Highland Street, 035, Williams House, Edward, 35 Highland Street, Easton, MA, info, Easton Historical Society -

More information on this image is available at the Easton Historical Society in North Easton, MA
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The development by Oliver Ames and Sons Corporation of the factory and village land use in a rather organic manner with a mix work-related classes created an integrated geographic network. The housing on perimeter edge with factories and business affairs in the center creating the village concept in North Easton. Other important concepts were the Furnace Village Cemetery, Furnace Village Grammar School, and the Furnace Village Store, which explains Furnace Village and other sections of Easton.
source: Massachusetts Historical Commission
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Description of the Furnace Village Area and Highland Street below
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The story for this property will be shown upon completion of the research process.
source: Easton Historical Society
source; Massachusetts Historical Commission
source: Ancestry
source: History of Easton, William L. Chaffin, 1886
source: Easton’s Neighborhoods, Edmund C. Hands, 1995
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Furnace Village Area
The Furnace Village is an area about one-half mile in the four directions of Leach Foundry Office and Store at 559 Foundry Street, which is the intersection of Poquanticut Avenue and Foundry Street. The earliest settlers in Furnace Village were a mixture of village configuration of housing with industry and farming, being the livelihood of the early residents. By 1723, houses started to be built and industries started to appear in Furnace Village by 1742. By 1751, the designated name of Furnace Village became associated with this part of Easton being nationally known for its iron producing with the start of the furnace operations. During its time, events included the cannon cast at Perry's Furnace and, like the Ames business district in North Easton, the three ponds, Keith’s Pond, New Pond and Old Pond, canals, raceways, and streams providing power for industries. Also, the canals were used for washing areas for the tannery industries. The Mulberry Brook was from Borderland through Furnace Village down by the Wheaton properties on Bay Road. In the early days, the Mulberry Brook served the industry purposes with mill power and water uses such as the Queset Brook did in the central part of the Town and the Dorchester Brook in the eastern part of Easton. In 1836, the Belcher Malleable Iron Company at 560 Foundry Street was established with a relationship to the Perry's Furnace made the company being the oldest continually operating malleable iron foundry from the same location in the country. In 1763, some of the roads in Furnace Village started seeing paving and other roads created by 1741. The two cemeteries, Furnace Village Cemetery at 90 South Street and Dr. Edward Burial Ground at 23 Highland Street were the burial grounds for many of the residents within and outside Furnace Village as far back as the early 1800s.
info, Easton Historical Society
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Highland Street
Highland Street runs from the Mansfield line to Kimball's store on the Bay road. In 1741 that part of it from the Bay Road to the old Nathaniel Perry place was laid out. The section west of this place to the Mansfield line was laid out in 1772. The east end of it subsequently underwent some change. It formerly joined the Bay road a few rods north of its present eastern terminus. The eastern section of this road was widened in 1878.
source: History of Easton, William L. Chaffin, 1886
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Highland Street
Highland Street was laid out running west from Bay Road in South Easton in 1741, and the 1750 Benjamin Cobb survey of the town shows three houses on its north side and one laying far off the road on the south side. Through the rest of the eighteenth century into the last quarter of the nineteenth, the south side of the road was largely farmland and often was owned by those whose houses stood on the north side of the road. In 1855 only a carpenter shop and the home of Franklin Sylvester stood on the south side between South and Foundry Streets; the 1871 map shows only what is probably Sylvester’s house on the south side. By 1886 the house at 58 Highland Street, marked - W. Erving, - joined the Sylvester house on the south side.
