Introduction: Three Strikes

A map of Boston Harbor, c. 1800. Not to scale.

The “Chelsea” in the upper-right corner is the present-day Revere.

T he city of Revere, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, had renamed itself after the
legendary Midnight Rider Paul Revere, in 1871. Revere had been the birth-
place, in 1832, of the “rags-to-riches” author Horatio Alger, Jr., whose name be-
came synonymous with the American Dream. In April 1944, on the anniversary of Paul Re-
vere's ride, and as the Second World War neared its end, the Revere Journal published an edi-
torial titled “Revere Is A Great City!” A few years later, the secretary of the local Chamber of
Commerce, an Algerphile who had moved from Maine to Revere because it was Horatio Alger's
hometown, praised it to the skies. “All that is best in American life,” he wrote, “is to be found in
Revere.”1 Based on such praise, those not from the Boston area might have assumed that Revere
1
George C. Clarke, “Kiwanis History of Revere: Village, Town, City--1624-1966.” In two parts:
1
was, or at least once had been, a typical New England town. But Revere is not and Rumney
Marsh never was a typical New England town. What New England town ever was? “Typical”
typically means mythical. “There is something about the New England town that still stirs arc-
hetypal echoes in the American memory,” a historian wrote. “Yet, like any artifact of the imagi-
nation,” he added, “the archetypal New England town has been tied only tenuously to the actual
one.”2
Back in the seventeenth century, Revere or, as it was then named, Rumney Marsh was
the antithesis of the mythically typical New England town. From the beginning, Rumney Marsh
was a poor, sparsely populated backwater. Severely retarded in its economic and civic develop-
ment, Rumney Marsh had not just the proverbial two but the full complement three strikes
against it. Those three strikes can be classified as geographical, topographical, and geopolitical.

Geography

It could be said of Rumney Marsh that geography was destiny. “So near and yet so far”
was a recurring refrain in the town's first two hundred years. Though close to Boston—about six
miles as the crow flies—the town, only about three miles long and a mile wide, was separated
from it by water and marshes and even more by mind-set and perspective From the start, Rum-
ney Marsh was to Boston what the American colonies would become to Great Britain, with this
crucial difference: the town was not remote enough to gain independence, nor strong enough to
free itself from Boston economically and politically—or from Cambridge theologically. Though
close to Boston, Rumney Marsh lagged behind it in time. The more time that passed, the further
it lagged behind. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, in some respects it was already a
half century behind, and throughout the rest of the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth century,
though it changed its name more than once, as if seeking a new identity, a new destiny, it re-
mained a rustic backwater.
Throughout its nearly four- hundred-year history, the town has had four different names
and one number—13—which it had been assigned when it was annexed by Boston, in 1634,
before taking the name Rumney Marsh. It was named after an area on the south-east coast of
England, now called Romney Marsh. Rumney Marsh retained its name for about a hundred
years, then in 1739 Rumney Marsh joined with neighboring Winnisimmet to form the new town
of Chelsea. A little over a hundred years later, in 1844, those two entities separated, with the old
Winnisimmet section retaining the name Chelsea and the old Rumney Marsh section taking a
new name, North Chelsea. Finally, in 1871, the town fathers, many of them Masons, successful-
ly petitioned the state legislature in Boston to change the name of North Chelsea to Revere, in
honor of Paul Revere, the silversmith and Mason who might accurately be called not the Savior
but the Factotum of the Revolution. It was Longfellow, a poet not a historian who him into a
national hero with his 1864 imaginative account of Revere’s midnight ride. Precinct 13,
Rumney Marsh, Chelsea, North Chelsea, and Revere—with each new name had come the hope
that a new day was dawning for the town. But by any name, at any period, the star-crossed

I: The Story of Revere Beach. II: The Community of Revere, Massachusetts. Mimeographed, circa 1966.
Written under Kiwanis auspices, this is a historically inaccurate, typo-ridden history.
2
Michael Zuckerman, Peaceable Kingdoms: New England Towns in the Eighteenth Century
(New York: Knopf, 1970), p. 3.
2
community stood in ironic contrast to the archetypal New England town, whose town meetings
were supposed, to have been the democratic model for the new American republic.

