The Pleasant View Farm property, of course, was originally Native American Indian land on the territorial fringes between the Massachusett and Nipmuc tribes. Arrowheads and other artifacts are not uncommonly found in locally plowed fields and gardens, including a perfectly crafted arrowhead that my father, Bob Delaney, found while tilling one day. The 1676 King Phillip War resulted in the eradication or enslavement of most Native American Indians of the region, and by the late 17th/early 18th centuries, English settlers found their way to what would become Pleasant View Farm, evidence of which includes several stone rubble cellar holes, ancient maps, and local histories.
Briefly, William Leland (1817-1888), a gunsmith and farmer by trade and son of the well-known gunsmith Lemuel Leland and his second wife Chloe, built the house and barn in the mid-1840s (family pictured above). Bill Gun, as he was known, married Amy Eames and together had two daughters, Agnes (1842) and Amy (1849). Bill Gun's death record indicates that he died of "shock following the removal of a tumor from thigh" several years after Amy married farmer George Fleming. One of their two daughters, Mercie, a schoolteacher, later married Irving Hildreth, who, census reports tell us, boarded in their home as a servant and farm laborer. A Holliston native whose father worked in a shoe shop, as head of the household Irving inherited the farm in the early 20th century. They had a brood of their own, including the last true farmer of that land, eldest son Harold Hildreth (1903-1986), who lived there until his death with wife Leta.
As evidenced by census and other records, along with hundreds of artifacts they left behind, the Lelands/Flemings/Hildreths were true Yankee farmers, relying on the land and toilsome labor to make life work. Independent in spirit and self-sufficient in their means, they left tantalizing clues to piece together life on the farm over the generations, some pictures of which are in the gallery below.