Synopses & Reviews
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A STUDY OF CHURCH AND TOWN GOVERNMENT. CHAPTER I. OLD BRAINTREE. On the 18th of November, 1637, according to the calendar now in use, sentence of banishment was passed on John Wheelwright; and, before the 1st of December, the preacher at the Mount had forever left his people there, and was on his way to New Hampshire. The character and extent of the settlements on the shores of Boston Bay south of the Neponset, at that time, have already been referred to. Practically, the region was still a forest wilderness of swamp, salt marsh and upland. There was as yet no road from Boston to Plymouth, for the path to the latter place ? in trying to follow which Phinehas Pratt had lost his way thirteen years before1 ? began at Wessagus- set, and such little intercourse as there was between those dwelling at Wessagusset and at Boston was by boat across the bay. The Indian trail did not follow the shore, nor could it be called a path, for the eye of the trained woodsman was needed to detect its devious way as it wound about the head-waters of tidal inlets and circled the uplands in search of fords, or 1 Supra, 86-8. those points where alone it was possible to cross the swamps. While a forlorn remnant of the Massachusetts, the stricken survivors of plague and small-pox, haunted the forest, between the Neponset and the Mon- atoquit there were absolutely no white inhabitants. First Morton and the Merry-Mount company had been rooted out by the magistrates, who afterwards hunted Gardiner into the wilderness; and, so far as those two earliest attempts at settlement were concerned, axe and fire had done the work of obliteration with all possible thoroughness, as Alderman, the pioneer settler at Hingham, found when, in 1634, having had occasion to be in Boston, he undertook to return home...
Synopsis
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