Mirabilis Member Years

There shall be initially 410 Mirabilis Members. Mirabilis is latin for miracle. The Mirabilis Members will each be unique in that they will adopt a year in the great American story.

1630

John Winthrop preached “A Model of Christian Charity” aboard the English ship Arabella at the beginning of the great Puritan migration to North America, primarily Massachusetts. In it he declared that the colony should be “as a city set on a hill” for all the world to see and be instructed. 20,000 English Puritans entered New England over the next ten years. Winthrop’s iconic sermon has been quoted through the years by preachers and politicians like John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.
City of Boston, Massachusetts founded

1631

Rev. Roger Williams arrives in Massachusett’s Colony and is welcomed.

1632

Winthrop allowed 116 freemen to vote for the legislature, which represented almost all the male members of the colony but servants, establishing a precedent for self-government for the colony.

1633

The Colony of Maryland is founded by Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, for commercial reasons and as a refuge for English Catholics

1634

The first Virginia counties are formed, which would become the basic unit of civil jurisdiction in the South as new colonies, then states, were organized. New England government would be based on the townships.

1635

Minister Richard Mather arrived in Boston aboard the James. The ship had been caught in a hurricane, and their survival rightly attributed solely to the special Providence of God. Mather would be the first of three generations of great preachers—men that John Adams called the real founders of the nation.

1636

Massachusetts and Plymouth colonies and the Narragansetts and Mohegan tribes go to war for two years against the Pequot tribe. The Pequots were defeated almost to the point of extermination.

1637

Pequot War ends when Chief Sassacus flees to the Mohawks who promptly cut off his head, whether for the Puritans or the Narragansetts is uncertain.
Religious dissident and perennial malcontent and subversive Anne Hutchinson banished from Massachusetts. Her family of 15 children, husband, and a few followers move to Rhode Island and then to Dutch-claimed territory in New York where the entire band were massacred by Indians.

1638

Sweden successfully established a settlement in Delaware until taken over by the Dutch in 1655

1639

Plymouth and Massachusetts settled their boundary dispute amicably.