by Jonathan Tucker

This is the 21st 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 work—what the first few generations of York McIntires did to survive, to make a living, to acquire income, and to accumulate family resources in their frontier community. As always, this article draws heavily on the information in the “Red Book” geneaology by Robert Harry McIntire, as well as other sources. This article may be revised as new information becomes available.

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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EARLY McINTIRES & WORK

Micum Mcintire probably arrived in York, Maine sometime in the mid to late 1660s, staying first with established former Scots prisoners like Alexander Maxwell. He obtained a land grant south of the York River there in 1668, then purchased a property north of the river in 1670 on which he built a house, and married there in 1671. The very first log frame house in York had been built 40 years earlier, in 1630, on the promontory between Barrells Millpond and the York River on the harbor near where the village center would develop. In 1660s-1670s the community was still very much a frontier settlement. The village center north of the harbor at the mouth of the York River served as a place for civic activity and trade, but the Scottish prisoners of war (SPOWs) who settled the wild land around the upper tidal reaches of the York River were very much pioneers.

This dual character of York as it grew—a young but settled village center on a harbor downriver and wilder land four (4) miles upriver where the Scots settled—affected the nature of the work available to those who settled and lived there. While some remnants of Native American clearings still existed, settlers of the wild lands were obliged to do the hard work that survival and subsistence required—clearing land, building homes and outbuildings, clearing/plowing/tending fields for crops or grazing, caring for livestock, fishing and hunting to add to the food supply, participating in logging operations to produce lumber for their own use and to sell. But they also could travel downriver overland or by boat to the village center to trade or barter their own produce for necessities, and participate in the more developed trading economy there. 

So, at a minimum, the first couple of generations of York’s McIntires—Micum and his sons—were subsistence settlers, farmers, fishermen, hunters, loggers, etc. Micum may have also possessed craft or trade skills. He had certainly acquired skills during his 6-8 year indenture in Oyster River, and there were always opportunities for work in a frontier community. Logging and sawmill operations figured largely in the latter. So while Micum McIntire and his sons were never solely subsistence settlers, it is reasonable to assume that the economic activities necessary for survival occupied the majority of their work and time for the first two generations.

As we shall see, as the generations passed, the community of York grew, and while a subsistence economy remained necessary for many years, the viability of more specialized economic activities steadily increased. The local community and regional economy matured and the provision of the basics needed for simple survival were more assured.

To examine this fundamental aspect of the lives of our early McIntires, this and the next article will for the most part follow the men (for whom there are better records) in the first three generations of the descendants of Micum Mcintire—Micum, his three sons, and their children (Micum’s grandchildren). This does not discount the central role that women played in any family’s economic life. But there are simply fewer written records that reflect the details of the economic roles of the women in the first three generations of Micum McIntire and his descendants. 

MICUM McINTIRE

We know little (and so must speculate much) about Micum’s daily life in York, but his will provides some useful clues to how Micum spent his life, through the possessions that he had through his own efforts acquired and was able to distribute to his children. Micum’s will of April 17, 1700 does not mention his wife Dorothy, so the assumption is that she had passed on before the will was written. In fact, she may have passed in early 1700, with her death spurring Micum to write his own will.

This and other articles in this series assume that a rumored fourth son of Micum and Dorothy, named Alexander, did not in fact exist. Other sources disagree, and assert that an Alexander was born and lived for a time, possibly losing his life to accident or disease, or during the 1692 Candlemas Massacre. But there is no contemporary documentation of his existence of any kind. For the purposes of the historical record, and this or any other article in this series, Micum Mcintire had only three sons—John, Daniel, and Micum Jr.

Land, Precious Land

The first distribution of possessions in Micum’s will occurred in 1705 after his death. His will dispersed close to 200 acres of land that Micum had acquired in York and in Newichawannock (South Berwick) among his three sons—John, Daniel, and Micum. Land dictated and represented work and well as wealth—not only the work involved in acquiring land, but the work involved in managing and tending it, and thereby using and increasing its productivity and value. 

