USA > Maine > Lincoln County > Waldoboro > History of old Broad Bay and Waldoboro, Volume 1 > Part 2
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CHAPTER
ences. Squatters adamant. In end they capitulate. Terms of final settlement. Death of General Henry Knox.
XXV THE LAST DECADE OF THE CENTURY 550
The first Federal census. Size of local families. Road building. Ridding the town of undesirable settlers. Handling of paupers. Representation in the General Court. Weather conditions. First epi- demic of smallpox. Survey map of Nathaniel Meservey. Participation in political life. Federal currency of dollars established. Miscellaneous items. Ordinances governing the fisheries. Militia and Indian visitors. Conveyance of mail. Custom House established. Fiscal troubles. Peculations of John C. Wallizer. "The Friendly Society." De- tails of local life and fashions. Social life. Jacob Ludwig and his "Note Book." Land transfers. William Doane, Barnard, and Sproul. New fami- lies in the town. Henry Kennedy. Impressions of the town as recorded by the Rev. Paul Coffin and Talleyrand.
APPENDIX
Roster of Waldoborough soldiers in the Revolu- tion.
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xxiii
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
frontispiece
THE OLD WEAVER HOMESTEAD
title page vignette
THE WALDOBORO AREA IN PREDISCOVERY DAYS
5
DISTRIBUTION OF THE INDIAN POPULATION
17
MEETING OF WHITE AND RED MEN IN NEW ENGLAND
27
MAP OF LAND CLAIMED IN THE WALDOBORO AREA
44
MAP OF EARLIEST SETTLEMENTS ON THE RIVER
69
MAPPED AREA OF GERMAN MIGRATIONS TO BROAD BAY
83
ARRIVAL OF SHIP Lydia AT BROAD BAY
108
GOVERNOR WILLIAM SHIRLEY
119
FRENCH TOWN AND FORTRESS OF LOUISBURG
136
CONRAD HEYER
161
WIFE OF CAPTAIN JACOB LUDWIG
194
GOVERNOR THOMAS POWNAL
facing
224
JACOB LUDWIG, SR.
facing
256
THE LUTHERAN CHURCH
facing
257
A BROAD BAY HOME IN THE 1760's
308
THE MORAVIAN MISSION, BROAD BAY, 1762
358
MAP SHOWING LOCATION OF EARLY PURITAN FAMILIES
406
GRAVE OF CHARLES C. G. LEISNER
430
THE ULMER FAMILY CREST
512
MAJOR GENERAL HENRY KNOX
facing
528
AN OLD WALDOBORO KITCHEN
facing
529
THE REVEREND JOHN W. STARMAN
facing
560
SQUIRE JOHN J. BULFINCH
facing
560
THE REED MANSION
facing
561
THE OLD JACOB LUDWIG HOMESTEAD
570
BRIGADIER GENERAL SAMUEL WALDO
XXV
INTRODUCTION
Everybody has a place in the history of the world. Simply to be born into it one must, one way or the other and roughly speaking, contribute by one's little span one's mite to the whole of the world-span. THOMAS MANN (Joseph the Provider)
This history is economic, political, social and cultural in its surveys, analyses and evaluations. It aims to record clearly the continuity of change in man's attitudes, outlooks, modes of feel- ing, thinking, acting, and living which are integrated into that nexus of endless causation which we call the historical continuum or process. Nor does it in its sequential character lose sight of those tiny happenings and episodes, those absorbing little things which make up so large a part of the simple yet significant life of the great, the lowly and the poor, not only the poor in purse but the poor in spirit. In fact, it has been my aim to omit no detail, however seemingly small, so long as it is human, relevant and illu- minating. It is possible that Waldoboro may never have another history. Should this prove a fallible prediction, then it is probable that a century or more might elapse before such a work were undertaken. In the interim bodies of data available now might well have disappeared forever. This is a fact by which I have, through- out my researches been repeatedly and frustratingly faced. It has made me loath indeed to ignore vital material in the faith that some later historian would salvage it.
