Framingham Legends & Lore Read Online Free PDF Page B

stand in Framingham.)
    T HOMAS D ANFORTH , F ATHER OF F RAMINGHAM
    Thomas Danforth was baptized at Framlingham, England, on November 20, 1623, the fourth of seven children of Nicholas and Elizabeth Danforth. Elizabeth died in 1629, and in 1634 Nicholas sailed with his children to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They settled in Cambridge and he bought out the holdings of several neighbors who were departing to found Hartford, Connecticut. Almost as soon as he had arrived, Nicholas became one of the proprietors of the town and a member of the colony’s general court. Nicholas only lived a few short years in New England, dying in April 1638, age forty-nine years.
    He had been wealthy enough that all his orphaned children were well provided for. Thomas, the eldest son, naturally took over his father’s business interests. He became a freeman (voter) of Cambridge when he was still only nineteen years old and married Mary Withington on February 23, 1644. He quickly achieved prominence, serving as treasurer of Harvard College from 1650 to 1669 and steward of the college until 1682. Like his father, he became a representative to the general court in 1657 and then became one of the governor’s assistants and magistrate from 1659 to 1679, at which point he became deputy governor of the colony, a position he held, with a brief interruption, until 1692.
    Shortly after he became an assistant, Danforth acquired a grant of 250 acres of land in Framingham. How he first became interested in the area is unknown. His younger brother Samuel had been a member of the second graduating class at Harvard College in 1643 and had followed the wish of their late mother that he enter the ministry. He was ordained an assistant to the Reverend John Eliot at Roxbury in 1650 and remained at that post until he died in 1674. Through his brother Samuel, Thomas Danforth would have known all about Eliot’s work with the Indian converts at Natick, so perhaps that is what drew his interest.
    Two years later, in 1662, an additional two hundred acres were laid out. At the same time, Danforth exercised his right to purchase an additional ten pounds’ worth of land. Ten pounds was not a huge sum, even in 1662, but in this case it was enough to purchase virtually the entirety of what is now Framingham that lies west of the Sudbury River, plus a portion of northern Ashland. In all, it amounted to some fourteen thousand acres. Shortly afterward, he bought out Richard Wayte, adding an additional three hundred acres, including Mount Wayte, and Richard Russell’s five hundred acres as well.
    Soon after his acquisition of the properties, the area became known as Danforth’s Farms, and that name and the year 1662 remain emblazoned on the town seal to this day. Perhaps in an act of modesty, by the 1670s Danforth had begun to refer to the settlement as “Framlingham,” named after the town of his birth in England. (Almost immediately the “l” was dropped from the spelling, following the common American practice of changing the spelling to represent more accurately how a word was pronounced.) If the earlier grantees had received plots of land roughly the proportions of a good-sized farm, Danforth’s holdings now virtually added up to an entire township. And that is precisely what he had in mind.
    J OSEPH B RADISH , F RAMINGHAM P IRATE
    Danforth’s dream of the town of Framingham was remarkably slow in arriving—ten years after his land purchases, only two additional families had moved to the area. One was the Eames family, whom we met in the previous chapter; the second was the Bradish family. Joseph and Mary Bradish had moved from Sudbury to the north side of Nobscot Mountain, not far from the home of the Indian Old Jethro, by 1672. The outbreak of King Philip’s War three years later was probably what prompted the family to move to the safer confines of Cambridge, although they eventually returned to live in Sudbury.