Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Blacks in Maine – Part 1

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Headstone of Eliza Talbot and Sarah Freeman, in Talbot cemetery, in China.

by Mary Grow

So far, people in this history series have been almost entirely the group that is still Maine’s majority population: white people descended mostly from inhabitants of the British Isles, plus representatives of other northern and western European countries.

For example, Millard Howard wrote in his Palermo history that early settlers in that town came mostly from Massachusetts or New Hampshire, sometimes via coastal Maine. These settlers’ ancestors, he wrote, had usually been religious dissidents (Puritans especially) who emigrated from Great Britain in the 1630s.

This picture is incomplete. In addition to the Native Americans, who lived here for generations before Europeans arrived, the central Kennebec Valley has had a small Black population for almost as long as the Europeans have been here, and since the 19th century people from the Middle East and French Canada have created distinct minority cultures.

Readily available sources tend to provide only scanty information on these groups, and as readers will soon learn, what information is available is sometimes inconsistent.

An invaluable source on Blacks in Maine is H. H. Price and Gerald E. Talbot’s Maine’s Visible Black History: The First Chronicle of Its People, published in 2006.

(Gerald Talbot is a descendant of the Talbots who lived in the Town of China in the 19th century. He was the first Black member of the Maine legislature, and is the father of current House assistant majority leader Rachel Talbot Ross, of Portland.)

The book lists the following Black families among early China settlers: Brackley, Foy (also Foye or Fay), Freeman, Jenkins, Jotham, Seco, Sewall (also Sewell) and Talbot (also Talbert, Talbet, Tallbet, Tarbet or Tarbot).

Price and Talbot found that China had 24 Black residents in 1820 (of a total population of 894); 15 were men and nine women. In 1830 there were six Black families (headed by Peter Freeman, Enock Jenkins, Calvin Jotham, Ambrose Sewall, John Sewall and Ezekiel Talbot), totaling 29 people.

Other records showed that Abram Talbot and Ezekiel Talbot lived in Gardiner before they moved to China “by the 1840s.” If Abram and Abraham are the same man (as seems likely, but not certain; records show Abraham Talbots in multiple generations in the family), he was born in 1756 and died in 1850.

Abraham Talbot is described as “a former slave who owned a brickyard on the east side of China Lake.”

One man named Ezekiel Talbot was born in 1760, according to Price and Talbot. An on-line genealogy lists an Ezekiel Talbot who was born in Brockton, Massachusetts, on Dec. 21, 1787, and died in China, Maine, in 1879.

His parents are identified in this and other sources as Abraham Talbot (May 27, 1756 – June 11, 1840) and Molley or Mary Dunbar (1758-1850); they married in Bridgewater, now part of Brockton, in September 1787. An on-line site says the couple appears to have moved to China before 1800, “as he is enumerated in a collective district for the 1800 federal census which included Three Mile Pond, areas east of Winslow, and Freetown Plantation [later Albion].”

This Abraham Talbot was a Revolutionary War veteran, and he was living in China when he applied for his veterans’ pension on April 18, 1818.

Abraham and Mary Talbot had eight children, according to an on-line family history. Their births are recorded in Fairfax (now Albion), indicating that they lived in the area that was added to the north end of present-day China in 1816 and 1818.

The reference to the 1800 census cited above says: “Due to his status as a free black, the census record only gives the number of persons in Abraham’s household, which totaled 6 persons. As the couple had six children born by 1799, it would appear that two of their children died at an early age.”

Abraham and Mary’s oldest son was Ezekiel (also called Eschiel Tarbet), who was born Dec. 21, 1787 (in Massachusetts, or Maine?), and died in China in 1879. The third son was Abraham, born Feb. 28, 1792; the website says he married Edith Griffin Freeman, in Gardiner, in 1818. He was buying land in Portland in the spring of 1847, in partnership with William Jones; the two are called “mariners.” There is no evidence that he returned to China; he “was buried on 25 January 1862, in Portland.”

The Ezekiel Talbot who was born in 1787 married Eliza or Elizabeth Seco (see below for more about the Seco family). He was a farmer and a landowner; on-line sources list records of land transfers.

One source says Ezekiel and Eliza had three sons (Abraham and Mary’s grandsons), all born in China: Charles C., born in 1814; Alvin Austin, born in 1836; and Henry H., born in 1839. Another source adds a daughter named Sarah, and a son William appears in the 1850 census.

A 1984 Waterville Sentinel article says Ezekiel Talbot was a China resident in the 1830, 1840 and 1850 federal censuses. In 1850, the household was listed. Ezekiel was 65 years old and Eliza was 64. Alvin A. and William C., aged 19 and 17, were farmers; Henry H. was 10 years old; Sarah D. Augustine was 28, a sailor named Homan L. Augustine (Sarah’s husband) was 24 and Eliza J. Augustine was four years old.

