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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
    S ETTLERS AND S PECULATORS
    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.
    T HE G RANTEES OF F RAMINGHAM
    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