"Too much jollity."
That's why an ancestor I'd never heard of until last year had his liquor license — the first one issued in the Colonies — pulled in 1638. But Francis Sprague was soon back in business running his "ordinary" in Duxbury, a settlement just north of Plymouth, though he continued to frequently run afoul of more puritanical founding fathers.
I'd learned of Sprague from a rarely seen cousin, who'd spent many days during the pandemic shutdown tracing the ancestry of our mutual grandmother, Mary Jones, who later changed her name to Catherine — "Who wants to be called Mary Jones?" she would ask, in a move that will no doubt confuse future ancestry tracers — and married Donald Somers. Decades ago, with a goal of joining the Daughters of the American Revolution, Catherine Somers had successfully tracked the Jones family's ancestors back to homes in the Colonies before 1776 — only to decide that, after the DAR refused to let Black opera singer Marian Anderson sing at Constitution Hall, she wasn't interested in joining such a group after all. Anderson wound up giving a triumphant 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial in front of 75,000 people; my grandmother was content not to become a DAR member.
Had my grandmother, daughter of a Congregational minister, traced her lineage back a little further, she would have found that in the mid-1700s, a Sprague had married one of her Joneses, thus directly linking the teetotaling Reverend Charles Jones to Francis Sprague, who encouraged "too much jollity" and was also accused of "drinking overmuch" in his own establishment, according to early records.
That documentation also shows that Sprague had left England on the third ship to land at Plymouth, the Anne, and attended the big wedding feast in the fall of 1623 for Governor William Bradshaw and Alice Southworth that reportedly was the first Thanksgiving. No word on whether Sprague provided the spirits.
At a time with far too little jollity, to have a cousin share that laboriously researched history definitely brightened the year. And so last weekend, on a family trip to Boston, we made a side trip to Duxbury and found "the Nook" near where Francis Sprague had settled with his family in 1632, as well as the "Old Burying Ground, 1632-1787" that covers the site of the settlement's original meeting house and church...and likely Sprague's inn. We even found the tombstones of a few Spragues from the 1700s; apparently liquor was an early staple, but the colony was short of a stonemason for several decades.
Our jaunt was full of jollity.
And so, while it was not a holiday observed by Reverend Charles Jones or Francis Sprague or any other ancestors that I know of, on this Día de los Muertos I will raise a glass to those who've gone before and those who've carried on.
Even if overmuch.
Catherine Calhoun
