Historic Towns of New England

Although the sand of Cape Cod is in some places three hundred feet deep, there is believed to be a backbone of diluvian rock. There is a clay vein, too, which slants across the Cape and crops out at Truro in the so-called Clay Pounds, now crowned by Highland Light, shining two hundred feet above the ocean. This hill of clay thus renders a sovereign service to that dangerous stretch of navigation. It must be borne in mind that Cape Cod runs out straight into the Atlantic for twoscore miles, by the south measurement, and then, abruptly turning, juts up another forty to the north. The shifty sand-bars of the Back Side have caught, twisted and broken the hulls of innumerable craft. One gale of wind wrecked eighteen vessels between Race Point, at the extremity of the Cape, and Highland Light. The average width of our crooked peninsula is six miles, but at Truro it narrows to half that distance. Across this strip the storms whirl the flinty sand, until the humblest cottage may boast of ground-glass window-panes. The coast outline is ever changing and the restless dunes show the fantastic carvings of the wind. The houses cuddle down into the wavy hollows, with driftwood stacked at their back doors for fuel, and with worn-out fishnets stretched about the chicken-yards. Here and there a pine-tree abandons all attempt at keeping up appearances and lies flat before the blast. The ploughed fields are as white with sand as so many squares of beach, and the sea-tang is strong in the air. Accustomed, before their harbor failed them, to depend chiefly upon the sea for subsistence, the people of Truro now find it no easy matter to wrest a living from what they have of land. Everything is turned to account, from turnips to mayflowers. Along those sand-pits of roads, bordered with thick beds of pink-belled bear-berries, or where the dwarfish pines, their wizened branches hung with gray tags of moss, yellow the knolls, are gathered large quantities of sweetest, pinkest arbutus for the Boston market.

Wellfleet, which drew off from Eastham in 1763, has also fallen on evil days. Perhaps the fishermen have overreached themselves with the greedy seines. There is high controversy on this point between line-fishers and weir-fishers, but the fact stands that fish are growing scarce. Wellfleet had once her hundred vessels at the Banks, her whaling-schooners, built in her own yards from her own timber, and beds of oysters much prized by city palates. There was a time when forty or fifty sail were busy every season transporting Wellfleet shell-fish to Boston. “As happy as a clam” might then have been the device of Wellfleet heraldry. But suddenly the oyster died and, although the beds have been planted anew, the ancient fame has not been fully regained. A town, too, many of whose citizens spent more than half their lives on shipboard, was sure to suffer from our wars, peculiarly disastrous to seafaring pursuits. Early in the Revolution, Wellfleet was constrained to petition for an abatement of her war-tax, stating that her whale-fishery, by which nine tenths of her people lived, was entirely shut off by British gunboats, and that the shell-fish industries, on which the remaining tenth depended, was equally at a standstill. In this distress, as again in the Civil War, Cape Cod sailors took to privateering and made a memorable record. Wellfleet, like Truro, has lessened more than one half in population since 1850, but her shell roads are better than the sand-ruts of her neighbor, and bicyclists and other summer visitors are beginning to find her out. She has her own melancholy charm of barrenness and desolation quite as truly as she has her characteristic dainties of quahaug pie and fried-quahaug cakes. The place abounds in dim old stories, from the colonial legend of the minister’s deformed child, done to death by a dose from its father’s hand, that child whose misshapen little ghost still flits, on moonlight nights, about a certain rosebush, to the many-versioned tale of the buccaneer, ever and anon seen prowling about that point on the Back Side where Sam Bellamy’s pirate-ship was cast away, and stooping to gather the coins flung up to him by the skeleton hands of his drowned shipmates. A volume would not suffice for the stories of these Cape towns. Their very calendar is kept by storms: as the Magee storm of December, 1778, when the government brig General Arnold, commanded by Captain James Magee, went down; or the Mason and Slidell storm of 1862, when the Southern emissaries were brought from Fort Warren to Provincetown, and there, amidst the protest of the elements, yielded up to the British steamer Rinaldo; or the pitiless October gale of 1841, when from Truro alone forty-seven men were swallowed by the sea.

