Teen Power - 1793

The Chase family was the primary founding family of Cornish, New Hampshire. I try not to follow people who do not stay in the Upper Valley, but Philander Chase had an influence on the Upper Valley, and became prominent nationally, thus I will tell his story.

Philander was the youngest son of Alice and Dudley Chase. He became the first Episcopal Bishop of the state of Ohio, and traveled throughout the United States starting new Episcopal churches and colleges. Laura Chase Smith, Philander's granddaughter, wrote a biography of Philander, and her book, which she wrote using information taken from his own autobiography, letters, and diaries, tells a lot about the life of the Chase family during the early days of Cornish, and in the newly independent United States.

Laura recounts her grandfather's stories of playing on the banks of the Connecticut River, and how he was raised mostly by his sister Alace, since his mother was always either busy or sick. Even so, when he grew up, Philander respected his parents' wishes concerning his education and future. He had planned on staying home, working the family farm and caring for his parents in their old age, but they had other plans. They wanted him to become a minister.

With that end in mind, following in the footsteps of his older brothers, Philander entered Dartmouth College, at age16. During his Sophomore year at Dartmouth, when he was 17 years old, he happened to find an Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. He took it home, read it through, and decided he found the Episcopal way of worship much more beautiful than than what he was used to, and he decided to become an Episcopal minister.

The Chase family was Congregational, and they attended the Congregational Church in Cornish. Laura says, in her book, “Deacon and Alice (notice she uses the modern spelling of her great-grandmother's name) were born and bred in the Puritan faith, but both had the kindly, generous nature which disarmed the rigid laws and practices of those early days”. She also mentions that some of her ancestors, in Puritan Connecticut, were fined for picking peas on the Sabbath.

You have to wonder how strongly attached the Chases were to their Congregational beliefs, because when Philander, at age 17, shared his new religious beliefs with his family, they enthusiastically embraced his new denomination, going as far as to tear down the Congregational Church and build an Episcopal church in its place. I would find this hard to believe if I didn't know it was true. Furthermore, Laura herself thought this was pretty amazing. She says that “Not a voice was raised against this plan in the neighborhood. This is certainly a remarkable event. It is doubtful if anything like it has ever occurred before or since. That a mere youth should have brought this about among his relations is indeed wonderful, but that the whole neighborhood should have consented to this great change seems next to impossible.” Yes, it does.

It seems even more unlikely in view of the fact that America has just won a war of independence from Great Britain, and the Episcopal Church was (and is) the Church of England, the established church of the monarchy and everything it stands for. Philander's Uncle Jonathan was a Colonel in the Revolutionary War and his father served in the Continental Army as a private under Jonathan. This makes the fact that this family was willing to abandon their Congregational beliefs and become Episcopalian even more remarkable.

All this occurred before Philander had even begun training to be an Episcopal minister. He graduated from Dartmouth three years later, at age 20. The Chase family was affiliated with two Episcopal churches, one in Cornish and one in Bethel, which is not surprising, in light of the fact that they were the original settlers of both towns. Neither church had a permanent pastor, but two traveling preachers held services at both places. One was the brother of Vermont's Governor Chittenden. There was no Episcopal seminary in the United States at the time, and through these ministers, Philander learned that there was an Episcopal minister in Albany, New York who would be willling to provide him with religious instruction in an apprenticeship type arrangement.

He went to Albany, the first city he had ever seen, knocked on Reverend Ellison's door and introduced himself. He was welcomed with open arms. Soon he had a teaching job in the city of Albany, so that he could support himself while he was studying theology. In her book, Laura mentions that he made $400 a year.

Nathan Smith was an important doctor in the Upper Valley in the late 1700’s.  His practice encompassed an area with a fifty mile radius.  He was married to Sally Chase, Jonathan Chase’s daughter, and they lived right across the road from Colonel Chase in Cornish. As the years went by, Nathan provided medical services to families on both sides of the Connecticut River, through smallpox and typhus outbreaks.  He also saw the gamut of common medical emergencies, setting broken bones and performing surgeries.

Nathan usually had an apprentice working with him.  Sometimes he had two students working in his practice, gaining their medical training the same way he did.  Nathan went to Harvard because he was dissatisfied with the level of expertise he gained from his apprenticeship, and he wanted more for his students as well. He felt strongly that every state should have a medical school that could provide a high quality medical education.

Since 1769, Dartmouth College had been providing higher education to Upper Valley students (all men – women did not go to college) and it seemed logical to Nathan to approach the nearest college with a plan to establish a medical school. When he met with the trustees of Dartmouth, they were not overly enthusiastic about the idea.  For one thing, Dartmouth was broke.  In 1795 they only had 100 students and struggled to pay their professors.  The trustees told him to come back in a year when the college might be financially better off and more able to consider the proposal.

Nathan decided that he needed further education.  Although Sally was pregnant with their second child, he decided to go to the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Nathan was always invested in increasing his medical knowledge, but it is also likely that he thought that Dartmouth would take him more seriously if he had been to Edinburgh.

Nathan’s letters home to Sally, reprinted in his granddaughter-in-law’s book “The Life and Letters of Nathan Smith” show that he missed his wife and little boy and that he was worried about them. He writes, “ I am sure I shall ever be happy if I live to return and find you and Solon alive and well. Do be careful of our dear little son.” He doesn’t mention Sally being pregnant or any anxiety over the unborn baby.  It is hard know what to make of this.  Does he not know Sally is pregnant?  Did people in that day just not mention pregnancy in their correspondence? 

