Saint Croix Courier, St. Stephen, NB
April 19, 1894
GLIMPSES OF THE PAST
Contributions to the History of Charlotte County and the Border Towns.
CXII – THE PENOBSCOT ASSOCIATED LOYALISTS - Continued.
One James Taylor is mentioned by Sabine as having come to St. Andrews in 1783 and built the third house erected there. He was a native of Glasgow, and had emigrated to New York in early life. He died in St. Andrews in 1835, aged seventy-nine. It seems that there is some mistake here, as the name of James Taylor does not appear in the list of grantees, though John, Ralph and Gillam Taylor are found. Gillam Taylor died at Halifax in 1843, aged eighty-six.
John Jones, who drew one of the Oak Bay lots, and for whom the large tract at Waweig was reserved, is the Captain Jones before mentioned as one of the surveyors on the St. Croix.1 He had been a surveyor for the Plymouth company, in Maine, before the Revolution. Imprisoned for his loyalty, he escaped from jail in Boston, in 1780, and fled to Quebec, where he was made a captain in Rogers Rangers. Captain Jones, Moses Gerrish and Thos. Ross obtained a license of occupation of the island of Grand Manan; but, failing to fulfil the conditions of settlement, they were unable to secure a grant of the island. Gerrish and Ross remained at Grand Manan; Captain Jones returned to Maine and died at Augusta.
Moses Gerrish, whose lot in the Penobscot Association grant was also at Oak Bay, was a graduate of Harvard in the class of 1762. He was an able man, and for many years served as a magistrate in Grand Manan; where he died, in 1830, at the age of eighty years.
Thomas Ross drew one of the lots in the present town of Upper Mills. He had been a mariner at Falmouth; and was proscribed and banished. After coming to Grand Manan, he commanded a vessel in the West Indies trade; and he died at sea in 1804. He has descendants now living on Grand Manan. Ross Island bears his name.
Daniel Brown, a grantee of one of the lots in the fifth tract, (now Dufferin,) had emigrated from Scotland to Castine in early youth, and took an active part in the Royalist cause. He improved his lot on the St. Croix and made it his homestead. He died in 1835, aged ninety-one, leaving upwards of 200 descendants.2
Chas. Morris, junior, of Halifax, was at Passamaquoddy in 1783, as a deputy-surveyor, engaged in laying out the lands for the Loyalists, by order of Gov. Parr. (The elder Chas. Morris was the surveyor-general of the province of Nova Scotia, and presumably both Morris Town, at Schoodic, and Morris’s Division, in the town plot of St. Andrews, were so named in his honor.)
Benjamin Pomeroy came from Massachusetts. Pomeroy Ridge, where he finally settled, bears his name.
William Moore, a New Hampshire Loyalist, is the ancestor of the Moores of Moore’s Mills; and will be mentioned in connection with the Cape Ann Association.
1Article lxxx.
2Sabine’s ‘Loyalists of the American Revolution.’
CORRECTIONS.
Article cix.-James Simonds and James Frost, of the Penobscot Association, were not Simonds of St. John and Frost of St. Stephen. The second and third paragraphs should therefore be erased.
Erase the last sentence of the paragraph referring to William Swain, and add, ‘He was afterwards, for some years, a merchant at St. Andrews. One half of his lot near the Ledge was mortgaged in 1789 to General Benedict Arnold, who was for a short time a resident of Charlotte county.’
Article cx.-Erase the first two
sentences of the second paragraph.