For
Winthrop's fleet, led by the ship that bore her name, must have
passed into harbor that way. Dear and gracious spirit! The memory
of her brief sojourn here has left New England more truly
consecrated ground. Sweetest of womanly pioneers! It is as if an
angel in passing on to heaven just touched with her wings this
rough coast of ours.
In those primitive years, before any town but Salem had been
named, this whole region was known as Cape Ann Side; and about
ten years after Winthrop's arrival, my first ancestor's name
appears among those of other hardy settlers of the neighborhood.
No record has been found of his coming, but emigration by that
time had grown so rapid that ships' lists were no longer
carefully preserved. And then he was but a simple yeoman, a
tiller of the soil; one who must have loved the sea, however, for
he moved nearer and nearer towards it from Agawam through Wenham
woods, until the close of the seventeenth century found his
descendants--my own great-great-grandfatber's family--planted in
a romantic homestead-nook on a hillside, overlooking wide gray
spaces of the bay at the part of Beverly known as "The Farms.
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