by: Jean F Hankins
“MISTAKES WERE MADE”:
HOW OTISFIELD GOT STARTED
We’re talking tonight about how the town of Otisfield got started. Not all the history, but just the first part, from its origins up to 1798, when it became an incorporated town. Remember that Otisfield was part of Massachusetts until 1820, when Maine became a separate state. And Massachusetts was part of England until 1783.
But tonight we’re not going to start with 1783 or 1798. We’re going to start with 1690. What, you say, why 1690? The reason is that in 1690 Otisfield, along with a bunch of other towns in this area, such as Paris, Bethel, and Waterford, became a Canada town. What, you say, is a Canada town?
In 1690, of course, Otisfield was still a howling wilderness, inhabited mostly by deer, pine trees, and a few Indians occasionally plying their canoes on what became the Crooked River and four lakes. The area where Otisfield now exists was a small part of the vast frontier still contested by the French and their Indian allies. You’ve all heard of the long French and Indian War, right? Well, during that war, in 1690, Massachusetts undertook a rather foolhardy attack on the city of Quebec, hoping to dislodge its French rulers. The force of 2500 was led by Sir William Phipps who proved to be an inept commander. The invading troops, organized in companies of 60 men each, were drawn mainly from the coastal towns surrounding Boston, towns like Sudbury, Beverly, Rowley, Newton, and Barnstable.
In 1690, the colony of Massachusetts had no money, and it was common practice to defer any direct soldiers’ wages, letting them reward themselves by looting the territory they conquered. But if, as in the case of the Phipps expedition, the invading troops were roundly defeated, the General Court sometimes paid its troops – once peace with France was again established – by giving the various companies a grant of land on its unsettled western and northern frontiers. Each of the 60 members of the company, or his “heirs and assigns” would get an equal share in the new town so granted. This practice continued as long as the frontier unrest continued, until about 1760.
We are concerned only with the 1690 company commanded by Captain John Gorham. In 1736 the Massachusetts General Court did finally reward them with a land grant, one of about 13 such grants to the 1690 veterans which historians have called “Canada” towns. There was one serious problem with that legislation: it failed to specify exactly where the new towns were located; Massachusetts and New Hampshire had never been able to agree on Maine’s boundaries. Therefore a royal commission in London was created to settle the question. It ruled in New Hampshire’s favor. In 1740 it removed from Massachusetts some 28 townships lying between the Merrimac and Connecticut Rivers and transferred to New Hampshire some 2500 square miles, including Otisfield and the other Canada towns. So in 1740 once again Captain John Gorham’s “heirs and assigns” found themselves out of luck.
From 1740 to 1771 nothing involving what’s now Otisfield seems to have happened, and there are gaps in the historical record. Finally. In 1771, the logjam broke. On June 4 of that year, responding to a petition from James Otis and Nathaniel Gorham, the Massachusetts General Court granted to the heirs and assigns of the Gorham Company a new township. This was to be laid out to adjoin some former grant “to the Eastward of Saco River.” That stipulation was important for defensive and practical reasons. It made sense to extend the new inland towns in a geographically systematic manner without great swaths of roadless wilderness between them.
Because Captain Gorham’s company had 60 members, so the tract that made up Otisfield was divided into 60 shares, called rights, plus 4 more “public” shares which were allotted to every new Massachusetts town: one for the first settled minister, one for the support of the ministry, and one for public education, and one for Harvard College. Harvard was included because it was where the ministers received their education. (Remember that at this time church and town were not divided.)
The proprietors of Otisfield were land speculators, and all had purchased their rights or shares from the original 60 “heirs and assigns” of Captain Gorham’s company. As it turned out, none of the first 60 “heirs and assigns” were able or willing to assume the financial risk of developing a new town and so sold their shares to others. By November 1771 there were only 21 proprietors, between them owning all 60 of the shares. The 21 proprietors were investors, men who had purchased the Otisfield rights in expectation of monetary gain when they eventually sold their shares. James Otis (1702-1778) of Barnstable was the proprietor with the largest number of rights, 9. The Prescott brothers, James, Oliver, and William, all from Groton, together owned another 15.
