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The Manchester Historia  Vol. I
By Susan Waterflower Bell
A Historia to the Somerset Adventures

The city we now know as Somerset can trace its origins in the humble collection of cottages built by the first Anglo-Saxon settlers to brave the three week voyage from ’Mother England’ to this, then remote outpost of the new world. The readers must remember this was before the puritans had braved there crossing to settle in the rugged coastline in the land that is now called the ’United States of America’.

The dwelling of these first peoples was nothing grand. Nothing but simple wooden box house’s made from locally produced lumber and hammered in with nails that where brought from home. Records from this period are scarce and hard to find. Indeed what little we do know comes from private dairies and letters.

The letters and dairies paint us a picture of a collection of houses that seemed to center at a large wooden building. This building is often referred to as the ‘Meeting House’. Here the first charter naming collection of houses and the few shops the village of ‘The Village of Somerset’.

At the time of the Charting the village could boost a population of around five hundred people. Most of whom where Anglo-Saxon. Once the settlement had been reward the statues of a village. A mission from the ‘Church of England’ arrived. The group of four monks, two laymen was lead by a young Priest by the name of Fr. Burns.

Fr. Burns played a critical in not only building up the newly created Parish of ‘Somerset’ but also devoted his time and effort into schooling the young men of the village in the classics. One might even say the foundation of proud school system was birthed in the cold, one room cabin that was donated to the church by a unknown benefactor.

Doctors, layers, and skilled workers followed the mission. After all building a church required a number of skills, stonemasons where needed to lay the foundation and build the walls, silver and blacksmiths where needed to forge the tools, and above all men where needed to handle the other task that are to many to list here. These men where all paid in ready cash. And many of those workmen spent there hard earned money at local shops, thus keeping the money in city if will.

Though vices follow people, and once such vice is the love of drinking and women. Now some miles from the booming settlement was a low laying area. Here the first taverns where built, these first taverns where nothing more than shacks, some where a little better than others but for the most part they where shacks.

The area was given the name ‘Hemlock Lane’ due to the vast amounts of Hemlock leafs that could found growing in the area. Its also a play on words. Becomes Hemlock is a poisons plant, and the area was so filled with vice and sin, the name hemlock seemed to suit, because in words of one Fr. Burns, ’The place is nothing but a collection of sin and vice, a open wound that will one day poison the youth of this city and become a stain that will not be cleansed from its moral fabric’.