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LIFE AND LETTERS OF JOHN BROWN.
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brother's four children,—two sons and two daughters,—who survived him. Peter Brown was unmarried when he landed at Plymouth, but within the next thirteen years he was twice married, and died,—as we learn from unquestionable authority, the "History of Plymouth Plantation," left in manuscript by William Bradford, who succeeded Carver in 1621 as governor of the colony, and died in 1657. Writing about 1650, Bradford says: "Peter Brown married twice. By his first wife he had two children, who are living, and both of them married, and one of them hath two children; by his second wife he had two more. He died about sixteen years since." It is supposed that his first wife was named Martha, and that Mary and Priscilla Brown were her daughters,—the two who are mentioned by Bradford as married in 1650. In 1644 they were placed with their uncle John, and in due time received each £15, which their father had left them by will. The rest of Peter's small estate went to his second wife and her two sons, of whom the younger, born in 1632, at Duxbury, was the ancestor of the Kansas captain.[1] He was named Peter for his father, removed from Duxbury to Windsor in Connecticut between 1650 and 165S, and there married Mary, daughter of Jonathan Gillett, by whom he had thirteen children. He died at Windsor, March 9, 1692, leaving to his family an estate of £409. One of his children, John Brown, born at Windsor, Jan. 8, 1668, married Elizabeth Loomis in 1691, and had eleven children. Among these was John Brown (born in 1700, died in 1790), who was the father and the survivor of the Revolutionary Captain John Brown, of West Simsbury. He lived and died in Windsor, there married Maxy Eggleston, and Captain John Brown just mentioned, the grandfather of our hero, was his

  1. It would be curious to trace the English ancestry of Captain Brown, which, some suppose, goes back to that stout-hearted John Brown of Henry VIII.'s time, who was one of the victims of Popish persecution in the early years of that king. Fox, in his "Book of Martyrs," tells the story of his martyrdom at the stake, in the early summer of 1511, at Ashford, where he dwelt; and adds that his son, Richard Brown, was imprisoned for his faith in the latter days of Queen Mary, and would have been burned but for the proclaiming of Queen Elizabeth, in l558.