Eastport’s growing community’s land claims needed to be clarified.

As Jonathan D. Weston notes in Kilby’s history, the Massachusetts legislature on June 17, 1791, authorized the survey of Moose Island, or Eastport, “the inhabitants prior to that time being simply ‘squatters,’ without titles to the land they occupied. The effects of this shiftless, temporary condition of affairs lingered for some time afterward.” Solomon Cushing then assigned lots to the occupants in 1791, according to Kilby. At the time, Eastport and Lubec, as Plantation 8 or Township 8, had a population of 244 people.

The deed John Shackford received from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts opens with the date June 18, 1791, and describes the committee appointed to “survey and lay out the [plan] of the settlers within said township one hundred acres of land to each settler to include his improvements,” as well as additional public lands to support a church and a school. Each settler who arrived before January 7, 1784, would pay the state five dollars for their property, while those who came later would be charged ten dollars. The purchasers would be exempt from any state taxes for five years.

Fitting “a plan of that part of said township called Moose Island with the several lots delineated thereon that Captain John Shackford a settler,” received lot No. 3, one hundred acres. The agreement was dated August 14, 1793, and recorded in Boston September 20.

His brother-in-law, Caleb Boynton senior, received lot No. 4, also one hundred acres. While his document was also dated June 18, 1791, it was not recorded until August 30, 1804.

Lot No. 17, 50 acres, went to Caleb Boynton junior in 1804.

The Shackford property would stretch along the waterfront from the middle of Shackford Cove to what would become Key Street and then back to County Road. Boynton’s stretched from Key Street to Washington Street. Together, their holdings would encompass about half of the business and residential lots of the eventual village.

The 1790 Census had a single Shackford household, John’s, with one free white male over 16, four under 16, and one free white female. This was recorded next to Caleb Boynton, with two white males over 16 and four females. Further down the list, Caleb junior had one white male over age 16, one under, and two females.

Curiously, in 1800, it was only one Boynton, Caleb senior.

You will find holes in the Census data.

Among non-family dwelling with Shackford around then was an unmarried Englishman, James Carter, in 1789. Quarters must have been tight.

With the deeds, the occupants became landowners rather than remaining squatters. Five dollars, do note, was a substantial amount at the time. Whether it was “reasonable” can be left to debate.

Thus, in 1793 Shackford gained clear ownership of one hundred acres at Shackford Cove, being lot No. 3 — and within that, the plot that includes our house. How much earlier he had built here becomes the question. By 1783, as his fee would indicate? Not all of this land went to farming, and he obviously augmented his holdings over time. If he was building ships, he definitely needed timber, which might explain the Shackford Head connection.

While I’ve been unable to find the deed of Shackford Head, it’s clear that Captain John acquired a hundred acres there, too. There are tales of the box of unsorted early documents at the courthouse.

The transactions I’ve found do undermine a story about a sheriff arriving from Massachusetts in 1797 with an armed party to seek payment for the lands. Remember, Maine was a district of Massachusetts until 1820. After being roughed up, and with what may have been a revised approach, the sheriff offered deeds from the state at a reasonable cost plus a five-year tax exemption.

Of Captain John and Esther’s children who survived to maturity, all four sons became ship captains, and two of their three daughters married likewise. Many of the grandsons continued that legacy.

Can you imagine the life in this house at the time?

John Shackford senior definitely explored what would become Eastport in 1782, and, as one account expressed the encounter, “determined to remain and make provisions for the safety and comfort of his wife and children preparatory to permanent settlement.”

The early years of Eastport and its Moose Island are generally fuzzy. Legally, the pioneer white inhabitants were squatters. Captain John initially settled at Broad Cove at the neck of what became known as Shackford’s Head, and soon afterward built a mile-and-a-half away, at the edge of today’s downtown and what was soon known as Shackford’s Cove.

In one version,

“The Shackford family originally settled on Shackford Head, where Revolutionary War veteran Captain John Shackford began a homestead in 1783. … He built accommodations for curing the fish he hired caught by the Indians and some white fishermen … He also erected a strong storehouse of logs, where he kept and sold such merchandise as met the requirements of the fishermen and Indians; the fishery and storehouse were in full operation, and he set about building a dwelling house and planting part of his farming lands. Everything being ready in 1784, he set out in his small sailing vessel, the Industry, for Newbury, and brought to their new home his wife and two children, John and William Shackford.”

