Other drivers were John Chase, Joel Shattuck, William Shattuck, Moses Titus, Frank Shattuck, David Coburn, —— Chickering, Thomas Emory, and William Kemp, Jr.
The sad recollection of an accident at Littleton, resulting in the death of Silas Bullard, is occasionally revived by some of the older people. It occurred about the year 1825, and was caused by the upsetting of the Groton coach, driven by Samuel Stone, and at the time just descending the hill between Littleton Common and Nagog Pond, then known as Kimball's Hill. Mr. Bullard was one of the owners of the line, and a brother of Isaac, the veteran driver.
Besides the stage-coaches the carrier wagons added to the business of Groton, and helped largely to support the taverns. The town was situated on one of the main thoroughfares leading from Boston to the northern country, comprising an important part of New Hampshire and Vermont, and extending into Canada. This road was traversed by a great number of wagons, drawn by four or six horses, carrying to the city the various products of the country, such as grain, pork, butter, cheese, eggs, venison, hides; and returning with goods found in the city, such as molasses, sugar, New-England rum, coffee, tea, nails, iron, cloths, and the innumerable articles found in the country stores, to be distributed among the towns above here. In some seasons, it was no uncommon sight to see forty such wagons passing through the village in one day.
In addition to these were many smaller vehicles, drawn by one or two horses, to say nothing of the private carriages of individuals who were traveling for business or pleasure.
For many of the facts mentioned in this paper I am indebted to Mr. Moses Gill, an octogenarian of Groton, whose mind is clear and body active for a man of his years. Mr. Gill is a grandson of Lieutenant-Governor Moses Gill, and was born at Princeton, on March 6, 1800. He has kept several public houses in Groton, already mentioned, besides the old brick tavern situated on the Lowell road, near Long-sought-for Pond, and formerly known as the Half-way. House. This hotel came within the limits of Westford, and was kept by Mr. Gill from the year 1842 to 1847. In his day he has known personally seventy-five landlords doing business between Davenport's (opposite to the celebrated Porter's tavern in Cambridge) and Keene, New Hampshire; and of this number, only seven are thought to be living at the present time.
THE FAMILY IMMIGRATION TO NEW ENGLAND.
BY THOMAS W. BICKNELL, LL.D.
The unit of society is the individual. The unit of civilization is the family. Prior to December 20, 1620, New-England life had never seen a civilized family or felt its influences. It is true that the Icelandic Chronicles tell us that Lief, the son of Eric the Red, 1001, sailed with a crew of thirty-five men, in a Norwegian vessel, and driven southward in a storm, from Greenland along the coasts of Labrador, wintered in Vineland on the shores of Mount Hope Bay. Longfellow's Skeleton in Armor has revealed their temporary settlement. Thither sailed Eric's son, Thorstein, with his young and beautiful wife, Gudrida, and their twenty-five companions, the following year. His death occurred, and put an end to the expedition, which Thorfinn took up with his marriage to the young widow, Gudrida; with his bride and one hundred and sixty-five persons (five of them young married women), they spent three years on the shores of the Narragansett Bay, where Snorre, the first white child, was born,—the progenitor of the great Danish sculptor, Thorwaldsen. But this is tradition, not history. Later still, came other adventurers to seek fortunes in the New World, but they came as individuals,—young, adventurous men, with all to gain and nothing to lose, and, if successful, to return with gold or fame, as the reward of their sacrifice and daring.
Six hundred years pass, and a colony of one hundred and five men, not a woman in the company, sailed from England for America, and landed at Jamestown, Virginia. Within six months half of the immigrants had perished, and only for the courage and bravery of John Smith, the whole would have met a sad fate. The first European woman seen on the banks of the James was the wife of one of the seventy Virginia colonists who came later, and her maid, Anne Burroughs, who helped to give permanency and character to a fugitive settlement in a colony, which waited two hundred and fifty years to learn the value of a New-England home, and to appreciate the civilization which sprang up in a New-England town, through the agency of a New-England family.