Shubael Dummer

[1] Richard was a settler, who had arrived at Boston from England in May 1632 with Mary, and was an associate of the radical Puritan malcontent Stephen Bachiler.

Thomas Parker, one of the most eminent scholars and Christians among the founders of New England, who educated him and prepared him for admission to college.

[13] On 3 December 1672, he was ordained to the Ministry and settled over the church at York,[14] on the recommendation of Richard Banks, his brother-in-law,[15][2] and Edward Rishworth.

[1] The parish records were lost when the church was destroyed by fire, and consequently there is little detailed information about Dummer's thirty years at York.

[18] Despite his family advising him to find a safer ministry, Dummer continued to support the people of the town through their various trials and sufferings on account of the Indian wars and urged the townspeople to maintain their ground, and not allow their homes and farms to be destroyed by the enemy, as had some of the surrounding settlements.

[16] According to Cotton Mather: Though solicited with many temptations to leave his place, when the clouds grew thick and dark in the Indian hostilities, and was like to break upon it, he chose, rather, with a paternal affection to stay amongst those who had been so many of them converted and edified by his ministry.

He might have taken for the coat of arms, the same that the holy martyr Hooper did prophetically, - a lamb in a flaming bush, with rays from heaven shining of it.

[19] The invaders stripped and mutilated his corpse;[20] his friends, who escaped by being in the garrisoned houses, or on the west side of the river, later found his body near his own door, "naked and in his blood, with his face to the ground".

John Flood, who had come with the militia from Portsmouth, found on his arrival that "the greatest part of the whole town was burned and robbed," with nearly 50 killed and another 100 captured.

Dummer's widow, Lydia, was among those freed, but she shuttled back and forth to the raiders' camp so often, begging for the release of her infant son, that she was taken with the rest of the hostages.

[16] On the first Sabbath after they started on their journey, an Abenaki, dressed in the clothes stripped from Dummer's dead body, "paraded himself before them with mock dignity, and in derision of a Puritan minister – a devil as an angel of light".