Tag: History

Massachusetts was primed for Revolution long before Paul Revere’s midnight ride

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Quite simply, Britain betrayed the settlers in her colonies, from Ireland onward. The American plaint, “Taxation without representation,” reflected that all too succinctly. Where were the colonies’ representatives in Parliament or the House of Lords? What voice did they have?

The colonists identified as English but must have seen they were definitely second-class citizens. Or maybe third.

As I note in my book Quaking Dover, the Massachusetts Bay colony’s Calvinist intransigence had been at odds with the Crown from its inception. The first shot heard ‘round the world could have erupted at any point.

My pivotal question is just what turned the Loyalists in Virginia so far as to reject the monarchy as well and then join in taking up arms in the revolutionary cause by 1776?

The other colonies moved somewhere in between.

Not that all of this falls much within the scope of my little 400-year history volume as I try to keep a focus.

Join me virtually at Cape Cod

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I’d love for you to join me on Cape Cod on Sunday, July 9, for a Zoom examination of ways a faith community can sustain a unique witness in the face of strong resistance. I do expect some lively discussion, based on my book, Quaking Dover, but you don’t need to be a Quaker to participate.

Do note that preregistration for the free event is required  (https://bit.ly/QuakingDover).

Hey, it’s a great place to be on a day in July!

 

As for another taste of scandal?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Dover’s second minister, the Rev. George Burdet, made a quick exit from town amid scandals, quickly followed by more in York, Maine. He had even briefly been “governor,” or the agent in charge of the New Hampshire province, making him in charge of both its religion and politics. Or, as historian George Wadleigh quipped, a wannabe pope.

Beyond that, as I observed in Quaking Dover, Burdet “was obviously on a downward spiral, as Thomas Gorges wrote to John Winthrop in 1641, noting that Burdet was at Pemaquid and ‘is grown to that height of sin that it is to [be] feared he is given over. His time he spends in drinking, dancing, singing scurrilous songs, and for his companions he selects the wretchedest people of the country. At the spring I hear he is for England.’ Later that year, the younger Gorges added of Burdet, ‘the dishonor of his profession and monster of nature, is now gone for England by way of Spain.’ That description of drinking, dancing, and singing rather seals the Robert Dover connection for me, even if Merrymount’s Thomas Morton, the more obvious reveling partner, wouldn’t return to Maine for another year or two.”

I do have to wonder where the wild tavern sat in the early Maine settlement here.

So here’s where he spent that wild binge – 110 miles or so from Dover, or a two-hour drive away today.

Recent research has come up with a site for the jail. I do have to wonder if the Rev. Burdet ever served time therein.

As for Robert Dover, who gave Burdet the inspiration for naming the New Hampshire settlement? He was an anti-Puritan wit and attorney. That, in contrast to the South English port famed for its white cliffs.

Reports of the cleric’s subsequent movements vary, possibly ending in Ireland, “where he was named chancellor and dean of a diocese. He died in Ireland in 1671, ‘after founding a much respected county family.’ Had he reunited with the wife and children he’d left behind?” As I say in my book, “Or was he, in fact, a bigamist? Also, there’s no mention of prison.”

Turn to Quaking Dover for the details.

What my Pemaquid visit made me realize is how little history of early Maine I had encountered in drafting my book, and how tenuous so much of it I’ve found since remains. Yes, the early settlements, including Pemaquid, were obliterated and abandoned during the decades of warfare with the French and their Native allies, but there had been significant settlement before that, something that kept getting swept away.

 

One site, three successive forts in colonial history

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Coming to Colonial Pemaquid’s state-maintained historical site in Maine, I wasn’t prepared to find this.

It was far more than the wooden palisades found across much of early New England. It looked to me far more like something out of Scotland or a Monty Python movie.

This wasn’t even a reproduction of the first fort there, but rather the second.

The first was Fort Charles, built 1677 after the village had already been destroyed. That fortification was overrun and destroyed by the French and their Native allies in 1689.

Most of the usual attention to warfare between the English colonists and the Natives focuses on King Phillip’s war, which heavily impacted southern New England. Much of the heaviest toll, however, happened in the decades after that when the tribes allied with the French to the north. Those outbursts afflicted northern New England, including Dover, New Hampshire, for decades later.

That’s where Pemaquid, fortified to hold the Maine at the edge of English claims in the New World, comes into play with my story, Quaking Dover.

