Elizabeth Hester SMITH Johnson

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Elizabeth Hester Smith Johnson (1665–1767), a 10× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her Virginia birth, English colonial parentage, marriage to Dr. Archibald Johnson, her daughter Elizabeth, and her long life spanning the colonial era from Jamestown to Maryland. Notable: born at Jamestown, remarkable longevity of 101 years, span from Stuart to pre-Revolutionary America.

Elizabeth Hester Smith Johnson (1665–1767) entered the world on the 29th of October, 1665, at Jamestown in James City, Virginia — the very seat of the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. She was the daughter of Edward Smith (1636–1696) and Elizabeth Symons (1632–1678), a household firmly rooted in the small but consequential planter society that had taken hold along the tidewater of the James River. By the time of Elizabeth's birth, Jamestown had endured famine, fire, and Indian war, and the Virginia colony was settling into the tobacco economy and parish life that would define the Chesapeake for generations.

Elizabeth came of age in the turbulent decades that bracketed Bacon's Rebellion of 1676 and the gradual decline of Jamestown itself as a center of colonial government. In due course she was united in marriage to Dr. Archibald Johnson, and through this union the family was drawn into the professional class of colonial medicine, a calling of considerable hardship in an age before modern remedies, when physicians traveled great distances on horseback through a land still thinly settled. From this marriage was born a daughter, Elizabeth Johnson (1679–1722), who would carry the line forward into the next generation.

The later years of Elizabeth's long life were spent in Charles County, Maryland, where she died on the 5th of August, 1767, having attained the extraordinary age of one hundred and one years. Her lifetime encompassed the reigns of seven English monarchs, from Charles II to George III, and she lived to see the American colonies grow from a scattered frontier into a society on the eve of revolution. Few of her contemporaries survived to witness such a sweep of history.

Elizabeth Hester Smith Johnson stands in the compiler's paternal-grandfather (PP) line as a tenth great-grandmother, one of the earliest American-born ancestors recorded in this branch of the Hyten family register.