USA > Maine > Washington County > Dennysville > Memorial of the 100th anniversary of the settlement of Dennysville, Maine, 1886 > Part 2
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But if the human life reared on this eastern frontier of our pros- perous country does not rate high in the statistics in respect to quan- tity, we may restore our complacency by taking a valuation of its quality. My uncle, the late Deacon Peter Talbot, of East Machias, who used to frequent the flourishing cities scattered along Long Island Sound to get orders for the sale of lumber, was once asked by some of his customers about the productions of his section. "Do you raise wheat or corn down in eastern Maine, where you live ?" " No," he said, " wheat is rarely sown, and corn will not ripen." " Well, do you raise cattle or horses ?" "Not many; the summers are too short, and the cost of fodder is too great." "Perhaps you raise wool, and make butter and cheese ? " " Not so much as we con- sume." "Well, then, what do you raise ?" "Raise! " said my uncle; " we raise men."
When we take stock of the three generations of intelligent and upright men that have been reared here in a hundred years, the in- tellectual as well as physical comforts and luxuries that have made their homes attractive, the noble army of emigrants that have gone out hence to build in western prairies new communities, of which this is a type, and to battle for the integrity of the American Union and the preservation of its liberties, we may be sure that we have not neglected our task in the beneficent work of the country and the age.
Let us briefly glance at the state of things in the country at large, and especially in this eastern wilderness, into which, here and there, in places widely separated from each other, a few hardy settlers had ventured at the time the first colony sat down to make a home on the banks of this little river. The War of the Revolution had been terminated by the peace of 1783 only three years, but the constitu- tion, that made of the separate colonies a nation, had not yet been adopted nor devised. Under a confederation, that had served ill enough to keep the states together, and draw from them the neces- sary contributions of men and money to continue the war, it seemed, now when peace had come and the external pressure had been with- drawn, that there was no community of interest, purpose, nor senti- ment to prevent disintegration and anarchy. There was no adequate power to execute laws or collect taxes for purely common and na- tional purposes. There was no tribunal to define the federal and the local jurisdiction of legislation or judicial procedure; there was no uniform commercial system to give security to trade.
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The soldiers and officers of the war, paid in depreciated paper for their services, had come back to their homes, impoverished by their long absence, to find their farms run out, their trades ruined, and their old habits of industry and economy broken up. Commerce, that the home government before the war had fostered -though always managing to get from it the lion's share of profits - now that the colonies were enfranchised, it hampered with every annoying restriction and impost. It was not until the ratification of the Jay Treaty that the new United States secured any freedom of the high seas, or any just terms of dealing in the markets of foreign coun- tries, which Great Britain either held or dominated by the superior- ity of her naval power. No wonder that there had come with the peace a feeling of depression and discouragement! No wonder that many men, whose hearts had never been in sympathy with inde- pendence, began to predict commercial and political disaster as the result and punishment of an unnatural and unpatriotic rebellion. The condition of the whole country was not unlike that of the con- quered South after the late civil war, and before the rehabilitation of the insurgent states in their relations to the Union. True, the South had signally failed, and the colonies had succeeded in their rebellion, but for the South to have succeeded would have aggravated and not lessened her calamities.
In this crisis of commercial distress and political gloom, what were the discharged soldiers, what especially the general officers of the revolutionary army, to do ? Washington could go back with dignity to Mount Vernon, and with efficient gangs of slaves and their over- seers could make his extensive plantations productive, and so main- tain his carriages and horses, his formal dinners for successive guests, and the general aristocratic style, in which Virginian gentle- men of large property had lived under the regal government. But it would have been hard for General Greene to go back to his forge in Rhode Island, or for General Knox to reopen his bookstore in Boston. The army had not educated the higher officers in the art of earning their living. They had brought from their homes the tastes and habits of gentlemen, cultivated by the courtly inter- course which Washington prescribed as the etiquette of his camp. No one can read the journals and letters of the revolutionary period without being struck by the fact that there was a formality of ad- dress and a rigor of politeness in use among the great military chiefs, which we miss in the reminiscences of camp life and the official cor-
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respondence of the great leaders of the vastly greater armies of the war of the rebellion.
