USA > Maine > York County > York > New England miniature; a history of York, Maine > Part 24
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28
239
Cape Neddick
thousands of yards of sea sand have been hauled from the beach to fill in the house lots laid out since 1870.
At some time around 1913 Long Sands was nicknamed "the Shoestring" during the course of a court hearing. An eccentric landowner at Long Sands decided to take the description of Long Beach Avenue, given when the road was laid out in colonial times as the King's Highway, as a guide in the measurement of his property in the twentieth century. Since 1880 the bounds have been those which were established in that year by the County Commissioners. Acting on his decision, the landowner haled his neighbors into court-one of them, he charged, was by his meas- urements encroaching upon his property by as much as three- quarters of one inch.
During the course of the hearing, the lawyers referred casually to the various sections of York. The judge was soon confused.
"Just a moment", he said, "will someone distinguish for me these localities-this York, York Beach, York Village, York Har- bor, and whatever".
One lawyer did his best. "Your honor", he said, "if you will look upon the town of York as being somewhat in the shape of a boot, you might consider York Harbor as the toe, York Village as the heel, and York Beach as the boot top. As for Long Sands- well-you might call it the Shoestring".
Of the five titles conferred on that day only the Shoestring remains in use.
The Long Sands area of York was the scene of at least two attacks by the Indians, as has been told in other chapters; once, during the Massacre in 1692, when Nathaniel Preble was killed, and again in 1707 when Elias Weare was slain.
The promontory extending seaward from the eastern end of the beach, Cape Neddick Neck, or if preferred, the Nubble, is featured in history thirty years before the white man's Agamenticus was founded and fourteen years before the Indians were decimated by the plague. The recorder of Captain Bartholomew Gosnold's journey of exploration in 1602 wrote that his party named the Nubble "Savage Rock" (because the savages first showed them- selves there). Eight Indians in a Biscay shallop approached their vessel at sea and invited them to come ashore. Had the white men accepted the invitation they no doubt would have seen to their surprise as large an Indian settlement as could have been found anywhere in Maine, for Captain John Smith was sufficiently im-
240
NEW ENGLAND MINIATURE
pressed to locate it on a map in 1616 for Prince Charles, who named it "Boston".
William Hooke, while governor or plantation manager of Agamenticus in the absence of Edward Godfrey, used for a goat pasture the whole promontory from Long Sands to Short Sands. It was a convenient location for the purpose, requiring a fence across only one side, from one beach to the other, and had a fresh- water "spring by the ponde". Henry Blaisdell, son of Ralph, the first of the family who came to York but moved to Salisbury, Massachusetts, and father of Ebenezer, who returned to live in York and was the ancestor of all the York Blaisdells, deposed in 1700 that when he was a boy Mr. Hooke hired him "to keep goats for him upon his land Called Cape nedock Neck" (Deeds VIII- 262). In 1650 after he had moved to Salisbury, Hooke gave half of the Neck to John Alcock and John Heard on condition that it be used as a pasture. The given half came into the possession of Sylvester Stover, and was sold piecemeal by his heirs, until the last parcel was disposed of around 1920 by heirs in the seventh generation.
When Massachusetts deprived the original patentees of much of their land and turned it over to the town, the other half became common land, and was part of the hundred acres which the town sold in 1732 for the benefit of the creditors of Elder Joseph Sayward. (Deeds XV-124). The buyers were Richard Mil- bury, Benjamin Stone, Abraham Bowden, Abiel Goodwin, Samuel Milbury, and John Milbury. Part of the Bowden purchase, with land granted in 1705, has remained in the family to this day; most of the Milbury land became part of the Norton farm in 1787.
The first private owner of the area now known as York Beach, between Short Sands and Cape Neddick River, was Syl- vester Stover. From his heirs William Pepperrell bought the land from Union Bluff to Cape Neddick River in 1733; in 1761 Joseph Parsons Jr. bought one hundred and eighty acres to the westward. By 1765 Richard Talpey, then of the Isles of Shoals, acquired both the Pepperell and the Parsons purchases, so that he owned all of what is now the business section of York Beach. The Union Bluff acres having come into the possession of Richard Talpey's granddaughter Hephzebah, who married Jeremiah Freeman, was known as the Hepzy Freeman Farm, which explains why the main street in that section was named Freeman Street.
With the coming of summer visitors Talpey heirs found buyers for most of their land. Before it was built up, the marshland
241
Cape Neddick
back of Short Sands, including the present business center and the filled-in land west of the hill at Freeman Street where a stream (now narrowed artificially to the confines of a culvert) still flows under the street and into the ocean, was "Stover's Pond".
