The old powder house.
Among the recent accessions of our Society's library we find a newspaper clipping entitled ‘The
Old Wayside Mill.’
It bears no date and is evidently from some local paper of over thirty years ago. It describes a structure well known to Medford people by sight, but not within our city's bounds.
Historian
Brooks (in 1855) alluded to it thus:—
When the circular stone windmill, now standing on Quarry hill in Somerville, was built, the inhabitants of Medford carried their grain there.
Before the Revolution the mill was converted into a powder house and has been used as such to our day.
Just what he meant by ‘our day’ does not appear.
Mr. Usher added no information and little mention has ever been made of it in the Register, which now for almost the first time varies from its course of Medford almost exclusively.
It is well to remember that until 1754, Medford was a small town lying four miles along but one side of
Mystic river.
We have always had a curiosity (which probably will never be entirely satisfied) as to why our boundary line beside old
Charlestown was made so remarkably crooked, and right here we may well recall that a piece of the
middle of
Charlestown was cut out and incorporated as
Somerville in 1842.
The newspaper clipping referred to closed thus:—
Sir Walter Scott has said, nothing is easier than to make a legend.
We need not invent, but only repeat one of which the Old Mill is a subject.
[p. 12]
This clipping proved to be a reprint or copy of Chapter V of ‘Fields and Mansions of
Middlesex.’
（
S. A. Drake, 1874.)
Referring our readers to the above book we will only quote:—
Except that the sides of the edifice are somewhat bulged out, which gives it a portly, aldermanic appearance, and that it shows a few fissures in its outward crust, the Powder House is good for another century if for a day. Nothing is wanting but its long arms, for the Old Mill to have stepped bodily out of a canvas of Rembrandt or a cartoon of Albert Durer.
It carries us in imagination beyond seas to the banks of the Scheldt,—to the land of burgomasters, dikes and guilders.
It was left to us to find in another quarter the legend.
In an ‘occasional’ paper styled the ‘Old Powder House,’ printed for a church fair in 1878, was A
Legend of the Old Mill, by
Mrs. L. B. Pillsbury,—in all thirty-two verses.
That writer (unlike the former one) had the grace to append a footnote, thus:—
Suggested by the facts given in Drake's ‘Fields and Mansions of Middlesex.’
As the eviction of the Acadians from Grand Pre was in 1755, and the sale of the old mill to the province for a powder house in 1747, there is room for doubt of the legend.
But the writer certainly followed
Drake's prose in poetic form.
Our space forbids its reproduction but we quote its finale:—
In tones of thunder, a voice from below—
‘Let go of that cord, I say, let go,
Or you are a dead man,’—too late!
too late!
For e'en as the word of alarm was spoke,
The silent old mill with avenging stroke
Out of its lethargy suddenly woke,
And Dick Wynne, the debauchee, had met his fate.
Mangled and bleeding, with tender care
They bore out the dying man into the air,
Back to the house where so late he had stood
So conscious of power and haughty of mien,
While in tears, o'er his suffering couch was seen
The sorrowful face of the fair Claudine,
True type of forgiving womanhood.
[p. 13] At last the pale lips of the sufferer stirred;
They listened intently for his dying word;
But the awe-stricken group at his bedside heard
Naught but the faint murmured name Claudine,
For the mighty waves of a broader sea
Than the maiden dreamed of, had set her free,
Lay in wide expanse their lives between.
What truth do we garner, what moral glean,
From this traditive tale of the tower so gray?
Was it chance, the grasp of that reckless hand?
Or, was that wild clutch of the fatal band
An act of retributive wrath foreseen?
Was the old mill an avenger of wrong that day?
Who shall answer the question, yea or nay?
In
Historic Leaves (published by
Somerville Historical Society) in 1903,
Florence Carr has an interesting article of six pages on the Mallet family, tracing its
Huguenot origin and its connection with the old mill.
Mrs. L. F. A. Maulsby also gives in a Somerville souvenir a brief account illustrated by a cut of the old mill with its sails and the long inclined beam with the wheel at its end, upon the ground.
The old gravestone of
John Mallet in
Charlestown cemetery is also shown.
We commend a reading of these which are in the
Society's library.
This ancient structure was probably built very soon after
John Mallet's purchase of the site in 1703-4, and is mentioned in his will (1720) which devised it to his two sons.
