Jonas
- Mark Travis
- Jul 9, 2024
- 23 min read
Updated: Sep 29, 2024
The story of Jabez Fairbanks begins with his father, Jonas, who like Jabez was both a cause and a victim of the violence that remained central to the lives of our ancestors over five generations. But it would sell these ancestors short to define them as only that, causes and victims of violence.
So what more can I say about Jonas Fairbanks?
That he was nine years old when his parents, Jonathan and Grace Fairbanks, brought the family across the Atlantic to New England in 1633. Perhaps his heart raced with excitement, if only on the first and last days of their passage; probably he was seasick, his body wracked by heave upon heave; surely he hated the dank, dark, stinking space below decks in which his family spent their cramped weeks at sea. Gender and birth order meant everything in his time. He was the third-born son, and because only the first could expect to inherit the homestead the family soon built in Dedham, Jonas grew up knowing that he had to make his own way in life.
That as a young man he got in trouble for making his own way in life by wearing a pair of fancy "great boots" while only 28 and still establishing himself in the world. That landed him in court for dressing above his station. Maybe he had a thing for boots, loved the supple feel of leather; maybe he ran with a fast crowd; maybe he hoped to catch a young woman’s eye. We can’t know. But his friends lied for him, and he got away with it.
That boots or no boots, he did catch a young woman’s eye. It just took a while. He married at 34 and married well, to Lydia Prescott, the youngest daughter of the most important man in Lancaster, Massachusetts, the frontier town where they raised their family and met their fate. At 17, Lydia was half Jonas’s age when she became his wife. They had seven children and had been married 17 years on the day in February 1676 when Jonas died in an Indian attack alongside his oldest son and his brother-in-law. Though Lancaster was destroyed and for a time abandoned, Lydia, Jabez, and his five other siblings survived.
Had 5-year-old Jabez perished in that attack too we wouldn’t be here today, because Jonas is the second and Jabez the third in our line of direct Fairbanks descendants, leading in time to my mom, me, and you. But survive he did, and we now stand as a New England family of fourteen generations because of it.
Settling down
The town of Lancaster grew on fertile land at the confluence of the Nashua and North Nashua rivers, about forty miles west of Boston. Commuting distance in our time, but the far edge of the frontier when English settlers, led by John Prescott, first moved there in 1650. Lancaster sat at an indigenous crossroads, long frequented by the nearby Nipmuc, Nashaway, and Penacook as well as native travelers from more distant places.
A history of the town written in 1879 by the Rev. Abijah Marvin tells the story of its founding this way: the English were invited there by a Nashaway sachem named Sholan, who wanted Thomas King, a trader, to establish a “trucking post” there, saving the Indians the long trip into Boston to exchange beaver pelts for the muskets, ammunition, axes, iron pots and other goods the natives valued. Sholan’s secondary motive, the history says, may have been deterring the aggressive ways of the Mohawks to the west by bringing the English into their midst. He made a strong sales pitch, as the history tells it, saying “that the Great Spirit had been very bountiful to the place, and that his people would rejoice in the presence of that great people who had come from a distant world.” A group of English investors bought Sholan’s pitch along with eighty acres of land. The transaction was sanctioned by a deed, approved by the General Court, seemingly a two-way document in which the settlers agreed “not to molest the natives in their fishing, hunting or planting places.”
There's another way to tell that story, one that's gained acceptance in my time. I've read it in a number of sources, and I heard it from Bob Goodby, a professor of archaeology and anthropology at Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, New Hampshire, about an hour from my home.
"The sachem selling land?" Bob began. "Bullshit. Okay?"
He's a rumpled fellow with round glasses who slouched in the chair behind his messy desk as we spoke, hands clasped over his belly, holding pointed opinions. For decades now, he has dug for the actual, findable, physical truth of native life in New England, particularly in New Hampshire, and he has uncovered artifacts that document an indigenous presence of at least 13,000 years here. For the record, that's 520 generations in what we call New England, compared to our family's fourteen.
But pottery shards and stone tools can't speak for themselves. They take on meaning through interpretation, and the study not just of artifacts but cultures around the world. So yes, Bob holds opinions about how frontier towns like Lancaster came to be.
