Back Aa

Old Coast Road From Boston to Plymouth

<h2>CHAPTER VI</h2> <h3>COHASSET LEDGES AND MARSHES[1]</h3> A sickle-shaped shore—wild, superb! Tawny ledges tumbling out to sea, rearing massive heads to search, across three thousand miles of water, for another shore. For it is Spain and Portugal which lie directly yonder, and the same tumultuous sea that crashes and swirls against Cohasset's crags laps also on those sunnier, warmer sands. Back inland, from the bold brown coast which gives Cohasset her Riviera-like fame, lie marshes, liquefying into mirrors at high tide, melting into lush green at low tide.[Pg 93] Between the ledges and the marshes winds Jerusalem Road, bearing a continual stream of sight-seers and fringed with estates hidden from the sight-seers; estates with terraces dashed by spindrift, with curving stairways hewn in sheer rock down to the water, with wind-twisted savins, and flowers whose bright bloom is heightened by the tang of salt. For too many a passing traveler Cohasset is known only as the most fashionable resort on the South Shore. But Cohasset's story is a longer one than that, and far more profound. Cohasset is founded upon a rock, and the making of that rock is so honestly and minutely recorded by nature that even those who take alarm at the word "geology" may read this record with ease. These rocky ledges that stare so proudly across the sea underlie, also, every inch of soil, and are of the same kind everywhere—granite. Granite is a rock which is formed under immense pressure and in the presence of confined moisture, needing a weight of fifteen thousand pounds upon every inch. Therefore, wherever granite is found we know[Pg 94] that it has not been formed by deposit, like limestone and sandstone and slate and other sedimentary rocks, but at a prodigious depth under the solid ground, and by slow crystallizing of molten substances. There must have been from two to five miles of other rock lying upon the stuff that crystallized into granite. A wrinkling in the skin of the earth exposed the granite, a wrinkling so gradual that doubtless if generations of men had lived on top of the wrinkle they would have sworn it did not move. But move it did, and the superimposed rock must have been worn off at a rate of less than a hundredth part of an inch every year in order to lose two or three miles of it in twenty-five million years. As the granite was wrinkled up by the movement of the earth's crust, certain cracks opened and filled with lava, forming dikes. The geologist to-day can glance at these dikes and tell the period of their formation as casually as a jockey looking at a horse's mouth can tell his age. He could also tell of the "faulting," or slipping down, of adjacent masses of solid[Pg 95] rock, which has occurred often enough to carve the characteristic Cohasset coast. The making of the rock bottom is a story which extends over millions of years: the making of the soil extends over thousands. The gigantic glacier which once formed all over the northern part of North America, and which remained upon it most of the time until about seven thousand years ago, ground up the rock like a huge mill and heaped its grist into hills and plains and meadows. The marks of it are as easy to see as finger prints in putty. There are scratches on the underlying rock in every part of the town, pointing in the southerly direction in which the glacier moved. The gravel and clay belts of the town have all been stretched out in the same direction as the scratches, and many are the boulders which were combed out of the moving glacier by the peaks of the ledges, and are now poised, like the famous Tipping Rock, just where the glacier left them when it melted. Few towns in America possess greater geological interest or a wider variety of glacial phenomena than[Pg 96] Cohasset—all of which may be studied more fully with the aid of E. Victor Bigelow's "Narrative History of the Town of Cohasset, Massachusetts," and William O. Crosby's "Geology of the Boston Basin." This, then, is briefly the first part of Cohasset's ledges. The second part deals with human events, including many shipwrecks and disasters, and more than one romantic episode. Perhaps this human section is best begun with Captain John Smith. Captain John Smith was born too early. If ever a hero was brought into the world to adorn the moving-picture screen, that hero of the "iron collar," of piratical capture, of wedlock with an Indian princess, was the man. Failing of this high calling he did some serviceable work in discovering and describing many of the inlets on the coast of New England. Among these inlets Cohasset acted her part as hostess to the famous navigator and staged a small and vivid encounter with the aborigines. The date of this presentation was in 1614; the scenario may be found in Smith's own diary.[Pg 97] Smith and a party of eight or more sailors made the trip between the ledges in a small rowboat. It is believed that they landed somewhere near Hominy Point. Their landing was not carried out without some misadventure, however, for in some way this party of explorers angered the Indians with whom they came in contact, and the result was an attack from bow and arrow. The town of Cohasset, in commemorating this encounter by a tablet, has inscribed upon the tablet Smith's own words: "We found the people on those parts very kind, but in their fury no less valiant: and at Quonhaset falling out there with but one of them, he with three others crossed the harbour in a cannow to certain rocks whereby we must pass, and there let flie their arrowes for our shot, till we were out of danger, yet one of them was slaine, and the other shot through the thigh." History follows fast along the ledges: history of gallant deeds and gallant defense during the days of the Revolution and the War of 1812;[Pg 98] deeds of disaster along the coast and one especial deed of great engineering skill. The beauty and the tragedy of Cohasset are caught in large measure upon these jagged rocks. The splinters and wrecks of two and a half centuries have strewn the beaches, and many a corpse, far from its native land, has been found, wrapped in a shroud of seaweed upon the sand, and has been lowered by alien hands into a forever unmarked grave. Quite naturally the business of "wrecking"—that is, saving the pieces—came to be the trade of a