Military History. 245 



indications of the ability and watchfulness of those responsible 

 for the safety of the town. The incidents attending the several 

 attempts upon it, and the intelligent location of the forts and 

 garrison houses, with their garrisons at this time made permanent, 

 the mutual support which they afforded each other, and the fact 

 tli at scarcely a house from Fort Hill to Broad Bridge, and thence 

 to South Hingham, was beyond the range of tire of one or more of 

 them, added to the vigilance which anticipated and forestalled 

 panic when the hour of peril and trial at last came, furnish indu- 

 bitable proof of the military instinct, knowledge, foresight, and 

 faithfulness of Joshua Hobart, John Smith, and John Thaxter. 

 Beyond question it is to this due that the two known attempts 

 against the town met with comparative failure ; of others, con- 

 templated but abandoned, owing to the thorough dispositions for 

 meeting them, we of course know little. 



In this connection we recall the old tradition that Philip himself 

 was at one time concealed within our borders and awaiting per- 

 haps a favorable opportunity to make a descent. As the story 

 runs, he lay somewhere in the region known as the swamp, which 

 in those days extended with scarcely a break from Broad Bridge 

 to near the Weymouth line, and included the location of Round 

 Pond and the district known as Bear Swamp. The sagacious 

 chief probably concluded that the chance of success was too small 

 and the risk of severe loss too great to justify a movement against 

 the lower part of the town, and therefore prudently withdrew. 

 No amount of caution, however, could insure individual life or the 

 safety of isolated farms against the silence and celerity of the 

 Indian war parties. One of these, having perhaps eluded Captain 

 Jacob, whose small force could hardly hope to cover the long 

 frontier assigned to its care, was moderately successful at South 

 Hingham in bringing the terror and horrors of the war home to 

 our own firesides. 



On Wednesday, the 19th of April, young John Jacob, who, as it 

 will be recalled, had served against Philip the previous autumn, 

 and had seen his brave captain fall before the fort of the Narra- 

 gansetts, took his gun and went out to shoot the deer that had 

 been trespassing upon "a field of buckwheat near his father's house 

 and not far from the site of the present Great Plain Meeting-house. 

 He was a famous hunter and of a lisrhting stock, and he had been 

 heard to declare that he would never be taken alive by the Indians. 

 Little did he dream that spring morning that his would be the 

 only blood ever shed by a public enemy upon the soil of his native 

 town. 



The simple and brief accounts, with a little assistance perhaps 

 of the imagination, bring like a living panorama before us the 

 events, the homes, and the actors of that and the following day 

 in the far away time when our prosaic town was making a part of 

 the history which has become one of the romantic chapters of New 



