USA > New Hampshire > Rockingham County > New Castle > Bi-centennial souvenir, 1693-1893 : New Castle, New Hampshire > Part 3
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Resolved, That we are the saints.
It is in no spirit of controversy that I speak of the intolerant traits of character that prevailed among the very worthy leaders who governed our neighboring colony, and were willing to govern us. These men acted according to the light that they had. If they actually believed that a man here who happened to think otherwise than they did, could do so only at the instigation of the devil, we of to-day can stretch out the hand of forgiveness. But the truth of history is to be zealously sought for, and when found, as zealously defended. We may rejoice that a new era has opened before us. The asperity and the rank injustice that marks the pen of the Puritan chronicler is largely shorn of its power for mischief, now that the sources upon which it drew for inspiration are understood and duly estimated.
The prevailing religion among those who first settled here, was that of the Church of England. Mr. Albee has, I think, very satisfactorily shown that there must have been a church here soon after 1640, at which the Reverend Robert Jourdan ministered. Little by little, however, the Puritan faith made
1 Of late, England has seen a revival of interest in early records, and the kingdom is being searched to discover old documents and papers. The cheapness with which printing can now be done, and the increase in number of those who aim to preserve historic material, both in England and America, combine to make it probable that some originals may yet be brought to light that belong to the annals of our early settlements here. It is by no means unlikely, therefore, that by the next centenary a more accurate and minule account of the inhabitants of Great Island, at their first coming here, can be laid before the audience then to be assembled, than is possible at the present day.
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RESIDENCE OF JACOB WENDELL, "FROST-FIELDS."
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headway, until at last church worship was abandoned here, and people went to meeting at the Banke. As the town taxed everybody to support the minister, the location of the meeting-house came to play an important part in the life of the town. It was no slight undertaking, especially in winter, to row against wind and tide to Portsmouth. There, on the hill below the south mill bridge, stood a building, described as "of sixty feet by thirty with galleries, a low belfry and a bell, the windows with diamond panes set in lead." Alongside of it were a cage, and a pillory and stocks. To Mr. Nathaniel Fryer, of Great Island, had been accorded the privilege of building next door to the meeting-house, a little cabin, wherein the Fryer family doubtless found it convenient to " fix up," before facing the congregation.
In the many attempts to gain a right to be set off as a separate parish (which eventually resulted in the incorporation of New Castle) one argument pressed by the petitioners was the great hazard and danger of getting their families to meeting. To this Portsmouth neatly rejoined : "We have never heard and hope never shall of any lives lost in attempts to come to meeting. If at any time there should be any danger of that, they well know mercy is to be preferred before sacrifice."
Candor compels the admission that a good deal of staying away from meeting on the Lord's Day was practised in the olden time upon this island.
Nehemiah Partridge, it seems, had a servant named Robert (never mind his family name), whose predilections in this regard have gone into our public archives. Robert stands confessed of record, not only of having a vacant seat charged up against him on several successive Sabbaths, but on "the Sabbath before last Sabbath [so the record runs] he did eat part of two pigs that were roasted at Christopher Kenneston's." The pigs had been stolen, but Robert was not accused of being privy to that enormity. Robert's offence consisted of profanation of the Sabbath, and absenting himself from Mr. Partridge's service. Upon examination before the Worshipful Richard Martyn, of the Council, Robert got sentenced to be publicly whipped upon his naked body nine stripes. Could his Honor have looked down the vista of a century and a half, and caught the full flavor of Charles Lamb's disserta. tion upon this subject (I do not mean the subject of staying away from meet- ing-but of roast pig), his sense of judicial duty could scarcely have been tempered with more mercy; for the court suspended execution until Robert should again neglect his master's service, or profane the Sabbath, -" then forthwith to be whipped with nine stripes, as above."
It is but a step from the meeting-house to the school-house. We do not underestimate here in New Castle the importance of giving to our boys and girls a good, plain, common-school education. That this policy was early determined upon, is apparent from the records.
