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Over 50 years of research into the Stratton, Schneider, King, and allied families—from colonial Massachusetts to Indiana and beyond. Built by Bill & Karen Stratton.
Strattons of Massachusetts Bay
Running Through the Sands of Time
The Long Line: A Stratton Chronicle — Chapter Three
Hinwick, Bedfordshire — Spring 1633
The youngest was still learning to walk.
John — born in 1632, the third son and the last of them to be English-born — was fourteen months old and unsteady on the flagstones of the Hinwick kitchen, and Samuel watched him for a long moment the morning he left, long enough that Alice looked up from the table and saw what he was doing.
“He won’t remember this,” she said.
“No.”
“He’ll be walking properly by the time you’re back. Running, even.”
Samuel picked the boy up and held him for a moment — the solid, warm weight of a child who has no idea his father is about to do something enormous — and then handed him to Alice. He touched Richard’s head, six years old, standing in the doorway with the careful dignity of a boy trying not to show anything. He nodded to Samuel Jr., who was eight, who had his mother’s eyes and was already old enough to understand the arithmetic of what was happening.
“You’re the man of the house,” Samuel told him.
“I know,” the boy said, in a tone that was so much like Alice’s that Samuel almost smiled.
He had spent the winter preparing. His brothers — William and Robert and Francis, still on the Hinwick land after their father’s death — understood what he was doing and offered no argument. They had watched him train in the instruments for years, had seen the surveying chain hung on its peg in the barn and the back-staff wrapped in oilcloth and stored in the dry. They were Bedfordshire men who would stay Bedfordshire men, and they had accepted, without much said about it, that Samuel was a different kind.
He had capital enough for the crossing and more. His father’s estate had been divided among four sons, and Samuel had been careful with his portion — careful in the yeoman way, adding to it slowly and spending only what was necessary. He had enough to pay his passage, enough to put something toward land when he arrived, enough to come back for his family when the ground was ready.
Alice had packed his trunk without being asked. She had been packing it in her head for two years.
“Come back whole,” she said at the door.
“I intend to.”
“Intentions aren’t promises.”
“No.” He picked up the trunk. “But I’ve always been better at keeping intentions than most men are at keeping promises.”
She looked at him for a moment with the particular expression she wore when she was deciding whether or not to say the next thing. Then she kissed him once, hard, the way she did everything — completely and without second thoughts — and stepped back inside.
He walked to Wellingborough, hired a wagon to Northampton, and began the journey south.
Southampton, England — Spring 1633
He had never seen the sea.
That is the thing a Bedfordshire man had to reckon with: he had grown up on clay soil sixty miles from the nearest coast, and the sea was a word in scripture and a rumor in travelers’ accounts, but it had no reality in his body. He had not felt the salt air on his face or heard the particular sound of water against a hull or looked at a horizon where there was nothing between him and the edge of the world.
Southampton stopped him.
He stood at the harbor for longer than was necessary, looking at the ships riding at anchor — the masts and rigging against the April sky, the smell of tar and salt and something organic and vast that he had no name for. Around him the docks moved with the efficient chaos of a port city: barrels being rolled and ropes being coiled, sailors calling to each other in language that was English but barely, passengers standing with their trunks and their expressions of combined determination and barely controlled terror.
He was forty years old. He had a back-staff wrapped in oilcloth in his trunk, a circumferentor and Gunter’s chain in their leather case, a Bible, a change of clothes, and enough money to make a start. He had left behind a wife, three sons, two brothers, and a farm that had been in the family for fifty years.
He felt, standing at the harbor, both entirely certain and completely afraid. He had learned over forty years that these two feelings were not contradictory. They were the necessary equipment of anyone who intended to do something difficult.
The Arabella was loading that week. She was not a passenger ship — she was a three-hundred-and-fifty-ton merchant vessel borrowed for the enterprise, pressed into service for the crossings the Puritan movement had been making since Winthrop’s founding fleet in 1630. Samuel had arranged his berth in advance, through the network of Puritan men in Northampton who had been looking toward Massachusetts for years, the same network that had put the surveying instruments in his hands and the arguments of John Cotton in his mind.
