Abraham Pierson, the elder

Abraham Pierson, the elder (1613-1678) was an English churchman, known as a minister in New England.

Born in Thornton, Bradford, West Ridings, Yorkshire, Pierson graduated B.A. from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1632. That year he was found to be an unlicensed curate at All Saints' Church, Pavement, York. He was ordained deacon at York in September 1632. Family genealogy says he was ordained in Newark, and that's how he chose the name for the New Jersey town he founded later in life.

On 19 March 1640 Pierson was summoned to the Court of High Commission, described as of Ardsley. He did not attend, and was fined. Family genealogy says he came to America in 1639, to escape persecution for his Puritan views. Pierson was in New England in the early part of 1640, and became ordained a Congregational minister in Boston.

In 1640 Pierson and a party of emigrants from Lynn, Massachusetts formed a new township on Long Island, which they named Southampton. There Pierson remained as minister of the congregational church for four years. In 1644 this church became divided and a number of the inhabitants left. They united with another body from the township of Wethersfield and formed, under Pierson, a fresh church at a settlement at Branford, within the jurisdiction of the New Haven Colony.

In 1666 Pierson moved again. The background to this was that a new charter was granted to Connecticut Colony by King Charles II, incorporating New Haven with the colony, several of the townships of New Haven resisted. New Haven, rigidly ecclesiastical from the outset, had, like Massachusetts, made church membership a needful condition for the enjoyment of civic rights. No such restriction was imposed in Connecticut. Pierson disapproved of the Half-Way Covenant, and moved to pursue his vision of theocracy.

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