Tag: History

About the Passamaquoddy

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Getting to or from Eastport means driving through the Passamaquoddy’s Pleasant Point Reservation. And yes, I dutifully observe the 35 mile an hour speed limit. I also gladly pay the voluntary “toll” that helps fund the fireworks for the tribe’s annual festival. Besides, it’s a better bargain than a movie and, anyway, we’re all invited.

Having lived previously at the edge of the Yakama reservation in Washington state, I appreciate having an Indigenous population so close at hand.

Here are some things I’ve learned.

  1. The first time I heard of the tribe was through a traditional healer and his apprentice who were our house guests maybe a dozen years ago back in Dover. And ever since, thanks to his warning, I never disrespect a mockingbird. Could that be why I’m still here?
  2. The tribe generally proclaims itself as “people of the dawn” or even “keepers of the dawn.” I’ve already posted that the dawns around here – the first light in the USA – are unique and full of wonder. But the tribal name’s root reflects the importance of fishing in their culture – “pollock-spearer” or “those of the place where pollock are plentiful.”
  3. Traditionally, for most of their 10,000 or more years, they summered in settled villages around the coasts and tributaries on both sides of the St. Croix River, where they harvested shellfish and worked the deep waters. In winter they dispersed inland, where they hunted large game.
  4. Today their centers are Sipayak (the Pleasant Point Reservation adjoining Eastport), where 2,005 members are enrolled; Motahkomikuk (Indian Township an hour to the north), 1,364 members; and Qonasqamkuk in New Brunswick, 206. There are also uninhabited tribal tracts inland.
  5. Economically, on-reservation families have a much higher poverty-income rate compared to Maine overall. The tribe is making efforts to improve income. A blueberry enterprise, a maple-syrup operation, and vacation sites are among its new directions.
  6. About 500 people speak its Algonquian dialect. After a steep decline in numbers over recent decades, efforts to preserve and reclaim its use are under way. It is being taught in the elementary schools.
  7. They’ve long been considered first-class loggers and woodworkers, as well as excellent basketry artists.
  8. In 1993 the state banned the use of the word “Passamaquoddy” by businesses, products, and activities without the written authorization of the tribe. Those using it before that date, however, were exempted.
  9. The tribe is one of four comprising the Wabanaki Confederacy today.
  10. Joe Clabby’s two excellent histories about Eastport and the Passamaquoddy vicinity delineate seemingly endless governmental mismanagement, mistreatment, and betrayal of the tribe and others in Maine and the nation – even when its members have served with honor in the world wars. One entry, relatively minor in comparison, hits home for me. In 1950, longtime “Indian agent … Hiram Hall allowed the state to charge the Passamaquoddy Fund $8,000 per home for home construction (the homes are worth only $2,500.)” Not that it ended his career.

Friends lived ‘under discipline’ as a means to avoid disorder

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Quakers have always faced an inherent conflict in trying to uphold a community of faith predicated on a personal experience of the Divine. How do you know you’re not being deluded or misled? You have to turn to others. (I’d say this is a great value in marriage, as well!)

This is further complicated by the profession of embodying an eternally unchanging Truth while acknowledging shortcomings in our human comprehension and changing social conditions.

I’m convinced that when the Friends movement first burst forth in Britain, anti-blasphemy laws precluded them from fully articulating the scope of their theological vision. They couched some of that by referring to the Light rather than Christ, and focused on daily conduct, or “walking in the Light.” And, no, it was never “Inner Light,” not until the late 1800s, but rather “Inward Light” or some variant. Light pouring into oneself, like a lighthouse beacon. Well, that’s the thrust of my pamphlet Revolutionary Light, available as a free download at my Thistle Finch site.

~*~

BY THE END OF THE 1600S, Quaker leadership had resolved to push away from theological correctness in favor of right daily practice – orthopraxis rather than orthodoxy.

The choice has come back to bite us repeatedly.

What we did inherit was a system of unique decision-making.

First is the organization of Meetings designated by the frequency of their decision-making sessions.

