Naturally the proprietors to whom the township was granted were the most potent factors in its welfare and government, and, if actual settlers, took the most prominent part in its affairs. Frequently they offered bounties for the building of gristmills and sawmills, and the forty dollars bounty offered induced the building of such mills, that in their turn failed not to attract settlers; for it was not unusual for pioneers to go twenty miles on foot with a grist to the nearest mill, or to make as tedious journeys for a load of boards, the more tedious that all the environing forest was full of unattainable lumber. Many of the towns now most populous and important were then uninhabited and unnamed. Bennington, the first township granted by New Hampshire, had its hamlet, its principal building, the Green Mountain Tavern, conspicuous for its sign, a stuffed catamount. Here the fathers of the unborn State often sat in council, moistening their dry deliberations with copious mugs of flip served by their confrere, landlord Stephen Fay. Brattleboro, within whose limits Fort Dummer was built and the first permanent settlement made, although it boasted the only store in the State, was of less importance; while Westminster, with its court-house and jail, assumed more. But at Vergennes, then known as the First Falls of Otter Creek, where the beavers had scarcely quit building their lodges on the driftwood that choked the head of the fall, there lived only Donald McIntosh, the stout old soldier of the Pretender's futile array and of Wolfe's victorious army, and half a dozen other settlers, whose cabins clustered about the frequently harried mills. Where now is the beautiful city of Burlington, the unbroken forest sloped to the placid shores of Petowbowk; and the Winooski, from its torrential source to where its slow current crawls through the broad intervales to the lake, turned no mills, and, but for its one block-house and the infrequent cabins of adventurous pioneers, was as wild as when its devious course was but the warpath of the Waubanakee. Thence to Canada stretched the Wilderness, its solitude as supreme as when, a century and a half before, the French explorer first beheld its snow-clad mountain peaks.