The Bay State Monthly. Volume 2, No. 1, October, 1884

On February 9, 1878, the Herald was issued for the first time from the new building erected by its proprietors at No. 255 Washington Street. This structure has a lofty and ornate front of gray granite with trimmings of red granite; it covers an irregular shaped lot, something in the form of the letter L. From Washington Street, where it has a width of thirty-one feet nine inches, it extends back one hundred and seventy-nine feet, and from the rear a wing runs northward to Williams Court forty feet. This wing was originally twenty-five feet wide on the court; but in 1882 an adjoining lot, formerly occupied by the old Herald Building, was purchased and built upon, increasing the width of the wing and its frontage on the court to eighty-five feet. The structure forms one of the finest and most convenient newspaper-offices in the country. In the basement are the pressroom, where at the present time six Bullock perfecting-presses (two with folders attached) are run by two 45-horse-power engines; the stereotype-room, where the latest improvements in machinery have enabled the casting, finishing, and placing on the press of two plates in less than eight minutes after the receipt of a "form"; the two dynamos and the engine running them, which supply the electricity for the incandescent lights with which every room in the building is illuminated; and the storage-room for paper and other supplies. On the first floor are the business-office, a very handsome and spacious apartment facing Washington Street, and finished in mahogany, rare marbles, and brasswork; the delivery and mailing rooms, whence the editions are sent out for distribution at the Williams-court door. On the second floor are the reception-room, the library, and the apartments of the editor-in-chief, managing editor, and department editors. On the third floor are the general manager's office and the rooms of the news and city editors and the reporters. The entire fourth floor is used as a composing-room, where stand "frames" for ninety-six compositors; the foreman and his assistants have each a private office, and a private room is assigned to the proofreaders. All the editors' and reporters' rooms are spacious, well lighted, and admirably ventilated; they are finished in native woods, varnished, and are handsomely furnished. Electric call-bells, speaking-tubes, and pneumatic-tubes furnish means of communication with all the departments, and no expense has been spared in supplying every convenience for facilitating work and the comfort of the employees.

With increased facilities came continued prosperity. The business depression in 1877 affected the circulation of the Herald, as it did that of every newspaper in the country, and the circulation that year was not so large as during the year previous; still, the daily average was one hundred and three thousand copies.

The array of men employed in the various departments of the Herald at the present time would astonish the founders of the paper. In 1846 the editorial and reportorial staff consisted of two men; now it comprises seventy-seven. Six compositors were employed then; now there are one hundred and forty-seven. One pressman and an assistant easily printed the Herald, and another daily paper as well, in those days, upon one small handpress; now forty men find constant employment in attending the engines and the six latest improved perfecting-presses required to issue the editions on time. The business department was then conducted with ease by one man, who generally found time to attend to the mailing and sale of papers; now twenty-one persons have plenty to do in the counting-room, and the delivery-room engages the services of twenty. Then stereotyping the forms of a daily newspaper was an unheard-of proceeding; now fourteen men are employed in the Herald's foundery. The salaries and bills for composition aggregated scarcely one hundred and fifty dollars a week then; now the weekly composition bill averages over three thousand dollars, and the payroll of the other departments reaches three thousand dollars every week, and frequently exceeds that sum. Then the Herald depended for outside news upon the meagre dispatches of telegraph agencies in New York (the Associated Press system was not inaugurated until 1848-49, and New England papers were not admitted to its privileges until some years later), and such occasional correspondence as its friends in this and other States sent in free of charge. Now it not only receives the full dispatches of the Associated Press, but has news bureaus of its own in London, Paris, New York, and Washington, and special correspondents in every city of any considerable size throughout the country. All these are in constant communication with the office and are instructed to use the telegraph without stint when the occasion demands. The Herald has grown from a little four-paged sheet, nine by fourteen inches in dimensions, to such an extent that daily supplements are required to do justice to readers as well as advertisers, and it is necessary to print an eight-paged edition as often as four times a week during the busy season of the year.

