District No. 5 School

The earliest recorded fact concerning any inhabitant of Shrewsbury comes to us from the soil itself, and from a grave found upon our borders. Here we learn that the mastodon once roamed in his majesty over our hills, and claimed one of our valleys for his last resting-place. For an unknown number of years no owner of the soil had any suspicion that beneath the smooth, heavy sod m the meadow lay a gigantic body, until the flesh had become a part of the soil and the bones had crumbled to dust. In 1884, while Mr. W. U. Maynard, the present owner, was having a deep trench dug, in order to drain and improve the land, the spades of the workmen brought up with the dark soil nine beautiful, polished teeth darkened with earth stains, and resembling choice specimens of agate. These with a few fragments of bone were all that remained of the "Mastodon Giganteus. " In close proximity to these teeth was found a human skull, and the mystery surrounding the fact, that these two skulls were found in one place eight feet below the surface of the ground, has not yet been cleared away. Perhaps a ray of light is shed upon the human skull by a recent reliable historian, W. T. Harlow, who tells us that undoubtedly this farm was the first in town occupied by a white man, and that this man was ]Mr. Warner. He also tells us that ]Mr. Warner suddenly disappeared and no trace of him was ever found. May not this be a trace, this skull without a name.? Doubtless I\Ir. Warner lost his way in the trackless swamp and sank in the soft mire to the rock bed on which lay the mastodon. This spot may now be seen in the meadow bordering on the Northboro line and the county road, at the right as you go westward. The mastodon teeth are preserved by the Natural History Society in Worcester, and Mr. Warner's skull (if it be Mr. Warner's) was sent to the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, where it has been examined by scientists and pronounced by them to be a remarkable specimen ; they also deemed it worthy of a learned treatise by one of their number. It is fitting that the memory of the first white inhabitant should be thus perpetuated.

Passage source: Old Times in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. Gleanings from History and Tradition, published 1892.

New World which was at that time attracting so many adventurers from beyond the sea, Isaac Johnson had gathered together all that he had, and taken his portion of his grandfathers estate to take himself and his frail young wife to America and establish there a home for themselves. After their arrival, he made himself useful to the government and received as remuneration a grant of several hundred acres of land lying in the northwest part of what was afterwards called Shrewsbury. The Lady Arbella found refuge for a time in Salem in the home of friends, but she soon faded away like a delicate tropical flower in the cold, hard life which she found in New England. Her amiable and heart-broken husband followed her in one month, his grave being the first m King's Chapel burying ground in Boston. It is pleasant to feel that the story of the charming Lady Arbella is even so remotely connected with any part of our town, though it is probable that neither of them ever saw the Shrewsbury land.

Passage source: Old Times in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. Gleanings from History and Tradition, published 1892.

Machine-read from a century-old scan, so expect the errors a machine makes: misspelled names, dropped words, stray characters.

Read the whole chapter on Shrewsbury Town - 37,888 words on its settlement, mills, schools and churches.