|
a.
|
Note: Married by Rev. Benj. Goldsmith
Family tree by grandson Nehemiah Conkling shows his parents to be Benjamin Conklin Jr. (s/o Benjamin, s/o John) and Lydia Tuttle.
"Refugees from Long Island to Connecticut" says his parents are unknown and speculates David s/o Cineus.
"Muster rolls of New York provincial troops. 1755-1764" shows a David Conkling age 17, a cordwainer, who was a member Capt Jonathan Bakers Co., under Capt. David Mulford of the NY Militia in abt. Apr. 7th 1860, but IMO that is more apt to be the David who married Sybil Wheeler, son of Thomas Conkling and Abiah Hubbard
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1790: Soulthold, Suffolk, New York
David Conkline 1 male, 1 female (wife). 2 other persons. 2 slaves
1800 U.S. Census Records, (official enumeration date - 4 August 1800), New York > Suffolk > Riverhead, pg 6,
David Conkling 45+ (bef 1756] , Lydia 45+, male 16-25 [1775-1785], male 26-45 [1755-1775], 4 slaves.
David Conklin [Dr] (Henry Conklin lives next door]
1810 US Census: Riverhead, Suffolk, New York pg 5
Free White Males - 26 thru 44 : 1 [1765-1785] Dr David
Free White Females - 26 thru 44: 1 Susie
Free White Males - Under 10: 2 [1800-1810] David B & Benjamin
a different David Conkling
1810 US Census: Riverhead, Suffolk, New York , pg 3
White Males - 26 thru 44 : 1 [1765-1785] Free White Females - 26 thru 44: 1
Free White Females - Under 10: 3 [1800-1810]
___________________________
SOUTHOLD AND ITS PEOPLE IN THE REVOLUTIONARY DAYS
By Wayland Jefferson
L.I. TRAVELER PRINT
Southold, NY 1932
.............. In addition to the great ledger, there are a bundle of smaller notebooks and a mass of papers of the Revolutionary period which throw a great light on the conditions existing in Southold from 1776 to 1783. With these papers are the notes of Dr. David Conkling, Quartermaster of the Southold company of Minute Men [ Doctor David Conkling, had been commissioned by Col. Livingston to render a report on the stock of munitions on hand. ]
These contain his reports to Colonel Livingston on his efforts to obtain arms and ammunition in Southold at the beginning of the Revolution. To these may be added the personal accounts of Long House John Conklin for the same period, which list his expenditures while a Refugee at Guilford. Added to this is the great ledger of Joseph Cleveland for the same time; and constant cross-reference from one book to the other makes it possible to recreate the scene with confidence in its verity.
To return to the Refugees, most of whom had signed the "Association," as it came to be known, the news that Lord Howe proposed to invest the town with a force that would be of sufficient size to be able to enforce absolute control, and the added indignity of being driven by Hessian hirelings to cultivate the land, not for their own profit, but for the purpose of feeding the armies to fit the yoke to their shoulders, was more than the men of Southold could contemplate.
When the news came there was instant confusion. The town which had known a placid existence since the return of its sons from Ticonderoga was thrown into a turmoil. All was disorder, but disorder with a purpose. Under the direction of Jared Landon, the populace made haste to abandon the land of their fathers and seek refuge in New England. Crops were garnered, grain was threshed, and by fall the whole town was ready to abandon their several homes. Cattle were penned, hogs were rounded up, surplus fodder burned, and the oxen strained late into the night drawing the great wains to a score of landing places where great heaps of furniture were piled awaiting the coming of a score of captains whose glorious service in the patriot cause is not too well known. Everything movable in the town was packed and made ready for transportation.
To the approaching invader, nothing was left. Empty houses, close mown fields, cropless acres, but nothing that could be of use. 129 captains superintended the great hegira. 48 of them came from Long Island, and Southold gave to the cause Gamaliel Bayley, Samuel Beebe, Benjamin, John (Skipper) and Joseph Conkling, Daniel, Jasper and Peter Griffing, Joseph Hallock, Barnabas Horton, Benjamin King, David Landon, Jonathan Salmon, Isaac Schellinger, Benjamin, Elisha, John, Jonathan and Joseph Vail, James and John Webb, and David and James Wiggins.
