“Rehoboth branch” Carpenters
Scott is a “Rehoboth branch” Carpenter—so-called after William Carpenter, who with his wife Abigail Briant, sailed to America aboard the Bevis in 1637. They settled Rehoboth, Mass. Their descendents number in the tens of thousands.
William Carpenter of Providence—first 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 married Governor William Bradford on August 14, 1623.
Scott’s great grandfather, the Hon. Lewis Cass Carpenter (R-S.C.) arrived in Colorado in 1877 and supervised the new states first national census in 1880. A native of Putnam, Conn., Cass (b. 1836) was a one-term congressman from South Carolina’s then black-majority Third District for the Forty-fourth United States Congress. Carpenter, a Radical Republican, was also publisher and editor of the Daily Republican in Columbia and Charleston, S.C. He clashed famously with the notorious News and Courier. He served as a U.S. Treasury agent (the dread “revenue man” of Southern lore) and tangled with an ascendant Ku Klux Klan in Reconstruction South Carolina.
In Colorado under Republican 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, at Fairmount Cemetery in Denver. His papers are housed at the Colorado History Museum.