Friday, October 23, 2026

Two Lives, One Deed: Thomas Pitman, Wenepoykin, and Marblehead's 1684 Bargain

Every Marbleheader has walked past the framed 1684 deed in Abbot Hall. I've looked at it a hundred times. Only recently did I learn that one of the men who helped bring it about was my own ancestor, Thomas Pitman. By my family records he is my 9th great-grandfather. On the other side of that parchment stands Wenepoykin, son of Nanepashemet. He is the man at the center of my novel, The Wing. The two of them were born within a few years of each other. Their lives ran side by side for seventy years, and they met on paper only after one of them had died.

Here is their story, told side by side and as close to the records as I can keep it.

Two boys, two worlds (c.1612–1633)

Nobody knows exactly where Thomas Pitman came from. He was born somewhere around 1612 to 1617. His own sworn ages in court drift across those years, which was common at the time. You'll see a 1612 baptism at Wedmore, Somerset, repeated online, but it rests on nothing more than a matching name. One family historian writing in 1913 called his ancestry "unknown," and I'll leave it there. The Pitman name is heavily a Somerset and Dorset name, so a West Country origin is likely. That is a probability, not a fact.

Wenepoykin was born around 1616, on the shores the English would call Lynn and Marblehead. John Higginson, born in 1616 himself, later testified that George (the English name for Wenepoykin) was "young then about my Age." His father, Nanepashemet, was dead by the fall of 1621. In December 1633 smallpox swept the coast. Governor Winthrop wrote that "John Sagamore died of the small pox, and almost all his people," and that "James Sagamore of Sagus died also, and most of his folks." Those were Wenepoykin's older brothers. At about seventeen he became sagamore of what was left.

A fisherman comes to Marblehead (1640s)

We don't know when Thomas crossed the Atlantic or on what ship, and no English record yet tells us where he was born or what he did there. He first appears in February 1646, standing surety for a neighbor in the Salem court, years after the great Puritan migration had ended. Marblehead was a rough fishing station, not a pious village. Governor Winthrop dismissed its fishermen that year as "profane persons, divers of them brought the last year from Newfoundland to fish a season."

Everything about Thomas suggests he came for work, for fish, land and a better living than the struggling West Country could offer, where pirates were taking ships, men were being pressed into the navy, and civil war had broken out. He did not come to build a godly commonwealth. Marblehead had no church of its own until 1684, and nothing shows him joining Salem's. Yet he became a pillar of the place anyway: as constable in 1659 he reported neighbors who had taken up with the Quakers, he helped pay for the meeting-house, and in old age he was probably made a freeman of the colony.

He stayed. In 1648, the year Marblehead became its own town, the commons were divided among 44 families, and the list reads "Tho. Pitman, 2 cows." Most families got one. In 1657 Thomas, "of Marblehead, fisherman," bought a house and barn. In 1658 he was sworn constable. Over the next decades he served as fence surveyor and as selectman, and in 1670 a witness to a street brawl saw "Thomas Pitman & his foare sons." He raised six known children with his wife, Joan or Jane. One of them, John, married Charity Gale in 1681. My own line runs through John.

During those same years, Wenepoykin's land was slipping away. In 1652 he mortgaged Nahant to Nicholas Davison of Charlestown for £20. He pressed the General Court over his late brother's land and got nowhere. The missionary John Eliot judged in 1649 that the Lynn Indians were "all naught" because "their sachem … careth not to pray to God." Wenepoykin married Joane Ahawayet, daughter of the Nahant sachem called Black Will. In time he moved north to Wamesit, in what became Chelmsford.

An inquest, a war, an island (1664–c.1683)

The two worlds touched early. In December 1664 Thomas Pitman sat, signing with his mark, on the jury of inquest into the death of "an Indian named Peter," found frozen on the highway at the edge of Marblehead.

In 1672 an Indian court at Natick heard old Ahaton swear that "George Saggamore wth no nose was Saggamore of ye place where marblehead is seated." Wenepoykin agreed that his kinsman James Rumney Marsh could deal for the Marblehead land, provided George received half the pay.

Then came King Philip's War. On 25 August 1675, "Mark Pitman of Marblehead," very likely Thomas's kinsman, was killed in the fight near Hatfield. Wenepoykin, by later accounts, sided against the English. Those accounts are secondary, and the details of his part in the war are undocumented. He was captured in 1675 or 1676, depending on the source, and he ended up in Barbados. Selling war captives into Caribbean slavery was common, so enslavement is the likeliest reading. The romantic story that John Eliot won his release is tradition, not record. What is on record is a 1686 deposition: "Sagamore George when he came from Barbados he lived Sometime and dyed at ye house of James Rumley Marsh," at Natick. Before he died he left his land claims to James. He was dead before July 1684.

July 1684: the paths cross

By 1684 the colony's charter was under threat from the Crown, and land titles suddenly mattered. "James the Indian and some other Indians" pressed their claim to Marblehead. On 14 July 1684 the commoners met, and the town records read:

"it is votted and agread to by generall consent that Mr Mosis Maverick mr John Deverix Capt Samll Ward mr Thedeous Riddan William Beall Thomas Pittman Richard Read and Nathanill Waltown be Joyned as a Comittee with the present Select men of the Town to mack Inquierie into the saied afaiere and sarch after the pretended Claieme and truth of thear title…"

Thomas, now about seventy, was one of eight men chosen to look into the claim. Only Ward and Devereux were empowered to strike the bargain, and they moved fast. Four days later, on 18 July 1684, the heirs sealed the deed for £16 "Currant money of New England." Those heirs were Wenepoykin's widow Joane, "relict Widdow of George Saggamore als Wenepawweekin late of Chelmsford," their daughters Susannah and Sarah, their grandchildren, and James Rumney Marsh's family. The deed was acknowledged that day before Governor Simon Bradstreet. (You'll sometimes see "16 September 1684." The parchment says July 18.)

Then the bill came due. On 6 August the proprietors

"Impowred mr Samuell Chevers Samuell ward Thomas Pittman and Nathanill Walltown to Joyn as a Comittee with The Select men to proportion each mans part acording to his privellidg in saied township and thay proportioning by Cows leases fiend it to amount to nien pence pr Cow in mony."

So the fisherman who got two cow rights in 1648 helped work out what each cow right owed for the town's title. It came to ninepence apiece.

Historian Sidney Perley noted that this Thomas Pitman "was of Marblehead when it became a town, in 1648." There was also a younger Thomas, so I can't be absolutely certain it was the elder. Everything points that way. Thomas Pitman died in the summer of 1694, ten years after the deed.

Why it matters to me

Wenepoykin never signed that deed. He had agreed to it in principle in 1672, then lived through war, slavery and exile, and died before the paper existed. Thomas never met the heirs face to face, as far as we know. His job was the inquiry and then the arithmetic. Still, the two men were near-exact contemporaries on the same shore, and one document ties their families together for good. When I stand in Abbot Hall now, I see both of them.

Sources

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