Wandering California

          After little Elsa’s birth, Christian and Alma Hansen started having serious conversations with Alma's parents Christina and Zacharias Pohle about the difficulties of earning a living in the dreary East, while across the country a golden state beckoned. The thought of traversing thousands of hot, grueling miles overland with small children in tow appalled them, so the two families agreed to leave Buffalo by ship, just the way they had come in the first place.

          The village of Pasadena was a trendy health retreat for asthmatics, and in the 1880s experiencing a great land boom. Christian found employment as a carpenter with the Pasadena Manufacturing Company. Both his wife Alma and mother-in-law Christina worked as laundresses to supplement his income.              

A third child, Arthur Christian, was born in November 1887.

Soon after this son’s birth, Christian moved his family upstate to San Francisco, where he built staircases. Then he broadened his professional range by serving as a foreman in the construction of several churches. He admired the large Queen Anne Victorian homes (now fondly called “Painted Ladies”) springing up all over the Bay Area, and resolved to someday build one for his family. Here his son Arnold Albert was born in 1890.

Next the family went to Modesto in Stanislaus County, where the ambitious young man worked as a contractor and builder. By 1894, a little older and much more experienced, he was ready to return to Pasadena with his in-laws, and open his own contracting and architectural firm.

After the younger Hansens returned to Southern California, Dorothea Hansen died (1898). She was in her mid-sixties.

Migration to Buffalo, NY

               Prussia held Schleswig-Holstein and the City of Flensburg firmly in its iron grip. The Hansens were not Lutheran. The freedom of religion factor has always been cited as the sole reason for their immigration, but as Dorothea’s descendant, I think her qualms about her family’s remaining in Flensburg ran deeper than that.

There’s a school on the hill

Where the sons of dead fathers

Are led toward tempests and gales,

Where their God-given wings

Are clipped close to their bodies

And their eyes are bound ‘round with ships’ sails.

               These lyrics were composed by a Scottish folk singer, Andy M. Stewart, but they perfectly describe the situation in Flensburg. Dorothea didn’t want her sons to be forced into the seafaring life of their father.

               So in 1881 Dorothea put her sons Christian and Andrew Theodor on a ship and headed for Buffalo, N.Y. I’ve seen a photo of these boys leaning on the ship’s railing, gazing down at Mama. They tried to look nonchalant, but their eyes held both apprehension and excitement. They were 18 and 17, respectively.

Christian and Andrew Theodor were among the great wave of immigration that started around 1880. They probably passed through the newly opened Ellis Island. Source:  en.wikipedia.org.

               Evidently both boys worked very hard at the jobs they found on the East Coast; Christian made a specialty of creating interior hardwood finishings for the firm of Miller, Brown & Messmer. The young immigrants were able to send for Dorothea before too long. By the time he was 20, Christian felt he could afford a wife and family.

               Christian and Alma’s first child, Theodore Martin, was born in Buffalo, N.Y. ten months after his parents’ marriage. Their daughter Elsa Lydia followed two years later in 1885.

A Danish Sea Captain

This is a painting of the Urania of Flensburg. Hans Hansen captained a ship very much like this one.
Source: www.schiffshistorisches-archiv.de. 

               Like almost every other man in Flensburg, Hans Hansen was involved in the rum trade. He must have started out as a lowly sailor, but eventually his abilities earned him the captainship of a vessel.
               He wasn’t home very often.  He typically left Flensburg at the beginning of March, sailed northwards around the tip of Jutland and through the North Sea, down the English Channel and the Bay of Biscay, slipped past Portugal and docked briefly at Madeira to obtain fresh water and foodstuffs for his crew.

               Doubtless he also took on barrels of the local wine. This wine was immediately fortified with a neutral brandy to help it not spoil during the long voyage. As the ship swayed, so did the barrels, so their contents were constantly mixed and agitated. Exposure to below-decks heat and salt air gave the Madeira its famous oxidized, salty, and nutty characteristics.

               Then Hans’s ship’s sails caught the trade winds and he reached the Danish West Indies by May or June. He unloaded his goods, restocked the vessel with raw materials, and rushed to leave port before the local autumn storms hit. Then he followed the North American coast northwards for a while, and finally cut back across the Atlantic. With a little luck, he was home before Christmas.

