Roger Mowry

d. 1666 · Plymouth MA → Salem (Essex County) MA → Providence RI

Died 1666

Children include Hannah

On 18 May 1631 the Massachusetts court took "names of such as desire to be made ffreemen," and two of them were Roger Mawry and Roger Williams. Neither man stayed in the Bay colony to take up the privilege. Both went on to Plymouth, then to Salem, and ended their lives living side by side in Providence. He was a member of the Salem church by 1635. On 20 January 1637 the town of Salem agreed with Roger Mowry, neat herd, that he should begin keeping all the town's cattle on the fifth of the next second month and continue eight months, with the help of another sufficient man. He was to be ready at the pen an hour after sunrise each day to take them, and those who did not have their cattle ready were to bring them on after the herd. His pay was seven shillings a head for every beast except bulls, in four equal payments, always a quarter in advance. Five years later he and Lawrence Southwick agreed to keep the cows on the same terms as the year before, except that the wages had fallen to five shillings a head.

He removed to Providence about 1643, and a deposition taken at Salem more than half a century later, in September 1700, fixes it: Nathaniel Felton declared that Roger Mowry had gone from Salem before the year 1644, having sold his land in the woods to Emanuel Downing. He was a freeman of Rhode Island in 1655, and on 25 May of that year the Court of Commissioners appointed him to keep a house of entertainment, with a convenient sign to be set out at the most perspicuous place of the house to give notice to strangers. He entered ten ankers of liquors in July 1656, and three ankers of rum and two barrels of sack in the same year. In August 1656 he had a house lot laid out to him upon the hill over against Roger Williams his meadow, and in January 1657 the town allowed him six shillings for a day's firing and houseroom, which is what a public house was for in a settlement with no other hall. He was commissioner in 1658 and juryman in 1661.

He died on 5 January 1666. He had left a will and made his wife executrix, but she refused administration because the property would not discharge the just debts and pay the legacies.

Children

Hannah Mowry (d. 1718)

Sources

Engraved by Norman Isham, Rhode Island Photo Engraving Company, 1895, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

John Osborne Austin, Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island (1887), Mowry; William A. Mowry, The Descendants of John Mowry of Rhode Island (1909), chapter 1; James Savage, A Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England (1860); and, for the Heath will as printed from the original, J. Wingate Thornton, Lives of Isaac Heath and John Bowles (1850), which reads the legatee as Mary Morice rather than Mary Mowry

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Cite: Heirology, "Roger Mowry (d. 1666)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/roger-mowry-1666-7fddbd.