Peleg Wadsworth's Great Escape

During the American Revolution, Maine once again found herself sandwiched between two warring parties. With Montgomery and Arnold's failure to capture Quebec, new America found that it would be unable to carry Canada along with it to independence from Britain. Less settled, less established and perhaps less civilized, Maine was in a precarious position at the edge of a new nation. The British took advantage of the opportunity to invade eastern Maine in June 1779 with 750 troops under Francis McLean and a small squadron of three sloops under Capt. Henry Mowat, the destroyer of Falmouth. The purpose of this invasion was to build a fort at Castine on the Majabagaduce Peninsular and lay the ground work to establish a new colony for their loyalist supporters. It would be called New Ireland, sandwiched as it was between New England and New Scotland (Nova Scotia).
Massachusetts saw this as a whittling away of its territory. Without so much as a by your leave from the Continental Congress, Massachusetts raised an army of 1000 militiamen, as well as 20 transports and 19 armed ships, many privately owned and not a few manned by sailors impressed for this duty. The ill-fated attack on the new British Fort George in July 1779 known as the Penobscot or Bagaduce Expedition was masterfully bungled. In the end the militia was abandoned, the ships and transports were sunk or run aground, and Massachusetts was all but bankrupt. But, this is another story.
The connecting thread is that the expedition brought Peleg Wadsworth to Maine. A Massachusetts native and a Harvard graduate, Wadsworth was an early patriot who served on the Kingston, MA committee of correspondence and began studying military tactics as early as 1771. When the war began, he rose quickly through the ranks. Wadsworth was a capable surveyor and engineer, skills that served him well later in life and were equally useful in the military. He laid out the defenses for Roxbury. Later, at Penobscot, he was second in command of the land forces.
After Bagaduce, the reputation of almost every American officer or ship's captain involved was impugned. Commodore of the fleet Dudley Saltonstall was court martialled and dismissed from Continental service. Lt. Col. Paul Revere, commander of the artillery, was court martialled and acquitted but not before his reputation was ruined. Perhaps the only bright spot in the American leadership was Brig. General Peleg Wadsworth who returned to eastern Maine as commander of the militia in 1780, and there our story begins.

Commander of the Militia in Eastern Maine

Life in eastern Maine was uncertain at best. The allegiance of many inhabitants depended on the proximity of the British. The possibility of trade was a determining and, often, a necessary factor. Frequent raiding parties of British troops or Tories influenced the local populations to remain passive if not outright supportive of the crown. Patriots were targeted and killed; property and ships were destroyed or confiscated. When Wadsworth arrived Downeast in the spring, he found a population whose allegiance shifted with the wind. He did not find soldiers.
There were supposed to be some eight hundred state paid militia stationed in strategically located garrison towns. By August 1780 the number rose to an actual high of 552 men in posts between Falmouth and Machias. Food was terrible; clothing and housing were unsuitable. As their terms of enlistment expired, the men went home. Wadsworth did not have enough men to enforce the martial law he declared in Lincoln County in hopes of regaining some measure of control. By Christmas he was holed up in Thomaston with hardly enough soldiers to defend himself let alone the Maine coast. For the second time he was abandoned Downeast and forced to make his own way out. He wrote a letter of resignation, but before he could leave the British struck.

Blood and Carnage

Wadsworth stayed at a house on what is now called Wadsworth Street in Thomaston. The house had been originally built by local militia colonel Mason Wheaton for his family. When Wheaton's wife died in 1779, the colonel placed his children with relatives and offered the house to Wadsworth. It was a primitive frame, one-story building of perhaps three rooms standing across the road from the Knox Spring. The nearest neighbors were as much as a 1/2 mile away across the river at Watson's Point or up to Prison Corner. (Morse, Vol I, 190)
On the night of February 18, 1781, a force of 25 raiders crossed Penobscot Bay in a privateer piloted by the notorious Tory Waldo Dicke. Under cover of darkness, the ship made its way up the "Gig" or Wesaweskeag River and set the party ashore about four miles below Wadsworth's headquarters.The party waited at the house of a Mr. Snow until about 11 pm and then proceeded up Wessaweskeag Pond, across the frozen marsh and then Mill River. Speed was necessary; the raiding party did not wish to raise an alarm. It is hard to imagine in that year and harsh season that anyone would be abroad in Thomaston, Maine in the middle of the night! However, one Hezekiah Bachelder was returning from the mill at Warren with a bag of meal. Bachelder was taken along with the party to prevent his sounding the alarm. The party proceeded along the back lots and approached the house from the rear. (Eaton, 157)

