It's been a stressful month or two.
Between Thanksgiving and Christmas there are five birthdays in my
family. My job has been challenging lately. The we've gotten have
made life just that much more difficult, although thank the Lord, we
did not lose power like so many of our friends across the Upper
Valley did. There's always something to be thankful for. Actually,
my family is safe, healthy and employed, and my grandkids are all
healthy and doing well. The heroin problem is still upppermost in my
mind, as we have lost another extended family member to an overdose.
My husband said it was the saddest funeral he's ever been to. In
addition, my computer had to be repaired yet again. I finally got fed
up and bought a new computer, brand new, the first new laptop I've
ever owned. Of course, I am having to get used to Windows 8 – and
it is driving me crazy, although I do have the 8.1 version which does
include a start button. All of this stress and these changes have
given me a case of writer's block in regards to the Upper Valley
History, but I have made up my mind to forge ahead and see where I
end up.
I started researching Cornish because
I feel it is at the edge of the Upper Valley, and my plan was to
proceed through the various towns. I started out with Dudley and
Alice Chase and found Jonathan by accident. Jonathan led me to Nathan
Smith and when I went back to Dudley and Alice I found some stories
that were interesting but difficult to link together into a coherent
narrative. After struggling for several days to piece these stories
together, I decided just to tell the anecdotes one at a time and hope
they made sense as a whole. At least it would get me back on track,
and thinking again about Upper Valley History.
Judge Samuel Chase and his wife Mary
were elderly, by the standards of colonial New England, when they
traveled up the Connecticut River to New Hampshire. When they came
here they were almost 60, and chose to stay in the more settled town
of Walpole, while their sons Jonathan and Dudley continued north to
establish homesteads in Cornish. Researching this family is
confusing. Mary's maiden name was Dudley. She named her son Dudley,
some of the other girls in the Chase family married Dudleys and their
daughters named their own sons Dudley, so they ended up with a
plethora of people with both the first and last names of Dudley.
In addition to Dudley and Jonathan,
Samuel and Mary had six other children, most of whom lived to be
adults. Many of them moved to Cornish, but Dudley and Jonathan
featured most prominently in the history of Cornish, although Samuel,
Jr, served under Jonathan in the Revolutionary War and was a
selectman for several years.
Dudley's wife's name was
Alice(Corbet). They had 13 children. About half of their family was
born before they came to Cornish, and half were born after they
arrived. Their daughter Alice was the first English child born in
Cornish. In most of the records, her name is spelled Allace, which
makes me believe that her mother's name was spelled that way as well.
Allace helped raise her five younger siblings. Her younger brother
Philander, in his memoirs, fondly remembered playing with stones down
by the river,with Allace watching over him while their mother was
busy managing the household. Allace was 10 years older than
Philander, so when he was three or four, she was 13 or 14 and fully
able to supervise a little boy playing by the waters of the
Connecticut.
Although Dudley and Alice stayed in
Cornish, they continued to invest in land farther up the Connecticut.
Dudley was one of the incorporators of the town of Bethel, and he
bought adjoining farms there for both Allace, Lois, and Simeon.
Allace married Bibye Lake Cotton. Although Bibye was one of the
founders of the Episcopal Church in Bethel, along with his
brother-in-law Dudley, Jr, and he was also called “Deacon”
Cotton, Bibye had a reputation of having a quick wit and a sharp
tongue. It is possible that the name “Deacon” was given to Bibye
as a joke, and it stuck. One story tells the tale of Bibye's
encounter with an important minister who was traveling through the
region. He got the wrong impression when he learned that Bibye was
called “Deacon”, and asked him about the state of religion in the
Bethel region. Bibye informed him that “it was in a damned low
state”.
After receiving that bit of
information, the minister couldn't help but agree, and moved on.
Another story takes place at a July
4th celebration in Bethel. When the dessert pudding was
served, it was very hot. Bibye took a bite and would have burned his
mouth, except that he spit the mouthful into his hand and put it on
the table to cool. The person sitting next to him asked him what he
was saving it for, and Bibye said, “It is so hot, I'm going to use
it to light my pipe, by God.” Quite a pithy character for a church
founder.
Bibye and Allace were married in
Bethel in 1789. They built a log cabin on the east side of the third
branch of the White River, but when the road to Randolph was built,
they built a nicer house next to the road, next to Allace's sister
Lois and her husband Benjamin Smith. This house still existed in
1895, as the “Illustrated Historical Souvenir of Bethel, Vermont”
written by Henry Cox in 1895, describes it as the “home where
Robert Trask now lives”.
Frontier families had to build houses
and clear the land to grow crops to feed their families. Land
clearing took precedence over building the houses. The Cottons were
typical in that they threw up a log house to live in while they
focused on clearing some land to grow food. Typically, the first
crops these families grew were corn, wheat, rye, peas, and beans.
For meat, they raised pigs, but the pigs ran more or less wild in the
woods, and at slaughtering time they would be caught and brought back
to the farmstead to be butchered and cured. People supplemented
their food supplies with nuts, berries and edible greens they found
in the forest and meadows, along with game and fish in season.
This is an illustration by Vermont author and illustrator Rowland Evans
Robinson. It is possible that the Cottons and Smiths had this much help
clearing their land. They were two fairly well off families who might have
worked together to clear both parcels of land.
Bibye and Allace's quick move from the
cabin on the side of the river to a house on the roadside seems to
indicate that Bethel developed rapidly from frontier settlement to
rural town. Once towns were established on the Connecticut River,
they spread northward, and life wasn't as difficult for the people
building towns up the river. Within a generation, civilization
wasn't as far away as it was for Allace's parents, who had Fort
Number Four, really just a barely stocked outpost, with the nearest
real town all the way down the river in Northfield, Massachusetts.
When Bibye and Allace built the cabin, the river was the roadway. For
the most part, people still used canoes to travel up and down the
river.
Although the river provided
transportation, it was undependable transportation at best. The
rivers froze over in the winter and often got too low in the summer
to be able to navigate by canoe. In the spring, they were too rapid
to be safe to travel on. As Bethel residents know to this day, the
White River is notorious for flooding and it was a good idea to build
a home away from the river as soon as possible. Probably the log
cabin was a temporary dwelling for the family to live in while they
could get their fields cleared.
As soon as the road was built,
families visited each other on horseback, but the roads were still
not good enough to use coaches and wagons. (William Adams tells us in
the “Gazeteer of Washington County”, written in 1889, that the
first wagon in Montpelier arrived the year of Bibye and Allace's
marriage, and the owner had to cut his way in from Williston to
Montpelier.)
Speaking of traveling on horseback,
and roads, just as Allace was the first English child born in
Cornish, Lois's son was the first white child born in Bethel. During
Lois's pregnancy, the Indians to the North of Bethel were becoming
more and more active, with increasing threats of violence and attack.
Dudley became concerned for the safety of his pregnant daughter and
his unborn grandchild, and decided to go to Bethel and bring her home
until the baby was born. When he got there, her state of advanced
pregnancy made it apparent that she was not going to make a trip back
to Cornish in back of her father on a horse. Her son Asa was born
safely on September 6, 1780. Four weeks later, she twas brought
downriver to a fort at the mouth of the first branch of the White
River. The mouth of the First Branch is in present day White River
Junction, and I don't know of any fort that was there. Maybe they
just took Lois and the baby to a more established and safer homestead
in Hartford where she could stay until she had recovered from
childbirth and her baby was older.
