Nehemiah Stetson
Nehemiah Stetson was born at Scituate, Massachusetts, on 25 June 1696. The town book enters him as "Nehemiah, s. Joseph". He is the only Nehemiah Stetson in the printed Plymouth County records of his time, and he was of age to marry in 1718, so the Scituate boy is almost certainly the Pembroke man. He was the fourth of the ten children of Joseph Stetson and Hannah Oldham, and a great-grandson of Cornet Robert Stetson, granted a farm on the North River in 1634.
On 30 December 1718 he married Sarah Despard at Pembroke. Their first son, John, was born on 4 September 1720. Sarah's brother John Despard was an iron founder at Plympton, a man who cast iron. In his last sickness, on 12 April 1723, John Despard made a nuncupative will, spoken aloud before witnesses, and gave "all the remainder of his Estate whatsoever and wheresoever both Real and personal ... unto his cousin John Stetson the Eldest Son of Nehemiah Stetson of Pembrook ... & Sarah his wife". He named Nehemiah sole executor. The heir was two years and seven months old. Five years later, in 1728, Nehemiah was in court as executor of "John Despard late of Plympton Founder".
The boy did not live to come into it. John Stetson died on 18 April 1725. A year later, on 27 April 1726, a daughter Mary and a son Nehemiah died on the same day. A son John was born in 1731. The Nehemiah who carried the line on was born after April 1726, and his birth was not entered. He was most probably a second son given the dead boy's name.
In 1740 Nehemiah joined the Land Bank. The Manufactory Company, as it was formally called, was a scheme of Massachusetts landowners and merchants to supply the colony with paper money. A subscriber mortgaged land to the company and received its bills, and he repaid in produce such as hemp, flax and cordwood, or in the company's own bills. On 9 September 1740 "Nehemiah Stetson and Sarah his wife" mortgaged 81 acres at Pembroke by the Saw Mill Pond to "Robert Auchmuty ... Samuel Adams, William Stoddard, Peter Chardon, Samuel Watts, George Leonard, Robert Hale, John Choate and Thomas Cheever ... Directors of the Manufactory Company". Samuel Adams on that board was the father of the Revolutionary leader. Parliament suppressed the Land Bank in 1741. In 1742 the mortgage was released after Noah Cotton of Pembroke paid off twenty pounds of principal and three pounds five shillings of interest and charges. A run of Suffolk County court files of 1740 to 1745 under his name are probably suits over the company's affairs.
He lived on a homestead that straddled the Pembroke and Halifax line, the ninth lot in the tract called the Major's Purchase, on the south side of the Herring Pond. By the 1750s he was "Nehemiah Stetson of Hallifax". About January 1755 he sold it to his son: "To all to whom these Presents shall come Know Ye that I Nehemiah Stetson of Hallifax in ye County of Plymouth in New England Yeoman for and in consideration of fifty Pound lawfull money to me in hand paid by my son Nehemiah Stetson Jur of Hallifax aforesd Yeoman Have Given Granted Bargained and Sold ... all my Homest[ead] land with ye buildings and fences thereon lying partly in Pembroke and partly in Hallifax being ye ninth lott in number in ye Majors Purchase so called lying on ye Southerly side of ye Herring Pond". The price was fifty pounds. On the same day John and Barnabas Briggs sold the son land "adjoining to ye Homes[tea]d land of ye sd Nehemiah which he bought of his Father by a Deed bearing equal date".
The son died on 11 January 1756, about a year after the sale. Nehemiah was still living in March 1758, when Halifax laid out a road "to Pembrook Line near Nehemiah Stetson House". His death has not been found.
Sources
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Cite: Heirology, "Nehemiah Stetson (b. 1696)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/nehemiah-stetson-1696-2d94e3.