Last week I wrote about the house at 269 Marion Rd. The two names always associated with the house are Lewis and Hathaway, but in my research for that article, I came across another name. The house was built prior to the Revolution by David Wing, and he sold the house to Theophilus Pease, a shipwright. Pease never lived in the house but rented it to mill workers who worked at the nearby mill. He detached the front porch and moved it across the street to be a home for the miller who operated the mill on the property.
There is no record of him selling the house, but it did later become the town “poor farm”. However, what interested me was that whenever his name came up in the literature it was, “Theophilus Pease, of whom curious incidents are recorded”. This appears more than once, but there is never any information offered about those incidents, so I went looking.
The first thing I found was that he was a Quaker, and it was said that he built a Quaker Meeting House. However, there doesn’t appear to be any wills or records or deeds that definitely say where it was located, and I didn’t think it fit the criterion of “peculiar.” However, I did find another interesting story attached to Pease concerning the Gale of 1815. This is the report, “Theophilus Pease, of Rochester, aged 73, having repaired to [on] a small island at [near] Mattapoisett during the gale, to preserve some hay, soon saw his dangerous situation.”
The account goes on to say that he took his pitchfork and some line that was in his pocket. He tied the pitchfork across the branches of a tree. He then stood on the pitchfork for about six hours while the storm raged around him. During part of that time, he was standing in water. The story finishes by saying that the island only had three or four trees, all of which were carried away by the flood, except for the one in which he stood. As the story goes, “it was a remarkable instance of preservation.”
I think that this would definitely be classified as a “curious incident.”
By Connie Eshbach
That is a very early picture of the house where I grew up. No mention of my family name: Humphrey. My great grandfather, Chester Humphrey died when I was about a month old. He was a school administrator. We lived with him. My grandfather, Albert Humphrey, had his own insurance business in town with many local customers. I have fond memories of growing up in that house. We always had a canoe and another boat or two to use on Hathaway Pond. Sometimes we would follow the stream above Hathaway’s Pond and put in at Leonard’s Pond. The old gristmill had come down in a hurricane before I was born. Our family had chickens housed in the old mill mainly for eggs but they were gone by the time I came along. I believe my mother’s first ‘date’ with my father was to go out to the chicken house at night and hold the flashlight while he shot rats with a 22 rifle. I guess that qualified her as good marriage material. After the chickens were gone my grandfather would buy eggs from Tom Gayoski and sell them to his customers every Friday. He just couldn’t bring himself to stop the practice. The names you mention in your article are unfamiliar to me. I knew it had served as a poor farm. I also heard that criminals were secured in the cellar. My Aunt Amy claimed one was a murder kept in chains. No wonder I found going into the cellar a little creepy!
Allan Humphrey