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Strattons of Massachusetts Bay
Running Through the Sands of Time
The Long Line: A Stratton Chronicle — Chapter Four
Watertown, Massachusetts Bay Colony — July 1647
The shallop moved up the Charles in the long light of a July evening, and Samuel Stratton stood in the bow and watched the town come into view.
Fourteen years. He had left Alice behind in Bedfordshire with three small sons and a promise, and he had crossed the Atlantic and built a life on the far end of it. Now here was the other half of the bargain — the shallop rounding the bend in the river, and Samuel standing in the bow with the particular stillness of a man who does not trust himself to speak.
Alice came to stand beside him. She looked at the landing, at the houses along the bank, at the cleared fields rising toward the treeline. She was fifty-three years old, and the crossing had been hard, and she did not look like a woman who had just been softened by the sight of her new home.
“Well,” she said.
“Well,” he agreed.
She was quiet for a moment. “You’ve been busy.”
He almost smiled. “I have.”
What he had built, in fourteen years: a house in the English style, timber-framed and sound. A kitchen garden that wanted tending. Two lots in the town grant, a third in the uplands toward Concord where Samuel Jr. might someday farm his own ground. A reputation — Mister Stratton, they called him, the honorific that marked a man of standing in the colony. Surveyor for the town. Selectman twice over. Constable when no one else would take the post.
His sons came to the bow beside him. Samuel was twenty-two, already broad through the shoulders the way his father was. Richard was twenty, quieter, watchful. John was fifteen — the one who had been fourteen months old at the Bedfordshire farewell, who had never seen his father except in his mother’s stories — and he stood now looking at this big, weathered man with the careful attention of someone trying to match a story to a face.
Samuel put a hand briefly on John’s shoulder. John did not pull away.
The shallop ground against the landing. The river smelled of mud and summer growth and the particular green smell of a place that had not yet fully decided whether to accept them.
It would. He had forty years left in him. That was enough time.
Watertown — 1647 to 1648
They built Watertown the way they built everything in those first years: out of desperation and faith and the stubborn refusal to die.
Samuel had already been doing the building. He had been at it since 1633, when he stepped off the boat at Boston with a surveyor’s tools and a Bedfordshire farmer’s knowledge of how land worked and what it was worth. But Alice had not seen it grow, and she watched it now with the evaluating eye of a woman who had been maintaining her half of a partnership from five thousand miles away.
She approved of the kitchen garden. She had opinions about the house layout. She formed views, quickly and without particular apology, about the neighbors. Alice had always formed views. It was, Samuel had always believed, one of the best things about her, even when the views concerned him.
The colony had grown while he was in the middle of it. Harvard College stood in Cambridge, turning out ministers. The General Court passed laws governing everything from the price of a beaver pelt to who could own what and speak what and believe what. Towns pushed inland. Churches multiplied. The whole enterprise took itself with enormous seriousness, which Samuel respected, mostly, though he sometimes found the intensity exhausting.
He was a man who believed in God without needing to discuss it at every meal.
He was also a man who believed in plain justice — documented, arguable, not requiring mystical authorization. That belief had coexisted comfortably enough with colony life until the summer of 1648. Then a woman named Margaret Jones was arrested, and the two things could no longer share a room without one of them giving way.
Samuel Stratton did not give way easily. Alice did not give way at all.
Charlestown, Massachusetts — June 1648
Samuel had seen her work.
Three winters before, Margaret Jones had sat with Alice through a bad fever — pressing cool cloths to her forehead, murmuring remedies in a calm, practical voice that had nothing mystical about it. She knew herbs. She knew the body’s rhythms. She was brusque and sometimes blunt, and some of her patients, when her remedies failed — as remedies sometimes did — found it easier to call it witchcraft than to accept that sickness was stronger than medicine.
The accusations came in the spring of 1648. By summer, Margaret Jones was in chains.
Samuel attended the trial. He sat in the back and listened to the testimony — neighbors who claimed she had given them pains, a man who said his cattle had sickened after she looked at them, a woman who swore she had seen a small child-like spirit emerge from Jones’s body. He listened to the judges, somber men who believed utterly in the Devil’s power to recruit agents among the living. He listened to Margaret Jones herself, who denied everything with a flat, stubborn dignity that he thought was probably sealing her fate.
She was convicted on a Thursday.
She was hanged on a Friday, at Gallows Hill outside Boston, in front of a crowd that watched in terrible silence.
Samuel said nothing at the trial. He said nothing at the hanging. He walked home through summer heat with Alice beside him, and they were quiet for a long time.
That evening, after supper, he said: “Jones’s wife died wrongfully. She was no witch.”
Alice looked up from her mending. Her eyes were very still. “No.”
“The magistrates hanged an innocent woman. And took bribes doing it, I’ll warrant.”
Alice set down her mending. “Samuel. You know what it will cost us.”
