USA > Maine > York County > Biddeford > Stories and legends of old Biddeford > Part 7
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his horse on the shore of the Pool where his lifeless body was discovered the following morning."
A man can often be judged by his friends and the jovial Doctor's likeable nature, as outlined by Folsom, suggests very clearly that Nathaniel Ladd was a social man too. Social and sociable, with perhaps the dignity (when occasion required) that his army service had given. When Folsom says that Dr. Cummings was "cheerful and full of anecdote" he makes it very clear that when the Doctor and Nathaniel were together of an evening in the old inn parlor, there was laughter and good stories and splendid fellowship. What a pity that Folsom did not record some of the Doctor's talk.
The warm inn fireplace and a good story
So it is probable that Dr. Cummings was one of the company . at the Ladd inn, on the night the mock trial was held. It was not merely a good company, it was also a distinguished one. David Sewall, of York, was there, and also John Lowell of Newburyport. Sewall and Lowell were later the first Federal judges appointed for Massachusetts and Maine, and Lowell's son (Francis Cabot Lowell) was to be a founder of the New England cotton textile industry and to have a city (Lowell, Mass.) bear his name. There was also James Sullivan whose father "read Latin and Greek fluently until he reached one hundred years of age". The brother of James was to be one of Washington's most distinguished generals, and James himself was to be Biddeford's leader in the early days of the Revolution, a member of the Continental Congress, and later a Governor of Massachusetts. Such men relished the company of Dr. Cummings and Nathaniel Ladd. And no one can doubt that Madam Ladd, and Madam Ladd's good table, was also part of the charm of the
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old inn. It is not mere imagination to place Dr. Cummings as part of the company at the inn at the time of the mock trial. He knew well the lawyers and judges who came to Biddeford to hold court, because from 1768 to 1770 the old records show that the annual October term of the York County courts in Biddeford was actually held in a room in Dr. Cumming's house. And when the location was shifted, in 1771, it was to the Ladd inn - which probably dates the mock trial.
Here is the account that has come down to us, as told in 1858 from the personal recollection of David Sewall who had participated:
"The manners of the judges were not only decorous but dignified, and the members of the bar were courteous and well-bred; but in their familiar intercourse there was little formality or restraint, and their festivities were seasons of wit and frolic and often sufficiently uproarious. When the business of the term was nearly completed it was customary for both bench and bar to assemble at the tavern for a social meeting. On these occasions they constituted a (mock) court among themselves, appointing one of their number chief justice, for the trial of all breaches of good fellowship during the term.
"(This year) the inferior court was sitting at Ladd's Tavern, there being no court-house (then) in the place. John Lowell had arrived, late on Monday evening, to attend its sessions and finding the inn full sought lodgings elsewhere, probably at his friend Sullivan's where he was always a welcome guest. He left his horse tied to the post at the inn, expecting it would be properly cared for; but the landlord never gave it a thought. When, on Friday evening a court was held for the hearing of all omissions and commissions which had occurred during the week, Ladd was called upon to answer for leaving the horse unattended to - and defended himself on the plea that he had received no orders to put him up. The case was tried with becoming gravity, and the judge, upon the evidence, sentenced Ladd to pay a single bowl of good punch for his neglect, and Lowell (was sentenced to pay) twice as much for not taking better care of his own steed.
Incidentally it is interesting to recall that punch, the famous social drink of Colonial times, was called "the drink that is all contradiction" because, as the amusing old rhyme went, it contained:
Brandy to make it strong, Water to make it weak, Lemon to make it sour, Sugar to make it sweet.
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It is also interesting (and revealing) that the standard measure of a bowl of punch in those days was one quart. Thus the court's sentence of one bowl from Ladd and two bowls from Lowell, meant almost a gallon of punch for a treat to the inn company. There can be no doubt that a very merry evening followed that mock trial, in the old inn on the King's highway in Upper Biddeford.
