Framingham Legends & Lore (13 page)

Chapter Five

MERCHANTS AND ABOLITIONISTS

Framingham in the Nineteenth Century

T
HE
L
ITTLE
R
ED
S
TORE AT
F
RAMINGHAM
C
ENTRE

In 1781, when the formal end of the American Revolution was still two years away, a small but not insignificant event took place in the quiet environs of Framingham Centre, just south of the common. In that year Daniel Bridge, felt maker and hatter, constructed a tiny shop where the Esty Block now stands on Route 30. No one could have known it then, but Bridge's modest “little red store,” the earliest structure built exclusively for commerce in the village, was the first sign of the commercial and industrial development that was to come in the nineteenth century. This quiet agrarian town would slowly but steadily become a little bit less of both.

T
HE
M
ILLERS OF
S
TONE
'
S
E
ND

The first “industrial” structures in town were the mills built by the Stone family, the earliest settlers of Framingham. As related in
Chapter One
, they lived in what is now known as Saxonville, but for a long time before was called “Stone's End.” John Stone established the first corn mill at the falls by 1659; his son Daniel established a sawmill at the same site sometime shortly thereafter. Daniel's grandson Micah Stone built the first fulling mill, necessary for the manufacture of cloth, on an island in the Sudbury River by 1735.

As the town's population expanded, other grist- and sawmills were built in other sections of the town, although always dependent on a stream or river for power, of course. One of these neighborhood gristmills was constructed after 1748 by Deacon William Brown, the owner of Crispus Attucks, just east of where Old Connecticut Path crosses Cochituate Brook. William's son built an adjoining sawmill there about 1795. Deacon Brown had also built a fulling mill about 1775 at a separate location, this one farther down Cochituate Brook to the southwest of his house on the opposite side of the Old Connecticut Path bridge. The Brown family's two mill privileges on Cochituate Brook would prove remarkably important to the industrial development of Framingham.

T
HE
F
RAMINGHAM
M
ANUFACTURING
C
OMPANY AND THE
W
ILLIAM
K
NIGHT
C
ARPET
F
ACTORY

In 1811, a limited liability stock company was formed to purchase the old Brown mill privilege east of Old Connecticut Path. The Framingham Manufacturing Company, as it was called, was probably the first corporation of any kind to exist in town, and the company immediately began to erect a cotton mill on the site. The mill grew rapidly, attracting a number of families whose children worked there, opened a store and employed their own blacksmith. Though the company did a large volume of business, it never proved especially profitable, and the proprietors put the factory up for sale in 1821. It was acquired by an I. McLellan of Boston, who continued to operate it for a number of years until the factory burned down in 1834. The privilege was eventually acquired by William H. Knight in 1844.

Knight, a native of England, had first come to Framingham in 1824 to work as superintendant of the Saxon Factory. After briefly relocating to Connecticut, he returned in 1828 and purchased the privilege to Deacon Brown's old fulling mill. There he erected a carpet factory that, in contrast to the cotton factory nearby, was almost immediately successful. He bought a second privilege on the brook to build a larger carpet works in 1839, and in 1844 bought out the old Framingham Manufacturing Co. site. At his peak in 1845, Knight employed 191 men and 41 women in three factories along Cochituate Brook. And yet the next year he was out of business—the City of Boston bought out Knight's interests in all three factories in order to construct the Cochituate reservoir. Before one gets too teary-eyed for Knight, he walked away from the deal with $150,000 for his troubles—a considerable fortune for the 1840s.

T
HE
S
AXON
F
ACTORY

The largest and most long-lasting of the mills of the early nineteenth century was the Saxon Factory. In 1822, its proprietors bought out the land on both sides of the Sudbury River at Stone's End. There they erected a large cotton woolen factory. By 1832, they were operating five separate mills at the site with 246 employees. They were bought out by the New England Worsted Company in 1837, which then changed the focus of its manufacture to worsted carpet yarns and woolen blankets. In 1858, the entire operation was purchased by Michael H. Simpson, beginning sixty years of family ownership. Simpson changed the name to Saxonville Mills and immediately profited by the coming of the Civil War three years later, when his factories churned out uniforms and blankets for the Union army.

