♂Roger Conant

Roger Conant (baptized 9 April 1592 – 19 November 1679) was a London salter from Devon, remembered as the leader of the Old Planters^W, the few settlers who began Salem, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, in 1626. Near the end of his life he called himself “the first that had house in Salem”, and in 1671, at almost eighty, he asked the General Court to rename his town of Beverly “Budleigh”, after the Devon market town where he was born. The Court refused. He was the tenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son Lot Conant (1624–1674).

Devon and London

He was the youngest of the eight children of Richard Conant and Agnes Clarke of East Budleigh, Devon, and was baptized in the parish church there on 9 April 1592. By 1619 he was living in London, in the parish of St Lawrence Jewry. On 20 January 1619/20 he and his brother Christopher, a grocer, signed a bond for their brother John, a clergyman, over the rectory of Lymington, Roger signing as a salter. That word implies that he was a freeman of the Salters’ Company^W and a citizen of London.

Roger Conant and Sarah Horton were married at St Ann Blackfriars^W, London, on 11 November 1618. Their first two children were baptized at St Lawrence Jewry: Sarah on 19 September 1619, who was buried there on 30 October 1620, and Caleb on 27 May 1622.

Plymouth, Nantasket and Cape Ann

He crossed to New England in 1623 or 1624 and spent a short time at Plymouth Colony^W. He is said to have left because he was a Puritan who would not break with the Church of England, while the Plymouth settlers were Separatists, and to have joined John Oldham and the Rev. John Lyford^W at Nantasket after Plymouth turned them out in 1624. The genealogist Robert Charles Anderson has argued that he was also the unnamed salt-maker sent to Plymouth in 1624, whom Governor William Bradford^W called “an ignorant, foolish, selfwilled fellow”.

The Rev. John White^W of Dorchester and the merchants of the Dorchester Company^W, whose fishing station at Cape Ann was failing, chose him in 1625 to run their affairs there. The historian William Hubbard^W, who seems to have known him, called him “a religious, sober and prudent gentleman”. At Cape Ann, Hubbard wrote, a quarrel over a fishing stage between Captain Myles Standish^W of Plymouth and a rival party might have ended “in blows, if not in blood and slaughter”, had not “the prudence and moderation of Mr. Roger Conant” and the ship’s captain Peirce prevented it.

Naumkeag and Salem

The fishing lost money and Conant disliked the place. He looked instead at a place a little to the west, on the other side of a creek called Naumkeag, at the site of Salem, and in the autumn of 1626 he moved there with the forty or so settlers who chose to stay. When most of them then made ready to leave for Virginia or England, by his own account and Hubbard’s he refused to go, and his refusal kept the settlement alive. Forty-five years later he told the General Court he had been “a means, through grace assisting me, to stop the flight of those few that then were here with me”.

In 1628 a new company in England obtained a patent for the bay and sent John Endecott^W with about fifty colonists to take charge, putting Conant aside after some three years at the head of the settlement. The old planters resented the change, which included renaming Naumkeag as Salem, and Hubbard credits the peace that followed to “the prudent moderation of Mr. Conant”.

A Salem townsman

He was admitted a freeman of the colony on 18 May 1631, and by the lists of his offices he spent the next thirty years in Salem’s public business. He represented the town at the General Court^W in 1632 and 1634, was named one of the magistrates of the Salem court in 1637, and was a selectman in the late 1630s and again in the 1650s. He served often on its juries, sometimes as foreman, laid out lots, highways and town bounds, and kept the town’s book of grants for 1637 in his own hand.

In the 1630s he was a partner with Peter Palfrey, Anthony Dike and Francis Johnson in a trading house at Blue Point, near Saco, on the coast of Maine, buying beaver and otter; twenty years later the partners sued Johnson at Salem for skins he had never accounted for, and in November 1655 the jury found for them.

On 25 January 1635/6 Salem granted him and four other leading men farms of two hundred acres each at the head of Bass River, and he moved there; in 1637 the town bought his old house in Salem. When the Bass River people were given their own church in 1667, his was the first name on the list of members, and the next year the Bass River side was set off as the town of Beverly.

