The history of Dedham, Massachusetts, 1635–1699, begins with the first settlers' arrival in 1635 and runs to the end of the 17th century. The settlers, who built their village on land the native people called Tiot, incorporated the plantation in 1636. They sought to build a community in which all would live out Christian love in their daily lives, and for a time did, but the Utopian impulse did not last. The system of government they devised was both "a peculiar oligarchy" and "a most peculiar democracy." Most freemen could participate in Town Meeting, though they soon established a Board of Selectmen. Power and initiative ebbed and flowed between the two bodies.
The settlers then undertook the difficult task of establishing a church, drafting its doctrinal base, and selecting a minister. In early days nearly every resident was a member but, seeking a church of only "visible saints," membership declined over time. Though the "half-way covenant" was proposed in 1657 and endorsed by the minister, the congregation rejected it.
Population grew from about 200 people in early days to around 700 by 1700, with land being distributed according to rank and family size. Though it was given out sparingly in general, lands were also awarded in return for service to the church and the community. The town remained insular during the early years, with the community remaining self contained. With a small population, a simple and agrarian economy, and the free distribution of large tracts of land, there was very little disparity in wealth.
As the town grew, new towns broke off from Dedham, beginning with Medfield in 1651. With the division and subdivision of so many communities, Dedham has been called the "Mother of Towns." Of towns founded during the colonial era, Dedham is one of the few towns "that has preserved extensive records of its earliest years." This has enabled historians to date the Fairbanks House as the oldest tinder house in America and Mother Brook as the first man-made canal in Colonial America. It also established the Dedham Public Schools as the first public school in the country.
Incorporation
In 1635 there were rumors in the Massachusetts Bay Colony that a war with the local native people was impending and a fear arose that the few, small, coastal communities that existed were in danger of attack. This, in addition to the belief that the few towns that did exist were too close together, prompted the Massachusetts General Court to establish two new inland communities. On May 6, 1635, the General Court granted permission to residents of Watertown to set off and establish new towns. One group, led by Rev. Thomas Hooker, left and founded Hartford, Connecticut and another, led by Simon Willard, left to found Concord, Massachusetts. Together, Dedham and Concord helped relieve the growing population pressure and placed communities between the larger, more established coastal towns and the Indians further west.
It was not until the following March, however, that the General Court ordered that the bounds of what would become Dedham be mapped out. The committee appointed to do so reported back in April, but the date the grant was awarded to the original proprietors has been lost to history. The original grant was for about on the northeast side of the Charles River, including what is today Newton and land on the other shore that makes up roughly half of present-day Dedham, Needham, Westwood, and Dover. The order came after twelve men petitioned the General Court for a tract of land south of the Charles River.
Those men, plus seven others, made a second petition on August 29, 1636, for additional land on both sides of the river. One of the additional men was Robert Feake, the husband of Elizabeth Fones, the widow of John Winthrop's son, Henry. Feake only ever attended three meetings, all of them in Watertown, and there is no record that he ever set foot in Dedham. He was presumably recruited for his political influence and was granted a farm lot in addition to his house lot in return.
Neither the settlers nor the General Court knew exactly how much land they were requesting, or granting. The petition was for all the land south of the Charles River, but maps from the early 1630s show the river ending somewhere near modern-day Dedham. It had never been explored by colonial settlers beyond that point. Instead, the colony gave them over "two hundred square miles of virgin wilderness, complete with lakes, hills, forests, meadows, Indians, and a seemingly endless supply of rocks and wolves." There were a number of surveys undertaken over the years, beginning with one in 1638 undertaken by John Rogers and Jonathan Fairbanks, but the issue was not settled until the United States Supreme Court took up a case in 1846 that involved a dispute between the border of Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
In the second petition, the settlers asked the General Court to incorporate the plantation into a town, and to free the town from all "Countrey Charges," or taxes, for four years and from all military exercises unless "extraordinary occasion require it." The General Court granted only a three-year reprieve from taxes.
They also asked to "distinguish our town by the name of Contentment" but when the "prosaic minds" in the Court granted the petition on September 7, 1636, they decreed that the "towne shall beare the name of Dedham." The earliest records of the settlement, before the General Court settled on Dedham, all use the name Contentment. Tradition holds that John Rogers or John Dwight, both signers of the petition seeking the establishment of the town, asked the Court to name it after their hometown in England of Dedham, Essex. "Contentment" eventually became the motto of the town. Many of the other yeomen settling the new Dedham in the Massachusetts Bay Colony came from Suffolk, in eastern England.
