USA > New Hampshire > Hillsborough County > Weare > The history of Weare, New Hampshire, 1735-1888 > Part 21
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51 | Part 52 | Part 53 | Part 54 | Part 55 | Part 56 | Part 57 | Part 58 | Part 59 | Part 60 | Part 61 | Part 62 | Part 63 | Part 64 | Part 65 | Part 66 | Part 67 | Part 68 | Part 69 | Part 70 | Part 71 | Part 72 | Part 73 | Part 74 | Part 75 | Part 76 | Part 77 | Part 78 | Part 79 | Part 80 | Part 81 | Part 82 | Part 83 | Part 84 | Part 85 | Part 86 | Part 87 | Part 88 | Part 89 | Part 90 | Part 91 | Part 92 | Part 93 | Part 94 | Part 95 | Part 96 | Part 97 | Part 98 | Part 99 | Part 100 | Part 101 | Part 102 | Part 103 | Part 104 | Part 105 | Part 106 | Part 107 | Part 108 | Part 109 | Part 110
NATHANIEL PEASLEE, from Newton, settled on lot 78, range 7, Craney hill. He had a family of nine children, all born in Newton but one. His eldest son, Jonathan Peas- lee, married Hannah Hunt. Jonathan fell down the cellar stairs in 1794 and broke his neck. Hannah lived a widow sixty-seven years, and died about 1861, aged more than one hundred years.
JOHN MUZZY, from Hampstead, settled on lot 74, range 7, the same lot as Caleb Emery. He was a carpenter and joiner, a good workman and had a nice set of tools. He served in the Revolution, and one season went under General Sullivan in the Rhode Island expedition.
ABNER HOIT, originally from Poplin, now Fremont, bought Jacob Straw's home- farm, lot 93, range 7. He came from Hopkinton to Weare, and spent the rest of his days at the Straw place. His son, Aaron Hoit, succeeded liim.
SAMUEL AYERS, of Weare, settled on the south half of lot 91, range 7, Sugar hill. He bought one-half of the lot south of the road of Ebenezer Collins, paid him £223 old tenor, and built liis house on the north-east corner. In 1791 he sold to Jonathan Edmunds, of Salisbury point, for £270 lawful money. The farm remained in the Ed- munds family for three generations.
12
178
HISTORY OF WEARE, NEW HAMPSHIRE.
[1775.
JONATHAN MARTIN, from Goffstown, settled on lot fifty-one, range three, and built his house on the north end of it. He was probably a brother of Nathaniel, the first settler. Before the town was settled, Jonathan used to come to Weare hunting. He was a very strong, spry man. Once the Indians followed him to make him their prisoner. He fortunately discovered them, ran, and when they were almost upon him escaped by leaping twenty-five feet across the Piscataquog. At raisings he would easily jump from one high beam to another, twelve to fifteen feet, never making a miss or losing a foot-hold. He was a tithing-man, selectman in 1780, and one of a committee of three to settle with the soldiers who served in the Revolutionary war.
ROBERT GOODALE, a Quaker, from Salem, Mass., September, 1775, settled on lot fifty-four, range three. He spent his days there, and was buried in the Friends' burying-ground. He had been a sea- captain ; the war interfered with his business and he turned farmer. He was the grandfather of Hon. John H. Goodale, of Nashua. The new settlers were few this year, owing to war times .*
JONATHAN OSBORN came early in 1776. He did not sign the Association Test, classing himself as a Quaker. Along with him came his wife Esther, and they had several children. He lived on lot twenty-eight, range four.
JAMES HOGG, 1776, son-in-law of Benjamin Page, settled on lot eighty-nine, range seven, east of Sugar hill, where Benjamin Collins had lived. In 1777 he sold this farm to Robert Hogg, Jr., of Weare, and moved to Dunbarton.
