This text is part of:
[8] In 1655 John Fownell sold to Henry Dunster, thirteen acres of the above land in Charlestown, which he recovered by law, as we have already stated; being a portion of that land, which certain inhabitants of Charlestown, in 1646, granted to Mr. Henry Dunster, President of the College, in Winottamy or Menotomy Field-Cambridge bounds one side, and Mystic Pond and River and Menotomy Brook the other sides.—Midd. Registry, i. 104, 5. This property is now included in the town of Arlington. The present Mystic street1 is very near the former Charlestown line, which formed the eastern (or northern) boundary of Cooke's twenty acres, 1642-1652. See Wyman's Chs. 312. George and Alice Cooke had in Cambridge, Elizabeth, b. 27 Mar. 1640, died Aug. 1640; Thomas, b. 19 June 1642, died 16 Aug. 1642; Elizabeth, born 21 Aug. 1644, married Rev. John Quick, of St. Giles, Cripple-Gate, London, England; Mary, born 15 Aug. 1646, or after her father returned to England—of the Parish of Martin's-in-the-Fields, London, spinster, in 1669—married Samuel Annesley, Esq., of Westminster, England—she, Mary Annesley, formerly Mary Cooke, wrote letter to Edward Collins, that she had lately married a younger brother of her mother, Sept. 12, 1681 (court files).—See Paige, 397-98, 513, 623, 653; Wyman, 22, 235.2
Persons cutting down trees in swamp or upland on the side toward the ‘town,’ of the Menotomy River—the Great Swamp only excepted—were liable to fine in 1647; and the same for cutting or taking away wood or timber on any land at Menotomy, on the side toward the ‘town,’ of the path which goeth
1 Otherwise the ancient road to Woburn from Cambridge. Capt. Cooke and others were appointed by the General Court to lay out the way from Cambridge to Woburn in 1643. This road leading from Woburn to Cambridge is described on the Woburn Records, in 1646, as ‘leading to Cambridge mill and town’ the one way, and to ‘Upstreet and Shawshin,’ in Woburn, the other way. In Woburn it was called Plain Street, from its going over the plain in the west side of what is now Winchester, where the same road now is.—See Sewall's Hist. Wob, p. 26. The laying out of this road from Woburn, and that also from Watertown, in 1638, show the importance of Cooke's mill to the early settlers of this region.
2 The History of the Reed Family, by J. W. Reed, p. 39, states, ‘There was a Dr. Samuel Read of Stafford in England, who, in 1646 (1636?), furnished one Cook with funds to build a gristmill in Cambridge, Mass, and took a mortgage of the same. Whether this mill was on Charles River, or on a small stream which is in West Cambridge, I have no knowledge; but it was a great enterprise for those days, and controlled the location of highways in that section.’
The mill was certainly that belonging to Colonel George Cooke, and long known as Cutter's, near West Cambridge—now Arlington—Centre. And the stream is the same that flows from the Great Meadows in Lexington, through the present Arlington, into Mystic Pond, near the head of the Mystic River. The privilege is at present owned and occupied in Arlington by Samuel A. Fowle. We have been unable to substantiate the statement of the historian of the Reed Family, regarding the above mortgage; but incline to agree with him, that the mill was ‘a great enterprise for those days,’ and ‘controlled the location of highways’ in this section.
Boston: David Clapp and son. 564 Washington Street, 1880.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.