"You're a party of English people," he said. "You're looking to expand to this area. You find an Indian there, you give him some rum and get to know him a bit. And he says, sure, you can have it, makes his mark on a piece of paper, even though he is coming from a culture where you don't do that, you can't do that. Right? You never even think of doing that. Land isn't bounded. It's not alienable. You can't separate it from people. They're playing by two very different sets of rules initially. And then when the native people do catch on to the new set of rules that's being imposed on them, the legitimacy of those transactions is often suspect. Did the people signing this have the authority to speak for anybody?"
The English came from a place ruled by a single king or queen, a land of documents and boundaries, a world of nation states. The natives they found here, Bob said, lived in a world of decentralized, family-based social networks with no formal political structure and no one person with the authority to make decisions that applied to everyone. "Their social world was based primarily on kinship," he said, "who was related to who and how you could use those kin ties to accomplish what you wanted to accomplish."
At the same time, Bob said, New England's native inhabitants shouldn't be thought of innocents. "They had their own ambitions, their own complexities, their own ego-driven characters who shaped this response" to the arrival and growing presence of English colonists, keeping one eye on the settlers and the other on their native rivals. "They had things they wanted and they played the game, and they played it effectively. At times they played it in a very calculating and sometimes ruthless way."
Marvin's traditional telling of Lancaster's founding suggests a future of peace and prosperity, while Bob Goodby's points to complexity and conflict. Given how events unfolded, it's more persuasive to me.
In any event, John Prescott was the only one of the original English investors who chose to move to the nascent settlement, so he’s considered the town’s founder. A blacksmith and farmer by trade, Prescott had the right skills for establishing a frontier town, and the right priorities too. He built a gristmill and a sawmill after establishing his homestead, all of which meant he could repair the tools, cut the lumber, and grind the corn his new neighbors needed to survive. The town’s early settlers wanted to name their community Prescott in his honor but—just as in Dedham’s case—those dour decision-makers in the General Court rejected that idea. (1)
By any name, there were only nine families in town when Lancaster was incorporated. In 1654, a year later, there were twenty. By 1675, when what’s called King Philip’s War broke out, fifty English families lived in town, with a population of 250 colonists or so, as well as possibly just as many Indians who continued to move and live amongst them.
~
In the years when John Prescott was doing so much to establish Lancaster, Jonas Fairbanks was every bit as busy establishing his own place in life. As I’ve said, only Jonathan and Grace’s firstborn son could expect to inherit the family property, which he eventually did. (2) That meant Jonas, his other two brothers, and their two sisters had to find their own paths toward prosperity. Mind you, their prospects were brighter than they would have been in England—because here, land was abundant and there for the taking.
For Jonas, the first documented step in his path led to a job. At 27, he found work in the Hammersmith Iron Works on the banks of the Saugus River about 20 miles from Dedham. It’s now a national historic site, a place the Park Service calls the birthplace of the American iron and steel industry. At the heart of the ironworks stood a blast furnace, fueled by charcoal produced on site, lit with a 3,000-degree fire that workers kept burning 24 hours a day for weeks on end. The work there was physically demanding and dangerous. Just imagine the shimmering heat Jonas experienced simply standing nearby.
Jonas appears in Hammersmith’s pay records in 1651 and 1652, earning a total of 37 pounds over two stints of about 30 weeks each. He was considered a paid servant—a position equivalent to that of a clerk, something short of skilled ironworker—and he lived along with two others in the manager’s house. Exactly what role he played isn’t certain. But the place had a rough reputation, in part because of 62 Scottish prisoners of war who worked there as bonded—that is, unpaid—servants. Slaves, effectively, at least for the term of their bond.
Jonas put some of his earnings toward that pair of great boots—tall leather boots that could be worn above the knee while riding horseback or folded down for casual wear. Hard to fault him for that, at least in my time, when sneakers are fashion-statement collectibles that go for thousands of dollars.
But in 1651, the General Court had passed the latest in a series of what were called Sumptuary Laws, dictating who in Puritan Massachusetts could wear what. “We cannot but to our greife take notice that intolerable excess and bravery hath crept in upon us, and especially amongst people of meane condition, to the dishonor of God,” the lawmakers said. They also noted the scarcity of leather and warned against “the consumption of our estates.” And so it was that, with a few exceptions, only men with holdings worth 200 pounds or more to their name—far more than Jonas could have amassed at his age—were entitled to wear great boots.
