As a moneyed man with a good trade, 3 sons, and the status of a Revolutionary War officer, Enoch must have cut quite a fine figure in Maytown's streets and that stood him in good stead when his first wife Sarah died and Sarah #2 took her place. But happiness was not to long bless the conjugal pair, as differences in age and expectation took their toll. Sarah #2, you see, was the once famous "Sally" Hastings, born on March 25, 1773 the same year as Enoch's youngest son, John -and therefore almost half a century younger than her mate.

Born near Intercourse, Pa., the daughter of Robert (parson or blacksmith?) and Margaret Anderson, Scots Irish Presbyterians (who nevertheless had been married at St. James Episcopal Church in Lancaster on June 2, 1767), Sally moved to Donegal in 1783 with her widowed mother and five siblings, and they became part of farmer Brice Clark's family. Brice was a pillar of Donegal Presbyterian Church and his large farm is located along what today is Colebrook Road, just to the East of Maytown, and north of Rock Point Road.

Not one to "hide her lamp under a bushel basket" or be told by someone else how to live her life, the impetuous 15 year old girl defied the wishes of her parents and the conventions of society by marrying the then 61 year old. Enoch (who was older than her step father) in 1788 and moved into Enoch's house. (An article which appeared in the 1906 edition of the Lancaster County Historical Society Journal (Vol. X, p. 373 states that the couple "dwelt for a time in the brick house in the square at Maytown, where later Amos Slaymaker and more recently John C. Sweiler kept a store, but I believe that to be incorrect for reasons that will follow in the text. I think that she moved into Enoch's log house on lot #3, our museum's building, and that the brick house referred to, on lot #2, was not yet dreamed of.)

Three children appear to have been born to the couple: Margaret, who died in infancy, Enoch, born in 1793, and Sarah, in 1795 however, what became of the boy and girl is not yet known by me. What is certain is that Sally wasn't cut out for the hard and tedious, intellectually numbing life of a frontier wife and mother, and so she became a "grass widow," who separated herself from her husband at some point, but was unable to seek a divorce, due to the religious scruples of her church and her stern and influential step father.

In one of the poems which she wrote and which served as the basis for her nineteenth century celebrity, "Maytown's Grass Widow" wrote of herself and her motives for leaving Enoch:

That being the case, in 1800, she left Maytown behind and accompanied her sister, Rebekah, Rebekah's husband, Joseph Barton, 2 servants, and 5 children, on a two horse wagon trip west, across the Allegheny Mountains to Cross Creek, Washington County, Pennsylvania. The account of this journey, together with 60 original poems, were later published, in 1808, at the prompting of William Dickson, the editor of the Lancaster "Intellegencer and Weekly Advertizer". The 6¾" x 4¼" leather bound tome contained 220 pages, and it sold for 87½¢ a copy, with 854 copies purchased by primarily Presbyterians in Pennsylvania and neighboring states. The cumbersome title of the work read: "Poems, on Different Subjects. To Which is added a Descriptive Account of a Family Tour of the West, in the year 1800. In a letter to a Lady, by Sallie Hastings."

I find the diary portions of the text to be quite interesting and evocative of a time when the "west" wasn't so far away as we who grew up in the 1950's thought of it peopled with cowboys and Indians on the Great Plains or rocky desert buttes. Sally tells us what it was like to cross through forests and over low Eastern mountains on a pathway that many generations later would be rendered easy by the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

Sally's poetry is rather formal and stilted with a lot of obscure references to classical literature and non specific and impersonal musings on nature. She is perfectly orthodox in her Christianity and unabashedly patriotic. Her heroes are Presbyterian ministers and Thomas Jefferson. Not long after arriving in Cross Creek, the poetess's sister died, leaving her to tend the children until, in February of 1805, she was replaced with a step mother, and she could return to Donegal for an extended visit which may have lasted for three years.

In 1808, she went west again this time to serve as nanny and housekeeper to her widowed brother, Robert Anderson, and his children, and there, in Washington County's seat, "little Washington", she was in her glory. Robert, you see, was not only a jeweler and a maker of tall case clocks, but also a rising politician, who served as sheriff, town councillor, and a state legislator, and theirs was a household that was always humming with interesting visitors and, in Sally's surprising admission "a train of beaux."

