Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 5.djvu/404

 36S THE GRANITE MONTHLY.

by appointment, he was to preach the next day, but on the following he was seized with a return of a long-fought asthmatic trouble, and died sud- denly at the home of his friend, Rev. John Parsons, September 30, 1770.

It is doubtful if any of the early proprietors of Whitefield, save those wht joined the first surveying party under Capt. Gerrish, and those of the scouting "rangers," ever set foot upon their pine-land possessions. Certain it is, none ever became actual settlers. Timothy Nash may have hunted there, and the Rev. Jeremy Belknap, New Hampshire's early historian, who was one of the Cutler exploring party, in 1 7<S4, at which time the name of Washington was first applied to the highest peak of the mountains, doubtless surveyed with his eye from afar off his gubernatorial donation of the ninety-fourth part of the township, bur aside from these no one of the grantees nf the town ever saw their " Cohos " estates. So it remained for Maj. John Burns, Col. Joseph Kimball, John McMaster and their followers, in the beginning of the present century, to develop the v/ild ^Vhitefield tract, which the early organizers of the town- ship, in their down-country meetings, had vainly tried to accomplish.

Samuel Adams was chosen moderator at the first meeting of the proprietors of the town, after the close of the war, and the early records of the township bear his signature, in the same unmistakable characters that are shown upon that Record of Independent Declarations, that made us a nation.

Perhaps to the energies of Samuel Minot, Esq., of Concord, Massachusetts, more than to any other one man, is due the revival of interest in the early settlement of Whitefield, after the disappearance of the original proprietors. He owned at one time, by vendue purchase, more than three fourths of the first granted rights of the township. His father, Capt. Jonas Minot, was the first proprietors' clerk.

Col. Samuel Adams and Capt. Robert Foster, were two of the chosen as- sessors, in those primitive days of the town ; and their duties as well as all the transactions relating to the unsettled location, were conducted at a distance of one hundred and fifty miles from the place of interest ; the first meeting hav- ing been held at old Dunstable, which town and its divisions probably furnished more men for the famous Rogers Rangers, than any other section. Also for the Pov/ers expedition, which located and named the wild river along whose hill-shadowed valley we are traversing. For many years the early proprietors of Whitefield could hardly be content with their chartered boundaries, suppos- ing by semi-authoritative description, that the western limit was along the summit of, or near to, the Apthorp range of hills ; but the corner monuments of Col. Gerrish, established in 1779, ^^^ '^'"'^ blazed line of Capt. Eames, in 1802, settled the doubt, and the river rippled into Dalton at its present bound- ery, and "Blake's Pond " marked the designated corner. This name was left to that fountainless lakelet above Whitefield village, by a famous hunter, Moses Blake, who in the wilderness days, here among the pines, pitched his cabin and scouted this region for peltries. What changes have taken place along this historic stream, since the wild Coosauke roamed in undisputed freedom along its pine-clad borders ! Or since John Stark, in a military point of view New Hampshire's Cieorge Washington, as an Indian captive, explored its valley, fished its waters and hunted its game-haunted solitudes. The rock-lined liills alon.g its boundaries are almost disforested ; the dark-shadowed trail of the roving native, has become the steel-clad track of civilization ; the scream of the steam whistle, echoes above the savage war-wlioop ; grain-burdened fields and sunny pastures are spread over the broad upkinds, where, but a century ago, amid the unbroken forests howled the ])ro\vling bear, and tramped the un- hunted moose, while up from below comes the hum of industry from 1 tliou- sand mill-wheels of improvement. And yet the possibilities of our little valley

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