further west in
Coleraine, particularly Fort Lucas and Fort Morrison, the owners being
assisted by grants of men and supplies from the General Court; and
during this war and more especially the next and last French war, the
Indians often lurked with hostile intent in the vicinity of these
extemporized forts, and not infrequently surprised and killed and
scalped men from the little garrisons, and carried women and children
into captivity to Canada.

But the first regular fort built to protect the valley of the Deerfield
and incidentally also the line of the Connecticut, was placed by
Massachusetts in the present town of Heath. It was built wholly at the
public expense, and garrisoned by regularly enlisted or impressed
soldiers, and named Fort Shirley from the enterprising Governor of the
Province. John Stoddard of Northampton was then Colonel of the militia
of Hampshire, a designation at that time including all of Massachusetts
west of the Connecticut River; he was Shirley's right-hand man for this
end of the Province, and it was under his general direction that Forts
Shirley and Pelham and Massachusetts were erected.

The letter is still extant in Stoddard's own hand, dated July 20, 1744,
in which Capt. William Williams is ordered by him "to erect as soon as
may be" a block-house sixty feet square "about five miles and a half
from Hugh Morrison's house in Colrain in or near the line run last week
under the direction of Col. Timo. Dwight by our order." In the same
letter, Williams is directed to employ soldiers in the construction of
the fort, carpenters to be allowed "nine shillings, others six shillings
a day old Tenor." Several other directions are given, and the main
outlines of the fort are prescribed; some bills are still extant giving
items of money paid out for many different parts of the work; six of the
original hewn timbers of the building are in good preservation today in
the barn of Orsamus Maxwell in Heath, each stick telling some tale of
the original mode of construction; so that, from all these sources of
information, a pretty accurate idea of the old fort can be made out
to-day, 141 years after it was built.

For the outside, white pine logs were scored down, and then hewn to six
inches thick and fourteen inches high; and the scores worked 48 days
on these, receiving L14, 8s. for their work, and the hewers 24 days,
receiving L10, 16s. The walls of the fort were twelve feet high, thus
requiring nine co