Vermont's Northland Journal - Trials of a Pioneer of Brighton Captured in a Letter

Trials of a Pioneer of Brighton Captured in a Letter

Trudy Stevens of Derby Line provided the Historical with the following letter about one of the early pioneers of Brighton, John Cargill. Although she isn’t sure who wrote the letter, Stevens says that Cargill is one of her ancestors. Left undated, it’s difficult to determine when the letter was written, but apparently sometime during the last years of the 19th century or early years of the 20th century. In transcribing the letter for this article, every attempt was made to not change the wording; however, parts of the letter proved difficult to transcribe accurately.

Perhaps the last of those sturdy pioneers from Connecticut, so many of whom were among the first settlers of the different Vermont towns and who did so much to make the history of this state, was the subject of this sketch.
John Cargill, the first settler of the town of Brighton, was born in Promfret, Conn., November 11, 1798, and died in Brighton July 26, 1889 age 90 years, 8 months and 15 days.
When a boy he moved with his father’s family to Brunswick, Vt., where he grew up. Of his youth there is but little known except that he had his full share of the privations, hardships, and ceaseless toil of the early settlers of Vermont. His opportunities for schooling were exceedingly limited; still he succeeded in acquiring a common education. Blessed with a very retentive memory, when he had once learned a thing, it always remained with him, and he had a ready tact of calling it up and making use of it.
His early life of toil built him up a constitution that carried him through his ninety years almost without any ailment. He was a very strong man. Eli G. Smith says that when a little boy, he had seen Mr. Cargill commence to cut the butt of a large log when another man began the second cut, and before the latter had finished, Mr. Cargill would have the third cut completed.
In January 1820, when 21 years old, John Cargill married Orpha Schoff, daughter of Jacob Schoff of Maidstone. By her he had two daughters, Laura Ann, who married Ladoit Farmer, and Elmina Jane, who married Arba Joy. Neither of them are now living, and Mrs. Cargill died October 29, 1878.
Nowadays, when a young man seeks to make a start in life, he looks around for a clerkship, or some soft job in which he can keep his clothes nice and his hands soft. In Mr. Cargill's time it was different. Then it seemed to be the proper thing for a young man starting in for himself to strike out into the wilderness, select his location, and there literally [carved] out a home for himself and family. Hard work did not terrify them.
In September 1822, John Cargill in company with his brother Ithiel, started out to find a place on which to settle. After looking through Morgan and Charleston, they decided to locate in what was then Caldersburg, now a part of Brighton, on the farm where John Cargill spent the rest of his life. With two other men they set out to make a clearing, and put up the inevitable log house. One day while chopping, a tree just cut was noticed as likely to fall on Ithiel. The others shouted to him, but he seemed paralyzed with fear, and instead of moving stood looking at the tree. It struck him in the back and knocked him down. He was holding his axe in such a way that the whole bit of the axe was driven into his breast, making such a gash that his lungs were plainly exposed to view. Just as they brought Ithiel to the camp, Mr. Oliver Pinney of Holland, father of the late Levi Pinney, reached the camp with a horse he had borrowed the day before from Ithiel, also one of his own. A man was sent with one of the horses to the Connecticut River…to notify Ithiel’s father and to bring a doctor. The doctor reached the camp at daylight next morning, sewed up the wound, and then they started to carry him home. They placed him upon a litter swing between two horses, but this jarred him so badly that the men had to carry the litter themselves. They camped one night in the woods, and reached old Mr. Cargill’s the next day. Ithiel, however, died when he was within three-fourths of a mile of home. An examination showed that a splinter driven into his back, unnoticed in their hurry at the time of the accident, had caused his death.
His brother’s death so discouraged John that he determined to abandon his clearing and settle elsewhere. His wife, however, desired to come back, and was so persistent that John gave way to her, and they returned finally settling here in April 1823. They lived in a log house just below where the barn is on his old place. The roof of the log house was made of bark, the floor and door of split logs. For some time their nearest neighbors were eight miles away in Morgan, or 16 miles on the Connecticut River. When John was so fortunate as to raise some grain, he had to carry it to Derby to be ground.
He built the first framed barn in town, having to haul the lumber some eight or nine miles from a little sawmill north of Morgan Corner. The matron of the present day would naturally suppose that Mrs. Cargill, deprived as she was of all opportunities for making calls, shopping, tea fights [?], and that greatest of all pleasures, the semi-annual housecleaning, must have been unhappy and discontented; but the contrary was the fact. That she was blessed with the usual amount of happiness and contentment is widened by the fact that when at the end of their first season in town the frost had destroyed all their crops and John declared he would leave. Mrs. Cargill said she had come there to live and make her home, and she would never leave there till she went to her last home. And she did as she said.
When Mr. Cargill came into town he had a pair of three-year-old steers and a cow. With those steers he used to go to Derby to mill, and also to dispose of his pearl ash and potash, which were the first settlers “legal tender” for lack of a better. For a cart, he went to his father’s sawmill in Brunswick and sawed in to plank a large birch log. Two of those planks were pinned together crosswise, hewed out round with an axe. A hole was bored through the middle and the wheel was complete. The axle was hewed out, the tongue a crotched pole, and the body of the same primitive manufacture. With this he did his work, carried his grain to mill, and his salts to market, and in later life he would laugh heartily at the recollection of the sensation his unique vehicle created on the road. He needed no help to announce his approach, for the carriage itself gave timely warning of his coming. What a pity this cart could not have been preserved, so that it could have been placed on exhibition when the Brightonians celebrate their centennial anniversary. It would be worth a farm.
Mr. Cargill once told the writer that in the very early days of his residence here, game of all kinds abounded. In the space of about a year and a half, he killed sixty odd deer in and around his clearing. Wolves also were plentiful. Once when he and his wife were away, some wolves were in the pasture chasing the sheep. The two girls drove them off by pounding on the side of the house with a fire shovel, and by clapping their hands and shouting.
Like many people of those times, Mr. Cargill was a little superstitious. He used to tell how in the spring of 1825 he dreamed one night that Warren Stevens and Jerry Bishop were lost, and he want out to help hunt for them; that he found them and could get Jerry but could not get hold of Warren. The place in the woods and the log on which he stood became firmly fixed in his mind. The next day he was called upon to help search for Edwin Stevens, a young brother of Warren. In tramping through the woods he came to the very place, and stood upon the same log he had seen in his dream. He looked under the log and saw the boy, dead.
In 1851-2 Mr. Cargill in company with Arba Joy built a saw mill on the ground where David Hayne’s grist mill now stands. The first lumber they sawed was on a $500 M contract for the G.T. Ry. R. Co. at $6 per M. This lumber was used in building the old engine house and the fright shed. They also sawed considerable of the woodsheds and barns. They ran the frames of the Island Pond House, woodsheds, and barns. They ran the mill six years and then sold it to N.L. Woodbury who moved it to East Brighton.
For the last 25 years Mr. Cargill lived with Mr. and Mrs. H.R. Stevens, who tenderly cared for him in his declining years. His general health was good, his mind perfectly clear and bright until a short time before his death.

Brighton, whose village is known more commonly as Island Pond, was chartered on August 30, 1781 by Joseph Brown as Random. The first town meeting was held in 1823. This picture was apparently taken during the early half of the 20th century. Postcards courtesy of That Bookstore and Antique Center in St. Johnsbury

The village of Island Pond is located on the shores of a body of water also called Island Pond. This picture shows what was then a rural section of Brighton in its earlier days, most likely in the days when the railroad played an important role in that community, a community that now promotes itself for the region’s natural, rugged beauty.