"displayed the goodness of his heart, and frequently the strength of his
native genius, with a certain laconic mode of expression, and an
unaffected epigrammatic turn," were "fearfully and wonderfully made,"
the despair of his correspondents and the ridicule of his enemies.

It is doubtful if he had any greater ambition than to become a good
farmer, as good as was his father before him, and like him, attain to a
competency. He was already fairly well to do the year he became of age,
for his father, after providing generously for the other children, had
bequeathed to 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