In 1700, Josiah Cotton, after having graduated from Harvard College in 1698, was engaged to be the schoolmaster of the town for a term of seven years and during his administration the first school house was built. This was more than 80 years after the landing. Later, for many years he was Clerk of the Courts and Registrar of Deeds. For a time he preached to the Indians of Pembroke, Manomet and Herring Pond with a salary of twenty pounds “for propagating the gospel among the heathen.” He perfected himself in the Indian language, wrote a grammar, and his sermons to the Indians were delivered in their own tongue. He died in 1756 at the age of 76. In 1700, after the death of the pastor, the parsonage was conveyed by his widow to her sons Josiah and Theophilus. The population of Plymouth in 1700 was approximately 600 people. This was nine years after the Plymouth Colony was consolidated into Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1691. In the William T. Davis volume _Ancient Landmarks of Plymouth_ there is a quotation from a poem of the seventeenth century poet, Pomfret, called _Choice_. This reference to _Choice_ was first made by Josiah Cotton in his diary, as Davis explains, to describe a house he bought in 1709 in the northern part of Plymouth near the seashore. The place was known as the Crow estate, from land sold by Francis Billington, of Billington Sea fame, in 1655 to William Crow. His widow, Hannah, later married John Sturdevant and had a daughter, Hannah, who married Josiah Cotton. It is to illustrate the ideal of a home: “If heaven the grateful liberty would give, That I might choose my method how to live, Near some fair town I’d have a private seat, Built uniform, not little nor too great; Better if on a rising ground it stood, Fields on this side, on that a neighboring wood.” This ideal comes close to realization in the homestead dwelling built later on the shore of Great South Pond, a seat which has the characteristics asked for in Pomfret’s lines. The buyer of the land to the south of the Cottons, Henry Richmond, was the person who had the house built there, sixty years after Josiah Cotton used the Pomfret poem to describe his house in Plymouth. The two men could share a realization of the ideal site for a dwelling. CHAPTER VI. HENRY RICHMOND AND HIS SON, ELIAB