e very heart
and soul, and for which he furnished a large share of the brains. This
fair township--now divided among nine towns--and all it has been and is
and is to be may be justly called his monument. The house of Deputies in
1652 voted it to be rightly his, and marked it by incorporative
enactment with his honored and honorable name, _Prescott_.
Unfortunately, however, some years before he had said something that
seemed to favor Doctor Robert Child's criticisms of the Provincial
system of taxation without representation; criticisms that grew and bore
good fruitage when the times were riper for individual freedom; when
Samuel Adams and James Otis took up the peoples' cause where Sir Henry
Vane and Robert Child had left it. Therefore when, in 1652, what had
been known as the Nashaway Plantation was fairly named for its founder
in accordance with the petition of its inhabitants, some one of
influence, whether magistrate or higher official, perhaps bethought
himself that no Governor of the Colony even had been so honored, and
that it might be well, before dignifying this busy blacksmith so much as
to name a town for him, to see if he could pass examination in the
catechism deemed orthodox at that date in Massachusetts Bay. Alas! John
Prescott was not a freeman. Having a conscience of his own, he had never
given public adhesion to the established church covenant and was
therefore debarred from holding any civil office, and even from the
privilege of voting for the magistrates. There was a year's delay, and,
in 1653, "Prescott" was expunged and _Lancaster_ began its history.

As in the broad area of the township various centres of population grew
into villages and were one by one excised and made towns, it would be
supposed that each of them would have been eager to honor itself by
adopting so euphonious and appropriate a name as _Prescott_. But no! The
first candidate for a new designation, in 1732, chose the name of the
generous Charlestown clergyman, _Harvard_, for no appropriate local
reason now discoverable. Six years later another body corporate imported
the name--_Bolton_. Two years passed and a third district sought across
the ocean for its title _Leominster_. Then Woonksechocksett forgetful of
its benefactors and of the grand Indian names of its hills and waters
borrowed the title of a putative Scotch lord, who bravely fought for our
Independence, and, in adopting, paid him the poor compliment of
misspelling it--