The first war against trees
- Alisa Kline
- Nov 8, 2024
- 7 min read
From a financial standpoint, colonial New Hampshire was a bust. Not only did it fail to make men wealthy, mere subsistence required hard labor. Early arrivals imagined that the lush forest they encountered promised fertile soil. It did not.
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The early settlers of Canaan were men of brave patience. […] They were rich only in stout hands and strong faith, and they conquered the wilderness of swamp and forest because they wanted a home. The earth which bore such trees would yield rich crops of grain and fruit.
They set themselves down in the wild wood, it made little difference where, and attacked the trees.
The early settlers, having incorrectly concluded that the only thing standing between them and a life of plenty was the forest, set out on New Hampshire’s first great war against trees.
I’m being funny. They didn’t declare war on trees, but they may as well have. The scheme for acquiring land in Canaan was a two-step affair. First, you had to acquire the right to settle land. You purchased that right from one of the original 61 grantees. Those grantees were investors given sweetheart deals by the governor. Kind of like buying a hot stock as part of an IPO. The original grantees hoped to flip their shares at a profit.
Some of them did. Others used their rights to stake their own claim in Canaan. Still more forfeited their shares as the taxes laid upon them for the building of roads and other infrastructure through the years drove them out.
Once a potential settler acquired a right, he wasn’t done yet. That right didn’t entitle him to property. There was a second hurdle. The right entitled the holder to one hundred acres of land, provided they cleared the trees from at first one acre but soon five acres of that land within a year.
The colonial Governor of NH set up this system to entice people to live in the forested wilderness and do something to make enough money to pay him some taxes. In a perfect world, taxes could also be paid to the King of England and profits returned to the investors who sent the settlers to the New World in the first place.
This first war on trees was both successful and unsuccessful. It was successful in that it rid New Hampshire of many trees and added to New Hampshire many people. It was unsuccessful in that most of those people didn’t make much money.
Compare this with the other band of Europeans who set up shop in the New World. The group who landed in Virginia found it easy to grow things. It was so easy that the only thing keeping them from growing more things was the lack of a labor force. The way they solved that problem still haunts us. They enslaved Africans, dragged them across the sea, and set them to work without wages and without end.
New England, on the other hand, was so unfavorable to agriculture that no number of enslaved Africans could have turned it profitable. But the men and women who settled New England had more on their minds than money. They were borne here on a great wave of religious fervor. They came to the New World to seek perfection. They yearned for a connection to God through the immediacy of God’s written word in the bible shared with small groups of like-minded congregants.
They didn’t come to the New World seeking riches. They sought a Godly utopia. Their energy went to devising the perfect set of rules for man to live by. By the late 1700s, the Puritans of Connecticut had created so many rules that people sought refuge in New Hampshire.
Those seeking refuge weren’t seeking refuge from religion, just from a form of religion that seemed corrupted, static, and joyless. They formed other churches, and then had arguments that split them into yet more churches. They had a whole new country to play with! If you wished to worship differently than your neighbors, have at it, plenty of land in all directions. All you had to do was slay the trees and plant a crop.
Thomas Miner, Canaan’s second citizen said much the same this to his fellow Grantees about his decision to leave Connecticut and actually set out for Canaan:
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Mr. Miner made known to many of these men his intentions [to settle in Canaan], but at first got little encouragement. Meeting Mr. Harris one day, he said to him: “Mr. Harris, I’ve got tired of this humdrum sort of life in a village, where everybody has to be so proper and religion is a pretense for a great deal of meanness. And I don’t want to stay any longer in a place where I’m not allowed to kiss my wife on Sunday. I’m going to get out er this, and try the bears and wolves for neighbors, and live on fish and venison. Come along, and let’s look after our six miles square.”
Six miles square is actually 36 square miles, six miles on each side. That is the size of Canaan and every other one of the “plantations” the Governor laid out. Most of the grantees in these new plantation towns had no interest in moving to the wilderness to fell trees. They bought the right to develop the land in hopes that someone else would want to move up there and buy the rights from them.
