USA > New Hampshire > Colony, province, state, 1623-1888: history of New Hampshire > Part 25
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One of Livermore's ambitions was to be a great land owner. He was one of the original grantees of the township of Holder- ness, and by purchase gradually became the proprietor of nearly two-thirds of its territory. For Gov. Wentworth's right he paid $50, and for James Kelley's the sum of $88.88. In this way some ten or twelve thousand acres in Holderness, Campton and Plymouth came under his ownership, and it was good land, too, -- pasture, woodland and valley, whose yearly income brought more than one good pound into the proprietor's pocket. Incited perhaps by the example of Governor Wentworth, who in 1770 had built a splendid summer residence on the shores of Lake Winnipiseogee in Wolfeborough, and perhaps, too, desiring to be at a distance from the tempest that he saw gathering over the government at Portsmouth, Livermore sold his farm in Londonderry to John Prentice, a graduate of Harvard, who had studied law with him, and afterwards was attorney-general of
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the State from 1787 to 1793, and betook himself with his family to his wilderness home. This was in the year 1774.
At that time there were but nine families in Holderness. William Piper had come there in 1763; the others, John Fox, John Sheppard, Bryant Sweeney, Samuel Eaton, Joseph Sin- clair, Andrew Smith, John Herron, and Nathaniel Thompson settled later. Several families followed the Livermores from Londonderry and vicinity. Among them was John Porter who became the first settled lawyer of Plymouth, but returned to Londonderry in 1806, which town he represented for eleven years. Mrs. Porter was a very accomplished lady, and was Mrs. Livermore's most intimate friend.
Mr. Livermore lived successively in two or three small build- ings before he built the large and handsome mansion in which he died, and which he erected during the last of the Revolution. During the first years of the struggle he took no prominent
part. It was from no lukewarmness to the cause, however. Doubtless his high office that he had held under the crown and his well-known friendship to Governor Wentworth caused some of the patriot leaders to regard him with suspicion. These years he remained entirely aloof from public affairs, caring for his own affairs in Holderness. He had a grist mill at the mouth of Millbrook, and here he might have been seen any day in 1776 and 1777 dressed in a white suit, and tending the mill with his own hands. We find him soon after this a member of the State Assembly from Holderness. He had now a splendid opportunity to prove that he was no lukewarm adherent to the cause of the colonists. He threw the whole weight of his power and influence into the popular scale and became the con- trolling spirit of the assembly. Such men as Meshech Weare and Matthew Thornton, who knew his worth and his vast ability, embraced his cause. In 1778 he was appointed attorney- general of the State, again superseding Wyseman Claggett, who had held the office for two preceding years.
1 The just claims for services of some of the hardy rangers, among the original proprietors of Whitefield we find recognized
1 L. W. Dodge.
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by Gov. Wentworth. There were Captain Gerrish, and Lieut. Waite, and Ensign White, and the Farringtons, all of Rogers's company. Then there were the Cloughs, five of them, all from Canterbury, and under Stark, and there was Colonel Jonathan Bailey, whose possessions were also increased in this region by purchases with Colonel Moses Little. This latter once owned nearly all of what was known as Apthorp, extending for fifteen miles or more along the Connecticut river, and embracing the present towns of Littleton and Dalton. The name of the terri- tory was changed from its first English title of "Chiswick," so named from the celebrated country seat of the duke of Devonshire, to Apthorp, in memory of a distinguished divine who came to this country in 1759, as a missionary of the Society for the Propa- gation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. After its purchase by Colonel Little, who was then the Surveyor of the King's Woods in this section, it was divided, one part taking the name of Littleton, from its owner, and the other Dalton, from an old towsman of the colonel's, Hon. Tristram Dalton, who was also one of the original grantees. Colonel Little was a native of the old town of Newbury, Massachusetts, and was greatly distinguished throughout the war of the Revolution.
