Roberts Farm in Dover

Date: 1631 [unknown]
Location: Dover, New Hampshire
Surname/tag: Roberts

Roberts Farm in Dover

"DOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE- New Hampshire believes it is justified in claiming to have within its borders the oldest farm in the United States- oldest in the sense of having been owned, occupied and tilled as a family possession continuously from its beginning. This is the “Gov Thomas Roberts Farm” at Dover Neck. It dates from almost the beginning of the white men’s settlement of New Hampshire territory.

"Dover Neck is that narrow tongue of land between the Piscataqua on the east and the Bellamy, or Back River, on the west and sloping gently southward to the confluences of the rivers and Great Bay at Dover Point. Here in the Spring of 1623 New Hampshire had its beginning in the little settlement formed there by Edward Hilton, William Hilton, Thomas Roberts and a few others, whose names, if ever recorded, have been lost in the lapse of centuries.

"While its exact age as a family possession is not known, owing to the disappearance of the record of its acquisition by the pioneer, Thomas Robert, other historical data point to the probability that it was acquired by Roberts in 1628, when the land became available under the David Thomson grant, as will be later explained. It is possible, however, that Roberts did not come into possession of it until 1631, the year Edward Hilton received a special grant from the Council of Plymouth, England, called the Swamscott patent, confirming and defining the bounds of the territory he had acquired under Thomson’s grant of 6000 acres in 1622....

"Through an indenture signed December 14, 1622, by him and three wealthy merchants of Plymouth, Abram Collmer, Nicholas Sherwill and Leonard Pomery (later spelled Pomeroy), the four undertook to start a settlement of [David] Thomson’s 6000-acre grant, establish fisheries then one of England’ s most important industries, engage in trade with England and her colonies and develop plantations....

"The indenture provided for the landing of only seven men besides Thomson at the beginning. Two of the seven came over in the ship Jonathan of Plymouth with Thomson.... The other five men, including the Hiltons and Roberts, came over afterward in the ship Providence of Plymouth, owned by Pomery, and landed in Pomery’s Cove at Dover Point, called at the beginning Hilton Point....

"The fourth article of the Thomson indenture provided that before the end of five years after the first landing there should be an allotment if 600 acres of land around the buildings of the settlement, which with the buildings should be divided equally between the parties. It was from this allotment that Thomas Roberts obtained his farm.

"Romance played an important role in Roberts securing on of the choicest locations, apart from Edward Hilton’s for his plantation. In 1627 Roberts married Rebecca Hilton, a sister of Edward and William Hilton.

"The Hilton brothers were members of the aristocratic Fishmongers’ Guild of London when Thomas Roberts, according to the guild’s archives, became apprenticed to it in 1622. The friendship then formed between the three young men led them to associate themselves with David Thomson’s New England enterprise. Roberts and Edward Hilton were nearly of the same age, each slightly past his majority.

"William was five years older than Edward, and married. He had come over to Plymouth in 1621, but had returned to England the following year. It was therefore natural that Edward Hilton, who had been made the head of the settlement by Pomery, should give his brother-in-law first choice for his farm of approximately 150 acres. Roberts selected high ground on Dover neck about two and a half miles above Hilton Point....

"Immediately after his marriage Roberts lived in a house at the Point near Hiltons. It was not until sometime in the following decade, after his farm had been partially cleared of timber, that he began the erection of the Dover Neck dwelling....

"In 1640 Thomas Roberts succeeded Capt John Underhill as the fourth Governor of the Dover colony. Roberts served until the Massachusetts Bay colony achieved its ambition of annexing, in 1642, the Piscataqua River settlements, Dover, Strawberry Bank and Exeter, also Hampton, and making them a part of Norfolk County.

"He had a leading part in the formation and establishment, in 1640, of “The Dover Combination,” an improved scheme of local self-government. He was one of 21 of the 42 signers of the Combination agreement in 1641, a protest against annexation to Massachusetts.

"Gov Roberts was not of Puritanic mold. He possessed a liberality of thought which led him 20 years later to embrace the teachings of the Quaker missionaries, who had come here early in the ‘60s, and secured a following from among the orthodox Church people, only to be driven out of Dover in mid-Winter under harrowing conditions in accordance with Massachusetts laws against Quakers.

"While he sympathized with the missionaries and was fined by being deprived of his cow for attending their meetings and staying away from public worship, his two sons, John and Thomas, both constables, zealously executed their appointed part of Massachusetts’ order expelling the missionaries from its jurisdiction....

"From the earliest times the Roberts family have been intimately associated with the progress of Dover. It was Gov Roberts who was the first to turn the soil of New Hampshire with the plow. He was taught by the Indians how to raise Indian corn and fertilize the hills with alewives, which swarmed up river in the Spring. A tannery on the Roberts farm was one of the first established here. Brick-making, which came later, was conducted by Roberts descendants.

"The ancient burying ground, in which all the first settlers were buried, occupies a niche taken from the Roberts farm close by the highway. The graves are mostly unmarked, but that of Gov Roberts is marked with a slate headstone suitably inscribed, placed there about 25 years ago to replace the original. Gov Roberts died in 1674."^[1]

Sources

1. ↑ Dover Public Library. "The Roberts Farm" By W.H.W. Benedict, Boston Sunday Globe, September 9, 1928. (Accessed 8 Apr 2023) https://www.dover.nh.gov/government/city-operations/library/research-learn/history/the-roberts-farm/

NOTES

This material was extracted from the profile of Thomas Roberts (abt.1600-aft.1673).

The source of the text was discovered at the Dover Public Library. The link to the Dover Public Library copy of the article was broken in 2022 and newly re-discovered in 2023.