USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Pittsfield > The history of Pittsfield (Berkshire County), Massachusetts, from the year 1734 to the year 1800 > Part 10
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CANOE MEADOW
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the most conspicuous figures in the history of the town, was born at Wethersfield in 1720, and "obtained a hope " says his epitaph, "under Whitefield in 1741." He was the first man of considerable property who joined the settlement, and long continued the wealthiest citizen of the town, as well as one of those most distinguished for enterprise and intellectual ability. Both before and after his removal to Poontoosuck, he dabbled a good deal in land speculations, and had large interests in what are now Hancock and Lanesborough. In June, 1752, he bought of Col. Wendell " one third-of his one-third part " of the "Commons, or undivided lands," of Poontoosuck, for £473 7s. 4d. And being, unlike the other proprietors of those lands, desirous of immediately enjoying his 'portion, he applied to the next September term of the Superior Court, sitting at Springfield, for the appointment of commissioners to make partition; and the following gentlemen were accordingly named for that duty : Timothy Dwight, Eldad Taylor, David Moseley, Benjamin Day, and Obadiah Dickinson. The lands were alloted by them to the several proprietors in accord- ance with the plan here given, which was accepted and confirmed by the Court at its next session. It did not, however, prove acceptable to Colonel Wendell, and he petitioned the General Court that it might be annulled : alleging that no proper notice of the proceedings in the Court at Springfield having been served upon him, his only knowledge of them was transient and acci- dental ; that only four out of the five gentlemen named by the Court had acted on the commission ; that only the meadow-lands had been surveyed by them, - a general view merely being taken of the uplands, - and that, in part, when they were covered with snow; and that, returning home, the four commissioners, in their winter leisure, set out the allotments to the several proprietors, which in the spring were surveyed by only two of their number, as the four had protracted them upon the plan. He considered, that, if any justice had been done by such a process, it must have been the effect, not of judgment or understanding, but of accident ; which accident had not happened, as the division was very unjust and unequal, and greatly injurious to himself, - all which he con- ceived would appear to the Court from an inspection of the plan.
Notice of Col. Wendell's memorial was ordered in "The Week- ly Post-boy." The commissioners responded, that -the law re- quiring all the proprietors to be notified of the proceedings, that
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they might, if they wished, be present at the making of the division -they sent word to Col. Wendell and Elisha Jones, by Col. Partridge, who was going to the General Court, in October; that, Mr. Dickinson being unable to join them, it was necessary to pro- ceed without him; that they "had obtained an exact accompt of the upland, and the situation and laying of the meadow, as it is interspersed and intermingled among the upland; and examined, as far as they thought needful, the quality of the soil, the form of the surface of the ground, and the timber growing upon it; " that the subsequent proceedings were properly had, and the commis- sioners unanimous in all their acts.
The General Court sustained the objections of Wendell, and in June, 1754, resolved that the partition was, " of course, null and void." 1
But Goodrich had already - as soon, at least, as the partition was confirmed by the Superior Court - built upon a portion of the land set off to him, which now forms a part of Hon. Thomas Allen's farm.
Col. Williams, at the close of the war, wavered in his intention of settling at Poontoosuck; and in October, 1749, obtained from his friend, Gov. Benning Wentworth of New Hampshire, an authorization 2 which subsequently resulted in the grant to him and sixty-three other persons - of whom nine bore the name of Williams - of the township which afterwards became Benning- ton in Vermont, with whose fame that of Pittsfield is so gloriously associated in Revolutionary story.
But in November, 1752, -"Col. Williams having already been at Poontoosuck in order to bring forward a settlement, and intend- ing to return early the next spring to reside permanently at the place " - Madame Stoddard addressed a note 3 to "The Hon. Timothy Dwight and the other gentlemen commissioners," desiring them, in apportioning her share of the township, to " have respect to the design of her deceased husband ; that his kinsman, William Williams, settling at Poontoosuck, should have one hundred acres of his lands there."