The proprietors decided not to put all the Otisfield lots up for sale at once but in five different divisions, as shown by Tom Peaco’s map, which would be sold at five different times between November 1773 and June 1791. Each of the five divisions had 64 lots, 60 for the 1690 company and 4 public lots. The first division had a 65th lot, designated for the miller, George Peirce. The lots were about 100 acres each, and their owners or sellers were the individual proprietors. Before being sold, the lots had to be surveyed and numbered sequentially. In the first division, shown in yellow, the lots were numbered 1-65. The second division lots, shown in orange, were put up for sale 3 years later, and had lots numbered from 66 up. And so on. After the division and sale process ended, there were a number of lots left unsold. Most of these, according to Tom, were sold at discount, or given away.
But let’s back up a bit. The General Court had no intention of giving the 21 proprietors free rein in getting its new towns settled. For each new town it imposed some difficult requirements. Non-compliance could mean forfeiture of the grant. The new owners, the proprietors, must within six years “settle thirty families in said Town, build a Meeting House and settle a Learned Protestant Minister.” The number of families to be settled and the time limit varied from town to town; Otisfield’s requirements were quite stringent. And it was unfortunate that Otisfield’s six years was up in 1777, in the midst of the Revolution. Capt. Britton’s list, published in Spurr’s History, has only 14 families by 1783. Evidently the General Court enacted a grace period because of the war.
So who were the first settlers? The proprietors, all of whom lived in the Boston area, were the first owners, but they had no intention of being the first settlers. According to their record book, now kept in Otisfield’s town vault, by 1773, none of the “heirs and assigns” were still involved. All had sold out.
Without doubt the first settler was George Peirce, Jr. (1734-1807), a native of Watertown, Mass., who arrived about 1774. He had been hired by the proprietors to serve as surveyor of the new territory. That required that he move here. Interestingly, his father, also named George, had served as surveyor for the earlier, 1734 territory awarded to Capt. John Gorham’s company. That territory, remember, had been voided when the New Hampshire boundary was redrawn about 1740. The younger George fared better. According to a 1774 contract between Peirce and the proprietors, Peirce received 80 pounds money and a deed to the “mill lot,” numbered 65, in return for building a sawmill and grist mill. He remained the proprietors’ agent and surveyor for many years. He laid out all the lots, built roads and bridges, determined the town boundaries, and, in general, prospered. The first house Peirce built was located on the Crooked River at Edes Falls, now in Naples, doubtless a rough affair situated near the new sawmill. We have only a vague date of this first house, probably about 1774 or 1775. The home he built in 1792, now located near the center of Naples, is, according to Spurr, “one of the best houses ever built in this section of the country.” (p. 522). Still standing, it reflects Peirce’s high status.
So who who else came to Otisfield, and why? The main source for what we know about the early settlers comes from William S. Spurr’s History of Otisfield. He published his book about 1950. His major source was a manuscript compiled by Grinfill Holden in 1880 but never published. According to Spurr, the first settlers were probably a few squatters, or illegal settlers, but their identity is unknown because they left behind no records. Because of the stringent rules imposed by the Massachusetts General Court, it wasn’t easy to become a legal settler. You may remember that the General Court had mandated that the proprietors settle 30 families in the new township within 6 years, not an easy task. They also imposed some tough rules on the would-be settlers. Among these requirements was the stipulation that the settler had to 1) build a house of 18 square feet and seven feet “stud” ; 2) clear a certain number of acres suitable for pasture and a certain number for planting.
Although Peirce was the first settler, apparently he was not required to clear land; instead he was required to build a dam and mills. The second settler was Benjamin Patch, of Groton, a Revolutionary War veteran, who arrived in 1776, stopping first at Edes Falls, now in Naples but then on the southern periphery of Otisfield. According to Spurr, who quotes Patch’s diary, the trip from Groton to Edes Falls took only 4 days. Unfortunately he gives no other details. Patch was then 32 and unmarried. Soon he staked out a claim to lot number 72 on the south side of Bell Hill. Six years later proprietor David Gorham sold lot 92 to Patch for 8 shillings and a promise to build a house and clear the land.
