The Vermont settlers and the New York land speculators

Chapter 1. Eakly Military Outposts And Explorations

The settlement of the territory now known as the state of Vermont was for a long time delayed by the continuance of the wars between France and England which followed the English Revolution of 1688. Until the close of the French and Indian Wars and the conquest of Canada in 1760, most of that territory was the pathway of the hostiles. The intervals of peace were not long enough to permit any permanent settlements beyond the protection of forts and garrisons. It is true that the settlements within the province of Massachusetts had extended up the valley of the Connecticut river, so that as early as 1721: a block house or fort was constructed near what is now the village of Brattleboro. Within a few years afterwards these outposts had been extended as far north as Number Four, now known as

6 Vekmoxt Settlers axd

Charlestown, New Hampshire ; and around these block houses a few settlers had ventured. But these were simply military outposts or the advance guard of the settlements in Massachusetts.

There had been also early occupation by the French of grounds near Lake Champlain. The resetirches of Mr. David Read, found in volumes one and two of Miss Heraen way's Vermont Gazetteer, have shown pretty clearly that a French fort was built on I>le La Motte as early as 1666. At some considerable time previous to the overthrow of the French power, other French settlements were made on Windmill Point in Alburg, on the Missisquoi river in S wanton, in Colchester near the mouths of the Lamoille and Winooski rivers, and on Chimney Point in Addison. Judge Strong, the historian of Addison, has also shown thatin 1690 a scouting party under the command of a Capt. D' Narm, sent out by the Governor of New York, built what was called a stone fort on Chimney Point, but it does not appear that there was at that time anything like a permanent settlement there. All these were, however, only appendages of the outposts made necessary by the military occupation of the country. It is safe to say that there was no settlement in what is now Vermont, independent of its military occupation, until after 1760.

The settlement of the new territory was especially promoted by an occurrence near the close of that war. It will be remembered that in September, 1759, at the very time when Wolfe was making his final assault on Quebec, Major Rogers started from Crown Point for a raid on the St. Francis Indians in Canada. He reached their village on the 5th of October and inflicted upon

New York Laxd Speculators. 7

them the most serious punishment known in the indian wars of this country. In fact, he destroyed the power of those indians and completely took away their courage. Although in 1752, during the short interval of peace between the two last French and Indian wars, they had sent messengers to the post at Number Four, forbidding in arrogant terms the establishment of any English settlements on the great meadows at Newbury and Haverhill, nevertheless, when the upper Connecticut valley was settled some ten years later, these St. Francis indians were found to be the most peaceable and subdued indian tribes in any of the American settlements.

The progress of the French and Indian wars gave large opportunity for the people of New England to get acquainted with this unexplored territory. In the preceding wars there had been a few scouting parties across some parts of the state, and some captives had been dragged through its valleys, but there had been no considerable explorations of that territory. Capt. John Stark had in 1752 been taken prisoner by the indians in northern New Hampshire, and had been taken through the upper valley of the Connecticut, which he described as an unknown country. After his release, two years later, he conducted an exploring party up the valley as far as Lancaster.

At the commencement of the war in 1755 troops from New Hampshire and Massachusetts, in order to reach Lake George and Ticonderoga, were obliged to go around by way of Albany ; but a party of Massachusetts soldiers, who had been at Lake George, in making a short cut off for their homes, found the land that they afterwards settled as the Town of Bennington.

8 Vermont Settlers axd

During the next two or three campaigns, while the active hostilities were confined within the vicinity of Lake George and Ticonderoga, the scouting parties of the colonists, chief among which were Major Rogers with his rangers, — John Stark and others, — had made pretty thorough exploration of the whole of the present state, as well as of a portion of Canada.

