The Rev. James K. Allen was not a native of Dorchester, but became one of our community’s most well-loved and respected members during his long tenure as pastor of the First Parish Church on Meetinghouse Hill. Rev. Allen was perhaps the most well-versed Dorchester historian of his generation and in 1979 he published this remarkable essay about the Puritan people who settled the town of Dorchester in 1630 and their early history in the “New World.” In the 24 years since Rev. Allen wrote this article, many things have changed in Dorchester. Our population is no longer the astounding 200,000 that Rev. Allen accurately recorded at the time; the Kennedy Library, which was then still a promise, has now been completed and its dream fulfilled. Sadly, we’ve also lost a great friend in Rev. Allen, who died in February 1991, but lives on in our memories and through his thoughtful writings, such as this.

BY REV. JAMES K. ALLEN
Dorchester, with a population of just under 200,000 people, is the second-largest urban center in Massachusetts. That, in itself, would make Dorchester important; but through its history, Dorchester rightly deserves to be recognized as “a foundation stone of our nation” because so many important developments in our history had their beginnings herein.

When Captain Squebb of the Mary and John unloaded his 140 passengers at Hull, in 1630, the Massachusetts Bay Colony had its second group of settlers, the first being Salem about six months before. These jettisoned people made their way by fishing boats to Savin Hill Bay to begin their colony on the land called Mattapan by the Indians of the area, but destined to be called Dorchester at the home base of those Puritan adventurers. Inspired by the Reverend John White, they chose to cross the Atlantic and make a new beginning in this new land where they would name their community Dorchester in honor of the pastor, John White who sponsored them and helped them prepare for their new life in a new area which they referred to as “God’s Plantation in the Wilderness.”

After one saga by some of the men up the Charles River to the present area of the arsenal in Watertown where they planted their gardens as the Indians watched them in amazement, they returned to Mattapan at the behest of the majority who chose the shores of Savin Hill and the Mouth of the Neponset River as most favorable for settlement. A group of these people returned to Watertown in the fall of 1630 to harvest their crops planted the first week of June.

The Dorchester settlement was selected as an appealing location with conditions favorable for gardens and the feeding of farm animals on which the new settlers would lean heavily for their subsistence on this new continent. The harbor of Massachusetts Bay itself, with two rivers –the Charles and the Neponset–was a favorable place, with the protection of many islands facing the Atlantic, and beautiful background of forested hills. Dorchester seemed the most advantageous location for the most dominant colony in New England, as indeed it was for the first century. Only because of the deeper channels in its harbor did Boston outstrip Dorchester in population and commercial life. Even then, it borrowed many of its important developments from the town of Dorchester and its people.

The early Dorchester community had foundations four-square: home, church, school, and town. The home was the starting point for the new-born, but it was also more than that. It was not only a fortress against the world, but also a training place where the children learned the ways of piety and godliness from their earliest impressions. The Bible was read daily and prayers were said, not only at the beginning and end of the day but also in thankfulness before meals. Homes were the fortresses of their lives - the training schools of character as well as shelter from the pristine wilderness. Death laid a heavy hand upon the young, with no understanding of sanitation and no means of combating such epidemics as smallpox, diphtheria, and a long list of fatal illnesses. Two out of three of the children born the first year died, so those who survived were regarded as even more precious. Life expectancy in colonial America was less than 20 years.

It was the purpose of the people to emphasize the sacred in their lives, and that was the whole meaning of the Puritan Revolution. They protested what was known as the Cavalier spirit in Mother England, where profane attitudes toward life were blatant and destructive, and obscenity was so commonplace as to cause the Puritan reformers to close all the theaters and places of public meeting, where possible, in order that what was left of the sacred would not be overwhelmed. The home life developed by the Dorchester Puritans served as evidence that these people not only sought a new way of life but found one of its strongest foundations in their homes.

