"Away back almost to the days of good Queen Bess, eleven years after the landing at Plymouth, as early as 1631, Governor Winthrop and company with him ascended Charles River eight miles beyond Watertown, and there, standing on a very high rock, they saw a "very high hill due west, about forty miles off."*

This was our grand old Wachusett, or the "Great Watchusett" of the Indians , two hundred and fifty-six years ago.

In 1643, Governor Winthrop again says: "At this Court, Nashacowan and Wassamagoin, two sachems near the great hill to the west, called Wauhasset [Wachusett], came into the Court and desired to be received under our protection and government; so we, causing them to understand the Articles and all the Ten Commandments of God, and they freely assenting to all, they were

* Hon. Charles T. Russell's oration, at the centennial of Princeton.

solomnly received, and then presented the Court with twenty-six fathom more of wampum; and then the Court gave each of them a coat of two yards of cloth and their dinner; and to them and their men, every one of them, a cup of sack at their departure; so they took leave and went away very joyful."

In 1686, five Indians, who claimed to be the owners, sold to five white men a tract of land twelve miles square, the northern part of which run up to "Great Watchusett". This deed was not registered til April, 1714. In 1759, on petition of the owners, fifteen thousand acres lying at the base of the great mountain were "erected into a district under the name of Princetown" by the Act of the General Court. This name was given in honor of Rev. Thomas Prince, the colleague pastor of the Old South Church in Boston. He was by far the largest proprietor, owning then or subsequently about three thousand acres, which descended to his daughter, Mrs. Moses Gill.

In 1765, the district voted to send a petition to the Great and General Court, asking that some thousands of acres of Province land be added to their town. Samuel Woods and two other men were sent to the Court on this business.

This is the first time the name of Samuel Woods appears in the early records; but afterwards it occurs frequently in connection with town and church affairs.

Some time before the first school-house was built, a room was

hired, and Mr. Woods engaged for the sum of six pounds (about twenty-seven dollars) a year to teach the children and youth. Thomas Wilder, Esq., in his address to the Centennial, says of him:--

"Master Woods was greeted by his appropriate appellation by old and young wherever he was known. Being self-taught, he understood how to teach others. Being a man of profound thought, he strove to promote it in his pupils by questions suited to elicit reflection, and propounding problems to be solved by induction, thus giving to the mind a stimulus to develop itself without artificial help. Consequently, a goodly number of intellectual inhabitants came forward, honorable to the town and country. We need look no farther than his own family for illustrations; I might speak of numbers, but will particularize but one, his oldest son, by his last wife, Leonard, whose germ, under paternal culture, gave hopeful promise, and who, encouraged by the means of education which at that time the public schools afforded, graduated at Harvard with the highest honors of the college; and whose writings are said to be the most lucid in the English language, and are read in all the enlightened parts of the world." *

* Address of Mr. Wilder at the celebration.

"Master Woods did a great deal of public business. He was

an excellent teacher and trained up a number of excellent men. He had two sons who were Doctors of Divinity. Abel Woods, who began his ministry in 1790, and ended it in 1850, making a term of sixty years that he was in active service. His son Alvah was also a Doctor of Divinity, and president of a college in Alabama, and he had a daughter who married Rev. Dr. Patterson, president of Newton Theological Seminary.

"Another son of Samuel Woods, Leonard was for a long period a Professor of Divinity at Andover. His son, of the same name, is a Doctor of Divinity, and president of a college. He also had four sons-in-law who were Doctors of Divinity, two of them professors in theological seminaries. This is is honor enough for one schoolmaster." *

The first settlers of Princeton were religious men, and long before the building of the meeting-house, maintained religious worship in private houses, finding their way through the forest by marked trees.

The first church edifice was reared in 1762, as the record has it, "fifty foots long and forty foots wide." It will not be difficult to judge of the principles of these settlers from the account given of their early history by the orator before referred to : "First freedom, then an axe, then a clearing, then a house, then a wife to

*Address of Professor Everett at the Centennial.

make it a home, a Bible to make it Christian, honest, loving labor to give it comfort, and thenceforth everything went as regular as clock-work, from the care of the dairy to the christening of the children."