Framingham Legends & Lore

by James L. Parr

  These virtues are cast into particular relief when one considers the career of Danforth’s de facto successor, Joseph Buckminster. Buckminster was born July 31, 1666, at Muddy River (now Brookline), Massachusetts Bay Colony. He was only two years old when his father died; perhaps the resulting economic insecurity of his family while he was growing up contributed to the development of his subsequent character. The Reverend William Barry, an early chronicler of Framingham, reports that he was “a man tall and athletic of great physical power, and of a resolute spirit.” To say he possessed a resolute spirit may have been an understatement.

  Buckminster first appeared in the story of Framingham in May 1693. Thomas Danforth, over seventy years old and still residing at Cambridge, had decided that he could no longer personally supervise the leasing of land at Framingham. Therefore, after setting aside the three reserved tracts of land noted above, he leased the remaining available land to Joseph Buckminster and his partner Joseph White of Roxbury. They, in turn, would sublet the land to families wishing to actually settle at Framingham. This partnership quickly ran into problems, as Buckminster and White failed to keep up their payments to Danforth. Buckminster evidently convinced Danforth that White had been the one at fault, as the two struck a new lease agreement on March 25, 1699. When Danforth died eight months later, Buckminster was left to his own devices.

  If one were charitable, one might be inclined to state that Buckminster had been handed a vague mandate that, when accompanied by the negligent oversight of Danforth’s heirs, may have led him occasionally to exceed the bounds of his authority. But the overall pattern of Buckminster’s actions bespeak of such bad faith, greed and general cantankerousness that it is difficult to endorse such a conclusion. One need only consider that all three of the land tracts set aside by Danforth eventually became embroiled in a lawsuit stemming from Buckminster’s mismanagement.

  Due to poor construction or maintenance, or possibly both, after only twenty-seven years the 1698 meetinghouse was in danger of falling down. Despite the wishes of approximately two-thirds of the residents to rebuild on the same site, Buckminster was steadfastly opposed. He lived in the north part of the town, on the southeast corner of Millwood and Winch Streets, and wished the building located nearer his own residence. When the town voted to go ahead anyway, a supply of lumber was cut and delivered to the old site; Buckminster obdurately took possession of the timbers and used them to erect a barn on his own property. This ignited a ten-year debate and engendered numerous lawsuits and acts of the legislature before a new meetinghouse was finally erected farther north on the Framingham Centre Common. In the process, Buckminster successfully managed to confiscate 35 acres of the land Danforth had originally set aside for the ministry when he argued that the court should recognize the original estimated acreage (140), rather than the original boundaries (which actually contained 175), set forth in Danforth’s deed. Buckminster’s son, Colonel Joseph Buckminster Jr., then built his house and tavern on this newly acquired acreage west of the old meetinghouse.

  If Buckminster’s handling of the ministerial lands seemed self-serving, his stewardship of the six hundred acres on Doeskin Hill and Nobscot Mountain held in trust for the Danforth heirs was nothing short of fraudulent. The land was held in common by Danforth’s heirs, and Buckminster had bought out the rights of some, but not all, of the heirs. Since the land had yet to be divided, he had no authority to dispose of any of the property, yet he sold off the best parcels for his own gain. His base criminality was exposed when it was discovered he had destroyed a tree marking the southeast border of the property and then marked a different tree more than a mile away in order to try to conceal his misdeeds. The Danforth heirs eventually sued Buckminster, and though he lost at every stage, he fought them tooth and nail. Even after Buckminster himself died at the age of eighty in 1747, his son continued to hold out. Finally, the land was divided for the Danforth heirs’ benefit in 1767, twenty years after Buckminster’s own death, twenty-five years after the lawsuit began and a full sixty-eight years after Thomas Danforth’s death.

  The fate of the Commons was similar. Buckminster had begun settling families on this commonly held parcel as early as 1693, when he directed the Salem End families to erect their farms there. (Since Danforth’s policy was to let families live rent-free for a number of years while they established themselves, Buckminster presumably did not want to allow them to settle on any land on which he might be able to charge someone else rent right away.) Once again lawsuits ensued, although this time Buckminster’s son, Colonel Joseph, had had enough of losing lawsuits and wisely agreed to settle.

