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Gc 974.401 P74r 1781036
M. D.
REYNOLDS HISTORICAL GENEALOGY COLLECTION
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ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 01101 2082
840
Lands of SIPPICAN On Buzzards Bay
by ALICE AUSTIN RYDER
REYNOLDS PRINTING NEW BEDFORD, MASSACHUSETTS 1934
840
Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019
https://archive.org/details/landsofsippicano00ryde
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PROVINCE TOWN
WELLFLEET
NIS
TIVE
NEWPORT
mab and decorated by Theodore L'. Pitman. Eso
PROVINCE TOWN
THE LANDS OF SIPPICAN
PLYMOUTH
WELLFLEET
CAPE
COD
MIDDLE BORO
The Landsi of Sippican
ROCHESTER
FALL RIVER
MARION
BLAKES POINT
MATTAPOISETT
HYANNIS
TIVERTON
MASHPEE
NEW BEDFORD
BUZZARDS BAY
. E. FALMOUTH
FAL MONTI
WIRHCHINH
NEWPORT
NAUSHON
NASHUEN
VINEYARD
CUTTY HUNK
MARTHAS
VINEYARD
Drawn from an old man and decorated by Theodore & Pitman Eso
SNIPATUIT
1781036
1.
Ryder, Alice Austin.
F 844492 .76 Lands of Sippican, on Buzzards bay, by Alice Austin Ryder. New Bedford, Mass., Reynolds printing, 1934.
3 p. 1., ix-xi p., 1 1., xiii-xvi, 368 p. front., illus. (map) plates, ports. 231em.
Map on front lining-paper and illustration on back lining-paper. QuestionLimited to one hundred_copies "-This copy Bet-THIRD beredt:
CHELF CARO "Stories of former days ... a panoramic history of the 'lands', espe- cially of the village of 'Sippican', now .Marion'."-Acknowledgments. Bibliography : p. xiii.
1. Marion, Mass .- Hist. 2. Rochester, Mass .- Hist. 3. Mattapoisett, Mass .- Hist. 4. Buzzards bay-Hist. I. Title.
34-34778
Library of Congress Copy 2.
1.74.M313RS
G 3635 Copyright 1 75555
[3] 974.48
Heb paxaJax
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LANDS OF SIPPICAN
)
Mrs. Elisabeth Taber - "A great lady comes home"
G3635
DEDICATED
To all those who love the LANDS OF SIPPICAN.
"God gave all men all earth to love, But since our hearts are small, Ordained for each one spot should prove Beloved over all."
KIPLING.
TelLu
4
SIPPICAN BOOK COMMITTEE
Miss Edith Austin Mr. Oswald Chew
Mrs. Bruce Clark Mr. Roger W. Converse Mrs. George U. Crocker
Mrs. Cecil Clark Davis Mrs. Sidney Hosmer Mrs. James Richardson Mrs. Galen L. Stone Mr. John H. Wisner, Jr.
1
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
A group of summer residents of Marion who became inter- ested in preserving the stories of old Sippican, organized as the "Sippican Book Committee", and have given generously of their time and means that this book might be published: with the cooperation of descendants of the old families of Rochester-Towne, these stories of former days have been gathered together.
There are probably interesting items that might have been included, and errors no doubt have been made; but the book is just an attempt to save from oblivion tales that other- wise might be lost, and to give in a general way a panoramic history of the "Lands", especially of the village of "Sippican", now "Marion".
I gratefully acknowledge help received from notes and articles by Miss Mary Leonard based on the Records of the Rochester Propriety - 1679, and the Records of Rochester- towne - 1694.