Winnisimmet Ferry

Close enough to Boston to be annexed and taxed by it, the town was too removed from it
to benefit economically and culturally. In the seventeenth century, the roundabout land route be-
tween Rumney Marsh and Boston by oxcart was a two-day round trip. The most direct route was
by ferry, from Winnisimmet to Boston's North End, but there were no scheduled departure times,
and the ferry, which had to travel a distance of two and a half miles, left only when it had
enough passengers to pay for the trip. Sometimes there was not enough wind for the ferry’s sails,
so that it had to be rowed, and sometimes there was too much, capsizing the cumbersome craft.
Ice and strong headwinds in the winter and unpredictable weather throughout the year made the
passage, in Mellen Chamberlain's words, “irregular, protracted and often dangerous.”3 In those
earlier times, when relatively few people could swim, taking the ferry could be risky, even in
the summer. Cotton Mather was a minister at the Second Church, in Boston’s North End, to
which some of Rumney Marsh residents belonged before they formed their own church. More
often than he liked, Mather had to take the ferry across the harbor to minister to members of his
flock in Rumney Marsh, performing baptisms or administering last rites. In May 1709, minutes
after Mather had stepped ashore at Winnisimmet, a violent thunderstorm struck. Unable to
swim, he was certain he would have drowned had it struck minutes earlier. When he returned
home safely from a trip, especially one over water, such as those to Winnisimmet, Samuel Se-
wall usually recorded words of thanks in his diary: “Laus Deo!” Praise God! Coincidentally,
Mather and Sewall would become the spiritual architects of its meetinghouse and the godfathers
of Rumney Marsh’s First Church. One of the ancillary benefits Mather would derive from the
raising of the meetinghouse and the gathering of the First Church was that he no longer had to
take the ferry to Rumney Marsh to minister to its inhabitants.
The ferry, which started service in 1631, transported passengers to an old country road
—the first county road in New England, Chamberlain claimed—that wound through Winnisim-
met and along the western boundary of Rumney Marsh. What could be said of the country road
might also be said of progress: for hundreds of years it did not go through as much as it went
around the town. The town made a name for itself, but it was not a name which residents could
take pride in. During the first half of the nineteenth century, when its name was Chelsea, the
town became a synonym for isolation and stagnation. Being transported by the pokey ferry from
Boston to the backwater town was, for some passengers, like being transported to Hades, the
land of the dead. The expression “as dead as Chelsea” was proverbial in Boston.4 Passage on the
ferry could be paid for at one time by wampum, the means of exchange used by the ungodly In-
dians. Public officials did not need wampum; they could travel free, and others, with empty
pockets sometimes tried to. Sewell reported that one of the ferrymen, an old man who had per-

3
A Documentary History of Chelsea, 1624-1824 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society,
1908), 2 vols., II, 116.
4
An editorial in the Winnisimmet Pioneer objected to the use of the phrase (3 April 1847), p.
1.The phrase was still in use as late as 1877. See Chelsea Telegraph & Pioneer (23 June 1877), p. 2.
3
haps made the trip once too often, cut his throat.5 Farmers in Rumney Marsh sometimes com-
plained about poor harvests, but the grim reaper always found a rich harvest, especially among
the children. Those who survived childhood were not home free, for they had to contend with the
local version of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse—divisiveness, debt, drunkenness, and dis-
ease.

