Sawyer Family, Newburyport, MA 

Sawyer Family, Newburyport, MA. Joseph Sawyer (1777-1795) traveled with Dorothy Smith, his aunt, from Massachusetts as a sailor on the Caroline during her visit to Savannah, GA, in 1793. According to a portage bill for the brig Caroline, compiled in August 1795, Sawyer was listed among the sailors, with his monthly wages set at £4.10.0, on a voyage to England that departed from Newburyport in August 1794 and returned in July 1795.  His time of entry was listed as 30 July 1794.  He did not sign for his wages on the portage bill, and the entries for him under the columns “time in pay,” “whole wages,” or “wages due,” are blank.  The reason is that during this voyage, while in London in January 1795, Sawyer died (see Josiah Smith Papers, 1785-1817, Newburyport Historical Society).  Joseph’s sister, Sibyll, is also mentioned in Dorothy Smith's diary.  Their parents were Dr. Micajah Sawyer (1747-1815) and Sibyll Farnham Sawyer (1746-1842), Dorothy Smith’s older sister.  Sawyer earned an A.B. from Harvard in 1756 and afterwards became one of Massachusetts’s leading doctors, “his qualifications,” according to James Thacher, “were not surpassed by any young man of his time” (American Medical Biography [Boston, 1828], vol. 2, p. 73).  He married Miss Farnham on 25 November 1766 and moved into a home on the corner of State and Pleasant Streets in Newburyport. The Sawyers attended the First Religious Society in Newburyport along with the Smiths, and, like Josiah Smith, Micajah Sawyer was a Whig Democrat.  He served as a Justice of the Peace in 1772 and as a member of the town committee in 1774.  He was awarded an honorary M.D. by Harvard in 1793. He was a charter member of the Massachusetts Medical Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Micajah Sawyer became quite prosperous, with real estate valued at $10000 and personal property valued at $63000 in 1807. See Russell C. Farnham, The New England Descendants of the Immigrant Ralph Farnum of Rochester, Kent County, England and Ipswich, Massachusetts [Portsouth {NH}: Peter Randall, 1999], vol. 1, 405-06; Clifford K. Shipton, ed., Biographical Sketches of those who attended Harvard College, 17 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933-75), vol. 14 (1756-60), 85-86; Newburyport Tax Records 1807, Newburyport Public Library.