THE LOST PRINCE AT

T

LONGMEADOW

HE first meeting-house to be built at Longmeadow, a beautiful old

town on the Connecticut River, not far from Springfield, Massachusetts, was erected in 1714, and that same year the Reverend Stephen Williams, who had been taken captive with his father's family in the sack of Deerfield,1 was ordained minister of the parish. For sixty years he served the community here, his round of parish duties being interrupted only by work as chaplain in the Louisburg expedition of 1745, and on other occasions, 1 See "Romance of Old New England Rooftrees."

and by his missionary interests in the Indians. This last concern of his had arisen very largely from his solicitude for the children of his sister Eunice, who, it will be remembered, had steadily refused to return with her family to New England and to the faith of her fathers, preferring the Roman Catholic religion and an Indian chief. To Stephen Williams, as to all the rest of the family, this apostasy on Eunice's part was a deep and abiding

sorrow.

So it was, perhaps, that he might compensate in a measure for his sister's "error" that the minister of Longmeadow laboured so zealously to cultivate the virtues of Protestant Christianity in the little town to which he had been called. In June, 1767, the "old church on the green" of our picture was begun by him, and the work of building the

same was steadily carried on under his superintendence until, in April, 1769, this meeting-house was dedicated. Then Stephen Williams was gathered to his fathers, being buried in the summer of 1772 from the church he had struggled to achieve. His chosen successor was the Reverend Richard S. Storrs, Doctor Williams's grandnephew. And during Doctor Storrs's ministry it was that quite another Williams came to Longmeadow, and, by his connection with the town and its meeting-house, furnished an excuse for the introduction here of a Longmeadow chapter. For the romance of the Reverend Eleazer Williams, believed by many to be Louis XVII. of France, is far and away the strangest and most fascinating story in all New England history.

If you search the Longmeadow town records you will find repeatedly men

tioned there the name of Deacon Nathaniel Ely, who figures in the local history as agent in the "Important Business" of making Longmeadow "the oldest child of the state." [The precinct was the first to be incorporated as a town after the signing of the Treaty of Peace, September 3, 1783.] Deacon Ely had married the grandniece of Eunice Williams, and he was a worthy and intelligent, though uneducated, man. Until he was thirty years of age he had worked on his farm and enjoyed uninterrupted health. Then his whole family was suddenly attacked with sickness, and his mother and three children swept at once to the grave. He likewise was very ill at this time, and he vowed that if he recovered, "his future life, health, property, and everything dear on earth should be consecrated to God.". For this reason, as well as because he was