Its walls are two feet thick and built of the blue (slate) ledge stone, probably quarried from the hill close by, over two centuries ago. While used as a mill its surmounting roof was mounted on some kind of tracks
[p. 14] and could turn around for its sails to face the wind, which was its motive power.
When no longer thus used, the roof was permanently fixed in its present form.
From that time (about 1750) the public's interest in it is that of its being the powder magazine of the province.
Medford had taken alarm and removed its powder elsewhere just before the visit of the
British troops, who removed the two hundred and fifty half-barrels it contained to
Boston.
We cannot say when it was last used for safe storage of powder, but remember that our first sight of it (except from the railway cars) was in summer of 1861 as we walked up from Central street to ‘Camp Cameron,’ near Cambridge line, where is now Holland street in West Somerville.
The large three-story house of
Tufts stood on the opposite corner and bore a sign ‘Somerville House,’ indicating its use as a tavern.
A small dwelling and barn were near the powder house, from whose roof the stars and stripes were flying.
The old stone quarry was plainly visible.
The land southward was entirely vacant and open as far as the Boston & Lowell railway track where was a little flag station called Willow Bridge.
The triangular space between the railroad, Menotomy road and present Warner street was partly in
Medford and was fenced into cattle pens and had one small structure on which was painted
Medford Cattle Market. One day each week was there for years a busy one.
Aaron Sargent in
Historic Leaves tells of
Broadway (the
Menotomy road) in 1842, when
Somerville came into being, naming the then existing houses, and only named two between Medford street and Menotomy river,—the
Tufts house and that of
Russell, far away on the western slope of
Walnut hill.
So the old mill and powder house stood in lonesomeness when the ‘Somerville House’ was destroyed by fire, leaving its massive chimneys as gaunt reminders.
Across the railroad track in
Medford was erected the
Willow bridge house, which accommodated the drovers
[p. 15] and cattlemen who came down from the north weekly.
After the departure of the cattle market to
Brighton this house remained in its decadence till during last year it was torn down and a big modern garage there erected.
Equally lonely was the tract beyond
Quarry hill till in 1869 the Boston & Lowell railroad laid its tracks from Somerville junction to its purchased
Arlington and Lexington road. A little village called West Somerville began to grow around the railway station and extend itself compactly to Cambridge line and up onto both Spring and
Walnut hills.
In the late sixties a little chapel was built near the entrance to the old quarry.
Removed toward Davis square for a time, it was brought back again, and later moved down and across
Broadway, somewhat enlarged and used as a ‘
Union Chapel,’ till the erection last fall, just beside it in
Medford territory, of the present creditable structure recently opened for public ‘Assembly of the Brethren.’
But College avenue is not now without its houses of worship, as six have been there erected, the latest being of stone with its parish house styled ‘the
House beside the
Road.’
College avenue has been extended across the
Sorrelly plain and famous Two-penny brook into
Medford over the
Southern division of the railroad by the once famous
Stearns estate and Royall house and ends at Cradock schoolhouse on Summer street.
Warner street is the Somerville end of Medford's Harvard street and just over the line in
Medford is St. Clement's church, parochial residence and school.
Powder House boulevard has also been constructed beside the college area, and over and around the hill to where
Mystic valley parkway crosses the Menotomy river.
The new
West Somerville has grown till it so completely adjoins
Medford hillside that the city boundary is difficult to find today even by some of
Somerville's officials.
Drake wrote, the old stone tower ‘had three stages or lofts, with oaken beams of great thickness,’ and ‘strange
[p. 16] that edifice created to sustain life should become the receptacle of such a death dealing substance as powder.’
There came another turn in the cycle of events.
In the seventies, a big shed over a hundred feet long, from beside the railroad at Willow bridge, was cut into three parts and moved near to the old powder house and made into the canning and pickle establishment of
George R. Emerson, who lived in the little dwelling beside it. His farm was on the ground and his ‘finished products’ bore the label, Old Powder House
Brand, and with good reason, as before shipment they were stored within the sturdy walls of the old stone tower.
The city of
Somerville is its present owner and has well preserved it and created a beautiful forest park about it, developing a beautiful residential section of the city close to its borders, even now finding the pressure of business at its busy corners.
But the central dominant figure is the old wayside mill, the circular stone tower erected for
John Mallet two centuries and more ago.
