Williams College - Gulielmensian Yearbook (Williamstown, MA)

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t! l '----'il' i and the firmest principles of Fair and Right throughout, but not a single one ot' them is well spelled, few, if any, of them come completely under the rules of common English Grammar, and there is additional proof in them of a fragmentary home and school training, many arithmetical mistalres creep into the successive muster-rolls, and few of the many-itemed bills are found to be strictly accurate. That he put, nevertheless, a high estimate upon that ofwhich he himself had been deprived, is clearly shown by a good many expressions in his last will and testament, and particularly by the essential clause of it establishing the Williamstown Free School, and condi- tionally also Haschoolin the EastTownship, where the fort now stands, and the same fact is st-rongly indicated by several concurrent lines of tradition, which was best gathered up 'by Mr. Fitch, the first preceptor of the Free School, forty-five years after the Colonel's death. ,He had a taste for books, and often lamented his want of a liberal education 5 he witnessed, with humane and painful sensations, the dangers and difficulties and hard- ships which the first settlers were obliged to encounter, and to encourage them he intimated his intention of doing something liberal and handsome for them. - It is nearly as plain, from a full survey of all the circumstances, in the second place that Ephraim Williams found his double and doubtful home re- lations disagreeable, if not intolerable. The best evidence of this is that he left home and went to sea when quite a youth, and no traces of the time when, or reason why, or manner how, have ever been discovered, although these were diligently soughtforfifty years ago by Dr. Stephen West Williams, agrandson of his younger brother, Thomas. It is certain, however, that his father was troubled by this sea-faring life of his motherless boy, that he earnestly tried to dissuade him from pursuing it, and that he ultimately succeeded in inducing him to abandon it. It is certain also that the boy or young man made many voyages to Europe, in some of which he visited Spain and Holland and England, but whether he went before the mast or as a supercargo, or as apetty officer, will never be known, though perhaps it may be fairly inferred that he personally profited by these opportunities as towards that agreeable companionship and social success and political influence of his later life, and it is certain further, that while ships of a con- siderable burden then sailed up the Charles River as far as Newton, none of his own immediate family on either side were then, or had been, sea-go- ing people, and too that there is a strange reticence both of record and of after-reference to this portion 'of the Colonel's life. The same year, 1739, in which his Grandfather Jackson made his last will and testament, his father, Williams, then forty-eight years Old, broke up his establishment in Newton, where he had been prominent both in church and civil affairs, sold the ancestral acres there, and moved his family IO .

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'Qlllilliamstown jfrcc School, 1791-'93. secondary Williams family were being born and ...., R GB?-4 , .3-5, 2 CL. EPHRAIM WILLIAMS was a bachelor. He T had encountered in his childhood some ofthe sin- isterinfluences usually derivable from the genus pi ,M b I step-mother. His own mother died April 12, 1718, but a few days after giving birth to her .-bi c onlyother child,Thomas,when Ephraim was just i' turned four years old. The father married again in thirteen months, and the maternal grand- . rw father, Abraham jackson, took the two boys to , his own home and brought them up, while a bred in the immediate neighborhood. There came to be seven children in the new family. The environment, accordingly, of the two boys was abnormal. The grandfather jackson was the son of the first permanent settler in what came to be called Newton, on the Charles river, Cambridge and Watertown being the adjoining and closely associated villages. He had a large family of his own, was much in the public business, and for twelve years certainly was a Selectman and also one the first School Committee in Newton. He made his will in january, 1739, and died eighteen months thereafter, being then eighty-tive years old, when Ephraim Williams was not quite twenty-five and Thomas not quite twenty-one, and he bequeathed .1-lzoo to these grandsons, saying in that connection in his will that he had already spent considerable sums upon their bringing up and education. Two important features of the childhood and youth of Ephraim Wil- liams are plainly enough to be discerned at this late day, even in the absence of all direct and contemporary testimony. First, his early school education, though considerable, was neither thorough nor extended. ' This is proven directly by his manuscripts still extant, mostly letters, of which there are twelve or fourteen of some length, besides muster-rolls and money-accounts with the Province of Massachusetts. These letters dis- play, without exception, unusual insight into personal character, good sense as to the then existing relations of things, more or less of humor, 9

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to Stockbridge, with the laying out and settlement of which town as a mission station for the I-Iousatonic Indians, and with the new townships adjoining, he had had much to do for two or three years. A committee of the General Court of Massachusetts with johnfStoddard for chairman, had been appointed for this general purpose in 1735, and had been instructed to reserve 1-6o of the new townfor the missionary, john Sergeant, and an- other 1-6o for the schoolmaster, Timothy Woodbridge, both of them already at work for the Indians there, and also a sufhcient portion of the land for four other English families, whose permanent residence and intercourse were designed to encourage the missionary and schoolmaster, and to ex- emplify tothe Indian families at once both civilization and Christianity. The Williams family were the first of these four to arrive, and settled in june on Stockbridge Hill. Neither of the two older sons accompanied the family to Stockbridge, for Thomas, who had received the better early education, who had already studied medicine after the fashion of those times with Dr. Wheat of Bos- ton, and who took the honorary degree of Master of Arts from Yale in 1741, was just then settling down in old Deerfield as a physician, where he became and continued distinguished as such till his death in 13775, and the whereabouts and attitude of Ephraim in 1739 is not now known. just at this point of time, the many-branched Williams family, all de- scended from Robert, who emigrated from the English Norwich, and was admitted a Roxbury freeman in the year 1638, members of which early became potent on the Charles River, and others equally so along the Con- necticut later, and now in 1739 established upon the I-lousatonic in strong public influence, touched the same year the Hoosac valley also with a potency never for one instant intermitted since. In addition to the terri- tory bought by him ofthe Stockbridge Indians and organized into the four I-Iousatonic Townships so-called, the elder Williams brought to Stock- bridge authority from the General -Court to survey and lay out two townships along the Hoosac River, and during this autumn he with others proceeded to execute the somewhat pressing mandate, as New Hampshire claimed a strip of territory along the whole northern border of Massachusetts, as well as New York along the entire western border. So far as written records go for even traditionj Williams and his surveying party were the first white men to traverse what is now Williamstown and North Adams and their report accompanied by a careful map of the locality which alone preserves the Indian name Ashuwzllficook and Mayunsook of the south and north branches the of Hoosac, respectively, is still held in the archives at Boston, although for certain reasons another and final survey ten years later located in part these two townships differently, and so be- came the guide to their legal organization. , A II