HAVERHILL UNDER ATTACK

The men in those old days...in constant dread of attacks by Indians, always...left the house before the women and children, thus making sure the safe exit of the latter. ~ Alice Morse Earle

Haverhill

Haverhill lies just inside Massachusetts below the New Hampshire border. As one of the far northern towns, the settlment saw its share of devastation during the seemingly endless wars. One particularly horrific attack happened on 15 Mar 1697 during King William's War when French soldiers, with their Algonquin and Abenaki allies, invaded the small frontier community. While only six homes were burned, 27 townspeople were killed and 13 were taken captive. Our cousin John Swan's (1C10X) future wife, Susannah Eastman Wood, lost her husband and only child in the raid.

the story of Hannah Duston

The 1697 attack on Haverhill became famous in later years because of one woman who was taken captive. Hannah Duston, with her baby only a few weeks old, was marched north into New Hampshire. While captives were important to the Natives for trading and ransom purposes, holding up the long march north would never be tolerated. Babies, in particular, were more often seen as a liability. Sometime during the trek, Hannah's child was killed.

Hannah's captors eventually left her in the care of an Abenaki family which included two men, three women and seven children. Hannah and two other captives staying with the Abenaki family were not restrained in any way. One night, as the Native family slept, Hannah and her English companions armed themselves with the Native's tomahawks and brutally killed the entire family with the exception of an older woman who managed escaped with a small boy.

The trio scalped the ten Natives they had killled, snuck away from the village and took a canoe down down the Merrimack River to Massachusetts. The scalps were then presented to the General Assembly of Massachusetts which awarded the three escapees £50.

For slaughtering a Native family with six children, Hannah Duston became an American heroine. Three statues were subsequently erected in her honor. In two of them she holds scalps, in the other one she's is holding a hatchet and pointing an accusing finger.

Hannah Duston Statue in Haverill

Hannah never wrote her own story. The story we know of her comes down from Cotton Mather who also famously wrote about the witch trials. Mather compared Hannah to the biblical heroine Jael, who saved her people by driving a spike through the head of Sisera while he slept. Mather saw the conflict between the Puritans and the indigenous people as a battle between good and evil and that is exactly how Duston’s story was told.

During and after the Civil War, the United States was in sad need of heroes. Hannah Duston fit the bill for pioneers facing the dangers of crossing the wide country. The fact that Hannah had killed six defenseless children was conveniently left out of the accounts from the 1830's on. She remained, for many years, a symbol of American valor and patriotism.

Haverhill ramps up

During Queen Anne's War which began in 1702, every town north of Wells, Maine, home of our Littlefield families, had been abandoned. That left the frontier towns of southern Maine and northern Massachusetts even more vulnerable to attack.

Red = Wells, Maine Blue = Haverhill

On 8 Feb 1702, a garrison house in Haverhill was attacked and a pregnant woman, Mrs. Bradley, taken captive. Her child, born on the journey to Canada, was killed. Mrs. Bradley was held in Quebec for three years until she was finally redeemed by her husband.

As Queen Anne's War progressed, town raids intensified. Hardest hit were southern settlements in Maine. In a particulary horrifying attack in August of 1703, 131 Maine residents were captured or killed, including Cousin Moses Littlefield's (1C11X) wife and three of his children.

Note: We wrote about the 1703 attack on Maine in our "In Maine" post.

This raid put the town of Haverhill on high alert. Recognizing the extreme threat, the Massachusetts Assembly ordered a contingent of men from Newbury to help man the garrison houses in Haverhill. The Newbury men, however, proved to be more of a liability than a benefit. Colonel Richard Saltonstall of Haverhill complained about them in a letter to Colonel Noyes of Newbury:

I received your return of ye twenty men...and when ye persons (which I can't call men) appeared...a considerable number of them to be but boys, or children and not fit for service, blind in part, and deaf, and cross-handed...the queen likes it not to be served in this manner. My heart if it speaks is full...To take boys for orriginally prest men...I know not the regularity of it.

In spite of their weak fortification, Haverhill managed to avoid any serious attack for three years. Small raids on the town took place almost every year after 1704. Then, on 29 Aug 1708, the town sustained a major assault by French and Native forces. Haverhill, not the original target, was then chosen for two key reasons. The village layout was already well known to the French from previous raids and it was a small town of only twenty-five to thirty houses. In addition, only some of the houses were fortified. In the raid, sixteen people were killed and twenty-four taken captive.

John Swan and his wife Susannah Eastman Swan

In 1699 our cousin John Swan (1C10X) married the widow Susannah Eastman Wood. Her story is well known to me because, at one time, the Eastman's were included on our family tree. Further research proved that I had gone down a rabbit hole with that one and we are not, in fact, related to the Eastmans. Susannah, however, once again joined our tree with her marriage to our cousin.

Susannah would live through three Native attacks in three different wars. In 1676, during King Philip's War, her family home was burned and her father taken captive. She was only three years old at the time. Susannah also suffered through the 1697 attack during King William's War in which Hannah Dustin was taken captive. In that raid Susannah's husband and only child were killed and some accounts say that she was taken captive. Two years later, however, she was back in Haverhill where she married Cousin John Swan. The couple would live through yet another Native attack on their town in Queen Anne's War.

