By Jonathan Tucker

Where Did Micum McIntire Live?

The structure most often associated with Micum McIntire and his descendants is the Maxwell-McIntire Garrison located on Route 91 (Cider Hill Road) in Scotland District.  It has survived to the present day, against all odds, thanks to the careful stewardship of the McIntires and Davises who have owned the land since 1707.  

A great deal has been written about this remarkable building, and pictures of it are common and readily available online.  It was occupied continuously by Micum’s descendants in York from 1712 until the last quarter of the 1800s.  As a result, many of Micum’s descendants assume that the garrison was Micum’s home.  But it wasn’t.

The property of the Maxwell-McIntire Garrison was acquired by Micum’s oldest son John sometime in 1707-1711 (no deed of that transfer survives), about two years after Micum’s death in 1705.  Recent dendrochronological analysis of the Garrison’s white pine and oak timbers indicates that they were first cut 1712-1713, which means that John McIntire would have built the Garrison as a fortified residence sometime around 1713-1715.  Micum McIntire never lived at the Garrison.  It is possible that when Micum first arrived in York around 1668-1670, he may have boarded with—fellow former Dunbar prisoner Alexander Maxwell or with his putative cousin, Alexander Mechanere (MacNair). Micum first moved to York from South Berwick, where he had been working at the Salmon Falls mill. It was common for the former Scots prisoners to board with one another, as part of a mutually supportive community.

So where did Micum live most of his life in Scotland District, if not at the Garrison?  Parts of the answer are sitting in plain sight in the Red Book if we follow the track of Micum’s life in York. Sometime after December 1670, probably in late summer 1671, Micum married Dorothy Pierce, following the death of her first husband (claimed to be Micum’s distant cousin) Alexander Mechanere (MacNair). The next fall, in September 1671, Alexander Maxwell granted MacNair’s house and house lot (which apparently Maxwell had owned all along) to Micum and Dorothy, perhaps as a kind of wedding present.  Micum and Dorothy thereafter lived out their lives in the house that Micum’s cousin, Alexander MacNair, had built.

A Simpler, Cruder Structure

MacNair’s house would have been a simpler, rougher building than the Garrison, probably not more than a single story structure with a possible internal loft. This is likely not only because York in the 1660s and 1670s was the frontier, and first homes were often quickly built, crude structures.  It is also likely because In transferring the property later, Alexander Maxwell said that Alexander MacNair had built the house. MacNair was to some extent disabled by illness and/or injury. We don’t know if that illness or injury had been caused during the battle of Dunbar, or during the long death march down into England that followed, or as a result of his incarceration in the disease-filled cathedral at Durham, or because of the Nov./Dec. 1650 winter crossing of the Unity, or from trials he had suffered in the New World. But Alexander MacNair was disabled and probably to an extent a ward of his Scottish community. Local court records regarding his and Dorothy’s absence from “publique meeting in the Lord’s days” (i.e., not attending church) state that Alexander was acquitted “by reason of his weakeness and lameness.”

Yet in transferring the homestead property to Micum and Dorothy and Micum in the fall of 1671, Alexander Maxwell described the property as “Upland whereon the said Mackentyre’s house now standeth” and the house itself as “formerly built by his (Micum’s) predecessor, Allexander Machenere.” Given the times and the ample evidence of MacNair’s illness/disability, it is unlikely that MacNair would—even with assistance from his community–have built a grand structure. So we can with some assurance assume that it was a fairly simple but functional frontier cabin that Micum inherited from his cousin after Alexander MacNair died in late 1670.

Where Was It?

Okay, but WHERE was MacNair’s house located? From all indications, MacNair’s house and lot was located on the south side of the Cider Hill Road, adjoining Maxwell’s property and not far from the Garrison. In the Red Book’s discussion of the Garrison (pp. 12-15), there is a mention of the original McIntire homestead.  In discussing John McIntire’s June 1707 acquisition of 3 acres of land around and next to the Garrison (before he acquired the Garrison itself) it is noted that “This property [the 3 acres] ADJOINED the McIntire home lot. . . .”

So the original McIntire homestead—Micum and Dorothy’s home—was not the Garrison and their original homestead lot adjoined the Garrison property at the time.

The Mapped Evidence – There are numerous historical maps available to review in a search for the original McIntire homestead. They include:

1794 – David Sewall map

1854 – York County atlas

1865 – York County atlas

1872 – York County atlas

1893 – USGS topographic map

1917 – USGS topographic map

1920 – USGS topographic map

1956 – USGS topographic map.

All of these maps are online, but not all can be copied. The information these maps provide is suggestive, but because of the failings of early mapping, they do not definitively answer the question we are asking. Early maps and atlas maps did not indicate outbuildings or derelict, unoccupied buildings, and their display of scale and distance cannot be counted on as accurate. They are at best rough indications. Their purpose was in large part to identify who owned an occupied residence (whether occupied by its owner or someone else) or commercial or public structure.  It is also likely that the original McIntire home (MacNair’s home), as a smaller, cruder structure built in the 1660s, became derelict and unused sooner, and may have rarely if at all appeared on the maps of the time.

The Current Candidates

There have been several potential candidates for the location of the original McIntire homestead in which Micum and Dorothy lived.  All are located on the south side of Cider Hill Road, overlooking the upper reaches of the York River, which is where the McIntire homestead property (now mostly owned by the York Land Trust) was located.  All are part of larger McIntire properties that once abutted the property of the Garrison.  New information has sharply reduced the number of potential sites and has focused attention on the original five-acre McIntire property ‘inherited’ from Alexander Mechanere (MacNair) and gifted to Micum and Dorothy by Alexander Maxwell in September 1671.

The Original Property Site

The original McIntire property, as identified in the York records, is an approximately five-acre property (see below) currently owned by the York Trust.  It runs uphill from the north shore of the York River through a treed boundary to a point just north of the current location of the McIntire cemetery (the small open square within the property) and downhill of the old Reverend Joseph Moody house.  Its western boundary runs roughly due south-southeast downhill from the yellow Victorian farmhouse originally built by John Randolph McIntire in the early 1870s.

There is a slight flattening of the land in the field just west of the McIntire cemetery, and a more pronounced level plateau in the lower lefthand corner of the property close to the river, elevated well above tidal and flood levels.  Both (shown by arrows) are potential sites for the cabin of Alexander Mechanere (MacNair) and subsequently that of Micum and Dorothy.  The map illustration above is taken from a presentation by professor Emerson Baker.  We are anticipating that additional site analysis, including more detailed LIDAR-measured topography, may provide us with a better siting.

The initial work by the archeological team working on the joint Landscapes of Indenture project, conducted by personnel from New England institutions and archeologists from the University of Durham, England noted an interesting pattern with the original home sites of Dunbar and Worcester prisoners.  All had located their family cemeteries, often quite small and rudimentary, within a stone’s throw of the homesteads themselves.  So the proximity of the McIntire cemetery, assuming it is of ancient vintage, which the number of simple fieldstone markers seem to indicate, would tend to support this area as a likely location for Micum’s home.

More information as it becomes available.