number of Cohasset citizens, and so expert did Cohasset divers and seamen become that they were in demand all over the world. One of the most interesting salvage enterprises concerned a Spanish frigate, sunk off the coast of Venezuela. Many thousand dollars in silver coin were covered by fifty feet of water, and it was Captain Tower, of Cohasset, with a crew of Cohasset divers and seamen, who set sail for the spot in a schooner bearing the substantial name of Eliza Ann. The Spanish Government, having no faith in[Pg 99] the enterprise, agreed to claim only two and one half per cent of what was removed. The first year the wreckers got fourteen thousand dollars, and the second they had reached seven thousand, when the Spaniards became so jealous of their skill that they had to flee for their lives (taking the seven thousand, however). The clumsy diving-bell method was the only one known at that time, but when, twenty years later, the Spaniards had to swallow their chagrin and send again for the same wrecking party to assist them on the same task, modern diving suits were in use and more money was recovered—no mean triumph for the crew of the Eliza Ann! As the wrecks along the Cohasset coast were principally caused by the dangerous reefs spreading in either direction from what is known as Minot's Ledge, the necessity of a lighthouse on that spot was early evident, and the erecting of the present Minot's Light is one of the most romantic engineering enterprises of our coast history. The original structure was snapped off like a pikestaff in the[Pg 100] great storm of 1851, and the present one of Quincy granite is the first of its kind in America to be built on a ledge awash at high tide and with no adjacent dry land. The tremendous difficulties were finally overcome, although in the year 1855 the work could be pursued for only a hundred and thirty hours, and the following year for only a hundred and fifty-seven. To read of the erection of this remarkable lighthouse reminds one of the building of Solomon's temple. The stone was selected with the utmost care, and the Quincy cutters declared that such chiseling had never before left the hand of man. Then every single block for the lower portion was meticulously cut, dovetailed, and set in position on Government Island in Cohasset Harbor. The old base, exquisitely laid, where they were thus set up is still visible, as smooth as a billiard table, although grass-covered. In addition to the flawless cutting and joining of the blocks, the ledge itself was cut into a succession of levels suitable to bear a stone foundation—work which was possible only at certain times of the tide and[Pg 101] seasons of the year. The cutting of each stone so that it exactly fitted its neighbor, above, below, and at either side, and precisely conformed to the next inner row upon the same level, was nothing short of a marvel. A miniature of the light—the building of which took two winters, and which was on the scale of an inch to a foot—was in the United States Government Building at the Chicago Exposition, and is stone for stone a counterpart of the granite tower in the Atlantic. Although this is an achievement which belongs in a sense to the whole United States, yet it must always seem, to those who followed it most closely, as belonging peculiarly to Cohasset. A famous Cohasset rigger made the model for the derrick which was used to raise the stones; the massive granite blocks were teamed by one whose proud boast it was that he had never had occasion to shift a stone twice; a Cohasset man captained the first vessel to carry the stone to the ledge, and another assisted in the selection of the stone. It is difficult to turn one's eyes away from[Pg 102] the spectacular beauty of the Cohasset shore, but magnificent as these ledges are, and glittering with infinite romance, yet, rather curiously, it is on the limpid surface of the marshes that we read the most significant episodes of Colonial and pioneer life. One of the needs which the early settlers were quick to feel was open land which would serve as pasturage for their cattle. With forests pressing down upon them from the rear, and a barrier of granite in front of them, the problem of grazing-lands was important. The Hingham settlement at Bare Cove (Cohasset was part of Hingham originally) found the solution in the acres of open marshland which stretched to the east. Cohasset to-day may ask where so much grazing-land lay within her borders. By comparison with the old maps and surveying figures, we find that many acres, now covered with the water of Little Harbor and lying within the sandbar at Pleasant Beach, are counted as old grazing-lands. These, with the sweep of what is now the "Glades," furnished abundant pasturage for neighboring[Pg 103] cattle and brought the Hingham settlers quickly to Cohasset meadows. Thus it happens that the first history of Cohasset is the history of this common pasturage—"Commons," as it was known in the old histories. Although Hingham was early divided up among the pioneers, the marshes were kept undivided for the use of the whole settlement. As a record of 1650 puts it: "It was ordered that any townsman shall have the liberty to put swine to Conohasset without yokes or rings, upon the town's common land." But the Massachusetts Bay Colony was hard-headed as well as pious, and several naïve hints creep into the early records of sharers of the Commons who were shrewdly eyeing the salt land of Cohasset. A real estate transfer of 1640 has this potential flavor: "Half the lot at Conehasset, if any fall by lot, and half the commons which belong to said lot." And again, four years later, Henry Tuttle sold to John Fearing "what right he had to the Division of Conihassett Meadows." The first land to come under the measuring chain and wooden stake[Pg 104] of surveyors was about the margin of Little Harbor about the middle of the seventeenth century. After that the rest of the township was not long in being parceled out. One of the curious methods of land division was in the Beechwood district. The apportionment seems to have had the characteristics of ribbon cake. Sections of differing desirability—to meet the demands of justice and natural conditions—were measured out in long strips, a mile long and twenty-five feet wide. Many an old stone wall marking this early grant is still to be seen in the