Ancestors

Ephraim Wetherell

Ephraim Wetherell was born at Norton, Massachusetts, on 24 January 1745. He was the son of Ephraim Wetherell and Bathsheba Wilde, and the eldest son of their nine children. Norton lay in the old Taunton North Purchase, and the Wetherells had farmed that ground since the 1600s.

On 21 January 1766, at Norton, he married Tabitha Harvey, who was two years older than he was. The intention had been entered on 2 November 1765. The town called him Ephraim Jr., to keep him apart from his father. Their first child, Rhoda, was born at Norton that August. Noah followed at Easton in 1768, and Selah and a son Ephraim at Taunton in 1770 and 1773.

By 1776 the family had moved north to the Connecticut River valley of New Hampshire. Their son Josiah was born at Westmoreland that July. In 1778 "Ephraim Wetherell of Westmorland" paid the widow Mary Nelson of Keene two hundred and forty pounds for sixty acres in Keene, part of hundred-acre lot 16. The land bordered Daniel Kingsbury, Benjamin Hall and Jonathan Carr. Three more children were born at Keene: Tabitha in 1779, Asaph on 11 July 1781, and Lydia on 1 March 1784.

He served in the Revolution each time the militia was called. In October 1776 he marched with Capt. Joseph Burt's company of Col. Samuel Ashley's regiment to reinforce General Gates at Ticonderoga. In June 1777 he went again with Capt. Waitstill Scott's company. That July he marched with Capt. John Cole's company of Westmoreland, and the men got as far as Otter Creek before they met part of the army in retreat. Ticonderoga had been abandoned. In 1778 he enlisted for Sullivan's campaign in Rhode Island. In July 1779 he went back to Rhode Island as a sergeant, later ensign, in Capt. Ephraim Stone's company of Col. Mooney's battalion. The Keene selectmen paid his bounty of thirty pounds and his travel to Providence.

Keene in those years was also caught in the quarrel over whether the Connecticut valley towns belonged to New Hampshire or to Vermont. On 1 January 1782 armed men from Chesterfield and Westmoreland rescued a Vermont partisan, Samuel King, from the sheriff at Keene. The special sheriff, Robert Smith, then wrote to Ephraim with orders to arrest two of the rescuers and bring them before the Committee of Safety at Exeter.

His money did not hold. A creditor sued him on a note in 1784, and the county court called him a husbandman of Keene. His daughter Tabitha, not yet five, was killed by a rolling log at Keene on 5 May 1784, according to a family Bible record. He died at Keene in September 1785, aged forty. The estate paid a doctor and a nurse for his last sickness.

Asa Dunbar, a Keene lawyer and town clerk, administered the estate. The inventory held two beds, a loom, a coverlid, an iron pot, a trammel, a poor foot wheel, a broken dish kettle, and a note or a deed for fifty three acres. It could not pay the debts. The land was sold, the creditors took a share each, and the widow was paid for seventy seven weeks' care of her two youngest children. In 1789 Daniel Kingsbury became guardian of the eldest son at home, Ephraim, then over fourteen.

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Cite: Heirology, "Ephraim Wetherell (1745-1785)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/ephraim-wetherell-1745-1785-646360.