The quiet little town of Eastham, originally “Nawsett,” settled in 1646, only seven years after the three pioneers, Barnstable, Sandwich and Yarmouth, has shared the hard fortunes of the lower Cape. With a remnant of less than five hundred inhabitants, it finds, under the present stress, a resource in asparagus, shipping a carload or two to Boston every morning in the season. To this land industry the ocean consents to contribute, the soil being dressed for “sparrowgrass” with seaweed and shells. But no hardship can deprive Eastham of its history. After the encounter between the Pilgrims and Indians here in 1620, the place was not visited again until the following July, when Governor Bradford sent from Plymouth a boatload of ten men to recover that young scapegrace, John Billington. This boy, whose father, ten years after, was hanged by the colonists for murder, had come near blowing up the Mayflower, in Provincetown harbor, by shooting off a fowling-piece in her cabin, close by an open keg of powder, and, later, must needs lose himself in Plymouth woods. He had wandered into the territory of the Nausets, who, although this was the tribe which had suffered from Hunt’s perfidy, restored the lad unharmed to the English. The Nausets further proved their friendliness by supplying the Pilgrims, in the starving time of 1622, with stores of corn and beans. But the following year, suspecting an Indian plot against the colonists, Myles Standish, that “little chimney soon on fire,” appeared upon the Cape in full panoply of war, executed certain of the alleged conspirators and so terrified the rest that many fled to the marshes and miserably perished.

The traveller up the Cape notices still that Eastham has more of a land look than the lower towns. The soil is darker, small stones appear, and the trees, although still twisted to left and right, as if to dodge a blow, are larger. The Indians had maize-fields there and the site seemed so promising to the Pilgrims that talk sprang up in the early forties of transferring the Plymouth colony thither. As a compromise, several of the old-comers obtained a grant of the Nauset land, and established a branch settlement, soon incorporated as a township. Promptly arose their meeting-house, twenty feet square, with port-holes and a thatch. They secured a full congregation by absence penalties of ten shillings, a flogging or the stocks. One of these sturdy fathers in the faith, Deacon Doane, is said to have lived to the patriarchal age of one hundred and ten, rounding life’s circle so completely that at the end, as at the beginning, he was helplessly rocked in a cradle.

Thoreau was amused over a provision made by the town of Eastham in 1662, that “a part of every whale cast on shore be appropriated for the support of the ministry,” and drew a fancy-picture of the old parsons sitting on the sand-hills in the storms, anxiously watching for their salaries to be rolled ashore over the bars of the Back Side. One of these worthies, Rev. Samuel Treat, whose oratory outroared the stormy surf, shares with Richard Bourne, of Sandwich, the memory of a true pastoral care for the Cape Indians. He was, in return, so well beloved, that, on his death, his wild converts dug a long passage through the remarkably deep snowfall of the time, and bore him on their shoulders down this white archway to his grave. The Revolutionary War was a heavy drain on the resources of the staunch little town, but, with the restoration of peace, whaling and all kinds of deep-sea fishing were resumed, and a tide of prosperity set in. Salt-works were established, and presently Eastham was able to afford such luxuries as a pulpit cushion and a singing-school.

Orleans, set off in 1797 from the southerly portion of Eastham, has an old-fashioned quaintness that is better than business prosperity. Sand has partially closed the harbors, and the population has been dwindling for the past half-century, but the ocean still serves old neighbors as it can with quahaugs and the seaweed, now collected for paper-making. The distinction of being the terminus of the French Atlantic Cable from Brest is in keeping with the name Orleans – a unique instance of a foreign title among these old Cape towns. The early settlers put by the melodious Indian words, Succanessett, Mattacheeset, and the rest, and substituted the dear home names from Devon, Cornwall, Norfolk and Kent. The christening of Brewster, Bourne and Dennis honored severally the Pilgrim elder, the Sandwich friend of the Indians and a Yarmouth pastor; but these are of comparatively recent date. As Wellfleet and Orleans have been cut, on north and south, out of the original Eastham, so were Harwich, Chatham, Dennis, Brewster, once “within the liberties of Yarmouth.”

The history of Yarmouth, too, is so closely allied to the histories of Barnstable and of Sandwich, with her daughter Bourne, that the story of all these may be told as one.

