had scarcely obliterated
the footprints of persecuted Roger Williams, making his toilsome retreat
from the new settlement on the Bay to the headwaters of the
Narragansett; and the Bay road was only an uncertain path blazed through
a dense forest, along which not a hundred pairs of Anglo-Saxon feet had
ever trudged.

In this vast solitude the intrepid William Blaxton had spent thirty
lonely years before the original purchase was made. He built his rude
house on the extreme western frontier of Attleboro Gore, beside the
river which now bears his name with altered spelling, made friends with
his Indian neighbors, planted the first apple-orchard in North America,
and trained an imported bull to serve him as a saddle-horse. There, like
Thoreau in his Walden hut, the old divine encountered nature in her
rougher aspects and studied her wonderful book untrammelled by even the
slight social conventionalities that obtained in colonial Boston.

The first settlement within the limits of the present town was made
beside a stream which crossed the Bay road, on the site of the Hatch
tavern, opposite Barden's building in North Attleboro; and because this
stream marked a journey of ten miles from Seekonk, the early travellers
named it Ten-Mile River. Here the famous John Woodcock took up his abode
in 1663 or 1664, and established a garrison which afterwards formed one
of a chain of strongholds extending from Boston to Rhode Island. An
avowed foe of the red race who surrounded him, he found them hostile and
treacherous, and had no recourse but to fortify himself behind his
stockades, and keep the stealthy warriors at bay with his musket. At
this dangerous outpost Woodcock bravely defended his little family for
many years, until quite a community of white people had placed
themselves under his protection, and he became a sort of feudal lord,
into whose rude castle they might retreat in time of danger. He was a
restless spirit, fond of hazardous adventure, to whom civilized life was
unendurably tame, and many are the current traditions of his prowess and
bloody encounters with the savage aborigines. In 1670 he opened a
licensed ordinary on his premises, the first public house in the
country; and from that time a hostelry was kept on that spot for nearly
two centuries.

Other settlements were naturally made in the open meadows easily
accessible from the Bay road; and so we find the next community growing
up in what is now the Falls Villa