Descendants of John SPOONER
Notes
2.
John SPOONER
Portrait of John Spooner, 1763
by John Singleton Copley, 1738-1815
Oil on Canvas, 30 x 25 3/4 in. (76.2 x 65.4 cm)
Signed and dated at lower right; J. S. Copley/Pinx 1763
Bequest of Nancy Susan Reynolds
The merchant John Spooner sat for this portrait one year after his second marriage to Margaret Oliver, whose family was one of the wealthiest and most influential in Boston. Her father, Andrew Oliver (1706-1774), served as Secretary of Massachusetts from 1756 to 1771, and then as Lieutenant Governor under his brother-in-law Thomas Hutchenson (1711-1780), the last royal governor of the colony. Born in 1728, John Spooner was the son of John and Elizabeth Wells Spooner. His first wife was Hannah, the eldest daughter of John Jones of Boston, whom he married in 1756.1 This portrait was probably precipitated by John Spooner's marriage to Margaret Oliver in 1762 or by the birth of their son the following year.
Like the majority of Copley's sitters, John Spooner was a Congregationalist and had a median income of one hundred to five hundred pounds per year. He was also a High Tory and therefore shared political sympathies with the Oliver family, who by the mid-1760s, had begun to receive threats from the radicals.
10.
Andrew SPOONER
[spooner.FTW] "Andrew Spooner was educated in England, returned to America, and married Ann Howard in Newport, Rhode Island, June 16, 1787. The had a daughter. . .and a son . . . Andrew Spooner's wife Ann died in 1791, and in 1798 he married Elizabeth Sparhawk, who died in 1800 . . ." Letter from Andrew Oliver, Jr., Director, Museum Program, National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, C. C., to Barbara Millhouse, October 27, 1987.
Bathsheba RUGGLES
[spooner.FTW]
Memoirs of the Leonard, Thompson and Haskell Families Author: Caroline Goodenough
Dea. Roger and Joanna Haskell had seven children; there was twenty years difference in the ages of the first and last of these. While the parsonage was being built, this family took as a boarder, Rev. Timothy Ruggles, who had to supply the glass and nails for his new home. This famous minister is so closely connected with our Haskell ancestors that we must digress from our story to speak of him and his twelve children, six of whom settled in the town of Hardwick of which Reverend Timothy was a promoter. His most famous son was Brigadier General Timothy Ruggles, Jr., a graduate of Harvard in 1736, who married Bathsheba Newcomb. Timothy, Jr., once as a practical joke succeeded in getting a law passed "that all men who owned swine should have their noses ringed." He became a noted Tory leader and was a member of the Mandamus Council in 1774. He was obliged to escape to Halifax, where his sons followed him into exile. His daughters married men on the side of the Colonists and never saw their father again. Timothy's property was confiscated, but this was a small calamity beside the heavy tidings which came to him in Halifax that his beautiful married daughter, Bathsheba Spooner, named for her mother, had been hung in 1778 for complicity in the murder of her husband through love for another man. Bathsheba was the last woman hung in Massachusetts, and is buried on the beautiful Andrew Green Estate near Worcester. Her grandfather, the old Rochester minister, Timethy Ruggles, Sr., had happily died ten years before this tragedy occured.
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