The Herald has achieved a great success; it has broadened from year to year since the present proprietors assumed control. It has been their steadily followed purpose gradually to elevate the tone of their paper, till it should reach the highest level of American journalism. They have done this, and, at the same time, they have retained their enormous constituency. The wonderful educating power of a great newspaper cannot easily be overestimated. It is the popular university to which thousands upon thousands of readers resort daily for intelligent comment on the events of the world—the great wars, the suggestions of science, the achievements of the engineers, home and foreign politics, etc. That such a great newspaper as the Herald, wherein the elucidating comment is kept up from day to day by cultivated writers trained in journalism, must perform many of the functions of a university is clear. The news columns of the Herald are a perfect mirror of the great world's busy life. The ocean-cable is employed to an extent which would have seemed recklessly extravagant ten years ago. It has its news bureaus in the great capitals of civilization; its roving correspondents may be found, at the date of this writing, exploring the Panama Canal, the interior of Mexico, studying the railway system of Great Britain, investigating Mormon homelife, scouring the vast level stretches of Dakota, traversing the great Central States of the Union for presidential "pointers," making a tour of the Southern States to secure trustworthy data as to the progress achieved in education there, and journeying along the coast of hundred-harbored Maine for the latest information as to the growth of the newer summer resorts in that picturesque region. In large and quiet rooms in the home office a force of copy-readers is preparing the correspondence from all over the world for the compositors; at the news desks trained men are working day and night over telegrams flashed from far and near, eliminating useless words, punctuating, putting on "heads," and otherwise dressing copy for the typesetters. The enormous amount of detail work in a great paper is not easily to be conveyed to the non-professional reader. From the managing editor, whose brain is employed in inventing new ideas for his subordinates to carry into execution, to that very important functionary, the proof-reader, who corrects the errors of the types, there is a distracting amount of detail work performed every day. The Herald is managed with very little friction; the great machine runs as if oiled. With an abundance of capital, an ungrudging expenditure of money in the pursuit of news, a great working-force well disciplined and systematized, it goes on weekday after weekday, turning out nine editions daily, and on Sundays giving to the public sixteen closely-crowded pages, an intellectual bill-of-fare from which all may select according to individual preference.

The organization of the Herald force is almost ideally perfect. Its three proprietors, all of whom are still on the ascending grade of the hill of life, share in the daily duties of their vast establishment. Colonel Royal M. Pulsifer is the publisher of the paper, and has charge of the counting-room, the delivery, press, and composition rooms, the three last departments being under competent foremen. A large share of the wonderful business success of the Herald is due to his sagacity and liberality. He is a publisher who expends at long range, not expecting immediate returns. Under this generous and wisely prudent policy of spending liberally for large future returns the Herald has grown to its present proportions. The editor-in-chief of the paper is Mr. Edwin B. Haskell, who directs the political and general editorial policy of the paper. He has the courage of his independence, and is independent even of the Independents. Since he assumed the editorial chair, the Herald has fought consistently for honest money, for a reformed civil service, for the purification of municipal politics, for freer trade, and local self-government. The editor of the Herald writes strong Saxon-English, believing that in a daily newspaper the people should be addressed in a plain, understandable style. He has an unexpected way of putting things, his arguments are enlivened by a rare humor, and clinched frequently by some anecdote or popular allusion. The third partner, Mr. Charles H. Andrews, is one of those newspaper men who are born journalists. He has the gift of common sense. His judgment is always sound. The news end of the Herald establishment is under control of Mr. Andrews, and to no man more than to him is due the wonderful development of the Herald's news features. The executive officer of the Herald ship is the managing editor, Mr. John H. Holmes, who is known to newspaper workers all over the country as a man of great journalistic ability. He has the cosmopolitan mind; is free from local prejudices, and can take in the value of news three thousand miles away as quickly as if the happening were at the office door. An untiring, sleepless man, prodigal of his energies in the development of the Herald into a great world-paper, Mr. Holmes is a type of that distinctively modern development, the "newspaper man." Men of adventurous minds, of breadth of view, and delighting in positive achievements, take to journalism in these days as in the sixteenth century they became navigators of the globe, explorers of distant regions, and founders of new empires.

