by Mary Grow

Of the 26 chief justices of the Maine Supreme Court, Augusta has provided six – perhaps not surprising for the state capital. Portland is second, with five chief justices including Leigh Saufly, who was appointed Dec. 6, 2001, and retired April 14, 2020. Andrew Mead is currently acting Chief Justice. None of the other Kennebec Valley towns in this series has brought forth a chief justice, though Wikipedia lists Waterville as the residence of five of the 109 associate justices.

The state Supreme Court, known as the Law Court when it acts as an appellate court, was established by legislative act June 24, 1820, according to the chapter on the courts in Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history. (The chapter was written by William Penn Whitehouse, later to become the court’s tenth Chief Justice.) The court initially had a Chief Justice and two Associate Justices. The membership was increased in 1847 and again in 1852. When Whitehouse wrote in 1892, he said there were a Chief Justice and seven Associates, as there are now.

Justices were originally and still are appointed by the Governor of Maine, with Senate confirmation required. Wikipedia says until 1839 justices were appointed for life or until they reached the mandatory retirement age, 70. Since 1839, they have been appointed for seven-year terms, with an unlimited number of reappointments and no mandatory retirement age.

The court’s office is in Portland. Wikipedia comments that most state supreme courts meet in the capital city, but Portland’s Cumberland County courthouse offered a larger meeting room than Augusta’s Kennebec County courthouse.

The court’s website lists five principal duties: hearing appeals on legal grounds from lower-court cases, both civil and criminal; giving the governor and the legislature advisory opinions on important issues; supervising the conduct of Maine lawyers and judges (including disciplinary power); making procedural rules that apply to all Maine courts; and, through its appellate division, hearing appeals of criminal convictions if the defendant received a prison sentence of a year or more. Wikipedia says only a few other state constitutions authorize state supreme courts to issue advisory opinions.

Prentiss Mellen

The court’s members were initially appointed July 1, 1820, with Prentiss Mellen, of Portland, as the first Chief Justice.

Nathan Weston Jr.

The second Maine Chief Justice was Augusta native Nathan Weston, Jr. (1782-1872). A Dartmouth College graduate (Class of 1803) and lawyer in Boston, he was appointed Chief Justice of the Second Circuit of Maine in 1811. After Maine and Massachusetts separated on March 15, 1820, and the Maine Supreme Court was created, he became one of the initial associate justices on July 1, 1820.

Louis Hatch wrote in his Maine: A History that in 1825 a Maine legislative caucus offered to nominate Weston for governor, after incumbent Albion K. Parris declined to run for a sixth term. Weston preferred to stay on the court.

Chosen on Oct. 22, 1834, to succeed Mellen as Chief Justice, he served until his term expired on Oct. 22, 1841, according to on-line information.

In 1827, Weston bought the Fuller-Weston House on Summer Street, in Augusta. The Federal-style two-story wooden house was built in 1818 for a lawyer named Henry Weld Fuller, who sold it to Weston. Weston lived there with his wife Paulina Bass Cony (1787-1857) and their four sons and four daughters, born between 1810 and 1824.

Later, Wikipedia says, the house was the St. Mark’s Episcopal Church rectory. House and church have been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1984.

Records do not show what Weston did between 1841 and his death in 1872. Apparently, however, he continued to be an important figure in Augusta. When a large public meeting was held on April 22, 1861, as part of Maine’s response to the beginning of the Civil War, he was one of the speakers, along with Lot M. Morrill, former three-term governor and in 1861 United States Senator; James G. Blaine, at that time a member of the state House of Representatives and chairman of the state Republican Committee; and others.

Melville Weston Fuller

Weston’s daughter Catherine married Fuller’s son Frederick and gave birth to a son, Melville Weston Fuller, in February 1833. The couple divorced almost immediately, Wikipedia says, and Melville was raised in the Summer Street house by his grandfather. Following family precedent, Melville studied law and rose to the position of Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, a position he held from July 20, 1888, until his death July 10, 1910.

(Melville Fuller’s statue outside the Kennebec County courthouse, in Augusta, is currently a topic of public debate, because during his tenure the 1896 “Plessy v. Ferguson” decision upheld racial segregation laws, the “separate but equal” doctrine. According to a recent Kennebec Journal article, Fuller did not write the decision, but agreed with it. Earlier this year the Maine Supreme Court asked Kennebec County Commissioners to remove the statue from the courthouse, calling it inconsistent with contemporary judges’ values.)