The local body is called a Monthly Meeting, and this is where memberships are “held” or recorded. A Monthly Meeting likely encompassed smaller neighborhood bodies of worship within it, such as Preparative Meetings (so called because they might “prepare” items for the monthly business session) or Indulged Meetings or, nowadays, a Worship Group.

Thus, Dover Monthly Meeting over time included Sunday and midweek worshiping bodies on Dover Neck and Cochecho Village, as well as in Kittery/Eliot, Berwick, Rochester, Lee, Barrington, New Durham, Wolfeboro, and Sandwich. In time, those that survived were set off as their own Monthly Meetings and then included in Dover Quarterly Meeting.

Which leads us to the way neighboring Monthly Meetings joined four times in a Quarterly Meeting, for mutual nurture and the resolution of lingering issues. These could be a kind of holiday that Friends and family spent together. I’m told that the local meetinghouses were closed on these occasions, because everyone was away, together.

And once a year, a regional Yearly Meeting gathered, essentially uniting a common discipline and practice for the Quarterly and Monthly Meetings within it. For Dover, this was New England Yearly Meeting, which gathered in the haven of Newport, Rhode Island. And those present were largely representatives who could afford to be away for a week.

~*~

SECOND, AND UNIQUELY, Friends developed sets of Queries and Advices to guide practice. At each Monthly Meeting, a few questions would be pondered, personally and then collectively, and a written response would be drafted and sent to the Quarterly Meeting, which would then draft a summary to be considered at the Yearly Meeting.

Until the late 1800s, business was done by the men’s “side of the Meeting” and by the women’s – the meetinghouse had interior dividing shutters that could be opened for worship and closed for business – and each half had its own responsibilities. If there were problems in a marriage, for instance, the man had to report to the women’s Meeting. Or at least, more privately, to its elders.

The Quaker marriage process reflected the faith’s discernment and discipline, as I explain in my new book.

~*~

THIRD, FROM THE DUTCH MENNONITES, via the General Baptists they influenced in England, was our recognition of ministers and elders (aka bishops within a Meeting) and, by extension, overseers.

Through them, we also gain our peace testimony, Plainness, even anti-slavery plank.

~*~

AND, YES, WE’VE COME TO APPRECIATE “continuing Revelation.” That is, an awareness of our own human fallibilities combined with some flexibility.

If only that had come more fully into Quaker awareness earlier. Instead, at times, we’ve fallen under a deadly legalism.

~*~

Check out my new book, Quaking Dover, available in your choice of ebook platforms at Smashwords.com.

Welcome to Dover’s upcoming 400th anniversary.

Giving the devil his due

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In researching a project of any scope, you can’t ever read everything touching on the subject, and sometimes that can be a blessing in disguise.

For one thing, it may mean you have to examine points afresh and unguided rather than relying on another’s assumptions or conclusions.

And, for another, you may find reassurance or in seeing how another researcher has come to the same results you have independently or, in another vein, you may strengthen your disagreement.

That’s where I find myself on The Devil of Great Island: Witchcraft and Conflict in Early New England, Emerson W. Baker’s 2007 examination of a paranormal outbreak of flying rocks in an inn on an island in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, ten years before the infamous Salem witch trials just to the south. Now that I’ve finally read it, I can say he’s cleared up some questions I had on events upstream and provided backup for some of my deductions.

My new book, Quaking Dover, takes place one colonial town upriver from Great Island, today’s New Castle, and shares some of the same cultural and historic influences. While I examine a sharp divide in Dover between its English settlers from Devonshire and the Puritans from East Anglia, Baker identifies this in Portsmouth and much of the rest of New England as the Old Planters, of Anglican faith, being pushed aside by the newer Puritans, and their rigid Calvinism. Quite simply, the tensions were more prevalent and widespread than I’d assumed.

The target of the airborne mineral projectiles was innkeeper George Walton, along with his family and guests, evening after evening through an entire summer.