General Benjamin Lincoln had joined the continental army in 1776, and having attained the grade of major-general of the Massa- chusetts militia was commissioned at once as a general officer. His services, though not brilliant, and sometimes followed by serious disasters, had been meritorious. His courage, his patriotism, the soundness of his judgment, had never been questioned. His integ- rity and his indomitable and equable spirit had endeared him to Washington, who honored him with a special confidence and affec- tion, that found expression in a mutual exchange of friendly letters, that continued till the death of one of the correspondents. When Lincoln gave himself up to the service of his country in the field, he was the senior of most of the officers of his own rank, generally quite young men when compared with the officers on both sides in the late civil war. He had been some years married, and had quite a numerous family of children, the oldest approaching manhood.
When the war ended, he returned to his farm, which offered scanty resources for the maintenance of his family, especially as he could no longer contribute his own labor to its cultivation, by reason of premature old age, and the disability occasioned by a serious wound incurred in the battle, which had made Burgoyne's army prisoners. But he was sanguine and enterprising, and soon turned his attention to the eastern lands as a field for lumbering and farming, and three years after the establishment of peace, in connection with Messrs. Thomas Russell and John Lowell of Boston, purchased of the State the two townships in Lincoln County, as it then was, numbered One and Two, bordering upon the waters of Passamaquoddy Bay.
It was very natural that Maine, then a part of Massachusetts, and as large as all the rest of New England, should have been the coun- try most open to colonizing enterprise. Oregon and Dakota, Cal- ifornia and Minnesota, to which enterprising or disappointed young men now resort, were not dreamed of. But sixteen years had inter- vened between the conquest of Canada and the breaking out of the revolutionary war, and all through that war the northern and west- ern Indians had been in frequent alliance with the British, adding burnings, scalpings, and massacres, to the horrors of defeat. The raid upon Wyoming Valley, in the center of Pennsylvania, and the terrible vengeance the savages had wreaked upon the surrendering 3
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garrison at Fort William Henry in Northern New York, were still told, as recent events, to shuddering listeners. The region of the Ohio, the Genesee and Wyoming Valleys, now full of wealth and peace, under a moral civilization, but in 1786 roamed over by fierce Indian tribes, were no more considered as open to colonies than are now the heart of Africa or the valleys of the upper Nile.
So from the end of the war in 1783 till 1820, Massachusetts, desir- ous of cultivating and developing her eastern province, poured into it at all points her enterprising and migrating young men, always the élite of a population. The result was a sudden growth of Maine in wealth and numbers, which soon bred a love of independence and home-rule, that at last brought on separation. Eastern Maine was more attached to Massachusetts than western, and in the suc- cessive ballotings upon the question of separation, referred to the popular vote, the eastern communities, as a general thing, threw strong majorities against it. The reason of this was, that the east- ern settlers, or the leaders among them, had come direct across sea from Massachusetts, and Boston being the only market for their only export, lumber, had maintained exclusive trade relations with it. The western towns had been taken up by a slower movement, over land from precinct to precinct, much of it from New Hamp- shire, and soon found in Portland and other thriving seaports cen- ters for their local trade.
All Eastern Maine was a wilderness full of wealth and natural beauty. There stretched back toward Canada, from its long and indented coast line, an unbroken forest, of which the magnificent white pines, the great stumps of which stand still in your wooded pastures, undecayed, to mock the puny second growth that has taken their places, towered above the great billowy surface of the other evergreens and hard-wood trees. Wild grasses grew on the extensive marshes that widened the estuaries of the rivers at high tides, and further retired on the margin of lakes and the intervales of the smaller streams. Salmon, alewives, shad, and smelts, in their season, could be taken upon the rapids of the rivers, and the cod, haddock, pollock, halibut, and hake, now found rarely wide off the coast, came to live on the immediate shores and in the thoroughfares that separated neighboring islands. Deer and moose, and an abun- dance of other smaller game for food or fur, abounded in the woods, and wild geese and ducks could be come at on the tide waters, or in the bays of lakes smooth and dark with overhanging woods.
