“Pack Up Your House and Sail”
(a talk by Dr. Leigh Smith)

Saturday, January 26, 2019

When the Maine/Nova Scotia boundary was finalized after the Treaty of Paris (1783), it turned out that the town of Castine was to remain in the State of Maine, instead of the Province of Nova Scotia. (New Brunswick had not yet been carved out of Nova Scotia: that came in 1784.) This decision came despite petitions from the citizens of Castine to the government in London: they even paid to send a small delegation to plead their case, that the Penobscot River should be the natural boundary between Maine and Nova Scotia, rather than the St. Croix River. Fort George, the British fort at Castine, was the last fort ceded to the USA in 1784, when the 74th Highland Regiment abandoned it.

About 40 Loyalist families from Castine who absolutely refused to remain in the USA carefully took apart their wooden houses, laid the walls and roofs onto barges, and floated them down the Penobscot River, eastward along the coast to Passamaquoddy Bay, and then to the peninsula where St. Andrew’s took shape.

Dr. Smith was able to show photographs of several buildings still existing in St. Andrews which originated in Castine. He pointed out that these were not log cabins, but were houses built of horizontal planks of wood, so it was easier to take down each side of the house as a unit. As one member of the audience pointed out, based on the construction methods of the times, they would have been held together with wooden pegs rather than nails, so tapping out the dowels was probably easier than removing nails would have been. All glass was carefully removed from the windows and packed for transport. Leigh’s photos of the re-assembled houses showed that the windows frequently consisted of about a dozen small panes rather than one large pane, as glass window panes were difficult to make and thus very expensive.

Given the tides in the Bay of Fundy, safely moving the barges and their loads behind a sailing boat was probably the hardest part of the enterprise.

This was a very interesting story of Loyalists from another part of the country, which most of us had never heard before. Dean Taylor, who introduced Leigh as speaker, has a special knowledge of the area, since he descends from a Castine Loyalist – and he’ll speak about them in September.