Baker labels Walton repeatedly as a Quaker, as he also does for the identity for Nicholas Shapleigh, continuing a widespread misconception. The prominent Shapleigh proved a valuable ally but, as his descendants point out, he was never a member of the Society of Friends (Quakers). While Major Shapleigh suffers persecution for maintaining some of the Friends positions, nothing in Walton’s life or character suggests he did so. Quite the contrary, there were many reasons he would have been disciplined and disowned, if he had been part of a Quaker Meeting, the closest one being at Hampton.

As Baker, a Salem State University history professor, lays out Walton’s family and neighbors, what becomes clear that just about everyone had good reason to target the contentious innkeeper. As for a devil on Great Island, I’d have to say it was Walton himself.

Baker sees the New Castle incident as a precursor to similar events that culminate in Salem, and he traces individuals who would have been familiar with the Walton stoning incidents to the outbreaks elsewhere. He further finds common elements that include contested land claims and political upheaval, which far outweigh theological issues.

Baker has since written much more about witchcraft, befitting his locale. The Devil of Great Island is a fun and fast read and a fine introduction to a definitive moment in the American experience.

As I’m arguing, there’s much more in New England’s past than you were ever taught. Or maybe even suspected.

 

Was there a hidden connection in the street name?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The site in south Boston where two Quaker missionaries were hanged less than a month after visiting Dover, New Hampshire, was eventually christened – get this – Dover Street.

The street was later renamed.

Another of the four who died on the gallows there had also apparently visited Dover a year or two earlier.

Who made the decision – and why? They couldn’t be that oblivious, could they?

Once the surrounding water was filled in, the street came to have a long history of immigrants and seedy characters, perhaps doomed by its bloody past, before part of the neighborhood was razed for the urban renewal that brought the Boston Herald newspaper plant and later removed the elevated subway station after the Orange Line was rerouted to the west in 1987.

Today it’s known as East Berkeley Street, hoping for a new image.

Check out my new book, Quaking Dover, available in your choice of ebook platforms at Smashwords.com.

Elizabeth Hanson’s ordeal

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Through the waves of warfare between the English settlers and the French and their Native allies to the north and the east, Dover Friends were caught in a bind.

Quakers espoused a pacifist Peace Testimony as part of their Christian faith, but in New England all fit adult males were compelled to participate in the militia. In some cases, accommodations may have been made, such as allowing the Friends to not carry arms or to serve as watchmen or in other non-combatant service. But some no doubt refused to do even that because it still supported the fighting.

Quaker testimony of non-violence was anything but an idealistic, abstract statement. It meant placing their lives – and their children’s – in jeopardy. The final fatal forays in Dover were on a Quaker family.

John Hanson’s house at Nock’s Marsh (more commonly known as Knox Marsh) was in an exposed position. Because of the renewed troubles, he was advised by neighbors to move into the more compact area of Cochecho village. Instead, as a “stiff Quaker” upholding the Friends’ witness of good relations with the Natives, he stayed put.

Life looked good to him. On August 9, 1725, his eldest daughter, Hannah, and Israel Hodgdon junior wed in a Quaker service. Four days later, Hanson’s wife gave birth to daughter Mary (also known as Mercy).

Only two weeks after those celebrations, though, 13 Natives, including French Mohawks, lay in wait for several days, looking for an opportunity to attack. On August 27, while Hanson and daughter Hannah attended midweek Quaker worship and his two oldest sons were work at some distance, the Natives swept in and “all naked with their guns and tomahawks” entered the house.

Elizabeth Meader Hanson was at home, along with a servant and three children. Two young sons, playing in the orchard, would have escaped but just as the Indians had finished rifling the house, the boys – Ebenezer, age five, and Caleb, four – came in sight and made such noise that the invaders immediately killed them by bashing out their brains and scalping them – in front of their mother – to stop the alarm. Daughter Sarah entered the house and was also taken. The raiders promptly started for Canada, with their captives in tow – Elizabeth Hanson, who had given birth to daughter Mary just two weeks before, plus seven-year-old son Daniel, daughters Sarah, 16, and Elizabeth, 14, and the servant girl.

