A Bodwell family story · Haverhill, Methuen & Lawrence, Massachusetts · 1693–1847
Three towns, two names changed by other people, and one piece of ground that never moved
Read enough of the old Bodwell records and you start to wonder whether the family could ever sit still. Henry Bodwell's children were born “in Haverhill.” Henry himself died “in Methuen.” His great-great-grandson the governor was born “in Methuen” but grew up, by the time anyone wrote about him, “in Lawrence.” Family histories call the Bodwells some of the first settlers of Lawrence, and in the next breath describe their ancestral home in Methuen. It sounds like a family on the move. In fact, for more than a century and a half they hardly moved at all. The Bodwells stayed on the same patch of ground at the fork of two rivers while the towns around them were redrawn, renamed, and redrawn again.
When Henry and Bethia Bodwell arrived at the junction of the Merrimack and Spickett rivers in the summer of 1693, “Haverhill” did not mean a town in the modern sense. English colonists from Newbury had settled at Haverhill in 1640, following the Merrimack up from the coast. The township they were granted stretched for miles along the river, but nearly everyone lived close to the meetinghouse in the east. The western end, where the Bodwells built their log house, was frontier: woods, meadow, the falls, and the fords where the river could be crossed.
The Bodwells were among the first English families to make a permanent home on that north bank, on ground that is now the heart of the city of Lawrence. They weren't quite the first colonists anywhere inside today's city limits. In 1655 a blockhouse had been set up in Shawsheen Fields, now South Lawrence, on the Andover side of the river. And long before any English farmer arrived, the river and its falls had belonged to the Pennacook and their neighbors, who had fished there for generations. But on the north shore of the Merrimack, at the fork of the two rivers, the Bodwells were early, exposed, and very nearly alone.
Being early meant being exposed. The Bodwells settled in the middle of King William's War, when French Canada was encouraging Abenaki and allied warriors to raid the English frontier, and Haverhill was one of the most vulnerable towns in Massachusetts. The fords near the Bodwell land were natural crossing places. Raiding parties came over the river, drove cattle from the common pastures along the Shawsheen, and slipped back across the water before anyone could follow.
In March 1697 Haverhill was struck hard: twenty-seven people killed, thirteen carried off as captives, among them Hannah Duston and her newborn baby. In August 1708 raiders came again. Families on the outlying farms, and there were few farms more outlying than the Bodwells', kept muskets within reach, worked their fields in groups, and ran for the nearest fortified garrison house when an alarm went up. Henry Bodwell, a survivor of the massacre at Bloody Brook, earned a reputation as a marksman and as “a terror to the hostile Indians.”
It is worth remembering that this was a war with two sides. To the colonists, the raids were terror descending from the woods. To the Native peoples of the Merrimack valley, already devastated by disease and watching their homeland disappear one farm at a time, farms like the Bodwells' were the advancing edge of that loss. Both sides buried their dead. The fear on that riverbank was real, and it shaped everything about how the family lived.
Take away the danger and life at the fork of the rivers was still hard. Everything began with an axe. Trees had to be felled and burned, stumps pulled with oxen, and fields fenced against wandering livestock before a single crop went in. The Bodwells grew corn, rye, and flax, kept cattle and hogs, and took shad and salmon from the river when the fish ran each spring. Nearly everything the family wore was spun, woven, and sewn by hand at home. Light came from the fire and from candles made at home, and in winter the whole household lived around one great hearth.
Life was also organized around the town, and in Puritan Massachusetts the town was organized around the meetinghouse. Attendance at Sabbath worship was expected of everyone, usually for most of the day, in an unheated building. Every household paid “rates” to support the minister and the school, and turned out for town meetings, road work, and militia training. For a family living miles from Haverhill's center, all of that meant long, hard journeys on rough tracks, often across flooded brooks, with the risk of ambush along the way.
That distance is the root of everything that follows. In 1716 Henry and several of his neighbors asked Haverhill to reduce their ministry and school taxes because of how far they lived from town and how difficult it was to get there. The town agreed to cut their ministry rates in half. It was a small concession, but it was a first sign that the west end was becoming a community of its own.