It is impossible to overstate the impact the mills had on Stone's End, which soon became known as Saxonville. (The Saxon Factory itself owed its name to the Saxony breed of sheep, whose wool was processed by the mills.) Saxonville was a company town and, in the hands of the Simpson family, this was not a bad thing. Simpson employed a paternalistic form of management and oversaw nearly every aspect of life in the village. He lived in the town in his early years, as did many members of his family after him, although he eventually built a new mansion house across the line in Wayland after he remarried. He developed parks and looked after the interests of his employees. The only downside to this model of corporate benevolence is that it relies upon both the goodwill of corporate management and the profitability of the corporation. Both took a decided turn for the worse after the Simpson family sold the mills in 1917—but that was a long time in the future.

In the meantime the factories, as well as the construction of the reservoirs and aqueducts for the Boston water supply, brought a whole new population to Framingham—Irish immigrants. St. George's Church in Saxonville, the first in Framingham, was dedicated June 1, 1847.

T
HE
E
NTERPRISING
W
HEELER
B
ROTHERS

By and large, the ownership of the factories established in Saxonville in the early 1800s had one common element: none of the owners resided in Framingham. Except for the Wheeler brothers—Abner, Benjamin and Eliphalet—that is. The three were from nearby Lincoln, Massachusetts. In 1798, Abner became the first to move to Framingham, opening a general store in the little red shop at Framingham Centre that had been built by Daniel Bridge seventeen years before. He eventually bought the Framingham Hotel nearby and maintained it as a village institution for years. He was also an original proprietor of the Saxon Mills and an investor in the Worcester Turnpike. In the twentieth century, his stately home, located at the junction of Main Street and the turnpike (now Route 9), became a well-known restaurant, the Abner Wheeler House, before eventually being demolished for a strip mall development. Shrewd businessman that he was, perhaps he would have understood.

Brother Benjamin Wheeler was just as enterprising. He came to Framingham in 1801 and opened his own store, eventually filling the void left by his brother when the latter became a hotelier. The Wheeler store was a Framingham Centre institution for generations, later being run by his son, Increase Sumner Wheeler. Benjamin was a trustee of Framingham Academy for nearly forty years, a founder of the Framingham Manufacturing Co., a temperance advocate and even saw to the planting of shade trees along the lanes in the Centre that lent the area its pristine bucolic feel in photographs taken in the late nineteenth century. He prospered so well that he purchased the Brinley Farm, the former estate of that famous Loyalist and, before him, the original Joseph Buckminster. The stone doorstep to his store is embedded in the lawn in front of the Framingham Historical Society and Museum as a memorial to the man who was so long a trustee for the academy that was once housed there.

The third brother, Eliphalet, came last to Framingham, in 1816, building a house on the west side of the Centre Common that still stands today. He boasted a lower profile than either of his brothers, although he was also a proprietor and one-time superintendant of the Saxon Factory, before serving as deputy sheriff for many years. The enterprising Wheeler brothers did as much as anyone to establish Framingham Centre as the heart of the town's economic life in the first half of the 1800s.

T
WO
T
URNPIKES
, O
NE
R
AILROAD

If the factories of Saxonville ensured that village as the industrial heart of Framingham, the establishment of the Framingham Bank in 1833 in Framingham Centre seemed to put a final seal on the village becoming the center of commerce (as well as government) for the town. Yet it was at that very moment that the Centre's shrewdest businessmen, the Wheeler brothers, inadvertently ensured that it was South Framingham that would become the actual center of town business within a few short decades.

The Worcester Turnpike Corporation was chartered in 1806 to build a toll road between Roxbury and Worcester, a distance of approximately forty miles. The surveyors of this turnpike took to heart the principle that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line; even looking at a map today, the contemporary Route 9 from Brookline to Worcester, which follows the path of the old turnpike, is a remarkably straight road.

