USA > Maine > Washington County > Dennysville > Memorial of the 100th anniversary of the settlement of Dennysville, Maine, 1886 > Part 3
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neath where we are sitting now, and the great trunk ran up a hundred feet over our heads. Be this as it may, I have often heard some of them descant upon the improvement in their fare when all that fresh provision was added to their poor stock.
"The caribou could not be overtaken by the wolves, but these lived mostly about the lakes and large heaths, and the men had no time to hunt them, even if they had snow-shoes or knew anything about hunting. The moose were too formidable for the wolves to attack. Till that time they had been astonishingly numerous, but were then nearly exterminated. In the winter before the first arrival of the white men, there had been the greatest destruction of game animals by the Indians ever known before or since. I do not now recollect the cause of jealousy on their part of the supposed designs of the gov- ernment in planning the settlement of the country, but during that winter not less than four hundred moose were caught by one family of Indians alone. Just beyond the Great Meadow, between that and the little meadow, twenty were killed in one yard. Their hides and tallow only were taken, and the next summer their bones were found strewing the ground where they fell. Most of these bones have de- cayed, but the writer has one in his possession that was picked up on the spot only five or six years ago. At that time also the beavers had possession of the dam at the Meadow, where they had lived perhaps a hundred years; but they, too, were all trapped that winter. In digging up a piece of the original dam, a few years ago, the short billets of wood, which they had carried in for their winter store of food seventy years before, were found with all the marks of their teeth upon them."
Everything that bears the marks of a tradition of the elders, or that comes down as an authentic narration of one of the first settlers is so much more interesting than anything I can tell, that at the risk of repeating some features of the primeval scene, which you are all fascinated to hear described, I append some reminiscences of his grandfather, communicated in his boyhood to Mr. Benjamin Lin- coln, the living representative of the family here, who lives on the old "Mill Lot," in the hospitable house built by Theodore Lincoln the second, his late father.
" My Grandfather used frequently to talk with me about his early experiences here. The morning of the arrival in the river was per- fectly calm, and as they rowed up the tide the quiet was almost pain-
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ful; not a leaf quivered, nor a breath of wind ruffled the smooth sur- face of the water. Although it was early in the season, the seven- teenth of May, the trees were in full leaf. The old woods came completely down to the water's edge-not a clearing anywhere above Falls Island, where Mahar, who piloted them up, had a small cabin, except about one-quarter of an acre cleared on land now owned by P. E. Vose, Esquire, where his wharf in Edmunds now stands. Immediately upon landing they went to work putting up a log camp. Grandfather and one or two others spent their first night in Levi Scott's camp on Hobart's Point, near where the road divides into branches, one to Mr. Vose's, one to Mr. Allan's wharf. The rain fell in torrents, but Grandfather managed to keep decently com- fortable by getting under a large pine slab, that was sawed by Cap- tain Ayers in the mill on the Cathance, which was burned before the coming of the settlers. As soon as possible the party went to work building the mill, also a small frame house-the ell of the house in which Eben Wilder now lives is the same old frame. The people called it two miles from their house on the shore to the mills, and used to go up back of the church, and come down where my house stands, so as to keep up on the high land. Ultimately they bushed out a path along by the river shore, traces of which may still be seen on the bushes below A. L. R. Gardner's shop. Even by that route it was called a mile up to the mill.
" The mill frame was cut directly on the mill brow, and the largest stick in it -and they used large dimensions then - stood as a tree where mill refuse has been lately burned; another was felled just in front of T. W. Allan's house, its stump still to be seen. The stream was then so narrow that the bank on the Edmunds side had to be dug away to set the sills; all the width beyond that has since been washed out by the waste water.
"The river at that time was stocked with salmon, trout and shad, and after shutting down the mills at night there were barrels of trout in the ponds. Salmon abounded, but for some unknown cause the shad disappeared and have been quite rare ever since the settlement.
