Benjamin F. HOWLAND

Jedediah married Susanna CRAPO on 04 Jun 1815 in Dartmouth, Bristol County, Massachusetts. Susanna (daughter of Peter CRAPO and Content PECKHAM) was born on 23 Jul 1793; died on 11 Feb 1887. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Notes:

Excerpt from "Certain Comeoverers": In 1886 an enterprising reporter of the Boston Globe found an interesting subject for a character sketch which I happened to glance at. Near Jucketram Furnace in East Freetown, on the shore of Long Pond, he found an old lady ninety-four years old on the twenty-fifth of September, 1886, named Susanna Howland. According to the reporter she was a most remarkable old lady, being a tireless worker at all manner of farm labor in the fields and woods, and in the farm kitchen, hoeing, digging, chopping, berrying in the swamp, planting the garden and harvesting. In her later years she had, as a pastime, woven three thousand yards of homespun cloth. The neighbors told queer stories about finding this ninety-four year old woman in the woods chopping wood with an axe, clad in men's attire, trousers, vest and blouse, with stout top boots, working away for dear life with all the grit and abandon of a backwoodsman. Just why I persisted in reading this long tale of vigorous old age I know not, but as I read, I gradually came to the realization that this remarkable old woman was your great great grandfather Jesse Crapo's sister. Alive in 1886, just think of it! And she bore the name of her great great great great grandmother Susanna White who came over in the Mayflower. The reporter describes her as saying: "My father's name was Peter Crapo. He owned a great deal of property. The Indians used to say 'Old Peter Crapo's jacket hung in the woods was worth more than all the eel-spearing in Long Pond at sunrise.' When I was a girl on my father's farm I remember how he would go out with the neighbors and search in the old fields for the corn the Indians were always stealing from the settlers. The Red Skins would plant it just below the surface of the ground in big pits that would hold bushels and bushels and then they would turn the ground up all around so that no one could tell where the pits were. The white men would go out with their horses and ploughs and plough these fields until the corn pits were found, and sometimes the Indians would be prowling round in the woods and when they say the corn was found, sometimes there would be a skirmish and somebody killed." Susanna Howland seems to have been the daughter of her father. She may have inherited all the energy and grit which should have been the share of her brother Jesse.