Deacon Edmund Rice

Edmund Rice is well documented. The Edmund Rice (1638) Association is one of the oldest family associations in the United States. Please consult their publications before merging or making profile changes. "Until someone can cite such a record, the Association must state emphatically that Edmund Rice's parents and ancestry are not known and that Edmund Rice's descendants cannot claim royal ancestry"'. 'There is no doubt that his wife's sister married into the Rice family at Stanstead, but there is no proof that he was the same person as Edmund Rice, of Stanstead.

Edmund Rice was born in England about 1594, probably in Stanstead, Suffolk, England. His parentage is unknown. He married Thomasine Frost at St Mary's in Bury, Suffolk, on 15 October 1618. Thomasine (also known as Tamazine), daughter of Edward Frost and Thomasine Belgrave, was born in Stanstead on 11 August 1600. They had eight children in England before emigrating to the American colonies, probably in 1638, where two more children were born. Thomasine died in Sudbury Massachusetts on 13 June 1654 and Edmund married Mercy Hurd (also known as Mercie, Mary, and Merrie) widow of Thomas Brigham of Cambridge, Massachusetts in Sudbury on 1 March 1655/6. Mercy had two daughters and three sons by her first marriage. Edmund was buried in Sudbury on 3 May 1663, "age about 69".

Marriages and Children

1. Thomasine Frost (11 August 1600 Stanstead, England - 13 June 1654 Sudbury, Massachusetts) married 15 October 1618 St. Mary's Church, Bury St. Edmunds, England
   1. Henry Rice born c.1617 England, baptised 13 February 1620/1, married Elizabeth Moore
   2. Edward Rice born c.1619 England, baptised 20 October 1622, married Agnes Bent
   3. Mary Rice baptised 23 August 1619 England, died unmarried
   4. Thomas Rice baptised 16 January 1625/6 England, married Mary King
   5. Lydia Rice born c.1627 England, baptised 9 March 1637/8, married Hugh Drury
   6. Matthew Rice born c.1629 England
   7. Daniel Rice baptised 1 November 1632 - died November 1632 England
   8. Samuel Rice born 1634 England, baptised 12 November 1634, married (1)Elizabeth King, (2)Mary (Dix) Browne, (3)Sarah (White) Hosmer
   9. Joseph Rice born before 13 March 1637/8 England, baptised 13 March 1637/8, married (1)Mercy King, (2)Mary Beers, (3)Sarah (Prescott) Wheeler
   10. Benjamin Rice born 31 May 1640 Sudbury, Middlesex, Massachusetts, married Mary Brown
2. Mercy Hurd (born in Cambridge, Middlesex, Massachusetts - 22 December 1693 Marlboro, Middlesex, Massachusetts) married: 1 March 1655 Sudbury, Middlesex, Massachusetts
   1. Lydia Rice, born c.1657 Sudbury, Middlesex, Massachusetts, married James Hawkins, Jr.
   2. Ruth Rice born 29 September 1659 Sudbury, Middlesex, Massachusetts, married Samuel Wells

Note

Please note that a son and daughter often mistakenly attributed to Deacon Edmund Rice have been proven not to be his children. Ann Rice (born 19 November 1661), the wife of Nathaniel Gerry/Gary, belonged to a different Rice family; it appears that Edmund Rice (born 1638) never existed.

Biographical Sketch

Edmund Rice was born in England about 1594, probably in Stanstead, Suffolk. He is believed to have been the younger brother of Henry Rice, who married Elizabeth Frost, sister of Edmund's wife, Thomasine Frost. The marriage of Edmund Rice and Thomasine Frost was recorded on the register of St Mary's in Bury, Suffolk, 15 October 1618. Thomasine was born in Stanstead 11 August 1600, the daughter of Edward Frost, and Thomasine Belgrave. Her father was a wealthy "clothier", a cloth manufacturer.

Knowing the names of Edmund Rice's children, family historians have traced his family back to England using church baptismal records for his children and, eventually, to his marriage to Thomasine Frost. However, no record of his baptism nor any other record that names his parents has been found.

