Dispossession and Accommodation

The permanent colonial settlement of the "eastern slope" of the White Mountain region—the heart of Molly Ockett's world—began in the early 1760s at Fryeburg and followed an arrangement common to much of northern New England in the years just before and during the American Revolution.  Unlike in earlier days, when provincial governments granted townships to settlers who also acted as "proprietors" (owning home lots clustered in villages and holding pasture land and woodlots in common with other shareholders), many of the earliest towns in this vicinity were granted to people of influence who had little, if any, interest in relocating to the North Country.  These absentee landlords, some of whom received grants as payment for military service during the French and Indian wars, hired surveyors to create town plans divided into grid patterns of roughly 50-acre parcels that did not call for a centralized village and which virtually ignored the local topography.

During the 1760s, a handful of white settlers, anxious to take advantage of the agricultural, forest, and mineral wealth of this newly-opened territory, purchased farmsteads from these town proprietors or, in some cases, were given land in an effort to meet certain grant stipulations.  "Gateway" towns like Fryeburg, Maine, and Conway, New Hampshire, were hurriedly established, and within a few years the pace of land granting quickened, so that before the outbreak of the American Revolution, most of the towns in this area had been laid out and mapped, though some had yet to see land cleared for farmsteads.  The emigration of people into this region from the south was slowed but not halted by the Revolution.  Far removed from the panic and confusion in New England's older communities, these emerging backwoods settlements were relatively safe from British reprisals.

Numerous stories handed down by descendants of the first white settlers tell of how their most frequent visitors during the coldest months were the Abenaki, some coming from St. Francis and all of whom were struggling to retain a measure of their traditional culture, despite being dominated by an ever-growing English population.  Camping seasonally in bark wigwams near Fryeburg and other frontier settlements, these native people, including Molly Ockett, survived by hunting, fishing, and trading furs and homemade crafts and cures to the white residents.  Part of a small ethnic minority numbering only in the hundreds, Molly Ockett made use of her special skills and vast medicinal knowledge to forge important and useful relationships with these newcomers—links that served her well throughout the remainder of her life.