On the southwest bank of Cape Neddick River, a few rods above the present Passaconaway Bridge, Sylvester had his home and carried on a fishing industry second in size in York to that of Henry Donnell. He was also the ferryman for the river, and as was a requisite for official appointment to that responsibility, kept a tavern. For the defense of his neighborhood in the time of King Philip's War he built a stone garrison which, with a house built of timbers inside a stockade, figured prominently in Indian raids during later wars. Some of his neighbors were attracted to that region by the prospects for fishing, others by the timber in the deep forests.
The first use of the water power of Cape Neddick River was made less than a decade before the outbreak of King Philip's War. John Smith Sr. apparently had convinced the selectmen that he was capable of being successful in large-scale lumbering opera- tions, for he received from them the grant of a tract of timberland two-and-a-half miles square. Again in 1668 he was granted an additional eighty acres. No account of his milling activities has been found, but as it is known that his family suffered heavily in Indian raids it may be surmised that he may have been so engaged until his mill was destroyed and his records lost. The description in the town records of the eighty acres granted in 1668 begins "at a Hemlock tree where the River Seemeth to be a pond, about twenty Rodd above the upper falls". This would appear to be the millpond just east of U.S. 1, between U.S. 1A and the River Road.
Henry Sayward, however, might have been the first to build a sawmill on Cape Neddick River. His mill is referred to in a deed drawn in 1671, but the actual date of construction is not known. The site of it was at "the Lower Falls", nearer the ocean than the Smith location. Within a few years other settlers were gradually attracted by the possibilities, until an enterprising colony was established.
Benjamin Johnson, son of the pioneer Edward who left the Massachusetts Bay Colony to join Colonel Walter Norton's group when they founded Agamenticus in 1632, came over from the neighborhood of Meeting House Creek in 1675 to start a shipyard. Thomas Averill, or Avery, sold his property in the Tatnick region of Wells in 1680 and started again in the vicinity of Averill's
242
NEW ENGLAND MINIATURE
Pond, now Lake Caroline, as a neighbor to the eastward of Peter Weare. Jacob Perkins, son-in-law of Dependence Stover, took up land at the Wells boundary. Joseph Weare, in partnership with Nathaniel Donnell, son of Thomas, beginning about 1685 applied for and received extensive grants of timberland northeast of the river.
In 1689 Samuel Banks was granted forty acres on each side of Cape Neddick River and bought forty-eight acres of John Smith on which he operated a shipyard by the river bank. By 1690 when open hostilities with the Indians were about to be renewed, the region for several miles around the entire length of the river had attracted shipbuilders and sawyers, of whom Samuel Webber was the most ambitious.
Samuel Webber (1656-1716) came of two Maine pioneer families. His father, Thomas, had a deed from an Indian saga- more, Robin Hood, to a large tract of land on the southwest side of Kennebec River, over against Arrowsic Island, and his mother, Mary (Parker) Webber, inherited land from her father, John, who owned Parker's Island, Long Island, and several other islands in Casco Bay. When the English settlers around the Bay were driven out by Indians in King Philip's War, the Webbers moved to the vicinity of York but still claimed to be of Casco Bay, until 1685 when Samuel sold his Falmouth grant with home, mill, and hundred acres. Having bought some of John Smith's grant in Cape Neddick, he built a sawmill in 1688, extending his holdings by a grant from the Town of York in 1690, when he was captain in command of the Cape Neddick garrison. (Doc. Hist. Me. Vol V). When the Stover garrison was abandoned, Samuel Webber, George Stover, John Smith, and others moved their families to Gloucester where they stayed until 1699. Still claiming Gloucester as his residence, Samuel Webber asked for and received in 1693 the liberty to build a corn mill and a fulling mill in Cape Neddick. By 1703 his sons Samuel and John were old enough to receive land grants, and with their father they built several mills in which younger brothers Benjamin and Thomas were given shares.
His seven sons owned at various times hundreds of acres at Josias and Cape Neddick Rivers, as well as properties in other parts of York, and there were Webber mills on each of the streams, saw, grist, shingle, fulling, carding-whatever showed prospect of profit. The last Webber to own mills (a shingle mill and a grist- mill on Cape Neddick River about a mile northwest of U.S. 1 on a side road leading from Mountain Road) was Colonel Samuel
243
Cape Neddick
Webber. Having no sons he left them to his ward, John K. Weare, whose son Harvey carried on a sawmill after his father's death until the mill was destroyed by fire around 1920. Just below Colonel Samuel's mills were another shingle and a gristmill which were originally Webber property but in later years came to be known as Todd mills.
