USA > Maine > Cumberland County > Gorham > Celebration of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Gorham, Maine : May 26, 1886 > Part 6
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beat of drum. The growth of the towns that composed this Republic, and of the country itself, was at first slow; but it was natural and healthy, grew out of the habits and character of the people, and reflected them ; whereas in respect to the numerous republics that in rapid succession have risen and fallen in the world, or that have now a name to live, while they are dead, they have not had such a natural and healthy growth. Their in- stitutions are something put upon them like religion upon a hypocrite, and have not grown out of the spirit instincts of the people, and been shaped by them to meet and satisfy a general want. The steady growth and permanent prosperity of this town has resulted in a great degree from the occupation, as well as from the character of its original inhabitants. All progress comes from tying man down to a piece of land, and compelling him to obtain his bread from it. So long as man wanders, and merely gathers what nature offers, he makes little progress. He has but few wants, they are easily satisfied, and when they are satisfied, he sleeps. He builds no permanent structures, and bestows little labor on that which is to be abandoned tomorrow. His memorial column is a heap of stones, a tree, or a mountain peak. With only the animal for his competitor, he rises but little above the level of his four-footed antagonist. A birch canoe, a bow and arrow, snow-shoes, a sledge, a few rude tools of bone or of stone, record his progress, and limit his attainments in mechanics ; but fasten him to the soil, place him in contact with the forces of the material universe, that he may perceive and avail himself of their 'aid. Make him a producer, and at once new wants arise, that clamor for gratification, and that stimulate invention. Competition begets effort, arts and sciences are born, and leisure and culture follow. What saith the scrip- ture on this point: "The king himself is served from the field." " He who tilleth his land shall have plenty of bread, but he who followeth after vain persons shall have poverty enough." As insects take the color of the bark upon which they feed, thus their whole course of thought and act were tinged and shaped by their religious proclivities. They believed that men were made of the earth, and the nearer they keep to it, the better and hap- pier they are, and that this idea was foreshadowed by the Crea- tor when he assigned this occupation to the first of the species.
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They loved the soil, and clung to it, and placed ownership of the land from which they obtained their bread, before everything else.
Elizabeth Mclellan expressed the sentiments of her neighbors, when she said, -" We will risk our scalps for land." The land was worthy of the risk, for it was fertile and repaid the culti- vator. Place a community on a barren sand or a hungry gravel, that contributes nothing of itself, from which there is no re- sponse, and the husbandman receives only the value of the dress- ing he put on it, and that community will dwindle; but the in- stance has yet to be found of failure or lack of progress, where an industrious race have owned and tilled a fertile soil.
When in 1730, Edmund Phinney cut on Fort Hill the first tree for the purpose of clearing land to plant, his was the initial act that, succeeded by others of a like nature, was destined to trans- form the haunts of the wolf and the savage, into homes for fair women and brave men, where barns should be filled with plenty, and the oxen feed after their manner. An agricultural people are essentially a warlike people, since they produce the men, the provisions, and the clothing. It surely does not become us to forget that the contest which rendered us independent of Great Britain, was fought by farmers, and the expenses borne by the farms ; that our grandmothers spun the wool and flax, and wove the blankets and other clothing, and knit the stockings required during the war; that every household was a manufactory, and every woman an operative. Narragansett was then a frontier settlement, an unbroken forest extending from thence to Canada, and from time immemorial it had been the thoroughfare by which the savage passed from the interior to the sea coast and the mouths of the rivers, and the exposure was great. The nerve and resolution manifested by our progenitors in clearing land of such an enormous growth as this soil then produced, and subduing and fitting it for tillage, was a triumph over obstacles of which any body of men might be justly proud.
Hugh Mclellan and his son William cut a tree for a mast in the flat between the Congregational Meeting-house and the old Female Seminary, on the stump of which they turned around, without their stepping off, a yoke of oxen, six feet in girth; the remains of which were of large size in my boyhood.
