For years this piece of unimproved real estate waited for a name, until, at length, for some unaccountable reason, it was christened after the English town where George Eliot attended Miss Lathom's school when a child, and caught a chronic cold, from the effects of which she seemed never to have quite recovered, and it was called Attleborough. The original purchase included a much larger area than that comprised in the present township; and, like the then adjacent domain of Dorchester, Attleboro parted with one section of land and then another, until its acreage to-day is but a fraction of that perambulated by the colonial surveyors. On the west side a triangle, locally known as the Gore, was set off in 1746 to form the town of Cumberland, R. I., while from the south and east sides were taken generous slices to piece out the towns of old Rehoboth, Mansfield, and Norton. The history of Attleboro, like that of so many other New England towns, naturally divides itself into two widely different epochs, each interesting to the modern reader. From the year 1661, when Wamsetta, chief sachem of Pokanokett, made the original conveyance of the territory to Capt. Thomas Willett, representing the town of Rehoboth, until the close of the last war between this country and Great Britain, is a period rich in annals of men and deeds, whose records live on musty parchments and crumbling gravestones. It is crowded with tales of hardship, struggle, and heroism out of which some local Scott or Cooper with wizard hand might fashion many books of poetry or fiction:-- "And so, by some strange spell, the years, The half-forgotten years of glory, That slumber on their dusty biers, In the dim crypts of ancient story, Awake with all their shadowy files, Shape, spirit, name in death immortal, The phantoms glide along the aisles, And ghosts steal in at every portal." Then, after the primeval wilderness had been subdued under the patient tillage of more than one generation of sturdy farmers, there opens a second period extending to the present date,--busy years of modern industry, when the nervous spirit of enterprise and the restless fever for gain have stimulated brain and brawn to ceaseless endeavor.