The Incendiary

Greenwold is a rural township, in which there is a little village, a grist-mill, a saw-mill, a paper-mill, a small woolen factory and many farms. It is largely a farming town, in fact; every autumn the farmers hold an agricultural fair in their enclosed fair grounds, and the exhibits of live stock and farm products are a credit to both farms and farmers. 

As in many other rural towns in the East, the people are generally related to each other, either by marriages or blood relationship. There were, at the time of the settlement of Greenwold, two families, the Marshalls and the Browns; and even now fully half the entire population bear either one or the other of these names, and far more than half are related to one or the other of these families. Ansel Marshall and his sons, Hiram and Ephraim, own what is considered the best farm in Greenwold. 

The Browns, though also farmers, own the mill property. Of late the property has fallen into possession of five brothers— Calvin, Holmes, John, Stephen and Sumner Brown. 

For more than half a century there has existed in this town of Greenwold that ugliest and most disintegrating of all social elements, a feud. It lies between the Browns and Marshalls. It had its origin years ago, in a dispute about a “fence-line,” and has been perpetuated in annual quarrels about flowage on the small river which furnishes water power for the mill. The Marshalls own the meadows, and the Browns by the dam by which they secure their water power overflow the low lands, much to the detriment of the Marshall hay crop.