This account of the life of Thomas Rushmore of Hempstead, Long Island, a seventeenth century pioneer and so far as is known the American patriarch of all the Rushmores in the United States, can hardly be called a biography in the full sense of the word. Except for the testimony of two witnesses at his 1676 trial before the New York Court of Assizes in a Long Island land dispute, no contemporary picture of him exists, and no family legends or memories of him have survived. Did he cross the Atlantic alone or with his parents? Who were his parents, and what became of them? What did he look like? We will probably never know. Surviving physical evidence of his existence is limited to extensive specimens of his handwriting in the Hempstead town records. His signature has survived, and we know he spelled his name two ways: usually Rushmur, but often Rushmore. Yet he is a significant presence in the early records of the town of Hempstead, and from them and from other colonial documents, though they are sometimes vague or fragmentary, enough evidence exists to characterize the man and sketch a broadly coherent picture of his life.
     Who, then, was Thomas Rushmore? An Englishman certainly, and a member of the Hartford, Connecticut, colony in 1649 when his name first appears in historical records. But as to where in England he came from we can only speculate, for no record has yet been found either of his existence in England or of his passage across the ocean. As the majority of New England settlers came from the eastern counties of England, especially East Anglia, there is a good possibility that he derives from that part of the country. But it's also possible that he was a West Country man. The second most important source of migration to New England was southwestern England, especially Dorset, Wiltshire, and Somerset, and many of these West Country people were among the early settlers of Connecticut
     No birth registration for Thomas Rushmore has as yet been found. One Long Island genealogist says he was born in 1609, but many details of his life suggest that that is much too early. For example, on September 6, 1649, the Particular Court of Hartford found him and two others guilty of "disorderly carriage in the meeting house upon the Sabbath Day" and sentenced him to prison "till the Court sees cause to free him."  If born in 1609, he would have been about forty years old then. The offense, however, suggests a young man, not a forty-year od. High spirits or restlessness during a long church service seems the likely explanation. The sentence itself, nevertheless, implies that he was not too young, certainly not under seventeen years old. But he probably did not go to prison, for a Thomas Burnham put up ten pounds as guarantee "that Rushmore his man shall appear at the next Particular Court and carry good behavior in the meantime." Apparently, Rushmore was Burnham's employee, that is, an apprentice or a household servant and, since the whereabouts of his parents is unknown, perhaps his ward as well. If we assume that in September 1649 Rushmore was between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one, he was born sometime between 1628 and 1632.
     During his time in Connecticut Rushmore appeared twice more before the Hartford Particular Court On March 1, 1654/55, he sued a John Webb for debt and breach of contract and asked thirty pounds in damages. Webb countersued for twenty pounds. The Court awarded both sides a portion of what they sought, and Rushmore came out ahead but only by about a pound. The second time, June 7, 1655, Rushmore was found guilty of being drunk and fined ten shillings, the usual amount for a first offense.
     Sometime then between June 1655 and the winter of 1656-57 Rushmore decided that the land across Long Island Sound looked greener, and he joined the English settlement of Hempstead in New Netherland on the western end of Long Island. In view of the legal difficulties he got himself into in Hartford, he must have felt that the authorities in Connecticut, rightly or wrongly, were prejudiced against him and that he had no future there. He wanted a new start, and perhaps he saw his main chance in the more fluid social situation of frontier Long Island.
     A town in what is now Nassau County, New York, Hempstead was founded in 1644 by a group of English families mainly from Connecticut, who had purchased the Indian title and obtained a patent from the Dutch governor of New Netherland. For one reason or another, they had become dissatisfied with life in New England. That many no doubt resented the theocratic polity and authoritarian clergy of the New England colonies is not to say that they were religious rebels. But they were not so much Puritans as English Protestants. Though their church government was Congregational in form, their creed was the kind of Reformed Christianity defined by the Westminster Confession and compatible with the Reformed Church of the Dutch. To most of these settlers, however, religion was a given, an institution they took for granted as part of the inherited framework of society, as a moral sanction for their behavior, and as a source of education for their children. The mainspring of their energies in the new settlement was economic. The town was large, about 125,000 acres in area. Its lands extended across the width of the island from the Sound to the Atlantic Ocean, the soil was fertile, and its terrain, hilly on the north but flat and open or easily cleared below the hills to the south, would make fine meadowland and pasture, as well as farmland. The settlers intended to make cattle-raising, supplemented by grain and tobacco, the economic basis of their community. More people came from the east and west ends of the Island as well as from the mainland, and by the mid-1650s there were more than a hundred families in the town.
