What part did the family play in King Philip's War, 1675-1678?

In June 1675 war broke out between the colonies of southern New England and the Wampanoag under their sachem Metacom, whom the English called Philip. It drew in the Nipmuc, the Narragansett and the peoples of the Connecticut valley, and in Maine it went on until 1678. In proportion to population it was the deadliest war in American history: some eight hundred colonists were killed and dozens of English towns burned, and the Native peoples of the region lost thousands to battle, hunger and disease and more to slavery and exile. When it began, about two hundred and thirty of the family's ancestors were living in New England or on Long Island, in nearly every town it touched. The Small world tab "One war, every branch" named a dozen of them. This thread asks what part each one played, as soldier, officer, magistrate, press master, refugee, mourner or creditor; where their paths crossed, long before their lines joined; and how the war looked from the side of the people they fought, traded and lived beside.

Takeaway

In the summer of 1670 Capt. Hopestill Foster of Dorchester rode out to a farm on the Wading River to meet Philip, sachem of Mount Hope, about land. The witness was John Sassamon, Philip's own scribe. Two years later Philip wrote to Foster asking for "five yards of White light collored serge to make me a coat." In January 1675 Sassamon was found dead under the ice of Assawompset Pond, and by June New England was at war. More than seventy of the family's ancestors and their near kin were caught up in it, in nearly every town it touched.

They fought it side by side, centuries before their families joined. On a Sunday in December 1675, after a night march through the snow, one army stormed the Narragansett fort in the Great Swamp, and in its ranks were men of three of the four grandparents' lines: Richard Mather of Dorchester in Capt. Prentice's troop; Samuel Tyler of Rowley, twenty, pressed three weeks before; and Ralph Ellinwood of Beverly, eighteen, most likely in the Salem company whose captain was shot through the head inside the walls. In March 1676, by the falls of the Blackstone River, Capt. Michael Pierce of Scituate led his company across the river after a decoy and into a much larger force. Shot in the leg, he was held up to the end by Amos, one of his Native soldiers, who would not leave him. Pierce died with nearly fifty of his men, among them men of five of the family's houses, and the next day Rehoboth's minister wrote down their names, town by town.

Most of them fought the war as New England fought it, from their own towns: lieutenants and sergeants, deputies and press masters choosing which neighbours would march, and boys of fifteen to twenty. One, John Pynchon, commanded the Connecticut valley and rode home to find Springfield "in flames." Another, John Foster, the captain's son, printed both of the war's first histories in Boston and cut for one of them the first map made in the English colonies. They buried ten of their own and lost their homes. They were also part of a conquest: family men sat on the councils that sold the defeated, and their grandsons drew the townships granted for the war. The records keep both, often in the same hand.

The case

In brief

1. About twenty of the family's direct ancestors bore arms in the war, and a dozen more held its offices, on the muster rolls, in the colony treasurer's journal and the colony records, and in the soldiers' land grants of 1728-1736.
2. The family's war was a town war. Its men were lieutenants, sergeants, deputies, raters, press masters and draftees; one, John Pynchon, held high command, and one, John Foster, printed the war's histories.
3. They paid for it. Ten near kin were killed (at Pawtucket, Bloody Brook, Sudbury, Lancaster and Mendon), two were maimed, and families lost houses at Springfield, Weymouth and Rehoboth and fled Mendon and the Sheepscot.
4. They took part in the conquest. Family men sat on the councils and juries that sold or banished the defeated, one was named to help sell the conquered land and held a Native servant, and their heirs drew war townships.
5. Their paths crossed most at four places: the Great Swamp (19 December 1675), Pierce's company (26 March 1676), Capt. Brocklebank's company and Capt. Holbrook's expedition with Capt. Sill (April-May 1676).

Before the war: neighbours, land and a coat

The family knew Philip before they fought him. On 22 June 1670 Capt. Hopestill Foster of Dorchester answered a letter from "Philip, Sachem of Mount Hope," who had asked to meet "about land at pole plaine and within our township." Foster wrote that the land was Dorchester's "both by grant from our Court and also by agreement with Indians, who say that it is theirs," but agreed to meet him with "some of the bay Indians" at Capt. William Hudson's farm at Wading River on 12 July (Pierce, Foster Genealogy (1899), pp. 494-495). The meeting happened. The town's accounts of 1671 pay "Capt. Foster for money he laid downe to the Sachem" and charge "Liquors for the Jorney to wading Riuer" (Dorchester Town Records (Boston Record Commissioners, Fourth Report, 1880; 2nd ed. 1883), pp. 179-180). There Philip and Squamaug, sachem of the Massachusett, settled the line between their peoples, and the witness was John Sassamon, the praying Indian who had been Philip's scribe; the historian of Norton saw the agreement "with the autograph of King Philip attached" (Increase Mather, A Brief History of the Warr with the Indians in New-England (Boston: John Foster, 1676); ed. Samuel G. Drake as The History of King Philip's War (Boston, 1862), Drake's note, pp. 51-52; George F. Clark, A History of the Town of Norton (1859), pp. 50-51). Squamaug had written to Foster that spring calling Philip's claim "the mount hope Sachem's pretended title." In May 1672 Philip wrote again: "when I last saw you att Wading river you promised mee six pounds in goods," and he asked for "five yards of White light collored serge to make me a coat and a good holland shirt redy made, and a pair of good Indian breeches." It was Sassamon's death under the ice of Assawompset Pond in January 1675, and Plymouth's execution of three of Philip's men for it that June, that began the war.

The Wading River farm ties the family to the Narragansett side of the quarrel too. Capt. William Hudson of Boston was a partner of Maj.-Gen. Humphrey Atherton, whose company took a mortgage of 1660 on "all our whole Countrey" from the Narragansett sachems after the United Colonies fined them 595 fathom of wampum (PCR 10:449, Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, ed. Shurtleff and Pulsifer, vols 1-12 (1855-61); Elisha R. Potter, The Early History of Narragansett (1835), pp. 58-66). The Crown's commissioners declared the purchase "void" in 1665; the proprietors pressed it anyway. John Easton, Rhode Island's deputy governor, wrote in February 1676 that the colonies' contest for Narragansett country was, he had "Case to think," "the greatest Case of the war against them" (Charles H. Lincoln, ed., Narratives of the Indian Wars, 1675-1699 (New York, 1913): Cotton Mather, Decennium Luctuosum (1699), pp. 16-17). Atherton is an ancestor on the Hatten side, and in 1664 Lt. John Holbrook of Weymouth had been chosen to serve under Hudson; Hudson also witnessed Philip's submission at Taunton in April 1671, when the Wampanoag gave up their guns.

The grievances Philip's council put to Easton at Trip's Ferry in June 1675 can be read in the family's own court records. "The English Catell and horses still incresed," they said, so that even thirty miles away "thay Could not kepe ther coren from being spoyled" (Lincoln, p. 11). In 1655 Plymouth asked Edmund Freeman of Sandwich to share out the damage done to "the Indians corn by horses att Mannomett" among the Sandwich horse owners; in 1670 Lt. John Ellis's oxen were in an Indian named William's corn; in June 1671 Sgt. William Harlow was one of the men appointed "to view the Damage done to the Indians by the Horses and Hoggs of the English" (PCR 3:89-90, 5:47, 5:54). In 1665 Owannamaug, "Indian Chiefe, neere Marlborough," complained of Job Tyler for taking his hay (John G. Metcalf, Annals of the Town of Mendon, from 1659 to 1880 (1880), pp. 43-44); in 1656 William Nickerson was disfranchised for buying Monomoy from the sachem Mattaquason without the court's leave. Matoonas, the Nipmuc who struck the first blow in Massachusetts, bore "an old Grudge" for his son, executed in 1671, "whose Head ever since stands upon a Pole near the Gibbet" (William Hubbard, A Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New-England (Boston: John Foster, 1677); ed. Samuel G. Drake as The History of the Indian Wars in New England, 2 vols. (Roxbury, 1865), 1:260-261).

