Bristol County, Massachusetts - Chapter 1: Preparing the Way, 1924

It is now the industrial high noon of the history of the city of Fall River. Engrossed as never before with the care of the manifold threads of labor, the city keeps rythmically at work. 'There never was a season when shuttles ran so swiftly or when weavers kept time so true, or were so attuned to the throbbing march in the weave-shed. 'Their allied and other lines of toil have caught up the refrain. Here, if nowhere else in the New World, has the call of labor 'become cosmopolitan, and her voice is heard in many tongues. And as you pass through this factory-land, and on through the city where homes in plenty and institutions many have established themselves as a result of the mill and the factory, the oldest inhabitant will tell you that. industry has never failed to be the keynote of the existence of the old township; and that his ancestors had handed along the selfsame declaration from the days of the hamlet.

The concentrated interests that keep four million spindles moving year by year, and that furnish the world more than two billion one hundred million yards of cloth annually, distinguish Fall River among the great manufacturing cities. This practical truth we keep first in mind whenever we speak of Fall River. Yet that fact is itself comprehended in the mission of history, and it is through history that Fall River captains of industry are not displeased to have made record of the meagre beginnings of the town and all its business. They are aware that the first purchasers of the land and the earliest comers here were people of simple tastes, and because of the conditions of their times, and the surroundings they had adopted for their new homeland, they had consecrated themselves to hard work. There were no men of wealth among them; nor, Plymouth Court Records would have it understood, were there any with ulterior designs upon the native and his lands.

The majority of writers of good judgment have in their writings held to their belief that the men from the outside world who first trod these territories were mechanics and artisans, who, paying well for their lands, paid doubly for them in their toil that made those lands worth their while. They did not come sight-seeing nor adventuring, but to make their living in the colony, and to build their homes here. They sought freedom from oppression, - ship-load after ship-load of the first of the immigrants hastening away from those conditions that William Bradford in his book, and that others of his time agreed to, was a form of religious oppression. Neither at first did they oppress the natives, in turn; nor, at first, did they molest other sectarians as they made their appearance in America; though the arrogance of individuals, and the assertiveness of an increasingly dominant - race did practise oppression, as time passed on. Aside from all else, the main purpose of the majority of the new-comers, so far as research has discovered for us, was to seek freedom from tyranny in the worship of

God, to build their homes, to lay the stone walls, a few of which remain near the foundations of old dwellings, to construct their mills along the rivers, to launch their boats, to fish and to trade. Any other than this finding of the earliest aims they had in view must be conjectural.

The first to buy lands, and before the actual settlers themselves came, were not the racial progenitors of the Fall River as we know it today - for most of the primitive purchasers never made their homes on the Quequechan. But their heritage, and that of those who immediately succeeded them, to the Fall River of today, is labor and the various enterprises of toil; and all Fall River's traditions of success at this hour are due to the fact that the real founders of the town kept busy at tilling the soil or turning the wheels of the mills. Plymouth Colony neighborhood and Pilgrim Father traditions of incessant hard work were very real to those men who first looked about the present Fall River region for a place to settle down; for only thirty-six years after the first arrival of the "Mayflower" came the purchasers, and from Plymouth itself - a fact that has not been sufficiently dwelt upon by any writer - for descendants of "Mayflower" Pilgrims were purchasers of Quequechan. Falling Water, we know, the name signifies; and though the variously named town became Troy, the reversion to the Fall River of today has become a perennial memorial to the aborigines.

Freetown, even now, is comparatively a small place, but its beginnings and those of Fall River were one and the same - the ''Freeman's Purchase"; and that one fact of the unpretentious and unheralded beginnings made by common folk of their generation, should never fail to draw the inquiring and interested attention of every worker in every mill, as well as command the respect and praise of mill owner and industrial leader.

It was the "Freeman's Purchase" secured away back in 1656, when the rules and usages of the Colonial period were dominant, but while Massasoit still had more than nominal oversight of the Wampanoags, that in the written contract, at least, Fall River had its beginnings. Other freemen had been and were purchasing lands along New England shores, and they were quick to name the location of their intended settlement usually in honor of the home town or city in England. But these particular freemen exhibited early signs of American independence, in nomenclature, when they styled their new possessions "Freeman's Purchase,' and at the same time they paid the Indian owners of the location that sort of wampum that was most welcome and valuable to all natives, namely: "T'wenty coats, two rugs, two iron pots, two kettles, one little kettle, eight pairs of shoes, one dozen hatchets, six pairs of stockings, one dozen hoes, two yards of broadcloth - and a debt satisfactory to John Barnes, that was due from Wamsutta, son of Massasoit."

Discriminating writers who have spent much of their time among the sources of Colonial information, like Weeden, for example, are firm in their belief that in such exchanges the Indians took satisfaction and delight. Of land they then had more than they needed, and the Plymouth Court had likewise secured to them their reservations. Tools to work with, iron receptacles in which to do their cooking, instead of those of clay or hollowed from stone, to which they had been used, and clothing to keep them warm in winter - these, to them, were the better part of the bargain; and so long

A tract four miles wide and nearly seven miles in length was granted, July 3, 1656, by the Plymouth Court; and on April 2, 1659, a warranty deed of that tract was signed by Wamsutta and Tattapanum, in the presence of Thomas Cooke, Jonathan Bridge and Thomas Sassawan. 'The paper received its acknowledgment by Wamsutta and Tattapanum before Josias Winslow and William Bradford, General Court Assistants, though the signature of Massasoit was not placed upon the deed, his death occurring the next year, 1660. Later came the incorporation of the settlement as a town, when in 1683 the freemen called their village Freetown, then a part of Plymouth Colony.

