Samuel Chase
Samuel Chase was a Continental soldier of the Revolution who spent his old age moving between the hill towns of northern New Hampshire and Vermont with his grown children. He swore in April 1818 that he was fifty-seven years old, which puts his birth about 1761. The federal census of pensioners taken in 1840 gave his age as 83.
By his own sworn account he enlisted at Newbury, Massachusetts, at the end of May or the first of June 1781, for three years. He served as a private in Captain Simeon Lord's company of the 2nd Massachusetts Regiment, commanded by Colonel Ebenezer Sproat. The Massachusetts Line was the body of regular Continental regiments the state raised for the war, as distinct from its militia. He stayed with the regiment until the fall of 1783, when he was honorably discharged at West Point, New York, the army's great fortress on the Hudson. Newbury filled its quota that year the way Massachusetts told every town to: the townsmen were divided into classes, and each class had to find and pay one man for three years in the Continental army. Samuel was the man one Newbury class hired. A neighbour from Newbury later swore that he went into the service from the town "& received pay there from the Class who hired him." A return of the men Newbury raised that summer lists a Samuel Chase, also given as Samuel Chase Jr., enlisted on 8 July 1781 for three years.
When he came home at the close of the war he went to Stephen Morse of Newbury as an apprentice to the trade of house joiner, and served his time with him. It was the trade he followed for the rest of his working life. By 1798 he was taxed at Bath, Grafton County, New Hampshire, for one poll and one hundred acres of wild land, in a town where Nathaniel Rix, a soldier he had known in the army, also lived.
On 13 November 1800 he married Betsey Hadlock at Bath, a farming town on the Ammonoosuc River in Grafton County, New Hampshire. The family lived at Bath, where the children were born: Rhoda about 1801, Jonathan about 1803, Catherine, Joseph, Moses in 1810, Hezekiah in 1812, Dorothy Ann in 1814 and Christopher Columbus in 1816. Betsey died in 1832. Two Hadlock brothers stood close to the family. Samuel Hadlock of Bath was sued alongside Samuel Chase in 1802, and before 1817 Chase deeded his farm at Bath to Samuel Hadlock and his brother Hezekiah, who sold it to Thomas Hall of Barnet in August 1817. They were Betsey's brothers, sons of Jonathan Hadlock, who had brought his whole family to Bath from Weare in Hillsborough County.
In April 1818 Samuel was living at Ludlow, Windsor County, Vermont, when Congress passed the first general pension act for poor veterans of the Continental service. He applied at Cavendish on 21 April. He swore that on 17 January 1817 his house had burned, and that "his Discharge and all his other papers, and all the property that he possessed, were consumed together with his house." Judge Amos Heald of the Windsor County Court certified that he was "in indigent circumstances, and stands in need of the assistance of his country for support." He was put on the Vermont roll at eight dollars a month from 21 April 1818.
In August 1820 he had to prove his poverty again under a new law, which required every pensioner to show the court what he owned. He appeared in open court at Haverhill on the 8th, aged fifty-nine and living at Bath. He gave his trade as joiner. His wife was 41, "weakly of late years and unable to work but little." He named eight children: Rhoda, 19; Jonathan, 17, "subject to fits from his birth & wholly unable to support himself"; Catherine, 15; Joseph, 13; Moses, 11; Hezekiah, 9, "sickly most of the time"; Anna, 6, "verry subject to the Phthisic"; and Christopher, 3. Anna was Dorothy Ann, born in 1814. The town of Bath had helped the family for three years before the pension came, "as I was burnt out my folks sick & I poor & owing much as I still do & cannot pay." The court valued everything he had at forty dollars and fifty cents.
He was back at Bath by August 1820 and had his pension moved to New Hampshire. In the fall of 1829 he went north to Jay, in Orleans County on the Canadian line, where several of his wife's Hadlock family had settled. He told a justice why: "he is a father to several boys who want land & in Jay is a large tract of new land." He had gone onto a lot there and was making a farm, and at about sixty-eight he had given up the joiner's trade. In 1836 he was living across the line at Sutton, in Lower Canada, and spent several weeks at Bath waiting to be allowed to draw his pension. Several of his children married or settled there and in neighbouring Troy. On 5 March 1839, before Ira Goodall, a justice of the peace at Bath, he declared himself "Samuel Chase late of Jay in the State of Vermont now of Bath." He asked for the pension to be paid in New Hampshire again because "he wishes to live with his son Moses Chase who lives in Bath in Grafton County in New Hampshire and has removed from Jay to Bath to his said son's house to live with him the rest of his days as he now expects."
He did. The census of pensioners of 1 June 1840 found Samuel Chase, 83, in the household of Moses Chase at Bath. He died on 20 June 1843, by a family genealogy at Lyman, the next town north, where Moses's wife had been raised.
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Cite: Heirology, "Samuel Chase (1761-1843)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/samuel-chase-1761-1843-a6e08d.