John Feke

Grandfather of Mary (Cock) Frost: the son of Lieut. Robert Feake and Elizabeth Fones, and so a grandson of Anne (Winthrop) Fones, Governor John Winthrop’s sister. He grew up in the troubles that followed his father’s madness. In 1648 Theophilus Eaton complained that William Hallett and “she that was mr. Feakes his wife” had carried off “the children” from Stamford, and that “the children went (if not naked) very vnsatisfyingly apparraled” (source, 5:237-239); in 1649 the family went to Long Island with Hallett.

With his brother Robert he conveyed land at Flushing in 1660 and 1669 “to ‘our brother John Bowne’” (source, p. 287). He came to Killingworth on Matinecock with his “bro-in-law” Capt. John Underhill, his sister Elizabeth’s husband, “and it appears that he gave young Feke the Southeast part of the tract received from the Indians, on which Feke built and reared a family of considerable note” (p. 10). In 1693 Underhill’s son David conveyed to “his uncle and nearest neighbor, John Feke, ‘all of my part and share in land formerly my father’s’” (source, 2:76).

A Friend and probably a builder: in 1672 he and Samuel Andrews contracted to build the Friends’ meeting house at Oyster Bay, to be paid in “wheat, pease, Indian-corn and porke” (source, p. 36). He witnessed Anthony Wright’s will in 1673; his estate was valued at £130 in 1683; in 1684/5 he was one of those to whom the Matinecock Indians released their remaining land; and in 1694 he agreed with Henry Townsend Jr. and the Birdsalls to build a sawmill on the Beaver Swamp Creek beside his meadow (source, pp. 287-288). James Cock named him an overseer of his will in 1699 (p. 12). Meetings and marriages were held in his house: at his daughter Mary’s wedding to Henry Cock in 1699 the visiting minister Thomas Story wrote that “The Ranters Kept pretty still most of the time, save one old man who hooted like an Owl, making a ridiculous noise as their manner is and stood up and bore testimony against Friends’ set forms of Marriage” (p. 18). The Friends recorded his death in 1724 as that of “an Ancient friend of Matinecock” (p. 291).

His children with Elizabeth Prior (p. 288): Elizabeth (1674), who married Benjamin Field; Hannah (1675), who married James Cock; Mary (1678), who married Henry Cock; John (1679-1680); Robert (1683), who married Clemence Ludlam; Sarah (1685/6); Martha (1688), who married John Carpenter; Abigail (1691), who married Josiah Coggeshall; and Deborah (1695), who married Thomas Whitson Jr. His son Robert became a Baptist preacher at Oyster Bay and was the father of Robert Feke, the colonial portrait painter (source, p. 14).

Research: research/mcmillan/Frost_Underhill_Bowne_Feake.md.

Open questions

• His birth year, and the year of his marriage (1670 or 1673).