Part 2: The Most Prejudicial of Colonies

Discussed in this post

• The “King’s Broad Arrow”

• Property and Profits

• Resistance and Rebellion

This post continues from “Kings Pine.” Together with posts still to come, they are a written version of a talk scheduled for 2/6 at Three of Strong Spirits. The event ticket includes a donation to the Locker Project.

In 1685 a Surveyor of Pines and Timber in Maine was appointed and authorized to blaze and reserve the finest trees for the Royal Navy, beginning an increasingly onerous practice that would eventually drive rebellion. Enacted in stages from 1691 to 1729, “the Broad Arrow governed New England land rights and woodland activity” until the American Revolution.  

“All trees of the diameter of twenty-four inches and upwards at twelve inches from the ground,” were reserved to the Crown.   The “Broad Arrow,” old sign of naval property (something else we didn’t know until a recent visit to the Maine Maritime Museum, where we saw it on a cannon from H.M.S. Boxer), was cut on such trees by surveyors.  

Property rights in other, more settled parts of New England offered colonists some opportunity for profit, but “In Maine virtually all land could be called Crown land in the opening decades of the 1700’s due to the decimation of the settlers by indian raids.”  The settlers and woodsmen resisted claims of distant proprietors and crown surveyors. The men on the ground wanted to exploit the trees for their own profit, but in the final iteration of the broad arrow policy no trees were to be cut until the property was surveyed.

At that time, Maine was in two parts: only the section from the Piscataqua River to the Kennebec was Maine.  “The Eastern districts, then called ‘Sagadahoc Territory,’ were in a flux of ownership between English grantees and the French.”  In those Eastern districts, the Crown’s representatives had little ability to impede free trade by the locals. Maine was the center of the greatest resistance to the Broad Arrow Policy.Resistance to the Surveyors and their deputies was continuous and pervasive, from the forests to the sawmills to the courts to the legislatures.

Locals used a variety of subterfuges to profit from mast pines.  Farmers would cut the lesser trees from around a mast pine, so it would have no buffer from the wind, and would fall in a gale.  Tour guides around here relate that as the source of the phrase “windfall profit.” Mast pines would simply disappear. Milled lumber was always less than the 24” standard.  Set fires made the big trees unsuitable for masts, but not other purposes.

In 1730 settlers near the Sheepscot River complained to the court that the Surveyor General “came with an armed force, turned them from their lands, seized their timber, burned and destroyed their houses and threatened to throw them into confinement.”  Such peremptory behavior led to retaliation. At Exeter in 1734, when some deputies were sent to bring a confiscated load of timber away, the locals disguised in Boston Tea Party fashion scuttled the boat, so it nearly didn’t survive the return trip to Portsmouth.

The Surveyor and his men were subject to political pressure and backstabbing in Britain and the colonies, bribery, threats, and even assault.  In 1759 one Daniel Blake was thrown into a millpond.  In 1772, another charged sawmill owners with milling trunks that had been marked with the King’s Broad Arrow. One of the owners refused to pay the fine. He was arrested and then released with the promise that he would provide bail the next day. He and 30 to 40 men, their faces disguised with soot, assaulted the government officials and ran them out of town.  Eight of them were later convicted of assault, but the local judges let them off so lightly it seemed like support for their actions. 

Woodsmen in Maine were fully aware that the members of Parliament who passed unrealistic onerous laws regarding pines in New England had exempted their own Oak forests from similar regulations.  That knowledge helped them rationalize their defiance.

“The undermining of New England property rights and business morality by the Broad Arrow Policy served mainly to fan sparks of rebellion in the colonists,”   Manning wrote. As an example of chronic and continuous irritation, it is a larger cause of the Revolution than generally credited. The rejection of absentee ownership claims and regulations it engendered continued until Maine separated from Massachusetts and became a state in its own right.