REV. JOHN WISWELL.
John and Thomas Wiswell were early residents of Dorchester. John's name is found in the records as early as 1634. His brother Thomas came to Dorchester about 1635. Noah, son of Thomas, born in 1640, was a military man, and was in command in the desperate battle with the Indians near Wheelwright's Pond, N. H., where he and his son John were killed, July 6th, 1690. Another son of Thomas, Inchabod, born in 1637, was minister of Duxbury. He had a son Peleg, born in 1683, who was schoolmaster at Charlestown in 1704. John Wiswell, son of Peleg, married Elizabeth, daughter of Dr. Samuel Rogers, graduated from Harvard College in 1705, was a master of a Boston Grammar School in 1719. He died in 1767, aged 84 and is buried in Copps Hill burying ground.
John Wiswell, son of the aforesaid, was born in 1731, and graduated from Harvard College in 1749. In 1753 he was teaching school in Maine, but he pursued the study of divinity as a Congregationalist. Occasionally he preached, and in 1756 he was invited to become the pastor of the New Casco parish in Falmouth, now Portland, and was ordained November third of that year. In 1761 he married Mercy, the daughter of Judge John Minot, of Brunswick.
In 1764 John Wiswell suddenly changed his religious views and left his people. He embraced the Episcopal form of worship, and preached for several Sundays in the town-house. On September 4, 1764, the Parish of St. Paul's Church, Falmouth, was organized and Mr. Wiswell was invited to become their rector. For want of a bishop in the colonies, he was obliged to go to England to receive ordination. A writer at this time says, "There was a sad uproar about Wiswell, who has declared for the church and accepted of the call our churchmen have given him to be their minister." They voted him £100 a year and later he received £20 as a Missionary from the Missionary Society. After a year's elapse, he was able to report to the Society in London for the propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, that his Congregation had increased to seventy families, and the admittance of twenty-one persons to the communion. In 1765 the parish addressed a letter to the Rev. Mr. Hooper of Boston, asking his good offices in enlisting the sympathy of the churchmen there, in behalf of their oppressed fellow-worshippers in Falmouth. John Wiswell was an ardent Loyalist, as were about twenty of the leading men of his church. He continued to preach until the revolution broke out. After the trouble came in the colonies, he was seized while out walking one day with Captain Mowatt, by Colonel Samuel Thompson of Brunswick, who had arrived with about fifty men unknown to the inhabitants. Colonel Thompson refused to release Mr. Wiswell, and Captain Mowatt, but finally seeing that the town was against him, he consented to release them if they would give their parole to deliver themselves up next day. After his capture, the clergyman was obliged to declare his abhorrence of the doctrine of passive obedience and non-resistance, and was then released. Mr. Wiswell now joined the British Forces, and after going on board a man-of-war addressed a letter to the wardens of his church, resigning his charge. After Captain Mowatt burned Falmouth, he sailed to Boston, and then to England. After leaving his parish he was for three years a chaplain on the British Naval Ship Boyne, and later for a short time was a curate in Suffolk. He and fifteen others from Falmouth had their estates confiscated, and were banished.
At the close of the war, Mr. Wiswell accepted the call of some of his former parishioners, and settled in Cornwallis, Nova Scotia, over a parish they had formed there, and in 1782 he was appointed a missionary of that place. Having lost his first wife, he married a widow Hutchinson from the Jerseys, as the Rev. Jacob Bailey, the frontier missionary writes, who married them. John Wiswell was afterwards a missionary at Aylesford, and after a very full and worthy life, died at Nova Scotia in 1812, at the age of eighty-one. He left two sons, born in Falmouth, who were Lieutenants in the Navy. Peleg, one of his sons, was appointed Judge of the Supreme Court, of Nova Scotia, in 1816 and died at Annapolis in 1836, at the age of seventy-three. When the Rev. John Wiswell lived in Falmouth, Maine, he occupied a house painted red, which stood on the corner of Middle and Exchange Streets, afterwards owned and occupied by James Deering, and which gave place to the brick block built by that gentleman.