Topography

Rumney Marsh’s topography exacerbated its disadvantageous geography. About one-

third of the town was salt marsh.6 Since the tide seeped into them about twice every twenty-four
hours, the marshes were unsuitable for habitation or farming. In later centuries, some of the
marshes were filled in with trash and built upon, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
they remained unoccuped and undeveloped, and throughout the long winters the wind whistled
through the salt grass and wolves howled at night. During storms, the ocean pounded the fragile
shoreline. The earliest settlers might have thought that the Dammed Marsh, near the beach, be-
cause it was so godforsaken, might more fittingly have been called the Damned Marsh. Farming
was practiced in the drier inland sections of the town, but even there the thin rocky soil, like that
in much of New England, was better for grazing than farming.
If many of the marshy acres of Rumney Marsh were not suited for cultivation, they were
useless for mining. To the northwest, in the town of Saugus, after ore was discovered, the first
iron works in America was established, in 1646. But the only things Rumney Marsh had in ab-
undance were sand, salt grass, and seaweed. It was a sign of just how hard-pressed the local
farmers were that the town passed ordinances that denied to non-residents the right to remove
anything from the beach, including seaweed and the manure deposited by passing livestock, be-
cause of their value as fertilizer. Because the flotsam and jetsam that washed up on the beach
was useful as fuel, the town denied out-of-towners the right to harvest it.7 The townspeople felt
they were too poor to share anything with outsiders, and they were determined to keep out the
indigent because they might subsequently become a financial burden. In most towns, paupers
were committed to a poor house, but Rumney Marsh was too poor to afford a poor house.
The absence of swift-flowing rivers or streams, another consequence of Rumney Marsh’s
topography, meant there was no power for a grist mill. Until a tidal mill was built a century lat-
er, local farmers had to take their corn to Malden for grinding. When industrialization came to
New England, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the lack of rivers and streams meant the
town was not able to attract any mills or factories. It was literally powerless. Lynn, just to the
north, experienced explosive growth as a manufacturing city, producing millions of pairs of
shoes, while Rumney Marsh, or Chelsea, as it was then called, remained a down-at-the-heels
village. As late as 1915, when the town of Revere incorporated as a city, it was still an econom-

5
Samuel Sewall, The Diary of Samuel Sewall, ed. M. Halsey Thomas, (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1973), 2 vols., I, 45.
6
In the 1630s, the town consisted of 2500 acres. Around 1900, it consisted of some 3750 acres.
(See Chamberlain, II, 125.) The discrepancy can probably be accounted for by the fact that, over time,
marshes were filled in and reclaimed and the ocean pushed back. A breakwater helped protect the shore
from waves during storms at high tides.
7
Chamberlain, II, 412-416.
4
ic invalid. The mayor in his inaugural address that year said the city would continue to have to
impose high real estate taxes because it still lacked an industrial base.
Another major drawback of Rumney Marsh’s topography was the lack of a harbor. The
importance of a harbor to coastal towns in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was reflect-
ed in the growth of Boston, Salem, Marblehead, and Newburyport, all of which had good har-
bors. Lynn's growth in the nineteenth century would have been hampered if it had not had a
modest harbor. The shallowness of Broad Sound on Rumney Marsh’s coast made it impossible
for larger ships to dock, so there was little commercial advantage to being on the ocean. On the
contrary, like the salt marshes and waters that separated it on the south from Boston, the shallow
sound tended to isolate the town from the rest of the world. Clipper ships deposited the riches of
the Orient on the docks of Salem,, but only seven miles or so down the coast, the same tides
brought only driftwood and seaweed.

