Rambles about Portsmouth. Sketches of persons, localities, and incidents of two centuries: principally from tradition and unpublished documents. By Charles W. Brewster.

9 ~8 RRAMBLES ABOUT PORTSMOUTH.
several generations bore that name and in succession inherited the house and possessed the farm.
The owner in the year 1700 was Samuel Ham. His oldest son, William, who was boin there about 1712, married
Elizabecth Waterhouse and had seven sons-Samuel, who
inherited the homestead) Timothy,t George, William,
Ephraim, Nathaniel, and Benjamin,-and one daughter, who
married Capt. John Tuckerman. The farm came by right
of primogeniture into possession of Samuel, who broke the
entailment, and more than forty or fifty years since the
farm passed out of the family.
It was at a time when the hostile Indians were prowling
in this neighborhood, just after Madam Ursula Cutt had
been murdered on the adjoining farm, that the Ham boys
were left at home one Sunday while the family boat had
borne a load to the old mill-dam meeting. In the midst of
the services, a powder explosion was heard. The meeting
was closed instantly, and the worshippers, putting themselves in position to meet the Indians, proceeded to the
Point. They were agreeably disappointed to find that the
boys had affrighted themselves as well as the whole village,
by the explosion of the great powder-horn.
About a third of a mile north of the old Ham mansionhouse on the Point, between the great eln and the shore,
in a grove, is the cellar of the house of Timothy Waterhouse. He was the third son of Richard Waterhouse, the
tanner, who married Sarah, the daughter of Dr. Renald
Fernald, and owned and occupied Peirce's Island, in 1688.
The other sons of Richard W. were Richard, born in 1674,
and Samuel, born in 1676.
Timothy Waterhouse located himself on this cove above
Freeman's Point probably soon after the year 1700. He
t The children of Timothy Ham were Tim6thy. William, Supply, Henry, Elizabeth, Sarah
(mn:rried Samuel Akerman,) Mary (married Samuel Brewster), rhebe (married Charles
Reding), Ann and Jane.