Samuel Pond Jr. entered the world on a winter day—March 4, 1648—when the village of Windsor, Connecticut, still smelled of pine and woodsmoke, and the very soil was in the process of being claimed, cleared, and built upon by English settlers. His father, Samuel Pond Sr., had arrived years earlier, a man of uncertain origin who had managed, in the short span of a colonial lifetime, to marry, raise a household, and acquire a modest estate of 62 acres. This land, stitched together with labor and tenacity, lay along the banks of the Farmington River where mist rose over the meadows and wolves could still be heard in the night.