               This left his wife Dorothea as a more-or-less single parent to their four sons, Henry, Peter, Christian Martin, and Andrew Theodor. She was a tiny woman, but no clinging vine. When Hans died young, she “cared for and raised the children, preparing them for useful and honorable positions in the world”, according to an old Southern California history book. She arranged for her 15-year-old son Christian to be apprenticed to a Flensburg cabinetmaker, and three years later she decided it was time to send her younger boys to the United States.

Rum City

               Back in Buffalo, N.Y. Alma Hildegard had married a young Schleswig-born carpenter in December 1883. They were both 20.

               Christian Martin Hansen in later years described himself as German, because that was a simple explanation of a complex situation. His birthplace, Flensburg, was located on a fjord along the coast of the contentious province of Schleswig-Holstein. When he was born in 1863, the area was still part of Denmark, but after the German-Danish War of 1864, it became Prussian territory.

               Flensburg was a “Rum City” and had a fleet of 300 trading ships involved in the rum industry.  More than 200 local distilleries processed sugar cane juice into grog, and a plethora of refineries, oil mills, and soap and tobacco factories handled other raw goods the traders brought home. It was a given that nearly every man in town would be somehow involved in the West Indies trade. Food, building materials and coke were transported from Flensburg to Christiansted on St. Croix, and bartered for sugar cane, color wood and spices.

  

Flensburg harbor

             Christian’s father Hans was born in Naestved on Denmark’s big island of Zieland, and his mother Dorothea came from Angeln in Schleswig-Holstein. Both his parents were ethnic Danes, which causes difficulties for anyone trying to trace their origins. Before 1828, Denmark practiced the use of patronyms and matronyms. For instance his father Hans Hansen, born around 1835, was probably Hans, the son of another Hans. Hans Senior might have been named something like Hans Gunnarsen or Hans Eriksen.

Likewise, we know Christian’s mother as Dorothea Petersen (or Jensen; there’s some confusion here). But her father might have been baptized Peder Olesen or Jens Ottarsen…or? And her mother would have been identified as someone’s daughter, as in Elsa Einarsdatter. Later in this chronicle, I’ll be able to trace some of our family branches back over a thousand years. But as for anyone thinking they can march into Naestved or Angeln and trace our forebears to the Viking Age, I wish them luck.

Poppies Near Pasadena

               Zacharias and Christina Pohle toiled in Buffalo, N.Y. for sixteen years, but were intrigued by stories of a distant haven where promises of the good life hung on trees like big, succulent fruit. Finally they boarded another ship, sailed around the tip of South America, and relocated to California in 1887.

               If they disembarked near Los Angeles in springtime, they would have seen a heavenly sight. Forty miles north, vast swathes of California poppies shimmered orange in the sunlight on a gentle slope rising above the village of Pasadena, just below the mountains. Later this tract was paved with houses and called Altadena, but before that happened local artist Benjamin Brown immortalized the scene in his Poppies Near Pasadena.

I have been unable to unearth any information about the children John or Theodore Pohle, except that around 1893 one of them might have sired a son Lloyd by a Norwegian-born woman with the last name of Birg.  About their little sister Lydia, I know a bit more. Once I caught a glimpse of a picture of a pretty girl posing coyly in a skintight turn-of-the-century bathing costume. My Grandma Alma indignantly snatched the photo from me and tossed it back into a storage box.

               “That’s Lydia. We don’t talk about her,” was all she said, but from the expression on Grandma’s face, I knew THAT conversation had ended.

               Everything I understand about Lydia suggests lyrics penned by the late troubadour Sonny Bono: She was a scamp and a tramp and a bit of a camp, a v-a-m-p: VAMP.  

On November 21, 1891 this item appeared in the Los Angeles Herald under the heading “People Who Yesterday Secured Permission to Wed”: R.W. Alven, a native of Germany age 21, residing in this city, and Lydia Pohle, a native of New York, age 13, residing in Pasadena.

               I didn’t make a typo here, and neither did the newspaper. The girl was 13. In 1916, when she was around 39, she married one Webster Elmer Fike in Santa Monica. By 1930 they resided in San Diego. What happened during the gaps in Lydia’s documented history, I do not know.

               This sad notification appeared in the Herald on March 3, 1898: “Zacharias Pohle, aged 71 years, died of old age in his home on North Mentor Avenue yesterday. Mr. Pohle had been a resident of Pasadena for eleven years, and leaves here a son and a daughter. The funeral was held at 2 o’clock this afternoon from the home and interment was made in Mountain View Cemetery.”

