Here the venerable couple were living in truly patriarchal style, occupying the “mansion” of Townsend Bishop, when the witchcraft delusion occurred.  They and their children were all clustered within the limits of the three-hundred-acre farm.  They were one family.  The territory was their own, secured by their united action, and made commodious, productive, valuable, and beautiful to behold, by their harmonious, patient, and persevering labor.  Each family had a homestead, and fields and gardens; and children were growing up in every household.  The elder sons and sons-in-law had become men of influence in the affairs of the church and village.  It was a scene of domestic happiness and prosperity rarely surpassed.  The work of life having been successfully done, it seemed that a peaceful and serene descent into the vale of years was secured to Francis and Rebecca Nurse.  But far otherwise was the allotment of a dark and inscrutable providence.

There is some reason to suspect that the prosperity of the Nurses had awakened envy and jealousy among the neighbors.  The very fact that they were a community of themselves and by themselves, may have operated prejudicially.  To have a man, who, for forty years, had been known, in the immediate vicinity, as a farmer and mechanic on a small scale, without any pecuniary means, get possession of such a property, and spread out his family to such an extent, was inexplicable to all, and not relished perhaps by some.  There seems to have been a disposition to persist in withholding from him the dignity of a landholder; and, long after he had distributed his estate among his descendants, it is mentioned in deeds made by parties that bounded upon it, as “the farm which Mr. Allen, of Boston, lets to the Nurses.”  Not knowing probably any thing about it, they call it, even after Nurse’s death, “Mr. Allen’s farm.”  This, however, was a slight matter.  When Allen sold the farm to Nurse, he bound himself to defend the title; and he was true to his bond.  What was required to be done in this direction may, perhaps, have exposed the Nurses to animosities which afterwards took terrible effect against them.

In granting lands originally, neither the General Court nor the town exercised sufficient care to define boundaries.  There does not appear to have been any well-arranged system, based upon elaborate, accurate, scientific surveys.  Of the dimensions of the area of a rough, thickly wooded, unfrequented country, the best estimates of the most practised eyes, and measurements resting on mere exploration or perambulation, are very unreliable.  The consequence was, that, in many cases, grants were found to overlap each other.  This was the case with the Bishop farm; and soon after Nurse came into possession, and had begun to operate upon it, a conflict commenced; trespasses were complained of; suits were instituted; and one of the most memorable and obstinately contested land-controversies known to our courts took place.  In that controversy Nurse was not formally a principal.  The case was between James Allen and Zerubabel Endicott, or between Allen and Nathaniel Putnam.