Over 200,000 African-Americans fought in the Civil War, with most serving in the Union Army. Others (more than 18,000) were members of the Union Navy, serving as both as sailors and “shore men.” While many African-American soldiers and sailors were assigned to support roles, more than a few were mustered into fighting units, among them the Massachusetts 54th and 55th Colored Infantry regiments. The importance of these formations cannot be overstated. Abolitionists and leaders in the black community, here in Massachusetts and in other Union states, insisted blacks were capable of serving with …

“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,” a notorious tyrant is supposed to have once said. Whatever the origins of the saying, history has validated its truth through the limitless casualties of modern warfare. In the course of the Civil War, over six hundred thousand died, including almost ninety from Natick. But Asa Smith was not one of them. Grievously wounded and told by a dishearteningly long string of battlefield surgeons he was as good as dead, Smith managed somehow to survive his injuries, going on after the Civil War to marry, educate himself and become a …

So said Mark Anthony in Shakespeare’s epic parable of political intrigue and civil war, Julius Caesar, written in 1601. In the course of the play, Anthony speaks his lines after Caesar’s assassination, following words prophetic of the fall of the Roman Empire, and eventually, our own Civil War. “Blood and destruction will be so in use,” Anthony says, “And dreadful objects so familiar, that mothers shall but smile when they behold, their infants quartered with the hands of war... Such words have presaged more than one national conflict of horrendous proportions, but when compared to our own …

There is a curious fact that has been observed by Cary Holmes, a reference librarian at the Natick’s Morse Institute who perhaps more than any single local individual in our era has become widely familiar with the history surrounding Natick’s participation in the Civil War. Having examined the application records of the Natick chapter of the Grand Army of the Republic – the Union veterans’ organization of which there were hundreds of branches throughout the North – he has discovered that almost to a man every veteran declared his reason for volunteering to fight was to save the Union. Natick …

To paraphrase Winston Churchill and apply one of his most intriguing phrases to local history: The true character of Natick is “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” In its actions relating to the Civil War, especially the extraordinary number of local residents who took up arms in defense of the Union, Natick distinguished itself among the most militant communities in the North. On a proportionate basis, Natick may have sent more soldiers to fight than any community of any size in the course of the conflict. But why? First, the riddle: It may come as a surprise to learn that the…

Lost in the tumult of the past are the tectonic shifts among the complex events conditioning life in Natick and a thousand towns of similar size and character throughout the North in the spring of 1861. With the destiny of a nation trembling in the balance, Natick, indeed all of New England, looked on as in quick order Southern states began to succeed from the Union. A whole generation of Natick’s youth, which for the first time in the town’s 200-year history had begun to benefit from a high school education (beginning only in 1852 with the forming of Natick High’s first freshman class), …

In the years immediately before the Civil War, New England and eastern Massachusetts in particular were alive with abolitionist agitation. Any number of local anti-slavery societies engaged a variety of religious figures, women and militants like William Lloyd Garrison and Lydia Maria Child, the later who had lived in Natick for a few years in the 1830s and was militant in her opposition to “the peculiar institution.” Yet Henry Wilson, whose active dislike of slavery was unquestioned, was forced to maneuver through a thicket of political parties and alliances where the “slavery question” was …

In the almost 136 years since his death, Henry Wilson has been largely forgotten. Even in the town where he lived much of his life, Natick, MA, the specifics of his life are virtually unknown. Yet in his own time he was a popular figure throughout the Northern states and was even rumored to be a potential candidate for the presidency. On occasion, his name was linked to scandal and in some regards, unfortunate conduct. But on balance his transgressions, whatever they may have been, are far outweighed by his positive accomplishments. As a US Senator and chair of the Military Affairs Committee …

It has been said less than one in ten thousand Americans even knows Henry Wilson’s name, and of that I have no doubt. Even here in Natick his memory has receded into the past save for the presence of an old cobbler’s shop and his home, on West Central Street. The former, painted a rich red, ornaments a busy corner on Rt. 135; a mile or so east, on the same street, stands his home, a modest white, ante bellum structure now occupied by a group of environmental engineers. To their credit, the engineers are rehabilitating the interior, which with high ceilings and period mantels conveys the …

There is a tendency to view the Civil War exclusively in political, social and military terms. Or as an incoherent series of horrific battles culminating in a moral victory followed by an indeterminate, only vaguely understood time called “Reconstruction.” Writ large upon the canvas of the overall conflict, outsize personalities ruled events that simply go beyond description and even organization. Among the personalities alone, Lincoln, Davis, Grant and Lee ruled a pantheon populated by dozens of lesser figures, including generals and politicians. Elsewhere in the middle distance of a canvass…

