Colonel Thomas Westbrook (1675–1743/44) was a senior

New England New England is a region comprising six states in the Northeastern United States: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It is bordered by the state of New York (state), New York to the west and by the Can ...

militia A militia () is generally an army or some other fighting organization of non-professional soldiers, citizens of a country, or subjects of a state, who may perform military service during a time of need, as opposed to a professional force of r ...

officer in

Maine Maine () is a state in the New England and Northeastern regions of the United States. It borders New Hampshire to the west, the Gulf of Maine to the southeast, and the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Quebec to the northeast and ...

during

Father Rale's War Dummer's War (1722–1725) is also known as Father Rale's War, Lovewell's War, Greylock's War, the Three Years War, the Wabanaki-New England War, or the Fourth Anglo-Abenaki War. It was a series of battles between the New England Colonies and the ...

. In addition to this senior militia role he was a scout, a colonial

councillor A councillor is an elected representative for a local government council in some countries. Canada Due to the control that the provinces have over their municipal governments, terms that councillors serve vary from province to province. Unl ...

, an

innkeeper Inns are generally establishments or buildings where travelers can seek lodging, and usually, food and drink. Inns are typically located in the country or along a highway; before the advent of motorized transportation they also provided accomm ...

, a mill owner, a land speculator and a King's Mast

Agent Agent may refer to: Espionage, investigation, and law *, spies or intelligence officers * Law of agency, laws involving a person authorized to act on behalf of another ** Agent of record, a person with a contractual agreement with an insuranc ...

. He is the namesake of

Westbrook, Maine Westbrook is a city in Cumberland County, Maine, United States and a suburb of Portland. The population was 20,400 at the 2020 census, making it the fastest-growing city in Maine between 2010 and 2020. It is part of the Portland– South Port ...

Early years

During

Queen Anne's War Queen Anne's War (1702–1713) was the second in a series of French and Indian Wars fought in North America involving the colonial empires of Great Britain, France, and Spain; it took place during the reign of Anne, Queen of Great Britain. In E ...

, Westbrook became a ranger in a small company of four (1704). In 1716 the General Assembly of the Province made a grant to Thomas Westbrook, to keep the only public house at the Plains, in consideration that he should lay out six acres of land for the accommodation of drawing up the militia of the town. From at least 1720 he was the owner and proprietor.

Father Rale's War

During the years 1721-3 Westbrook became a captain in the militia and, after the fall of Colonel

Shadrack Walton Shadrach or Shadrack may refer to: Media * "Shadrack" (Robert MacGimsey song), a 1962 popular song written in the 1930s by Robert MacGimsey * ''Shadrach'' (novel), a 1953 children's book by Meindert De Jong *'' Shadrach in the Furnace'', a 1976 no ...

from favour with Massachusett's acting Governor

William Dummer William Dummer (bapt. September 29, 1677 (O.S.) October 10, 1677 (N.S.)/small> – October 10, 1761) was a politician in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. He served as its lieutenant governor for fourteen years (1716–1730), including an e ...

, became the colonel in charge of the militia in the "East" (

) A focus during the

was the New England effort to apprehend Father Sebastien Rale, a Jesuit

priest A priest is a religious leader authorized to perform the sacred rituals of a religion, especially as a mediatory agent between humans and one or more deities. They also have the authority or power to administer religious rites; in partic ...

and French national who resided with and, the New Englanders thought, guided the natives to raid and kill or abduct New England colonists. The General Court of Massachusetts in December 1721 directed the militia to apprehend Rale and bring him to

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

to answer these charges.

The Strong Box

In January 1722 Colonel Westbrook led a group of militia that, unable to find Rale, seized
strongbox
containing his correspondence with

Marquis de Vaudreuil The Marquis de Vaudreuil may refer to: *Philippe de Rigaud de Vaudreuil (1643–1702), governor of Montréal then of New France *Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil (1698–1778), last governor-general of New France *Louis-Philippe de Rigaud, Marquis of V ...

, the French Governor in Quebec, and a hand written dictionary of the native

Abenaki The Abenaki ( Abenaki: ''Wαpánahki'') are an Indigenous peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands of Canada and the United States. They are an Algonquian-speaking people and part of the Wabanaki Confederacy. The Eastern Abenaki language was pre ...

language. In the minds of New Englanders of the day, the letters proved French complicity in urging Native American tribes to attack New England settlements, and they were conveyed to authorities in Boston.The dictionary is now in

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

's Houghton Library. Dan L. Thrapp (ed)., "Thomas Westbrook", In: ''Encyclopedia of Frontier Biography'', p.1536 He was present at the December 15, 1725 Falmouth peace treaty with the Indians, " Dummer's Treaty", which ended the hostilities, apparently his last act as a militia officer.