These were the first two. For practical reasons those settlers who followed travelled first to Edes Falls, then to Patch’s place on Bell Hill.
Captain Jonathan Britton, who arrived in town in 1782, drew up a list of the first fourteen families in what became Otisfield, though not who settled in any pieces added to the plantation after that date. His list ends in 1783. (Published on p. 10 of Spurr) I’m going to read these names without the dates: The first fourteen families were headed by: George Peirce, Benjamin Patch, Ebenezer Kemp, Joseph Spurr, Daniel Cobb, Michael Whitney, Jonathan Moors, David Ray, Mark Knight, Zebulon Knight, Jonathan Britton, Samuel Reed, and David Mayberry.
There are problems with his list, as William Spurr suggests. He wrote, “Some of the above came here earlier and worked but did not bring their families until later and others that worked here never settled here.” (p. 10) Then there’s the problem of those who arrived and left before Britton did. Thomas Thurston, for example, was here from 1780 to 1783, according to Grinfill Holden. He earned a long entry in Spurr’s biographical section but isn’t mentioned by Britton. Ebenezer Kemp , who is included by Birrton, was here only from 1782 to 1784. Despite such problems, Britton ‘s fourteen names remains the best list of early settlers we have. Obviously it is far short of the 30 families the General Court required, but obviously too the Court failed to impose the dire threat to cancel the Otisfield grant altogether.
The Historical Society is grateful to Tom Peaco, who has deep roots in town and has done some important research. He has even cpmpiled copies of all the early Otisfield land records. Looking for an easy way to come up with my own list of first comers, I asked Tom, who now lives in Florida, to send me his list of the first 20 or so deeds, arranged by date. Easy, huh? He wrote: “I could get the info for the first twenty deeds which were recorded in the Cumberland county registry…I don’t believe all deeds were recorded, especially the early ones… the deeds up through 1780 almost always involved multiple lots, not something an actual settler/family in Otisfield would have bought…. You also need to be aware that the sale of land to someone does NOT mean that the new owner was a settler. I’m thinking that the first deeds were most often NOT made to ultimate settlers…. The mill lot was PROMISED to George Peirce early on, but was not OFFICIALLY deeded to him until 1788.”
Tom’s email demolished my idea of an easy way to identify the first settlers.
One indisputable fact is that the first settlers came as individual families, not in groups of relatives or friends. As far as we can tell, apparently none of the 14 individual settlers had family connections with others. Here in random order are the towns they came from, as best we know: one each from the Massachusetts towns of Watertown, Concord, Dorchester, Shirley, Wrentham, and Newbury; two from Groton. One each from the Maine towns of Gorham and York; and one from Pittsfield, New Hampshire. Some individuals had lived in two or other locations, usually heading north. Eight had fought in the Revolution. As one would expect, most were young, and some were unmarried. Many of the husbands came alone, in order to build some kind of dwelling house before retrieving the rest of their families.
Occasionally an early settler would be followed, years later, by a sibling or other relative. In 1792, for example, Stephen Knight followed his brother Zebulon from Falmouth (now Portland) to Otisfield. Zebulon Knight had been here for 14 years, arriving in 1778, with his wife and children coming four years later.
So it seems that new settlers did not come in in a flood, but somehow the obligation of getting 30 families here within six years (1777) was not enforced. In 1783, as we have seen, Captain Britton counts only 14 families here, the first being George Peirce in 1775. Fifteen years later, the first federal census was held (1790) and counts a total population of 197. That 197 included men, women, and children, not just families. Amazingly, there are exactly 30 men listed as heads of family, which actually number 32 if you add in the two heads of families who were women. They reached that number some 13 years later than required.
