Nathan Dow

• General Notes
  • A birth record for Nathan was never found but he was of age by 1767 and here is the only available gap.
    Nathan was executor of his father's estate. He lived on the farm still known in 1929 as Dow's Point. This was presumably inherited. His nearest neighbor was Jonathan Eaton, who came from the mainland in 1767 with Nathan Dow Sr. A phrase in Hosmer, History of Deer Island, suggests that Nathan Jr. got himself a grant of land. Possibly this was under the 1783 bounty law. It is doubtless this Nathan who enlisted on March 4, 1777, under Captain Brooks and Colonel Marshall Battle. It is possible that there was another Nathan Dow in Hancock County, whose identity was as yet undiscovered in 1929. Some Nathan Dow of Castine, Maine took a contract in 1778 to carry mails between Belfast and Bangor, Maine. This does not seem like the same man. The 1791 census gave in Hancock County a Nathan Dow and Nathan Dow Jr. The term Jr. was sometimes employed to distinguish wholly unrelated men. Neither can be the Nathan Dow descended from Henry Dow. About 1885 a grandson wrote to Edgar R. Dow saying clearly that this Nathan had seven children, but did not give the name of a wife. Beyond this, all information is relied upon the data of the Census of 1850 and on the vital statistics collected by the State subsequent to 1892. In 1924 the town clerk of Deer Island collected and sent to Robert P. Dow the complete list of vital statistics from 1785. Of course, the early records are more or less defective, but the kindly act enabled a reconstruction of the history of the entire Deer Island family. The chuildren appear as of Nathan and Jemimah.