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The men who came here in that early time had to content them- selves with few neighbors. Machias had been settled since 1763, and was an incorporated town from the year 1784. The township had been granted in 1770 to eighty persons by name, all of whom were or became settlers, and in 1786 more than one hundred families must have been settled about the falls of its three rivers. The spir- ited people had fought successfully the first naval battle of the war in 1775, and had in 1777 repelled a formidable attack of an English naval expedition fitted out to capture the place. As Great Britain had held Castine, a strong fort commanding the Penobscot river, dur- ing and after the war, her negotiators would have desired to make that river the eastern boundary of the United States, but were re- sisted by our commissioners, who could not in good faith consent to a line that left the brave defenders of Machias on the territory of their enemies. So, thanks to the exploits of Abner Foster and their compatriots, the pioneers of Dennysville, wandering so far away from the center of Massachusetts, and settling down in these eastern woods, still found over them the ægis of the American Union, and the prestige and fortunes of a sovereign, free, and independent State.
. Beside Machias, the Narraguagus, Pleasant, and Chandlers Rivers had each a sprinkling of farmers, lumbermen, and fishermen, settled on their banks since the close of the war. According to Counselor Weston's history of Eastport, Mr. Shackford, and Mr. Tuttle and others, five families in all, had been settled in Eastport since 1783, and there were twenty-one or twenty-two families upon the island in 1790. Lubec on the mainland, settled at the same time, had still fewer people in 1786.
But these scattered settlements had no roads connecting them, and communication was the long and perilous one around by the sea, un- surveyed, uncharted, and unlighted, and the Indian trails inland by lakes and streams, with carrying places through the woods marked by blazed trees.
The idea has prevailed that the two townships, which ultimately became the property of Theodore Lincoln, senior, were a grant from Massachusetts to the General, his father, for his services in the war of independence. But this was not the case. Massachusetts, im- poverished by an advance of money and men above her fair propor- tion, to support the common cause of the colonies, was in no position to be generous, and the bounty the old hero had earned was due
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from the nation, not from his State. Like the larger estate acquired by General Knox, called the Waldo Patent, the purchase of Perry and Dennysville was for money at a full market price, and was a land speculation, pure and simple, attended, like that, with great expense and sacrifice, and saved, as that other enterprise scarcely was, from disaster and loss, only by the prudence, economy, and sound judg- ment that from the first characterized its management.
After the purchase by Lincoln, Russell, and Lowell became known, Colonel John Allan, then living on Dudley's Island in Pas- samaquoddy Bay, who claimed to have made some improvements in the territory bought, and to have erected a mill on one of the streams, made strong remonstrances against their occupation. The letters, which he sent to General Lincoln, very formal, and decorous in tone, very neat and handsome in chirography, set forth at great length his grievances. He says he always expected a grant of lands from the State to compensate his great sacrifices in leaving a valua- ble estate and the franchise of lucrative offices in Nova Scotia, to take sides with the colonists in their contest with the king's govern- ment, and as a recognition of the meritorious services he had ren- dered in securing the alliance of the warlike Tarratine Indians to the cause of independence. But as has been already explained, Massachusetts was in no condition to give bounties to continental soldiers, and as the correspondence I have referred to discloses that Colonel Allan never contemplated the purchase of these lands, if indeed he was in a condition to undertake so expensive an enter- prise, as the letters express the high personal regard in which the correspondents held each other, and as Mr. Lincoln of Dennysville maintained an intimate relation with Colonel Allan during his life, it is probable that the old soldier became satisfied that if he had been neglected and ill-treated, he had not been by the purchasers of the lands he had hoped himself to acquire. It was one of the con- ditions of the conveyance of townships number One and number Two, that the grantees should quiet the title of all persons settled on the townships prior to 1784, and grant to each without compensation one hundred acres of land, and without doubt Colonel Allan's de- mands were compromised by the associates in a just and liberal spirit.
