New Hampshire Grants


Sections:

Getting Lost
More reflections on my relationship with the land.

First Settlers
Well, the first European ones.

First Romp
In which I search for ghosts in the woods.

New Hampshire Grants
Politics and rebellion.

Local Government
Interesting tidbits from tedious meeting minutes.

Getting Lost

I've always been good at mental mapping. When I was studying abroad, a friend and I traveled to Edinburgh, Scotland to visit a friend who was studying there. The cheapest flight landed at about midnight, and we took a shuttle from the airport to somewhere near the heart of the city. We had our friend's address, but realized too late that our French phones (and accompanying GPS) didn't work in Scotland. The city was quiet except for distant music and voices coming from the bars. A few dark-coated people hurried past us and the moon shone down on the river below the bridge where we stood. We could see the hulking black outline of the city rising up, and the glow of lights from Edinburgh Castle. The only thing to guide us was a small map of the bus routes affixed to the bus shelter. We set out, discovering that Edinburgh is a twisting town full of little alleys and unexpected turns. The ground was wet and the air was cold. The houses all looked the same, the street signs were dark and indistinct. But I charged ahead, assuming we had to go southwest about ¾ of a mile and taking the roads that went roughly in that direction. And we found the place! That alone was one of my proudest achievements from studying abroad.


But it hasn't always been this way. One of my most vivid memories of woods wanderings with my sister started with us exploring while our parents weren't home. We weren't supposed to go out of view of the house, but that isn't always an easy rule to follow when each step through the dense, brushy woods reveals something new and hides something that was clearly visible a moment ago. At any rate, we stopped at some point and, turning slowly, found ourselves encased in a globe of leaves. There was no sign of our white house, and the only thing that broke the cacophony of green and brown growth was the sky, far off overhead and extremely unhelpful.

The turning itself probably didn't help. We looked at each other and at our dog Toby, who had accompanied us and was absolutely unconcerned by our predicament. The patch of woods we were in is neighbored on three sides by fields, but in my mind we were in one of those situations where a movement in the wrong direction could mean disaster. I imagined our house, just out of sight in one direction, and then an endless wilderness full of wolves and bears spreading in all other directions. I had my little sister to think of. We had to find our way back or else I would be responsible. My initial reaction was to cry, hug Toby, and demand that he lead us back to civilization like all good dogs do in books.

Toby fears no forest.

Toby regarded me with his quizzical eyebrow spots cocked, then continued his inspection of the woods, which he surveyed every morning. I looked around in desperation. I don't remember what Molly was doing, though I'm sure she was doing it with more poise than me. Then through the trees I saw a flash of grey. I was sure it was a house, though no house I had ever seen before. I could see it clearly, and I wondered how someone could have been living in these woods for so long without me knowing it. The house was old and its windows were dark.

"Molly!" I said, "There's someone over there! They can save us!"

Molly disagreed.

We ran around a little bit, arguing and jumping over logs. Toby trotted along beside us. Then, a breakthrough: "I see our house!" Molly shouted. She was right: the eaves of our roof were clearly visible in a hole through the trees. We scampered out, running away from the old gray building I had seen. As we emerged into the driveway our mom drove up in her car. It was incredible to me that we could have been through so much peril and our mom didn't even know it. Perhaps unwisely, we told her all about our adventure and got yelled at for going into the woods when she wasn't home. Later on, I asked about the gray building. There was no such thing in the woods. Ours was the only house on this side of the road.

Surely the thing I saw was a figment of my overexcited imagination. But the image of that old building has never left me, and neither has the sense that if I had just walked toward it that day I would have been able to see whoever lived there. It's hard not to believe in ghosts in the woods of Vermont. Sunken spots are cellar holes from where houses used to stand. Big old wolf trees show where the forest used to be someone's yard. Sometimes they come in pairs, coffin trees planted by newlyweds and intended to live only as long as the couple. Rock walls mark property lines that don't exist anymore.

Settlers

There was a lot going on in the late 1700's on the North American continent. The first thing you probably think of is the conflict with England and the subsequent Revolutionary War. The founding fathers were meeting and scheming while England taxed its disenchanted colonies. But Vermont experienced its own special flavor of injustice from England, and it was this injustice that took up the time and energy of the early settlers of Danby. It all started with the New Hampshire Land Grants.

