Kendall Street
From Worcester Activist wiki
For nearly 15 years, up to the time he died at 59 on Oct. 2, 1847, Joseph G. Kendall was clerk of courts.
He knew every counselor of law who trotted into the Court House carrying a green bag, a sign of his office. When the session opened, Mr. Kendall administered the oaths and put the jurors upon the panel.
He read the documents “in his own natural tone of voice,” recalled a later historian.
Mr. Kendall was a highly-respected citizen of Worcester who minded his business carefully and could name no man as enemy.
In his own, quiet way he enjoyed life; was charter trustee of Worcester County Horticultural Society which was founded Sept. 19, 1842, and a member of a distinguished body of flame dousers – the Worcester Fire Society.
He was born in Leominster, was graduated from Harvard and became a Leominster lawyer.
In 1828 he was elected representative to Congress and re-elected two years later. In 1833 he received the appointment as clerk of courts and moved to Worcester.
When the first train came to Worcester on July 4, 1835, Christopher Columbus Baldwin, a fellow boarder and Antiquarian Society librarian, asked him along in his wagon. They drove to high ground.
The train was late; it was hot and Baldwin suffered from the sun, he recorded in his diary.
“Mr. Kendall left the wagon and sat under the shade of a tree. When the cars came in sight, my horse took fright … when he was so far recovered as to permit me to look around, the train of cars had reached their destination!”
The death of Mr. Kendall was announced at the beginning of the Court of Common Pleas session. Court immediately adjourned for the day.
“He was one of the most honored and beloved citizens, a man of good talents, of refined and cultivated taste, and of uncommon purity of character,” wrote the Massachusetts Spy on Oct. 6, 1847.
When Kendall street was laid out shortly afterward, it was named in his honor, first appearing in 1849. It runs from Lincoln street east to Hooper street.
The core of this article comes from A History of Your City Streets.
