USA > Maine > Lincoln County > Waldoboro > History of old Broad Bay and Waldoboro, Volume 1 > Part 10
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Boice Cooper, as his father's heir, remained at Broad Bay for some years following the latter's death. He is characterized by Cyrus Eaton in the Annals of Warren, as a typical Irishman, care- free, impulsive, and irresponsible. It is related of him that when his father's brig needed repairs, she was hauled up at Pemaquid Point for that purpose while the father went to Boston to procure work- men. "During his absence some of the people, influenced either by motives of mischief or profit, persuaded Boice that it would be better to build a new one with the iron of the old. He seized upon the idea at once, set the brig on fire, and on the elder's return nothing much remained but the ashes." In the son's Irish nature, there was a deep love of music; and he seems to have been a gifted violinist. He is further characterized as humorous and eccentric, "a genuine son of the Emerald Isle, fearless and reckless, passionate
52York Co. Deeds, Bk. 26, p. 54.
53Lincoln Co. Deeds, Bk. 7, p. 88.
54A table brought over in the North or Cooper vessel, which became the property of Boice Cooper and which graced the cabin on the banks of the Medomak in the 1730's is now in the possession of a descendant of his in this town, Mrs. Ida Mallett.
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The First Settlers
and profane, but generous and hospitable, prodigal of his money, his time and convivial hilarity." He also seems to have possessed the Irishman's love of a fight, for after the coming of the Germans to his neighborhood, "his habits, temper and recklessness brought him into perpetual collision with them, their fists being more than a match for his tongue, especially as the latter was not under- stood."55 He soon abandoned the unequal battle in disgust, ex- changed with Waldo his lots on the Medomak in 1743 for land on the Georges56 and retired from a scene now dominated by the Teutons. It is hardly necessary to say that his subsequent days in the latter settlement remained characteristically reckless and pic- turesque.
The next lot, No. 15, brings us to the Slaigo Brook area at the foot of Thomas' Hill. This lot contained 90 acres, was forty rods in width, and had the Gay Brook as its western bound. It covers pretty much the area of the present George Simmons estate and part of the farm of Clyde Sukeforth. The deed drawn June 25, 1743, transfers this property to James Littel (Little), a farmer, "the lot in his actual possession now being by virtue of a grant made to the said James Little by Samuel Waldo, December 6, 1736." This instrument reserves to Waldo "any stream or Falls of water for mills," which, of course, means any mill rights on the Slaigo Brook. Little moved into this area in all probability from Pemaquid, where Little is still a common family name. Little, too, collided with the Germans, against whom he complained bitterly to Waldo; but he stood his ground and remained in the settlement for a number of years. In the French and Indian War he did service in the militia in the company of Captain Alex Nickels in 1756 and thereafter disappeared from history. In 1762 John Ulmer acquired this lot from Little's heirs and sold it to John Martin Schaeffer, clerk, of Broad Bay for £66 13s. 4d.37 This seems to have been Dr. Schaeffer's first acquisition of Broad Bay real estate, and it may have been the scene of his first residence in the colony.
Due west of the James Little lot on the peninsula formed by Broad Bay and the Slaigo Brook, on the tip of what is known now- adays as Schenck's or Hollis's Point, was Captain Lane. Captain Lane is the mystery man of the "town of Leverett." Nowhere is there record of this lot being allotted to him by Samuel Waldo, yet many of the old records contain references to Captain Lane and to Lane's Point as the earliest designation of this tract of land. Consequently the conclusion is unescapable that Captain Lane was one of the earliest settlers on the river. Among the references to
65Cyrus Eaton received the narrative of these facts from the lips of Mrs. Elizabeth Montgomery, a daughter of Boice and a granddaughter of Francis Cooper. Annals of Warren, 2nd ed., p. 69.
56York Co. Deeds, Bk. 24, p. 219.
67Lincoln Co. Deeds, Bk. 5, p. 231.
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HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
him is one contained in a letter of June 5, 1744, from Governor Shirley to Colonel Arthur Noble. At this time active defense measures were being taken at Broad Bay against the Indians on the eve of the Fifth Indian or King George's War. The letter in question directs Colonel Noble to assign ten men to the garrison "at Captain Lane's at the Point of Broad Bay."58 Captain Lane's place was not a blockhouse, since the only blockhouse in the settlement is speci- fically mentioned in Shirley's order as being elsewhere; but it was merely a good log cabin which had been surrounded by a stockade. It was the lower garrison on the east side and stood on the knoll on the site of or near the present summer home of Carroll T. Cooney. This was a very strategic point and it served as a refuge and rallying point for the settlers in the Slaigo district and those farther down the river. .
