USA > Maine > Lincoln County > Waldoboro > History of old Broad Bay and Waldoboro, Volume 1 > Part 34
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WILLARD or WILLIARD. The origin and time of settlement of this family at Broad Bay is an uncertainty. The name in its recorded form is not German, but probably represents an anglicized form of a German name that had come into use in the second generation. The first of this name at Broad Bay was Andrew, who died in 1769. He left at least a grown son and a minor daughter Margaret, who was placed under the guardianship of Christopher Cline on June 5, 1770. Willard left an estate appraised at £82 12s. 9d.277 The son, George, moved to North Carolina in the Moravian exodus and signed the "Brotherly Agreement" at Friedland on July 21, 1771. He married there in the same year Eva Lauer, who was born at Broad Bay, September 9, 1754.278 The name has long been ex- tinct in Waldoboro, but descendants of the daughter, Margaret, are a possibility in the town.
WINCHENBACH. This has been variously anglicized to forms such as Winchenbaugh and Wincapaw and in modern times abbreviated to "Wink." This is one of Waldoboro's most numerous clans, and one that in one way or another is linked by blood ties to most of the old families in the town. The immigrant at Broad Bay was Friedrich who was in the Boston migration of Joseph Crell of 1751 or 1752, came to the settlement in 1752, and settled on Lot No. 39, on the upper end of Dutch Neck. This Friedrich was compelled to repurchase his farm of eighty-three acres of the Pemaquid heirs on September 21, 1763, for £11 1s. 4d.279 He was also a signer of the Schaeffer Petition of June 14, 1767.280 Among his children were Jacob, born in Germany on May 15, 1742, and died at Waldo- borough in 1825, who signed the Schaeffer Petition with his father in 1767, and who seems to have remained on the paternal farm on "the Neck." Other known children were John (1754-1847) and Henry (1762-1831). Friedrich died prior to 1790, or was living at that time as a dependent with his son Jacob, for the only Winchen- bachs appearing as heads of families in the census were Jacob, John, and Henry. The descendants of Friedrich today are num- bered in the thousands, and the name is still a common one in the township.
276Lincoln Co. Deeds, Bk. 3, p. 75a.
277 Patterson, Lincoln Co. Prob. Recs. 278 Adeliade Fries, State Historian of N. C., a descendant of the Broad Bay Voglers. 27ºLincoln Co. Deeds, Bk. 4, p. 90.
280 Mass. State Archives, Vol. 118, pp. 211-212.
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Muster Roll of 1760
WOHLFAHRT. This family name has been extinct in Waldoborough for upwards of two centuries. The incidents of its life at Broad Bay are set forth here in some detail only because in their tragedy and pathos they are typical of what so many families endured in our early history. The immigrant, Johann Jacob Wohlfahrt was a native of Castell (modern Kassel), a district in the old Duchy of Franconia, Germany, where he owned vineyards. In 1746 he mar- ried Sophia Vogt of Castell, who was born February 26, 1722. They came to Broad Bay in 1752. This union was blessed with one daughter and three sons, one of whom died at sea but was near enough to the American coast to receive a land burial. John Jacob died in military service in the French and Indian War in 1759, and for six years thereafter his widow served in various families until her marriage to Adam Schumacher in 1765. In 1769 this couple, with her daughter Elizabeth, migrated to North Carolina, and re- sided near Salem until the death of her second husband in 1784. One of the sons by her first marriage, John Jacob, Jr. (born August 9, 1755, at Broad Bay and for a number of years bound out as an apprentice to a baker in Boston), joined his mother in 1769 in the migration to North Carolina where he learned the trade of a millwright. Later he became active in the Moravian church and in 1801 became a minister and was the first Broad Bayer to serve the Friedland parish. Eventually he became a missionary in the Cherokee country in Georgia. He died August 4, 1807, leaving behind his widowed mother who had become blind.
In August of this year she heard with deep sorrow that her beloved son had been called unto the eternal homeland. Mild tears streamed from her sightless eyes, showing her grief. .. . On the other hand, in the fol- lowing years she had the pleasure to hear from her son, George, whom she had left in New England, of whom she had heard no word for thirty-five years, and whom she believed to be no longer in this world.
The widow Schumacher died July 24, 1816, leaving sixteen grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren.281 I know of no blood kin of this family now in the community although it is pos- sible that the son, George, may have left descendants.
