Jacob Allen

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Jacob Allen (1801–1865), a 5× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth, life, and death in Columbia, Washington County, Maine, his marriage to Fanny Tenney, and his son Samuel Chandler Allen. Notable: lifelong residence in coastal Down East Maine spanning the early Republic through the Civil War.

Jacob Allen (1801–1865) passed the whole of his sixty-four years within the bounds of a single town: Columbia, in Washington County, Maine, where he was born at the opening of the nineteenth century and where, in 1865, he was at last laid to rest. Few in the family register can claim so settled a life, and fewer still in a corner of the American republic as remote and weather-beaten as the Down East coast of Maine.

Washington County in Jacob's lifetime was a country of tidewater rivers, blueberry barrens, and stands of spruce and pine, its small communities turned toward the sea and the lumber trade. Columbia itself, set inland from the Pleasant River, had been incorporated only a few years before Jacob's birth, and through his lifetime it remained a modest agricultural and timbering settlement, its families closely intermarried and its rhythms set by the cycles of the woods, the river, and the coastal markets at Machias and beyond. He came of age in the years following the War of 1812, married within his community, and lived to see the outbreak and resolution of the Civil War, dying in the very year that conflict came to its close.

Jacob took as his wife Fanny Tenney, and of their union the family record preserves a son, Samuel Chandler Allen (1827–1908), born when Jacob was in his middle twenties. Through Samuel the line carried forward into the latter half of the nineteenth century and onward toward the compiler's own generation.

The Allen surname, common throughout New England from the earliest colonial period, situates Jacob within the broader stream of English-descended families who settled the Maine frontier in the eighteenth century, gradually pressing eastward from the older settlements of Massachusetts and the Kennebec.

Jacob Allen stands in the compiler's paternal-grandmother line as a 5× great-grandfather, one of the more distant New England forebears preserved within the Hyten family record.