The present Fall River section, that part to the north of the Quequechan, was purchased and came into the control of the Europeans at a time of genera! unrest, when the white men were coming to these shores in numbers, and when the red and the white races were soon to resort to their final clash for entire ownership and domination. Massasoit, sometimes called Ousemaquin, and than whom no more mild-mannered, prudent or generous chief ever ruled over an Indian tribe, according to all that legend and story have revealed to us, was still in general oversight of the tribe; but he was gettting old, and his sons, Wamsutta, or Alexander, as the English had christened him, and Metacomet, or King Philip, were given charge of lands that had not been disposed of to the English. The region wherein were to be situated the future Freetown and Fall River was known as Quequechan.

The nomad Indians, camping from Mount Hope to Winnecunnit, were acquainted with every foot of this territory; they had roamed over it, and fished and hunted throughout its length and breadth; and at the time they disposed of it to the English they believed there would be a sufficiency of territory both for the new comers and for themselves, neither foreseeing the successive hordes of immigration that were to throng the country. It was an immense relief to the Indians to have come into the possession of means of planting their gardens such as they had never known; of means of catching and curing fish such as none of their race had ever invented; of seed to plant in the ground; and they took the chances of exchanging their lands for such commodities and useful things as those. There was no building, so far as historians have absolutely ascertained, on the part of the white man, in the Quequechan territory until after the King Philip War, so that the Indian raiders at that particular period had but little of the property of the white man to destroy there.

The death of Wamsutta, or Alexander, took place in 1662, two years after the death of his father Massasoit, and then King Philip came into control of that part of the present Bristol county that had not been otherwise disposed of. From that time onwards, Philip is said to have left no scheme untried until war was ravaging the land in 1675. It is maintained by some writers that land was forcibly taken from the Indians, and that the latter were mulcted of their possessions by mean exchange. The Plymouth Court itself, just in its dealings with white and red, would have prevented that; and no land was seized before the King Philip War, Not only had the first comers to Plymouth Colony received warning from their directors and sponsors in England to give heed to the rights of the natives, but the Plymouth Court drew up carefully worded and lawful treaties, of which abundant proof remains for the securing of titles. Had the honest dealings and humane provisions begun by the early settlers toward the Red Men, been adopted as a continuous habit by the new comers, there would have been no Pequot War, perhaps no King Philip War, though we have never been entirely assured about that chief and the exact causes of his belligerency.

For two generations there has existed much uncertainty and conjecture regarding the causes of the increasingly serious disputes between the red people and the white. There are the extremists like General EK. W. Pierce, who, having befriended descendants of Chief Massasoit, pitying their poverty, and bemoaning with them the gradual and entire disappearance of the former owners of the land, have been able to see no more than meanness and cupidity on the part of the Europeans towards the natives. He asserts that in all ways the ignorant native was cheated, mistreated and robbed. There is nothing in all Indian history that is quite equal to Pierce's biting sarcasm. If he "thought for himself" it would appear that he did not think from any other viewpoint, nor did he weigh any other records or traditions with the care due the record of every age. There are other writers who make claim that the new comer, though no better than the latter-day immigrants, took every opportunity to find out who owned lands before they occupied them permanently, while the Plymouth Court was judge as to their good intentions.

All three of the Southeastern Massachusetts chiefs had reigned and disappeared, - the war was at an end, and the former power and place of the Wampanoags had dwindled and fled. The section was still the "Old Colony" as we call it today, and other and political events were exercising the talents of the new diplomats on New England's shores.

In the year 1643, the Colonies of Plymouth, of Massachusetts Bay, of Connecticut and New Haven, had made conjunction in their new confederacy for mutual protection, styled The United Colonies of New England; and the final session of this union had taken place at Hartford, Connecticut, in 1684, a year after the incorporation of Freetown. 'Thenceforward, Plymouth itself became absorbed, and its story was interwoven with that of the others - New Plymouth, or the "Old Colony" becoming divided in 1685 into the three counties of Plymouth, Barnstable and Bristol. The last General Court of Plymouth was held in July, 1691, the.date that is generally given as that marking the close of the Colonial Period. Thus Freetown was a Colonial town but eight years.

We of today are keeping in mind the essentials of the first purchase : - that Quequechan, the section to the north of the river, where Freetown's foundations were laid, was purchased of the Indians themselves not indiscriminately, but through orderly procedure of the Plymouth Court, by twenty-six Plymouth residents, at which time they acquitted Wamsutta of a debt owing to a certain John Barnes, and paid over the practical articles of general utility before mentioned. The grant under which this purchase was made was confirmed in a later deed by the Plymouth Court. But the Pocasset Purchase, to the south of the river, on which a part of the city stands today, and extending from that river to the Puncatest and Dartmouth bounds, south and easterly from four to six, miles, came into the hands of the colony by conquest, on account of the war with Philip; and that section was sold for English currency - eleven hundred pounds.

No record of the preservation of the original deed of the Freeman's Purchase is extant; but the original deed of the Pocasset Purchase is still kept. From the point of view of the Colonial Period, these two purchases, as to situation and condition, were similar to our greater west of 1850. No one knew, with certainty, how far west New England extended, and they were reckoned as pioneers indeed who ventured through Quequechan.

Thus, in outline, were the earliest known trails leading out of Plymouth colony, and down the primitive river banks, to end, in the appointed season, at the spot where Fall River now is. The new race of people had approached whose children were to redeem the barrens and the river forces for the industrial and economic uses of a generation farther along. At this hour, except in the historical record, the seething and speeding polyglot city has slipped away from all recollection or interest in either Red Man or First Settler. Yet, let it be borne in mind that these marked the beginnings, and we could make no count of present milestones, nor, for proofs of progress could we make comparison of days and events, were it not for them and those who soon afterwards came upon the scene.