source: Massachusetts Historical Commission
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35 Highland Street
The early history of the house at 35 Highland Street is somewhat obscure. It might readily be confused with the house marked “Tim Williams” on the 1750 map of Easton; Tim Williams was Timothy Williams (1714-70), great-grandson of the immigrant Richard Williams, who settled at Taunton by 1639. Timothy Williams was an early town clerk (1754-59) and among the nine men who signed the articles of agreement that established the first foundry, ultimately run by Shepard Leach and then Lincoln Drake and his sons, in Furnace Village in 1751.1 In the 1760s, however, Timothy Williams and at least part of his family moved to Woolwich, Maine, where he died in 1770. Before he left for Maine, Williams sold a tract on the south side of Highland Street to Seth Williams (1722-59), a second cousin, in 1755; their grandfathers were brothers and two of the nine children of Richard Williams. In 1761 he sold a little more than an acre to the heirs of Seth Williams, who died two years earlier.2 No Timothy Williams deed transferring his homestead has been located, and it is clear from the style of the house and Williams’s known date of death that he did not construct 35 Highland Street. A recently discovered 1825 map of Furnace Village labels the D. Williams, no doubt for Deacon Dwelly Williams (1785-1838). Dwelly Williams was one of the twelve children of Edward Williams (1750-1820) and Sarah Lothrop (1755-1835) and a grandson of Seth Williams (1722-59). Seth Williams had married Luceanna Fobes in 1750, and their sons Edward, Marlborough (born 1753), Josiah (born 1755), and Seth (1756) all lived in this section of Easton. Josiah’s son Cyrus inherited 37 Highland Street, while Seth’s son Nahum lived west of 41 Highland Street in a house that has not survived. It seems likely that 35 Highland Street was built for Edward, who married in 1772, for the couple and their growing family. This Edward Williams is probably the man of that name described in William Chaffin’s history of the town. He was a selectman from 1799 to 1802 and operated a tannery in this section from the late 1700s into the early 1800s that is said to have stood an eighth of a mile west of the Lemuel Keith mill (behind and slightly west of 45 Highland Street), which by 1855 was the “thread manufactory” shown just north of the house marked “Edward Williams.” Chaffin also stated that during the Revolution Edward Williams “when too feeble to enlist in the active service, harnessed his team and took into the camp near Boston food, blankets, and many means of comfort, to procure which he stripped his house and received the most generous contributions from neighbors.”3 Unless debilitated by illness, it seems unlikely that the Edward born in 1750 was the same man. An Edward Williams appears in the 1790, 1800, and 1810 censuses for Easton. Although the 1800 census was recorded alphabetically, the order of the 1790 and 1810 censuses show Edward Williams within a name or two of Lemuel Keith, who lived just east at 29 Highland Street. In the same neighborhood in 1790 were Edward’s brothers Josiah and Marlborough Williams; in 1810 these two men are enumerated between Keith and Edward Williams, and after Edward are his son Dwelly and probably his brother Seth Williams (1756-1817). The house at 35 Highland descended through the family of Dwelly Williams; in one 1839 deed his son Edward mentioned land having been set off to him in the division of his the estate of his father “Deacon D. Williams,” who had died the year before.4 Edward Williams lived here until after 1810, and between that year and 1820 he and his wife Sarah moved to Augusta, Maine, where he died in 1820 (Sarah Williams die din Maine in 1835). The house then passed to his son Dwelly, and, after Dwelly’s death, to Dwelly’s son Edward Williams (1811-75). This Edward Williams is shown as the property’s owner in 1855. Edward Williams probably lived with his father and inherited the house after his father’s death. By 1841 he had married Mary Dailey, daughter of Wade and Ruth Williams Dailey of Easton and his second cousin; her mother was a daughter of Josiah Williams, son of Seth and Luceanna. By 1841 Edward and Mary Dailey Williams had had a son, Edward Dean Williams, who died of typhoid fever in 1855, when he was fourteen. In both 1850 and 1860 Williams and his wife lived with Betsey Allen, born about 1806, and the family of bootmaker Alexander Woodward, composed of his wife Sarah and son Charles, born in 1847. Edward Williams worked as an iron moulder in 1850 and 1860, but by 1870 he had left the foundry and identified himself as a farmer. He lived in the house with his wife and with Betsey Allen. No death record has been found in Massachusetts for Edward Williams, though his marker in Dr. Edward Dean cemetery on Highland Street indicates that he died in May 1875.5 His widow Mary was living in the house in 1880 with Edward Dwelly Williams, identified as her nephew; born in 1858, he was actually a child of Dwelly Williams’s second marriage. In January 1894 Mary Dailey Williams died in Easton, and in May that year her heirs—children and grandchildren of Dwelly Williams’s second marriage—sold the 67-acre Williams farm to John Erving Jr. for $1975.6 The farm ranged along both sides of Highland Street; its barn, which is extant, is on the south side of the street. The heirs had sold Erving a tract of woodland in 1890, and in 1895 Erving bought an adjacent tract on the north side of Highland Street from George Clifford Belcher. John Erving Jr. (1845-1918) was born in Ireland and emigrated in 1871. Two years later in Easton he married Irish immigrant Agnes Beatty (1862-1930), and their son William Gilmore Erving was born in September of the same year. Erving was the son of John Erving (1821-1907), who emigrated later, in 1886; both had houses on South Street, John Erving Jr. at 104 and John Erving Sr. at 55 South. By 1894, when he bought 35 Highland Street, Erving Jr. had six children—William G., Samuel Robert, James H., Russell, Margaret A., and Martha C.