GenMassachusetts-L Archives

From:
Subject: [GM-L] Thomas Sawyer b. 1742 at Bolton, MA
Date: Tue, 9 Jan 2001 21:24:44 EST

CHAPTER XXXI.

HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF SALISBURY, Addison Co., Vermont

http://www.middlebury.edu/~lib/AddisonCoHistory/chap31HAC.html


Thomas Sawyer was born in Bolton, Mass., in 1742, and was bred a millwright.
He took a prominent part in the Revolutionary movements of the age in which
he lived. He was placed in many important offices in Massachusetts during the
preliminary battles of the Revolution. In the latter part of 1776 he was
stationed for a short time at Ticonderoga, and when his time of service had
expired at that place he returned to his family in Massachusetts. In making
this journey he passed through a part of Vermont, and was impressed with the
opportunities here presented for enterprise and usefulness. In 1777 he moved
his family to Clarendon, where he built a bullet-proof block-house of solid
oak timber. Even the windows were provided with such heavy shutters that a
bullet could not be made to pass through them. He remained in Clarendon until
1783, when he began operations in Salisbury, at the falls where the village
now is, and near Lake Dunmore. Here he erected the first saw-mill, and on the
1st day of June, 1783, sawed the first log, having in two months erected a
dam and a building sufficiently large for a saw-mill and a grist-mill, the
latter of which was put in operation in the following winter. As this part of
Salisbury was claimed by Leicester at that time, he was the first
representative from that town in the State Legislature, and was also one of
its first magistrates. He left the State in 1795, and settled with his family
in what is now called Manchester, Ontario county, N. Y., where he died three
years afterward

This thread:

• [GM-L] Thomas Sawyer b. 1742 at Bolton, MA by