Vermont was the site of war and general danger in the mid-1700's, to the extent that few people wanted to spend much time there. There had been plenty of European exploration in the region, mostly by French and British militaries, and the probing had led to war. Each side recruited Native Americans and pushed for territory. Eventually, of course, the British were victorious, and as a result I'm writing this in English. During this time, there wasn't much settlement in Vermont apart from a few outposts in the Connecticut River and Champlain Valleys.

Though the French and Indian War (also known as the Seven Years' War) lasted until 1763, the tide was already turning in 1760. The British pushed against the French footholds in Canada, finally capturing Montreal in September of 1760. The war then pivoted to other theaters, leaving the area of Vermont free of fighting. Meanwhile, the population was growing in Massachusetts, and there were plenty of settlers eager for some new land. They just had to wait for the French to clear out.

This is a super cool map drawn in 1761. You can see allotments of towns creeping in from the south, but most of Vermont is still unsettled and uncharted. The map is covered with little notes such as "only the Mouth of this River is known to ye English" and "these Branches are only Conjectural". Another poetic tidbit: "These white hills [the White Mountains] appear many Leagues off at Sea like great bright Clouds above the Horizon, & are a noted Land Mark to Seamen".

The absence of bayonet-wielding soldiers triggered a significant bump in Vermont real estate values. Over a hundred new towns were chartered in the area now known as Vermont the mid-1700's. In fact, more Vermont towns were established in 1761 than in any other year on record. Danby was one of them. The sixty-eight proprietors who founded Danby, led by Jonathan Willard, asked the Governor Benning Wentworth of New Hampshire (more on him later) for the land, and King George III granted it to them in the following flowery form on August 27, 1761:

Province of New Hampshire, George the third, by the grace of God, of Great Britain, France and Ireland, King, defender of the faith, &c. To all persons to whom these presents shall come, Greeting:

Know ye that we of our special grace, certain knowledge and mere motion, for the due encouragement of settling a new plantation within our said province, by and with the advice of our trusty and well beloved Benning Wentworth, Esq.,... [some more adjectives and "hereafters"]... do give and grant in equal shares, unto our loving subjects, inhabitants of our said province of N.H.,... [a long description of the land to be bequeathed]

The charter went on to stipulate various decrees from the monarchy, including the rule that all white pines in the town were to be left standing for the royal navy to use as masts. It also declared the "rent" for the town to be one ear of Indian corn per year for the first ten years. Each inhabitant also had to pay one shilling for every hundred acres he owned. Even for poor and struggling settlers on a rugged frontier, this financial burden wasn't exactly back-breaking. The sum was more symbolic of their continued allegiance to the crown. And after all, they were doing England a favor by clearing and cultivating the colonies.

I couldn't find a date telling what year Joseph Soper died under a tree in a snowstorm, but it must have been at least a few after 1765. That was the year he came to an arbitrarily selected plot of land, distinguished from the rest of the unsettled land by nothing but the name Danby, and built a house. He wasn't alone- in that year, four other men came and began to clear land, too. They were Joseph Earl, Crispin Bull, Luther Colvin (today, Colvin Hill Road climbs up the hill across from my house) and Micah Vail. I would have thought they'd settle right near each other, to fend off loneliness and help each other out, but by checking Williams' map I found that they spread themselves out over the whole of the basin I call home. They were close but not too close, claiming pre-measured plots of the land they planned to clear for agriculture. Still, they all happened to break ground within the sphere of my earliest world- within the cup-shaped valley.

Figuring this out wasn't easy. Even in Williams' day, the late 1800's, the marks made by the first settlers were fading from the landscape. Their original cabins had rotted away or been taken down, and it seems that none of the original families stayed on the land they first claimed. Williams, meanwhile, only describes their first settlements in reference to the neighborhood in his time: "Joseph Soper... came first, with his family, from Nine Partners, N.Y., and pitched on the farm now owned by James Stone."... "Joseph Earl... commenced a clearing west of Soper, near the present residence of John Hilliard." These descriptions would have made a lot of sense in 1869, but for me they're only one part of a puzzle. James Stone and John Hilliard aren't around anymore, and neither are their homes.

Remember my analogy of the guideline disappearing up a misty cliff? When I began reading about the early settlers, I wanted to visit the ground where they slept and worked. But all I had were descriptions of where they used to live within the context of a neighborhood that no longer exists.

