USA > Massachusetts > Franklin County > Northfield > Puritan outpost, a history of the town and people of Northfield, Massachusetts > Part 9
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Joseph Parsons, son of Cornet Joseph, the first grantee of North- field land and never a settler, had been at the first settlement as a boy and at the second as a youth and was still living, but not sharing an intention to return. His brother, Ebenezer, was killed in the In- dian onslaught of 1676. Thomas Poat had died in 1694; William Smead in 1703; Thomas Webster in 1686. Samuel Wright's death in the murderous last days of the first settlement had been the start- ing point of his son's, Benjamin's, devotion to Indian warfare. Judah, brother of Samuel and so the uncle of Captain Benjamin Wright, who might also recall the tragedy of 1676 as a witness, had just now (in 1713) died at the age of 71.
To follow the blood line from settlement to settlement would be to rival the entrancing interest of the "begats" of the Book of Kings. It may be assigned to the genealogies where remote descendants can gather pride out of a resolute pioneer ancestry. What the settlers of the second decade in the eighteenth century recognized was that they were in the main of the same blood as the first patriots of the valley's pioneer period, which had been spared from Indian murder. This flowed through the sonship of the second settlement and now filled the veins of sons and grandsons in the third. It was still the pure English blood and sustaining the same sturdy manhood.
CHAPTER X PERMANENCE
Blood of First Pioneers Recruited by New
HERE WAS AGAIN A PAPER TOWN, spacious in its homesteads, as the revived plan of the second settlement indicated them, more spa- cious in the stretches of unoccupied holdings between the eight houses that in the summer of 1714 displayed the enterprise of the few new pioneers. Only two of these appeared on the easterly side of the long street-Captain Benjamin Wright's, of course, for here was a per- sistent promoter of a real town, and Nathaniel Alexander's, with one vacant ten-rod lot between. Far to the south, where the first stockaded fort had stood, was Zechariah Field; 20 rods to the north, Isaac Warner, Jr. in his father's stead; another gap of 20 rods and then, adoining each other, Thomas Taylor and Hezekiah Stratton; be- yond the north meadow road, Joseph Alexander, succeeding his father, John, in the ownership of the corner lot ; three lots lay between him and Peter Evens, where John Woodard had owned the first title, now the farthest out in this scattering settlement.
Another waiting year, 1715, followed with but a single new arri- val, Ebenezer Mattoon, way beyond Mill Brook, on land of which Joseph Warner was the earlier owner. Mattoon, Stratton, Field were new names to the town spirit of enterprise in the scattered homes.
These promoters of the settlement, for which there was strong hope of permanence, were no chance group. They were united by bonds of inter-relationship, by residence in common in Northampton or Deerfield and by their baptism in the terrors and the sacrifices of the half-century. In the main they were young men. The oldest among them was Nathaniel Alexander, a patriarch at 62, seeming not a year older than the battle-seasoned Ben. Wright, who at 54 was veteran of nearly 40 years of Indian conflict and pursuit. Isaac Warner was 44, Peter Evens 40, Thomas Taylor was 34; Joseph Alexander, 33, Zech. Field, 29; Hezekiah Stratton and Eleazer Mat- toon, 25.
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Nathaniel and Joseph Alexander were uncle and nephew. Eleazer Mattoon was cousin by virtue of his marriage to a Boltwood. Zech. Field's wife was Mattoon's sister. Warner's mother was a Boltwood, tieing him in kin to Wright and Mattoon; moreover, his brother Samuel had married a sister of Zech. Field's wife. Stratton's sister was the youthful second wife of Benjamin Wright. Joseph Alexander had married Margaret, the daughter of Philip Mattoon and so a sister of Eleazer. Peter Evens' wife, Mercy, daughter of Edwin Allen, was a cousin of the wife of Nathaniel Alexander. Eleazer Mattoon, besides the connections already mentioned, had a sister who was the wife of Isaac Warner, Sr. In such a web, the nine households were but one, cousinship and in-law-ship binding them in cross ties that would some day be the puzzle of genealogical pursuers.
