by Jonathan Tucker

This is the 16th article in a series of articles about the life and descendants of Micum McIntire, a Scottish prisoner of war who settled in York, Maine, and about MacIntyres in general. This article is about the settlement of Newichawannock (South Berwick, Maine), Micum’s second ‘home’ in the New World. This article may be revised as new information becomes available.

Newichawannock was the first name for the European colonial settlement that grew up in the area now known as South Berwick, Maine. It was part of the large colonial township of Kittery, and was often referred to as “Upper Kittery,” and “Kittery North Parish” and “Unity Parish” and “Salmon Falls” early on. In 1713, Newichawannock and a larger area to the north along the Newichawannock (Salmon Falls) River was established as the community of Berwick. In 1814, the town of South Berwick was set off from that original town, and North Berwick was set off in 1831. The area most under discussion in this article predominantly includes what is now South Berwick and some southern portions of the town of Berwick.

The most definitive and comprehensive current source for information on MacIntyres in general is the “Clan MacIntyre: A Journey Into the Past,” Martin L. MacIntyre, Regent Press, Berkeley, CA, 2018, second edition.  Copies may be purchased by contacting the author at martin.macintyre@juno.com .

The definitive genealogy is “Descendants of Micum McIntire,” Robert Harry McIntire, revised edition, 1983, Bookcrafters, Chelsea, MI.  This is often referred to as the “Red Book” among Micum descendants because of its bright red cover.  New copies may be obtained through the Gift Shop on this website:  https://micummcintireclanassociation.org/shop/?product-page=2.  Used copies can still be obtained from time to time through online booksellers.

Those interested in pursuing their own genealogical connections to Micum McIntire may submit question through this website at:  https://micummcintireclanassociation.org/micum-mcintire-genealogy-questions/

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NEWICHAWANNOCK

In the year 1659, nine (9) years after being captured and transported to the New World, former Scottish prisoner of war Micum McIntire paid taxes for the first time as a citizen of a Massachusetts Bay Colony citizen in the township of Dover, likely in the village of Oyster River (now Durham, NH). With at least six other former Scottish prisoners of war, Micum had lived and worked at Oyster River as a compelled indentured servant for early proprietor and merchant Valentine Hill.

Micum had not entered into his indenture willingly. As a captured prisoner of war transported to the New World, Micum had been required to work for others for a period of 6-8 years. But he had been fortunate. Valentine Hill, the man who purchased Micum’s indenture, was a fair and generous man. He paid his Scots a fair wage, and did not mistreat them. He acquired land for them to build cabins on. Their work week was only four days long. They could tend their own gardens and keep and save their pay. Enough so that some Scots bought themselves out of their indentures early. Micum did not. He worked out his full 8 year indenture—1651 to 1659, and then continued to work for Valentine Hill. He may have been saving up as much income as possible, anticipating the costs of starting a new life.

In 1659, Micum’s period of indenture finally ended. He was a free man and suddenly a full citizen of the community in which he had worked. The fact that he was paying taxes was one probably indication of his freedom—indentured servants were not free men, and did not pay taxes unless they owned land, which Micum did not.

Micum might have stayed on in Oyster Bay indefinitely, continued to work for Valentine Hill, and settled there. But fate intervened two years after he became free. Valentine Hill, the man for whom he and the other Scots had been working, died sometime between December 1660 and June 1661. With his known employer and reliable income gone, Micum apparently decided to look for greener pastures.

Probably later in 1661, Micum moved from Oyster River to the nearby settlement of Newichawannock (South Berwick, ME), located about 10-12 miles away on a small tributary on the east side of the Newichawannock (now Salmon Falls) River. He may have travelled overland, up through Dover, crossing the Cocheco River and then crossing the Newichawannock River. But it was easier to travel by boat, and is likely that was how he got from Oyster River to Newichawannock.

Once in Newichawannock, Micum sought work at the Great Mill complex or one of the other sawmills in the community. The village that had grown up around those mills came to be called the Parish of Unity. It was named for the ship that had transported about 150 of the Scottish prisoners of the Battle of Dunbar from London to Charlestown, MA. Micum was one of them. There were so many Scots from the battles of Dunbar and Worcester (a year later) who lived and worked in that part of Newichawannock that the parish—the area served by the church and minister there—was named for ‘their’ ship.

The work at Great Mills—woodcutting, logging, and feeding sawmills–was the same work Micum had done in Oyster River. It was familiar and he had become good at it. Living in Unity Parish, Micum was among numerous other Dunbar and Worcester Scots who had shared his wartime and exile experience, a group that supported one another and spoke the same Scots Gaelic language among themselves. Newichawannock was a supportive ‘staging area’ for Micum and other Scots transitioning from indenture to freedom, and preparing to strike out and settle on their own.

