Primary source material: Bullard Collection, Old Sturbridge Village Research Library. Original spelling has been retained but in some cases, punctuation has been added for clarity.
Fort Constitution
At the end of 1826, when Frances J. R. Sargent was nine, her father was transferred from Fort Sullivan in Eastport, Maine to Fort Constitution in New Castle, New Hampshire. He and Fanny packed up once again and shipped their belongings from Maine to New Hampshire. Well-bundled against the northern New England winter, young Frances and her parents traveled southwest in a sleigh with hot, flannel-wrapped bricks at their feet.
Built on Great Island, adjacent to the fishing village of New Castle, Fort Constitution overlooked the tidal estuary formed by the Piscataqua River and the Atlantic Ocean.
The Fort was ever-so-slightly downriver from the bustling city of Portsmouth, a commercial ship-building center—and like Eastport—another of the young republic’s busy international ports. Across from Portsmouth, on a group of conjoined islands collectively called Seavey’s Island, the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard churned out vessels for the Navy.
Like Eastport, Portsmouth Harbor was crowded with sailing ships of all sizes and kinds. The big difference was the Fort. Fort Constitution was larger than either Fort Sewall or Fort Sullivan. Much larger.
As the Sargent family approached the Fort, they passed Walbach Tower, a Martello tower above the righthand side of the road, built on top of a small rise, west of the Fort.
Martello Tower – a small, round, thick-walled masonry structure, usually two stories high with a flat roof and a single heavy artillery piece mounted in such a way so as to be able to fire in a complete—or nearly complete—circle.
In 1814, near the end of the War of 1812, Colonel Walbach had hastily ordered the tower built to repel British warships anchored off the Isles of Shoals—so that Portsmouth would not suffer the same fate as Eastport.
Past the tower, Fort Constitution’s whitewashed walls and bright granite ramparts enclosed red brick buildings. There was a semicircular bastion at the northeast corner and another jutted from the southwest corner. An octagonal lighthouse towered eighty-feet above the rocks outside the southeast corner of the Fort.
The Sargent family passed through the guardhouse at the main sally port in the middle of the west wall and entered the Fort. There, they could see that the red brick barracks were large enough to accommodate a hundred and fifty soldiers. They saw a shot furnace, two brick powder-magazines, two storehouses, emplacements for thirty-six guns on the ramparts—and a large privy.
Dr. Sargent and his family crossed the parade ground and reported for duty at Commander Fabius Whiting’s brick house at the east end. Whiting was an amiable, kind and forbearing man—patient and restrained. He’d replaced Colonel Walbach as Commander of the Fort, six years earlier.
(Inside the Commander’s house—she must have been old enough to have heard the stories—Frances might have wondered if there were still signs of the leg-that-landed-on-the-dining-table.)
Whiting directed the little family to the Surgeon’s house and hospital—outside the walls of the Fort, adjacent to additional barracks and several storehouses described as ‘open’.
Like the winters at Fort Sullivan in Eastport, winters at Fort Constitution were bitterly cold. Old Benjamin Waterhouse had long since reported that the men at Fort Constitution had hard service and required warmer clothes than what he called ordinary soldiers.
Nevertheless—Waterhouse assures us—in the summer there was a good garden at Fort Constitution and in the fields to the west of the Fort, seasonal laborers raised bushels and bushels of potatoes to provision the garrison.
When the Sargent family arrived at the beginning of January 1827, they saw little evidence of summer—the magnificent potato fields and the garden lay dormant, windswept and frozen.
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On February 7, 1827, the Sargent family was still settling into the Surgeon’s house at Fort Constitution when James Sargent wrote in his diary, a Mr. R. R. Waldron call’d here P.M.
Richard Russell Waldron was always called ‘Russell’ among his family and friends.
As usual, Dr. Sargent didn’t reveal the reason for the young Navy officer’s visit. He only noted that Waldron stopped by, that afternoon.
We don’t know why Russell Waldron stopped by the Surgeon’s house. We don’t know what was said or what was offered but his appearance in James Sargent’s diary is important. It is the first ripple in the pond.
They didn’t know it but that first visit was the beginning of a many-years-long relationship between the Sargent family and the extended Waldron family—a relationship that would impact Frances J. R. Sargent in a profound way.
In fifteen years time, she would fall in love with Russell Waldron’s youngest brother, Thomas—but during the winter of 1827, nobody knew that yet.
