♂Gideon Walker

Gideon Walker (about 1751 – 8 May 1828) was a tavern keeper of Topsham, Maine, at whose house the town’s Masonic lodge held its first meeting, on 20 February 1802. He was the fourth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Hannah Walker (1780–1867).

Early life

A history of Kennebunkport published in 1837 makes him a son of Gideon Walker of Arundel, as Kennebunkport was then called, and his first wife, Hannah Palmer, who married in 1741. By that account the elder Gideon had come from Kittery about 1740 and built his house in the village in 1745, and Gideon was one of ten children. The parentage rests on that compiled family register; no baptism or birth entry for him has been found. His year of birth, about 1751, is reckoned from the age on his gravestone.

Marriage and family

He married Mary Perkins, whom the Topsham town record, copying a private family record, calls the daughter of “Thomas, Esq., of Kennebunk, who was a minister”; the 1837 history also lists a daughter Mary, wife of Gideon Walker, among the children of Thomas Perkins. The town record gives no date; the history of Brunswick, Topsham and Harpswell published in 1878 dates the wedding 2 November 1777 and gives his birth as 8 July 1751, at Arundel.

The 1878 history dates the family’s move to Topsham, then in Lincoln County, to 3 December 1789, although a road laid out there in 1781 already ran “from the county road at Gideon Walker’s“, and another was laid out to “Gideon Walker’s Corner” in 1790. A history of Brunswick, Topsham and Harpswell records that his house served as a tavern from 1792 to 1803, and that the Masonic lodge met there for the first time on 20 February 1802. Freemasons commonly met in taverns in these years, before a town had a hall of its own.

The 1878 history names four children: Hannah, born 2 January 1780, who married Captain James Stone of Brunswick on 29 December 1796 and, on 26 July 1807, as Mrs. Hannah Stone, Johnson Wilson of Topsham; Nathaniel (1781–1851); Lucy, who died on 19 December 1802, aged seventeen; and Susanna (1792–1852), who married Samuel Veazie.

Death

The Topsham town record gives his death as 8 May 1828. His gravestone gives the year as 1829 and his age as seventy-eight. His widow, Mary, died at Topsham on 1 March 1845, aged eighty-seven, and her stone calls her “relict of Gideon Walker”.

Notes

A descent through his grandmother Mary Bickford, born in 1693, from the Rev. Joseph Hull, a minister of seventeenth-century New England, is set out in the compiled genealogies of Maine and New Hampshire families.