" Bucks Co. History  pg. 442 - 447 "

John Chapman 

First Settler of Wrightstown

By

Henry Mercer
Doylestown, PA.
Friends Meeting House,
Wrightstown Meeting,
November, 8, 1913

" I am on my mother's side, the great - great- great - great - grandson of John Chapman, the first settler of Wrightstown, but I would not venture here in the Wrightstown meeting house at this time to tell you anything new about him if it had not been for an ancient document which my cousin, Miss Margaret Wiggins, gave to me two or three years ago. "

" Here it is, one of those old, yellow manuscripts with its creases, ear marks, time- stains and ink flourishes which, if read between the lines from the point of Sherlock Holmes, would tell us everything.  I have had it framed.  It is John Chapman's marriage certificate 243 years old, signed by his own hand, proving his own legitimate marriage, which he brought over with him in his poxket or sea chest, from his old home in England, which he produced here to show who he was in the first place, which he kept with the greatest care, and which has been moldering here in Wrightstown through this long interval of time until it came into my hands

"My point is that on its face a singular contradiction appears, which so upset my previous knowledge as to the orgin and birthplace of John Chapman, that I became very much more interested in the matter than I had been before, and after going over all the information available namely, a lot of deeds, Friends' certificates, and various versions of a family narrative, which the Chapman descebdants possessed, was led to make an important correction in our records."

" It has always seemed to me rather a backward thing for a man to know that his ancestor came from a certain country, yer not to know or seem to want to know, the name of the town, district or city which gave the ancestor birth.  Such, however, was the state of my family's knowledge upon this subject until the year 1875.  We knew from the records several things concernin John Chapman's life in America, for instance, that he arrived in the Delaware in the ship ' Shield ' or 'Shields'; Captain Toaes, from Newcastle-on-Tyne, after a sever storm that he settled, probably, on the advice of Phineas Pemberton, in Wrightstown, with his wife and three little children, as owner of five hundred acres in October, 1684, that he built one of the earth swellings called caves, near this spot where his sons, Abraham and Joseph, were born, that these twin children were rescued by Indians, that their sister, Marah, captured a deer, that John Chapman's widow became poor and received charity from the meeting, that he died here in 1694 and that his son or grandson wrote an epitaph which never appeared on his grave.

" But as to his birth and ancestry in England our knowledge was very insignigicant.  We knew that he came from a place called Stannah, variously spelled in the records, somewhere in England, that he had been a mariner by profession, had joined the Society of Friends and had been persecuted for his faith, that his second wife's name was Jane Sadler, who was born at a place called Lazenby, wherever that was, and that his father's name was John.  That was all.

" Then in 1875, my grandfather, Henry Chapman, went to England, and found Lazenby, near Northallerton, in Yorkshire, along the line of the Northeastern Railway, and established the fact that this Stannah was Stanhope, in Durham, about thirty miles to the north; that the church register of a very old church at that place, where Bishop Butler afterward preached, showed the birth of Hohn Chapman, the son of John Chapman, in 1626, and that the forefathers of this John lay buried there and in the churchyard at a village of Fosterly nearby.

" So convinced was my grandfather of these facts, to which he had been led to by a remarkable series of coincidences, that he called his new house " Fosterley " and embodied the informatation not only in Davis' " History of Bucks County, then being written, but also in an English book, " Memorials of Old Stanhope, in which the English writer, on my grandmother's authority, refers to John Chapman as having left the church of his ancestors to join the Society of Friends, and gave an account of his descendants here in Wrightstown. "

" Like the rest of my family, I took these things for granted until this old, time-stained paper came into my possession which states at the very beginning, in the most positive manner, that Stannah is in Yorkshire.  If, therefore, the place was in Durham, or if my grandfather was right, then the paper is wrong, wrong, either through an unaccountable blunder in geography, or else wrong, because the document was intentionallu signed at a nonexistent place and hence possibly invalid. "

" To settle these doubts, I went over all the evidence and as no place called Stannah appeared anywhere on the map of England and as there were three or four Lazenbys, I never cleared up the matter until I found what my grandfather had never seen -- namely, a note that had been copied from one of the most interesting old manuscripts we ever had in the county, which is the official record of the arrivals of the first settlers, kept by Penn's secretary, Phineas Pemberton, known as " The Book of Arrival " , which in some unaccountable way, has recently been lost or mislaid at our courthouse.  This note daid that John Chapman came from Stanghah, ( now spelled Stanghow in Bartholomew's Atlas of England and Wales, 1903 Edition, plate 15 ) in the parish of Skelton, in the county of York. "

" That was conclusive.  The old marriage certificate was right.  Strange to say, my grandfather had found the wrong Lazenby in the right county and about thirty miles from the right Lazenby.  He had found a John Chapman, the son of John Chapman, born in the right year, but at the wrong Stannah and we had to begin all over again as far as John Chapman's birthplace was concerned "

" My maps and gazetteers showed that the real Stannah, or Stanghow, was and still is, a little town of four or five houses set upon the spur of a hill, where the highlands slope downward over what is called the Vale of Cleveland, toward the German Ocean, about five miles away.  The mouth of the River Tees is in sight, where, according to the old Wrightstown manuscript, the ships of Chapman's boyhood days went in and out, and whence, possibly from the port of Stockton, he himself, late in life sailed to America.

