THE RETROSPECT OF THE YEAR. 187 



the domestic life of the times, as the homestead succes- 

 sively of his son and grandson, both named Rufus, the 

 former of whom was again the fifth child by his second mar- 

 riage with Mary Eudicott, [by whom he also had daugh- 

 ters, Tryphosa and Tryphena], and the latter of whom, in 

 1758, conveyed his interest to Capt. George Dodge; and 

 through him, with Israel and Deacon Joshua Dodge, and 

 their grantees, Jonathan Conant, 1 and others, it came into 

 the possession, towards the close of the century, of Col. 

 Israel Thorndike of Beverly. 2 From him it passed through 

 the intermediate hands of John Safford of Hamilton and 

 Barnabas Dodge of Beverly, to Henry, an elder brother 

 of Capt. Joseph White of Salem, and on the death of the 

 former in 1825, to Capt. Joseph White. He enjoyed it 

 but a few years, spending the afternoon before his tragic 

 death April 6, 1830, 3 in a visit to the farm. Indeed one 

 of the plots for taking his life was to overturn him in his 

 chaise after dark, while riding home alone from Cherry 

 Hill as he often did, and to make it appear that his death 

 had resulted from accident. Hon. Stephen White, his 

 brother Henry's son and his devisee, was the next owner of 

 Cherry Hill and, for some years, a royal hospitality pre- 

 vailed there. Nathaniel P. Willis was a frequent guest, 

 and so Avas Daniel Webster. From him the estate passed 

 to Col. Amos Shelden, who leased it for a time as a man- 

 ual labor school to an Institution numbering some sixty 



1 A marked character in his day; the last of the name to occupy the old Roger 

 Conant Homestead, which stood near Kittredge's Crossing in Beverly; a member 

 of the Committee of Correspondence and Safety; also a selectman and one of the 

 town representatives of the year 1780, the first year of the State Constitution. See 

 History and Genealogy of the Conant Family, pp. 118, 226-8. 



*Se Stone's History of Beverly, pp. 130-2 and Quincy's History of Harvard Uni- 

 versity, Vol. 11, pp. 111-14, 596. Ward's Journal and Letters of Samuel Curwen, 

 (4th Ed.) pp. 661-4. 



s See works of Daniel Webster, Vol. vi, pp. 41-51. Stone's Hist. Beverly, p. 9. 



