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Tag: New Hampshire

  • Some Assembly Required: William Chadbourne (~1582–)

    Some Assembly Required: William Chadbourne (~1582–)

    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.

    Sources. The 16 March 1633/4 Laconia Company contract and the Pied Cow‘s July 1634 arrival, via the Chadbourne family genealogy and the Old Berwick Historical Society. James Wall’s deposition of 21 May 1652 — the primary record for the building and running of the mill at Asbenbedick (later Great Works) falls. Francis Small’s 1685 deposition for the “first in New England” priority. The 1631 sawmill-model letter from the Laconia Company papers. The Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire (Noyes, Libby, Davis) for the Chadbourne family and the descent through Humphrey. The Richard Leader grant of 1651 and the Dunbar prisoners from York County and Kittery records, and the Old Berwick Historical Society’s “Great Works” history for Leader’s expansion and the name.

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  • Bad Fortune: William Hilton the Elder (1591–1655)

    Bad Fortune: William Hilton the Elder (1591–1655)

    William Hilton came to America in 1621, on the second ship to Plymouth.

    Never heard about Plymouth’s second ship? You’re not alone — almost nobody has, and once you know what happened, you’ll understand why.

    The ship was called the Fortune, which is the kind of name you give a ship before anything has gone wrong yet.

    It arrived a year late. The Mayflower landed in 1620, but the Fortune didn’t drop anchor off Cape Cod until 9 November 1621, missing, by weeks, the harvest feast that would eventually get rebranded as the first Thanksgiving.

    It was smaller. Much smaller. About a third the size of the Mayflower, and it carried roughly thirty-five new colonists, mostly young single men, into a settlement that had buried half its people the previous winter.

    And here is the part that tells you everything about the men who financed the voyage: they sent thirty-five new mouths and no food. None. Governor Bradford, who was not a man given to comedy, sat down and recorded for posterity that there was “not so much as a biscuit-cake” for the new arrivals, no bedding beyond “some sorry things” in their cabins, and “nor pot, nor pan, to dress meat in.” The ship hadn’t even been provisioned to feed its own crew on the trip home.

    Plymouth did the math, put everyone on half rations, and worked out that the corn would last about six months if nobody got greedy. The colony’s reward for surviving its first year was thirty-five strangers and a hunger problem.

    That could be considered the best outcome. It nearly went worse.

    The Fortune loitered around the tip of the Cape long enough that the colonists decided it was a French raider come to murder them, and Bradford convened a council of war. Myles Standish — the colony’s tiny, perpetually furious military officer — mustered every man and boy who could hold a gun and had the cannon up on Fort Hill fire a warning shot. The ship then ran up the red cross of England, everyone exhaled, and Plymouth narrowly avoided opening fire on the reinforcements it had spent a year praying for.

    The Fortune’s fortune didn’t get much better. While in port, the colonists spent two weeks cramming the hold with everything that might pay down their debt to their English investors — beaver and otter pelts, sassafras, split-oak clapboard. Somewhere around £500 of goods were packed in the ship for the trip back, enough to cut what they owed in half. The ship sailed for London on 13 December 1621 carrying the first real value the colony had ever produced.

    It never got there.

    A navigation error put the Fortune on the coast of France instead of in the English Channel, where a French warship took it on 19 January 1622, held everyone aboard for about a month, and helped itself to the Fortune’s entire cargo.

    The ship limped into London in February with an empty hold. The financier who’d sent it lost his whole investment, the colony’s first paycheck went to a French privateer, and the Fortune sailed out of history the way it had sailed into it — broke, late, and badly handled.

    Remember, this was the ship my great-grandfather William Hilton (~1591–1656) chose.

    Not a ton is known about what Hilton did, individually, but it doesn’t look like he stuck around to enjoy Plymouth for very long.

    He was still there in 1624 when the Reverend John Lyford baptized a child against the wishes of the Separatists running the colony — the church fight that got Lyford run out of town.

    Not long after, Hilton packed up and left for the salt works at Little Harbor, up on the Piscataqua. Salt-making, as it happens, had been the chief trade of Northwich, the town he’d come from back in England.

    He’d crossed an ocean, picked the worst possible ship, landed in a colony that couldn’t feed him, sat through its first religious schism, and then gone right back to making salt.

    Now, personally, I’m batting .000 as far as Mayflower goes, at least for now. But maybe the Fortune is the better inheritance anyway.

    The Mayflower is the story we tell — the brave little band, the rock, the pageant. The Fortune is how it actually went. You arrived late, with the wrong supplies, to a place that isn’t ready for you, and the one good thing you manage gets taken by pirates on the way home.

    Maybe that’s not the founding myth, but that is immigration for most of us.

