New Glasgow
The peace held until the ninth of April, 1731, when the church elders voted to bring the congregation under the Platform of Church Discipline, the formal order of governance that the synod of Cambridge had settled on years before. To an English Congregationalist the vote was a housekeeping matter, the kind of thing a growing church does as a matter of course. To the Presbyterian families it looked like something else entirely, a foreign hand reaching into a form of worship they had crossed an ocean to keep. Ten families withdrew from communion the moment the vote passed. In time they were placed under discipline and then excommunicated outright, cut loose from the very church they had helped found seven years before. The record kept the names. William Dunahy. Robert Hambleton. Jane and Rebecca Wark. John, Hugh, and Mary Hambleton. Israel and Mary Gibbs, and others besides.
Back in Hopkinton, the ground they had cleared did not sit ownerless for long. The families signed their leases over to Gordon in 1742, eight years after they had already gone, closing out on paper what had ended on the ground years before. What became of the farms in Gordon's hands afterward, the record does not say. The next clear trace comes only in 1809, when a man named Seth Nelson sold a farmstead standing at the end of what is still called Old Town Road today, on the line between Hopkinton and Mendon. No deed survives connecting the Nelsons directly back to Gordon or to the Scots-Irish who first cleared that ground, but the location leaves little room for coincidence. What the record does show is a hillside cleared twice, farmed by two different peoples in two different tongues for two different churches, within the span of a single century, and a bell that was promised and never rang.