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Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Agriculture and organizations – Part 4

February 4, 2026/0 Comments/in Kennebec County, Local History, Maine History, Palermo, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley/by Mary Grow

Sheep

by Mary Grow

The following article concludes (at least for now) the discussion of early agriculture in Vassalboro and moves eastward to Palermo. The focus in Vassalboro this week is on livestock.

Readers will note this week’s article is even more discursive than usual, as your writer came across a variety of slightly-related topics that intrigued her.

* * * * * *

In Samuel Boardman’s chapter on agriculture in Henry Kingsbury’s 1892 Kennebec County history, two family names appear repeatedly in discussions of animal husbandry in Vassalboro, the Burleighs and the Langs.

Boardman organized his discussion by the type of livestock, starting with cattle, about which he wrote, “As cattle are the real basis of successful agriculture, the farmers of the province of Maine had their cows and oxen as soon as they had homes.”

Vassalboro’s John D. Lang and his son, Thomas S. Lang, were prominent Shorthorn breeders in the 1860s, Boardman wrote (see the Jan. 22 article in this series for more on Shorthorns).

John Lang imported Ayrshires, too, in 1855 and 1856 from Massachusetts. Thomas Lang was the first in Kennebec County to import Holstein-Friesians, in 1864, from another Massachusetts breeder.

Hall C. Burleigh was breeding Herefords by the 1870s. In 1879, he formed a cattle-importing partnership with former Maine governor Joseph R. Bodwell, of Hallowell, that lasted until Bodwell’s death in December 1887.

Boardman wrote that Burleigh and Bodwell imported more than 800 cows. Burleigh went to England five times to personally choose good breeding cattle, and the firm imported others, sight unseen, from England and from Canada. In 1883, Burleigh “chartered the steamship “Texas” and brought over for his firm the largest lot of Hereford stock ever brought to this country by one firm, numbering 200 head.”

Burleigh and Bodwell imported Polled Aberdeen-Angus through the 1880s, and in 1883 and 1886 they brought in Sussex cattle. In 1881 and 1883, Burleigh took some of his Vassalboro herd to exhibit at major agricultural fairs, including in Chicago, Kansas City and New Orleans, winning prizes everywhere.

Hereford/Polled Angus

Boardman wrote that a heifer named Burleigh’s Pride, a two-year-old, 1,820-pound Hereford/Polled Angus crossbreed, won a “champion gold shield for the best animal of any sex, breed or age, exhibited by the breeder.” He did not say what year or which fair brought this honor; nor did he discuss the complexities of moving a herd of valuable cattle around the country in the 1880s.

Burleigh’s national prominence brought Maine, and specifically Kennebec County, recognition for cattle-raising.

Writing in 1892, Boardman said Burleigh’s herd took 15 first prizes, 11 second prizes and one third prize at the 1891 Maine State Fair. His son, Thomas G. Burleigh, was also breeding cattle.

Another Hereford breeder Boardman named was J. S. Hawes, in South Vassalboro, who started breeding there in 1876 and in 1879 moved with “many of his best animals” to Kansas, where he continued breeding “on a very large scale.”

These types of cattle Boardman called “adapted to general purposes” – work animals that produced healthy calves and gave “sufficient milk for family use.” In 1855, he wrote, a Winthrop resident introduced the first Jerseys, a breed that produced ample milk and made butter and other milk products possible.

This novelty, in Boardman’s view, was “the beginning of specialties in farming, and specialties in farming mark the modern from the old style methods, introduce new ideas, create diversity and insure larger returns.”

The importer, Boardman said, was derided by other farmers for bringing “small, delicate Jerseys” into the homeland of “magnificent Durhams and Herefords.” It took a few years for the breed to be widely accepted, but by the 1870s they were popular throughout Maine.

In 1892, Boardman wrote, Chandler F. Cobb, owner of Mt. Pleasant Farm in South Vassalboro, was Kennebec County’s largest Jersey breeder, with a herd of “sixty choice, fashionably bred animals.” The “leading animals” were named Sir Florian (an import from Pennsylvania) and Fancy’s Harry 7th. The cows won multiple prizes, and “the product of his celebrated dairy has a high reputation.”

* * * * * *

Sheep, Boardman wrote, have been in Kennebec County since the late 1820s, but have never been as popular as cattle and horses. He assigned part of the blame to the “vast numbers of predatory dogs” which made keeping sheep risky, unless they were close to home.

“In hillside pastures remote from the dwelling, the losses to flocks from roving dogs have always been great and have actually driven many farmers out of the business of sheep husbandry,” he wrote.

The Langs, father and son, took the risk. Boardman called them “early and continuous importers and improvers of sheep,” specializing in Southdowns and Cotswalds (see the Jan. 22 article for brief descriptions of some sheep breeds).

Boardman named two other sheep breeders, Moses Taber, who imported Spanish Merinos from Vermont in 1853, and Hon. Warren Percival, another Cotswold breeder. He described N. R. Cates and H. G. Abbott as specializing in sheep husbandry.

Wikipedia says Merinos, noted for their fine, soft wool, originated on the Iberian Peninsula in the late 15th century. For years, the Spanish government prohibited exporting them; those who defied the ban could face capital punishment. Only in the 1700s did the breed spread to other European countries, and thence to the rest of the world.

In the April 18, 1874, issue of a South Carolina newspaper named the “Port Royal commercial and Beaufort County Republican,” there is a letter from an unnamed Maine farmer to the Department of Agriculture (of South Carolina, presumably) advocating keeping grassland in good condition by top-dressing without plowing. He cited Abbott as an example.

Abbott, he wrote, had a 40-acre meadow “covered with white daisy and yellow weed, the grass killed out.” He put 50 sheep to graze on 10 acres for two years, and in the spring of the third year mowed “the heaviest crop of hay he had ever grown.”

“Timothy and red-top came in, and in some places the clover was so heavy that the mowing machine could not be used,” the writer said. He concluded, “He [Abbott] is of opinion that farmers who do not pasture sheep sustain a great loss.”

* * * * * *

Horse breeding in Kennebec County started in 1818 and 1819 in Winthrop, Boardman wrote, and the county’s trotting horses soon became world-famous. In 1859, Thomas Lang “began a breeding stud which soon took high rank among the most noted in the country.”

Boardman named some of Lang’s best-known horses, including the stallion General Knox. An 1895 New York Times headline called General Knox (who had died in 1873) the “most famous of Maine horses.” A five-page article written in 2004 by Clark P. Thompson and archived in the University of Maine’s Digital Commons called him “a foundation sire of Maine trotting horses.”

General Knox

A black horse with brownish overtones and white markings on his face, General Knox was born in New York; he was three when Lang brought him to Vassalboro in 1859, Thompson said.

Thompson cited a Maine Farmer description of one of General Knox’s races, at the Waterville Driving Park in the fall of 1863, before an audience of 5,000 people. Knox’s competitors were two other prominent Maine stallions, Hiram Drew (who had never been defeated, and who had outpaced General Knox in an 1860 contest) and Gen. McLellan.

The race was supposed to be five heats, with the horse that won three the winner. It went three heats, because General Knox took the first three, “despite in the third a near spill for [driver Foster S.] Palmer when a stray dog crossed the track in front of Knox.”

In 1871, Lang sold General Knox for $10,000 and moved to Oregon.

* * * * * *

In his 2015 history of Palermo, Millard Howard began his chapter on 19th century agriculture by commenting that the period was the “golden age” of the family farm, and although people look back on it “with nostalgia,” few would enjoy reliving it.

Several readers of these articles have shared that sentiment, especially during January’s cold spell.

Howard continued: “Life was controlled by the seasons and the weather. Each season had its tasks and, if the weather failed to cooperate, disaster was close at hand.”

Men’s occupations overlapped. A farmer needed to practice a variety of crafts to keep his farm running, and skilled craftsmen raised crops and bred animals for food.

Milton Dowe had made a similar point in his 1954 Palermo history. All summer, he wrote, men cleared land, planted, tended and harvested crops and built and maintained fences and buildings; all winter, they worked in the woods.

They could lumber, hunt or trap, or all three. A trapper might sell to traders fifty or a hundred dollars worth of furs, Dowe wrote (without date). Hunting and fishing provided food, and in spring “there was much syrup and sugar making.”

Howard mentioned one home occupation: citing Palermo’s 1850 agricultural census, he wrote that William Jones ran three water-powered mills: a sawmill, a shingle mill and a stave mill. “Staves [planks] were in great demand for the home manufacture of barrels in the farm’s cooper shop.”

Forty years later, Dowe wrote, Palermo was producing apples for export, mostly to Massachusetts, and for home consumption. The latter, he said, were “peeled, cored and sliced, then strung on twine and hung to dry” before being used for cooking.

By 1890, making barrels, for apples and for lime, was done in cooper shops, of which Dowe said Palermo had many. His description focused on the process of building barrel hoops, the flexible bands (originally wood, now usually metal) that run around barrels at intervals to hold the staves together.

Wooden hoops were of “ash…for apple barrels and birch for lime casks,” Dowe wrote.

(An on-line source says the staves, too, differed. Ash is durable, yet flexible to withstand handling, and does not impart a flavor to the barrel’s contents; birch was readily available, thus cheaper, and similarly strong. Oak is waterproof, so it is suitable for liquids, including alcoholic liquids; and it does impart flavor to contents.)

For apple barrels, Dowe continued, the hoops were six and a half feet long (shorter for lime casks). They were “shaved by hand” down to three-eighths of an inch thick and sold in bundles of 100.

By working hard, a man could make 600 hoops a day, Dowe wrote – and earn, on average, one dollar.

William Jones appears repeatedly in both histories. An on-line source suggests references might be to father and son: William Jones who was born in in Bristol in 1774, married Abigail Bennett in 1798 and died in Palermo in February, 1834; and their son, William Jones, the mill-owner.

The Bristol-born William Jones “prepared a home” for his family “in the lower part of town,” Dowe wrote, and brought them from Bristol in 1815. “His children settled on farms around him.”

During the War of 1812, when Palermo (and other area towns) sent soldiers to Edgecomb, in September 1814, to repel a rumored British invasion that never materialized, Howard named William Jones (the elder, age 40) as one of the privates who participated.

Howard listed William Jones (the younger) as father of six children attending Palermo’s District 16 elementary school in 1847. (Nelson Jones, the younger William Jones’ older brother, sent another five Joneses to the same school the same year, out of 41 students.)

This district Howard located at the southern end of Turner Ridge Road, with its schoolhouse near the intersection with the road to Hibbert’s Gore. Turner Ridge Road runs south from Route 3 along the west side of Sheepscot Pond; Howard’s description locates the Jones family in extreme southern Palermo, close to the town line with Somerville (which is also the Waldo/Lincoln county line).

Dowe, again without providing a date, wrote that William Jones (readers are welcome to guess which one) “went on a voyage, as captain of a merchant ship, contracted a fever in New Orleans and died from its effects.”

Main sources

Dowe, Milton E. , History Town of Palermo Incorporated 1804 (1954)
Howard, Millard, An Introduction to the Early History of Palermo, Maine (second edition, December 2015)
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Agriculture – Part 3

January 28, 2026/0 Comments/in Local History, Maine History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley, Vassalboro/by Mary Grow

by Mary Grow

Vassalboro part one

Until Jan. 30, 1792, Vassalboro, on the east side of the Kennebec River, included Sidney, on the west side. A partial summary of Sidney’s early agricultural history was the topic of last week’s article in this subseries; this week’s article will concentrate on the area that remained Vassalboro.

Alma Pierce Robbins, in her 1971 history of Vassalboro’s first two centuries, offered an overview of the first settlers in the town, who were perforce at least part-time farmers if they wanted to feed their livestock and themselves.

The area was surveyed and lots laid out in 1761 by Nathan Winslow, she wrote. Some families were already living there, with land titles so uncertain they created a century of legal disputes.

Some pieces of land were claimed by more than one family. The Kennebec Proprietors frequently went to law to try to compel squatters — settlers with no or dubious titles — to buy their lots from them, and, Robbins said, succeeded “in a few cases.” A boundary line the surveyor described as running “[f]rom a ‘white oak stake to a stone’ was highly vulnerable to time and weather.”

Robbins quoted Rev. Jacob Bailey’s observations on the hardships of life in Vassalboro in the 1760s and 1770s, describing children going barefoot all winter, beds that were mere heaps of straw and families living for months on “scarce anything…except potatoes roasted in the ashes.”

Another quotation Robbins included was from a 1766 petition to the Kennebec Company, asking for a grist mill to be built on Seven Mile Brook. More than two dozen petitioners wrote that “The most of us are able to raise a great part of our bread and expect soon to raise all,” but carrying the grain to the closest mill at Cobbosseecontee to be ground was expensive.

