John Chandler was born in Massachusetts in 1836. By 1860, he was working as a whaleman and, with his brother George (a housepainter), was boarding in the house of Nathan Dunham, a seaman. During the 1860s, Chandler became a ship's captain, undertaking voyages to Barbados and St. Vincent in 1867 and 1868. Sometime in the 1860s or 1870s he married a woman named Ruth and they moved to Orrington, Maine. Then, in 1874, John and Ruth Chandler executed an agreement (copied into the account book near the back) to take care of Nathaniel and Nancy Rider of Bucksport, Maine, in return for the deeding of land in Bucksport to the Chandlers. Captain Chandler settled into agricultural life in Bucksport for the next forty years.