Old Put" The Patriot"

Table of

e fame through his military exploits. It has been told many times, it will be told for centuries yet t

his maternal grandfather, Israel Porter) was the great-grandson of his first American ancestor, John Putnam, who had come from England, where the original name of the family was Puttenham. He had settled at Salem more than eight

horse saddled in the stable, ready for a fight or a flight in case the witch-hunters should come to carry him off to jail. They had accused his sister, who saved her life only by fleeing to the wilderness and remaining in hi

came from England and settled in Salem about the year 1630, and who was an ancestor of the famous romancist Nathaniel Hawthorne. John Hathorne, son of William, was a military man and a magistra

married, and when, in 1727, Mrs. Putnam took a second husband, one Captain Thomas Perley, of Boxford, only the younger members of her family went with her to live in the new home. There Israel resided until he was abou

less and independent. From his earliest years he craved, and was always in pursuit of, some daring adventure, yet he was the most sober and apparently contented youth in the village, loving hard work, even seeking to perform a man's task at daily labor, while yet a mere stripling. Brought up mainly on the farm, spending his days in severe labor and his nig

n reserve. Such an occasion occurred the first time he paid a visit to Boston, the metropolis of his State. He was roaming about in rustic fashion, when he attracted the attention of a youth twice his size

, however, and there he hung, suspended by his clothes betwixt heaven and earth. His cries attracted some companions, one of whom he commanded (as he had a gun) to fire a bullet at the limb and try to break it. This the boy did, after much coaxing on Putnam's part, and was so successful that his friend came tumbling t

ography. There are few men, perhaps, who did so many things worthy of emulation, and so few unworthy. Dangerously near the latter, however, was one act of his youth, when he caught a vicious bull i

ing mastered the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic, he was considered well equipped for his destined calling, which was to be that of a farmer. Throughout his whole life he suffered from this neglect of early instruction. His letters, particularly, though they alw

o 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

r the foot of Hathorne Hill, in Danvers, on the turn-pike road half-way between Boston and Newburyport. It contains many relics of Putnam's time, but the most in

m, nothing now remains but the cellar and foundation stones, near which