William Carpenter

Born about 1605 in England. May 2, 1638: William and his wife along with 4 of their children and William’s father were at sea having left from Southampton, England aboard the ship Bevis. He married April 28, 1625, at St. Michael and All Angels Church in Shalbourne Parish, Wiltshire/Berkshire, England. He died February 7, 1658[1659], in Rehoboth, Plymouth Colony (now Rumford, East Providence, Rhode Island).

A Joiner in Weymouth and Rehoboth

William Carpenter, a house carpenter and joiner born around 1605 in England, crossed the Atlantic in 1638 aboard the ship Bevis with his wife, several children, and his own father. He settled in Weymouth, Massachusetts, where he served as constable, town deputy to the colony's General Court, and proprietors' clerk, before following the town's minister, Samuel Newman, to found Rehoboth in Plymouth Colony around 1643 — one of fifty-eight original proprietors who drew lots for the new settlement's first land division. In Rehoboth he held nearly every civic post available over the following fifteen years: selectman, constable, grand juror, fence-viewer, and surveyor of highways, and in 1653 he helped negotiate an agreement with the Pawtuxet people in which colonists paid for a fence to keep livestock out of Pawtuxet cornfields rather than remain liable for the damage. (Genealogists have sometimes confused him with a different William Carpenter of Pawtuxet, Rhode Island — a militia captain — but town records make clear he held no such commission.)

A Library on the Frontier

William's will — undated in the surviving record but probated after his death in February 1659 — divided his land, livestock, and an unusually large personal library among his children: religious works in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, including a Greek grammar, a Hebrew grammar, a Greek lexicon, and volumes of sermons and commentary, distributed individually to his sons alongside more ordinary bequests of clothing, tools, and farm animals. He also owned an island in Pawtuxet, Rhode Island, purchased jointly with Benedict Arnold and Joseph Carpenter, where he pastured sheep and cattle. William's total estate was appraised at nearly 645 pounds, a substantial fortune for a Plymouth Colony tradesman of his generation.