Book Description

"Here may we read the rise and course of a New England town, whose citizens were mostly rude, uncultivated, often perverse men, endued with the ordinary attributes of selfishness, yet controlled and directed by the few more intelligent and broader minds, at whose head for the early generations was the minister and later, the wealthy and educated families, whose fortunes acquired elsewhere supported them in case and moderate affluence on the barren soil. When the throes of revolution came, it is evident how eagerly the humbler classes, who had little to lose, entered into it, and how reluctant and hesitant were the more wealthy; how small a portion of the men went to war with the mother land; and how lightly the expense of the struggle was borne. The mighty change which took place, when the money value of the ledges beneath the hard surface was developed, is clearly set forth, leading forward to conditions which forced the expansion of the town into the city of today, and its preparation for incorporation, by and by, into the larger Boston of the future. "The influence of the Norman element was for the best interests of the whole community. In no New England town was the energy, the enterprise and the formative power of the blooded families, settled among the people, more pronounced than as exemplified by the Quincys, the Apthorps, the Borlands, the Cleverleys and the Vassalls of Braintree. Content to subsist on the product of their farms, with very moderate margins for income, they dwelt as did their humbler neighbors, in every day life and labor; but their wise and masterful direction of public affairs was manifest and paramount at the annual March meeting, where the right of free discussion and vote always existed. In business there was very small traffic, for there was almost no money, and no surplus was raised. The farming barely supported the inhabitants; probably would not, had not proximity to Boston and easy access by water furnished a ready market for the cider, the pumpkins and the beans, spared from slender hoards to supply indispensable wants and the taxes. Small fisheries flourished, and vegetables were exported to Spanish and other tropical, or semi-tropical, ports. Out of this and, as it grew, quitting Braintree, came Colonial commerce and the hardy seamen who conducted it. In this history, that of Braintree was very similar to that of other Massachusetts coast towns; the gentle blood filled the highest political stations, while the deacon, the highest elective church official, came from the plain people. The minister was imported and, we are afraid, very meanly and grudgingly supported. The narrow thoughts and petty lives of the towns-people, the vulgarity of their manners, the lax moral tone and universal intemperance, prevalent in the Colonial period, are well known to all students and searchers of county records. Distilleries were frequent, taverns ubiquitous and every country store had its open bar....All this and much more Mr. Adams shows in a series of delightful chapters, with full record of the ultimate changes effected by the railway and the granite. Such is the wholesome flavor of the antiquary and the political philosopher, which pervades the volume." -The New England Bibliopolist, June, 1892