The attack and departure came swiftly and quietly. Newly-wed Hannah discovered the carnage on her return from worship.

Was the Hanson house this big at the time? Or was it enlarged over the years, as many others were.

Not knowing the Natives were resolved to strike again, her father stayed briefly with a brother who, though Quaker, had three lusty sons with firearms loaded for big game. Still, John moved back to the farm. When three men came by on September 25, 1725, the raiders hid in the barn before promptly shooting and killing either 37-year-old Benjamin Evans or his likely nephew William. Slightly wounded but profusely bleeding was John Evans, whom the Natives thought was dead. They scalped him, turned him over, pounded him with their guns, and moved on. Making their escape, they took 12- or 13-year-old Benjamin Evans as a captive. He was later ransomed. John Evans, meanwhile, was taken to a nearby garrison where he recovered to live another 50 years. He was the last Dover man to lose his scalp.

The large Evans family was no stranger to Native attacks. Among the victims were patriarch John Evans, chained to Major Waldron’s barn and burned in the 1689 carnage at Cochecho village, and his son John, who died in captivity in 1692.

Her recollections were republished over the years.

Elizabeth Hanson’s arduous ordeal, though, turned into five months of captivity, which she later related in detail. The trek to Canada was merciless, leaving the captives wet, cold, bruised, and hungry. At one stretch, they had nothing to eat but tree bark, and Elizabeth feared for her infant as her milk began to dry up. Once in Quebec, all her children except the baby were separated from her, and in one instance, she was informed that her captor was very displeased with her and was planning to murder her the next night.

Funds for the family’s ransom included a large sum collected by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, and her husband quickly went to Canada to redeem them. The price for Elizabeth and baby Mary was around 700 pounds. He also obtained the release of son Daniel and daughter Elizabeth, but the Natives would not release Sarah on any terms, though they did allow the father and daughter several hours together.

The chief’s wife had plans of having the girl become their son’s bride, even though the name they gave her translated as “the woman of the burning of the cooking.”

Back in Dover, John and Elizabeth had yet another child, Abigail, but he could not be content until rescuing Sarah, too. On April 19, 1727, he set out with a kinsman for Canada but fell ill at Crown Point, New York, on the west bank of Lake Champlain, and died.

The kinsman, Ebenezer Downs, and his wife continued on in hopes of redeeming their own children as well.

A marker along State Route 155 is all that remains at the site.

In Quebec, Frenchman Jean-Baptise Sabourin had interposed with the Natives and persuaded Sarah to obtain her freedom by marrying him, which she did on June 27, 1727. The record names her as Sara Ennson, daughter of Jean Ennson, deceased, and Elizabeth Midor, English of the village of Touba in the government of Boston.

Apparently, Downs had managed to meet with her and inform her of the death of her father. But she had been baptized at age 17 and renamed Catherine, perhaps as a step in gaining her release from the Natives.

With Jean-Baptiste, she had at least eight children, two of whom married children of Deerfield, Massachusetts, captives, two who died in infancy, and one who became a nun.

On March 24, 1730, her sister Elizabeth married Ebenezer Varney, the son of Ebenezer Varney, whose garrison had survived the 1689 attack on Cochecho village, and Mary Otis, who had been captured and returned.

Two first-person accounts of Elizabeth Hanson’s experience became widely known. The first, God’s Mercy Surmounting Man’s Cruelty, Exemplified in the Captivity and Redemption of Elizabeth Hanson, appeared in 1728 in Philadelphia.

A second, more detailed version was by English Quaker minister Samuel Bownas, who knew the Hansons from his travels to America. It was first published in London in 1760: An Account of the Captivity of Elizabeth Hanson, Now or Late of Kachecky, in New-England: Who, With Four of Her Children and Servant-maid, Was Taken Captive by the Indians, and Carried into Canada. This volume, especially, gives insights into life within a tribal culture. Both narratives lean heavily on a Quaker religious framework.

Kachecky, of course, was another variant of Cochecho, while Touba was a French attempt at Dover.