In the fall of 1652, toward the end of his time at Hammersmith, Jonas was summoned to the Essex County Quarterly Court in Salem to answer for his footwear. He was not alone in facing such charges; others stood accused of wearing silver lace, a silk hood, ribbons, and—in at least one other case—another pair of inappropriate boots.
Here’s the thing: Jonas got away with it. The court discharged the case against him after four witnesses, all men, testified that Jonas had worn the boots before the law took effect but not after. So he paid no fine. However humble his station in life, odds are that Jonas was rich in good friends, willing to lie in court on his behalf.
How Jonas’s path led him from Hammersmith to Lancaster isn’t clear, and it’s not certain when he arrived there either. It’s possible that John Prescott recruited him to town, either because of family ties from back in England or the skills Jonas had developed at the foundry. Perhaps both. (3) In any event, Jonas arrived early enough to stand among the original signers of the town covenant.
Prescott had five daughters, and none were married when he brought the family to the frontier. They must have worried about their prospects. But two of them soon married single men who had moved to Lancaster; after one of those daughters died in childbirth, along with her twins, her widowed husband promptly married one of her younger sisters. The fourth sister also married a widower, a man with three children. (4) And Lydia chose Jonas, boots and all.
Together they established a farm on the south end of town in what amounted to a family cluster, next to a property owned by John Prescott, now Jonas’s father-in-law, and nearby the homes of two of Lydia's married sisters, Mary, the wife of Thomas Sawyer, and Sarah, the wife of Richard Wheeler.
Jonas and Lydia had seven children, three daughters and four sons, beginning with a daughter, Marie, in 1659, eleven months after their marriage. Their first son, Joshua, followed in 1661, and Jabez—our ancestor and their sixth child—is thought to have been born in 1670. His name is taken from the Bible and suggests that his was a difficult delivery. Three years passed before Lydia gave birth to her seventh and final child. His parents named him Jonas, for his father.
Marvin’s history of Lancaster describes a tight community—a reasonable supposition, although he couldn’t have actually known, writing two hundred years later. “The inhabitants were good neighbors,” he wrote, “living close together and rendering kindly offices in health and sickness. They trained their children well in the ancient way.” At the same time, he wrote, “local gossip was rife enough for comfort or provocation. The love affairs of the young were known through all the plantation, and unhappy widowers made work for match-makers. … A public scandal was a general grief.” Lancaster’s residents celebrated no holidays except Thanksgiving, but they gathered often for barn-raising, corn-husking, hunting and fishing parties, weddings, and funerals—and of course, every Sunday for the Sabbath. As they had for centuries, the natives amongst them cultivated corn, squash, beans, sunflowers, and sunchokes, gathered edible berries and medicinal plants, hunted in the woods and fished along the rivers.
There is an air of injured innocence in Marvin’s account of the war that left Lancaster in ruins. “From the first they had dwelt in safety,” he wrote of the settlers. “They had been at peace with the Indians, and had found them convenient neighbors. By them their tables had been supplied with fish and wild game, and some rude articles of manufacture which the ingenuity of savages could produce. There is no proof that the settlers had encroached upon them, or interfered with their hunting, fishing or planting.”
But even Marvin hints at the darker truth of the story. “It is quite possible, however,” he conceded, “that the natives began to feel that the increasing number of whites would soon crowd them out of their wonted haunts. Nor would it be strange if at some time, a reckless fellow offended the susceptible Indians’ pride, and provoked revenge.”
Up in flames
The cruelest blow the English inflicted upon New England’s native inhabitants landed before the Pilgrims did in 1620. In the few years before their arrival, disease carried ashore by traders and fishermen devastated the population of coastal Indian tribes, then worked its way inland. The lowest estimate of the death rate I’ve seen was 80 percent, the highest 95—although I’m not sure how anyone would actually know. (5) Still, there’s no question that the epidemic greatly reduced an indigenous population that might have exceeded 100,000 before contact with Europeans. When the Pilgrims, upon landing, found abandoned Wampanoag villages and the bleached bones of their inhabitants, they rejoiced. Surely, they reasoned, God had cleared the way for their benefit.
