Raising Israel Randall

Local historian conjectures a life not found in the history book

Lance Com­fort holds the Israel Ran­dall deed that he bought on Ebay.

By Sharon Lakey

The ide­al his­to­ri­an goes to the mouth of the tomb, cries: “Lazarus, come forth!” and sets him that was dead for ages, blink­ing and pas­sion­ate, in the sun.”

AUSTIN O’MALLEY, Key­stones of Thought

Lance Comfort’s Lazarus is Israel Ran­dall of North Danville, and his attempt to raise him start­ed with a deed he bought on Ebay.

The deed, a time-weath­ered doc­u­ment, begins with “Know all men by these presents that I Jesse Leav­en­worth of Danville in the Coun­ty of Orange and State of Ver­mont for and in con­sid­er­a­tion of the sum of thir­ty pounds law­ful mon­ey to men in hand paid before the deliv­ery here­of by Israel Ran­dal of Danville…” The deed is dat­ed Novem­ber 30, 1791.

With deed in hand, Lance began his own his­tor­i­cal mys­tery tour with a series of ques­tions that devel­oped into a con­jec­tured under­stand­ing of Israel Randall’s life in Danville. “His­to­ry is writ­ten by the sur­vivors, the win­ners, those who passed their his­to­ry for­ward. If a fam­i­ly didn’t stick around, they do not appear in the his­to­ry book,” said Lance, point­ing to Vil­lage in the Hills a his­to­ry of Danville, Ver­mont that lay on the table in front of us. A quick check of the index in the book shows no Israel Randall.

How­ev­er, Randall’s name does appear once in the book—page 24 on the map that is cap­tioned: “Final divi­sion of land under Danville’s sec­ond char­ter in 1802 fol­low­ing set­tle­ment with New York for ’30,000 rights.’” There, in the tini­est of print, is a plot with­out a num­ber read­ing “200A Israel Ran­dall.” The first town char­ter was grant­ed under New York with the name of Hills­bor­ough; the sec­ond char­ter was grant­ed under Ver­mont with the name Danville. Vil­lage in the Hills describes this con­fus­ing process in detail in chap­ter two. It was a process that Lance believes affect­ed Ran­dall as well as and oth­er ear­li­er set­tlers. Could Ran­dall have set­tled first under the Hills­bor­ough char­ter, then lat­er be made to com­ply with the sec­ond? Lance believes this is likely.

Lance laid a trans­par­ent map of the Danville land plots over an exact-sized map of the town. This locates the Ran­dall plot in North Danville, very near the Ben­nett ceme­tery where he has locat­ed Israel’s grave. It also encom­pass­es the land where the Old North Church stands.

A close­up of Israel Ran­dal­l’s 200 acre piece. In this par­tic­u­lar area of the map, one sees more vari­ety in the plots, pos­si­bly iden­ti­fy­ing them as ear­li­er set­tlers. In this pho­to you see Jacob Bay­ley and Jesse Leav­en­worths name, both pro­pri­etors sell­ing lots.

Look at these plots,” con­tin­ued Lance, point­ing to the imme­di­ate vicin­i­ty around Randall’s.  “They are dif­fer­ent from the oth­ers, dif­fer­ent sizes, dif­fer­ent names.” True. Many of the oth­er plots on the map have the names of the two pro­pri­etors on them—Leavenworth of Cabot and Bay­ley of New­bury. “I think these peo­ple were here before the Danville char­ter,” said Lance. The book backs this pos­si­bil­i­ty by the fol­low­ing (pg. 10), “Under the char­ter, the new town was divid­ed into 78 equal shares ‘exclu­sive of the Poses­sion of forty-nine set­tlers now resid­ing on said Land who are to have each one hun­dred acres agree­able to a plan.’” Lance has com­piled a list of names of 115 peo­ple who claim to have been born in Danville before 1790.

To get an under­stand­ing of when Ran­dall may have set­tled here, Lance checked out Ancestry.com. From Ances­try records, he dis­cov­ered Ran­dall was born in Durham, NH, in 1743 and died in North Danville in 1829. He was mar­ried to Sarah Ches­ley, also of Durham, in 1768. The cou­ple had nine liv­ing chil­dren. But when, dur­ing that life­time, did the cou­ple move to what we know as North Danville?

I believe he was here between 1772 and 1776,” said Lance. Check­ing the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War records, he found Israel did not serve in the mil­i­tary. “Why?” asked Lance.  “If he had stayed in New Hamp­shire, he most like­ly would have served. But up here, the war was far away and there was no mil­i­tary pres­ence. He most like­ly had his hands full if he was to sim­ply sur­vive. Think about the set­tlers who came here that ear­ly. It was a dan­ger­ous place. The French and Indi­an War had just occurred and these peo­ple were mov­ing into unchart­ed territory.”