The costal contour of Southold has changed in the last one hundred years. Waters that were once deep are now shallow; inlets that afforded a port are now closed, and places along the beach, such as Petty's Bight at Orient, are no longer looked upon as good landing places. To the westward, Mattituck Creek offered the best point of departure. North of the Hermitage (Peconic) Goldsmith's Inlet offered a fair haven. Jacamiah Goldsmith had bought a piece of black walnut for a new gunstock, loaded himself down with fifteen pounds of powder and all the bullets he could stagger under and had departed in the direction of Lexington and Concord.
Night saw the departure of many families. While a small squadron of the King's navy cruised about in the Sound, the hardy skippers ran their loads of contraband across under the very guns of the British fleet. The Britons hated these waters. The Sound offered innumerable chances for shipwreck. `Plum Gutte' was especially dreaded and only half-hearted were the attempts to bottle up Peconic Bay and the thirty-odd creeks which emptied into it. Once Skipper John Conkling was caught with a load of goods in the Bay. The cannon of British sloops of war waited for him at South Ferry. Off Long Beach waited another ship. Nothing daunted, Skipper Conkling ran his load into Crab Creek, unloaded it in the darkness, and the Dering oxen carted it across Shelter Island, where it was again loaded and sped on its way to Connecticut.
Buried in the depths of Mather's massive work is an almost complete list of those who left Southold. For the information of the reader, I will cite in complete detail the account rendered by Captain David Landon, sailing the sloop "Polley," 55 tons burthen, belonging to his brother-in-law, Samuel Brown of Guilford. The appended is an exact copy, spelling, abbreviation and capitalization being that of the time, 1776.
FAMILIES NUMBER
Mr (Thomas) Dearing 7
Ezra L'hommadieu Esqr 10
Sam'l Landon Esqr 10
(Capt.) Daniel Hedges 5
(Capt.) Joseph Hallock 9
(Capt.) Benjn Vaill 11
Ebenezer Ward (Wade) 6
John Busseau (Boisseau) 11
Doctr (David) Conkling 3
Joshua Horton 4
Benjn Pain 2
Recompce Howell 4
Joseph Cleaveland 5
Hannah Moore 5
Peter Danes 9
Natha Overton 2
Richd Terrey 11
Jonathan Wells 3
Joshua Reaves 3
Abijah Wines 5
Thos Hutchinson 4
Jona Conkling 2
John Dickinson (Dickinson) 6
Abijah Coey 6
Capt. (Barnabas) Horton 6
Barnabas Horton (Jr.) 4
John Drake 5
Jonathan Horton 3
Joseph Peck 5
(Capt.) Gamaliel Daily 5
(Capt.) Jonathan Daily 4
(Capt.) John Ingram 4
Molley Hart 3
(Ebenezer) Jennings 2
Thomas Hempstead. 3
Single Persons, by Estimate 50
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total 237
To Freight or Passage of 237 persons at 3s...... 35-11-0
To the Sloops Hold four times full of Household Goods grain & other Effects allmost Innumarable Estimated by the number of Barrels the Sloop will Carry-Capt. Benjn Vaill of whom I bot her say 300 a 1-6.......... 100-00-0 a 1--6 ................ 100- 0-0
To Freight of 100 head Cattle & Horses a 6.... 30-00-00
To Do of 600 Sheep & Hogs a 6d..... :......... 15-00-00
To Lighter hire for 25 days to ship & unship cattle and horses (Charge disallowed)Charges for repair to the lighter were also refused payment
Total 168-14-00
These charges were met by the Committee appointed by the State of New York which worked in company with Commissioners from Connecticut. This is far from a complete list of the Refugees. In fact these are only those transported in the months of September and October. The Committee of Southold had anticipated the result of the Battle of Long Island by sending their cannon and ammunition to Saybrook. Following this, permission had been given to leave for the `main'. The bill cited above was the first general answer to this.
