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A Calamitous
Situation
The Life of Polly Jarvis
Dibblee
By Stephen Davidson
Sometime in this period Polly's
husband brought an escaped slave, Tom Hyde, into his employ. The African had
broken free from his master in Fairfield in 1778 and then served with the
British forces before being employed by the Dibblees. (How the twenty-seven
year old African escaped from his master in Fairfield and met the lawyer is not
recorded.) With the arrival of Fyler and Tom, there came word that the family's
property in Stamford had been confiscated.
When Fyler had
recovered from his long imprisonment, he drew on his legal skills to petition
the British government for restitution and relocation. Within two years, Fyler
was repaid for his losses and made a deputy agent in transporting loyalists
from New York to Nova Scotia.
Polly and the children were
going to be leaving everything and everyone they knew, but they could look
forward to a fresh start in a new land far from rebel raiders. Sometime before
the family packed up to leave Long Island, Fyler acquired an indentured servant
for Polly. Little is known of the mulatto child, Sukey, except that she was
freeborn and just nine years old. The Dibblees were the only passengers to have
servants on the ship that took them to Nova Scotia.
In
early April the transport ship Union sailed into Huntington Bay to take on its
refugee passengers for Nova Scotia. Fyler Dibblee compiled the manifest of all
who went aboard. By Wednesday, April 16th the sails were hoisted, and the ship
headed southwest towards New York City. Here, in the former Loyalist
stronghold, the Union's passengers made their final preparations to leave the
land of their birth.
While the Union was in port,
British commissioners came aboard to certify that the Dibblees' African
servants were not actually the rightful property of American citizens. Their
names were duly recorded in The Book of Negroes compiled under the authority of
Commander Guy Carleton.
(There is an interesting
historical footnote here. Because Tom Hyde and Sukey were on the Union, they
became the very first Black Loyalists to arrive in present-day New Brunswick.
Three thousand other Africans who had been loyal to King George would follow
them over the course of the refugee evacuations of
1783.)
On Thursday, April 24, 1783, with 101 adults and
108 children on her passenger manifest, the Union sailed out of New York
harbour as the flag ship for a fleet of nineteen vessels. Their seven thousand
loyalist passengers arrived at the mouth of the St. John River after a journey
of two weeks.
On May 11th, the Union was guided into the
harbour of Parrtown, a settlement that would one day be known as Saint John.
The rest of the refugee convoy joined the Dibblees and their fellow passengers
in the days that followed.
With his duties as deputy
travel agent for the Union's passengers now fulfilled, Fyler Dibblee prepared
to settle his family in Parrtown. At first the swelling settlement offered the
Connecticut lawyer many opportunities to use his legal training. He was
appointed a magistrate and served as an agent in the settling of the loyalist
refugees. No doubt Polly was beginning to feel optimistic about life in their
new community.
Fyler became the loyalists' representative
on a committee that investigated who was illegally settled on crown lands.
Settling land disputes was a welcome return to normality for the Connecticut
lawyer after the years of violence and imprisonment he suffered during the
Revolution. By October Fyler wrote his father that his family was settled "to
their unspeakable satisfaction".
Amazingly, 1,500 homes
would be built around the mouth of the St. John River by the loyalist refugees
between June and October of 1783. It is hard to imagine what it was like for
Polly and her two servants to run the household and feed six mouths in such
wilderness conditions. Perhaps the older children, Walter, William, and Peggy
were able to find ways to earn a living in the new settlement. Perhaps a proud
father forbade them to do menial work. The records are silent.
The first winter in Parrtown was overwhelming for Fyler
Dibblee. The calls for his services had diminished over time. During the early
months of 1784, Fyler borrowed a great deal of money from a fellow Union
passenger as well as Polly's brother, Munson Jarvis, who had also settled in
Parrtown.
The gloom of that first winter in the northern
wilderness of Nova Scotia must have lightened for at least a few days in early
April. Fyler and Polly were the parents of a bridegroom. Walter, their first
born son, became the husband of Hannah Beardsley. She was the oldest daughter
of the Rev. John Beardsley, an Anglican pastor from Poughkeepsie, New York. No
doubt both Fyler and Polly were pleased to be connected to such a prestigious
clergyman's family.
However, April's brief excitement
faded quickly for the Dibblees. Living in a crowded home and being forced to
subsist on a diet of potatoes were physical discomforts. Depression over
Fyler's property losses in Connecticut and the limited chances for success in
his new country were psychological strains. Fyler even feared that he might be
put in prison due to his rising debts.
Eventually, it was
all too much for Polly's forty-three year old husband. On the evening of
Thursday, May 6th as his family sat down for their meal, Fyler was clearly
agitated. He paced back and forth in their small log cabin. Suddenly, he took
out his razor, drew the curtains around his bed, lay down, and cut his throat.
The Dibblees' winter of despair did to Fyler what rebel attacks, incarceration,
and the loss of property over seven years had been unable to do -- utterly
crush his will to live.
It was indeed a calamitous
situation for Polly. Although she had two brothers in the new colony, the new
widow must have realized that they could not give her very much assistance. The
burden of supporting five children was ultimately Polly's to bear. If they had
not already been let go earlier in the winter, the Polly's African servants
must have been dismissed by the end of May, given the family's economic plight.
Polly could not even consider selling their house and
land. One of Fyler's creditors claimed the Dibblees' property to cover what the
lawyer owed him. But the ultimate ownership of her house was taken out of
Polly's hands. A fire swept through Parrtown in June, burning the Dibblee home
to the ground.
The loss of her father and the family's
economic predicament must have been especially stressful for seventeen year old
Peggy Dibblee. They had the potential to thwart her future marriage to John
Bedell, formerly of Staten Island. Would Peggy, now the daughter of a suicide
victim and a penniless widow, be a desirable a match for an ambitious young
man? However, the circumstances surrounding the death of his fiancee?s father
did not deter John Bedell. He married Peggy later in
1784.
In July of 1784 Polly Dibblee was given a grant of
land that included Palmer Point up on the St. John River near Amesbury (later
to be known as Kingston). The widow and her children settled there, building
themselves a log cabin and taking on a native girl as a servant. Polly would
eventually rent Hay Island, a portion of her grant, to Walter Challoner,
formerly of Rhode Island.
As a community made up of
refugees from Connecticut and passengers from the Union, Amesbury would be as
close to a replacement for Polly's hometown of Stamford as she could find. Her
younger brother, John Jarvis, and his wife Sally had already settled in the
community, so there was the promise of nearby family support as
well.
Polly's brother-in-law, Frederick Dibblee, had also
moved to Amesbury with his family. Besides working his own land, he served as
the lay reader for the settlement's small Anglican congregation. All that he
had endured as a loyalist would give Frederick a great deal of empathy for
others. He had not only lost his brother Fyler to a depression-induced suicide;
his sister in Stamford had gone insane from the intense fear of so many violent
attacks on her father's home.
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