Mother's Painful Secret: From the Howling Wilderness to the Halls of Congress: the Saga of Five Generations of an American Family

By Anne Pearce Lehman

Author and educator Anne Pearce Lehman captures intimate and poignant details of her familys American experience, beginning with the journey of Catherine and James Dillen from Ireland to the New World in the nineteenth century and continuing up to the present. The author traces four generations of her familyrugged and enterprising settlers who carved a living out of the wilderness of northern Maine, followed the continent west in search of riches, and finally arrived in the halls of the nations government in Washington, D.C., in the person of Uncle Ira Hersey, US Congressman.

Through her ancestors letters and her own research and conjecture, Lehman paints a vivid portrait of hardship and adventure in early America and learns something about her own past in the processa secret that her own mother, Vera Adelma, took to the grave.

Woven into the rich tapestry of Aroostook County in northern Maine, Mothers Painful Secret is an artistically crafted portrayal of nineteenth-century American history and culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9781450265027

Anne Pearce Lehman

Anne Dillen Pearce Lehman grew up in Washington, D.C., and northern Maine. She graduated from Wilson College in Pennsylvania and earned a master’s degree at the University of Maryland. Lehman served as principal of Barnesville School in Maryland, and now lives in retirement with her husband in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.

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Mother’s

Painful Secret

From the Howling Wilderness to the Halls of Congress:

The Saga of Five Generations of an American Family

Anne Dillen Pearce Lehman

iUniverse, Inc.

New York Bloomington

Mother’s Painful Secret

From the Howling Wilderness to the Halls of Congress: The Saga of Five Generations of an American Family

Copyright © 2011 Anne Pearce Lehman

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4502-6503-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-6501-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-6502-7 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 08/02/2011

Contents

Chapter 1

PART I

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

PART II

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

PART III

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Part IV

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

PART V

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Epilogue

Known Burial Sites of people

in this book

1842-1881

Complete Set of Dillen Letters

Author’s Biography

Dedicated to the memory of my mother Vera Adelma

and our Dillen ancestors

And to my beloved siblings

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A biographer in search of illusive truths

The past, like Aroostook, is really another country

Chapter 1

The Box of Letters

Soon after the death of my mother, Vera Adelma Dillen Pearce in 1980, I began to search for the truth of her life. I was attempting to discover what she kept hidden from us, her five children, and probably from her husband. She told each of us a different version of her childhood, which we only compared after her death. As she stood behind a line I could never cross, she made it difficult for me to love or understand her. Now, I set out hoping to find what secrets she harbored from her childhood.

Quite by accident in 1995, I inherited a cache of letters written to and from family members in Aroostook County, Maine. They cover the periods from 1842-58 and 1875-81. As I transcribed them, I found that they contained information about my earliest ancestors in Canada and Maine, and go forward to my grandfather, whose name I never knew.

James and Catherine Lindsay Dillen’s love story began in Banbridge, County Down, Ireland in 1816, and continued with their banishment to the New World. My mother’s grandfather was William, the last of Catherine and James’ six children.The letters are surprisingly legible, spelling unique, punctuation scarce, and condition good, considering the years they spent folded in a box. These first hand accounts of the hard times experienced by most of rural New England, of men wanting to go to the Gold Rush, of lumbering in Colorado, have never been made public before.

I am the last person who heard my great aunt Annie Dillen’s stories, myths, and family legends, which she had from her aunt Eliza, the first born in America. I have interwoven these with the inherited tintypes, family documents, letters, newspaper clippings, obituaries, and what pertinent research was found. I have built this adventure up piece by piece from what I believe to be true.

The stories of Catherine and James’six children have been put together with those of the next three generations. These interesting early relatives, the one hundred surnames in the letters, and the search for Vera’s secrets have been the driving force for me to complete this book. I have continued our family story forward to show Vera’s interactions with her five children in the exciting years of WWII in Washington, D.C., and in our blissful summers in Maine.

I have come to know and admire my ancestors and their friends. This further knowledge of our thrilling inheritance has made me stronger and more self-reliant. We have become who we are because of how they struggled, and endured, even if we never knew it. The legends and the times in which they lived can be interpreted, but real truths are seldom known.

I have confirmed what I already knew, that we are an optimistic, energetic, determined tribe, with especially strong, capable women—our heritage from the howling wilds of Maine—a legacy that helps shape our lives, and our future.

My appreciation goes out to all our Maine and Irish ancestors.

