The Early Years

If Edward S. Graves could speak to us today . . .

I was born when wind and timber ruled the world. From the earliest generations, my people earned their bread from land and sea. We coaxed crops from rocky soil and built ships sturdy enough to circle the globe. Aside from the large family I raised, I count among my proudest works the sailing ships that left the yard and took the tide out of Penobscot Bay.

In those days every cove along Maine’s coast rang with the sound of adzes and caulking hammers. From Kittery to Castine the air smelled of pine, tar and salt. Thomaston, Rockland, and Camden built barks, brigs for the great Atlantic trade. Sawmills on the rivers turned out timbers and planks; lofts stitched sails; chandlers filled casks with pitch and lamp oil; ropewalks twisted miles of hemp line. The world seemed bound together by what came out of Maine.

Vessels crowding Penobscot Bay bore crews from every quarter of the earth. Their holds carried sugar and molasses from the Caribbean—sweet cargo that our distilleries turned into rum. The ships loaded out with granite from the quarries, barrels of dried fish, and casks of lime that whitened city buildings as far away as Havana and London. We sent off our forests and brought back the world’s goods, and for a while it seemed the trade would never end.

My parents were Nathaniel and Louisa (Emery) Graves. I was born in 1823 on the family farm near Harrington Cove along the road to St. George and it was there that I would draw my final breath. My hair was brown once, my eyes blue, and I stood five-foot-four—nothing remarkable except perhaps a firm chin that marked most of our line.[1]

I was the middle child of fourteen. Only two were lost in infancy, leaving a dozen of us to crowd the farmhouse and share its chores. Lydia came first, then George, Elizabeth, Dennis, Margaret, and Sylvania before my turn. After me came Harry, the twins Josiah and Nathaniel, then Sarah, Sophia, and Louisa. Harry and Sarah were the only little ones buried in the Village Cemetery.

Father, a once apprenticed joiner had come from Deerfield, New Hampshire, about 1805 with his half-brother William, settling this tract between St. George and what later became South Thomaston. My mother's Emery family had been in Maine from its earliest days and one couldn't step off the farm without greeting a blood relation.

We learned our letters in the one-room schoolhouse and practiced our sums by tallying cords of wood and barrels of potatoes. As soon as we could walk straight, Father set us to work. The homestead ran to about one hundred, fifty acres of pasture and woodland. We raised peas, beans, potatoes, barley, and hay; kept cows, oxen, sheep, pigs, and poultry; and shipped what surplus we could to Boston markets by coaster or packet.[2]

Tragedy came early. My sister Lydia, newly married to Oliver Wheeler, died scarcely a month after her wedding in 1832. Mother had plenty of little ones still underfoot, me included, and Lydia’s death shadowed the house. My father draped black bunting over the lintel of the front door and it would be the first burial I’d remember. Extended family filled the house, the men went outside to drown their sorrow and my mother carried her own for a long time.

My brother George learned the carpenter’s trade, and soon as I was old enough to swing a hammer, I was right beside George and my father at the shipyard. My brother Dennis took to the sea. George married Lucy Harrington in 1838 and set up his own farm and household. That winter our sister Mary married William Graves—kin through our grandfather Joseph of Brentwood, New Hampshire.[3] He too was a builder and part owner of some of the ships that sailed out of the harbor.

I was twenty-one when the news came that Dennis had been lost at sea in 1843. The black bunting covered the lintel, but there was no body to bury.

By my manhood, the forests of Maine had been felled twice over. New growth stood where giants once had, but the best masts were long gone. Yet shipbuilding thrived. Ship builders drew timber from farther afield—from the Appalachians of Georgia and South Carolina to feed our yards.

In 1848, just as we began work on yet another ship, providence smiled—or at least played a bold hand—for while her ribs were still rising on the ways, word reached us that gold had been discovered in California.

NOTES

1 Edward Graves’ passport.

2 Agricultural Census, St. George, ME. While this census was taken after Edward Graves was a child, it was the farm he inherited when his father died in 1855.

3 Mary and her huband William D. Graves were both grandchildren of Joseph Graves of Brentwood, New Hampshire.