Ancestors

John Fitch

John Fitch bought a hundred acres about seven miles northwest of the Lunenburg meeting house and farmed the furthest lot out. In his own words, written afterwards to the General Court, he had by industry built him a house and improved so much land as to raise provisions for his growing family and some to spare, whereby he entertained and refreshed travellers.

When the war with France came, his neighbours urged him to turn the place into a garrison and offered to help build it. A guard of two soldiers was posted there and it became a stop for scouting parties working out of Townsend and Northfield.

On 5 July 1748 a raiding party took it. Both soldiers were killed, the buildings were burned, and Fitch surrendered rather than watch the rest happen. He was carried to Montreal with his wife and five children and, as he put it, entered into a melancholy captivity. The alarm was three muskets fired at intervals, and men came in from Groton, Lancaster and Westford before sunrise; a few miles up the trail they found a paper pinned in the bark of a tree, signed by Fitch, asking them not to follow, because he had been told what would be done to his wife and children if they were pursued. They turned back.

A subscription raised at Bradford ransomed them a few months later. His wife died on the road home, at Providence in Rhode Island, on Christmas Eve 1748. Four year old Jacob came back with his legs permanently deformed by the way he had been bound, and worked the rest of his life as a shopkeeper's clerk in Lunenburg.

Fitch married again, prospered, and opened a public house as the country north of him filled in. He sat on the committee that carried Fitchburg's incorporation through the General Court in 1764, and then did the same work for Ashby, which made him its first moderator, its first constable and one of its first selectmen and put a granite monument on the common saying so. He was for a while the richest man in the town. Then the Continental currency collapsed, he lost everything, and he finished as a charge on the town he had incorporated. He died at Ashby on 8 April 1795, aged eighty seven.

If John Fitch is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "John Fitch (1707-1795)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/john-fitch-1707-1795-0f6541.