Dover was often on the frontier of English settlement, a thin ribbon along the coastline but barely reaching inland and thus nearly impossible to defend, at least much north of Boston.

Once the English did reclaim this stretch of Maine from the French, the New Englanders built a new, second fortification, Fort William Henry, erected in the large rectangular area defined on the site today by low stone walls and a tall stone tower, or bastion. The stone bastion you see was built in 1908 as a replica of that feature of the fort.

As Maine’s online documentation explains, before the second Fort William Henry was built in 1692, the Pemaquid settlement and the previous fort had been captured by the French and their tribal allies, driving the English to abandon much of the nearby coastal area. By 1691, however, the English regained authority over the region and built Fort William Henry.

(I am fascinated by the tenacity of those who kept returning despite the costly odds.)

As you will find, with the construction of Fort William Henry in 1692, England sought to fortify the frontiers of its Massachusetts eastern district. Pemaquid lay on the northeastern edge of English influence and, as such, occupied a very strategic location.

The fort built here was extraordinary for its time. Massachusetts Governor Sir William Phips spent two-thirds of the colony’s budget (£20,000) to construct it. Workers used 2,000 cartloads of stone to build walls 10 to 22 feet high and a stone bastion, which rose to a height of 29 feet. The fort housed nearly 20 cannon and a garrison of 60 soldiers.

(Note that the costs were born by the New Englanders, not the British Crown.)

For all its seeming strength, Fort William Henry did not last. Native people, upset at their treatment by the English, united with the French to attack the fort in 1696. This fort, which had seemed so strong, proved to be weak. Mortar used to build the stone walls was of poor quality and the fort’s interior buildings could not stand bomb attack. The garrison’s water supply lay outside the fort walls. His garrison outnumbered, Captain Pasco Chubb finally surrendered. With the fall of Fort William Henry, the English abandoned Pemaquid once again.

(If this were fiction, I can’t imagine what to do with a name like Captain Pasco Chubb. Especially as an Englishman.)

Well, that’s an official account, one I for now I find no reason to quibble with. What does change my earlier perspective, however, is Fort Frederick, erected in 1729 and dismantled in 1775 to keep it out of British occupation in the Revolutionary war.

It never faced hostilities with the Natives, which seriously makes me reconsider a much earlier reoccupation of Maine by English settlers, something I had largely ruled out before 1763, the end of the French and Indian wars. Now see that’s not quite accurate, though it still seems to apply Downeast, where I now live.

So much for these confessions of an amateur historian.

The 1630s was a most remarkable decade in New England

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

A comment from a professional historian after one of my Quaking Dover presentations has me realizing how much more needs to be seen in fresh light.

New England history, he said, is told through Harvard. And then, to smaller degrees, Yale and Williams College. A more accurate verb might be “filtered” or “focused,” but the implication was clear. The tale is party-line. Even Greater Boston-based.

When I delved into the roots of tiny Dover to the north, from the perspective of its Quaker Meeting, I had no idea how unconventional my stance would be.

The traditional history, I will argue, is Puritan-based and largely pushes aside the earlier settlers and the cultural differences or influence they had.

The well-organized Puritan invasion began full-force in 1630 with Massachusetts Bay and then the Connecticut colonies. Their utopian vision was far more fragile in practice than we’re led to believe. In that first decade, Roger Williams, Ann Hutchinson, and Samuel Gorton were banished, leading to the establishment of Rhode Island and quickly afterward, in reaction, Harvard College. Their own charter was under threat of revocation from the king, and they placed cannon on Boston Harbor to fire on Royal Navy ships, if needed. Think about that. And its Pequot War enslaved Natives who were exchanged for Africans, spurring the lucrative slave-trade.

That’s a lot in a small space in a short time.

Settlement to the north was not immune.

In New Hampshire, two of the four colonial towns were established by religious dissidents fleeing Massachusetts. Dover’s Edward Hilton conveyed his charter (exactly how or for how much remains unclear) to the Lords Saye and Brook for their own management … or mismanagement. As my book details, the New Hampshire province and neighboring Maine quickly became a hotbed of dissidents and misfits – a story that is largely overlooked in the traditional accounts. Let me just say it was a ripe time.

What I’ve also been seeing is that the story of dissent has focused on Rhode Island and largely ignored the north, including Salem, Massachusetts.

Should one of my upcoming presentations redress that?

A few more candid reader reactions

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Despite nearly 60 years of writing, I’m still not accustomed to having readers come up to me in public with enthusiastic reactions.

