USA > New Hampshire > Strafford County > Dover > The first parish in Dover, New Hampshire : two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, October 28, 1883 > Part 2
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15
The invaluable record of Winthrop, at Boston, is our main authority now : -
"The same day [October 10, 1633], Mr. Grant, in the ship James, arrived at Salem, having been but eight weeks between Gravesend and Salem. It brought Capt. Wiggin and about thirty, with one Mr. Leverich, a godly minister, to Pascata- quack (which the Lord Say and the Lord Brooke had purchased of the Bristol men), and about forty for Virginia, and about twenty for this place, and some sixty cattle."
The historian Hubbard, minister at Ipswich, writing in the same cen- tury, adds, that others followed. "In the interim [1633-1640] several persons of good estates and some account for religion, were, by the interest of the Lords and other gentlemen, induced to transport them- selves thither, so many as sufficed to make a considerable township."
The tenth of October, old style, 1633, would be the twentieth of October, new style. It was Thursday. They could not land, these emigrants, with their goods, and reach Hilton's Point by the following Sunday. It is possible that these emigrants travelled by land from Salem, but in 1633 it was an unbroken wilderness, which, if men could endure its hardships, was impassable for women and children; and we know that some children came in this colony. Nor could household goods be thus transported. The ocean was the highway. Doubtless they came by that easy avenue, and ascended the open river. But whether by the waters or through the forests, they would not reach Hilton's Point by their first Sabbath day in America, and they would reach it before the following Sabbath, the last Sunday in October. And on that day, two hundred and fifty years ago this Sabbath day, they would worship God. Whether it was in some small house on that spot where Thomas Wiggin's lineal descendant now dwells, or under the autumn trees which then overhung the banks of either river, who can tell ? The foliage on their plateau or across in Eliot wilderness was the royal autumn crimson and gold. The same great rivers then, as now, rolled down to the sea and surged back with the tides. Two or three small buildings on the edge of the salt waters were all that showed signs of men's prior labors.
The ocean waves-a thousand leagues -separated them from fatherland, and northward and westward were there wild forests, wild men, wild beasts. No beauty of autumnal day, no languid listening to
17
THE MEMORIAL ADDRESS.
the ripple of the waters upon the shore, but only the sense of sepa- ration from kindred forever, but with God overhead. There fell words of trust in the Father from the lips of the first minister of Christ upon this New Hampshire land; there were spoken trusting prayers ; there arose the first psalm from congregation, and there commenced the worship of a people whose prayers and songs have kept with the rhythmic flow of two hundred and fifty years, and will, please God, keep on by children and children's children, till time shall be no more.
Why did these people come over the sea? Why expatriate them- selves? Why leave the comforts and the beneficent institutions of their ancestral home? Why undertake the hardships of the forests to be subdued, the dangers of the savage foes to be resisted? It was but a ripple of emigration. But it illustrated the times.
The answer is not entirely a single one. They had no chronicler, as did Boston in its Winthrop or Plymouth in its Bradford, to tell their story. Indeed, it is to the Plymouth historian that we look for the first contemporary record of the settlement of the Pascataqua ; and it is to the pages of Winthrop that we turn for the priceless record of the coming of the ship Fames in 1633. And it is to the stories of the historian Hubbard, of Ipswich, that we look for the few facts which he garnered forty years after, from the old men, of their coming and their work.
The answer is not a single one. Doubtless, first, there was the spirit of adventure which characterized that age. It characterized England, and we are Englishmen. It characterized the western counties of England in a marked degree. Salop, Gloucester, Somerset, Devon, were the counties which had furnished the great Admiral Drake, and Walter Ralegh, and their associates, and these were the counties which furnished the emigration of New Hampshire. There was a restless feeling in England ; their thought was of wealthy lands beyond the seas.
But there was more meaning in the New England emigration of the period from the year 1629 to that of 1640, -the precise period in which no parliament met in England. English liberty was struggling against the tyranny of the Stuarts ; and, at the period of this Pascata- qua migration, its prospects were gloomy. The king had, seven years before, levied tonnage, poundage, and ship-money, without a shadow of right, and Hampden's resistance, itself apparently futile, was three years in the future. The king had dissolved parliament after parlia- ment, because none was submissive to his views, and he was ruling without a parliament. He had assented to the Petition of Right in
18
THE FIRST PARISH IN DOVER.
