William Hubbard (clergyman)

For the 19th and early 20th century Toronto city councillor, see William Peyton Hubbard.

William Hubbard (1621 – September 24, 1704) was a New England clergyman and historian, born in Ipswich, England.

As a child, he was taken by his parents to New England, where he later graduated from Harvard as one of nine graduates in the first commencement ceremony (1642), was ordained and became assistant minister and afterward pastor of the Congregational church at Ipswich, Massachusetts, a post which he resigned just a year before his death.

He wrote, at the order of the Colonial government which paid him 50 pounds for it, a History of New England, mainly compilation, which barely escaped destruction by fire when Gov. Thomas Hutchinson's house was mobbed in 1765. The Massachusetts Historical Society printed it in 1815. He wrote also, A Narrative of Troubles with the Indians (Boston, 1677), which for years was popular in New England. The work contains a map of the greater Massachusetts Bay Colony and surrounding area, from a woodcut by John Foster and is the first printed map produced in the American colonies.

Hubbard's work was reprinted at the beginning of the nineteenth century at Worcester, Massachusetts (1801) and Roxbury, Massachusetts (1805). It is full of errors, but illustrates what was regarded by the writer's contemporaries as an elegant prose style. Minor works are a volume of sermons (1684) and a short pamphlet, Testimony of the Order of the Gospel in Churches (1701).

References

• Woodward, David (1967). "The Foster Woodcut Map Controversy: A Further Examination of the Evidence". Imago Mundi. 21. Imago Mundi, Ltd.: 50–61. doi:10.1080/03085696708592299. JSTOR 1150479.

Hubbard, William (1680). A general history of New England : from the discovery to MDCLXXX. Boston: Charles C Little and James Brown. Retrieved 26 March 2013.

• Hubbard, William (1677). A narrative of the troubles with the Indians in New-England, from the first planting thereof in the year 1607, to this present year 1677, but chiefly of the late troubles in the two last years, 1675 and 1676.: To which is added a discourse about the warre with the Pequods in the year 1637. Printed by John Foster, in the year 1677. Retrieved 26 March 2013.
• Hubbard, William (1701). Higginson, John (ed.). A Testimony, to the Order of the Gospel, in the Churches of New-England: Left in the Hands of the Churches, by the Two Most Aged Ministers of the Gospel Yet Surviving in the Countrey. Timothy Green.