woods. Could anything but the indomitable spirit of those English settlers and the strong feeling for land ownership have built walls of carted stone about enclosures a mile long and twenty-five feet wide? Having effected a division of land in Cohasset, families soon began to settle away from the mother town of Hingham, and after a prolonged period of government at arm's length, with all its attendant discomforts, the long, bitter struggle resolved itself into Cohasset's final separation from Hingham, and[Pg 105] its development from a precinct into an independent township. While the marshes to the north were the cause of Cohasset being first visited, settled, and made into a township, yet the marshes to the south hold an even more vital historical interest. These southern marshes, bordering Bound Brook and stretching away to Bassing Beach, were visited by haymakers as were those to the north. But these haymakers did not come from the same township, nor were they under the same local government. The obscure little stream which to-day lies between Scituate Harbor and Cohasset marks the line of two conflicting grants—the Plymouth Colony and the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In the early days of New England royal grants from the throne or patents from colonial councils in London were deemed necessary before settling in the wilderness. The strong, inherited respect for landed estates must have given such charters their value, as it is hard for us to see now how any one in England could[Pg 106] have prevented the pioneers from settling where they pleased. The various patents and grants of the two colonies (indefinite as they seem to us now, as some granted "up to" a hundred acres to each emigrant without defining any boundaries) brought the two colonies face to face at Bound Brook. The result was a dispute over the harvesting of salt hay. All boundary streams attract to themselves a certain amount of fame—the Rio Grande, the Saint Lawrence, and the Rhine. But surely the little stream of Bound Brook, which was finally taken as the line of division between two colonies of such historical importance as the Plymouth and the Massachusetts Bay, is worth more than a superficial attention. The dispute lasted many years and occasioned the appointing of numerous commissioners from both sides. That the salt grass of Bassing Beach should have assumed such importance reveals again the sensitiveness to land values of men who had so recently left England. The settling of the dispute was not referred back to[Pg 107] England, but was settled by the colonists themselves. The author of the "Narrative History of Cohasset" calls this an event of only less historical importance than that of the pact drawn up in the cabin of the Mayflower. He declares that the confederation of states had its inception there, and adds: "The appointment for this joint commission for the settlement of this intercolonial difficulty was the first step of federation that culminated in the Colonial Congress and then blossomed into the United States." We to-day, to whom the salt grass of Cohasset is little more than a fringe about the two harbors, may find it difficult to agree fully with such a sweeping statement, but certainly this spot and boundary line should always be associated with the respect for property which has ennobled the Anglo-Saxon race. Between the marshes, which were of such high importance in those early days, and the ledges which have been the cause and the scene of so many Cohasset adventures, twists Jerusalem[Pg 108] Road, the brilliant beauty of which has been so often—but never too often—remarked. This was the main road from Hingham for many years, and it took full three hours of barbarous jolting in two-wheeled, springless ox carts to make the trip. Even if a man had a horse the journey was cruelly tedious, for there were only a few stretches where the horse could go faster than a walk—and the way was pock-marked with boulders and mudholes. With no stage-coach before 1815, and being off the highway between Plymouth and Boston, it is small wonder that the early Cohasset folk either walked or went by sea to Hingham and thence to Boston. It has been suggested that the "keeper of young cattle at Coneyhassett," who drove his herd over from Hingham, was moved either by piety or sarcasm to give the trail its present arresting name. However, as the herdsman did not take this route, but the back road through Turkey Meadows, it is more probable that some visitors, who detected a resemblance between this section of the country and the Holy[Pg 109] Land, were responsible for the christening of this road and also of the Sea of Galilee—which last has almost dropped into disuse. There does not seem to be any particular suggestion of the land of the Pharaohs and present-day Egypt, but tradition explains that as follows: Old Squire Perce had accumulated a store of grain in case of drought, and when the drought came and the men hurried to him to buy corn, he greeted them with "Well, boys, so you've come down to Egypt to buy corn." Another proof, if one were needed, of the Biblical familiarity of those days. It is hard to stop writing about Cohasset. There are so many bits of history tucked into every ledge and cranny of her shore. The green in front of the old white meeting-house—one of the prettiest and most perfect meeting-houses on the South Shore—has been pressed by the feet of men assembling for six wars. It makes Cohasset seem venerable, indeed, when one thinks of the march of American history. But to the tawny ledges, tumbling out to sea, these three hundred years are as but a day; for[Pg 110] the story of the stones, like the story of the stars, is measured in terms of milliards. To such immemorial keepers of the coast the life of man is a brief tale that is soon told, and fades as swiftly as the fading leaf. <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/image146.jpg" width-obs="250" height-obs="116" alt="" title="" /></div> <div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3> <div class="footnote">[1] For much of this chapter I am indebted to my friend Alice C. Hyde. </div> </div> <hr style="width: 65%;" /> [Pg 111] <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/image147.jpg" width-obs="350" height-obs="225" alt="" title="" /></div> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.