Framingham Legends & Lore

by James L. Parr

  To that end, Washington appointed Henry Knox—twenty-five years old at the time—as commander of the artillery, such as it was. Since artillery was the only thing that might drive the English out of Boston, it was important to amass whatever he could find. Knox immediately came up with the idea of transporting the large number of mortars and cannons that had been captured at Fort Ticonderoga when it had been seized by Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys in May 1775. The only problem was that Ticonderoga stood on the shores of Lake George in upstate New York—three hundred miles to the west, and on the other side of the Berkshire Mountains. Washington gave Knox the go-ahead and authorized an expenditure of £1,700 for the purpose.

  Knox arrived at Ticonderoga in early December 1775 and immediately set about assembling the large number of oxen, wagons, sleds, sledges, etc. needed to transport the dozens of field pieces and ammunition. The journey was arduous and took much longer than the three weeks Knox had estimated. That Knox was able to do it at all given the terrain he encountered, using mid-eighteenth-century technology, was an engineering marvel.

  According to General William Heath, Knox arrived at the army’s headquarters in Cambridge on January 18, 1776, and the artillery train, at that point near Springfield, Massachusetts, was ordered to halt in Framingham. We know the artillery was at Framingham a week later. Patriot leaders John Adams and Elbridge Gerry were on their way to attend the Continental Congress in Philadelphia and stopped for dinner (a midday meal in this case) on January 25, 1776, at (where else?) Buckminster’s tavern. Adams noted in his diary that afterward “Coll. Buckminster…shewed us, the Train of Artillery brought down from Ticonderoga, by Coll. Knox.” The two then proceeded to supper at “Maynards,” presumably the old Jonathan Maynard tavern on Maple Street, which by this time was operated by his son Joseph, although historian Stephen Herring suggests they may have gone to William Maynard’s on Salem End Road just east of the junction with Temple Street, before heading to Worcester the next morning.

  Monument memorializing the passage of the Knox artillery train through Framingham. Photo by Edward P. Barry.

  It makes sense that the artillery would be held up in Framingham, a sufficient distance away from Boston, so as not to tip off the British before they were able to be deployed. The guns were kept at the houses along “Pike Row,” a line of properties that began at the Pike-Haven house (still standing) on the corner of Grove and Belknap Streets and extended eastward. The oxen were said to have been kept at the Hemenway (later Whiting) farm on Brook Street, in a barn that burned down in 1958. Just how long the artillery remained in Framingham is open to conjecture, although the first deployment in positions surrounding Boston did not begin until late February.

  In the end, the cannons served their purpose: once the colonists had taken Dorchester Heights (in what would now be termed South Boston), they commanded Boston, and the British withdrew from the city on March 17, 1776.

  LOYALISTS IN FRAMINGHAM

  Not everyone in Framingham supported the Revolution, of course. Although since Patriots dominated the town, as they did Massachusetts and New England in general, most of those who harbored doubts about the rebel cause largely kept those thoughts to themselves.

  One Loyalist created a great many headaches for Colonel Joseph Buckminster, by then in his late seventies. Commodore Joshua Loring of Roxbury, who had commanded the British naval forces on Lake Champlain during the French and Indian War, left his home on April 19, 1775, never to return, as he could not bear the thought of abandoning the flag and king he fought for in his distinguished military career. His young son John Loring joined the Royal Navy at the age of fourteen but was soon captured by the rebels and imprisoned in the jail at Concord. His prominent uncle Obadiah Curtis interceded and, given the boy’s youth, he was released into the care of Curtis’s father-in-law, Colonel Buckminster in Framingham, sufficiently far from the sea to avoid getting into further trouble. That Buckminster was a Patriot was unquestioned; two of his sons were officers in the militia and fought at Bunker Hill, while his son-in-law Colonel Jonathan Brewer was an officer in the Continental army. Nonetheless, Buckminster soon found himself in an awkward position, caught between his sense of family obligation and the anger of his friends. Loring persisted in taunting Buckminster’s Framingham neighbors, calling them “rascally rebels” and worse, and the enraged townsmen threatened to demolish Buckminster’s home for harboring the young Tory. It was no doubt with a great sense of relief that Buckminster saw Loring leave town in 1776 as part of a prisoner exchange. John Loring went on to a distinguished career in the Royal Navy, attaining the rank of commodore and seeing extensive service during the Napoleonic Wars.

