♂Gideon Walker

Gideon Walker (6 October 1719 – 4 April 1805) was a settler of Arundel (now Kennebunkport), in the District of Maine^W, the son of John Walker, a shipwright of Kittery, whose will of 1743 left him twenty acres there. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son Gideon Walker (1751–1828).

Early life

He was born at Kittery, then in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, the son of John Walker and Mary, daughter of John Bickford of Newington, New Hampshire, who had married in October 1717. The Kittery town book, as indexed online, dates his birth 6 October 1719; the history of Brunswick, Topsham and Harpswell published in 1878 gives 12 October. He was not the couple’s first child: an elder brother, Eliphalet, had been born in August 1718 and died the same year. The 1878 history says Gideon was apprenticed to a tanner at Rowley, Massachusetts, and that in 1741 his father bought him a homestead at Arundel.

On 18 November 1722 he was baptised at Kittery Point, with his younger brother Eliphalet, on the day their father was baptised as an adult. Five more children followed over the next fourteen years, and the same index names eight in all for the marriage, a number that matches the genealogical dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire by Noyes, Libby and Davis. Besides the two Eliphalets there were Temperance, John, Elizabeth and two girls named Mary. The index records four of the eight dying young, among them the first Eliphalet and Temperance, at about ten; that would leave Gideon, John, Elizabeth and the younger Mary as the four children living in 1743, the four named in their father’s will.

His father made that will on 13 May 1743, as “John Walker of Kittery … Shipwright being very sick and weak in Body”, and it was proved on 15 July 1743. It gave “my well-beloved Son Gideon Walker” twenty acres of his land at Arundel, “lying by the Land of Samuel Perkins”, and left the rest of the estate, after the life of his widow Mary, to “my well-beloved Children Gideon Walker John Walker, Elizabeth Walker & Mary Walker”, with the houses and lands to go to the two sons.

Arundel

He married Hannah Palmer at Rowley on 23 February 1741, as the printed Rowley vital records enter it (“Hannah, and Gidian Walker of Arundel”); Charles Bradbury’s History of Kennebunk Port (1837) gives the same day, the 1878 history 3 February. By Bradbury’s account he came from Kittery about 1740 and in 1745 built the third house within what later became the village; the part of it that he built, known as “the old red house”, was moved to another site about two years before the book appeared. The 1878 history dates the couple’s move to Arundel to the same year. Bradbury adds that in times of danger he and his neighbors took refuge in John Mitchel’s garrison house on the other side of the river.

Bradbury names ten children: Temperance, Mary, Eliphalet, John, Gideon, Mehitable, Daniel, Andrew, Nathaniel, and Hannah, who died young. Four of the names, Temperance, Mary, Eliphalet and John, were those of his own brothers and sisters. No register of the children’s births survives online: Bradbury’s list of ten is the only one, and the dates for Eliphalet, Mehitable and Andrew come from index and cemetery entries that name no parents, so that they belong to this family is probable rather than proved. The son Gideon, born at Arundel on 8 July 1751 by the 1878 history, married Mary Perkins and later moved to Topsham.

Bradbury names him among the few Arundel householders who each owned a slave. The book does not name the person he held.

In 1776, after the town had received the Declaration of Independence, Bradbury records that it chose him and four others as “a committee of correspondence, inspection, and safety”^W.

Second marriage

His second wife was Hannah, widow of Matthew Lassell and daughter of John Burbank of Arundel; Bradbury says she had no children by him. Walter Goodwin Davis’s Ancestry of Sarah Miller (1939) records that Matthew Lassell and his wife sold four acres to Gideon Walker, Jr., on 20 January 1778, the last mention of Lassell found, and that his widow married the grantee’s father, so the second marriage was most likely after that date. Gideon’s first wife, Hannah Palmer, died on 9 March 1792, so his second marriage, to Hannah, widow of Matthew Lassell, came after that, when he was past seventy.

Death

He died on 4 April 1805, aged 86, and was buried in Evergreen Cemetery at Kennebunk, the town beside Kennebunkport. Both facts come from a cemetery card in the Nathan Hale collection, which names no place of death. His first wife, Hannah Palmer, had been buried in the same cemetery in 1792.

Notes

Bradbury makes his grandfather a brother of the Joshua Walker who came to Arundel from Kittery in 1728. John Walker’s will, which names Gideon as his son, and the 1878 history both make John Walker of Kittery his father.

The cemetery card’s age of 86 is a year more than the town book’s birth date gives, since he was in his eighty-sixth year in April 1805. The online index of the town book is the only source read for the brothers and sisters; the image has not been found. Some of its dates sit awkwardly with the church register: the baptisms of a Mary on 2 August 1730 and on 18 July 1736 fall before the births the index gives for the two girls named Mary, 27 August 1730 and 18 August 1736, so either the index months are off or those baptisms belong to another Walker household. A compiled family tree online also gives other years for two of the deaths.