These three initial settlements on the Cape were recognized as townships in 1639. From the outset, the difference in their locations imposed upon them different tasks. Yarmouth, the elbow town of the Cape, bore the brunt of wind and wave; Sandwich kept the border, notably in King Philip’s War, when she guarded the faithful Cape Indians from temptation and received for safe harborage English refugees from the ravaged districts; and Barnstable, the aristocratic sister of the group, made traditions, set examples and produced the Otis family. With Old Yarmouth, the Cape widens. No longer do householders, as at Truro, own land in strips from shore to shore. The soil, too, deepens, and the cows need not with hungry noses brush away the drifted sand to find the grass. On the Back Side is no marked change in aspect. Still pine grove after pine grove adds flavor to the salt air, and where the carpet of needles is trodden through, gleam patches of white sand. The strange reappearance of the Somerset is out-miracled in Old Ship Harbor, where, in 1863, long after the significance of the name had been forgotten, the hull of the Sparrow-Hawk, wrecked there in 1626, on her way from London to Virginia, rose again to view. This portion of the Cape is in excellent repute with pleasure-seekers, and the seaside cottage is ubiquitous, especially in beautiful Chatham, whose ever-changing shore takes the wildest raging of the surf. Harwich, which has gone through the regular stages of whaling, codding, mackerel-fishing and salt-making, cultivates in turn the summer boarder, but somewhat quizzically. Retired sea-captains are not easily overawed even by golf-sticks, and retired sea-captains, in Harwich, are as thick as cranberries. Snuffing the brine, they pace their porches like so many quarter-decks and delight their auditors and themselves with marvellous recitals. The Cape has not proved friendly to manufactures in general. Salt-works and glass-works have come to naught, – but the spinning of sea-yarns is a perennial industry.

Many of the summer guests prefer the north side of the Cape, where fogs are less frequent, or where, in ancient Indian parlance, old Maushope smokes his pipe less often. Such find in Brewster and Dennis no less delightful colonies of ancient ship-masters, living easily off their sea-hoards. In 1837 that little town of Dennis claimed no fewer than one hundred and fifty skippers sailing from various American ports, and in 1850 it was said that more sea-captains went on foreign voyages from Brewster than from any other place in the United States. Often their wives sailed with them and had thereafter something wider than village gossip to bring to the quilting-and the sewing-circle. It was a great day for the children in the village when a sea-captain came home. From door to door went his frank sailor-gifts, jars of Chinese sweetmeats, shimmering Indian stuffs, tamarinds, cocoanuts, parrots, fans of gay feather, boxes of spicy wood, glowing corals, and such great, whispering shells as Cape Cod beaches never knew. It was a hospitable and merry time, given to savory suppers, picnic clambakes, and all manner of neighborly good-cheer. Even the common dread made for a closer sympathy. Any woman, going softly to her neighbor to break the news of the husband lost in Arctic ice, might in some dark hour drop her head upon that neighbor’s shoulder in hearing of a son drowned off the Banks or slain by South Sea Islanders.

The old town of Yarmouth, dozing thus among children already gray, has many a thing to dream about, when the surf is loud. She remembers the terrible gale of 1635, in which the Thacher family were wrecked upon the island that since has borne their name, the March snow-storm that destroyed the three East Indiamen from Salem, the stranding of the English Jason, and many a tragedy more. Along that treacherous Back Side, lighthouse towers are now closely set, and well-equipped, well-manned life-saving stations have succeeded the rude Charity Houses, the fireplace, wood and matches, straw pallet, and signal-pole which used to give what succor they might to hapless mariners. The old volunteer coast-guard, which rarely failed to pace the beach in storms, is now replaced by a regular patrol, carrying lanterns and red hand-lights and thoroughly drilled in the use of shot-line and breeches-buoy. But still the fierce-blowing sand cuts their faces to bleeding and still the furious surf makes playthings of their lifeboats, so that manhood has no less heroic opportunity than in the earlier days. The crew at one of these stations, after an exposure of twelve hours on the wintry beach, failed in every effort to launch the surf-boat and had to see the rescue they should have made effected by a crew of fishermen volunteers. The keeper brooded over his disgrace and the following winter wiped out what is known upon the Cape as the “goading slur” by a desperate launching in a surf that beat the life from his body.

Ever since the day of the Pilgrims, who made the suggestion, and of George Washington, who furthered the project, there has been talk of a Cape Cod canal to expedite traffic and avert disaster. A channel between Eastham and Orleans was once forced by the sea, and various routes through Yarmouth, Barnstable and Sandwich have been surveyed, and charters granted, but ships still round Race Point. The railroad, however, which was built by slow stages down the Cape and reached Provincetown only a quarter of a century since, has facilitated travel, doing away both with the red-and-yellow mail-coach, which used, a hundred years ago, to clatter through to Boston in two glorious days, and with the packet service of jolly memory. Yarmouth and Barnstable were sharp rivals in these packet trips, Barnstable putting her victories into verse:

“The Commodore Hull she sails so dull
She makes her crew look sour;
The Eagle Flight she is out of sight
Less than a half an hour.
But the bold old Emerald takes delight
To beat the Commodore and the Flight.”

