You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
By the time of the Civil War, Bangor as in Maine was the world’s leading lumber port. Some of that wealth is reflected in the proud Second Empire, Greek Revival, and Federal style homes that punctuate the Broadway Historic District and elsewhere through the city.
My elder daughter would find these to be models for her annual gingerbread houses.
Meanwhile, do any of them capture your imagination?
And you wonder where Stephen King got his inspiration?
It was fairly common in the wild when I was growing up in the Midwest, and its red roots and polymorphic leaves of one, two, and three lobes all on one tree made it distinctive. But the tree is rather rare where I’m now living.
It does, however, play into my Quaking Dover story, as I’ll explain.
Here are ten things of note about sassafras.
Quakers weren’t the only significant minority along the Piscataqua watershed in the colonial era.
One that doesn’t appear in my book Quaking Dover is the Scottish conscripts who had been defeated by Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan army at the battles of Dunbar in 1650 and Worcester in 1651, with some then showing up in what would become Berwick, Maine, and Oyster River in New Hampshire, now the town of Durham.
The Scots had sided with Charles II as king rather than Cromwell’s commonwealth. Hence, the “Bonnie Charlie” of the folksong lament, “Will yae ne’er come back again?” I now see the song also applying to the sons and brothers lost in the battles.
Despite their shared Calvinist theology, the Puritans took up to 16,000 defeated Presbyterians (Covenanters) as prisoners of war and treated them harshly. Many died in an infamous death march to Durham, England, or of illness later. Of the 3,000 survivors, around 900 of the healthiest were then deported to the American colonies, where they were sold for 20 to 30 pounds apiece (the cost of their passage) into indentured servitude, a form of slavery with freedom after five to eight years of satisfactory labor. The numbers of soldiers, I should caution, vary widely, depending on the source, at least until we get to the passengers on the ship Unity, 150 when it set sail late in 1650, and an additional 272 who reached Boston Harbor aboard the John and Sarah in late 1651.
I had come across passing references to some who had been sent from there to Berwick, Maine, but had not known of the enormity they endured or of their impact on the Piscataqua. One roadside historical marker, as I now understand, sanitizes their history.
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The Old Berwick Historical Society has pursued the story of about 25 Scots who were brought to reconstruct and expand a sawmill on the Great Works river, on a site now on Brattle Street in South Berwick.
For full details, check out their website and its post, The Scottish Prisoners of 1650.
For an idea of the impact of that number, remember that neighboring Dover, the largest town in the region, had about 60 households.
The Puritans in the New World did continue to rub salt in the Scots’ wounds. Before the town of Berwick was set off from Kittery in 1713, the English often called the settlement Unity, after the first ship that had transported the prisoners.
B. Craig Stinson’s Oyster River Scots, available online at the Scottish Prisoners of War Society’s thorough website, names another 22 who were taken to what was then part of Dover and then examines 18 of them. His list is drawn from the tax list at Oyster River, 1657-1659, most of them arriving on the John and Sarah. These are men who had fulfilled their indenture obligations, been freed, but were still in the settlement. Many of them later moved on to new locations.
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Cultural clashes with the New England Puritans were inevitable. The records tell of Scots being taken to court for using foul language or bold confrontations with militia leaders as well as one husband put in the stocks for kissing his wife on Sunday and a minister being barred from preaching.
Considering the imbalance of European men and women in the New World, I am surprised by the number of Scots who managed to marry after they had paid off their indenture. According to the New England Historical Society, many of the brides were Irish housemaids who had been brought to the region, in this case likely Scots-Irish; a few others were even the daughters of the men’s former bosses. Notably, few of the former prisoners of war returned to Britain. Still, I’ve wondered if any of them had left wives and families behind and somehow reunited with them in New England.
In subsequent generations, I do see some descendants marrying into Quaker surnames, but not many.
One notable exception, told in my book, is Quaker Richard Otis’ third wife, Grizel, the daughter of Scottish POW James Warren of Berwick.
