USA > Maine > York County > York > New England miniature; a history of York, Maine > Part 3
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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
In 1641, shortly before the Scituate Men settled in Gorge- ana, the Province Court ordered the division of the twelve thou- sand acres comprising Agamenticus among the patentees. Up to this time the entire land area had been controlled by common consent among the whole body of proprietors, but apparently the patentees grouped themselves in factions which did not always agree. The committee chosen to decide the distribution-Deputy Governor Thomas Gorges, Edward Godfrey, and Roger Garde- first separated the patentees into presumably harmonious groups (three groups of four men each), and then divided the area into thirteen parts or dividends by designating points on the northeast bank of York River and then projecting parallel lines running in a northeasterly direction, without specifying any limits or number of acres. The plan, evidently clear and acceptable to the various groups of patentees, was destined to cause boundary disputes in later years. Fortunately not many grants were made before Massa- chusetts took possession and rejected claims of ownership of all
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lots not fully described by definite metes and bounds, and the losses of titles, for the most part, fell upon the patentees.
The citizens of little Gorgeana had personal problems enough from 1640 to 1652 to occupy their minds and hands. The regulations of a city charter imposed certain adjustments to their way of life, besides whatever changes in the tenancy of their land may have been brought about by the division of the twelve thousand acres among the patentees. Improving their buildings, clearing more acres for crops, tending increasing herds, acquiring surpluses beyond the needs of the home for barter at the Market Place-these tasks left little time for curiosity about what might be going on outside of their city. Little did they realize that with the outbreak of the Civil War in England in 1642, the flow of immigration had ceased and the visits of Eng- lish merchant vessels had been brought to an end because of the danger of piracy and privateering, and the impressment of crews into the navy; or that adventurous Boston merchants, obliged to build ships and find markets that might be safely reached, would open up a prosperous trade with the West Indies, where the raising of sugar and the making of rum was so profitable that the planters preferred to buy food from abroad rather than to raise food on their own acres. In Gorgeana they may not even have known that one of their patentees, Samuel Maverick, from his home in Massachusetts Bay, was the originator of triangular trade between Boston, the West Indies, and European ports. They had yet to learn that the narrow life to which they had been restricted was proper training for the days to come when they would become traders in their own ships under Massachusetts rule.
Though fishing and the raising of grain and meat were still the greatest sources of profit, a new side line developed out of the growing need for barrel staves and clapboards. The export- ing merchants discovered the need for these products in foreign ports in France, Spain, and the Canary Islands, where casks were needed for wines and brandy and boxes and barrels for the ship- ment of fruits, and in the West Indies for the loading of sugar, molasses, and rum. The merchants sought their supplies of these lumber products from the farmers who saw a profitable use of slack time in cleaving them by hand out of pit-sawed lumber. "Claw-boards and pipe staves", they called them, and throughout New England vast quantities were made annually in the days when sawmills were few. There was no gristmill in operation nearer than Strawberry Bank on Piscataqua River, and much of
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A History of York, Maine
the grain harvest was carried as far as Boston to be ground into meal. Bread was one of the items traded for from the ships coming in to the Market Place.
The settlement of Wells was begun in 1643 by refugees from Puritan persecution and from that circumstance, more or less indirectly, York in the next decade was destined to acquire some most valuable citizens, particularly Edward Rishworth. Thomas Morton of Merrymount, the bane of the Bay officials, sought refuge among the followers of Gorges in 1645, but died two years later and was buried in Gorgeana.
In 1649, Sylvester Stover, progenitor of one of York's oldest families, was granted, with three partners, a tract of land at the mouth of Cape Neddick River, and they started the second large-sized fishery plant in Gorgeana.
A contemporary traveler, John Josselyn, who spent several years between 1638 and 1667 visiting relatives in the Casco Bay region, wrote a graphic account of conditions in New England, which no doubt applied to life in Gorgeana:
The people in the province of Main, may be divided into Magistrates, Husbandmen or Planters, and fishermen; of the Magistrates some be royalists, the rest perverse Spirits, the like are the planters and fishers, of which some be plant- ers and fishers both, others meer fishers.