From 1776 until 1780, there was a steady stream of exiles and, though no correct estimate has ever been made of their number, Mather was of the opinion' that nearly half of Southold fled to Connecticut. It should be noted that this number was largely the male population. It was with the idea of defeating the British commander's scheme of using Southold as a victualing ground that the men absented them-selves, taking the cattle with them. In many cases the women stayed behind and kept their houses from occupation. It had been the policy of the royal governor not to allow soldiers to occupy houses that were tenanted by their owners. This was more than a gracious gesture and probably was due to the influence of Colonel Phineas Fanning, who had cast his lot with the Tories and, though he was thoroughly hated, an examination of the records will show that he stood as buffer between the Whigs and Tories. Tempers were high and prejudices violent, but Phineas Fanning managed to steer a course of loyalty to his king and loyalty to his fellow townsmen and by his efforts softened many a blow. So successful was he that he was allowed to retain his lands, although his contemporary, Parker Wickham, was stripped of his estates by a bill of attainder.
James Fanning, a nephew of Phineas, was a blacksmith by trade. There could be no doubt of James' attachment to the cause of freedom. When Tryon and his force at last occupied the town, he refused to shoe the horses of the enemy. Once, it is related, a Hessian orderly brought his master's horse to James Fanning's shop. Fanning had seen the man approaching and had allowed the fire to die down at the forge. He had covered the glowing cannel high with fresh coal and, as a special favor to the Hessian, he had placed a liberal handful of powder on top of the coal. The Hessian, with slight command of English, made known his wants and Fanning conveyed the information that if he wanted the beast shod, he could do it himself. The orderly finally got the drift of what was being said and, approaching the bellows, gave them a mighty tug. The fire sprang up, the Hessian blew up, and our story ends.
With the departure of the first consignment of Refugees, the town began to know the hardships of war. Raiding parties of British soldiers began to appear and seize grain and cattle of those who had stayed behind. Those who had signed the Association in behalf of the Continental Congress found themselves in a bad way. Their crops and cattle were subject to seizure for their evident disloyalty. Those who professed regard for the royal cause found that adherence to the king's cause meant nothing and they were told that they should not protest as it was for the King's good that their cattle were taken. Raiding parties began to appear and prey on both the patriots and the Tories. Whence they came no one could be certain. The stay-at-home patriots accused their Tory neighbors of being the instigators of these forays. The Tories retorted in kind. The disorders became so great that the long threatened invasion became a reality. Tryon with 500 infantry and 50 cavalry appeared and Southold was formally invested. Without access to the British records, historians have failed to establish the exact date. It was certainly some time after Lt. Col. Return Jonathan Meigs made his famous raid on Sagg Harbor. Before we consider either Tryon and his army of invasion, or Meigs and his whaleboat expedition, we must consider the Southold that the 237 Refugees had left behind. Parenthetically, in speaking of Southold, I mean all of it, from Laurel (Benjamin Franklinville) on the west to Oysterponds Point on the extreme east.
SOUTHOLD IN 1776
The Southold of 1776 was a town of 3000 inhabitants. This was the number exclusive of the slaves. The census had been made at the order of the royal authorities and the slaves had been omitted on the theory that they would attach themselves to the King's cause. Contrarily, they were quite as loyal to the Continental Congress as were their masters who had signed. On a page of Judge Samuel Landon's ledger I find a series of entries whereby lie had caused the mending of Pomp's musket and bayonet and from his personal supply of powder had given this chattel of Benjamin Sawter four pounds of powder and had sent him with his blessing to New England. Southold as a town had not been a great user of slaves. A few of the grandees of the town had establishments similar to those on the James River-notably Col. Matthias Hutchinson at Peconic . His `Old Castle', for many years the residence of Henry Davids Horton, swarmed with slaves. William Albertson of Arshamomaque and John Conklin, his neighbor and relative by marriage, had a great number. Ezra L'Hommedieu took a half-dozen to Connecticut. But the average citizen had one or two, as was the case with Captain Barnabas Horton, whose `Jack the Guiney-man's' chair may be seen at the house so long known at the Austin Horton home at Hogg Neck.
