Mary "Marie" (Secord) Beebe

Sometime around 1755-1760 Mary married a Capt John Krookston or Crookston. She may have had one son John Jr. Nothing more is known about the captain except that he died in the Indian Wars. Most likely between 1756-1763 during the French & Indian War or the 7 Years War.

Mary met and married next, Joshua Beebe. This is the union that produced the Beebes of the Gaspé and southern Ontario. Joshua was born in 1738 in East Haddam, Connecticut. Six children were born in Ashford, and Susquehanna Valley that we know of; Adin, Amasa, Asa, Charlotte, Sarah and a son Secord.

• http://www.uelac.org/education/QuebecResource/Chapters/LOYALISTS%20...
• http://members.tripod.com/~David_Cooke/Roots/secord.htm

Mary's brothers all fought on the side of the King. Joshua joined Col. Butler's Rangers, part of the Indian department of the British army. Adin, their eldest son also joined Butler's Rangers. Nothing is known about his military career except that he died in 1779. Mary's testament for Loyalist claims states that Joshua died while taking urgent dispatches to New York City. He died of small pox. Mary, a widow with 6 children, is believed to have fled to Niagara. Members of the Secord family were there. She then removed to Yamachiche near 3 Rivers (Trois Rivieres) Quebec. A refugee camp was established there for the women and children of soldiers fighting in the war. Mary met Christopher Pierson there. Mr. Pierson was an Englishman who had lived in New York for years. His wife had died leaving him with two daughters. He had been released from military service and worked as a rations officer at the camp for this reason. In 1781, Mary and Christopher were married in the Garrison church. Mary took this opportunity to have her children baptised. The records are written in French. The chaplin at the Garrison was a Swiss Protestant. He had been brought over by the British with the hopes of converting the French Canadian population to the Protestant sect.

More about Mary:

At twenty, Mary married John Crookston, the son of an English emigre, who lived in Eastchester, five kilometres from New Rochelle. It was 1756, the beginning of the Seven Years' War, the final act in a long-running worldwide imperial struggle between England and France that had started in 1689. The hostilities in North America--called the French and Indian Wars by American historians--began two years earlier, in 1754, in southwestern Pennsylvania's Ohio Valley. There, twenty-two-year-old George Washington was forced to accept a humiliating surrender after ambushing a small French detachment. Alarmed at French activity at their back door, the British ordered two regiments to America, and began raising colonial regiments. Among those colonials who died fighting was John Crookston, Mary's husband, aged twenty-three. It was 1758, the same year their son John was born.

Two years later, Mary, a twenty-four-year-old war widow and mother, was poised to marry twenty-two-year-old Joshua Beebe, a Connecticut Yankee. Though not a soldier, his family name peppered the musters. How they met is a mystery. Joshua lived 160 kilometres away from Eastchester in Ashford, Connecticut, a long journey in eighteenth-century terms. But family ties and the push for land may explain it. The Beebes were a large Connecticut family and had spread into New York. Joshua's cousin Ephraim Beebe, for example, lived in Cortland County, New York. So did Mary's brother Daniel. Joshua's uncle Richard Brockway was one of the first men in the Susquehanna Land Company, which in 1753 purchased land from the Six Nations in the Wyoming Valley, on the north branch of the Susquehanna River, in northeastern Pennsylvania. The same company also lured Mary's older brothers Peter, John James, and Daniel Secord. The population of the American colonies was exploding, and the Pennsylvania frontier was proving irresistible to land-hungry colonists.

The Seven Years' War continued. Quebec fell to the English in 1759. The next year, the French formally surrendered in Montreal. By 1763, the war was over, and British control of North America was made official under the Treaty of Paris. Mary and Joshua rode out the war in Connecticut. Their first child, Adin, was born in 1761. The next two, Secord and Charlotte, were born in 1764 and 1767 respectively. However, sometime before the 1769 birth of their fourth child, Amasa, the family joined the others moving to the Pennsylvania frontier.

The end of the Seven Years' War, however, did not guarantee tranquility in Britain's North American colonies. Resentment grew as the colonists were ordered by Parliament to pay for the enlargement of garrison forces for which they had not asked, to pay taxes for which they were not represented, and forbidden to further exploit frontier lands in respect of aboriginal claims. In April 1775, war between Britain and its American colonies began with a skirmish at Lexington, Massachusetts. In July 1776, the American colonies declared themselves an independent nation. In the Wyoming Valley, as elsewhere in the colonies as war escalated, people fell under pressure to declare an allegiance. New England troops began moving into the frontier, forcing settlers to sign the Articles of Association against the British government, persecuting those who refused. The Beebes appear to have made an early choice to remain loyal to the Crown. Records from April 1777 show Joshua and his sixteen-year-old son Adin enlisting in Butler's Rangers, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel John Butler, originally of Connecticut, who had headquartered his loyalist troops at Fort Niagara. By June, father and son were drawing four shillings a day army pay.