The Rice family lived first in Stanstead, Suffolk, England; later in Great Barkhamstead, Hertfordshire. They emigrated to New England about 1638, and were settled in Sudbury by 1639. The first record of his presence in the New World is in Township Book of the Town of Sudbury in the year 1639. Regrettably, no ship's passenger list has survived and we have no record of Edmund Rice and his family before 1639 so we can not be certain exactly when or where he and his family arrived in the New World.

Edmund Rice and the other early settlers at Sudbury were well prepared for the tasks of forming and governing a new community. As yeomen they had assumed both personal and community responsibilities back in England. As Protestant churchmen they had been encouraged to read and write so that they could study and understand their Bible. Although not of the noble class, they had shared many community and church responsibilities in their former communities in England.

He was one of the substantial men of the plantation, owning lands in and out of the town, some by grant of the court. He shared in all the divisions of uplands and commons and the total number of acres which he received as an original inhabitant was 247 acres. His first dwelling in Sudbury was on the old North Street. This he sold in 1642 to John Moore, and bought of Widow Mary Axtell six acres of land with her dwelling house, in the south part of the town. Some years afterwards he bought of Philemon Whale his house and nine acres adjacent to the Axtell place. All this together formed the old Rice homestead in Sudbury, which remained in the family for many years. In 1654 Edmund deeded it to his son Edward, who conveyed it to sons John and Edmund. In 1647 he took a ten-year lease on the Glover farm, mostly in what is now Framingham, and in 1657 he bought 200 acres more. In 1659, he bought the Dunster farm.

Edmund Rice was one of the prominent leaders of his community at both Sudbury and Marlborough. He was made a selectman of Sudbury in 1639, took the freeman's oath 13 May 1640, and subsequently, was made Deacon of the church in 1640, and represented Sudbury at the General Court at Boston in 1654. In his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Puritan Village, The formation of a New England Town, Sumner Chilton Powell sums up the high regard that his fellow citizens had for Edmund: "Not only did Rice become the largest individual landholder in Sudbury, but he represented his new town in the Massachusetts legislature for five years and devoted at least eleven of his last fifteen years to serving as selectman and judge of small causes," and "Two generations of Sudbury men selected Edmund Rice repeatedly as one of their leaders, with the full realization that they were ignoring men of far more English government experience who had come with him."

Thomasine died in Sudbury, Massachusetts, on 13 June 1654 and Edmund remarried nine months later, on 1 March 1655/6, to Mercy Hurd, widow of Thomas Brigham of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mercy had two daughters and three sons by her first marriage.

Although much respected by his fellow townsmen, Edmund seems to have had an independent side to his nature. In 1656 Edmund Rice and others petitioned the Massachusetts General Court for a new town which became the City of Marlborough. Edmund moved his immediate family and was elected a Selectman at Marlborough in 1657. Later generations of Rices were founding members of many new communities, first in New England and Nova Scotia, and later across the United States and Canada.

Deacon Edmund Rice died on 3 May 1663 at Sudbury, Massachusetts, "age about 69". He was buried at Old Burying Ground, Wayland, Massachusetts. One possible site of the grave is marked by a monument designed by Arthur Wallace Rice of Boston, Massachusetts, dedicated by the Edmund Rice Association on 29 August 1914. A boulder with a bronze tablet was also erected by the Association and it marks Edmund's homestead on the Old Connecticut Path in Wayland.

Genealogical Research on Parentage and Ancestry

Twice in the twentieth century nationally-recognized research genealogists have attempted to determine the parents and ancestors of Edmund Rice. Mary Lovering Holman described the negative result of her search for records in the parishes near Stanstead and Sudbury, Suffolk County, England in “English Notes on Edmund Rice”, The American Genealogist, Volume 10 (1933/34), pp. 133 - 137. In 1997 the Edmund Rice (1638) Association commissioned Dr. Joanna Martin, a nationally-recognized research genealogist who lives in Hitcham, Suffolk, England, only a few miles from Stanstead and Sudbury, to search again for records of Edmund Rice's parents. Dr. Martin reported in 1999 that she found no record that identified Edmund's parents or ancestral line.

