A family record · North Kingstown, Rhode Island
Chadsey
He bought the hill everybody laughed at, and planted apples in the sand.
- Span
- 227 yrsFrom an immigrant's landing to a New York grave
- Descent
- 9 gensFather to son, unbroken through the record
- Origin
- 1715Arrival in the colonies; Rhode Island by way of the south
- Seat
- Sand HillQuidnessett, North Kingstown — still on the map
Generation One
The Welsh
William
Some records place his birth in Somerset. The family has always insisted on Wales. Either way, he stepped off a ship around 1715 with an accent nobody in Rhode Island could place and no land to his name.
He was the son of Richard Chadsey and Jane Shoats, and he seems to have come ashore first in Pennsylvania — Virginia, by some accounts — before working his way north to the Narragansett country. What drew him to Quidnessett is not recorded. What he did once he got there is.
Within four years he had married into one of the colony's founding families. Within a decade he had bought the worst-looking tract in the parish. He would live sixty-eight years in that house, bury nothing but one infant daughter, and die at ninety-five in the same year as his wife.
- ParentsRichard Chadsey (b. c.1666–1672) and Jane Shoats (b. c.1673)
- Arrivalc. 1715, landing south before settling at Quidnessett
- MarriedSusannah Greene, 24 May 1719 — his twenty-seventh birthday
- ChildrenTen. Nine survived to adulthood.
- BuriedFarm plot, later removed to Elm Grove Cemetery, North Kingstown
The gamble · c. 1720s
Sand Hill
The neighbours grew wheat and barley, which want heavy, wet ground. The tract William bought was scrub pitch pine standing in white sand. They told him he had been swindled.
He had not been looking at the crop. He had been looking at the drainage. Apple roots rot in the swampy clay that covers most of the Narragansett shore; they thrive in sand that lets the water through. William cleared the pines and put in thousands of trees.
By the time his children were grown, the Chadsey Orchard was the premier source of fruit and cider in the colony — a working export business built on land the parish had written off. He was not a subsistence farmer. He was a land speculator with an unusually good eye for soil.
Three centuries later the road that runs through the tract still carries his name.
“Worthless.”— the settled opinion of North Kingstown, shortly before it wasn't
The marriage · 24 May 1719
An outsider marries
into the forge
Susannah Greene was a birthright Quaker from the family that owned the ironworks at Potowomut. William was an immigrant with no meeting, no land, and no local name. She married him anyway.
The Greenes had been in Rhode Island since John Greene the surgeon followed Roger Williams out of Massachusetts in the 1630s, and they were among the founders of Warwick. By the mid-1700s their forge on the Potowomut River was turning out anchors, chain and tools for half the colony — the industrial heart of the region and the engine behind the family's political rise.
The Chadsey orchard and the Greene forge sat on opposite banks of the same water. A short ride, or a shorter row. For three generations the two households were effectively one clan, and the Chadsey children grew up around the fires and hammers of an ironworks that would soon be arming a revolution.
William and Susannah were married sixty-eight years. They died in the same year, 1787 — a coincidence the town read as a blessing on the match.
The Fighting Quakers
Quaker discipline forbade military service. When the war came, the Greene cousins did not merely enlist — they led. Nathanael Greene was disowned by the meeting for attending a military parade, and went on to become Washington's most gifted field strategist. Christopher Greene took command of the 1st Rhode Island. The meeting minutes record the family being “dealt with” one by one.
The rift at home
The older generation held the forge and the faith while the younger generation marched. That tension ran straight through the Chadsey household too, and it explains the shape of the next chapter: one son went to sea and to war, another went north and refused to take a side at all.
“Killed in the dawn raid at Pine's Bridge, 14 May 1781, alongside his cousin the Colonel.”
Generation Two
The patriot
martyr
William's sixth child wanted nothing to do with apples. He was a seafaring man before the war gave him a reason to be one.
He served aboard the Providence, one of the busiest ships in the Continental Navy, and was among the crew that took the armed British transport Mellish along with the brigantine Active. The Mellish was carrying winter uniforms for the British army. They went instead to Washington's freezing men — one of the few unambiguous logistical victories of that miserable season.
On land he served as a private in the 1st Rhode Island Regiment under his cousin, Colonel Christopher Greene. The 1st Rhode Island is remembered as the “Black Regiment” — the only Continental unit to field segregated companies of Black and Indigenous soldiers — and it saw some of the war's ugliest close fighting.
It ended at dawn on 14 May 1781, when DeLancey's Loyalist refugees fell on the regiment's post at Pine's Bridge on the Croton River. The fighting was hand to hand. Colonel Greene was killed. So was William. He is believed to lie in the mass grave at the site, near Yorktown Heights, New York — the only man in this line with no marked stone.