  Framingham’s most prominent Loyalist was Nathaniel Brinley. He leased the old Joseph Buckminster property on Millwood and Winch Streets beginning in 1760. Although the farm was a large one and a source of income for Brinley, he apparently maintained it as a summer estate and a seasonal residence. (The farm employed a large number of servants, both white and black, including one Daniel Shays, who became famous for leading a revolt against the state government in 1786.) When the war broke out, the Brinleys were at their residence in Boston, but four months following the British evacuation in March 1776 Nathaniel was arrested. His only offense seems to have been that he had signed an address to Governor Gage, which his wife later maintained had been done only under duress. The authorities in Boston decided that to be on the safe side he should be confined to Framingham. Not only had he already been at least a seasonal resident of the town, but as in the case of John Loring, Framingham was securely in Patriot hands and safely distant from the coast.

  The Committee of Safety in Framingham took its responsibility to secure Brinley quite seriously. It placed him in the custody of John Fiske, who resided on the southeast corner of Walnut and Main Streets. Not only did he have to labor on Fiske’s farm, but he was also not allowed to stray more than twenty rods from the dwelling house without being accompanied by Fiske and was denied the use of pen, ink and paper. When his wife appealed that his treatment in Framingham went far beyond his sentence, the council in Boston clarified that Brinley was to be confined within the borders of the town but not otherwise restrained. The Committee of Safety appealed this ruling to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, citing that Brinley had expressed his Loyalist leanings and must have had advance notice of the British march on Lexington, as he had moved his family and most of his furnishings out of Framingham in the weeks before April 19. The response to this appeal was more ambiguous, stating only that Brinley was to remain under the jurisdiction of the Committee of Safety in Framingham.

  Meanwhile, Brinley had been transferred to the farm of Benjamin Eaton and placed under the additional burden of not being allowed to speak to anyone, including his wife, unless Eaton himself or another member of his family was present. Finally, after about a month, the Massachusetts Council and House of Representatives acting in concert took pity on the beleaguered Brinley and sent him to his kinsman Francis Brinley of Newport, Rhode Island, requiring only that he post £600 bond. Brinley’s Tory leanings could not have been that strong; unlike most Loyalists, who fled to England or Canada, after the war he settled in Tyngsborough, Massachusetts, where he died in 1814 at the age of eighty-one. His old property in Framingham, which he had never actually owned, continued to be known as the “Brinley Farm” for generations.

  THE ORDEAL OF JONATHAN MAYNARD

  Jonathan Maynard was born on January 22, 1752, the son of Jonathan and Martha (Gleason) Maynard. His parents’ house was located on the north side of Salem End Road, a few hundred yards to the east of the Temple Street intersection. His grandfather, also named Jonathan Maynard, had moved to Framingham from Sudbury in 1713 and established a tavern in the house that he bought from John Towne that still stands on the north side of Maple Street. (Towne was the nephew of the three sisters tried as witches at Salem whom we met in Chapter Two.)

  Jonathan graduated from Harvard College with t
he class of 1775, just in time for the outbreak of the American Revolution. He was still in Cambridge in April 1775, and therefore missed the Battle of Lexington and Concord, unlike his older brother William and cousins John and Needham Maynard, who were Minutemen from Framingham. He enlisted within the week, however, and served alongside the three of them at the Battle of Bunker Hill in June of that year.