“I know what it costs if nobody says it.” He stood up from the table. “That’s worse.”
Alice looked at him for a long moment — this man she had trusted across fourteen years and an ocean. Then she nodded, once, and picked up her mending again.
The next morning, Samuel Stratton began to tell his neighbors what he thought. Alice told hers. In a community that had just watched a woman hang, most people had the sense to keep their doors closed while he talked. Some listened. A few, eventually, told the court what he had said.
Cambridge, Massachusetts — October 30, 1649
The summons came in October.
Samuel and Alice appeared before the Cambridge county court on the thirtieth day of October, 1649. The charge was speaking against the court, against the magistrates, against the righteous judgment of the colony. The fine: five pounds. The requirement: public acknowledgment of error.
What the court record preserves of what they actually said is worth reading exactly as it was set down.
Samuel Stratton had told his neighbors that Jones’s wife Died wrongfully, and was no witch and that the magistrates would doe anything for bribes, and the members also.
Alice Stratton had told hers that Goodwife Jones dyed wrongfully and was no more a witch than she was.
These were not careless words spoken in grief and later regretted. Samuel had not merely called the verdict wrong; he had accused the magistrates of corruption by name. Alice had not merely expressed sympathy; she had placed herself on equal ground with the dead woman — no more a witch than she was — and dared the court to draw its own conclusions.
The court drew them. Five pounds each. Public acknowledgment.
Samuel stood straight in the dock. Alice stood beside him. Around them, the court watched with the particular attention of people who wanted to see someone bend.
The magistrate read the judgment. He called upon Samuel Stratton to acknowledge the error of his ways and the mercy of the court.
Samuel acknowledged the mercy of the magistrates.
“And the charges against the court? The verdict?”
“I remain,” Samuel said quietly, “of the same mind.”
Somewhere in the gallery, a woman whispered. The magistrate’s face went red. The additional fine — five pounds more, levied the following April — was, Samuel always said afterward, worth every shilling.
The court record notes, without apparent irony, that the Strattons were nearly suspected themselves of witchcraft.
The last time Alice Stratton appears in any document is November 9, 1649. Ten days after the fine.
After that, the record goes silent.
Watertown — 1650 to 1657
History keeps women the way it keeps weather: when something dramatic happens, it notes them down. Otherwise, the ordinary days go unrecorded and unremembered. Alice Stratton had lived her dramatic days in full view of the court records. After November 1649, she steps out of the frame and does not come back.
She died before 1657. That is all that can be said with certainty.
Samuel does not speak of her death in any surviving document. He does not tell us what the house was like without her, or how long it took him to stop expecting to find her in the kitchen garden, or whether the herbs she planted were still growing years after she was gone. He was not a man who talked about the things that hurt him. He was a man who remained — in the phrasing he had already chosen, without knowing he was choosing it — of the same mind.
His sons were grown. Samuel Jr. had begun looking toward Concord, where land was opening and a young man with his father’s surveying skills could make something substantial. Richard stayed nearer, quieter, watching. John was in his late teens, forming himself into a man without yet knowing what kind.
The house in Watertown was quieter than it had been for thirty years.
Samuel felled timber. He surveyed lots. He served on committees, settled disputes, witnessed wills. He was Mister Stratton of Watertown — a man the colony relied on, and who did not particularly mind being relied on, because work was better than the alternative.
In 1655, a young Scotsman came to his door with papers to sign. In 1657, Samuel Stratton married again.
The record came back to life.
Watertown — 1655
Seven years after the fine, a document crossed Samuel’s table that troubled him in a different way.
The man’s name was Alexander Gordon. Scottish, young, come to Massachusetts under circumstances that Gordon himself described as unjust — one of a group of Scots taken prisoner in the English Civil Wars and transported to New England to serve as bound labor. When a group of these men petitioned the General Court for their freedom, the court had not found the matter interesting enough to pursue.
The indenture papers described the arrangement plainly. Goodman Stratton, Planter of Watertowne. Six years of service. No absences without permission, day or night. The full weight of colonial law behind the master’s authority.
Samuel studied the papers. He thought about Margaret Jones. He thought about the way power arranged itself — always — so that certain categories of person had very little power to refuse.
He signed. He needed the labor, and Gordon needed food and shelter and the hope of something better at the end of six years: freedom dues, a stake, a start in a new country that had not chosen him as he had not chosen it. That was the bargain, and Samuel intended to honor his side of it, whether he could defend the system that created the bargain or not.
He kept Gordon’s service. He kept the terms.
When Samuel wrote his will, in the winter of 1672, it provided that his servant Thomas Cooper should receive a cow upon Samuel’s death.
It was a small gesture. It was not nothing.
Boston, Massachusetts — June 27, 1657
Her name was Margaret Bowlins, and she had been married before.