So I searched. I cross-referenced these names with the map and with another history of Danby, Two Centuries, which describes the general area I grew up in as "The Oxbow" neighborhood. There's one bend in the river down the road that I thought must be the distinguishing feature of the Oxbow neighborhood. On Williams' map, it's the center of action: the mill, one of the schools, and a lot of the houses are all grouped in that area. And it's about a mile south of an old intersection called Four Corners, which is another vague indicator Williams uses to describe where the first settlers supposedly lived.

When I first came to this conclusion, zooming in on Google Maps to see the shape of the river, I felt a little shivery. This long bend in Mill Brook means something to me. I used to go exploring through the hemlock stand that encloses the stream there. The dense cover and dark green of the trees gives the stream a sense of mystery and depth. There are roads and fields and farms a few hundred feet in any direction, but it's quiet in the Oxbow. Mill Brook cuts deeply through the earth there, narrow and quick. I have a vivid memory of watching my dog Toby run through the trees after an imaginary squirrel, his movements amplified by the stillness all around him. This place always seemed to hold secrets. Now I know that it was once home to people, too.

First Romp

My Dad, who turned out to know a lot more about the history of Danby than me, has always been a source of expert advice when it comes to nature and the land around our house. The first time I visited home after starting my research, he and I went on an expedition to see what was left of the Oxbow neighborhood referred to in Two Centuries. It was October. We layered up before leaving, not sure what the temperature was going to be a few steps off the porch, let alone down in the hemlock woods by the stream. The mountains were dressed in layers, too. The tops were white with snow, and so were the western-facing hollows. But the lower legs of the hills were still maple red and beech yellow. Above it all, the clouds were drifting away and the sky was an awesome blue.

Dad and I brought the little print-off of Williams' 1869 map. We walked along a pasture with two horses in it. While the horses galloped back and forth behind the fence, excited to have visitors, Dad and I talked about old names.

We were walking along Keeler Road, and almost every house belonged to a Keeler. They were a pillar of Danby in my eyes. Our road is called Edmunds, though it only got that name within the time that I lived there. It changed from "Rural Route 22" when I was in elementary school, and I didn't like it. To me, giving a name to a road was kind of hoity-toity (my hoity-toity detectors were unusually strong), especially a road that only my family and a few other people lived on. "Edmunds" didn't have anything to do with us, so why did it have to be the name of our road? I thought it should be Parent Road, since the Keelers got their own. But as soon as I started reading Williams' book I realized that any claim I have to the road is less significant than that of the several Edmunds families who lived in my neighborhood in 1869.

We turned the corner at the end of the pasture, following the fence away from the road and through increasingly dense brush. We were looking for a good spot where we could turn into the woods. When none presented itself, we resigned ourselves to the burdocks and raspberries and headed for the treeline. Once we had conquered the brush, we thrashed our way through a wall of densely packed hemlock branches. Abruptly, we were in a different world.

The low shrubs and grasses couldn't grow without sunlight, and the woods around the stream let very little light through. Without the undergrowth, walking was easy. Seeing was easy, too. It was sort of like being in a low-roofed many-pillared room, except that those pillars had branches we had to duck under or step over.

We wandered upstream, pausing every few hundred feet to check the 1869 map. There were a few black dots marked alongside the stream that had either been houses or barns. We crossed the stream where a large poplar tree had fallen across it. We found a small ribcage surrounded by a circle of white fur, probably the remains of a rabbit. I started to get the feeling that I was doing two scavenger hunts at once- I was looking for signs that humans had lived here, but it was far easier to find interesting parts of the natural world. Mushrooms, woodcocks, and bright leaves abounded.

We found a few flat areas above the stream that seemed like good places to put a house. There was an old rock wall sinking into the ground, barely visible under the fall leaves. We found a hump of earth that was different from the surrounding ground- the mound was hard and rocky, unlike the springy, peaty ground everywhere else. Our combined archaeological expertise was negligible, so noticing the mound was about as far as we got with that mystery.