William Penn Whitehouse

The second Augusta Chief Justice was the court’s 10th, William Penn Whitehouse (1842-1922). Born in Vassalboro, son of John Roberts Whitehouse and Hannah Percival Whitehouse, he attended China Academy, entered Waterville (now Colby) College in September 1858, graduated with honors in 1863 and earned a master’s degree in 1866. After a year as principal of Vassalboro Academy, he studied law, becoming a member of the Kennebec Bar in October 1865.

Whitehouse served as Augusta city solicitor for four years, Kennebec County attorney for seven years and Kennebec County Superior Court judge for 12 years. He was appointed an Associate Justice of the state Supreme Court on April 15, 1890, and Chief Justice on July 26, 1911. He served less than two years, resigning on April 8, 1913, and returning to practice in Augusta.

Colby awarded him an honorary LLD in 1896 and Bowdoin another in 1912. An on-line site (which this writer has not confirmed) describes the historical marker on Water Street, in Augusta, east of and close to Memorial Circle, where his house once stood. The house was a Greek Revival building dating from 1851; Whitehouse bought it in 1879 and died there on Oct. 22, 1922. The marker says the house became an apartment building and was demolished in 2007.

According to the marker, Whitehouse was “a strong advocate for the abolition of the death penalty in Maine.” An on-line source quotes Hatch, writing as though he knew Whitehouse, as offering high praise for his legal knowledge and his character, using phrases like “fair-mindedness,” “sense of duty,” “keen and ready mind,” “gracious and urbane manners” and “balance and sanity of temperament.” (The on-line source purports to be reprinting a long excerpt about the Whitehouse family from Hatch’s Maine history, pp. 35 and 36. However, in this writer’s facsimile copy of the 1919 printed history, the index refers to no such material, and pp. 35 and 36 deal with military actions during the Revolution.)

Whitehouse married Evelyn Marie Treat (1843-1925) in 1869. Two of their three children died in infancy; their first-born, Robert Treat Whitehouse, was also a lawyer with a practice in Portland.

Leslie Colby Cornish

Leslie Colby Cornish (1854-1925), a Winslow native, became Maine’s 12th Chief Justice on June 25, 1917. Son of Colby Coombs Cornish and Pauline Bailey Simpson Cornish, he attended Waterville Classical Institute (later Coburn Classical Institute) and graduated from Colby College, Class of 1875, with high honors. He was one of Coburn’s original 1901 trustees, and from 1907 to 1926 he chaired Colby’s Board of Trustees.

His legal studies included a year with an Augusta law firm (1878-79) and a year at Harvard Law School (1879-1880). He became a member of the Kennebec Bar in November 1880, and held local elective office in Augusta. In 1884, he married Fannie Holmes Woodman. He was appointed an Associate Justice on March 31, 1907, and Chief Justice on June 25, 1917. He resigned on March 1, 1925, for health reasons and died June 24, 1925.

The April 10, 1807, issue of the Colby Echo reported that Cornish had thrice rejected nominations to the Maine Supreme Court because he preferred practicing law. In 1807, the Echo writer surmised, he accepted because he and Governor William Titcomb Cobb had been roommates at Harvard Law School and friends ever since. The writer commented that with Cornish’s appointment, “while the bar of Maine loses one of its most brilliant and best beloved practitioners, the bench gains a member who will honor and adorn it.”

In 1922 Cornish was chosen a member of an American Bar Association committee chaired by Supreme Court Justice William Howard Taft to draw up a code of judicial ethics.

An on-line excerpt from Sprague’s Journal of Maine History credits Cornish with restoring a Wiscasset monument honoring Samuel Sewall, a Commonwealth of Massachusetts Chief Justice who died suddenly while holding a court session at Wiscasset on June 8, 1814. Cornish was similarly representing the Maine court in the 1920s when he found the monument in disrepair and started a restoration fund. Massachusetts Chief Justice Arthur P. Rugg joined his effort.

Sprague adds that Cornish was “one of the cultured men of Maine who are appreciative readers of Maine history; who believe that it should be taught to the youth of Maine in our public school[s]; and that the state should pursue a broad and liberal policy in encouraging the publication of literature relating to it.”

