August 2022Exploratory excursion to visit Hands Cove, Shoreham, VTWe continue to research to know more about our Herrick of Pawlet, Colonel Samuel Herrick, of the Revolutionary War. We explored this significant historic place and found a most beautiful bucolic meadow and wood on the shore of Lake Champlain. Sited just above the lake there is an existing house which has been kept well and intact by the current owners, who live nearby. According to the Hand’s Cove article by J. Robert Maguire, at one place in time it was possibly the Herrick farm.
Hands Cove:Rendezvous of Ethan Allen and The Green Mountain Boysfor the Capture of Fort TiconderogaBy J. Robert MaguireThe following is a passage from J. Robert Maguire’s article. Footnotes are omitted. Mr. George Maguire, his son, kindly gave me permission to use the passage here.
“When Nathan Hand came to Shoreham from Easthampton, Long Island, in 1792, with his wife and seven of their nine children, the family settled on the farm formerly owned by Rufus Herrick on the shore of Lake Champlain. The cove on the lake shore of the farm, known during the Herrick occupancy as Herrick’s Cove and thereafter to the present as Hand’s Cove, had been the rendezvous in 1775 for Ethan Allen and his men for the attack on Fort Ticonderoga. Seventeen years before the memorable event, a cousin of Nathan Hand, Captain Elias Hand, had commanded a company in another attack on the fort, during the French and Indian War; and, according to family tradition, the accounts of soldiers returning from that war of the fertile lands on the shores of the great lake and first set Nathan to dreaming of settling there one day.
“The Herrick house into which the Hand family moved, and where they lived for the next fifty of the one hundred and fifty years the farm remained in the family’s possession, stands today, sound and essentially unaltered. It is described as follows in an historical account of the Hand family:
“The house came to, as good today as then, was built of solid square timbers around an enormous central brick chimney. Four large rooms with innumerable closets, and cupboards, below stairs, and above, four small rooms and three triangular attics.”
“The house is two rooms deep and one and a half stories high. Squared timbers, laid one atop the other, form the walls of the front and sides of the house to a depth of one room, and also from the center partition of the first story; the second set of rooms has plank walls. This feature of its construction suggests the possibility that the house might originally have been one room deep, and at least the heavy timbered part of it may date from an earlier, less settled time than the immediate post Revolutionary period when Rufus Herrick is said to have come to Shoreham and when several houses of more typical braced frame construction were built in town.
“There is some local tradition, for which no documentary support has been found,
that the house had been the home of Samuel Beman and his son Nathan, Allen’s guide into Ticonderoga; this tradition is shared by contemporary descendants of the Bemans. Recalling the historic event sixty years later, Nathan Beman wrote as follows of the circumstances of his coming to act as Allen’s guide:
“I was eighteen years old, and resided with my father, Samuel, in the town of Shoreham, VT., nearly opposite the fort. I had been in the habit of visiting the fort very frequently, being well acquainted with Captain Delaplace’s family, and other young people residing there. On the day preceding the capture my father and mother dined by invitation, with Captain Delaplace. I was of the party, and spent the day in and about the fort. On our return to Shoreham in the evening, and, just as we were landing, we discovered troops approaching whom we soon ascertained to be Allen and his party. To my father— to whom he had long been acquainted –Allen stated his object, and the proper measures were at once concerted to accomplish it.
“It was agreed that I should act as guide….”
“Whether or not the home of the Bemans, if the house had been standing in Allen’s time, situated as it is on a slight rise overlooking and commanding a view of the cove, at a distance of a few hundred yards, and considering the sympathies of the local inhabitants at the time, one could almost assume Allen’s presence there during the long night of waiting for the boats to transport his force across the lake, while he and Benedict Arnold wrangled over the latter’s claim to command the expedition.
“The following information was collected, for the most part from among the Shoreham town records, examined in the light provided by Goodhue’s History of Shoreham, hereinafter referred to as Goodhue, in an attempt to learn something of the origin of the old Herrick house and whether it could in fact have been a part of the setting at Hand’s Cove on May 9-10,1775.