In her book, Emily Smith says that Nathan took comfort in knowing that Sally and Solon would be well cared for by Sally’s mother and father (Jonathan and Sally Chase).  Certainly the elder Chases looked after their daughter and grandson, but one wonders what they thought about the situation. Nathan and his family lived right across the road from the Chases, in a house that Jonathan owned. Things were different in those days, but it is easy to believe that at least Sally’s mother was at the very least annoyed that her daughter was left alone and pregnant.

As much comfort as Nathan took from the fact that Sally’s parents were right nearby, he was still homesick and worried about them.  Another letter says,

“Tho' I am every day surrounded with new and interesting scenes and am treated with great kindness and attention by the people here, yet my thoughts continually turn on you and our dear little son, whose name I cannot write without shedding tears on it. I imagine a thousand evils ready to befall him. I see him every night in my dreams and often wake myself by attempting to grasp him, but he always eludes my fond embrace and leaves me to mourn his absence. Do my dear, If he be still living, and I dare not think otherwise, do, I say, watch over him with maternal care, kiss him for me a thousand times each day and tell him that his papa is coming soon." In an era when infant deaths were all too common, it was perfectly reasonable that Nathan was worried about Solon.  In an era when maternal deaths were even more common, it would have been even more reasonable for him to worry about Sally and the unborn baby, making one wonder again if he knew that Sally was pregnant.

The well-being of his family was not Nathan’s only concern. Money was always an issue.  Nathan needed money for medical books, supplies, and medical equipment, as well as for food, lodging and the fare for the voyage.  Records show that he wasn’t always prompt in repaying his debts, waiting 25 years to pay back one of the people he owed. Oliver Hayward’s biography of Nathan, “Improve, Perfect and Perpetuate”, cites several instances of Nathan being slow to pay his bills. 

There is no evidence that Nathan ever matriculated and actually took courses at the College in Edinburgh, although he did attend lectures there. In his letters home, he mentions that he was disappointed in the quality of the lectures he attended. He soon discovered that the medicine’s star was rising over London, and he left Edinburgh to spend some time in London before he went home to Cornish. While he was in London, he toured the London hospital, observed some dissections on cadavers, and was nominated to and joined the Medical Society of London.

When he returned home to Cornish in September of 1797, both Sally and Solon were fine.  Nathan met his second son Nathan Ryno, called Ryno by his family, who was four months old by the time Nathan got home. There is a story, recounted in both Smith’s book and Hayward’s biography, about Nathan’s homecoming. Apparently Sally borrowed three or four neighbor babies the same age as Ryno, lined them all up with her own son and challenged Nathan to identify which one was his. Legend says that Nathan picked correctly, saying that it was easy, he just picked the prettiest baby.

As soon as he returned, Nathan returned to Hanover and Dartmouth. He didn’t wait the trustees to approve the establishment of a medical school, but started giving private lectures on his own, instructing students on various medical theories and techniques. This is much like what he experienced with the London Medical Society, which sponsored various lectures rather than offering education through an established   The difficulty of the trip soon led him to board in Hanover, leaving Sally and the boys in Cornish and coming home when the weather, the roads and his schedule permitted.

school. He traveled back and forth from Cornish to Hanover, riding horseback on poor roads, across unreliable bridges, sometimes crossing streams when bridges were out.

A painting of Dr Smith on horseback, owned by Darmouth College

 

In 1798 the trustees of Dartmouth finally approved the establishment of a medical school and Nathan became a member of the faculty at Dartmouth. He asked his friend and student Lyman Spaulding to be the lecturer in chemistry.  Together, the two made up the entire faculty of the medical school.  In 1800, Nathan lists 19 Seniors and 16 Juniors who attended his lectures for that school year. The medical curriculum included Theory and Practice of Physic; Chemistry, accompanied by actual     experiments (Nathan’s words); and Anatomy and Surgery, accompanied by dissections if subjects can be legally obtained. The fee for Anatomy and Surgery was $50, chemistry cost $23 and Theory and Practice of Physic cost $17. Nathan’s lectures were popular with the students.  According to journals of his students quoted by Hayward, Nathan spoke from experience, added anecdotes from his country practice and even sometimes used humor.

Nathan finally succeeded in getting a medical school established in the north country, so that his students could have a high-quality, formal education in the medical field instead of relying only on apprenticeship as training to become doctors.

 

Nathan Smith and Smallpox Inoculation

Nathan Smith was an important doctor in the Upper Valley in the late 1700’s, if not the only doctor.  He married Sally Chase, Jonathan Chase’s daughter, and they lived right across the road from Colonel Chase in Cornish.  Emily Smith wrote a biography of her grandfather-in-law, The Life and Letters of Nathan Smith. In her book, she said that Nathan’s practice encompassed an hour fifty miles in diameter..

            Nathan gained the credentials he needed to begin a medical practice by serving as an apprentice for a well-respected, established doctor in Southern Vermont. After he had been in practice for a few years, he decided he needed formal medical training and became the 5^th student to receive a Bachelor’s in Medicine degree from Harvard. 

            Nathan took medical education seriously, and often had a medical student or two living with him and helping with his practice as apprentices. We get an idea of how he ran his household from a comment in one of his student’s diaries regarding a visit to Nathan’s home prior to his apprenticeship.  The student says, “I am not likely to be burdened with compliments, for, all the time I was there, Smith had not introduced us to the ladies of the family, and three were sitting silently engaged in needlework.” The student seemed to assume that Nathan’s lack of courtesy toward the female members of his family would likely extend to the newest and perhaps lowliest newcomer.