The ability of new settlers to acquire substantial grants of land during the earliest periods of settlement in frontier communities was for our Scottish prisoners of war (SPOWs) one of the most profound differences between their lives in the New World and the lives they had left behind in Scotland. In Scotland, all land was owned or controlled by the clan chiefs and nobility. Through a complex system of rights and responsibilities, regular Scots could only rent small (sometimes very small) parcels on which to locate a home, plant and tend a few crops, and keep and graze livestock. And their ability to continue to occupy any piece of land over time was dependent on their relationship with a clan chief or noble.

In the New England colonies in the mid-late 1600s, especially on the developing frontier, an average person could acquire, own, manage, control, and sell tens or even hundreds of acres of land. That was unheard-of in Scotland. For Micum and the other former Scots prisoners, it must have seemed an almost unimaginable opportunity. So one thing this article will emphasize is the central role that the acquisition of land, ownership and use of land, and transfer of land from one generation to another played in the fortunes of Micum’s family.

In his will, Micum McIntire gave his oldest son John “all my homestead, both housing and land and fencing.” It may seem strange to specifically mention fencing as property to bequeath, but if you had to make, install, and maintain any meaningful lengths of fencing—which took a lot of worked wood—to create a secure enclosure for your livestock, it became an important item of property. It was not easy to build and maintain. In the will of Alexander McIntire (Micum Jr.’s son, mentioned later in this article), Alexander directed his executor to “sell my sixty acres land I have at laboring vain to purchase boards to fence the lands I have given to Sarah,” his grand-daughter. You can’t use land for pasturage for livestock or for crops (while keeping out your neighbor’s livestock), if you can’t enclose that land.

Micum further gave John 20 acres of “wood land . . . on this [north] side the river” west of the homestead which “lyeth along the way ye goeth to Newichawannock” (Rte. 91/Cider Hill Road)—an important source of lumber and firewood. Micum gave John another 20 acres out of a 60 acre parcel on the other (south) side of the river that Micum had acquired from Alexander Mechanere (MacNair) and his father-in-law John Pierce.

Micum gave John one third (about 23 acres) out of a property of around 70 acres “at the partings or thereabouts above the Minister’s Creek.” Minister’s Creek feeds what is now known as Barrells Millpond, a bay off the north side of the York River estuary close to York Village center, almost 4 miles downstream from Micum’s home. This was a relatively large property close to (if not providing) harbor waterfront close to a developing village center—a property that would be very valuable in coming years, as the community grew. Micum was a foresighted man.

Micum made similar distributions of land to his sons Daniel and Micum Jr., both of whom seem to have already acquired land by 1700, although at the time of the writing of Micum’s will Daniel was only 16 and Micum Jr. was younger still. In addition to other specific property bequests, each received 20 acres of the 60 acre property south of the York River, and one third (23 acres) of the Minister’s Creek property near the village center.

Finally, Micum divided his properties consisting of “marsh or meadow both salt and fresh” evenly between his sons. These consisted of tracts of wet and regularly inundated meadow lands—grassy wetlands—along the York River and its tributaries. The grasses that grew in these settings provided superior feed for livestock and were as a consequence considered very valuable. 

“Cattle or Creatures”

Micum divided “all my stock of cattle or creatures” equally between his sons. We can imagine that in addition to cattle, this may have included a horse or two, as well as pigs, sheep, goats, chickens, ducks, or geese. The food provided by livestock and poultry raised for that purpose would have been supplemented by animal protein provided through fishing and shellfish gathering in the York River and in the ocean near the harbor four miles downstream. Hunting was another supplemental source of protein—deer, black bear, turkey, and waterfowl would have been common prey. Even in the 1600s, York would have been the southern end of the range of moose. Deerskins and bear pelts were valuable for trade.

The “marsh or meadow” lands were prime areas for hunting and trapping. It is possible that Micum ran one or more trap lines. In the 1670s and later there were still viable populations of beaver, otter, muskrat, fox, ‘brush wolves’ (the typical New England wolf–a mid-sized wild canid that may have been a hybrid of grey and red wolves and coyote), the much more rare catamount (Eastern puma), bobcat, otter, fisher, marten, mink, weasel, and other fur-bearing animals in York whose pelts would have been valuable trade items. We can assume that wolves, bear, puma, bobcat, and similar predators were hunted as much to protect livestock as they were for their pelts.

