Dorchester, Massachusetts

“ In 1633 Captain William Holmes, of the Plymouth Colony, established near the mouth of the Farmington river a trading post, the first settlement by Englishmen in Connecticut; a more important and a permanent settlement (until 1637 called New Dorchester) was made in 1635 by immigrants from Dorchester, Massachusetts, led by the Rev. John Wareham, Roger Ludlow and others. In 1639 representatives from Windsor, with those from Wethersfield and Hartford, organized the Connecticut Colony. ”

“ Governor Oliver's country house in Dorchester is situated on the corner of Washington and Park streets. In the old deeds it is described as being "On the Road leading to Milton." The house appears the same as in the olden times. Not one whit has the estate changed outside of the interior of the great house. The broad acres that surround it still spread out before and behind it, the same drives are lined with great English Elms as in the old days; no finer old mansion house of the colonial period is to be found in New England, none is richer in memories of olden times. ”

“ My ancestress, Ann Greenaway, whose tedious voyage from England to Massachusetts was beguiled by her courtship and marriage to stalwart “Robert of Dorchester,” bore him many robust sons and “capable,” if not fair daughters, dying at last in the Dorchester homestead at the ripe age of one hundred and four. ”

“ He probably resided at Dorchester until 1766, when he purchased an estate on Elmwood Avenue, near Mount Auburn, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and erected the mansion afterwards the residence successively of Governor Gerry, the Rev. Dr. Lowell, and James Russell Lowell. Being a man of fortune, he was not actively engaged in business, nor did he take much part in public affairs until March 1774, when he accepted the office of lieutenant-governor of the province and president of a council appointed by the king in a manner especially galling to popular feeling. ”

“ For eight years they remained the only successful colony in New England. Then came the memorable movement of Puritans out of Old England into New England, beginning with the little settlement at Salem, under John Endicott; expanding next year into the "Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay"; founding Dorchester, Roxbury, Charlestown, Watertown, and Boston, in 1630, and rapidly possessing and putting the stamp of the stern, strong Puritan character on the whole section of America which it planted with towns. ”

“ NATHANIEL HATCH.
Colonel Estes Hatch was one of the most prominent and wealthy men of Dorchester. He owned many negro slaves who worked on his extensive estate, comprising sixty acres of land on the southerly side of Dudley street, lying part in Roxbury and a part in Dorchester. It included Little Woods, afterward known as Swan's woods.
Col. Hatch commanded the Troop of Horse, in Boston, led a company at the capture of Louisberg and died in 1759. He was prominent in town affairs, and held the principal military offices, and at the time of his death was Brigadier General of Horse. ”

“ We, therefore, have a story of her life, not of her thoughts; and many references to her diary appear in this volume.
Anna Green Winslow
It is curious and interesting to note how Puritan traits and habits lingered in generation after generation, and outlived change of environment and mode of living. In 1630, Rev. John White of Dorchester, England, brought out a Puritan colony which settled in Massachusetts, and named the village Dorchester, after their English home. In 1695, a group of the descendants of these settlers once more emigrated to "Carolina." ”

“ The first government of Plymouth Colony was practically a town meeting. The first town to set up a local government in Massachusetts was Dorchester (1633) . Thus started, the system spread over all New England. Nothing was too petty to be acted on by the town meeting. For example, "It is ordered that all dogs, for the space of three weeks after the publishing hereof, shall have one leg tied up.... If a man refuse to tye up his dogs leg and he be found scraping up fish [used for fertilizer] in the corn field, the owner shall pay l2_s._, besides whatever damage the dog doth." ”

“ All the able poor were set on work, and the impotent maintained by the profit of a public brewhouse and other collections' (Worthies, ii. 340) . The same authority says 'he had perfect control of two things, his own passions and his parishioners' purses,' which he drew upon for his philanthropic ends. While at Dorchester he expounded all through the Bible once and half through again.
About 1624 White interested himself in sending out a colony of Dorset men to settle in Massachusetts, where such as were nonconformists might enjoy liberty of conscience. ”