On Nov. 5, 1852, the family history compiler found that Ezekiel sold a 50-acre lot bounded on one side by the Palermo town line to his son Alvin, for $200.

Charles C. married Margaret Crossman and moved to Aroostook County.

Alvin Austin, born about 1831 and in China in 1850, married Lucy Peters, in Boston, Massachusetts, in March 1855. The writer of the on-line family history surmises she must have died almost immediately, because the 1860 census listed Alvin as a laborer again living with his parents, in China.

Alvin also moved to Aroostook County, where he married his second wife, Georgia Ann Cornelison, from New Brunswick. He worked as a barber in Houlton and Bangor; the couple moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he died Dec, 22, 1901.

Henry H., born in or around 1840 (according to the on-line family history), spent his life as a farmer in China, never married and died of liver cancer Oct. 2, 1915.

Enough Talbots died in China so there is a Talbot cemetery, a small graveyard east of Yorktown Road on the China-Palermo boundary, just south of China’s Thurston Park. A legible stone marks the graves of Eliza Talbot and Sarah A. Freeman – although the dates do not match exactly, they are probably Ezekiel’s wife Eliza and her daughter Sarah (Augustine) Freeman. There are remains of three other stones in the same row, and two others separately (that might be footstones). Henry H. Talbot was reportedly buried “in a private cemetery,” perhaps the Talbot cemetery.

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Another Black cemetery is on the east side of China’s Pleasant View Ridge Road, west of the Talbot cemetery. This one holds graves of the Sewall and Seco families.

Among those buried there are Ambrose Sewall (1787 – Jan. 22, 1851) and his wife Mary (Shay) Sewall (died in 1849). Nearby is the grave of Griffin Sewall, son of Ambrose and Mary Sewall, who died Nov. 29, 1818, at the age of 17. (Another source gives Griffin Sewall’s dates as 1831 to 1848.) There are at least three more stones that appear to be from the same family.

Ambrose Sewall was a son of Elias and Amee Dunbar Sewall. Elias, born Aug. 1, 1751, in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, was a Revolutionary War veteran; an on-line source says he was listed in Harlem (now China) census records in 1800 and 1810, and died in China, date unknown.

Sharing the graveyard are at least seven stones that probably mark the graves of members of the Seco family. Between the two areas, the Waterville newspaper article says, in 1964 there appeared to be remnants of one or two more rows of graves.

According to the article, the Secos seem to have come to China in the 1850s (but Eliza Seco must have connected with Ezekiel Talbot earlier than that). Various other sources, including the 1860 census, describe two Seco families in China. One consisted of William, age 67 (born about 1793, in New Hampshire, and by 1860 blind), his wife Almira (Sewell), age 50 (born about 1809 or 1810, in Maine; one on-line source says she was the daughter of Ambrose and Mary Sewall) and seven children.

The other family included William Seco, Jr., age 30, his wife Elizabeth, age 27, and living with them seven-year-old Anna Talbot.

William, Sr., and Almira were married in December 1825 or thereabouts. An on-line source says he died Sept. 5, 1866, and she died March 23, 1879; both are buried in the Seco cemetery.

Fifteen Seco children are listed, born between about 1827 and 1850. William W. (the one who was still in China in 1860) was the third child/second son, born about 1830, in Waterville, died after 1879 in Michigan.

The oldest son was Charles L., born March 18, 1830, in Fairfield, and died about July 12, 1916, in Winslow; his grave is in Winslow’s Fort Hill cemetery. His first wife was Eliza Sewall, whom he married in Boston in 1852; his second wife was Olive E. Williams, whom he married in 1865 in Winslow.

Hiram was William and Almira’s fifth son, born about 1838. A 2015 story from the Bangor Daily News, found on line, says Hiram was described as a blacksmith in the 1850 census (though if the birthdate is anywhere near right, he would have been a very young blacksmith). Most of the other adult males were listed as farmers, the article says.

On March 29, 1863, Hiram Seco and Lydia Perkins were married in Gardiner. Lydia was born, in Brunswick, on March 18, 1838. The couple had five children, born between about 1865 and 1873; they named their sons Hiram, William and George and their daughters Lydia and Mary, in honor of older family members.

Lydia Seco (the mother) died Oct. 24, 1901, and is buried in Brunswick. Hiram died sometime after 1910, probably in Brunswick, and is the only one of William and Almira’s children specifically listed as buried in the Seco cemetery.

George W., William and Almira’s sixth son, was born, in Waterville, in May 1841. He apparently spent his life in China, because the newspaper article quotes a China town report: George Seco, widower, age 67, died Feb. 17, 1909, “and was buried in a private cemetery in the town.” Also buried in a private cemetery was four-month-old Alton W. Seco, who died Aug. 2, 1904. This “private cemetery” might well have been the Seco cemetery.