(Sprague wrote that Sewall died, and Cornish discovered the neglected monument, when each was holding a “nisi prius” term at the Wiscasset courthouse. On-line legal dictionaries translate “nisi prius” as “unless before,” summarize its origin in British law, offer “court of original jurisdiction” as substitute wording and explain that it describes a trial court [as distinguished from an appeals court] where cases are tried before a judge. Some definitions say a judge and jury, and one limits trials in the United States to civil cases.)

Hatch wrote that both Whitehouse and Cornish were active in the Unitarian Church. When Hatch’s history was being assembled for its 1919 publication, Whitehouse headed Maine’s State Conference of Unitarian Churches and Cornish headed the Maine Unitarian Association.

Main sources

Hatch, Louis Clinton, ed., Maine: A History 1919 (facsimile, 1974).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Reproduction of The Orb from 1836.

by Mary Grow

Several of the small towns in the central Kennebec Valley have had local newspapers, and one – China – still does as of 2020. This writer has found no record of a newspaper published in Sidney, Winslow, Benton, Palermo or Windsor.

Vassalboro’s first local paper was The Clarion, which Dean Marriner calls “one of the most unusual newspapers ever printed in Maine or anywhere else.” The first edition was published in March 1886 by S. A. and N. C. Burleigh. S. A. was 15-year-old Samuel A. Burleigh, later owner and editor of the Sentinel in Waterville; N. C. was his eleven-year-old sister Nettie.

The first issue, Marriner wrote, was only four small (six inches by five-and-a-half inches) pages. It contained the publishers’ statement of purpose (“dissemination of truth and temperance” and “advancement of scientific and practical knowledge”) and advertisements from a dressmaker in North Fairfield (Hall Burleigh, Samuel and Nettie’s father, was a Fairfield native), a farm in Vassalboro and a Vassalboro woman selling a Davis Machine (Davis was a leading brand of sewing machine in the 1880s). Marriner added that ads cost 10 cents an inch, 45 cents a column or 85 cents for a whole page. An annual subscription was 20 cents.

By 1888, Marriner continued, the Burleighs’ monthly paper had four eight-by-10-inch pages, a circulation of more than 1,000 and ads from as far away as Belgrade. The annual subscription price was 30 cents, and the publishers were seeking local correspondents in Vassalboro, China, Winslow and Sidney. Recompense would be a free subscription, and the publishers would supply writing materials and pay postage.

When Samuel Burleigh entered Colby in the fall of 1881, the Clarion went out of business. Marriner wrote that Burleigh replaced it in September 1881 with a four-page non-partisan weekly named the Valley News, published by the Kennebec Valley News Company. The publisher was also the editor. Subscriptions were 50 cents a year. Numerous advertisers from Waterville helped support the paper, whose closing date is not listed in any source this writer found.

The Library of Congress (LOC) on-line newspaper directory lists a weekly Kennebec Valley News with the same Vassalboro-based publisher. It appears to be yet another paper, because the LOC has a copy of Vol. 1, No. 32, that is dated April 5, 1892.

The LOC also lists a monthly publication from Vassalboro named The Young America that first appeared in 1877. This writer failed to find any additional information.

Whittemore wrote in his history of Waterville that in 1898 the W. M. Ladd Company, whose owners bought the Waterville Sentinel’s printing equipment, began printing three weeklies from surrounding towns, the Vassalboro Times, the Clinton Herald and the China Tribune. This writer has found no other reference to any of those newspapers.

Fairfield has had two local weeklies, according to the bicentennial history, and Howard Owen, author of the newspaper chapter in Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history, added a third. According to Owen, before Benjamin Bunker started the Kennebec Democrat, in Waterville, in February 1887, he published the Pine Tree State in Fairfield for two years starting in 1880, and owned the Fairfield Journal (see below) until 1886.

The Fairfield history says the Fairfield Chronicle began publication March 1, 1872, in the village then called Kendall’s Mills (now downtown Fairfield). It continued until 1878, according to LOC’s summary. The LOC lists George H. Colby as editor and the publishers as Fairfield Chronicle Association, 1873-1875; George H. Colby in 1876, 1877 and 1878; and Colby & Small in 1878.

