Framingham Legends & Lore

by James L. Parr

  We do know that at least two of Netus’s party were eventually pardoned. Joshua Assatt served as a scout for the English in their campaigns against the Indians in western Massachusetts and presumably earned his pardon through loyal service. Old Jacob, the former resident of Indian Head, also was spared, although the reason is not known.

  Peter Jethro also survived the war, serving as a double agent for the English. On September 1, 1676, he convinced a large party of natives to surrender at Cocheco (now Dover), New Hampshire, with a false promise of amnesty. Among those so duped were his own father, Old Jethro, who was executed that same month, and the rest of his family (excepting Peter), who were sold into slavery. Peter Jethro was still living at Natick as late as 1688.

  The war in Massachusetts wound down shortly after King Philip himself was killed in August 1676, although the conflict in Maine continued to drag on until the Treaty of Casco was signed a year later.

  NATIVE AMERICAN LEGACY IN FRAMINGHAM

  King Philip’s War had a tremendous influence on the future course of Framingham. Thomas Eames died in 1681, fewer than five years after the massacre. But he had already secured a huge grant of land from the Natick Indians in compensation for his losses. The property included virtually all of present-day Framingham east of Farm Pond and Mount Wayte, south of the old Musterfield and north of Route 135. By 1678, he and his surviving sons had returned to Framingham and built their houses and farms on this new property. Ironically, the massacre had ensured that the name of Eames would remain a common one in the town for the next two hundred years.

  The war all but ended any native presence within the future bounds of Framingham itself. The native village at Magunkook was never resettled, and the land was eventually leased to the proprietors of a new English town named Hopkinton. Although greatly reduced in number by the war and their winter of hardship at Deer Island, the Natick Indians did return to their homes. Among those who lived at Natick were two of Netus’s warriors, Old Jacob and John Assatt, whose presence so nearby never ceased to anger and torment the surviving members of the Eames family. The number of natives dwindled over the years, and they lost their most powerful advocate when Reverend Eliot died in 1690. Natick remained an Indian town until 1762, when whites took over its governance, although much of the land remained in trust for the natives for quite some time afterward.

  Eames massacre monument placed on Mount Wayte by the descendants of Thomas Eames.

  Framingham’s native inhabitants may be gone, but they are not forgotten. They remain alive in the names of Captain Tom’s Hill, Indian Head, Lake Waushakem, Lake Cochituate and others. They are inextricably a vital part of the town’s history; their presence did much to influence the future bounds, settlement and development of Framingham, both directly and indirectly.

  What of House Rock itself? The site where it and the grove of birch trees that Josiah Temple said marked Omena’s final resting place once stood is now the property of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, consumed in the construction of Exit 12 fifty years ago. But House Rock itself had ceased to exist before Temple had even penned his story—his neighbor Jonas Clayes saw that the two enormous slabs of granite were perfect for fashioning into millstones.

  Chapter Two

  WITCHES, PIRATES AND SPECULATORS

  Framingham Becomes a Town

  SETTLERS AND SPECULATORS

  The story of the English settlement of Framingham is that of settlers and speculators. With only a couple of exceptions, these were by and large two entirely distinct and separate groups. The people who were awarded grants of land generally did not live in Framingham, nor did they intend to. Some of them may have never even set foot inside the bounds of the future town. Ownership of land was the most tangible sign of wealth in a rapidly growing colony. The trick was to get in early before a township was settled, but not so early that one would have a large amount of capital tied up in land that no one would be interested in living on (or, more important, buying or at least leasing) for decades. Then as now, the real estate market could be cyclical, liable to periods of both boom and bust.

  In Stephen Herring’s memorable phrase, Framingham was “the hole in the center of the doughnut.” Most of the surrounding towns had been settled and incorporated beforehand: Concord (1635), Dedham (1636), Sudbury (1639), Natick (an Indian town, 1650), Marlborough (1660) and Sherborn (1674). The outbreak of the English Civil War in the 1640s marked the end of the “Great Migration” of Puritans to New England. Thereafter, growth in the Massachusetts Bay and other colonies would have to come about through natural population increase rather than mass emigration of new settlers from England. This natural population growth was significant—New England’s comparatively healthy climate, agricultural economy and ready supply of new land meant that its citizens lived longer than elsewhere in the British Empire and had large families with significant numbers of children surviving to adulthood. As these children started families of their own, they pressed out to the frontiers in search of land to farm. But time was needed for the children of the immigrants of the 1620s–1640s to reach adulthood, which explains why there was a relative pause in the settlement of new towns after the flurry created before 1650.

  Establishing land ownership was not always straightforward, even after one had been granted land. Since the new land grants were inevitably on the unsettled frontier, the authority making the land grants usually had not actually seen, never mind surveyed, the land in question. So there were often overlapping claims, defined by nonsensical, contradictory or nonexistent physical features, depending how accurately the area had been mapped, if at all. (The most extreme example of this phenomenon was the colonial governments of New York and New Hampshire each granting land in what is now Vermont.) Furthermore, there were often claims by Native Americans to the area. Sometimes it took decades of lawsuits before the courts finally sorted out who owned what.

