Biographical Sketch (1969):6, p. 1-2. "John Johnson came in the fleet with Winthrop in 1630, his family including his wife and five children. Savage says he was 'a man of estate and distinction.' When the adjoining village of Roxbury was formed, he was appointed Constable in October 1630. He had a grant of land as Goodman John Johnson, and served 1638-40 as Clerk of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company.

Winthrop, in his Journal under date of February 6, 1644/5, said: John Johnson, the Surveyor General of Ammunition, a very industrious and faithful man in this place, having built a fair house in the midst of town, with diverse barns and outhouses, it fell on fire in the day time, no man knowing by what occasion, and there being in it seventeen barrels of the country's powder, and many arms, all was suddenly burnt and blown up, to the value of four or five hundred pounds. Johnson was from home and neighbors, who had run in to help, remembering the powder, retreated from the house just before the explosion, which shook the houses in Boston and Cambridge, so as men thought it had been an earthquake, and carried great pieces of timber a good way off, and some rags and such light things beyond Boston meeting house."