Solomon Tracy entered the world in 1773, his first cries echoing through the timber-framed walls of a modest home in Durham, Androscoggin County, Maine. The air smelled of pine and hearth smoke, and the rhythm of his infancy was set to the cadence of an agrarian life—oxen lowing in the fields, the scrape of a hoe against rocky soil, and the distant rush of the Androscoggin River. His birth coincided with the simmering unrest of the American colonies, just two years before the Revolutionary War would erupt. Though too young to grasp the significance, the fight for independence would later shape the world he inherited.