LUCKY LOTHROP WIGHT
The Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861 thrust America into the Civil War. Thousands of volunteers from across the nation enthusiastically enlisted in the cause, including over five hundred from Framingham. One of those volunteers was a young man named Lothrop Wight. Son of a prominent real estate owner in town and Framingham Academy graduate, the twenty-three-year-old Wight mustered in as a second lieutenant with the Sixteenth Massachusetts Volunteers in July 1861. After a short trip to Boston, the regiment traveled on to Fort Monroe, Virginia, for training. Within a short time, Wight found himself battling not for his country, but for his career as a soldier.
During the course of training at Fort Monroe, Lieutenant Wight had become unhappy with the leadership of his captain, Henry Lawson, and had filed charges against him. Confident that Lawson would be found guilty and removed of his regimental command, Wight began voicing that opinion to the soldiers serving under him. Over the course of several days in October, the lieutenant was heard to have called Captain Lawson a “damned fool.” He also remarked that if the regiment were to go into battle, Lawson would be relegated to the rear of the company and he, Lieutenant Wight, would be called upon to lead the troops. A sergeant in the company looking for extra blankets was told by Wight to take Captain Lawson’s, because “he wouldn’t be needing them much longer.” Not surprisingly, the arrogant and downright insubordinate words of Lieutenant Wight caused charges to be filed against him, and soon he was on trial under general court-martial for, among other infractions, “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.” Several of Wight’s men testified against him, and he was promptly found guilty of all charges and “cashiered out,” or dishonorably discharged, in November 1861. The charges against Captain Lawson were not pursued, and he continued to serve in the Sixteenth Massachusetts Volunteers until he died of disease at Chancellorsville, Virginia, in October 1864.
Lothrop Wight.
Lothrop Wight was given another chance to prove that he could be a good commander. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy in June 1862 and served with distinction on several ships for the duration of the war. Wight’s various positions of command on the ships Wachusett, Vanderbilt and Mendota included officer of the watch, acting master’s mate and acting chief. While serving on the Vanderbilt, he crossed the oceans of the world hunting down the Confederate ship Alabama, with no luck. The crew of the Vanderbilt did, however, capture three blockade runners during its yearlong chase.
It was while serving on the USS Mendota, however, that Wight proved himself in battle and earned a place in Framingham legend. The Mendota had been patrolling the James River throughout 1864, supporting the Union attack on the Confederate-held city of Richmond, Virginia, and was regularly assaulted by artillery on the shore. In one particularly intense attack at the end of July, Wight was hit by a Confederate bullet. Miraculously, the bullet struck a penny that Wight was carrying in his pocket. The bullet made a large indentation in the penny, fusing its silver metal to the copper of the coin and saving the life of the lucky lieutenant. After the war, Wight became a florist in Wellesley Hills, where he lived quietly until his death in 1918. The lucky penny that saved his life was passed down to his granddaughter, who donated it to the Framingham Historical Society and Museum in 1976.
The penny that saved the life of Lieutenant Wight.
Framingham boasts another Civil War sailor with a strange tale; yet this sailor did not fight under the Stars and Stripes, but under the flag of the Confederacy.
A REBEL ON UNION AVENUE
By the time he arrived in Framingham from Post Mills, Vermont, in 1898, Thomas Chubb had already lived a life of adventure and achievement. Shortly after his birth in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1839, Chubb and his family moved to Galveston, Texas, where his father, also named Thomas, began a successful shipping company. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the Yankee-born Chubb men served the Confederacy proudly. The elder Thomas captained a blockade runner, the Royal Yacht. Thomas the younger was a commander on several different ships and was eventually captured near the end of the war. He obtained his freedom by paying a substantial fine.
After the war, Chubb contracted yellow fever and was advised by doctors that his health would only improve if he moved north—back to the area of his birth and the home of the victorious Union army. He arrived with his family in Post Mills, Vermont, in 1868 and, not surprisingly, got a chilly reception from the local citizens. Chubb soon became fast friends and business partners with local entrepreneur William Marsten. Together in the early 1870s they founded a successful fishing rod manufacturing company. The Chubb factory produced the first machine-made rods in the world, which were renowned and coveted for their superior quality. Chubb’s rods and other fishing products were promoted heavily, the distinct star logo and Chubb’s bearded visage appearing in hundreds of newspaper and magazine ads across the country. Eventually the people of Chubb’s adopted home came to accept and even respect him, so much so that he successfully ran for several local offices before being elected to both the Vermont house and senate.
By 1898, the successful sailor, businessman and politician needed a change. His fishing rod factory had burned and been rebuilt several times. Although it was still successful, Chubb sold out and moved south to Framingham, where he bought a house on Union Avenue. He later built a house on Warren Avenue and became active in town affairs. Every summer he would return to Post Mills to spend time with his Vermont acquaintances. In the summer of 1910, Chubb was gathered with friends, saying his usual goodbyes before his trip north. Before departing, he startled his friends by revealing a strange premonition he had. He told them that he would not be returning to Framingham; that he would die in Post Mills and be buried next to his wife on the ninth of July. Chubb was so sure of his premonition that he packed his most treasured possession—a Confederate flag. Within a few days of departing Framingham, Thomas Chubb’s prediction had come true. He was laid to rest in Vermont on the very day he had predicted, his head resting on the Confederate flag under which he had fought so many years earlier.
