tunnel must have been prompted sometime after Alexander’s death in 1662.
In all probability when Philip finally did attack it served its purpose, since there is no record of a White Man’s being killed in that vicinity.
SHAWOMET LANDS
'pHE Somerset of today in extent and boundary is closely identical with the Indians’ Shawomet. Precisely what Shawomet included was not defined. Until the White Man’s respect for property compelled the Indians to set definite bounds to the land sold and bought, place names were generally for designation, not definition. Hunting and fishing bounds were indeed often meticulously established, as in the case of Lake Chauggamog, near Worcester, whose full name means “I fish on my side of the lake, you fish on your side of the lake, nobody fish in the middle of the lake.”
Natural bounds such as rivers, shore lines, island groups were, on the other hand, generally recognized as demarking areas. The name Narragansett means “People of the Pointed Lands,” and it was by these natural divisions, with their bay and river outlines, that the Indians named Sakonnet, Papoosesquaw, Assonet, Shawomet, Pokanoket, Mattapoisett and others.
Shawomet was probably in their minds the region extending along the Taunton river from Broad Cove to Brayton’s Point and up the east side of Lees River.
Shawomet Lands were among the most esteemed of Wampanoag possessions. No offer of purchase, and there were many, by the Whites for Pokanoket, including Mt. Hope and Bristol Neck, or for Assonet or Shawomet, was ever considered by them. Regarding particularly Shawomet, the reason is easy to see. The combined facilities it offered for farming, hunting, fishing, shellfish harvest, easy transpor¬ tation in every direction and genial residential conditions were unsurpassable.
It was, moreover, one of the six principal villages of the tribe, a center of Wampanoag living, cultivation and
tradition for many generations. Implements which orig-
8
SHAWOMET LANDS
9
inally must have been dropped on the surface of the ground have been dug up in later Somerset excavations at a depth which may represent a thousand years of soil accretion.
Winslow and Hopkins, and later visitors, found Shawomet deserted as a consequence of the epidemic Bradford reports as occurring in the year 1618. What this plague was is not established. Some commentators think it may have been measles caught from European ship crews. It if was, it is curious there was no recurrence in later years. It may have been the disease, unknown to the European' pioneers, which in their first years here attacked Indians i# the form of a sudden and furious bleeding at the nose, with death usually in two or three hours. Whatever it was ^it killed off three-fourths of the Wampanoags, while missing the Narragansetts entirely.
Previous to this abandonment, either to escape the plague or to consolidate the remaining tribes for protection, the town site of Somerset had had for many generations a populous and a prosperous predecessor in Shawomet Village.
All Atlantic coastal Indian tribes had goods and food and ease of life beyond the average of the country at large. And Shawomet was a little better off than most. Surround¬ ing waters supplied both fresh and saltwater fish, shellfish and crabs and lobsters; the woods furnished every kind of game in season. Woods and water courses combined to provide all kinds of wildfowl. Grapes, blueberries, black¬ berries, raspberries and huckleberries were abundant; wild cherries, cranberries, wild apples, beach plums, elderberries and other fruits plentiful.
Fish furnished fertilizer for the hills of corn, beans, squash and melons, which could be set in holes scattered between stumps without troubling to remove them. Maples grew along watercourses and in swamps everywhere to provide the sap and boiled down maple syrup which provided the sugar many tribes in the interior did without. When maples were lacking the birch produced a thinner but still sweet juice. Salt, as essential to their health as to ours, was
10
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
easily procured by evaporating salt water in stone hollows and brushing it together with whisks. When we realize that the salt of some interior nations had to be brought hundreds of miles by couriers we see the privilege of this resource.
Medicinal herbs of every kind were close at hand, and there was a good exchange traffic in these. There was never lacking wood for fires, springs for water — the Indian avoided drinking from running streams — clay for pottery, rushes for baskets and the mats they wove for summer house walls and beds. Shells for everything : hoes, fish-hooks, small instruments such as the tweazers with which young braves pulled out their sparse beards hair by hair, were always at hand.
And this was the region where wampum, the gold and silver of the Indian, was plentiful. The greater part of authentic wampum, made with a special process and finish which the Indian easily distinguished from White Men's counterfeits, was produced on Long Island.
Its currency as money at first was due to the desire of all Indians to have it for ornament. In this desire the Dutch traders early saw its possibilities as a medium of exchange, sold goods for it, offered it for goods and soon had it established in the Indians’ mind as money. In 1627, they
brought it to the attention of the Pilgrims, as they had others, and it soon became currency, not only among the Narragansetts and Wampanoags, but among the English who used it themselves as money, with its equivalents in English coinage established by law. The Narragansetts learned to make it; then the Wampanoags. And, said Brad¬ ford in his Journal, “it makes ye Indians in these parts rich & power full and also prowd therby.”
The periwinkle and the white of the quahaug shell furnished the material for the white bead; the black spot on a quahaug shell the black bead, which was worth twice the white. Its plenty was wealth that bought more wealth, and growing ease. Already when the Pilgrims landed, the Indian’s equipment was becoming streamlined with Euro-
SHAWOMET LANDS
11
pean manufactures. The first sheaf of arrows shot at Pilgrims on Cape Cod and collected by them to send back to a British museum contained several with brass heads.
It is easy to reconstruct this earlier Somerset called Shawomet. All early visitors report that its slopes had been cleared for dwellings and farming for a considerable distance back from the shore. There is evidence that the residence section ran well up to the ridge. When the high school play¬ ground was levelled down, two years ago, the stone work¬ bench, or anvil, of an arrow maker was found some yards in the rear of the school.
By the time the White Man came, the stumpage of these occupied slopes must have long since disappeared. They would be green with grass in season. There was a coopera¬ tive farm at the present Somerset Village. And a very large one just over the present line of Dighton. Between these a forest of white oak wedged its way to a considerable distance down the Great Neck, as early descriptions show and the coming of settlers in the 1690’s to build ships of that same white oak proves. Brayton’s Point then, as now, was flanked with salt marsh.
Along the “residential slopes” from the Village to the Point, at will and without order or streets, the houses of the residents were scattered. Mostly they were round, built of small skinned poles tied together and coming to a point at the top ; although there were some oblong roofed dwellings for large families. In summer, they were covered by mats of woven grass or reeds ; in the chill of early autumn, by skins. In the winter they stood bare and tenantless because the population had left for their winter homes in the ever¬ green thickets of Barrington or Middleboro.
Canoes of birch or dugout pattern were numerous on the river as the menfolks left for their daily business of fishing, hunting or ranging the woods, perhaps on their way to enjoy the plentiful lobsters of Plymouth harbor, of which they were inordinately fond. They roved fearlessly as far north as Stoughton or south to Sakonnet Point, for all were Wampanoags in this region and on the islands of Narragan-
12
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
sett Bay. But they kept away from the westerly shores of Narragansett south of Bristol, for, possibly because of the softening luxury described, they feared the Narragansett man to man, as the guides of the Pilgrims often showed by their scrutiny of an approaching Indian.
Meanwhile in Shawomet Village a cheerful life went on. The women divided their domestic labors of cooking with days on the communal farms hoeing or harvesting; digging clams; treading out quahaugs, splitting fish and laying them out on the rocks to salt and dry; gathering wild fruits and berries and drying most of the latter in the sun for winter use; weaving mats and baskets; softening deerskins or sewing them into garments.
Occasionally they worked with their babies strapped on their backs, as often pictured, but generally the baby rolled on the ground in charge of a sister or of a cousin whose duty as nurse was as strong as a sister’s; and all too often com¬ pletely neglected. Child mortality was terrific.
Except for baby-tending, or young masculine attempts with bow and fishing tackle, the children played at will. Nobody ever punished them whatever they did. They did not quarrel because an Indian seldom thought of any object as his personal property. All goods, like all their gods and all their morals, were tribal affairs. Early Christian preachers failed to find any Indian who thought that he individually had ever sinned. Parents cuffed their children as they cuffed their dogs, sometimes, because they were in the way; but the parental attitude, all in all, was more indulgent and on the surface, more affectionate, than that of the average English of early days.
Games played by the children ranged all the way from dolls to baseball. The girls frequently dressed little puppies in complete Indian baby attire and carried them around like papooses on their small backs in imitation of their mother. Jackstones, often carved to represent animals and familiar articles, were popular with both sexes. Shinny or hockey with a crooked hockeystick any modern boy might have cut from an alder clump was a great favorite with the boys;
SHAWOMET LANDS
13
stilt-walking was universal. Guessing games of the hide- the-thimble character were popular. The throwing of small spears, or sticks to represent them, so that they would land in certain positions relative to or across another, was a game that occupied them endlessly. And there was no school, except that all Indian children, boy and girl alike, but particularly boys, were expected to learn the language with complete accuracy by listening and practice, and it is reported that they learned it at a surprisingly early age and that an error in language among Indian children was so rare that some observers never heard one.
The really big time of the day was when father came home at night. There was usually a meal befitting the size of his appetite, eaten in absolute silence, but with the whole community for company; and after the eating there was talk. An Indian was judged by his ability to talk well as a story teller or as an orator, with oratory prized as the supreme accomplishment. If the talk were good it might last all night, as weary visiting colonists often discovered. In Shawomet Village there was always tobacco, another comfort that made it a peaceful and luxurious place, smoked most often with a lobster claw for a pipe bowl ; and always a small cheerful fire. So insistent was the Indian on having a fire for cooking or good cheer whenever he wanted it that he usually carried a pocket-lighter, ingeniously contrived of a heat-resisting clay tube filled with some smouldering material.
Shawomet women could cook, like most Wampanoag women. There is no record of a Wampanoag’s ever being seen to eat raw meat. He liked his fish and his fowl a good bit over-ripe, it is true, and mouldy corn or nut meal had no distaste for him. But he had luxuries. Winslow enjoyed very much a dish of baked shadroe which Corbitant served him, although he didn’t care for its garnish of musty acorns. It was from Wampanoag Indians that the Pilgrims got their first taste of johnny cakes swimming in maple syrup. Then there were blueberry corn muffins, succotash, usually with bits of meat thrown in with the corn and beans ; fowl wrapped
14
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
in leaves or clay and baked, not quite so delicious, perhaps, because the entrails were left in as nature made them; oysters and quahaugs baked until they lay open in their own juice; and the clambake.
There was much joking and singing in Shawomet, too. Even the staid Pilgrims record some of the Indian jokes. Practical jokes were popular and often cruel. The Indian brave sang at work and at play. The Indian squaw sang endlessly. There is a strange minor note in all their songs, generally supposed to show that the Indian was too afraid of his gods to be ever wholly happy. But there have been too many other nations and people whose music prefers the minor key for this explanation to be acceptable.
Although war roused their savage philosophy of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, in everyday life they were affectionate, talkative, gamesome and home-loving. It is a mistake to believe that their wives were down-trodden and brow-beaten. A Wampanoag explained to a Pilgrim that the women cultivated the farm, made the clothing and got the meals “because she was the mother of life and could make these things give life.” When a baby was expected, if it was the first one, the father spent days and weeks carving and adorning a cradle. When his children died he • often maimed himself, even to cutting off a finger, in mourning. Older members of the family were buried beside the house where they had lived, the mats were taken from its walls, its furnishings removed, and the bare frame, never to be occupied again, left as a token of a home bereft. This is the reason why Indian graves have been found, in later days, in all sections of Somerset.
In the tribe, as has been said of the home, the tribal conception of life and property made quarrels and crimes rare. Such matters as required an application of the tribal law were adjudged in tribal courts held twice a year, with the Chief Sachem as judge and his sagamores as jury. Generally, judge and jury with delight awarded the decision to the Indian whose advocate made the best oration in his behalf. The most frequent punishment was banishment,
SHAWOMET LANDS
15
for some days, a season, a year or permanently from the tribe.
This was the life of the residents of aboriginal Somerset, called Shawomet. It was a very human pop¬ ulation. Some of its people were highly intelligent, with foreheads and brain pans whose capacity astonishes present- day scientists, and some acted and looked like cretins. Some were fat and some slim; some energetic, some lazy; some merry, some moody like King Philip who was now growing up on Mt. Hope. There were good cooks and poor cooks: though nobody ever recorded a good housekeeper amongst them; good hunters and poor ones; brave fighters and cowards.
Some were handsome and some ugly. Some painted themselves with black and white stripes, some red all over. Several Wampanoags learned English and went to Harvard and Yale. King Philip employed an Indian private secretary to write letters. Some never had an idea worth a letter.
Shawomet residents, in short, were more human than the popular conception of the Indian may believe.
KING PHILIP’S WAR
•j
yHE Indian and the White Man never understood each other. Each made more allowances for the other, tried
harder and forgave more, than is usually realized. But the misunderstanding was fundamental and both races were too stubborn, too sensitive and too courageous to yield their point of view entirely to any other.
The Englishman’s law was personal and vigorously administered even in the wilderness. The Indian’s only lawT was a code of tribal customs which he seldom broke but would allow no other tribe, least of all a tribe from another world, to infringe.
Upon the Englishman’s conscientious effort to convert him to Christianity the Indian looked as an effort to wean individuals from their sachems to English submission.
But the critical point of difference was the fundamental one of land ownership. The White Man felt that he had bought the land he traded for and that he and his heirs and assigns owned it personally and forever. The Indian thought he had rented it; that like a renting landlord he might go and come across it as he willed ; and, moreover, that he had only rented it for the lifetime of the renter.
Massasoit, shrewd and intelligent enough to keep his authority even though he had been conquered by the Narra- gansetts, welcomed the Pilgrims as allies for his tribe, cut in quarter by the great sickness. It was an excellent deal for him to sell the White Man land and leave his doubts unspoken.
His oldest son, Alexander, was disposed to follow Massasoit’s policy. Alexander’s death from fever while an enforced guest of Josiah Winslow at Marshfield, whither he had been compelled to come to discuss Indian disturbances,
left a quite different type of sachem in power.
16
KING PHILIP’S WAR
17
Philip, second son of Massasoit, came into the kingship when the pressures and permanency of White policies had clearly begun to threaten his people. He was 23 years old, shrewd and energetic. His sultry nature fitted him for a program of resentment. His gift of oratory, that greatly prized art of the Red Race, enabled him to state his issue persuasively to the tribes all over New England.
The result was the Indian rebellion against White encroachment known as King Philip’s War.
This was an important chapter in Somerset’s history, not only because it broke out in the region where Somerset is located, and ravaged it, but because it erased completely the Indian town of Shawomet and any Indians that might return to it, and left it an empty stage ready for the scenes and the cast of the next act.
It broke out on Sunday, June 19, 1675, in Swansea, when the village was at church. Technically, as Philip prob¬ ably wished, the Whites drew the first blood, when an old man who had not been able to go to church, fired a gun and wounded marauding Indians who had stolen some of his furniture. By night, two Swansea houses had been burned and a Swansea man killed. One of the homes was that of Job Winslow, grandson of that William Winslow who had been the first White Man to set foot in Swansea- Somerset.
The beginning was deliberate. Some Indians had ransacked the house of Hugh Cole just west of the later Touisset railroad station at Swansea the day before but this was evidently the impulsive act of some impatient braves. Tradition is strong that the inter-tribal war council decree¬ ing the war was held that night, Saturday, June 18, on an island at the mouth of the Assonet river, ever since known as Conspiracy island.
At this council the assault on Swansea, during the hours of church service, was doubtless decided upon. By Sunday night, the Whites were in flight : those of Swansea gathering in the home of Rev. Myles, which was speedily provisioned and barricaded, or to the Bourne house on Gardner’s Neck.
18
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
Dighton folk fled to Taunton. The scattered settlers west of Swansea hastened to Providence. Portsmouth dwellers felt safe under Roger Williams’ egis; and Little Compton residents held their neck of land, firmly backed by the Sakonnet Indians who had refused to join Philip. Similar concentrations took place all over New England, but we are dealing only with Somerset territory and neighborhood.
Outlying Indian villages were similarly deserted and Indian families and Indian fighting forces were gathered at strategic places, notably Mount Hope, where an attempt by assembled Colonial troops on the 28th failed, with fatal consequencess, to dislodge them.
Shawomet Village was completely deserted. On the necks between the rivers the Indian lodges were empty. In this vicinity there remained of Indians only a small group of families, living on the slope southward to Dublin creek and known in those days as the Quaker Indians.
In numbers the Colonists and the Indians were about equal. King Philip’s Wampanoags could muster about 500 fighting braves; the Pocassets along the present Tiverton slopes about an equal number. The Narragansetts had a thousand. Colonial levies of parallel size were quickly assembled, the first force gathering at Taunton under Major Cudworth of Scituate, Major William Bradford of Plymouth, son of the Plymouth governor, and Capt. Benjamin Church of Little Compton, and arriving at Swansea on the 22nd.
From that date on, war flamed violently in this region, as it did all over New England. Undoubtedly this section owes most to Capt. Benjamin Church, who lies, with his sword of five wars beside him, in Little Compton cemetery. The policy of the trained leaders of the Colonial forces was to build forts at assumed strategical points and dare the Indians to come and attack them. When the Indians failed to come, as they shrewly did, Capt. Church pursued them, with relentless energy and unvarying success.
