Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Churches – Part 4

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South China Meeting House.

by Mary Grow

Two churches in the Town of China were added to the National Register of Historic Places on Aug. 4, 1983. The earlier is the Pond Meeting House, on Lakeview Drive, built in 1807. The South China Meeting House, now South China Community Church, on Village Street, dates from 1884. Both were originally houses of worship for the Quakers, or Society of Friends.

The present Town of China’s first settlers, two generations of the Clark family, came in 1774 and established their homesteads around China Lake’s east basin. Originally named Jones Plantation after surveyor John Jones, the area was Harlem from 1796 to 1822 and became China in 1822, with various boundary changes along the way.

In his chapter on the Society of Friends in Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history, Rufus Jones, China’s most famous Quaker, wrote that Miriam Clark, wife of settler Jonathan Clark, and her sons Andrew and Ephraim were Quakers; her husband and two other sons were not.

Andrew and Ephraim Clark made their homes on the east shore of the lake. For the first few years, the nearest Quaker meeting was 40 miles away in Durham.

In 1780, the Vassalboro Friends established the earliest meeting in Kennebec County, Jones wrote. The first Vassalboro meeting house, built in 1785-86, was near the Kennebec River, about 10 miles from the Clarks’ China home. In 1797 the East Vassalboro meeting house opened, an easy ride across China Lake.

Enough other Quaker families arrived in the next two decades to justify a China meeting, which began in 1802 in Lemuel Hawkes’ house. Jones quoted from February (2nd month, to Quakers) 1807 minutes of the China Friends meeting, at which they voted to share the cost of building a 30-by-40-foot meeting house on land bought from Jedediah Jepson. They appointed Jepson, Reuben Fairfield, Isaac Hussey and James Meader as the building committee, instructing them to work as they thought best and report when necessary.

Pond Meeting House

The Pond Meeting House is about three miles south of the north end of the lake. Gregory Clancey, the architectural historian who wrote the application for National Register recognition in April 1983, described it as “a modest but pleasing post and beam structure, devoid of all ornament or stylistic claim, save for the concern with regularity and proportion characteristic of Federal buildings.”

The building is a story-and-a-half high with a steep roof. The equally tall entranceway, attached at right angles on the west side of the building, has separate entrance doors with a window between them.

Although Quakers always accepted women as entitled to speak at meetings and to act as preachers, inside a meetinghouse men sat on one side and women on the other, usually with a moveable partition between them. They would be together for worship, separated for business meetings.

Update on Victor Grange

The May 13 history article was about Victor Grange in Fairfield Center, the oldest continuously operating Grange in the central Kennebec Valley area. Since then, Barbara Bailey, the Grange member who contributed so much to the story, has sent out the Grange’s summer newsletter.

One theme is continuing work on the grounds and building. The new parking lot beside the Grange Hall is finished and in use. Interior work has run into unexpected problems, as so often happens with old buildings (readers will remember, of course, that the hall was built in 1902 and 1903).

The section headed “The Insulation Saga” explains that Grange members are fund-raising to insulate the building. The first step, finished in May, was “to get all the critter droppings cleaned out and disinfected” to protect the ceiling.

An insulation vendor explained that insulating required adding ventilation. Grangers are now seeking someone who can ventilate and insulate the top of the building, as they continue to raise funds to pay that person. Suggestions, volunteers and donations are welcome.

The mailing address is Victor Grange, c/o Roger Shorty, 118 Oakland Road, Fairfield, Maine 04937; the email address is Victorgrange49@gmail.com. The Grange has a Facebook page that includes information on coming events, the second theme of the newsletter.

These include hosting the Fairfield Historical Society’s annual Quilt Show on Saturday, July 10, and Sunday, July 11, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $5 to view more than 50 antique and new quilts. Grange members will provide lunches and snacks.

On Saturday, July 31, from 9 a.m. to noon, Rita Fortin, President of the Clinton and Somerset County extension services, will host a free workshop on canning green beans. She is scheduled to return on Saturday, Aug. 28, same hours, to talk about canning tomatoes. Interested area residents can sign up at the Grange email address above or by contacting Fortin directly at 453-2945 or ritafortin2@gmail.com.

The Pond Meeting House originally had two rooms separated by what Clancey called “a shutter-door attached to the ceiling with iron hooks.” The interior was a single room by 1983, except that in 1930 a corner had been partitioned off to make a kitchen.

Clancey described the interior with its exposed beams and hand-hewn pine floorboards and roof timbers. The meeting house was by then, as it is in 2021, part of the China Friends Camp, founded in 1953 under the auspices of the New England Yearly Meeting of Friends.

What is now the South China Community Church was initially a Friends meeting house also, built in 1884 on the north side of Village Street.

The first church building on the lot, Jones wrote, was the Second Baptist Church’s brick meeting house, built in the 1820s or 1830s. On May 10, 1856, church members approved selling the building. It was moved, and in 1862, they put up a larger wooden building on the lot.

The South China Baptists were active in the prohibition movement in the 1860s and 1870s. On Oct. 1, 1869, Jones wrote, “a liquor man” burned down their church. The Friends later bought the lot for a dollar on condition that they build a house of worship.

The China bicentennial history names the building committee for the new meeting house: five men, one surnamed Philbrook and four surnamed Jones.

The earliest section of the meeting house, Clancey wrote, was a single room in a minimally-decorated, clapboard-sided story-and-a-half building with a pitched cedar-shingled roof, its gable ends on the north and south. There were three windows on each of the long sides and a small vestibule on the south (street) side

About 1900, Clancey wrote, the vestibule was extended across the gable end and four street-facing windows were added. At the west end of the vestibule a square tower not much taller than the building was constructed, with a south-facing door in the base. Another door was added to the east end of the enlarged vestibule.

At that time, the upper part of the tower was shingled rather than clapboarded and was “painted a darker color than the rest of the church,” Clancey wrote. Later (undated) additions included a room behind the tower attached to the original west wall and a small shed that Clancey wrote was a kitchen in 1983.

The interior was remodeled repeatedly. The change Clancey mentioned specifically was the 1970s addition of a stained-glass window parishioners bought from Whittimore Associates, of Needham Heights, Massachusetts.

Meanwhile, the building was home to weekly Friends meetings until the 1930s, when the congregation became too small to support a pastor. In 1935, the bicentennial history says, the Friends proposed uniting village residents in the South China Community Fellowship, which continues active today.

The Friends own the church building. Fellowship members retain their individual religious affiliations, but they cooperate to maintain the building, select a minister and organize and finance community religious and social activities. Current Pastor Paul Harwath has served since 2012, according to the church website.

Clancey’s 1983 application for National Historic Register listing included three other buildings associated with Rufus Jones, who was profiled in the July 30 and August 6, 2020, issues of The Town Line.

Two residential buildings gained individual listings and will be discussed, with a third, in the next article in this series. The third nominee, the South China Public Library across Village Street from the church, was rejected by the keepers of the National Register.

The square story-and-a-half library building was built in 1900, Clancey wrote, with donated materials and local labor. It housed books for a library originally incorporated in 1830. Library association members have described the South China Library as the oldest continuously functioning library in Maine, but not the oldest library (see box).

The first library in the State of Maine (before Maine was a state)

Blue Hill Library

The Blue Hill library, in Hancock County, was organized in 1796 in the local grocery store, with the grocer as the librarian. According to an on-line history, “Overdue fines were six cents a week, with additional fines of two cents per page for spilled drops of oil or tallow.”

The library’s bookplate, which the history site says is still used, was designed by the first Congregational minister in town, Jonathan Fisher (1768-1847; in Blue Hill from 1794 to 1837). Fisher, one of the founders of Bangor Theological Seminary, was also an artist (his self-portrait is on his Wikipedia page), a writer (including local newspaper reporting) who could bind his own books, a scientist, mathematician and surveyor. He built his house and designed and built furniture.

The Blue Hill Library history page explains that lack of interest caused the library to close before the Civil War. After almost 20 years, a new group reorganized it in the 1860s as the Ladies Social Library of Blue Hill.

The ladies met once a week to swap and discuss books over dishes of ice cream. By 1895, Blue Hill had a new town hall and the library had two rooms on the ground floor. The first professional librarian, a Colby College graduate named Anne Hinckley, was hired in or soon after 1930.

In the 1930s, the library had a car that was its bookmobile, used to bring books to remote residents and to students in Blue Hill’s seven elementary schools and George Stevens Academy. The history site says library services included party planning.

Besides Hinckley, two other women are associated with the 20th-century Blue Hill Library, according to the history site.

Adelaide Pearson was responsible for hiring Hinckley and was the driving force behind the first separate library building, a brick structure designed by Augusta architects Bunker and Savage and opened in March 1940. She and Hinckley persuaded the federal Public Works Administration, created to combat the Depression by funding big public works projects, that a library in Blue Hill, Maine, qualified.

An on-line photo shows the ground-breaking for the building, Dec. 19, 1938, with the comment, “It was 12 degrees below zero.”

Dorris Parker was the first full-time Blue Hill librarian. She started as head librarian in 1944 and retired in 1981. An on-line photo, from the 1950s, shows a small, dark-haired woman behind a large, rather cluttered circulation desk that has three panels across the front and two more on back-folded side wings, each with a scene that appears to depict a historical event. Well-filled bookshelves rise on either side of the desk and the office area behind it.

The Blue Hill Library remains active today, in space that was doubled by a $2 million expansion in 2000 and 2001. The expansion provided a children’s room and a community meeting room. The website says the library building typically hosts 450 meetings and 400 library-sponsored events annually.

Clancey had the library building on his nomination list because, he wrote, “Rufus Jones served as library president 1919-1948, the only civic activity with which he was associated.”

Main sources

Grow, Mary M., China Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Churches – Part 3

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Inside view of First Baptist Church, in Waterville.

by Mary Grow

First Baptist Church, Universalist-Unitarian Church in Waterville

First Baptist Church, Waterville, in1907.

Moving up the Kennebec to the city of Waterville, two of its many church buildings are on the National Register of Historic Places: the First Baptist Church, at 1 Park Street (on the northwest side of the intersection with Elm Street, across Elm Street from the Waterville Public Library), and the Universalist-Unitarian Church, at 69 Silver Street, in the north corner of the Y-shaped intersection of Elm and Silver streets.

The First Baptist Church was built in 1826 and listed on the National Register Jan. 2, 1976.

Patricia Brown, the student assistant at the Maine Historic Preservation Commission who prepared the National Register nomination papers, wrote that the church is historically significant as “Waterville’s oldest existing public building and first denominational structure.” Brown used as one of her sources a book now almost 100 years old, Minnie Philbrick’s 1925 1818-1918 Centennial History of the First Baptist Church of Waterville, Maine.

Baptist congregations had been established in towns near Waterville, including China, Clinton, Sidney and Vassalboro, between 1788 and 1806, according to George Dana Boardman Pepper’s chapter on churches in the Waterville Centennial History. Rev. Jeremiah Chaplin (Jan. 2, 1776 – May 7, 1841) organized Waterville’s first Baptist congregation, at his house, on August 27, 1818.

