December 4, 2024
Introduction: In this article, Melissa Davenport Berry continues her series on Mayflower descendants, again focusing on the Munroe and Church family lines. Melissa is a genealogist who has a website, americana-archives.com, and a Facebook group, New England Family Genealogy and History.
Today I continue my series on “Mayflower Descendants: Who’s Who” with additional Munroe, Church, and allied families who married into Pilgrim lines.
To recap: My last story covered the offshoots of Mayflower passenger Richard Warren, which included the military background of his grandson Colonel Benjamin Church (1639-1717/18), son of Richard and Elizabeth (Warren) Church. He married Alice Southworth, daughter of Constant and Elizabeth (Collier) Southworth and the stepdaughter of Governor William Bradford. (See: Part 1.)
Colonel Church, aka “America’s First Ranger,” dictated his story of King Philip’s War, which included the “Great Swamp Fight,” to his son Thomas Church, and it was published in 1716 as The Entertaining History of King Philip’s War.
A relic belonging to Colonel Benjamin Church, which he used in King Philip’s War, is housed at the Massachusetts Historical Society. (See: Benjamin Church’s Sword.)
I first came across this information in a 1954 Evening Star newspaper article entitled “Swords through the Centuries,” by Florence S. Berryman, covering an exhibition of military swords.
The article references Colonel Church’s sword, one of many on exhibit. Another sword included in the exhibit which may be of interest belonged to Mayflower passenger Captain Miles Standish.
Then I found this article in the Evening Bulletin newspaper from 1912. At that time the sword was still in the possession of a lineal descendant of Colonel Church.
This article reports:
A silver-mounted sword, hand engraved and showing its great age and the hardy use to which it was put in the colonial days more than two centuries ago, was one of the interesting exhibits at the cabinet of the Rhode Island Historical Society last evening. It is now the property of Mrs. W. J. McCaw [born Clara Medora Church (1851-1935) to William Henry and Susan (Lincoln) Church, and a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution] of this city; a lineal descendant of Col. Benjamin Church, and was used by the latter in his conflicts with the Indians in this State during the King Philip War, so called.
Was There More than One Sword Owned by Colonel Benjamin Church?
If Colonel Church’s sword was still in the family in 1912, then was there a second sword? I wonder because, according to William Shaw Russell in Pilgrim Memorials, and Guide to Plymouth: With a Lithographic Map, and Eight Copperplate Engravings, published in 1860:
Several valuable articles are deposited in the rooms of the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, namely the swords of Gov. Carver and Col. Benjamin Church.
Further leads reveal that this sword was gifted to the Massachusetts Historical Society about 1822 by Mrs. Anna (Richmond) Atwood, of Taunton, Massachusetts, a great-granddaughter of Colonel Church.
Anna (Richmond) Atwood (1767-1846), wife of George Atwood, is the daughter of Perez and Marcy “Mercy” (Church) Richmond, who is the daughter of Thomas Church (who published his father’s stories of King Philip’s War) and his wife Sarah (Horsewell) Church.
A letter written by Samuel Leonard Crocker of Taunton, a member of the Old Colony History Museum, to Rev. A. Holmes, dated 6 May 1825, furnishes the provenance of the sword.
Crocker writes:
“The tradition in the [Church] family, which is no doubt correct, is that the sword and a gun, both belonging to the warrior [Col. Benjamin] Church, were given by him to his son, Thomas.”
In 1822 a newsclip sent in by “A Son of the Old Colony” makes a correction statement about the sword and the history presented.
This article reports:
In the Memorial of the 14th inst. it is stated that “the sword with which Col. Church dispatched the Sachem Philip, in 1675, after he was shot by one of the Natives friendly to the English, has lately been presented to the [Massachusetts] Historical Society by a great grandchild of Col. Church.” In this article there are doubtless two errors. First, [King] Philip [Metacomet, Chief of the Wampanoags] was killed in August 1676, and not in 1675 as there stated [killed 12 August 1676 in the Miery Swamp near Mount Hope in Bristol, Rhode Island]. Second, from Col. Church’s account of that event it does not appear that any sword was used, Church being at a considerable distance from Philip when he was shot by [John] Alderman, one of Church’s Indian soldiers.
You can read the account published by Church’s son Thomas here.
This image of King Philip is from Benjamin Church’s The Entertaining History of King Philip’s War, a line engraving, colored by hand, by the American engraver and silversmith Paul Revere.
I leave the discussion of the sword theories to you readers.
Stay tuned for more…
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Note on the header image: “Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor,” by William Halsall, 1882. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
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