Summer 1675: Mount Hope, Mendon and Brookfield

The war began at Swansea on 24 June 1675. Massachusetts sent foot under Maj. Thomas Savage and Capt. Nicholas Paige's troop to Mount Hope, and two Chebacco men of the Low side rode in Paige's troop, both credited on 3 September: Joseph Safford, the husband of Sarah Low, daughter of Thomas Low, and Joseph Proctor, brother of Abigail (Proctor) Varney (Bodge, Soldiers in King Philip's War (1906), p. 86). Philip's people slipped out of the neck, and the war went inland.

On 14 July Nipmuc men under Matoonas killed "five or six" of the people of Mendon "as they were at their Labour in the Field" (Hubbard 1:86). The only name the historians kept is Richard Post, the husband of Mary Tyler, daughter of Job Tyler (Brigham, The Tyler Genealogy (1912), 2 vols., 1:23-24; Drake's note to Hubbard, 1:86). Post had been Mendon's constable in 1674, with Job Tyler a surveyor of highways. The Tylers and the minister, Rev. Joseph Emerson (brother of Elizabeth (Emerson) Fuller), left, and Mendon was burned that winter. Hope Tyler took his family back to Roxbury, where his children were baptized in 1676; by late November his brother Samuel Tyler was at Rowley, one of twelve men impressed there, "some of them ... men that are but latly come to town, and want arms" (Thomas Gage, The History of Rowley (Boston, 1840), pp. 181-182). In Boston Capt. Hopestill Foster sat on the General Court's standing committee for Mendon (Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 5:40), and William Holbrook, a brother of Capt. John, had a house lot there.

Brookfield was ambushed and besieged on 2-4 August. Thomas Millett, who had preached there since 1674, died that summer, and on 28 September the Ipswich court gave his widow the administration of his estate (Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts, 6:73). In the ambush that opened the siege Capt. Thomas Wheeler of Concord, perhaps an uncle of John Wheeler, was badly wounded.

Autumn 1675: the valley

In August the war came to the Connecticut River. Maj. John Pynchon of Springfield, the valley's magistrate and its great trader with the Native towns, was "Commander in Cheefe in the County of Hampshire" (Bodge p. 143). On 18 September Capt. Thomas Lathrop of Beverly and his Essex company, guarding the carts that were bringing in Deerfield's harvest, were ambushed at Muddy Brook. Among the dead in the list "At Muddy-Brook bridge ye 18 Sept." are Peter Woodbury, brother of Thomas Woodbury, and Josiah Dodge, brother of Thomas's wife Hannah (Dodge) Woodbury (Bodge pp. 136-138). One Beverly couple lost a brother each in the same hour. Peter's mother remembered him in her will fourteen years later, "my son Peter that was killed in ye war with Capt. Lartheope by the Indians."

On 5 October the Agawam people, Springfield's neighbours and Pynchon's trading partners, let in warriors and the town was burned while Pynchon had its soldiers at Hadley. He came back that afternoon with Capt. Samuel Appleton and Capt. Joseph Sill: "we came to a Lamentable & woefull sight. The Towne in flames ... my grist Mill, & corne Mill, Burnt downe ... I believe 40 familys are utterly destitute" (Henry M. Burt, ed., The First Century of the History of Springfield: The Official Records from 1636 to 1736, 2 vols. (1898-99), 1:131-132). Deacon Samuel Chapin, about 77, had gone with the old men into the fortified houses; Pynchon's brick house was one. John Hitchcock, husband of the deacon's daughter Hannah, lost "Barnes, corne & all they had," and Jonathan Burt, grandfather of Ebenezer Hitchcock and so an ancestor on the Hatten side, wrote the only account of the burning in the town book. Capt. Sill's company stayed to garrison the town, and the deacon died there on 11 November. While Springfield's mills were ash, it ground its corn at the Westfield mill in which Cornet Joseph Whiting of the Hampshire troop had a share (Chester D. Stiles, comp., A History of the Town of Westfield (1919), p. 12).

In November Capt. Daniel Henchman and Capt. Sill went into the Nipmuc country after the people who had carried off the praying Indians of Hassanamesit. In the fight of 9 November, Henchman wrote, "his corporal, Abiell Lamb, outran himself" (Bodge p. 55). Abiel was a son of Dorothy (Harbottle) Lamb of Roxbury, a Low-side ancestor; Jeremiah Wise, a son of Joseph Wise, was in the same expedition.

Winter 1675-76: the Narragansett campaign

On 2 November the United Colonies declared war on the Narragansett, who had sheltered Wampanoag women and children. The army mustered on Dedham Plain on 9-10 December, and the soldiers were promised "a gratuity of land, besides their wages" if they "played the man, took the fort" (Bodge p. 406). On Sunday 19 December, after a night march through snow, they stormed the Narragansett fort in the Great Swamp in what is now South Kingstown and burned its wigwams with the old people, women and children inside. Increase Mather reckoned that "not lesse then a thousand Indian Souls perished"; of the English "about two hundred and thirty" were killed or wounded and six captains fell (Increase Mather, A Brief History of the Warr with the Indians in New-England (Boston: John Foster, 1676); ed. Samuel G. Drake as The History of King Philip's War (Boston, 1862), pp. 107-109).

No battle of the war holds more of the family. In the army that day:

Who	How the family knows him	Company	The record
Richard Mather of Dorchester	Ancestor (Hatten side)	Capt. Prentice's troop	"Richard Mather Juniour" in the troop list; credited £4 10s, 24 Mar 1675/6 (Bodge pp. 82-83)
Capt. William Dodge of Beverly	Brother of Hannah (Dodge) Woodbury	Capt. Prentice's troop	"William Dodge (Jr,)" (Bodge p. 83); Hubbard's "one W. Dodge of Salem," 21 Jan 1676
Samuel Tyler	Ancestor (Holbrook side, Tyler line)	Maj. Appleton's own company	"Sam. Tyler" on Appleton's roll; credited 24 Mar 1675/6 (Bodge pp. 155-157)
Ralph Ellinwood of Beverly	Ancestor (Ellingwood side)	Probably Capt. Gardner's	On Beverly's list of the men at the fort (Edwin M. Stone, History of Beverly (Boston, 1843), p. 28); drew his own township right in the 1730s (Bodge p. 423)
William Bath of Beverly	Next husband of Eleanor (Lynn) Ellinwood	Capt. Gardner's	"William bath" on Gardner's Beverly muster (Bodge p. 167)
Thomas Holbrook of Braintree	Son or grandson of the immigrant Thomas	Capt. Isaac Johnson's	"Tho: Holbrook," Dedham, 10 Dec 1675 (Bodge p. 162); "alive" in 1733
Abiel Lamb of Roxbury	Son of Dorothy (Harbottle) Lamb	Capt. Isaac Johnson's	On the same list; credited £4 10s (Bodge pp. 162, 277)
John Wheeler of Concord	Ancestor (Ellingwood side)	Capt. Davenport's	Impressed at Concord; credited 24 Mar 1675/6; his son drew a lot "For his father John" (Bodge pp. 170-172, 435)
John and Samuel Payson of Roxbury	Kin of Elizabeth (Payson) Foster	Capt. Prentice's troop	Credited £4 10s each (Bodge pp. 82-83)
Rev. Nicholas Noyes	Cousin of Rev. Moses Noyes	Chaplain, Connecticut regiment	Council of War, 11 Dec 1675 (The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, vols. 1-2 (1850-1852), 2:388); Bodge p. 183

Captains Johnson and Davenport, whose companies held Thomas Holbrook, Abiel Lamb and John Wheeler, were shot at the log that bridged the entrance; Capt. Joseph Gardner of Salem was shot through the head inside the fort. Samuel Tyler's company lost four men killed and eighteen wounded; Samuel came through unhurt.

