A landscape of fear dominated New England in the spring of 1676. Towns were burning. Families were fleeing. Every sunrise could bring another attack. For nearly a year, a brutal conflict we now call King Philip’s War had torn across the colonial frontier. It left behind a trail of smoldering ruins and shattered communities. King Philip’s War (1675-1676) reshaped New England and changed colonial life. Click here for a 24-minute video posted on July 19, 2026 by Eric Ostroff at Tracing Your New England Roots.

Thomas Pratt was born around March of 1623 in Aston Clinton, which is a small parish in the green countryside of Buckinghamshire, England.  King Charles I was then on the throne and his belief in the divine right of kings put him in direct conflict with a Parliament that was increasingly filled with Puritans. Around 1640, as England teetered on the brink of civil war, Thomas’s father, Makuth Pratt, gathered his family, including the teenaged Thomas, and they joined the Great Exodus to the Mass Bay Colony.

The English legal system began demanding that Native leaders, especially the Pokanoket Chief Metacom (above, center) to submit to their colonial authority. In 1671, Metacom was humiliated when he was forced to go to Taunton and sign an agreement requiring that his people surrender their guns.

When John Sassamon, a Native man was charged with murder and tried by an English court, a war broke out. During the war, on April 19, 1676, Native warriors struck Weymouth in one of the war’s most devastating raids. One of the men who chose to stand and fight was Sergeant Thomas Pratt—an English immigrant, farmer, selectman, husband, father, and militia leader who had spent more than three decades helping build the town of Weymouth. As homes burned around him, the 53-year-old Thomas Pratt took up arms to defend the community he had helped create but was killed in the conflict.