Framingham Legends & Lore

Framingham Legends & Lore Read Free Page B

Book: Framingham Legends & Lore Read Free
Author: James L. Parr
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to the Massachusetts Bay Colony by 1636, when he served in the Pequot War, married a woman named Margaret and settled in Dedham by 1640. He resided in Medford from 1652 to 1659, and was living in Cambridge by the time he married his second wife, the widow Mary (Blandford) Paddleford, about 1662. Two years later they removed to Sudbury, where Mary’s father had been among the original settlers, and leased the “Pelham farm” in what is now Wayland. In 1668, Thomas Eames, fifty years old and “maimed in his limbs,” appealed to the government of Massachusetts Bay to grant him land for his service in the Pequot War as a youth. The colony did not grant him his request, but his petition caught the attention of Deputy Governor Thomas Danforth, who agreed to let Eames settle on part of his vast acreage at Framingham. By 1670, Thomas Eames set about building a homestead on Danforth’s land on Mount Wayte.

    Thomas Eames’s 1668 petition that brought him to the attention of Deputy Governor Thomas Danforth.
    Eames may have sought protection for his farm even before the Nipmuc raid on Mendon, as the council at Boston had sent four soldiers to be quartered at Framingham by July 22, 1675. On that date, two of the guards were reassigned to the Reverend Browne’s house at Sudbury. Thomas Eames, already ineligible for the militia due to disability, further petitioned the council to prevent his horses, which he required to ensure his own family’s safety, from being pressed into military service by the towns of Marlborough or Sudbury on the occasions when he and his family traveled there. “Divine providence having cast my lot in a place both remote from neighbors in the woods,” wrote Eames of his farm’s vulnerable position, “and in a place of no small danger in this day of trouble, when God hath so signally let loose the heathens against his people everywhere.” Yet when the fall and early winter brought no new attacks on the region, the council at Boston, already struggling to pay for the war, decided to withdraw the soldiers altogether.
    In late January came word from two praying Indians who had returned from infiltrating the Nipmuc at Menameset that the English towns of Lancaster, Groton, Marlborough, Sudbury and Medfield were liable to be attacked in the coming weeks. This news is probably what spurred Thomas Eames to travel to Boston to seek ammunition and further assistance for himself and other nearby settlers. He was still in Boston on February 1, when Netus and his party arrived at Mount Wayte looking for the missing corn from Magunkook.
    T HE E AMES M ASSACRE
    Netus’s party seized the two Eames children at the well so that they would not alarm the others. Wannuckhow, also called William Jackstraw, one of the Magunkook Indians, later testified that he stayed back in the fields, probably guarding the two children, as the rest of the warriors approached the house. Inside, Thomas’s wife, Mary (Blandford) (Paddleford) Eames, a woman in her mid-forties, was engaged in the manufacture of soap at the hearth. We shall never know whether Netus intended merely to subdue the family while his band took corn and other provisions, or to take the family prisoner for possible ransom. All we know is that Mary Eames was determined not to be taken without a fight and threw the cauldron of boiling lye at her attackers, then tried to fight them off with whatever implements she had beside her in the kitchen. The enraged warriors killed her, along with several of her children. William Jackstraw’s sons Joseph and John later testified that they convinced Netus and Annecoeken, the two who had done the actual killing, to take the remainder prisoner, thus saving the lives of some of the children. Joseph further stated that he carried one of the Eames sons on his back. (How much credence one accords this testimony is open to conjecture, as it was given in a failed attempt to gain clemency

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