Chaplin came from Massachusetts to Waterville in 1818 as the first President of the Maine Literary and Theological Institute (later Waterville College and then Colby College); he returned to Massachusetts in 1833. Pepper called the Waterville church “the child of the college.”

Kingsbury wrote in his Kennebec County history that of the 20 founding members of the Waterville church, 13 were from Sidney’s First Baptist Church.

Kingsbury probably meant Second Baptist. In her history of Sidney, Alice Hammond explained that in 1818, Sidney’s Second Baptist Church had no pastor, leading 13 members to join with seven from other towns under Chaplin’s leadership. “Second Baptist in Sidney is proud to have been the ‘mother church’ of the First Baptist in Waterville,” Hammond wrote, giving the church a second parent.

Hammond further explained that organizers of the first Baptist church in Sidney, in 1791, named it the Second Vassalboro Church (Sidney did not separate from Vassalboro until 1792). It became First Baptist when Sidney’s second Baptist congregation organized in February 1806, and later West Sidney Baptist.

The early Baptist services in Waterville were held in a 1796 meeting house on the site of the present Waterville City Hall. In 1824, the congregation decided to build their own church.

Historian Brown wrote that in 1824, “it was illegal for a religious group to own property.” (The state legislature eliminated the prohibition in 1901.)

Church members therefore formed the Waterville Baptist Society. State Senator Timothy Boutelle donated the Park Street lot; contractor James Packard, of Readfield, and a three-man building committee designed the building; and Packard built it in 1826.

Pepper wrote that Packard’s contract was for $3,375. The foundation cost another $100 plus a free pew worth $125. Most of the money came from selling pews, Pepper wrote. The new church was dedicated Dec. 6, 1826; but Pepper wrote that heating stoves were not approved until 1832.

Until 1829, the First Baptist Church hired no pastor, depending on Literary and Theological Institute ministers. From 1834 to 1841 its pastor was Rev. Samuel Francis Smith, who had written “America” in 1831, while he was studying at Andover Theological Seminary, in Massachusetts. Smith was simultaneously teaching modern languages at the former Institute, which had become Waterville College on Feb. 5, 1821.

The church building went through changes and additions from the 1840s on. Kingsbury wrote that the church was “repaired and reseated” in 1846. In 1875 there was a major renovation, inside and outside, that Kingsbury said cost $17,000. The work was done under the direction of architect Francis Fassett (who has appeared repeatedly in this series of articles, most recently on June 10 as architect of Augusta’s South Parish Congregational Church).

The 1875 changes included removing a chapel Samuel Redington had paid to have built in 1836 and adding the vestry on the west end.

As the Waterville centennial history went to print in 1902, Pepper wrote that because of the growth of the Sunday School, a building committee was planning another addition.

This idea might not have been carried out, because Brown wrote in the 1975 National Register application that the church was its original size, except for the addition of the vestry on the back, and stood on its original granite foundation.

A two-story wooden building facing east, it had a steeple enclosing the bell and topped by a weathervane. Brown described its architectural style as “a combination…ranging from the Neo-classical revival to the Victorian Era.” Later she called the main entrance Romanesque style.

The many large windows have always been clear glass rather than stained glass. Fassett, Brown wrote, added “window moldings and gable decorations.”

Inside, Brown found that the original pulpit was so tall that the minister “looked straight at the people sitting in the balcony.” It had been lowered before Fassett did the major interior renovation that left only the three-sided balcony (accessed by curving stairways from each side of the vestibule) as originally constructed.

The building was rededicated after the reconstruction, Brown wrote.

Universalist-Unitarian Church, Waterville, in 1910.

Waterville’s second National Register church, the Universalist Unitarian Church at the south end of Elm Street, was built in 1832 and gained historic recognition on Feb. 17, 1978.

The nomination form for the National Register was prepared by Frank A. Beard and Robert L. Bradley, the team who nominated Augusta’s South Parish Church, assisted by intern Kristin Stred. Writing in 1977, they described a “late Federal style meetinghouse with early elements of the Gothic revival.”

The original church on the site was built by a Waterville Universalist congregation that Rev. Sylvanus Cobb organized May 18, 1826. Kingsbury wrote that the first worshippers included 11 people from Waterville, four each from Fairfield and Sidney and one from Winslow.

Members met in Cobb’s home (per Wikipedia) or the “town meetinghouse” (per Beard and Bradley) for the first five years. In 1831, “having matured a plan to erect a church edifice” (Kingsbury), they formally organized as the First Universalist Society in Waterville (Pepper).

At the society’s first official meeting, Nov. 17, 1831, they appointed a six-man building committee headed by Jediah Morrill to have a church built within a year.

Sources agree that Simeon Matthews or Mathews donated part of the lot at the intersection of Silver and Elm streets. Kingsbury cited the record of the Jan. 28, 1833, meeting during which parishioners thanked him for the gift, “valued at $100.”

James Crommett might have given another piece of the lot, but, Kingsbury wrote, the deed got lost, leaving no record of the donor. The church bought the south point of the lot from Crommett for $50.

The Universalist church was finished July 9, 1832. A Universalist Society meeting on Nov. 8, 1832, authorized Morrill to chair another committee to provide furnishings, including a stove.

Inside view of the Universalist-Unitarian Church, in Waterville.

The church was dedicated Jan. 1, 1833. It had 60 pews, Wikipedia says, and cost $4,100 ($4,200, according to Kingsbury and Pepper). Congregants raised another $360 to buy a bell, and Morrill donated a $350 clock and paid to have it wound and kept in working order. Kingsbury called it the town clock.

Morrill had earlier made a generous contribution to the building fund. Kingsbury wrote that when he died in December 1872, after more than 50 years as “the acknowledged leader of the society,” he willed $3,000 to the church, the interest to be used to further its activities.

Beard and Bradley learned that in 1833, Waterville officials agreed to pay someone not more than $30 a year to ring the church bell three times a day. They further agreed the town would maintain the area in front of the church, to be used as a park.

Kingsbury said the first organ was added in 1852 (Pepper wrote that there had been at least one before then). In 1854, the congregation spent $600 on repairs. In 1879, Susan Hoag, Morrill’s niece, donated another $500 for repairs.

In 1894 a chimney fire caused considerable damage. George H. Ware offered to pay for building a basement farther north on the lot and moving the church onto it. The entrance was changed to face south as part of the project (there is no mention of which way it originally faced; this writer guesses it had faced east).

Pewholders voted $1,500 for repairs, in addition to Ware’s donated work. The renovated church got a new organ, donated stained-glass windows and a new bell (for $150 plus the old bell, by then cracked, according to Beard and Bradley).

Mean­while, the Unitarians had built a church on Main Street in Waterville in the 1860s. They invited the Univer­salists to meet there while damage from the 1894 fire was repaired.

Neither group was wealthy, leading to 20th-century merger talks. In 1952, Wikipedia says, the Waterville Unitarians and Fairfield’s Church of the Good Shepherd joined the Universalists, creating the Universalist Unitarian Church of Waterville.

Writing in 1977, Beard and Bradley called the church building “a well proportioned Federal-Gothic Revival transitional structure” and a significant Waterville landmark. They described a rectangular wooden building on a granite foundation. Each side wall had five bays, each bay with a tall stained-glass window under a louvered Gothic-type arch.

The projecting entrance with double doors, each with six panels, had stained-glass windows above it and on both sides. On either side of the front projection were more stained-glass windows, the lower ones topped by “louvered arches in the Gothic manner.”

Each side of the square central tower had a clock face with Roman numerals. Above the tower, an octagonal belfry had a “delicate wooden balustrade” and “eight open Gothic arches.” The belfry roof was an octagonal dome topped with a cross.

By 2008, Wikipedia says, the bell tower was so weakened by age that it was removed. Tower, clock and lightning rod were sold at auction, and a new tower was put up by Christmas Eve 2008.

Kristin Stred

Kristin Stred

Kristin Stred, the Maine Historic Preservation Society intern who worked on the application for National Register of Historic Places listing for Waterville’s Universalist Unitarian Church, is a Lewiston native and Winthrop High School graduate now living near Seattle, Washington.

After a college major in Chinese history, she graduated from Harvard Law School in 1984 and worked in the corporate world, specializing in mergers and acquisitions. She switched to working as a corporate recruiter, and in 2012 formed Stred Executive Search, LLC, a firm that finds qualified and experienced new members for executive boards.

The motto on the firm’s website: “We promise you: ‘No empty suits.'”

Stred describes the 1977 summer internship researching and writing at Maine Historic Preservation as “a good fit,” and adds “Frank Beard and Robert Bradley were supportive mentors that summer.”

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Churches – Part 2

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The Fuller-Weston House in Augusta.

by Mary Grow

In the June 10 issue of The Town Line, readers learned about three of the four Augusta church buildings that have gained recognition on the National Register of Historic Places. The fourth, and an associated building, are described herein.

The building that used to be St. Mark’s Church, at 9 Summer Street, in Augusta, was built in 1886 and, Kingsbury wrote in his Kennebec County history, consecrated Feb. 2, 1887. It was the second home for an Episcopal congregation organized in 1840; the first was a small wooden church Wikipedia says was a little north of Lithgow Library. Kingsbury said the first building was consecrated July 20, 1842, and “greatly enlarged” in 1858.

St. Mark’s Episcopal Church postcard in 1900.

The 1886 Summer Street church cost $40,000, according to Kingsbury. The old one was sold to John W. Fogler, who in turn sold it to Dr. George W. Martin, who built “a fine residence” on the lot in 1891.

Rev. Walker Gwynne was St. Mark’s rector from Jan. 17, 1884, to at least 1892, when Kingsbury’s history was published. He was the author of a Manual of Christian Instruction, According to the Church Catechism, Adapted to the Christian Year, and in Four Uniform Grades. The Manual was published in London and reprinted in New York. It has an introduction by the Very Rev. R. W. Church, M.A., D.C.L., Dean of St. Paul’s, London; and an endorsement by John Fredericton, Metropolitan of Canada.

Architect Richard Michell Upjohn designed St. Mark’s granite Gothic Revival building with its slate roofs. The main section, with a steep gable roof topped with crosses, has a large window, in 10 sections, under a pointed arch in the east end.

Near the east end, an almost-square lower annex with another steeply-pitched roof has a round window above three arched ones in its south face. A brick chimney rising well above the roofline marks its western junction with the center of the main building, by the main entrance.

Near the west end, a tall square tower with what look like louvers in its upper level rises to a four-sided roof with a cross atop its peak. Wikipedia says the belfry is in the tower.

Richard Michell Upjohn (1828-1903) was the son of a British emigree architect, Richard Upjohn. The son joined his father’s firm in New York in 1853 and later became his father’s partner.

St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in 2013.

Wikipedia says his earliest commission was probably New York City’s 1853-1854 Madison Square Presbyterian Church. He designed many other churches, working mostly on the east coast but doing an Episcopal church in La Grange, Texas, in 1855. Other buildings he designed included the First National Bank, in Salt Lake City, Utah (1871), and the Connecticut State Capitol, in Hartford, Connecticut (1871-1878).

