Chapter 1: Ancestry.—1764-1805.
Daniel Palmer removes from Rowley, Mass., to the river St. John, N. B., where his daughter Mary marries Joseph Garrison. Their son Abijah marries Fanny Lloyd of Deer Island, N. B. From Nova Scotia this couple remove in 1805 to Newburyport, Mass., where William Lloyd Garrison is born to them.The scenic glories of the River St. John, New Brunswick, are well past on the ascent when, on the right, the obscure outlet of the Jemseg is reached. The hills on either shore have both diminished and receded; and thenceforward the voyager sees only the fringe of alder bushes, or willows, which hide on the one hand the level intervale, on the other the level islands, until Burton heights loom up on the south, and, on the opposite bank, the spires of Sheffield and of Maugerville.1 Along this lowland margin a feeble line of French Acadian settlers stretched, in the middle of the last century, from the Jemseg to the Nashwaak. A couple of hundred souls were still clustered at the trading station of St. Ann's (now Fredericton) when, in the summer of 1761, Israel Perley, of Boxford, Essex County, Massachusetts, and a handful of companions, triumphing over the wilderness between Machias and the St. John, looked from the mouth of the Oromoeto down over the gleaming waters and woody plains of this romantic region.