“Voted that John Sullivan to sweep and take care of ye meeting house & to have thirty shillings.”
From that date to 1752 no schoolmaster is named, but from year to year the parish would vote to have a school and leave the matter with the selectmen to hire a teacher. As they had voted Master Sullivan in once, it was taken for granted that he would be the teacher. April 6, 1752, “Voted Mr. Joseph Tate twenty three pounds old tenor to keep ye Parish School one month.” The record does not show that Master Sullivan kept the parish school after Mr. Tate began work there.
Master Sullivan was married to Margery Browne in 1735. Soon after that he commenced to sign his name as witness to documents as “John Sullivan of Summersworth.” Their third child, John, was born in 1740. In 1787, when he was the Federalist candidate for governor, then called president, his opponents charged him as guilty of being born in Berwick, Me., hence was not eligible for the office.
The New Hampshire Gazette, March 10, 1787, replied to this as follows:
Surely the collector of intelligence has not consulted all the people in this state, or he would have found out that President Sullivan was born in Somersworth, in the county of Strafford.
In the summer of 1743 Master Sullivan and his wife had a falling out, and he went off to Boston to remain till her temper cooled. She repented of her cruel treatment, and published the following advertisement in the Boston Evening Post, July 25, 1743, from which I copied it in the Boston Public Library. It shows conclusively that Summersworth was Master Sullivan’s home in 1743:
Advertisement.
My Dear and Loving Husband:
Your abrupt departure from me, and forsaking of me your wife and tender babes, which I now humbly acknowledge and confess, I was greatly if not wholly the cause by my too rash and unadvised speech and behaviour towards you; for which I now in this public manner humbly ask your forgiveness, and hereby promise upon your return to amend and reform and by my future loving and obedient carriage toward you, endeavor to make an atonement for my past evil deeds, and manifest to you and to the whole world, that I can become a new woman, and will prove to you a loving, dutiful and tender wife.
If you do not regard what I have above written, I pray you harken to what your pupil, Joshua Gilpatrick, hath below sent you, as also the lamentations and cries of your poor children, especially the eldest (Benjamin) who though but seven years old, all rational people really conclude that unless you speedily return will end in his death; and the moans of your other children (Daniel and John) are enough to affect any human heart.