It is, of course, pure conjecture as to what induced Launcelot, a man of family, to leave his home in the settled part of the colony and plunge into the wilderness with a wife and ten children. But the books are full of what induced other men to remove into the newer country, and it is fair to assume that our ancestor was influenced by the same motives. Eastern Massachusetts was anything but an attractive farming country. It cost more to clear a farm in Essex County than the land was worth when cleared. Sand and rocks abounded; the soil was poor; the country, too, had not recovered from the terrible depression of 1640. For thirty years reports of the charming valley of the CONETTICOTT had reached the eastern settlement. Its fair fields, so different from the rugged ones of the coast; its milder climate; its "Grate Ryver," which teemed with salmon and other fish, offered a picture to the struggling husbandmen of the stormy coast too alluring to be withstood. People flocked to the gentle valley and cast their lot among those who had gathered along the banks of the silvery river.

Probably such reasons induced Launcelot to cross by the Bay Path to these inviting regions in the summer of 1674 and in the newly-laid-off town of Southfield, or Suffield, to seek a new home. Whether he then brought with him his family is problematic; there are signs that say he did not. If so, they could not have followed him for several years, since the bitter and fatal war with King Philip soon broke out and stopped for a time all immigration into the valley. The war began in the summer of 1675, and Suffield was abandoned by all.

People left in haste, burying such valuables as they could not carry away. Some went to the south; others to the villages of Springfield and Westfield, a dozen miles away to the north. To the latter place went Launcelot Granger The inhabitants of Westfield, though ordered by the authorities to abandon their settlements, decided it was wiser to remain, though they were in the very vortex of the trouble. Peculiarly situated, they proceeded to fortify the place. Two rivers here come together, forming a letter V, and in the fork stood the village. The busy inhabitants erected a stockade across this V, and continued it down each river until it met at the point. The distance around the stockade was two miles, and within the large inclosed space stood the village and the fields, which the inhabitants cultivated with reasonable safety. To this house of refuge Launcelot went, and if his family were indeed in Suffield of course they accompanied him.

The Rev. Mr. Taylor, the minister of Westfield, says in his records regarding the Indian fight which occurred there on October 27, 1675:

Our soil was moistened by the blood of three Springfield men -- young Goodman Dumbleton and two sons of Goodman Brooks, who came here to look for iron on land bought of J. Pynchon, Esq., who accompanied them, but they fell at the first fire of the enemy. This occurred after the murders at Northampton. At the same time the Indians burnt in Westfield the house of Mr. Cornish and John Sackett's house and barn with their contents. A Mr. Granger was seriously wounded in the leg at the same affair.

Drake, the able editor of "Hubbard's Indian Wars in New England," written in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and which describes the fight, assumes it was Launcelot Granger who was wounded. It is, moreover, well authenticated in the family that Launcelot was indeed wounded in the leg by the Indians and was extremely lame the balance of his life. Undoubtedly he was the unfortunate sufferer at Westfield.

Launcelot was back in Suffield with his wife and ten of his eleven children, as we have seen, in 1678, when his home lot was set off to him. Henceforth he continued to reside there till his death in 1689. On his home lot he built his house, and at the same time he planted in the road in front of his dwelling a maple tree. This stands to-day by the wayside, knotted and twisted with age, one of the two old domestic trees of the town, and still known as the "Launcelot Granger tree." It stands directly opposite the Gay mansion on the High Street, and cannot be overlooked by any one seeking to find it. It seems as though some steps might be taken to preserve as far as possible this relic of our ancestor.

The first town meeting was held in Suffield on March 9, 1681-2, and the record shows thirty-four voters. Lines were drawn, Feather Street vs. High Street, and the latter won by a majority of six votes. Launcelot Granger is noted as voting with the majority. The town, now being organized, assumed the duty of allotting land, settling disputes regarding boundaries, and electing officers. The Land Measurer was a position of great importance in the young community, as can be well imagined. Many and delicate were the duties which would naturally be placed in the hands of the town's surveyor. The record of the meeting says: "Goodm: Granger chosen Measurer of Land to be Lay'd out in Suffield for ye year ensuing." He was re‰lected several times, serving his last term a year before his death.

Besides the home lot on the High Street Launcelot and his two sons were granted lands for farming "more remote." Where the elder Granger's farm was I cannot ascertain, but at a town meeting held December 25, 1685, a piece of land for a farm was allotted to his son Thomas. It lay on the east side of the Springfield road, afterward known as Crooked Lane, and descended from father to son till it was sold by his grandson, Captain Abner Granger, in 1806, just prior to his removal to Buffalo, N. Y.

