Book in Progress

The tiny ship lists in the gale as it escaped the protective channel of an oppressive England in 1633. The intuitive, introspective Jonathan Fairbanks, sitting on his family’s only possessions, looked back through the porthole as the land dwarfed into a strip of gray across the beryl waters. Fairbanks uprooted his family of eight to provide them a better future.

Jonathan beaconed to John Prescott, his restless blacksmith friend, to follow with his young family. Both men sought the promised religious freedom, peace, and property that was not available in England. The trips were perilous. They felt it in the uncertainty of the small craft on the expansive sea. There was no way of knowing that it would be the beginning of sacrifices toward security for themselves and their heirs.

In traditional fashion, Jonathan settled in Dedham, Massachusetts Bay Colony, among like-minded families who established an exemplary town through common minds and goals. Prescott, single-handed, fought for and forged a plantation in the west which grew on the edge of uncertainty because of rigid religion and an iron-fisted Governor John Winthrop. Prescott’s Lancaster, Massachusetts Bay Colony, was fraught with insecurity from all directions. The warring natives were to the west, the unhelpful government in the Bay, and mother-nature’s fury and calms surrounded the new plantation.

We watch as Jonathan, struggling first with perceived rejection by his own father, becomes the father he felt he never had, providing for all of his children during his life and after he was gone. One son, Jonas, having a mind of his own, didn’t mold into his father’s perception of the family which caused continual struggles after their life in the New World seemed to be settling.

Lives were lost in Dedham and new lives were brought into the Fairbanks family. Love and dangerous wilderness births enlightened and shadowed the personal landscapes of the frontier township of Lancaster.

Freedom and prosperity came at a price. Both the Fairbanks and the Prescott’s watched as the once peaceful relationship between the settlers and the natives deteriorated over the generations into a struggle of dominance and elimination. No one and no place was safe. Was theirs a story of life, loss, or both?

The book is based on documented facts about the Fairbanks and Prescott families, the early history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Dedham and Lancaster, and the friends that followed them. In 1637, Jonathan Fairbanks built the oldest frame house still standing in North America. John Prescott became known as the “Father of Lancaster.” These two families came together through the love and offspring of their children, Jonas Fairbanks and Lydia (Prescott) Fairbanks. Jonas and Lydia’s family continued the Fairbanks story of settling this nation.

This is the first book in a Made to Last Forever series that will take the Fairbanks family and their wives across North America. As early settlers in Vermont, Ohio, and Kansas, they opened this country. They fought the country’s wars: the French and Indian Wars, Revolutionary War, Civil War, WW I, and WW II. They were significant in shaping and protecting our nation as common people doing uncommon things.