In the devastating 1689 attack on Cochecho Village, her husband and a stepson and stepdaughter were slain, while she, her three-month-old daughter, and other family members were taken captive to Montreal, where she was renamed and remarried to a French-Canadian farmer and had five children. After being widowed again, she returned to Dover without her children and established a prominent public house, or tavern.
The Otis story is part of my book.
In general, when it comes to new tech, I’m pretty much of a neo-Luddite. I prefer to stick to the tried-and-true rather than chasing after every new twist and trying to master it before it’s obsolete by the next wave.
I still haven’t stepped up to host a Zoom session, for heaven’s sake. And we’re definitely not E-Zpass users when it comes to highway tolls, either.
Preparing visuals to accompany my public presentations related to my new book, Quaking Dover, however, has me beaming.
The first leap was in learning to connect a laptop to a slide projector – you know, so folks could watch a slide show on a big white screen or a wall.
From that experience, I realized the shots really needed to be all of one size. Some pictures I was discussing ran off the screen, while others were too small. That led to the PowerPoint format.
My initial outing with PowerPoint was with the Whittier Birthplace Museum’s virtual lecture series back in January. There, I was amazed to discover how much I could enlarge a detail from a photo without having it pixilate. Individual signatures from a Quaker marriage document, for instance, could be displayed prominently. The size of the photo in hand wasn’t an issue, either. Up we go!
I’ve been at it again, this time for presentations at the Dover Public Library on March 22 and the Pembroke (Maine) Historical Society on April 18, as well as a third in July via the Falmouth Friends Meeting on Cape Cod. All will be streamed, by the way, if you’re interested in participating. (Do mark your calendars.)
It’s getting easier with each round, and I’m learning how to easily copy a PP slide from one production to another. Yay!
Fun? I’m finding it downright exciting. Hope you do, too.
New England’s annual town meetings are often hailed as an epitome of participatory democracy, but I have yet to hear an examination of how they mutated from the original Congregational churches’ model of self-governance, back when the town and Puritan parish were one.
As long as voting on town affairs was limited only to males in good standing with the local congregation, up to two-thirds of a town’s households were excluded from the deliberations.
In New Hampshire, that wasn’t the case, even after Massachusetts annexed the colony. What happened then, I’ll venture, is that the Quakers and Baptists tempered the deliberations in the future Granite State in ways that eventually seeped elsewhere.
Quakers, or more formally Friends, served as a loyal opposition, one that wouldn’t take up arms in its cause but that would nonetheless hold firm to its convictions. Like the Baptists, they also believed in a separation of church and state.
The Quaker practice of conducting community business in a monthly session meant seeking unity on an issue without ever taking a vote. A vote, after all, would create a minority. Instead, when differences arose, due consideration might produce a synthesis – not a compromise. The former would be superior to either of the earlier positions. The latter would mean settling on the lowest common denominator.
Crucial to this process was the Meeting’s clerk, carefully listening to all involved.
A skillful town moderator, so I’ve heard, needs similar abilities.
I’m curious to hear how this played out in Rhode Island and on the Cape, where Friends and Baptists were also an influence.
Do note, the Puritan colonies had none of the toleration of Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, or New York to the south and west, yet they lacked the town meeting heritage.
I do want to hear more.
Even before many folks switched to unlisted numbers, in part to evade obnoxious ding-a-ling solicitations, the annual telephone book began shrinking. The migration from landline to cell phones was apparently the final straw, along with Yellow Pages regulars who turned instead to website searches or FaceBook.
What was long a standard reference volume for local communities is now long gone.
When’s the last time you saw a phone book?
Decades have passed since I’ve been in any part of New York City. In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, though, most of my buds were from there or nearby, so I wound up staying in all five boroughs. And I was reintroduced in the mid-80s as well.
I became fascinated with the transit rails and even imagined what I cast as Subway Hitchhikers, their psychedelic underground adventures now available in my novel Subway Visions.
Oh, the history! The city has certainly undergone a wild ride in the years since, some of them admittedly terrifying.