Ellis Island and Castle Island

April 17 has been designated National Ellis Island Family History Day. The web explains that the designation “encourages families to explore their ancestry and discover family who immigrated through Ellis Island,” which was the busiest point of entry into the United States from 1892 until 1924.

During those years, the website says, about 12 million immigrants came into the country through Ellis Island. One million arrived in 1907 alone; on April 17, 1907, the center processed 11,747 people, the busiest day on record.

After the first world war, the web says, the United States established consulates all over the world. One of their functions was to process immigrants, so Ellis Island was no longer essential. After 1924, the web says, the facility became a detention center for illegal immigrants, then a World War II military hospital and a later a training center for the Coast Guard.

Apparently there was a residual immigration center there, too, because the web says the last immigrant was processed on Nov. 12, 1954, the day the federal government closed Ellis Island. He is identified as “a Norwegian merchant seaman named Arne Peterssen.”

New York’s first immigration processing center was Castle Island, which was jointly run by New York City and New York State from August 3, 1855, to April 18, 1890. Some 11 million immigrants are recorded as coming through Castle Island.

When the federal government took control of immigration in 1890, Castle Island center closed. The web says a temporary site at the U. S. Barge Office “on the eastern edge of The Battery waterfront” was used while the federal Office of Immigration built the Ellis Island center.

The web lists castlegarden.org and ellisisland.org as on-line resources for lists of names and other information from each center.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Wars – Part 14

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The battleship USS Maine.

by Mary Grow

Mexican & Spanish-American

The wars on which this series has provided information so far began with fighting against the European power that once claimed the United States and continued with the 1861-1865 war between two parts of the United States.

Ongoing were a third category, wars the United States’ founders fought to establish and expand its land area. From their first arrival in the 1600s, Europeans pushed aside the Native Americans, from the eastern seaboard first and the rest of the continent later.

(Consequences of those years persist as Natives reclaim parts of their historic home. See, for example, here in Maine the restoration to the Passamaquoddy tribe of 140 acres of the 150-acre Kuwesuwi Monihq, Pine Island [or White’s Island], in Big Lake.)

Starting with 13 states facing the Atlantic Ocean, the country reached to the Pacific with the 1850 admission of California. Adding Utah in 1896 brought the number of states in the continental United States to 45 by the end of the 19th century. Oklahoma was added in 1907, Arizona and New Mexico in 1912.

Alaska went from a territory to state in January 1959. Hawaii became the 50th state in August of the same year.

Two formally declared wars were part of 19th century growth, one with Mexico (April 25, 1846 – February 2, 1848) that added land in the southwest and one with Spain (April 21 – December 10, 1898) that gave the United States its first overseas territories.

(Liberia, in west Africa, was settled beginning in 1820 by former slaves from the United States, under the auspices of the American Colonization Society [ACS]. The historical consensus is that it was never a United States colony or possession; in fact, Wikipedia says, “The United States government declined to act upon requests from the ACS to make Liberia an American colony or to establish a formal protectorate over Liberia, but it did exercise a ‘moral protectorate’ over Liberia, intervening when threats manifested towards Liberian territorial expansion or sovereignty.” Liberia became an independent country on July 26, 1847.)

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Wikipedia explains that the prelude to the war between the United States and Mexico was the declaration of independence by residents of part of northern Mexico in 1836. The Battle of the Alamo in late February and early March 1836 was part of that struggle.

Mexico did not recognize Texas as an independent republic. The United States (and Britain and France) did. Most Texans, Wikipedia says, were willing to join the United States, and after political maneuvering, Texas became a state on Dec. 29, 1845.

In the spring of 1846, President James Polk sent United States military forces into the new state. Mexican forces resisted, leading to battles in April and May followed by a May 13 United States declaration of war.

A series of battles stretching as far west as present-day California led to United States occupation of major Mexican cities, including in September 1847 Mexico City. The war was officially ended by the Feb. 2, 1848, Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Mexico gave up the area that, Wikipedia says, became “the present-day states of California, Nevada, and Utah, most of New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming.”

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The proximate case of the Spanish-American War was the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor on Feb. 15, 1898. Built at the navy yard in Brooklyn, at a cost of almost $4.7 million, and commissioned Sept. 17, 1895, she was the first ship named in honor of the State of Maine.

Wikipedia says the Maine had been sent to protect United States interests as Cubans fought for independence from Spain. Later in 1898, a naval inquiry concluded a bomb had been the cause; but, Wikipedia says, some naval officers suggested instead an internal explosion in a coal bunker. A 1974 re-investigation supported their theory. Wikipedia says the cause of the sinking “remains a subject of debate.”

