that in the first edition of History of the County of Lunenburg, the one published in 1870, Judge DesBrisay had identified the three who discovered the Money Pit as Daniel McGinnis, John Smith, and Samuel Ball. Ball was not replaced by Vaughan until the second edition of DesBrisay’s book was published in 1896. There was no explanation for the change offered. Ball was still in the book, described as one of the “early residents” on Oak Island, “a coloured man, who came from South Carolina where he had been a slave to a master whose name he adopted.” DesBrisay added only that Ball was remembered as “a good man.”
A bit more information than that was available. Samuel was born (probably in 1764) and grew up on a plantation in South Carolina. On November 14, 1775, fearing the revolutionary fever that was sweeping through the colonies, John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore and governor of Virginia, issued the Proclamation of Kemps Landing, in which he declared free men any black males who would join His Majesty’s forces in the battle against rebel forces. Based on this promise, Ball escaped the plantation shortly after the Revolutionary War broke out and joined the troops commanded by Lord Charles Cornwallis, but he was quickly transferred to the army marching on New York under the command of General Henry Clinton, then assigned to the command of a Major Ward and stationed at Bergen Point, New Jersey. At Bergen Point, Ball worked for the British army as “a woodcutter” until Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, then fled along with many of the other loyalist freemen to Canada.
Records show that Ball arrived in Shelburne in 1783 and remained there three years before moving to Chester. Based on an 1809 petition (called a memorial in those times) that Ball submitted to a justice of the peace named Thomas Thompson in Chester, we know that Ball had by then been living on Oak Island for twenty-three years. In his petition, Ball requested the allotment of land promised to black slaves who had joined the loyalist cause. Thomas stated Ball’s case in writing:
Your Memorialist Ball has no lands but, what he has purchased, never having got any from government, and there is a four-acre lott vacant, No. 32, on Oak Island, joining a lott purchased by your Memorialist. Your Memorialist therefore prays, Your Excellency well be pleased to grant, or otherwise order to have said Lott. Your Memorialist has but one son living. Chester, 9th September 1809.
This day the above named Samuel Ball came before me and made oath on the Holy Evangelist, that what is stated in the above memorial is strictly true, which I verily believe to be so.
I do hereby further certify that I have known said Samuel Ball, above twenty years, and I believe he is an honest, sober and industrious settler, worthy of encouragement.
Thos. Thompson, Jus’Peace.
The lot Ball requested was granted, and eventually he acquired others, gradually becoming the owner of nine four-acre lots on Oak Island, which made him for a time the landowner with the most real estate on the island. Ball had paid £8 for the first lot he purchased on Oak Island according to the deed dated September 22, 1787. This was a considerable sum at the time and evidence, as shown by the records in the Lunenburg County Book of Deeds, that acre for acre Oak Island was the most expensive land in Mahone Bay. How Ball was able to afford to purchase another seven lots in addition to the one he was awarded by the British Crown and also to acquire an additional hundred acres on the mainland and on Hook Island is something of a mystery. In various poll tax registries, Ball was listed as a farmer who raised cattle and sheep, also working as a logger and fisherman. Somehow, though, Ball and his wife, Catherine, were able to afford a servant named Isaac Butler who remained with them until Ball’s death on December 14, 1845, at the age of eighty-one. Ball’s will, probated on January 5, 1846, shows that his hundred acres on the mainland adjoined “lands owned by Daniel McGinnis.”
For more than a century and a half, there have been accusations that the young men who discovered the Money Pit (along with Samuel Ball, who was not so young but may have been part of that original discovery) did in fact find a treasure there, which explained their apparently “sudden prosperity” in the early nineteenth century. The story that the young men found three chests of treasure about 20 feet deep in the Money Pit and took one each surfaced in 2007. That year, a local historian named Danny Hennigar spoke to a woman descended from McGinnis who showed him a heavy cross of braided gold that was clearly hammered and hand formed, claiming she had inherited it as part of the treasure passed down through the generations from Daniel McGinnis. The cross, the woman said, had been examined by experts who said it was six hundred years old. That same woman, Joyce McGinnis, also showed up on the island in 2015 with her two sisters and repeated the tale of the three chests—which made for a dramatic story for the season three finale of The Curse of Oak Island. According to her, this cross was the one part of his treasure that Daniel McGinnis had held on to, insisting that it be handed down through the generations from oldest son to oldest son. Her brother had received it from her father, Joyce McGinnis said, but when he was about to die without a male heir, he had given it to her, making her promise to “never let this out of your sight.” Joyce McGinnis said she’d taken it to several jewelers who had told her “it could be as old as five hundred years.” In the summer of 2016, the producers of The Curse of Oak Island arranged for the cross to be examined by Dr. Lori Verderame, a former professor of art history at Penn State who had built a business identifying ancient artifacts. She reported that the cross was rose gold, between twenty-two and twenty-four carats in weight, and was of Spanish colonial design and manufacture, probably cast in a mold in either Mexico or Peru sometime between 1550 and 1700. The tiny holes in the cross had originally held emeralds, she said.
Others have focused their suspicion on John Smith, who not only fathered fourteen children and supported his brood comfortably, but also came to own 19 percent of Oak Island, all of nearby Frog Island, and pieces of several other islands. How had that been possible, this faction of amateur investigators has demanded. They point to John Smith’s grandson Murdock Smith, who in the late nineteenth century donated the funds for the construction of the library at Port Williams, Nova Scotia, suggesting that he was using a portion of the “treasure” he had inherited to relieve his familial guilt. In fact, Murdock Smith was a successful dentist in Massachusetts and might very well have been able to pay for the library out of his own savings. As for the real estate holdings of John Smith, those could have been amassed by a combination of hard work, thrift, and shrewd investment.
The stories of the Vaughan family coming into “sudden wealth” around the end of the eighteenth century are both the most numerous and the most compelling. These stories seem to go back to two of Anthony Vaughan’s brothers, John and Daniel, who in the early 1800s became wealthy shipyard and mill owners in New Brunswick. The story that they got their start with a pile of gold coins received from their nephew Anthony Jr. might have something to do with the fact that, according to Families of the Western Shore, the Vaughans established their business in New Brunswick in 1796, within a year of the Money Pit’s putative discovery. Those tales of the Vaughans and the mysterious source of the family’s wealth have stayed alive for more than two centuries. In 1991, an eighty-one-year-old man named Carl Mosher who was living in the veterans’ unit of the Fishermen’s Memorial Hospital in Lunenburg, told one of those stories to a local reporter. Back in 1925, Mosher said, his grandmother Lucy Vaughan, a descendant of Anthony Vaughan, showed him “a wooden trunk containing about twenty-five white canvas bags of gold.” Not long after this, according to Mosher, Lucy’s brother Edward Vaughan “took the trunk and disappeared, leaving his property, business, wife and family.”
In August 2016, I spoke to a woman named Anna Frittenburg, the great-great-granddaughter of Ennis Joudrey, for whom one of the two major inlets on Oak Island, Joudrey’s Cove, was named. Her grandfather (Ennis Joudrey’s grandson) Harris Joudrey, who was born on Oak Island in 1889, had spoken often of the Vaughans and his suspicions about their wealth, Frittenburg told me.
He said there were four Vaughan brothers living in the area when he was growing up, and that they lived very well, even though they never seemed to work. They had this little schooner that they sailed to the States two or three times a year. My grandfather had been friends with one of the brothers when they were young. He said one time this boy got ill and my grandfather went to visit him. He said the boy was so happy to have a visitor that he sent him to a closet in his room and said, “Move that board.” When my grandfather did, behind the board, in between the wall studs, was a bag filled