—and worked as a farmer. He may have bought the Highland Street property initially for the rental income. In 1901 his son William, who had earlier worked as an electric railway conductor but by then was also farming, married Ellen J. McDonnell of Rockland, and in 1902 his father John Jr. deeded the Williams farm to him.8 By 1910 William G. Ervin and his family—his wife and three young daughters—were living in the Highland Street house with three male farm laborers. By 1915 William G. Ervin had moved to Mansfield, and he sold the 35 Highland Street property to Harriet S. Dean, also of Mansfield.9 The 1920 census shows Dean in the house with her husband Walter E. Dean, a native of Taunton who was farming the property, and an adopted daughter, Gertrude, who had been born in Canada. The Deans had two male boarders, one twelve and the other fourteen years old, who may have helped on the farm. By 1930 Walter Dean had died, and Harriet Dean lived in the house with Gertrude and Gertrude’s husband Howard F. Smith, a shoe shop heeler. Again the family had children as boarders, three between the ages of two and eleven years old. In 1934 Harriet Dean defaulted on the mortgage for 35 Highland Street, and Foxboro Savings Bank foreclosed on the property and acquired it at auction.10 By 1955 Nathan Stuart of Providence owned the property and sold it to Rupert Lamont and Frances Reese Andrus. Andrus was the son of a feed and lumber merchant and was born in Upstate New York in 1913; he married Frances Reese of Buffalo in 1945, and the couple had two children—Eric Philip, born in 1945, and Craig Edward, born in 1947. They were living in Foxboro when they bought the property. The Andrus family owned and occupied the house until 1994; current owners Michael C. and Patricia L. Harrison acquired it in 2002.
source: Massachusetts Historical Commission

FURNACE VILLAGE
Although the Furnace Village area possessed the highest degree of industrialization in the town in the late 1700s, it nevertheless remained to a large extent rural until after World War II. Secondary dirt roads slowly became paved starting in the late 1920s. Electricity only gradually made its presence known. A trolley line ran through the heart of Furnace Village, but it was primarily to service Mansfield with all of Easton. This line proved to be a financial disaster and did not exert a major influence on the inhabitants during its brief existence. The rural atmosphere made people very self-sufficient in their outlook, and in many ways they remained those ideal Americans that Thomas Jefferson spoke about. Small, self-contained farms symbolized much of this community. This lack of reliance on others made the area provincial in nature; Furnace Village felt little kinship with other sections of the town. Self-sufficiency appeared in many ways and forms. Furnace Village never voted for a water district, although the State Legislature passed enabling legislation in the 1930s. Quite frequently several vocations were practiced by the inhabitants, and most families had land to support a garden, a wood lot, chickens and even an occasional cow. The land seemed to have a great effect on this area, perhaps more than in other parts of town. The remains of charcoal pits off Prospect Street and Foundry Street indicate an early utilization of resources. Ice houses stored locally cut ice, and by 1900 at least seven could be counted. Woodchopper shacks were frequent throughout the area because the people used wood for fuel. There are many examples of the stone mason's use of locally obtained stone. The best is the long dam at New Pond. The iron industry had developed because of the supply of bog iron in the area. But by the middle of the nineteenth century these supplies had proved insufficient, and iron had to be imported. Nevertheless, iron continued to be the major influence and the area received its name from the iron furnaces which melted down the ore. Most oi the men who were not country artisans worked in me of the two major foundries. The Drake Foundry, which had been carried on by that family since 1832, on the site of Capt. James Perry's famous furnace that cast cannon for George Washington, ceased operation in 1890. Industry closer to the source of better raw materials won out when charcoal and bog iron could no longer be utilized appetitively. The Drake Foundry had made a major effort to convert to dern methods, but competition was too keen from foundries with better ashes. Belcher Malleable Iron Company, established in 1837, specialized in malleable in a highly specialized product, and thus survived the competition. Today it is a major producer of malleable iron with the distinction of being the oldest tinually operating malleable iron company at the same