               The widowed Christina and her little grandson Lloyd were not left alone and desolate. The Pohles’ married daughter Alma Hildegard Hansen and her family were residing with them at 634 N. Mentor.

               The strikingly handsome Lloyd Cyril Pohle, evidently without parents through death or disinterest, grew up as part of the Hansen household and served in World War I as a medic.  He later lived in San Gabriel, married a Mabel and had a son also named Lloyd. He died in 1954.

Non Lutherans Had to Leave

               Alma Hansen's mother, another Alma emigrated from Meerane, Saxony, Germany, in 1871 at the age of seven. Meerane was a hub of cloth production and associated industries like dye works and tanneries, which employed the family of Christina Brautigan, little Alma Hildegard’s mutter. When still in the Old Country, her father Zacharias Pohle described himself as a “printer”. It’s unclear whether he printed designs on fabric or words on paper.

The location of Meerane in Germany

              

              This was the period of German unification, when the hyper-aggressive kingdom of Prussia forcibly melded all the other Teutonic principalities and kingdoms into a big and powerful empire. The goal was to forge a unified people with one philosophy and one religion. That religion was Lutheran, which the Pohle family was not. Their situation became unpleasant.

               So Zacharias led his wife, daughter, and infant son Johannes onto the immigrant ship Herschel. Sometimes this vessel carried the wretched refuse of Germany’s shores to the ends of the earth (well, to Australia) but fortunately on this voyage it docked at Buffalo, New York on September 13, 1871.

               Once there, Zacharias classified himself as a “laborer." He and Christina produced two more children in Buffalo, a son Theodore and a daughter Lydia. At one point Christina bore a fifth child who died young.

The Great War was Over!

The Great War was over! The Pasadena Star-News reported on November 7, 1918 that the Armistice had been signed, and the city reacted to the grand occasion as it always did: with a big parade. Everyone poured into the streets, banging on pots and pans in jubilation.  World War I veterans marched in rank and file with those from the Spanish-American War and even a fife and drum corps of grizzled Civil War vets.    

Pasadena hadn’t seen a crowd in months. Spanish flu was rampant, so the town had adopted prohibitions against gatherings indoors or out, even in churches.  The Star-News chirpily documented everybody’s scofflaw behavior: “Influenza regulations were forgotten and the ‘flu’ germs probably died in the noise and sunshine”.

               It was a glorious celebration. Unfortunately, the Star-News had made an error and the Armistice was actually signed on November 11. Unfazed, Pasadena threw another parade and giant block party a few days later.

               It was on one of these occasions that Harry met Alma. Or rather, 15-year-old Alma Hansen spied the head and shoulders of a tall, slim young man looming above his fellow soldiers. She turned to a bevy of her girl friends and announced “I’m going to get that guy”, and then promptly walked over and introduced herself.

               Harry Frederick Herman Heather was 28 years old and one of the most forlorn men on the planet. Years before, everyone he cared about had been torn from him by death, rejection, and disgrace. He must have been bewildered but touched that someone wanted to meet him.

               The girl smiling up at him was anything but alienated and bereaved. The youngest child of successful immigrants, she knew nothing but life swaddled in the protective cocoon of a loving family circle.

Frances and Earl

Let us return to 17-year-old Frances Woodley, who had vague dreams of becoming a doctor. But then her client’s son took one look at her, plunged his hands down her bodice to fondle her breasts, and she didn’t know what to do. I’m sure she turned pink and got flustered, as she did all her life whenever she fancied some male was interested in her. She had no way of knowing this man was morally unbalanced and took liberties with every female he ran into. She was young and naïve; he was the first man to drool over her.

Earl Beers’ psychic sister Lena had envisioned Frances at a clothesline hanging out diapers, and sure enough by the time her mother Edith died, there were two baby sons. By this time Frances realized she had married in haste; another man smelled her discontent and started sweet-talking her. Offended by her husband’s roving eye, she commenced a sporadic affair with her brother-in-law Verne (which was confirmed decades later by Verne’s wife Ruby). Then, to her horror, she became pregnant with a daughter her husband named Anna May.

Earl and Frances' family lived in various homes in Pasadena. Source: http://www.buncee.com/

In later years, Frances admitted she hadn’t wanted this female child of uncertain paternity, so she deliberately tried to starve the baby. Finally a doctor, upon examining the emaciated, rickets-ridden little waif, threatened to file a complaint with the police. It wasn’t the last time my grandmother was threatened with the law.