WOLSGROVER. This has been variously spelled in anglicized forms from the German Woltzgruber. This family seems to have come to these parts in 1752 under the headship of Christoph, a name shortened by his contemporaries to "Stoffel." His wife apparently died in the early 1750's. Christoph settled on Lot No. 42, at about the center of Dutch Neck and in 1763 "Strophel Woolscrofer" was compelled to redeem his fifty-five and one-half acre farm of
281 Data based on the Memoirs of Sophia Schumacher and Johann Wohlfahrt, Jr., Morav. Archives (Winston-Salem, N. C.).
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HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
the Pemaquid proprietors for £7 8s.282 A Christopher is listed as a family head in the census of 1790. This may have been the immi- grant or his son. There was also a son George who moved to the Friendship side of Goose River in 1773. On April 22, 1791, this George acquired of Christoph Neuhaus for £27 the property in Goose River Bay, a nine and one-quarter acre island, known to this day as Wolsgrover's Island.283 He, too, had a son Christopher who had a mill at Goose River. The name Christoph ran through this family to the last Wolsgrover in the town, a Christopher who lived on the property under the high ledge on the Bremen road. On the roadside opposite his house, "Chris" had his blacksmith shop, which I recall from early boyhood. Chris' dwelling burned in 1878 and the present little house on its site was built from some of the lumber of "the old long house on the hill" which was in part the structure erected by General Waldo in 1753 to house the Germans of this migration during the first winter.284 The name of Wolsgrover has long been extinct in the town, but there are de- scendants living in Lewiston and Portland.
ZUBERBUHLER. Sebastian Zuberbühler had early and intimate con- nections with Broad Bay history. He was born at Linden in the Canton of Appenzell just south of Lake Constance in Switzerland. In 1734 he went to South Carolina and engaged there in various land and colonizing enterprises. In 1741 he appeared in the Rhein- pfalz as General Waldo's agent and recruited the colony of 1742 with which he came to Broad Bay in late October of that year. He remained in the colony until December, aiding in the surveying and assignments of lots. During the next two years he was in and out of the settlement and had a home on the east side which was a large fortified cabin that became "the Middle Garrison," during the Indian wars.285 In 1745 he joined the Broad Bayers in the ex- pedition against Louisburg, where he was commissioned a captain in the field.286 After the capture of the fortress, he did not return to Broad Bay but joined the German colony at Lunenburg. Here he became a magistrate and died in good financial circumstances, as appears from the inventory of his and his daughter's possessions.287
NOTE: This chapter is the only one in the History of Old Broad Bay and Waldoboro which has been a chore. It covers the sole genealogical problem of interest to me, to wit, those sturdy souls of the first generation who gave up their homes in the Old World,
282Lincoln Co. Deeds, Bk. 5, p. 170.
283Ibid., Bk. 27, p. 214. 284Oral narrative of Alice Waltz Morse, neighbor of the last Wolzgrover family. 285 Letter, Gov. Shirley to Col. Noble, June 5, 1744, Mass. Archives. 286H. C. Burrage, Maine Louisburg (Augusta, 1910), p. 65.
287 Der Brisay, History of the Colony of Lunenburg, pp. 69-72.
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Muster Roll of 1760
made the long trek across the sea, hacked this town out of a wilder- ness, and for a generation imparted to their new home the flavor- some quality of an ancient feudal culture - an enterprise redolent of what Macauley has called the romance of history. To track each one back to the lair of his birth, to label him with his signifi- cant dates, to restore to him his rightful name and to associate him with his own original bit of soil in this town has involved patient labor in an area of detail so vast that here and there too thinly drawn inference will undoubtedly have lapsed into an error. Con- sequently I have drawn around myself a bulwark of over two hundred and seventy-five documentations, and in my arsenal there are still others, withheld here in order to spare my readers an over- load of wearying detail. In case those who know better will delve in sources not available to me and discover sound evidence for re- vising some of these conclusions, this chapter will have served its good purpose. Somewhere in old trunks or chests, lying forgotten, are documents which will confirm or disprove some of the posi- tions taken here on the basis of partial evidence. To examine or re-examine such is a worthy task, for to know one's ancestors that one may honor their worth and memory should be a matter of family initiative and pride. Fittingly, indeed, it has been said that "those who take no pride in the achievements of their ancestors, near or remote, are not likely to accomplish much that will be remembered with pride by their own descendants."
XV
LIFE AT OLD BROAD BAY IN ITS FEUDAL PERIOD
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet than that of painted pomp?
