Archive 2008 - 2019

The Settlement at The Farms; The Stone Fort and King Philip's War (Part1)

by Martha DeWolf
2/7/2012

Two years after the Pequot War, Ann Martyn Bullard was widowed in 1639 when her husband Robert succumbed at age 40 to an un-named illness.  His was one of the earliest deaths recorded in Watertown.  Ann’s son, Benjamin, then around five or six years old, was taken from Watertown into the home of Magdalen and John Bullard , his aunt and uncle in Dedham.  Ann’s two other children remained in Watertown with their mother, perhaps because they were girls or simply because they were older and needed less care from a woman who was suddenly the sole provider for her family in the New World.

In those days, the property of a family was generally held in the husband's name alone, but, by law wives (and children) were considered the legal obligation of the husband to support and not necessarily his “property” although there were certainly husbands who felt that way.  With that in mind, Ann made certain her legal rights were protected knowing full well the potential for unscrupulous second husbands.  Characteristic of the times and circumstances, she remarried within the year.  Prior to her second marriage, Ann had already deeded Robert’s property to her Bullard children, and not to her new husband or the stepchild he brought into her family in the second marriage.  By the time she entered her second marriage, Ann had required her new husband to promise, in writing, that he would not claim as his any property legally belonging to her at her own death, or willed by her to her Bullard children.

Divorce was possible but rare and under English and therefore colonial law, widows had definite shares of an estate (normally one-third) when a husband died, in the absence of other arrangements by will.  The children could contest a father’s will at court; and his wife could contest it as well.  A widowed wife’s property (such as Ann’s homestead) could be willed by her alone to her children and, both in England and in the Colonies; such deeds were quite common and enforced. In fact the early records of Watertown list a number of properties owned by women.  Bond's map* shows property held by Robert Bullard's daughters Anne and Maudlin (a simplification of Magdalen) in their own names.

*Bond, Henry; Genealogies and History of Watertown; Little, Brown & Co., Boston 1855.

For more than fifteen years John and Magdalen and their growing family lived in the homestead they built, settled, and developed in Dedham, but by 1652 they had sold the original homestead and moved to Medfield, farther up the Charles River valley to settle on new grant land once again.  No doubt they made a profit on the sale of their Dedham property and received the Medfield land at no purchase cost.  Ann's son Benjamin Bullard, just coming of age, moved from Dedham then as well.  In 1659, he married a sixteen year old Dedham woman named Martha Pidge.  Like Benjamin she had been brought up from childhood apart from her own family.  Shortly after Martha’s birth, her mother was suddenly widowed and married soon afterwards a widower named Michael Metcalf.  Their combined children numbered twenty, of whom Martha was the youngest.  By mutual arrangement Martha soon went to live with and be brought up by the Jonathan Fairbanks family whose home (the still-standing Fairbanks House in Dedham) was just two doors away from the Metcalfs.

After their marriage Martha and Benjamin Bullard, together with a small number of other couples, settled on a new colonial grant of land across the Charles River from Medfield, an area which became known as "The Farms".    This term in those days indicated that the area was located beyond any town boundaries.  At that time the Farms area, so far as currently known, contained no settled Indians although some of it had earlier been under Indian cultivation.  It is not unlikely, however, that they knew and traded with their neighbors in Natick.  In 1651 the Christian Praying Indian town founded by John Eliot had been moved from Nonantum (Newton) to Natick just six miles down the river from The Farms, where residences, a meeting-house, and a school-house were built, and where Eliot preached as often as he was able, once every two weeks until his death in 1690.  
 

In the 1650s, when Martha and Benjamin Bullard were homesteading at the Farms, their neighbors at Medfield were growing and storing wheat and corn as well as raising horses, cows, sheep and pigs. The only wildlife that was a serious nuisance to the settlers were squirrels and crows.  Generations later in 1730, six years after the new town of Holliston (the Neck at Bogastow and westward) was incorporated, the last deer in Sherborn (the Farms) was killed and the last panther (bobcat) in Medway (Black Swamp area) was shot in 1790.  Foxes were occasionally seen and shot as late as the 1890's.  Very occasionally an otter was caught and raccoons were fairly common until the mid-19th century.  Today, because of the absence of hunting as a necessity and its diminution as a sport in the eastern part of Massachusetts, the populations of squirrels, raccoons, skunks, foxes, deer, wild turkey and even coyote in the early twenty-first century, have rebounded and in some cases exceeded those of late 17th century New England.

