Samuel Leavitt

The recipient of large grants of land in Rockingham County, Leavitt held positions of authority within the colonial province.

Three years later, in 1667, he bought a home and barn and 7 acres (3 ha) of land from his father-in-law John Robinson.

There is no evidence that John Leavitt, father of Samuel, ever settled at Exeter – but both his sons eventually did; his son Moses Leavitt married Dorothy Dudley, daughter of Exeter's minister Dr. Samuel Dudley; his son Samuel married Mary Robinson, daughter of John Robinson, who was an early settler of Ipswich, Massachusetts and later an early Exeter settler.

In March 1673, for instance, he and John Wedgewood were charged with seizing any person who violated an order allowing new residents to cut 1,000 white oak pipe staves within a year.

In 1690 he was named to represent the town of Exeter at a convention of state deputies to assess the Province's relationship with the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

(The reason for the meeting was the attempt by John Mason, the royal patentee of New Hampshire, to try to transfer his claim to a London merchant.)

[6] By March 1690 Samuel Leavitt was acting as lieutenant of Exeter's militia, reporting to Major William Vaughan of Portsmouth.

"The said Moses Gilman did suddenly rise up, and said that Samuel Levett should not go to prison", according to the record of the trial of the two men.

The source of the trouble had apparently been a political discussion about taxes and Royal authority in the province.