Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 1

His isolation, however, except in public sentiment, lasted hardly more than a year. Despite the good-will and assistance of Massachusetts, before a project of fortifying the month of the St. John could be carried out, in May, 1777, the British sloop Vulture, fourteen guns, from Halifax (a vessel afterward famous for having been the refuge of Benedict Arnold on the discovery of his treason), sailed up the river with troops, and, as was¹ reported in Machias on the 29th, compelled the settlers to take the oath of allegiance to his British Majesty. Many were robbed of their all; some were carried away. A vain attempt to reverse this was made by a Massachusetts expedition in the following month. Boston was too far away, Halifax was too near. Submission was unavoidable; but time never reconciled all of the inhabitants to the separation from their kindred in the old Massachusetts home, and their regrets have been handed down to their posterity. Shut off from further increase by immigration from the original hive, they could only perpetuate their numbers by intermarriage; and the tourist on the St. John to-day finds in Sunbury County not only familiar New England names, but perhaps as unmixed a Puritan stock as exists on the continent.

Of Joseph Garrison, except that he died at Jemseg in February, 1783, we know nothing more that is eventful. He passed for a disappointed man. His physical characteristics, as determinable from his posterity, may be set down as follows: a long chin and a large bump of firmness (phrenologically speaking), with a great length between; black hair, with early baldness. Probably to him, too, rather than to the Palmers is to be attributed an hereditary tendency to congenital lameness, which has shown itself in three generations,—though never in a straight line, and always (it is believed) in the male children,—and two instances of a prominent facial birthmark in a son and grandson of Joseph and Mary Palmer