♀Hannah Walker

Hannah Walker (about 1780 – 25 September 1867) was a resident of Topsham, Maine, who married twice, first Capt. James Stone of Brunswick and then the Topsham mill owner Johnson Wilson, yet was remembered at her death, sixty years after her second wedding, as the wife of her first husband. She was the third great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Eliza Stone Wilson (1812–1881).

Early life

She was the daughter of Gideon Walker and Mary Perkins, who had married in 1777; both came of families at Arundel (now Kennebunkport). The Walker family account in the Wheelers’ history of Brunswick, Topsham and Harpswell, published in 1878, gives her birth as 2 January 1780, which agrees with the age of 87 years and 8 months recorded at her death. The family moved from Arundel to Topsham in December 1789, and her father’s house there later served as a tavern.

Marriages

On 29 December 1796 “Hannah of T.”, that is, of Topsham, married Capt. James Stone of Brunswick. Nothing further about the marriage has been traced, and the records read do not say what became of him. By 1807 she was “Mrs. Hannah Stone”, and on 26 July of that year, both being of Topsham, she married Johnson Wilson, the son of William and Mary (Patten) Wilson, according to the town’s printed vital records. The town’s record of that marriage names her as the daughter of Gideon Walker.

On 8 July 1808 Johnson Wilson took a deed of Fishing Rock Island in the river at the falls, and he built the first mill on it. The same history tells how the island got its later name: Wilson and some friends, pretending to be fish-wardens, once made off with a catch of shad that other men had taken illegally on a Sunday and hidden there, and when Wilson was blamed for breaking the Sabbath his critics took to calling his mill the “Shad Mill”, and the island itself later became known as Shad Island. During the high water of 1811 he and a companion were stranded there by the breaking ice for nearly two days, fed with crackers and fish thrown from the Brunswick shore, until they were brought off by boat.

Their daughter Eliza was born at Topsham on 4 July 1812. Her middle name, Stone, is the surname of her mother’s first husband.

Later life and death

In 1850 a Hannah Wilson, aged seventy, was living in the Topsham household of William Dennett and his wife Eliza; she was very probably this Hannah, then living with her daughter.

She died at Topsham on 25 September 1867, aged 87 years and 8 months. The town’s printed vital records, taking the entry from her gravestone, list her not under Wilson but under Stone: “Hannah, w. James, and d. Gideon and Mary Walker”. The records do not explain why the stone names James Stone rather than Johnson Wilson, whom she had married sixty years before.

Notes

The Wheelers date the first marriage to 1797; the town’s marriage record gives 29 December 1796, which is kept here. No record of Johnson Wilson’s death has been examined.