Your GrandNana Phyllis McCausland Rivers was a woman of many skills and interests. These included cooking/baking (over a coal stove in the early years of her marriage, which she understandably complained about), gardening, sewing, knitting, traveling and volunteering such as for Planned Parenthood and United Way. And being a minister's wife, an unofficial job with numerous responsibilties especially at a prominent church like St. Stephen's in Wilkes-Barre. Also, as an intellectual graduate of Radcliffe College (sister school to Harvard, where Great Grandad studied) and intrigued by family history. Here is a photo of GrandNana and Great Grandad, from sometime in the 1960's. Then followed by a cheerful picture of her at Christmas, 1990 with Uncle John.
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Last year, your (Great) Aunt Ginny passed along a number of Rivers family records. In this treasure trove of family documents, pictures, newspaper articles, mementos, etc. was a copy of GrandNana's 1987 paper from Thursday Club. It's about family origins of your Great Grandad Burke Rivers, along the Maine coast. You may know that your (Great) Uncle Dick's full name was Richard Davis Rivers. I'm copying the full paper at the bottom of this post; it was handwritten, and Grammie recently took time to transcribe it. GrandNana did a great job weaving together historical events with family lore. I've included a few of my own notes in the bullets below:
- Londonderry - From which Joseph Rivers came to Massachusetts (Maine territory), then an English colony, in 1730. Seems most likely to be the city in Northern Ireland, now known as "Derry", which is much larger than a different village of Londonderry in northeast England. Londonderry Ireland has a complicated history. It was originally called "Derry" when settled by the O'Neills, a Gaelic tribe. In the early 1600's the English, wanting to exert control over the resistant Irish (catholic) population, established a settlement there. Many English and Scottish (protestants) then relocated to the province of Ulster, including Derry/Londonderry.
- Genoa, Italy - From which Samuel Davis (Guarnieri?) came to Maine in 1813-14. It was historically one of the most important ports of the Mediterranean Sea.
- "....work lunars as well as Bowditch himself..." - This is referenced in the 3rd paragraph from the end, related to rigors of ocean navigation. Nathaniel Bowditch wrote a book New American Practical Navigator published in the early 1800's, which was used universally by American sailors through the century. Working lunars means using the moon - much as the hands of a clock - moving against the background of the sun, the stars, and the planets. In "taking a lunar", the navigator uses a sextant to measure the angle of the moon with the sun, stars, and planets.
Of Men and Events
Phyllis Rivers
Thursday Club April 9, 1987
This paper is an act of compromise. This was to be the year of sabbatical leave for Molly and me. Certain of our members could not prepare papers this year (for very good reasons) so I agreed to write one if I could use the material on which I have been working: records and information about Burke’s family and mine; and Molly graciously l offered to have the tea. This was compromise #1.
The problem of how to fit my material of personal and limited interest into the category of “Events’ brought compromise #2. It consisted of fitting the biographical data of two men into the events of their times.
The two men are Joseph Rivers, the first of his line to come to the coast of Maine who arrived in 1730. The other is Samuel Davis who came to the same village on the St. George peninsula, Tenants' Harbor, in 1813 or 1814. Their lives were about a century apart.
About Joseph Rivers we know very little. He is recorded as one of a group brought from Londonderry to replace settlers on the Maine coast who had been massacred by French and Indians from Canada in the long effort to secure Maine (then a part of Mass.) for France, accomplishing this by killing off English colonists. We know this period as that of the French and Indian wars, part of a European set of wars. Joseph Rivers was one of the St. George Plantation. So we know only this much: when he came, why he came, whence and where he came. Beyond that we cannot go. Maybe he was a soldier destined to reman the fort at the mouth of the St. George River, which is family legend, or maybe he was a farmer with the job of bringing the land again under cultivation. He may have been married already when he came, or he may have married the daughter of a family in the group. When we come to consider the situation into which he came, we will be able to take some sound guesses about what his life was like.
