Believed to be of Scottish heritage,[a] Taft left the British Isles to settle in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1670s.
Living first in Braintree, he settled in Mendon in 1680 and was a leading citizen and wealthy landholder, who was instrumental in the growth of the town.
[1] Planning to move to Mendon, as other settlers who survived the war were returning to the area, they purchased the farm of Colonel William Crowne on August 16, 1679.
[4] The previous landowner, Colonel William Crowne, reportedly left the area during King Philip's War, and did not return.
[18] Touching Robert Taffe, the person complayned of for irregular trading with the Indeans, that matter is wholly left to the County Court of Suffolk to doe therein as they shall judge meet unto whom the peticoners may apply themselves for releife.
[2][14] Taft's son Joseph planned with other members of the town to build a road west of the Great River beginning in 1727.
[24][27][28] There is a tradition that he [Taft] was an adherent of the commonwealth, a Scotch Puritan, disgusted with the Cavaliers, and that in the troublous times consequent upon the rule of Charles the Second, he sought refuge from civil and religious tyranny in the forests of New England, — that he had been in the country longer than any extant records show, and had even been in Mendon before the Indian War.
He was of age in 1660 when Charles II gained control of the British government, and had opportunity to be disgusted, and perhaps terrified, by the misgovernment and tyranny, civil and religious, of that monarch.
The distance in time is not so great as to take away all the force of statements handed down from fathers to sons, and so far as this tradition makes Scotland the place from which Robert first came, it is probably correct.