    Sources. The arrival of the Fortune (Cape Cod, 9 November 1621), the missing provisions, and the Lyford baptism dispute of 1624 are from William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation; the £450–500 cargo and the French seizure of January 1622 are likewise from Bradford and the early Plymouth records. William Hilton’s place on the ship rests on the 1623 Division of Land (Plymouth Colony Records 12:5); his Northwich origin, his arrival on the Fortune, and his removal to the Piscataqua salt works are from the Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire (Noyes, Libby & Davis), under HILTON.

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  • The House That Made a City: Humphrey Chadbourne (1615–1667)

    The House That Made a City: Humphrey Chadbourne (1615–1667)

    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.

    Sources. The attribution of the Great House to Humphrey Chadbourne, as carried by the Strawbery Banke Museum and Wikipedia, traces in popular print to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, An Old Town by the Sea (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1893). Earlier, the conflation of William and Humphrey Chadbourne into a single builder traces to James Sullivan, The History of the District of Maine (Boston: Thomas & Andrews, 1795). The scholarly correction — the family in Tamworth, Staffordshire until the Pied Cow crossing of 1634, with the building contract not surviving — is Robert Charles Anderson, The Great Migration: Immigrants to New England, 1634–1635, vol. II, C–F (Boston: NEHGS, 2001), 33–36.

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  • The Charter and the Pond: Capt. Noah Wiswall (1638–1690)

    The Charter and the Pond: Capt. Noah Wiswall (1638–1690)

    Capt. Noah Wiswall (1638–1690) was fifty-one years old and had ten children the summer Massachusetts asked him to walk into the woods and go to war one more time.

    He said yes.

    He was a generation past the age when a man is expected to do this, he had a farm in what’s now Newton and a wife and a houseful of kids, and when the colony raised two companies to chase a French and Abenaki raiding party north, Noah took one of them.

    It was King William’s War — the European powers had decided to be at war again, which on the New England frontier meant France arming the Abenaki and the Abenaki fighting to keep the English from spreading any further across their lands.

    On 4 July 1690 a raiding party hit Exeter. Exeter held. The party fell back and made camp on the shore of a pond named for the Rev. John Wheelwright, in what is now Lee, New Hampshire. Those two Massachusetts companies went after them — one under Capt. John Floyd, one under Noah.

    His scouts found the trail at first light on 6 July. The militia came down on the camp and the thing turned into what the old accounts called “a running fight through the woods, after the Indian fashion.” When it was over, three officers and fifteen men were dead — Noah among them, along with his lieutenant Gershom Flagg and his ensign Edward Walker.

    And one of his sons. John Wiswall was about twenty years old and in his father’s company that morning, and he died there too.

    Theodocia Jackson Wiswall, forty-seven years old, buried her husband and her son on the same day, with five children still living and the youngest fourteen. She remarried four years later, the required next step for a woman of that time after doing the arithmetic of how to stay alive.

    The aftermath has its own grim comedy, if you want it. Floyd kept the field for hours after Noah fell, until enough of his men were dead or bleeding that he pulled the rest out — and was promptly second-guessed by people who weren’t there, for not staying longer.

    Capt. James Convers rode out at sunrise the next morning, found seven of the wounded still alive in the woods, carried them to a hospital, then went back to bury everyone else.

    The Charter

    By strange coincidence, while Noah was dying in those woods for Massachusetts Bay, his older brother was in London, losing a different fight to the same colony. The Rev. Ichabod Wiswall was the minister of Duxbury, Ma., down in Plymouth Colony.

    In February of 1690 — months before Noah marched — Plymouth scraped together the money to send Ichabod across the Atlantic to plead for a royal charter. Little Plymouth had never had one, and without it the colony was a legal ghost, eyeballed by its bigger neighbors. Ichabod went to London essentially to keep Plymouth on the map.

    On the other side was Increase Mather — the heaviest minister in New England — who was working the same court for the opposite result: fold Plymouth into Massachusetts Bay and be done with it.

    Two reverends from Dorchester, arguing over a colony’s life in front of the Crown. Mather won. The 1691 charter erased Plymouth and handed it to the Province of Massachusetts Bay — a hostile takeover with a king’s signature on it.

    One Wiswall brother dies in a Massachusetts Bay company defending Massachusetts Bay’s frontier. The other watches Massachusetts Bay swallow the colony he’d crossed an ocean to save. Both Wiswalls lost to the same flag in the same eighteen months.

    The Monument

    Newton put up a monument to its first settlers, and Noah is on it: “Capt. Noah, of the expedition against Canada, killed in battle with the French and Indians, 1690. Leaving a son Thomas.”

    Not to be salty, but Noah’s daughter Margaret is the reason I’m here. She married a Parker and carried the line out of that grief and down to me.

    He went into the woods at fifty-one and didn’t come back, and somewhere in the wreckage of that summer is a girl who would grow up and marry, ensuring her father was somebody’s ancestor instead of only a name carved on the south side of that monument.