Several authors of published works and computer datasets have claimed names for Edmund Rice's parents. Regrettably they have not given sources that would assist in definitive genealogical research. For example, the Ancestral File and International Genealogical Index, two popular computer datasets widely distributed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, offer parent candidates that include: Henry Rice and Margaret Baker, Henry Rice and Elizabeth Frost, Thomas Rice and Catherine Howard, and Thomas Rice and Elizabeth Frost.

From Mrs. Holman's paper we have an excellent record of one Henry Rice's marriage to Elizabeth Frost in November 1605 at Stanstead. Mrs. Holman also documents the baptism of Edmund's first child on 23 August 1619 at Stanstead. If this is the Henry Rice and Elizabeth Frost to which the LDS records refer, the LDS records must be erroneous. Our researchers have not been able to find records that support any Henry Rice and Elizabeth Frost, Henry Rice and Margaret Baker, Thomas Rice and Catherine Howard, or Thomas Rice and Elizabeth Frost as parents of Edmund Rice.

A scholarly investigation by Donald Lines Jacobus, considered by many as the dean of modern American genealogy, appeared in The American Genealogist, volume 11, (1936), pp. 14-21 and was reprinted in the fall of 1968 and the winter of 1998 issues of Newsletter of the Edmund Rice (1638) Association. Jacobus traced many of the false accounts to the book by Dr. Charles Elmer Rice entitled "By the Name of Rice”, privately published by Dr. Rice at Alliance, Ohio in 1911.

Sudbury, England includes three parishes, two of which do not have complete records for the years near 1594, which is Edmund's most likely birth year. Edmund Rice deposed in a court document on 3 April 1656 that he was about 62 years old. Thus, if he were born in Sudbury his records have been lost and we may never know his origin.

In his address to the 1999 annual meeting of the Edmund Rice (1638) Association, Gary Boyd Roberts, Senior Researcher, New England Historic Genealogy Society, reviewed all of the genealogical sleuthing on Edmund's parentage. Mr. Roberts is well known for his research on royal lineage. He concluded that there was no evidence whatsoever that supports the published accounts of Edmund Rice's parents and no evidence that Edmund Rice was from a royal lineage.

Source: Who were Edmund Rice's ancestors?, Edmund Rice (1638) Association <edmund-rice.org>.

Speculations About Ancestry

In 1992 Reg Rice reported finding a conjunction of King, Parmenter, and Rose families in Polstead, Suffolk:

• Joan Parmenter, born 5 December 1585, daughter of Richard
• Will King, born 26 October 1595, son of John (who married Joan Fox in 1571)
• Edmund Rose, born 22 December 1585, son of Tho.

King and Parmenter families appear in Sudbury, Massachusetts as associates of Edmund Rice, although it is not clear they are Polstead families of the same name. Thomas King was one of 13 petitioners with Edmund Rice in 1656; he was one of three who took the inventory Edmund Rice, and three of Edmund's children married into the King family.

Source: Edmund Rice (1638) Association Newsletter 58(Winter 1992), 19.

DNA Testing

The Edmund Rice Association has conducted extensive ancestral haplotype DNA testing on males believed to have descended from Rice, identifying descendants from five of his sons. Edmund Rice's Y haplogroup is soundly Norse; I1a. DYS 455 = 8 almost exclusive to I1a. DYS 394(19)/ 390/ 385a, b = 14/23/14,14, and DYS 462 = 13; DYS 511 = 10. DYS464a,b,c,d for Ultra-Norse was 12,14,15,16. Most likely his direct paternal line ancestors were Norman, though conceivably they were Norse vikings, and it is not impossible that his paternal line ancestor crossed the channel as a French or Dutch trader.

DNA testing proves there is a very distant familial link between Edward and John Rice, however this relationship was not parental; John was not Edmund's son.