Tied as closely were these newcomers to old soil by the events that had made the history of the valley. Benjamin Wright, from the terror of September, 1675, had been in the front of every battle and the leader in the valley's defensive and offensive. Nathaniel Alexander could tell the story of the Falls' fight. Zech. Field was the son of Samuel, in the Falls' fight and killed by the Indians in 1697. His aunt was killed in the massacre at Deerfield-when, too, the family of his cousin John was broken up, the wife being one of the captives later returned from Canada. Zech. Field, a captain now, had shared in the pursuit of the Indians fleeing from the scene of their murderous assault in Deerfield, and in the Meadow fight. He had just now (in 1711) married Sarah Mattoon, another Deerfield captive, into whose life had come the further tragedy of the killing of Mathew Clesson by the Indians at Deerfield in 1709, whose will had left a bequest to her "who was like to be married to said deceased."
Isaac Warner had been a boy at Northfield in the second settle- ment and knew its sufferings. Deerfield's destruction had come home to him in the captivity of his brother, Ebenezer, with all his family, later among the redeemed. Thomas Taylor had been wounded in De Rouville's second attack on Deerfield (1709) and under Lieu- tenant Samuel Williams had been a sergeant in the convoy of French prisoners to Canada. Young Joseph Alexander had made his escape from the captive crowd out of Deerfield on the first night of the march towards Canada. Peter Evens in the late days of King Philip's war had been in the midst of Deerfield's events. Eleazer Mattoon
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was the son of Philip, soldier under Turner at the Falls fight, and Elizabeth, his wife, had lost her father, Samuel Boltwood, in the Meadow fight after Deerfield's capture.
Absentee ownership persisted. A full year had elapsed. The win- ter of 1714-15 had merged into spring and the planting season had passed with not a sign that the owners, all of whom had held tight to their titles, were to fill in the wide open spaces of the village along- side the few inter-related new pioneers. The General Court had as- sumed that when it reaffirmed the titles there would be a response in actual settlement. On that assumption it had placed upon the settlers the maintenance of the town.
With a craftiness greater than their patriotism, surely greater than their pioneerism, the owners settled back in their snug neighborhoods down the river and let Ben Wright and the few others build up around their lots. No taxes were laid upon the absentee owners. They were prospective beneficiaries in the way of unearned increment. They were also gathering the resentment of the few of their kith and kin who were struggling along to make their detached homesteads re- semble a town, which it fell far short of being. And this resentment, poured into the ears of the non-resident committee, finally led to a change in the scheme, a radical tax reform. Through Partridge and the others of the committee it reached the General Court, which, on June 15, of that second summer ordered
(1) That the time for settlement be extended three years further.
(2) That the committee "be directed to settle the town in the most regular and defensible manner that may be."
(3) Most importantly of all, that the town taxes be levied upon the owners, resident or not, particularly visiting upon them the main- tenance of the meadow fences.
It was the second article that first bore fruit in action. There was no visible threat upon the security of the town; no Indian visitations had been unfriendly ; there was peace in the valley; but to look at the scattered houses, nine of them spread over more than a mile's length, was to sense the peril of any attack. To make the town defen- sible was to compact it within the bounds of a stockade-and this the Committee proceded to do.
Town planning took a new turn. The broad street was to be nar- rowed to three rods. It was now to be a central highway, running
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from a north to a south gate, a distance of but 40 rods, with four highways intersecting and running to highways, only two rods wide, along the sides of the plot and just within the stockade. Within these close bounds were to be 24 lots, all of them less than 5 rods square. Within those bounds were the present settlers to remove and the future comers to find their abode.
Visions of a noble town vanished in this project. It was "defen- sible" only in the liberal sense of being enemy-proof. And it devel- oped prompt attack from within. The property of four of the settlers was within the bounds ; five were outside its limits, and would have to transplant.
When the proposal of the committee for a consolidated and con- fined settlement reached Northfield, there was precipitated the first violent difference of opinion. Captain Wright, Nathaniel Alexander and Thomas Taylor, the fronts of whose lots, with their house-sites, were within the proposed stockade, were agreeable to the plan. They knew the perils of exposed homes. They were for preparedness.
All the five whose home-lots were outside the plan opposed it. Family ties did not control them. The Alexanders, even, divided- Nathaniel for it, the nephew, Joseph, against it. Isaac Warner, Jr., and Zechariah Field down the street ; Peter Evens and Eleazer Mat- toon, away to the north; those stood out for their detached homes. To their side came Hezekiah Stratton, who was geographically within bounds, but personally an independent.
