Bristol County, Massachusetts - Chapter 2: Attleboro's First Purchasers and Settlers, 1924

The first comers to Attleboro lands have their enduring place; and those early sowers are not to be set aside by the present-hour reapers in the fields of local history. They came and conquered a wilderness, and as a result, from that time onwards there always has been a town and a city, and a place for the new-comers and the industrious. Leaders among the town builders in New England, they were the men of the hour for their age, and they are not to be forgotten. Yet we are not to crown them as extraordinary men, except as we think of them courageously facing the wilderness and attempting to restore the barrens. Some of them helped make the laws of the time that seem so stringent to us, but that were necessary for their era; and others shared in the evasion of those laws. We shall upon no pretense, for example, condone the acts of individuals with regard to the misfortunes of Indians, yet we shall not fail to recall, the fact that the Plymouth Court itself made just laws intended for the safety and good order of the colony, and much of the results of the Attleboro town meetings were based upon the example set by that court. Let us not hasten, then, to the story of today, as it is contained within these volumes, until we somewhat acquaint ourselves with those folk who made clear the paths ~ for our coming.

In a preceding chapter we have made introductory reference to the men who first ventured here - colonial men, yet distinct types of colonists. From all that we have been able to read of Thomas Willett, first called Captain when he succeeded Captain Myles Standish as the leader of the militia of Plymouth, we gather that he was an enterprising, progressive business man, a fearless spirit, adapting himself naturally to the frontier life that he had chosen. 'Two outstanding facts are generally known of him: he was the first purchaser of this tract of land, and he was the first English mayor of New York, twice elected. These two facts are interesting enough to cause us to make further inquiry about him. He was a native of Barley in Hertfordshire, England, son of Dr. Andrew Willett, rector of that parish. In 1629 he was in Holland and associated with the Leyden congregation; there he knew many of the Pilgrim Fathers, and shared their views. He came to Plymouth on the ship "Lion" in 1632, and became a freeman there in January, 1633, and was granted six acres of land. He married Mary Brown, daughter of John and Dorothy Brown, July 6, 1636, and they had thirteen children. A man of mental attainments, he saw and welcomed opportunities for the enlargement and further settlement of the colony, both natives and settlers trusting him thoroughly. How much was he trusted? He was assistant at the General Court fourteen years; was captain of the military force at Plymouth; was delegate to Massachusetts, representing the interests of the Plymouth Colony; was made representative at Kennebec of the Plymouth company; and in a score of other ways, he was of special service to his times.

This was the way of his going to New York and becoming the chief executive of the city. New Amsterdam and the New Netherlands capitulated to the English forces September 7, 1664, and New York took their place. The king's commissioners having knowledge of Captain Willett's intimacy with the Dutch language and customs, he was selected by the Plymouth Court to assist in settling affairs of the new régime. His labors in that regard were so meritorious that he at once became popular, and upon the organization of the government under the English rule on June 12, 1665, he was elected mayor. Afterwards he was alderman of the city, and in 1666 he was again elected mayor. Early in 1668, he returned to Swansea; but again, in 1670-72, he was elected commissioner to the general council of the United Colonies; he was directed by Plymouth Colony to purchase lands from the Indians; and he determined the boundary between the New York and New Haven colonies. He was tactful, and in treaty and parley with the Indians won their confidence. In that, he was leader, too. Not only was he the original purchaser of Rehoboth North, for Rehoboth later settlers and others, but he was one of the purchasers of Taunton North; and he and Rev. Mr. Myles, first of the Baptist clergymen in New England, were founders of the town of Swansea.

Because of his services to the colony, Captain Willett was granted a tract of about 600 acres of land on both sides of Seven Mile river, and known to this day as Willett's farm. He died at Swansea August 4, 1674, sixty-three years of age, and his burial-place is at Seekonk. His descendants are numerous and many have been prominent; as, for example, a greatgrandson, Samuel, who also was a mayor of New York City. This was the sort of pioneer captain and public-spirited townsman who first brought Attleboro territory into notice.

But though Captain Willett purchased, he never settled in Attleboro. Yet, one of the unusual characters of the early colonial period, namely William Blackstone, did come here and establish his home within the town's original limits. A graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge University, England, where he received his Master of Arts degree in 1621, we remember him as having been first also to settle within Boston territory, or at Blackstone's Neck, Shawmut, as it was called. Five years before Governor Winthrop and his group of settlers came, he was there established, and there he lived part of his solitary though studious and active life. A minister of the Established Church, he left England, as he himself stated, "not being able to endure the power of the lords bishop." At Shawmut he set up his household goods, and cared for garden and orchard.