Southold had had varied industries in their 136 years, and at the time we are considering, they were becoming a farming community. Flax seed was their chief interest. This was their money crop. Horses were raised for export to the upper counties of the state. Oxen were their draft animals and their roads were laid with an eye to easing the burden of these slow footed beasts. The road which now passes over the crest of Willow Hill was unthought of during this period. The road to the western plantations deployed to the north and went around the base of
the hill. Only cleared land paid taxes and this had served to deter the growth of the town. Many families, unable to secure land for themselves, had departed for Vermont, Orange County, the district about Utica, and some of the more hardy had even ventured to go among the hated Quakers of Pennsylvania. Nathan Landon, in a letter to one of his relatives, complains that the Pennsylvanians refused to accept the emigrants from New York as citizens and for a time refused to allow them to take title to lands.
The enormous family holdings of the Corwins, the Conklins, the Wells, the Hortons, the Hallocks and so on through the list of those who had. first come to the town were beginning to be broken up. New names had begun to appear on the tax roll and much new blood had come into the town. No amount of new 'blood could alter the customs of the country and the trend of trade was still across Sound as it had been in the days of Governor Dongan. Although visits were made to New York, the major part of the merchandising of the town was done in New England ports.
THE TAVERNS
This had served to keep Southold fully acquainted with the happenings in New England and in a large measure accounts for the people's support of the patriot cause. Although the New London Gazette was circulated in Southold, the chief source of news was the returning mariner and the center of distribution was the tavern. In Henry C. Kittredge's `History of Cape Cod and Its People', the writer devotes several paragraphs to the importance of the tavern in the economic scheme of things ancient, specifically as a broadener of minds and as a center for the diffusion of news.
Granting him his premise, Southold should have been the best informed town in America, if the presence of ale-houses and taverns may be taken as criteria.
When Samuel Landon, the most methodical of men, began to close his affairs preparatory to retiring to Guilford, he put his accounts into exact order. He was Commissioner of Excise and he wrote down a complete list of the retailers and tavern keepers. He enters memoranda as to wills left in his care, and he gives an exact account of the supply of powder and shot in his care. Why this supply of munitions was not in the possession of Dr. David Conkling, Quartermaster of the Minute Men, or with Capt. Paul Reeve, who headed the body, I am unable to say. He so ordered his affairs that in case he should not return-he was 76 at the time-the exact amount due the town could be computed in short time. Seemingly he was an overseer of the poor, for he lists town charges of one shilling for going to Hogg Neck and sitting with `Wido Corey' and for similar service with Mot Melican he debited the town with a charge of a shilling, six pence. Why it should have cost the town six pence more in the case of Mot Melican will be left to the reader's speculation.
.................From the fact that Samuel Landon's watch was stolen, it is evident that his son Jared must have been imprisoned, for the second time, after the elder Landon's death, which occurred at Guilford in 1782. The arrest must have been effected in January 1782. Jared brought his father's body from Guilford in a coffin that John Pain had built at a cost of one pound, four shillings. In his neat handwriting one may find the whole account of the funeral and, pinned to the page, is Dr. David Conkling's receipt for attendance on the judge. Dr. Conkling had bought his way out of a British jail a few years before, so he could sympathise with the younger Landon when, on the instigation of Parker Wickham, the British commander seized the well-known sympathizer with the cause that Washington was leading. The hatred of these two men for each other was marked. Once Jared had unburdened himself to his father to the effect that the town was not large enough for him and `P. Wickham' and that `P. Fanning was no better.' When the war was over Jared Landon avenged himself on P. Wickham by having his estates confiscated and bidding them in through the agency of one Norton, who appeared for him in many business matters.
The book of Samuel Landon contains many entries made at Guilford where-in he extended help to his less fortunate neighbors from Southold. He was an old man past eighty, but he sent to Southold by his son, Captain David, and had him bring over several sides of leather and his kit of shoemaker's tools. In his boyhood he had learned this trade. His father, Nathan, had been possessed of a fortune, but in accordance with the spirit of the times, each youth must learn a trade, and Samuel had obediently learned his. During the long years at Southold, he had employed a James Webb and Dayton Smith to carry on this business, which evidently came to him from his father, Nathan. But at the age of eighty, he takes up the last again and makes shoes for his long-time friends and neighbors. No one ever paid him for these shoes, and it is more than doubtful if he ever asked for any. In the same way, his son Jared carried scores of people after the Revolution, who had come back penniless after a self-imposed exile. Jared made no attempt to collect these debts due his father's estate and in turn his executors forgave those who were struggling up from poverty when it came time to settle his estate.
