"The Birthplace of American Independence, 1687"
How Ipswich, Massachusetts, Won This Inscription for Its Town Seal
by
J. H. Burnham
Someone has truly said that every tree in the forest has, under ground, roots which are equal in body to all of its branches above ground. If this is correct, perhaps it can be said with equal truth that the great tree of American Liberty possesses, buried in the remote and distant past, as many roots and rootlets as its beautiful structure of branches exhibits to our admiring gaze.
We sometimes think of liberty's roots in the Swiss Mountains where William Tell slew the tyrant Gessler, and we often refer to the English Plains of Runnymede where the Barons compelled King John to assent to England's Magna Charta; but the branches of our own tree of American liberty have been nourished by many very deep growing roots concerning which history is sometimes entirely silent, or to which it has given but niggardly praise, and we can perhaps spend a few moments profitably in tracing one rootlet of our liberty tree, which has not been exactly overlooked by history, but which from the present generation of Americans has attracted little or no general attention.
I was born in Ipswich, Essex County, Massachusetts, in the very school district where the leader in the events I am about to describe was the settled Pastor in the Congregational Church in what was then called Chebacco Parish, but which is now, since 1819, the little town of Essex.
Ipswich, whose Indian name was Agawam, is located on the north side of Cape Ann, about thirty miles from Boston, and fronts on Ipswich Bay. It narrowly missed being the Plymouth home of the Pilgrims in 1620. You will remember that various un-
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