Author: Shaw, Thomas
Biography:
SHAW, Thomas (1753-1838: ancestry.com)
Shaw was an unschooled woodsman whose broadside ballads apparently sold by the thousands in Maine at 6.25 cents apiece; only one of his publications meets the standard of length for inclusion in this bibliography. He is said to have come from a seafaring family of Exeter NH and was born in Hampton NH to Ebenezer and Anna (Philbrick) Shaw. He spent the first ten years of his life on Sargent's Island, then moved farther inland to a homestead in Standish ME. Shaw became a farmer and miller; he built a frame house for himself in 1774. He fought with the US army during the Revolutionary War and returned to Standish when discharged in 1777. In the same year he married Anna Wood; they had children, but it is not clear how many. He had somehow learnt to read and write. He claimed to have written his first poem in 1775; the first he had printed appeared in 1797; the first to sell in large numbers--distributed by the author himself, in travels around the state--was composed in 1807; and the last, a tribute to Lafayette, was issued in 1824. Most of them took up subjects of local news, usually gruesome, as of deaths by drowning and freezing. In 1808 he was converted to Methodism. After the death of his first wife that year, he married (1809) Susanna Thomes. There seem to be extant copies of only five of his eight known publications, but "a small trunk" owned by the Maine Historical Society is filled with unpublished writings. Some portions of his diary were included in Windsor Pratt Daggett's A Down-East Yankee from the District of Maine (1920). Shaw died in Standish and is buried in the cemetery there. (ancestry.com 12 Sept. 2020; findmypast.com 12 Sept. 2020; Donald A. Sears, "Folk Poetry in Longfellow's Boyhood," New England Quarterly 45 [1972] 96-105) HJ