John Lane

Died	1715-01-17
Select Board
In Office	1693 - 1694 1696 - 1705 1709 - 1710
Representative to the General Court
In Office	1707 - 1707
Father	Job Lane
Mother	Anna Reyner
Spouses	Susanna Whipple (m. 1682-03-20 )
Children	Susanna Job (b. 1689-06-22) John (b. 1691-10-20) James (b. 1696-08-12)

John Lane, son of Job Lane and Anna (Reyner) Lane, was born in October 1661. He inherited one-half of the 1,500-acre Winthrop farm his father had purchased. On March 20, 1681-2 he married Susanna Whipple, daughter of John Whipple of Ipswich.

He held the rank of colonel in the militia and was, in the words of town historian Henry Hazen, "very active during the Indian alarms, before and after 1700," and "the leading military man in the town," appearing "in rapid succession as lieutenant, captain, and colonel." On August 23, 1693 Sergeant-Major Thomas Hinchman ordered Lieutenant Lane to impress eight troopers from the troop under his command, four of them to scout daily about the town, "especially towards the great swamp." In February 1696-7 Major Jonathan Tyng of Dunstable ordered him to see every trooper "mounted on a good, serviceable horse for war," armed with carbine and pistols and ready to ride to any alarm on the coast. In November 1702 Governor Joseph Dudley sent him with two troops to carry letters to Marlborough, Lancaster, Groton, Chelmsford and Dunstable and to assure the "Penacooke men" of the governor's friendship. His papers preserve the names of the twenty-nine troopers who served under his command "to the reliefe of Dunstable" on July 4, 1706. A family tradition, told by Leander Hosmer, a grandson of Lane's daughter Mary, held that during one alarm Mary, left at home with a single guard who laughed at her fears, took the gun herself and fired at a suspicious stump, "and the stump rolled over, a dead Indian."

Hazen also calls him "a leading citizen" of his generation. He served as a selectman in 1693, from 1696 to 1704 and in 1709, and was chosen deputy to the General Court in 1707, receiving land for his "deputy service." After a flood carried away the old fordway bridge his father had built, a new bridge was built farther up the Concord River, and in March 1699 the General Court ordered Groton to pay its share to "Major Hinksman, Major Ting, & Mr. John Lane, undertakers for the building of the bridge lately erected in Bilrica." Because the Lane lands came from the purchase of an early grant rather than from the town, the proprietors of the common lands refused him a share in their divisions; on May 30, 1705 he and four others petitioned the General Court, which ruled on November 16, 1705 that "Capt. John Lane and others" were entitled to a proportionable share in all future divisions.

Susanna Lane died August 4, 1713, aged about 51, and John Lane died January 17, 1714-15; the town's vital records name him Major John Lane. Their children were Susanna, who married Nathaniel Page; Job, who died in infancy; Mary, who married John Whitmore of Medford and died in Bedford in 1783; Jemima, who died in infancy; Job, who inherited the homestead; John, who married Katharine Whiting; Martha, who married Col. James Minot of Concord; James; and Joseph, who died before his father.

John Lane

John Lane

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