Years ago the Herald outgrew the provincial idea that the happenings of the streets must be of more importance, and, consequently, demanding more space, than events of universal interest in the chief centres of the world. The policy of the paper has been, while neglecting nothing of news value at home, and while photographing all events of local importance with fulness and accuracy, to keep its readers au courant with the world's progress. In all departments of sporting intelligence the Herald is an acknowledged authority; its dramatic news is fuller than that of any paper in the country; it "covers," to use a newspaper technicality, the world's metropolis on the banks of the Thames not with a single correspondent, but with a corps of able writers; during the recent troubles in Ireland one of its special correspondents traversed that distracted country, giving to his paper the most graphic picture of Irish distress and discontent, and he capped the climax of journalistic achievement by interviewing the leading British statesmen on the Irish theme, making a long letter, which was cabled to the Herald and recabled back the same day to the London press, which had to take, at second-hand, the enterprise of the great New-England daily. At Paris, the world's pleasure capital, the chief seat of science, it is ably represented, and its Italian correspondence has been ample and excellent. When public attention was first drawn to Mexico by the opening up of that land of mystery and revolutions by American railway-builders, the Herald put three correspondents into that field, and made Mexico an open book to the reading public. It is one of the characteristics of the paper's policy to take up and exhaust all topics of great current interest, and then to pass quickly on to something new. In dealing with topics of interest of local importance, the paper has long been noted for exhaustive special articles by writers of accuracy and fitness for their task. Its New York City staff comprises a general correspondent, a political observer, a chronicler of business failures, an accomplished art critic, a fashion writer, a theatrical correspondent, and three general news correspondents, using the wires. The Herald is something more than a Boston paper. It has a wide reach, and employs electricity more freely than did the oldtime newspaper the post-horse.

In its closely-printed columns the Herald has, during the last decade, given to its readers a cyclopædia of the world's daily doings. Portraitures of men of affairs done by skilled writers, the fullest records of contemporaneous events, the gossip and news of the chief towns of the globe,—all this has made up a complete record to which the future historian may turn.

To manage such a paper requires a coördination of forces and an intellectual breadth of view deserving to be ranked with the work and attributes of a successful general. Not to wait for the slow processes of legislation, to be up and ahead of the government itself, to be alert and untiring—this is the newspaper ideal. How near the Herald has come to this, its enduring popularity, its great profits, and its wide fame and influence, best show.

WACHUSETT MOUNTAIN AND PRINCETON

By Atherton P. Mason

Almost the first land seen by a person on board a vessel approaching the Massachusetts coast is the summit of Wachusett Mountain; and any one standing upon its rocky top beholds more of Massachusetts than can be seen from any other mountain in the State. For these two reasons, if for no others, a short historical and sceno-graphical description of this lonely and majestic eminence, and of the beautiful township in which it lies, would seem to be interesting.

Wachusett, or "Great Watchusett Hill," as it was originally called, lies in the northern part of the township of Princeton, and is about fifty miles due west from Boston. The Nashaways, or Nashuas, originally held this tract and all the land west of the river that still bears their name, and they gave to this mountain and the region around its base the name of "Watchusett." Rising by a gradual ascent from its base, it has the appearance of a vast dome. The Reverend Peter Whitney2 speaking of its dimensions, says: "The circumference of this monstrous mass is about three miles, and its height is 3,012 feet above the level of the sea, as was found by the Hon. John Winthrop, Esq., LL.D., in the year 1777: and this must be 1,800 or 1,900 feet above the level of the adjacent country." More recent measurements have not materially changed these figures, so they may be regarded as substantially correct.