Barnstable has pursued from the outset a course of modest prosperity. She does not ask too much of fortune. If her census-roll has gained only five in the last decade, that is better than losing, as most of the Cape towns have done, and, even so, her numbers rank next to Provincetown. How humble were the beginnings of this sedate and gracious county seat may be learned from the letter of an early citizen, declining Governor Winslow’s appointment to lead an expedition against the Dutch. This quiet colonist, who commanded the Plymouth forces in King Philip’s War, pleads his domestic cares:

“My wife, as is well known to the whole town, is not only a weak woman, and has been so all along, but now, by reason of age, being sixty-seven years and upwards, and nature decaying, so her illness grows more strongly upon her. Never a day passes but she is forced to rise at break of day, or before. She cannot lie for want of breath. And when she is up, she cannot light a pipe of tobacco, but it must be lighted for her. And she has never a maid. That day your letter came to my hands, my maid’s year being out, she went away, and I cannot get or hear of another. And then in regard of my occasions abroad, for the tending and looking after all my creatures, the fetching home my hay, that is yet at the place where it grew, getting of wood, going to mill, and for the performing all other family occasions, I have now but a small Indian boy about thirteen years of age, to help me. Sir, I can truly say that I do not in the least waive the business out of an effeminate or dastardly spirit, but am as freely willing to serve my King and my country as any man whatsoever, in what I am capable and fitted for, but do not understand that a man is so called to serve his country with the inevitable ruin and destruction of his own family.”

An “effeminate or dastardly spirit” would indeed be a novelty in the birthplace of James Otis. But it was not only in face of the Indian and the redcoat that these three old towns showed firm courage. To their glory be it remembered that they withstood the persecutor and bluntly refused to enforce the laws against heresy, so that a special officer had to be sent by Plymouth Court to hunt out and oppress the Quakers. Under his petty tyrannies, the faith of the Friends gained many converts, and Quakerism became permanently established on the Cape.

These upper towns have never depended on the sea as exclusively as those below, and hence the decline of the fisheries has been less disastrous to them. They need industries to hold their young people at home, but the marine manufacture of salt by solar evaporation, the discovery of a Dennis sea-captain, has had its day, and the once famous Sandwich glass-works are now idle. Sheep-raising and cattle-raising were long since abandoned, but while the New England Thanksgiving lasts, cranberry culture bids fair to yield an honest profit. As early as 1677, Massachusetts presented Charles II. (put out of humor by the pine-tree shilling) with three thousand codfish, two hogsheads of samp and ten barrels of cranberries. These last are still good enough for a better king than the Merry Monarch, and cranberry-picking is one of the most picturesque sights on the modern Cape. Hundreds of pickers, gathering by hand or with the newly invented machines, move over a bog in ordered companies. The “summer folks” flock to the fun, and Portuguese, Italians, Swedes, Poles, Finns, Russians, troop down from Boston and over from New Bedford for the brief cranberry season, or they may come earlier to join the blueberry-pickers that dot the August hills. The bogs are easily made from the wastes of swamp, which are drained, sanded, planted and given three years to grow a solid mat of vines. The crop from a few acres brings dollars enough to carry the thrifty Cape Codder through the year. Rents are of the lowest, and the shrewd old seaman who tends his own garden, salts his own pork, raises his own chickens, milks his own cow and occasionally “goes a-fishin’,” while his wife cooks and sews, and “ties tags” for pin-money, has no heavy bills to meet. There is so little actual poverty in these towns that the poorhouse is often rented.

Even Mashpee, once the Indian reservation, but now a little township peopled by half-breeds, mulattoes and a sprinkling of whites, grows tidier and more capable every year. The aborigines of Cape Cod have left slight traces save the melodious names that cling to bay and creek. Arrow-heads are scattered about, and now and then the plough turns up one of the clam-shell hoes with which the Nausets used to till their maize-fields. The Praying Indians of the Cape deserve our memory, for they were always faithful to their English neighbors. When the first regiment was raised in Barnstable County for the Revolutionary War, twenty-two Mashpees enlisted, of whom but one came home. A Praying Indian of Yarmouth has won a place in New England song, – Nauhaught the Deacon, who, hunger-pinched, restored the tempting purse of gold to the Wellfleet skipper and received a tithe “as an honest man.”