I am deeply indebted to Mr. Clark P. Howland, Dr. Oliver Cobb, and former pupils of Tabor Academy for stories of Mrs. Elisabeth Taber; to Dr. Oliver Cobb for notes on Captain Nathan Briggs, and Records from the Vice Admiralty Court of Gibraltar - Case of the Mary Celeste; to Mr. George I. Luce for the loan of diaries of Captain and Mrs. George L. Luce and account books of Captain Elisha Luce; to Mr. Henry Delano for scrap-book and letters; to Mrs. William Crapo for articles in regard to Captain Hiram Nye's voyages; to Mrs. Henry Kendall for logs of whalers; to Miss Augusta Hart for
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stories of Captain and Mrs. R. F. Hart; to Mrs. Paul Gary for letters and papers; to Mrs. Adelbert Hiller for articles and stories about Captain and Mrs. Robert Delano and Stephen Delano; to Miss Helen Clifton for deeds of Savery Clifton, Quaker; to Mrs. R. S. Ryder for diaries and letters of Ben- jamin Clifton, R. S. Ryder and Robert Elder; to Mr. David Packard for Account Book; to Mrs. John Guthrie for Account Book; to Mrs. T. G. Frothingham for articles and pictures; to Mrs. T. A. Oglesby for maps; to Mr. C. S. Barrows and Mr. Weston Allen for stories of old times.
Many tales of the old days have come down through the years from those who have gone - "Aunt Mary Mendell", (from whose attic the whalers were sighted); "Aunt Lucy Briggs", (who worked in Handy's Tavern when the sailors came up for grog) ; Mr. Silas B. Allen, (one of the builders of the white church on the corner); Mrs. Josephine Briggs (who was carried ashore by black savages on a wild coast, and who pieced Mrs. Taber's cap-strings) ; Mrs. Abbie L. Prichard, (who collected stories of the sailors' houses of Sippican) ; Mr. Edwin C. Luce (who remembered old days); Mr. Nathan Briggs, (son of Captain Oliver, and nephew of Captain Ben- jamin of the Mary Celeste) ; Mr. Theodore Tripp, (the whaler) ; Mr. John Wilbur, (sailor and soldier); and Mr. Charleton Wing (who made the Civil War something more than chapters in dull history books) - to these also must be inscribed thanks.
Many articles pasted in old scrap-books could not be traced to sources. Some were from the New Bedford Standard, Mercury, Cape Cod Item, Boston Herald, Globe, Transcript, Record, and from newspapers of New York, San Francisco, Gibraltar and Valparaiso.
Quotations from the Poems, Letters and Record of Friendship, by R. W. Gilder used by permission of Rodman
X
Gilder; Richard Harding Davis's articles and letters, by per- mission of Charles Scribner's Sons, and description of Marion from The Bostonians, Henry James, by permission of The Macmillan Company.
We are indebted to Mr. Charles Dana Gibson for per- mission to use his drawings, and to Mr. Theodore B. Pitman for map.
To Mrs. Frances F. Cleveland Preston, I wish to express sincere thanks for the encouragement of her letter: "I wish I could do something to help you in the very interesting work you have undertaken to perpetuate our beloved 'Sippican'."
ALICE AUSTIN RYDER. 1
Marion, August 22, 1934.
XI
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F
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I Adventurers, Red Skins and Two Kings 1
II Our Ancestors, and the Lands of Sippican . 12
III King Philip, and the Lands of his Fathers . 24
IV Oysters, Kent, and Rochester-Towne-in-New Eng- land 38
V Tithing Men, and the New England Primer 51
VI Shillings and Pence to Dollars and Cents 67
VII Sippican, Salt Works and Ship Yards 85
VIII
The Whalers and Moby Dick Himself
103
IX The Good Old Ways of the Captain's Days 127
X Such as these Sailed the Seven Seas . 157
XI A Philopena from Sippican . 172
XII And It Shall Hail as "Marion" 179
XIII A Sound of Drums . 210
XIV The Greatest Sea Tragedy of Them All - The® Mary Celeste -
XV A Great Lady Comes Home 258
XVI Henry James and Richard Watson Gilder 285
XVII
"The President" in Marion
306
XVIII
Adventurers Set Out Again from Sippican
.
332 XIX And Now 359
n
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Handbook of American Indians. Massasoit
Lives of Famous Indians
King Philip's War
History of Plymouth Plantation
Plymouth of the Pilgrims
Weeks Goodrich Ellis and Morris Bradford Banvard Steele
Chief of the Pilgrims Plymouth Colony Records and The "Ancient List of Freemen"
Book of Indian Records for their Lands-1620-1651.
