Petition of John Hector to the Massachusetts General Court

To the Honorable the Senate and House of Representatives in General Court Assembled

Respectfully represents your petitioner, John Hector, that he is one of the descendants of the Tribe of Indians known as the Hassanamisco or Grafton Tribe,1 that he is, as one of said Tribe, entitled to the consideration of said General Court upon the facts following, to wit, as is well known to Your Honorable Bodies, the said Tribe parted with their lands for the consideration of two thousand and five hundred pounds lawful money in the year 1628,2 that said sum was confided to Trustees appointed by the Legislature to be held for the benefit of said Tribe and their descendants forever.

That as appears by Report of a Committee of the House of Representatives A.D. 1849. House Document No. 46.  "The State is still indebted to the Tribe for the fund which was lost under her Management."3      

That in addition to his interest as being one of the descendants of said Tribe, he is now the sole heir at law4 of one Moses Gimbee that the said Gimbee died seized and possessed of certain lands situated in Worcester and Paxton in the County of Worcester.  That by a resolve of the Legislature, Chapter 54. 1850,5 said lands were sold for the benefit of the Tribe, where the same belonged to the said John Hector, as heir at law of the said Gimbee in his own right, whereby manifest injustice has been done your petitioner in the premises.6

Wherefore, your petitioner prays that he may be put in possession of his said lands which belonged to the said Moses Gimbee, from which he has been evicted and that further relief may be granted him as is due, as one of the descendants of said Tribe.

And as in duty bound will ever pray,                

John Hector

• 1. Hector descended from Moses Printer, one of the original Nipmuc proprietors of Hassanamisco.
• 2. This certainly is a typographical error. The date was March 19, 1728. For a copy of the Indian deed, see Frederick Clifton Pierce, The History of Grafton, Worcester County, Massachusetts (Worcester, MA: Press of Chas. Hamilton, 1879), 36-40.
• 3. Bird Report, 44.
• 4. Hector's half brother, Harry Arnold, was a shoemaker who died on August 4, 1851 from typhoid fever. Grafton Vital Records, Deaths, 55. Ancestry.
• 5. See Petition of Charles Brigham, Jr. to the Massachusetts General Court, 1850.02.03.00. Resolves 1850, c.54, passed March 28, 1850.
• 6. For an earlier complaint by Hector and Arnold on the same matter in 1851, see Petition of John Hector and Harry Arnold to the Massachusetts General Court, 1851.04.25.00. Resolves 1851, c.73, passed May 21, 1851.