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The Marstons: A California Family - Part 15
Tom Sawyer, Ichabod Crane, and the Marston Family
By Robin Lakin
November/December 2024
By the light of a harvest moon and a dripping candle, Washington Irving, quill pen in hand, scratched out the character of Ichabod, protagonist of his short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in 1820. Nearly 60 years later, Samuel Clemens wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Sandwiched between these tomes was the birth of George White Marston, who presumably read both stories eagerly during his youth. He carried interesting family connections to people named Tom Sawyer and Ichabod in his ancestral pocket, so to speak, courtesy of his mother Harriett.
In 1765, 50-year-old Thomas Sawyer (1714-1785) and several of his sons, including 15-year-old Ichabod, endured a journey of 250 miles on horseback from Hebron, Connecticut to Orford, New Hampshire along the Connecticut River. One of the original Orford settler families, the Sawyers went to work clearing the land for their farm by cutting down 200-foot-tall pine trees, which King George III’s surveyors attempted to confiscate for royal ship masts.
A dozen years after Irving published The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, he visited Orford, and described the evolving settlers’ community: “In all my travels in this country and in Europe, I have seen no village more beautiful. It is a charming place. Nature has done her utmost here.”
Upon Thomas Sawyer’s death in 1785, he left his home and the lot it stood on to his son Ichabod (1750-1826), the father of three-year-old Theda, the future grandmother of George Marston.
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Left Headstone of Thomas Sawyer, great-grandfather of George White Marston, in West Cemetery in Orford, Grafton County, New Hampshire. Right Last will and testament of Thomas Sawyer. The will states, “I give and bequeath unto my beloved son Ichabod Sawyer, and to his heirs, and assign forever, the remainder and all that part of the river lot in the town of Orford on which my dwelling house stands.” Photos courtesy Find A Grave |
 Harriett Marston, daughter of Jeremiah and Theda (née Sawyer) Marston, wife of George Phillips Marston, and mother of George White, Mary White, and Lilla Gilman Marston, c. 1859. Courtesy SOHO |
 Home of Jeremiah and Theda Marston, where they raised daughter Harriett and her brothers, in Orford, New Hampshire, date unknown. Courtesy SOHO |
 Postcard image of Bridge Street in Orford, 1908. Mary Marston wrote of Orford, “The beauty of the countryside was a constant and enduring influence” in the lives of her great-grandmother’s family. Courtesy Wolf Creek Paper Antiques, eBay |
In 1809, Theda Sawyer (1782-1864) married Jeremiah Marston (1780-1867), grandson of another early Orford settler, Jeremiah Marston III, who arrived in 1768, three years after the Sawyers. As Mary Marston wrote in George White Marston, a Family Chronicle, the new couple made their home in an old farmhouse with commanding vistas of “distant peaks, wooded hills, and grassy valleys” several miles from Orford’s singular thoroughfare.
Theda and Jeremiah had six children: Henry, Gilman, Charles, Arthur, Jeremiah, and Harriett. Mary Marston described the close-knit Congregationalist family gathering each evening in a circle “around the cheerful and blessed old hearth.” Though not wealthy, the couple ensured their children received abundant education. Her brothers doted on Harriet, the youngest and only daughter, and when they departed home for their education they wrote to her frequently and sent her books to read. She became a teacher in Vermont and New Hampshire after studying at a boarding school in Plymouth.
Curiously, the Marston family records are silent on how Harriett, described by Mary Marston as a girl of spontaneous friendliness and charm, met her sixth cousin, George Phillips Marston. He was a Newburyport, Massachusetts native who by the time their courtship began had established a farm near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin.
Harriett (1821-1888) and George (1818-1877), both direct descendants of William Marston of Hampton, New Hampshire, married on October 2, 1849, in Orford. George’s family was not in attendance, but after the wedding he and Harriett made their way to Newburyport to visit them.
Like Harriett, George came from a family of boys with one sister who had unfortunately died young, Harriett won the hearts of her new in-laws, becoming their surrogate sister and daughter.
When the couple continued west to Wisconsin, new adventures awaited them, along with a freshly hewn log cabin. Their future baby named George would test the fictional Tom Sawyer’s adventure skills and surely make his very real great-grandfather Thomas Sawyer extraordinarily proud. But in 1849, George was yet a twinkle in the stars.
Read the rest of the ongoing The Marstons: A California Story History Series.
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