The Indians, mind you, were Passamaquoddy, who are still vital component of the community.

In the other version, “In 1787, having built a dwelling-house near the shore, at the foot of Shackford Street, he brought his family, consisting of wife, sons John and William, to their new home in the wilderness …” Not only is the date different, but also their address or its equivalent.

As I said about fuzzy? The consensus for the Shackfords’ arrival seems to be 1783/1784, the end of the Revolutionary War.

Jonathan D. Weston’s recollections had the Shackfords as one of the first six white families in town, arriving in the spring of 1784. Five years later, Weston calculates, the number of households had increased to 22 or 24, “the heads of one-half of these families were either men of English birth or those who had adhered to the royal cause of the war.” Either way,

“John’s little craft was the first vessel owned in the place, as the fishing business up to that time had been done in open boats. Among the vessels subsequently owned by him were Delight, Hannah, Sally, and Patty,” two of them apparently named for his daughters. Patty, meanwhile, “plied between Eastport, Portland and Boston, and was the first freight and passenger boat employed on this route. She was commanded by his son, John.”

While that jumps ahead in our chronology, it does reflect the family’s identity as shipmasters and perhaps also shipbuilders. Shackford Cove wound up with four shipyards along its short shore.

From the start, even before being named Eastport, the small frontier community on Moose Island comprised of a handful of families gained a reputation for “sheltering and sharing the gains of adventurers, smugglers, and gamblers.” Not to cast a shadow over the Shackford family integrity, right? Or making a nice profit?

Welcome to America’s Wild East.

John Shackford was a Revolutionary War veteran who brought his young family to Eastport at the end of the war, making them one of just six households on Moose Island. For the next half century and a bit more, they were influential figures and then faded entirely from the scene by the turn of the 20^th century. It was a pattern I’m seeing in seafaring families in coastal communities in American genealogy.

His ancestry in America goes back to Dover, New Hampshire, where I lived for 21 years before moving on to Eastport. His father, Samuel, was a mariner who resettled at the mouth of the Merrimack River in Massachusetts, where John was born in 1753 in Newbury, a decade before the port was set off as a separate town, Newburyport.

Among the other children of Samuel and his wife, Mary Coombs, were Mary, who married Caleb Boynton, for whom Boynton Street and Boynton School in Eastport were named; Captain Samuel Shackford, who died in Newburyport; Levi; and William.

As a sailor, John may have visited Eastport as early as 1763, age 10 or so. (As one version goes, “He was brought up a sailor and while so employed his ship visited Eastport, Maine, as early as 1763.”)

Around here, “captain,” as you may be noting, more often referred to a shipmaster than an army rank.

As a soldier in the newly formed Continental Army in its second major military operation, John enlisted in the strenuous march in September and October 1775 through the wilderness of Maine under the command of General Benedict Arnold. Serving in a Captain Ward’s company, Shackford was one of 1,100 men in the arduous trek that saw 300 soldiers turn back and another 200 die en route The surviving troops were left starving and lacking in many supplies and equipment assigned to attack Quebec City.

Joined by General Richard Montgomery’s forces after their capture of Montreal, the Americans attacked Quebec City in a snowstorm on the last day of the year. They were roundly defeated.  Montgomery was killed and Arnold’s leg was shattered.

Shackford was taken prisoner and confined for nine months, six weeks of the time in irons — that is, chained.

After his release, he broke his promise to his captors not to engage in battle. In early 1780 he and instead served under George Washington at Kingsbridge, in Westchester County, New York.

During the Revolution, John’s brother Levi was wounded at the battle of Bunker Hill. More extensive was the service of brother William. First, he was captured on the privateer “Dalton” and confined in the Old Mill Prison in Plymouth, Devonshire, England, for three years; and then, on being released, he served under John Paul Jones and was either killed in action or died from hardships endured in the war — he never returned.

On the other hand, as a veteran, Private John Shackford returned to Massachusetts and married, on November 26, 1780, Esther, daughter of Captain Gideon and Hannah Woodwell. Her father was an extensive shipbuilder at Newburyport.

Now that we had the history of our old house back a century-and-a-half, there was still a 20-year gap of getting from Lucy M. Hooper, Anne Dodge, and Mary Roberts, who were named in the 1875 deed transfer, and the Shackford Est of the 1855 Eastport map.