When peace was restored after Queen Anne's War in 1813, the Cape Neddick area became a scene of much activity. Though no definite reference has been found, it may be assumed that all former mills had been destroyed at the time of the destruction of the Stover garrison. The closest reference occurs in Deeds XI-67 (1720) by which the second John Sayward sold to Samuel Clark for the comparatively small sum of six pounds his one-eighth part "of the ruins of a Saw mill and Damm. ... Commonly called Cape Nedwick old Mill Copartners", the partners at that time were James Sayward, Richard Milbury, Dependence Stover, and Jonathan Bane. This was probably the mill built by Henry Say- ward before 1671, standing at the narrow lower end of the long cove below the ledges east of U.S. 1. In Deeds VIII-51 (1714), whereby Samuel Webber Sr. sold his quarter-interest to Richard Milbury, this mill is referred to as "ye Lower Mill Next to ye Salt water or Sea". In XI-13 (1722) it is mentioned that this mill is "newly repaired". Richard Milbury and his son-in-law Abiel Goodwin, the mason, invested heavily in both mill shares and timberlands. Apparently milling was profitable, for Dependence Stover, who had inherited only one quarter of his father Sylvester's property, left at his death an estate valued in 1726 at 843 pounds in real estate and 281 pounds in personal property-a respectable accumulation for an owner of only one-quarter share in one mill and a sixteenth part of another in an isolated area, with strong competition.
New construction was carried on with a thought for protec- tion against future Indian raids, for men had lived through the years when all working parties had required a guard detail of at least twice the number of defenders as of workers. By now the population would have been too large for the Stover garrison even if it had not been ruined. At some time around 1720, two new garrisons, described by Edward E. Bourne in an article entitled "Garrison Houses, York County" were built.
In Cape Neddock, ... there were two, which were built by one Clark, an Englishman, sometime in the last century. Sites were selected. ... where the sentinels could
244
NEW ENGLAND MINIATURE
have an unobstructed view of many rods in every direction. One of these stood at the eastern end of the lower bridge over the Cape Neddock river. It was about forty feet long and twenty-two wide; to this, as the main body, was built out on the western end a kitchen. It was constructed entirely of timber, or as we might at the present time say, of deals. These were sawed about twenty inches wide and about five inches thick, or sufficiently so to be impenetrable to bullets, muskets being then the only guns of which the Indians could avail themselves. They were sawn out as thin as they could be with safety, for convenience in raising them to their posi- tions. These were placed on their edges, and were all dove- tailed at the corners, so that they could not be started from their places. It was thus built without any frame; these deals thus laid one above the other constituting the entire walls of the house. The door posts were of stout white oak, and so grooved to receive the door, that nothing could penetrate from the outside. The doors were made of thick heavy wood. The house was of two stories, the upper projecting on each side and end twenty inches beyond the lower so that the second story was over forty-three feet long and twenty-five feet wide. At each corner of the second story were built out what was termed sentry boxes, sustained by three braces from the walls of the main building. These projected about six feet and were made sufficiently large to accommodate six men. Thus secured from danger from without, the watchmen were adequate to defend against any attacks which were like- ly to be made upon it .... Small openings were made in the walls from which they could discharge their guns in any needed direction. The projection of the second story over the first was [for the purpose of extinguishing] fire if they should attempt to burn the garrison.
On the lower floor of the house were three rooms be- sides the kitchen; and on the upper four sleeping rooms. As all these garrison houses were built by individuals, as to the inner arrangements, they were made according to the various tastes of their owners. This house was well plastered and finished.
The other garrison lower down and on the opposite side of the river was constructed in about the same style, one man erecting both. This was the common style of the simple garrison all over the Province.
* * *
There had been another garrison near the sea, which was protected only by a high wall of earth. But this mode of security was not followed any where else. These have all been razed to the ground within the present century. (Me. Hist. Soc. Coll. 1st Series, Vol. VII, published 1876).
245
Cape Neddick
The builder of the two forts, whom Bourne refers to as "one Clark, an Englishman" was Samuel Clark, or Clarke, car- penter, of Topsfield, Massachusetts, who came to York in about 1720 and promptly applied himself to his trade. In that year he bought John Sayward's eighth-interest in the ruins of the "Cape Neddick Old Mill". On May 6, 1720, he bought of Johnson Harmon the former Harmon garrison and twelve acres. In 1726 he became one of the eighteen incorporators of the new mills at Barrell Mill Pond. In 1727 he sold his Village holdings at a profit of two hundred and twenty-five pounds and in 1731 he bought for two hundred pounds the idle shipyard together with forty acres on the southwest side and eighty-eight acres on the northeast side of Cape Neddick River from the heirs of Samuel Banks. For al- most a century the Clark family was influential and highly re- spected in York. The senior Samuel was more or less restricted to the businesses of milling, building houses, and reconditioning his Banks property, which had stood idle for many years. In 1741-42 he was the York representative to the General Court. But his sons Samuel, and particularly Daniel, branched out as storekeepers and innholders, and in 1762 Daniel had a newly- built ship to sell.
"Clarke's Tavern" was recommended in almanacs for many years, Daniel Clarke having received in 1758 the tavern license which had been held from about 1740 to 1745 by James Donnell, and until 1757 by his widow and her second husband, James Berry. According to the inventory of his estate, Daniel Clark left ninety-two acres of land, half of a dwelling, two-thirds of a mill and all other buildings thereon, besides another small dwelling- also a male and a female negro, drygoods in a shop, and shares in two sloops. His sons and his widow, Lucy, daughter of Colonel Jeremiah Moulton, the Indian fighter, gave in 1785 to the in- habitants of Cape Neddick a houselot on which to erect a school- house. By 1839 Captain Jonathan Talpey-who in the War of 1812 had been captured first by a French privateer, which while still on the high seas was in turn captured by an English privateer, and had wound up as a prisoner of war in the dread Dartmoor Prison-acquired part of the Clark property. The deed of that year conveyed to him the interest of all the Clark heirs in "a dwelling house at Cape Neddick it being a house formerly built for a garrison house, it stands opposite the lower bridge crossing" Cape Neddick River". (Deeds 167-203).
246
NEW ENGLAND MINIATURE
The first and longest-enduring commercial use of Cape Neddick River was as a base for the fishing industry. In every large family there would be some sons who chose to make their living by catching fish or lobsters, and there were a number of men engaged in that business until about the time of World War I. The Matthews family were, in a way, drawn to Cape Neddick through fishing. Walter, of the third generation to live as fisher- men at the Isles of Shoals and the environs of Piscataqua River, had a son John, who married Abigail, the daughter of Job Avery, and a daughter Susanna, who married Roland Young Jr. By 1737 the family was well established in York. The first house known to have been owned by a Matthews still stands on U.S. 1, being the one which Elijah, son of John, built for his daughter Joanna.
After Henry Sayward built the first Cape Neddick mill there was need for shipping to transport materials and goods to other ports. As the Webbers, the Clarkes, and the Weares de- veloped their mills and shipyards, the shipping industry absorbed the available manpower of the community, of which a steady force was trained to be mariners and sailors. The main wharf was located on the northeast side of the river just below the lower dam at the boundary between the large Stover tract and the Clarke land, where the river widens out to a marshy bay. Schooners could be navigated only at the crest of the tide and when idle careened with the fall of the tide. When the export of lumber slackened there was still demand between here and Boston for firewood, hay, fish, and such country products as were accumulated through barter at the Cape Neddick stores. When the number of summer boarders increased there was more money to be made on land, and the coasters gradually went out of business. Cape Neddick River was idle just as new ports farther down east were coming into the peak of their prosperity around 1890. Until about 1900 there were always a number of vessels from other ports to be seen sailing past York.
But the true sailor, determined not to be beached, signed on at other ports, some on coasters plying north as far as New- foundland or south to Georgia. Some sailed in the West Indies trade. Timothy Winn, William Talpey, and Jonathan Talpey were captains-spoken of as "China men"-to whom no port was strange.
After the division of the Inner Commons was voted in 1732, and again, around 1750, after the lots in the Outer Com- mons were distributed, Cape Neddick had attracted many new
247
Cape Neddick
settlers. From Spruce Creek in Kittery came the family of John Norton Jr. to the John Milbury acres at York Beach; the families of Jonathan and Enoch Hutchins came to Bald Head, the Wilson family to the region of North Village where the Winns at the Wells boundary had extended their property, by grant, into York. De- scendants of the Blaisdells of Beech Ridge, the Welches and the Ramsdells of Brixham, the Junkinses of Scotland, the Moultons, Bracys, and Plaisteds of Cider Hill, and the Swetts of Seabury settled between Cape Neddick Pond and Mount Agamenticus. Descendants of Arthur Bragdon and of Abraham Preble moved to Cape Neddick and became fishermen. The Todd family, estab- lished in York before 1800, shortly afterwards owned a shingle mill and a gristmill where now the Cape Neddick troop of Boy Scouts have a camp.