Maine Historic Preservation Commission architects Frank A. Beard (who also did the South Parish application in 1980; see the June 10 issue of The Town Line) and Roger G. Reed wrote the May 1984 application for National Register status for St. Mark’s. They wrote that as of that spring, the church interior was “unaltered since its construction.”

With evident pleasure, they described particularly striking aspects. “Large marble columns with stone palm leaf capitals support lancet arched arcading flanking the nave. …The pulpit is panelled wood with a hand-wrought copper railing shaped in a floral motif. The ceiling of the chancel is painted with original stenciling.”

They also mentioned the “screens carved with openwork Gothic tracery” and the stained-glass window brought from the earlier church and placed above the choir.

The building deserved historic listing because it was an outstanding example of Gothic architecture, the two historians wrote. “No other church in the area conveys a similar rusticity and none has a more carefully worked interior.”

Wikipedia says the Saint Mark’s congregation supported community services, like groups supplying food and clothing, and musical events. The latter included an annual organ concert that from 2010 was named the Marilyn Tedesco Memorial Concert, to honor a former organist and music director.

In January 2015, the St. Mark’s congregation began worshiping in Prince of Peace Lutheran Church, because they could no longer afford to maintain their own building. They put St. Mark’s church on the market in 2016. Social services continued to operate from the 1908 parish house, according to a Dec. 22, 2014, Central Maine newspapers story by Craig Crosby.

The former St. Mark’s Church was added to the National Register on July 19, 1984. The parish house was not included in the application.

However, the building at 11 Summer Street that served as the rectory for St. Mark’s Church has a separate listing as the Fuller-Weston House. Historians Beard and Reed filled out its application in January 1984 and it was added to the National Register on March 22, 1984.

The two-story wooden house with a Federal-style door in the center of its south-facing, five-bay front is just west of the former church. Built in 1818, it is recognized not only for its architecture, but also for three early owners.

The first owner was Connecticut-born lawyer and judge Henry Weld Fuller (1784-1841) who, Wikipedia says, bought most of the land that is now downtown Augusta. He married Esther Gould (1785-1866) in 1806, and they had nine children, including Henry Weld Fuller, Jr. (1810-1889), who in turn begat Henry Weld Fuller III (1839-1863).

The senior Fuller became a wealthy man as the value of his land increased. Beard and Reed wrote that he represented the Plymouth Proprietors (the British-chartered landholders who owned part of Maine) as a lawyer, served in “the General Court” (presumably the Massachusetts General Court before 1820) and was a Maine Militia Colonel and “eventually” a Kennebec County judge of probate.

In 1826 or 1827, Fuller sold the house to Nathan Weston, Jr. (1782-1872). Weston was one of the original (1820) associate justices on the Maine Supreme Judicial Court and in 1834 became Chief Justice, serving until 1841.

Weston and his wife, Paulina Bass (Cony) (1787-1857) had four sons and four daughters. Fuller’s son Frederic married Weston’s daughter Catherine, and in 1833 Catherine bore a son, Melville Weston Fuller (1833-1910).

Frederic and Catherine divorced shortly afterwards, and Melville Fuller lived with his grandfather Weston in the Fuller-Weston house until he left for Bowdoin College, from which he graduated in 1853. Two years later he graduated from Harvard Law School; in 1888, President Grover Cleveland appointed him Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

The controversy over Fuller’s statue, 2013-2021

Fuller statue

In their application for inclusion of the Fuller-Weston house on the National Register of Historic Places, historians Frank A. Beard and Roger G. Reed wrote that Supreme Court Chief Justice Melville Weston Fuller was “highly respected as a jurist.” They mentioned several important issues that came to the Supreme Court during Fuller’s tenure, including income taxes and immigration.

They did not mention “Plessy v. Ferguson”, the 1896 case that created what became known as the “separate but equal” doctrine for United States white and colored citizens. In 1954, the “Brown v. Board of Education” ruling overturned “Plessy”.

Fuller was part of the seven-man Court majority. (Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent contained the statement that “the Constitution is color-blind.”)

In Augusta 2013, a bronze statue of Fuller was erected in front of the historic Kennebec County Courthouse, on State Street, in Augusta.

Commissioned and funded by Robert Fuller, Jr., an indirect descendant of the former Chief Justice, and approved by the Kennebec County Commissioners a year and a half earlier, the statue was sculpted by Forest Hart, of Monroe. Tony Masciadri of S. Masciadri & Sons, in Hallowell, provided the granite base.

Kennebec Journal reporter Betty Adams attended the installation. The statue shows Fuller “seated and robed and looking much like Mark Twain” on the “front lawn of the Kennebec County Courthouse, welcoming all,” she wrote for the Aug. 14 issue of the newspaper.

Among those at the ceremony were Maine Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Leigh Saufley (who retired in 2020) and Daniel Wathen, Chief Justice before Saufley. Adams quoted from Saufley’s speech, which did refer to “Plessy”.

After calling Fuller ” ‘an Augusta boy [who] made good,’ ” Saufley “praised his administrative skills and emphasis on collegiality” among his Supreme Court colleagues. She then called “Plessy” “one of the [Supreme Court’s] most reviled decisions.”

Fuller’s joining the majority in the case “is a good reminder that respected, capable people can do something that is so flatly wrong,” Adams quoted Saufley as saying.

By the summer of 2020, the statue became controversial. A series of Kennebec Journal reports by Rob Montana and Jessica Lowell followed developments.

The Maine Judicial Branch, in an Aug. 5 letter signed by Maine Supreme Judicial Court Acting Chief Justice Andrew Mead (Saufley’s interim successor), asked Kennebec County Commissioners to consider removing the statue. Mead wrote that the “Plessy” decision was not consistent with state values, and that it was inappropriate for the Fuller statue to be “the monument that members of the public see as they approach the courthouse.”

Kennebec County Commissioners held a hearing on the future of the statue in December 2020. In February 2021, they voted to have it removed, and created an advisory commission to suggest where it might go.

On April 20, the Commissioners made the advisory commission’s role superfluous by voting unanimously to accept Robert Fuller’s offer to take back his gift. Commissioners “sold” it to him for $1 and gave him 12 months to remove and rehome it, at his expense.

Reporter Lowell wrote that advisory committee members hoped the statue would be placed where its “educational value” would be preserved. They had suggested giving it to the Maine State Museum, but Lowell said Museum Director Bernard Fishman said the museum had no money to buy it or to store it while renovations to the museum building are finished.

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Websites, miscellaneous

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Churches – Part 1

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Unitarian Church

by Mary Grow

Augusta South Parish Congo, All Souls UU, St. Mary’s Catholic

Having finished summary histories of Grange organizations in the central Kennebec Valley in The Town Line issues beginning April 8, and a two-part description of aspects of the Goodwill-Hinckley School, in Fairfield, this writer now turns to a different type of organization, the church. The focus will be not on the organizations, but on the buildings they acquired or constructed that have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Why not the organizations? For three reasons: there are too many of them; many have complicated histories of relocations, schisms and mergers; and most have been covered in other histories, of religion, of specific religions and of Maine towns and cities.

According to randomly selected local histories, 19th and 20th century denominations in central Kennebec Valley towns and cities, most with at least one church building sometime somewhere, included Adventists (First Adventists and Second Adventists), Baptists, Catholics or Roman Catholics, Christians, Christian Unionists, Church of Christ, Church of the Nazarene, Church of World Brotherhood, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, Free or Free Will or Freewill Baptists, Full Gospel, Mennonites, Methodists, Society of Friends or Quakers, Spiritualists, Unitarians and Universalists (the last two separately or merged).

South Parish Congregational Church and Parish House, 2013. Augusta, Maine

Church buildings in the Central Kennebec Valley that have qualified for the National Register number fewer than a dozen. Four are in Augusta: South Parish (Congregational), 9 Church Street; All Souls (Unitarian), 70 State Street; St. Mary’s (Roman Catholic), 41 Western Avenue; and St. Mark’s (Episcopal), 9 Summer Street.

The South Parish Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, was built in 1865, as the new home of a congregation established in 1773. The church and its Parish House were added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 22, 1980.

Kingsbury, in his 1892 Kennebec County history, wrote that Congregational Church members started their first meeting house in 1782 in Augusta’s future Market Square, while Augusta was part of Hallowell. The building was used beginning in 1783, though it was not finished until 1785.

When the towns separated in 1797, the meeting house was included in Augusta’s south parish. The original meeting house was used for 26 years. When Kingsbury wrote, it had been moved repeatedly and was then on Winthrop Street and had become the Friends’ chapel.

A second meeting house was started in July 1807 and dedicated December 20, 1809. Kingsbury quoted a description of its location: on Judge North’s land, near a grammar school, “on the east side of the street leading to the Court House.” This church was struck by lightning July 11, 1864, and burned down.

An on-line site says the Sunday after the fire the congregation, led by minister Alexander McKenzie (1830-1914), decided to rebuild, with non-flammable materials. McKenzie graduated from Harvard College and Andover Theological Seminary; he was ordained in Augusta and served at South Parish from 1861 until he transferred to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1867 for the rest of his life.

The church hired Portland architect Francis H. Fassett (1823-1908), who also designed the Williams Block and the Whitehouse Block in the Water Street Historic District (see the Feb. 4 and Feb. 18 issues of The Town Line). His plan was approved within three months, and the new church was dedicated on July 5, 1866.

The Gothic Revival building is of granite with a slate roof. The south-facing front is in three sections.

On the west end, a tall tower of three vertical sections, with large windows set in Gothic arches, houses the belfry. The tower is topped by an octagonal steeple. On the east end is a shorter three-story tower with no steeple.

Between the two towers, the main section features a front entrance with recessed doors set in another Gothic arch. Above the entrance is a tall stained-glass window; and above that, as the building rises to a point, a small round window.

Frank A. Beard and Robert Bradley, who wrote the Maine Historic Preservation Commission’s 1980 application for historic register listing, said the building’s side walls each have six bays. On the ground floor, they are separated by buttresses and contain stained-glass windows.

On the upper level, “each bay is a pair of recessed lancets below labelled lintels.” Wikipedia defines a lancet, in architecture, as “a type of pointed arch,” and says lancet windows were common in 13th-century Gothic architecture in England. A lintel is the beam that covers the top of a window or door and bears the weight of the wall above the opening.

There is a large rose window in the end of the sanctuary, and “a large pipe organ, beautifully decorated, which was installed when the church was built.” E. and G. G. Hook, of Boston, built the organ.

(The Hook company, formed by brothers Elias Hook and George Greenleaf Hook, built more than 2,000 pipe organs between 1827 and 1935. The Hooks retired in 1881; their partner, Frank Hastings, continued the business.)

The Parish House was added in 1889 and dedicated in 1890. It is a story and a half wooden building designed by Augusta architect James H. Cochrane in the Stick Style, which Beard and Bradley wrote is “comparatively rare in Maine.”