(Seven Mile Brook is the stream that runs from Webber Pond to the Kennebec River. Cobbosseecontee survives as the name of a large lake west of Augusta and Gardiner, across the Kennebec and about 25 miles from Vassalboro [by modern transportation, not on foot or horseback or by ox-cart along rough trails].)

There were “very soon” both grist mills and sawmills on the stream, Robbins added.

She named four families who moved to Vassalboro in the 1760s: Getchells (also Gatchell, Gatchel, and Getchel; once Robbins called the same man Getchell and Getchel, in the same sentence), Lovejoys, Farwells and Browns. Robbins’ details about the families mention generous land grants with requirements to build a house and clear a specified number of acres.

Vassalboro, still including Sidney, was incorporated April 26, 1771. Another evidence of the importance of farming comes from Robbins’ report on Vassalboro’s first town meeting, held May 22, 1771.

Vassalboro voters elected among their town officials four men (including Nehemiah Getchell) as fence and fieldviewers, and four other men as hogreeves.

(Fence-viewers were responsible for inspecting new fences; making sure fences were not illegally moved or changed and were kept in repair; and settling disputes between abutters. Your writer found no on-line definition of fieldviewer; another article suggested their duties might include supervising maintenance of common fields, owned by the town as an entity.

Hogreeves in action.

(Hogreeves, or hog constables, Wikipedia says, were responsible for rounding up and impounding stray swine. Swine could do considerable damage by rooting in people’s fields and gardens; the reeve’s job included assessing damages.)

Robbins said these Vassalboro voters also voted that “Swine shall run at large without ringing, with a yoke on their necks according to the law.”

(Wikipedia makes this vote sound unusual. Not only were swine running at large potentially destructive, but Wikipedia says laws required owners to provide their swine with nose rings, as well as yokes. If a hogreeve caught an unringed animal, he was supposed to ring it, and could charge the owner for the service.

(The first hogreeves were “stationed at the doors of cathedrals [in Anglo-Saxon England] during services to prevent swine from entering the church,” Wikipedia says)

At a Sept. 9, 1771, meeting, an article asked what Vassalboro voters would do about pounds, the town-owned structures where stray animals were held until their owners claimed them.

They approved building two, by June 5, one on David Spencer’s land and another on James Burns’ land, with “the inhabitants [to] meet on the first Monday of December next to build same.” (Robbins did not explain the three-month delay; perhaps to collect stones or other building materials?) Anyone who did not come to help build would be fined two shillings and eight pence.

Robbins found another indicator of the importance of agriculture in Vassalboro: a September 1783 list showed about 420 inhabitants, almost evenly divided between males and females; 30 dwelling houses; and 34 barns.

By 1820, Robbins wrote, Vassalboro farms were producing “wheat, corn, hemp, flax and silk.” (See box.) A bit later, potatoes and squash became important crops, and especially apples.

* * * * * *

Samuel Boardman, in his chapter on agriculture in Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history, credits the Vaughn farms in Hallowell for the introduction and spread of apple-growing in the central Kennebec Valley, beginning in 1797. Brothers Benjamin and Charles Vaghn shared their imported varieties with people in other towns, including Vassalboro.

In addition, Boardman wrote, settlers brought apple seeds with them, or sent back to their former home colony for them once they had a space for an orchard.

The Starkey apple is a variety that originated in Vassalboro. On-line sites about apples call it a “chance seedling” discovered by Moses Starkey in the early 1800s, on his farm on what is now Oak Grove Road.

The Starkey had almost died out until the late 1900s, when John Bunker, Palermo’s famous apple expert, “tracked it down,” one website says. Sources unanimously praise its taste, which this site describes as a “rich, complex flavor that is both sweet and tart, with notes of spice and honey.”

Another website calls it “one of the perfect dessert apples.” Robbins recommended molasses cookies as an accompaniment.

By 1843, Vassalboro native Daniel Taber (1797 – 1860) grew 170 varieties of apples in his Vassalboro nursery, Robbins said.

Boardman mentioned an 1876 survey that found six apple nurseries in Kennebec County, with a total of 151,000 trees. The list of owners included Charles I. Perley, in Vassalboro, with 20,000 trees, and J. A. Varney and Son in North Vassalboro, with 40,000 trees.

As Kingsbury’s history went to press in 1892, Boardman’s list of almost two dozen owners of large orchards in the county included J. H. Smiley and the Cook brothers in Vassalboro and George H. Pope in East Vassalboro. The Cook brothers, he wrote, had 3,000 trees.

As in Sidney, access to railroad transportation from the 1850s on was a boon to Vassalboro orchardists, and other farmers. Robbins included an undated list of Vassalboro shipments to Portland and Boston: “lumber, apples, hay, potatoes, milk and mail.”

* * * * * *

Boardman and Robbins both touched briefly on 19th-century agricultural improvements, mostly the replacement of human power by machines, usually horse-drawn.

Humans’ hand tools were also improved, Boardman said. He described pre-1840 “forks, scythes, sickles, axes and hoes” as “heavy, bungling affairs” made by the local blacksmith of iron or steel. In 1841, he wrote, a Hallowell resident named Jacob Pope began making Maine’s “first polished spring steel hay and manure forks,” and improvements to other tools quickly followed.

One invention Boardman and Robbins highlighted was the threshing machine, a replacement for the hand flail.

(Threshing is separating grains like wheat, oats and barley from their husks. Wikipedia says, “An agricultural flail consists of a short thick club called a ‘swingle’ or ‘swipple’ attached by a rope or leather thong to a wooden handle in such a manner as to enable it to swing freely. The handle…is held and swung, causing the swingle to strike a pile of grain loosening the husks.”)

Robbins wrote that around 1836, two Winthrop, Maine, brothers named Pitt invented a threshing machine, which came into use in the 1850s. Boardman named other Maine threshing-machine inventors, from the 1820s on, and mentioned lawsuits over whose patent infringed whose.

Entrepreneurs would buy a machine, hire a crew and go from farm to farm threshing grain. Some farmers accepted both machine and workers; others had every male over 12 years old in the family work for the machine.

Also around 1836, Robbins said, there were allegations that iron plows were a threat: they made weeds grow and poisoned the soil. Nonetheless, she wrote, in Vassalboro “iron plows sold very well according to the newspapers.”

The horse rake and the mowing machine, two horse-drawn machines replacing hand rakes and scythes and saving an immense amount of labor, appeared on Vassalboro farms in the 1840s, Robbins wrote. Hanson G. Barrows, of Vassalboro, invented one type of mowing machine.

Barrows (1831-1916) was the oldest of three sons and two daughters of Caleb Barrows and his wife (whose name your writer has not found). Henry Kingsbury, in his chapter on Vassalboro in his Kennebec County history, said the family moved to Vassalboro from Camden in 1830.

They settled on a farm called Twin Oaks, on Barrows Road. After Caleb’s death, Hanson inherited it and spent the rest of his life there. He and his wife, Julia E. (Wood) Barrows (1854-1942), are buried in Vassalboro’s Union cemetery.

(Barrows Road ran west from Webber Pond Road to the section of Old Route 201 named Holman Day Road. On May 13, 2010, the Vassalboro select board ordered the road discontinued, without retaining a public right-of-way. Voters at the June 7, 2010, town meeting ratified the decision.)

Sericulture

Sericulture, or silk farming, was encouraged by the Maine State government beginning in the 1830s, according to on-line information. It was mostly a home occupation, carried on in attics and barns.

Since sericulture required growing mulberry trees to feed the silkworms, and mulberry trees did not thrive in the Maine climate, this unusual form of farming pretty much disappeared by the 1850s.

There was a resurgence in 1874, with the founding of the Haskell Silk Company in Westbrook. By then, providing and using silk was a mechanized industry. One source says by the late 1800s, Haskell (and other US manufacturers) used mostly imported silk.

The Maine History Journal, Vol. 44, No. 1 (2008) has an article by Jacqueline Field titled From Agriculture to Industry: Silk Production and Manufacture in Maine 1800-1930.

Field pointed out that from the 1830s on, Maine agriculture declined as soil wore out and as farmers’ sons – and daughters – saw new choices in factories and urban centers and in the westward movement. She wrote:

“Sericulture seemed to offer farmers some sort of partial solution: mulberry plants provided a new crop; silkworm raising offered wives and daughters a new cash-generating household activity; sericulture seemed to promise a better return than other seasonal work; and the seasonal nature of sericulture made it a good fit with traditional agricultural patterns.”

Field described the process of raising silkworms in a home, work done mostly by women and older children. After the worms hatched from tiny eggs, they had to be fed mulberry leaves continuously for 40 days, she wrote, until they were ready to build their silk cocoons; and the trays in which they lived had to be kept clean.

The worms’ keepers needed to provide “bushy arcades of twigs or straw” to support the cocoons. In the two weeks before the moths hatched, they had to rescue a few cocoons for eggs for the next year and kill the rest “by stifling them with heat” so the silk would be available.

Neither her article nor any other source your writer found confirmed Alma Pierce Robbins’ implication that sericulture was practiced in Vassalboro.

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892)
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771-1971 n.d. (1971)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Last three Ballard children

December 3, 2025/1 Comment/in Central ME, Local History, Maine History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley/by Mary Grow

by Mary Grow

Last week’s article ended without finishing the story of Martha and Ephraim Ballard’s second son, Jonathan. When interrupted, he was living on his farm in the northern part of Augusta, on the road to Sidney, with his wife, Sarah “Sally” (Pierce), and an increasing number of children.

In December 1799, Martha and Ephraim moved into a new house on Jonathan’s farm. In February 1804, while Ephraim Sr, was in jail for debt, youngest son Ephraim Jr., married (see below) Mary Farwell. After the couple “went to housekeeping” in July and moved out of either parent’s home, Mary’s widowed mother, called in the diary “Sister Farewell,” and younger sister Sally moved in with Martha.

On Oct. 25, 1804, Martha wrote, Sally Farwell brought a message from Jonathan: he was going to take over Martha’s house in two weeks. Martha, he said, could “tarrie here [with them] or go and liv in their house and see how good it was to bring water from this wel.”

Ulrich said that in addition to having an inadequate well, Jonathan’s house was older and lacked “a bake oven.” Though Martha thought his demand another example of “his impetuous and irrational behavior,” it might have seemed reasonable to him: better living quarters for his growing family and, if Martha chose to stay with them, help for her.

Martha shared what had been her house with Jonathan, Sally and children until Sept. 14, 1805. Over the winter of 1804-05, she spent time with daughter Dolly Lambard and her family (see below) and with Ephraim, Jr. During the summer of 1805, Ulrich wrote, she stayed with Jonathan and Sally, helping with gardening and other chores, including taking case of the many grandchildren who lived and visited there.

A dozen people lived in the house in the spring of 1805, Ulrich wrote, and 21 other people visited for a meal or overnight in one month. Most were much younger than Martha (who was born in February 1735). Ulrich quoted an April 14, 1805, entry: “I have felt very unwell but have had the nois of Children out of 5 famelys to Bear….Some fighting, some playing and not a little profanity has been performd.”

Five days later, on April 19, 1805, Ulrich noted, “Sally gave birth to her sixth son and ninth child.” (This boy was Samuel Adams Ballard; he died Nov. 27, 1806.)

Ephraim Sr., was freed from jail on May 29, 1805, but his return to the family made no difference. On June 7, Martha wrote that Sally told her she would not get her house to herself that summer.

Ulrich quoted diary references to Sally’s “tantrums”; to her calling Martha a liar; and to Martha describing Sally as “inconsiderate” and “very impudent.” Sally, too, was overworked and unhappy.

Although Martha never “developed an intense and daily intimacy with Jonathan and Sally,” Ulrich wrote that she came to appreciate “the small gifts of love and care they were able to offer”; and Sally’s “immense” burdens became less as her children got old enough to help.

In late August, 1805, relying on the diary, Ulrich reported the start of a new house for Jonathan’s family. On Sept. 14, Martha wrote that they had moved back to their old one, leaving Martha and Ephraim in theirs.

FamilySearch and WikiTree say Jonathan Ballard died in Augusta on June 7, 1838. Sally was living with daughter Hannah and family in 1850; she died on July 1, 1858.

* * * * * *

Martha and Ephraim’s daughter Hannah was born Aug. 6, 1769, in Oxford. On Oct. 28, 1792, in Augusta, she married Moses Pollard (the couple became “daughter Pollard” and “son Pollard” in Martha’s diary).

WikiTree lists nine Pollard children, “although records are scant and there may be other children.” Ulrich also said nine, though she pointed out that Hannah and Moses could have had more after Martha’s diary ended in May, 1812 (when Hannah was almost 43).

According to the diary excerpts, Hannah’s first child was born in July 1794. WikiTree names this child as daughter Rhoda, who married James Black in Sidney on June 30, 1816.

Ulrich said after the second child was born in October 1795, Hannah was so sick as to be delirious, and could not join the family for meals for six weeks. WikiTree says this child was daughter Hannah (Oct. 18, 1795 — May 14, 1863).