Other differences between natives and newcomers—fundamental ones—appeared from the first. The Wampanoag, along with other tribes of central and southern New England, actively farmed the land, but not in a way that the English recognized or respected, with plowed, permanent fields or fences that divided one property from another. The natives didn’t think of land as something one owned or dominated, as the English did—and this in a time when, to the English, owning land meant everything. As the English observed Indian women working the fields, they considered that a sign that the men were lazy and thus unworthy when in fact, they were fishing and hunting. In no way did the newcomers see the natives as their equals. Instead, the English considered them savages, damned in God’s eyes unless they converted to Christianity. Some did, but the settlers largely segregated rather than embraced even these “Praying Indians” who adopted English ways.
Despite all that, the natives and the settlers coexisted for a generation, allowing the English to take root, because each had something to gain from the other. The Pilgrims suffered greatly in the first winter in America, surviving because the Wampanoag shared their food and their farming techniques as well as what became the settlers’ single most essential crop: maize, or what we call corn. In return, the Pilgrims offered the Wampanoag, weakened by disease, protection against attack from their powerful tribal neighbors, the Narragansett. The dynamic of mutual reliance evolved but persisted as the first generation of Puritans arrived in far greater numbers a decade later. The English wanted the beaver pelts the Indians brought them for export back home; the Wampanoag, the Narragansett, the Nipmuc, the Nashaway, the Massachusett—all these tribes and more wanted the steel and iron implements the colonists offered in trade, as well as any edge that their dealings with the settlers might provide in their own rivalries. (6)
More settlers meant a need for more land. That’s how Dedham, home to the Fairbanks family, and Newbury, home to the Travises, soon came into being. And as the children of the first settlers came of age, the demand for more land grew. At the same time, the market-driven surge in trapping left beavers scarce and their pelts harder to find. The land itself became the best the natives had to offer. They learned quickly about English ways, and did their best to protect their interests in the deeds that documented their transactions. But it was not enough.
The Lancaster history insists that its settlers honored their commitments, and maybe that’s true. But across New England, unscrupulous traders tipped the natives into debt—and English courts then held tribal leaders personally accountable for the money due. Hogs and cattle roamed freely outside colonial settlements, feasting on crops they found in unfenced native fields. The utopian aspirations of the first Puritan generation gave way to everyday realities as congregations bickered, towns split, elders decried a decline in values, and families moved on. The colonists pushed ever inland, settling new towns, moving west from Boston or north from Long Island Sound and up the Connecticut River valley. As they expanded their presence, more of the region’s native inhabitants came to see the newcomers as a threat to their way of life and their place on the land itself—and with good reason. “It became apparent,” one historian wrote, “that they were gradually sinking into a position of complete economic subservience.”
Tensions ran deepest in what’s now southern Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Here the presence of two colonies that rubbed uneasily against each other—Plymouth, then still a fundamentalist Pilgrim colony, and Rhode Island, founded by religious dissidents—fostered conflicting deeds and misunderstandings that facilitated land fraud. This was the ancestral territory of the Wampanoag, whose sachem at the time the Pilgrims arrived—Massasoit—had chosen to ally his tribe with the English. But by the time he died in 1661, relations had grown uneasy. The next year, the English arrested his son and successor, Wamsutta, on suspicion of plotting war. He died during questioning. His brother and successor, Metacom, had every reason to doubt the English, who called him King Philip.
Somehow, peace prevailed—but only until 1675, when an Indian who had warned the colonists that Philip was planning to attack them was found dead in a pond. That led to the trial, conviction, and, on June 8, the hanging of three Wampanoag men who may have been guilty only of being close to Philip. Within two weeks, Wampanoag warriors carried out a series of retaliatory raids that left about 10 colonists dead. The colonists responded by sending soldiers to destroy Philip’s home village, Mount Hope, in a clumsy campaign that succeeded only in revealing how much the English had to learn about waging war in the wilderness. (7)
Flames spread. Lancaster, at the outermost edge of the communities around Boston, was among the most vulnerable settlements, and an initial raid there in August at the north end of town left eight settlers dead, two of them children. That raid doesn’t figure in the family’s written history, but it surely alarmed Jonas, Lydia, and all their neighbors. The escalating revolt terrified colonial authorities, who responded with violence that grew rapidly less discriminate and more desperate. In December, in what was called the Great Swamp Fight, colonial soldiers assaulted a Narragansett fortress, setting wigwams afire with women and children inside, killing hundreds of warriors and innocents alike—even though the Narragansett, after violence first broke out, had signed a treaty reaffirming their neutrality. Their offense: harboring Wampanoag refugees, a matter of kinship to the natives but a sign of treachery to the English.