In 1963 a single-story addition and passage connected the parish house to the church. Its slender windows in pointed arches match the church windows. Beard and Bradley wrote that although the addition was comparatively new, “its low profile and simple design are no detraction” from architectural significance of the buildings.

The South Parish Congregational Church hosts the Amy Buxton Pet Pantry, which provides cat and dog food to area residents and useful information about pet care on its Facebook page (and welcomes donations). Summer hours start June 12; the pantry will be open from 9 to 10 a.m. the second Saturday of each month.

All Souls Church

The former All Souls Church, at 70 State Street, in the northwest corner of the intersection with Oak Street, is the next oldest of the four Augusta church buildings on the National Register. It was built in 1879, Wikipedia says, as the third place of worship for a Unitarian congregation that started in 1825.

Kingsbury wrote that the first Unitarian church building, dedicated Oct. 18, 1827, was Bethlehem Church, on the east side of the Kennebec River, where the Cony Flatiron Building (formerly Cony High School) now stands. The second, on Oak Street, was dedicated Oct. 17, 1833.

The third All Souls building is another example of Stick Style architecture. The architect was Thomas William Silloway (1828-1910) of Massachusetts, who was also, from 1862 to 1867, a Universalist minister.

Silloway’s architectural specialty was church buildings; he is said to have designed more than 400, “more church buildings than any other individual in America.” An on-line source says he was commissioned to supervise restoring six churches in Charleston, South Carolina, after an 1886 earthquake.

He also designed school and college buildings; libraries; asylums; the Vermont State House, in Montpelier; town halls and other public buildings; and private homes. Wikipedia credits him with designing Memorial Hall, in Oakland, Maine, built in 1870.

The Brighton Allston (Massachusetts) Historical Society published on line an article about Silloway by historian Dr. William P. Marchione. Marchione wrote that Silloway was only 29 when he was hired to rebuild the Vermont State House after a fire. He quotes later and more famous architect Stanford White (1853-1906) as calling the building “the finest example of Greek Revival architecture in the country.”

However, Marchione wrote, Silloway’s insistence on using the most expensive materials led to his being fired from the project before it was finished. The University of Vermont’s giving him an honorary M. A. in 1862 might have been intended as compensation, Marchione suggested.

The All Souls building is no longer used as a church. The web page of Augusta’s Unitarian Universalist Community Church says that “the All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church (traditionally Unitarian) and the Winthrop Street Unitarian Universalist Church (traditionally Unive­rsalist) consolidated to form the Unitarian Universalist Community Church in 1992.”

The UUCC’s main building is at 69 Winthrop Street. In the fellowship hall, the website says, are paintings by local artist David Sillsby, including one of “All Souls Unitarian Church building on State Street. (The building is still standing without the steeple.)”

Cally Stevens, “a long-time member of UUCC from All Souls Church (deceased)” donated the painting, the web page says.

All Souls Church was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on Jan. 31, 1978.

St. Mary’s Catholic Church

The newest of the four Augusta churches on the National Register is St. Mary of the Assumption, a Roman Catholic Church at 41 Western Avenue (almost across from the Augusta post office). The church was built in 1926 and granted historic status on June 12, 1987.

In nominating St. Mary’s for recognition, historian Kirk F. Mohney (now Director of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission) said “the handsome and richly decorated Gothic building” was “among the most architecturally significant religious edifices in Augusta.”

St. Mary’s was designed by O’Connell and Shaw of Boston, whose partner Timothy G. O’Connell (1868-1965) designed many other Catholic school and church buildings in Maine, including St. Augustine, on Northern Avenue, in Augusta, and Sacred Heart, on Pleasant Street, in Waterville. The Louis Milo Company, of Lewiston, built the church.

The St. Mary’s congregation had two earlier wooden churches. When they first organized in 1836, they bought the Unitarians’ former Bethlehem Church, supplanted three years earlier.

In 1845, Thomas B. Lynch wrote in Kingsbury’s history, Rev. Patrick Carraher bought land and built a new church on State Street, dedicated September 8, 1846. The Bethlehem building was sold to Cony Female Academy.

Ground-breaking for the present gray granite building was May 26, 1926, and the building was dedicated May 30, 1927, by the Right Reverend Bishop John Gregory Murray (1877-1956), of Portland. Its cornerstone has two dates, 1836 and 1926.

Mohney wrote that the long nave has space for 850 people. He described many of the building’s features – the bell tower on the southeast with its “richly detailed louvered belfry” and its “image of Mary Queen of Peace” below eight pinnacles at the base of an octagonal spire; the memorial windows on both sides of the nave; the coffered ceilings and the octagonal pulpit.

Other on-line sources join Mohney in praising the elaborate entrance, with the wooden doors inset from “an ornate buttressed porch with corner spirelets and an image of the Immaculate Conception.”

St. Mary of the Assumption remains in use as a house of worship, part of St. Michael’s Parish.

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Goodwill-Hinckley – Part 2

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Moody Chapel

by Mary Grow

Averill school, Prescott admin, Kent woodworking, Carnegie library

The Goodwill-Hinckley campus has more buildings of historic interest than there was space to describe in the May 20 The Town Line article, including a third school included in the boundaries of the National Register area.

The Averill School, later Averill High School and now Averill/Alfond School, dates from 1930. Originally a two-story Georgian Revival brick building, with chimneys on either end, it acquired two wings and more chimneys on its new ends.

After listening to school founder George W. Hinckley’s requests for a new school nearer the center of campus, Keyes Fibre executive Dr. George C. Averill (1869-1954) and his second wife, Frances Mosher Averill (1873-1962), provided money for the school, and remained important supporters of Goodwill-Hinckley for years. (Averill also bought, in 1944, the Great Pond property for the Boy Scouts to build Camp Bomazeen, in Belgrade.)

Later, Maine philanthropists Harold and Bibby Alfond supported redoing the Averill School interior and adding a middle school; the building was rededicated in September 2000. The school’s online information says it is coed, serving students in grades six through 12, with a 4:1 student:teacher ratio.

The Averill family also provided Averill Cottage. An on-line photo caption relates its story: on Jan. 2, 1927, during a service in Moody Chapel, Hinckley announced a gift of $20,000 to build another girls’ home and name it in honor of Leah S. Averill, George Averill’s mother. The donor was identified as Averill’s second wife, Frances B. Mosher, of Bangor. Maintenance Superintendent James Tuttle built the two-and-a-half-story wooden Colonial Revival residence with its spacious porch; it was dedicated Sept. 18, 1927.

Frances Moody, of Bath, mentioned in the May 20 article as the funder of the Moody School building, made the donation that led to construction of Moody Memorial Chapel. The stone chapel was built in 1897 and expanded in 1927, after the congregation outgrew the original space.

The architect was Wilfred Mansur (1855-1921), described as the most prominent architect in Bangor in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Most of his work was done in Bangor, including the Penobscot County courthouse, the Mount Hope Chapel and Office in Mount Hope Cemetery and several buildings in Bangor’s historic district.

Moody Chapel is in Romanesque style, which Mansur used on other buildings as well. It features arched windows and a square bell tower. Two stained-glass windows honoring Frances and Mary Moody face east and west, one showing flowers and the other fruit.

The windows were created by Cyrus Hamlin Farley (1839-1934), of Portland. A web page from Church on the Cape UMC, a Cape Porpoise church with six Farley windows, says Farley began a career making nautical instruments; switched to eyeglasses; and then switched again to windows, ornamental and ordinary.

Goodwill School closed in 1909 after the Maine attorney general found its effort to become a college preparatory school violated its charter and state funds were withdrawn. Leaders reorganized and raised money and the school reopened.

After the reorganization, a 2011 Harold Alfond Foundation gift made it possible for Kennebec Valley Community College to acquire part of the Goodwill-Hinckley campus, including Moody Chapel. The college, the foundation and “a team of preservation professionals” went to work to restore the building.

As with the Moody School, extensive reconstruction was needed, including “reattachment of veneer stones to the wall core,” rebuilding “the two buttresses at the front of the building,” and restoring the bell tower from lobby to roof.

Carnegie Library

Goodwill-Hinckley’s Carnegie Library was designed by Albert Randolph Ross (1868-1948), built in 1906 and 1907 and dedicated May 29, 1907, according to Wikipedia’s list of Ross’s works. The Carnegie Corporation of New York donated $15,000 in 1905 for the building.

The brick and granite building is in Classical style. Photos on line show tall pillars flanking a central entrance, with a large dome over the center section and a chimney at the end of each wing. There are basement windows below tall main-floor windows.

An on-line site explains that Hinckley always realized that his school needed a library. As soon as he started it in 1889 he began soliciting books, and within a few years had 150.

By 1904 the library had grown to 5,000 volumes. The on-line site says on New Year’s Eve 1904 the original Moody School (built in 1895; see the May 20 issue of The Town Line, which did not include this recently-discovered information) burned down and the books were lost.

When Hinckley started rebuilding in the summer of 1905, he sought funding from Andrew Carnegie, leading to the grant that allowed construction of the Carnegie Library.

Architect Ross was born in Connecticut, son of architect John Wesley Ross (1830-1914), he practiced in Buffalo and New York City before moving in 1901 to what Wikipedia calls Negro Island off Boothbay Harbor. Some of his many other works include the Pittsfield Public Library (on the National Register of Historic Places) and the Old Town Public Library, both dated 1904.

(A July 27, 2020, letter to the editor of the Boothbay Register, signed by six couples who made up the Negro Island Property Owners Association, announced the island’s name had been changed, by unanimous vote, to Oak Island. The original name dated to the mid-1700s, the letter said, and had been making the island’s residents “increasingly uncomfortable.” The new name was chosen because of numerous oak trees and as a symbol of “strength, endurance and serenity.”)

The first Goodwill-Hinckley librarian was Hinckley’s sister, Jane E. Hinckley. (She was also the first Matron, the first office employee, and the organizer and first director of the boys’ choir, among other roles.) The on-line site mentioned above as a source of the library’s history says the library’s collection had expanded to 12,000 volumes by the time she died in February 1914.

The Goodwill-Hinckley Library closed in 2008. Recently, it has reopened with grants and donations paying for renovations and updates. Like other contemporary libraries, Goodwill-Hinckley’s now offers high-speed internet service, a 3D printer and other contemporary technological features.

The Prescott Memorial Administration Building was designed by New York architect Edgar A. Josselyn and built in 1916. The application to add the campus to the National Register of Historic Places gives the additional dates 1921 and 1922, and one on-line source says the original building burned.

The two-story brick building is in Georgian Renaissance style. On-line photos dated 1916 and 1926 each show a square three-story central tower with an arched window above the entrance and above that level an impressive wooden cupola. The square bottom of the cupola has four clock faces; above them, two receding round towers with windows are topped by a small golden dome and a weathervane.

An on-line slideshow says Portland-based landscape architect Carl Rust Parker (1882-1966) laid out Prescott Drive, a main road through the campus, and sited the Prescott building. He explained to Hinckley that the building should be “in a commanding position, and be easily accessible from the railroad, highway and the rest of the campus.”

