history

By David P. Braun

When people ask, “who were the first inhabitants of Lincoln,” they often mean, “what tribe lived here?” The short answer is, probably Massachuset.

But as best we can tell, most Native American “tribes” were somewhat fluid. They did not have rigid boundaries or a concept of land as property in the way that the European invaders did. With some exceptions, they were more like loose confederacies of local communities that sometimes acted together as larger groups. They had territories based upon their traditional uses of the landscape, their shared history, and their shared history of alliances and disputes with neighboring groups. They spoke related, mutually intelligible Algonquian languages and were descendants of Algonquian-speaking communities that had lived and evolved together for thousands of years.

The exact tribes known from the historic record may not have had that much antiquity. Social relationships and identities likely evolved over those thousands of years, as lifeways changed and as populations grew and shifted over time. But the incorporation of agriculture into their lifeways starting around 1000 A.D. likely brought considerable changes. Populations grew faster, and areas with good soils for farming would have become valuable resources.

Occasionally, where the edges of tribal territories met or overlapped, the communities would have worked out rules for sharing. There is a lake in Webster, Massachusetts, famously named (or at least so recorded), as

“Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg”

If my memory serves, this native name is usually translated literally as something like “you fish on your side of the lake, we fish on our side of the lake, and nobody fishes in the middle.” However, Algonquian languages are very figurative. The local communities might have thought of the lake simply as “Border Treaty Lake.”

Places such as Lincoln, which is mostly upland terrain, may have been part of some native communities’ identities and hunting territories before Europeans arrived, but not the site of winter or even seasonal villages. That was not how the indigenous communities lived. Instead, the adjacent Sudbury/Concord/Merrimack River valley and its wetlands would have been far more important as dwelling places. The rivers were avenues of travel and sources of food, and the floodplains would have provided productive farmland near to their villages.

The arrival of the Europeans in the early 1600s and the fatal diseases they brought caused havoc, disrupting the indigenous peoples’ lives, locations, and connections with each other. Many communities became mixtures of local natives and refugees from neighboring areas that had suffered worse. And the written records we have of these communities post-date the start of that havoc. They do not necessarily record how the people lived beforehand. The historic records, biased though they may be (after all, who wrote them? Not the natives…), suggest that the natives did their best to maintain their sense of identity and their identification with their traditional home landscapes. But the European diseases killed their elders fast. As the native communities lost their elders (with their unwritten stores of history and traditional knowledge), they lost much of their collective cultural memories.

It is wrenching to think of the thousands of years of tradition and knowledge that were lost with the erasure of these communities.

For those who wish to read more, I recommend Charles Mann’s book, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (2011). It is grim reading but also important and fascinating. Also valuable is Nathaniel Philbrick’s book, Mayflower (2006). This also is grim and specific to southeastern New England, but an excellent treatment of how the natives and early European settlers in the Massachusetts Bay area perceived and treated each other.

Addendum — After this story was published, town historian Jack MacLean offered this additional information abut the map:

The map here shows Massachuset territories extending further north than was the case at the time of contact. Along the coast, lands associated with the Pawtucket Confederation extended down to Charlestown, which was purchased from Pawtucket leaders. Boston (Shawmut) was associated with the Massachuset, with the Charles River providing a divide. Watertown and Cambridge south of the river were also Massachuset. However, Lincoln’s primary parent community of Concord was purchased from local leaders (Tahattawan) and from Squaw Sachem, along with her second husband, who lived at Mistick (Medford). Squaw Sachem had succeeded her first husband (Nanepashemet) as the leader of the Pawtucket Confederation. While Concord was formally seen as being under Squaw Sachem and the Pawtucket Confederation, the close proximity of the two “tribal” groups in this area indeed suggests much fluidity and interconnectedness.

David, it should be noted, is the coauthor with his mother of The First Peoples of the Northeast.

“Lincoln’s History” is an occasional column by members of the Lincoln Historical Society.

A new photo has been added to the photo gallery at the bottom of the December 8, 2021 story headlined “Archivist, family members unwrap a historic quilt.” The inadvertently omitted image shows a square hand-written by Joseph Flint.

The Lincoln Public Library archives contain all sorts of historical items, but not all of them are on paper — a quilt that was made for a woman before she sailed off to be a missionary recently came out of the vault to be admired and rewrapped.

The Flint family, which has lived in Lincoln since the 1600s, donated the quilt to the library some years ago. Three generations of Flints were on hand in the Tarbell Room when the quilt was removed from its box, carefully unfolded on the big table, and refolded with layers of acid-free tissue paper for posterity.

Overseeing the process was Virginia Rundell, Lincoln’s town archivist, who splits her part-time job between the library and working with materials including vital records (births, marriages and deaths) the Town Office Building. 

When 26-year-old Mary Susan Rice, an ancestor of the Flints, decided to travel to Persia in 1847 to pursue her missionary vocation, members of the Lincoln Ladies’ Missionary Sewing Circle (part of the First Parish Congregational Church) sewed individual squares for the quilt and added hand-written messages of inspiration and affection, many of which are still legible today. They did this knowing that it would serve as a cherished reminder of her Lincoln home for Rice, who quite possibly would never return, given the dangers of distant travel at the time.

