Text Box:         Home        Contact Salem Focus at   salemfocus@comcast.net Text Box: Roger Conant - Founder of Salem Roger Conant, founder of Salem, was born in East Budleigh, Devonshire, England, in 1592. Conant sailed with his family to Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1623 on the ship Anne. The venture was financed by the Dorchester Company, a group of English investors, who hoped to reap financial gain from a fishing station that was to be established north of Plymouth in a place called Cape Ann. The ship, however, had to land in Plymouth in accordance with the patent granted to the Dorchester Company by the Crown.  Most of the people on the ship were risking everything they had in order to improve their lives. While some of them were Puritans, many of them were not, and not many were as passionate about their religion as the few Puritans among them.   When the Anne landed in Plymouth, where the Mayflower had landed three years earlier, Conant and many of his fellow Anne passengers quickly found the little settlement stifling because of the narrow, rigid views of the predominantly Separatist Puritan colonists who ran the tiny colony. Unlike the Dorchester venture with its accent on financial return, the Mayflower venture had been primarily religious with the accent on Separatist Puritanism. That is, they wanted to separate themselves from the Church of England.  Conant and a number of his fellow Anne passengers, plus a few dissident Plymouth Colonists, soon departed for Nantasket just to the north of Plymouth, where they hoped to be free of the oppressive environment in Plymouth and planned to start a fishing station. While in Nantasket, Conant received instructions that he was to go on to Cape Ann further to the north to manage the small fishing outpost there that was poorly run and tottering on collapse. Cape Ann, of course, was the original destination of the Dorchester venture.  Within three years, Conant came to the conclusion that the settlement at Cape Ann was not going to meet the goals of the Dorchester Company. The original plan was to establish a self-sustaining colony of farmers, fishermen and tradesmen. As it turned out, most of the men who had settled in Cape Ann were either fishermen or men of few skills. Many lacked any trade at all. The few farmers there found that the land at Cape Ann was not suitable for farming. As a result many men who’d never fished in their lives went into fishing. The settlement suffered from a lack of farm products, too much fishing and too few trades. The economy failed to thrive and Conant decided in 1626 that he would move southward to Naumkeag. Naumkeag had first been discovered by the English by John Smith, one of the founders of Jamestown Colony. Smith came upon Naumkeag in an exploratory trip he took up the coast in 1614. He saw that the place had a natural harbor, and he believed it would be a good location for a future settlement.  Conant invited his fellow Cape Ann settlers to join him in moving to Naumkeag. In the fall of 1626 he led 25 or 30 settlers south to establish a new settlement. This was the beginning of Salem. The remaining Cape Ann settlers either returned to England or decided to remain where they were.  □