The daughter of Mr. Peters came over to America shortly after his death, bringing with her her mother, who, for many years, had been subject to derangement.  They were kindly received; and some of his property, particularly a valuable farm in the vicinity of Marblehead, which the daughter sold to the American ancestor of the Devereux family, was recovered from the effect of his attainder.  She probably soon went back to England, where she spent her days.  Papers on file in the county court show that Elizabeth Barker, widow, “daughter of Mr. Hugh Peters,” was living, in March, 1702, in good health, at Deptford, Kent, in the immediate vicinity of London, and had been living there for about forty years.

In consequence, perhaps, of the intimate connection between Mr. Peters and the family of John Winthrop, Jr., the name of the latter is to be added to the cluster of eminent men who, at that time, were drawn to reside in Salem.  He was here, it is quite certain, from 1638 to 1641, if not for a longer period.  There are indications of his presence as early as March of the former year, when he was appointed with Endicott to administer the freeman’s oath to his uncle Downing.  On the 25th of the next June, he had liberty to set up a salt-house at Royal Neck, on the east side of Wooleston River.  There he erected a dwelling-house and other buildings, as appears by the depositions of sundry persons in a land suit about thirty years afterwards, who state that they worked for him, and were conversant with him there for several years.  His first experiments and enterprises in the salt-manufacture, which he subsequently conducted on a very extensive scale in Connecticut, were performed at Royal Neck.  His daughter, the widow successively of Antipas Newman and Zerubabel Endicott, in the suit just mentioned, recovered possession of that property, comprising forty acres, with the buildings and improvements.  In 1646, John Winthrop, Jr., accompanied by a brother of Hugh Peters, Rev. Thomas Peters from Cornwall in England, began a plantation at Pequot River; and Trumbull, in his “History of Connecticut,” says that “Mr. Thomas Peters was the first minister of Saybrook.”  The fortunes and families of Hugh Peters and John Winthrop, Jr., seem all along to have been linked together.

Downing, Read, and Peters, three of the original planters of Salem Farms, were drawn back to England and kept there by the engrossing interest which the wonderful revolution then breaking out in that kingdom could not but awaken in such minds as theirs.  Here and everywhere, a great check was given to the early progress of the country by the turn of the tide which carried such men back to England, and prevented others from coming over.  If the Parliament had not attempted to arrest the usurpations of the crown at that time, and the Stuarts been suffered to establish an absolute monarchy, the eyes and hearts of all free spirits would have remained fixed on America, and a perpetual