Legacy

Edmund Rice left no will. The inventory of his estate was taken both at Sudbury and Marlborough on 16 May 1663. His widow, Mercy Hurd Brigham Rice, survived him and settled his estate. She later married William Hunt.

Like many early New England families, Edmund Rice's family was a very large one. Of his twelve children, ten survived to have children of their own. Edmund Rice's descendants through his great-great grandchildren number nearly 1,450. This pattern of large families continued well into the 19th century. The result is that many living people can trace their ancestry to Edmund Rice. Edmund Rice was the progenitor of many eminent descendants. Among them were:

• U.S. President John Quincy Adams
• U.S. President Calvin Coolidge
• U.S. President Ulysses S Grant
• Julia Ward Howe, writer and poet, author of Battle Hymn of the Republic
• Francis E Willard, philanthropist, reformer, educator, and President of the Women's Christian Temperance Union
• Clara Baron, Civil War nurse, American Red Cross founder
• Mary A. Rice Livermore, Civil War nurse
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, poet
• Samuel F.B. Morse, inventor of the electric telegraph
• Ransom Eli Olds of Oldsmobile fame
• Brigadier General Edmund Rice
• Congressman Edmund Rice
• Senator Henry Mower Rice
• Steve Young, NFL football player
• Stillman Pond, Mormon Pioneer

Sources/Further Reading

• American Genealogist. "The Strutt Ancestry of Thomasine Frost Wife of Edmund Rice of Sudbury, Mass"; Harold F. Porter, Jr; January/April 1986; Vol. 61; pages 161-166
• American Genealogist. "The Paternal Ancestry of Thomasine Frost, Wife of Deacon Edmund Rice of Sudbury, Mass.; Harold F. Porter, Jr.; July, 1988; Vol. 63, No. 3; pages 129-137
• Brigham, Willard Irving Tyler, and Emma Elisabeth Brigham. The History of the Brigham Family: A record of several thousand descendants of Thomas Brigham, the emigrant, 1603-1653. (New York : Grafton Press ; Rutland, Vt. : Tuttle, c1907-c1927), p. 69, 1907-1927.
• Buczek, John, History of Marlborough: "HISTORY: An In Depth Look Source Program Book - Marlborough Tercentenary Celebration"
• Bullard, Edgar J. (Edgar John), and Gail Wheeler Pritchard. Bullard and Allied Families: the American Ancestors of George Newton Bullard and Mary Elizabeth Bullard. (Detroit, Michigan: E. J. Bullard, 1930), p 113.
• Cutter, William Richard, and William Frederick Adams. Genealogical and Personal Memoirs Relating to the Families of the State of Massachusetts;. New York: Lewis Historical Pub., 1910. Google Books. Web. 13 Mar. 2013. <https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=kmujIJi3_FkC&rdid=bo...>
• Flagg, Ernest. Genealogical Notes on the Founding of New England: My Ancestors' Part in that Undertaking. (Hartford, Conn.: Case, Lockwood & Brainard, 1926)
• Holman, Mary Lovering, "English Notes on Edmund Rice", The American Genealogist, volume 10 (1933/34), p. 133-137
• Hudson, Charles. History of the town of Marlborough, Middlesex County, Massachusetts: from its first settlement in 1657 to 1861; with a brief sketch of the town of Northborough, a genealogy of the families in Marlborough to 1800, and an account of the celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the incorporation of the town. (Boston, Massachusetts, United States: T R Marvin & Sons, 1862)
• Jacobus, Donald Lines, "Pre-American Ancestries: Edmund Rice of Sudbury, Mass.", The American Genealogist, Vol II (1936), pp 14-21
• King, Ella D., An Interim Tracing of the Ancestry of Valarie Daly King, 1956; p. 24
• Marlborough, Middlesex, Massachusetts, United States. Vital Records of Marlborough, Massachusetts, to the End of the Year 1849. (Worcester, Massachusetts: Franklin P. Rice, 1908), p. 34
• Paige, Lucius R., Freemen of Massachusetts
• Paige, Lucius Robinson. History of Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1630-1877: With a Genealogical Register. (Boston, Massachusetts: H.O. Houghton, 1877), 1877.
• Parker, Ebenezer, "The Story of the Rice Boys: Captured by the Indians". Westborough Historical Society, 1906
• Savage, James. A Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England: Showing Three Generations of Those Who Came Before May, 1692, on the Basis of Farmer's Register. (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co, 1860-1862), 3:532.
• Shurtleff, Nathaniel B., Records of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, vol. 3, pp. 259, 297, 340
• Smith, Elsie Hawes. Edmund Rice and his family. (Boston: The Meador Press,: unknown, 1938)
• Sudbury Records - Vitals taken from Middlesex records, NEHGS, Register, volumes 17-18
• Temple, Josiah H., Gen Reg of Framingham Families, pp. 680-681
• Ward, Andrew Henshaw. A Genealogical History of the Rice Family: Descendants of Deacon Edmund Rice, who came from Barkhamstead, England and settled at Sudbury, Massachusetts, in 1638 or 9. (Boston: C. Benjamin Richardson, 1858). Massachusetts, United States. Massachusetts Vital Records to 1850.