....................An added affliction was the appearance of the bloody flux. Colonel Josiah Smith came down with it during his tour of the Island. It was dreaded almost as much as the smallpox, and the children who, by luck, escaped the smallpox were victims of cholera morbus. With every simple of the day employed, the women of the town were powerless to stem the awful tide of the disease. Dr. Micah Moore, who dwelt in the little house by the entrance to the Village of Beixedon, had died a year or two before. Dr. Havens of Shelter Island was serving in the Hospital Service of the patriot army. Dr. David Conkling was languishing in the provost's prison in New York. He sent a letter to his mother, "Widow Anna Conkling, East End Long Island, By the favour of Mr. Maps", (possibly the same man who arranged for Jared Landon's release from the Southampton prison).
There is a possibility that Dr. Ebenezer Way was still living at this time. Conkling paid a bill to a Dr. Way late in 1774. If he was the son of the doctor who married Irene Hobart, he must have been of a great age-well into his nineties at the time. It is impossible to trace him from the fact that often several sons in one family bore the same given name, with a middle name added to differentiate them, and then, to confound confusion, there was the ghastly historic trick of naming sons for dead brothers until one survived to carry on a pet name.
_________________________________________________________________
Cutchogue, Southold's First Colony by Wayland Jefferson, published in New York, 1940, 172 pages. (http://www.heritagequestonline.com) page 88 in part:
"Landon set forth with a safe conduct from Captain Ayscough bound for New York. He went ostensibly to collect for 32 head of cattle taken from his mother-in-law for the use of the King's forces. He was, in fact, assisting Dr. David Conkling in transporting 26 stands of arms to the patriot forces stationed near Hackensack. Dr. Conkling finished his job and returned to New York only to be thrust in the Provost's Prison where he found Jared Landon had preceded him. It was openly charged that Parker Wickham had informed against them. Whatever the merits of the accusation they were able to free themselves by the simple device of bribery. It took eleven pounds to turn the trick"
___________________________________________________________________________
http://www.riverheadli.com/rhist1.html
The Town of Riverhead was formed from a large portion of what was known as the "Aquebogue Division" of Southold. From 1661 to 1792, all the land between Mattituck and Wading River (which would now include Laurel, Jamesport, Northville, Aquebogue, Roanoke, Riverhead, Calverton, and Baiting Hollow) was described as "Aquebogue".
At the time of separation, the two largest villages in the Town were at Wading River and Lower or Old Aquebogue, which is now Jamesport.
The first 10 years or so, after the organization of the Town, saw as its Supervisors: Daniel Wells (1792-93), Dr. David Conkling (1793-94), and Josiah Reeve (1794-1803).
____________________________________________________
SOUTHOLD AND ITS PEOPLE IN THE REVOLUTIONARY DAYS By Wayland Jefferson
L.I. TRAVELER PRINT
Southold, NY 1932
In addition to the great ledger, there are a bundle of smaller notebooks and a mass of papers of the Revolutionary period which throw a great light on the conditions existing in Southold from 1776 to 1783. With these papers are the notes of Dr. David Conkling, Quartermaster of the Southold company of Minute Men These contain his reports to Colonel Livingston on his efforts to obtain arms and ammunition in Southold at the beginning of the Revolution. To these may be added the personal accounts of Long House John Conklin for the same period, which list his expenditures while a Refugee at Guilford. Added to this is the great ledger of Joseph Cleveland for the same time; and constant cross-reference from one book to the other makes it possible to recreate the scene with confidence in its verity.
_________________________
1784- Southold slave deaths included: Pompe Negro on January 8, Gershom Terry`s wench Hannah on May 24, Doctor Conkling`s "wench" on September 17, (Salmon Records pg 57)
|