The original grant stretched from the southwestern border of what is today Boston but was then Roxbury and Dorchester to the Rhode Island and Plymouth Colony borders. To the west were ungranted lands. The less than 100 Indians who lived on the land sold it for a small sum. Early settlers gave places names such as Dismal Swamp, Purgatory Brook, Satan's Kingdom, and Devil's Oven.
Landing and first settlement
The Algonquians living in the area called the place Tiot, which means "land surrounded by water." Many of them had died prior to the settlers arrival due to disease contracted by contact with English settlers. The area near Wigwam Pond, however, was still a seasonal site for the local tribe, however. The settlers were not looking to establish wide tracks of land, however. They were looking to recreate an English country village, and believed that with a compact settlement and hundreds of acres of land, a peaceful co-existence with the native peoples was possible.
Dedham was settled in the summer of 1636 by "about thirty families excised from the broad ranks of the English middle classes," largely from Yorkshire and East Anglia. Only five signers of the covenant were university graduates, but many more would be called upon to serve the town, the church, and the colony. As Puritans, they came to Massachusetts in order to live and worship as they pleased.
They traveled up the Charles River from Roxbury and Watertown in rough canoes carved from felled trees. These original settlers, including Edward Alleyn, John Everard, John Gay and John Ellis "paddled up the narrow, deeply flowing stream impatiently turning curve after curve around Nonantum until, emerging from the tall forest into the open, they saw in the sunset glow a golden river twisting back and forth through broad, rich meadows." In search of the best land available to them they continued on but The river took many turns, so that it was a burden the continual turning about.... West, east, and north we turned on that same meadow and progressed none, so that I, rising in the boat, saw the river flowing just across a bit of grass, in a place where I knew we had passed through nigh an hour before. "Moore," said Miles then to me, "the river is like its Master, our good King Charles, of sainted memory, it promises overmuch, but gets you nowhere."
They first landed where the river makes its "great bend," near what is today Ames Street, and close by the Dedham Community House and the Allin Congregational Church in Dedham Square. The site is known as "the Keye," and in 1927 a stone bench and memorial plaque were installed on the site.
By March 1637, with homes built and fields planted, the settlers moved to their new village. The first town meeting held in Dedham was on March 23, 1636–37 and was attended by 15 men.
Utopian commune
Like its surrounding communities, Dedham's early culture was much like the English villages where its original settlers were born and small agricultural communities all over Europe. A number of the customs and institutions in the town were direct transplants from contemporary English villages. However, as a settlement of English Puritans who escaped oppression to settle in the wilderness, "Dedham was peculiarly American."
It was originally intended to be a Utopian society along the lines of the later Amana Colonies, Oneida Community, and Brook Farm. In "its first years, the town was more than a place to live; it was a spiritual community." Its distinctive characteristics created what has been described as a "Christian Utopian Closed Corporate Community": Christian because they saw Christian love as the force which would most completely unite their community. Utopian because theirs was a highly conscious attempt to build the most perfect possible community, as perfectly united, perfectly at peace, and perfectly ordered as man could arrange. Closed because its membership was selected while outsiders were treated with suspicion or rejected altogether. And Corporate because the commune demanded the loyalty of its members, offering in exchange privileges which could be obtained only through membership, not the least of which were peace and good order.
Each of the original settlers pledged to live out Christian love in their daily lives. Each was also expected to be united in this love as it was designed to bring about a deep and abiding peace throughout the whole community. Inquiries could also be made into the private lives of townsmen, and adjustments ordered when a resident's life was not as virtuous as the community felt it should be.
None who were not committed to this ideal were to be admitted as townsmen and, if the need arose, they were to be expelled. The commitment in the Covenant to allow only like-minded individuals to live within the town explains why "church records show no instances of dissension, Quaker or Baptist expulsions, or witchcraft persecutions." The Covenant was intended to extend beyond the lifetimes if those who wrote it and to be binding upon all residents in perpetuity.
The poor would be helped if they were residents of Dedham, but sent away if they were not. In addition to paying taxes, each man was expected to labor on communal projects several days each month. Every year, six days were set aside to work on roads and each man was expected to work four of them. Townsmen also took turns serving in a variety of low level offices, including constable, hog reeve, or fence viewer.
This did not mean communism as the settlers subscribed to the Puritan belief of a natural inequality among men as being divine providence. Still, the relative economic equality kept social rank to a minimum and helped maintain social harmony. Men could live their entire lives in this community among their equals and on their own land. This was, according to one commentator, the "plan of the society [John] Winthrop hoped to construct in Massachusetts was the plan of Dedham writ large."
Decline