Lexington: From Liberty's Birthplace to Progressive Suburb

By Richard Kollen

A quiet colonial town forever changed by the shot heard round the world on April 19, 1775, Lexington evolved from its famous roots and adapted to the ever-changing culture of the nation it helped create. Over the centuries, an influx of immigrants and new ideas helped shape the town from farming community to booming rail suburb and into today s diverse city that treasures its rich heritage while striving toward a dynamic future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Jul 14, 2004
• ISBN: 9781439614082

Richard Kollen

Author Richard Kollen has taught history in Lexington�s schools since 1974 and is also a lecturer at Boston�s Northeastern University. A professional historian with articles published in various journals, he has received numerous teaching awards along with the Massachusetts Historical Society�s Adams Fellowship and also serves as archivist for the Lexington Historical Society. In this new volume he combines alluring historic photographs with a fresh and engaging narrative that examines the essence of Lexington both before and long after that famous April morning.

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grateful.

INTRODUCTION

Lexington’s classic New England town center motif comes into view upon entering the center village. Its centerpiece—a town common flanked by colonial style houses with a white church sitting in close proximity—can be seen throughout Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island in towns replicated by Congregational settlers. The view is in the words of geographer Joseph S. Wood, one of Anglo-America’s great historical landscape icons. Yet, closer inspection reveals the scene to be not quite so typical. Captain Parker’s statue greets a westerly approach. Tour buses from around the nation unload onto the Common. Often, tourists begin their visit to the Common by stopping at the country’s oldest Revolutionary War monument, rising above the interred bodies of eight militiamen. Lexington’s space has a singular national importance.

The events of April 19, 1775, marked Lexington for the history books forever, as the first battle of the Revolutionary War occurred on its soil. Consequently, Lexington has become the namesake of 20 other towns. Yet the close examination of this famous event has overshadowed the rest of the town’s past. The only full-scale town history, Charles Hudson’s two volume History of Lexington, Massachusetts, was written in 1868, and updated in 1913. Though it suffers from the biases of its time, it remains an impressive and essential work. But the narrative portion primarily focuses in detail on the colonial era and the Revolutionary War, with meager coverage of the town’s history since, and certainly none after 1913. No other narrative of the course of the town’s history has been published.

Lexington today has developed into an affluent suburb of Boston with a population of 30,355. Considered progressive in its politics and outlook, among its population reside many college professors, scientists, computer analysts, and other professionals. Few Lexington residents now work in town. Many travel the highways linking it to Boston, Cambridge, and the high tech companies along Route 128. Though still predominantly white, the population no longer worships exclusively at the Congregational church. The town has added a substantial Asian population, along with some African Americans and Hispanics. Housing costs have become prohibitive to many young families. Fifty standing committees help regulate aspects of life in the town in order to preserve its virtues in the face of change. It would be beyond the ken of the original Puritan settlers living in unpainted lean-to houses with pigs rooting inside the front fence, seemingly remote from Boston, to imagine such a community. How Lexington developed from its 1713 incorporation to its present status is the story of this book.

A town’s history is a combination of the universal and the unique. Lexington certainly fits this characterization. While its history is distinguished by some firsts, one most notable, it also remains a quintessential American town, shaped by the popular movements, economic vicissitudes, technological advances, and demographic trends in the nation. Its story might be considered a prism through which one can view the country’s experience, in particular that of the New England region. Yet it has its own genetic code, borne of its terrain, seasoned by its founding and early years. This imprint has always influenced its response to the larger historical forces. That is its story.

This slim volume cannot be exhaustive in its treatment of Lexington’s history, although it tries to be comprehensive in considering its entire scope. Nor do I doubt that, when read in the future, this book also will suffer from the biases of its time. But it does attempt to synthesize the events that shaped the town’s experience. From rural colonial town to commercial crossroads, to railroad suburb, to highway suburb, Lexington never remained frozen in time. While always proud of its status as the birthplace of American liberty, it did not lose sight of its need to adapt.

Chapter One

CHOOSE A COMMITTEE TO SEAT THE MEETING HOUSE

Lexington was a relative latecomer as an incorporated Massachusetts town. It began as part of Newtowne (renamed Cambridge in 1638). The inhabitants of Newtowne were among the original Puritan vanguard who arrived on 17 ships in Boston Harbor in 1630. These men and women, frustrated in their efforts to reform the Church of England, left their homes mostly in the East Anglia region, sometimes as entire congregations, to chart a different course in the New World. Their goal was to create a model community, a bible commonwealth that would strike a blow for true faith by setting an example for the world. Initially settling in Charlestown, the colonists soon moved to Boston. Fearing that Boston Harbor’s openness made them vulnerable to attack from either the French or King Charles I, no friend of the Puritans, Governor John Winthrop sought a more easily fortified site. In 1631 they settled on the area south of Massachusetts Avenue and east of Elliot and Brattle Streets in modern day Cambridge.

