USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 6
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The movement was delayed pending negotiations for the redemp-
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tion of captives. Among the redeemed was Mrs. Rowlandson, who had spent the early days of her captivity in Philip's camp at Squak- heag. By mid-June, Hadley was to quarter a garrison of near a thousand men. Before all the troops had arrived, 700 Indian warriors swooped down upon Hadley, met with unexpected resistance and fled in panic. Meanwhile the Mohawks had fallen upon the camp of Passacus, at Squakheag, sacked it completely and left 50 women and children dead in the ruins.
Dislodging the hostile Indians from the valley had become the determined policy of the Bay government. Detachments sent out from Hadley ranged in all directions, rarely encountering the shift- ing remnants of Philip's braves, destroying the growing corn, gather- ing in stores of provisions, removing the abandoned forts and wig- wams. Captain Swain was in command of the Valley forces. In August, the fields of corn at Squakheag were destroyed by his soldiers, gathered from all garrisons. With this final stroke, the war of Philip in the Valley ended on August 22. The chieftain, driven to bay by the great fighter, Captain Benjamin Church, his ablest braves slain, deserted, betrayed, bereft by the capture of his wife and only son, had fallen and his head been taken to Plymouth on a day appointed for thanksgiving, long to be exposed on the battlement of Plymouth fort. His boy, the last of the Massasoit race, was sold as a slave in Bermuda.
Squakheag, for a fateful year, the capital of the Indian realm, now reverted to wilderness. Presently the picture of its occupation by Philip was to be drawn by Mrs. Rowlandson, who had been held there, on the way to her Canadian captivity. She had been redeemed and the story of her captive days became the possession of the people of the Colony, to be printed, as the first record in printed page of the tragic days, in 1685. On the afternoon of her "seventh remove," she had reached Squakheag, "where the Indians quickly spread them- selves over the deserted English fields, gleaning what they could find. Some picked up ears of wheat that were crickled down. Some found ears of Indian corn. Some found ground nuts and others sheaves of wheat that were frozen together in the shock and went to threshing of them out. Myself got two ears of Indian corn, and, whilst I did turn my back, one of them was stolen from me, which much troubled me."
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On the second day of her stay, Mrs. Rowlandson was escorted to the river bank, on the way to visit King Philip, at the hill which was his lookout, but as she was about to go into a canoe, a great shout arose and she was forced to step back. Her visit to Philip came later and some miles up the river, at Coassett, where on March 7, she was regally received with an offer of a pipe, which she declined, having given up the smoking of tobacco. She wrote into her faithful record, "I could not but be amazed at the numerous crew of Pagans that were on the bank."
The grain Mrs. Rowlandson had seen gleaned in March, 1676, was the frozen remains of the crops of the first settlers. That gath- ered in by Captain Swain was of the planting of the Indians the next season. There would be no more until the colonists should venture again from the lower settlements into a region of still doubtful security.
CHAPTER VI SECOND SETTLEMENT
Pioneering Takes Little Note of Peril
SOMEWHAT OF ROMANCE would be missing in a second settlement. The men of 1672 advancing into unknown country, to break virgin soil for civilized homesteads, carrying forward to new bounds the realm of Christendom, guided by pioneer impulse, with prudence subdued, and calculation of advantage offset by pious determination to have and to hold at whatever cost, were heroes as not they nor their sons would ever seem to be again. The same men, for them- selves, and their sons through their seasoned guidance, would take reckoning of perils ere they set out to reclaim what had been tragi- cally lost.
Not for a moment had determination to occupy the fair site of the upper valley weakened. It waited. The evil days of the succeed- ing seasons, the vicious incursions of the red men, the desertion of Deerfield in the same month as that of Squakheag, the raid which had driven even the Northampton families into closer quarters, the slaughter that had given the Falls fight a sequel full of warning against offensive movements, had wrought instruction in caution. Philip, known instigator of the savage plan of white extermination, had died. Scouting up the valley, a never-ending enterprise, had re- vealed diminishing numbers of the enemy. Some negotiations toward peace had disclosed a lessened if not an abandoned enmity. And there was the constant lure of the rich lands which for three seasons had responded bountifully to their husbandry.