Widow Hanson, as Bownas repeatedly referred to her, never remarried and died in 1737.

~*~

Check out my new book, Quaking Dover, available in your choice of ebook platforms at Smashwords.com.

Welcome to Dover’s upcoming 400th anniversary.

There’s more to history than the usual names-and-dates scenario

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I’ve admitted, many of the historical persons in my new book, Quaking Dover, really deserve full-length biographical treatment or maybe individual operas or Hollywood blockbuster movies, if only we had time to linger. Four hundred years requires a lot of compression and that meant keep moving ahead. Anyone looking for a writing prompt can dig in with a host of possibilities on the list.

Retired librarian Olga R. Morrill, bless her, rises to the challenge with her historical fiction, Vagabond Quakers: Northern Colonies, published in 2017, focusing on the three women missionaries who came to Dover in 1662 and were whipped out of town in what was essentially a death sentence.

In doing so, she also portrays Richard Waldron and Nicholas Shapleigh as fully fleshed characters, even though they both have much more ahead in their lives after the three troublesome Quakers venture off-stage, the part she follows as the women venture south. (Yes, we need a full bio for each of the guys, please.)

As fiction, Vagabond Quakers resorts to some creative history and plausibility to fill in huge gaps. I see this in Waldron’s chronology, especially – with details where my findings and her tale conflict – but she does induce a compelling drama even in the minor players. She weaves fact and fiction seamlessly and manages a credible dialogue. (What they actually said would sound unintelligible gibberish to our ears.) If only I were sure which parts arise in her invention and which parts rest on solid evidence.

I’m happy to see that she examines Waldron’s life as a major figure in Boston, not just his existence as the most powerful man in New Hampshire, where he’s usually confined in the telling. Dover may have been his private fiefdom, out on the fringe of New England, but he wasn’t exactly provincial. She even manages to stir some sympathy for the man I dub the perfect villain.

She also gives full due to the deep conflicts in the town church before the Quakers arrive. Those are something I’ve long suspected contributed to the willingness of so many residents to join Friends early on. My one quibble is that I think Elder Starbuck would have been in the other party than the one where she places him.

For me, Morrill’s biggest contributions come in her envisioning the proceedings from the women’s perspective – not just the Quakers, but even those in the Waldron household. In the actual dates-and-names history, they’re mostly invisible. Many of Dover’s earliest wives remain ciphers, and even too many of their first and maiden names are missing. As for their language, demeanor, and dress? Morrill has me willingly suspending disbelief in her storytelling. Was one of the Quakers of short stature? Not that I’ve found anywhere. As for singing? Unlikely, but the quirk does pop the individual into three dimensions.

The events she describes in what would seem an out-of-the-way frontier settlement remain an important breakthrough in establishing religious freedom, anywhere.

Morrill and I both find these events to be endlessly fascinating, and hope you will, too.

Let me know of examples of courage you find that match the Quaker women’s.

Don’t overlook Baltimore

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

There are reasons it’s also known as Charm City. Or, as they say of neighboring D.C., it has Northern charm combined with Southern inefficiency. By the way, don’t blame me for that perspective.