TRISTRAM COLLINS, 1777, a Quaker, from Hawke, now Danville, settled on lot twenty-one, range six, in the Piscataquog valley. It is told of him that he was a very absent-minded man, that he went to a Quaker meeting one day and knocked. That knock broke the solemn silence of the church ; it created a great sensation. Elijah Purington went out to see who knocked. Mr. Collins had to apolo- gize, he said if his mind had been where it ought to have been he should not have knocked. But it was dwelling on secular affairs, and so he knocked. Mr. C. found growing on his farm huge pines with the king's broad arrow mark on them, and great stumps where masts had been cut and hauled away years before his settlement.
* DANIEL PEARSONS, of Berwick, Me., settled on lot 91, range 7. He bought forty- five acres of this lot on the road north of Sugar hill for £120 lawful money. EZRA PILLSBURY settled on lot 91, range 7. He bought a part of it for £135 lawful money, built the large house now standing and there spent the rest of his days.
179
THE OLDEN TIMES.
1770.]
Hundreds of other families sat down in Weare as the long years of the eighteenth century passed slowly, but it would be imprac- ticable to give a particular account of all of them in this brief history.
CHAPTER XVII. THE OLDEN TIMES.
OUR early settlers, as has been told, resided in log cabins. They procured their food by tilling the land, hunting and fishing. They were rude farmers. At first they could not plow their fields, by reason of the stumps and logs. They dug the soil and hoed in their seed with a clumsy hoe, made by the common blacksmith. It had a great eye for the coarse handle fastened in with a wedge, and it was edged with steel. It required herculean strength to wield it. When they got ploughs they were home-made, carpenters furnish- ing the wood-work, and blacksmiths the plow-irons. These plows had wooden mould-boards covered with bits of sheet-iron or tin to keep them from wearing out, and a steel or iron point, which often had to be carried to the blacksmith to be sharpened. They had no carts, and the manure, shoveled with coarse wooden shovels, was borne to the field in rough hods, or lugged in baskets on their shoulders. The blacksmith made their scythes, very heavy and uncouth, their snaths were straight sticks or some natural bend from the woods; their pitch-forks were heavy, bungling things, and their hay and other crops were drawn on the bare ground to their log barns with heavy ox-sleds, or carried in on poles, "poled in," by two men. They threshed with a clumsy flail, and win- nowed with the wind, the grain falling upon sheets spread on the ground, and the chaff flying away. The women and girls often worked in the fields. They could drive oxen, hold plow, shovel, plant potatoes and corn, hoe, mow, reap and bind, harvest, take care of the barn and split wood at the door as well as the men. Mrs. Nathaniel Fifield used to go into the burnt piece, on Sugar hill, and help clear the land. She would say : "Get out of the way here, you lazy devils ; see what a woman can do"; and then the great logs went " spry " into piles for burning.
180
HISTORY OF WEARE, NEW HAMPSHIRE.
[1770.
But often farm products were scanty. Game from the woods and fish from the ponds, streams and Amoskeag falls were then a great help. Moose, deer, bears, " coons," turkeys and the smaller game were all cooked and eaten. For a quarter of a century, it is said, John Hodgdon and Samuel Philbrick were the only citizens who were able to have domestic meat on the table every day in the week.
At first, their facilities for cooking were very rude, it having to be done by the fire in the great, stone fire-place. They had a stout lug-pole, made of the greenest beech or maple, to which they attached the pot-hooks and trammels, so constructed that they could be made long or short, and on these were hung the pots, kettles and large, iron pans. These were lifted on and off with a long lever. In them they boiled the potatoes, garden vegetables, the salt beef and moose meat. Haunches of delicate venison, fat, juicy quarters of the bear, whole "coons," woodchucks and wild turkeys, when they had them, were generally roasted. These were hung by a stout cord to the oaken mantel-piece in front of the hot fire, a drip- ping-pan was placed beneath, and one of the children with a long stick made the roast revolve, cooking it on all sides alike. When the string was once hard twisted it would unwind and wind itself up, requiring but very little work to tend it. Small pieces of meat and fish with salt pork were fried in a long-legged spider placed over a bed of hot coals raked out on the hearth. When in a hurry a bannock, made of meal and water, was baked on a green, maple chip set close up before the fire, and potatoes were roasted in hot ashes, covered with glowing coals; what a delicious smell when they were raked out !
