USA > New Hampshire > Carroll County > Tamworth > The Tamworth narrative (New Hampshire) > Part 5
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TAMWORTH
Tamworth both east and north, and over on the north to where the lines are now established, and no land was ever sold by any other person (between s'd limits) in B or Eaton, but in a clandestine way."
We almost know Jere Gilman who thought to get free land in return for running the hoped-for new lines. Probably he was the one who started at the Jourdan tree. And we al- most hear the Widow Weed's clamor of injury because the town lines were not moved to improve her location.
The historian not in the confidence of these people pon- ders their motives a hundred and fifty years later. Henry Weed would no doubt have liked to vote in Tamworth as it was much nearer for him, and he and Blaisdell were working to- gether at the time in Tamworth Iron Works. Was there a split in the family? It was not Henry but the "Widow Weed" (his mother?), Elisha, and Daniel who thought themselves injured by the decision. Henry became afterward their most notable member. He must have moved down nearer the Works after he married, as the 1800 census taker lists him in that neighborhood. He appears often on town minutes and be- came Moderator as well as holding other offices. What his relation was to that other Henry Weed, son to Orlando, who remained in Sandwich and founded Weeds Mills is unde- termined.
As for Jacob Blaisdell, he must have been relieved to retain his Tamworth status. Then why had he acted as agent for Eaton in the dispute? Probably because among many other functions he was Eaton's Proprietor's Clerk and so an employee of Moulton's; and represented all three towns at the General Court. He may have regarded the question as a test case, anxious only to see it settled.
Losing their case, Eaton and Burton should have paid the costs of the futile proceedings, but the towns probably had no money. In the end Tamworth and Sandwich together magnanimously met the expenses of the committee, and the receipt is in Tamworth archives.
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Town Boundary Disputes
The costs were itemized, and we can see how much trouble and time Jonathan Moulton caused by his machina- tions. The Gilman family, then of much importance and value to the town, bore the brunt of the work. Captain Ben- jamin Gilman is down on the bill for making arrangements and going to Concord after papers; Colonel Jacob Gilman attended on the committee at Sandwich; Sam'l Gilman (no rank) also attended and "proccured evidence"; and Colonel David Gilman, that excellent first Gilman to settle, received "half his time travil as a wittness." Here is Benjamin's bill:
Cost Tamworth
Capt. Benjamin Gilman 9 days making ar- rangements self and horse and expenses $18.0
5 days self horse and sleigh going to Concord after papers and expenses 15.0
4 days attendance on Committee at Sandwich and expenses 8.0
To paid for papers at Concord 3.0
Paid for plan and surtificate from Merrell 3.0
Paid for Harvey's deposition 1.0
$48.0
Later they all put in another account for "sitting with meeting committee and expenses." The whole bill to Tam- worth was formidable for those times, $147.75, and to Sand- wich the same. Certainly the hand of Satan was plain. After this the boundary question subsided and every man plowed the acres that he had. In 1837 Tamworth dickered with Ossi- pee and acquired the north side of the Ossipee Mountains to go with the valley of the Bearcamp and enable farmers to vote in the nearer town. Part of this tract went back to Ossipee in 1859. Further slight additions to Tamworth on the northern boundary also "set over" some farms for voting purposes. After this the map was let be, and remained static to this day.
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The Hand of Satan - Jonathan Moulton
THIS JONATHAN MOULTON, carrying the honorifics of Esquire, Major, Colonel, and then General, when not named Satan himself, what sort of man was he? Replied a modern citizen of Moultonboro, "If he had lived today, they would probably have thought him just a clever business man, a local boy making good."
He began operating in the Sandwich valley in the 1770's. A Hampton boy, probably of poor parents, he had climbed the small business ladder up to a big business, and afterward administered his affairs from a mansion such as a boy of this type is sure to erect when he attains success. It is related that one source of his early revenues was buying salvage from ship- wrecks and retailing it, and that he once boasted he made a thousand guineas on one such bid. In swift succession he was made Colonel of Militia, and in the Revolution Brigadier- General. Before his popularity had waned he held important offices in Hampton and in state affairs and was chosen for almost any responsible emergency.
The excellent Governor William Plumer, however, in writing a short sketch of Jonathan Moulton, does not spare him. Though Moulton spent much money forming settlements and making and repairing roads, all useful to the state, his business reputation was not good, wrote the Governor.
