It Happened in Dorchester

The Legend of the Minot House

by Peter F. Stevens

Perhaps the image best endures in a nineteenth-century print. That picture, of a solid, simple three-story wooden house crowned by a steeply pitched roof and a brick chimney and framed in the foreground by a stately tree, evokes Old Dorchester.

On a dirt path that winds to the home's front door, a colonist who sports a high, crowned hat and a walking stick approaches the Minot House. The pastoral scene belies the violence that erupted inside and around the dwelling in King Philip's War, 1675-1676.

In many ways, the Minot House long stood as a fitting symbol of Dorchester's first settlers. It cannot be stated with certainty when the house first rose in Neponset on a tract that was later part of Chickatawbut Road, several sources stating that the first structure was built as early as 1633, others opting for 1640. Various historians would contend that the Minot House was once "the oldest wooden house standing on the continent," although Virginia and several others among the original colonies would - and still do - dispute the claim.

What is certain is that the Minot family did inhabit the house "as early as 1640." A traveler to New England in 1663 wrote of the Minots' hometown:

"Six miles beyond Braintree lieth [sic.] Dorchester, a frontier town pleasantly seated, and of large extent into the main land, well watered with two small rivers, her body and wings filled somewhat thick with houses to the number of two hundred and more, beautified with fair orchards and gardens, having also plenty of corn-land and store of cattle counted the greatest town heretofore in New England, but now gives way to Boston. It hath a harbor to the north for ships."

In that "frontier town," the traveler described one hundred and forty of those "two hundred houses, and of the handful that would survive into the nineteenth century, "the oldest of these is supposed to be the Minot House."

The original Minot House, which was erected soon after the Mary and John and the "Weymouth Settlers" landed in 1630 and 1633 respectively, was in all likelihood a rough-hewn "log cabin" with a roof of thatch. As the early Minots survived their first harsh New England winters and began to thrive, they built a more substantial structure, "its frame…filled in solidly with brick, either for greater durability or perhaps to render the walls bullet-proof."

The house's design was classic early New England and "frontier" Dorchester. Eleven small-paned windows graced the front, allowing light to penetrate the dark wooden walls and floors of several generations of Minots.

The addition to the side was also a common building practice of the era.

"Orchards and gardens full of fruit-trees, plenty of corn land…ordinarily good crops" - the land that the Minots owned around their home marked them as a Colonial family on the rise.

As with most of the town's early settlers, the Minots and their growing home reflected "the bold spirit of enterprise which, in common with an earnest religious faith…was not checked when they had landed on its [Dorchester's] shores." The settlement of Dorchester was thriving by the mid-1600s, and the Minots along with it.

In 1675 and 1676, all that the Minots and their neighbors had labored for in their new homeland was threatened. Metacomet, the foremost sachem of the Wampanoags, and his allies rose against the white settlers of New England, unleashing a maelstrom of death, destruction, and atrocities committed by colonists and by Native Americans alike.

Known as King Philip, Metacomet rampaged throughout "the New England wilderness and settlements," and in the autumn of 1675, "it looked as though King Philip and his allies would drive the colonists into the sea." Already perched on the coast, the settlers of Dorchester were literally fighting for their homes, their families, and their very survival against a resourceful, fearless foe determined to push the English invaders from the tribes' age-old lands.

The Minots and their neighbors viewed themselves not as invaders, but as "pioneers," "Pilgrims," and latter-day "Hebrews." In the poem "The Mary and John in Dorchester Bay," Hezekiah Butterworth muses upon the sense of place that the "Elder George Minot" felt not only for the home on Chickatawbut Street, but for every inch of turf from Neponset to Savin Hill: "And Grandfather Minot looked out on the sea - the last of the Dorchester Pilgrims was he - And he thought of the days of the pioneers gone - Who sailed on the deck of the Mary and John."

Butterworth's paean to Minot and the colonists refers to the town's "sturdy oak mansions" and smoking chimneys that dotted the "long russet curves around Dorchester Bay." For their part, the Minots of 1675 were prepared to fight for their own "oak mansion." They would have to do just that.

The ferocity of King Philip's War may have caught some of Dorchester's citizens somewhat by surprise, for, like many settlers of the Massachusetts

Bay Colony, the Minots, Blakes, and other Dorchester pioneers believed that they had helped the "savages" [sic.] on the path to "salvation." Local families had "warmly supported" the Reverend John Eliot, who had preached to local Algonquins in their own language.

In 1657, when Eliot requested land for his mission, the Town Meeting of Dorchester allocated six thousand acres "at Ponkapog [sic.] for an Indian reservation." Many of those same Englishmen were aiming muskets at Metacomet's warriors less than two decades later, perhaps unable or unwilling to grasp "the incompatibility of Indian life with that of the colonists."

As the men of Dorchester helped fill the muster rolls of the Colonial militia, Metacomet's bands attacked at least fifty-two white settlements, burning twelve to the ground. Everything that two generations of Minots and their neighbors had carved out was at stake.

Against the bloody backdrop, the legend of the Minot House unfolded.

The story is that "of a maiden's heroism during the war with King Philip in 1675." She was in the employ of John Minot, helping with the domestic chores and child-rearing in the Neponset household. According to local tradition, on a sultry July Sunday in 1675, "the maid-servant and two young [Minot] children were left in the house without protection," the rest of the family ostensibly attending Sabbath services.

From the Neponset woods, a lone figure emerged and darted through the fields and orchards to the house. He paused, studying the doors and windows, carrying a musket. But the man was not one of the Minot men or a neighbor checking in on the servant and the children. He was a warrior and "straggler from one of Philip's bands."

Inside, the maid, going about her household tasks, suddenly sensed the approach of the intruder or heard him testing the door and windows as he "sought to gain an entrance." She grabbed the two young children, hid them under two large brass kettles, and dashed upstairs to grab a musket that was probably loaded and primed already.

As she raced back down the stairs, either the warrior pushed through the door and snapped off a shot at the woman or else fired at the door to open it.

Historian Justin Winsor writes: "The courageous young woman returned the fire with more success, wounding the Indian in the shoulder; and when, with a desperate indiscretion, he tried to enter through the window, she quickly seized a shovel of hot coals and threw them in his face."

The man staggered away from the house and lurched back into the woods. Several hours later, a search party of colonists found him slumped on the forest floor, "dead about five miles away" from the Minots' house.

The maid's desperate courage would become a colorful episode of local lore, but time would not prove so kind to the "sturdy house," in which she became something of a legend. While several generations of Minots lived at the site throughout the 1700s and much of the 1800s, a fire in November 1874 gutted the home, leaving it "a mere shell, charred and blackened by the flames."

Still, a domestic artifact of the Minots' pivotal presence in Dorchester has survived the years. The Minot Cradle, at the State House, remains a tangible reminder of a family that staked a foothold in the annals of Dorchester and America alike.

(Journalist Peter F. Stevens is the author of The Rogue's March: John Riley and the St. Patrick's Battalion, 1846-1848, Brassey's, and Notorious and Notable New Englanders, Down East Books.)

8/10/2000