CHAPTER XXXV. HAVERHILL The story of an old New England town like Haverhill, rich in traditions, events, history and active participation in great historical movements, can be told within the limits of this article only by selection from its records, and not in full detail. It was the sixth Essex plantation to be established, Salem (1626), Lynn (1629), Ipswich (1633), Newbury (1635), and Rowley (1639) being settled earlier. The exact list of the first settlers and the exact date of its settlement, whether 1640 or 1641, are unknown, since records of the very earliest years either were not kept or were lost. We know, however, that in response to the request of the Rev. Nathaniel Ward and his son-in-law, Giles Firman, both of Ipswich, the General Court on May 13, 1640, made grant to "Mr. Ward and Newberry men" of a new plantation on the Merrimack, giving them choice of location at Pentucket (later Haverhill) or Cochichewick (later Andover), "provided they return answer within three weeks from the 21st present, & that they build there before the next Courte." Evidently they returned answer, selecting Pentucket, and made a beginning of building in the summer of 1640; for at the next General Court, meeting October 7, 1640, commissioners were appointed to view the bounds between "Mr. Ward's plantation" and Colchester (later Salisbury). A similar order by the General Court, June 2, 1641, appointed a committee "to set out the bounds between Salisbury & Pantucket, ali: Haverhill. They are to determine the bounds which Mr. Ward & his company are to enjoy as a town or village if they have 6 houses up by the next General Court in the 8th m. (October)." This order contains the first mention of the name chosen for the new settlement, Haverhill, and marks the desire of the Rev. Mr. Ward to perpetuate in the New World the name of the old town in England whence he came and where generations of his family had lived. It is probable that the number of settlers in the new plantation was very small and the houses very few in the summer of 1641, for the order contains the condition "if they have 6 houses up by the next General Court." Nathaniel Ward had sought the establishment of this settlement, not for himself, but in the interests of his son-in-law, Giles Firman, a physician, and of his son, John Ward, a clergyman. Firman did not remove to Haverhill, but the Rev. John Ward, accompanied by John Fawn and Hugh Sherratt, went from Ipswich to Haverhill in 1641. Of the early settlers it is possible that James Davis, John Robinson, Abraham Tyler and Joseph Merrie settled in Haverhill in 1640; it is probable that in addition to John Ward, John Fawn and Hugh Sherratt, Job Clements, William White, Samuel Guile and Richard Littlehale became settlers in 1641; and it is certain that in addition to these, Robert Clements, Tristram Coffyn and Thomas Davis were dwellers here in 1642. When the first settlers came from Newbury and Ipswich up the Merrimack river to the site of the Indian village of Pentucket, no red man dwelt there and no wigwam stood there. Doubtless the place had been desolated by that fatal epidemic of 1616-17, under which whole Indian villages wasted away and the New England tribes were reduced to feeble remnants of their former strength. Traces of their settlement Note This excellent narrative, closing on page 481, is contributed. in Pentucket existed in stone arrow heads and the fragments of stone tools, the bones of their dead, and, so tradition says, a single abandoned wigwam in the East meadow. But though no Indians occupied the locality or disputed their possession, the Colonists recognized the proprietary rights as belonging to Passaconaway's tribe, and as soon as they could meet the representatives of the great chief, they bought the territory comprised in their plantation. This deed, called the Indian deed, dated November 15, 1642, conveyed to the settlers a tract of land along the Merrimack, extending eight miles west from Little River and six miles east from the same bound, and six miles north, for three pounds and ten shillings a great triangle of land, from which Methuen (including the present territory of Lawrence north of the Merrimack) was set off by the General Court, December 8, 1729, and a very large tract, now embraced in the New Hampshire towns of Salem, Hampstead, Plaistow and Atkinson, containing nearly one-third of the population, property and population of Haverhill, was separated by the establishment of the boundary line between Massachusetts and New Hampshire by decree of the King in Council, August 5, 1740. When the first adventurous settlers from Newbury and Ipswich came up the river to establish their new homes at Pentucket, they moored their pinnace where a brook-Mill Brook, now lost to sight, but its location marked by Mill street that lay west of it came purling down to join the Merrimack; and they chose the land close by, stretching west along the river from the present location of Pentucket Cemetery, for their dwellings. These homes were doubtless rude houses of logs, with the crevices filled with clay, and each had about it a lot of a few acres, wherein they planted their orchards and made their gardens. The Blackstone and russet apples grew there, and the dear English flowers, heartsease and mignonette, rue and rosemary, for all these were brought from the Old England to the New in the sailing vessels that brought the Colonists. There were apportioned to each settler grass lands and grazing lands remote from their homes and often very widely separated. Daniel Ladd's "accommodations," for instance, were scattered from East meadow, near the Whittier homestead, to the Spicket meadows in the present confines of Methuen. The courage, energy, perseverance and strong will of these earliest settlers should never be forgotten, for they planted a colony where the wilderness had to be conquered and the soil made