Little more is known of Captain Lane. It is probable that he joined the expedition to Louisburg in 1745 and served in Waldo's regiment under Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Noble, who was a co- proprietor of land in Nobleborough and Lane's commanding officer in the Waldoborough area the year before. In this case he may have been killed in action or died in camp at Cape Breton, for his name does not appear again in our history, although the name of Lane's Point recurs again and again in old deeds and indentures of the period. Especially is it recurrent in the Quadripartite Indenture of March 19th, 1768, in which the Waldo children effected a divi- sion of their father's holdings under the Muscongus Patent.59 If Lane had abandoned his farm in the course of the Indian war or died at Louisburg, his claim at Lane's Point would have reverted to Waldo in case the terms of his occupancy had not been fulfilled. This seems to have been the case; for in the Indenture "three hun- dred acres of land at a place called Lane's point in Broad Bay" were in Waldo's possession at the time of his death in 1759, and in the division of the property were assigned to his oldest son, Samuel, Jr. There is a further possibility that after the Louisburg campaign Captain Lane abandoned his home at Broad Bay and became a pro- fessional soldier, for we hear of a "Capt Lane" in 1756 recruiting men for the expedition against Crown Point, and again in 1775 as recruiting soldiers among the Indians.
This land remained unoccupied until 1769 when Samuel Waldo, Jr., for the consideration of £100, conveyed the title to Andrew Schenck, tanner. The amount conveyed was 100 acres "being lot No. 1 on Lane's Point" and embraced territory from "Place Brook so called, including the same with the Falls" to the shore of Broad Bay.60
58Colls. Me. Hist. Soc. Doc. Ser. XI, 296.
59 Lincoln Co. Decds, Bk. 27, p. 82. 60Ibid., Bk. 7, p. 16.
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The First Settlers
Next north of the north line of the Little and Lane farms was Lot No. 14, containing ninety acres with a width of forty rods. This farm extended from the shores of the bay due east into the woods until the ninety acres were completed. The line began
by a spruce tree by the riverside, and running down the river by high water mark forty rods to a white burch and from said trees to run into the country forty rods wide on east course till said ninety acres are complete, said Waldo reserving to himself any stream or falls of water lying within the premises suitable for creating a mill or mills.
This lot was conveyed by deed of January 26, 1743, to James Burns, "in actual possession of James Burns by a grant made to him December 6, 1736." Like all the other deeds, this one contains the usual peppercorn clause, which reads: "and especially in con- sideration of the Rent of one Pepper Corn per annum to be paid yearly by the said James Burnes to the sd. Samuel Waldo his Heirs and Assigns on every Twenty Ninth Day of September forever."61 This is an old formula, but its inclusion in these deeds is interesting, as it gave Waldo a feudal claim to all the land and may indicate the presence in his mind of the thought that some day there would be, as there actually was, a nobility in the colonies, and that he might be the Baron of Muscongus, or even as he actually styled himself later, "the Hereditary Lord of Broad Bay." James Burns moved into the "town of Leverett" from Pemaquid, and was the father, or perhaps brother, of Joseph and William Burns who were allotted farms in this area at the same time. At the outbreak of King George's War in 1745, he abandoned his farm and seems never to have returned to it.
North of No. 14, the Burns lot, was a wide strip of virgin forest which extended unbroken to a clearing just below the first falls of the Medomak. Here in 1736 was William Burns with a cabin and ninety acres of land reaching back over the hill and including the present Main Street and land north thereof. Burns came from the Pemaquid area, where he had been allotted a farm by Shem Drowne. This lot was not suitable because of lack of water, so Drowne offered him (September 26, 1735) an additional house lot if he would build a cabin and improve the land. This arrangement apparently was not satisfactory to Burns, since on February 21, 1736, he sold his claim at Pemaquid to George Cra- dock62 and took up the lot offered by Waldo just below the first falls in the town of Leverett. Here he remained improving his land until the outbreak of the Fifth Indian War. In 1745 when a large part of the settlement joined the Louisburg expedition, Burns raised a company of militia for the defense of those remaining in
61York Co. Deeds, Bk. 27, p. 108. 62Ibid., Bk. 25, p. 193.
