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EVERAL years ago one of our most charming New England writers issued a volume entitled "From Ponkapog to Pesth," and, more recently, there has come from the same pen "Ponkapog Papers." T. B. Aldrich states in his introduction of the one, "Ponkapog is the Indian name of a little New England village which scarcely merits a description"; and in the other, "The little Massachusetts settlement, nestled under the wing of the Blue Hills, has no illusions concerning itself, never mistakes the cackling of the bourg for the sound. that echoes round the world, and no more thinks of rivalling great centres of human activity than these slight papers dream of inviting comparison between themselves and important pieces of literature." It would seem the author assumed too little, for his slightest fragment will ever receive "praise and perusal," while Ponkapog, the unpretentious, and Canton, the town corporate, are

entrancing bits of historic soil. Moreover, to such as love to trace the beginnings of things, Blue Hills

the old Cheviot Hills of John Smith's Journal-will furnish a creditable list of civic and industrial benefactions which had their origin in this locality.

The Massachusetts tribe of Indians, governed by Chief Chicataubut, were in full and undisputed possession of all the country surrounding Massachusetts Bay when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. A year later the old Sachem signed. a treaty with the English agreeing to the occupancy of Dorchester by them. His successors distributed other parcels, so that, when the General Court confirmed the deed of the Indians in 1637, ancient Dorchester was the largest town in New England. Portions of this town were taken at intervals to form others, and in 1726 the South Precinct, containing the the modern towns of Stoughton, Sharon and

Canton, with the lands beyond, was incorporated under the name name of Stoughton, the name being selected in honor of Lieutenant Governor Stoughton, who was born in Dorchester and who had a distinguished career. A graduate of Harvard and later a Fellow of New College, Oxford, where he received the degree Master of Arts, he left evidence of his interest in things educational by his gift of Stoughton Hall to Harvard and land for school purposes to his native town.

While the white men were making themselves homes and becoming landed proprietors in this section,

was hospitably received in the wigwams and who had already succeeded in establishing a "praying town" in Natick. He gathered such of the Massachusetts tribe as had settled near the mouth of the Neponset River and requested "the good people of Dorchester" to give a tract of land whereon they might make permanent settlement and he have opportunity regularly to preach to them. Accordingly the Indian Plantation at Ponkapog, "not exceeding six thousand acres," was granted in 1657, and became "the Second Praying Town." These sons of the forest not only hunted,

own building, and listened reverently to the preaching of the learned man who couched his messages to them in simple language.

From 1726 till the stormy days of the Revolution the history of Stoughton was similar to that of other early colonial towns. Many of the English customs were adhered to. The tithing-man was strict in his Sunday duties; the mortifying stocks must have punished petty offenders, for there is extant a bill for repairing the same by one Preserved Lyon. Quaint old character he, this carpenter of olden days, and his name marvel

put him into a quart tankard and shut down the cover." All houses boasted their tankards and decanters. Rum, gin, brandy were on the sideboard, while the careful housewife kept in some safe receptacle, on the high mantel, Abel Puffer's Sure Cure for the Bite of a Rattlesnake. Though the remedy may have long since passed into disuse, the venomous reptiles still haunt this locality.

If the general history of the community was not unique, some of its individual characters were decidedly so. The oldest inhabitants of Canton, from the remembered

stories of their grandsires, will tell you of William Sherman, shoemaker by trade, who became a well-to-do farmer of seventy acres, among whose lineal descendants may be mentioned John A. Logan, Chauncey Depew, Senators Hoar and Evarts, Secretary John Sherman and William Tecumseh Sherman, while his son became one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Roger Sherman learned the trade of his father and it is said that when he left Canton (about the time he attained his majority), he carried his kit on his

lege, judge of the Superior Court, member of Congress, he was described by Jefferson as a man who "never said a foolish thing in his life," and John Adams declared that "he was one of the most sensible men in the world, with the clearest head and steadiest heart." He was constant in his affection for his boyhood home and often revisited it. They will linger over the life of Parson Samuel Dunbar, protegée of Cotton Mather, pupil at the Boston Latin School, graduate of Harvard, who, in his long ministry, preached eight thousand and fifty-nine ser