He was about thirty-seven, with a large family, but apparently he and his wife, Rebecca, managed to cope. He was one of the founders and first president of the Portland Marine Society, as noted earlier.
Falmouth’s inhabitants salvaged what they could and began to rebuild. Instead of stamping out revolutionary fervor Mowat’s raid served only to intensify it. Among the commerce-raiding privateers with which Falmouth’s entrepreneurs hoped to combine patriotism with profit was the hastily built Retrieve of 1776, which the British almost immediately captured and took to Halifax. Another was the Fox. Though apparently pierced for twenty guns she carried but four, but four days out surprised a heavily laden vessel which they captured and brought to Boston. This seems to have been the high point of the Fox’s career as she never took such a rich prize again. The 1778 privateer brig Union carried twelve guns—though six of them were wooden fakes—but "nothing brilliant or profitable attended her career," according to historian Willis. As might be expected in a small, tightly-knit maritime community, many of the names connected with these enterprises figure in the early history of the Portland Marine Society: Ilsley, Preble, Moody, McLellan and the like. The McLellan family even seems to have made a profit from disaster. In 1779 Joseph McLellan (never a Society member himself, though others of the extended clan were) chartered his Centurion to the Massachusetts-led attempt to drive British forces from Castine, in Penobscot Bay. The expedition was a disaster and McLellan’s son, William, in command of the Centurion, joined his fellow captains in setting the vessel on fire to avoid capture. Afterwards McLellan collected handsomely for the loss of his vessel.
Though the actual treaty ending the war was not signed until September 1783, hostilities had ended by April and Falmouth greeted the news with what seems to have been quite a wild celebration. Parson Smith of the First Parish Church described it as a "mad day of rejoicing, firing cannon incessantly from morning to night among the houses...." As long as the war was on, Falmouth had made only minimal efforts to rebuild, but as William Willis wrote poetically not quite a century later, "As the notes of peace came booming over the sea and were echoed from our thousand hills, accessions to the population were rapidly made, and a sudden impulse was given to business and the restoration of the town." Forty-one new houses, ten stores and seven shops went up in 1784. These were all of wood. General Peleg Wadsworth built the town’s first brick house the following year. The Wadsworth-Longfellow House, home of the Maine Historical Society, still stands on Congress Street.
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