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<Jri)c JTarmcr's iltotttl)hj ilisitor. 



in the country. On the first alarm the rest of the 

 family had retired from the West Cambridge 

 tavern: on the night previous to the 19th April 

 1775, the old gentleman remained at the house 

 alone. He once described to us the scene of the 

 passage of the first detachment of British regu- 

 lars up the main road that night. His tavern and 

 the whole line of the road had been notified by 

 friendly messengers of the approach of the 

 troops. Mr. Adams retired to the garret, and 

 saw them pass from the window in the gable end. 

 It was a slill moonlight night. Dressed in red, 

 with brightened muskets gl'stening in the twi- 

 light, they passed in close order, and molested 

 nobody on the road until seeing a light some 

 three-fourths of a" mile above on the same road, 

 a gang of the ruflians entered the house of anoth- 

 er Mr. Adams, (brother or cousin to the above) 

 who himself left it on their approach, and after 

 rifling it of silver ware and other contents, abus- 

 ing and driving out the mother with an infant 

 nine days old and the scared family of elder chil- 

 dren, set the house on fire, which, after they left, 

 was almost miraculously put out and preserved 

 by the elder daughter of the same family. Of 

 this last group of children, the infant so ungra- 

 ciously treated with its mother by the British sol- 

 diery, is now the wife of James Hill, Esq., the 

 farmer of West Cambridge who for the last forty 

 years has been earliest in the Boston market with 

 peas and other vegetables, and whose sons with 

 himself are the owners of the lot on which our 

 early childhood was nursed — the lot that has re- 

 mained in the occupancy of the Hill name for 

 more than two hundred years. This lady had an 

 elder brother living at New Salem, Ms., Daniel 

 Mams, when we last saw her, who i^ now more 

 thau one hundred years of age. 



On such an cxubejant subject we can scarcely 

 ovoid running into digressions that may^confound 

 the reader not so fully interested, We return to 

 the Cambridge farm at Ashburnham U|)on which 

 our patriarch,unrivalleil we believe as a centenari- 

 an letter writer, commenced cutting down the 

 trees in the year 1770. Driven away from his 

 home by British hostility, the father and original 

 purchaser of the Cambridge farm removed to it 

 about the year 1775. This lot of one thousand 

 acres, in a scjuare of nearly one mile and a fointh 

 in extent each way, lay along the westerly line 

 of the county of Middlesex-, being the first in the 

 county of Worcester, about thirty miles in a 

 northerly direction from the town of Worcester: 

 its easterly side ran almig the town of Ashby, 

 und its southerly line came almost down to the 

 lines of Westminster and Fitchburg. It was a 

 beautiful lot of heavy timbered red oak, maple, 

 beech and while ash, with the stately hemlock 

 and spruce upon the si<lc hills and vullies, from 

 whose rocks streams of pure waters, the sources 

 of the Nashua river below, gushed in silver pmi- 

 ty. The father of the writer moved to a hastily 

 cleared little " place " upon this Cambridge farm 

 in 1798, twenty-eight years after it was opened. 

 Our early recollections then are that more than 

 one-half of the noble primeval forest was still left 

 standing. Of the woods upon the hills the red 

 oak, running U[) in a straight rifk some (orly to 

 seventy feet without touching a limb, predomina- 

 ted. So even were the higher trees, that in a dis- 

 tant view you might seem to walk the top of the 

 forest as you would walk over a smooth mendow. 

 The Cundiridge farm was confessedly the very 

 best lot of land in the town. Our patriarch com- 

 menced upon it at first l)y cutting down in one 

 season with his own hands some three acres, not 



of what was then called wood, but "timber," as 

 denoting thick standing trees from three to five 

 feet in diameter. All of this was burnt upon the 

 ground, leaving a richness which gave for years 

 afterwards the most abundant crops. The Cam- 

 bridge farm was not oidy rough but hilly. Upon 

 it is that beautiful dark prominence first south of 

 Wetatick mountain on the line between New 

 Hampshire and Massachusetts, called Jewel hilT, 

 which may be as distinctly seen as the Wacliu- 

 sett still further south, from the Washington 

 house upon Dorchester heights, as well as from 

 the Bunker hill monument, sixty miles distant, 

 with the naked eye. The Cambridge farm now 

 includes twelve to fifteen of the most valued farms 

 in Ashburnham : with the exception of only a 

 single morass or meadow, there is not an acre of 

 the thousand that was not originally rife with 

 rocks, large and small, more than sufficient to 

 fence it. One man settled a lot of fifty acres of 

 this land and contrived to bring up a family of 

 sons and daughters upon it, where he could for 

 several years find only a single acre feasible to 

 the plough, which he u-ed to alternate into a crop 

 of Indian corn and wheat. This acre was first 

 prepared by digging with the crow-bar into the 

 rocky soil piecemeal, annually, while another acre 

 of the heavy timber was cut down, burned and 

 cleared for a crop of rye and a portion of pota- 

 toes and turnips. The grass mowed upon this 

 place where the surface was nearly half covered 

 with rocks, turned out for years two to three tons 

 of the best hay to the acre. A very few acres 

 soon became the best of pasturage for oxen, cows 

 and sheep. The boys of this family, with a father 

 and mother kind aiid indulgent almost to a fault, 

 were the companions of our youthful pastimes 

 in wet weather, when we could not hoe corn or 

 make hay — when no summer school could privi- 

 lege itself with its rare opportunity — in e.xtreme 

 rain to hide-and-go-seek about the hay-mow, or 

 when the lowering clouds did not bring on rain 

 to angle for trout in the nearer brook, or early in 

 the day to hasten to the more distant pond, where 

 if the larger perch would not bite to our hook, 

 the resort of catching an abundant string of pouts 

 never failed us, even if the sun shone out at mid- 

 day. This roughest "place" upon the Cambridge 

 farm — its first owner having exchanged it for one 

 more feasible in the town of Acworth, N. H., 

 where we hope he yet lives at an age nearer nine- 

 ty than eighty years of age— this meanest of the 

 thousand acres with a i'aw acres inore lijasible 

 added to it from that once called " our place," 

