The Inventive Life of Charles Hill Morgan: The Power of Improvement In Industry, Education and Civic Life. Allison Chisolm
in an old cotton mill and soon needed several new buildings, including a machine shop headed by Joseph B. Parker. Parker had married Hiram’s younger sister, Mary Ann, in 1833. Hiram may have joined his brother-in-law to work at the company as early as 1841.
To accommodate his expanding enterprise, Bigelow built housing for the workers. By November 1844, Hiram had moved his family from West Boylston into what had come to be known as Clintonville, to be closer to work. Records for April 1845 show that young Charles, then a gangly 14, had joined his father among the lace manufacturing department’s nine employees. Hiram moved over to join the machine shop employees later that year. The shop made all the machinery needed for the Clinton Company’s coach lace operations.
That machine shop played an important role in Clintonville’s economic development. One resident, Daniel B. Ingalls, noted in a local history that he decided to settle in town as a young mechanic in 1847 after a conversation with Parker (known as “Deacon Parker” for his role in the local church). Parker at that point was supervising more than 200 men in the Clinton Company’s machine shop.
Engraving of Erastus Bigelow, c. 1860
After young Ingalls described his own machinist skills, Parker explained that “pretty good machinists” earned $1.25 (roughly $36 in today’s dollars) for a day that began before breakfast and ended at 7 p.m., an hour earlier than Ingalls’ experience had been in Connecticut and Maine. Ingalls promptly decided to settle in Clintonville.
Parker “impressed me as a frank, open-hearted, self-possessed, honest man,” Ingalls wrote. “There was no sham about him ... He had a way of expressing himself with a look that manifested his contempt for insincerity in others ... While true to his employers, he was helpful to those in his employ, and in general was public-spirited in the best sense of the word.”
Both uncle and employer, J.B. Parker also took on the role of Charles Morgan’s first mentor as a skilled mechanic. That machine shop headed by Parker became a seedbed for further invention by several of those working there, not just Charles. As local historian Andrew E. Ford commented:
It is here in this machine shop that we find, more than anywhere else, the promise of the Clinton that was to be, for some of the men who were working here afterwards became most substantial citizens. Moreover, the later improvements made in the machinery of the mills is due in no small degree to these men who, under the charge of J.B. Parker, prepared many of the original looms.
CLINTONVILLE BEFORE CLINTON
The southernmost neighborhood in the sprawling town of Lancaster, Clintonville in the 1840s had “no fire department, no police, no cemetery, no poor-house,” recounted Dr. George M. Morse, Clinton’s first physician. And no mail service, as it was still officially part of Lancaster. A stagecoach would bring the mail from Shirley to L.F. Bancroft’s store for local collection.
“If people were in a hurry for their mail, they would drive over to Lancaster for it,” said Morse. By 1847, John C. Stiles had begun offering a twice-daily coach trip to Worcester’s Foster Street station. Railway service arrived in July 1848 with the Worcester & Nashua Railroad running through to Ayer, adding service to Worcester the following year.
There were only two direct roads out of town, one south to West Boylston and the other north to Lancaster. The other roads meandered around farms or were cart-paths. At the time of Clinton’s formal incorporation, on March 14, 1850, there were just four public streets, all others having been privately constructed. The following year, town records show J.B. Parker was paid $71 to build additional roads. He must have had a profitable business, as a $71 project then would cost about $1,630 in today’s dollars. The average annual income for manufacturing workers in rural New England was just over $300 in that period.
Life in Clintonville didn’t require many roads, however, since people tended to stay close to home. As Morse noted:
...amusements of all kinds were generally frowned upon and considered frivolous and non-edifying. Occasionally a tea party was given... The women generally did their own housework, and stayed at home and took care of their children. There was but little money, and people had little time to spend in mere amusement.
Clintonville didn’t have churches either. In the early 1840s, residents would make weekly omnibus trips to churches in Lancaster, but soon decided they preferred their own house of worship.
Most people attended the Congregational church, known at the time as orthodox Evangelical Congregational. While Massachusetts residents were no longer taxed to support it, what had been the state church until 1833 retained local loyalty. The Congregational church also retained local prominence, as Ingalls noted:
The social, educational and religious, as well as political interests were largely associated with the vestry of that church; there they held the first town meetings. It was open to all gatherings calculated to benefit the people.
Clintonville’s first “independent religious society,” as it was later described, was founded in June of 1844. Hiram Morgan helped establish what became the Second Evangelical Church of Lancaster that September, as he worked together with Joseph B. Parker and three others “to draw up a form of covenant, confession of faith and articles of discipline” to meet the spiritual needs of the growing population.
By November 1844, some 51 people had pledged to join from towns as close as West Boylston (Hiram and Lucina among those) and as far as Providence, Rhode Island, and the church at Andover Theological Seminary. Parker was named one of two deacons the following January, and continued to serve as superintendent of the “Sabbath School,” which had started well before the new church. Horatio Bigelow became the church’s choir director, and “when he was in town,” Ford noted, his brother Erastus would play the violin.
The congregation began meeting in Clintonville, in a chapel that seated 200. Quickly outgrowing that space, however, they sold the building on Main Street and built a new one on Walnut Street in 1847, known familiarly as “the Lord’s Barn,” due to its plain architecture.
In November 1848, Hiram Morgan was elected to the leadership position of Deacon, which he held until 1860. The church’s first pastor, Rev. Joseph M.R. Eaton, later described both Deacon Morgan and his wife Lucina as “devout...lights that did not become dim. Necessarily employed in the labors of the day, early and late, by careful planning and strict economy of time, the family Bible and the altar of prayer and thanksgiving were not forgotten.” Lucina Morgan was named the third president of the church’s Congregational Benevolent Society, succeeding the pastor’s wife in the position. An historic accounting of the church’s early years also includes C.H. Morgan on the list of members “most prominent for service.”
Charles thus grew up in an atmosphere of pious living coupled with the strong example of how to start a new church organization outside the established order. The church soon attracted lecturers on burning issues of the day—the abolition of slavery and temperance. One early speaker was temperance activist John B. Gough, just beginning his lifelong career of speaking out against the evils of drink across the nation. About sixty years later, Charles Hill Morgan would buy Gough’s estate “Hillside” in nearby Boylston.
SCHOOL DAYS
As the son of a mechanic and church lay leader, Charles had as much education as his family could afford, which meant by the age of 12, a combination of school and work would have to satisfy his natural curiosity. They had moved back East from Michigan when he was eight, so he would have attended one of the seven or eight district schools in West Boylston, which included “writing school” and “singing school.” Summer terms were eight weeks, and winter terms nine and a half weeks, for a little more than four months’ public schooling for the year. There was no high school, as with just 1,600 residents in 1840, West Boylston didn’t have the 500 families required by the state to offer advanced education.
The district classrooms would have been more crowded in