Meanwhile, however, United States opinion had settled immediately on Spain as the villain. With “Remember the Maine!” as its battle cry, Congress approved a declaration of war on April 21, 1898. Fighting in Cuba and in the Spanish possessions of Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines was over by August. On Dec. 10, 1898, the Treaty of Paris ended the war and gave the United States the former Spanish territories.

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The effects of the Mexican War and the Spanish-American War in Maine were slight. Exceptions would be the few families with members who served, who had connections with the affected areas or were otherwise involved on a personal level.

In his history of the State of Maine, Louis Hatch didn’t mention the Mexican War. About the Spanish-American War, he wrote that in response to President William McKinley’s call for volunteers, Maine sent “one regiment of infantry, four batteries of heavy artillery and a signal corps, amounting in all to 1,717 non-commissioned officers and men.”

Other Maine men volunteered, and Portland’s and Bath’s “volunteer naval reserve associations” were “mustered into United States service,” Hatch wrote. The troops assembled in Augusta. He said nothing about casualties.

The 1898 Maine Adjutant General’s report, found on line, has long lists of Kennebec Valley volunteers.

Most local historians omit any mention of either war. Two exceptions are Alma Pierce Robbins, in her Vassalboro history, and General Isaac Bangs, in the military history chapter of Edwin Whittemore’s Waterville history.

Robbins wrote that when the “off and on” Mexican border dispute led to the United States declaration of war in 1846, not many people in Vassalboro cared. “Those who had gone west and those who were ‘tired of farming’ did go,” she wrote.

In the 1890s, as tension with Spain mounted preceding the Spanish-American War, Vassalboro was involved in national military exercises.

“Encampments and ‘war games’ were encouraged everywhere,” Robbins wrote. Massachusetts troops came “to compete with Maine men to demonstrate proficiencies in military techniques, with official sanction.”

Some of the encampments were on Horace Sturgis’ River Road farm. Robbins’ history includes a photograph of then-Colonel Theodore Roosevelt’s mounted Rough Riders in front of Sam Mitchell’s house on the River Road at Riverside in 1897, as they recruited area volunteers.

About the actual war Robbins was silent. But, she said, names of Vassal­boro residents who died in the Spanish-American War and World War I share a bronze plaque on the bridge at North Vassalboro.

The plaque has been moved since Robbins’ history was published in 1971 and is now on the larger of the two stones in the memorial on Main Street, in North Vassalboro. The memorial sits in front of the large building that used to be the North Vassalboro schoolhouse, then the town office and later a health clinic.

The names from 1898 are Prince Bessey, John O. Brown, Alton M. Lord, Andrew Peterson, Agra Pooler (state military re­cords list his name as Ogra), Fred Pooler, Bert J. Priest, Charles H. Priest, Charles H. Simpson, David Simpson and William J. Surman.

Prince Manter Bessey

Robbins erred when she wrote that all these men died in the Spanish-American war; your writer has found post-war information about several of them.

On-line sources say Prince M. Bessey was born Sept. 14, 1879, in China, Maine. On May 17, 1898, he enlisted from Augusta as a private in Battery A, Maine Volunteer Artillery Battalion; he was discharged May 31, 1899, in Savannah, Georgia.

After the war Bessey lived in North Vassalboro from 1907 to 1911. He worked as a salesman in several places, including Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he met and married Nora Smith in 1920. After he retired from Gimbel’s Depart­ment Store in 1948, the couple moved to Nora’s home town, Ceredo, West Virginia, where he died.

Charles Henry Priest was born July 12, 1881, in East Vassalboro, and died June 27, 1960. He is buried in Priest Hill Cemetery.

Peterson and Fred Pooler were privates in Battery A; each was 19 when he enlisted. Both Poolers were reportedly born in Waterville. Ogra or Agra Pooler, who enlisted at 21, was a North Vassalboro resident.

David Simpson, a Waterville native, was 24 when he enlisted. Surman was 27; his birthplace is listed as Dover, England.

Most Battery A men were from Lewiston or Auburn. In addition to those from Vassalboro, an on-line list includes First Lieutenant and Assistant Surgeon Robert J. Martin and Privates Harvey J. Libby, Nathan T. Shaw, of Augusta. Bangs’ chapter in Whittemore’s history gives names of a dozen privates from Waterville in Battery A, including Joseph Butler, who enlisted May 17, 1898, and deserted at Fort Popham July 16, and another deserter named Edward Lessor.

Battery C included 21 more Waterville men and smaller numbers from Augusta and Fairfield.

Bangs added a list of a dozen Waterville men who served in the First Maine Infantry in the Spanish-American War. William J. Surman is one of them. In the Maine Adjutant-General’s Report for the year 1901, Ogra Pooler, Charles H. Priest and William J. Surman are listed among Company D men who received $22 each in “Extra Pay of Maine Volunteers.”