1628, but he was habitually and shamelessly violating its provisions. So little promise of security in civil rights existed, that many men contemplated emigrating, who finally remained in England. Such were Lords Say and Brooke. Religious motives also had their influ- ence. Perhaps it was the decisive influence. It was an age of intense religious activity in thought. The great revolt of the Northern nations against the authority of Rome had not come to the settled line which seems to separate the Teutonic and the Latin races; the line which makes a liquid language Roman and a guttural tongue Protestant; the line on the south of which the mildness of summer is transfused into symbolic and ornate worship, and on the north the rigor of a hardy climate makes a hardy faith.
Nor was there anything promising in the broad outlook. In that very November 1632, when Thomas Wiggin was planning with Lords Say and Brooke, Gustavus Adolphus, the Lion of the North, who had defeated Tully at Leipsic, and defeated Wallenstein at Leutzen, fell in the victory of the latter field. And yet it was only the precise centre year of the great Thirty Years' War of religions. Rochelle, the last stronghold of the Huguenots in France, had fallen. The Prussian bul- wark of Protestant liberty was not to exist for seventy years onward.
At home they saw no more promise. Many Protestants were becoming more protestant. They came to believe that it was not enough to hold that no authority but the Bible should govern men's faith; none but that should impose rites and ceremonies. In what seemed to them the half-way reformation of the Church of England, they believed that some unscriptural observances were still made obligatory. They rejected the requirements of arbitrary command. They were not, like the Plymouth pilgrims, separatists from the Church of England. They scrupled at its ceremonies, but not at the exist- ence of that church ; not at its doctrines, and hardly at its polity. It was in this spirit that Winthrop and his associates, in 1630, on leaving England wrote their touching address to their brethren of that church : --
" We esteem it an honor to call the Ch. of England, from whence we rise, our dear mother, & cannot part from our native country where she especially resideth, without much sadness of heart & weary tears in our eyes; ever acknowledging that such hope & part as we have obtained in the common Salvation we have received in her bosom We, blessing God for the knowledge and education as members of the same body, shall always rejoice in her good and unfeignedly grieve for any sonow that shall ever betide her."
In this period of rapid emigration to New England, there was little hope at home for a purer worship or for liberty of conscience. It was
19
THE MEMORIAL ADDRESS.
a hundred years too early for the life which John Wesley was to infuse into England's soul ; a hundred years too early for the burning elo- quence of Whitefield. The tyrannical, bigoted, treacherous Charles was upon the throne. That very summer, before our October emigra- tion, Land was made archbishop of Canterbury and primate of all England. It was itself the threat that the High Commission Court, of which he was the moving power, and under whom, says Macaulay, " Even the devotions of private families could not escape the vigilance of his spies," was to be still more powerful. They could not see that, twelve years of patience, and his head would be brought to the block. In the very summer before your emigration, also, they saw Thomas Wentworth, later Earl of Strafford, the King's most trusted adviser, his most stern and implacable agent in arbitrary rule, promoted still higher in honor and power. They could not see that, when but eight years had passed away, William Wentworth, later your Puritan elder, would, in the New Hampshire woods, read letters out of England, telling him how popular vengeance has brought his illustrious kinsman to the scaffold. Oliver Cromwell was then a justice of the peace at Huntington. Twenty years more, and this man, one of their own religious faith, would be Lord Protector of England, and this royal Englishman would terrify Europe with the threat that his guns should thunder at the gates of Rome.
They could not predict. They would live free lives under God's ordinances. They would live free men under English law. They would rear children in a pure faith. Therefore did such men come to make a New England on the basis of the liberties of the Old. They brought the stout English blood into this land. It became disciplined by trials. It was made stalwart by wars with savage and civilized enemies. It was forced to self-thought and independent action. Almost at once it adopted a balder form of worship, and would have frowned upon the semblance of the Cross which your artist placed upon yonder wall. Without government, it was forced into republican or rather into democratic equality and polity.
But it must be remembered that this emigration, with its additions within the few years immediately following, was not of the intense type of Puritanism. Nor was it without an admixture of different moral elements. It found also an Episcopal interest here. The Ifiltons were of the Church of England; and it is significant that Edward Hilton, the founder in 1623, a man of wisdom and integrity, never held office under Massachusetts after the first year of the submis- sion of Dover to that government. New Hampshire was not Puritan. Portsmouth favored the English Church, and that church was predomi-
20
TIIE FIRST PARISHI IN DOVER.