WikiTree then lists 3) Sally, born in 1797, and 4) Harry, born in 1799 and died March 5, 1800, in Augusta.

Martha said Hannah had another child just after midnight on Jan. 11, 1801. WikiTree names a son 5) Samuel (1801 — Feb. 22, 1870).

WikiTree then lists 6) Dorothy, aka Dolly (1803 — Feb. 1, 1881); 7) Thomas L. (born in 1804, in 1849 married Mary R. McIntire, widow of his first cousin, James S. Ballard); and 8) Martha Moore (1807 — Sept. 11, 1880).

WikiTree says Hannah and Moses’ ninth child, Catherine Nason, was born in 1809 and died in Augusta, May 1, 1882. On May 28, 1809, Martha wrote that “son Pollard” called her at 2:30 a.m., and at 6 a.m. Hannah gave birth to her sixth daughter and ninth child.

Hannah died May 25, 1863, according to FamilySearch, in Augusta; she is buried in Slowhegan, where she had been living in 1850 (when the town was named Bloomfield).

* * * * * *

Ephraim and Martha’s fifth child, Dorothy (Dolly), was born, according to FamilySearch, on Sept. 2, 1772, in Oxford. On May 14, 1795, in Hallowell, she married Barnabas Lambard, born Sept. 1, 1772.

On April 3, 1797, after Hallowell’s northern part became the new town of Harrington (changed to Augusta on June 9), voters at the first town meeting elected Barnabas Lambard a fence-viewer and a surveyor of lumber, according to Captain Charles Nash’s chapter in Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history. In 1799 he was a member of the town’s first “company of firemen.”

FamilySearch says the Lambards had at least 12 children, six sons and six daughters, between 1796 and 1816. Ulrich and Augusta historian James North (in a brief biography of Barnabas Lambard) say 11.

According to FamilySearch’s list, the first child was a son, Allen, born July 22, 1796, died Sept. 5, 1877. He was followed by 2) Dorothy, born Nov. 11, 1797, death date unknown; 3) Thomas, born Aug. 10, 1799, died Oct. 12, 1804, aged five; 4) Barnabas, Jr., born April 17, 1801, died Sept. 25, 1814, aged 14; 5) Lucy L., born Jan. 31, 1803, married in 1822 Asaph R. Nichols, with whom she had at least nine children, died Oct. 17, 1884, in Boston (she had been in Augusta in 1880); 6) William, born Nov. 21, 1804, died Feb. 15 or 19, 1839; 7) Henry Augustus, born Dec. 26, 1806, died March 27, 1821, aged 14; 8) Sarah Farwell, born June 25, 1809, lived in Augusta until at least 1880, apparently unmarried, died in 1896 in Natick, Massachusetts; 9) Martha Town, born April 4, 1811, died July 27, 1823, aged 12; 10) Thomas, born June 29, 1813, married, lived in Augusta at least until 1870 and died in Boston Sept. 28, 1892; 11) Hannah Pollard, born March 29, 1816, married Rev. John A. Henry in September, 1842 (and after his death, Edward Walcott of Natick, Massachusetts, in 1850, North wrote), died Aug. 12, 1896, in Natick; and 12), according to FamilySearch, another Hannah, also born in 1816, who married David Waire or Wire, had at least eight children, died May 19, 1895.

(FamilySearch says when the first Hannah was born in March 1816, her parents were both 43 years old, and when the second was born the same year, they were 44. Making the two births chronologically possible does not explain the duplicate names.)

Dolly Lambard died March 14, 1861, in Augusta; her husband had died Oct. 10, 1860, FamilySearch says.

* * * * * *

Ephraim Ballard Jr., according to an unusually complete biography on Wikipedia, was born in Augusta on March 30, 1779. Wikipedia calls him “an engineer and a builder,” descriptions compatible with things Ulrich wrote about him.

According to Wikipedia, Ballard and Benjamin Brown built Augusta’s second Kennebec River bridge in 1818; and after it burned on April 2, 1827, Ballard was hired to replace it. North wrote that the work was “pushed forward with unexampled dispatch for this region”; the new bridge opened for foot traffic on Aug. 3 and for carriages on August 18.

In 1829, Wikipedia says, Ballard was chosen to build “the Mattanawcook road.” (Mattanawcook was the Town of Lincoln’s name until the Maine legislature changed it, in 1829). He “was between Augusta and Mattanawcook when he contracted typhoid fever and died at Bangor,” on Nov. 5, 1829.

Ballard’s first wife was Mary Farwell (born June 21, 1785), whom he married in Augusta on Feb. 5, 1804. Their first daughter, whom they named Mary, was born four months after the wedding, and died when she was three months old.

WikiTree lists the rest of Mary and Ephraim Ballard Jr.’s children as: 2) Sophia, born Nov. 3, 1805, married Charles Keene, died Dec. 24, 1847); 3) Theodore Sedgwick, born Nov. 3, 1805, died March 1839; 4) Amelia, born and died in 1808; 5) an unnamed daughter, born June 25, 1809; 6) Edward, born June 4, 1814, died in Chicago, May 31, 1871; and 7) Charles Henry, born about 1815, died Nov. 11, 1841.

As usual, other websites give different information.

Mary Farwell Ballard died March 13, 1819, aged 33. On Jan. 7, 1822, in Augusta, Ballard married Paulina Palmer, who was born about 1795.

Paulina might have given him more children. After Ephraim’s death in 1829, Wikipedia cites the 1830 census that lists Paulina’s Augusta household as including “one female 30 to 39 [Paulina], one male under 5, one male 5 to 9, one male 10 to 14, one male 15 to 19, one male 20 to 29, one male 70 to 79, one female under 5, and two females 5 to 9.”

Paulina remarried in December 1833; her second husband was named Jonah Dunn.

* * * * * *

As previously written, Martha Moore Ballard died in late May 1812, aged 77. Her widower, Ephraim Sr., died in 1821, aged 96.

Readers of this and the preceding article will have noticed what different historical records the Ballard children and their spouses left. The men owned land and buildings, farmed, practiced professions and held town offices. The women bore children.

This subseries began on Nov. 6 with two themes: women in the late 1700s and early 1800s worked as hard and as long as men, but their work left no historical record. Martha Ballard’s diary was a rare exception.

Ulrich pointed out that except for the diary, “Martha has no history….no independent record of her work survives.” She is not listed in financial records, or as a church member, or in legal records.

“Without the diary, even her name would be uncertain,” Ulrich wrote. Once Martha married, her name became “Mrs. Ballard.” Minister Benjamin Tappin, who brought her comfort in the last weeks of her life, thought her first name was Dorothy; historian North called her Hannah in his genealogy.

“Fortunately, she had the good sense to write firmly at the end of one of her homemade booklets, Martha Ballard Her Diary, Ulrich said.

The other theme in the Nov. 6 article was that women’s work is never done. Martha, too, noticed that.

Ulrich quoted a diary excerpt, written as midnight approached on Nov. 26, 1795, in which 60-year-old Martha summarized her day doing housework, nursing a cow and keeping up with two paid helpers and various family members.

Martha said, “A womans work is never Done as the Song says and happy shee whos strength holds out to the End of the rais.”

Main sources

North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870)
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, A Midwife’s Tale The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, 1990

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Lower courts & Augusta Courthouse

April 2, 2025/0 Comments/in Augusta, Local History, Maine History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley/by Mary Grow

by Mary Grow

Judge William Penn Whitehouse

Last week’s article summarized part of the origin of Maine’s court system, including the 1820 creation of the state Supreme Court. The next level below the Supreme Court, according to William Penn Whitehouse’s information in Henry Kingsbury’s 1892 Kennebec County history, was the court of common pleas.

As related last week, courts of common pleas were abolished in 1872. In 1878, some of this court’s functions were taken over in Kennebec County by the county superior court.

Whitehouse summarized the types of cases the superior court was authorized to decide. Through successive legislative acts, he wrote, the court’s jurisdiction came to include “all civil matters, except real actions, complaints for flowage, and proceedings in equity, including libels for divorce….”

Here is a definition of “real action” from the web: “a local legal action founded on seisin [another word for possession] or possession in which title is placed in issue and which aims at establishing title to a particular piece or part of real estate and at recovering the piece or part of real estate.”

“Flowage” is defined as “an overflowing onto adjacent land,” or “a body of water formed by overflowing or damming.”

“Proceeding in equity” means “a civil suit that seeks an equitable remedy, such as an injunction or specific performance, rather than a legal remedy, such as monetary damages.”

The superior court, Whitehouse wrote, also had “exclusive original and appellate jurisdiction of all criminal matters, including capital cases.” It was authorized to hear appeals from “municipal and police courts and trial justices in civil and criminal cases.”

An 1891 law, he said, limited the superior court’s jurisdiction to cases where requested damages were under $500. It also provided that in a murder trial, “one of the judges of the supreme court must preside.”

The next level of courts Whitehouse described he called the court of sessions. Inherited from Massachusetts, this court consisted of justices of the peace, at first however many there were in a jurisdiction, after 1807 a fixed number.

Kennebec County Courthouse

In Kennebec County (which had been separated from Lincoln County in February 1799), Whitehouse said this court had six justices plus a chief justice until 1819, when it was reduced to two justices plus a chief justice.

In 1831, the court of sessions was replaced by a court of county commissioners. This court still existed in 1892; it consisted of “three persons elected by the people.”

(Whether Whitehouse meant these “persons” were commissioners is unclear. However, the current Kennebec County website suggests they might have been. This site says the three Kennebec County commissioners, each representing a district in the county, have responsibility for policies and budgets; and “Additional duties include municipal tax abatement appeals and hearings on maintenance of town roads.”)

Yet another type of court Whitehouse said Maine inherited from Massachusetts is the probate court. A Maine Probate Court website explains: “Probate Courts handle the estates of deceased and missing persons, guardianship of incapacitated adults and minor children, trusts, legal name changes of adults and minors, adoption matters as well as other family matters.”

In 1784, Whitehouse wrote, the Massachusetts legislature created county probate courts, each consisting of one “able and learned person” as judge. The Maine legislature, in 1821, continued the system; in 1853, county probate judges and registers of probate (the person who manages and administers the court) were made elective officials, serving four-year terms.

Elizabeth “Libby” Mitchell, of Vassalboro, has been Kennebec County probate judge since 2016; she was re-elected in November 2024. Her husband, James “Jim” Mitchell, had held the position for 37 years before his death in September 2016.

The register is Ronda Snyder, of Sidney, serving her first term.

* * * * * *

In addition to state and county courts, Whitehouse listed municipal courts. In Kennebec County, they were established in Hallowell in 1835; in Gardiner in 1849 or 1850; in Augusta in 1850; and in Waterville in 1880 (called the police court).

Judges were elected until 1876. Thereafter, Whitehouse said, they were appointed by the governor and council for four-year terms.

These courts generally took over the powers that had been held by justices of the peace. In 1891, Whitehouse wrote, the legislature expanded the Waterville court’s jurisdiction over both criminal matters and minor civil actions. He did not explain why.

* * * * * *

According to James North in his 1870 history of Augusta, when Augusta and Hallowell separated in February 1797, the courts remained in what became briefly Harrington and on June 9 Augusta.

The first courthouse had been built in Market Square near Dickman Lane (now Dickman Street, in downtown Augusta?) in 1790. Money was raised by subscription, North said, with Henry Sewall (1752 – 1845, one of numerous Sewalls important in Augusta history) subscribing $10 in “labor and materials.” He and his brother, Jonathan Sewall, did most of the work.

By December 1790 the project was out of money, and the building wasn’t finished. The subscribers decided to make one room fit for the Court of Common Pleas’ January 1791 session. North wrote that the room was adequate, though it was “neither plastered nor lathed” until December 1791.

In June 1801, North wrote, Kennebec County officials decided it was time for a new courthouse. They chose a site on State Street (then named Court Street; what is now Court Street did not exist until 1803, and then only its east end, between Water and State streets) “on the site of the present [1870] new jail.”

This courthouse was usable by the winter of 1801-1802 – North wrote that religious services were occasionally held in it. It was officially finished March 16, 1802, and the Court of Common Pleas moved in.

“It was a commodious building for that day, and served the county for nearly thirty years,” North wrote. After that it became the State Street Chapel, home of the Second Baptist Church; then the Concert Hall; and when the new jail claimed the lot under it, it was moved and in 1870 was still the Concert Hall.

When the Kennebec County Court of Sessions met for its December 1827 term, some Kennebec Bar members asked for a new courthouse. The judges decided there was indeed a need for “better accommodation of the county and public offices” and appointed a six-man committee to design a new building and provide a cost estimate.

The committee reported in February 1828, proposing a 50-by-60-foot granite building 30 feet high. The court agreed and appointed James Cochran architect and Robert C. Vose builder. In January, 1829, they paid $1,000 for a lot (now 95 State Street).

