USA > Maine > York County > York > New England miniature; a history of York, Maine > Part 18
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The last speaker before Governor Hancock who made clos- ing remarks and called for a vote was Nathaniel Barrell who said, in part:
Awed in the presence of this august assembly, con- scious of my inability to express my mind fully on this im- portant occasion and sensible how little I must appear in the eyes of those giants in rhetoric who have exhibited such a pompous display of declamation, without any of those talents calculated to draw attention, without the pleasing eloquence of Cicero, or the blaze of Demosthenian oratory. I rise, Sir, to discharge my duty to my constituents, who, I know, expect something more from me than merely a silent vote. ... Etc.
In brief, he presented these arguments :
1. It places too great power in Congress.
2. Six years is too long for senators.
3. There is uncertainty about ability to bear the expense.
4. Continental collectors would not be as just as local collectors.
5. The language is too obscure and ambiguous.
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6. Excise and import duties, besides taxes, is too great a cost.
7. It will not furnish efficient government.
8. Salaried officials will be allowed to set their own compensation.
9. Such a government would be disagreeable to men with high notions of liberty.
10. There is too great haste in pushing through the innovation.
11. I favour adjournment-though I would be tempted to vote for it.
12. The federal constitution as it now stands needs much Amendment before it will be safe for us to adopt it. . . .
So spoke the delegate from York, showing that he was al- ready wavering from his former complete opposition. His younger brother, Joseph, a prominent Boston merchant, had written a letter to him the month before, in which he expressed the Feder- alist view that it would be best to ratify the constitution at once and to improve upon it later. George Thacher, the Biddeford lawyer who in his early days had practiced law for a year in York and now was a member of the Continental Congress, had also labored with him along the same lines.
The Convention of 365 delegates voted ratification of the Constitution by a slight majority of 19, of. which Nathaniel Bar- rell was one.
But how would the voters back home welcome the returning delegate who had assured them he would "sooner lose his arm than put his Assent to the new constitution"? Would they look significantly at his sleeves or would they take drastic action? In a letter to George Thacher, David Sewall expressed his doubts: "Your letter and other matters made a proselite of Mr. B who at the time of his Election was a flaming Anti-federalist, how his particular Electors will relish it I cannot say. But (inter nos) they were such as it would degrade a man of Sensibility and Integrity if it was known and realized that he was a genuine Representative of them".
And Samuel Nasson of Sanford wrote:
When I arrived at the County of York I received in general the thanks of all I mett while our Friend Bar'el (for such I yet esteem him) was much Abused how far the Town will carry their resentment I cannot say I strove as much as in me lay to keep down the Sperite of the people and I hope that they will not hurt his person or his property he did not
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return with me so that I cannot give any account of him but he was much to blame, I think, not for his voting but for striving to enflame the minds of the Town and the County against the then proposed Plan and by that means got himself elected to go to Boston.
Nathaniel Barrell too had his misgivings, and he expressed them in a letter to George Thacher which shows significantly the motives which swayed the minds of many people at the time :
Your friend (our Eastern Cicero?) [his nickname for Judge David Sewall] can tell you with what zeal I pushed the opposition till powerful reason flashed conviction on my mind, and bore down all before it in spite of the almost in- vincible resistance of deep rooted prejudice.
I recolect with pleasure the Candour which appeared in your conduct at the period you point at when Whig and Tory ran so high; and tho at that time I was branded with the opprobrious epithet of the one my soul rejected the charge knowing there never was a time since I have been able to wield the Sword that I would not cheerfully expose my life in defense of my Country.