nant in the interests of Gorges on the Maine side of the river. To obtain the consent of the New Hampshire towns in 1641 to a union with Massachusetts, that province was forced to relieve these towns from its law that none but church members could be voters in the State. Ours was a modified Puritanism, with disturbing elements inter- mingled. „Men came here who, unable to endure the tyranny of the Church and the State in England, were equally unable to submit to the despotic rigor of the Massachusetts rulers. George Burdett, who came here from Massachusetts as early as 1637, had left England because of persecutions for non-conformity in rites and ceremonies, but left Massa- chusetts because of an opposite non-conformity. Hanserd Knollys, who came here in 1638, wrote home from Boston, although a Puritan, that the rulers there were worse than the High Commission Court, whose grasp he had felt in England. Capt. John Underhill, who came here in the same year, was banished from Massachusetts, not for grave moral offences suspected, but because of his views upon the doctrines of the Holy Ghost. So Thomas Larkham, who came here in 1639 or 1640, early and later a Puritan, here differed with Knollys about the " burial of the dead," - as one instance, which involved the difference between the English liturgy and the Puritan heathenish burial without even prayer. Francis Champernowne, of the same blood with Ralegh, and descendant of King John, was nephew of the wife of the royalist Sir Ferdinando Gorges. Hilton, Champernowne, and Robert Burnum petitioned in 1665, by the King's Commissioners, that " they might be governed by the known laws of England," meaning thereby to escape the peculiar laws of Massachusetts; and that " they might enjoy both sacraments, which they say they have been too long deprived of," meaning thereby the sacraments of the Church of England. Jomm Wheelwright, banished from Massachusetts, who settled Exeter, was a man of learning, piety, and uprightness. The Waldernes, William and Richard, coming about 1637 from Alcester, an early home of Lord Brooke, may be supposed to have been in the Puritan inter- est. But our Puritanism was not the Massachusetts Puritanism, and with it were people who still loved the English Church, and other people who cared little for either. But it insured us the right of con- science in the Church, and self-government in the State. No witch- craft delusion dishonors our annals, and the episode of stripes upon travelling Quakers was under the orders of the Massachusetts govern- ment.
It is a misfortune that we have not the names of the emigrants. We have no records prior to 1647, except a few references to land grants, some being given in 1636. The earliest document extant giving names
21
THE MEMORIAL ADDRESS.
is the combination for government 1 in the year 1640, and this we have only in a copy (apparently not perfectly accurate), found in the Public Record Office in London, made in 1682. This document, a copy of which is certified to me as correct, by W. Noël Sainsbury, Esq., of that office, is as follows : -
Whereas, sundry mischeifes and inconveniences have befaln us, and more and greater may in regard of want of civill Government, his Gratious Matie haveing hitherto setled no order for us to our knowledge :
Wee whose names are underwritten being Inhabitants upon the River Pascata- quack have voluntarily agreed to combine ourselves into a body politique that wee may the more comfortably enjoy the benefit of his Maties Lawes together with all such Orders as shalbee concluded by a major part of the Freemen of our Society in case they bee not repugnant to the Lawes of England and administered in the behalfe of his Majesty.
And this wee have mutually promised and concluded to do and so to continue till his Excellent Matie shall give other Order concerning us. In Witness whereof wee have hereto set our hands the two and twentieth day of October in the sixteenth yeare of the reign of our Sovereign Lord Charles by the grace of God King of Great Britain France and Ireland Defender of the Faith &c. Annoq Dom. 1640. John Follet, Thom. Larkham,
Fran : Champernoon,
Robert Nanney,
Richard Waldern,
Hansed Knowles,
William Jones,
William Waldern,
Edward Colcord,
Phillip Swaddon,
William Storer,
Henry Lahorn,
Richard Pinckhame,
William Furbur,
Edward Starr [buck ?]
Bartholomew Hunt,
Tho. Layton,
William Bowden,
Tho. Roberts,
James Nute, Anthony Emery,
John Wastill, John Heard,
Bartholomew Smith,
Richard Laham,
John Hall,
John Underhill,
Jolin Cross,
Abel Camond,
Peter Garland,
George Webb,
Henry Beck,
John Dam,
James Rawlins.
Robert Huggins,
Steven Teddar,
John Ugroufe,
Thomas Canning,
John Phillips, Tho : Dunstar,
This is a true copy compared with ye Originall by mee
EDW. CRANFIELD.
[Indorsed.]
The Combination for Government by ye people at Pascataq 1640 Rec'd abt. 13th Febr. 82-3.
