by Jonathan Tucker

Coming Home

As the 1660s progressed, the former Scottish prisoners in this region of northern New England had completed their indentures, accumulated some income (and possibly land), and they were looking for places to obtain land grants and settle.  A number of them, including Robert Junkins, Alexander Maxwell (who had been at Great Works), John Carmichael (a Worcester prisoner), Andrew Rankin, Alexander Machanere (MacNair)—a distant cousin of Micum’s—and others obtained land grants in nearby York, Maine, along the upper reaches of the York River.  Alexander Maxwell was probably first, obtaining land in York in 1656, before his indenture in Newichawannock had ended.

By 1668, Micum obtained his first land grant in York, on the south side of the York River near the properties of his fellow Scots.  The Scottish enclave soon came to be known, then and now, as the Scotland District of York.  In 1668, it had been 18 years since Micum and his brothers had left Scotland in chains as prisoners.

On June 22, 1670, Micum purchased another 40- 42 acres of “upland and meadow land” (‘meadow” meaning tidal marsh land capable of growing salt marsh hay—preferred for livestock) on the north side of the York River.  It lay “on the south west side of Mr. Dummer’s cove neare to the Parting of the River.”   Micum bought the land from early English settler John Pierce, a fisherman who was friendly with the Scots.  Pierce had purchased the land from Richard Burgess.  From this area near the end of the tidal reach of the York River, Micum had access to the uplands and the waterway, and he could travel by boat downriver to York Village and fish or trade as needed.  With help from friends, he acquired other land grants and purchased other properties as the years passed.

A Wife and a Home

There is no documented evidence that Micum built a home in York soon after arriving.  As he had done in Newichawannock, Micum may have instead boarded with either Alexander Maxwell, who lived nearby, or with Alexander Mechanere (MacNair) and Alexander’s wife Dorothy Pierce (daughter of John Pierce).  It has been asserted that Alexander may have been a distant cousin of Micum’s.  Alexander MacNair was sickly and disabled, and he died just prior to December 1670.

On September 4, 1671, Micum’s marriage to Dorothy Pierce, the widow of his cousin, Alexander Mackanere, was registered in nearby Dover, NH.  Alexander Machanere had built (probably with help) the cabin in which he and Dorothy had lived on land owned by Alexander Maxwell.  On the same day, September 4, 1671, Alexander Maxwell deeded to “Michum Mackintire . . . upland whereon the said MacKentyre’s house now standeth, formerly built by his predecessor, Alexander Mackanere, whose relict or Widow hee [Micum] since married.”  A handsome wedding present.  [And yes, whichever English clerk was writing out the deed spelled Micum’s last name two different ways in the same document.]

A new life and family had begun in York.  Micum and Dorothy had three sons we can document—John, Daniel, and Micum (Jr.).  A fourth son, Alexander, has been speculated, but cannot be verified.  More about Alexander in Chapter 15.

Micum and Dorothy’s new home in a Scottish settlement in western York was part of a landscape filled with violent conflict—late 17^th century York was on the front lines of a hotly-contested frontier.  As English settlements expanded, tensions between the new settlers and displaced resident Native Americans came to a head.  In addition to local conflicts with Native Americans, there were regional conflicts like King Philip’s War (1675-77) and the several French and Indian Wars, which during Micum’s life waxed and waned as part of the colonial struggles between England and France.  York was subject to periodic attacks by Native American raiding parties, mostly Algonkian-speaking members of the Abenaki confederation, spurred on by French Jesuit provocateurs trying to drive out the Puritan (Protestant) English settlements.

The Scots captured at the battles of Dunbar and Worcester were known as fighting men and, as Gaelic-speaking Scots, were considered by the English to be a separate, inferior race, and therefore expendable.  Scots like Micum and his fellow former prisoners were encouraged to seek land grants on the frontier, where they could serve as a buffer between the hostile French and Indian forces and the mostly English settlements further south.  The pattern of settling Scots as a frontier buffer was repeated elsewhere in the New World colonies, including in New Jersey and the Carolinas.

“They Got Up A Spree”

One tale (tall or not) reveals how the echo of Dunbar and the Highland warrior legacy remained a part of Micum’s life.

It was a 3-4 mile walk downriver along the cart trail from Scotland Parish to the First Parish Church in York Village, but Puritan church leaders mandated regular church attendance on Sundays.  York may have been on the frontier, but lack of attendance at church was still a crime.  The York Scots—including Alexander Mackanere and Dorothy Pierce—more than once paid fines for missing the services.