Handicrafts-men there are but few, the Tumelor or Cooper, Smiths, and Carpenters are best welcome amongst them, shopkeepers there are none, being supplied by the Massachusetts Merchants with all things they stand in need of, keeping here and there fair Magazines stored with Eng- lish goods, but they set excessive prices on them, if they do not gain Cent per Cent, they cry out that they are losers. . ..
The planters are or should be restless painstakers; providing for their cattle, planting and sowing of Corn, fenc- ing their grounds, cutting or bringing home fuel, cleaving of claw-board and pipe-staves, fishing for fresh water fish and fowling takes up most of their time, if not all. . . . In some places where the springs are frozen up, or at least the way to their springs made impassable by reason of the snow and the like they dress their meat in . . . melted snow, at other times it is well cook't, and they feed upon (generally) as good flesh, Beef, Pork, Mutton, Fowl, and fish as any in the whole world besides.
Their servants which are for the most part English, when they are out of their time, will not work under half a Crown a day, although it be for to make hay, and for less I do not see how they can, by reason of the dearness of clothing.
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NEW ENGLAND MINIATURE
The fishermen take yearly upon the coasts many hun- dred kentals [quintals] of Cod, hake, haddock, polluck, etc., which they split, salt, and dry at their stages, making three voyages in a year. When they share their fish (which is at the end of every voyage) they separate the best from the worst, the first they call Merchantable fish, being sound, full grown fish and well made up . . . ; the second sort they call refuse fish, that is such as is salt burnt, spotted, rotten, and carelessly ordered; these they put off to the Massachusets Merchants ... the Merchant sends the Merchantable fish to Lisbonne, Bilbo, Bordeaux, ... and other cities of France, to the Canaries with claw-board and pipe-staves which is there and at the Canaries a prime Commodity; the refuse fish they put off at the Charib-Islands, Barbados, Jamaica, etc. who feed their Negroes with it.
Of [the planters] the Merchant buys Beef, Pork, Pease, Wheat, and Indian Corn, and sells it again many times to the fishermen.
4
Gorgeana, in 1650, was still a "poor village", as Winthrop had called it in 1644, even though its citizens, for the most part, were making a living by their individual efforts while improving their condition. There was, as yet, no manufacturing in which men gave full time to the making of a special product, as for ex- ample, lumber, and Governor Godfrey and the city officials were casting about to find a miller to meet this need. By June 1652, a mill was erected and in operation, due largely to the efforts of Edward Rishworth, who had become the secretary and recorder for both the city of Gorgeana and for the Province of Maine.
It turned out that the new recorder had also the proper talents and necessary business connections to carry out the aim of establishing a mill in Gorgeana. He was a member of the famous Hutchinson family which, by the co-operation of many members working as a unit, had branches throughout New England and in the West Indies, with interests in mines, lumbering, cattle raising, and trade. Rishworth himself, while still a citizen of Wells, had been granted a mill privilege on Cape Neddick River, perhaps as an added inducement for him to come to live in Gorge- ana. The new recorder, then, was already interested in the milling before he began his official duties. In April 1652, largely through his efforts, Governor Godfrey signed a contract with William Ellingham and Hugh Gale, partners who had recently sold their milling interests in Kittery. By June these men had a sawmill in operation on Mr. Gorges's Creek, across the river from Old Mill
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A History of York, Maine
Creek, and were applying to the governor for the right to build more sawmills and extension of their grants of timberland, agree- ing at the same time to build and maintain a gristmill.
