Many of their descendants have risen to high respectability, among whom are numbered four Governors of New Hampshire, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, several distinguished officers in the Revolutionary War and in the last war with Great Britain, including Stark, Reid, Miller, and McNeil, a President of Bowdoin College, some Members of Congress, and several distinguished ministers of the gospel. It was a Scottish stock, with an Irish preceding the American transplanting, that peopled Bedford. There were among its original settlers a few families of English and fewer still of pure Milesian extraction, but the Scotch descent was overwhelmingly predominant, and the austere theology and noble traditions of the Kirk of Scotland formed the leaven of the community. Their religious history dated back to John Knox. Their immediate ancestors were the sturdy Presbyterians with whom James I. colonized depopulated Ulster after he had crushed the Catholic uprisings. Those involuntary colonists made that the most prosperous of the Irish provinces, and at a critical moment for the cause of Protestantism added to the annals of heroic endurance the defense of Londonderry against the army of James II. But to their simple and tenacious faith the tithes and rents of the Anglican Church were scarcely less abhorrent than Catholic persecution, and the example of Puritan emigration ultimately led them by thousands to American shores. Much of this tide of settlement was diverted by the Puritan pre-occupation of New England soil to the Middle and Southern States, but a strong current set up into northern New England and occupied (with much other territory) the valley of the Merrimack. It was to these Scotch-Irish Presbyterians that the greater number of the grantees of Bedford--as a rule the descendants of Massachusetts Puritans--sold their claims, and the community became what their labors and influence made it. The Chandler (representing an original grantee) was one of the few Bedford families which sprang from English stock and possessed Puritan antecedents.