Framingham Legends & Lore

by James L. Parr

  KING PHILIP’S WAR

  King Philip’s War, the most destructive of all the conflicts between the English settlers and natives, broke out in 1675. It shattered the nearly forty years of peace that had endured since the close of the Pequot War of 1636–37. It originated in the continuing friction between Philip, sachem of the Pokanoket of the Mount Hope peninsula in Rhode Island, and the leaders of the Plymouth Colony. Philip’s father was the sachem Massasoit, who is renowned for having aided the Pilgrims during their difficult early years in America. While in Massasoit’s time the alliance helped the Pokanoket and their Wampanoag allies fend off their more powerful Narragansett neighbors, by the 1670s the expansion of Plymouth into new towns closer and closer to Mount Hope meant that the white settlers posed an increasingly greater threat to Philip’s domain.

  The long-simmering conflict erupted into open warfare with the Pokanoket raid on the town of Swansea on June 20, 1675. While deeply troubling, there was no reason for the few white families living in what is now Framingham to believe they would be directly affected. The area was in the Massachusetts Bay (not Plymouth) Colony, and the local natives were Nipmuc, not Pokanoket or Wampanoag, and most of them were Christian converts.

  By midsummer, the forces dispatched from Plymouth successfully drove Philip and his allies out of southeastern Massachusetts, but they failed to capture him. More important, their efforts to intimidate neighboring tribes into remaining neutral had the opposite effect of pushing them into open alliance with Philip. The Narragansett began wreaking havoc on Providence in the Rhode Island Colony while, even more troubling, on July 14, 1675, the Nipmuc attacked Mendon in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

  THE TRAGEDY OF THE PRAYING INDIANS

  Any doubts as to which side the Nipmuc favored were answered in August 1675, when they ambushed an English expedition that sought to negotiate a treaty of neutrality with them and allowed Philip and his followers safe refuge at their village at Menameset (near New Braintree, Massachusetts). This put the natives settled in and around Framingham in an awkward position, to say the least. Most of them were Christian converts, and all lived alongside if not actively participated in white society. Yet their brethren had declared war upon that society. As a result, they were trusted by neither side.

  So what happened to the Indians we met earlier in the chapter? John Awassamog, aged by this time, seems to have had the good sense or good fortune not to become ensnared in the conflict, probably staying with his son Thomas in the vicinity of Sherborn. The same could not be said of Old Jethro, Old Jacob, Captain Tom and Netus.

  When the English settlement of Lancaster, eighteen miles to the north, was attacked on August 22, 1675, the praying Indians of Magunkook were suspected, and the village was seized by the English a week later. At their trial, the natives were able to prove their innocence by producing witnesses who testified that they had in fact attended Sunday meeting at Marlborough that day. Nonetheless, the village lay abandoned as some Indians remained imprisoned and others were relocated to Deer Island in Boston Harbor to keep them out of further trouble, while most (probably including Old Jacob) joined their neighbors at Natick. Old Jethro, though not a Christian, had decided to demonstrate his loyalty to the English by moving from his home on Nobscot Mountain to within the bounds of the praying Indian town of Natick.

  During the autumn of 1675, King Philip’s War raged from Rhode Island to the Connecticut Valley to the frontier of Maine, but the vicinity of Framingham remained relatively quiet after the raid on Lancaster that August. At first the colonial government sought to isolate the praying Indians from their Nipmuc compatriots by forbidding them to leave Natick, whether to hunt game in the forests or harvest corn planted outside the borders of the town. This represented a considerable hardship, as their numbers had swelled with refugees from Magunkook. But to the Massachusetts Bay authorities, the mere continued existence nearby of such a large settlement of natives, Christian converts or not, represented a powder keg that could be ignited at any time.

  On October 26, a detachment of soldiers from Cambridge swept through Natick to forcibly relocate all the natives to Deer Island. No provision of housing or food stores had been made for them there, although it was already the eve of a New England winter. Feeling betrayed by their fellow Christians, a number of natives whose only crime was to be Indian chose instead to take their chances with the Nipmuc and fled to the west, including Old Jacob, Old Jethro, his son Peter and Netus. Captain Tom also reluctantly joined the warring Nipmuc when a party of warriors arrived at Hassanamesit on November 1, gave the converts there the choice of joining with them or being attacked and told them of the fate of their friends at Natick.