            This interesting tidbit notwithstanding, we can assume that Sally was called upon to assist with some of her husband’s medical endeavors.  The 1790 Cornish town report documents that Dr Nathan Smith “shall have the liberty to erect a pesthouse and inoculate for the small-pox.  A pest house was a sort of hospital, a building where the town constables and doctors would quarantine people who were sick with a communicable disease, usually smallpox, but sometimes other diseases as well.  These people would be confined to the pesthouse until they either died or got well. One wonders whether Sally helped with these inoculations or whether the apprentices did. The fact that Nathan himself was given the liberty to erect the pesthouse seems to indicate that he also had responsibility for the patients within them.

            When Nathan was at Harvard, one of the three medical school professors there was Benjamin Waterhouse, the first doctor in America to practice inoculation for smallpox.  Smallpox inoculations at that time involved making a scratch in a person’s skin and introducing matter from cowpox pustules into the scratch.  Cowpox was a non-lethal illness similar to smallpox.  People who had gotten cowpox were immune to smallpox. Edwin Jenner had developed the smallpox vaccine in England.  Waterhouse introduced it to America by inoculating his own children.  Then he inoculated a servant boy and sent him to a pesthouse, where he did not contract the disease.  Nathan studied under Waterhouse and came home to Cornish believing in smallpox inoculation.  The fact that the Cornish town report mentions a pesthouse and inoculation in the same entry probably means that anyone who was inoculated had to be quarantined in the pesthouse for a period of time, just in case they came down with smallpox. Inoculation was a brand-new procedure, and many people thought that it was unsafe and probably wouldn’t work. 

            Smallpox and cowpox were originally European diseases.  Waterhouse made a lot of enemies by insisting that doctors throughout America doing inoculations buy the inoculant from him only, thus insuring that he had a monopoly on the vaccine.  Without a doubt any vaccine used in Cornish or anywhere in the Upper Valley came from Waterhouse. The vaccine consisted of some pus or serum scraped onto a piece of cotton string from a cowpox lesion on a patient in England and shipped to America.  Since there were no refrigerated compartments on ships, and the voyage was not quick, some of the cowpox samples were dried out and dead by the time they were used, so effectiveness was not guaranteed.  Still, the inoculations done in this primitive way were remarkably powerful in reducing smallpox cases.

            There is some confusion between the words inoculation and vaccination. They are almost interchangeable. Inoculation refers to the practice of giving people a disease, under controlled conditions, causing them to contract the disease in a less virulent form, thus developing immunity to the disease but not dying from it.  Vaccination refers to giving a person dead or weakened pathogens so that the person develops immunity to the disease without getting the disease itself, or by getting a very mild case.  Some inoculations done in America were done by taking the serum from actual smallpox pustules and infecting healthy people with it. For some reason, people who contracted smallpox in this way became much less sick than from natural smallpox. This was done if an area couldn’t get any of Waterhouse’s inoculant, or if there was an outbreak of smallpox nearby and people were scared enough to take the risk.  I believe Nathan’s method of inoculation used Waterhouse’s cowpox inoculant.  We do not  have any evidence of a smallpox outbreak near Cornish, and Nathan would have had personal ties to Waterhouse and thus would have had access to his inoculant.  That being said, the mention of a pesthouse confuses the matter.  Why would they need a pesthouse if there had not been some cases of smallpox, unless they thought they were about to have some?  I stand by my original thought that they wanted to isolate the people who were inoculated, but it is a question.

           

           

Nathan and Sarah's wedding - Cornish, 1794

Nathan Smith, a doctor and surgeon in Cornish in the late 1700's, married Jonathan Chase's daughter Elizabeth in 1791. Elizabeth was 26 and Nathan was 29. They had only been married for two years when Elizabeth died. After Elizabeth died, Nathan married her younger sister Sarah, who was called Sally. At the time of their marriage, Sally was 18 and Nathan was 32.

Many of the rules of American society changed after the Revolution, and the customs of courtship and marriage were no exception. Although marriages had ceased to be an economic negotiation between the fathers of two families, families still viewed marriage as a way to align the leading families of a town or county. It was common for sisters to marry brothers, and it was not uncommon for second cousins to marry. If a mother or father remarried after their original spouse had died, often the children would marry into the stepfather or stepmother's family. Prudence Chase married married a man named Nathaniel Hall, who was almost certainly related to her stepmother, whose maiden name was Hall.

The Chase's were the leading family in Cornish, and would have been happy to have their daughter marry a doctor. Although Nathan was a doctor, he was the son of a farmer from Chester, Vermont, and gained considerable social status by marrying a Chase. Fifty years earlier, the marriage would have been negotiated between the parents of bride and groom, or between the groom and the bride's parents, with little input from the bride. By the late 1700's, the bride had much more voice in the decisions surrounding her marriage, although exactly how much voice she had depended on the family.

Regardless, it wasn't a matter of falling in love with a boy and presenting him to her father as the man she wanted to marry. Girls saw boys at school or at church or at other social events, usually weddings or funerals. Girls and boys didn't “date” like they do now. There was very little privacy in small houses where there were lots of siblings and often an unmarried aunt or grandparent. Sometimes if a couple were interested in maybe getting married, the family would let them “bundle”. “Bundling” was a custom invented to give a couple some privacy in order to get to know each other better. Each young person was tied or sewn into their clothes, and maybe tied or bundled into sheets and blankets, and put into a bed together, then left alone in order to be able to visit in privacy. Sometimes the parents would put lay a board up on its side between them – called a bundling board.