To sum up a bit, after a slow start, Otisfield between 1775 and 1790 experienced a noticeable population growth. The town’s boundaries also moved around somewhat, as you may already know, and as Tom’s map shows. The southern tier of lots, which included Edes Falls and George Peirce’s mansion, was set off to Naples in 1834 and 1848. Some small amounts of land surounding Thompson Pond also changed hands over the years, with donations to and from the towns of Poland and Oxford.
But the big alteration for Otisfield came in 1803, when Otisfield annexed the large piece of land on its eastern border known as Phillips Gore. We’ll get to that later.
First we’re going to consider the relations between the proprietors and settlers. For the plantation of Otisfield, as it was then designated, the period between, say, 1775 and 1798 was a time of transition from colony to independent town. During this period the proprietors were gradually slling off their lots to the newcomers. During this time the proprietors retained most of their authority over, and obligations to the new settlement. Obviously, once the proprietors sold all their lots, the settlers alone assumed full responsibility for running the town. How did that go? How did the two groups, proprietors and incoming settlers, get along?
Even before their involvement in Otisfield, most of the proprietors were already well-to-do merchants and investors who hoped to profit eventually in return for what they’d paid out in getting Otisfield ready for private owners. Building roads and bridges was especially costly. The General Court had also imposed on them the responsibility of building a meetinghouse in the new town. Remember that in the 18th century that building served as both town hall and Congregational Church, which was then the established Protestant denomination in Massachusetts. The arriving settlers were hoping the new town would provide a good place to earn a living and raise a family. Some were disappointed and sold out after a few years.
Although the two groups did not directly interact, since the proprietors were in Massachusetts and the settlers in Maine, relations between the two were often contentious. George Peirce, agent for the proprietors but also an Otisfield settler, acted as arbiter between the two groups. His name appears everywhere in the proprietors’ record book, and is sometimes followed by the honorary term “esquire.” His role was to keep both sides happy, not an easy job. The Historical Society has a letter from Samuel Otis, then the proprietors’ clerk, writing to “the inhabitants of Otisfield” about their mutual problems:.
Otis writes on 24 October 1785: “Peirce informs us that by travelling the road it has so worn it that it has made it exceeding bad . . . but you must not expect us [the proprietors] to do any more upon the road till the inhabitants have done some work . . . We have now a road to make through the south part of the town, where there will be a large bridge to build, all which will be a great expense to the proprietors. . . and as soon as you clear the ground . . . to set a meeting house upon, we expect to build, and our taxes [expenses] are now so excessively high that we can but just keep along. We think your situation much preferable to ours at present, for you are out of the way of taxes.” [MS in Otis Papers, Mass. H. S., as copied by David Hankins]
The issue of building the meetinghouse continued to plague both sides for years. After many fits and starts, it was finally erected, by David Ray and George Peirce, who started about 1796 and finished two or three years later. In addition, the proprietors were expected to settle a “learned Protestant minister.” They fulfilled this obligation when Otisfield hired the Rev. Thomas Roby. His house was built on what is now the Peaco Hill Road. We’re showing a picture of that house, which years later was moved down to the state highway where it still stands today.
With the completion of the meetinghouse and the settlement of the “learned Protestant minister,” the proprietors’ responsibilities in Otisfield came to an end, and opened the way rather smoothly for the incorporation of the town in 1798.
The Gore
Let’s turn now to the Gore, which became a major part of Otisfield in 1803. First, what’s a gore? For the dressmaker, it’s a triangular piece of cloth that serves to make a skirt fuller. Surveyors usually mean it to indicate a mistake, two angles that weren’t precise or had been drawn in error and which usually form a triangle. Because Maine has lots of mountains and lakes to confuse things, Maine ended up with lots of gores.