" Those were the days for sportsmen. Ducks in the river, and par- tridges in the woods were always to be met with and easily shot. Foxes, bears and loupcerviers were so numerous as to make the keep- ing of sheep and poultry precarious business. Bears used to come up out of a large cedar swamp, where John Allan's pasture now is, and
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catch and carry off sheep upon Corn Hill. My Grandfather told me that, after his large farm house was built, he was in the sitting-room one evening in summer and saw a large bear come down from the heath through his field, get over the fence where the church is, and catch a sheep. He went out at once with some men, found the mangled animal and set a gun. Before nine in the evening there was a report, and going out again, he found the bear dead, near the head of what is now D. K. Eastman's field. It was not uncommon to hear bears calling to each other across the river from the Edmunds side to Mayhew's Point.
"In the order of work clearing land followed immediately after building the small frame house. The present orchard by the Dock was the first field cleared, next the cellar and foundation and in due order the large two story house, still inhabited by the Lincoln family, which must have been so capacious as to be a wonder to the country, if there had been any country to wonder. All the lawn in front of it was never ploughed, the stumps and hollows being levelled off by the earth dug from the cellar. It stood for several years without an L, the north room unfinished.
" At the time of the arrival of the immigrants, the marsh extended above the upper wharf, the river running south of the middle ground, then covered with low spruce and fir trees. The Dock Brook ran north of the middle ground in a narrow channel. The marsh ran almost in a direct line from the end of Marsh Point to a short dis- tance below where Captain Reynold's wharf used to be, and has since been gradually worn away by the action of ice and water.
"For years after Grandfather came here, the Indians used to make his house a stopping place on their way to and from Machias; camp- ing on quilts and robes before the great fire-place in his old kitchen. Nothing about the premises was ever locked up or put aside under the fear that they would steal it. In those days stealing was unknown among Indians. I have heard my grandfather tell of their morning devotions, which they performed before the white family were astir, and how wildly sounded their simple hymns wailed out in their deep and sonorous voices.
"One great want of the people in the early times was sufficient fodder for cattle during the winter months. A meadow of fresh grass, made, like all the natural meadows, by beavers was a great discovery. My grandfather found Dudley Meadow one day, while
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hunting for a stray ox, and called it a stroke of good fortune, only it seemed ever so far from home. The first logging camp was near the crossing of the summer and winter roads to the Big Meadow. The location of it is easily found as there is now a beech tree, nearly a foot in diameter, growing on the old site, and it shows how our fathers judged distances to note that they called the place two miles from home, going, as they did out over the ridge by the ten acre field, and thence on the high ground east of Big Meadow.
"The first vessel was built in the Dock, the stern standing on the western side of the road, and was named the " Ranger." The old blacksmith shop stood where the road now is, south of Dock Bridge.
"For several years after coming here my grandfather used to ride to Boston in the fall on horseback and return in the spring. There were no bridges over any of the rivers east of Saco; the Kennebec and Penobscot were crossed by ferries. The other rivers he was obliged to swim his horse over, crossing himself in a boat or canoe. The woods were generally free from underbrush and a mounted horseman could travel through them as through the oak openings of the west. People had peculiar notions in those days upon the sub- ject of firewood. For years they refused to use slabs and the waste of the lumber for fuel, and for kindling and oven wood they would select the straightest rifted pine, haul it up to the door, bolt it in lengths of three feet and split and dry it, using timber now worth eighty dollars per thousand feet. This improvidence is not surprising when the price of the best pine boards of a quality not to be found now anywhere in North America was only about six dollars per thousand in Boston. The first year the settlers planted a few potatoes and a little corn and some other vegetables, and the soil was found to be very fertile, yielding abundant crops of grain and hay."
Your patience would not suffer me, if I had the materials, to bring down with detail the history of the events of the hundred years fol- lowing the beginning of your life here as a community of your own. It has been said: " Happy are the people that have no annals." His- tory is largely the recital of the wars, contests, and calamities that have befallen our race. The fruition of good things, if such is long any human experience, as it makes no impression upon our grati- tude, makes for itself no record, while we are loud in our complaints and circumstantial in our perpetuation of our hard fortunes.
