In December, when I wrote my last blog post, I was looking forward to the end of another chaotic and weird year in hopes of a fresh beginning for 2022. I felt like I was ahead of the Holiday craziness with my shopping pretty much done and prepared for our Family Christmas brunch with our daughters and grandchildren, the Sunday before Christmas, as some have other places to go. I was all set. Ready. Just a few things left to grab.
What we didn’t know, nor were we prepared for, my husband would test positive for Covid, one week before Christmas. Needless to say, our Christmas with our girls and grandchildren didn’t happen. The days following, Jesse started feeling terrible. Sleeping, day in and day out. I sequestered him to the bedroom area of the house and I stayed on my side of the pine partition, taking up space on the couch. It’s really not an easy task to isolate from someone you need to tend to, much less isolate from each other in 400sqft. Christmas Eve, Jesse retested negative. I however, still had to quarantine, for another 10 days. Christmas morning came. The day dragged on. In the evening, our oldest daughter delivered dinner that she and my sister-in-law made. Bed time couldn’t come fast enough. I just wanted the day done and over. The following day, all the decorations were packed up and put away. I wanted this year behind us.
During our quarantine I had plenty opportunity to get some overdue reading in. I finished three of the four books I had started and was also given the chance to dig a bit deeper into Jesse’s family history.
For as long as I can remember, my mother has been into geneology. I think back to our summer road trip vacations growing up and there were always cemetary stops here and there. I never knew why she was looking for stones, until I became the Sexton, for Harmony, years later. Headstones were more detailed back in the early days. Not only would the stone have the birthdate and death date, but also, quite often, explained who belonged to who; “wife of”, “husband of” and so on. And since family’s rarely moved too far from one another, if at all, there would be large family plots with generations, side by side. My mother would also spend endless hours at the State Archives doing some digging. I may have been 7 years old or so, so I kept myself entertained by doing my own “research” and “studying” with my notebook and pencil. With all the research my mother had done, she knew our family background before computers were a thing. Binders and binders…full.
For Christmas this year, my mother did Jesse’s family tree. We knew that my mother-in-law was born here and that Jesse’s grandfather, Arlie, grew up here and attended the school that we now live in. What neither one of us knew he was that he was also born here, in Kingsbury. So with the family tree my mother did, a few old maps that were given to me by a friend and doing some more digging I found out just how far his roots go.
There is very little information about Kingsbury online. What I am able to find is repetative information and minimal. The little bit I have found is that the land had been bought by a Judge from Gardiner, Maine, Sanford Kingsbury, in 1833, hence the plantations name and that he moved here in 1834 (apparently in a very elaborate house for the time period, that was eventually burnt). Kingsbury was incorporated as a town in 1836. One piece of information that I kept seeing was that two brothers, last name Hilton, settled in Kingsbury in 1834. This is where I was led to believe that Jesse’s family had moved here later on. I was very much mistaken and pleasantly surprised.
In 1797, Daniel Campbell, was born in Bowdingham, Maine. At the age of 20, he moved to Wellington, Maine with his wife, Ruth Huff. They then moved to Kingsbury, date unknown, but their son, Rufus Campbell, was born in Kingsbury May 17, 1831. Rufus lived in the Campbell house at the end of what is now Preble Lane. Daniel Campbell is Jesse’s 4x great grandfather. Bizarrely enough, Rufus, Jesse’s 3x great grandfather was on the town council, as Jesse was for 11 years in Harmony. Rufus married twice. Lydia Sherburne was his first wife and they together had a daughter, Mary in 1870. Mary, I do believe, was once a teacher in The Schoolhouse. I’m only saying this because Jesse’s bosses wife told us her Aunt Mary Campbell was a teacher here. Unbeknownst to us until recently, they are related.
Then there is his other 3x great grandfather, Nathaniel Curtis. Nathaniel was born in Dexter, Maine in 1833. I’m not positive on the timeline of when he moved to Kingsbury, but I do know he owned the property that The Schoolhouse sits on and lived in a house at the end of the tote road that runs along our property. He died there Christmas Day in 1896. The foundations of the home and barn are still visable today amongst the blueberry fields.
As I sit in our house writing, I look across the snowy blueberry fields to the wood line. Quiet and desolate now. Knowing at one time there were houses across from us, children living just down below, probably romping through the fields to get to school. Horses and wagons once carried people and families two miles down the road to the little village that no longer exists. Barely a trace left of anything old and original to the town that once had nearly 250 people. It amazes me. I’m eager to do a bit more digging and now knowing what I’m looking for, it will make things a bit easier, as I do have access to some historical information.
No wonder we feel so AT HOME here! Roots run deep❤
Off-Grid Soul 