Turner's Public Spirit, October 13, 1923
A look back in time to a century ago
By Bob Oliphant
Center. The supper and entertainment held at the town hall on Monday night, under the auspices of the Ladies’ Auxiliary to Westford post A.L., proved very successful. The hall and tables were prettily decorated and an excellent menu, consisting of cold meats, baked beans, salad, fancy pies, coffee and rolls, was served under the direction of Miss Eva M. Lord, assisted by an able corps of assistants. There were musical selections during the evening by the Misses Precious and the following enjoyable entertainment, in charge of Mrs. J. Edward Clement, was presented: readings, Mrs. H. Leon Gage, who gave us one of her selections, “Their day of glory”; piano solo, Miss Florence Caunter; reading, Master Edwin Packard; violin solo, Miss Mildred Precious. The artists were all called upon to respond to encores. About 100 members and friends attended and had a very enjoyable evening, much credit being due those in charge.
Raymond Prescott of last year’s class [of 1923], Westford academy, is attending the Bentley school of accounting and finance, Boston.
The first meeting of the Tadmuck club this season was held at the Unitarian church on Tuesday afternoon with a large number of members and five visitors present. The club has increased its membership by 16 this year, making a total membership of 115. The two junior honorary members are Veronica Payne of Graniteville and Dorothy Anderson of the Center, members of the senior class [of 1924] at the academy who were selected on account of having had the highest rank in their studies. The program of the afternoon proved a very pleasing one and consisted of original monologues by Miss Helen Legate, the musical part consisting of selections by Miss Daisy Precious [WA ‘20], piano, and Miss Betty Prescott and Master Albert Eaton, violins. At the close of the program tea was served in charge of the reception committee, which consists of Mrs. William Roudenbush, Mrs. Elbert Flagg, Mrs. George F. White, Mrs. Harry Prescott and Mrs. Arthur Whitley. During the afternoon a reception was tendered the new officers and the program of the year promises to be both entertaining and instructive.
C. B. Knowlton of Wollaston was a Sunday guest at Mrs. J. E. Knight’s home.
A number of people from Graniteville and the north part of the town made up an enjoyable theatre party at the Lowell Opera House Tuesday evening. The party included Mr. and Mrs. Charles Blodgett, Miss Lillian Wright, Miss Bernice Gould, Mr. and Mrs. Edwin Gould, Mr. and Mrs. Mark Palmer, Mr. and Mrs. William Wyman, George Bosworth, Miss Louise Bosworth and Mr. and Mrs. Robert Bosworth.
Dr. and Mrs. Atwood and daughter Evelyn of Daytona, Fla., are the guests of the Misses Atwood [4 Graniteville Road].
Mrs. Fred McCoy is spending a few weeks in New Brunswick, the guest of relatives.
Mr. and Mrs. Louis Robbins of Watertown were Sunday guests of the latter’s [nee Bertha C. McCoy] father, Fred McCoy.
The Ladies’ Aid of the Congregational church met with Mrs. Charles Wright on Thursday of this week.
Rev. Mr. Youngkin of Arlington occupied the Congregational pulpit last Sunday at the morning and evening services.
The third and fourth degrees will be conferred at the next regular meeting of Westford Grange on next week Thursday.
The Improvement society is having two tablets made which will be placed on the flagpole on the common.
The banquet and entertainment given by the Unitarian society at the town hall last week Friday night proved a great success both socially and financially. Over 200 people were present and partook of the excellent supper. At the conclusion of the banquet Rev. Frank B. Crandall called to order and an excellent program was presented, consisting of humorous sketches and stories by Lucius Fairchild of Ayer, vocal selections by Mrs. Carrie Derby and instrumental selections by the Precious sisters. Mr. Fairchild also spoke relative to forming a Laymen’s League in town and gave an account of the work of this organization in Ayer and Chelmsford. A large sum was realized as the result of the supper carried out under the direction of Mrs. Gertrude Skidmore, assisted by a corps of workers.
A special town meeting will be held on Monday night October 15, at eight o’clock. One of the most important articles is one relative to raising money for the charity department, one to hear the report of the world war memorial committee, an article to see if the town will allow the use of the town hall for basketball by the boys of the academy and another is a request to establish a hydrant at Bridge street, Graniteville.
Edward Hunt, another member of last year’s graduating class [WA ‘23], is also attending the Bentley school of accounting and finance, Boston.