It was, however, the campaign of 1759 that gave the best opportunity for the men of New England to become acquainted with the unsettled territory of Vermont. While Wolfe and Montcalm were girding themselves for their final struggle at Quebec, the English commander in chief. Sir Jeffrey Amherst, upon getting possession of Ticonderoga and Crown Point in the early summer, halted his army at a safe distance from the enemy and began the enormous but useless task of constructing a great fortress at Crown Point. Before the season closed, he had with him five thousand men from Connecticut under General Phinehas Lyman, and also militia men from Massachusetts and Rhode Island. During that season and the next a large force of New Hampshire men were engaged in constructing a military road from Number Four to Crown Point. These New England men made very extensive explorations of the valley of Lake Champlain as well as of the Connecticut and the intervening streams, and when the peace came, there were many of those soldiers ready to occupy the fair land they had seen.

The first of these was Capt. Samuel Robinson, of , Hardwick, Massachusetts. He had been the captain of a company in one of the Massachusetts regiments in the campaigns of Lake George in 1755 and 1756; and in going through the wilderness, on his return from one of these campaigns, he accidentally came to what was afterwards Bennington, where he encamped for the night. He was so much pleased with the appearance of the country that he determined to make settlement there. Accordingly he took an early opportunity to ascertain who were the owners of the land he had seen, and finding that the land had been granted by Governor Wentworth of New Hampshire to some people in Portsmouth, he went to Portsmouth, got title to that township, and in 1761 he with his neighbors and friends, some of whose names are found in the muster rolls of his company in the war, started the first permanent settlement in Vermont west of the Green Mountains.

Chapter II. New Hampshire Charters

As the title Captain Robinson got was a very material feature of the contests that afterwards ensued, it seems proper to notice somewhat in detail the authority given to Governor Wentworth to give charters to the township of Bennington and to other townships in the disputed ter^itor3^

For some forty or fifty years the provinces of Massachusetts and New Hampshire had been united undeV one colonial governor, although their governments were otherwise distinct. In the year 1737 there had come to be a dispute between the councils of those provinces in regard to the boundary between them. The province of Massachusetts, or Massachusetts Bay as it was then termed, had been created by a special charter from the crown of England, in which its northern boundary was described as a line drawn three miles north of the Merrimack river at the most northerly part of that river, and thence extending west to the Pacific Ocean. At the time this charter was granted, the Merrimack river had been explored only a few miles from its mouth, and, so far as it had been explored, its general course was from the west towards the east, making a bow or bend to the north and thence turning southeast to its mouth in the Atlantic.

New York Laxd Si'eculators. 11

Further exploration of the country, however, showed that the Merrimack river, for the most of its course, was a stream ilovving from the north toward the south ; and the M^issachusetts council, by a literal construction of the language of that charter, claimed jurisdiction and ownership of all the land west of that river to a point three miles north of its source. This source was the junction of two rivers, in what is now the town of Franklin, New Hampshire. A line extended west from that point would cross the Connecticut river in the vicinity of what is now Windsor and would include that part of the present state of Vermont south of Windsor and of Rutland. Under this claim, what is now Concord, the capital of the State of New Hampshire, was settled by Massachusetts people, and twenty-eight townships were granted by Massachusetts under their claim of ownership. On the other hand, the New Hampshire council insisted that the true meaning of the charter was, that the line extending west should start from the most northerly portion of that part of the Merrimack river which had a general easterly course, and that the discovery that the actual course of the Merrimack was different from that understood at the time of the charter, should not be held to give to the province of Massachusetts land that was not contemplated when its charter was granted. This dispute was referred to the privy council in England.

The privy council was an institution of which we have no counterpart in this country. In theory its functions were simply to advise the king in respect to his official actions, and its determinations took the form of "orders of the king in council.*' Originally the king was sovereign in fact as well as in name and his determinations embraced all departments of government, legislative and judicial as well as executive. As the development of the english constitution progressed and the different departments of government came to exercise the functions which have now been accorded to them, the functions of the privy council became more and more limited, but in the early part of the eighteenth century and until the discussions arose about the control of parliament over the colonies, the privy council had very largely the entire direction of colonial matters. This direction was both legislative and judicial in its character. In so far as the orders of the king in council made provision for what it was supposed the public good required, these orders were in the nature of legislative enactments and were wholly prospective in their operation. The privy council had also jurisdiction to determine certain appeals, — mostly those coming from the colonies. Some of these determinations were judicial in their character and had a retrospective effect; but its judicial functions were never very clearly defined.