When Miner arrived, he found Canaan’s first citizen already in residence. Thomas Scofield, had arrived in 1766. He was in search of someplace without neighbors and when he got to where South Road is now, things were to his liking. He brought his wife and children and set up housekeeping. He had the place to himself until, the grantees from Connecticut, Miner just the first of them, began to arrive.
Thomas Miner was the first grantee who actually moved to Canaan. He was unusually well off for a young man. He went to sea at 18 and became financially independent. What he wanted next was a bit of freedom and a challenge.
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His ventures at sea had been fortunate, he had laid by a sum sufficiently large to secure him independence of labor. [… In 1766 he was] out of business, somewhat disgusted with the restraints of the Blue Laws that governed the civilization of Connecticut, and waiting for some exciting event to shape his course in the world.
While in this frame of mind, it occurred to him that he was joint proprietor of a wild uninhabited tract of land in New Hampshire, which he had never seen. He was one of the sixty-one proprietors named in the charter.
He could learn but few particulars concerning this land. Emigrants to the Upper Cohos had passed through it by the foot trail, but could give no description of it, except that it was covered with goodly trees, plenty of stone for fencing purposes; the waters abounded in fish, and the woods with game,— some of it dangerous.
He resolved to explore that wild land, even if he had to go alone. This scheme just suited his present state of mind. He had explored the ocean whose waste of waters left no trace behind. Now he would explore the land and leave trace of himself that should make him famous in local story.
Miner returned to Connecticut with a favorable report and tried to get some his fellow Grantees to join him in Canaan. They persuaded him to wait until the spring. Which he did. But when spring came, they asked him to wait a little longer.
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Mr. Miner’s temperament was not of the waiting kind. When the spring came and he found the company [fellow Canaan grantees who had promised to travel to Canaan with Miner] still undecided, he took his wife and child and such implements and conveniences as he could pack upon a horse and with a compass in his pocket, to guide him when he became uncertain of his way, he started out for his territory driving a cow.
This young man of twenty-three years, who thought he had already enjoyed and exhausted the pleasures of the sea, and had found the charms of social life unsatisfactory, stood thereon that evening, the past all behind him, facing the new present, and looking through the great trees at a future crowned with fruitful fields and houses filled with comely faces. He stood there like a prophet and “viewed the landscape o’er.” There was fearless resolution in his heart, and he turned to his wife who was near by caressing the boy, and said:
Wife, this is a goodly place. I think we’ll build us a home here. This seems to be a great point in our lives. You know I’m not much of a hand a-praying, but we’ll begin now, and thank God that we are here, and pray that he will give us strength and grace to accomplish the labors that are before us, and length of days that we may see the generations that are to subdue and utilize these forests and streams.”
And it was right here and on this occasion that all the romance departed out of his young life. The sun was setting in crimson and gold. His wife and boy were resting upon the ground, the horse and cow weary with their long journey, were turned loose to graze. The scene was not a rural one; it engendered a feeling of insecurity which called for immediate action.
The past glimmered for an instant before his mind, with all its religious and social opportunities, but it was only a gleam that flitted rapidly away and left him standing there on the brow of that hill, filled at once with the resolves of ripe manhood.
Henceforth there was to be only work, not a mere struggle for existence, but earnest active labor that the years to come would be proud of.
Wallace had such respect for these men. His imagination of the moment “all romance departed out of his young life” is so vivid. He sees the departure of romance not as a loss but as the arrival of maturity, of a life worth living. Miner arrived in Canaan a hundred years before Wallace wrote about him. But it's still possible that Wallace heard this story from Miner's own lips. It's certainly true that Wallace knew Miner when he was an old man and Wallace was a child. Miner died in 1827, Wallace was born in 1815.
Wallace wrote his history after the country had fought the Civil War and after most of the people who had tried to succeed in New Hampshire had moved on to easier places. He wrote it to memorialize the generation that he so respected. Wallace had spent a career as a journalist across America, chronicling the establishment of the Western US and the travails of the Civil War. He returned to Canaan and meditated on the men and women of his hometown who had played a role in it all. Who had ended slavery. Who had redeemed the nation.
But they still didn’t make any money in New Hampshire.
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