Under the prevailing ethos, that wasn’t the status a working- or middling-class man was supposed to aspire to. Society admired “independence,” which meant running one’s own farm or business well enough to support a family, employ others, and own real property. It didn’t view doing tasks for a salary as ideal. But that’s how Thomas Williston worked for most of his adult life.
On 21 Aug 1715, five-year-old Thomas’s parents brought him to Boston’s First Meeting-House to be baptized along with four siblings. It looks like their mother had just been admitted to the meeting to allow that rite. That belated baptism began a lifelong link between Thomas Williston and that church, called the Old Brick.
On 3 July 1733 the minister of the Old Brick married Thomas Williston and Sarah Wormell. Thomas became a full member of that meeting in November 1734, just in time for the baptism of the couple’s first child, born in January 1735. Sarah joined two years later.
Thomas and Sarah had eight more children baptized at the Old Brick between 1738 and 1752, coming in regularly every two or three years. In the “too much information” category, the last five of their children (four births, two being twins) all had birthdays between 20 and 30 August, so we know Sarah Williston had a regular conception window.
I haven’t found sure evidence of what profession Thomas Williston was trained in. (In Robert Love’s Warnings, Cornelia Hughes Dayton identified him as a cordwainer, or shoemaker. However, in the 1748 deposition of “Thomas Williston, cordwainer,” published by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, the deponent identified himself as fifty years old rather than thirty-eight. So is this the same man?)
In 1741 Thomas Williston became the sexton of the First Meeting-house. He maintained the building, ordered supplies, and carried out errands at the direction of the minister and church leaders. In 1749 the congregation had a big business meeting that ran long. Among its decisions were “that ten Pounds old Tenor be an Addition to Mr Thomas Williston’s Salary as Sexton” and that “Mr Williston should have a list of the large committee and warn said Committee to meet at the adjournment of this Meeting.”
Sextons didn’t get paid much. Indeed, they were proverbially poor. So it’s no surprise that Williston looked for other sources of income. On 9 Mar 1742 the Boston town meeting considered his petition:
Setting forth, That he had been Sexton of said Meeting house the Year past and had Constantly Attended his Duty and it has been an Ancient Custom that the said Sexton should have the Benefit of Publishing the Banns of Matrimony when Capable and most of the Congregation are desirous that he should have the Benefit of Publishing if he had the Order of the Town Meeting for the sameThat petition is in fact the earliest evidence I’ve found of Williston’s employment. The meeting had “Considerable Debate” on his request to collect those marriage fees and then voted that “the said Petition should be Dismissed.”
Williston continued to look for public employment. In 1743 the selectmen appointed him to stop “Carts Trucks &c.” from outside Boston from disrupting the market at Faneuil Hall and to keep tents off the Common during militia training day. He worked as a gravedigger—a common task for sextons—and a town watchman.
In 1744 Boston paid Williston £5 Old Tenor for “Winding up the Clock of the Old Brick Church the year past”—though that clock was on the meetinghouse roof, it was a public resource. In 1749 the town tasked him with tracking down the relatives of corpses that had been unearthed during the expansion of King’s Chapel.
The steady job of a sexton looked good enough that Thomas’s younger brother John became “Sexton and Bellringer” at the Old North Meeting-house in March 1747, and their younger brother Ichabod sexton at King’s Chapel from 1754 to 1761. Ichabod also joined the town watch until June 1768 when he was replaced for neglecting that duty.
TOMORROW: On the town payroll.
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