1 An earlier combination for government had existed, but no relic of its history remains except in two instances. Winthrop says : "Mr. Burdett, who had thrust ont Capt. Wiggin sent there by the Lords." Burdett himself, in a letter to Archbishop Laud, from Dover, 29 November 1638 (the original of which is still preserved), urges " that a speedy course be taken to settle his majestys government amongst us, there yet being noue but combinations. . . . For the year past and this currant the hehn hath been put into my hands by the principal plantations." In fact, Capt. Wiggin being no more than the super- intendent of a land company, the people, in 1637, organized and chose a chief magistrate, as was right and proper. Unfortunate selections of officers dissolved the combination in 1640, and a new one was formed as above.
3
Samuel Haines,
William Pomfret,
22
THE FIRST PARISHI IN DOVER.
How many of the above-named came in 1633, and how many in the several later years, it is impossible to tell. It is also impossible to tell, beyond a few names, who of this list were and who were not of Puritan sympathies. The signers of a paper, 'still existing, dated 1 March 1641, addressed to the Massachusetts authorities, and protesting against the action of some petitioners for annexation, might be supposed to designate such as were not in sympathy with the Bay government, but an analysis shows that even this is not decisive.1 -
II. THE FIRST PARISH TERRITORIALLY.
This First Parish was in the beginning and for many years coin- cident with the town, or rather, the town was the parish, and at its meetings transacted all secular-ecclesiastical business. The territory, when the limits of Dover came to be defined, included the present city of Dover, the towns of Somersworth and Rollinsford on the north, the towns of Madbury and Lee on the west, the town of Durham on the southwest, and the town of Newington on the south. The north- west boundary line as run from the Newichawannock river down to the western corner of Lee, is twelve miles in length. An air line from the upper corner of the now Somersworth, running to the southern line of Newington, is fifteen miles in .length. From the western extremity of Lee an air line to the meeting-house on Dover Neck, crossing hills, rivers, and forests, is more than thirteen miles. Such for eighty years was the extent of the First Parish.
In the course of time it became inevitable that parts of this great tract should be set off to constitute other parishes. Settlers multiplied, and local interests grew up. The fertile shores of the Great Bay drew men to Newington. The water-power at Durham on the west, and Salmon Falls on the north, built up industries in those places. The laws required all people to pay taxes for the support of the ministry, and the principles of our polity required every inhabited territory strong enough to do so to erect a house of worship at the public ex- pense. The place of worship was on Dover Neck, and those remote found it a hardship to travel thither every Lord's day. In 1660, in- deed, so strong had grown the settlement at Cochecho, our now centre of population, that this vote was passed : -
" It is ordred for the supply of cochecheae thear is set apart fiftien pound of towne rents for the ministrey thear in the winter season."
1 The signers were Thomas Larkham, William Jones, John Follett, Robert Nanny, Thomas Durs- ton, Thomas Roberts, Samuel Haines, Bartholomew Smith, John Dam, Bartholomew Hunt, William Waldern, John Tuttle, Henry Beck, Thomas Layton, Edward Starbuck, Wilham Pomfret, William Furbur, William Storer, John Hall, Phillip Swaddon, Richard Waldern, Edward Colcord, Robert Huckins, Richard Pinkcom, and Thomas Tricky. The spelling of names varies from that of the pre- ceding paper. This protest will be found in the Appendix.
23
THE MEMORIAL ADDRESS.
This was a standing vote. Our defective records make but one allusion to the result, viz. : -
" 2, 2 mo. 1666. By the Selleckmen, Ordered that William Pomfrett shall gine out Orders to Mr. Rayner for the Seuerall Rents dew from mills to be payd to him toward his sallery, as also to giue Mr. Coffin order to Receue £15 of Rent to pay Elder Wentworth for his paynes at Crechechae the last winter."
Elder William Wentworth, thus the first person recorded as statedly officiating at Cochecho, was a ruling elder in the church, and ances- tor of three governors of the province of New Hampshire, who ruled from the year 1717 until the war of the Revolution.
Durham. - The earliest efforts for separation, although then unsuc- cessful, were made by the people of Oyster River, now Durham. Such was the importance of that place, and such the difficulty of travel, largely by boat, that an agreement was made, 14 July 1651, that two ministers should be employed, each at 650 salary, Mr. Daniel Maud to remain at Dover Neck, and another be called for Oyster River. A vote dated 16 April 1655, provides for the " comfortable maintenance of the ministry of Dover and Oyster River," by devoting to that pur- pose all the rents of the saw-mills, and a tax of two pence in the pound upon all inhabitants. A meeting-house was built upon Durham Point in 1655, and it was voted 30 March 1656, that "thear shall be a house at Oyster Reuer Billd neier the meeting house for the use of the menestrey, the demenshens as follareth, that is to say 36 feet long, 18 foett Broed, 12 foot in the wall, with too chemneyes and to be seutabley feneshed." There was also a minister there. On the 17th of June 1657, "Mr. Flecher 1 and the towne hauing had some discorse whether he will leaue them, he willingly manifested that he was not minded to stay aney longer, but to Prepaer himselfe for old England and could not justly lay Aney Blame Apon the Towne."