England and Holland of the Pilgrims
Dexter
Fathers of New England
Andrews Bliss
Social Life in Old New England
Crawford .
Diary of Doctor Thomas Robbins
History of American Whaling
The Story of New England Whalers
Starbuck Spears Melville
History of Nantucket
Macy
Nimrod of the Sea
Davis
Rochester's Official Bi-Centennial Record-1879.
Old Rochester and Mattapoisett
Leonard and others
Vital Records-Rochester-to 1850.
Clipper Ship Era Clark
Forecastle Songster of 1849
The Bostonians
James Ford
Cleveland
McElroy
Speeches
Cleveland
Life of John Hay
Thayer
Record of Friendship
Gilder
Poems
Gilder
Letters
Gilder
Articles and Stories
Davis
Adventures and letters of Richard Harding Davis
XIII
Colonial Times on Buzzard's Bay
Moby Dick
The Cleveland Era
قدا ساسة الشركة
ILLUSTRATIONS
MAP OF LANDS OF SIPPICAN by Theodore B. Pitman
Inside front cover MRS. ELISABETH TABER - "A great lady comes home." Frontispiece
MASSASOIT - "Product of Nature's sun, stars, earth direct - a towering human form." Whitman. page 1 FIRST MAP OF SIPPICAN - "Watachpoo's lands of his fathers." 23
MINISTER'S ROCK - "Where the first settlers found cleared Indian fields." 52
BRIGADIER GENERAL TIMOTHY RUGGLES - "Timothy, the Tory." 60
SCRIMSHAW WORK - "Lazy days on a whaler." (Hins- dale collection) 116
THE SAIL-LOFT AND THE LOOK-OUT ATTIC 117
A SPERM WHALE - "How the critter looked to a green- horn." 124
FIGURE HEAD OF THE ADMIRAL BLAKE - "The little whaler that cleared $8,000 in two months." 125
CAPTAIN JOSEPH EMERSON HADLEY -
"The stars were set for guides for such as he And earth was but a cup to hold the sea." Guiterman. 160
THE CAPTAINS' MEETING HOUSE . 176
CAPTAIN GEORGE AND SOPHIA LUCE - "Whose ring lies under the Cape Horn seas." 177
THE BOYS IN BLUE - "On Memorial Days they march again." 224
ROSE COTTAGE - "Where Mother Briggs waits in Sip- pican." 240
XV - O/4.
القرعة ٠٠٦/٢١
5
CAPTAIN BENJAMIN BRIGGS of the Mary Celeste . 241
CAPTAIN OLIVER BRIGGS - "Whose arbor-vitae hedge waits after sixty years." 256
"SONS OF MOTHER OCEAN" - sketched by C. D. Gibson for Frank Stockton's Merry Chanter. . 272
THE BAY VIEW HOUSE - The Inn that to Henry James "suggested dreadfully an early bedtime." 273
THE GILDER STUDIO - "In the woods that bring the sunset near." 292
HARBOR ROAD - "Down which Henry James walked." . 300
MR. AND MRS. GILDER, MRS. CLEVELAND AND HER MOTH- ER, AND JOE JEFFERSON 308
SAINT-GAUDENS AND MRS. CLEVELAND "Against the grey walls of the Studio." 316
"THE PRESIDENT" IN MARION.
324
THE WHARF - "Where the little schooners came in for wood and boxboards." 332
THE HORSE SHOW - "Gibson takes his Marion friends." 333
A TIN-TYPE - "Elsie and Betty in the Nineties." 340
PLUMMER HANDY - "I'm goin' clammin'." 344
JOHN FOX, FINLEY PETER DUNN, FRITZIE SCHEFF and "R. H. D." 352
MISS EDITH AUSTIN - Hostess of "The Bund", a house whose hospitality extends from "Marigold Days." .
356
TABOR ACADEMY ON SIPPICAN HARBOR . .
360
KITTANSETT CLUB, WINTER HOUSE - "Where the beach- plums used to grow." 361
WINTERING IN THE ARCTIC - "With the ice slowly closing in." By William Bradford. (Courtesy of Marion Library Association). 368
AIR PLANE VIEW Inside back cover
XVI
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Massasoit - "Product of Nature's sun, stars, earth direct - a towering human form." Whitman.