I know much more about Samuel Davis. His cemetery monument says he lived from 1808 to 1894. He had 14 children by two wives, 13 by one and one by the second wife (Hooper.) This youngest, Aunt Ida, we knew. Her name was Ida Davis Rivers, daughter of Samuel Davis and married to Weston Rivers, a descendant of Joseph Rivers. They lived in the Davis homestead and we visited there many times. Burke shared in the final settlement of the Samuel Davis estate, divided after our retirement, among the heirs who could be found, heirs of 14 children. His part was $247.68.
All this is beside the point. Samuel Davis is buried in Martinsville Cemetery (the village of Sarah Orne Jewett’s “Land of the Pointed Firs”). But his name was not Davis. It was Guarnieri, or something which sounded like that. No one really knows.
Aunt Ida, his youngest child, told us what I know: that a little boy of 6 or 7 and his father had arrived at Tenants’ Harbor on a sailing vessel which they had boarded at Genoa. The little boy was to become her father. Why had they left Genoa? We don’t know. Perhaps the mother had died and the father was seeking a new life in a new land. Perhaps the father had political reasons for leaving. It was the period of the height of Napoleon’s expanding conquests (1813 or 1814) and Napoleon had just annexed Genoa and the Piedmont to France.
Samuel Eliot Morison says in “The Maritime History of Massachusetts” that Genoa was a regular port of call for Indiamen (around the world sailing vessels, traders) on their way home to Massachusetts and Maine.
It is understandable that the father should decide to discard the Italian surname and, so the tale goes, he took the name of the first land sighted as they approached Port Clyde. The land was Davis Island. The father had the means to buy land and a house. So we have a small Italian boy growing up in a Maine village, Tenants' Harbor, with the name of Sam Davis - American enough.
Tenants’ Harbor is a pleasant village on a good harbor on the east side of the St. George peninsula. Burke’s Uncle Mel Hart told us that when he was a boy there Tenants’ Harbor was home port to about 100 sailing ships which went over the seas to China, India, the Mediterranean ports and our own West Coast. Parenthetically, Uncle Mel told us that in those days no man owned his own vessel; he owned 1/10th of 10 vessels, thereby ensuring himself against loss in case of disaster at sea or an unprofitable voyage, as well as benefiting from the profit of a good voyage. Morison said the 1/16th was a more common division of ownership on larger vessels.
Like other boys in the village, Sam probably went to sea at the age of 10 or 11, serving as cabin boy, cook’s helper, then moving along to more responsibility as second mate, first mate, finally master or captain. To go to sea and become master of a vessel involved an on-the-job education in navigation, handling of men as well as of the ship, a knowledge of trading. It was a respected and demanding calling, requiring intelligence and good judgment. I do not know at what age Samuel Davis commanded his own vessel. I only know one certain fact: that the log of a voyage he made to the “China Seas” is in the archives of the Maine Historical Society in Portland.
I used to tease Burke about how he could have 14 children and be at sea for long voyages. It may be that his wife and children went with him. That was not uncommon. Fourteen children there surely were, for in Aunt Ida’s parlor (I mean Parlor) was a large framed grouping of photographs, each one separate, of 14 men and women. The men were well-set-up, mustachioed in the walrus manner; the women looked dour, with hair parted in the middle and drawn back (they were no nonsense women). Our son David could be one of them; he looks like them. The frame was scrimshaw; doubtless made on a long sea voyage.
He finally abandoned the long sea voyages, changing to coastal trading. A common load at that time could have been ice, lumber, salt fish, maybe Rockland lime, from Maine to Havana, or one of the West Indies, then back with molasses to Medford, Mass. where it was turned into rum. Or maybe the trip took him for Savannah for cotton, or to New Orleans. A master took from Maine what was available land did his trading as he could.
Our son David has a Civil War rifle which Capt. Davis is supposed to have found on a battlefield near Norfolk after the Civil War. He (Capt. Davis) remade the stock which may have been damaged, and used it for hunting. So he must have put in at Norfolk at least once.
Both deep sea and coast-wise trading must have been profitable for when Capt. Davis died he left a property to each of his children. Aunt Ida inherited the family home, a pleasant Cape-Cod cottage with additions, what the down-Easters call a woman-killing-house: first the main house, then attached and strung out, the kitchen-pantry ell, the wood shed, the chicken house, finally the barn. In a winter storm or on a rainy day a man could lend all his chores without going out of doors.
