Thomas Newton

Children include Capt.

Thomas Newton was one of the four men who came with Roger Ludlow in 1639 to begin the plantation at Pequonnock, which became the town of Fairfield, Connecticut. He was a carpenter. His birth and his English home are not known.

He was soon one of the leading men of the new town. In April 1645 he sat for Fairfield as a deputy to the General Court, the assembly that made Connecticut's laws. In 1648 he was one of the first five settlers of Bankside, with Daniel Frost, Henry Gray, John Green and Francis Andrus. The five had the right to all the land they enclosed and equal shares in every future allotment of town land.

He was also seldom out of court. On 3 June 1647 the General Court fined him five pounds "for his misdemeanor in the vessell called the Virgin in giueing Phillippe White wyne wn he had to much before". In 1648 and 1649 he and Jonas Wood of Long Island sued each other over a bargain for cattle. One jury found that Wood must deliver to Newton "the two Cowes and the Steare and their increase if any and 20 shillings in Wampun", or pay eighteen pounds. Another made Newton answer for a bond given among the Dutch for 400 guilders, with damages, seventy eight pounds in all. The court set one verdict against the other and left Newton owing Wood sixty pounds. Wampum, strings of shell beads, served as small money in the colonies.

His first wife was named Dorothea, and she was dead by the spring of 1648. That spring he married Joan Smith, the eldest daughter of Richard Smith of the Narragansett country, who was then living among the Dutch. They were married twice. The first wedding, at Flushing on Long Island, was performed by the Dutch sheriff without her parents' consent, and the government of New Netherland declared it void. The second took place before the Director General and Council at New Amsterdam on 10 April 1648, with her father present and reconciled. The record of it calls him "Thomas Newton, widower of Dorothea Newton, residing at Oakeway (Oncoway)".

In 1650 he was jailed at Fairfield on a capital charge. What he was accused of is not recorded. The New England genealogist James Savage thought it "probably witchcraft or other imaginary offence". Thomas escaped from the prison with the help of his neighbours and fled to the Dutch. On 15 May 1651 the General Court remitted the fines it had laid on five of those neighbours for the help they had given him.

The Commissioners of the United Colonies, the league of the New England colonies, demanded that Peter Stuyvesant, the Director General of New Netherland, hand him over. Stuyvesant did not. In May 1653, at the Manhattoes, Thomas came to believe that the house he was in was surrounded. He drew his sword and declared that "Peter Stuyvesant had betrayed him ... whosoever comes first I will run him throw". That same year he was the schout, or sheriff, of Middelburgh on Long Island, and in 1656 he bought land there.

In 1651 he witnessed the deed by which Roger Williams sold his trading house in the Narragansett country to his father-in-law, Richard Smith. Joan died before 1664. They had four children: Abigail, born about 1654, Israel, James and Thomas. Abigail married her cousin Lodowick Updike, James settled at Fairfield and later Colchester, and Thomas went to London.

Thomas Newton died before 28 May 1683. On that day his son James sued at Fairfield as attorney for Israel, over "the lands and privledges of his father Thomas Newton deceased".

Children

Capt. James Newton 1654-1739

Sources

Clair Alonzo Newton, The Colchester, Conn., Newton Family: Descendants of Thomas Newton of Fairfield, Conn., 1639 (1911), p. 3, quoting Albany Records VII, 141-145, and E. B. O'Callaghan, History of New Netherland II, 222; archive.org colchesterconnne01newt, leaf 32

Clair Alonzo Newton, The Colchester, Conn., Newton Family: Descendants of Thomas Newton of Fairfield, Conn., 1639 (1911), p. 4, printing Roger Williams's testimony of July 1679 (Rhode Island Colonial Records III, 57); archive.org colchesterconnne01newt, leaf 34

Clair Alonzo Newton, The Colchester, Conn., Newton Family (1911), pp. 1-6 (archive.org colchesterconnne01newt), quoting James Savage, Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England; the Colonial Records of Connecticut; Ebenezer Hazard, Historical Collections (State Papers) II, 248; Albany Records VII, 141-145; E. B. O'Callaghan, History of New Netherland II, 222, and New Netherland Register, p. 44; J. O. Austin, Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island, p. 185

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Cite: Heirology, "Thomas Newton", https://heirology.com/ancestors/thomas-newton-7b7852.