theparkerfamily.org

Month: September 2026

  • The House That Made a City: Humphrey Chadbourne (1615–1667)

    The House That Made a City: Humphrey Chadbourne (1615–1667)

    The history of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, is complicated, and no two accounts agree. But, for a long time, the legend has put my great-nth-grandfather at the center of it.

    Humphrey Chadbourne (1615–1667) — or maybe his father William (1582–1652) — built the first house in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and everything that’s there now grew up around it.

    The story goes that he came over a housewright, which in 1631 was the top of the carpenter’s trade. They were the men you trusted not just to nail boards together but to raise a frame that would still be standing when your grandchildren were old. Captain John Mason’s Laconia Company had a charter, a stretch of riverbank, and a stand of wild strawberries that gave the place its name. What it didn’t have was a single permanent English building. It needed one, and it needed it to be good, because a real house is how you tell a coastline you’re not leaving. They gave the job to Chadbourne.

    He built the Great House on the slope above the water — a store below, lodging above, the headquarters of the whole venture. Oak frame, mortise and tenon, pinned and joined to stand against everything the North Atlantic could throw up the river, which over the next century was plenty. It held. The men who’d crossed an ocean on a company’s promise now had a roof that meant the promise was real. The settlement had a center. It had a beginning. And the beginning had Chadbourne’s hands on it.

    He didn’t stop at one house. The man who built the first building went on to help build the colony around it. He bought land up the Piscataqua and dealt with the sachems who held it, on terms steady enough that he traded with them for years. He kept the town’s records as clerk. He sat as selectman, then went down to the General Court as a deputy, then took the bench as an associate judge under Massachusetts. He married Lucy Treworgye and raised a houseful of children at Sturgeon Creek. When he died in 1667 he was one of the substantial men of the river — his will written from the Parish of Unity, his estate large enough to take real time to inventory properly.

    That’s the arc the place remembers. A young carpenter raises one stubborn building at the edge of the known world, the building holds long enough for a fishing charter to turn into a town and the town to turn into a city, and the carpenter turns into a founder. The Great House was the seed. Humphrey — or somebody — planted it.

    You can still stand where it stood. Three hundred and ninety years on, the strawberries are gone and the city is not, and the line runs straight back to someone.

    Different people can choose which legends they believe. To be honest, I’m pretty happy believing this one.

    Sources. The attribution of the Great House to Humphrey Chadbourne, as carried by the Strawbery Banke Museum and Wikipedia, traces in popular print to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, An Old Town by the Sea (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1893). Earlier, the conflation of William and Humphrey Chadbourne into a single builder traces to James Sullivan, The History of the District of Maine (Boston: Thomas & Andrews, 1795). The scholarly correction — the family in Tamworth, Staffordshire until the Pied Cow crossing of 1634, with the building contract not surviving — is Robert Charles Anderson, The Great Migration: Immigrants to New England, 1634–1635, vol. II, C–F (Boston: NEHGS, 2001), 33–36.

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  • Marching at Liberty: Thomas Stanton (~1615–1677)

    Marching at Liberty: Thomas Stanton (~1615–1677)

    Most of my ancestors are a line on a chart. A lucky few left enough of a paper trail that I can wonder what in the actual #$^%& were they thinking.

    Thomas Stanton (abt. 1615–1677), my eighth-great-grandfather, sailed from London in 1635 at twenty. Within a year he had taught himself Algonquian — one of the few Englishmen in the colony who could speak to the people whose land the colony was taking. By 1636 he was John Winthrop Jr.’s interpreter.

    The language was his career, and it made him useful to the English who faught what the called the Pequot War.

    Before dawn on 26 May 1637, English forces under Captain John Mason and their Narragansett and Mohegan allies surrounded a fortified Pequot village at Mystic, set it on fire, and shot the people who tried to escape.

    The warriors were mostly away. The village was women, children, and the old. Between four and seven hundred people were burned or killed in about an hour; two Englishmen died.

    The Narragansett and Mohegan who had come with Mason were sickened by it and went home. The English wrote it down as the will of God.

    The next year, the Treaty of Hartford ordered the survivors sold into slavery or handed to the victors, and forbade them to return to their land, to speak their language, or to call themselves Pequot.

    That is the war Thomas Stanton interpreted.

    On a march after Mystic, as the English burned Pequot homes as they went, two Pequot men stood on a hill and shouted at the column. Stanton — “marching at liberty,” moving free of the ranks — asked leave to fire on them. The captain refused.

    Stanton was not a reluctant man dragged along by his usefulness. Given the chance to kill, he asked for it.

    A few weeks later, English forces trapped a large group of Pequot in a swamp near Fairfield. Stanton went in to talk to them. He was trusted, and he spoke their language, and he used both to bring close to two hundred old men, women, and children out of the swamp. They were sold into slavery.

    Connecticut made him its first official interpreter in 1638. The United Colonies put him on retainer for all of New England, and by 1658 he was Interpreter General. He was the English voice at the treaties, the surrenders, and the land transfers across southern New England.

    The conquest needed someone to make its terms understood to the people it was dispossessing. That was his job.

    The record also shows him, later, arguing that the defeated tribes be treated fairly, and protesting the reparations the commissioners kept extracting from them years after the fighting stopped. And it shows Uncas, the Mohegan sachem, coming to Stanton’s house to have him write his will.