I can assure you I place as first among the most meri- torious acts of my life my assent to the federal Constitution, notwithstanding I see serious consequences attending on it and that by thus doing I create in this town (at least) tem- porary enemies of those I considered two months since as disinterested friends. There are various sorts of opposers to this system; and all of them dangerous-some wish to be under a British Government which if this takes place, they can have no chance for, some were ill-treated torrys and are now ready to sacrifice all for revenge; others are more in debt than they have property to discharge and fear they shall not have paper money to cheat their creditors with; some are in debt and tho they have property to pay, yet the fear of tender acts ceasing cuts off their hopes, while some honest ignorant minds whome my soul pitys become dupes to the above group who persuade them that their libertys are in danger and they will be made slaves of others-aside from all these are not a few of those Insurgents who have neither property or principle, consequently want no government but that Anarchy which may in its confusion give them a chance of sharing all property amongst them-this lesson I have learned by being in the minority when I was obliged to mix with a set of the most unprincipled men-persuade me to believe what they themselves do not that if the proposed amendments will not take place-I dread the conse- quences-there is something which whispers within that tho more than 55 years has silvered my head I should be
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one of the first that would sound the alarm and call to arms-may Heaven prevent it!
I am joined by your friend, my better self, and our circle, the prating Girls.
Your friend and humble servant N. B.
But Nathaniel Barrell returned to Barrell Grove unharmed, and lived there in peace for many years. George Thacher enjoyed several visits to York in the years immediately following and wrote of pleasurable visits to Barrell Grove. He was inspired to write to his wife in March 1789: "I hardly know any place that I want to make a visit of a week or ten days or more, than Old York". Samuel Phillips Savage of Weston, Massachusetts, father- in-law of George Thacher, was another close friend. And when Nathaniel Barrell journeyed to Boston he had friends who made him welcome there. His life lay in pleasant lines at the farm and at the Boston home of his brother Joseph. In 1794 he was in that city as York's representative to the General Court.
He was deeply interested in the expedition which Joseph Barrell and associates sent to the northwest coast of the Pacific under Captain Gray on the Columbia, as a consequence of which the Columbia River, named for the vessel, and Gray's Harbor, named for the captain, were acquired for the United States.
In 1797 Jonathan Sayward died, apparently distrusting to the last his son-in-law's impulsive nature and lack of business acumen. In his will he bequeathed Barrell Grove to his daughter and then to Nathaniel's son John, and his business interests to Nathaniel's son Jonathan Sayward Barrell. To Nathaniel he left "a decent suit of apparell for every part of his Body and the walk- ing stick he gave me".
When Sarah Barrell, wife of Nathaniel, died on April 23, 1805, nine of their eleven children had reached maturity. The oldest, Sally Sayward Barrell, "Madam Wood", gained fame as Maine's first professional female author.
Nathaniel Barrell died on April 3, 1831, at the age of ninety-nine, bringing to a close a long career in a colorful period of York's past.
JUDGE DAVID SEWALL (1735 - 1825)
THE NATIVE OF YORK who won the widest respect and recognition of his talents was David Sewall, born October 28, 1735, son of Samuel Sewall and his second wife, Sarah Batchelor. A member of a family which from early days in New England has been noted for its distinguished sons in high positions in every generation as men of piety, benevolence, and superior intellect, he lived up to the standards set for him by his inheritance.
At the age of sixteen he was admitted to Harvard College, and graduated in the Class of 1775 as a Bachelor of Arts, and in 1758 was awarded his Master's degree. Always diligent and persevering, he lost no time in preparing himself to earn his living. In 1758 he compiled and published the first of several "Alman- acks", and in July 1760, at the Court of Common Pleas held in York, he was admitted to the bar.
At about this time Dr. Job Lyman, Yale 1756, younger brother of Reverend Isaac Lyman who in 1749 had succeeded Father Samuel Moody as the pastor of the First Parish Church, came to York to practice medicine. The fledgling lawyer and the struggling physician formed a friendship which remained close until the doctor died in 1791. The two bachelors took up house- keeping together, commencing in May 1760, in the former Phoebe Tanner house, on the main street in the Village just west of the present Library, which they rented. Two years later, both of them married, and David Sewall bought the property and continued to live there until 1794.
On December 17, 1762, David Sewall was married in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, by Reverend Samuel Langdon to Miss Mary Parker (1738-1788) of Portsmouth, daughter of William Parker, in whose office the young man had studied law. At the age of twenty-seven he had not yet built up a law practice that would by itself sustain him, but with his customary diligence he sought after sidelines to augment his income. The year that he was married he taught for one term in the York grammar school,
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filling the vacancy caused when Samuel Moody resigned to com- mence his successful career as preceptor of Dummer Academy. In 1763 David Sewall was Collector of Excise for York County and a member of the Commission of the Seal. Since 1760, he had been a solicitor of subscriptions to the New Hampshire Gazette.
The year 1766, when he was thirty-one years old, marks the beginning of his rise. In that year he was chosen Register of Probate, and he gained new honors in rapid succession from that time on. In November 1767 he was appointed a justice of the peace for York County and was sworn in on June 5, 1768.
John Adams, later the second president of the United States, was a Harvard classmate of David Sewall. In the years after 1765 he too began to gain recognition in Maine as a lawyer. From 1765 to 1774, he attended court annually at Falmouth and at Pownalborough, now Dresden, where he represented the in- terests of large landholders in the Appellate Court. In his diary and in letters to his wife, John Adams showed that he attended court in York four times during the years from 1770 to 1774, stopping at Woodbridge Tavern, managed by Matthew Ritchie, in 1771 and 1772. The friendship between the two classmates was renewed and after they had both retired from active life they still carried on a correspondence notable for the amusing recollec- tions of experiences during their college years.
In his private business, David Sewall was representing some good clients and in the course of time, he acquired others still more prosperous and with wider interests. His friend, Dr. Job Lyman, had married Abigail Moulton, daughter of Jeremiah 4th. The doctor acquired real estate from time to time, and when his father-in-law died in 1777, he was appointed executor of the large Moulton estate, involving the legal affairs of the town of Sanford and of several mills in Brunswick and other towns; this became a valuable account and led to the still more important business of the Phillips estate which involved the development of nearly all the towns in the inland region of York County.
In November 1774, Sewall was elected one of the delegates for York at a county congress to take a stand on the question of the impending revolution. He was now becoming known in the wider circle of the General Court of Massachusetts. In 1775, he was appointed a justice of the Quorum Unus for York County by the Massachusetts Council, and within a year, senator of the General Court to represent the District of Maine, and in the following year, he was appointed a justice of the Massachusetts
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Superior Court, a position he resigned after six months, when appointed a justice of the Quorum for the Province of Massachu- setts.
In 1780 York voters elected him one of their representa- tives to the General Court to revise the laws of the Province and to draft a constitution for Massachusetts. David Sewall was one of the committee of seven to prepare the draft and one of a committee to speak in behalf of it before the General Court. On February 16, 1781, he was appointed a justice of the Supreme Judicial Court after both houses of the General Court had called on him for an opinion on the right of the Senate to join in the fixing of valuations on taxable property.
In York, during the years just before the Revolution, he gave counsel to the citizens lest their enthusiasm should lead them into rash acts which might commit the town to an unwise or even dangerous position. When Captain Daniel Bragdon was elected representative to the General Court in 1775, David Sewall was chairman of a committee to prepare written instructions which restricted the delegate to definite conservative acts. The town records during the war years contain no specific references to any speeches made by David Sewall, but there is evidence that his counsel was usually accepted. After the Battle of Lexington, when a Committee of Correspondence was created, the selectmen were to be its members, but within two months David Sewall and Edward Emerson were added, and in the following year David Sewall was made chairman of a committee with wider responsi- bilities.
Busily engaged as he was in affairs of importance con- cerning the whole Province of Massachusetts and with matters before the Council of the District of Maine, he continued to give time and talent to the guidance of his small town in strenuous days when tact and patience were necessary to direct the acts of an impulsive and shortsighted majority.
In 1780 he became a charter member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1789 he was chosen an elector of the president, the only member to represent Maine in that first electoral college. In September of the same year, he was appointed by President George Washington to be the first judge of the District Court of Maine, an office which he held for twenty-eight years, until 1818. In all, his career as a judge in the colonial and in the national courts was continuous for forty-one years and four months.
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His first wife having died on May 28, 1788, he took for a second wife Miss Elizabeth, daughter of Reverend Samuel Lang- don, at Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, in November 1790.