Falmouth, Maine

He moved to Falmouth (modern

Portland, Maine Portland is the largest city in the U.S. state of Maine and the seat of Cumberland County. Portland's population was 68,408 in April 2020. The Greater Portland metropolitan area is home to over half a million people, the 104th-largest metropo ...

) "as early as 1719" to enter the lucrative business of providing masts to the British navy as a private contractor. He was one of only a few European-descended residents there at that time. He was appointed as King's Mast Agent in 1727 and moved the "King's mast business" from Portsmouth to Falmouth. The mast agent was charged by the Crown with marking, protecting and providing trees which were suitable for ship's masts in the Royal Navy. Westbrook "became a citizen" of Falmouth in August 1727. He built his "splendid seat" of "Harrow House" with garrisons on the south side of Stroudwater River on a property. It was likely at this home that Westbrook entertained Governor Belcher and other guests. He built two mills, a

gristmill A gristmill (also: grist mill, corn mill, flour mill, feed mill or feedmill) grinds cereal grain into flour and middlings. The term can refer to either the grinding mechanism or the building that holds it. Grist is grain that has been separat ...

whose stones still survive as markers of other historical sites, and a

papermill A paper mill is a factory devoted to making paper from vegetable fibres such as wood pulp, old rags, and other ingredients. Prior to the invention and adoption of the Fourdrinier machine and other types of paper machine that use an endless belt ...

.William Goold, ''Portland in the past'' (1886), p.205 at: https://books.google.ca/books?id=4DfmZIJyM2UC&pg=PA212&lpg=PA212&dq=%22thomas+westbrook+waldron%22+elizabeth&source=bl&ots=uYYHIepkUM&sig=byt2IkOdr_BF-ZzVPpwOmQFLP1A&hl=en&ei=zXtwTPKaJIq2sAO6q_z6BA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=%22thomas%20westbrook%20waldron%22%20elizabeth&f=false accessed August 21, 2010 Native chief Polin travelled to the governor to protest Col. Westbrook's failure to provide a way for spawning fish to get past his mill.

Councilor

As early as 1710 he was part of the King's Council appointed by the governor, and held his post (though often absent) until 1730 when he resigned voluntarily. In 1733 he was briefly in Boston as a representative to the council from Falmouth and courted by Governor

Jonathan Belcher Jonathan Belcher (8 January 1681/8231 August 1757) was a merchant, politician, and slave trader from colonial Massachusetts who served as both governor of Massachusetts Bay and governor of New Hampshire from 1730 to 1741 and governor of New J ...

to be a supporter of the Massachusetts government. He showed little interest in these duties and was fined for being absent.

Business

With the young Brigadier General

Samuel Waldo Samuel Waldo (August 7, 1696 – May 23, 1759) was an American merchant, land speculator, army officer and politician in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. Biography He was born in Boston, the son of Jonathan Waldo and Hannah Mason. In 1722, h ...

(pictured at right) he became a land speculator of as much as 15,000 acres in the Falmouth area (near present-day Portland, Maine). The two partners prospered until, for reasons that are not entirely clear, Waldo " ho hadled him into large land speculations ... then struck upon him in an unfortunate time." "Waldo by unscrupulous or ruthless means divested Westbrook of his lands and much of his wealth by 1743..." "In 1743, Waldo recovered judgement against him for ten thousand five hundred pounds, which he levied upon his property, and swept it nearly all away." A copy of one of his later letters, desperately seeking a loan, survived and was transcribed near the end of Trask's ''Letters of Colonel Thomas Westbrook''. Unlike most of his letters, this one was probably not dictated and captures Westbrook's choice of spelling as well as his desperation.