Three years later she had another daughter, Virginia Pearl. She liked this pretty girl better, but resentment and bitterness made her an abusive mother. She beat her first four children hard and often; children do try one’s patience and Frances had no patience at all.  Her life’s possibilities had somehow been stolen from her, and it was everyone’s fault but her own.

Earl was worse. The Depression made it hard for a gardener with little education to support his family, so he depended on charity baskets for help.  When his sons Bill and Roy defied him, he reacted savagely. Occasionally the boys had week-long vacations from school while the welts and bruises around their necks faded away. By the time Anna and Virginia were toddlers, their father often plopped them down on his lap and taught them to pleasure him sexually. His demands on them grew as their bodies developed, and he was impervious to their pleas and tears.

Frances didn’t even attempt to protect her children. She would merely pout until he let his sobbing daughters escape, and then turn his amorous attentions on her.

Actually, my grandmother didn’t do much of anything. She was determined not to be a drudge like her own mother, so she became something much worse. Her house was always filthy, and her children were too mortified to invite in their friends. In truth they were ashamed of themselves: their smelly bodies, greasy hair, dirty clothes and reeking underwear. Frances also disliked cooking, and her husband seldom found a hot meal awaiting him when he got home from work. She saw no reason to put herself out for his sake.

They snarled and yipped at each other like a pair of rabid curs. My grandparents poisoned their own lives, and the lives of everyone around them, because they were trapped together. In the 21^st century when people realize they made a mistake, they are able to get divorced almost as quickly as they got married. Only the wealthy had that option in the first part of the 20^th.

Frances finally called the police when her daughters were teenagers. Earl was carted off, but she was horrified when a prosecutor threatened to order her arrest as an accessory.  So, with the help of her brother-in-law Verne, she took her daughters and went into hiding. Because no one appeared in court to testify against Earl, charges against him were dropped.

It amazes me that four of their five offspring survived their childhoods. 

Venice Beach

Sometime before 1920, Emory Straker had had quite enough of the Northeast in general and Vermont in particular. He boarded a train to California, took an amazed look around, and sent word for his family to follow him out to the Coast.

Stories of blue skies and golden sunshine with nary a snowdrift in sight, thrilled his parents Daniel and Maloney Maria, so they pulled up stakes and went west themselves. Daniel died in Venice, CA 0n 16 December 1923, and Maloney breathed her last on 18 December 1927.

Perhaps because she was now living in a land of fresh starts, Edith, Emory's wife, resolved to have her umbilical hernia repaired. The surgery was unsuccessful, and she died on 23 February 1922. She was 52 years old.

When her daughter Frances went to the funeral home, she backed out of the viewing room in consternation. She was certain she was in the wrong place; the attractive, beautifully groomed woman displayed in the coffin couldn’t be her mother. But in fact it was Edith, and the funeral director had given her the care her husband, and her own innate simplicity, had always denied her.  

Emory seemed to enjoy life in Venice, California as a single man. Frances sniffed that her father lived near the beach so he could ogle all the floozies in bathing costumes. Hubba hubba!

Security Pacific National Bank Collection - LA Public Library

Before 1930 Emory married a slender, savvy businesswoman named Iola. She was either widowed or divorced, because she had four grown daughters in tow. On the 1930 census form, they claimed their last names were Woodley and Emory as their father, but he could not have been. When they were conceived in Indiana, he was shoveling snow in Mooers, NY. 

Edith - Used Like a Plow

          Emory and Edith Straker started their married life on a farm in Mooers, NY. 

The farmhouse and barn, which may still stand, although shakily.

          There is a touching but troubling story connected to this house. Edith’s first child was a little boy named George (1893) whom she simply adored. Evidently Emory didn’t share her infatuation with parenthood, and regarded his firstborn as an unanticipated burden. (This is puzzling, because surely Maloney Maria and Daniel gave him the Birds and Bees talk.) Anyway, Edith seemed to fear that her husband might harm her son. One day when she was down on her knees painting the farmhouse’s floor, little George trailed after her, leaving his tiny footprints in the wet paint. In later years, when she repainted the floor, she carefully skirted around the footprints so she could preserve some aspect of her child, no matter what happened to him.
          Emory was a hard-working one, as all farmers are, but he was careful to enforce his marital privileges. Every Sunday he would order his children to stay downstairs and leave him alone while he locked himself in his bedroom with Edith. I suppose he was indignant each time another baby mysteriously appeared, which happened in 1894, 1899, 1902, 1903, and 1907.