Through the agreement thus acknowledged, - Col. Wendell afterwards joining in the gift, as he had joined in the original
1 Mass. Ar. v. 116, p. 491. 2 T. C. C. p. 86.
3 Madame Stoddard's letter in Laneton Col.
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promise, - Col. Williams finally obtained a rectangular tract, one hundred and twenty by one hundred and thirty-four rods in area, lying upon Unkamet Street, west of the meadow.1
He also received in the same way the " original home-lot," No. 31 north, which lay about one hundred and twenty-five rods farther west, and contained some valuable meadow and upland. But he built his log-cabin, and commenced his clearing, in 1753, on the north side of Unkamet Street, and not far from the river.
On the 23d of June, 1753, a petition was presented in the General Court "from the inhabitants of the township on the Housatonick River, commonly called Poontoosuck," 2 setting forth the difficulties they were under in bringing forward their settle- ment, and praying for directions and assistance. In response, the Court incorporated them as a plantation under the name of " The Proprietors of the Settling-lots in the Township of Poontoosuck," with the power to assess and collect taxes, but only upon the
! Although it is clear that Col. Williams finally obtained this Unkamet-street property in virtue of. the Wendell and Stoddard promise of 1743, yet some obscurity rests upon the intermediate transactions. The tract was allotted by the commissioners to Wendell and the heirs of Stoddard ; but was understood "to be and belong to William Williams, " who thus recited his title in a mortgage-deed of 1754. This title, of course, failed when the partition upon which it was founded was annulled. But conveyances are extant, -in the H. C. C. and the Spring- field Registry, - which indicate that agreements regarding tracts in the vicinity of Unkamet Street, made among the joint proprietors previously, were carried into effect in the final partition of the Commons in 1759-60. Thus Wendell and Mrs. Stoddard, although their exclusive title to the lands in question does not appear by the record to have become perfect until 1760, gave a deed of them, with warranty, to Col. Williams in 1758 ; and, in like manner, Charles Goodrich sold him two contiguous acres in May, 1759.
In the final division of the township, as in the first, the hundred acres were assigned to Wendell and the heirs of Stoddard, although they actually became the property of Williams; but the latter, in regard to some undivided right which he had acquired in the Commons, obtained - besides large tracts near Poontoosuck Lake - a narrow strip containing twenty-five aeres, and lying in the form of the letter L, on the north and west sides of the Unkamet-street property, and also a straight strip of sixteen acres on the south of it.
The apparently detached location and inconvenient shape of Col. Williams's lands, as exhibited by the plan of 1759, are thus explained by the fact, that he really owned the intervening lands as well. The allotment of the one hundred acres jointly to Wendell and Stoddard - the only instance upon the plan in which they are joined - is also thns made clear.
2 It was also often styled Wendell, or Wendell's Town, and sometimes Wendell and Stoddard's Town.
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sixty settling-lots; exeluding the lands reserved for the first minister, for the perpetual support of the ministry, and for schools, as well as the " Commons."
Plantations, under the old statutes, although embryo towns, yet, in their powers and duties, resembled private more nearly than municipal corporations.1 The officers which they chose were only a moderator, a clerk, a treasurer, a collector, and asses- sors. And they were simply empowered, through these agents, to assess and collect province, county, and plantation taxes ; appro- priating the last to fulfil the conditions upon which they held their lands, and to make such improvements in building bridges, making highways, and the like, as, by " bringing forward the settle- ment," would enhance the common value of the home-lots.
Any community of Massachusetts men, associated as the people of Poontoosuck were, would certainly have united, if it became expedient, in measures for the protection of the public morals, and the promotion of the general safety or comfort; and they would have been likely to resolve upon them in Proprietors' meet- ing. But the statute gave such resolutions no legal effect ; and, in fact, the only allusion in the Poontoosuck records to matters of local police is a vote that "hogs shall not run at large."
Among graver matters, appropriations for the support of publie worship - sincerely as the people individually prized "the minis- trations of the Gospel " - in Proprietors' meeting, were, of necessity, purely business transactions, done in fulfilment of contracts ; and even provision for the burial of the dead was to be considered as adding to the value of the home-lots, whose occupants were thus assured of the chamber whose narrow bed all must one day need.