In writing this history it is my belief that I have not been engaged in any mere humble chore. I am conscious that fashions in the writing of history change and have steadily shifted toward more expanded and comprehensive concepts of what in reality human history embraces, until today this concept is inclusive of the life of man at every level. The time when local history was mere antiquarianism, written by some local scribe purely for pride- ful, local consumption, is past. In the fields of history the local scene has arrived at the state of legitimacy, and scholars have taken over. Of this thesis I sense in many quarters an ever growing ac- ceptance. Recently a Professor of American History at Yale Uni- versity, Samuel Flagg Bemis, has defined the status of local history as Everyman's history, and he adds: "By competent studies of little American communities ... scholars are replowing the base and marking out the contours of our Republic. The general historian of the future must stand on this revived base and follow these smaller contours, if he is to feel and portray the real American heritage." Such a view is wholly in keeping with my conviction reached independently as the slow outgrowth of my own phi- losophy of history.
xxvii
As I view this work in retrospect I become more clearly con- scious of four major points of view which have been organizing factors in its conception and execution, and have imparted to it such uniqueness, if any at all, as it may be fortunate enough to possess. The first of these viewpoints is that in deepest reality there is no essential difference in local, state, or national history. These are simply arbitrary categories devised by man for his conven- ience in writing history. There is only history - the complete and integrated record of man's activity at all social levels. To speak contrariwise, as has been said elsewhere in this work, would be to affirm that a part is not a portion of a whole. By the same token local history is an integral of world history. The scale is reduced but it is none the less revealing. Just as there are painters who employ bolder strokes on broader canvasses, so are there those who work in miniature and depict a reality equally convincing and revealing. Such is local history, a reflection of world move- ments in simpler lives and on a smaller scale.
The second organizing viewpoint has been an outgrowth of my study of the work of two great scholars, Professors Karl Lamprecht of the University of Leipzig and James Harvey Robin- son of Columbia University. To be sure, in my youth I loved the old school history texts of the nineties, which epitomized in kalei- doscopic successiveness the voyages of the early explorers, the set- tling of the colonies, the chronological march of the Presidential administrations, the sequence of battles and wars, interrupted by insignificant interludes of peace. This was the Old History. But the newer conceptions of the two master scholars I found later far more intriguing, and I came to regard historical writing as a continuous recreation of the life of the past in all of its relevant detail, not only in the modes of thinking and feeling implicit in the leadership of the great, but also the customs, beliefs, and prac- tices of commoner man, and his manner of living and adjusting to the ever changing configurations of human civilization.
It is here recognized that a past cannot become a living past, unless the human beings who once animated its life, who imparted to it its dynamic quality, its energizing force and its unique color and flavor, again become living realities in its history. By this is not meant that generations of obscure and unnumbered thousands must return again, crowding the historical picture in flesh and spirit. Rather does it mean that where masterful men have domi- nated a scene and given direction to an unfolding community life, where beauty of living and largeness of soul have left their healing marks on the drab or festering spots of a tiny society, or evil in- carnate has bruised or blackened its sensitive fabric, and wherever the creative impulse has harbored itself in quaint, gifted, and ec-
xxviii
centric individualities who at one time or another were focal points of local awe, wonderment, laughter, or scorn, such people should live again wherever the record of their words and doings is suffi- cient to piece together their strong, lovable, or puzzling personali- ties.
I am quite aware that this latter task is one calling for a degree of literary craftsmanship which I do not possess. Neverthe- less in my conviction it does follow that the local historian needs something of the power of apt, accurate, and quick characteriza- tion, able in a few incidental strokes to impart life and humanness with the brevity and ease of George Eliot, when, in reference to an elderly lady in Middlemarch, she observed: "She had too much religion for family comfort." Here in a phrase we encounter a character. Such a gift represents a greater need of the historian at the local than at any other level, for it is at this level that life itself is the essence of things historical, and that the truth of fiction and the truth of history are ofttimes one.
