Rum and Carpentry

I am trying to find a link to the Chase family that takes me somewhere else in the Upper Valley. Bethel is an outlying town, and much of the Chase family were either early proprietors or settlers in Bethel. I wasn't going to continue posting about Bethel, because I ended up in Bethel with the Akins family, and here I am again with the Chases. However, as I read the stories, they are so interesting, I feel compelled to share them. There are some interesting stories in Bethel's past. Part of the reason there are so many stories available on the internet is the book “Two Vermont Hollows, a History of Gilead and Little Hollows, published in Randolph in 1976. This book is often quoted on various genealogical sites, and would be a gem of a book to read over the winter, for anyone interested in the history of Bethel.

Dudley and Alice's oldest child, Mercy,, born in Sutton, Massachusetts, moved to Cornish when she was 10 years old. She was one of the kids who traveled up from Fort Number 4 in the canoe when Alice demanded to be taken to Dudley. She married Stephen Child in 1778 when she was 23. Stephen had served in the Revolutionary War under Jonathan, and was with him during the aborted trip to Ticonderoga. He was a corporal under Jonathan, and returned to New York State with Jonathan as they marched to the Battle of Saratoga, and witnessed the surrender of Burgoyne.

Along with Dudley, Stephen was one of the early proprietors of Bethel, although he never lived there. He and Mercy lived to be old in Cornish. Stephen died at age 82 and Mercy died at age 80.

Two of their sons, Daniel and Enos, did move to Bethel.

Daniel married Apama Lyman, from Lebanon, in 1804, when he was 25 and she was 19. They moved to Rochester as newlyweds. Apparently Dudley Chase was one of the proprietors of Rochester,and he sold his grandson Daniel a hundred acre lot. Daniel and Apama cleared their land and built a house. Daniel had settled in Rochester because the road from southern Vermont to Montpelier was supposed to go through Rochester Hollow near his land. The road was never built, and in the summer of 1818 the Childs moved to Bethel. By this time they had six children: Emily, Abel, Philander, Eliza, Elijah and Lucy.

Daniel relocated in Bethel by trading his farm in an even trade with Charles Morse. Morse took possession of Daniel's farm in Rochester, and Daniel moved to Morse's farm in Bethel. When they moved to Bethel, the Childs were not satisfied with the house there so they hired Chester and Cyrus Chapman to build another. The 1820 census lists a Charles Morse living in Rochester, and he had a wife and two children. It is entirely possible that the Morse house was not big enough for six children.

Leyland Wood, in his book “Two Vermont Hollows”, published in Randolph in 1976, says that the Chapman brothers built the house for an unspecified amount of money and all the rum they could drink. He goes on to say that “The builders must have been able to carry their liquor well. It is doubtful if present day builders would be able to construct a house that was true and plumb if they were to consume a gallon of liquor daily.” I have lived in old houses all my life, and have always wondered if carpenters from that era had even ever heard of a plumb line or a level. Now I know that there may have been other reasons for the uneven floors and slanted molding in the houses that were built back then.

The story was that Daniel's two sons, Abel and Philander, carried the rum from Bethel every day. The rum was contained in a gallon jug, and the two boys carried it between them strung on a stick.

In 1818 Abel was 8 years old and Philander was 6. It's hard to imagine such young boys doing such a huge job, but it certainly wasn't uncommon in that day and age.

The “Two Hollows” book describes the location of the house as being “in the short cross road from the Camp Brook Road to the present Route 12, the first place on the right going south.” From this description, it is a fair estimate that the boys walked a little more than two miles every day to deliver the rum. The question is, did they walk from the farm to Bethel, get the rum, and bring it all the way back? If so, it would have been a four mile walk. Did they get a ride to Bethel in the farm wagon, and then walk back? Were they living in town in Bethel while the house was being built? If so, they walked from town to the building site and then back to town again.

At one point, Daniel thought he might want to move to Ohio. Several of his Chase relatives had moved there and he thought he would check it out, so he walked there, didn't like it, and walked back.

He was very involved in town and church affairs. He was one of the organizers of the Old Christ Church. He was also the clerk of the Episcopal district of the area. Wood, in “Two Vermont Hollows”, tells that the local paper was the “Woodstock Mercury”, and Daniel would stop in at the
post office on Friday and gather up all the papers belonging to the subscribers that were church members, and hold them hostage until Sunday, when he would scatter them on the pews of the church, making it necessary for those people to come to church to get their papers.

                                                                                                                                                                          Old Christ Church in Bethel                                                                                  

Daniel was a surveyor and was well known for keeping meticulous records and being very focused on details. His surveying work was accurate and well documented, and even in the 1970's, landowners used his old documents to ascertain property lines. He was also the town clerk for many years. He was famous for his beautiful handwriting, and in 1829 the town hired him to recopy the records of the early proprietors, as well as the early vital statistics. His work is still in the town vault.

Daniel and Apama had nine children and lived to their early seventies. Daniel dropped dead in the streets of downtown Bethel when he was 73. Just to keep things in perspective, Dudley and Alice Chase were Daniel's grandparents. Jonathan was Daniel's great-uncle. Allace and Bibye Cotton were his Aunt and Uncle, as were Lois and Benjamin Smith. There is every indication that the various branches of the Chase extended family in Bethel got along, so Daniel and his children probably spent a lot of time with many of these relatives, all of whom had large families of their own.

Note to readers:Looking at google maps, I can see where the end of Camp Brook Road makes a fork into Route 12. Using the street view, there is a house that appears quite old that would be the first right headed south. I hesitate to definitively say this is the house, but if you are reading this, and you have some extra time, and are interested, head to google maps, give it a look, and email your comments, or comment on this blog. If I have time in the next few weeks, I'll head up to the Bethel town clerk's office and do a title search on this house to see if it is Daniel and Apama's house.

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.