History of Petersham, Massachusetts, Incorporated April 20, 1754

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. Those note books are a mingling of facts, traditions and stories in all shades of propriety, revealing strange emotions of jealousies, retaliations as well as humor and pathos, in the simplicity of the good, the beautiful and the true, in the lives of the Petersham folks, in those early days. When the committee selected the writer of this History, they charged her to record everything she knew of the past, for no matter how insignificant an item seems, there is a chance that it prove to be the tie linking those of greater importance. These years have been full of joy, and interest in the attempt to verify, adjust, and co ordinate a tale of reasonable truth of the past two hundred and ten years of Petersham life. Even so, many things, remain doubtful and unrecorded, in the hope that they may some time be verified by future students of history, enabled by clearer records to proceed along this alluring path. Stress has been placed upon the location of Early Settlers, for two important reasons, first because of the ever increasing number of inquiries locating ancestors; and second, because of the rapid demolishment of sources of information regarding them in clearing out seemingly useless papers from attics. Family Bibles were removed by remote generations and by fires.