SHAKESPEARE
B Y THE YEAR 1760 BROAD BAY was at peace, even though the war had not been officially terminated. The long-standing score with the French had been decisively settled and their Indian allies had had enough. The crowded and regimented garrison life of the past six years was at an end, and men and women were free to move back into their own houses and there continue to work out, in their new environment, the ancient cultural patterns which had given texture, form, and color to their lives in their ancestral homes across the sea. In this short period Broad Bay was a uniquely color- ful spot in the history of northeastern America. Her people were exclusively German; their social inheritance was that of a very ancient culture, still feudal in its attitudes and concepts. The only modes of living they knew were the ancestral ones developed and handed down to successive generations through many centuries. Their agricultural, economic, domestic, political, social, and re- ligious life all followed an archetypal pattern set in centuries long removed. It could not have been otherwise, for Broad Bay was just a big clearing in an immense wilderness, protected by an iso- lation almost total from the contagion of alien cultural forces. The civilization of eighteenth-century Germany was all that they knew. There was nothing like it in all New England, for in other centers of the northeast wherever Germans had settled, with the possible exception of Frankfort, they found themselves in the midst of an alien culture where their own was soon submerged and lost. And so it was that old German feudal culture flowered at Broad Bay before any major modifications were effected through contact with the restless Puritans.
At the beginning of this decade, the settlement in many of its externals was little changed from what it had been in 1750. In fact, some of the cabins of 1742 were still sheltering their same
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Its Feudal Period
families, while those built in 1748-1749, to replace the ones de- stroyed by the Indians in 1746, were still by the riverside. Dur- ing the intervening years of war there had been no point in con- structing new or larger cabins, and so it was that the decade opened with the old cabins in the old locations. The one major change was in the five garrisons and the cleared areas reaching a consider- ably greater distance back from the river into the forests; for the work of clearing land in order to feed the Boston fuel market had gone on all through the war.
This work of clearing land was a much slower task for the Germans than it was for English settlers. The latter would fell trees over a considerable area, trim them, let them dry out through the summer, then drag the logs together in great piles and burn them with the slash. The German was more economic and syste- matic. Every bit of wood removed served a useful purpose. Every tree was carefully trimmed, sawed into log or cordwood lengths, or into rail lengths, and split for rail fences. Underbrush was not only cut out, but the roots were grubbed out as well as the stumps of trees. When a German finished clearing an acre of land, it was as ready for planting as it would be twenty years hence.1 The rocks, too, were removed and with prodigious toil placed in position for constructing line fences. In this the Germans followed the practice of their English neighbors.
If the beginning of this decade witnessed the wilderness by the river side studded with the same old cabins, "18' x 18'," or their equivalent in size, the decade also witnessed a period of active building. At Broad Bay the German aimed to keep his buildings close to the junction of his field and pasture in order to avoid driv- ing his cattle to their grazing areas through his grassland and planted fields. So there followed an era of building new and larger cabins, at the junction of field and pasture, ever farther and farther away from the river as the land was cleared and turned to crops or grass, until finally farm buildings reached their present locations near the edge of pasture land, or near enough so that the farm could tie up with the pasture land by lanes confined on both sides by stonewalls.
The Germans had a saying that "a son should always begin his improvements where his father left off," namely by building a larger house. All the farms along the river in an earlier day bore evidence of this practice in the number of old cellars, each farther removed from the river. As a typical example, there may be taken the old James H. Castner farm, where between the shore and the present homestead the remains of three old cellars were once vis- ible.2 The eminences in the fields not far from old springs fre-
1Benjamin Rush, Notes from Manners of the Old German Inhabitants of Pennsyl- vania (Phila., 1789).
2Oral narrative, Daniel Webster Castner, died 1909.
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HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
quently mark the successive locations of these cabins. My boy- hood home on the old Loring Sides farm is thus marked in suc- cession by a spring, another spring, and then a well. The new cab- ins of this decade were larger. All contained cellars or partial cel- lars, lofts, boarded or planked floors, and fireplaces laid up with stone and lime. Cellars were accessible through a trap door and ladders led to the lofts. Before the cabins there was usually an out- of-door fireplace where the cooking was done, for the most part, from spring until autumn.
