INTRODUCTION.

FROM

ROM the year 1726 the records of Lancaster become continuous, are complete, and in good condition. All before that date is fragmentary. The earliest existing volume opens with A. D. 1653, in which year the Nashaway Plantation was formally given the classic name it now bears. The earlier pages of that book, however, are a copy, made about 1657, of the first records. Of "the old book," often referred to therein, no leaf remains, and many pages of the transcript have disappeared, while others are badly worn and almost illegible. During the first seventyfive years of the town's life, the inhabitants nearly all held proprietary rights in the common lands; and we find the clerks recording indiscriminately, often upon the same pages, action of the freemen as electors, of the proprietors dividing their landed estate, and of the people directing local improvement and church administration. After the settlement of Rev. John Prentice in 1708, special church records begin, and a register of births, marriages and deaths dates from about 1718, in which a few earlier dates have been casually inserted. This register is exceedingly imperfect. The earliest recorded meeting of the proprietors, as distinct from the town-meeting proper, was Feb. 4, 1716, statute provision having been made for such meetings March 25, 1713. The doings of regular town-meetings continued, however, to be recorded with proprietary action until 1726, when a new book was opened for the former. The proprietors used the old volume until 1810, about which time the proprietors' clerk made a careless copy of the whole, by which we know that the records

were then in the same imperfect condition as at present. The common land was all divided before 1836, and their last recorded meeting was held April 6, 1846.

The Book of Lands, dated probably from the days of the commission in 1657. The original volume has been long missing, but a transcript of it was made in 1763, by Caleb Wilder, then proprietors' clerk. This is the only town book that contains records made between the massacre of 1676 and 1716. Three large volumes continue the registry of lands therein begun. The Book of Roads dates from 1729, and the Book of Estrays was begun in 1755.

Not only are the earliest notes of the town's action, as set down by the clerks, always curt, and many of them not to be found, but during a long and eventful period of our colonial history, all town records entirely fail us. A woful gap of forty-six years yawns between the last entry of Ralph Houghton and the first of Joseph Wilder; from the sixth of February, 1671, to the fourth of February, 1717. How or by whom the records of the town-meetings were kept during this period we have no direct information. and the time and manner of their loss is unknown. Of the years since 1708 we glean a few meagre facts from Rev. John Prentice's records of baptisms and church membership; but for the nine years previous to 1653, and the forty-six succeeding 1670, we must seek the town's annals in documents scattered here and there through the Massachusetts Archives and the records of the Middlesex County Courts. With such of these documents as have, by diligent search, been discovered, throwing light upon the history of Lancaster, our imperfect records are herein supplemented. Many of these have never been before in print, and others are now for the first time copied verbatim. To preserve so far as is possible the savor of the olden time, the spelling, punctuation and capitalization of all original manuscripts have been faithfully retained. To those who

will charge- and justly—that the editor has magnified his office by multiplying comments of his own, he would state that, in what he has intruded, he is honestly striving only to bring into light something heretofore obscured, or to adduce evidence respecting matters in doubt, or to combat those false impressions about men, localities, and events which his experience has found unwarrantably rampant among us.

Even though considered as by too many it will bemerely a list of the Nashaway pioneers, and a schedule of their landed possessions, this transcript of our forefathers' records is of especial value; but it has a deeper import. It is Lancaster's modest contribution to the story of the growth of human freedom. The planters of Massachusetts brought with them dogmas of spiritual tyranny, and old world political formulas, which proved too inelastic when framed into social and civic institutions, for the government of a restless community facing the deprivation, toil, and dangers of the colonist. Struggles with savage men and savage nature compelled self dependence, and soil and climate favored liberty of thought and conscience. As novel external conditions modified daily life and individual character, political life progressed, and ever towards freedom. The process of this progression -so painful and slow that the actors were perhaps unconscious of advanceis nowhere more plainly depicted, and nowhere offers more of interest to the student of history, than in the records of our older towns. In the "orderly agitations" of the New England town-meeting was cradled the germ of our nation's constitutional life.