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When second-generation settlers such as the Rogerses and the Snows “removed” to new communities within the Plymouth Colony, they were presumably motivated by some combination of pioneering spirit, the pull of unconstrained opportunities away from the settled center, and the Colony’s desire to solidify its hold on new lands. One suspects that three generations later, the continuing dispersion of their descendants to rather more distant frontiers may have stemmed more from the filling up of the best farmlands back home.
In the mid-1700s1, fifth great-grandparents Benjamin Smith (great-grandson of Joseph and Hannah Rogers), and his new wife Ruth Snow Smith (great-granddaughter of Nicholas and Constance Hopkins Snow) set up housekeeping two hundred miles west from their birthplace in Eastham, in the new settlement of Sandisfield, in Berkshire County.

The town was incorporated in 1762. By this time the Plymouth Colony had long been absorbed into His Majesty’s Colony of Massachusetts Bay.
I’m actively investigating the stories2 of the Smith, Hurd, and Stillman families, three of our lines that met and conjoined in Sandisfield and in neighboring Colebrook, Connecticut, in the mid-18th century.

The Smiths and the Stillmans arrived in the 1750s and quickly became leaders in the community. A main route through Colebrook is still called Stillman Hill Road, acknowledging the Stillman Hill neighborhood where many of our kinfolk lived.
1Their arrival date remains a bit conjectural, but 1755 is my best guess. The Proprietors’ Book records that our Benjamin and his brother Solomon were offered forty shillings a head to bring their families to settle in “Housatonic Township #3.” I’ve reproduced the actual text of the offer here. Inasmuch as all the Smiths of that generation are buried in the Berkshires, we gather that they accepted the inducement. Reports that their son (our Uncle) Lot (b. 1756) was the first birth of a male child in the new settlement suggest that they had then arrived fairly recently.
 2In this “Mayflower” piece, I report my progress in getting acquainted with the people of our direct Mayflower lines. Even beyond its Pilgrim echoes, though, this now-remote neighborhood is a very special place for our family history, and so I’ve moved most Berkshire-specific material to a separate section named “Sandisfield-Colebrook,” within this collection. Some of the material’s repeated in both places, and I’ve linked back and forth, as has seemed appropriate.
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