On the 30th of July, Simeon Crofoot, Charles Goodrich, Jacob Ensign, Solomon Deming, Stephen Crofoot, Samuel Taylor, and Elias Willard requested Joseph Dwight, Esq., to call the first meeting of " the Proprietors of the Settling-lots in the Township of Poontoosuck," to act upon certain articles specified in the request. That magistrate accordingly issued his warrant to Stephen Crofoot, " one of the principal proprietors, etc," directing him to warn the meeting, to be held at the house of Elias Willard at two o'clock in the afternoon of Sept. 12, by posting up the
1 Especially in cases like that of Poontoosuck, where their jurisdiction was con- fined to a single seetion of the township.
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request and warrant, twenty days at least before the day of the meeting, in some public place in the township.
The Proprietors met at the appointed time, and, Gen. Dwight presiding, chose Hezekiah Jones as moderator; after which the plantation was organized by the choice of the following officers : Clerk, David Bush ; Assessors, Deacon (Stephen) Crofoot, Hezekiah Jones, Jacob Ensign; Treasurer, Charles Goodrich; Collector, Samuel Taylor, 2d.
It was voted to assess a tax of three shillings upon each lot "for the support of preaching among us," and to raise, in lawful money, £40 for building a meeting-house, and £15 for making highways, building bridges, and "for other necessary expenses that shall come upon us."
Deacon Crofoot, Charles Goodrich, and Jacob Ensign were ap- pointed " to agree with some suitable person or persons to preach among us"; Jacob Ensign, Josiah Wright, and Abner Dewey "to dispose of " the appropriation for bridges and highways; Hezekiah Jones, Israel Dewey, Elias Willard, Deacon Crofoot, and Charles Goodrich, "to manage the whole affair of the meeting-house," which last did not prove an affair to be easily "managed."
It was of much importance to the plantation, that saw and grist mills should be erected, as the nearest point at which the farmers could have their grain ground was Great Barrington, twenty-one miles distant ; and it does not appear how sawed lumber could be obtained at all within any practicable distance. Deacon Crofoot, who seems to have been an active and enterprising man, wished to supply the deficiency, and, for this purpose, asked the plantation to exchange that portion of the school-lot which included the water-privilege, now occupied by the Pittsfield Cotton Mills, for a section of his home-lot, which adjoined it upon the east. Articles to consider this proposition, and also "to see what the Proprietors will give Deacon Crofoot for setting up the mills," were inserted in the warrant. But, the record curtly informs us, the meeting refused either to make the proposed exchange, or to " give Deacon Crofoot any thing for setting up his mills." It is nowhere ex- plained why the plantation did not encourage an enterprise which seems to have been so much for the common interest. But Deacon Crofoot, although he afterwards built his mills, was never popular as a miller.
Finally, it was ordered that succeeding meetings should be called
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" by posting up notifications at the house of David Bush, in the township, at least fourteen days before they were to be held." Mr. Bush's house stood on the south side of Honasada Street, about one hundred rods west of Wendell Square ; and, as the Proprietors' meetings were also held in it, its location must have been consid- ered fairly central, although its selection for the purposes named was in part due to its owner's office of Proprietors' clerk.1
Proprietors' meetings were held in March, May, and August, 1754; and the records show progress in the plantation. It was voted to double the tax upon cach lot for the support of preaching. . The dimensions of the meeting-house were fixed " to be thirty feet long and thirty-five wide," and it was determined to go on with the work the next fall. The troubles concerning the erection of this building, which afterwards became chronic, seem already to have commenced ; for the May meeting resolved that Stephen Crofoot and Hezekiah Jones, who had tendered their resignations, should nevertheless continue to "stand committee about the meeting- house."
The enterprising Deacon Crofoot had built a bridge, the first public work ever completed in Pittsfield, across the river, in his lot, a little east of the present Elm-street iron bridge; and it was agreed to give him £9. 18. 4d. for it, including a road, which, care was taken to provide, should extend as well from East Street to the bridge as from the bridge to East Street.
The warrant calling upon the Proprietors to decide whether they " would hire Mr. Smith to preach any certain time with them, or call him as a probationer," the second alternative was adopted.2
The "Mr. Smith " to whom this call was extended was Rev. Cotton Mather Smith, father of Hon. John Cotton Smith, after- wards Governor of Connecticut. He was a graduate of Yale, and studied theology with Rev. William Williams of Hatfield. In 1752-3, he was an instructor in the Indian school at Stockbridge,
' As the crossing of Wendell and Honasada Streets is a point of which frequent inention occurs, we shall, for the sake of conciseness, speak of it as Wendell Square.