General Joseph Chandler laid the cornerstone for the courthouse on May 29, 1829. North does not further identify him nor say why he was chosen; he does say there was a “brief ceremony, in presence of the workmen and a few spectators.”

Under the cornerstone, he said, were placed an engraved plate with the date; the governor’s name (Enoch Lincoln, who became governor on Jan. 3, 1827, and died in office Oct. 8, 1829, in Augusta, three days after a public speech at Cony Female Academy); lists of judges of the Supreme Court and the Court of Sessions; and the name of “Mr. Berry, the master builder.” Two “recent newspapers” were added.

North wrote that the outside of the building was finished in August, the inside in December. The Supreme Court was the first to use it, opening a session on June 1, 1830.

Maine’s first chief justice, Prentiss Mellen from Portland, who served from July 1, 1820, until he retired on Oct. 11, 1834 (the year he turned 70), praised the new courthouse as the best in the state. The state Supreme Court continued to hold its Augusta sessions in the building until 1970.

The courthouse is an early example of Greek Revival style in Maine, with Doric columns across the front on both levels. It now has a wooden belfry on top; but North wrote that originally the courthouse bell was hung in a small separate tower “in the rear of the county offices at the southwest corner of the lot.”

This configuration, he wrote, gave rise to jokes about “a church having sunk, leaving its steeple above ground.”

The belfry was moved to its proper location “within a few years,” Maine historian Earle G. Shettleworth Jr., surmised when he prepared the application for National Register listing in December, 1973.

The original courthouse has been enlarged twice, Shettleworth wrote. In 1851, it was expanded to the rear; in 1907, a new probate wing was added. Both additions were made “with granite in sympathy with style, scale, and texture of the original structure.” The inside has been repeatedly renovated.

* * * * * *

Your writer failed to find information on any early courthouse in Waterville.

Looking up “courthouse history Waterville Maine” on line brought an AI response (your writer regards AI with caution and doubt) saying Waterville’s courthouse is the 1829 Kennebec County courthouse, in Augusta.

Other on-line sources consider the contemporary Waterville courthouse the modern brick building on Colby Street, north of the business district. It houses the district court.

The Maine Judicial Branch website offers this information on contemporary district courts:

“As of July 1, 2024 the District Court has 44 judges and a number of Active Retired Judges who hold court in eight regions at many locations throughout Maine. The District Court hears civil, criminal and family matters and always sits without a jury.”

Augusta’s District Court is housed in a modern building at 1 Court Street. Another website says the Kennebec County Superior Court also holds sessions there.

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Vassalboro – Winslow

June 5, 2024/0 Comments/in Local History, Maine History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley, Vassalboro, Winslow/by Website Editor

Map of Vassalboro in 1879.

by Mary Grow

Going north from Augusta on Route 201 on the east bank of the Kennebec River, one follows the approximate route of Massachusetts Governor William Shirley’s 1754 military road between Fort Western, in present-day Augusta, and Fort Halifax, in present-day Winslow.

The town between Augusta and Winslow has been named Vassalboro since 1771, though the spelling has been simplified: Vassalborough lost its last three letters in the town clerks’ record books by 1818, according to local historian Alma Pierce Robbins.

Robbins starts her history in early March 1629, when England’s King Charles gave a group of men called the Massachusetts Company in London (or the Massachusetts Bay Company; sources differ) a charter for a Massachusetts colony. Among these men were Samuel and William Vassall or Vassal. In June, the company sent out three ships, which arrived in Salem on June 29, 1629.

Samuel (1586-1667; “probably” died in Massachusetts) and William (1590 or 1592 – 1656) were sons of a London Alderman (city councilman) named John Vassall (originally DuVassall), “a Protestant refugee from France.” In 1609, John Vassall became one of the Virginia Company chartered in 1606 by King James I – and, Robbins wrote, thereby determined that a piece of the Kennebec River valley would be named Vassalboro.

Robbins summarized the family’s ventures in England, Barbados and, to a much lesser extent, North America. William Vassall was briefly in Massachusetts in 1629, and from 1635 to 1648 lived in Scituate with his wife and six children.

Some later Vassalls moved permanently to Massachusetts, Robbins wrote. One of importance to Vassalboro was Florentius. According to Robbins, Florentius was Samuel’s great-grandson: Samuel had a son named John and John had a son named William, father of Florentius.

On-line sources, however, list one Florentius Vassall as a Jamaican sugar planter who married Anna Maria Hering Mill (born c. 1675), by whom he had a son, Florentius (1709-1776; called Florentius II in one source) before he died in 1712.

Another Florentius Vassal(l) was born around 1689 and died in 1778.

Two sources say Florentius II married Mary Foster, born in 1713; they had a daughter, Elizabeth (Vassal) Barrington, and/or a son, Richard (1732-1785 or 1795).

Robbins wrote that the Florentius Vassall who was William’s son and who was born in 1709 was one of the 1749 Proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase. She said he acquired acreage on both sides of the Kennebec from Pownalborough north, including in present-day Augusta and Vassalboro.

James North’s 1870 history of Augusta says the Florentius Vassall who was a Proprietor was son of William and great-grandson of Samuel.

This Florentius was born in Massachusetts, North wrote, where his father had come “as early as 1630,” but later moved to England and died in London in 1778 (not 1776). He had a son named Richard, and in his 1777 will left his land-holdings to Richard’s daughter Elizabeth’s male heirs, touching off title disputes that North said were finally settled by “the Supreme Court at Washington.” He gave no date; Robbins’ history suggests the Supreme Court was involved around 1850.

Robbins listed no Vassall among the early settlers in Vassalboro. The only mention of the family in the latter half of the 1700s is her account of a 1766 petition from the settlers to the Kennebec Proprietors asking for a grist mill at Seven Mile Brook, in southern Vassalboro.

Robbins commented that the petition was unusual in that it was sent to the whole company rather than to the individual Proprietor. Other Proprietors, she said, had built mills and churches for their settlers.

She added, “There is nothing to indicate that Vassall hastened to see that the inhabitants had a grist mill.”

(They did get one, and a sawmill as well, as described in the Jan. 11, 2024, article on mills on Seven Mile Brook.)

The 1761 Nathan Winslow survey, mentioned in previous articles, increased interest in Vassalboro land. Nonetheless, there were only 10 families living there in 1768; and remember, the town then extended 15 miles back from each bank of the Kennebec. The town was incorporated as Vassalborough on April 26, 1771.

Robbins credits the choice of name to Florentius Vassall’s “speculative [and profitable] deals in real estate” on this part of the Kennebec.

Henry Kingsbury, in his Kennebec County history, wrote that Vassalboro’s town records from 1771 to “the present” (1792) “are in four leather-bound books, well preserved and beautifully written.”

On May 17, 1771, Kingsbury said, Justice of the Peace James Howard (presumably the Fort Western James Howard) called the first town meeting, at “James Bacon’s inn.” Meetings were held in inns on alternate sides of the Kennebec for more than 20 years; the first town meeting house was authorized in 1795, on the east side of the river.

According to Kingsbury, the first “buildings” Vassalboro taxpayers paid for were two town pounds. He named the owners of the lots where they were built, but did not say where the lots were. He did write that the inhabitants were ordered to meet to build them in December, 1771, and anyone (presumably, any able-bodied man) who did not show up was fined.

Kingsbury described the first reference to schooling as a decision at the March 1790 town meeting to create nine school districts on the east side of the river. Less than two years later, on Jan. 30, 1792, Sidney, on the west side, was separated from Vassalboro and incorporated as a separate town. Readers will hear more about Sidney in a later article in this series.

* * * * * *

Winslow is the next town north of Vassalboro on the east bank of the Kennebec. It, like Vassalboro, started on both banks of the river and lost its western part, in its case in 1802.

Fort Halifax in 1754.

Fort Halifax, built in 1754 (and mentioned in last week’s article) was not the earliest European building within the town boundaries. Kingsbury explained in his chapter on Winslow that the location, at the junction of the Sebasticook and Kennebec rivers, was important to Natives and Europeans, because rivers were main travel routes.

Kingsbury used the spelling Ticonic for the junction and for the falls upriver on the Kennebec. Edwin Carey Whittemore and Stephen Plocher, two writers of Waterville history, chose Teconnet; Plocher said the falls were named after Chief Teconnet. Early British records used Taconnett.

Kingsbury wrote that the first trader up the Kennebec, in 1625, was Edward Winslow, who might not have come as far as “the land that was destined to carry his named down to posterity.” On Sept. 10, 1653, according to a document Kingsbury quoted, Christopher Lawson built a trading house on the south side of the Sebasticook where the rivers joined.

In the same year, Kingsbury wrote, Lawson “assigned” his building to Clark & Lake (Thomas Clark or Clarke and Thomas Lake). Clark & Lake and Richard Hammond both had trading posts at Ticonic (and farther downriver) by 1675, when the Natives captured the Ticonic posts and apparently controlled the area until, Plocher wrote, the remaining building “was burned” – presumably by Europeans – in 1692.

Plocher called Hammond Winslow’s first white resident. Multiple sources say he was accused of cheating the Natives in his trading; they killed him in 1676.

As summarized last week, in 1754 Massachusetts Governor William Shirley had Fort Western built at Cushnoc and Fort Halifax built at Ticonic for protection against the French and their Native allies.

After Shirley and the Kennebec Proprietors agreed, on April 17, 1754, to build the two forts, the governor named General John Winslow, from Marshfield, Massachusetts, to supervise building Fort Western. Winslow (1703 -1774) was the great-grandson of Edward Winslow (1595 – 1655), who came to North America in 1620 on the Mayflower, was a governor of the Plymouth Colony and founded Marshfield.

Governor Shirley went up the Kennebec and personally chose the site for the fort, on the north side of the Kennebec-Sebasticook junction, as a strategic location to cut off Native communications and from which to launch an attack upriver.

Captain William Lithgow was the fort’s first commander, arriving on Sept. 3, 1754. Lithgow Street in present-day Winslow runs parallel to the Kennebec south of the rivers’ junction.

The fort’s name honored the Earl of Halifax. Kingsbury said he was the British Secretary of State. Louis Hatch, in his Maine history, said Halifax was President of the British Board of Trade, and added he was “sometimes called on account of his services to American commerce the ‘Father of the Colonies.'”

A settlement developed around the fort. Morris Fling, in 1764, was the first to farm the flat land nearby, Kingsbury said; the name “Fling’s Interval” lasted a couple generations.

Captain Lithgow used to have the river ice swept so his men could “slide the ladies,” Kingsbury wrote. A former island below the falls was a recreation area for Fort Halifax “officers and their families,” and a Native camping site as late as 1880.

Kingsbury also mentioned a brook named after a Sergeant Segar, who built a bridge crossing it. A contemporary on-line map of Winslow shows Segar Brk Avenue, off Whipple Street, north of Halifax Street (Route 100).

Plocher wrote the area’s first incorporation was as the plantation of Kingfield; Kingsbury called it Kingsfield; neither provided a date. It became the town of Winslow on April 26, 1771, including present-day Waterville and Oakland, named after General Winslow.

An on-line genealogy related to the historic Winslow house in Marshfield says Edward Winslow frequently voyaged between Massachusetts and England. He “died at sea somewhere in the Caribbean in 1655 while serving as Chief Civil Commissioner during the British fleet’s expedition to conquer the West Indies.” This information, in your writer’s opinion, increases the probability that General Winslow’s great-grandfather was the same Edward Winslow who Kingsbury said traded up the Kennebec in 1625.

Winslow’s first town meeting, Kingsbury said, was held at Fort Halifax on Thursday, May 23, 1771. In 1787, he wrote, Ezekiel Pattee (an early settler) and James Stackpole, of Winslow, and Captain Denes (or Dennis) Getchell, of Vassalboro, settled the Winslow/Vassalboro town line.

(Pattee was featured in the Jan. 25 issue of The Town Line as the man for whom Winslow’s Pattee Pond was probably named.)

Managing town business became increasingly difficult by the 1790s, especially since there was no bridge across the Kennebec. In 1793, Whittemore wrote, voters appointed two (tax?) collectors, one for each side of the river, and provided for preaching and town meetings to alternate between east and west banks.

After much discussion of a division, usually with the Kennebec as the dividing line (“though once a line one mile west of the river was proposed,” Kingsbury wrote), on Dec. 28, 1801, voters approved a petition to the Massachusetts legislature to make a separate town named Waterville on the west side of the river. The legislature approved June 23, 1802.

Main sources

Hatch, Louis Clinton, ed., Maine: A History 1919 ((facsimile, 1974).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870).
Plocher, Stephen, Colby College Class of 2007 A Short History of Waterville, Maine Found on the web at Waterville-maine.gov.
Robbins, Alma Pierce History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: The story of Independence Day

June 28, 2023/0 Comments/in Augusta, China, Local History, Maine History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley, Waterville, Windsor/by Mary Grow

by Mary Grow

Local historians make some references to Independence Day celebrations

According to Wikipedia, celebrating Independence Day on July 4 each year is most likely an error.

