My eyeballs need a break…finished transcribing the last few deeds of the set that I gathered up at Alfred, ME six weeks ago. The inventory is now (fairly) complete up to 1740. I have spent the last three hours cutting, pasting, and correcting over thirty manuscript pages of deeds that (thankfully) were previously transcribed by James Phinney Baxter and published in 1913 in Volume 24 of “The Baxter Manuscripts.” Baxter gathered up and time lined the various deeds that impacted the 1714 Pejepscot Proprietors purchase of the sizable tract of land in the Kennebec/New Meadows River and Merrymeeting Bay area. Baxter’s book may be found on Google Books: https://play.google/books/reader?id=OsMMAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&authuser=0&hl=en The story, as my simple mind is able to grasp it at this point in time, is thus: -In 1620 King James of England granted a charter for the formation of a “body corporate”, which when formed became the Council of Plymouth (in England) and which subsequently begat a grant to the Plymouth Company, whose members, after crossing the ocean on the MAYFLOWER, established their settlement at New Plymouth. The Plymouth Company’s charter was finally dissolved in 1691, they being absorbed into the 1692 created Province of Massachusetts Bay. -In 1630 another settlement took root to the north of the Plymouth Company, this being the Puritan-led Massachusetts Bay Colony, and whose governor was John Winthrop. -The same Council of Plymouth, in 1632, granted a land patent (which encompassed all of present-day Phippsburg) to Thomas Purchase and George Way. -The overlapping land claims awarded to both the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Thomas Purchase/ George Way were mollified (somewhat) by an Indenture effected between Winthrop and Purchase on July 4th 1639. This indenture essentially limited Purchase’s land patent to only those that he himself improved, or sold to others and which they had improved, in the seven years following (which makes the end date 1646). I am not so sure Purchase was pleased with the arrangement, but we aren’t going to go there. [Sidebar: I want to say that I recall one of the many conjectured dates for Thomas Atkins obtaining the southern half of Phippsburg was 1646 – could Atkins’ deed be from Wharton prior to the July 1646 Indenture deadline?? Still looking for it…Along this research track are some other historical deed volumes (of which I do not know what later volumes they were folded into): “Great News Book of Records of the Province of Mayne” (c. 1666 deed entry) and “Third Book of Records for the Province of Mayne” (c. 1683 deed entry)] -In July 1684 a Boston lawyer, Richard Wharton, stepped up to the plate and through various deeds with heirs of Thomas Purchase and George Way, as well as six Indian Sagamores, purchased the entirety of Purchase and Ways land patent. Exactly why he did this is a mystery to me at this point in time, but it seems like the lawyer was had – which provides me some comfort considering the $$ I have shelled out five years ago in my introduction to jurisprudence actions. -With respect to Phippsburg, Wharton might have thought he was acquiring a semblance of land ownership, but he absolutely wasn’t. The southern end of town (the demarcation line roughly running up Sam Day Hill Road from the Parker Head area over to Casco Bay) had been previously purchased by Atkins and had been subdivided, sold, and re-sold to various persons. The northern part of Phippsburg was similar, John Parker having purchased it in its entirety by virtue of a 1659 deed from the Indian Sagamore Nanuddemance. This 1659 deed to Parker was witnessed by Henry Jocelyn, whom by 1684 was an esteemed Esquire as well as a Justice of the Peace for the Province of Mayne. It is good to have friends in high places – there was NO WAY that Wharton could even entertain the idea that Parker’s 1659 deed was invalid. - Six days after Wharton executed the deed with the six Indian Sagamores, which John Parker was a witness to, Wharton executed an Indenture with Parker “re-affirming” Parker’s 1659 Indian deed. The yearly cost Wharton stipulated of Parker for land that he had lived upon for 28 years at that point, which he had deeded the majority to others, was thus: “The Said John Parker his heirs or Assignes or some of them yielding & paying yearly Vizzitt upon the Tenth Day of June Two dry Cusk or Two dry Cod fish if demanded to him the Said Richard Wharton his heirs or Assignes for ever…” Parker, when not grinding his teeth at the arrogance of Wharton, was likely finding it difficult to contain his mirth, for even the Sagamore Nanuddemance negotiated more exacting payments – one beaver skin at time of signing and then, annually, a bushel of corn and a quart of liquor. -Thirty years later a group of Boston merchants formed the Pejepscot Proprietors – a group with a specific interest in acquiring long abandoned land claims along the frontier of Maine in the Sagadahoc area – their mechanism to this end was to acquire the former Thomas Purchase/George Way land grant, subsequently purchased by our smart lawyer Richard Wharton in 1684, and who was 1714 deceased. The Proprietors, when they purchased Wharton’s deed, knew that the Phippsburg area was already claimed through Ancient Deeds. -The Proprietors, in a proposal submitted to a Court appointed committee for adjudicating land claims in “the Late Province of Maine” stated the following: “To enable us to settle a fishing Town near Small-Point, which lyes conveniently situate therefor, That the Generall Court would please to grant us, the unappropriated Land (WHICH IS NOT MUCH [my emphasis]) lying between Small-Point-Harbour & Small-Point to be laid out in Allotments for accommodating the Settlements there.” Not much was an understatement, to say the least, as there was ZIP un-appropriated land. -Fittingly, the Proprietors then set out to acquire the Ancient Claims in Phippsburg. They made some progress in this effort; however, these Boston merchants failed to recognize just how wily Mainer’s really are. It wasn’t until the Proprietors began dividing up the Phippsburg area for their own personal use through their First and Second Divisions, and began establishing their own (or their tenant’s) operation on the land, thus increasing its value, that the rest of the Ancient Claim heirs popped up and re-asserted their rights to the land. I am up to 1740 in the deeds, twenty-six years after the Pejepscot Proprietors first formed, and there are still large swaths of land in Phippsburg proper whose deed lineage has not yet linked over from the 1689 and before era. -Lastly, and I haven’t really examined this in detail, the Pejepscot Proprietors – or what remained of them and their dying on the vine land venture in Maine, was laid to rest (at least in Phippsburg) when they forfeited the remainder of their Phippsburg area land claims to the Kennebec Proprietors (the offshoot of the Plymouth Company) in order to retain claim to areas further upriver. Just an outline of thoughts… Patrick community.curtislibrary/CML/wheeler/ww_ch2.html
Posted on: Sun, 06 Oct 2013 00:03:09 +0000
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