Geopolitics

Rumney Marsh was a victim not only of geography and topography but also of geopolit-
ics. Except for a thin neck of land that connected it with the mainland, Boston in 1634 was only
a small island in Massachusetts Bay. In order for the freemen of Boston to have enough land for
farms, homes and country estates, the Massachusetts Bay Company annexed land in the sur-
rounding areas, including Rumney Marsh, dividing it among a number of recipients in the Great
Allotments of 1637. Large land grants were made in Rumney Marsh to prominent Puritans, such
as John Winthrop, Henry Vane, and Robert Keayne, and smaller ones to those Winthrop referred
to patronizingly as “the lesser sort”—mainly tradesmen and soldiers.
Had economic and social status been the only difference among those allotted land in
Rumney Marsh, perhaps they could have formed a cohesive community. But there was another
important difference among allottees besides class: though all were Puritans, some considered
themselves purer than others. Anne Hutchinson advocated a form of Puritanism that differed
from that promoted by John Winthrop and most ministers in the colony. The differences be-
tween Hutchinson’s followers and the Puritan oligarchy were not just theological; they were also
political, for the theology and politics were inextricably intertwined in the colony. Of the fifteen
men who were allotted land in Rumney Marsh, eight were among Hutchinson’s followers, in-
cluding the young governor, Henry Vane. When the conflict between the orthodox and unortho-
dox came to a head in the Antinomian Crisis of 1637, the unorthodox were soundly defeated.
Vane returned to England. Anne Hutchinson and a number of her followers were banished from
Massachusetts. Most of the land in Rumney Marsh that had been allotted to her followers fell
into the hands of her opponents, chief of whom locally was Capt. Robert Keayne. Though
Keayne was himself a controversial figure who ran afoul of Puritan authorities more than once,
he was in his religious thinking a devout, rigidly orthodox Puritan.8
After the defeat of the Antinomians, orthodoxy triumphed in Rumney Marsh and the lati-
fundia-like estates increased in size. Keayne enlarged his original allotment by acquiring part of

8
The terms orthodoxy and unorthodoxy are used with reservations, for as Elaine Pagels has
shown about early Christians and Janice Knight about the first New England Puritans, what subsequently
came to be called orthodoxy may have initially been unorthodoxy. It is usually the victors who decide
what is orthodox and what unorthodox.
5
the Antinomians’ holdings. He supported Harvard, the institution responsible for the propagation
of orthodoxy, by remembering it in his will. In 1652, John Cogan, another orthodox allottee who
had profited from the Antinomians’ departure, granted Harvard the use of seventy acres of his
Rumney Marsh land, known as the College Marsh, for as long as Harvard taught the orthodox
faith.9 Two other land owners with orthodox sympathies donated a part of their annual income
to Harvard.10 In the town’s first two hundred years, no institution had greater influence on it
theologically than Harvard. After the Antinomian Crisis, the residents had to bend to the ortho-
doxy reigning at Harvard; and in the nineteenth century, though they were by then largely ortho-
dox, the farmers of the town were pressured to accept Unitarianism, the liberal faith then in vo-
gue at Cambridge. As Harvard went theologically, so went the town, whether the residents liked
it or not.
Had the views of Anne Hutchinson and her Antinomian followers triumphed, Rumney
Marsh might have become a town where democracy and capitalism flourished: it might have be-
come one of the most progressive towns in eastern Massachusetts, or at least it’s nice to think so,
to paraphrase Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises. Instead, it became a feudalistic backwater, with
absentee landlords, tenant farmers, black slaves, and no meetinghouse. It had never occurred to
Keayne to encourage a meetinghouse, and the crafty husband of Keayne’s granddaughter, when
a meetinghouse was proposed early in the eighteenth century, did what he could to discourage it.
Geopolitics had combined with geography and topography to make the town a virtual fiefdom of
Boston, which alternately exploited and neglected it. The complaint in the town down through
the centuries was the same—too many taxes and not enough money. The town became identified
in Boston with poverty and stagnation. Both literally and figuratively, and by whatever name it
called itself, the town remained what a tax-burdened farmer in the middle of the eighteenth cen-
tury described as a “sinking town.” Keeping one’s head above water, economically and spiri-
tually, became the challenge for successive generations. The title of one of Horatio Alger’s dime
novels could be taken as the stark choice the town’s residents often felt they were faced with:
Sink or Swim.
If only the waters off the coast of Rumney Marsh had not been so shallow; if only so
many of its acres had not been marshy; if only a swift-flowing river or stream had run through
it; if only it had not been annexed by Boston; if only Winthrop and the other Puritan patriarchs
had not been so rigidly orthodox11; if only Anne Hutchinson had not been so defiantly heterodox;
if only Henry Vane had not been so young and impulsive; if only Robert Keayne had not been
so stubborn and intemperate; and if only he had left money in his longwinded will to build a
meetinghouse in Rumney Marsh, as he had left money for a town house in Boston, things might
have been different. If only . . .