The writer of the on-line site’s article on this national holiday says that the Second Continental Congress, meeting in a closed session, approved Virginia representative Richard Henry Lee’s resolution declaring the United States independent of Great Britain on July 2, 1776.

Knowing the decision was coming, a five-man committee headed by Thomas Jefferson spent much of June drafting the formal declaration that would justify the dramatic action. After debating and amending the draft, Congress approved the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 – having approved the act of independence two days earlier.

Wikipedia further says that although some Congressmen later said they signed the declaration on July 4, “[m]ost historians” think the signing was really not until Aug. 2, 1776.

The article includes a quotation from a July 3, 1776, letter from John Adams, of Massachusetts, to his wife, Abigail. Adams wrote that “[t]he second day of July 1776…will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival.”

Adams recommended the day “be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.”

And so it has been – two days late.

Wikipedia says July 4 celebrations began in 1777, in Philadelphia, where the observance included an “official dinner” for members of the Continental Congress, and in Bristol, Rhode Island. The Massachusetts General Court was the first state legislature to make July 4 a state holiday, in 1781, while Maine was part of Massachusetts.

Windsor historian Linwood Lowden mentioned the importance of the local Liberty Pole as part of Independence Day observances. Liberty Poles, he explained were put up after the Declaration of Independence as symbols of freedom. Many later became town flagpoles; Windsor’s, at South Windsor Corner (the current junction of routes 32 and 17), was still called a Liberty Pole in 1873.

The central Kennebec Valley towns covered in this history series have quite probably celebrated the holiday annually, or almost annually, since each was organized. As with other topics, local historians’ interest, and the amount of available information, vary from town to town.

James North’s history of Augusta is again a valuable resource. He described Independence Day celebrations repeatedly, beginning with 1804 (it was in 1797 that Augusta separated from Hallowell and, after less than four months as Harrington, became Augusta).

In 1804, North describes two celebrations, divided by politics. The Democrats, or Democratic-Republicans (the party of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and others) gathered at the courthouse, where Rev. Thurston Whiting addressed them.

(Whiting is listed in on-line sources as a Congregationalist. He preached in Newcastle, Warren and before 1776 in Winthrop, where he “was invited to settle but declined,” according to a church history excerpted on line. He preached in Hallowell in 1775 [then described as “a young man”], and in 1791 is listed in Hallowell records as solemnizing the marriage of two members of prominent Augusta families, James Howard, Esquire, and Susanna Cony.)

The Federalists (the party of Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and others) began celebrating at dawn with “a discharge of cannon,” North wrote. They organized a parade at the courthouse that went across the Kennebec and back to the meeting house where an aspiring young lawyer, Henry Weld Fuller, gave a speech. The day ended with a banquet at the Kennebec House (a local hotel that often hosted such events), during which participants “drank seventeen regular toasts highly seasoned with federalism.”

(Hon. Henry Weld Fuller [1784-Jan. 29, 1841], born in Connecticut, graduated from Dartmouth in 1801, studied law and came to Augusta in 1803. He married Ester or Esther Gould [1785-1866], on Dec. 21, 1805, or Jan. 7, 1806 [sources differ]. They had seven children, including Henry Weld Fuller II [1810-1889], who in turn fathered Henry Weld Fuller III [1839-1863], who died without issue. North wrote that the senior Fuller served in the Massachusetts legislature in 1812 and 1816 and in the Maine legislature in 1837. He was appointed Kennebec County attorney in 1826 and was a Judge of Probate from 1828 until he died. His grandson, Henry III’s brother Melville Weston Fuller, was Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.)

By the summer of 1807, the Democratic Republicans had elected one of their number, James Sullivan, as governor of Massachusetts, and the Maine party members “were in high spirits,” North wrote. On July 4, they heard an oration by Rev. Joshua Cushman, of Winslow, and partook of a dinner for 150 people in lavishly decorated courthouse.

Cushman’s speech was published; North wrote that “it attacked federalism with more vigor of denunciation than truthfulness or discretion.”

(Wikipedia says Rev. Joshua Cushman [April 11, 1761 – Jan. 27, 1834] was a Revolutionary War veteran who graduated from Harvard in 1787 and became a minister, serving Winslow’s Congregational Church for almost two decades. He was a member of the United States House of Representatives representing Massachusetts from 1819 to 1821, and with Maine statehood continued as a Maine member until 1825. He had just been elected to the Maine House of Representatives when he died. Wikipedia says “He was interred in a tomb on the State grounds in Augusta.”)

By July 4, 1810, the Augusta Light Infantry had been organized and paraded as part of the Federalist celebration, which North believed was held in Hallowell. He listed a parade including the Light Infantry as part of the 1810 and 1812 celebrations as well.

Because 1826 was the 50th anniversary of independence, Augusta officials organized an all-day celebration, North wrote. It began with a “discharge of cannon and ringing of bells” at dawn and continued with a parade, a ceremony, another parade, a dinner and fireworks set off on both sides of the Kennebec.

One of Augusta’s most prominent residents, Hon. Daniel Cony (Aug. 3, 1752 – Jan 21, 1842), presided at the banquet. Attendees included General John Chandler (Feb. 1, 1762 – Sept. 25, 1841), then in his second term as a United States Senator; Peleg Sprague (April 27, 1793 – Oct. 13, 1880), then a member of the United States House of Representatives and later a U.S. Senator; and “some officers of the army and navy who were engaged in the survey of the Kennebec.”

Also present, North wrote, was Hon. Nathan Weston (March 17, 1740 – Nov. 17, 1832), whom Cony introduced as the “venerable gentleman” who served in the Revolutionary army and fought at Saratoga with him. North wrote that Weston “briefly review[ed]…the events which preceded and led to the war of the revolution, noticing the severity of the struggle and the spirit which brought triumphant success, gave the following toast: ‘The spirit of ’76 – alive and unspent after fifty years.'”

(North’s history includes two biographical sections on this Nathan Weston, whom he usually called Capt., and his son, also Nathan Weston, who was a judge and whom North usually called Hon. North did not write anything about Capt. Weston’s military service after the French and Indian wars. However, the younger Nathan Weston was born in 1782 and could not have fought in the Revolution.)

By July 4, 1829, Augusta had been designated Maine’s new state capital (succeeding Portland), and Independence Day was chosen as the day to lay the cornerstone of the State House, leading to “unusual ceremonies and festivity,” North wrote.

The celebration began, as usual, with bells and a 24-gun salute at dawn; continued with a parade featuring the Augusta Light Infantry, many speeches and a banquet; and was climaxed by fireworks set off on both sides of the Kennebec.

One more Independence Day celebration North thought worth describing was the 1832 observance. That year, he wrote, for the first time since 1811, the two political parties – by then the National Republicans and the Democrats – “each had separate processions, addresses and dinners.”

The Democrats got “part of” the Augusta Light Infantry and a band from Waterville for their parade and held their dinner in the State House. The Republicans’ parade incorporated “the Hallowell Artillery and Sidney Rifles, each with a band of music, and the Hallowell and Augusta band.” Their dinner was in the Augusta House.

The local Republican newspaper, identified by North as the Journal, claimed 2,000 people in the Republican parade. The Democratic Age estimated only 700 in the Democrats’ parade, but claimed 1,000 at the State House meal, versus only 400 or 500 at the Republican dinner.

North wrote that the Journal admitted the Democrats fed a larger crowd, but, North quoted, said snidely, “probably half of them dined at free cost.”

Windsor historian Lowden was another who described an occasional Fourth of July celebration, quoting from diaries kept in the 1870s and 1880s by residents Roger Reeves and Orren Choate.

In 1874, Reeves described “Bells, cannon guns, pistols, rockets, bomb shells, fire crackers” on Water Street, but “very little rum” and “no rows.” (Windsor no longer has a Water Street, and your writer failed to find an old map with street names.)

Two years later, Reeves’ family went to the Togus veterans’ home “to see the greased pig caught,” while Reeves himself intended “to celebrate in the hay field.” And in 1878 Reeves again worked all day, earning “a dollar and a pair of slippers” for whitewashing a barn. In the evening he went “up on the hill and played croquet by lamp light.”

Choate went to Weeks Mills for the 1885 Independence Day celebration (he was 17 that year, Lowden said), and wrote that it included races and a dance and he didn’t get home until midnight.

The next year, 1886, July 4 was a Sunday, so the celebration was on Monday. Choate got up at 2 a.m. to join relatives and friends for a trip to Augusta’s celebration, from which they got home at 3 the following morning. “We had a good time,” he wrote, without providing details.

Other local historians made occasional comments about Independence Day celebrations – for example, the Fairfield bicentennial history says that Fairfield’s Civil War monument was dedicated on July 4, 1868.

Your writer hopes that readers remember enjoyable, perhaps moving, ceremonies from years past and will have a safe and fun holiday this year.

Main sources

Fairfield Historical Society, Fairfield, Maine 1788-1988 (1988).
Lowden, Linwood H., good Land & fine Contrey but Poor roads a history of Windsor, Maine (1993).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Taking care of paupers

June 14, 2023/0 Comments/in Central ME, Hallowell, Kennebec County, Local History, Maine History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley/by Mary Grow

Bidding out was done at town meetings, where officials and voters discussed each needy person or family publicly by name. Residents bid for a poor person, asking a specific sum from the town for a year’s room, board and care, in the pauper’s home or the bidder’s home.

by Mary Grow

The earliest settlers in the Kennebec Valley, as elsewhere in New England, were for the most part able-bodied and self-supporting. But within a generation or two, a settlement would be likely to have residents who were unable to support themselves.

Some might be physically or mentally disabled. Older people might lose their ability to do manual labor and outlive their resources. Children might be left without a caring family.

A bad economy might send people into poverty. Different historians mention the near-destruction of export-dependent businesses (lumbering, for example) and the dramatic increase in prices of food and other necessities caused by the embargo during the War of 1812. Bad weather was another factor; farmers lost crops and income in 1816, the Year without a Summer.

Whatever the cause, if someone was a pauper and had no supportive relatives, caring for the poor was a town responsibility, as evidenced by the expression “going on the town” – becoming dependent on local taxpayers for the means of existence.

An on-line source says going on the town was a last resort and a humiliation. The writer gave three reasons: paupers lost the right to vote or to hold office; town officials might have authority to sell paupers’ property to fund their care; and townspeople looked down on those whom their taxes supported.

Maine towns had at least two ways of caring for their poor. One system was called “outdoor relief:” paupers were either supported financially on their own properties, or bid out to live with more prosperous neighbors.

An alternative was for voters to leave placement decisions to town officials. Officials for this purpose were the selectmen, whose titles included, and in many Maine towns still include, overseers of the poor.

The other option for a town was to buy a piece of property for a town poor house or poor farm, where paupers would be housed and cared for. “Farm” was almost always literal; the residents helped raise crops and tend livestock.

In her history of Sidney, Alice Hammond listed another method a person or family who owned property but was facing insolvency could use: the property could be deeded over to the town, on condition that the town would care for the donor(s) for life. Hammond mentioned real estate records showing Sidney had thus become owners of several farms that town officials later sold.

Town officials were careful not to spend their residents’ tax money on other towns’ paupers. Local histories occasionally mention lawsuits between towns to settle which is responsible for a person or family.

The following paragraphs will offer more specific information on how municipalities in the Central Kennebec Valley area took care of their poor before the present era of homeless shelters and homeless encampments.

This topic is one for which your writer’s self-imposed restriction to secondary sources available in books or on line (you’ll remember that this history series started early in the pandemic, when visiting town offices was discouraged) is limiting. Not all towns’ records are available on line, and some town historians wrote nothing about paupers. Others, however, provided enough information to intrigue your writer and, she hopes, her readers.

* * * * * *

At Augusta’s first town meeting, on April 3, 1797 (after Augusta separated from Hallowell in February 1797 and briefly became Harrington), Kingsbury reported that voters approved spending $1,250 for roads, $400 for roads and $300 for everything else, including supporting the poor.

The first poor house was approved at a March 11, 1805, meeting, according to Kingsbury and to James North’s Augusta history. Selectmen were not to spend more than $300. Voters at the annual meeting in 1806 elected George Reed or Read as its first superintendent.

Kingsbury described the location by 19th-century landmarks: north of Ballard’s corner (probably the current intersection of Bond and Water streets), and just south of the Curtis residence in 1805, and in 1892 marked by a “well on the east side of the road and an old sweet apple tree.”

By 1810, according to North, municipal spending had increased in the three categories Kingsbury listed in 1897: the appropriation for roads was $1,500, “payable in labor”; for schools, $1,000, and for everything else (both historians lump the poor “and other necessary charges”), another $1,500.

