Robert Pierce

- 1664

• Name	Robert Pierce  [1, 2]
  Born	England
  Gender	Male
  Anecdote	From the "Historic New England": Robert Pierce and Ann Grenway settled in Dorchester in the first wave of seventeenth-century emigration from England to America, but the circumstances of their arrival are ambiguous. Family legend weaves a tale of a shipboard romance between them on the “Mary and John,” a vessel in John Winthrop’s Massachusetts Bay Colony fleet, but the passenger list for that 1630 voyage does not include a Robert Pierce. John Grenway, a millwright, his wife Mary, and their daughter Ann, however, were passengers on the “Mary and John,” and the Grenways became active residents of the fledgling town. Although not a proprietor, John Grenway was among the first to be granted freeman status, and he was therefore entitled to vote and to share in further land divisions. He owned a house on five acres of land, “said to be near the burying place,” and accumulated other properties throughout the town.2 Mary Grenway and her daughters, all of whom were literate, took an active role in town affairs that pertained to women. Mary Grenway initiated two petitions to the Massachusetts General Court seeking freedom for a midwife, Alice Tilly, to practice freely in Boston and Dorchester; Grenway gathered the signatures of over forty local women, including four of her daughters. Robert Pierce, who married the Grenways’ daughter Ann, was among the first few groups of Englishmen who left from Plymouth and other western counties of Great Britain to settle the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It is not known whether he sailed on another ship in Winthrop’s fleet, or came later in the 1630s on a ship arriving directly in Dorchester, but genealogists have traced the family to Plymouth, England, where Robert was born around 1600. It is clear that Ann Grenway and Robert Pierce eventually met, married, and settled in Dorchester, but the dates of these events remain uncertain because genealogical records of this era are spotty. Genealogists use the year 1635 as the approximate date of both their marriage and the birth of their first child. Ann Grenway Pierce’s birth date is also unknown, but Dorchester records and her gravestone assert that she was 104 years old at her death in 1695, noting her status as an aged and respected matriarch. Robert and Ann Pierce settled first in Pine Neck, later called Port Norfolk, an area of upland and salt marsh along the Neponset River and the harbor that took its name from a dense grove of pine trees that persisted well into the nineteenth century. Pierce built their home on a parcel of land belonging to his father-in-law, John Grenway. Like other seventeenth-century fathers, John Grenway arranged for the distribution of property among his children. Common practice would have been for a father to divide his land among his male heirs at his death,6 but Grenway and his wife Mary had six daughters and no sons, and he divided his land during his lifetime, among his daughters and sons-in-law. In 1650 he gave portions of his lands to at least two of his five married daughters and their husbands, including Robert and Ann Pierce. To them he deeded all his land on Pine Neck, six acres, and it was there that Pierce built his first house. Throughout the nineteenth century Pierce’s descendants and other Dorchester townsfolk had a clear idea of where this house was located, for the cellar and the well remained local landmarks. The Rev. John Pierce, minister of the First Parish in Brookline and a Pierce descendant, visited the site in 1804. He “found part of the cellar, in which was the stump of a tree, and drank water from the well dug for the use of my great, great, great grandfather.” On a return visit, in 1820, he took a small fragment of rock from the well as a memento. Later in the nineteenth century local historian Edward McGlenan wrote in The Dorchester Book that the house was near what was then the Neponset railroad station, and he also referred to the cellar and the well. When the Pierces settled in Pine Neck, they were one of only a handful of families in the area, most notably the Pierces, the Minots, and the Tolmans. The most densely settled area of Dorchester remained Allen’s Plain, near the first meetinghouse, in the northern section of the town; this was the location of the Grenways’ home. The intention of the Massachusetts Bay Company and its settlers had been to establish a nucleated town center, with small houselots clustered near the church. One concern was safety, as the colonists had feared attacks by any nearby Native American tribes, but they were equally concerned that Dorchester should remain a cohesive, unified community, with religion at its center. In 1635 the General Court reiterated this intent, ordering that no dwelling be built more than a half mile from the meetinghouse without permission. As evidenced by the Pierces and others, however, settlement quickly spread from the tight, compact village to other parts of Dorchester. The actual threat from the native Neponsets, most of whom had been felled by disease before the colonists arrived, was negligible, and the land seemed boundless. The earliest town records contain a few scattered references to Robert Pierce. The first reference, in 1639, declared that he “shall be a Commoner.” Pierce and his wife Ann joined the Dorchester Church in 1640, making him eligible for freeman status with its accompanying suffrageand property rights, but there is no record that Pierce ever obtained that status. He did take a role in town affairs, serving as fence viewer in 1651 and 1654, and he probably shouldered his responsibility for the maintenance of the roads that ran near his land in Pine Neck and later in the Great Lots. While women in the seventeenth century generally had a very limited public role, Ann Grenway Pierce, along with three of her sisters, signed her mother’s petitions to the General Court in 1649 and 1650. Robert and Ann Pierce eventually moved to a house on a six-acre “home lott” of plowing land in the Eastern Great Lots. An unrecorded deed in the Pierce Family Papers indicates that Pierce acquired this property from John Smith in 1652, and he had apparently already built a house according to an earlier “verbal agremt” between them, on land which lay along the Lower Road, the “jogging” section of Adams Street that is now Gallivan Boulevard. Pierce owned other parcels of land in addition to this homelot. The inventory of his estate, in 1664, lists the home lot, with the house, barn, and surrounding six acres, twenty acres of land in Pine Neck, five acres of meadow, perhaps from one of the town land grants, and thirty-six acres of common land. With the other items specified in the inventory, these land holdings indicate the kind of mixed-use, scattered- field farming typical of New England in the seventeenth century. Pierce had plowing land, meadow, and, on Pine Neck, the salt marsh so essential for forage. The inventory lists wheat, Indian corn, “pease,” and hay, and a few animals—two cows and two pigs—that were typical of crop and animal husbandry. The household goods, which included some brass and pewter, a table and chairs, a feather bed, and two Bibles, indicate a family of moderate means. Robert and Ann Pierce had three children, and two, Thomas and Mary, survived into adulthood. In his will Robert Pierce provided both for his children and for his widow, Ann. With only one son there was no question as to whether his property would go only to the eldest son, or be divided among all the sons. In England, due to limited land, primogeniture, a practice which passed real property intact to the oldest son, was the rule, but with the abundance of land in the New World, fathers were able to make different decisions. Subsequent generations of the Pierce family dealt with the transmission of property to the next generation in various ways, factoring birth order, gender, age, and the amount of available property into the bequests. Ann Pierce inherited more than the customary widow’s third; rather, she was to have, during her lifetime, one half of Robert’s house, land, and household goods. Although she could do as she wanted with the household goods, her share of the house and land would return to her son Thomas at her death. Thomas in effect inherited all the property—but only after an indeterminate period of time. Robert and Ann’s daughter Mary had married Thomas Hearring about 1650, and Robert gave her a dowry at that time. In his will he left her an additional twenty pounds, and he also bequeathed ten pounds to be divided equally among Mary’s five children. Ann Grenway Pierce survived her husband by almost thirty years. She probably lived out her long life in the house built by Robert Pierce in the 1650s, but it was Ann rather than her husband who lived long enough to see the house further north on the Lower Road that her son Thomas and his family moved into in the 1690s—the house that was for so long called the Robert Pierce House.
  Immigration	Abt 1630	Massachusetts
  Died	4 Nov 1664	Dorchester, Massachusetts
  Person ID	I2246	Our Family
  Last Modified	27 Sep 2016

