It would be difficult for the present dwellers in the thriving villages of Attleboro to imagine a time when but a single white inhabitant had a fixed abode within the limits of Capt. Willett's extensive purchase, when Ten-Mile River had never reflected a pale face or turned a mill-wheel, and when the site of humming Robinsonville was occupied by a clump of Indian wigwams in a beaver clearing. The historic elm on the Carpenter estate, under which Whitefield preached so eloquently, had not yet sprouted from the seed; the falling leaves had scarcely obliterated the footprints of persecuted Roger Williams, making his toilsome retreat from the new settlement on the Bay to the headwaters of the Narragansett; and the Bay road was only an uncertain path blazed through a dense forest, along which not a hundred pairs of Anglo-Saxon feet had ever trudged. In this vast solitude the intrepid William Blaxton had spent thirty lonely years before the original purchase was made. He built his rude house on the extreme western frontier of Attleboro Gore, beside the river which now bears his name with altered spelling, made friends with his Indian neighbors, planted the first apple-orchard in North America, and trained an imported bull to serve him as a saddle-horse. There, like Thoreau in his Walden hut, the old divine encountered nature in her rougher aspects and studied her wonderful book untrammelled by even the slight social conventionalities that obtained in colonial Boston. The first settlement within the limits of the present town was made beside a stream which crossed the Bay road, on the site of the Hatch tavern, opposite Barden's building in North Attleboro; and because this stream marked a journey of ten miles from Seekonk, the early travellers named it Ten-Mile River. Here the famous John Woodcock took up his abode in 1663 or 1664, and established a garrison which afterwards formed one of a chain of strongholds extending from Boston to Rhode Island. An avowed foe of the red race who surrounded him, he found them hostile and treacherous, and had no recourse but to fortify himself behind his stockades, and keep the stealthy warriors at bay with his musket. At this dangerous outpost Woodcock bravely defended his little family for many years, until quite a community of white people had placed themselves under his protection, and he became a sort of feudal lord, into whose rude castle they might retreat in time of danger. He was a restless spirit, fond of hazardous adventure, to whom civilized life was unendurably tame, and many are the current traditions of his prowess and bloody encounters with the savage aborigines. In 1670 he opened a licensed ordinary on his premises, the first public house in the country; and from that time a hostelry was kept on that spot for nearly two centuries.