Rehoboth Carpenter Family
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The Rehoboth Carpenter Family was a historic American family from 1638 who helped to found the town of Rehoboth, Massachusetts. Savage in his A Genealogical Dictionary of The First Settlers of New England, Before 1692 traced the recorded origins of this family to a father (b. 1576) and son William Carpenter (1605-1659) who sailed for Weymouth, Massachusetts, on the Bevis from Southampton, England, in 1638. Nothing more is known of the father in Massachusetts and he is presumed to have perished in passage or shortly thereafter.
The son William Carpenter Jr. appears in copious Plymouth Colony Records and in writings of John Winthrop. This William Carpenter was among the founders of the new Rehoboth Colony in 1645. Plymouth Colony Records show him as a sympathizer of the newly emerging Baptist movement in America. The portrait of him in Winthrop's writings, as well as the Plymouth Colony Records, present a man of intense religious conviction as well as compassion. His many descendants in America have played their part in every aspect of American history, including two U.S. presidents and one Project Mercury astronaut, M. Scott Carpenter(b. May 1,1925), who descends from Joseph Carpenter, the third or fourth son of William jr.
The Rehoboth Carpenter family provided many soldiers to the American Revolution. Notable was a Captain Benajah Carpenter a founding member of the United States Army Field Artillery Corps under Henry Knox. Among other Carpenters in the subsequent 1800s was George Rice Carpenter (1863–1909), born in Labrador and a graduate of Harvard in 1886. Carpenter taught at Harvard from 1888 to 1890 and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1890 to 1893. In 1893 he became a professor of rhetoric at Columbia University. Carpenter authored a long list of literature textbooks, 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 one volume memoir of his stay. The English origins were obscure for this family until the discovery of parish records in Bishops' Transcripts. The two William Carpenters had resided in the Berkshire village of Shalbourne, just outside Hungerford. The appearance of William Carpenter Sr. in Shalbourne coincided with a childless Thomas Carpenter and wife Alice at adjacent 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. William Carpenter Jr. had married an Abigail Briant at Shalbourne in 1625. A search of Westcourt Manor Records reveals William Carpenter Sr. as a resident of Shalbourne and Westcourt Manor from 1608. 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 or 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 there 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.
The Carpenter family was a joint founder of the Newman Congregational Church, located in Rumsford, Rhode Island and formerly part of Rehoboth, Massachusetts.
[edit] References
- Carpenter, Amos B., A Genealogical History of the Rehoboth Branch of the Carpenter Family in America, Amherst Massachusetts, 1898.
- Bowen, Richard Lebaron. Early Rehoboth, Documented Historical Studies of Families and Events in This Plymouth Colony Township.(Rehoboth, Massachusetts: Privately printed [by the Rumford Press, Concord, N.H.], 1945-1950). 4 vols.
- Zubrinsky, Eugene Cole. 'The Family of William(2) Carpenter of Rehoboth, Massachusetts, With the English Origin of the Rehoboth Carpenters.' The American Genealogist,70 (October 1995), pp. 193-204. [Reassessment of the English origins of William Carpenter (1605-1660) and his wife Abigail Briant.]