2 It is a noticeable fact, although not peculiar to Poontoosuck, that, while the records accord the title of Deacon, wherever it is due, with great precision, the pre- fix Rev. is never connected with the names of any of the clergymen with whom negotiations were had, - not even in the case of Mr. Allen until after his ordina- tion.
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and had probably, before this call, preached occasionally at Poon- toosuck, and perhaps the first sermon ever delivered in the town- ship.
Eight pounds were voted at one meeting, and twenty at another, for highways and bridges; and Jacob Ensign, Josiah Wright, and Abner Dewey were chosen to dispose of this money, and also em- powered " to make exchanges of lands, so that the Proprietors may be better suited, if occasion requires." But no record of their acts remains. Unkamet's Road appears to have been overgrown; for in 1753, according to the very reliable authority of Judd's " History of Hadley," "a horse-road was marked out from fifteen miles east of Albany," - where the carriage-road probably commenced, - "through Poontoosuck, to Northampton ; but it was not much · used." " The way from Hampshire and Hartford to Albany," says the same work, " was through the villages of Westfield and Kin- derhook, and the territory now in Blandford, Sheffield, etc. A later road crossed Great Barrington." But many of the settlers of Poontoosuck appear to have come by the most direct route practicable, through the woods, guided by marked trees. And this was more easily done than we are apt to suppose, on account of a practice which prevailed, both among the aborigines and the pioneers, of burning the underbrush, in order to facilitate hunting, as well as to destroy the lurking-places of prowling enemies, and, by the natives, in order to prepare some portion of the ground for their rude culture.
It is a mistake to picture the aboriginal forest of New England as a scene altogether or chiefly of sombre shades and tangled thickets. " The dark-haired maiden loved its grassy dells," where, when the swift servant, Fire, had roughly done his work, kindly Nature had followed, " touching in her picturesque graces." The hunters of a labor-hating race, courting neither difficulty nor danger in the chase, did not choose that their grounds should be cumbered with thickets which at once impeded their pursuit of game, and afforded concealment to hostile braves ; and so, since it cost but the kin- dling of the spark, the annual fires swept them clear. Even the patient squaws were not enamored of hard work, and the same ready agent helped them to prepare the meadow for the hoe. Thus immense tracts were swept of their undergrowth, while the more massy trees were unharmed; so that it is related that a deer could often be seen, in a heavily-timbered country, at a distance
.
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of forty rods. And many of the upland forests were passable - with a little occasional aid from the axe -for carts and drays, like those with which Goodrich and Fairfield entered Poontoosuck. 1 These burnings were, perhaps, not so universal in the times of the Indians, upon the western mountains, as in other parts of Hampshire; and these may have been, as the name Taghkanik intimates, more deeply wooded. But the same reasons which had originated the burnings by the natives operated still more power- fully upon the settlers, and fire swept the way before advancing civilization ; while, even in tracts where it did not reach, -
Old winding roads were frequent in the woods, By the surveyor opened long ago, When through their depths he led his trampling band, Startling the crouched deer from the underbrush. - STREET.
And so it happened that the pioneers found less difficulty in traversing the woods, and in many instances better preparation for their clearings, than, without considering these facts, we should suspect.
1 Hist. Hadley.
CHAPTER V.
SECOND FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR.
[1754-1759.]
State of the Plantation. - Position of Housatonic Indians. - Homicide of Waum- paumcorse. - Indian Massacre at Stockbridge and Hoosac. - Flight from Poon- toosuck. - Poontoosuck Military Post. - Building of Fort Anson. - Garrison- Life at the Fort. - The Settlers during the War. - Fort Goodrich. - Fort Fair- field. - Fort at Onota. - Oliver Root. - William Williams.