The New England Meetinghouse

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a meetinghouse was very important in a

9
Chamberlain, II, 390.
10
Chamberlain, I, 126.
11
Samuel Sewall, The Diary of Samuel Sewall, ed. M. Halsey Thomas (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1973), 2 vols., I, 45.

6
New England town, where church and town were virtually one. A meetinghouse was where town
meetings were held on a weekday and where religious services were conducted on the Sabbath.
A meetinghouse was the center not only of spiritual but also of political and social life. In an age
when religion pervaded every aspect of life, both public and personal, a meetinghouse served as
both a civic and spiritual center. A meetinghouse was where matters both mundane and divine
were dealt with, where taxes were levied and sermons preached, where voters elected town offi-
cials and, much more importantly from a Puritan’s perspective, where the Elect decided who was
and who was not qualified to join them as communicants and voting members of the church.
Because of its dual role, there was no building more important to the early New England
settlers than a meetinghouse, which was why at least eighty of them were built in New England
by 1660.12 Boston had a meetinghouse as early as 1632 as did Lynn, just north of Rumney
Marsh. Salem had a meetinghouse by 1635,13 and Marblehead had one by 1638. But Malden,
did not have a meetinghouse until 1649. A relative late-comer, Malden’s was the forty-third
church in the Massachusetts colony.14 But as relatively late as Malden was in raising a meeting-
house, Rumney Marsh did not raise its own until over a half century later. The minister was
usually the most important person in a town, and for that reason the first settlers in New England
formed churches, built meetinghouses, and ordained ministers at the earliest possible time.15 But
in the case of Rumney Marsh the earliest possible time turned out to be relatively late. Rumney
Marsh was without a meetinghouse for almost a hundred years after it was settled. By contrast,
most of the settlements around Boston had established their own churches and townships, and
chosen a permanent minister, as early as the 1630s and 1640s. John Oliver a young member of
Boston’s First Church who was preparing for the ministry, moved to Rumney Marsh in 1640
and might have eventually become its ordained minister, but he served only briefly before be-
ing carried off by a malignant fever, in 1646, a year after graduating from Harvard.16
Because it was the most important building in a New England town, a meetinghouse
might have made a significant difference in Rumney Marsh. “In seeking for the life of a com-
munity,” Chamberlain wrote, “we must not disregard the history of the church.”17 He might have
added that we must not disregard the history of the meetinghouse, either, because a meeting-
house functioned as both a church and a town hall. But a meetinghouse was not built in Rumney
Marsh until over a half century after Keayne’s death, and when it was built the congregation

