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Subject: [GENMASSACHUSETTS] Oration Honoring Col. Wm. Prescott by Wm.Everett. Part 1.
Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2007 14:54:47 EDT


Subject: Oration in Honor of Colonel William Prescott -
Delivered in Boston - by William Everett - Bunker Hill
Monument Association.

p.25 ORATION.
We have come to the end of that period of commemoration which recalled by
solem services
the series of events that created and consolidated our existence as a
nation. From 1874
to 1889, every year has had its own centennial anniversary. Boston Harbor,
Lexington,
Concord, Bunker Hill, the long line of ensuing battles, the Declaration of
Independence,
the formation of the Constitution, the first opening of the North West
Territory have,
in turn received appropriate and grateful notice.

And now, as our country's second century is rapidly following her first, one
season after
another marks the days when our fathers and founders themselves left the
stage, and made
way for their sons, who are already appearing as historic, nay, almost
legendary froms to
us. I do not recall that any notice was taken in 1886 of the centenary of
the death of
Nathaniel Greene, probably the greatest military genius of the Revolutionary
War, second
only to George Washington, in his influence on the great result, yet the
very spot of whose
burial is forgotten; nor did I hear that in 1890 Philadelphia offered any
special honors at
the grave of Benjamin Franklin. All the more does it seem right that this
association should
pay a suitable tribute to the hero of Bunker Hill, our own citizen soldier,
the redoubted
William Prescott, whose life of

p.26 COLONEL WILLIAM PRESCOTT.
glory ended on the 13th of October, 1795. It is well to realize, by such
commemoration,
how completely the days of our own infancy are over, and to draw from it the
lesson what
we are to do with the legacy of the fathers when a hundred years have rolled
by since one
of the bravest of them put off mortality when close on threescore and ten.

It is a mistake to think of our age and its duties as though we had no past,
and were en-
titled to begin the 20th century as if just rescued from a deluge. We are
told that Noah
celebrated his deliverance from the ark by a new discovery; but it further
developed a new
vice, unknown to the submerged centuries. Neither have we any right, when
we commemorate
the fathers, to fancy that they have prescribed our absolute pattern, and we
have nothing
to do but to go on repeating their operations forever.

Over the grave of Colonel William Prescott it is right to ask who and what
he was in his
time; and then what ought we to do as his descendants, who have so lately
laid his great
grandson and namesake to rest in the ancestral home at Pepperell.

William Prescott was born in the ancient town of Groton, Massachusetts. His
family was
originally derived from Lancashire, England, where the town of Prescott
still exists in
the heart of the manufacturing district. The Prescotts were among the
earliest settlers
of the frontier parts of Middlesex County, Watertown, Sudbury, Concord and
later of Groton,
all exposed to the fiercest incursions of the Indians. The first of the line
was a black-
smith by trade, and aqcquired that honor which always attends

p.27 ORATION BY WILLIAM EVERETT.
John Prescott.
his craft, as we are told by Longfellow in a poem that we shall find
concerns our hero
still more nearly. He was a born fighter, and often engaged with the
savages, at one time
defending his house from their inroads with no other aid than his wife's,
who loaded musket
after musket for him to fire. He had brought with him from England, a
complete suit of mail,
helmet, cuirass and gorget, with which he was wont to clothe himself in any
contest with the
Indians, and rendered as he thus was inpenetrable to the heaviest blows of
the tomahawk, was
regarded by them as a supernatural being.

John Prescott's son, Jonas transferred his father's trade from Lancaster,
Massachusetts to
Groton, and rose to the first eminence in that venerable town, being Captain
in the militia,
a Representative to the General Court, and entrusted with every other
position with which
a New England democracy burdens those whom it professes to honor.

A Greek city would not improbably have rewarded such services as Jonas
Prescott's by exempt-
ing him and his descendants forever from the payment of taxes; but that is a
pitch of grati-
tude to which the Athens of America and her sister boroughs have not yet
climbed, as I am
sure the Prescotts and the Lawrences of Groton are thoroughly aware.

Of Jonas Prescott's courtship a romantic story is told, how his sweetheart's
parents in
Sudbury steadily refused his suit, and locked his beloved Mary Loker in a
room with a grated
window. This harsh treatment did not shake the constency of the lovers; but
Jonas, who one
would suppose would have given a new illustration of Love's contempt of
locksmiths by filing
the bars of the dungeon as only a blacksmith could, preferred

p.28 COLONEL WILLIAM PRESCOTT.
to stand under the grating, to bide the pelting of a storm, talk to his
beloved, and pray
for better times. Mary Loker, still defying her parents' authority - no
slight matter in
the days before Philip's War - was sent by them, in a species of banishment,
to what is
now Sterling, Mass., then as remote and wild as the Adirondacks. Thither
Jonas tracked her,
and they were married in spite of all opposition, but utterly without dowry
or inheritance.

>From this pair has sprung a large and distinguished progeny, of whom Mary
lived to see one
hundred and seventy five of them. Her youngest son was Benjamin Prescott,
born two hundred
years ago. He married the daughter of Thomas Oliver of Cambridge, a member
of Governor
Joseph Dudley's Council, belonging to a family which was of unbroken
distinction in the
colonial and provincial days of Massachusetts, from the arrival of Cotton to
the fall of
Governor Hutchinson, and far from obscure in later days. Benjamin Prescott
was a man of
remarkable bodily and mental energy, and, like his father, of the first
consideration in
the town and the province. He was a member of the General Court for many
years, a lieutenant
colonel in the militia, a Justice in more than one tribunal, and finally was
offered, but
declined, the arduous post of Representative in England, of the Colony,
which needed someone
to plead its cause on boundary and other questions, where Governor Belcher
had proved any-
thing but an efficient leader.

Benjamin Prescott died in 1738. He had seven children, three of them sons,
of whom James,
the eldest

p.29 ORATION ON COL. WILLIAM PRESCOTT BY WILLIAM EVERETT.
and Oliver Prescott, the youngest son were both fully worthy of the highest
position to
which their fathers had raised the name, standing out as leaders of men,
both civil and
military.

To be continued Part 2
Transcribed by Janice Farnsworth



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