Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [78]
By the 1830s, Stoneham was a town of subsistence farms and sawmills. There was not a brook in the area that did not have at least one sawmill on it, and its abundance of white and red oak made it a source of staves for the manufacture of wood barrels. Stoneham’s staves, the beveled pieces of wood that formed the sides of the barrels, traveled by wagon to Portland and then by schooner to Cuba and the West Indies, where they were assembled into barrels and filled with molasses and rum. The staves were temporarily assembled into barrels in Stoneham to assure their eventual watertightness, and then broken down and packaged into shooks that took up less space in shipping—in the local vernacular, the staves were “all shook up.”
There was a sheep and wool boom occurring then, and much of the land in Stoneham and throughout northern New England was sheep pasture. Up to eight thousand sheep a day from Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont arrived at the Boston stockyards, herded along the roads from backcountry farms. The wool was turned into cloth at mills along the major rivers, or at home on spinning wheels.
In 1847, Joseph, then sixty-nine years old, sold his farm to his son William for a thousand dollars and the promise that William would provide “good suitable support” for his father and mother until their deaths. In the 1860 census, Joseph was still alive, at eighty-three, and so was Mary, at eighty. By then they lived with their grandson Joseph Jr., and there were four Adams households in the intervale, probably all of them carved from the original purchase and all of them within a rifle shot of the place where my cabin would eventually be built. In those four households, there were twenty-five people with the surname Adams. In one of those households there were two young Adams brothers—Hosea, fourteen, and Albion, seventeen. They had about the same age spread as Paul and I.
Hosea (as his military record would soon indicate) was five feet, eight inches tall, with dark eyes and dark hair. Albion was taller, a six-footer, with hazel eyes and sandy hair. They lived in the home of Sylvester Adams, another one of Joseph’s grandchildren, but they could not have been Sylvester’s sons because Sylvester was only thirty years old in 1860. My guess is that they were Sylvester’s nephews or cousins and Sylvester had taken them in because a brother or uncle (also in the intervale) had been unable to care for them. The moving around of children among an extended family was not unusual in those days. Families took in other family members’ children in hard times. There was no alternative but destitution. Besides, Hosea and Albion would have been welcome hands around Sylvester’s farm, strong boys with strong backs. Sylvester appears to have been unmarried at the time, with no children, and he was living with his mother, Sally.
The nullification tremors crested on April 12, 1861. With seven states already having declared their secession from the Union, forces of the breakaway Confederacy attacked U.S. troops at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. President Lincoln called for volunteers to put down the rebellion. Albion enlisted in October 1861. The corn at his uncle’s farm would have been harvested by then, and only the gourds would have been left in the stubble fields. When Albion struck off that fall and made his way past Little Pond and the knob and hillside on the way to Norway, and then down to the coast and Cape Elizabeth, where his regiment would muster, the poplar trees would have already turned gold and the bears in the mountains would have been actively foraging in preparation for winter. Maybe one or two would have visited the Adams’ chicken house. Surely, the mountain ash was ablaze with its fiery red berries.
Albion’s regiment, the 12th Maine Infantry, gathered at Fort Preble on Casco Bay before departing