# 2 Settling Hurry Hill  Take time to orient yourself. Fry Road
runs north and south. If you face the woods and put Fry Road to
your back, you are facing west. Charles Billings settled the
Hurry Hill area and bought 100 acres of wooded land for $2/acre.
To the south, you can see one of the fields he cleared and a
woods – a maple sugarbush (a large number of maple trees).
Imagine the fields being covered with a huge maple, hemlock, and
beech forest. Imagine the work it took in 1846 for Charles,
armed with axe and saws to clear the land by cutting off the
trees, removing the tree stumps and rocks from the field to make
a farm from a woodlot. The settlement of Franklin Township took
place between 1820 and 1850. Near the Fry Road bridge north of
the creek, there is small mound which housed a sawmill. You can
faintly see the “run” where water flowed around the uphill side
of the mound to power the sawmill. When the fields were cleared
of trees, sawmills were built nearby and subsequently, log
cabins and barns. A b