CHAPTER XI.

THE COMMUNITY: NEARBY, AND BEYOND

In the 1790’s the total population of the town of Plymouth had grown to 3500 people. By today’s standards this seems to be slow growth, averaging an increase of about 200 people per year since 1620. After the first growth of the early decades Plymouth settled into a slow growth rate until recent times, partly because economic growth and settlements flourished elsewhere. Much of the area then could be called a basically rural countryside.

There was a small village for the South Ponds area near the present small chapel, located at the beginning of the road into the South Pond Cemetery. The early Burgess and other settlers are buried there.[17]

It may be assumed from perusal of deeds and a general acquaintance of the area that it had acreage with enough meadow, upland and woodland to provide a basis for a livelihood of varying quality from the land.

There was a school established in South Pond village in 1796. In this year the town voted $850.00 to maintain all the schools of the town, mostly primary and grammar schools for young males. Earlier, in 1793, the town voted to establish female schooling, based on six months per year, with one teacher and one session being held for them one hour in the forenoon and one hour in the afternoon at the close of the regular daily sessions. Discrimination against girls, obviously, but at least a start was made.

The South Pond schoolhouse is now converted into a dwelling house beside the chapel. Nearby is another schoolhouse also converted into a dwelling house. The S. Bourne map of Plymouth in 1830 shows a school location on the road near the junction of the watercourse and the stream from Finney’s meadow which later becomes Eel River.

The homesteads in the area toward the end of the eighteenth century included those of Samuel Wright-John Burgess and that of Belcher Manter, as well as Jonathan Holmes. South of the chapel were other Burgess dwellings and that of Nathaniel Thomas. These locations are near the third share of the sixth great lot and near the fourth share at Gunner’s Exchange Pond. One of the Nathaniel Thomases served in the Revolution. The Joshua Wright homestead was in the vicinity.

The road northeast to Plymouth center was approximately five miles long for the horse-drawn team or carriage. The Burgess Road followed along not far from the eastern shore of South Pond. The roads were selected for as much lack of grade as possible to avoid hills for horses and teams. The Baptist Road continued south to College Pond and then west to Carver. Settled land in this area was not common. There were some farms near Bloody and Half-Way Ponds. Long Pond Road went through South Pond village, later crossing Mast Road at the Four Corners. It went eventually southward beyond Herring Pond to Sandwich.

Belcher Manter had a homestead built probably during the last quarter of the eighteenth century one mile north of the Burgess homestead near the shore of South Pond. Near his house a stream called Watercourse began at the Pond and flowed downhill east through his property and eventually joining a stream from Finney’s Meadow to Russell Mill Pond and Eel River to the ocean.

The cut fieldstone sides of this stream can still be seen near the site of the house. There was a grist mill on this stream, as mentioned in old deeds. The Watercourse has now largely dried up except in periods of very high water in South Pond, since the 1850’s a source of Plymouth’s water supply.

In his history Wm. Davis states that this outlet for South Pond was not alluded to in the early records, thus confirming the tradition that it was an artificial brook dug under the direction of Elder Thomas Faunce in 1701. Elder Faunce was the son of John, who came on the _Ann_, 1623, and was born in 1647. From 1685 to 1723, Thomas Faunce, the worthy elder of the church, held the office of town clerk and kept the town records.

In the 1780’s there was a town effort made to get alewives to come from the ocean up into the Watercourse and into South Pond for spawning. Some sections of the stream were dug and deepened, but I could find no evidence that the project ultimately succeeded.[18]

The first Belcher Manter, 1736-1825, came from neighboring Wareham to the south. By his second marriage to Rebecca Palmer he had a son, the second Belcher, 1776-1857. This second Belcher married Sarah Wright in 1799, probably the daughter of Joshua Wright who had a homestead in the vicinity.

Their family is close to the John and Phineas Burgess families, since Phineas was one of the administrators of the second Belcher’s estate. The daughter of Phineas Burgess, Ruth Anna, married Benjamin B. Manter. She was the girl who planted the maple tree now thriving in front of the barn here and lived for 105 years, until 1956.

The Belcher Manter house also provided the north ell on the front of the Burgess dwelling. This ell had been moved here and attached at an early date. Its foundation stones at its original site match the dimensions of the ell here. This account was given me by Susan Burgess.

The event we consider so important, the American Revolution, has little concerning it recorded about the South Pond community except for some names of members of families we are familiar with and their relation to it. Henry Richmond was the owner of the homestead during that time until 1783 when the crisis had passed. Perhaps the proximity of the events that aroused the Boston area were, in the geography of the time, a little remote for close involvement by the rural area of Plymouth.

There are the names of a few men associated with the South Pond community who served in the war of the American Revolution recorded in the Veterans Administration files in the Plymouth Town Office Building.

