Old Put The Patriot | Page 3

For, after the fashion of those primitive times, when early matrimony was encouraged, young Israel had been "courting" a lovely girl, the daughter of a neighbor, who lived about four miles distant from the home farm, near the boundary-line between Salem and Lynn. Hannah Pope was her name, and she also was descended from one of the first families of Salem Village. Being a sensible girl, she accepted Israel Putnam as soon as he proposed, and the 19th of July, 1739, they were married, when he was twenty-one years of age and she only eighteen. Taking his young wife to the little house he had built with his own hands on the farm, there Israel Putnam and Hannah, his wife, began their married life. The next year a son was born to them, the first of ten children who blessed their union, and he was called Israel.
The house in which the first Israel Putnam was born, an old colonial, gambrel-roofed structure, still stands where it was erected by his grandfather in 1648, near the foot of Hathorne Hill, in Danvers, on the turn-pike road half-way between Boston and Newburyport. It contains many relics of Putnam's time, but the most interesting portion of the house itself is the little back chamber, with its one window looking out over the farmyard, where the infant Israel first saw the light.
Of the house which he himself built, on a distant knoll of the home farm, nothing now remains but the cellar and foundation stones, near which is the well he dug, now choked with rubbish and overgrown with brambles.

CHAPTER II
"OLD WOLF PUTNAM"
Judging from the stability of his position in Danvers, it would seem that young Farmer Putnam was established for life. He had land enough to satisfy any ordinary cultivator of that period, and a comfortable house in which dwelt with him wife and child, to cheer him by their presence. But the future patriot felt within him an ardent thirst for adventure. He longed for a wider field, and though to all appearances firmly rooted in the soil of Salem Village, he was already thinking of transplanting himself and family into that of another region. Hardly, in fact, had he settled in the home he had made than he began preparations for removal to what was then considered a comparatively wild section of New England.
In the old homestead at Danvers is still preserved the quit-claim deed signed by Israel Putnam, "of Salem in the County of Essex and Province of Massachusetts Bay in New England, husbandman," which records the transfer by him to his brother David of his share in the ancestral house and acres.
In the local history of the town of Brooklyn, Conn., occurs this passage: "In the year 1703, Richard Ames purchased 3,000 acres of land lying in the south part of Pomfret, where the village of Brooklyn now stands, which he divided into five lots and deeded to his sons. Directly north of this was situated a tract of land owned by Mr. John Blackwell, comprising 5,750 acres, which was willed to his son John, and afterward sold to Governor Belcher of Massachusetts, who divided it into farms and sold them to different individuals, among whom was General Israel Putnam. This tract went by the name of 'Mortlake.' A beautiful stream which rises in the western part of the tract, and received its name from the former proprietor, Blackwell, empties into the Quinnebaug."
These several transactions in real estate, taken together, will sufficiently explain to the reader, perhaps, the subsequent movements of Farmer Putnam. After disposing of property to his brother David, and receiving therefor the goodly sum of ￡1,900, Israel Putnam joined with his brother-in-law, Joseph Pope, in the purchase of more than five hundred acres of land from Governor Belcher, for which they agreed to pay at the rate of five pounds per acre. They paid for it partly in "bills of credit on the Province of Massachusetts," and gave a mortgage for the remainder. And so fertile was this wild land, and so thrifty was the young pioneer farmer Israel Putnam, that within little more than two years he had liquidated the mortgage and received a quit-claim deed from the Governor, as well as purchased his brother-in-law's portion of the tract they had bought together.
The two pioneers may have made a special trip to the Connecticut tract before deciding to purchase; for it was not in the nature of them to "buy a pig in a poke," as it were. And such a journey of nearly a hundred miles, mainly through a wilderness, was no child's task in those days. In after-years General Israel Putnam made many a longer journey, through wilds swarming with hostile Indians, too, and thought nothing of it; but this was the first of