At some point Capt. Davis retired from going to sea and settled into being a man-of-all-trades: a wheel-wright, a gun-smith. He built a shop on his own land right beside the road. We saw it first about 1940, untouched, literally, since his death in 1894, with his tools and patterns still as he had left them. There is a rumor that he operated a grist mill on a tidal salt pool on his property. There is evidence of a tide-water mill having existed there and such mills were not uncommon.
I would call a man of parts, certainly remembered with love and admiration by his daughter.
She remembered that he always wore small gold-loop earring and a black brimmed sailor hat. So he was still a little bit the Italian boy.
Every person’s life is shaped by the events of the time into which he/she is born. For me the events have been two World Wars and a cataclysmic depression. Wars and a cataclysmic depression. You know the events which have determined the course of your life.
The rivalry of the French and English for occupation and power in the Old World (break-up of Empire of Charles V ) and for trade and territory in the New World presents the key to the 75 years of warfare known to us as the French and Indian Wars. This was the shaping force for Joseph Rivers’ life.
At first the Indians has been friendly toward the early English colonists, had traded with them for domestic utensils, cloth and guns, but the friendliness began to disappear as the Indians found themselves cheated in trade and finally cheated of their lands and perhaps worst of all, looked upon as an inferior race.
The French, in contrast, treated the Indians as brothers. They married Indian women and sat as friends at their council fires. The role of the Jesuit priests among them was friendly, teaching them Christian faith and better ways of living. Of course the French took advantage of the Indians to increase their own power, but they did it in such a way that the Indians were flattered and proud to ally themselves to the French cause.
About the year 1717 a strong and capacious fort was built on the easterly bank of the St. George River. A short distance from that a block-house was erected and the large area between was enclosed by palisades. This afforded ample accommodation for a garrison of two hundred and fifty men. In 1720 there were twenty houses, a few stores and two or three wharves near the stronghold.
The Indians felt that the fort was a direct threat to their hunting grounds and they continually prowled around it and attacked it whenever they could.
In May of 1724 there was a major attack on a group from the fort who had gone on a hunting trip. All were killed by a group of Indians waiting in ambush. In the summer of 1724 a large group from the fort made a retaliatory raid on an Indian village, coming upon them at siesta time and killing most of them.
The governor of Mass. (Dummer) devised a peace with the Eastern Indians and four chiefs went to Boston to sign the treaty. By this treaty the English bound themselves to keep trading posts on the principal rivers for the convenience of the Indians and the settlers were confirmed in their land titles by the Indians, who promised not to molest them on the land they had bought of the chiefs. The peace that followed was the most lasting since the Indian wars commenced.
Governor Dummer kept his word. Trading houses were established, one at Fort St. George on the St. George Rivers. With honest men in charge, the forts were well stocked with goods the Indians needed and wanted. The Indians were well satisfied with this trade and even Canadian Indians came because they received full value for their furs.
But the area needed to be repopulated. Joseph Rivers was one of these settlers.
In the spring of 1774 France joined Spain in another war against England. Soon the French in America took occasion to attack English settlers in Nova Scotia. On Cape Breton King Louis 1X of France had built a fort at Louisburg, considered the strongest fort in America. It guarded the ship channel to the St. Lawrence and consequently to the French holdings. From Louisburg the French had been harassing English shipping and fishing along the coast of New England. Gov. Shirley of Mass. and the colonial merchants felt that if they could capture the fort, they could break the French power and protect their shipping and fishing industries.
An armament of 4,120 men, vessels with transport and supply ships and only 200 guns was assembled, leaving Nantucket Roads in late March, 1745 and arriving at Canseau in Nova Scotia in May. All along the coast of Maine they added recruits of men willing to go along. It is estimated that half the men on the Maine coast went. Joseph Rivers may well have been one. Burke liked to think so.
