A house burns to the ground one drizzly January day in Whitefield.
All is lost – except 75 years later, a 19th century photograph of the center chimney Cape style house is given to the historical society. The quest is on.
Who are the people standing on the lawn? Who were their forebears? Who built the house, and when?
It didn’t take historical society member Elizabeth “Libby” Harmon long to hit the trail and find a compelling story. The search took her to Lincoln County Registries of Deeds and Probate, where she spent many hours poring over documents, finding “missing links” through marriage and property transfers between family members.
Most gratifying, said Harmon after her “Treasures in Deeds” talk last week at the society’s annual meeting, was the realization that the organization’s collection contained some of the answers to her questions. Puzzle pieces were tucked in card files or popped forth at the click of a mouse.
To an attentive and curious audience, Harmon told the story of the Seth Tarr house, which stood on Head Tide Road where Phil and Barbara Russell’s home stands today.
Evelyn Joslyn, who donated the photo, was in the audience and remembers when the house burned in 1935 when she was a little girl. Her father Horace owned it then and was away that day, having driven an elderly neighbor to Gardiner. He returned home to find a smoldering cellar hole.
Also in the audience was Lawrence Felt, 90, who recalled skipping school with other boys and running up Head Tide Road to see the blaze.
A trip through time via probate
Harmon’s talk reached back to the original property owner, Abraham, born in 1761. At age 85 he conveyed one-half interest in the farm and Weary Pond woodlot to his youngest son Calvin.
Doug Wright added drama to the evening’s presentation by reading conditions Abraham included in his 1846 deed: “Calvin shall carry on the whole farm in a husband like manner to my satisfaction.” He was expected to do “all my necessary work…about the house,” and was allowed “use of my oxen on the farm and to work upon highways in payment of taxes.”
Additionally, Calvin was to make sure his father and older brother Alexander were kept “comfortable both in health and in sickness, and furnish necessary attendance to us in sickness and during my natural life.”
More conditions were added in 1848, stipulating that the property was to be divided, with part going to son Jesse, and another part, 50-ft. from abutter Joseph Erskine’s property line, to be reserved as a burying ground.
A critical fact was that several years after Abraham’s death, Calvin Tarr sold his part of the property to neighbor Christopher Erskine and moved out of town.
In trying to trace Seth Tarr’s ownership to his grandsire, Harmon said she “hit a wall.” By searching Erskine family deeds, however, she picked up the trail again.
She discovered a Wiscasset woman who married one Moses Erskine of Whitefield about 1818. Erskine’s family lived next to the Tarr property and the woman, Melinda Smith, bought land for herself and baby son William – the 25-acre lot where the Russells live today. Harmon said the deed did not say whether there was a house on the land.
The couple had four more children, the youngest being twins Alice and Christopher.
A generation later, Melinda and Moses’ son William, now married with children, was living on this land. In 1851, tragedy befell the family: William’s wife died young, swiftly followed by two of their small children and, two years later, William himself died, aged 36. There were two orphans, Moses II and Rosea.
Harmon discovered that three weeks after William’s death 24-year-old Seth Tarr married William’s youngest sister, Alice, who is pictured in the photograph that prompted Harmon’s search. This is the “missing link” that shows how, through marriage into the Erskine family, Seth Tarr became owner of the property and the newlyweds cared for the two orphaned children.
In the society’s collection, Harmon found a 1909 letter from a great-great granddaughter of Abraham saying, “he settled on the place opposite what is now Seth Tarr’s and died there.”
Harmon’s labor of love enabled her to appreciate much of the story behind the people pictured in the photograph of the long-gone Cape, a photo she can now date to about 1880. It shows Seth’s wife Alice (who died in 1886), and their two adult children, Sanford and Martha.
Harmon also cited a deed from Christopher Tarr, Seth’s father, stipulating that Seth’s brothers James and Abram were to “provide a horse and carriage” if the parents, who gave their farmstead to the two sons, wanted to visit their home place once a year.
The “colorful deeds” Harmon found in the county registry proved to be “wonderful snapshots of family life on the farm; without them none of this information would be known,” she said.
Another treasure she uncovered in the Registry of Probate was an inventory concerning a Longfellow family member. Harmon lives in the house they built in Kings Mills. A list of Nathan Longfellow Jr.’s belongings included a Bible. Harmon’s cousin David Chase discovered the extremely fragile book, dated 1796, in his Townhouse Road residence many years ago and gave it to her. Nathan Jr., age 39, died of drowning in 1814 and left no will.
Discovering the Bible listed in the Probate inventory “gave me goose bumps,” said Harmon.