USS Constellation, built in 1855, graces the Inner Harbor. (Photo via Wikimedia)
  1. Baseball great Babe Ruth was born here (1895) and poet Edgar Allan Poe died a drunk on its streets (1849).
  2. Speaking of baseball, the Camden Yard ballpark spurred the return of smaller professional arenas to central cities across the continent. Now, if the Birds could only fly higher than the Yankees or Red Sox in their division. They really are doomed in that association.
  3. Speaking of birds, the Baltimore Oriole got its name because its colors resembled those of the coat of arms of Maryland founder Lord Calvert. I have no idea about their religion, but he was an advocate of religious liberty.
  4. The port was second only to Ellis Island in the number of immigrant arrivals in the 19th century. And while the city sits below the Mason-Dixon line and has a Southern outlook, it also has a strong German presence and Northern connection strengthened by the Baltimore & Ohio train tracks.
  5. With his profits from those rails, Quaker Johns Hopkins founded the nation’s first research university in 1876. Today it and its related hospital and institutions are the state’s largest employer.
  6. The metro area is also home to McCormick spices. You can smell it in the humid spring air.
  7. The National Aquarium crowns the redevelopment of the Inner Harbor as a popular destination. The waterfront is also graced by the tall-masted USS Constellation of Civil War glory.
  8. American Methodism was founded in 1784 at the site of today’s Lovely Lane church. And a 1789 conference at Old Otterbein Church led to the formation of the United Brethren denomination of German-Americans (it merged in 1968 with the Methodists, giving them the “United” in today’s name). Also in 1789, the nation’s first Roman Catholic archdiocese was founded in the city; its cathedral was finished in 1821. It even produced a saint, I believe.
  9. A flag waving over Fort McHenry during the War of 1812 inspired Francis Scott Key to write the lyrics to the National Anthem, the one that was much in the air yesterday, but the music’s from a much older British drinking song. How ironic, especially since it challenges even the most professional singers.
  10. The city doesn’t show up in my fiction, despite my living in the inner city’s Bolton Hill and suburban Owings Mills for three years. Even if the place is so hot and humid you have to turn on your air conditioner on the same day you turn off your furnace. Or, as they say of neighboring Worshington, it’s built over a swamp you know.

Ours was a bloody frontier much longer than most Americans know

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In 1676, during King Philip’s War, a number of Natives fleeing from the Massachusetts Bay colony militia received shelter among the Pennacook tribe living around Dover. The refugees were part of what’s called a rebellion that began the previous year, the first in a series of armed campaigns between the colonists and the Indigenous peoples in and around Dover and beyond.

The existing accounts, of course, are one-sided, but the devastation afflicted innocent non-combatants on both sides.

~*~

Up to this point, most of the fighting was to the south, though there were fatal attacks in Oyster River, still part of Dover, among others.

Not all of the tribes aligned with the rebellion. The Narragansetts, for one, were neutral, yet more than 600 were killed by the colonists in revenge.

Dover’s Richard Waldron and Maine’s Charles Frost led colonial forces in an incursion on the Mi’kmaq in French-held Acadia – today’s Downeast Maine.

In the midst of this, two events in Dover added fuel to the conflagration. Until now, Dover had largely mutually positive relations with the Natives, Waldron aside.

Waldron was ordered to attack the Natives who had found refuge nearby and turn any combatants over to the Massachusetts militia. He instead invited about 400 Natives to participate in a mock battle against the New Hampshire militia. After the guests had fired their guns, Waldron took them prisoner and sent them to Boston, where the leaders were executed. Others were sold into slavery in “foreign parts,” mostly Barbados.

The usual take on the “mock battle” comes from Waldron’s account and often has most of the captives being returned peacefully. In contrast, the Indigenous version handed down orally has the event being an invitation to a feast. Only twenty of the Natives were armed, and at least 350, mostly women and children, were taken, sold, and never returned. Among the consequences was the fall of the peaceful, Christian Wonalancet as sachem and the rise of the warlike Kankamagus.

Major Richard Waldron masterminded the sham war game that led to the captivity of local Natives who came in peace.

Quakers were no doubt appalled by Waldron’s dishonesty and physical violence as well as the enslavement – New England Friends, including children, had faced being sold into slavery by Puritan authorities at the height of the persecutions. Moreover, Friends cherished good relationships with the Natives.

They were not alone.

“The local Indians were released but never forgave Waldron for the deception, which violated all the rules of honor and hospitality valued by both sides,” as one version, drawing on the colonial record, relates.

Despite its brevity, King Philip’s War is considered the greatest calamity in 17th-century New England and the deadliest war in Colonial American history. Within a year, many of the towns had been destroyed or damaged, and the economy of Plymouth and Rhode Island colonies was all but ruined. Hundreds of Wampanoags and their allies were publicly executed or enslaved, and the Wampanoags were left effectively landless.

For northern New England, it was only the beginning of a series of wars connected to European conflicts that would devastate the frontier until 1763, when New France was surrendered to Britain.