12
Marian Card Donnelly, The New England Meetinghouses of the Seventeenth Century (Middle-
town: Wesleyan UP, 1963), p. 45.
13
Salem erected four meetinghouses between 1634 and 1826. A protracted controversy took
place in Salem the late nineteenth and early twentieth century over the exact location and size of its first
meetinghouse. The uncertainty over whether or not the 1710 meetinghouse was the first or second (it
was the first) was small potatoes by comparison.
14
Robert G. Pope, The Half-Way Covenant (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969), p. 192.
15
Sidney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1972), p. 148.
16
Chamberlain, II, 129.
17
Chamberlain, II, 200. Mellen Chamberlain (1821-1900) was born in New Hampshire and grad-
uated from Dartmouth, but he lived for many years in Chelsea, where one of his ancestors had been a
deacon in the First Church. By profession a conveyancer, he also served as a judge, a state legislator, and
as a director of the Boston Public Library. See “Memoir of Mellen Chamberlain,” A Documentary Histo-
ry, II, xvii-xliv.
7
chose as its first minister a local older farmer with a checkered past and a wariness of the fu-
ture. The raising of the Rumney Marsh meetinghouse in 1710 could have signaled a step for-
ward in the development of the community, particularly if it represented, as its architecture
seemed to suggest, a break with the Puritan past. But Thomas Cheever, who was installed as it
first minister, in 1715, represented not a break with but a reaffirmation of the past, not a step
forward but a step backward.
The Rev. Thomas Cheever was not trying to help the parish make up for lost time,
which the situation in Rumney Marsh seemed to cry out for. Instead. he appeared to be trying to
expiate the sins of his youth. Cheever had sown his wild oats in his twenties, when he was a
profane, hotheaded, womanizing minister in the Malden church. But at the beginning of the
eighteenth century, as a grandfather in his mid-fifties, the repentant’s apparent aim was to turn
the clock back to the time of the first generation of New England Puritans, who were viewed by
the filiopietistic second generation as saints. Living into his nineties, as his stern schoolmaster
father Ezekiel had, Thomas Cheever became a stern patriarch and zealous proponent of the
old New England Way. Embodying the irrational and unconstructive spirit of Puritanism, with its
profoundly pessimistic view of human nature, Cheever was to Rumney Marsh in the eighteenth
what Robert Keayne had been in the seventeenth century: the most important man in the com-
munity but also the one least able to help it overcome the three strikes it had going against it.
When a plague struck the neighboring town of Malden, Cheever preached that the wicked people
of that parish were getting the punishment they deserved. By the same Puritan logic, it could be
said that in the Rev. Cheever the Rumney Marsh parish was getting just the punishment it de-
served.
While he was serving as the American minister to the Court of St. James, John Quincy
Adams convivially offered a Virginian over dinner a recipe for making a New England town in
Virginia. The chief ingredients of Adams’ recipe were three traditional institutions: “The mee-
tinghouse and school house and training field are the scenes where New England men are
formed,” Adams boasted to the Virginian. “The virtues and talents of the people are there
formed; their temperance, patience, fortitude, prudence, and justice; as well as their sagacity,
knowledge, judgment, taste, skill, ingenuity, dexterity and industry.”18 Adams no doubt had in
mind the area south of Boston where his family had been prominent for over one hundred and
fifty years, the area that had been named Mt. Wollaston when, along with Rumney Marsh to the
north, it had been. annexed by Boston in 1634, but which today is the suburb of Quincy.19
At the outset, when Boston annexed them, the similarities between Mt. Wollaston and
Rumney Marsh were striking, with at least one important exception. Mt. Wollaston had had a
meetinghouse, rough-hewn at it was, as early as 1636. It was followed by several others before
the century was over. Rumney Marsh, by contrast, did not have a meetinghouse, or a school
house until the beginning of the eighteenth century. If the New England character and the New
England town owed half as much to the meetinghouse, schoolhouse, and training field as Adams
claimed, then the absence of all three was a huge handicap to Rumney Marsh throughout the se-
venteenth century. Though both Mt. Wollaston and Rumney Marsh early became notorious ha-
vens for Antinomian heretics, and though Wollaston was twice as far from Boston as Rumney
Marsh was, with water in between, Mt. Wollaston eventually became Quincy, a proud, prosper-

18
Charles F. Adams, Three Episodes of Massachusetts History (Boston: 1892), II, 792.
19
Three Episodes, II, 732.
8
ous Boston suburb, the “City of Presidents,” whereas Rumney Marsh could do no better than
become Revere, where at least some of the virtues Adams listed for his dinner guest were some-
times in short supply. The chapters that follow will try to explain how and why it came about
that Rumney Marsh lacked a meetinghouse in the seventeenth century and what some of the
consequences of that lack were. Partly because of the lack of a meetinghouse, Rumney Marsh’s
religious, political, and economic development were retarded, if not blighted, and for centuries
it had to play catch up. For a settlement that had three strikes against it from the get-go, the lack
of a meetinghouse was more than discouraging: it was debilitating, so every allowance should be
made for what followed.

