THE ROMANCE OF WEYMOUTH
The paintings of John Constable, idyllic in their quietness, dewy in their serenity—how many travelers, how many lovers of art, superficial or profound, yearly seek out these paintings in the South Kensington Museum or the Louvre, and stand before them wrapt in gentle ecstasy?
The quality of Constable's pictures delineates in luminous softness a peculiarly lovely side of English rural life, but one need not travel to England or France to see this loveliness. Weymouth, that rambling stretch of towns and hamlets, of summer colony and suburb, possesses in certain areas bits of rural landscape as serene, as dewy, as idyllically tranquil as Constable at his best.
Comparatively few people in New England, or out of it, know Weymouth well. Every one has heard of it, for it is next in age to the town of Plymouth itself, and every one who travels to the South Shore passes some section of it, for it extends lengthily—north and south, east and west—being the only town in Massachusetts to retain its original boundaries. And numbers of people are familiar with certain parts of it, for there are half a score of villages in the township, some of them summer settlements, some of them animated by an all-the-year-round life. But compared with the other towns along this historic route, Weymouth as a whole is little known and little appreciated. And yet the history of Weymouth is not without amusing and edifying elements, and the scenery of Weymouth is worthy of the détour that strangers rarely make.
"Old Spain" is the romantic name for an uninteresting part of the township, and, conversely, Commercial Street is the uninteresting name for a romantic part. It is along a highway stigmatized by such a name that one gets the glimpses of a Constable country: glimpses of rolling meadows, of fertile groves, of cattle grazing in elm-shaded pastures, of a road winding contentedly among simple, ancient cottages, and quiet, thrifty farms. These are the homes which belong, and have belonged for generations, to people who are neither rich nor poor; cozy, quaint, suggesting in an odd way the thatched-roof cottages of England. Not that all of Weymouth's homes are of this order. The Asa Webb Cowing house, which terminates Commercial Street within a stone's throw of the square of the town of Weymouth, is one of the very finest examples of the Colonial architecture in this country. The exquisite tracery and carving over and above the front door, and the white imported marble window lintels spin an elaborate and marvelously fine lacework of white over the handsome red-brick façade. Although it is, alas, falling somewhat into disrepair, perfect proportion and gemlike workmanship still stamp the venerable mansion as one of patrician heritage. There are other excellent examples of architecture in Weymouth, but the Cowing house must always be the star, both because of its extraordinary beauty and conspicuous position. Yes, if you want a characteristic glimpse of Weymouth, you cannot do better than to begin in front of this landmark, and drive down Commercial Street. Here for several smiling miles there is nothing—no ugly building large or small, no ruthless invasion of modernity to mar the mood of happy simplicity. Her beauty of beach, of sky, of river, Weymouth shares with other South Shore towns. Her perfection of idyllic rusticity is hers alone.
Just as Weymouth's scenery is unlike that of her neighbors, so her history projects itself from an entirely different angle from theirs. While they were conceived by zealous, God-fearing men and women honestly seeking to establish homes in a new country, Weymouth was inadvertently born through the misconduct of a set of adventurers. Not every one who came to America in those significant early years came impelled by lofty motives. There were scapegraces, bad boys, rogues, mercenaries, and schemers; and perhaps it is entirely logical that the winning natural loveliness of this place should have lured to her men who were not of the caliber to face more exposed, less fertile sections, and men to whom beauty made an especial appeal.
The Indians early found Wessagusset, as they called it, an important rendezvous, as it was accessible by land and sea, and there were probably temporary camps there previous to 1620, formed by fishermen and traders who visited the New England coast to traffic with the natives. But it was not until the arrival of Thomas Weston in 1622 that Weymouth's history really begins. And then it begins in a topsy-turvy way, so unlike Puritan New England that it makes us rub our eyes, wondering if it is really true.
This Thomas Weston, who was a merchant adventurer of London, took it into his head to establish a colony in the new country entirely different from the Plymouth Colony. He had been an agent of the Pilgrims in their negotiations with the Plymouth Company, and when he broke off the connection it was to start a settlement which should combine all of the advantages, with none of the disadvantages, of the Plymouth Colony. First of all, it was to be a trading community pure and simple, with its object frankly to make money. Second, it was to be composed of men without families and familiar with hardship. And third, there was no religious motive or bond. That such an unidealistic enterprise should not flourish on American soil is worth noting. The disorderly, thriftless rabble, picked up from the London streets, soon got into trouble with the Indians and with neighboring colonists, and finally, undone by the results of their own improvidence and misbehavior, wailed that they "wanted to go back to London," to which end the Plymouth settlers willingly aided them, glad to get them out of the country. Thus ended the first inauspicious settlement of Weymouth.
The second, which was undertaken shortly after by Robert Gorges, broke up the following spring, leaving only a few remnants behind. Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who was not a Spaniard as his name suggests, but a picturesque Elizabethan and a kinsman of Sir Walter Raleigh, essayed (through his son Robert) an experimental government along practically the same commercial lines as had Weston, and his failure was as speedy and complete as Weston's had been.
A third attempt, while hardly more successful, furnishes one of the gayest and prettiest episodes in the whole history of New England. Across the somber procession of earnest-faced men and women, across the psalm-singing and the praying, across the incredible toil of the pioneers at Plymouth now flashes the brightly costumed and pleasure-loving courtier, Thomas Morton. An agent of Gorges, Morton with thirty followers floated into Wessagusset to found a Royalist and Episcopalian settlement. This Episcopalian bias was quite enough to account for Bradford's disparaging description of him as a "kind of petie-fogie of Furnifells Inn," and explains why the early historians never made any fuller or more favorable record than absolutely necessary of these neighbors of theirs, although the churchman Samuel Maverick admits that Morton was a "gentleman of good qualitee."