Bushrod, Richard, 1577 - 1628

Richard Bushrod, the son of John Bushrod of Sherborne, Dorset, was a Puritan haberdasher of Dorchester, England.  He was a Member of Parliament in 1624 and 1626.  A parishioner of John White, he and White organized the Dorchester New England Company with others interested in American fishing and fur trading ventures and colonization.  On behalf of the Company, he received a patent to do so in 1623 with the idea of turning the fishing and trading outposts into permanent settlements.  Bushrod later became a subscriber of the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1628.  History of Parliament Online.  David Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 42, 132-133.