Whither the Weathercock?

Today’s Boston 1775 posting comes from Charles Bahne, a local historian based in Cambridge. In this “guest blogger” essay, Charlie discusses an artifact of the North End in the early 1700s and Cambridge in the late 1800s, making the case to preserve and reproduce it locally.

One of the most historic elements of the Cambridge skyline is coming down sometime soon: the big brown church with the rooster on top is losing its rooster.

The Executive Council of the First Church in Cambridge—the stone church on Garden Street, across from the Common—has decided to bring the cockerel weathervane down for its own safety. According to the church’s website, drone videos have revealed significant and dangerous erosion of the gilding on one side of the cockerel, especially its large tail feathers. After extensive consultation, nationally recognized experts in the field of American Folk Art and historic weathervanes have strongly advised removal. The date for its descent is still being determined, but the goal is to make the move as soon as possible.

The church adds, “Once the cockerel is safely down and securely stored, church leaders and the congregation will need to consider next steps in the stewardship of this national treasure, including discerning whether the time has come to consider selling it. Another future decision is whether the Shem Drowne original should be replaced with a replica or something else.”

At 302 years of age, the five-foot gilded fowl is one of the oldest weathervanes still in use in America. Perhaps the first rooster weathervane, or “weathercock,” made in this hemisphere, he was fashioned in 1721 by Shem Drowne, the same coppersmith who crafted the grasshopper vane atop Faneuil Hall.

For a century and a half—nearly half of his existence—he has dominated the corner of Garden and Mason Streets, a landmark for Cantabrigians. And before he landed in Cambridge, the cockerel perched atop a church in Boston’s North End, where he led quite an interesting life.

The weathervane originated with a 1719 dispute among members of a North End parish, over the ordination of a pastor named Peter Thacher. Following Rev. Thacher’s rather tumultuous installation, the dissenting parishioners seceded from the original congregation and erected a new meeting house just three blocks away. As a deliberate insult to their former colleagues, they commissioned the cockerel weathervane for their new building: an allusion to Peter’s betrayal of Christ at the crowing of the cock. Upon placing the new vane on its spindle, “a merry fellow straddled over it, and crowed three times to complete the ceremony.”

Officially the “New Brick Meeting House,” their 1721 structure was commonly known as the “Cockerel Church” in honor of its weathervane; and some people (perhaps not so jokingly) called it the “Revenge Church of Christ.”

Paul Revere worshipped in the Cockerel Church for most of his life; the back yard of his house abutted the meeting house property. The weathercock appears prominently in Revere’s 1769 print of “A View of Part of the Town of Boston,” where he towers over the North End neighborhood.

Before he changed his career from the ministry to writing, Ralph Waldo Emerson preached sermons under the cockerel weathervane for three years, as pastor of the Second Church in Boston, which had merged with the original New Brick parish.

A new building followed in 1845, on the same Hanover Street site, and the weathercock was placed atop it. When that building came down for an 1870 street-widening project, the vane was sold at auction. William Saunders, an antiquarian and a member of the First Church Cambridge congregation, bought it, and the cockerel found his new home, roosting atop First Church’s new stone building. Since 1873 he has graced the corner of Garden and Mason streets, overlooking Cambridge Common.

So our friend the rooster has quite a story to tell, over and above the weather forecast. It’s a story that’s unique to Boston and Cambridge. It’s important that he remain in our community, where he can continue to tell it to us. He must not be allowed to fly the coop, and land somewhere else.

In an ideal world, the historic fowl would be repaired and restored to the Garden Street perch where he has served for 150 years, fulfilling his ancient purpose of informing us which way the wind is blowing.

Should that ideal not be possible, for fragility or other reasons, then all of us in Cambridge and Boston have a stake in the decision. After a century and a half in our town—and another century and a half across the river—the cockerel weathervane has become a valuable member of our entire community. He’s an important part of our shared heritage, and not just an asset belonging to only one organization.

It is understandable, but always sad, when an institution chooses to monetize its patrimony, exchanging its heritage for financial gain. Given the significance of this historic weathercock, it would be a tragedy if he were sold to a distant museum, and exiled to a place where his story cannot be fully appreciated. It would be an even greater tragedy if he were sold to a private collector and locked behind closed doors where the public cannot appreciate him.

If the cockerel weathervane is to be sold, it is imperative for him to remain on public display locally, at the Museum of Fine Arts or a similar organization.

And what of us Cantabrigians who look skyward? We too will be losing a familiar friend, a piece of our history. If Shem Drowne’s classic cockerel is too fragile to remain on his perch above the Common, then he should be replaced with a likeness. Any monetary gain that First Church might realize from the sale should be used to finance the creation of a replica, to keep this fowl’s memory alive atop the tower which has been his home for so long.

