Down East Latch Strings/Chapter 2
When things are once come to the execution, there is no secrecy comparable to celerity.—Bacon.
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n Haymarket Square, the Boston & Maine Railroad has the advantage of possessing the station nearest to the business centre of the city, of all the passenger depots in Boston. Fifty years ago sloops and barges, bringing rural produce, used to float up to the place where it now stands and deliver their merchandise on the adjacent wharves. So large a part of this trade was in hay, that the locality became known as the hay-market. Oyster boats from Wellfleet were accustomed to land here, too. Then the canal was replaced by the railway, and filling went on until it had gone beyond the old causeway (now Causeway street) which formerly bounded the river-front at the edge of the flats.
Now, as we leave the station and cross the Charles river, through a wilderness of tracks and drawbridges, we find it impossible to realize how the Charles must have looked two centuries ago, when spacious meadows lined its current on each side, and boats might be rowed almost to the centre of what is now the Common.
On the right, as we cross the river, the heights of Charlestown and Bunker Hill monument are in full view, while at the left, and ahead, are East Cambridge and Somerville, rising into Winter Hill, where Burgoyne's captive troops viewed the scenery over the muskets of their guards a good deal longer than they cared to. Somerville does not show to good advantage from the ears nor does Chelsea; but when we get past, and out upon the meadows of the Mystic and can look backward to the left at the hills of West Somerville and Medford (the latter crowned by the clustered buildings of Tuft's College), we begin to enjoy the real country. In Medford, is a two-storied, low-roofed brick house, built by Gov. Matthew Craddock, in 1634, and said to be the oldest edifice in New England. The town contains the homes of many prominent business men of Boston. A more general repute belongs to Medford in connection with the rum made there ever since colonial days, when the odor of sanetity was hardly distinguishable from an odor of rum on all occasions of hospitality or celebration.
On the high bank beyond these meadows (in whose colors an artist must always take delight) is old "Mystic-side," now called Malden,— one of the favorite suburbs of Boston, and the residence of many persons doing business in the city. It was one of the first settling-places of the Puritan pioneers, and its annals are unusually interesting. One of the churches near the station was organized on that site in 1649. Little of the flavor of antiquity lingers about Maiden, however. In the grounds cultivated first so long ago, and under aged shade trees, have risen long streets of handsome suburban homes, in the centre of which has lately been opened one of the finest buildings in the state as a public library and art gallery. Maiden has several factories and some 17,000 inhabitants, who are wide-awake.
"If mother were here," remarks Prue, "she would tell us that the most noteworthy thing about Maiden is, that it was the home of Judson, the famous missionary to Burmah, whose 'Memoir' was one of the very few books I was allowed to read on Sunday, when I was a girl."
Beyond Maiden the train carries us into a region of rocky hills, which arrange themselves and the openings between them,—often filled with small ponds, or occupied by some neat cottage or hamlet,—into a constant succession of charming landscapes. In such a region is Melrose, and its pleasantly scattered neighbor, The Middlesex Fells. This district, only seven to ten miles from the city, has retained its wildness so long because it was of little use to the farmer or market gardener. But this was a great boon to the city men; and among its broken hills, crags, and prairie nooks, beside its dancing streams and under the shade of its oaks and chestnuts, have now been built scores of beautiful country homes, picturesque in outward appearance and luxurious within, while magnificent roads have replaced in all directions the old cart-tracks and country highways. We were looking over a collection of photographs, the other day, made among these rugged little hills,—none of which are too high for a child to climb, yet big enough to make imposing features in the limited views afforded to any one house set in their midst,—and we were astonished at the wildness and the artistic charm shown in every direction. Among all the justly admired environs of Boston, I know of none likely to grow into greater beauty than The Middlesex Fells.
Next, we pass through Melrose and Melrose Highlands, where a street railroad connects for Stoneham, a shoe-making town; then Wakefield, which derives its name and a part of its prosperity from the family of that name, whose rattan furniture is seen all over the world, and whose tasteful munificence has adorned a factory town with elegant public and private buildings. One branch railroad diverges near here (at Wakefield Junction) and runs through Lynnfield to Peabody and Salem; while another crosses the hills northward to Newburyport. Its principal stations are Danvers, Topsfield, Boxford, and Georgetown,
situated on one or other of the old turnpikes through Essex county, and as full of traditions of Puritan and Revolutionary days as their fields are full of rocks. In Danvers, first  | An image should appear at this position in the text. If you are able to provide it, see Wikisource:Image guidelines and Help:Adding images for guidance. |
The main line of the "Western," or inland division of the Boston & Maine, by which the through trains are sent northward, bends westward from Wakefield and passes through the farming towns of Reading and Wilmington to Lowell Junction, whence a short branch-road carries passengers to Lowell, on the Merrimac river.