Mellen Chamberlain

Mellen Chamberlain’s A Documentary History of Chelsea, 1624-1824, is a tome in

search of a thesis. A historical tome without a thesis is like a novel without a plot, an opera with-
out a libretto, a watch without hands, or a compass without a needle. Chamberlain had expressed
the view that to understand the American Revolution we have to first understand American reli-
gion. As he put it, “the American Revolution in its most vital and most potent force was religious
rather than political.”20 He had expressed a similar view in A Documentary History that to un-
derstand the New England town, and “Chelsea” specifically, we first had to understand New
England religion, specifically Congregationalism or what was more popularly known as Puritan-
ism. In stressing the primary role of religion in American history, Chamberlain was in terms of
historiography, at the beginning of the twentieth century, going against the tide. For the Puri-
tans, religion and the Bible in particular explained everything, Think of Cotton Mather’s Magna-
lia Christi Americana. But for the children and especially the grandchildren of the Puritans, and
I am thinking of the Adams family in particular, the pendulum had swung in the opposite direc-
tion. But not so much for Chamberlain, who was a closet Puritan among Unitarian iconoclasts,
a Victorian Congregationalist among the iconoclastic Adamses. Because of the limitations of his
background, training, and temperament, Chamberlain was not able to prove that religion was
the potent and vital force behind either the American Revolution or the New England town, or at
least of the town he called Chelsea. In his documentary history of Chelsea, Chamberlain fails
not only to prove but even to apply his theory. He appears to have thrown in the towel and set-
tled for a documentary rather than an analytical history. What he was most likely to be longest
remembered as, according to one of his associates, was as an antiquarian. The Chamberlain Col-
lection of Autographs and Manuscripts, which he left to the Boston Public Library, was reported-
ly priceless.21
Chamberlain’s understanding of religion and specifically of Puritanism was not as deep
or sophisticated as it needed to be. For example, he did not adequately understand or at least
fully appreciate the importance of the Half-Way Covenant in the history of New England Puri-
tanism, and he especially did not understand its importance in the history of what later became,
mutatis mutandis, the First Church of Chelsea. A historian who made the claim for the influence
of religion on the formation of the nation and on the New England town, needed to know more
than Chamberlain did about New England Puritanism. Chamberlain was a devout Congregatio-

20
A Documentary History, I, xxxviii-xxxix.
21
A Documentary History, I, xxv.
9
nalist, with ancestors who had belonged from its earliest years to the town’s Puritan, that is Con-
gregationalist, First Church . He was also a dedicated but part-time amateur historian with a
remarkable memory. But all that was not an adequate substitute for being a trained historian,
with a specialty in the history of of New England Puritanism. His role as historian had to play
not second but third fiddle to “the bar and the bench,” that is to his responsibilities as a lawyer
and then as a judge.. More than he was a historian. Chamberlain was an antiquarian, a collector
and compiler, and we are all the richer for it. But if A Documentary History is a monument to
Chamberlain’s dedication and perseverance as an antiquarian, it is also testimony to his partial-
ity. He admired the Puritans; with all their faults, and he admidred John Winthrop. He lived for
the last thirty years of his life in Chelsea, where he built a home and helped found a small Con-
gregational church nearby. From his home he could see the neighborhood that had once been
John Winthrop's allotment in Rumney Marsh (Revere), and he said he had “often climbed its
rounded height and never I think without consciousness that it was once Winthrop’s.”22 He was
an admirer of Winthrop, as he was of Thomas Cheever, even though Cheever was, in my view,
a cantankerous and mischievous minister—mischievous, in the older sense of harmful and inju-
rious. As Robert Keayne had been in the seventeenth, Cheever was the most obstructive human
impediment to progress in the town in the eighteenth century.

Map of Boston and Vicinity, 1852

(1) North Chelsea (originally Rumney Marsh, later Revere) (2) Chelsea (originally Winnisimmet)

22
A Documentary History, I, xxxii.
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(3) Winthrop, originally Pullen Point, and (4) Boston.

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