The price paid for the two towns was eight thousand, nine hun- dred and ten pounds, two shillings, six pence, in the consolidated se-
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curities of the United States. When it is considered that the sale was conditioned on the reservation of one thousand, three hundred and sixty acres of land for public uses, and on a grant of one hun- dred acres to sixty families, undertaken to be located in the settle- ment within six years, and that Machias and the twelve townships east of the Penobscot had been conveyed to the first settlers in free gift upon similar terms, the price must be regarded as an ample one. Fifty years later, when the land speculations began, and lumber had a high price and a larger market, more valuable timber townships were bought at no greater price.
What had turned General Lincoln's attention to the Maine lands was undoubtedly his visit to Passamaquoddy in the summer of 1784, in company with General Henry Knox and George Partridge, as Commissioners of Massachusetts, to ascertain and report what was the true St. Croix named in the Treaty of 1783. Great Britain claimed that it was the Cobscook or Dennys River, Massachusetts that it was the Maguadavic. A new province had been organized called New Brunswick, and a flourishing town of loyalist refugees had been begun at St. Andrews, on the east side of Passamaquoddy Bay. The provincial authorities asserted jurisdiction over Moose Island, now Eastport, and arrested and imprisoned Mr. Tuttle living there, and exercising the office of collector of imposts, levied, as all duties then were, under state authority. The commissioners pro- ceeded to the frontier, and examined the rivers Cobscook, Schoodic, Maguadavic, and took some testimony of Indians and settlers, and reported that the latter river was in their judgment the true St. Croix. International negotiations succeeded, and a commission, ap- pointed jointly by the United States and Great Britain some years afterward, discovered remains of the old fortifications built by De Monts on Neutral Island, opposite to Red Beach on the Schoodic River, and named by him the St. Croix, which determined that river as the boundary intended by the treaty. It was not till 1816, after the war of 1812, and while Eastport was still held by the English, that another commission, of which John Holmes of Maine was the American member, fixed the boundary through Passamaquoddy Bay, between Moose and Deer Islands, and between Campobello and Lubec at the Narrows.
A summer visit to the shores of Passamaquoddy before the prime- val forest had been mutilated by the lumberman's ax and the settler's
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fires, must have been a pleasant memory in a man's life. It spread - in shape like a great open human hand - its long, finger-like bays far into the surrounding wilderness, piling up rocky cliffs and pre- cipitous headlands to resist the rush of the furious tides that twice in every twenty-four hours poured their millions of tons of salt water in a rushing river back and forth through the narrow channels that let in and out the restless currents of the Atlantic. Only the skilful Indian knew where it was safe to push his frail canoe on its treach- erous surface, and where the rush of dark water or the roar of ever- shifting breakers signaled danger. Dense, cold fogs brooded over it in summer, but when they lifted, and the sunlight played with the restless billows, there was no aspect of sea and shore so weird and exhilarating on the whole extent of the American Atlantic coast. Mount Desert and quiet reaches of seaside along the thoroughfares of the Eastern Maine coast may possess more quiet picturesque beauty, but for grandeur, for that element of terror and peril that inspires courage and daring, the swift currents, and bold shores, and invigorating breezes of the Passamaquoddy must be the most attract- ive to bold spirits.
Early in the season of 1786, the expedition to take possession of the new purchase in this far-away Eldorado of Down East, set sail from Massachusetts Bay. They are Hingham farmers and artisans, old neighbors and the sons of old neighbors of Benjamin Lincoln, that with him had every Sunday attended the long services in the old square Hingham meeting-house, and at least once a year voted with written ballot or upraised hand at the annual town-meeting in the same building-the ballot-box got some salutary association of sacredness from the circumstance that it stood on the communion table. Perhaps some of them had borne the old flint-lock musket in the May trainings, or the autumn general muster of the militia, in which he had been in succession captain, major, colonel, and gen- eral, and then carried the same weapon in a real army, in a real and terrible war. These are the names of the little band of adventurers: -.