A more worldly 37-year-old Sallie even became engaged in a prolonged and heated newspaper debate with the puritanical Alexander Campbell, who objected to the "unseemly" conduct of some students at Washington College's annual commencement exercises, and thereby incurred the wrath of the more tolerant and liberal Sally. (Campbell, by the way; later founded the Disciples of Christ denomination.)

Two years later, as American naval forces were engaging the Barbary pirates on the "shores of Tripoli", Sallie died, in 1812, and she was buried in an unmarked grave eventually forgotten by all, save a tiny cluster of literary and historical researchers.

One of them, Hon. W.U. Hensel, wrote of her in 1906, in the exceedingly flowery language of the day, "(she was) a minor minstrel, rural and local, slightly remembered, if not altogether forgotten, a star that flickered feebly in the constellation of local poesy and then was lost to literary view a flower that blushed not altogether unseen, but whose fragrance soon was wasted on an unsympathetic, desert air." (LCHS Vol. 10, No. 10 pp. 370 1.)

But now we enter truly murky waters and a mystery which this historian has not yet been able to solve. As Sallie was out cavorting in the West, things did not stand still in Maytown, bucolic though we may have been!

Enoch's youngest son, John, for example, first shows up on the tax rolls, as the owner of a separate house and lot, in 1802, and on October 17, 1805, John married Agnes McCurdy, who had been born on August 16, 1781, in County Donegal, Ireland. The couple produced possibly Enoch's first grandson on May 26, 1807, when John Richards Hasting was born, and it is interesting to note that in that same year's tax rolls, Enoch is no longer listed as owning one house and two lots, but only one house and one lot, while his son now owns one house and 3 lots.

This suggests to me that the proud and aging grandfather gave lot #2 to John so that he could raise his growing family in a new, larger house, on the town square, and have a more visible venue for nursing his profession as a saddler. 1808's tax rolls show that Enoch owned one house and one lot, valued at $75, while John owned one house on only one lot (plus 24 lands patent) , valued at $309, which means the younger man got rid of two lots and perhaps exchanged houses, so that now he lived next to his Dad, in a better place.

On January 15, 1809, Adeline Simpson Hastings was born to John and Agnes, and January 11, 1811 saw the birth of Edmund McCurdy Hastings. Agnes, it should be noted, is credited with having started the first Sunday School in Maytown, in 1828, The 1904 Lutheran Church history, written by Pastor Goll, on page 132, says she taught in a log school house where later the double brick school was built, and which today are dwellings probably at the corner of South King and West Elizabeth Streets in Maytown.

But here's what I mean about a mystery: The 1810 federal census shows that Enoch Hastings was living with one 26 45 year old free white male (probably his unmarried. son, William or Howell) and a woman 45 years of age or older! (Who was this woman? Sallie Hastings would have only been 37, and she was living in Washington County!

Sallie made a big issue out of her frustration in not being able to get divorced from Enoch, and there is no indication that she ever re married. Did HE? Was the woman on the tax rolls a housekeeper, a mistress, or a third wife?)

And if that weren't confusing enough, consider this: Enoch died at the age of 84, on January 26, 1812 the same year that Sallie died and he was buried by himself in the St. John's Lutheran Church graveyard, where his stone still stands today, in row 12---yet from 1813 through 1823, the tax rolls show "widow Hastings" owning Enoch Hasting's house and lot, and in 1824, "Widow Hasting's Estate" is said to be the owner as if she only died that year!

The only apparent solution to this discrepancy is:

a) that Sallie Hastings did not, in fact, die in 1812... nor was she buried out west, as the legend says....but rather, that she returned to Maytown after Enoch's death (if not before!!!) and lived here until her own death in 1823 or 1824.

b) that Enoch took a third wife who survived him (and whose name may have been "Sarah" like wives #1 and #2 adding to the confusion!)

c) that Sallie's family kept waging a legal battle, asserting her claim to Enoch's property long after her death. (Although that doesn't explain why ownership should suddenly change to "the estate of.")