Although the Conants are buried here, no stone or monument has been found to mark the spot where they lie. The Rector told the author that all the Conants had moved away, leaving none to care for the graves of their ancestors. This was probably the cause of the absence of any information by which the place of burial could be ascertained.
A brother of Roger’s—John, matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford—was made a full Fellow, 10th July, 1612; B.D., 2 Dec., 1619, or 28 June, 1620. He resigned his fellowship, and was instituted Rector of Lymington, a country parish near Ilchester, Somersetshire, on the presentation of Sir Henry Rosewell, and on the 20th of January, 1620, compounded for the firstfruits of the living—the sureties of his bond being his brothers Christopher and Roger. The name of Rosewell or Rowswell, is well known to students of the history of Massachusetts. Sir Henry’s name stands first among the grantees in the Patent from the Council of Plymouth—a fact which bears some significance to the emigration of Roger and Christopher to the New World, and also indicates that Conant had already espoused the cause of the Puritans.
The above is taken from the “History and Genealogy of the Conant Family,” and is necessary to connect Roger’s early life with the period of his emigration to the New World.
Roger was baptized at All Saints’ Church, East Budleigh, on the 9th April, 1592. He was the youngest of eight children. His after life showed that the integrity and piety which characterized his parents and elder brothers had been instilled into his mind in childhood. Like his brothers, he evidently received as good an education as the times would afford. He was employed to lay out boundaries, survey lands and transact other public business. The records of the Salters’ Company, to which he belonged, have been burned, so that no more authentic proof of his having been a freedman of the company can be adduced than the presumptive evidence given by the fact of his signing his brother John’s bonds as “Salter of London.” He married in London in November, 1618, and emigrated with the Pilgrims to New England in 1623.
Members of the Drysalters’ Guild of London (the ninth of the twelve great livery companies, and chartered by Queen Elizabeth in 1558) have certain privileges and perquisites. To illustrate this more fully, the author during a visit to London, at the time of the Queen’s Jubilee, 1887, learned upon enquiry that by the laws of primogeniture (only abolished in Upper Canada in 1841) the direct descendant of Roger Conant was entitled to two meals a day and a bed to sleep on. The perquisite is not retroactive and an application for any commutation could not be regarded, but he was told that the two meals a day and a bed would be given to the direct heir of Roger Conant, the Drysalter, whenever he chose to claim them.
It is not certain what was the name of the vessel in which Roger Conant sailed, but from the fact that his brother Christopher was a passenger in the Ann, which arrived at Plymouth about 1623, it may be inferred that Roger accompanied him. In a petition to the general court, dated May 28th, 1671, he states that he had been “a planter in New England forty-eight years and upwards.” This would fix the date of his arrival early in 1623. Roger did not remain long in Plymouth. There were differences between him and the Pilgrim Fathers, he being a Puritan and they Separatists, and although these differences were not sufficiently marked to subject him to the treatment meted out to Allan and John Lyford, he left Plymouth for Nantucket, where they had settled soon after their expulsion from the former place. While here he appears to have made use of the island in Boston harbor, now called Governor’s Island, but then and for some time afterward known as Conant’s Island.
The Dorchester Company was formed in 1622-3, and in 1624-5 Roger Conant’s reputation as “a pious, sober and prudent gentleman” reaching its associates, they chose him to manage or govern their affairs at Cape Ann. While here a proof of the truth of the report was given them in the magnanimity and justness, as well as prudence, exercised by him in settling a dispute over the possession of a fishing stage between Miles Standish, “the captain of Plymouth,” and a captain Hewet, who had been sent out by the opposite party. This scene has been made the subject of a window in the Conant Memorial Congregational Church, recently erected at Dudley, Mass., by Hezekiah Conant.
Cape Ann was not a suitable place for settlement; the land was poor and the merchandise brought from England unproductive of lucrative returns. Roger selected a site “on the other side of a creek called Naumkeag (now Salem),” and shortly after removed there.
During his stay at Cape Ann Roger occupied the great frame house which had been built by the old planters in 1624. The frames, it is said, and probably with truth, were brought from England. The timbers are oak, yet sound, and in existence still as a part of a stable. The house, as given in the accompanying illustration, is taken from a drawing made in 1775. It is similar to many of the old houses of the same date, and still the most picturesque features of the villages in Surrey and Devon.
This house was occupied by Endicott when