T HE Plantation of Poontoosuck had, in August, 1754, made re- spectable progress ; and the proprietors were ready, as the votes we have quoted show, to prosecute their corporate work with increasing vigor. Most of the sixty home-lots had been taken up ; and, although in some instances two or more were purchased by a single settler, the population of the place must have been nearly two hundred. The dwellings were as yet all of logs ; but Charles Goodrich was preparing to build on Wendell Square, if he had trot already partially erected, the first frame-house in the town- ship. The pioneers of 1743 still felt the depressing effects of the failure of their enterprise, but were gradually overcoming the diffi- culties which it placed in their way. The settlement was attract- ing men of substance, and some of that class had already joined it. Had no new misfortune intervened, it would have been close upon that prosperity which it only actually attained after long struggles with poverty and pecuniary embarrassments, - struggles whose marked influence upon the character of the people of Pittsfield was especially manifest in the internal political troubles which ac- companied the Revolutionary War.
/ Between the years 1725 and 1754, the territory now embraced in Berkshire gained a population of perhaps something more than
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fifteen hundred, -almost all of it south of Poontoosuck. The towns of Sheffield and Stockbridge were incorporated; and settlements were planted in New Marlborough, Sandisfield, Tyringham, Alford, Egremont, and Mount Washington. Northward, a few families had made their homes in Williamstown and Lanesborongh ; and a little land was cultivated, at times, under the guns of Fort Massa- chusetts. Here and there, among the green woods, solitary hunters and trappers - hardier even than the pioneer farmer - planted patches of vegetables in the scant clearings where they built their lonely cabins, - seminaries which produced the boldest and most successful scouts in the coming war.
The Indians formed a more considerable element in the popula- tion of the Valley than at any previous date since its settlement by the English, showing a census of probably about three hundred.
The mission commenced in 1734, and established at Stockbridge in 1735, had in twenty years produced an admirable change in the condition of the Mohegans; but it had not wronght a miracle upon them. Ever well disposed towards the white man, and, upon the whole, well treated by him, they received at his hands the gifts of education and religion with a readiness which was not to be ex- pected in tribes whose experience had been of a different character ; and they adopted the usages of civilized life with astonishing facil- ity. They did not, however, leap at once from the depths of bar- barism to the plane which the Saxon race had reached only after ages and generations of painful climbing. Much less did they cle- vate themselves above the human passions and frailties from which their teachers were not themselves free.
There was, moreover, as in all such cases there inevitably .must be, a vagabond class, who had lost the virtues of savage life with- out submitting to the restraints of civilized society, -loose fellows, who hung around the settlements, selling the fruits of their hunting and trapping for rum, and then roaming from farm-house to farm- house, committing the annoyances of which mention has been made. They were frowned upon by the more respectable and numerous class of the tribe ; but they created a bitter prejudice in the minds of the unthinking against all of their color. The inhabitants of the Mission Village were collected from many sections of country, some of them as distant as the banks of the Susquehannah ; 1 and,
1 Ree. Gen. Court, Jan. 27, 1752.
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although this long pilgrimage in search of Christian instruction afforded a presumption in their favor, a few disappointed the hopes formed of them, and all, in those days of suspicion, were objects of jealousy as strangers. Nor were the annoyances to which the settlers were subject wholly unprovoked on their part. The Pro- vincial Government, its agents, and the better part of the people, did, indeed, treat the Mohegans, not only with scrupulous justice, but with tender and earnest regard for both their temporal and spiritual welfare, and with generous forbearance towards the frail- ties and perversities of their wild neophytes. But there were too many exceptions to this rule, even among men in some small authority, who had come from sections of the Province where the Indian, without distinction of person or tribe, was known to the masses only to be detested. And, if the Mohegan suffered injustice from the hands of those who should have been in some degree restrained by the well-known wishes of the government, the treat- ment was simply intolerable which he received at the hands of a rude soldiery, hereditary haters of every red-skin, and ignorant or regardless of the long-tried fidelity of the tribe of Uncas to the English cause.1
In addition to these just causes of complaint, the Mohegans had become discontented with the disposition which they had made of their lands, and alleged, although apparently without truth, that, in bargaining them away, they had been misled by false representa- tions,2 and that, in some cases, they had been seized without pur- chase.
1." They say, and we are, and too often have been, witnesses of the many in- sults and abuses which they (the Mohegans) have suffered from the English sol- diery, - their lives and sealps threatened to be taken, and they called every thing but good, charged with the late murders, and actually put into such terror as to not know which way to turn themselves."-Col. Dwight to Col. Israel Williams, October, 1754.
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