Origins in Williamstown
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. EPHRAIM WILLIAMS. " How sleep the brave who sink to rest, By all their country's wishes blest! When Spring, with dewy fingers cold, Returns to deck their hallowed mould, She there shall dress a sweeter sod Than Fancy's feet have ever trod. " By fairy hands their knell is rung, By forms unseen their dirge is sung; There Honour comes, a pilgrim gray, To bless the turf that wraps their clay, And Freedom shall awhile repair, To dwell a weeping hermit there." ? William Collins, in 1746. It is difficult, from the scant and scattered materials now extant, to gather a clear and certain notion of the private character and public services of the founder of the College, and the godfather of the town ; and it is impossible to do this without characterizing at some length, and through several generations,
...a family which had striking traits of its own, the members of which to an unusual degree clung together for mutual interests and advancement, and which intermarried from time to time, with other prominent and influential families in New England, ? the whole giving a sort of historical setting, and throwing an illumination around the bachelor life and soldierly career of our founder. No other character in connection with the town and the College, has anything like the interest and fascination for posterity that attaches to him; an interest that awakens and deepens at every gleam of light which falls upon his name and story from the pen of others, and especially which is engendered by the comparatively few words now possible to be found, falling from his own pen. Robert Williams sailed from the port of Norwich, England, and settled in the town of Roxbury, Massachusetts, in or before theyear 1638; because it is a matter of record that he became a freeman of that ...
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