A "What If" Paddle

This past Tuesday I got out on the Concord River for a "what if" paddle.  By that I mean trying to imagine what if an elaborate plan proposed to the Massachusetts Bay Colony on March 23, 1676 at the height of King Philip's War had been enacted.  I recently came across mention of the plan in the book Groton During the Indian Wars by Samuel Abbott Green, M.D. (1883).  It was something I'd never heard of before and returned to the book for more details. The plan was developed by "several considerable persons" (though unnamed) during a most dark and desperate time when many of the Colony's outlying towns were being raided by Native Americans.  The Colony was at wit's end as to how or if they could protect the many outlying towns.  The plan detailed creating a defensive line utilizing the Charles, Concord, and Merrimack rivers as a water barrier composing the majority of the line.  What complicated matters was how to connect over land from a point on the Charles River in Watertown to a point on the Concord River at Billerica.  The proposal called for a 12-mile long, 8-foot high stockade fence or stonewall "extending from Charles River, where it is navigable, unto Concord River not far from George Farley's house, (living in Billerica)".  The stockade would incorporate several unnamed ponds to help reduce the length.  Those ponds may have been Fresh Pond, Spy Pond, Mystic Lakes, Horn Pond, and Nutting Pond.  The stockade would end in Billerica where it would give way to the Concord River. Oddly, George Farley's house is the only location specifically mentioned by name in the plan leading me to wonder if he may have been one of the plan's proponents.  "This line (stockade) in connection with the Concord and the Merrimack Rivers, it was thought would form a barrier against the savages and protect all the towns lying within the district.  This complicated system of defence was favored by the Council...."  They listed 20 towns within the district: Salem, Charlestown, Cambridge, Watertown, Ipswich, Newbury, Rowley, Lynn, Andover, Topsfield, Reading, Woburn, Malden, Billerica, Gloucester, Beverly, Wenham, Manchester, Bradford, and Medford.

I've used this map, found on Stanford University Library's (Barry Lawrence Ruderman Collection) website, to show the proposed line of defense which included the 12-mile stockade....

The route looks similar to the northern portion of today's Route 495 connecting with Route 3 at Chelmsford.

This is the same map showing the extent of the Bay Colony including many outlying towns...

Another map of the New England Colonies 1677 showing the locations of the Native American Praying Towns as well as many of the outlying towns...

Note that most of the Praying Villages, with the possible exception of Wamesit, would have been outside the defensive line.

So I started my paddling trip from outside of the Colony's defensive line in the wilds of present-day Bedford and headed downriver towards Billerica.  Made my first stop a half mile downriver at Two Brothers Rocks...

...where the kiosk explains how Englishmen, Gov. Winthrop and Deputy Gov. Dudley came to claim much of the land on the east side of the Concord River. George Farley would later build his homestead in the southwestern portion of the Dudley Farm Tract in the early 1650s.

From Two Brothers Rocks I continued downriver passing Jug Island...

...and the very busy Route 3 bridge...

...until reaching a point near the bridge abutments for the old Middlesex Turnpike...

Landing here on the east side of the river I left my boat and hiked a quarter-mile or so up a wooded slope alongside an old stone wall...

...to the address where George Farley's garrison house once stood, and where near it the 12-mile long stockade would have reached its terminus at the Concord River.  It would have been a key point in the line of defense. According to Wikipedia remnants of the structure were still standing as recently as the year 2000 when they were disassembled and 10 years later reassembled in New Hampshire.  An image of how the house looked in 1676 can be seen on the Wikipedia page for the Abraham Jaquith House (Farley's son-in-law).  On this day I found the location to be a barren lot behind this sign announcing the upcoming development to be built on the site...

While I could find no historical marker related to the Farley Garrison House there was a marker for the Middlesex Turnpike which reached roughly the same spot in the early 1800's...

...in fact the route of the proposed 12-mile stockade may have crisscrossed both the turnpike and the Middlesex Canal in places.

Also at this location was this marker noting the Billerica Minutemen having passed the spot in 1775...

So, if the stockade had been built and if I were standing here in 1676 I would have found myself looking up at the structure and wondering which side of it I'd rather be on.  My guess is I would have preferred the side where clerics wouldn't be telling me what I could and couldn't do or say.

Made interesting food for thought on the trip back upriver (outside the proposed defensive line)...

The Massachusetts Bay Colony ultimately appointed a committee made up of Hugh Mason, John Danforth, and Richard Lowden to examine the issue and they found the plan not to be advisable for the following reasons: too costly to build and maintain; would take too long to build; would require many laborers at a time when farms needed tending; and finally they concluded the enemy could easily breach the stockade, ford the rivers, or simply cross the waterway in rafts.  Their opinion prevailed and the defensive line wasn't built.  Following the attack at Sudbury, a month later, the Native American forces suffered a series of setbacks culminating with the death of Metacom (aka King Philip).   Thus the threat of attack on the outlying towns, while still present, never rose to the point where such a drastic solution was considered.  Here several other "what ifs" come into play:

 

What if Canonchet hadn't been captured and killed in April by the Mohegans and Niantics?

What if, a month later, the Native American sentries at Peskeompskut had detected Captain Turner's force before Turner and his men could destroy the village and people at the falls now named for Capt. Turner?  

Had those two "what ifs" gone the other way the defensive line plan might have been reconsidered.

 

Trash from Tuesday...

Trash collected from the Assabet River in Acton...

...while Mrs. Trashpaddler and I participated in OARS 3 Rivers Annual River Cleanup.   It included 17 plastic 2-liter bottles of Schweppes ginger-ale. Brand loyalty on display?!   Also 58 miniature (nip) bottles.