Academy Notes. The athletic association has formed two division, one of boys and the other girls. The boys have elected the following officers: Richard Wall, pres.; John Trask, vice pres.; Frank Jarvis, sec.; Gerald Desmond, treas.; Richard Wall, captain of basketball team; Edward Harrington, manager. Girls—Lillian Hosmer, pres.; Alice Socorelis, vice pres.; Mary Wall, sec.; Regina McLenna, treas. It was voted to pay a tax of twenty-five cents each month for support of the association and Principal William Roudenbush is the general treasurer.
The academy orchestra and glee club will rehearse on alternate Wednesdays at the town hall under the direction of Miss Pamelia Precious [WA ‘20].
The $25 in prize money allowed by the trustees will be given this year to that class which shall have attained the highest credit during the year as regards attendance, tardiness, scholarship, conduct and effort. Results posted at the end of each month showing how the classes stand in order of total credits in all four particulars.
The results for the month of September found the junior class leading, freshmen 2d, seniors 3d and sophomores 4th.
Church Notes. First Parish church (Unitarian) Sunday service at 4 p.m. Preacher, Rev. Frank B. Crandall, the minister. Subject, “Repentance and life.”
The church school reopened Sunday with all increased enrollment.
The new Wayside pulpit, built by the Phelps mill at Ayer, was brought to Westford last week Friday evening by the minister and exhibited at the supper at the town hall. After the glass has been set and the pulpit painted it will be erected near the southwest corner of the tower.
The Y.P.R.U. [Young People’s Religious Union] met Sunday evening at the vestry. Plans were made for subsequent meetings and activities. A supper followed the meeting.
The men of the parish are to serve a supper in the town hall about the middle of November. J. Edward Clement, Clifford Johnson and Arthur Walker are the committee.
The young people of the parish are invited to a whist party and dance to be given under the auspices of the Y.P.R.U. at Chelmsford Center Friday evening, October 19, from 8 to 12.
The junior conference of Y.P.R.U. chapter will be held at Chelmsford Center Saturday, November 3, beginning at ten a.m.
Miss Mary Balch, Mrs. Adeline Buckshorn, Mrs. Fred Burbeck, Mrs. Sarah Drew, Miss Mabel Drew, Mrs. J. Herbert Fletcher, Miss Eva Fletcher, Miss Alice Howard, Miss Grace Lawrence, Mrs. Alexander McDougal, Miss Plummer and Samuel L. Taylor attended the Unitarian conference at Groton; minister of the parish also attended.
About Town. Mr. and Mrs. Fred A. Snow and Stanley L. Snow attended the vesper services at the Unitarian church on last Sunday afternoon and also made a friendly visit with the William A. Lawrence family.
At the meeting of the Grange on Thursday evening, October 18, the program informs us that the third and fourth degrees will be conferred. One of the several state deputies will be present for inspection and as helper in social life. The usual harvest supper and a social time will follow the initiation. Better be present and help in the social end of affairs.
The annual meeting and dinner of the trustees of Middlesex-North Agricultural society was held in Odd Fellows’ hall, Lowell, Tuesday.
Amos Polley, on the Morning Glory farm, has just commenced next year’s haying by installing a horse hay fork unloading machinery. This will greatly conserve the sweating apparatus of the human being and reduce the redness of red faces in unloading hay while a thunder shower is pressing hard in the rear or everywhere, fore and aft. Of course we have not been pressed very hard this dry season of 1923.
“The Man About Town” says “Still waiting for that line storm.” I do not like to disagree with one who writes so wisely and well and quick to the point. In the first place there is no such phenomenon in nature as a line storm. I was dieted on this nonsensical error in my Stony Brook school days and still later on. The line storm was supposed to be the result of the sun crossing the equator. Well, who is the equator? Now Webster’s dictionary says of the equator: “The imaginary circle which passes around the middle of the earth, and divides it into two equal parts.” So now the equator is an imaginary phenomenon does not exist only as you are willing to be deluded that there is such an animal.
With the wells going dry as never before the danger from forest fires has not increased in proportion. I have seen them much more attractive to fire when we had more rainfall. It’s hard to explain all of the queer freaks of nature this year. Be this so or otherwise, we are not having the forest fires as usual.
