USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 11
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51 | Part 52
That there was a prevalent sense of amplitude in land had already been shown in the free fashion with which it had been presented to the minister, whose trial trip in preaching had opened the hearts of his parishioners. It now displayed itself in wholesale presentations to the members of the committee that had run the town's prudentials. It began the same year (1719) that the vote was passed to create trus- tees and when, to give the members of the committee a few hundred acres would show that there was no personal ill-will in this move towards independence, Major Stoddard was given all the Little Meadow, and if there had some time been a grant within it to some other person, plain land was to be added to complete a hundred acres. This was reward for service as town clerk, past and to come. The next spring the committee, following a vote of the inhabitants, allotted themselves one hundred and fifty acres each, omitting, how- ever, Major Pynchon, that prime citizen of Springfield, who perhaps had all the valley lands he could desire. Samuel Porter, Henry Dwight and Samuel Partridge, committee members and non-resident,
107
SEEKING TOWNSHIP
each acquired one hundred and fifty acres. The three tracts adjoined each other in the southerly part of the town, where there had also been set aside a country farm reservation, thus creating seven hundred acres of pre-empted land, country farm and committee farms, hence- forth to be known as "The Farms."
Other events, also colored by the sense of broad empire, were marking advance towards completeness of town equipment. A Deer- field man, Ebenezer Field, was given thirty acres of land on condition that he employ here his trade as a blacksmith. He came in 1720 and took the lot on the main street which had been owned by Jon- athan Patterson, who had died in 1718, and promptly set up his smithy in front of the lot within the main street. That broad strip of land had already been invaded by the meeting-house and by that little twelve-foot by sixteen-foot house for the short-lived first ministry of Mr. Whitmore and by all sorts of appropriations by the other dwellers along its sides. Also a good section of Bennett's meadow had been presented to four men, Sergeant Benoni Moore, Joseph Petty, Ebenezer Field and Nathaniel Mattoon, in consideration of their set- ting up a saw-mill.
Further to help Parson Doolittle, he had been given a little plot, twenty-four feet in breadth and thirty-two in length to set a house on, and this went into the main street. There was developing a sort of jealousy of that broad avenue, which was almost everything else than an avenue. Did it really need to be so wide? Back in 1718, the com- mittee had decided to narrow it for a good share of its length. The three lots on the easterly side below the Mill Brook had their front lines moved out so as to leave the street only six rods wide, and that reduction in width was accepted for all the northerly end, the region beyond the brook.
Was the town properly secured against attack by an enemy? Captain Wright, with all his other enterprising ideas for the place, was urgent that there should be better defences. If dissent on the ground that there was no enemy in sight or in prospect existed in the minds of the younger men and those who had more recently come up from the secure lower towns, it was not outspoken.
The Captain's distrust of Indians was deep-seated. He was cred- ited with having caused some papooses to be killed in the days of real warfare on the ground that "nits would become lice." The
108
A PURITAN OUTPOST
heathen were still in the neighborhood. They were on trading terms with the settlers and there was a steady-going and profitable business in furs and skins. They did not inspire confidence. They were sus- pected of being ready to sell their murderous services to the French, whenever there was again a market. Behind their mumbled and hiss- ing few words, they still harbored a notion that these white people were occupying and constantly taking in more of the lands than by right were theirs. Was it safe to have these homes, scattered as they still were, and the mills on the streams and the meeting-house and all else left unsheltered ?
A militia company was kept active. It was required by the colony's law that every man between sixteen and sixty should be kept in training. There being in the town less than sixty-four, the standard quota for a company with a captain, its commanding officer was a leftenant, and he was annually appointed by the town's com- mittee. Captain Wright had served for three years from 1714. Thomas Taylor succeeded him in 1717, and when he was accidentally drowned, that very year, Zechariah Field was promoted from Sergeant. Eleazer Wright came to command in 1719. There were regular training days and the men kept their flintlocks in constant readiness for action.