Although self-sufficient for the most part, the homesteaders of The Farms still needed certain town services and required the support of an established community.  Although virtually the same people were involved in administering them, the civic, religious, and mercantile requirements of an early village were separate.  Recording of land deeds, surveys, control of animals (fence surveyors), building of roads and bridges, and the like were civil responsibilities; conducting marriages and recording of births and deaths were usually done through the church, although not necessarily in the church.  What needs the settlers could not grow from the land or manufacture from the forest had to come, usually by barter, from an established market.  An English settler could expect to qualify for all these services by being an admitted member of a church.

Admission to a church was by no means automatic by residence, and citizens of a town were not normally admitted to its church if they wouldn’t accept its beliefs.  Often the wife was admitted as a member, sometimes years before her stubborn husband was, if ever.  If the Bogastow settlers wanted to be citizens of the colony in full standing and enjoy its valuable privileges including free land, they would have expected to join the nearest church which was Medfield for them.  Thus, even though they lived outside its geographic boundaries, they sought to be recognized as de facto inhabitants of the town, their births, marriages, and deaths were recorded in Medfield until the Town of Sherborn and its church were created years later to include them geographically and much later the Town of Holliston incorporated the Bullard farm land.

Church attendance in Medfield initially required fording the Charles River on Sunday year round.   The Charles, was called Quinobequin by the original inhabitants, the approximate translation of which means long, meandering river.  It is a seemingly lazy river, snaking through marshland and winding around glacial moraines.  However, its ice is unreliable in the wintertime, and it is prone to significant flooding in the spring.  In those early years of English settlement, several people from The Farms drowned attempting to reach, or return from Medfield.  For them any business east of the river had to be well worth the trouble of crossing it.

Even so, both the settlers and the Indians made good use of rivers (the Charles, the Connecticut and other waterways) and streams for passage and transport.  The Bogastow settlers thus had direct seasonal access by water to several early English communities on the Charles below Medfield.  As the English settlers moved westward, they built the roads and bridges necessary to connect them with the earlier population centers, sometimes using long-established Indian trails.   The Bogastow settlers also benefited particularly from a major Indian trail running through the Farms area.  This was the trail that connected the Natick Indians to Nipmuc settlements in Mendon.  From Natick (John Eliot’s village of “Praying Indians”) just north of The Farms, it followed the Charles southwards (upstream) at a small westward distance, skirting Pauset (or Pocasset) hill near where Martha and Benjamin Bullard and their neighbors built their farms immediately north of Bogastow Pond (now South End Pond).  The trail then crossed Bogastow Brook, and ran generally west to the Indian settlement at Mucksquit on the shores of Weenakeenig (now Lake Winthrop in Holliston) and on to Mendon. Only a quarter mile of this trail remains a woodland path today and it runs through the Bullard farm. Today “The Farms” area is transected by Route 115, partly following the trail described above.

For the Bullard ancestors who settled at the Farms, it became apparent that in order to cross the Charles River safely and reliably, a bridge was the only solution.  The best location to build a bridge, other things equal, is at a narrows where high solid ground edges a river closely on both sides.  The early ford across the river used by the Bogastow settlers to get to Medfield lies at one of very few places along the upper Charles where both banks are close and solid. The exact date the first bridge was built at this location is uncertain.  The new bridge had no name for several years, and it was rebuilt at least once.  Over time it became known colloquially by the name of the household living nearest it.  For many years, that was the Death (pronounced Deeth) family, and it was generally called “Death’s Bridge.”  It brought a major improvement in the lives of the Bogastow settlers.

During the 17th century, timber was used not only as building material, and fuel, but also as masts and spars for the King's navy.  Shiploads of lumber went back to wood-starved England.  Soon, settlers were prohibited from taking any tree larger than fourteen inches across because that timber by proclamation now belonged to the King of England.  The bigger the tree, the more useful it was and therefore the more valuable it became.   As described earlier, timber was so scarce around Medfield at the founding of Medfield in the upper Charles River valley in 1651, the cutting of even the smaller trees for fencing was forbidden in the new town without special license, and fences were discouraged entirely when a ditch would do. Eight years later, Benjamin Bullard and his neighbors were reprimanded by name in the town bylaws.  In 1659 the town of Medfield declared that the settlers at "The Farms” were prohibited from taking any more wood without permission from the town of Medfield because they had wasted it in “maintaining” their bridge.  It appears that they complied.