Soldiering On

The grave of Jabez Fairbanks in Lancaster.

As a goodwife and a Puritan mother, Lydia Prescott Fairbanks’s life centered on teaching daily lessons to her seven children. Lessons in reading, writing and piety drawn from the family Bible, the most precious book in a time when all books were precious. Lessons in self-sufficiency too: how to judge the temperature in the hearth for cooking by holding your bare arm in its heat until you could no longer stand it, how to mend a coverlet, how to bear the pain of giving birth.

Then came the day that changed everything, the day an Indian attack left her husband and her oldest son dead, with her brother-in-law dead too, and their farm in ruins. Beginning the very next morning, on February 11, 1676, it fell to Lydia to teach her six surviving children the hardest lesson of all, even as she learned it herself: how to endure an unthinkable tragedy and soldier on.

As soon as she could, Lydia abandoned Lancaster, alongside her father, her sisters, and all her neighbors, climbing aboard ox carts with an escort of soldiers, jouncing along icy, rutted roads toward safety far from the frontier, huddled for warmth. Circumstances suggest she sheltered at first in Concord, twenty miles away, in the care of members of the extended Prescott family. 

In two years, she remarried. Her second husband, Ellis Barron, was a widower with eight children of his own, and he made his home in Watertown, just outside Boston and farther still from the ruins of Lancaster. Together, they brought four more children into their troubled world, the first two daughters, the final two, sons. They named the first of these boys Joshua, after Lydia’s first child, killed in the Indian attack alongside his father at the age of fifteen. This second Joshua died within days of his birth in 1683. Lydia was forty-three and already the mother of ten when she delivered her last child in 1684. Another son. She and Ellis named him Joshua too. 

Imagine their grief when Lydia’s third Joshua joined his namesakes in death, three weeks after his first birthday. I wonder, how did she endure? Hadn’t she suffered enough?

But endure she did. Around this time Lydia’s second, blended family moved back to Lancaster. The Prescott family ties to the community must have been too much to resist. It was home, however vulnerable to attack it might still be, and Ellis Barron must have seen opportunity in making Lancaster his home too.

In returning to Lancaster, Lydia brought her son and our third-generation Fairbanks ancestor, Jabez, back to town with her. He would have been about fifteen years old, give or take—a first-year high school student in my time, eager for his driver’s license, awash in the turbulence of puberty; in his time, though, already a young man, and expected to shoulder his share of the family’s daily burdens. He would shoulder those burdens and live out the rest of his long life in Lancaster, dying there in 1758 at the age of eighty-eight.

In its basics, Jabez’s life was unremarkable for his time. In 1700, at the age of thirty, he held property in his own name not far from the old farmstead where he had been born. By then he was married to a woman named Mary Wilder and the father of two. By the time Mary died in 1718 at the age of forty-two, she had given birth to ten children. Jabez remarried a year later and outlived his second wife, Elizabeth Whitcomb, too. 

There’s no indication that Jabez made his way through life as anything but a farmer, and his record of public service suggests he was well-regarded by his neighbors. He served one term as a town selectman, five times as moderator, presiding over town meetings, and four times as Lancaster’s representative to the General Court in Boston. 

But in both the Rev. Abijah Marvin’s town history and the Fairbanks family genealogy, he is celebrated first and foremost for his military service. “He was a very efficient soldier and officer in the Indian wars,” the genealogy says, “and was no doubt incited to heroic exploits by the massacre of his father and brother, in 1676, and of his only surviving brother in 1697.” Marvin describes him as a military hero in times of trial in the early 1720s. “He was a famous scouting officer,” he wrote, “and traversed large sections of the country to the north, east and west, in search of prowling Indians.”

No other direct ancestor that I’m aware of has earned such accolades. The genealogy actually lays it on a bit thick: “His military dispatches preserved in the records show him to have been a man of marked intellectual ability, and he was certainly a hero of great physical stamina and bravery.”

I quoted from Jabez’s wartime correspondence in “Make It Stop,” the introductory post in this exploration of our family’s century of violence. I won’t repeat it here, but you can go back and judge a dispatch or two for yourself. He was clearly a bright guy, but it was a literate age and I’m not sure his reports and letters were that exceptional. 

What’s beyond question is the extent to which violence was a defining, recurring feature of Jabez’s life, along with his willingness to put his life on the line to protect his family, his home, and community. I touched on five distinct episodes of violence in “Make It Stop,” beginning when Jabez was only 5 and ending seventy years later. It’s not a complete list. In the nine decades beginning in the 1670s, seven saw outbreaks of violence with regional Indians and, as time passed, these also involved the French, jostling for advantage over the British in what remained to them a new world. Indians allied with one, the other, or adopted a neutral stance as they tried to preserve their place in what to them was an old world indeed.

The last attack on Lancaster came in 1710, but fear gripped the community in times of war for decades longer. Only after the conclusion of King George’s War in 1748 was Lancaster considered far enough from the frontier to be secure—yet even so, young men from Lancaster continued to serve in campaigns near and far, among them three of Jabez’s sons as they came of age and then, in turn, their sons too. Two of these grandchildren, Samuel and William, died on the same day in the same battle in New York in 1755. William was a drummer, and only nineteen. “The soldiers who survived and returned told the story with thrilling details, in every family,” Marvin recounts in his history of Lancaster. I can almost feel him pausing in his writing as he added this: “With all the glory there was mourning in many households.” Among them, surely, were the many Fairbanks households in and around Lancaster.

The last of these conflicts, what’s known today as the French and Indian War, was the regional expression of what became a global conflict—what you might call the first world war. It began in 1754, and when it ended with a British victory in 1763, the French were all but driven from the continent. The Indians who had supported the British found themselves betrayed in the war’s aftermath, as promises that what is now Ohio would be kept free of English settlement were no sooner made than ignored. (1) You could say the British soon found themselves betrayed too, as the colonies they planted here rose in rebellion just over a decade later. The American Revolution is the closing conflict of our century of violence.

So far in recounting these trying times, I’ve stuck to the Fairbanks side of the family tree, largely through the stories of Jonas, Lydia, and Jabez Fairbanks. Their Travis counterparts have stories to tell too, and I’ll get to them soon. First, though, I have one more Fairbanks story to tell. Aside from the stories of my own parents’ suicides, which come much later, it’s the most difficult of all.

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(1) By our ultimate Founding Father, George Washington, in particular, I might add. He served in the French and Indian War—in fact, he lit the fuse as a young military officer, believe it or not—and later pegged his finances to developing 45,000 acres he acquired in the Ohio Valley, promises made to the Shawnee living there notwithstanding. A good book on the French and Indian War is The War That Made America by Fred Anderson.