Two of Wadsworth's three body guards were on duty in the kitchen; John Montgomery (according to Morse this was actually his ancestor Daniel Morse) was off duty visiting his father in Warren that night. Three miltiamen were also on duty that night: William Boggs, P. Sechrist and Nat Copeland. Militiaman Boggs of Warren, the single sentry stationed outside the house, heard a crunching of snow and barely called out "who comes here?" before he was quickly overpowered. The guards in the kitchen were overrun when they opened the door to investigate. The bedroom windows were shot out, and the house was in chaos. (Eaton, 157)
Startled from their bed in the front room, Wadsworth and his wife Elizabeth sprang to action. They were faced with a three prong attack- the kitchen, their bedroom and the adjacent bedroom where their two children and a family friend, a Miss Fenno, were sleeping. Elizabeth ran to her children. In all likelihood baby Elizabeth was shrieking, but five year old Charlie slept through the entire attack. A British officer entering through the children's window discovered only women and children and stopped that prong of the assault. Two rooms , then, were under British control- the back bedroom and the kitchen. The general was barricaded in the third behind doors "strongly barred". (Eaton, 158)
Meanwhile, Wadsworth grabbed up his arms. He put up quite a fight with pistols, blunderbuss, musket and finally with a bayonet. He managed to keep the invaders back from both his windows and kitchen door. "Twice he ineffectually snapped his blunderbuss at others whom he heard at the entry" (hall doorway) (Eaton, 158) He shot at least three invaders; two died from their wounds. (Eaton records only two wounded raiders and two wounded American guards.) Circumstances only came to a conclusion when one of the invaders had a glimpse of the general's white nightshirt and managed to shoot him in the arm. Thus crippled, Wadsworth surrendered, and Lt. Stockton ordered a cease fire. The men in the kitchen ignored the order. Now here's the stuff from which legends are made. Wadsworth called into the kitchen to ask the soldiers there why they continued to fire. A badly wounded soldier rushed into the room and planted his gun barrel on Wadsworth's chest. He said, "You have taken my life and I will take yours." Before he could fire, an officer, probably Stockton knocked the gun away. The little battle was over; candles were lit revealing glass, blood and carnage.
Wadsworth was helped into his clothes, and the women bandaged up his arm. The women were left behind with quite a disaster. Hickey, one the general's body guards, was badly wounded in the thigh. He was taken off to a doctor in Waldoboro and later recovered. The militia men simply went home and the bereft family eventually made its way to Boston.
With great haste the raiding party made their escape with the general in tow. Two of the wounded raiders were put on the general's horse for the trip back to their ship. Wadsworth, his arm bleeding heavily, was forced to walk along with his wounded guard. He did not expect to last long but was probably saved from bleeding to death by the freezing temperatures.
The party proceeded a mile or so to the house of Dr. David Fales. By now word was out that something was afoot; a gun battle is hard to cover up. Wadsworth himself was silent under pain of death but the party was not so large that he would go unnoticed. The doctor's brother Atwood, a veteran of the Bagaduce Expedition, knew enough to go out the back door and hide in the woods. Fales and his sons inquired if the party had captured General Wadsworth but this was denyed. It was arranged for one of the wounded British soldiers, supposed to be dying, to be left behind with Fales. The doctor extracted a ball from the man's thigh and cared for him until he recovered. Wadsworth was mounted on the horse, and the party went onward to Snow's at the Gig. Here, the British released their first prisoner, Hezekiah Bachelder, despite Snow's warning, "Take him with you to Biguyduce if you don't want the whole neighborhood at your backs." Eaton points out that Thomaston was "lonely, thinly settled" at this time and uable to mount a rescue mission at this point.(Eaton, 159-60)
When the party arrived at the ship, Capt. Dicke castigated the general viciously for harming the king's men. Stockton again came to his defense. The ship's arrival in Castine brought another harangue from the local Loyalists. However, Wadsworth was treated civilly and correctly as a prisoner of war as soon as he reached the Fort George prison. His wound was tended, and he was treated like a gentleman. Waldo Dicke was even made to apologize.