The following shows how the differences between the two parts of the town were settled : -
Wee hose names are heir under writen being chosen By the towne of Douer ar Appoynted by thear order to heire and Determine all such Differences as apier Betwixt the inhabetants of the too thierds of the towne of Douer and the on thierd of the towne in Oyster Riuer Doe Conclude at Present as followeth that is to saye
Ily first that from the first of Aprill 1657 and soe forward from yeir to yeir it is heirby mutually agreed uppon that the naigeborhoed of Oyster Riuer shall inioy
1 Edward Fletcher, admitted townsman in Boston, 2 February 1640; returned to England in 1657 ; was minister at Dunsburn (Duntsbourne? ), co. Gloucester : " He was beaten and used unmercifully. . . . He came a little before out of New England," says Calamy, "and being thus abused returned back thither . . . and there died." He came back to Boston, and his will was proved there, 12 Feb- ruary 1666.
24
THE FIRST PARISH IN DOVER.
full Righte and intrest of twenty pounds out of the Rents of the towne to be from lamprell Riuer grant Rent performed as allsoe the sayd neagberhoed shall inioy thear full Right of the too peney Rate Rising from within themselfes boeth wich twenty pounds and too peney Rate is for the supply of the minestrey within them- selfes and to be ordered by themselfes for the End Exprest
ely It is Agried and determined that the sayd naigberhoed shall haue leberty from time to time to make Choyse of a minestrey for thear accomodations, provided that thay haue the approbations of the sayd towne or of anie three oidasent Elders
gly That in Case the nieghberhoed of Oyster Riuer shall bee without a ministrey aboue fower moenthes theay shall Returne the twenty pounds aboue sayd into the Coman tresseurey with Proper anabell (?) Contrebution theay of Douer doeing the like to them in proportion in the like Case and this mutually to be Donn soe longe as thear is Defeekte of Eather sied
4ly It [is] Ordred for the minestry of Douer Necke thear is sett aparte fifty fiue pounds of Towne Rents with the two penic Rate appon all the inhabetants Except oyster Riuer is set apart for the ministry thear and in Case this Doe not make up the Sallarey, then to be maed up by a Rate uppon the sayd Inhabetants Blody poynt Excepted only paying the two pennco Rate.
5ly It is ordered for the suppley of Cochechoe thear is set apart fiftien pound of towne Rents for the ministrey thear in the winter seasone
Gly It is agreed that the house of mr Vallintin Ilill wich is his nowe dwling house at Rockey point shall be within the line of Deuetion to Oyster Riuer
Witnes oure hands this 17th of July 1660
Vallintine Ilill Richard Wallderne
William ffurber
John Daucs
William Wentworth
Robert Burnom
William Willyames
Raphfe hall Richard Otes
William Robords
Rev. Joseph Hull also served a brief time at Oyster River. Our records make no mention of him, but Bishop's New England judged by the Spirit of the Lord, a thoroughly partisan work, mentions him. "George Preston, Edward Wharton, Mary Tomkins, Alice Ambrose (alias Gary)," says this work (published in 1667), " having been at Do- ver, . . . passed from thence over the water to a place called Oyster River, where, on the first day of the week, the women went to Priest Hull's1 place of worship, who, standing before the Old Man, he began to be troubled." After the usual interruption, the Quakers were "led out of the place of worship, but in the afternoon they had their meet-
1 Rev. Joseph Hull was born in Somersetshire, in 1594 ; graduated St. Mary Hall, Oxford, in 1614 (or near that year); was rector of Northleigh, Devon, 1621 to 1632 ; was minister at Weymouth, Mass., in 1635 ; was at Yarmouth in 1640; had trouble with the Massachusetts authorities, doubtless because of his greater liking for the English church, and left the province. Was at York in 1642, but appears to have returned to England after the Parliament became powerful. Calamy mentions him as at St. Buryan, Cornwall, ejected or silenced, but gives nothing but his name and place. He then appears at Oyster River parish in 1662 ; soon went to the Isles of Shoals, and died there 19 November 1665. His daughter Elizabeth married John Heard of Garrison Hill, and her descendants are numerous here, inc uding Dr. John R. Ham, one of the deacons of this church.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.