David Sumner, Hartland's 19th Century Lumber Baron

David Sumner was Northern New England's first lumber baron. He started out as a storekeeper in Hartland. He inherited some woodland, then bought some more woodland and went into the lumber business. In 1805, he married Martha Foxcroft, the daughter of a doctor from Brookfield, Massachusetts. Soon after, he built a mansion in Hartland, that is still there as a bed and breakfast inn.

Martha, nicknamed Mattie, never had any children and died in 1824. David remarried Wealthy Thomas, from Windsor, in 1838.

The trees that were cut on Sumner's land in northern New Hampshire by the Connecticut Lakes was floated down the river to Hartland. At Hartland, it was either shipped south to be cut into boards in Holyoke, Massachusetts or Hartford Connecticut, or cut into boards at his lumber mill on the Connecticut River at Sumners Falls. In “Log Drives on the Connecticut River”, author Bill Gove says that the majority of the homes built in Hartford, Connecticut in the early 1800's were built out of Sumner's lumber.

David contracted most of his log drive labor, hiring other men to get the logs down the river. This meant that he avoided having to be responsible for crews of men that had to travel from the Canadian border to the mouth of the Connecticut River. Gove mentions several different contractors who drove logs downriver for David. It seems like he hired a different contractor every year. He did, however, have some business agents who made sure everything was going according to plan and the company wasn't getting ripped off.

Lemuel Gilson and Charles Johnson were contractors for David Sumner. Lemuel and his wife Wealthy had 5 children. I thought it was weird that both Lemuel and David Sumner had wives named Wealthy, but I tried and tried to find a connection and did not find one. Lemuel was born in Hartland and died there at age 60. He had three daughters and two sons and at least four of them lived to be grownups. Charles Johnson lived in Newbury and had one son who moved to Worcester, Massachusetts. Johnson lived to be 77 years old and died in Beloit, Wisconsin. These men worked for David, but they also did other logging work, and Charles Johson and his brother Cyrus appear to have been quite well off.

David hired several agents to travel along the river to locate and retrieve pirated logs. Valuable logs floating freely down the river were tempting to anyone who lived along the river and was hard up for cash. Albion Taylor, John Kimball, Luther Rogers, and Albert Hunter were agents Gove mentions in the book, but I cannot find any futher information on any of them. David had a business manager named Nathaniel Page. It seems that David did not have much personal contact with the contractors and agents he hired, although Nathaniel kept close tabs on them. David and Nathaniel Page had a close personal relationship, and in 1821, they joined with some other prominent citizens of Hartland in petitioning the Vermont legislature for the establishment of a secondary school in Hartland, the Hartland Academy. Although the Hartland Academy never came into existence, the two men's signatures side by side on the application shows that they worked together as more or less equals, on endeavors other than David's businesses.

Over the years in which David Sumner was the lumber king of the Connecticut River, there were hundreds and hundreds of nameless workers, mostly from the Connecticut Lakes region and northern Vermont and New Hampshire, who traveled through the Upper Valley, literally on the river, moving lumber. These men were paid low wages to risk their lives driving logs from the Canadian border, through David's lumber mill and canal and locks at Sumners Falls, to Hadley, Chicopee and Agawam, Masschusetts, and all the way to where the river empties into the Long Island Sound. Like Charles Barber, some died and others experienced crippling injuries doing this dangerous job.

David married his first wife, Martha Foxcroft, in 1805, when she was 25 and he was 29. She died in 1821, at age 41. She had never had any children. He then married Wealthy Thomas. There is very little information available on Wealthy Thomas, and what is available on Ancestry.com is inaccurate. Ancestry.com repeatedly lists Wealthy's birthdate as 1780, which is Martha's birthdate. This is impossible for two reasons. In “The History of Windsor County”, by Lewis Aldrich and Frank Holmes, Wealthy Thomas Sumner is said to have died in 1887, which would have made her 107 years old. Also, Wealthy had two children by David, which would have been impossible if she was born in 1880.

I could do a little speculation about Wealthy Thomas. Every source agrees that she came from Hartland. According to the 1830 Windsor census, there was a Thomas family in Hartland, headed by Stephen Thomas, with a female between the ages of 20 and 30. This would have been the right age for Wealthy to have married David in 1839 and to have children, although she would have been quite old when she had her son. I can find no information about Stephen Thomas, and since he seems to have had no sons, this is not surprising.

It is absolutely fair to assume that Wealthy was significantly younger than David when they married, because he was 63 when they married and she had two children by him. I think he married her with the goal in mind of having children. He did wait 18 years to remarry after Martha (Mattie) died. Was that because he finally found another soul mate, or because it took him that long to get over the loss of Mattie? I'm going with the second option, because David and Wealthy's first child was a girl, named Martha Brandon Foxcroft Sumner, the exact name of David's first wife. Interestingly, David seems to be descended from one of the original families at Fort Number 4, and has at least one female ancestor named Martha Brandon Foxcroft, so it seems likely that Martha was a distant relative of David's. In those days it was very common for people to marry second or third cousins.

Wealthy also had a son, David Sumner, Jr. David, Jr was preparing to take over his father's business when he died in 1867 at age 25. The “History of Windsor County” states that this loss killed David, Sr, who died eleven days after his son. Maybe so, but David Sumner didn't have long to live at that point in any case, being 90 years old when he died. The same book also states that Wealthy died in 1887, although maddeningly, it doesn't give her age when she died. She had to have been 35 at the oldest when she had David, (to go back to speculation about Wealthy's age and birth date) which puts her birth date at no earlier than 1807, making her 23 at the time of the 1830 census.

David and Wealthy's daughter Martha, also called Mattie, like David's first wife, inherited the Sumner Mansion and lived there with her husband, Judge Benjamin Steele.