The "Old Fort", John Pynchon's brick house at Springfield

The brick house John Pynchon built at Springfield about 1660, the only brick building in the town in that century, with its steep gables and arched door. It was “sometimes called ‘the old fort,’ from its having been a fortified house and place of refuge.” When the town was attacked on 5 October 1675 the people fled in the night to the town’s three fortified houses, Major Pynchon’s the first of them, and held out while thirty-two of the forty-five dwellings and Pynchon’s corn mill and saw mill were burned. The house stayed in the family until it was pulled down in 1831. Henry Morris, giving the town’s address on the two-hundredth anniversary of the burning, owned a photograph of a sketch Rev. Dr. Peabody drew from memory the year after it came down, and this plate in his printed address seems to be taken from it. John Pynchon, magistrate and commander of the forces on the river that autumn, was probably the father of Mary (Pynchon) Whiting; Deacon Samuel Chapin, who had governed the town with him, died there on 11 November 1675, five weeks after the burning.