Nathaniel Carver, who bought a piece of land on the west shore of the pond from Samuel Wright enlisted on June 6, 1776 and served until August 26, 1779. He served in both the army and navy and was on the sloop _Reprisal_ as well as in the Plymouth Fifth Company Regiment.

John Churchill, 1745-1779, was lost at sea. He enlisted on May 28, 1776.

Col. Theophilus Cotton, 1716-1782, was a colonel of the First Plymouth Company. He enlisted on June 5, 1775, and was discharged March 31, 1781. Joshua Cotton, son of the third John, 1753-1829, enlisted in the colonel’s regiment and served for three and one half months.

Nathaniel Thomas, 1756-1838, of a family with a homestead in this region was a member of Captain Peleg Wadsworth’s company.

Wadsworth, Harvard class of 1769, the year Henry Richmond built the homestead, was a teacher in a private school in Plymouth in 1769, served in the Revolution and was captured by the British during the period. He is the grandfather of the poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Mr. Lewis Wadsworth, Jr., a Boot Pond resident, is in the same Wadsworth family.

The surrounding community also had a wider community beyond, economic and other forces of which had an impact on the lives of the people of the South Pond region.

To increase our understanding of some of the influences of the people in this chronicle I have found a reading of Wm. T. Davis’s _Plymouth Memories of an Octogenarian_ to be a source of illumination. His dates are 1822-1907. Accurate and charmingly written by an aware mind it has many delightful and human passages as well. I am indebted to his granddaughter, Ruth Gardner Steinway, for lending me her copy. I have chosen various subjects that he had taken up, showing influences on the Plymouth community during most of the nineteenth century. We can follow such matters as fishing, shipping, transportation, stage coaches, postal service, railroads, and finally the anti-slavery movement. A way of life was followed then very different from our present technological society.

We may look back upon whaling with some romantic nostalgia. Plymouth did have some whale fishery in the first half of the century, providing employment and adventure for some of the townspeople.[19] Whales were in Massachusetts Bay, but no serious efforts were made to engage in their capture. In 1821, however, a company was formed to prosecute this fishery. In this year the ship _Mayflower_ of 345 59-95 tons sailed for the Pacific, was absent for three years and landed between two and three thousand barrels of oil. She made two more Pacific voyages, landing about five thousand barrels.

In 1822 another company was formed, built the bark _Fortune_ of 278 47-95 tons. She returned from the Pacific in 1825 with two thousand barrels. She made five voyages through 1840, the year of her last voyage.

Other ships sailing in the whale fishery were the _Arabella_, of 404 26-95 tons, 1830; the _Levant_ of 332 34-95 tons, 1831; the _Triton_ of 314 49-95 tons, 1833, and the bark _Mary and Martha_ of 316 56-95 tons, 1838. All these sailed the Pacific.

In 1833 the brig _Yeoman_, afterwards changed to a bark, was built in Plymouth. It made several voyages to the South Atlantic. The schooner _Marcaibo_, 93 53-95 tons, built in Plymouth, engaged in Atlantic fishery and was lost off Bermuda in 1846. The schooner _Exchange_ of 99 91-95 tons, made four voyages and was wrecked in West Indian waters. Two other vessels engaged in whale fishery were the schooner _Mercury_ of 74 34-95 tons and the schooner _Vesper_ of 95 53-95 tons.

“In 1803 the foreign trade of Plymouth was at the height of its prosperity. In that year it was carried on by seventeen ships, sixteen brigs and forty schooners, and the duties paid into the Plymouth Custom House amounted to nearly one hundred thousand dollars.”[20]

The embargo act of 1807 and the war of 1812 brought this activity to a permanent decline.

Of the captains commanding such vessels, Davis mentions some with the name of Burgess: Chandler, John, Lewis, William W. and Winslow.

Cod fishery was active and successful.[21] From 1765 to 1775 an average of 65 vessels per year were employed. In 1802 there were 37 vessels engaged, employing 265 men, landing 26,175 quintals (hundred weight) of codfish. All but six of these vessels made two trips yearly. Among the skippers he lists there is Nathaniel Clark, possibly a one time owner of the homestead. He was of the _Benjamin Church_ of 70 tons which produced 350 quintals of codfish.

All those of us who love to eat lobster and regret their present and future scarcity and high cost will enjoy this account telling of Sam and Joseph Burgess:[22]

“In the angle where the T joined the main wharf, there was a flight of substantial steps, where boats at all times could land, drawing not over two feet of water. This was a great convenience, enabling Sam Burgess, with his fish for the market, lobster boats from the Gurnet, and the Island and Saquish boats, to land without regard to the stage of the tide. Many a householder with his mouth made up for a fish dinner has sat by the hour together at the head of those steps, waiting for Sam. In those days, too, the purveyor of lobsters was Joseph Burgess, the keeper of the light, and as regular as the day he would appear with his lobsters and wearing his red thrum cap, would wheel his barrow full about the town. There was no talk then of short lobsters, nor of extravagant prices, for nine pence, or twelve and a half cents in the currency of the time, would buy a three or four pound lobster.”