It was inevitable that the discussions as to re-settlement should sound more like the proceedings of a real estate exchange than the outpourings of a prayer-meeting. Collectively, the title-holders dis- played caution ; individually they would meet danger with unquailing spirit. Some of them, older now and instructed in the serious busi-
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ness of pioneering, were conservative; but among them were valiant sons whose names should yet be immortalized in frontier annals.
Not in the meeting-house, as in the days when the project of forming a settlement at Squakheag was a community undertaking, but at one or another of their houses, the grantees gathered to talk over the return to their abandoned lands. Now it was at William Holton's new house on Meeting House hill, which had replaced the one burned by the Indians in their raid of March 14, 1676-the only house to be destroyed within the palisades. Its destruction had been a gain rather than loss to the community-and to the whole val- ley-for the Indians learned such a lesson in loss of life that they henceforth respected palisades as traps to be avoided.
Or gathered at the house of William Clarke, still newer, on the ground that far in the future was to be occupied by the main build- ing of Smith College. Here they would recount the still recent sensa- tion furnished by the negro, named Jack, when he locked the Clarke family in the house and set it afire, an act for which he paid the penalty of being "hanged by the neck till he be dead and then taken down and burnt to ashes in the fire with Maria, the negro." In Maria's case, she having set fire to two houses, the preliminary of hanging was omitted, burning at the stake being more appropriate.
Whether at Holton's or Clarke's the Squakheag land-owners were in the presence of a great man of the town. Both were seasoned councillors, to whom the people had turned in every problem of church or town and of war or peace. Holton was now 71 and Clarke 73 years old. Both of them were ready to serve as best they could on the committee for the second settlement as they had on the first.
Late in the winter of 1682 a petition to the General Court was drawn up, asking that a committee be authorized to order and regu- late the affairs of the plantation. It was less reverential in its phras- ing than the one of a decade earlier but it did not fail to ask the blessing of God and divine direction in the legislature's proceedings, a formality that in time would come to be omitted in legislative peti- tions. It made note of the deaths of William Allys and Isaac Graves of the first committee and asked that their places be filled. Allys, who died in 1678, had long been cornet of the Northampton trained band and Sergeant Graves, who was of Hatfield, had been a member
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of the council of war appointed by Pynchon in the troubled days of that year.
The General Court at its session of May 24, 1682, made its order upon the petition and gave a new spelling to the troublesome name of the plantation-Squaheag. It named as new members of the com- mittee : Ensign John Lyman, Sergeant John King and Sergeant Pre- served Clap. They with William Clarke, William Holton and Lieu- tenant Samuel Smith, surviving members, made up the committee which should take upon itself a restored government of the revived village.
Ensign Lyman was the first American-born son of Richard, who came from England in 1631, bringing with him in his family group the son, Richard, who was the progenitor of the Northfield Lymans in one line as this John was of another which ended in the town with William Swan Lyman. When John was thirteen he had gone with his father and brothers in "the great removal" with Hooker to Hartford. Sergeant King was English born (1629), was at Hartford in 1645 and Northampton in 1654. He was now Northampton's representa- tive in the General Court as he was to be until 1689, a period of ten years. He had married a daughter of William Holton but his name was not to be perpetuated in the town where he was an original grantee. (Temple and Sheldon include a Samuel King as one of the grantees of 1682 but as this son of John was but seventeen years old at the time and the name does not appear among the settlers this may be one of the rare errors of these exact antiquaries.) Lieutenant Clap was younger than his associates, born in 1643. He was a man of affairs, the trusted bearer of the rich shipments of furs which Joseph Hawley periodically sent down to Pynchon at Springfield. His house, outside the Northampton palisades, had also been burned in the In- dian onslaught of 1676. His little girls, Sarah and Waite, were among those first girls of the town to go to school, pupils of the already famous Joseph Hawley.