We found a piece of our own history, too. Up above the stream we came upon a meadow marked by another deteriorating rock wall. I had driven by that spot countless times, but had never actually walked through it. If I had I would have found the carcass of an enormous sugar maple lying half-buried in the puckerbrush. It was easily two hundred years old and riddled with the swirling, burley growths that characterize all old maple trees. It was a tree that might have lived for as long as there have been Europeans in Danby. It was right next to the rock wall, meaning it might have stood beside a road or house once upon a time. Insignificant on the one section of its trunk was a flat plane cut by a chainsaw. My dad casually pointed it out. He himself made that mark when he harvested a piece of the maple to make knife handles. Now, several years later, the cut looked old and dull, just another part of the rotting tree. That small mark is a detail I never would have seen without my dad's prompting, and it made me wonder how much else I was missing as I walked through the woods and fields of Danby.

Dad's maple

Next we headed downstream to the area I know as Highbridge. It got its name because, well, there's a high bridge that crosses the stream. As far as I can tell, Highbridge is The Oxbow. The stream here transforms from a meandering brook into a swift current cutting through a boulder-filled ravine. You can see where the water has carved through the rock, leaving hollowed-out spheres in its face.

I grew up knowing Highbridge as a cold swimming hole that wasn't safe to visit if there were other cars parked there. But in the early 1800's it was a mill. In 1766, the founders of Danby offered 60 acres of land to whichever person built a mill on this spot. It would be a huge benefit to the town, which was basically a bunch of primitive cabins at the time. They needed a gristmill to grind their grains, and a sawmill to cut boards. No one took them up on the offer until sometime after the Revolutionary War, though Williams says he couldn't find an exact date. He did know that the first gristmill was built by Stephen Calkins around the year 1787. Dad and I didn't find any sign of it. Later on in the 1800s, a man named Nelson Kelley built a sawmill.

At Highbridge, we immediately found its foundations. The mill had been part of a large grouping of buildings, and their construction was clearly a major undertaking. We stumbled across a sunken stone-lined foundation near the side of the stream, and then quickly found more rock walls. Along the edge of the water there were clear signs of human influence: huge rocks piled into sturdy walls and what might have been a channel for directing water out of or into the stream. Again, if I hadn't been looking for it, I probably wouldn't have questioned what the rocks were doing there.

There was a clearing a few dozen yards from the remains of the mill. As we waded through chest-deep brush looking for more clues, I wondered why it was still there. A similar clearing just a quarter mile away had disappeared under a fierce growth of white pine within my lifetime. Why was this one still dominated by low-growing brush and sickly-looking sumac?

"Succession isn't that simple," my dad said, bending down and pushing crispy stalks of goldenrod aside in an attempt to find the ground.

If I dig deep (like, really deep) into my collapsing memories of Information from Formal Education, I recall that succession is the process of clear ground (land that has been disrupted by people or a falling tree or fire, for example) being taken over by successively heartier and more assertive plants. Fast-growing, sun-sucking plants like raspberries build up, but they're eventually pushed out by bigger, tougher plants like pines, and so on until you've got a stand of huge oak trees three hundred years later. But, as I've learned from my dad and the geologist Roger Haydock, plants don't just grow anywhere; they're indicators of the quality of soil, the elevation, and the amount of exposure to sun and other natural forces like wind and rain. The two clearings near the old mill in Danby, both made by humans and almost within sight of each other, must be different in at least one of those categories.

My dad straightened up, holding a flat, dark rectangle. It was a slate roof shingle, and there were more piled underneath a mossy layer of growth.

Stephen Calkins' gristmill and Nelson Kelley's sawmill were vital to the little town of Danby. Before they built their mills, the people of Danby had to travel thirty miles round trip by horse to get all their milling needs fulfilled in nearby Manchester. And yet it took around twenty years for anyone to build a mill in Danby. Were the founders lazy? Nay, for shame! Williams, who had an almost idolizing attitude towards these "hearty" and "athletic" men, has another explanation, to which I will add my own two cents.

New Hampshire Grants

So what slowed down the process of building a mill in Danby? The biggest challenge facing settlers of Danby, the one that made them band together in a militia to torment and sometimes kill their enemies, was a feud between the provinces of New York and New Hampshire. Both were colonies of England, and before Vermont declared its independence, the two bordered each other. As we've learned, the founders of Danby (along with the founders of dozens of Vermont towns) got their charters from Benning Wentworth, governor of New Hampshire. A line along the Hudson River had been declared the eastern border of New York, meaning that the area now known as Vermont was technically under the jurisdiction of New Hampshire. In 1765, however, New York Lieutenant-Governor Colden and the government of New York (or, as Vermont hero Ethan Allen described them, "that despotic Fraternity of Law-Makers, and Law-Breakers") declared the border of New York and New Hampshire to be the Connecticut River, which flows south from Canada to Connecticut. This border bump meant that all the people living in the disputed area between the Hudson River and the Connecticut River were suddenly New Yorkers. This might not seem like such a big deal, except that New York wanted money. The Lieutenant-Governor started granting land patents in the same areas already granted to the current inhabitants by New Hampshire. Basically, he wanted Vermonters to pay for their land again. The inhabitants of Danby were ordered to re-purchase the land they had already bought.

