The fur traders’ hot market for beaver pelts in colonial New England soon reduced beaver populations, and fewer beavers meant fewer beaver ponds, an important source of the local Native diet, including roots and waterfowl.

That was followed by the construction of mills, which were powered by water, and that meant dams. Some impounded incoming tides for release a few hours later. These were tricky to operate, though, and changed speeds depending on the strength of the incoming tide or the level of the water during its release.

Dams at the waterfalls became more common.

Either way, dams impeded upstream migrations of fish trying to return from the sea to their spawning grounds. These included salmon, sturgeons, eels, and river herring. Their reduced stocks afflicted both the Natives and the English inland fishing industry.

The mills also produced copious amounts of sawdust that choked river bottoms, reducing and killing off additional species.

The demand for timber itself cleared land all the way back eight to ten miles from the riverbanks, further eliminating wild game. The wood was needed not only for the sawmills but also as fuel for brickmaking, domestic cooking, and warmth through winter. Heating a house commonly required 40 cords of wood a year – no small feat of labor.

And runoff muddied and silted the streams.

Let’s not get too sentimental about the bucolic nature of the era, OK?

~*~

Welcome to Dover’s upcoming 400^th anniversary.

 

One of the first thing the colonists typically built was a sawmill. From what I’ve seen to date, it always came before a gristmill. I would have thought food would have been the priority, but there are suggestions they imported their flour or even bread instead.

That raises questions of just exactly what their meals were. The Puritans were devoted to their beer and tobacco – and that extended to even their children.

For that matter, how early was Beantown a synonym for Boston?

So why sawmills? The early settlers along the Piscataqua apparently erected log cabins, along with fortifications. For that matter, the sole surviving garrison house, preserved at the Woodman Institute, was essentially a log cabin built around 1675.

But flat boards were needed for shipbuilding, wharf planking and bridges, and barrels – for shipping dried fish, especially. Perhaps lumber itself was also an export to Barbados, the Bahamas, and the West Indies.

Let’s remember, too, the construction of dams and mills and their operation required sophisticated skills.

I’m guessing that few of the early English settlers along the Piscataqua were menial day laborers.

~*~

Welcome to Dover’s upcoming 400^th anniversary.

 

One of the things the Dover 400 project is doing is raising an awareness of the Indigenous peoples who inhabited the region for millennia before European colonists arrived.

The tribes were far more varied than the generic “Indian” label conveys. Sometimes they were in open conflict with each other, and there were many differences in language, culture, and lifestyles. There were also alliances with other tribes, creating subtle but significant relations across the region.

Some lived in permanent villages, often along streams. Others ranged from ancestral site to site through the year in a cycle of fruit, vegetable, and animal fare.

As hunters and fisherfolk who often traveled by water and lived in villages along the shores, many of their names for places are often translated as some variation of “water,” with distinctive nuances that are lost to Western ears but still hint of sharp observation of the character and advantages of each site.

Their name for Hilton Point, for example, is something along of the lines of “place encircled by water,” while Cochecho is more like “foaming falls,” each one, however, unlike other points or coves or waterfalls.

As for our own names applied to these places? I doubt we give them a second thought other than perhaps their spelling.

And, to our loss, we have none of their mythopoetic stories in their original richness – narratives rooted in their unique environment. At least we can begin to listen to those told by surviving tribes in neighboring Maine.

  ~*~

WHEN THE ENGLISH ARRIVED in New England, most of the tribes had been decimated by pandemics, many of the illnesses resulting from contact with earlier explorers and traders. The sharp loss of population gave the Pilgrims an opening in their settlement at Plymouth.

The first traders brought items the Natives appreciated as useful – metal pots, knives, blankets – that could be obtained in exchange for furs.

As we know, the dynamic changed. We’ve rarely heard the Indigenous voices tell their side of the struggles. The English, French, and Dutch all have barbaric actions to atone for.

The marker at Ambush Rock on Route 101 in Eliot, Maine, for example, makes it sound like the victims were an innocent party on its way home from church one Sunday in 1697. There’s no mention that the prime target, Major Charles Frost, was Richard Waldron’s cohort in the notorious “games” of 1676 that ended up in the arrest of nearly 400 Natives who were then executed or sold into slavery. The Natives waited 21 years for revenge. Frost was the highest-ranking militia officer in Maine.

For me, the missing details change my view of the event entirely. It’s not an isolated instance.

~*~

DOVER WAS IN PENNACOOK COUNTRY, a tribe closely related to the Abenaki – the identities are sometimes merged, suggesting change over time. The Pennacook spanned over much of New Hampshire, neighboring Maine, and parts of Massachusetts. The English jurisdictions didn’t match theirs.

Another consideration is how many of the English settlements occurred at earlier Indigenous villages, as seems to be the case both at the falls in today’s downtown Dover or neighboring Exeter, Newmarket, Durham, Rollinsford, Somersworth, and South Berwick.

~*~

ONE THING THAT WAS OBVIOUS TO ME in a visit to the Plimoth living history museum in Massachusetts was how superior the Wampanoag’s communal wigwams were for living through winter compared to the Pilgrim’s drafty cottages of 1630.

I’m sure the same can be said of the shores of the Piscataqua.

~*~

Welcome to Dover’s upcoming 400^th anniversary.

One awareness I’ve gained living in New England is that when you’re out on the water – say in a sailboat, fishing boat, whale watch, or ferry – the geography fits together quite differently than it does on the land.

