♂Johnson Wilson

Johnson Wilson (about 1775 – 30 March 1857) was a mill owner at Topsham, Maine, who built the first mill on the island at the lower falls there and, according to a local tradition, gave that island its later name of Shad Island through a Sunday prank. He was the third great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Eliza Stone Wilson (1812–1881).

Early life

No record of his birth is known, but the age on his gravestone, 81 years and 9 months at his death, puts his birth about 1775. The town’s printed record of his marriage, drawing on a private family record, names him as the son of William and Mary (Patten) Wilson. William had been born about 1741 and died at Topsham in 1826; the couple had married in 1769. On 26 July 1807 Johnson Wilson and Mrs. Hannah Stone were married at Topsham, Sagadahoc, Maine, both being of that town. She was Hannah Walker, the daughter of Gideon Walker, who had married Capt. James Stone of Brunswick in 1796. Their daughter Eliza was born at Topsham on 4 July 1812; her middle name, Stone, is the surname of her mother’s first husband.

Topsham

On 8 July 1808 Wilson received a deed of the island at the lower falls, then called Fishing Rock Island, and not long afterwards he built a double mill on it, the first mill on the island. By 1810 he was the head of a household at Topsham, with Hannah, aged thirty, and Mary Stone, aged eleven, her daughter by her first marriage. The Wheelers’ history of Brunswick, Topsham and Harpswell, published in 1878, gives the tradition behind the island’s later name. The law then forbade catching shad between sunset on Saturday and sunrise on Monday. One Sunday some men caught several of the fish and hid them on the island, not daring to be seen carrying them home; Wilson and some friends went out in boats pretending to be the fish-wardens, found the catch and carried it off for sport. When the joke was discovered, complaint was made against Wilson for breaking the Sabbath, and when he built his mill, those who had blamed him called it the “Shad Mill”, from which the island later became known as Shad Island. The same history records that during the high water of 1811 Wilson and a man called “Noggin” Potter crossed the ice to the island to work at the mill and were cut off when the ice broke up; friends on the Brunswick shore threw them crackers and pieces of fish, and after nearly two days Major William Frost and another man brought them ashore by boat.

Later life and death

He died at Bowdoin, Sagadahoc, Maine, on 30 March 1857 and was buried in Adams Cemetery there. In 1850 a Hannah Wilson, aged seventy, very probably his wife, was living at Topsham in the household of their daughter Eliza and her husband William Dennett; he was not listed there. Online family trees give him a birth year of 1776 or 1782, against the gravestone’s age, which points to about 1775.