A second foundation of the early Dorchester Community was the Church–a gathering of Christian people who held certain commitments about their faith and belief known to the world as Puritan. The word “Puritan” was an epithet hurled at them and was identified by others as negative, hence, in many ways destructive of social values. In some ways, Puritanism could rightly be identified in these ways: but a wider study of its effects both on the people and the civilization which they produced bordered on the admirable. It is not a completely strange system of belief but had its beginnings in Manichaeism of the late fourth century, to which the great Augustine was himself a convert for many years, and then came to the surface again in the late 12th century with the Cathari of the Roman Catholic Church. They championed the Bible, especially the New Testament as the root of their religions faith and opposed the absorption of all religious authority as residual in the clergy. They attempted to purify their lives and attracted so much attention as to threaten the mainstream of Church life for another century. Religious attitudes very similar in kind surfaced with the Anabaptists of Europe in the early 1500s with Zwingli and many of their basic ideas were strengthened by John Calvin in Switzerland and John Knox in Scotland. All this happened as a foundation to the Puritan movement in England that led to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Dorchester, in particular.

Henry VIII leaned on this arm of religion when he succeeded in having Parliament declare the independence of the Church of England in 1534. The Church of England remained the official bastion of religion until Mary came to the throne in 1553 to re-establish Roman Catholicism. Then Queen Elizabeth restored the power of the Church of England in 1558, but only on paper. Large numbers of English people continued to be Roman Catholics in faith and belief. In 1585, an Act was passed in Parliament accusing all Jesuits and seminary priests entering the realm as guilty of high treason for which there was punishment of hanging, drawing, and quartering. Father Thomas Pilchard was tried and executed on the gallows in Dorchester, England. There were many others throughout the realm, so that regardless of any implication made by any writer, the early Puritans and the faithful Roman Catholics had a common bond of resentment and also of faith that would later result in a basic acceptance–one of the other–in Dorchester, Massachusetts colony. The ecumenical spirit, so new in many parts of the world, was not strange in Dorchester from its beginning though the actual physical Church in the Massachusetts Bay colony was made up of English Puritans who themselves suffered threats and violence at the hands of English law and the enforcement of that law demanding conformity.

The Dorchester Colony, like other units in the Massachusetts Bay, was a theocracy with the powers of government centered in the Church and the authority of the Church residual in the membership of the congregation, though in actual fact, the clergy exercised wide influence. The people were allowed to vote but the power of franchise was limited to those who belonged to the Church, so the Church was a political power in the life of the Dorchester community.

Richard Mather, who was regarded as a reformer in England and looked on with disfavor by the bishops there, came to New England in 1635. He had been a schoolmaster at Toxteth Park in Liverpool where he was known as a skillful educator. It was normal, therefore, that he should emphasize education in Dorchester where he was called to be minister of the Church in 1636. His work with the people gave rise to a school - the first tax-supported school in America. Three other towns claim this distinction: Boston, with its Latin School, Dedham, and Rehoboth. The Boston Public Latin School was opened in 1635, but it was public in the British sense; the scholars paid their tuition costs. The town of Boston did not contribute any money to the Latin School until 1641. School in Dedham was tax-supported from its beginning, but Dedham was not even incorporated until the Dorchester public school had been in operation for four years; and the same thing can be said about Rehoboth and its public school.

The tax-supported public school had its beginning in Dorchester with Mr. Thomas Waterhouse as its teacher. The school opened in March at 7 in the morning and continued until 5 in the evening through the month of September, with two hours off for lunch except for examinations that came on Tuesdays to test the Sabbath Day learning of the scholars. They met on Saturday for instruction in catechism and began every school day with prayer, ending it the same way in the afternoon. This six-day-perweek program continued from October through February - a 12-month session - except that the day was shortened from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. during the five months of less daylight.

The other foundation of life in Dorchester was the Town. Towns are as old as human history, but the democratic form of government which had its beginnings in Dorchester, Massachusetts, was something new in the world. Roger Ludlow, who served as Deputy Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony under Winthrop, was the man who instituted what has come to be known as the New England Town Meeting on October 8, 1633 - the most democratic process of government known to history. The ancient Greeks exercised the process of democracy, where the word originated, but only one person out of 10 was qualified to vote in the Old World.

When the beating of the drum summoned the inhabitants of the Town of Dorchester “every Mooneday of the Monthe,” the citizens were asked to assemble in the Meetinghouse to consider their civic and political problems and responsibilities. These meetings were called in the morning because it was a time when indoor lighting was inadequate.

All power of political action was assumed by the New England Town Meeting, except when their actions encroached upon the authority of the Commonwealth or of their British over-Lords whose authority they repudiated in common practice. This Town Meeting form of government spread rapidly to Cambridge, Watertown, and other towns, and was made an official instrument of government by the General court in 1638.