He was suspected, and not without cause, of various kinds of unfair and dishonest management to acquire property. He was a man of considerate talents and of insinuating
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EARLY WALL by the Bennett House, Stevenson Hill Road
THE MILL AT BUTLER'S BRIDGE
The mill had had a succession of owners before a gale blew it down about 1908. A canal beside the Bearcamp River led the water to the wheel from a dam above. The sawmill was on the ground floor; upstairs was the shop where furniture, including perhaps an organ, was made.
SWIFT RIVER AT TAMWORTH BRIDGE
Stretched from one bank to the other, the dam made a large millpond for skating, shown as a lake in the 1860 map. The water was used by several mills.
The Hand of Satan
address, and uniformly flattered the vices and follies of mankind. . . . Those with whom he dealt most suffered the most by him. He attempted to corrupt judges, bribe jurors, suborn witnesses, and seduce counsel.
In the end he was unable to get justice himself, and died in a smother of lawsuits with not enough property left to pay his debts.
Up in the wilderness country where the pioneers work- ing so desperately to keep alive were governed by the strictest Puritan theology, this man would be simply detested. He was powerful, and the grumbling was not too open, but there are relished anecdotes such as this one: Moulton claimed for Moultonborough a Vittum farm on Vittum Hill in Sandwich (fifty-eight Vittum homesteads were in that section a little later ) in order to fulfill a requirement in his grant that fifty families should settle in Moultonborough within six years. Trying to eject this Vittum family on the ground that their Sandwich title was not valid, he appeared at the house with three armed men to drive them out and take possession. Mistress Sarah Vittum met them at the door with a kettle of boiling water; thus they were routed, and the farm title re- mained in the Vittum family.
There was at first but one representative to the General Court from the three towns, Moultonborough, Sandwich, and Tamworth, as customary where populations were small. Gen- eral Moulton appointed himself to the office, but as he was not a proprietor of Sandwich, Sandwich objected and elected its own representative. A long document obviously written by Moulton, who had more education than most of the settlers, vents anger at the Sandwich selectmen trying to dispossess him of his "right" to represent them at the Court, a "false and Scandalous Libel ... fabricated as a base and insidious Sub- terfuge to cover the Perfidy of the Select men of said Sand- wich ... . " He states as a good reason for retaining his seat that he owns five times the value of the estates of all the in- habitants of Sandwich, and as many more country seats within
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TAMWORTH
Tamworth and Moultonborough, at which "he usually re- sides." He denies that he has "distributed any victuals or Ligors with the least View of obtaining Votes; . .. But on the close of the Day of Election the Inhabitants of Moulton- borough and Tamworth being from their own Homes, pro- cured such Refreshment as they wanted at their own Cost & Charge, in a Sober and peacible Manner," and much more in the vein of righteous indignation over "any Captious select men find themselves disappointed in their own ambitious Views," and asking that those "officious select men . . . may be reprimanded." The selectmen of Sandwich were at that time the colleagues of the unexceptionable Daniel Beede, first settler and Town Clerk. Close scrutiny of the names of the supposedly outraged citizens appended to Moulton's protest shows that some of them, if other records are correct, must have been away fighting in the Revolutionary War.
Moulton tried continuing to take his legislative seat as formerly and had to be forcibly expelled. He was always moderator of the Proprietors' meetings and "kept it under short adjournments." He became Collector of Taxes of Moul- tonborough and then Treasurer, and was always securing another fifty pounds for "all the care and charges" he had been at, and calling meetings to have more money voted to him. He was quick with a public vendue when a man's taxes were unpaid, and the funds found their way into his hands. Most transactions for his northern townships seem to have been made in absentia down in Hampton. He kept the offices of Town Clerk and selectman in Moultonborough as long as he could (at one time the three selectmen were himself and two sons). Even Tamworth put him on a church committee two or three times, perhaps not to offend him. No one liked getting into trouble with him, as shown in this representation to the Proprietors :
July 16, 1777, Mr. Joshua Nichason and others are appre- hensive that by their Settlements under Col. Moulton in Tamworth that they have Got Beyond his Line, upon the
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The Hand of Satan
Proprietors Claim in the Ungranted lands therefore desire that If it shou'd Appear so that they have Got upon said Land, woud be Glad to be Quieted by the Proprietors upon Such Terms as they Can Agree.
