Joseph Leavitt - A New Life in The Woods

A New Life in The Woods

Shortly afterwards, Leavitt decamped for the new township of Sylvester in what was still the state of Massachusetts. He accompanied the surveyors paid by the government to lay out new townships along the Androscoggin River. As an assistant to the surveyors, Leavitt noted the topography, and told the surveyors that after returning to his Massachusetts home, he would be back to settle permanently at the place that later became the new township of Turner. The surveyors, noting Leavitt's pacifist tendencies, told him half-jokingly, "Well, Joe, you will like to go to meeting, so we will give you a lot next to the meeting-house lot."

The next year, the young surveyors' assistant Leavitt returned alone from Massachusetts to the place he had chosen. Leavitt carried his scant provisions with him on his back. The closest non-Native inhabitant was 20 miles distant. Leavitt's relations with the native Algonquian tribe were apparently warm. That spring and summer Leavitt wielded an axe to cut a clearing, on which he built a blockhouse, the first house in the new township of Turner.

In the fall Leavitt returned to Pembroke, the home of most settlers of Turner. The following year, and after the heavy Maine winter, Leavitt returned to his blockhouse in the wilderness and planted a crop. Shortly afterwards he journeyed by foot to New Gloucester, Maine, where he purchased 19 apple tree seedlings. Carrying them on his shoulders, Leavitt returned to his outpost in the Maine woods, where he planted his orchard.

Later that same year Leavitt left his meager belongings in the care of Algonquins and returned again to Pembroke, where he married Anna Stevens. On the return trip to his new lands, Leavitt's new wife Anna rode behind him on his horse, with her belongings and portmanteaux stuffed into saddlebags on accompanying pack horses, a journey that took several weeks through the Province of Massachusetts, as Maine was then known.