          This last birth in 1907 constituted my Grandmother Frances’ earliest memory.  The sight of Edith standing at the stove with two-hour-old Ernest balanced on her hip, cooking dinner for a gaggle of farmhands, haunted her to her final breath. The unspoken message “A woman’s first duty is to care for the menfolk” is one she vehemently rejected.

           By 1910 the family had relocated to a dairy farm in Woodstock, Vermont. Edith toiled on dutifully throughout these years, albeit in increasing discomfort. She had developed an umbilical hernia, which is usually caused by obesity, heavy lifting, or multiple pregnancies. In her case, all three factors converged.

          One of Edith’s great-granddaughters describes her in a short poem as: “Used like a plow/ Browbeaten, worn out/ Disposed of unmourned.” This is a little melodramatic, but contains more than one kernel of truth.

Canadians and Americans

Samuel Woodley junior was born in Grand Isle, Vermont in 1801. He married an Irish-born colleen named Margaret Lamberton (1810). They raised nine children, and Samuel died in Sciota in 1884 of apoplexy at the age of 83. All his descendants I know of over the age of 40 pop high blood pressure pills like they were Tic-Tacs to avoid succumbing to the dreaded apoplexy. Margaret followed him to the grave ten days later.

Their son Daniel (1842) married Malony (her spelling; her descendants tend to spell it “Maloney”) Maria Stockwell, the child of Joseph and Anna Maria Stockwell. They started their life together in Mooers, NY, where their older son Emory Carol was born on 14 August 1869. By 1920 Daniel and Maloney were living in Clinton, NY, a nearby farming community.

Evidently Emory was a stern young man, and Edith Frances Straker, born just over the Canadian border in Hemmingford, was meek, hardworking, and eager to please; she was a good choice for him. Perhaps he wasn’t such a good choice for her, but I’m basing my hunches on conversations with her granddaughter Orella Colburn. Not to mention comments made by her daughter Frances, who considered Emory to be something of an ogre.

Edith’s grandfather Robert Straker was born about 1791 in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England. East Riding sounds like an area reserved for nobility in brocade riding habits to chase foxes around. Actually, it comes from the old Viking administrative term Threthingr. Robert was a farmer with Episcopal leanings, and he lived near the North Sea coast. I’ve looked at fully a hundred photos of the area, and although the landscape’s quite striking, the sky’s always stormy. It reminds me of Victoria Beckham.

Fighting Napoleon left England in a post-war depression. Because she was the victor (and in no mood to let France forget that fact) in 1820 she proclaimed Lower Canada “open for settlement”. Farmers from Yorkshire began pouring into East Hemmingford and LaColle; Robert Straker was one of the first. According to a Web site called The English Settlers of Lacolle, Quebec, “the English settlers…and their families broke into the wilderness…[they] established settlements throughout Lacolle with churches, schools, and stores. Along with their lifestyles, customs and religious beliefs, they brought with them new and better methods of farming and husbandry.”

In other words, they taught their ignorant French neighbors a thing or two.

LaColle Mills Blockhouse. Source: Wikipedia.com

Robert married an American woman, Rachael Palmer (1817) and they raised their six offspring in LaColle, Quebec. Their son Robert (1844) married Charlotte, the daughter of Godfrey Andrew and Mary Lett; among their six children was our Edith Francis/Francis Edith (the arrangement of her given names varies from source to source. She seemed to call herself Edith.)

This Robert gave me quite a start, because records show he died in the Somme, Picardie, France, in 1914. I pictured a 70-year-old doughboy dying in the trenches with the rest of the blighters. Then I recalled the Somme offensive happened in 1916. So I guess that after a lifetime of hearing his French neighbors boast about La Belle France, he decided to see for himself. It was his last hurrah.

From Being Homeless to an Ashery

The Woodleys had been in the Chazy, N.Y. area for three generations. Chazy is west of Lake Champlain in the Adirondack Mountains, just south of the Canadian border. Samuel Woodley had been born in Devonshire, England around 1770. After he immigrated about 1790, he married Phebe Lent, who belonged to an old New Amsterdam family.  They learned of land in New York State that the government was offering to settlers, so they attempted to establish a homestead in the wilderness about two miles east of a place called Flat Rock, a remote spot where the nearest neighbor was five miles away. But a plethora of bears, wolves, and an especially ornery colony of rattlesnakes, drove the family out.