He found his berth. He stowed his trunk. He went up on deck and watched England from the rail as the tide turned and the ship began to move.
He did not look away until there was nothing left to see.
At Sea — Spring/Summer 1633
Six weeks.
The crossing was six weeks of Atlantic weather, which in the spring meant cold, and chop, and days when the horizon tilted forty degrees and stayed there for hours, and other days of preternatural calm when the sails hung slack and the ship wallowed in a glassy swell and the passengers sat on deck and said very little because there was nothing to say.
Samuel was sick for the first week. Everyone was. The merchant ship’s surgeon — who was less a surgeon than a man with experience of what happened to people who had never been to sea — moved through the passengers with resignation and a bucket, and said the same thing to all of them: it passes. It passed.
After that Samuel found his sea legs, which meant he stopped vomiting and started paying attention. He spent the days on deck when weather allowed, watching the navigation. The captain used a back-staff of the same general type Samuel had trained with — the Davis quadrant, sighting the sun’s shadow rather than the sun itself, reading the angle off the arc — and Samuel observed with the professional interest of a man who used instruments and wanted to understand every instrument that existed. He introduced himself. The captain, a Devonshire man with many Atlantic crossings behind him, recognized a practical intelligence and tolerated the questions.
“What’s our latitude?” Samuel asked, on a clear afternoon in the third week.
The captain read the back-staff and showed him the calculation. Forty-two degrees north, by his reckoning. They were tracking the great circle route, following the latitude toward the Massachusetts coast.
“How do you know when you’ve arrived?”
“When you smell the pine,” the captain said. “Before you see it, you smell it. The whole coast — pine and cold water. Nothing else like it in the world.”
Samuel stored that away. He stored everything away. He had been storing information about Massachusetts for ten years, from every man who had been there and come back, from every letter copied out in the meetinghouses, from the official accounts and the unofficial ones. He had a surveyor’s mind: spatial, patient, organized around the question of how things related to each other in space. He was building a mental map of what he was going toward, and every piece of new information went onto it.
There were storms. There were days of gray Atlantic ferocity when the ship plunged into walls of water and came out the other side shaking, and the passengers below decks held onto what they could and said their prayers. Samuel said his. He was a serious Puritan — not the anxious performative kind, but the kind for whom the theology had settled into something quiet and structural, like the beams of a well-built house. He prayed with the confidence of a man who believed God had an interest in the outcome but also respected the competence of the seamen, and that the two things were not in conflict.
He did not, during the storms, believe he was going to die. He had too much work ahead of him.
Massachusetts Bay — Summer 1633
The captain was right about the pine.
He smelled it before he saw it — a clean, resinous smell that came off the water two days before the coast was visible, the smell of a country that had forests all the way to the water and colder currents than anything the Atlantic had shown him in six weeks. He was on deck when it hit him and he stood very still for a moment, taking it in.
Then the coast came out of the haze.
Green. That was the first thing — green in a way that Bedfordshire was not, a deep saturated green of forests that had never been cleared, running right down to the granite shore. The rocks were dark and irregular, not the gentle chalk of Berkshire or the clay banks of the Bedfordshire rivers, but something harder and more ancient, as though the ground itself was making a point about what kind of country this was going to be.
The harbor opened before them: Boston, with its hills and its wharves and its improbable density of buildings for a colony that was barely three years old. The Winthrop Fleet had brought seven hundred people in 1630. By 1633, Massachusetts Bay had settlements at Watertown and Charlestown and Cambridge and Salem and a dozen smaller clusters pushing inland — the whole furious energy of a people determined to build something permanent in a place that had not asked for them.
Samuel watched it come into focus with the particular attention of a man who has imagined something for years and is now, for the first time, seeing whether the imagination was right.
It was not quite right. It was both less and more than he had imagined. Less because the buildings were rougher than he had expected, the streets muddier, the whole enterprise rawer and more provisional-looking than the confident letters from Massachusetts had led him to believe. More because it was alive in a way no letter had conveyed — the particular energy of people making something from nothing, which has a quality that you can see in a settlement’s face if you know what to look for.
He knew what to look for.