In March, 1669, the town voted that " a piece of land at Great Island, not exceeding an acre, be sequestered to build a school-house on, and that a school be built on it at the towne's charge, the selectmen Captain Pendleton and Mr. Dering to see it done." The house was accordingly built, and on the 9th May, 1672, liberty was granted to Nicholas Hogkins to swing his ferale within its walls. With your permission, I will read Master Hogkins' letter
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of application for this office. It will serve to remind us that the art of pre- paring one's own recommendation is of no recent origin. We shall also see what happy work that gentleman made of it.
" To the Inhabitants of Portsmouth
" Nicholas Hogkins humbly deaclareth That being by the ordination and providence of God a resident upon the Great Island about 15 months and affecting ye public benefit of ye unlarned and untaught youth heare or adja- cent do by your favourable permission countenance and choyce intend to ex ercise myself in teching those arts with which God hath betrusted me and with which I may for future be endowed hearby manifesting my respect to obedience of and complyance with the laws and orders of this place either sacred or civill and endevowing to manifest myself Yo Reall servant
" Nicho llogkins."
On the 15th March, 1674, is the entry that " upon motion made by Widow Lock to live in the school house on the Great Island in order to the teaching of children to read and sow have granted her desire."
The jurisdiction assumed by the Bay Colony over us, lasted from 1641 to 1679. Forty years of a strong government had wrought a wide-spread change in the condition and the sentiments of the people. Those who were Puritans (some of whom had come here from the Bay) were aggressive and united, backed as they were by the authorities. They alone held the offices, and they had gradually got possession of the land. The Church of England party little by little was pushed to one side ; a few yielded, and ranged themselves with the dominant faction.
Upon the restoration of the king to his throne, the opponents of the union with Massachusetts sought redress of their many grievances. Mason's heirs had all along been active against the encroachments of the Bay. To adjust these, and other difficulties, and to capture New Netherland from the Dutch, a fleet of four vessels of war was sent over, with a small force of soldiers. Four royal commissioners accompanied the expedition. On the 20th July, 1664, two ships, the Martin, and the William and Nicholas put into this har bor. They remained at anchor for a day or two, and then sailed for the ren- dezvous at Long Island. They took New Netherland, now New York ; but the commission accomplished nothing in the way of curbing the power of the Bay Colony. The next year three of the commissioners visited Portsmouth, where some of the people had signed petitions, saying that the Massachu. setts had usurped power, and that they were kept from open opposition by fear of fine and imprisonment.
It is a long but a deeply interesting story. I have time only to say that of the strong adherents to the policy of separation, a few lived here at New Castle.
At last, after a struggle of many years' duration, the union of the two colo. nies was dissolved by order of the king. New Hampshire was erected into a royal province, under a president and six councillors, with an assembly of eleven deputies. The commission was sealed IS September, 1679. Finns
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were fired here upon receipt of the tidings. John Cutt was appointed presi- dent ; Martyn, Vaughan, and Daniel of Portsmouth, Gilman of Exeter, Hus- sey of Hampton, and Waldron of Dover, were named as the council. Singu- lar to state, they were every one a firm friend of the Bay Colony. President Cutt lived but a year after taking office. Waldron succeeded him for a short term, when there came upon the stage one of the most restless, strong-willed, and zealous representatives of royal authority that ever crossed the Atlantic.
Edward Cranfield,-who, as his remains lie buried in the cathedral at Bath, probably came from Somerset-is, upon the whole, the most interesting histor- ical personage to whom New Castle may lay claim. Here he lived during the
RESIDENCE OF CAPT. A. H. WHITE.
entire term of his brief service as governor. From almost the day of his arri- val he succeeded in plunging our little province into a state of turmoil and excitement, of which this immediate locality was the centre.
Great Island was the court end of the capital of the province. Here, with the advent of the provincial government, sat the council, and here the assem- bly met. Here, too, the courts of justice tried offenders, and they were kept busy at the work. Here was the jail. The house of Captain Stileman had been devoted to that purpose, and the new governor found opportunity to make not a few leading citizens acquainted with its interior. We came near having a portrait of His Majesty, King Charles, the Second, together
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with the royal arms, set up here in fine style, only it so happened that the vessel on which they had been shipped never reached her destination, and the province had to get along without them.
