The Lancaster Raid

  

 

Site of the Lancaster Raid today.

 

On this day 350 years ago, 400 warriors from the Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and Narragansett tribes descended on the Massachusetts village of Lancaster in the first attack of what became known as King Philip’s War.

 

Three of the 13 settlers killed that day were John & Elizabeth (Fox) Ball and their six-year-old son John Ball. The elder John Ball is our 10th great-grandfather on the Cross/Torrance branch, who emigrated from Norwich, England to Watertown, Massachusetts around 1640. Soon after arriving he married Elizabeth Pierce, another English immigrant (and also our 10th great-grandmother).

 

Though the records are unclear and sometimes contradictory, the Balls had several children, including a daughter in 1851 named Mary Ball, our 9th great-grandmother. According to a family history, “about the year 1655, [John Ball’s] first wife [Elizabeth] became violently insane, which likely accounts for the apprenticing of their children.” Another account states the Ball children, “were farmed out to foster families when their mother was declared insane by the town selectmen and their father abandoned them. Mary went to live with her grandparents when she was five.”

 

“After her grandfather died in 1661 . . . [and] her grandmother died in 1666, . . . Mary was put in the household of Michael Bacon and his wife.” This led to further hardship: “Mary later became pregnant with Michael’s child. Michael was ordered to raise the child but Mary was warned out of Watertown.” Or in other words, Mary Ball’s child was taken from her and she was told to leave town.

 

Her story continues: around 1671 “Mary was rescued by William & Martha Munroe of Cambridge Farms [later renamed Lexington].” Does this story sound familiar? Back in September 2024 I wrote a post about William Munroe being banished from England in 1651 following the Battle of Worcester. He was our 9th great-grandfather.

 

Then, “when Martha died in 1672, Mary became the second Mrs. Munroe and gave William ten children over the next two decades.” Many of their offspring and spouses were on Lexington Green at the start of the American Revolution, and their youngest child, Benjamin Munroe, was our 8th great-grandfather.

 

But what does all this have to do with the Lancaster Raid? After parceling off his children, Mary (Ball) Munroe’s father, John Ball, married a woman named Elizabeth Fox. They had several children and became one of the first three families to settle in what became known as Lancaster. When tensions between the ever-encroaching colonists and the about-to-be-pushed-out Native population erupted in 1675, Lancaster was the first village leveled, including the home of the Balls. John & Elizabeth and their son were killed and two other children were taken captive. Another captive, neighbor Mary Rowlandson, later wrote an account of her ordeal, A Narrative of the Captivity, Sufferings and Removes of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, which became the first “bestseller” in New England.