Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 6.djvu/103

 THF. SURPLUS REVENUE IX CANAAN.

��87

��of which was paid from the surplus revenue fund, and amounted to 828.37.

While they were passing these votes in tones that were to echo through all the capitals of the south, making glad the heart of every man who was loyal to slavery, it was discovered that the outrage to the academy, which they had met to avenge, was committed by a man named George Drake, a black- smith, who had a bill for labor upon the academy which the trustees were too slow in paying, and he took that unusual method to receipt it. But this discovery produced no change in the sentiments of the ''legal voters " of Canaan. They were not going back on their own mouths. If the abolitionists did not commit that outrage, it was because Drake got in ahead and took away their oppor- tunity.

At the annual meeting in March, 1S39, it was "'voted to apply the school fund and the literary fund the same as in the preceding year." Interest on the surplus revenue was also included. amounting this year as before to $180.42. It was also ''voted to collect a sum of the surplus revenue sufficient to buy a farm for the poor, and to stock it, and to furnish the house on said farm."

The farm they proposed to buy was the old Dea. Welch farm, then owned by Moses Pattee, now owned by Har- rison Fogg. The farm had cost the impecunious Moses about eleven hundred dollars ; but his brothers Daniel and James held a mortgage against it. They were willing and anxious to receive their money back, and as Daniel was chairman of the board of selectmen, it was not difficult for him to persuade the "Board" that the farm was worth much more than the sum it cost Moses, and that it would be greatly to the interest of (the Pattee family) the town and the poor then to purchase it at the price asked. He was successfully persuasive, and thus the town became the happy possessor of that valuable real estate : the poor had a home, the Pattee- got

��their money back, and a large hole was made in the sum total of the sur- plus revenue.

But there were many voters who were not satisfied with this disposition of the money. They thought there was too much family interest at work in getting rid of that farm for so much money, — $1450 for the land, and $550 to carry out the second part of the ••vote." The town worked this farm with the usual results to such specula- tions — that means losses every year — for eight years, and dien was glad to find a purchaser in 1847, at 81200. in Moses French of Enfield. The furni- ture and stock were sold for what they would brin.'z at auction. The loss to the town in this operation, amounted to 10 per cent, per annum on its invest- ment, without reckoning the dimin- ished amounts paid to the schools.

For two years, namely in 1837 and 1838, the interest in advance on the surplus revenue distributed to the schools was Si 80. 2 2 for each year. In 1S39 the amount fell off to S60; in 1840 it was 860 ; in 1841 it was 860. And the sum total of this reve- nue which accrued to the benefit of the schools during the five years it attracted the greed of the. people, was $440.44. After 1S43 it ceases to appear in the records, because it had then been absorbed into the pockets of the tax-payers.

The dissatisfied people got up a town meeting on the 15th of April. It will be noticed that town-meetings were very common among that people. The men who ruled here in those vears believed that a "vote" or "re- solve" at a "legal town-meeting" gave them great credit in South Carolina, particularly after they drove the "niggers" out of town. This meeting of April 15th did not amount to much. The wrong men got it up, and when they came together and moved a vote " to appropriate a portion of the sur- plus revenue to the building of a town-house and academy," they were voted down promptly and the meet- ing dissolved. The selectmen were

�� �