The Sons and Daughters of the Colonial and Antebellum Bench and Bar 1565–1861 is a hereditary society honoring descendants of individuals who served in the lands now comprising the continental United States as judges or lawyers prior to April 12, 1861. The society encourages genealogical and historical research into the early American legal profession and the courts that supported colonial and early national governance.
John Hoar (c1622–1704)
My membership is in right of John Hoar (c1622–1704), of Concord, Massachusetts. John Hoar was born in Gloucester, England, about 1622. A record of apprenticeship in 1633 implies he was about eleven years old at that time. By the early 1640s he had come to Massachusetts with his widowed mother and was established in Scituate no later than 1643, when he appears among the town’s men bearing arms.
In 1659 he removed to Concord, where he became known not only as a militia figure, but also as someone willing to deal directly with Native communities in a period when that could be socially and physically dangerous. One episode recorded in later summaries is his effort, during King Philip’s War, to offer shelter to John Eliot’s “Praying Indians,” an act that helped establish his reputation as an intermediary, even though his neighbors thwarted the attempt and the forced removal to Deer Island proved catastrophic for many of those confined there.
Hoar’s most famous public act came in the crisis surrounding Mary Rowlandson’s captivity. Rowlandson was taken in the Lancaster attack of February 1676 and held for weeks while her captors moved through central Massachusetts. Hoar, described in summary accounts as a prominent lawyer (and, in some tellings, a missionary), was asked to act as the colonial representative in negotiations for her release. He set out from Lancaster in late April 1676, traveling with Native guides to meet the war party near what is now Princeton. On May 2, 1676, Rowlandson was released at the granite outcropping now known as Redemption Rock, following an agreement for ransom that later tradition commonly describes as £20, and that at least one contemporary-derived account itemizes in goods and money.
The physical memorialization of this event has its own afterlife. A Princeton Historical Society account notes that U.S. Senator George F. Hoar, identified as a descendant of John Hoar, purchased Redemption Rock and adjacent land in 1879 and caused an inscription to be cut into the stone recording the May 2, 1676 agreement for Rowlandson’s ransom.
Hoar died in Concord on April 2, 1704. He is also remembered locally as the first inhabitant of the house later known as Orchard House, later associated with Louisa May Alcott, which is an appropriately odd footnote for a man whose life already reads like a stitched-together anthology of colonial New England.
Additional memberships will be added as they are approved.