The Wamesit purchase was divided into small parcels of land and sold to settlers.  Samuel Pierce, who had his domicile on the Indian reservation, was elected a member of the General Court, in 1725, but was refused his seat on the ground that he was not an inhabitant of Chelmsford.  Accordingly the people of the reservation refused to pay taxes to the town of Chelmsford until an act was passed legally annexing them to the town.  The place was afterward known as East Chelmsford.

The year 1729 is memorable for the great earthquake which occurred on October 29, and did considerable damage in the Merrimack valley.

Tewksbury was incorporated in 1734, its territory before having been included in Billerica.

At the battle of Bunker Hill two companies of Chelmsford men were present, one under command of Captain John Ford, the other under Captain Benjamin Walker; and one company composed largely of Dracut men was under Captain Peter Colburn.

[Illustration:  FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, 1840.]

Captain Ford had served previously at the siege and capture of Louisburg, in 1745.  When the first man in his company fell at Bunker Hill, an officer prevented a panic by singing Old Hundred.  When closely pressed by the British, and the ammunition had been exhausted, Captain Colburn, on the point of retreating, threw a stone at the advancing enemy and saw an officer fall from the blow.

Colonel Simeon Spaulding, of Chelmsford, was an active patriot during the Revolution and did good service in the Provincial Congress.

During Shays’ Rebellion, in 1786, a body of Chelmsford militia under command of General Lincoln served in the western counties.

The people of Chelmsford, from the earliest settlement, gave every encouragement to millers, lumbermen, mechanics, and traders, making grants of land, and temporary exemption from taxation, to such as would settle in their town.  It became distinguished for its sawmills, gristmills, and mechanics’ shops of various kinds.  Billerica, Dracut, and Tewksbury gave like encouragement.  About the time of the Revolution a sawmill was built below Pawtucket Falls and owned by Judge John Tyng.

[Illustration:  PAIGE-STREET FREEWILL BAPTIST CHURCH, 1840.]

Toward the close of the last century the lumbering industry on the Merrimack grew into prominence; and, in 1792, Dudley A. Tyng, William Coombs, and others, of Newburyport, were incorporated as “The Proprietors of the Locks and Canals on Merrimack River.”  This canal, which was demanded for the safe conduct of rafts by the Falls, was completed in 1797, at an expense of fifty thousand dollars.  The fall of thirty-two feet was passed by four sets of locks.

The first bridge across the Merrimack was built, in 1792, by Parker Varnum and associates; the Concord had been bridged some twenty years earlier.

[Illustration:  DAM AT PAWTUCKET FALLS.]