First Settlement Period (1676-1738)

Transportation Routes
This period saw the continued improvement of the major native routes, with the northeast branch of the Bay Path leading through Stow and Concord toward Boston as the Lancaster Road, and the south branch southeast to Marlborough and Sudbury usually referred to as the Marlborough Road. In 1691 the Lancaster Road, as the most important through-route of the region, was again laid out by the colony. In 1721 Bare Hill Road was cut through from the north to connect with the Lancaster Road via Green, Golden Run, Sugar, and Burnham Roads, and in 1725 the lower section of Annie Moore Road was laid out. There is some evidence that a road later called "Town House Road", that led north from the Lancaster Road to the intersection of Sugar and Golden Run Roads was in existence by 1732. (This road was discontinued between 1831 and 1857. Its northern section has recently been re-opened as a new town road).
 
Population and Settlement Pattern
After King Philip's War, English settlers slowly returned to Lancaster. Supposedly in the belief that a dispersed settlement would fare better in Indian attack than a clustered village, a few hardy second- and third-generation farmers and their families established homesteads on their outlying lands in Bolton, especially along the east side of the Wataquadoc range and in the northeast part of town. Josiah Whetcomb, for instance, who with his family owned all the northeast quadrant of modern-day Bolton, built his house at the intersection of today's Sugar and Golden Run Roads in 1680-81, where the first child whose birth is recorded in the Bolton territory, his son, Hezekiah, was born in 1681. (See Form #935). Other late-seventeenth-century families who settled here include Beamans, Moors, Snows, Wests, Wilders, and Wilsons. In 1692, in an attempt to keep population in the frontier towns, the legislature passed an act forbidding inhabitants of a community from moving away. In fact, life in the Lancaster area was still dangerous, with isolated Indian raids a constant fear. In 1692, Lancaster designated several houses as garrisons, where settlers were to retreat in the threat of attack. Two are believed to have been located within the borders of Bolton--the garrison of Lt. Thomas Wilder and John Hinds near the center and north part of Wataquadoc, and east of Wataquadoc the house of the less fortunate Ensign John Moore, who was later killed by Indians in 1702. By 1700 there was also some settlement by the Houghton family in north central Bolton.
 
When garrisons were again designated during Queen Anne's War in 1704, settlement within Bolton had increased enough to require three garrisons. By then members of the Houghton family had built houses on their large landholdings in the north central part of the territory in the vicinity of Bare Hill Road. Two houses, the garrisons of John and Jonathan Moore in the southeast, and of Gamaliel Beaman on the east slope of Wataquadoc, are gone, but the foundation of the third garrison, the house of Josiah Whetcomb (Whitcomb), remains. By 1711, when the last group of garrisons was designated for Lancaster, twelve of the twenty-seven were located within Bolton territory, where the population had reached 146, nearly a third of the total of 458 for the whole of the Lancaster territory.
 
In 1706, the inhabitants of Lancaster east of the Nashua River drew up their first petition to be set off as a separate town. Among the reasons they cited was the usual difficulty of getting to the meetinghouse on the Sabbath, but also mentioned was their concern for the upkeep of the eight bridges that by then had been built over the Nashua River and its wetlands.
 
That petition was denied, but as the perceived threat of Indian attack subsided with the 1713 Peace of Utrecht, farmers from Lancaster and beyond began to settle outlying areas with increasing frequency. By 1730 efforts to set up new towns had again intensified, and in 1732 the town of Harvard was incorporated in what had been the northeast section of Lancaster. Finally, in 1738, a petition from the residents in the east and southeast part was granted, and the town of Bolton, including much of present-day Berlin and part of Hudson, was incorporated as a new community of thirty-five square miles, named in honor of the Duke of Bolton, England.
 
Subsistence Pattern/Economic Base
In a pattern that characterized most of New England in the colonial period, the early residents of Bolton were virtually all farmers, practicing a subsistence type of agriculture of mixed grain raising and animal husbandry. Upland, meadow, and grass lands were still highly prized, and orchard culture, with a few small cider mills to process apples into cider, the most important colonial drink, were in existence before 1740.
 
With one possible exception, industry in Bolton during this period was all for a relatively local market. The first mill in town, a sawmill or gristmill run by members of the Sawyer family on Wataquadoc Brook near Pine Hill, was in existence by about 1700; the millpond of its successors, Thomas Sawyer's sawmill and gristmill, was created when the mills on Century Mill Road were built in about 1739. (See Forms #143 and Area Form E). Bolton's most significant regional colonial enterprise was probably in operation before the town was incorporated, by the early 1730's. Limestone deposits had been discovered on Whitcomb family land at the east end of town several years earlier, but it is believed that limestone was first quarried and turned into lime in the 1730's at the second lime quarry in New England, the Whitcomb Lime Quarry (see Form #927) by John Whitcomb (later Gen. Whitcomb).
 
Inns and taverns were part of the local scene as early as 1717-18, when David Whetcomb (Whitcomb), one of the sons of Josiah, opened one in his house at 43 Old Sugar Road (#107). He had married the widow Mary Fairbank, whose husband and two children had been killed in a 1697 Indian raid. Although her life had been spared, she had been captured, and during her two-years' captivity in Canada she had gained knowledge of the use of roots and herbs in medicine. Upon her release and her marriage to David Whetcomb in about 1700, she became known as "Doctress" Mary, the first doctor in Bolton, and the only physician in the area closer than Concord.
 
Architecture
The oldest extant house in Bolton is the David Whitcomb Inn at 43 Sugar Road (#107), built about 1700, and said to be similar in design and proportion to the house of his father, Josiah (see Whitcomb Garrison Site, #935). Authentically restored in the mid-twentieth century, it is also Bolton's only remaining example of a center-chimney, 2 1/2-story saltbox with a rear leanto. There are apparently two 2 1/2-story half-houses extant from this period: 48 Hudson Road (the Kimmens/Whitcomb House, ca. 1730--#153), and part of the house at 283 Berlin Road (#131), probably built for Deacon Jabez Fairbank in the 1720's. Bolton is fortunate to have several examples of center-chimney, 2 1/2-story, five-bay houses from this period, although some may have attained that form as a result of later expansions. In the latter group are the ca. 1720 Houghton House at 159 Golden Run Road (#155), the James Keyes House at 258 Hudson Road (#145), the Jonathan Moore House at 211 West Berlin Road (#175), and the house of David Whitcomb, Jr. at 496 Sugar Road (#108), now without its center chimney. In spite of later alterations and expansions, another inn, the Josiah Richardson House (later the Wilder Mansion), at 101 Wilder Road, is the only representative in Bolton of an early Georgian hip-roofed, 2 1/2-story house (#179).
 
Both the ca. 1730's Whitcomb Lime Quarry and its associated stone Lime Kiln (#927 and 928) are today protected on town conservation land, and frequently visited as colonial engineering site unique within the region. One burial structure, called locally the "Old Settlers' Tomb, (#929), located off Long Hill Road, is a rare surviving example of a "Corn Hill" type of underground stone tomb that dates to about 1700.