George Felt

George Felt
Born	February 28, 1601 Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, England
Died	c. 1693 (aged 92) Malden, Massachusetts Bay Colony
Nationality	English
Spouse	Elizabeth Wilkinson

George Felt (February 28, 1601 – c. 1693) was a 17th-century English emigrant to the New England Colonies. A mason by trade, he is considered a founder of the Boston neighborhood of Charlestown, and is one of the three main early settlers of North Yarmouth, Massachusetts Bay Colony (now Yarmouth, Maine), along with John Cousins and William Royal.

Arrival in the New England Colonies

George Felt arrived in Salem, Massachusetts Bay Colony, in late 1628, aboard the ship Abigail with John Endecott, regarded as one of the Fathers of Anglo-Saxon White Puritan New England. Felt was born at Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, England, and is considered the first of the Felt family in America. He went to Charlestown, Massachusetts Bay Colony, the following year where he helped form a government with thirty-three other colonists in 1633. He erected a cabin at the original settlement, southwest of what was then called Mill Hill, now known as Town Hill, near what today is Galvin Memorial Park. In 1638, an inventory of the some 68 acres of land that Felt owned in Massachusetts included: "One Dwelling house with a garden plott, scituate on the south west of the mill hill, butting southward upon Charls river, northeast upon crooked lane, bounded on the norwest by Nicholas Trerrice, and on the southeast by Ben. Hubbard."

He then moved across the Mystic River, north to what is now Everett, Massachusetts. In 1643, he removed to what was then North Yarmouth, Massachusetts Bay Colony (now Yarmouth, Maine). He purchased 300 acres of land at Broad Cove from John Phillips, a Welshman.

Felt later owned a lot at the foot of the northern end of Pleasant Street in Yarmouth, adjacent to Stony Brook, in an area that became known as Grantville.

In 1684, military officer and fellow Englishman Walter Gendall claimed to own all of Felt's two thousand acres beside Casco Bay. He had purchased one hundred acres from him in 1680.

Personal life

Felt's family in Bedfordshire, England, went by the family name Felce. He called himself George Felch, however, when he moved to America. He began to be known as George Felt in his later years.

In 1630, Felt married 29-year-old Elizabeth Wilkinson (1601–1694), with whom he had six children: Elizabeth (born c. 1635), George Jr. (1638–1676), Mary (1639–1725), Moses I (1641–1650), Aaron and Moses II (1651–1733).

Around 1649, the family moved from what is now Maine back to Malden, Massachusetts Bay Colony, just as it was being incorporated into a city. They returned to Casco Bay in 1667, shortly after which Felt bought 2,000 more acres of land from Phillips. He later lost most of the land in a deed dispute though his son, Moses II, and grandson George III, retained 300 acres.

Conflicts forged by King Philip's War caused the Felts to abandon their home. In 1676, Felt's son and Mussel Cove resident, George Jr., was killed on Peaks Island during the conflicts. The deceased's wife of fourteen years, Londoner Phillippa Andrews, moved to Salem Massachusetts Bay Colony, where she married twice (to Samuel Platt in 1682 and Thomas Nelson in 1690) before her death in 1709. She had emigrated to America with her parents in 1635.

Death

In 1684, an aging George Felt moved back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He wrote to the town of Malden: "Some time after the late Indian war it was withheld from me by some of the inhabitants of said Town of Caskoe Bay and being by said war much impoverished I could not recover it out of their hands.  I also am now forced to suffer for want of convenient care taken of me in my present distresse being about eighty seaven year’s old and very crasy and weak."

He died in Malden in 1693, aged 92, with Elizabeth surviving him by one year. The couple had become the first citizens of Malden to receive town aid, such was their fall from wealth during the latter stages of their time in North Yarmouth.

Legacy

Home of the great-great-grandson of George Felt and Elizabeth Wilkinson, Sgt. Peter Felt, at Temple, New Hampshire. Known as the Felt-Tobey-Scott House.

Descendants of George Felt (Felt family) and Elizabeth Wilkinson include American architect John H. Felt; the LDS Church's Children's Organization President Louie B. Felt; American Politician Nathaniel H. Felt; Egyptologist and inventor George Henry Felt; American Revolutionary War soldier Capt. John Felt, who repulsed the British in February 1775 at the Salem Gunpowder Raid; and the American inventor and industrialist Dorr Felt.

George Felt's grandson Joshua Felt (1691–1744), son of Moses II, married Ann Walcott, the younger half-sister of the famed Mary Walcott, one of the "afflicted" girls called as a witness at the Salem Witch Trials in 1692-93. Ann's grandmother was Ann Holyoke Putnam, whose family founded Holyoke, Massachusetts. These marriages joined the Felts with the noted Holyoke, Walcott and Putnam families of England and New England. This includes Thomas Putnam Sr. (1615–1686), one of Salem's wealthiest residents and whose home remains in Danvers, Massachusetts, from 1648, as the oldest in the U.S. still owned by a descendant of the original family that had it erected.

George Felt's great-great-grandson Capt. John Felt (1723–1785) was the "Hero of the British Repulse at North Field Bridge," or the Salem Gunpowder Raid, also known as "Leslie's Retreat" on February 26, 1775. It was the colonies' first armed resistance to British authority. Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Leslie and 300 British soldiers from Boston attempted to seize illegally held ammunition during which they were repulsed by citizens led by Capt. Felt in a bloodless confrontation. Felt was the great-grandson of George Felt Jr., who was killed by Native Americans in a raid on Peaks Island, Maine, a century earlier, in 1675.

George Felt's great-great-grandson Sgt. Peter Felt (1745–1817) was one of six Felt brothers who served in the American Revolution, including at the Battle of Lexington and Concord; all survived, though two were wounded. Peter, a shoemaker by trade, was a sergeant at the Battles of Saratoga and afterward erected a commodious house in Temple, New Hampshire that still stands. He and his first wife, Lucy Andrews, were married in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1769 by Rev. William Emerson, the grandfather of the noted American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Their son and Peter's namesake, Col. Peter Felt, Jr. (1784–1866), held stake in a cotton textile mill and was a New Hampshire State Representative in 1825 and again between 1828 and 1829. In 1830, Col. Felt removed to Quincy, Illinois, where he helped found a church first called "The Lord's Barn." He became a farmer and abolitionist. Col. Felt was among a party of pioneers from New Ipswich who emigrated to Quincy and Mendon about the same time, including the family of American Unitarian minister Mary Safford.

See also

• Mill Creek, a watercourse in today's Falmouth Foreside which was originally named Felt's Brook
• Felt family