Which Shackford was the Est, presumably for Estate, in the 1855 map?

It was a prolific family in town at the time.

Shackford is a name existing as three places in Eastport: a cove just south of the downtown, a head of land occupied today by a state park, and a residential street.

Just who were they?

I was already working this line from the earliest materials and trying to see if I could connect someone to the material you’ve already seen.

The central question, remember, was how far back did this house go?

It was time to take Captain John Shackford senior seriously.

After all of that, I backtracked and realized Commander Albert Buck never owned the house. It had instead passed to Fisher Ames Buck’s daughter, Alice May Buck, who died in August 1955. Presumably, she had no children.

And after that, ownership passed to Arline F. [Fallon] Vaughn (1898-1974), the daughter of George and Fanny (Buck) Fallon — Fisher’s daughter. Arline was employed for many years by Moore-McCormick Shipping Lines in New York. Her obituary listed no husband or children. She was buried at Hillside.

Also named in the proceedings was Rose Lee, presumably the remarried widow. The search goes on.

In short, by 1975 our house had apparently become a summer home or rental property under absentee ownership.

Born in 1837 on Campobello Island, New Brunswick, to Ames and Amy (Creighton) Buck, Fisher and his family were living in Maine by 1843.

In the 1850 Eastport Census, Ames was a blacksmith, 49, born in New Brunswick. His wife was 50; and the children were clerk George, 22; Mary E., 19; Amy, 18; blacksmith Joshua, 17; Abigail, 15; [Fisher] Ames, 13; Anna M., 11; [Adelaide] Sophia A., 10, all born in New Brunswick; and John F., 7, born in Maine.

In 1855 Ames owned a house diagonally across Water Street from ours. An alley ran beside their house from Water to Sea Street, providing ready access to the Shackford wharves, as well as one labeled Buck and the A. Buck and Company steam mill attached to the William Newcomb sash and blind factory.

Ames was one of the six sons of Jacob Buck, half-brother of the Bucksport founder. Another son was Eliphalet, who landed in Eastport and is buried in neighboring Robbinston.

In the 1870 U.S. Census, his family included school teachers Mary, 29; and Ada, 25, and fish dealer John, 21. The wharf makes sense. And son Fisher Ames Buck had a household of his own.

The 1879 map shows a J.S. Buck wharf as No. 32 just below the Water Street property, presumably John S. Buck, and nothing for the Shackfords, who had previously owned multiple wharves there.

By the time of his death, Ames was described as both a blacksmith and a machinist.

Incidentally, Ames’ headstone in Hillside Cemetery gives 1796 for his birth and erroneously names daughter Amy Cory (1880-1886) as his wife. The date of his death is a year earlier than some other accounts I’ve seen.

~*~

In turn, Fisher married Clarissa Alice Bailey (1842-1922) in 1865. Their children include twins Frances F. Buck (1872-1934) and Frank Clifford Buck (1872-1950), William Edwin Buck (1875-1935), Alice M. (circa 1879-1955), and two who died in childhood, Harry C. and Jesse B.

Like his father, he was a blacksmith. Later he was an engineer. He was also a freemason, as was son William Edwin, and he served as a town selectman, 1874-1879.

He was among the subscribers underwriting Kilby’s 1888 history, along with a George N. Buck of San Francisco (his brother?).

Fisher died April 5, 1910, of pneumonia. He is buried at Hillside Cemetery in Eastport.

~*~

His son William Edwin Buck was father to Clifford Hilyard Buck (1899-1973). I do wonder whether they lived in the house or whether other family members did or whether it was rented out or even largely vacant during the period.

~*~

The Tides Institute & Museum of Art’s online photo collection of Eastport houses calls ours the Commander Albert Buck house, with the note: “He returned (after World War II) to Eastport with Rose and settled in the family house at the corner of Third and Water Streets.”

Commander Albert Clifford Buck (1886-1951), a U.S. Navy veteran of World War I and World War II, is buried at Hillside. He was 64. The headstone also names Elizabeth E. Lizzie Sears Buck (1851-1907). Who is she, other than born in Woodland, Washington County? Not Rose, obviously.

Albert, it turns out, was born to Fisher’s brother, John, the fish dealer.

So how did he wind up with the house? Forty years passed between Fisher’s death and Albert’s, and family members may have moved elsewhere for employment and other reasons. Perhaps the others simply weren’t interested. Who, in fact, inhabited the house in the interlude?