My fourth and last slant is that in that history where little lives play themselves out amid local scenes, as they fade and re- cede into the past, they invariably dissolve into folklore and poetry. Indeed Thomas Gray, as he wandered and lingered in the church- yard at Stoke Poges where was gathered all that was mortal of that hamlet's long history, yielded to the poetic mood, and in lovely and enduring verse indited an historical obituary of name- less generations, embodying in it that which was most significant in their simple annals. Here it happens that under the magic al- chemy of the artist history is transmuted into poetry. In taking such a slant on history I harbor no strange illusion, for there are others who believe as I do. George Macaulay Trevelyan, felt by many to be the ablest of living English historians, has made his work a point of protest against the conventional dogma that his- tory is a science and only a science. He affirms that even the most prosaic details in the fullness of time will enshroud themselves in the mists of poetry, and he finds the poetry of history "in the quasi-miraculous fact that once on this earth, once on this familiar spot of ground walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone like ghosts at cock- crow." He adds: "This is the most familiar and certain fact about life, but it is also the most poetical."
To such a view I can do naught but subscribe. In fact, I hold the poetic element in the historical to be inevitable, for poetry is a quality inherent in life, and history is a record of that life. Accord- ingly in this history wherever poetry comes close to the surface
xxix
in little episodes, little experiences, and little lives, the aim is to record them in a manner that their poetic quality may be sensed by the reader; for history touched by the warm glow of poetry, wherever poetry is inherent in it, loses none of its historicity and gains much in humanness.
There are other minor but difficult goals which have hovered before my mind in the guise of faint hopes as this work has moved across the face of more than two centuries. Ever before me has been the realization that each age had its own characteristic beliefs, outlooks, and ways of feeling; that it is these qualities which im- part to each era an essence which is distinctively its own. Could the art of the historian recapture the peculiar flavor of successive periods for the modern reader? Such an attempt has here been made. Whenever possible, through the actual written or spoken words of men and women, through their most characteristic acts, through the folklore, the religious mood, and through the loves, the prejudices, and the hatreds of those living long ago, I have sought to recapture for each period its own archaic flavor, that the reader might savor the real tang of life in the successive generations of his ancestors. The historian can face no task more difficult than such a bridging of the almost insuperable chasms separating men of the present from the life of men of the past.
As I have sought over the years a true and meaningful syn- thesis of history out of great masses of heterogeneous data, one question has always been uppermost in my thought. For what level of reader interest, or for whom was I writing such a history? Upon an answer to this question there always hinged the decision of what material to use and what to discard, what use to make of the material selected and where to lay the emphasis. Face to face with this problem I have sought a middle ground, if such there might be, where all and sundry readers, with the exercise of some tolerance toward the author's judgments, might meet at a common level of experience and interest.
Several years ago while I was reading Macaulay's essay on "The Romance of History," I came across a sentence which seemed to epitomize much of what I have here attempted. "The perfect historian is he in whose work the character and spirit of an age is exhibited in miniature." While I am only too painfully aware that "the perfect historian" does not yet exist, I was instantly conscious that here was defined a conception of history that fitted the aims of my story of Old Broad Bay and Waldoboro. Here, too, was a most adequate and satisfying definition of good local history, to exhibit the character and spirit of the successive epochs of a locale in miniature.
XXX
HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO Volume I: The Colonial and Federal Periods
I
THE WALDOBOROUGH AREA IN PREDISCOVERY DAYS
This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, Stand like Druids of eld . ..
HENRY W. LONGFELLOW
IT IS QUITE GENERALLY TRUE that the history of a town or local community may be thoroughly understood only when it is con- sidered as an integral part of its natural geographic area or district. This is the case of many of the present-day coastal towns of Maine, and perhaps of none is it truer than of historic Broad Bay or Waldo- borough. In the early period of the development of the coastal region of this general area, the coveted goal of the early settlers was the river valley with its rich arable lands and its head of tide, where the falls would furnish the power needed to provide the essentials of a stable and self-sufficient economic life. It is rather difficult in this modern era, when land is so common, cheap, and seemingly superfluous, to understand the soil hunger of the early Europeans in America. In the Old World land was practically the sole form of wealth possessed by the peasant classes; and at their almost animal standard of living, it produced in one way or another nearly everything that they were privileged to consume. In short, it was to them life.