location in this country. These foundries trained generations of moulders and, when work lessened in area, they commuted to other foundries in the region, coming home only on we kends and during plant shutdowns. Lack of good transportation forced those worked out of town to take rooms during the week at their source of work. Fire was a major concern to foundry workers. Belcher Malleable Iron Company twice, in 1880 and 1919. The second fire destroyed the pattern use and the furnace itself, although the office building and annealing buildings escaped the blaze. Lack of fire-fighting apparatus was evident, for the North Easton Village District Fire Department had to be called for help. The abundance of wood in the Furnace Village area led other fire-utilizing the abundance of wood in the Furnace Village area led other fire-utilizing industries to be established. Hop kilns were operated near the Godfrey house on Bay Road near the Norton Line and brick kilns were built on the site of the present Pine Oaks Golf Course off Foundry and Prospect Streets. Several other industries were also in the area. Hayward's Carriage Shop had started on Poquanticut Avenue in the 1830s by four Hayward brothers. Hayward built a new shop at Five Corners and moved the old Poquanticut Avenue building to the new location where it became the ell of the factory. Their quality carriages were purchased throughout the area, and many remember the butchers' carts built for Will Leonard of Norton and Henry Heath, which made their rounds through the Furnace Village area. Their carriages won first prize at the Brockton Fair in 1900. More modern forms of transportation marked this industry's death knell. Rollins's Cider Mill, on Highland Street, drew customers from as far as Sharon, no small feat when nearly every farm had its own small cider press. Kimball's Greenhouses, High Power Morrison's Chemical Company, and Phelin's Blacksmith Shop were other small local enterprises. Other industries included the thread mill established in 1834 across from Drake's Foundry on Foundry Street. It was a red three-story building with a factory bell. The mill at Keith's Pond, south of the Belcher Foundry and just west of South Street, during its long lifespan was a grist mill, a saw mill, an oil mill, a shingle mill, a thread mill, and a cotton batting factory. In 1878 it was purchased by James Belcher and was used again as a sawmill until the early 1900s. Its remains are still present, and the frugality of the former owners is noticeable by the mill stones built into the foundation after they had worn out. A sawmill just south of the oldest house in Easton on Bay Road was erected in 1844. It was the first belt-driven sawmill in the vicinity. Early in the twentieth century a gasoline engine was installed, but it ran only one day, and waterpower was returned to run the mill. Despite the relative sparseness of population, there was no shortage of stores. The largest store in the Furnace Village area was Swift's Store, located across the street from the Belcher Malleable Iron Company. It also served as the local post office. The building, formerly the Drake Foundry offices, had been purchased from it on its closing in 1890. The store maintained a complete line of everything from dry goods to horse collars. To round out the atmosphere, one of the Swifts held the Veeley Automobile dealership in his garage for a short period of time. Orders were delivered throughout the area and the size of the business necessitated a daily trip to the Easton Center train station to pick up supplies. Its hours in the beginning were from 6:45 A.M. to 10 P.M. The store went out of business after World War II when automobile transportation and big stores changed the character of American buying habits. The Kimball family maintained a store for an number of years on Bay Road at the corner of Highland Street. Joel Drake had a store at Five Corners, which, in turn, became Jacobson's Store and then Rohdin's store before it was torn down to make way for a gasoline station in the late 1960s. Lemaire's Store was just across the street between Bay Road and Depot Street and in it was housed Lindsay's Barbershop. The area contained no church buildings, although Harmony Hall, behind Swift's Store, did serve as a Sunday School in addition to its being a general gathering house1 The Sunday School was organized November 18, 1877, and continued for many years. The Hall contained school desks for a while, and at the time school was taught in three different parts of town it had served as a school. The Easton Brass Band practiced at the hall during its sixty years of playing and perhaps gave the hall its name. Furnace Village was an area where individualism was practiced and preached. Hermits, like Quantico Smith lived their own lives in this district. Neighbors were quick to help when assistance was needed but did not pry. This way of life began to disappear with the coming of the automobile and mass transportation and was changed even more by the post-World War II influences of housing and population growth. Gradually the area lost its distinctiveness and has begun to reflect the suburbanization of the greater metropolitan area. But a careful observer can still see that Furnace Village was a distinct settlement.
source: History of Easton, Massachusetts, Vol. II, M. McEntee, Easton Historical Society, ET AL, 1886-1974

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