1737 October 21 (Friday). Closely engaged in my preparations. At eve Brother William Parkman came from the Council at Concord, which had voted Mr. Whiting[1] unfit to sustain the holy ministry and advised the church of Concord to dismiss him, which they complied with. N.B. Mr. Francis Pierce here — finished with him about his Boards. N.B. My Brother left us. Dr. Gott called in. P.M. I rode to Shrewsbury and met with Mr. Burr at Mr. Cushing’s.[2] I proceeded to Worcester and stopped at the Goal at the Grates to speak with the Prisoner and to put him in mind of the preparations needful for him to make in order to his keeping his Last Sabbath. I lodged at Mr. Burr’s.
[1]Walett: Reverend John Whiting, minister of the First Church in Concord, 1712-1737.
[2]Forbes: Rev. Job Cushing, the first minister of Shrewsbury, pastor of the church there from 1723 to his death in 1760. He was the father of Col. Job Cushing – also of Rev. John Cushing, who married in 1767 Mr. Parkman’s daughter Sarah. She lived to be eighty-two years of age and died in 1825. Mrs. Tuckerman writes of this daughter Sarah, as follows: — “My grandmother married Dr. John Cushing, of Ashburnham, who taught school in Westborough the year after he graduated from Harvard College. He boarded in the minister’s family, and when he was ordained, at the age of twenty-four, he came back and carried off the daughter as his bride. This was in 1768. She was a remarkably bright and capable woman, judging from the family traditions. There were seven children in that large family younger than she, and she had so much to do that her mother could not spare her the time to go to school when it was kept at intervals. But she was ambitious to learn, and her father helped her all he could. She taught herself to write by copying letters with a piece of chalk on the barn floor, for paper and ink were precious in those days, and not to be unduly wasted.”
The house where the Rev. Mr. Cushing lived stood east of the Shrewsbury Town Hall.