Gradually but steadily the numbers of fighting Indians diminished. Decreasing bands of Indians flitted from place to place, foraying for supplies and against the unprotected
KING PHILIP’S WAR
19
edges of towns. Philip was everywhere, even making a trip to the New York Indian tribes which, however, refused to join him. Either from a sense of his value as leader, or as chroniclers of the time believed, because he was lacking in personal valor, Philip fled at every approach, never leading in battle.
Poor Weetamoe, who had almost yielded, as Awashonks of the Sakonnets had, to Church’s advice not to take part, but who had finally joined her brother-in-law Philip, found her forces drained to a hopeless handful. Memories of happier days must have moved her with a strong homesick¬ ness. Or perhaps she merely came home to die.
For in the spring of 1676 she brought her decimated tribe, a mere fifty now, up from the Pocasset woods, across the bay, and settled them at the old site of Shawomet, on the neck today known as Brayton’s Point, then as Boston neck. It was her old stamping ground, from the shores of which her father had run ferry service to Mt. Hope and to the slopes of the future Fall River. This was the last, melancholy chapter of the Indian history of Shawomet.
There was nobody to attack her refuge on Brayton’s Point. All but four houses in Swansea had been burned. The eastern shore of the Taunton where Fall River would sometime rise, was still a wilderness between the river and the Watuppas. Dighton, on the main Indian trails from the Middleboro lakes to Mt. Hope, was deserted. And in Shawomet Lands there was not as yet a single settler, unless it may have been the owner of the mysterious house in the present village, whose owner must long before have fled.
For the moment Shawomet Lands were an asylum for Weetamoe. But with the advance of spring disaster closed in rapidly on Philip. His allies were being rapidly wiped out, or were deserting his cause to the wiser Uncas in Connecticut, or had fled to the Six Nations in New York. The Indian crops of the year before had been but sketchily planted and what had grown had been mostly destroyed. The settlers had fared little better in this respect but could count on neighboring colonies while their farms yielded nothing to Indian forays.
20
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
The circle of colonists, infuriated by the war’s destruc¬ tion and killing of their property and families, closed steadily tighter about Philip. He was driven from his Middleboro stronghold, and, pursued up and down by the tireless Church, finally retreated to his original base on Mt. Hope.
After sleeping for a night, it is said, in Bear’s Den rocks in Freetown, he arrived with a small company of braves at Mt. Hope on August 16, 1676, determined, it is believed, to surrender. Unfortuately one of his Indians had the poor diplomacy to suggest that course. The exasperated Philip struck him dead. The dead Indian’s brother, Alderman, fled the camp and finding Church, still in pursuit, offered to guide him to Philip.
Church’s force came upon Philip, camped on the edge of a swamp on Mt. Hope, in the early morning light. Alderman seized a gun from a soldier’s hand and shot Philip dead. The English, with their customary legal logic, adjudged Philip a traitor to the English crown and gave him a traitor’s sentence. He was drawn and quartered and his head sent to Plymouth and set up on a pole. A hand, well known to have been crippled by an exploding gun, was cut off and given to Alderman to carry about the colonies as a token of Philip’s defeat.
The war had lasted almost exactly fourteen months and the Indians of this region had been exterminated. Except for the tribes of Maine, which required an expedition led by Capt. Church, and a single attack on Hatfield in November of that year by Indians swooping down from Canada, there was never again an Indian attack in the region of King Philip’s confederacy.
The job had been well done, but it had cost the colonies appallingly. Over 600 dwellings had been destroyed. Thir¬ teen villages had been wiped out. One able-bodied man in eleven of the Colonial population had been killed, besides many women and children. The cost to Plymouth colony alone had been half million dollars (£100,000).
KING PHILIP’S WAR
21
On the other hand, the region was free of the Indian forever. All those who had survived the war, with the exception of the Christianized Indians, and the loyal tribes at Seaconnet, Nashua, Nantucket, Martha’s Vine¬ yard, were sold in slavery to the West Indies. This included King Philip’s wife, Weetamoe’s sister, and her son.
At news of Philip’s death, Weetamoe, who had spent the night with a few followers somewhere in the vicinity of Swansea, sought to make her escape across the Taunton river on a raft constructed of brush. The next morning her body was found drowned on the shore of Brayton’s Point. Whether she had been murdered by her followers or had drowned by the falling to pieces of her raft has never been determined.
Her head was borne through her cherished Shawomet Lands on the end of a pole to land to be set up on Taunton green.
In Squahannock swamp, in Rehoboth, Capt. Benjamin Church, dropping from a ledge to land between forty braves and their arms laid at its foot, single-handed captured Philip’s great battle leader Anawan, whose mighty cry of “Tarboosh” had sent terror to the Colonists’ hearts through a terrible year.
After a supper in which Church had chosen “cow beef” in preference to “horse beef,” Anawan slipped quietly away to return soon with Philip’s royal trapping of wampum which he laid at Church’s feet in token of the final surrender of the Wampanoags. Then in the moonlight Indian and White captains sat until dawn talking over the past year’s tactics, successes and defeats: two great warriors.
Church’s promises of protection for Anawan and his family were betrayed by the Pilgrims. Church was sent on an errand to Boston and during his absence Anawan, his wife and his son, were executed.
Awashunks and her Sakonnets were alloted land on Little Compton shores. Peter Nunuit, the Pocasset sagamore who had staid faithful to the Whites, was made custodian of the other peacable Pocassets on a reservation established
22
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
in Freetown. In Shawomet Lands, a fragmentary and spiritless group of Wampanoags known as the Quaker Indians remained on the flats and slopes of the later Dublin.
All other Indians of the region were either dead, fled or ending their lives as slaves on the estates of Bermuda, the Bahamas or the West Indies.
Shawomet Lands, bare except for overgrown farms and rotting wigwam frames, awaited the era of White settlement.
22 HISTORY OF SOMERSET
in Freetown. In Shawomet Lands, a fragmentary and
spiritless group of Wampanoags known as the Quaker
Indians remained on the flats and slopes of the a
All other Indians of the region were either dead, tied or ending their lives as slaves on the estates of Bermuda, t e
Bahamas or the West Indies.
Shawomet Lands, bare except for overgrown farms and rotting wigwam frames, awaited the era of White settlemen .
RECORD-5
This Plah CoPieo rgon Plan or Apovc ~n~n_e.
Pens 23, i<?37
H.J. Habvcy Cuei.'e
..
. •
SHAWOMET PURCHASE
'Y'HE same English legal logic that had ordered the quartering of King Philip as a traitor declared that the lands of all Indians participating in the war should be for¬ feited to the Colonies. They were to be sold and the proceeds used either to reimburse the Colonies for the war’s expense or for the relief of disabled soldiers and the families of those killed.
Lands in this immediate vicinity thus seized and sold included those choice possessions of the Indians, no part of which they had ever been willing to sell :Assonet, Pokanoket, including Mt. Hope, and Shawomet Lands.
Mt. Hope was purchased mainly by men of Boston; Assonet by residents principally of Taunton and Dighton; and Shawomet by men of Plymouth, Marshfield and other contiguous Plymouth colony settlements.
As a means of disposing of Shawomet Lands without •charge of favoritism ; and possibly of increasing the pro¬ ceeds ; the Shawomet area was offered in a lottery in which 31 full shares were designated including a share for Captain Benjamin Church and one for Governor Winslow. Governor Josiah Winslow was the third generation of his family in succession to be governor of Plymouth colony; and the grandson of the first White Man to set foot on Shawomet Lands.
The gift to Captain Church combined an expression of admiration for that doughty warrior’s achievements on behalf of the Colony with payment in part for the financial debt it owed him : a debt which it never came anywhere near paying and which finally ruined him.
Not all of the purchasers received a full share. Some had to be content with a half or a quarter while others had two and three full units. The method by which this division was arrived at does not appear.
23
24
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
The first meeting of the Purchasers was held at Plymouth under date of March 6, 1677, with Samuel Sprague as clerk. According to Sprague’s record, and spelling, the purchasers were :
“Richard Dwelby, Isaac Buck, Daniel Damon, Nathaniel Winslow, Samuel Prence, W. Briggs Jr., C. Briggs, Jonathin Halloway, John Briggs, Richard Winslow, Thomas Linkcom, John Swift, Capt. Fuller, John McNuckly, Jonathan Jackson, Richard Pronby, Ephraim Littelle, Samuel Littelle, John Mendall, William Hatch, William Poaks, Joseph Wod, Daniel Wod, Cornelius Briggs, Increase Robinson, Thomas Peirce, John James, Governor Winslow, and Capt. Benjamin Church.”
At this meeting of March 6, 1677, it was “voted, as their joint agreement, that the said lands shall be divided into thirty and one shares, whereof one of the said shares shall be laid out in a convenient place for a minister, and to be perpetually for the use of the ministry.”
“It is further agreed that the little neck called Boston Neck shall be laid out in thirty-one shares, every man enjoying according to his proportionate interest in the, purchase.”
“It is likewise agreed that the great neck shall be laid out in thirty-one shares.”
“It is likewise agreed that the lands lying in Taunton river from the said neck to Taunton bounds be laid out into thirty-one shares, each share extending from the said river till it crosses to the highway which is to be left between these lands and the two miles that belong to Swanzey.”
“As also it is agreed that three men be chose to be a committee who shall have the power to order such prudentials as are necessary for the good of the whole Society as to the setting the bounds between their lands and the lands of Swanzey in the best way they can and to procure an artist to survey said lands to be lotted out and lay them out as aforesaid, making such allowance in quantity to such shares as shall not fall out to be so good land as the
SHAWOMET PURCHASE
25
other shares and also to lay out such convenient highways as in their view and survey shall to them seem most convenient.”
Captain John Williams, Isaac Little and Thomas Lincoln were chosen to serve on this committee, and they made divisions with each lot of the Little Neck containing five acres, each on the Great Neck forty-five acres and each in the Out Lot thirty-five acres.
For the first three years the Purchasers held their meetings at Plymouth; then in 1680 they transferred them to the home of William Slade, who had taken up his residence at Shawomet to run the ferry left idle by the death of Corbitant, and built a home nearby.
With this year begins the ancient record book of the Purchase, which continued for exactly one hundred fifty years until the final meeting, on June 19 of 1830, when the remaining interest of the Purchasers was deeded in gift to the town of Somerset.
This book is still in existence in the custody of the Somerset town clerk : in a fine state of preservation, with its pages of rag paper not greatly yellowed by age and its ink, from the first entry, as black as the day it was set there by goosequill. While the writing until 1745 is in old English script, requiring familiarity to read it rapidly, every word of it is legible, and from the time its entries begin in the modern Italian script in 1745, gives many satisfactions to the reader.
The book’s first entry, made with the flourish of a newly appointed secretary, is on its title page with the following inscription :
“This book was begun in the year 1680 By Increase Robinson, Clark for the Said purchasers.”
Robinson’s spelling of the Indian name of the land should be noted as varying from that adopted in this history. To him they are Showamet Lands. To later “clerks” the spelling is Shewammock. To a still later secretary, Shewamett. In one or two entries the writer arrives at what is undoubtedly the right rendition of Shawomet. A strange survival of some one’s early error is seen on the U. S. Coast
26
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
Survey map of 1920 where Brayton’s Point is called by a name that never was on land or sea — Sewammock Neck.
Shawomet is the spelling authorized by the U. S. Bureau of Ethnology in its encyclopedia of the American Indian, and therefore the one adopted for this history.
Other spellings reported by the Bureau are Mishawomet, Mshawomat, Shawamet, Shewamett and Shewamet. The definition of the name is given in the encyclopedia as “Point of Land/’ But it may be profitable to consider Ruttenber’s Indian Geographical Names in which he notes that “Shaw” means “side” ; “ong” means “hill” and “et” the place where or “at.” It is within possibility that tribal usage had slurred the word “Shawonget” originally meaning “at the hillside” to the Shawomet the Whites found in use.
Increase Robinson, although himself a purchaser, did not long remain the Purchasers’ clerk, for the name of Samuel Sprague soon reappears in that office to serve until 1699, and he is very early recorded as a holder of consider¬ able lots of land in partnership with Zachariah Eddy.
Zachariah Eddy may safely be supposed to have received his lots by way of payment for service rendered. After the clerk he was the first officer of Shawomet Purchase. At the first business meeting in Plymouth Eddy was appointed constable of the new purchase. He was a former Plymouth settler who had moved to Marshfield. His principal duty at Shawomet purchase, as the records show, was to guard the land from timber cutters who had long regarded Shawomet Lands as ownerless and needed to be taught that owners had arisen.
A heavier problem soon fell on the Shawomet Pur¬ chasers than that of protecting their timber. No sooner had they begun to lay claim to their land than it appeared that much of it in the vicinty of the present Swansea boundary was already claimed by, and had apparently been sold to, the earlier arriving Swansea residents. Many an early session of the Purchasers was devoted to untangling this knotty problem, with the dispute generally ending by the Purchasers paying Swansea claimants amounts sufficient to hold the boundary lines set up in the Shawomet Purchase.
SHAWOMET PURCHASE
27
The outstanding historical and documentary interest of the records is the establishment and definition of the original holdings under the basic division into thirty-one three-fold shares. These were the outline and framework of the future Somerset, and no written pages can compare with the Plan of Shawomet Purchase included in this volume as a picture of the newborn town.
This plan or map has been prepared by Somerset's town engineer, Henry J. Harvey, from an earlier plan prepared in 1881 by I. C. Burgess, and confirmed by a detail study of the Proprietors’ record book. The original purchase map was taken to Taunton in a law case and never traced. It presents Shawomet Purchase as it was divided in 1683, six years after the purchase and three years after the transfer of the Proprietors’ meeting place to this vicinity.
It is especially valuable as recording the first buyers of the land from the original owners. These were Thomas Bailey, Robert Bennett, Elizabeth Burton, William Peck, John Pierce, Job Randall, John Reed, Samual Sherman, William Slade, the Indian Little Tom, and Daniel, inheritor of William, Wilbur. The names are here given alphabet¬ ically because the sales, being the personal affair of the individual owners, were not entered in the record book and their relative dates cannot be stated.
The apparent tidal river forming an island at the end of Brayton Point in the plan, represents the tidal marsh which was not at first deemed worth owning or assigning, although its value for salt hay was later realized. The same lack of apparent value explains the failure to assign Lot 30 which comprises the marsh still existing above the mouth of the “Creek.” This area was named Labor in Vain by the town’s settlers because of its uselessness. The unmarked area comprising the present Read Street playground and school lot and the town farm was reserved by the Pur¬ chasers to be the location of a town tavern, never built.
New names appearing from time to time in the records, due to their presence at the meetings as proprietors, announce the arrival of additional families as owners and residents: In 1694, Joseph Woodworth arrived; in 1702,
28
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
William Anthony; in 1711, Russell Mason, Thomas Stephens, and Oliver Read; in 1712-13 Robert Gibbs, Sylvanus Soule, Abraham Baker and Oabdiah Eddy.
In 1714 new names were Charles Joslin, Edward Sim¬ mons, John Pearse, John Cloobus, Major James Brown and Preserved Brayton.
The probability that new owners attended meetings makes this list, however incomplete, an indication of the Purchase’s steady expansion. Family records show that the year of Preserved Brayton’s first appearance at a meeting, 1714, was the year that he purchased 138 acres of land on the neck which would bear his family’s name through coming centuries, from William, son of Isaac Little and there built his first home about a quarter of a mile west of the present homestead, on the west side of Brayton Avenue. This farm 160 years later would be crossed by a railroad and edged by Slade’s Ferry Bridge.
On the other hand, Jonathan Bowers, who arrived and took over Bowers Shore in 1694, is not mentioned for years in the record. Nor are the Perrys, although there is a Perry cemetery at the foot of Simms Avenue whose only decipher¬ able headstone indicates it had been much used by 1725.
Buyers and settlers of the Purchase came from all sections. Brayton, Bowers and the Perry’s, like William Slade, came from Newport. John Pierce was from Rehoboth, Thomas Buffington from Salem. Sprague, Eddy and the Little’s were from Marshfield. James Brown was from Swansea, the Chace’s branched from Warren through Swan¬ sea. William Wilbur was from Portsmouth, the Luther’s from Taunton. Road and the first Shove’s were from Free¬ town. The Sherman’s were a Rhode Island family. Other regions were doubtless represented though not traced. Predominantly they were from Pilgrim Colony territory; and like the new Assonet and Bristol settlements the Purchase was placed under Plymouth’s administration in an order issued the year of the purchase.
In March of that year, 1677, the General Court decreed “that Wannamoisett and parts adjacent thereto shall there-
SHAWOMET PURCHASE
29
after be known by the name of Swansea and that Captain Thomas Willett, Mr. Paine Sr., Mr. James Brown, John Allen and John Butterworth have the trust of admittance of the town’s inhabitants and disposal of the land therein. All but Thomas Paine were residents of Swansea, Paine being one of the original Purchasers and Major James Brown, the successor of Myles Standish as commander of the Plymouth Military, a proprietor by 1683.