He was, after all, a yeoman’s son. He had been reading the face of cultivation since he was old enough to walk a field.
This will do, he thought.
Then the ship docked, and the work began.
Watertown, Massachusetts Bay Colony — Summer/Autumn 1633
The town was four miles up the Charles River from Boston, on the northern bank where the ground rose enough to be dry and the soil ran to a heavy loam that reminded Samuel, usefully, of the best of the Bedfordshire fields.
Watertown had been settled since 1630. By 1633 it had a meetinghouse, a mill, a school, established families in solid houses, and the organized land system of a Puritan settlement: lots assigned by the General Court, recorded in the town book, bounded and surveyed with the approximate precision of people who were working fast and learning as they went.
Samuel arrived with his instruments and immediately found work.
This was the calculation he had made in Bedfordshire: a man who could run a chain and read a circumferentor was a man the colony needed. Every land grant required bounds. Every dispute between neighbors — and there were disputes, because boundaries always generated disputes — required someone to walk the line and write the measurement down. The General Court required surveys. The towns required surveys. The simple act of proving you owned what you said you owned required someone with a chain and the knowledge to use it.
Samuel Stratton, aged forty-one, walked into Watertown with that knowledge in his hands and was useful from the first week.
He spent the summer running lines. He learned the local surveying conventions — the way Massachusetts grants ran from a base line, the way metes and bounds were described in relation to trees and rocks and the compass bearings between them, the particular way New England soil resisted the chain in wet years and cooperated in dry ones. He worked alongside men who had been at it for three years and who were, most of them, making it up as they went. A man who had trained in England, who had read Gunter and studied the circumferentor and understood the mathematics behind the chain lengths, was better than they were, and they knew it.
By autumn he had a lot of his own — a section of the Watertown grant, assigned by the town book, bounded on the north by the river and on the south by the common fields. Good soil. High enough to drain well. A place where a house could go.
He did not build the house. He made arrangements.
There was a man — a Massachusetts-born laborer named Josiah whose last name Samuel never quite learned to spell consistently — who agreed to clear the lot over the winter in exchange for a portion of the first year’s harvest. Samuel drew the agreement carefully, in the same plain legal language his father had used in Bedfordshire, and the man signed it, and Samuel filed it with the town recorder.
He looked at the lot one last time in October, standing in the yellow autumn light with the Charles River glittering below him and the Massachusetts forest pressing at the edge of the cleared land, and understood something that he had suspected but not confirmed: this country was going to be hard. The winter would be harder than any Bedfordshire winter. The soil had its own temperament that he had not yet fully learned. The community was full of capable, argumentative, thoroughly serious people who would not make his life easy but would, if he earned it, give him their respect.
He was looking forward to all of it.
He booked his return passage in November.
England — Winter 1633/34 to 1647
He came back to Alice in the deep of a Bedfordshire winter and told her what he had seen.
She listened the way she always listened — completely, without interruption, her hands still in her lap. When he was done she said: “The winters are worse.”
“Considerably.”
“And the soil is different.”
“Learning it will take two or three years.”
“How long before the lot is ready?”
He had been thinking about this on the return crossing. The honest answer was: longer than he wanted. The lot needed clearing, the house needed building, the farm needed establishing. In Bedfordshire the infrastructure existed — the roads, the mills, the markets, the neighbors who had been neighbors for generations. In Massachusetts, all of it had to be built from scratch, and building it from scratch with a wife and three children, one of whom had been a year old when he left and would be — God willing — still alive when he returned, was a different proposition than building it alone.
“Five years,” he said. “Perhaps more.”
Alice was quiet for a moment. Then: “Then we’d better start preparing.”
What followed was fourteen years of preparation.
He is quieter in the record during this period — the gap in the English documents before he disappears into the Massachusetts ones — but his preparations can be inferred. He continued to farm the Hinwick land with his brothers, growing the capital he would need. He followed the Massachusetts news through the Puritan network: the Antinomian Controversy of 1637, when Anne Hutchinson was banished; the founding of Harvard in 1636; the Pequot War; the steady spread of settlements into the Connecticut Valley. He watched the colony survive its early crises and concluded that it was going to last, which was the thing he had most needed to confirm.