My book Quaking Dover just may change that.

Here are two recent examples.

“It’s like you’re speaking right to me! It’s not like a history at all!”

That’s from a city councilor far from Dover.

I do hope that doesn’t put off history book addicts, though.

On the other hand, a Dover history buff said this:

“The clearest presentation of George Burdet I’ve read. Usually the histories of him are convoluted and hard to follow.”

When she first mentioned him, I felt some trepidation. Burdet wasn’t a Quaker and in fact predated them. He was one of those side details that could trip up the central argument if I had misread something.

More important than any praise is the confirmation. Or correction, too, for moving forward.

The shipwreck of Angel Gabriel had a Dover angle

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

A monument at Colonial Pemaquid acknowledging to the 1635 tragic sinking of a ship caught me up short. I had forgotten the vessel’s impact on Dover.

As background, the ship had been commissioned for Sir Walter Raleigh’s last expedition to America in 1617 and in several subsequent incarnations been involved in some high seas adventures, staving off repeated boarding by pirates and beating off three Spanish ships. Not that I knew that in my initial research.

As the monument at the Maine historical site proclaims, the Angel Gabriel was a 250-ton galleon carrying settlers to new lives in New England in August 1635 when it anchored at the village of Pemaquid. Most of the passengers and crew got off the ship before nightfall to rest on land as guests of the villagers. That night, August 14-15, a storm later known as “The Great Colonial Hurricane” struck the area and the Angel Gabriel was torn from her anchors and destroyed.

Or maybe it had happened earlier and the ship had limped into harbor. Still, I’m quoting there, from an account that continues: “In the mid 1970s, efforts were made to locate the wreck in Pemaquid Harbor with divers and a magnatometer and sideccan sonar but no artifacts form the ship were ever located.”

For context, “The Angel Gabriel was very similar to the Mayflower but 18 feet longer and bearing four more gun ports per side.”

I am now curious to see whether the small museum displays a trunk that went down with the ship and was found floating the next day. It belonged to a passenger named John Cogswell and his descendant of the same name agreed to lend the trunk for display.

This marker, though, stirred up some memories of a section that got cut from the final version of my book Quaking Dover.

Here’s what I had:

Three Dover Combination signers shared a tragic introduction to the New World when their ship, the Angel Gabriel, broke up in the August 14 “Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635,” either in the harbor at Pemaquid, Maine, or at the Isles of Shoals.

[Note the clarification in the site of the disaster in the bronze monument.]

Twenty-one-year-old William Furber settled next to his brother-in-law, John Bickford, at Oyster River and later relocated to Bloody Point, opposite Hilton Point on Great Bay. He married Elizabeth Clarke, daughter of William Clarke and Elizabeth Quick, in 1642 in Dover.

(The Bickford family, meanwhile, has John landing at Dover in 1623 and marrying Temperance Furber in 1624 in New Hampshire. If these dates and locations can be supported, they would significantly change the early history of the Piscataqua settlement. Their son, John, though, was born in 1625 in Devon, England.)

Samuel Haines was an indentured servant or apprentice to John Cogswell, who was also aboard and survived. They were bound for Ipswich  [Massachusetts], where Haines finished his obligations the following year and may have moved at that time to Northam, as Dover was also called.

He did, however, return to England in 1638 and married Ellenor Neate within a few weeks after his arrival, suggesting they were engaged before his coming to America.

After a year-and-a-half, they set sail and established their home in Northam/Dover, where he had ten acres of land near the meetinghouse. Later, he had twenty acres on the Back River, where his neighbors were fellow Angel Gabriel survivors William Furber and John Tuttle.

He was taxed in Dover in 1648 and 1649.

In 1650 he leased Captain Francis Champernown’s Green Land farm for two years, and then secured ninety-one acres adjoining it, where he built a permanent home, and another ten acres where he eventually owned a mill. In 1653 he was one of the petitioners successfully asking the Massachusetts General Court to change the town name from Strawbery Banke to Portsmouth. That year he began the first of ten successive years as a town selectman. In 1666 he helped run the town line between Portsmouth and Hampton.

He was also the first deacon at the formal organization of the first church in Portsmouth in 1671.

At much of this time, the population of what now constitutes New Castle, Portsmouth, Greenland, and Newington was only fifty to sixty families.