Ralph Ellinwood, eighteen, probably went in with the Beverly men of Gardner's company, among them William Bath, who would marry his widowed mother. More than fifty years later Ralph drew his own township right for that winter's service, one of the few soldiers still alive to do it.

Behind the army stood the men who raised it. At Woburn the impressment return for Davenport's company is headed by the town's three officers, Capt. John Carter, the father of Hannah (Carter) Converse, Lt. William Johnson and Ensign James Converse, very probably Hannah's father-in-law (Samuel Sewall, The History of Woburn (Boston, 1868), p. 113; Bodge p. 172). At Scituate the press masters for the Narragansett levy were "Major Cudworth, Cornett Robert Studson, and Isacke Chettenden" (PCR 5:183): Isaac Chittenden chose which of his neighbours would march. At New London the colony's stores were put in the hands of Joshua Raymond, son of Richard Raymond, the army's commissary (The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, vols. 1-2 (1850-1852), 2:384, 405-406). Lt. Reinold Marvin, Lyme's deputy, signed its soldiers' pay bills (2:386).

The army stayed in the field. In January Prentice's troop met a party of the enemy, "in which Exploit something hapned very remarkable; for one W. Dodge of Salem, riding in Company with another Friend," met two Indians, and "saved the Life of one Friend, and slew two of his Enemies" (Hubbard 1:163). Rev. John Wise, another son of Joseph Wise and the future brother-in-law of Richard Mather, went out from New London on 26 January as one of the ministers to Maj. Treat's Connecticut army (John Langdon Sibley, Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University, vol. 2 (1881), 2:428-429). Capt. Samuel Brocklebank of Rowley brought recruits through a storm "that bit some of them by the heels with the frost," and they followed the Narragansett north on the Hungry March, eating their horses; Robert Rand of Lynn was credited £1 10s under Brocklebank on 24 March, the five weeks those recruits served (Bodge pp. 200-207). In the same company was John Burrill, first cousin of the Lynn girl, Tabitha Ivory, whom Rand married in 1683/4.

Spring 1676: the towns burn

In the new year the Native towns carried the war to the English towns, and the family's war became a war at home.

Lancaster, 10 February. Nipmuc and Narragansett men burned the town and set fire to the garrison house of the minister, Rev. Joseph Rowlandson. Of the thirty-seven people inside, Mary Rowlandson wrote, none escaped "either present death or a bitter captivity, save only one." Among the dead was "Thomas Rowlandson, aged 19," the minister's nephew from Salisbury, son of Thomas Rowlandson and brother of Martha Rowlandson, then nine; she would marry Ralph Ellinwood in 1691, and her sister Elizabeth married his brother John. Mary Rowlandson, their aunt by marriage, was carried off with her children (Bodge pp. 352-354; Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682)). John Stanwood of Gloucester had served in the Lancaster garrison in the weeks before, and was paid off on 25 January with a Gloucester neighbour, John Fitch (Bodge p. 355). The one man who escaped the Rowlandson house, Ephraim Roper, was on the list of Capt. William Turner's company "taken at Medfield" eleven days later, beside Richard Cheever of Boston.

Medfield, 21 February; Weymouth, 25 February. Medfield was half burned although Capt. John Jacob's company was quartered there, and Turner's company, among them Richard Cheever, then fifteen, came in the next day (Bodge pp. 234, 239). Four nights later, Increase Mather wrote, "the Indians fired seven Houses and Barns in Weymouth," the town of Lt. John Holbrook and his father, old Thomas Holbrook, then about eighty-six (Increase Mather, A Brief History of the Warr with the Indians in New-England (Boston: John Foster, 1676); ed. Samuel G. Drake as The History of King Philip's War (Boston, 1862)). On 19 April Sgt. Thomas Pratt was killed at Weymouth, and Capt. William Torrey wrote for the militia committee that the town already had "ten men out ... four killed by the enemy, already ... Just at this instant saw appearing of fire and smoke about the Town" (Gilbert Nash, Historical Sketch of the Town of Weymouth, Massachusetts (1885), pp. 38-40).

Northampton, 14 March. Turner's company was in Northampton when warriors broke through the palisade before dawn; five houses burned. Richard Cheever was probably with the company then, and inside the town were Isaac Sheldon and his household, Hatten-side ancestors (James Russell Trumbull, History of Northampton, Massachusetts, vol. 1 (1898), 1:307-312). Cheever came home in April with Lt. Drinker's part of the company, and so missed the fight at the Falls in which Turner was killed.

Pierce's Fight, 26 March. On 29 February Plymouth's council of war ordered the men pressed in the southern towns "to be att Plymouth on Weddensday ... and with them 20 or 30 of the southeren Indians ... to goe forth vnder the comaund of Captaine Michael Peirse and Leiftenant Samuell Fuller" (PCR 5:187). Capt. Michael Pierce of Scituate had made his will on 15 January, "being now by the appointment of God going out to war, against the Indians," leaving "my daughter, Abigail Holbrook five pounds." On Sunday 26 March, near the Pawtucket falls of the Blackstone River, his company followed a decoy across the river into a much larger force. "Captain Pierce was slain, and forty and nine English with him, and eight (or more) Indians who did assist the English" (Mather). Hubbard tells of Amos, a Christian Indian, who "after the Captain was shot in his Leg or Thigh ... would not leave him" until there was no hope (1:175-176). Rev. Noah Newman of Rehoboth listed the dead by town the next day: from Scituate "Capt. Pierce, Samuel Russell, Benjamin Chittenden," from Sandwich "Benjamin Nye" (Bodge pp. 359-360). Benjamin Chittenden was a son of Isaac Chittenden, the press master. Benjamin Nye was a son of Benjamin Nye of Sandwich, whose daughter Mercy probably married Lt. Matthias Ellis. John Read Jr. of Rehoboth, brother of the Tyler side's Daniel Read, was "slain on the 26th of March, 1676" (Bliss), and John Walker of Eastham, a grandson of Nicholas Snow and Constance Hopkins, fell with them.

Rehoboth and Providence, 28-30 March. Two days after the fight the enemy burned "about thirty Barns, and near upon fourty dwelling Houses" at Rehoboth (Mather), the town of the Reads, Ides and Pecks of the Tyler side's Read line. The town's account of what its men advanced for the war, from Joseph Peck's £2 10s to "Wid. Rachael Read, with the loss of a gun," survives (Leonard Bliss Jr., The History of Rehoboth (Boston, 1836), pp. 117-118). Two sons of Nicholas Ide served, John in the Narragansett expedition and very probably Nicholas under Maj. Bradford that summer, with Daniel Read's brothers Thomas and Israel; between August and December some twenty Rehoboth burials were recorded, among them Nicholas Ide's wife Martha on 3 November and John Ide in December.