 with the rocks of the mowing lands blown out 

 and carried away— is now one of the most beau- 

 tifidly productive farms in the north part of the 

 county of Worcester. Looking upon it in the 

 vernal season from the higher hills three miles 

 off at the centre of Ashburnham, laid out and 

 walled into oblong or square fields, it appears as 

 a splendid garden of large beds with all its varie- 

 gated crops, rich green, bright and golden yellow, 

 or changeable cameleou purple and brown. 



The first pitch in this wilderness of giant trees, 

 in the midst of hills of giant stature,to those who 

 had never seen a moimtain region and ledges and 

 boulders of protruding rocks of gneiss and mica 

 with isolat<!d granite boulders out of place, was 

 made by our now centenarian patriarch. More 

 prudent than some others who settled there, uni- 

 ling in wedlock before they had chopped a tree 

 or cleared an acre, he cleared first a little, earned 

 the means to erect his buildings, and went after 

 marriage to their occupancy in a style umisiuil to 

 the wilderness at that early day. The approach 



to the town in summer was too rough for any 

 wheeled vehicle with horses. So he rode with 

 his new wife on horseback, which used there to 

 be the style of going to meeting for whole fami- 

 lies for as many as forty years afterwards : her 

 furniture was carried with a stout ox-team in a 

 journey of several days, doubtless unloaded, to be 

 forced piecemeal over parts of the tnost difficult 

 way, where the best road since our recollection 

 in a rocky pathway encountered steep angles of 

 forty-five degrees. Nine miles easterly from Ash- 

 burnham began these steep rises, to encounter 

 which in any carriage with wheels many years 

 afterwards, required more manual strength than 

 the rough road from that to Boston, a distance of 

 full forty-five miles. Up through these hills and 

 over still higher, further on, the march of im- 

 provement has been such that a railway is about 

 to carry a hundred tons at a single load the dis- 

 tance in as many minutes that a heavy team of 

 oxen would carry a single ton in as many hours! 

 All this the patriarch might see could he leave 

 the distant home (Harford, Sns(|uehanna county, 

 Pennsylvania) where his letter should be dated, 

 instead of his more familiar home, Ashburnhnm, 

 the place which he has mistaken. The success 

 which attended his first year's residence at Ash- 

 burnham, enabled him soon to do good to those 

 who were about him. In 1775 he had three chil- 

 dren, from one month to four years of age. The 

 partner of his early attachment — an excellent 

 matron now in our own bright recollection as 

 vivid as that of our own mother, although she 

 died twenty-five years ago and we had seen her 

 but a few times in the last forty years — always of 

 delicate health, and himself engaged in the mul- 

 tifarious concerns of farming in fair weather and 

 shoemaking for himself and neighbors in foul 

 days — made him more useful to iremain in the 

 town when it became necessary for at least one 

 in every four men to be present either as militia 

 men or regulars to serve in the army of the rev- 

 olution. He went not himself, but hired and paid 

 a substitute from his own pocket, once, twice and 

 thrice or more. For this service he might de- 

 serve a pension : since he was one hundred years 

 old, he wrote his Massachusetts namesake, John 

 Quincy Adams, relative to his service in that 

 cause, and his claim from necessity — for his 

 properly has all been given away for the benefit 

 of his children and others. He bears the same 

 name of the late President of the United Stales, 

 who was born ten years before him, and who re- 

 ceived the honors of a graduate at Harvard Col- 

 lege in 1753. An autograph letter of the scholar 

 and statesman, John Adams, hearing the date of 

 Qiuncy, Dec. 30, 18J.5, a copy of which we have 

 taken verbatim from the library {of Congress, 

 says — 



"I was born Oct. 19, 1735, in Quincy, then the 

 North Parish in Hraintree, my Father was John 

 Adams born in the same Parish, My Grandfather 

 was Joseph Adams Junior horn in the same Par- 

 ish, My Great Grandfather was Jo.seph Adams 

 Senior, and my (Jreat great Grandfather was Hen- 

 ry Adams who came from England. These all 

 lived and died nnd were buried in this Parish as 

 their Gravestones in the Congregational Church 

 yard distinctly show to this day." 



We copied this letter of the scholar at SO as a 

 curiosity contrasting with the farmer and shoe- 

 maker of 102, whose youth was restricted to a 

 few weeks' instruction in schools where reading, 

 spelling, and hardly writing, with the simplest 

 sums in arithmetic were taught — where the hoy 

 had to work morning, noon ami night in his 

 " woolen shirt and leather breeches." The two 

 John Adums, if of the same family in England, 



