Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 7.djvu/47

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��GRANITE MONTHLY,

A NEW HAMPSHIRE MAGAZINE

Devoted to Literature, Biography, History, and State Progress.

��Vol. YIT.

��:N^OyEMBER, 1883.

��Xo. 2.

��CORNELIUS VAN NESS DEARBORN.

��I

��BY JOHN H. GOODALE.

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��Early as 1639, and only .nineteen years after the landing of the Pilgrims, John Wheelwright, a dissenting minis- ter from England, was banished from Massachusetts Bay colony. It is an evidence of the stern intolerance of that day that the only error with which he was charged was " inveighing against all that walked in a covenant of works, and maintained sanctification as an evidence of justification" — a charge not readily comprehended at the pres- ent day. There was a minority, in- cluding Gov. Winthrop, who protested sentence, but without Wheelwright, therefore, company of friends, re- moved from Massachusetts to Exeter, in the province of New Hampshire. Among the thirty -five persons who signed the compact to form a stable and orderly colony, is found the name of Godfrey Dearborn, the patriarch of the entire Dearborn family in this country.

Forty years before he was born in Exeter, England, and in 1637 landed at Massachusetts bay. He lived at Exeter ten years, and in 1649 rnoved to Hampton, built a framed house, which is still standing, became a large land-holder and town official, and died February 4, 1686. Few men of the early settlers have left a family name so widely represented as Godfrey VII— 3

��Dearborn. His descendants are nu- merous in every county of New Hampshire, and are to be found in every part of New England.

It is worthy of note that among the descendants of Godfrey Dearborn the practice of medicine has been a favorite occupation. Benjamin Dear- born, of the fifth generation, gradu- ated at Harvard in 1746, and entering upon a successful practice at Ports- mouth, died in his thirtieth year. Levi Dearborn had for forty years an extensive practice at Nortli Hamp- ton, and died in 1792 ]\dvvard Dearborn, born in 1776, was for half a century the medical adviser of the people of Seabrook, and acquired a handsome estate. Gen. Henry Dear- born, who gained a national reputa- tion by his brilliant services in the Revolutionary war, and as the senior major-general of the United States army, in the war of 181 2, was a prac- ticing physician in Nottingham when summoned to join the first New Hamp- shire regiment raised in 1775. To- day several of the ablest physicians of the state bear the name.

Toward the middle of the last cen- tury the Dearborn family had been quite generally distributed through Rockingham county. Peter Dear- born, the great-grandfather of the subject of this sketch, v/as born in

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