for about forty years.

In consequence, perhaps, of the intimate connection between Mr. Peters
and the family of John Winthrop, Jr., the name of the latter is to be
added to the cluster of eminent men who, at that time, were drawn to
reside in Salem. He was here, it is quite certain, from 1638 to 1641,
if not for a longer period. There are indications of his presence as
early as March of the former year, when he was appointed with Endicott
to administer the freeman's oath to his uncle Downing. On the 25th of
the next June, he had liberty to set up a salt-house at Royal Neck, on
the east side of Wooleston River. There he erected a dwelling-house
and other buildings, as appears by the depositions of sundry persons
in a land suit about thirty years afterwards, who state that they
worked for him, and were conversant with him there for several years.
His first experiments and enterprises in the salt-manufacture, which
he subsequently conducted on a very extensive scale in Connecticut,
were performed at Royal Neck. His daughter, the widow successively of
Antipas Newman and Zerubabel Endicott, in the suit just mentioned,
recovered possession of that property, comprising forty acres, with
the buildings and improvements. In 1646, John Winthrop, Jr.,
accompanied by a brother of Hugh Peters, Rev. Thomas Peters from
Cornwall in England, began a plantation at Pequot River; and Trumbull,
in his "History of Connecticut," says that "Mr. Thomas Peters was the
first minister of Saybrook." The fortunes and families of Hugh Peters
and John Winthrop, Jr., seem all along to have been linked together.

Downing, Read, and Peters, three of the original planters of Salem
Farms, were drawn back to England and kept there by the engrossing
interest which the wonderful revolution then breaking out in that
kingdom could not but awaken in such minds as theirs. Here and