A little later, and the farmers built Dutch ovens of stone and clay, out doors, on the top of a great stump cut evenly for the pur- pose, and in it the housewife baked bread, cakes, pies, beef, geese, turkeys, chicken-pies so appetizing, and pork and beans. In winter, when the great fires of oak and rock-maple were blazing, they used the old-style tin kitchen, always scoured bright, and in it the johnny- cakes were baked. These had to be turned, and the skilled cook, face red from the heat, with a flourish would do it quick as a flash. When brick chimneys were built they had the great, brick oven, so convenient, and in the fire-place over the fire the iron crane super- seded the lug-pole. It was fastened to one side of the chimney jamb, and its long arm was swung off or over the fire as was de- sired, with the pot-hooks and trammels attached.
181
FOOD AND DRESS OF THE OLDEN TIMES.
1770.]
But most of the time the food of the first settlers was very plain. They only had delicacies occasionally. Salt pork was plenty, and with boiled potatoes was made into hash for breakfast, and all ate it from a great, pewter platter. For supper they often had a bowl of " scalt milk " with a brown crust. The most common dish of those times was bean porridge. It was made by boiling the beans very soft, thickening the liquor with a little meal and adding a piece of pork to season it. A handful of corn was often put in. When the good man was going away in winter to work, with his team, the wife would make a bean porridge, freeze it with a string in it so he could hang it on one of the sled stakes, and when he was hungry he would break off a piece and melt and eat it. They also had samp or hominy and barley broth, which they ate with milk from a large, wooden bowl, with wooden spoons to bring it to their mouths, all standing around it. They had no table-cloths, no plates, no knives and forks; they took their meat in their fingers and cut it with their teeth. There were no tumblers, no cups and saucers, no pass the tea and coffee, but it was please pass the mug, and in the last, as soon as they had orchards, was plenty of cider. In many families there was no such thing as sitting down to the table. They stood around the board; and, when the food would admit of it, they took what they wished in their hands and sat by themselves and ate it.
The early settlers dressed in homespun or in the skins of wild beasts. Each farmer in the old days raised his " patch " of flax, and every autumn came the pulling, rotting, breaking, swingling and combing. Without it they could not have clean sheets and pillow- slips, nor coarse or fine towels, nor white shirts or white handker- chiefs, and no clean white dresses. Some men were very expert in caring for flax. They could pull and spread it neatly, thresh off the seed so well, and rot it just right. They were strong to break it in the "flax-break," and could swingle forty pounds a day on the swingling board. It required skill to comb it, get out the tow and make it ready for the distaff. Many women took in flax to spin, and the buzzing of the linen-wheel was music in the humble kitchen. Smart spinners could spin " two double skeins " in a day. Neigh- bors often carried their linen-wheels and flax when they went visiting, and spun and chatted at the same time.
When the cloth was woven it was " bucked and belted " with a maple beetle on a smooth flat stone. Then it was washed and spread out on the grass or bushes to bleach and whiten. Small girls spun
T
182
HISTORY OF WEARE, NEW HAMPSHIRE.
[1770.
swingling tow into wrapping twine, and with it bought notions down country. Older girls made "all tow," "tow and linen," or "all linen stuff" to barter for their fixing-out. Boys had stout, tow trousers and short frocks for summer wear. They were cheap and durable.