Back then, Frances J. R. Sargent and Thomas W. Waldron were just children with cumbersome names.
***
Two weeks after Russell Waldron first stopped by the Surgeon’s house, one of Fort Constitution’s officers—a devout young Lieutenant named Justin Dimick—confided to Dr. Sargent that he was engaged to Russell’s only sister, Miss Mary Waldron.
Many years after his engagement in 1827, Major Justin Dimick was lauded for his respectful and humane treatment of Confederate prisoners confined at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor during the Civil War—and for the sacrifice of his namesake son during the Battle of Chancellorsville (1863).
They intended to marry at the end of March—in just a few weeks time.
Several days later—on March 20, 1827—Mary and Russell Waldron’s widowed mother, Olive, call’d on the Surgeon’s family. Not surprisingly, Dr. Sargent doesn’t say why she came.
Olive Sheafe Waldron was fifty years old in 1827, the mother of seven surviving children: Richard Russell, Nathaniel, Charles, Mary Constantia, Daniel Jr., Edmund, and thirteen year old Thomas—named for his famous grandfather, Thomas Westbrook Waldron.
Olive’s only daughter, Mary Constantia Waldron’s middle name is unusual and reveals that Olive was well-educated, seemingly respectful of her mother-in-law, and maybe, just a bit cheeky—in a world where women like Olive demonstrated ‘agency’ behind the scenes.
(‘Agency’ is the way—however small and insignificant—human beings take control of their lives when they have little or no legal power.)
Olive was part of that first generation of post-Revolution, classically educated American women—à la Benjamin Rush and his ideas about female academies—and she probably learned about Constantia (or Constantina), the powerful eldest daughter of Constantine the Great while studying Ancient History at school. Maybe she admired Constantina.
It is likely that Olive was also aware of the medieval legend responsible for Constantina’s veneration as ‘Saint Constance.’ And, her mother-in-law’s name was Constance (sometimes recorded as ‘Constant’).
It is very likely that Olive chose Mary’s middle name in part to honor an ancient and powerful Roman woman named Constantina. She also chose it to honor her husband’s mother, Constance Davis Waldron.
But, spelling it ‘Constantia’ and not ‘Constance’, ‘Constant’ or ‘Constantina’ is significant—because this particular spelling makes it more than just an homage to an influential Roman woman and Olive’s mother-in-law.
It is a kind of domestic code—a secret message to people who were similarly educated and aware—a code that indicated her support for women’s rights.
Back in 1790—when the Constitution was finally ratified and Olive was an impressionable but classically educated and well-informed fourteen year old schoolgirl—leading American author and Unitarian intellect, Judith Sargent Murray published another eagerly awaited essay using the penname ‘Constantia’—one of several literary disguises she had used since she first turned to writing as a way to earn a living and support her family.
For years, Murray had argued in favor of women’s education. It would enable women to write or teach school if they found it necessary to provide financial support for their families or—if they chose not to marry—support themselves.
Written in 1774 and released in 1790—in the midst of that intellectually and politically charged time at the very beginning of the United States—Murray used ‘Constantia’ to publish her most important and controversial work. She called it: On the Equality of the Sexes.
by John Singleton Copley – Livre Un regard transatlantique : la collection d’art américain de Daniel J. Terra, Paris : Éditions Adam Biro, 2002. ISBN 9782876603479, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8301842
***
When she first met the Sargent family in 1827, Olive Sheafe Waldron and at least five of her seven fatherless children lived on Pleasant Street in Portsmouth—just around the corner and steps away from her childhood home. She and her ten siblings grew up in a mansion on Buck Street—renamed Broad Street after the 1813 fire which destroyed central Portsmouth. Today, Broad Street is called State Street.
Olive had deep family connections to the Portsmouth area—her ancestors had governed New Hampshire since English settlement in the 17th century. Her father, Jacob Sheafe, inherited the family mercantile business and considerable property in Portsmouth. It would not have been unusual that at least part of his inherited fortune came from the infamous ‘triangle trade’—textiles, rum and manufactured goods to Africa, slaves to the Americas, sugar to New England.
Olive’s mother, Mary Huske Quincy, came from another wealthy and well-connected family. As was expected of her generation, she gave birth to at least eleven children. Olive’s great-aunt, Dorothy Quincy, was John Hancock’s first wife. If there had been such a thing as royalty in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the Quincy-Sheafes would have been one of the royal families.
