Samuel Nash INGERSOLL

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Samuel Nash Ingersoll (1784–1872), a fifth great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in Down East Maine, parentage by Governor William Ingersoll and Elizabeth Knowles, his long life spanning the early Republic through Reconstruction, and the daughter through whom his line continues to the compiler.

Samuel Nash Ingersoll (1784–1872) entered the world on the 28th of June, 1784, in the riverside community of Pleasant River, Maine, only months after the close of the American Revolution. Maine in that era remained a district of Massachusetts, a rugged maritime frontier of timber, shipbuilding, and small farming settlements clustered along the tidal rivers of the Down East coast. It was into this landscape of pine forests and Atlantic inlets that Samuel was born, the son of Governor William Ingersoll (1754–1807) and Elizabeth Knowles (1758–1810).

His father's appellation as Governor speaks to a family of standing within the early New England civic order, though Samuel himself came of age in a Maine that was still finding its political identity, eventually achieving statehood in 1820 under the Missouri Compromise. He would have witnessed in his lifetime the entire sweep of the young Republic — the War of 1812, the maritime ascendancy of the New England coast, the Civil War, and the early years of Reconstruction.

The loss of both his parents while he was still a young man — his father in 1807 and his mother in 1810 — placed Samuel in adulthood without the elder generation by the age of twenty-six. Among his children was recorded a daughter, Anna K. Ingersoll, born in 1818 and surviving until 1910, through whom the Ingersoll line passes forward into the compiler's pedigree.

Samuel lived to the venerable age of eighty-seven, dying on the 14th of February, 1872, in Centerville, in Washington County, Maine — not far removed from the river country of his birth. His life thus traced nearly nine decades along the eastern Maine coast, a region whose communities he saw transform from post-colonial outposts into established towns of the Union.

Samuel Nash Ingersoll stood as a fifth great-grandfather of the compiler along the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.