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The first man who set foot on this soil with the intention of making a permanent settlement, was Captain John Phinney, the son of a Narragansett soldier. He was a pious, energetic man, an accomplished officer, of clear head and good judgment. He was so well balanced as not to be confused by sudden exigencies or discouraged by severe rebuffs, and was the Miles Standish of the little colony. He came up the Presumpscott River in a light canoe, accompanied by his son Edmund Phinney, afterward a colonel in the Revolutionary Army, and then fourteen years of age. As they were obliged to carry their boat and its lading around the falls at Saccarappa and Ammon Congin, they took with them only an axe, gun, and a small quantity of provision and ammunition. Captain Phinney landed, and proceeding west about two miles through the forest, selected a spot on the south- ern side of Fort Hill, so named from its becoming the site of a fort built during the Indian war, and upon the farm since occu- pied by Mr. Moses Fogg. Here the son cut the first tree ever cut in Gorham, in order to clear land for planting, May 26th, 1736. In the same year Captain Phinney removed his family, consisting of his wife and seven children, being himself forty- three years of age.
The present inhabitants of this town have great reason to congratulate themselves that the most important events, and even many of the most minute details of the history of their native place have been so fully and, on the whole, so accurately pre- served, collected, and transmitted to them. This is due to the fact that the majority of the first settlers were not only persons of strong natural abilities, and tenacious memories, but lived to a great age; and thus the links in the chain that connects the present with the past are comparatively few in number, and likewise that one family among them was not only very numer- ous, but being nearly related to large families in Portland and Saco, the number of interested custodians of the manners and times of our forefathers was multiplied. It is seventy-eight years since the death of Edmund Phinney, who cut the first tree for clearing land to plant, seventy-one since that of John Phinney Jr., who planted the first hill of corn, and but fifty-two since James Phinney, the youngest son of the first settler, died at the age of ninety-three, a man of great intelligence, possessed of a most tena-
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cious memory, more especially of dates, events, and the names of individuals, retaining his faculties till the last, and whose daugh- ter, Mrs. Martha C. Wentworth, is still living to take part in these ceremonies, to the great gratification of all present. Elizabeth McLellan, the wife of Hugh, the third settler, died in 1804, aged ninety-six, and leaving two hundred and thirty-four living descend- ants ; and it was from her lips that my father took and wrote down the account of the massacre of the Bryant family. Captain Phin- ney and his family lived the only white family in this wilderness for two years. Then came Daniel Mosier, then Hugh Mclellan. Others followed till they summed up eighteen families.
PRIVATIONS OF THE PIONEER.
The hardships encountered by this handful of people set down in the midst of a dense forest, were at first very great. They were without a road in any direction, except a mere bridle path through the woods, indicated by spotting trees, - that is, a slice of bark and a little of the wood was taken from trees a few rods apart so as to leave a permanent scar. This gave the right direction and in a direct line, but it could not be followed in the night. The sloughs and brooks must be waded and the rivers forded. So difficult was the road for horses that they were seldom used. We should also bear in mind that those settlers, while clearing their land and before they could obtain crops from it, must procure their supplies of various kinds from Portland and Saco and Scarborough. Their method was to carry these sup- plies on their own backs, or on the back of a horse led by them. Another way was, when they wished to carry their grist to mill, (and the nearest mill was at Ammon Congin, now Cumberland Mills), to carry their grist on their back, two or three miles, to the Presumpscott, then take a light boat or make a raft, and when they came to the mills at Saccarappa, carry both boat and grist around the falls. In this case several went together, or the women went with the men. When but one or two went, they made a raft of logs fastened together with withes, carried their load around the falls, and leaving the raft first constructed to return on, made another to go on with. The first settlers must undergo all this toil to obtain bread, or pound their corn in a mortar, or parch it before the fire, and boil their wheat and rye.
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They were often without wheat for months, and were sometimes compelled to eat the grain reserved for seed, and even forced as a last resort to boil and eat green beech leaves. The pioneers could not live comfortably, as they had no way to clear their land but by the ax and fire-brand, and their crops must be grown among the ashes. It was important to burn thoroughly, or nothing could be raised, and they must therefore set the fires when the woods were dry, and thus often burned up their first dwellings that were wretched shelters, not much labor being bestowed upon them.