We often imagine the families of young unmarried guys and girls during this era being very strict, not letting them out of the house unsupervised and guarding the morals of their young people very closely. Actually, in the late 18^th century, one girl in three was pregnant when she was married, and the theory is that bundling had a lot to do with it. As long as girls were married by the time the baby came along, a premarital pregnancy wasn't the calamity it would be later in American history.

Obviously we don't know if Jonathan and Sally Chase allowed Elizabeth to “bundle” with Nathan Smith. We do know that neither Elizabeth nor Sarah was pregnant when they were married, although Sarah and Nathan's first child, a son, was born almost exactly nine months from their wedding day.

There is a story about Sarah and Nathan, that I have found in multiple sources. Apparently at Nathan's and Elizabeth's wedding, Sarah managed to get in between Elizabeth and Nathan for a few moments during the ceremony. One account portrays Sarah as a little girl, so I envisioned a four year old who had a crush on her future brother-in-law. No, Sarah was sixteen at Elizabeth and Nathan's wedding, so she may have had an eye on Nathan from the beginning. Keep in mind that wedding ceremonies were much simpler in those days. The bride and groom were married in the bride's parents' best room – the parlor if they had one, with close family members from both sides of the family in attendance. All attendees wore their best clothes, but not anything different from what they wore to church on Sunday. Afterward, there may or may not have been a big meal. Probably in Elizabeth and Nathan's case, there was, and probably there was a big meal for Sarah's wedding as well, although we don't know.

Royalton Raid

Colonel Jonathan Chase commanded the Cornish, New Hampshire regiment in the Revolutionary War. His troops were in the Battle of Saratoga, and witnessed the surrender. When he was gone, his wife Sarah was busy at home running the farm, a tavern, a ferry, and raising seven children.

Jonathan married his first wife, Thankful Sherman, when he was 22 and she was 20. She had three daughters, and died in 1768, at age 28, when her daughter Prudence was 8, Mary was 5 and Elizabeth was 3. Jonathan remarried 2 years later. Sarah Hall was 28 at the time and Jonathan was 38.

Sarah married Jonathan, became an instant mother to three young girls, and soon had a baby son, Jonathan Jr, born in 1771. Jonathan soon had a brother, David, born in 1773, and a sister, Sarah, born in 1775. Thus when Jonathan led his troops on the way to Saratoga in 1777, she was left with two teenage girls, a twelve year old, and three little ones, the youngest being 2. The Chases had a farm, kept a tavern, and ran the ferry across the Connecticut River, between Cornish and Windsor. That in itself had to have been really tough to handle, in addition to the worries about the possibility of her husband being killed or injured in a war.

Jonathan came home from Saratoga and settled down to running the many family businesses and raising his family, which soon expanded with the birth of Lebbeus, Pamela, and Gratia. After the Saratoga campaign, the war moved out of New England into the Middle Atlantic colonies and then into the south. Although the war had moved south, New England men still had to be ready at a minute's notice, in case hostilities broke out again. The militia held drills on town commons throughout New England, and each member of the militia was expected to have all the necessary equipment on hand and ready to go should the need arise.

Albert Stillman Batchellor, in his address to the New Hampshire Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, in 1900 said that , “each officer and private soldier had to have a firearm, a ramrod, a worm, priming wire and brush, bayonet, scabbard and belt, sword, tomahawk or hatchet, a pouch for a cartridge box holding at least 100 buckshot, a jackknife and tow for wadding, six flints, one pound powder, forty lead balls, a knapsack, a blanket, and a canteen or wooden bottle that held one quart of water”. This amount of equipment posed a serious economic challenge for many men in a community that did not see much money. Towns were required to pay for equipment for men who couldn't afford it, and they did so by asking for donations. Most of the wealthier men equipped several others besides themselves. I'm sure Jonathan Chase donated money or equipment to a good number of the soldiers in his command, and probably several others were equipped by his father and uncle. Often if a man was too old to serve in the militia, if he had enough money he would help provide the equipment for someone younger but not as well off.

Three years after Saratoga, Jonathan's regiment did get the call to march again. This time it really was on a minute's notice, in response to the raid on Royalton on October 16,1780. Although the war had moved south, the Connecticut River and Lake George and Champlain were still important thoroughfares during those days of using waterways for transportation, and in late 1780 the British thought that since the war had moved out of the area, they could make a surprise attack on some northern settlements and regain control of these northern waterways. Many Indian tribes were allies of the British because they felt the British were more fair than the colonials when it came to respecting native property rights. As a result, British troops combined with a war party of Mohawks and Abenakis to attack the town of Newbury on the Connecticut River. When they decided that Newbury was too well defended, they went to the very young and virtually undefended village of Royalton on the White River instead.

Royalton at that time was just a bunch of cabins along the White River. Many of the cabins were inhabited by young families or single young men, who were easily overwhelmed by a combined Indian and British war party of 265. Most of the town's residents were captured and taken to Canada as captives, where they were held as prisoners of war until they either died of disease or were released at the end of the war. Some men were killed when they resisted being captured or tried to fight back, and a few people managed to escape capture by running or hiding. The attackers burned all of the buildings killed the livestock and destroyed the crops, leaving the little village of Royalton in smoking ruins.

