CHAPTER V.

COTTON FAMILY LAND

The land adjoining the Churchill property toward the north at South Pond was owned by the famous Cotton family, by a grant from the town of Plymouth in 1713 to Josiah, born 1680 and Theophilus, born 1682. These brothers were granted the third share of the sixth great lot on the eastern shore of Great South Pond. What was called “laying out” meant that the land was allotted by the free holders of Plymouth for development and was carried out by a systematic procedure using the principle of chance or lot which was then recorded in formal records. This land was “in the range of John Churchill’s land, bounded by his land until it comes to Finney’s Meadow.” It was also bounded on the west by South Pond and was later owned by Joseph Bartlett, Jr., and then by Belcher Manter.

In the beginning, John Cotton, born in Derby, England in 1585, came to Boston in 1633. He had a daughter, Mary, born 1642, who married the famous divine and one of the colony’s first authors, Increase Mather. Their son was Cotton Mather, also famous as a writer and divine. His _Marginalia_ is an important book of the time. Another of his writings called _An Horrid Snow_ is an account of a massive New England blizzard in his time. He had a phrase for the forest and wilderness: “the Synagogue of Satin.”

John Cotton had a son, also called John, born 1640. He was a graduate of Harvard College, class of 1657 at the age of 17. Living in Weathersfield, Conn., for a time, he came to Plymouth in 1667 and was settled as minister. During his ministry a church was built on the site of the present Unitarian Church. He continued until 1697 and died in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1699.

Col. Theophilus Cotton, 1716-1782, a son of Josiah Cotton, is remembered as a leader of a group of inhabitants who in 1774 with twenty yoke of oxen assembled to remove Plymouth Rock from the water’s edge up to Town Square. In attempting to raise the rock it separated into two parts, one of which remained. In 1834 the portion at Town Square, weighing 6,997 pounds, was moved to the front yard at Pilgrim Hall. It remained there until 1880 when it was returned to its original location from which it was separated.[6]

This pastor Cotton had a son, John, and other children, among them, Josiah, born 1680, and Theophilus, born 1682. These brothers were granted the third share of the sixth great lot at South Pond.[7]

In 1700, Josiah Cotton, after having graduated from Harvard College in 1698, was engaged to be the schoolmaster of the town for a term of seven years and during his administration the first school house was built. This was more than 80 years after the landing. Later, for many years he was Clerk of the Courts and Registrar of Deeds. For a time he preached to the Indians of Pembroke, Manomet and Herring Pond with a salary of twenty pounds “for propagating the gospel among the heathen.” He perfected himself in the Indian language, wrote a grammar, and his sermons to the Indians were delivered in their own tongue. He died in 1756 at the age of 76. In 1700, after the death of the pastor, the parsonage was conveyed by his widow to her sons Josiah and Theophilus. The population of Plymouth in 1700 was approximately 600 people. This was nine years after the Plymouth Colony was consolidated into Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1691.

In the William T. Davis volume _Ancient Landmarks of Plymouth_ there is a quotation from a poem of the seventeenth century poet, Pomfret, called _Choice_. This reference to _Choice_ was first made by Josiah Cotton in his diary, as Davis explains, to describe a house he bought in 1709 in the northern part of Plymouth near the seashore. The place was known as the Crow estate, from land sold by Francis Billington, of Billington Sea fame, in 1655 to William Crow. His widow, Hannah, later married John Sturdevant and had a daughter, Hannah, who married Josiah Cotton. It is to illustrate the ideal of a home:

“If heaven the grateful liberty would give, That I might choose my method how to live, Near some fair town I’d have a private seat, Built uniform, not little nor too great; Better if on a rising ground it stood, Fields on this side, on that a neighboring wood.”

This ideal comes close to realization in the homestead dwelling built later on the shore of Great South Pond, a seat which has the characteristics asked for in Pomfret’s lines.

The buyer of the land to the south of the Cottons, Henry Richmond, was the person who had the house built there, sixty years after Josiah Cotton used the Pomfret poem to describe his house in Plymouth. The two men could share a realization of the ideal site for a dwelling.