John Kenrick

John Kenrick (1755 - 1833)

John Kenrick was born 6 November 1755. He launched his career as a purveyor of plants and trees (primarily the latter) in 1790 when he laid out several rows of peach stones on his estate on the southwestern slope of Nonantum Hill in Newton (Middlesex County, Massachusetts). So successful were his early experiments in pomology, that in 1794 he founded a commercial nursery, offering the buying public as many varieties of fruit-bearing trees and bushes as were then available in the Boston area. In 1797 Kenrick added ornamental trees to his stock, including two acres of Lombardy poplars, then the most salable tree in this part of the country. Kenrick also aggressively imported foreign varieties of fruit bearing trees and bushes, until his Nonantum Hill nursery became the most extensive and varied establishment of its kind in New England region.

The Kenricks American progenitor, John Kenrick I (1605-1685) , settled in the town of Cambridge Village (now Newton) in 1658, having purchased 280 "broad and tangled acres" on the banks of the Charles River opposite Needham in the present Oak Hill section.

In 1775, our John Kenrick acquired the acreage in the eastern part of Newton on which he later established his famous nursery land that had previously belonged to the prominent Durant family. A site already of historical importance when in 1646, that the Reverend John Eliot of Roxbury (so-called 'Apostle to the Indians') had established the first Christian Indian village of Nonantum in British North America (its 1732 mansion house -- now known as the Durant-Kenrick House -- still stands on Newton's Waverly Avenue).

In 1780 he married Mehitable Meriam, daughter of Newton's fourth Minister, and shortly thereafter left the Highlands, and moved a nighty-four-acre farm near Newton (then Angier's) Corner that he bought from Edward Durant (built by Durant's father in 1732).

John Kenrick proved himself a pioneer of a different kind in 1817 when he published a fifty-nine page booklet entitled 'Horrors of Slavery', which lashes out at American society for its hypocrisy in sustaining slavery. It contained little that was original, consisting mainly of excerpts from works of earlier writers -- this in itself says a great deal about Kenrick's fortune in owning access to such rear and possible progressive material.

"[Is it not] incredible [he queried] that people, so jealous of their natural rights, could hold in the most absolute and degrading servitude, under a free government, a million fellow beings, who have by nature, reason and justice, as fair a claim to liberty as themselves? Could it be supported that people, thus jealous of their own rights, could treat their brethren of a different colour as property, to be bought and sold like oxen and horses! Yet such is the inconsistency of the white inhabitants of the 'United States -- a people who call themselves Christians!"

The antislavery movement was in it infancy when Kenrick venturing on dangerous ground in embracing abolitionism. The majority of northerners regarded slavery as a strictly local concern, which no resident of a free state had any business raising. This was when "Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison were [then still] school-boys, and John Brown was a lad tanning hides in Ohio".

Kenrick's Nursery continued to flourish despite the stance that he took on the controversial slavery issue. In the New English Farmer (1823) it was described as "the finest in America". By the 1820s it included extensive grounds devoted to the cultivation of red currents for the production of large quantities of wine (3600 gallons in 1826 alone).

The early 1830's saw two Kenrick nurseries on Nonantum Hill, later to be united under John's eldest son William's (1789-1872) management. By the end of March 1833, however, John died and Misses Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880) had the following memorial placed on his grave:-

JOHN KENRICK, Esq.
Aged 77 years,
He was laborious, honest, and frugal.
Though possessed of wealth,
He loved no money, but loved his fellow men:
Rigidley sparing in self-indulgence, but bountiful to others.
...

1. Thanks to researcher and historian Ric Greaves