Excerpt from The History of East Bridgewater
Shortly after the retreat of the last great ice age, the first men appeared in East Bridgewater. What little is known about them is thanks to the work of Maurice Robbins and the Massachusetts Archaelogical Society. Their digs on the South Shore have completely changed ideas of what New England was like in prehistoric times.
The excavations in this area show that the first residents of East Bridgewater were men of considerable energy who erected large round houses or temples, cremated their dead, and painted themselves with a clay that turned blood red when wet. When people dig cellars or plow in this area they come across reminders of the mysterious past -- axes, mortars, blades of stone. Particularly near Robbins Pond and along the banks of the Satucket River are caches of the early inhabitants. They were not Indians. The Indians came later.
When the Indians did come, they made East Bridgewater one of their principal centers. Satucket, as we now spell it, means "the place where rivers meet." About thirty yards north of the fish weir in the river, a weir that can still be seen when the water is down, the Indians had a clearing where they gathered for festivals. The land was held by the Wampanoags, who became inhibited, then poxed, and finally extinct under the white man's occupation. The last East Bridgewater Indian, given the Christian name of Robert Pegin, died in 1815.
East Bridgewater was granted by Plymouth Colony to the people of Duxbury as compensation for the part of their town known as Marshfield, lost when Marshfield split off from them. A team headed by Captain Myles Standish obtained title by negotiations with the Wampanoags carried out in March of 1649 at Sachem's Rock, a jagged outcropping located on the land now of Dr. and Mrs Donald Bannerman, southeast of the Carver Cotton Gin Company. The area bought included Brockton, all the Bridgewaters, and parts of Abington, Hanson and Middleboro.
The Indian that Captain Standish bartered with was Massasoit, and the deed he gave Standish still exists, marked with his signet in the shape of a hand. All of the territory passed for a value of less than $30. -- the price was seven coats, nine hatchets, eight hoes, and twenty knives, along with four moose skins and ten and a half yards of cotton.
The original town of Bridgewater that resulted from the purchase was the first interior settlement of the Old Colony. Many of the people who moved to East Bridgewater were the sons and grandsons of the very first Plymouth settlers. They set aside house lots laterally by the rivers, about six acres each. The first house in East Bridgewater was built by Samuel Allen Jr., who moved from East Braintree in 1660. He built on the east side of the Matfield River. His land included what is now East Bridgewater center, with the cemetery and common and property of the First Church.
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