In the array, for and against, the resisters were in the majority, six against three. It was closely a division between cautious age and resolute youth. Majority ruled and outrightly enough to make the presiding committee, down at Northampton, abandon the restricted project. The resisters had saved the town to its future expansiveness, against a scheme which was held out to them to be only temporary but which they sensed was a practical abandonment of the project of a spacious town, with its long main street and its ample homesteads.
The absentee committee realized that it was dealing with a reso- lute even though small group of settlers. The resistance to the stock- ade plan led them at once to new action. It appointed from among the men on the ground a surveyor of highways, Zechariah Field, and fence viewers, Hezekiah Stratton and Eleazer Mattoon-all of them from among the insisters on the open town, adding Benoni Moore,
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who had succeeded to Lieutenant John Lyman's rights and was then living at Deerfield but presently to remove to Northfield. The com- mittee went further in recognition of the expansionists and ordered these surveyors and measurers to parcel out Bennett's meadow and Pauchaug, to measure out Great Meadow anew and place boundaries to the individual lots, reporting their action in the form of a plan of the allotments.
Another year (1716) showed results of the new tax policy. The advantages of non-residence had vanished. Benoni Moore, who had been granted a home-lot with its share in the meadows, arrived, and in the course of the season, Remembrance and Daniel Wright, Jon- athan Patterson, and two of the Janes family, Deacon Benjamin and Jonathan. The newcomers fitted readily into the inter-related com- munity, themselves tied to the slightly earlier settlers by bonds of blood and marriage. Only one, Jonathan Patterson, was a compara- tive stranger.
Patterson brought a new romantic association. His father, who had died in the first year of the century, had been a soldier in the loyalist army of Charles I and was one of the soldiers captured by Cromwell at the battle of Worcester. The Great Commoner sent him, with the other captives, to the Massachusetts colony, to be sold. He arrived at Boston on the John and Sarah in 1652. He did service in Philip's war and was made a freeman in 1690. His older sons settled in Billerica and Groton but Jonathan, the youngest, born in 1686, learning the tailor's trade, struck out for himself when he be- came of age and after a few years at Watertown had arrived in Deer- field in 1713. Grant of land had now been given him at Northfield on the usual condition that he should settle there, as he did, bringing with him his wife, a Deerfield Hawks, and their infant son. The town gained a patriot and a maker of clothes.
In the nine households scattered along the street by the end of 1715, childhood was slightly represented, compared with the popula- tion of the first settlement. It included 17, but most of them were in- fants and life was lonesome for the few older boys and girls. Captain Wright had the one big household, with David, 18, the son of his first wife, and William, 13; Mary, II, and Experience, 9, by his mar- riage to Mary Baker. To this he had added the young family of his son, Remembrance, who had brought his wife and the grandchild,
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Lydia, now two years old. Late in the year there had arrived a little Remembrance.
There were three eligible girls in Nathaniel Alexander's family. Abigail had reached the remarkable age of 26 for an unmarried per- son but was said to be the object of chief interest to Jonathan Smith of Hadley, whose brother, Joseph, had just now (in November) mar- ried her sister, Sarah. The others were Ruth, 24, and Thankful, 21. Here too was the one boy, Thomas, 19. The other Alexander family, that of Joseph, Nathaniel's nephew, was highly promising. He and his wife, Margaret Mattoon, had brought four children into the world, and to Northfield-John, who was now 9; Joseph, 6; Philip, 4 ; and Aaron, not quite 2. Their fifth, Rachel, born October 4, was one of the first native-born additions to the little colony.
Romance and annual childbirth marked the household of Zecha- riah Field. Here the mother was that Sarah Mattoon (sister of Joseph Alexander's wife) who had been in captivity in Canada, been re- deemed, just missed marrying Mathew Clesson by his death in 1709, and at 24 had married Zechariah. Here were the infants, Seth, who was 3 ; Sarah, 2 ; and Catherine, another girl of Northfield birth, born February 1I, 1715.
There were two young children in the Peter Evens household. He had married Mary Allen, of Deerfield, and here were John, scarcely four, and Peter, born February 11, 1714, just before the re- moval to the new town.