  The actions of its progenitor notwithstanding, the Buckminster name eventually became both a prominent and well regarded one in the town. Similarly, despite the divisions and acrimony of its early years, in the first three quarters of the eighteenth century Framingham grew into a reasonably prosperous farming town on the fringes of the British Empire, before events just beyond its borders shattered that world forever.

  Chapter Three

  REBELS, RIOTERS AND SPIES

  Framingham in the American Revolution

  A TOWN OF FARMERS

  Framingham on the eve of the American Revolution was a small agricultural town. In the 1765 provincial census, the town had 205 houses containing 234 families and a total population of 1,313. While a huge increase over the mere 7 families who were living here in 1675, this was roughly similar to the population of the surrounding towns—Marlborough had 1,287 people, Concord 1,564, Sudbury (which still included Wayland) was a bit larger at 1,773, Sherborn smaller at 643 and Natick smaller still at 511. (Boston, by far the largest town in the province, had 15,520 residents.) Almost the entire population lived on farms—even those men who had other professions such as miller, carpenter, tavern keeper, shoemaker or blacksmith were generally also farmers.

  The surnames of the town officeholders in the early 1770s were largely familiar ones—Major Lawson Buckminster, Captain Josiah Stone, James Clayes Jr., Captain Joseph Eames—plus a few whose families were relative newcomers to Framingham, such as Major John Trowbridge, Daniel Sanger and Deacon William Brown. Yet perhaps the most prominent of Framingham’s sons to gain fame in the era of the Revolution was not culled from the ranks of these town fathers, although he was in fact owned by one of them.

  CRISPUS ATTUCKS, MARTYR TO THE REVOLUTION

  Those who lacked the means to own their own farms worked as laborers for others. At the bottom of society were slaves. Although small in scale compared to the South, slavery continued to exist in Massachusetts until it was outlawed just after the Revolution in 1783, when a court ruled it incompatible with the freedoms guaranteed in the new state constitution of 1780. In 1765, there were twenty-five African Americans living in Framingham, although it is unclear how many were free and how many were slaves.

  That some of them were slaves there is no doubt. There had been slaves in Framingham at least as early as 1716, when Jone Jackson, a slave owned by John Stone, sought her freedom. There were never large numbers of slaves in the town, just one or two owned by each of the wealthiest families, and their duties could vary widely. It did not resemble the gang labor employed in agriculture in the South that we often picture when thinking of slavery, though the institution was certainly no less abhorrent.

  Not much is definitely known about the life of Crispus Attucks. He is believed to have been half African American and half Native American and a descendant of John Auttuck, a Natick Indian who was hanged alongside Captain Tom during King Philip’s War in 1676 (see Chapter One). Local lore has it that he was born in the vicinity of Hartford Street in what is now Framingham, although at the time it lay within the bounds of Natick. On October 2, 1750, the following advertisement ran in the Boston Gazette:

  RAN-away from his Master, William Brown of Framingham, on the 30th of Sept. last, a Molatto Fellow, about 27 Year of Age, named Crispas [sic], 6 Feet two Inches high, short curl’d Hair, his Knees nearer together than
common; had on a light colour of Bearskin Coat, plain brown Fustian Jacket, or brown all-Wool one, new Buckskin Breeches, blue Yarn Stockings, and a check’d woolen Shirt. Whoever shall take up said Run-away, and convey him to his abovesaid Master, shall have ten Pounds, old Tenor Reward, and all necessary Charges paid. And all Masters of Vessels and others are hereby caution’d against concealing or carrying off said Servant on Penalty of the Law.

  It was said that other than this one incident, Attucks had a good relationship with his master, Deacon William Brown. He was deemed “a good judge of cattle,” and Brown gave him broad discretion to conduct business. He later became a sailor in the coastal trade, supposedly with Brown’s blessing, although it is also possible he simply ran away to sea.

