FORESTRY

The Pine Tree Riot happened 250 years ago, on April 14, 1772, in the town of Weare on the site where the Quimby Inn once stood. Today, a large millstone with a plaque marks the site on Route 114 where the riot took place.

In the early 1700s, more and more people were leaving England and coming to the colonies for a new life, hoping for less control from King George III. As early settlements grew and moved from the New Hampshire coast inland, the plentiful and valuable resource, our trees, became more important for landowners.

In the late 1600s, England realized it had over-logged their own forests to the point they were unable to provide large trees for masts used on the wooden sailing ships of its navy. So the king claimed all the white pine trees in the new colonies that exceeded 24 inches in diameter belonged to him. In 1722, the British Parliament passed a law to reduce the size of the white pine trees they would call their own, from 24 inches to 12 inches in diameter, to be sure they would have a continuous supply of white pine tree masts for future ships.

To understand what a loss of value this change of tree diameter is to understand the following: A 16-foot log with a 24-inch diameter produces a total of 425 board feet of lumber, compared to a 12-inch diameter, 16-foot log, which would produce only 95 board feet.

If that wasn’t enough to get folks worked up, the king had his surveyors go out and mark all white pine trees 12 inches and larger and notified the settlers that they first had to pay for a royal license in order to cut any of the remaining white pine trees, on the colonist’s land.

When Benning Wentworth was governor of New Hampshire, he did very little to enforce the king’s pine tree laws, but in 1766 John Wentworth (Benning’s nephew) became governor and began to enforce them by sending out surveyors to check the sawmills in Goffstown and Weare and measure the diameter of white pine logs. They found pine logs from 15 inches to 36 inches in diameter and claimed they were the property of the king. The mill owners were ordered to pay fines on February 7, 1772.

The sawmill owners of Goffstown paid their fines to get the logs back, but the sawmill owners in Weare did not. On April 13th, the sheriff and his deputy rode into South Weare to arrest sawmill owner Ebenezer Mudgett, who was the leader of the Weare mill owners. By the time they found him, it was dark and Mudgett agreed to meet the sheriff and deputy the following morning at the Quimby Inn.

Early in the morning, Mudgett and others surprised the sheriff and deputy in their rooms and pulled them out of bed, whipped them, took them outside where their horses were waiting with their manes and tails sheared off, and both were forced onto their horses and run out of the town of Weare.

The sheriff didn’t give up his efforts to collect fines, and later in the spring captured one of the rioters, so the others involved agreed to pay the bail money and appear in court. That September, eight men from Weare appeared in court in Amherst and were fined 20 shillings each, which was a very light punishment for their crimes.

Mudgett and other loggers and sawmill owners stood up and rebelled against the King’s “Pine Tree Laws,” which encouraged others to stand up and push back. This became the spark that one year later fueled the Tea Party in 1773 and then the Revolutionary War against Great Britain in 1775.

Tom Thomson is a tree farmer in Orford.