The beauty of the upper Cape, culminating in the lovely town of Falmouth, is largely rural and sylvan. A system of dyking has, within the last fifty years, converted much of the salt marsh to good, fresh meadow, and, from Orleans up, the look of the country is more and more agricultural. Portions of Yarmouth are well wooded, and in Barnstable, Sandwich and Falmouth are depths of forest where the fox and the deer run wild. The wolf alone has been exterminated, and that with no small trouble, the Cape finally proposing, after grisly heads had been nailed on all her meeting-houses, to build a high fence along her upper border and shut the wolves out. But Plymouth and Wareham objected, from their side of the question, to having the wolves shut in, and this ingenious scheme had to be abandoned. These woodlands are dotted in profusion with silvery ponds, which the Fish Commission at Wood’s Holl keeps well stocked. Often the north side, as in Sandwich, is skirted by long stretches of unreclaimed marsh, over which the heron flaps, with the distinguished air of an old resident, and from which the sweet whistle of the marsh quail answers the “Bob White” of the woods. There is plenty of rock in this landscape, the backbone of the Cape jutting through. Barnstable proudly exhibits four hundred feet of wall, two feet in width, wrought from a single mass of granite found within her limits. Falmouth arbutus grows pinkest about the base of a big boulder known as City Rock, and a field of tumbled stones upon her Quisset road is accounted for on the hypothesis that here the Devil, flying with his burden over to Nantucket, “broke his apron-string.” The trees, too, are of goodly size and stand erect. Elms, silver-leaf poplars, balm of Gileads, great sycamores, spotted with iron-rust lichen, and willows, lemon yellow in the sun, shade the waysides. Golden-winged woodpeckers and red-shouldered blackbirds dart to and fro, while the abundance of jaunty martin-houses shows that Cape Cod hospitality is not limited to the human.

The quiet, white homesteads, with green blinds, broad porches and sometimes a cupola for the sea-view, stand in a sweet tranquillity and dignity that should abash the showy summer residence. But these old-fashioned homes keep up with the times. Against the well-sweep leans the bicycle. The dooryards are blue with myrtle, or pink with rose-bushes, or gay with waving daffodils. Old age is in fashion on the Cape. When twilight fades, the passer-by sees gathered about the early evening lamp the white heads of those whose “chores” are done. And though death comes at last, the cemeteries are so tenderly kept that the grave is robbed of half its dread. Even in the oldest burial-grounds, where the worn, scarred stones lean with the privilege of age, the staring death’s-heads are cozily muffled in moss, and “Patience, wife of Experience,” sleeps under a coverlet of heartsease.

All the way from Provincetown to Falmouth are certain briny signals, – a ship’s figure-head, marble steps whose stone was washed ashore as wreckage, lobster-pots, herring-nets, conch-shells set on lintels, a discontented polar bear pacing a stout-paled yard, ruffling cockatoos, boats converted into flower-boxes, whales’ vertebræ displayed for ornament, garden-beds marked out with scallop-shells, everywhere the ship-shape look, the sailor’s handy rig, and everywhere the codfish used for weathercocks. In Barnstable court-house a mammoth cod is suspended from the ceiling. Vistas of ocean outlook, too, from under arches of green branches, flash upon the eye, the salty flavor is not lost in woodland fragrances, and the rolling hills and wavy pastures take their model from the sea.

Of the old-timey features of the Cape, no one is more impressive than the witch-like windmill with its peaked cap, outspread arms and slanting broomstick, reminding us that the Pilgrims came from Holland. Some of these antique mills have been bought by summer residents and moved to their estates for curiosities, but the one at Orleans was in use as late as 1892, taking its profitable toll of two quarts out of the bushel.