During his lifetime, of thirteen packets in service Davis remembers the last eight very well.[23] These ships carried merchandise and some passengers on runs to Boston, using sail. The last packet with passenger service was the schooner _Russell_. She survived the advent of the railroad in 1845. Her fate was a sad one. On March 17, 1854, on a return from Boston, she drifted off course and went ashore at Billingsgate Light on Cape Cod, southeast from the Gurnet. The schooner was a total wreck and all on board were lost. She had a captain and three crew members and five passengers. The bodies came ashore at Wellfleet and Truro. Davis, as administrator of Capt. Simmons’ estate, had to identify them and arrange for their removal to Plymouth.

A steamboat line was established with the advent of the _General Lafayette_,[24] in 1828. She left Plymouth when the tide served, and left Boston at hours which on her arrival would enable her to reach her dock. The fuel was wood and she made the passage in five hours, making about eight and one half statute miles per hour. In 1830 the steamboat _Rushlight_ came to Plymouth and advertised to carry passengers to Boston for a dollar and a quarter, the fare by stage being two dollars.

In 1840, the _Hope_ left Boston at two, reaching Plymouth at six. Wm. Davis tells of an incident that year. He took a stage which left the same time as the ship. The driver, Samuel Gardner, told Davis that he would beat the steamboat that day. Gardner did not leave the box, horses were ready at the three places where changes were made and, “as I dismounted at my mother’s house on Cole’s Hill the boat passengers were coming up the wharf.” That day the stage did thirty six miles in four hours.

In 1801, Davis quotes the _Farmer’s Almanac_, there were twenty-five lines of stagecoaches running out of Boston.[25] The stage to Plymouth made three trips per week by the way of Hingham, being ten hours on the road. The New England stage in the early part of the nineteenth century was a long covered wagon hung on leather thorough-braces and contained seats without backs. “After a few years the clumsy stage gave way to the well-known English stage made with the addition of a middle seat with an adjustable tack strap.”[26]

In 1834 a line of stages to and from Boston for mail and passengers was established and continued until the opening of the Old Colony Railroad in 1845. The accommodation left Plymouth at six or seven each day, and returning left Boston by two. By way of Pembroke, Hanover, Weymouth Landing, Quincy and Dorchester was the route up from Plymouth. The mail stage, when separate, left Boston at five o’clock in the morning, arriving at Plymouth at ten thirty.

The first post office and postmaster were established in 1775 in Plymouth.[27] In this year a horseback mail route was established from Cambridge to Falmouth through Plymouth. The two post riders made the trip down and back once a week.

On March 18, 1844, the Old Colony Railroad was incorporated.[28] On the 8th of November, 1845, the road was opened. The next day trains ran twice daily at 7 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. from Plymouth and 7:45 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. from Boston. Running time was an hour and three quarters. The railroad for the next twenty years used wood for fuel. The distance was 37 miles.

The population of Plymouth in 1820 was 4384. In 1833 it was 5,000. By 1905 it had reached 11,107.

A moral and political situation, slavery and the abolitionist movement, had an impact on the Plymouth community. Wm. T. Davis has written about some aspects of the attitudes in Plymouth. His observations have a special validity because he gathered them during his active public life as lawyer, banker, historian, writer and political leader while the storm clouds were gathering.

We know that in the family tradition Charlotte Burgess, in particular was sympathetic to the cause of freedom for the blacks. Strong and moving words on slavery were contained in the eloquent address by a young Daniel Webster, 1782-1852, to the Pilgrim Society dinner in 1820, the occasion being the commemoration of the landing two hundred years previously.

“It is not fit that the land of the Pilgrims should bear the shame longer. I hear the sound of the hammer; I see the smoke of the furnace where manacles and fetters are still forged for human limbs. I see the visages of those who by stealth and midnight labor in this work of hell and dark, as may become the artificers of such instruments of misery and tortures. Let that spot be purified, or let it cease to be of New England. Let it be purified or let it be set aside from the Christian world; let it be put out of the circle of human sympathies and human regards, and let civilized man henceforth have no communion with it.”[29]

From the assessor’s records, Davis estimates there were fifty slaves of all ages in Plymouth in 1740. He lists many of these slaves and their owners.[30] When the Massachusetts Constitution was adopted in 1780 slavery was forbidden. In 1781 the supreme judicial court of Massachusetts so decided in the case of Walker vs. Jennison. Davis cites a case of a slave in which his grandfather had a part.[31]