Some soldiers from New Hampshire did arrive in the vicinity of Royalton and engage the enemy, but not very successfully. After an exchange of gunfire, the enemy managed to escape without being damaged, and continued northward, with captives in tow. By the time Jonathan and his men made it to Royalton, they were found the fledgling town reduced to smoke and ash, with its inhabitants either taken prisoner or having fled for safety.

Until the British surrendered at Yorktown, the Royalton raid, and similar raids on Sharon and Tunbridge, left people in the Northern Connecticut River Valley in a state of heightened alert. Town militias stepped up their muster days and were even more prepared to defend themselves and their neighbors at a moment's notice. Certainly Jonathan and Sarah, with their brood of children to protect and care for, kept their eyes and ears open and their children close by during those dangerous times.  

 

If you are interested in reading more about the Royalton Raid, Vermont history.org has an article on George Avery, taken captive during the Royalton Raid and brought to Canada, where he survived, had plenty of adventures, made it back to his family on Cape Cod and eventually moved back to the Upper Valley and settled in Plainfield.  It's a great story.  It took me much longer than it should have to write this post because I read that whole story.

https://vermonthistory.org/journal/80/VHS8002GeorgeAvery.pdf

 

  I also ordered a book on the Royalton Raid from Amazon.com - "We Go as Captives" by Neil Goodwin.  It hasn't come yet, so I can't give a recommendation - but it has gotten good reviews and it should be great summer reading.

Jonathan Chase and Saratoga

In the Spring of 1777, political battles within the upper echelons of George Washington's military commanders had left Fort Ticonderoga in New York State vulnerable to attack by the British. Colonel Jonathan Chase and his soldiers from Cornish, New Hampshire marched all the way from Cornish to Fort Ti, only to be told that their services were no longer needed because the danger from British forces had passed. The arrived home only to be sent back to New York, but on their return trip they met soldiers headed for home with the news that Fort Ticonderoga had fallen to the British. In response to this fiasco, General Horatio Gates was reinstated as the commander of the northern forces.

During the Revolutionary War, Committees of Safety in each state organized and managed the troops from their areas and districts. The Upper Valley's Committee of Safety consisted of delegates from Cornish, Lebanon, Plainfield and Hanover. In a letter dated September 17, General Gates wrote to the Committees of Safety asking them to send troops, as British General Burgoyne was headed toward Saratoga. The Committee of Safety met on September 21 to plan a response to this request. It's impressive that in the space of four days, the letter traveled safely from the war zone in the Lake George region, to the Upper valley and the Committee was able to meet and take action.

During the Revolution, troops couldn't travel long distances because of inadequate roads and primitive modes of transportation. When General Gates needed more troops in New York than that area could provide, he sent missives requesting reinforcements to committees of safety within a couple of days travel. Troops were not sent across the country to fight in other regions. I think that partially explains why the Patriot troops were more likely to win battles fought in rural areas. The men that fought in those battles were more familiar with guns and could use them more effectively than soldiers from the city who may have had less experience with firearms.

The Upper Valley Committee of Safety sent Jonathan Chase and his troops back to New York one more time, along with troops from Lebanon and Hanover. Originally, the term “regiment” referred to the geographic area a commander drew his troops from. The minutes of the Committee of Safety, quoted in “A History of Dartmouth College and Hanover New Hampshire” by Frederick Chase, say, “whatever number of men shall turn out for the purpose aforementioned from the towns of Colonel Chase's regiment shall have the liberty to chuse (sic) proper officers for their company from amongst themselves.” This quote refers to the towns of the regiment and not to the members, men, or soldiers of the regiment. There were seventeen regiments in New Hampshire and Chase's regiment was the 17^th. Each regiment had to fill a quota, providing a certain number of soldiers. These men left Cornish on September 26, 1777, and traveled to Fort Number 4, crossed the river, and headed toward New York, probably via the Crown Point Road.

General Burgoyne's plan was to invade New York, and by controlling the Hudson River he would cut New England off from the rest of the colonies. He believed that if he could isolate New England the rest of the states would abandon the rebellion, because New England was the heart of the rebellion. After the British captured Fort Ticonderoga, Burgoyne sent a force of Hessian troops to Bennington,

Vermont looking for food and supplies. These men were defeated in the Battle of Bennington and never rejoined the main army in New York. Just as importantly, they never brought the much needed food and supplies they were sent to find.

While Burgoyne was on the march from Ticonderoga to Saratoga, Horatio Gates was busy building defenses on a ridge of bluffs near Stillwater, New York overlooking the Hudson River. If the Patriots controlled the river and the road coming into Saratoga, a natural bottleneck in the river valley would funnel the invading British right into a trap. On September 19, 1777, the two armies collided in a field on a farm near the bluffs. In a day of fierce fighting, the field changed hands several times but at the end of the day, the British prevailed and controlled the field. They could not manage to advance any further. On September 22, Burgoyne got word that General Clinton, the British officer who was in charge of the forces occupying New York City, was getting ready to send reinforcements to Saratoga. Burgoyne's forces had carried the day on that first day of fighting, but could not gain any further ground without reinforcements, so he decided to dig in and wait for the arrival of Clinton's men.

Clinton's men did start north, capturing a few forts a long the way. A few troops made it as far as Albany, but Clinton decided he needed them more to maintain the occupation of New York City and Philadelphia. Meanwhile, Horatio Gates' army was becoming increasingly stronger as more and more reinforcements arrived every day. One of the new arrivals was Jonathan Chase's regiment of 142 men from Cornish. Along the way, he had gathered even more recruits so that by the time he arrived in Saratoga on September 26^th, he had 235 men. On October 1, 30 more men to joined the Patriot forces.