Connecticut, 26-27 March. Simsbury was burned, its people already withdrawn to Windsor, where the council had ordered garrisons at the houses of the east side, "Nath: Bissell's" among them, where old John Bissell lived (The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, vols. 1-2 (1850-1852), 2:410). The next day the council fined his son Samuel Bissell forty shillings: when the constable of Windsor pressed his horse for the army, Bissell "did deceiue him of him, and let him be turned out of his yarde before his face" (2:423).

Sudbury, 21 April. Some hundreds of warriors drew Capt. Samuel Wadsworth and Capt. Samuel Brocklebank into an ambush near Sudbury and killed most of their men. Edward Cowell of Boston, bringing eighteen troopers back from Marlborough, was caught about three miles from the town: "fower of my Company was killed ... upon Capt. Wadsworths Ingadgine with the Indian I wentt Backe and Beuryed the fower men which were killed whereof (Lt.?) Thomas Haw[le]y, and Hopkinsies son both of Roxbeury" (Bodge p. 226). Thomas Hawley was the second husband of Dorothy (Harbottle) Lamb. Cowell swore his deposition before the Council on 19 June, against "this Indian Tom" who had been in the fight: Capt. Tom, Wuttasacomponom, the ruler of the praying town of Hassanamesit, whom Gookin called "a prudent, and I believe, a pious man," was hanged in Boston three days later, though Christian Indian soldiers had petitioned for his life (Daniel Gookin, An Historical Account of the Doings and Sufferings of the Christian Indians in New England (1677), in Archaeologia Americana: Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 1836), pp. 423-534, pp. 476, 528). Brocklebank, who died that day, was the captain of Robert Rand's winter service and of John Stanwood and his brother Philip, whose credits for the Marlborough garrison were posted in June and July. The same day "(as is judged fifty) Indians burnt nineteen houses and barns at Scituate" (Mather).

Capt. John Holbrook's company, 27 April-10 May. After Sudbury Massachusetts sent out "the Foot under the Command of Capt. Sill, Capt. Cutler, Capt. Holbrook; the Horse under the Command of Capt. Brattle, Capt. Prentice, Capt. Henchman, Commanders in Chief ... April 27, 1676, to range the Woods towards Hassanamesit" (Hubbard 1:224-225). Lt. John Holbrook of Weymouth mustered at Concord on the 29th and wrote: "this Day have mustered my Company ... which are but very Small which is a great Discouragement to me ... I have neither Drume nor Collors." His certificate says he was "ordered to take 82 men under my Command together with 28 horses & 14 men to tend them," from Boston, Roxbury, Dorchester, Dedham, Braintree, Weymouth and Hingham, and lists who did not come: "From Dorchester non-appearance. Consider Atherton, Henry Wedarton, Ebezar Clape" (Bodge pp. 280-281). Consider Atherton was a son of Humphrey Atherton and a brother of Elizabeth (Atherton) Mather. Weymouth's share was six men, the draft Capt. Torrey had protested. On 6 May the Natick scouts, "pursuing a Bear," found a party of the enemy; the horse killed or took about sixteen, and the force went back to its quarters at Medfield, where an "epidemical Cold" broke it up on 10 May. Elisha Foster, a younger son of Capt. Hopestill Foster, very probably rode beside Holbrook's foot in Brattle's troop (Bodge p. 264). Holbrook was captain for the expedition; at home he was Weymouth's lieutenant still, and the colony called him captain only from about 1680.

His sister company's captain would marry into the Hatten side. Capt. Joseph Sill had been Beers's lieutenant in the valley, had marched into burning Springfield with Pynchon, held Lancaster after its fall and Groton before it was abandoned, and in September would help seize some two hundred Indians gathered at Dover, many of whom were sold; in October the Court discharged him because "he hath carrjed himself offencively" (Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 5:126). In 1677/8 he married at Lyme the widow of Lt. Reinold Marvin, a Hatten-side ancestor, and their son later married Richard Mather's daughter.

Scituate, 20 May. Scituate was attacked again. "The garrison house of Stockbridge was pallisadoed on three sides, the fourth being defended by the mill pond," and the attackers fought there for hours and could not take it; toward night "Lieut. Buck had mustered all the men below" (Samuel Deane, History of Scituate, Massachusetts (Boston, 1831), pp. 126-127). Lt. Isaac Buck is a Holbrook-side ancestor through his daughter Mehitable; the mill was the Stockbridges', the family of Sarah (Stockbridge) Woodworth on Frances Holbrook's mother's side. Isaac Chittenden, the press master, came through the fight; on 29 July he sat first on a coroner's jury at Scituate, and he died before November (PCR 5:211, 5:225-226). That July the court allowed land "for Benjamine Woodworth," Joseph's brother, who very probably came home too and sat on a Scituate jury the next March (PCR 5:206, 5:227).

The Falls, 19 May. About a hundred and fifty mounted men of the valley towns under Capt. Turner rode through the night from Hatfield and fell at dawn on the fishing camps at Peskeompskut, at the head of the falls. "Our soldiers came and put their guns into their wigwams ... and did make a great and notable slaughter among them"; the camp held men, women and children, and Judd, Hadley's historian, thought 130 to 180 "old and young" perished. On the way back the column broke under counter-attack, and Turner and nearly forty men were killed (Sylvester Judd, History of Hadley, with family genealogies by Lucius M. Boltwood (Springfield, 1905), pp. 160-167). The roll of 1736, made when the survivors and their heirs were granted land, has "Chapin, Japhett, Springfield"; "Mun, James" and "Mun, John," brothers of Nathaniel Munn; "Hitchcock, Luke" and his brother John, the husband of Hannah Chapin, who was shot through one arm and had the other broken; and Thomas Stebbins, husband of Abigail Munn (Bodge pp. 250-253; George Sheldon, A History of Deerfield, Massachusetts, vol. 1 (1895), 1:158-160). Two lines that later joined in the Chapins rode in that column: the Munns, and Luke Hitchcock, whose son Ebenezer married Mary Sheldon, granddaughter of Isaac Sheldon and of Cornet Joseph Whiting. The chaplain, Rev. Hope Atherton, another brother of Elizabeth (Atherton) Mather, was separated from the troops in the retreat, offered himself to the enemy as a prisoner, was refused, and found his way back to Hadley (John Langdon Sibley, Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University, vol. 2 (1881), 2:194). In May 1677 Japhet Chapin, Springfield's constable for the war year, and John Hitchcock were charged with bringing in "the account ... of our expences at ye fals fight" (Burt 2:131).

Hadley, 12 June. A large force attacked Hadley and was driven off by the newly arrived Connecticut army and its Mohegan allies. Samuel Porter of Hadley had "taken care of most of the wounded souldjers at Hadley ... laying out of his oune money" and was owed "neere two hundred pounds"; the Court paid him £25 on account in September (Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 5:116-117). His daughter Experience was born in the garrisoned town on 5 August.

