Dorcas Barton

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Dorcas Barton (1779–1854), a 5× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in coastal Maine, her parentage, her marriage to William Henry Caler, her known issue, and the historical context of post-Revolutionary Lincoln County, Maine. Notable: lifelong residence in the District (later State) of Maine.

Dorcas Barton was born on the sixth day of August in 1779, in the coastal town of Waldoboro, Lincoln County, in what was then the District of Maine under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. She was the daughter of John Barton (1752–1834) and Abigail Davis (1744–1837), and she entered the world in the closing years of the American Revolution, when the settlements along the Maine coast were still recovering from the disruptions of war and the uncertainties of frontier life. Waldoboro in this period was a notable community of German-speaking settlers and Yankee fishermen and farmers, its harbors busy with the lumber and shipbuilding trades that defined the region.

In the course of her life Dorcas was joined in marriage to William Henry Caler, known familiarly as "Jost," a name preserving the older Germanic forms that lingered among the Waldoboro families well into the nineteenth century. Of their union is recorded a son, William Henry Caler (1805–1883), through whom her line descended into the generations that the present compiler has traced.

Dorcas lived a long life that spanned the formative decades of the young Republic. She witnessed Maine's separation from Massachusetts and its admission as a state in 1820, the gradual transformation of the coastal economy, and the great westward migrations that drew so many New England families inland. She herself, however, remained in her native region, and her days closed in Centerville, Washington County, Maine, on the thirtieth of May, 1854, at the age of seventy-four. She was laid to rest in the eastern reaches of the state, having outlived her husband and seen her son well into his middle years.

Dorcas Barton stands in the compiler's paternal-grandmother line as a fifth great-grandmother.