For example, where I now live in Maine, it’s only four miles or so from our downtown to the one just south of us. That is, if you’re just looking, going by water, or a bird. To drive, though, you have to head north and loop around Cobscook Bay, a distance of 38 miles and about 46 minutes. At least it has no traffic lights.

The water perspective is especially important in understanding the dynamics of early Dover, centered as it was at Hilton Point and Dover Neck between the Piscataqua River and Great Bay. For example, the heart of the town of Kittery was in today’s Eliot, just a mile away by water but 18 miles by land. And today’s Kittery was ten miles downstream or even longer by land.

Oyster River, or today’s Durham, was only four to eight miles to the west, depending whether you were stopping at wharves along the way or going all the way to the Lamprey River’s falls and the landing.

A trip by boat between Eliot/Kittery and Oyster River/Dover was – and still is – no big deal.

In fact, by water they were closer to Hilton Point than was the village at Cochecho Falls, today’s downtown Dover.

For perspective, I’ve read that a man on the Isles of Shoals thought nothing of rowing ten miles – six of them on the open ocean – for an evening in Portsmouth and then ten miles back in the dark.

In comparison, the relocation of families from Eliot/Kittery to Oyster River becomes much more sensible than a land-based movement would suggest, and much less puzzlingly.

Also, the boundary between New Hampshire and Maine largely dissolves. The watershed becomes the defining perspective.

In terms of understanding history, “Piscataqua” can mean not just the original settlement at Hilton Point but also the expansion across both sides up and down the river. That seems to be the case when Portsmouth, Kittery, and New Castle all claim a 1623 founding.

You might even say it muddies the water.

~*~

Welcome to Dover’s upcoming 400^th anniversary.

 

One of the more disquieting things my examination of early Dover and New England stirred up for me is an awareness of a prevalent expression of white supremacy.

It starts out as fear, expressed in the emphasis on fortifications. The Plymouth settlers, for instance, spent much of their first year on building palisades rather than farming, which led to a nearly disastrous shortage of food through the winter. The defenses were apparently intended against Native raiders more than the Spanish, French, Dutch, or pirates.

Later, Puritans required palisades around their houses of worship as well, as happened at Dover’s second meetinghouse, and ordered that all men carry arms, which were lined up against the wall during public assemblies such as religious services.

~*~

THE PREMISE OF WHITE SUPREMACY COMES THROUGH CLEARLY embedded in descriptions of the Indigenous as savages or pagans and is intensified in the resolution of legal conflicts in an unjust system of jurisprudence. Natives always came out on the losing end, with no means of appeal.

Especially telling is the reaction to the killing of John Stone and seven of his crew in 1634 in retaliation for his kidnapping and murder of the Pequot sachem Tatobem. Even though Stone had previously been banned from Boston for drunkenness, adultery, and piracy, and news of his death brought outright joy to some residents in the city, officials demanded the Natives turn over the warriors responsible to face trial. The Pequot, however, refused, even after paying atonement.

Simmering tensions erupted in 1636 after the killing of trader John Oldham and several of his crew on a journey to Block Island, Rhode Island. Even though Oldham was a troublemaker banished from the Plymouth colony, his death caused sermons across Massachusetts and prompted military action that quickly escalated into war.

Telling of the implicit racism is Roger Williams’ line of congratulation to John Winthrop in 1637 for disposing of “another drove of Adam’s degenerate seed.”

~*~

BY 1638, MOST OF THE PEQUOT had been massacred or sold into slavery in Bermuda or the West Indies. An estimated 1,500 warriors had died in battle or been hunted down. And what followed was a landgrab by the colonists.

Military leader John Underhill, responsible for the massacre of Pequot women and children fleeing their burning village, then came to Dover, where he was briefly governor of the upper province, meaning Dover.

Bluntly? From the colonists’ perspective, a bad white man was worth more than a noble Native.

~*~

SLAVERY WAS PART OF NEW ENGLAND from the beginning.

When David Thomson settled at Pannaway in 1623, he had a Native as a slave, presented to him by an Indian leader. Yes, there was slaveholding among the Indigenous, too.

And whites could be enslaved as well, as was seen in threats to sell Quaker children in the late 1650s.

A key turn in the emergence of Merrymount in 1625 was the sale of some of the project’s indentured English male servants to Virginia and the impending sale of more to the tobacco estates, where death within a year was likely. Thomas Morton used the situation to rally the remainder to resist and stay put, leading to his libertine colony south of today’s Boston.

The origins of African slaves in New England are murky, but Pequots were exported so that they could not escape and return to their families or be freed in retaliatory raids. Instead, they were exchanged for Blacks, who could be held at less risk.

In 1637, during the Pequot War, the first American-built slave ship, the Desire, was constructed in Marblehead, Massachusetts, outfitted with leg irons and bars, and armed. She set sail to the British West Indies carrying Boston rum, dried fish, and captive Pequots, and returned seven months later with tobacco, cotton, salt, and enslaved Africans from the Caribbean plantations.

Thomson’s friend Samuel Maverick bought two Blacks as slaves in 1638. Another prominent slaveholder was John Winthrop.

In 1641, the Massachusetts Body of Liberties document included a formal recognition of slaveholding.

~*~

UP TO THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, despite opposition, some Quakers held slaves, and Dover was not exempt. Up to ten were manumitted, likely with the equivalent of a year’s wages. There’s more on this in my book.

~*~

Welcome to Dover’s upcoming 400^th anniversary.