By the mid-1820s, several of Olive’s ten siblings owned substantial houses and estates in and around Portsmouth.
Her sister Mary married Edward Cutts, a prominent and wealthy Portsmouth attorney and they lived in town. Sister Ann (Nancy) married Charles Cushing. Their ancient and ‘eclectic’ forty-room mansion—just downriver from Portsmouth—overlooked Little Harbor.
Some sources say that Charles Cushing purchased the venerable and historic house for his bride. Others say that Ann’s father bought it for her as a wedding present.
Today, the Cushing’s extraordinary house is known as the Wentworth-Coolidge Museum and is open to the public.
Across Sagamore Creek and downriver from the Cushing estate was another vast property called Sheafe Farm—inherited from his father by Olive’s brother, Theodore Sheafe. Sister Hannah married Benjamin Prescott. After Benjamin’s death, Hannah and her daughters lived with Theodore and his family at Sheafe Farm.
When Olive Sheafe married Daniel Waldron in June of 1802, she wed the scion of another ancient and wealthy New Hampshire family.
Daniel Waldron’s ancestor, Richard Waldron (1615–1689) was a no-nonsense Puritan who controlled valuable land at the Cocheco River Falls in Dover, NH. He was prominent in early local politics. A pious and powerful man, he ordered the whipping of three Quaker women who attempted to spread their heresy in Dover.
At the end of King Philip’s War (1675-1678), Richard Waldron captured four hundred indigenous refugees from Massachusetts by deception. He sent them to Boston where they were shipped to Barbados as sugar plantation slaves.
Waldron’s misdeed was never forgotten—thirteen years later, during King William’s War (1688–1697), the then elderly Waldron was ambushed in his bed, tortured to death, his body mutilated, and his fine house burned down.
His children rebuilt, the Waldron family prospered, and in 1763, raised the frame of a ‘great house’ that was said to have been ‘in its prime’ when the Constitution was ratified in 1790.
Like her own, her new husband’s ancestors were English Puritans who settled in Dover, New Hampshire in the 17th century. For nearly two-hundred years, the Waldron family controlled much of the land, the mills, and the government there—and owned additional property in Portsmouth. Like other wealthy New England families in the 17th and 18th centuries, the colonial-era Waldron family owned slaves.
In 1745—a generation before the American Revolution—Olive’s father-in-law became a New Hampshire military hero during the Siege of Louisbourg (Cape Breton, Nova Scotia). Thomas Westbrook Waldron was a powerful, middle-aged, colonial administrator when the time came to join the American rebellion or remain loyal to the Crown. At fifty-three, he joined the revolutionaries.
Unfortunately, Olive never had the chance to meet him because he died in 1785, seventeen years before she married his son, Daniel.
by John Greenwood – http://www.historicnewengland.org/collections-archives-exhibitions/collections-access/collection-object/capobject?gusn=GUSN-175713&searchterm=Thomas%20Westbrook%20Waldron, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37148385
Nevertheless, this alliance between two illustrious New Hampshire families—the Daniel Waldron-Olive Sheafe marriage—seemed brimming with possibilities. Daniel had married a rich wife. His textile mills in Dover were booming. Three sons, a daughter, and then, three more sons were born. The oldest children went to good, classical schools. Life was good. Fortune smiled on them.
Until Fortune stopped smiling and it all came crashing down during the Panic of 1819, when the entire ancient Waldron family fortune was lost. Daniel was forced to sell his mills and almost all of the ancestral Waldron family land in Dover. Two years later, he was dead and Olive had to make do for seven half-grown children with whatever was left of the money. If she was fortunate, he had invested in an early version of a life insurance policy before he died.
If not, Olive became the pitiable ‘poor relation’ in her very wealthy family. Which didn’t necessarily mean she was out on the street without a penny to her name. She probably had what remained of her dowry and if they were lucky, the youngest of her children were classically educated at the expense of their rich grandmothers. With a little more luck, they were partially supported by Olive’s affluent sisters. Her eldest son, Russell—who was about eighteen when his father died—enlisted in the Navy.
***
(Next: Lieutenant Dimick marries Mary Waldron; Frances J. R. Sargent continues her education; a new commander; the Indian Problem…)
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Pigs in the Cellar 
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