In colonial New England, the way to solve the meetinghouse problem was to become a town, or at least a separate parish, with a meetinghouse, a minister, and a town meeting of your own. That required permission. In 1719 Stephen Barker, Henry Bodwell, and others asked Haverhill to set off their part of the township as a new town. Haverhill said no, and understandably so: losing the west end meant losing its taxpayers.
The families kept trying. In 1724 Stephen Barker, Henry's son-in-law, led another petition, this time going over Haverhill's head to the General Court in Boston. Their fellow townsmen opposed it, but on December 8, 1725, the General Court incorporated the new town.
The people who lived there didn't choose the name. It was chosen in Boston. The town was named in honor of Sir Paul Methuen, a member of the King's Privy Council and a friend of the acting governor, William Dummer. Naming a new town after an influential patron in London was common practice, a small compliment that could bring friends at court. So from one day to the next the Bodwells, who hadn't moved a step, were living in a town named for an English diplomat none of them had ever met. The first town meeting was held on March 9, 1726, in a resident's home, and a meetinghouse went up later that year. Henry was in his early seventies. He had outlived the frontier and helped create a town, and when he died in 1745 he was recorded as a man of Methuen.
The boundaries kept shifting after that too. When the long-running dispute between Massachusetts and New Hampshire over their border was settled in 1741, the new line cut through the northern part of Methuen, and families there found themselves living in another province without having moved at all. The Bodwell homestead, down by the river, stayed in Methuen.
For the next hundred years the Bodwell land was simply part of Methuen. Four generations of Bodwells farmed it, kept the old house, and watched the elm planted in 1729 grow into a giant. The falls beside the homestead were known as Bodwell's Falls, and the crossing as Bodwell's Ferry.
The second change came from money and water power. By the 1840s the textile mills at Lowell had shown what a big river could do for manufacturing, and a group of wealthy Boston merchants wanted a new mill city of their own. In 1845 they formed the Essex Company, headed by Abbott Lawrence as president and chief stockholder, and began buying up farmland on both sides of the Merrimack, from Methuen on the north bank and Andover on the south. The prize was the falls: Bodwell's Falls, where the company built the Great Stone Dam.
For a couple of years no one agreed on what to call the place. It was known interchangeably as the “New City,” “Essex,” or “Merrimac.” Then in 1847 the legislature incorporated the town of Lawrence, joining the Methuen and Andover sections and naming it after Abbott Lawrence. It became a city in 1853. Once again the Bodwells hadn't moved. The border had simply been drawn around them. Governor Joseph R. Bodwell's own biography puts it neatly: he was born in Methuen in 1818, and in 1847 the part of town where he was born split off to become part of Lawrence.
The name changes have one thing in common: none of them was the Bodwells' idea. The first came from a governor honoring a friend in London. The second came from industrialists honoring the man who put up the money. The family's own name survived only in the places named for them, the falls and the ferry, and even Bodwell's Falls eventually disappeared under a dam and a mill canal.
All of this explains why the old records seem to contradict each other. A document written between 1693 and 1725 says Haverhill. One written between 1725 and 1847 says Methuen. Anything later usually says Lawrence, often adding “then Methuen” or “formerly Haverhill.” When a family history calls the Bodwells the first settlers of Lawrence and another places the homestead in Methuen, both are right. They are describing the same hundred acres at the fork of the Merrimack and the Spickett, under different names.
A good way to write it, and the way this site tries to, is Haverhill (later Methuen, now Lawrence). It keeps each record honest about its own time and reminds us that the family didn't move. The boundaries did.
One small reminder of the oldest name survives in the city today. When the Old Elm Bodwell House was moved from its original spot, it went to 31 East Haverhill Street. It stood there, in the city of Lawrence, until 1957, on a street still named after the town where the family's story on that land began.
A family can stay put for a century and a half and still turn up in the records of three different towns. The Bodwells didn't cross any borders; the borders crossed them. Each new name reflected who had power at the time: a frontier township on the edge of the colony, a new town named by a colonial governor for a friend in London, and a mill city named by Boston money. Through all of it, the fork of the rivers stayed where it had always been.