I n 1955, when my mother, née Eileen Mary Hopkins, inherited an old, dark, beat-up wooden chest at the death of her grandmother in Santa Barbara, California, she didn’t think much about it. “It was just the piece of furniture on which Grandma kept the antique Russian Samovar,” Mom said, “which I found much more interesting.”
Mom didn’t care much about her American heritage since she was born and raised in England. Her American father, Prince Hopkins, brought her to America after her English mother died, and to rescue her from the Blitzkrieg in 1939.
The chest was moved to Pasadena and placed in a dark living room we seldom used. In 1965 it was transported across town, and served as a resting place in Mom’s bedroom for her clothing and earrings, when she was too hurried to store them properly. Not until 2004, when Mom gave the chest to me, did we place it in some light and look at it closely.
It’s a massive beast, roughly four feet wide, two feet deep and two feet tall. The crudely carved decoration was chiseled and stamped by hand. The lid has no male counterpart to the lock on the chest, So we’ve determined it to be a later replacement. Also, the wooden pegs and hand-hammered metal plate covering the chest’s keyhole don’t match the more modern hinges with screws attaching the lid. Slots at the back reveal the placement of the original hinges, probably of leather that disintegrated long ago. A trip to England brought us to the chest’s twin, during a tour of an old manor house in Surrey. The docent reported the twin to be Jacobean, made in 1606.
My great grandfather Charles Harris Hopkins brought the chest to California from Maine sometime after 1850. Most, if not all his ancestors had sailed from England to America between 1620 and 1640. Since no seats were available on board ships back then, such chests served as tables and benches as well as containers.
By 1640, Charles’ ancestors had settled on Cape Cod, where the chest resided for the first 160 to 184 years. We will never know which ancestor brought it to America, but here are some possibilities.
Charles was a seventh generation descendent of Stephen Hopkins through Stephen’s son Giles, and an eighth generation descendent through Stephen’s daughter Constance. Could the chest have been brought on the Mayflower by one of them? Or by Stephen himself? Could it possibly have sailed with him to America twice, surviving the first trip to Jamestown in 1609 and the shipwreck on Barbados?
Perhaps Stephen’s in-laws brought it. Giles’ wife Catherine and her father Gabriel Wheldon could have hauled it from England through Plymouth to Yarmouth, where they, Giles and Stephen built the first houses.
Constance’s husband Nicholas Snow could have carried it with him on the Anne when he sailed to Plymouth in 1623. Perhaps our ancestor William Brewster brought it on the Mayflower, though his chest in Pilgrim Hall looks very different—more Dutch. Maybe his daughter Patience brought the chest with her when she sailed on the Anne with her sister Fear. Or perhaps Patience’s husband, Thomas Prence of Glouchester, shipped it with him on the Fortune in 1621.
Ancestor Edmund Freeman could have had the chest made in Sussex before bringing it on the Abigail. After landing in Boston Harbor, Edmund would have hauled it first to Saugus, then Plymouth, then Duxbury and finally to Sandwich, which he helped settle in 1637.
It could have belonged to Stephen Tracy, part of the group who emigrated through Holland. Or Samuel Mayo could have brought the chest from Essex, in which case it landed on Long Island before moving to Eastham where many of our ancestors resided. Edward Hawes, part of Freeman’s group in Sandwich, is another possibility.
It’s more certain that by 1700 the chest resided in Harwich, either in the home of Joseph Hopkins (Stephen’s great grandson through Giles) or Nathanial Snow (Stephen’s great great-grandson through Constance). These families united when Joseph’s son, Prence Hopkins, married Nathanial’s daughter, Prence’s third/fourth cousin, Patience Snow, in 1753.
Their son Prince Jr was born in Harwich in 1768 and would have moved the chest off the Cape in 1804 to New Sharon, Maine. Their son Prince III would have taken it with him to North Vassalboro, Maine, where he and his wife Olive Hawes owned the P. Hopkins Hotel. My great grandfather Charles Harris was their child. Their son Prince IV died at age four.
News of gold in California reached North Vasselboro when Charles was twelve. He made it to San Francisco a few years later. But the chest probably didn’t travel with him quite yet.
Charles landed a lucrative job in San Francisco’s new mint and put enough change in his pocket to finance a return trip in 1865 to Maine to marry his childhood sweetheart, Lizzie A. Cullis. Maybe Charles brought the chest to California when he returned with Lizzie. But the poor girl died soon after in childbirth.
Charles then married Ruth Merritt Mathews, one of the twenty-seven children of Isaac Merritt Singer who died in 1876. Charles received Ruth’s inheritance when she also died during childbirth in 1878, and became the major holder of Singer Manufacturing Company stock.
Charles’s third wife was the daughter of an Englishman Charles had known at the mint. Charles was forty-six when he married eighteen year-old Mary Isabelle Booth, known as May.
In 1885, May successfully gave birth to Charles’ only child in Oakland, California, my grandfather Prince Charles Hopkins. By 1900 the family had built and moved to a large home in Santa Barbara, which Charles claimed as his residence when he became the twenty-fourth member of the California Mayflower Society, established in1908. The chest remained in Santa Barbara through Charles’ death in 1913 and May’s in 1955. And that leads us back to the beginning of this story. ▄