In 1833, North wrote, Augusta voters authorized selectmen to decide how to care for paupers. Neither he nor Kingsbury explained why there was evidently dissatisfaction with the poor house.

A special meeting in January 1834 made the authorization more specific: after the current contract with David Wilbur (the poor house superintendent?)) expired, town officials were to consider whether to buy a farm, contract or think up “some other mode.”

The five-man committee created to carry out this instruction reported at an April 21 meeting that while the legislature was in session they had talked with people from other parts of Maine and found unanimous support for “thePoor House system, both as regards economy and comfort and the prevention of pauperism.”

This committee recommended a second committee be appointed to look for “a suitable piece of land.” Charles Williams, from the first committee, and four new members of the second committee agreed with the first in advising that the farm be “near the village”; they recommended a third committee to buy a suitable property.

This third committee, which consisted of John Potter from the second committee and four more newcomers, reported to a Sept. 9 town meeting an agreement to buy Church Williams’ farm for $3,000. Their action was approved and yet another committee, chaired by Potter, appointed to build a house on the property.

The building went up by the end of 1834, North wrote. By 1870, he said, it had been “enlarged from time to time to the dimensions of the present commodious and convenient almshouse.”

A century after the building was finished, an on-line report on the Depression-era New Deal’s Federal Emergency Relief Administration’s work relief project describes repairs planned in 1934 and done in 1935. The writer said they were much needed: “Very few people realized the condition of this building and the unsanitary conditions and the inmates were living in.”

By then the building consisted of four floors over a large basement, “all of which were deteriorating rapidly.” Early steps were to reinforce a ceiling and put a partial new foundation “to keep the kitchen and range from falling into the basement.”

“The entire building was so infested with cockroaches and bedbugs that a special machine had to be hired along with an operator to exterminate these insects. All beds and bedding including blankets, mattresses, pillows and sheets were destroyed and replaced.”

Interior walls were replastered or repapered or painted; plumbing and heating systems were totally updated; the building was completely rewired; all the stairways were replaced, as were 20 doors and about 75 windows. A laundry was added and equipped, and a shed converted to a well-stocked store from which “the town truck delivers food daily to the city’s poor.”

The work crew consisted of 21 men. Total cost in labor, supplied by the ERA, was almost $5,400; the City of Augusta provided about $5,000 worth of materials. Work began Jan. 24 and was finished June 6, 1935.

The undated on-line site adds that the building had since been demolished and the Augusta public works department had moved onto the property.

* * * * * *

In Sidney, immediately north of Augusta on the west side of the Kennebec River, historian Hammond wrote, in the context of official town business in the 1790s, that “A problem right from the beginning was how to provide for the poor in town.”

She found an (undated) record of an early incident: the town constable “was ordered to serve notice on at least 25 families [presumably poor families] who had moved into town without first seeking permission.”

Town clerk’s records show that the constable carried out his orders, but, Hammond said, there is no proof the families were equally obedient; instead, some were still in Sidney years afterwards.

In addition to bidding out paupers, Hammond found Sidney town meeting voters repeatedly appointed a committee to buy a poor house or poor farm – and at the next meeting rejected the committee’s recommendation.

In 1867, she wrote, “the town actually purchased a working farm, hired a superintendent and moved paupers to the house.”

This poor farm was on 100 acres where Town Farm Road runs west off River Road (now West River Road) to Middle Road, in the north end of Sidney. The 1879 Kennebec County atlas shows the farm in the northwest corner of the three-way intersection; some of the land, then or later, was on the east side of West River Road (see below).

In 1869, Hammond wrote, voters directed selectmen to lay out and fence a cemetery on the town farm.

The 1877 town meeting warrant included an article Hammond quoted: “To see if town will vote to build suitable places at the poor house on the farm so as to be able to control the unruly poor.”

She also quoted the voters’ decision: “That it be left with the overseers to put them on bread and water if they see fit.” (Note the plural “overseers,” – by 1877, taxpayers were paying more than a single superintendent to staff the farm.)

This farm was a working farm, as Hammond’s information from what she called a typical inventory in the February 1895 annual report showed. The farm then had 28 hens; a dozen sheep; four cows and two yearlings; and two pigs. There were stockpiles of hay, straw, potatoes, turnips, oats, beans and beets.

The inventory further listed ham, pork, flour and butter; vinegar, pickles, molasses, spice and salt; and 80 gallons of cider and one pound each of tea and coffee.

Town officials and voters continued to debate whether the farm was the best arrangement, Hammond wrote. They agreed to lease it to different people, and eventually closed and sold it in 1919 to Mrs. Clara Wilshire for $3,000.

Hammond wrote that the sale did not include “the gravel bank on the east side of the River Road.” J. J. Pelotte later bought that parcel for $1,000. (Sidney’s 2003 comprehensive plan, found on line at the University of Maine Digital Commons site, lists the J. J. Pelotte gravel pit.)

Main sources

Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Windsor’s Colburn family

June 7, 2023/0 Comments/in Local History, Maine History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley/by Website Editor

by Mary Grow

Exceptionally attentive readers with exceptionally good memories might remember that Francisco Colburn was one of the commanders of Windsor’s Marcellus Vining GAR Post in the 1880s (see the May 25 issue of The Town Line).

Marcellus is not a typical Maine name, to be sure – presumably his classically-educated parents named him after the Roman Marcus Claudius Marcellus (42 – 23 B.C.). But for some reason, your writer was struck by Francisco, and began wondering why a couple in Windsor, Maine, in the 1830s would choose that name for their son.

The question remains unanswered. The search for the answer revealed a lot of information – and misinformation – about a once-prominent Windsor family.

A Civil War source found on line says Francisco Colburn was born in 1839. On Oct. 20, 1861, when he was 22 years old, he enlisted as a corporal in Company C, 1st Maine Cavalry. He was promoted to sergeant and then first sergeant in 1863, and was mustered out of service on Nov. 25, 1864.

Henry Kingsbury, in his Kennebec County history, added that he came back to Windsor and made his home on a piece of the family farm.

He married Sarah E. Chatman (1838 – 1922), daughter of Andrew Chatman, another Windsor resident. One on-line genealogy says their only child was a son they named Charles H.; born in 1865, he died in 1881, in his mid-teens.

However, Kingsbury listed four sons, all, from the wording, alive in 1892: “Francisco, George A., Horace and Raymond.” And another on-line family history says Francisco and Sarah had five sons: Francisco D., Jr. (1862 -1901); Charles (1865 – 1881); George Arthur (1867-1936); Horace (1869-1957); and Raymond (1873-1940).

Kingsbury wrote that the first Francisco served as Windsor town treasurer for 1882 and 1883. He might have been a town selectman for two years beginning in 1886: Kingsbury listed “Francisco” as a last name, with a blank for the first name, but your writer suspects a printing error.

Francisco died in 1928, in his 89th year. He, Sarah and Charles are buried in Windsor’s Oak Hill Cemetery, their graves marked by one of the five tall monuments there. A plaque lists the three names, with dates; to the south, a flat stone marks Charles’ grave, and two more flat stones to the north are labeled “Mother” and “Father.” There are no other marked graves in the plot.

In early June 2023 a new American flag stood beside the monument.

* * * * * *

Francisco’s parents were Horace Colburn (Sept. 11, 1812 – April 15, 1885) and Almena Wilson Colburn (July 1813 – Feb. 11, 1903). They and other Colburns, including some of Francisco’s brothers and sisters, are buried in Windsor’s Resthaven cemetery.

Linwood Lowden’s history of Windsor includes a reproduction of a photograph of Francisco’s mother. Mrs. Almena Wilson Colburn is standing by a large spinning wheel in the dooryard of a white-painted house with a portico across the front. She wears a high-necked, long-sleeved, floor-length dress, dark-colored with small white flowers (?). Her dark hair, parted in the middle, is drawn tightly behind her head.

Sources differ wildly on the names and lives of Francisco’s siblings; in the following paragraphs your writer combines several contradictory lists.

One says he had two older sisters for the first 10 years of his life. Ginevra was born in 1836 and died Aug. 13, 1849, when she was 12 years old. Delphena was 13 when she died Sept. 10, 1849. There might have been an epidemic that fall; Caleb W., born in 1845, died Oct. 3, 1849.

By then Horace and Almena had another daughter, Minerva, born Jan. 20, 1848, in Winslow (according to an obituary found on line). Minerva was a bookish child who soon began teaching, a career she continued until she married Dr. James A. Pierce on April 7, 1875.

The Pierces moved to Stockton Springs, where Minerva, though a semi-invalid for many years, was a well-loved community member. They had one son, James A. Pierce, Jr.

When Minerva Colburn Pierce died Dec. 26, 1900, at 88, the obituary says she was survived by her husband and son; her 88-year-old mother; one sister; and three brothers. Your writer has identified her mother and three brothers, Francisco, Joseph and Frank, but cannot name a surviving sister.

According to an on-line genealogy, Joseph (April 1843 – April 12, 1919) was born in Windsor. Kingsbury said he lived on part of the family farm and taught school in the winter from the time he was 16.

The genealogy said he married Eliza A. Wyman (Aug. 1843 – May 18, 1919) on Sept. 15, 1864, in Waterville. They had at least two children, Frederic (Oct. 1865 – ?) and Grace Almenia (Aug. 4, 1871 – Dec. 28, 1908). Joseph and Eliza are buried in Norton, Massachusetts.

Frank was Francisco’s youngest brother, born in 1854 and died in 1927. He too lived on the family farm and was a teacher from his teens.

Frank’s gravestone in Resthaven Cemetery says he married Lizzie E. Donnell (1861-1942). C. Arlene Barton Gilbert’s chapter on education in Lowden’s history lists Frank Colburn and Lizzie Donnell among 1881-82 Windsor teachers – Lizzie’s fifth, sixth and seventh terms and Frank’s eighth. Lizzie Colburn was still a Windsor teacher in 1927; by then the school year was 30 weeks, and teachers earned from $15 to $18 weekly.

Another source lists Sanford Colburn (? – Mar. 6, 1878) as one of Francisco’s five siblings (and omits Minerva). Your writer has found no other information on Sanford Colburn.

* * * * * *

Horace Colburn is mentioned frequently by both Lowden and Kingsbury.

On Oct. 21, 1839 (the year Francisco was born), Lowden said, Horace Colburn, of Pittston, bought a farm on the west side of current Route 32 (“the main road leading to China Village”), about a mile north of the Windsor Corner post office. Carlton Colburn is listed as a co-purchaser, and elsewhere Lowden added Joseph; he did not explain their relationships.

The ad describing the farm (from the May 9, 1835, issue of The China Orb, published in China Village) said it was about 150 acres, 60 acres under tillage and the rest “woodland of an excellent quality.” The property included “a young orchard”; an almost new sawmill (built by a prior owner named Nathan Tollman in or before 1832); three shingled barns, two 36-feet-square and the third 30-feet-square; other outbuildings; and a “good well of water” close to the farmhouse.

The brook that powered the mill, called Colburn Brook in Lowden’s history, was either the one now called Dearborn Brook or the tributary (unnamed on on-line maps) that joins it from the west near Meadow Brook Lane.

The 1856 and 1879 Windsor maps Lowden reproduced both show H. Colburn’s sawmill. Kingsbury wrote that in 1892 Horace Colburn’s sons were running it; Lowden believed it operated until at least 1900.

The nearly-new farmhouse was a story and half on “an excellent cellar.” Five of the six rooms on the ground floor had fireplaces.

The seller was John B. Swanton, Jr., of Bath, and the ad named local representatives Ebenezer Shaw, Esquire, in China Village, and Ebenezer Meigs, Esquire, in South China. Why it took four years to sell the farm Lowden does not guess.

Horace’s sons Francisco, Joseph and Frank all settled on the property, changing the area’s semi-official name from Linn Hill to Colburn Hill. For some years they ran the shingle mill and farmed, and Joseph and Frank taught school.

According to Kingsbury, Horace Colburn was Windsor’s town treasurer in 1848, 1850, and 1856; served as a selectman for six years, beginning in 1853; and was “twice elected county commissioner, which office he held at his death.”

Gilbert listed Horace as a member of Windsor’s 1866-67 Superintending School Committee, with Orren Tyler and C. A. Pierce. The three reported that there were 478 students on April 1, 1866. They evaluated each of the teachers, mostly local, mostly female, whom they supervised during 24 terms in 13 schoolhouses.

They then berated Windsor voters. Teachers would have done better, they wrote, with proper schoolhouses:

“Three-fifths of our school houses are not fit places for schools. They would be more appropriate for pig-pens or hen-houses, we might have said stables, but conscience forbids, for many of the parents are sending their own children to those miserable huts called school houses which they would not even think of keeping their horses or oxen in during the winter season without repairing.”

