Framingham Legends & Lore Read Free Page A

1675, the praying Indians of Magunkook were suspected, and the village was seized by the English a week later. At their trial, the natives were able to prove their innocence by producing witnesses who testified that they had in fact attended Sunday meeting at Marlborough that day. Nonetheless, the village lay abandoned as some Indians remained imprisoned and others were relocated to Deer Island in Boston Harbor to keep them out of further trouble, while most (probably including Old Jacob) joined their neighbors at Natick. Old Jethro, though not a Christian, had decided to demonstrate his loyalty to the English by moving from his home on Nobscot Mountain to within the bounds of the praying Indian town of Natick.
    During the autumn of 1675, King Philip’s War raged from Rhode Island to the Connecticut Valley to the frontier of Maine, but the vicinity of Framingham remained relatively quiet after the raid on Lancaster that August. At first the colonial government sought to isolate the praying Indians from their Nipmuc compatriots by forbidding them to leave Natick, whether to hunt game in the forests or harvest corn planted outside the borders of the town. This represented a considerable hardship, as their numbers had swelled with refugees from Magunkook. But to the Massachusetts Bay authorities, the mere continued existence nearby of such a large settlement of natives, Christian converts or not, represented a powder keg that could be ignited at any time.
    On October 26, a detachment of soldiers from Cambridge swept through Natick to forcibly relocate all the natives to Deer Island. No provision of housing or food stores had been made for them there, although it was already the eve of a New England winter. Feeling betrayed by their fellow Christians, a number of natives whose only crime was to be Indian chose instead to take their chances with the Nipmuc and fled to the west, including Old Jacob, Old Jethro, his son Peter and Netus. Captain Tom also reluctantly joined the warring Nipmuc when a party of warriors arrived at Hassanamesit on November 1, gave the converts there the choice of joining with them or being attacked and told them of the fate of their friends at Natick.
    The Indians interned on Deer Island suffered much that winter, but the disruptions and dislocations of war brought privations upon those natives who had fled Natick as well. On February 1, 1676, Netus assembled a party of about a dozen warriors (including Old Jacob) to retrieve the stores of corn from the abandoned village of Magunkook. But the granaries were empty. Suspecting the town had been pilfered by the English and unwilling to return empty-handed, Netus urged the party to continue three miles eastward on the path to the nearest white settlement to look for the missing corn. As they climbed the rise of Mount Wayte, they spotted two English children at the well a short distance from the Eames house.
    T HE E AMES F ARM AT M OUNT W AYTE
    According to historian Stephen Herring, there were probably no more than seven English families settled within the bounds of present-day Framingham on the eve of King Philip’s War. There were the Stones and their relatives who had long been established at what is now Saxonville; a little farther south were the Bent and Rice families not far from the ruins of the old Nipmuc village on the western shores of Lake Cochituate, the Bradish family at Nobscot and the Thomas Eames family on the southern slope of Mount Wayte. While the other families were clustered relatively close to each other, the Eames farm stood over three miles distant to the southwest. As Framingham had yet to be incorporated, the Eames family did not even think of themselves as living in the same town as the other settlers. All the other families attended Sunday services at the meetinghouse in Sudbury (located within present-day Wayland), but the Eameses traveled instead to Sherborn.
    Thomas Eames had been born in England about 1618 and had come