A fine article [“A Relic Returned,” Gazette, March 29] regarding the return of Justus Dwight’s powder horn to Belchertown’s Stone House Museum, whose Tom Stockton was among representatives receiving items that were stolen 50 years ago.

It’s important to say more upon Dwight, a central figure relating to the village of his name, about which I have been researching as of late, thanks in large part to the museum and historian Cliff McCarthy.

In 1765, Captain Justus Dwight, Esq., purchased land here, immediately southeast of the Amherst line, in the heart of what would become known, by turns, Log Town, Hope Town, Dwight’s Station, Pansy Park and today, simply Dwight.

It was at the confluence of three rushing brooks, near a swamp, a 9-square-mile mountainous no-man’s land between two larger settlements.

His father, Nathaniel, who ran a tavern near the Common, gave Justus a parcel that year as well, for “love and affection.” As surveyors, Justus and his brother are said to have laid out most town lots.

With wife Sarah Lamb, who was expecting, and their two children, ages 6 and 1, Justus Dwight began a farm here in the fall of 1769, in part because of “contention in the church in Belchertown” that was “carried to such a pitch of virulence,” according to his autobiography.

“When I first began the farm I now live on,” he writes. “There was no path to go in to or from the farm, and to go 5 miles or 6 miles through the woods up very bad hills without a path was hard and yet we attended [Pelham] meeting often.”

When the Revolution broke out, according to a published genealogy, Dwight had, “a weaker type of [T]ory feeling, embarrassed by conscientious convictions leading them one way, and local sympathies another way.” He believed the colonists “premature in their uprising” though independence “would eventually be consummated.” He, like his father, for at least some of the war, paid a substitute.

In 1788, the town sent him to Boston to represent them on the ratification of the Constitution, which he voted against, siding instead with the anti-Federalists, who believed central government would wield too much power.

Two years on, tragedy struck when the family’s 11-year-old daughter died. Justus began the area’s first cemetery with young Sarah’s burial in the spring of 1790.

By the turn of the century, he held 290 acres, with wood house, barns and a “two-story home with fourteen windows” in which he lived with children and grandchildren. Years later, his grandson Harrison would erect the home remaining at Federal and Goodell streets.

Dwight also served as town clerk and as a selectman. He died in 1824, age 86, and his beautifully carved headstone gives us this: “The righteous shall be had, In everlasting remembrance.”

Driving toward Belchertown, look for his former farmland in the green pasture on the right, just past Wilson Road.

Michael Carolan lives in Dwight, a village of Belchertown. 

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