Building and (presumably) roadway were named in honor of Amos L. Prescott (1853-1926). Born in South Berwick and later moving to Passaic, New Jersey, Prescott was a successful manufacturer of stove polish. He served on the board of Good Will Homes and donated money for the building.

The single-story brick Kent Woodworking Shop named in the 1986 application for Historic Register listing is another of Josselyn’s Georgian Renaissance buildings, built in 1919. On-line information is lacking.

The woodworking shop might have been successor to the 1903 Quincy Manual Training Building, where students from Goodwill and from outside, mostly boys, learned “carpentry, drafting, printing, and metal work.” The building now houses the L. C. Bates Museum (see the May 20 issue of The Town Line).

George Walter Hinckley

George Walter Hinckley

George Walter Hinckley (1853-1950), a Connecticut native trained as a minister and a teacher, wanted to help underprivileged and troubled youngsters. An on-line history describes his seeing another child arrested for trying to steal from a lunch pail because he was starving. As a teen-ager, Hinckley persuaded his parents to take in an orphan boy.

By 1889 Hinckley was in Maine, “doing fieldwork for the American Sunday School Union of Philadelphia.” He bought the 125-acre Isaac Chase farm, in Fairfield, owned by former Senator Margaret Chase Smith’s grandparents. The farm became the basis of Goodwill-Hinckley, and Hinckley devoted most of the rest of his life to raising money to support and expand it.

In addition to his sister, Jane Hinckley, filling many roles, Hinckley’s older son, Walter Palmer (1885-1963) succeeded his father as manager in 1919; and his younger daughter, Faith Jayne (1891- 1987) worked at the school.

Walter’s daughter Harriet married Donald Price, whose parents had been school employees, and the younger couple also worked there.

The present campus offers a variety of walking trails, a bird sanctuary, an arboretum, an artificial pond, a picnic area and gardening and farming spaces, including greenhouses. Located on the campus are:

  • The Maine Academy of Natural Sciences, Maine’s first charter high school, emphasizing agriculture, forestry and environmental science, some of whose students live in on-campus housing;
  • The Glenn Stratton Learning Center, a day school for students in kindergarten through 12th grade whose “significant social, emotional and behavioral problems” make public school difficult for them;
  • The Roundel Residential Center, providing “safe and supportive housing with specialized support services” for people in need aged from 12 to 21; and
  • The College Step-Up Program, providing housing and support for high-school graduates or GED (General Education Diploma) holders as they work toward a community college degree or certification.

The Goodwill-Hinckley website, provides a telephone number – 207-238-4000 – and an email address –info@gwh.org. It shows a map of trails and monuments on campus and invites people to schedule a visit. The name Goodwill-Hinckley refers to an organization as well as the physical property; donations are welcome.

Carnegie Libraries

Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) was born in Scotland, emigrated to the United States when he was 12, invested wisely and became for a time the richest man in America, even richer than John D. Rockefeller. He was noted for giving away almost all of his fortune through foundations and organizations that supported the arts, science, education, world peace and other causes.

A “Carnegie library” is a library built with financial assistance from a Carnegie fund. Wikipedia says between 1883 and 1929 Carnegie money helped build 2,509 libraries world-wide, including 1,689 in the United States. Others were in places as distant as South Africa, New Zealand, Mauritius and Fiji.

Maine’s 20 Carnegie libraries were funded between 1901 and 1912, with the exception of $2,500 awarded in 1897 to finish the Gardiner Library. The most common grant in Maine was $10,000; the most generous was Lewiston’s $60,000 in 1901. The state’s total came to $311,450.

Of the 20 libraries, 18 were or are public; Goodwill-Hinckley’s and the University of Maine at Orono’s are categorized as academic. Eighteen of the 20 are still libraries, including Goodwill-Hinckley, Waterville, Oakland and Pittsfield.

Freeport’s Main Street library was replaced in 1997 and is now home to a private business. UMO’s Carnegie Hall houses the Virtual Environment and Multimodal Interaction (VEMI) Laboratory.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Granges – Part 7

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Charles Moody School.

by Mary Grow

Hinckley Grange

Last week’s article was on the two Fairfield Grange organizations, still-active Victor Grange, in Fairfield Center, and no-longer-active Hinckley Grange, with its Hall across the Kennebec River from Fairfield, in Clinton. There is one more connection between the Grange and the town of Fairfield, a connection that brings us back to the National Register of Historic Places.

Maine State Grange voted at its 22nd meeting, held in Bangor in 1895, to raise money to build and equip a “cottage” for the new “Girls’ Farm” at what was then Good Will Homes, in Hinckley, one of Fairfield’s original seven villages.

Good Will Homes, for a while Goodwill Home-School-Farm and now Goodwill-Hinckley, is a charitable organization dedicated to helping orphaned and at-risk children and young adults. Its multi-building campus stretches along about two miles of Route 201 between Nye’s Corner to the south and Pishon’s or Pishons Ferry to the north.

Connecticut native George Walter Hinckley (1853-1950) founded the institution in 1889 as a home for boys, with the girls’ division added not long afterward. By the time Hinckley died, Wikipedia says, the school owned 3,000 acres, had 45 buildings and was serving thousands of young people.

Grange Cottage, 1911.

The original Grange Cottage was dedicated on Dec. 20, 1897, according to an on-line source. The building burned in 1912 and was promptly replaced. On-line photos on the mainememory site, from the L. C. Bates Museum collection, include a 1908 photo of the first cottage and a 1912 photo of the second cottage.

Both buildings were two full stories high with third-floor windows in front and side gables. Each had an open front porch and appeared to have a basement, though in the 1912 photo the foundation is hidden by the snow around the building.

The 1912 building was designed by Augusta architect, Charles Fletcher. It was larger than the first one, and the larger third-floor windows imply more usable space in the gables. The front porch wrapped around part of one side.

(Charles Fletcher also designed the 1890 Doughty Block, at 265 Water Street, in Augusta. See the Feb. 10 issue of The Town Line.)

The second Grange Cottage burned in 1987 and was replaced by a third building.

According to the 2009 Journal of Proceedings of the One Hundred Thirty Sixth Annual Convention of the Maine State Grange, Goodwill-Hinckley had just discontinued its residential program and the use of Grange Cottage. The state Grange’s Committee on Women’s Activities was holding money intended for the building, which Goodwill-Hinckley owned; the meeting report says the money would be “redirected if the program does not start up again.”

Good Will Cottage, 1940.

Grange Cottage is in the section of the Goodwill-Hinckley campus described in the application for National Register listing (completed in November 1986; the property was added Jan. 9, 1987). The area designated as historic includes 33 buildings (two are complexes of buildings), “the original historic core” of the Hinckley Home-School-Farm, on about 525 acres.

Martin Stream, a major tributary that drains northern Fairfield into the Kennebec, divides the historically significant area. The application says the main campus, including the first cottages for boys, is south of the stream; the area where the first girls’ cottages were built is north of it.

Historian Frank Beard, writing the application for the Maine Historic Preservation Commis­sion, explained the significance of Goodwill-Hinckley in two ways. Socially, he wrote, it was “an early home,” perhaps the first in the United States, for “indigent and homeless children.” Arch­i­tecturally, its buildings, constructed between 1889 and 1930, “represent an important concentration of period buildings.”

The description of Grange Cottage in the application is of the 1913 building, the one that burned soon after the campus was added to the National Register.

Another among the 33 buildings is on the National Register of Historic Places separately, the L. C. Bates Museum, listed Oct. 4, 1978 (see below).

Carnegie Library.

The other buildings include three schools, (Charles E.) Moody (built in 1905-1906), Edwin Gould (built in 1926-27) and (George C.) Averill (built in 1930); Moody Memorial Chapel (built in 1897 and enlarged in 1927); Carnegie Library (built in 1906-1907); Prescott Memorial Administration Building (built in 1916 and substantially remodeled in 1921-22); Kent Woodworking Shop (built in 1919); and residential buildings.

The earliest residential building is Golden Rule Cottage, designed by architect Henry Dexter, of Dexter, and built in 1891. Beard described it as a two-and-a-half-story Queen Anne style wood-frame building with a “veranda” and a “rear porch with fan-shaped brackets.”

The newest residence on the list, Pike Cottage, dates from 1935 (and is the only building in the historic area constructed after 1930). Colonial Revival style, wooden, two and a half stories, it has a gable roof and an east-side veranda.

Beard called three cottages, Gifford House, Hinckley House and Price House, part of “teachers’ row.” They were all built in 1904, presumably as faculty housing.

Also in the historic area are Easler Cottage and a cluster of buildings identified as Easler Farm. The late-19th-century Easler Farm includes two wooden barns, a metal-sided animal barn and a garage.

Beard described Easler Cottage, built in 1900, as Queen Anne style, two-and-a-half stories, with a “pedimented veranda supported on turned posts with corner brackets and spindle work.” He listed with the cottage a story-and-a-half barn with a gable roof and a cupola.

Raising the bell to the tower of Prescott Building in 1915.

The sole nameless building listed in the application is a story-and-a-half mid-19th-century wood frame “house.”

The L. C. Bates Museum is in the 1903 Quincey Building, designed by Lewiston architect William Robinson Miller (1866-1929). The brick building is an example of the elaborate Romanesque architecture in which he specialized.

The application for National Register listing mentions the building’s “hipped roof, dormers, recessed round-arched entry, [and] symmetrical round stairwell towers on principal (east) elevation.” A Wikipedia article adds its “distinctive terracotta egg and dart ornamentation, and arched windows.

Inside, the museum has 32 Maine dioramas painted by American Impressionist Charles Daniel Hubbard (1876-1951); impressive natural history collections, from mammals to minerals; and Native American baskets, archaeological artifacts and other Maine historical items.

The Moody School, architect Miller’s earlier building on the campus, honors Charles Eckley Moody, of Bath. A Goodwill-Hinckley web page says Hinckley visited Moody’s two sisters, Mary and Frances, in 1894, a year after Moody died. The visit reminded them that their late brother had favored Hinckley’s project, so they donated $25,000 to build the school. Dedicated Jan. 1, 1896, it was the first brick building on campus.

(The Rev. Albert Teele Dunn, D. D., is quoted as calling the dedication “one of the proudest, happiest days” in Hinckley’s life. Dunn later was honored in Portland by naming Dunn Memorial Church after him, because he organized its congregation shortly before he died in 1904. The church later became Central Square Baptist Church and is now Deering Center Community Church.)

Beard described the two-story Moody School building as Renaissance style, “with hipped roof,…central pavilion with arcaded recessed entry, square-headed and round-arched windows.”

The Edwin Gould School was added in 1926-1927 with funds donated by railroad and Wall Street tycoon Edwin Gould (1866-1933), after he read of the need for a girls’ school on the Goodwill campus. According to on-line sources, the name honors his son, Edwin Gould, Jr., who died in 1917 in a hunting accident.

The building was designed by the Portland architectural firm of Miller, Mayo & Beal, whose members were William Miller, doing his third Goodwill-Hinckley project; Miller’s former head draftsman, Raymond J. Mayo; and Miller and Mayo’s former head draftsman, Lester I. Beal. The firm specialized in school buildings.