These additions, combined with significant reinforcements from northern New England, gave Gates confidence that he could meet the British in battle and beat them. On October 7^th, the two armies battled again, and this time the outcome was much different. Although Burgoyne managed to hold the field on September 19^th, he lost a large number of troops in the effort. On October 7^th, his depleted troops faced an enemy that was substantially increased in number. The Patriots soundly defeated the

British in that battle. Burgoyne lost so many men he was outnumbered 3-1. With nightfall, he and his remaining troops retreated under cover of darkness to the town of Saratoga. In Saratoga, starving, miserable and surrounded by the Patriot army, there was no other option for General Burgoyne but to surrender. The first thing the Patriot army did after the surrender was feed the starving British troops.

There is some mention online that Jonathan Chase may have “drawn up” the Articles of Convention” that outlined the terms of Burgoyne's surrender. The Wikipedia entry for Jonathan Chase makes that claim, and so do several ancestry websites. I have spent hours looking for other, more legitimate sources that mention this, but I could not find any. The other question, not that it really matters, is what does “drawn up” mean? Did Jonathan write the Articles of Convention, supposedly, as dictated by someone else because he had good handwriting? Or did he compose and write them? Reproductions of the Articles of Convention are available for purchase, and if it could be verified that Jonathan wrote them, it would be possible to buy a document that you know is a copy of something written by him.

Sources: Chase, Frederick "A History of Dartmouth College and Hanover New Hampshire" 1891 Hanover, NH: J Wilson and son http://books.google.com/books/about/A_History_of_Dartmouth_College_and_the_T.html?id=gfEKAAAAIAAJ

Child, William Henry "History of the Town of Cornish New Hampshire" 1911 Concord NH: Rumford Press https://archive.org/details/historyoftownofc01chil

Heald, Bruce "New Hampshire and the Revolutionary War" 2013 Charleston: The History Press

Jonathan Chase - Cornish's Revolutionary War Colonel

When Governor Benning Wentworth granted the charter for the town of Cornish, New Hampshire, he named the town after Sir Samuel Cornish, a renowned admiral in the Royal Navy. In 1765, the Chase family traveled up the Connecticut River by canoe to become the first family to live in the Connecticut River town. Judge Samuel Chase had purchased a considerable tract of land from one of the first incorporators of the town, and he and his two sons came north to establish their homesteads in the wilderness north of Fort Number 4. Judge Chase's son Dudley's and his wife Alice had 14 children, including Alice, who was born soon after they arrived at their new home. Alice Chase was the first child born in Cornish.

Judge Chase's other son, Jonathan, born in 1732, was a colonel in the Revolutionary War. He was colonel, paymaster and mustermaster of the 13^th New Hampshire regiment. He was appointed as a colonel in 1775. Jonathan was 45 during the Revolutionary War. 

 

Jonathan and his men were first called to duty in the early Spring of 1777. Cornish was a rendezvous point for several other regiments. From Cornish the New Hampshire soldiers marched to Cavendish, Vermont, where they met up with more regiments and continued to Fort Ticonderoga. The whole trip took a month, and when they finally arrived at Fort Ticonderoga they were told to turn around and go home, that the danger to the fort had passed.

                                                                                                                          Jonathan Chase

Again they were called out. On June 27, Jonathan and his regiment of 186 men left again for Ticonderoga. On their way, they met returning troops who told them that Ticonderoga had fallen to General Burgoyne. When they heard this news, they were angry and discouraged, feeling that had they been allowed to stay at Ticonderoga when they were there a month ago, maybe the fort wouldn't have fallen.

                                                                 Fort Ticonderoga

During the previous several months, Patriot Generals Philip Schuyler and Horatio Gates, both in positions of importance in the northern region, had been involved in competitions for more power and more important command posts. In March, the Continental Congress gave the top position to Gates, but when Schuyler protested, the decision was reversed and the position was given to Schuyler. Gates, who was in charge of Fort Ticonderoga, refused to serve under Schuyler and went to Philadelphia.

Arthur St. Clair replaced Horatio Gates as commander in charge of Fort Ticonderoga. He arrived three weeks before General Burgoyne attacked, on June 9. Jonathan and his regiment from the Upper Valley had arrived during the change in command. Jonathan left Cornish on May 7. If the History of Cornish, by William Child (1911) is accurate, and it took exactly a month for Jonathan and his regiment to reach Ticonderoga, would have arrived on June 7, two days before St. Clair. It's possible that no one was in charge at Ticonderoga when our guys arrived, and whoever was the ranking officer there at the time just told them to go home. It's also not hard to imagine Gates there, but packing to leave and not wanting to bother with a bunch of country bumpkins from New Hampshire.

 

 

All accounts of General St Clair's arrival in Ticonderoga state that he immediately knew there weren't enough troops, and insufficient ammunition to conduct a successful defense if Ticonderoga were attacked. It's hard to believe he would have met New Hampshire's troops, knocking on the gate of the fort ready to serve, and sent them back home. When it became apparent that an attack was imminent, St Clair abandoned Fort Ti, and Burgoyne's troops arrived and took possession almost unopposed.

