Rehoboth Carpenter family
The Rehoboth Carpenter family were among the first settlers of Rehoboth, Massachusetts. William1 Carpenter (b. c1575), his namesake son, William2 Carpenter (c1605-1658/9), and the latter man's wife and children (then numbering four) arrived on the Bevis from Southampton, England, in 1638. They had previously lived in Shalbourne, an English parish near Hungerford that straddled the boundary between Wiltshire and Berkshire. Nothing is known of William1 in Massachusetts, and he is presumed to have died by the time the family settled at Rehoboth, in 1644. William2 Carpenter first appears in New England records in 1640, as a resident of Weymouth, Massachusetts. He was among the founders (at Weymouth in late 1643) of the Plymouth Colony town of Rehoboth (settled 1644). Despite previous claims herein to the contrary, records of the time tell us nothing of William2's character traits or religious convictions. (He was certainly not a Baptist, the assumed affiliation of William1 Carpenter of Providence, with whom William2 of Rehoboth is sometimes confused. And in any case, Roger Williams impugned the orthodoxy of the Providence man's beliefs in a 1655 letter to the Massachusetts Bay General Court.) William3 Carpenter (1631-1702/3) was for many years the Rehoboth town clerk, and his name thus appears in many local records, several of which (vital-event lists) were incorporated into Plymouth Colony records.
The Rehoboth Carpenters' English origins were obscure until the discovery of Bishops' Transcripts of Shalbourne parish records containing marriage, baptismal, and burial records pertaining to them. Among these records is that of William1's marriage in 1625 to Abigail Briant of Shalbourne. The appearance of William1 Carpenter in Shalbourne was said previously herein to have "coincided with a childless Thomas Carpenter and wife Alice at nearby Hungerford. Thomas Carpenter was a dyer and leading merchant of the town who, with others, gained the incorporation of the town from the crown. Thomas died in 1625 and an Alice was buried in Shalbourne just prior to the Carpenter emigration to Massachusetts." There is no evidence, however, that this was anything more than coincidence. More likely than a close connection between Thomas Carpenter of Hungerford and the Alice Carpenter buried at Shalbourne is that she had been the wife of William1 of Shalbourne; this is not confirmed, however. A search of Westcourt Manor tenants' records reveals William1 Carpenter as a copyholder at Westcourt Manor in Shalbourne from 1608 to late 1637.
According to a previous contributor, "Manor records from Culham, Oxfordshire contain various references to a father-son William Carpenter whose activities conform to Shalbourne records. The Carpenters had inhabited Culham as a prosperous yeoman family from 1533 with a Thomas Carpenter of Culham and tenant of the Abbey of Abingdon. Carpenter tenants of the abbey extend back to the 1400s elsewhere in Berkshire. William Carpenter Sr. served as an Assessor of Fines in the Culham Manor Court. Many pages of Latin documents record Carpenter family activities and are now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. This William Carpenter Sr. educated his eldest son Robert at Oxford for the church. Many of what were perhaps Robert Carpenter's books made their way to Massachusetts in the possession of Carpenter's son William Carpenter Jr. (b. 1605). In nearby Reading a Thomas Carpenter was mayor in the 16th century and has a place in the economic history of England." A recently published sketch of "William1 Carpenter of Newtown, Shalbourne, Wiltshire (Bevis, 1638)," however, refutes this claimed connection between the Shalbourne/Rehoboth Carpenters and those of Culham (see external link, below). The reference above to the Reading mayor has no known bearing on the issue.
There is no record to confirm it, but it is said that certain Rehoboth Carpenters were among the founders of the Rehoboth (Newman) Congregational Church, located in present-day Rumford, Rhode Island (site of the original Rehoboth settlement). This much we know: William2 Carpenter's admission as a Massachusetts Bay Colony freeman from Weymouth in 1640 required church membership. The minister at Weymouth was Rev. Samuel Newman, most of whose congregation accompanied him to Rehoboth, where he was also the minister. William2 Carpenter was one of Rehoboth's fifty-eight original proprietors and is buried in Old Rehoboth (Newman Church) Cemetery.
Among the many Rehoboth Carpenter descendants who fought in the American Revolution was Captain Benajah Carpenter, a founding member of the United States Army Field Artillery Corps under Henry Knox. Another distinguished product of this family was George Rice Carpenter (1863–1909), born in Labrador and a graduate of Harvard in 1886. He taught at Harvard from 1888 to 1890 and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1890 to 1893. In 1893 he became a professor of English rhetoric at Columbia University and authored a long list of textbooks on literature and rhetoric and biographies of Whittier, Whitman, and Longfellow. A classics library at Columbia is named in his honor. Also of note was the painter Francis Bicknell Carpenter (1830-1900), whose work hangs in the United States Capitol. Carpenter also resided with President Lincoln in the White House and published a memoir of his stay. Project Mercury astronaut M. Scott Carpenter (b. May 1,1925) descends from Joseph Carpenter, the fourth son of William2.
References
- Carpenter, Amos B. A Genealogical History of the Rehoboth Branch of the Carpenter Family in America (Amherst, Mass., 1898). Read with caution.
- Bowen, Richard LeBaron. Early Rehoboth: Documented Historical Studies of Families and Events in This Plymouth Colony Township, 4 vols. (Rehoboth, Mass.: Rumford Press, 1945-1950).
- Zubrinsky, Eugene Cole. "The Family of William2 Carpenter of Rehoboth, Massachusetts, With the English Origin of the Rehoboth Carpenters," The American Genealogist 70 (October 1995):193-204. Establishes the English origin of William2 Carpenter of Rehoboth (c1605-1658[/9]); identifies his wife, Abigail Briant; and revises their children's birth order. See external link, below.
- Zubrinsky, Eugene Cole. "William1 Carpenter of Newtown, Shalbourne, Wiltshire (Bevis, 1638)" (Ojai, Calif., 2009). See external link, below.