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HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
the settlement. Indian attacks, however, were so frequent and fierce that Burns finally withdrew to Scituate, Mass. At the close of the war he again took up land under Waldo, this time at "Smelt Cove" on Muscongus Brook,63 where he died in 1750.
North of the Burns lot were the two largest grants on the river. On April 20, 1737, two men, either brothers or a father and son by the name of Samuel and William Douse from "Clughereen, County of Kerry in the Kingdom of Ireland" and later of Boston, signed an agreement with Samuel Waldo to settle for seven years two tracts of land on the Medomak above tidewater. The first of these tracts, on the east side of the river, contained 2010 acres and began
at the northwest corner of a certain Lot of Land now in the Improve- ment and Possession of one, Willm. Burnes below the Lower Falls ... and thence running up along by the said River the same Course which the said River runs into the Country till the sd. Tract is one mile and a half in breadth and so running back within that Breadth an East Course into the Country till the aforesd. quantity of Two Thousand and Ten Acres is made up and Compleated.
The Douses were also to have the sole use and privilege of the lower falls and also "such part of the aforesaid River or Stream as shall be necessary for the Useing and Working such Iron Works or other Works of that kind as shall be erected by the said Samuel and William Douse." From this tract Waldo reserved for his own use ten acres adjoining the Great Falls a half mile above, for the building of "one or more Mill or Mills for the Accomodation of a Settlement there commonly called or known by the Name of the Town of Leverett." For this land the Douses were to pay "16 Pounds, 13 Shillings, 4d. each March 25th."
On the west side of the river there was a similar tract which began at the lower falls and embraced 2100 acres. This lot followed the course of the river up into the country for 385 rods. From this point it "ran back into the Country North Thirty Three Degrees West and up along the aforesd. River the Same Course which the said River runs into the Country till the aforesaid quantity of Two Thousand One Hundred Acres is made up and Compleated." On this side Waldo reserved for himself 100 acres "to be laid out or Adjoyning near to a Certain great Falls upon the aforesd. River at about half a Mile's Distance from the herein before mentioned lower Falls." This tract, also, he planned to use for mills for his settlement known as the town of Leverett in honor of one of the original owners of the Muscongus Patent and his later heirs, one of whom had become Governor of Massachusetts and another President of Harvard College. For this second tract the Douses
"Lincoln Co. Deeds, Bk. 4, p. 107.
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The First Settlers
were to pay the yearly rent of five shillings. These two "Agree- ments by Grantees" were both executed on April 20th, 1737, acknowledged August 10th, 1737, and recorded May 22, 1738.64 Of the later activity and eventual fate of the Douses nothing fur- , ther is known. They may have enlisted under Waldo for the Louis- burg campaign in 1745, or joined the local militia for the defense of the settlement, or abandoned their holdings in the face of the certainty of the impending Indian war.
The west side of the river below the Douse grant was a stretch of virgin forest extending down to Broad Cove. At this place in the 1730's were cabins and clearings of James Hilton, possibly Jacob Eaton, and certainly Joseph Burns,65 a brother of William, who also moved into this area from Pemaquid. He was the captain of a local transport in the Louisburg expedition, was present at the capture of the stronghold, and still at Broad Cove in 1761 when the Pownalborough records list him as being married to Mary Bogs of Pemaquid. After the war he resettled at "a place called Musconkus, about four miles south of Broad Cove."66
This process of settling after the initial start had been made should be thought of as slowly continuous, with now and then a new family taking up land on the river. Such was Waldo's policy and such was the procedure as is apparent from several sources, one of which is cited here, an advertisement in the Boston Gazette of July 13, 1738: "Samuel Waldo of Boston, Merchant, intending to take his departure for Great Britain with Capt Hall, gives notice that all desiring to settle on the Eastern Parts of this Province, apply in his absence at his House on Queen Street from his agents." Never again, from 1736 on, was the settlement ever entirely abandoned.