Family

Roger and Sarah had nine children. Sarah and Caleb were born in London; the other seven were born after the family came to New England. Caleb died a bachelor “beyond seas” before November 1633. When Salem granted land in 1637 the household numbered nine, and early in 1640 the town gave their son Roger twenty acres as “the first borne Child in Salem”. According to the family genealogy, Roger deeded the Bass River homestead to his son Lot in November 1666, and on the same day Lot leased the house, orchard and garden back to Roger and Sarah for their lives, at a yearly rent of “one Indian corne”.

Old age and death

The petition of 1671 gave two reasons for the change of name: the town’s people disliked “Beverly” because it had earned them “a constant nickname of beggarly”, and he and the first settlers had all come from the west of England. The Court kept the name, but that June granted him two hundred acres as a “very ancient planter”. In 1678, at about eighty-six, he was still giving evidence in court, about canvas stolen from his house, years before, while he was down in the cellar and two sisters who had come to buy apples were alone upstairs.

He made his will on 1 March 1677/8, “aged about eightie fiue yeares … though weak & feeble in body”. Sarah is not named in it. He left land near Dunstable and at home and the rest of his goods to his son Exercise, his executor, and money to the children of Lot, Sarah, Mary and Exercise. He also set aside sixty acres for the daughter of a Mrs. Pitts, living at Colyton in Devon, for goods sold for her mother in London many years before, which “it is alleged was never paid”. He died at Beverly on 19 November 1679, and the will was proved at Salem on 25 November; his estate was valued at £258 10s. Where he was buried is not known. Nathaniel Hawthorne later wrote him into his sketch “Main Street” as “the first settler in Naumkeag”.

Notes

Sources

• His baptism, his parents and his place among their eight children are from The Great Migration Begins (Robert Charles Anderson), which cites A History and Genealogy of the Conant Family (1887); the 1887 genealogy prints the East Budleigh register entry. The marriage at St Ann Blackfriars and the London baptisms and burial of the children are printed from the parish registers in the 1887 genealogy.
• His death on 19 November 1679 is entered in the printed Beverly vital records, which give his age as about 88 years 7 months. That age would put his birth about April 1591, a year before the baptism; the will calls him “about eightie fiue” in 1678 and a deposition of 1678 “about eighty-six”.
• The will and inventory are printed in Dow’s Probate Records of Essex County, volume 3, and in the 1887 genealogy. The 1671 petition is in the Massachusetts Archives and is printed in the 1887 genealogy and in The Great Migration Begins.
• His years at Plymouth, Nantasket and Cape Ann, the move to Naumkeag and the coming of Endecott rest on William Hubbard’s history, written in his lifetime, and on Conant’s own petition, as gathered in the 1887 genealogy and The Great Migration Begins.
• His offices, lands, the fur-trade partnership and the 1678 deposition are from The Great Migration Begins and the 1887 genealogy, which cite the Massachusetts Bay records, the Salem town records and the Essex court files. The Great Migration Begins lists him as deputy in 1632; the 1887 genealogy has him as Salem’s delegate to the Court in 1632 and a deputy in 1634.
• The deed of 1666 and the lease back to Roger and Sarah are printed in the 1887 genealogy from the Essex deeds.

When he came over

In his petition of 1671 he said he had been “a planter in New England forty-eight years and upward”, which would place his arrival before May 1623, and the 1887 genealogy thought he probably came on the Anne with his brother Christopher. The Great Migration Begins points out that Plymouth’s land division of 1623 gives him nothing, and dates his coming to 1624.

The salter at Plymouth

Robert Cushman wrote to Plymouth in January 1623/4 that the “salt-man” being sent was “a skillful & industrious man”; William Bradford, writing later, called him a failure who caused a great frame house to be built for salt-making and burned it the next year at Cape Ann. The Great Migration Begins argues that this unnamed salter was Roger Conant, since there could hardly have been a third salter in Plymouth so early, and that Hubbard’s kinder picture may owe something to Conant himself, who was most likely one of his informants. The 1887 genealogy does not make the identification.