Joseph Griffin’s 1872 publication, The Press of Maine, found online, has a paragraph about the Chronicle, which he called the Fairfield Weekly Chronicle. Griffin dated the first issue May 1, 1872. The four-page, eight-column paper was what the trade called a “patent outside”; Griffin explained that the outside pages, one and four, came preprinted from Boston or New York and editor Colby composed and printed the local news and ads that filled pages two and three. An annual subscription was $2.50, Griffin wrote.

The Chronicle was succeeded by the Fairfield Journal, beginning July 2, 1879, and ending, according to the LOC listing, with Volume 52, No. 28, July 9, 1925. The LOC gives the publisher as Augustine Simmons. The Fairfield history includes an excerpt from the Dec. 17, 1901, issue describing the flood the day before.

Judge Augustine Simmons rates three pages in Sprague’s Maine history journal (found online), with his Fairfield newspaper experience covered in a single sentence. Elmer Sawyer wrote that Simmons was born Feb. 20, 1849, in Topsham; the family moved to Brunswick when he was three and he always called Brunswick home, though he lived elsewhere.

Simmons entered Bowdoin in 1867, but withdrew for lack of money after two years; he graduated in 1881, counted as a member of the Class of 1871. During his enforced break he taught, mostly at Anson Academy in North Anson. He also studied law with E. W. and F. E. McFadden in Fairfield and became a member of the Kennebec bar on Aug. 7, 1877. After that he edited the “Fairfield Journal “for less than a year (perhaps its first editor?) before going back to teaching and then practicing law in North New Portland over the 1880-81 winter and in North Anson from May 1881 to Oct. 24, 1917.

Simmons has the title “Judge” because he was Somerset County Judge of Probate from 1904 to 1912.

The LOC lists one 20th century Fairfield weekly newspaper, the Fairfield Free Press. The first issue appeared Nov.3, 1938; Ivers L. Greenleaf is named as publisher. This writer has found no other information.

The Clinton Advertiser was the first – and only? Owen says so, but see the Clinton Herald reference above – Clinton local paper. According to the LOC, from Oct. 14, 1886, to sometime around 1894 it was a weekly; it was published until at least July 29, 1909 (when the volume was number 32). The University of Maine’s Fogler Library index, however, says the Advertiser began publication in 1879 and closed in 1907.

Owen wrote that as of 1892, the paper was the smallest in Kennebec County. It was founded in June 1886, edited and published by B. T. Foster & Company. An annual subscription cost 50 cents. A Clinton history web site says Clinton’s Brown Memorial Library has bound copies of the Advertiser.

In Albion, Ruby Crosby Wiggin found a copy of the Albion Courier dated Oct. 7, 1878. The front page said the paper was a semi-monthly published by Bert Foster. The subscription fee was listed as 50 cents (annually?) or for six months 25 cents, payable in advance. Foster declared the paper was apolitical, non-sectarian and interested in local news, including accounts from neighboring towns.

Wiggin’s history has no other information about the Albion Courier. This writer found no other references.

China’s 19th-century newspaper was The Orb, published every Saturday by “an association of gentlemen” (quoted by Marriner from its initial issue) headed by China Village resident Japheth C. Washburn. The first two volumes of The Orb started with the issues of Dec. 5, 1833, and Dec. 6, 1834, respectively. The China bicentennial history says in the fall of 1835 Washburn organized a meeting to consider whether to discontinue publication and got enough local support to continue the paper until November 1836.

The paper’s goal was to be “interesting, useful and pleasing.” It covered agricultural and other local occupations; temperance; and religious, literary and political news.

A lengthy description in the China history says the paper had four pages, each with four or five columns of small type. The only illustrations were in ads. Readers found a mix of fiction and non-fiction: Washburn’s editorials were on page two, news (from the town, the state, the nation and the world) usually on pages two and three, ads mostly on pages three and four, frequently a poem and a moral or religious essay on page four, jokes throughout as fillers.

The Orb supported President Andrew Jackson and his party; the Dec. 13, 1834, issue contained the text of Jackson’s December 1 address to Congress. Washburn had no use for the opposing Whig party and frequently referred to them as Wigs, Marriner wrote. In 1836, the China history says, The Orb reported on the state and national Democratic conventions. The paper presented selective detailed information on state legislative sessions and Congressional activities, sometimes even quoting or summarizing debates.

Local items included births and deaths, meeting notices, and reports on fires, crimes and similar events. The China history comments that one unusual item, appearing intermittently, was “the list of addressees of unclaimed letters at the China post office.”

