Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 1.djvu/377

 HILLSBOROUGH.

��369

��HILLSBOROUGH.

��BY COL. FRANK H. PIERCE.

��The town of Hillsborough, in the Coun- ty of the same name, in New Hamp- shire, has a history of enviable repute. Its recoi-ds are confined to the past one hundred and thirty-seven years, but its events and its men during that period have given the town special note at home and in the national annals. In 1741 the territory now incorporated as a town was a wild, unbroken forest, a home for bears, wolves, and other beasts of prey, and occasionally for the nomadic abo- riginal, who was the greatest foe to every approach towards civilization. It is not a certified fact that " Number Seven" — as Hillsborough was named on the Pro- vincial map —was the regular abode of any portion of the Pennacook tribe of red men ; but frequently since the settle- ment of the town, evidences have been found of the visits of that people to the quiet waters of the Contoocook, and to the adjoining forests for fishing and hunt- ing purposes. These relics consist of tomahawks, spears, and arrow-heads, pestles and mortars — all made of stone, and more generally found buried in the light soil on the margin of the ponds and Contoocook River.

In 1741, cotemporary with the running of the boundary line, which separated the province of New Hampshire from that of Massachusetts, a company was formed in Boston, who traveled thence through the forests to Hillsborough, and pitched their tents in its wilderness. This territory had been formerly granted to Col. John Hill. The little settlement was called Hillborough in honor of Col. Hill; the leading men were Samuel Gib- son, James Lyon, Robert McClure and James McColley — the two latter being natives of the north of Ireland. There was in the little colony a commingling of Puritanism and Presbyterianism, concen-

��trating in a strong religious feeling. In proof of this sentiment, among the ear- liest labors of the settlers was the erec- tion of a meeting-house and a parsonage. Land was assigned for a grave-yard, in which several members of the colony were buried. There remains to-day no vestige of this solitary cemetery. The wife of McColley was the only female in the settlement, and remained exiled from her sisterhood for more than a year. Her husband built the first dwelling — a log hut — near the Bridge, where the first child born in the settlement saw the light.

Lieut. John McColley subsequently en- tered the Royal service and fought against the French and Indians. After- wards he was in the war of the Revolu- tion, in the militia corps which New Hampshire sent against Gen. Burgoyne. He was a man of exemplary character, and died in 1834, at the age of 92. Some five months after the birth of Lieut. Mc- Colley's child a daughter was born to Samuel Gibson, who was named Eliza- beth.

In 1744 the Cape Breton war broke out between the English and French and North-western Indians. This war car- ried death and destruction wherever it was prosecuted. The Indian raids upon many of the early settlements, and the slaughter and destruction of the dwellers therein, are matters of tragic history, in which Hillborough shared.

In 1746 the menaces of the Indians were so threatening that the feeble col- ony of seven or eight families in Hills- borough, on hasty consultation, agreed to abandon their homes and seek safety in Massachusetts. They hid away their agricultural implements, loaded their cattle with what household property and provisions they could carry, buried the remainder of their portable property, and

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