The following is a first person account of what happened during those trying times as recorded by Lydia Whitney Sherman, wife of Aaron Sherman a local carpenter who is most noted for building the Ruggles House at Columbia Falls, and daughter of Colonel Jeremiah O’Brien. She remembers distinctly the British occupation of Machias in 1814, then a girl of eleven years. When in her nineties her remembrances were recorded by her son George W. Sherman, who sent them to George Drisko, who printed her story in the March 9, 1897 issue of the Machias Union – as follows.