♂Zaccheus Gould

Zaccheus Gould (about 1589 – 1668) was an English-born farmer and one of the largest landowners of early Topsfield in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, where in 1644 his petition had a village set off around his farm at the New Meadows of Ipswich. In 1648 he was one of the three men who signed the petition asking the General Court^W to name the village “hempsteed”; the court named it Toppesfield instead. He was the ninth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Phebe Gould.

England, Weymouth and Lynn

He gave his age as 72 in a deposition at the Salem court on 26 March 1661, which puts his birth about 1589; B. A. Gould’s “Ancestry and Posterity of Zaccheus Gould” (1872) reports the deposition. George Francis Dow’s History of Topsfield (1940) says that he had lived at Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire, England, and that he came to the colony about 1638 and lived first at Weymouth. In the spring of 1640 he moved to Lynn, where he leased from John Humphrey a farm of three hundred acres lying “within the liberties of Salem”, for a yearly rent of 400 bushels of rye, 300 of wheat and 200 of barley with oxen, cows, calves and mares; that December he leased a second Lynn farm, called “The Ponds”, for ten years.

Topsfield

Early in 1644 he moved onto the 300-acre grant of Captain Patrick at the New Meadows, then part of Ipswich, which he had bought of William Paine; the deed was not dated until 4 November 1652, when it called the land the farm “upon which the said Zaccheus now dwelleth”. By Dow’s account he brought his wife and four children there and built his house that spring. On 29 May 1644 the colony records noted that, upon his petition, a village about his farm would be “for the genrall good, & very convenient”. The petition of 1648 that proposed “hempsteed” was signed by Will Payne, Brian Pendleton and “Zacheous Goold”, and in October the court named the village Toppesfield. Dow points out that Samuel Symonds, a magistrate who owned five hundred acres at the New Meadows, had come from Toppesfield in Essex.

His farm lay across the line claimed by Rowley Village, and at a town meeting on 23 February 1658 he “joined himself with his estate to ye Town of Topsfield for seven years”; the General Court later confirmed the farm to Topsfield. He was one of the thirty men entitled to share in the town’s common land in 1661, and Dow estimates that by 1664 he held about 3,000 acres, only 580 of them inside Topsfield.

Meeting house and court

In 1656 the Ipswich court arraigned him for absence from meeting on the Lord’s day. In September 1658 he was summoned to answer a complaint of “abusive carriages” in the meeting house, where testimony showed that “at time of singing ye psalm one Sabbath day in ye afternoon, he sate him downe upon ye end of ye Table (about wch ye minister & chiefe of ye people sit) wth his hatt fully on his head & his back toward all ye rest of ym yt sate about ye Table.” Dow’s history records that he was fined £3 in 1659 for entertaining Quakers, at a time when the colony punished those who harbored them; the next spring the fine was remitted “in consequence of his great loss lately sustained by fire”.

Family and last years

B. A. Gould’s 1872 genealogy gives his wife’s name as Phebe and her death as 20 September 1663. Dow names among his children a son, John, and a daughter, Mary, who married John Redington, and calls John Wildes his son-in-law. A compiled genealogy, B. A. Gould’s The Family of Zaccheus Gould of Topsfield (1895), gives him five children in all, four daughters and a son. His daughter Phebe married Thomas Perkins about 1640, by the account of George A. Perkins’s The Family of John Perkins of Ipswich (1889), which adds that her father gave the couple a farm of 150 acres in the middle of Topsfield. On 25 September 1662 Thomas Perkins and his wife Phebe sold a quarter share of 600 acres of Rowley land “which we have by deed of gift of our father Zaccheus Gould”, as Dow’s history quotes the deed, and Thomas’s will of 1685 left a farm “which I had of my father, Gould”.

On 12 June 1664 he conveyed to his son John, “for natural love of son and other consideration”, the farm “I now dwell on”. He died at Topsfield in 1668, after 30 March, when he acknowledged a conveyance of land to Thomas Perkins, and before 13 November, when a division of the common land recorded him dead; his share went to his sons, and the Patrick land was divided among his children.