John Miller

     John Miller was born say 1639 (deposed age 45 in 1685).² He married Hannah Chater, daughter of John Chater and Alice Emery, circa 1662. He died before 18 April 1720.³
     
     It is believed, but not proven, that our ancestor John Miller was the son of John Miller, a tailor, who bought a house in Salem on 16 February 1652/53 from William Venus and had a wife Elizabeth living 31: 1: 1657. Because the surname Miller was rare in Essex County in the seventeenth century, the John Miller who in 1661 at age 22, and therefore born about 1639, was a witness in a Salem-Beverly law suit between Osmond Trask and Roger Haskell, was almost certainly a son of the Salem tailor. Our ancestor, John Miller of Cape Porpoise, Maine, deposed aged 45 in June 1685, and was therefore born in 1639 or 1640.⁴ He

     John Miller married Hannah soon after the Chaters had moved from Newbury to Cape Porpoise, Maine. The following is taken almost verbatim from Davis' Ancestry of Sarah Miller:

As his father-in-law acted as attorney for Miller on 25 April 1662 in the York County court, in an action brought by Isaac Walker, and was awarded costs as the action was not prosecuted, it would seem that the young couple went immediately farther down the Mine coast to Jeremisquam (now Westport, Maine) near the mouth of the Kennebec River and in the county of Cornwall, which was their home for about seven years.

     On 5 September 1665, John Miller of Sagadahoc (a name applied to the Kennebec neighborhood) took the oath of allegiance at the house of John Mason, on the Sheepscot River, and in 1668 he signed the petition of various inhabitants of Maine to the King, complaining of the encroachments of Massachusetts and asking for the privilege of self-government. Late in 1669, possibly because of the illness or death of Lieut. Chater, the Millers sold their house and land at Jeremisquam to George Pearson of Boston and returned to Cape Porpoise. On 18 December 1672, Miller received the last payment of £40 on this sale and in the Wells town records, under the date of December 20, is entered his receipt to Samuel Wheelwright, who apparently acted as agent of George Pearson, who signed as a witness, "in full payment for all bills from the beginning of the world unto the date hereof."⁵ Also related to this transaction was his acknowledgment, dated 25 June 1695, at York, that he had received £36 from Capt. Francis Champernowne, being payment of a bill given by Capt. Champernowne to Mr. Walter Barefoot and assigned to Mr Pearson and again to Miller.⁶

     Miller doubtless occupied the land at Cape Porpoise which had belonged to Lieut. Chater, of whose estate Miller was administrator in 1671 when Mr. Nathaniel Fryer sued him unsuccessfully in that capacity. In 1681 one hundred more acres were laid out to him by the town at Kennebunk River. He served on the grand jury of York County in 1670, 1680, 1683 and 1687, was constable in 1671 and 1675, was a member of a jury of inquest on John Batson who was found drowned under a mill-wheel in 1685, was a selectman at Saco in 1688 and 1689, when the inhabitants of Cape Porpoise were associated with that town, and acted as surveyor and lot-layer. He had duly submitted to the Massachusetts government in 1680. In the courts he successfully sued Charles Potum and Humphrey Case for debts in 1673 and 1674, was himself sued by Nicholas Frost in 1683 and lost, but gained a questionable advantage over Frost a year later when he had his adversary presented to the magistrate for drunkenness.

     In 1685 he made the deposition by which the date of his birth is estimated, being stated to be forty-five years of age.

     The second Indian war broke out in 1690 in full force and the inhabitants of the scattered settlement of Capt Porpoise deserted their farms and fishing-stages and withdrew to the protection of more thickly settled and better protected towns. Miller and his family fled to New Hampshire and it is there that we find his children in the early years of the next century. The dates of their parents' deaths are unrecorded.⁷