Colonel Benjamin Church

  I am currently working on a series of posts on Dr Benjamin Church, Jr.'s great-grandfather ( not grandfather as has been believed), Colonel Benjamin Church, and King Philip's War, one of the most devastating wars ever fought in North America, but now largely forgotten. It was the single greatest calamity to have occurred in seventeenth century New England. Church, not Robert Rogers of Rogers' Rangers, should be considered the father of the American military tradition of the Rangers. Below is a Paul Revere engraving of a likeness of Colonel Church that appeared in a a 1772 reprint of Colonel Church's history of King Philip's War, compiled by his son Thomas, and originally printed in 1716.