The neighborhood did have a number of Lebanese families by the early 1900s, attracted to jobs in the sardine canneries that ruled the local economy after the wooden shipbuilding industry collapsed.

Albert’s obituary mentioned that he had maintained a summer home in Eastport since the end of World War II, but neglected to note where his fulltime residence was. It also named a son, Charles S., stationed in Arizona (in 1951,) and brothers Milford in Rowley, Massachusetts, and George of New York City. (Milford R. Buck (-1952) is buried at Hillside. George is another mystery. The obituary also said the funeral service would be at the Washington Street Baptist church and that Albert was a freemason.

Just two years later, Charles, age 40, died of meningitis at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Tucson, Arizona. He was an automotive mechanic and, according to the state certificate of death, was born March 13, 1913, in Massachusetts, to Albert C. Buck, born Maine, and Rose A. Mayer, born Massachusetts. In addition, he was buried in Rowley. What was the family connection there?

I’m guessing it’s where Rose’s family was. Albert was likely at sea for extended periods. In short, he wasn’t in Eastport.

Our home, by the way, had an unobstructed view of the water.

Fishing for the purchase document by the Bucks led to Fisher A. Buck, who bought our Cape from Lucy M. Hooper, Anne Dodge, and Mary Roberts in July 1875, beginning a century of family ownership, the longest span in the property’s history.

Who were the three women? They lived in Boston and Brooklyn, not Eastport. And they weren’t Shackfords, as far as I could tell.

The Bucks, on the other hand, saw many changes in the place.

Sometime after urban mail delivery was established during the Civil War, the stylish front entry, with its vertical mail slot and side panel windows, was added, followed at some point by the downstairs two-over-one sash windows, perhaps larger than the originals. (When we replace them, do note, there was significant rotting.)

The house narrowly averted destruction when the 1886 downtown fire that started in a cannery just below our house and continued northward along the waterfront, destroying 160 homes plus stores and wharves. The rafters in our house were intensely charred, though. The Bucks would have also installed the electrical knob-and-tube wiring, along with indoor plumbing and the small bathroom.

The two large ells shown on the 1855 and 1879 maps were removed, for whatever reasons, eliminating the small courtyard on the back of the house. We can speculate about their uses, a horse shed in one and a kitchen perhaps in the other. Or perhaps one was a cabin that first sheltered the Shackfords while the deep cellar was being dug for the bigger main house. As for a woodshed? Why not?

Over the Bucks’ time, portions of the foundation were replaced or upgraded, and a mudroom was added, slightly smaller than the ell it replaced. The two dormers may have also been added — they’re not obvious in the 1879 map of Eastport though they may be the two white dots and there are none in an 1847 sketch of the windmill where the house appears in the background. (Windmill? We’ll get to that later.)

Significantly, there was at least one chimney fire and perhaps one or two additional house fires, as well as the downtown fire of 1886 that charred the rafters.

Quite simply, it was a different house when it left the family than when it had entered it.

The Buck family had its own prominence.

Several branches of the family originating in Haverhill, Massachusetts, arrived early on in Eastport.

The most celebrated and traceable line descends from Revolutionary War Colonel Jonathan Buck (1719-1795), who came to Maine and gave the Penobscot Bay town of Bucksport its name. He is best known through a questionable story of a witch he supposedly sentenced who then cursed him at her execution.

His son, Captain Ebenezer Buck (1752-1824), born in Haverhill, built the first framed house in Bucksport, but because he was captain of the local militia, the British burned it during the Revolutionary War.

So much for broader historical importance.

Ebenezer’s son Jonathan (1796-1843) brought the line to Eastport. He was a member of the Eastport Light Infantry in 1818 during the War of 1812, as was a John Buck.

Beyond that, Jonathan’s “business life was passed at Eastport, where as a merchant, he was associated with a Mr. Pillsbury, of Portland, Maine,” as one account noted, while the Eastport Sentinel in October 1839 reported,

“Died, in this town, on Wednesday last, Jonathan Buck, Esq., aged forty-three years. Mr. Buck belonged to that class of men who may well be called the creators of the wealth of a community. To an untiring energy, which enabled him to accomplish more than most men, he added an enterprise, energy, and intellect well fitted to direct the exertions of others. In every relation of life, he will be missed and lamented. To his family the loss is irreparable. Those whose labor he has for years directed will miss their guide. The community loses one of its leading men and little at this time can it bear the loss. He rests from a life of severe labor, and when such a man dies, we feel that a part of society has gone.”