The Old Oaken Bucket farm folks are watering their stock with apples, not that we are all out of water, but there is milk you know—well perhaps I have hinted enough. Just one more explanation about watering the stock with apples. A cow will easily stand a bushel of apples per day. A hen will stand half a peck per day ground and mixed with grain, without causing anti-Volsteadism conduct or laying twin eggs. A horse will stand a [illegible word] of apples per day, if not fed all in one mouthful and thus save our water and increase our output of milk.
The article on Westford academy by Capt. Sherman H. Fletcher, secretary of the board of trustees, as printed last week, is worth the while as a jog to memory in recalling the older days of wise building and limited opportunity as compared with the luxurious lavish present, which in proportion to opportunity does not always produce the individuality that builds wisely for itself or the community. This is not the fault of education, but the over emphasized motive behind the push. John Wright, mentioned as one of the teachers, was an uncle of Miss Ella T. Wright.
Death. A. Bryant Winn, one of the well known retired business men of Nashua, died last week Friday at the age of seventy-six years. He was born at Westford Corner on August 24, 1847, the youngest of fourteen children, of whom only one survives, Mrs. Elizabeth Jaquith, of North Billerica, at the advanced age of ninety-two years.
Mr. Winn is recalled by some of the older residents of this town. The greater part of his life was passed in West Chelmsford at the home of his parents. It was at West Chelmsford that your correspondent became acquainted with him at the village church and at the postoffice store of the late John N. Perry. As a youth two years my [Samuel Law Taylor] junior he was a most affable companion of a smiling sunny disposition, and he kept the fires of good nature well in hand until the last to earthly life. He had been a resident of Nashua for the past sixty years and so the older residents of Westford who knew him in his youthful manhood had largely lost the trail. As a help to the trail I recall that he moved from West Chelmsford to Nashua in 1863, and on October 29 [1863] the battle of Raccoon Ridge [near Chattanooga, Tenn.] was fought and it was at this battle that Sergt. John F. Buckley, his brother-in-law, also a resident of West Chelmsford, saved the life of William Jubb, of Westford Corner, by knocking down a rebel with his musket. I recall this incident because Mr. Buckley was not only related to Mr. Winn, but well known to us older youths as a member of the Spalding Light Cavalry.
For many years he conducted the ice cream business in Nashua, having been one of the pioneers in the ice cream business in that part of the country. He was a member of Rising Sun lodge of Masons and an attendant at the First Congregational church. He is survived by his wife; a sister, Mrs. Elizabeth Jaquith, of North Billerica; a nephew, Capt. Herbert Bailey, of Virginia, and two nieces, Mrs. Anna Holland, of North Billerica, and Miss Ethel Buckley, of Hopkinton.
Single Taxation. I was much interested in James R. Brown’s recent lecture on taxation before the Ayer Board of Trade, and while I am strongly inclined to favor Fiske Warren’s “single tax” the lecture on this subject by Mr. Brown left a few weak spots which were probably cleared up by those who listened in the questions and answers that followed. But as I was not a listener I must do my own clearing up. “Nor do you need to go to the theatre in order to get a laugh. Just step down to the tax office and after you have made a thorough survey of our methods of doing business there, if you have any sense of humor you will go out back of the city hall and laugh your head off.” He is quite correct in regard to “laughing your head off” at our quadruple and sextuple system of taxation, but the laugh never occurs, being offset by the seriousness of paying so many taxes by so many different people on the same source of values; part of it due to lack of uniformity of state laws.
A person in Westford owns woodland in New Hampshire; as real estate it is taxable in the above state and Massachusetts also, and the value all comes from the land from which all taxable values come, whether it is a cooking stove or a cord of wood, man or man’s invention. If a Massachusetts farmer should send sheep into Vermont to pasture for the summer they would be taxed in Massachusetts and Vermont also. Do you doubt that they would be taxed in Vermont also? Let me take that doubt out of you. A well-known citizen of Westford happened to be in Vermont on a visit with horse and carriage at assessing time, and they insisted on taxing his horse and carriage and he had to pay in Vermont and Westford, too and the same citizen paid in New Hampshire and Westford on the machinery that only temporarily was in New Hampshire building a dam.