The principal occupation of these first settlers on the Medo- mak was the supplying of firewood to the Boston market, the proceeds from the sale of which went for the purchase of winter supplies of food and such other necessary articles as they could not fabricate for themselves. To this must be added farming and some fishing and trapping. The wood sloops plied constantly between Maine points and Boston in all ice-free seasons of the year. They usually carried thirty cords of wood when loaded, were manned by three hands, and made an average of about fifteen trips each year. The settlers received seven shillings per cord for the wood delivered at the water side. These boats also carried pas- sengers, the charge for which was six shillings a trip, the traveller providing his own food.
6+York Co. Deeds, Bk. 20, pp. 131, 133.
$5Lincoln Co. Deeds, Bk. 3, p. 66.
60"Testimony of Wm. Burns, son of Joseph," Lincoln Report, pp. 161-162.
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HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
The data set forth in this chapter renders inevitable the con- clusion that the first permanent settlement on the banks of the Medomak, the beginnings of the present town of Waldoboro, was in 1736, and that the first settlers were of English, Irish, and Scotch-Irish descent and had pushed up from the lower districts of the sound or filtered in from other sections of New England. Their settlement was continuous and overlapped that of the first Germans who came between 1739 and 1742. Some of them re- linquished their holdings after the coming of the Germans, some during the War of the Austrian Succession, 1744-1748, and others during the French and Indian War. The last holdings of these earliest settlers were not disposed of by sale until the early 1760's when the Germans were fully established.
This chapter has been fully documented in order to fix finally the date of the first settlement of the town, which heretofore has been guessed at by historians, various dates being given, such as 1748, 1742, and 1740.67 The earliest settlement was one of slow extension up the sound, of advance and retreat, of holding and relinquishing. It was the Germans who finally held on, in part because once on the land here they were too poor to leave, and in part because they were inured by a long tradition of living amid uncertainty, insecurity, and fitful warfare. They had been trained by hard experience to bear up under situations which the Irish, the English, and Scotch found intolerable, and from which they repeatedly retreated.
67Samuel L. Miller, Edgar O. Achorn, and Cyrus Eaton respectively.
VI
THE EARLY GERMAN MIGRATIONS TO AMERICA AND THEIR BACKGROUND IN EUROPEAN HISTORY
Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history.
EMERSON
T. HE MOST PERMANENT SETTLEMENT at Old Broad Bay was made by peoples from the populous valleys of the Rhine and its tribu- taries, who came in an unending stream across the Atlantic from 1680 down to the beginning of the American Revolution, and onto the coasts of a New World, and into the valleys of the Savannah, Susquehanna, the Mohawk, and the Medomak.
The motives leading to these migrations are implicit in the very beginnings of Germanic history. The less remote and more immediate causes, however, are always the more dramatically apparent, and of course the more potent. Hence we shall start in medias res and begin to pick up the motives from the early half of the sixteenth century, when the religious unity of Europe was shattered and a deep fissure was opened up within the Uni- versal Church. This line of cleavage, now known as the Protestant Reformation, was one of the major causes for the peopling of America. A second of these major causes influencing emigration was the desire to better their fortunes, and along with those legitimately so actuated, there must be included the adventurers, the footloose, the ne'er-do-wells, who sought the New World from sheer restlessness and recklessness in the hope that there "luck would do better for them than labor." With our German forefathers at Broad Bay, however, migrating was largely a matter of economic betterment and religious freedom.
Out of the Reformation in northern and western Europe there evolved three schools of dissenting doctrine which took root in the teachings of Martin Luther, John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli, and in due time became established faiths. There was also a great host of earnest souls "hungering and thirsting after righteousness," who failed to find fulfillment of their religious needs in any of these forms sanctioned by the state. Bohemia, Saxony, and Moravia were the breeding grounds of these dissidents. Here there was con-
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HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
stant religious ferment and out of it grew independent com- munities and sects which devised and propagated some rather unconventional practices and beliefs, such as lay ministers, un- premeditated sermons (preaching as the spirit might at the moment move them), refusal to submit to oaths, changes in the sacraments, religious objections to military service, nonparticipation in secular government, and rejection of infant baptism, the basest of all heresies to the Catholics. According to the religious belief of these sects baptism was the mark of an individually attained relation to Christ, and a sacrament to be practiced only when such a rela- tionship had been personally experienced. Hence they taught the necessity of rebaptism, which under the doctrines of the estab- lished churches was an impiety, and in the eyes of the law a capital crime.