to yield a living, and the necessary "accommodations" could be reached only through roadless forests and across bridgeless streams, while packs of roaming wolves, eager to attack the solitary settler or his flocks, and the savage Indians, more cunning and less merciful than the wild beasts, created conditions of constant danger and fear. The first winter in the new settlement, 1640-1641, was one of terrible severity. The depth of snow was very great, and so cold was it that Boston Harbor was frozen over, and for six weeks passable for oxen and loaded carts. The hardships of those earliest years in the little hamlet are pathetically told in the death of thirteen children before the year 1644, and of twenty-seven other children and seven adults before the year 1633. And yet the colony grew "Nor fire, nor frost, nor foe could kill The Saxon energy of will." Stern in their religious faith, the Colonists worshipped under the leadership of their "Learned, Ingenuous and Religious" minister, John Ward, at first under a great spreading oak or in the houses of the settlement. In the same year (1645) in which Haverhill was incorporated into a town-the twenty-third town in the colony-the first church was formed with a membership of fourteen members, eight men and six women. Three years later, in 1648, the first meeting house was built, "on the lower end of the Mill lot," a tiny log structure twenty-six feet long and twenty wide. On the front of this house the heads of slain marauding wolves were often nailed, and on its doors the laws and public notices were always posted. In it, after the services, there followed the trial of offenders, and there were heard the penitent confessions of those who had transgressed. While the settlers doubtless from the first transacted public business by assembling together, the first recorded such meeting was held in 1643. In that year the General Court divided the colony into four counties, Norfolk, Essex, Middlesex and Suffolk. Haverhill, lying north of the Merrimack, was grouped with Salisbury, Hampton, Exeter, Dover and Portsmouth (Strawberry Bank), in forming Norfolk county. It was transferred to Essex county by an order of the General Court, February 4, 1680. The first "clerk of the writs" and "town Recorder" (1643) was Richard Littlehale. The first birth and the first death in the town was that of the infant, John Robinson (1641), whose brief life lasted but three weeks. The first recorded marriage was that of Job Clement and Margaret Dummer, December 25, 1645. The first selectmen, chosen October 29, 1646, were Thomas Hale, Henry Palmer, Thomas Davis, James Davis and William White. The settlement grew steadily in numbers and became organized in the first ten years of its existence (1640 to 1650), and at the end of that period it had a considerable population, with possessions of cattle and horses and cultivated fields, with a town organization and a church, whose minister was a revered and influential leader. Much of the records of the early years has to do with the apportioning of land and its changing ownership, and into them are written, too, the efforts to bring into the town men skilled in the industries needed in the community: John Hoitt, a brick maker, comes from Ipswich to Haverhill (1650), the town granting him three-fourths of an acre of land and the clay pits (in the West Parish) in consideration that he become a resident; Isaac Cousins is offered "a six acre house lot, with all accommodations proportionable (Dec. 16, 1651), provided he live in the town five years, following his trade of a smith." John Webster is offered the same (July 4, 1653), provided that he follow the trade of a blacksmith "in doing the town's work when they have occasion"; his brother, Stephen, a tailor, is induced to remove here from Newbury at about the same time. A ferry across the Merrimack was established in 1648, the place being just west of the present fire station on Water street (nearly opposite Kent street), the ferryman, Thomas Hale, and the rates "one penny for a passenger, two pence for cattel under two years old, and four pence for such as were over that age." In 1660 it was ordered in the November town meeting that the land "behind the meeting house should be reserved for a burial ground", the land now in the central part of Pentucket Cemetery. In the same year, probably, the first public school in the town was established, the teacher being Thomas Wasse, and his salary ten pounds a year. He held this place for fully thirteen years, but his later services were given to Newbury, where he died, May 18, 1691. But while the foundations of the settlement were being made with care and zeal, and there was the promise of a prosperous town in a location so admirably chosen, there was one deterrent, the fear of attack by the merciless Indian. During the first seventy years of its existence, Haverhill was a frontier settlement, the clearings in which its few houses were set,—no more than thirty in the village, and several, more venturesome, lying scattered within a mile or two of the village-were bounded on the north by an unbroken forest that reached even to the St. Francis river in Canada, one hundred and fifty miles away. And this so vast forest, harbored and protected, was swiftly traversed by a foe stealthier, more treacherous and more cruel than the beasts of prey. Undoubtedly the fear of the savages dwelt ever in the hearts of the Colonists. A stockade was built around the meeting house, and the men set sentinels to watch, and carried their muskets to the church as well as to the field. Yet within the first thirty-five years of the life of the settlement (1640-1675) there were no signs of Indian hostilities, and so apprehension became dulled, the watch was less constant-the stockade was suffered to fall into decay. This period of safety and calm drew to a close with increasing troubles in the