Launcelot Granger died at his house in Suffield on the 3d day of September, A. D. 1689. He was buried in the graveyard which stood opposite the meeting-house on the High Street. The church of the present day, a fine brick building, abuts the graveyard, and under the very shadow of its walls is the ground in which all the proprietors and their families were laid to rest. No stone marks his grave (its exact spot is unknown), but both Launcelot and Joanna sleep their last sleep on the crest of that gentle Suffield hill which overlooks a valley teeming with wealth and marked with a beauty rarely to be found elsewhere in the land.

It was not until after the death of Launcelot that his Suffield family commenced to separate and wander to different parts of the country. His oldest son, John, had left the paternal roof in Newbury directly he was married, and had removed to the neighboring town of Andover, throwing his lot with his wife's family, the Poors. He was given a farm by his father-in-law, which lay directly across the road from the Poor home, and here John settled, lived, and died. Here, until about the beginning of the nineteenth century, some of his descendants lived. Indeed, as far as it can be ascertained, it was not till his grandson Daniel removed to West Springfield, Mass., about 1750, that any of John's descendants quit Andover. To-day the name has completely disappeared from the town. John, the younger brother of Daniel, was the next to leave, and he took up a new home and a second wife in New Braintree, a few miles south of Boston. In the next generation the movement from Andover was northward to Maine, and the representatives speedily strung themselves along the New England coast till they reached from Eastport, Me., to Cape Cod. Then the New Braintree family sent (about 1800) a number of representatives to Randolph, Vt., and from them have sprung a large and flourishing branch who claim allegiance to the State of the Green Mountains. But it must be remembered that, while a large number of the Vermont Grangers trace their ancestry back to the gallant Captain John of New Braintree, yet it is more than probable that the major portion of those who have lived in that State came either from Suffield or from another Captain John Granger of Bristol, R. I., whom it is impossible to connect with Launcelot. It is not improbable that these Bristol Grangers came from the British colonies in the West Indies.

The year after Launcelot's death his first child left Suffield. Rebecca Granger married young Joseph Wolcott and followed him to his new home in North Brookfield, midway between Springfield and Worcester, Mass. Here she met her tragic fate, which is described in a later page. Her brother Robert, a single man, followed her to the same place, where he too met a violent death seventeen years after her's. It is a remarkable incident that the sister was the first victim in Massachusetts of that terrible French and Indian war which broke out in 1692, while the brother was the last.

Somewhere toward 1720 the first entire family left Suffield. George, the son of Launcelot, had trouble with the town authorities, and undoubtedly felt it imperative to leave. He did not go far--only five miles west till he had crossed the line into the neighboring town of Simsbury, where he settled in the parish of Turkey Hills. Here he and many of his children lived and died, but some of them moved away. His son George, who has made himself memorable as the husband of three wives and the father of seven children by each wife, wandered north to the township of Westfield in Massachusetts, where he found sufficient room for his increasing progeny. From this second George many hundreds of people have sprung. The rest of Launcelot's children remained in Suffield until their deaths.

By the middle of the eighteenth century the emigration of Grangers from Suffield had been very heavy. They had few of them gone far, because there were few places to go to. They went west to Simsbury, Hartland, and the other towns which lay toward the New York border, or northerly to Westfield. When the meadows and plains at the eastern slope of the mountains became well settled they climbed the hills. Some settled on the slopes at Granville and Blandford, some stopped on the summit at Tolland, but many more, just at the close of the Revolution, passed over to the charming valley of the Housatonic in the Berkshire country and took up farms at Sandisfield, Monterey, and the adjoining towns A Westfield family (Daniel, b. 16 September, 1710) was, I believe, the first to settle west of New England. They went before the Revolution to what was known as the Skeensborough District in the then county of Charlotte, N. Y. This district comprised all the country between Lake George and the present Vermont line, and in it lay Whitehall, Granville, and other towns associated with the early Grangers. But after the Revolution, and as the land in central New York and northern Ohio was opened to settlement, the rush began. The families from Turkey Hills, descendants of the George who was forced to leave Suffield, settled at Phelps in Ontario County, N. Y., and spread over the country north to Sodus on Lake Ontario. As they grew this family again became restless, and from central New York they went by scores to Michigan. I believe the bulk of the large family in the latter State are descended from the Phelps Grangers. To-day family bearing the name in Phelps.

The beginning of the Revolution found a goodly number of Grangers still living at Suffield. There were twenty-seven heads of families there in 1775 who paid taxes. To-day there are but four taxpayers in the place who bear the name of Granger: Timothy Granger, who came from the George who lived at Turkey Hills, resides a half mile west of the meeting-house; Fernando Granger, a single man, lives in the old home at Taintor's Hill, three miles southwest, which was built by his ancestor, Captain John, one hundred and fifty years ago; Julius Granger, who came from Abraham, the youngest son of Launcelot, lives at West Suffield; while Francis Granger, a single man, lives on the old place on Feather Street, facing the Connecticut River, which has been in the possession of his branch of the family almost, if not quite, from the time of his ancestor, Samuel, the son of Launcelot Granger.