The town of Whitefield, until July 4, 1774, formed a part of the ungranted lands, and lays claim to being the last town- ship granted within the State under royal favor, and by its last royal governor, John Wentworth. At that date it only re- quired an organization and a name, for its metes and bounds were already established by surveys of surrounding townships ; therefore this was literally what was left, and they called it Whitefield when organized, from the celebrated Methodist divine of that name, who a few years previously in an itinerating tour in southern New Hampshire and in Massachusetts stirred the religious thoughts of the people into intense activity, so that, says a writer of the day, his name was a household word. His last sermon was at Exeter, where, on his journey from Portsmouth to Boston, he had stopped by the importunities of friends to preach one of his unique discourses. It was delivered in the open air, for the doors of the established churches were
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closed against him, and only God's great temple was open, and for two long hours he interested the crowd which had flocked to see him and to hear his wonderful doctrines. Greatly fatigued he continued his journey to Newburyport, where, by appoint- ment, he was to preach the next day, but on the following morning he was seized with a return of a long-fought asthmatic trouble, and died suddenly at the home of his friend, Rev. John Parsons, September 30, 1770.
It is doubtful if any of the carly proprietors of Whitefield, save those who joined the first surveying party under Captain Gerrish, and those of the scouting rangers, ever set foot upon their pine-land possessions. Certain it is, none ever be- came actual settlers. Timothy Nash may have hunted there, and the Rev. Jeremy Belknap, New Hampshire's early his- torian, who was one of the Cutler exploring party, in 1784, at which time the name of Washington was first applied to the highest peak of the mountains, doubtless surveyed with his eye from afar off his gubernatorial donation of the ninety-fourth part of the township, but aside from these no one of the grantees of the town ever saw their Cohos estates. So it remained for Major John Burns, Colonel Joseph Kimball, John McMaster, and their followers, in the beginning of the present century, to develop the wild Whitefield tract, which the early organizers of the township, in their down-country meet- ings, had vainly tried to accomplish.
Samuel Adams was chosen moderator at the first meeting of the proprietors of the town, after the close of the war, and the early records of the township bear his signature, in the same unmistakable characters that are shown upon that Record of Independent Declarations that made us a nation.
Perhaps to the energies of Samuel Minot is due the revival of interest in the early settlement of Whitefield, after the disappearance of the original proprietors. He owned at one time, by vendue purchase, more than three fourths of the first granted rights of the township. His father, Captain Jonas Minot, was the first proprietors' clerk.
Colonel Samuel Adams and Captain Robert Foster were two
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of the chosen assessors, in those primitive days of the town; and their duties as well as all the transactions relating to the unsettled location were conducted at a distance of one hundred and fifty miles from the place of interest ; the first meeting having been held at old Dunstable, which town and its divi- sions probably furnished more men for the famous Rogers Ran- gers than any other section. Also for the Powers expedition, which located and named the wild river along whose hill- shadowed valley we are traversing. For many years the early proprietors of Whitefield could hardly be content with their chartered boundaries, supposing by semi-authoritative descrip- tion that the western limit was along the summit of, or near to, the Apthorp range of hills; but the corner monuments of Colonel Gerrish, established in 1779, and the blazed line of Captain Eames, in 1802, settled the doubt, and the river rippled into Dalton at its present boundary, and Blake's
Pond marked the designated corner. This name was left to that fountainless lakelet above Whitefield village, by a famous hunter, Moses Blake, who in the wilderness days, here among the pines, pitched his cabin and scouted this region for peltries. What changes have taken place along this historic stream, since the wild Coosauke roamed in undisputed freedom along its pine-clad borders! Or since John Stark, in a military point of view New Hampshire's George Washington, as an Indian captive, explored its valley, fished its waters, and hunted its game-haunted solitudes. The rock-lined hills along its boundaries are almost disforested ; the dark-shadowed trail of the roving native has become the steel-clad track of civiliza- tion ; the scream of the steam whistle echoes above the savage war-whoop; grain-burdened fields and sunny pas- tures are spread over the broad uplands, where, but a century ago, amid the unbroken forests howled the prowling bear, and tramped the unhunted moose, while up from below comes the hum of industry from a thousand mill-wheels of improvement.