Iron Tools & Household Goods

In his will, Micum granted his three sons choice of the most valuable of his remaining goods according to their birth order. As the eldest, John got first choice of Micum’s “iron pots” and one of his three sets of “plow irons,” and then Daniel got to choose, and then Micum Jr. The rest of Micum’s household goods were to be distributed equally among his sons under the direction of his administrators, Samuel Donnell Esq. (lawyer) and James Plaisted. 

Note the importance placed on iron goods—one set of which plowed the land and the other of which cooked the results. Iron was an uncommon and precious material in the colonies. Its scarcity and value was one of the primary reasons that Puritan English colonial businessmen had sought to transport Scottish prisoners of war to the New World as cheap labor in the first place—to gather iron ore, to harvest the wood and produce charcoal for the forges, to smelt iron, and thereby to produce the iron implements needed by a growing colony.

So Micum McIntire’s April 1700 will tells us that he had thoughtfully and deliberately acquired land that would not only have immediate productive value as farmland or for timber or access to the river, but also in anticipation of future community development. And it tells us that he also worked as a farmer, he raised livestock, and he probably logged and fished and hunted and trapped, and did anything else he could to support his family then and into the future. 

THE SECOND GENERATION

The second generation—Micum’s three sons—lived during the period between 1677 (when John was born) and 1774 (when Daniel died).

JOHN McINTIRE

Micum’s eldest son John McIntire was born in York in 1677. John married Susannah Young about 1706, and with her had seven (7) children—Joseph (died age 23, never married), Susanna, John, Hannah, Ebenezer, Daniel, and Samuel. John seems to have built on the foundation of economic activity that his father Micum had established—farming and acquiring land.

In addition to the properties he had inherited from his father, John received several town land grants, including the maximum eight grants under a dispersal of town land in 1723. John also purchased several properties on his own including, in 1707, the land and garrison on the Alexander Maxwell property next door. The remainder of John’s acquisitions will be described under the sections for his children.

DANIEL McINTIRE

Micum Mcintire’s second son Daniel was born in 1684. Daniel never married. He is recorded in town records as being a cordwainer and a yeoman (a generalist farmer). A cordwainer was a craftsman who made new shoes and boots out of leather—not a cobbler, which was a specialized craft that focused on repairing shoes and boots.

In addition to the York properties he inherited from his father, Daniel acquired several town land grants. Although it is not specifically mentioned in his father’s will, Daniel also inherited Micum’s very first 40+ acre land grant in Berwick. Micum passed away in 1705—a year later, Daniel sold the Berwick property to Philip Hubbard, who had also acquired the adjacent land grant of SPOW James Barry. See article 16.

Daniel never married, nor had any children that we know of. When Daniel died in 1774, he had no will. His estate was administered by his nephew John McIntire Jr. (John’s third child). 

Robert Harry McIntire’s Red Book asserts that Daniel was listed on the muster roll of the York County militia under Captain John Penhallow from January 7 to November 14, 1722, during Dummer’s War. Being a member of the militia was an obligation, but it was also a familiar kind of work and source of income for anyone of Scottish ancestry, particularly the son of a former Scottish soldier.

MICUM McINTIRE JR.

Micum’s third son Micum McIntire Jr. was born after 1684 (some sources have him born in 1863). He married Jane Grant in 1708 and they had three children—Alexander, Keziah, and Mary. It is assumed that Mary died before October 21, 1743, when Micum Jr. drew up his own will, because she is not mentioned and he refers in his will to “my only and well beloved daughter Keziah.” Micum Jr. died October 21, 1775 in York.

In addition to the properties he inherited from his father, Micum McIntire Jr. obtained several town land grants and, like his older brother John, received the maximum of eight land grants under the dispersal of town land in 1723. Micum Jr. bequeathed to his wife Jane one third of his property and “moveables.” He gave Keziah 150 pounds (he had already given her an equal amount sometime prior), and the rest of his property and estate was bequeathed to his son Alexander.

Micum McIntire Jr. was listed in town documents as being an innholder, doubtless locating his establishment in one of the McIntire family homes sited along the east-west connector (Rte. 91/Cider Hill Road) between York and Newichawannock (South Berwick). Innholders usually also operated taverns or “ordinaries” which required permission from local Puritan authorities to serve alcohol.

The work lives and fortunes of the third generation of Micum McIntire’s family—the children of John McIntire and Micum McIntire Jr.—will be reviewed in the next article.