Joseph Loomis

     Joseph Loomis was born before 1590, in Messing, Essex, England. He married Mary White, daughter of Robert White and Bridget Allgar, on Monday, 30 June 1614 in Messing, Essex, England, Possibly they married in Shalford.¹ Joseph Loomis was a woolen draper, a merchant engaged in the purchase of cloth from the many weavers who wove on hand looms in their cottage homes.  He had a store in Braintree, Essex, Eng., stocked with cloths and other goods which a draper usually dealt in. These products he sold both wholesale and retail to tailors and consumers in general. Braintree and near-by towns were centers of the cloth manufacture, as many weavers from Flanders had been induced to come to England by Edward III and they had been followed by others in the latter part of the sixteenth century, who had settled in Essex, not far from Braintree, in 1570. Joseph Loomis was in prosperous circumstances and his father-in-law, Robert White, was a man of considerable means for those times.¹ The family stayed in Dorchester for a year and then accompanied Rev Ephraim Hewitt to Windsor, CT on 17 Aug 1639.¹ Joseph Loomis and Mary White immigrated on the ship Susan and Ellen arriving on 17 July 1638 at Boston, MA. Their children Joseph, Sarah, Elizabeth, Mary, John, Thomas, Nathaniel and Samuel were with them.¹ Joseph Loomis settled at Windsor near the junction of the Farmington river with the Connecticut, on the island.  The island was high land and so called because it became an island at every great freshet of the river.  His house has been in the perpetual possession of the family down to the present time and is probably the oldest one now standing in Connecticut, which is still owned by the descendants of the pioneer builder.  It was on this island that Capt. William Holmes and a few other men of the Plymouth colony established a trading house in 1633, which was the first permanent English settlement in Connecticut.¹ February 1640 he had granted him 21 acres on the west side of the Connecticut river; he also had several large tracts on the east side, partly from the town and partly by purchase.¹ Joseph was Deputy in 1643 and 1644.¹ Joseph Loomis died on 25 November 1658 in Windsor, CT.¹