Saint Croix Courier, St. Stephen, NB
October 26, 1893
GLIMPSES OF THE PAST
Contributions to the History of Charlotte County and the Border Towns.
LXXXVI [sic - should be LXXXVIII] – THE PORT MATOON ASSOCIATION-Continued.
The following notes, relating to some of the Morristown settlers, are gathered from family traditions and other sources:-
James Maxwell was a native of Armagh, Ireland, and was brought to America by his widowed mother when he was six years old. At nine he was apprenticed to a potter, and worked at the trade until the war broke out, when his employer joined the insurgent forces and he the British side. He was at this time about 14 years of age. He had two brothers; but he never saw any of his relatives again after the time of his enlistment, nor ever learned what had become of them except that they had gone to Philadelphia. He served throughout the war as a driver in the Flying Artilery, and was in Cornwallis’s army at the surrender. At one time, it is said, he chanced to see LaFayette riding alone, and followed him for six miles, but failed to capture him, as LaFayette had the better horse.
Maxwell married a daughter of Daniel Hill, a pre-Loyalist settler already mentioned,1 who had been a soldier in the old French wars. He died in 1847, and his grave is near the entrance of the old burial ground on King street. The youngest of his ten children, Mr. Samuel Maxwell, (our authority for the principal points in this brief sketch,) is the present collector of rates for the parish of St. Stephen.
Thomas Dodd was another one of the disbanded soldiers. His wife, who outlived him, is the subject of the following note, which appeared in the St. Andrews Standard, in 1849:-
Died at St. Stephen, on the 21st of July, Mrs. Elizabeth Dodd, aged one hundred and eleven years.
In the death of this aged person there is a volume of history lost. Living in great retirement, the relic of a forgotten age, few knew the stories she could tell of the brave old days. Born on board a British ship-of-the-line in the Bay of Bi--cay; cradled on the broad Atlantic; her father killed fighting the battles of George I.; she was cast an orphan on the shores of New York. Thence carried to St. Augustine, her youth was passed in the South. Here she married and settled on the banks of the Alabama. On the outbreak of the war between the governments of France, Spain and England, she, with other British settlers, was made prisoner and taken to New Orleans. After two years she was transferred to the Spaniards, and taken into the castle of Vera Cruz, where she remained until the capture by the British in 1761. She was then relieved and taken to New York. During the first American war, she followed her husband through the principal campaigns, was at many of the hardest fought battles-at Monmouth, White Plains, Yorktown, &c. At the close of the American war, she came with the loyalists to this province in 1784.
As might be inferred from her history, Mrs. Dodd was somewhat rough in manner. Equally so was the wife of Thomas Grace, who is described as a very large and strong woman, and is said to have carried a tub of salt on her back from her house to the Salmon falls, a distance of four miles.
1Article lii. Daniel
Hill was an ardent Loyalist, though not a member of the Loyalist
associations. After it was decided that the St. Croix would
be the boundary line, he left his land at Ferry point, (Calais,)
or was dispossessed by the Massachusetts authorities, and went to
some place near Horton, N. S., but returned and settled at
Hill’s point, now in the parish of Dufferin.
Correction: Article LXXXIX states that this one should have been numbered LXXXVIII. It also notes that, "Mr. Marks assures us that it is an injustice to Mrs. Dodd to speak of her as 'rough in manner,' for she was much less so than might have been expected."