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.

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.