The Town of Dorchester included all of the land between Boston, which began at the channel at the present South Station, and the Plymouth Colony that included what became the town of Braintree, the nearest part of which is now known as Quincy. Dorchester boundaries included the communities now know as Squantum and Wollaston, as well as the present towns of Milton, Hyde Park, the adjacent parts of what became Wrentham, Stoughton, Sharon, Foxboro, and Canton (Dorchester Village). Dorchester’s land reached to within 150 rods of the Rhode Island border. Though new settlers continued to arrive in Dorchester from England, the population was thinly scattered over the hinterland with most of the people living near the ocean and along the few roads of the town, the most important of which were the Lower Road, now Adams Street, and the Upper Road, now Washington Street, Centre Street, and a small complex that was called the village center on Allin’s Plain, where Pleasant Street met east Cottage Street. It was within the triangle formed at this junction that the first Meetinghouse and the village school were built; and nearby, the old Blake House (1650), oldest frame house in the United States and still standing.

New settlers arrived from Boston and settlements to the north, and some came by ship from Englandin 1632, especially. A n o t h e r group, motivated by the discontent of Deputy Governor Roger Ludlow, left Dorchester in the company with Thomas Hooker and some of his friends of Cambridge (Newton) .They made their way to the Connecticut River and floated down to found the colony at Windsor, Connecticut. Ludlow, unhappy because he had not been appointed Governor in the place of Winthrop, decided to leave Massachusetts. He wrote “The fundamental Orders of Connecticut” that furnished the framework of our federal Constitution and the constitutions of many states. Though brilliant, he was a malcontent and departed from Windsor to die in Virginia. Dorchester’s first minister, John Warham, went to Connecticut with those dissidents. The Reverend John Maverick died in 1635, so the
Dorchester people called Richard Mather, recently arrived from England, to be their new minister. He began his work in 1636 and continued until the time of his death in 1669, at the age of 73. He was regarded as an authority on theological subjects by his New England contemporaries and authored America’s first book, “The Bay Psalm Book.” Richard Mather was the father of Increase and the grandfather of Cotton Mather, outstanding clergymen of early New England. Dorchester people continued to move. Some went to Taunton, and many of them were included among the early residents of Northampton. An organized colony, partly gathered from other towns, left Dorchester, Massachusetts on shipboard to found Dorchester, South Carolina in 1696. There was discontent in South Carolina because of inadequate acreage for farming, and swamp fever. The greatest problem, however, was the building of the Church of Saint George in the middle of the Dorchester colony at the behest of the governing authorities in South Carolina. It was the legal church - the Church of England - which the colonists were called on to support by taxation but in whose religions life they did not share. The people of Dorchester, South Carolina, investigated possibilities and moved in 1752 to found the towns of Midway and Sunbury, Georgia. From this Georgia community came two signers of the Declaration of Independence, four governors of Georgia, two of the nation’s greatest scientists, the founder of the University of California, representatives and senators, both in states and nation, as well as 85 clergymen; also, the grandfather of Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Theodore Roosevelt, as well as the father of Mrs. Woodrow Wilson.

Industries in the Town of Dorchester, Massachusetts were notable from its beginnings. Agriculture and fishing began with the arrival of the first settlers. A corn mill, powered by the waterfall in the lower Neponset River, was the first power mill in New England. The first of Dorchester’s three clay pits was opened, and building bricks were made from it in the early years of the colony. Downtown Boston was built from bricks molded and fired near one of Dorchester’s three clay pits. The clay from one of them, Kaolin, was used in making pottery, - an industry that continues until the present day. Shipbuilding was well-developed as an industry at Commercial Point for more than a century.

The modern-day Dorchester includes one of the nation’s greatest hospitals, the Carney, plus six neighborhood health centers. It is the site of the Dorchester Ice Cream plant, the Boston Globe, the nerve center of the First National Bank system, the Harbor Campus of the University of Massachusetts, the Joseph Pollak Corporation, plus many wholesale and retail establishments.

The first supermarket of the nation, Elm Farm, was here, as was the first Howard Johnson restaurant in the nation. Many things have their beginning here. The first playing cards in America were made in Dorchester, the first stringed instruments factory was here, as was the first paper mill, the first book-printing establishment, and the first chocolate mill.

As a present development and a suggestion for future leadership of the Dorchester community, the Kennedy Memorial Library and Museum is now under construction in Dorchester.