George Chase in his History of Haverhill, Massachusetts recounts the Swan's story, obviously romanticized:

Two Indians attacked the house of Mr. Swan. Swan and his wife saw them appraching and determined, if possible, to save their own lives and the lives of their children, from the knives of the ruthless butchers. They immediately placed themselves against the door...The Indians rushed against it. The strength of the besiegers was greater than that of the besieged, and Mr. Swan, being rather a timid man, said our venerable narrator, almost despaired of saving himself and family and told his wife that he thought it would be better to let them in. But this resolute and courageous woman had no such idea. The Indians had now succeded in partly opening the door...The heroic wife saw that there was no time for parleying; she seized her bake spit, which was nearly three feet in length, and a deadly weapon in the hands of the woman, as it proved, and collecting all the strength she possessed, drove it through the body of the formost. This was too warm a reception for the besiegers...The two Indians thus repulsed immediately retreated and did not molest them again. Thus, by the fortitude and heoric courage of a wife and mother, this family was probaby saved from a bloody grave.

This story told by a "venerable narrator" probably has some truth to it as it was handed down mouth to mouth until it got to Mr. Chase's ears ca. 1860.

This final raid on the town might have been all Susannah could handle. Shortly afterwards the Swans removed to Stonington, CT. Connecticut had a reputation as the most Native friendly province in the colonies. At the time of the attack on Haverhill, John and Susannah had three children. They had four more children born in Stonington. John Swan died in 1743 at 75 years of age. The brave Susannah died almost thirty years later. She lived to be 100 years old.

John Swan's tankard

The Skinner Auction House had an interesting story about a silver tankard that they were auctioning off in 2015. The tankard belonged to our cousin John Swan of Haverhill. The inscription on the side reads “The Gift of John Swan who Died/May 1 1743 Æ 75 To his Son John Swan (2C9X).”

The story on the Auction House site adds: "In addition to the inscription, an early 19th century note drafted by a descendant accompanies the tankard offering some insight into the history of the Swan family." The fairly nonsensical note reads in part:

...when a Child [John Swan, Jr.] had a little drum which he beat uppon when the indians attacked the house of his father as it was the mother of my grandfather they wanted as they had murdered her first husband a taylor and one Child and they took her prisoner and kept her one year and ten months when she escaped in exchanging prisoners She came to haveril then Wido where she married this Crazy headed John Swan…

My best translation of that note is that John Swan, Jr. had a drum that he beat when the Indians attacked. "It was the mother of my grandfather they wanted" refers to the story that Hannah Eastman was taken captive when her first husband and child were killed. Since she had escaped, the Natives came to Haverhill looking to take her back. Actually, a fairly plausible story. Of course, Susannah foiled them with the "bake spit."

That a descendent would call Cousin John Swan "Crazy headed" also makes s lot of sense. He was the son of that "crazy headed" Uncle Robert Swan (9U) from that crazy Swan family we wrote about in our post The Black Swans.

Cousin Samuel Ayer

Samuel Ayer (1C10X) was the son of Robert Ayer and our aunt Elizabeth Palmer (9A). At the time of the 1708 attack on Haverhill, Cousin Samuel was fifty-four years old and held the rank of captain. A well respected man around town, Samuel had served in King Philip's war and was town constable in 1689. His name also appears in the list of “snow-shoe men” headed by our cousin Robert Richardson (3C8X). In his capacity as constable during King William's War, Samuel responded to a citation issued to the town of Haverhill by the General Court for "withholding the one-half of their proportion of rates:"

I pray you consider our poor condition. There are many that have not corn to pay their rates, more which have not money; to strain I know not what to take: we are a great way from any market, to make money of anigh thing we have: and now there is not anigh way to transport to other places: I pray consider our poor condition.

Samuel was commander of one of the town garrison houses during the 1708 attack on Haverhill. He was among a troop of men that decided to give chase to the French and Natives who had taken some of their neighbors captive.

George Chase gives another idealized account of Samuel's part in that event:

Captain Samuel Ayer, a fearless man and of great strength collected a body of about twenty men, and pursued the retreating foe. He came up with them just as they were entering the woods, when they faced about, and though they numbered thirteen or more to one, still Capt. Ayer did not hesitate to give them battle. These gallant men were soon reinforced by another party, under the command of his son: and after a severe skirmish which lasted about an hour, they retook some of the prisoners, and the enemy precipitately retreated, leaving nine of their number dead. Capt. Ayer was slain before the reinforcement arrived. He was shot in the groin, and being a large, robust man, bled profusely. When his son arrived, he was told that his father was killed, and the informant pointed him out. He looked at the corpse awhile, as it lay on the grass, all covered with blood, and told his informant that that person could not be his father, for he (meaning the person slain) had on a pair of red breeches.

Cousin Samuel was indeed killed on that battlefield. Chase also reports that Capt. Ayer “was one of the most worthy, active and intelligent citizens of the town.”

final notes on the attack

One of the sixteen slain in the raid on Haverhill was our uncle John Dalton (8U). John was only fifteen when his father Samuel Dalton (9GGF) died in 1681 in Hampton NH. When her husband died, Grandma Mehitable Palmer Dalton (9GGM) took her children, Samuel among them, back to her hometown of Haverhill. I can find no other information on Samuel's death and don't know whether he died in the attack or in the battle.

That New England and the surrounding area was still a small world can be gleaned from a story recounted by George Chase in his History of Haverhill. Chase writes of a Haverhill man, Joseph Bartlett, who was taken captive in the 1708 raid. On their journey, north Bartlett's group was "hard up for food and met up with other Natives who gave them some corn and pumpkins. With them was an Englishmen named Littlefield taken from Wells. The Natives had shaved the hair from one side of his head, greased the other and painted his face. He was redeemed but was subsequently killed by Indians in 1612 in his fields." The Littlefied that Bartlett met on the road was our cousin Josiah Littlefield (1C11X) who had been captured a second time while returning home from his first capture. We wrote about Cousin Josiah in our "Woe's of Josiah Littlefield" post.