Upon this dispute between the provinces of New Hampshire and Massachusetts, the privy council might have made a construction of the terms of the charter of Massachusetts which would have been a judicial decision of the dispute between the two provinces. What the council did do on that question was to set aside the boundary named in the charter, and to establish an entirely new boundary, giving the province of New Hampshire a strip of land about twelve miles wide, — more than it had ever claimed. The determination of the king in council was to enact that the boundary between Massachusetts and New Hampshire should be

New Yokk Land SPECur.ATOi:s. 13

a west line starting three miles north of the most southerly portion of the Merrimack river, clearly ignoring the express language of the boundary of the charter which started that west line from the most northerly part of the river. It was then claimed by english lawyers that the king, by the advice of the privy council, could, in his own discretion, revoke any charter that had previously been granted either to a colony or a corporation. Since the decision of the great Dartmouth College case some seventy years ago, it has been the accepted law both in this country and in England, that charters that have been acted upon, cannot be revoked, even by the sovereign authority ; but at the time of the decision in question there was little dispute about the full control of the king over the boundaries of his colonies.

This enactment of the king in council was a great surprise to the Massachusetts authorities. To say that they were angry at the result, would be a very inadequate statement. Believing that their Governor Belcher had not fairly represented their interests, they made a great clamor for his removal, and got in his place Governor Shirley, an english lawyer whose practice had not been large enough to prevent his acceptance of a colonial office, and whose wealth, if any he had, was not sufficient to place him above the temptations which usually assailed the colonial governors of those times. After he came, there was a good deal of wild talk about ignoring the decission of the king in council, but the only tangible result of that talk was, that Governor Shirley undertook in 1744 to confirm a title claimed by a dutchman named Lydius to a tract of about seven hundred square miles of land extending along the Otter

Creek and for about sixty miles south of its mouth. As this tract of land was, for the greater part, entirely outside of what was ever claimed to be the boundary of Massachusetts, and as Governor Shirley had never any jurisdiction nor authority outside of the fixed boundary of the province, his confirmation of that title was of no avail.

After this decision of the privy council Benning Went worth was appointed governor of the province of New Hampshire. His commission authorized him to exercise jurisdiction over the province of which one boundary was defined in the commission as follows :

"Bounded on the south side by a similar curved line pursuing the course of the Merrimack river at three miles distance on the northern side thereof, beginning at the Atlantic Ocean and ending at a point due north of a place called Pawtucket Falls, and by a straight line drawn from thence due west across the said river until it meeta with our other governments.''''

The commission also authorized Governor Wentworth, with the advice of his council and under moderate quit rent to be reserved, to dispose of such lands within the province as were under the disposition of the king : —

"Which said grants are to pass and be sealed by our seal of New Hampshire, and being entered on record by such officer or officers, as you shall appoint therein, shall he good and effectual in laiv against us, our heirs and successors.''^

The order fixing the boundary of the provinces provided that the line designated should be surveyed by commissioners appointed by each of the provinces. Two surveyors were appointed by Governor Wentworth for New Hampshire, but the Massachusetts council in a sulky manner refused to have anything to do with the survey ; and so the line was run by the two New Hampshire surveyors alone.

There was nothing in the commission to Governor Wentwprth, nor in any other of the orders of council, that had then defined the western boundary of either Massachusetts or New Hampshire. There was an understanding that the province of New York extended to a line twenty miles east of the Hadson river, so, when the surveyors for New Hampshire ran out the line between the two provinces, they extended it to a point twenty miles distant from the Hudson river. Eight years after the making of this survey, Governor Wentworth made a charter of the township of Bennington, in which the boundaries were designated with reference to a marked tree on the survey line between the provinces, which tree was designated as twenty-four miles east from Hudson river, and from that tree running six miles at right angles to the province line to a certain hemlock tree, and thence the boundaries of a township six miles square were designated, having its southwest corner four miles west of the hemlock tree. This statement of the controversy between Massachusetts and New Hampshire has been made in detail because it illustrates the effect of the orders of the privy council upon the title of the lands affected. Although Concord and those twenty-eight townships that had been granted by Massachusetts had been transferred to New Hampshire, the title to all those lands was confirmed in the grantees of the Massachusetts colony.

