The earliest picture of Five Corners is this view looking north with Joel S. Drake’s store occupying the present location of Sports Gas. This picture is from an old glass plate. Drake’s store was started in the 1840’s and continued through the 1880’s.
Easton’s Pictorial Past, 250th Anniversary, Easton Historical Society, 1978
More information on this image is available at the Easton Historical Society in North Easton, MA
www.flickr.com/photos/historicalimagesofeastonma/albums
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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 Foundry 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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Foundry Street
Foundry Street extends from the Cocheset line northwest across Prospect Street, through the Furnace Village, past Belcher’s and Drake’s Works, then curving to the southwest terminates in Norton Avenue. Its different sections were laid out at very different times. The east part of it, from the old Capt. Edward Hayward place to Cocheset, was laid out in 1735, though a century later it was considerably changed from the turnpike east to the town line. The west part from the Bay road *to Highland Street was laid out in 1741, and that from the Hayward place to Jonathan Pratt’s was laid out in 1782. The next extension of it (northwest) was voted in 1812 and formed a connection with the Bay road three rods north of Isaac Kimball’s store, so as to connect with Highland Street; but June 28, 1813, it was changed to a straighter course, so as to come out by Ichabod Macomber’s shop on the Bay road, near the now Joel S. Drake place. At the same date the next section, that from the Bay road to the furnaces, was laid out. The southwest portion of it was made in 1757. Alterations were made in 1842, 1871, and at other times.
source: History of Easton, William L. Chaffin, 1886
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Foundry Street
According to local historian William L. Chaffin, the section of Foundry Street between Bay Road on the east and Highland Street on the west was laid out in 1741, though the 1750 map of Easton does not show it, and its course was made straighter between those points in 1813. For many decades maps indicate that the south side of the street between Bay and South Streets, just west of the compact part of Furnace Village, was open land. The 1855 and 1871 maps of the village show no houses on the south side and few on the north. By the time Chaffin prepared the maps for his 1886 history, five houses had been built on the south side of Foundry Street between South Street and Bay Road, among them 518, 524, 526, and 530 Foundry Street.
source: Massachusetts Historical Commission
523 Foundry Street
The house at 523 Foundry Street was probably built by 1820 for Joel Drake (1786-1844), who was born in Easton and was the son of Bethuel Drake (1763-1817). The Drake family was large and well represented in Easton. Joel and Lincoln Drake, the latter prominent in Furnace Village’s iron products industry, were fourth cousins, descended from Benjamin Drake, born in Weymouth in 1677; he acquired fifty acres and a dwelling in South Easton in 1700. Benjamin Drake’s son Joseph (1706-91) was Joel Drake’s great-grandfather, while Benjamin’s son Benjamin (1700-84) was Lincoln Drake’s great-grandfather. Joel Drake is shown in South Easton censuses from at least 1820, and this house was probably on the site from that date, if not earlier; he was probably in his father’s household until he married Lusannah Williams in 1811 and may have had the house built at the time of his marriage. The couple had five children—Betsey Howe Drake, born 1813; Harriet Williams Drake, born 1816, Nahum Mitchell Drake, born 1820; Joel Smith Drake, born 1823, and Bethuel Franklin Drake, born 1825. Joel Drake died in 1844 and left his farm of more than twenty-three acres to his children. The 1855 map of Furnace Village shows his widow in possession of the house. Lusannah William Drake died in 1873 at the age of eighty-four, and the next year her heirs sold the property to Hugh Curran, who worked in one of Furnace Village’s foundries. The deed describes the property as “a certain farm situated in Easton containing 23 acres and 27 rods, on the north side of road leading from the furnaces to J. S. Drake’s store next to Mrs. Hill’s house lot, along Mr. Manahan’s pasture . . . the property being the same as left to them [the heirs] in Joel Drake’s will in the year 1844.”1 Curran paid $1855 for the property. Born in Ireland in 1836, Hugh Curran came to the United States in 1850 and was living in Easton by 1854, when he married Irish immigrant Mary Mullins. Curran was one of many Irish immigrants drawn to Easton by the presence of work principally in the Oliver Ames and Sons shovel works in North Easton and the Furnace Village foundries. The first foundry was incorporated in Furnace Village in 1751 and was flourishing from the production of cannon and cannon shot during the American Revolution. Under the ownership and management of Shepard Leach from 1808 to 1832, the forge and furnace business expanded; by 1823 Leach was operating seven furnaces in Easton alone. At his death the business passed to his brother-in-law, Lincoln Drake, and for decades the Drake furnace turned out castings for heating devices, machinery, and schoolhouse furniture. In 1837 Drake also founded A. Boyden and Company across Foundry Street from his works. Daniel Belcher became manager of woolen machinery, and agricultural tools.2 Both operations had a constant need of labor to undertake the hot, dirty, and dangerous work. The order of enumeration in the 1880 census indicates that Curran, his wife, and their five children were living at 523 Foundry Street by that time. In 1900 Curran, shown as a moulder in the census, was widowed and lived in the house with his son Hugh, a day laborer, and his daughter Sarah, who worked as a domestic servant. Hugh Curran died in 1907 at the age of seventy-one. Less than a year later his four surviving children sold the 523 Foundry Street property to Robert Hamilton, whose Scots parents had resettled in Ireland; Hamilton came to the United States from Ireland in 1886 and by 1900 was working as a day laborer in Easton.3 He had immigrated with his wife Margaret and their sons William, Robert, and David; their children Alfred and Marjorie were born in Easton in 1889 and 1896 respectively. In 1903 Hamilton’s wife Margaret died at the age of forty-one, and in 1908 he remarried, to Clara E. Hudson, a domestic servant who had emigrated from Ireland only two years earlier. The 523 Foundry Street household in 1910 included Hamilton, then farming the property, his second wife, his son Alfred, a farm worker, and his daughter Marjorie, then fourteen years old. The 1920 and 1930 censuses show only Robert and Clara Hamilton in the house, though poll tax records for the latter year suggest Robert’s son and namesake, then forty-six years old, was probably living there and working the farm with his father. In 1930 assessors estimated the value of the 523 Foundry house at $700, its barn at $250, its 23.5 acres at $1025, and its poultry house at $150; Hamilton at the time had 150 chickens. Robert Hamilton died by April 1942, when his son William, administrator of his estate, sold the property to Laura B. Hoxie of Milton. From 1948 to 1976 the family of Harvey A. and Hazel J. Johnson owned and occupied the house.4 Born in Easton about 1914, Johnson was the son of gear company machinist Herbert A. Johnson and his wife Mabel, and he grew up on South Street in Furnace Village, at first in the home of his mother’s father, Charles A. Harvey, and then in his parents’ household. In March 1941 Johnson enlisted in the U. S. Navy, and he was a crewman on the supply ship U.S.S. Castor at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked the port in December of that year.5 The vessel was hit by enemy planes, but it was not seriously damaged, and none of the crew was killed. The Castor and its crew then carried cargo from San Francisco to various ports in the Pacific Theater to strengthen American operations there.
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
