The house, or rather houses, for two structures compose it, is still occupied by Putnams. The newer building, already old by comparison with some of its neighbors, was built in 1744; the original in 1650, or thereabouts, according to family tradition. One object, to which the attention of every visitor is directed, is the old pollard of enormous girth standing near the house. House and tree seem types of the sturdy, indomitable old man, who at nearly three-score was full of the rage of battle.
BIRTHPLACE OF PUTNAM.
By the courtesy of the family, ever ready to indulge a proper curiosity, I looked over the old house from garret to cellar. The little room in which the general was born remains just as when its rough-hewn posts and thick beams were revealed to his astonished gaze. There are few relics of the general remaining.
While in the Wadsworth Museum at Hartford, I lately saw the damaged sign displayed by Putnam when he kept an inn at Brooklyn, Connecticut, about 1768. Another famous soldier, Murat, was the son of an aubergiste, and Napoleon was not too willing on this account to give him the hand of his sister.
PUTNAM IN BRITISH UNIFORM.
The Putnams settled early in Salem. John, the first emigrant, came from Buckinghamshire, in 1634, with three sons, Thomas, Nathaniel, and John. Some of the name exercised a fatal influence during the reign of witchcraft. Israel was already an old man when he left his plow in the furrow to gallop to Cambridge, having been born in 1718. At twenty-one he removed to Pomfret, Connecticut. Putnam was prompt, resolute, and incapable of fear—full of fight, and always ready. Washington, who did not judge badly, thought him the only fit man to make an assault on Boston. Though uneducated, Putnam wrote pithily, as to Governor Tryon: