three men having been sent up to build, plant,
and prepare for the coming of other proprietors. But two houses had been
built. Linton probably lived with his son-in-law Waters, in his home
near the fording place in the North Branch of the Nashaway, contiguous
to the lot of intervale land which Harmon Garrett and others of the
first proprietors had fenced in to serve as a "night pasture" for their
cattle. Ball had left his children and their mother in Watertown; she
being at times insane. Prescott's first lot embraced part of the grounds
upon which the public buildings in Lancaster now stand, but this he soon
parted with, and took up his abode a mile to the south west, on the
sunny slope of George Hill, where, beside a little brooklet of pure cool
water, which then doubtless came rollicking down over its gravelly bed
with twice the flow it has to-day, there had been built, two years at
least before, the trucking house of Symonds & King. This trading post
was the extreme outpost of civilization; beyond was interminable forest,
traversed only by the Indian trails, which were but narrow paths, hard
to find and easy to lose, unless the traveller had been bred to the arts
of wood-craft. Here passed the united trails from Washacum, Wachusett,
Quaboag, and other Indian villages of the west, leading to the wading
place of the Nashaway River near the present Atherton Bridge, and so
down the "Bay Path" over Wataquadock to Concord. The little plateau half
way down the sheltering hill, with fertile fields sloping to the
southeast and its never failing springs, was and is an attractive spot;
but its material advantages to the pioneer of 1645 were far greater than
those apparent to the Lancastrian of this nineteenth century in the
changed conditions of life. With the privilege of first choice
therefore, it is not strange that Prescott and his sturdy sons-in-law
grasped the rich intervales, and warm easily tilled slopes, stretching
along the Nashaway south branch from the "meeting of the waters" to
"John's jump" on the east, and extending west to the crown of George
Hill; lands now covered by the village of South Lancaster.

In 1650 John Prescott found himself the only member of the company
resident at Nashaway. Of the co-partners Symonds, King, and John Hill
were dead; Norcross and Child had gone to England; Cowdall had sold his
rights to Prescott; Chandler, Davis, Walker, and others had formally
abandoned their claims; Garrett, Shawe,