Excerpt from An Account of the Early Land-Grants of Groton, Massachusetts It should be borne in mind that the first settlers of the town did not attach the same signification to the word meadow which now belongs to it in New England, where it means low, swampy land, without regard to the mowing. They called by the name meadow all grass-land that was annually mown for hay, and especially that by the side of a river or a brook, and this meaning of the word was the common one in England, whence they brought their language. They sometimes spoke of a swamp, meaning by it what we call a bog, but much of this kind of land has since been reclaimed, and is known with us as meadow. As a matter of fact it happened that the lands which could be mown for the fodder were low lands, and it would require perhaps less than a generation to transfer the meaning of mowing lands to the low lands, which were about the only ones that could be mown in the early days of the colony. This explanation will make clear the following vote of the town, passed February 18, 1680. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.