Tag: Chadbournes

Most of my ancestors crossed an ocean for God. William Chadbourne crossed it for a paycheck. He was a carpenter — a housewright, in the period word, the man you hired to frame a building and have it still be standing the following winter.

On 16 March 1634 he put his name to a contract with Captain John Mason’s Laconia Company, a London joint-stock outfit chasing profit on the New England coast. The deal was to come to Berwick, build a sawmill and a grist mill, run them on shares for five years, and at the end walk away with fifty acres on a long lease for three bushels of corn a year.

William said “hey, why not?” then boarded a ship called the Pied Cow with two other carpenters — James Wall and John Goddard — and landed at the falls in July 1634. The Chadbournes were Church of England, not dissenters. They hadn’t come to build a shining city on a hill, they’d come to build a mill on a river.

Two weeks off the boat, they started cutting timber at the falls the Wabanaki called Asbenbedick, and what they put up there is, by the honest accounting, the first water-powered sawmill in New England. (Occasionally, people call it the first sawmill in America, but that seems a stretch given Jamestown/1607 wasn’t exactly built with bricks.)

He had done his homework before getting here. In 1631 a letter out of London notes a scale model of a sawmill going across on an earlier voyage — a little wooden demo of the thing, sent ahead so the men on the ground would know what they were looking at when the real mill went up.

So New England’s first sawmill arrived the way a lot of things still do: as a demo unit, shipped across the Atlantic to an audience you could fit in one boat. Some assembly required, carpenter sold separately, arriving 1634.

And then the thing he built became the blueprint of the engine that drove the entire region. Those falls became the center of the regional lumber trade: the boards that framed Portsmouth and Kittery and the Berwicks, the masts that went out to the Royal Navy, came off mills built and rebuilt at the gorge for generations.

He didn’t found a colony. He built the machine the colony grew up around. He just wasn’t around to see it.

Mason died. The Laconia Company lost its money and its nerve. And William Chadbourne … disappeared. He has no death record. Not in Maine, not in England. The last time the paperwork sees him is a petition at Kittery on the twentieth of December, 1652. That’s not a death date. That’s a last-seen. He deeded his homestead to his son-in-law and walked off the edge of the documentation, presumably back to England for a quiet death, but honestly we have absolutely no clue.

In 1651 the town of Kittery granted the privilege at the falls to Richard Leader, late of the Saugus Iron Works, who took over the site and staffed it with Scotsmen — Dunbar prisoners, shipped over as bonded labor after Cromwell broke their army. Leader put in a gang of up to twenty saws, and it was his bigger operation, not William’s, that gave the place and the river the name they still carry: Great Works.

Most of my ancestors crossed an ocean for God, and they got the sermons and the meetinghouses and the Thanksgiving. William Chadbourne crossed it on a contract, built the one structure the region couldn’t have done without, and left before the paint dried.

History remembers the pilgrims. The town remembers the sawmill.

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The history of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, is complicated, and no two accounts agree. But, for a long time, the legend has put my great-nth-grandfather at the center of it.

Humphrey Chadbourne (1615–1667) — or maybe his father William (1582–1652) — built the first house in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and everything that’s there now grew up around it.

The story goes that he came over a housewright, which in 1631 was the top of the carpenter’s trade. They were the men you trusted not just to nail boards together but to raise a frame that would still be standing when your grandchildren were old. Captain John Mason’s Laconia Company had a charter, a stretch of riverbank, and a stand of wild strawberries that gave the place its name. What it didn’t have was a single permanent English building. It needed one, and it needed it to be good, because a real house is how you tell a coastline you’re not leaving. They gave the job to Chadbourne.

He built the Great House on the slope above the water — a store below, lodging above, the headquarters of the whole venture. Oak frame, mortise and tenon, pinned and joined to stand against everything the North Atlantic could throw up the river, which over the next century was plenty. It held. The men who’d crossed an ocean on a company’s promise now had a roof that meant the promise was real. The settlement had a center. It had a beginning. And the beginning had Chadbourne’s hands on it.

He didn’t stop at one house. The man who built the first building went on to help build the colony around it. He bought land up the Piscataqua and dealt with the sachems who held it, on terms steady enough that he traded with them for years. He kept the town’s records as clerk. He sat as selectman, then went down to the General Court as a deputy, then took the bench as an associate judge under Massachusetts. He married Lucy Treworgye and raised a houseful of children at Sturgeon Creek. When he died in 1667 he was one of the substantial men of the river — his will written from the Parish of Unity, his estate large enough to take real time to inventory properly.

That’s the arc the place remembers. A young carpenter raises one stubborn building at the edge of the known world, the building holds long enough for a fishing charter to turn into a town and the town to turn into a city, and the carpenter turns into a founder. The Great House was the seed. Humphrey — or somebody — planted it.

You can still stand where it stood. Three hundred and ninety years on, the strawberries are gone and the city is not, and the line runs straight back to someone.

Different people can choose which legends they believe. To be honest, I’m pretty happy believing this one.

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