Starting from the boundaries of this town of Bennington, Governor Wentworth, in the year of 1761 and the following years, made grants of a large portion of the land now known as Vermont, on the west side of the mountains. On the east side of the mountains what is now the Town of Vernon had been included with some land on the other side of the Connecticut river in the charter of the Town of Hinsdale, granted by the province of Massachusetts before the change in the boundary. There was also a tract of land on the west side of the Connecticut river extending from Hinsdale up the river twelve miles, six and one-half miles in width, which had been conveyed to the province of Connecticut in exchange for some lands belonging to Connecticut that had been encroached upon by Massachusetts. These "equivalent" lands had been sold by Connecticut to a syndicate, of which Colonel Brattle and Lieutenant Governor Dummer of Massachusetts were leading members. North of that, there had been granted by Massachusetts, under the designation of Township Number One, a township now known as Westminster, as well as other townships in New Hampshire. After Governor Wentworth had assumed jurisdiction over these townships granted by Massachusetts, he made new grants to the claimants under the Massachusetts grants. That part of Hinsdale west of the Connecticut river afterwards l)ecame the township of Vernon. The equivalent lands were divided into three townships named Brattleboro, Dummerston and Putney, and Township Number One was regranted as the township of Westminster. After the close of the war, Governor Wentworth continued his grants until the number within the present state of Vermont became between one hundred and thirty and one hundred and

I forty. The number most frequently »iven is one hundred and thirty-eight.

His manner of procedure is illustrated by his grants on the Connecticut river. He had a survey made on the ice in the winter time and marked the trees on the bank of the river at intervals of six miles. These marks were made the corners of the townships. He then had three tiers of townships platted and from those plats he made the charters. In this way during the year 1761 every township except four on the Connecticut river was chartered, and before July 1764 more than one-half of the present state had been covered by these grants. The grantees of these charters were in a few instances men who intended to settle upon the lands they had so acquired, but were very largely land speculators, who took only to sell again. In looking over the names in the different charters it will be found that there were different syndicates, as we would now call them. Townships were granted to the Hunts and Hubbards and Willards, men prominent in the early settlements of Brattleboro and several New Hampshire towns. Their acquisitions covered several townships on Connecticut river, and some towns as far north as what is now Franklin county. Most of the grantees appear to have been men from Massachusetts and Connecticut, but one township, Essex, was conveyed to people from New Jersey, and two townships, Ferrisburg and Charlotte, were granted to Benjamin Ferris and his associates. Ferris appears to have been a Quaker, residing in what was termed the "Oblong "in Dutchess couuty. New York. Sometimes his residence is stated as the ' 'Oblong" and sometimes as "Quaker Hill." Most of the townships in Chittenden county and some in Washington county were granted to Edward Burling and Thomas Willis and their associates, from whom were named the towns of Burlington and Williston. Nearly all of these men are said to have been residents of Westchester county, New York, althousjh it appears that some of the grantees lived in New Milford, Connecticut; and friend Benjamin Ferris appears associated with the Westchester people in some of the townships. These charters to Burliog and Willis were dated June Tth and 8th, 1763, at which date the charter business of Governor Wentworth appears to have reached its flood tide.

These charters were of townships as nearly as practicable six miles square, each containing something over twenty-three thousand acres. They not only embraced conveyances or deeds of the land to the grantees, but also included grants of corporate franchises of townships. They had provisions for the allotment of the towns between the proprietors, the election of officers to conduct the municipal business ; and they showed their anglo-saxon origin by providing for another institution which is especially dear to all yankees, the New England town meeting, — that nursery of incipient orators and budding statesmen. Each of these townships had about sixty proprietors, with his share of three hundred to three hundred and fifty acres. In each one of these townships a tract o five hundred acres was reserved for the governor. In some of the charters that was named as two shares; in some of the others this governor's right was described as an exception to the grant. There was also one right granted to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, — a London society, — one share for a glebe for the church of England, one share for the first settled minister of the gospel and one share for 'the benefit of schools ; and there was also a quit rent of one shilling for every one hundred acres after the first ten years, and a reservation of all pine timber fit for masts.