CHAPTER I
ADVENTURERS, RED SKINS AND TWO KINGS
"The Eastern nations sink; their glory ends; And Empire rises where the sun descends."
Carved on a boulder in Manomet in 1627
Three centuries ago the shores of Plymouth, Cape Cod, and "the lands of Sippican" on Buzzards Bay were the edge of an unknown world.
Over the wide ocean which might well cover a lost Atlantis, the fishermen and adventurers came from Spain, Portugal and the North in their open boats, held by calms, driven by gales, and found themselves on these strange shores. The long waves broke against the new continent and tossed the sailors who poked along the inlets and bays in a salty baptism of flying spray. They saw the whales, caught mackerel and cod, watched the seal play on the rocks, and went back to tell their tales of the land that was called "West Indies".
Of the countless unknown fishermen who came only now and then is a name and a story printed on the years. Strange tales were told of a strange land, of a naked people, of sea ser- pents and mermaids.
It was on June 15, 1609, that two sailors in Henry Hud- son's ship in Cape Cod Bay saw a mermaid "looking earnestly at them". It was true for "Their names that saw her were Thomas Hilles and Robert Rayner." It was from the land of Queen Elizabeth and her quarrelsome followers, the land of Shakespeare who wrote of the "dew" fetched from "the still- vex'd Bermoothes" that many came for fish, for gold, and ad- venture. Shakespeare's friend, the Earl of Southampton, while
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LANDS OF SIPPICAN
a prisoner in the Tower of London, became interested in the romantic adventures in that rich land of bright islands and strange bays. He contributed to a voyage "To discover con- veyant places for a new colony", and this was the voyage in which our own Buzzards Bay was explored.
Without any authority from Sir Walter Raleigh, Barthol- omew Gosnold, the adventurer, sailed out from Falmouth, Eng- land in a little bark "concord" on March 26, 1602.
He sailed on and on and suddenly out of the mist he came to find himself "embayed" by "a mighty headland". While Gosnold was exploring for "six howers", the sailors filled the little ship with cod; and so it is that we look across at "Cape Cod" today - the first land in New England touched by the English, and its recorded "fish story".
Gosnold built a hut on the island called by the Indians "Cuttyhunk", "something-that-sticks-out-of-the-water." He ex- plored Buzzards Bay for three weeks, cut a load of cedar and sassafras, and sailed for home with the first recorded cargo from New England.
He was very enthusiastic about his stay and in the first book about New England by John Brereton published in Lon- don, 1602, he gives his impressions of the land.
"Coming ashore we stood a while like men ravished at the beautie and delicacie of this sweet soile: for besides divers clere lakes of fresh water (where of we saw no end) medows very large and full of greene grass; e'en the most woddy places (I speak only of what I saw) doe grow so distinct and apart, one tree from another upon greene grassy ground, somewhat higher than the plaines as if nature would show herself above her power artificiall!"
Our Buzzards Bay, which he named "Gosnold's Hope", he called the "finest sound" he ever saw. "For the agreeing of this climate with us (I speake of myselfe, & so I may justly do for the rest of our companie) that we found our health and strength all the while we remained there, so to renew and in- crease, as notwithstanding our diet and lodging was none of the best, yet not one of our company (God be thanked) felt the
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ADVENTURERS, RED SKINS & TWO KINGS
least grudging or inclination to any disease or sickness, but were in better health than when we went out of England."
He sailed away; but in 1797 two centuries later, the cellar of the "captaine's" storehouse could be seen and in 1848 was still there; and now a Gosnold memorial has been built on the island.
And so they sail in from the wide Atlantic.
In 1614 Capt. John Smith came over "to take Whales, discover mines, or fish or furs", and to establish colonies. The "Admiral of New England" he was called. He found the fishermen's maps wrong so he went from "Point to Point, Isle to Isle, and Harbor to Harbor, with the sounding, sands, rocks and land-marks, as I passed close aboard the shore in a little boat", and Prince Charles called the land "New England", and "The Description of New England" in 1616 was the first real map for the sailors around the coast. They fished and trapped and sailed away with no knowledge of the "two great ice caps that rolled down" and piled up against Gosnold's mighty "headland"; with no knowledge of the ages that had come and gone with the coastline sinking, and ice sheets grind- ing down great mountains bringing the granite boulders that line our shores and the ledges that crop up in our fields; the ice melting making the ponds and rivers; the sea water coming in around the higher land and making the inlets and the sounds, leaving the high land as "necks" and islands.