Much less is known about survivor John Tuttle, who was about seventeen years old at the time of the disaster. After their rescue, he arrived in Chebasco (in Essex or Ispwich, Massachusetts). His age and destination suggest his situation may have been similar to Haines’. By 1638 Tuttle settled in Dover, where he was known as Shipwreck John and had a farm on today’s Bellamy River – one that grew into what was long known as America’s oldest family-owned and operated enterprise. (Never mind that Thomas Roberts’ heirs nearby would have a longer claim.) Tuttle’s son Thomas was killed by a falling tree while still a young teenager, leaving John Jr. to continue the family name.

~*~

Successive Tuttles became prominent Quakers. And, as I inserted, the monument is more specific about the scene of the disaster than I’d previously found.

There’s more to the legacy of New Hampshire’s Hiltons

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

While Edward Hilton is hailed as the father of New Hampshire and was early on joined by his older brother William, both drifted away from my history Quaking Dover. Still, some points of interest remain.

Among them:

  1. His son, Edward Hilton Junior, married Anne Dudley, daughter of Puritan minister Samuel Dudley, allying his line with a prominent early New England family in Exeter. I sense there’s much more to this union that is presented.
  2. Edward’s grandson, Colonel Winthrop Hilton, was slain by Natives in 1710 while harvesting mast trees in Epping. He had succeeded Richard Waldron as head of the New Hampshire militia. His other grandfather was Massachusetts governor John Winthrop. So much for high connections.
  3. Winthrop Hilton’s brother Dudley was carried off in the attack and never heard from again.
  4. Edward’s nephew Captain William Hilton mapped an island in South Carolina in 1663, naming the location Hilton Head Island. He also mapped Cape Fear that year. He sailed out of Charlestown on Boston Harbor but acknowledged finishing the maps in the home of Nicholas Shapley in Maine – that is Shapleigh, a major figure in my book. Just look at Billy’s uncle’s second wife.
  5. That is, the elder Edward’s second wife, the widow Katherine Shapleigh Treworgy, who had a daughter marry into the equally prominent Gilman family.
  6. Into the late 1900s, one line continued to live on the farm settled in Newmarket around 1630. In fact, they claimed it was the oldest homestead in the state.
  7. Descendant Daniel Hilton, born in 1794, removed from Newmarket to Meredith, where he had 18 children and left an estate of 80,000 acres by the time of his death in 1867. His ancestry also included Thomas Wiggin, who had brought many of the first wave to settle in Dover after the Hiltons.
  8. Daniel’s son Charles became chief engineer of the New York Central railway, in charge of the building of bridges over the Hudson River and a viaduct in Albany in addition to Grand Central Station and grain elevators in New York City. So much for humble Granite State beginnings. He was also a high-ranking Free Mason.
  9. The Hilton family burial ground along State Route 108 in Newfields, just across the town line from Newmarket, rather thickens the plot.
  10. There’s no connection to Conrad Hilton and his hotel chain.

 

Now for a word from Friends Journal magazine

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

A classy magazine published 11 times a year in Philadelphia and having a readership in all 50 states and 43 foreign countries has reviewed my book Quaking Dover. Yay!

As Friends Journal critic Marty Grundy asks, “What was it about Dover, N.H., on the Piscataqua River separating it from Maine, that enabled early Friends ministers to establish first a toehold and then to gather a third of the populace into the meeting, in spite of New England’s violent opposition to Quakers?”

Dover, I might venture, is way off the radar of the usual Quaker heritage addicts.

For answers, she notes, “This book offers an alternative history to the usual Puritan-centric stories,” a volume where “history is not just the result of the larger, impersonal scope of folkways, economic and political forces, or social class. It is lived by individuals who are part of families, individuals who make personal choices and influence those with whom they live. So Hodson also traces family connections showing that both a bold embrace of Quakerism and bitter persecution of the disturbers of the status quo tended to run in families.”

Yes, it is about people.

As Grundy also observes, “The book is an artifact of COVID in that it was created using what is available on the web, including secondary sources, much older published accounts, and summaries of meeting minutes … As anyone knows who has tried to do historical research recently, there is a gratifyingly wide variety of materials available electronically. Hodson has done a good job of mining; juxtaposing; and, as he says, ‘connecting the dots’ to produce a somewhat speculative but eminently well-argued and documented account,” one “also filled with verbal asides as the author comments on what he is discovering and sharing with the reader. He offers various versions of events and cheerfully acknowledges when he can’t find facts to fill in gaps.”

For the full review, see the magazine’s March issue.

My, and this was in a periodical going back only to 1827.