Escape from Castine

Early in the spring, Elizabeth Wadsworth and Miss Fenno were given passes to visit the general. The women's escort on this trip was Major Benjamin Burton of Cushing. (For another reference to Burton, check out The York Tea Party.) Ironically, Burton joined Wadsworth in his prison quarters a short time later. On the return trip, after depositing the women in Boston, Burton's ship was captured off Monhegan by a privateer, and he was taken prisoner. This turned out to be fortuitous. Relations between the prisoners and their captors began to cool. It was becoming increasingly evident that there would be no paroles. The two prisoners learned that they would soon be sent to England aboard a privateer. There was little hope for either man if they were tried for treason in England. The men began to plan their escape.
For a dollar they purchased a gimlet from their barber, a man who was either sympathetic, mercenary or stupid. It was akin to the file hidden in the cake routine. They began to drill closely spaced holes in the wood ceiling. This must have been a fairly amusing sight. Burton was tall enough to reach, but Wadsworth was a shorter man and found drilling holes overhead to be a chore. In the end, Burton drilled, and Wadsworth kept guard. To cover up their handiwork the men filled the holes with a paste made from bread crumbs. Some problems arose with this camouflage method when butter in the bread paste melted and stained the wood. For three weeks their preparations went unnoticed by the British.
The men made good their escape on the stormy night of July 18, 1781. They removed the ceiling boards along the perforations and, under cover of thunder and rain, crawled through the attic space right above the officers' rooms. The shorter Wadsworth, further handicapped by a weak arm, had a difficult time reaching and crawling through the hole. The plan was to escape the building and then lower themselves over the wall using blankets. They even had a meeting place on the shore if they became separated. And separated, they soon were.
Wadsworth made his way up the east bank of the Penobscot until he found a canoe and, luckily, Burton. The two men made their way across the river avoiding a barge load of soldiers sent to recapture them. In fact, they kept to the woods avoiding everyone for fear of recapture. After three days of eating roots and berries and of difficult traveling, they reached Warren and safety.
Wadsworth soon returned to his family in Massachusetts. Major Burton left for his home in nearby Cushing, but this was not a safe place for an escaped prisoner of war. Burton left Cushing for Boston the very next day. He soon joined the navy and was again captured by the British when his ship was taken off the coast of Ireland that same Fall. Burton was eventually freed and made his way home to Cushing via France and Connecticut.

Wadsworth was not the only patriot leader to be so ignominiously kidnapped in the middle of the night. Brigadier general and sheriff of Lincoln County Charles Cushing was kidnapped without a struggle on a July night in 1780 from his Pownalborough home. He was soon exchanged but immediately abandoned Pownalborough for safer territories. In the same month as Peleg Wadsworth was captured, the British sent another party to Frenchman's Bay. Attacking just before dawn, they succeeded in capturing militia leader Daniel Sullivan after a brief fight. Sullivan was the brother of General John Sullivan who served on Washington's staff. Capt. Daniel Sullivan was was rousted from his bed; his children barely escaped from their burning home. Sullivan refused to take the oath of allegience to the crown and was carried away to imprisonment in New York aboard the infamous HMS Jersey. Conditions were so bad aboard the ship that imprisonment there was a virtual death sentence. Sullivan died shortly after his release from the ship. (Cay)

Wadsworth Hall

Despite everything that happened to him in Maine during the Revolution, Wadsworth returned to Maine again in 1784 and settled his family in Portland. There he built the first brick home in the city and led a prosperous life as a land agent and surveyor. Not unlike other high ranking military leaders (Knox, for example), Wadsworth speculated in land. Within three years of his return to Maine, he acquired a grant of 7800 acres, known as the Wadsworth Grant, between the Saco and the Ossipee Rivers for less than $1000. Two years later, 1,000 bushels of corn were raised on burnt land on his estate.

By 1800, work was begun on his mansion house on the Wadsworth Road in Hiram by master carpenter Stephen Jewett of nearby Cornish. Lumber was milled in Wadsworth's up and down mill on Great Falls Brook. One of the largest houses in the area, it has a seven bay facade and an unusual floor plan. The house is constructed with an unusual full cellar; a team of oxen could pull a load of produce completely into the cellar for easy unloading and then continue out the opposite side. The front door allows admission directly into a room so large and high ceilinged that it was used by the local militia for drill during inclement weather and at other times as a school. The customary stairway hall usually associated with the front door is found at the side of the house. The house, the third oldest house in Hiram, still stands today although it was extensively remodeled in 1875. Windows were changed, a piazza was added and a roof top outlook was removed. Originally yellow, the exterior paint was changed to white. Reportedly, many of the furnishings are original and brought to Hiram from Duxbury and Portland by the old General himself. The property remains a working farm in the hands of Wadsworth's descendents. (Ward, 187-191)

Wadsworth led a very political life. He was actively involved in the movement for Maine statehood and was chairman of the first convention in 1785 in Portland to address that issue. In 1792 he was elected to the Massachusetts senate and later that same year to the third US Congress. He was a Federalist and served as a representative in the six succeeding Congresses. In 1807 he declined the nomination for another term and retired to Wadsworth Hall, his estate in Hiram. There he set about improving his grant, incorporating the town of Hiram and serving as selectman, treasurer and magistrate. Peleg Wadsworth died in 1829 at the age of 81 and was buried in Hiram in a cemetery at the foot of the hill below Wadsworth Hall..

