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Excerpts from "The Swansea Stage Coach - A Local History" 1 (which is available from the
Luther Store Museum
FORMING A TOWN
We must look to the Tower of London, that French castle which still rises above the British capital city,
to understand the beginnings of Swansea, Mass.
In the Tower's big court yard, Sir Harry Vane was executed by having his head chopped off on the morning of
June 14, 1662. This good friend of New England, who had been governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony at
Boston while still a youth, gave up his life soon after King Charles II was restored to the English throne.
For Sir Harry Vane not only had been a leading Puritan in the 10-year republic set up in England under
Oliver Cromwell, but he was the much-admired leader of the radical Puritans on both sides of the Atlantic.
He had encouraged both Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, who were driven out of the Bay colony for their
liberal religious and political views-- before they founded Rhode Island.
The restored English king, whatever his earlier promises, in 1662 took revenge on those earnest folk who
sought to worship as they pleased. Soon after the bloody death of Harry Vane, an Act of Uniformity drove
2,000 independent clergymen out of their small churches in the British Isles.
To Rehoboth, most western town in Plymouth Colony, fled John Myles, a 40-year-old Baptist minister from
Swansea, Wales. With him came several members of his flock, and in Rehoboth they were welcomed by a few
families who belonged to a Baptist congregation which had been stamped out there a few years earlier.
In the middle of the 17th Century, for reasons which today seem odd, Baptists were regarded even by Puritans
as dangerous fanatics-- almost as wild as the Quakers, who proclaimed that God spoke to them directly.
Plymouth took advice from Boston, and Myles had to lead his followers out of Rehoboth. So they built a
meeting house amid salt meadowlands on the west bank of the Palmer River in what later became known as
Barneyville. Today North Swansea girls and boys fish from a span that is called "Myles bridge"-- an
historic site.
It is still just south of the Rehoboth line.
This was rather close to the Wampanoag Indians' stronghold and camp grounds in the center and southern
end of nine-mile-long Mount Hope Neck. Yet a few English families (Brown, Butterworth, Cole, Willett)
(already lived, in peace, close to this heartland of Massasoit's people. In general, these English
preferred the Baptist newcomers' beliefs to the established Congregational way at Rehoboth. In any event,
old settlers and new joined hardy Thomas Willett and pioneering John Brown, who lived on vast estates
sold to them by Massasoit.
Willett, who spoke Dutch, was made the first mayor of New York City when Britain seized Manhattan Island
from the Hollanders in 1665. John Brown's energetic son, James, we have met before, as the husband of
Elizabeth Tilley's daughter, Lydia Howland. The graves of these particular pioneers are in Little Neck
Cemetary at the head of Bullock's Cove, Riverside, RI. A chimney of the ancient Brown home still stands
as part of a newer residence on Willett Avenue at Kingsford Ave.
Bound by love of the land and their religion, these settlers petitioned Plymouth to let them form a
new town. It's name, they suggested, would be Swansea. This happily honored the Welsh home town of the
church, and catered to the Puritan custom of sprinkling New England with town names from Old England.
When their petition was approved by the Plymouth court on October 30, 1667, the permit covered everything
south of Rehoboth and Taunton but warned against pressing too closely on the choice lands sacred to the
Indians. In effect, the new town was allowed a broad frontier between Taunton and Providence Rivers so
long as it did not take anything claimed by anybody else.
But in allowing the grant, Plymouth employed the following language: "The Court doe also approve that
the Township....shall henceforth be called and known by the name of Swanzey."
This mis-spelling led to some confusion for about 300 years. |
Town History
