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his son William.
This William was a well-to-do clothier who lived in Upper House, and, besides, possessed three other houses or cottages (being taxed for ‘4 hearths’), with gardens, closes, crofts, etc. He had two sons, Nathan and William, and four or five daughters.
William was baptized at Guiseley (the parish church of Horsforth), October 20, 1650.
The first of the name in America was this William, son of William of Horsforth.
He came over, a young man, to Newbury, Massachusetts, about 1676.
Soon after, he married Anne Sewall, daughter of Henry Sewall, of Newbury, and sister of Samuel Sewall, afterward the first chief justice of Massachusetts.
He received from his father-in-law a farm in the parish of Byfield, on the Parker River.1 He is spoken of as ‘well educated, but a little wild,’ or, as another puts it, ‘not so much of a Puritan as some.’
In 1690, as ensign of the Newbury company in the Essex regiment, he joined the ill-fated expedition of Sir William Phipps against Quebec, which on its return encountered a severe storm in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. One of the ships was wrecked on the island of Anticosti, and William Longfellow,
1 In 1680 Samuel Sewall wrote to his brother in England: ‘Brother Longfellow's father Wm lives at Horsforth, near Leeds. Tell him bro. has a son William, a fine likely child, and a very good piece of land, and greatly wants a little stock to manage it. And that father has paid for him upwards of an hundred pounds to get him out of debt.’ In 1688 William Longfellow is entered upon the town records of Newbury as having ‘two houses, six plough-lands, meadows,’ etc. The year before, he had made a visit to his old home in Horsforth.
Boston and New York, Hougton, Mifflin and company, 1902.
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