" Near by, stands the ancient parish church of Skelton, where John Chapman was baptized, and where in a strong box, built in the thickness of the wall, are to be found at this moment, not only of his life and birth, but probably of three generations of his forefathers.  A few miles across county is Guisborough, mentioned in another Wrightstown manuscript, where many of the early Friends' meetings were held, a town which an old English writer says is as beautiful as Pozzuoli in the Bay of Naples, and far more salubrious.  The real Lazenby, where my ancestress, Jane Sadler, was born, lies four or five miles northward by the sea nad near a moor known as Lazenby Whinn.  And behind Stannah rises a hight hill known as Roseberry Topping at the base of which the great navigator, Captain Cook, was born and the summit of which looking over Stanghow, which commands one of the finest views in the norht of England, such a view we might think, as Kingsley describes in his lines : "

" Airly Beacon, Airly Beacon
Oh the pleasant sight to see
Shires and towns from Airly Beacon,
While my love climbed up to me "

" The discovery of iron in the Cleveland hills about 1850 has changed the county around Stannah and at one place near by, thrown up a mountain of slag.  But several little brick houses are there, where the roads cross and several other older buildings stand out on the moor on isolated farms. "

" Would that I might be able to visit this little known corner of Old England, where associations would rise from the earth at every step, or that I might learn more than I have learned from the travels of two of my friends, recently prevailed upon to go there, one of whom reached Stanghow in such dense fog that he could not make out the points of the compass, and the other, who was in such a hurry that he only had time to see the strong box in Skelton Church, without examining its contents. "

" But through the kindness of the present rector I have had these old records searched and after a good deal of outside investigation, have thus far been able to gather one or two new facts as to the origin and birthplace of John Chapman as follows :

" He was one of the name Chapman, very common all over England and of a family, numerous in 1626, near Stanghow, but now extinct there.  The fact that there were several Johns living about the same time, all referred tp om tje church records, complicates matters, but I am thus far nearly certain that his great - grandfather was Thomas Chapman, a rich tanner, of Stanghow, who died in 1586 and is buried at Skelton Church.  He had two brothers, viz: Thomas and Robert and a sister, Ann Stonehouse, the first and last of whom may have been living when he left for America.  He had a sister - in - law, Ann, possibly also then living, with her two sons, his nephews, John and Robert Chapman.  And his mother, Jane, was alive two years before he left for America, according to the probate of her will."

"In view of these facts, it is a very curious thing that none of the names of any of these relatives appear as witnesses at his wedding, or sign this old deed, by which he bought his five hundred acres of American land before he left England, as if possibly, some of them might have remained in the Church of England and disapproved of his change of creed, or as if he might have quarredled with them, one and all

" As he was born in 1626, he must have been, for twenty years at least, a member of the Church of England in which he was baptized, even if he joined the followers of Fox in 1648, at the beginning of the society.  His persecutions, the first of which occurred not underthe rule of the English Church, but of the Puritans, in the time of Richard Cromwell, and finally during the reign of Charles the Second, narrated not only in the old Wrightstown record, but in the celebrated book known as " Besse's Persecutions of the Quakers ".  John Chapman refused to swear.  He was fined for attending meetings and was unjustly taxed through false witnesses, but the most remarkable incident in all his troubles was his strange silence at Sunderland, when he went to see, or feed or comfort some Quaker Friends who were sitting in the stocks, was put in himself, absolutley refused to speak to the officers, and was sent to Durham jail for nine weeks. "

" The old deed has a curious seal.  It looks like the impression of an ancient stone intaglio, stamped through the paper with the device of a bleeding heart pierced with two arrow, as if pressed from a signet ring, certainly not worn by Chapman, but possibly by the other party, Captain Toaes, who might have found it in some trading voyage in the Levant.  The document shows that Chapman bought his land according to the Wrightstown manuscript, the day before he started for America, and from this same Captain Toaes who grought him over in his ship the Shield, of Stockton-on-Tees, which ship, with the same captain and a lot of emigrants was blown up the Delaware river  in a heavy gale in the year 1678 and tied to a tree, after which it was so cold over night that the passengers were landed next morning on the ice. "

" It was on the longest day of the year, 1684, when Chapman left Stanghow with his wife and his little children, Ann ( afterwards Ann Parson, the minister ) aged eight, John, five, Marah, thirteen and poor little Jane, aged twelve, who died at sea and was thrown overboard and with his ward, Ann Parsons, of Kirk Leatham, in Cleveland, therefore he must have started either on the traditional Mid-summer Day of St. John the Baptist, June 24, which the Germans would have called his " name day ", or on the 21st of June.  He had received his portion from his mother's will about two years before, and his deed for five hundred acres in " Pennsollvania" , with Captain Toaes had just been signed.  But he never could have heard of Wrightstown or had any intention of coming there, since his land, though bought, was not apportioned in the wilderness, until he reached Philadelphia."

" He was careful in getting character cetificates and required one from Captain Toaes, when he left the ship, but strange to say he never took the trouble, during lifetime, to get Penn's official patent for his five hundred acres, and that document, here show, with the great seal of Pennsylvania stamped on beeswax, in a box of hammered tin plate, probably made in Germany, first came into possession of his son, John Chapman, Jr. in 1705. "

" if any one proposes to investigate the English origin of John Chapman, this marriage certificates shows that he must abandon Stanhope and go to Stannah or Stanghow, in the Cleveland country of the North Ricing of Yorkshire, and the ancient strong box in Skelton Church.  I am only pretending to present this fact, not to write his life.  What else any one can read in the Chapman narrative I pass over, with a final word as to his gravestone, probably without an epitaph, which appears was probably carried off as building material about 1828 from the old Friends' burial ground at Logtown, the reprehensibly negelected and abandoned by this meeting, and which stone may be now built into the wall of Jacob Liverzy's house at Penn's Park."