This was not a conflict of clearly defined states and armies, as the colonists had known in Europe. The battleground was a wilderness that the Indians understood far better than they. It was a decentralized conflict too, and though known from early on as King Philip’s War, it had no single native leader. “Each tribe, each community, and each sachem was fighting his own war,” one historian wrote. Unable to locate, let alone defeat, their enemies, the English turned on their native allies, the Christian Indians on whom they relied for intelligence and as guides, fearing that they too would join in the revolt. As many as a thousand Praying Indians were imprisoned on Deer Island in Boston Harbor during the winter of 1675-76. Hundreds died in the cold; those who survived were eventually sold into slavery in the Caribbean. (8)
As the winter wore on, fear deepened. Jonas and Lydia had every reason to believe that the worst was yet to come—and they were right.
The dolefullest day
We don’t have to imagine the sights, sounds, and horrors of the tenth of February in 1676, when as many as 400 Nipmuc, Wampanoag, and Nashaway warriors assaulted Lancaster. A survivor, Mary Rowlandson, wrote an account that became America’s first bestseller. (9)
“Their first coming was about sun-rising,” Rowlandson said. “Hearing the noise of some guns, we looked out: several hours were burning, and smoke ascending to heaven. There were five persons taken in one house; the father, and the mother and a sucking child, they knocked on the head; the other two they took and carried away alive.” A wounded man begged for his life, but he too was knocked in the head, Rowlandson wrote; the attackers “stripped him naked and split open his bowels.” Another man who challenged the Indians he saw around his barn was immediately shot dead.
“At length,” Rowlandson wrote, “they came and beset our house, and quickly it was the dolefullest day that ever mine eyes saw.”
Rowlandson’s husband, Joseph, was Lancaster’s minister. He was away in Boston on the day of the attack, pleading with colonial leaders to send soldiers to defend the town—for the assault did not come as a surprise. Two Praying Indians had risked their lives on a spy mission to the Nipmuc village of Menemisit, just ten miles from Lancaster but a wilderness away and unknown to the settlers. Having learned the attack was imminent, the spies slipped away, pretending they were off to hunt. But colonial authorities ignored the warning the first of the two men delivered, acting only after the second arrived by snowshoe in Cambridge on the night of Feb. 9 to raise the alarm. (10) It came too late, leaving Lancaster's residents to fend for themselves.
Most of the townspeople are thought to have spent the night before the attack in one of six garrison houses in town, all of them fortified, two-story structures where nearby families could gather for shelter and defense. Some may have been surrounded with a timber stockade and a barred gate.
The Rowlandson home—centrally located and the most prominent garrison, with thirty-seven settlers inside—soon became the focus of the attack. “The house stood upon the edge of a hill,” Rowlandson wrote. “Some of the Indians got behind the hill, others into the barn, and others behind anything that could shelter them; from all which places they shot against the house, so that the bullets seemed to fly like hail.” Settlers fought back, firing their muskets through gunports in the walls, sometimes shooting down from the second floor upon the attackers outside. One man, a second, and then a third soon fell wounded, but those inside held out.
Remember now: it was the dead of winter, and the Rowlandsons had stacked their firewood high against the back of their house, making it easier to fetch an armload every so often to keep the fire blazing in the hearth and the cold at bay. This proved to be the undoing of all inside. The stacked wood blocked gunports the settlers needed to defend that side of the house. The attackers found flax and hemp in the barn, piled it in a cart, set it afire and rolled it toward the house and its firewood. A settler ran out, doused the fire, then dashed back inside, somehow surviving; the attackers tried again, and this time, the flames caught and the building began to burn. Now those inside were doomed, and they knew it.
