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��88 THE GRANITE MONTHLY.
��cousin, Lady Bessborough, to take her infant child, Harriet Elizabeth, with the understanding that she would give it the care the mother could not give it then. Upon her recovery she was told that the child had died in the Isle of Wight, while in reality it had been transferred to the Earl of Carlisle, who had adopted it as his own child. Upon the death of Lady Bessborough, this came to light. Mrs. Eastman died soon after, and the father was offered, by the Duke of Sutherland, such a farm as he might select, and an income for life, if he would lay no claim to the Duchess as his daughter. The old man, with more pride than policy, refused — and died poor. Joseph, one of the nu- merous sons of the pioneer Roger, heeding the immutable command, " Go west, young man," which was as potent in his day as at present, traveled overland from Salisbury to the then far-off valley of the Connecticut whose broad meadows had that attraction for him, that he settled in Hadley, Mass., where he found favor in the eyes of the great man of the town, Peter Tilton, and married his daughter. Peter Tilton had belonged to the gentry in the old country : was the perpetual representative to the General Court at Boston : and was to Had- ley, with John Russell, the minister, what Theophilus Eaton, at the same period, with John Davenport, was to New Haven — the Moses and Aaron of the civil and ecclesiastical power of the town.
The descendants of Joseph Eastman, the first, and Mary Tilton, did their part in settling Western Massachusetts ; inter-married with the first families of the old colonial days ; and later we find traces of an early emigration to New Jersey aud the middle States. We have to do more particularly, however, with another line of descent, which reversed the general order of things, turning its face north and east, planting the rugged hills of New Hampshire and the wilds of Maine with a stock as hardy and enduring as the granite hills of one and the primeval forests of the other. A grandson of Roger, one of the solid men of Haverhill, Mass., Ebenezer Eastman, first comes prominently to notice in 1 721, as a petitioner with others to the Governor and Council and House of Representatives, stating that, " being straightened for accommodations for ourselves and our posterity, we have espied a tract of Land, scituate on the River of Merrymake, where we are desirous of making a settlement." The petition being granted, Capt. Ebenezer was the first to cross the trackless wilderness with a cart and six yokes of oxen to Penacook, later Rumford, now Concord, N. H., about 1727, and with six stalwart sons, is conceded to have first got his house in order, land cleared and under cultivation, in the new settlement. The early records show him to have been considered a man of good judgment and sound sense, as from 1732 to 1749 (and probably later, as there is a lapse in the records for some years), Capt. Ebenezer Eastman's name appears, almost without intermission, as moderator or presiding ofiicer at town meetings, as well as assessor and selectman. As a boy we find him inured to danger and hardship, and early imbued with the sturdy and patriotic principles which were so remarkable in his later years. At nine years of age his father's house and buildings were burned by the Indians at Haverhill, Mass., his family being captured and dispersed to that extent that a full record has never 'been found. When only nineteen he joined the expedition against Port Royal, and two years later had command of a company of infantry which joined the British forces against Canada.
In going u\) the river St. Lawrence, — with which he was somewhat acquaint- ed, — the force of character and decision of the voung man may be imagined when we learn that he seized and imprisoned the captain of the transport, who persisted in following a dangerous and fatal course in the night, which act resulted in the safety of the vessel and crew, and an humble acknowledgement from the captain in the morning.
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