5772 Highway 201: The Samuel Morse House

Architecture Style: Georgian Classical

Built: c. 1798

Samuel and Abner Morse were brothers who emigrated from Sherburn, MA on the Charming Molly in 1760 with their father-in-law, Jonathan Church. Forty-five “Planters”  sailed into Annapolis one spring day, bringing provisions, tools, and some livestock. Abner brought a pair of oxen, two cows, and a horse! The Planters’ 500- acre grants had been vacant since the deportation of the Acadians in 1755; Samuel’s grant had belonged to Jean Bastarache, who escaped and fled to Quebec, and died there in 1757.

It is doubtful if they had pangs of conscience;  the French-Indian war (1754-1763) had been fierce and brutal, with massacres on both sides. Anti-“papist” sentiment ran high in New England, and Jonathan Church’s great-uncle was Benjamin Church,  that “fierce messenger” of Puritan New England who saw himself as the avenging arm of God. With his band of colonial and native fighters, he pillaged and terrorized Acadian and native villages in Nova Scotia and Maine: women, children and men were “all enemies alike to me.” The new settlers, however, soon sought the expertise and friendship of the Acadian remnant and their Mik’Maq friends, who knew the land. Samuel and Lydia  [Church] prospered. Their son, Samuel II, built a mill, and this valuable example of a Georgian Classical home, with its elegant circular staircase, enjoyed by the family from 1798-1909.

In 1909, John Noble Jackson III married Emma Voss Harris and began the next century of family ownership. John’s great-grandfather was Christopher Jackson, a blacksmith with the Royal Artillery in Annapolis, who was granted Dalhousie land in 1820. His death was a notorious event; in 1827 James Gormley killed him in a fight and spent years in prison.   John came to Paradise as a boy of 11 with his parents, Martha [Buckler] and Christopher, who started the Roxbury mill for Pickles and Mills and managed their Paradise store. A son, Christopher, went to Ontario. Their daughter Louise kept the house in the family; she came home from  Bermuda to help and married Mason Pearle of Baxter’s Harbour. They farmed at the corner of Paradise Lane and Highway 201 until they retired, sold their farm to son Jack and Anne Marie[Balcom], and moved back to this house. Jack and Anne Marie had lived in it for five years, and later their daughter Michelle, Carl, and Cassidy- making Cassidy the fifth generation to live in this historic home!