Maine Memory Network

While Tate is best known for his role as a mast agent, he also worked a more typical job as a merchant, selling products such as lumber, including clapboards, shakes and staves, as well as fish, rum, and molasses.

He and his peers, including Jedediah Preble, Francis Waldo, and Sheriff William Tyng, became principal merchants of the colonial seaport and saw the growth of Falmouth in Casco Bay as a thriving center for the lumber trade.

An Englishman by birth, Tate’s sympathies always remained with the Anglican Church, even during the Revolutionary War.

As a result he did not support the powerful Congregational Church that most colonists followed in Falmouth in Casco Bay.

King George III served as the symbolic head of the Church of England, the Anglican faith. In 1763 Tate helped found a new Anglican parish on Falmouth Neck.

He and thirty other men issued a complaint regarding the distance between their homes in Stroudwater and the Congregational Church, located three miles away.

Tate and other Anglicans used this complaint to mask stronger sentiments against Parson Thomas Smith of First Parish’s Congregational doctrine.