Prescott, at least, was chargeable with no delay.  By June 1645, he and his family had become permanent residents on the Nashaway.  Richard Linton, Lawrence Waters the carpenter, and John Ball the tailor, were his only neighbors; these three men having been sent up to build, plant, and prepare for the coming of other proprietors.  But two houses had been built.  Linton probably lived with his son-in-law Waters, in his home near the fording place in the North Branch of the Nashaway, contiguous to the lot of intervale land which Harmon Garrett and others of the first proprietors had fenced in to serve as a “night pasture” for their cattle.  Ball had left his children and their mother in Watertown; she being at times insane.  Prescott’s first lot embraced part of the grounds upon which the public buildings in Lancaster now stand, but this he soon parted with, and took up his abode a mile to the south west, on the sunny slope of George Hill, where, beside a little brooklet of pure cool water, which then doubtless came rollicking down over its gravelly bed with twice the flow it has to-day, there had been built, two years at least before, the trucking house of Symonds & King.  This trading post was the extreme outpost of civilization; beyond was interminable forest, traversed only by the Indian trails, which were but narrow paths, hard to find and easy to lose, unless the traveller had been bred to the arts of wood-craft.  Here passed the united trails from Washacum, Wachusett, Quaboag, and other Indian villages of the west, leading to the wading place of the Nashaway River near the present Atherton Bridge, and so down the “Bay Path” over Wataquadock to Concord.  The little plateau half way down the sheltering hill, with fertile fields sloping to the southeast and its never failing springs, was and is an attractive spot; but its material advantages to the pioneer of 1645 were far greater than those apparent to the Lancastrian of this nineteenth century in the changed conditions of life.  With the privilege of first choice therefore, it is not strange that Prescott and his sturdy sons-in-law grasped the rich intervales, and warm easily tilled slopes, stretching along the Nashaway south branch from the “meeting of the waters” to “John’s jump” on the east, and extending west to the crown of George Hill; lands now covered by the village of South Lancaster.

In 1650 John Prescott found himself the only member of the company resident at Nashaway.  Of the co-partners Symonds, King, and John Hill were dead; Norcross and Child had gone to England; Cowdall had sold his rights to Prescott; Chandler, Davis, Walker, and others had formally abandoned their claims; Garrett, Shawe, Day, Adams, and perhaps two or three others, retained their claims to allotments, making no improvements, and contributing nothing by their presence or tithes to the growth of the settlement, thus becoming effectual stumbling blocks in the way of progress.  Prescott, very reasonably, held this a grievance, and having no other means of redress asked equitable judgment in the matter from the magistrates, in a petition which cannot be found.  His answer was the following official snub: