USA > Maine > York County > York > New England miniature; a history of York, Maine > Part 20
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Voted that there be and hereby is Granted unto such Persons as will accept and undertake it, the Liberty to Build a Bridge at their own Cost over York River, some where be- tween Colo. Harmon's Wharfe and Mr. Donnell's Point of Rocks, above the Ferry: Provided there be a sufficient way left for Sloops to Pass and Repass and the Inhabitants to have free liberty to Pass over the same without anything to pay.
About fifteen years passed, during which the Samuel Sew- alls, father and son, tended the Middle Ferry from the south bank, which in times past had been the concession of Thomas Donnell, operating from the north bank of the river. During those years the younger Samuel Sewall was intent on inventing a new kind of bridge structure. It would be constructed of multiple piles, bound in a cluster at the top with iron bands, in place of single piles used in the standard bridges of the day. Because of varying depths of mud, the piers in each cluster would be of different lengths. The problem was to find a way to drive these
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multiples into the river bottom. It was years before he contrived and rigged up a crude pile driver, which with a trip hammer, would loose a heavy oak log endways upon the caps.
By 1757 he was prepared to start, with Captain John Stone as his assistant. In 1761, when sufficient funds had been raised by subscription, the bridge was built and opened. The road to and across the new bridge, then over Elder Holt's land, along the South Side Road to Main's Hill, became a part of the King's Highway, shown on Daniel Sewall's map of 1794 as the Post Road.
Major Samuel Sewall's fame spread throughout New Eng- land. Some years later he and Captain Stone contracted to super- intend construction of the famous bridge across the Charles River in Boston. They built a pile bridge similar to the one over York River, at which Benjamin Franklin's sister marveled in a letter to her famous brother, and which the Reverend William Bentley, the noted diarist of Salem, Massachusetts, described in full.
Lindsay Road (which was not so named until about 1900) became a busy street, with shops at the Village end near the Gaol, wharves and warehouses along the river.
In 1761 Dr. Job Lyman bought the original Arthur Brag- don farm extending from the Indian Trail to Bass Cove, on which in 1785 he built the present house. In 1769 the street now known as Organug Road was laid out through the properties of Captain John Stone, Dr. Lyman, and Thomas Adams to Scituate Men's Row.
On the opposite side of Indian Trail, John Parker's son-in- law, John Harmon Jr., built, in about 1735, a new dwelling in which he and his wife Mehitable brought up three orphan chil- dren of their daughter, Elizabeth (Harmon) Moulton and the two of their daughter Deborah (Harmon) Harmon. One of these grandchildren, Johnson Moulton, carried on the Harmon military tradition in the Seven Years' War and in the American Revolution.
In 1754 the Harmons sold their house to Captain Joshua Simpson in the year of his marriage to Maria Bradbury. One of their five children, Benjamin, took part in the famous Boston Tea Party. In 1832 Joshua Simpson's son Edward sold the property to General Jeremiah McIntire who in that year married Elizabeth A. Lunt. The story is still told in York-and the hoofprints on the stairs are shown in evidence-that the General rode his horse up to the second story on a training day, but there is no tale of how he ever got the horse down again.
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During the Revolution the King's Highway became a busy thoroughfare. When the first Maine volunteers met on the Village Green and marched towards Massachusetts after the Battle of Lexington, Captain Johnson Moulton led his company down the road and over Sewall's Bridge. Whenever English warships block- aded the coast, the food and clothing sent by the town as its share of the war tax was carted to Boston over the same route.
In 1784, after the Revolution, the former Harmon garrison near the creek bridge became Stacey's Tavern, when William Stacey acquired the property. At about this time, for some reason a most precious document once in the possession of Edward God- frey, and left by him in the care of Edward Johnson, was thrown out and blown about by the winds. This proved to be the charter, dated 1641-42, by which was created the City of Gorgeana. Captain Joseph Tucker, who then lived in the house across the way, found it and in 1797, at the suggestion of Judge David Sewall, presented it to the Massachusetts Historical Society, where it can still be seen, together with the letter of explanation :
"I was crossing a field in the Town some years since and found it in Mutilated Situation you now see it. It was very wet I dried it and found what it contained & preserved it. I am sorry the Seal is wanting, but it was gone when it came into my hands".
Captain Joseph, son of Nicholas Tucker, who had sailed ships of Sir William Pepperrell, was a successful privateer and also served in the United States Navy during the Revolution. Some time around 1920, the Navy Department made inquiry about him in York on the occasion of naming a small war vessel in his honor. In 1784 he married Mary, daughter of Captain John and Eunice (Raynes) Stone and bought of his father-in-law the Donnell seventy-acre farm and half of the Donnell wharf and warehouses. He later acquired the other half from the estate of John Hancock.
Captain Tucker had bad luck with his new property in the very year that he bought it, for according to Jonathan Sayward's diary, he left with his bride by land for Boston on November 23 on a honeymoon, and on November 26 the highest tide in Say- ward's memory "carried away Coll Donell's warehouse of two stories high, wharf and all, across the River & also a warehouse and wharfe of Mr. Jos. Tucker of 2 stories High across the river".
Though Captain Tucker continued to own vessels after he acquired wharves and warehouses, he either hired captains or leased his vessels to other merchants. From 1791 to 1793 he
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represented York in the General Court, where he won the gratitude of his constituents by successfully campaigning for a grant from the proceeds derived from the sale of property confiscated by the Court out of Pepperrell possessions when that family was outlawed as Tories. The grant, amounting to three hundred pounds, went towards a new Sewall's Bridge, "east of our old one". From 1795 to 1804 he was Collector of Customs for the Port of York, having succeeded Captain Richard Trevett, the first to hold the office. After his death in 1806, his heirs, of whom one was William Pitt Preble who had married his daughter Nancy, sold the property to Edward Augustus Emerson. Later owners were Solomon Brooks, Alexander Dennett, and George A. Marshall.
For reasons other than the presence of a wharf, a store, and the office of the Collector of Customs, there was heavy traffic past these places in order to go over the Mill Dam Road about a hundred yards to the eastward. Now little better than a logging road in the woods, the road was well-traveled when the mills at the pond were active, by carts hauling lumber and grain from westerly parts of town. Evidence that it was also used as a short cut from Sewall's Bridge to York Harbor by passenger-carrying vehicles is shown in an account in Jonathan Sayward's diary of an incident which occurred there.
February 13, 1782
My wife & Polly Plummer with Doctr Keating a coming home from Kittery overtaken by a terrible snow squall over sett the slay down the bank by the river and being near stiff [frozen] the Doctr lost his hat with a stone buckle, my wife on a galoshoe, Polly her cap muff, one shoe & buckle all supposed to [be] down into the river. In this condition the Doctor without a hat, Extreme cold, took a Pocket hand- kerchief and wrapped Polly's foot [the] which was soon lost and he took her in his arms and carried her till he got to the end of the Mil dam & was there assisted by his Broth- ers home. She was just [about] gone and my wife also pre- served.
At least twice attempts were made to have it accepted by the town as a public road: in 1888, in order to provide a shorter route between York Harbor and Sewall's Bridge, and again in 1906, as a convenience for travel between the Harbor and the Country Club.
In 1811 a later Collector of Customs, Alexander McIntire, built the fine dwelling which still stands, on land bought of
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William Stacey's heirs, on the easterly side of the Lindsay Road at the turn where the road heads towards York River. After it was taken over by the United States Government it was owned, in succession, by Edward A. Emerson, Solomon Brooks, and his brother, Jeremiah Brooks.
In 1821 Captain Thomas Savage and his son-in-law, Solo- mon Brooks, bought from the estate of Mercy Frost, widow of Joseph Harmon (and of Judge Simon Frost), the land where Edward Godfrey had first settled "containing twenty acres with the very ancient dwelling house thereon". Could that house, "very ancient" in 1821 (Deeds 108-15), have been the original Godfrey house, built in 1630, which according to Reverend Na- thaniel Norcross in 1648, was "a very good house"? Savage bought one-third of an acre adjoining by a deed (112-166) which twice stipulates that it is to include the springs of water by the millpond, thus bringing to light the source of water supply which attracted Edward Godfrey to that spot. There is no further men- tion of the house after it was bought by Thomas Savage.
According to Angevine W. Gowen, the Harmon garrison, later Stacey's Tavern, was torn down some time between 1870 and 1875.
In 1890, two years after he had bought what remained of the Point Bolleyne land between the road, the river, and the pond from the estate of Frank Huidekoper, John E. Staples laid out an elaborate plan of land development to be called Villa Sites, York Shore, which provided for a large hotel site with a wharf and a park, besides several large house lots; but the project did not materialize. Mr. Staples, having prospered as a maker of stone monuments at his marble works on the westerly side of Lindsay Road, formerly the homestead of Thomas Savage with the present house (built shortly before 1792), interested himself in promot- ing several speculative undertakings. His most satisfactory effort was his work as one of the promoters of the York Harbor and Beach railroad line, which became a part of the Boston and Maine Railroad.
The last commercial venture at Barrell Mill Pond was a project between 1880 and 1884 to replace the brackish water with fresh, in order to carry on an ice business there. Frank Phillips Emerson, the promoter of this ambitious scheme, planned to bring water from Folly Pond through a pipeline built of wooden staves, fifteen or twenty feet long, put together in the same way as barrels are made. He was unsuccessful, however, because the
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water pressure from Folly Pond was greater than the connecting joints, of smaller size than the staves, could stand, and they burst. An icehouse built at the cove near Paul's Hill stood for many years afterwards as a reminder of this failure. Emerson's rights to the water of Folly Pond were acquired by Frank E. Jones, brewer of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, who formed the Aga- menticus Water Co. which eventually became the Kittery Water District.
Lindsay Road is now a quiet, residential street in need of a reminder of the prominence it held in York affairs through nearly three centuries. While still a footpath extending over only a third of its present length, it was used, from 1667 to 1713, by more persons than any other street in Maine. During the eight- eenth century slow-plodding oxen dragged loads of logs or grain to the mills, or of provisions for the ships-salted beef and pork, and live cattle, sheep, and crates of cackling hens-interfering, after 1761, with the fast couriers on king's business and the stagecoaches following the route of the King's Highway between Portland and Boston. At the river, wharves and warehouses at- tracted merchant vessels, including those of one who was to be the first governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, bring- ing imports from distant places which were bartered for such produce as could be brought from anywhere in town. Along the road were many homes of sea captains. Stacey's, and later Lind- say's, taverns attracted groups of noisy sailors, often foreigners from the West Indies. But during all those activities and down to present times, most of Edward Godfrey's Point Bolleyne has remained, undeveloped and unoccupied, in the same condition as it was when he first took possession of it in 1630.
It would be no unprofitable thing for you to pass over the several streets and call to mind who lived there so many years ago.
- INCREASE MATHER
SOUTH AND WEST OF YORK VILLAGE
THE SOUTHWESTERN CORNER of the Town of York, be- tween the Kittery line at Brave Boat Harbor and York River, has been known since the days of the vacationists as Seabury. In earlier times it was a region where few owners each had many acres. In plantation days, when Sir Ferdinando Gorges had only a vague idea of the geography of Kittery and Agamenticus, he gave in 1634 to Arthur Champernowne in England a deed to Champernowne's Island and five hundred acres on the other side of Brave Boat Harbor. In 1643 when Thomas Gorges was Deputy Governor of the Province and in charge of affairs for Sir Ferdin- ando in Gorgeana, he gave to the inhabitants (Deeds IV-46) a deed to a neck of land on the south side of the river at the mouth . , to bee taken on a streight lyne from ye sid Ferdindo Gorges house there, to the pond neare Mr. Edw. Godfrey his farme house, & all the Marsh at Brave boate Harbour, lying between ye Marsh of Capt. Francis Champernown, & ye se Farme, saveing Twenty Acres heretofore granted to George Burdett Minister, together with all the marshes & Yslands-from Poynt Ingleby to ye Harbours mouth-with free lyberty to sett up houses for fishermen, by the water side. And I the se Thomas Gorges do-appoint Francis Rayns. Gentle my-attorney-to Enter into the se Prem- isses-and yr of take full-possession-in his name to de- liver to the [inhabitants].
For practical purposes it may be understood that the history of Seabury thus commences in 1643 when Governor Thomas Gorges made Francis Raynes his attorney in charge of the land between Godfrey's Pond and Brave Boat Harbor.
Having while in England been one of the supporters of Sir Ferdinando Gorges in the colonization of New England, Cap- tain Francis Raynes apparently considered himself above the laws of the Province when he arrived in Maine. In 1646 he was granted land at Brave Boat Harbor. In 1647 he was fined for
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resisting officers in the service of a warrant. A feud with Godfrey and his wife, probably starting with disputes over indefinite boundaries, developed by 1651 into several suits for slander. When Massachusetts took possession in 1652 Raynes became a member of the first board of selectmen and thereafter showed himself more amenable to public laws. Whatever his reputation was among his neighbors, his standing in the town improved with the years; he was lieutenant of militia in 1654, captain in 1659, one of the staff of the Royal Commissioners in 1664, associate justice in 1668.
During those years grants of Seabury land were also given to others, principally to Thomas Crockett and to Edward Godfrey or his wife Ann Messant Godfrey. As Ann Messant she had been given by George Burdett his twenty acres in payment of debt, and as wife of Godfrey she inherited all of his holdings west of York River. She gave all her land to her niece, Alice Shapleigh, who sold it in 1684 to Francis and Nathaniel Raynes. In the same year Francis Raynes bought also the thirty acres which the town had given to Thomas Crockett for a planting field. From that time on until 1886 that section became known as "Raynes Neck". Three of the houses which once belonged to Raynes families are still standing; one was listed as a garrison in 1711.
Captain Francis Raynes and his son and heir Nathaniel devoted their lives to political affairs, but Nathaniel's sons, Deacon Francis and Nathaniel, became shipbuilders at Brave Boat Har- bor. In 1700 Deacon Francis Raynes of the third generation became a partner with Samuel Donnell, son of Henry, in building a sawmill at Rogers Brook near York River.
The eastern area, between York River and Godfrey's Pond, which Governor Thomas Gorges had given in 1643 to the city for public distribution, also came into the possession of a few owners of large holdings. William Hilton, who came from Dover, New Hampshire, in 1650, was given the license to keep the ferry be- tween Stage Neck and the opposite shore, and the City of Gor- geana also granted to him some land on the Seabury shore, where he built a house in which he kept a tavern. His sons-in-law, James Wiggin and Arthur Beale, came soon after, and the Beale family continued to have male representatives in York for more than two centuries. As time went on, the Hiltons and the Beales acquired more land, by grant and by purchase, so that early in the eight- eenth century each of the families owned more than a hundred acres. That portion of the Hilton land which was first called
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Point Ingleby, lying opposite-across the river-Godfrey's Point Bolleyne, came to be known as Hilton's Point. William Pepperrell Jr., who bought this tract-from a little below Sewall's Bridge down to a point distinguished as "a flat rock by York River" inland as far as Godfrey's Pond-left it to his heirs, but it was confiscated and sold by the Massachusetts government in 1793 to the Moore family.
The Arthur Beale land at the point bounded both by the river and the ocean, having been bought in 1718 by Joseph Swett of Hampton, New Hampshire, became known as Swett's Point, but is now Western Point. Descendants of the Swetts kept the property in the family until 1886 when Arthur Cox sold most of it to Seabury Allen, in whose honor the name Raynes Neck was changed to "Seabury".
William Moore, ferryman and fisherman, owned land in Seabury early enough to have had court actions with Edward Godfrey in 1651. He also acquired land in various parts of the town. Through his wife Dorothy, who inherited from William Dixon, he owned land at York Harbor. In 1674 he bought Harker's Island from the son of John Harker for whom the island was named. In 1711 his son Thomas sold this island and sixty acres near Rogers' Cove to William Pepperrell.
Thomas Trafton, ferryman near the site of Rice's Bridge, came to live in York at an indefinite time before 1671, in which year his holdings were increased by a grant of land from the town. His son Zaccheus added to the family property, and as one of his ventures started a fulling mill on the stream between Rice's Bridge and Old Mill Creek, and so provided the reason for the name "Fulling Mill Creek".
Early in the nineteenth century the names of new owners appear prominently in the records. Noah Trafton (1791-1881), son of Tobias who lived near the boundary of York and Kittery at Brave Boat Harbor and who had married Lavinia, daughter of Joseph Moore, in 1817, bought of George Raynes, boatbuilder, in 1820 the estate of his father, Daniel Raynes Jr., bounded east- ward by the sea. This probably marks the time when the famous designer and shipwright started his yard in Portsmouth by the Piscataqua River near the railroad station. George Raynes, born in 1799, in the sixth generation from Captain Francis, won fame as the builder of fast clipper ships in the 1850's.
In 1820 Noah Trafton bought the land of Barsham Allen Jr. adjoining his, southwesterly of Godfrey's Pond. In 1840 Eliza
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Jane, daughter of Noah Trafton, married Captain Joseph Sewall, and some of Noah Trafton's property came into the possession of cousins Judge Arthur Eugene Sewall and Howard Sewall, grandsons of Captain Joseph.
Some of the original Raynes property, near Brave Boat Har- bor, has until recently remained in the possession of descendants of the first Captain Francis, having come down in a straight line of succession to Nathaniel, to Deacon Francis the shipwright, to Daniel, to Francis (1786-1873), to Francis (1821-1904) to George W., to Dr. Alphonse Francis. This line also held posses- sion of the islands in Brave Boat Harbor: Turkey, Round, and Yonder Hills.
In 1827 Ebenezer Chapman of Greenland, New Hamp- shire, was given some one hundred and fifty acres, among which were included the thirty Crockett acres, by Robert Raynes and his wife Lucy in exchange for care and maintenance in their declining years. In 1851 Mr. Chapman was still buying Seabury property.
The next farm inland from the Robert Raynes Place came to Nathaniel Beal in 1833, also in exchange for care and main- tenance, by an agreement with Stephen and Polly Raynes. In 1841 Beal sold his seventy-acre homestead to John Moulton, whose heirs in 1884 sold it to Benjamin Lucas.
Hiram Shaw (1798-1876) of the fifth generation from William, who came to York in 1699 and settled in the Brixham section, bought Seabury land before 1830, and he and his de- scendants added more, to the extent that one heir, Joseph P. Shaw of Boston, had according to his inventory taken in 1901, three hundred acres, which were later owned by Eugene Foss, once a governor of Massachusetts.
In modern times Seabury remains not exclusive but se- cluded from the commercialization which haunts a popular resort, and the comparatively few owners of so large an area strive to maintain the natural beauty of woods and shoreline which once was common to all of York.
Northward of Seabury, the history of the area between the road to Kittery Point and Sewall's Bridge concerns chiefly the affairs of Samuel Sewall, cordwainer, and Elder Joseph Holt, blacksmith. Both of them came to York around 1708, and in 1712 they owned, between them, all of the land at Hilton's Point (Point Ingleby) to the neighborhood of Sewall's Bridge and from the river to the Kittery line. In 1719 the town laid out a road
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past Holt's house (the home of Mrs. Willis Grant in the twentieth century) and another road from this house, at right angles, to form the South Side Road. The stretch of road near the Elizabeth Perkins house in the lowland near the river was not laid out until 1879. Elder Holt sold to Samuel Sewall in 1718 all his share of land southeast of the road up the hill from the river, keeping all that lay on the northwest.
The land between York River and the Kittery line, from the site of Sewall's Bridge up to the line of the Blaisdell property, had been granted undivided to Thomas Donnell and Arthur Bragdon 1st. In 1728 the heirs agreed to divide the property. Elder Holt, having become one of the Donnell heirs through his marriage to the widow of Benjamin Donnell, and by purchases from other Donnell heirs, acquired all the southeastern half ex- cluding a narrow strip given to William Dunning, another Donnell heir. By the division Samuel Bragdon and his son Samuel were given title to the other half.
In 1731 Elder Joseph Holt's son, Captain Joseph Jr., built the Elizabeth Perkins house and also a wharf and a ware- house. This property came into the possession of his stepson Captain John Pell, a bachelor, who in his will left four hundred dollars towards the fund for the upkeep of Sewall's Bridge, two hundred to the First Parish to establish the Pell Fund for the benefit of the poor, and the rest of his estate to the town to be spent within three years for some public purpose. After his death the Pell property was bought by descendants of Samuel Sewall.
Some of the original Sewall property is still owned in the family, as of mid-twentieth century. Several prominent men were born and reared on these acres, among them Major Samuel Sewall, the bridgebuilder, his brother Judge David Sewall, and several generations later, Judge Arthur Eugene Sewall, known and loved as "Gene" throughout the whole State of Maine, who spent his boyhood days in the Perkins house.
On the road along the river, beyond Sewall's Bridge at a sharp turn to the right, is Beech Hill Cemetery. This plot, orig- inally a quarter of an acre, was deeded to the neighborhood in 1735 by Elder Joseph Holt "in consideration that there is no convenient place near unto us for a Burying Place for Persons dec'd", and he named as "Feoffees in Trust" his neighbors Na- thaniel Whitney, Samuel Sewall, Samuel Adams, Samuel Bragdon, Christopher Pottle, and Ralph Farnum, but stipulated that it was "for all that shall See cause to Make Use of the same . . . forever".
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Here is the grave of Major Samuel Sewall, bridgebuilder, and a monument in his memory. Captain John Pell in his will gave another fifty feet of land to enlarge the cemetery.
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