    He marched at liberty — no one made him. It was his job, sure, but he chose it, and stayed in it for 40 years.

    Sources. John Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War — the Mystic fight and the line that gives the post its title, Stanton “marching at liberty.” John Underhill, Newes from America — the allies leaving Mystic. Treaty of Hartford (1638) — the terms imposed on the survivors. The Barbour Collection of Connecticut vital records — the Stonington descent through Anna Stanton. Colony and United Colonies records — Stanton’s interpreter appointments and his post as Interpreter General.

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  • Instead of Ground Nuts: Lucretia Williams (1633–1676)

    Instead of Ground Nuts: Lucretia Williams (1633–1676)

    The first solid fact anyone wrote down about Lucretia is how she died, and it doesn’t use her name.

    In 1677 the minister William Hubbard published his account of King Philip’s War, and somewhere in the eastern campaign he set down a single sentence: a Mrs. Hitchcock was carried off captive from Saco and died the following winter from eating a poisonous root in place of ground nuts, as the Indians reported afterward.

    No first name, no age, no further comment. A captive woman got hungry enough in the woods to dig up and eat something that killed her, and the only reason it’s recorded at all is that her captors mentioned it later and a minister found it worth half a line.

    So you go looking for who she was, and the problem is the same as always. Women are almost impossible to find except through the men standing around them.

    In this case, her name was Lucretia Williams, and she’s my grandmother about 10x greats ago.

    She’s a daughter of Thomas Williams of Saco, which we know because the record tracks her father, not her. She married Lt. Richard Hitchcock and gave him a houseful of children — Jerusha, Thomas, Lydia, Rebecca, Ann, Margaret — which we know because the record tracks her husband and his estate. Then Richard died, and she became, in the documents, “the widow Hitchcock.” A daughter, a wife, a widow.

    Three men deep and we still don’t have a sentence that’s actually about her.

    When she becomes more visible — genuinely, repeatedly, in the court files — the reason again fails the Bechdel test. She took up with George Garland (my great-nth-grandfather), and the Province of Maine could not leave it alone.

    George was a tenant farmer at Nonesuch, and he came with baggage. The court had been after him since 1662 for frequenting the house of a woman named Sarah Mills, on the suspicion that he already had a wife back in England.

    (A man with a wife on the far side of the ocean shopping for a second was a known genre.)

    They indicted him and Sarah for living together in 1665, indicted them again in 1668 and ordered them to marry inside the month. In the same season they had Sarah, entered in the record as “a known vagabond Quaker,” whipped from town to town, Boston to Scarborough.

    Then, when George and Lucretia were trying to settle down and make me some grandparent, the court forbade George from marrying Lucretia, on the grounds that he was still “owning himself Sarah Mills’s husband.”

    He had never married Sarah. He could not marry Lucretia because he had not married Sarah. The trap was airtight and the colony was proud of it.

    Lucretia and George answered by ignoring the ruling. He took a public flogging for it. The record notes that despite the proceedings and the whipping, “their relations continued until her death.” They had a son (life finds a way) named Jabez, who was born square in the middle of the prosecution.

    The colony generated a longer written record of whose bed Lucretia Williams was in (though, technically, it was George because he’s a man) than it ever generated about Lucretia Williams.

    The government knew the cohabitation, the dates, the prior entanglement, the precise legal reason she could not marry the father of her child — and it never once thought to set down who she was. The government was exhaustively, litigiously interested in regulating her sex life and completely uninterested in her. Getting out of the bedroom was not a frontier the seventeenth century hadn’t reached. They reached for the inside of that cabin with both hands and a docket.

    And the thing that ended it cared about none of it.

    In September 1675 the war came east and the Wabanaki hit Saco. Major Phillips’s garrison house took the brunt — fifty people inside, ten of them able to fight — and Hubbard treats its survival as a small miracle. They were besieged, outnumbered, the buildings burning, and yet not one of the fifty killed.

    God, he writes, does not fail those who trust His power.

    Then comes the next sentence, the one about Mrs. Hitchcock and the root. The providence that spared fifty did not extend to the woman carried off from the same yard.

    George drops out of the record at the same moment, most likely killed in the same raid. The court spent thirteen years failing to separate these two. The war managed it over a single winter.

    The colony had wanted, more than nearly anything, Lucretia’s name on a piece of paper — a banns, a marriage record, something filed and proper. It never got it. The one document that finally records her, the half-line about how she died, doesn’t give her first name either. To the court she was the widow it couldn’t marry off. To the war she was “one Mrs. Hitchcock.” Both of them looked right past her to the man in the frame.

    She left no will, no deed, no signature, no first name in the record of her own death. She left a line of descendants by the one man she was legally forbidden to have. It’s the most personal thing in the file, and it’s the only thing nobody had to write down.

    Sources. The Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire (Noyes, Libby, Davis) for the Williams, Hitchcock, and Garland families and the court record — the 1662–1672 prosecutions, the 1672 forbidding of the marriage, George Garland’s flogging and disappearance — citing the Province and Court Records of Maine. William Hubbard, A Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New-England (1677), for the September 1675 attack on Saco, Major Phillips’s garrison, and the death of “Mrs. Hitchcock” by poisonous root; the identification of her as Lucretia is the Dictionary‘s.

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