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CHAPTER III THE FIRST SETTLERS. “No form of bronze and no memorial stones Show me the place where lie his mouldering bones. Only a cheerful city stands, Builded by his hardened hands, Only ten thousand homes, Where every day the cheerful play Of love and hope and courage comes. These are his monument and these alone. There is no form of bronze and no memorial stone." —Edward Everett Hale
The first white man to build a home at Pawtucket was Joseph Jenks, Jr., a skilled worker in iron and metals. He, no doubt, was induced to locate there because the water power was readily available to drive his forge and saw mill and the neighboring forests furnished abundant fuel. According to family traditions he is said to have settled at Pawtucket in 1655, but no authentic evidence exists that he was there at such an early date, only nineteen years after the beginning of the town of Providence. If he did come at that time he must have been so poor that he was obliged to hire land, and there is no hint or trace of any such transaction on his part in any record or tradition. Indeed, at that period it would have been a very unlikely thing for the Tubal Cain of Southern New England, with the capital already in the possession of his father at Lynn, to have become a tenant in the “barbarous Wilderness” of Pawtucket, which Roger Williams al1d Gregory Dexter less than ten years before the traditional date of Jenks’s settlement, had declared Was practically worthless*. He might, it is true, have been a squatter, but his subsequent career and his prudence and thrift all militate against that assumption. He was certainly living at Lynn in 1660**, as in that year he was imprisoned on a charge of treason for speaking disrespectfully of the new king, Charles II. At this time he was working with his father in the Lynn Iron Works, and according to the narrative “during some free and easy discussion with the other workmen or perhaps in a political dispute” at the tavern, he said that if he had the power he would cut off the king’s head and make a football of it, and also declared himself in favor of treating the new ruler as Charles I. had been served. His exact Words in the latter connection were ac-
*See purchase from Massasoit, chapter 2, p. 28.
**Annals of Lynn, ed. 1865, p. 251.
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CHAPTER III THE FIRST SETTLERS. “No form of bronze and no memorial stones Show me the place where lie his mouldering bones. Only a cheerful city stands, Builded by his hardened hands, Only ten thousand homes, Where every day the cheerful play Of love and hope and courage comes. These are his monument and these alone. There is no form of bronze and no memorial stone." —Edward Everett Hale
The first white man to build a home at Pawtucket was Joseph Jenks, Jr., a skilled worker in iron and metals. He, no doubt, was induced to locate there because the water power was readily available to drive his forge and saw mill and the neighboring forests furnished abundant fuel. According to family traditions he is said to have settled at Pawtucket in 1655, but no authentic evidence exists that he was there at such an early date, only nineteen years after the beginning of the town of Providence. If he did come at that time he must have been so poor that he was obliged to hire land, and there is no hint or trace of any such transaction on his part in any record or tradition. Indeed, at that period it would have been a very unlikely thing for the Tubal Cain of Southern New England, with the capital already in the possession of his father at Lynn, to have become a tenant in the “barbarous Wilderness” of Pawtucket, which Roger Williams al1d Gregory Dexter less than ten years before the traditional date of Jenks’s settlement, had declared Was practically worthless*. He might, it is true, have been a squatter, but his subsequent career and his prudence and thrift all militate against that assumption. He was certainly living at Lynn in 1660**, as in that year he was imprisoned on a charge of treason for speaking disrespectfully of the new king, Charles II. At this time he was working with his father in the Lynn Iron Works, and according to the narrative “during some free and easy discussion with the other workmen or perhaps in a political dispute” at the tavern, he said that if he had the power he would cut off the king’s head and make a football of it, and also declared himself in favor of treating the new ruler as Charles I. had been served. His exact Words in the latter connection were ac-
*See purchase from Massasoit, chapter 2, p. 28.
**Annals of Lynn, ed. 1865, p. 251.