In Search of Mary Beebe

I became a genealogist-cum-historian about 15 years ago by my 88-year-old great-aunt who had several ancestral lines on the go. But she was far more interested in painting historical pictures and personal stories than in documenting who begat whom and the stories took flesh.

Of the several intriguing ancestral possibilities, Mary Secord Beebe was the most fascinating. An ordinary woman who could neither read nor write, she embodies the migrations, violence, and upheaval that characterized colonial Canada. Living to be at least 100 years old, she survived three husbands, a multitude of epidemics, the American Revolution, a land-dispute war, a wilderness march with six children under fifteen, refugee camp, and resettlement. This is her story.

Mary’s great-grandfather was Ambroise Sicard, a salt farmer near La Rochelle, a port on France’s Bay of Biscay. A Huguenot, he enjoyed the religious freedom guaranteed to Protestants by the 1598 Edict of Nantes, which ended religious persecution at the time of the Reformation.

In 1685, during a period of political instability, Louis XIV revoked the edict in an attempt to unify the country under one religion. Refusing to sign an allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church, some 400,000 Huguenots fled France, Ambroise Sicard among them. He sought sanctuary first in England; then, under the sponsorship of a London church that considered his family “persons of middle quality” sailed to the New World.

By 1689, Ambroise and other Huguenots founded New Rochelle, now a bedroom community of New York City. That same year, he appeared on the census (age 67), and pledged allegiance to England; and England and France went to war. Colonial life reflected the enmity between the two countries with newspaper reports critical of all things French. Around 1709, according to New Rochelle records, the Sicards became Anglicans.

By the time Marie Sicard was born in 1736, the eighth of eleven children, the family name changed to Secord. Two years later, town records were in English, Marie became Mary, and by 1790 no French was spoken.In these early years, New Rochelle and its inhabitants prospered. Ambroise had purchased ninety-five acres a few years after arriving, and in 1701 his will made provision for a sixteen-by-twenty-eight-foot wood-and-stone gable house that still stands.

Sarah Kimble Knight, a New Englander who traveled through New Rochelle in 1704, wrote that it was “a very pretty place well compact and good handsome houses, clean, good passable roads, and situated on a Navigable River, abundance of land well fined and cleared."

As was common, Mary was a young bride. At twenty, she married John Crookston, the son of an English émigré living in Eastchester, five kilometres from New Rochelle. It was 1756, the beginning of the Seven Years’ War, the final act in a long-running worldwide imperial struggle between England and France that had started in 1689.

The hostilities in North America – called the French and Indian Wars by American historians – began two years earlier, in 1754, in southwestern Pennsylvania’s Ohio Valley. There, twenty-two-year-old George Washington was forced to accept a humiliating surrender after ambushing a small French detachment. Alarmed at French activity at their back door, the British ordered two regiments to America, and began raising colonial regiments. Among those colonials who died fighting was 23-year-old John Crookston, leaving behind Mary and their infant son, John.

Two years later, Mary, a twenty-four-year-old war widow and mother, was poised to marry twenty-two-year-old Joshua Beebe, a Connecticut Yankee.

How they met is a mystery. He wasn't a soldier though his family name peppers the musters. And he lived 160 kilometres away from Eastchester in Ashford, Connecticut, a long journey in eighteenth-century terms. But family ties and the push for land may explain it. The Beebes were a large Connecticut family and had spread into New York. Joshua’s cousin Ephraim Beebe, for example, lived in Cortland County, New York. So did Mary’s brother Daniel. Joshua’s uncle Richard Brockway was one of the first men in the Susquehanna Land Company, which in 1753 purchased land from the Six Nations in the Wyoming Valley, on the north branch of the Susquehanna River, in northeastern Pennsylvania. The same company also lured Mary’s older brothers Peter, John James, and Daniel Secord.

The Seven Years’ War continued. Quebec fell to the English in 1759. The next year, the French formally surrendered in Montreal. 1763 saw the end of war and British control of North America official under the Treaty of Paris.

Mary and Joshua rode out the war in Connecticut. Their first child, Adin, was born in 1761. The next two, Secord and Charlotte, were born in 1764 and 1767 respectively. However, sometime before the 1769 birth of their fourth child, Amasa, the family joined the others moving to the Pennsylvania frontier.

The population of the American colonies was exploding and the Pennsylvania frontier was proving irresistible to land-hungry colonists. But both Connecticut and Pennsylvania claimed land along the Susquehanna due to charters granted simultaneously by Charles II in the 1660s.