I will describe the hardships encountered by a single family that of Hugh and Elizabeth McLellan, to represent those which in different degrees of intensity, fell to the lot of all. I do this for the following reasons : because they began in the greatest poverty, made the most rapid progress, and because they were, in the phraseology of that day, Scotch Irish. King James colo- nized the North of Ireland with Scotch and Irish, and the- McLellans went over at that time and their descendants came over to this country. They were Scotch Presbyterians, a High- land clan set down in New England. One of them, Bryce, settled in Portland, James in Saco, and Hugh bought a soldier's right in Narragansett No. 7, which took all the money he possessed, leaving him only an old white horse, well-nigh past labor, a cow, and scanty clothing. His only household utensils were an iron pot, skillet, some earthen pans, wooden trenchers in lieu of plates, and a hook and trammel to hang the pot on, and. which Elizabeth brought over from Ireland in her straw bed.
By settling among the Puritans in Narragansett, they were at. first compelled to encounter the prejudices which then among protestants attached to all who emigrated from Ireland. Going on to his land the latter part of the winter to fell trees, Mclellan. found an old camp. that had been used by lumbermen, much. decayed. He repaired it and spent the winter chopping, and the last of March went for his family. Nearly all of their household effects were put on the back of the horse. Elizabeth rode and held the youngest child in her lap. William, born in Ireland, and then ten years old, drove the cow, and Hugh, a large framed and very athletic man, followed with a pack on his back, a musket slung across his shoulders, and another child in his arms. About four
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of the clock in the afternoon they reached the camp, cold, tired, hungry, and the children crying, expecting to find food and shel- ter. But during the absence of Hugh, snow had fallen, breaking in the roof of the camp, and partly filling it with snow and the broken fragments of the roof. The parents procured some pieces of bark, scraped out some of the snow and trod down the rest, spread some hemlock brush over it and their blankets on that. There was a fire-place built against the back wall of the camp with stones and clay. In this Hugh built a fire. Elizabeth and the children lay down with no roof but the sky. The father cov- ered them with what wearing apparel they possessed, and put light boughs over them. He then took the horse and cow inside lest the wolves should attack them, and building a fire outside sat by it all night with his gun across his knees. The next day prov- ing fair, he put on the roof and cleared the camp of snow. It was built over a large stump, which, being in the center, had served the lumbermen, the former occupants, for a table, and answered the same purpose for Hugh's family. Elizabeth told my father that the sweetest meals she ever tasted were eaten on that old stump, for they were on their own lands, had a certain dwelling-place, a thing which had never fallen to their lot before. Amid difficulties of this nature did our ancestors secure a fast hold on this soil.
THE INDIAN WAR.
To take land from the forest and bring it into tillage involves hard labor and is a work of time, even with a strong force of men and cattle, because it takes a year to raise a crop. But they were destitute of these helps. They had no grass seed to sow, and the land was left to come into grass of itself, and the first crop was mostly fireweed that always comes up on a burn. No sooner had they by dint of toil and suffering subdued the forest sufficiently to cut a little hay, keep small stocks of cattle, escape the press- ure of pinching poverty, and look forward to better days, than an Indian war broke out, and for fourteen years they were never free from the apprehension or actual experience of savage warfare. For four years they were closely confined to the garrison, and for seven years partially so, living in their own houses during the winter, when the savages were not wont to come, as they could
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be tracked, - and in the summer they went out in the day to plant and sow, returning at night to the fort. They often labored in squads, part of them working while other kept watch. Boys were also placed back to back on stumps to look out and give the alarm. During this period their cattle were killed and many persons murdered by the Indians.
The four years during which they were confined to the fort were years of great suffering by reason of sickness. The rooms in the garrison were small, the only windows were loop-holes. They were crowded together, there was but imperfect ventilation, sick and well in the same rooms, no physician, no proper nourish- ment for the sick ; and when the weather was most sultry and the fresh air most needed, was the very time when danger from the savages was most imminent.
