Person:James French (19)

Letter to MaryLu McClure from Wilson Brown, 12/2007- Samuel French, the joiner, had several sons and two of them, Samuel and Jeremiah purchased land in Manchester and Dorset, Vermont.

I'll try to explain how this all came about. After the British defeated the Dutch and took over the Dutch Territories in North America, they had a claim from the Delaware River to the Connecticut River, including the modern states of NY, NJ, western CT, western Mass, and western New Hampshire, now Vermont, as well as some islands now part of Rhode Island. When that land was turned over to James, Duke of York (later James II), he claimed it all, but his governors ran into jurisdictional disputes with CT, Mass, and later New Hampshire.

The dispute with Connecticut was solved when Ct. agreed to yield to NY all of eastern Long Island, and NY agreed to a line 20 miles east of the Hudson River. The one exception was for the towns of Stamford and Greenwich on Long Island Sound, which went to CT. In compensation, CT. granted NY a equal territory 1.8 miles wide and running north to the Massachusetts border. This was known as "the Oblong." It was different from the rest of NY that ran along the Hudson because those lands had all been granted to wealthy landowners who had large estates and leased their land to tenant farmers. The Oblong had no such ownership, and much land came up for sale. Two families dominated the southern part of this narrow stretch of the land - that of Jeremiah French, son of Samuel, and that of Matthias Marsh and his son-in-law Zebulon Ross. Land holdings were around 1,000 acres for each of the three families. The town where they settled was Dover, with the Marshes in the village of Webatuck in South Dover. That is where the young William Marsh met the young Sarah French and married her and began a family with her.

In the meantime, the governor of New Hampshire, Benning Wentworth, began to sell lands west of the Connecticut River. These had been unusable before the defeat of the French and Indians in the war of the same name. Typically, Wentworth would create a rectangular township, 6 miles by 6 miles, and then get together fifty or more persons who would buy that land from him and the colony, with no particular intention of living there. Samuel and Jeremiah French bought their land from the first "proprietors

Then in 1764, the Crown decided that NY had the better claim for the area of now called Vermont, but instructed it to respect titles. The original titles said that people had to settle the land, so there was a great movement to settle Vermont in the period 1764-1770. The Frenches then sold their land to members of their families. Manchester was heavily dominated by people from the Oblong -- the first town meeting was held in Amenia, New York. Manchester has more names from the Oblong than does Dorset.

Then New York would not respect the New Hampshire titles, and had given away some of the land on its own. The various governors in the late colonial period tried to find a solution, but the NY courts and legislature kept pushing to declare all the NH titles invalid. To keep the "Yorkers" out, various local groups formed militias, known collectively as the Green Mountain Boys. Marsh was a colonel in the GMB. It was not at that time opposed to the king, and did not take sides until the fall of 1775, when it seized Fort Ticonderoga.

So, that's how the families got together. They were different in background. The French family were Anglican and the Marshes Congregational, even Separatist. Sarah French Marsh had the children baptized Anglican, even when it meant waiting a few years and travelling to Arlington to have it done. William Marsh was not intensely religious. The children split, some Anglican and more and more became Methodist.

As far as maps go, I think I can find you an aerial photo from the 1930s, which will show you Eliakim's lands and most of Marsh's lands.

You're looking eastward across at Bromley Mountain and your plane is over Morse Hill on the side of Mt Aeolus. The river is the East branch of the Battenkill, and if you see two streams to the left, one is Mad Tom Brook. The road runs north-south and the pond you see in the center is Deming Pond, with the house on it, just as it is today. The road is now Route 7A. If you look to the right (south), you can see a little pond with a house just to the south. Across the street are some barns. That is the old Marsh property. It was in the SE corner of Dorset, right against the mountain, probably not too far from where you can see the fence line, and it extended several hundred rods (16.5 ft) to the south. Eli Deming held 50 acres in that corner (just off the map, regrettably) and may have held more. I think he purchased 50 acres from the State when Marsh's land was confiscated. (The rest of the Dorset land belonged to his father, Matthias, so was not taken.)

Marsh's land ran north along the mountain and eastern town line, then cut westward along Eliakim Deming's land, but it dipped and doodled. I think it crossed the road where the river crosses the road, then headed west up Morse Hill. Marsh's youngest son John Johnson Marsh, mortgaged his land, about 600 acres, and described it, but without clear bounds on the west. But the southern part had already been sold off before John Johnson held it, and there were 70 rods between where John Johnson's land started and the town line with Manchester. So the total must have been close to a square mile.

The town line, incidentally, was moved east in the 1820s.

1. ↑ From the family files of Jan Dwyer. (ddjdwyer@@sofnet.com).