The Hundred-year Lease
A great deal can be endured for a long time if the burden is light and familiar and nobody disturbs it. The penny an acre had become, by the middle of the eighteenth century, simply a fact of life in Hopkinton, the way the meetinghouse bell or the spring boundary walk was a fact of life. Men were born onto leased land, farmed it, and were buried in sight of it, and the small yearly rent was a thing their fathers had paid and their sons would pay, settled and unremarkable. The trouble, when it finally came, did not come from the size of the penny. It came from the calendar. The leases had been written for ninety-nine years, and ninety-nine years, however far off it seems to the man who signs the lease, eventually arrives.
The machinery on the other side of the rent dispute was the older arrangement out of which the whole Hopkins tenancy had grown. For the land had not always paid its rent to a charity for English schoolboys. Before the trustees of Edward Hopkins ever collected a penny, the Magunkaquog ground had carried a rent of a different kind, owed to a different people, and the way that earlier rent was gathered and paid out is one of the few places in this whole long dispute where the record reveals real human faces rather than figures on a ledger.
When the Natick Indians parted with the lands that became Hopkinton, they did not part with them for nothing in the colony's own reckoning. An arrangement was made that they should receive an annual rental for the ground they had given up. That rent had to be collected, held, and distributed, and the man who did it has a name. He was Francis Fullam, of Weston, styled by the colony as Esquire and in time a judge of the Superior Colonial Court, who served for many years as superintendent of those Natick Indians who acknowledged the English government of the province. Fullam was no stranger to Natick's affairs. He appears, per Hurd's account, to have been present at most of the business meetings of the Natick proprietors, who Hurd's history says held him in high esteem. He sat with them while they laid out their lands. He approved their surveys. His name runs through their proprietors' records like a thread, the one Englishman trusted to stand in the middle of their affairs, and his standing as superintendent of the Natick Indians is confirmed independently of Hurd's own account, in later genealogical records of his own family.
In 1719, at a general meeting of the proprietors and freeholders of Natick, warned and gathered together on a Monday in May, Francis Fullam was constituted the agent of the Indians to receive and pay out their rent money. The Natick proprietors' clerk's record of that meeting, portions of which are preserved and summarized by the Natick Historical Society, names the thing exactly. They met, among other purposes, to settle the proprietors and the rents of the money of the Maguncoge Lands, and to order how the yearly payments of those rents should be received in the future from the Hopkins trustees and paid to the Indian proprietors of the Natick lands. The whole circuit of the money is laid out in a single sentence of provincial English. The Hopkins trustees collected the rents off the leased Hopkinton acres. Out of those rents an annual sum was owed to the Natick for the ground they had handed over. Francis Fullam received that sum and distributed it among the Natick proprietors, the named men whose marks and signatures fill the old book, the Speens and the Pegans and the Wabans and the rest, each entitled to his share of the rent of the Maguncoge Lands.
The distribution did not last forever. The annual rental was paid to the agent and distributed by him among the Natick Indians for thirty-five years or more after the sale of the lands. For a generation and better, the ground that Edward Hopkins's charity now owned still sent a portion of its yearly increase back to the people it had been taken from, carried there by Squire Fullam, divided out among families whose hold on the country was already failing. Then, somewhere past the thirty-five-year mark, that stream ran dry. The Natick payments ended. The penny an acre kept coming in, but it no longer went, even in part, to the Indians. It went only to the schools and the scholars, as the will had always meant it to, and the older claim on the land faded out of the rent rolls altogether, the way the people themselves were fading off the land in the same years.
So the rent machinery had a memory built into it, even if the men paying the penny in 1790 had long since stopped thinking about where it had once partly gone. The ground that became portions of Hopkinton and Ashland had been, in the colony's own bookkeeping, ground that owed rent twice over, once to a dead governor's charity and once to the living remnant of the people who had farmed it before any Englishman did. The first rent outlasted the second by a wide margin. The dispute that troubled the town for a hundred years was a quarrel among the English townspeople themselves, over that very ground.
The leases ran for ninety-nine years. Reckoned from around 1720, that meant they ran out near the close of the eighteen-teens and into the eighteen-twenties, well within living memory of men alive in the new century. As that expiration came into view, the trustees of the Hopkins fund did the thing landlords have always done when a long lease at an old rate approaches its end. They looked at what the land was worth in the present, compared it with the penny an acre their predecessors had agreed to, and concluded that the bargain had become absurd. The town had been a half-cleared wilderness when the rate was set. It was now a settled and improving country of farms and mills and meetinghouses, worth many times what it had been in the early eighteenth century, and still paying an eighteenth-century rent. To the trustees this was plainly intolerable, and in the year 1823 they acted on it. They demanded a considerable increase in the rent for the remaining time the leases had to run.
That demand is the spark. Everything that had been quiet for a hundred years caught fire in 1823.
The demand landed on the tenant farmers like a thunderclap out of a clear sky. These were men who held their farms on the faith of a written lease, a lease their grandfathers had signed, a lease that named a penny an acre and named ninety-nine years, and who had paid that penny faithfully across three generations on the understanding that the terms were the terms. They had improved the land at their own cost and labor. The barns, the walls, the cleared fields, the orchards, all of it represented the sweat of families who had taken the ground when it was worth little and made it worth a great deal precisely because they trusted the rent would not move under them. Now, with the leases running toward their end, the trustees proposed to capture the value of all that improvement by raising the rent for the years that remained. To the tenants this was not a fair adjustment. It was the charity reaching in at the last moment to take the increase that the farmers' own hands had created. They refused.
