ORATION DELIVERED AT MALDEN, ON THE TWO HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE INCORPORATION OF THE TOWN, MAY 23, 1849. BY JAMES D. GREEN. PUBLISHED BY REQUEST OF THE TOWN. BOSTON: PRINTED BY GEO. C. RAND & CO. NO. 3 CORNHILL. ORATION. FRIENDS AND FELLOW CITIZENS.: It accords well with the best feelings of our nature to meet, as we do to-day, to commemorate our Fathers. Two hundred years ago they laid here the "first foundation stones" of the town of Malden. Such is the expression of Edward Johnson, of Woburn, who, in his "History of New England," published in London in 1654,* says, that these foundation stones were "laid by certain persons who issued out of Charlestown; and, indeed," he adds, Malden "had her whole structure within the bounds of this more elder town, being severed, by the broad spreading river of Mistick, the one from the other, whose troublesome passage caused the people on the north side of the river to plead for town privileges within themselves; which accordingly was granted them." The brief record of what may be regarded as the act of incorporation by the General Court is as follows: "In answer to the petition of several inhabitants of Mistick side, their request is granted, viz. to be a distinct town of themselves, and the name thereof to be Maulden." It is no unreasonable presumption, that it was for the purpose of being reminded here, in what was then a wil *Chap. vii. p. 211. derness, of that spot in the parent country from which they had removed, and which now lay three thousand miles behind them, that the early settlers of this town gave to it the name of Malden. It is the name of a town in England, in the county of Essex, about thirty-eight miles from London, which, if we take the authority of Camden as our guide,* is identical with the ancient Camalodunum, once the capital of Cunobeline, a powerful old British king, and the seat of the first Roman colony in the Island. About the middle of the first century, it was made by the Emperor Claudius a place of great magnificence and beauty. The monuments, however, of Roman grandeur, by which it was distinguished, being, in the eyes of the native Britons, monuments of their subjection, were suffered by them to be of no long continuance. They were utterly demolished by the people, when they rose to throw off the Roman yoke; and the English Malden of the present day, though a town of some importance, is said to retain few or no vestiges of its ancient renown. The affections of the first planters of New England still clung, as was natural, to the soil of their nativity. They gave utterance, at parting, to the emotions of the heart, when they said, "farewell, dear England;" and they designed, by the names they bestowed on the places of their abode, in this land of their adoption, to keep alive in their breasts the tender associations of home. Of the first settlers of this town I now address many of the lineal descendants. As I turn the leaves of the early records, and read there, continually occurring, such names as Hill, Wait, Sprague, Sargent, Lynde, Howard, Nichols, *Camden's Britannia, edit. 1772, Vol. I. p. 353. |