Robert Mason asserted the right of collecting quit-rents of the landholders, in virtue of the patent to his grandfather, Captain John Mason. This clain had all along been bitterly resisted. Mason mortgaged the province to Cran- field for twenty-one years, to secure to Cranfield the payment of £150 for seven years. Mason was made a councillor, and afterwards chancellor. Cranfield's conimission as lieutenant-governor passed the seals gth May, 1682. By another commission from the Duke of York he was made vice-admiral, judge, register, and marshal of the admiralty, with power to appoint substi- tutes. Upon Cranfield far greater powers were conferred than had been given to his predecessors.
Sailing from Plymouth in the frigate Lark, he was nearly seven weeks reaching this coast. The ship put into Salem harbor, ist October, 1682. The royal governor hurried overland to Portsmouth, where he arrived on the 3d. He was quick and alert. Early the next morning he set about the duty of officially announcing his presence. He took the oath, swore in his council, and issued a proclamation. The Lark soon made her appearance. She stayed here till early in January. The governor at first established quarters at the house of Captain Walter Barefoote. Afterwards, he went to live at that very attractive spot, the Jaffrey house, a mansion that we pray may stand as sturdily for years to come as it has for more than two centuries past.
Time forbids my dwelling upon the many commotions that swiftly followed each other in Cranfield's administration : the dismissal of the assembly, the Jaffrey affair, the Mason land suits, the imprisonment of the Reverend Joshua Moody, the rebellion at Hampton, and the conviction and awful sentence of its ring-leader, Gove, for the crime of treason. Upon complaint made to the king, an arrangement was at last effected by which Cranfield withdrew in 1685, and later retired to the Barbadoes, where for some years he faithfully served his royal master.
All these events have, as the expression goes, passed into history, though as that history has been to a large extent written by clergymen opposed to the Episcopal faith, its statements will bear certain qualifications. New Hampshire owes to Jeremy Belknap a debt of gratitude for a work that in point of purity of style has nowhere been excelled. We can see that as a historian the writer tried to be impartial in narrating facts, to be just in stat- ing conclusions, and charitable in imputing motives. When treating of Cran- field, however, Dr. Belknap does not stop at moderately emphatic terms of disapproval. " Vindictive," " cruel," " deceitful," " malicious," and other like adjectives are freely employed to denote the warmth of the historian's denun- ciation. "Cranfield's hypocrisy," he tells ns, "is detestable."
One can scarcely dismiss a suspicion, that could the historian of New Hampshire return to-day in the flesh for the purpose of revising what he wrote more than a century ago, he would soften, at least some of these ex- pressions. Dr. Belknap, it is proper to explain, had no access to the other side of the controversy. Letters written at the time and dispatched to England by
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Cranfield, are now before us in print,-thanks to the energy and the liberality of a worthy son of Portsmouth, the late John Scribner Jenness.
Cranfield, it is plain to see, was hot-headed and stubborn. He wofully lacked tact. He utterly failed to enter into the tone and temper of the people he had undertaken to govern. It may be that personally his manners were not agreeable, for he had not in his nature a particle of conciliation. Pos. sibly it is true that he was disappointed at not making out of the office the money upon which he had counted. But like many an unpopular occupant of public station, Cranfield has been made to carry a heavy load of charges, for a part of which he is not justly responsible.
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RESIDENCE OF HOWARD M. CURTIS.
Some day this striking episode in New Hampshire history will be written anew. Facts, some of them not heretofore consulted, will be thoroughly sifted. A picture will be drawn of those turbulent times, which shall do even-handed justice to all the actors, chiefest of whom is Cranfield. New Castle will furnish the background of the picture. The canvas stands ready for the artist.
As though the good people here had not had their fill of excitement, another kind of agitation occurred in Cranfield's day, that must have gone nigh to turning the island completely upside down. I refer to a stone thiow-
RESIDENCE OF THOMAS HAYWOOD.