 

One of the fortified garrison houses built in Dover. Each one was surrounded by a palisade. When the neighbors arrived for the night, things must have been pretty crowded.

Along the Piscataqua, the Natives were patient, waiting 13 years for revenge. As historian Jeremy Belknap related: “Friday the 28th June, 1689, was the fatal day in the morning of which Major Richard Waldron was murdered and the destruction of Cochecho perpatrated by the Indians of Pennycook and Saco. This caused the absence of Mr. Pike for some years.”

Was the town’s minister permanently injured in the attack? Or suffer mental illness as a consequence?

~*~

The Reverend John Pike noted “the eastern Ind joyning with those of Pennicook (thro the Instigation of Hawkins & a Sagamore) suddenly seized on Cochecho, about break of day, wn all things were silent & secure. Killed 23 persons … and carried captive 29.”

This was the beginning of King William’s War, a series of massacres orchestrated by Jean-Vincent d’Abbadie de Saint-Castin and Father Louis-Pierre Thury.

In New England, the conflict originated in the failure of the settlers to adhere to the treaties and agreements made at the end of King Philip’s War, but the renewed outbreak of hostilities was also the North American theater of hostilities originating when King James II, the last of England’s suspected secretly Roman Catholic kings, was deposed and replaced by Protestants William and Mary. Hence, the “William” in what was also known as Father Baudin’s War and Castin’s War. Baudin was a French Sulpician priest who had trained to become a musketeer and later ministered in Acadia. This segment would continue for nine years, ending in 1697.

Waldron had dismissed concerns about renewed hostilities, telling residents to go and plant their pumpkins, and he would take care of the Natives.

Instead, in the attack, the sword-wielding elderly Waldron was cut across his belly with knives, with each warrior saying “I cross out my account.” Five or six dwelling houses were burned, along with the mills. Fifty-two colonists, a full quarter of the entire population, were captured and carried off to Quebec or slain.

One view of the attacks.

The Indigenous account of 80-year-old Waldron’s demise is more detailed. His nose and ears were cut off and stuffed in his mouth, as were his thumbs. To the Natives, he had turned his nose to injustice, refused to hear all sides, and cheated on weights in trade – placing his thumb on the scale. He also avoided trading them useful goods they desired and instead paid them in rum or trinkets.

The garrisons were houses that had been fortified from 1675 and on, set within palisades and designated as places of shelter in the event of attack. At the time of the 1689 attack, there were an estimated fifty such sites within and around the sprawling town.

The most extensive toll came at Richard Otis’s garrison, where the 64-year-old blacksmith, his son Stephen, and daughter Hannah were killed. His third wife, Grizel, three-month-old daughter Margaret, three daughters from his first marriage, Judith, Rose, and Experience, and at least two grandchildren were taken captive. One adult son, Richard Jr., escaped. The garrison was burned.

The Otis family was Quaker.

~*~

Welcome to Dover’s upcoming 400th anniversary.

 

Our city even has a forested state park

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Eastport may be a city, but much of it is still forest.

Shackford Head, between Broad Cove and Deep Cove, has one of those. And it’s a state park. Mercifully, it even escaped becoming an oil refinery in the 1970s and ’80s, thanks to some dedicated citizen action.

This is all that remains of five Civil War ships that were burned between 1901 and 1920 at Cony Beach at today’s Shackford Head State Park. The vessels were brought close to shore and set aflame to release metal for scavengers to collect at low tide. This is Cony Beach with Shackford Head beyond.

I should note that the Shackford family, so prominent in the settling of Eastport, had roots in Dover, New Hampshire, before spreading into Newburyport, Massachusetts, and then shooting up here. It seems that our house was built in the 1830s by one of them.

Apart from that, the 90-acre state park allows for some delightful hiking and vistas without having to drive miles from home. You know,  needed a quick fix of more nature.

The shoreline can be quite rugged but have a pocket beach below.
Deep Cove flanks one side of the park.
Sometimes a trail takes to a plank walk over muddy stretches.