Chapter V
Other Glimpses of Life in Colonial Biddeford
Much sentimental nonsense has been written about the pleasures of life in the "good old Colonial days." But there was also a dark side that is not so well known. As long as a man or woman had health, a home, and work by which to earn money, life was not so bad. Yet it was not by any means as serene and carefree as it has been painted. The diary of the Reverend Thomas Smith, the Portland parson, ( see page 45), is full of recurring plagues and near-famines, and complaints against inflation such as this entry of 1748:
"The difficulties of living daily increase ... there is no standard, but every man, getting what (price) he can ..... The prices of the neccessaries of life do daily monstrously increase."
Four years later he wrote "It is a time of dismal scarcity of Bread", and later (in 1761) he called it "a sickly dying melancholy time", while in March of 1763 he wrote of the arrival of a shipload of corn with this comment, "people were reduced to the last and extremest distress; scarcely a bushel of corn in the whole Eastern country." Something has already been said (page 44) of the difference between the money known as 01d Tenor and that called Legal Money in 1748. 01d Tenor was then so depreciated that it was worth only one-fourth as much as Legal Money. But the parson's diary records that twelve years later, in 1760, 01d Tenor had sunk still further - so low that one million pounds Old Tenor was worth only one hundred thousand pounds sterling, a ratio of ten to one. And in 1766 the Reverend Thomas Smith writes once more
"There are great and universal complaints for want of money."
In the small towns there were no charity organizations, no hospitals, and nowhere was there a Red Cross or Traveller's
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Aid. A document found in the Massachusetts archives gives a picture of what could happen to a stranger without money or friends. The document mentions Biddeford and Falmouth (now Portland); it is dated November 10, 1748, and it will be recalled that in April of that same year ( see page 47) two Selectmen of Biddeford had appeared in court on charges of not having provided a schoolmaster for the town. It was probably some rumor of that vacancy that brought the stranger to Maine. But this is the way the old document puts the story:
"The Selectmen of the Town of Falmouth humbly sheweth that William Forde, an Indigent Person (as he Saith) came from the west of England on the seventeenth day of April last, to New Found Land & from thence to Piscataqua, from thence to Boston where he lived about two months. From thence he travailed to the Eastward, as far as Biddeford, intending to have Kept School there. But meeting with no Incouragement, and being informed that there was a Mast Ship at Falmouth, he Travailed from Biddeford to Falmouth intending to get a passage home in said Ship.
"Said Forde having no money to pay his Passage with, the master of said Ship refused to Carry him, upon which said Forde being in a Strange Land, having neither Friends nor money he was tempted by the Divel to Kill himself. and was so far prevailed with by the Tempter to Cutt his own Throat with a Razor he had in his Pockett, which he Cutt very Badly, this was done the Second Night after he came to Town which was the second day of September last."
It was only after his attempted suicide that poor Forde was given any attention - but only then on the expectation that there would be pay for his care. And the purpose of the old document was to induce the Massachusetts General Court to pay for Forde a "bill of expense" amounting to 58 pounds 10 shillings Old Tenor, which the Falmouth selectmen carefully translated as 14 pounds 12 shillings and 6 pence New Tenor (or Legal Money) .
As another glimpse of the times, there is the case of what were called the French Neutrals. In 1745 the troops under William Pepperrell captured Louisburg and Cape Breton but in 1748, when France and England signed the treaty of Aix la Chapelle, both places were restored to France - to the great disappointment of the people of New England. Then the English began to settle in Nova Scotia, founding the city of Halifax in 1749. As the Halifax colony grew it found itself sandwiched between the French of Cape Breton and those in the section known as Acadia. History says that the Acadians refused to take part in the wars between France and England. They would not serve France and they also would not take the English oath of allegiance - which explains the name of French Neutrals given
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them. As so often happens, however, there were reckless young men who did not share the caution of their elders, and it is said that when (in 1755) the English soldiers captured a French fort on the Bay of Fundy they found 300 young Acadians among the garrison. It was soon afterwards that all of the Acadian people, young and old, were ordered deported - and they were driven from their homes.