The large quilt (109” x 96”) has an unusual structure, with cutouts at the two bottom corners to allow it to be laid flat on a four-poster bed. It was made of scraps of many types of material but only lightly quilted for “sentimental value rather than hard everyday use,” according to a 1998 article by Tracy Barron of the American Quilt Study Group.

Each of the 82 squares contains a personal note or Bible verse signed by Rice’s numerous friends, family and acquaintances, among them her mother, who penned a heartfelt inscription into the cloth:

Father to Thee
I yield the trust. O bless her with a love
Deeper and purer, stronger far than mine.
Shield her from sin, from sorrow and from pain.
But should thy wisdom deem affliction best,
Let love be mingled with the chastening.
With an unshrinking heart I give her, Lord, to Thee.
Thy will, not mine be done.

(A bit of research revealed that this was not an original composition by Rice’s mother; it appeared at least once before in print. It’s part of “Love’s Offering” published in The Mother’s Magazine in 1840.)

Rice was well qualified to teach at the Fiske Girls’ School in Oroomiah, Persia (now Rezaiyeh, Iran) — she had attended Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary (later Mt. Holyoke College), founded just 10 years before her departure by Mary Lyon, who also contributed a Biblical verse and wish on one of the quilt’s squares.

Rice did in fact return to Lincoln after 22 years in Persia, where she “helped implement progressive ideas about the roe of women in a society where women were not educated and considered second-class citizens,” Barron says. Some of her students even converted to Christianity in “Holyoke-style revivals.” She resumed living in Lincoln and attending Sewing Circle meetings until her death in 1903.

Mary Susan Rice was the sister of Caroline Rice Flint, the great-grandmother of Peggy Flint Weir and Ephraim Flint. Mary and Caroline grew up in the house that still stands at 7 Old Lexington Rd. When Mary returned from Persia, she lived with her sister and brother-in-law Ephraim Flint in the Flint homestead on Lexington Road, still home to three generations of Flints. The quilt was found by Margaret Flint Sr. in the attic of Bertha Chapin, whose mother also grew up in the Flint homestead, according to family members.

Preserving artifacts like the quilt are central to the work of archivists like Rundell. Along with local historians, they’re sometimes called on when older residents are downsizing and looking to dispose of old letters, photos, papers, records and other materials that may have been sitting in attics or basements for decades. Documents that are deemed historically significant are treated so the paper so won’t degrade any further. Sometimes books are unbound and later archivally rebound so they can be digitized, making them available online to researchers anywhere in the world. Much of this work in Lincoln is funded by annual town budget appropriations requested by the Community Preservation Committee (the money comes from property taxes and the state).

Another part of the job is making archival materials more “discoverable” using finding aids for the various collections pertaining to Lincoln buildings, families, events, organizations and photographs. “One of the big goals is to get people engaged with the archives,” Rundell said. “You don’t get this stuff and put it in a vault so it just sits there — you went people to use it.”

Click on an image below for a larger version and caption (photos by Alice Waugh).

By Rick Wiggin

Contrary to popular Lincoln myth, the town’s Minute Men did not muster in the field at the corner of Sandy Pond and Baker Bridge Roads. The mistaken identity of that field as the “Muster Field” came about from a misreading of Lincoln’s history and from the politics of the town’s acquisition of that field in 1983.

In the early hours of April 19, 1775, Lincoln’s Minute Men and militia company mustered on the Town Common near to the meetinghouse, where the town stored its gunpowder and military supplies. From there, the soldiers began their march to Concord along what is now Sandy Pond Road. When they reached the junction with modern Baker Bridge Road, they were joined by members of the Baker and Billing families, who lived along the western border of town. Amos Baker, age 19 at the time, wrote many years later that, “When I went to Concord in the morning, I joined the Lincoln company at the brook, by Flint’s pond, near the house then of Zachary Smith …”

The historically accurate marker at the “muster field” (click to enlarge).

In the early 1980s, Sumner Smith, who then owned much of the land around Flint’s Pond, offered to sell several large tracts to the town before offering them to a developer. A Special Town Meeting in November 1983 hotly debated the financial cost against the value of preserving the land as open space. In the debate, it was asserted the land was of incalculable historical importance because it was the place where the Minute Men mustered on April 19. But this was a misreading of Amos Baker, who only stated that he and his family joined up with the Minute Men at the site, not that all the town’s soldiers had mustered there. One of the town’s modern Minute Men even promised to erect a commemorative marker on the “Muster Field” if the town purchased it. The town responded enthusiastically and voted to buy the land, and a large stone was soon moved to the site.

The myth of the Muster Field began to unravel shortly after the purchase, and the large stone sat un‑engraved for 17 years. But the name stuck. In the year 2000 — the 225th anniversary of April 19, 1775 — engraved markers were finally placed on both the Town Common and the mis-named Muster Field, commemorating the march of Lincoln’s soldiers to Concord. Together, the two stone markers erected in 2000 tell the correct story. But old names — even incorrect ones — die hard.