But in that same year the usurpation of Maine by Massa- chusetts intervened. The Bay Colony had given hints of this in 1638 when the General Court had warned officials in Kittery of a plan to restudy the terms of its charter of 1629 and make a survey in order to determine just what lands lay within its bounds. During the years while King Charles I still lived and reigned, the plan had been placed on file lest action upon it might result in reprisal from the throne, but by 1652 Parliament held the power, and public sentiment was then in favor of Puritan views. The course being clear, Massachusetts grasped the opportunity. The Province of Maine, now cut in half by the Lygonia Patent, and comprising only the "combination" of three thinly-populated settlements, was defenseless. Directly after a new survey was made in the summer of 1652, commissioners were sent from Boston to Kittery to take over the administration of that town. When the inhabitants refused, the General Court made plans to use force if necessary. By issuing notices dated October 3, 1652, to all of the militia companies within Norfolk County, the Isles of Shoals, and the Province of Maine directing "All magistrates, commissioners, captynes, and all other officers, civill and military" to hold themselves in readiness to give military support to the commissioners if needed, the Court discouraged all thought of organized resistance. Again the commissioners called upon the inhabitants of Kittery to submit, and on November 16, 1652, after long debate and questioning, Kittery capitulated. A week later, on November 23, the commissioners visited Gorgeana and received its submission.
The General Court made scant denial that these acts con- stituted usurpation. Calling attention to the commodious harbor at Piscataqua River, it argued that Massachusetts was justified because the security of New England would be imperiled if it should fall into enemy hands. The "enemy" was purposely not named; in England it would be understood to be France and the French possessions between Castine and the St. Lawrence River; in New England among the Puritans, the "enemy" would be the Royalists and all who had been banished from the Bay. The fact that the shipping of mast timber out of the Piscataqua River for the use of the English navy was then the greatest source of profit in all New England was also carefully not mentioned.
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But to claim that by the charter of 1629 Maine was truly a part of Massachusetts which the Bay Colony had in the gener- osity of its nature allowed others to settle upon so long as there was "good correspondency between" them necessitated a judicious amount of skullduggery. The original interpretation had been that the charter defined the north boundary of the Massachusetts grant to be a line drawn to touch all points three miles north of the Merrimack River; and a "bound house" or stone marker, set up at such a point near the mouth of the river, had for twenty years been accepted as the northern limit. In those early days the river was thought to flow from west to east for its full length, but the survey party of 1638 made the great discovery that while the lower forty or so miles flow from west to east, the river above runs from north to south from its source, Lake Winnepesaukee This finding was the basis for the new interpretation: that Massa- chusetts rightly owned all land lying three miles north of the most northerly part of the Merrimack River, (which by decision of the General Court included the tributaries that flow from sources even farther north than the upper part of the lake), and east and west from sea to sea-all this, notwithstanding that such a claim encroached upon the valid patents of Mason and Gorges to lands in New Hampshire and Maine. The "good correspond- ency" was interpreted by Massachusetts to have ended when the Province of Maine "entertained, countenanced, etc. some that we had cast out, etc.", like Reverend John Hull, Reverend John Wheelwright, and others.
When all is said, however, the annexation of Maine by Massachusetts, illegal or not, was a blessing to the little province. The struggling plantations would not have prospered sufficiently in the next quarter-century to have withstood the Indian Wars that were to come if Massachusetts had not been obligated to take care of its own. Massachusetts would have let Gorges men fend for themselves, and the people of Maine would have been wiped out. Gorgeana had been planned by a man who never saw it, to become the capital of the English colonies, a stage setting built in anticipation of a great play which never was produced. Tragedy came to Edward Godfrey, who gave fully of himself and his fortune in the advancement of the dream city as the purpose and the fulfillment of his life work, only to see all his efforts wiped out and himself impoverished, not for want of ability but by the chicanery of grasping politicians whom he had several times befriended.
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A History of York, Maine
The General Court began a series of changes, their first step being to wipe out anything which pertained to the plans of Sir Ferdinando Gorges. The City of Gorgeana was reduced to the status of a town and called York, and the Province of Maine was renamed Yorkshire or York County. However, to make the shock of changes less violent, York was to continue to be the county seat, and Edward Godfrey was given the most important position in the county which a resident could hold-that of the second highest judge of the full county bench, the first being a Boston judge appointed to represent the General Court. Next, the owner- ship of all land in each town was vested in its board of selectmen. Each inhabitant was allowed to retain possession of his property, provided he could show definite metes and bounds. The patentees lost most of their acres because they could show only the more or less vague boundaries which had been set by the terms of the division of 1641. Godfrey complained that he had been "stripped of his property", but he was allowed to retain some eight hundred acres for him and his heirs forever. The other patentees did not fare as well because owners of large estates, fearing that they might lose many of their acres, petitioned to the General Court to disallow further claims by Edward Godfrey and his partners.
Within three weeks from the date of the Submission, the first "town meeting" was held on December 8, 1652, and the Town of York commenced to function in accordance with the laws of Massachusetts. Edward Rishworth was retained as re- corder and secretary, and because part of his duties was to make public the rulings of the General Court, he was probably the most prominent man in the county, which within a decade included all the land in Maine then in English possession.
Under Massachusetts supervision York returned to the building of mills with new vigor. In January 1653, the selectmen, being now in control of York lands, reopened the negotiations begun by Godfrey with Ellingham and Gale concerning additional mills. A new contract was added by which the partners were granted the right to cut timber on public lands to be laid out by the mile on both banks of York River, and in addition they were allowed to cut another thousand pine trees on land above New Mill Creek provided they maintained a corn mill and paid a yearly rent. To carry out this contract, the partners required more capital, for which Edward Rishworth, through his Hutchinson family connections, was in a position to negotiate, not in the form of a mortgage loan, but by admitting three new members into the
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firm: Henry Webb and Captain Thomas Clarke, wealthy Boston merchants connected with the Hutchinson interests, and Rish- worth himself. Ellingham and Gale sold their interests to Webb and Clarke within a year or two, and in 1658 Rishworth with- drew in order to work as a partner with a newcomer, Henry Say- ward of Rye and Hampton, New Hampshire, to build and operate still other new mills on New Mill Creek. Eventually Rishworth also sold his holdings in the Sayward mills to Webb and Clarke.
In 1655, Edward Godfrey, in order to press his claims before influential men at court, left York for England, never to return. Now seventy years old and past his prime, he had been too long away from the home country to be remembered for his services to his king; furthermore, he was to find Parliament, not a king, in control and the Royalists in disrepute. In vain, he sought to be heard, wrote many letters that were never answered, and published a "Vindication" of the Gorges claims to no avail. His debts accumulated until, poverty-stricken and begging for assistance in letters that were well-nigh incoherent, he was thrown into debtors' jail, where he died in 1663.
And so it came about that Agamenticus (1632-1638) Bristol (1638-1641) Gorgeana (1641-1652) became the Massa- chusetts town of York, the shire town of York or Yorkshire County which, until 1760, when it was divided into three counties, in- cluded all of Maine as far north as Sagadahoc.
The commerce, as well as the laws, of the new shire town was dominated by men of the Bay Colony. No longer were English ships calling at American ports; a growing fleet of Boston-built vessels was carrying ever-increasing cargoes to foreign ports. Op- portunities to sell York products were improving. Already in 1650 Gorgeana's first merchant was in business: John Davis, who had acquired the inn and property of George Puddington at the Market Place, and had a wharf, warehouse or store, and a trading vessel.
York men favored neighboring Piscataqua River as a trading center, a busy, growing port where several new merchants were engaged in buying the fish and produce brought in from surround- ing towns, and in loading vessels to ship to still larger merchants. But a new and more important industry was making Piscataqua River the center for New England's most lucrative business of that period: the shipping, in specially-constructed vessels, of mast pines, three feet or more in diameter at the butts and seventy-five or more feet in length, to England for the use of the navy. Several wealthy corporations of the time were avidly competing for a
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A History of York, Maine
major share of advantageous millsites and valuable timberlands. One of these exerted an influence on the course of York history.