PART I

—

Catherine Lindsay Dillen and James

Arrive in the New World 1818

Chapter 2

An Inauspicious Beginning

Banbridge, County Down, Ireland 1816

According to family lore, the father of my great-great-grandmother Catherine Lindsay had been sent to Ireland in the 1700s to run one of the Irish plantations usurped by the English. The island, so beautiful to visitors today with its mists and drizzle making everything six shades of green, must have seemed to Catherine a barren outpost with the unwelcome English scattered about. Here she knew few with whom to ride or go to dances; she probably had no friends close by—only her mother, father and the hired servants. She must have wept for all she was missing in England, stuck as she was in this dreary, godforsaken country, filled with poor, starving wretches. This is the legend passed down to me from my great aunt Annie Dillen, who raised my mother, who had it from her aunt Eliza, with whom Annie lived.

The vacillating realities of English rule over three hundred years of Irish history made for a fierce division between ruled and ruler, fueling hatred that exists to this day. The clans had fought and ruled Ireland until English monarchs exerted control over most of the territory in the 1500 and 1600s. In 1536 Henry VIII disbanded the monasteries and sold the confiscated church property to the clan chiefs who had supported him. The 1798 Rebellion led by Theobald Wolfe Tone became one of the fiercest struggles in all of Irish history. Tone, a Protestant of English decent, was insisting on complete Irish independence. After much bloodshed, the struggle was put down that same year. Great Britain dissolved the Irish Parliament and Ireland very reluctantly became a part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

James was an impressionable young lad when these exciting events were occurring. Family lore tells us he was an illiterate farmhand, working on the Lindsay property in the Banbridge area, County Down, in present-day Northern Ireland. It is not surprising that he sets out to further his own fortune and take a small portion of personal revenge by seducing a lonesome English girl. Any Irish citizen might be ready to take advantage of the English whenever an opportunity arose. How is he to resist this opportunity that slides before him? Soon Catherine’s pregnancy was the result of this liaison. I am sure he realized that Catherine’s family would somehow make this disgraceful indiscretion valuable to him. Perhaps this convoluted beginning helps explain, if not excuse, James’ lifelong callous behavior toward his English wife, and his children, particularly his daughters?

The presence of an illegitimate child was intolerable to Catherine’s parents. But the reality of the situation needed to be dealt with immediately. James and Catherine went to Dublin where baby John was born August 1, 1817. There they made arrangements for passage to Canada, where her family had banished them. Catherine was permanently dismissed by her family, never hearing from any of them again. She and James are the first of our clan in America.

Both the governments of New Brunswick, Canada, and England were promoting immigration, with offers of free land and free passage. A few men were awarded specific lands before arriving; some of these parcels contained good land, others were worthless. Timbered land had to be cleared before the owner could even assess its value. Most coming to farm had to search out and clear land on their own. Whatever way, it was a lengthy process that could take three or four years or more.

Catherine and James with baby John, are presumed to have landed in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, about 1818. Records prior to 1820 are not complete, so no ship or arrival date has been found. They proceeded upstream to the Irish Settlement in Milltown on the Pennyack River, near Frederickton, New Brunswick. Not until 1826 did Catherine have a second child, Eliza Ann, sometimes called Ann Eliza, born in Houlton, Maine, in 1826. Then in rapid succession followed George 1827, Matilda 1828, Mary Jane 1830, and lastly my great-grandfather William on February 23, 1832. The lapse of nine years between first-born John, and second child, Eliza, raises a number of questions. Where was Catherine in those intervening years? Did James come to the New World alone, with Catherine staying in Dublin? Were there some babies whose deaths were not recorded? The most plausible explanation is that Catherine stayed in the ‘Irish Settlement’ while James went back and forth to the Houlton area to scout out and clear suitable land. The distance from the Irish Settlement, on the Penniac River, to Houlton was approximately 85 miles, with nothing but a foot and bridal path between. Thus, James was lucky to be able to make that long, ten to twelve day, journey twice a year.

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As with many immigrant families, there are several spellings of a surname, a hindrance to descendants engaged in genealogical research. Our family is no exception. Either by chance or choice, from letters, to family records, to grave sites, those tracing our family will find the name spelled, Dillen, Dillon, Dilling, and Dilin, on James and Catherine’s tombstone.

This family and their children joined the young immigrant generations that through the 1820s formed 58 percent of the population of the United States under the age of twenty.

A Brief History of Maine

We need to look at the conditions that my Dillen ancestors faced setting up a farm in the farthest regions of what would become the state of Maine. This history of the region gives further insight into the encumbering geographical difficulties of the area.

The earliest reference to Maine is on a 1529 map drawn by Giovanni de Verrazano, which located Norumbega somewhere on the back side of Nova Scotia, vaguely on the Penobscot River in Maine. In 1614 Captain John Smith labeled the area New England and advocated settlement. Sir Ferdinando Georges formed the Council for New England and by 1629 had named and become proprietor of the Province of Maine. He never reached Maine himself, but encouraged early settlement, earning the title Father of Maine.

Maine’s Indians, the Wabonaki, whose name means living at the sunrise, called the area Dawnland. The Abnaki, further down the coast, determined to hold on to their land, burned hundreds of farmhouses and killed or captured in excess of 700 colonists from Pemaquid, Berwick, York and Kittery. By the end of the 1600s Maine came under the defense perimeter of Boston, and Massachusetts, remaining there until the 1820 Missouri Compromise.

The following history is the best explanation I have encountered of why State of Mainers were referred to affectionately as Mainiacs in my childhood in the 1930s and 40s. This term suits them better than State of Mainers, as they are stronger and more self-reliant than even other New Englanders.

One of the best assessments of the character of those who hail from Maine is found in the preface of Patricia Wallace’s book, Politics of Conscience: A Biography of Margaret Chase Smith, published by Baylor University. Following her husband, she became the Republican Congresswoman, then Senator from Maine from 1940 to 1973. She was the first woman to actively seek the presidential nomination of a major political party.

Reflecting the hard work required to clear the howling wilderness in which they found themselves, the Puritans sanctified work and taught that worship of God included dutiful attention to a secular calling. The Puritans made sins of idleness and luxury and virtues of industry and thrift… .

In perceiving themselves as different from Massachusetts citizens, Mainers developed a unique—some would say peculiar—self-image. Their peculiarities became a cherished aspect of their collective character and as integral as their verities of hard work, economy, and prudence. Mainers valued their own practical wisdom and natural wit over that of outsiders, particularly learned ones… . Mainers also acquired a self-confident identity as independent, self-sufficient, assertive, and conservative, even among other New England Yankees. Early, Maine was as much a state of mind, an attitude, as a place… .

Mainers quickly learned that nature had the upper hand. The huge granite slabs that push up through the ground stood as barricades to use of the good soil. The towering forests of huge trees cowed those who sought to cut them, and on the rocky seacoast there were no white, sandy beaches, but, rather, the angry North Atlantic that dared men to wrestle for its wealth. Then for nine or ten months of the year, there was the cold to battle as the world turned white and icy with body-numbing gale-force winds. Those who survived—and many did not—became as rugged as the land and sea and lived an unrelenting life of work. Mainers earned their clear, blue-eyed squint of suspicion, thin-lipped smile of hard-fought triumph, and craggy, weathered faces, and they passed what allowed them precarious survival on to their children.

Author J. Hector St. John de Crevecouer in Letters from an American Farmer(1782) made the following observation about Friends [Quakers], who had gone from Nantucket to an ideal situation in New Gardens, North Carolina. He said life there was too easy so even Quakers became indolent. I with equal cheerfulness would pitch my tent on the rougher shores of the Kennebeck [in Maine]. This will always be a country of health, labour, and strong activity and those are characteristics of society which I value more than greater opulence and volumptouse ease.

This was the world to which our Dillen ancestors came. Together they tamed a hostile wilderness, and forged qualities of fortitude and determination that live on in us, their descendants.

Chapter 3

Reality in the Howling Wilderness of Aroostook, Maine 1815-1881

The lives of these early Dillen ancestors come directly from the family letters. Their stories are a powerful testament to the people living in the farthest regions of Maine, described in the history as a howling wilderness. Aroostook experiences long, extremely cold, icy winters with almost continual snow. Mount Katahdin marks the end of the Allegheny Mountains. Above this area the land is flatter, with many streams, lakes and bogs, and much colder winters. What good land there is, has rich, loamy soil. Sufficient rainfall provides for excellent crops of wheat, oats and potatoes, once the timber is cleared. My father teased my mother about Aroostook’s three seasons, July, August and winter. In late August temperatures can dip into the 30s at night and all but ‘Indian Summer’ is gone. Once snow begins it can stay on the ground until April, sometimes snowing in Houlton in June. This two-month window of ‘summer’ is all the opportunity for farming in Aroostook, with crops only having one harvest. During the rest of the year a farmer had to attempt to provide for his family by lumbering, splitting shingles, hunting and fishing, gathering hides and furs, or improving his farm.

The original settlers of Houlton were from New Salem, Massachusetts. They had already experienced the problems of early settlement and the challenges of New England farming, but under less dire conditions. They had acquired household goods and the necessary farm tools, making numerous trips up the Saint John River to deliver them to their newly planned home. They had teenage children who supplied much needed manual labor. They were a ready-made community. No wonder several of these original family names remain prominent in the area.