Strange as it may seem given the illustrious record of what would become Massachusetts in the American Revolution, support for abolition and even the Union cause was not uniform in Massachusetts in the decades before the Civil War. Slavery had been abolished here in 1783, but slave catchers roamed the state in the 1850s in pursuit of Southern runaways. The Emancipation Proclamation still lay far ahead in the distant future. In one particularly notorious incident associated with “The Secret Six,” a group of wealthy and influential abolitionists in pre-Civil War Boston, Thomas Wentworth …

Looking back to the decade of the 1830s, the first trains that ran out of Boston over the tidal flats of the Back Bay and on into the towns west of the city seem laughably quaint. Constructed to resemble stagecoaches to give comfort and familiarity to first-time riders, they were pulled by squat, black engines capable of speeds approaching 35 miles per hour.In the world of 1830s New England, that might as well have been the speed of light.  Nothing like it had ever been seen before. The technology and the era in which it emerged mark a dividing line between ancient times and the modern epoch…

The period between the end of Andrew Jackson’s second presidential administration in 1837 and the stirrings of Civil War are largely a blank in the minds of most Americans, and for good reason – we were finally getting about the hard, gritty business of disciplining ourselves to become a mature nation. To do this, however, we would have to build railroads, invent previously unimagined, technologically sophisticated devices (including the telegraph, sewing machine and mechanical reaper) and launch a series of cultural initiatives designed to bring knowledge and civility to a largely illiterate…

There is a little-known but startling fact about the Civil War – the War Between the States. Most us of know from high school history and Public Television that the North possessed clear economic superiority in the contest. But few recognize the disparity in size between the armies of the North and South. In point of fact, the South was able to maintain a dominant position in the field through the early years of the war, yet accomplished this with a force less than half the size of the ultimately victorious North. Many correctly attribute the tactical brilliance of Robert E. Lee to this early…

It would not be unfair to say that Natick in the third decade of the 19th century was largely isolated and undeveloped, which in general describes the condition of much, if not all, of the region described to this day as Middlesex County. The area, which lies west of Boston and stretches north and west from Natick, has made a signal contribution to the American experience. But in the first quarter of the 19th century, life in Natick was lived largely anonymously. Other than being the location of a “Praying Indian Village” at some time in its indeterminate past, Natick had little to …

 Of all the epochal events that have defined the American experience and by association life in mid-19th century Natick – from the Revolution to the opening of the Erie Canal and the discovery of gold throughout the western US – to the build-out of the Transcontinental Railroad – the two World Wars and the Great Depression: None comes even remotely close in terms of the price paid in human life and suffering on the part of the American people and of Natick than the Civil War. In the space of less than 30 years in the middle of the 19th century, Natick, that in the first years after its …

For those who live in Natick and have an interest in local history, or come here in order to more fully understand our past, a wealth of information, materials and homes are available for consideration. For instance, at least three major works published within the last two decades focus exclusively on the Natick Plantation, the “Praying Indian Village” founded in 1651 by John Eliot and his Native American followers. One volume concerns itself with the political conditions and real estate transactions surrounding the latter days of the Plantation, while another explains the various religious …

Consider Captain Farris in the fullness of his years. Having ably served his king in the French and Indian Wars of the mid-18th century, he retired to the Needham Leg (present-day East Natick) with a “friend,” one Jane Cope, the widow of a British general officer. The couple’s Cambridge neighbors took a dim view of the relationship, due to their lack of a formal marriage. So sometime in the later 1700s, the couple removed to the “Needham Leg” to farm and enjoy their pensioners’ “half pay.” Active in local affairs, Farris was among the petitioners who sought to have a meetinghouse erected in …

For me it all began with a trip to the beach one toast-warm morning in the summer of 1945. My dad had driven down to Provincetown, where he and my mom had rented a little cottage on Commercial Street. An Army Ordinance officer, his assignment kept him in Boston. But often his weekends were free. The house looked out on Provincetown Harbor. A narrow fringe of beach across   the street from the house was strewn with jettisoned fishing smacks and was a lovely place to swim. In those days all that connected Provincetown to the world was a narrow, country road. With the war on, even in summers …

As senior citizens go, they are a mixed lot. Some are broken down, their skin sadly defaced and so fragile they appear to be on the verge of collapse. Others, judged on appearances, are well loved and cared for. As a group they represent a substantial number – upwards of a thousand by one, well-informed count. But one thing is for sure: these senior citizens have nothing to be ashamed of. Look at them through the eyes of Natick architect and preservationist Steve Evers and its easy to see that while they’ve been through a lot, they still stand tall and proud. For these are the historic homes …