St Clair knew when he abandoned Fort Ti that he was putting his reputation and military career at risk. He is quoted as saying, “I knew I would have saved my reputation by sacrificing the army, but were I to do so, I would forfeit that which the world would not restore, the approbation of my own conscience. Sure enough, St Clair was court martialled for charges of cowardice. He was acquitted with the highest honor. The court concluded that “Burgoyne's army, when he met St. Clair, numbered 7863 men. St. Clair had less than 2200, all of whom were half fed and half clad. Burgoyne surrounded him with 142 guns, while St. Clair had less than 100 second rate cannon of various sizes and these were manned by inexperienced men.” (Stanley L. Klos 2011 “Arthur St. Clair” The Forgotten Fathers http://theforgottenfounders.com/the-forgotten-fathers/arthur-st-clair/)

Alice and Dudley Chase of Cornish

The original incorporators did not settle in Cornish. They were land speculators who sold their land to families that wanted to build new communities in the wilderness. Two years after Governor Wentworth established the grant, the first family to live in Cornish traveled up the Connecticut River from Sutton, Massachusetts, a distance of 140 miles. Judge Samuel Chase had purchased extensive parcels of land from the incorporators of Cornish. In 1765, he and his son Dudley, son-in-law Daniel Putnam, and family friend Dyer Spaulding, brought Dudley's wife and children to New Hampshire to start a new town in the wilderness.

Coming up the Connecticut in a canoe, Judge Chase got as far as Walpole, which was the last real settlement. He was 60 years old, and decided to stay there while the rest of the group continued up the river. After they had cleared the land and built a house, he would join them, but for the time being, he would stay in Walpole. The rest of the band continued up the river.

Dudley and his wife Alice had seven children. Imagine them paddling up the river, into completely untamed wilderness. Canoes full of kids and provisions, along with their mother, father, and a couple of other men. Actually, the “History of Cornish” mentions that they had “workmen” with them, and you have to wonder if that means slaves. The “History of Cornish” also tells us that tradition says that it was in the earliest days of June, when the weather was at its nicest and the leaves were newly green.

Alice and the kids made it as far as Fort Number 4. Dudley left them at the fort while he and the other men continued up the river to begin work on their land. His priority was not to build a house, but to clear enough land to plant crops, and get the crops in the ground. After that, his plan was to start on a house and when all that was done, he would return for the kids and Alice. By that time, there was not much going on at Fort Number 4.

William Child, the author of “The History of Cornish”, writes that Alice's youngest son, Philander, writing as an adult, describes his mother as horribly lonely at the fort, with only her children for company. She spent most of her time down at the riverbank, looking for her husband coming down the river. Finally, one day at sunset, she saw a canoe in the distance. At first she thought it might be Indians, but as the canoe got closer she saw that it was not Indians, so it had to be her husband. Well, it wasn't. It was Dyer Spaulding, who was coming down to check on the family and get some provisions. Child says, “No sooner did the canoe reach the shore than the children were in it, and on his knee, telling him that their mother was resolved that they would all go upriver to join their father in the woods.

Dyer informed them that this was not the plan. The men were focused on clearing the land and getting the crops planted. They, themselves had no shelter, and there was certainly nowhere safe for a woman and seven children to stay. Apparently Alice was a woman who didn't take no for an answer, or Dyer was a man who couldn't resist a forceful woman, a woman who had spent day after day down by the river's edge waiting for word from her husband. He brought Alice and the kids up the river to their father, who had no idea they were coming.

 

The Connecticut River served as the only means of transportation for these early settlers. If you are

ever out on the river on a canoe, the river does remind you of the interstate. Once you were on the river, the banks were too steep to allow you to easily leave the river with your canoe. River travelers used the brooks and streams emptying into the river as a way to leave waterway, traveling up these small inlets and pulling their canoes up the less steep banks. The Chases “put in” by traveling up the brook that is now called “Blow Me Down Brook” in the northwest corner of town. They found a meadow near the mouth of the brook and began preparing the land there for cultivation. (Disregard the powerboat in the illustration.  Obviously it isn't historically correct.  But this is a good illustration of the steep banks on either side of the river)

Alice was 32 years old at the time. Mercy, her oldest child, was 10, Lois was 9, Simeon was 7, Abigail was 6, Salmon was 4, Ithamar was 3 and Baruch, the youngest, was 1 year old. This was the crowd that mobbed Dyer that day and demanded to be taken up the river to their father.

When they arrived at the campsite, their father could not believe they were there. He asked his wife, “Have you come here to die before your time? We have no shelter for either you and you will perish before we build one”.

The authors of these town histories often wax poetical when describing the intrepid early settlers in all their saintly heroic history. Alice is supposed to have replied, “Cheer up,my faithful. Let the smiles and rosy cheeks of your children make you joyful. If you have no shelter, you have the strength and hands to make one. The God we worship will bless us and help us obtain shelter.” This is a quote from her son Philander. Really? I think it's more likely that she said, “How dare you leave us all alone at that nasty old fort? You have strong arms and hands – build us a shelter! We will all help.”

Child's history says that it took three hours for them to build wigwams out of birch bark and branches for the family to spend the night in, and the next day they built a cabin. The first English family north of Fort Number 4 had a home. Four months later, Alice gave birth to a baby girl, the first English baby born north of Fort Number 4, and named her Alice. Eventually, the Chases moved three miles south, onto Cornish plain.

Mast Pines

The town of Cornish, New Hampshire was created by charter in 1763, to a group of 69 incorporators led by Reverend Samuel McClintock of Greenland, New Hampshire. Governor Benning Wentworth granted charters to 12 other towns that year. The charter outlined some requirements the grantees had to fulfill to be able to keep their land. They had to plant and cultivate 5 acres for every 50 acres of land he owned in the township after 5 years. For the first 10 years, town incorporators had to pay one ear of Indian corn every year on December 25^th. After 10 years, they would owe one shilling for every 100 acres, also on December 25^th.