The general history of Falmouth but repeats the story of her sister towns. The first settlers are believed to have come in boats from Barnstable, in 1660. They encamped for the night among the flags of Consider Hatch’s Pond, where a child was born and, in recognition of the rushes that sang his earliest lullaby, named Moses. The town was duly incorporated in 1686, next after Eastham, and has steadfastly stood for piety, wisdom and patriotism. She admitted the Quakers, and if one of her deacons held a negro slave, as colonial deacons often did, poor Cuffee was at least brought to the communion table. It is Truro that contains “Pomp’s Lot,” where the stolen African, with loaf of bread and jug of water at his feet for sustenance on his new journey, escaped slavery by hanging. As for learning, it was Sandwich Academy which the Cape towns held in awe, but our Falmouth men, like the rest, half sailor, half farmer and all theologian, had a genuine culture, born of keen-eyed voyaging and of lonely thought, that kept the air about them tingling with intelligence. When it comes to war stories, if Provincetown, from her end of the Cape, can tell of her boy in blue that went down with the Cumberland, and her naval captain at Manila, Falmouth can recall that twice she was bombarded by the British and twice defended by the valor of her sons, and when the Civil War broke out, with the larger share of her able-bodied men at sea, she yet sent more than her quota of soldiers to the front.

Within the last quarter-century, Falmouth has entered on new activities, largely due to the increasing fame of Buzzard’s Bay as a summer resort. The story goes that the town had all gone to sleep, but somebody woke one day and painted his front fence, and forthwith his neighbors, not to be outdone, painted theirs, and their houses too, and the new era came in with a rush. But whatever good fortune the future has in store, Paul Revere’s bell, that sounds from her central steeple, will hold Falmouth true to her traditions; for these Cape towns, simple as their record is, have worked out on unconsciously heroic lines the essential principles of a God-fearing, self-respecting democracy.

DEERFIELD

OLD POCUMTUCK VALLEY

By GEORGE SHELDON

TO every one familiar with the history of the old Bay State, the name of Deerfield naturally brings to mind two diverse pictures: one, the giant trees of the primeval forest under whose sombre shade the white-haired Eliot prayed, and the sluggish stream beside whose banks he gathered its roving denizens for a test of civilization; the other, that scene of woe and desolation, when, under a wintry sky, the glare of burning houses lighted up a wide expanse of snow, shaded by dark columns of wavering smoke, and splashed here and there with red. The first picture suggests possibilities, the second results. The connecting link between the two is the fact that out of the labors of Eliot on the river Charles grew directly the settlement of the English on the Pocumtuck.

Back of all was the interest in the newly discovered heathen, which sent currents of gold from England across the seas to the Indian missions. Of all these that of the Apostle Eliot was the head and front. His first attempt, at Newton, was a failure, from its proximity to a Christian town. On his petition, the General Court granted him a tract in the wilderness where he and the uncontaminated native could come face to face with the God of Nature. This tract was claimed by the town of Dedham, and, after a successful legal contest, the General Court gave the claimant in lieu of it the right to select eight thousand acres in any unoccupied part of the colony. After wide search this grant was laid out on Pocumtuck River, and the selection was ratified by the Court, October 11, 1665.

This power, however, was only leave to purchase of the native owners. The laws recognized the rights of the Indians to the soil, and no Englishman was allowed to buy or even receive as a gift any land from an Indian without leave of the General Court. The oft-repeated slander that the fair purchase of land from the Indians was peculiar to William Penn, can be refuted in general by a study of our early statute books, and in particular by an examination of the original deeds from the Indians, now in our Memorial Hall.

It will be seen by these deeds that the Indians reserved the right of hunting, fishing and gathering nuts – all, in fact, that was of any real value to them. The critic says that in such trades the price was nominal and that the Indian was outrageously cheated. Fortunately, in this case existing evidence proves that Dedham paid the natives more than the English market price, in hard cash, and besides gave one acre at Natick for every four here.

The money to pay for the eight thousand acres was raised by a tax on the landholders of Dedham, the owners paying in proportion to the number of shares or “cow commons” held; and their ownership of the new territory was in the same proportion. There were five hundred and twenty-two shares in all, held in common, covering the whole of Dedham.

In 1671 a committee from Dedham laid out highways, set apart tracts for the support of the ministry, laid out a “Town Plott,” and large sections of plow-land and of mow-land. In each of these sections individuals were assigned by lot their respective number of cow commons. Later the woodlands were divided in the same manner. For generations this land was bought and sold, not by the acre, but by the cow common, fractions thereof being sheep or goat commons, five of these being a unit.

The “Town Plott,” laid out in 1671, is the Old Deerfield Street of to-day.

The first settlers at Pocumtuck were not, as generally supposed, the original Dedham owners. The shares of the latter had been for years on the market, and many had passed to outsiders. But only picked men were allowed to become proprietors. This fact is illustrated by votes like the following:

“Dec. 4, 1671. John Plimpton is allowed to purchase land of John Bacon at Pawcumtucke provided that the said John Plimpton doe settle thereupon in his owne person.” On the same day the request of Daniel Weld for leave to purchase was refused. No reason was assigned, and Mr. Weld was admitted soon after.

