Natick Before the Civil War, Part 4: From Small Farm Town to Industrial Giant

The period between the end of Andrew Jackson’s second presidential administration in 1837 and the stirrings of Civil War are largely a blank in the minds of most Americans, and for good reason – we were finally getting about the hard, gritty business of disciplining ourselves to become a mature nation.

To do this, however, we would have to build railroads, invent previously unimagined, technologically sophisticated devices (including the telegraph, sewing machine and mechanical reaper) and launch a series of cultural initiatives designed to bring knowledge and civility to a largely illiterate urban and rural population.

Natick played a role in virtually every one of those initiatives; in doing so it underwent a dramatic transformation. In the decade of the 1830s Natick was small, isolated and largely cut off from the main currents of national life. Less than four decades later at the close of the Civil War, Natick was a boomtown on a growth spurt running unchecked – until the fires of 1872 and ’74 brought the commercial and industrial life of the town to a calamitous halt.

In that time Natick: 1) established a variety of important cultural institutions that would help its citizens stay abreast of contemporary ideas and commercial opportunity; 2) experienced a leap forward in transportation that would allow it to become a major industrial community; 3) adopted new technologies and business relationships that facilitated the move of Natick’s cobblers from participants in a colonial craft economy into the front ranks of a regional shoe manufacturing industry; and 5) made Natick the largest town by population in South Middlesex county.

In the brief passage of three decades, Natick, like many of the towns surrounding Boston, but not all, moved aggressively beyond its rural roots, driven by a host of external factors on one hand, compelled by local entrepreneurs and progressive thinkers on the other. On one hand, Natick’s dairy farms, fields and orchards would continue to supply nearby Boston, which in the age proceeding mechanical refrigeration relied on a network of regional communities with over a million acres of farmland under cultivation.

On the other, the newly arrived railroad would administer a final blow to the woodlands of what is now MetroWest. Without the means to transport anthracite coal into the region ­– the build-out of America’s railway system would not occur until the post-Civil War period (prior to assuming the presidency, Lincoln made his living as a railway lawyer) – we still relied on locally-grown wood to heat with and construct Massachusetts homes.

Cut and milled wood, which along with fish was the backbone of the colonial export economy, and for that matter local trade as well was consumed with a voracious appetite: wood for building homes; for barrel staves and railroad ties; for ship building and heating (30 cords were required to keep a farmhouse warm through famously hard New England winters and stoke its cook stove); and most of all wood to stoke the burning maws of the “goats and pufferbillies” (early steam engines) that multiplied like fecund farm animals along the railway lines that suddenly appeared throughout the region and all of New England.

Railroad engines, while comparatively small, primitive and inefficient like the behemoths of the pre-diesel 20^th century, still consumed vast quantities of wood. By the start of the war, it has been estimated that less than 10% of the region was still populated by woodlands, a circumstance that, fortunately was reversed by a number of factors so that in our own time Massachusetts enjoys the highest proportion of en-forestation of any heavily populated state in the country.

And finally, wood for sawdust to insulate the network of ice houses adjacent to Middlesex ponds. Entrepreneurs like Frederic Tudor supplied area ice chests, but also exported the stuff as far a-field as the American South, Europe, the Caribbean and even India! Morse's Pond long supplied that trade, which may also have accounted for the excavation of Dug Pond, adjacent to the sight of our high school.

The arrival of the railroad initiated a change that would vault Natick into the front ranks of American industry. Shoemaking, which took place here in “ten footers,” (small sheds staffed by farmers and their children and used for various steps in the lasting and stitching process), experienced a dramatic change in both supply and demand conditions with the arrival of the railroad in Natick in 1834.

No longer dependent on local suppliers of hides and with the means at hand to deliver volume shipments to the Port of Boston at reduced cost and with enhanced speed, “jobbers” in Natick and scores of similar towns across Eastern Massachusetts sought to enhance their workforce, going so far by the 1840s to recruit Irish at the Port of New York in flight from the Great Potato Famine.

Wages dropped and production increased at the expense of Natick’s artisan cobblers (“jours,” from the French appellation for day laborers) whose way of life was effectively eradicated by the introduction in 1857 of a mechanized shoe-stitching machine by Lyman Reed of South Abington.

Natick exploded in a frenzy of enterprise and profit, capitalizing on a crude but widely popular boot style called the “brogan.” Popular among laborers, it also found wide adoption throughout the South by plantation-owners as a means to shoe their slaves.

Thousands of workers poured into newly opened factories in South Natick and a new district stretching from Natick Center to Felchville, stretching north along present-day Main Street. With its suddenly enlarged population of five thousand, Natick became the largest town in South Middlesex.

In the midst of this heady mix, Henry Wilson emerged. A recent émigré from New Hampshire capable in his youth of prodigies of work and study, he attended Natick’s Bacon Street School located not far from the Felchville workman’s boarding house he occupied in the 1830s. Irrepressibly gregarious and fond of debate, he found himself in the midst of a small-town renaissance of sorts, in the form of a new lending library and debating society, in both of which he played an active role.

Natick, it would seem, was going places. What most people did not realize in the 1840s was that it would eventually be off to war.

Next in “Natick Before the Civil War” – Schools begin to play an important role in town life, but Natick graduates are headed for a rude type of higher education.