The Merrimac valley was of great renown among the aborigines. Their weirs and fishing stations occurred all along its banks, from the headwaters down, and upon its tributaries. The warm bottom-lands along these streams afforded choice farming places, and the French in Canada were told of it as early as 1604. Lying on the boundary be tween the possessions of the Laconia company and those allotted to the Massachusetts colony, it was entered by representatives of both. Haverhill was settled about 1635, and other towns were founded a little later along the Merrimac and its tributaries. By 1674, Gookin and Eliot were preaching missionary sermons to the Indians. On one May Sunday they met in Wamesit, at the wigwam of one called Wannalancet, about two miles from the village near Pawtucket falls in the Merrimac river. The step to this year of grace, 1887, is long, but the story is rapid. "Pawtucket and Wamesit, where the Indians resorted in the fishing season, are now Lowell, the city of spindles and Manchester of America, which sends its cotton cloth around the globe."
But this gigantic weaver is a youth among the towns he has so out-stripped in size. A canal was made around Pawtucket falls a century or more ago; but the water-power was not utilized until 1821, when some Boston men set up a factory here. In 1828 the "Merrimac" cotton mills were started. Now, Lowell's textile factories employ a capital of nearly $20,000,000, running 25,000 looms and almost a million spindles. "They produce annually 240,000,000 yards of cotton cloth, 10,000,000 yards of woolens, 3,500,000 yards of carpetings, 120,000 shawls, 16,500,000 pairs of hose; and 100,000,000 yards of cloth are dyed and printed." In addition ta this. many other branches of machine industry are followed in this busy city, whose demands have outgrown, twice over, the power afforded by its river, even when conserved by the great dam at the outlet of its Winnipesaukee reservoir. Lowell now contains about 70,000 inhabitants, the larger half of whom are foreign born, and employed in the mills. The best residences are on the hill encircling the city. From Lowell went that 6th Massachusetts regiment which was mobbed in Baltimore on April 19, 1861; and a marble monument to the two young citizens killed at that time stands on Merrimac street, in the busiest quarter of the town.
A few miles beyond is Andover,—than which no rural name in New England is more widely known. "This ancient academic town was settled about 1643, on the Indian domain of Cochickewick, which was bought from the natives for $26.64 and a coat. Andover has some manufactures but is chiefly famed for its schools. The Punchard High School is a local institution of high standing, Phillips' Academy (distinct from that at Exeter, N. H.) occupies a fine building on the hill, and is of wide reputation. It was endowed by the Phillips' family in 1778, with $85,000 and considerable landed estates, and has since occupied a prominent position, The Abbott Female Seminary is an old and famous school for young ladies. The Theological Seminary of the Congregational Church was founded about 1808, and soon after received liberal endowments.… This institution has long been the 'school of the prophets' for the sect to which it belongs, and has prepared its ablest divines for their work.… Its buildings are very plain, causing the visitor to wonder 'if orthodox angels have not lifted up old Harvard and Massachusetts' halls, and carried them by night from Cambridge to Andover hill,' But the situation is one of extreme beauty, and the grounds are quiet and abounding in trees.… A beautiful chapel has lately been built."
There are pretty ponds in Andover, and the valley of the Shawsheen river has the well-known Shawsheen grove and some pleasant rural scenery, while the view from Andover hill (at sunset, especially,) is highly praised. Many summer visitors stay here, partly attracted by the fine society.
This society has, in the past, included many persons of intellectual superiority and fame, and is similarly enriched at present. The names of some of these are "familiar as household words." The husband of Harriet Beecher Stowe was a professor of Hebrew at the Theological school, and the house in which Mrs. Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, is still standing. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, author of Gates Ajar and other books, is still a resident of the village, where her mother, also an authoress, lived and wrote. The list might be extended.
Just beyond Andover, Lawrence comes into view, located upon both sides of the Merrimac river. A short branch road extends across the river and connects with the Manchester & Lawrence railroad for Manchester and Concord, N. H., and other towns in northern New Hampshire and Vermont.
Lawrence was selected as a factory site half a century ago by the Essex company, who built a great dam across the Merrimac and thus secured an immense water power. This dam is 28 feet high, and 1,000 feet long, so that were it a natural cataract the fall of water aver it would be thought a sight worthy of a long pilgrimage. Lawrence has now about 40,000 inhabitants and great wealth. One of its cotton mills alone, runs 150,000 spindles and employs nearly 5,000 operatives; several others employ from 500 to 3,000 people each. Besides the cotton mills there are extensive factories for woolen goods. paper, machinery, woodenware, etc. The mills and the populous community of tenements and boarding houses in which an army of working-people dwells, is separated from the main part of the city by a canal and a park. This leaves the town proper unvitiated by the presence of noisy and unsightly factories, ant its wealth has made it into the handsomest city of its class in the state. It received its name from the Lawrence family of Boston, who were early identified with its industries.
