Moses Wheeler

Ship carpenter, ferryman and landholder of Stratford, Connecticut, and father of Mary (Wheeler) Fairchild. He first appears in a New Haven tax list of about 1643, two persons and £50 estate. By May 1648 he was at Stratford, where the General Court on the 18th recorded: “The motion made by Mr. Ludlowe, concerneing Moses Wheeler for the keepeing the Ferry att Stratford, is referred to such as shall keepe the next Court att Fayerfield, both in the behalfe of the Country and the Towne of Stratford” (source). He seems to have kept the ferry over the Housatonic from then until he assigned it to his son in 1690. On 12 April 1659 “Moses Wheeler, Ferryman” bought of the Indians a large tract at Pagassett (Derby) for “five pownd and one Girdell.” The town’s lease of 18 November 1670 to “Moses Wheeler, ‘Ship Carpenter’” of “ye ferry over ye River called pag[as]sett River commonly called Strattford ferry” bound him “to Carry and fetch ouer all passongers, horses, cattell and things passable there: and to keep in repayr two Boats ye one to be called ye house boat, ye other to be called ye sciffe,” for no more than “two pence p passonage, and four pence a horse or beast,” but townsmen were to be ferried at “one half penny p p’son, and two pence p horse or beast,” and no “Cannoo or boat” was to carry passengers against him (source).

When the town moved to lay out land above Pagassett, he wrote in December 1673 to his “Loveing Neighbors of Strattford,” offering to meet them, “But in Case not, I doe hereby disire you yt you medle not wth my land, in any such way,” signing himself Moses Wheeler senior; the General Court settled it in 1685. He gave his son Moses a house and land “Out of tender loue and affection” in 1674, settled his lands on his children in 1688, and in January 1690 assigned the ferry lease to his son Samuel.

His will of 19 February 1689/90, “being Aged and weake of body but in my Right understanding,” left the house, lot and stock to his son Samuel “to strengthen him to maintain my wife and my selfe comfortably during life”; “to my Daughter Miriam To pewter dishes”; “to my son Moses his wife, the great pewter platter”; “to my daughter Mary a brasse kettle holding ten or twelve Galons more or lesse. The abridgment of the martyr booke, and Mr Brookes his devices of sathan”; “to Elizabeth ye wife of my son Saml the great Kettle”; and “to Mr Israell Chauncy Twenty shill. In silver.” He died in January 1697/8; his gravestone in the old Congregational burying-ground gave his age as a hundred years. Fifteen years later the estate was still unsettled, and it was not distributed until 1719 (source).

Children (Stratford land records, per Starr): Elizabeth, 6 August 1642 (married Samuel Blakeman, then Jacob Walker); Miriam, 28 March 1647 (married James Blakeman, then Edward Groome); Samuel, 28 April 1649; Moses, 5 July 1651; Mary, 13 September 1655; and Joanna, 5 March 1658/9. The Wheelers of Salisbury, Wiltshire, and Newbury, Massachusetts, elsewhere in this archive, are a different family. Later claims that he was “an Englishman of considerable wealth” are unsupported.

The family’s descent from him rests on the identification of Jonathan Fairchild of East Jewett with Jonathan, born at Norwalk in 1744, which is only possible (see Jonathan Fairchild).

Research: research/mcmillan/Fairchild_Raymond_Woodworth.md.

Open questions

• His wife’s name and family, and his birth (the gravestone’s hundred years is doubtful).