John Leavitt
Deacon John Leavitt (1608–1691) was a tailor, public officeholder, and founding deacon of Old Ship Church in Hingham, Plymouth County, Massachusetts, the only remaining 17th-century Puritan meeting house in America and the oldest church in continuous ecclesiastical use in the United States.
In his early history of Hingham, attorney Solomon Lincoln recited the oft-told tale of Leavitt's supposed origins: "The family tradition concerning John Leavitt is that he was an indented apprentice in England," wrote Lincoln in 1827, "and that he absconded from his master and came to this country when nineteen years of age....
[11] Sarah Gilman's sister Lydia married Daniel Cushing, who became Hingham's town clerk [12] and John Leavitt's lifelong friend and, later, witness to his will.
John Smith,[17] with whom he frequently collaborated in his real estate dealings, had secured 12 acres (49,000 m2) on the border of Hingham and what is today Cohasset.
"[1] Nearby Leavitt's home described as 'over the Delaware' (River) was the so-called Great Rock, an enormous boulder subsequently blown up in the nineteenth century for building material.
The inscription read: "When wild in wood the naked savage ran, Lazell, Low, Loring, Lane, Lewis, Lincoln, Hersey, Leavitt, Jacobs, King, Jones and Sprague, Stemmed the wild torrent of a barbarous age, And were the first invaders of this country, From the Island of Great Britain, in 1635.
[22] Leavitt made several such purchases during his lifetime, most lying in the so-called 'Narragansett country,' in the region south of Hingham near the Massachusetts-Rhode Island border.
[3] The Old Ship Church, so-called because the hammerbeam roof construction recalled that of an upside-down ship's hull, was completed July 26, 1681, when the townspeople of Hingham gathered on the knoll bordering on Bachelor's Row (now Main Street) to watch the raising of the frame of the new building.
[1] Observing the festivities was Deacon John Leavitt, aged seventy-three, who had argued the need for the new wooden edifice.
His voluminous will records the disposition of the extensive lands accumulated during his lifetime, as well as documenting the family and social connections that sustained him in the New World.
[26] The executors of Leavitt's estate, named in his will, were his friend and brother-in-law Daniel Cushing Sr., Hingham's longtime town clerk, Capt.
John's son Israel, bearing another Old Testament name, married Lydia Jackson[29] of the Plymouth Colony, where her grandfather Nathaniel Morton,[30] the colony's Secretary and nephew of Governor William Bradford, was first to publish a list of signers of the Mayflower Compact, as well recording the celebration of the first Thanksgiving.
Minister to the Kingdom of Hawai'i, forced to resign in 1893 when accused of conspiring to overthrow Queen Lili'uokalani; Forest Ranger and later U.S.
Ambassador to China and Singapore Jon Huntsman, Jr. and Major League Baseball pitcher Ron Darling.
Among John Leavitt's English descendants was Admiral of the Fleet Sir Alfred Dudley Pickman Pound,[36] a torpedo expert who masterminded Britain's victory in the Battle of the Atlantic (1939–1945).