Beyond these there were only prospects, but ample ones as the fashion went in the productive valley towns. Two of the settlers had married this year, Thomas Taylor to Thankful, the daughter of Eleazer Hawks, at Deerfield, and Eleazer Mattoon to Elizabeth Bolt- wood, at Hadley. Hezekiah Stratton was the remaining bachelor and there were indications of his interest in another of the Deerfield Hawkses. He had rather elderly parents, living in Concord, whence he had recently come, and there was a notion in the village that he might have a design to bring them to his new house. An older sister had married Jonathan Minot of Boston but there were three brothers and two sisters younger than himself still in Concord.
Tom Alexander and Dan Wright remain in the picture as the natural boy companions. They had to take their full share of the work that fell upon the builders of new houses and the tillers of new
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soil. There was the plowing with the fearfully heavy wooden plows, behind unhurried oxen, the seeding of corn by the dropping of the prescribed number of kernels in each hill of the long rows, the pull- ing and spreading to dry of the flax, the sowing of wheat and barley, and in the harvest season, the cutting and "stooking" of the grain. The hay and grain had to be brought up the steep hill from the meadow and stacked in good form in the yards.
There were long slow trips to Hadley and Deerfield, chiefly the former, to cart back the boards and the provisions, there being no successor to John Clary and his household, all slaughtered by Indians back in 1688. The boys had not arrived at the skill required for hewing the timbers but they took their turn at cutting wood in the hills to the east of the settlement and when winter came they had their full share of snaking the logs over the snow with ox-teams.
Winter indeed brought no release from labor even for youth. There was the laborious husking and threshing and winnowing of the grain, the care of the stock, and, when not otherwise employed, the relief of the mothers in the slow process of butter-making in the deep stone churns. The appetite of the big fireplaces for fuel was one of their banes, and sawing and splitting was next to endless. There was well established in their minds that long-abiding rule of New England farm life that "change of work is play."
The nearest to play coming into their lives was hunting and fish- ing. Even these, along with the trapping, were subservient to the practical needs of the households and profit in trade. When the Con- necticut was running full of shad and salmon, there was another kind of harvest. Shad were in such abundance that it was almost a sign of poverty to be found making this fish the principal item in any meal. Getting salmon took on the form of sport and almost of art. There were few good spearing forks in the town and to be granted the use of one was a favor. The spearing places had also to be known. They were the points where rocks jutted from the shore into the river, adding a risk to the enterprise which was the cause for the mothers to caution the boys as to their footholds and for worry all the time they were known to be on the slippery ledges.
The woods were the boys' chief delight. There was game in abundance, large and small ; deer were plentiful and smaller animals and game birds, chiefly the partridge, were numerous ; but there was
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need of skill to locate their haunts and for the quick, sure aim to bring them down. The furs of the animals had dropped out of domestic use but they held an important one in the commerce of the valley towns, with only increasing value as they ceased to be brought in by the Indians in abundance and traded for trifles. Northfield had every advantage in its nearness to deep forests, in the number of the streams that came down from the hills, the abode of fur-bearers like the otter and the beaver, and in being the outpost of a region from which the growing human population was driving out the wild life.
On their tours into the hills and woods, Tom and Dan, as the two boys called each other when out of range of parental ears which would only tolerate Thomas and Daniel, would sometimes take along with them the next younger in the town, Dan's brother, William Wright, and they had their troubles in keeping out the nine-year brother of Tom, John Alexander, who had his own notion of age and consequence. Even William, whom they dared to call Bill, was a hindrance to their greater exploits, was not permitted to handle a gun, was too noisy at times when stealth was the need, as when trout fishing and partridge hunting, and had no patience with their man- fashion practice of creeping up upon imaginary Indians.
If play was a forbidden word in the boy vocabulary it was quite unknown to girl life. The daughters shared the toil of their mothers. They carded, spun and wove; they sewed and knit ; they set the mash and brewed the beer; they skimmed the cream from the earthen pans and if they did not work the dasher of the churn, they had the salting and rolling of the butter. They married young and to the toil of the households they presently added the duty of childbearing and rearing. That they were not reduced to moroseness was some- what the fortune of ready, even pious, acceptance of their place, and for the rest, the product of their sound physical health and the capacity for companionship with others of the same sex and place in life at social functions no more exciting than a quilting bee or a husking party, with its added thrill of the presence of boys and young bach- elors, surely on their way to early matrimony. How the three Wright girls had escaped marriage was a marvel and even they had a secret notion that Hezekiah Stratton ought to be saved the travel to Deer- field for his courting.