The account was signed by Seth B. Mitchell, editor.

Another line in the Passamaquoddy area came through Captain Eliphalet Buck. The 1820 Census for Eastport includes an Eliphalet Buck, who wed Mehitable Vose in 1818 in Robbinston, Maine, and drowned in 1836.

None of this, though, pointed toward our house.

Only later, after learning that Fisher Ames Buck had once owned our house, could I sense a different route going back to Jacob Buck, half-brother of the Bucksport founder. Jacob’s wife was Hannah Eames, a surname that evolved into Ames. They had six sons, four of their fates unknown, as far as I can tell.

That line led through Canada and the Loyalists who left the United States at the end of the Revolutionary War. You probably weren’t taught about them in your American history classes, but they were a significant factor around here, as I’ve learned in this project.

Working the line of our old house downward quickly led to a tangle. You’ve been following what I uncovered at the Washington County courthouse, but at this point, an earlier reference was not recorded in the transaction at hand. Zip, zero, nada. Without that, I was stuck at 1975, well within my own lifetime, not exactly historic in my viewpoint.

The sale to the Greenlaws, according to the record, involved Oscar L. Whalen, executor for estate of Arline F. Vaughn, of New York, and someone named Rose Lee. But there was no Book and Page mention to lead me to the next entry.

The best I could do was to try working from the earliest residents and hope to build a line to 1975.

Since the 1855 map labeled our house “Shackford Est,” looking at the Shackford family made sense. Maybe Arlene was one of them.

Revisiting the Tides Institute and Museum of Art’s online survey of the homes of Eastport, I found that they had added a notation to their photo of our house. They quoted the weekly Eastport Sentinel account of U.S. Navy Commander Albert Buck returning home after World War II. Home, of course, is the one where we’re now living.

Buck? That gave me another family to start investigating, especially since they were living across the street in the 1855 map.

The Milanos were also short-term owners of our house. They sold the property in June 1978 to Dora and Merrill Lank junior. He was an Eastport native who served a stint as a city police officer and also enjoyed making wreaths. Both of them had grown up in Eastport — he in the north end and she in the south — and had children.

When the Lanks took ownership, our house had a slate roof, one with a pink scalloped pattern worked it. It was sided it what Dora has called ugly blue asphalt shingles. They divided the two big rooms upstairs into four, added the closets at the top of the stairs, and installed the casement window over the kitchen sink and the pass-through to the front parlor before moving in with her mother a few blocks away.

The house was then rented to Mel Soctomah, newly retired from the U.S. Army. He was Passamaquoddy in his late 40s and moved in with his wife, three children, and a dog. At liberty to make renovations, he installed the big wood and oil-fired cook stove that occupied the kitchen when we arrived. He recalled that the flue drew well, an important consideration in a place as windy as Eastport. They then left for a stint in Florida before returning to Eastport and neighboring Sipayik for good.

Dora and Merrill divorced, though, and complications emerged after she moved on. There was a sale from Bangor Savings Bank to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on October 8, 1982, with a supplementary entry on August 5, 1983. This was during a national recession that included a depressed real estate market and foreclosures. Somehow, Gordon Greenlaw reappears in this sale.

Sometime during this period and the one that followed, puzzling rough-sawn dark ceiling beams were erected in the two front parlors — “pseudo-rustic pop 1970’s kitsch,” in the words of one current resident, or “ye old Lion’s Den tavern,” in the mind of another. Those ceiling beams are distinctive, in that love- it-or-hate-it kind of way. For us, our reaction often depends on the day you might be asking. Looking closer, touches appeared in the kitchen, like the Montgomery Ward electric stovetop that came with the house when we bought it. Monkey Ward, for the record, went out of business in 2000 and probably had no outlet anywhere near Eastport well before that. I am wondering about some of the shelves, though, and considering them her Calla’s. Or now, maybe Mel’s. Nice work, either way. Particle board cabinets that also arrived at now scheduled for replacement, as are the triple-track storm windows.

We can still ask who added the knee walls or the cosmic crab wall painting we found under the wallpaper upstairs.