An Acadian family facing harsh exile in a strange land
This was the famous tragedy on which Longfellow based his poem "Evangeline." In about five years a total of 6,000 men, women and children were forcibly scattered among the American colonies. About 1,300 were brought to New England and two different shipments are believed to have come to York County. How many people were in the first lot sent, is not known. the Massachusetts State Archives show an official document of 1760, by which 61 of the unhappy deportees were assigned in York County. Three of these, a man and wife and infant child, were made public charges of Biddeford, as follows:
But
"The Committee to make a division of the French people in the County of York, late inhabitants of Nova Scotia, into the several towns within the said County, - beg leave to report they met the 17th of July, 1760, and made the following division.
"Biddeford: Claud Boudrin and wife, with one child
"Scarbourer (Scarboro) : Joseph, John, Mary and Margaret, children of Claud Boudrin
It will be seen that the division broke up a family of seven, and four children were completely separated from their parents. That cold-blooded separation of families was another characteristic of the day. In this same York County division another family (of nine) was broken up between Wells and
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Berwick - ine father, mother and rive children being assigned to Berwick while two other children (both girls) were sent to Wells. No record has been found of how long the Boudrins were kept here, nor just what their experience may have been. That it was not happy, goes without saying. These deportees were treated and handled as paupers in the various towns, and there was complaint in some towns that more work could not be gotten out of them. Most of the French Neutrals were allowed to drift back to Canada after its final conquest by England in 1762 but they must have taken with them (especially the children) many bitter memories of their enforced stay in Colonial New England. It is only fair to add, however, that the French Neutrals were not treated any differently from New England's own native paupers. The times were very harsh for the poor.
Even medical science was harsh and bloody, by modern standards. Vile-tasting pills, purges and bloodletting, made up the doctor's stock in trade. It is known today that George Washington died prematurely - because he was "bled" excessively by his doctors. Even a toothache met with strange treatment as is shown by this quotation from a magazine article of 1778:
"If the decay be not too far advanced; that is if it be not rendered useless simply as a tooth, I would advise that it be extracted, then immediately boiled with a view to make it perfectly clean and also destroy any life there may be in the tooth. Then it may be restored to the socket."
That article was not written by a quack; it did not refer to dental practice in some backwoods settlement. It appeared in a leading English magazine (The Gentleman's and London Magazine of April, 1778) and it was written by the King's own dentist. Incidentally, among other choice bits of treatment noted by this man was the use of powerful acids for "burning the nerve", the applying of "blisters" (fiery plasters) behind the ear "to divert the pain", and finally the naive advice that:
"To burn the ear by hot irons has sometimes been a successful practice, and has relieved toothache."
If the King of England in his palace, received such treatment, then what must have been dental conditions in the small Colonial village. And there were then no anesthetics, no deadeners of pain - not even for a King.
The Pirate and the "Bleeding Curse"
Another aspect of this darker side of Colonial life is revealed by an old legend of Biddeford Pool. Just how old the legend is, we cannot tell. It seems to have first been
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referred to in print by John Locke, of an old Biddeford family, who apparently drew upon boyhood memories of family talk when he wrote about 1880 of
"The terrible tale of the pirate Melcher's bleeding victims, whose dying prayers brought upon his posterity the ' bleeding curse' which caused so many of them in Biddeford to bleed to death from the scratch of a pin."
In 1926 Miss Fannie M. Hackett, member of still another old Biddeford family, wrote out the legend as she remembered her mother telling it:
"There was a shipwreck. A boat was lowered and filled with men, one of whom was Melcher. A man struggling in the water wanted them to take him aboard. They refused, thinking his added weight would swamp the boat. He clung to the side of the boat; they could not pull his hands away, and Melcher grabbed an ax and cut off his hands at the wrists. As the man sank from the side of the boat he pronounced a curse upon Melcher - that he and all his descendants should bleed to death. Since that time everybody who. had Melcher blood has died that way."
