Is there a better local storyteller than Town Historian Sharon McDonald? Certainly not now, and perhaps not through the entire 131 years of the Bedford Historical Society, which she serves as president.
McDonald continued her historical “cast of characters” series of presentations at the society’s annual meeting on Sunday. She explained that it’s an ongoing effort to showcase the town’s post-colonial history and personalities.
“One of my mottoes is, ‘In Bedford there’s so much more history that’s really cool,’” she said.
At some point, she added, “I think I’ll put them together in a booklet.”
Her narrations are replete with interesting details, peppered with colorful tidbits, and often related to today’s landscape through geography or artifacts.
On Sunday, she mentioned Bedford’s first firefighting apparatus – the Eagle – acquired around 1850 and today resting on the stage in the Reed Room of Town Hall.
She also enjoys digressions that add to the understanding of the local culture at various times, and sharing details of her research efforts.
One of the 19th– and early 20th-century luminaries McDonald spotlighted on Sunday was Charles Jenks, who has become more familiar in recent years thanks to the renewed attention to the Jenks Nature trail fronting the library and the high school and the location of the upcoming Prom Stroll on May 30.
Jenks was a gentleman farmer who lived at Fitch Tavern at 12 The Great Road, the family homestead, with most of his Stone Croft Farm spreading southward across the street. What is now the nature trail was a cow path to pastures around the site of John Glenn Middle School. Thanks to the generosity of Jenks and his estate, the town boasts an uninterrupted central campus featuring key educational, governmental, and recreational facilities.
A successful Boston businessman, McDonald said, Jenks retired to what was then-called the Stone Croft Farm in 1894 when he and his three sisters inherited it. While helping to care for his livestock, Jenks “spent lots of time walking the hills and woods of Bedford, compiling a complete inventory of every flowering plant that grew here. He was a “student of nature.”
She added that he also meticulously attached news clippings about the town into scrapbooks for several years. (Many Bedford events and community and social happenings were reported in The Lexington Minuteman into the 1950s.)
Jenks’s resume of town service ranged from serving as the first tree warden to library trustee to moderator for more than 20 years, as well as membership on study committees reflecting a town in transition: street lighting, drainage, school overcrowding, town payroll, water supply.
“He didn’t just care. He acted,” McDonald said. (She added that he resigned from the position of gypsy moth warden after he reported the creatures eradicated, only to see them reappear a few months later.)
McDonald also described the impact of Mary Alzina Hartwell Fletcher, who was born in 1839.
“That does qualify her as a townie,” McDonald said.
Charles Jenks, who has become more familiar in recent years thanks to the renewed attention to
the Jenks Nature trail fronting the library and the high school. Courtesy photo
Fletcher was a link among the Hartwell and Fitch families whose “histories spiral all through Bedford.”
Alzina married Mattthew Fletcher of Cambridge (the speaker said she discovered a letter from a cousin in Illinois thanking Alzina for mailing him a piece of the wedding cake.) The couple resided in West Cambridge, now part of Arlington. In 1871, she learned of her inheritance in Bedford: acreage along The Great Road from Springs Road to Fitch Tavern, and all the way north to Pine Hill Road.
So, she returned to the town where she grew up. Although the population still had not reached 1,000, much had changed. McDonald detailed: the railroad had arrived, immigrants from Ireland worked the farmers’ fields, there was a new Catholic chapel, a resort flourished at Bedford Springs.
“Her dream was to create Bedford’s first housing development,” McDonald said.
Fletcher had her land divided into 100 half-acre lots and planned six streets: Fletcher, Paul Revere, Maxwell, and Middlesex roads as well as Fitchdale Avenue and Hancock Street. She opened a store at the corner of Fletcher and The Great roads that expanded into a commercial strip known as the Fletcher Block, she added.
“About the time of World War I, her real estate business stalled and she couldn’t pay back taxes,” McDonald said, so she was forced to sell her property.
On Sunday, McDonald began her talk with William Gragg, who resided with his wife and four children at what is now Springs and Anthony Road in the mid-19th century. Gragg, a nautical pharmacist (at the time called “surgeon’s steward”), was at sea for months at a time.
He was part of a “diplomatic mission” to far corners of the world, setting sail in 1857 and traveling as far as China and Japan, McDonald said, adding that the 80-page book he wrote about the experience “was not very diplomatic.”
After enlisting in the Union Army in 1862, he ended up on the USS Housatonic, a gunboat that was part of a blockade of Charleston Harbor. McDonald reported that in February 1864, the Housatonic became “the first ship that was ever sunk by a submarine,” with most of the crew surviving. The historian said after many years, she couldn’t confirm if Gragg was among them, until Sandy Duffy, the society’s office and archives administrator, found the evidence in his obituary.
That writeup said Gragg had contracted a fatal disease and returned to Bedford in 1864 for the final week of his life.
McDonald said the Historical Society archives include a letter from Gragg to his son, donated by Carl Hansen, as well as copies of four letters written about his Civil War experiences that McDonald located in a library at the University of Michigan.
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