THE FIRST HOMES. I7I 



The original highway, reserved according to the Fisher 

 plot, lay along the crooked eJge of upland next to the 

 marshes ; and along here the two-wheeled carts had for- 

 merly picked their way outside the marsh fences. 



In 1682, ten years later than the bridge contract, a com- 

 mittee was appointed to lay out this more direct way 

 through thirty-four lots of the First Division from Jacob's 

 Meadow to the meadow near where a little brook now 

 crosses South Main Street, a hundred yards or more south 

 of Cushing's greenhouse. 



Each owner of a lot was reimbursed for the highway 

 cut through his land four rods wide by property lying at 

 the edge of the marshes, a strip which had not been 

 divided by the Fisher plan. About half of these, from 

 the twelfth to the twenty-eighth, were " to run down to the 

 meadow fence as it now stands," said the committee, "with 

 this proviso, that all the proprietors of the meadows shall 

 have liberty of free, egress and regress into their meadows 

 in the old highway as they have had formerly for the cart- 

 ing of their hay, . . . and also that all the proprietors of wood 

 and timber on the northeastward side of said highway 

 now laid out by the committee shall have free egress and 

 regress in the said way as formerly." 



This highway, which is nowadays so well traveled, was 

 laid out four rods wide by marking trees on each .side 

 with the letter "H." The northward continuation of this 

 highway after crossing Jacob's Bridge lay in the reserve 

 area along Great Neck and the present Town Common 

 until it reached the seventy-first lot beyond Sohier Street, 

 where Daniel Lincoln was then living. 



At this point the con7mittee turned straight towards 

 Hingham, making the angle as we now see it, and reim- 

 bursing Daniel Lincoln, John Farrar, Ibrook Tower,* and 

 others for as much land as this diagonal highway four rods 

 wide took from them as it passed through the First Division 



* Ibrook Tower had purchased lot seventy-three. 



