The Bostwicks, Ingersolls and Canfields were all New England families who had made their start in the New World in the 1600s, and frontier living had been second nature to them for generations. The Bostwicks and Canfields were kinfolk by marriage and as community leaders in several places. Samuel Canfield Sr. was particularly valuable to the Oxford settlement because he had already lived the life of starting a new settlement in the mountains of New Hampshire. In the early 1770s he and wife Lucy joined a group of Connecticut families who had been granted the wilderness township of Marlow there, and Samuel soon became a town leader, elected one of the selectmen for the community and appointed captain of the local militia company. When the War of Independence came, he rallied the company to support the Continental Army. For this he is still revered as a local hero in Marlow.