The General Court, at first fitfully but by now steadily, provided a small garrison, usually of ten men, not inhabitants, who were paid for their service by the state but were quartered and subsisted in the homes of the settlers. Then there were two who were a special guard for the minister, who were kept in his household. By another turn in its usefulness, the sixteen-foot by twelve-foot original ministerial residence was made a guard-house.
Still it was an exposed town, open to assault, barren of shelter for its people under possible attack. The committee supported the home demand for defences and two forts were ordered built. The historic sites, both of which carried memories of Indian attack, were the natural ones for the new stockaded forts and their mounts, heavy log structures rising to a sufficient height to serve as watch-towers-the Zechariah Field lot, on which was the hillock once wet with the blood of the first settlers, and the John Clary lot, on the top of the bank above Mill brook, where still were the unmarked graves of that first miller and his household. Here, in the four-year period before incor- poration, the forts were built.
109
SEEKING TOWNSHIP
The town was now real. Its equipment was not inferior to that of the down-valley towns, even though it had but its score of families. The minister was also an educated physician and chirurgeon and his practice was his week-day occupation. Some attention was turned to the teaching of the children. The wife of Ebenezer Field, the smith, taught a class of young children at her own house for the twenty-two weeks of each summer, being paid at the rate of fourpence a week for each child. She was of the Arms family in Deerfield.
In every household were the big and little spinning wheels, one for wool, the other for flax, and the looms from which were turned out the stout fabric of the men's and the women's wear and the linen that came to be stocked in plenty for current needs and in anticipa- tion for each bridal outfit. Saw-mills were supplying the boards for the houses and barns and the household furnishing. Grist mills were turning the corn into meal and the wheat into coarse flour. The clay bank near the old oak tree at the south end of the street had been dug into and a brick-kiln was burning the brick, with which some of the newer houses were interlined. A malster was supplementing the regu- lar household production of beer. Some apple trees, set out during the second settlement were now bearing, and the cider press was set up at the mill on Mill Brook. Independence in town affairs had its complement in self-reliance in all the features of village living. To complete its resemblance to the more populous towns, Ensign Field had a slave boy, "Caesar."
CHAPTER XIV A MILITARY OUTPOST
Threats and Acts of Attack a Call to Arms
POLITICS, OF THE PERSONAL SORT, appeared at the outset of town government. The legislative act of incorporation signed by the gov- ernor June 15, 1723, had directed that Captain Benjamin Wright and Lieutenant Eleazer Wright notify and summon the inhabitants to assemble and meet together for the choosing of town officers.
"Does the General Court think there are none other than Wrights in our town?" It was from some of the younger element who had asserted themselves as of importance in recent years that the question could come. This charter, they noted, had distinguished the Wright brothers as "two of the principal inhabitants" and there were democratic citizens to deny anybody was more "principal" than the others.
When the town meeting was held on July 22, after Joseph Petty, war veteran and redeemed captive, was chosen moderator, and Eleazer Holton, another of the old guard, one of the three grandsons of the emigrant William who were not residents, was made the first local town clerk, the rebuff to the Wrights was delivered in the elec- tion of the first board of selectmen without any of that "principal" family in the list. They were Captain Zechariah Field, who was already marked as a spirited independent, Benoni Moore, who had no local background of ancestry, and Joseph Petty. In the entire list of these first officials neither of the distinguished Wrights appeared, while a son of each of them was elected a hayward, the least sig- nificant office in the roster, a left-handed compliment at best.
War clouds hung on the horizon of the newly constituted town. In the June before there had been an Indian outbreak on the Ken- nebec river, in which nine families had been made captive. The instigators were two Jesuit priests, the more conspicuous being Father Sebastian Râle. There was a mission at Norridgewock and from this
IIO
A MILITARY OUTPOST
the opening sally was made. On the surface the conflict was between the Eastern Indians and the English, whose efforts to establish them- selves on the northerly coast were resented. Behind it lay the French determination that Canada be saved from England. The two Euro- pean powers were at peace but Frenchmen who had transplanted to northern America kept the opposition alive and belligerent. The Indians were their easy tool and events already indicated that the French governor-general, Vaudreuil, was actively in sympathy, with its dark threat that the Indians of the St. Francis river region would presently be employed for rapine in the Connecticut Valley.
