ay 1644, John Winthrop records that "Many of Watertown and other
towns joined in a plantation at Nashaway "--and Reverend Timothy
Harrington in his Century Sermon states that the organization of this
company of planters was due to Thomas King. The immediate and final
disappearance of this original proprietor has seemed to previous writers
good warrant for charging that King and his partner Henry Symonds were
but land speculators, who bought the Indian's inheritance to retail by
the acre to adventurers. I believe this an unjust assumption. At the
date when Winthrop noted down the inception of the Nashaway Company,
Henry Symonds had already been dead seven months. He was that energetic
contractor of Boston noted as the leader in the project for establishing
tide mills at the Cove, and was no doubt the capitalist of the trading
firm of Symonds & King, who set up their "trucking house" as early as
1643 on the sunny slope of George Hill. Symond's widow a few months
after his death married Isaac Walker, who in 1645 was prominent among
the Nashaway proprietors. If King really sold his share of the Indian
purchase, may it not have been therefore because, his senior partner
being dead, he had no means to continue the enterprise? He too died
before the end of the year 1644, not yet thirty years of age. The
inventory of his estate sums but one hundred and fifty-eight pounds,
including his house and land in Watertown, his stock in trade, and
seventy-three pounds of debts due him from the Indians, John Prescott,
and sundry others. King's widow made haste to be consoled, and her
second husband, James Cutler, soon appears in the role of a Nashaway
proprietor.

The direction of the company was at the outset in the hands of men whose
names were, or soon became, of some note throughout the Colony. Doctor
Robert Child, a scholar who had won the degrees of A.M. and M.D. at
Cambridge and Padua, a man of scientific acquirements, but inclined to
somewhat sanguine expectations of mineral treasure to be discovered in
the New England hills, seems to have been a leading spirit in the
adventure; and unfortunately so, since his political views about certain
inalienable rights of man, which now live, and are honored in the
Constitution of the Commonwealth, seemed vicious republicanism to the
ecclesiastical aristocracy then governing the Colony of the
Massachusetts Bay; and the odium that drove Child across the ocean,
attached also to his companion p