In America they were not long in discovering that the fringe of soil immediately adjacent to the ocean was ill-suited, indeed, even to their poor standard of living. They well knew where the richer lands were located, and in this area the arrow of their destiny remained pointing in this direction for nearly a century. In the absence of roads, the river was their one channel of access to the headwaters of their dreams. On the other hand, it connected with the sea, and the river and the sea were the sole ways of securing access to a larger world and to markets where an exportable surplus could be sold or exchanged for goods which could not be fabri- cated in the primitive industries of a new community. From the time of the very first settlement of Monhegan or Pemaquid, it was
2
HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
written unchangeably in the economics of laissez-faire that Waldo- borough was to be the dominating unit in this region; and from the beginning all growth was in its direction, until in the 40's of the nineteenth century "this place had become the grand center this side of the Kennebec; so much so that the whole district had taken the name of the Waldoborough District."1 Here again, as in the history of many other coastal centers, the richer bottom lands, water power, and water transportation were the three decisive economic factors upon which the dominance of the town in this area was built. By sheer geographic location its overlordship was assured until the iron rail and the gasoline truck should supersede the sea and river as avenues of transportation, and until steam and electricity should provide the power that water alone once fur- nished.
These three economic objectives, however, were not imme- diately achieved by the early settlers of the Maine coast. There were supervening factors in consequence of which colonization along the bays and rivers seems to have followed the same general course. First there was the occupation of the islands by the Euro- pean fishermen and traders, since the more inland waters were uncharted, unsafe, and little known. Monhegan and Damariscove Islands are examples of this first step which had the added advantage that the islands furnished security against the savages. The second step was to the coastal harbors where the land was somewhat better for agricultural purposes and where the islands could still furnish a quick refuge in the event of Indian attack. Pemaquid and New Harbor are relevant examples of this second step in our own area. The third step was the strengthening of these footholds on the main by the erection of forts and palisades which served as protec- tive nuclei for the settlers clustered about them. From such points, as the number of settlers increased, the inevitable push was up the bays and sounds, then up the rivers until the head of tidewater was reached, where the larger towns were built on the triple economic foundation here specified.
In the Waldoborough area this penetration to the falls of the Medomak was a slow one. More than a century elapsed between the first settlements of Pemaquid and New Harbor (1625-1630) and the final occupation of the headwaters of the "Muscongus" in the 1730's and in 1742. This century was a tragic era for the early settlers. It witnessed four Indian wars with their bloodshed, tor- ture, fire, captivities, and the repeated retreat of the colonists from their hard-won farms. Their successive pushes, however, in the brief intervals of peace carried them ever farther up the river and ever deeper inland. Pemaquid, New Harbor, Round Pond, Mus-
1A. J. McLeod, "Centennial Sermon" (German Lutheran Church, 1873).
3
Prediscovery Days
congus, Greenland, and Broad Cove in our area were the successive frontiers of this movement. Hence any history of Waldoborough cannot dissociate itself from such beginnings and from such a trend within the limits of its natural physical bounds. From the begin- ning the task of felling trees, clearing land, and building homes was slowly continuous and in one direction, namely to the head- waters of the Muscongus, or Medomak as it is now known.
The area of exploration and settlement as a single geographic and economic unit is clearly indicated by the map accompanying this chapter. It may be roughly bounded by Monhegan and Allen's Island of the Georges Group on the east, and by Pemaquid Point on the west, thence northward following the contours of Mus- congus Bay inland, and up the Medomak River to the power sites at its head. The upper river valley beyond the falls and the lands adjacent to the lower Medomak on the east and west form a part of this area, which reaches to the heights of land constituting the water divide that separate it from the Georges River valley on the east and from the Damariscotta River basin on the west. Within these limits have taken place those historical events and those social and economic developments whose synthesis is the history of Waldoborough. It is recognized that this interpretation cuts at times across the boundaries of a few of the smaller adjacent towns. Such lines, however, are artificial and man-made and are neither observed nor respected by the free play of historical forces. In this volume they are respectfully observed save at those times and points where they are obliterated by the natural action of social and economic forces.
For many centuries preceding the discovery of this district, there were few major changes in conditions as they are experienced at the present time. Climatically it is probable that the rainfall was heavier and the winters severer in prediscovery days. Very old folks, relying on their own memories and on the accounts received orally from parents and grandparents, affirm the truth of this assumption. It is also confirmed by the records of the United States Weather Bureau reaching back over the better part of a century. If the trend observed in this period may be taken as an accurate gauge, the average temperature is rising at the rate of three degrees a century; and the rainfall is decreasing at the rate of two inches a century. In the last fifty-five years the snowfall has decreased fourteen inches.2 Here again, if this represents a long-time trend, it would indicate harsher temperatures and more constant and deeper snows in this district in times before the advent of the white man.