The country all along this part of the line is rolling and agricultural, though seeming to a person accustomed to such regions as the Connecticut valley, less thoroughly cultivated than it ought to be. But the irregularity and rockiness of the land, and the many ponds, which render complete cultivation impracticable, add to its interest for us who are merely lookers on, having neither to till it, nor pay its taxes.
After leaving Lawrence, the railroad follows the bright and swift Merrimac for some distance, passes through the village of North Andover, enters Bradford, and crosses the river into Haverhill,—a big town and a busy one, devoted principally to shoemaking, the chief industry of all the Essex towns outside of Lawrence.
This Merrimac river is worth a moment’s pause. Bubbling out of the snow-fed springs in the White Mountains, and reinforced by the steady flow of Lake Winnipesaukee, it is pure and vigorous from its birth. "At first it comes on murmuring to itself by the base of stately and retired mountains, through moist primitive woods whose juices it receives, where the bear still drinks it, and the cabins of settlers are far between, and there are few to cross its stream; enjoying in solitude its cascades still unknown to fame; by long ranges of mountains of Sandwich and of Squam, slumbering like tumnli of Titans, with the peaks of Moosehillock, the Haysack, and Kiarsarge reflected in its waters; where the maple and raspberry, those lovers of the hills, flourish amid temperate dews,—flowing long and full of meaning, but untranslatable as its name, Pemigewasset, by many a pastured Pelion and Ossa, where unnamed nmses haunt, tended by Oreads, Dryads, Xaiads, and receiving the tribute of many an untasted Hippocrene. There are earth, air, fire, and water,—very well, this is water, and down if comes.… Falling all the way, and yet not discouraged by the lowest fall. By the law of its birth never to become stagnant, for it has come out of the clouds, and down the sides of precipices worn in the flood, through beaver-dams broke loose, not splitting but splicing and mending itself, until it found a breathing-place in this low land. So it flows on down by Lowell, Lawrence and Haverhill, at which last place it first suffers a sea change, and a few masts betray the vicinity of the ocean. Between the towns of Amesbury and Newbury it is a broad commercial river, from a third to half a mile in width, no longer skirted with yellow and crumbling banks, but backed by high green hills and pastures, with frequent white beaches on which the fishermen draw up their nets;…until, at last, you glide under the famous Chain Bridge, and are landed at Newburyport. Thus she who at first was 'poore of waters, naked of renowne,' having received so many fair tributaries, as was said of the Forth,
Here, almost two centuries ago, happened that thrilling incident of colonial history of which the heroic Haunah Dustan was the central figure. Every schoolboy knows it,—how, one bitter March night. Hannah had been dragged from a sick-bed by the Indians and been compelled to march, half-dressed and barefooted through the snowy wilderness far to the northward. "She had seen her seven elder children flee with their father, but knew not of their fate. She had seen her infant’s brains dashed out against an apple-tree, and had left her own and her neighbors’ dwellings in ashes. When she reached the wigwam of her captor, situated on an island in the Merrimac, more than fifty miles above where we now are, she had been told that she and her nurse were soon to be taken to a distant Indian settlement, and there made to run the gauntlet, naked. The family of this Indian consisted of two men, three women, and seven children, besides an English boy whom she found a prisoner among them. Having determined to attempt her escape, she instructed the boy to inquire of one of the men, how he should despatch an enemy in the quickest manner, and take his scalp. ‘Strike 'em there,’ said he, placing his finger on his temple, and he also showed him how to take off the scalp. On the morning of the 31st she arose before daybreak, and awoke her nurse and the boy, and taking the Indians’ tomahawks, they killed them all in their sleep, excepting one favorite boy and one squaw who fled wounded with him to the woods. The English boy struck the Indian who had given him the information, on the temple as he lad been directed. They then collected all the provisions they could find, and took their master’s tomahawk and gun, and scuttling all the canoes but one, commenced their flight to Haverhill, distant about sixty miles by the river. But, after laving proceeded a short distance, fearing that her story would not be believed if she should escape to tell it, they returned to the silent wigwam. and taking off the scalps of the dead, put them into a bag as proofs of what they had done, and then retracing their steps to the shore in the twilight, recommenced their voyage.…Ice is floating in the river,—the spring is opening; the muskrat and beaver are driven out of their holes by the flood; deer gaze at them from the banks: a few faint-singing forest birds, perchance, fly across the river to the northernmost shore; the fish-hawk sails and screams overhead, and geese fly aver with a startling clangor; but they do not observe these things, or they speedily forget them. They do not smile or chat all day. Sometimes they pass an Indian grave surrounded by its paling on the bank, or the frame of a wigwam, with a few coals left behind, or the withered stalks still rustling in the Indian's solitary cornfield on the intervale. The birch stripped of its bark, or the charred stump where a tree has been burned down to be made into a canoe, these are the only traces of man,—a fabulous wild man to us. On either side, the primeval forest stretches away uninterrupted to Canada, or to the 'South Sea';…While two sleep, one will manage the canoe, and the swift stream bear them onward to the settlements, it may be, even to old John Lovewell's house on Salmon brook to-night. According to the historian, they escaped as by a miracle all roving bands of Indians, and reached their homes in safety, with their trophies, for which the General Court paid them fifty pounds. The family of Hannah Dustan all assembled alive once more, except the infant whose brains were dashed out against the apple-tree, and there have been many who, in later times, have lived to say that they had eaten of the fruit of that apple-tree. This seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton wrote his Paradise Lost." (Thoreau.)
