Framingham Legends & Lore Read Online Free PDF

corner of present-day Framingham, while the adjacent six hundred acres granted at the same time to her soon-to-be second husband are now part of Wayland. This second husband was Henry Dunster, first president of Harvard College, who leased and then sold his land to Edmund Rice, founder of that name in the region. (Rice received his own grant in 1652 nearby in Framingham, settled by his descendants and known as “Rice’s End” for many years.)
    If Glover’s grant was presumably intended as a form of death benefit for losing her pastor husband before even reaching New England, the Dunster grant was more characteristic—a form of payment for services rendered to the colony. For example, Thomas Mayhew was granted land in Framingham in 1643 as payment for building a bridge in Watertown. Evidently neither he nor his heirs were particularly excited about the land, as it was not formally laid out until 1714. (By that time most of Framingham had already been claimed, so Mayhew’s grant formed an odd panhandle to the west that was absorbed into Southborough upon its creation in 1727.)
    Others who received land in Framingham for services rendered were the Reverend Edmund Browne of Sudbury, who was granted a meadow in 1654; Richard Russell, who was granted five hundred acres in South Framingham in 1657 in consideration of his role as the colony’s treasurer; Elijah Corlett, the Cambridge schoolmaster who had previously sued Netus, received two hundred acres in 1659; and Colonel William Crowne, who received five hundred acres in 1662 for his work lobbying on behalf of the colony in England. In 1658, Richard Wayte was granted three hundred acres in compensation for his service in the war against the Pequot more than twenty years earlier. He only held the land for the few years it took to have it laid out and sold, but the hill he owned still bears his name today—Mount Wayte.
    Except for the Rices, none of the above grantees ever resided in Framingham. Some of them, such as Corlett, sold out directly to the Stone family, the first English settlers of Framingham, who resided at “Stone’s End,” or present-day Saxonville. Most of the other property eventually wound up in the hands of the largest grantee, the deputy governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Thomas Danforth, about whom we shall learn more later.
    G OOKIN AND H OW ’ S P URCHASE
    As we saw in the previous chapter, a large portion of contemporary Framingham east of the Sudbury River was originally part of the domain of the Natick Indians. About 35 percent of this land was granted to the Eames family in 1677 in the wake of their losses in King Philip’s War. The remainder was bought from the Indians in 1682 by partners Samuel Gookin of Cambridge and Samuel How of Sudbury.
    There are a couple of aspects of this transaction that might cause the modern observer to arch an eyebrow. Samuel Gookin’s father was Major General Daniel Gookin, Indian commissioner of Massachusetts Bay. The elder Gookin was an associate of the Reverend John Eliot and acted as a sort of trustee for the Natick Indians. That his son was buying land from the natives whose interests he was bound to protect might be said in the very least to raise the appearance of a conflict of interest, if not outright charges of an insider deal. Furthermore, although the boundaries were ill-defined, the original purchase was said to encompass about 200 acres. But in a court ruling in 1695, Gookin and How were awarded a total of 1,700 acres in acknowledgement of the vague description of the bounds of the original tract and the numerous payments Gookin and How had made to the Natick Indians over the years, effectively subsidizing them. (The Native Americans could have actually done worse—Gookin and How were denied an additional 1,000 acres they sought east of the Eames family’s land; otherwise the Natick Mall and other northwestern portions of that town might today