  Maynard served in the army throughout the war. He participated in the Battles of Stillwater and Saratoga, but the most famous incident of his military career occurred at the little-known Battle of Cobleskill in central New York on May 30, 1778. There Mohawk and Tories under the command of Chief Joseph Brant burned the settlement to the ground, and Maynard’s unit, which was trying to relieve the settlers, was driven back with heavy casualties. The rest of his company was killed but, as he was a lieutenant and wore a sword, he was taken captive and brought before Brant himself. According to lore, the chieftain had determined that Maynard would be burned alive, but as he was being tied to the stake, the Masonic symbols on his arms became visible. Brant recognized Maynard as a fellow Freemason and stayed his execution, instead conveying him as a prisoner to British-held Quebec. There he remained for well over two years until he was exchanged on December 26, 1780. He was promoted to the rank of captain before finally leaving the service on November 19, 1782.

  Variations of this tale are told about three other American officers. According to various Masonic and Revolutionary histories, Colonel John McKinstry, Major John Wood and Lieutenant Thomas Boyd all employed the lifesaving Mason’s distress signal to avoid a horrid death at the hands of Chief Brant. While we will not try to evaluate the credibility of the stories regarding the other officers, there is some evidence supporting Maynard’s tale.

  House built by John Towne, nephew of convicted witch Sarah Clayes; it later became the Jonathan Maynard tavern.

  Mohawk chief Joseph Brant.

  Captain Jonathan Maynard.

  We know through official army documents and contemporary diaries that Maynard was indeed captured at the Battle of Cobleskill on May 30, 1778, in a fight against Brant’s Mohawk and was held prisoner until 1780. Maynard had joined the Masons the previous winter along with a number of fellow officers while bivouacked outside Albany. Perhaps what is the strangest part of the tale is easiest to believe—that a Native American chieftain could have been a Mason. For Brant was no ordinary Mohawk; he had been educated at the Indian school conducted by Dr. Eleazer Wheelock, who went on to found Dartmouth College; he was well traveled in the white world and had recently returned from a trip to Europe, where he was presented to the Court of St. James. He was already a legendary commander, so it is not impossible to believe that he might have joined the order while in England.

  In the very least, Maynard seems to have told the tale himself during his lifetime. The memoir of Neal Dow, the Civil War general and national temperance leader who married a granddaughter of Jonathan’s older brother William, recounts Dow’s having visited the old man in Framingham during the summer of 1830. (Interestingly, Dow relates the story of the ordeal as a tale of how Maynard’s hair had turned white almost overnight as a result of the scare put into him by his near execution.) In his biography of Brant published in 1838, William L. Stone published the excerpt of a letter telling of Maynard’s account written by George Folsom, an attorney in Worcester from 1830 to 1837. It seems likely that Folsom may have known Maynard personally. Furthermore, Folsom was well respected as a historian, having been an early contributor to the American Antiquarian Society, chairing its publications committee and, after 1838, the New York Historical Society.

  After the war, Maynard returned to Framingham and married Lois Eaton on May 30, 1784. He erected a house on the west side of Pleasant Street, just north of the intersection with Maynard Road, which still stands today. He soon became one of the town’s most prominent citizens, serving at one time or another as justice of the peace, selectman, town clerk, state representative, state senator and Framingham’s first postmaster. In his will, he designated half a township in Washington County, Maine, be granted for the benefit of Framingham Academy.

  Perhaps it was a sign of gratitude toward the institution that saved his life when Maynard played a key role in the founding of the Middlesex Lodge of Masons in Framingham. He served as the lodge’s first master and offered the large third floor of his home as a meeting place for many years. The most notable meeting occurred during that first year at the Maynard house when Paul Revere himself, in his capacity as grand master of the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts, presided over the formal installation of officers on November 25, 1795. Maynard died on July 17, 1835.

  The Captain Jonathan Maynard house on Pleasant Street.

  THE LEGACY OF THE REVOLUTION IN FRAMINGHAM

  To a remarkable degree, given its proximity to these great events, the town of Framingham emerged from the Revolution relatively unscathed. Individual lives were changed, surely, but it had not wrought the devastation and wrenching changes as had King Philip’s War a century earlier.