An on-line photo from the L. C. Bates Museum’s collection and historian Beard’s description of the Gould School depict a two-story brick Georgian Revival building with chimneys on each end. The building had two entries, one near each end, “sheltered by Doric porticos,” and a wooden cupola atop the middle.

On-line information about the Gould School says it closed in 2009 and stood vacant or was used for storage for four decades. In 2012, officials decided to reopen the building.

By then, there were holes in the roof “leading to severe water damage and rot.” The need for taller rooms on the ground floor required excavation and control of water under the building. Original masonry and interior and exterior trim were restored.

(Gould Academy, in Bethel, originally organized by local citizens as Bethel Academy, was renamed after Rev. Daniel Gould willed it $842 in 1843. Gould Academy’s website says annual tuition is currently $38,650 for commuting students and $62,700 for boarders. This information has nothing to do with Goodwill-Hinckley.)

Colonial Theater update

The restored decorative element, now completed, on top of the Augusta Colonial Theater. Caught at a moment by Dave Dostie – 2021. May.

In the May 14 Central Maine newspapers, the Kennebec Journal and The Morning Sentinel, reporter Keith Edwards continued his description of the reconstruction of the Colonial Theater in Augusta, specifically the elaborate decorations on the front (see The Town Line, Feb. 4).

The Water Street theater has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1914. Edwards wrote that the façade work is part of a restoration project started “several years ago,” after the building had been vacant since 1969. Organizers turned to Maine artisans who had the skills to replicate work originally done in the 1920s.

Total cost of the restoration is estimated at up to $8.5 million. Donations are welcome; they may be made via the website, augustacolonial.org, or by mail to Augusta Colonial Theater Offices, 70 State Street, Augusta, Maine 04330.

People wanting to read Edwards’ article in the Central Maine newspapers should look for the headline “Augusta’s Colonial Theater topped by work of artisans.”

Main sources

Websites, miscellaneous.

Next week: more Goodwill-Hinckley buildings.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Granges – Part 6

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Victor Grange,

by Mary Grow

Victor and Hinckley

The members of the next Grange to be discussed should be proud to belong to one of the earliest Grange organizations in the central Kennebec Valley area, and one that is still active in its 147th year.

Victor Grange #49 was organized on October 29, 1874, when, the Fairfield bicentennial history says, “a group of men and women met at the home of Mr. James Porter at the top of what is known as ‘Fuller Hill’ in Fairfield Center.” The Grange was incorporated in 1888.

The new Grange started with 29 charter members, 11 of them women. As with the Albion Grange profiled in the April 8 issue of “The Town Line”, at first only farmers could join. By the 1988 publication of the Fairfield history, membership was open to “those interested in farming and in the welfare of others.”

Barbara Bailey, of Larone (northernmost of Fairfield’s seven villages), is Victor Grange’s lecturer. (Maine State Grange Communications Director Walter Boomsma says the title “lecturer” now means program director.) Bailey has been reading Victor Grange’s records (as of early May, she reported she was up to 1914).

The bicentennial history identifies the first Victor Grange Master as Olando A. Bowman. Bailey said his name was Orlando Bowman, with the last name sometimes spelled Bowerman, and the following dates are written under his picture in the Hall: “1874- 75-76-77-78 1881.”

Inside dining hall of Victor Grange.

In their first three meetings, Bailey wrote, Victor Grange members agreed to repair the Town Hall, which they had rented for five years as their meeting house. The 200 feet of spruce joists they ordered were presumably for that project.

They further voted to buy Grange regalia for 30 Brothers and 20 Sisters, one dozen fifth-edition Grange manuals and 100 letterheads. They ordered a cord of wood, and voted to pay M. D. Emery 25 cents a night “to build fires, fill oil lamps and trim wicks.”

Another early vote, Bailey wrote, was “to change the design of the seal to a Lady holding the Sickle,” instead of a man. Other early Grange seals featured a sickle; most contemporary ones show a sheaf of wheat. In 1967, the U. S. Postal Service issued a five-cent stamp showing a straw-hatted farmer holding his scythe, to honor the 100th anniversary of the National Grange.

(Sickles and scythes are both harvesting tools, hence Grange symbols. A sickle, also called a reaping hook or bagging hook, has a C-shaped blade about a foot long and a handle about six inches long; one harvesting with a sickle bends down, gathers an armful of grass or grain and cuts it a few inches above the ground. A scythe blade is only slightly curved, often over six feet long, attached to a six-foot handle with two handholds; one harvesting with a scythe stands erect and sweeps the blade along the ground, laying the grass or crop in rows. George Stubbs’ painting Reapers shows two men with sickles; Jean-Francois Millais’ painting The Reaper shows a man with a scythe.)

In January 1875, Victor Grange members started buying in bulk to sell to members cheaply: half a carload of flour; a “hogshead barreller of Puerto Rican Molasses and ½ chest of Japanese tea” (Bailey says a “hogshead barrel” was 33-1/3 gallons); and that month and in March spices, including cream of tartar. They appointed Watson Jones their agent to “sell wool for the farmers” and report at the next meeting.

They were also furnishing the Hall, buying four stands and two lamps in January and 25 chairs and a second-hand cookstove in March. In March, too, members voted to “Frame the Grange Charter in a suitable manner” and rent a “suitable instrument” (first an organ, later a piano, Bailey said).

By the first anniversary meeting, Bailey wrote, Victor Grange had 94 members. They voted to pay E. C. Jones 50 cents for stabling their horses during the anniversary celebration; and they voted to buy more regalia, three wall lamps, a hand lamp, window-curtains and “bleached cloth for tablecloths.”

They also voted to have an oyster supper and pastry at their next meeting and to buy “a suitable number” of plates, bowls, mugs and spoons.

In 1878, Bailey said, they spent $300 to buy a nearby store, which they used as a members’ co-op and, the Fairfield history says “the Grange home.”

The Hall standing today was planned and built in 1902 and 1903, and the former store was attached. The Fairfield history says Maine State Grange Master Obadiah Gardiner dedicated the new building on Oct. 1, 1903.

Bailey wrote that the fourth Victor Grange Master was Orlando Bowman’s grandson, George Tibbetts. Dates under his picture are 1883-84, 1885-1889, 1901-1902 and 1905, making him the Master under whom the organization was incorporated and construction of the new Hall started.

Another piece of Victor Grange’s history is a wooden chair, with the inscription on the bottom of the seat, “March 28,”87″ [1887] Geo Tibbetts Wedding.”

On Dec. 27, 1979, Ray W. Tobey wrote Grange members a thank-you letter for the Christmas food basket they left at his house. Thinking back over the 77 years to the rainy night when he took his first two degrees as a Grange member, he wrote that “the new hall was in process of construction and the Grange was meeting in the old Town Hall just north of the present building.”

Grange women used to prepare meals for students in the one-room schoolhouse across the street. After the building was no longer used as a school, Grangers bought it and turned it into a stable.

Tobey referred to the stable as the “building in which my father went to school when he was a boy.”

The Grange Hall stands in the south angle of the intersection of Routes 104 and 139 with Route 23, facing west on Route 23 (Oakland Road). The vacant lot just south of the building is being filled for a parking lot.

The large two-story building (plus basement and attic) has one section that is almost square and one – the former store – rectangular, with the main entrance with an open porch where the buildings join. A brick chimney rises from the roof near the junction.

Bailey said the former store houses the entryway, stairs, kitchen and bathrooms. The second floor is the junior room. Junior Grangers are aged from five to 13, she said; from age 14, members are treated as adults entitled to vote in Grange business.

The 1903 Grange Hall, the square section, has the dining room on the ground floor and a meeting room on the second floor, with a stage and a painted stage curtain.

Bailey said the meeting room has a rainbow-shaped tin ceiling that is 15 ½ feet long. Records show the Grange ordered it in 1899 from Pennsylvania, paying $357. It came by boat from Pennsylvania to Boston, by train from Boston to Hoxie Siding, in North Fairfield, and by horse and buggy to Victor Grange Hall.

In the 1990s, Bailey said, the state relocated Route 23 in front of the Grange Hall, moving it so much closer that vibrations from heavy trucks damaged the building. Window panes cracked and even the granite foundation crumbled.

The Fairfield history calls the Grange Hall “the social gathering place for Fairfield Center” for many years. Bailey found records of oyster stew suppers followed by a play presented in the second-floor room; admission was 25 cents, and up to 200 people would attend.

The Grange used to meet twice a month. Programs included assigned readings, which Bailey interpreted as reading local news reports for the benefit of farmers whose spare time and reading skills were limited.

Debates were another feature. Two three-person teams would present opposite sides of an issue, without a decision whether either side won. Bailey sees this activity as educational and a chance for members to hone public speaking skills.

When a Grange member died, the Charter was draped in black for 30 days and a small group, usually three other members, prepared a Resolution of Respect. The resolutions mourned the lost members, often mentioning a specific contribution that would be missed – the delicious biscuits, the work caring for the Hall, the floral arrangements.

Bailey said Victor Grange almost collapsed in the 1990s, as interest waned nationwide and local leaders aged and fell ill. She credits former Waterville dentist Steve Kierstead (Jan. 5, 1921 – Feb. 4, 2006), whose grandfather had been an early Master, with sparking a renewal of interest.

A neighborhood canvas led to the monthly senior citizen meals that continue today. At first, short programs focused on useful information about local politics, social services and the like.

One day a member brought in a scrapbook that contained newspaper clippings and other items, to show another member how he had learned her date of birth. His action led other members to do the same, to copy and to exchange clippings and to reminisce – “some of the most fun things we’ve ever done,” Bailey said.

In recent years Victor Grange has hosted annual sessions with Window Dressers, the nonprofit group that helps people build and install energy-efficient window coverings in their houses.

Bailey said the Hall has a new furnace and is handicapped-accessible, including the restrooms and a stairlift to the second floor. She expects more programs for senior citizens, to save them the drive to Waterville’s Muskie Center or other senior centers.

Currently, Victor Grange members are raising funds for insulation and other energy-efficiency improvements for the Grange Hall.

Bailey said Fairfield had another Grange organization, Hinckley Grange. Its Hall in Clinton is still standing on the east side of River Road, a short distance north of Pishon or Pishon’s Ferry, where Route 23 crosses the Kennebec River from Fairfield.

Hinckley Grange Hall is smaller than the other Grange Halls discussed, but is a typical rectangular wooden building, two stories tall with a peaked roof allowing space for one third-floor front window.

This writer has found one on-line reference to Hinckley Grange #539, in the obituary of former member Martha May Stokes (Sept. 17, 1922 – Sept. 23, 2012), who died in Kansas. The obituary says she was a Good Will High School graduate who “worked as a nutritionist for several hospitals.”

The number assigned to this Grange says it was founded in the 20th century, and Bailey reported that the collage of pictures of Hinckley Grange Masters, now part of Victor Grange’s collection of historical materials, begins in 1920 and ends in 1956.

