Deacon William Harrington carried on a small
business as a bookbinder, and Messrs. William Greenough & Sons erected
a building on the farm now owned by Mr. Brown on the Lancaster road,
and introduced the business of stereotyping--business then new, I
think. These various industries gave employment of a large number of
workmen, mostly young men. The establishment of Colonel Cushing was
near the store of Heywood, and it was at the bindery that I first saw
Alvah Crocker, afterwards known in the politics of the State, and as
the projector of the Fitchburg railroad. He was a maker of paper at
Fitchburg, and he came with a one-horse wagon to Cushing's place and
carried away the paper shavings produced in the bindery. Crocker was
a lean and awkward man, remarkable for his voice, which could be heard
over the larger part of the village. When in after years we were
associated in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and boarded
at the same hotel, the Hanover House, I was compelled to hear the same
voice in constant advocacy of the Fitchburg railroad project.
Colonel Cushing was one of the foremost men in town, but his
aristocratic ways made him unpopular, and therefore he failed to secure
official recognition. He was the father of Luther S. Cushing, for many
years clerk of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, then
reporter of the decisions of the Supreme Court, afterwards a judge upon
the bench of the Court of Common Pleas, and then the author of
Cushing's Manual.
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