o ^ 



THE FARME 



sitor: 



^ 



THE VISITOR. 



New England Thrift and New Englnud 

 Intellect illnstrated in the history of the 

 first hundred years of the town of Wil- 

 ton, N. H. 



What Boil, what holy ground was Yankee Free- 

 dom built on ? 

 8ucb ground aa that nround, upon, beyond 



The noble hills of Wilton. 



Lexington, Bunker Hiil, White Plains, tlie best 



blood was spilt on, 

 TJiat flow'd in veins of noble spirits rais'd around, 



upon, beyond 



The glorious hills of Wilton. 



What reg'ion bcbt fires, rouses, inspires a genius 



like Jolm Milton ? 

 That elevated land around, upon, beyond 



The gladden'd hills of Wilton. 



Er.ijAir Stockwell, Esq. in his acceptable pres- 

 ent of an octavo pamphlet of more tlian on« hun- 

 dred pages, containing an acconnt of the Centen- 

 nial Ccle'jration of the Bettlenieut of Wilton, N. H. 

 has faroisiied half a day's reading, which reviving 

 all the recollections of the first fourteen years of a 

 life spent under the paternal roof has awakened 

 sensations of much deeper and more thrilling in- 

 terest tliem would the perusal of the best written 

 story of the lives of warriors or statesmen having 

 little or no affinity to the country in which we live. 

 Wilton is a small township of New Hampshire 

 hardly equal to the dimensions of a township four 

 miles squ.ire, measuring only between fifteen and 

 sixteen thousand acres: it is situated upon the 

 eastern declivity of that ridge ot" land, which be- 

 ginning in New London county in the State of 

 Connecticut passes nortlierly to the line of Massa- 

 chusetts and thence tlirougli the entire width of the 

 latter State from north to south central in Worces- 

 ter county, strikes the line of New Hampshire 

 forming its back-bone from north to south, and di- 

 viding for the distance of one hundred and fifty 

 miles the waters falling into the Connecticut from 

 those falling into the Merrimack. The eastern de- 

 clivity of this ridge towards tiie Merrimack is of 

 greater e.\tent than the western tic livity which fa- 

 ces the Connecticut. At suitable' distances from 

 south to north are transverse ridges and valleys 

 which convey the waters of the several tributary 

 stieams from the mountains and tiie higher back- 

 bone ridge to one or the other of those main streams. 

 The hills of these transverse ridges in many cases 

 are almost as high and magnificent., as the higher 

 mountains. We have quite recently been inform- 

 ed that there is a point of the great Wiiite Moun- 

 tain ridge in Coventry, in the State of Connecti- 

 cut, from which Mount Washington itself, in a 

 clear air, is descried at the distance ci" more than 

 two hundred miles ! The elevation at both points 

 cuts off the height of the intervening obstacle 

 which usually shuts out the distant object in the 

 rotundity of the earth. 



The little sjieck of New England, whose history 

 for the* first hundred years of its settlement has so 

 much interested us, is perched upon and among 

 the hills at an elevation approaching a moun- 

 tain height: its south line is hardly six miles from 

 the line of Massachusetts, having only a single 

 township (Mason) in New Hampshire intervening. 

 Through the town from its southwest corner to the 

 centre of its eastern line, in a valley of stupendous 

 hills upon either side and with very few acres of al- 

 luvion, pours down the main branch of the Souhe- 

 gan, whose southern sources are under the Weta- 

 tick mountain in Ashburnham, and uniting with 

 another considerable stream running from the same 

 mountain ridge further north, furnish the water 

 power for many extensive factories and mills in 

 New ipswich and Mason : lower down in Wilton 

 other two trii>utaries from Temple and Lyndebo- 

 ough unite with the main stream, which spreads 

 out in a more level country below, forming the 

 beautiful hop farms in Milford and other valuable 

 alluvion farms in Amherst and Merrimack, where 

 it unites with our own river of the same name eight 



miles above tlie uiouth of the Nashua, wii-Ee course 

 md whose valley is from the same south-westerly 

 direction. 



Settlement of Wilton. 