  The Indians interned on Deer Island suffered much that winter, but the disruptions and dislocations of war brought privations upon those natives who had fled Natick as well. On February 1, 1676, Netus assembled a party of about a dozen warriors (including Old Jacob) to retrieve the stores of corn from the abandoned village of Magunkook. But the granaries were empty. Suspecting the town had been pilfered by the English and unwilling to return empty-handed, Netus urged the party to continue three miles eastward on the path to the nearest white settlement to look for the missing corn. As they climbed the rise of Mount Wayte, they spotted two English children at the well a short distance from the Eames house.

  THE EAMES FARM AT MOUNT WAYTE

  According to historian Stephen Herring, there were probably no more than seven English families settled within the bounds of present-day Framingham on the eve of King Philip’s War. There were the Stones and their relatives who had long been established at what is now Saxonville; a little farther south were the Bent and Rice families not far from the ruins of the old Nipmuc village on the western shores of Lake Cochituate, the Bradish family at Nobscot and the Thomas Eames family on the southern slope of Mount Wayte. While the other families were clustered relatively close to each other, the Eames farm stood over three miles distant to the southwest. As Framingham had yet to be incorporated, the Eames family did not even think of themselves as living in the same town as the other settlers. All the other families attended Sunday services at the meetinghouse in Sudbury (located within present-day Wayland), but the Eameses traveled instead to Sherborn.

  Thomas Eames had been born in England about 1618 and had come to the Massachusetts Bay Colony by 1636, when he served in the Pequot War, married a woman named Margaret and settled in Dedham by 1640. He resided in Medford from 1652 to 1659, and was living in Cambridge by the time he married his second wife, the widow Mary (Blandford) Paddleford, about 1662. Two years later they removed to Sudbury, where Mary’s father had been among the original settlers, and leased the “Pelham farm” in what is now Wayland. In 1668, Thomas Eames, fifty years old and “maimed in his limbs,” appealed to the government of Massachusetts Bay to grant him land for his service in the Pequot War as a youth. The colony did not grant him his request, but his petition caught the attention of Deputy Governor Thomas Danforth, who agreed to let Eames settle on part of his vast acreage at Framingham. By 1670, Thomas Eames set about building a homestead on Danforth’s land on Mount Wayte.

  Thomas Eames’s 1668 petition that brought him to the attention of Deputy Governor Thomas Danforth.

  Eames may have sought protection for his farm even before the Nipmuc raid on Mendon, as the council at Boston had sent four soldiers to be quartered at Framingham by July 22, 1675. On that date, two of the guards were reassigned to the Reverend Browne’s house at Sudbury. Thomas Eames, already ineligible for the militia due to disability, further petitioned the council to prevent his horses, which he required to ensure his own family’s safety, from being pressed into military service by the towns of Marlborough or Sudbury on the occasions when he and his family traveled there. “Divine providence having cast my lot in a place both remote from neighbors in the woods,” wrote Eames of his farm’s vulnerable position, “and in a place of no small danger in this day of trouble, when God hath so signally let loo
se the heathens against his people everywhere.” Yet when the fall and early winter brought no new attacks on the region, the council at Boston, already struggling to pay for the war, decided to withdraw the soldiers altogether.

  In late January came word from two praying Indians who had returned from infiltrating the Nipmuc at Menameset that the English towns of Lancaster, Groton, Marlborough, Sudbury and Medfield were liable to be attacked in the coming weeks. This news is probably what spurred Thomas Eames to travel to Boston to seek ammunition and further assistance for himself and other nearby settlers. He was still in Boston on February 1, when Netus and his party arrived at Mount Wayte looking for the missing corn from Magunkook.

