Editor’s note: The Item is running occasional columns about Lynn history prepared by the staff of the Lynn Museum/LynnArts. Today’s is written by Museum Board of Trustees member Joe Boyd.
About 30 years ago, my mother-in-law gave me an old book which she had purchased for $1.50. It was titled, “In Lynn Woods with Pen and Camera” by Nathan M. Hawkes, and written in 1892.
She was a member of the Lynn Camera Club and the book’s overview of facts highlighting locations of charm and interest remind me why I like walking in Lynn Woods. The book also details the history of city efforts to secure a municipally-owned wildlife sanctuary with views and vistas 125 years ago.
Hawkes was a founding member of the Lynn Historical Society. Recently, I reread his 104-page labor of love to get a feeling for the times.
It was a delicate operation: The 1890’s technology of combining stiff photographs among the narrative and 130 years of aging on the book’s pages and binding made the book brittle with age and the seams on the verge of coming apart.
I don’t know if age makes “In Lynn Woods . . .” worth more or less, dollar wise, but — to me — the book is a gem.
Hawkes tells us that William Wood’s “New England Prospects,” written in 1634 and describing the Massachusetts colony and Native Americans, was “the first book ever written on the soil of Lynn.”
Alden Vaughan, in his introduction to the 1977 edition of “New England Prospects,” surmises that Wood collected his information in Massachusetts, but probably wrote the book in England after returning there in 1633.
Be that as it may, the book has interesting stories. For instance, when some early Lynn residents began to establish homes further inland, they found it inconvenient to attend church services in downtown Lynn. They suggested moving the meeting house to a location near the woods off Walnut Street proposing that site as more central for all parishioners. Discussion ensued and eventually, writes Hawkes, “Lynn objected.”
The inland residents established their own church meeting halls which eventually developed into the towns of Saugus and Lynnfield. The location near Walnut street designated for the church that never was became “Choose Hill,” signifying the event that broke Lynn up into three communities.
There are many other stories. Hawkes recounts that Lynn’s first English settlers believed in the sharing of common land and woods for livestock and other uses.
The next generation — the first born in Lynn — had a “good-fences-make- good-neighbors” sensibility of keeping to your own property.
By the time of his book’s publication Hawkes was lamenting “the hordes of vagabonds and outlaws shipped to us from the slums of the world.” One can only guess that this resentment of new immigrants to the city influenced the founding of an Historical Society to solidify the values of Lynn’s old established families.
The evolution of the Historical Society to today’s community-friendly museum is a leap of inclusivity.
Hawkes’ concept of “the woods” is clearly broader than the land that was marked off by the city as a nature preserve in 1881. He remembers a time when unsettled tracts might still be used as common woods for firewood and the building of houses and open spaces for grazing animals and cranberry bogs.
But the city fathers saw the value of preserving a large piece of land as a “public forest.” His little book includes the official actions taken and the contributions of private land that created the woods we know today.
Did you know that Edward Tomlins of the Lynn Woods’ Tomlins Swamp fame also established the first mill where Strawberry Brook meets the Saugus River near where Summer street passes by GE Field?
Nathan Hawkes’ legacy is to remind us that we are walking on sacred soil.
“In Lynn Woods . . .” isn’t trying to give us a full-on history of Lynn. It’s more of a reminder that “good neighbors make good history.”
Those neighbors may have lived a long time ago, but they are alive in Hawkes’ memory and they live on in his book.
Much of the Lynn Woods Reservation with its swamps and rocky terrain was considered undesirable for homesteading as old Lynn expanded inland. Its natural ponds and man-made reservoirs restricted more acreage from human habitation.
When the preservationist urge gained ground in the latter part of the 19th century, the woods were a natural for nature lovers. The hills, pond, pasture and glen that Nathan Hawkes brings alive in “Lynn Woods with Pen and Camera” are a gift of lucky circumstance and civic planning to the benefit of posterity.
Luckily, copies of the book in better condition than the one
I possess can be found for leisure reading in local libraries and from online vendors, although for more than $1.50 my mother-in-law paid for her copy.
Read on!