Nineteenth-century magazine advertisement for Chubb fishing rods. Courtesy of James L. Parr.
THE “BATTLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC”
During the nineteenth century, Washington’s Birthday was a holiday celebrated with nearly as much patriotic fervor as Independence Day. Parades, fireworks, military displays and speeches were all popular forms of entertainment on February 22 each year.
The 130th anniversary of Washington’s Birthday in 1862 took on new meaning as the nation was nearing the end of its first year in the Civil War. A proclamation by President Lincoln urged Americans to include in their public observances a reading of Washington’s farewell address to his troops. Framingham’s program was held at the Plymouth Congregational Church on the town common, with Normal School principal George Bigelow reading the Washington speech. Several poems and hymns were also included in the program, one of them a stirring tribute and call to victory for the Union entitled “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” written by Julia Ward Howe and recently published in the Atlantic Monthly. At the end of the program, for the first time in public, Howe’s lyrics were sung to the now familiar and often parodied tune. Little did the audience in Plymouth Church know the depth of meaning that would later become attached to this song as the war dragged on for three more years.
The melody to which Howe set her lyrics is said to have come from the camp meeting circuit of the early 1800s. The tune had earlier been appropriated by soldiers of the Massachusetts Militia stationed at Fort Warren on George’s Island in Boston Harbor. When a fellow soldier named John Brown died while stationed at the fort, his comrades invented various lyrics to the old tune in tribute, one of the lyrics being “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.” The song and its new lyrics became popular in Boston, where Julia Ward Howe was living at the time. Many residents mistakenly believed the song to be about the abolitionist John Brown, who had been
arrested and executed for his raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. In true folk-tune tradition, new verses were anonymously added and passed on.
Cover of 1862 program that featured the first public singing of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Page from 1862 program with words to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
While touring army camps with her husband in Washington in November 1861, Julia Ward Howe and her companions were heard singing the John Brown song with some of the Union soldiers. A friend suggested she write new lyrics to the tune, and the next morning Mrs. Howe dashed off the lyrics in one sitting, knowing even then that something special had just been created. The song became a national anthem for the war effort and was revered to the point that, in 1863, a New York school principal was fired for refusing to sing the song with her students as directed by the school board.
Julia Ward Howe made several appearances in Framingham after the war, including the recitation of a poem to a crowd of two thousand suffrage supporters gathered at Harmony Grove in 1874. In June 1900, Mrs. Howe was invited to speak on the subject of character during a celebration of the town’s 200th anniversary held at the Grace Congregational Church on Union Avenue. During the program, a group of schoolchildren had the unique privilege of singing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” to an audience that included the song’s author, in the same town where it had first been sung publicly thirty-eight years earlier.
A BRAND-NEW FRAMINGHAM
By the end of the Civil War in 1865, Framingham had been transformed into a completely different town than it had been at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Not only had its population almost tripled since 1800—from 1,625 to 4,665—but it had grown much more diverse, with new Irish Catholic immigrants added to the old Yankee population. It was now a town of railroads and turnpikes, with two industrial villages at Saxonville and South Framingham that had not previously existed, and even the relatively sleepy Centre was a much more dynamic place. The explosive growth would only accelerate over the next forty-five years as the population reached 12,948 by 1910 and included even more new immigrant groups from Southern and Eastern Europe. But the pattern for this growth had already been established.
Chapter Six
REFORM AND RECREATION
Framingham in the Victorian Era
THE INDOMITABLE SPIRIT OF REFORM
The reform spirit that had fed the abolitionist movement did not entirely dissipate after the Civil War. Instead, the energy was fed into new movements—temperance, women’s suffrage, prison reform, education and religious enlightenment, among many others. If the business of Framingham undoubtedly remained business during the Victorian era, this chapter will examine a different side of the community, one striving for moral improvement or diversion, sometimes both at the same time. The reader may rest assured that we will get back to business in the next chapter.
THE SHERBORN REFORMATORY
The facility that is today known as the Massachusetts Correctional Institute–Framingham began its life in a different town with a different name. Originally known as the Massachusetts Reformatory Prison for Women, it was established in the town of Sherborn in 1877. When the town of Framingham annexed 565 acres of north Sherborn in 1924, it also acquired the women’s prison and its colorful history.