    Yet the monument speaks of the son but fails to mention the daughter.

    Sources. The Wiswall Genealogy — descent and the Newton, Massachusetts marriage to Theodocia Jackson, 1664. WikiTree (Wiswall) and the Newton Vital Records — Noah’s children, including John, killed beside him, and the eldest son Thomas, named on the First Settlers Monument. Contemporary accounts of the Wheelwright’s Pond fight, 6 July 1690, and of Ichabod Wiswall’s charter agency in London.

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  • The Wrong Scot: Ellen Boyle (1823–1866)

    The Wrong Scot: Ellen Boyle (1823–1866)

    For about a week, Ancestry.com was confident I was from New Jersey.

    It had me descending from a woman born in Marlton – which I assumed was in Scotland, but a quick consult of the atlas turned out to be a city in New Jersey, fifteen miles from Philadelphia. The town is named after marl, a green clay full of crushed shell that local farmers spread on their fields as fertilizer. 

    There is no Marlton in Scotland. There never was. The whole thing arrived in my tree the way these things always arrive: a bum merge, somebody else’s bad data welded onto mine by a hint I should not have accepted, quietly relocating a genuine Scottish ancestor to a Philadelphia suburb named after dirt enhancer.

    It’s even funnier once you know I’d spent my whole life certain that it was being a MacDonald that made me Scottish.

    My grandmother was Marion Louise MacDonald — Nana — and honestly her name did most of the work. You hear MacDonald and you picture heather and a tartan and somebody being treacherous to somebody else at a dinner party in 1692. I never questioned it. Of course I was Scottish. Look at the name.

    But my MacDonalds had not been in Scotland for a long time. By the time anyone in my family was alive to tell me I was Scottish, the MacDonalds had been Canadian for well over a century. John @#$@#ing George MacDonald — my great-great-grandfather, the brick wall, the man Nana spent twenty years of her life trying desperately to trace past — was born in Nova Scotia and died in Nova Scotia.

    So when John George was a seven-year-old Canadian, Helen “Ellen” Boyle (1823-1866) was on an actual boat, leaving actual Scotland. Ellen Boyle is on the Parker side. The side with the flat, unbothered English name that nobody ever accused of being from anywhere. 

    Ellen was baptized in 1823 in Troqueer, Scotland — a parish on the west bank of the River Nith, just south of Dumfries, in the old stewartry of Kirkcudbright. That’s Galloway, the bottom-left corner of Scotland, the part they don’t feature on the shortbread tin. 

    Through her childhood, Ellen’s family moved between three Galloway parishes — Creetown out on the granite coast, Troqueer, and Kirkpatrick Irongray inland — the tell of a family chasing work that keeps not lasting.

    Her father James did a stretch in the Kirkcudbright tolbooth, the town jail, which in that time and place held one type of guest: men who owed money. (I looked for something more dramatic. There isn’t any.) He died in Scotland. So did Ellen’s mother, Mary.

    Galloway in the 1830s and ’40s was a place you left. The handloom weavers who’d anchored the local economy were being ground out by the power looms in the cities. Wages collapsed.

    When Parliament studied the misery, its experts arrived at a creative remedy. The government’s official advice for the crisis was for the affected Scots to leave Scotland.

    Two of the Boyle children didn’t need to be asked twice. Ellen sailed to Massachusetts and married Charles Francis Parker in Newton — a Yankee, with no claim on a global heritage in him anywhere. Ellen’s brother went to a mill town up in Strafford County, New Hampshire, married a local woman, and dissolved into rural manufacturing without a ripple.

    The parents stayed, and died. That was the end of the Boyles in Galloway.

    Ellen was built to vanish. Lowland Scots came with the full assimilation kit — Presbyterian, English-speaking, literate — and dropped into Protestant Yankee New England like they’d been ordered from a catalog. 

    She married Yankee Parker in Newton, and then the couple drifted north to Rochester, New Hampshire — the same Strafford County mill country her brother had landed in. And, within one generation, whatever was left of Galloway in them was simply gone: the tolbooth, the three parishes, the granite coast.

    So here’s the full stack, and I’d like a moment to appreciate it.

    The branch of my family that defines diversity as “how many minutes are you outside of Boston” brought me the ancestor with the most recent claim on global citizenship.  

    And when I finally went looking for her, the machine briefly and confidently informed me she’d been born in New Jersey.

    In a town named after fertilizer.

    Sources. Scottish parish registers — Troqueer and the Galloway parishes (Kirkmabreck/Creetown, Kirkpatrick-Irongray), Kirkcudbrightshire. Newton, Massachusetts vital records — the Boyle–Parker marriage, 1843. Find A Grave — Ellen’s death at Rochester, New Hampshire, 1866, the record that fixes Thomas M. Parker as her son rather than Charles’s second wife’s. Kirkcudbright burgh court records — James Boyle’s imprisonment.

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