F19 681 This reprint edition is an unabridged and unaltered Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 71-128108 Manufactured in the United States of America MOSES GREENLEAF (1777-1834) Moses Greenleaf, author, surveyor, map-maker, and proselytizer for Maine statehood, was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, on Oct. 17, 1777. The circumstances of his birth gave little indication of the course he was to follow in later life. Members of one of New England's first families, Greenleaf's forbears had followed the sea in one way or another since coming to the Merrimac River settlement, then called Newbury, in 1635. His father, Moses, Sr., was himself a ship carpenter by trade. Following the Revolutionary War, however, the elder Greenleaf, a veteran who had attained the rank of Captain, remained in the maritime community of Newburyport for only a few years. In 1790, he joined the postwar migration north to Maine in search of land and a new life. The Greenleafs settled in the Cumberland County town of New Gloucester. There, Moses Greenleaf received an elementary education and grew to maturity. He was one of five children. A brother, Simon, was destined to achieve prominence as a legal scholar, and is given credit - together with famed jurist Joseph Story for establishing the pre-eminence of the Harvard School of Law. Unlike his younger brother, however, Moses Greenleaf was denied the advantage of higher education. Like many of Maine's noted sons William King among them he was the brother who remained at home. Until the age of 22, Greenleaf helped to till the fields of his father's New Gloucester farm. At that juncture, he went into business for himself, operating a general store, first in New Gloucester and then in Bangor to which he moved in 1804. The atmosphere of Bangor, gateway to the north woods, changed his life. It was there that Greenleaf, now married, became interested in the Maine wilderness and its development. He turned from the produce business to real estate and land speculation for subsistence, and embarked on an avocation that grew into a life's work. In 1806, Greenleaf purchased a one quarter interest in Williamsburg township, in what is now southern Piscataquis County. By 1810, he and a Boston associate were intimately involved in efforts to settle the town. He moved his family there the same year from the wilderness settlement of East Andover, where they had resided for two years. The remainder of Greenleaf's life was largely spent procuring settlers for the Maine interior, surveying roads, locating mineral deposits and, above all, writing and publishing data about the region. Greenleaf was, in a sense, a man captivated and obsessed by the potentialities of the Maine environment. To support his visionary promotional activities, he sought numerous and various means of earning a livelihood. He served as Justice of the Peace for Hancock County from 1812 to 1816, and in the latter year accepted an appointment as Justice of the Court of Common Pleas for the new County of Penobscot. In 1833, he was pioneering in railroads, and secured a charter for the Piscataquis Canal and Railroad Company. Greenleaf was also active in early attempts to mine and market Maine minerals, and became the first to discover slate deposits in the state in Piscataquis County. All of these activities were secondary, however, to Greenleaf's tasks as self-appointed publicist for Maine and its natural resources. In 1816, his first book, A Statistical Survey of the District of Maine; More Espe cially with Reference to the Value and Importance of the Interior, appeared. It was published in Boston and addressed "to the consideration of the Legislators of Massachusetts". The book, accompanied by the first detailed and accurate map of Maine, established Greenleaf as an authority on what were vaguely called the "eastern lands". The Statistical Survey served a dual purpose. It provided information on the region's interior for potential land purchasers, and also offered information and suggestions for government action to promote settlement. More importantly perhaps, in terms of historical perspective, the book generated optimism that Maine could stand alonė as a self-sufficient entity. It thus played a significant role in promoting statehood, a development which Greenleaf enthusiastically welcomed. From 1820 to 1829, Moses Greenleaf was almost totally absorbed in the work of writing and cartography. In 1820, the year of the separation from Massachusetts, an updated version of his map of Maine appeared. Four years later, Eastern Indians, a Greenleaf treatise on Maine Indian languages, was published by the American Society for Promoting the Civilization and General Improvement of the Indian Tribes within the United States. Finally, in 1829, the culmination of Greenleaf's career was reached with the publication of A Survey of the State of Maine, in Reference to Its Geographical Features, Statistics, and Political Economy. The new survey, an expanded and much improved version of its 1816 predecessor, was accompanied by a new, more complete map of Maine and New Brunswick, as well as an atlas of smaller detailed maps. Together, these publications constituted the most thorough examination and documentation of Maine up to that time. |