♀Elizabeth Savage

Elizabeth Savage (21 January 1761 – 7 February 1844) was a daughter of Daniel Savage of Hallowell, on the Kennebec River in Maine, and the wife of John Clough, whose son John was born at neighboring Readfield on 24 March 1787. She and John Clough had eight children, all born at Readfield between 1785 and 1804, and she died at Phillips, Maine, at the age of 83. In 1804 John Clough and Elizabeth his wife, of Readfield, sold to Jonathan Ballard for five hundred dollars their “right, title, interest & claim” in the estate of Daniel Savage, which was most likely her share of her father’s property. She was the fourth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son John Clough (1787–1855).

Birth and parents

The original Hallowell town register of births lists “Elisabeth Savage” among the “children of Daniel and Elizabeth Savage”, born on 21 January 1761, a date a later State of Maine copy card repeats. A compiled history of Augusta, published in 1870, lists her as “Elizabeth, b. Jan. 2, 1761” among the ten children of Capt. Daniel Savage, who it says was a selectman and for eleven years the town clerk of Hallowell; the town register’s 21 January is used here. The 1994 family chart, which gave her birth as 1759 at Winthrop, is not supported by either. The register lists her six full siblings, five sisters (two of them twins) and a brother Daniel, and the four children of her father’s second marriage, to Anne.

Her mother’s surname is unresolved. The town register names the mother only as Elizabeth, with no surname; the “Pierce” on the State copy card is the copyist’s addition, not the town record’s. The 1870 history names Daniel Savage’s first wife as Elizabeth Robinson, and the same history gives Pierce as the maiden name of the wife of Elizabeth’s brother Daniel. The name Robinson therefore rests only on that history.

When Benedict Arnold’s expedition to Quebec^W passed up the Kennebec in September 1775, a history of Augusta published in 1870 records that some of Arnold’s soldiers were quartered at her father’s house, and one of them, turned out after a quarrel, fired into it and killed a man. Elizabeth was then fourteen.

The 1804 deed names Daniel Savage’s “homestead farm”, “lot No thirtyone & part of lot No thirty” in Augusta, and “a part of a double saw mill called Savages mill” among the property in which she and her husband sold their claim.

Marriage and family

Her marriage intention with John Clough, both of Hallowell, was filed on 5 April 1784, according to another State card copying an old town record; it names no parents. The 1994 chart also dates the marriage to 1784. The 1870 history lists her as “m. John Clough”, and gives her an older sister, Mary, who married Jabez Clough of Readfield in 1774.

The couple settled at Readfield, where their eight children were born, the eldest, Relief, in January 1785 and the youngest, David, in 1804; John, through whom the line runs, was born between them in 1787. Their son Benjamin, born in January 1792, died on 29 May 1814, aged 22, according to a family record copied from a very old book in Phillips, Maine, and typed in 1933 for the Daughters of the American Revolution. By 1810 her husband was living at the settlement the census called “Curvo (so called)”, probably the plantation that became Phillips, and in 1820 he was farming at Phillips.

Death

She died at Phillips, Franklin County, on 7 February 1844, aged 83, and was buried in Riverside Cemetery there.

Notes

Her birth is given three ways. The Hallowell town register has January 1761, with 21 January on the State copy card; the 1870 history prints “Jan. 2, 1761”; and the family record typed in 1933 gives “Jan. 20, 1760”. The register is the original record and gives the date used here. The age of 83 at her death fits January 1761 (it would be 84 for January 1760), while the age of 61 that her husband gave for her in 1820, as the pension office summarized it in 1929, is two years too high for 1761 and one year too high for 1760, so it fits neither.

Her death and burial come from a transcription of her gravestone in the Nathan Hale cemetery collection of Maine records, where she is entered as “Elizabeth S Clough”; the record is the index entry, not the card itself. A lineage application to the Sons of the American Revolution, made in 1942 by her descendant Kenneth Blanchard (1897–1975), names her as “Elizabeth Betsy Savage”, wife of John Clough, Sr., and gives her death as 1859, which would make her 98. The cemetery record puts it fifteen years earlier, in 1844, and no record backs 1859.

The Readfield town index of births names John Clough as the father of the eight children and gives no mother. The family record lists John and Elizabeth and then six of the children, from Benjamin to David; it differs from the index by days or weeks on Moses, Zacheus and David, and agrees on the other three. Of her father’s second family, the register heads three daughters as those of “Daniel and anne Savage”; the fourth child, James, born in 1774, follows in fainter ink and is counted with them here.