Seneca Paige: Justice of the Peace, MLA, counterfeiting king

Dunham’s first cottage industry was a real money maker

People often speak dismissively of our history, no doubt fuelled by that teacher who recited names and dates, making sure to never stray too far from the established curriculum. History is something that happened elsewhere, written by and for kings, leaders and generals who dictated the terms of victory, or rarely, accepted defeat.

            But history is so much more than that. It is the lived experiences of people just like you and me, who worked hard, often died young and struggled, not merely to be successful, but just to survive. While I love history, I hold no illusions about “the good old days.” Like many of you, I’m alive because of medical science and modern prosperity. I’ve never had scurvy, tuberculosis, or faced the threat of starvation. It might not seem like it, but we live in the best time to be alive.

            As a storyteller though, I love history. I love imagining myself not in the shoes of Napoleon or Churchill, but in the well-worn leather boots of more regular folks. And if there’s one man I’d love to do an interview with, and who refutes the Townships myth of “nothing interesting ever happened here,” it would be Dunham’s counterfeiting king, Seneca Paige.

            Before we dive into Paige’s life, a quick bit of background: In the early days of the United States there wasn’t a single US currency. Instead, banks issued notes that served as legal tender. These notes varied greatly in style and substance, and early settlers with an artistic flair often set out to recreate them, trading them for legitimate cash, gold, or using them to buy supplies. Counterfeiting was illegal in the US, but north of the border, making fake US bank notes wasn’t against the law. Having come from the States, some of the new settlers seized upon an opportunity, and a border that was, for the most part, still an imaginary construct.

            Born in Hardwick, Massachusetts in 1788, Paige was a slippery critter from the get-go. He got busted in Jersey City in 1809 for passing a fake dollar bank note, but got out of that one. Then after being arrested for counterfeiting in Baltimore in 1812 he escaped custody. He got caught again in 1816 and managed an escape yet again. That’s when he moved to Cogniac Street in Dunham.

            Not much of a street, barely even a road, stretching from near Selby Lake to North Sutton, Cogniac Street, now known as Hudon Road, became the counterfeiting capital of North America in the early 1800’s. And it’s here that our intrepid Mr. Paige really came into his own.

            Paige built up a counterfeiting network of printers, engravers, couriers, and various folks all looking to cash in on counterfeit craze. Known officially as a wood merchant and building contractor, his main focus was making money. Lots of money.

The counterfeiter’s tool kit.

            But there were others on Cogniac Street that he had to deal with. Ebenezer Gleason was an illiterate but clever man with a gang of funny money makers of his own. In a region and time where survival was a daily concern for most, Gleason prospered. Seemingly he saw the benefit of working for Paige and his people, contenting himself to playing second fiddle.

            Not so for Turner Wing and his gang. In 1824 Wing led his gang of thugs, armed with pistols and swords, down the road to Paige’s lair. They hauled away about $4 000 in bank notes, copper plates, printing equipment and even a few of Paige’s crew, including his dear old dad, who ran the presses. Nobody messes with dad and gets away with it, so Paige and Gleason locked and loaded and paid the Wing crew a visit. By the time the dust settled all was returned, including dad, and Wing was allowed to continue his business, on a reduced scale.

            Where were the cops, you might ask. This being early days, there wasn’t much for law enforcement. There was pretty much just Ephraim Knight, Bailiff for the District of Bedford. Knight tried his best, getting little more than the occasional beating and regular torment from the counterfeiters, known far and wide by now as Cogniackers.

            By 1833 however, the tide began to turn, and the laws began to catch up. That summer an assortment of law enforcement types from both sides of the border surrounded and raided the Wing and Gleason compounds, hauling away large sums of legal and illegal tender, printing equipment and chemicals, and arresting thirteen people, including Ebenezer Gleason and four of his sons. Hauled to Montreal, they were all convicted, but only spent two years behind bars.

            Walking between the raindrops once again was Paige, who was never convicted of a crime north of the border. But what does a criminal do when the counterfeiting business goes into decline? For Seneca Paige, politics, of course. He was given a large tract of land by the Crown, served a stint as a Justice of the Peace, and then in 1851 he became the Member of the Legislative Assembly for Missisquoi in the Province of Canada. He even has his own National Assembly web page, which makes no mention of his checkered past.

