On the 20th of March 1630, a group
of 140 men and women, set sail from Plymouth, England, in the ship "Mary and
John." The company had been selected and assembled largely through the efforts of the
Reverend John White, of Dorchester, England; of Dorchester, England; with whom they spent
the day before sailing, fasting, preaching, praying."
These people had come from the western counties England, mostly from Devon,
Dorset, and Somerset. They had chosen two ministers to accompany them: "men who were
interested in the idea of bringing the Indians to the knowledge of the gospel." The Reverend John Maverick was an elderly man from
Devon, a minister of the Established church. Reverend John Warham was also an ordained
minister of the Church of England, in Exeter, eminent as a preacher. There is some
evidence that both of these men were in some difficulties with the church on account of
their sympathies with the Puritans.
According
to tradition they landed upon the south side of Dorchester Neck, [which is now South
Boston], in OId Harbor. Ten of the men, under the command of Captain Southcote, found a
small boat, and went up the river to Charlestown Neck, where they found an old planter,
probably Thomas Walfourd, who fed them “a dinner of fish without bread.” Later
they continued their journey up the Charles River, as far as what is now Watertown,
returning several days later to the company who had found pasture at Mattapan. The
settlement was later called Dorchester, in honor of Reverend John White, of Dorchester,
England.
Roger
Clapp tells of the hardships that followed. They had little food, and were forced to live
on clams and fish. The men built small boats, and the Indians came later with baskets of
corn. "The place was a wilderness," writes Roger Clap. "Fish was a good
help to me and to others. Bread was so scarce that I thought the very crusts from my
father's table would have been sweet; and when I could have meal and salt and water boiled
together, I asked, 'who could ask for better?’”
Here
they lived for five or six years. Other boats arrived and other towns were titled. But the
life at Dorchester was not entirely congenial to the lovers of liberty of the "Mary
and John. The group of settlements around Massachusetts Bay was dominated by clergymen and
officials of aristocratic tendencies. Their Governor, John Winthrop, had little empathy
with the common people. "The best part (of the people)," he declared, "is
always title least, and of that best part, the wiser is always the lesser." And the Reverend John Cotton put it more bluntly
when he said, “Never did God ordain democracy for the government of the church or the
people.”
These
principles were repugnant to the people of the “Mary and John”, who had come to
America to escape such restraint. They had no
wish to interfere with the methods of worship of others, and they did not wish others to
interfere with them. Too, they were
land-hungry, after centuries of vassalage to the lords of the manors, leading hopeless
lives without chance of independence. Perhaps
there were influenced also, by the fact that a great smallpox epidemic had raged among the
Indians, killing off so many that they were not the menace that they had been at the
first. The settlers turned their attention
toward the fertile meadows of the Connecticut Valley.
A group under Roger Ludlow, set out and reached
the Plymouth Trading house that had been erected by William Holmes near the junction of
the Connecticut and the Farmington Rivers, early in the summer of 1635. A little later 60 men, women and children, with
their “cows, heifers and swine,” came overland from Dorchester. The winter was severe and the food scarce, and
many returned to Massachusetts, but in the Spring they came back to Connecticut with their
friends, and by April 1636, most of the members of the Dorchester Church were settled near
the Farmington River, along the brow of the hill that overlooks the “Great
Meadow”. This in spite of the fact the
Plymouth people disputed their claim to the land. They
built crude shelters, dug out of the rising ground along the edge of the riverbank. The rear end and the 2 sides were simply the earth
itself, with a front and a roof of beams. The
town was later named Windsor.
Below are surnames of the first settlers of Dorchester who arrived on the Mary and John in 1630, or were known to be in Dorchester before 1632 (from Anderson, NEHGR 147):
Benham, Clap, Collicot, Cooke, Denslow, Dyer, Eggleston, Ford, Gallop, Gaylord, Gibbs, Gibson, Gillet, Glover, Grant, Greenaway, Holman, Hoskins, Hulbird/Hubbert, Hull, Johnson, Lumbert/Lombard, Louge, Ludlow, Maverick, Newton, Phelps, Phillips, Pierce, Pomeroy, Rockwell, Rossiter, Smith, Southcott, Stoughton, Terry, Upsall, Warham, Way, Williams, Wolcott, Woolridge.