Death

He died heavily in debt on 11 February 1743/1744 "of a broken heart caused by Waldo's Acts". He expired in a smaller cottage adjacent to his beloved Harrow House, which had been lost to his creditors. Despite his bankruptcy his estate was valued at seven thousand, three hundred and two pounds. In contrast, his probate inventory totalled £1052/14/5 and included a house, a pew in Rev Smith's meetinghouse, and books. His Globe Tavern later appears among the property owned by his grandson Thomas Westbrook Waldron though the date of transfer of this property and of his

son in law In law and in cultural anthropology, affinity is the kinship relationship created or that exists between two people as a result of someone's marriage. It is the relationship which each party to a marriage has to the relations of the other part ...

's house is unknown. " s family was forced to spirit his body away in the middle of a nighttime snowstorm in order to prevent the Waldo family from claiming Westbrook's remains and holding them "hostage" until debts were paid". The burial location was unknown until the 1976 bicentennial celebrations except to descendants of his sister Mary (Westbrook) Knight. The gravesite, located at Smiling Hill Farm, has been marked by the '' Daughters of Colonial Wars in Maine'' and is pictured on the Knight family farm's website.

Family

] Born in 1675, he was the son of John Westbrook and Martha Walford of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Portsmouth,

New Hampshire New Hampshire is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Massachusetts to the south, Vermont to the west, Maine and the Gulf of Maine to the east, and the Canadian province of Quebec to the nor ...

. His siblings included Mary who married Nathan Knight,Myrtle Kittridge Lovejoy, Earle G. Shettleworth, and William David Barry, ''This was Stroudwater: 1727-1860'', (1985) p.5 as cited by Craig Bryant at http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=peru1812&id=I31136 accessed August 23, 2010 and whose family continues to own and operate the "Smiling Hill" farm. Thomas married Mary Sherburne, daughter of the mariner John Sherburne and his wife Mary Cowell. The restored Sherburne house at Portsmouth, New Hampshire's Strawbery Banke, has been identified as theirs. Their only child, Elizabeth, married Richard Waldron (Secretary) of a prominent colonial New Hampshire family.William Blake Trask (ed)., ''Letters of Colonel Thomas Westbrook ...''. (1901),p.5, at: http://library.umaine.edu/wabanaki/Letters_of_Colonel.pdf accessed August 22, 2010William Goold, ''Portland in the past'' (1886), p.208 at: https://books.google.ca/books?id=4DfmZIJyM2UC&pg=PA212&lpg=PA212&dq=%22thomas+westbrook+waldron%22+elizabeth&source=bl&ots=uYYHIepkUM&sig=byt2IkOdr_BF-ZzVPpwOmQFLP1A&hl=en&ei=zXtwTPKaJIq2sAO6q_z6BA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=%22thomas%20westbrook%20waldron%22%20elizabeth&f=false accessed August 21, 2010 Though he had no sons, he was the namesake for several descendants all bearing the name "Thomas Westbrook Waldron". A great-great-grandson of this name, a US

consul Consul (abbrev. ''cos.''; Latin plural ''consules'') was the title of one of the two chief magistrates of the Roman Republic, and subsequently also an important title under the Roman Empire. The title was used in other European city-states throu ...

who died in 1844 at

Macau Macau or Macao (; ; ; ), officially the Macao Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (MSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China in the western Pearl River Delta by the South China Sea. With a p ...

, was commemorated in a May 1, 2009 Washington DC ceremony by then- Secretary of State Clinton. The names "Thomas Westbrook" or merely "Westbrook" as given names were in use among descendants well into the twentieth century.

Legacy

Letters_of_Colonel_Thomas_Westbrook_and_others

In 1814 the town of Stroudwater was created from Falmouth. Within a couple of months, the town was renamed Westbrook in honour of the Colonel. "... was a member of the Knight family -the descendants of Westbrook s sisterwho were holding the secret of his burial place - who proposed naming the town after him." His reports of activities as a militia captain and colonel to Governor Dummer were a series in the ''New England Historic & Genealogical Register'' (including vol 44, 1890 to vol 45, 1895) and then published in a book: ''Letters of Colonel Thomas Westbrook and others relative to Indian affairs in Maine, 1722-1726''. This work is often cited as a primary source in histories of that time.

References

External links

Father Rasle's Strongbox todayE Book: ''Letters of Colonel Thomas Westbrook and others Relative to Indian Affairs in Maine 1722-1726''
{{DEFAULTSORT:Westbrook, Thomas People in Father Rale's War 1675 births 1743 deaths People of colonial Maine People of Maine in the French and Indian War People from Portsmouth, New Hampshire Westbrook, Maine People of pre-statehood Maine People of Queen Anne's War