In general Tamworth itself had no very acute grievances against Moulton, unless that he would not act on their petitions promptly. In having the township surveyed, he put his own initials down for what he regarded as the choicest plot, 640 acres overlooking Great Hill Pond, now in the Tozzer prop- erty. He never used it himself, and an odd circumstance is that the tract did not extend to the pond's edge but left 110 acres between his land and the pond. The early land-grabbers did not always guess correctly what would create ultimate values.
In every history of New Hampshire is the story of the fattened ox. Hoisting a British flag on the horns of an enor- mous ox of fourteen hundred pounds which he had fattened for the purpose, with fife and drum and a great procession General Moulton drove the animal to Portsmouth as a present for his dear friend Governor Wentworth. He would receive no compensation whatever of course, but if the Governor cared to give him charter to a small gore of land which he had found adjoining his Moultonborough, he would accept that. The Governor carelessly conferred on him some twenty- seven thousand acres, now the towns of Center Harbor and New Hampton.
A few years before General Moulton's decline and fall (1782), a new Proprietors' Clerk published a warning: "Whereas Jona. Moulton of Hampton in said State, hath lately advertised in the Boston & New Hamp Gazzets, sundry Lots of Land in the Townships as he calls them of Eaton, Tamworth etc & to which he has no just Title"- the caution follows to all persons against purchasing or trespassing on such lands.
Settlers being backward about coming to take up his land - perhaps they did not like what they heard - Moulton
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TAMWORTH
had final recourse to advertising in Ireland! He represented there that he had eighty thousand acres of which he wished to sell half, in the eight towns of Eaton, Burton, Tamworth, Moultonborough, New Hampton, Chatham, Piermont, and Orford, and that (in vague language) all aid and comfort would be given to "any Gentleman or Company wishing to embark" to this country.
The mansion in Hampton whence his works emanated is still known as the Haunted House. In its vast and numerous rooms the ghost walked, banged doors, etc .; finally the citizens brought a company of ministers who began at the attic and preached at the ghost, story by story, till they got him down to the cellar, where they built a wall in the corner and so walled him in, after which he bothered no more. This solu- tion was related by a descendant who rented the Fay house in Tamworth one summer. Jonathan's daughter Sally married a minister, and they have another descendant in Tamworth who lives in the very house of his ancestors. He agrees that it is highly interesting to have so shocking a colonial ancestor.
In Stephen Vincent Benet's The Devil and Daniel Web- ster, General Moulton is thinly disguised. Even more he is supposed to live in Whittier's The New Wife and the Old. A Treasury of New England Folklore gives the legend of Jona- than Moulton and the Devil, which, reduced to bareness, goes like this: Jonathan was visited by the Devil, down the chimney in a shower of sparks. The Devil dripped golden guineas, and Jonathan, bedazzled, signed the proffered scroll, giving his soul to become the richest man in the province. On the first day of every month, the visitor was to fill Jonathan's boots with golden coins. Jonathan got the largest jack boots he could find, hung them from the crane in his fireplace, and once a month emptied them into his coffers. Then becoming bolder, he cut out the soles of the boots, and the chimney and the room itself filled with guineas. When the Devil, trying to fill the boots regularly, discovered the trick, Hampton House
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The Hand of Satan
burned to the ground the same night, and not a vestige of gold could ever be found in the ruins.
No house in the area of Moulton's enterprises hereabouts appears to claim to have been a residence of his, though land lists with his name on them were overwhelming in length, and after his death there is a reference to him as "innholder in Moultonborough." All the "common lands" he had amassed were sold at vendue by his insolvent estate for one hundred dollars.
The first minister for his town, whom he himself had secured, was one of his unhappiest victims. This Reverend Jeremiah Shaw, whose house is now a neat and charming summer home on Route 107 at the corner of old Moulton- boro, writes in 1774, "Rec'd of Jona. Moulton four Dollars in Part Pay for Priching at Moultonborough Last Summer." This was while Jonathan was doing handsomely by himself. Two pathetic petitions to the Proprietors are from the same hand: one dated 1789 asks for the settlement of thirty pounds that was legally due him by their votes nine years before, whereof he had received nothing. He would gladly receive it in "nails of all sorts, glass 7 x 9, putty, white lead, stone, lime, hinges etc." Considering the time it has been due he thinks the gentlemen "cannot reasonably be offended at his now calling thus erneastly upon you therefor." Another petition two years later still draws their attention to the right of land reserved in the charter for the town's first legally settled minister, and "of which he has been deprived" except for "one mutilated lot," and again asks for the thirty pounds "generously voted by your honors," signing himself "your needy humble ser- vant." General Moulton had been dead three years, but the evil that he did was faithfully living after him.