As you might imagine, the inhabitants of Danby did not take kindly to the request. They refused to pay. Vermonters in this era earned a reputation for being irascible and strong-willed. John Burgoyne, a British general in the Revolutionary War, wrote in a 1777 letter that "The Hampshire grants in particular, a country unpeopled and almost unknown in the last war, now abounds in the most active and most rebellious race on the continent, and hangs like a gathering storm on my left." He was defeated at Saratoga soon afterwards.

Ethan Allen, brave rebel of Vermont! He and his Green Mountain Boys led the movement for Vermont independence, first from New York and then from England. I picture him dressed in green with a bow slung over his back and a feather in his cap. Yes, he's indistinguishable from Robin Hood in my imagination. In research for this story, I've had the pleasure of reading some of his rhetorical upper-cuts directed against New York. Here's a taste, from an open letter to Danby's own Captain Micah Vail: "... if the Governmental Authority of New-York, will judge in their own case, and act in opposition to that of Great Brittain, and insist upon killing us, to take possession of our Vineyards; come on, we are ready to take a Game of Scalping with them; for our marshal spirits glow with bitter Indignation, and consumate Fury to blast their infernal Projections."

The people of Vermont militarized in response to New York's demand for money. Organized and rallied by Ethan Allen, towns assembled committees dedicated to protecting their land from agents of New York. They repelled agents of New York's government and generally made a big stink. Those sympathetic with New York were pestered and abused by the strange logic of local justice.

Two such conflicts in Clarendon, two towns north of Danby, have a taste of both humor and horror. The first involves a man named Benjamin Spencer, who owned land he had purchased from New York. Ethan Allen and another rabble-rouser named Remember Baker (awesome, right?) arrested him with the help of thirty Green Mountain Boys. They held a trial, accusing Spencer of "cuddling with the land-jobbers of New York" and decreeing that his house was a public nuisance and must be burnt down. Spencer expressed disagreement with the verdict and managed to convince the Green Mountain Boys to inflict a lesser punishment: instead of burning down his house, they merely removed its roof "with great shouting, much noise and tumult." It could be replaced, they said, if Spencer re-purchased the land through a New Hampshire Grant.

In a less amusing example, another man from Clarendon refused to comply with the wishes of the Green Mountain Boys. He defended his New York land title and was sentenced to be tied to a tree and given two hundred lashes. After that thoroughly unpleasant experience, he was expelled from Vermont with a note testifying that he had received his full punishment.

The state of hostility might have continued if it weren't for the outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1775. Then the attention of the people of Danby turned from land-jobbers to Tories, once again passing over the issue of mills. Vermont was the site of one major campaign of the Revolution. The unfortunate aforementioned General Burgoyne and his troops marched down from Canada in an attempt to isolate New England from the rest of the revolutionary forces. The Battle of Hubbardton was fought to the north of Danby, and in its aftermath part of Burgoyne's army actually marched through Danby. The appearance of British troops in their little town apparently caused the settlers "great alarm", though Williams doesn't allude to any brave or daring response from the farmers. However, a Danby militia was mustered up around that time. They traveled forty miles in time to fight in the Battle of Bennington. The timing was tough, and once again illustrates why mills weren't quite a priority yet. After risking their lives in a fight to the death, they had to rush home in order to harvest enough of their crops to survive the winter.

The next year, 1777, British agents were sent to scour the countryside for anyone sympathetic with the British cause. They didn't have much luck. The inhabitants of Danby were actively engaged in the same search, though for opposite reasons. They wanted to root out the Tories. There was a superstition that Tories hid behind one particular rock on Isaac Nichols' farm, but there's only one record of a British sympathizer being positively identified. That man and his family were ordered to leave Danby and their property was confiscated.

