John Perkins Lord, Esq. (1786-1877) was the son of the Gen. John Lord and Mehitabel Perkins Lord. Gen. Lord was a shipping merchant and partner of Jonathan Hamilton, and made the family’s home at Quamphegan Landing on present-day Liberty Street, South Berwick. Two brothers of John Perkins Lord were Nathan Lord, president of Dartmouth College from 1828-1863; and Samuel Lord of Portsmouth, NH, cashier of the Piscataqua Bank who owned the John Paul Jones House. Their sister, Susannah Lord Hayes, married Judge William Allen Hayes.

Late in life, probably about 1866, John Perkins Lord annotated the Records of the First and Second Churches of Berwick. In a note identifying himself he wrote,“gr. At H. C. [Harvard College] 1805; studied law: was a merchant in Portsmouth, NH: was a member of ye Legislature of Mass., and officer of Customs in Boston.”

He may have studied law with Daniel Webster and Jeremiah Mason in Portsmouth, where he apparently lived on Congress or Islington Street, as the columnist Charles W. Brewster remembered years later. Lord apparently rented a pew in the old North Church. In “Bench and Bar” from the History of Rockingham County, New Hampshire, Lord is listed as being in practice there from 1809 to 1819.

From a South Berwick map of c. 1860.

A merchant with ties to Portsmouth, Lord may have been a key figure in the construction of the Portsmouth Manufacturing Company cotton textile mill at Quamphegan Landing, near his childhood home, around 1830. Historian Annie Baer, in her essay, “The Landing Mill,” wrote, “Ferguson also sold to the Portsmouth Co. a tract of land and wharf on the Berwick side. The same year Moses Varney and wife sold the Company a strip of land along the river in Somersworth; Theodore F. and Thomas Jewett sold to the same, land and wharf in So. Berwick. This land had been bought of John P. Lord.”

George Washington Frosst, who wrote a memoir of his years growing up in South Berwick in the 1830s, said John P. Lord then kept a store at Quamphegan Landing at the corner of Liberty and Pleasant Street. It had earlier been a business owned by his father, the West Indies merchant John Lord. It later became the location of a store run by Isaac L. Moore and then the Maddox family.

Lord’s first wife was Sophia Ladd, born c. 1788, daughter of merchant Capt. Eliphalet Ladd of Exeter (later Portsmouth), and Abigail Hill of old Berwick (b. 1750, daughter of Elisha Hill and Mary Plaisted), who married here in 1772, according to Vital Records of Berwick, South Berwick and North Berwick. In Ports of Piscataqua, William G. Saltonstall describes Ladd as “an ambitious Exeter ship captain and privateersman who later moved down river to 'the Bank.'" At least one of Ladd’s ships was sailed by a local captain, Ebenezer Ricker of Rollinsford, who sailed to Demerara 1799-1802 aboard the Eliza, according to Port of Portsmouth Ships by Ray Brighton.

In a newspaper column in the mid-1800s, Brewster mentioned Lord’s marriage to Sophia Ladd: “1772 [Capt. Ladd] married a lady of Berwick whom he met at her brother's house in Portsmouth, Miss Abigail Hill, who was a true helpmeet. To her good management, he used in his latter days to attribute at least three-fourths of his wealth. Ten children were added to their household... Four of his daughters were married. Rev. William F. Rowland, of Exeter, Capt. Samuel Chauncy, John P. Lord, and John Langdon, Jr. of Portsmouth, were their husbands.” (For more on Eliphalet Ladd and his aqueduct go to Brewster “Rambles” .)

The Records show that John P. and Sophia Lord’s daughter, Susan Hayes Lord, was baptized in South Berwick’s First Parish Congregational Church in 1823; a son, Nathan Augustus Lord, in 1825, and daughter Mary Ladd Lord in 1826. Susan Hayes Lord married Rev. C. F. Mussey, a Presbyterian minister “killed (1865) in Batavia, NY,” according to the Records. Nathan Augustus Lord later became a merchant in Melbourne, Australia. Cemetery records indicate the Lords also had a son, J. Buckminster Lord, who died at age 21.

Lord apparently was active in the church. The Records note, “At a Church meeting held at the dwelling house of John P. Lord Esqr on the 29 October 1828, Voted that after this year the Lords supper shall be administered on the First Sabbath in January, March, May, July, September and November.” It is not known whether Lord was living in this house at that time.

Sophia Lord died in 1830 at age 42. Lord then married Sally Noble, (c. 1804-1897). Both wives are buried near Lord in Old Fields Burying Ground.

For over 50 years Lord was a trustee of Berwick Academy, which he likely had attended as a student and where his father had been a founder. He served as secretary of the board of trustees, where he was remembered, his son noted later, for his “clear, legible, neat English handwriting contrasting strikingly with the records made by other secretaries.”

Lord died in 1877 at the age of 91, and his wife Sally in 1897at the age of 93. The John Perkins Lord House today is the McIntire-McCooey Funeral Home.

From a South Berwick map of 1872.

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