It was inevitable that persecution and martyrdom should follow such heretical teachings. In Germany and Switzerland they took the form of wholesale expulsions, drownings, beheadings, and deaths at the stake. In the face of universal persecution these dissenting sects became peoples without a national home. Many of them ultimately found refuge in Pennsylvania, and some figured colorfully in early Broad Bay history.
The religious troubles occasioned by such schisms created as a by-product intolerable economic conditions, for they brought on the great Thirty Years War. It was Germany especially which became in these years (1618-1648) the witches' brew of these clashing sects and competing fanaticisms. For nearly a century after Luther's time such differences had smouldered, flaring up now and then in a persecution or a more violent outbreak, only to subside and smoulder anew, until around 1618 the smoking embers again broke forth in the conflagration that involved prac- tically every country in Western Europe. Germany was its battle- ground. The political losses and gains accruing from this raging struggle did bring an undeniable advance toward religious free- dom, but this was little indeed compared with its catastrophic effects on Germany, its principal victim. As A. W. Ward has pointed out, its effects material and moral together, furnish per- haps (prior to the First and Second World Wars) the most ap- palling demonstration of the consequences of war to be found in human history.1 When this war came to an end in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia, Germany lay devastated, depopulated, and crushed.
The basis of the peasant economy, which was agriculture, was scarcely existent. It could not have been otherwise, since for three decades the armies of Western Europe made up of both a
1Prof. A. W. Ward, in the Cambridge Modern History, Vol. IV.
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Early Migrations
native and a mercenary soldiery, with no organized commissariat, paid largely by such loot as they could lay hands on, had marched back and forth, fighting major battles and minor engagements often in the same areas. In fact, matters came to such a pass that amid such devastation military operations in certain districts be- came impracticable. There were areas that were almost entirely depopulated, where the property wreckage was appalling. In Bo- hemia, where the war had broken out, 6000 villages were left standing at its finish out of a total of 35,000. In Moravia conditions were little different. There was, in short, scarcely a district in Germany where destruction, famine, and desolation did not stalk unchecked and where disease was not more deadly even than the work of the sword.
The depopulation arising from this bitter war finds few paral- lels in history. The number of people in the Empire shrunk in these thirty years from 16,000,000 to less than 6,000,000, which was close to a two-thirds reduction. Of this number 350,000 had per- ished by the sword, famine, and disease, and the abandonment of the land had done the rest. In districts which later figured in Broad Bay history, the loss of life had been even more frightful. In the lower Palatinate it is estimated that one person in ten survived; in Würtemberg it was one in six. Cannibalism was a common practice; where there was nothing else the bodies of the dead were used as food. Later in the old Duchy of Franconia the prob- lem of repopulation was met in part by allowing a man a legal limit of two wives, and by forbidding anyone under sixty to become a monk.2
The restoration of peace brought no surcease of oppression to the peasants who had survived the ordeal of war. There was still a master class left to impose taxes. These were freely levied wher- ever it was possible to collect them, and since there was no money the equivalent of these imposts was usually taken in goods and services. Through such a practice the condition of the peasantry was largely reduced to one of serfdom. In the face of such an intolerable status farms were deserted and reverted to forest and bushland, until a full third of the arable land remained uncultivated. Such a development reduced the standard of living close to a level of hopelessness, and in this depressed state it remained for the better part of two centuries.
The military and economic effects of the war were no less severe in cities and towns, from which some of our Broad Bay settlers later came. Many of these communities faced the problem of rising from their own ashes. Cologne was completely crippled
2E. F. Henderson, A Short History of Germany (New York: Macmillan Co., 1914), pp. 496-497,
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HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
commercially and industrially; Aachen had shrunk to one quarter its normal size; the balance of trade once centered in Rhinish cities shifted to France, and the products of German industry literally vanished from the markets. In the absence of capital and of adequate labor Germany entered a long period of economic stagnation, and its people a further prolongation of degradation, hardship, and poverty. A blight seemingly deadly and unending lay over the whole land. There was also the widespread abandon- ment of all moral controls, so characteristic of war, and so much a part of its aftermath, a breakdown of restraints built up by centuries of culture and spiritual discipline. The higher values disappeared from life. The influence of education was but faintly felt; the voice of literature was nearly silenced, and amid bitterest sectarian hatreds, the renewal of religious life, necessarily fostered by a faith in God and a trust in man, was left for later generations to recreate.
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