One of the most enjoyable aspects of learning my family’s history has been learning where they lived and imagining their lives in those places. I know from working with others, that the same is true for most folks. The first historical account I read of the settling of our twin towns of Dover and Foxcroft told of the difficult trek made by Abel Blood and his family from Bangor to Dover, on foot. The Bloods came in 1803 to settle Dover from Temple, N.H. by boat to Bangor; Mr. and Mrs. Blood and their 1-year-old son. From Bangor they traveled on foot to Kenduskeag where they purchased a horse to help them make the remaining miles of unmarked, heavily forested passage.
In the following years since reading this, I had many times imagined Fred’s ancestor, Peter Brawn had traveled the same difficult route, and every time I returned from a drive to Bangor, I felt a sense almost of kinship when I would reach the top of Charleston Hill and spy Borestone Mountain in the distance. It contributed to my sense of “coming home” and over the years, I have derived a great deal of comfort from this.
However, as the years passed and my research continued, I learned that Peter Brawn and his young family came from Madison, Maine, not Bangor as I had been imagining, and it was a couple years after that that it occurred to me that they never traveled the future Route 15 to arrive at their new home. So what was the route that young Peter Brawn, his Scottish wife Catherine Beckey and their three young sons, Reuben, Arthur and Ethan would have taken to get to Dover? I wondered if someone at the Dover-Foxcroft Historical Society would have any ideas. Then I began to reread the wonderful “Dover-Foxcroft: A History,” written by local historian Louis Stevens and I got the most likely answer in detail.
In 1799, Abel Blood and seven other men traveled from Norridgewock to Dover to fell trees for the future settlement. Among those seven were the Spaulding brothers (who also later settled in Dover, one buying Peter Brawn’s house on what would become Pine Street.) This group traveled by team to Athens on the only road available. From there they walked with all their burdens to Moose Pond in Harmony, where they hired canoes to carry their stuff and walked beside the stream to the pond in Parkman, then across the pond to the outlet near what would become Sangerville, then to East Dover.
It requires no stretch of the imagination to think that the trapper, Peter Brawn; long used to keeping to the water’s edge, would have followed this or a very similar route. I don’t know where he lived when he lived in Abbot, but from Madison to Dover and ending in Willimantic, his homes were always in view of a river or stream. It pleases me to think his third great-grandson and I look out our back window onto Fox Brook! Some things never change.
Editor’s note: Columnist Nina Brawn of Dover-Foxcroft is a longtime genealogy researcher, speaker and teacher. Reader e-mails are welcome at ninabrawn@gmail.com. Her semimonthly column is sponsored by the Aroostook County Genealogical Society which meets the fourth Monday of the month except in July and December at Cary Medical Center’s Chan Education Center at 6:30 p.m. Guests are always welcome. FMI contact Edwin “J” Bullard at 492-5501.
