A Loyalist Moves to Canada after the Revoluntionary Way

It was just a matter of time before Ebenezer Stockwell’s son Joseph started keeping company with Anna Maria Saxe, a young lady whose origins were not only un-Puritan but scandalously unorthodox.

Her grandfather John Saxe had been born into a prosperous Saxe-Gotha (principality of Hanover) family. His father Godfrey owned eight acres of prime farmland and was known as a “stern man of great strength and courage.” John left school at 13 after his father died, and supported himself with odd jobs as he and a friend traveled around Europe. Around 1750 they boarded a ship in Amsterdam, bound for the New World. After a 15-week voyage they landed in Philadelphia and John was apprenticed to a miller to pay for his passage. Unlike William Stockwell nearly a century before, both the voyage and the apprenticeship were his own choices.

The first thing John did in America was to take an oath of allegiance to King George II. This must have seemed a natural thing to do, because Saxe-Gotha was located in the principality of Hanover, which George II also ruled as its duke. Events were to prove that John didn’t take his oaths lightly.

Once his apprenticeship was completed, John Saxe managed a flour mill in Valley Forge and then moved to New York City.  He began to court Catherine Weaver, the daughter of German immigrants who lived in Rhinebeck, New York, and after they wed he moved there to operate another mill.

John Saxe, Loyalist by George J. Hill, describes the couple. “John was said to be nearly six feet tall, with broad shoulders, small feet, light brown hair, blue eyes, an aquiline nose, and a firm mouth and chin...His wife was described as a beautiful woman, somewhat below medium height, with a fair complexion, black eyes, and dark curling hair.” She was praised as an “excellent housekeeper, a faithful wife and mother”.

At the onset of the Revolution, John declared himself to be a Loyalist. His sense of honor left him no other choice. In 1779 he was arrested and jailed for his “attachment to the Enemy,” but soon escaped and joined the Ansbach Jaegers (Hessian mercenaries) as a scout.

After the Revolution was over, his property was confiscated so he and his entire family high-tailed it to Canada. They journeyed up the Hudson River until they found themselves on Lake Champlain in an open boat, and finally found their way to Missisquoi Bay, at a location now known as Philipsburg, Quebec.

About three thousand displaced Loyalists joined the Saxe family and their associates on the northeastern shore of Lake Champlain. But the precise location of the international boundary line proved to be confusing. To quote from one explanation of what took place, “he [John Saxe] settled in Philipsburg, P.Q., Canada, and built a grist mill on Rock Mill, cleared the land, and settled down as a Canadian. However, when the government resurveyed the boundary line, he found that his mill was in Highgate, Vermont”.

A Philipsburg, Quebec log cabin dating to the Revolutionary War period. Source: http://www.quebecheritageweb.com.

John’s fifth son Godfrey Saxe was the family black sheep. He fathered a daughter by an unknown woman, possibly related to him, whom he didn’t bother to marry. This “wrong side of the blanket” child was Anna Maria Saxe who married Joseph Stockwell. She was born in Vermont in 1804 and died in Mooers, N.Y. in 1890.