The Germans at Broad Bay were of the very flower of Ger- man peasantry - men and women with courage for adventuring and the willingness to face hardship to secure economic better- ment. They were sturdy of frame and strong of muscle, and ac- customed by the tradition of centuries to the hard life of toil and little in the way of comfort and earthly possessions. An example to be cited in such matters was Andrew Suchfort, a Hessian cap- tured at Stillwater, who eventually came to this district. Of him it is reliably related that he lugged two bushels of salt on his back over rough roads from Waldoborough to Union,3 a feat before which most modern hearts would quail. From the beginning and for long after, life at Broad Bay was an affair to cause the stoutest hearts to quail; for many there were who were terribly impover- ished. By 1760 some of the older colonists had achieved a degree of security and comfort, but for many of them life was still a bit- ter struggle.
In 1767 and 1768, when some of them were pondering the question of migrating to North Carolina, Georg Soelle, their Moravian missionary, commented on the spot in respect to the migration and in the words of one settler, as follows: "I have here in rich measure what I need. It flows into my house."4 Describing two other families Soelle observed: "Their poverty is so great and their children so numerous - each has seven or eight who are naked and who cannot help themselves."5 Addressing Bishop Ett- wein on another occasion he added: "There are three families among them for whom the moving would be most difficult, since each has seven or eight children. They are so poor that they could scarcely give one another a drink of water. At this time [Novem- ber] the children have nothing on their bodies except a little shirt, and will get nothing else during the winter."6
Despite the lack of clothing, shoes, furniture, and other crea- ture comforts there were few who went hungry in the 1760's. Once the method of procuring food had been worked out, Nature was
3John L. Sibly, History of the Town of Union (Boston, 1851).
4Letter of Georg Soelle without address, from Newport, Aug. 27, 1768, Morav. Archives (Bethlehem, Pa.).
"Ibid.
6Soelle, Letter to Bishop John Ettwein, Nov. 2, 1767, loc. cit.
-
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Its Feudal Period
lavish in her supply. Bears and deer abounded on the outskirts of the settlement and furnished a supply of meat through summer and autumn, as well as skins for clothing, rugs, and coverings. Great herds of moose frequented the northern sections of the set- tlement and had their yards around the ponds in the outskirts of the district and in the great bogs in the northeastern and north- western areas of the town. Thither went the men in the late autumn and secured great quantities of meat, which was smoked Indian fashion for winter consumption. Hunting parties also went out in midwinter whenever fresh meat was wanted, and the families kept it for weeks, or even months, in a frozen condition. Small game such as hare and partridge abounded throughout the year, while the annual visits of the pigeons provided the settlers with an al- most never-ending luxury. These birds which came in millions were shot and snared by the hundreds and laid down in their own fat for winter use. The shores and river beds were overcrowded with shellfish, while the salt water in every season of the year gave up fish in such quantities that the Germans fed them to their swine7 - salmon, alewives, shad, herring, mackerel, cod, hake, flounder, smelts, frostfish, and eels ran in turn the gamut of the four seasons and provided for the energetic a rather ample security against hunger.
This happy abundance of Nature was not matched by the fruitfulness of the native soil, for the agricultural economy of these days was a matter of endless labor and scant returns. Crops were limited to rye, barley, hay, potatoes, cabbage, beans, peas, and roots.8 Here the lack of plenitude was largely a matter of tools. There were no ploughs in the settlement.9 As soon as the land was cleared, it was put under cultivation. Every bit of sod left after roots had been grubbed out had to be turned over by hand with a hoe or mattock, a fact which greatly restricted the size of the crops. Once the sod had rotted over the winter, the harrowing could be done with a crude handmade harrow with wooden teeth drawn by oxen or cows. The rye and barley was then sown and harrowed in by dragging a small birch tree over the seeded ground. Rye was the principal grain used in baking. Such wheat as was used came from Boston, and this was imported throughout the year in small quantities as it was needed by those who could afford its use.10 There was little fruit cultivated. Such a luxury was limited to ber- ries native to the district.
The pride of the German in his livestock was traditional. In Pennsylvania they were commonly charged with devoting greater care to it than to their own children. This pride was also true of
"Soelle, Report of a Visit to Broad Bay, 1760, loc. cit.
8Ibid., Report to Bishop John Ettwein covering May and June, 1767, loc. cit.
9Ibid., Letter to Bishop Nathaniel Seidel, Aug. 28, 1764, loc. cit.