Some settlers began to keep sheep very early, but they were greatly annoyed by wolves, bears and other wild animals, which often made fearful inroads upon the flocks. Other settlers got their wool from the older towns. The women carded it with hand cards. It was hard work, and to make it cheerful they had carding-bees, or wool-breakings. To spin it was as much work as to card it, and a woman's " stent " was to spin five skeins a day, for which the usual price was fifty cents a week and board. It was woven in the old, hand loom. The common color was " sheep's gray," the wool of a black sheep and that of a white one being carded, spun and woven together. It was made into " sheep's gray short frocks," trousers and vests. The sheep had coarse wool, but the women picked out the finest and made cloth for their short, woolen gowns and their under garments, and the nicest was for neck handkerchiefs and infants' wear. The women, in winter, wore baize, dyed with green or red. Sometimes they made heavy, waled cloth and dyed it with bark at home. When stores were opened in the valley, the good wife bought indigo and set up a blue vat in the form of a " dye tub," and then what a sweet smell when she wrung out the mittens, stockings, and the blue yarn for the frocking that soon came into fashion ! The blue frock was one of the best and handiest of gar- ments. It was whole in front, put on over the head, came below the knees and was gathered about the waist with a belt. The color was a medium blue, striped with a white thread. So generally was it worn, that it was said that when the minister prayed at town. meeting a " square acre " of blue frocking rose up before him. But many of the settlers still wore moose-hide trousers,* and every man had his leather apron that came down nearly to his feet. One man on Burnt hill dressed entirely in skins, and was known as Jim Brown, the leather wearer.
Most of the settlers in winter wore caps of home make. The best ones were of the skins of the wolf, bear, fox and raccoon, and
* The cost of moose-hide breeches can be seen by the following: " Thursday, Oct. 31st, 1776. Agreed with Mr. Dan' Gilman for 100 coarse Moosc Hide Breeches, at 18s." - N. H. Hist. Coll., vol. vii, p. 63.
183
CUSTOMS OF THE OLDEN TIMES.
1770.]
poorer ones of the cat, rabbit and woodchuck. Lappets were sewed on to them to protect the ears in cold weather. Some had wool hats, and it is told how David Green, a snug, thrifty farmer, one autumn was sadly in want of a new hat. He had no money and would not run in debt. So he took his best sheep, sheared it, and had a fine, new, felt hat made from the wool. But he had to care- fully blanket the shorn lamb all winter.
The men who felled the forest and cleared the land had no three- cornered, cocked hats, tightly fitting small clothes, and silver knee and shoe buckles. These came with Weare's second generation. Old men, now living, can remember how David Chase, Nathan Chase, Samuel Brooks Tobie and some others used to wear the shoe and knee buckles, long stockings and short breeches, and they tell how fine they looked with their continental coats, huge, frilled shirt- bosoms and powdered wigs.
The Friends wore drab suits ; men had broad-brimmed hats, and women plain, becoming bonnets. Suspenders were not allowed. One man wore tow strings crossed over his shoulders to keep his trousers up. A committee of the brethren labored with him, and urged, among other reasons against suspenders, that he was encour- aging the papacy by having a cross on his back. But in time this innovation prevailed.
The Weare people generally, at first, were also opposed to um- brellas, and the Friends particularly so. Two young Quaker ladies, by the name of Green, went to Massachusetts, purchased two cotton ones and brought them home. Their appearance created a great excitement. The Friends said it was an indulgence in sinful vanity and a defiance of Providence to intercept the rain which was sent from heaven. Sober-minded people of other denominations consid- ered it a dangerous innovation. But their great convenience was soon appreciated, and they came into general use.
Many of the early housewives were very neat. They kept their rude floors scoured white, and nicely sanded, their ceilings made of matched pine boards, each two or three feet wide and brought up from Goffstown before our mills were built, so clean and shin- ing that one could almost see his face in them ; their " dressers," that extended from floor to ceiling, and gleamed with mugs, basins and great platters, all of pewter, white and free from dust ; and their towels, sheets and pillow-cases, all linen made with their own hands, were of spotless purity.
184
HISTORY OF WEARE, NEW HAMPSHIRE.
[1770.
