General Benjamin Pierce, the father of Franklin, was one of the earliest
settlers in the town of Hillsborough, and contributed as much as any
other man to the growth and prosperity of the county. He was born in
1757, at Chelmsford, now Lowell, in Massachusetts. Losing his parents
early, he grew up under the care of an uncle, amid such circumstances of
simple fare, hard labor, and scanty education, as usually fell to the lot
of a New England yeoman's family some eighty or a hundred years ago. On
the 19th of April, 1775, being then less than eighteen years of age, the
stripling was at the plough, when tidings reached him of the bloodshed at
Lexington and Concord. He immediately loosened the ox chain, left the
plough in the furrow, took his uncle's gun and equipments, and set forth
towards the scene of action. From that day, for more than seven years,
he never saw his native place. He enlisted in the army, was present at
the battle of Bunker Hill, and after serving through the whole
Revolutionary War, and fighting his way upward from the lowest grade,
returned, at last, a thorough soldier, and commander of a company. He
was retained in the army as long as that body of veterans had a united
existence; and, being finally disbanded, at West Point, in 1784, was left
with no other reward, for nine years of toil and danger, than the nominal
amount of his pay in the Continental currency--then so depreciated as to
be almost worthless.

In 1780, being employed as agent to explore a tract of wild land, he
purchased a lot of fifty acres in what is now the town of Hillsborough.
In the spring of the succeeding year, he built himself a log hut, and
began the clearing and cultivation of his tract. Another year beheld him
married to his first wife, Elizabeth Andrews, who died within a
twelvemonth after their union, leaving a daughter, the present widow of
General John McNeil. In 1789, he married Anna Kendrick, with whom he