Nor did Gosnold know that the "medows very large and full of greene grasse" were the abandoned gardens of the dark skinned people he called "Indians". The naked creatures who lurked in the forests and watched with keen out-of-doors vision his coming and going.
For there were people who lived on these shores of ours, men and women, youths and maidens, and babies. A people who had lived nobody knows how many hundreds of years on "the lands of Sippican", before explorers came to Buzzards Bay.
We know almost more about the ice sheets of millions of years ago than we know about the dark skinned owners of old
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LANDS OF SIPPICAN
"Sippican". "Their names are on our waters and we cannot wash them out" but our knowledge of the owners of the names is vague and often false. We know the Indians touched by the white man's civilization and not in their own free life of the forest and sea.
The adventurers who came, caught, with the fur bearing animals, a few natives, and as their. habit was carried them home, bound as booty from the "Indies"; but they guessed little of the huge stretch of new continent of great rivers, moun- tains, plains, lakes and valleys with its dark kings and their thousands of subjects.
But every explorer from Columbus down testified to the kindness of the Indians with whom they dealt. Columbus, from the Islands of the South, two centuries before - "I swear to your majesties that there is not a better people in the world than these, more affectionate, affable or mild. They love their neighbors as themselves and they always speak smilingly."
Gorges at the mouth of the Kennebec in 1605 - "civil entertainment and kind respect far from brutish or savage nations."
Weymouth from Massachusetts Bay - "great civility of manner, far from the rudeness of our common people."
Hudson from the great river farther South calls them "gentille", and Gosnold from our own Buzzards Bay - "Truly the holsomness and temperature of the climat doth not onely argue the people to be answerable to this description, but also to a perfect constitution of body, active, strong, healthfull and very wittie." And yet in our histories they are "savages"!'
In 1614 twenty-seven of them were seized in Cape Cod Bay and sold as slaves in Malaga. Later an Indian of "great stature was shown up and down London for money as a wonder. He was of no less courage and authority than of wit, strength, and proportion."
The Indians thought the first white people were gods - no wonder they later thought them devils - and an Indian mother falls into a "great fit of weeping" when she sees men like those who carried away her sons.
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ADVENTURERS, RED SKINS AND TWO KINGS
The Indians who owned and loved our "lands of Sippican" with their almost "superstitious feeling for the sea", what shall we say of them?
From out the mist of 300 years there comes the picture. We must change the scene as we know it. We must sweep away our roadways lined with English elms, maples, and our houses large and small and bring back the forest trees that grew to the water's edge. We must picture the "green grassy places", the corn hills in the new clearings, the long canoes gliding down the harbor or drawn up along the shores.
At the head of the harbor, on a little neck of land that in that day was nearly surrounded by water, around a big boulder were clustered the wigwams, the village of the Sippican Indians of the Wamponoags, a tribe of the Algonquin nation; and no- body knows how many centuries these bronzed people had fished, feasted, played and planted on these shores when the Pilgrims came along Cape Cod in 1620.
Our shore has changed somewhat; the shore line has filled up with marsh in some places leaving the knolls that were favor- ite wigwam sites farther from high water.
The Indian stories that have come down to us are few.
They told of a long ago time when a great river ran through the forest where the bay is now. A terrible storm came, and the river widened, and the salt water rushed up the river and the forest trees were killed on the banks, and roots are seen to this day when the tide goes down at Silver Shell Beach. The great river was called Pawkihchatt; and men digging in a field three miles up from the head of the harbor have found where the tide used to come, that tells the story of the inlet and the mouth of the lost river.
They told a story of the islands that lie on the southern horizon like a string of big beads, and guard the bay from the ocean. The big ones are the giant Manshope's moccasins that he threw off one warm restless night, when he got them full of sand on the Cape Cod dunes; and the rest of the islands are the ashes from old Manshope's pipe.
