Colonel Asa Waters

Asa Holman Waters was born in Sutton's North Parish (now west of Millbury) on February 8, 1808. A member of the prominent gun manufacturing family, he distinguished himself not only as a gun, cotton, and woolen manufacturer but also as a lawyer, legislator, banker, writer and historian. To his contemporaries, he proved himself a man of intellect, warmth, and character, a patriot and humanist.

Colonel Waters was the third child of Asa Waters II and Susan Holman, daughter of Revolutionary War Colonel Jonathan Holman of Sutton; he had seven sisters. He spent his youth in Millbury, even then an active manufacturing town. His father had built an armory on the Blackstone River in 1808, in the section of the present town center which came to be known as armory village. The armory was then in full operation under government contract, especially to supply arms for the war of 1812. Mr. Asa Kenney operated a brass foundry in West Millbury, the first in central Massachusetts. The inventor of the eccentric lathe, Thomas Blanchard, had established his shop opposite Kenney's. Young Asa interested himself in the operations of the armory and the foundry. Doing errands for both establishments, he came to know Mr. Blanchard, whose biography he would later write. He eagerly observed the hearing at the Old Common on the contested patent rights to the eccentric lathe, at which Mr. Blanchard was declared the inventor. He was also first impressed at the hearing with the Interchange System, another subject for his future publications and useful concept for his own work as a gun founder.

Asa Waters left Millbury at age sixteen to attend Monson Academy and another school in Wilbraham. He entered the class at Yale in 1825 and graduated with honors in 1829. Proceeding then to Harvard Law School, he was admitted to the bar in 1835 at the Court of Common Pleas in Dedham, Massachusetts. He served as a justice of the Peace from his first commission in 1835 until his retirement, and as Governor Marcus Morton¹s Aid-de-Camp during Morton's 1843-44 term.

A respected and able lawyer, Col. Waters did not confine his energies on his thirties to his practice. He became an active member of the Worcester County Horticultural Society in 1842, and planted the trees surrounding the Water's Mansion (built in 1829 by Asa II and bequeathed to Asa Holman in 1841) himself. He became a President and later a Director of the Millbury Bank founded by his father in 1825. He was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in the fall of 1848, and went to the State House in 1849, the same year he married Mary Elizabeth Hovey of Sutton.

Col. Waters represented the town of Millbury in the Great and General Court in 1849 and 50, serving on the House Standing Committee on Elections. No bills filed in those years are specifically accredited to Col. Waters. A number of bills were filed by the Committee on Elections, however, and one may reasonably assume that Col. Waters assisted in developing those pieces of legislation.

Among the Committee bills of 1849 were two deciding contested elections in the towns of Somerset and West Cambridge (H.115 and H.23 respectively), which included extensive reports and testimonies of witnesses. Also filed were bills calling for the publication of reports on such contested elections (H.160) and for the regularization of vote counting and verification procedure in state elections (H.24). Finally, a bill unique to the context of the nineteenth century electoral process was filed, proposing examination of the inability of some Massachusetts districts to elect U.S. Congressmen for lack of a majority (rather than the presently required plurality) of votes.

Similar bills deciding contested elections were filed in 1850. A thorough examination of the problem of electing U.S. Congressmen was filed (H.8), listing "numbers of ineffectual trials to elect members of Congress in this Commonwealth since the year 1825," including as many as eleven no choice elections in twenty-five years in some districts.

No Blackstone River or Town of Millbury bills were filed during Col. Waters' term. This is surprising in view of Waters' interest in the prosperity of the town in general and the river rights of Millbury manufacturers in particular. Col. Waters was obviously aware of the implications for the town of his serving in the Legislature. His father had sat in the House in 1823, 1824, and 1831, and two Waters cousins would closely follow Asa.1 Col. Waters possibly felt that he could serve the town more directly by generating local manufacturing business, to which he had turned his father's attention in his father's last years. His impact on the town's prosperity was in fact quite notable.