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“Nathan Hand justify the house and farm from the estate of Rufus Herrick, receiving a deed from Samuel Strong, “as Commissioner authorized and appointed by the Judge of Probate for the District of Addison to sell and convey a certain farm or tract of land lying and being in Shoreham…lately occupied and improved by the said Herrick known by the name of Herrick farm containing one hundred and twenty-five acres be the same more or less”. Goodhue furnishes the following information about Rufus and Nathan Herrick, who apparently were brothers, although Goodhue does not identify them as such:
“Nathan Herrick, son of Col. Samuel Herrick, an officer in the army of the Revolution, settled on Larabee’s Point, in 1783; sold out to John S. Larabee, and left town in 1787.
“Rufus Herrick, from Duchess County, N.H. (sic), settled near Hand’s Point in 1783, on the farm afterwards owned by Deacon Nathan Hand and Capt. Samuel Hand. He died in that place about 1787.
“According to the Herrick family genealogy, Rufus and Nathan Herrick who settled in Shoreham were the sons of Col. Rufus Herrick and both died in 1788. Col. Rufus Herrick was from the region of the Nine Partners in Dutchess County, New York. At the time of the formation there in April 1762 of the precinct of Amenia he was elected Constable and continued thereafter to hold various local offices. He was appointed a captain in the fourth Continental Regiment by the Provincial Congress of New York on June 28, 1775, and the following month completed the raising of a company, which was ordered to Ticonderoga. He remained at Ticonderoga for eighteen months, during which relatively quiet time before the advance of Burgoyne’s army he must have seen something of the place on the opposite shore of the lake where the inhabitants were so sympathetic to the Colonial cause and where his two sons were to settle at the war’s end, a few years later. A third son, Samuel, was a member of his father’s company; quite probably he is the Samuel Herrick whose name appears as a witness on the deed to the Shorham farm which his brother, Rufus, received from Paul Moore in 1787.
“Paul Moore, who was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1731, is described by Goodhue as “one of the most prominent characters engaged in the early settlement of the town”; “a daring and fearless adventurer” who ran away to sea at the age of 12, he spent more than twenty years of his life as a sailor. On his return from sea he came to the New Hampshire Grants with some soldiers from the French war and spent much of his time hunting in the region around Lake Champlain. “In the fall and winter of 1765 he spent six months in Shoreham, in a hut which he constructed of pine and hemlock boughs, without seeing a human being the whole time”; the following year, 1766, “[h]e came with the first company… and lived in the first log house that was built, until it was burnt by the Indians.” A friend and supporter of Ethan Allen and Seth Warner, who were frequent visitors at his house during the land contests between the Green Mountain Boys and the settlers under the New York grants, Moore was unable to take an active part in dispossessing the Yorkers due to a lameness resulting from an accident in his sawmill. After the flight of the other Shoreham inhabitants before Burgoyne’s army, and the reoccupation of Fort Ticonderoga by the British, Moore spent the winter of 1778 in Shoreham in a cabin with Elijah Kellog, “while there were no other persons in this town.” Kellog was one of Allen’s party at Ticonderoga and “is said to have been the first man who entered the fort after Allen and Arnold.” Moore was twice captured by the Indians during the Revolution.” He was once a large proprietor of lands, which if he had retained, would have made him wealthy. Some of these he gave away at an early day, as an inducement to settlement, and others he sold for a merely nominal sum.”
“The deed from Paul Moore to “Rufus Herrick jur of amena precinct Dutches County State of New York” dated January 15, 1787 shows that the land purchased by the latter was not only not among those lands that Moore sold “for merely a nominal sum” but was purchased for an amount considerably in excess of average land values prevailing at the time. The price was…approximately seven dollars per acre.”
There is a photo in the article labeled, “Old Herrick House at Hand’s Cove, Shoreham” – see below. The photo above is the one I took while exploring the cove.
The article was published in Vermont History: The Proceedings of the Vermont Historical Society; Volume XXXIII, Number 4, October 1965: 417-438