The Origins of the Village

Newichawannock was named for the Algonkian-speaking tribal group who lived there until the late 1600s and early 1700s. They were part of the larger Abenaki confederation which occupied most of coastal Maine to the north, and south and west into the Merrimac River Valley. In the early 1600s, increased exposure to European transmitted diseases along the coast, diseases against which the Native Americans had no immunity, led to a major epidemic in 1611. That was followed by another epidemic (smallpox, this time) in 1617. These epidemics decimated the populations of the Newichawannock and other nearby tribal groups like the Cocheco in Dover. Entire villages were wiped out. Many of the survivors retreated north and west away from the coast. Their sagamores (tribal leaders) still maintained territorial claims in the 1600s, and continued to live on their ancestral lands and negotiate with colonial representatives. But their presence in and control over their previous territories was diminishing.

After negotiations with the Newichawannock sagamore Rowle, in May 1630, three men—Ambrose Gibbons, Roger Knight, and (probably) Thomas Spencer—arrived at Newichawannock by boat. They were there to establish an outpost settlement, to trade with the Native Americans, and to harvest, mill, and sell lumber, which was a valuable commodity for England and its colonies. They cast anchor at Little John’s Falls, a deep hole in the Newichawannock River off the mouth of the Asbenbedick River. 

Gibbons subsequently built a large log structure—a combined trading post, fortification, and residence–on a hill north of the confluence of the Asbenbedick River with the main river. With typical English colonial modesty, he named it “Great House.” It was surrounded by a defensible palisade.

A short distance to the north was Quamphegan, the seasonal settlement of the Newichawannock’s sagamore Rowle and his remaining people. It was located next to the cascades on the east side of Salmon Falls, where the people could readily harvest the spawning salmon making their way up the cascade. Their centuries of use of the area meant there were cleared openings near Gibbon’s trading post on which he was able to use to grow corn and other crops, and to graze some cattle transported from Denmark for the purpose. The colonists’ wives arrived in 1631.

Ambrose Gibbons was acting as agent for Captain John Mason, who together with Sir Ferdinando Gorges, was seeking to establish a distinct new colony in the larger area. In 1634, English carpenters and millwrights hired by Capt. Mason arrived to build a first sawmill, “stamping” (grist) mill, and other mills on the upper falls of the Asbenbedick River under Gibbons’ direction. They did so, and those mills operated for a time, serving both the settlement and other communities as far away as Boston.

In 1634, Henry Jocelyn took over from Ambrose Gibbons as settlement agent. Gibbons moved west across the main river and helped begin the settlement of Oyster River (Durham). Captain Mason died in 1635, and that slowed settlement for a time. His employees sacked the mills for what they could take, and left. Mason’s widow and family inherited the rights to the settlement.

In 1638, Henry Jocelyn was succeeded as settlement agent by Frances Norton, who also served as family attorney for Captain Mason’s widow. Norton sold off all the cattle Gibbons and Jocelyn had raised and sent them south for sale. Settlement proceeded slowly in the decades after Capt. Mason’s death, but it did proceed. The early mills on the upper falls were abandoned, but others were built—Thomas Spencer, for instance, built mills at the lower falls of the Asbenbedick River immediately upstream of its confluence with the main river. There was no decrease in demand for the high quality lumber available in the area.

Great Works

Richard Leader was a Boston merchant and engineer. He had in-laws in the settlement of Portsmouth at the mouth of the Piscataqua River, and through them and from talk among colonial leaders in Boston he doubtless heard of the vacancies left by Captain Mason’s demise. He had been acting as agent for the operators of the irons works at Lynn (Saugus, MA), but he saw the vacuum created by Captain Mason’s death and the pending arrival of indentured Scots labor as an opportunity. In 1651, he obtained a land grant for 400 acres in Newichawannock that included the abandoned mills of Captain Mason.

That same year, Leader travelled by boat up the Atlantic coast from Boston with his brother George and 15-25 Scots prisoners of the battle of Dunbar on board. At Portsmouth, they turned west into the mouth of the Piscataqua River on a slack tide and crossed the Great Bay, turning north into the Newichawannock River.

It is possible that Micum McIntire and six other Dunbar prisoners whose indentures had been purchased by Oyster River proprietor Valentine Hill had come earlier, or that they were also on Leader’s boat. If so, before turning north up the Newichawannock River, the boat would have travelled further west across the Little Bay and due west up the Oyster River to the end of its tidal reach, to drop off Micum and the rest of Hill’s Scots. The boat would then have travelled back eastward across the bay and turned north up the Newichawannock River to its destination.

Soon after their arrival in Newichawannock, Leader and his built housing for themselves near the dams at the upper falls of the Asbenbedick River. At the upper falls, English millwrights and the indentured Scots laborers built an ambitiously large complex of new sawmills under Leader’s direction. Once complete, it claimed to have as many as 19 saws going at once and, like Gibbons’ trading post, it quickly acquired a modest name–Great Works. Together with other mills downstream on lower falls near the confluence of the rivers operated by Thomas Spencer, the industrial heart of the pioneer community had become impressive, and drew employees from elsewhere in the colony. Leader obtained 5 more land grants in Newichawannock in 1653 and 1654.