10 I bid.
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HISTORY OF OLD BROAD BAY AND WALDOBORO
the Germans at Broad Bay, a fact which led Soelle in 1760 to the overstatement that "I can clearly see that this folk here is more concerned about its cattle than about the souls of its children."11 Considering the struggle in these years for survival and a small measure of well-being, such an attitude may be understandable as well as traditional. There was livestock in the settlement just as soon as the Germans could get it. One German farmer, in order to procure a cow from the Georges, gave his wife as security for the animal until such time as he could redeem her by payment. Even in the 1750's there were cows, oxen, swine, and poultry in the colony; and the 1760's witnessed the advent of the sheep and the horse.12 There were as yet no frame barns and each farm's stock was housed in log sheds and log lean-tos. Since these could contain only a limited amount of stored hay, this fodder was stacked in the open near by and fed to the stock as needed.
The three major agricultural developments in the life of the community in this decade were the growing of flax, the introduc- tion of sheep, and the cultivation of the first Indian corn in the colony. A little flax had been grown prior to 1760,13 but from this time on, it was cultivated on a much larger scale, and it brought to each household an ever increasing supply of light clothing for summer wear and linen for household use. Samuel Boggs was the great livestock specialist and trader of the district. He raised and sold in a market that extended from the Penobscot to the Me- domak, and his stock of cattle would run as high as thirty head. From Boggs' farm on the Georges River the first sheep, imported from Pemaquid, came to Broad Bay in 1760, providing a new food, and of greater importance, meeting a most urgent need of mate- rial for clothing, blankets, and other household fabrics.14 Lastly in 1764, Daniel Fielhauer commenced the cultivation of Indian corn on his farm on the west side of the Medomak.15 The effect of this experiment was instantaneous. In a season everybody was growing maize. This provided a basic food cereal which lent great variety to human diet and added fodder and grain for the feeding and fat- tening of stock and poultry, placing animal husbandry on a se- cure and flourishing basis. This all meant an increased supply of milk, cream, butter, eggs, salted and smoked meats, tallow for can- dles, hides for robes, shoes, and harnesses - all of which added markedly to the development of economic well-being, and led Bishop John Ettwein, on his visit in the spring of 1767, to observe that "people are beginning now to get along better."16
11Soelle, Report of a Visit to Broad Bay, 1760, loc. cit.
12 Memoir of Michael Jung, Morav. Archives (Bethlehem, Pa.).
13Cyrus Eaton, Annals of Warren, 1st ed. (Hallowell, 1851), pp. 112, 128. 14I bid.
15 Ibid.
16 Ettwein's Report, Morav. Archives (Bethlehem, Pa.).
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The improving economic status brought no abatement in toil. The men performed the acts of husbandry with few, crude, and limited tools. Money was scarce. The few luxuries and neces- sities that could not be produced from the farm were imported from the Boston market. Cordwood and lumber remained through- out this decade as the exportable surplus and provided the only income for a reserve and for what Broad Bay itself could not pro- duce or fabricate. The women worked with their men in getting out cordwood, in getting eelgrass and rockweed on to the land for fertilizer, in the planting, the haying, and the harvesting. One season Elizabeth Kaler, later the wife of Joseph Ludwig, worked eight days (1771) hoeing potatoes for John Ulmer at eight pence a day. A man's wage at this time was two shillings.17 The truck patch was under the special care of the women, as were all the innu- merable concerns of the household. Families were large and all the children worked. There was so much to do to provide every- thing that was needed for consumption that it could not possibly have been accomplished had there not been many hands. Children were an economic necessity, and in most families they came in an unbroken regularity about every second year until the number reached a maximum of from eight to twelve. With three or more to a bed, the loft and trundle bed were never empty.
The furniture of these early households was meager. The table which served all family purposes was the familiar sawbuck type with the top overlaid with rough boards. The seats were rough benches made of a plank supported by four legs. The cook- ing dishes were of iron, and the accessory dishes were limited to the supply of family pewter brought from the Old World or se- cured in Boston. Iron was scarce in colonial times, and its scarcity forced the settlers to the rather general use of wood. The first ploughs, of which there is one still preserved in the town,18 were made of wood and later fitted to an iron tip. It was a time-consum- ing chore to make everything that came into use in an agricultural economy, but wood it was in harrows, cartwheels, shovels, rakes, barrel hoops, firkins, tubs, and churns. Dishes, trays, and spoons, too, were fashioned under the art of these "whittling" Teutons. Gourds fitted nicely to the concepts of dippers, bottles, and bowls, while clamshells could serve as spoons, and the boles of birch trees be made into brooms such as I myself have seen and used.
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