Summer 1676: Church's company and the end of Philip

By midsummer the Native towns were starving and coming in. Plymouth gave Benjamin Church, a grandson of Richard Warren, a company of English and Native soldiers, many of them Sakonnet men who had come over with their sachem Awashonks, on terms "that the country should find them ammunition and provision, and half the prisoners and arms they took. The Captain and his English soldiers to have the other half of the prisoners and arms, and the Indian soldiers the loose plunder" (Thomas Church, Entertaining Passages relating to Philip's War (1716), as The History of King Philip's War, ed. Samuel G. Drake (1825), 1825 ed., p. 74). Early in August Philip's people, surprised, "left their kettles boiling, and meat roasting upon their wooden spits; and ran into a swamp ... Captain Church pursuing, sent Mr. Isaac Howland with a party on one side of the swamp, while himself with the rest, ran on the other side ... Captain Church and Mr. Howland soon met at the further end of the swamp" (pp. 90-91). Isaac Howland of Middleborough is a Holbrook-side ancestor through the Ellises, and Church, a grandson of Richard Warren, is kin on the same side; the Warren and Howland lines met again a century later in George Ellis and Phebe Stephens. Church's men took Philip's wife and nine-year-old son on 1 August; on 6 August Weetamoo, the sachem of Pocasset, drowned crossing the Taunton River and Taunton men set her head on a pole; on 12 August, in a swamp at Mount Hope, Philip was shot by Alderman, one of Church's Native soldiers (Mather, pp. 190-194).

At Dorchester Capt. Hopestill Foster, who had sat in the war Courts of May 1675 and May 1676, made his will on 19 July and died in October, two months after the man who had asked him for a coat (Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 5:42-43, 77). His son Hopestill was made ensign of Capt. Thomas Clarke's Boston company that May (5:127). Lt. Reinold Marvin, Lyme's deputy, died on 4 August.

The Eastern war, 1676-1678

In Maine the war went on two years longer. After the Kennebec trading houses fell on 13-14 August 1676, a girl who escaped "ran across over the Land that Night ten or twelve Miles, to give them Notice that lived at Shipscot River ... Those of Shipscot taking this Warning escaped away as soon as they could, leaving their Cattel and their Dwellings" (Hubbard 2:157-158). Among them, very probably, was the family of Thomas Messer, whose daughter Lydia Messer said in old age that she lived in her father's house on the Sheepscot "till she was seventeen years old and married, which time was before the first Indian Wars"; Thomas Messer was among the former inhabitants who met in Boston in 1682 to plan the resettlement, and in 1680 Lydia, widowed, married John Stanwood in Boston (David Q. Cushman, The History of Ancient Sheepscot and Newcastle (Bath, 1882), pp. 60-66; Bolton, A History of the Stanwood Family in America (1899), pp. 32-34).

John Ellinwood of Beverly, Ralph's brother, was "Imprest & sent to ye Eastward as a souldier ... in ye Towne of Wells being then vnder ye Comand of Capt Frost & Leiut Sweat," and there "sorely wounded in my right hand my fore finger being shott away & ye rest of my hand so greiuously shattered & Torn" that it was "almost altogether vseless" (The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay, vol. 7 (Boston, 1892), 7:657). He was most likely hit in the spring of 1677, at seventeen, when the Wells garrison under Lt. Benjamin Swett lost men on the 6th, 12th and 29th of April; Swett himself was killed with some forty English and twelve Natick men at Black Point that June. His certificate in 1701 was signed by Thomas Parlor, who had been on Maj. Appleton's roll for the Narragansett campaign. The General Court granted him £5 and £3 a year for life. Peace was made at Casco on 12 April 1678.

What happened to the defeated

The war ended Native independence in southern New England and broke up its peoples. Plymouth's council of war sold 112 "men, weomen, and children" brought in to Plymouth on 4 August 1675, and on 2 September the 57 who had "lately come in to Sandwich ... in a submissiue way" were "condemned vnto ppetuall servitude" and sold (PCR 5:173-174). Church, who had promised the Dartmouth people quarter, called their sale "an action so hateful to Mr. Church, that he oppos'd it" (Church, Dexter ed., pp. 45-46). Ships took captives to Cadiz, the West Indies, Bermuda, the Azores and Tangier; Massachusetts's treasurer sold them by the lot (Bodge pp. 479-480). The ministers argued over Philip's nine-year-old son; in March 1677 John Cotton wrote, "Philip's boy goes now to be sold." On 22 July 1676 Plymouth let its magistrates put the children of those who surrendered "vnto such of the English as may vse them well, especially theire parents consenting thervnto," until they were 24 or 25 (PCR 5:207). Historians now count more than two thousand Native people taken in the war, perhaps five hundred of them shipped away and the rest bound in New England households, terms that often merged into slavery (Margaret Ellen Newell, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (Cornell University Press, 2015); Linford D. Fisher, "'Why shall wee have peace to bee made slaves': Indian Surrenderers During and After King Philip's War," Ethnohistory 64:1 (2017): 91-114).

The family sat on the bodies that ordered these sales and juries that sent men away. In March 1676/7 Joseph Bartlett, son of Robert Bartlett and Mary Warren, and Mark Snow of Eastham were on the Plymouth jury that found two Native men "very suspisious" of the murders of three Englishmen at Taunton; the court sent them "out of the country speedily, and the other likewise, as hee is prisoner taken in warr" (PCR 5:224). In 1699 Capt. John Holbrook's will provided "if my Indian Servant Anthony doth behave himself well, that he have his Freedom in twelve years after my decease." Anthony was probably bound to him after the war rather than taken in it.

The land went too. In October 1678 Massachusetts named "Leift Jn° Holbrooke" one of three men to attend the meeting at Plymouth "to assist in the sale of the concquest lands" (Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 5:204). The colonies paid their soldiers in land as well. Plymouth allowed Scituate's men land "for such seruice as they pformed for the country" in July 1676, "Leifte Isake Bucke, 10:00:00" first (PCR 5:206); Gloucester gave the three Stanwood brothers soldiers' lots at Kettle Cove in 1679/80, entered in the town book kept by Thomas Riggs; John Ellinwood had his pension. Half a century later Massachusetts made good the promise of Dedham Plain. In 1728-1733 it granted seven Narragansett townships to the soldiers of 1675 and their heirs: "Ralph Elinwood ... (Alive) (By himself)" at No. 3 (Amherst, New Hampshire), Samuel Tyler's right to "Ebenezer, son," Rand's to "Robert Rand, son," Thomas Low's to Jonathan Low at No. 1 (Buxton, Maine), "Thomas Holbrook, alive" at No. 5, Thomas Hawley's to his son-in-law, Abiel Lamb's to his son, John Wheeler's to Ebenezer "For his father John" at No. 6 (Bodge pp. 413-438). The clerk of the whole body of grantees was the Boston printer Samuel Kneeland, a son of Mary (Green) Kneeland (William S. Heywood, History of Westminster, Massachusetts (1893), pp. 45-51). Connecticut granted Voluntown to its volunteers; Rev. Moses Noyes of Lyme drew a Cedar Swamp lot there (Bodge pp. 442-445). In 1736 the survivors and heirs of the Falls Fight, Japhet Chapin's son and the Munns among them, were granted a township of their own.

