♂Samuel Webber

Samuel Webber (died 1716) was a millwright who worked mills along the Maine coast, from Casco Bay to Cape Neddick and York, and who in August 1692 swore testimony at Salem against the Reverend George Burroughs^W, who was hanged as a witch later that month. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), probably through his son Waitstill Webber (1698–1775).

Mills on the frontier

Samuel was born about 1656, judging by the age he swore to in 1692, and was probably a son of Thomas Webber, a fisherman on the Kennebec, and his wife Mary Parker. No record of the marriage of Samuel Webber and Deborah Littlefield is known; she was probably a daughter of Captain John Littlefield of Wells.

He was at Wells by 1679, and in June 1680 he helped appraise the mill on the Mousam River. He then ran a mill of his own at Casco Bay, taxed in 1682, and in 1685 sold his house and mill at Long Creek. He witnessed mill deeds at Biddeford in 1686, had a mill at Cape Neddick by 1688 and a town grant at York in 1690, and in that year, early in King William’s War^W, he commanded the garrison at Cape Neddick.

The Burroughs case

George Burroughs had been the minister at Casco Bay while Samuel lived there, and had come to the Webber house. In the summer of 1692 Burroughs was in prison at Salem, accused of witchcraft. On 2 August Samuel, “aged aboute 36 yeares”, swore that the minister had once told him “he had put his fingers into the Bung of a Barrell of Malasses and lifted it vp, and carryed it Round him and sett it downe againe.” It was a tale of strength that Burroughs had told about himself, and at Salem it was turned into evidence against him. The widow Mary Webber, most likely Samuel’s mother, swore a statement of her own the same day, but only his was used: it was sworn again at Burroughs’s trial on 5 August, and Burroughs was hanged on 19 August 1692.

Gloucester and York

By 1695, with the war still going on, the family had moved south to Gloucester, in Massachusetts. At Gloucester the couple lost two small children in 1698: a daughter, Deborah, aged three, and Patience, the twin sister of Waitstill, who died the month after the twins’ birth in January 1697/8.

In March 1698/9, still “of Gloucester”, Samuel bought twenty acres at York, and in 1699 he sold a sawmill and land at Cape Neddick to Dependence Stover. Settled at York, he served on the province jury from 1700 to 1702 and on the grand jury in 1703, and in 1702 he was a partner with Captain Pickering and Matthew Austin in a York mill. In 1709 he and his son Samuel bought the Smith homestead. In 1712 either he or that son was shot and wounded in an Indian attack.

Will

In 1716 Samuel passed his outlying lands to his sons: land at Cape Neddick to Thomas and Benjamin, and 110 acres on the Kennebec to John. His will, made on 5 May 1716 and proved on 13 November 1716, named his wife Deborah as executrix and left the homestead in time to Waitstill and Joseph; he died between those two dates. The couple had at least twelve children: nine named in Samuel’s will, two who died as infants at Gloucester, and a daughter, Barsheba, who is named only in her mother’s will.

The family

Their son Benjamin, a millwright like his father, later testified that he had gone to Damariscotta and built the first mill there for William Vaughan. A daughter, Barsheba, was living in Canada when her mother made her will in 1737. She was most likely the English girl written “Wabert”, a daughter of Samuel, who had been carried to Canada as a captive, was baptized there as Marie on 17 February 1714, and married Joseph Saleur on 11 March 1720.

Notes

Parentage and birth

The Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire, by Sybil Noyes, Charles Thornton Libby and Walter Goodwin Davis, gives the account of his life used here (Webber no. 10) and makes him a son of Thomas Webber, a Kennebec fisherman, and Mary Parker. Bernard Rosenthal’s edition of the Salem records, Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt (2009), indexes him the same way, as a millwright of Gloucester and Wells, son of Thomas and Mary (Parker) Webber and husband of Deborah Littlefield. His age in 1692 points to a birth about 1656; Emma Lewis Coleman’s New England Captives Carried to Canada gives 1658 at Falmouth, which does not fit that age. The same dictionary is the source for the shot of 1712, which it gives to “either fa. or son”.

The Salem testimony

Rosenthal prints the testimony (no. 447) from the original, dated “Salem August 2d 1692” and marked as sworn in court, and lists it among the evidence sworn at Burroughs’s trial on 5 August. Mary Webber’s statement, in which she gave her age as about 53 and called herself a widow, is no. 446; the editors note that it “was not used at the trial of Burroughs although her son’s was.” Enders A. Robinson’s The Devil Discovered (1991) calls the barrel story “no more than a story” that “was being turned into evidence against” Burroughs.

The line to Mercy Webber

Mercy Webber, who married Jacob Blake at Harpswell in 1755, is placed as a daughter of Waitstill Webber, but no record names her father. An index of York births lists a Mercy born on 4 February 1736 to Benjamin Webber, Waitstill’s brother. The Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire makes both men sons of Samuel Webber and Deborah Littlefield, so under either reading Mercy was their granddaughter.