  THE EAMES MASSACRE

  Netus’s party seized the two Eames children at the well so that they would not alarm the others. Wannuckhow, also called William Jackstraw, one of the Magunkook Indians, later testified that he stayed back in the fields, probably guarding the two children, as the rest of the warriors approached the house. Inside, Thomas’s wife, Mary (Blandford) (Paddleford) Eames, a woman in her mid-forties, was engaged in the manufacture of soap at the hearth. We shall never know whether Netus intended merely to subdue the family while his band took corn and other provisions, or to take the family prisoner for possible ransom. All we know is that Mary Eames was determined not to be taken without a fight and threw the cauldron of boiling lye at her attackers, then tried to fight them off with whatever implements she had beside her in the kitchen. The enraged warriors killed her, along with several of her children. William Jackstraw’s sons Joseph and John later testified that they convinced Netus and Annecoeken, the two who had done the actual killing, to take the remainder prisoner, thus saving the lives of some of the children. Joseph further stated that he carried one of the Eames sons on his back. (How much credence one accords this testimony is open to conjecture, as it was given in a failed attempt to gain clemency for the three Jackstraws.) The warriors burned the house and barns, slaughtered the livestock and destroyed whatever stores they were unable to carry off with them.

  Thomas Eames inventoried his loss as £330.012.00, a substantial sum for the time:

  “An Inventory of the loss of Thomas Eames, when his house was fired by Indians at Framingham near unto Sudbury in the county of Middlesex, the first of February 1675–6.”

  Imprimis—A wife and nine children.

  Item—A house 34 feet long, double floores and garret, and cellar, and a barn 52 foot long, leantir’d one side and two ends

  100.00.00

  It. 4 oxen

  024.00.00

  It. 7 cows fair with calf

  028.00.00

  It. 2 yearlings

  003.00.00

  It. 1 bull

  002.00.00

  It. 2 heifers fair with calf

  006.00.00

  It. 1 heifer

  002.00.00

  It. 8 sheep fair with lamb

  003.12.00

  It. 30 loads of hay in ye barn at 8s. per load

  012.00.00

  It. 10 bush. wheate at 6s. p. bush.

  003.00.00

  It. 40 bush. rye at 4s. 8d. p. bush.

  008.00.00

  It. 210 bush. of indian at 3s. p. bush.

  031.00.00

  It. Hemp and flax in ye barn

  001.00.00

  It. Fire arms with other arms and ammunition

  006.00.00

  It. Butter 20s., cheese 40s., 2 barrels and a half of Pork and 4 flitches of bacon

  013.00.00

  It. Carpenter’s and joyner’s tooles

  005.00.00

  It. 2 great spinning wheels and 2 small wheels 4s. 4s. for cards

  001.00.00

  It. 6 beds 3 of them feather beds and 3 flock, 6 rugs, 12 blankets

  012.00.00

  It. 1 chest of lynen, with ye sheets and shifts

  010.00.00

  It. A livery cupboard with what was in it

  002.00.00

  It. My wife’s linen and wearing apparel, and children’s clothing, and my own cloathing, with cloathing that was my former wife’s

  025.00.00

  It. Pewter, brasse, and Iron ware

  014.00.00

  It. Churns, and other dairy vessels, with other wooden lumber

  005.00.00

  _______

  Total 330.012.00

  The accounts of that day are fragmentary and contradictory. Having said that, the nine children most likely at the Eames farm along with their ages and probable fates were: Mary Eames (age thirty, killed); Zachariah Paddleford (age eighteen, captured and escaped); Edward Paddleford (age fifteen, killed); Thomas Eames Jr. (age twelve, killed); Samuel Eames (age eleven, captured and escaped); Margaret (age nine, captured and ransomed); Nathaniel (age seven, captured and escaped); and Sarah (age five) and Lydia Eames (age three), one of whom was killed and the other captured and never redeemed. Mary was the daughter of Thomas Eames’s first marriage and Zachariah and Edward Paddleford were the children of Mary (Blandford Paddleford) Eames’s first marriage to Jonathan Paddleford of Cambridge, while the six youngest were the children of both Thomas and Mary. One particularly disturbing aspect of the whole incident was that the warriors and their victims were almost certainly well known to each other. They had lived in proximity prior to the war, and Netus had attended Sunday meeting at Sudbury with the Eameses’ closest white neighbors, the Stones, Rices and Bents. By not killing all the children, the natives ensured the survivors would later be able to identify their attackers.

  Nineteenth-century engraving depicting the Eames massacre.