The worth of these new men, established in their leading share in Northampton's life, was further attested by all three of them hav- ing been in the Falls' fight, the major historic event of the period between Northfield's first two settlements.
There was yet another member of the committee, as he had been of the earlier one, Lieutenant Samuel Smith. He was the son of the
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Rev. Henry Smith of Wethersfield whose leadership in a controversy there was so effective that it led to a numerous emigration to Hadley, even though it occurred after his death. Lieutenant Samuel had been for several years in Northampton but was now of Hadley and later of Hatfield. The youngest of his children was born in August, 1677, in the midst of all the alarm and excitement of the war, when almost any child born in the Connecticut valley could appropriately have been given the name which was henceforth to be repeated along the generations of the Smith family-Preserved. Lifting the veil on the future, the descent from Lieutenant Smith is found to have included the Oliver Smith, whose benefactions were made permanent in the form of the Smith charities, and his sister, whose name stands as that of the great college for women ; likewise, Mary Lyon, the founder of Mount Holyoke, through marriage into the Miles Standish family, another distinguished list; and, at Northfield, the Mattoons (Isaac of the nineteenth century), the Doolittles (including the Mrs. Lydia Everett, whose home next to the First Parish church was later that of Ira D. Sankey), the Alexanders (through the mother of Major Elisha Alexander), the Strattons (and thus of the Lord and Webster families ) .
Caution and deliberation were to be expected of a committee made up so largely of men who had been immersed in the conflicts with the savages of the valley and who could give full appraisal to the perils of exposed plantations; the farthest advanced one had been Squakheag, as it would again be if it were re-established. They delib- erated a full year, not idly but cautiously. As they met from time to time at the homes of the Northampton members, they canvassed the list of the original grantees, made note of the removal of some of them and uncovered the dubious state of mind of others who had become fixed in the safer shelter of populous and progressing towns such as this one and others farther down the valley. But they found no disposition to relax title to the abandoned lands of the northern-most plantation.
The committee's mind-searchings of the holders of the titles by virtue of the first settlement and their weighing of conditions which must put to test their readiness to revive them in actual occupation came to a definite point in the spring of 1683. They reached these momentous conclusions-
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I. That there shall be forty families settled on the tract ; and that the home of each shall be twenty rods wide.
2. That Pauchaug meadow and the upper division of Great Meadow shall be "thrown up," so that future settlements shall be encouraged.
3. That every person who has sixty acres of interval land shall settle two persons upon it.
4. That these owners must be there by the 10th of May 1686, or forfeit their lands.
5. That if any fail to settle two families upon the 60 acres they shall have the remainder of their land at the further end of the plan- tations.
The outcome of such an arrangement was clearly foreseen to be a compact town, without unoccupied homestead lots alternating with the actual homes, but not with narrow bounds. The map they drew was of a settlement of hardly less than magnificent distances. There would be a main street ten rods in width, with each estate having a frontage of twenty rods, and reservations for common use or for the public occupation as the community's needs should develop. Given great expanse of territory and no present occupancy, the committee plotted a town as none of the earlier towns had been developed, with their adjustment to the possession of lots by the chance of personal occupation.
An antiquarian interest attaches to the list of thirty-five allot- ments made by the committee but it has a fragile relationship to the actual settlement. Names abound therein which never found their owners transplanted to the ground nor reappear in the later life of the then problematic community. Deeply discouraging was the re- sponse and it was quite another year before a plan on paper was transferred to lines on the soil. Three men had been given the task of marking out the highways along which the homesteads were to face. They were Micah Mudge, the youth of the first exploring party and now but thirty-four ; John Broughton, also in the early thirties, stepson of William Janes and half brother of Samuel and Benjamin, small boys now and future sharers in the new town's life; Benjamin Wright, now but twenty-three years old but matured beyond his years by the experience of 1675, when he had seen his father killed in the Squakheag debacle.