One of the most important provisions of the grant was that all “White and other Pine Trees fit for masting for our royal navy must be preserved for that use”. Although England's forests had been cut down by the mid 1700's, the British navy needed lumber to use for ship building. The Eastern White Pine grows the tallest of any of the pine species of North America. White Pines grow 150 – 250 feet tall. Lumber from these trees is strong, light, and rot-resistant. Because these trees grow so tall and straight, they were ideal for making ship masts. Much of the speed and prowess associated with British ships was due to their masts made out of New England White Pine.

Before Cornish was chartered, an area just south of where the Windsor Covered Bridge is now was called the “Mast Camp”. Every winter, representatives of the King would travel through the woods, marking White Pines fit for becoming masts with the “King's Broad Arrow”.

  These trees were to be saved for the Royal Navy. When Spring came and the ice broke, logging crews set up at “Mast Camp”. These crews went into the woods, cut down the White Pines marked with the King's Mark, and using oxen, dragged them to the riverbank, where they dumped them into the Connecticut River and sent them on a 200 mile trip downstream.

Cutting down White Pines was an arduous and dangerous job. White Pines are bare of limbs for 80 or so feet above the ground. When they fall, they can split if they fall hard enough. If the logging was done in the winter, several feet of snow would soften the fall of the tree. However, it wasa impossible to house and feed a logging crew in the New Hampshire wilderness in the dead of winter. There really couldn't have been a “Mast Camp” in the deep snow. In the summer, lumbermen cleared the ground underneath the mast tree from any rocks or boulders. They chopped down smaller trees and arranged them so they would cushion the fall of the big tree.

Once the mast tree was safely felled, it had to be cut into a straight log. The log was cut in a proportion of a yard in length for every inch in diameter. A ship's mast had to be at least 24 inches in diameter, so the mast logs had to be at least 24 yards long. Logs more than 24 inches in diameter would match their width in length.

The logs were tied to two sets of wheels, and up to 40 oxen pulled the mast and machine to the edge of the river. Dragging the logs on the ground could damage them. At the edge of the river, the huge logs were dumped into the water to begin a 200 mile journey to Connecticut, where they were loaded on ships specially built to transport such long cargo to Britain.

I am far, far from being an expert on colonial ships, but I do want to explain what the mast was, for people who may not know. The masts are the tall poles that carry the sails of the ships. The rigging (ropes, or lines) was attached to the mast and then the sails were attached to the rigging. When the wind caught in the sails, it propelled the ships forward. Using the rigging, sailors could adjust the sails to catch less wind or more wind to go faster or slower, but in a total absence of wind, there was nothing they could do but sit and wait. If you look at the illustration, you can easily imagine the masts being tall White Pines.  This is a picture of a replica of the "HMS Bounty", a little bit more recent ship than we're talking about here, but you can get an idea of the height and straightness of the masts, as well as the extensive system of lines that made up the rigging.

Ships were steered by a steering wheel, attached to an apparatus that led down to the bottom of the ship that attached to a rudder. The rudder was a sort of paddle that turned in the water, and turned the ship. Adjusting the sails could also help a ship turn.

Commonly, British warships and merchant ships of the 18^th century had three masts. The tallest one was in the middle of the ship, with shorter ones at either end. Larger ships needed taller masts that would hold larger sails to take in the increased amount of wind needed to propel more weight. The very biggest ships had four masts. These ships could carry a lot of cargo, but were not very fast.

Ship's masts could break, in a storm or naval battle. When a ship's mast broke, the crew would use the sails on the remaining whole masts to get it to a friendly port as soon as possible, where the broken mast would be replaced with another, temporary one, until the ship could get back to England, where it would either be scrapped, or the mast replaced with a good one made from Northern White Pine. Either way, a broken mast would call for a least one more White Pine, four more if the ship was scrapped, because a the Royal Navy would build a new ship to replace it. The term “jury rigged” isn't as common today as it was when I was a kid, but it means a makeshift repair job done with whatever tools and supplies you have on hand. On my father's farm something would be “jury rigged” with black plastic and baling twine. “Jury rigged” is an old nautical term for fixing a broken mast at sea. The “rigged” comes from the rigging of the sails. There is some argument over where the “jury” comes from, but it probably comes from the French term “joury” which means “for a day”. Thus “jury rigged” literally means “rigged for a day”, or a temporary rigging.

The ship mast industry continued to supply England with White Pines until the Revolution. As time went on, property owners grew more and more resentful over the law reserving the White Pines for the Royal Navy. Not only did the colonists want to use the lumber from the White Pines themselves, they were also in the way during land clearing. Even when White Pines fell in the forest naturally, the landowners were not allowed to touch them. Sometimes fallen mast trees would rot on the ground if a King's surveyor did not get around to approving it for local use. In April of 1772, in Weare and Gofftown, New Hampshire, hatred of the White Pine Act expressed itself in riots against King's Surveyors inspecting local sawmills for suspected poached White Pines.

Although less well known than the Stamp Act or the Tea Tax, the White Pine Act was equal in inflaming the passions of the colonists against the rule of the king, inciting the movement for independence. One of the first flags of the Colonists during Revolutionary War featured an emblem of the White Pine, and the tree remains on the Vermont State Flag. Throughout New Hampshire, roads that are named “Mast Road” were once the path used by oxen pulling the masts to a river.