Adding more weight to the place­ment of Ran­dall here at that date is a writ­ing he has found online from Sias Ran­dall, one of Israel’s grand­chil­dren, who was born in 1822 and

Sias Ran­dall

lived in North Danville with his grand­fa­ther until the age of sev­en. Sias relat­ed that his grand­fa­ther lived in North Danville before the Revolution.

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~vermont/45SuccessfulVermontersRandallSias.html

Then how did Ran­dall gain own­er­ship of his 200 acre par­cel, and from whom?  Lance points a fin­ger at a shady land spec­u­la­tor, Samuel Stephens of Bar­net. Before becom­ing a land spec­u­la­tor, Stephens was court-mar­tialed for cow­ard­ly behav­ior in neglect­ing to set sup­plies des­per­ate­ly need­ed by Rogers’ Rangers as they retreat­ed from their raid on the Abena­ki at St. Fran­cis. After his court mar­tial, he moved to sell­ing land for the New York grants, and Lance believes that is how Ran­dall acquired his 200 acre par­cel in North Danville. Lat­er, Stephens sold land under the Ver­mont grants. It is pos­si­ble that Ran­dall had to pay twice for his prop­er­ty. Remem­ber the price that Ran­dall paid Leav­en­worth to receive the Ver­mont deed Lance pur­chased on Ebay. Thir­ty pounds was a high price to pay for what was called a “fil­ing fee.”

With his met­al detec­tor, Lance searched the prop­er­ty, guess­ing where the orig­i­nal cab­in struc­ture would have been near the Ben­nett ceme­tery. “I found a lot of trash, a few old but­tons and a 1786 colo­nial cop­per,” he said. “Just too many things had gone on there over time to reveal much in the way of arti­facts.” By the time grand­son Sias Ran­dall was inter­viewed, there were no more Ran­dalls from this large fam­i­ly liv­ing in North Danville. After Sias’ father, Thomas, died in 1830, the estate passed to his eldest broth­er, Thomas. Lance believes the land on which the Old North Church stands, erect­ed in1832, was donat­ed in his father and grandfather’s names.

If he couldn’t prove much with his met­al detect­ing near the site, per­haps he could prove oth­er set­tlers in Danville were here pre-Rev­o­lu­tion. But find­ing an orig­i­nal cab­in site is not easy. “There are no foun­da­tions,” explains Lance. “When a set­tler would move in, it would be in ear­ly spring and the first struc­ture would like­ly be a cab­in of some sort. There was no time that first year to build a foun­da­tion, let alone a home struc­ture. Lat­er, if the set­tler stayed, a new more per­ma­nent struc­ture was built.” He turned back to the orig­i­nal Danville plots and looked for unusu­al shapes and sizes. He found one in a plot labeled Ab. Mor­rill, which has a cor­ner that juts upward. Again, Lance asked him­self, “Why?” And that led to his best find in Danville, a site he calls Nova Hill, locat­ed on Kate Beattie’s property.

From the 1875 map, Lance has drawn the jut­ting piece of prop­er­ty where he dis­cov­ered the cab­in site. It is locat­ed on land present­ly owned by Kate Beattie.

I thought that jut­ting point on the map might be where a house already stood when Danville was char­tered for Ver­mont, thus requir­ing an unusu­al plot­ting,” said Lance, “and I went look­ing with my detec­tor.” There he found a pletho­ra of arti­facts in what was an orig­i­nal cab­in site. “There was no foun­da­tion, and it most like­ly was made of a com­bi­na­tion of sod and logs. There were also bricks brought in, prob­a­bly for the hearth.” Here he found coins, from both pre and post revolution—King George on one, love­ly Lib­er­ty on the oth­er. Old shoe buck­les recov­ered also show a style pro­gres­sion from a small­er to larg­er buck­le, all dat­ing to the lat­ter 18th century.

His case made—there were set­tlers here pre-Revolution—Lance knows that to real­ly raise Israel from the past, he needs to put some meat on his bones by adding the human sto­ry. That is the stuff of his­tor­i­cal fic­tion, and he is well on his way with half a book already writ­ten. I, for one, am anx­ious to get a glimpse of Israel Ran­dall as he emerges from the tomb of history.

To view the full pho­to album relat­ed to this arti­cle, click here

The pub­lic is invit­ed to a pro­gram where Lance Com­fort will share his find­ings and arti­facts at the Danville Ver­mont His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety on Sun­day, March 25 at 1:30 pm, 121 Hill Street, Danville. 

 

 

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