CHAPTER XI BROAD PLANNING
Social Foundations Laid for All Time
THERE WERE TRACES of the second settlement on the lot where Zechariah Field was to build his house and farther up the street where Micah Mudge's house had stood, and again on the brow of the hill where John Clary and his girl were killed. The stout timbers with which the houses of the earlier settlement had been built had withstood the weather of a quarter century. They were partially decayed and that they were not wholly gone may have been due to the charring from fires set by the Indians.
The nine houses that by the end of 1715 scattered along the street were much alike. They were two stories high and had pitched roofs. Their frames were of heavy hewn timbers, with the sills set close to the ground with a little under-pinning. The covering was of clap- boards, the roofs covered with hand-shaved shingles. In the center rose the big stone chimney, broadened out at the base to provide the great fireplace, which furnished the heat for the entire house and with its hooks, pots and kettles the means for the family cooking. The inside finish, both floors and walls, was of pine boards, some of them as much as two feet wide. The furnishings were hardly more varied, high-backed settees which could be moved to face the fire, a few chairs and more stools, a stout table or two and beds with square posts, plain head- and foot-boards and slats nailed to the sides, the frame being held together with wooden pins.
Captain Wright's house had two exceptional features. One was a cellar, under a part of the house, without a wall and without light, entered by a trapdoor. It was wet in the seasons when the ground was full of water but it was cool and had its uses for keeping vege- tables and butter. The other was the lean-to, the "lean-ter" as the Captain, for that matter all the settlers, called it. The house stood
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with its length facing the street and the roof was extended at the rear, with the same slope, to a one-story height, furnishing additional sleeping room for his numerous household. It had the usual few and small windows, with small panes of glass set in frames that either were immovable or hinged to swing open, inward. These were pro- tected by board shutters. The doors were of heavy oak plank. The houses that had stood a year or more had by this time taken on the brown of exposed boards, which would darken to still browner with the years.
Notions varied as to the location of the barn, which each place had. The rule was to have it on the line of the house, with a barn- yard between, but two or three owners had varied by placing it at a little distance back of the house, with an open shed, convenient for the house wood, connecting.
There was another difference in plan, in relation to the street line. Some of the houses were set back a short distance but most of them were nearly on the front line of the lot. Plenty as was space, there was outright criticism of the waste of it for a front yard which could serve no useful purpose. The street was wide enough as it was. It was waste space, except that it furnished a road-way, which wan- dered wherever carts happened to have been driven, and the storage of any of the carts or the plows or accumulating manure piles. There were scattering trees, including the oak, under whose shade Elder Janes had preached the first sermon forty years ago, and some clumps of brush that had sprung up in the neglected years. It was an impos- ing avenue on the plan, a wide stretch of next to unused land on the face of things.
Visitation of taxes upon the non-resident owners, which had been counted upon to induce their removal to the town, was proving next to ineffective but it put some activity into sales. The staunch settlers scattered along the street watched these transactions with renewed hope that they would produce actual neighbors.
Could it be expected that Joseph Parsons, son of the Cornet Joseph, to whom the first deed of Northfield land had run, would come again to the scene of those two or three years of his boyhood, where he had been one of the group driven into the fort for torturing
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hours of uncertainty of their lives, where he had seen his brother slain by the Indians in their attack and which he had left in that woeful company Major Treat had saved? He was a judge now, had been for years the representative in the General Court from both Springfield and Northampton and had accumulated wealth. He was typical of the conversion of pioneer into capitalist, of venturer into conservative. The Northfield estate lost its charm with the recur- rence of tax bills. It was sold in this summer of 1716 to another citi- zen of Northampton, Jonathan Hunt, somewhat younger but yet a man in middle life. The lot was across the street from Captain Ben- jamin Wright and the new ownership gave him the prospect of a friendly neighbor, about his own age, and with a family of eight children, the oldest boys 22 and 19, and the youngest but four years old. Hunt was a malster and a cooper and a substantial addition to the village.
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