Northfield men, seasoned in warfare with the French and Indian combination, sensed at once the significance of the new demonstra- tion, far away as it was, and in the month of the Kennebec outbreak petitioned the General Court to put the town in a position of defence. The answer was an order in July that the soldiers at Northfield garri- son one or more suitable houses, with a request that the inhabitants assist them with their teams. Lieutenant Joseph Kellogg was in local command and, after haying was over, two stockades were built. The military burden grew apace. A full company was billeted upon the town. Captain Kellogg's report that the existing forts were in mean condition carried information to the governor that the townspeople were not willing, even if they were able, to make forts defensible.
After all the attempt to make this a real town, was it worthwhile trying to keep it up? The doubt which had years before caused the people to leave, gradually out of weariness under the threat of war, or in haste when some outrage occurred, was again taking possession of some of the townsmen. Any overt act of war might any moment lift it into certainty that it was a region too much in peril to be inhab- itable. Would such an event occur ?
August of the year of the town's independence brought the answer. The silence of a mid-summer day was broken by the sharp crack of gunfire in the meadows. Two men fell under it-Thomas Holton, 42, father of a numerous family, and Theophilus Merriman, 31, father of three little children, one of them a deaf and dumb boy of five. The scalps of both the men had been taken. Panic would have resulted but for Lieutenant Kellogg's persuasion and the prompt action of the governor in sending more troops to guard the men at harvesting.
II2
A PURITAN OUTPOST
Suspicion that the attack was at the hands of Gray Lock, sly old chieftain, known only too well as the constant watcher of the towns, was confirmed from Rutland, miles away over the easterly hills, where he attacked Deacon Joseph Stevens and his four sons in the hay-field, the father escaping, two boys killed, two carried away, and coming upon the minister, Joseph Willard, murdered him. The Rutland attack, in which Gray Lock was seen, following so soon upon the kill- ing of the Northfield men, fixed the guilt of both upon him.
A company of cavalry rode into town at the end of August, and sheltered the harvesters for a fortnight. September brought new alarm in the word from New York's governor that Gray Lock had again set out with 50 of his braves from his camp at the head of Lake Cham- plain. The corn harvest was on in October when down upon the men in the meadow came again the Gray Lock marauders, killing Ebe- nezer Severance, wounding Hezekiah Stratton and Enoch Hall and carrying away Samuel Dickinson for his second captivity-the first having been when as a boy of II he had been taken prisoner in Hatfield, and rescued in a thrilling event.
The town now became the centre of the strategy of the valley's defence. Kellogg was given a captain's commission with a full com- pany in his command. It was again the English outpost. Scouting up the valley and through the hills had here its starting-point. Captain Benjamin Wright, aroused to action by the new peril, besought the General Court to give him a troop for a far-flung venture to the north, only to be answered by a consent so sprinkled with "ifs" that he chose to wait.
Late in December the government ordered the building of a real fort on the west side of the river, just beyond the northerly line of the town. At the outset it was given the name of the alert governor- Dummer. Northfield's best carpenter was Stephen Crowfoot, who had come up from Hadley two years before and had built the scow for the town. He was put in charge of building the new fort.
"Should an Indian be entrusted with the building of a fort against Indians?" was asked by one of the troopers new to Northfield and not knowing that "Crowfoot" was a good English name and its possessor, Stephen, a sturdy son of an emigrant, who might have saved con- fusion by spelling it Croffut. His mother was a Hadley Dickinson, his wife a Hatfield Graves and his brother, Daniel, one of those Deerfield
II3
A MILITARY OUTPOST
captives of 1704 who had not returned from Canada-credentials enough as to his fitness to build the first great fort in the valley.
It was mid-winter, the snow was deep, the cold bitter, and Stephen and his men, one of whom was Daniel Wright, had to lie in the woods, next to unsheltered, and to labor early and late to push the fort along. They rarely traversed the 12 miles back to town but, when they did, Stephen had to report on the fort, the stronghold of the town's hope.
