Captain John and Esther’s adult children eventually built their own homes more or less within a half-moon crescent about a block away in each direction around our house.

John Shackford junior built on the southeast corner of what’s now Water and Middle streets. He married Elizabeth Batson (1790-1830), and probably remarried another Elizabeth afterward.

William built at the southwest corner of Shackford and Middle streets — just beyond the diagonal edge of our block. He married his sister-in-law, Sarah Ann Batson (1788-1837) in 1807, and then Mary Cutter Lincoln, who survived him. She was the daughter of Captain Jacob Lincoln, whose 1790 farm is now the Rossport by the Sea resort in Eastport’s Quoddy Village neighborhood.

Jacob Shackford, meanwhile, built at the southwest corner of Water and Key streets. He married Eliza D. Pearce/Pierce (1794-1869). She was the sister of Darius, husband of Jacob’s sister Hannah. Eliza was born in Rhode Island, like her brother, and died barely a month after her husband’s passing.

Samuel, probably the first male child born in Eastport, died in 1820 of yellow fever at Demerare, South America. He had married Elizabeth, daughter of Otis and Elizabeth Lincoln of Perry, before the Shackford siblings divided the holdings. His son Samuel received a half-share in Captain John’s will.  More on him later. Elizabeth, meanwhile, is the Mrs. Eliza Shackford who married Captain Silvanus Appleby on October 16, 1825, officiated by Charles Morgridge.

The repeated surnames among the spouses continues over the next generation or two. Finding siblings in one family marrying another set of siblings is not uncommon in the period.

Darius Hannah and her husband, Captain Darius Pearce/Pierce, built at 9 Shackford Street, a block northeast of our house. Born in Rhode Island to a prominent family, he came to Eastport and, after marrying, was a surveyor by 1833, the customs inspector in Eastport by 1841, and a merchant.

Daughter Esther and her husband, Joshua Hinckley, lived on Key Street, just to the west of Jacob. She died, 1880, in Dennysville. Joshua’s father, Matthew, had died at sea in 1809 near Sulawesi Tengah, Indonesia; he was born in 1752 in Georgetown, Maine. (Also born in Georgetown and living in Eastport was John Hinkley (1764-after 1850), son of John Hinkley. Cousins?) The Hinkleys, we should note, were among the early returnees to Maine amid the devastating travails of the French and Indian wars. Joshua and his wife, Esther, were living in Portland in 1823 and relocated to Eastport shortly afterward.

Sarah M. “Sally” and her husband, Captain John Lincoln, remain largely nebulous. I had even wondered if they died at sea. Many captains’ wives accompanied their husbands on long voyages, typically serving as navigators as their children grew up aboard ships. What I did eventually find was a real estate transfer dated October 15, 1832, where “Sarah Lincoln, widow of John Lincoln, shipmaster” sold her one-sixth share in the 1826 land purchase to her brothers William and Jacob and brother-in-law Darius Pearce/Pierce for $150. She was born in 1795 and died in 1846.

The Lincolns, who originate in Hingham, Massachusetts, include a branch that came north after Benjamin Lincoln, a celebrated Revolutionary War General, and two others purchased 10,000 acres in to Washington County. His son Theodore arrived to oversee those holdings and, in establishing a related timber industry, was an original settler of Dennysville. Other portions of the tract extended into what would become the towns of Pembroke and Perry. His brother Jacob, came to Moose Island, as noted. And their cousin Otis was an early settler of Perry. They’re the source where the Shackford marriages fit in. Another branch led from Hingham to the 16^th president of the United States, should you be asking.

Even before getting to John and Esther’s grandchildren and beyond, I had many loose ends of potential owners of our house who may have led to Lucy M. Hooper of Boston and Brooklyn, New York, and also Anne Dodge and Mary Roberts, both of Boston, the ones who sold the house in July 1875. Trying to run the deeds from them and down to the Shackfords had me stonewalled.

Who were they and how did they come into its ownership?

All of it, of course, has relevance on the house we bought.

As the growing village took shape, John senior had his tract surveyed by Benjamin R. Jones, resulting in Shackford’s Plan of lots. A copy of that would help make sense of the wheeling and dealing that followed. Many of the purchasers were by John’s own children, individually or in combinations of partnership often formalizing land they had already “improved” and buildings they had constructed or sites where they would. Others went to Eastport’s new merchants and tradesmen. In all, I find 73 transactions, most of them as a grantor, or seller, recorded at the Washington County courthouse in Machias. I’ve probably missed a few, so take that as a rough figure.