Some little children were stolen from the mainland and Manshope stepped out into the ocean and when he found the
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LANDS OF SIPPICAN
children on Nantucket, he sat down and smoked, and when the fog rolled in from the bay the little Indian children cried out "Old Manshope's smoking!" "Old Manshope's smoking!"
And so they told stories and hunted and played and planted three hundred years ago. The braves were tall, smooth faced and straight, with heads up, with "the most beautiful mouths in the world" because the Indian mothers were careful to carry their new born babies for seven months with the little backs straight against a board and to pinch the little lips to- gether that the teeth might come in straight and strong. The children were taken to the shore of river or sea every morning for the cold water bath even in winter and then oiled that the body might stand any kind of weather. Naked little boys shot at marks every day, "sometimes a bit of moss thrown into the air"; and they must run, because they must be able to run thirty, forty miles and back in a day. There were no young weaklings in an Indian village.
Roosevelt says;
"They began to track game as soon as they could walk; a scrape on a tree trunk, a bruised leaf, a faint indentation of the soil, which the eye of no white man could see all told them a tale as plainly as if it had been shouted in their ears. With moccasined feet they trod among the brittle twigs, dried leaves, and dead branches as silently as the cougar - they could no more get lost in the trackless wilderness than a civilized man could get lost on a highway."
The moral law of the tribe was very strict. There were two or three children in a family and the marriage lasted only as long as there was love because there was no quarreling. No less an authority than Parkman writes "Wrangling and quarrels are strangers to an Indian dwelling". "An Indian village is singularly free from petty strife because of self content inculcated from childhood upon every individual and enforced by a sentiment of dignity and manhood."
The work was divided according to the law of the tribe. The braves built the wigwams or houses with skins or bark laid over a frame of boughs stuck in the ground with a hole in the top for a chimney. They burned out logs and scraped them,
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ADVENTURERS, RED SKINS AND TWO KINGS
dragged them to the water for boats, girdled the trees for clear- ings in the forests, planted with fish for fertilizer for eight or ten years, then gave them up to grass and cleared another. They hunted for deer and other animals; went on long journeys to spy out their enemies, the Mohawks or other hostile tribes; then home again to fish, bathe, oil their skin, chip arrow and spear heads, wrestle, smoke or sit silent with head on knees, while the women did their allotted tasks.
They scraped the skins their braves brought in, and made them supple, pounded corn or crushed it by rolling over it a heavy stone in the hollow of a big rock, brought in the pine knots, made "succotash" of the corn and beans and served the braves first.
Baskets, mats, bracelets of copper, belts of colored shells used by settlers for money were made during the long winter months.
And so we picture them as they lived on "the lands of Sippican", a happy people smiling rather than laughing.
There was the little settlement at the head of the harbor with the old "Indian field" and many, many more of the tribe coming over the Rhode Island Path summer after summer, that they may be near the sea. Men and women, boys and girls, babies on the backs of their mothers, all along the shores with the blue waters of the harbor dancing in the summer sunshine.
The fields are full of their spear and arrow heads; the shores still show traces of their feasts and their graves. Some of the graves have been rifled and grinning skulls deck the museums, but many old chieftains lie at rest on forgotten Indian burial grounds and Indian fields of Sippican.
There is a great rock near the lane that leads from Front Street up to Holmes' Woods that might have been brought from Labrador by the flowing ice river of long ago ages. It was split, as the ice sheet slowly ground its way along, leaving, so they say, a slab in Dighton, to be the slate of some sculptor who wished to make a record of some great event of his time.
As the ice melted, the "stone that was shaped dim years ago", settled slowly on the side of Hosmer Hill, called Bartlett's by the old timers of Sippican.
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ГРЕВУСТА
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LANDS OF SIPPICAN
An Indian chief lies buried under the pine needles in the dark passage between its granite sides, or at least so the child- ren of the older generation believed. As they climbed the sides of the big boulder they shouted and sang but when they ran through the dark cave in the rock, they felt a sense of awe that made them quieter because of the brave who lay beneath.
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