Col. Waters had become a partner of the armory, subsequently called Asa Waters and Son, and he inherited the business in 1841 at his father's death. He managed the company prosperously until 1845, when a government order suspended the operation of private armories. The company was then left idle for more than fifteen years, except for a brief rental to Col. J.D. Green (later of the Massachusetts Fifth Regiment), who made patent rifles for the Russian government).2

When the Civil War broke out, the government requested that Col. Waters reopen the armory. He hesitated at first, but recalling his father's gun making in 1812, his grandfather Asa I's and great uncle Andrus' gun founding during the American Revolution , and even his forebear Richard's in Salem in colonial times, he consented. As much of the gun machinery had functionally depreciated during the idle years, the company produced parts only, supplying the government with rods and bayonets. The armory ran day and night during the war, employing at times 200 people.

Col. Waters' business prowess benefited both the Union Army and the town of Millbury. A.H. Waters and Company, a cotton mill and Atlanta Mill Company, manufacturing woolens, were established by him in the 1860's. The Stillwater mill, built by him in 1855, and admired for its fine architecture, also ran at a profit until it burned in 1870. When he retired from business in 1870, Millbury was a thriving town and Col. Waters a rich man.

In addition to producing guns for the Union during the Civil War, Col. Waters responded to both the needs of militia and the Abolitionist cause. He had joined the Free Soil Party in 1854, when he attended the Constitutional Convention in Boston, and from that time on spoke frequently in public in favor of the cause. He was adamant that Kansas should be a free state, and was very active in the Eli Thayer movement for a free Kansas. Waters became a Republican when Lincoln ran for the Presidency.3

Col. Waters raised at least seventy Millbury men for the local regiment at the outset of the war. He maintained these volunteers at his own expense when they were not in battle. These men would have had Col. Waters lead them, although he was fifty-three years old in 1861.

Col. Waters had always been a prolific public writer and student of history. The end of the war and his retirement from business afforded more time for these pursuits. He went to Europe in 1874 with his wife and daughters Isabel Holman and Florence Elizabeth. The Waters made a lengthy visit to their daughter Lilian Hovey in Constantinople, where she lived with her husband Professor E. A. Grosvenor of Robert College. Col. Waters climbed the pyramid of Gizeh in 1876 and visited the Sphinx and other antiques in his travels.

Returning to Massachusetts in 1877, Col. Waters resumed his activities in the Millbury Natural History Society and his public writing. He carried on a lengthy debate in the Worcester Daily Spy on the subject of "Lost Arts". Challenging the concept of lost arts and championing progress, he wrote, "Since the days of the ancients, a great number of the arts have been abandoned for better methods, and as the world moves in its onward progress, this process in constantly repeated year by year, but it cannot be shown that a single art of any value has been lost, which has not been supplemented by something better".4 In the course of the contest, he exposed a fraudulent publication by Clinton G. Gilroy of England on Ancient weaving in Carthage.

Writing in Commonwealth, Col. Waters argued with Mr. Oliver Johnson on the origin of the Abolitionist movement, rightly giving credit to the widespread pockets of anti-slavery sentiment in the northern states which swayed opinion in favor of Free Soil.

His biography of Thomas Blanchard was first published in Harpers' Magazine in July, 1881, and reprinted in the Philadelphia Journal of Progress several years later. The articles on the Interchange System, the development of which he credited to Mr. Blanchard, appeared in the Boston papers in the 1880's. The historical articles including "Gun Making," "Sutton in the Revolution," and "North Parish Families," furnishing the Waters genealogy, were written by Col. Waters for History of Sutton compiled in 1878.

Col. Waters once again proved his dedication to historical accuracy in his 1885 paper to the Millbury Natural Historical Society on the origin of the electric telegraph. In it he credited Doctors Jackson of Boston and Leonard Gale of Millbury, and Professor Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institute with the development of the device. Samuel Morse, Col. Waters proved, had created the Morse code alphabet, publicized the invention, and procured federal grants for the work, but he himself had not created the telegraph.

Col. Waters spent his last years in his home, reading, receiving guests, and closely following affairs of the town. He said to John C. Crane on one occasion there, "I well know what there is abroad, but after all, give me this, my home".5 He died peacefully there on January 17, 1887, at the age of seventy-nine.