Victor Grange schedule

Victor Grange meetings are held the second Monday of the month, with a 5 p.m. potluck supper followed by the meeting at 6. The next meeting is scheduled for June 14, the final meeting of the year for Dec. 13.

The Senor Circle meets at 11 a.m. the third Friday of the month. The next Senior Circle meeting is on May 21, and the final one for the year will be Dec. 17.

Public suppers are scheduled for 5 p.m. the fourth Saturday of each month through October. The next supper will be May 22, and the final 2021 supper will be Oct. 23.

Three special events are scheduled in the remaining months of 2021.

On Saturday, July 10, and Sunday, July 11, the Grange will host the Fairfield Historical Society’s quilt show. The show runs from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days; admission is $5. Grange members will provide lunches and snacks.

The Grange’s annual fund-raising tollbooth will be held in July. Readers ungenerous enough to want to know which day to avoid which road will need to consult the web.

The annual Fall Festival is scheduled for Saturday, Nov. 13.

The Fairfield Historical Society holds a barn sale from 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, May 15, and Sunday, May 16, at the History House, 42 High Street, Fairfield. Items offered include furniture, glassware, jewelry, antiques, books, collectibles and more.

The Society’s website says that people attending this and other Historical Society events should wear masks and observe social distancing and other relevant Covid requirements.

Main sources

Boomsma, Walter, Exploring Traditions – Celebrating the Grange Way of Life (2018).
Fairfield Historical Society, Fairfield, Maine 1788-1988 (1988).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Personal conversations, Barbara Bailey.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Granges – Part 5

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The curtain on the stage of the Windsor Grange. (contributed photo)

North Vassalboro, Cushnoc, Windsor, Winslow

by Mary Grow

In addition to the East Vassalboro Grange discussed last week, Vassalboro had two other Grange organizations. According to Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history, the earliest of the three was Oak Grove Grange #167, organized in North Vassalboro on May 11, 1875.

In 1883, Alma Pierce Robbins wrote, Oak Grove Grange was “reorganized” at Getchell’s Corner, then an important village. Kingsbury located the Getchell’s Corner Grange Hall a little south of the Congregational Chapel.

Oak Grove Grangers opened a store in 1889, Kingsbury wrote; Robbins said Isaiah Gifford was store manager.

It is possible that Oak Grove Grange was discontinued before or about 1900. It is not listed in available on-line state Grange documents from 1902.

In the south end of town, 39 charter members organized Cushnoc Grange #204 at Riverside (occasionally called Riverside Grange) on Jan. 13, 1876. Kingsbury wrote there were 115 members in 1892; on-line records show 130 members in 1902, but Robbins said there were 150.

Kingsbury wrote that Cushnoc Grange members built their hall in 1879, naming it Liberty Hall. It burned in May 1885.

In 1886, Robbins wrote, Howard H. Snell and Hartwell Getchell, “Directors of the Cushnoc Grange Corporation,” paid James Robbins $175.74 for the building that had been a broom factory, a multi-family tenement, the post office (until 1856) and Benjamin Brown’s store. The building stood on a half-acre lot on the east side of “the County Road from Augusta to Vassalboro” and the north side of Cross Hill Road.

Robbins wrote that the deed of sale gave the new Grange Hall the “the right to take water from two wells described in the deed of Malina S. Kimball to Nathan Coombs.”

Grangers enlarged the building and, Kingsbury wrote, opened a store on the ground floor in August 1887. Robbins quoted a source describing a store-keeper in business in the Grange Hall from about 1884 until 1905. At some point the former schoolhouse “across the road” was moved beside the Grange Hall for a horse shed.

A Friday, Jan. 19, 1894, Kennebec Journal article found on line describes the Wednesday, Jan. 17, installation of Cushnoc Grange’s new officers (not named), attended by representatives of the state Grange.

After the installation, attendees “repaired to the large dining room connected with the grange hall where a bounteous array of good things had been provided by the ladies of the grange and which received ample justice at the hands of all.”

The writer of the article concluded that in 1894, Cushnoc Grange “has one of the finest grange halls in the State, is prosperous and best of all deserves to be.”

For some years around 1900, Robbins wrote in a 1974 essay republished in the 2017 Anthology of Vassalboro Tales, Cushnoc Grange and Riverside Church each put on a Christmas celebration. In bad weather, she commented, “the long cold drive to the Grange Hall with horse and pung was more hazard than happy,” especially for families with small children. (A pung is a small, box-like sleigh drawn by a single horse.)

Cushnoc Grange hosted fairs with livestock, farm produce and handiwork; oyster stew suppers; and baked bean dinners where neighbors shared “great jars of home made pickles and dozens of apple pies.” The Grange folded in 1967, Robbins wrote. Possessions included “dishes to serve more than one hundred” that were given to Riverside Church. The hall was demolished and a house built on the lot.

The University of Maine’s Raymond H. Fogler Library’s special collections has boxes of Grange documents. According to the on-line catalog, contents include Cushnoc Grange secretary’s records from 1876 to 1914 and from 1926 to 1966.

Moving to another town south and east, Windsor Grange #284 was organized June 2, 1886. Kingsbury lists the first Grange Masters, until he completed his Kennebec County history in 1892, as C. F. Donnell (1886), Frank Colburn (1888), George R. Pierce (1890) and John H. Barton (1891).

Colburn and Barton received individual mention in Kingsbury’s history. Frank Colburn was a “farmer and school teacher”; he started teaching winters when he was 18, and was Windsor’s supervisor of schools in 1888 and 1889.

Barton was the great-grandson of Dr. Stephen Barton, who came to Vassalboro in 1774 and moved to Windsor in 1803 to join one of his sons there. John Barton was another schoolteacher; he married Ellen Goddard, of China. Their daughter was a teacher, and their son, who died in 1890 at the age of 27, had headed the commercial department at Kents Hill School.

Windsor Grange had 105 members in 1902, according to Maine State Grange records. Records at the Fogler Library are dated from 1888 to 1995.

Although Linwood Lowden’s Windsor history refers to agriculture in its title, good Land & fine Contrey but poor Roads, he gives the Grange a single paragraph. The Grange “has always rented space in the town hall,” he wrote, paying $125 for the year in 1923, “when the present hall was new.” Another $30 a year went for “space in the G. A. R. Hall.”

Like many other local Granges, Windsor Grange used a large meeting room with a stage, and the stage had a handsomely decorated curtain. Barbara Bailey, from Fairfield Center’s Victor Grange, said when the Windsor town office took over the Grange quarters, the stage curtain was refurbished and remains in the town office.

Winslow, north and west of Windsor, had a 19th-century Grange organization, Winslow Grange #320, which left almost no records to which this writer has access. According to lists of documents stored at the Fogler Library, the collection includes secretary’s records from 1894 to 1972; the earliest account books that have been preserved there date from 1896.

In 1902 Kennebec County Deputy M. F. Norcross of the state Grange wrote that Winslow Grangers “built the fine hall this year, which shows that they are prosperous and progressive.” At that time the Grange had 221 members.

Readers looking for more information on Winslow Grange might try to reach the Winslow Historical Preservation Committee, the town committee that succeeded Winslow Historical Society. The committee’s website is https://winslowhistory.weebly.com, and it has a Facebook page.

A second Grange in Winslow, Progressive Grange #523, was chartered as a Maine non-profit corporation on Oct, 2, 1914. Clyde G. Berry, at 5 Mar Val Terrace, was listed as the corporation’s registered agent.

MaineCorporations records on line skip from the 1914 filing to July 3, 1979, when a registered agent and address (not given) were filed. In 1981, the organization was sent a notice for failing to file its annual report.

The next record is dated March 22, 1991, when a change of agent and office were submitted. Annual reports were filed in March from 1993 through 2002; after a change of agent in 2002, the filing date moved to April and in 2007 to May.

In March 2009 a report was filed by a new agent and the corporation was reinstated, after having failed to file a 2008 report. In September 2010 it was again dissolved for another failure; a new agent got it reinstated in December 2010.

He (or she) was equally lax, however, because Progressive Grange was administratively dissolved in August 2011, reinstated in 2012, and dissolved for the final time in August 2013.

Clyde G. Berry was also the first agent for Pleiades Grange #355, organized in Augusta on August 28, 1987. Berry’s address was then given as an Augusta post office box.

Pleiades Grange went through a series of suspensions and reinstatements until it was suspended for good in July 1999.

Clyde G. Berry

Clyde “Sonny” G. Berry (Dec. 28, 1946 – May 5, 2018) lived an interesting and varied life, according to his obituary that ran in at least two Maine newspapers.

He was born in Glenburn, attended Bangor High School, graduated from Higgins Classical Institute (a boarding school in Charleston) and attended Husson College and the University of Maine. The obituary says he “worked for several banks before his retirement.”

The Grange was important in Berry’s life. In 1961 he joined Glenburn’s Pleaides Grange, of which he was Master for some years. He later joined and held offices in Mt. Phillip Grange, in Rome. He held offices in three Pomona (county) granges, Penobscot, Sagadahoc and Lincoln.

In the Maine State Grange, Berry was on the Youth Committee, and was Lecturer from 1981 to 1987, Overseer from 1987 to 1989 and Master from 1989 to 1997. Later, he was elected Chaplain in 2011 and Assistant Steward in 2015.

In the national Grange, Berry was a member of the Assembly of Demeter, held the positions of Steward in 1991 and Lecturer in 1997 and worked for the organization as program resource director.

At some time he lived in Vermont, where the obituary says “he was a charter member and Past Master of Upper Valley Community Grange and a charter member and First master of Heart of Vermont Pomona.” He was also a trustee of the village library in Hartford, Vermont, and a “lister” for the town.

In addition to Grange activities, Berry held memberships and offices in historical societies in Hartford, Vermont, and Somerville, Maine; genealogical societies; the Maine Old Cemetery Association; Civil War veterans’ groups; and Sons of the American Revolution.

He served a term on the Glenburn School Board and was for “many years” on the Cemetery Committee; and he co-chaired the 1972 sesquicentennial celebration and co-authored the 1972 sesquicentennial town history.

He died in Bangor at the age of 71, is buried in Glenburn and requested memorial donations to Taconnett Falls Genealogical Society in Winslow.

Main sources

Bernhardt, Esther, and Vicki Schad, compilers/editors, Anthology of Vassalboro Tales (2017).
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).
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Vassalboro holds 250th anniversary commemoration and Civil War monument re-dedication

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Featured speakers, from left, Selectboard chairman John Melrose, local historian Lauchlin Titus, and Vassalboro Historical Society President Janice Clowes. (photos by Eric W. Austin)

by Eric W. Austin

On a blustery Monday morning, April 26, around 50 people gathered in Vassalboro’s Monument Park to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the town’s founding and rededication of its Civil War memorial.

The event was organized and emceed by John Melrose, chairman of the Vassalboro selectboard.

“On behalf of the Vassalboro selectboard,” Melrose said to open the ceremony, “I join you today in commemorating the 250th anniversary of our town, as we also recognize three years of work at Monument Park to celebrate this event.”