The principal purpose of making these grants by the colonial governors, was to secure to themselves the fees. The fees demanded by Governor Wentworth were not generally very large. Mr. Hildreth in his history states that they were one hundred dollars a township. In fact, however, there was no uniform price. It was usually supposed that fees fixed by law would be uniform, but there was no more uniformity in Governor Wentworth's prices than there is. in the prices of a Chatham Street store. It appears from the history of Rutland that the fee paid for the charter of that town was one hundred dollars. The fees paid for the charter of Underbill were two hundred and thirty dollars and forty-one cents, and for Barnet the expense of procuring the charter was two hundred and nineteen pounds, or about seven hundred dollars.

There was not much difiiculty in getting charters, provided the applicants would pay the fees. In fact, it seemed to be the principal business of all the colonial governors to make as much out of their ofiices as possible. Governor Wentworth is said to have got rich out of the fees he received, and his charges were mild in comparison with those of the New York governors. Governor Clark, in New York, from 1736 to 1743 is said to have cleared one hundred thousand pounds out of his office, and Governor (Admiral) Clinton is said to have made eighty-four thousand

20 Yeemont Setti-ers and

pounds in ten years. It was not alone the stamp tax and the tax on tea that was oppressive to the colonists. Their whole system of colonial government was managed to satisfy the rapacity of the government, and to farther favoritism to those in power ; and as a result, that system was miserably ineflScient for any good purpose.

These charters of Governor Wentworth had, many of them, as grantees the names of parties living at Portsmouth and supposed to be included in the inner circle of the governor's friends, or, to use the expressive but slang expression of these days, were within the "ring," We find the name of Richard Wybird very common in the list of grantees, and also Theodore Atkinson, who was secretary of the governor's council, and occasionally the names of Meshech Weare and John Wentworth. It is very probable that these men worked themselves in as proprietors of the townships as "dead heads." Governor Went worth's reservations of five hundred acres to himself, so far as the charters granted within what is now the territory of New Hampshire were concerned, got him into trouble after the expiration of his term. The reservations were clearly illegal, because in making these charters or conveyances of land, he was acting simply as the agent of the king, and nothing is better settled in law than that an agent cannot donate to himself any property of his principal. There was not much contest in the Vermont grants upon this question. Eight of these reservations were granted by Governor Golden of New York to other parties, which was the most satisfactory grant made by any of the New York governors. Governor Wentworth did not, however, get much profit

New York Land Si-eculatoks. 21

from these reservations as they were mostly lost through tax titles and in the disturbances growing out of the contest with the New York governors.

After getting the title to the lands in Bennington, Capt. Robinson commenced a settlement. Within four years, or by the summer of 1765, the settlement of Bennington embraced by actual count sixty-seven families, occupying as many separate farms. These settlers had cleared up lands and fitted them for cultivation, had constructed houses, such as they were, and outbuildings, had made roads and established three schools in the town, built a meeting-house, had established a church with a settled minister, and had also built a saw mill and a grist mill. Of the neighboring towns, Arlington was probably next in the state of settlement and improvement. There must have been within that town forty or fifty heads of families. They had both saw and grist mills, built and owned by Remember Baker, whose name became prominent a few years later. These settlers were from .Connecticut. Further north, on the Battenkill river, was the settlement of Manchester, less advanced ; but by 1765 it had become pretty well started towards the establish iijent of a town. Next north of that, the settlement of Dorset had just begun, and still farther north, Danby was starting. These last three towns were settled mainly from the eastern part of Dutchess county, New York. Among these settlers were some quakers from near Nine Partners in Dutchess county. New York, which in those days appears to have been notable in Quaker history. Danby was afterwards spoken of by Ethan Allen as ' ' Quaker Danbe. ' ' The only settlement north of Danby was at the falls of the

Otter Creek, where is now the City of Vergennes, and where some settlers from Salisbury, Connecticut, had improved the water power by the construction of a saw mill and had taken up some lands in the town of Panton. In the town of Shaftsbury, between the towns of Bennington and Arlington, were quite a number of settlers, and there were probably some in Sunderland between Arlington and Manchester. There were also some in Pownal. Just how many of these settlers there were, is pretty hard to determine, as no records were kept and the only evidence we have is from traditions collected by the town historians in the Vermont Gazetteer. It is probable, however, that not less than two hundred families had located in Bennington county on as many farms.

