What this is. One road at Kittery — Rogers Road, running up from the Navy Yard past Orchard Grove Cemetery — and the handful of small properties along it that this family bought and sold. Edward Schmidt's house stood on it, and so did the acre Lydia Dudley bought in her own name.
Why it matters. It is the piece of ground we can most easily walk in September, and the deeds tell you who the neighbours were.
There is a road at Kittery called Rogers Road. It runs up from the Navy Yard, past Orchard Grove Cemetery, and it is on the 1872 county atlas exactly where it is today.
Two things this family owns sit on it, and it took seven deeds and a mistaken identity to work out why it has that name.
Edward Schmidt's house was on it. His deed of 22 July 1861 puts his sixty-six rods "on the road leading from the Navy Yard, near the dwelling house of John Rogers."
Lydia Dudley's acre was on it too. Her deed of 31 March 1873 describes her boundary running to "the road leading from Kittery 'Foreside' to the nursery of John Rogers."
Same road, same man, twelve years apart — and for a long time that was all: a name in two boundary clauses. This project set out to find out who John Rogers was, and the answer came out of a chain of deeds that has almost nothing to do with him.
6 November 1861 — and the acre changes hands twice before the day is out.
First: "I JOHN ROGERS of Kittery, County of York, and State of Maine, NURSERYMAN, in consideration of the sum of seventy five dollars paid by Antonio Lopez of Kittery… being one acre, more or less."
⭐ There it is. Not a farmer, not a labourer — a nurseryman, a man who grew and sold plants and trees. The road is named for his nursery, and this is the only document that says so in his own conveyance.
And then, the same day, Lopez sold it straight on:
…do hereby convey unto the said Antonio Francis… being one acre, more or less; and being the same which I purchased THIS DAY of John Rogers.**
Seventy-five dollars in, seventy-five dollars out. Antonio Lopez held that acre for a matter of hours and made nothing on it. The deeds do not say why, and this project will not invent a reason — but the shape of it is a man standing in for somebody else in a transaction, and the shape is all we have.
23 November 1861 — the block starts coming apart. Simon Lewis and Dolley his wife sell to Antonio Francis, mariner, for one hundred and twenty-eight dollars. It is the oldest link in the chain this project holds, and the first cut into a larger holding.
7 July 1865 — and the deed is signed in New York City. Antonio Francis, mariner, conveys back to Antonio Lopez — now styled yeoman, not mariner — for two hundred and ten dollars. Francis signed it by his mark, and he signed it at the City of New York, hundreds of miles from the acre he was selling. A Kittery mariner disposing of Kittery land from a New York wharf is a small, sharp glimpse of how these men actually lived.
25 April 1864 — Lewis to Lewis. Simon Lewis and Dolly convey to John E. Lewis for seven hundred dollars, a lot with a dwelling house — and the boundary runs "South Easterly by the stone wall one hundred feet."
⚑ That stone wall appears in three separate deeds across twelve years. It is the one physical thing in this entire chain that a person could walk up to and touch.
31 March 1873 — and the acre arrives. John E. Lewis conveys to Lydia J. Dudley of Kittery, married woman, for one thousand dollars — the largest single sum anywhere in this family's papers — a lot of land with the buildings on it, bounded by the road to John Rogers's nursery.
⭐⭐ She bought it in her own name. The deed says married woman and grants to Lydia J. Dudley, her heirs and assigns forever. Her husband John H. Dudley is not a party to it. That is a deliberate use of the married women's property law, and it explains something that had puzzled this project for months: why the family's Kittery land never appears under his name anywhere. It was never his.
Seven years later the newspapers reported a house at Kittery burning, "owned by Lydia J. Dudley." Ten years after that, when the acre was finally sold, the grantors were the widow and her two sons.
The chain would not close for a long time, because of a name.
Three separate deeds appeared to name three different men called John Lewis — a John C., a John E., and a plain John. On the abstracts they looked like a family of them, and a lot of effort went into deciding which was which.
They are one man. The deeds were re-read at native resolution, one leaf at a time, and two of the readings turned out to be wrong at the letter — including a grantor's name that had been recorded as Antoine Dufez and is in fact Antonio Lopez.
⭐ And the proof needed no handwriting at all. The 1873 deed to Lydia recites both of the earlier purchases as its own grantor's prior title. A man does not recite his own prior title in another man's name. One seller, one chain, one John Lewis.
John Rogers grew things for a living, on a piece of Kittery big enough that the way to it was simply called the road to Rogers's nursery — first in a deed of 1861, and still, on the county atlas printed in 1872 (a published map this project has not yet written into its own source register), and still today.
Edward Schmidt bought a house on that road in July 1861, four months before Rogers sold the acre, and named him as a neighbour. Lydia Dudley bought her acre off the same road in 1873. When Edward died in 1881 he was buried at Orchard Grove, which the 1872 plate shows sitting immediately north of his lot — on the road to the nursery.
Two households of this family, a burying ground, and a man who sold plants. That is what a road name is.
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