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Whenever in the future, the breadth and the straight lines of Northfield's "street" should be admired, credit would be given to these three young men who with rod and rope and rod-long pole, crude implements of amateur surveyors, ran its lines. They plotted as well a grand intersecting avenue, of the same amplitude, running to "the meadow fence west and so (it runs) into the woods eastward," a design that some time, when landspaces should seem not so limitless, would suffer a contraction in breadth by nearly one-half.
The youthful surveyors had performed their town planning in the first weeks after the heavy soil of the valley, here underlaid by a water-holding hardpan of clay, had yielded its sticky hold on the frost. Their report was delivered under date of May 28. Every man's holdings were exactly defined on their map. There was now no physical reason why they should not take possession. It was late for planting but not forbiddingly so, and there were splendid months ahead for house-building. Given the enthusiasm of the 1672 settlers, the season would not have passed unimproved. The four years within which titles must be secured by occupation would begin to run in November. The urgency was not extreme and the proprietors were quite comfortable in their Northampton and Hadley homes. More- over, there were lingering doubts as to Indian infestment, although the surveyors had been undisturbed and seemingly unwatched by native eyes.
The summer passed with slight indication, on the ground, of a purpose to occupy. With the autumn, the fires were started on the meadow lands and the plains, after the fashion of the Indians, to free them from sprouting brush and rank growth. The year had counted for next to nothing. Then followed the winter with its suc- cession of meetings of the landlords at one end and another of their houses in Northampton. One day, when the spring was appearing, they were at Ensign Lyman's house, and came out of their fruitless winter-long talk to a conclusion that, since the "bound marks between men's lots were lost since the time they were driven away by the Indians, being about ten years since," the home lots and the meadow lands should be measured again and each man should "have his just due."
This decision, not such a difficult one as to have taken months to reach, was made April 8. It took three weeks to reach another, that
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the men who found that their meadow lots were too small or too poor in quality to be a fair share should be granted a portion of the upper section of Great Meadow or of Pauchaug "until it be equalized." Then the prospectors made a significant addition to the project by granting John Woodward, William Clarke (the son of the veteran head of the committee of 1672) and Richard Lyman and "any other that shall join with them, liberty to build a saw-mill." The first industrial grant was liberal and reflected the sense of amplitude of space that guided all the proceedings-"a stream, so much land as they need to pond on and to lay logs upon, 20 acres of land near the mill for pasturing or any other youse, ... and liberty of the Com- mons for timber what they need to build with."
The settlement project was expanding-in prospect, and to get more room a petition was sent the General Court for extension of the grant two and a half miles to the south, reading "Fower Miles Brooke." It was dated May 23, 1685. The statement in it that there were "neare about forty families preparing to settle there within a little time" was based on such assurances as William Clarke, the wise and experienced leader and the sole signer of the petition, would need for any representation he would make. The petition was granted. Thereby were added valuable home-sites and a wealth of timber but no meadow, that region later to be known as Pine Meadow having been spared the Indian's annual burning over and being heavily timbered as its name suggests.
Another year was getting into its summer season. The meadows invited the plow. The home lots were marked out. The territory had been enlarged to meet all demands. Where were the forty families? The answer was that half of them were still reckoning with the perils of a home so far removed from other settlements and recalling the fate of their kin and neighbors in the earlier venture. The committee members were eloquent in their advice to the other land-owners to go forward but none among them set an example.
Among the older men, William Miller was almost the only one to show an active interest. He had come early to Northampton, was one of the first colony at Squakheag, a resolute pioneer, moreover he had a daughter married to Godfrey Nims and living in Deerfield, much such an exposed place as Squakheag would be. Micah Mudge, first explorer, in the first settlement, surveyor of the new one, was
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keen for the new venture. There was no doubt in his own mind nor in that of any others who knew him that Benjamin Wright would be among the first ; his blood never cooled from the heat of that day his father had been killed. John Alexander would not be outdone by his sister, Mudge's wife.
