The events connected with the first settlement of the town of Guilford, which afterwards became so noted as the stronghold of toryism and adherence to the New York supremacy, form a curious anomaly even in the anomalous history of Vermont. The territory comprising this township appears to have been granted, as early as 1754, to a company of about fifty persons, by a charter, which, unlike that of any other town, empowered the proprietors, in express terms, to govern themselves and regulate the concerns of their little community, by such laws as the majority should be pleased to enact, without being made amenable to any power under heaven, save that which might be exercised by the British Parliament. Being thus constituted a band of freemen and legislators, at the outset, they soon took possession of their chartered piece of wilderness, organized by the election of the proper officers of state, and assumed the title of an independent republic, which their charter, in fact, created, any control of the Parliament of England being as little to be apprehended, in their secluded retreat among the wilds of the Green Mountains, as that of the Great Mogul of Tartary. And as novel as was the idea of a republic at that early period, when “the divine right of kings” to govern all men was as little questioned as the divine right of Satan to afflict the pious Job of old, this enterprising little band of settlers, for many years, appear to have well sustained the character they had assumed, not only by carrying out, in all their public doings, that essential principle of a republic which makes the will of the majority supreme, but by the simplicity of their tastes and habits in private life, and their beautiful exemplification of the great law of love, that can only be fulfilled towards our neighbors by according to them equal rights and privileges with ourselves. At length, however, new doctrines began to prevail, and the independent character of our little republic was soon, in a good degree, forfeited; and that, too, by the very means, it would seem, which had been taken to make it flourish and increase. It had been one of the conditions of the charter that every grantee should become an actual settler, and, within five years, clear and cultivate five acres of land, for every fifty purchased. And in accordance with this cunning policy for insuring the actual and rapid settlement of the place, the township had been laid out in fifty and one hundred acre lots, except the governor's right of five hundred acres, which his excellency of New Hampshire, in granting Vermont lands, never forgot to reserve for his own use, in every township, but which the proprietors generally contrived, as in this instance, to have set off on the highest mountain in town, considering it but respectful and fitting, as they used waggishly to observe, that so elevated a personage should be honored with the most elevated location.