Emma F Allen

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Emma F. Allen (1854–1930), a 3× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in Columbia Falls, parentage, marriage to Henry Franklin Foster, her son Henry F. Allen, and her death in Machias, with era context for Down East Maine in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Emma F. Allen (1854–1930) was born on the sixteenth of September, 1854, in Columbia Falls, a small Washington County township in the Down East region of coastal Maine. She was the daughter of Samuel Chandler Allen (1827–1908) and Phidelia R. Tenney (1826–1902), and through them she inherited the New England stock that had long peopled the eastern Maine coast — families whose livelihoods were typically bound to lumber, shipbuilding, the coasting trade, and the small farms that lay between tidewater and forest. The Columbia Falls of Emma's childhood was a community shaped by the Pleasant River, by sawmills, and by the slow contraction that followed the heyday of Maine's wooden shipbuilding industry in the mid-nineteenth century.

Emma married Henry Franklin Foster, and from this union came a son, Henry F. Allen (1871–1954), who carried his mother's surname into the next generation of the family record. The retention of the Allen name into her son's line is itself a point of interest to genealogists tracing the family, and it anchors Emma's place in the descent.

The years of Emma's adulthood spanned a period of considerable change for rural Maine: the post–Civil War decades brought the gradual depopulation of inland Washington County as younger people moved toward Bangor, Boston, and points west, while those who remained adapted to canning, blueberry barrens, and seasonal labor. Emma lived through the First World War and into the early years of the Great Depression.

She died on the fourth of October, 1930, in Machias, the Washington County shire town situated only a short distance from her birthplace — a life lived, by all evidence in the record, within the compass of the eastern Maine coast she had always known.

Emma was the compiler's 3× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.