"It is big and sturdy," he reported. ""Tis made of the heavy yellow pine timbers provided in the fields about that region. These logs are locked together at the corners. It is 180 foot long and the same in breadth. The inside of the log wall is the back of the houses for the soldiers, all under the one roof. The remainder is open and a good parade ground. No heathen will ever break down the gate we've made. If any of thim ever git inside, they will fall under the guns in the houses. One big cannon is to be so placed that it will give alarm. Ye'll be hearin' it in the town."
Captain Timothy Dwight's company was in the fort before the winter's end-some of the men from Northfield, Sergeant Cooper, Corporal William Syms, Privates Jonathan Janes and Nathaniel Mat- toon-and with them some Maqua Indians Captain Kellogg had gone to Albany to hire into the service. By March 27th, Colonel Stoddard, the valley's commander-in-chief, had come to the conclusion the Indians were of no use.
"Not wuth the provender to keep 'em alive," was the comment of Crowfoot, who saw them at the fort.
"Wuth nothin' at all," Captain Wright may be heard responding. "Cap'n Kellogg might have saved himself all that journey to Albany to git those redskins. The only place for a live Injun is fur enough off so he'll stay there."
As it proved, the Maquas were good soldiers in the fort while all was peace and quiet and what they did at the first sign of trouble was to get away, which on the whole was the best part of their service. It was discovered after they had gone that their tribe had been bought up by the French governor before Kellogg had invested in them.
The English were as ready to employ Indian allies on pay as were the French but they were much less adroit in the business and dis- tinctly less successful. The primary difference was that the English were ever trying to deal with them on the theory that they were men ;
II4
A PURITAN OUTPOST
the French regarded them as tools. And the two notions had the widely different result that the French gave full play to their savagery, put no restraint upon their murderous performance, indeed stimulated it and counted upon it to the limit of its deviltry, while the English wasted their efforts to mold their conduct into some semblance to civilized warfare.
Now, it seemed, Northfield was to develop into the town of the hopes of settlers who had clung to their homes in peril and had gained independence of non-resident authority. It was sheltered by the strong fort just beyond its northern border and there was no sign that Indian assaults would ever again disturb the quiet industry of a farming town, whose resources had not yet been employed to more than a fraction of their rich possibilities. It was no longer needed that Cap- tain Kellogg should stay to keep the town in the "posture of defence." He was ordered to recruit a small company to garrison Fort Dummer, from which Captain Dwight and his company had been relieved.
Even Dummer became more of a trading post than a military stronghold. Indians there were-a considerable number, as Major Partridge reported to the governor in 1727, but they were using the guns the English and the French had placed in their untrustworthy hands in the pursuit of game instead of the human beings they had made a source of profit by slaughter. The market for scalps was replaced by one for furry pelts. Trading with them gave play to the shrewdness of the thrifty settlers and, as Partridge told the Governor, to the employment of an ignoble ally, rum.
An Indian drunk was easy on a trade. The Major saw a new peril in the process. When the native sobered off and found he had parted with his furs "for a small matter," which small matter might have been only the potion that made him pliably good-natured, he was "mad and cared not what he did." New Indian atrocities were a possible sequel to a trade of substantial pelts for a transient stim- ulant. There was further peril in the sharing of the strong drink by the white man in the trade, producing upon him the effect of making him revengeful for some treasured recollection of a past outrage.
Perhaps it was when he was aroused by the spirits that Daniel Severance, whom Major Partridge cites as a disorderly instance, exclaimed, "I'm going to kill the Injun that scalped my father."
Daniel was a good soldier, already a lieutenant and clearly marked
II5
A MILITARY OUTPOST
for further service if occasion should arise, even now in Captain Kellogg's new company and warrantably resentful of the killing of his father, Ebenezer, while harvesting corn in Great Meadow four years before ; but the commander down the valley disapproved his outbursts and told the Governor of the danger of such threatenings.
Remedy for the unfair trading and protection against its con- sequences was found in making Captain Kellogg truck-master and turning Fort Dummer into a new defensive service by centering the fur-trading there. The Northfield men stationed at the Fort were now receiving a new liberality in pay, 40 shillings a month, and there was warrant for it in the profits the truck-house came to yield.