Today Lexington occupies 20 square miles of upland between the Charles, Mystic, and Concord Rivers. The area is a watershed with small streams running in all directions, but without providing a significant source of waterpower. Considered Cambridge’s North Precinct and often referred to as Cambridge Farms, its creation a few years after Newtowne’s founding sprang from a concern about overcrowding. Certainly, seventeenth-century standards regarding what constituted crowded living conditions differed from those of today. The land granted by the General Court in 1638 extended Newtowne’s northern boundary eight miles from its meetinghouse in Newtowne, between the Woburn and Watertown grants. This land encompassed most of today’s Lexington. A later grant to Cambridge in 1642 added the northern part of Lexington. At this time little if any Amerindian settlement existed in the area, although many trails indicated its prior existence.

In 1636 Cambridge residents began to venture into this wilderness district, but only to pass through to settle Concord, the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s first inland town. A road, probably what is today Massachusetts Avenue to Lincoln Street, was cut through the woods for Reverend Peter Bulkely to lead his company to settle Concord. Soon after Billerica, Woburn, and Watertown were incorporated as towns surrounding Lexington. This road became the main thoroughfare used for travelers from Cambridge to Concord. For the most part, roads through Lexington consisted of worn Indian paths. Lexington historian Edwin Worthen in his Calendar History of Lexington wrote that the most important path from Lexington led directly to Boston over Dorchester Neck, the only land route to the peninsula. From the north, one path covered Grove-Hancock-Waltham-Marret-Stedman-Allen-Blossom-Waltham-Bow Streets to Trapelo Road to Watertown where the Charles River flowed. From Concord to Boston early colonial commerce traveled to Lincoln Street and picked up Massachusetts Avenue.

The earliest landowners in what was Cambridge’s North Precinct or the Farms probably were speculators who resided in Cambridge. These absentee owners likely used the land for cultivating hay and grain and for grazing livestock. The first grant of land went to Richard Herlarkenden in his brother Richard’s name in 1636. The 600-acre grant, at a place called Vyne Brook, extended to roughly just beyond Lexington’s center today. Richard Herlarkenden remained in England—a truly distant absentee proprietor. A condition of his grant was that he improve it by building or planting. With these terms yet unfulfilled, the grant passed to his brother Roger. When Roger died, the land passed in 1642 to Herbert Pelham, treasurer of Harvard College, who had married Herlakenden’s widow. Carleton Staples reports in the Proceedings of the Lexington Historical Society Proceedings Volume II that the property’s deed showed a house as part of the property in 1642. Edwin Worthen places the first house in today’s Lexington near the site of the Edison Station, while Staples speculates that it lay in the approximate location of Buckman Tavern. Worthen’s theory appears more plausible, since the Edison Station location was closer to the water source of Vine Brook. Charles Hudson, Lexington historian, only notes that the deed stated, At the further side of Vine brook one house.

Benjamin Muzzey lived on the Pelham land as a laborer, charged with clearing the 600-acre grant. While engaged in this endeavor he lived in this Pelham house. According to Worthen, he built his own dwelling near Vine Brook upon purchasing his 200 acres in 1693. Staples also raises the possibility that the one house on the Herlakenden-Pelham land might have functioned as a tavern due to its location midway between Cambridge and Concord. Regardless, since one proprietor held one large tract of land including the entire town center, it remained a wilderness until 1693. In 1643 Pelham’s son Edward, quite a carouser as a Harvard student, left Massachusetts upon graduation. He eventually sold the tract of land in three equal shares to Benjamin Muzzey of Cambridge, Joseph Estabrook of Concord, and John Poulter of Cambridge.

By 1642 additional proprietors had acquired rights to other parts of the precinct. Although most did not reside on the land, it provided their male children an inheritance. Slowly, settlers began to populate Cambridge Farms, usually along the borders due to the large central tract being held by one proprietor. The Stedman, Stone, and Bridge families settled in the southwest area nearest the roads. Without a church to centralize settlement patterns, most early settlers lived on the precinct’s outskirts. By the time Pelham subdivided and sold his large grant, about 30 families had settled in Cambridge Farms. Charles Hudson, in The History of Lexington, writes that the Bowmans, Bridges, Winships, Cutlers, Tidds, Fiskes, Reeds, Merriams, Wellingtons, Russells, Munros, and Whitmores numbered among the earliest families who provided the basis for the new community.

