Owing, as has been stated in another connection, to erroneous notions about the topography of the country; the incompetency perhaps, in some cases, of surveyors; and the want of due care in the General Court and the towns to have boundaries clearly defined,—uncertainties and conflicting claims arose in various portions of the colony, but nowhere to a greater extent than here. The village became involved in controversies about boundaries with each one of its neighbors; producing, at times, much exasperation. The documents drawn forth on these questions, as they appear in the record-book of the village, are written with ability, and show that there were men among them who knew how to express and enforce their[i.236] views. The plain, lucid, well-considered style of Nathaniel Ingersoll's depositions on the court-files, in numerous cases, render it not improbable that his pen was put in requisition. Sergeant Thomas Putnam, the parish recorder, as he was sometimes entitled, was a good writer. His chirography, although not handsome, is singularly uniform, full, open, and clear, so easily legible that it is a refreshment to meet with it; and his sentences are well-constructed, simple, condensed, and to the purpose. His words do their office in conveying his meaning. No public body ever had a better clerk. Somehow or other, he and others, brought up in the woods, had contrived to acquire considerable efficiency in the use of the pen. Perhaps, a few who, like him, had parents able to afford it, had been sent to Ipswich or Charlestown to enjoy the privilege of what Cotton Mather calls "the Cheverian education." The southern boundary of the village was intended to run due west from the Ipswich road to Lynn, and was accordingly spoken of as "on a west line." As originally established, it was defined by an enumeration of a variety of objects such as trees of different kinds and sizes, as running through the lands of John Felton, Nathaniel Putnam, and Anthony Needham, to "a dry stump standing at the corner of Widow Pope's cow-pen, leaving her house and the saw-mill within the farmer's range," and so on to "the top of the hill by the highway side near Berry Pond." From the changeable conditions of some of the objects, and a diversity of methods adopted by surveyors,—many[i.237] of them being unacquainted with, or making no allowance for, the variation of the compass,—controversies arose with the mother-town: and some proprietors, like the Gardners, were left in doubt how the line affected them; and there was, in consequence, much disquietude. The line was not accurately run until 1700.