  What is known is that in early 1770 Crispus Attucks was in Boston, waiting to ship out on a boat bound for North Carolina. He recently had come from New Providence, in the Bahamas, but contemporary newspaper accounts all emphasized that he hailed from Framingham. The city Attucks came to was filled with discontent, with British soldiers stationed there since 1768, charged with enforcement of a series of ever-changing revenue laws that had been flouted by the colonies since the Stamp Act riots of 1765.

  The British government was trying to fund the debt it had acquired in waging the Seven Years’ War, as well as establish the principle that Parliament had the power to levy direct taxation on its colonies in North America. Since the colonies had benefited directly from the war through the conquest of Quebec and the removal of the French threat on the continent, Parliament thought it reasonable that they be asked to shoulder some of the costs of the war. On the other hand, the colonists believed the sole power to tax lay with their own colonial assemblies since they had no representation in Parliament. They felt they possessed the same rights as his majesty’s subjects living in Britain, and yet they were being treated like a conquered country, with the British regulars acting as an army of occupation. So while it has sometimes been observed that the actual financial burden on the colonies was small—and most of the duties were indeed repealed shortly after they had gone into effect—both sides were standing on principle, important principle, about what the rights of the British subjects living in America really were.

  It was into this cauldron that Crispus Attucks, a sailor on shore leave with abundant free time, plunged himself fully on the evening of March 5, 1770. There had already been unrest in Boston—an eleven-year-old boy named Christopher Seider had been killed eleven days earlier, shot by a British customs service officer who had fired his musket into a mob throwing rocks at his house. At about nine o’clock, a scuffle broke out in the street between British soldiers and young boys armed with sticks, one of whom was wounded in the arm by a cutlass. Soon a crowd assembled at the customhouse, taunting the sentry and pelting him with snowballs and ice. A squad of eight soldiers came to his aid when a second group appeared, led by a “stout mulatto” brandishing a cordwood stick, charging up from Dock Square on the waterfront. This was Attucks, who—according to John Adams, an attorney defending the British officer from manslaughter charges—was bold and strong enough to grab one of the British muskets by the bayonet and throw the soldier to the ground. It was at this point that the soldiers opened fire. Attucks and Samuel Gray were the first to be hit, Gray dying immediately, Attucks surviving long enough to be brought into a nearby house before expiring. Three others also died—Samuel Maverick, Patrick Carr and James Caldwell. That night has gone down in history as the Boston Massacre, a key event galvanizing Patriot opposition to British rule.

  There has been much argument about Attucks over the years—whether he was a hero or a bully, whether he was a leader or the leader of the crowd or simply the man standing at the front, whether he was the first to be shot at the Boston Massacre and so on. But much of the debate seems to miss the point; he was a man from Framingham who challenged British power in one of the pivotal events of our history and paid the ultimate price. As such, in 2000 the town rightly honored his memory by naming after him the bridge over the Sudbury River on Old Connecticut Path, just south of the Deacon William Brown house where he had worked as a slave 250 years before.

  SPIES AT BUCKMINSTER’S TAVERN

  Relations between Britain and its American colonies continued to deteriorate following the Boston Massacre. Parliament eventually removed all the duties it had imposed, except for the one on tea, which remained as a mostly symbolic gesture emphasizing that Parliament had a right to impose such taxes on British colonies. At the same time, the British East India Company, faced with a surplus production of tea, was granted the exclusive import right for the colonies. This effectively undercut colonial merchants, who were no longer legally allowed to import tea, but prices had been driven so low that even with the added tax, British East India Company tea was still cheaper than the tea brought in illegally by colonial smugglers.

  In response, the colonies responded as they had to all previous duties—they boycotted all goods that Britain had taxed, in this case tea. Boston, as always, went a little further, and on December 16, 1773, Patriots there dressed as Indians raided three ships on the waterfront and dumped all the tea overboard. In response to the Boston Tea Party, as it became known, England adopted a series of increasingly punitive measures during 1774, including closing the port of Boston, until the tea that had been destroyed was paid for.