Online

• Edmund Rice Association Edmund Rice (1638) Association
• Kines and Quinn Geneology
  • Wikipedia article Edmund Rice (1638)
• Rice descendent chart
• Find A Grave Edmund Rice

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He had 13 children, 9 with Thomasine and 4 with Mercy Heard.

He was a proprietor , selectman, deacon in 1643. He was in Sudbury in 1639.

"The house was set in a pleasant valley close by a clear spring. From the small paned windows the flat Sudbury meadows could be seen, bright green in summer, yellow in fall, brown and white when winter came. From other windows small patches of open fields and stretches of untouched woodland meet the sky. The house was long and grey, two storied in front, the back roof slanting down in a long line to meet the first story in a narrow cave, the typical salt box roof. This was the house that stood by the spring on the Deacon Edmund Rice homestead." By Elsie Hawes Smith, 1938 from Edmund Rice and HIs family. This homestead burned down in 1930, a plaque marks the spot now on a path in Wayland.

Edmund himself was supposed to have been "solidly built, med height, broad brow, generous nose, long cheeks, steady blue eyes and a determined mouth. When they came from England they were well to do, bringing cattle, goods, carved chests, a flax wheel, blankets, linens and utensils.

Edmund Rice (c. 1594 – 3 May 1663), was an early immigrant to Massachusetts Bay Colony born in Suffolk, England. He lived in Stanstead, Suffolk and Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire before sailing with his family to America. He landed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in summer or fall of 1638, thought to be first living in the town of Watertown, Massachusetts. Shortly thereafter he was a founder of Sudbury in 1638, and later in life was one of the thirteen petitioners for the founding of Marlborough in 1656. He was a Deacon in the Puritan Church, and served in town politics as a selectman and judge. He also served five years as a member of the Great and General Court, the combined colonial legislature and judicial court of Massachusetts.

Biography Edmund Rice's rough birth date of 1594 is reckoned from a 3 April 1656 court deposition in Massachusetts in which he stated that he was 62 years old. His likely birthplace, somewhere in Suffolk in East Anglia, is found through the town of his marriage and of his earliest children's births. Many of the church records from 1594 in Suffolk are lost, so any record of his birth or the names of his parents or any of his forebears is unknown. Edmund Rice had a presumed brother, Henry (c. 1580-1621), who married Elizabeth Frost (sister of Edmund's wife Thomasine) on 12 November 1605 at St. James Church, Stanstead, Suffolk 52.111652°N 0.690641°E. Repeated attempts to find record of Edmund Rice's birth or the birth of his presumed brother Henry in church or civil records of the Stanstead, Sudbury, Haverhill, and Bury St. Edmunds region of Suffolk have not been successful and the records are presumed to be lost.