But when Winthrop came, and his removal was desired to a nearby 'location of fifty acres, he was unwilling to be engineered by the "lords brethren"; and so, taking the purchase price for the relinquishment of his title, nearly £30, he removed with a stock of cattle the long way to Rehoboth North Purchase, thirty-five miles south of his original plantation. That was in 1634.

As he had enjoyed his solitude, his orchard and his books at Shawmut, he again resumed that condition and those occupations within old Attleboro lines, where now is Cumberland, Rhode Island, or, more immediately, Lonsdale. His place of refuge he called Study Hall, and a hill nearby was named by him Study Hill. On July 5, 1659, however, he was married to Sarah Stevenson, widow of John Stevenson of Boston. He had been resident in New England fifty years, forty of those years in this part of the Old Colony, when he died, May 26, 1675, leaving an estate of two hundred acres. Blackstone's lineal descendants have erected a monument to his memory, on the spot where his remains were found, and within the yard of the present Lonsdale Company's Ann and Hope mill. For a moment let us pause and wonder, as the more leisurely clerks of former times would do, concerning the remarkable extremes of that hermit life, and the present locality of the grave of Blackstone - the one passed within an unbounded wilderness; the latter at the very doors of a modern industry. We can never fully understand his choice; and he never could have foreseen nor assented to his burial-place.

Blackstone's library consisted of one hundred and eighty-four books, among them being ten "paper books," all of which were destroyed in the Indian war. Were the ten "paper books" valued manuscript of the hermitwriter? Other historians say they were "probably MSS," but we may not conjecture, interesting as the thought is. He was a faithful orchardist here, as he had been at Shawmut, and anecdotes still continue to be told of his devotion to his "hobby" as we might now call it, of apple-raising and of the excellence of his product. Some of his trees, declares Hon. John Daggett, were living one hundred and forty years after they had been set out, and in 1646 there was an apple that had been named for him. Further than that, in 1836, three apple trees were standing upon the meadow, near the site of Study Hall, and two of them were bearing apples; yet Study Hill and Study Hall have both disappeared at this time, and a cotton mill © takes their place. Blackstone knew a kindred spirit, Roger Williams, and upon one occasion he preached in Williams' pulpit. Hermit-like though his. manner of living was, yet he was one of those who opened the path for the approach of this generation, and his presence here has been recognized by the naming of a river for him - of a town, a factory, a banking institution.

The firstlings of all divisions of time and place continue to hold more than transient attention. Blackstone came first to the original bounds of the township; and soon afterwards, in 1669, arrived John Woodcock from Roxbury, to settle within the present Attleboro limits. Here for many years he dwelt, believing well in the employment of hands and brain, yet one of the most famous and self-confessed of Indian haters that ever trod the highways of Bristol county. His convenient location upon the highway was near the Baptist meeting house, where in later times stood the Hatch tavern, his public house being fortified throughout that period as a garrison house, and there, so state the Old Colony records, "he was enjoined to keep good order, and that no unruliness or ribaldry be permitted there." A strenuous townsman, outspoken and at times very vengeful, yet he was elected a deputy to the General Court, and he became a large landholder, in the ownership of more than six hundred acres of land.

Like others of his time, though, he sat in the stocks an hour on training day, and he paid a fine of forty shillings for going into the house of an Indian and "taking away an Indian child and some goods" in the place of debt that it was stated the Indian owed him. No western plainsman of a half century ago was the possessor of a more bitter hatred against the red race than was John Woodcock, and it was such stubborn and callous settlers as he who demolished the best intentions of the Plymouth government as regards Indian rights and privileges. He utterly disliked his Indian neighbors, and their dislike of him was as fervent. The incident relating to his forcible entry into and taking property from the house of an Indian took place more than twenty years before the King Philip war; but when the Indians slew one of his sons and maltreated the body in 1676, he never at any time lost sight of his purpose of retaliation that gave him no rest until he had run to earth as many as possible of the natives. Says Hon. John Daggett of this tireless Indian hunter: "He was foremost in all enterprises the object of which was the destruction of the Indian, and it is said that after his death the scars of seven bullet holes were found in his body." The tavern or garrison house, established by him in 1670, was noted in its day, and famous for generations to follow, as it was one of a number of similar garrison houses that extended along the Bay road from Boston to Rhode Island. The military of all the colonial period made the place their headquarters, as they did the garrison houses at Boston, Dedham, Rehoboth and elsewhere. There halted Captain Moseley and his one hundred and ten men on their way to Swansea; and there stopped Captains Henchman and Prentice in the King Philip war. There were entertained Judge Sewall on his way from Rehoboth; there, too, Madame Knight lodged en route from Boston to New York.