On June 2, 1685, the Old Colony was formed into Bristol County by the coalition of Taunton, Swansea, Rehoboth, Freetown, Dartmouth, Bristol and Little Compton.
The laying out of main highways, the fencing of high¬ ways and by-ways, the guardianship of private timber and of the public timber on the lot assigned for school purposes, and the establishment and maintenance of a school, fill the written record of Shawomet for upwards of a century. Before the century’s end the names of Brayton, Bowers, Slade and Gibbs are predominant in the moderators, secretaries and committees chosen. By the turn of the century the meetings grow briefer, scarcely more than routine. The common interests of the heirs and assigns of the original Purchasers are dwindling.
Finally, on May 22, 1830, a warrant is issued for a meeting of the Purchasers to be held on June 19 : —
“To show their minds whether they will reconsider a vote passed at the previous Proprietors’ meeting to lease the Proprietors’ land to the Town of Somerset.
“To show their minds whether they will Deed said land to said town and to act on all matters that may properly come before said meeting.”
The warrant is signed by Edward Slade, Eber Chace, David Buffinton, Nathaniel Mason, Lemuel Chase, Elisha Slade, Asa Pierce, Jonathan Buffinton, Jonathan Slade, Benjamin Buffinton, David Earle, and attested by David Buffinton, clerk.
At the meeting thus warranted for June 19, 1850, Samuel Gibbs being chosen moderator it is : —
80
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
“Voted to deed the proprietor’s Land to the Town of Somerset and that the deed should be without an consider¬ ation, or as a deed of gift.
“Voted to choose a special Committee to give a deed to the town of Somerset on behalf of the proprietors.
“Voted to choose Captain Elisha Burgess, Edward Slade and Eber Chace to give the inhabitants of the said town a deed of the Shewamet Purchase.
“Voted that the above named Committee be impowered to give a deed of gift to the inhabitants of the Town of Somerset in behalf of the Proprietors, the deed to be executed on or before the last day of July next and the Proprietors’ Records be kept at the Town clerk’s office.
David Buffinton, Proprietors’ Clerk.”
This is the last entry in the record book. Shawomet Purchase had passed into history.
1675-1775
^HE century between the outbreak of King Philip’s war
at Swansea on June 19, 1675, and the Revolution’s first battle at Concord and Lexington on April 19, 1775, saw Shawomet Lands grow from a deserted Indian village to a Colonial town of nearly a thousand inhabitants.
Like all New England, it began as an agricultural community and however it branched out industrially or commercially, it remained agricultural. The settler on a farm needed no capital but his axe and his farming tools. The labor of his neighbors helped him frame his house and raise his barn. The process of building these cleared his land if he needed it cleared, and as a byproduct gave him his first pay crop for market.
As near as Newport there was a good market for hewn logs and firewood. Providence, Boston, New York, the South and the West Indies took as fast as vessels could be found to ship them, oak lumber, cedar logs and cedar poles for fences, fir boards, masts, tan bark, pitch, tar and barrel staves. Staves had the best market of all, being so needed in England that no pioneer ship could sail without bond to return as many new barrels as it took away with supplies. John Alden came to Plymouth with the Pilgrims because they had hired him as a cooper.
Another immediate crop which Shawomet settlers could market was hay. Even thus early the thickly settled areas, and those engaged in occupations on the sea, had to buy much of their hay and grain. Two natural crops of hay were found in Shawomet ; fresh meadow hay and salt meadow hay. To this the settlers soon added plantings of English hay, usually timothy, sometimes mixed with orchard grass and clover. Haying, like house building, was usually done by exchange labor between the farms, dates being
31
32
Jonathan Bowers’ House — First House in Somerset
1675—1775
33
mutually arranged, with special references to salt hay which had to be cut at low tide.
Where the land owner had capital and extensive hay- fields he hired workers. The pay for mowers was eighteen pence a week. Four oxen and a man could be hired for five shillings sixpence a day; six oxen and a man for seven shillings, and eight oxen and a man for eight shillings. If this seems small pay, it may be noted that there is a record of land in Rehoboth being sold at about this time for eight pence an acre. It did not require more than a season’s hiring out for an ambitious young man to acquire enough money to buy a farm for himself.
If the settler had capital he stocked his place with a full variety of livestock. Well before King Philip’s war the farms of the Old Colony had horses, cattle, oxen, sheep, hogs, geese, and hens. These, except the sheep, furnished additional material for commerce in meat with other communities and with those industrially occupied at home. Sheep were seldom eaten in the first century of Shawomet, being care¬ fully bred and kept for their all-necessary wool. Pork, beef, horses and corn had a ready market as far away as Virginia and the West Indies. Fish, salted, was shipped regularly to England, France and Spain.
With the coming of livestock, if not for the clearing of hay fields, wall building began. The whole reach of Somerset is within a terminal morain where the retreating glaciers of the ice age dumped their cargo of loose rock torn from the mountains to the north or ground from local ledges. Clearing these from the land was a task that used up the late fall and winter for the settler, his sons and his neighbors, and furnished another source of income for the landless. The going pay for wall building in the late 1600’s was fifteen cents a rod for the ordinary field wall, upwards for finished wall.
The land was prepared for clearing by mowing with a brush whip, a stubby wooden handle set at right angles with a sturdy blade. Swung with full force the brush whip would cut down even sizeable saplings. The rocks from the denuded
34
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
land were then carried by hand or drag to dumping piles. Here the wall builders took them.
The wall builder worked with bare hands for the better and surer manipulating of the stones. His hands needed to be tough and he toughened them by soaking them in brine and then charring bits of woolen cloth, by laying them on hot steel, and rubbing the charred remains into his palms and fingers.
Where set with the approval of town authorities, usually the fence viewers, these walls were accepted as legal boundary lines and many of them still serve as such in today’s land titles. That not all lots were bounded with walls is shown by repeated votes in the Record directing owners to fence their land where it faced on a highway. So essential did this seem to the common good that a person building fence was allowed to cut his posts and poles from any owners’ land along the way.
The course of the original roads in Somerset can be traced closely by reference to the Shawomet Purchase plan of 1683. Votes entered in the Record carefully reserve the road, now County Street, thereon laid out from the northern boundary to Swansea street, now called Buffinton. Here it deflected to the west of the present Buffinton Green and swung up the course of Buffinton west to Prospect, following the course of Prospect street to the present Read street, and thence up Read street to the Swansa line. The highway down on to the neck followed the course of the present Brayton Point road.
The east and west road laid out across the Point is identical with the present Wilbur avenue and, passing as it did, the land of one of the first purchasers, Daniel Wilbur, was very early known by his name. From the eastern end of this Wilbur road a roadway early grew to connect with the ferry and form the curving highway later known variously as Wilbur Avenue, the Warren road, and Route 103.
Brayton Avenue was later laid out to connect Read street with Slade’s Ferry and is probably the original Indian trail
1675—1775 1466373 35
to Corbitant’s ferry. Wilbur and Brayton avenues are among the first roads in the Purchase growing out of use rather than planning. Early in the Record a vote appears for another road which experience had found desirable: the road now called North Street, to connect Town Landing with the old Indian road, Elm Street.
Anyone comparing the Somerset map of today with that of the original Purchase must be impressed with how well, in general, the Proprietors foresaw the pattern of its future growth. Particularly interesting is to note the conformity of its east and west residential streets with the lot lines on the original plan.
The key to the history of Somerset lies in the pattern of walls slanting in parallels down its eastern slope, and the little docks between them at the river front. These walls mark the boundaries of the early farms. The docks are the wharves which each landholder very early built to load at his own dooryard for shipment near and far the crops he had raised. These docks and the little sloops and schooners built to serve them, by the farmers themselves or by such enter¬ prising families as the Gibbs’, Walker’s, Weaver’s, Slade’s and Brown’s, were the beginnings of Somerset’s fleets and the foundation of the capital with which the town has met the opportunities of its successive eras. These all but count¬ less little docks are the monuments of the founders.
Within twenty years of the first settlements in Shaw- omet, three villages had begun to define more or less the future three precincts of the town. These were the loosely clustered farmsteads of the Point, the settlement at the future Egypt, and Bowers Shore, the future Somerset Village.
First of these in time was Bowers shore, which followed the arrival of Jonathan Bowers, to establish a ship yard.
The fame of the white oak forests of Shawomet and lands adjacent made so strong an impression in England that by 1693 Thomas Coram had arrived in Dighton to represent one English firm in building ships; and Samuel Lee from New York to represent another. Coram began building in
36
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
Dighton in 1693 and remained ten years. Before he left, Samuel Lee had settled on Brayton Point and had his first ship on the ways on the shore of the river that would ever afterwards bear his name.
It would have been strange, therefore, if Jonathan Bowers, trained in shipbuilding on the Clyde and come to Newport with several thousand pounds to set up for himself, had not been attracted to the same region.
William Slade, at the ferry, had known Bowers in New¬ port and they must have discussed the matter together before Bowers arrived one summer’s day to pick up Slade and go exploring for a site. They went up the bay and the Taunton as far as the Assonet river, investigated that, the Broad Cove and other shores and decided upon the stretch of future Somerset shore from the present Shellac works to the neighborhood of the later railroad station as the location for a shipyard. This area would be known for centuries to come as Bowers Shore.
Jonathan Bowers’ first visit appears to have been in the year 1694. The next year, he returned, built a home and settled there with his bride. This house, built on Water Street, now Main, was the first frame house in the Village, and was soon followed by seven others on the same street, occupied by employes at the new shipyard.
In view of the universal skill of the early Colonists as shipwrights it is not probable that he had much difficulty in assembling labor. One unique source of manpower was available immediately at hand in the squatter residents of the sandy bluffs just around the point to the south. These were soldiers of King Philip’s war who either had lost their homes and families and had no place to go, or had left the war informally and couldn’t go home. A considerable colony of them had made themselves dwellings, like cliff swallows, in the bluffs. Some of them had hollowed into the hill until they had two-room abodes, reinforced with logs and stone to prevent caving. Here they had dwelt for several years, getting farm products from the Quaker Indians nearby and furnishing the Indians in return with game killed by guns
1675—1775
37
which the Indians were not allowed to have. How many of these cliff dwellers went to work for Bowers is not known, but after his coming their squatter settlement soon dissolved.
Jonathan Bowers’ first vessel was a sloop of 40 tons which came off the ways in the year of his arrival, 1695. In 1697, his yard produced the town’s first ship. No list of the vessels he built exists. He built to sail as well as sell, and by 1735, when he died, had become one of the foremost merchants of New England, with a fine reputation and large credit throughout the Colonies.
Water street, which no longer exists, became the center of a thriving village. It was on Water street that the town’s first industry other than shipbuilding was started. This was Somerset’s first pottery, which was started in 1705. In 1715, the Village’s first dock was built as the location of a try works with a fleet of small vessels bringing whales and smaller oil-producing fish from nearby waters. This dock later became the Mt. Hope Iron Works dock.
Before his death, Jonathan had built homes, considered very fine for the times: for David, the later “Black Block77 in Bowers Lane ; for Philip, the house still standing on South Street; for Jonathan, the later Avery Slade house on County Street ; and for Henry, the house now known as the Burgess House. His own house, on Water Street, he left to Benjamin. This was the Isaac Pierce house which stood until 1915, serving in its later years as the town’s police station. For his sixth son, Jerathmel, he would build no house, having fallen out with him.
Benjamin succeeded his father at the shipyard. Henry concentrated on commerce and built his father’s business to new dimensions and prosperity. It was during his career that many village wharves were built; storehouses were erected, Main Street laid out, the first rope-walk built, and many of the ancient elms of the present Village planted. Under him an extensive trade grew with the South and West Indies, and ships sailed regularly between England and Canton and Bowers Shore.
Gratitude is due the memory of Avery Slade, who knew
38
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
men who had known the Bowers’, for the information con¬ cerning them which his well known reminiscences preserve. The family were the founders of Somerset Village and the sponsors of its phenomenal early growth.
But growth at the other end of the town was steady and important, if not sensational. The Point was a normal agricultural community of early New England type, with broadening farms, a shipyard of its own, vessels often under construction all along its shores, the activity of through traffic across Slade’s ferry, and a constantly increasing population.
In 1680, the same year as William Slade, Zachariah Eddy had arrived to take up actively his duties as constable and settle on land near Lee’s river at the present crossing of Read Street into Swansea. His descendants at the end of this first century numbered 31.
In the same year, William Wilbur of Portsmouth had bought two lots along the road which now bears his name, and by 1710 his son, Daniel, having inherited the property, had settled there.
By 1707 Samuel Lee had begun launching a rapid series of vessels from his yard on the back of the Point, beginning with a ship of 120 tons, a large craft for the times. In 1708, he launched a brigantine of 50 tons and a ship of 170; the next year, two brigantines of 50 tons each, and in 1712 a sloop of 80 tons.
In 1714, Preserved Brayton, first-comer of the family thenceforth to be identified with the Point and all the surrounding region, arrived from Newport and built a home the stone foundations of which are still to be seen a little way up the hill from the later Homestead. His wife was Content Coggeshall, grandaughter of John Coggeshall the partner of William Coddington who had led the Ports¬ mouth group which had founded Newport and who had been the almost sucessful rival of Roger Williams for control of Rhode Island. By the end of the century they had four¬ teen descendants of the Brayton name living within the Purchase.
1675—1775
39
Some twenty other families named in the preceding chapter had arrived early in this century and by its end there was a total of 68 different family names within the teiritory of the Purchase.
In 1729, William Slade died, the operation of the ferry passing first to his brother Jonathan and on his death to Jonathan’s nephew Samuel, who in addition to attending the ferry managed a farm and ran a blacksmith’s shop. When William’s wife, who lived to the age of 97, died in 1761 there were 435 descendants of these two first settlers, living mostly in the Purchase.
Meanwhile, the central section which would later be called Pottersville was beginning to grow. Benjamin Weaver was very early a large landholder in this section, with his descendants engaging in shipping. By the end of the century families located here included Sherman’s, Chace’s, Luther’s, Read’s, Davis’, Gray’s, Butterworth’s, Buffinton’s, Wood’s, Bourne’s, Purington’s and Gibbs’.
Captain Robert Gibbs arrived in Shawomet sometime before 1730 and built on the main road, now County Street, at the head of the lot now occupied by the Pottersville School and playground. The Gibbs family concentrated on coastal shipping, at one period owning eleven vessels registered from Somerset, with four members, representing three generations, ship captains.
In this future Pottersville section was located in 1701 the first church building built within the area of the future Somerset, the Friends’ Meetinghouse, not far up the hill from Egypt on the location occupied by the present Friends’ Church. This was attended by dwellers of all sections, as will be seen in the account of this church in a later chapter.
In 1728, the first school, financed by the proprietors, was organized. This was for a time held at homes in the three sections of the Purchase; then, from 1734, in a school- house “near to Mr. Robert Gibbs by the highway.” There was already at the Village a private school supported by the well-to-do families there; but this was the first public school within the area of the present town. Its location was on
40
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
the west side of County Street just south of the old Potters- ville school, now abandoned.
As the century ended, the first Massachusetts census was recording the population of Swansea as 1840. From the Swansea and Somerset figures of a few years later it would appear that an approximate half of this figure lived in Shawomet Lands. It was a substantial and vigorous community which watched the train of events, and con¬ tributed its own defiant part to them, leading to a break with the Old Country.
NOTES ON FIRST CENTURY
'"THE story of the cliff dwelling squatters in the bluffs above ' Bowers Shore is found in the “Sketches of Somerset Village” published in 1884 by Avery Slade, descendant of William Slade and born in 1818 when traditions of the previous century were still vigorous. Of them he says :
“When Jonathan Bowers first landed on this shore, the river bank rose much more abruptly than it does at present, and was dotted with huts and cabins of the most primitive type.
“These structures consisted of an excavation made in the bluff, and were lined and arched with walls of rough stone, and supplemented by a room in front, made of round logs, notched at each end to keep them in place, thus forming a sort of vestibule to the less exposed apartments. Whether this appendage was intended for use or ornament is not definitely known, but probably both. It was made tight in winter by filling the crevices with clay ; and perfect ventila¬ tion was secured in summer by its removal. This room was sometimes used for a dining room, but generally as a recep¬ tion room for neighbors and friendly Indians. From the centre of the rear apartment a hole in the ceiling was made, and from hence upward through the earth to the surface, which constituted the chimney.
“The occupants of these rude habitations were mainly refugees, or deserters from the ranks of Captain Church, who had been fighting against Philip. Fish and game were abundant and easily trapped, and from this source they drew their principal subsistence. The hill lying South and East of the Dublin schoolhouse was covered with a primitive growth of white pine, and was inhabited by a remnant of a tribe of friendly Indians, who were afterwards called Quakers because they refused to take up arms for or against
41
42
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
Philip. Where openings were found in the forest they planted corn, and supplied the new settlement with seed which enabled them to add the luxury of corn bread to their liberal rations of fish and game.
