It would appear that a second group that settled in Londonderry, NH. Again this may be an area to find out if any of these settlers were at the Siege of Londonderry, City, Ireland in 1689. Mike boyd Brisbane Scotch-Irish in New England By Rev. A. L. Perry, Professor of History and Politics, Williams College, Williamstown, Mass. Taken from The Scotch-Irish in America: Proceedings and Addresses of the Second Congress at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, May 29 to June 1, 1890. 2. LONDONDERRY. The core of the company that settled Londonderry, N. H., in April, 1710, consisted of sixteen men, with their families, namely: James McKeen, John Barnett, Archibald Clendenin, John Mitchell, James Sterrett, James Anderson, Randall Alexander, James Gregg, James Clark, James Nesmith, Allen Anderson. Robert Weir, John Morrison, Samuel Allison, Thomas Steele, John Stuart. Thirteen of these men lived to an average age of seventy-nine years; six of them attained to nearly ninety, and two of them overpassed that limit; and one, John Morrison, lived to see ninety-seven years. All of the Scotch-Irish of that generation, wherever they located in New England, unless their personal habits were such as shorten life, attained on the average to a very advanced age. The pioneers in this second settlement were most of them men in middle life, robust and persevering, and adventurous and strong-willed, fronting death with no thought of surrender. Most of them were the descendants of Scotch Covenanters who had passed over to Ulster later than the mass of the settlers there, and they had kept together in church relations, as well as in residence, more closely than most of the Scotch settlers. Their residence was in the valley of the Bann, mostly on the Antrim side of the river, in or near the towns or parishes of Coleraine, Ballymoney, Ballymena, Ballywatick, and Kilrea; and when they decided to emigrate, they still wished to keep together in church relations, and those of them who had been under the pastoral charge of Rev. James McGregor, who came with them, especially the McKeen families and their numerous connections, desired to form a distinct settlement here and become again the charge of their beloved pastor. With this end in view, about twenty families, taking others with them, amounting in all (as Willis estimated) to three hundred persons, sailed from Boston in the late autumn to explore Casco Bay for a home, under a promise from Governor Shute of a grant of land whenever and wherever they decided upon a location in any still unappropriated quarter in New England. They wintered, hungry and cold, in Portland Harbor. In the early spring they explored to the eastward, but there is no record how far they went or what they found. It is enough for our present purpose that Maine seemed to offer no genial home to those sea-worn and weather-beaten voyagers. Though they left a few of their number in Portland, to whom we shall recur later, and probably a larger number on the Kennebec at or near Wiscasset, the bulk determined to seek a milder climate and a more favorable location. Undoubtedly while still in Boston their attention had been called to Southern New Hampshire as well as to Maine, both at that time under the jurisdiction of the governor of Massachusetts, for they sailed directly back to the mouth of the Merrimac and anchored at Haverhill, on that river, where they heard of a fine tract of land about fifteen miles to the northward, then called Nutfield, on account of the abundance of the chestnut and walnut and butternut trees which, in connection with the pines, distinguished the growth of its forests. A party, under the lead of James McKeen, grandfather of the first president of Bowdoin College, and brother-in-law of Pastor McGregor, went up and examined the tract; and ascertaining that it was not appropriated, they decided at once to take up here the grant obtained from the government of Massachusetts of a township twelve miles square of any of her unappropriated lands. Having selected the spot on which to commence their settlement, and having built a few temporary huts on a little brook which they called "West-Running Brook," a tributary of Beaver Brook, which falls into the Merrimac at Lowell, and leaving two or three of their number in charge, they returned to Haverhill to bring on their families, their provisions, their implements of labor, and household utensils. Mr. McGregor and some others had passed the winter at Dracut, on Beaver Brook, just north of Lowell; and two parties, one from Dracut and the other from Haverhill, were soon converging through the forests toward West-Running Brook, when they met, as tradition says, at a place ever after called "Horse Hill," from the fact that both parties there tied their horses while the men surveyed the territory around as the future home. This day was April 11, old style, 1719. The next day, having in the meantime explored with the leaders more fully what they had selected for the township, the good pastor, under a large oak on the east side of Beaver Pond, delivered to his people, now partially re-united, the first sermon ever preached in that region--Isaiah, 32, 2: "And a man shall be as a hiding-place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place; as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land." The spot where this religious service was held, especially the tree around which these hardy pioneers assembled, was for a long period regarded with great reverence by the people of Londonderry. When at last it decayed and fell, the owner of the field in which it stood planted a young apple tree among its rotten roots, which now serves, and will long serve, to designate the venerated spot. These first families, in order to secure the advantages of near neighborhood, and be better able to protect themselves against the attacks of the Indians, with which all the New England colonies were at that time threatened, planted their log-houses on each side of West-Running Brook, on home-lots but thirty rods wide and extending back on a north and south line till they inclosed sixty acres each. These lots constituted what has ever since been called the Double Range. For fifty years or more this range continued to be a populous section of the town. The first season the settlers cultivated a field alongside the brook, then and ever since called the "Common Field;" but the best land in the township was not in that section, for it lay too low, and as each settler had allotted to him another sixty acres elsewhere, after a while the lowland began to be deserted of houses, and nothing is now to be seen along the Double Range but meadows, dotted here and there by the cellar-holes of these earliest planters. No price was paid for the land, since it was the free gift of King William to his loyal subjects of the old country, some of them faithful champions of his throne in the siege and defense of Londonderry. The first dwellings were, of course, of logs, and covered with bark. It is to be noticed, however, that in these exiles for rightousness's sake, sound and pious as they were, there was as much human nature to the square inch as in the rest of mankind. When John Morrison was building his house in the Double Range his wife came to him, and in a persuasive, affectionate manner said to him, "Aweel, aweel, dear Joan, an' it maun be a log-house, do make it a log heegher nor the lave,'' (than the rest). Beaver Brook, however, tumbles well in its course from the pond to the Merrimac, and saw-mills were soon built, and within a year or two good framed houses were erected; the first for Pastor McGregor, only quite recently demolished, and the second by John McMurphy, Esq., who bore a commission as justice of the peace, dated in Ireland, and so antedated the commission signed by Governor Shute, April 29, 1720, to Justice James McKeen, in some sense the foremost man of the settlement. Two stone garrison-houses, strongly built and well prepared to resist an attack of the Indians, were put up the first season, and to these the several families retired at night whenever, for any reason, special danger from that source was apprehended. But it is remarkable, that neither in Lovell's War, when Londonderry was strictly a frontier town, nor in either of the two subsequent French and Indian wars, did any hostile force from the northward ever even approach that town. Tradition has always been busy in ascribing the signal preservation of this colony from the attacks of the Indians to the influence of Pastor McGregor over Governor Vaudreuil, of Canada. It is said that they had known each other in the Old World at college; that a correspendence was kept up between them on this side the water; that at the request of his friend the governor caused means to be used for the protection of the settlement; that he induced the Catholic priests to charge the Indians not to injure any of these people, as they were different from the English, and that the warriors were assured beforehand that no bounty would be paid for such scalps, and no sins forgiven to those who killed them. It is certain that the early inhabitants of Londonderry believed in all these assertions; and it is some confirmation of them that a manuscript sermon of McGregor's, still extant, has on the margin the name and various titles of the Marquis Vaudreuil, by which, of course, he would be addressed upon occasion.