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At various other town meetings a like petition was presented and always rejected, until January, 1764, when it was granted, and a committee appointed to obtain an act of incorporation from the Legislature; and at last, on the third of February, 1764, the Governor of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay signed the Act, which made Fitchburg an incorporated town, with all the rights and privileges usually granted, except that the two towns of Lunenburg and Fitchburg were to have but one representative to the General Court.
It seemed an inappropriate manner of arrival the Fitchburg Railroad. One should have dropped down upon the sacred spot by parachute; or, at worst, have come on foot, with staff and scrip, along the Lexington pike, reversing the fleeing steps of the British regulars on that April day, when the embattled farmers made their famous stand.
But Maggie preferred going at once to the Fitchburg depot, which she accordingly did, and drawing her veil over her face, lest some one of her few acquaintances in the city should recognize her, she sat there until the time appointed for the cars to leave.
They were made by Daniel Cross, of Fitchburg, and, when in 1884, I visited that town, and found him still engaged in the business, I ordered a dress suit from his hand.
He went very slowly down to the street where a great many horse-cars were passing to and fro, and waited for one marked "Fitchburg, Lowell, and Eastern Depots." He was not going to take it; but he meant to follow it on its way to those stations, in the neighbourhood of which was the hotel where he had left his travelling-bag.
A portion of the territory of Fitchburg was set off a few years later to form a part of the new town of Ashby. The first town meeting in Fitchburg was held in the tavern of Captain Samuel Hunt, on the fifth of March, 1764, when selectmen were chosen, and other business necessary to the organization of a town government transacted.
It was about this time that Rufus C. Torrey wrote his history of Fitchburg, in which work he was most substantially aided by his friend, Nathaniel Wood, then a public spirited young lawyer, who had already accumulated quite an amount of material from records and conversations with the older residents These two men saved from oblivion very many valuable facts in the history of the town.
On the second of December, 1873, he gave a lecture, his last, on 'The Structural Growth of Domestic Animals, before the Massachusetts Board of Agriculture at Fitchburg. On the third he dined with friends; on the fifth he was present at a family gathering and smoked cigars, defying the orders of his physician. But the end was not far off.
Up the road, and near the present residence of Ebenezer Torrey, was a bakery and a dwelling-house, and beyond, towards the west, were two or three houses and a blacksmith shop. Pine stumps, hard-hack, and grape vines were plentiful by the side of the road. Such was the village of Fitchburg in 1786.
Well, I start now on foot, and get there before night; I have travelled at that rate by the week together. You will in the meanwhile have earned your fare, and arrive there some time tomorrow, or possibly this evening, if you are lucky enough to get a job in season. Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will be working here the greater part of the day.
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