Asa Brown’s history of the family indicates that all five of John and Sarah’s sons were involved in conflicts with the Indians:

If we may put confidence in tradition, all five of his sons were engaged in the conflicts with the Indians, but with respect to three of them, it is certain. During King Philip’s War in 1676, John and Thos. Brown were among those to whom Hampton was to pay certain sums for military services, as may be seen by the record of expenses in that war, still preserved at Boston, and they seem to have been under Major Appleton. In 1677, Stephen, the youngest son, being but 18 years of age, enlisted, and accompanied the expedition to the eastward, and in the unfortunate battle at Black Point, when 60 out of 90 men lost their lives, he was killed on the 29th of June, 1677.

The Court of Middlesex County at Cambridge, on the 28th of September following, granted administration to “John Poor of Charleston on the estate of his brother-in-law, Stephen Brown, lately slain by the Indians at Black Point”, &c.¹

“The Battle at Moore’s Brook, Scarborough, Maine, June 29, 1677” by Sumner Hunnewell provides a detailed accounting of the battle in which Stephen Brown was killed. The article, which appeared in the August 2003 issue of The Maine Genealogist, was prompted by ‘“[t]he rediscovery of a 1677 casualty list of men wounded and killed in Maine’s last pitched battle of the King Philip’s War.”²

Stephen is mentioned twice in the article:

Only one man from Swett’s town of Hampton was recorded to have accompanied him. STEPHEN BROWN was a teenager probably living with his widowed father, a first settler and prosperous landowner in Hampton. It may have been a shortlived but merry meeting for Stephen and John Parker of Andover. Stephen’s older sister had married John’s oldest brother. Some (if not all) of Stephen’s brothers were soldiers during the war and now it was his turn to play the man.³

STEVEN [sic] BROWN died and like his commanding officer would no longer return to his beloved Hampton.⁴

You can find a link to “The Battle of Moore’s Brooke” on the Lane Memorial Library’s website: http://www.hampton.lib.nh.us/hampton/history/military/doleful2.pdf.

After finding a 21st-century perspective on King Philip’s War, I was interested to see what a 19th-century historian had to say. I found Pictorial History of King Philip’s War by Horace Wentworth, published in 1851 with the somewhat overwrought subtitle, Comprising a Full and Minute Account of All the Massacres, Battles, Conflagrations, and Other Thrilling Incidents of That Tragic Passage in American History.

Imagine my surprise at the view of King Philip presented in the book’s introduction:⁵

I think the last sentence says it all, don’t you?

¹Asa Warren Brown, “From the Exeter News Letter, October 27, 1851: The Hampton Brown Family” (unpublished manuscript, Personal Papers of Ronald Dalrymple Brown, n.d.), 1-2.

² Sumner Hunnewell, “‘The Battle at Moore’s Brook, Scarborough, Maine, June 29, 1677,'” Lane Memorial Library, accessed May 7, 2017, http://www.hampton.lib.nh.us/hampton/history/military/mooresbrook.htm.

³Hunnewell, “‘The Battle,” Lane Memorial Library.

⁴Hunnewell, “‘The Battle,” Lane Memorial Library.

⁵Daniel Strock and William Croom, Pictorial History of King Philip’s War: COMPRISING A FULL AND MINUTE ACCOUNT OF ALL THE MASSACRES, BATTLES, CONFLAGRATIONS, AND OTHER THRILLING INCIDENTS OF THAT TRAGIC PASSAGE IN AMERICAN HISTORY. (Boston: Horace Wentworth, 1851).