♂John Clough

John Clough (24 March 1787 – 11 July 1855) was a farmer of Readfield birth who spent his working life in the hill country of Franklin County, Maine, around Freeman and Phillips, and died more than a thousand miles to the west, at Portage, Wisconsin, where a family genealogy says he had gone to visit his brother. He was the third great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Harriet Clough (1809–1887).

Early life

John was born at Readfield, in the Kennebec country, on 24 March 1787, the second of eight children whom the town’s register of births enters together under his father’s name, the first a sister, Relief, in 1785 and the last a brother, David, in 1804. His mother was Elizabeth Savage, who had filed her marriage intention with the elder John Clough in 1784. Maine was then still a district of Massachusetts, and did not become a state until 1820. His father, who shared his name, was a veteran of the Revolutionary War; a family chart compiled in 1994 gives the elder John’s birthplace as Poplin, New Hampshire. The first federal census, in 1790, lists a John Clough as head of a household at Wales Plantation, not far from Readfield; that was probably his father’s household, with the young John in it.

Father and son on the Sandy River

By 1810 both Johns had moved up the Sandy River to the new settlement then called Curvo, which probably became the town of Phillips. The census taker that year wrote them on consecutive lines, the father at the head of a large household and, directly below him, “John Clough Jun”, then 23. Two men of the name appear in the district at every census from 1810 to 1840, and the ages tell them apart. The younger John was farming in Freeman by 1820 with a wife and a growing family, and in 1830 a man in his sixties was living in the Freeman household, most likely his father. By 1840 the elder John, aged 80, headed his own house at Phillips and was marked in the column kept for Revolutionary pensioners, while the younger was still at Freeman with his wife and six younger people in the house, a youth and five girls and young women. In 1850 John, then 63, was living at Phillips with Sybil, aged 65.

Marriage and family

John married Sybil Howard (1784–1864), daughter of Uriah Howard, a Continental Army veteran who had settled at Phillips, and his wife Lydia. They married on 9 April 1809, according to the family Bible leaf her father wrote; no place is recorded. Their eldest child, Harriet, was born in 1809, and she later married Benjamin Webster of Kingfield. The couple had eight children, born between 1809 and about 1828. Maine death records of the 1890s and 1900s name John Clough and Sybil Howard as the parents of four of them, sons and daughters who lived on into old age at Houlton, Madison, Fairfield and Phillips; one of those records, for Adline, gives her father’s birthplace as Readfield. A genealogy of the Clough family published in 1952 lists the other three, a son Benjamin and daughters Valina and Matilda; they rest on that compilation.

Death

John died at Portage, Columbia County, Wisconsin, on the morning of 11 July 1855, of a disease of the heart. The Portage newspaper the Independent printed the notice the next day, calling him “formerly of Phillips, Me.” and announcing his funeral at Verandah Hall at two o’clock that afternoon; it gave his age as 69, a year more than his 1787 birth allows. The notice shows that the man who died in Wisconsin was the Phillips farmer. The 1952 genealogy states that he served as a soldier in the War of 1812 and had gone to Portage to visit his brother; no record of either the service or the brother has yet been found. His grave there is recorded under the name John P. Clough, with the same date; the middle initial appears nowhere else. Sybil outlived him by nine years in Maine. She died at Phillips on 1 February 1864, and was buried in Riverside Cemetery there, on her father’s lot.

Notes

The compilations disagree on the year of his death. The 1994 family chart and the 1952 genealogy give 11 July 1851; a lineage application to the Sons of the American Revolution in 1942 and the Wisconsin grave memorial give 11 July 1855, as does the newspaper notice of 1855, and that date is used here. The Readfield register of births names John Clough as the father of the eight children and gives no mother; Elizabeth Savage is named as his wife by the 1784 marriage intention and by the 1994 chart. The memorial also gives his birth as 27 March 1787; the town record’s 24 March is preferred. In the census of 1830 the only man of his generation in the Freeman household is counted as in his thirties, when he was 43; the children’s ages fit his family exactly, and the entry is taken as his.