The first manufacturing industry of New England, the Saugus Iron Works (built, incidentally, under the supervision of the same Joseph Jenks who had owned land near that on which the First Parish Church of York now stands ) had been managed by John Becx and Company, ironmongers of London. In the days of its early success, the management acquired many acres of land in various parts of New England selected for their promise of value as ore deposits or sources of wood and charcoal for fuel. The Iron Works having fallen into financial difficulties, its stock- holders and creditors took possession of the widely separated tracts of real estate. The Hutchinson family as the largest stock- holders and principal creditors, acquired most of the property, particularly the valuable timber holdings around the Piscataqua River, acting sometimes in the name of John Becx and Company, sometimes as the Hutchinson Company, and often in the names of individual branches of the family, as if there were no connec- tions with each other or the companies. Under one ownership or another, the Hutchinsons bought up nineteen sawmills, includ- ing, under the names of Webb or Clark or Rishworth, the mills of York.
5
As the next decade opened, York became indirectly in- volved in a political attack on Massachusetts that was instigated by a former Agamenticus patentee, Samuel Maverick, one of the earliest pre-Puritans, who had settled comfortably at Noddle Island at least six years before Winthrop's men came and made them- selves obnoxious to friends of Gorges in Massachusetts Bay. He maintained his independent manner of living, being known as "the only hospitable man in the Bay", and made his own rules of business conduct, for which he was ever in disfavor with the officials. When Walter Norton had sought associates to help in the settling of Agamenticus in 1630, Maverick had taken an interest, and he maintained it until Gorgeana submitted to Massa- chusetts. In the 1641 division of land among the patentees, Mav- erick received three portions at what is now York Corner, at Scotland and at Brixham, made a few grants to settlers, and had a resident acting as a local agent for his business affairs here. When possession of land was vested in the town in 1652, Maver- ick lost his title to all of his York holdings.
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NEW ENGLAND MINIATURE
However this new attack in 1660 started not in York but in England, with a petition to the courts of England to investigate the loyalty of Massachusetts to the crown. The monarchy had recently been restored, and royal officers, rather than committees of Parliament, were directing colonial affairs. Besides many letters to friends in high places, Maverick wrote a treatise on the state of affairs in New England, addressed to all the high officials, intending to show how Massachusetts had disregarded English laws, to the detriment of the crown's interest in New England, had mocked the English court, and had even acted so high- handedly as to usurp the government of neighboring colonies contrary to the terms of its charter and of the patents granted to other parties. He brought about the appointment of a royal com- mission to investigate the situation and managed to get himself appointed one of the members of that body.
While Maverick had been carrying on his campaign, young Ferdinando Gorges, grandson of the knight, having come of age, had begun with the co-operation of Robert Tufton Mason, grand- son of Captain John Mason and heir and claimant to the New Hampshire patent, a siege of his own.
The Royal Commission arrived in Boston in July 1664 and entered upon its duties at once. Petitions and claims of grievances poured in, and it was obvious that conditions, not only in New England but also in New York, necessitated thorough investiga- tions and complete redress. In the three southern colonies of Plymouth, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, the commissioners were welcomed, and soon reached satisfactory agreements. In Massachusetts, however, they encountered a stone wall of opposi- tion, and found themselves hampered by the very instructions they had been given: to draw the colonies closely under English rule but not to interfere in matters that were strictly colonial affairs unless such matters were being conducted contrary to the rules prescribed in the charters. On these grounds, the General Court consequently declared that the Commission had no power to act.
But when the Commission, in June 1665, came to York to regulate affairs in Maine, it carried special instructions. Gorges and Maverick had been allowed to present the case for the oppo- sition in England, and the attorney general had ruled in their favor. In June 1664 the king had sent, by John Archdale, brother- in-law and attorney of Gorges, a letter to the General Court of Massachusetts ordering the restoration of the Province of Maine
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A History of York, Maine
to Ferdinando Gorges. Joyfully welcomed in York, the commis- sioners, proclaiming Maine to be a royal province, appointed eleven justices to maintain law and order. Learning that two magistrates from Boston were due to arrive in York a day or two later, the commissioners, with a military escort of their own and supported by the trainbands of the Province, stayed to confront them, but the magistrates came only to the Piscataqua River and merely protested by letter to Sir Robert Carr, the temporary leader of the Commission, and retreated to Boston.
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