  One contemporary account mentions the wife of one of Thomas Eames’s sons dying the day after the attack. This actually may have been Thomas’s unmarried daughter Mary—it is possible she had been scalped and left for dead, only to survive for one more agonizing day. We do know that one of the sons was with the band of Nipmuc who attacked Sudbury on April 21, 1676. Samuel Eames escaped his captors, traveling across unfamiliar territory in the direction of the rising sun. On May 12, he came across plantains, an herb called “English Foot” by the natives because it was cultivated by settlers and did not grow wild, and realized he had arrived in the vicinity of an English settlement. Two days later, Margaret and either Sarah or Lydia Eames were seen at a native camp at Turner’s Falls, Massachusetts; by June they were reported “at a great hill about middle way between Wachusett and Pennacook [Concord, New Hampshire].” Zachariah Paddleford had escaped by August 24, 1676, when he was listed as a soldier on the rolls of Captain Joseph Syll’s company dispatched to fight the natives in western Massachusetts. Nathaniel also seems to have escaped, possibly in company with Zachariah. Margaret was eventually ransomed back from Indians in French Canada, a not uncommon occurrence, and reportedly later married one of the men who had participated in the expedition to redeem her. It is said that the youngest captive daughter remained with the tribe that took her in, content to continue living the only life she could remember. This was known to have happened in other instances and is entirely possible.

  TWILIGHT OF THE INDIANS

  In the months following the attack on the Eames farm, the Indians seemed to grow bolder. On February 10, 1676, they attacked Lancaster and forced the abandonment of that town. The Nipmuc and Narragansett attacked Medfield eleven days later. Marlborough was attacked on March 16 and again on March 26, destroying much of the town. Perhaps the most impressive native victory was at Sudbury on April 21, the assault witnessed by one of the Eames boys, where the main English force had been routed. By the beginning of summer, eleven English towns had been abandoned altogether, including Lancaster and Groton, while Marlborough was maintained solely as a military base.

  In truth, the natives were rapidly losing their ability to continue with the conflict. They had smaller populations, were less able to withstand the losses from combat and lacked the infrastructure to maintain large bands of warriors in the field for indefinite periods of time. Quite simply, food was r
unning out. They also learned that when they withdrew farther inland away from the English, other tribes were ready to pounce on their newly vulnerable positions. King Philip himself discovered this when his band of warriors was set upon by the Mohawks near Albany, New York. By June, after a year of fighting, many of the tribes were looking to cut a deal with the settlers.

  One by one, the Framingham Indians died or fell into the hands of the English. Netus died in the second attack on Marlborough in March; his cohort Annecoeken was killed shortly thereafter. On June 9, an English expedition sweeping through the hills west of Natick yielded Captain Tom, captured on the hill on the border between Natick and Framingham that still bears his name. (Today, somewhat more prosaically, it is the site of a Jordan’s Furniture store.) Tom was said to be relieved to be back in the company of the English, but his captors were skeptical of his story that he had joined the Nipmuc only under duress. So it was on June 19, 1676, that a man who was once so trusted by the government of Massachusetts Bay that he was commissioned a captain in the militia was condemned to death by that same authority. The Reverend John Eliot thought it a grave miscarriage of justice and spent the final day praying with his old Indian friend. Captain Tom was hanged at Boston on June 22, 1676, alongside another Natick Indian, John Auttuck, the probable ancestor of Crispus Attucks, whom we shall meet in a later chapter.

  On July 25, 1676, a party of 180 Nipmuc who had sued for peace surrendered to the colonial authorities at Boston, including Old Jacob and probably all three Jackstraws. Perhaps on the basis of testimony by the newly returned Zachariah Paddleford, the eldest of the captive Eames children, warrants were issued for the arrest of Joshua Assatt, John Dublet (a son-in-law of Old Jacob) and the Jackstraw father and sons. The three Jackstraws were brought in for interrogation before magistrate Thomas Danforth in August. Danforth’s interest in the case went beyond his official capacity—as the owner of the land at Mount Wayte, it was he who had encouraged the Eames family to settle there in the first place. (Danforth had also lost a son, Thomas Jr., at the Great Swamp Fight with the Narragansett in December 1675.) In any event, the Jackstraws’ pleas that their actions had in effect spared the lives of some of the Eames children fell on deaf ears. Three natives, presumably the Jackstraws (although the record does not explicitly name them), were executed for the crime on September 21, 1676. Netus’s widow was sold into slavery, but it is unknown whether any of the other assailants were ever tried for their crimes.