A Penny An Acre
Among the men who eventually put their names to those printed leases was one who never farmed an acre of Hopkinton in his life.
James Gordon was born in 1693 in County Down, Ireland, and crossed to Boston about 1718. He made his living importing Irish linen, served among the town's first constables, and in 1723 bought pew sixty-two at King's Chapel. By 1736 his standing in that congregation had risen far enough to make him the chapel's first warden. He was also, on the side, a speculator in land, and he placed Scots-Irish tenant families on Hopkinton ground through the 1720s, well before any lease bore his own signature. The paper caught up to the practice only in 1742, when six plots of Hopkinton land, described in the surviving instrument as held by marchant signee James Gordon, formally passed into his name. By then the families he had placed there years before were long gone. Having given up their farms and struck out for Blandford, they signed their Hopkinton leases over to Gordon, closing out on paper an arrangement that had stood, informally, for two decades. Those lease papers survive today, archived among Harvard's own manuscript holdings alongside the deed that created the town in the first place.
They had come to Hopkinton for the same reason the English tenants down the road came. Unlike the English, who expected as a matter of course to own the ground they broke, the Scots and the Irish had farmed as tenants in the old country for generations, and a ninety-nine-year lease looked to them less like a compromise than like an ordinary and workable way to hold land. They moved their families in, cleared the timber, brought in cattle and swine, and raised the first farmhouses on plots that had been raw woodland a season before. On the second of September, 1724, a Congregational church organized in the young town, and seven of its original members were Scots-Irish Presbyterians who had settled under Gordon's sponsorship. Five more Scottish families joined them soon after. In its first years the congregation kept no formal discipline at all. The families simply assented to a shared covenant and worshiped together, without much apparatus of church government behind it, and for seven years that loose arrangement held.