It was from the top of the Cherry Mountain that Timothy Nash, one of the solitary hunters of this region, in 1771, first discovered the old Indian pass now famous as the " White
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Mountain Notch." Up one of the rivulet paths he had tracked a moose, and finding himself near the highest point, in his eagerness for an unobstructed view he climbed a tall tree, and from this birchen lookout he saw, away to the southward, what he at once surmised must be the hitherto unknown defile. Steering with the acquired precision of an old woodman for the desired point, he had the satisfaction of realizing the truth of his surmises ; for it was indeed the rocky pass,- the gateway of the mountains. Admitting to his secret a fellow-hunter, by the name of Sawyer, together they repaired to Governor Went- worth, at Portsmouth, who, after sufficient and novel proof of the fact of the discovery, gave to the fortunate hunters a grant of land, since known as the " Nash and Sawyer " location. Nash was also one of the original grantees of the town of Whitefield, but whether by purchase or in consideration of services rendered is not known.
All along the pathways of the world's history there are scat- tered monuments to the memory of its men of mark - pioneers in its enterprises, foremost in its leading events, great captains in the onward march of improvement. Around the headwaters of John's and Israel's rivers, in those days, between the depar- ture of the Indians and the coming of the white man, settled Colonel Joseph Whipple. He was a brother of that General William Whipple whose illustrious name goes down to posterity along with those others of the framers and signers of that "im- mortal instrument " which gave us our liberties. They were successful merchants in the town of Portsmouth, and acquired large landed estates north of the White Mountains, -most of them, doubtless, as reward for valuable service, both civil and military, rendered the State. Colonel Whipple's title to these Jefferson meadows followed that of Colonel John Goffe, the first owner after the extinction of the Indian titles, and by him named Dartmouth. What particular incentive brought Colonel Whipple hither so early as 1773 it would be satisfactory to know. A luxurious home by the sea-side exchanged for a wild haunt among the mountains ; the enjoyments of civilization for the deprivations of the wilderness. Was it an inborn love
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for adventure to be gratified, or really the acquisition of more wealth and power in the development of his broad acres? Or was it the allurements of the grand old mountains themselves, and he
" A lover true, who knew by heart Each joy the mountain dales impart."
The settlement of the colonel lying in the track of the In- dians, as they passed from the valley of the Saco to the Con- necticut, by way of the Notch and Cherry Mountain pass, he was at times greatly annoyed by the visits of the redskins. They never seemed to wish him any harm, however, until during the Revolutionary war. He one day found himself a captive in his own house. A wandering party of warriors applied to him for entertainment, and he, as usual, suspecting no evil intentions, admitted them to his house and his table. Their wants supplied they coolly informed him of their purpose to take him to Can- ada as a prisoner. Feigning submission, he at once commenced bustling around in preparation for the journey, telling them they must wait a little until he could make ready to go. During his seeming preparations, he contrived to instruct his housekeeper to gain, by some stratagem, their attention from his movements ; this she successfully did, by the help of some curious mechanism which the Colonel possessed. Passing into his sleeping room for the alleged purpose of changing his clothing, he leaped from a rear window, and ran for the meadow where his workmen were engaged in fence-building. Directing each man to shoulder a stake, as soon as his would-be captors appeared in search of him, the sham hunters started for them. Seeing, as they sup- posed, a party of well-armed, brawny fellows coming for them in dead earnest, the red devils, hastily seizing what booty they could conveniently make way with, took to the woods, firing as they went on a Mr. Gotham, who was a member of the Whipple household.
These Indians were, doubtless, members of the warlike tribe of Sokokies, or Pequauquaukes, who were driven from the valley of the Saco and their ancient hunting-grounds by the advance
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of the white man in the carly half of the eighteenth century. They were the most warlike of all the Abenakis tribes, but seem to have disbanded after the Lovewell fight, and joined the Anasagunticooks of northern Maine, and the Coosaukes at the head-waters of the Connecticut, and, in a few years thereafter, the St. Francis tribe in Canada. Those who attempted the ab- duction of Colonel Whipple were, doubtless, in the employ of the English, and this was among the last of hostile demonstrations by the subdued natives, before their final disappearance.