Their suggested remedy was to consolidate districts so taxpayers could build fewer, better schools, arguing that a good school a mile and a half away was better than “a nuisance” close to home.

In 1876, voters elected Horace Colburn moderator of an Aug. 12 special town meeting called to replace the tax collector, after an investigation that generated a report Lowden could not find in the town records.

Horace’s younger sons also held town offices, according to Kingsbury. He lists Joseph as supervisor of schools from 1871 to 1886, town clerk in 1883 and 1887 and a selectman for two years beginning in 1891; and Frank as town treasurer in 1884, apparently as his brother Francisco’s successor, and supervisor of schools in 1888 and 1889.

Lowden found other odds and ends of Colburn family history. For example, after Windsor Grange (Patrons of Husbandry No. 284) was organized June 2, 1886, the second Grange Master was Frank Colburn, in 1888. In 1895, there were seven Colburns among the membership: Francis (Francisco?) and his wife; Frank and his wife; J. (Joseph?), Eliza and Fred (Joseph’s wife and son?).

Two of Windsor’s early cemeteries

Linwood Lowden’s Windsor history has a section on town cemeteries, including the Resthaven and Oak Hill cemeteries in which 19th-century Colburns are buried. Henry Kingsbury listed both graveyards in his Kennebec County history.

Resthaven Cemetery, much the larger of the two, is on the east side of Route 32 just south of the Maxcy’s Mill Road intersection. Oak Hill Cemetery is less than half a mile north, on the west side of Route 32 just south of the Reed Road intersection.

said Resthaven Cemetery’s first burial was that of Persis Wheeler, in 1810; Kingsbury dated the graveyard to 1808. Lowden wrote that Persis’ husband, Samuel Wheeler, Sr., “apparently” owned the lot then, though shortly thereafter it was Joseph Linscott who deeded it to what was then the Town of Malta.

Lowden found a call for a July 1, 1811, special town meeting at which voters were asked to buy some “ground for a burying ground,” though he found no related records. He also found a May 6, 1814, record of a decision to fence the cemetery; and he quoted Linscott’s 1816 description: half an acre “in length ten rods on the said mill road [Maxcy’s Mill?] and in width eight rods situated where the graves now are.” (A rod equals 16.5 feet.)

Linscott wrote in the 1816 document that the land was intended as a “burying yard” for the Town of Malta and that he had received “the value thereof from said town.”

Lowden said this cemetery was at different times named the Burying Ground on the Ridge, the Mill Road Cemetery and the Sand Hill Cemetery. He found it was re-fenced in 1856, and in 1859, the by-then-Windsor “selectmen divided this yard into lots.”

The Colburn/Coburn/Oak Hill Cemetery, Lowden wrote, was “established as early as 1822 if not earlier.” The first burials, beginning in 1822, were members of the David Given family. Kingsbury called it “the Chapman burying ground.”

Lowden contradicted Kingsbury’s claim that Oak Hill Cemetery was owned by those who bought lots there. He listed town expenditures: a pre-1837 fence; 1847 fence repairs; in 1853, approval of a half-acre expansion, at a cost of $25.00; in 1857, voters’ rejection of a request to whitewash the fence; and in 1858, selection of a three-man committee to “lot out” the yard.

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Lowden, Linwood H., good Land & fine Contrey but Poor roads a history of Windsor, Maine (1993)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: GAR and Togus

May 31, 2023/0 Comments/in Augusta, Local History, Maine History/by Mary Grow

by Mary Grow

The Grand Army of the Republic, or GAR, was responsible for more than organizing the local Posts and Memorial Day observances described in previous articles in this series.

Additional information on this Civil War veterans’ organization, from various sources, says it assisted veterans in many ways, including advocating for legislation and policies, providing financial support to needy members and helping them stay in touch with each other.

The organization also “supported charitable causes such as the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, Eastern Branch, and the Maine Military and Naval Children’s Home in Bath,” an on-line source says.

In the spring 2004 issue of Prologue magazine, Trevor K. Plante, then an archivist with the National Archives and Records Administration, wrote an article entitled The National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers.

The National Home was actually more than a dozen homes, established by federal legislation in March 1865. The board appointed to carry out the legislation (originally 100 members, reduced to 12 in March 1866) began looking for sites. The first one they approved was an abandoned resort called Togus Springs, in Chelsea, Maine, about four miles southeast of Augusta on the east bank of the Kennebec River.

According to on-line sources (including the federal Department of Veterans Affairs, or VA), “Togus” is a shortened version of an Indian name, Worromontogus, or “mineral water.” The mineral spring, Henry Kingsbury wrote in his Kennebec County history, had been known to white settlers since 1810; it was called the Gunpowder Spring because it reeked of sulfur, and it was supposed to heal “malignant humors.”

In 1859, Horace Beals, described as “a wealthy granite merchant from Rockland, Maine,” bought 1,900 acres in Chelsea, including the spring. He planned to develop a health resort for the rich, a Maine institution that would rival Saratoga Springs, in New York.

In pursuit of his dream, Beals spent more than $250,00 to build “a 134-room hotel, a race course, bowling alleys, bath house, and other recreational facilities,” with a farmhouse and stables.

Kingsbury wrote that the resort opened in June 1859. The Civil War left it struggling; it closed in 1863. Beals went bankrupt and died soon afterwards, and his spa was locally called “Beals’ Folly.”

Beals’ widow sold the property to the Board of Managers for the planned veterans’ homes for $50,000. The managers liked the site for numerous reasons: because of the mineral spring, presumed to be a health benefit; because of the rural setting and isolation from cities, qualities that were supposed to be soothing and to keep veterans away from urban temptations; because the buildings were almost ready for immediate use; and, the VA website says bluntly, “because it was a bargain.”

An on-line source describes Togus and its fellows as “a place for disabled veterans to live if they could not care for themselves or their pensions did not provide enough financial support.”

James North, in his Augusta history, wrote that at Togus, honorably discharged veterans with war-caused disabilities “were fed and clothed, and given religious and secular instruction to fit them for the callings in life to which they may be adapted.”

After some remodeling, the first veteran moved into Togus on Nov. 10, 1866. Wikipedia identifies him as James P. Nickerson, no rank given, of Company A, 19th Massachusetts Volunteers.

There were about 200 ex-soldiers at the facility by the next summer. Another site says most of the men came from three states, Maine, Massachusetts and New York; over half were “foreign born, including a large Irish community.”

To accommodate increasing need, Kingsbury wrote that in 1867 officials added a brick hospital – probably the 50-by-100-foot brick building that North described – and had plans for a chapel and other additions.

The VA site does not mention the January 1868 fire that North described, which destroyed most of the main buildings. (Your writer cited North’s description in the Nov. 10, 2022, issue of The Town Line.) The extensive new construction in the next few years featured buildings specifically adapted to a veterans’ home, and made of bricks (manufactured on the grounds), so they would be more fire-resistant.

North described in detail the four brick buildings that were started in the spring of 1886. They were each 50-by-150-foot, with a basement, two main floors and a mansard roof that provided space for a third floor; they were arranged in a square around a central courtyard.

The first building faced eastward. It had storage space in the basement; a large schoolroom that could double as a chapel, plus a smaller schoolroom and teachers’ accommodations, on the ground floor; and an open second story “to be devoted to such purposes as may be required.”

Two more buildings extended westward from each end of the first building. North wrote that they housed “accommodations for the officers and dormitories for the soldiers, the dining-room, kitchen, post office, telegraph office and reading-room.”

The building that closed the west side of the quadrangle had an ell extending west. Its basement housed “a bath room, laundry, store rooms, bakery, boiler room and wash rooms.”

The first floor was another dining room, with the kitchen in the ell. The hospital occupied the main part of the second floor, with a dispensary and nurses’ quarters.

Other new late-1860s buildings listed on line include “an amusement hall, barn, workshop, and the Governor’s House.”

The Governor’s House was built in 1869. The two-story-and-a-half story, 22-room brick house is still standing; it has been on the National Register of Historic Places since May 30, 1974. It is described as historically significant as “the sole remaining building of the country’s first Veteran’s [sic] Home.”

North wrote that as he completed his history in 1870, a two-story brick amusement hall and another building that would house a 10-horsepower engine and the machine shop, shoe shop and tailor’s shop that it would serve were under construction.

Another major, and very expensive, project, he wrote, was building a reservoir that would cover an acre and would “furnish an unfailing supply of pure water, which is to be taken from Greely pond.”

By 1870, too, the campus was steam-powered throughout, North wrote: “Steam for warming and raising hot and cold water to every part of the buildings, and for cooking and laundry purposes, is generated by two boilers capable of driving a sixty horse-power steam engine.”

Wikipedia’s list of new buildings in or about 1872 reads: “a bakery, a butcher shop, a blacksmith shop, a brickyard, a boot and shoe factory, a carpentry shop, a fire station, a harness shop, a library, a sawmill, a soap works, a store, and an opera house theatre.”

The store, North said, sold desirable items to the residents, with proceeds going into their amusement fund.

In 1872, Wikipedia says, the name was changed: the institution became the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers. On Aug. 13, 1873, according to the same source, President Ulysses Grant came to Togus “to review the men who had served with him during the Civil War.”

Wikipedia says in 1878, 933 men lived at Togus, mostly Civil War veterans and a few from the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. Kingsbury added there were 1,400 residents in the spring of 1883 and 2,000 by 1892; by the 1880s, there were 20 additional buildings. The peak population was almost 2,800 in 1904.

The former soldiers lived under military discipline, North wrote. The VA site adds that some of the housing was like barracks, and the men wore “modified army uniforms” (or surplus uniforms, according to Wikipedia).

The men paid for their room and board with their federal pensions, Wikipedia says. Those who were able worked in the shops or the farm. Another source says they were paid “at a rate fixed by the managers,” getting half their pay at intervals and the other half when they left (if they left).

The farm provided much of the residents’ and staff’s food. Writing in 1870, North said “farming operations…are already quite extensive.” There had been 85 head of cattle over the previous winter, he said, “some of which are choice Devon stock.”

Wikipedia says the three dairy Holsteins brought from the Netherlands in 1871 started “the first registered herd of the breed in Maine.”

Togus was connected to the surrounding towns on July 23, 1890, by the narrow-gauge Kennebec Central Railroad that ran to the Kennebec at either Randolph or Gardiner (sources differ). On June 15, 1901, the Augusta and Togus Electric Railway began service.

After that, the VA site says, the veterans’ home “became a popular excursion spot for Sunday picnics. There were band concerts, a zoo, a hotel, and a theater which brought shows directly from Broadway.”

Wikipedia and other sources add baseball games. Wikipedia said the zoo let area residents see “antelope, bear, buffalo, deer, elk, chimpanzees, and pheasants.”

* * * * * *

The Togus grounds include the Togus National Cemetery, which covers 31.2 acres. According to the VA and other sources, this cemetery has two sections, called the West Cemetery and the East Cemetery. The latter opened in 1936 and closed in 1961.

The beginning of the West Cemetery was laid out in 1867, on a hilltop on the west side of the grounds. A VA website says Major Nathan Cutler, of Augusta (see box), was running the institution then and chose the site “because he preferred that attractive hilltop.”

Beginning on April 20, 1867, Cutler oversaw the reburial in the new cemetery of six veterans who had died in the first few months. The website says: “Major Cutler felt the factors of color, rank and religion were of no importance. They were buried side by side since they had been soldiers together.”

In 1889, the then head of the Eastern Branch, General Luther Stephenson, had the cemetery’s Soldiers and Sailors Monument built. It is a stone obelisk, 26 feet high, on a stepped foundation with four dedicatory plaques; the granite was quarried on the Togus grounds.

Residents did the work. One website names two specific contributors: a Pennsylvania marble worker named William Spaulding, who did the design, and a Massachusetts stone-cutter named Jeremiah O’Brien.

By the summer of 2010, the obelisk had so deteriorated that the VA’s National Cemetery Association had to rebuild it. In the process, workers found an 1889 time capsule. An on-line photo of the contents shows a slender bottle; two newspapers, from Augusta and Boston; and a small pipe.

When the restored obelisk was rededicated in September 2010, a new time capsule was added.

Togus had its own GAR post

Togus had its own GAR Post, Cutler No. 48, honoring Major Nathan Cutler, known on the web as “the man who saved the ‘Cutler Bible.'” Here is the story, as told in a 2007 blog by a historian and author named Dale Cox.

In the Civil War battle of Marianna, Florida (Sept. 27, 1864), Cutler was 20 years old; he had abandoned his classes at Harvard and joined the 2nd Maine Cavalry, led at Marianna by Brigadier General Alexander Asboth and after he was wounded by Colonel L. L. Zulavsky.

Cutler led the first Union charge; his troops were driven back by stubborn Confederate soldiers, including some holed up in St. Luke’s Episcopal Church and nearby houses. Zulavsky ordered the buildings burned to dislodge the enemy.