Cornelius Merry, the Irishman, completed the Northampton group to go to the new town this summer. He had won his way against odds in the older one. He was one of few Irishmen in an English community, and all of them were held in disdain. Among them only three were ever permitted to hold land and they were denied citizenship. Cornelius was the 'servant of John Lyman, held in cast-iron indenture. He was the first of his race to receive a grant of land, when the town-meeting ordered three acres to be allowed him, "yet not so as to make him Capabelle of acting in any town affairs, no more than he had before it was granted to him" ---- which was none at all.
Prior to this action, in 1666, the court ordered "Cornelius Merry to be whipt 20 stripes for abusing the authority in this country and the English by seditious speeches." Cornelius was probably the first among Irishmen transported to America to give voice to the undying antipathy towards the English-this was the purport of his "seditious speeches." A portion of the penalty of stripes was remitted, the number of stripes reduced.
Even so it was not Cornelius Merry's first offence. For a mis- demeanor he had previously been fined thirty shillings. He paid all but ten shillings of the fine and his master, John Lyman, agreed to pay that sum, with two shillings for costs and the Court ordered the Irishman to serve his master twelve days more after his term of apprenticeship should have expired.
Even at this, Cornelius was less unfortunate in the contumely of English superiors than others of the Irish servants in Northampton. Another of the three to receive a grant of land was David Thro, his grant being "upon the same conditions that Cornelius the Irishman was." After his apprenticeship was completed David went to Spring- field, where he also broke through the racial lines by marrying Pris- cilla, widow of William Hunter, in 1678. But David had the same Hibernian gift of fervid speech as his friend, Cornelius, and in 1665 had been presented to the Northampton court "for contemning the
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constable's authority, commanding him into the meetinghouse in the time of God's ordinances last Sabbath." David's resistance to church attendance under the constable's command caused him to be ordered to "sit in the stocks during the court's pleasure."
The third land-holding Irishman was Matthew Clesson, who had his three acres "granted to him as the other Irishman haue it granted theme not as a hom lote." He had acquired fifty-nine acres of land lying in twelve different parcels; his dwelling-house was one of those burned in the raid of 1675; and he had taken the oath of allegiance in 1673. Clesson's name was in the first petition to the General Court in behalf of Squakheag and in the list of those granted land in the first settlement.
Cornelius Merry bore his slights with calm. He was as jovial as his name suggested. Indeed Northampton people believed it had been acquired through this trait. He was as good as any of them-and on one occasion, stirred by some particular meanness of his civic superiors had declared, "a dam sight better." He taught them a lesson of racial equality that jarred them deeply by marrying Rachel Ball. He was always ready with his gun for the Indians and bore his share in the Falls' fight. He was in the first Squakheag colony and now he was keen for the second venture.
Others to reach Squakheag in the summer of 1685 were from other towns than Northampton-Samuel Davis, who went up from Deerfield; Benjamin Palmer, from Hadley; and John Clary, Jr., whose father had come from Watertown to Hadley, the son reaching Northfield after residence in Hatfield.
CHAPTER VII BUILDING
Confidence Broadens Spaces and Plans
HARDLY A TRACE remained of the village of the decade before. The site of the stockade was strewn with charred timbers and for the rest there were but few marks of the destroyed homes. The Indians had made the destruction complete. But these had vivid memories for Wright and Mudge and Merry at least. They and their com- panions set about building homes, less primitive than the earlier ones. They worked together and before the summer was gone there were scattered houses along the wide stretch of land which was to be the future street. Now they were not building with nearness to a protect- ing palisade, much less within it. They were appropriating the spacious lots, each for himself, taking first steps towards a symmetri- cal, expansive town.
John Alexander and Micah Mudge were near neighbors, on the west side of the street, with the intersecting avenue to the meadow between them. Next Mudge, to the south, was Samuel Davis, while one hundred rods down the road Cornelius Merry was building, nearly down to the site of the former stockade. Nearly opposite him was William Miller and on the second lot north Benjamin Wright was settling. John Clary, Jr., was far up the street, on the brow of the slope to the brook which was already in his mind as the site for the saw-mill. Across this little valley and coming down to the brook as it approached the street was Benjamin Palmer.
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