Forty Shillings from Eastham
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This map may help us understand why it took a cash inducement to bring our Smiths from their Cape Cod home to the wilderness of the Berkshires. Coming from Wethersfield, the Stillmans were moving little farther than across town. They seem to have remained part of the Wethersfield scene: Uncle Robert was married there in 1784, long after the family moved to his birthplace in Sandisfield.

The Smiths, on the other hand, were leaving behind a long (and perhaps already a proud) five-generation history in Plymouth Colony. Benjamin’s great-grandfather was Pilgrim Thomas Rogers of the 1620 Mayflower; his grandfather was Joseph Rogers, also a Mayflower passenger as a ten-year-old boy. Ruth’s great-grandfather was Pilgrim Stephen Hopkins; her grandmother was Constance Hopkins Snow, a Mayflower teenager. Thomas and Stephen both signed the Mayflower Compact; perhaps their great-grandchildren were beginning to understand the historic importance of that document and of the pioneering that the Pilgrims had done more than a century earlier.

Grandpa Joseph Rogers with his wife Grandma Hannah, and Grandma Constance Hopkins Snow with her husband Grandpa Nicholas, by the way, had been among the original settlers of Eastham, around 1644; they lie in the old Cove Burial ground there.

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