manner adorn Colonial annals. Persecuted for his honest opinions, he
went out into the wilderness with his family to found a home, and for
forty years thought, fought and wrought to make that home the centre of
a prosperous community. Loaded from his first step with discouragements,
that soon appalled every other of the original co-partners in the
purchase of Nashaway from Showanon, Prescott alone, _tenax propositi_,
held to his purpose, and death found him at his post. His grave is in
the old "burial field" at Lancaster, yet not ten citizens can point it
out. Over it stands a rude fragment from some ledge of slate rock,
faintly incised with characters which few eyes can trace:

JOHN PRESCOTT DESASED

No date! no comment! That is his only memorial stone; his only epitaph
in the town of which, for its first forty years, he was the very heart
and soul, and for which he furnished a large share of the brains. This
fair township--now divided among nine towns--and all it has been and is
and is to be may be justly called his monument. The house of Deputies in
1652 voted it to be rightly his, and marked it by incorporative
enactment with his honored and honorable name, _Prescott_.
Unfortunately, however, some years before he had said something that
seemed to favor Doctor Robert Child's criticisms of the Provincial
system of taxation without representation; criticisms that grew and bore
good fruitage when the times were riper for individual freedom; when
Samuel Adams and James Otis took up the peoples' cause where Sir Henry
Vane and Robert Child had left it. Therefore when, in 1652, what had
been known as the Nashaway Plantation was fairly named for its founder
in accordance with the petition of its inhabitants, some one of
influence, whether magistrate or higher official, perhaps bethought
himself that no Governor of the Colony even had been so honored, and