USA > New Hampshire > Coos County > Pioneers of the Magalloway from 1820 to 1904 > Part 3
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LORENZO DOW LINNELL At 86 years of age
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land on account of the depth and strength of the current.
There was now no alternative but for them to pass the night on the island, and an imme- diate fire was necessary to keep them, wet as they were, from freezing to death; but how was a fire to be obtained? By desperate search young Linnell discovered, beneath the arm, in his cotton undergarment, a small dry spot which he was not long in cutting out, and on this, from a water-tight flask, they poured powder, which they ignited by flint and steel, and with the help of birch bark picked up in the darkness, soon had a roaring fire, and were out of immediate danger.
At morning's dawn the channel of the river which they had attempted to ford was frozen over to a thickness sufficient to bear their weight, and thus they escaped from an island experience which had bidden fair to be more tragic than that of Robinson Crusoe. The episode is since commemorated by the name of Talbot's Island, which the scene of their perilous night adventure still retains.
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CHAPTER XVII
T HE life of David M., second son of Joseph Sturtevant, furnishes an example of in- dustry, of fortitude, and of perseverance in the midst of misfortune, unparalleled in the history of the Magalloway, and rarely sur- passed in the annals of mankind. In the win- ter of 1845, soon after attaining his majority, he commenced lumbering near Errol, N. H., and never within the memory of the oldest inhabitants has there been another so dis- astrous a lumbering operation as that. Hardly a man who entered the woods on that ill-fated job came out well and whole. One man, John Bennett, Jr., as before mentioned, was instantly killed by a falling tree; another who stood by his side was injured and narrowly escaped death by the same stroke; a teamster was afterwards jammed between his sled and a wayside stump; and finally Mr. Sturte- vant himself was struck above the knee by the whole blade of an axe, and saved from death only by the most vigorous efforts of the crew, who conveyed him to his home as soon as possible, dashing snow in his face continually to keep the breath of life in his body. Many months elapsed before he was again on his feet, but with all the surgical skill they could obtain, he never recovered the use of his knee-joint, and the amount of labor since performed by him, on that straight and rigid
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DAVID M. STURTEVANT
leg, has never been surpassed by any neighbor, however nimble, healthy or sound.
In 1847 the young hero commenced the erection of a saw mill and dam, on the outlet of what has since been known as Sturtevant's Pond, where the loose nature of the shores rendered the success of the project somewhat doubtful. He had hardly got the dam com- pleted and the mill in operation when the treacherous bottom gave way, and the labor and hopes of many months were apparently annihilated, but not so in the mind of the indefatigable proprietor. He immediately repaired the damage and resumed business, when away went the water supply again, and away went the hopes of everyone but himself in the ultimate success of the enter- prise. Again was the dam repaired, and again swept away, by which time Mr. Sturte- vant, concluding he had lost enough by building on so uncertain a foundation, aban- doned the project and his expensive saw mill to oblivion and decay.
Meanwhile Mr. Sturtevant had been lum- bering to some extent in winter, and farming in summer. Not long after the events just narrated, and soon after harvest, his barn took fire and was consumed, with the year's crops, together with a valuable young horse. The barn was immediately replaced, but Mr. Sturtevant soon after took up a larger farm, engaged in agriculture on a heavier scale, took to himself a wife, and rapidly advanced, both in prosperity and posterity.
In 1861 the dreadful scourge of diphtheria
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broke out in his infant family, and swept away his young wife and five children, leaving only the youngest, a boy babe of one year, as an inducement for the half-distracted father longer to live. But employment of the hands is a great regulator of the mind, and Mr. Sturtevant, by plunging desperately into the cares and duties of his several farms, avoided what under no worse circumstances has been the sad fate of thousands. He thenceforth recovered rapidly from his financial embar- rassments, came into possession of more real estate than any four other men on the river, and was virtually landlord and banker of the whole settlement. But misfortune had not yet lost sight of her favorite victim. In the autumn of 1879, again his well-filled barn and all his other buildings were burned to the ground, and not a cent of insurance was there to atone for the loss.
The calamity, however, bore not as heavily on him as those of previous years. His son had now become a substantial help in his business, and together they soon had a new and elegant set of buildings, including a barn one hundred feet long, and a small store building, now well filled with the great variety of goods indispensable to back-country trade. Mr. Sturtevant is now in his eighty-sixth year, hale and hearty, weighs as usual some- thing like two hundred and twenty-five pounds, drives his own team in summer or winter as occasion requires, attends church as often as opportunity offers, and is favorably known throughout a wide extent of country.