He also watched England.
Charles I dissolved Parliament in 1629 and ruled without it for eleven years. The King’s attempts to impose Anglican forms on Scottish worship triggered a war in 1639. Parliament was recalled in 1640 and immediately turned on the King. By 1642 there was a civil war — Cavaliers against Roundheads, King against Parliament — that was going to reshape England in ways nobody could fully see yet.
Samuel watched it and was not surprised. He had been watching the storm build his whole adult life. What surprised him was how slow it was — how long the old world took to fall apart once it started falling.
He got his family out before the worst of it.
Southampton to Massachusetts Bay — 1647
He was fifty-four years old.
Alice was fifty-three. Samuel Jr. was twenty-two and already something of his father’s second self — the same quality of patient practical intelligence, the same way of looking at a piece of ground and seeing what it could become. Richard was twenty, steady and undemonstrative. John was fifteen, the youngest, the one Samuel had held as a toddler and was now meeting almost as a young man — long-limbed, with his mother’s eyes and an unsettling habit of asking the exact right question at the exact wrong moment.
They stood together at the Southampton rail on a morning in spring, watching England dissolve into the gray.
He had made this crossing before. He knew what the weeks of Atlantic looked like, knew the smell of the pine before the coast appeared, knew the shape of the Charles River valley from the water. He had been preparing for this moment for fourteen years. The lot was cleared, the house was built — built by the laborer Josiah and then improved, over the years, by the men Samuel had paid to work it in his absence. There was a barn. There was a kitchen garden. There was, in the town book of Watertown, a recorded deed with Samuel Stratton’s name on it and the bounds of his land described in the careful, tree-and-stone language of Massachusetts surveys.
He had done the reconnaissance. Now he was moving the family in.
“Is it like you described?” John asked, beside him at the rail.
“Yes and no,” Samuel said. “It’s exactly like I described and nothing like what you’ll expect.”
The boy considered this. “That’s not particularly helpful.”
“No.” Samuel watched the last of England go gray in the morning mist. “It never is, until you see it yourself.”
Alice said nothing. She was looking forward, the way she always had — the woman who had met his eyes at the Podington market when they were both young, the woman who had packed his trunk for the scouting trip without being asked, the woman who had raised three sons on Bedfordshire clay while he was surveying lots in Massachusetts and filing them in a town book he intended to fill with his family’s name. She had been waiting fourteen years for this.
She did not look back.
The ship moved out into the Channel and the wind filled the sails and England was gone, and Samuel Stratton, yeoman of Podington, planter of Watertown, stood at the rail of a ship in the middle of his life and felt the immense clean simplicity of a decision that was finally, completely made.
He had left the world his father built.
He was going to the world he was going to build.
The Atlantic took them. The weeks passed the way they pass on a long crossing — in weather and boredom and small dramas and the long meditative watch of men and women who have nothing to do but think about what is behind them and what is ahead. Alice kept the boys occupied. Samuel Jr. spent hours with the captain, learning the navigation. Richard fished off the stern with two other young men and caught nothing. John asked the ship’s carpenter so many questions about the construction of the hull that the man finally handed him a drawknife and put him to work.
Samuel watched his family on the ship and thought: they’re going to be all right.
He had been fairly certain of this. Now he was sure.
Watertown, Massachusetts Bay Colony — 1647
The pine smell came two days out, just as the captain had told him fourteen years before.
He was standing on deck when it hit him. He did not say anything. He just closed his eyes for a moment and breathed it in — that clean, resinous smell off the cold Atlantic, the smell of a country that was waiting.
Then he opened his eyes and went to find his family.
They stood together at the rail — Alice and the three boys — as the Massachusetts coast assembled itself out of the morning haze. Green and granite and cold blue water. The harbor opening before them with its wharves and its familiar, improbable density. The town beyond, bigger now than it had been in 1633, more permanent, the raw provisional quality replaced by something more settled and assured.
“There,” Samuel said.
Alice looked at it for a long time without speaking. Then she said, very quietly, “Show me the farm.”