As a Puritan community, the church defined its existence. By 1682 the families who had settled in Cambridge Farms had to travel as far as eight miles to attend church in Cambridge, unless given dispensation to attend the Watertown or Concord church. This inconvenience led the inhabitants in 1682 to begin to petition the colonial legislature, the General Court, for a separate parish. Finally, in 1692, the petition was granted and the settlers were relieved of the portion of their tax obligation that supported the Cambridge church and were permitted to collect funds to support their own minister. Records of public meetings during this time show business to be concerned almost exclusively with raising funds to build a church and settle a minister. Remaining a precinct of Cambridge denied the farmers the ability to govern their community beyond the church. Since the farmers still paid tax money to Cambridge, they could not lay out roads or control their school.

Both the construction of the meetinghouse and the selection of the minister took place immediately upon the parish’s creation. This church traces its lineage to today’s First Parish. Benjamin Estabrook of Concord, son of Joseph, was chosen as the first minister. The parish allotted him a settlement of £40 for that year and paid about £60 for the meetinghouse’s construction. With considerable foresight, the parish purchased 148 acres from the Cambridge proprietors in 1693 in order to support the minister. Income from this ministerial land, derived from hay and wood sales, could cover the considerable expense of settling ministers in the future. In 1694 the parish erected a house for Estabrook, located where Cary Memorial Library stands today, on condition he become permanent minister. Two years later he did. Thirty three members strong, the Cambridge Farms parish, anxious to worship in its new church, held services before construction was even finished. Even after completion, it remained a rude structure, even by seventeenth-century standards—but typically Puritan. Unpainted and with a shingle roof, it suited the simplicity of a Puritan meetinghouse unadorned with the worldly trappings they had abandoned England to escape. Its location today was about where Captain Parker’s statue stands, at the junction of Massachusetts Avenue and Bedford Street.

Following common Congregational church practice of the time, the meetinghouse seating arrangement divided along gender lines. Men sat on the benches on one side, women on the other with their daughters. Boys assembled at the back so that they could be supervised. Within this arrangement, parishioners sat according to status: a combination of age, property, and social position. The congregation funded the meetinghouse and the yearly settlement of the minister through subscription. Each of these early subscription lists exceeds 40 people, and contributions are listed according to the amount subscribed. Among the largest contributors were David Fiske, Samuel Stone, Benjamin Muzzey, John Tidd, William Munro, Joseph Simonds, Thomas Cutler, and Samuel Winship.

The Farms remained a precinct of Cambridge, but in 1711 it took a critical step toward organizing as a township. It purchased from Nibor Benjamin Muzzey a parcel of land that included the area near the meetinghouse. This 1.5-acre parcel ultimately became the beginning of the Common. Previously, Muzzey town records show that he had been chosen to ring the bell on saboth days and on lecture days and . . . to bring the water for the baptizing of children and to sweep the meeting house. This was most certainly due both to his earnestness and his house’s proximity to the church, but also because of the esteem in which he was held. The funds to purchase the parcel were also raised through subscription. Later in 1722 the town purchased another acre from Benjamin and John Muzzey that added to the Common. When the inhabitants of the parish of Cambridge Farms bought the land that would become Lexington Common, few could imagine how important this space would become to the town and the nation’s history.

Typically, the town common in Puritan New England served as the community’s spiritual, military, and civic center. On or near the New England town common stood the meetinghouse that functioned both as the church and public space for town meetings. Most early colonial meetinghouses were unheated and not until 1820 was a stove purchased for the Lexington meetinghouse. On frigid days parishioners brought foot warmers in the form of metal boxes filled with hot coals on which they rested their feet. In the coldest weather even the hardy Lexington town meeting retreated to the schoolhouse, which had a stove.

The Cambridge Farms residents petitioned the General Court to organize as a township, and in 1713 Lexington was incorporated. This process of division into a precinct with its own church parish, and later separation into a town, was common among Congregational settlements. Lexington fell victim to it when residents in its southwestern sector, combined with those residing in contiguous parts of Concord and Weston, petitioned the General Court to be considered a separate precinct in 1735. Lexington successfully opposed this potential loss of land and tax revenue until 1744, when the precinct was granted permission. In 1754, the final step was completed as the town of Lincoln became incorporated. In all, Lexington lost 974 acres that became part of Lincoln.