Flat Rock State Forest

Samuel Woodley took refuge in Grand Isle, Vermont, but evidently did not prosper. On 26 February 1806 his family was issued an order “to depart town and find a place to settle” because “they had become destitute and without worldly goods.” They had to decamp within 20 days of being served notice, and were to be escorted to the next settlement or out of the state. In other words, the Woodleys were homeless “riffraff” and run out of town.

Because he had no choice, Samuel trudged back to the little cabin in the wilderness he had built five years before. It was far from any road, but at least it offered shelter. He finally realized it also offered a means of supporting his family.

Wikipedia explains it succinctly: “In the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, potash production provided settlers in North America a way to obtain badly needed cash and credit as they cleared wooded land for crops. To make full use of their land, settlers needed to dispose of excess wood. The easiest way to accomplish this was to burn any wood not needed for fuel and construction. Ashes from hardwood trees could then be used to make lye, which could either be used to make soap or boiled down to make valuable potash…The American potash industry followed the woodsman’s axe across the country. After about 1820, New York replaced New England as the most important source…” The Champlain canal connected the area with Montreal, the major potash exporting port. 

Samuel had established an ashery in nearby Sciota by 1828, and in 1843 had sufficient means to will his sons 10 acres each, while his daughters received two acres each.

A Poet in the Family

One of John Saxe’s grandchildren was named after two of his uncles and became quite renowned. John Godfrey Saxe was a lawyer, humorist, and noted American poet. A nineteenth-century version of Ogden Nash, he was often published in a sophisticated periodical called The Knickerbocker. Here is a sample of his work, and please note that its construction is crisp, precise, and lacks any high Victorian sentimental dithering:

Rhyme of the Rail

Singing through the forests,

Rattling over ridges;

Shooting under arches,

Rumbling over bridges;

Whizzing through the mountains,

Buzzing o’er the vale,---

Bless me, this is pleasant,

Riding on the rail!

This charming delight zips through stanza after stanza, and its uncut version can be found on the Internet.

To this day, many descendants indulge in writing, especially poetry; our brains simply work this way and we can’t help ourselves. My mother and her sisters Virginia and Jinx were born in thrall to the muse Calliope, as were my sister Kathryn and I.

That last sentence indeed reeks of high Victorian dithering, but I’m postulating that our delight in poetry is an unwitting bequest from Frances Woodley Beers, whose legacy usually makes us wince. Or to phrase it more simply, every thorn has its rose.

John Godfrey Saxe is best known for re-telling the Indian parable, "The Blind Men and the Elephant."

Source: Wikipedia.com

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.

A Statue of Deacon Samuel Chapin

In 1881 a descendant, a congressman, commissioned master sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens to produce a work memorializing Deacon Samuel Chapin. The piece "...emphasizes the piety, and perhaps the rigidity, of the country's religious founders..." Its eight feet of intimidating pride and assurance of divine approbation is location in Merrick Park, Springfield, MA. Photo courtesy of  http://farm5.statisflickr.com

Hannah and Benajah Stockwells’ son Ebenezer (1778) married a much older widow, Abi Holbrook Lee (1764). Abi was the great-great granddaughter of another Puritan superstar, Deacon Samuel Chapin. Born in Devon, England, he became a selectman and a commissioner (magistrate) in Springfield, Massachusetts. He also was a mainstay of the local church. These colonists had not yet realized that religion and government, like oil and water, should not even attempt to mix.

Around 1800 Ebenezer Stockwell bought a house in Highgate, Vermont and moved his family into this recently established enclave of Loyalists and Lutheran German immigrants. He became the “principal agent, or foreman” for Ira, a brother of Ethan Allen. 

Tried as a Witch

William and Sarah Stockwell’s son Ebenezer married Mary Singletary of the Singletary-Cooke clan. In 1735 they produced a son named Benajah (which was an eighteenth-century twist on a traditional name, like our present Josh or Liam) who married Hannah Gale.

Hannah had one vaguely distinguished line of heritage, being descended from a wheelwright grandly known as Lord Symond Fiske, Lord of the Manor of Stadhaugh (in Suffolk, England). He inherited all this grandeur from his grandfather Daniel, who was Lord of the Manor of Stadhaugh during the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V.  Lord Symond even awarded himself a coat of arms.

Unsurprisingly, the Fiske clan eventually became involved with the Dissenters and immigrated to New England.