After all, what is a big brown church without a rooster on top?

First Church is giving the community a chance to reflect on, ask questions about, and consider next steps following the decision to remove the cockerel, which was announced to the congregation on Sunday, September 10. A first listening session will be on Sunday, October 8, at 12:30, followed by a weeknight Zoom session on a date to be announced. For more information, including photos and videos of the weathervane’s current condition, visit the First Church website.

(And thanks to Cousin Lynn and the late Ol’ Sinc of “Hillbilly at Harvard” for coining the phrase “big brown church with the rooster on top,” many years ago.)

Thanks, Charlie! The Rev. Peter Thacher who prompted that rupture in the New North Meeting wasn’t the same Rev. Peter Thacher who was active during and after the Revolution, but they were collateral relations.

Boston 1775 readers may recall that another weathervane attributed to Shem Drowne was put up for sale through Sotheby’s in January with an asking price around $400,000. I can’t find the result of that auction, but it shows the potential value of this sort of famous folk art.

Orations at Old South, 21 Mar.

On Wednesday, 21 March, the Old South Meeting House will host “Speak Out!”, its fourth annual remembrance of the Boston Massacre orations.

From 1771 to 1783, Boston had a yearly town meeting to commemorate the fatal violence on King Street. The tradition was started by Dr. Thomas Young speaking at the Manufactory on 5 Mar 1770, and the town’s politicians decided the event was successful enough to make it an official occasion, not just a speech by a radical who wasn’t even from around here.

That year the town had assistant schoolmaster James Lovell speak in April. From then on, the orations were always on 5 March or, if that date fell on a Sunday, 6 March. The invited orator was usually a rising young politician. In order:

• Dr. Joseph Warren
• Dr. Benjamin Church (after John Adams declined)
• John Hancock
• Dr. Warren again 
• Rev. Peter Thacher (speaking in Watertown since Boston was besieged)
• Benjamin Hichborn
• Jonathan Williams Austin
• William Tudor 
• Jonathan Mason, Jr.
• Thomas Dawes, Jr. 
• George Richards Minot
• Dr. Thomas Welsh 

In 1783 Boston decided that remembering the Massacre was less vital now that Massachusetts was independent, and the town shifted its annual patriotic oration to the Fourth of July.

The Old South event focuses on the orations leading up to the war. The description says:

Join us to hear selected excerpts of these speeches, performed by an inter-generational group in the grand hall where the orations took place 240 years ago! Learn about the orations and their significance with special guests Bostonian Society Executive Director Nathaniel Sheidley, historian Robert Allison, and Dr. Joseph Warren biographer Dr. Samuel Forman. Audience members will also have the option to read from a selection of excerpts; prizes will be awarded to the most rousing orators in youth and adult categories!

This free event is co-sponsored by the History Department at Suffolk University, the Bostonian Society, and the Boston Public Schools’ Department of History and Social Studies.

All are welcome, but Old South asks people to please register in advance. The speeches start at 6:00 P.M. If the weather is bad, the event might be postponed for a week until 28 March.

ADDENDUM: This event has now been rescheduled for 28 March.

Malden’s Road to Revolution Retraced, 2 May

On Tuesday, 2 May, the Malden Historical Society will hold its 130th annual meeting with a special presentation titled “Malden—Steps Along the Road to Revolution.”

The event description says: “Six costumed re-enactors will portray historic Maldonians in a script based on their lives written by historian Mary Fuhrer. Learn what was in the hearts and minds of residents as the Revolution approached.” Those personae include the Rev. Peter Thacher, enslaved worker Peter Green, and militia officer’s daughter Rebecca Dexter.

Fuhrer told me more about how this program grew out of collaboration with the Freedom’s Way Heritage Association:

Freedom’s Way has a program called Patriot’s Paths that helps towns research their local records to recover local stories in the decade leading up to April 19th. Once we’ve combed town meeting, church, court, probate, newspaper, letters, memoirs, etc. for evidence, we select six real local historical personae to tell the stories of the town’s path to revolution. We craft a 40-minute script with narrator and characters, showing how the road to revolution was uneven, contingent, influenced by personalities and localities, but ultimately driven by themes that are shared across the province.

Sometimes communities don’t know their stories widely. Sometimes they do but think their stories are unique, not realizing how they parallel and connect to what other towns were doing at the same time. And in fact elements of every community’s story are unique, so research and comparison brings out those details.

The Malden Historical Society meeting is scheduled to start at 7:00 P.M. at the town’s public library, 26 Salem Street. It is free and open to the public. In addition to the presentation, there will also be an election of officers for the coming year. A reception will follow.