It will be noticed that while only one of those versions calls Melcher a pirate, yet they both agree that the incident involved a shipwreck, and that a family was afflicted with the hereditary male disease known as hemophilia - popularly called "the bleeding sickness." Incidentally, a somewhat similar legend is told in the Libby family, but in that case the taint is laid to intermarriage with the descendants of a sailor named Lassell.
As to Melcher's being a pirate (if he were one) there is no record of anyone by that name among the known pirates of the New England coast. The legend somehow suggests that he may have been what was called a "wrecker" ( a man who preyed upon wrecked vessels) - and in Colonial times the line between pirate and wrecker was often hard to draw. As late as 1752 the British Parliament was forced to pass a law making it a crime punishable by death "to plunder any vessel in distress ... to prevent the escape of any person that endeavors to save his life ... to wound him with intent to destroy him ... or to show false lights (on shore) in order to bring any ship into danger". Many dark tales have come down of ships being decoyed by false
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signals on to rocky shores, to be wrecked and plundered. And needless to say, the wreckers were not anxious to have any witnesses survive among the crew and passengers of the doomed ship. Because these wreckers preferred the dark of the moon for their work, they are traditionally known as "mooncussers". It has been repeatedly and strenuously denied that any such things were done on the lonely shores of Cape Cod, or among the even lonelier coves of the Maine coast - but still the stories persist of the "mooncussers". In fact, a sea captain once remarked in the old days that he would much rather take his chances in a wreck on the wild and cannibal Fiji Islands, than he would on certain parts of the coast of Maine.
At any rate, whether Melcher was a pirate or mooncusser, whether he really wielded his axe on a man struggling for life in the sea, no one can say today. But it is still sometimes said in Biddeford, when a man is known to be a bleeder, that he "must have Melcher blood."
The slaves of Biddeford
Also dark in the Colonial picture was the fact of slavery. It existed throughout New England, and records recently discovered show that Biddeford had its share of slaves. There were two forms of slavery known here. First there was the form known as "indenture" in which a man, woman or child was sold into virtual slavery for a limited time. These "indentured servants", as they were known, were white persons. For a few Indians, and for many blacks, there was the second form known as chattel slavery that lasted for life - the type of slavery that finally caused the great Civil War.
The first form of slavery (indenture) worked this way. A man or woman in England, wishing to come to America but too poor to pay for transportation, might arrange with the captain of a sailing ship to be sold on arrival in this country so that the captain could recover the cost of the voyage. The average cost was twenty pounds (about $100) and the average length of slavery needed to pay that cost was four years. An advertisement in a Boston newspaper of 1729 is typical:
White men for sale!
"To be sold ... a parcel of White Servants, both Male and Female, lately arrived from Europe. Their time from 4 to 11 years, and are to be seen on board the Vessel at Long Wharffe."
To make that advertisement clearer, the reference to"their time from 4 to 11 years" meant
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that these white men and women would be sold for sums that would put them in servitude for from 4 to 11 years.
It was not only immigrants who were sold that way. Prisoners of war were thus sold. A man or woman who had fallen in debt, or who badly needed money or support, could sell themselves. Parents could sell children (of any age) and one of the horrible features of the indenture system of Colonial times was the traffic in kidnapped children - kidnapped in one country or section and sold to unscrupulous buyers in another. It is true that indentured servitude was supposed to be for only a definite term of years, but a harsh or greedy master could readily find ways for prolonging the servitude. As an example there is a case at Berwick, in the old records, in which an indentured man was convicted of "abusive carages toward his master and Mrs." He might easily have been deliberately provoked by that "master and Mrs" into doing something to justify such a charge. At any rate, in this Berwick case the indentured man was sentenced to be whipped ("thirty lashes upon the bare skin") and made to serve that "master and Mrs" for enough more time to work out his fine of 7 pounds 10 shillings, as well as the time he had spent in jail awaiting trial. That sentence certainly added two or three years to his servitude - and no one should be foolish enough to imagine that the "master and Mrs" made those extra years easy.