- RankPrivate, 1st Rhode Island Regiment; seaman, Continental Navy
- ShipContinental sloop Providence
- ActionCapture of the Mellish and the Active; defence of the Croton line
- CommandersCol. Christopher Greene — his own cousin
- GraveUnmarked. Yorktown Heights, Westchester County, New York
The fork · 1775
The war cut the
family in two
While their father was at sea, his two eldest sons made opposite decisions about the same war. One line ends in a Canadian churchyard. The other ends in this record.
Abel
In 1775 Abel was on a whaling voyage to Labrador. The ship put in at Liverpool, Nova Scotia on the way home, and there he heard what was happening in Massachusetts. He held his mother's Quaker convictions more firmly than his father did, and he decided not to go back.
He stayed, farmed, sailed, married Mehitable Smith in 1778, raised thirteen children and founded the Canadian branch of the family. Nova Scotia records remember him for “strict integrity.” His obituary called him a poor but honest man — the noblest work of God.
Benjamin
Benjamin was twelve when his father was killed at Pine's Bridge. He stayed in Rhode Island into early manhood, then joined the wave of young New Englanders moving west into the Hudson and Mohawk valleys.
He settled at Vischer Ferry in Clifton Park, Saratoga County, where the records name him Dr. Benjamin Chadsey. He practised medicine, bought land in the village during its Erie Canal boom years, and is listed among the early owners of the Vischer Ferry general store — a building still standing. He married Mary “Polly” Wait in 1794, and Rebecca Vail in 1828. He is buried in the Vischer Ferry cemetery.
The paternal line
Nine men,
two hundred years
Rhode Island to Saratoga County to the mill towns of the Mohawk. Each generation moved a little further from the orchard.
- I1692 William Chadsey1692–1787m. Susannah Greene The Welsh William. Immigrant, orchardist, founder of the Sand Hill tract.
- II1730 William Chadsey Jr.1730–1781m. Lucy Seaman and soldier. Killed in action at Pine's Bridge, New York.
- III1769 Benjamin Chadsey1769–1849m. Mary Wait Physician. Moved the family from Rhode Island to Clifton Park, New York.
- IV1789 William Chadsey1789–1837m. Jane Frazer The nineteenth-century New York anchor.
- V1829 R. B. Chadsey1829–c.1856m. Almina M. Best Died young at Fulton. The thinnest link in the chain and the hardest to trace.
- VI1853 James D. Chadsey1853–1934m. Lillian D. Bigford Settled the branch at Amsterdam and Utica during the mill years.
- VII1874 William B. Chadsey1874–—m. Lillian Baker Death date not yet established.
- VIII1894 George Soloman Chadsey1894–1962m. Gertrude Frances Secord —
- IX1919 Bradford W. Chadsey1919–1989m. June L. Peterson The line as recorded here ends with him. It does not end with him.
The household · 1720–1740
Ten children of William and Susannah
- Jabez · 1720Lived to a hundred. Married Honor Huling. The family's living memory — he was still telling stories about his Greene cousins long after the General was dead.
- Mary · 1721Married Thomas Spires (or Spicer).
- Richard · 1724Moved to Danby, Vermont. Married Serviah Reynolds.
- Susannah · 1725Died in infancy, 1726.
- Jane · 1727No further record.
- William Jr. · 1730Seaman, soldier, and this line's second generation.
- Naomi · 1732Married a Northup.
- Phebe · 1735No further record.
- John · 1737No further record.
- Elizabeth · 1740No further record.
What is still there
Traces
The orchard is gone. The road, the burial ground and the name are not.
Chadsey Road
Runs through the residential streets of North Kingstown between Post Road (Route 1) and Quonset Point, bordered by Forest Park and the Quidnessett neighbourhood. It marks the edge of the original Sand Hill tract. Chadsey Way branches off it.
Elm Grove Cemetery
William and Susannah were first buried on the farm. As the community grew around the plot, both were removed to Elm Grove in the nineteenth century so the founding graves would not be lost. The older Chadsey–Greene Burial Ground (NK084), just south of his house site, survives separately.
Where this comes from
The record
The Descendants of William Chadsey
The definitive record for this paternal line. Documents the 1715 arrival, the marriage to Susannah Greene, the Sand Hill purchase, and both the Nova Scotia and New York branches.
FamilySearch Library · Archive.org
The Greenes of Rhode Island, 1534–1902
Eight hundred and ninety pages on the Greene family, including Susannah's line, the Potowomut forge, and the military generation.
FamilySearch Library · HathiTrust
North Kingstown Town Records
Eighteenth-century tax lists, militia charters and town council proceedings — the original entries these later books were built from.
The Narragansett Historical Register
Articles on the specific families and land of the Quidnessett region.
Quaker meeting records
Certificates of removal, marriages under the care of the meeting, and the disciplinary minutes recording the Greenes who left the peace testimony for the Continental Army.