“Feb. 16, 1671-2. Lieft. Fisher is alowed libertie to sell 6 cow common rights and one sheepe common right at Paucomtuck to Nathaniel Suttlife of Medfield.”

The pioneer settler here was Samuel Hinsdell, of Medford. He had bought shares, and, impatient of delay in making the division, he became a squatter, and in 1669 turned the first furrow in the virgin soil of Pocumtuck. Samson Frary was a close second, if not a contemporary; “Samson Frary’s cellar” is mentioned in the report of the Committee, May, 1671.

The settlers increased rapidly. May 7, 1673, the General Court gave them “Liberty of a Towneship,” which is Deerfield’s only “Act of Incorporation.” Soon after, a rude meeting-house was built, and Samuel Mather served as a minister among them.

A loose sheet of paper has been found dated Nov. 7, 1673, with a record of a town-meeting. This was signed by the following, who must be called the earliest settlers:

The action of this meeting was chiefly on the division of land, but it was voted that “all charges respecting the ministers sallerye or maintenance bee leuied and raised on lands for the present.” Another page shows a meeting November 17, 1674, when the plantation was called Deerfield. We have no clue as to why or by what authority it was so called.

The newcomers found the meadows free from trees, with a rich soil which soon yielded abundantly of wheat, rye, peas, oats, beans, flax, grass and Indian corn. The meadows were enclosed with a common fence to keep out the common stock, which roamed at will on the common land outside.

The war of 1675 is called “Philip’s War” because Philip was able to incite the tribes to hostilities against the whites, rather than because it was carried on under his direction. A seer and a patriot Philip may have been, but he was not a warrior. It is not known that he was ever in a single conflict.

When the first blood was shed at far-away Swanzey, in June, 1675, the men of Pocumtuck were not disquieted. With the Indians about them they had lived for years in perfect harmony. But when the blow fell on Captains Beers and Lothrop under the shadow of their own Wequamps, war became a reality. As a measure of defense two or three houses were slightly fortified, and none too soon. The village was marked for destruction. On the morning of September 1, 1675, the Indians gathered in the adjoining woods, awaiting the hour when the men, scattered about the meadows at their work could be shot down one by one, leaving the women and children to the mercy of the Indians. This plan was frustrated. The Indians were discovered early in the morning by James Eggleston, while looking for his horse. Eggleston was shot and the alarm given. The people fled to the forts. These were easily defended by the men, but beyond the range of their muskets ruin and devastation held sway.

Deerfield was the first town in the Connecticut Valley to be assaulted, and the alarm was general. The news reached Hadley the same day while the inhabitants were gathered in the meeting-house observing a fast; “and,” says Mather, “they were driven from the holy service they were attending by a most sudden and violent alarm which routed them the whole day after.” Their alarm and rout were needless; no enemy appeared. Yet these words of the historian are the narrow foundation on which Stiles and others gradually built up the romantic myth of Goffe, as the guardian and deliverer of Hadley.

September 2, the tactics at Deerfield were successfully repeated by the Indians at Northfield. Eight men were killed in the meadows, but enough were left in the village to hold the stockade. September 4, Captain Richard Beers with his company who were marching to their relief, were surprised, and himself and twenty men were slain. September 5, Major Robert Treat, with a superior force, brought off the beleaguered survivors.

Sunday, September 12, another blow fell upon Deerfield. The place had now a garrison under Captain Samuel Appleton. The Indians could see from the hills the soldiers gathering in one of the forts for public worship. They laid an ambush to waylay the soldiers and people returning after service to the north fort, but all escaped their fire save one, who was wounded. Nathaniel Cornbury, left to sentinel the north fort, was captured, and never again heard from. Appleton rallied his men, and the marauders, after inflicting much loss on the settlers, drew off to Pine Hill.

But a sadder blow was to fall upon the dwellers in this little vale. The accumulated result of their industry and toil was to disappear in flame and ashes. In their wanton destruction the Indians had spared the wheat in the field for their own future supply; “3000 bushels standing in stacks,” says Mather. This wheat was needed at headquarters to feed the gathering troops, and Colonel Pynchon, the Commander-in-Chief, gave orders to have it threshed and sent to Hadley. Captain Thomas Lothrop, with his company, was sent to convoy the teams transporting it.