Looking back over the long past, and considering the agitations,
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the anxieties, the vague forebodings, that make the age in which we live, notwithstanding its enormous accumulations of wealth, the mar- velous inventions that have stimulated industry, and added so enor- mously to its productive power, an age of sadness and depression, we are disposed to regard the generation, whose life began in the latter part of the eighteenth century and closed before the middle of the nineteenth, as a favored generation. It may be the mere illusion of retrospect, and our times may have the same charm for those that come after us, but certainly those years in the history of your coun- try, if of no other, look, on the survey, like our golden age.
There were no great wars or wide-spread famines or pestilences; the rich, virgin land then just free from enemies, opened its fertile bosom for our teeming crops, and plenty crowned the equally divided labors of the husbandman and the artisan. Competence and com- fort was the general condition of all the people, and the madness of speculation, the craze for sudden wealth, had not seized the national heart and corrupted the simplicity of the national manners. Con- tent with moderate fortune, the citizen, more than before or since, staid at home, followed the occupation, and succeeded to the ample estates, of his father.
Here at first there had to be a hand-to-hand struggle with snows and frosts, and with a soil rich indeed, but already possessed by a vigorous, universal growth of forests, and in that struggle, before conditions of peace could be exacted, there was suffering from cli- mate, there was early rising and days of patient industry, till econ- omy and labor became a habit and a passion. The wooded slopes were chopped, and piled, and burned, and ultimately made permea- ble by the heavy plow turning shining furrows after the sweating oxen. Log and small frame houses gradually loomed among the stumps in place of the first winter's camp, where, without the minis- try of women, the working men had cooked, eaten, and slept. Things grew better fast. To the married their wives came as soon as shelter could be had for them, and the young men went home for wives, or heard of them by a sagacious instinct here and there in the remote settlements. The voices of little children sometimes in glee, oftener in dire complaint and wail began to be heard in the set- tlement above the hooting of owls and the whirr and gnashing of the throbbing saw as it slowly bit through the soft spongy pines. Simultaneously came over seas- taking no interest in the voyage,
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protesting, with what dumb demonstrations they could make against its discomforts - the cows, the pigs, and the sheep, and at least one horse, needing as yet no chaise or even springless four-wheeled wagon. As yet the harvests are not to be depended upon. Ven- ison and the clam-beds must eke out the scanty larder of salt food, and the vessel that carried pine boards to Boston, and sold them for a song, is eagerly watched for, because she has in her hold flour and Indian meal, tea and coffee, and perhaps a little modicum of West India rum, to be carefully kept and judiciously doled out for the sicknesses and often infirmities of the colonists.
There were wet seasons and dry seasons, early and late springs, premature frosts that nipped the unripe beans, and blackened the pumpkin vines, open winters, when bears came out of their dens and terrorized the sheep-folds, and long rainless winters, when sheeted snows lay deep on the narrow footpaths, the only streets, and carpeted all the shrubbery of the woods with one level, downy blanket of white, all the aspects of the seasons being much talked about and compared.
To the early settlers were conveyed, without money compensa- tion, their several homestead lots, only the outlying wild lands and a margin of the river bank being reserved by the proprietary. Gen- eral Lincoln's family ultimately bought the interests of his associ- ates, the greater part of which became the property of the late The- odore Lincoln senior. Though he always kept up his lumber busi- ness, and had logs enough brought to his mills every year to keep them occupied without much driving, he was always disposed to hus- band rather than to exhaust the lumbering resources of the river, knowing how much the livelihood of the community depended upon them.
His greatest interest was in his crops of wheat and barley and potatoes, and in providing ample pasturage and foddering for sheep and cattle. He was accustomed to rise very early in the morning, in winter several hours before daylight, and had his household of men and women laborers, his children, and the stranger within his gates, up to keep him company. He conducted all the details of his busi- ness in a systematic and economic way. He oversaw everything that was done with an intelligent direction, so that all his cultiva- tion, all his methods of training and feeding animals, all his me- chanical contrivances, became the expression of his own judgment.
