Petition of Abraham Williams to the Massachusetts General Court

For the Right Worshipful, the Honored Governor,1 Deputy Governor, and the Rest of the Honored Magistrates with the Deputies Assembled in General Court

Honored Sirs,

We thought it our duty to inform you that we apprehend it very necessary to the common good of outskirt plantations that you take some course for the preventing the Indians kindling of fires in the woods at the later end of the year,2 for there hath to our certain knowledge happened great damage thereby.  There was burned the best part of one hundred loads of hay in our town by fire so kindled, and, although we did not see the Indians cinder them and so cannot positively say it was this or that man, yet we know they were thereabouts hunting on those days and had their rendezvous thereabouts, and so it is out of question to us for those that saw them had hay abroad and therefore would not set fire to burn their own hay and then put their cattle to wintering, the like we have heard of Mendham and Boggestow3 and Groton and Sudbury farms.  We humbly present it to your considerations and pious care for prevention.

So rest, Sirs, your servants humbly obliged in all duty,

• 1. Josiah Winslow
• 2. The fires described in this document may have been the kind used annually by Native people to manage undergrowth. For example, see Tobias Glaza and Paul Grant-Costa, Breaking the Myth of the Unmanaged Landscape, ConnecticutHistory.org, https://connecticuthistory.org/breaking-the-myth-of-the-unmanaged-landsc....
• 3. Boggestow was the Native name for the Charles River Valley above Natick and for several miles southward. Hurd, History of Norfolk County, Massachusetts. 439-440.