The Thomas Vose Homestead (Part 3

July 30, 2026

The first United States census was conducted in 1790. There were eleven head-of-households recorded; Joseph Porter, John Johnson, Samuel Jones, Daniel Somes, Job Johnson, Widow Fausett, Jacob Boyden, William Bugby, Donald McDonald, John Brewer and Samuel Leshure, with a total population of 54. It is interesting to note that both Joseph Porter and Thomas Vose appear on the census.

Thomas Vose at the age of 25, embraced his responsibilities. He manned the store providing provisions for the settlers and traded for furs with the local Passamaquoddy. They had several small settlements in town as well as a main village of nearly 400 wigwams at nearby Pleasant Point. St Andrews across the Bay in Canada, the region’s main market town, was a source for provisions and a ready market for timber, spars and shingles produced at the lumber mill. St Andrews people, on the other hand, sometimes floated their grain across the bay to be ground in the grist mill.

A few years after Vose arrived, Edward Robbins, now a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, was appointed as one of the commissioners for the building of the Massachusetts State House in Boston. The Beacon Street building site, on the summit of Beacon Hill, across from the Boston Commons, was just next door to John Hancock's old house on land that originally served as his cow pasture.

Robbins gave Vose the task to locate and cut large timbers for the building from land that Robbins owned just north of Robbinston in the southwestern part of Calais. The original twelve impressive Doric columns that graced the front of the state house were turned and fluted from these giant old growth pine trees over three feet in diameter. A gilded wooden pinecone adorns the top of the golden dome, as a symbol of Maine and the Commonwealth's reliance on lumbering in colonial days. The State House is considered one of the architects, Charles Bulfinch’s finest works and a masterpiece of Federal Architecture.

Dr. Edwin Howard Vose once recounted; I well remember, when a boy of eight years, of my grandfather charging me to 'go and look at those pillars' when I went to Boston, and to 'remember that my old grandfather got them.’

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