Tag: History

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.

So this is how Dover’s early houses looked?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Some historical accounts contend that the first housing in Dover was log cabins, as opposed to the thatched roof houses of Plimoth Plantation we can visit down in Massachusetts on our way down south of Boston to Cape Cod. (Go there, if you get the opportunity, by the way. It’s truly enlightening. And you won’t have to eat turkey or cranberry, not that I would object. Anyway, did those Pilgrims have mashed potatoes or sweet potatoes on that big event menu?)

Let me emphasize, log-style construction is often claimed for both the Hiltons’ settlement at Dover Point and the growing settlement’s first meetinghouse, which sat on what’s now roughly under a toll plaza on the Spaulding Turnpike.

Alas, both Dover sites represent lost opportunities for historical research.

In contrast, Colonial Pemaquid, Maine, from the same era, has been subject to extensive archeological work. This reproduction is a typical West Country fisherman’s family structure for the period, based on those findings.

Yes, that’s right. A whole family would fit in one.

Notably, the earliest residents there and in Dover were from the West Country of England – especially Devonshire. And from nearby Bristol, a name that’s been applied to both.

An extended conversation with one of the dedicated volunteer caretakers convinced me on this style, unlike log cabins, which were apparently brought to America by Scandinavians to Delaware a few years later.

Fish-drying racks would have been important.

In a related conversation, close to where I now live, I was surprised to hear that the French settlers on St. Croix Island in 1604 arrived with pre-fab housing and set it up, rather than constructing their village and fortifications from scratch. When the survivors abandoned the site in the spring of 1605, they readily dismantled these and took them to their new site, Port-Royal, Nova Scotia.

That had me wondering how all of that would fit into a ship, but then I started thinking of it as the cargo coming in one direction, replaced with fish, fresh timber, and pelts on the return. Maybe it was bigger than a bunch of U-Hauls. You’d be surprised how much we’ve shoved into a few of those.

So might something similar gone on when the English sailed up the Piscataqua? It would make a plausible alternative to the log cabin assumption.

The Maine historical site adds details to the reasoning behind their reconstruction.

By the way, the Borderlands region of England had a structure known as a cowpen (sounds like cabin), reflecting the reality of a somewhat temporary house that would be destroyed by fighting within 50 years. Or maybe even a wild party.

I’ve never been quite comfortable with the traditional log cabin description of Hilton Point’s early settlement. Point made?

Pemaquid, out beyond the Piscataqua frontier

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Call it a serendipitous trip.

My stopping off at the Colonial Pemaquid historical site in Maine during a weekend at the Common Ground Country Fair last year was an impromptu decision. I’d made a side trip to visit the iconic lighthouse down on Pemaquid Point in midcoast Maine and saw a roadside sign and thought, what the heck, on my drive back.

After all, the settlement had some connections to early Dover, as I note in my new book, but simply setting foot there gave me a more substantial sense of the place than as a footnote vaguely out there somewhere up the coastline.

At first, the state-managed site appears rather modest. Its small museum and nearby seafood restaurant were both closed, this being the shoulder season. But nosing around revealed much, much more, as I’ll explain here and in some upcoming posts.

It was settled by West Country fishermen, like those who were pivotal in early Dover, shortly after Edward Hilton and Thomas Roberts set up shop along the Piscataqua, so they would have shared a common culture. Notably, both sites were established before the great Puritan migration into Massachusetts Bay, bringing a much different English culture into New England.

Unlike Dover, the Pemaquid village was destroyed repeatedly in attacks from the French and their Native allies in the decades from King Phillip’s war on.

In short, English settlement was erased from Maine all the way down to Wells and York, close to Dover. I have to admit that caused me to give lesser attention to settlement much to the east of the Piscataqua River.

Still, the Pemaquid site, now in the town of Bristol, was left relatively undisturbed after the late 1700s. In the 1990s, though, extensive archeological excavations determined the shape of the village and a gave a clearer understanding of its economy and lifestyle. Today, the stone foundations and interpretative signage present some of their findings.

In those, as I’m excited to see, I got a clearer sense of how early Dover may have also emerged along High Street – today’s Dover Point Road.

I’d love to hear more about the settlers’ culture

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

What did they eat, for instance. Or, more accurately, how did they prefer it to be cooked?

And did children really smoke tobacco and drink beer, as seemed to be common among the Puritans.

My book, Quaking Dover, mentions a number of things that may have come down through the West Country culture of Devonshire. As one historian details, they were part of the Cavaliers’ lifestyle in Virginia, but for now I have no evidence of the degree they influenced the settlers in the Piscataqua watershed.

Still, I believe they were one of the reasons the Quaker message so readily took root and flourished there.

Not that Quakers or Puritans got very far in Virginia.

Let’s haul on some sea chanteys

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

As I’ve previously noted, the work songs went into the woods in the winter, carried by sailors who came ashore for the season. But few songs in return migrated from the forests to the sea.

Women’s names could be a clue to the, uh, moral integrity of many messages. “Sally” or “Nancy,” for instance, some more sterling than others.

Other work songs include chain-gang ditties or even the racist, “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah,” though it might fit what’s become of the minimum-wage American workplace.

As for spellings, I’m sticking with “chantey,” based on a scholarly friend’s insistence the notes having a chanter setting the pace. “Shanty” and “chanty,” though, are more common.

Here are some related facts.

  1. This folk music genre flourished aboard larger merchant vessels of the 19th century as a means of setting a rhythm to optimize joint labor involved in either a pulling or pushing motion, such as lifting anchor or setting sail, tasks that required working together for a long time. Think of circling a capstan. Think “Heave!” Or “Haul!”
  2. That’s why many of them are about whaling.
  3. The tradition soared in the period between the War of 1812 and the Civil War and died out with the arrival of steam-powered ships.
  4. Its roots, though, go way back through earlier work songs around the world, including stevedores loading and unloading ships.
  5. Some of the chanteys originated with African-Americans performing “cotton-screwing” on shore, using a large screw-jack to compress and bale cotton for shipment from Southern ports. Some of the incomprehensible words in the songs are attributed to this.
  6. Essentially, it’s a call-and-response form between the solo chantey man and the work crew.
  7. Sometimes they were accompanied by a bosun’s pipe, fife, drum, or fiddle.
  8. They were sung by pirates, too.
  9. About 200 were set down on paper, but thousands more were likely lost.
  10. Some may have been used when relaxing in the evening.

 

There’s a good reason Dover Friends didn’t have a meetinghouse before 1680

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Or keep minutes, that we know of.

The Quaker Meetings in Salem, Hampton, and Dover were all in Puritan-governed colonies, and thus officially illegal at the time. Religious toleration around 1680 came with a change New England governance and a royal governorship in Massachusetts.

With it, Salem has claimed to have the first Friends meetinghouse in America, though it was built about the same time as the one on Dover Neck, just south of today’s St. Thomas Aquinas high school. And Third Haven on Maryland’s Eastern Shore may be a tad older than either one.

Now, if we only had documentation, we might find the honor of being first in New England belongs instead to Dover.