Jonathan Bacon

Born	1672-07-14 Billerica, MA
Died	1754-01-12
Select Board
In Office	1719 - 1720 1727 - 1728
Representative to the General Court
In Office	1726 - 1726
Preceded by	John Blanchard
Succeeded by	George Brown
Father	Michael Bacon
Mother	Sarah Richardson
Spouses	Elizabeth Giles (m. 1694-01-03 ) Elizabeth Hancock
Children	Sarah

Jonathan Bacon (1672 to 1754) lived on the Bacon farm along the Shawshin River, in the part of Billerica that became Bedford in 1729, and was licensed in 1699 to keep a house selling victuals and drink. He served Billerica as a selectman in 1719 and 1727 and as its representative to the General Court in 1726, and he was among the first members of the Bedford church. He was born on July 14, 1672, a son of Michael Bacon and Sarah Richardson, sister of Thomas Richardson of Billerica. His father, a grandson of Michael Bacon of Dedham, held by lease and on July 19, 1682, bought the five-hundred-acre farm that Cambridge had granted to the Rev. Jonathan Mitchell, on the Shawshin "above the Wyman farm," in what became the northeast part of Bedford. In King Philip's War, when Jonathan was three, the town sent Michael Bacon's family to Timothy Brooks's garrison by the mill.

On January 3, 1694, he married Elizabeth Giles. In 1699 the selectmen approved Samuel Hunt to sell victuals and drink "only three months in y^e year," and gave Jonathan Bacon the same license "not limited to three months." His name also appears on an undated roll, from about the time of the Indian alarms of 1706, of "the men that went the rouns with Major Lane."

Because the Bacon farm lay outside the original township, its owners had no proprietors' rights in the town's common land. When Billerica prepared to divide its remaining commons, Bacon joined Captain John Lane, John Wilson, Thomas Frost and Thomas Richardson Jr. in a petition to the General Court, dated May 30, 1705, complaining that men who had long been inhabitants and paid their full share of "rates, taxes, and charges" were to be shut out of the division, which seemed to them "against all Justice and Equity." The Court stayed the division and on November 16, 1705, ruled that the petitioners who were freeholders and inhabitants should have "a propoitionable share" in all future divisions. In the divisions that followed he received lots of ten and thirty-three acres. On March 27, 1710, when the town voted to defend Christopher Osgood against claims for flooding Dr. Toothaker's meadow with his new mill-dam at North Billerica, "Jonathan Bacon, Josiah Bacon, & Josiah Fassett entered their desent."

He was a selectman in 1719 and in 1727, and in 1726 he represented Billerica in the General Court. In 1722, when the schoolmaster Mr. Houston moved about the town, the school was kept for a month at Jonathan Bacon's, as it was at the Hunts', John Stearns's and the Kittredges'. When Bedford was incorporated in 1729 from parts of Billerica and Concord, his farm went with it, and Lemuel Shattuck counted him among the first members of the Bedford church.

His first wife died in 1738, and in the late summer of 1739 he married Elizabeth Hancock, widow of Benjamin Wyman of Woburn. He died on January 12, 1754, in his eighty-second year. His children, all by Elizabeth Giles, were Elizabeth (born 1695); Sarah (1696), who married Israel Putnam; Anna (1698), who died that October; Jonathan (1700); Mary (1702); Bridget (1706/7); and a second Anna (1709).

Jonathan Bacon

Jonathan Bacon

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