CHAPTER VIII.

SAMUEL WRIGHT AND THE WRIGHT FAMILY

Samuel Wright, Jr., and his wife Sarah Richmond, whom he married five years previously, a daughter of a former owner, bought the ninety acres and homestead built by Henry Richmond. He paid Nathaniel Clark the sum of seventy pounds “lawful money in hand.”

During the thirteen years Samuel Wright owned the property he made a living from farming and general husbandry.[11] A yeoman is one who worked his own ground for his income. In England these small landed proprietors have been considered fundamental people in performing services from the early days.

The Wright family is a prominent one in this area, almost from the beginning. In old English, a wright is a carpenter, usually in a combined word, such as shipwright. William Wright, born 1588 in Austerfield, England, near Scrooby Manor House, a center for the Separatists, came on the _Fortune_ in 1621, the next ship after the _Mayflower_. His wife, Priscilla Carpenter, came with him, and some children. He had a son, Richard, who died in 1691, about 83 years of age.

William settled in what is now Plympton, Mass. His grandchildren were Adam, Esther, Mary, John and Isaac. Adam, 1645-1734, had two sons by Sarah Soule and eight more children by his second marriage to Mehitabel Barrows. One of these eight was the first Samuel, 1699-1773. See the notes for a copy of his will.[12]

His son, the second Samuel, 1728-1814, had nine children, one of whom was the third Samuel, born about 1760, married Sarah Richmond in 1783. Wm. Davis lists 37 lines of names of Wrights in his Genealogical Register.

Through the courtesy of Mr. Eugene Wright, an octogenarian who lived in Plymouth and was a descendant of the Plymouth and Plympton Wrights, I was given genealogical information that the third Samuel eventually removed to Hebron, Maine, and is buried there. The exact date of his birth and death has not been available.

Many days and hours intermittently over three years I spent at the Plymouth Registry of Deeds pouring over microfilm slides of deeds in a viewer trying to decipher all sorts of bygone styles of handwriting in an endeavor to trace back the ownership of the Boot Pond homestead to its beginning. Since it didn’t seem to be known, I had the urge to seek it out. I had seemed to have come to a dead end in my search, but decided one day to give the effort one last try. The index pointing toward the solution I was seeking was not quite complete, or else I had just missed it, somehow. During the last attempt, on the lighted screen of the viewer I came across the names of Nathaniel Clark and Samuel Wright and the whole thing began to come together. The continuity back to Johnathan Churchill and Henry Richmond was revealed in a short time. It was like Revelation for me.

Now to go back to the Wright family.

Joshua Wright had a homestead and farm on the present road into the South Pond Cemetery. Nothing remains of it now except a few foundation stones, pointed out to me by Mr. William Holmes, a life-long resident of the area whose people go back to the early beginnings. The Wright family gave part of their land for the location of the South Pond cemetery, according to Miss Minnie Burgess.

Joshua Wright, yeoman, according to 77-145, on Feb. 5, 1795, for 24 pounds sold John Burgess of Plymouth forty acres, his first purchase in Plymouth. The land was southward of Gunners Exchange Pond, originally laid out to John Foster, as in the First Book of records, p. 224. When John Burgess bought the homestead and land in 1801 from Samuel Wright he now adjoined the land he bought from Joshua Wright six years earlier.

There were neighborly ties between the families in the vicinity, romances and several marriages. John Burgess’s son Nathan in 1813 married Susanna, the daughter of Joshua Wright.

The last transaction of the Wrights, Samuel and Sarah, was the sale of the homestead, 91-78, in 1801 to John Burgess for $600.00. The original deed was given to me by the kindness of Miss Mary Burgess. It contained the same acreage that came from the Churchills originally.

It would have been exciting to find more evidence of the personal lives of these people we have been writing about. Such information would come from letters, diaries, written accounts by friends and contemporaries, descriptions by those who knew them and their activities at the time.

However, it seems evident that these people were absorbed in their daily activities for the most part. They did not have the leisure or affluence nor was it the custom of the times to keep records of personal feelings. Wills, land transactions, vital statistics, court proceedings were necessary and recorded and are useful as far as they go. We have to depend mostly on such sources and infer what we reasonably can and use imagination wisely.

It is not really a case of “the short and simple annals of the poor” for they did lead lives of significance, some dramatically so, but their innermost lives are hidden from us in the shades of the past.