Butler's Rangers headquartered at Niagara, but set up temporary encampments in the hotly contested New York and Pennsylvania frontier. Mary's family was in the centre of it. In May 1777, Sir Guy Carleton, governor at Quebec, eager to maintain the allegiance of the Six Nations, ordered the invasion of the colony of New York where settlers had appropriated land from the native people. In August, with a force of rangers leaving Niagara in pairs--one ranger and one Indian scout--Butler surprised rebel troops at Fort Stanwix, east of present-day Syracuse, and decimated their army. However, two months later, General John Burgoyne, marching south from Quebec to sever New England from the other colonies, was forced to surrender at Saratoga--a turning point in the American War of Independence. Preparing for the worst, Butler arranged to have the Susquehanna settlers' cattle driven north to Niagara to supply the garrison. He despatched a ranger party from Oswego, led by Mary's older brother James, to Susquehanna. The rangers were attacked, and thirty were captured, while the rest fled for their Wyoming valley homes, probably Joshua and Adin among them.

Meanwhile, many from the Wyoming Colony had already escaped northwards. In 1777, refugees arrived in Niagara with letters from seventy Susquehanna inhabitants, all being pestered by rebels and all wanting to enlist with Butler's Rangers.

Mary's brother John Secord had large land holdings at Tioga Point, where the Rangers had an encampment. It's a logical place for Joshua to safely leave his family, then return to his company. Their last child, Joshua Jr., was born on July 1. But Joshua Sr. was not heading to New York, as the letter suggests. On July 2, the Rangers descended the Susquehanna in boats and rafts, landing a few miles above Forty Fort, at Wyoming, where a major rebel force was holding out. After a fierce battle, the rebels surrendered.

Three months later, Joshua died of smallpox while carrying a message to NewYork. The next record of Mary isn't until 1781. By this time, she is in Machiche, a refugee camp near Trois-Bivieres, Quebec. After George Washington's 1779 sweep through central New York, burning villages and destroying crops, refugees flooded the Niagara garrison--Mary's probable destination in the wake of her husband's death and the fighting at Wyoming. That winter, British supply ships were blocked on the lake and the refugees were starving. A pitiful corn harvest provided no relief, and a group of refugees left, possibly including Mary. Rangers' families were commonly sent to Montreal and Machiche to reduce consumption at the fort. It was a good thing--conditions worsened. The following winter was even grimmer--one of the coldest on record, and entire native families living outside the garrison walls froze to death in their leantos; those inside the garrison didn't fare much better

Mary settled into life at the Machiche refugee camp. She married Christopher Pearson, the camp rations officer and former Susquehanna neighbour, had her children baptized, and, over five or six years, grew in reputation as an excellent midwife and seamstress, helping to supplement her family income.

But by 1783, Machiche was so crowded that Sir Frederick Haldimand, governor of Quebec, put a notice in the Quebec Gazette offering free land in Gaspe and passage for Loyalist settlers. About four hundred people answered the advertisement, including Mary. In June 1784, she, Christopher, and six of her children sailed for Chaleur Bay, eventually settling on land near New Carlisle.

Gaspe was no Eden. In an 1809 letter, Mary's daughter Sarah wrote to her older brother Adin who had settled in Niagara with his fellow Butler's Rangers:

 most of the time Spent at Saling and fishing, growing tired of 

  Both and inclining to folow the farming which is Not Very 

  Comfortebel in this Northing Climet.... Cannot do anything 

  about lands or trespass to rilate the rached state of the districk

  of Gaspe would be endless. 

( From a book by Alex Newman)

(1) Mary Second Beebe was also an aunt by marriage of Laura Secord, heroine of the War of 1812. Laura Secord's father-in-law was Mary's brother James.

( COPYRIGHT 2005 Canada's National History Society

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Born in NY - New Rochelle area Married (1) Cpt Crookston (died in French & Indian Wars) Married (2) Joshua Beebe II from East Haddam, CT Married (3) Christian Pearson from England Went to Niagara, CA -- 1778 Went to Machiche Camp near Niagara - 1779 Went with Loyalists to New Carlisle- 1784 Died at 104 years of age-- about 1839

GEDCOM Note

Mary\\Marie married Daniel CHEDAYNE.

The child from this marriage was:

i. Judith CHEDEAYNE .

Mary\\Marie next married Captain John CROOKSTON in 1756. Captain was bo rn in Westchester, New York and died in 1761.

The child from this marriage was:

i. John CROOKSTON .

GEDCOM Note