The Sherborn Reformatory was the first women’s prison in the country, begun by social reformers with the intent of actually changing the lives of its inmates rather than merely incarcerating them. To accomplish this mission, the women were put to work on the four-hundred-acre farm that surrounded the imposing brick prison building. A variety of vegetables and grain crops were grown, and pigs, cows, sheep and poultry were also raised. For a time, the inmates raised silkworms, which spun their cocoons in the 128 mulberry trees planted expressly for that purpose. A shirt-making industry was also operated on the grounds. Receipts from the sale of the prison’s products were used to cover operating expenses.
Sherborn Reformatory (now MCI–Framingham) in a nineteenth-century view.
Another crucial component of the inmates’ reformation was the grading system used to encourage and reward hard work and good behavior. Upon entering the institution, inmates were assigned a grade, or division, from one to four. Inmates in the higher divisions were given more comfortable rooms and privileges, such as letter writing and tea taking. Some inmates in Division 4 were sent out to work as domestics in local homes. A point system, much like a report card, was used to keep track of an inmate’s progress, allowing her to gain more privileges as she moved up through the divisions.
One of the first superintendents of the reformatory was Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross. Miss Barton had been deeply immersed in her Red Cross work in the spring of 1883 when the governor of Massachusetts, retired General Benjamin Butler, asked her to take over the superintendent’s position. Although she was reluctant to leave her Red Cross mission, Barton felt a fierce loyalty to Butler, who had strongly supported her as she ministered to the wounded and dying on the battlefields during the Civil War. After taking a tour of the facility, she agreed to take the position, but only for six months. Although the facility had been open for only six years at the time Barton took over, it had already earned a national reputation as a model for reform. Clara Barton’s short stewardship only reinforced that reputation.
Her tenure there was marked by kindness and empathy toward the women, many of whom she viewed not as criminals but as victims of poverty, alcohol and the social double standards of the time. She treated them with a respect and human dignity they had never experienced before. Her reputation as the “Angel of the Battlefield” during the Civil War inspired awe in the prisoners who met her as she walked the hallways and gave talks in the chapel. Upon their release, many inmates tearfully promised her they would turn their lives around. Barton also made improvements to the prison’s educational, governmental and business systems. She stayed two months longer than she had agreed to, returning to the American Red Cross in early 1884.
Barton was succeeded by Mrs. Ellen Johnson, who held the post for fifteen years until her death in 1899. Despite several unfortunate incidents over the years, including a series of prisoner riots in 1888, Johnson ran the reformatory with efficiency and compassion and is remembered as one of the most successful and innovative reformers of the nineteenth century.
CATTLE ANNIE AND LITTLE BRITCHES
Two of the reformatory’s most notorious residents arrived in the fall of 1895 from the wilds of Oklahoma. Anna McDoulet and Jennie Metcalf, better known as “Cattle Annie” and “Little Britches,” were only fifteen years old, but they were already experienced criminals. As members of the Bill Dalton outlaw gang, the tobacco-chewing, gun-toting teens stole horses, sold whiskey to the natives and acted as lookouts during robberies. Jennie was arrested after a shootout in which she easily handled a pair of massive six-shooters. Because of their youth, both girls received relatively light sentences of two years at the Sherborn Reformatory, where they would learn “womanly duties” and “get accustomed to the civilized, proper style of life.” Their arrival in Sherborn brought crowds of people to the prison gates, hoping to get a glimpse of the “Oklahoma Girl Bandits” at work in the fields. After spending about a year farming, doing laundry and other chores, the girls were released, having turned their lives around at Sherborn. Although there are conflicting accounts of their lives after they were released, their criminal careers were well behind them. The girl outlaws remain a part of Wild West lore to this day. In 1981, Hollywood produced a movie loosely based on their adventures called Cattle Annie and Little Britches, starring Diane Lane, Amanda Plummer and Burt Lancaster.
THE CHAUTAUQUA ASSEMBLIES AT LAKEVIEW
The names Mount Wayte, Methodist Campground, New England Chautauqua, New England Sunday School Assembly and Lakeview all refer to the hilly area located to the northwest of Farm Pond. Originally named for Richard Wayte, the Boston resident who was granted three hundred acres by the Bay Co
lony in 1658, we recall it as the site of the infamous Eames massacre of 1676, as related in Chapter One. Nearly two hundred years later, in 1871, the Methodist Church purchased forty-five acres and established a summer campground there, which they named “Lakeview.”
Camp meetings were a popular summer diversion offered since the early 1800s, gaining in popularity after the Civil War. The first camp meeting at Lakeview began rather humbly in August 1872, with five hundred participants staying in tents and attending daily scripture readings, prayer services and hymn sings. By the next summer, several wooden cottages had been built and the facility included mail service, a bookstore and a barbershop. Over the next few years, both the crowds and the campus grew, and in 1880, the first meeting of the New England Chautauqua Assembly took place. The Chautauqua Movement was begun in 1874 by two Methodist ministers who intended to advance the social, physical, moral and intellectual lives of its members. The name came from New York State’s Lake Chautauqua, where the first assembly took place. Assemblies were held each summer across the country, and the campground at Lakeview was the headquarters for the New England Assembly.
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