John Sexton

Born March 4, 1649[1650], in Windsor, Connecticut. He married July 30, 1677, in Windsor, Connecticut. He died December 4, 1718 in Simsbury, Connecticut.

A Simsbury Wolf-Hunter

John Sexton was born March 4, 1650, in Windsor, Connecticut, and settled in Simsbury by 1686, where he steadily acquired farmland from the town over the following decades and served as a fence-viewer and as hayward and pound-keeper for the lower meadow. He was, by the record of bounties he collected, a remarkably persistent wolf hunter, bringing in wolves — or their ears or heads — for payment more than a dozen times between 1700 and 1717. In 1699 he bought thirty-three acres from a neighbor for ten barrels of tar and twenty pounds in silver, and in 1707 he and his sons joined dozens of fellow Simsbury residents in an agreement to work the Turkey Hill copper mine.

A Family Estate Divided

John was active in supporting Simsbury's church, pledging days of labor and helping build a barn and gather fort timber for its minister, the Reverend Dudley Woodbridge. In his March 1717 will he divided his land among his surviving son John, his daughter-in-law Hannah (widow of his late son Richard), his son-in-law William Gillett, and Richard's children, taking care that Hannah could keep her land as long as she kept her children with her. John died in December 1718; his estate, appraised at nearly 296 pounds, included his farmland, livestock, a musket and an “Indian gun,” and an old family Bible.