“ Accompanied probably by his younger brother George [see below] he sailed to America with Maverick and Warham in the ship Mary and John, and was one of the first settlers of Dorchester in 1630. Having been appointed an assistant of the Massachusetts colony by the general court in London on 10 Feb. ”

“ They occupy the summits of two hills, which command Boston Neck on the left, the city of Boston in front, and the harbor on the right. Southeast from the heights, pleasantly situated among gentle hills, is the village of Dorchester, so called in memory of a place in England of the same name, whence many of its earliest settlers came. The stirring events which rendered Dorchester Heights famous are universally known. ”

“ No, modern Dorchester is not like that, and its chief features—the noble elm avenues, that struck the traveller by road into and out of the town with admiration—have had their exquisite nobility qualified by time and change. ”

“ Up to this time Dorchester was the largest town in the colony, but dissatisfaction arose with the location (Boston had a better one chiefly on account of the deeper water in its harbour) , and in 1635–1637 many of the original settlers removed to the valley of the Connecticut where they planted Windsor. New settlers, however, arrived at Dorchester and in 1639 that town established a school supported by a public tax; this was the first free school in America supported by direct taxation or assessment on the inhabitants of a town. ”

“ Nonconformity, then, was the "very motive and cause" which settled Dorchester, the oldest town but one in Puritan New England, and planted there a sturdy yeomanry to whom freedom of conscience was more than home and dearer than life. Nor was this "vast extent of wilderness" to which they succeeded by right of purchase from the heirs of Chickatabat any such narrow area as that of the same name, recently annexed to the city of Boston. ”

“ All the incidents in Dorchester’s history seem insignificant beside the tremendous melodrama of the ‘Bloody Assize.’ The stranger has eyes and ears for little else than the story of that terrible time, and longs to see the Court where Jeffreys sat, mad with drink and disease, and sentenced the unhappy prisoners to floggings, slavery, or death. ”

“ It has been said that the Dorchester in the Wessex novels had no suburbs; the North Street ended abruptly in a mill by the river; the South Street came to an end in a cornfield—but these bounds have been leaped over in several places, and to-day the east, or Fordington side of the town (Mr. Hardy’s Durnover) alone remains unchanged ”

“ It is said that he tore down the walls, but this, almost for certain, was not so; they were too massive to be wrecked without long labour, which the rovers would not care to spend; and there is large evidence for their existence far into the seventeenth century. However, Danish fire and sword must have left the town black and blood-stained within its ramparts. Half a century later, under the Confessor, Dorchester counted 172 houses; the number is recorded in Domesday Book (1085-6) as large, in contrast to the eighty-eight at the date of the survey. ”

“ They called meetings and took action by themselves, as at Watertown, when, in 1632, the people assembled and expressed their discontent with a tax laid by the court, and at Dorchester as previously referred to. To Dorchester, however, belongs the honor of leading the way to that form of town government which has prevailed in New England ever since. It came about in this way. The settlement was begun in June, 1630, and for more than three years the people seem to have managed their affairs under the administration of the Court of Assistants by means of meetings. ”

“ It must have been with a ferocious satisfaction that Jeffreys arrived here to open that Assize, for Dorchester had been a ‘malignant’ town and a thorn in the side of the Royalists forty years before. A kind of wild retribution was to fall upon it now, not only for the share that this district of the West had in Monmouth’s Rebellion in this unhappy year, but for the Puritanism of a bygone generation. ”

“ A decade later Miss Burney (Mme. D’Arblay) gives a lively picture of Dorchester as she saw it when travelling in [Pg 151] the suite of George III. to Weymouth: “The city had so antique an air, I longed to investigate its old buildings. The houses have the most ancient appearance of any that are inhabited that I have happened to see; and inhabited they were indeed! There was an amazing quantity of indigenous residers—old women and young children,” who, as she shrewdly remarks, could not have come in from a distance, and so formed an index of population. ”