The war with Spain continued until 1902 in what some historians call the Philippine-American War, as the United States consolidated its power over those islands. It was an appropriate introduction to the 20th – and 21st – centuries, as one country or ideology after another used – and uses – force against others.

Update from Brown Memorial Library in Clinton

The Dec. 2, 2021, article in this series talked about the Brown Memorial Library in Clinton, named in honor of William Wentworth Brown (April 19, 1821 – Oct. 22, 1911). The article said that Brown gave the library a portrait of himself by Frederic (or Frederick) Porter Vinton (Jan. 29, 1846 – May 19, 1911); in November 2021, the portrait had been sent away for cleaning.

William Wentworth Brown

It is now back on the wall, and assistant library director Cindy Lowell says she and Director Cheryl Dickey-Whitish are very pleased. Mr. Brown is “holding a pair of red gloves you couldn’t even see before,” she said. The head of his cane is visible and his hair and beard have turned from salt-and-pepper to almost pure white.

The following information is copied from the March-April 2022 issue of the Clinton Community Newsletter.

“The Trustees of the Brown Memorial Library recently had Mr. Brown’s very large 100-year-old portrait sent to a professional art restoration company for cleaning. Last week the portrait was returned to its place of honor displaying new details that were previously hidden by layers of coal dust!”

The newsletter has a color picture of the portrait and invites area residents to stop in to see it, an invitation Lowell seconds.

Brown Memorial Library is at 53 Railroad Street, in Clinton, on the east side of the street a block north of Main Street (Route 100).

Main sources

Hatch, Louis Clinton, ed., Maine: A History 1919 ((facsimile, 1974)
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971)
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902)

Websites, miscellaneous

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Wars – Part 13

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Capt. James Parnell Jones (left), Capt. Charles W. Billings (right)

by Mary Grow

Civil War

Henry Kingsbury lists four men who served in “the late war” in the personal paragraphs in his chapter on Benton in the 1892 Kennebec County history.

Stephen H. Abbott enlisted from Winslow and served six months with the 19th Maine; he moved to Benton in 1872 and served as postmaster from 1890 and for three years as a selectman.

Gershom Tarbell was in the 19th Maine for three years. Albion native Augustine Crosby was in the 3rd Maine, credited to Benton. Hiram B. Robinson was in Pennsylvania when the war started and enlisted from there not once but twice; he fought in 37 battles and returned to Benton in 1865.

Kingsbury does not mention Benton-born Frank H. Haskell (1843-1903), described in on-line sources as enlisting in Waterville June 4, 1861, when he was 18. Sergeant-Major Haskell was promoted to first lieutenant in the 3rd Maine Infantry after being cited for heroism during the June 1, 1862, Battle of Fair Oaks (also called the Battle of Seven Pines) in Virginia. His action, for which he received a Medal of Honor, is summarized as taking command of part of his regiment after all senior officers were killed or wounded and leading it “gallantly” in a significant stream crossing.

Another Civil War soldier from the central Kennebec Valley who was awarded the Medal of Honor was Private John F. Chase, from Chelsea, who enlisted in Augusta and served in the 5th Battery, Maine Light Artillery. As the May 3, 1863, battle at Chancellorsville, Virginia, wound down, Chase and one other survivor continued firing their gun after other batteries stopped and, since the horses were dead, dragged the gun away by themselves to keep it from the Confederates.

Grave of Horatio Farrington

At least 40 China residents died of wounds or disease, including, the China bicentennial history says, the five oldest of Mary and Ezekiel Farrington’s seven sons. Horatio, age 27, Charles, 25, Reuben, 20, Byron, 19 and Gustavus, 18, died between June 1, 1861, and Oct. 30, 1864.

Records do not show how many Civil War veterans were permanently disabled, the author commented. She retold the story told to her by Eleon M. Shuman of Weeks Mills about Jesse Hatch, from Deer Hill in southeastern China, who (for an unknown reason) fought for the South and came home so disfigured from a powder magazine explosion “that his appearance frightened the neighborhood children, but his friendly words and gifts of apples made him less terrifying.”

One of China’s best-known Civil War soldiers was Eli and Sybil Jones’ oldest son, Captain James Parnell Jones. As the author of the China history pointed out, pacificism is a central Quaker tenet, but in 1861 some Quakers decided ending slavery and maintaining the Union outweighed religious upbringing.

She quoted from the Jones genealogy an account of James Jones (who was 23, married with one son) and his 18-year-old unmarried brother Richard at a troop-raising event.

“Richard immediately raised his hand when the call came but James walked over to his brother, pulled down the raised arm and slowly raised his own. ‘Thee’s too young, Richard.’ ”

Jones was in the 7th Maine, first a company captain and from December 1863 a regimental major, as the troops fought in Virginia and at Gettysburg. In 1864, in the Battle of the Wilderness, he allegedly replied to a demand to surrender his embattled regiment with, “All others may go back, but the Seventh Maine, never!”