  
  

  Family	Ann Greenway,   b. 1591, England ,   d. 31 Dec 1695, Dorchester, Massachusetts  (Age 104 years)
  Married	Abt 1635
  	It's not clear if they got married in England or in Massachusetts. From "Historic New England": "Robert Pierce and Ann Grenway settled in Dorchester in the first wave of seventeenth-century emigration from England to America, but the circumstances of their arrival are ambiguous. Family legend weaves a tale of a shipboard romance between them on the “Mary and John,” a vessel in John Winthrop’s Massachusetts Bay Colony fleet, but the passenger list for that 1630 voyage does not include a Robert Pierce. John Grenway, a millwright, his wife Mary, and their daughter Ann, however, were passengers on the “Mary and John,” and the Grenways became active residents of the fledgling town."
  Children	1. Mary Pierce,   b. Dorchester, Massachusetts   2. Thomas Pierce,   b. 1635,   d. 26 Oct 1706  (Age 71 years)   3. Deborah Pierce,   b. 1639, Dorchester, Massachusetts ,   d. 15 Apr 1640  (Age 1 years)   4. Sarah Pierce,   b. Dorchester, Massachusetts ,   d. Between 1650 and 1674
  Last Modified	4 Oct 2016
  Family ID	F800	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

• Event Map		Born - - England Immigration - Abt 1630 - Massachusetts Died - 4 Nov 1664 - Dorchester, Massachusetts  = Link to Google Earth
  Pin Legend	: Address       : Location       : City/Town       : County/Shire       : State/Province       : Country       : Not Set

  
  

• Sources

  [S294] Book of the Lockes. [S295] Robert Pierce and Ann Grenway Pierce.