Captain Zadoc F. Brewster was a direct descendent of the renowned William Brewster, who along with William Bradford and Edward Winslow was a leader of the Pilgrims. A native of Scrooby, Nottinghamshire, he helped organize a separatist religious congregation in 1606 and financed the move to Leyden in Holland. Most of the group remained in Leyden, but Brewster sailed aboard the Mayflower, having won the approval of the Virginia Company to settle his congregation in America. His children were named Jonathan, Patience, Fear, Love, and Wrestling. An Elder of the Plymouth Brethren and a Governor of the Colony, he died in 1644, twenty years after the famous voyage.

Nearly one hundred years later, William’s great-great-grandson, Zadoc Brewster was born in Massachusetts in 1742. Then in 1785, he made the long and dangerous journey north with his wife and seven children to Old Thomaston, which later became Rockland. Although he became a stalwart citizen of that city, he was originally warned not to settle there, strangers were not welcome in the area at that time. Why Zadoc did not obey the warning, is not known. He bought most of the land on Mount Madambettax. Ten years later, a Dr. Ezkiel Dodge acquired a title to the same land. Zadoc’s son, Darius, who, like his father, fought in the Revolutionary War, felt his title was the better one, and told Dodge to stay away from his land, something Dodge refused to do. Darius shot him in ‘the fleshy portion of his posteriors,’ an act that sent him to prison and caused him to lose most of his land. Dodge built a house there and the mountain became known as Dodge Mountain.

Zadoc Brewster’s grandson was Zadoc F. Brewster and the man who built this gracious home in about 1862. He was born in 1829, and married Sarah Brown of Rockland. He is listed in the early Directories of Rockland as a seaman and a master mariner. Later, he became a Captain in the US Navy, and served in the Civil War. One of his children, Sarah, was living here in 1882. Today, we can still enjoy his gracious house overlooking the remarkable Rockland Harbor.