Elihu Hoyt of Deerfield, Massachusetts, was the youngest son of David Hoyt and his second wife, Silence King. He grew up in the Old Indian House, a legendary building that had survived the 1704 raid on Deerfield during Queen Anne’s War (1701-1713). His father kept tavern there, and Elihu inherited the house when his father died in 1814. Elihu was a colonel in the militia and a county commissioner, and he served in the legislature every year but three from 1803, until he died in 1833. The year he died also saw the printing of his Brief Sketch of the First Settlement of Deerfield, Mass., written to satisfy the many curious visitors who came to see the scarred door of his house, a relic of the 1704 raid. “It has now become a matter of much interest to the Antiquarian,” he wrote, “to learn what were the perils endured by the first settlers, the time and place of some of the principal incidents, which without some record, would soon be lost.” He believed the sketch would “gratify the feelings of those who are descendants of the early settlers of the place,” and presumably his own descendants were among those he had in mind. Elihu had married Hannah Taylor in 1794, and they had seven children, three of whom lived to adulthood.