Colony between the English and the Indians and signs of hostility by the red men, and the outbreak of King Philip's War, opening with the butchering of the men of Swanzey, as they were returning from church on Sunday, June 24, 1675, followed by attacks on isolated places and homes as widely separated as Hadley and Deerfield and Saco and Wells, kindled into new and stronger life the fear of the Indians. Although in this war, which ended in 1678, no attack was made on Haverhill, rumors and reports created constant apprehension, and the town was kept active and guarded, and by order of the Court one-fifth of the men were continually on scout duty. On May 2, 1676, Ephraim Kingsbury was killed by the Indians, the first person in Haverhill to be thus slain, and on the following day Thomas Kimball was killed while defending his home on the road leading from South Groveland to Boxford, and his wife and five children were taken captive. In 1688 war broke out afresh on the frontiers, the Indians charging that the English had not kept the treaty of 1678, and terror spread her dark wings over the isolated settlement on the Merrimack. In August 13, 1689, a party of Indians made their swift appearance in the northern part of the town and killed Daniel Bradley, near where the Atkinson depot now is. In the same attack they shot Daniel Singletary, living nearby, and captured his son. In the following October, Indians again appeared in the same part of the town, and wounded unto death Ezra Rolfe, who lived near the site of the present North Parish Meeting House. So terrified were the inhabitants of Haverhill that in the next town meeting, March 24, 1690, they seriously considered abandoning the settlement and withdrawing to some place less remote from protection. The selectmen made provision for six garrisons and four houses of refuge, separating these so widely that each part of the town was provided for. The stories of those days have come down the years on the lips of tradition, notably the youthful bravery of the boy captives, Isaac Bradley and Joseph Whittaker; the prowess of John Keezar; the mysterious fate of the boys, Thomas and Jonathan Haynes, and the thrilling fortunes of the twice-captured little Joseph Haynes and young Daniel Ladd, the "marked man"; the heroism of Hannah Duston and Mary Neff; the awful experiences of the brave Hannah Bradley; and the attack and massacre in the very centre of the settlement on August 29, 1708. These stories should be read in fuller detail than the limits of this article permits them to be written, in order that we may know by what courage and endurance and suffering and sacrifices the town was held in those dread days when "A yell the dead might wake to hear and neither compassion nor mercy stayed the hands of the cruel foe. The attack on Haverhill on March 15, 1697, made memorable by the story of one of the captives, Hannah Duston, was made by a small party of Indians, numbering no more than twenty, but the swiftness of the savages, the paralyzing fear that their cries and appearance caused, and the isolation of the houses attacked, made their work bloody and destructive. Nine houses were burned, twenty-seven persons, of whom thirteen were children, were killed, and thirteen prisoners were borne away. Two miles northwest from the centre of the village was the farm of Thomas Duston. Here, probably where Eudora street now is, he had built a cottage in 1677, to which he brought his bride, Hannah Emerson, whom he had married in December of that year. Twenty years later, because the little house seemed too small for his growing family,-there were seven children living then, and four had died previously,-selecting a site still farther west, he began to build a larger and stronger house of brick. On the eighth of March, 1697, a twelfth child was born to Mrs. Duston, and to care for the mother and the infant, Mrs. Mary Neff, whose home was a mile nearer the village, had come to act as nurse. It was the fifteenth of March. The wood fire on the hearth threw its glow over the simple furnishings of the humble home. It flickered over the bed on which Mrs. Duston lay, weak and ill; it gave faint color to the piece of linen still in the loom, which she had been weaving be fore her illness; it shone on the week-old baby in her arms, to whom she had given the name Martha. With no apprehension of danger, Thomas Duston had started to go on horseback to a distant part of his farm. He had gone but a little distance when, with horror, he saw stealing forth from the woods on the north a band of Indians, moving stealthily but swiftly towards his house. He turned his horse, galloped back, shouted to his children to flee, and tried to get his wife from bed, that he might aid her to escape. There was not time. Urged by his wife to save the children, he seized his musket, leaped on his horse and rode to overtake them. At first, thinking that it was impossible to save all, he planned to seize one or two from the group and ride rapidly away. But when he came to his children, the father's heart could make no choice, and he resolved to defend all and bring them to safety, or die with them. Dismounting, he placed his horse between his children and the enemy, rested his musket across the back of the animal, and bringing it swiftly to bear on any Indian who came into the open-for they skulked behind trees- he kept the foe at bay and brought all to the garrison house of Onesiphorus Marsh, a mile from his home. In the Duston home the nurse, Mary Neff, had hastily cut the woven cloth from the loom and wrapped the infant in it, and was starting in flight when the Indians reached the door. They seized her and the child, dragged Mrs. Duston from the bed, set fire to the house with fagots from, the hearth, and started immediately, with the captives, in retreat. The baby cried, and the mother saw a savage snatch it from the arms of |