the night in that dismal lodging-place. Tradition says that the young man grew melancholy and died a few years later from the effects of his fright. After that the authorities buried the entrance of the tomb deep below earth and sod. When I see the symmetrical mound which still remains, I wonder if the poor body below has fulfilled its penance and returned to its native dust. New England; nor less hardy and persistent than their brethren of the other towns were the men of Malden. Undismayed by adverse circumstances of church and state, they felled the forests and subdued the land, building their rude homes, laying out and defining roads, and enacting their simple and homely laws, which, ridiculous or cruel as they sometimes appear, bore in them the germs of It was a hardy strain which peopled morality, of good citizenship and free INTERIOR OF THE LIBRARY. dom. For the commonweal they stood firmly in opposition to tyranny and usurpation, and gave freely of their blood and goods for the common defence. In the disastrous and bloody Philip's War, though removed from the scene of hostilities, they bore their part; and fifty-two inhabitants of Malden, sufferers by the war, received aid from the Irish Charity, a contribution which Ireland sent to the relief of the Christian brethren in New England. At least seventy of the men of the little town were in active service, of whom many were members of the redoubtable Three County Three County Troop, the memory of whose deeds may long have lingered by the hearths of the countryside, but has perished with the crimson standard of silk which led them to victory. Another was the brave and active Lieutenant Phineas Upham, who fell in the great Narragansett Fight, and dying, was buried in the ground at Sandy Bank. The overthrow of the Indian confederacy, by the defeat and death of Philip, and the summary ending of the unpopular adminis tration of Governor Andros, with the establishment of a permanent provincial government, gave a new life to the spreading settlements of Massachusetts Bay. In Malden, as elsewhere, the farms grew larger as the active arms of the hardy yeomen beat the forests backward, and the acreage of grazing and plant ing land increased. In 1695 the last great aggregation of common lands, comprising about thirty-five hundred acres and embracing, with the exception of a few scattered lots and plantations, the whole of the present city of Melrose and the district of Greenwood in Wakefield, was allotted to the seventy-four freeholders of the town. After the decease of Mr. Wigglesworth, the ecclesiastical affairs of the town were unsettled; and in a spiritual sense the community was in a condition altogether forlorn. Contentions divided the people. Minister after minister was considered or called without avail, the town hindering the church, or the church opposing the town in matters of choice, or both uniting in that which was inexpedient or which came to naught in the end. THE MALDEN HOSPITAL. church and town concurred in the choice of the Rev. Joseph Emerson. Barely twenty-one years of age, his youthful fervor and the faithfulness of his ministrations and his pleasant and courteous manners won the hearts of the people; and, even in the unfortunate division of the town which came to disturb his otherwise peaceful pastorate, he lost the respect and love of none. The people of the later Mystic Side, or that territory which still remained to Charlestown on the east bank of the river, owned rights of burial in the ground at Sandy Bank and church privileges in the meeting-house at Bell Rock in common with the people of Malden, and were recognized in the enjoy North River, as well as those on the promontory between the Mystic and the South River. Isolated from their fellows on the Charlestown side, their town privileges were few, and they appear to have received little attention or help. It is not easy to understand why the few settlers of the southerly portion of Mystic Side were retained to the elder town when their northerly neighbors were allowed a separation in 1649, as all their interests were intimately joined with those of their Malden brethre n. Schools had been established early in Malden and had been continued with more or less liberality, as the County Court urged, 'or the town's sense of the benefits of education impelled; but scanty provision had ever been made by the town of Charlestown for its people at Mystic Side. At length, apparently under a desire for school privileges, an unsuccessful attempt was made to obtain a separation. The uneasy people were quieted for a time by some slight grants for a school; but in 1723, on a second attempt, not wholly suc cessful, they were annexed to Malden for ministerial and educational purposes only. A school was promptly established at Mystic Side; but as the inhabitants there now owed divided responsibilities, religious and educational in Malden, political in Charles marked the beginning of a new period of trials and dissensions. The first meeting-house of the town and the second, which was built in 1660, were near Bell Rock, so called from the early fixing of a bell in a frame upon its summit, having apparently been placed in that location by reason of its nearness to the settlements near Sandy Bank and upon Green's Hill. As the population increased to the northward and eastward, the situation became inconvenient, being, as it was until the annexation of the later Mystic Side, nearly at the southern limit of the town. After nearly seventy years of use, the house became too small for its congregation, and it was decided by the town to build a new house at the clay-pits, THE SQUARE. town, the situation was not satisfactory. A wish for a complete disunion with Charlestown prevail d, which, though opposed by the parent town, was finally successful; and in 1726 the desired union with Malden was accomplished. The advent of "our Charlestown neighbors" in the body politic upon land given by William and Dorothy Sprague for that purpose. This location was upon the north side of Harvell's Brook, where the house of the First Parish (Universalist) now stands. The south side people protested against the removal, although the proposed location was far south of the centre of the town. A contest |