It wasn’t just housing lots, either. Captain John’s waterfront properties were valuable sites for wharves, docks, and storehouses. He was even selling sites between the high and low tide lines. I’ll spare you the tensions between low tide mark claims today.

The one transaction I haven’t been able to track down is his title to Shackford Head. Was it simply overlooked by the indexers?

A significant deal took place on April 14, 1826, when his surviving offspring, all in adulthood, paid him $3,000 for the land between High (also known as Back) Street and County Road. And here I thought he had given it to them. Where did I get that idea? That was a huge figure for the time, by the way.

Was he a Scrooge with his offspring? Or merely cunning?

He still had plenty of lots left to sell.

Esther died on June 21, 1830, age 76.

All of it, of course, has relevance on the house we bought.

 

Among the many vessels in Eastport by the 1820s, according to historian Jonathan D. Weston, John Shackford senior was one of possibly two residents owning ships of “suitable size and equipment to perform voyages at a distance.”

Captain John’s schooner was the Delesdernier, named after an Eastport family owning the tract just south of his own.

Lewis Frederick Delesdernier was the town’s first customs officer, in fact, and Weston’s grandfather. Note the “D” for the middle name.

Was the naming of the ship an inside joke? I’ll take it that way. He may have also been an investor in shares, another common practice.

The remaining ships of note in Eastport, incidentally, were “owned by inhabitants of other parts of the country.”

All of it, of course, has relevance on the house we bought.

While Eastport had a twisting trail into the village, the first real road was Water Street, laid out in October 1803, “from Mr. Todd’s house to Mr. Shackford’s.”

The Todd house, most recently known as a bed and breakfast inn, is believed to be the oldest surviving dwelling in Eastport. It was built around 1781 — some say as early as 1775 as a cabin – by John C. Todd and has early additions. Unlike ours, it had a large central chimney with multiple fireplaces, a colonial New England architectural signature. Ours had two smaller chimneys, including a precariously collapsing brick arch in the cellar when we bid on the place. That had to go before the rest of the bricks caved in.

When I began this investigation, I didn’t feel our house goes back quite that far, though I’m now convinced that Captain John had some residence on our lot by the time Water Street came along. For now, let me simply say the plot has thickened. No pun intended.

As historian Jonathan D. Weston describes,

“Water Street was laid out, 24 feet wide, after opposition by those who contended that 18 feet was ample width as it would allow two wheel-barrows to get by each other with room to spare, and, at the suggestion that it would be too narrow for horses and carriages to pass, scouted the idea that the idea that strange curiosities would ever be seen on Moose Island.”

That does explain the traffic congestion downtown today, long after horses and carriages yielded to automobiles and delivery trucks.

Key Street, bordering Shackford’s northern property line, came along in 1805, and then Shackford Street. Third, meanwhile, appears to the third east-west street in the Shackford tract. It is the only numeral street in the city.

Do note that Water Street was interrupted by gates and bars until 1808, when the town ordered their removal.

Up to 1820, as Weston observed, the town had only four public ways and no suitable places of worship. The annual town meeting was conducted in a small meetinghouse on today’s Clark Street..

The 1855 and 1879 Eastport maps show the main section of the house situated as ours is on this property. In the 1855 map, above, there were two ells but only one, larger than the current mudroom, in the 1879 map. Thus, for a time, a small courtyard existed, a common feature of the period. We have no way of knowing their use, for now. Sheds for horses or firewood are possibilities, as are a kitchen and common room.

The cellar, though, has thick stone walls, a serious undertaking.

As our renovations work has confirmed, the house is timber framed — what you may think of as post and beam, except that pegs were used rather than metal brackets and bolts. The nails, by the way, were hand cut.

That rules out Weston’s mention of the second framed house in town being built shortly after 1812 by John Shackford but removed shortly before 1888, perhaps the one John junior had a block further south on Water Street. (It may have been moved across the street sometime after 1835, if we go by the maps.)

Other evidence of an early origin of the house are the hand-split oak lathing, found in the ceiling. and the hand-cut nails. Those lathes disappeared from common usage by 1830, or so we were told.

All of it, of course, has relevance on the house we bought.