The war in print

The war's first histories came from a family press. John Foster, a son of Capt. Hopestill Foster and the brother of Ensign Hopestill, had opened Boston's first printing office in 1675 "over against the sign of the Dove." He printed Increase Mather's A Brief History of the Warr with the Indians in New-England (1676), and in 1677 William Hubbard's Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians, with a woodcut "Map of New-England, Being the first that ever was here cut," the first map cut and printed in the English colonies, on which numbers mark the towns attacked (Charles Evans, American Bibliography, vol. 1, 1639-1729 (1903), nos. 220, 231; William Hubbard, A Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New-England (Boston: John Foster, 1677); ed. Samuel G. Drake as The History of the Indian Wars in New England, 2 vols. (Roxbury, 1865)). Drake: "There was then but one printer in Boston, — John Foster by name, — and he must print both Works." Increase Mather was a brother of Timothy Mather of Dorchester, a Hatten-side ancestor, whose son Richard rode at the Swamp Fight. Foster died in 1681, and his gravestone in Dorchester's North Burying Ground calls him "the ingenious mathematician and printer."

Across the river, Samuel Green of Cambridge printed Capt. Thomas Wheeler's narrative of Brookfield (1676) and Mary Rowlandson's narrative (1682), and in 1659 had taken as his apprentice a Nipmuc boy from Hassanamesit, James Printer, who set type for the Indian Bible, left in 1675 to join his people, was among the Nipmuc when Mary Rowlandson's ransom was agreed, came in under the offer of mercy in July 1676, and went back to setting type (Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America, vol. 1 (2nd ed., 1874), 1:95-98; Mather, p. 172). Mary (Green) Kneeland, mother of Samuel Kneeland, the grantees' clerk, may have been Samuel Green's daughter. Church's memoir was printed by Bartholomew Green in 1716, and its reprint of 1772 carried Paul Revere's engravings of Philip and of Church.

The other side

Most of the Native people in the family's records appear only because the colonists wrote about them. Read against the grain, the records name: Metacom, writing to Capt. Foster about land and a coat; Squamaug of the Massachusett, contesting his claim; John Sassamon, the witness at Wading River whose death began the war; Owannamaug near Marlborough, whose hay Job Tyler took; Matoonas, who struck Mendon for a son whose head stood on a pole; Toto, living with a Windsor family, who warned Springfield the night before it burned; James Quannapohit and Eleazer Pegin, the Natick scouts who guided Capt. Sill; Amos, who would not leave the wounded Capt. Pierce; Capt. Tom of Hassanamesit, hanged on evidence that included the deposition about Thomas Hawley's death; the 57 sold at Sandwich, and Keweenam, "an Indian sometimes liueing about Sandwich," sentenced to be beheaded in July 1676 (PCR 5:205-206); the Natick men killed with Lt. Swett at Black Point; Wenepoykin, the Lynn sachem sold to Barbados, who came home in 1684; the Mohegan under Uncas and Oneco, Connecticut's allies, whom the council let "dispose of" their captives "by sale or otherwayes" (The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, vols. 1-2 (1850-1852), 2:385); and Anthony, in Holbrook's will. Some of the family lived alongside the praying towns that stayed loyal: the Tuppers of Sandwich preached to the Native people of Herring Pond, Thomas Tupper Jr. sat on Sandwich's committee for the war's charges in 1677, and Lt. Matthias Ellis later ran the bounds with the Mashpee. On Long Island, under New York's government, the war passed the Oyster Bay Friends by: Gov. Andros's council heard in September 1675 that "many of ye Inhabitants there being Quakers & refusing to beare arms" could not keep the watch, and ordered the defaulters fined, while Nicholas Wright was one of the town's overseers (Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, vol. 14 (1883), p. 697).

Where their paths crossed

The family's lines did not join for generations after the war, so most of these meetings were among strangers who would later share descendants. Where they crossed:

1. Wading River, 12 July 1670. Capt. Hopestill Foster (Low side) met Philip at the farm of Capt. William Hudson, partner of Humphrey Atherton (Hatten side) in the Narragansett mortgage, with John Sassamon as witness. Lt. John Holbrook (Holbrook side) had been chosen to serve under Hudson in 1664.
2. The fort in the Great Swamp, 19 December 1675. One army held Richard Mather (Hatten side), Samuel Tyler (Tyler side), probably Ralph Ellinwood (Ellingwood side), Capt. William Dodge (brother of an Ellingwood-side ancestor), Thomas Holbrook of Braintree (Holbrook kin), Abiel Lamb (son of a Low-side ancestor), John Wheeler of Concord (Ellingwood side) and John Ide of Rehoboth (Tyler side), with Rev. Nicholas Noyes, cousin of Moses Noyes (Hatten side), as Connecticut's chaplain. Mather and Dodge rode in the same troop; Tyler and the Beverly men served under the same major, Samuel Appleton.
3. Capt. Brocklebank of Rowley. He signed the Rowley impressment that sent Samuel Tyler to the army in November 1675, commanded Robert Rand (Ellingwood side) on the Hungry March and the Stanwood brothers (Tyler side) at Marlborough, and was killed at Sudbury on 21 April 1676, the day Thomas Hawley, husband of Dorothy (Harbottle) Lamb (Low side), was killed in Cowell's party three miles away.
4. Pierce's company, 26 March 1676. Capt. Michael Pierce (Holbrook side) died with Benjamin Chittenden (son of a Holbrook-side ancestor), Benjamin Nye (son of a Holbrook-side ancestor on the Ellis line), John Read Jr. (brother of a Tyler-side ancestor) and John Walker of Eastham (grandson of Ellingwood-side ancestors, Nicholas Snow and Constance Hopkins). It is the one fight in which both of Frances Holbrook's and Dick Ellingwood's families lost men.
5. The town councils of war of 29 February 1675/6. One order of Plymouth's council (PCR 5:186) put Joseph Warren at Plymouth, Isaac Chittenden at Scituate, Edmund Freeman Jr. at Sandwich, Jeremiah Howes at Yarmouth, and Capt. John Freeman and Mark Snow at Eastham on their towns' councils: five Holbrook-side families and one of the Ellingwood side's in a single paragraph.
6. Lancaster, January-February 1676. John Stanwood (Tyler side) in the garrison in the weeks before; Thomas Rowlandson (brother of an Ellingwood-side ancestor) killed in the minister's house; Capt. Sill holding the town afterwards; Ephraim Roper, the one man who escaped the house, marching beside Richard Cheever (Ellingwood side) in Turner's company.
7. Holbrook and Sill, 27 April-10 May 1676. Lt. John Holbrook (Holbrook side) and Capt. Joseph Sill commanded two of the three foot companies of one expedition; Sill married the widow of Lt. Reinold Marvin (Hatten side) in 1677/8. With them rode Brattle's troop, very probably with Elisha Foster (Low side kin); Consider Atherton, drafted for Holbrook's company, did not come.
8. Springfield and the Falls. Maj. Pynchon and Capt. Sill marched into burning Springfield together on 5 October 1675, where Deacon Chapin and Jonathan Burt had taken refuge; Sill's company garrisoned the town as the deacon died. At the Falls in May 1676 the Chapin, Munn and Hitchcock men of the Hatten side rode together, and the chaplain was Hope Atherton, of the same side's Mather-Atherton line.
9. Scituate, July 1676. The court's list of men to have land for their service puts "Leifte Isake Bucke" (Holbrook side) a few lines from "Charlse Stockbridge, for Benjamine Woodworth" (Frances's mother's side) (PCR 5:206).
10. The Plymouth jury of March 1676/7. Joseph Bartlett (Warren kin, Holbrook side) and Mark Snow (Ellingwood side) sat together on the jury whose verdict sent two Native men out of the country (PCR 5:224).
11. Paige's troop, 1675. Joseph Safford and Joseph Proctor, the son-in-law of Thomas Low and the brother of Abigail Varney, rode together to Mount Hope; their families' lines joined a century later.
12. The widows. Sarah (Clark) Marvin married Capt. Sill; Eleanor (Lynn) Ellinwood married William Bath, who had been on Gardner's muster; and two Rowlandson sisters, whose brother was killed at Lancaster, married two Ellinwood brothers who had served.