After the interminable four hour Puritan services ended, the more leisurely afternoon walk or ride along the trail back upriver became an occasion for the kinds of recreation more native to Scotland than staid Puritan New England.  Homemade hard cider (a hill along the way is called “Cider Hill”) and other potables were passed around.  Gaelic songs and wordplay, filled with jests and playful insults, washed away the pinched and hardbitten sounds of Puritan sermonizing.  Playful insults turned to mock challenges and rough-housing.  And, sometimes, rough-housing among inebriated former warriors turned into full-blown rows.  York historians have said, “the MacIntire is a peaceable fellow, but beware how you start the Scotch blood.”

In the family history of Abraham Preble of York, there is preserved a stanza of rhyme about one such pitched battle:

            And there stood Micum McIntire

            With his great foot and hand

            He kicked and cuffed Sam Treathy so,

            He could neither go nor stand.

Despite the 19^th century Colonial Revival habit of outright historical invention, Sam Treathy was a real person—a local sailor, and the brother of a woman who married Dunbar Scot Thomas Doughty.  Micum and Sam Treathy would have known each other.  The Preble history also refers to the men in Micum’s family as “veritable sons of Anak” (a Biblical giant), meaning that they were big, powerful man.  Family legend has it that Micum stood more than six feet tall—a large man for his day.  Other sources indicate that many MacIntyres have historically been physically large, perhaps a legacy of their blended Dalriadan (Irish Celtic, Viking, and Pictish) heritage.  On a contested frontier, this would have been useful. 

Conflict with Native Americans

King Philip’s War (1675-1677)

During this first region-wide conflict, York and nearby Wells and Kittery were attacked several times, mostly in hit-and-run skirmishes and raids.  On April 7, 1677, John Carmichael, former Worcester prisoner and husband of Dorothy’s sister Ann Pierce, was one of seven (7) York men killed by a raiding party while the men were preparing their fields for planting.  Former Dunbar prisoner Andrew Rankin was also killed there.  That fall, Micum served as the administrator for John Carmichael’s estate.

King William’s War (1689-97)

This conflict began in 1689 with several concentrated attacks on settlements in Maine by the French and their Indian allies.  On March 18, 1689, Newichawannock (South Berwick), where Micum had lived and worked before coming to York, was overrun and destroyed.  During the summer of 1690, there were several raids in which York settlers were killed.

By 1691, only the settlements of Wells, York, Appledore, and Kittery remained under British colonial control.  Life on the frontier was precarious and tense.

York 1692 – The Candlemas Massacre

On the evening of January 23, 1692, a raiding party of about 150 New England and Canadian Abenaki (Penobscot) warriors camped at the foot of Mount Agamenticus near the headwaters of the York River, about three miles north of Micum’s home.  In the chill dawn of Candlemas, January 24, 1692, the warriors, leaving their spare snowshoes stacked against a large rock, began a silent approach eastward down frozen stream beds toward York Village center.  The raiding party first encountered and captured three young men out checking their trap lines.  After questioning them, they killed two and left the third bound to pick up later as a hostage.  The Abenaki raiding party burst into the center of the village at about 10 o’clock in the morning, and began to burn and kill their way through York.

Many York settlers, including Micum, his wife Dorothy, and their children, took shelter in the fortified garrison houses in York and tried to fight off any Abenaki who attempted to take the buildings.  Accurate figures are hard to obtain, but by the end of the raid about 48 English and Scots settlers had been killed and about 80 taken captive to Canada as hostages to be ransomed.  Among the dead were Dorothy’s parents, John and Phoebe Pierce, the local minister, and many other colonists.

At the end of the raid, of the several fortified garrison houses in York, only three had not been burned or taken.  Two were in York Village itself.  The other was the Scotland Garrison, whose ownership is not clear, defended by Micum and his fellow Dunbar Scots—most of whom were by then in their late 50s, 60s, and even early 70s.  Micum himself was 66-67 years old.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

At this point, I must ask the readers’ indulgence in allowing me a departure from more completely verified history in favor of a brief and completely fanciful vision of the Scotland Garrison on that day.  These older Scottish men had spent decades in a strange land, working under often dangerous frontier conditions, laboring under the strict (and probably deeply boring) rule of a Puritan theocracy.  Through their own long labor and effort, they had built homes and lives and families.  Raised as farmers and woodcutters and fishermen, they knew how to work.  But as 17^th century Scots, they had also been raised as warriors, both to defend clan territories and as potential foreign mercenaries, a common occupation for Highland men since the 1200s.  They were all former soldiers.  Armed conflict was not new to them.  Many of the Puritan English settlers in York, had also been former soldiers, under Cromwell.