For more about this history, see “Recognition of a Proud Legacy” by Rick Wiggin (The Lincoln Review, January/February 2000).

“Lincoln’s History” is an occasional column by members of the Lincoln Historical Society.

By Donald Hafner

In 1730, Samuel Dakin with his brothers and three other investors had high ambitions. They formed a partnership for “searching after, digging, and improving all such mines or ores as may be found in or upon the land of” Samuel Dakin. Iron ores were highly valued, and bog iron ore — which forms in iron-rich, swampy water — had been found around Iron Mine Brook near Beaver Pond in Lincoln. The partners hoped a lode of bog iron ore might lie buried beneath Dakin’s land. His mining ambitions, however, were a bust. If the partners ever found “such mines or ores,” they were meager.

Fortunately for Dakin, his father had bequeathed to him a limestone quarry and a kiln for roasting limestone at high heat, converting it into powdery, white lime. The quarry and the lime kiln were located on Dakin land bounded by modern Sandy Pond and Baker Bridge roads. For his neighbors, it might well have been cursed as “Lime Kiln Field.” The heat needed to roast limestone into lime required large amounts of wood and produced acrid smoke and toxic fumes. The lime kiln cannot have been a good neighbor.

Lime had many uses in 18th-century Lincoln. Weaver Joshua Child used “two pounds of the best rock lime” in his recipe for dyeing cloth. Joshua Brooks used lime at his tannery on the North Road to remove hair from the hides before tanning. And in March 1767, the town paid Joshua Brooks for “eight bushels and half of hair to mix with lime for the meeting house.” The town had built a new gallery in the meeting house, and lime bought from Amos Dakin was mixed with sand and the hair from Brooks’ tannery “to plaster under the galleries in the meeting house.” (The animal hair helped bind the plaster together.) Over the years, the town treasurer’s records are sprinkled with payments for lime to be used in whitewashing the walls of the town’s schoolhouses.

It is not clear when the lime kiln in Samuel Dakin’s field ceased belching smoke and fumes. In 1788, Dakin sold his land to a Lincoln newcomer, Zachariah Smith. Whatever became of Dakin’s lime kiln, clearly it had not transformed Lincoln into a mining town. Yet perhaps scattered in that field there still can be found a scorched stone or two that once were part of Lincoln’s ancient lime kiln.

This account of the Dakin lime kiln is indebted to Jack MacLean’s A Rich Harvest, which can be purchased from the Lincoln Historical Society. Illustration from “Pre-Industrial Lime Kilns” (Historic England, 2018).

“Lincoln’s History” is an occasional column by members of the Lincoln Historical Society.

Film on slave trade

The First Parish Racial Justice Advocates will screen “Traces of the Trade: a Story from the Deep North” via Zoom on Thursday, Sept. 30 at 7 p.m. The film is about a Rhode Island family that follows the route of the  triangle slave trade through Ghana, Cuba, and Rhode Island and see a family reacting to the past and the present. Click here for details and the Zoom link.

Two from Lincoln are National Merit Scholarship semifinalists

Amanda Pillar

Sonali Das

Lincoln residents Sonali Das and Amelia Pillar are among the seven Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School students who have been named semifinalists in the 2022 National Merit Scholarship Competition. The other honorees are Nicola Donlan, Madison Johnson, Spencer Reith, Joy Ren, and Jeffrey Zhang. These academically talented high school seniors have an opportunity to continue in the competition for some 7,500 National Merit Scholarships that will be offered next spring.

Free flu clinic on October 23

The town will offer a public flu vaccination clinic on Saturday, Oct. 23 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the newly renovated Brooks School gymnasium for residents age 3 and up. High-dose vaccines will be available for those over age 65. To sign up:

1. Click here to register for a time.
2. Download and complete the Vaccination Consent Form (one per person) and bring it with you.
3. Download the Vaccine Information Statement for your records.

Jeffrey Gibson exhibition opens at deCordova

Jeffrey Gibson, INFINITE INDIGENOUS QUEER LOVE, 2020, Acrylic on canvas, glass beads and artificial sinew inset into wood frame. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins and Co. Image: Jason Wyche (click to enlarge)

The deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum announces the exhibition Jeffrey Gibson: INFINITE INDIGENOUS QUEER LOVE opening Friday, Oct. 15 and on view through March 12, 2022. The two outer terms suggest boundless spaces and generative, tender relationships, while the interior words convey markers of identity that Gibson disassembles and reconstructs through his artistic practice as a queer Choctaw-Cherokee man. The exhibition comprises a series of collages, an immersive display featuring three hanging fringe sculptures, and recent videos created with collaborators, musicians, and performers. It complements Gibson’s large-scale outdoor installation Because Once You Enter My House, It Becomes Our House (an homage to pre-Columbian architecture) on the sculpture park’s front lawn. A series of related programs will take place throughout the fall and spring; visit thetrustees.org/jeffreygibson for more information.