A Vice President in the Family

In 1633, one of our distant Fairbanks relatives—ten generations back from Floyd— a Jonathan Fayerbanke, at age 39 years, sailed from his home in Sowerby, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, Halifax, England to Boston with his wife and children in his own sailing ship. In Halifax, in the spring of 1617, Jonathan had married a pretty redhead named Grace Smith Lee, who was born in 1600 in Yorks, England. Spanning the 9 years from 1618, to 1627, they had 7 children. They were John, Mary, Jonathan, Jonas, George, Susan and another Mary. In 1636, six years after landing in America, Jonathan moved his family from Boston, 40 miles down the Charles River to Contentment, Massachusetts where he built a large home from either his ship’s larger beams and boards or from beams cut from oak in England and shipped to him. The house was erected on 12 acres of government Common Grant Land plus 8 acres of swamp. Jonathan purchased considerable additional lands in later years. The township of Dedham was formed there the same year, and Jonathan and his 3 teen sons entered into the township covenant, promising with 120 others to pay taxes proportionate to wealth and to protect the Christian faith. However, Jonathan did not join the Christian church there for 10 years, having some problems with church doctrine requiring members to make a public declaration of their faith. But the Deacons talked to him in a “loving way” and changed his mind to the result that he “finally declared his abiding faith and made a profound confession to God.” The house he built in Dedham still stands today at 511 East Street. It is the oldest standing timber frame dwelling in America and is a registered National Landmark. It has been owned continuously by the Fairbanks family and has never been mortgaged. It is studied for early American construction methods and several replicas have been erected throughout the United States, one at Boston Commons. Jonathan was a prosperous farmer who ran a self-sufficient estate. He earned the right to wear great boots (thigh high) when his estate grew to the value of $200. Jonathan’s wife, Grace, died on June 19, 1676, in Dedham, Massachusetts. Jonathan died 11 year later on December 5, 1668 at age 74 in Dedham. He is buried in Essex, England. The Fairbanks family was an important and very extended family in Colonial America. Their line can be traced back to 1445 in Yorks, England to a Mr. William Fairbanks. Though they lived in New England, a long-time Loyalist stronghold, (sympathetic to England) the Fairbanks family had many Patriot men in the Revolutionary War. The Fairbanks were intellectual, politically active and some, who became members of the Landed Gentry, held slaves. The Fairbanks family can boast many Yankee soldiers and officers, and naval captains, some of whom were heroes for the Union in The Civil War of the 1860s. Two grandsons of the original Jonathan and Grace Fairbanks of Dedham, another Jonathan, with his own 7 year old daughter and his 15 year old brother, Joshua, were killed in an Indian raid in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1697. The wife of the murdered Jonathan was carried away with 6 other town women and held prisoner by the Indians, but was later released through local government negotiation with “horrors of the body and spirit to tell.”

Just three generations before Floyd, a Jason Fairbanks was hanged on September 1, 1801 for murdering Elizabeth Fales. Reports of the day said, “Meeting, as oft they did, by the old apple tree near the birch thicket, barely 80 rods from the Fales’ home, Jason Fayerbanke {old spelling} with mere a knife of 10 cents value did stab Miss Fales in the back while she attempt’d to crawl over a low stone wall and shortly thereafter did cut through her throat.” Jonathan, proclaiming innocence, and, after claiming the event was a botched lover’s double suicide, escaped from jail, and fled to Canada where he confessed to a friend it was Elizabeth’s rebuffing his marriage proposal that preceded his killing her. Soon recaptured and tried, Jason Fairbanks was, at the time, a 21-year-old, six-foot man who suffered a frozen elbow from a botched mercury treatment for smallpox. He was the youngest son of Ebenezer Fairbanks, an elderly farmer of the Dedham property living in the Fairbanks’ family home. Jason, spoiled as a youth due to his deformity, had no occupation but instead pursued intellectual activity. After his hanging, which was interrupted by a violent electrical storm, he was memorialized in endless fables—perhaps similar to those about Elvis Presley in modern times—in legends that tell of Jason having been resuscitated by his compatriots after his hanging and then fleeing to South America, where sightings and tales of his adventures prompted stories “oft and colorfully told.” Charles Warren Fairbanks was included in a branch of the family that moved west to Ohio and was, later, while serving as a senator from Indiana, voted Vice President of the United States to serve with Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt from 1905 to 1909. He was by trade a lawyer specializing in new railroad laws and quite prosperous. Fairbanks, Alaska is named after him. It has been argued that if he had gotten along better with Roosevelt, Teddy might have nominated him for the presidency to succeed him, but they were bitterly divided on important issues according to Indiana historians, so William Howard Taft got Teddy’s nod instead. Almost an American president in our line! Maybe Charles Warren Fairbanks was as stubborn as some of us are. For those who desperately want a celebrity—greater than an American vice president—in the family, the movie stars, Douglas Fairbanks and his son, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who popularized swashbuckler movies are direct descendants.