Jones was killed in the fighting around Fort Stevens July 11 and 12, 1864, as the 7th Maine helped defend Washington.

From Clinton, Kingsbury listed Daniel B. Abbott, born in Winslow, who served in the 19th Maine until June 1865 and after the war bought a farm in Clinton and became commander and grand master of Billings Post, G.A.R. (Grand Army of the Republic, the Civil War veterans’ organization that was disbanded in 1956 after the last member died).

The post was named to honor Captain Charles Wheeler Billings (Dec. 13, 1824 – July 15, 1863), Company C, 20th Maine, who was wounded in the left knee July 2, 1863, at the Battle of Little Round Top and died in a field hospital.

Clinton’s Brown Memorial Library website and a “Central Maine Morning Sentinel” article found on line describe the June 6, 2015, rededication of Clinton’s Civil War monument and the monument at Billings’ gravesite in Riverview Cemetery. The newspaper quotes speaker Bruce Keezer, then President of the Friends of Brown Memorial Library, as saying Clinton had a total population of 1,600 in the early 1860s; 252 men enlisted and 32 died.

The website says Billings was the highest-ranking 20th Maine officer to die at Little Round Top.

Billings left a widow, Ellen (Hunter) Billings, whose 30th birthday was July 1, 1863, and two daughters: Isadore Margaret, born in 1850, and Elizabeth W., or Lizzie, born in 1860. Another daughter, Alice, born in 1856, had died in 1860; and Elizabeth died Dec. 7, 1863. Isadore died in 1897, the day after her 47th birthday. Ellen lived until 1924.

Also from Clinton, according to Kingsbury, were Isaac Bingham, Rev. Francis P. Furber, Joseph Frank Rolfe and Laforest Prescott True.

Bingham had gone to California in 1852; he came home in 1861 and served two years with the 1st Maine Cavalry. After the war he moved back and forth between his Clinton farm and California.

Furber, a Winslow native who moved to Clinton in 1845, served in the 19th Maine for three years. A wound received May 6, 1864, “destroyed the use of one arm,” Kingsbury wrote. He was ordained a Freewill Baptist minister Sept. 27, 1885, after serving as a minister in Clinton and nearby towns since 1875.

Rolfe, born in Fairfield of parents who moved to Clinton when he was about three, served in the 2nd Maine Cavalry from 1863 to the end of the war. True was in the 20th Maine from 1862 to 1865 and was wounded twice.

Fairfield’s Civil War monument is one of the oldest in Maine, according to the town’s bicentennial history. The writers noted that its dedication day, July 4, 1868, was a scorching Saturday: the temperature reached 105 degrees in the shade.

Soldiers came from all over Maine. Ceremonies included a parade; cannon salutes; speeches, including one by Governor (former General) Joshua Chamberlain; dinner prepared by townswomen and served “in the old freight depot”; and a baseball game with a final score of 60 to 40 (the history does not record the names of the teams).

“The day was not without its tragedy,” the history says. A veteran named William Ricker, who had survived the war unscathed, lost a hand when one of the cannons went off too soon. Chamberlain promptly canceled the remaining salutes.

Kingsbury found that one of Sidney’s soldiers, Mulford Baker Reynolds (Aug. 5, 1843 – Aug. 3, 1937) served in Company C of the 1st Maine Cavalry from August 1862 to July 1865, “and spent about six months in Andersonville prison” in Georgia.

Reynolds married Ella F. Leighton on Nov. 23, 1881, according to an on-line source. Kingsbury wrote that in 1892 Reynolds was farming his family place in Sidney and he and Ella had four children.

Among the many Vassalboro men whose personal paragraphs in Kingsbury’s history list Civil War service is Edwin C. Barrows (April 2, 1842 – April 20, 1918). Educated at Waterville and Bowdoin colleges, he enlisted Nov. 19, 1863, in the 2nd Maine Cavalry.

Transferred in June 1865, he became second lieutenant (but acted as adjutant, the officer who assists the commander with administration, Kingsbury wrote) of the 86th U.S.C.T. (United States Colored Troops), serving until he was discharged April 10, 1866.

After the war, Barrows got a law degree from Albany Law School in January 1867 and practiced four years in Nebraska City, Nebraska. He married Laura Alden (Sept. 5, 1842 – Dec. 19, 1909) and returned to Vassalboro in 1872. By 1892, he had been a supervisor of schools in 1882 and 1883 and since then a selectman, “being chairman since 1887.”

Edwin and Laura Barrows are buried under a single headstone in Vassalboro’s Nichols Cemetery.