On the east side of the mountains there were more settlers. Fort Dummer was built in 1724 and that settlement had existed for more than forty years. In Hinsdale there had been two forts built a few years later, and the misfortunes of those settlers and their captivity by indians were noted in our early school books. It does not appear just how many settlers there were in Hinsdale, now Vernon, but it is said that in 1763 there were three frame dwelling-hoi^ses raised in one day. Brattleboro was getting to be a place of some importance, and ambitious of being made the seat of the new county in contemplation. There had been a fort constructed on the great meadows in Putney some time previous to 1740, and settlements had been made jaear that fort. There were settlements in Kockingham near what is now Bellows Falls and in the immediate vicinity of the fort on the other side of the river in Walpole built by Colonel Bellows. Dummerston was

New Youk Land Speculators. 23

settled in 1752 by Capt. John Kathun ; Chester was settled in 1762 ; Halifax and Guilford, a little earlier. Pretty soon after the close of the war, settlements had been commenced in Springfield, Weathersfield, Windsor, Hartland and Hartford. One settler had started in Norwich, several in Thetford. There was quite an extensive settlement at Newbury in connection with another across the river at Haverhill, and there was a settlement in the upper Coos at Guildhall. The settlement at Westminster was probably the largest in the eastern part of the present state and had fifty families in the summer of 1765. Rockingham had twenty-five families in 1765,

Some years later it seemed to be in the interest of New York oflacials to diminish the statement of the number of actual settlements in the New Hampshire grants, and so in 1771 there were put among the colonial records some aflidavits and oflicial statements. One affidavit stated that there were not over sixty families in the whole of the Connecticut river valley on the west side of the river. The statement of Mr. Simon Stevens, who was a prominent adherent of the New ^York claims during the whole controversy, fixed the number at seventy and claimed that some of those were squatters, having no claim of title to the land they occupied. Colonel Samuel Wells of Brattleboro, who was the agent of the New York claimants in that vicinity, stated that in his opinion there were not over seventy settlers ; and another statement was that there were less than one hundred. None of these statements are worthy of any credit. From the actual facts appearing not only from accredited historians but the colonial records of New York themselves, it is certain that they were so wide of the truth that they could not have been honestly made. Qn the twentieth of January, 1766, there was a return made to the colonial office in New York, by name, of over six hundred men between the ages of sixteen and sixty, subject to military duty, who were residents in the south part of that territory east of the mountains and west of the Connecticut river. This enumeration must have been made the summer before, or in the summer of 1765. The same return gives an estimate of the numbers for the north part of the same territory at three hundred. A census was taken of the inhabitants of that region in 1771, in which it was shown that the number of heads of families was something more than seventy per cent, of the number of enrolled militia. There is no reason for supposing that this proportion was materially different in 1765. That would give over four hundred heads of families or settlers in the summer of 176.5 for what was afterwards Cumberland county alone. The estimate made in the return of Colonel Chandler for the north part of the territory under consideration was undoubtedly too large, and, instead of being half as many as in Cumberland county, one-fourth would have been about the proportion as shown by the census. It is pretty safe to say that in the summer of 1765 there were more than five hundred settlers in the valley of the Connecticut on the west side of the river. Each of these settlers had started a farm, had cleared some land and had built a cabin or a house to live in. The extent of these improvements varied in proportion to the length of time the settlers had been there. Capt. Kathan of Dummerston had cleared one hundred and twenty acres of land, had built a house and barn, a saw mill and