Yet by sticking so close to geometric principles, the Worcester Turnpike Corporation created two major problems for itself. First, a straight line took no account of the topography of the route. The pike went up and down numerous hills that could have easily been circumvented—not an important concern when one's customer is driving a car on an interstate, but a definite disadvantage if one's customer is walking, riding a horse or driving a wagon or carriage. More important, the route led directly over Lake Quinsigamond before entering Worcester. The corporation spent countless thousands of dollars building three bridges over the narrow, but quite deep, lake, the first two having broken apart and sunk in fairly short order.

Second, the straight route passed through only one town center—Framingham Centre. This is no doubt what drew the interest, and the dollars, of the Wheeler brothers. But it meant that unless one were going directly to Worcester, Framingham or Boston, the turnpike might not necessarily be the shortest or most convenient route to get to any other town along the route. Since the turnpike was charging money for the privilege, this was an important consideration. These factors, combined with the practice of “shunpiking”—when one is walking or riding a horse, it is remarkably easy to step off the turnpike for a few hundred yards to avoid a toll house—meant that the Worcester Turnpike Corporation was always in a precarious financial position. By 1826, it was already seeking to give portions of the road back to the local towns so it would no longer bear the burden of maintaining the most unprofitable stretches of highway.

That is why it is even stranger that the Central Turnpike Corporation was founded in 1824, seeking to build a toll road between Boston and the Connecticut line, where it would connect to another turnpike to Hartford. This road followed the current path of Route 135 through South Framingham. The road was completed in 1830, and the portion through Middlesex County, including Framingham, was abandoned only six years later, indicating what a colossal financial disaster the Central Turnpike had been for its investors.

When the Boston and Worcester Railroad was chartered to build a route for the new “iron horse” through Framingham, its organizers approached the proprietors of the Worcester Turnpike with a proposal to buy their right of way. It made the most sense for the train station to be in Framingham Centre and, as we know, the turnpike is in a straight line from Boston to Worcester. But the Wheeler brothers still had hopes of realizing a profit from the turnpike, feared the competition from a railroad and blocked the laying of track through the Centre.

So the railroad turned to the Central Turnpike Corporation, which was only too happy to find out that somebody was willing to give it money for something, and the line to Worcester passed through South Framingham in 1834, the full line to Worcester completed in 1835.

Thenceforth, South Framingham would develop at a rapid rate due to access to a direct rail connection both east and west, while the Centre began to languish. A spur line was connected to Saxonville in 1846, the growth of which, due to the factories and abundant waterpower already there, was not negatively impacted by its lack of access to a direct rail route. Framingham Centre finally got its own spur line in 1850, which terminated at the present site of Trolley Square east of the Centre. A later line ran to the west of the Centre and did eventually connect to points north, but by then it was too late.

The turnpikes had been great successes at road building but abject failures at making money. Framingham Centre benefited greatly from being the sizable community directly on the turnpike and Route 9 continues to be a central axis through town today, but in the coming decades nothing would top the power of having a direct rail connection to Boston.

T
HE
D
EVELOPMENT OF
S
OUTH
F
RAMINGHAM

One of the first manifestations of the economic impact of the railroad was the growth of the straw braid industry. The braiding of straw had begun literally as a cottage industry in Framingham about 1800, with individual women braiding straw to be sold for the manufacture of hats. Those who first engaged in this business were scattered across Framingham—Mary (Swift) Bennett lived about where the Massachusetts Turnpike crosses Concord Street south of Saxonville, Mary (Eames) Rice lived a bit farther south on what is now Cherry Street and Benjamin Wheeler soon became a major merchant in the straw braid and bonnet business, sometimes realizing $30,000 a year from his business, chiefly in the American South. But as the business became bigger and factories were built in the 1830s and 1840s, they were almost all located in South Framingham—on Park Street and Concord Street—all not far from the rail depot.