Hannah had another line of heritage that was more than “vaguely distinguished:” it played a part in the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s most horrific episode. Her great-great grandmother was Rebecka Towne Nurse, a Norfolk, England-born matriarch who raised eight children and was a devout member of the Salem Congregationalist church. She served as a midwife well-versed in using herbs to alleviate her patients’ sufferings, while her husband Francis was a successful craftsman and served as Salem Towne’s constable in 1672. They were both highly esteemed pillars of the community. But they made the mistake of indulging in a long series of property disputes with a powerful family, the Putnams, and they challenged the appointment of a local minister.

The pastor and the Putnam family took advantage of the prevalent witch hysteria and decided to make an example of the Nurses by destroying Rebecka and her sisters. They dragged them before the Court of Oyer and Terminar (Hear and Determine) and charged them with witchcraft. A group of teenage girls engaged in some hysterical trumpery to ensure the sisters were condemned.

This plaster statue depicts Rebecca Towne Nurse, Mary Towne Esty, and Sarah Towne Cloyse. The statue, located in the Salem Wax Museum of Witches and Seafarers, was a 1970 work of Yiannis Stefinarkis. The photo was taken by Benjamin C. Ray in 2001.

As Rebecka and her sister Mary went to the gallows on 19 July 1692, a minister urged her to admit her guilt. She snapped, “You are a liar! I am no more a witch than you are a wizard!”

She was buried in an extremely shallow grave to emphasize her unworthiness of a proper Christian burial, but in the dark of night her heartbroken family dug her up and reinterred her on their family homestead. John Greenleaf Whittier’s words now appear on her gravestone:

O Christian Martyr who for truth could die

When all around thee owned the hideous lie!

The world redeemed from Superstition’s sway

Is breathing freer for thy sake today

While composing this entry, the motto of Mary, Queen of Scots kept flashing through my brain: In my end is my beginning. Today Rebecka has a sea of descendants, and we must never embroider her memory into something quaintly grotesque, like the witches in the film Hocus Pocus. Our kinswoman was murdered by corrupt local authorities, and this sorry truth shouldn’t be forgotten.

A Shanghaied, Indentured Servant

Mary Singletary, sister of John Singletary, wed into a family that came to the New World not through religious convictions, but by an event that might have been penned by Robert Louis Stevenson.

William Stockwell was the son of another William Stockwell and born in Scotland around 1650. Any plans the young man may have made for his future were abruptly torn to shards and tossed to the winds when he was shanghaied and thrown aboard a ship bound for the American colonies. Once he reached Massachusetts, he was forcibly indentured to a master to pay for his passage. After a few years of servitude, he became an upstanding citizen of Ipswich, Massachusetts and had a meetinghouse seat assigned to him. At this point, his father ventured across the sea to join him.

The area had been thus described by Captain John Smith in 1614: “…there are many sands at the entrance of the Harbour…Here are many rising hills, and on their tops and descents are many corn fields and delightful groves…plain marsh ground, fit for pasture, or salt ponds. There is also Oakes, Pines, Walnuts and other woods to make this place an excellent habitation, being a good and safe harbor.” Ipswich was established by an extraordinary group of pioneers, “men of substance and education, who were among the key founders of the Puritan Commonwealth”. Most of these “men of substance” were farmers, fisherman, shipwrights, and traders.

In 1685 William married a local girl, Sarah Lambert (1661), whose family had long dwelled in the St. Dionis neighborhood of London before immigrating. They produced eight children.

In 1704 the governor of the province of Massachusetts granted a charter for the new town of Sutton to be established. Its proprietors offered 100 acres free to each family who settled there within a specified period. A list dated 1717 mentioned the names of William Stockwell, John Stockwell, and William Stockwell (the last two named were elder Stockwell sons) as people who received these grants.

After William’s death in 1727 “ye widdo Stockwell” was granted a seat in the Sutton meetinghouse.

A Scalping in the Family

Nathaniel Singletary was born in 1644, and evidently had a foot or leg ailment. His brothers were enlisted to fight in King Phillip’s War (King Phillip was an understandably rebellious Native American), but Nathaniel was “dismissed from training for Lameness in 1662”. He married Sarah Belknap, who had been born in the heavily wooded market town North Weald, Essex back in England.  They were farmers in Haverhill, Massachusetts Colony and had nine children.

