"Joseph P[lumb] Martin
was one of the original settlers. He was the
son of a minister of Berkshire County, Mass.
He was born November 21, 1760. He died May
2, 1850 and is buried at the Sandy Point
Cemetery. At the age of sixteen, he enlisted
in the Revolutionary army, in 1776, and
served until the close of the war. He was
present at the surrender of Cornwallis. He
was listed as a settler in the Wast Book in
1774, but old records say that he built his
cabin in 1784 on the land now owned by
Harold McKenney. Mr. Martin served for
twenty-five years as town clerk of Prospect.
He was a poet, a writer, and an artist. He
wrote the book, Life of a Revolutionary
Soldier, also several poems and
songs. In September 1836, The Light Infantry
marched from Belfast to Buckstown on an
excursion. In passing through Prospect, now
Stockton Springs, they honored Mr. Martin,
hero of the Revolution, by firing a salute
in front of his house."1
1 Ellis, Alice. The
Story of Stockton Springs, Maine.
p21.
"The future was less kind to Joseph
Plumb Martin. Having served in
the army through the entire war, Martin took
up land in Maine near the mouth of the
Penobscot River in what became the town of
Prospect. By 1818, at age fifty-nine, Martin
was destitute, his total property assessed
at fifty-two dollars. Age and infirmities
left him barely able to support himself, his
sickly wife, and five children. Martin
scraped out an existence from his veteran's
pension of ninety-six dollars a year and
from whatever else he could earn as a town
official and an occasional laborer."2
2 Leamon, James
E. Revolution Downeast: the
War for American Independence in
Maine. Amherst, the
University of Massachusetts Press, c1993,
p192.
Cites the following sources:
Gross, The
Minutemen and Their World,
pp. 177-179.
Taylor, "Liberty-Men
and White Indians," pp. 46-52.
Joseph Plumb Martin, Private
Yankee Doodle: Being a Narrative of
Some of the Adventures, Dangers, and
Sufferings of a Revolutionary Soldier,
ed. George E. Scheer (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1962), pp. xii-xv.
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