His son, Alphonso Taft, was born in Townshend, Vermont, and attended Yale University, where he founded the Skull and Bones society.

He later was Secretary of War and Attorney General of the United States and the father of President William Howard Taft.

In 1734, Benjamin Taft started an iron forge, in Uxbridge, where some of the earliest beginnings of America's industrial revolution began.

Josiah's widow became "America's first woman voter", Lydia Chapin Taft, when she voted in three Uxbridge town meetings.

[3] President George Washington visited Samuel Taft's Tavern in Uxbridge in 1789 on his "inaugural tour" of New England.

[9][10][11] [12] Ezra Taft Benson, Sr, a famous Mormon pioneer, lived here between 1817 and 1835, and married his first wife Pamela, of Northbridge, in 1832.

The story is told that Peter Rawson walked a cow all the way from Uxbridge to Townshend, a distance of well over 100 miles.

Peter Rawson Taft I became a Vermont legislator and eventually died in Hamilton County, Cincinnati, Ohio.

[17] William Howard Taft, as a young boy, spent a number of summers in the Blackstone Valley in Millbury, Massachusetts, and even attended schools for at least a term in that nearby town.

His own autobiography states that he lived in Uxbridge between 1817 and 1835, or about 17 years, after his mother, Chloe Taft and father, John Benson, moved to a farm there.

Ezra joined the LDS Church at Quincy, Illinois in 1840, entered plural marriages, marrying seven more wives after Pamela.

[9] These woolen mills, some of the first to use power looms, and satinets, ran 24/7 during the Civil War producing cloth for U.S. military uniforms.

Samuel Slater, who built his mill in (1790), at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, on the Blackstone River, was credited by President Andrew Jackson as the father of America's Industrial Revolution.

[21] This story was repeated in a poem form by Mayor Chapin, at a famous Taft family reunion here,[where?]