I know a man (and probably there were more) who paid three poll taxes in one year—in Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut, he having landed just in time to get all three assessments. We tax the land on which the hay grows and tax the hay and then tax the cows that eat up the hay and then tax the cow’s hide, and beef as stock in trade. We tax the sheep in Massachusetts and Vermont and if the wool on sheep owned in Massachusetts is sheared in Vermont it is taxed in said state as so much stock in trade, and when it gets down to the Abbot Worsted Co. in Westford it is taxed again as stock in trade, and when it gets in the carpet mill it is taxed again as stock in trade, and when it gets to the clothing store it is taxed again as stock in trade, and when the carpet gets laid on your floor it can be taxed again as house furnishings, and this is only a small part of the tracing of the tax on one sheep.
When I was on the board of assessors I started to trace how many times a sheep was taxed, but I got dizzy and busy and fell off. But I have wandered a long way from “weak spots” in Mr. Brown’s address.
He says, “When we fail to tax land values fully we offer a premium to men to hold valuable land idle, thereby artificially boosting the value of land and raising rents.” Now let us remember that while we have got a standard of weights and measure we have got no standard of values to guide an assessor in fixing values, whether it is a horse, house, mouse trap or piece of land. The horse can be weighed on the standard scales and establishes his weight, but you cannot weigh his value [in] which the element of guess work has to play some part, and this element has to enter into fixing all values. Take the town of Ayer where the lecture was given as an illustration. Of the 3000 more or less of inhabitants let them go around singly and without consultation and fix the taxable value on the real estate of the town, and the personal property, and I am tempted to believe that there would be more variations in fixing the values than there are inhabitants in the town. Many would not agree with their own argument under cross-examination.
My own observation says that there is but very little idle land but what is taxed to the burden point and in many instances the taxes have exceeded the value of the land when sold. When farmers in the outskirts of a city as ordinary farming runs pay from $600 to $1000 per year in taxes it’s doing something toward forcing productive land towards boosting food values, for they cannot afford to pay the present price for hired help and add to the taxation drain of their finances, and they sell their land for the assessed value, $1000 per acre. The “upper and nether millstones” that Mr. Brown refers to is well exemplified in both idle and productive land, so do not try to fix it all on idle land.
“Boosting rents” is not caused by idle land very much, it is caused almost wholly in increased cost of material and labor, and material is based on the law of supply and demand, with a very small amount of selfishness in holding material. Our folly in using up our forest reserves faster than nature can replenish has come home to roost and our needless complicated system of quadruple and sextuple and more system of taxation hasn’t even remotely got anything to do with boosting rents, and the single tax wouldn’t if it did. Don’t dose us all with the single tax medicine like some advertised patent medicine—curing everything from a headache to a bunion on the foot—for the single tax will not eliminate the hog out of any of us, and that is the center of most of the world’s troubles of today. We hear and read of the hog renter; it is sad it is so true, but it is sadder yet that it applies to our universal business life and crops out in variations in all business sub-divisions.
“The curse of the race is the vacant lot industry.” A man who is competent to make the deep-thinking and brainy address under consideration, and the best that I have ever read on the subject, ought not to attempt to prop it up with anything so inconsistently true. “It spreads our cities unnecessarily over a vast area.” That’s just what the best informed on the remedy for congested slum life are advocating – get out into the open, where the birds sing and the wild flowers grow and mountains, hills, forests, rivers and trout brooks and sunset glory of which Emerson has said: “Most people have never seen the sun set.” To these inspiring invitations of nature as all environment to shake off Darwin’s early ancestry from which we have partially emerged but our conduct still clings to its trademark, we would scatter our cities in an effort to complete emancipation from our mud ancestors.
Ayer
News Items. Rev. and Mrs. Frank B. Crandall and Mr. and Mrs. Lucius C. Fairchild attended a supper given by the Alliance of the First Parish church in Westford on last week Friday evening.
Real Estate Transfers. The following real estate transfers have been recorded from this vicinity recently:
Westford. Alice Gilman to James Sullivan et ux., land on Pleasant street; James Sullivan to Alice Gilman, land on Pleasant street; George W. Wyman et al. to William W. Wyman, land on Groton road.
Notes:
What is today Bentley University, was started in 1917 on Huntington Ave., Boston, by Harry C. Bentley to educate the next generation of accountants. In 1968 Bentley moved to its present campus in Waltham. See https://www.bentley.edu/about/bentley-education/history
The Concord, Mass., poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) in his 1836 essay on “Nature” said “To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing.” I don’t believe he ever said “Most people have never seen the sun set.”