            Today the Cogniac Street counterfeiters are all buried in one of the several cemeteries along Hudon Road. Ebenezer Gleason is in the Harvey Cemetery, Turner Wing in the tiny cemetery that bears the family name. Various others, little known or entirely forgotten, sprinkled amongst the more faithful in the Dunham East or Farnam’s Corner cemeteries.

            But not Seneca Paige. He died in 1856 at the age of 68. Finally safe to return to the US, he was buried in Bakersfield, in Franklin County, Vermont. His tombstone states: “His Loss will be felt by many; particularly by the poor. He was truly the poor man’s friend.”

My writing life

I’ve written quite a lot over the years. During my time at the Sherbrooke Record as a general assignment reporter I penned as many as 300 stories a year on everything from municipal council meetings to drug busts to cults waiting for the aliens to arrive to save us all. So I was a little taken aback recently when an old friend asked me what my writing practice was.

Really? What is my writing practice? Do I HAVE a writing practice?

Fact is, I don’t really have a set writing practice. Instead I’d say that the rest of my life, with a smattering of procrastination (okay, maybe more than a smattering) shapes the writing I do.

That procrastination thing is a killer. I love writing, but am also quick to do other things to avoid it. Why? Years of therapy have so far failed to yield any change on that front. But give me a deadline, and things start to happen. College and university? Deadlines. Newspapers, translation contracts and magazines? They all provide me with deadlines.

The existence of these deadlines has served me well. I’ve done some of my best writing when there are only minutes to go before my editor has my copy, or keels over from their latest heart attack. That’s when my energy finally comes into focus. That’s when the flow state happens.

So when it came to writing The Granby Liar, I had no deadline. None. Nada. No publisher and no idea how I would get it into print. As a result it took me a decade to get it done. When I gave my mom the manuscript my nephew said “Un-oh. A Crossfield actually finished something.” I guess I’m not the only one in my family who’s good at starting things, but not finishing them.

So when asked about my method for novel writing, I had to admit I didn’t really have one. I don’t have a specific period in the day exclusively for writing. I don’t set a daily word count for myself. My story planning is basically a few pages of notes: Turns of phrase, questions to be answered, maybe an idea for a plot twist or a new character. I don’t plot out the story line, plan chapters or try to bend the characters to my will.

Indeed, I enjoy letting the characters drive my general idea of the plot. Sometimes a minor character has enough lifeblood to become more important, sometimes more important characters whither on the vine.

Welcome to the pandemonium in my head. And out of it comes (hopefully), something I can be proud of. Always keeping in mind that just because one is creative doesn’t mean everything they create is art. Sometimes the art is in going back and tweaking things. Sometimes there is no art to be found, and my efforts end up in the waste bin.

Every writer has their way of doing things. Some plot out every section, every chapter, ahead of time. Others are more like me. Like life, it’s a matter of figuring out what works best, and what works best for me may be the exact wrong thing for you.

Writing, like life, is a DIY project. With practice I’ve gotten better at a few times, and everything takes longer than I’d expect. And while there are moments when I miss the adrenaline of a midnight deadline where the guys on the press are waiting for my copy, I’m happier to learn better time management and appreciate the writing I do.

I hope you’ll appreciate it too.

It’s the Townships. With all the grit you remember from the good old days

I have always been a storyteller. Came from a family of storytellers. Stories are what make us who we are.

And yet, when I looked to the world of stories and books, I rarely saw myself reflected in the stories of others. And when I looked back at what a lot of people think of as “the good old days,” I came to the realization that if I was going to tell stories from an era, I had to be true to that era.

The Eastern Townships of my youth, in the 1970’s and 1980’s, contained all of the bucolic beauty you might expect. But it was also a hardscrabble place, filled with political turmoil, racism, dirt and grit.

Welcome to Townships Noir

On this site you’ll see much more than just me trying to sell books. News, author stuff, local history and folklore, maybe even some fresh short fiction. I plan to be experimenting, so please come back often.

You never know what you’ll find.