In 1777, just six years after Otisfield’s grant was made, the General Court of Massachusett deeded a large tract of Maine land to Alexander Shepard, a cartographer from Newton, Massachusetts, that was contingent on Shepard’s making a detailed map for the General Court showing all the lines of the grants and decisions they had made in Maine. The large tract was called Shepardsfield. It Iincluded what is now Hebron, Oxford, and the Gore, which was a rectangular piece about 8 miles long and 1 ¼ miles wide and extended from Otisfield’s borders across Thompson Lake. Or so they thought. That same year Shepard quitclaimed what is now the Gore to three men – proprietors James Prescott, his brother Oliver Prescott, and Otisfield agent George Peirce.
Two years later, after Shepard finished the map, the General Court issued him a valid deed confirming the provisions of the 1777 deed except for one change: The new deed somehow failed to include the Gore. Shepard now owned Hebron and Oxford. But the Gore still belonged to Massachusetts.
Well, as I said earlier, gores are created by mistakes. This gore retained its basic shape from 1777 to 1803, when Otisfield annexed it. What was once the Outpost would have been in the Gore; so would Callie Zilinsky’s house, located on Stonehirst Road where two families named Scribner settled.
It took two deeds, both written in 1794, for the General Court of Massachusetts to “remedy the defects” in previous deeds and legally sell the Gore, now said to total some 6185 acres, to one Samuel Phillips for 151 pounds,
A few years earlier, about 1780, new settlers had started to arrive in the Gore, probably without much consideration for who actually owned their property. One of the earliest was Capt. Jonathan Sawyer, a Revolutionary vet from Gorham who moved onto a site near the outlet of Moose Pond. There he built a mill and also a fine federal-style house now recognized as the oldest in Otisfield.
Sawyer’s new neighbors, like the first settlers of Otisfield, were a homogeneous group with names like Anderson, Greeley, Lovell, and Rich.
But the Gore wasn’t part of any town. The 1790 census takers didn’t know quite what to do with the folks living in there, with no civil designation whatsoever. So he counted the 10 heads of household and a total population of 71 in the Gore and inserted them into something called “Raymondtown Plantation,” an entity which did not elsewhere exist.
The Gore residents were finding that without any political organization they could not manage very lwell: None of the civic functions they were used to could occur. Without taxes, there could be no schools, improved roads, bridges, support for the needy. Therefore probably in 1802 they petitioned the selectmen of Otisfield belaboring the disadvantages of living in an unincorporated society, and asking to be “annext to the Town of Otisfield.” Seven men, including three named Scribner, signed the petition. The Otisfielders responded by voting “to receive the Inhabitants of Phillips Gore so called, to receive all our advantage with our disadvantages.” And with little more ado, on Feb. 8, 1803, the Gore and its 71 inhabitants became part Otisfield. (That transfer included a small piece of land east of Thompson Lake, but which in 1830 was ceded to Oxford.)
Conclusion
So tonight we’ve seen that the beginnings of Otisfield were difficult, complicated by the political differences first between France and England, then between Maine and New Hampshire. Also, the American Revolution probably had a serious effect on how things developed. As we have seen in the example of the Gore, more mistakes continued to be made and did not always get corrected. Newcomers often found they were subject to rules they hadn’t anticipated. But most persevered.
So, in 2023, we have concluded that Otisfield was quite a different place to live back then. We who are the present settlers are different now too, and not everyone here looks the same or goes dutifully to church once a week. Otisfield’s minimum building lot is no longer 100 acres. On the other hand, the town’s Planning Committee today would probably balk at plans for any dwelling house sized at 18 feet square and 7 foot stud. We’re no longer required to grow five acres of crops. And except for the census takers every ten years, no government officials are trying to make sure we’ve got at least 30 families here. The sawmills and gristmills so important in the days of George Peirce and David Ray are now only piles of stone, and no one any longer knows where the first road was. Outsiders do still sometimes raise an eyebrow when you mention something called the Gore, but the term “proprietors” which once defined the group of Otisfield’s 21 real estate developers and landowners has to be explained over and over.
Somehow we’re still here, and the town of Otisfield is still too. Of course we can’t predict what will happen to it in the next 50 or 100 years. But so far it’s been a pretty interesting trip through history.