Garden Street
From Worcester Activist wiki
Also LEVI LINCOLN
“The love of plants is with me a deeply fixed passion. Although at times I grow indifferent to the garden, yet the interest revives whenever I can work or wander about its walks…”
So wrote Lincoln in his local journal on Nov. 6, 1835.
At about 108 Lincoln street, nearly opposite Catharine street, in the early 1800’s, stood the farmhouse of Gov. Levi Lincoln.
It had the most beautiful grounds in Worcester, carefully tended. In the Summer, flowers rioted with color; fish leaped and splashed from a pond in the rear.
“I have labored year after year to render the home which my father had so much ornamented, a fair spot,” wrote the son in his journal. “Although the plan is not yet perfected, it will require but a few years to give height to the trees and render most of the grounds elegant…”
Five governors are identified with this house.
Gov. John Hancock is said to have lived there in the 1700’s. Gov. Levi Lincoln was the second. His son, Levi, Jr., who also became governor, was born there is 1782. Enoch Lincoln, governor of Maine for three years, lived there. So did “Honest” John Davis, another Massachusetts’s governor.
Christopher C. Baldwin, an attorney and librarian of the American Antiquarian Society, wrote in his diary on May 10, 1829:
“Go the church in the morning, dine with Hon. John Davis, and afterwards ride in my friend William Lincoln’s birch bark canoe, with him and Mr. Davis.”
He also wrote, a few days later, of dining with Mr. Lincoln, “after dinner, fish in Mr. Lincoln’s pond, catch many pouts and breams, drink punch. Mrs. Davis and children ride in the boat.”
The estate went back to Capt. Daniel Henchman, pioneer, who settled there in 1684. Later it was owned by Thomas Hancock, uncle of John. The Lincolns bought it in 1781; kept it until 1846.
Lincoln’s pond has long since been filled in, with a factory over the placid water. Three deckers now cover the site of the house.
Garden street, off Lincoln street, commemorates the garden of the Lincolns. It was named in 1847.
The core of this article comes from A History of Your City Streets.
