It Happened Here-- In Sir William's Footsteps

Part 2 Will Gilliland

William Gilliland, (he preferred to be called Will) was a well educated, charming young man living in Ireland. When his father died,  his family was thrown into difficult, if not dire financial straits.  But it was an affair with a young lady of the Irish nobility that caused him to leave Ireland when her family objected and pressured him, (or worse) to desist.  Will escaped into the British army and served for four years in the 35th Regiment of Foot during the French and Indian War.  The Regiment was garrisoned at Fort William Henry and it was there he undoubtedly learned of Sir William Johnson.

Sir William, an Irishman, of modest means, like himself  had made a fortune in the wilderness, establishing himself on a vast manor surrounded by his tenant farmers, mills and cottage industries.

Discharged in 1758 in Philadelphia, Will found work in a New York mercantile firm, and soon charmed his way into the life of Elizabeth Phagen, an orphan and the ward of one of his senior business associates. He married the 'beautiful and accomplished' Miss Phagen who fortuitously came with an estate of 1,500 Pounds.

 With the end of the French and Indian War came the promise of soldiers land bounties* and the nullification of French land titles on land below the 45th parallel (the present NY/Canada border).  Sometime after his marriage, Gilliland moved his business interests to Albany which had become something of a hot bed for land speculation. By April 1763 he was advertising in the Irish newspapers for farmers to come to America to be his tenants and in September that year he met with Sir William Johnson at Johnson Hall.  Johnson recommended he purchase land along the west shore of Lake Champlain, above Crown Point.  He must have been impressed by the young man for he remained his friend and in 1770  secured for him an appointment as a Civil Magistrate for northern Albany County, which then included the Champlain Valley (!).

Rte. 22, Willsboro

 In 1764 Gilliland applied for and received a land bounty of 2000 acres for himself and soon was assisting other veterans in applying for their land bounties, which he, by pre-agreement, would buy from them. Eventually he would own 50,000 acres. In May 1765, leaving his family in New York, he left with a party of fourteen--a clergyman, carpenters, millwrights, weavers, servants, some of their wives and a slave to build a community on the Bouquet River.  With him he took livestock, and eighty barrels of supplies and building materials. Along the way, in Albany and towns farther north he recruited additional tenants. Known as Milltown at first, Gilliland would later name it Willsborough Falls (after himself) and later it would be shortened to Willsboro.

Rte 9, South of Plattsburgh

Also that year, Gilliland negotiated purchase of the land bounty of Lt. John Friswell who had surveyed his 2000 acre claim around the mouth of the Salmon River, where it empties into Lake Champlain, and the adjacent Stuart patent, a 2000 acre parcel in what would become the Town of Peru. On the Salmon River property he would founded the town of Janesboro, named after his daughter. Another purchase was made on Cumberland head, a promontory north of what would become the city of Plattsburgh. He named it Charlottesboro after another of his daughters. Additional settlements were laid out--Elizabeth, named for his wife and daughter--a town that became Essex; and Bessboro, later Westport, named for his third daughter.

The following year, the first significant threat to Will Gilliland's growing empire occurred. Count Charles DeFredenburgh, a German nobleman with ties to the British royal household received a grant of 30,000 acres around the Saranac river, where he built a house and a mill.  Fearful that DeFredenburgh's claims would override his own, Gilliland gathered a party of workmen, armed them to the teeth and marched north.  In three days they constructed a house, his "Possession House", in the heretofore unoccupied Janesboro and headed to the Saranac where they presented their claims to DeFredenburgh and warned him against trespassing. At the beginning of the Revolution, DeFredenburgh, a Loyalist, retreated with his family to the safety of Montreal.  During the war he returned to find his house and mill in ashes. Shortly after, Defredenburgh disappeared, never to be seen again. It is thought he may have been murdered for the silver plate and valuables he was thought to have hidden before fleeing to Montreal.

FIRST BUILDING
ERECTED IN THIS SETTLEMENT
STOOD HERE IN 1767.
IT WAS THE HOME OF
COUNT CHARLES DE FREDENBURGH
Location: AT INTERSECTION OF BRIDGE AND CHARLOTTE STS.
 PLATTSBURGH

Rte 9, South of Plattsburgh

 

 The war years saw a disastrous decline in Will Gilliland's fortunes.  Hungry rebel forces ransacked his properties for food and clothing and any saleable items and escaping Loyalists, heading north burned houses and mills.  When General Burgoyne's invading army camped on the Bouquet river in the spring of 1777, Willsborough was abandoned.