2John J. O'Neill, in the New York Herald Tribune, March 13, 1938.
4
HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
Geographically there was far less difference than climatically in the centuries preceding discovery. The contours and configura- tion of the area were in all essential features identical with those that we know today. In other respects, especially connected with the flora and fauna, it was markedly different. The district was formerly covered with forests of beech, elm, maple, birch, oak, ash, and conifers. These woodlands were not in the main dense, as the trees reached such tremendous proportions that underbrush and small growth inevitably lost out in their shade and disappeared. There had been ample time for the fittest in the way of tree life to survive, and these fittest were very fit indeed. Some idea of their size may be gained by recalling the observations of some of the earliest settlers as well as those of later naturalists who explored the forests of the northern part of the state in the nineteenth cen- tury when these woodlands were still untouched by the wasteful hand of man. Thoreau, for example, in his Maine Woods, an account of his trip to the Moosehead district in 1846, measured white pine that were six feet in diameter at the base and yellow birch that were fourteen feet in circumference. Certainly trees of equal size met the gaze of the first settlers in the moister and lower lands along the coast. On the estate of Col. Thomas H. Perkins on Swan Island in the Kennebec River, as revealed by early letters, there stood in front of the house
two mighty oaks each twelve feet in circumference; five white pines that were over one hundred and fifty feet in height, not by guess, but by measurements made by Major Barney of Baltimore, an officer in the Engineer Corps of the United States Army. There were six sugar maples on it [i.e., land near the house] each measuring fifteen feet in girth with large spaces around them, cleared from the forest by my grandfather Dumaresq, a great lover of fine trees; and there were many beautiful oaks both white and red which came near to the proportions of the two giants in front of the old house.3
Such forests as these, rising straight from the river bank and the shores of the bay, as well as on the coast and islands, and stretch- ing away endlessly beyond the gaze, must have presented a sight of unparalleled charm, beauty, and majesty from the tender green of spring through the deeper green of summer to the riotous blaze of autumn and the deep, cold snows of winter. The natives left these forests practically untouched except for the dead wood and small stuff which they burned for fuel. In fact, more trees seem to have been destroyed by beaver than by Indians.4 The moisture which these vast wooded areas conserved in the soil, as well as the heavier rainfall, gave to the brooks and streams a constant sup- ply of water so that they flowed deep, clean, and unpolluted and
"Proceedings of the Mass. Hist. Soc., 2nd Ser., II, 431.
4J. D. Whitney, The United States (Boston, 1889), p. 176.
Prediscovery Days
5
foamed madly or lazily over their rapids according to the season of the year. Here and there along the shores were small clearings, where the Indians made their summer camping grounds and planted
THE
WALDOBORO AREA
IN
PRE - DISCOVERY DAYS
MONHECAN
their crops on their annual treks to and from the coast. Open glades or meadowlands, too, occurred in the forests where old beaver dams had flooded a considerable area in years past and killed out the trees, and where the young growth had been kept cleared by the moose, and the grass cropped close by the deer.
6
HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
Without fail, such a land stirred deeply those explorers who first beheld it, and even more deeply the imaginations of their patrons in the Old World, as well as countless merchants and ad- venturers who saw in it vast empires and the possibilities of un- dreamed wealth. It was, in fact, something of a natural paradise. Only the law of natural selection and the crude snare and flint arrowhead of the Indian restricted in a very limited way the great numbers of moose, deer, bear, wolves, wildcats, bobcats, lynx, the stealthy panther, and fur bearers of every description - foxes, skunks, raccoons, beaver, otter, mink, and martins. The number of these fur bearers can, in a measure, be inferred from the account of Capt. John Smith, who came to this area early in the summer of 1614 and did a little trading on his own with the natives while his sailors laid in large stores of fish. His ship was based at Monhegan. With eight men in a small boat, he ranged the coast for twenty leagues and obtained for trifles in barter 11,000 beaver skins, one hundred martins, and many otter. The same year he reported that the French traders obtained on the coast a little farther north 25,000 beaver skins.5
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