“A hole cut in the surface of a flat rock, in which they pounded his corn, remains to this day (1884) and pestles cf stone and arrowheads were frequently found in this vicinity by the early cultivators of the soil.”
A large stone pestle was found on the high school play¬ ground when it was graded in 1938.
BUFFINGTON’S CORNER
While there is no knowing when the name of Buffing¬ ton’s Corner first became habitual with the town, its residents descended from a dweller in Shawomet who was here sometime before 1729, the date of his tombstone in the Bourne cemetery, and whose son bought land at the Corner, lot 24, as early as 1712.
This first of the Buffington’s “with a G” was Thomas, a man with a personal history which is one of the town’s traditions.
Ke was born in Scotland, and when a young man was seized by a press gang and forced aboard a British man-of- war bound for the New England colonies. When the ship reached this side and put into Salem harbor young Buffing¬ ton was determined to escape from the bitter slavery of the impressed sailor and on a dark night escaped the sentry’s eye and slipped overboard and swam ashore. Death was the penalty if he were seen escaping or afterwards apprehended, but the first man to whom he was forced to speak as he lay exhausted and hungry under a haystack when morning came was a Quaker who assisted him to dry clothing and food, hid him until the ship left, and then helped him find a job.
Thomas repaid the country which had given him sanctuary by serving in the Indian wars, and afterwards married a widow, Sarah Tidd of Salem, who inherited a substantial property from her father.
He now settled down to practice his trade of mason but his experiences were not over. Going into Salem town
NOTES ON FIRST CENTURY
43
one day he was pulled off his ox team by the authorities and taken to court charged with practicing witchery. He asked the officers who had complained of him on this charge and they pointed out a woman sitting in court. He walked over to the woman and laid his ox whip on her until she ran out of the court and he, following, laid on the ox whip whenever he got the chance. Then, according to the custom of those days, the officers went up and down the street asking each person whether he was for Thomas or against him. So large a party clustered around Buffington that the officers did not dare touch him.
Thomas Buffington’s first residence in Somerset is said to have been a log cabin. When his son Benjamin followed him to Shawomet and bought GO acres of John Blethen he assisted Benjamin in building the first house at the Corners, which had a rear wall of field stone which was torn down in 1884 and used for the foundation of the 1885 high school building.
The son, Benjamin, was called to the ministry of the Friends Church in 1731, and served it for 29 years, until 1760. He was killed by the falling of a beam while raising a store for Henry Bowers. Benjamin’s grandson Jonathan built a grist mill which stood where the later Buffington icehouse, now gone, once stood. This Jonathan’s son built the foundation for the town’s first rolling mill and several of the town’s docks, including the long wharf in front of the Peterson house.
TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE
Henry Bowers is noted in one reminiscence of the town as a large owner of slaves. Sometime after 1760, one of Henry Bowers’ captains brought him a splendid young black captured in Africa and reputed to be the son of a native king. There was something in the mien of this spirited, black which made the neighbors uneasy and they finally prevailed upon Bowers to get rid of him, which he did by sending him on one of his vessels to the West Indies.
Some years later the same captain, on another trip to the West Indies, determined to visit Hayti and meet the
44
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
Toussaint L’Ouverture whose military skill in leading a rebellion and setting up a Republic had won the world’s acclaim. When he came face to face with the liberator the Somerset captain recognized him. Toussaint L’Ouverture was the former slave of Henry Bowers.
As great and wise a governor as he had been an able general, Toussaint had given his new republic a code of laws and a system of education, and had embellished his career with philosophical writings which had attracted attention in France and may still be read with profit. In the interval between his Somerset days and the captain’s visit he had been sent out by his master to school in France, trained in letters and military science and returned to lead his people to freedom. His first name was given him by his French master: the second L’Ouverture was a title of honor meaning, “The Liberator.”
At Toussaint’s death John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a poem of stirring tribute, including the lines :
“For the time shall come Yea, even now is nigh When everywhere thy name shall be Redeemed from color’s infamy;
And men shall learn to speak of thee As one of earth’s great spirits, born In servitude and nursed in scorn,
Casting aside the weary weight And fetters of its low estate In that strong majesty of soul Which knows no color, tongue or clime.”
MILES’ BRIDGE
One hundred fifty years after its incorporation, the town still helps to support a bridge between two other towns across a river that nowhere touches Somerset. This is the Miles’ bridge across the Palmer River, twice replaced and still, and probably forever, a liability under the terms of the charter of 1790.
As early as 1736, there was a wooden bridge across the Palmer River referred to in the records as “Miles’ Bridge
NOTES ON FIRST CENTURY
45
in a country road.” By 1749 this original bridge had fallen into decay, and the town of Swansea representing to the legislature that it could not afford the expense of repairing it, the legislature on December 11 of that year authorized a lottery for the amount of twenty-five thousand pounds, old tenor, to rebuild it.
Ten per cent of the subscriptions to the lottery was to be paid out as prizes. “And in order that there may be no bubble or cheats happening to the purchasers or drawers of the tickets” the Town of Swansea was made answerable to the purchasers for “any deficency or misconduct of the managers according to the true intent of lotteries.”
In the act incorporating the town of Somerset it is specified that “the inhabitants of the Town of Somerset shall forever hereafter support and keep in repair their proportional part of the bridge known by the name of Miles Bridge in the proportion that the Town of Somerset and and the Town of Swansea now pay on the present valuation.”
The lottery bridge was replaced in 1876 by an iron bridge seventy-five feet long. In the hurricane of 1938, this bridge was washed away. A new one was built by the State.
THE FIRST SCHOOL
The Proprietors early set aside a school lot of several wooded acres running down the hillside easterly from the Highway (later County street) and adjoining the south side of the land of Captain Robert Gibbs whose property is now partly occupied by the Pottersville School
Dates of the first schoolhouse there, and of the first teacher, have to be inferred because the Record of the Purchasers is silent until January, 1734, when the teacher is reimbursed for buying boards and nails and repairing the schoolhouse at his own expense.
This is the first time the Record calls him by name but from then on “the schoolmaster William Hart” appears many times. An entry in the Record enjoins all to “cut no wood on the school lot except for firing and fencing;” the “proceeds of hiring out the school lot are to pay into the treasury for our schoolmaster.”
46
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
The proceeds were not up to expectation. On February 11, 1743, appears an entry: “Received of the Purchasers and Proprietors full satisfaction for my salary for about fifteen years last past as schoolmaster for Shewamock pur¬ chase only remaining, due me the sum of fifty pounds, six¬ teen shillings and eight pence Old Tenor to Dec. 27 Last. Witness my hand Wm. Hart.”
This makes the date when the first school teacher in Shawomet Purchase began his work somewhere in the early winter of 1728. Whatever the character or date of the first schoolhouse it served only a part of the year as a school building, although evidently all the year as the schoolmaster’s home. At the beginning, there were three school districts, indicated in the vote of May 27, 1758, that the schoolmaster, “shall begin the school the first four months at the middle school (his home) , the second four at the upper school house (apparently a selected private home), and then compleat his year’s service at the lower schoolhouse.”
It is also voted at this time to repair his house, and on January 15, three years later, it is voted “to build a schoolhouse near to Mr. Robert Gibbs by the highway 15 feet square with a chimney.”
William is getting sixty pounds a year, now, when he gets it. All his acknowledgements of salary received show a balance remaining due. In 1751, he tried for a salary increase, allowing it to be put to a vote before the Proprie¬ tors “whether William Hart the schoolmaster should have one hundred fifteen pounds for the year ensuing.” It was, says the Record, “Voted in the niggetive.”
In 1761, he is still teaching, but his signature, once marked by a fine flourish, is getting shaky. Then no entry for a year; and then in February of 1763, the Proprietors appoint Benjamin Slade, Samuel Slade and Israel Brayton a committee “to hire a schoolmaster or schoolmasters or school mistress at a price in their judgment,” and that the widow, Mary Hart, have the use of half the schoolmaster’s house to live in.
NOTES ON FIRST CENTURY
47
WEETAMOE
In February of 1676, the Rowlandson garrison house at Lancaster was attacked by the Indians, and Mrs. Row¬ landson was captured and sold to Quinnopin who gave her to Weetamoe as a maid. Mrs. Rowlandson was well treated and able to observe calmly all she saw. After her ransom she wrote of Weetamoe :
“A proud dame she was ; bestowing every day in dressing herself near as much time as any gentry of the land : powdering her hair and painting her face and going with her necklaces, her jewels in her ears and bracelets upon her hands. When she had dressed herself her work was to make girdles of wampum and beeds.
“She had a kersey coat, covered with girdles of wampum from the loins upward. Her arms from her elbows and her hands were covered with bracelets. There were handfuls of necklasses around her neck and several sorts of jewels in her ears. She had fine red stockings and white shoes, her hair powdered and her face painted red.”
FRIENDS’ MEETING HOUSE
W^ITH so many of the settlers of Shawomet, and of the v firstcomers to Swansea at Gardner’s Neck, members of the Society of Friends, the dominant religious group of the region was, next to the original Baptists, the Quakers — to use the name which by long tolerance of the Friends them¬ selves has grown respected of all the world.
The Rhode Island Quarterly Meeting was the meeting for this area, and it appears to have been gathered at Warren when, on the 13th day of the 8th month, 1732, Samuel Aldrich, one of the Friends appointed to inspect into the capacity and circumstance of Friends having a Monthly Meeting settled at Swansea (now Somerset) made report that he had been among Friends there, “and find them very unanimous therein, and is of the belief that it may be of
service.
48
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
“This meeting therefore agree that a Monthly Meeting be settled in Swansea, to be held on the first Second-day of the week in each month, and that those Friends who dwell on the northward of Tiverton, and are belonging to this Quarterly Meeting, shall be under the care of said Monthly Meeting in Swansea.”
In pursuance of this authorization the present Friends’ Church of Somerset began its existence as recorded in the minutes of its first clerk, Thomas Richardson :
“And in confirmation to the Quarterly Meeting order and settlement as aforesaid Friends have met. At our Monthly Meeting held in Swansea, the 6th day of the 9th month, 1732, and also settled our Preparative Meeting on the fifth day before the Monthly meeting and also appoint John Earle clerk.”
But long before this, the Quakers of Swansea and Shawomet were meeting regularly nearer home, and by 1701 in a Meetinghouse of their own on land owned by John Shaw, later by Thomas Earle. By inference there would appear to have been a Meetinghouse previously to this, but it is def¬ initely recorded that on October 9, 1701, a committee was appointed to see about erecting such a building in the region then known as Wickapimpset, now Somerset Centre.
The building which this committee proceeded to build was the first church structure in Shawomet Lands. At the Quarterly Meeting of the next January, 1702, a collection was taken to defray the cost of the Meetinghouse which had been finished and was in use. Six years later, the land on which it stood was purchased from Thomas Earle on behalf of the Meeting by a committee composed of William Anthony, Richard Borden, Joseph Anthony Jr., Thomas Hicks of Portsmouth and Joseph Wanton of Tiverton.
On this site the Friends’ Church of Somerset still stands, with the addition of a quarter acre purchased later of Eber Chace. On this enlarged lot the main part of the present church, 45 feet long, 30 feet wide and 18 feet high, was built in 1746-1747 at a cost of 759 pounds 19 shillings; a commo¬ dious building and a large investment for a church two hundred years ago.
NOTES ON FIRST CENTURY
49
This building, enlarged in 1872 and again in 1889, and altered and renovated from time to time, is the one now in use by the Friends’ church, with close to two hundred years of age and service.
The congregation in the early building sat with the men on one side of the meeting room and the women on the other, with shutters dividing the two sides. The seats were high-backed and uncushioned. There was no heat. Until about 1885, there was no singing and this building in its early years frequently witnessed meetings in which the whole congregation sat throughout with no one moved to utter a word until the ministers and elders on the rising seats facing the audience rose to signify the meeting’s end.
The burial ground in the rear of the building has many graves which in accordance with the humility of the early Quaker faith were not marked at all, and others that are marked by small undated stones. Others have stones bearing the names of persons noted in the early history of the Friends and the town.
Swansea Friends’ Meeting kept to the system of resi¬ dent ministers from among its members until shortly before the death, in 1907, of Obadiah Chace, at the close of exactly sixty years as minister. This span of service, remark¬ able though it is, was equalled by Theophilus Shove in his ministry from 1736 to 1796. The first Benjamin Buffin- ton ministered twenty-nine years ; the second forty-five.
The full list of ministers is a memorial of leading early families of the town as well as to lives of service. They were, with dates so far as known :
Abraham Chase, 1727 — ; Sarah Chase, 1730 — ; Ben¬ jamin Buffinton, 1731-1760, Job Chase, 1733 — ; Isaac Chase, 1733-1750; Theophilus Shove, 1736-1796; Israel Buffinton, 1753 — ; Hannah Chase, 1764-1775; Patience Brayton, 1768-1794; Philip Chase, 1870 — ; Jonathan Chase, 1781-1824; Stephen Slade, 1784-1803; Benjamin Buffinton, 1784-1829; Abigail Lawton, 1802 — ; Daniel Brayton, 1806-1836; Mary Buffinton, 1820 — ; Mary Shove, 1838 — ; Obadiah Chace, 1847-1907.
50
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
In 1894 the church adopted the pastoral system, with pastors to date as follows :
Frank E. Jones, 1894-1901 ; Mead A. Kelsey, 1901-1905; Jesse McPherson, 6 months; George B. Evans, 1906-1910; Oscar Mostrom, 1910-1912; Frank E. Jones, 1912-1926; William C. Hartnett, 1926-1931; Augustus W. Benedict, 1932-1937 ; Cecil E. and Mary P. Pearson, 1938-1939.
In Patience Brayton, minister from 1768 to 1794, Friends’ Church possessed one of the unforgetable characters of this town : its first anti-slavery champion, and its first author whose writings appeared in book form.
The book, which the Meeting published in her memory in 1801, is a paper-bound volume of octavo size, with 142 pages. According to its title page it is: “A Short Account of The Life and Religious Labors of Patience Brayton, late of Swanzey, in the State of Massachusetts. Mostly Selected from Her Own Writings.” It begins with an affectionate and admiring “Testimony” in the form of a short biography by the church, signed by its clerks, Daniel Brayton and Mary Earle. Following this are her reports on her travels, letters between herself and her husband and friends, discussing her work, and an address to King George III urging him to banish slavery from the British Kingdom.
Patience was the wife of Preserved Brayton, grandson of the Preserved Brayton who bought and settled on the Point in 1714. She struggled long with the problem of embracing her husband’s religion before agreeing to marry him. But so thoroughly was she converted that almost immediately thereafter she was made minister of the meeting and followed its teachings wherever they led, in spite of a frail body and constant ill-health.
She began her anti-slavery work by persuading her husband to free his slaves. Others followed Preserved Brayton’s example and in 1771, thirteen years after her marriage, she felt the call to larger fields. With the Meeting’s approval, and the consent of her husband, which was no small sacrifice on his part since he was himself in poor health, she set out that year to visit every Friend’s Meeting the whole length of the Atlantic coast, a journey which took over a year.
NOTES ON FIRST CENTURY
51
Her reports show her often homesick and ill, but always keeping on, until she thought her mission done and she returned home in 1772. The next year a second calling took her throughout New England; and finally, in 1783 she set out on a journey to England where she staid four years waiting for an audience with George III and visiting the Friends’ Meetings of the ^Kingdom. Failing of the audience, she addressed a memorial to the King and sailed for home, to spend the last six years of her life with her church.
The address to the monarch who had but lately lost the land she hailed from is full of fervor and the eloquence which must have made Somerset’s first anti-slavery champion a powerful influence.
PETITION TO GEORGE III FROM PATIENCE BRAYTON
May the Almighty God save the King, and establish thee and thy seed after thee on thy throne here, and enable thee so to walk, as that when thou hast done with all things on this side of the grave, admittance may be obtained into the kingdom of everlasting rest and peace !
I have often thought of thee in my native land, and since my residence here have had to behold how the Lord on high hath blessed thy kingdom beyond other kingdoms of the earth; and earnest desires have been raised in my heart for thee, that thou mayest be the chosen of the God of heaven, to shew kindness unto those who are in distress ; particularly by stopping the progress of slavery, and promoting the freedom of the enslaved Negroes in thy dominions, as far as lies in thy power; so that thy righteous acts may never be erased from rememberance as long as the world endures — that he by whom kings reign and princes decree justice, may delight to establish the kingdom over- which thou presides, in righteousness, and that a door may be opened for other nations concerned in that unrighteous traffic to follow so laudable an example.
52
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
The hearts of all men are in the power of God, and he by thy means may turn the hearts of other princes to feel for those highly injured and deeply distressed people, so as to rise up and unite in the same benevolent design : and it is my faith, that the first of them who shall publicly assert their cause, and open a door for their deliverance, the Lord of the whole earth will distinguish by his peculiar favour, and give to rejoice in the experience, that it is indeed righteousness alone that truly exalteth a nation.