An annual subscription to The Orb was $2 discounted if paid during the first three months. Washburn reported 300 unpaid subscriptions at the beginning of the second year,perhaps one reason the paper had a short life. Owen adds another explanation: the lack of advertisers and of other jobs for Washburn’s printing press in an agricultural town. [Editor’s note: Reproductions of The Orb, Vol. 3, No. 37, dated September 10, 1836, are available at The Town Line’ s office.]

Main sources

Fairfield Historical Society, Fairfield, Maine 1788-1988 (1988).
Grow, Mary M., China Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Marriner, Ernest, Kennebec Yesterdays (1954)
Wiggin, Ruby Crosby, Albion on the Narrow Gauge (1964).

by Mary Grow

In previous pieces there have been references to local newspapers, especially the Augusta-based Kennebec Journal. Both it and its sister publication in Waterville, the “Morning Sentinel”, have had long lives; but they are not and never have been the only newspapers in the central Kennebec Valley.

Here is a partial list of 18th and 19th century Augusta and Waterville papers, excluding monthlies and student and most other specialty publications. The Library of Congress list of newspaper holdings has others.

• The earliest was the Eastern Star, Aug. 4, 1794 to sometime in 1795, published in Hallowell by Howard Robinson, the first of at least a dozen Hallowell papers started before 1830. Augusta was the northern part of Hallowell until February 1797.
• The Tocsin, 1795-1797, was published by Thomas B. Wait and John K. Baker from Falmouth, who sold it to Benjamin Poor in September 1796.
• The Kennebec Intelligencer, started Nov. 14, 1795, was published by Peter Edes (son of printer Benjamin Edes of Boston); it became the Kennebec Gazette in 1800 and the Herald of Liberty in 1810. The Herald of Liberty went out of existence in 1815 when Edes moved to Bangor.

An excerpt from an on-line source says the Tocsin and the Kennebec Intelligencer were the earliest inland papers in Maine. The first Maine newspapers were published in Portland beginning in 1792. Kennebec Valley staff members worked hard to bring local people news from London in 61 days and from the United States Congress in Philadelphia in 16 days.

• Hallowell Gazette was a Federalist organ published by Ezekiel Goodale and James Burton from January 1814 to 1827.
• Augusta Patriot, March 17, 1817, was published by James Burton and, perhaps because Burton vowed to avoid “personal invective, political rancor, and sectarian heat,” discontinued in less than two years for lack of readers.
• Kennebec Journal, Jan. 8, 1823, was published by printers Luther Severance and Russell Eaton. It started as a Whig paper, with about 450 initial subscribers, and transitioned to the successor Republican party.

The Kennebec Journal had several owners in the mid-19th century, including briefly (1854-1857) James G. Blaine. Henry Kingsbury, in his Kennebec County history, describes Blaine’s management as “able and vigorous.” During part of the Civil War, the paper published a small daily supplement with current news, received by telegraph. At the beginning of 1870, Howard Owen, Charles E. Nash and Alden Sprague made the Daily Kennebec Journal the first successful daily paper in Augusta, while continuing the weekly version that Kingsbury says acquired subscribers state-wide.

• Gospel Banner and Universalists’ Family Monitor existed from July 25, 1835 to July 16, 1836; Gospel Banner and Maine Christian Pilot from July 23, 1836 to July 15, 1837; Gospel Banner, a weekly, from July 30, 1842 to Nov. 4, 1897. Kingsbury lists a number of successive owners and editors, the majority Universalist ministers.
• Maine Patriot and State Gazette, Oct. 31, 1827-December 1831, was published weekly by James Dickman, edited by Aurelius V. Chandler for three years and J. W. Bradbury in 1831, after Chandler resigned and moved south for health reasons. (He died on Dec. 31, 1830, in Charleston, South Carolina, at the age of 23.) This paper was started to support Andrew Jackson against John Quincy Adams in the 1828 election.
• The Age, Dec. 23, 1831, was started after Maine’s capital was relocated from Portland to Augusta in 1827, to meet two needs: printing state documents and providing publicity for the state government. It was initially printed in the Maine Patriot and State Gazette’s facility, and, Kingsbury wrote, “absorbed” the Gazette. It was edited by part-owner Francis Ormond Jonathan Smith, former editor of the “Portland Argus”.

