The town of Chesterfield, Mass., was first occupied about 1760 to 1765 by Simon Higgins, George Buck, Pierce Cowing, Charles Kid, Robert Hamilton, Benj. Kid, Con. Bryan, Thomas Pierce, John Holbard, Jerry Spaulding, William White and David Stearns. They were mostly Irishmen from Pelham and elsewhere. The first pastor called to preach the gospel was Rev. Peter Johnson of Londonderry. They named one of the principal streets of the town, Ireland street. This street was accepted March 17, 1763, and is the only street in the town which has remained unaltered. The people of Chesterfield were patriots in the Revolution and voted, in 1775, to purchase 400 pounds of powder, 400 pounds lead, and 1,200 flints to supply the forty-seven Minute Men who marched to Cambridge upon the Lexington alarm. Of the territory comprising the original county of Hampshire, Mass., from which the counties of Hampden and Franklin have been set off, the Irish settled a large portion of the area from which the early organized towns were formed, such as Palmer, Chester, and Blandford. Pelham, Colerain, Charlemont, Sunderland, and many districts were later set off and organized into townships, such as Granville, Brimfield, Southwick, Russell, Montgomery, Goshen, Conway, Ware, Amherst, Orange, Gill, Huntington, Rowe, Greenwich, Worthington, and Middlefield. The history of the towns of Berkshire county, Mass., shows that they were mostly all organized a generation or two after the coming of the Irish, who settled the original territory from 1718 to 1740, and although the names on the town records show that many of them were settled by the sons and grandsons of the settlers from Ireland, we can only guess at the origin of others by their Irish names, such as the Plunketts of Pittsfield and Adams, Patrick Murphy and Michael Sweet of Savoy, with Patrick Tyrell, Whalen, or Phelan, Casey, Kerwin, Kneil, or Neil, Hale, and McHale, Bryan, or Bryant, in several towns of the county. Isaac Magoon came from Ireland with the colony that settled in Palmer, Mass., in 1727. The farm allotted to him by the legislative commission was at the southwest corner of the Reed estate. He left two sons, Alexander (who also left two sons, Isaac and Alexander), and Isaac who married Lucretia, daughter of John Downing, and had thirteen children. This family owned about 1,400 acres of the best land in Ware, Mass. Several of the descendants of the Magoon family afterwards settled in the Western states, and many of them probably know very little of their Irish ancestry.