Samuel Felt

Biography

Samuel Felt’s earliest substantial appearance in the surviving account is a petition about land at Casco Bay, on the Maine coast near present-day Portland. On March 23, 1687/88 he and his brothers George and Jonathan asked Governor Edmund Andros to confirm their claim to land and marsh near Mussel Cove. They described property inherited through their father and requested confirmation of Lower Clapboard Island as well as additional acreage.

The petition spoke in the language of colonial grants and family inheritance. It asserted possession and improvement of the land; the outcome of the petition is uncertain. Samuel’s later career took place farther south. Around 1690 he moved to Salem, where he worked as a tailor and owned a small house and shop on the main street.

A purchase on December 30, 1701 extended his narrow lot back toward Salem Common. The added strip was sixteen feet six inches wide and cost £4. In April 1710 he sold the house, shop and lot to Samuel Hayward. The sequence gives an unusually tangible view of a tradesman’s premises: a street-facing business with a modest piece of land behind it.

By 1703 Samuel was living at Rowley, and by the latter part of 1710 he was associated with Byfield Parish. His wife was Elizabeth. Their children’s baptisms trace the household from Salem into Rowley. He died before November 1729, when his children sold the inherited Maine interest as his heirs. His life connected coastal land claims, a Salem tailoring business and a later household in the Rowley area.