In March 1791, he was named one of the trustees of Berwick Academy, and in October of the same year he was elected the first resident member of the Massachusetts Historical Society, which he had helped to organize.
In 1794 he built "a grand new house", as Jonathan Sayward described it in his diary, prophesying "it will when finished be one of the grandest billt in the county". Known now as "Coven- try Hall", it still is admired, in the middle of the twentieth century. Here he entertained many distinguished men who came to York, among them, in 1817, President James Monroe.
In 1794 he became a member of the first board of Over- seers of Bowdoin College, and served for many years, part of the time as president of the board. In 1812 the College conferred on him the degree of L.L.D. In his honor, as one of the early bene- factors of the College, a "Sewall prize" is awarded annually.
He was eighty-three years of age when he resigned as a federal judge of Maine in a letter to President Monroe dated January 9, 1818. His last few years were spent in his native town. Shortly before his death he stated that if he were to live his life over again, he did not know that he should wish to alter it. He died on October 22, 1825, at the age of ninety.
Superior in intellect, conscientious in duty, gracious and witty in society, friendly and benevolent, in the words inscribed on his tombstone in the old cemetery, "In him the defenceless found a Protector, the poor a Benefactor, the community a Peace- maker, Science, Social Order and Religion an efficient Patron."
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YORK VILLAGE IN HISTORIC YORK VILLAGE are included the land and buildings eastward of the triangle at York Corner, particularly the properties on or near York Street to the Harbor boundary, and Newtown Road, Organug Road, Long Sands Road, Post Road, and Ridge Road. Across Chase's Pond Road (once known as Parsons Lane) from the easterly side of the triangle, at the westerly end of the original Simpson grant, stands the Daniel Simpson house (1780), later the home of Samuel and Thomas Junkins. Farther along is the house built (about 1720) by Lieutenant Daniel Simpson, an intrepid snowshoeman and scout during the worst period of Indian fighting. Between the Simpson land and the Moulton land (orig- inally the grant to Twisden, one of the four Scituate men) was a road into the woods-long since discontinued and becoming in 1959 part of a gravel pit-called the Newtown Road, later Frost Lane. When this road was in use it extended through the settle- ment of Newtown to Chase's Pond Road. At present all that is left of it is the short stretch leading from the northerly side of U.S. 1 and running to the boundary fence of the Toll Road. Only two of the old houses in the Newtown district are still standing. The house which once stood at the corner of York Street, home of Captain Thomas Simpson, who succeeded John Paul Jones as commander of the U.S.S. Ranger, is gone. Near the boundary fence of the Toll Road stands the house built by Joseph Simpson in 1737. Beyond the other boundary fence, and not far from Snowshoe Rock, stands the house built by Samuel Preble in 1724 on land inherited from his father, the second Abraham. The first settler of Newtown appears to have been Nicholas Sewall, the tanner of Lindsay Road. His house was the early home of his grandson, General Henry Sewall of the Revolutionary forces, Daniel Sewall, the mapmaker and first York postmaster, and Reverend Jotham Sewall, the pioneer missionary 183 184 NEW ENGLAND MINIATURE of Maine. John Bradbury Jr. also had a home on former Preble land. To the eastward of Newtown Captain Daniel Bragdon put together a farm of more than a hundred acres, which became the property of John Hancock. One tract of it was known as "the Quincy Pasture", so named for John Hancock's father-in-law. Newtown Road was a thoroughfare long before Organug Road was laid out on the opposite side of York Street. Before Sewall's Bridge was built there were two private lanes leading from Scituate Men's Row through the farms of Thomas Adams and Captain John Stone, who had bought his property of Captain Thomas Donnell. After 1761 use of the lanes as a road to shorten the way to the Bridge became popular "on sufferance in the winter- time", as Captain Stone expressed it in a petition to the court in 1767 to have the way made public, for he had become annoyed by the frequent taking down of bars, not always carefully replaced, and by the trampling of his fields. The court being in favor, the road was laid out with the two lanes merged into one. On the easterly side of the corner of Newtown Road and York Street was the Moulton farm, on which Joseph built in 1688 the tavern which was destroyed in