“Some in our house were fighting for their lives, others wallowing in blood,” Rowlandson wrote, “the House on fire over our heads, and the bloody Heathen ready to knock us on the head, if we stirred out.” Women and children cried in fear; “Lord,” one shouted above the din, “what shall we do?” They had no choice, and so they emerged, hoping to run for it. Rowlandson watched as her brother-in-law, already wounded in the throat, fell dead, and then her own sister too. A bullet pierced Rowlandson’s side, then tore through the body of the 6-year-old daughter she held wrapped in her arms. Another victim, tomahawked in the head and stripped naked, tried in vain to crawl away.
Only one of the house’s occupants escaped. Twelve lay dead, and the rest stood, dazed, “with the blood running down to our heels,” Rowlandson wrote—twenty-four of them, captives now. Behind them, the Rowlandson home burned; what had come of their fellow townsfolk, they couldn’t know.
“It was a solemn sight to see so many Christians lying in their blood,” Rowlandson wrote, “some here, and some there, like a company of sheep torn by wolves, all of them stripped naked by a company of hell-hounds, roaring, singing, ranting, and insulting, as if they would have torn our very hearts out.”
~
To our great good fortune, our ancestors, the Fairbanks family, were not inside the Rowlandson home the morning of the attack, but instead in another garrison house a half-mile away, home to Lydia's sister Sarah and her husband, Richard Wheeler. It’s easy to imagine a scene much like the one Rowlandson described unfolding there too—the noise, the fury, the cries of “Lord, what shall we do?” (11) What’s not so easy is understanding why Jonas Fairbanks, his 15-year-old son, Joshua, and Richard Wheeler left the security of the garrison and ventured forth to their deaths.
It’s likely that the Wheeler garrison, located at the southern tip of town, was among the first to come under attack. Perhaps when Mary Rowlandson heard the sound of gunfire and emerged from her home to see smoke rising in the sky, she was looking in its direction. Her account says that three men were killed outside a garrison by attackers who climbed on the barn roof and fired down upon them. She couldn’t have witnessed this, and she named no names, but that appears to be a reference to our family members. We can’t be sure. Any scenario you might imagine is as good as mine.
You might also imagine the emotions tearing at Lydia Fairbanks as she comforted her children and her sister too, recognizing as the attack persisted that her husband, oldest son, and brother-in-law must be dead outside, their home, their barn, their furniture reduced to embers, their livestock dead or gone forever, along with her heavy iron pots and anything else the natives chose to carry away—leaving her a widow, with her surviving children, her faith, and little else.
If, that is, they survived the day themselves.
Can I truly stand in her shoes at that moment, coming as I do from a place of peace and plenty? Appreciate her fury as her children trembled in her arms, knowing that everything she and Jonas had built together was gone? Or in Jonas’s shoes—his great boots, perhaps—as he grasped the cold steel of his musket, nodded to Joshua and Wheeler, unbarred the door, and stepped with purpose into the pale bitterness of that winter morning? Her fortitude; his courage. The attack tested both of them in ways I have never known—and, though he was only five, it surely tempered Jabez Fairbanks too, helping to prepare him for the life-and-death moments his own life would bring.
Remarkably, the Wheeler garrison withstood the attack that day, as did the other four garrisons in Lancaster, among them, the home owned by John Prescott, where one person died. The Rowlandson garrison, done in by its firewood, was the only one to fall. At least fifty Lancaster residents were killed—about one in every five. The Indians withdrew with their captives as a relief column of forty soldiers approached the devastated town, leaving the soldiers little to do but help bury the dead.
“No mortal knows of their sepulchre,” Marvin wrote in the town history. “Not a slab, or mound, or group of unlettered stones, give any indication of their resting place.”
Jonas’s body, like that of his son, Joshua, may have been stripped naked; perhaps they were mutilated too. I wonder: did Lydia lay her eyes upon their corpses before they were buried? Her hands? Did she cry out her pain or repress her tears? Did she shield her surviving children from the horrible sight—or did she expose them to it, wanting them to know, to remember, to never forget?
The survivors and the soldiers clustered in or around two garrisons, at the northern and southern ends of Lancaster. Rowlandson spent the night atop George Hill, just to the west of town, looking down on the flames, still burning, listening as her captors celebrated, sheltered with her dying daughter in the cleft of what’s now called Rowlandson Rock.
