♂John Gorham

John Gorham (about 1621 – 1675/76) was a settler of Plymouth Colony^W who married Desire Howland, a daughter of the Mayflower passenger John Howland^W, lived in turn at Plymouth, Marshfield, Yarmouth and Barnstable, and died at Swansea in February 1675/76 while serving as a captain in King Philip’s War^W. A family record printed in The Mayflower Descendant says he died of a wound taken when a shot split the powder horn at his side. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his daughter Desire Gorham (1644–1700).

Early life

In a court deposition of 1674/75 he gave his age as 53 “or thereabouts”, which places his birth about 1621; the deposition is known from the abstract printed in a published compilation of Mayflower families. A compilation of New England marriages before 1700 gives the same year for his birth.

Marriage and family

Compiled genealogies date his marriage to Desire Howland to about 1643, probably at Plymouth. Her father’s will of 29 May 1672 left twenty shillings to his daughter “Desire Gorham”.

The couple had eleven children, born between 1644 and 1667: the eldest, Desire, at Plymouth; four more at Marshfield, where the family had moved by 1646; a son at Yarmouth in 1654; and the last five at Barnstable from 1656.

A genealogy of Maine families published in 1909 describes him as a tanner and currier^W who worked leather in the winter and farmed in the summer, and says that after moving to Yarmouth in 1652 he became a large landowner, with a grist mill and a tannery. The same account has him constable of Marshfield in 1648, admitted a freeman^W of the colony in 1650, deputy for Yarmouth at the colony court in 1653 and a selectman of Yarmouth in 1673–74.

King Philip’s War

The 1909 account says that in June 1675, when the war opened with an attack on Swansea, he led twenty-nine mounted men from Yarmouth toward Mount Hope. It quotes a letter of his to the governor reporting that his soldiers were much worn, “having been in the field this fourteen weeks and little hopes of finding the enemy”, and adding: “as for my own part, I shall be ready to serve God and the country in this just war, so long as I have life and health.” On 4 October 1675 the court made him captain of the second company of the Plymouth forces, and the same account places his company at the Great Swamp Fight^W in the Narragansett country on 19 December 1675.

He was buried at Swansea on 5 February 1675/76, aged 54, according to the colony’s records as abstracted in the Mayflower compilation. The 1909 account and an older dictionary of New England settlers say he died there of a fever, which the 1909 account puts down to the cold and exposure of the winter campaign. A family record printed in The Mayflower Descendant gives a different cause: that he “Was Wownded by having his poudr Horn Shot and Split against his side and Wownded and Dyed att Swansey”. The records do not settle which account is right.

The year is written 1675/76 because the colony still began its year on 25 March, so a February date fell in 1675 by the reckoning of the time and in 1676 by the modern one. Compilations that give his death as 1675 and those that give 1676 are describing the same winter.

Estate

His estate was divided on 7 March 1676/77 between his widow Desire and eight of the children, James, John, Joseph, Jabez, Mercy, Lydia, Hannah and Shubael; the division noted that three daughters were already married and had received their portions. The 1909 account adds that in 1677 the court, in consequence of his service in the war, confirmed to his heirs a hundred acres at Papasquash Neck in Swansea which he had chosen in his lifetime.

Desire died in 1683; the Mayflower compilation gives the date as 13 October 1683 and cites her gravestone at Barnstable. When her estate was settled on 5 March 1683/84, the children named included Desire, Temperance and the children of the late Elizabeth, the three married daughters left out of the division of 1677.

Notes

His parents are not known, and the published studies disagree. Elizabeth Pearson White’s volume on the Gorham descendants of John Howland, and the older genealogies, make him the son of a Ralph Gorham and give his baptism at Benefield, Northamptonshire, on 28 January 1620/21. George E. Bowman, writing in The Mayflower Descendant, preferred a father named John, relying on a journal kept by John Gorham’s great-grandson Colonel John Gorham, which placed the family’s origin in Huntingdonshire. A Ralph Gorham did live at Plymouth between 1637 and 1642, but no record connecting him with John has been found.

The daughter through whom the line runs is named in the settlement of her mother’s estate in 1683/84, as abstracted in the Mayflower compilation. The Barnstable family notes and the later compiled studies identify her with Desire Gorham, born at Plymouth on 2 April 1644, who married John Hawes of Yarmouth in 1661; no original record making that identification has been examined for this family.