On that midwinter’s day, probably alerted by runners from the village, these older men were well-worn but still hale and vigorous.  Dressed in wool and rough homespun, they hurried with their families into the Scotland Garrison nearby.  We presume that the garrison was set on the hillside north of Cider Hill Road, above the river.  The land around the garrison had been cleared of trees for pasturage and meadow—it provided a long view in all directions.  Twenty years of past raids had prepared everyone for this day.  This was not the first time they had all sought this fortified shelter during alarms.

The men hauled the last of their extra provisions inside, set sentries outside, and pulled and bolted most of the shutters to seal up the building.  Some of the older children—Micum’s oldest son, John, would have been 15—were handed weapons whose use they had been trained in from childhood.  The women dressed and banked fires in every fireplace, set up a kitchen, water barrels, and stored provisions.  They made sleeping arrangements and prepared medical supplies—all with varying degrees of practiced calm and resignation.  Small children and livestock contributed to the background noise in the crowded garrison.

The men loaded and checked their weapons and set them near windows within easy reach.  They gathered in one of the downstairs rooms and began to discuss tactics, preparing once more to defend everything in life that mattered to them. But as they met one another’s eyes, the tactical conversation began to falter, and, one by one, these older former warriors grew quiet, looking at each other.  And then, from one face to another, a fierce grin started and spread.  Finally, another chance to once again be a central part of who they really were.  You can almost feel sorry for the Abenaki.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

On July 18, 1694, the settlement at Oyster River—Micum’s first ‘home’ in New England—was completely overrun and destroyed, with between 45 and 104 settlers killed and dozens of others taken away as captives to be ransomed.  A month later, on August 20, 1694, fellow Scot Daniel Livingston, who had moved to York around 1666 from Braintree, Massachusetts with his wife, widow Joanna Downham Pray and her three youngest children, was killed in Scotland Parish near Micum’s home and the garrison.

The deaths of John and Phoebe Pierce during the 1692 Candlemas raid had created a need to resolve their estate between the husbands of John’s daughters, Dorothy and Ann.  Ann Pierce, widow of Worcester Scot John Carmichael (killed in 1677), had subsequently married John Bracey, a tailor and a “turbulent” fellow who was frequently in trouble with the law.   Between 1673 and 1698, Bracey was accused before Puritan authorities of, in order—stealing nails, shooting someone else’s hog, “casting several reflecting speeches on the Reverend Mr. Drummer,” being a “common liar,” and cursing in public.  For that last offense, Bracey spent three hours in the stocks in York Village center.  In April 1697—five years after the Candlemas Massacre and the deaths of John and Phoebe Pierce—Micum and John Bracey finally reached an agreement to simply divide the Pierces’ estate equally.

In the midst of the constant threat of raids, life in York went on, and Micum and his family continued to prosper in York.  He worked as a subsistence farmer, fisherman, and woodcutter, and accumulated still more land.  His children grew.

Dorothy preceded Micum in death, probably in early 1700.  Her death may have prompted Micum to write his own will, dated April 17, 1700.  He divided his estate among his three sons, and named his “true and trusty friends” Samuel Donnell and James Plaisted as the “overseers” (executors) of his will.

Queen Anne’s War (1702–13)

York suffered another raid in August 1703, sometimes named the Barrett Massacre for the family worst hit.  Most of the family of settler Arthur Bragdon were also killed.  On April 25, 1704, two men travelling in Wells were killed and another captured.  In the spring of 1705, five settlers were killed in Kittery.

Sometime in the weeks before October 2, 1705 (when his will was probated), at about the age of 80, Micum McIntire passed on, in his own bed, in his own home, on his own land, with his three sons by his side.  John was 23, Daniel was 16, and Micum Jr. was still a child.  Micum had lived a life filled with war and loss and upheaval and change.  But it had been a fulfilling life.  He had made a real home and a family.  He had assured his children’s futures and had shown them how to prosper “Per Ardua”—through difficulty.  He had achieved things he could never have dreamed of in Scotland.

After their father passed, first John McIntire and then Micum Jr. married and had children, who in turn had children, who themselves had children.  Micum’s descendants are very numerous.