When the Connecticut settlers arrived in 1762, Six Nations natives drove them out. Undaunted, the pioneers returned in February 1769, Joshua and Mary Beebe among them, todiscover Pennsylvania settlers had already moved in. Predictably, violence broke out, marking the beginning of the first Pennamite War, which lasted until 1772.

The Beebes’ exact whereabouts in this period are difficult to determine. Records show that two children were born at York. So perhaps they stayed in that town while Joshua cleared some land and built a log cabin fartherup the river. Tax lists from 1776 and 1777, farther up the Susquehanna, in northern Pennsylvania, in the Wyoming Valley, include Joshua Beebe. As well, two more children born to Mary are recorded atSusquehanna.

A letter, dated 1871, from John Secord Beebe of Quebec to William Beebe of Nebraska supports this: The Secords with your grandfather Beebe moved to the Susquehanna some fiew years before the revolution they had located themselfes on the river just where the river after winding throug the mountains came into a flat country called Wyoming leading down to the Chesapeak Bay. they wher amongst the first that settled on the [illegible word] lands amongst the mountains, one of there farms was the first as they came to the mout that is to say the country was flat or more level from that toward the Chesapeak each one of the four of them had taken as heads of family one of those [illegible word] flats being “A large flat on one side and mountainson the other, opposite your grandfathers farm in the river was an islan by some Called long Island whilst others called it Peach Island owing to A quantity of Peach trees growing on it."

This mythical island could be anywhere since the Susquehanna is so wide in places there's room for long narrow fertile islands. There is one near the present town of Towanda, though nobody knows whether it was ever called either Long Island or Peach Island.

Wherever they were, the Beebes experienced only a brief period of peace. The second Pennamite war had erupted in the frontier lands by 1773 and the revolution brewed in the east as early as 1774.

The Seven Years' War, largely fought by and paid for by the colonists, accomplished two things. It gave colonists a taste of independence and a sense of ownership of their youngcountry, plus they saw the fertile lands tantalizingly beyond reach in the frontier. Further, they bitterly resented Parliament's order to pay taxes for which they were not represented, and to refrain from exploiting frontier lands in respect of aboriginal claims.

In April 1775, war between Britain and its American colonies began with a skirmish at Lexington, Massachusetts. In July 1776, the American colonies declared themselves an independent nation. New England troops moved into the frontier, forcing settlers to sign the Articles of Association against the British government, persecuting those who refused.

The Beebes appear to have made an early choice to remain loyal to the Crown. Records from April 1777 show Joshua and his sixteen-year-old son Adin enlisting in Butler’s Rangers, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel John Butler, and by June, father and son were drawing four shillings a day army pay.

The Rangers headquartered at Niagara but set up temporary encampments in the frontier, for easier access to the hotbed of military action in the New York and Pennsylvania frontier. Mary’s family was in the centre of it.

In May 1777, Sir Guy Carleton, governor at Quebec, eager to maintain the allegiance of the Six Nations, ordered the invasion of the colony of New York where settlers were burningMohawk villages and taking the land. In August, the rangers left their headquarters in Niagara in pairs – one ranger and one Indian scout – surprising rebel troops at Fort Stanwix, east of present-day Syracuse, and decimating their army.Two months later, Britain's fortunes plunged. General John Burgoyne, marching south from Quebec to sever New England from the other colonies, was forced to surrender at Saratoga, New York.

Preparing for the worst, Butler arranged to have the Susquehanna settlers’ cattle driven north to Niagara to supply the garrison. He despatched a ranger party from Oswego, led by Mary’s older brother James, to Susquehanna. The rangers were attacked, and thirty were captured, while the rest fled for the Wyoming valley homes, probably Joshua and Adin among them.

Meanwhile, many from the Wyoming Colony had already escaped northwards. In 1777, refugees arrived in Niagara with letters from seventy Susquehanna inhabitants, all being pestered by rebels and all wanting to enlist with Butler’s Rangers.

In an 1861 letter to Dr. Egerton Ryerson, Elizabeth Bowman Spohn describes the experience of her grandparents, the Bowmans who were neighbours of the Beebes: my grandmother … suffered so much through want and anxiety … in the fall the commander of the British forces at Niagara, … brought in five families: the Nellises, Secords, Youngs, Bucks, and our own family (Bowman), five women and thirty-one children, and only one pair of shoes among them all. Mary Secord Beebe was not among the earliest arrivals.

