This text is part of:
[97]
alteration was made in the road near the river, on land of Jonas Dix and Richard Cutting,1 and in 1761 the subject of a Bridge over the river was brought up in town-meeting.
The ‘new way to the new bridge’ is first placed on the list of town ways in 1762, and probably a bridge had then been completed, built by subscription.
In 1773 a vote of the town shows that the mouth of Beaver Brook had been changed, so that it should flow through Jonas Dix's land more to the eastward, to avoid having a bridge over it on Newton Street.
‘Pond End’ was the name applied to the neighborhood on the Lincoln road near the ‘Great Pond.’
Allen Flagg and his brothers John and Michael settled here about 1684, on Chester Brook, and the Sandersons about 1689.
Joshua Bigelow had settled on or near Chester Brook in 1676.
Several of the deacons in Mr. Angier's church lived in this section.
Jonathan Sanderson2 was chosen deacon January 7, 1702-3, and his son and grandson of the same name held the same office.
Thomas Livermore was appointed deacon October 3, 1718; his homestead afterwards passed into the hands of Jonas Clarke, Sen. So many of the leading men in the church resided here, near to each other, that the name ‘Piety Corner’ was given to the locality around the junction of Bacon and Beaver Streets. Captain John Clarke3 lived here, the eldest brother of Jonas just named.
The Clarkes had a grist-mill on the site of the present machine-shop of George F. Shedd on Chester Brook which, perhaps, had previously belonged to Deacon Thomas Livermore.
1 His grandson, Uriah Cutting. Jr., was a noted man in Boston, extensively engaged in real estate transactions, and distinguished for projecting and carrying out very important public improvements. He was the chief mover in opening Broad, Cornhlil, Brattle, and other Streets in Boston; also in building Central and India Wharves. He projected the Mill-Dam, but did not live to see it completed.
2 His grandson, Abner Sanderson, was Assessor 25 years, 1766-1805; Select-man 21 years, 1778-1806; Representative 23 years, 1778-1808; also a Justice of the Peace and principal surveyor of the town. He accompanied Mr. Ripley in 1814 in his search for Mt. Feaks, Masters's Brook, and Adam's Chair. Since page 28 was put in type it has been ascertained that the Fitchburg Railroad passes over the site of Adam's Chair, every trace of which has been obliterated.
3 Captain John Clarke was the son of Deacon John Clarke, whose sister Hannah was maternal grandmother of Hon. Hannibal Hamlin of Maine. She married Deacon Elijah Livermore, father of the town of Livermore, Maine, and her daughter Anna, born in Waltham, was the mother of the distinguished Senator and Vice-President, who thus had Deacon Samuel Livermore as his maternal great-grandfather, the mother of whose children was a sister of Deacon William Brown, of Waltham.
Thomas Lewis, Landscape Photographs, 1879.
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.