And so, in 1823, trouble arose on this subject, and it arose in the most thorough way a dispute can arise in a republic of laws. Both parties resorted to the courts and the legislature. The trustees pressed their claim. The tenants pressed their resistance. The matter went up through the machinery of Massachusetts justice and into the halls of the General Court, and there it stuck. The sources that record the quarrel do not preserve the names of the individual farmers who carried the fight, nor the particular cases by their captions, nor the speeches made on the floor of the legislature. What the record gives is the shape and the duration of the thing. The shape was two stubborn parties, each with a colorable claim, neither able to force the other to yield. The duration was nine more years of it.
Both sides had a real argument, and that is exactly why the dispute would not resolve itself. The trustees were not robbers. They held the fee to the land. The leases were running out. When a lease ends, the land and everything fixed to it returns to the owner of the fee, and the owner is then free to set whatever new rent the market will bear. By the strict letter of property law the trustees stood on solid ground, and a charity has a duty to its purpose, which was the education of poor scholars, and that duty arguably required the trustees to get the most they could out of an asset let go far too cheaply for far too long. The tenants, for their part, were not thieves of value that did not belong to them. They had built the value. They had paid every penny owed. They had relied, as men must be able to rely, on the plain terms of a binding instrument, and they could fairly say that changing the rent near the end of the term was to punish them for the very improvements the lease had encouraged them to make. Two honest claims, set hard against each other, with a hundred years of accumulated rent and improvement piled up behind them. No wonder the courts could not cut it clean.
This is the quarrel that D. Hamilton Hurd, looking back across the whole span of it in his History of Worcester County, Massachusetts (1889), summed up in a single weary phrase. The Hopkins fund lands, he wrote, were during nearly a hundred years a source of trouble and vexation to the inhabitants. Nearly a hundred years. Set that against the dates and it lines up closely enough. Leasing had begun around 1720. Peace was not made until 1832. From the founding of the tenancy to its final settlement runs a span of well over a century, and for the whole of that span the manner in which the town held its land was a low and constant irritation to the people who lived on it, flaring at the end into open legal conflict. The trouble did not respect town lines either. When a slice of Hopkinton was set off to Upton in 1735, a portion of the Hopkins fund land went south with it, and Upton inherited its share of the same trouble. The quarrel was woven into the soil of the whole region the trustees had once owned, and it traveled with the soil wherever the soil went.
For nine years after 1823 the matter dragged through court and committee with no resolution that satisfied anyone. And then the General Court did the thing that, in the end, only the General Court could do. It bought the peace.
The settlement came in 1832, and it was, at bottom, a purchase. According to Hurd's account, the legislature agreed to pay money to both parties to make the dispute go away: eight thousand dollars to the trustees of the Hopkins fund and two thousand dollars to the tenants, ten thousand dollars in all, drawn from the Commonwealth. For that consideration, the central thing happened, the thing that finally untied the knot. The trustees abandoned their claim on the lands. With the eight thousand dollars in hand they let go of the fee, surrendered the demand for increased rent, gave up the long landlordship that had hung over Hopkinton since the founding. The tenants took their two thousand dollars. And the land, at last, came free of the ninety-nine-year lease and the penny an acre and the dead governor's charity all at once.
There is a rough justice in the arithmetic. The eight-to-two split was not even, and it was never going to be even, because the two sides were not holding equal things. The trustees held the fee, the underlying ownership, the larger legal interest, and they were being paid to give it up entirely. The tenants held leases that were running out anyway, leases that would have reverted to the trustees in a few years in the ordinary course, and they were being paid to drop their resistance and accept that the old penny rate was gone. So the larger share went to the larger interest, as such settlements usually arrange themselves. But the smaller share was not nothing. Two thousand dollars, distributed among the farming families of the town in 1832, was a real sum, a public acknowledgment that the men who had built the value of the land had a stake worth buying out, and not merely tenants to be turned off at the landlord's pleasure. The Commonwealth, in effect, paid both the owner and the improver to agree the matter was finished. It was an expensive peace. It was also, by the look of it, a durable one.
D. Hamilton Hurd set down the close of the affair in a sentence that has the ring of a town letting out a long-held breath. Not until 1832, he wrote, was peace restored. Peace restored. The choice of words captures what the hundred years had felt like from the inside. It had not been a mere legal technicality humming along in the background of town life. It had been a disturbance of the peace, a standing grievance, a thing that set neighbor against trustee and tenant against owner and made the simple holding of a family farm into a matter of constant unease. When the legislature wrote its checks in 1832, what it bought was not only the trustees' fee and the tenants' silence. It bought back the town's quiet.
The long quarrel resolves into something almost like a parable, though it is a parable with hard edges and real money in it. A pious man in England left five hundred pounds to educate poor scholars. The money was invested, as such money was, in land, and the land it bought was the home of a people who did not wish to sell it. To make that land pay, it was leased out at rates that eventually settled at a penny an acre for ninety-nine years, fair enough when the country was wild, but a grievance once the country grew rich and the trustees wanted the new value for the schools. For a hundred years the arrangement troubled the town. In the end it took an act of the Commonwealth and ten thousand dollars of public money to dissolve the whole inheritance and hand the ground, free and clear, to the people who farmed it. The dead governor's charity got its eight thousand dollars and went on educating its scholars.