It is rather odd that this serene old place, discovered only two or three days after the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, is so devoid of a printed career. As soon as the Pilgrims had explored the spot, they put themselves on record as having "a great liking to plant in it" instead of in Plymouth. But they decided against it because it lay too far from their fishing and was "so encompassed with woods," that they feared danger from the savages. It was very soon settled, however, and remained as the north end of Plymouth for a hundred and six years, until 1726. Governor Bradford writes, in regard to its colonization:
"Y^e people of y^e plantation begane to grow in their outward estate ... and as their stocks increased and y^e increase vendible, ther was no longer any holding them togeather, but now they must of necessitoe goe to their great lots: they could not otherwise keep catle; and having oxen grown they must have land for plowing and tillage. And no man now thought he could live except he had catle and a great deal of ground to keep them: all striving to increase their stocks. By which means they were scattered all over y^e bay, quickly, and y^e towne, in which they had lived compactly till now [1632] was left very thine, and in a short time almost desolate."
Governor Bradford seems to deplore this moving out of Plymouth, but as a matter of fact he was among the first to go, and his estate on Jones River comprised such a goodly portion of what is now Kingston that when he died he was the richest man in the Colony! A boulder marks the place which he, with that unerring eye for a fine view which distinguished the early settlers, chose for his estate. From here one catches a glimpse of water, open fields, trees, the Myles Standish Monument to the left, the sound of the passing automobiles behind. The distant smokestacks would be unfamiliar to Governor Bradford's eye, but the fragrant Kingston air which permeates it all would greet him as sweetly to-day as it did three hundred years ago.
Governor Bradford, who was Governor for thirty-seven years, was a man of remarkable erudition. Cotton Mather says of him: "The Dutch tongue was become almost as vernacular to him as the English; the French tongue he could also manage; the Latin and the Greek he had mastered; but the Hebrew he most of all studied." Therefore if the curious spelling of his history strikes us as unscholarly, we must remember that at that time there was no fixed standard for English orthography. Queen Elizabeth employed seven different spellings for the word "sovereign" and Leicester rendered his own name in eight different ways. It was by no means a mark of illiteracy to spell not only unlike your neighbor, but unlike yourself on the line previous.
But it is more than quaint diction and fantastic spelling which fascinates us as we turn over, not only the leaves of Bradford's famous history, but the pile of fading records of various kinds of this once prosperous shipbuilding town. The records of Kingston are valuable, not only because they tell the tale of this particular spot, but because they are delightfully typical of all the South Shore towns. The yellowing diaries mention crude offenses, crude chastisements; give scraps of genealogies as broken as the families themselves are now broken and scattered; lament over one daughter of the Puritans who took the veil in a Roman Catholic convent; sternly relate, in Rabelaisian frankness, dark sins, punished with mediæval justice. In fact, these righteous early colonists seemed to find a genuine satisfaction in devising punishments, and in putting them into practice. We read that the stocks (also called "bilbaos" because they were formerly manufactured in Bilbao, in Spain) were first occupied by the man who had made them, as the court decided that his charge for the work was excessive! There were wooden cages in which criminals were confined and exposed to public view; whipping-posts; cleft sticks for profane tongues. Drunkenness was punished by disfranchisement; the blasphemer and the heretics were branded with a hot iron.
Let us look at some of these old records, not all of them as ferocious as this, but interesting for the minutiæ which they preserve and which makes it possible for us to reconstruct something of that atmosphere of the past. It was ninety-six years after the settlement at Plymouth that Kingston made its first request for a separation. It was not granted for almost a decade, but from then on the ecclesiastical records furnish us with a great deal of intimate and chatty material. For instance, we learn in 1719 that Isaac Holmes was to have "20 shillings for sweeping, opening and shutting of the doors and casements of the meeting house for 1 year," which throws some light upon sextons' salaries!
The minute directions as to the placing of the pews in the meeting-house (1720) contain a pungent element of personality. Major John Bradford is "next to the pulpit stairs"; Elisha Bradford on the left "as you go in"; Benjamin Eaton's place is "between minister's stairs and west door"; while Peter West is ingloriously, and for what reason we know not, relegated to the gallery "in the front, next to the stairs, behind the women."
It is significant to note (1728) that seats are built at each end above the galleries for the Indians and negroes.
Fish laws, rewards for killing wild cats, bickerings with the minister, and brief mention of the death of many women at an early age—after having given birth to an incredible number of children—fill up pages and pages.
The eye rests upon a resolution passed (1771) to "allow Benjamin Cook the sum of 8 shillings for a coffin, and liquor at the funeral of James Howland." They might not believe in prayers for the dead in those days, but there was evidently no reason why the living should not receive some cheer!