Historian - December 2006

Just down the road in New Hampshire’s Hillsborough County is a nice little town called Merrimack. From Manchester you can travel south toward Nashua along the Everett Turnpike or take the Daniel Webster Highway to get there. The area was first visited in 1665 and settled in 1722. When the town was separated from Nashua (then called Dunstable) in 1746, it was given the name of the river that flowed next to it – Merrimack.

The residents of Litchfield, a neighboring town located on the opposite or eastern shores of the mighty Merrimack River, wanted a method to help get them to the western shores. A ferry service called Lutwyche’s Ferry was soon established by Edward Goldstone Lutwyche.

Edward Goldstone Lutwyche, Esq., was an upstanding English gentleman. He was born in 1737, the son of Captain Lawrence and Sarah Lutwyche. He was a well educated lawyer and was quite wealthy, owning a sizeable estate in his hometown of Merrimack.

At the outbreak of the Revolutionary War and our declaration of independence from England, Lutwyche was a Colonel in the 5^th Regiment of the New Hampshire Provincial Militia. Colonel Lutwyche was a Tory, or British sympathizer, and rather than lead his men against the English, he took up sides with the enemy and fled to Boston. He served a time there in the British Army under General Thomas Gage. In 1778, he served as Superintendent of the King’s Brewery in New York. There he oversaw the brewing of beer using barrels made of spruce timbers. This so-called spruce beer helped prevent scurvy which was quite prevalent in the army in those days because of the necessity to feed the troops with salted meats. Soon after, he left the country and never returned. He died, I believe, in Kensington, Middlesex, England in January 1816.

When Edward Lutwyche fled to Boston, he left his wife Jane in Merrimack. If that wasn’t bad enough, she was left to operate the Lutwyche Ferry alone, an undertaking that proved to be too difficult for a lady in the 18^th century. She quickly petitioned the New Hampshire Legislature for a release of the responsibility. Sadly for her, at the end of the war, the State of New Hampshire confiscated the Lutwyche estate, including a large farm and the ferry.

In 1780, not long after its confiscation, Lutwyche’s property was purchased from the State of New Hampshire by none other than Brother and Dr. Matthew Thornton, a prominent physician and Freemason who, as you may recall, was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. On the sale, Lutwyche’s Ferry became Thornton’s Ferry.

Today, the town of Merrimack is made up of four villages including, Merrimack Village, South Merrimack, Reed’s Ferry, and you guessed it, Thornton’s Ferry.

Bro. Matthew Thornton lived out his latter years on his farm in Merrimack and died while visiting Newburyport on June 24, 1803. He is buried in Thornton’s Ferry Cemetery in Merrimack. I should mention now that the man who started it all, Edward Goldstone Lutwyche, was welcomed into St. John’s Lodge No. 1 as a member on September 10, 1761.

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