♂Samuel Howlett

Samuel Howlett (died 11 March 1720) was a deacon of the church at Topsfield, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, and an officer of the town’s militia, who first came to the town to work as its blacksmith. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Mary Howlett (born 1672).

The town’s blacksmith

He was probably born about 1646. A history of Topsfield published in 1940 records that on 15 January 1668/9, soon after the town’s earlier blacksmith had moved away, the inhabitants voted to invite Samuel Howlett of Ipswich “to set Vp his trade of smithing to doe ye Townes Work”. The same history explains why the vote mattered: a smith shod the animals, made the iron work on every kind of farm tool and turned out hand-made nails, and a rural town could not do without one. He agreed to come, and was given four acres of common land on the “Common Hill”, where he built his house, with his smithy beside the same road. He was voted a commoner of the town on 7 March 1675/6.

The same work makes him a son of Ensign Thomas Howlett, an early settler of Ipswich, who later moved to a farm in Topsfield. When Thomas died, his son William was given the house and the rest of the farm, and Samuel was given fifty acres of land.

Church and militia

On 26 March 1678 he was sworn constable of Topsfield at the Ipswich court. Samuel Howlett and William Howlett are both on the list of “members in full communion” that the Reverend Joseph Capen drew up when he was ordained at Topsfield in 1684. On 5 June 1693, in King William’s War^W, he signed as clerk a petition of the Topsfield militia officers asking the governor to release men of the town who had long been out on service. In February 1700/01, as Ensign Samuel Howlett, he was one of the committee chosen to settle the claim of Samuel English, a grandson of the sachem Masconomet^W, to the town’s land. On 14 October 1707, in Queen Anne’s War^W, he and the other militia officers agreed to free Daniel Waters from being pressed into the Queen’s service so long as he kept and maintained his mother. As “Dea. Samuel Howlet” he was named to a committee to seat the people in the town’s meeting house.

Family

Samuel Howlett and Sarah Clark were married at Topsfield on 3 January 1670/71. Their daughter Mary was born there on 17 February 1671/72, and in 1689/90 she married Ephraim Wildes, whose mother, Sarah Wildes^W, was hanged at Salem as a witch in 1692. The town’s printed vital records enter seven children of the couple, born between 1672 and 1693. Sarah died at Topsfield on 26 March 1717.

In his will of 24 January 1714/15 he styled himself a smith. Samuel died at Topsfield on 11 March 1720, entered in the town’s printed vital records as “Samuel, Dca., Mar. 11, 1720”. The entry has no double year; under the Old Style calendar^W then in use, the date may fall in 1719/20.

Notes

Birth

The birth year rests only on Anderson’s The Great Migration Begins, a compiled study of early New England settlers, which gives it as an estimate, about 1646.