The Carpenters

Scott is a Rehoboth branch Carpenter—so-called after William Carpenter, who with his wife Abigail Briant, arrived in America aboard the Bevis in 1637. They were the first English family to settle in Rehoboth, Mass., and their descendents number in the tens of thousands.

William Carpenter of Providence—cousin of the Rehoboth William—helped to settle Rhode Island with Roger Williams; his descendants are called Providence branch Carpenters. Another cousin, Alice (née Carpenter) Southworth, was the second wife of Governor William Bradford; they married in Plymouth Colony on August 14, 1623.

Scott’s great grandfather, the Hon. Lewis Cass Carpenter (R-S.C.) was born in Putnam, Conn., in 1836. During Reconstruction in the South he was publisher and editor of the Daily Republican in Columbia and Charleston, S.C. He also served as a U.S. Treasury agent and tangled with an ascendant Ku Klux Klan until Reconstruction came to an end in 1876.

The Carpenters moved to Leadville, Colorado, in 1877 and then to Denver in 1880. Cass Carpenter supervised Colorado’s first state census in 1880. Under Republican state administrations, Cass was post office inspector. Under Democratic administrations he was a patent attorney, Denver Republican journalist, and a GOP activist until his death in 1908. He is interred alongside his wife, Mary (née Morrison), at Fairmount Cemetery in Denver. His papers are housed at the Colorado History Museum.

 

The Hon. L. Cass Carpenter , R-S.C.
(b. 1836, Putnam, Conn., d. 1908, Denver, Colo.), ca. 1906.