CHAPTER IV.

THE CHURCHILLS

The first proprietors of the ninety acres “and small piece of meadow on the easterly side of South Pond” where my land is located, were members of the Churchill family. This land, later owned by the Burgess family, came to the Churchills by grants from the town of Plymouth, beginning in 1670 and 1702 from the common lands. The recipients were the brothers Joseph and Eleazer Churchill. The year 1670 would be 100 years before the property was sold outside the family, namely to Henry Richmond who made it into a homestead.

The Churchills were one of Plymouth’s earliest, largest, and continuous families.[5] There is a Churchill house of the seventeenth century, one of three still standing now in Plymouth. In William Davis’s Genealogical Register of Plymouth families up to 1883, they cover a span of 240 years and total some 250 lines and possibly 1,000 names. The progenitor was John Churchill who arrived in 1643 and married the next year. His extensive property ran on the east side of Sandwich Street in the Hobshole area to the bay shore. It extended from the brook at Nook Road south to the present Jabez Corner, named after Jabez Churchill, b. 1756, the son of the second Elkanah, who had a shop at this corner. He had a son and a grandson named Jabez. Jabez’s daughter, Mercy, the wife of William Sears, sold the south half of the house in 1872, after continuous ownership in the Churchill family of about 240 years. In 1973 the telephone directory lists six Churchills in the town of Plymouth.

The granted property begins on the easterly side of South Pond. From its northwest corner it runs easterly to Finney’s Meadow which at present contains a large cranberry bog. It is located north of Gunner’s Exchange Pond, east of Snake Hill Road, and northwest of South Pond Cemetery. Josiah Finney was the first grantee of land by lot in the first decade of the eighteenth century. The southwest corner of the property begins at the Pond and runs easterly, bounded on the south by land then belonging to Jonathan Holmes, to Finney’s Meadow on the east.

It is worth recalling that the owners of the land running along a boundary with the Churchills were a noted Plymouth family, the Cottons. They did not occupy it. Later buyers utilized it for homesteads. We now take a brief glimpse of the Cottons.