Upon incorporation as a town, Lexington voted to build a new meetinghouse on the Common, just a few feet west of the former location of the first meetinghouse, at the location of the stone pulpit today. This more expensive, two-story box-like structure stood across from Buckman Tavern, built in 1709 by John Muzzey, son of Benjamin. The selectmen determined that families should sit together rather than be divided by gender as in the first meetinghouse. The issue of seating was a recurring one as people left the parish and newcomers arrived, shifting relative status. A second gallery was finished in 1722 to seat the town’s slaves and poor. Periodically, a committee was assigned the unenviable duty of deciding the seating arrangement. On May 6, 1731, such a committee took on this task on behalf of the 106 heads of families. This was probably necessitated by a renovation creating more seats perhaps as a response to population growth. Eight months later the seating plan was presented to the selectmen, an example of the intersection between the religious and civic sphere at the time. Seating was a critical issue since it reflected one’s public standing. In many Puritan towns a fine was issued to anyone sitting in the wrong pew. The seating committee’s recommendation was not always final. In 1744 the work of a similar committee was rejected by town meeting.

Children were often seated together, sometimes leading to behavior problems. Sundays must have seemed long for young, energetic children, many of whom could only interact with children their age from far-flung farms on the Sabbath. The same town meeting addressed the Sunday behavior of children in and around the meetinghouse. It appears that some young people had been misbehaving while meeting, at least according to eighteenth century New England standards. Moreover, even during intermission, the lunch break in the church service, they had ben at play on the Lord’s day. Town meeting decided to help supervise by voting to choose 6 men to Inspect ye children. Inside the meeting any Tythingmen seeing any child play at meeting were directed to inform their parents. Tythingmen enforced the law, both inside and outside the church.

The Sunday Sabbath, a day when the community attended church all day, was also a social event, especially during the noon break. Sunday was the only day of the week when community members broke their work routine. The sermons offered intellectual stimulation and going to meeting provided one of two occasions when virtually the entire town gathered, the other being town meeting. For many on the outskirts of town, this interaction bound them to the community. Thursday afternoon called for a church service as well. Called lecture day, this practice was observed for most of the colonial period.

The most important figure in any Puritan community was the town’s spiritual leader. For close to its first 100 years two talented ministers, John Hancock and Jonas Clarke, served Lexington. John Hancock succeeded Benjamin Estabrook in 1698 while the town was still a precinct of Cambridge. In 1699 he purchased 25 acres northwest of the Common. Since in 1700 Hancock married Elizabeth Clarke, the Chelmsford minister’s daughter, a house probably stood very near the present Hancock Clarke House site at that time. This was not the venerable dwelling visited by tourists today, however. Constructed in 1738, this parsonage later would prove central to the events of April 19, 1775.

Hancock’s 54-year ministry earned him the esteem of not only his own parish but the surrounding congregations as well, who fondly referred to him as the Bishop. One significant accomplishment was his curtailing controversy during a time when doctrinal disputes were tearing some New England towns apart. The religious revival called the Great Awakening, at its height in New England in 1741 and 1742, left deep fissures within congregations. While remaining a Calvinist, albeit with some liberal tendencies, Hancock did not let this revival divide Lexington as it did in surrounding communities. Rather, during this time Hancock added 80 members to his flock. His affability and flexibility served as a uniting force in very divisive times.

Eventually Hancock became the senior minister in Middlesex County, assuming many leadership roles among local clergy. Hancock’s son Ebenezer was ordained in 1734 and joined his father as a co-pastor. Ironically, although Ebenezer’s motivation was to lighten his father’s workload as he aged, Ebenezer died in 1740. At the time John was 69 and would live 14 more years. When John Hancock died in 1752, he had been minister in Lexington for 54 years. His grandson, the more famous John Hancock, would spend some of his childhood years living at the parsonage after his father died.

Civic life also revolved around the Common. In 1713 the town allocated four pounds to Benjamin Wellington to build a pounde, and a pair of Stocks near the meetinghouse. The pound, specified to be 30 feet square, served the community as a holding area for stray livestock, a significant issue in colonial communities. The town records show that on November 1, 1718 alone a chestnut mare, brown steer, black mare, and red steer were impounded. Lieutenant John Munro was the first keeper of the pound. In fact, he and his sons served in that capacity regularly. Local historian Michael Canavan wrote in 1900 that the pound stood in the general vicinity of the current Hancock Church. This would have been convenient for John Munro and