Cutler – or someone else; Cox found the record unclear – refused to burn a church. When the order was repeated, Cutler supposedly “dashed into the burning church and saved the Bible, bringing it through the flames to safety.”

Soon afterwards, “two young members of the Marianna home guard” wounded Cutler badly enough so he was left behind and taken prisoner when the Union forces pulled out the next day.

He survived, however, because Cox recounted later interviews in which Cutler agreed someone, not necessarily himself, had argued for saving the church, and did not claim to have rescued its Bible, perhaps through modesty.

However, in a Sept. 19, 2014, article in the Tallahassee Democrat, in anticipation of the 150th anniversary of the Union raid into Marianna, senior writer Mark Hinson repeated the tale and said:

“It’s a romantic story but it never happened. Cutler was badly wounded before the kerosene torches ever touched St. Luke’s. The Bible was saved by someone else because it was returned to the sanctuary of the new St. Luke’s, where it remains on display to this day.”

Main sources:

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Memorial Day – Part 3

May 24, 2023/0 Comments/in Local History, Maine History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley/by Mary Grow

Grand Army of the Republic hat insignia worn by the Horse soldiers.

by Mary Grow

GAR posts Fairfield, Windsor, China, Albion & Sidney

Continuing with central Kennebec Valley GAR Posts in the order of their formation, the next after Billings Post #88, in Clinton, was Fairfield’s E. P. Pratt Post #90 (in Somerset County, therefore not on the Kennebec County list in Henry Kingsbury’s history). According to Barbara Gunvaldsen, of the Fairfield Historical Society, this Post was organized Oct. 18, 1883.

Records at the FHS History House (the 1894 Cotton-Smith House) include a summary biography of Elbridge P. Pratt, in whose honor the Post is named. He was born in 1841, son of a farmer, Jesse Pratt, and his wife Hannah (Hubbard) Pratt.

On July 23, 1862, Pratt enlisted in Fairfield; he was mustered in July 25 (Wikipedia says Aug. 25) in Bath as a private in the 19th Maine Infantry, for three years. On July 27, his unit went to Washington, where it was stationed until September 1862. In October, the 19th was assigned to the Army of the Potomac.

Battles in which the 19th fought included Fredericksburg, Virginia (Dec. 11-15, 1862); Chancellorsville, Virginia (April 30 – May 6, 1863); and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania (July 1-3, 1863).

Pratt was killed on July 2, 1863, one of 232 men – more than half the regiment’s total – the 19th lost at Gettysburg. He is buried in Gettysburg National Cemetery.

E. P. Pratt GAR Post was still active in early 1918. A paragraph in the Tuesday, Jan. 10, 1918, issue of the Fairfield Journal announced the Wednesday, Jan. 16 (either day or date must be a misprint) installation of officers of the E. P. Pratt Relief Corps (the GAR ladies’ auxiliary) at the GAR Hall. Post members and wives, Corps members’ husbands and Sons of Veterans and their wives were invited.

* * * * * *

South China’s James Parnell (or Parnel) Jones Post #106 was organized April 23, 1884, with 25 charter members, Kingsbury said. At first members met in the AOUW (Ancient Order of United Workmen) hall; in 1885, according to the China bicentennial history, they built their own hall (demolished in 1964) at the crossroads where South China’s Memorial Park now stands.

Kingsbury said the GAR building was “complete in itself, containing a large hall, offices, rooms for Sons of Veterans and a Woman’s Relief Corps, and suitable banquet hall.”

Major James Parnell Jones (May 21, 1835 – July 12, 1864) is locally famous as “the Fighting Quaker.” Born in China, son of Quaker missionaries Eli and Sybil Jones, he was educated at the State University of Michigan and Haverford College, Pennsylvania.

On Sept. 15, 1857, he married Rebecca Maria Runnels (1836 – April 14, 1899).

When the Civil War began in April 1861, Jones was principal of China Academy, in China Village. He and Rebecca had lost their first son, James Lecky, in 1859, at the age of six months; their second, James A. “Jamie,” had been born Feb. 16, 1861. Nonetheless, Jones promptly helped raise and became captain of the unit that became Company B, 7th Maine Infantry.

In September 1862 he was slightly wounded. In 1863, he was promoted to major. In 1864 he was wounded again, at the Battle of the Wilderness (May 5-7); and on July 12, 1864, he was killed at Crystal Springs, Virginia, outside Washington D. C.

Sometime in 1863 Jones had home leave, because his and Rebecca’s daughter, Alice, was born Aug. 6, 1864. She lived five days, dying on Aug. 11; and on Aug. 14, three-year-old Jamie died.

Parents and children are buried in China’s Dudley Cemetery, on Dirigo Road, with James P. Jones’ mother, Sybil. His father Eli’s grave is in the nearby Dirigo Friends Cemetery.

Rebecca remarried on Sept. 29, 1867, to Rev. Moses W. Newbert.

An undated obituary from the Lincoln County News says Newbert was born in Waldoboro and died May 6, 1898; the accompanying picture of his tombstone shows he was aged “64 yrs. 3 mos. 14 dys.” The obituary writer praised his “natural ability” as a preacher and said, “His success in the ministry was remarkable.”

The obituary says he began preaching about 1856 “under the direction of the Methodist Conference.” Starting in Palermo, he moved to North Vassalboro, China and Southport; to Wisconsin for two years; and back east to serve in several Maine towns, including Waldoboro.

A period of ill health led to a change to an unspecified 15-year “business career…in China and Camden.” He then returned to the ministry, with posts in “Cushing, Caribou, Hodgdon and Linneus, Sprague’s Mills.” Ill health led to retirement to a farm in China for his last two years, the obituary says.

Newbert’s first wife was Helen Augusta Washburn (Oct. 6, 1829 – May 11, 1866), daughter of Zebah and Susan Washburn of China; they were married March 6, 1860. Newbert is buried in Zebah Washburn’s family plot in the China Village Cemetery.

The newspaper obituary says his second wife was “Mrs. Maria R. Jones, of China, whose first husband was Maj. Jones, who was killed during the war of the Rebellion.” A Methodist yearbook found in line adds that in his last years Newbert was “tenderly cared for by his faithful and devoted wife.”

* * * * * *

Grand Army of the Republic badge.

In her research into the history of Albion, Ruby Crosby Wiggin found that Albion’s first Memorial Day observance was in 1885. She wrote that Civil War veterans from Albion and adjoining China organized Grand Army Amos J. Billings Post #112 on May 17, 1884, in China Village.

Kingsbury gave June 17 as the date and said there were 20 original members.

The two towns jointly financed the 1885 Memorial Day celebration, with Albion’s March 1885 town meeting raising $25 for the holiday observance and for decorating solders’ grave.

Kingsbury listed commanders of this Post as Llewellyn Libbey, John Motley, B. P. Tilton, J. W. Brown, Henry C. Rice, Robert C. Brann, A. B. Fletcher and John Motley.

Amos Judson Billings was born Jan. 20, 1833, to Benjamin Allen Billings (1799-1870) and Sarah (Tenney) Billings (1801-1882). On May 1, 1853, in Waldo, he married a woman named Bacon, perhaps Elizabeth A. Bacon (the on-line census record is unsure).

Billings rose to the rank of lieutenant in Company G, 24th Maine Infantry. Census and town records agree that he died of disease in Arkansas on July 28, 1863. His grave is in Albion’s Libby Hill Cemetery.

* * * * * *

Sidney’s Joseph W. Lincoln Post #113 honors Lieutenant Joseph Warren Lincoln, who was born in 1835 and died at Falmouth Virginia, April 8, 1863. His gravestone in the Lincoln Cemetery on Quaker Road says he served in Company F of the 20th Maine; a GAR note on the Find a Grave website, dated 2016 (after the GAR ceased to exist), says Company I, 20th Maine.

In 1857, according to Find a Grave, Lincoln married Laura Ann Whitman McPeak (Jan. 4, 1837 – Sept. 20, 1869). Born in Douglas, Massachusetts, she died in St. Louis, Missouri.

The Sidney Post first met May 24, 1884, according to Kingsbury. Starting with 11 charter members, it had 26 members in 1892.

Meetings were held in the Grange Hall, Kingsbury wrote; GAR members had “contributed considerable labor” to help build it. In her 1992 history of Sidney, Alice Hammond said meetings of both the Post and the Women’s Relief Corps were “in the Town Hall for many years.”

Kingsbury’s list of Post commanders included, in order, Nathan A. Benson, A. M. Sawtell, Thomas S. Benson, John B. Sawtell, Simon C. Hastings, James H. Bean, Silas N. Waite and Gorham K. Hastings. Hammond said Bean was in charge for many years, and his wife, Vileda Bean, was the longest-serving president of the women’s auxiliary. Kingsbury listed Vileda A. Bean among charter members when the Women’s Relief Corps was organized July 29, 1890.

* * * * * *

Windsor’s Marcellus Vining GAR Post honors Lieutenant Marcellus Vining (May 2, 1842 – May 19, 1864).

Kingsbury wrote that Marcellus Vining was the grandson of Jonathan Vining, who came from Alna to Windsor about 1805, and son of Daniel Vining (April 27, 1810 – Feb. 10, 1890). A farmer, Daniel had 12 or 13 children by two wives; Marcellus was his oldest son by his first wife, Sarah Esterbrook (or Esterbrooks) of Oldtown.

Marcellus Vining became a private in the 7th Maine Infantry on Jan. 25, 1862. Kingsbury wrote that the 19-year-old’s “ability and courage soon pointed him out as one especially fitted to a more important place among his comrades.”

Vining received two promotions before his two-year enlistment ended. When he reenlisted Jan. 4, 1864, it was as a sergeant in Company F of the 7th Maine.

He was promoted twice more that spring, to second lieutenant, Company A, on March 9 and to first lieutenant, Company A, on April 21. Wounded at the May 12, 1864, Battle of Spottsylvania, Virginia, he died May 19 in Fredericksburg, before, Kingsbury said, receiving the federal government’s notice that he had been promoted to captain. He is buried in Windsor Neck Cemetery.

Kingsbury wrote that as Vining awaited death, he wrote his father a letter in which he said that “it was preferable for him to die in the defense of his country’s flag than live to see it disgraced.”

Vining GAR Post #107 was organized June 2, 1884, Kingsbury said. Before then, Lowden wrote, residents celebrated Decoration Day at the National Soldiers Home in Togus.

Kingsbury listed the Post commanders, to 1892, as H. A. N. Dutton, Francisco Colburn, George E. Stickney, G. L. Marson, Cyrus S. Noyes and Luther B. Jennings.

Lowden said Windsor’s Post members met every Saturday night in the GAR Hall, the second floor of the town house. The Hall accumulated memorabilia; Lowden wrote that in 1886, “a Mr. Bangs presented a picture of Marcellus Vining,” and Kingsbury added that the Vining family donated Marcellus Vining’s army sword, a life-size portrait and a flag.

Lowden believed Vining Post continued “well into the twentieth century.” Windsor voters helped fund the organization, usually at $15 a year, he wrote. In 1929, however, “$30.00 was appropriated for G.A.R. Memorial and paid to the Sons of Veterans,” the successor organization to the GAR.

After local Memorial Day observances began, they typically included a speech, Lowden said. Windsor’s first was in 1887, and “must have been appreciated since a $13.00 honorarium was paid to the speaker who to this day has remained anonymous.” Lowden did find names of several ministers who delivered memorial addresses in the next decade.

Gustavus B. (G.B.) Chadwick

One of Windsor’s Memorial Day speakers, according to Linwood Lowden’s history, was G. B. Chadwick, in 1892. Though not listed as a minister, he almost certainly was: Rev. Gustavus B. Chadwick, a member of a prominent South China family. In the China bicentennial history (where he is consistently referred to simply as G. B. Chadwick), he is mentioned as a school committee member, head of the Masonic Lodge, in South China, and in 1872 among the people who bought the Chadwick Cemetery, where he is buried.

Information from the on-line Find a Grave site says Chadwick was born July 24, 1832, in China. On Aug. 27, 1864, he enlisted in the navy and served as a Landsman on the USS Rhode Island until honorably discharged June 3, 1865. He was a member of China’s Amos J. Billings GAR Post.

Gravestones in China’s Chadwick Hill cemetery list Rev. G. B. Chadwick (did he so dislike the name Gustavus?) and dates; his wife Clara M. (1851-1934) (probably born Clara Erskine); their son Wallace W. Chadwick (1892-1930) and Wallace’s wife Martha Francis (Gardner) Chadwick (1891-1947).

Main sources

Grow, Mary M., China Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984).
Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Lowden, Linwood H., good Land & fine Contrey but Poor roads a history of Windsor, Maine (1993).
Wiggin, Ruby Crosby, Albion on the Narrow Gauge (1964).

Websites, miscellaneous.