     The earliest date which we can be certain Rushmore was in Hempstead is March 6, 1656/57, when he purchased a home lot of several acres for ten pounds and proprietary rights to additional land for forty pounds more. The property, which he bought from William Yeats, included a dwelling house and outbuildings, but by the terms of the sale he could not occupy the house until the first of May. If single at the time, he may have stayed temporarily at the house of John "Rock" Smith, which was licensed as an inn or public house. At this stage in the town's history most of its land was still held in common, so his home lot was probably in or near the so-called Town Spot, the center of the present village of Hempstead. Though he may have made a cash down-payment for the property, coined money was scarce in the colonies in the seventeenth century, and it is likely that he paid the balance, at least, in cattle and or grain.
     Why he chose Hempstead rather than, say, Flushing or Newtown is not known, but he may have had friends there, perhaps former inhabitants of Connecticut, who would vouch for him and may indeed have invited him. Only the townspeople by a majority vote had the authority to admit newcomers, and if the newcomers were strangers they had to have letters of recommendation from the communities they had left and to affirm that they were Reformed Protestant Christians and not Quakers or "any such-like opinionists."
     Was he married when he came to Hempstead? If so, no record of a marriage in Connecticut survives. If not, he surely was soon to be. Unmarried men were rarely admitted as members of New England settlements in the early days, and, in any case, the primitive conditions of those times made a wife and children almost economic necessities. If he was born about 1630 as proposed above, in 1657 he would have been in his mid-twenties, the usual age for men in New England to marry.
     Genealogists do not agree about the details of Rushmore's marital history. Charles Werner says that he married Martha, daughter of John Hicks, one of the leaders of the town, but there is no evidence of this in the Hicks genealogy. Werner says that Martha was the mother of Thomas, Jacob, John, and several daughters, and he makes no mention of a second marriage. Rosalie Fellows Bailey, on the other hand, says that Rushmore's wife Martha was the second daughter of John "Rock" Smith. Because Rushmore and Samuel Denton, who married Martha's older sister Mary, bought property rights jointly on March 15, 1663/64, Bailey speculates that Rushmore may have married Martha Smith before that date. This Martha was certainly the mother of Ann and Mary Rushmore who were named in their grandfather Smith's 1695 will, and Bailey says she was probably stepmother of Thomas, John, and Elizabeth Rushmore. She makes no mention of Jacob. Herbert Armstrong Poole, who has done the most complete Rushmore genealogy, thinks that Rushmore was married twice, the first time to a Martha "who might have been a Hicks, but the Hicks genealogy does not confirm this" or to a sister of John "Rock" Smith, one of Hempstead's original proprietors and, like Rushmore, of the yeoman class. Poole says that Rushmore's second marriage was to Martha, daughter of John "Rock" Smith, that Thomas, John, Elizabeth, and Jacob were by his first marriage, and that Ann and Mary, of whom he can find no trace after the Census of 1698, were by the second.
     Poole and Bailey, it should be noted, apparently assume that Rushmore was born in 1609 and that he was in Hempstead by 1648. But there is no evidence to support these assumptions, and the Connecticut court records prove that the second, at least, is erroneous. It may be that Rushmore had only one wife-Martha daughter of John "Rock" Smith. There is no evidence for marriage to a daughter of John Hicks, and the gentry status of Mr. Hicks, a leading citizen and several times magistrate of the town, makes it unlikely that his daughter would marry a new arrived member of lower social rank. Furthermore, the theory that he had a wife before Martha Smith appears to hinge on the fact that his father-in-law, John "Rock" Smith, mentioned only two of his Rushmore grandchildren-Ann and Mary-in his 1695 will and made no mention of the older Rushmore childrer Thomas, John, Jacob, and Elizabeth because they were not his.  But it may be for reasons that we cannot now discover that grandfather Smith deliberately chose not to endow the older children. Perhaps it was because Thomas, the eldest, had already inherited his father's estate in 1683 when his father died and because neither John nor Elizabeth was married. John, so far as is known, never married and there is no record of Elizabeth's marrying, though she is listed in the 1698 census as living in the household of Thomas Ellison, possibly as his housekeeper.