It was now the spring of 1746. Nine of the families composing the little settlement had gone into the fort. Four, Bryant's, Reed's, Cloutman's, Mclellan's, were living on their farms, the rest had fled. Capt. Phinney, well aware of the danger, was extremely anxious and was urging them to come into the fort while they were exerting themselves to the utmost to plant and sow, lest, once in the fort, they should starve. McLellan had built a substantial log house with bullet-proof shutters and loop-holed, on the same side of the road on which the brick house now stands, but further down the declivity and nearer to a spring that now serves as a public watering place. Reed lived on the next farm now owned by George Pendleton, Esq. Cloutman lived just above Reed on the Frost farm, and Bryant about thirty rods above Cloutman. His house stood in the corner where a town road crosses the Fort Hill road, and less than half a mile from the garrison. In the garrison, under the command of Capt. Phinney, were eleven soldiers furnished by the State of Massachusetts to aid in defending the fort, and to act as scouts and as a guard to settlers who were compelled to obtain provisions from Portland, and to cultivate and harvest their crops. They had, however, to deal with a foe merciless as the pestilence, who gives no warning and shows no mercy. Ten Indians, eluding the vigilance of the scouts, had come into the settlement, resolved to either kill or cap- ture these four families without firing a gun or doing anything that would alarm the garrison. It is not probable that the
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Indians meant to kill the Mclellans but to take them prisoners. The McLellans were naturally benevolent and hospitable ; having suffered extreme poverty themselves, they knew how to feel for others, and were ever ready to divide with those in need. Before the war the settlers were in constant intercourse with the savages who were great beggars, and wanted meal, pork, potatoes, and especially rum. William McLellan, Edmund Phinney, and the Watson and Bryant children had Indian playmates. Some of the settlers would give to the Indians because they were afraid of them, some from kindly feeling, but the majority refused ; while Elizabeth, who had no fear about her, always gave them when she had anything to give, saying, "God made them, and that they had as good right to the soil as her folks, and better too." Before the Indian war the settlers were not wont to fasten their doors at night, and often on rising in the morning, Hugh would find an Indian sleeping on the hearth-stone, wrapped in his blanket, and the chance guest was never permitted to go away without eating with the family. A savage never forgets a favor or an injury, and often when they had plenty would repay the kindness. Not many days would pass by before a salmon, a brace of wild pigeons, or a haunch of venison would testify their gratitude. Mrs. Bryant on the other hand was a boisterous woman, a great scold, and hated and despised the Indian. When they wanted to sharpen their knives or tomahawks on the grind- stone, she would drive them away, calling them Indian dogs, and would never suffer one to enter the house, and even refuse them a drink of water, saying, "If you once began with them there was no stopping place." These things were all made a record of in Indian memories, and the day of reckoning was at hand. Bryant had made his arrangements to go into the fort, and would have gone that day, but his wife, who had an infant a fortnight old, said she would risk her scalp one day longer if he would stay out and make a cradle, and he consented.
It was now the evening of the 18th of April, the weather being warm for the season, and quite a fire on the hearth. The Mc- Lellans were sitting with the door open. William came in from the spring with a pail of water, and had just set it down, when the dog who went with him, but lingered behind, ran into the house, growling and his hair bristling. As he was known to have
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a great antipathy to Indians, their suspicions were aroused at once. They fastened the doors and the shutters, and hung blankets before the fire that they wished to make use of. They had four guns, powder and lead, and while Hugh and William lay at the loop-holes, Mrs. McLellan, behind the screen of blankets, was molding bullets and making cartridges. The night passed quietly, but after the war, an Indian told William they had beset the path to the spring, and could have touched him as he went by with the water; but either the recollection of past favors, or something else, held them back. The night, however, passed quietly, and when morning came, Mclellan yoked his oxen, resolved to finish his work that day, and go into the fort. He was about to start for the field, when Reed, the next neighbor, came to borrow a chain. They told him of the actions of the dog, but he said he did not believe there were any Indians round, guessed the dog smelt a wolf, that he should finish his work, and go in the next day. On his way home, he stopped at the brook, and got down on his knees to drink; while drinking, two Indians jumped upon him, bound him, and led him away.