About a mile below the first, or Dodge and Abbott, damming of the John's river, is a second artificial obstruction. Here was built, in early Whitefield days, the " Foster mill," and here among the pineries settled one Foster. There are Fosters and Fosters ; but there was but one Perley Foster, and he the sire of a son who became the hero of two wars. In a humble home in this secluded spot was born, in 1823, Gen. John G. Foster.
The last trace of the old Foster house is obliterated. Noth- ing remams to mark the birth-place of a man of note but the dim outlines of a cellar ; not even the traditional sentinel of an ancient apple tree. 1 We remember to have passed along the almost disused, half-forgotten road, one summer day in the long- ago, when the old house, from dilapidation, had become unten- antable. Clapboards were rattling in the wind ; the doors and windows were in useless ruin ; a thicket of unrebuked thistles was crowding about the entrance ; and the only thing of beauty about the spot was a broad-disked sun-flower, growing upon the sunny side, with a flourishing family of tall hollyhocks. After awhile the old structure, from constant wind-beatings, tumbled down; the ruins were gathered up or burned, and the site plowed under. Descendants of the ancient May-weeds still linger around the place of the old gateway, and there are relics of a way-side fence; but even the noisy brook, which tinkled its way across the road and down into the beaver meadow, is almost run dry.
Thus does time, the obliterator, crowd away the past, with its homes and its hallowed spots, to make room for the future.
I L. W. Dodge.
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The old Foster mill, by its addition and changes, has lost its originality, but the river still rushes onward, singing as it runs,
" Men may come and men may go, But I flow on for ever."
1 The principal town officers, prior to the war of the Revolu- tion, authorized or required by the Province Laws of New Hampshire to be elected at the annual town meetings, were a moderator for the meetings, town-clerk, treasurer, selectmen or " townsmen," constables, fence-viewers, field-drivers or "hay- wards," surveyors of highways, surveyors of lumber, sealers of weights and measures, sealers of leather, tithingmen, deer-reeve or deer keepers, hog-reeves, pound keepers, overseers of the poor, and overseers of houses of correction. Several of these offices have now for many years become obsolete, there being no statute law authorizing them. The powers and duties per- taining to some others of them, since the adoption of the con- stitution of 1792, differ widely from what they were under the Province Laws, while those of others remain substantially as before the Revolution.
The moderator, then as now, was the presiding officer of the town meeting, with much the same powers and duties as under the present State laws. No person was allowed to speak in the meeting without leave first obtained of that dignitary, " nor when any other person was speaking orderly." All persons also were required to keep silent at the request of the moder- ator, under the penalty of five shillings for the breach of every such order. (Colonial Laws, 1718.) By an Act of the General Court in 1791, it was further provided that if any person, after being notified by the moderator, should persist in disorderly conduct, the moderator should order him to withdraw from the meeting, and that if the offender should fail to obey, he should forfeit and pay a fine of twenty shillings for the use of the town. ( Laws of 1797, p. 187.)
In pursuance of an Act of the General Court of the Province passed in 1719, the freeholders and other inhabitants of each
Samuel T. Worcester.
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town, having taxable property of the value of £20, were required to meet sometime in the month of March annually, and beside other town officers, to choose " three, five, seven, or nine able and discreet persons of good conversation, inhabitants of said town, as selectmen or townsmen." Under the laws of the Province no inhabitant had a right to vote at these meetings except freeholders and such others as had taxable personal estate of the value of £20.