 The first pitch made in the mountain town of 

 Wilton, which unlike the most of its neiirhboring 

 towns has not a single pond or an extensive mead- 

 ow, was niadp in the north part of the town by two 

 families from Danvers, Ms. by the names of Put- 

 nam and Dale in the year 1739. For the first three 

 years, the wife of Jacob Putnam was the only wo- 

 man who resided permanently in the town. Dur- 

 ing th" winter, so great was the depth of snow and 

 such the distance of neighbors, that she saw for the 

 entire space of si.x months only the members of her 

 own f.imily. Caleb Putnam, the grandson of this 

 lady, exhibited on the day of the celebration, a hill 

 of corn raised on the land where the first settle- 

 ment was made a hundred years before. And John 

 Dale, grandson of the original settler of the same 

 naiiip, raised last year more than four hundred 

 bushels of grain on the farm cleracd by his ances- 

 tor a century before : this gentleman now resides 

 in the first two story frame house erected in the 

 town. The eldest daughter of the first settler, 

 John Dale, taught the first school kept in the town, 

 and for several years was the only teacher. 

 Conflicting titles. 

 The whole region of New Hampshire westerly 

 of Merrimack river, for many miles north of the 

 present line of Massachusetts, was at first claimed 

 by the latter; and the duplicate grants made by 

 the government of that colony and by the Masoni- 

 an proprietors under the colonial government of 

 New Hampshire were formally years fruitful sour- 

 ces of contention. The grant of Concord which 

 W..5 made by Jlassachusetts was the prevailing 

 grant, because the first settlers pitched down here 

 under that grant; hut the original grant of Bow of 

 nine miles square, covering not only our neighbor- 

 ing town on the south, but much of Pembroke on 

 the east side of the river, and nearly the entire lim- 

 its of Concord on both sides, made by the New 

 Hampshire authority to Jonathan Wiggin in 1727, 

 did not give us up until the township had been paid 

 for a second time after the agent of the Massachu- 

 setts proprietors, the elder Timothy Walker, who 

 was the first settled minister, had made three voy- 

 ages across the Atlantic with the view to bring u- 

 bout the great object. 



A part of the town of Wilton fell v.'ithin a Mas- 

 sachusetts grant made before the Masopian propri- 

 etors obtained a footing under Gov. Benning Went- 

 u'ortli, vv'lio was first recognized as the head of a 

 distinct colon}- in New Hampshire in the year 1741. 

 In consequence of the distinguished services ren- 

 dered by the Massachusetts soldiers against the 

 French and Indians of Canada in the year 1690, 

 and their "great sufferings," grants of land were 

 made to meritorious individuals by the colonial 

 government. Ashhurnliain, Ms was originall}- 

 granted to Thomas Til-ston and others of Dorches- 

 ter, and was called " Dorchester-Canada." To 

 "Samuel King and others who were in the expe- 

 dition to Canada in 1690, and the descendants of 

 such of them as are dead," was made the grant of 

 a township six miles square embracing the whole 

 of the p/esent town of Lyndeborough, about two 

 miles of the northerly side of Wilton, and a portion 

 of the easterly line of Temple, by the Council and 

 House of Kepresenlatives of Massachusetts in the 

 year 1/3.5, under the name of "Salem Canada." 

 in this part of the town was the first settlement of 

 Messrs. Putnam and Dale froiij Danvers. After- 

 wards in 1749, the remaining portion of Wilton, in- 

 cluding also the south-eastern part of Temple, was 

 granted to the heirs of John Tufton Mason to pro- 

 prietors in shares of 240 acres each, with the re- 

 servation of twenty shares for the use of the grant- 

 ors. Little progress was made here for the first 

 ten years of the settlement; and it was not until 

 the 2d of January 1765, that a charier of incorpora- 

 tion issued by Gov. Wentworth under the name of 

 Wilton, it being derived from an ancient borough 

 of the same name in Wiltshire, England. 



