William Hamlet

Select Board
In Office	1662 - 1665

William Hamlet came to Billerica from Cambridge, one of fifteen of the town's earliest settlers who came from Cambridge, the mother town. He was born about 1614 and married the widow Sarah Hubbard, whose daughter was the wife of Samuel Champney; their children, baptized in Cambridge, were Jacob and Rebecca. In 1656 he and William Tay became the first settlers to take house lots on the common land, off the Township and the Farm, and in November 1658 he was among the inhabitants who subscribed the agreement with the proprietors of Mr. Dudley's farm. Hazen quotes Hamlet's grant as the model of the common form: a single share, "one tenne-acre lot," of which his first grant was fifty-six acres "on the North-East corner of bare hill, and on ye south of hogrooten meadow," bounded by Simon Crosby on the west, Thomas Foster on the south and Joseph Tompson and Peter Bracket on the north. His house there, south-east of the village near the later Crosby place, is the William Hamlet House at 570 Boston Road.

Hamlet served as a selectman from 1662 to 1664. In March 1664 he sat with James Kidder and Ralph Hill Jr. on the committee that laid out the highway through the great common field east of the Concord River, a road whose description runs to "William Hamlet's swamp," and on November 29, 1664 the townsmen chose him "to join with a man from Chelmsford to repair the great Bridge" over the Concord. When the town organized its garrisons in King Philip's War in 1675, William and his son Jacob Hamlet were assigned with their families to Simon Crosby's house, and in the town's first division into tithing groups in 1677 he was placed under the care of Sergeant Tompson.

He is best remembered as one of the first Baptists in Billerica. Hazen counted him among the town's early Baptists, with probably George Farley, and noted that a letter of his was printed by the Baptist historian Isaac Backus. Hamlet was a member of the Baptist church gathered at Charlestown in 1665, later the First Baptist Church of Boston, whose records list "Bro: Hamlet" among its early members. In April 1670 the Middlesex grand jury presented George Farley, Thomas Foster and William Hamlett of Billerica "for that they frequently departe out of the meetinge howse when the ordinance of Baptisme is administered," and on June 18, 1672 the three confessed the charge in court, were admonished and fined. That same month he wrote from Boston to the Baptist church at Newport to correct a report that their brother John Russell of Woburn had died in the Cambridge jail: "Through grace he is yet in the land of the living, and out of prison bonds."

On May 20, 1679 Hamlet and his wife Sarah exchanged their homestead with Caleb Farley of Woburn, conveying "one Dwelling house and old Barn and about forty four or forty six acres," the house lot the town had granted him, except a part he had already sold to his son-in-law James Frost, who had married Rebecca Hamlet in 1664. The deed was acknowledged in 1684 and recorded only in 1707. Hazen wrote that Hamlet removed to Woburn, where his son Jacob also settled. His wife Sarah died on January 18, 1688/9, aged about ninety, and her gravestone survives in Billerica; the date of William Hamlet's own death has not been found.

William Hamlet

William Hamlet

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