The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees

by Mary Caroline Crawford

Originally Dunbarton was Starkstown. An ancestor of this family, Archibald Stark, was one of the original proprietors, owning many hundred acres, not a few of which are still in the Starks' possession. Just when and by whom the place received the name of the old Scottish town and royal castle on the Clyde, no historian seems able to state with definiteness, but that the present Dunbarton represents only a small part of the original triangular township, all are agreed. Of the big landowner, Archibald Stark, the General John Stark of our Revolution was a son.

Another of the original proprietors of Dunbarton was a certain Captain Caleb Page, whose name still clings to a rural neighbourhood of the township, a crossroads section pointed out to visitors as Page's Corner. And it was to Elizabeth Page, the bright and capable daughter of his father's old friend and neighbour, that the doughty John Stark was married in August, 1758, while at home on a furlough. The son of this marriage was called Caleb, after his maternal grandfather, and he it was who built the imposing old mansion of our story.

Caleb Stark was a very remarkable man. Born at Dunbarton, December 3, 1759, he was present while only a lad at the battle of Bunker Hill, standing side by side with some of the veteran rangers of the French war, near the rail fence, which extended from the redoubt to the beach of the Mystic River. In order to be at this scene of conflict, the boy had left home secretly some days before, mounted on his own horse, and armed only with a musket. After a long, hard journey, he managed to reach the Royall house in Medford, which was his father's headquarters at the time, the very night before the great battle. And the general, though annoyed at his son's manner of coming, recognised that the lad had done only what a Stark must do at such a time, and permitted him to take part in the next day's fight.

After that, there followed for Caleb a time of great social opportunity, which transformed the clever, but unpolished New Hampshire boy into as fine a young gentleman as was to be found in the whole country. The Royall house, it will be remembered, was presided over in the troublous war times by the beautiful ladies of the family, than whom no more cultured and distinguished women were anywhere to be met. And these, though Tory to the backbone, were disposed to be very kind and gracious to the brave boy whom the accident of war had made their guest.

So it came about that even before he reached manhood's estate, Caleb Stark had acquired the grace and polish of Europe. Nor was the lad merely a carpet knight. So ably did he serve his father that he was made the elder soldier's aid-de-camp, when the father was made a brigadier-general, and by the time the war closed, was himself Major Stark, though scarcely twenty-four years old.

STARK HOUSE, DUNBARTON, N. H.

Soon after peace was declared, the young major came into his Dunbarton patrimony, and in 1784, in a very pleasant spot in the midst of his estate, and facing the broad highway leading from Dunbarton to Weare, he began to build his now famous house. It was finished the next year, and in 1787, the young man, having been elected town treasurer of Dunbarton, resolved to settle down in his new home, and brought there as his wife, Miss Sarah McKinstrey, a daughter of Doctor William McKinstrey, formerly of Taunton, Massachusetts, a beautiful and cultivated girl, just twenty years old.

It is interesting in this connection to note that all the women of the Stark family have been beauties, and that they have, too, been sweet and charming in disposition, as well as in face. The old mansion on the Weare road has been the home during its one hundred and ten years of life of several women who would have adorned, both by reason of their personal and intellectual charms, any position in our land. This being true, it is not odd that the country folk speak of the Stark family with deepest reverence.

Beside building the family homestead, Caleb Stark did two other things which serve to make him distinguished even in a family where all were great. He entertained Lafayette, and he accumulated the family fortune. Both these things were accomplished at Pembroke, where the major early established some successful cotton mills. The date of his entertainment of Lafayette was, of course, 1825, the year when the marquis, after laying the corner-stone of our monument on Bunker Hill, made his triumphal tour through New Hampshire.