  The new Massachusetts constitution ended slavery for good in 1783, but there had never been that many slaves in Framingham (although two of them played remarkably prominent roles in the Revolutionary era). Unlike in some communities, there was not a significant displaced Loyalist local elite—only poor Nathaniel Brinley was forced from town, and he had been a renter, not an owner, and evidently not that ardent a Tory at that. The war had been the formative experience for a new generation of leaders, but most of them—Buckminster, Maynard, Nixon, Trowbridge, et al.—already came from well-established families.

  In the end, Framingham was still a quiet farming town. The coming nineteenth century, with its new technologies, new immigration, (mostly) peaceful revolutions in transportation, markets and the first hints of a consumer culture, would do far more to change everyday life in Framingham.

  Chapter Four

  THUNDER SENT FROM HEAVEN

  WEIRD WEATHER

  While the previous chapters have dealt with the acts of men and women, no history of Framingham would be complete without also chronicling what the insurance industry calls “acts of God.” Given the Puritan heritage of most of Framingham’s earliest English settlers, it was not a phrase taken lightly.

  Today’s weather watchers have an amazing amount of resources available to them for predicting meteorological events. Up-to-the-minute satellite and radar images can be accessed by Internet, television and even cell phone. Every winter storm is treated as a major blizzard by TV forecasters, with continuous coverage beginning days before the first flake ever falls. Over the centuries, Framingham’s citizens have endured momentous, even catastrophic weather events without even a moment’s warning, beginning with the first settlers in the seventeenth century. Hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, ice storms, lightning and even earthquakes have plagued Framingham for over three hundred years.

  Aftermath of the ice storm of January 21, 1921, in Framingham Centre.

  THE REVEREND JOHN SWIFT

  Framingham’s earliest weather chronicler may have been its first minister, the Reverend John Swift. The twenty-one-year-old Milton native was ordained October 8, 1701, although he had been preaching in the town for a year prior. The town then set about providing him with a house and fenced-in pasture on the ministerial land set aside by Thomas Danforth, encompassing the east side of Bare Hill to the Sudbury River. Nevertheless, Swift often had to confront the town elders, as the town was not always prompt or thorough in living up to the letter of its agreement to furnish the minister with firewood or other payment in kind. Despite these hardships, he was apparently never tempted to move, as he was still serving as Framingham’s minister when he died on April 24, 1745.

  Reverend Swift made many weather observations in his journal over a ten-year period, limiting his descriptions to either short passages or one or two words, sometimes in Latin, even when the event called for a more detailed account. For example, a storm in February 1717 that
dropped six to seven feet of snow on Framingham and is today considered one of the worst storms of the eighteenth century was simply noted by Reverend Swift in his journal as “deep snow.”

  On the evening of October 29, 1727, an earthquake that has since been estimated at a magnitude of 5.5 on the modern Richter scale struck the Northeast from Maine to Philadelphia. Eyewitness accounts across the state give great detail to the event. The quake struck shortly after eleven o’clock at night with a noise like booming cannons. It lasted for about two minutes, shaking chimneys loose and causing windows and doors to fly open. Cattle ran across fields bellowing in confusion and fear; dogs barked wildly in homes and in the streets. In Boston and surrounding towns, terrified citizens gathered in churches, seeking reassurance from their ministers that the quake was not a punishment or judgment from an angry God. For weeks following the quake, pastors preached about its meaning and the lessons to be learned from such an event. A forty-five-page sermon delivered in Boston the Sunday after the tremor by Boston’s Reverend Cotton Mather was later published and sold under the grand title “A Short Essay to preserve and strengthen the Good Impressions Produced by Earthquakes on the Minds of People that have been Awakened with them, With some Views of what is to be Further and Quickly look’d for.” Incredibly, a tremor felt in Amesbury, Massachusetts, in October 2007 and measuring 1.8 on the Richter scale is believed to have been an aftershock of the 1727 quake felt 280 years later.

  And what did the Reverend John Swift scribe in his journal on this fearful day? A short Latin phrase loosely translated into: “Between ten and eleven at night the earth moved in a dreadful and intense manner.”