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Prescott, very reasonably, held this a grievance, and having no other means of redress asked equitable judgment in the matter from the magistrates, in a petition which cannot be found. This dire threat of the closing sentence may have been simply "sound and fury, signifying nothing," or Prescott may have been able to prove to the authorities that Nashaway was fit and waiting for its St.
When he set up his anvil and with skilful blows hammered out the first plough-shares to compel the virgin soil of the Nashaway valley to its proper fruitfulness, he was all unwittingly helping to forge the destinies of this great republic; was in his humble sphere a true builder of the nation.
Those who remain of the generation familiar with this region before the invention of the power loom made such towns as Clinton possible, remember the depression that told where Prescott dug his cellar. The oldest water mill in New England was scarce twenty years old when Prescott contracted to grind the com of the Nashaway planters.
John, but found none willing for the service. In fact, its St. John was then a junior at Harvard College, writing a pasquinade to post upon the Ipswich meeting-house, and Nashaway was "suffered to live without the meanes," waiting for him until 1654.
Doctor Robert Child, a scholar who had won the degrees of A.M. and M.D. at Cambridge and Padua, a man of scientific acquirements, but inclined to somewhat sanguine expectations of mineral treasure to be discovered in the New England hills, seems to have been a leading spirit in the adventure; and unfortunately so, since his political views about certain inalienable rights of man, which now live, and are honored in the Constitution of the Commonwealth, seemed vicious republicanism to the ecclesiastical aristocracy then governing the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay; and the odium that drove Child across the ocean, attached also to his companion planters, and perhaps through the prejudice of those in authority unfavorably affected for several years the progress of the settlement on the Nashaway.
He was that energetic contractor of Boston noted as the leader in the project for establishing tide mills at the Cove, and was no doubt the capitalist of the trading firm of Symonds & King, who set up their "trucking house" as early as 1643 on the sunny slope of George Hill. Symond's widow a few months after his death married Isaac Walker, who in 1645 was prominent among the Nashaway proprietors.
Linton probably lived with his son-in-law Waters, in his home near the fording place in the North Branch of the Nashaway, contiguous to the lot of intervale land which Harmon Garrett and others of the first proprietors had fenced in to serve as a "night pasture" for their cattle. Ball had left his children and their mother in Watertown; she being at times insane.
He entered upon the Nashaway scheme with characteristic zeal and energy, if we may believe his own manuscript testimony: but Day's zeal outran his discretion, and his energy devoured his limited means, for in 1644 we find him in jail for debt remonstrating piteously against the injustice of a hard hearted creditor.
At the date when Winthrop noted down the inception of the Nashaway Company, Henry Symonds had already been dead seven months.
Therefore when, in 1652, what had been known as the Nashaway Plantation was fairly named for its founder in accordance with the petition of its inhabitants, some one of influence, whether magistrate or higher official, perhaps bethought himself that no Governor of the Colony even had been so honored, and that it might be well, before dignifying this busy blacksmith so much as to name a town for him, to see if he could pass examination in the catechism deemed orthodox at that date in Massachusetts Bay.
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