John Barton

From the Hyten family archive; subject is John Barton (1752–1834), a 6× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in colonial Massachusetts, his parentage, his marriage to Abigail Davis, his daughter Dorcas, his death in Maine, and the broader era context of the Revolutionary generation in New England.

John Barton (1752–1834) was a son of New England, born in 1752 in Falmouth, then a settlement within the Massachusetts Bay Colony of British Colonial America. His parents were Penewell Pennell Barton (1712–1760) and Mary Burnell (1716–1771), forebears whose roots reached into the early colonial communities of the northeastern seaboard. The loss of his father when John was a boy of about eight, and of his mother before he reached twenty, placed him among that cohort of young New Englanders compelled to assume the responsibilities of adulthood at an early age.

John came of age in a region on the eve of profound transformation. The years of his youth and early manhood coincided with the gathering tensions between the American colonies and the British Crown, and the communities of coastal Massachusetts and the Maine frontier — then the District of Maine, still administered as part of Massachusetts — were drawn deeply into the Revolutionary cause. Falmouth itself was a place marked by the conflict of that era. Whatever John's personal participation, his life unfolded against this consequential backdrop, and the New England in which he matured was steadily reshaping itself from colony into republic.

He married Abigail Davis, and from their union came a daughter, Dorcas Barton (1779–1854), through whom the family line continued into the nineteenth century. The family's later years carried them northward into Maine, which achieved statehood in 1820 after long association with Massachusetts.

John Barton died on 12 May 1834 in Salem, Franklin County, Maine, having lived eighty-two years — a span that carried him from the late colonial period through the Revolution, the founding of the Republic, and into the Jacksonian age. He rests within the early settlement history of the Maine interior.

John was a 6× great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.