JOHN PRESCOTT, THE FOUNDER OF LANCASTER.
1603 TO 1682.
By HON. HENRY S. NOURSE.
The facts that have come down to us whereupon to build a biography of John Prescott are scanty indeed, but enough to prove that he was that rare type of man, the ideal pioneer. Not one of those famous frontiersmen, whose figures stand out so prominently in early American history, was better equipped with the manly qualities that win hero worship in a new country, than was the father of the Nashaway Plantation. Had Prescott like Daniel Boone been fortunate in the favor of contemporary historians, to perpetuate anecdotes of his daily prowess and fertility of resource, or had he had grateful successors withal to keep his memory green, his name and romantic adventures would in like manner adorn Colonial annals. Persecuted for his honest opinions, he went out into the wilderness with his family to found a home, and for forty years thought, fought and wrought to make that home the centre of a prosperous community. Loaded from his first step with discouragements, that soon appalled every other of the original co-partners in the purchase of Nashaway from Showanon, Prescott alone, tenax propositi, held to his purpose, and death found him at his post. His grave is in the old "burial field" at Lancaster, yet not ten citizens can point it out. Over it stands a rude fragment from some ledge of slate rock, faintly incised with characters which few eyes can trace:
JOHN PRESCOTT DESASED
No date! no comment! That is his only memorial stone; his only epitaph in the town of which, for its first forty years, he was the very heart and soul, and for which he furnished a large share of the brains. This fair township—now divided among nine towns—and all it has been and is and is to be may be justly called his monument. The house of Deputies in 1652 voted it to be rightly his, and marked it by incorporative enactment with his honored and honorable name, Prescott. Unfortunately, however, some years before he had said something that seemed to favor Doctor Robert Child's criticisms of the Provincial system of taxation without representation; criticisms that grew and bore good fruitage when the times were riper for individual freedom; when Samuel Adams and James Otis took up the peoples' cause where Sir Henry Vane and Robert Child had left it. 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. Alas! John Prescott was not a freeman. Having a conscience of his own, he had never given public adhesion to the established church covenant and was therefore debarred from holding any civil office, and even from the privilege of voting for the magistrates. There was a year's delay, and, in 1653, "Prescott" was expunged and Lancaster began its history.
As in the broad area of the township various centres of population grew into villages and were one by one excised and made towns, it would be supposed that each of them would have been eager to honor itself by adopting so euphonious and appropriate a name as Prescott. But no! The first candidate for a new designation, in 1732, chose the name of the generous Charlestown clergyman, Harvard, for no appropriate local reason now discoverable. Six years later another body corporate imported the name—Bolton. Two years passed and a third district sought across the ocean for its title Leominster. Then Woonksechocksett forgetful of its benefactors and of the grand Indian names of its hills and waters borrowed the title of a putative Scotch lord, who bravely fought for our Independence, and, in adopting, paid him the poor compliment of misspelling it—Sterling. The next seceder ambitiously chose the name of a Prussian city—Berlin. The sixth perpetuated its early admiration of the great small-pox inoculator, Boylston; and the last was named—for a hotel. None so poor as to do Prescott reverence. But surely, it would be thought, banks and manufactories, halls or at least a fire engine, might with tardy respect have paid cheap tribute to his name by bearing it. Is there any example! Yes, at last a short street having little connection sentimental or real with the pioneer, bears his name—this only in the aspiring town, almost a city, of which John Prescott's old millstone is the visible foundation! Clinton.
I have stated that Prescott was an ideal pioneer. Not that there was in him anything of kinship to that race of frontiersmen now deployed along the outer verge of American civilization, like the thread of froth stranded along a beach outlining the extreme advance made by the last wave of the tide. The frontiersmen of to-day, bibulous gamblers, reckless duelists, blasphemous savages of mixed blood, had no prototype in Colonial days, for even the human harvest then gathered to the stocks, the whipping-post and the gallows, was of a far less obtrusive class of offenders against morals and social decency. Prescott was a Puritan soldier, a seeker of liberty not license; fiercely rebellious against tyranny, but no contemner of moral law. It was no accident that put him in the advance guard of Anglo-Saxon civilization, then just starting on its westward march from the shores of Massachusetts Bay. The position had awaited the man. 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. His neighbors and friends, John Tinker, Ralph Houghton, and Major Simon Willard, doubtless excelled him in culture, but no neighbor surpassed him in natural personal force, whether physical, mental or moral. Not only was he of commanding stature, stern of mien and strong of limb, but he had a heart devoid of fear, great physical endurance and an unbending will. These qualities his savage neighbors early recognized and bowed before in deep respect, and because of these no Lancaster enterprise but claimed him as its leader. His manual skill and dexterity must have been great, his mental capacity and business energy remarkable, for we find him not only a farmer, trader, blacksmith and hunter, but a surveyor and builder of roads, bridges and mills. The records of the town show that he was seldom free from the conduct of some public labor. The greatest of his benefactions to his neighbors were: His corn-mill erected in 1654, and his saw-mill in 1659. The arrival of the first millstone in Lancaster must have been an event of matchless interest to every man, woman and child in the plantation. Till that began its tireless turning, the grain for every loaf of bread had to be carried to Watertown mill, or ground laboriously in a hand quern, or parched and brayed in a mortar, Indian fashion. Before the starting of his saw-mill, the rude houses must have been of logs, stone, and clay, for it was an impossibility to bring from the lower towns on the existing "Bay road" and with the primitive tumbril any large amount of sawn lumber.
Of Prescott's wife we know only her name: Mary Platts. But her daughters were sought for in marriage by men of whom we learn nothing that is not praiseworthy, and her sons all honored their mother's memory, by useful and unblemished lives. John Prescott was the youngest son of Ralph and Ellen of Shevington, Lancashire, England. He was baptized in the Parish of Standish in 1604-5 and married Mary Platts at Wigan, Lancashire, January 21, 1629. He was a land owner in Shevington, but sold his possessions there and took up his residence in Halifax Parish, Sowerby, in Yorkshire. Leaving England to avoid religions persecutions, his first haven was Barbadoes, where he is found a land owner in 1638. In 1640 he landed in Boston, and immediately selected his home in Watertown, where he became the possessor of six lots of land, aggregating one hundred and twenty-six acres. In 1643, his name is found in association with Thomas King of Watertown, Henry Symonds of Boston, and others, the first proprietors of the Nashaway purchase. His children were eight in number and all were married in due season. They were as follows:
1. Mary, baptized at Halifax Parish February 24, 1630, married Thomas Sawyer in 1648. The young couple selected their home lot adjoining Prescott's in Lancaster and there eleven sons and daughters were born to them.