Thomaston sported a different Wadsworth mansion of sorts. Wheaton's one story house was much abused on the night Wadsworth was captured, but in the years after the Revolution the house was repaired and much enlarged with the addition of a second story. It was then known locally as the Wadsworth House, the Seavey House after its second owner or "the old castle". It sunk into disrepair and was torn down in the 1870's to make way for a new house. This one eventually became the home of Peter Hilt and his bride Phylena Burton. And so a Burton descendent lived out her days on the site of the Wadsworth abduction that was part of her family story. (Morse, Vol. II, 89)

No account of Peleg Wadsworth would be complete without noting his famous grandson. When Wadsworth left his Portland home for Hiram, he left the brick mansion to his daughter Zilpah and her husband, the lawyer Stephen Longfellow. Wadsworth spent most winters in the Portland house with his daughter and her family. The famous grandson who grew up in that house was, of course, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. And when he visited his grandfather in Hiram he stayed in a room, now known as the Longfellow Room, next to the main hall.
It should be noted that Peleg and Elizabeth Wadsworth had ten children. She is aptly described as a woman of great energy (!) who ran her household and raised seven sons and three daughters often without any help from her spouse who was away at war or Congress for lengthy periods of time. Their son Lt. Henry, for whom his poet nephew was named, died at Tripoli in 1804. He was a volunteer on the near mythical (but now forgotten) Intrepid, the suicide ship used to explode the captured USS Philadelphia in Tripoli harbor. Another son, Alexander Scammell Wadsworth, was named for his father's dear friend who was taken prisoner and heinously shot down by the British at Yorktown. Young Alexander was awarded a silver medal for heroism for his actions while serving aboard the USS Constitution during its battle with the HMS Guerriere during the War of 1812. He then went on to command squadrons in the Mediterranean and the Pacific. In 1840, as Commodore Wadsworth, he ended his illustrious career after serving as Navy Commissioner.
The brick house, now known as the Wadsworth Longfellow House, still stands on Congress Street in downtown Portland. The Maine Historical Society Library is just behind it with the new museum next door to the right. Few of its many visitors seem to know much about grandfather Peleg and his adventures, but all seem to have heard of his famous grandson poet.

Sources: "A Naval History of the American Revolution, Chapter XII: The Penobscot Expedition, 1779." AMERICANREVOLUTION.ORG. http://www.americanrevolution.org/nav12.html .
Bennett, Randall H. Oxford County, Maine: A guide to its historical architecture. Bethel, ME: Oxford County Historic Resource Survey, 1984.
Eaton, Cyrus. History of Thomaston, Rockland and South Thomaston, Maine from their first explorartion, A.D. 1605; with family genealogies. Hallowell: Masters, Smith & Co. Printers, 1865.
Cayford, John E. "The Sullivan Brothers." Maine's Hall of Fame, Vol. 1. Brewer, ME: Cay-bel Publishing, 1987.
Hiram, Oxford County, Maine: USGenWeb Page. http://hirammaine.homestead.com/Wadsworth.html .
Leamon, James S. Revolution Downeast. Amhearst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993.
Lemke, William. The Wild, Wild East. Camden, ME: Yankee Books, 1990.
Morse, F.L.S. Thomaston Scrapbook. 2 Volumes. Thomaston, ME:Thomaston HistoricalSociety, 1977.
Packard, Aubigne Lermond. A town that went to sea. Portland, ME: Falmouth Publishing House, 1950.
Smith, Marion Jacques. A History of Maine. Portland, ME: Falmouth Publishing House, 1949.
The Wadsworth Heritage. http://www.wadsworth.navy.mil/heritage.htm .
Wadsworth, Peleg. "Letter from General Peleg Wadsworth to William D. Williamson, January 1, 1828." Maine Historical Society Collections, Series 2, Vol.2 (1891), 153-162.
Ward, Ida Spenser. "Wadsworth Hall of Hiram." Historic churches and homes of Maine. Compiled by the Maine Writers Research Club. Portland, ME: Falmouth Book House, 1937.
Willis, William, The History of Portland. Somersworth, NH: New Hampshire Publishing Co., 1972.

c2001 Pat Higgins