“ It is doubtful if any town in England has so many remains of the remote past in its vicinity as Dorchester. Probably the Roman settlement of Durnovaria was a parvenu town to the Celts, whose closely adjacent Dwrinwyr was also an upstart in comparison with the fortified stronghold two miles away to the south; the "place by the black water" being an initial attempt to establish a trading centre by a people rather timidly learning from their Phoenician visitors. ”

“ He and my mother saw, from Maumbury, about 1832, the Princess Victoria with her mother, passing in their carriage on the way to Weymouth. My brother, since 1880 Bishop in Mid-China, recalls the bringing into the town, in carts, about 1834, of loads of saplings sent to be planted along the London Road; and a noble avenue they made, which now, alas! is no more than a relic of itself.
I just remember the days of the stage coaches in Dorchester. I see the old Emerald still, and hear the bugle of the guard. In 1852 I travelled by coach to Dorchester from Bath. ”

“ Moule, writing in 1893, says: “Roman work of one kind and another has been found here in Dorset in eighty places, and that for the most part casually.” But year after year this number is increased, and, truth to tell, so frequent are the discoveries that in Dorchester the ordinary labourer, when excavating in the streets, or elsewhere, is ever on the alert, and many a treasure rewards his watchful care ”

“ In Edward the Confessor’s reign one hundred and twenty houses stood in this Dorset town, which, in comparison with the other towns of the county, came next to Dorchester and Wareham. Bridport, too, had a mint of its own, and its mint-master paid well for the privilege of coining.
The Norman Conquest does not appear to have been an unmixed blessing in these parts. In Domesday Survey the town is shown to have gone back considerably. Twenty houses are stated to be desolate, and the people impoverished. ”

“ From Wallingford up to Dorchester the neighbourhood of the river grows more hilly, varied, and picturesque. Dorchester stands half a mile from the river. It can be reached by paddling up the Thame, if you have a small boat; but the best way is to leave the river at Day’s Lock, and take a walk across the fields. Dorchester is a delightfully peaceful old place, nestling in stillness and silence and drowsiness. ”

“ The sea which surrounds Boston comes on both sides of it. It is well seatted, for the Body of the Towne lyeth on both sides a small Rivolet of water. There are many considerable ffarmes belonging to it, and by Farmeing is there most subsistance.
Dorchester.—Two miles near east from this Towne lyeth Dorchester, which claimes the third dignity as being ye third Towne setled by the English in the year 1630. They are a very industrious people, and have large bounds on wch are many gallant Farmes, by these bounds runes the Massachusets River. ”

“ The "hands across the sea" between the two Dorchesters have never been separated, but the pilgrims now come in the opposite direction, thousands of Americans visiting Dorchester and its antiquities; we heard afterwards that the American Dorset had been presented with one of the tessellated pavements dug up from a Roman villa in what we might call "Dorchester, Senior," in England, and that a memorial had been put up in the porch of Dorchester Church inscribed as follows:
In this Porch lies the body of the Rev. ”

“ Osric rose; put on his tunic over a coat of light chain mail; girded his sword to his side; put on a leathern cap, padded inside with steel, for in those days prudent men never travelled unarmed; then he bade Judith farewell, and started for Dorchester, making for the Synodune Hills, beyond which well-known landmarks Dorchester lay, and beneath the hills was a ford across the Thames. ”

“ Dorchester is surrounded by chalk uplands, and it is, no doubt, because there were few forests to clear that the entire neighbourhood is remarkable for its Roman and British remains. The trees around the town have fortunately been sedulously planted and preserved, and the avenues of sycamores and chestnuts on the site of the old rampart have somewhat of a Continental character. The well-defined remains of ancient camps are numerous on the slopes overlooking the Frome, Maiden Castle and the Roman amphitheatre being wonderfully perfect in their typical character. ”