"A History of the Town and People of Northfield MA" Published 1937 By: Herbert Collins Parsons [Capt Benjamin Wright - the Indian Fighter] In the year of peace, 1743, just when the long period of calm was coming to an unforeseen end, the greatest hero of the valley's struggles, New England's most resolute scout, Captain Benjamin Wright, went to his reward. His eighty-three years covered the entire period of the colony's Indian Wars, save only the last French and Indian incursions. The year of his birth was the one in which the death of Massasoit, faithful friend of the Pilgrims, signified to an extent not then sensed the end of the comity between the native and the invading races. He was the grandson of Samuel, the early emigrant from London who was among the first of the settlers at Springfield, and again of Northampton, and he could remember the day, when he was five years old, on which that founder of the family died sitting in his chair as if asleep. His mother was of that family of Burt which had played a leading part in the first century of the Connecticut valley's stirring pioneer history. Leaving Northampton, where Benjamin had been born Jul 13, 1660, Samuel Wright and his family were among the first white people to find a home at Northfield, in 1673. There were seven children, Samuel, 19; Joseph, 16; Benjamin, 13; Ebenezer, 10; Elizabeth, 7; Eliezer, 5; Hannah, 2. These were gathered into the stockade that frightsome day, Sept 2, 1675, when the Indians fell upon the little settlement-all but the father, who was in command of the company that had been provided for defense and who fell, first victim of Indian bullets on Northfield soil. Only Samuel, the oldest son, suffered physical harm, receiving into his body a bullet to remain there all the rest of his eighty years. But into the heart of each of them was carried a wound that would cause it to pulsate in resentment all their days. They shared the unspeakable terror of the nights and days of imprisonment in the little fort, heard together the distant shots of the Beers battle, suffered as one the awful silence that followed it and joined in the journey down the valley which left the town of their pioneer hopes a desolate waste. Benjamin's years from fifteen to an early matured majority were spent in Northampton. He was among the first in the reoccupation, in 1683, and of the last to leave when the village had dwindled to a handful. Through the quarter-century of Northfield's existence only in name, he served in every soldierly adventure, began his scouting career in 1688, when pursuing the red men after attack upon Deerfield had rescued the two boys from their Indian captors at the then far north point, opposite the mouth of the Ashuelot river, and was in the thick of the ventures and the defenses of the eleven years of Queen Anne's war. In 1708, he had led a ranging party far up the Connecticut, the first of those ventures which came to mark him as the premier ranger of the colonies, and the next year, with his few men, had crossed the Green Mountains to the Champlain country, boldly attacked the enemy, killed eight of them, destroyed a small fleet of canoes and thus shut off one of those French-sent invasions of the valley, to what saving of lives and homes is only to be guessed. In 1709, then in his sixtieth year, he had written the letter, immortal in frontier annals, with its offer to the governor of the colony, "Here am I. Send me." Again he was first in Northfield pioneers, when the permanent foothold was gained. At the second settlement, he had brought his young wife, Thankful, and their little Benjamin, born in 1681. Thankful was the daughter of that Captain John Taylor, who was killed while leading the pursuit of French and Indians after they had wiped out the hamlet at the base of Mt Tom. She had died in 1701, leaving him seven children, and he, with the celerity that marked all his conduct and was not unseemly even in this event, had within four months married Mary Baker of Springfield. William, Mary and Experience had been added to the house-hold, and there were ten, not to mention the Thankful, Rachael and Martha, his son Benjamin's children, and the first baby of his son, Remembrance. There were thirty years yet to be lived by this resolute pioneer. They were filled with activities that were equally distinguished when civic and when military. In both, he led. His personality marked every advance stop of the town. Even his stand against the liberal departure of the beloved minister from the stout faith of the Calvinists was token of his rugged character, never yielding, never finding a ground of compromise. His mounted journey to Boston to save some hundreds of acres to the town in its northeasterly reaches, the unhesitating venture of a man of seventy-two years, and the deference paid him at that seat of government, displayed his own vigor and the esteem in which he was held throughout the Bay Colony. His military leadership ran through the three years of Father Rale's war, when he was well along in the sixties. He was sixty-five when the Governor called upon him to raise a company of rangers and he led them through the far northern wilds in pursuit of the sly Gray Lock, whom he only failed to meet because that sneaking warrior, who never met white men in the open, clung to the woods for watching the movements of a warrior he dared not encounter. The second time in a year, he led his fourth far-flung venture, the last only because the death of the French governor put an end to strife. In the ripe years, he had the gratification of seeing his own spirit animating his much younger brother, Benoni, who was born ten days after that fateful attack on the village in which his father was filled, and his own sons, Benjamin, Remembrance, Daniel, who were in the first garrison at Dummer, and the youngest, Daniel and William, holding commission in the fighting militia. Of the girls Thankful had married a Connecticut Woodruff and Mindwell was the wife of Stephen Belding, the new miller of the town. One son along, Jacob, had left the home country and was settled in far-away South Carolina. All that the town of varied fortunes was and all it was to become were linked to the devoted leadership of Benjamin Wright. That its street was the broad avenue it came to be was the product of his far-visioned planning at the outset of the second settlement. He met rebuffs at the hands of his townsmen, another evidence of his outrightness. He was for the moment ignored in the earliest incorporated elections. He was defeated in his stand against the minister, when Edwardsism and Arminianism came to battle. But he was revered and beloved. In the story of Civilization's advance over interior New England, he stands out in a form that would be called typical of the pioneer only that it was pre-eminently individual. Stronger character is nowhere traced in the personal features of a new country's heroes. If you have possible additions or corrections to this line you may contact Footprints at the Mail Box below. 
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