 Traditional accounts of Springfield history say that the first city and county records were kept "in the chamber over the porch", and that Commissioner John Pynchon, and associates Elizur Holyoke, and Deacon Samuel Chapin held their court in the parlor before audiences of townsfolk.Toward midnight on a night in October 1675, every room of the house was filled with Springfield's men, women, and children as tribesmen burned every other dwelling to the ground; until the end of the siege it remained the only safehouse in the settlement.Following the rebuilding of Springfield, the homestead, with walls described as more than one foot thick, remained in the Pynchon family until it was razed in 1831 for a "more modern edifice".