Edmund Stevens

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Edmund Stevens (1738–1790), a sixth-great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in colonial Kittery, his parentage, his marriage to Lydia Holbrook, his daughter Mercy, his death in Down East Maine, and the era context of the Maine frontier in the late eighteenth century.

Edmund Stevens was born in 1738 in Kittery, Maine, then one of the oldest English settlements on the northern New England seaboard and a community long shaped by the timber trade, coastal fisheries, and the ever-shifting frontier between colonial and Wabanaki territory. He was the son of John Stevens (1704–1743) and Hannah Seavey (1723–1815). The loss of his father in 1743, when Edmund was still a small child of about five, left his mother widowed at a young age; Hannah herself would outlive her son by a quarter-century, dying in 1815 at the venerable age of ninety-two.

Edmund came of age in a province that, throughout the middle decades of the eighteenth century, was repeatedly drawn into imperial warfare between Britain and France, and whose easternmost reaches remained sparsely settled well into the Revolutionary era. He in time married Lydia Holbrook, and from their union came at least one recorded daughter, Mercy Stevens, born in 1767.

At some point in his adult life Edmund removed from the older settlements of southern Maine to the far Down East coast, settling at Addison in what is now Washington County. The Addison district, situated along the rocky inlets between the Pleasant and Indian Rivers, was opened to permanent English-speaking settlement only in the years just before and during the American Revolution, and families who took up land there contended with isolation, a short growing season, and an economy dependent upon lumbering, fishing, and small coastal vessels.

It was in Addison that Edmund Stevens died, sometime before August of 1790, at roughly fifty-two years of age. His passing came in the first months of the new federal republic, the very summer that the first United States census was being enumerated across the seaboard states.

Edmund was the compiler's sixth-great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.