In Canseau they were joined and strengthened by a squadron from the Royal Navy and as soon as the ice went out all proceeded to Cape Breton and Louisburg. They blockaded the harbor preventing aid from France from entering. Maj. Gen Pepperell of Mass. moved his troops into commanding positions overlooking the fort, doing it in a most unmilitary way which bewildered the French officers who believed the fort invulnerable. The colonial troops hauled their guns and ammunition over swampy lands which the French had thought impassable, using sledges devised by a Maine shipbuilder. The attack was from the rear of the Grand Battery; it surprised and overwhelmed the French forces and the commander surrendered. In England the news was received with astonishment and Pepperell was knighted
This victory was at great cost of both colonists’ lives and money and the colonists felt it was their victory, so it was an understandable cause of bitterness and disillusionment to them when in the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) Louisburg and all other conquered lands were given back to the French by the English king in spite of the wishes of the people of New England who had fought so bravely and sacrificed so much. They had to do it all over again in 1758. Some historians believe that this episode sowed the first seeds of discontent on the part of the colonists which led to the War of the Revolution.
Samuel Davis arrived on the Maine coast at the height of the sailing ship. It was this, the pinnacle and the decline of the sailing ship, which shaped his life.
From earliest colonial days lumbering had been an important industry in Maine. The virgin forest was very old and through it stood pines to the height of 200-240 feet, straight and tall, unmatchable for the masts of large sailing vessels, ergo called “mast pine” or ”puncheon pine”.
During the long war with France the “Broad Arrow” policy was adopted whereby the king claimed for his navy all pine trees from two feet in diameter at 12 inches from the ground that were growing in ungranted land. Surveyors went through the forest and cut the “broad arrow” in trees reserved for the Royal Navy. Transport of these and other lumber, barrel staves, was made easy by swift rivers flowing to the loading places of sailing vessels for English fuel, smelting, ship-building.
In the early part of the 19th century Maine produced for export in addition to lumber, corn dried fish, horses and cattle and later ice. Lime from Thomaston. These became the staple products for the three-cornered trade to the Indies and back to the southern colonies and home.
Samuel Eliot Morison writes the ship building boom began about 1831 when Samuel Davis would have been a young man. In this year Maine overtook her parent Mass. in the building of sailing vessels. The great shipyards on the Kennebec, St. George (our territory) and Penobscot Rivers became serious competitors of the Mystic and Merrimac. Small coasting vessels were constructed along many shore harbors.
Very different types of vessels were needed for different routes and purposes. For the carrying of cotton from the South to northern mills, old-fashioned converging topsides were preferred. They increased stability for so light a cargo.
The finest type of the period was the East Indiaman, usually with a cargo carrying capacity of about 500 tons. They were freight carrying vessels, the fastest and most economical carriers of their generation. Clippers came later.
Their crews were in the most part Yankees. Wages were low: $8 a month for boys, $10 for ordinary seamen and $12 for able seamen, on long voyages. It was not uncommon for youngsters of good families to ship before the mast: (e.g., Richard Henry Dana). Sailors wore a distinctive costume: shiny black tarpaulin hat, red-checked shirt, Blue bell-mouthed dungaree trousers, navy blue pea jacket or watch coat. For shore leave, a fathom of black ribbon for the hat, black silk kerchief in a neat sailor’s knot around the neck, white ducks and black pumps.
It was a rough, demanding life. Nevertheless a foremast hand on a Yankee Indiaman was the best paid, best fed and most competent sailor in the world, regarded as the top dog of his profession. For the most part the commanders were men of high character and education; navigators who could work lunars as well as Bowditch himself and who inherited all the practical seamanship of the old school; “merchant-captains” who owned part of their vessel and had full responsibility in trading. We may fairly call the 1830’s and 1840’s the golden age of the American merchant marine.
Essentially the Civil War saw the end of the sailing ships and trade. Actually it merely hastened a process that had already begun, the substitution of steam for sail. Railroad expansion to the West and the protective tariff killed many lines of commerce. The profit had gone out of the carrying trade in sailing vessels. The era had come to an end.
It stretches the meaning of “Events” but this high era of sailing ships provided the events which constituted the life of Samuel Davis. He had seen the world and when the sailing days were over, his was a different life, and he survived the change.
