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

I
SPRINGFIELD, 1636-1S86. 579
teen years of his stay here, the labor and responsibiUty of laying the founda-
tions, we must not forget or overlook the names of others, who, without aspiring
to any post of leadership, were content, in the simple capacity of pioneer settlers,
to aid in building up this town in the wilderness, although it required them to
expose themselves and their famihes to the privations and dangers of a frontier
life. Of this class of early settlers, in addition to those already named, may be
mentioned John Searle, Thomas Horton, Thomas Mirrick, John Leonard, Robert
Ashley, William Warriner, Henry Burt, Rowland Stebbins, Richard Sikes,
Thomas Cooper, James Bridgman, Alexander Edwards, Francis Ball, John
Harmon, Miles Morgan, Benjamin Cooley, John Matthews, George Colton,
Joseph Parsons, John Clarke, Widow Margaret Bliss and her four sons,
Nathaniel, Lawrence, Sanuiel, and John, also Reice Bedortha, John Lom-
bard, George Langton, Anthony Dorchester, John Lamb, John Duinl)leton,
Rowland Thomas, Jonathan Taylor, Thomas Miller, Benjamin Munn, John
Dibble. All these have descendants here, and their names have long been
familiar to us.
We are now at the commencement of a new era in the history of this toAvn.
One quarter of a thousand years has passed since its cori)orate existence began
in the mutual agreement of the first settlers. Although weak in its infancy, it
gradually outgrew the discouragements of its origin. The steady courage of the
founders never failed amid all the trials of its early years. When William
I'ynchon, the original leader of the colonists, was compelled to abandon the
town and return to England, it seemed for the time that the enterprise was almost
hopeless, and a deep gloom spread over the minds of the people.
But a new leader came forward in the jierson of liis son, John Pynchon, who
immediately showed his capacity to take tlie place Avhich his father had vacated,
and carry on the work that his father had begun. And so a new impulse, for-
ward and upward, was given to the enterprise, and tlie town continued steadily to
grow and prosper until that disastrous day in October, 1(575, when the Indians,
stimulated by Philip, the chief of the Wampanoags, a tribe having its principal
seat in Bristol county and the adjacent parts of Rhode Island, suddenly laid
aside the pipe of peace, and with tomahawk, gun, and torch began tlie work of
destruction and slaughter.
Philip endeavored to combine all the Indians of New England in a grand con-
federacy against the English colonists, in the hope to expel or exterminate the
colonists. Failing at first to secure the cooperation of tlie Narragansett
Indians, and being hard pressed by the English and their alhes, the Mohegan
Indians, Philip was forced from his stronghold in Bristol county and its vicinity
to the interior of Massachusetts among the Nipmuck Indians. These joined