rough. The
original purchase included a much larger area than that comprised in the
present township; and, like the then adjacent domain of Dorchester,
Attleboro parted with one section of land and then another, until its
acreage to-day is but a fraction of that perambulated by the colonial
surveyors. On the west side a triangle, locally known as the Gore, was
set off in 1746 to form the town of Cumberland, R. I., while from the
south and east sides were taken generous slices to piece out the towns
of old Rehoboth, Mansfield, and Norton.

The history of Attleboro, like that of so many other New England towns,
naturally divides itself into two widely different epochs, each
interesting to the modern reader. From the year 1661, when Wamsetta,
chief sachem of Pokanokett, made the original conveyance of the
territory to Capt. Thomas Willett, representing the town of Rehoboth,
until the close of the last war between this country and Great Britain,
is a period rich in annals of men and deeds, whose records live on musty
parchments and crumbling gravestones. It is crowded with tales of
hardship, struggle, and heroism out of which some local Scott or Cooper
with wizard hand might fashion many books of poetry or fiction:--

"And so, by some strange spell, the years,
The half-forgotten years of glory,
That slumber on their dusty biers,
In the dim crypts of ancient story,
Awake with all their shadowy files,
Shape, spirit, name in death immortal,
The phantoms glide along the aisles,
And ghosts steal in at every portal."

Then, after the primeval wilderness had been subdued under the patient
tillage of more than one generation of sturdy farmers, there opens a
second period extending to the present date,--busy years of modern
industry, when the nervous spirit of enterprise and the restless fever
for gain have stimulated brain and brawn to ceaseless endeavor.

It would be difficult for the present dwellers in the thriving villages
of Attleboro to imagine a time when but a single white inhabitant had a
fixed abode within the limits of Capt. Willett's extensive purchase,
when Ten-Mile River had never reflected a pale face or turned a
mill-wheel, and when the site of humming Robinsonville was occupied by a
clump of Indian wigwams in a beaver clearing. The historic elm on the
Carpenter estate, under which Whitefield preached so eloquently, had not
yet sprouted from the seed; the falling leaves