I had to believe several years before I left my native country, that the Lord would give thee an offer to take the lead; but that if thou refused, he would chuse another to set up the standard of righteousness on this occasion, wherein so large a part of the inhabitants of the earth are concerned; many of whom are now groaning in thy domin¬ ions under oppression sufficiently grievous, as I have thought, to affect the hearts even of the most obdurate.
Mayest thou, oh King, be earnest in supplication as one formerly was, whom the Lord Most High called his servant, who said, “Take from me a stony heart and give me a heart of flesh,” that as Christ has declared, “They that ask shall receive,” thine may be tendered and enlarged to desire and promote the good, not only of thy own people, but of the nations around thee ; and that thou mayest be enabled in the time of extremity, to which we are all approaching, to appeal to the searcher of the heart as good King Hezekiah, did, “Thou knowest how I walked before thee, with a perfect heart, and have done that which is good in thy sight.”
To be thus conscious, that thou hast not turned a deaf ear to the cry of the poor and distressed, will then be an experience far more enriching than any which the splendor of a temporal crown can afford ; because he the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords hath said, “Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.” Oh King, thou art entrusted with great ability to do good under him, who of one blood created all nations, not to oppress and destroy one another, but to lend a hand of assistance where it is needed in our several stations; that looking down on the mutual kindness and endeavour of his children to promote each other’s happiness, he may delight to open the windows of
NOTES ON FIRST CENTURY
53
heaven, and to add to the temperate enjoyment of his temporal gifts, the blessing of his divine saviour.
Under the influence of this, as I have been sometimes led to pray for thy prosperity, it hath been opened to my understanding, that the Lord did love thee, and that if thou wert faithful in the promotion of righteousness, he would bless thee as he did King Solomon, with both spiritual and temporal riches, the dew of heaven and fatness of the earth ; for the earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof, and he giveth it unto whomsoever it pleaseth him. It is the righteous who are to enjoy it as an inheritance from him, and delight themselves in abundance of peace ; and oh that thou mayest be of the number, by promoting an extension of mercy to the injured and oppressed Africans.
In the hours of solid retirement I have been often much affected in viewing their distresses, and since I have been in this nation, have believed it required of me as a duty to lay their deplorable case before thee, intreating thy inter¬ position on their behalf; that in the day of inquisition for blood thou mayest stand clear in the sight of God, by whom not the sayers but the doers of the law will be justified ; those who obey his injunctions will partake of his promises, and such as sow plentifully in faith, will reap accordingly in peace and joy.
So wisheth my heart for thee oh King!
Be pleased to accept favourably this disinterested Pe¬ tition; and remember that the Almighty Ruler of the uni¬ verse, though heaven is his throne and the earth his foot¬ stool, is not unmindful of the poorest among men, but graciously condescends to hear and answer their petition, having declared that “for the cry of the poor and sighing of the needy he will arise.”
PATIENCE BRAYTON.
London, 23d of 7th mo. 1787.
54
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
Henry Bowers -John A. Burgess House
John Bourne House “1720-1730”
THE REVOLUTION
A
yHE Lexington alarm which reached the Taunton’s shores in the early evening of April 19, 1775, brought no great surprise. The same Minute Man organization which had turned out that morning at Lexington Green and Con¬ cord’s Old North Bridge existed in every Bristol County settlement. Men of Bowers Shore, Brayton’s Point and Egypt, as well as of the rest of Swansea, Dighton, Reho- both, Freetown and all the region round had been drilling on open lots of summer evenings, or practicing the manual of arms on barn floors throughout the winter, for upwards of two years. In Shawomet Lands, as elsewhere, muskets had been listed, bullets cast and powder and flints stored in accordance with orders from the Massachusetts Commit¬ tee of Safety.
A full ten days before blood was spilled at Lexington, the open Revolution had almost been begun at Assonet by Bristol County Men.
The Essex Gazette of Salem printed the story on April 18, 1775:
Boston, Monday, April 17th “A letter from Taunton dated last Friday, mentions that on the Monday before (April 10) parties of Minute Men, etc., from every town in that county, with arms and ammunition, met at Freetown early that morning in order to take Col. Gilbert, but he had fled on board the man-of-war at Newport.
“They then divided into parties and took twenty-nine Tories who had signed enlistments and received arms in the colonel’s company to join the king’s troops. They also took thirty-five muskets, two case bottles of powder, and a basket of bullets, all which they brought to Taunton the same afternoon, where the prisoners were separately ex¬ amined, eighteen of whom made such humble acknowledg-
55
\
56
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
ments of their past bad conduct and solemn promise to behave better for the future they were dismissed, but the other eleven being obstinate and insulting, a party were ordered to carry them to Simsbury Mines, but they were sufficiently humbled before they had got fourteen miles on their way thither, upon which they were brought back next day, and after signing proper articles to behave better in the future, were escorted to Freetown.
“There were upwards of two thousand men embodied there on Monday/’
This foray occurred on April 9 and 10, and had either Minute Men or the guard of twenty-five armed Tories around Colonel Gilbert’s house fired one impulsive shot the Revolution would have dated from April 10, with men of Shawomet Lands sharing the fame.
Now word was come by way of the same alarm system which had sent Paul Revere riding the night before, that the Minute Men were to assemble to the aid of Boston. Almost without exception every Bristol County town had a com¬ pany of men on the road Boston-bound before midnight on the 20th. The Swansea contingent joined with that of Re- hoboth, making a total of six companies which the Reverend William Emerson, seeing them arrive at Cambridge the next day, said compared well in appearance and equipment with the British regulars.
Swansea the next morning warned a special town meeting to be held on the following day, April 21. At this meeting two votes passed were:
“That 40 guns, 250 pounds of powder, 750 pounds of bread, and 600 flints be provided. The committee of inspec¬ tion shall provide provisions and all other necessities for the poor upon any special emergency. That 50 men be en¬ listed to be ready at a minute’s warning, and paid three shillings a week for exercising two half days a week, and six dollars bounty if called out of town. The officers to have the same as Rehoboth pays its officers.”
“That we keep a post to ride to Boston (and leave it to the selectmen how often) for the best intelligence that can be had there,”
THE REVOLUTION
57
In the eight years that followed, the war bore hard on the thriving settlement. From the first it was realized that Slade’s Ferry was a crucial point. In December of 1776, the British fleet captured Newport and soon occupied all of the island of Rhode Island. Immediately, an artillery company under Captain Fales of Taunton was posted at the Ferry.
This company was gradually replaced by a company under Captain Peleg Sherman, resident of the Shawomet portion of the town, and made up principally of local men. This second force remained on guard at Slade’s Ferry from January 6, 1777, to June 5 of the same year and was then transferred to Bristol. Peleg Sherman afterwards became a colonel and was placed in charge of regional commissary. His home, in the future Pottersville section, was at times used to quarter the local troops.
Captain Sherman’s transfer left these shores virtually unprotected, and although the British had shown no inten¬ tion to molest the town its people were uneasy. Captain Philip Slade was therefore- selected to wait on General Sullivan “to represent to him the fenceless condition of the town and pray him to be pleased to order a guard for us against our enemies in Rhode Island.” Philip Slade was one of the town’s diplomatists. The following year he was ap¬ pointed one of the committee “to confer with General Gates at Providence upon some measures for the safety of the town.” He was twice a representative of the town before the Provincial Congress at Concord; and a delegate, along with Jerathmel Bowers, to represent the town at Cambridge in the forming of a new state constitution.
The alarm over the danger to Somerset shores was reasonable. On May 25, 1778/ a British detachment came up the bay, landed at Fall River and burned its grist mill. Freetown Minute Men repulsed the attack with muskets and cannon, one shot decapitating a British soldier as his boat pulled away. His comrades tossed him overboard and his body, coming ashore next day on Brayton’s Point, now lies beneath the later constructed dock of the old railroad ferry connecting with Ferry street. Two British soldiers
58
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
are buried in the Slade Cemetery near the end of Bright- man’s bridge in graves marked by small undated stones. They died in the Ferry house from causes and on a date not recorded. The Slade family had them buried in its cemetery, and descendants recall the fact.
Except for a later invasion of Brayton’s Point to seize Obadiah Slade, the landing at Fall River was the nearest the British ever came in force to Somerset shores. Slade’s Ferry remained unmolested, perhaps because of the al¬ most constant guard stationed there.
By the middle of summer, 1778, the only part of the Colonies held by the British, aside from Manhattan Island and a few posts on the western frontier, was Newport and the Island of Rhode Island. Washington determined to make an effort for the Island’s recovery and assigned to the task the Revolution’s ablest general, next to Washington himself, General Nathaniel Greene of Rhode Island. With him was to cooperate count d’Estaing, lately arrived in American waters with a French fleet.
General Sullivan’s force consisted of 1500 regulars, which he proceeded to reinforce with large enlistments of volunteers from the surrounding territory, large contin¬ gents of these passing over Slade’s Ferry on the way to the island. The army that fought the subsequent battles on Rhode Island accounts for a large majority of the Bristol County quota in Revolutionary records. A Swansea unit of the forces numbering 40 was led by Captain Job Slade. There were numerous other enlistments besides these.
August 8 of 1778 came with Sullivan’s forces gathered and ready to spring, but day after day passed and d’Es- taing’s fleet did not appear. No satisfactory explanation of the delay has ever been made . Meanwhile, the British learned of the Continentals’ plans and began a campaign to sweep the surrounding waters free from American ship¬ ping.
This aggressive blockade, though the British ships did not invade the waters of Somerset, was the death blow to its shipping for the balance of the war. With it, ended the town’s greatest business, the commerce of Henry
THE REVOLUTION
59
Bowers. At the opening of the war Henry Bowers had owned or employed 110 vessels. They circled the world with their trade. Bowers Shores “was the principal depot for West India imports north of New York, and from Bowers Shore to Boston was an endless procession of heavy wagons going and returning with merchandise.”
Now all this activity was stilled and Henry Bowers was ruined. Although a Quaker by religion, this great mer¬ chant of Shawomet Lands was wholehearted in his support of the Revolution. The pay of soldiers and the support of their families in the vicinity often came from his pockets. His warehouses were always open to the needs of the cause. On more than one occasion he gave food, bankets and shoes for whole regiments of the Colonials.
In the end he paid everything he had for the success of the Cause. This early Somerset merchant in the “plain” Quaker garb was one of the heroes of the American Revolu¬ tion.
By the 8th of August General Greene despaired of the French Fleet’s help, and on the 9th ordered the attack on Butts’ Hill at the northern end of the Island, which was successful. This was the battle of the Revolution which engaged more Bristol County men than any other. No record exists of who from Swansea took part.
The next day, August 10th, d’Estaing’s fleet appeared. The fleets engaged, as Colonel Joseph Durfee of that sec¬ tion of Freetown which later became Fall River records, “in a very bloody battle with many broadsides exchanged.” But as the battle rose so did the winds of the hurricane long known as the Great August Storm ; the two fleets were separated, “and many who escaped the cannon’s mouth found a watery grave.”
The British fleet withdrew to New York and the French fleet to Boston for repairs. D’Estaing never return¬ ed. The Colonial force took Hunneman’s Hill ; but it was the most they could do. As they drew closer to Newport Pigot’s force of 6000 regulars made their strength felt, and on August 29 the American force withdrew from the Island.
60
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
It is the estimate of history, however, that although he won no consequential battle General Greene won the campaign. With the Provincials holding Tiverton and the Narrows, together with Little Compton and the Rhode Island mainland, encirclement was complete. Supplies of food were hard for the British forces to get. Tories, and Colonialstowhom British prices seemed more important than the Cause, had an increasingly hard time delivering the herds they collected and drove across country to points on the bay.
The Elizabeth Islands were ravaged for sheep and cattle, one British raid on Martha’s Vineyard island captur¬ ing 10,000 sheep and 300 oxen. On September 5, Pigot sent Capt. Charles Grey to attack New Bedford, then still called Dartmouth ; and Grey burned all shipping in the harbor, together with twenty-three stores and warehouses and twelve homes in the town. The inhabitants drove off the at¬ tackers and immediately Swansea and surrounding towns sent forces to their aid. These arrived on September 7, but were not needed.
This was the last British assault in this region. On October 29, 1779, after months of ineffectual idleness, the British withdrew to New York, completely evacuating the Island.
April of their last year’s possession of the Island, 1779, witnessed the greatest war tragedy that befell within the territory of the future Somerset. This was the capture of Obadiah Slade, Theophilus Luther, and four others whose names were nowhere recorded, and their transfer to the British ship Jersey, where they ultimately died.
Obadiah Slade lived on the Point. His labors on behalf of the Revolution had been bold and unresting. For four years he had spent his energies securing the contribution of supplies and money to the cause, encouraging enlistments, and aiding soldiers and their families. British attention had been often centered on his activities. Alarmed friends had repeatedly warned him of the danger. But he persisted.
In the middle of an unusually cold April night a de¬ tachment of British attacked his house, turned his family
THE REVOLUTION
61
out of doors without giving them time to dress, set the house afire and marched Slade off half clad. The others taken at the same time were apparently an incident of the raid. None of them ever came back from the misery of the Jersey. How long they lived to bear it is not known. A tablet in Swansea town hall commemorates them, together with Joseph Brown, captured from an American privateer.
Joseph Brown, resident in the Purchase close to its western line, was the son of William Jr., and the grandson of the John Brown who gave the land in 1719 for the church of Christ, Swansea. He was only twenty when he died in the Jersey. He would, if he had lived, have been the uncle of Marcus A. Brown who v/as the first selectman of Somerset to be elected from the south end of the town.
Directly following the ravaging of the Obadiah Slade home it was voted by the town to set up a guard on each of the necks “for the safety of the good people of the town.” This night watch patrolled all shores for several months beginning in May, was for a time relieved, and again re¬ newed later in the year. The pay of the guards was “Four dollars per night, or if they choose two dollars with rations and Continental wages.”
The valuation of rations at two dollars per night em¬ phasizes One of the sharpest problems of the Revolution. By the beginning of the next year, 1780, the town was pay¬ ing three hundred pounds, Continental money, as a bonus to all who would enlist for six months ; later in the year four hundred pounds. The bounty was next raised to seven hundred pounds, then to a thousand pounds. In dollars this sounded, like ,five thousand. But the next step upwards was higher. The bounty was made one hundred twenty silver dollars.
Whether in Continental paper or silver the financial drain on the town was severe. At one meeting there was voted, “Eleven thousand seven hundred and sixty dollars for the purchase of horses to send to Taunton by order of the General Court.” In the same year there was voted “four thousand pounds to buy blankets, according to order of the Court, and to pay necessary expenses.”
The years 1780 and 1781 saw men from the town still
62
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
being enlisted under quotas for the Continental army on all its fronts from the Hudson to Yorktown, until in all 441 men accredited to Swansea had been enlisted. The final levy on Massachusetts was for two thousand men. Swansea responded with enlistments that came within two of filling its quota, a much better average than that of many com¬ munities.
Seven years after the Revolution, when the first United States census was taken, thirty-six veterans of the Revolu¬ tion were heads of families residing in the new town of Somerset. The list of these is given here. The complete roster of Swansea enlistments, in which other Somerset names and ancestors can doubtless be traced, will be found at the end of the book.
Anthony, David Bourn, Francis Bowers, Jonathan Bowers, Capt. Philip Brayton, Israel Bray ton, John Brown, John Chace, Silas Chace, Silas Jr.
Chace, Ebenezer Chace, Allen Cummings, Noble Cummings, John Davis, James Eddy, Lieut. Obadiah Gardner, John Gibbs, Benjamin Goss, Thomas
Noble Cummings lived to be the last original resident of the town of Somerset to draw a Revolutionary pension.
Hoar, Gideon Luther, Caleb Luther, David Mason, Job Manchester, Stephen Marvel, Benjamin Marvel, Thomas Morse, William Peirce, Preserved Peirce, David Peirce, Mial Reed, Nathan Sherman, Capt. Peleg Sherman, Gideon Slade, Capt. Philip Slade, Ensign, Jonathan Wilbore, William
RECONSTRUCTION
y^LTHOUGH the preliminary treaty ending the Revolution
was signed on the last day of November, 1782, Wash¬ ington chose the following April 19, 1783, the anniversary of Concord and Lexington, to proclaim the war at an end and discharge the army.
Beside him as he did so stood a young aid, called the handsomest officer in the Continental forces, Hodijah Bay- lies of Dighton, who would soon open the first United States customs office of the district including Somerset.
It was an omen. Somerset’s route to post war recovery was to build vessels and start shipping. At the village Joseph and Gideon Robinson, who had been Benjamin Bowers’ fore¬ men, took the lead and once more there were ships on the ways at the old Bowers yard. Plane and saw, hammer and caulker’s mallet were simultaneously resounding on all the shore. The eye could hardly rest on a stretch of it without seeing a vessel under construction. In the ten years to 1793 fifteen vessels were built on Shawomet’s shores; five more in the single year of 1794. Similar figures applied to other towns of Mt. Hope waters. By 1812, there were fully 150 vessels owned and operated from this bay.
