I commend you on recounting historical Concord events in the pages of Insider. Bringing them to the attention of the public helps orient newcomers (and old livers) in the city to various facts in the development of Concord.
But with the interesting column comes a very large responsibility to get the facts right.
A while back you reported that Nathaniel White established a credit card company. This was stretching the truth and laying down a layer of mis-information to readers. The American Express company that he and Benjamin Cheney created never heard of “credit cards.”
And last week, you aggregiously reported that the group of Haverhill men who arrived to lay out the bounds of Concord on May 13, 1726, found Judge Samuel Sewall “living on his five-hundred-acre tract on the east side of the Merrimack.” NOT TRUE. Nor was he the first “white settler” of Concord.
I checked Judge Sewell's diary. First, he doesn't account for his whereabouts that day. He had been to Plimouth a couple weeks earlier to sit court. And on May 16, he “set out for Ipswich accompanied by Benj.” (his 13-year-old ward, and son of a Newbury cousin).
Throughout most of his life, Samuel Sewall lived in Boston and acquired a large estate. He owned large pieces of the Fenway including where Fenway Park now stands, and much of Brookline which he named, while still referring to neighboring Muddy River. And he did indeed own a 500-acre farm in Pennycook along the Merrimack. He had it from Governor Winthrop, but he never lived on the land. And although he lobbied hard for Massachusetts men to settle a town at Pennycook, there is no evidence that he ever visited the place.
Information from The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674-1729, Newly edited from the manuscript at the Massachusetts Historical Society by M. Halsey Thomas. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973.
Thank you,
William John Hare, Concord