Our judgment

The family's war was the colonists' war in small, and it was fought at the level of the town. Only one of them, John Pynchon, held high command, and one, John Foster, shaped how the war was remembered. The rest were what a New England town needed to fight: lieutenants and sergeants (Holbrook, Buck, Harlow, Ellis), deputies and members of councils of war (Foster, Marvin, Howes, Chittenden, the Freemans), raters and press masters (Timothy Mather, Chittenden), a constable who kept the accounts of a battle (Japhet Chapin), a commissary (Joshua Raymond), a householder who nursed the wounded on credit (Porter), and young men pressed at fifteen to twenty (Cheever, Ralph and John Ellinwood, Samuel Tyler, Richard Mather). It cost them. Ten of their near kin were killed: Pierce, Benjamin Chittenden, Benjamin Nye, John Read Jr. and John Walker at Pawtucket, Peter Woodbury and Josiah Dodge at Bloody Brook, Thomas Hawley at Sudbury, Thomas Rowlandson at Lancaster and Richard Post at Mendon. John Ellinwood lost the use of his hand and John Hitchcock nearly lost both arms; the Tylers and the Messers lost their homes; houses burned at Springfield, Weymouth and Rehoboth.

It was also a war of conquest, and the family took part in that too. Its grievances were in their own court records before it began: their cattle in Native corn, their purchases without leave. Family men sat on the councils and juries that sold the defeated, John Holbrook was named to help sell the conquered land and held a Native servant twenty years later, and dozens of their heirs drew townships granted for the war half a century on. None of this was unusual in their world, and the records do not let us say that any of them stood against it. The nearest the family came to another way is Benjamin Church, a Warren kinsman, who opposed the sale of the Dartmouth people who had surrendered on his word, and the Quaker Friends of Oyster Bay, who would not bear arms at all. We think the honest account holds both together: the family defended their towns and buried their sons, and they were part of a war that ended with the sale of the people they had lived beside. The histories John Foster printed told the war as a deliverance; the rest of it is in the same records, often in the same hand.

Old stories, set right

A few of the stories the family has long told about the war come out differently in the records:

• Samuel Tyler was not wounded and left for dead at the Swamp. The company's clerk wrote "Samuel Taylor of Rowley" among the slain by mistake; the man who died was an Ipswich Samuel Taylor.
• Isaac Chittenden did not fall defending Scituate on 20 May 1676; he lived into the autumn.
• Benjamin Woodworth was not killed in the war; he came home to Scituate.
• Richard Cheever was not at the Falls Fight; he had gone home in April with part of Turner's company.

Trail

12 Oct 2026: The question

The Small world page had told the war in five stories ("One war, every branch," "Lancaster, 1676," "Scituate, 1676," "The captain, the lieutenant and the press master" and "Three Holbrooks, three Pierces"), naming about fifteen ancestors and near kin from Bodge's Soldiers in King Philip's War, Church's memoir and Deane's History of Scituate (Bodge, Soldiers in King Philip's War (1906), Thomas Church, Entertaining Passages relating to Philip's War (1716), as The History of King Philip's War, ed. Samuel G. Drake (1825), Samuel Deane, History of Scituate, Massachusetts (Boston, 1831)). The people files gave a wider net: 230 ancestors alive in New England or on Long Island in 1675-76, about sixty of whose pages already mentioned the war in some way. The question was put to the printed records region by region, five at a time: the frame and the Native side; Plymouth Colony; Massachusetts Bay; Essex County and Maine; and the Connecticut valley, Connecticut and Long Island. Each region's notes are in research/king-philips-war/.

12 Oct 2026: The frame and the Native side

Read in the contemporary narratives (Mather, Hubbard, Gookin, Easton and the London tracts in Lincoln), the Plymouth and Massachusetts records, the Dorchester town records and Potter's Narragansett (Increase Mather, A Brief History of the Warr with the Indians in New-England (Boston: John Foster, 1676); ed. Samuel G. Drake as The History of King Philip's War (Boston, 1862), William Hubbard, A Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New-England (Boston: John Foster, 1677); ed. Samuel G. Drake as The History of the Indian Wars in New England, 2 vols. (Roxbury, 1865), Daniel Gookin, An Historical Account of the Doings and Sufferings of the Christian Indians in New England (1677), in Archaeologia Americana: Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 1836), pp. 423-534, Charles H. Lincoln, ed., Narratives of the Indian Wars, 1675-1699 (New York, 1913): Cotton Mather, Decennium Luctuosum (1699), Dorchester Town Records (Boston Record Commissioners, Fourth Report, 1880; 2nd ed. 1883), Elisha R. Potter, The Early History of Narragansett (1835)). What it found:

• Wading River: Capt. Hopestill Foster's meeting with Philip in July 1670 was the meeting at which Philip and Squamaug settled their line, with John Sassamon as witness, at the farm of Atherton's partner William Hudson; Dorchester paid Foster back "for money he laid downe to the Sachem" (Pierce, Foster Genealogy (1899), George F. Clark, A History of the Town of Norton (1859)).
• The Atherton mortgage of 1660 named by a contemporary, Easton, as "the greatest Case of the war."
• The printers: both of the war's first histories printed by John Foster, the brother of an ancestor (Charles Evans, American Bibliography, vol. 1, 1639-1729 (1903)); the Nipmuc printer James Printer of Samuel Green's shop; Samuel Kneeland, son of John and Mary Kneeland, clerk of the Narragansett grantees in 1733 (William S. Heywood, History of Westminster, Massachusetts (1893)).
• The sale of the defeated: Plymouth's orders of 1675-76 and the historians' counts (Margaret Ellen Newell, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (Cornell University Press, 2015), Linford D. Fisher, "'Why shall wee have peace to bee made slaves': Indian Surrenderers During and After King Philip's War," Ethnohistory 64:1 (2017): 91-114).
• Two corrections: the 1678 order on the conquest lands names "Leift Jn° Holbrooke"; and the terms of his servant Anthony's freedom fit a man bound after the war better than a captive of it.

12 Oct 2026: The Connecticut valley, Connecticut and Long Island

Read in the Connecticut colony records and its Council of War journal, Burt's Springfield records, Judd, Sheldon, Trumbull, Stiles, Caulkins and the New York council minutes (The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, vols. 1-2 (1850-1852), Henry M. Burt, ed., The First Century of the History of Springfield: The Official Records from 1636 to 1736, 2 vols. (1898-99), Sylvester Judd, History of Hadley, with family genealogies by Lucius M. Boltwood (Springfield, 1905), George Sheldon, A History of Deerfield, Massachusetts, vol. 1 (1895), James Russell Trumbull, History of Northampton, Massachusetts, vol. 1 (1898), Henry R. Stiles, The History and Genealogies of Ancient Windsor, Connecticut (1891-92), Frances Manwaring Caulkins, History of New London, Connecticut (1895 ed.), Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, vol. 14 (1883)). New: Richard Mather in Prentice's troop at the Swamp; Samuel Porter's care of the wounded at Hadley; Samuel Bissell's fine for hiding his pressed horse; Japhet Chapin as Springfield's constable and keeper of its Falls Fight accounts; Luke Hitchcock and the Munn brothers at the Falls; Rev. Moses Noyes on the Voluntown roll; Lt. Reinold Marvin as Lyme's deputy; Capt. Joseph Sill's war, and his marriage to the widow Marvin; the Oyster Bay Quakers' refusal to bear arms. Corrected: the year of Andros's visit to Saybrook (1675), the date of James Eno's petition, and "Mr. Philips' Service" in John Bowne's journal, which has nothing to do with the war.