Woodcock occupied the garrison house as its proprietor twenty-three years, and in 1693-4 he conveyed it to John Devotion, who managed the place more than seventeen years. In 1711, Devotion conveyed the tavern and its farm of two hundred acres to John Daggett of Chilmark, and he, in April 16, 1722, to John Marcy. Colonel Israel Hatch became the owner

So we have glimpses of the three prominent first comers. Gradually came other adventurers and home-makers with their families, such as John Fitch, who settled not far from the gardens of Blackstone; while at the present Attleboro Falls section the new lands held out their attractions to John Daggett, who was the first one to lay out properties there, and who sold fifty acres to his brother Thomas in 1677. There was also valuable land in the immediate vicinity of the falls, and including the falls rights that belonged to Edgard Hall, who first hailed from Taunton, later from Rehoboth. In 1686, Mr. Hall's lands came into the possession of the Daggetts, Joseph Daggett building the first corn mill there. Thomas Butler was also a neighbor to the Daggett family at that location. The following-

The one-share purchasers: Captain 'Thomas Willett (John Wilkinson's share), Mr. Noah Newman, Lieutenant Peter Hunt, Mr. James Browne, Samuel Newman, John Allen, Sr., Sampson Mason, Anthony Perry, John Butterworth (whose share was sold to Daniel Jenkes including meadow), Peter Walker, John Ormsby, Richard Martin, Stephen Paine, Jr., Robert Jones, Obadiah Bowen, John Pecke, James Redeway, Samuel Carpenter, Mr. John Myles, William Carpenter, Joseph Pecke, Thomas Cooper, Jun., Ensign Henery Smith, Thomas Cooper, Sen., Samuel Pecke, William Buckland, Benj. Buckland, John Reade, Sr., John Reade, Jr., Nicholas Pecke, Elizabeth, Hannah and Lydia Winchester (whose share was sold to Daniel Shepardson), Daniel Smith, Jonathan Bliss, Rice Leonard, William Saben, John Perrin, Sen., George Kendricke, George Robenson, John Daggett, John Fitch, Richard Bowen, Jun., Elizabeth Bullucke, John Miller, Jun., Robert Fuller, Robert Wheaton, Ester Hall, John Miller, Sen., Jared Ingraham, John Kingsley, Gilbert Brookes, Thomas Reade, Jonathan Fuller, James Gillson (whose share was bought of Samuel Saben), Samuel Luther (whose share was sold to Mr. Philip, squire), Nicholas Turner, John Allen, Jun., Preserved Abell, Francis Stephens, Nicholas Ide, Richard Whittaker, Nathaniel Pecke, Israel Pecke, Jonah Palmer, Robert Miller, Nathaniel Paine (one-half of whose share he bought of Richard Bowen, Sen., the other half of Jeremiah Wheaton), John Polley (whose share was purchased of his father, Jon. Bosworth), William Allen of Prudense (whose share was bought of Nathaniel Paine), John Lovell, Eldad Kinsley. One-half share purchasers: "Thomas Estabrooke (of Roger Amidowne), Thomas Grant, John Savage, Thomas Ormsby (of Richard Bowen, Sen.), Jacob Ormsby (the share purchased of his mother). One and one-half shares: John Woodcock. Two shares: Mr. Stephen Paine, Sen. (one that was his own and one that was appointed for John Martin); Thomas Willmot (one he bought of Jo. Carpenter, and one of his own), John Titus (one that he baught of his mother-in-law, Abigail Carpenter, and one that was his own).

These are no longer mere names to be overlooked in historical readings as they sometimes are, since the close researches of the genealogist have preserved all of them, and made them of perennial use in their voluminous chronicles of New England ancestry.