A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers - Pennsylvania State ...

that the silver eel was formerly abundant here, and pointed
to some sunken creels at its mouth. This man’s memory and
imagination were fertile in fishermen’s tales of floating isles
in bottomless ponds, and of lakes mysteriously stocked with
fishes, and would have kept us till nightfall to listen, but we
could not afford to loiter in this roadstead, and so stood out
to our sea again. Though we never trod in those meadows,
but only touched their margin with our hands, we still retain
a pleasant memory of them.
Salmon Brook, whose name is said to be a translation from
the Indian, was a favorite haunt of the aborigines. Here, too,
the first white settlers of Nashua planted, and some dents in
the earth where their houses stood and the wrecks of ancient
apple-trees are still visible. About one mile up this stream
stood the house of old John Lovewell, who was an ensign in
the army of Oliver Cromwell, and the father of “famous
Captain Lovewell.” He settled here before 1690, and died
about 1754, at the age of one hundred and twenty years. He
is thought to have been engaged in the famous Narragansett
swamp fight, which took place in 1675, before he came here.
The Indians are said to have spared him in succeeding wars
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on account of his kindness to them. Even in 1700 he was so
old and gray-headed that his scalp was worth nothing, since
the French Governor offered no bounty for such. I have stood
in the dent of his cellar on the bank of the brook, and talked
there with one whose grandfather had, whose father might
have, talked with Lovewell. Here also he had a mill in his old
age, and kept a small store. He was remembered by some
who were recently living, as a hale old man who drove the
boys out of his orchard with his cane. Consider the triumphs
of the mortal man, and what poor trophies it would have to
show, to wit:—He cobbled shoes without glasses at a hundred,
and cut a handsome swath at a hundred and five!
Lovewell’s house is said to have been the first which Mrs.
Dustan reached on her escape from the Indians. Here probably
the hero of Pequawket was born and bred. Close by
may be seen the cellar and the gravestone of Joseph Hassell,
who, as is elsewhere recorded, with his wife Anna, and son
Benjamin, and Mary Marks, “were slain by our Indian enemies
on September 2d, [1691,] in the evening.” As Gookin
observed on a previous occasion, “The Indian rod upon the
English backs had not yet done God’s errand.” Salmon Brook