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Basic Ingredients
IT HAS BEEN commonly supposed that Tamworth was named for Tamworth, England, though no one has known just why. In Massachusetts and other New England regions, numbers of early settlements were christened by homesick colonists after the places they had left behind overseas. But in this northern forest wilderness where Tamworth came to be, the earliest arrivals had usually moved up from other parts of New Eng- land or from nearby towns right in the Province, and they came to districts which though vacant were already named, in charters given by the English governors to groups of grantees. The charters were drawn up at Portsmouth, the governing seat - nearly two hundred of them in a whirlwind few years after the French and Indian wars were over. In Tamworth's case the grantees were sixty-three names inserted to comply with the legal requirements, thought to be chiefly residents of Portsmouth or Hampton, or their children or other- wise straw figures. A few in the list, such as Walter Bryant and his son and James Head, could have already taken up their land in the Tamworth area.
That the town had been plotted on the ground a year or two before being chartered was seen in John Bradley's affidavit, given on pages 50-51, where he testified that in 1764 or '65 he had in company with Abiel Chandler surveyor and others of Concord "assisted in Runing the out Lines of a Town" six miles square "since cal'd Tamworth." A neat plan in Volume XXVIII of the State Papers, evidently in the hand of the later surveyor Hersey, whose more detailed map of 1775 though less specific as to Tamworth's location is here repro-
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Basic Ingredients
duced (facing page 70), shows a square set against the Sand- wich line but otherwise in the midst of nothingness, labeled "Tamworth as it Was Run by one Chandler."
The chief agent in getting this plot definitely chartered so that he could begin operating it, like five or six other embryo towns which he came to handle, was that Jonathan Moulton of humble origin, fast rising in the notice of Governor Benning Wentworth, who became their de facto Proprietor. It was not accident that named one of the towns for himself.
All three Wentworths who in succession governed the Province of New Hampshire in the eighteenth century were jealous upholders of the British political system and its world, from which they derived office. And where would most of the names be found for all the new grants in this New England that were crowding to be issued, unless out of the governors' wide backgrounds in England? Many charter names could naturally be from English towns: Plymouth, Canterbury, New London, Salisbury, and so on, and some were frankly named for the Wentworths' own relatives, like Francestown and Deer- ing (Frances Deering being the wife of Governor Sir John Wentworth), and like Rockingham, Effingham, Strafford, all titles in the Wentworth connection, or like Bennington itself. In some cases the name could have been suggested by either the town or the peer: Conway, Lancaster, Sandwich, etc. All the first five counties in the Province were named by Governor Sir John for his personal friends: Rockingham, Strafford, Hillsboro, Grafton, and Cheshire.
But numbers of the place names in both New Hampshire and Vermont which appeared in the eighteenth century char- ters were those simply of great personages in England during the Wentworths' period, especially Governor Benning Went- worth's twenty-five years of office. Some of our earliest towns became Marlborough, Amherst, Boscawen, Wolfeboro, com- memorating great soldiers all, or Walpole, Bedford, Chatham, Pittsfield, great political influences favorable to the colonial in- terests.
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TAMWORTH
Friendship or mere snobbery must also account for a large percentage, however. If you as Governor received a kind letter from some higher-up back home, why wouldn't you mount his name into one of the charters you were granting that same day? Any English milord might be pleased to have six miles square of forest given his name, with its chance of becoming a future metropolis, and he might remember the thoughtful colonial official more carefully in consequence. In this way there was an Admiral Shirley of the British Navy at the time, whose titles were Earl Ferrers and Viscount Tam- worth, both now extinct, I gather. It is not too much to guess that he figured in Benning's mind when our charter came up. This is more likely than that anyone at the Governor's busi- ness office at the time was interested in a not large Stafford- shire town associated with a fine breed of hogs. Or did the hogs originate later? In any case Tamworth is a better mouth- ful than Ferrers; it may have been a near thing. The other Tamworths in the world, one in Canada, one in Australia, and a small post-office in Virginia, were not yet born.
