North to Bethel

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 4^th 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.