Myles Standish - Settlement in Duxbury

Settlement in Duxbury

In 1625, Plymouth Colony leaders appointed Standish to travel to London to negotiate new terms with the Merchant Adventurers. If a settlement could be reached and the Pilgrims could pay off their debt to the Adventurers, then the colonists would have new rights to allot land and settle where they pleased. Standish was not successful in his negotiations and returned to Plymouth in April 1626. Another effort later in 1626, this time negotiated by Isaac Allerton, was successful, and several leading men of Plymouth, including Standish, paid off the colony's debt to the Adventurers.

Now free of the directives of the Merchant Adventurers, the leaders of Plymouth Colony exerted their new-found autonomy by organizing a land division in 1627. Large farm lots were parceled out to each family in the colony along the shore of the present-day towns of Plymouth, Kingston, Duxbury and Marshfield, Massachusetts. Standish received a farm of 120 acres (49 ha) in what would become Duxbury. Standish built a house and settled there around 1628.

There are indications that, by 1635 (after the Penobscot expedition), Standish began to seek a quieter life, maintaining the livestock and fields of his Duxbury farm. About 51 years old at that time, Standish began to relinquish the responsibility of defending the colony to a younger generation. A note in the colony records of 1635 indicates that Lieutenant William Holmes, Standish's immediate subordinate, was appointed to train the militia. When the Pequot War loomed in 1637, Standish was appointed to a committee to raise a company of 30 men, but it was Holmes who led the company in the field.

The families living in what had come to be referred to as Duxbury (sometimes "Duxborough") requested to be set off from Plymouth as a separate town with their own church and minister. This request was granted in 1637. Some, including historian Justin Winsor, have insisted that the name of the town of Duxbury was given by Standish in honor of Duxbury Hall, near Chorley in Lancashire, which was owned by a branch of the Standish family. Although the coincidence would suggest that Standish had something to do with the naming of Duxbury, Massachusetts, no records exist to indicate how the town was named.

During the 1640s, Standish took on an increasingly administrative role. He served as a surveyor of highways, as Treasurer of the Colony from 1644 to 1649, and on various committees to lay out boundaries of new towns and inspect waterways. In 1642, his old friend Hobbamock, who had been part of his household, died and was buried on Standish's farm in Duxbury.

Standish died on October 3, 1656, of "strangullion" or strangury, a condition often associated with kidney stones or bladder cancer. He was buried in Duxbury's Old Burying Ground, now known as the Myles Standish Cemetery.