him and his brother David the homestead, house and farm
attached. His mother was to have a home there so long as she desired;
but on her second marriage she relinquished her claim upon the
homestead, and the two brothers shared it between them. Israel's
portion was set off in 1738, and the next year he built a home in a
remote corner of the farm, but within sight of the house and room in
which he was born. For, after the fashion of those primitive times, when
early matrimony was encouraged, young Israel had been "courting" a
lovely girl, the daughter of a neighbor, who lived about four miles
distant from the home farm, near the boundary-line between Salem and
Lynn. Hannah Pope was her name, and she also was descended from one of
the first families of Salem Village. Being a sensible girl, she accepted
Israel Putnam as soon as he proposed, and the 19th of July, 1739, they
were married, when he was twenty-one years of age and she only eighteen.
Taking his young wife to the little house he had built with his own
hands on the farm, there Israel Putnam and Hannah, his wife, began their
married life. The next year a son was born to them, the first of ten
children who blessed their union, and he was called Israel.

The house in which the first Israel Putnam was born, an old colonial,
gambrel-roofed structure, still stands where it was erected by his
grandfather in 1648, near the foot of Hathorne Hill, in Danvers, on the
turn-pike road half-way between Boston and Newburyport. It contains many
relics of Putnam's time, but the most interesting portion of the house
itself is the little back chamber, with its one window looking out over
the farmyard, where the infant Israel first saw the light.

Of the house which he himself built, on a distant knoll of the home
farm, nothing now remains but the cellar and foundation stones, near
which is the well he dug, now choked with rubbish and overgrown with
brambles.

CHAPTER II

"OLD WOLF PUTNAM"

Judging from the stability of his position in Danvers, it would seem
that young Farmer Putnam was established for life. He had land enough to
satisfy any ordinary cultivator of that period, and a comfortable house
in which dwelt with him wife and child, to cheer him by their presence.
But the future patriot felt within him an ardent thirst for adventure.
He longed for a wider field, and though to all appearances firmly rooted
in the soil of Salem Village, he was already thinking of tr