The first white men known or supposed to have ever penetrated the
original forests in the town of Heath were Richard Hazen and six others,
the surveyor and chain-men and their assistants, who ran the official
northern line of Massachusetts in the early spring of 1741. Besides the
surveyor himself, who was then a prominent citizen of Haverhill, on the
Merrimac, and his son of the same name, then nineteen years old, the
party consisted of Caleb Swan, Benjamin Smith, Zachariah Hildrith,
Ebenezer Shaw and William Richardson. Under an imperative order from the
Privy Council in England, Governor Belcher, who at that time
administered government over both Massachusetts and New Hampshire,
commissioned Hazen to run the ultimate line between the two, beginning
at a point three miles north of Pawtucket Falls on the Merrimac (now
Lowell), and extending on a due west course till it should meet His
Majesty's other Governments. This arbitrary decision of the Privy
Council in selecting the very southernmost point in the whole course of
the Merrimac, as the place meant in in the old Charter of Massachusetts
in the phrase "Merrimack River," instead of taking, as Massachusetts
claimed, the northernmost point of the river in Franklin, N.
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