The first mention, and probably the first sight, of this mountain, or of any portion of the region now comprised in Worcester County, is recorded in Governor Winthrop's journal, in which, under the date of January 27, 1632, is written: "The Governour and some company with him, went up by Charles River about eight miles above Watertown." The party after climbing an eminence in the vicinity of their halting-place saw "a very high hill, due west about forty miles off, and to the N.W. the high hills by Merrimack, above sixty miles off," The "very high hill" seen by them for the first time was unquestionably Wachusett.

"On the 20th of October, 1759, the General Court of Massachusetts, passed an act for incorporating the east wing, so called, of Rutland, together with sundry farms and some publick lands contiguous thereto," as a district under the name of Prince Town, "to perpetuate the name and memory of the late Rev. Thomas Prince, colleague pastor of the Old South church in Boston, and a large proprietor of this tract of land." The district thus incorporated contained about nineteen thousand acres; but on April 24, 1771, its inhabitants petitioned the General Court, that it, "with all the lands adjoining said District, not included in any other town or District," be incorporated into a town by the name of Princeton; and by the granting of this petition, the area of the town was increased to twenty-two thousand acres.

The principal citizen of Princeton at this period was the Honorable Moses Gill, who married the daughter of the Reverend Thomas Prince. He was a man of considerable note in the county also, holding office as one of the judges of the court of common pleas for the county of Worcester, and being "for several years Counsellor of this Commonwealth." His country-seat, located at Princeton, was a very extensive estate, comprising nearly three thousand acres. Mr. Whitney appears to have been personally familiar with this place, and his description of it is so graphic and enthusiastic, that it may be interesting to quote a portion of it.

"His noble and elegant seat is about one mile and a quarter from the meeting-house, to the south. The mansion-house is large, being fifty by fifty feet, with four stacks of chimneys. The farmhouse is forty feet by thirty-six. In a line with this stands the coach and chaise house, fifty feet by thirty-six. This is joined to the barn by a shed seventy feet in length—the barn is two hundred feet by thirty-two. Very elegant fences are erected around the mansion-house, the outhouses, and the garden. When we view this seat, these buildings, and this farm of so many hundred acres under a high degree of profitable cultivation, and are told that in the year 1776 it was a perfect wilderness, we are struck with wonder, admiration, and astonishment. Upon the whole, the seat of Judge Gill, all the agreeable circumstances respecting it being attentively considered, is not paralleled by any in the New England States: perhaps not by any this side the Delaware."

Judge Gill was a very benevolent and enterprising man, and did much to advance the welfare of the town in its infancy. During the first thirty years of its existence, it increased rapidly in wealth and population, having in 1790 one thousand and sixteen inhabitants. For the next half-century it increased slowly, having in 1840 thirteen hundred and forty-seven inhabitants. Since then, like all our beautiful New-England farming-towns, it has fallen off in population, having at the present time but little over one thousand people dwelling within its limits. Yet neither the town nor the character of the people has degenerated in the last century. Persevering industry has brought into existence in this town some of the most beautiful farms in New England, and in 1875 the value of farm products was nearly a quarter of a million dollars. Manufacturing has never been carried on to any great extent in this town. "In Princeton there are four grist mills, five saw mills, and one fulling mill and clothiers' works," says Whitney in 1793. Now lumber and chair-stock are the principal manufactured products, and in 1875 the value of these, together with the products of other smaller manufacturing industries, was nearly seventy thousand dollars.

Princeton is the birthplace of several men who have become well known, among whom may be mentioned Edward Savage (1761-1817), noted as a skilful portrait-painter; David Everett (1770-1813), the journalist, and author of those familiar schoolboy verses beginning:—

"You'd scarce expect one of my ageTo speak in public on the stage";

and Leonard Woods, D.D., the eminent theologian.

This locality derives additional interest from the fact that Mrs. Rowlandson, in her book entitled Twenty Removes, designates it as the place where King Philip released her from captivity in the spring of 1676. Tradition still points out the spot where this release took place, in a meadow near a large bowlder at the eastern base of the mountain. The bowlder is known to this day as "Redemption Rock." It is quite near the margin of Wachusett Lake, a beautiful sheet of water covering over one hundred acres. This is a favorite place for picnic parties from neighboring towns, and the several excellent hotels and boarding-houses in the immediate vicinity afford accommodations for summer visitors, who frequent this locality in large numbers.