Considerable information about the early life of Edmund Rice in England can be gleaned from his children's baptismal records, as well as land ownership and other public records in Stanstead, Suffolk and Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. He moved from Stanstead to Berkhamsted sometime in 1626, based upon the baptismal dates of his children Thomas and Lydia. That same year as a newcomer in town, Rice was named as a joint trustee along with Rev. Thomas Newman of a £50 grant for the benefit of the poor from King Charles I given on the occasion of his coronation.

Under the incumbency of Rev. Newman, Rice served as a churchwarden at St. Peter's Church and acted as overseer of the poor for eight years. As a result of a royal inquisition held on 1 April 1634, funds remaining in the custody of Rice and Newman were to be transferred to the bailiff and burgesses of Berkhamsted as part of an effort to transfer and consolidate several royal charity grants for administration under civil authority.[21][nb 5] While living in Berkhamsted, Rice acquired and was taxed on 3 acres (12,000 m2) of land in 1627, and on 15 acres (61,000 m2) from 1633 to 1637. There is no record in Berkhamsted of Rice paying taxes on his land in 1638, possibly due to its sale to finance his trip to America.

There is no surviving record of Edmund Rice's voyage to America with his family, but it was speculated to have occurred between the 13 March 1638 baptism of his son Joseph in Berkhamsted and the petition to the Great and General Court to found Sudbury, Massachusetts 6 September 1638, showing all the Sudbury petitioners residing in Watertown, MA. However, the 1638 petition to the General Court to found Sudbury did not explicitly mention Rice's name, so documentation of Rice's presumed short-term residence in Watertown is poor. The first documented record of his presence in Massachusetts is in the Township Book of Sudbury prior to 4 April 1639 in which he was already serving as a selectman.

Between 1638 and 1657, Rice resided in Sudbury where he became a leader in the community. Sumner Chilton Powell wrote in his 1964 Pulitzer Prize-winning Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town, "Not only did Rice become the largest individual landholder in Sudbury, but he represented his new town in the Massachusetts legislature for five years and devoted at least eleven of his last fifteen years to serving as selectman and judge of small causes." He was appointed on 4 September 1639 by the General Court to lay out the roads and lots of Sudbury, and he was granted 4 acres (16,000 m2) of land near the original Sudbury meetinghouse 42.373835°N 71.372609°W. On 3 April 1640, Rice was granted 20 acres (81,000 m2) in southeastern Sudbury near the Old Connecticut Path. He served as a selectman in Sudbury in 1639 and 1640, and subsequently for several years between 1644 and 1656. He was designated a freeman on 13 May 1640, and was first elected as a deputy (representative) of the Great and General Court in October 1640. He was later appointed by the General Court on 2 June 1641 as a Judge of Small Causes for Sudbury, serving until 1648 in the appointed position. Then from 1648 until 1654 he was elected and reelected locally in Sudbury as one of the municipal judges. He was reelected for another year term as a deputy of the General Court in 1643. In 1644 Rice and two other Sudbury residents (Peter Noyes and Thomas Mayhew) were appointed to survey the farm properties of the estate of the deceased Joseph Glover near the southeastern boundary of Sudbury to be transferred to Harvard College President Henry Dunster who had married Glover's widow Elizabeth and assumed responsibility for the Glover children. On 18 June 1645, Rice and his colleagues reported to the General Court on their survey. In 1648, Rice was ordained as a Deacon in the Puritan Church at Sudbury. He was appointed by the General Court on 22 May 1651 as a member of a commission to settle a boundary dispute between Watertown and Sudbury, and he was reelected as a deputy of the General Court in each of the three years from 1652 through 1654. Again in May 1656, Rice and Peter Noyes were called upon by the General Court for their expertise to survey 11 acres (45,000 m2) of land purchased by John Stone of Sudbury from the Indians, which was supplemented by a grant of the General Court to Stone of an additional 50 acres (200,000 m2) in what is now Framingham. Stone erected a gristmill on his property of Stone's End in 1656 that would later become the village of Saxonville. And again in 1662 at the behest of the General Court, Rice and John Howe of Marlborough were called upon to survey 250 acres (1.0 km2) of land in the area now known as Framingham that they deemed to be worth £10 to be awarded by the General Court to Thomas Danforth as compensation for his services to the Colony and Harvard College.

