Mrs. Stowe has given it a new claim to notice, for beneath it, according to Drake's Historic Middlesex, "Sam Lawson, the good-natured, lazy story-teller, in Oldtown Folks, put his blacksmith's shop. It was removed when the church was built."
The present Eliot Oak stands east of the Unitarian meeting-house, which church is on or near the spot where Eliot's first church stood. It measured, January, 1884, seventeen feet in circumference at the ground; fourteen feet two inches at four feet above. It is a fine old tree, and it is not improbable—though it is unproven—that it dates back to the first settlement of Natick.
"Thou ancient oak! whose myriad leaves are loud
With sounds of unintelligible speech,
Sounds as of surges on a shingly beach,
Or multitudinous murmurs of a crowd;
With some mysterious gift of tongues endowed
Thou speakest a different dialect to each.
To me a language that no man can teach,
Of a lost race long vanished like a cloud,