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‘town,’ just below the fall; it was constructed1 in the spring2 of 1632 by permission of Governor Winthrop, granted, the Court not being in session, because if they had waited for a meeting of the Court before constructing it, the fishing season would have passed by. The Court sanctioned the grant at its next meeting, May 9, 1632.
Josselyn3 says: ‘A mile and a half from the Town is a fall4 of fresh waters which conveigh themselves into the Ocean through Charles River; a little below the fall of which they have a weir to catch fish, wherein they take store of Basse, Shades, Alwives, Frost fish and Smelts; in two tides they have gotten one hundred thousand of these fish.’
At a town meeting held January 3, 1634-5, it was agreed [by the freemen] ‘that there shall be foure rods in breadth on each side of the River, and in length as far as need shall require laied to the use of the Ware, so that it may not be preiudicial to the water-mill.
Also one Hundred and fifty Acres of Ground granted to the Ware upon the other side of the River, to be laied out in a convenient place.’
This wear was at first public property, but seems to have become private property in a few years, held in shares.
In town meeting, June 2, 1641, it was ‘agreed, that Mr. Mahew shall enjoy the 150 acres of land on the south side of Charles River, by Watertown wear.’
Thirty years later, as the wears were in danger of being purchased by Indians, the Town voted to purchase them, and they were then annually rented at the highest price that could be obtained.
They were the subject of many altercations and law suits.
1 Winthrop states the reason for building the wear to have been, because the people of Watertown, having fallen very short of corn the year before, for want of fish for manure, (which one of them they had learned from the Indians), wished to build a wear to take fish for that purpose Granting permission to build this wear was one of the charges brought against Winthrop by Ll. Gov. Dudley, a little later.
2 April 16th.
3 Whose distances are not to be depended upon.
4 ‘Which disadvantage attends most of the great rivers of New England, throughout the whole country: on the banks of whose streames are many veynes of very rich and fertile land, that would receive abundance more inhabitants, who might live as well as in most places of the world, were itt not for the intolerable burden of transportation of theirs goods by land, for want of navigable channells in those rivers. Charles River...runnes up twenty or thirty miles into the country, yet not navigable above foure or five, which makes it less serviceable to the inhabitants seated up higher on the bankes thereof’—Hubbord, p. 17.
Thomas Lewis, Landscape Photographs, 1879.
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