<\/p>\n
I want to introduce you tonight to one of the most interesting persons who ever lived in Maine — a man whose diary, published by the Maine Historical Society more than a century ago, is one of our best and most complete original sources of Maine history in the 18th century. The long journal is popularly called the Diary of Parson Smith, for the man was Portland’s first settled minister.<\/p>\n
He was the head of Portland’s First Parish Church from 1725 until his death in 1786. No other document gives us such a complete picture of conditions in Maine in those early years as does Parson Smith’s Diary.<\/p>\n
Thomas Smith was born in Massachusetts in 1702 and graduated from Harvard at the age of 18 in 1720. He began to preach in Massachusetts and New Hampshire towns in 1722, and came to Falmouth, as Portland was then called, in 1725. He began the diary that spring, before he came to Maine. Of interest to historians is the fact that the first item in Smith’s long diary refers to what we call the Battle of Lovewell’s Pond, the complete defeat of the Saco tribe in 1725 near the pond in East Fryeburg, Maine — a battle that Longfellow later celebrated in verse. This is what Thomas Smith wrote on May 15, 1725: “We have received an account that a week ago today Capt. Loverwell’s company had a battle with the Indians. The captain, one of his lieutenants and fifteen others were killed.” Soon Smith learned that the news had been confirmed as even worse than first rumored, that only eight soldiers and no officers had escaped alive, although the Indians had been completely routed. A few days later Smith wrote, “The news has cast a gloom all over New England.”<\/p>\n
On July 21 Smith noted that an armed force had left Boston for Richmond to march to Penobscot. Smith did not mean Richmond, Virginia, of course, but Fort Richmond on the Kennebec which could be reached by boat from Boston, whence the soldiers would go overland to Penobscot waters.<\/p>\n
It was on June 27 that Smith had first gone to Portland to hold services on two Sabbaths only, but before the year was out he had preached 17 times in the community, and the people decided to call him as their permanent, settled minister.<\/p>\n
The diary items for the year 1726 contain several references to an attempted treaty with the Indians. The tribes had been aroused by two stinging blows — the defeat of the Sacos at Lovewell’s Pond in 1725 and the near annihilation of the Norridgewocks and the killing of their French priest, Father Rasle, a year earlier in 1724, Many of the Indians had left Maine to take refuge with friends on the St. Francis River in Quebec, but the settlers still\u00a0 feared reprisal raids. So treaties with the remaining Indians, especially with the Penobscots, were much desired. It was agreed that the provincial Governor, William Dummer, and his council should come to Falmouth to meet the Penobscot Indians and negotiate the treaty. Let us see what happened in the words of Parson Smith:<\/p>\n
“July 15. 1726 — The New Hampshire gentlemen. who want to participate with the Massachusetts magistrates in the treaty, came here this evening and now lie below.<\/p>\n
“July 17 — The gentlemen are now all at meeting. They put up an imposing appearance with guns and drums. The Governor was guarded in pomp.<\/p>\n
“July 22 — The gentlemen have been entirely idle this week waiting for the Indians.<\/p>\n
“July 23 — The Indians arrived this morning with a message to the government, but were sent away in the afternoon.<\/p>\n
“July 29 — It appears that Indians who came last week were only advance messengers. The main party arrived today to the number of 40, all of the Penobscot tribe. In the afternoon the Congress opened.”(Congress is Smith’s word for conference. )<\/p>\n
“August 5 — The ratification of the peace was publicly done this day in the meeting house, followed by a public dinner.”<\/p>\n
On October 9, 1726 Smith recorded that the town meeting had voted to build him a house. At the end of the year he wrote: “When I first came here last June, there were 56 families, most of them very poor, because the Indians kept the people from their farms and confined them to garrisons. When I arrived, the meeting house frame was only roughly covered, but this summer it was handsomely finished outside, Governor Wentworth of New Hampshire giving the glass. This month I reckoned up the families in town and found there were 64. There are also a dozen marriageable young men recently arrived in town, and 38 soldiers of the garrison who are here without families. Last month Mr. Sawyer of York came here and finished the grist mill, which in every way answers our expectation, and saves us a long, tedious journey to grind our corn. Before this the people had to take their grain to Saco. A saw mill has also been built on the stream and several inhabitants have begun to get out logs.”<\/p>\n
Smith’s entry for January 23, 1727 is: “The town meeting today passed several votes in my favor — to supply me with wood, to clear with me every six months, to give me three acres of land for my house and lot and clear the lot.”<\/p>\n
A week later another town meeting made arrangements to entertain visiting ministers who should attend Smith’s ordination and they appointed a committee to see to building the pastor’s house.<\/p>\n
On March 8, 1727 Smith recorded an important day, both for himself and for Portland. “This day I was ordained a minister of the gospel and pastor of the church in this place. My father came here for the service in an Indian canoe from Saco.”<\/p>\n
Smith had come to Portland a bachelor. In 1728 he thought the time had come to take a wife. The girl lived in Dunstable, Massachusetts. Some brief items in the diary tell the story:<\/p>\n
“May 6, 1728 — Set out on a journey to Dunstable.<\/p>\n
“July 13 — I set out on another journey to Dunstable.<\/p>\n
“September 11 — I set out this morning early for Dunstable.<\/p>\n
“September 12 — I was married this evening to Sarah Tyng in Dunstable.<\/p>\n
“September 14 — We set out this morning for home, accompanied by my wife’s father, Col. Tyng.<\/p>\n
“September 28 — Got home very comfortably. We were met at Scarborough by Mr. Cobb and several of the people, women especially. They had prepared a noble supper for us.”<\/p>\n