The town, as such, entered further into the realization of being an organized part of the province when, in 1727, it experienced its first general tax. Along with it, however, came the encouragement of a grant of money from the government, amounting to £94 in bills of credit, which could be loaned to the inhabitants on an interest charge of six per cent, only four per cent being turned over to the provincial treasury, the other two per cent staying in the town's hands. The tax list of this initial year carried forty-eight names, which was a proud array in contrast to any previous enumeration of heads of families, as these largely were. There were nine Wrights in the list and these with the Mattoons, Holtons, Fields, Alexanders, Stebbinses and Warners made up half the whole number, fresh evidence that it was an inter- related population.
A people that had thus far, under the stress of Indian peril and the slow advance of land-owners to actual possession, kept itself in occupation of but a fraction of its widespread territory, could now turn to the business of distributing its personally unowned lands. The method had been established in other towns and consisted of distribu- tion by choice, meaning that as each citizen drew his name from a box he was permitted to take as many acres as were represented by his citizenship, each poll being good for ten acres, and a valuation of £I or more yielding another ten. Reservation was made to the town of the timber, wood, stone and herbiage for seven years and forever, if in that time, the lands were not fenced. April 1, 1731, brought the first division. In it certain families added largely to their holdings, the Holtons, for example, getting eighty-one acres on the west side of the river and away from its banks.
116
A PURITAN OUTPOST
Other divisions followed, the third, in 1732, revealing no less number than 62 men who qualified for an allotment, the Wrights still holding their pre-eminence by having fourteen names on the list. With the new sense of landlordship these awards of acres upon acres stimulated, there developed the instinct for speculation. Certain propertied men down the valley were purchasers and what was real- ized from the lands was such clear profit that Northfield territory went in large tracts at a trifle per acre. One of these buyers acquired 2,124 acres and sold it in a lump to James Brown of Newport, Rhode Island, for twenty-two cents an acre. Jonathan Morton of Hatfield, a neighbor of that Oliver and Sophia Smith who were laying the foun- dations of their great fortunes, captured 1,048 acres.
Land was inexhaustible in extent in all the region. Just as, years before, it had been passed to a new minister in generous hundreds of acres and to committeemen almost as freely, it was now awarded to the brave defenders of the settlements. Captain Benjamin Wright came in for the compliment of a free grant of six thousand acres westerly of Braintree, the new Braintree, which lay north of Brook- field. Then the General Court committed a disturbing blunder by giving Governor Belcher five hundred acres of land above the Ashuelot river, which was promptly discovered by Northfield people to be terri- tory they had held for half a century.
Such duplication of possession as the gift to the Governor precipi- tated was cause enough for protest and Stephen Belding was sent to Boston to bring about a rectification. Belding failed to impress the General Court and came back defeated, the problem unsettled.
"Let me go," was Captain Benjamin Wright's new form of volun- teering, in all the spirit of his "Take me" in his remembered letter of years before. He mounted his horse on a June day in 1732 and struck out over the Brookfield trail, over which the discoverers came, still the one route to the Bay.
The arrival at Boston of this veteran of valley defenses could not fail to impress the General Court. He was seventy-two years old, vigorous, as he must needs be for such a journey, and with a repute that was spread throughout the province. He was not to be refused any request and he was not denied this one. He returned with a com- plete concession of Northfield's claim, which was but a final ratifica- tion of the survey that land-capturing surveyor, Timothy Dwight, had made some years ago.
II7
A MILITARY OUTPOST
Over the high hills to the northeast of the town, up the Ashuelot river, there was a section that had not yet fallen within the division projects. In early April, 1733, the General Court, being out from under the persuasion of Captain Wright, granted a plantation six miles square to Colonel Joseph Willard and some others for the estab- lishment of a plantation to be known as Earlington, soon to get spelled Arlington and then changed to Winchester. This grant cut three thousand acres out of Northfield's domain but in a section that had been undeveloped.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.