The journal of the American-Irish Historical Society, Vol. IX, 1910Various
History
The journal of the American-Irish Historical Society, Vol. IX, 1910
Various
American-Irish Historical Society -- Periodicals; Ethnology -- United States -- Periodicals; Irish Americans -- Periodicals
A few families settled in that vicinity; the rest, in the spring of
1719, sailed up the Merrimac to Haverhill, and thence proceeded to that
high and beautiful region of country that was called Nutfield, because
it abounded in nuts; and there they determined to locate their grant of
twelve miles square of land.
This grant had been made by Gov. Samuel Shute, then governor of both
provinces, upon a petition signed in Ireland, March 26, 1718, by 217
persons, all but seven signing “in a fair, legible hand,” before they
set out on their voyage. These sixteen first settlers and their families
that had thus arrived, on the 22d day of April, 1719, had come over in
company with their pastor, the Rev. James McGregor, most of them from
his parish of Aghadowey, six miles south of Coleraine in the County of
Londonderry, Ireland. Among them were Samuel Allison, James Gregg, James
McKean, John Mitchell, John Morrison, Thomas Steele and John Stuart.
They were soon joined by a large number of their compatriots, the lands
were divided out to a long list of grantees, and in 1722 the town was
incorporated by New Hampshire authority by the name of Londonderry.
In 1736, seventeen years later, another ship, with emigrants from
Ireland, landed at Boston. These families passed the winter at
Lexington, and in the next summer settled at Lunenburg, Massachusetts,
and other towns in that vicinity. Among them were the names Cunningham,
Ferguson, McNee, Little, Robbe, Scott, Smith, Stuart, Swan, White and
Wilson.
From these two colonies southern New Hampshire was first settled.
At the time when Londonderry, New Hampshire, was founded, descendants of
the English Puritans from Massachusetts had settled along the Merrimac
River as far north as the old town of Dunstable. Bitter jealousies
existed between the two sorts of people. At first it was said the
Puritans hardly knew what to make of the newcomers; they called them the
“Wild Irish.” When they started up the Merrimac in boats, and one boat
was upset in the rapids, a Puritan poet wrote:
“They soon began to scream and bawl,
As out they tumbled one and all,
And, if the devil had spread his net,
He could have made a glorious haul.”
The Puritans, in ridicule, said of these Irishmen that “they held as
fast to their pint of doctrine as to their pint of rum.”
Thus was shown the relations existing between these Englishmen and
Irishmen at that early period. Will this feeling of unfriendliness ever
change? When the English people release Ireland from bondage and permit
her to take such a position among the nations of the earth that Emmet’s
epitaph can be written, then and not till then will the Irish people
look with favor upon England and her government.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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