  One way to protect one’s claim to the land was to buy out anyone with a competing claim, however legitimate or dubious that claim might be. We find in the Middlesex County records quitclaim deeds from various Indians in the 1680s surrendering their claims to Thomas Danforth, even though he had already been granted the land twenty years earlier by the colonial government of Massachusetts Bay.

  THE GRANTEES OF FRAMINGHAM

  The landholders had various motives for acquiring their respective land grants. Some turned around and immediately sold off the property for ready cash, some sought to rent out the land short-term while waiting for the value of the property to increase, while others sat on their grants for years without acting on them.

  The first grantee was Mrs. Elizabeth Glover, widow of the Reverend Josse Glover, who had died at sea en route to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1639. Her six hundred acres, granted in 1640, were located at the extreme northeast corner of present-day Framingham, while the adjacent six hundred acres granted at the same time to her soon-to-be second husband are now part of Wayland. This second husband was Henry Dunster, first president of Harvard College, who leased and then sold his land to Edmund Rice, founder of that name in the region. (Rice received his own grant in 1652 nearby in Framingham, settled by his descendants and known as “Rice’s End” for many years.)

  If Glover’s grant was presumably intended as a form of death benefit for losing her pastor husband before even reaching New England, the Dunster grant was more characteristic—a form of payment for services rendered to the colony. For example, Thomas Mayhew was granted land in Framingham in 1643 as payment for building a bridge in Watertown. Evidently neither he nor his heirs were particularly excited about the land, as it was not formally laid out until 1714. (By that time most of Framingham had already been claimed, so Mayhew’s grant formed an odd panhandle to the west that was absorbed into Southborough upon its creation in 1727.)

  Others who received land in Framingham for services rendered were the Reverend Edmund Browne of Sudbury, who was granted a meadow in 1654; Richard Russell, who was granted f
ive hundred acres in South Framingham in 1657 in consideration of his role as the colony’s treasurer; Elijah Corlett, the Cambridge schoolmaster who had previously sued Netus, received two hundred acres in 1659; and Colonel William Crowne, who received five hundred acres in 1662 for his work lobbying on behalf of the colony in England. In 1658, Richard Wayte was granted three hundred acres in compensation for his service in the war against the Pequot more than twenty years earlier. He only held the land for the few years it took to have it laid out and sold, but the hill he owned still bears his name today—Mount Wayte.

  Except for the Rices, none of the above grantees ever resided in Framingham. Some of them, such as Corlett, sold out directly to the Stone family, the first English settlers of Framingham, who resided at “Stone’s End,” or present-day Saxonville. Most of the other property eventually wound up in the hands of the largest grantee, the deputy governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Thomas Danforth, about whom we shall learn more later.

  GOOKIN AND HOW’S PURCHASE

  As we saw in the previous chapter, a large portion of contemporary Framingham east of the Sudbury River was originally part of the domain of the Natick Indians. About 35 percent of this land was granted to the Eames family in 1677 in the wake of their losses in King Philip’s War. The remainder was bought from the Indians in 1682 by partners Samuel Gookin of Cambridge and Samuel How of Sudbury.

  There are a couple of aspects of this transaction that might cause the modern observer to arch an eyebrow. Samuel Gookin’s father was Major General Daniel Gookin, Indian commissioner of Massachusetts Bay. The elder Gookin was an associate of the Reverend John Eliot and acted as a sort of trustee for the Natick Indians. That his son was buying land from the natives whose interests he was bound to protect might be said in the very least to raise the appearance of a conflict of interest, if not outright charges of an insider deal. Furthermore, although the boundaries were ill-defined, the original purchase was said to encompass about 200 acres. But in a court ruling in 1695, Gookin and How were awarded a total of 1,700 acres in acknowledgement of the vague description of the bounds of the original tract and the numerous payments Gookin and How had made to the Natick Indians over the years, effectively subsidizing them. (The Native Americans could have actually done worse—Gookin and How were denied an additional 1,000 acres they sought east of the Eames family’s land; otherwise the Natick Mall and other northwestern portions of that town might today stand in Framingham.)

  THOMAS DANFORTH, FATHER OF FRAMINGHAM

  Thomas Danforth was baptized at Framlingham, England, on November 20, 1623, the fourth of seven children of Nicholas and Elizabeth Danforth. Elizabeth died in 1629, and in 1634 Nicholas sailed with his children to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They settled in Cambridge and he bought out the holdings of several neighbors who were departing to found Hartford, Connecticut. Almost as soon as he had arrived, Nicholas became one of the proprietors of the town and a member of the colony’s general court. Nicholas only lived a few short years in New England, dying in April 1638, age forty-nine years.

  He had been wealthy enough that all his orphaned children were well provided for. Thomas, the eldest son, naturally took over his father’s business interests. He became a freeman (voter) of Cambridge when he was still only nineteen years old and married Mary Withington on February 23, 1644. He quickly achieved prominence, serving as treasurer of Harvard College from 1650 to 1669 and steward of the college until 1682. Like his father, he became a representative to the general court in 1657 and then became one of the governor’s assistants and magistrate from 1659 to 1679, at which point he became deputy governor of the colony, a position he held, with a brief interruption, until 1692.