Both cargoes and markets were ready for them as fast as they came off the ways, new or repaired. In the years of the Revolution the British had destroyed or captured more than 1700 vessels, one sixth of them from Massachusetts, and forced many more to interne. The whole Atlantic coast, particularly the South, the West Indies, Bermuda, was in need of the food and commodities New England could fur¬ nish. Even Nantucket had been so short of staples as to verge on starvation, and so lacking in firewood as to suffer bitterly.
The things these regions needed in food stuffs waited on the shores of the Old Colony. With the disbanding of
63
64
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
Mrs. Jerathmel Bowers From The Portrait by Copley
RECONSTRUCTION
65
the army a big market was gone. Industries seeking to re¬ cover had to find an outlet. Raw materials for these indus¬ tries were needed; and molasses, sugar, tobacco, rum, fruits, rice, tea, coffee demanded.
Among those from the area of the soon-to-be Somerset investing in ships in the first years were John Shaw, William Wilbur, Samuel Read, Antipas Chace, Francis Boar, Jr., Preserved Pierce, Job Chace, Lloyd Bowers, William Law- ton, Henry Gibbs, Samuel Gibbs; Obadiah, Ebenezer and David Peirce; Jesse, Isaac, Collins, Isaiah and Philip Chace; Obadiah Austin, Barzillai Walker, Daniel Eddy, James Chace, Francis Brown, Henry and John Pettis, Benjamin Davis Jr., Joseph Moore, David Anthony, Stephen and Samuel Anthony; Preserved, James and Joseph Sherman.
Many names would be added to this list in the succeed¬ ing years. And much of the capital which would later trans¬ fer to Fall River’s cotton mills was earned in Somerset commerce.
Outstanding among those prospering in the new com¬ merce was Jerathmel Bowers, none of whose brothers would have him for partner and whose father had refused to aid him with home or capital. Jerathmel had prospered in spite of them. The war, says one reminiscence, had ruined every business man in the town except Jerathmel. To him it had brought prosperity. He was now the town’s “rich man.”
Tradition credits Jerathmel Bowers as being the first to realize the possibilities of shipping livestock to the West Indies. In it he prospered beyond all others, and soon his ships were reaching out to Europe and China as part of that great fleet which raised New England to commercial leadership of the world. At his death in 1794 Jerathmel Bowers would leave a fortune of $600,000, a great sum for that period.
Under the impetus of this revival of commerce Shaw- omet Lands rose safely through the new United States’ con¬ struction period. Unemployment and need there was aplenty among tradesmen, sailors long without ships to sail in, and farmers who had sacrificed homes and farms through mort-
66
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
gages made to carry them while they served the Colonies or for other reasons tried to bridge the war depression. Records of the town of Swansea in the first years after the war are replete with expenditures for the care of these.
But the town did generously and its people refused al¬ most entirely to be drawn into Shay’s rebellion of 1786 which was taken up so strongly by other communities, one neigh¬ boring town furnishing several companies of volunteers for that strange but perhaps understandable outbreak.
Soon the houses of Shawomet from Point to Cove were being repaired and painted, new homes, some of them among the finest the town has had, were being built. “The harbor was a favorite stopping place for merchant vessels, many of them coming in for repairs and supplies. Somerset be¬ came a chief distribution point in New England for foreign goods. Trees were planted, streets and townways improved ; labor was in great demand, men coming from points far and near in search of work. Prosperity presided.”
By 1789 many in this prospering sector felt that its area was so singularly identical with the boundaries of the original Shawomet Purchase that its destiny as a town separate from Swansea was self-evident. The idea was not new. Petitions for separation from Swansea had been introduced in town meeting as early as 1720 and voted down; and again with the same result in 1724. Now, in 1789, separation was attempted again. By a close vote the motion was defeated in town meeting, but the hand¬ writing was on the wall.
Jerathmel Bowers had been representative from Swan¬ sea to the General Court in 1781 and 1783. In the latter year, on written complaint of the selectmen of Rehoboth and certain Swansea citizens he had been tried by Bristol County Court of Sessions, found guilty of being a British sympathizer and ordered to resign from the Legislature. The verdict also prohibited him from holding any future office under the Commonwealth. Tradition imputes revenge as Jerathmel’s motive in working for the separation of Shawomet Lands from Swansea. Such may be the case.
RECONSTRUCTION
67
History likes a simple explanation. But there had to be at least a majority of Shawomet Lands’ sober and influential men in favor of such action to make it effective. At a dis¬ tance of a century and a half the separation looks logical. The joining of Shawomet Lands with Swansea had never be¬ come organic. No more convincing evidence of this can be found than the almost complete failure of original families in either part of the early town to transfer residence across the boundary lines of the original grants.
A difference of interest between two areas, one pre¬ dominantly agricultural the other predominantly and flourishingly commercial, lay beneath the separation which was decreed by the General Court of Massachusetts on February 20, 1790 in the following resolution :
“An act for incorporating that Part of the Town of Swanzey known by the name of Shewamet, in the County of Bristol, into a Separate Town by the Name of Somerset.
“Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representa¬ tives in General Court assembled, and by the authority of the same. That the lands hereafter described and bounded as follows, viz; Northerly partly on Dighton and partly on the ancient Swanzey line; Easterly, on Taunton Great River so-called; Southerly, on Lee’s River, so-called; Westerly, partly on Lee’s river and partly on the ancient line of Swanzey, including all the lands formerly known as Shewa¬ met Purchase, however otherwise the same may be bound¬ ed, with all the inhabitants thereof, be and hereby are in¬ corporated into a town by the name of Somerset, and the said Town is hereby invested with all the powers, privileges and immunities to which towns in this Commonwealth are or may be entitled agreeable to the Constitution and Laws of this Commonwealth.
“And be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, that the inhabitants of the said Town of Somerset shall pay all the arrears of taxes which have been assessed upon them, together with their proportion of Debts now due from the said Town of Swanzey, and so in proportion shall receive all dues and town stock whatsoever from the said Town of Swanzey, and that all persons who were born on the said
68
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
Shewamet Purchase who may hereafter become chargeable for support and have not gained a legal settlement in any town shall be the proper poor and charge of the said Town of Somerset, and that in the apportionment of all charges between said Towns, together with the poor now at the charge of Swanzey, the same shall be provided according to their proportion in the present valuation; and be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, that the in¬ habitants of the town of Somerset shall forever hereafter support and keep in repair their proportional part of a bridge known by the name of Miles’ Bridge in the propor¬ tion that the Town of Swanzey and the Town of Somerset now pay on the present valuation.
“And be it further enacted by the authority afore said, that Samuel Tobey, Esq., be and he is hereby Empowered to issue his warrant Directed to some principal inhabitant re¬ quiring him to warn and give notice to the inhabitants of the said Town of Somerset to assemble and meet at some suitable place in the said Town, to choose all such town officers as towns are required to choose at their annual town-meetings in the months of March or April annually.”
In accordance with this act Samuel Toby, who was justice of the peace, notified Preserved Peirce and other inhabitants to meet and elect town officers.
The meeting was held “at the schoolhouse near Capt. Robert Gibbs,” on December 15, 1790, and the following of¬ ficers were chosen :
Moderator, Jerathmel Bowers; Town Clerk, Jonathan Bowers; Selectmen, Assessors and Overseers of the Poor, Daniel Wilbur, David Luther, and Theophilus Shove; Treasurer, Preserved Peirce; Constables, Jonathan and Aaron Baker; Fence Viewers, Captain Job Slead and Allen Chase; Field Drivers, Philip Bowers and Daniel Chase, Jr.; Hog Reaves, Peleg and Nathan Chase; Surveyor of Timber and Plank, Thomas Marbel ; Cutter of Staves, Ezra Chase.
However deepseated and basic the causes that had played into Jerathmel Bowers’ hands the first town meet¬ ing was his day. On May 15, three months after the town’s incorporation, he had been elected its first representative
RECONSTRUCTION
69
at the General Court. Now he was elected moderator of the new town. And it was he that had named it.
Somerset, the new town’s name, had been chosen as a compliment to Jerathmel’s wife, who had been Mary Sher¬ burne and who had lived in Boston on Somerset Square. He had, it is told, wished to name the town Sherburne in her honor ; but there was already a town of that name, the town now called Nantucket on the Island of Nantucket. Hence the second choice.
A charming lady, of fine family, the inheritor of twenty thousand pounds in her own right, dispensing hospitality gracefully and liberally at the great house (the later Peter¬ son House) which Jerathmel had built on Main Street, she was the popular “first lady” of the community. There is no recorded dissent at naming the town in her honor.
The portrait of Mary Sherburne Bowers reproduced in this history is from the famous “Portrait of Mrs. Jerathmel Bowers” by Copley in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, called the most beautiful portrait in the museum. Painted probably in 1763 or 1874, the portrait was acquired by the Museum in 1915 from Mrs. Mary Isabel Jencks, widow of Mrs. Bowers’ great-great-grandson.
“She wears a white dress, the neck of which is trimmed with gold braid. Her sacque is purple, her dark hair orna¬ mented with flowers and pearls; The rose at her bosom is pink,” says a volume on the work of John Singleton Copley.
70
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
JERATHMEL BOWERS’ HOUSE WITH JOHN’S GARDEN
THE NEW TOWN
■pHE new town of Somerset in its year of incorporation had a population of 1125 divided among 188 families, count¬ ing bound and indentured servants as part of the family they served. Of this population, 1055 were white; 70 were bond servants, mostly negroes and Indians, serving in 18 dif¬ ferent families. There were no slaves.
The town had been set off in time to be recognized as a unit in the first Federal census, which began in 1790 ,and which listed and published the head of every family in the United States, together with the number of males and fe¬ males in each, the number under 16 and over, and the number of servants and slaves.
The list of families, and their size in the year of Somer¬ set’s birth, will complete this chapter. Examination shows that in this list 15 family names comprise 781 persons, or about 75 per cent of the town’s residents. The Chace family alone totaled at this time 180 individuals; Slades were next with 63. Descendants bearing the name of eleven of the original purchasers still lived here.
Comparison of the 1790 census figures shows that of each hundred living in Swansea at the date of separation Somerset had taken away 43. At a Somerset town meeting on May 7, 1791, it was decided that the new town ought to pay thirty-six pounds on each hundred of the pre-separation Swansea debt ; and the same proportion on the poor charges. In view of the figures of Somerset’s population it looks at this distance as if somebody in the new town engineered a good deal. - f 1
Early town meetings, which as a rule were held monthly throughout the year, are given over in the main to financial problems of this sort, and it was not until April 6, 1795, that a Somerset meeting got around to voting a town house “25 feet by 30 feet for the use of the Town of Somerset.”
71
72
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
This first town house was built on what was destined to remain the town lot for all future years, being located near Centre Street, north of the present Town Offices.
It would appear that this site was suggested by its near¬ ness to the tentative “center” established by the Proprietors7 schoolhouse “near Captain Gibbs’7 where the first town meeting, December 15, 1790, was convened. This, as noted, was just south of the present Pottersville School.
The next year, 1796, the town built its first schoolhouse under the town charter.
This was located on Palmer Street, near the north-west corner of the present Palmer Street Cemetery. In subsequent years the building was several times moved to points more central for the growing school population; and finally to the south end of the Village where, after many years of service, it was bought and made into a cottage by Captain David P. Davis.
By 1796, Nathaniel Lyons, a mechanic, had begun church meetings at his own home which resulted in 1803 in the organization of the second church in the area, the First Baptist Church.
A little later in its first services, but a year earlier in its organization, was the Methodist Episcopal Church, the first in South Somerset. With this group, preaching was begun in 1800 by invited ministers. The church was organized in 1802 and built in 1804, the same year as the First Baptists’ building.
These religious and educational activities were the results of the continuance of that wave of growth and pros¬ perity which had launched the new town. It was still expanding on its second commercial era, building ships, manning them, and freighting them near and far.
In 1790, there was a launching of historical significance. This was a fine ship of 270 tons ; which Jared Chace had been building when the new town received its papers. In honor of the event Jared named his sloop the Somerset.
While the Somerset was the first vessel to be launched from the town of Somerset, the honor of the first registra¬ tion from the town goes to the Hibernia, owned by John
THE NEW TOWN
73
Shaw and Francis Brown. Second was the sloop Swallow, owned by Antipas Chace, Francis Boar, Jr., Peleg Mason of Swansea, and Samuel Reed who was also her master. The Swallow was later bought and sailed by Henry Gibbs.
The schooner Harmony was registered in 1791 by Preserved Peirce; the Parthenia by John and Joseph Gardner, with Edward Mason her master, the same year; and in the next year the sloop Hannah with Lloyd Bowers and William Lawton owners, Lawton master; while Sheffel Weaver was sailing the sloop Union for Samuel Gibbs and the Peirce family.
These were all Somerset-built vessels. So also were the registrations the next year of the large schooner Ranger, Isaac Chase master; the sloop Dolphin, Abiathar Austin owner and master; the sloop Delight, Philip Gardner master; the schooner Adventure, Joseph Northam master; and the sloop Sally, Francis Brown master.
Before the war of 1812 had closed down on these shores, 48 vessels had been built in the new Somerset to sail under Somerset registry, numbers not traceable had been built and sold to other ports, and twelve built elsewhere had been bought by Somerset owners and added to the Somerset fleet. This gave Somerset by the end of 1812 sixty vessels registered from the town. The figure is no measure of those that were going and coming between Somerset and other ports.
While this commercial greatness was still climbing, Somerset in 1804 received a shock in the failure of the Bowers business. Jerathmel had died in 1796, leaving his daughters well provided for and his only son, John, the bulk of a $600,000 fortune. By extravangances so pic¬ turesque that they have become a part of the town’s tradition John had managed, spite of the efforts of David Anthony, his manager, and Billings Coggeshall, his chief accountant, to deplete both income and capital until, in a bare eight years, he brought the firm to bankruptcy.
For the moment, the failure, which was large, caused some local financial distress, the sale and transfer of several vessels and a consequent halt in the employment of many
74
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
on land and at sea. Yet on the whole the town hardly paused in the onward march which had given it the strength and ambition to withdraw from under the paternal roof of Swansea and set out for itself.
Prosperity and work to do were virtually universal. Money was being made by nearly everybody from ownership of vessels, or employment aboard them, or by participation in the trade which their cargoes represented. Some of these cargoes were made up of Somerset products such as lumber in various forms, farm produce, and an occasional load of pottery. But the overland wagons were on the road again, taking goods unloaded at local wharves northward and northwestward to inland centers and even to Boston, and returning with cargoes of New England manufactures for southern and West India ports.
Not all Somerset vessels regularly made Somerset port. An owner himself, or his master, took a vessel out in the spring with what load he could get, or in ballast, to Provi¬ dence, Boston, Philadelphia, or lesser northern ports and began the season’s business of freighting from port to port as fortune or skill directed, not coming home until as late in the fall as he dared to challenge ice and winter storms.
Or he might not come home at all but winter in some southern port doing what business he could from there. This would not average much since the majority of the New England fleet would also be wintering south. Darien, Georgia, was the favorite winter port for vessels from Mt. Hope waters since they could always find there the familiar craft and faces of their home neighborhood. For many years it was said that if during the winter you wanted news of Assonet, Freetown, Dighton or Somerset you would do best to write to Georgia for it.
The social life of Somerset in these new years reached its height for all time, if reminiscences can be believed. Recorded details are fragmentary. John Bowers may have led the pace with a vast fortune slipping through his fingers and a rich and beautiful wife from Newport. Two uncles had married into the great land-owning Tabor family of Old Dartmouth; two sisters had married well socially in
THE NEW TOWN
75
Providence and Boston and another in the Village to Francis Borland. The great house on Main Street was the scene of extravagant hospitality but Bowers’, Brayton’s, Slade’s Eddy’s, Walker’s, and the town’s other well-to-do families had extensively intermarried in this and previous generations and their homes in all sections of the towns, many of them the finest in the town’s history, were open to a notable social life.
It was at this time that John Bowers’ garden, the most elaborate that Somerset has ever possessed, was built. Chroniclers of the beautiful gardens which were charact¬ eristic of early New England consider it notable. There is no detailed description of its wonders. The plan reproduced herewith by Luther Gardner, Somerset artist, is by courtesy of the Fall River Historical Society from a drawing in its possession.
John began the garden while his father was still alive, persuading him that it was being built from profits of his own enterprises in the family business. Its extent and general outlines suggest that it must have been at least adequate in floral beauty. In the shelter of a high brick wall separating it from the house the garden was divided into three features : a formal bed crossed with marble paths adorned with statuary at their intersections; a sunken garden of double the formal garden’s area, to the west of it; and an immense glass conservatory backed against the wall. Here, says Avery Slade, the only resident to chronicle its details, “native summer fruits and asparagus were grown in winter. Tropical fruits of the finest flavor daily supplied his table; and the floral department was alleged to have surpassed the flora of the tropics.”
