the General Court heaping honors upon Davenport, and finally, in 1639, making him a grant of one hundred and fifty acres of land, specially noticing his services in the Pequot War, which appear to have elicited general applause.  In some desperate encounters with the savages, seventeen arrows were shot “into his coat of mail,” and he was wounded in unprotected parts of his person.  He was twice deputy to the General Court.  In 1644, the General Court organized an elaborate system of external defence, the whole based upon Castle Island, now Fort Independence, in Boston Harbor.  From that point, hostile invasion by a naval force was to be repelled.  Every vessel, on entering, was to report to the castle, be examined and subject to the orders of the commandant.  It became the military headquarters of the colony, the protection and oversight of whose commerce were intrusted to the officer in command.  This was the highest military station and trust in the gift of the Government.  It was assigned to Richard Davenport; and he held it for twenty-one years, to the moment of his death.  The country reposed in confidence upon his watchful fidelity.  He put and kept the castle in an efficient condition.  In 1659, as evidence of their satisfaction and approval of his official conduct, the General Court made him a grant of five hundred acres of land laid out in Lancaster.  On the 15th of July, 1665, he was killed by lightning, at his post.  The records of the General Court speak of “the solemn stroke of thunder that took away Captain Davenport.”  The whole country mourned the loss of the veteran soldier; and the Court granted his family an additional tract of one hundred acres of land on the Merrimac River.  He was in his sixtieth year at the time of his death.  Of the company required to be raised in Salem for the Block-Island Expedition, in 1636, the three commissioned officers were furnished from the Farms,—­Trask, Davenport, and Read.  They were soldiers by nature and instinct, and to the end.  The volleys of devoted, faithful, and mourning comrades were fired over their graves, with no great interval of time.  United in early service, separated by the course of their lives, they were united again in death.

Thomas Lothrop originally lived in the town, between Collins Cove and the North River.  He became a member of the First Church in Salem, and was admitted a freeman in 1634.  He soon removed to the Farms; and his name appears among the rate-payers at the formation of the village parish.  For many years he was deputy from Salem to the General Court; and after Beverly was set off, as his residence at the time was on that side of the line, he was always in the General Court, as deputy from the new town, when his other public employments permitted.  No man was ever more identified with the history of the Salem Farms.  He contributed to form the structure of its society, and the character of its population, by all that a wise and good man could do.  During