They had no pictures, vases or bric-a-brac, but the powder-horn and shot-bag hung on their peg, the gun rested in the forked branches fastened up with wooden pins; and the poles overhead, on iron hooks in the great beams, had hanging on them hats, feet- ing, stockings, mittens, cloth, clothing and yarn at all seasons, and in autumn they were festooned with long strings of peeled, quar- tered and cored apples, and rings of pumpkin, drying.
In the old times when there were no friction matches, they had to be very careful of their fire and not let it go out. It was very diffi- cult to rekindle it ; they had to use the flint and steel with punk or tinder, or flash powder with tow in the pan of the old-fashioned, flint- lock gun, or often travel half a mile to a neighbor's for a live coal. Old folks now living remember of being sent, when children, with two dry sticks, with which to carry it, to borrow fire of a neighbor. Each night it was the last care before going to bed to bury a good, hard-wood, live brand in the ashes. Then in the morning the good man would shovel out the fire-place, roll in the great back-log, put a fore-stick front of it, a stone under each end to keep it up, rake open the bed of glowing coals, place on them the kindlings, cob- house fashion, and soon there would be a roaring, crackling flame leaping up the great chimney flue. When Abraham Green moved into the Caleb Atwood house on Mount Dearborn, one cold winter day, he found in the fire-place a bed of live coals, covered up with ashes, and with them he lighted the fire. Widow Josiah Dearborn, Mr. Green's daughter, when eighty-eight years old, well recollected the day they moved in and the bed of glowing coals on the hearth.
Some of the large, old-fashioned kitchens were very cold in zero weather. Then the long settle, with very high back, which nearly every farmer had, was drawn up close to the fire, and seated on that, they managed to keep one side roasting warm, while the other shivered with cold. Often, in very severe weather, they partitioned off a little room round the fire-place, by hanging quilts from the ceiling to the floor, and in it kept tolerably comfortable.
People took pains to gather pitch-knots and birch-bark, for evening use. They furnished a good light, by which to knit and shell corn, and for the studious youth, crouching in the chimney corner, to learn his lesson. Lucifer matches, one of the greatest inventions, came about 1830. Stoves soon followed, giving no light. Then came the sperm-oil lamp, superseding the tallow dip; then the burning fluids with numerous fatal explosions, followed by the
ODIORNE
1. 2020
MT. LOVELL.
HOME OF SARAH DEARBORN. FOR . 85 . YEARS.
SOUTHERN VIEW.
NORTHERN
VIEW LAFAYETTE.
WASHINGTON
MOOSILAUKL
CROTCHETTE MOUNTAIN.
4
185
THE PINE TREE RIOT.
1770.]
kerosene oil lamps, the cheapest, best and most extensively used light in the world.
Clocks and watches were scarce a hundred years ago. It is said one man in town, Jacob Straw, had a clepsydra or water-clock, and also an excellent sun-dial ; Josiah G. Dearborn has the latter now. Many others had sun-dials. Most built their houses square with the sun, and had a noon-mark on the window-sill, which would be right once a day when the sun shone. A few had hour-glasses, but they required to be carefully watched and turned on the instant. Small, four-minute ones were excellent to time the boiling of eggs. Clocks came about 1810. Jesse Emery and Abner Jones were the first clock makers in Weare. The latter made excellent brass clocks, running at this day as well as ever, and some that he made have been sold as high as a hundred dollars.
Their first vehicles, as we have seen, were jumpers or horse-bar- rows. With these, they could go anywhere in the woods, where a horse could make his way. Then came the ox-sled, used on bare ground, followed very early by the rude cart over the rough roads and in the stumpy fields. Two-wheeled vehicles, on which they could ride, came a little later, and soon the chaise, with top square as a box, and long, clumsy thills. Light wagons were scarce in Weare till about 1815. At first, the body sat solid on the axles, and rattled terribly driving over the stony roads; then they had leathern thor- ough-braces, a great improvement, and these were followed in late years by steel springs, making the model, modern wagon.