Many of the original names were changed later on, when all things that savored of British connections were out of favor, and new personages in America required honoring: Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Jackson, and the like. But Tamworth has never changed its name nor has Sandwich. Nearly every pond, lake, and river, however, has been rechristened one or more times to or from the Indian version, until at last in the present time the Geological Survey quadrangle maps seem to have fixed all designations permanently. Spelling of names has also gradually changed. No spelling could be very settled when only here and there some citizen could write; he who tried writing put down a name as it sounded, so that the sixty-eight variants of the word Pequaket or Pigwacket collected by the Conway historian Evans was merely typical. The word Cho- corua has always been a sticker for strangers and was worse for the pioneers. On James Hersey's survey map of 1775 it is written Jo Coway, a pretty good stab at how it sounded to
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Basic Ingredients
him. Zecoroway has been found in old papers. Corway was a frequent spelling until recently.
Tamworth's Charter granted in 1766 may have been the last official act of Benning Wentworth, for at about this time he was eased out of the governorship he had held for twenty- five years, chiefly for having granted sixty-eight towns across the Connecticut River, now in the state of Vermont, which were not strictly his to grant. It had been such a simple way for him to make money. There was little precedent for careful honesty in administration of remote unsettled colonies. Ben- ning's nephew John had been trying for some time to get the authorities in England to do something about various glaring irregularities, without, however, meaning to injure his uncle's reputation. When John was at length appointed instead, no great improvement might have been expected. But Sir John Wentworth's history is a surprise. He filled his office well even by standards of a later day, and New Hampshire had such absence of grievances under his rule that the era was slow to get stirred up over the events before the Revolution.
Tamworth had and still has within its boundaries a sur- prising variety in topography. At the very beginning, settle- ment flowed naturally into five quite distinct sections where conditions were the most favorable. Little communities grew up under separate names and with differing historical person- alities. The community of Tamworth village at the center; the community of South Tamworth and Whittier along the Bearcamp River and up into the Ossipee Hills; the community of Chocorua with the lake in it; the community of Stevenson Hill on the west and of Wonalancet high in the northwest corner under the Sandwich Range - all are comprised within the township of Tamworth. Nowadays in times of quick trans- portation the five fifths can feel their unity. Children go in buses to one central school. Parents who belong to one P.T.A., vote between other engagements in the one Town House, use the garage of their preference regardless of neighborhood, and shop impartially wherever they happen to be - these joint
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TAMWORTH
usages practised together by all parts of town were unimagined in early times. Every farm was then a practically self-sustain- ing unit. A one-room school, a church, a blacksmith shop, and later a mill were all near by, and no one needed anything else.
In this way certain families founded by early settlers have always been chiefly associated with a specific part of town. The Mason family, for example, chiefly bespeaks South Tam- worth, as do the names Meader, Folsom, Downs, Ames. Chocorua suggests Nickerson, Roberts and Robertson, Moore, Hayford. Wonalancet nourished Curriers, Tiltons, Bickfords. And the Gilman, Hidden, Evans, Wiggin, families, for instance, seem to have been mainly from the village in the center. These divisions must not be too arbitrary, for some names have been widely disseminated, like the Whitings, Moultons, Perkinses, and Berrys.
Carefully preserved in all accounts are the names of four men called "first" who came to pitch (or "make a pitch") in Tamworth five or six years after the Charter. Only one of these, William Eastman, remained; he filled offices, and was a deacon throughout his life, which meant a pillar of society. His final house is now the Hendersons' on Cleveland Hill Road. A second, David Philbrick, pitched at the upper end of what is still called the Philbrick Neighborhood, on the spot where the Engelmann house on the Fowlers Mills Road has lately been torn down (in the Forrester Clark family). This Philbrick was killed by the fall of a tree. His brother Jonathan is known to folklore as the man who brought corn meal on his back all the way from Gilmanton and killed fourteen bears in one season, both items recorded. The Philbrick family name is one of those that has "daughtered out," but relatives survive, Gilmans and Kimballs among them. The best-known Phil- brick was Stephen who ran the mill on Swift River a little above Tamworth bridge in the middle of the last century. His hundredth birthday was celebrated in 1871 by the whole town at the meetinghouse. The third, Jonathan Choate, pitched at what is now the Durrell cellar hole near the foot of
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