The Indian massacre of colonists at Swansee, Phymouth Colony started King Philip's war.
Source:  http://muskegonpundit.blogspot.com

This is how Chase’s History of Haverhill describes Nathaniel’s demise: “On the 13^th of August [1689] a small party of Indians made their appearance in the northerly part of the town and killed Daniel Bradford. Then they went to the field of Nathaniel Singletary, near by, where he and his oldest son were at work. They approached in their slow and serpent-like manner until they came within a few rods, when they shot Singletary, who fell and died on the spot. His son attempted to escape, but was soon overtaken and made prisoner. The Indians then scalped Singletary and commenced a hasty retreat. The prisoner soon eluded their vigilance and returned home on the same day to make glad the hearts of his afflicted relatives.”

The widowed Sarah gave birth to her last child a few days later. In 1707 Nathaniel and Sarah’s son Richard also died at the hands of Native Americans.

The 14-year-old escapee was our ancestor John Singletary. He married Mary Greele (1678), whose family had originated in England and Wales, but settled in Massachusetts by 1660. Mary’s maiden name reminded me of a similar, more famous last name, so I investigated it further. Indeed Mary’s birth family was to eventually produce that famous politician and newspaperman Horace Greeley, who advised his countrymen to “go west”.

John and Mary were hard-working “planters” (a glorified term for farmers) who couldn’t afford to send their children off to school. But they educated their offspring at home in a manner befitting descendants of Sir Anthony Cooke of Gidea Hall. One of their sons was a justice of the peace, served in a colonial general court, and was elected to sit in several legislatures. He had absolutely no Loyalist sympathies but spoke against the new United States constitution’s ratification; he simply feared the document might undermine true republican principles. A contemporary praised him as an “Earnest Christian”.

An Puritan Fighting with Oliver Cromwell in Ireland

Religious strife in England was increasing. In 1645 George Cooke abandoned his

prosperous Massachusetts Bay Colony mill, sailed back across the Atlantic, and joined Cromwell’s army as Colonel of a regiment of foot soldiers. They sent him to Ireland. Alas, he was a fiendishly efficient officer. In 1649 Cooke's regiment captured Wexford. Members of the New Model Army slaughtered all the inhabitants who had gathered around a great cross (an unfortunate “Popish” symbol) in the marketplace, begging for mercy.  George became renowned for his cruelty and brutality. In 1652, Cooke's men imprisoned 300 men and children in a house and set it on fire, killing everyone inside. Atrocity followed atrocity. Finally in April 1652, Cooke and his mounted escort engaged in a running fight with the troops of an Irish patriot, Captain Nash. It all ended with Nash and Cooke falling “dead together to the ground”.

A contemporary writer lamented, “…the flower of chivalry in the county of Kilkenny faded with the death of Captain Nash.” I have found no lamentations for the death of Colonel George Cooke.

Oliver Cromwell and the New Model Army in Ireland. Source: http://www.nam.ac.uk/

 While George Cooke grimly pursued his destiny, most of his immediate family remained in Massachusetts and were reverently regarded by the other colonists as something akin to Puritan royalty. A relation of theirs, Richard Singletary (ca. 1600), was looking for a new wife, after a woman known as “Goodwife Singletary” died in 1638. George Cooke's daughter, Susannah was of a marriageable age.

There’s a strange rumor about Richard. Supposedly a nursemaid kidnapped him as an infant, so that ambitious members of his noble family could not murder him to inherit his title and wealth. She put him on a ship to the New World where he was raised as a foundling, in ignorance of his origins.

This is a fine plot for a Victoria Holt-ish potboiler romance novel, with a dollop of The Pirates of Penzance thrown in for extra spice, but it can’t be true. Records praise Richard for his good education, which would not have been obtainable for an obscure colonial orphan. He named his children after various Dunham-Singletary family members back in England, so obviously he was familiar with them. It turns out these people had long used the last names Dunham, Donham, Singleton and Singletary interchangeably, which confusion might have hinted at mysterious origins and inspired the swashbuckling conspiracy theory.

The Cooke family was not unknown to him, as his parents had been first cousins directly descended from Henry Cook IV, the brother of Sir Anthony Cooke of Gidea Hall.  Despite the dropped “e”, the Singletarys were extended members of the Cooke clan.

Richard was a suitable match for our Puritan princess. He was a prosperous “Freeman” of Salem when he married Susannah in 1639. He was twice elected as a “Select Man” and became a planter and proprietor. Together they produced seven children who married into other prominent families.