♂Philip Allen

Philip Allen (28 February 1684 – 10 December 1752) was a Quaker farmer of Dartmouth, Massachusetts, who settled his family in the Oblong in Dutchess County, New York, when he was nearly sixty; the Quaker meeting there recorded his death as that of “Ancient Philip Allen”. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son Elisha Allen (1722–1804).

Early life

Philip Allen was born at Dartmouth, then in Plymouth Colony, the eldest son of Ebenezer Allen (1650–1725), a blacksmith and one of the town’s original proprietors, and his wife Abigail (who married John Whitely of Dartmouth in 1728). The Dartmouth town records list him among eight children born between 1682 and 1703, and the family belonged to the town’s Quaker community. His father’s will, signed in April 1725, left him part of the family land and named him executor, together with his mother as executrix. Ebenezer died within weeks, and on 24 April 1726 Philip swore to his account of the estate before the county’s probate judge: an estate inventoried at £1,162, with his mother’s third set aside and the legacies paid to his brothers and sisters.

Marriage and family

He married at Dartmouth a woman named Mary, given in the family record as Mary Mosher (1695–1769). The town register records eight children of “Phillip Allen and Mary”, born between 1717 and 1739: Ephraim, Susannah, Gideon, Philip, Elisha (7 September 1722), Audere, Mary and Abigail. A history of the settlers of the Beekman Patent, published in 1993, gives the same eight, among them Philip, who married Wait Fish, and Elisha, who married Elizabeth Fish, and a daughter Audre, who married Preserved Fish.

The Oblong

About 1743 Philip Allen moved from Dartmouth to the Oblong, the strip of land along the New York–Connecticut border in Dutchess County, where other Quaker families from Dartmouth and Rhode Island were settling around Quaker Hill. His wife’s brother Nicholas Mosher is said to have come at about the same time. He was assessed £2 in 1743 and £4 in the tax lists of the next few years. His son Elisha married there in 1752.

The records of the Oblong Monthly Meeting of Friends note that “Ancient Philip Allen died at his own house in Oblong 10 Dec. 1752”. In Quaker usage “ancient” marked an elderly, long-standing Friend; the meeting gave his age as sixty-seven. A history of the settlers of the Beekman Patent, published in 1993, places his widow Mary in January 1761 on a farm of 95 acres in lot 31 of the Oblong, the lot where her son Elisha also farmed. She was still alive in 1769, when she appears in the accounts of the Merritt store on Quaker Hill.

Notes

His birth is usually given as 28 February 1684. The Dartmouth town book, a clerk’s copy, reads 29 February, and the printed vital records of the town give “the last day of” February. The records do not settle which is right.

The Oblong meeting’s list of deaths, in Frost’s transcription, gives his death as “10 of 12m, 1752, aged 67 years”: the twelfth month, December, in the Friends’ reckoning of 1752. That age fits his birth year as the town wrote it: under the old reckoning the year began in March, so February 1684 fell in what the modern calendar counts as 1685.

His wife’s family is not proven. The Dartmouth register names her only as Mary. The 1993 history makes her a daughter of Nicholas and Elizabeth (Audley) Mosher, born 16 December 1695, but an 1891 genealogy of the Mosher family lists no Mary among Nicholas Mosher’s children and gives that date of birth to a daughter Mercy who died in childhood. The date may have been borrowed from that child even if the parentage is right. Her death in 1769 rests on the store accounts showing her alive in that year; no record of her death has been found.