There have been numerous improvements made to the park over the past several years, including a clean-up along the shoreline, installation of paving stones surrounding the Civil War memorial, the planting of trees, decorative bushes and other landscaping improvements, and a newly-installed granite plaque dedicating the park for the town’s 250th anniversary.

Vassalboro Boy Scout Troop #410 led the gathering by presenting the colors and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. (photo by Eric W. Austin)

Vassalboro Boy Scout troop #410 then performed a presentation of the flags and led the gathered group in a recital of the Pledge of Allegiance.

After a prayer and invocation from American Legion chaplain Pearley Lachance, the first presentation of the morning was given by Patsy Crockett, president of the Kennebec Historical Society and member of the Kennebec County Commissioners. She stated, in part, “April 26, 1771 is the date that the Massachusetts’ colonial government incorporated four area communities as municipalities: the city of Hallowell, the towns of Vassalboro, Winslow and Winthrop. They remained part of Massachusetts until Maine achieved statehood in 1820.”

Crockett continued: “Beyond sharing the same date of incorporation, the four communities have at least one other thing in common: they all originally covered a larger territory than they do today. In fact, combined, they occupied nearly half of what is now Kennebec County.”

Vassalboro was named after the Vassal family, she said, and was originally spelled “Vassalborough,” although the shorter version of the name became standard by 1818.

In 1845, the town voted to prevent the “immoral and unlicensed” sale of liquor. By 1860, the town had a population of 3,180 and in 1893 there were recorded 21 births, 32 deaths and 22 marriages.

At the end of her speech, Patsy Crockett presented the town’s selectboard with a resolution from the Kennebec County Commissioners in recognition of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the town of Vassalboro.

The next presenter was Janice Clowes, president of the Vassalboro Historical Society, who spoke about the history of the site. In part, she said, “Today we stand in Monument Park, a focal point for our community. For hundreds of years, this site and its immediate surroundings was a meeting place for those who inhabited what became Vassalboro. From our exhibits at the Vassalboro Historical Society you can come to realize how important this land at the outlet of China Lake was to the Native Americans. Later, with colonization, we know of the importance of the alewife runs at this location and downstream and how the stream powered our development in commercial enterprises.”

Lauchlin Titus, a local historian who has also served on Vassalboro’s school board, budget committee and on the selectboard, was the last presenter of the morning. He spoke about the history of the names that are listed on the Civil War memorial. Much of his talk was included in a front page article he authored that was published in The Town Line issue for April 22, 2021.

Repairs are also planned for the Civil War statue. “It was commissioned in 1905 and dedicated in 1907,” Janice Clowes explained. “[Based on] design number 407, ‘Parade Rest,’ [it] was carved by William Tregembo, of Hallowell, for the sum of $1,275, with $300 as a deposit and the remainder when the monument was completed. The base of the monument is made from Hallowell granite, while the soldier is made of Westerly granite from Rhode Island. As you may know, plans are underway to have the nose and two places on the cape repaired. The additional repair to the rifle is estimated to be more than $20,000, therefore only the other repairs will be completed.”

A video stream of the event, uploaded by David Trask, is available on Youtube at the following link: https://youtu.be/7MpFPMCFcBg.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Granges – Part 4

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East Vassalboro Grange

by Mary Grow and Bernie Welch

East Vassalboro Grange

Historical records show the Town of Vassalboro has had three separate Grange organizations, of which the newest, East Vassalboro, is still active in its 126th year.

East Vassalboro Grange #332 was organized in 1895. On-line Grange records show 171 members in 1902. It was incorporated as a nonprofit organization on Oct. 3, 1910, according to on-line state records.

The Anthology of Vassalboro Tales includes an October 1938 report from an unnamed newspaper describing that month’s East Vassalboro Grange Fair, organized by Lena Kyle, Arthur Mason and Frank Rand and a “dinner committee” consisting of “lady officers” Annie Adams, Edith Canham and Nina Mason. Almost 250 people shared the chicken pie dinner, and about half as many the baked bean supper.

More than 40 pounds of candy made by “Grange ladies and their daughters” were sold. After the baked goods entered in competition had been judged, they also were sold.

Prizes were awarded for fancy work, dairy products, canned goods and vegetables. The list of the latter included popcorn (Frank Bragg’s), dynamite popcorn (Alfred Taylor’s), citrons (Ernest Taylor’s) and mangles (Frank Rand’s).

At that fair, Annie M. Cates was in charge of the candy. Special prizes were awarded to two lots of vegetables: Dr. Sam Cates took first place and Herbert and Paul Cates took second place.

Sam Cates’ cream earned a first prize for dairy products, and Mae Cates’ quilt in the fancy work category. In canned goods competition, Annabelle Cates won first prizes for mincemeat, mustard pickles and squash; and Mrs. Samuel Cates placed first for cauliflower, corn, corn on the cob, cranberries, peaches and pumpkin.

East Vassalboro Grange first floor

These competent Cates were ancestors, direct and indirect, of Paul Cates, who with his wife Elisabeth founded Cates Family Farm, in East Vassalboro, in 1970. Originally producing only gladiolus, the farm website now advertises heirloom gladiolus bulbs, other annual and perennial flowers, beef cattle, hay and lumber.

Twenty-four babies were in the 1938 baby show, winning prizes for eye color, hair (or lack of hair), youngest (a four-week-old girl) and “from the largest family” (a boy with seven older siblings).

East Vassalboro students from first through eighth grade presented their school exhibit. After supper, a cast of 12 performed Henry Rowland’s Aunt Minnie from Minnesota, described as a “farce play,” followed by dancing “until a late hour with music by the Mosher orchestra from China.”

Alma Pierce Robbins, publishing her Vassalboro history in 1971, was pessimistic about East Vassalboro Grange. Meetings and suppers continued, she wrote, “but with a lessening of interest as the younger generations search for new ways to bring about modern changes.”

Fifty years later, Bernie Welch, of Full Circle Farm, in East Vassalboro, takes up the story of East Vassalboro Grange.

At 10 a.m. on the 4th of July 1976, it was pouring a cold rain in Vassalboro. Despite the deluge, the parade started on time in North Vassalboro, heading toward the East Vassalboro Grange to celebrate the 200th birthday of our country.

16-year-old Miss Vassalboro Grange, before the rain.

There weren’t enough umbrellas to go around on the tractor-drawn, hay-baled Grange float that proceeded slowly down Main Street (Route 32). A 16-year-old Miss Vassalboro Grange sat soaking atop a bale in the fine dress made by her mother Marj. That evening she came down with pneumonia that made her miss a week of work at her father Ron’s store, Lalime’s Drug Store, in Waterville.

For the privilege of riding on that wet bale that day, she had to write an essay describing how the Grange supported her community and interview Malvena Robbins, her grandmother, who was Grange treasurer for 35 years. For her it was worth it then, and for us it is worth it now, because our Vassalboro Grange has been supporting the greater Vassalboro community all along and intends to do so well into the future.

The East Vassalboro Grange hosts numerous suppers to support fuel funds and other community programs, Grange activities and Grange Hall maintenance. Vassalboro Community School students learn how to serve a meal under the guidance of Jobs for Maine Graduates Master Specialist Victor Esposito, with David Dutton, Lauchlin Titus, Richard Lemieux and others contributing to the meals.

East Vassalboro Grange and Vassalboro Historical Society members occasionally unite to sponsor potluck suppers.

Students and community members enjoy talent shows and open mike, beginning at 7 p.m., the second Saturday of the month at the Coffee House run by Stuart Corson, Holly Weidner and Mathew Freitag. The stage comes alive with music, dance and song, not to mention the coffee, tea and desserts. Fifth Saturday Contra Dances are another Grange calendar feature.

In recent years East Vassalboro Grange has sponsored varied events to entertain and educate area residents and to benefit local causes. Prominent among them have been plays written by Paul Cates (and others), produced and performed by talented community members and using the Grange Hall’s elegant scenery.

Past productions of Cates’ plays have included Great East Vassalboro Swindle, Poor People, Romeo and Juliet Solve a Mystery and Senator Mitchell’s Sidney Farmer Goes to Washington.

On Friday, Sept. 10, 2021, Linda Titus hopes to produce Cates’ Lillie’s Apple Pie as part of Vassalboro’s 250th anniversary celebration, with an apple pie contest at intermission.

Local historical programs have been presented by residents Kent London, Alma Robbins and Vicki Schad. In August 2017 Vassalboro hosted an afternoon of Jane Austen events, presented by a California entrepreneur called Malvena Pearl’s Emporium. Participants could attend workshops on novelist Austen’s late 18th and early 19th century writing implements, her novels, farming in her era and art and sewing; and could enjoy baked goods and beverages and live music and dancing.

East Vassalboro Grange second floor.

The Grange has hosted the Vassalboro Library Book sale for nearly 60 years, the first weekend after Labor Day.

Since May 2009, the Grange has sponsored indoor-outdoor farmers’ markets through September. At first at the Grange Hall, these events are now held Sunday afternoons at the North Vassalboro mill.

In the recent past the Vassalboro Grange has supported Spring Fever Day, presenting a variety of things to make the garden grow; and The Spirit of Christmas, a craft fair Elisabeth Cates inspires with tremendous support from the Vassalboro Friends and local craft vendors.

There was even socially distance badminton in the Hall during Covid.

The upkeep of the Hall began with Grange Master John Melrose, who made sure the building was painted and kept in top-notch shape. Guy Higgins put in the new windows and ceiling, and Linda and Lauchlin Titus established cleaning protocols and got Ray Breton’s crew to upgrade our kitchen so that it is modern and certified.

Erskine Day of Caring students, Kelly Clark, Steve Jones, of Fieldstone Gardens, Boy Scout Eagle projects, Samantha Lessard and Steve Asante have made tremendous efforts over the years to keep up the building, support Grange-sponsored efforts and keep the gardens tidy.

Many outside families and organizations have used the Grange for birthdays and other celebrations; school programs; dance programs; and town, political, conservation or community action meetings. We would love to know how many of you readers were married or celebrated anniversaries or births at our Grange.

The future of the Vassalboro Grange is the future of our community. It is a place that welcomes all who would like to join others to learn, have fun or create together in a well-maintained building. It even has excellent internet.

Our Grange membership is open to new ideas and uses for the Grange. Grange meetings, open to all, are held the last Friday of each month. We look forward to hearing from you with ideas. Contact us at http://www.vassalboro.net/grange.html or 207 649 2765.

That girl on the float, the one in the rain? She is Jody Lalime Welch, the Grange master and my wife. The Vassalboro Grange has been a powerful, positive and profound influence on our families’ lives for almost 111 years now. What does a little rain matter, anyway.

(Bernie Welch holds the office of Lecturer in East Vassalboro Grange, but he is content to be called the Grange Master’s husband.)

Main sources:

Bernhardt, Esther, and Vicki Schad, compilers/editors Anthology of Vassalboro Tales (2017).
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771-1971, n.d. (1971).
Welch, Bernie, personal information.

Websites, various.

Photos courtesy of East Vassalboro Grange.