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CHAPTER XVIII
T HIS hasty and incomplete glance at the pioneer experience of the more prominent and best known of the Magalloway's early set- tlers is now nearly concluded, and "what shall I say more," for the time (and information) would fail me to tell of Jacob York, the son of Isaac, and of Joseph, the son of Jacob; of Richard Caldwell, George Tucker, Abel Heath, Simeon Shurtleff, Benjamin Knight, of David Lombard also, and of Samuel, and the Sawyers and Hibbards, who through faithfulness sub- dued forests, stopped the mouths of bears and wolves, quenched the violence of forest fires, escaped the edge of the tomahawk, and who wandered in deserts and mountains, being destitute, afflicted, and tormented by black flies and mosquitoes. And these all having obtained a good report through faithfulness, received not the promise, but having seen it afar off, were persuaded of, and embraced it, and declared plainly that they looked there for a better country.
BOSTON, MASS., March, 1904.
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SUPPLEMENT
A PERIOD of eleven years since the conclu- sion of the foregoing, has wrought some changes in the personnel of the community in question, some notice of which the subject seems properly to demand. The name of Stur- tevant, like those of Lombard, Sawyer and Hibbard, has now disappeared from the time- honored roll, and with only two exceptions, the name of Fickett also.
As to the family of John M. Wilson, the township, county and state, where for fifty years his name was familiar as household words, have now, for nearly a like period, known the same no more.
The family of the Linnells has now extended to its sixth generation, the first two in the settlement having lately become extinct by the death, at the age of eighty-six, of Lorenzo, the eldest son of the nonagenarian Israel T.
The redoubtable David M. Sturtevant departed in peace, on April 26, 1906, at his own sumptuous home, at the age of eighty- eight years. His only son and heir, a promi- nent lumber merchant and all 'round business man, now resides in Colebrook, N. H., where he took up his residence some three years since.
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The oldest continuous resident on the river, Mr. Elihu Leavit, departed this life December 1, 1907, eighty-four years from the time of his arrival there with his parents when but one year old.
The last surviving member of the first family in Lincoln Plantation, Mrs. Catherine I. Emmet, second daughter of Elder Richard Lombard, died in New York, no longer ago than October 31, 1912, at the age of ninety- eight years, - a lady whose period of existence more than spanned the entire age of the Magal- loway settlements. Of her five robust pioneer brothers, it is worthy of remark, that the old- est and ablest one of the number died in 1853, at the early age of forty-five, after only a few days' sickness with pneumonia. The second in years, Samuel, was instantly killed in 1842, while assisting in erecting one of his own farm buildings. The next younger, David S., died at a mature age while sitting at his writing desk in his home at Brewer, Me. The fourth of the brotherhood, Richard Franklin Lom- bard, formerly a veteran of the New Bedford whaling expeditions, is said to have dropped dead in a street near his home in Wilmington, Del., at near the age of eighty years; while Henry, the youngest of the family, was fatally shot, by an accident, near his residence in Des Moines, Iowa. Hardly, if one, bearing the name of Lombard, now remains of the beloved family of the patriarch Richard, to perpetuate his respected and venerated name.
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Automobiles and motorcycles have super- seded on the now unexceptionable Magalloway highways, the original ox-cart and one-horse wagon, and the traditional neighborhood gossip of the lady-settlers, as well as the busi- ness conferences of the sterner sex, is now carried on by telephone, from Parmachene Lake to Berlin Falls, and any required extent beyond. Not a vestige of dam, mill or bridge now remains where once "the rushing and the roar" of Wilson's Mills varied the monotonous murmur
"Of that stream whose sunny gleam cheered the little rural town."
The rushing and roar are now supplied in that immediate locality by the incessant activities of the present proprietor of the former mill-site, Mr. Walter Bucknam, who during the last thirty years has caused that rocky southern shore to rejoice and blossom as the rose, and who now rivals the former reputation of the heroic David Sturtevant, as the most indefatigable money-getter on the Magalloway River.
FINIS
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AZISCOOS DAM. FALLS OF THE MAGALLOWAY
Length, 881 feet. Height, 82 feet. Time occupied in building, three years. Area of flowage by same, 24 square miles.
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