In 1859 Thomas Lovewell parked his wife and two-year old daughter on a farm in Iowa before setting out into the Far West on a quest for gold. He returned six years later to pick up the pieces of his life and start over again at the age of 39, bent on establishing a Homestead on the Kansas plains, at a most dangerous time.
Born in Ohio in 1826 when the Santa Fe Trail was first being surveyed and railroads were still in the tinkering stage, Thomas would witness the end of the American Frontier and watch automobiles bounce along the streets of the little Kansas village that bore his name. Over the course of a long life he took on the roles of prospector, Army scout, soldier, abolitionist settler, Homesteader, architect, building contractor, farm implement dealer, and town marshal.
However, this site is about more than the gentleman who appears in the banner at the top of the page, or the towns of White Rock and Lovewell which he founded in north-central Kansas. It is, as a popular action-movie franchise used to remind us, about family.
The Lovewell family arrived in America before 1658, the year when a marriage was recorded between “John Lowwell” and “Elizabeth Silvester” at Scituate, a small coastal settlement between Boston and Plymouth. New England historian Ezra S. Stearns dubbed the husband "John Lowell the tanner,” to differentiate him from a cooper with a similar name, and pronounced him "the ancestor of the Lovewell family of Dunstable.”
Modern-day researchers Michael J. Wood and John Blythe Dobson believe he was born around 1629 at Bristol, Gloucester, England, and died Jan. 7, 1694 at Boston. His son John, an early-day resident of Dunstable, was long remembered as the man who first gave refuge to America's vengeful heroine Hannah Duston in 1697, after she killed several of her Abenaki captors and made her way home clutching their scalps.
Decades before anyone had heard of Major Robert Rogers or Daniel Boone, Captain John Lovewell, son of the man who had welcomed Hannah Duston, became a hero commemorated in Colonial ballads and celebrated in newsprint for the next two centuries, all because of a battle which claimed his life and the lives of nearly half his company .
In 1724, John Lovewell decided to put an end to the recurring raids that ravaged English settlements near Dunstable. Raising a company of rangers, known as "snowshoe men," Captain Lovewell took the fight to the enemy in the wilderness of northern Maine.
After two successful forays into the frontier, a third raid ended his life in May of 1725 when Abenakis ambushed his company at Saco Pond, later renamed Lovewell Pond. After "Lovewell's Fight," only about half of the captain's men found their way home again, but the Abenakis had also taken heavy casualties and were forced to make peace.
Eight months after her husband fell in battle, Captain John Lovewell’s wife Hannah gave birth to their son Nehemiah Lovewell, who would grow up to be a frontier scout and fight in the American Revolution alongside his boy Zaccheus. Zaccheus’s son Moody Bedel Lovewell would take up the family tradition, shouldering a musket in the War of 1812. After the war, Moody moved to Athens County, Ohio, married Elizabeth Watkins, and fathered a dozen children who would, for the most part, fan out to settle the New West.
Moody Lovewell’s sons Thomas, William, Solomon, and Alfred, moved with their father to western Illinois, later becoming pioneers in southern Iowa in the 1850’s. After taking part in organizational elections in Ringgold County, they seemed to stay only long enough to make a tidy nest egg by selling farmland that was suddenly in high demand during a widespread wheat shortage during the Crimean War.
Spurred on by the admonitions of Horace Greeley and John Brown, Thomas Lovewell joined an abolitionist colony in Marshall County, Kansas, before heading to the gold fields of the West in the wake of his younger brothers Solomon and Alfred. Thomas also may have been escaping from an unhappy marriage, just as his brother Solomon was almost certainly doing, while young Alfred was evading capture for horse thievery and breaking out of jail.
As three Lovewell brothers journeyed west on the eve of the Civil War, one of the most storied chapters in the history of the Lovewell family was about to begin, full of tales of unflinching bravery, hair-breadth escapes, unfettered greed, blatant sculduggery, abject foolishness, occasional insanity, and unfortunate timing.
Please take your time to explore the stories of the Lovewells and their neighbors in the photo albums, slideshows, maps, movies, and more than five-hundred blog entries contained in these pages.
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