On the morning of that day, Bryant's son told his father if he would help him cover some potatoes that were dropped, he would help him make the cradle, and they went to the field together.
The Indians during the night had made a hole in the brush fence that separated the field and pasture, and lay concealed behind it. The cattle, finding the gap, came into the field. Bryant and his son drove them out, and as. they were putting up the fence, the Indians sprang upon them. Bryant was a very swift runner ; he told his son to hide himself in the woods, and ran himself toward the fort. Paying no attention to the boy, the Indians pursued Bryant, but finding he would reach the fort and alarm the garrison before they could overtake him, fired and broke his arm, and in this crippled state, overtook and killed him. Mrs. McLellan heard the gun, and told her little daughter Abi- gail to go up to Bryant's and see what that gun was fired for; but the child, who had heard the talk about Indians the night before, was afraid to go, and hid herself in the brush. Her mother finding her, boxed her ears, and sent her off. When she reached the house, four children were lying on the floor dead and scalped. Sarah Jane, a little girl of her own age and her
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playmate, whom the Indians had knocked on the head, scalped, and left for dead, lay in the doorway with her bloody head stick- ing out of it. She knew Abigail, and asked her to give her a drink of water. Too much terrified to heed the request, Abigail ran home, and when she reached the house, fell fainting on the threshold. Her mother put her on the bed, and threw cold water in her face; she revived, exclaimed "Indians!" and fainted again. Elizabeth blew the horn and fastened the door. Hugh and William had heard the gun, and the moment they heard it, they left the cattle and came home. Cloutman was a very pow- erful man ; he was more than six feet in height, and weighed two hundred and twenty pounds, and possessed courage in proportion to his strength, and the savages were well aware of it. As he was about to go into the garrison, and the deer were very trouble- some, and would leap any common fence, he had only the day before made his field fence very high, putting brush on and top poles. He was alone in this field sowing grain, having put his family into the fort. Cloutman had placed his gun against the fence, and was sowing away from it. Eight of the strongest Indians had been selected to take him, if possible, alive, as they did not wish to alarm the garrison, and they lay concealed behind the fence. Five of them had laid aside their guns, and armed with knives and tomahawks, prepared to grapple with Cloutman, while the other three retained their guns, determined to shoot rather than permit him to escape. He heard them as they came up behind, and turned around. Seeing there were so many of them, and that they were between him and his gun, and likewise between him and the fort, he ran for Bryant's ; but in trying to leap the fence he had made so high the day before, he fell back, made another attempt, and fell back. They were now so near that he turned and put his back against the fence, and faced them. He knocked down two of them, and hurt them so much that they died before they reached Canada (as the Indians themselves reported after the war). IIe trampled a third under his feet, and would have mastered all of them if the three armed with guns had not come up and put their weapons to his breast, when he surrendered; he was bound and taken by the Indians to Canada, and was drowned in attempting to escape by swimming across Lake Champlain, in a stormy night in November.
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During sixteen years of struggle and danger, the settlers main- tained with unshaken fortitude their religious character. They observed strictly the Sabbath, and continued (whether with or without a minister ), to hold their stated services in the flanker of the fort, or in the meeting-house that was near the garrison, sitting in church with their guns beside them.
When the Indian war ended with the capture of Quebec and the downfall of the French power in Canada, the inhabitants of this town were in a condition of great poverty and had abundant reason for discouragement. Their cattle had been destroyed, mills burnt, and roads had returned to their natural state for want of labor upon them. It was not customary in those days to sow grass-seed, but to leave the land to come into grass of itself, and the first crop was generally fire-weed and the next pigeon-weed. There was very little English hay to be obtained from it. Very little of the land had ever been plowed, but the planting and sowing had been on burnt ground, and not being tilled, it had grown up to bushes.
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