the Massacre. When his four sons, brought up at their grandmother's house in the Cider Hill district, came of age, the three older brothers sold to Jeremiah, the youngest, the Joseph Moulton property, less fifty acres which had been sold to Ebenezer Coburn. This Coburn land, with his house (1719), which still stands, was bought back in 1758 by grandsons Jeremiah 4th and Daniel. On a part of this land is the house built (1770) by Brigadier General Jotham Moulton, son of Jeremiah 4th, in which his widow Joanna (Tilden) and her second husband, Major Samuel Nasson, lived until they moved to a new house built by Jotham in Sanford when he intended to live in that town and take charge of the Moulton mill interests. The house which Colonel Jeremiah Moul- ton built (1717) and enlarged, and to which his son Daniel added (1770) an ell containing his office, which until his death in 1788 held most of the York County records, has been moved to York Harbor. In 1759 Colonel Jeremiah's son Jeremiah built for his second wife, Mrs. Abigail (Ruck) Watts, the house which stands at the eastern end of the Moulton property. In the division of his estate it was allotted to his two younger daughters, Hannah, the wife of Samuel Sewall, and Lucy, the wife of Storer Sewall, and remained the property of Hannah's descendants until recent years. 185 York Village On the tract granted to Richard Banks are two houses which once belonged to members of his family: the one erected in 1815 by Charles Bane, the son of Mary (Banks) Bane, on the corner of the property nearest the Moulton house, and the older house built in 1696 by Lieutenant Joseph Banks, son of Richard, after the division of the property. The house standing on the easterly corner, adjoining the Curtis lot, was built (1800) by Dr. Josiah Gilman, on land bought of Martha (Banks) Hunt, sister of Mary Bane. The eastern corner of the Curtis lot was sold in 1720 to Ebenezer Storer of Wells who thought to start a shop in York, but soon moved to Boston where he became a merchant and shipowner. In 1745 he sold the half-acre to Joseph Horn, who built the dwelling that still stands next to the present grammar school grounds. Edward Emerson bought this property in 1761, and two doctors, Christopher Gerrish and Wilson Hawkes, lived there at different times. Indeed about a mile of this street might be characterized as a "Doctors' Row", for during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries most of the town's doctors-including John Whitney, John Bennett, Josiah Gilman, William Lyman, Jasper Hazen, John C. Stewart, and for a time, Edward Cook- lived in various periods on the section from Dr. John Swett's house, opposite the Lewis Bane house near York Corner, to Alex- ander Bulman's house in the Village. On the original Preble land stands the Green Dragon Inn, at least a part of which might well be the oldest house in York and also the most historic. If any of the original timbers still remain, they belong to the house which the first Abraham Preble built in 1642 and his son Abraham converted into a garrison more than thirty years later. The history of the property presents the best example of the way in which a house was divided among many heirs. The division began in 1713, when the second Abraham Preble gave half of the homestead to his son Caleb. The other half became the inheritance of his widow Hannah and several children. When Caleb's property was divided after the death of his mother in 1751 at the age of eighty-nine, his widow Jemima received two rooms at the west end of the first floor and half of the chamber over the front room, half of the back cellar, all of the small chimney arch-with liberty to pass through the kitchen to her part of the cellar and out the back door to the well-possession of the small house she had built back of the mansion house, and 186 NEW ENGLAND MINIATURE use of the oven in the kitchen. Son Paul received the front and back corner rooms on the northeast side, the back stairs, half of the kitchen, the east end of the garret, also two-thirds of the front cellar and two-thirds of the arch. Daughter Hannah (wife of Daniel Moulton) was given the front chamber at the west end, the chamber at the northwest corner, the small room or closet between these rooms, one-sixth of the kitchen, one-third of the garret, one-third of the cellar, and one-third of the arch. Caleb Jr. bought his brother Abraham's share consisting of the front chamber over Paul's room, one-third of the kitchen, two-thirds of the garret, and one-half of the back cellar. Caleb and Hannah were given liberty to build back stairs out of the kitchen to the kitchen chamber. The front stairs, entry, and hall were to be held in common. Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.