Mount Wollaston
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mount Wollaston, also known as Merrymount, is a neighborhood in Quincy, Massachusetts, USA, the birthplace of presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams. Today the neighborhood now known as Wollaston lies to the west of the neighborhood known as Merrymount, with North Quincy to the north and Quincy Center to the south.
Mount Wollaston has a most unusual history. In 1624, Thomas Morton emigrated from England to the Plymouth Colony, in the company of a Captain Wollaston. Unable to get along with the Pilgrim authorities in Plymouth Colony, Wollaston and Morton left the colony in 1625 with a company of thirty or forty colonists. They cleared the land and built log-huts on the seaward slopes of the hills in what is now the city of Quincy, Massachusetts. In 1626, however, the captain and most members of the community departed for Virginia.
Morton remained, renamed the village Mare Mount (sometimes thought to be a contraction of Merry Mount but more likely referring to the seaside location - Mare - meaning hill by the sea), and proceeded to outrage the Puritans. As Morton himself wrote in The New England Canaan (Book III, Chapter 14): "The Inhabitants of . . . Mare Mount . . . did devise amongst themselves . . . Revels and merriment after the old English custome; (they) prepared to sett up a Maypole upon the festivall day . . . and therefore brewed a barrell of excellent beare . . . to be spent, with other good cheare, for all commers of that day. And . . . they had prepared a song fitting to the time and present occasion. And upon May day they brought the Maypole to the place appointed, with drumes, gunnes, pistols and other fitting instruments, for the purpose; and there erected it with the help of Salvages, that came thether to see the manner of our Revels. A goodly pine tree of 80 foot longe was reared up, with a peare of buckshorns nayled one somewhat neare unto the top of it: where it stood, as a faire sea mark for directions how to finde out the way to mine Hoste of Mare Mount." See also Nathaniel Hawthorne's account in the fictionalized retelling, The Maypole of Merrymount.
In 1628, Plymouth authorities dispatched Miles Standish to restore order. He promptly cut down the Maypole and took Morton into custody. Morton and associates were too drunk to resist; they were exiled to a small nearby island to await transportation back to England. There Morton was supplied with provisions by sympathetic Indians, escaped, and returned to England on his own. However, he reappeared in Plymouth the following year; once again, his property was confiscated and he was again sent home. In 1642, Morton returned to Massachusetts yet again, and was promptly imprisoned in Boston. Following his release, he was exiled to Maine, where he remained for the rest of his life.
Mount Wollaston was also the home of William and Anne Hutchinson following their emigration from England in 1636. It was in Mount Wollaston where Anne began her career as a pioneering female preacher in colonial America.
William and Eunice Cole first settled in Mount Wollaston upon their arrival from England, and were granted two acres of land on February 20, 1637, though they left for Exeter, New Hampshire before the year was out. Today Eunice Cole is better known as Goody Cole and was convicted of witchcraft (probably convicted anyway - no record of the actual verdict exists today) in Hampton, New Hampshire in 1656; the only woman to ever have been convicted of such charges in New Hampshire. She spent the remainder of her life in and out of prison, dodging witchcraft charges, and living a hand-to-mouth existence. Upon her death in 1680 she was (possibly) buried in a secret grave in Hampton; the whereabouts of which remains unknown with any certainty to this day. Other accounts suggest that her body was thrown into a ditch or the ocean. According to local legend, a stake was driven into her body after her death "in order to exorcise the baleful influence she was supposed to have possessed," and a horseshoe hung on the stake, just to be on the safe side. In truth Goody Cole was almost certainly unpleasant in the extreme - Hampton historian Joseph Dow referred to her as "ill-natured and ugly, artful and aggravating, malicious and revengeful" - but very probably not a witch.
The first Howard Johnson's restaurant was established in Wollaston in 1925. In spite of the fact that the city of Quincy has placed a stone marker next to the Wollaston MBTA station parking lot designating that location as the original site of the first Howard Johnson's, the first one was actually located a short distance up the street; on the corner of Beale Street and Newport Avenue. The original building is still standing and can be seen here in its early days. The initials "HJ" can still be seen in tiles on the walkway in front of the entrance to the door in the left middle of the picture.
The basement of what is now a Japanese restaurant at the corner of Hancock Street and Bass Street served as the original rehearsal room for the Dropkick Murphys when the popular Irish-influenced punk band was starting out in the mid-'90s. However, the band quickly developed a following and the original practice space was abandoned when too many teenagers began hanging around in front of the building while the band was rehearsing.
The name of "Mount Wollaston" is now given to a cemetery adjacent to the neighborhood.
