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ously fled thee premises. Captain Woodman was armed with a sword, sharpened like a razor. He was about to enter an out-building when they pounced upon him. He stabbed my uncle in the thigh, but not seriously; another made a grab at the sword and received a bad gash in his hand. lt fell to Col. Isaac Frink to grab a rail from the fence and he gave Captain Woodman a blow on the arm, causing him to drop the sword. His capture was made at once .... John Lowe Pickering of Newington was appointed his guardian and Nicholas was taken to the Pickering farm where a building had been prepared as a cage in which to confine him. lt was there he spent the remainder of his life, or about thirty years. As he grew older he became comparatively harmless, and occasionally he was given his liberty for a few hours at a time.(9)
Elijah Franklin Woodman, Jr. wrote to Mrs. Mary Effie (Furber) Griffiths. a great-grand- daughter of Jonathan* and told her Hoyt Jackson's story. She wrote back immediately.
Our family never heard the story that way at all. We always understood Jonathan went South to buy lumber - that being his business - and that he was traced as far as a forest, which he and his men had entered. People did not use checks in those days and it was supposed that he was killed for his money.
He was considered one of the first men in Newington. He had the first one-horse chair in town and many other comforts. His home was on 'Woodman's Point' of Great Bay, directly across from Durham. Do you think it possible that he could have lived in Durham, NH, and also his daughter, Elizabeth Chesley live there - and him never be discovered?...
Aunt Sarah frequently visited her grandmother, Elizabeth, who would talk for hours about the fate of her husband (Jonathan). She grieved for him until the day she died, hoping that he had not suffered long if he was attacked. Auntie Sarah, who was ninety on July 3, is convinced her grandmother never had a suspicion of being deserted. She believes il must be idle reports. My father used to tell me the same thing about Elizabeth, and my brother, Will Furber, remembers it as i do....
It is queer about the old man's will. "To his son Jonathan $1.00.' It might mean he thought Jonathan dead but left the one dollar to clear the law. But, your Mr. Hoyt Jackson may be right, and of course, we do not care a fig at this late date. Mr. Hoyt is right about Captain Nicholas. Nicholas was said to be very fine looking - blue eyes, fair hair, and a fine figure . . . one of the brightest of boys. [But she and Jackson Hoyt did not agree over the reason for Nicholas' insanity.] His insanity was caused by a girl named Frink to whom he was engaged. She was very pretty and an inveterate flirt who finally jilted him when they were near marriage. But the story that has come down to us is that her remorse over jilting him drove her to suicide by drowning in a pond. Her beauty was her ruin, and also her lover's you see.(l0)
Old records show that in November 1824, when Nicholas was twenty-seven years old, Elizabeth asked the court to appoint her as legal guardian of her son, Nicholas Woodman. She said he was a "distracted" person who needed someone to take care of his person and property: the court granted her petition. The following year on 10 May 1825, Elizabeth asked the court to allow her to sell about twenty acres in Newington belonging to Nicholas, for money to pay his bills. By the fall of 1845, after twenty-one years, Elizabeth gave up her guardianship of Nicholas, but she does not tell the courts why. She was about seventy years old by then; maybe her health was failing and she was just tired. On 2 October of that year, the men of Newington (eleven of them Pickerings) petitioned the Rockingham County courts to appoint a new guardian for Nicholas. calling him insane.(11)
Elizabeth, listed as head of a household in Newington in the 1840 and 1850 Census, died 4 December 1859, in Newington. That same month Nicholas P. Furber, Mary E. Furber, Sarah A. Furber and John S. Furber, John S. Chesley and Elizabeth E. Henderson - all grandchildren — reported to the probate court that Elizabeth's only close heir was the insane Nicholas, and asked the court to
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