Captain John Webb (right, with sword) leading convicted “heretic” Mary Dyer to the gallows on Boston Common in 1660.

John Webb of Boston and Dracut (1611-1668): A Colonial Snapshot

By Paul Marion

In his History of Dracut (1922), Silas Roger Coburn describes John Evered, also known by the surname Webb, as “the first white man to become a resident on the soil of Dracut, but not, as we have reason to believe, as a permanent settler, but as a speculator in the wild lands of the ‘Wildernesse.’ . . . His early home was in Marlborough, Wiltshire, England, and he was in Boston [by August 1635].”

    Much of the information that follows is taken from Coburn’s history and is offered here as a casual and general account of colonial-era dealings with native inhabitants during the decades of British rule long before the first talk among local people of American independence and revolution against the King of England.

     Source credit also to Donat H. Paquet’s Photographic History of Dracut, Massachusetts (1982), Rebecca A. Duda’s writings about Dracut in the Sun newspaper of Lowell, the William & Mary Dyer blog by Mary Barrett Dyer (2015), and the Wikipedia entry on John Evered (downloaded 3/6/2025) —PM

Dracut, Massachusetts, is the only place in America with that name, the origin being an estate in southwest England, Draycot Foliat, dating from 1086 at least, whose name combines two surnames. Found in Marlborough in Chiseldon Parish of Wiltshire County, Draycot Foliat is the ancestral home of Captain John Evered Webb, who, in 1665, acquired a large portion of the land that would be the colonial town from the Pennacook people who had survived there for centuries. The seller who signed a pivotal agreement was “Bess, wife of Nobb How,” a daughter of the legendary Pennacook leader Passaconaway, Child of the Bear.

Native peoples had been decimated by disease carried into their region by European explorers and settlers. From a population of perhaps 10,000, the tribes numbered some twenty-five hundred by 1631, the survivors of smallpox, flu, and diphtheria epidemics. By 1660, after relinquishing land claims and years of negotiating with white colonists to maintain peace, Passaconaway transferred leadership to his son, Wannalancit, and moved deeper into the northern wilderness. He may have lived to be more than one hundred years old, his burial place uncertain.

English reporters of the time had cast Passaconaway as a cross between a wiseman and a wizard, attributing to him tall-tale powers such as causing ice to burn in his hands, shaping green leaves from ashes, moving a rock with his eyes, and swimming underwater the width of the Merrimack River in one breath. In one account, tribesmen report seeing his spirit leave his dying body in a wooden sleigh covered in furs and pulled by a team of flying gray wolves.

John Webb paid the Indians one pound of tobacco and four yards of heavy cloth for a tract of land exceeding 1,000 acres, part of which he had sold illegally the year before to a pair of English settlers for cash and farm products worth four hundred English pounds. The sale encompassed land on the north side of the river, opposite the area called Middlesex Village close to today’s south campus of the University of Massachusetts in Lowell. Webb may have built a log cabin on what is now Old Ferry Road in Lowell, which would have been the first structure of white settlers.

Let’s review. Tobacco and cloth. Was it a swindle or did the Pennacooks think it was preposterous that the white-skinned people believed land could be held as private property? Take the tobacco and cloth now, they may have figured. These folks cannot be serious. They will never last in the forest.

Time check: Note that the Puritans, religious separatists from England, stepped ashore in what would be Plymouth, Massachusetts, in December 1620, after first making landfall at the fingertip of Cape Cod’s bent arm in the ocean: Provincetown now. This group or congregation was led by William Bradford, later a governor of Plymouth Colony. The Puritans, a strain of Protestantism, rejected the Church of England for not ridding itself of every aspect of the Roman Catholic Church, from which it had formally split in 1534 when Pope Clement VII in Rome denied merry old King Henry VIII’s request for an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon so that he could marry Anne Boleyn. Fast forward to the upstarts who insisted on a purer form of Christian worship and their voyage to the New World, seen from the Old World, Europe. Boston dates from 1630 as the hub of a second colony on the coast, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, led by John Winthrop. The first English people in what would be Dracut came from Boston and Cape Ann just north, the Salem-Ipswich area.

Webb arrived with family on this side of the Atlantic in August 1635 in the middle of a hurricane that battered their ship carrying one hundred English emigrants. After riding out the storm off the New Hampshire coast, the ship reached Boston. Webb found work on ships and joined a Boston church. He married Mary Faireweather, a widow, and adopted her son—they then had a daughter of their own and moved to Braintree.

He ventured inland to the territory of native tribes (“ye Wildernesse on ye Northerne side of Merrimack River”), and in 1653 helped to establish a settlement, Chelmsford, named for an English town. He learned how to bargain with the native people. A military man and politician, Webb held the rank of ensign in the state militia, rising to captain, and served three years in the legislature, the General Court in Boston.

Notably, Webb was in charge of the execution of Mary Dyer in 1660, a Quaker who had protested her banishment from Boston. She insisted on her right to worship according to her conscience and returned. Like Anne Hutchinson in 1637, the critic of Puritan ministers who was banished but not killed, Dyer challenged the religious establishment. She was hung as a heretic on Boston Common.

In 1664, Webb gained control of seven hundred-and-fifty acres near Pawtucket Falls on the Merrimack, a “military land grant” from the colonial government. This brings him to Drawcutt (Dracut) and the land transactions described above.

Before his property dealings in future-Dracut, Captain Webb, a man in a hurry, had already owned property in Boston including the lot later occupied by the legendary Old Corner Bookstore and Ticknor and Fields publishers—and perhaps fitting for this character took his last breath in Boston in a dramatic or even literary fashion, considering the details provided by Silas Coburn:

“Rev. Samuel Danforth of Roxbury states as follows: ‘17^th 8^th month 1668 Mr John Webb alias Evered was drowned, catching a whale below the Castle. In coiling ye line inadvisedly he did it about his body thinking the whale had been dead, but suddenly She gave a Spring and drew him out of the boat. He being in the midst of the line but could not be recovered while he had any life.’”

Paul Marion © 2025