Her first husband, William Parker of Scituate and Boston, had left her a widow of some standing — not wealthy, but established, the kind of woman who understood how colonial society worked and had learned to work it with some confidence. Her father was Thomas Bowlins. She was a woman who had made her own way after Parker’s death, and when she decided to remarry, she chose carefully.
She chose Samuel Stratton. The man who had paid ten pounds for saying a true thing in a Cambridge courtroom.
John Endicott performed the ceremony. The Governor of Massachusetts. On June 27, 1657, in Boston, Samuel Stratton — sixty-five years old, eight years a widower, a man who had never once recanted anything in his life — married Margaret Bowlins Parker before the highest civil authority in the colony.
That Endicott officiated says something about where Samuel stood in the world by 1657. He had come a long way from the Bedfordshire farm. He was Mister Stratton of Watertown, twice selectman, constable, surveyor of the town grants. The fine had not broken him. If anything it had confirmed him — as a man whose stubbornness was of the enduring rather than the destructive kind.
What Margaret made of him is not recorded. She was a woman who had already buried one husband and managed her own years before choosing another. She chose Samuel Stratton, which suggests she knew what she was getting.
They had nineteen years together.
Watertown and Concord — 1655 to 1672
The line was carrying itself forward without his help, which was as it should be.
Samuel Jr. had moved to Concord by 1655, following the land as his father had always followed it — not restlessly, but with the surveyor’s eye for where the good ground was and what a man could build on it. He was established there, known, carrying the family name west into the expanding colony.
Richard did not live to see much of that expansion. He died in 1658, around thirty years old — too young, the kind of loss that does not surprise a man who has already survived long enough to see surprising things, but hurts the same. Richard left behind a son, also named Samuel, and a grandfather who would remember that grandson in his will with the careful specificity of a man who understood that money in a document was a kind of love, translated into terms the law could protect.
John — the fifteen-year-old who had stepped off the shallop in 1647 not knowing his father’s face — had grown into a man, and would settle in Watertown for the rest of his life, tending a branch of the family that would take root there for three generations.
The bloodline that led to Indiana ran through Samuel Jr. He was the quiet one — his father’s surveying eye, his mother’s steadiness — and Concord was only the beginning of the road he would lay down for his own sons and grandsons to follow.
The colony was changing around Samuel as his sons moved through it.
The Half-Way Covenant of 1662 — a theological compromise that admitted the children of church members to partial standing without a personal conversion experience — appalled the old guard. Samuel watched it with the weary recognition of a man who had already paid his price for speaking plainly: communities either adapted or they calcified, and calcified things shattered eventually. He had no special attachment to the world as it had been when he arrived. He had built it. He was not required to worship it.
Roger Williams had been banished for saying conscience was a man’s own business. Anne Hutchinson for saying the ministers were wrong. Four Quakers had been hanged before the Crown intervened. Samuel had watched all of it. He had his own experience of what happened when you said a true thing at the wrong time.
He remained of the same mind.
Watertown — December 1672
Margaret Bowlins Stratton died on December 7, 1676, aged eighty-one. Samuel did not live to see it.
He made his will on December 19, 1672 — being in sound memory and understanding, But near my Death. He was eighty years old. He had been in Massachusetts nearly four decades, and the colony he was leaving bore only passing resemblance to the city upon a hill that John Winthrop had imagined when they were young men, before the Atlantic, before any of it.
He thought that was probably all right. Cities upon hills were aspirations. Aspirations were meant to be reached for, not achieved. The reaching was the point.
To his son Samuel: land in Concord.
To his grandson Samuel, Richard’s boy: a portion set aside.
To his servant Thomas Cooper: a cow, to be his outright upon Samuel’s death.
He died Christmas Day, 1672, and was buried in the Old Burying Place in Watertown.
Three years later, King Philip’s War tore the colony apart. Wampanoag, Nipmuck, and Narragansett warriors struck from the coast to the Connecticut River. Twelve towns were destroyed. Six hundred colonists died. The Native peoples lost far more — in battle, in massacre, in the slavery that awaited those who surrendered. New England came out of it English in a way it had never quite been before, and the price was written in blood on both sides.
Samuel Stratton did not live to see it. Perhaps that was a mercy.
His sons did. And his grandsons. And somewhere down that line, in a farmhouse in Chelmsford, a boy grew up hearing the old stories — the witch trial, the fine, the grandmother who had stood in a Cambridge courtroom and refused to say she was wrong — and understood without being told that the Stratton way of doing things involved, when it came to it, refusing to recant.
His name was Francis. But that is the next chapter.
For the documentary record behind this chapter, see Samuel Stratton Sr. (1592–1672) in the family histories.
—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.
If you are tracing a Stratton line, start here. Harriet Russell Stratton's two-volume Book of Strattons is the most comprehensive Stratton genealogy ever compiled—both volumes are free and fully searchable online.