12 Oct 2026: Massachusetts Bay and the Nipmuc country

Read in Bodge's transcripts of the Massachusetts Archives and Hull's journal, the colony records (vol. 5), Hubbard, Mather, the Dorchester and Roxbury records and the town histories (Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, The Diaries of John Hull, Mint-master and Treasurer of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society, vol. 3 (Boston, 1857), Vital Records of Roxbury, Massachusetts, to the End of the Year 1849, Samuel Sewall, The History of Woburn (Boston, 1868), William S. Tilden, History of the Town of Medfield, Massachusetts (1887), J. H. Temple, History of North Brookfield, Massachusetts (1887), Gilbert Nash, Historical Sketch of the Town of Weymouth, Massachusetts (1885)). New: Holbrook's expedition with Sill and Cutler in Hubbard's words, his Weymouth draft and his absentees (Consider Atherton among them); Thomas Holbrook of Braintree and Abiel Lamb in Johnson's company; Thomas Hawley's death in Cowell's party and Cowell's deposition against Capt. Tom; Capt. Hopestill Foster in the war Courts and on the Mendon committee, his son Elisha in Brattle's troop; Timothy Mather as Dorchester's war rater; John Wheeler of Concord at Narragansett; the Atherton brothers. Corrected: the date of the Weymouth raid (25 February 1676), Thomas Millett's death (intestate, before 28 September 1675), Richard Cheever's absence from the Falls, the date of Rev. John Wise's service (January 1676) and Holbrook's rank.

12 Oct 2026: Essex County and the Eastern war

Read in Bodge, the Essex court records, the Province's acts and resolves, Hubbard's second volume and the town histories of Rowley, Beverly, Salem, Lynn, Ipswich, Gloucester and Sheepscot (Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts, The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay, vol. 7 (Boston, 1892), Thomas Gage, The History of Rowley (Boston, 1840), Edwin M. Stone, History of Beverly (Boston, 1843), Sidney Perley, The History of Salem, Massachusetts, 3 vols. (Salem, 1924-28), Alonzo Lewis and James R. Newhall, History of Lynn (Boston, 1865), Waters, Ipswich in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 2 vols. (1905, 1917), David Q. Cushman, The History of Ancient Sheepscot and Newcastle (Bath, 1882), Records of the Proprietors of Narraganset Township No. 1, now the Town of Buxton (Concord, N.H., 1871)). New: Samuel Tyler in Appleton's own company; Capt. William Dodge in Prentice's troop and Hubbard's story of him; Richard Post killed at Mendon; Robert Rand on the Hungry March; the three Stanwood brothers; John Ellinwood's wound dated to the spring of 1677 at Wells under Lt. Swett; Joseph Safford and Joseph Proctor in Paige's troop; the Sheepscot evacuation of August 1676. Corrected: Samuel Tyler's "wound," the dates of John Stanwood's Lancaster service, and Felt's story of John Cogswell as a captive (he was in prison for debt).

12 Oct 2026: Plymouth Colony and the Rhode Island border

Read in the Plymouth colony and town records, Deane, Freeman's Cape Cod, Bliss's Rehoboth, the Rehoboth records and Church (Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, ed. Shurtleff and Pulsifer, vols 1-12 (1855-61), Records of the Town of Plymouth, ed. William T. Davis, vols 1-3 (1889-1903), Frederick Freeman, The History of Cape Cod, vol. 2 (1862), Leonard Bliss Jr., The History of Rehoboth (Boston, 1836), Arnold, Vital Record of Rehoboth (printed)). New: Pierce's commission of 29 February 1675/6, with its Native soldiers; Benjamin Nye's and John Read Jr.'s deaths with Pierce, from Rev. Noah Newman's letter and the Rehoboth record; the six family men on the town councils of war of 29 February 1675/6; Capt. John Freeman's company at Taunton; Sgt. Harlow on Plymouth's council of war; Isaac Chittenden on Scituate's; the Ides, Reads and Pecks of Rehoboth; Thomas Mulford of Eastham as a soldier-grantee; the Plymouth jury of March 1676/7. Corrected: Isaac Chittenden's death (not on 20 May 1676) and Benjamin Woodworth's (he came home).

12 Oct 2026: Pictures

Seventeen pictures were added to the Gallery: Foster's map, the title pages of Mather, Hubbard and Rowlandson, the Massachusetts Bay seal from Mather's book, Foster's portrait of Richard Mather and his gravestone, Revere's Philip and Church, the Pynchon fort, the Harlow house, the Scituate block house site, the place of Philip's death, and the monuments at the Great Swamp, Nine Men's Misery and Bloody Brook. The pictures not collected, with where they are, are listed in King Philip's War, 1675-1678: the family's register.

Where it stands

The family's part in the war is now known across all four grandparents' lines: about twenty direct ancestors under arms, a dozen in the war's offices, ten near kin killed, and their names on the councils, juries and land grants that followed. The old stories are set right on the people pages and the Small world page. A few branches (the Fosters, the Stanwoods, the Raymonds, and on the Hatten side the Chapins, Pynchons and Mathers) join the family through a link not yet proven; their pages say which. Most of what is left to find is in the soldiers' land claims of the 1730s.

Next

• The Narragansett township claims, 1728-1733 (Massachusetts Archives vol. 72; the proprietors' records of Amherst, N.H., Buxton, Me., and Bedford, N.H.): the claimants' proofs of service, which would settle Ralph Ellinwood's company and which Thomas Low served.
• Massachusetts Archives vols. 67-70 (images on FamilySearch, "Massachusetts Archives Collection"): Holbrook's letter and certificate (68:239, 69:12) in the originals; Prentice's troop list (68:73); Gardner's muster (68:93); the Weymouth petitions (68:179, 68:233); John Ellinwood's petition (70:503).
• Capt. John Holbrook's inventory, 1699 (Suffolk Probate 14): whether it values Anthony; and the Suffolk court records for how he was bound.
• The History of Weymouth (Weymouth Historical Society, 1923, 4 vols.; HathiTrust): whose houses burned on 25 February 1676.
• Plymouth Colony treasurer's accounts and the town lists of soldiers, for the Harlow, Churchill, Rider, Bartlett and Delano men, whose part the printed records show only through offices and rates.
• Connecticut Archives, Colonial Wars I (Connecticut State Library): the Swamp Fight survivors' petition (James Eno), and Lyme's soldiers.
• The Pynchon Papers (ed. Bridenbaugh, 1982-85): Pynchon's letters of 1675-77.
• Pictures still to fetch: the Ellis and Morris plates of Turner's Falls and the Lancaster garrison site (Internet Archive), the 1827 view of the Pynchon house, a pre-1929 view of the Stockbridge mill, and the 1716 title page of Church (not yet found in a free scan).