The growth in population had necessitated the opening of stores. Daniel Clarke and Jeremiah Clarke, the first shopkeepers, were followed by George Moody, Micajah Lunt, Nathaniel Free- man, and Samuel Woodbury Norton. At the Mount Agamenticus settlement John H. Plaisted had a small store without competition. In 1850 there were three stores, Samuel Currier's, Joseph Weare's store and postoffice on the northeast corner of U.S. 1 and River Road, and Asahel Goodwin's.
Lumbering operations along Cape Neddick and Josias Riv- ers furnished employment for the hill people back of Cape Ned- dick village. Some years there were at least seven mills in opera- tion at the same time on Cape Neddick River, and wherever there was a sawmill there was also a fulling, or shingle, or gristmill. Deacon Arthur Bragdon had probably been the first to build a dam at Cape Neddick Pond in about 1720; his mill privilege and fulling mill was sold in 1769 to Colonel Josiah Chase of Kittery. Nathaniel Webber, son of Samuel, was called a clothier because of his kind of mill. There were at least five mills on Josias River and its tributaries; the oldest was last operated by descendants of Ebenezer Moulton, a grandson of Colonel Johnson Moulton's brother Thomas.
When "the summer people" made the seaside the active part of York, those of the hill folk who did not seek summer work in the more settled parts of the town made at their homes baskets which were popular articles of trade. Oldtimers used to say that their winter clothes came from the blueberries they used to pick and sell to the vacationists. These people retained longest the traditions and the speech of their ancestors in the British Isles
248
NEW ENGLAND MINIATURE
and could have been best understood by the students of Shakes- peare and perhaps even of Chaucer.
Along the shore north and east of Cape Neddick River is a region which for two hundred years was for the most part owned in large tracts by few people. Of Peter Weare's five hundred or more acres many are still owned by some of his descendants. Norton Woodbridge, son of John, married Ann, the wealthy widow of Joseph Preble Jr. of Long Sands, and acquired many acres be- tween Lake Caroline and Phillips Cove. In her will Ann left the land at the cove to "my kinsman Henry Phillips" to go to his son Norton Woodbridge Phillips, for whom the cove is named. Her daughter, Miriam Preble, married Joseph Parsons, and in time much of the Norton Woodbridge property became the Parsons Farm, which was reduced considerably in 1811 by the auction of the estate of Joseph Parsons Jr. The sale of land in houselots for the building of summer cottages became frequent after Daniel and Octavius Weare sold tracts of land to the promoters of the Passaconaway Inn around 1900, and in mid-century an attractive colony of summer residences grows in appeal to prospective pur- chasers.
The Cape Neddick of mid-twentieth century, still a "sub- urb" of York, shows no evidence that it once endured horrible slaughter by marauding Indians; nor are there any signs that there once were busy mills along its river banks. No more does talk of ships and long voyages dominate the conversation in the settlement. Fishing is no longer a means of livelihood but a fair- weather sport for the idle. The village is now growing fast as a residential section, with many modern homes set among the re- maining old dwellings.
The decree of the court of the Province of Maine, handed down in 1651, which ordered that the "village shall soe Continew with their said priviledges till they grow to be more Capable for a Towne" reads today like a prophecy that has become ready for fulfillment.
NATHANIEL GRANT MARSHALL (1812-1882)
NATHANIEL GRANT MARSHALL, son of John and Eunice (Grant) Marshall, grew up to become a leading citizen during the years when York was rising out of deep depression. Born of parents who were in financial distress, and while quite young deprived of parental guidance after his father disappeared in 1817 never to be heard of again, he was further handicapped by being born with only one hand. When his mother died in 1819 he was taken into the home of his maternal grandparents, but by the time he was fifteen years old they too had died and he was thrown upon his own resources. He was engaged as a clerk in the store of George Lyman Emerson at York Corner on the triangle newly formed in 1827 when the highway to Portland (now U.S. 1) was rebuilt and straightened. Commencing at the age of eighteen he taught school in winter and worked in the store in summer until 1832, when he became proprietor. "Emerson's Stand" became "Marshall's Stand" on what he called "the great main-travelled road". From 1839 to 1843 he was in partnership with Charles O. Clark until he bought back Clark's interest. In 1850, his health failing, he sold his store and turned full attention to politics and the study of law.
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.