Early in his Augusta career, Kingsbury wrote, Smith wrote an article calling a Belgrade resident a deserter during the War of 1812. The Age’s publisher was tried for criminal libel and was acquitted, giving the paper valuable publicity.

In the early 1840s, according to Kingsbury, The Age and the Kennebec Journal made an agreement under which each published on three alternate days, creating Augusta’s first version of a daily paper. He did not say how long the arrangement lasted. From 1844 on The Age changed ownership frequently; an Augusta printer named Gilman Smith was the owner when the paper was discontinued during the Civil War.

• Maine Farmer began in Winthrop in 1833 as the Kennebec Farmer. In 1844 Russell Eaton, Esq, bought it and moved it to Augusta, where it became the “Maine Farmer” and was published until 1900 (or later).

In her Albion history, Roby Crosby Wiggin describes and quotes from a Thursday morning, Feb. 27, 1851, copy of Maine Farmer, found by Albion residents remodeling an old house. The paper then had a circulation of 5,500 and cost four cents a copy. Annual subscription prices were $1.75 paid in advance, $2 paid within a year and $2.50 paid more than a year late. Anyone who signed up six paying subscribers got a free subscription.

Wiggin describes a variety of content – local news, national news, fiction, inspirational pieces and farming information and advice, all intermingled. Advertisers sold medicines and a medical self-help book; pickles; coffee; furniture; and coffins in a choice of pine, black walnut or mahogany with free cushions included.

• The Washingtonian was a temperance paper started by journeyman printer Henry Green in 1840 and published “briefly,” Kingsbury wrote, at the height of the temperance movement in Maine.
• Drew’s Rural Intelligencer, first published Jan. 6, 1855, was a weekly published by Rev. William A. Drew, a former “Gospel Banner” editor. A website offering a bound copy of the first year’s issues gives its subtitle, “Devoted to the Wants and Pleasures of Rural Life; both in Town and Country,” and says it mostly covered “agricultural and home craft pursuits.” In 1857 a new owner moved the paper to Gardiner, where it appeared until 1859.
• Maine Standard was a Democratic weekly published from April 5, 1867, to April 5, 1881, described by Kingsbury as a successor to The Age. Its publishers for the first year were Thaddeus A. Chick and Isaac W. Reed, succeeded by others.
• The New Age, which began publication in 1881, was a successor to the Maine Standard, and was also Democratic. The publisher is given on-line as Manley H. Pike and Company, a reference to artist and writer Manley Herbert Pike (1857-1910), who bought the Maine Standard in 1881. This writer failed to find a date the paper was discontinued; it was still being published when Kingsbury wrote in 1892.
• Home Farm, 1880–1887, was published by Boardman and Hall and edited by Samuel L. Boardman. It was an eight-page weekly, subtitled “A journal of practical agriculture and home life.” George J. Varney’s article on the history of Augusta in the Maine Gazetteer calls it “an attractive sheet for a small price.”

(Samuel Lane Boardman [1836-1914] wrote books on history, including Peter Edes’ life in Boston and in Maine; on Maine agriculture; on Maine horse-racing, and on ornithologist George Augustus Boardman [1818-1901], who worked in eastern Maine and New Brunswick. One hopes that George was not Samuel’s father, because Wikipedia says George’s only marriage was in 1843.)

In Waterville, Kingsbury wrote that the first attempts to provide newspapers were short-lived. According to Kingsbury and to Henry C. Prince (who was editor of The Waterville Mail when he wrote the chapter on the press in Edwin Carey Whittemore’s 1902 history of Waterville), the early papers were:

• The Waterville Intelligencer, started in May 1823 by William Hastings, a Baptist-oriented paper sponsored by Waterville College and devoid of local news. Its last issue was Nov. 26, 1828.
• A successor named The Watchman, first published on Dec. 11, 1828, established by Hastings as an experimental political, literary and miscellaneous paper, and discontinued after its Dec. 30, 1829, issue.
• The Times, a Whig paper started in June 1831 by John Burleigh, a failure by the fall of 1833.
• The “Waterville Journal, Burleigh’s and Waterville College’s second venture, a non-sectarian religious paper that first appeared December 1833. Prince wrote that the college promised to help edit the paper and sign up subscribers, but “these promises not being fully met,” the paper folded after a year. (The Library of Congress lists a second Waterville Journal that began publication in 1878.)