In 1740 the first crude meeting house in Portland was replaced by a larger wooden structure at the corner of Middle and King Streets. King was the early name for Congress Street. Although an improvement, the new meeting house was still small, without steeple or porches. It remained unfinished for many years. It had no bell until 1758, when one of 800 pounds was procured from England. The spire was built in 1761. Not until after the Revolution did the church receive its first coat of paint.<\/p>\n
Now let us select a few items from Parson Smith’s diary to show the conditions under which people lived in what is now Maine’s largest city:<\/p>\n
“July 24, 1740 — I had three sheep killed by a wolf. Wolves are very troublesome this summer.<\/p>\n
“July 30 — The church kept a day of fasting and prayer today because of the pernicious spread of Quakerism.<\/p>\n
“January 10, 1741 — There has been for some time a melancholy scarcity of corn. We are told that many families on the Penobscot are living entirely on clams.<\/p>\n
“May 9 — The fish have at last struck in, a great relief to people almost perishing.<\/p>\n
“May 14 — Mr. Jones arrived with 900 bushels of corn. He is selling it at 15 shillings a bushel, while the price in Boston is 14 shillings. People ,”groan terribly at the price.”<\/p>\n
The Smith diary has a lot to say about the weather. In fact his weather observations are so accurate that they serve as a corrective for many mistakes of careless historians. For instance, in January, 1739 a ship from the West Indies is supposed to have tied up at a Portland wharf. We know from Smith’s diary that this could not have happened, because the whole harbor, or, as he calls it, the whole bay, was frozen over the entire month of January in that year.<\/p>\n
On May 18, 1741 Smith wrote: “I don’t think ever more rain since the Flood fell in one day than we have just suffered. The ground is everywhere one universal pond, and many bridges are carried away. People who have planted wish they had not, expecting their seed to rot.”<\/p>\n
On May 25 Smith reported: “Corn is rotting in the ground everywhere.”<\/p>\n
On August 30 Smith commented: “People are nearly dying of the ceaseless heat. Since July 25th there has been such continuous hot weather that I have seen nothing like it in my sixteen years here in Falmouth.”<\/p>\n
In Smith’s day the wild pigeon was a common Maine bird: “August 28, 1744 Gunning for pigeons, which are very plentiful. In a hour’s time I got ten dozen, which I brought home in my chaise.”<\/p>\n
The diary contains many references to Mr. Longfellow, who helped Parson Smith in many ways. The first reference says: “Mr. Longfellow came to live here.” Then later, “Mr. Longfellow gave me a peck of seed corn, a most generous gift in this time of scarcity.” Smith’s benefactor was Stephen Longfellow, the poet’s great grandfather, who, born in 1723, had graduated from Harvard in 1742, and three years later had settled in Portland. There his son, the second Stephen Longfellow, was born in 1750. His son, the third Stephen, born in 1776, was a prominent Portland magistrate and one of the founders of Bowdoin College. It was the third Stephen who was the father of Henry W. Longfellow, born in Portland in 1807.<\/p>\n
During Smith’s early years in his Portland pastorate there was constant fear of the Indians. Witness these items in the diary:<\/p>\n
“September 16, 1725 — News in town of Indians killing five men at Fort Dummer and five more to the eastward.<\/p>\n
“March 23, 1726 Indians killed cattle near Arrowsic.<\/p>\n
“March 27 — We have news by express from the Governor that the Penobscot Indians have denied several articles of peace.<\/p>\n
“October 16 — This day we had news that the Indians had broken out and taken a family in Kennebunk, eight women and ten children.<\/p>\n
“July 13, 1732 — The Governor and several gentlemen came here in a man-of-war from Kennebec to have conference with the Indian tribes.<\/p>\n
“July 25 — Today many tribal chiefs are in the town, making a great show. But because the Indians appeared with French colors, the Governor would not see them. About forty gentlemen, mostly young men, dined at my house. The Governor and gentlemen are on the hill (Munjoy Hill) almost every day, where there is a spacious great tent with seats and benches. There they will meet the Indians if the latter will lay aside their French flags.<\/p>\n
“July 29 — The conference is at last under way. The English and about 200 Indians dined together on the hill. Presents were delivered to the Indians. This conference was a relief to us, for only yesterday we were alarmed by the Indians appearing in a great body. We kept a town watch alert all last night.<\/p>\n
“July 30 — We still fear an uprising of Indians in spite of the conference. Today we sent out a scout of men to see if they could discover any new bands of Indians in the neighborhood. There certainly are numerous Canadian Indians somewhere in back of us, probably near Gorhamtown.<\/p>\n
“May 9, 1744 — News of war with France. People are assembling at the garrisons.<\/p>\n
“May 25 – All talk is now about war. We hear Casco has been taken.<\/p>\n
“June 14 — The soldiers arrived here today. The Province has raised 500 troops, 300 of them from the eastern county.”<\/p>\n
A few days later Parson Smith was able to record: “Several gentlemen from the General Court in Boston have been treating with the Indians at St. Georges, and have signed a treaty of peace. More than 150 soldiers in this county have now been dismissed, no longer needed because of the new treaty with the Indians.<\/p>\n
Next week I shall tell you about other interesting items in Parson Smith’s diary.<\/p>\n
Year: 1959<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #437, Broadcast on December 6, 1959<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":405,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[800,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8026"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/405"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8026"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8026\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}