The Edward Hopkins Trust And Final Dispossession
A Legacy from Across the Sea
By 1715, the survivors of Magunkaquog had held on for close to forty years since the war's end. That year the last blow fell, and it did not come with fire or muskets. It came with parchment, carried by a thread that began across the ocean decades earlier, with a man who almost certainly never knew the place existed.
His name was Edward Hopkins. He crossed to New England in 1637, in the first great wave of Puritan migration, prospered, and rose to serve as governor of Connecticut. In time he returned to England, and there he died, in 1657, leaving an estate and a will with a specific charitable purpose worked into it. Out of his New England property he set aside five hundred pounds, a considerable sum in that century, to be held by trustees. After his wife's death, the money was to be invested in houses and lands in New England, and the income was to support poor scholars in the grammar and divinity schools and to buy books for deserving students at Harvard College. It was, on its own terms, a generous intention, the act of a man who believed learning and faith were worth paying for after he was gone.
Forty Years in the English Courts
The trouble was time. The bequest could not take effect until Hopkins's widow, Anne, was dead, and Anne Hopkins did not die until 1698, more than forty years after the will was written. Even then the matter did not resolve cleanly. It went to law, and the English courts took their own deliberate time about it. Not until 1715 did the trustees finally secure their verdict and a fund of several hundred pounds in hand, with a charitable duty to invest it in land that would earn an income.
So they went looking for land, and they found it in Nipmuc country, on the hill of the great trees and the acres around it, still held by the survivors of Magunkaquog through their connection to the larger body of Natick.
"We Are Just Poor Indians": The 1715 Petition
By then, the arrangements for selling those lands to the Hopkins trustees were being made by the tribal elders at Natick rather than by the families still living on the hill. The villagers of Magunkaquog learned their ground was being sold out from under them by men of their own larger community, dealing with English trustees over the heads of the people who actually lived on the land. They did the one thing left to them. They wrote a letter.
That letter survives. It is held today in the Harvard University Archives, the very institution the Hopkins money was meant to serve, written in the petitioners' own hand and dated September 5, 1715. It was addressed to Samuel Sewall, a Boston magistrate of long service, the same man who years earlier had stood up in his own church and publicly repented his part in the Salem witch trials. To this man, of all the men they might have appealed to, the people of Magunkaquog sent their plea: “To the most honorable Samuel Sewall and all those men at the meeting on Monday last,” they wrote, “we are just poor Indians and are not willing to sell our land or to part with it in any ways.” Roughly fifteen names appear on that document, drawn from families with deep roots in the praying-town world, some tracing their connection back to the founding of Natick itself sixty years earlier. It stands as clear evidence that at least some of the people whose land was being negotiated away had never agreed to the sale.
The Deed and Isaac Nehemiah’s Death
It did not stop the sale. On the eleventh of October, 1715, the deed was signed, a transaction between the committee of agents acting for the Indian proprietors of Natick and the trustees of Edward Hopkins, transferring eight hundred acres of land in Middlesex County that had once been Magunkaquog. Six weeks later, the land was sold.
One day after that deed was signed, Samuel Sewall was informed that a man named Isaac Nehemiah, one of the Native signatories connected to the sale, had hanged himself with his own belt. This is known only because Sewall recorded it, in the same careful private diary he kept across his long life, a daily account of weather and sermons and the ordinary business of a Boston magistrate's days. He entered the fact of Isaac Nehemiah's death. He drew no line between that death and the transaction it followed.
"A Penny an Acre": Leases and the Birth of Hopkinton
The land the trustees now held was not immediately let out at a penny an acre. Beginning in 1720, the trustees entered into ninety-nine-year leases with the English tenants now settling the ground, charging as much as nine pence an acre annually, with the trustees themselves covering the province tax on the land. Not until 1740 did the trustees revise those terms, reducing the rent to one penny per acre annually for the remainder of each ninety-nine-year lease, and three pence afterward, in exchange for the tenants agreeing to pay their own province taxes going forward. The Massachusetts General Court approved the new terms in 1741. A new standard lease was printed the following year and used for the next two decades. A penny an acre was real, and it became, in time, the rate most remembered, but it took a quarter century after the 1715 deed to arrive at that number.
The land assembled through this purchase, and leased out on these terms, would in due course be incorporated into a township carrying the name of the dead governor whose charity had paid for its founding acres. It was called Hopkinton. The dispossession was, by 1715, largely finished. What followed was the slower business of watching a people come apart, and one further witness speaks to that part of the story, a complicated one.
The Slow Unraveling
Stephen Badger served as a missionary to the Natick Indians for nearly 45 years, and a 1797 letter he left behind offers a rare, firsthand account of the community's decline. While Badger attributed the tribe's collapse to character defects—such as drunkenness, aimless wandering, and lack of thrift—the factual details he recorded tell a different story. His own observations reveal that systemic pressures caused the decline: an epidemic in 1759 that disproportionately struck the vulnerable Native population, predatory credit practices by English merchants, and dispossession of land that forced residents into wandering and debt.
The hill of the great trees had given its people cedar, then quartz kept quietly in the dark, then a school, then, in the end, a penny an acre. Their own petition survives still, in the Harvard archive their land helped to build, the one document in this whole long story that speaks in their own words rather than an Englishman's.