History of Ware Massachusetts Author:Arthur Chase Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: n The Manour Op Peace Much the larger portion territorially of the town of Ware was comprised in the estate of John Read, and was named hy him the " Manour... more » of Peace." The circumstances by which John Read gained possession of this great tract of more than 11,000 acres take us back to the original settlement of the country. In 1636, within a year of the building of a fort at Saybrook by the authority of those who held the Connecticut Patent, pioneers from Massachusetts Bay settled at Hartford, Windsor, Wethers- field and Springfield. All of these towns were on doubtful territory. Springfield allied itself for two years with the Colony of Connecticut,1 but at the same time refused to pay taxes for the support of the fort at the mouth of the Connecticut River. In 1642 Massachusetts had caused the Colony line to be surveyed by Nathaniel Woodward and Solomon SaiFery. According to the original patent, the line was to run east and west from a point three miles south of the Charles River. Woodward and Saffery located the eastern starting point, but instead of extending the survey across the country, they sailed around Cape Cod and up the Connecticut2 to a point they supposed to be in the same latitude with their starting point. No wonder Connecticut refused to acknowledge their line! For more than sixty years the boundary was in dispute. At last, in 1713, Commissioners from the two Colonies met and came to an agreement. They made a report July 13, 1713, which was approved by each Colony in the following year. By the agreement Massachusetts was to retain jurisdiction over her old border towns, though they fell to the south of the Colony line. 1 "The Boundary Disputes of Connecticut," by C. W. Bowen. 1 Ibid. For this privilege of jurisdiction Massachusetts agreed to c...« less