The journal kept by Maclay is interesting and valuable and relates many thrilling experiences quite foreign to those of present-day surveyors.
He was lieutenant colonel of the First Battalion, Northumberland County Militia, organized at Derr’s Mills, now Lewisburg, September 12, 1775.
In 1787 Samuel Maclay was elected to Pennsylvania Assembly and served until 1791, when he became Associate Justice of Northumberland County. In 1794 he was elected to Congress. Three years later he was elected to Pennsylvania Senate, where he served six years. He was elected Speaker in 1802 and he served in this capacity until March 16, 1802, when he took his seat in the United States Senate, where he continued until January 4, 1809, resigning on account of broken health.
He died October 5, 1811, at the age of seventy years. His wife, Elizabeth Plunket Maclay, survived her distinguished husband until 1835.
Amusing and Memorable “Battle of the
Kegs,” January 5, 1778
In January, 1778, while the British were in possession of Philadelphia, some Americans had formed a project of sending down by the ebb tide a number of kegs, or machines that resembled kegs as they were floating, charged with gunpowder and furnished with machinery, so constructed that on the least touch of anything obstructing their free passage they would immediately explode with great force.
The plan was to injure the British shipping, which lay at anchor opposite the city in such great numbers that the kegs could not pass without encountering some of them. But on January 4, the very evening in which these kegs were sent down, the first hard frost came on and the vessels were hauled into the docks to avoid the ice which was forming, and the entire scheme failed.
One of the kegs, however, happened to explode near the town. This gave a general alarm in the city, and soon the wharves were filled with troops, and the greater part of the following day was spent in firing at every chip or stick that was seen floating in the river. The kegs were under water, nothing appearing on the surface but a small buoy.