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He worked, if not by a book science, by plans and rules derived from his ingenious ancestors, and modified by his own experience, so that his work was not routine or hap-hazard, but practical sagac- ity, justifying itself by what it accomplished.
The result was, not the accumulation of a large fortune, not the skinning and wasting of his lands, and this conversion into movable property to be carried away and spent, but a steady growth of the town, if not of his own estate, a generous income fairly earned by prudence and hard work; the means of educating his children, and of maintaining as long as he lived an open and generous hospitality. It was a salutary influence and example for his neighbors, who practised the same industry and economy, resulting in a local prosperity that has distinguished the town, small as it is, as one of the wealthiest in the State.
About the year 1830, the temperance revival swept over the whole Eastern region of Maine, and the leading citizens of Dennysville gave in their hearty adhesion to the reformed principles. The old prac- tice of serving ardent spirits twice a day to laboring men, of using them as a daily stimulant, and making the proffer of them to friends and guests a token of hospitality and civility, and of their open sale to all customers in any well-equipped country store, went out of use, at once and forever.
In 1832, the town had become so large that its Eastern part, the growth of which had been suddenly stimulated by the establishment of the iron rolling mills on one of its streams, six miles from center to center to the older settlement, that a separation was sought and a new town created with the name of Pembroke. I have left your ecclesiastical and school history, the succession of municipal officers, the statistics at different periods of the population and valuation of the town, its contributions of men and money to the support of the great civil war, together with some notice of its soldiers and heroes living and dead to be told by other voices than mine. With this description of the country and the beginning of its life as a commun- ity, and such brief data as I have taken from the intervening interval of a hundred years, I pass to complete my commemoration to some personal sketches of the character and history of a few persons and families, whose names are most intimately associated with the reputa- tion of the town.
Of the first comers I have been able to collect but few memorials.
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Captain Theophilus Wilder seemed to be a man of some substance. His family came to him in October of the first year, so he must have set up the first family altar in the new settlement. With them, per- haps his personal chattels arrived, two cows and two pigs, beginning of a long and important line. Theophilus was the father of a son of the same name, and of the late Deacon Ebenezer Wilder, who as well as his descendants, was always a man of consequence in the town. Very many persons only recollect Dennysville by the excellent food they have eaten at his table, and the quiet sleep they have enjoyed in his clean beds, lulled by the music of the mill-dam. The original Wilder lot was in what is now Pembroke and is still occupied by the family. The two Gardners took up lots near, and their numerous descendants are still with you, besides those scattered abroad. Joseph Bridges and James Blackwood settled at Young's Cove. Abraham, son of Joseph, is now living, upwards of ninety years old. Samuel Sprague settled in Pembroke and his name and blood still survive. Of course Smith came. He is a party in every enterprise and what English town was ever settled without him? This time he was known by the name of Richard, and not knowing in what pleasant places his lines might fall, pitched upon Edmunds for a home. Christopher Benner must have been one of General Lincoln's old Continentals. A boy, who was once asked what calling he meant to follow when he had grown up, replied: " I mean to be a Revolutionary Pensioner." It is a good business, or used to be, and Benner seemed to consider it vocation enough; for he took up no lot.
There was this peculiarity about the settlement of Dennysville. It was a proprietary settlement, like those on the Waldo Patent, whereas most of the townships in Eastern Maine, had been granted without purchase to a certain number of named first settlers. But though a proprietary settlement, and though its history and the character of its inhabitants have been somewhat modified by that condition, it was not a property where the proprietor was an absentee landlord, exacting his rents and spending them abroad, like the greater number of the owners of the soil of Ireland; but where he cast in his fortunes with his fellow colonists, and shared their hard- ships as well as their prosperity.