In respect to several matters of public concern, the selectmen of towns at that time had much more power and a wider field of duty than the like officers of the present day. Unless other persons were elected to that office, the selectmen were ex officio overseers of the poor of the town, chargeable not only with the care of providing for their needs, but also with the further in- hospitable duty of " warning out" of their town all such new comers or settlers as it was feared might become paupers if allowed to remain as permanent residents. They also had the exclusive charge of the public schools of the town, including the building of school-houses, the employment and payment of teachers, and the assessment of all school taxes for school build- ings and accommodations, and the wages and salaries of school- masters. In addition to the assessment of taxes for schools, it was also their duty "to assess taxes upon the polls, personal estates, and lands of all the inhabitants of the town in just and equal proportion, according to their known ability, for all such sums as may have been ordered at the town meeting for the support of the ministry, the poor, and all other necessary charges of the town." (Colonial Laws of 1719.) Under the Province Laws, males were chargeable with a poll tax at the age of eighteen. The valuation of some of the items consti- tuting the basis of taxation was as follows :- Polls, or white males over eighteen years of age, eighteen shillings ; male slaves from sixteen to fifty years old, sixteen shillings ; female slaves of the like age, eight shillings ; horses and oxen four years old, three shillings ; improved land, sixpence per acre.
The office of " field-driver," one of the town offices in New Hampshire for one hundred years and more, has long since
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gone into disuse, and the word itself, though in current use in the old colony statutes, is not to be found in the unabridged Dictionaries of either Webster or Worcester. It is, however, defined in Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms, as "a civil officer whose duty it is to take up and impound swine, cattle, sheep, and horses going at large in the public highways or the common and improved lands, and not under charge of a keeper." For very many years after the first settlement of most of the towns in New Hampshire a very large part of the unimproved land was unfenced, the rights of the owners of such land lying in common. These common lands in most of the towns fur- nished much valuable pasturage for cattle, and acorns and other nuts for swine, and by the laws of the Province no cattle, swine, or other domestic animals were permitted to run at large upon them without the consent of the land owners. If such animals were found at large upon the highway, or upon those lands lying in common, without the consent of the owners, it became the duty of the field-driver to impound them, for which service he was allowed one shilling each for neat cattle and horses, and three pence each for sheep and swine, to be paid by the owner of the animals before being allowed to take them from the pound.
The ancient office of "tithingman," like that of "field- driver," has also become obsolete in the State, and the name itself, once a terror to rude and wayward youth, very nearly so. Two, and in some towns four, of these officials were chosen at the annual town meetings. It was among their duties, under the colony laws, to visit and inspect licensed public-houses, and to inform of all disorders in them. Also to inform of all idle and dissolute persons, profane swearers, and Sabbath breakers. But one of their principal and most important duties appears to have been to attend public worship on the Sabbath, and to take note of and prevent all rudeness and disorders during the ser- vices, and, if needful, to arrest on view, and to aid in the trial and punishment of all such persons as were guilty of irreverent or disorderly conduct. In towns where four of these dignitaries were chosen, it appears that two of them were expected to take
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their seats on the lower floor of the meeting-house, to take note of all rudeness and disorder "below," and the two others to be installed in the gallery, chargeable with the like duties in respect to all improprieties and misconduct "above." As a badge of this office and authority the colony laws provided that each of them should carry " a black staff or wand two feet in length, and tipped at one end for about three inches with brass or pew- ter." (Colonial Laws of 1715.) By an Act of the New Hamp- shire General Court, passed in 1789, the law in respect to tithingmen was amended, and their powers and duties somewhat enlarged. This amended Act required the tithingmen to be chosen to be " persons of good substance and sober life," and among other things made it their duty to stop and detain all persons travelling on the Sabbath between sunrise and sunset, "except in attending public worship, visiting the sick, or on some work of charity."
By a Province Law enacted in 1719 swine were not per- mitted to run at large between the first day of April and the first day of October of each year, without being yoked and rung in the mode described in the law ; and two or more offi- cials, known as hog-reeves or hog constables, were required to be chosen at the annual town meeting, chargeable with the duty of enforcing the law at the expense of the guilty owner of the swine. The regulation hog yoke, as defined in the law, was made of wood, "and to be in length above the swine's neck, equal to the depth of the neck, and half as long below, the bottom piece of the yoke to be equal in length to three times the thickness of the neck." The ring, as defined in the Act, "was made of strong flexible iron wire to be inserted in the top of the nose to prevent rooting, the ends of the wire to be twisted together and to project one inch above the nose." (Colonial Laws, 1715.) The fees of the hog-reeve, as fixed by a law passed in 1794, were one shilling for yoking, and sixpence for ringing, each swine.
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