  By the beginning of 1775, tensions were near the breaking point. British troops controlled Boston, but reports filtered in to the new military governor that colonials were creating stores of arms and ammunition in several towns in the Massachusetts countryside should an armed rebellion arise. The governor, General Thomas Gage, decided he should send out a reconnaissance party to scout out the countryside so that a detachment of British soldiers could be sent to seize the supply depots once spring came to New England.

  On Thursday, February 23, 1775, three men set out from Boston bound for Worcester: Captain William Brown of the Fifty-second Regiment of Foot, Ensign Henry de Berniere of the Tenth Regiment of Foot and Brown’s “batman,” John. (A batman was an enlisted soldier assigned as a servant to an officer.) They were charged with noting the topography of the road and best routes, fordable streams, defensible positions, places where a unit could camp for the night—anything that might prove of possible military value. They were also to make maps and sketch prominent features as well as road junctions so that the soldiers could find the route and know what to expect along the way. What followed was not destined to go down among the annals of the great acts of espionage in military history.

  The three, “disguised like countrymen, in brown cloaths [sic] and reddish hankerchiefs round our necks,” were to pretend to be surveyors so as not to arouse suspicion. The prospect of two British officers, along with a servant, traveling the Massachusetts countryside in early 1775, sketching major roads, claiming to be surveyors somehow not arousing suspicion seems comical in retrospect, regardless of how like “countrymen” they dressed.

  The first day passed without incident. The travelers noted that Cambridge was “pretty with a brick college” and that neighboring Watertown was a big settlement by American terms, but would rank only a village in England. (That Cambridge was home to Harvard College was somehow news to the Englishmen, and their comparisons of Watertown to an English village spoke volumes about how much the three were proverbial fish out of water in the Middlesex countryside.) They came upon a tavern just over the line in Waltham, where they decided to stop for dinner and stay the night.

  The tavern was owned by Colonel Jonathan Brewer, a native of Framingham who had served in the French and Indian War before moving to Waltham in 1770. Brewer was an ardent Patriot, and while the officers were looking over their day’s work, Brewer’s black female servant brought in dinner. Making conversation, they offered the bland observation that this was “a fine country.” They were stunned when the servant replied, “So it is, and we have got brave fellows to defend it; and if you go up any higher you w
ill find it so.” Flummoxed, they paid their bill and immediately set out again to find somewhere else to spend the night. They subsequently learned from their batman, who had spoken to the woman, that she had recognized Brown as a British officer from the Boston garrison and immediately surmised what these “surveyors” were up to, especially after she had seen that they had sketched a map of the road through Charlestown and Cambridge.

  Their cover blown, the spies briefly considered returning to Boston. What kept them going was not their sense of the importance of their undertaking, nor military discipline, nor indeed their sense of duty to king and country—rather the realization that they would become the laughingstocks of the Boston garrison should they return in disgrace having so utterly failed in their mission. So they resolved to press on, although from now on they would try to hide their surveying from passersby and maintain a new cover story that they were sailors on shore leave out touring the New England countryside as a means of stretching their legs. This new alibi seems hardly more credible than the old one, as one would expect to find idle sailors in the grogshops along the Boston waterfront rather than traipsing about rural Massachusetts in February.

  After traversing Waltham, they stopped for a drink at the Golden Ball tavern in Weston. (This structure still stands, preserved as a historic site.) Here they were pleased that the proprietor, Elisha Jones, proved less inquisitive than the innkeepers of Waltham, and they arranged to stay the night. The owner lit a fire in their chamber, and when the travelers asked for coffee, he replied that they could have whichever they wanted, coffee or tea. The offer of tea was a loaded question in those days of the boycott, so the soldiers immediately knew their tavern keeper was a Loyalist friend, and they took great comfort in talking to him. (One wonders whether they might have been alarmed that virtually everyone whom they encountered immediately recognized them as British soldiers on a scouting mission, but if this worried them, they did not voice such concerns.)