Vassalboro’s G.A.R. Post was named in honor of Richard W. Mullen of the 14th Maine, one of 410 Vassalboro Civil War soldiers, Alma Pierce Robbins wrote in her town history. After the war, town meeting voters appropriated money to the G.A.R.’s Women’s Relief Corps for Memorial Day services and veterans’ grave markers. The Post disbanded in 1942 and the appropriation was transferred to Vassalboro’s American Legion Post and Auxiliary.

The Waterville G.A.R. Post, chartered Dec. 29, 1874, was named in honor of William S. Heath, who was killed in action at Gaines Mill, Virginia, on June 27, 1862. The first post commander was General Francis E. Heath, the second General I. S. Bangs. Francis Heath was almost certainly William Heath’s brother (variously identified as Frank Edw. and Francis E.; died in Waterville in December 1897), I. S. Bangs the author of the military history chapter in Edwin Whittemore’s Waterville history.

Ernest Marriner added information on William Heath’s life in “Kennebec Yesterdays”. In 1849, he wrote, Heath was 15 and “somewhat tubercular”; his father, Solyman, thought a trip to the goldfields in California would be good for him.

Young Heath “did survive the rigors of the terrible trip across plains and mountains, worked a while in a San Francisco store, then shipped off to China, from which distant land the anxious father soon had him returned through the intercession of the United States government.”

Back in Waterville, Heath graduated from Waterville College in 1853. When the 3rd Maine’s Company H was formed in Waterville in April 1861, Heath was captain and his brother Francis/Frank was first lieutenant. By the time of his death, William Heath was a lieutenant colonel in the 5th Maine Infantry, Marriner wrote. Francis ended the war as a colonel in the 19th Maine, according to Bangs.

Linwood Lowden, in his Windsor history, wrote that Charles J. Carrol, one of seven Windsor men who fought in the Battle of Gettysburg July 2-4, 1863, was mortally wounded. Three more Windsor men, George H. B. Barton, George W. Chapman and George W. Merrill, were killed May 6, 1864, in the Battle of the Wilderness.

Windsor’s Vining G.A.R. Post, organized June 2, 1884, was named to honor Marcellus Vining. Post members met every Saturday night in the G.A. R. Hall, which was the upper story of the town house, Lowden said.

At an 1886, meeting, “a Mr. Bangs presented a picture of Marcellus Vining” to the organization. Kingsbury added that the Vining family donated Marcellus Vining’s army sword, “his life-size portrait and an elegant flag.”

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

Kingsbury wrote that Vining was born on the family homestead on May 2, 1842, third child and oldest son of Daniel Vining by his first wife, Sarah Esterbrooks of Oldtown (Daniel and Sarah had three daughters and three sons; after Sarah’s death, Daniel married Eliza Choat, and they had six more daughters).

On Jan. 25, 1862, Marcellus Vining became a private in the 7th Maine. He served for two years, during which his “ability and courage” (Kingsbury) earned him two promotions. On Jan. 4, 1864, he re-enlisted in a reorganized 7th Maine. On March 9 he was made second lieutenant of Company A, and on April 21 made first lieutenant. On May 12 he was wounded at Spottsylvania, Virginia; he died a week later.

“A captain’s commission was on its way from Washington to him, but too late to give to the brave soldier his richly earned promotion,” Kingsbury wrote.

He continued with a paraphrase from a letter Vining, knowing he was dying, wrote to his father, saying it was better “to die in the defense of his country’s flag than live to see it disgraced.”

Kingsbury concluded: “Thus the oft-repeated tale—a bright, promising man with the blush of youth still on his cheek, willingly laid down his life to preserve that of his country.”

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)
Lowden, Linwood H., good Land & fine Contrey but Poor roads a history of Windsor, Maine (1993)
Marriner, Ernest, Kennebec Yesterdays (1954)
Robbins, Alma, Pierce History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971)
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902)

Websites, miscellaneous

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Wars – Part 12

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The Civil War left China, like Albion and other towns, deeply in debt, paying to outfit the soldiers and compensate their families.

by Mary Grow

Civil War

The United States Civil War, which began when the Confederates shelled Fort Sumter, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861, and ended with General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Virginia, on April 9, 1865, had the most impact on Maine, including the central Kennebec Valley, of any 17th or 18th century war.

Nonetheless, your writer’s original plan was to write only a single article about the Civil War. As usual, she found an oversupply of material that she hopes will interest readers as it interested her; but she still limits coverage to two articles, for three reasons.

The first and most important reason to downplay Civil War history is that unlike, say, the War of 1812, the Civil War is already familiar. Citizens who know nothing about the Sept. 13, 1814, bombardment of Fort McHenry (which inspired Francis Scott Key to write the poem that became the national anthem) recognize at least the names of battles like Bull Run and Gettysburg. Many people can name at least one Civil War general; few can name one from the War of 1812.

