Joseph Lord, the son of a cordwainer of Charlestown, Massachusetts, and graduate of Harvard College in 1691, was a schoolmaster at Dedham and later at Dorchester before he was ordained minister (October 22, 1695) and accompanied five other New Englanders as a missionary to Charleston, South Carolina, in December, 1695. There he settled in a town later named Dorchester, about twenty miles from Charleston on the east bank of the Ashley River. In 1701, perhaps at the hands of Madame Williams, he met Captain William Halsteed, who persuaded him to send to James Petiver five quires of dried Carolina plants which he had collected. Petiver acknowledged their receipt in a letter to Lord of May 20, 1701, expressing much pleasure with the collection, "which I understand by him [Captain Halsteed] I am obliged to you for as also for Collecting most of them yourself" (Stearns, 346).