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ing devil, who played his pranks on the premises of our old friend, George Walton. Luckily for posterity (who always want an authentic account of the marvellous), the Secretary of the Province, Mr. Richard Chamberlain, lodged and took his meals at Walton's. Being an "ocular witness " and handy with the pen, Mr. Chamberlain was thoughtful enough to set down then and there an account of these violent activities, with the whizzings and snortings that accompanied the same. When Mr. Chamberlain went back to England, he gave to the world a little book, printed at London in 160S, and entitled " Lithobolia." It is a famous little book now. Cotton Mather heard of what was going on here, and he also has embalmed it in literature, written in his well known simple and lucid style !
Tremendous as was the event, it bore a character strictly local. The brickbats and the hammers, the pewter pots, and sundry other articles con- venient for missiles, were hurled about nowhere else than within the boundary lines of Mr. Walton's real estate. Here, however, they freely circulated. Inasmuch as the demonstration had assumed a concrete form at a time when people were just recovering from the effects of a great fiery-tailed star, that had been blazing in the heavens, some of the wiser heads were sure that the devil, the comet, and Governor Cranfield had solemnly entered into an unholy league for the purpose of terrifying and harassing the Province of New Hampshire.
We of a later generation have reason to be proud of our stone-throwing visitor. To be sure, his name never got upon the tax-list, but we know that he stayed long enough in town to entitle him-if not to vote,-at least for ever after to hail from New Castle. No other incorporated community in the land (or in Europe either for the matter of that) can match us in this peculiar line. Moreover, though twice at least the black cat of witchcraft showed itself within our territory, it has left behind it, thank God, no stain of the gallows.
What single date may hope to awaken in us at this hour so lively an interest as that of the year 1693? The event distinguishing that year above the rest, we pay honor to by these commemorative exercises. All of us, I dare say, would like to know what the town of Nev. Castle looked like just after it had been born. It is safe to say that it must have had every appearance of being a healthy child. I am admonished, however, that your patience has been taxed to such an extent by my attempt to bring before you some conception of how they started off in 1623 with their infant settlement, that there is really very little time left us to look at the infant town.1
As for the christening, I am inclined to agree with Mr. Albee. He is good at guessing. This time I think he has hit the mark. The fort, as we know,
1 From records of the North Church, Portsmouth, we know that in 1692 the families in the parish numbered 231 : at Strawberry Banke, 120; at Greenland, 68; at Great Island, 43,- the families south of Sagamore Creek being classed with Greenland. The census of 18,0 gives us a total of 488. In 1773 var numbers were 601. The highest figure, I think, that New Castle has ever allained, is 932, in the census of 182). In 188, the town had 610 inhabitants. Several towns in Rockingham conuty show a decrease of population in the hist decade. One thing is sure ; we are to-day escaping the evils of a redundant population.
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was not infrequently termed the castle. It cost the rate-payers a pretty penny, too, to keep it in a state of what may be called " warlike posture." To judge from the frequency with which the subject figures in council and assembly records, the fort must have been always either actually undergoing repairs, or else deplorably in need of them.
It so happened, while our chief men were nearing the goal of their hopes, in their efforts to bring about a separation from Portsmouth, that a good deal was going on at the fort or castle in the way of making it as good as new. We can accept this plausible explanation, in default of a better.
The first town meeting was held on the 20th of December, 1693, in the old meeting-house that stood near the fort.1 The honorable office of selectmen was conferred upon John Clark, James Randall, and Francis Tucker. John Leach was chosen constable.2
The limits of the present address do not admit of my entering into the details of our political town history. That is a subject that deserves to be treated by itself. Ample materials for a sketch, instructive as well as enter- taining, are at hand in our local records.
The town-meeting is justly admired as the nursery and the conservatory of our liberties. The true democratic instinct here enjoys free, natural play. Every man meets his neighbor on a plane of equality, to discuss and decide questions of local concern. So far from being a mass of dry, dead matter, of no practical use to this busy age of ours, the recorded proceedings of our early town-meetings have much to teach us, illustrating as they do the steady growth and development, in its primary stage, of the foundation principles of self-government. Let me then invite your attention to the urgent need that exists for doing all that is to-day possible to put your town records into proper shape. The record that begins in February, 1756, ends abruptly on page 46 with the proceedings of a meeting 26th January, 1767. There are entries thereafter of meetings from 1800 to 1807, together with many pages of mar- riages and births. It can hardly be that one or two more books were not kept of the records from 1766 to iSoo. These books may be in existence somewhere in the neighborhood. Let search be made for them. There are loose papers of various dates covering this period. They should be carefully examined and classified, ready to be copied into a book, if we do not find the missing volumes.