     Like many of America's early pioneers, Rushmore was land-hungry. The home lot and proprietary rights he bought from Yeats in 1657 were just the first of his acquisitions. The following year he was granted ten acres by the town, and in April 1659 he bought the houses and lands of John Sturges, who was moving away. This pattern of real estate accumulation characterized all of the twenty-six-or-so years of Rushmore's life in Hempstead, and by the time of his death in 1683 he had owned, all told, over 300 acres, some by direct purchase, some by town grant, and some by exercise of proprietary rights he had purchased. These holdings were on the South Shore necks, in the woodland south of the Hempstead Plains, in the Westbury and Herricks neighborhoods, and at Matinecock, but the largest were in the Great Neck and Manhasset areas. In the seventeenth century a few men, e.g., John Seaman, Robert Jackson, John Hicks, had estates of several thousand acres each, but most of the Hempstead men were small holders who never owned more than fifty acres.
     In 1659 Rushmore's assessed valuation for tax purposes was twenty-seven pounds, an amount based on the ten-pound lot he bought from Yeats in 1657, ten acres on the North Side granted by the town in 1658, and "gate rights" to pasturage for his caffle on Rockaway Neck (he owned eight in 1659).  There were sixty-two rate-payers in 1659, the highest assessed at fifty~ight pounds, the lowest at six pounds. The average assessment was twenty-three pounds. Twenty-two men paid more than he, thirty-nine paid less. Thus within two or three years of his arrival Rushmore ranked among the richer men of Hempstead.
     Rushmore quickly gained the confidence and trust of the town. By occupation he was a smith, a man skilled in metal-worldng. Though a member of the artisan class, he seems to have been a man of many parts. That he had some education is evident from his work as copyist for John James, the town clerk, in 1658 and at other times. In 1679-1680 he himself served as town clerk.  He knew enough geometry and trigonometry to take linear and angular measurements, for he sometimes did surveying work, laying out land both under the authority of the town and for individuals. In the later years of his life he set up as a miller and operated both a saw mill and a grist mill. The intelligence and energy indicated by these activities must have recommended him. Before long, as is clear from the town records, he became associated with the most prominent men in the town and began to play an active part in running the community.
     In Hempstead when Rushmore arrived, authority rested nominally with the two magistrates appointed annually by the Dutch governor in New Amsterdam, but the actual running of the town was the responsibility of five Townsmen, administrative officers elected by the freeholders at the annual April town meeting. The Townsmen, as the town records put it, were to do everything that shall "conduce for the good and benefit of the town except only giving out of land and receiving in of inhabitants." The admission of new members to the town and the division or allotment of land were matters which only the freeholders themselves could decide by majority vote in general town meetings. In 1658 only a year or two after his coming to Hempstead, Rushmore was elected one of the five townsmen for that year, along with Robert Jackson, Henry Pearsall, John Smith, and Thomas Carle. From being the object of reproving authority in Connecticut, he had become an agent of
authority in his adopted town. This was just the first of many positions of trust that he held.
     Soon after the conquest of New Netherland by the English, the Duke of York's governor Richard Nicolls called an assembly of delegates from each of the Long Island towns and the town of Westchester to convene late in the winter of 1664/65 at Hempstead. Known as the Duke's Laws convention, this historic meeting was to acquaint the towns with the code of laws by which the new province was to be governed and to resolve other matters important to the towns, such as town boundaries. Rushmore must have been at this important event, for at a town meeting in February 1664/65 along with seven other leading citizens of the town-John Hicks, Richard Gildersleeve, John Seaman, Robert Jackson, Henry Pearsall, John Ellison, and James Pine-he was elected to help the Hempstead attorney at the convention "to state and plead their case and cases about their bounds... and any other thing that probably may conduce to the benefit of the Town in this juncto (juncture) of affairs."
     Not long after, on April 22, 1665, on the town's recommendation Governor Nicolls commissioned Rushmore ensign in the train band, the local military unit of the provincial militia. In the seventeenth-century train bands there were three officer ranks: captain, lieutenant, and ensign. Rushmore held his post at least until June 1670.
     The Duke's Laws also required that each town annually elect a constable and four overseers, who were "to rate each inhabitant according to his estate ... to make regulations for the government of the town, and to fix annually a rate for the support of the minister and the care of the poor."  Under the new provincial judicial system, they also composed the Town Court. Rushmore was an overseer in 1667-1668 and probably in other years as well, but the records are incomplete. As noted above, he served as town clerk in 1679-80. In 1681, after Governor Andros had been recalled, Rushmore was chosen to present a petition on the town's behalf to the next royal governor on his arrival. In 1683 he was selected to examine the boundary lines of the town's proprietors to make sure they conformed to the town records. And from 1681 to 1683, the year of his death, he was one of  four attorneys appointed by the constable and overseers to prosecute the town's suit in the Cow Neck dispute.