Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 5.djvu/425

 THE EASTMAN FAMILY. 3S7

knew him well. In my childhood, while trudging to school over the dusty highway, I often met him, cantering along on his chestnut horse. He always bowed, and said " Good-morning," so pleasantly that it made a ray of sunshine for me all day. When disease fell upon him, anxious incjuiries passed from hp to lip ; but the answers were ever sad, and when we knew that the great spirit had returned to its Giver, it was like a cloud passing over the sun at noon-tide.

��THE EASTMAN FAMILY.

��JNTEKESTING EEUXIOX AT CONCORD, N. H. THE EASTMAN

OEGANIZATION.

��BY C. E. STANIFXS.

ABOUT 1640 there came to these then inhospitable shores one by the name of Roger Eastman. It is pretty generally acknowledged that " Taffy was a Welshman," and so, according to good authority, was Roger (and we may suppose that here the similarity ends) ; but on the other hand it is con- tended that the name of East-man is so preeminently English and suggestive of Saxon origin that he must have been, as in duty bound, an Englishman. In support of this it is claimed that he sailed from Southampton, England, with a party of emigrants from Salisbury, which is hard by, and vicinity, and that this was the origin of the name of the town which afterward became their home in the New World. It is more than likely, however, that Roger Eastman, of Salisbury, in Massachusetts Colony, whatever his nativity may have been, was the pioneer and father of all the Eastman family in this country, which has now become, with all its connecting links, a numerous community. From this one man (who, it is said, forbidden among others to leave his native land, shipped as a servant) sprang a hardy, energetic, pushing race, which has cropped out here and there among the world's kin to places of honorable mention and intellectual superiority, which has given it prominence and com- manded the respect of its fellows.

From all evidence, it is plain that this family was not only ambitious of good alliance, but that it was considered a most desirable connection, or in otiier words a strain of good blood, by those who, priding themselves on their gentle stock, wished to perpetuate it by an equally favorable union. It is something more than tradition that one Eastman took to wife a daughter of Sir Ferdinand Gorges, who, about 1622, held the grant of Maine from the St. Lawrence to the Merrimack ; and some of their descendants still retaining the noble sur- name as an adjunct to the family patronymic, reside in Boston to-day. The Duke of Sutherland, who has within a few months visited the States, is said to be directly connected with one branch of the Eastman family on his mother's side. Burke's peerage records the Duchess of Sutherland, at one time Mis- tress of the Robes to C^ueen Victoria, as the third daughter of the sixth earl of Carlisle. The curious part of it is, however, that she was the daughter of Samuel Eastman, who li\ed in a suburb of London, known as Battersea, and was beadle of Battersea Parish Church for many years. Space does not allow a detailed account, but suftice it to say, that while the beadle came of good English farmer stock, his wife was of more gentle blood, being a cousin of Lady Bessborough, who was well known in her time, from rSoo to 1820. Mrs. Eastman, becoming seriously ill and not expecting to live, allowed her

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