In contrast, James and Catherine Dillen were making a single trip by boat from Ireland. He was a farmhand who owned few tools, and she was the daughter of an upper-class family. Both were woefully unprepared to be settlers, particularly for the hard scrabble life in Aroostook.

During the earliest days, the extreme isolation of the area was as much a problem as the vicious weather and short growing season. In the 1830s, the building of a military road, and a completed footpath from the south, made Houlton more easily accessible. Until this construction, the locals had been at the mercy of the few itinerant peddlers who, with great effort, often lost, pushed their way through streams and swamps, carrying their wares to Houlton. The residents were obliged to buy high, and sell low, not a recipe for prosperity. What a farm could not produce for itself usually had to be gone without. Bridal and footpaths led to the Saint John River, in Woodstock, New Brunswick, fifteen miles to the east. Boats were available when the river was not frozen, probably less than half the year. When frozen solid, goods could be taken down to Saint John by sledge, pulled my men on snowshoes. Transportation either by land or water was an expensive and difficult way of getting goods to market. Despite these hardships, as early as the 1820s, Houlton enjoyed the services of a minister and a schoolmaster.

A further detriment to New England’s economy, especially to Aroostook, so far away, was the opening of the Erie Canal in 1824. The hard times talked about in the letters are representative of most small rural communities in New England, and other parts of the East Coast. Clinton’s Folly made New York City the most important port in the nation with more tonnage than the ports of Boston, Baltimore and New Orleans combined. Governor DeWitt Clinton rightly predicted that New York City would become the financial capital of the United States, as well as the center of trade, population and commerce. Cost of shipping goods from Lake Erie to the Atlantic dropped from one hundred to ten dollars a ton, with the time of transport halved. The canal determined the direction the country expanded. By 1831, one thousand-immigrants-a-day passed through Buffalo, New York, bound for Ohio and beyond. Europe had allowed the United States to become its breadbasket while the Europeans concentrated on industrial and commercial development. Even today, the inland waterways carry one-sixth of the nation’s freight, mostly coal, petroleum products, grain and minerals. New York cities along the canal, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo, remain important.

The opening of the railroads in the 1830s further compromised the formerly thriving New England markets. Americans, particularly young men, even whole families, were continually on the move. It is estimated that ninety-five out of one hundred people in the early 1800s moved every ten years.

Starting with the first letter in July 1842 from Milltown, on the Pennyack River in New Brunswick, we heard "the times are so hard. Continuing in December, 1853 to Eliza in Houlton, Maine, from her friend Lydia Ann Dudley: . . . I am sorry to tell you there is rather poor encouragement for tailoresses down this way I do not know how it is in Calais probably the same as in H Again in November, 1855 to Eliza, Lawrence, Mass from [her cousin] M L Taber, Houlton, Maine… Money scarse, and business dull; more than usually so. Mrs M C Brine has gone to Boston, for good, at last: She may be thankful that she had enough to get away with. If you were here now you would be discontented, and out of employment. Evry lady makes her own dresses… December 25, 1855 to Elisa, Lawrence, from Prudilla Grant, Houlton, Maine… I hope you are doing well whare you are for it is such hard times here at present. . . . January 30, 1856 to Eliza [30] in Lawrence, from sister Mary Jane, [26] Houlton: Poor Mary Jane is bemoaning 24 dolars a year [for Mother, Father, brother George and herself] that will be only 8 Dolars apiece… . I expect we shall haf to scratch as hard as an old hen that has a dasen chickens to pay the rent…"

Throughout the 1700s, and until the middle 1800s, New Englanders experienced unusually cold winters, and had to contend with much snow, frozen lakes, rivers and even saltwater harbors. Our writers were so accepting of the conditions that snow and bitter weather are only mentioned in two letters. Dec. 28th, 1853 from Lydia Ann Dudley, to E. A. [Eliza Ann] Dillon, Houlton, Maine… To day is christmas but not very merry, as it is Sunday. I expected to have spent it up that way somewhere as my sister and I started for H. Last Wednesday and went about ten miles but the roads being so bad we were compelled to return. I think I shall go next week. If fortune favors. Then I can do all my talking. Again on October 27, 1880 to Annie Dillen, from Hattie McCray, Golden Ridge, Carlton Co., N B… it was a fearful cold day… Occasionally, brief mention is made of sledding parties. Our Annie Dillen Hersey, daughter of great-grandfather William and first wife Judith, told tales of snow drifted high enough to exit the house by a second-story window. I have a reference to this in