A committee of the pastor's people met their old clergyman upon his landing at Boston, and invited him to return to the charge from which he had, nearly three years before, been torn. And Mr. Williams had the courage to accept their offer, notwithstanding the fact that the war continued with unabated bitterness. In 1707 the town voted to build him a house "as big as Ensign Sheldon's, and a back room as big as may be thought convenient." This house is still standing (1902), though Ensign Sheldon's, the "Old Indian House in Deerfield," as it has been popularly called, was destroyed more than half a century ago. The Indian House stood at the northern end of Deerfield Common, and exhibited to its latest day the marks of the tomahawk left upon its front door in the attack of 1704, and the perforations made by the balls inside. The door is still preserved, and is one of the most interesting relics now to be seen in Memorial Hall, Deerfield.
For more than twenty years after his return from captivity, Mr. Williams served his parish faithfully. He took into his new house a new wife, by whom he had several children; and in this same house he passed peacefully away June 12, 1729, in the sixty-fifth year of his age, and the forty-fifth of his ministry.
Stephen Williams, who had been taken captive when a lad of eleven, was redeemed in 1705 with his father. In spite of the hardships to which he had been so early exposed, he was a fine strong boy when he returned to Deerfield, and he went on with his rudely interrupted education to such good effect that he graduated from Harvard in 1713 at the age of twenty. In 1716 he settled as minister at Longmeadow, in which place he died in 1772. Yet his manhood was not passed without share in the wars of the time, for he was chaplain in the Louisburg expedition in 1745, and in the regiment of Colonel Ephraim Williams in his fatal campaign in 1755, and again in the Canadian campaign of 1756. The portrait of him which is here given was painted about 1748, and is now to be seen in the hall of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, within four-score rods of the place where the boy captive was born, and from which he was carried as a tender child into captivity.