Under the Cornerstone of the State House

The big Boston historical news this week was the discovery of a time capsule sealed in the cornerstone of the State House, laid in 1795. Or rather, the rediscovery of the eighteenth-century artifacts inside that capsule because they were previously found in 1855.

But let’s start at the beginning. The first news reports, such as this C.N.N. dispatch referred to “a time capsule believed buried by Samuel Adams and Paul Revere.” My first guess was that a whole bunch of prominent Bostonians had attended the cornerstone-laying in 1795 and journalists scanning the list of attendees simply pulled out the two men who had become brand names.

But no, Adams and Revere really were the two most prominent dignitaries at the event on Independence Day in 1795. Adams was seventy-two years old and the governor of Massachusetts, having succeeded John Hancock two years earlier. Revere, for his part, had recently become Grand Master of Massachusetts’s Freemasons. Even though few of those Masons were really masons, they participated in a lot of stone-laying then.

Other notables at the event included the Rev. Peter Thacher, chaplain of the state senate; architect Charles Bulfinch; and builder/politician Thomas Dawes. Fifteen white horses, representing the fifteen states then in the U.S. of A., drew the cornerstone through the streets and up to Beacon Hill.

The 8 July 1795 Columbian Centinel reported that Adams and Revere placed a silver plate under the stone which said:

This Corner Stone of a Building, intended for the use of the Legislature, and Executive Branches of Government of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, was laid by his Excellency Samuel Adams, Esq., Governor of said Commonwealth.

Assisted by the Most Worshipful Paul Revere, Gr. Master, And Right Worshipful William Scollay, Dp. G. Master, The Grand Wardens and Brethren of the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts.

On the 4th day of July, AN. DOM., 1795. A. L. 5795.

Being the XXth Anniversary of American Independence.

Note that the twentieth anniversary of independence would actually come a year later.

The main speaker that day was a young lawyer named George Blake (1769-1841), whose speech was printed and sold by Benjamin Edes. A Jeffersonian, Blake spoke about how Royal Navy ships were once again preying on American crews. He went on to serve in both houses of the Massachusetts legislature and as U.S. Attorney for the district from 1802 to 1829.

Gov. Adams’s brief remarks on the new building included:

May the superstructure be raised even to the top stone without any untoward accident and remain permanent as the everlasting mountains. May the principles of our excellent Constitution founded in nature and in the rights of man, be ably defended here. And may the same principles be deeply engraven on the hearts of all citizens and there be fixed unimpaired and in full vigor till time shall be no more.

I think the constitution Adams referred to was the state’s, not the federal; the state’s was more explicit about natural rights. As to “permanent as the everlasting mountains,” less than two decades later developers began to cut down the crest of Beacon Hill, as shown above. And then in August 1855 a construction crew dug up that corner of the State House to repair the foundation.

They discovered the silver plate set between two sheets of lead—along with some other objects that the 1795 newspaper hadn’t mentioned.

TOMORROW: An expanded time capsule.

Joseph Snelling’s Delivery at Bunker Hill

Here’s another notable story of the Battle of Bunker Hill, told by the Rev. Joseph Snelling in his 1847 autobiography. It concerned his father, also named Joseph Snelling (1741-1816).

The elder Snelling was a bookbinder in Boston. He married Rachel Mayer in 1763 and evidently had a small shop of his own at the start of the war.

Snelling’s older brother Jonathan (1734-1782) was a merchant and officer in the Cadets. He dined with the Sons of Liberty as the Liberty Tree Tavern in Dorchester in 1769. But he signed the laudatory addresses to the royal governors in 1774, confirming himself as a Loyalist.

In contrast, Joseph the bookbinder “took an active part in our struggles for liberty, from the commencement to the close of the. American Revolution.” Or at least that’s what his son believed.

Joseph Snelling’s name doesn’t actually show up in the records of Patriot activities before 1775, so far as I can tell. According to his son, he continued to serve British officers and soldiers in his shop before the war: “the officers and soldiers were often in, paid honorably for the goods they purchased, and even treated the family with civility and respect.” The one possible example of prewar Patriot activity that Snelling’s son recorded was this:

At a certain time when the English had possession of Boston, our people at Watertown were in want of ammunition. My father hearing of this, volunteered with three or four others to convey it to them, if possible. Accordingly a scow was procured and loaded with arms and ammunition; and, to prevent suspicion, the whole was covered with boards. They then, in plain sight of English vessels, poled the scow to Watertown, and delivered the load to the people, who received it gladly.