In extent the garden reached from Main Street along the lane serving the David Bowers house “to the duck pond.” The duck pond was filled in by the later extension of High Street which may be taken as its approximate western boundary. The wall, shown in the drawing, is said to have required more than half a million bricks to build. This number of bricks was sufficient, when the wall was later torn down, to build the entire Borland block in Fall River,
76
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
and all the brick work of Fort Adams at Newport. The marble of the walks still serves as the marble walks in front of the Colt homestead in Bristol. The iron fence in front of the Colt home is that which originally fenced the Jerathmel Bowers house.
By the beginning of 1812 the new Somerset had for a second time reached what was described as its ‘‘palmy days,” a description which would twice later, in different details, be deserved. England had not given up hope that North America could be brought to heel. The activity of the young United States on the seas was a real menace to her dominance, and she was using the cruel and exasperating practice of impressing seamen to irritate the Americans into what is properly called the Second War for Independence.
The gathering storm struck at Somerset on January 12 of 1812, when the schooner James and Eliza, built in Somerset two years before and commanded by Robert Gibbs, was taken and burned by the British frigate Aeolus. The entry in the customs house register, on affidavit of Captain Gibbs, names the British commander as the notorious James Townshend.
The capture of the James and Eliza sounded the knell of Somerset’s second fleet. Within a few days Collins Chace had laid the Hiram up at Georgetown, “on account of the enemy’s cruisers.” One by one the Somerset vessels gave up the struggle of eluding the British blockade and laid up, in the nearest port, from South Carolina to Maine. The next year the Industry, belonging to Barzillai Walker, James Chace and Daniel Bowers, was destroyed by the British at sea. A few local vessels dared the blockade, sometimes with success and resulting fortunes, but by 1815, when the frigate Loire caught the Troy-owned packet High Flyer almost off Mt. Hope and burned her, the Atlantic seaway was practi¬ cally bare.
First repercussions of the war in the town records appear on August 22, 1812, when a “meeting of the inhabi¬ tants legally warned and duly convened for the purpose of taking into consideration the alarming state of our country” unanimously voted “to choose a committee of five gentlemen
THE NEW TOWN
77
to represent the town in a county convocation to be holden at Taunton on August 25. ”
The committee appointed consisted of Israel Anthony, Thomas Danforth, Billings Coggeshall, Captain William Read and John Brayton.
The upshot of the Taunton and similar meetings was that every New England state firmly refused to let its militia join in the war. There is little memory today of the unpopularity of President Madison’s action in declaring it. Not only did it instantly cripple New England’s vast sea trade, but Parliament had already settled the impressment question by voting its discontinuance and an apology to America.
When Madison refused to recall his declaration of war, New England wrath mounted high. A convention was actually held for the purpose of deciding whether New England should secede from the Union. Cool heads prevailed and the action was not taken.
What record exists of those from Somerset who took part in this war is found in the votes of Town Meeting, following a resolution on August 27, 1814, that in the case of men drawn in the draft of that year “the Town have liberty to hire men in their room or make up their wages to $20 a month.” The draft was for twenty-five days’ duty at the “New Barracks at Fairhaven.” Somerset’s contingent in this draft was fourteen men under Captain John Hood : Elijah Slade, Wanton Chace, Lloyd Cummings, John Hood, Jr., George Bowen, John Forester, Clothen Hathaway, Otis Handy, James Thompson, George Fish, David Hunt, Jonathan Peirce, Hale Kingsley and Joseph Luther. Jonathan Buffington, great-grandson of Thomas, and a Rice of Egypt, served in the war in other contingents.
The Treaty of Ghent was signed in December 1814. Somerset courage began to revive. Out of the harbor, early the next year, there nosed a little 51-ton sloop owned by John Chase and Peleg Gardner of Swansea and Philip Bowers of Somerset. They hoped there might again be profitable commerce. They named their sloop First Attempt.
78
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
Somerset’s trials were not over. Upon the town and its gradually reviving fleet there broke in September of 1815 one of the four great hurricanes this coast has known since the Pilgrims landed. The description of the “September Gale,” as it came to be called, written by a woman who watched it from Richmond Hill, shows how like it was, in all respects, to the recent hurricane of 1938.
“Great waves were dashing over the houses that stood near the river, which seemed1 like a raging sea, while large oak trees, in a grove nearby, were snapping off like pipe- stems as the fiercer gusts of the cyclone struck them. Windows many miles inland were covered on the outside with a film from the waves borne along by the gale. The coast was strewn with wrecks and several men from this town were lost.”
The next year brought another, and before it was done more costly, misfortune. It was 1816, the “year without a summer.” Snow fell every month of the year. Ice formed on the ponds in June. July brought a real snowstorm. August found the cornfields, planted late in cold and muddy soil, black with mould and stunted beyond possible use. Any kind of crop was rare, no farm made a profit, and food was scarce. By September, cold had begun to settle down, with snow again, which was repeated in October.
With the close of December, Somerset finished the most depressing five years in its history.
School district figures for 1813, however, indicate that it had not stopped its growth. In the town records for that year the division is: North District, 93 families; Middle District, 68 families; South District, 54 families. This is a total of 215 families as against 188 in 1790; an increase of nine per cent, with the Middle, future Pottersville, Dis¬ trict gaining steadily on the Village.
THE NEW TOWN
79
HEADS OF FAMILIES IN SOMERSET THE YEAR OF ITS INCORPORATION AS A TOWN — 1790
With The Number Of Members In Each Family
|
Allen, Anna — 3 |
Chace, Paul — 8 |
|
Algur, Joshua — 6 |
Chace, Edward — 7 |
|
Anthony, Benjamin — 2 |
Chace, Silas — 4 |
|
Anthony, William — 8 |
Chace, Silas, Jr. — 8 |
|
Anthony, Stephen — 6 |
Chace, Uriah — 4 |
|
Anthony, David — 12 |
Chace, Lydia — 3 |
|
Anthony, Caleb — 6 |
Chace, Moses — 5 |
|
Anthony, John — 7 |
Chace, David — 8 |
|
Anthony, Gardner — 9 |
Chace, William — 5 |
|
Austin, Benjamin — 5 |
Chace, Peleg — 6 |
|
Baker, Jonathan — 5 |
Chace, Obadiah — 8 Chace, Robert — 3 |
|
Baker, Lydia — 1 |
Chace, Stephen — 3 |
|
Baker, Samuel — 5 |
Chace, James — 10 |
|
Baker, Aaron — 3 |
Chace, Ezra — 13 |
|
Bourn, Joshua — 5 |
Chace, Ebenezer — 3 |
|
Bourn, Elizabeth — 3 |
Chace, Philip — 10 |
|
Bourn, Francis — 10 |
Chace, Nathan — 9 |
|
Bourn, Stephen — 5 Bourn, Sarah — 5 |
Chace, Charles — 2 |
|
Chace, Allen — 8 |
|
|
Bowen, David — 4 |
Chace, Daniel, Jr. — 11 |
|
Bowen, Jonathan — 3 |
Chace, Job Jr. — 6 |
|
Bowers, Jonathan — 7 |
Chace, Daniel — 1 |
|
Bowers, Phlip — 8 |
Chace, Abel — 7 |
|
Bowers, Jerethmuel — 7 |
Clark, Silas — 4 |
|
Bowers, David — 3 |
Cornell, Lillis — 1 |
|
Bowers, David, Jr — 9 |
Cummings, Noble — 6 |
|
Bowers, Lloyd — 8 |
Cummings, John — 12 |
|
Bowers, William — 5 Bowers, Mary — 2 |
Dana, Orlando — 4 |
|
Borland, Francis — 6 |
Davis, James — 7 |
|
Bragg*, Henry — 3 |
Davis, Silas — 5 |
|
Brayton, Israel — 6 |
Davis, Arthur — 4 |
|
Brayton, John — 8 |
Davis, Benjamin Jr. — 4 |
|
Brown, James — 6 |
Davis, Benjamin — 5 |
|
Brown, Mary — 1 |
Dennis, Arthur — 7 |
|
Brown, John — 10 Buffington, Benjamin — 9 |
Earl, Benjamin — 5 |
|
Buffing*ton, Benjamin 2nd — 5 |
Eddy, Obadiah — 8 |
|
Buffington, Jonathan — 7 |
Evans, Jacob — 9 |
|
Buffington, James — 5 Buffington, Moses — 7 |
Forrester, Rebecca — 3 |
|
Bush, William — 9 |
Fortner, Samuel — 9 |
|
Bush, Benjamin — 2 Butter worth, Phebe — 7 |
Gardner, John — 6 |
|
Chace, Asa — 8 |
Gibbs, Benjamin — 4 Gibbs, Robert — 4 |
|
Chace, Francis — 3 |
Gibbs, Robert 2nd — 6 |
|
Chace, Ichabod — 9 |
Gibbs, Mary — 6 |
|
Chace, Jonathan — 8 |
Gibbs, Henry — 3 |
80
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
Goss, Thomas — 5 Gray, Mercy — 7 Gray, Joseph — 4
Hill, Ruth— 2 Hoar, Gideon — 7 Holland, Richard — 3
Ingraham, John Bennett — 2
Keen, Robert — 4 Keen, Robert Jr — 5
Layton, William — 4 Lee, John — 3 Lincoln, Thomas — 7 Luther, Caleb — 6 Luther, Bathsheba — 5 Luther, David — 9 Luther, Barton — 4
Manchester, Stephen — 7 Marvel, Benjamin' — 7 Marvel, Thomas Jr. — 3 Marvel, Thomas — 9 Marvel, Ebenezer — 4 Mason, Job — 4 Morse, William — 6 Morton, Elijah — 5
Northrum, Joseph — 6
Palmer, Elkanah — 7 Peirce, Jonathan — 5 Peirce, Jonathan Jr — 6 Peirce, Preserved — 8 Peirce, James — 3 Peirce, David — 9 Peirce, Miel — 3 Peirce, Asa — 5 Pettis, Sibel — 6 Purrington, Clerk — 8 Purrington, Clerk Jr — 10 Purrington, Edward — 6 Reed, Samuel — 7 Reed, Elizabeth — 3 Reed, David — 5 Reed, John — 5
Reed, Nathan — 4 Reed, Benjamin — 5 Reed, Durfee — 2
Shaw, John — 8 Shaw, Eliphalet — 3 Sheldon, John — 4 Sherdon, John — 8 Sherman, Peleg — 8 Sherman, Benjamin — 6 Sherman, Gideon — 8 Sherman, Caleb — 8 Shove, Nathaniel — 5 Shove, Theophilus — 8 Simmonds, Brown — 9 Simmonds, Abiel — 2 Simmonds, Zephaniah — 10 Sisson, Isaac — 7 Slade, Baker — 6 Slade, Philip — 9 Slade, Job — 13 Slade, Charles — 11 Slade, Jonathan — 12 Slade, Samuel — 3 Slade, Mercy — 3 Slade, Elizabeth — 10 Stutson, Luther — 6 Swazey, Joseph — 2 Swazey, Joseph Jr. — 6 Swazey, Samuel — 4 Swazey, Jerethmuel — 8
Tubbs, Samuel — 5
Vincent, Solomon — 4 Vinicum, Susannah — 3
Walker, Margaret — 3 Weaver, Waistill — 3 Weaver, Thomas — 6 Winslow, Ebenezer — 16 Wilbore, Joshua — 7 Wilbore, Elisha — 9 Wilbore, Daniel — 13 Wilbore, William — 12 Wilbore, Thomas — 1 Wilbore, Peleg — 4 Wilbore, Mary — 5
THE DAYS OF SAIL
Y^ITH the war at an end, Somerset turned again to ships and shipping. Oliver Chace had started a cotton mill in Dighton in 1810; Tiverton’s Globe mill was in opera¬ tion in 1811; the Union, the Troy, and the Fall River Manufactory had started in operation in 1813, the latter under the management of David Anthony, son of the John Bowers business receiver. Somerset men, Eber Slade, William Slade, 3rd., William Reed and Anthony had joined in financing these. The machine age was not far off.
But Somerset’s faith was still in commerce and its faith would be justified to the extent that the next forty years would see greater and richer fleets sail from Somerset harbor, and mightier ships built, than in either of its two previous eras of sail, notable as they were.
By midyear of 1815 the two pre-war shipyards had re¬ sumed : Robinson Brothers at Bowers Shore, with the able Jonathan Cartwright again their master builder; and Nathan Davis 2nd. and Joseph Simmons at the site of the later Hood shipyard. Before the end of the following year there were eight shipyards in operation on the borders of the Taunton river, from Dighton down, besides numerous vessels building as individual enterprise all along both shores.
The war had left its mark on the town. Captain Barzillai Walker, who in the preceding decade had at one time owned and operated six vessels, had been ruined by it and had given up the great Jerathmel Bowers house which he had bought from the receivers in 1804. Many vessel owners had suffered complete or serious losses. Some of Somerset’s best vessels had been burned or captured by the British; a score or more of them sold at the ports, north and south,
where the war had caught them. Sharers in their profits as
81
82
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
The Captain Andrews House
“1723”
THE DAYS OF SAIL
83
well as those who depended on them for employment had felt the pinch.
Many vessels however, had been merely interned and the Somerset fleet was soon reassembling. The first work of the yards was the reconditioning of these; and also of the numerous craft from other regions which the war had laid up here. Most of these had had some young mate or owner's representative in charge during the internment; and it is recorded that as the refitted vessels sailed away in 1815 and ’16, so did many a Somerset bride.
Egypt Shore now emerged as a shipping village in its own right. At Egypt in this period lived Samuel Bourne, master carpenter in the construction of the Defiance and the Betsy; Henry Gibbs, shipowner, master and the builder of the Maria; Jonathan Cartwright, one of Somerset’s ship¬ building geniuses; his son John, master carpenter of the James and Eliza and the Lydia and Margaret; John Brown, master carpenter of the Mary ; and a full dozen other owners, builders and masters.
The name “Egypt” was now generally applied to the shore beginning with the store of Joseph Brown, south of the foot of Buffington Street, and extending to the foot of Center Street where the residence of Jonathan Cartwright was regarded as marking its northern limit.
In the year 1801, Joseph Brown, already located here for some time, began with the small sloop Harriet to trans¬ port loads of hoop poles from Somerset to Albany, bringing back loads of New York State grain, and such butter, cheese and other saleable commodities as he might trade for en route. Residents of other parts of the town, and of Steep Brook, Assonet and other up-river neighborhoods, used to “go down to Joseph’s” to buy grain. The parallel between this and the Bible story of the brothers of Joseph who went down to buy grain of him in Egypt was appreciated, and the name became fixed on the neighborhood.
The Brown store grew to be the outstanding grain depot of the region. It was located on the shore at the foot of Buffinton Street, between the two docks still there in good
84
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
condition, on the approximate later site of the Wilbur dance hall. All but a few feet of the building was on solid ground. The southerly of the two docks was later used by Joseph’s son David for a lumber dock and shed. On the north dock Seth Brown built and operated a grocery.
David succeeded his father, Joseph, in the operation of the business which during the lives of the two assumed large proportions, with half a dozen vessels, owned and sailed by them, serving it. The later well known Fall River schooner Daniel Brown was not one of their vessels, but was built and sailed by the Fall River Captain, Robert Reynard, who married Daniel’s daughter.
Joseph’s grandson William was Somerset’s first noted captain of steam, sailing the propeller Eudora, and the first steamers of the Bay State Line.
No trace of the thriving merchandizing plant which succeeding generations knew for many years remains, except the two neat docks. Half of the grain store is, how¬ ever, still in use as a carriage shed on the George P. Slade place on Prospect Street and the other half is used as a farm house on the Buff inton estate at the corner of Prospect and Buff inton Streets, after some years of use as a grocery store by Robert Buffinton.
The present Hindle house, at No. 2430 Riverside Avenue, is one of the original Brown residences. The little white house, No. 2457 Riverside Avenue, next north of the fire house, is considered by some to be the oldest house in Egypt. It was built by John Bourne of the Bourne family which was one of the original Shawomet Purchasers. The original Joseph Buffinton house, from which the street and the Egypt Buffinton Corner take their name, is at the corner of Buffinton and Prospect Streets, the ancient one- story house being raised to two and now occupied by Mrs. Thomas Buffinton.
At the middle of Egypt, between the Browns and Jonathan Cartwright, was the Weaver farm, extending from shore to Prospect Street. Here was the home of Sheffel Weaver, owner and master of several trading vessels and part owner
THE DAYS OF SAIL
85
in many. The Weaver property, including the homestead of James Luther, was purchased in 1843 by Obadiah Gardner whose bakery and home in Fall River had been destroyed by the Great Fire. The present Gardner Avenue is the approximate center line of the Weaver land.
Just south of Egypt the clustered little village of this period ceased abruptly with the great farm of David Luther beginning at the river and running westerly up the hillside to the Swansea town line. Some few lots had been sold from this farm, but in the main it formed a solid belt, comprising several lots c-f the original Purchase, with a southerly line south of the later Johnson Street.
