themselves, if not adventurers in the common stock, with no other property than their strong arms and resolute wills, particularly if they had able-bodied sons, liberal grants were made.  Every one who had received a town lot of half an acre was allowed to relinquish it, receiving, in exchange, a country lot of fifty acres or more.  Under this system, a population of a superior order was led out into the forest.  Farms quickly spread into the interior, seeking the meadows, occupying the arable land, and especially following up the streams.

I propose to illustrate this by a very particular enumeration of instances, and by details that will give us an insight of the personal, domestic, and social elements that constituted the condition of life in the earliest age of New England, particularly in that part of the old township of Salem where the scene of our story is laid.  I shall give an account of the persons and families who first settled the region included in, and immediately contiguous to, Salem Village, and whose children and grandchildren were actors or sufferers in, or witnesses of, the witchcraft delusion.  I am able, by the map, to show the boundaries, to some degree of precision, of their farms, and the spots on or near which their houses stood.

The first grant of land made by the company, after it had got fairly under way, was of six hundred acres to Governor Winthrop, on the 6th of September, 1631, “near his house at Mystic.”  The next was to the deputy-governor, Thomas Dudley, on the 5th of June, 1632, of two hundred acres “on the west side of Charles River, over against the new town,” now Cambridge.  The next, on the 3d of July, 1632, was three hundred acres to John Endicott.  It is described, in the record, as “bounded on the south side with a river, commonly called the Cow House River, on the north side with a river, commonly called the Duck River, on the east with a river, leading up to the two former rivers, known by the name of Wooleston River, and on the west with the main land.”  The meaning of the Indian word applied to this territory was “Birch-wood.”  At the period of the witchcraft delusion, and for some time afterwards, “Cow House River” was called “Endicott River.”  Subsequently it acquired the name of “Waters River.”

This grant constituted what was called “the Governor’s Orchard Farm.”  In conformity with the policy on which grants were made, Endicott at once proceeded to occupy and improve it, by clearing off the woods, erecting buildings, making roads, and building bridges.  His dwelling-house embraced in its view the whole surrounding country, with the arms of the sea.  From the more elevated points of his farm, the open sea was in sight.  A road was opened by him, from the head of tide water on Duck, now Crane, River, through the Orchard Farm, and round the head of Cow House River, to the town of Salem, in one direction, and to Lynn and Boston in another.  A few years afterwards, the town granted him two hundred