♀Harriet Clough

Harriet Clough (3 September 1809 – 8 August 1887) was a Maine woman who spent her married life at Kingfield, in Franklin County, as the wife of Benjamin Webster (1802–1884), a mechanic and clock repairer. Two of her six children went far from Kingfield, a daughter to Kansas and a son to Hartford, Connecticut, where in 1904 he published the family memorial that records her marriage and her children. She was the great-great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Eldora M. Webster (1846–1913).

Early life

Harriet was born on 3 September 1809 at Phillips, in what was then the District of Maine^W, still part of Massachusetts. Three family compilations, a lineage application of 1942, a genealogy of the Clough family published in 1952 and a family chart of 1994, name her parents as John Clough (1787–1855) and Sybil Howard (1784–1864), and by her birth date she was the eldest of their eight children. No record naming her parents has been found. Her entry in the census of 1880, which recorded where each person’s parents were born, gives her father’s birthplace as Maine and her mother’s as New Hampshire, which fits the couple: John was born at Readfield, Maine, and the census of 1850 also gives Sybil’s birthplace as New Hampshire. By 1820 John and Sybil were farming at Freeman, the town next to Kingfield, and the censuses found them there until 1840.

Marriage and family

According to the memorial of the Webster family that her son John compiled in 1904, Harriet married Benjamin Webster, a widower seven years older than she was, on 26 January 1832. The memorial records that his first wife, Mehitable Eustice, had died the previous May, and at the marriage his four children by her ranged in age from two to eight. Harriet and Benjamin had six children of their own, born between 1833 and 1850: Sybil, Benjamin C., John C., Conway, Eldora and Emma.

When the census was taken at Kingfield in July 1850, Harriet, then 40, was one of nine people in the household. Besides Benjamin, a mechanic, and five of her own children, it held two grown sons of his first marriage: William, a blacksmith of 23, and George, a carpenter of 21. In June 1860 the family was still at Kingfield. Harriet was 50, and five of her children were at home: Benjamin C., a laborer, John C., a printer, and the three youngest, who had all been at school during the year.

Sybil, the eldest, went west in the 1850s and settled in Kansas, where as a widow she kept a hotel at Lawrence. John, a printer at Concord, New Hampshire, when he married in 1862, went into insurance and settled at Hartford, and his own memorial describes him as a vice-president of the Ætna Life company. The memorial also records that Benjamin C. served in the Civil War. Eldora married Wesley Blanchard of Freeman in 1866 and made her home at Lewiston, and Emma married Peleg G. Sanford.

Later life and death

In the census of 1880 Benjamin, aged 78, was working as a clock repairer, and Harriet, 70, was keeping house. Their youngest daughter, Emma, with her husband Peleg G. Sanford, who worked in a tannery, and their three-year-old son, John, lived in the same house. A reading of the stones in Riverside Cemetery at Kingfield, filed on a Maine cemetery card in 1986, gives Benjamin’s death as 15 June 1884, aged 82, and Harriet’s as 8 August 1887, aged 77, and places them on the same lot. The family memorial adds that Benjamin’s first wife, Mehitable, and his son George lie in the same family lot.

Notes

Her dates of birth and death are given in two supplemental applications that her great-grandson Kenneth Blanchard (1897–1975) filed with the Sons of the American Revolution in 1942, tracing his descent through her from both of her grandfathers, John Clough and Uriah Howard, soldiers of the Revolution. Her ages in the censuses of 1850, 1860 and 1880 agree with that birth date. The index of her son John’s marriage record of 1862 gives her birthplace as Phillips, and the 1994 family chart gives Freeman. At the census of 1810 her father was living at the settlement then called Curvo, which probably became the town of Phillips.

The death record of her daughter Emma, made at Lewiston in 1921, gives Emma’s mother’s maiden name as Harriet Clough. The 1952 Clough genealogy lists Harriet last among the eight children, with no date of birth, and says that she went to New York; the censuses of 1850, 1860 and 1880 all find her at Kingfield.