By Donald Hafner
In 1730, Samuel Dakin with his brothers and three other investors had high ambitions. They formed a partnership for “searching after, digging, and improving all such mines or ores as may be found in or upon the land of” Samuel Dakin. Iron ores were highly valued, and bog iron ore — which forms in iron-rich, swampy water — had been found around Iron Mine Brook near Beaver Pond in Lincoln. The partners hoped a lode of bog iron ore might lie buried beneath Dakin’s land. His mining ambitions, however, were a bust. If the partners ever found “such mines or ores,” they were meager.
Fortunately for Dakin, his father had bequeathed to him a limestone quarry and a kiln for roasting limestone at high heat, converting it into powdery, white lime. The quarry and the lime kiln were located on Dakin land bounded by modern Sandy Pond and Baker Bridge roads. For his neighbors, it might well have been cursed as “Lime Kiln Field.” The heat needed to roast limestone into lime required large amounts of wood and produced acrid smoke and toxic fumes. The lime kiln cannot have been a good neighbor.
Lime had many uses in 18th-century Lincoln. Weaver Joshua Child used “two pounds of the best rock lime” in his recipe for dyeing cloth. Joshua Brooks used lime at his tannery on the North Road to remove hair from the hides before tanning. And in March 1767, the town paid Joshua Brooks for “eight bushels and half of hair to mix with lime for the meeting house.” The town had built a new gallery in the meeting house, and lime bought from Amos Dakin was mixed with sand and the hair from Brooks’ tannery “to plaster under the galleries in the meeting house.” (The animal hair helped bind the plaster together.) Over the years, the town treasurer’s records are sprinkled with payments for lime to be used in whitewashing the walls of the town’s schoolhouses.
It is not clear when the lime kiln in Samuel Dakin’s field ceased belching smoke and fumes. In 1788, Dakin sold his land to a Lincoln newcomer, Zachariah Smith. Whatever became of Dakin’s lime kiln, clearly it had not transformed Lincoln into a mining town. Yet perhaps scattered in that field there still can be found a scorched stone or two that once were part of Lincoln’s ancient lime kiln.
This account of the Dakin lime kiln is indebted to Jack MacLean’s A Rich Harvest, which can be purchased from the Lincoln Historical Society. Illustration from “Pre-Industrial Lime Kilns” (Historic England, 2018).
“Lincoln’s History” is an occasional column by members of the Lincoln Historical Society.
Thanks for another bit of interesting Lincoln history–very enjoyable reading!
Diana Beaudoin
My husband Jim Dakin also descends from Samuel’s father Simon Dakin, Sr. through Samuel’s brother, Simon Dakin, Jr. That line hangs by a thread, as most of the generations “daughtered out.” I would very much be interested in knowing more about this first and second Dakin generation. I compiled a history of the first five Dakin generations. A copy should still be in Concord’s library.