Several years ago, when the Historical Society was celebrating its 50th anniversary of incorporation, I mentioned that at some of their meetings (held at member’s homes before there was a museum) older members told stories about their pasts. One that was briefly mentioned was told by my grandfather, Jim Hartley, and it took place at Dewey Park. Last year when we were putting together our exhibit, Dewey Park came up again in comments from the Rochester Journals.
No one is quite sure exactly where Dewey Park was. The best guess seems to be that it was at the corner of Pine St. and Snipatuit Rd. (see picture), perhaps on property once owned by the McCombe family. I recently found the copy of a 1906 newspaper article (with no byline) in our files that was on the back of an account of an” Old fashion Housewarming” that took place on Snipatuit Rd.
To digress for a moment. Rochester over many years was an attractive place for people to travel to for a change from their city lives. In 1815, the Tithingmen (sort of constables in charge of keeping Sundays (calm and quiet) felt compelled to put a notice in a New Bedford newspaper warning that they would enforce the law against any “unruly element” meaning New Bedford’s seafaring community.
Now back to Dewey Park and the newspaper article. Dewey Park seems was a favorite destination for “wheelmen” and was reached by a pleasant country drive from New Bedford and other towns. On “certain evenings” a “quiet, country dance” was held. On one of these evenings, the quiet and pleasure was disrupted by an unruly element not from New Bedford, but from Wareham. A ” crowd of hoodlums, well-seasoned with cheap rum” managed to get in and immediately to run the dance as they would “in their own baliwick”.
The gang of “Warehamites” was so rowdy and their behavior was so “unseemingly and indecent” that it stopped the dance. As the article reports, “the sturdy sons of Rochester resented this unwarrantable conduct and forcibly ejected the whole crowd”. Beaten the Wareham gang left, but not before shouting a challenge to meet in a week at the same location and a challenge for the Rochester boys to “show their sand”, (a use of the word “sand” that I have never heard before).
The next Saturday, the group from Wareham were true to their word and full of “lubricant” showed up to do battle at Dewey Park. However, their attack was stymied when one Rochester “youth seized the ring leader and after severely spanking him, laid him quietly to rest”.
The dispirited group from Wareham quickly retreated. The author of the article goes on to mention their lack of “sand” and goes on to say, “The Wareham brave, hath a way of doing that sort of business. They are only nickel plated”.
My grandfather would have been 15 years old when this event took place in 1906. Perhaps his account of a much less auspicious encounter took place at a later unknown date. As he told it, Dewey Park had a “dancing board” that was later roofed in. Again, a group of boys from a neighboring town (not named) disrupted a dance and a fight ensued, but despite “a battle with baseball bats”(Rochester was usually very good with bats), the out-of-town ruffians “destroyed the pavilion”.
One can’t help but wonder if this fight was a continuance of the ones reported on in the 1906 article. Who knew that country dances could end up in brawls and property damage. Maybe they needed Tithingmen to warn off all these unruly elements.
By Connie Eshbach
