Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 5.djvu/100

 8o THE GRANITE MONTHLY.

��STARK PLACE, DUMBARTON.

��BY FRED MYRON COLBY.

DUNBARTON, originally Stark's town, but now bearing the name of the old Scottish town and the royal castle on the Clyde, is a triangular township in central New Hampshire, lyinginthe southern part of Merrimack County and bor- dering upon Hillsborough County, distant about nine miles south from Concord, and about the same distance north from Manchester. The borough has an area of twenty-one thousand acres, of which nearly seventeen thousand acres is improved land. Hilly but not mountainous, with salubrious air, good water, and a soil of the best quality, Dunbarton is one of the best agricultural towns in the county, and its people are noted for their wealthy and prosperous condi- tion. Perhaps the latter fact is attributable as much to the thrifty Scotch de- scent of the inhabitants, as to the advantages of air and soil. Much of the prosperity and activity of a people are due to ancestry, to that heritage of race and blood which always tell. The Scotch-Irish element, which largely predomi- nates among the Dunbarton yeomany, has produced some of the best and greatest men of our nation. Warren, Knox, and Sullivan had this blood in their veins, blood that had more than one drop of the sangre aziil in it, derived from ancient Irish chiefs and Scottish kings of medieval times. The same blood lighted the eyes and stirred the pulses of Whipple, Thornton, and Mont- gomery. This blood mingled proudly in the veins of many of the settlers of Dunbarton, and stirred the mighty soul of her noblest pioneer, who, among Pages. Rogers, Putneys, Fosters, and Stinsons, rose towering above them like a colossus, and wrote his name in marble that shall endure forever, — John Stark.

According to the statement of the able and accurate historian of his family, vide Memoir of John Stark, page ninety-four, the Starks originated in Germany. When Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, the widow of Charles the Bold, sent over to England a body of German troops under Gen. Martin Smart, to sup- port the claim of Perkin Warbeck to the crown of England, in the reign of Henry VII, the Starks, so tradition reports, for the first time put feet on English soil. Warbeck and all his supporters were defeated on the plain of Stoke, by Henry's general, the Earl of Lincoln, and the fugitives sought refuge in Scot- land. In the northern kingdom, the Starks soon rose to eminence. The book of heraldy contains a legend that one of the name saved the life of a Stuart, James V, King of Scotland, by slaying a wild bull which attacked his majesty while hunting. The following, copied from the book, gives the arms and motto of the family : —

•'•' STARK — SCOTLAND AND AMERICA ;

A bull's head erased, ar, (distilling blood, p. p. r.) Fortiorum fortia facta. ' '

Whether the tradition is true or not, it was left for the Starks to achieve their proudest laurels not under royalty in the old countries, but in the new western land of freedom. Archibald Stark was one of that band of heroes who braved a king's tyranny at the ever famous siege of Londonderry. In 1720, he em- barked with a small company of adventurers for the new world. Settling first at Londonderry, and subsequently at Derryfield, N. H., our adventurer gradu-

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