Middlebury register. (Middlebury, Vt.) 1886-1937, 1912-01-12
FOREFATHERS' ADDRESS
Delivered at Annual Celeb ration
by Prof. A. D. WethereIl.

for Virginia, had succeeded in land
ing at Plymouth, English explorers and
settlers had frequented the shores of
New England and, a few years later,
the coast was dotted with little fishing
and farming villages, the line extending
through Saco, Portland, Dover, Ports
mouth, Salem, Lynn, and Quincy to
Plymouth, the most southern and the
largest.
But the second and greater migration
from Old England to the New began in
1929. The vanguard consisted of two
hundred eighty emigrants who arrived
in Salem and Lynn, under the leader
ship of John Endicott. The next year
no less than one thousand people came
to the shores of Massachusetts Bay and
began the towns of Boston, Roxbury,
Watertown, Medford, Dorchester and
Newtowne or Cambridge, besides con-
tributing new settlers to Lynn and
Salem. BY the summer of 1888, ten or
twelve ships were coming each month
and the Great Emigration, as it was
called, went on until the population of
Massachusetts Bay in 1643 exceeded
that of the rest of British America.
For fifteen years, the New England
town settlements were confined to the
coast, but in 1875 Concord was founded
as the first inland town, and in the
same year, after long and heated de-
bate, the General Court of Massachu-
sets granted the request of Thomas
Hooker and his followers that they be
allowed to remove to the far off Con-
necticut Valley, there to make settle
ments at Hartford, Wethersfeld, and
Windsor, to which, from other sources,
Springfield and Saybrook were soon
added. Political and religious discon-
tent, tales of the rich Connecticut lands,
and, as Cotton Mather put it, "the
strong bent of their spirits" led to this
first swarming of the New England
hive. So quickly after landing in the
New World was the Puritan ready to
begin his long march toward the Pa
cific.
In 1867, another group of settle
ments was added, when Roger Williams,
Mrs. Hutchinson, and Coddington, ex-
lies all from Massachusetts moved to
the amphibious shores of Narragansett
Bay and Rhode Island began its career
of troubled independence.
By 1887, therefore, three distinct
areas of settlement had been developed,
the Eastern Coast, Narragansett Bay,
and the lower Connecticut River.
In America, expanding settlements
have marched steadily westward, except
when the direction had been modified by
physical conditions, and such conditions
existed in Kew England. In an unde-
veloped country, river valleys are natu-
raj highways, and the southward-how
ing rivers of New England so far modi-
fed the general law that the expansion
of New England after 1887 illustrates
powerful south to north advance, as
well as that from east to west.
This is strikingly shown in the period
from 1887 to 1875. By the latter date,
the coast settlements of Eastern Mas
sachusetts had moved in solid line to-
ward the west, as far as Groton and
Nashua; while the settlements on the
Connecticut had moved northward across
the entire state of Massachusetts to
Northfield and in the unsettled regions
between the two advancing lines,
powerful Indian tribes were more and
more restricted, until in 1875, King
Philip rallied them for the last great
stand of the red men of New England
against the encroaching whites. And
so desperately did they fight that the
whole New England frontier was DESC
lated and driven back. OF the eighty
or ninety towns in Eastern New Eng
land forty were badly damaged by fire
and dozen were totally destroyed.
The Indians were defeated, the middle
area of Massachusetts was thus opened
to settlement, but so fearful had been
the cost of victory to the whites that
only after fifteen years did they re-
cover all the ground temporarily lost to
settlement.
But by 100, in spite of French and
Indian warfare, the Eastern Massachu-
sets settlements had more than re-
covered from King Philips war, while
the Connecticut valley towns had ad-
vanced still farther north into South
western New Hampshire at Hinsdae,
and in 1924, Port Dummer, on the soil of
the present Vermont. had been built
Meanwhile, most of the vacant spaces
of Southern New England had been
peopled and fingers of settlement We're
reaching up the river valleys of Maine
and New Hampshire.
Studies in the origins of the settlers