Though rebel persecution escalated and many settlers were captured or driven from their homes in the winter of 1778, Mary appears not to have left her Wyoming Valley home until the late spring of that year. Her United Empire Loyalist land claim states “corn, turnups [sic], potatoes and wheat” were left in the field – crops ready for harvest in late May or June. She left behind: 300 acors of land on grants but not paid for; 9 acors cleared and fenced with logg house 43; stable, 2 large corn cribs; 2 cows and 2 heffers; 10 hogs large and small; 20 pound lining yarn; 1 crop of flax flock 1 acor; all the crop left on the ground wheat, corn potatoes and turnups; plow irons 2 logg chains sett Iron torcien; 1 ax 4 haws hand saw 1 Atchet 2 iron potts; 1 tramil pails tubs and other furniture; 1 rifle copper tea kettle; 1 large dish basin and tin plates; 2 pewter tea potts; hooking yarn; churn.

Fighting in the Susquehanna intensified. That May, Butler left Niagara to headquarter at Unadilla, New York, to more easily attack rebel forts in the Wyoming Valley. By the end of June, he was well down the river’s north branch to Tioga Point, near present-day Athens, Pennsylvania.The 1871 letter suggests the same, describing the Beebes "on there march up the river on there way to Canada they came to A place called Tioga Point being a point of land formed by another river coming into the main river. there they encamped for several days there your grandfather bade his wife and family farewel, bound to N. Y. on business of importance from which he never returned. there also was your father born 3 or 4 days after his father left. "

Tioga Point was where Mary’s brother John Secord had large land holdings, and was, according to Cruikshank'sbook, where the Rangers had an encampment. So it was a logical place for Joshua to leave his family in safety and return to his station. Their last child, Joshua Jr., was indeed born there on July 1.

But Joshua Sr. was not heading to New York as the letter suggests. On July 2, the Rangers descended the Susquehanna in boats and rafts, landing a few miles above Forty Fort, at Wyoming, where a major rebel force was holding out. After a fierce battle, the rebels surrendered. It wasn't until three months later that Joshua was on his way to New York. There he died of smallpox while carrying a message. Meanwhile the family would have headed to Niagara, along with hundreds of other refugees in the wake of George Washington’s 1779 sweep through central New York, burning villages and destroying crops.

It was a terrible year. British supply ships were blocked on the lake – only one got through in November – and the refugees were starving. A pitiful corn harvest provided no relief, and a group left for refugee camps near Montreal to reduce consumption at the fort, most likely Mary among them. It was a good thing – conditions at the fort worsened. The winter of 1779-80 was one of the coldest on record. Entire native families living outside the garrison walls froze to death in their lean-tos and those inside the garrison didn’t fare much better.

The next evidence of Mary is in 1781 at the Machiche refugee camp, near Trois Rivieres north of Montreal. She married Christopher Pearson, the camp rations officer and former Susquehanna neighbour, had her children baptized, and, over the five or six years there, grew in reputation as an excellent midwife and seamstress, helping to supplement her family income.

But by 1783, Machiche was so crowded that Sir Frederick Haldimand, governor of Quebec, put a notice in the Quebec Gazette offering free land in Gaspé and passage for Loyalistsettlers. About four hundred people answered the advertisement, including Mary.

In June 1784, she, Christopher and six of her children sailed for Chaleur Bay, eventually settling on land near New Carlisle.

But Gaspé was no Eden. In an 1809 letter, Mary’s daughter Sarah wrote to her older brother Adin who'd settled in Niagara with his fellow Butler's Rangers: "most of the time Spent at Saling and fishing, growing tired of Both and inclining to folow the farming which is Not Very Comfortebel in this Northing Climet…. Cannot do anything about lands or trespass to rilate the rached state of the districk of Gaspe would be endless."

Though many eventually left Gaspé for more hospitable climes, Mary never did. In 1838, Adin wrote to his brother Amasa: “In yours of 1836, I find that our mother is still living. O what gratitude, love, thanks, adoration, ” which would put Mary at 100 years old. His 1843 letter, referring to an earlier one of Amasa’s, laments the “demonstrated frailty of man” and thanks to those “whom I esteem for the attention they paid our deceased mother.”

If Mary had died that year, her age was a remarkable 106.

No amount of research can ever piece together every part of someone's life, but the quest through scant historical and genealogical accounts is an exhilarating and educational one. My only regret is that my aunt, who died in 1998 at age ninety-five, isn’t here to reap the rewards of our improved Internet resources. But I can well imagine her now communing with the spirit of Mary Beebe and getting the real scoop.

This article appeared in the June/July 2005 issue of The Beaver