Toward the middle of the last century the Dearborn family had been quite generally distributed through Rockingham county. Peter Dearborn, the great-grandfather of the subject of this sketch, was born in Chester in 1710. Of his children, Josiah, born in 1751, married Susannah Emerson, the daughter of Samuel Emerson, Esq., a substantial Chester farmer. He learned the trade of a shoemaker, but, on the breaking out of the Revolutionary war, entered the army as a private, and was stationed at Portsmouth under Col. Joseph Cilley. Afterwards he did honorable service, first as a private, and then as lieutenant in northern New York, and finally closed his enlistment by an expedition to Newport, R. I., in 1778. Returning from the war, he and his family found a new home thirty miles westward in Weare. It was not an unfitting location. With its sixty square miles still mostly covered with a dense forest of oak, maple, and beech, with its uneven surface nowhere rising into high hills, it had a strong soil, which, when cultivated, yielded large crops of hay and grain. It was already a growing township, and thirty years later became one of the four leading farming towns of the state. Here Josiah Dearborn passed his life, raising a family of eleven children, nine of whom were sons. Samuel, the fifth son, and father of the subject of this sketch, was born in 1792. The district-school system was not organized in New Hampshire until 1806, and the children of that time had scanty opportunities for instruction. Young Dearborn and his brothers were reaching manhood, when farming in the eastern states was depressed by the recent war with England and the occurrence of several cold summers. Migration westward had commenced, and the Dearborns for a time debated the expediency of a removal to the Western Reserve. They at length decided to locate in Vermont, and in 1816 five of the brothers and a sister removed to Corinth, a town in the eastern part of Orange county. Here Samuel Dearborn settled upon a farm, soon after married Miss Fanny Brown, of Vershire, whose parents were natives of Chester, N. H., and here he passed a long and useful life. He died December 12, 1871, in the eightieth year of his age. His wife had died in 1836. Of scholarly tastes, he was for many years a teacher of winter schools. An active member of the Freewill Baptist denomination, his religion was a life rather than a creed.