Edmund Rice was particularly successful in his own real estate transactions. After selling his 4 acres (16,000 m2) of land and homestead near the Sudbury meetinghouse on 1 September 1642 to John Moore, Rice established his residence on 13 September 1642 on his 20 acres of land abutting Henry Dunster's farm near the Old Connecticut Path in southeastern Sudbury. Within a year, Philemon Whale and Thomas Axtell, former town mates and kin from Berkhamstead, England established their homesteads on adjacent lots nearby. In October 1643 Rice sold Philemon Whale 9 acres (36,000 m2) of land and a house near the Old Connecticut Path in southern Sudbury and also that same month he sold 6 acres (24,000 m2) of adjacent land to Thomas Axtell. But only three years later on 6 May 1646, Rice, along with his son Edward Rice and Philemon Whale, administered the estate of the deceased Thomas Axtell and he purchased back the land from the estate shortly thereafter. On 8 April 1657, Rice purchased the 200 acres (810,000 m2) "Jennison Farm" in the southeastern part of Sudbury. And by 1659, Rice had acquired about 600 acres (2.4 km2) of land in southeastern Sudbury (present day Wayland and Cochituate), including nine acres of land and the homestead purchased back from Philemon Whale (see image of the homestead), and the probated estate of Henry Dunster that included the former Glover family lands. The General Court made grants of land to Rice in what is now Framingham, 50 acres (200,000 m2) in 1652 and 80 acres (320,000 m2) in 1659. These lands in Framingham were passed on to Rice's son Henry in 1659, and became to be known as Rice's End.

As the Enclosure Movement was a contentious political issue in England, the issue of land tenure was also highly contentious in 17th-century Massachusetts Bay Colony and in Sudbury in particular. Open field or communal farming was practiced in most of Sudbury, following traditions of the commons and governance practices brought from central and western England during the early 17th century. Rice and twelve other dissenters from Sudbury who were interested in 'closed field' or owner-operator farming, as it was practiced in southeastern England, petitioned the Great and General Court in 1656 to create the town of Marlborough where individual ownership of farmland was to be exclusively practiced. The tract of land was 8 square miles (21 km2) west of Sudbury that, in addition to becoming Marlborough, eventually became Northborough, Westborough, Southborough, and Hudson as well.[63] Rice was elected as selectman of Marlborough in 1657 as the town was being established. The town was formally chartered on 12 June 1660 by the General Court. Upon being granted a maximum allotment of 50 acres (200,000 m2) of land in Marlborough, Rice was one of the three largest initial landholders of the new town. According to Powell (1963), the founding of Marlborough with exclusive closed-field land tenure was a seminal event in establishing the predominant freehold or fee simple land tenure system of America. Rice was reelected as selectman in Marlborough every year after 1657 until his death.

Edmund Rice died on 3 May 1663 in Marlborough, Massachusetts, and is presumed to be buried at the Old North Cemetery (site of the first Sudbury Meeting House) in what is now Wayland, Massachusetts 42.370877°N 71.369052°W. Probate records show that his wife, Mercy, was executrix and that his estate including lands and homes in both Sudbury and Marlborough was valued at £743, 8s, & 4p, which was a considerable sum for the time. For decades, the Edmund Rice estate was disputed in part by heirs of John Moore (1610-1673). The issue of land ownership was eventually settled in 1716 by a transfer of land to John Moore's son, Joseph Moore (1647-1725), by Edmund's grandson (a son of Matthew) Isaac Rice (1668-1717). The only surviving artifact known to be owned by Edmund Rice and his second wife Mercy Brigham Rice is an antique bible box from the pre-Elizabethan Tudor Period (early 16th Century); it was brought from England by Mercy when she sailed to Massachusetts in 1635. The bible box was donated to the Worcester Historical Museum by Thomas Brigham Rice (1817-1914) in 1910, and it is recognized as one of the earliest known pieces of furniture with a New England history.