  Shortly after he became an assistant, Danforth acquired a grant of 250 acres of land in Framingham. How he first became interested in the area is unknown. His younger brother Samuel had been a member of the second graduating class at Harvard College in 1643 and had followed the wish of their late mother that he enter the ministry. He was ordained an assistant to the Reverend John Eliot at Roxbury in 1650 and remained at that post until he died in 1674. Through his brother Samuel, Thomas Danforth would have known all about Eliot’s work with the Indian converts at Natick, so perhaps that is what drew his interest.

  Two years later, in 1662, an additional two hundred acres were laid out. At the same time, Danforth exercised his right to purchase an additional ten pounds’ worth of land. Ten pounds was not a huge sum, even in 1662, but in this case it was enough to purchase virtually the entirety of what is now Framingham that lies west of the Sudbury River, plus a portion of northern Ashland. In all, it amounted to some fourteen thousand acres. Shortly afterward, he bought out Richard Wayte, adding an additional three hundred acres, including Mount Wayte, and Richard Russell’s five hundred acres as well.

  Soon after his acquisition of the properties, the area became known as Danforth’s Farms, and that name and the year 1662 remain emblazoned on the town seal to this day. Perhaps in an act of modesty, by the 1670s Danforth had begun to refer to the settlement as “Framlingham,” named after the town of his birth in England. (Almost immediately the “l” was dropped from the spelling, following the common American practice of changing the spelling to represent more accurately how a word was pronounced.) If the earlier grantees had received plots of land roughly the proportions of a good-sized farm, Danforth’s holdings now virtually added up to an entire township. And that is precisely what he had in mind.

  JOSEPH BRADISH, FRAMINGHAM PIRATE

  Danforth’s dream of the town of Framingham was remarkably slow in arriving—ten years after his land purchases, only two additional families had moved to the area. One was the Eames family, whom we met in the previous chapter; the second was the Bradish family. Joseph and Mary Bradish had moved from Sudbury to the north side of Nobscot Mountain, not far from the home of the Indian Old Jethro, by 1672. The outbreak of King Philip’s War three years later was probably what prompted the family to move to the safer confines of Cambridge, although they eventually returned to live in Sudbury. They inhabited Framingham long enough for a son, Joseph Jr., to be born here in December 1672. (Incidentally, the document reporting his birth to Middlesex County, along with those of several of the Eames children, is the only known official use of the British “Framlingham” spelling.)

  Not much is known of the younger Joseph’s youth except that he went to sea. He was a boatswain’s mate on the four-hundred-ton, twenty-one-gun, armed merchant ship Adventure that left London, England, bound for Borneo in March 1698. Six months later, after rounding the Cape of Good Hope, the ship stopped for water at an island in the Indian Ocean. While most of the officers were ashore, the crew mutinied and set sail, choosing Bradish (not yet twenty-six years old) as captain. They decided to split among themselves all the money, jewels and goods the ship carried for trade, and headed for Bradish’s home waters of New England. In March 1699, they landed at Montauk, Long Island, whose inhabitants were widely known to be not above trading with pirates. There Bradish stashed his share of jewels for safekeeping while he hired a coastal pilot and headed for Block Island. The Adventure was much too large and conspicuous a ship to go unnoticed for long. When the first party he sent to Newport to buy a smaller sloop was imprisoned by suspicious authorities there, Bradish managed to bribe a passing coastal trader for use of his vessel, and the Adventure’s crew scuttled it and scattered with their share of the cargo to various southern New England ports.

  Most of the pirates were eventually captured and the cargo recovered. Bradish himself was apprehended in Deerfield, Massachusetts, perhaps hoping that if he headed inland and made for the frontier he could escape his notoriety. On April 8, 1699, he and one of his companions were thrown into the jail at Boston, waiting for the local authorities to consult with the royal government back in London about what should be done with them.

  Some accounts state that the Boston jailer, Caleb Ray, was a kinsman of Bradish, others that he was merely incomp
etent. In any event, on Midsummer’s Night, June 24, Ray’s maid, Kate Price, assisted Bradish and his one-eyed compatriot, Tee Witherly, in escaping, and the three headed north. A Kennebec Indian sachem, Essacambuit, who had come to Boston to negotiate a treaty with the colonial government sought to ingratiate himself with the authorities by letting them know where Bradish, Witherly and Price could be found. The three were captured at Saco, Maine, and returned to the Boston jail on October 26, 1699. By this time Caleb Ray had been relieved of his duties, and the prisoners were clapped in irons to prevent their making another run for it.

  By chance, the three pirates shared the jail with Captain William Kidd of New York, who had been imprisoned several months earlier. While Bradish was unambiguously a pirate, Kidd’s case was somewhat more complicated, as he had crossed the muddy line between privateer and pirate. Nonetheless, the two were both sent back to England, departing Boston on February 3, 1700, aboard the man-of-war Advice, which had been dispatched by the British admiralty expressly for that purpose. They also shared the same fate at the end of a hangman’s noose.