South of the Luther farm lay the Read’s Woods Farm of Captain Preserved Read, founder of Read’s Corner, comprising the present Montaup property and extending to the main highway, now County Street. West of County Street, and north to the Luther farm which here included the present high school site, descendants of the original Purchasers still held the Bourne and Sherman lots. On the Buffinton brook Caleb Butterworth operated a tannery.
The Friends Meeting, at a focal point in this expanding area, was growing in members and jurisdiction. With no Friends’ Meetinghouse as yet in Fall River, the Quaker people from across the river attended here, coming by ferry or private boat. To lessen their problem of attending, Eber Slade, in 1821, built a commodious sailboat for the special purpose of furnishing free and dependable travel between the church and Troy shores. This landed at Read’s Cove.
On the northern border of Egypt, 1815 saw the dawn of the Pottersville era in the beginning of the pottery plant of Clark Chace. This would expand in 1847 in the formation of the Somerset Pottery by his sons Leonard and Ben¬ jamin.
Thus the future Somerset Centre was growing steadily, while in 1825, the southern section experienced a substantial impulse of progress in the establishment of regular stage coach service between Providence and New Bedford. Slade’s Ferry was part of this service. Providence coaches unloaded
86
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
on the Somerset side, New Bedford on the Fall River side, with passengers transferring by water while the stages returned to their starting point. A similar connection with the Newport stage had been in effect since 1808. The business from two stage lines now necessitated the replace¬ ment of the sail ferryboats by larger, more commodious boats propelled by horse power. The first horse-power boat was immediately ordered built and was put in service the next year, 1826.
Systematic travel facilities was the order of the day. In 1820, Joseph Marble built and put into service the 127- ton packet brig New Packet, the beginning of the local packet fleet.
Up to this time water journeys, necessary as they were, were impromptu. Captains with a boat sailing to New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, or beyond, spread by word of mouth, or by placard, the day and hour of intended sailing and the number of passengers that could be accomodated. Some owners made a business of catering to such trade with attractive cabins and fine table. Out of this grew the regular passenger packets, sailing on schedule and built more and more for speed and passenger convenience.
Somerset’s packet fleet in the next few years, besides the New Packet, consisted of the Charleston, also owned by Joseph Marble; Nathan Slade’s Reindeer, William Law¬ ton’s Industry, Benjamin Davis’s Sally, Benjamin Cart¬ wright’s Fall River, and the Somerset-built High Flyer, besides several Fall River boats. These ran on more or less regular schedule to Providence, Warren, Bristol, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Savannah, with William Law¬ ton’s Industry running as far as Havana.
The fare from Fall River to New York varied from $2 to $5 according to accomodations and whether times were hard or not. The hour of Fall River departure was eight in the morning and the run each way, weather favoring, was twenty-four hours, the packet spending one night in New York with passengers sleeping on board without additional charge.
THE DAYS OF SAIL
87
In September of 1828, Mt. Hope Bay’s first regular steamboat, the Hancock, began sailing past Brayton Point on alternate daily trips between Fall River and Newport. The next year the steamboat Experiment ran for a while daily past Somerset shores between Newport and Taunton, with Somerset passengers required to go over to Fall River to board her. The days of steamboat travel were nearing their end.
But packet owners refused to believe that steam could put them out of business. For some years they comfortably out-sailed the crude and cumbrous early steamers. Then the race grew closer. Trimmer boats were built and more sail was piled on ; but still the steamboats gained. The packets dropped their fares until passengers were paying twenty-five cents for the trip, with fine meals and plentiful wine included. The battle waged for twenty years before the packets met their final defeat, on the longer runs. The canny Somerset owners had long before that dropped ou-; of the contest and turned exclusively to freighting except for occasional cabin passengers who preferred the sail.
Meanwhile, from Point to Broad Cove Somerset’s great fleet grew. In the twenty years following the War of 1812 owners in the town registered 72 vessels of over 20 tons burden, refitted, new-built or purchased. In the next twenty years the total would rise to 124. Many of these were, as before, in the coastal trade of picking up and discharging cargoes wherever they could get a charter. But many others made this port regularly with fruits, molasses, sugar, dye- wood, tropical lumber, rice, cotton, coal, tobacco, turpentine, and every other West Indian and Southern product, coming north; New England manufactures going south. The wagons were on the road again ; a constant caravan, trans¬ porting to the railroads which came year by year rearer, or with heavy non-perishables going all the way to the final destination.
Whalers and fishing boats were added to the activity of the crowded Village harbor.
88
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
Two vessels appear to be the total of Somerset’s whaling ventures. The first of these was the bark Pilgrim, built by Davis and Simmons, owned by George B. Hood and cap¬ tained, in 1841, by Job Collins. Among the crew were James D. Marble, Henry P. Marble, George Davis, Edward Miller, Charles Luther, Albion K. Slade and Moses Chace.
On a second voyage, in 1843, the Pilgrim sailed in com¬ mand of Henry B. Clark. This voyage ended after a storm three days out had stripped the vessel and forced it to return for refitting. Captain Clark took the Pilgrim on several later, more successful, trips. She was then laid up for several years on the Somerset shore, until the gold rush made her seem profitable for New Bedford parties to refit her and sail her around the Horn. In California, however, she was con¬ demned and this Somerset Pilgrim’s bones now lie at the bottom of the Pacific.
While the Pilgrim was still in commission, the bark Jane was fitted out for whaling at Somerset and sailed, beginning in 1841, on several trips under Captain Abraham Manchester of Fall River. Her voyages were generally unsuccessful and she, too, was sold to New Bedford where her bad luck continued and she was decommissioned.
George B. Hood was also one of the principals in the herring fisheries at Broad Cove which at this time paid enormous dividends. Here, from the first of April until June, the seines were set at every high tide and hauled at every low tide, day and night. Captain Samuel P. Marble was Hood’s manager in this business. At the head of Broad Cove there was at this time another herring fishery owned by Oliver Simmons of Somerset, although the plant was in Dighton. The herring business continued exceedingly profit¬ able until the railroad bridge cut down the runs.
Broad Cove was added to Somerset’s shipbuilding area in the years beginning 1821 when Edward Slade established there a shipyard at which he built a total of three recorded ships. One of these was the Raven, not to be confused with the smart little clipper which later slid from the ways at Hood’s shipyard to capture some of the highest honors of the clipper age.
THE DAYS OF SAIL
89
Ashore, the town had progress befitting its energy and prosperity. The Somerset school system took shape with good schools in all the districts, growing educational standards, and systematic administration, as evidenced by the beginning, in 1835, of permanent school committee records which are still in the possession of the present superintendent.
In 1841, one Byron Morse, beginning with services in the sail loft on Burgess Wharf, organized a Methodist Epis¬ copal church, now merged in the Federated church, which began in 1842 to build the second church structure in the Village. In the same year, the First Christian Church, now the Christian Congregational Church on County Street in Pottersville, was formed.
Two railroads had come near enough to serve the town to some extent : in 1835, the line from Providence to Boston by way of Attleboro and Mansfield ; and in 1836, a road connect¬ ing this line with Taunton at Mansfield. In 1840, a line was opened between Taunton and New Bedford. And in 1845 trains from Fall River connected with this Taunton-New Bedford line at Myricks. A line from Providence to Fall River had been chartered, but it was 1866 before the first of its trains ran through Somerset territory.
With the opening of the Fall River-Myricks railroad a ferry began to operate at the Village, from a slip just north of the Tryworks wharf, to a slip, still to be seen, on the shore just south of the embankment at the Fall River end of the Somerset railroad bridge. This ferry, operated by Thomas Evans, made regular connection with trains until 1866 when the Fall River-Taunton “new road” began to cross Somerset bridge.
During this period the Chace family operated a ferry from the foot of Cusick’s Lane (sometimes called Chace’s Lane) to the opposite shore, using sail-boats. The landing was made at each side by running the boat up on the shore.
The depression of 1837 did not much affect the town except as it caused worry for its investors in the booming cotton industry of Fall River, which now had five large and several subsidiary mills and had passed the 5000 point in
90
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
population. All the mills weathered the stress, however, and Somerset proceeded on its prosperous way towards the year 1847 which was to bring a coincidence of climaxes in its history.
In this year, the town’s first business incorporation took place, launching the Somerset Pottery Company and the pottery era; Slade’s Ferry turned to steam for its motive power; the Mexican War broke, with the California rush in its wake ; and James M. Hood got ready to build clipper ships. One hundred and fifty years had been preparing Somerset enterprise, character and skill for the period that opened that year. No town ever had a more glowing era than the decade that followed.
CLIPPER SHIPS
•yHE outbreak of the Mexican War found 124 Somerset vessels of over 20 tons registered in coastal trade and 14 in foreign trade. During the next ten years 24 more vessels, including some of the greatest that ever sailed the seas, were built in Somerset, besides four revenue cutters of schooner rig for the United States government, and four lightships.
This grand total of 171 vessels of every type and size was for the most part sailed by Somerset masters, including some of the great clippers built in the Hood yard in the years 1848 to 1854.
The complete list of vessels registered from this port, in each of the several periods with the masters that sailed them both in domestic and foreign trade, together with their owners where recorded, is given at the end of this history.
It needs only a study of these lists to perceive that Somerset, in vessels and men, was one of the great New England ports, surpassed perhaps only by Boston, Salem and Providence, and possibly by New Haven. Certainly Somerset belongs with the foremost among the ports of the great tradition.
This third great era of sail in Somerset’s history was the climax of a century and a half of shipbuilders and ship¬ masters. In the foreign trade, Captains William and Enoch T. Bowers were following Bowers captains, Jonathan, David, Philip, Lloyd, Perry, and others of the name who had sailed large ships out of this port from before the town’s beginning. At the beginning and the end of this period, a Robert Gibbs and a Benjamin Gibbs were masters as their family had been for five generations, though their schooners were now three and four times the size of those in which they took Somerset farm and forest products to market in the early 1700’s.
A Brown, Captain James N., was sailing large schoon-
91
92
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
ers in the foreign trade now. So were John Peirce and David Pierce, 2nd. Collins and Stephen Chase, Joseph Gray, Jerathmel Swazey, Joseph Blethens (Bliffins) and David Cummings had brigs; William B. Pettis a schooner; regis¬ tered in round-the world commerce. All of them were of families which had built and sailed Somerset coastal carriers since before the Revolution.
Philip Enoch Bowers, Daniel Brayton Eddy, John H. Luther, Baylies Davis were names known to the whole ship¬ ping world. New names were appearing: John A. Cotton, David B. Hood, Surbinas Marble, Henry Eddy, Joshua Elwell, H. B. Major, Elisha Burgess; and the famed John A. Burgess, master of the Virginia now, but soon to captain the great Somerset-built clipper, Governor Morton.
On decks laid down in Somerset, in the closing decades of this period would come, along with Somerset’s own Burgess, the glamorous names of Hy Wakeman, Charles Cheever, William Henry, J. Madison Hill, James Reed, Francis and David Bursley, Whittlesey, James Johnston, Stetson and Martin Thompson.
At the opening of the Mexican War, Captain Baylies Davis, who though just turned twenty-one was a full-fledged master; Captain Philip E. Bowers, Captain Daniel Brayton Eddy and Captain James M. Hood, chartered their vessels for the carrying of supplies to Mexico for the United States government. Captain Bowers, “as fine a man as ever stepped on a deck,” was sailing his own brig Excelsior. Cap¬ tain Daniel Brayton Eddy, father of Daniel Bowers Eddy, was sailing his beautiful two-masted schooner Louisiana. And Captain James M. Hood the Eddy brig Virginia.
Captain Davis’ run was to Corpus Christi with supplies for the army base there. He came through the war without recorded mishap and lived to operate a charter for the government again during the Civil War and finally to become captain of the Fall River Line steamer Puritan, retiring in 1897 and dying in 1900. Captain Eddy ran to various points on the Louisiana, Texas and Mexican coasts ; and it fell to his lot to be the man to bring back to this
CLIPPER SHIPS
93
country the news of the army’s victory at Palo Alto. Driving the Louisiana across the Gulf he docked at New Orleans, and without stopping to change his tropical clothes mounted a horse and rode through a driving storm to bring to the army post at Baton Rouge the vital despatches he carried. Captain Eddy also sailed for the government again in the Civil War, with the schooner Jessie A. Woodhouse. He was the master who took the great ship William Nelson on her first trip out of Somerset for delivery to her New York owners.
After several voyages to Vera Cruz in the Virginia, Captain James M. Hood was wrecked on the Mexican coast and was forced to land his boats in the enemy country, 200 miles from General Scott’s army. In the landing, George Luther of Somerset, a nephew, was drowned in the surf. With nothing but their language to identify them, Hood and his men convinced the Mexican authorities that they were from an English vessel and they were released and given trans¬ portation to New Orleans from which they made their way to Somerset.
The revelation which Hood had received of the demand for vessels for the Mexican and California trade, and the rise of the American clipper ship era on all the oceans, determined him to go into shipbuilding. For the location of his yard he chose the site previously occupied by Nathan Davis, Sr., and Joseph Simmons, north of the early Bowers Shore yard. The Hood yard is, therefore, the wide and extensive flat area made by building up the shore and cutting deep into the hill just south of the old nail mill, and later used by the “upper mill” for its rolling mill.
Here, in the spring of 1849, James M. Hood launched his first vessel, the schooner Empire State, of 100 tons, built for Captain Surbinas P. Marble. While the Empire State was making ready to launch the Somerset, a brig of 180 tons, was laid down. This was the first of the boats designed by Stephen L. Dickinson, who was also its master carpenter or superintendent of construction. Dickinson remained with the Hood yard from then on to its close. The Somerset was
94
HISTORY OF SOMERSET
rigged in the stocks and launched ready to sail. She drew only four and a half feet, being intended for the shoal waters of southern cotton ports.
The place of the Somerset in the yard was taken by the ship Milford, 424 tons, built for Southport owners and cap¬ tained during her career by the famous Hy Wakeman. She appears to have made no outstanding record among the clippers, being, like the Somerset, of shallow draft for the southern cotton trade. But she added to the reputation of the Hood yard. Captain Hood himself sailed the Milford to New York, taking Captain Edward B. Chace as pilot.
The schooner Fountain, 110 tons, for Captain Henry Eddy, was next launched from the Empire State’s space and a large ship of 600 tons, intended for New York purchasers, was laid down. In the fall of the year 1850, fire broke out in the hold of this vessel on the stocks. There was no fire engine in Somerset at that time. The flames spread from the ship to the mold loft. Patterns, models, and a great quantity of material were destroyed. The fire then spread to the Old Tavern house and the residence of Baylies Davis, Sr., father of the captain, destroying both. It was finally checked by blowing up a house in its path.
The yard and its buildings were restored and a new ship, the Rosario, 528 tons, was built for Amos and Mulford Howes of New York. The owners assigned the Rosario to Captain Caleb Sprague, who is later found sailing the clipper Gravina, and finally the Neptune’s Car which made the New Yerk-San Francisco trip in 115 days. While not one of the record making ships the Rosario and her first master belonged to the clipper class, which deserves definition.
“Clean, long, smooth as a smelt,” is the classic defini¬ tion. “Sharp, arching head. Thin hollow bow ; convex sides ; light, round and graceful stern. A genuine East Indiaman or Californian. Aloft, large built, iron-banded lower masts; taut tapering smaller masts, long-proportioned spars from lower to skysails yards. Above board she towers up with strong, fibrous arms spreading a cloud of canvas to the gale.”
CLIPPER SHIPS
95
But it took a clipper captain to make a ship a clipper ship. “It took a hundred years to build the clippers. It took a generation of undiluted hell to develop the men to sail them. Out of the storm and stress and terrible drive came the fine gold of the sea — quiet-spoken, self-possessed men, under whose unruffled surface played panther sinews and whip¬ cord muscles, and in whose hearts the thought of fear never wakened — men who, by sheer vital force, could cow a score of the most desperate characters that ever wasted good salt horse. Such were the men who sailed the clipper ships.”
After the Rosario the Hood yard built the 229-ton bark Fanny Major for Captain H. B. Major. This was followed by the ship William Nelson, 1000 tons, the largest vessel up to that time laid down in Somerset. She was built for the New York and Liverpool trade under the supervision of the famous Charles Cheever who was to sail her.
Then came the Raven. Nearly finished when the Rip Van Winkle was launched in 1851, the Raven was of 712 tons, 158 feet in length and 32.8 feet beam, drawing 17 feet; and one of the smartest ships that ever sailed. In her first year, Captain William H. Henry sailed her from Boston on August 5 and arrived in San Francisco in 106 days. It does not appear that the Flying Cloud while in the San Francisco trade ever beat this but once. After reaching San Francisco on various trips from New York in 113 days, 106 days, and 112 days, the Flying Cloud made its high record of 89 days and eight hours. Captain J. E. Williams in the Andrew Jackson, made the trip in 89 days, four hours. And in 1854, according to the same authority, the Raven under Captain Henry Hanson cleared New York on February 23, stopped at