Samuel Chandler Allen

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Samuel Chandler Allen (1827–1908), a fourth great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth in Down East Maine, parentage, marriage to Phidelia R. Tenney, his daughter Emma, and the broader context of nineteenth-century coastal Washington County. Notable: lifelong rootedness in the Columbia/Columbia Falls region of Maine.

Samuel Chandler Allen was born on the 31st of August, 1827, in the town of Columbia, Washington County, Maine, and he died on the 11th of November, 1908, in neighboring Columbia Falls, having lived the whole of his eighty-one years within the same quiet stretch of the Down East coast. His life thus spanned the better part of the nineteenth century, from the early years of John Quincy Adams's presidency to the second administration of Theodore Roosevelt.

He was a son of Jacob Allen (1801–1865) and Fanny Tenney (1805–1846), the latter of whom he lost when he was but nineteen years of age. The Allens and Tenneys were among the families who had settled the eastern reaches of Maine in the decades following the Revolution, a region whose economy in Samuel's lifetime turned upon lumbering, shipbuilding, fishing, and the small mixed farms that clung to the granite-shored bays of Washington County. The town of Columbia and the village of Columbia Falls, situated along the Pleasant River, were among the modest but industrious communities of that district.

Samuel married Phidelia R. Tenney, uniting himself in marriage with a kinswoman of his late mother's line — a not uncommon pattern in the closely knit coastal townships of mid-century Maine, where families had intermarried for generations. Of their union, the record here preserves one daughter: Emma F. Allen, born in 1854 and living until 1930.

That Samuel was born, married, and buried within the same small corner of the Maine coast speaks to the rootedness of his generation, a constancy increasingly uncommon as the century wore on and many of his neighbors removed westward to the prairie states.

Samuel Chandler Allen was the compiler's fourth great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother line.