 Gilliland was an early supporter of the rebellion, active in its early planning stages and claimed to have proposed the attack on Ticonderoga to Allen and Arnold. He also claimed to have suggested a compromise to both men when feuding broke out between them. Present at the attack of Ticonderoga, he was one of the many left behind when sufficient numbers of boats could not be found to carry the American army across to attack the fort. 

But Gilliland was also a friend and confident of Philip Skene, a developer like himself who plotted for the creation of a new colony encompassing both shores of Lake Champlain and lands from the border, to Connecticut on the eve of the Revolution.  Skene became known as an infamous Tory, and Gilliland's association with him undoubtedly hurt him.

 A signer of the 1775 Declaration of Principals, written at Crown Point, Gilliland was one of several signers condemned by the Governor of Canada, and had a $500 reward posted for his capture.

Later the Sheriff of Tryon County with a small group of Tories and Indians would attempt to kidnap him, only to be captured by Gilliland and imprisoned at Crown Point, themselves.

In the summer of 1776, Benedict Arnold improvised a small fleet to try to oppose a British invasion led by Governor Carleton. One of the ships landed in Willsboro and commandeered food and supplies. Gilliland angrily fired off a letter to Arnold and his superiors, denouncing his actions and impugning his character. Arnold fired back accusing Gilliland of being unpatriotic and a Tory sympathizer.  The charges would dog him throughout the war. Condemned by the British and distrusted by the Americans, several times Gilliland would be taken into custody and held for months at a time while his business interests languished and his properties lay wrecked and abandoned.

Will Gilliand survived the war but slid into increasing debt.  When a Massachusetts law firm brought him to court for non-payment of a debt he felt was unjustified, he refused to pay and was hauled off to debtors prison for nearly six years from 1786 to 1791. In 1789, in a curious bit of defiance, he had a portrait painted of himself, while in prison by the well known portrait artist Ralph Earl (also, a former inmate). He gazes out from his portrait, a cultured man, smiling slightly with a trace of wistfullness, a trace of deviousness, a trace of resolve, his hand pointing to a document as if to say "It is what is." 

Rte 9, South of Plattsburgh

By the time he was released some form of dementia had begun to set in. Some of his properties were saved by "gifting" them to his children.  He went to live with one of his daughters in Willsboro, but insisted in taking long walks to examine "his" properties, which in reality, were no longer his. In 1796, on one of his long walks he became disoriented, lost in a snowstorm, and died.

In 1798 residents of Pleasant Valley, Essex County renamed their town Elizabethtown in honor of Gilliland's wife and daughter.

Rte 22, South of Willsboro

 COON MOUNTAIN
NEAR THE NORTHERN BASE OF THIS
MOUNTAIN, WILLIAM GILLILAND,
EARLY PIONEER OF CHAMPLAIN
VALLEY, MET HIS TRAGIC
DEATH IN 1796
Location: ON NYS 22 ABOUT 1 MILE NORTH OF WADHAMS

(NYSHM missing)

















*Land bounties were a way for the Crown to help pay monies owed soldiers and encourage trained soldiers to settle the frontier, organize into militia and protect the colonies from the threat of Indian attack.


 Marker of the Week -- "Mother Lake"

Washington St., next to Riverfront Center, Amsterdam

Her first day on the job Lenora Barry earned $0.11, and that week $0.65, at Pioneer Hosiery an Amsterdam factory where she was paid piece-rate, and often worked twelve hour days. She had been forced to go to work to support her children after her husband, William Barry had died, probably from lead poisoning he had contracted on the job as a painter.  In 1882  she took a manufacturing job because state law forbade her from returning to teaching, as a married woman. Two years later Lenora joined the Knights of Labor. She rose steadily in its ranks becoming a "master workman" representing one thousand workers, then was elected as the "General Investigator" for the Knights of Labor, taking charge of the Working Women's division. She became the first paid woman investigator and organizer; she was on the road continuously, speaking, investigating and writing reports about labor conditions. A direct result of her efforts was the country's first factory inspection law passed in Philadelphia in 1889.  She retired from professional labor organizational activities when she married Obediah Lake, a newspaper publisher in 1890 but "Mother Lake" continued to speak out and give lectures until 1928, at age 78.  Happy Labor Day.