There were trips to smuggle military material out of Boston before the war began. However, that story appears in the Snelling memoir after the Battle of Bunker Hill, when the family had moved out to Newton. Thus, that delivery may not have been from Boston, with a harbor patrolled by British warships, but from Newton down the Charles River, far from the enemy. (If it actually happened.)

As for Bunker Hill, the younger Snelling’s account is a combination of what he’d evidently heard from his father and what he understood about the battle, not always accurately. Thus:

On the afternoon before the battle of Bunker Hill, our people met at Cambridge, in order to make the necessary preparation for a battle which they were hourly expecting. My father was there with them. There was the brave General [Joseph] Warren, who came with his fusee and his powder-horn hung over his shoulder, and volunteered his services. When they were ready to start for Bunker Hill, Dr. [Peter] Thatcher offered a solemn and appropriate prayer to Almighty God, that their heads might be covered in the day of, battle, and they protected from their enemies.

According to our other sources, Warren wasn’t with the troops at Cambridge on 16 June 1775 but joined them in Charlestown the next day. The minister who prayed with those troops the evening before they went onto the peninsula was the Rev. Samuel Langdon, president of Harvard, not the Rev. Peter Thacher, who watched the battle from the far side of the Mystic River.

As for Joseph Snelling’s own experience:

Colonel Bradlee and my father were appointed to superintend the conveyance of five loads of provision to the fort for the refreshment of our people. Accordingly they engaged five ox teams, loaded with provision, and five men to drive them. In order to reach the fort they were obliged to cross a neck of land directly in front of the Glassgow frigate, and a floating battery, then lying in the river. These soon discovered the teams, and aimed their cannon at them, to prevent them from getting to the fort. As soon as the cannon balls began to whiz around them, the five teamsters left their teams, and fled with great precipitation.

Colonel Bradlee and my father then drove these five teams to the fort alone, which was the first time that my father ever drove a team. This was in the midst of the battle—but they were in more danger than the people at the fort. The balls flew thick and fast all around them, and I have heard my father say they were expecting every moment that their heads would be taken off, but a kind providence protected them; not a ball touched them, or one of their teams. Thus, agreeable to the prayer, their heads were covered in the day of battle.

When they arrived at the fort, they found our people almost exhausted, and suffering greatly with thirst—all their cry was water, water. Some hogsheads of beer were brought with the provision, by which they were greatly refreshed. The day was extremely warm, and our people, by the effect of the heat, the powder and smoke, resembled colored people. One man came to my father for refreshment, who had received a musket ball in the back of his head, which took out his eye without touching the brain—blood and water was then gushing from the wound. (Three months after this, the same man came to my father to receive his rations, his wound perfectly healed.)

A shorter version of this tale appears in Benjamin Woodbridge Dwight’s The History of the Descendants of Elder John Strong (1871); that refers to Snelling’s companion as “Col. Bradford, an associate commissary.” The Symmes Memorial, by John Adams Vinton (1873), doesn’t include the anecdote but says Snelling “joined the army…under Gen. [Artemas] Ward as a commissary.”

Joseph Snelling’s name doesn’t appear in the surviving records of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress or its Committee of Safety. However, a legislative act late in 1775 confirms that the Massachusetts government owed him money for somehow assisting its commissary general. (The General Court voted to recompense several other men as well, but not anyone named Bradlee or Bradford.)

In early 1812, the U.S. House considered a petition from Snelling “praying further compensation for services rendered as a clerk in the office of the Deputy Commissary General of Issues in the Revolutionary war.” The Committee of Claims responded “That the prayer of the petitioner ought not to be granted,” and it wasn’t. That doesn’t mean that Snelling’s petition was exaggerated; its facts might simply not have met the threshold for further compensation.

But really the Snelling family lore does seem extraordinary. American accounts of the Bunker Hill battle talk about how the soldiers on the front lines didn’t receive any supplies. Young Robert Steele recalled a desperate search for water. If five ox carts (somehow driven by two men, one a complete novice) had brought in beer and other provisions after the fighting had started (given that one man was allegedly bleeding from a musket wound), then surely some soldiers would have taken note of that fact.

The Rev. Joseph Snelling clearly had a familial motive for telling this story, and a religious one: he wanted readers to understand that his father and Bradlee had been protected from enemy fire “agreeable to the prayer.” But it looks like there had been a lot of “memory creep” between the elder Joseph Snelling’s experiences delivering some supplies to the provincial army in 1775 and when his son wrote down this tale decades later.

Historical Diaries Panel at Plymouth, 13 May

On Tuesday, 13 May, I’ll be at the Plymouth Public Library as part of a panel discussion on using diaries in historical research. This event will run from 7:00 to 8:30 P.M. in the Otto Fehlow Meeting Room, and is free and open to the public.