I regret to add that from 1856 to 1865 the records also are missing. Let us hope that these defects shall be remedied at as early a day as possible.
I feel, too, upon this occasion, that I may fitly urge you to guard these town books against all possible danger of future loss. Do not let it come to pass that fire destroy them. Not to you alone who live here; or to those whose lot it was to have been born here, are these old records of value. They are precious, and as the years pass, they will have grown more precious to thousands scattered over the country, who can trace back some ancestral tie that reaches New Castle.
: Albee, page 136.
2 In 1793 the selectmen were Henry Prescott, George Frost, and John Tarlton. In 1893, they are Fred Bell, Ambrose Card, and Charles H. Becker.
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To the foresight of some of our good townspeople do we owe it that the town has a transcript of the oldest book. This admits of the copy being deposited for safe keeping at a distance from the original. It is a wise pre- caution,-a kindness to posterity. Let the school children visit these records, and learn from them a lesson in history. Let us all look upon these pages as so many visible links binding us to the past. They who lived here two hundred years ago were not all old people (as one is apt carelessly to assume), but men, women, and children, of every age and condition. We simply have stepped forward to take their places. Soon we too will be gone. Let not the ancestor be totally forgotten upon the soil where once there smiled for him a happy home.
The first hundred years of the town, almost co-existent with the eighteenth century itself, brought in their train a varied fortune. The peaceful pursuits were the fisheries, or voyages along the coast, or to the West Indies. There were serious troubles with the Indians, and wars with the French, when New Castle manne'd the forts-(there had been a fort also at Jaffrey's point as early as 1665,)' or by night patrolled the shore from here to Little Boar's Head, or contributed her share of that product peculiar to the New England seaport towns-that half sailor, half soldier, and all fighter-to the taking of Louisburg.2 There were coronations at Westminster, and changes of high officials at home. It was a gala day when a new royal governor was proclaimed. They would fire muskets on the parade at Portsmouth, and then the guns of the fort here would respond with a noisy salute. When the Earl of Bellamont was proclaimed in 1698, it took four gallons of rum with a due proportion of sugar, nutmegs, and limes (amounting to : 6, 7 Shill., and Sd) to make the ceremony here at the fort pass off nicely. The receipt (not for making the punch, but in payment of the bill) is on record. What chiefly interests us, I think, is the apt name of the lieutenant who takes charge of these ingredients-Samuel Comfort.
Towards dark on the afternoon of the 13th December, 1774, a horseman rode in hot haste into Portsmouth. The king in council had passed an order prohibiting the exportation of gunpowder and military stores to America. The rider brought warning from the Boston committee of safety that a sloop of war had dropped down into the roadstead there, bound thither, it was thought, to strengthen Fort William and Mary. He was Paul Revere.
The next day the roll of drum had brought together men from all direc- tions to the door of the state house. By three o'clock in the afternoon a band of about four hundred, headed by Captain Thomas Pickering, coming from Portsmouth, Rye, and New Castle, surrounded the fort here and demanded its surrender. Captain John Cochran held it with five men. He told the patriots on their peril not to enter. In his report the captain says,-" I ordered three four-pounders to be fired on them, and then the small arms, and before we could be ready to fire again we were stormed on all quarters."
1 XVII State Papers, 542.
. 2 Among the names of New Castle men who took part in the siege are Captain Abraham Trefethren and Thomas Card. Henry Trefethren and Lewis Tucker lost their lives in this campaign.
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Seizing and confining the captain and his guard, the invaders broke open the magazine and carried off a hundred barrels or more of the king's powder. This powder did service for the cause of liberty at Bunker Hill.
This exploit was followed up by a later attack, in which John Sullivan and John Langdon (both destined to become eminent) were leading actors. The party secured and brought away certain cannon and small arms.
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