When I think about the Revolutionary War I picture George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, the Marquis de Lafayette. These were men driven by ideals, by the belief that government should exist for the people, not the other way around. But the people of Danby, while they might have agreed with such sentiments, fought for another reason. They wanted to keep their land. They wanted to be able to farm in peace, and to provide for their families. They were isolated- they must have felt worlds away from New York City and the seat of the revolution. They were building cabins in the Oxbow, clearing trees and planting seeds. At the end of the day, what they wanted most was to harvest their corn before winter.

Local Government

A local government was established as soon as people arrived in Danby. At first it was just a meeting, precursor to the town meeting days that still characterize local Vermont politics. Williams must have gotten his hands on a juicy stack of meeting minutes, because he spends a big chunk of his History of Danby reciting the minutiae of early decisions and appointments. If you look closely, you can see the same names of town leaders repeated over the years, and you can get a sense of the big issues facing the settlers. The details that I found interesting are the ones that give me some ability to glimpse the humanity of those times. It's hard (for me, at least) to wrap my head around the idea that people in the past lived as vividly and completely as I do. It's like that quote from Jane Eyre: "Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! - I have as much soul as you, - and full as much heart!" Jane is talking about being underestimated for her social position, but the same holds true for temporal position. People from the past seem simpler, but only because we don't know so much about them.

Williams frankly didn't do much to help bring the people of Danby to life. Probably the meeting minutes were the best he could get on the early settlers. His contemporary, H.P. Smith, did a little more in his History of Rutland County. He at least included experiences from his own childhood to augment his account of "the good old times." Here are a few of the stories I gleaned from Williams and Smith:

The Hog Saga

Williams gives only glimpses of what must have been a pretty big deal in Danby through its founding years. The topic of hogs comes up increasingly often in town meetings, with escalating reactions from town officials. In 1773, the representatives of the annual town meeting noted that "hogs were not allowed to run without being yoked." For several years after that, the town voted annually that hogs not be permitted to roam free at all. Apparently, the rebellious free spirits of Danby could not reliably follow this rule, preferring to let their hogs roam the countryside uninhibited. The town committee, seeing that their way of life was in danger from the threat of hogs, elected a hog constable in 1777 to keep the town pigs in line. Wing Rogers was Danby's first hog constable, filling "an office of some considerable consequence."

Fence Viewers, 1777

1777 was also the year when Danby first elected a fence viewer. The fence viewer's job was to survey the property lines in town, making sure that all fences conformed to the proper specifications and fining those whose fences were wanting. This job became very important in the 1800's, when millions of sheep roamed the land in Vermont. Vermonters didn't joke around about fence lines when a broken section could result in the loss of a whole herd. See "Mending Wall" by Robert Frost, in which an old Vermonter famously (and stubbornly) repeats, "good fences make good neighbors."

Another job that doesn't exist today was the "scaler of weights and measures", an elected position in charge of making sure, for example, that everyone's pound weighed the same.

Taxes and Punishments, 1776-1784

With the conflict from the New Hampshire Grants, it became necessary for Danby to muster up and support a militia. The town instituted a tax of six percent of a "grand list", an itemized list of all the things that had monetary value in the town. The list itself is interesting, because it shows the approximate worth of various items, according to the opinion of the day. Male persons sixteen to sixty were worth six pounds each. Women and children weren't counted on the list. Adult oxen and steers were worth three pounds, while adult horses were worth three pounds. Cultivated land counted for ten shillings an acre. Lawyers were worth fifty pounds and up, depending on how good they were.

Punishments for various transgressions were set by committees and elected officials and recorded carefully at town meetings. People who didn't pay taxes on their land in 1781 had their land seized and sold by the town. Families who lived in town but didn't own land were warned out of town, so they wouldn't become a burden on the taxpayers.

A fine was set up in 1783 charging ten pounds to anyone who brought smallpox into Danby.

At a special meeting in 1784, town officials voted to erect a sign post and stocks "near the house of Abraham Chase". This measure was a response to a state-wide initiative that every town should have a stocks. People could be placed in the stocks for various criminal offenses, and whipped according to the severity of the crime.

These small, specific details make me think of a pointillism painting, made up entirely of small dots. Each dot is just a dot of color, but when viewed from a bit of a distance an image starts to appear.

Up next: Danby Evolves

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