They went up the Charles River on a shallop, the five of them and their trunks, with the late-summer light cutting across the water and the forest pressing close on both banks. Samuel knew this stretch of river. He had surveyed half of it. He knew the name of every landowner on the northern bank and could tell you the bounds of every lot from memory.
He told the boys. He pointed out the landmarks — the mill, the common fields, the meetinghouse steeple above the treeline. John, characteristically, asked about everything. Richard looked at the soil on the bank with the expression of a young farmer evaluating ground. Samuel Jr. said very little, but his eyes moved over the landscape with the same measuring quality his father’s did, and Samuel recognized it with a quiet satisfaction.
The lot appeared around a bend in the river.
It was more than he had described to Alice. The clearing was bigger, the house sturdier, the barn in better condition than his most optimistic accounting had suggested. Fourteen years of paid labor and one last summer of intensive preparation had made it, not the raw beginning he’d started with in 1633, but something closer to a farm. Close enough.
“Well,” Alice said.
“Well,” Samuel agreed.
She stepped off the shallop onto the bank, looked at the house, looked at the barn, looked at the fields beyond, and turned back to him with an expression he had been watching for thirty years and never quite got tired of — the expression that said: I see what you were thinking, and it might actually work.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s get started.”
Watertown, Massachusetts Bay Colony — 1647–1672
What followed was twenty-five years of building.
They cleared more ground. They added to the house. They established themselves in the community’s life the way the Strattons had always established themselves — through the work that needed doing, through the positions that went to men who showed up and did not make trouble. Samuel served the town as surveyor. He served as constable. He served as selectman. He attended town meeting with the conscientious regularity of a man who understood that a community governed itself or was governed by someone else, and he had strong opinions about which was better.
Alice kept the house with the same quiet efficiency she had brought to Hinwick. She formed opinions about everything and shared them with select audiences. She grew herbs in a kitchen garden that became, in a few years, the source of half the medicinal remedies on the north bank of the Charles.
The sons spread out.
Samuel Jr. settled initially in Watertown, then moved to Concord in 1655, where the land was opening up and a young man with a head for farming could make something real. He married Mary Frye and built the Concord Stratton line that would still be in that valley a hundred years later.
Richard and John stayed closer, working the Watertown land with their father through the years when Samuel was slowing and the heavy work required younger backs.
And Samuel Stratton, fifty-four years old when he finally arrived in the country he had been preparing for since he was a young man standing at his father’s graveside in Podington churchyard, lived in Watertown for twenty-five years. He died on Christmas Day, 1672, having outlived his wife Alice by some years and having watched the colony he helped build grow into something that was beginning, improbably, to look like home.
His will, like his father’s will before him, distributed a specific world: land, cattle, household goods, the accumulated material of a life well and practically lived. Like his father’s will, it named his sons by name and gave each what was fair. Unlike his father’s will, it included a bequest to a servant — a cow to Thomas Cooper, a small gesture that said more about Samuel Stratton than any official record did.
He was not a man who forgot that other men’s labor had built what he was distributing.
He was eighty years old. He had been, in his long life, an English yeoman’s son, a Puritan, a surveyor, a farmer, a constable, a selectman, an immigrant, and a colonial. He had buried his father and his wife and watched his sons become men in a country that had not existed when he was born.
He had done his work.
He had handed it forward.
That was, as his father had understood before him, enough.
Samuel Stratton Sr. (1592–1672) made his first crossing to Massachusetts around 1633, possibly on the Arabella; his family followed in 1646 or 1647. He is buried in the Old Burying Place in Watertown, Massachusetts. He took the Oath of Fidelity on 6 December 1652 alongside his sons Samuel Jr. and John. His will, made December 19, 1672 “being in sound memory and understanding, But near my Death,” names his three sons and provides a cow to his servant Thomas Cooper. His son Samuel Jr. (1625–1707) settled in Concord and is the ancestor through whom this family’s Massachusetts line descends. The colony Samuel helped build — its arguments, its fines, its witch trials, its refusals — is the subject of Chapter Four: A City Upon a Hill.
—Wm. F. Stratton, May 2026
Over 50 years of research into the Stratton, Schneider, King, and allied families—from colonial Massachusetts to Indiana and beyond. Built by Bill & Karen Stratton.
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