Helpless, unable to feed or defend themselves against further attacks, the survivors petitioned colonial authorities in Boston for carts to take them to safety. “Many of us here in this prison,” the petition written by those in the northern garrison house said, “have not bread to last us one month, and our other provisions spent and gone for the generality. We are sorrowful to leave this place. Our women’s cries do daily increase beyond expression; which does not only fill our ears, but our hearts full of grief.”
A second petition, written by those in the southern garrison house, where Lydia and her children took shelter, amplified the message: “We are in like distress,” it said, “and so humbly desire your like pity and fatherly care, having widows and many fatherless children.”
When more troops arrived with the carts, Lancaster’s survivors packed up whatever they had left and made their way east to live among friends and family—in Lydia’s case, most likely in Concord among the Prescotts. After the carts departed, the attackers returned, burning all but two remaining buildings, one of them the meeting house, where residents had gathered for town business and worship—the very center of life in their settlement. Perhaps they were hedging their bets. “It has come down to us,” Marvin wrote, “that the Indians feared to set fire to ‘God’s house.’” The settlers were left to live with their own fears; several years passed before any dared to return.
Today, Lancaster is a bedroom town, home to commuters who drive to Nashua, Lowell, or Worcester for work. A number of historical markers identify sites from Lancaster’s darkest day—the Rowlandson garrison and Rowlandson’s Rock among them—but no sign marks the Wheeler garrison or the Fairbanks homestead, and the day of the attack is not commemorated. Neither is the town’s indigenous history.
“Lancaster is not Concord and it's not Lexington,” said Heather Lennon, president of the Lancaster Historical Society, as she showed me around town one day. “The people here don't get it. We have to fight with them to preserve the history. There's not a great awareness or value put on it.”
What may well be true in Lancaster is not true for everyone. In 2018, a book called Our Beloved Kin sought to retell the story of King Philip’s War from the native perspective. The first effort of its kind, it won the Bancroft Prize in American History the next year. When researchers associated with the project visited the Rowlandson homesite, they noted the old historic markers—and found living evidence of the past there too. Growing alongside the native plants that Indians harvested for medicine and food, they found the Englishman’s Footprint, or plantain. A broad-leafed plant that makes good tea, it was carried to New England in the guts of the cattle the settlers brought here, and spread in their dung. Ever adaptive, the natives made use of the Englishman's Footprint too—until, that is, the English finally succeeded in uprooting them.
Footnotes
Remember, the early settlers of Dedham, where the Fairbanks family first settled, wanted to name their town Contentment. In the case of Lancaster, I'm sympathetic with the General Court's reasoning—although the Prescott family genealogy isn't. The lawmakers, the genealogy said, "quibbled, pretending" that naming the town Prescott "smacked too much of man-worship or man-service." Seems to me the lawmakers had a fair point. [Jump back]
The parents named their firstborn son John, but they might as well have named him Patience. He didn't inherit the property until his father's death in 1668. John was about 50 years old at the time. [Jump back]
The town of Lancaster won permission to establish an ironworks in 1657, and Prescott owned an interest in a mining company. And the Prescotts and the Fairbanks family probably knew each other from England, because both families lived in the same Yorkshire village, Sowerby, before they came here. The Prescotts left England five years later than the Fairbanks family and stopped for two years in Barbados before arriving in Boston in 1650. [Jump back]
Neither death in childbirth nor a widower promptly marrying his late wife's sister were exceptional events in Puritan times—or, for that matter, as late as the early 1900s. [Jump back]
For years the leading culprit was smallpox, which had first devastated indigenous populations a century before. But a disease carried by rats, leptospirosis, has emerged as a new candidates because it more closely matches the symptoms that afflicted its victims. [Jump back]
The tribal names we know, Bob Goodby said, are essentially an after-the-fact labeling convention and not terms indigenous people would have used to identify themselves. But native people today identify themselves by tribe, so I have too. [Jump back]
Remember that campaign. It figures on the Travis side of this story, which we'll get to later. [Jump back]
I'll have more to say about that tragedy soon as well. [Jump back]
It's titled The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, and it became a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic after it was published in 1682. [Jump back]
His name was Job Kattenanit—remember it, because it will figure again in our family's story. [Jump back]
In fact, I did imagine the scene inside the Wheeler garrison in the post titled "Make It Stop." [Jump back]