As improbable as my hitchhikers seemed at the time, reality has since produced several parallel developments.
The first was the Mole People, the homeless who created villages in the tunnels starting in the Reagan era.
The second was the Subway Surfers, daredevil youths who would ride the tops of the trains or more recently, hang from the sides.
I thought they had faded from the scene, but a spate of recent fatalities is proving otherwise.
As for the adrenaline rush? Or is it testosterone?
Maybe someone will be able to describe it to the rest of us. I’m not sure I’d want to see the movie version, sedate as I’ve become now.
As my new book came together in its revisions, I began to feel some parallels to John Baskin’s 1976 New Burlington: The Life and Death of an American Village, a non-fiction opus based on what was then the new field of oral history.
The village he examined was largely Methodist and Quaker, the latter having come en masse from South Carolina as their rejection of living in a slave-holding countryside. In fact, when they relocated as a Quaker Monthly Meeting, they carried their treasured minute book with them and continued their records in Ohio.
His book became something of a classic and was even excerpted as a popular series in the Dayton Daily News.
While relying heavily on quotations from his sources, he did knit the interviews together with some heavy interpretation on his part. And here I was, becoming an active narrator in the action in my own work.
My book, as it stands, is heavily influenced by what I’ve learned writing fiction, in addition to my lifetime career as a newspaper journalist. I view the result as a story.
More to the point, when Quaking Dover came out, one longtime friend asked me if it was another novel. I bristled, I think, “No! It’s a history! Non-fiction!” While also thinking, “Didn’t you read the description? What did you miss?”
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I am trying to remember the first time I mentioned Baskin’s book, probably in a Quaker circle in another part of the state, and hearing the response, “It’s all fiction.”
Huh? It seemed pretty solid to me, and the asides on Quakers were rather informative for a newcomer, as I still was then.
A decade or so later, visiting family back in Ohio, I ventured off to worship at the New Burlington Quaker church, which had rebuilt out by the highway after the village had been flooded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
At the close of the service, I was asked why I chose them rather than the more silent Friends in nearby Waynesville. Well, I had worshipped in that historic meetinghouse years earlier but, as I replied, I enjoyed visiting other branches of the Quaker world. And then I added, “Besides, I have the book.”
A moment of awkward silence struck the circle around me before the oldest person, a woman perhaps in her early 90s, softly pronounced, “It’s all fiction.” Obviously, they all knew what I meant by “the book.”
Oh? I was in no place to argue and accepted her verdict as literary criticism. In some ways, I took it as advice, not that anyone knew I, too, was a writer. Those of us in the news biz were already treading on thin ice in too many ways.
Still, as I retold the encounter to a reliable bud, he inhaled sharply and noted, “That’s strange. It’s the same thing Aunt Cecille said. Her words, ‘It’s all fiction.’”
Well, she did live in a town only a few miles up the road, one where the local Friends church had recently petered out. She, too, had Quaker roots and community creds.
~*~
As a journalist, I can relay one fine reporter’s observation that he knew he was on course with a controversial issue when he found both sides of the story were upset. Not that I want to go there. Still, I do know that we humans have a hard time accepting our own shortcomings and follies and that we view events through our own lenses.
I should add that Quakers, as a whole, write a lot. It’s a crowded field.
How crowded? The primary Quaker history journal takes this stand: if a book hasn’t been vetted by a peer review panel of historians, it’s taking a pass.
As they did on mine.
Here’s how the organizers of tomorrow night’s program are touting the event:
I’m so psyched!
What the marker in Eliot, Maine, doesn’t mention is that Major Charles Frost and Dover’s Richard Waldron concocted the mock wargame that led to the hanging of Native men sent to Boston and the sale of about 350 Penacook women and children into slavery in the West Indies.
This was hardly an attack on an innocent party, then. The Natives waited years to extract revenge, and did it at a time and place that spared others.
My history Quaking Dover adds details.
Jnana's Red Barn 