It must be repeated that those indentured servants were white. They were men, women and children of the same blood and race as their masters and mistresses. Yet a modern historian comments :
"They were made to realize that they were not freemen. Any who had been unfaithful, negligent, or unprofitable in service, even though they had been ill-used, were not to be dismissed from their contract until they had made satisfaction according to the judgment of the authorities."
If in desperation an indentured servant in Biddeford, or elsewhere ran away, he or she could be advertised for and reclaimed by his master like any negro slave. In fact, in the advertisements in the old Colonial newspapers it is often hard to tell whether the runaway was black or white. For one thing the word slave was not much used in Colonial times. Black or white, held in chattel bondage for life or under indenture for a limited number of years, both classes still were called by the same name - servant. Roger Williams, famous leader for religious freedom, owned black and white "servants." So did William Penn and George Washington. It was the custom of the times, and even the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution did not do away with it.
As for negro slavery, it was far more common in Biddeford in Colonial times than has been previously realized or admitted
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by Biddeford historians. There is, for instance, no mention of slavery in Folsom's History, and yet at the time that Folsom wrote that History (1830) there were colored men and women living here who had been slaves in Biddeford or who were the sons and daughters of Biddeford slaves. But the truth is that when Folsom wrote, the great struggle over slavery was beginning between North and South - and New England people were trying to forget that New England had once been an active slave-trading center, or that slavery (even though far milder than Southern slavery) had ever existed there.
The black slaves of Colonial Biddeford seem to have been mainly house-servants rather than field hands. The census of 1764 showed 116 families living in Biddeford, and a total of 627 whites and 12 negroes. When it is remembered that slaves were then so expensive that only the well-to-do could afford them, that seems a fairly heavy ratio for a Maine village. Pepperellboro (Saco) had at the same time only 2 negroes against 538 whites.
The first Biddeford slave-owner of whom a record has so far been found, was Captain Samuel Jordan, Indian fighter and merchant, whose home (now known as the Goldthwait House) still stands at Hill's Beach. Captain Jordan died in 1742 - the year that Chrisp Bradbury was raising the rates at his ferry (see page 44)- and the inventory of his estate includes this interesting list of property, with the values given in "bills of Old Tenor":
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1 Moose Skinn
1 Negro
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1 pair of Oxen 1 Rone (roan) Horse
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5 50 8 pounds 35
The fact that the negro slave was valued at less than half the worth of the horse, may indicate that the negro was either very old or (more probably) very young. It was the work to be gotten out of them - negro or horse - that made the basis of value.
The next record of slaves found in Biddeford occurs in the inventory of the estate of Captain Daniel Smith who died in 1752 - the year in which George Washington reached his 20th birthday, and the same year in which Benjamin Franklin flew his kite and discovered that lightning was electricity. The three negroes shown as Captain Smith's property were undoubtedly used as servants in the old inn on the King's highway. Probably one was a hostler or stable hand while another may have been
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the "Black Hitty" who helped pick the beans for the "Royal Family's" dinner (see page 51). In the Captain's estate the negroes were listed along with other livestock as follows:
"To 2 Negroes
133 Pounds
6 Shillings
8 Pence
To another Negro
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Why two negroes should be valued at an average of 66 pounds each (between $300 and $400) while another was only 26 pounds ( about $125) is hard to say. But it was probably another case of either extreme age or extreme youth.
Even more interesting is the inventory of the estate of Jeremiah Hill, Senior, who died in 1779 - a year when the American Revolution was not yet won, and when the Reverend Thomas Smith of Falmouth was complaining in his diary that coffee was $8 a pound, and tea $19, in "Continental currency" of course. Jeremiah Hill, Senior, was a son-in-law to Captain and Rebecca Smith, having married their daughter Mary in 1746 and the wedding celebration was probably held in the old inn on the King's highway, Mary's home. Jeremiah had also been Biddeford's representative in the Massachusetts General Court for the years 1770, 1771 and 1772. £ And he was a leader in the old Pool Road church still standing. Thus the added interest of his inventory which included the following:
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