theparkerfamily.org

Month: September 2026

  • Some Assembly Required: William Chadbourne (~1582–)

    Some Assembly Required: William Chadbourne (~1582–)

    Most of my ancestors crossed an ocean for God. William Chadbourne crossed it for a paycheck. He was a carpenter — a housewright, in the period word, the man you hired to frame a building and have it still be standing the following winter.

    On 16 March 1634 he put his name to a contract with Captain John Mason’s Laconia Company, a London joint-stock outfit chasing profit on the New England coast. The deal was to come to Berwick, build a sawmill and a grist mill, run them on shares for five years, and at the end walk away with fifty acres on a long lease for three bushels of corn a year.

    William said “hey, why not?” then boarded a ship called the Pied Cow with two other carpenters — James Wall and John Goddard — and landed at the falls in July 1634. The Chadbournes were Church of England, not dissenters. They hadn’t come to build a shining city on a hill, they’d come to build a mill on a river.

    Two weeks off the boat, they started cutting timber at the falls the Wabanaki called Asbenbedick, and what they put up there is, by the honest accounting, the first water-powered sawmill in New England. (Occasionally, people call it the first sawmill in America, but that seems a stretch given Jamestown/1607 wasn’t exactly built with bricks.)

    He had done his homework before getting here. In 1631 a letter out of London notes a scale model of a sawmill going across on an earlier voyage — a little wooden demo of the thing, sent ahead so the men on the ground would know what they were looking at when the real mill went up.

    So New England’s first sawmill arrived the way a lot of things still do: as a demo unit, shipped across the Atlantic to an audience you could fit in one boat. Some assembly required, carpenter sold separately, arriving 1634.

    And then the thing he built became the blueprint of the engine that drove the entire region. Those falls became the center of the regional lumber trade: the boards that framed Portsmouth and Kittery and the Berwicks, the masts that went out to the Royal Navy, came off mills built and rebuilt at the gorge for generations.

    He didn’t found a colony. He built the machine the colony grew up around. He just wasn’t around to see it.

    Mason died. The Laconia Company lost its money and its nerve. And William Chadbourne … disappeared. He has no death record. Not in Maine, not in England. The last time the paperwork sees him is a petition at Kittery on the twentieth of December, 1652. That’s not a death date. That’s a last-seen. He deeded his homestead to his son-in-law and walked off the edge of the documentation, presumably back to England for a quiet death, but honestly we have absolutely no clue.

    In 1651 the town of Kittery granted the privilege at the falls to Richard Leader, late of the Saugus Iron Works, who took over the site and staffed it with Scotsmen — Dunbar prisoners, shipped over as bonded labor after Cromwell broke their army. Leader put in a gang of up to twenty saws, and it was his bigger operation, not William’s, that gave the place and the river the name they still carry: Great Works.

    Most of my ancestors crossed an ocean for God, and they got the sermons and the meetinghouses and the Thanksgiving. William Chadbourne crossed it on a contract, built the one structure the region couldn’t have done without, and left before the paint dried.

    History remembers the pilgrims. The town remembers the sawmill.

    Sources. The 16 March 1633/4 Laconia Company contract and the Pied Cow‘s July 1634 arrival, via the Chadbourne family genealogy and the Old Berwick Historical Society. James Wall’s deposition of 21 May 1652 — the primary record for the building and running of the mill at Asbenbedick (later Great Works) falls. Francis Small’s 1685 deposition for the “first in New England” priority. The 1631 sawmill-model letter from the Laconia Company papers. The Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire (Noyes, Libby, Davis) for the Chadbourne family and the descent through Humphrey. The Richard Leader grant of 1651 and the Dunbar prisoners from York County and Kittery records, and the Old Berwick Historical Society’s “Great Works” history for Leader’s expansion and the name.

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  • Bad Fortune: William Hilton the Elder (1591–1655)

    Bad Fortune: William Hilton the Elder (1591–1655)

    William Hilton came to America in 1621, on the second ship to Plymouth.

    Never heard about Plymouth’s second ship? You’re not alone — almost nobody has, and once you know what happened, you’ll understand why.