In May 1841 (Prince) or 1842 (Kingsbury), Daniel Ripley Wing and William Mathews founded The Watervillonian, described as “a literary and family journal.” Prince quotes Mathews as sarcastically describing the paper starting with 400 subscribers and by filling its pages with dead authors’ works reducing the number to 250 in a year. The paper ceased publication after that first year; Mathews said the publishers earned $600.

Kingsbury wrote that Wing (Dec. 13, 1816 — Dec. 2, 1885) remained in the newspaper business the rest of his life, and Mathews’ later renown in literature “needs no comment.”

(Mathews [July 28, 1818 – Feb. 14, 1909], was a Waterville native who entered Waterville College when he was 13; he got his bachelor’s degree in 1835 and a law degree from Harvard in 1839. He supplemented his law business with the newspaper. A teacher, writer and lecturer, he lived in and around Chicago from 1856 to 1880 and in Boston from 1880 to his death.)

Mathews, Wing and Mathews’ brother Edward started the Yankee Blade in June 1842. A new part-owner moved it to Gardiner in August 1843.

In April 1847 Charles F. Hathaway (later to found the Hathaway shirt factory) started The Waterville Union. Prince says it failed after 14 weeks, mostly due to “stringent rules adopted and enforced” about payment for subscriptions and ads (it sounds as though Hathaway wanted his money on time).

Hathaway sold to Ephraim Maxham, who started The Eastern Mail (first issue July 19, 1847) and on Sept. 4, 1863, renamed it The Waterville Mail. Wing had been working for Maxham; in 1849 he bought a half interest in the paper and stayed with it until his death.

The Mail endorsed the first Republican Presidential candidate, John Charles Fremont, in the 1856 election, but it only later became a reliably Republican paper, Prince wrote.

In 1886 two of Daniel Ripley Wing’s sons, Charles G. Wing (or Charles Burleigh Wing, according to an on-line genealogy that says Daniel Ripley Wing’s wife was Ann Elizabeth Burleigh) and Daniel Frank Wing, bought the Waterville Mail from Maxham and made it one of Maine’s highest-quality local weeklies. It went through more ownership changes before folding in May 1906.

The first issue of The Waterville Sentinel appeared Wednesday, Dec. 1, 1880, published by M. A. Leger and E. O. Robinson, who believed Waterville would grow fast enough to justify two newspapers. In the next two decades the newspaper went through multiple ownership changes, and, Prince wrote, several changes in publication day – Wednesday in 1880, Friday as of February 1881, Saturday beginning in May 1884.

In December 1896 then-owner Samuel Appleton Burleigh of Vassalboro tried a bi-weekly appearing on Tuesdays and Fridays. The weekly publication resumed Friday, April 16, 1897. In November 1897 a section in French was added; it lasted a month.

The Waterville Morning Sentinel succeeded the earlier title in 1904, started by a group of Democratic politicians plus one newspaperman, Thomas F. Murphy, according to Wikipedia. As of March 3, 1904, it was published daily, Marriner said. It was the Morning Sentinel from 1961 to 1971, the Central Maine Morning Sentinel from 1971 to 1996 and is currently the Morning Sentinel. At some point it changed from weekly to daily publication.

On Wednesday, Feb. 18, 1887, the first issue of Ben Bunker’s unabashedly political The Kennebec Democrat appeared in Waterville. Three months after Bunker’s death in March 8, 1894, Augusta people bought the paper, moved it to Augusta and renamed it “The Maine Democrat”, Prince wrote.

The former Home Farm (see above) moved from Augusta to Waterville and reappeared as the Eastern Farmer at the end of September 1887. Varney says Boardman still owned it; Kingsbury says Hall C. Burleigh and the Wing brothers (who were publishing the Mail) took it over, found it a “financial incubus” and killed it, selling the list of subscribers to the Lewiston Journal in April 1888.

The owners of the Waterville Mail added the Waterville Evening Mail as the city’s first daily newspaper beginning on Jan. 29, 1896. Prince wrote that the four-page paper, still published in 1902, was primarily a source of local news, though world events were mentioned.

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Marriner, Ernest Kennebec Yesterdays (1954).
Whittemore, Edwin Carey, The Centennial History of Waterville, Kennebec County, Maine (1902).

Websites, miscellaneous.