When Bonnie and Marc Cardwell purchased the property at 14 Old Town Pound Road, they joined the ranks of many residents who live in venerable old homes that might always be referred to as someone else’s. This is highly probable in their case, as the former owner was Peg Hoffman, who passed away in the 90th year of her life in the home, and in the room, where she was born. That Peg’s presence in that lovely Victorian with the broad, sweeping lawn of wildflowers in the front, and the classic New England barn in the back, has left an indelible mark on the town is furthered with her involvement in the community, where she was active in the Little River Grange, the Congregational Church, and the Fletcher Memorial Library, and with the fact that Margaret Pearl Hoffman was the daughter of Rueben and Gertrude – the Pearls one of Hampton’s prominent, founding families who can trace their residency in Hampton to the early 1700’s, and to the United States to the 1670’s, and yes, they even have a familial claim to the Mayflower.
The “Pearls of Hampton”, the website of the Pearl and Jewett families, informs us that the Hampton Pearls are descended from John Pearle who came with his brother, Nicholas, to the New World from Yorkshire, England between 1670-1675, settling in Marblehead, Massachusetts where he was granted mill privileges in 1671, and Ipswich, where he is officially listed in 1678, eventually moving to Boxford, or Bradford, Massachusetts. The union of John and his wife Elizabeth produced eight children, among them, Timothy. Born in 1695, Timothy was the first Hampton Pearl. A tanner by trade, he came to Connecticut somewhere between 1712 and 1716 and purchased 100 acres from Ebenezer Jennings on what was known then as Appaquage Hill in the northern section of town. Arriving here as a bachelor he soon married, twice. His first wife, Elizabeth, bore six children before she died, and his second, Mary, nine; miraculously for the time, all 15 children lived to adulthood.
Timothy’s son, James Pearl, born in 1739, married Jane Orcutt in 1763, and this is the union that provided the family with a link to the Mayflower. Information obtained from the “Mayflower Families Through Five Generations” reveals that: Jane was the daughter of William Orcutt, Jr. and Sarah Leonard, who was the daughter of Susanna King and Jacob Leonard, who was the son of Solomon Leonard and Sarah Chandler, who was the daughter of Roger Chandler and Isabella Chilton, who was the eldest daughter of James Chilton, the oldest passenger on the Mayflower. Born in 1556 in Canterbury, Kent County England, Chilton moved his family to Sandwich in 1600 where he was part of the Separatist movement, and one of the Pilgrims who came to the New World. He died on December 18, 1620, the only signer of the Mayflower Compact to die in Cape Cod when the Mayflower was docked in Provincetown Harbor. His wife died shortly afterwards, Governor Bradford recorded, survived by his daughter Mary, a passenger on the Mayflower, and another daughter, Isabella, who arrived at Plymouth afterwards.
According to the “Pearl and Jewett Family Genealogy & History”, James and Jane Pearl had eight children, one of whom, Jerome, married Amaryllis Allworth in Hampton in 1800, a union which produced nine children, among them John Porter Pearl, who was born in Hampton in 1813. His marriage to Maria Jennings Jewett in 1847 linked the Pearl and Jewett families, another early Hampton family. Maria was the daughter of Ebenezer Jewett II who, according to Susan Jewett Grigg’s “Folklore and Firesides,” built the Bell schoolhouse and the exhibition buildings at the Brooklyn fair-grounds and whose mother, Abigail Hammond, was sister to Sarah Hammond Mosley of the famed ‘House the Women Built.’ John Porter and Maria had eight children. The Hampton Pearls descend from their third child – Austin Eugene Pearl. Born in 1851 in Hampton, Austin was a representative in the General Assembly. He married Mary Emma Weeks, and they had seven children, Eva, Mary, Florence, Evelyn, Arthur, who with his father built the Little River Grange, William, who also farmed in Hampton, and Reuben, who, together with his wife, Gertrude, raised their children, Mary and Margaret, on the farm we feature this month.
From a search of records in both Windham and Hampton, the property was purchased by the first minister of Hampton in 1723. The property remained a lot for much of its early history. In 1875, the current Victorian style house was built and the outbuilding, including the New England style barn were built at that time or sometime soon after.
No longer a prominent surname in town – as a matter of fact, the name Pearl no longer appears on the voter list — that doesn’t mean that there aren’t plenty of Pearls among us. We’ll hear from them in a future article in Our Rural Heritage as we explore another Pearl farm, which gives you a few months to see if you can find the Pearls of Hampton. For now, some voices from their past.
From Hampton Remembers
We had three big meals a day, men working the way they did, but we always called it dinner at noon – that was always the biggest. Breakfast, for my father especially, was large – ham or bacon, fried potatoes, maybe baked beans sometimes and ‘course many times griddle cakes or muffins or hot biscuits. We had oatmeal quite a bit. My mother did an awful lot of baking. With the more physical work our bodies could take care of all that sugar and the fats. She’d never think of baking less than four to six pies at a time. And six loaves of bread every other day! She used a barrel of flour a month, and bought the sugar in hundred pound bags…We had an old English sheepdog, Jack, in later years and at night my father would tell Jack to take the cows out to the pasture and he would. And Dad would go cross lots and put up the bars in the barway. In the morning he’d let down the bars and have Jack bring the cows home. …We took our corn to the grist mill to be ground but first we took the corn off the ears with a corn-sheller. It was kind of fun to put the cobs with the corn on in the top and then you’d crank by hand and the cobs would come out one way and the kernels the other…Another of my jobs was to scrub those milk cans and how I hated it. Believe me they had to be scrubbed to pass my mother’s inspection! We’d use a cloth and very strong soap, hot water – and she’d say “take your fingernail and go ‘round the seams” – really to get things clean – and then they had to be scalded with boiling water, of course, and dried.
Evelyn (Pearl) Estabrooks
The electricity got to this north end of the street on the 27th of January, 1927. I remember because Reuben’s father, Austin Pearl, was very sick and the doctor said he couldn’t live but a very short time and I took care of him. There was never a day when he didn’t say “Oh I just hope I live to see those lights come on!” They had had the house all wired and were waiting. It finally came on and he lived two weeks to enjoy it…When you stop to think of the conveniences we have today that we didn’t have those days. I can remember we had a neighbor had to work and work on her husband to get a covered walk to the outhouse. It was quite a ways out from her kitchen door. Ours was under cover through a shed and a covered alleyway. That made a big difference.
Gertrude Pearl
In those days chickens ran around loose and found food but we fed them, too – they ate a lot of table scraps and cracked corn and we had to put out ground oyster shells to make the egg shells firm. They hid their nests and we had to look for the eggs all over, besides in their proper nests, and they had clutches of little chicks they’d hatch in a nest they’d make for themselves in the barn. We had a china egg we’d put in the regular nest to get them to lay there instead of hiding all their eggs where we couldn’t find them.
Vera (Jewett) Hoffman and Evelyn (Pearl) Estabrooks