Sunday, October 6, 2019 – Members from the Wayland Museum & Historical Society and the Sudbury Historical Society led a bus tour of “colonial-era Sudbury”, later known as Sudbury and East Sudbury, before becoming today’s Sudbury and Wayland.
Tour participants were given brochures with a map showing the “Two Sudburys”. The reverse side held an explanation for each of the ten tour stops.
Debbie Keeney of Sudbury kindly provided photos from the tour which are labeled in conjunction with the map.
The tour’s first stop was the Haynes-Garrison House on Water Row–one of six fortified houses existing in Sudbury at the time of King Philip’s War in 1676. Settlers sought refuge from King Philip’s warriors during the Sudbury Fight in 1676. Only the foundation shown in the photo remains at this location, which is the only King Philip’s War battle site left basically untouched in Sudbury.
Looking south toward the original Sudbury Town Center, a photo shows our tour group listening to Tom Sciacca describe the River and its vital importance to colonial settlers. This iteration of the bridge was built and rebuilt in the 1800s; Hurricane Diane “did it in” in 1955. The first bridges of the 1640s were at this same natural fording area.
The tour group viewed the Sudbury River from the Old Town Bridge at very low water. A canal was dug to the west to shorten travel by cutting out the oxbow. This necessitated TWO bridges across the river.
The tour stopped at the “real” town center in the North Cemetery. The boulder to the right center of the photograph marks the location of the original as well as two later town meetinghouses in which the Town’s ministers from Edmund Brown(e) to Israel Loring preached. Sudbury residents from both sides of the river were buried at this location until another cemetery was built by those on the west side in 1716.
Accompanying the tour group was Hal Cutler dressed as Reverend Israel Loring, the first minister of the West Precinct’s meetinghouse built in 1723. “Rev. Loring” is shown with the tour group near the Loring Parsonage, built in 1730 and rebuilt in 1797. Today the SHS is repurposing this town-owned Parsonage into the Sudbury History Center.
