♂Thomas Wilson

Thomas Wilson (died 7 April 1786), known as Captain Thomas Wilson, was a settler of Topsham, in what was then the District of Maine^W, where he died in his seventy-third year. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son William Wilson (1741–1826). A history of Topsham and its neighboring towns published in 1878 remembers him as a famous hunter, the town’s first known tailor and a leader of the settlers against the proprietors who claimed their land, and tells how he was mobbed as a suspected Tory at the outbreak of the Revolution.

From Ireland to Topsham

According to Moses Woodman’s manuscript history of Topsham, Thomas Wilson came from Ireland as a boy of about fifteen and landed at Boston, the only one of his family to come to America; the other Wilsons of the town, Woodman added, were no kin of his. George and Henry Wheeler’s history of Brunswick, Topsham and Harpswell, published in 1878, tells the same story and calls him a Scotch-Irish^W Presbyterian. Both histories say that Thomas Wilson married Ann Cochran of Londonderry, New Hampshire; neither gives the date. The two histories credit Thomas and Ann with seven children: William, James, Thomas, Lettice, Margaret, Mary and Elizabeth. William was born in Boston about 1741, by Woodman’s account, and came to Topsham as an infant.

The Wheelers’ sketch of his life has him moving on from Boston to Topsham, going back to Boston when the next Indian war broke out, most likely King George’s War^W of the 1740s, and returning once peace was made, to stay through the last French and Indian war and for the rest of his life. He was, they write, a noted hunter, one of a party of Topsham men who made their way through the wilderness to explore the country around what is now Farmington. His house, a block-house, stood a little west of where his grandson James later lived.

A Topsham tradition, set down in the same history, explains a local name. Coming home over the river ice one winter night with a web of cloth from a fulling mill at Brunswick, he heard a woman, Betty Watts, calling for help where she had broken through; the tradition holds that he held one end of the cloth, threw her the roll and drew her out, and that the mill nearby was named the Granny-Hole Mill in memory of the rescue, a name later given to the whole ravine.

Settler and townsman

The land of Topsham was claimed by the Pejepscot Proprietors^W, and some of the settlers disputed their title. In letters cited by the Wheelers, the company’s clerk, Belcher Noyes, named Captain Adam Hunter and Captain Thomas Wilson in 1760 as the ringleaders of those in Topsham who denied it, and in 1763 he wrote that “Capt. Wilson is at the head of this Rebellion — you will find him a very troublesome fellow.”

The Wheelers’ account of the town records shows him in office from the town’s beginning: when Topsham was incorporated in 1764 he was chosen a tithing-man at its first meeting, on 9 May, and on 2 June one of the committee to lay out its highways and roads; in 1766 he was the town’s committee to come to terms with a minister and schoolmaster, and one of three chosen to agree with the Reverend Stephen Scales after the town voted strongly for the Presbyterian form of worship; and he was a selectman in 1774 and 1775. He was also, as far as the Wheelers could trace, the first tailor in Topsham, at work in 1775 and before.

The Revolution

In 1775, the Wheelers relate, a mob from a Brunswick town meeting chaired by Samuel Thompson, who led the militia in Thompson’s War^W, crossed to Topsham and seized him as a Tory, “though strictly speaking he was not one”, handcuffed him and carried him to Benjamin Stone’s; one of his daughters followed, got the handcuffs off and threw them away, and he escaped home. When Topsham met to pass resolutions for separation from Great Britain he voted against them, not, the Wheelers explain, from sympathy with Britain, but because he believed too strongly in its power to subdue the colonies. Offended by the vote, Thompson denounced him as a Tory and gathered men at his house, until steadier townsmen, judging by the Wheelers’ account that “a tailor would be too great a loss”, persuaded the rest to withdraw. Shortly afterwards his wife wrote satirical verses on Thompson.

That autumn some of Benedict Arnold’s soldiers, brought back sick from the expedition to Quebec^W, were quartered at Brunswick, and townsmen unwilling to attack Wilson a second time themselves put fifteen or twenty of them up to it and lent them boats. The soldiers landed on the Topsham shore and loaded their guns, but the Wheelers record that he met them pleasantly, gave them breakfast and heard out an hour of their sufferings, and that they went back to tell those who had sent them he was “too worthy a man to be so grossly insulted.” Either before or soon after, according to the same history, a mob seized him, loaded him with chains and carried him to New Meadows, where they filled his wig with tar, set it on his head and sent him home. He made no resistance, the Wheelers add, and showed no resentment.

Death

Thomas Wilson died at Topsham on 7 April 1786, in his seventy-third year. The Wheelers write that he was buried in the graveyard near the old meeting-house. Ann died at Topsham on 4 October 1789, aged seventy-six.

Notes

• His gravestone, as given in the town’s printed vital records, has his death on “Apr. 7, 1786, in his 73d. y.”, which fits a birth about 1713 or 1714. The records do not say whether his title of captain was a militia rank or a ship’s command.
• The town’s printed vital records give Moses Woodman’s manuscript Early History of Topsham, kept by the Maine Historical Society, as the source for his origin, his marriage and six of the seven children; the Wheelers most likely drew on the same work, so the two histories are not independent. Mary’s parentage and her birth on 12 March 1752 come from a separate private family record. No record names Thomas as William’s father, and the printed Lincoln County probate records to 1800 hold no estate for him.
• The Wheelers’ family register dates his settlement at Topsham to 1752, while Woodman has William there at about a year old; their sketch, in which Thomas came to Topsham, went back to Boston for the war and returned with the peace, fits both.
• The Granny-Hole tradition and the Revolution stories call him Mr. Thomas Wilson of Topsham, without the title. He is most likely the captain: the same history makes the Thomas Wilson of the rescue the grandfather of James Wilson of Topsham, born 1789, near whose house the captain’s block-house had stood, and names only one Thomas among the town’s early Wilsons. The town officer of 1764–1775 is taken to be the same man.
• A Thomas Wilson who served as a selectman of Londonderry, New Hampshire, in 1735–1737 was most likely a different man; a Thomas Wilson of Londonderry still appears there in the 1750s and 1760s.