In October of the same year, three months after the picture was made, Daniel Webster at his Marshfield home, breathed his last; leaving this portrait the last ever taken of him from life.
FORT SHIRLEY.
By Prof. A.L. Perry of Williams College.
The recent centennial celebration in the town of Heath, Franklin County, Massachusetts, has freshened up an interest in the history of the old fort that was built within its borders, at the opening of the Old French War in 1744, by the State of Massachusetts. The present writer, however, has made a study for many years of that and its kindred forts, has repeatedly visited and critically examined its site, and has in his possession the chief movable memorials of what was indeed a small, yet in its historical connections a deeply interesting, military outpost.
The first white men known or supposed to have ever penetrated the original forests in the town of Heath were Richard Hazen and six others, the surveyor and chain-men and their assistants, who ran the official northern line of Massachusetts in the early spring of 1741. Besides the surveyor himself, who was then a prominent citizen of Haverhill, on the Merrimac, and his son of the same name, then nineteen years old, the party consisted of Caleb Swan, Benjamin Smith, Zachariah Hildrith, Ebenezer Shaw and William Richardson. Under an imperative order from the Privy Council in England, Governor Belcher, who at that time administered government over both Massachusetts and New Hampshire, commissioned Hazen to run the ultimate line between the two, beginning at a point three miles north of Pawtucket Falls on the Merrimac (now Lowell), and extending on a due west course till it should meet His Majesty's other Governments. This arbitrary decision of the Privy Council in selecting the very southernmost point in the whole course of the Merrimac, as the place meant in in the old Charter of Massachusetts in the phrase "Merrimack River," instead of taking, as Massachusetts claimed, the northernmost point of the river in Franklin, N.H., or as New Hampshire had claimed, the point at the mouth of the river, robbed Massachusetts of a strip of territory fourteen miles wide the whole length of the Colony, which New Hampshire had never before claimed, but which her shrewd and unscrupulous Agent now extorted trom the ignorance of English Councillors.
Hazen began his survey March 21, 1741. The English instructions required a course due west, and Governor Belcher and his Council ordered ten degrees for the then variation of the needle, which was not quite enough, so that the line actually ran slightly north of due west, and saved to Massachusetts at the west end of the line (in Williamstown) about 1 deg. and 50 min. After the party left the Connecticut river on April 6, they slept on snow at a depth of two or three feet every night till they crossed the Hoosac river in Williamstown on April 12. "It clouded over before Night and rained sometime before day which caused us to stretch Our blankets and lye under them on ye bare Ground, which was the first bare ground we laid on after we left Northfield." It was on April 9 that they measured the present north line of Heath. Let the clear-eyed surveyor describe in his own words the general situation of the future Fort Shirley.
"At the End of three miles we came to a large brook running Southeasterly and at the End of this days measure to another large brook running Southerly, by which we took Our lodging. Here we tract a Bear and therefore named it Bear brook, both these brooks being branches of Deerfield River. The land this day was some of the best of Land and for three miles together. The last year Pigeons' nests were so thick that 500 might have been told on the beech trees at One time, and they could have been counted on the Hemlocks as well, I believe three thousand at one turn Round. The snow was for ye most part three feet deep, the weather was fair and wind Northwest."