John Alden

The cooper who stayed

Among the possessions inventoried after John Alden’s death were augers, chisels, saws and cooper’s tools. Almost seven decades earlier, it was his skill as a cooper—a maker of barrels—that had brought him aboard the Mayflower at Southampton, a port on England’s south coast. William Bradford recorded that Alden was free to choose whether to return or remain after the voyage. He stayed.

Born circa 1599, Alden was a young tradesman when he crossed the Atlantic in 1620. He married fellow passenger Priscilla Mullins, whose father, brother and other members of her travelling household died during the colony’s first year. By the division of cattle in 1627, the record names John and Priscilla together with their children Elizabeth and John. Their family eventually numbered ten children.

The early settlement required arrangements for food, land, livestock and debt. In the 1627 cattle division, the Aldens belonged to the same group as John and Elizabeth Howland. The group received a heifer named Raghorne. Such allocations made household survival a matter of recorded shares and obligations. Alden also became one of the Plymouth “undertakers,” the small group that assumed the debts of that English colony on the coast of present-day Massachusetts in return for trading advantages. This was a financial responsibility as well as a position of influence.

Trade could carry consequences far beyond bookkeeping. In 1634, a dispute at Plymouth’s Kennebec River trading post in present-day Maine ended in the deaths of Moses Talbot and rival trader John Hocking. Alden had gone there with supplies. Bradford explicitly distinguished him from the men involved in the confrontation, yet Massachusetts Bay authorities imprisoned him when the news spread. The dispute drew the two colonies into argument over jurisdiction, trading rights and responsibility for the killings. A surviving letter from Thomas Dudley records Alden’s release and the further explanations required from Plymouth.

Alden’s ordinary public work is equally visible. Colonial records assign him tasks involving grazing and meadow land, property boundaries and roads. In 1636 he was among the officials asked to inspect land north of the South River and consider how it should be allotted. His own property at Duxbury, north of Plymouth, was described through physical landmarks: a pine tree, a burnt walnut stump, a white oak and the course of the Bluefish River. These were practical descriptions in a landscape where the location of a boundary determined access to fields, hay and water.

Over many years he served as a governor’s assistant, treasurer and participant in revising laws. His landholding also formed part of colonial expansion. A deed dated June 21, 1666 records Josias Wampatuke’s sale of a tract near Namassakett to Alden and the two Southworths for twenty pounds, with a specified reservation. The document names the Indigenous grantor and the terms; it does not describe land without prior owners.

Alden died at Duxbury on September 12, 1687 without a will. His estate inventory returns the story from government offices to household objects: livestock, bedding, linen, cookware, old guns and woodworking tools. The tools connect the elderly landholder and magistrate to the trade that first made him useful aboard the Mayflower.

The family account dates the marriage probably by 1623 and names the ten children as Elizabeth, John, Joseph, Sarah, Jonathan, Ruth, Rebecca, Mary, Priscilla and David. It also records his later conveyances of property to his children. Alden was a signer of the Mayflower Compact.