A Town Meeting in Canaan

As black students started trickling into Canaan to attend Noyes Academy, the school's enemies became more and more agitated. Over the July 4^th holiday of 1835, they formed a mob with the intention of attacking the school building, but they were turned back by Joseph Richardson, a well-respected deacon of the church. The leaders of the mob regrouped, and decided that they would call a legally warned town meeting, Any decisions made at that meeting would have been made legally. Anyone carrying out those decisions would be exempt from prosecution.

The meeting was duly warned. The town convened on July 31. William Wallace tells us that “the house was crowded with men filled with rage, rum, and riotous intentions”. Interestingly enough, the moderator is the same Joseph Richardson who had turned back the mob a couple of weeks earlier. The citizens present voted to call the school a Public Nuisance, because white females and black males at the school are “closely intimate”, and before long, there will be an “amalgamation of blood”. In other words, it's only a matter of time before Canaan has some mixed race babies in their midst as a result of this academy.

After the school was labeled a Public Nuisance, it then became the duty of the good citizens of Canaan to tear it down. The meeting voted to remove the school from where it stood. They decided that the selectmen would pick its final resting place and the town would pay any expenses incurred during the removal of the school. A committee was chosen to oversee the removal of the school.

When William Wallace wrote the account of the town meeting, he had the report from the meeting right in front of him, although he says that “the author of which sleeps in obscurity.” The report lists the names of the men who were on the committee to oversee the school's removal. Someone who also slept in obscurity, had, long after the fact, taken a pencil and written a 19^th century “where are they now” next to the name of each committee member. Wallace is nice enough to include those comments in his story on Noyes Academy. Thus, here is the list of committee members with the anonymous comments in red.

Jacob Trussel (still at 90 broken and defiant)

Chamberlain Packard, Jr (killed by God)

Win Campbell ( a foolish old infidel)

Herod Richardson

Elijah R Colby ( dead and rotten and now forgotten)

Americus Gates

Daniel Patee, Jr (a blasphemous cripple)

Nathaniel Shepard (a common drunkard)

Luther Kinne (ossified legs)

Peter Stevens

Robert Clark (dead in his bed)

Salmon P Cobb (an old witch too mean to live or die)

Daniel Campbell

James Patee ( a drunkard)

John Fales, Jr (an idiot)

Wesley P Burpee (an awful death from cancer)

Benjamin W Porter (drowned)

Bartlett Hoit (killed by God after having stolen money sent to him to keep his wife's father from starving or being thrown on the town)

March Barber (old, foolish, jealous and insane)

This list provides some interesting topics for further research, for sure. For now, this list raises some questions for me. Who was this person who wrote these footnotes? It is clear that there were plenty of people in Canaan who supported the Academy. Where were they? Why did they give this mob of lowlives (if you believe the anonymous author of the comments) free reign? It's one thing to add snarky footnotes to a town report decades after the fact, but where were they when the whole thing was happening? From what we have read, I believe Nathaniel Currier was a really good man who was not a speech maker or necessarily a leader. Wallace quotes him as saying that himself, so I think it's fair to assume that he wasn't going to lead a defense of the school. We know that George Kimball had big ideas, but we also know that the New Hampshire Bar Association of the day called him lazy in a published directory of lawyers. That pretty much takes him off the list. Samuel Noyes himself was way too old. It appears that the lower elements seized the day in August of 1835 in Canaan.

Nathaniel Currier

Nathaniel Currier was the third incorporator of Noyes Academy. Nathaniel Currier was born in Concord, New Hampshire in 1791. In 1816 he married Rebecca Varnum Pratt and they moved to Canaan, New Hampshire, where Nathaniel had already owned property for two years. Nathaniel owned a woolen mill, where wool was carded and woven into fabric. Customers could bring their unprocessed wool to Nathaniel's woolen mill to be carded and fulled, and take it back home to be spun and woven. Currier's also wove fabric, but it is unclear if they did this for individual customers or whether they sold wool fabric on the open market. Many woolen mills employed weavers who still did weaving at their homes. My guess is that the Currier woolen mill employed cottage industry weavers, although that's only a guess.

Nathaniel and Rebecca had eleven children. Of those eleven, Horace, Nathaniel, Franklin , George Kimball (one can assume he was named after aforementioned George Kimball), Elizabeth Pratt and Henry Kirk White lived past age 21. Elizabeth was the only girl. Of those children, Horace and Nathaniel would have been the age to be students at Noyes Academy. In 1835, Horace would have been 17 and Nathaniel would have been 16. Franklin would have been 12, and I'm not sure if that is too young to have been enrolled in the school.

The Curriers had a house “on the street”, which means they were one of the prosperous families that had imposing residences on Canaan Street. Canaan Street was first called the Grafton Turnpike, then Broad Street and as Canaan grew and became more prosperous the road was renamed. Nathaniel and Rebecca's house was a stop on the Underground Railroad.

                               Nathaniel Currier's house on Canaan St (then Broad Street) in Canaan

In 1838, Nathaniel Currier went into business with James Wallace, who owned a general store in town. Currier and Wallace was known for selling rum, and when the mob was dismantling the Academy building, they demanded that the store give them a barrel of rum. In “The History of Canaan” William Allen Wallace mentions that the New Hampshire militia held musters on the ridge in back of the store, and were treated to rum and sheets of gingerbread. Wallace is a descendant of Nathaniel's business partner. In his book, Wallace goes on and on in excruciating, graphic detail about the evils and consequences of imbibing in alcohol. He feels he must explain, in commenting on the refreshments provided at the musters, that “they never caused even a headache”. The rum at Wallace and Currier's must have been very popular if it afforded all of the benefits of alcohol and none of the dangers.

         This house was once Currier's store.  It's hard to tell in this picture, but in real life, you can see
                                                  where it might have once been a store.

 

Nathaniel Currier wasn't a churchgoer. In his book, Wallace discusses how many young people went to California during the Gold Rush. He quotes one of his own relatives, “In this country, everyone but old Daniel Campbell and Nat Currier go to meeting. They put faith only in bone and muscle. There is no excitement, no wildness, no enthusiasm on any subject.” Either this person hadn't been alive during the Noyes Academy excitement, or he was too young to remember it.

 

I really believe that, although Nathaniel Currier was a staunch abolitionist and his house was a stop on the Underground Railroad, what his goal really was as an incorporator of Noyes Academy was to start a school where his teenagers could get further education. For a while, after the demolition of the Academy, classes were held in the rooms above the store. In 1839, Canaan residents again decided to build a secondary school. Of the original incorporators of Noyes Academy, only Nathaniel Currier was an incorporator of Canaan Union Academy. In Wallace's book, both George and Frank (Franklin) Currier are listed as students at the second Academy.

What I don't understand, is why the white students at Noyes Academy aren 't listed anywhere on the internet. There is lots of reading about the academy, and Wallace writes a whole chapter about it, naming the black students. You can go on the internet and read about several illustrious black ex-students of Noyes Academy, and there is a list of most of the black students on ancestry.com, but nowhere can I find a list of the white students. To my knowledge, George Kimball didn't have any children. If Samuel Noyes had any grandchildren in Canaan, I haven't been able to find them. I feel pretty certain that at least Horace and Nathaniel Currier Jr did attend Noyes Academy.