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE PINE TREE RIOT.
KING WILLIAM and Queen Mary, in granting lands in America, 1690, reserved all white-pine trees above twenty-four inches in diameter, fit for masting the royal navy.
The Parliament of England, in the reign of George I, enacted a law, 1722, making it a penal offence to cut white-pine trees in our province without his majesty's royal license. The fine for cutting " any white-pine tree of the growth of twelve inches diameter and
-
186
HISTORY OF WEARE, NEW HAMPSHIRE.
[1772.
under at three foot from the earth " was £5 for every such tree; from twelve to eighteen inches, £10; eighteen to twenty-four, £20; · and twenty-four and more, £50, and all lumber made from such trees was forfeited to the king. If the offender did not pay the fine, then he was to be put in prison and kept there till his majesty's officers should see fit to let him out. The General Court of New Hampshire gave its sanction to this law .*
The Lord Proprietors, who bought out John Tufton Mason, re- served in their grant of Robiestown "all white-pine trees fit for masting the Royal Navy."
Gov. Benning Wentworth, in his charter for the incorporation of Weare, 1764, said : " Always reserving to us, our heirs and succes- sors all white-pine trees that are or shall be found growing or being on the said tract of land fit for the use of our Royal Navy."
Under Gov. Benning Wentworth the law was not rigorously enforced. In new towns but little attention was paid to it; in the old towns, just enongh was done to keep the masts for the king. Benning Wentworth resigned in 1766.
John Wentworth was made governor in his stead, and was also appointed "SURVEYOR OF THE KING'S WOODS." He soon saw that a generous revenue could be had from the white-pine tree law, and he at once began to collect it. He appointed deputies in all places where the white-pine grew in plenty, and he acted himself in the old towns.
And now, by the law, the new settler, before he could build his cabin and clear his land, had to get a deputy to put the broad arrow mark on all the king's pine trees that were to be kept for masts, and then a royal license to cut the rest, for all which he had to pay a good, round sum. If this was not done, the land-owner might be arrested and fined before he had got the " pole and bark roof " on his cabin, or his chimney of " cobbles and clay " topped out, could they but find a white-pine log in his cabin walls.
The law soon became very unpopular with all classes; mill owners wanted the trees to saw ; farmers, to build dwellings and barns, and ministers, for nice, new meeting-houses.
A favorite method with the surveyor and his deputies was to visit the mill yards and if they found any white-pine logs to put the broad arrow mark on each, and the same were the king's. When
* Laws of 1771.
187
SAMUEL BLODGET, ESQ.
1772.]
this was done the owner dared not touch a log. Governor Went- worth rode in his coach with a servant to drive when he attended to these duties. The logs thus seized were libelled in the vice- admiralty court, the owners cited to come in by a notice in some newspaper, and if they did not pay a large sum to settle, which was what the governor and his deputies most desired, the logs were sold at public auction, the proceeds, after paying the costs, turned into his majesty's treasury, and the offenders fined.
John Sherburn, a deputy " Surveyor of the King's Woods," came to the Piscataquog valley in the winter of 1771-2. He found a large lot of white-pine logs at Richards', Pattee's and Dow's mills ; two hundred and seventy at Clement's mill in Weare (Oil Mill vil- lage), and one hundred and fifty-four at Job Rowles' mill in Dun- barton. He thought the trees, from which they were cut, fit to mast the " royal navee " and that they were " The King's White Pine Trees." They were at once libelled in the vice-admiralty court and advertised in the New Hampshire Gazette,* Feb. 7, 1772, at Portsmouth; the log-cutters being cited to come in and show cause why the same should not be forfeited.
Samuel Blodget, Esq., of Goffstown, was sent by the mill owners to Portsmouth to settle. The governor fell in love with him at first sight, won him over to his side and, Feb. 11th, made him a deputy "Surveyor of the King's Woods." He gave him a long commission, t and by it a large territory to look after. They
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.