Theophilus Wilder Senior, Theophilus Wilder Junior, James Blackwood, Laban Cushing, Daniel Gardner, Calvin Gardner, Laban Gardner, Richard Smith, Christopher Benner, Braddock Palmer, John Palmer, Samuel Sprague, Seth Stetson, Ephraim Woodbury, William Holland (millwright), Solomon Cushing (blacksmith).
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Theodore Lincoln, the General's second son, then twenty-two years old and unmarried, was the leader, the Æneas of those sixteen pioneers, going, like the ancient Trojans, over seas to seek new seats and build the foundations of a new community.
The voyage from Boston lasted two weeks according to tradition. They were windbound, and made harbor at Machias, as will appear in the history, and as they arrived so early as the seventeenth of May, the expedition must have been fitted out with energy and dispatch. It seems that they did not venture over the Cobscook Falls in their vessel, but anchored in the lower bay, and rowed up with a pilot. I find a description of the first landing and of the country at the time of the first settlement so graceful and interest- ing, from the pen of the late Thomas Lincoln, that I can adorn my recital by adopting it without alteration. It was read by him at a meeting in your Town Hall in 1860.
" Just seventy-five years ago next May, after a fortnight from old Hingham, the first settlers of this town came up the river. It was the seventeenth day of the month, and the woods on shore were then in as full leaf, and cast as deep a shade as they do ordinarily in the middle of June. Those who saw them then for the first time rowed under the shadow of their overhanging limbs. They landed a few rods this side of the Dock Bridge, and stepped directly from the bow of their boat into the soft green moss, which carpeted the forest, then unbroken, from there to Canada.
" Taking out their little supply of stores, they built a camp under the trees, and there prepared to spend their first night in this great wilderness. Could we have looked in upon them as they sat around their fire, we should have seen a handful of men, whom few of us now can recall to mind, whom many have never seen, and of whom the last disappeared from among us nine years ago.
"Three quarters of a century only have passed, and we find it hard to believe that it is not all the baseless fabric of a dream; that on that night, not forty rods from the great hall where we now meet, just down by the shore, a little body of men lay down to rest in the bosom of the ancient forest of timber, as shady and dense as the ages could make it, whose silence was unbroken but from the wind swaying the tree tops and the cry of wild animals. And could a dream or some vivid picture bring that whole scene, with its surroundings to us- simple and quiet as it was-so that our eyes should see what theirs
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saw, so that from that landing place to the spot where we now gather, we should walk on the green wood moss, under tall trees and among the great trunks of pines, many of which were thrifty saplings when Columbus first saw the land, it would be to many of us, whose birth- place it is, of more interest than any fiction.
"But who is there living that can do for us what reality did for these men. We have looked into eyes that have seen it all, but they were long since closed; none can bring it back to us now. Without undertaking anything of the kind we will call up a few little facts and incidents, trifling indeed in themselves, but which, like the simple materials the painter uses-the colors and oils -may create for us something above and beyond that which they would individually signify.
"The next day after landing the settlers set to work to put up a log house a few yards only from the shore. The timber of which it was made had only to be felled on the spot, and rolled up into the walls and not, as now, to be hauled four or five miles. The ground where the trees stood is now the highway. In that house they all spent the first winter.
" There were no neighbors near in those long winter nights. There was no friendly light to be seen outside far or near; and there were no voices heard which they cared to answer. The cries they heard in the distance might be those of owls or wolves, or, as the supersti- tious among them thought, they might be-something else!
" At that time and for fifteen years afterward, the woods were entirely free of underbrush, and one could ride through them on horseback all over this region. But after that, the hacmetac trees first, then the hemlock, then the spruce were attacked by an insect; and the ground was in a few years strewed with the fallen trunks, and the woods became impassible.
" At the period of the first coming, the wolves had driven away nearly all the deer, though there were a few still on the islands, and the wolves themselves were disappearing, and but few were seen after the settlers came. But bears were plenty enough, and some- times in that first long winter, when the little party in the log house were confined to salted food with little or no vegetables, they found a fat bear and two cubs in a hollow tree but a short distance from their cabin. For aught I know-I would not like to say it was, but I do not certainly know it was not-it was on this very spot, under-
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