256 History of Hingham. 



esting of these is that Joseph Blake, whose father had been a 

 resident of Hingham, was, although but sixteen years of age, an 

 officer under Colonel Winslow, and was sent with a detachment 

 of the French Neutrals, as the Acadians were called, to this 

 town. 



Lieutenant Blake, who afterwards came to live here, went to 

 Crown Point the next year as an officer in Major Thaxter's com- 

 pany. Little is known concerning the Acadians who came here ; 

 even their names are for the most part unrecorded and forgotten. 

 They were, however, generally very poor, and worked at almost 

 any employment obtainable. Some of them were for a time 

 lodged in the old Hersey house on Summer Street, now the prop- 

 erty of A. H. Hersey and Mrs. Andrew, where within a few 

 years a window was preserved upon whose small panes some of 

 the exiles had scratched their names or initials with the stone 

 in a ring belonging to one of them. In the field near this old 

 house, so tradition says, these poor unfortunates were in the 

 habit of meeting, to hold, in quiet and peace, religious services 

 in the faith of their youth and their homes. 



Another family occupied a part of the old dishing house at the 

 foot of the Academy Hill ; and still another what is generally 

 called the Welcome Lincoln residence at West Hingham. The few 

 names that remain to us of these people are as follows : Joseph 

 and Alexander Brow, Charles, Peter, and John Trawhaw, and 

 Anthony Ferry. Beyond the inhumanity of their expatriation, 

 the treatment of the Acadians by the people of New England was 

 often kind, and even sympathetic. Without a country, separated 

 from the neighbors and friends with whom they had spent all their 

 happy days, in some cases members even of their own families 

 lost to their knowledge, their sunny homes destroyed, their lands 

 forfeited to the stranger, deprived of the ministrations of their 

 religion, hearing always a foreign tongue, seeing always un- 

 familiar faces, watched, suspected, trammelled, poor, their condi- 

 tion, let us be thankful, was at least not aggravated by extreme 

 bodily suffering, or by the coldness, neglect, and indifference of 

 their conquerors. Indeed, many of those who reached Canada 

 looked back with longing eyes towards the land of the Puritans, 

 where a kinder welcome and more generous charity softened their 

 hard lot than that given by their compatriots. 



The town records of Hingham contain many entries showing 

 liberal disbursements for the benefit of such of these people as 

 were in want ; and in the volumes devoted to the French Neutrals 

 in the State archives, are several accounts allowed by the Province 

 of Massachusetts Bay to the town for money expended in their 

 behalf. Among these is the following in relation to a family 

 which came here Nov. 29, 1755 : — 