The Indian history of this region is brief, but what there is of it is interesting to us on account of King Philip's connection with it. At the outbreak of the Narragansett War, in 1675, the Wachusetts, in spite of their solemn compact with the colonists, joined King Philip, and, after his defeat, "the lands about the Wachusetts" became one of his headquarters, and he was frequently in that region. For many years their wigwams were scattered about the base of the mountain and along the border of the lake, and tradition informs us that on a large flat rock near the lake their council-fires were often lighted.

Until 1751, but three families had settled in the Wachusett tract. In May of that year Robert Keyes, a noted hunter, settled there with his family, upon the eastern slope of the mountain, near where the present carriage-road to the summit begins. On April 14, 1755, a child of his named Lucy, about five years old, strayed away, presumably to follow her sisters who had gone to the lake, about a mile distant. She was never heard of again, though the woods were diligently searched for weeks. Whitney speaks of this incident, and concludes that "she was taken by the Indians and carried into their country, and soon forgot her relations, lost her native language, and became as one of the aborigines." In 1765 Keyes petitioned the General Court to grant him "ye easterly half of said Wachusett hill" in consideration of the loss of "100 pounds lawful money" incurred by him in seeking for his lost child. This petition was endorsed "negatived" in the handwriting of the secretary. With this one exception the early settlers of Princeton seem to have suffered very little at the hands of the Indians.

Princeton, in common with its neighbors, underwent much religious controversy during the first half-century of its existence. The first meeting-house, "50 foots long and 40 foots wide," was erected in 1762 "on the highest part of the land, near three pine trees, being near a large flat rock." This edifice was taken down in 1796, and replaced by a more "elegant" building, which in turn was removed in 1838. The three pine trees are now no more, but the flat rock remains, and on account of the fine sunset view obtained from it has been named "Sunset Rock."

The first minister in Princeton was the Reverend Timothy Fuller, settled in 1767. In 1768 the General Court granted him Wachusett Mountain to compensate him for his settlement over "a heavily burdened people in a wilderness country." It was certainly at that time neither a profitable nor useful gift, and it was a pity to have this grand old pile pass into private hands. Mr. Fuller continued as pastor until 1776. His successors were the Reverend Thomas Crafts, the Reverend Joseph Russell, and the Reverend James Murdock, D.D. At the time when Dr. Murdock left, in 1815, Unitarian sentiments had developed extensively, and "the town and a minority of the church" called the Reverend Samuel Clarke, who had been a pupil of Dr. Channing. The call was accepted and, as a result, a portion of the church seceded and built a small house of worship; but in 1836 the church and society reunited and have remained so ever since.

In 1817 a Baptist society was organized, and had several pastors; but in 1844 the society began to diminish, and not long after ceased to exist. The meeting-house was sold and is now an hotel—the Prospect House. In 1839 a Methodist Episcopal Church was organized which still flourishes.

Besides Wachusett Mountain there are two other hills in Princeton that are deserving of mention—Pine Hill and Little Wachusett. The former is about two miles from the centre of the town and not far from Wachusett, and the latter is about half a mile to the north of the centre. Neither of these hills is large or high, their elevation being about one thousand feet less than that of Wachusett, but they appear like two beautiful children of the majestic father that looms above them. All these hills were once heavily wooded, but much timber has been cut off during the last century, and forest-fires have devastated portions at different times; yet there is still an abundance left. Whitney speaks of the region as abounding in oak of various kinds, chestnut, white ash, beech, birch, and maple, with some butternut and walnut trees. The vigorous growth of the primeval forest indicated the strength and richness of the soil which has since been turned to such profitable use by the farmers. The houses in which the people live are all substantial, convenient, and, in many cases, beautiful, being surrounded by neatly kept grounds and well-tilled land.