th Sea, and
conflicted with the bounds of sister colonies. The thing to be defended
was the outer edge of this expanding society, a changing frontier, one
that needed designation and re-statement with the changing location of
the "West."

It will help to illustrate the significance of this new frontier when we
see that Virginia at about the same time as Massachusetts underwent a
similar change and attempted to establish frontier towns, or
"co-habitations," at the "heads," that is the first falls, the vicinity
of Richmond, Petersburg, etc., of her rivers.[41:1]

The Virginia system of "particular plantations" introduced along the
James at the close of the London Company's activity had furnished a type
for the New England town. In recompense, at this later day the New
England town may have furnished a model for Virginia's efforts to create
frontier settlements by legislation.

An act of March 12, 1694-5, by the General Court of Massachusetts
enumerated the "Frontier Towns" which the inhabitants were forbidden to
desert on pain of loss of their lands (if landholders) or of
imprisonment (if not landholders), unless permission to remove were
first obtained.[42:1] These eleven frontier towns included Wells, York,
and Kittery on the eastern frontier, and Amesbury, Haverhill, Dunstable,
Chelmsford, Groton, Lancaster, Marlborough,[42:2] and Deerfield. In
March, 1699-1700, the law was reenacted with the addition of Brookfield,
Mendon, and Woodstock, together with seven others, Salisbury,
Andover,[42:3] Billerica, Hatfield, Hadley, Westfield, and Northampton,
which, "tho' they be not frontiers as those towns first named, yet lye
more open than many others to an attack of an Enemy."[42:4]

In the spring of 1704 the General Court of Connecticut, following
closely the act of Massachusetts, named as her frontier towns, not to
be deserted, Symsbury, Waterbury, Danbury, Colchester, Windham,
Mansfield, and Plainfield.

Thus about the close of the seventeenth and the beginning of the
eighteenth century there was an officially designated frontier line for
New England. The line passing through these enumerated towns represents:
(1) the outskirts of settlement along the eastern coast and up the
Merrimac and its tributaries,--a region threatened from the Indian
country by way of the Winnepesaukee Lake; (2) the end of the ribbon of
settlement up the Connecticut Valley, menaced by the Canadian Indians by
way of the Lake Champlain and Wino