A month ago, I received a voicemail from Mr. Michael Dickson, a member of the Templeton Historical Commission. He had in his possession a document signed by the Douglas Select-men on September 2, 1776 and he wanted to ensure that the document was returned to the Town. I quickly returned Mr. Dickson’s call and arranged a meeting. A document as old as our country, please and thank you.
The story of how he came into possession of the document is almost more interesting than the document itself.
Mr. Dickson’s Uncle George was a Boston attorney, who happened to be at the Essex County Courthouse on the same day that a floor safe was being moved. Beneath this floor safe was a stack of “old” documents. Not in the safe, but UNDERNEATH the safe. From what Mr. Dickson relayed to me, it did not appear that these documents were in any type of envelope or wrappings, just stacked neatly under the safe for an undisclosed amount of time.
These “old” documents were almost 250 years old and represented 26 different towns/cities all from Worcester County. The curious cat in me would love to know how they ended up underneath a floor safe at the ESSEX COUNTY COURTHOUSE, approximately 65 miles from Worcester County Courthouse and still 25 miles from Boston and the Secretary of the Commonwealth.
Much like small town life, instead of bringing these documents to the Boston Historical Society or a number of municipalities, Uncle George thought that since his nephew was a member of the Templeton Historical Commission he would be the perfect candidate to give the documents to (in my eyes, Uncle George made the right call). Per Mr. Dickson, about five or six years ago his mom passed the somewhat disorganized, messy stack of documents onto Mr. Dickson. Once retired, Mr. Dickson made it his mission to make sure that the documents were returned to the towns.
Onto the Document!
Once again, the document was signed by the Douglas Select-men on September 2, 1776 answering a request by the Court of General Sessions of the Peace in Worcester. Per Mr. Dickson, many of the original documents were handwritten on the back of the original Court Request. The Douglas Select-men chose to answer on a separate piece of parchment. Due to that, Mr. Dickson included a photocopy of the request.
On August 16, 1776, Levi Lincoln, Clerk of the Court of General Sessions for Worcester County, requested that the Select-Men of each town in the county send to the court a list of the names of those innkeepers, retailers, or common victualers (a person licensed to sell alcoholic liquor). These persons must be of sober lives and conversation, suitably qualified and attached to the rights and interest of their country. If a person or retailer was not listed, they would not be granted a licence to sell liquor.
And on September 2, 1776, the five Select-men of Douglas – Benjamin Wallis, Benjamin Walker, Eliphas Stearns, Elijah Moore and Robert [Robart] Humes – dutifully replied. The Select-men approbated Dr. William Jennison as a retailer of spirituous liquors, deeming him of suitable quality, a friend and firmly attached to the liberty of America as witnessed by their hands.
We could spend plenty of time trying to figure out why the wanted this document and why who was granted the license had to be of certain character, but I don’t have that time right now. But what I do have the time for is telling you about the process of transcribing this document.
As you can see from the photographs of not only the original document, but also the photocopy of the request, there are times that my job requires a little bit of squinting, enlarging, deducing, and sometimes throwing my hands up in the air because I just can’t figure it out no matter how hard I try (and I tried…I also made Justin try and Gail try…)
Luckily the Court’s request was a printed document. The document from the Select-men, that was handwritten and took a little bit more to transcribe. In the transcriptions that I have included with the photographs, you will see that there are words to the document that I was unable to distinguish. Maybe you can figure them out. If you do, let me know (rlavallee@cwmars.org).
However, when looking at the documents, be careful. For if you look closely you will see that there are some ‘f’s where there should be some ‘s’s. These are in fact not ‘f’s, but instead they are what we know today as the “long s”.
They look like this ſ.
I was lazy, went to Wikipedia, made sure that it had a reputable footnote and found the following : “The long s, ⟨ſ⟩, also known as the medial s or initial s, is an archaic form of the lowercase letter ⟨s⟩, found mostly in works from the late 8th to early 19th centuries. It replaced one or both[a] of the letters s in a double-s sequence (e.g., “ſinfulneſs” for “sinfulness” and “poſſeſs” or “poſseſs” for “possess”, but never “poſſeſſ”).” HERE is the original source for the Wikipedia article.
Regardless of whether or not it is an ‘f’ or a ‘long s’, when one is reading and transcribing documents that are written in Old English, let us just say it is an experience.
So while the document itself is the find for the archive, the story is really how we probably never should have come into possession of this document. If Uncle George had had gone through the proper channels, we probably never would have seen it. Luckily for us, he happened to know a guy…a guy who understands and appreciates the significance of history. We cannot thank Mr. Dickson enough for making sure that this document was returned to the town.