The other panelists will be Michelle Marchetti Coughlin, author of One Colonial Woman’s World: The Life and Writings of Mehetabel Chandler Coit, and Ondine Le Blanc, Director of Publications at the Massachusetts Historical Society and thus one of the people behind the publication of Ellen Coolidge’s travel diary.

I’ll describe my work on boys’ diaries in the Revolutionary period, including those of John Quincy Adams, Peter Thacher, and Quincy Thaxter. I also plan to share secrets from the diary of John Rowe.

Donna Curtin, Executive Director of the Plymouth Antiquarian Society, will moderate the discussion and question session to follow.

As long as I’m talking a bit about me, here are links to a couple of articles that appeared on the web last week:

• I’m continuing to review episodes of the Turn television series for Den of Geek, and also wrote a profile of John Graves Simcoe, the real British officer behind [far behind—almost invisible in the distance behind] one of that show’s main villains. For more on Simcoe, check out Todd Braisted’s terrific article on Rachel Smith’s excellent new blog, Turn to a Historian.
• At the Journal of the American Revolution, Ray Raphael and I teamed up to write a pair of articles about the figure of a musket-toting woman shown above. Can A.P. U.S. History test-takers fairly deduce anything about that image without context? And where did it originate?

Did Washington Stable His Horse in Milton?

Yesterday Ben Edwards at Teach History alerted me to a “Washington slept here” statement that didn’t seem right. I dug to find confirmation, and couldn’t. So I dug a bit more to satisfy myself about how that belief might have arisen.

In a Wall Street Journal profile of Dr. Mark Vonnegut, Nancy Keates described his house in Milton as:

a 1740 beet-red former carriage house that locals believe housed George Washington’s horse; the building was once used as the stables for an inn across the street where the first president met with John Adams.

That story was even headlined “Washington’s Horse Slept Here.” But Washington’s diaries don’t mention Milton. Albert Kendall Teele’s The History of Milton, Mass., 1640-1887 doesn’t describe such a visit—and there’s nothing local historians liked more than filling out the details of George Washington’s visit to town.

George Washington did visit Massachusetts in 1789, during a progress through all thirteen states after he had been elected President. The roots of the Milton tradition may lie in his 1789 diary:

Sunday 25th [October]. Attended Divine Service at the Episcopal Church whereof Doctor [Samuel] Parker is the Incumbent in the forenoon, and the Congregational Church of Mr. [Peter] Thatcher in the Afternoon. Dined at my Lodgings with the Vice President.

That gives us Washington, Adams, and an inn, all in close proximity to the Rev. Peter Thacher. That minister was a native of Milton, where his grandfather of the same name was the town minister for a long, long time.

But Washington’s diary entry actually describes part of his visit to Boston, where the younger Thacher had become pastor of the Brattle Street Congregational Church. The “Episcopal Church” that morning was Trinity.

Maybe there’s a closer connection I’ve overlooked. If anyone knows more about this tradition and the evidence behind it, please share.

Ezekiel Price Enjoys a Massacre Oration

Last night I had the pleasure of hearing nine students from Boston Latin School deliver extracts of orations heard in Boston from 1771 to 1858 on the anniversaries of the Boston Massacre. They did a fine job of expressing the slippery-slope political arguments of the Revolutionary Whigs and the patriotic outrage of the ante-bellum Abolitionists. This event took place at Old South Meeting House, and was co-sponsored by the Bostonian Society.

Boston 1775 offers thanks to William Thompson, Eli Brown, Stephanie Rufo, Jacob Meister, Azia Marie Carle, John Wall, Cristhel Santillan, Kevin McCaughey, and Finora Franck, as well as their teacher at Boston Latin, Wendy Ann Holm.

As a tribute to such oration, I quote from Ezekiel Price’s diary for 6 Mar 1776. Price was a court official and marine insurance broker in pre-Revolutionary Boston; he thus knew every businessman in town. Because in 1776 Boston was occupied by British troops (who in turn were occupied with plans to evacuate that day), the town didn’t commission an oration on the Massacre that year. Instead, the tradition was moved outside the town to Watertown, where the General Court was meeting. Price wrote:

Yesterday, went to Watertown, and attended the delivery of the annual oration of the 5th of March on the horrid massacre in Boston in 1770. The meeting was opened with prayer by the Rev. Dr. [Samuel] Cooper, and the oration delivered by the Rev. Mr. Peter Thacher.

A considerable number of Bostonians were assembled on the occasion; which was a most agreeable sight, especially as there appeared an affectionate regard for each other.