Where is Madawaska, you ask? Take a look at a modern-day map of Maine. Go all the way to the top of the map, right on the northern border with Canada. There you will see a small town named Madawaska, located in Aroostook County. In fact, Madawaska, Maine and Edmundton, New Brunswick appear to be one town with a river running through its center. The Saint John River happens to be the international boundary between Canada and the United States. However, it wasn’t always that way.

Quoting from Jennifer Godwin’s Web site at: homepages.rootsweb.com/~godwin/reference/aroostook.html

The Aroostook War was an undeclared, bloodless "war" that occurred in 1839. The peace treaty in 1783 had not satisfactorily determined what is the boundary between New Brunswick and what is now Maine. The boundary dispute worsened after Maine gained statehood (1820) and, disregarding British claims, began granting land to settlers in the valley of the Aroostook River. The king of the Netherlands was asked to arbitrate the dispute, but the U.S. Senate rejected his award in 1832, although the British accepted it.

Canadian lumberjacks entered the Aroostook region to cut timber during the winter of 1838-39, and in February they seized the American land agent who had been dispatched to expel them. The "war" was now under way. Maine and New Brunswick called out their militiamen, and Congress, at the instigation of Maine, authorized a force of 50,000 men and appropriated $10 million to meet the emergency. Maine actually sent 10,000 troops to the disputed area. President Martin Van Buren dispatched General Winfield Scott to the "war" zone, and Scott arranged an agreement (March 1839) between officials of Maine and New Brunswick that averted actual fighting. Britain agreed to refer the dispute to a boundary commission, and the matter settled in 1842 by the Webster-Ashburton Treaty.

The compromise reached by Daniel Webster and 1st Baron Ashburton (Alexander Baring) awarded 7,015 square miles to the United States and 5,012 to Great Britain. Retention by the British of the northern area assured them of year-round overland military communications with Montreal. Webster used a map, said to have been marked with a red line by Benjamin Franklin at Paris in 1782, in persuading Maine and Massachusetts to accept the agreement. Britain agreed to pay these states $150,000 each, and they were to be reimbursed by the United States for expenses incurred defending the area against encroachment.

Of the ten thousand men called out to participate in this "war," there was one fatality: Private Hiram T. Smith of Company F. Hundreds of thousands of motorists have passed his grave, perhaps noticing the single tombstone on the side of the Military Road (U.S. Route 2) in the middle of the so-called Haynesville Woods. I probably drove past this tombstone one hundred times before Interstate 95 was built. It is a forlorn and lonely place for a military hero’s grave. Then again, perhaps he was no hero.

There is one unanswered question: What was the cause of Private Smith’s death? Official records seem to omit this bit of information. Perhaps he froze to death. After all, the men were marching through deep woods in mid-winter where the temperature occasionally reaches 45 degrees below zero.

One story says that the poor fellow was run over by an army commissary wagon. Another story says that he was stepped on while watering the horses. Another claims that he fell through the ice on Lake St. Clair, an interesting story, as there is no lake by that name today and none that can be identified in the area’s history. Finally, one more story says that he was a deserter, but again, proof is lacking.

In l930, the Daughters of the American Revolution of Houlton put a wooden marker on Smith's grave and later replaced it with the granite stone seen today. I’m not sure why the Daughters of the American Revolution did that since the Aroostook War had no reasonable connection with the American Revolution. Nonetheless, the D.A.R. did lend its prestige to the Hiram Smith story, and since 1930 he has been accepted as the only casualty of a war that was never fought

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