In 1652, following the arrival in Boston of the ship John and Sara with its cargo of 272 Worcester Scots, some of those men were sent north and joined the original former Dunbar prisoners who had first accompanied Leader (some also joined Valentine Hill’s crew of Dunbar Scots in Oyster River). Leader teamed up with David Selleck, a Boston soapmaker, shipowner, and trader, to finance a project to gather up and transport refugee women (especially young women) and children displaced by Oliver Cromwell’s brutal Irish campaigns, to help populate the frontier of Upper Kittery and the rest of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The ship Goodfellow carried these human shipments in 1652 and again in 1654. A number of marriages among the Scots resulted from this exercise in human trafficking. Dunbar Scot James Warren, for instance, married an Irishwoman named Margaret in Newichawannock.

In 1655, Richard Leader left Newichawannock with Thomas Broughton to explore new ventures in Barbados. He apparently died there, because his estate was being administered in 1661. His brother George Leader stayed on in Newichawannock, serving as a manager for the mills.

Unity Parish

Like Micum McIntire, Scots completing their indentures in the late 1650s travelled from all over New England to Newichawannock and its Great Works mill complex for reliable work. Many received land grants in the community, and those who had arrived with Leader were apparently given an early opportunity at land. In 1656, Dunbar Scot Alexander Maxwell, later a neighbor of Micum’s in York, Maine, acquired a land grant along the Newichawannock River, south of its confluence of the Asbenbedick River. So did Peter Grant (who had worked at the iron works at Saugus), John Taylor, and Thomas Abbot, among others.

As a latecomer to Newichawannock, Micum received his land grant relatively late, in December 1662, along with fellow Scots John Key (prob. MacKay), James Grant (an older Dunbar Scot called “the Drummer” by his fellows), and James Barry. These four plots were along the Newichawannock River well north of the center of settlement, and were located in what is now the town of Berwick. Starting from the river, the four properties, each of which measured 30 rods wide (495 feet), proceeded east-northeast 267 rods (4,405.5 feet). Each was a little over 50 acres in area. Micum’s was the furthest north, located out well beyond the edge of the community. He never built on it or lived there, but he held onto the land and allowed fellow Dunbar Scot John Neal to build and live on it. It was part of Micum’s estate when he died, and was inherited by his middle son Daniel McIntire, a cordwainer (a maker of new shoes) and farmer who never married.

[NOTE: If you travel north out of South Berwick on Rte. 236 and cross into Berwick, Micum’s land grant was located on the left (west) side of the road just before you reach the intersection with New Dam Road. Micum’s grant ran up from the Salmon Falls (Newichawannock) River to the original road. It is currently part of a farm.]

Others obtaining land grants at Newichawannock included Daniel Ferguson, William Furbish (a companion of Micum’s at Oyster River), Henry Magoun, Henry Hobbs, James Grant (“the Scotchman”), Alexander Cooper, John Ross, David Hamilton, George Gray, Niven Agnew (an Oyster River alumnus), Thomas Doughty (another Oyster River alum), and others.

Many of the freed Scots who worked in Newichawannock, obtained land there, and settled there. Others worked there for a time, and then moved on to settle elsewhere. These included those who founded the Scotland District in York—Alexander Maxwell, Alexander Machanere (MacNair), John Carmichael, and Micum McIntire. Some obtained land grants in Newichawannock before they moved, and then sold them (Alexander Maxwell sold his to John Neal). Others, like Micum, kept their land grants in Newichawannock, but moved on.

Micum McIntire moved east to York sometime between 1662 and 1668. Robert Junkins, Alexander Maxwell, Alexander Machanere, Daniel Dill, Andrew Rankin, and John Carmichael were already there, the first settlers of Scotland District. Micum may have boarded with one or more of them as he waited to build or acquire his first home. 

Conflict with Native Americans

As at Oyster River, serious conflict with Native Americans in Newichawannock did not break out until King Phillip’s War (1675-76). In the summer of 1675, the homes of Richard Tozier and Captain John WIncoll were attacked on subsequent days and several people were killed. In October 1675, a force of about 100 Native Americans once again attacked Tozier’s house and a few days later ambushed a party of 20 colonists sent out to recover bodies.

During King William’s War, in the spring of 1690 there was a major attack at Newichawannock with about 35 killed and some 54 captured and taken to Canada for ransom. Among the dead and abducted were some of the resident Scots and their adult children, including members of the Key (McKay), Grant, and Hamilton families. All homes in the northern part of the community were abandoned, and the community as a whole was abandoned for over a decade. It was not until 1703 that the community had been resettled and was renamed Newichawannock.

Newichawannock and its Unity Parish was an early center for indentured and then freed Scottish prisoners of war in what is now New Hampshire and southern Maine. In its original full extent, the township of Kittery included numerous other communities, including Berwick and Eliot. It was also the first recognized community in Maine. Through their residence and labor there, Micum McIntire and his fellow Scots were critically important participants in the earliest European colonial development of this region.

[A very useful source of information is the Old Berwick Historical Society which operates a website at http://www.oldberwick.org/ and the Counting House Museum at 2 Liberty Street, South Berwick.]