The hardships and sufferings of the present pion- 

 eers to the fast settling territory "far west" bear 

 no comparison to those of the first settlers of New 



England. The horrors of Indian warfare then were 

 such as to justify our ancestors in the utmost hos- 

 tility to the abftrigines : the treacliery of the In- 

 dians was often met with corresponding treachery 

 of the whites ; and a war of extermination against 

 the children of the forest was esteemed as no less 

 justifiable than the destruction of dens of hissing 

 poisonous serpents. When Wilton was first set. 

 tied, it being out of the path of Indian resort, wo 

 have no accounts of any real attack. They were 

 not, however, without fears of attacks from wild 

 beasts: the terrors of the catamount, the wolf and 

 the bear were within our memory often talked over 

 by men and women around a winter fire-side. It 

 is mentioned in the pamphlet that so late as 1737, 

 Abiel Abbot, being in the woods unarmed, waa 

 pursued by a bear and driven upon a tree, wiiero 

 the animal continued to watch until, wearied by the 

 delay and annoyed by a small dog, he left the ob- 

 ject of his pursuit. 



Those only who have gone miles into the woods, 

 not over good roads — not over roads which v/ere 

 passable with carriages of any sort, — but through 

 paths where it was even difficult to pass on horse- 

 back — tliose only who are able lo realize the siiut- 

 ting up of all patlis even to the nearest neighbor 

 by such immense depths of snow as in winter 

 sometimes covered the greaterjjart of t1ie high 

 ridges between the two great rivers of New Eng- 

 land, where the snow-shoe boeanie an invention of 

 necessity even to enable the settler to obtain his 

 supjily of fuel in the midst of the forest — those on- 

 ly who have obtained the materials for making 

 bread by back-corrying a bag of Indiin corner 

 grain to the nearest mill, a distance of ten, fifteen 

 and twenty miles over drifts and through devious 

 paths ; — can exactly realize the situation of our an- 

 cestors in the interior of New England seventy -five, 

 and a hundred years ago. 



From the address of the Rev. Epfiraim Peabo- 

 DV, of New Bedford, Ms. a native of Wilton — an 

 address which does great credit to both the head 

 and heart of its autliur — do we extract several in- 

 teresting incidents wliich have occurred in the last 

 hundred years within the town of Wilton. The 

 following stor}^ will strike all our readers as an il- 

 lustration of the value of social relations and near 

 neighborhood. Can it be wondered that our fa- 

 thers enjoyed and prized higher the social meeting 

 and greeting of friends and neighborhood than do 

 those of the present generation, when we read the 

 following ? 



The first death and burial in Wilton. 



"The first death that Ovicurrcd was that of John 

 Badger, in Feb. 1740. He died in the night. The 

 nearest neighbor was three miles distant, and 

 the ground was covered deep with snow. His wife 

 composed hira on the bed as for rest, left her chil- 

 dren, (of whom she had three, the oldest but eight 

 years of age,) with their breakfast, and with strict 

 injunctions not to awake their father, as he was a- 

 sleep, and putting on her snow-shoes proceeded to 

 seek assistance. That indeed was a dreary morn- 

 inuf as she went lorth through the solitary woods 

 of winter. Death is in her home, and her children 

 wait her return. Uphold her trembling heart, thou 

 Father of the fatherless and widow's God 1 Neigh- 

 bors returned with her. A tree was hollowed out 

 for a coftin, and so in the solitude was he commit- 

 ted lo the earth. Death at all times comes, chilling 

 the lieails of men witli awe and fear. Even in pop- 

 ulous cities, in the midst of the throng and busy 

 voices of life, an awful sense of solitufle rests on 

 those who witness the departure of the dying; and 

 days and years shall pass, and they who beheld the 

 scene shall enter that chamber with silent steps 

 and hushed voices and a shadow over their souls. 

 Whatthen mnsthavebeen her lonelines6,-a solitary 

 widow in the wilderness. She must watch by the 

 bedside of her children alone ; her tears shall be 

 shed alone — she shall no more kneel by her hus- 

 band's side to pray — his voice shall no more waken 

 her at morning, and when the night approaches she 

 shall unconsciously look forth to the forest, watch- 

 ing for his return, who shall never return again." 

 Itlinisterial and School Funds, and fleeting 

 House. 



With the ecclesiastical history of most of the Keo' 



