RT Article
T1 Solomon Stoddard, 1643–1729
JF Harvard theological review
VO 34
IS 4
SP 277
OP 320
A1 Miller, Perry
LA English
PB Cambridge Univ. Press
YR 1941
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1784641006
AB The town of Northampton was settled in 1654, by pioneers coming up the valley from Connecticut. The physical tasks of the first years kept them from forming a church, but in 1659 they called Eleazar Mather to be their parson, who came with his bride Esther, daughter of the Reverend John Warham of Windsor. Mathers were either long or very short lived; Eleazar died on July 24, 1669, leaving Esther a widow of twenty-five, with three children and an estate of £524, of which £60 were in books, and Northampton went in search of a new pastor. In the forthright New England of the seventeenth century there was a method in such situations so frequently observed that it might almost be called a custom. When a minister died, after a town had invested in him to the extent of land and a house, and the widow was of marriageable age, they summoned a young bachelor to the pulpit. A few months after Eleazar's death, Solomon Stoddard, eight years out of Harvard, came by invitation to exhibit a sample of his preaching; on March 18, 1670, he married Esther Mather. She bore him twelve children and in her old age, though very “lame of the Sciatica,” she still was spinning “at the Linen-wheel”; she outlived her husband by seven years and died in 1736 at the age of ninety-two.
DO 10.1017/S0017816000022495