22 FACTS RELATING TO GROTON, MASSACHUSETTS. 



not infrequently. The first speech that George Thompson 

 made in America was made in Groton. 



One Sunday morning I walked out towards what is now 

 called the Island. The road was marked by a rail fence, but 

 of buildings there were none. I went so far that I was near 

 the slave pen, a building now standing and which I have vis- 

 ited within a few years. It was of brick, enclosed within a 

 brick wall, and all of a dingy straw color. At a short dis- 

 tance from the building, I met a black woman walking slowly 

 away from it. I said to her: " What building is that?" At 

 once she was in tears, and she said : " That is the pen where 

 the poor black people are kept who are going down to Louisi- 

 ana." She had then been to visit her daughter, a girl about 

 eighteen years of age, according to the mother's statement, 

 who was to leave the next morning. She was the last of a 

 family of nine as the woman said, who had been sold and 

 taken away from her. As I was leaving I said: "Who is 

 your master? " She answered : " Mr. Blair, of the Globe." In 

 the fourteen years of my manhood, that I acted with the 

 Democratic party, I never said anything in favor of the sys- 

 tem of slavery. If otherwise I might have done so, the inter- 

 view with that old woman would have restrained me. 



VIII. 



First Experience in Politics. 



At the spring election of Groton in 1839, I was chosen a 

 member of the school committee. The other members had 

 been in the service in previous years. They were the Rev. 

 Charles Robinson, the Rev. Mr. Kittredge, Dr. Joshua Green, 

 and Dr. George Stearns. In the early Colonial period the 

 " minister " was often the school-master also. Naturally he 

 took an interest in the education of the children, and previous 

 to the time when school committees were required by statute, 

 he was the self-constituted guide of the teachers and schools. 

 Indeed, the schools were parochial. Whenever the minister 



