Springfield 1636-1886, History of Town and City, by Mason A. Green ...

CHAPTER X.
1677-1703.
"Waste Places rebuilt- — Deacon Chapin. — Chicopee. — Fishing Privileges. — The
Second Meeting-House. — Trouble about Mr. Glover's House and Lot. — Schools.
Taxes. — Law Breakers. — The Freemen of 1678. — The "Accord Tree."— King
William's War. — Pynchon's Attempts to protect the Towns.— Sir Edmund Andros in
Springfield.— Massacre at Brookfiekl.— Captain Colton's Heroism.— Pynchon's Letter
to Stoughton. — Death of Mr. Glover. — Suffield. — Enfield. — The Boundar}^ Ques-
tion. — Brimfiekl. — West Springfield. — Its Struggle for a Separate INIinister. — Pyn-
chon's Place in the Commonwealth. — His Business Connections.— Beaver Trade with
England. — Pynchon's Death.
The first thought of Springfield was safety, and the second the
restoration of the street to its former condition. Tlie men upon
whom the first steps of the burden of the rebuilding rested were
Selectmen George Colton, John Dumbleton, Benjamin Parsons, John
Dorchester, and Henry Chapiu.
The venerable Deacon Chapin had sunk into his grave amid the
desperate confusion of war. It would have indeed required that
faith which removes mountains to have died in a serene hope for
the future of Springfield. The larger faith in the gospel and the
Christian commonwealth we know he did have.
Samuel Chapin is supposed to have been a Huguenot, possibly one
of about 150 families that reached these shores shortly after the
Massachusetts Bay settlement. The Chapin name had an honorable
place in France so far back as the tenth century, when a Frenchman
won a coat of arms and the sobriquet " Capinatus," from a cut in
his head received during a fight. The cap with a cut in it and sword
lying across it became the coat-of-arms of the family, and this
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