Haverhill has now some 25,000 inhabitants, and the high eminence which it covers gives a wonderful picture of the teeming valley. Certain parts of the town have an appearance of venerable age and picturesqueness. The new look of the dozens of factories and business blocks in the midst of which the railroad station stands, is due to the fact that the whole riverside was leveled by fire a few years ago, and has been rebuilt.
"Shall we never get away from the city!" cries Prue, impatiently, as we roll out between brick walls and bustling business streets.
"Very soon, now. It is real country beyond here, all the way to Exeter, in New Hampshire, where I can console you, my dear, with a piece of pie baked in a farmer-wife’s oven and a glass of new milk."
"Nonsense! I knew a youngster at Phillips' Academy who told me that one of the 'larks' was to get out and have a 'feed' at the station restaurant, because they got city things to eat there."
"Well, I'll yield the pie, but I stick to the fresh milk."
The academy of which Prue spoke is the pride of Exeter, which, otherwise, is a most attractive village of about 8,000 people, in the midst of a farming region. It was founded in 1781, by the Hon. John Phillips, who endowed it, and it has since attained to great wealth and the highest rank as a preparatory school, so that it has been called the Eton of America. A long list of famous men are among its alumni,—famous in almost every walk of life,—and include Daniel Webster, Lewis Cass (who was born in the village), Edward Everett, Jared Sparks, and many at present in public prominence. More than 4,000 have been graduated from it, and 200 boys are annually taught there. The buildings are attractive and occupy an elm-shaded campus. There is also a large school for young ladies in the village, but the bars are not often down between the two institutions.
Exeter is at the lead of Exeter river, which flows into Great bay, a curious expansion of the Piscataqua, admitting the tide. South Newmarket Junction (where the Concord Railroad crosses) and Newmarket, just beyond, are also on arms of this bay. At Durham, again, we strike it, crossing Oyster river, which takes its name from the oysters found living there by the earliest settlers (more or less native oysters are still gathered at the mouth of this river), and then comes Dover,—the oldest settlement in New Hampshire. Only three years later than the coming of the Mayflower, the Laconia company of commercial speculators to whom this whole region haul been granted, sent colonists who settled (1623) where Dover now stands, at the confluence of the Bellamy and Cocheco rivers,—the head of sloop navigation. They belonged to the Church of England, were not seeking religious liberty, but gold and furs, and were greatly annoyed by the intolerant Puritans. In 1641, the colony was forcibly annexed to Massachusetts, but was given back to New Hampshire in 1679. The Indians soon became hostile, and during the first half-century of their history, the Dover people were incessantly in terror of the redskins. A trick by which (in time of peace) they disarmed and captured a large number of savages, several of whom were hung, was avenged tn 1689 by a massacre of nearly the whole settlement, and the death under torture of the aged governor who had directed the previous outrage. War did not cease until after the long French-and-Indian struggle in which the redmen exhausted themselves; but Dover was never abandoned. The town now is one of the most interesting and prosperous of the old centres of colonial life. It numbers about 10,000 inhabitants, and has extensive cotton mills and other manufactories.
Here the Northern Division of the Boston & Maine Railroad diverges toward Lake Winnipesaukee and the White Mountains, while the main line keeps on to Portland. We are bound to Lake Winnipesaukee, but are not required to change cars, since we took the precaution in Boston to find seats in a car labeled "Alton Bay," which is detached here and re-attached to the north-bound train. After a brief delay, therefore, we are again under way, in an augmented company of merry holiday-makers, and half an hour later get sight of Rochester, across a broad and level tract long ago called the Norway plain, on account of the prevalence of Norway pines in its forest.