Phidelia R. Tenney

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Phidelia R. Tenney (1826–1902), a 4× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in Centerville, Maine; her marriage to Samuel Chandler Allen; her daughter Emma F. Allen; her death in Columbia Falls; and the historical context of mid-19th-century coastal Washington County, Maine.

Phidelia R. Tenney was born in August of 1826 in Centerville, Washington County, Maine, and lived out the whole of her seventy-five years within the bounds of that same coastal county, passing on the fifth of July, 1902, in the neighboring town of Columbia Falls. Her life thus traced a quiet arc through one of the easternmost corners of New England, scarcely a day's journey from the place of her birth to the place of her burial.

Washington County in the years of Phidelia's girlhood was a region of timber, tide, and labor. The towns along the Pleasant and Narraguagus rivers thrived on lumbering, shipbuilding, and the coastal trade, and the small inland settlements such as Centerville depended upon the mills and the carrying of logs to the sea. It was into this world of New England industry and Congregational sobriety that Phidelia was born and raised, in a generation that would see Maine pass from frontier district into a settled state of the Union.

She was united in marriage to Samuel Chandler Allen, joining her line with the Allen family of Washington County. Of this union came a daughter, Emma F. Allen, born in 1854, who survived her mother by some years and lived until 1930. Through Emma, the line carried forward into succeeding generations of the family.

Phidelia's later years were spent in Columbia Falls, a village set upon the Pleasant River and known in the nineteenth century for its shipyards and its handsome federal-style houses built by prosperous mariners and merchants. There, on the fifth of July, 1902, the day following the nation's Independence celebrations, she died at the age of seventy-five.

Phidelia R. Tenney was a 4× great-grandmother of the compiler upon the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.