    The ship was called the Fortune, which is the kind of name you give a ship before anything has gone wrong yet.

    It arrived a year late. The Mayflower landed in 1620, but the Fortune didn’t drop anchor off Cape Cod until 9 November 1621, missing, by weeks, the harvest feast that would eventually get rebranded as the first Thanksgiving.

    It was smaller. Much smaller. About a third the size of the Mayflower, and it carried roughly thirty-five new colonists, mostly young single men, into a settlement that had buried half its people the previous winter.

    And here is the part that tells you everything about the men who financed the voyage: they sent thirty-five new mouths and no food. None. Governor Bradford, who was not a man given to comedy, sat down and recorded for posterity that there was “not so much as a biscuit-cake” for the new arrivals, no bedding beyond “some sorry things” in their cabins, and “nor pot, nor pan, to dress meat in.” The ship hadn’t even been provisioned to feed its own crew on the trip home.

    Plymouth did the math, put everyone on half rations, and worked out that the corn would last about six months if nobody got greedy. The colony’s reward for surviving its first year was thirty-five strangers and a hunger problem.

    That could be considered the best outcome. It nearly went worse.

    The Fortune loitered around the tip of the Cape long enough that the colonists decided it was a French raider come to murder them, and Bradford convened a council of war. Myles Standish — the colony’s tiny, perpetually furious military officer — mustered every man and boy who could hold a gun and had the cannon up on Fort Hill fire a warning shot. The ship then ran up the red cross of England, everyone exhaled, and Plymouth narrowly avoided opening fire on the reinforcements it had spent a year praying for.

    The Fortune’s fortune didn’t get much better. While in port, the colonists spent two weeks cramming the hold with everything that might pay down their debt to their English investors — beaver and otter pelts, sassafras, split-oak clapboard. Somewhere around £500 of goods were packed in the ship for the trip back, enough to cut what they owed in half. The ship sailed for London on 13 December 1621 carrying the first real value the colony had ever produced.

    It never got there.

    A navigation error put the Fortune on the coast of France instead of in the English Channel, where a French warship took it on 19 January 1622, held everyone aboard for about a month, and helped itself to the Fortune’s entire cargo.

    The ship limped into London in February with an empty hold. The financier who’d sent it lost his whole investment, the colony’s first paycheck went to a French privateer, and the Fortune sailed out of history the way it had sailed into it — broke, late, and badly handled.

    Remember, this was the ship my great-grandfather William Hilton (~1591–1656) chose.

    Not a ton is known about what Hilton did, individually, but it doesn’t look like he stuck around to enjoy Plymouth for very long.

    He was still there in 1624 when the Reverend John Lyford baptized a child against the wishes of the Separatists running the colony — the church fight that got Lyford run out of town.

    Not long after, Hilton packed up and left for the salt works at Little Harbor, up on the Piscataqua. Salt-making, as it happens, had been the chief trade of Northwich, the town he’d come from back in England.

    He’d crossed an ocean, picked the worst possible ship, landed in a colony that couldn’t feed him, sat through its first religious schism, and then gone right back to making salt.

    Now, personally, I’m batting .000 as far as Mayflower goes, at least for now. But maybe the Fortune is the better inheritance anyway.

    The Mayflower is the story we tell — the brave little band, the rock, the pageant. The Fortune is how it actually went. You arrived late, with the wrong supplies, to a place that isn’t ready for you, and the one good thing you manage gets taken by pirates on the way home.

    Maybe that’s not the founding myth, but that is immigration for most of us.

    Sources. The arrival of the Fortune (Cape Cod, 9 November 1621), the missing provisions, and the Lyford baptism dispute of 1624 are from William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation; the £450–500 cargo and the French seizure of January 1622 are likewise from Bradford and the early Plymouth records. William Hilton’s place on the ship rests on the 1623 Division of Land (Plymouth Colony Records 12:5); his Northwich origin, his arrival on the Fortune, and his removal to the Piscataqua salt works are from the Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire (Noyes, Libby & Davis), under HILTON.

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  • 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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