“It is not improbable that Plymouth was associated with the first claim made on a citizen of Massachusetts for the restoration of a slave to his master. Information concerning it I found among my grandfather’s papers. In 1808 the brig _Thomas_, Solomon Davie master, at some port in Delaware, received on board a slave who had deserted from his master, David M. McIlvaine, and until 1812 remained in my grandfather’s service, receiving wages as a hired man. In 1812 Mr. McIlvaine found the slave on board the brig in Baltimore, and a claim for his restoration being made, he was given up. In the meantime the slave who called himself George Thomson, bought a small house on the brow of Cole’s Hill, and in a settlement of a suit to recover wages, which my grandfather had paid to Thomson, Mr. McIlvaine, in consideration of the money paid, conveyed to my grandfather the house, and the following articles of personal property which were in the keeping of a colored woman, named Violet Philips, and were the property of Thomson--a blue cloth coat, fine; a black cloth coat, fine; one pair of ribbed velvet pantaloons; one black bombazet waistcoat; one black silk waistcoat; three yellow marseilles waistcoats; one pair white stockings; two checked shirts; one new fur hat; one chest, and one trunk in which were the title papers to his house, and one silver watch.”

Wm. T. Davis recounts the role of Borne Spooner, 1790-1870, born in Plymouth, and founder of the Plymouth Cordage Company in 1824, in the anti-slavery movement.[32] Perhaps his younger days in New Orleans, learning the rope trade, had influenced him. Davis goes on to list the names of those citizens of Plymouth engaged in the movement.

“The merchants, professional men, including ministers, and the politicians in both the whig and democratic parties, were either too timid to join the anti-slavery ranks, or were decidedly hostile to the anti-slavery movement. An anti-slavery meeting held on the evening of July 4, 1835, in the Robinson church, which was disturbed by an incipient mob which contented itself with breaking a few windows, and afterwards smearing with tar the dry goods sign of Deacon Ripley. Though the _Old Colony Memorial_ contained a paid advertisement of the meeting, its columns were silent concerning its doings and the disturbance. It is of little consequence how or when Mr. Spooner became interested in the movement. He became one of the most prominent men in the state, supporting it, and undoubtedly furnished to it material aid not exceeded in amount by the contributions of any others in its ranks. He was a constant friend and supporter of Garrison, Phillips, Quincy and Douglas, all of whom frequently enjoyed the hospitalities of his home.”

“The seed of anti-slavery fell in Plymouth on sandy soil, but watered by heavenly dew, it soon took root and broke through the conservation crust which under the influence of the commercial and financial interests of the town, for a time obstructed its growth.”[33]

Wm. Davis relates a vivid account of Jonathan Walker, a fellow townsman, and his anti-slavery experience.[34]

“I suppose that few of my readers know that Johnathan Walker, the man with the branded hand, ever lived in Plymouth. About fifty years ago, or perhaps a little earlier, he lived in the house now standing in what is called the Nook at the head of the waters of Hobb’s Hole brook. I do not remember to have ever seen him, but I recall the time when he was complained of for shingling his house on the Sabbath. He was born in Harvard, Mass., March 22, 1799, and at the age of seventeen went to sea. When quite young he assisted Benjamin Lundy in colonizing slaves in Mexico, and for a time lived with his family in Florida. In 1844 he assisted four slaves to escape by water, but was overtaken and captured with his companions by a Revenue Cutter which was sent in pursuit. He was carried to Pensacola, and after a trial for his offense was sentenced to stand one hour in the pillory, to pay a fine of one hundred and fifty dollars, and be branded on the hand with the letters S.S., signifying slave stealer. It is creditable to Southern humanity that a blacksmith refused to heat the instrument of torture. He remained in prison eleven months in default of payment of the fine, and then by the aid of Northern friends released. After his release he delivered lectures in various Northern towns and then settled down in Plymouth.... He left behind in Plymouth a son John, whom I knew very well, and whom it fell to me once to aid during a pecuniary embarrassment. His father had neglected his education, but he was a noble fellow in whose presence I always felt that I was in the presence of a man.

“I think he was one of not more than twenty men whose personality during my long life has impressed me. He always would call me William and I always called him John. I would have entrusted to him my life in any emergency, for I knew that he would have risked his own to save the life of a fellow man.”

Among the Plymouth men killed during the Civil War was Nathaniel Burgess, wounded at Fort Steadman, March 25, 1865, died of wounds in July, 1865.[35]

We now go on to the Burgess family, Phineas and Charlotte, whose lives span the nineteenth century and who spent most of their times at the Boot Pond Place in farming and raising eight children. We have photographs of them and information about their daily lives that is not similarly available for Nathaniel and John of previous generations. So time observed begins to move closer to the present. Our imaginations are assisted by reminiscences and we see more clearly what took place here long ago.

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