Much of the poetry of this local history necessarily centers about his life and character. He was admirably fitted for the romantic life in the wilderness he had chosen. He had turned with distaste from
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a scholastic and professional career, although he was a graduate of Harvard College, and had an alert, inquisitive mind, with some knowledge gained from books, and a fund of Yankee good sense, ingenuity and judgment derived from the training of a country life, and from a familiar experience of all the methods of domestic and agricultural labor and of the processes of nature. He was only twenty-two years old when he came to Maine, with robust constitu- tion and vigorous health, and brimming over, as he was to the last day of his life, with cheerfulness and lively animal spirits. He lived among his fellow settlers, faring generally as they fared, and entering enthusiastically into all schemes that helped to build up the town, and improve the condition of its people. Up in the small hours of the morning, he skipped away, sometimes on horseback, sometimes on foot; perhaps to be at the saw mill as soon as the works were hoisted, to give directions for sawing some dimension timber wanted for a frame, and to pick out in the pond the logs he wanted it sawed from; perhaps to go to the grist-mill and see if the peas and barley to fatten his hogs could not be put through the stones; perhaps to get Sprague to haul a load of gravel to stop a leak in the upper dam, or Gardner to come up, as soon as it was dry enough, and sow Corn Hill field to oats, or Benner's boy to drive away the young cattle; perhaps to see if the schooner that left Boston with flour and corn the week before was in the river below the falls, or to set a trap to catch a bear that had killed a yearling in the back pasture the day before. Sometimes he had to go to Quoddy where the loyalty of the French Delesdernier had been rewarded by Jefferson with the collectorship; perhaps to see about clearing a cargo of dry boards for the West Indies, sometimes to Machias, especially after it was a shire, and the Court, of which he was for a while one of the Judges, getting a title by which he was known in the county, began to be held there.
Often the Indians carried him in their canoes across lakes and up and down the connecting streams. He learned their habits, modes of thought and words of their language. Like them he was weather- wise, watched and noted the aspects of the seasons, the leaving of trees, the flowering of shrubs and fruit trees, and knew what passed as certain signs of a white winter and a dry summer. He kept a weather record all his life, noting also when the great operations of the farm, the mill and the lumbering took place each season, and
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could tell you what day in any year the ice left Cathance Lake, and when the wild geese came back from the north.
For twelve years, until he was thirty-four, he had lived alone among his fellow-settlers, going every winter on horseback the long journey to Hingham to visit his mother. His marriage, late as it came, had its features of romance. The little vessel, that carried the pioneers to Cobscook River, was wind-bound and made harbor in Machias Bay. Some of the voyagers, among them Mr. Lincoln went on shore and called at the house of one Mayhew, a hard-working, poor farmer and fisherman living at Bucks Harbor. Among the children playing about the door was a little girl eleven years old, meagrely clad, but slim and graceful, with soft black eyes and blushing when spoken to. Tradition asserts that she was chewing spruce gum- and little girls used to do such a thing-and that Mr. Lincoln asked her what she was eating, whereupon with the guileless good-nature of childhood she offered him a share of the fragrant morsel, taken from her own lips. After this no doubt usual interchange of primitive courtesies, she ran away and forgot her visitor. But he never forgot her; and when, some years later, the marriage of his housekeeper made a vacancy in his house, he sent to a correspondent at Machias to see if Hannah Mayhew could not be engaged to fill the office. The negotiation prospered, and in due time she arrived and entered upon her new duties. She has left off chewing gum. The tall and stately lady, whose stature actually exceeds that of the master whose ser- vice she has taken, will never believe that she could be guilty of such a breach of propriety, and he can not amuse himself long by the recollection, since he finds the beauty her childhood promised ripened into a loveliness not to be trifled with by any susceptible heart. But beauty is not her only adornment. She is intelligent, refined, self-respecting. It is told that the servant prepared the table for the evening of her arrival for but one person. The new house- keeper observed this, and said quietly : "Lay the table for two." " Mr. Lincoln's housekeepers never eat with him," objected the ser- vant. " If I am good enough to be Mr. Lincoln's housekeeper, I am good enough to sit at the same table with him," was all she said. Two places were prepared, and Mr. Lincoln's repasts were no less pleasant to him because there shone across the table, by sunlight and by candle light, the fair face he had remembered from childhood, the mirror now of a cultivated and sensitive mind.
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