A second point is that numerous excellent histories of the Civil War are readily available, including books specifically about Maine’s role.

And the third reason is that this war is recent enough that some readers undoubtedly have memories of their grandparents telling stories of the generation before them who fought in the Civil War.

Any reader who would like to share a family Civil War story is invited to write it, attach photographs if available and email to townline@townline.org., Att. Roland Hallee. Maximum length is 1,000 words. Submissions will be printed as space permits; the editor reserves the right to reject any article and/or photograph.

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Maine historians agree that the majority of state residents supported President Abraham Lincoln’s decision to fight to preserve the Union. Those who initially disagreed, James W. North wrote in his history of Augusta, found themselves a small enough minority so they either changed their views or moderated their expression.

By 1860, the telegraph was widely used. News of Fort Sumter reached Augusta the same day, followed two days later by Lincoln’s call for 75,000 three-months volunteers, including one regiment from Maine.

On April 22, North wrote, the Maine legislature, in a hastily-called special session, approved enrolling 10,000 soldiers in ten regiments for three years, plus “a State loan of one million dollars.”

Augusta had filled two companies by the end of April. Other Kennebec Valley companies joined them; they camped and drilled on the State House lawn. The Third Regiment started south June 5, 1861; those soldiers were promptly replaced by others from other parts of Maine, volunteers succeeded by men paid bounties and in 1863 by draftees.

North wrote that the first draft in Augusta was held July 14 through 21, 1863, starting two days after the New York City draft riots began, with news arriving hourly. In Augusta’s Meonian Hall, eligible men’s names were drawn from a wheel by a blindfolded man named James M. Meserve, “a democrat of known integrity and fairness, who possessed the general confidence.”

The process began with selection of 40 men from Albion. Augusta followed, and, North wrote, the initial nervousness gave way to “a general feeling of merriment,” with draftees being applauded and congratulated.

Being drafted did not mean serving, North pointed out. Physical standards were strict; out of 3,540 draftees, 1,050 were “rejected by surgeon for physical disability or defects.” It was also legal to pay a substitute or to pay the government to be let off.

Augusta remained a military hub and a supply depot through the war, centered around the State House and Camp Keyes, on Winthrop Hill, at the top of Winthrop Street. There were large hospital buildings on Western Avenue, North wrote, which were so crowded by 1863 that the Camp Keyes barracks were also fitted up as hospital wards. The trotting park between the State House and the river was named Camp Coburn and hosted infantry and cavalry barracks and enlarged stables.

North described the celebratory homecomings for soldiers returning to Augusta when their enlistments were up, like the one in August 1863 for the 24th Regiment. The “bronzed and war-worn” men had come from Port Hudson, Louisiana, up the Mississippi to Cairo and by train to Augusta, a two-week trip. Greeted by cannon-fire, bells, torch-carrying fire companies, a band, state and city officials and “a multitude” of cheering citizens, they marched straight to the State House, enjoyed a meal in the rotunda and “dropped to sleep on the floor around the tables, being too weary to proceed to Camp Keyes.”

Historians describing the effects of the Civil War on smaller Kennebec Valley towns tend to emphasize two points: the human cost and the financial cost.

Ruby Crosby Wiggin found as she researched the history of Albion a record saying that “out of 100 men who went to war from the town of Albion, 45 didn’t come back.” She listed the names of more than 150 Albion soldiers, six identified as lieutenants.

By 1862, Wiggin wrote, the state and many towns offered enlistment bonuses. In addition, towns paid to equip each soldier. Total Albion expenditures, she wrote, were $21,265; the state reimbursed the town $8,033.33.

Wiggin concluded, “No wonder the town was heavily in debt at the close of the Civil War.”

The China bicentennial history says almost 300 men from that town served in Civil War units. The author quoted from the 1863 school report that said attendance in one district school was unusually low, “the large boys having gone to the war.”

The Civil War left China, like Albion and other towns, deeply in debt. The China history says when the State of Maine began tallying municipal costs and offering compensation in 1868, China had paid $47,735.34 to provide soldiers. The state repayment was $12,708.33, and town meetings were still dealing with interest payments and debt repayments into the latter half of the 1870s.

China town meetings during the war were mostly about meeting enlistment quotas, and, the history writer implied, by 1864 voters were tired of the topic. In July and again in December 1864, they delegated filling the quota to their select board.

When the late-1864 quota had not been filled by February 1865, voters were explicit; the history writer said they agreed to “sustain the Selectmen in any measures they may take in filling the quota of this town.”

The Fairfield historians who wrote the town’s 1988 bicentennial history found the list of Civil War soldiers too long to include in their book and noted that the names are on the monument in the Veterans Memorial Park and in the Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.) record books in the public library across Lawrence Avenue from the park.

Of Larone, the northernmost and likely the smallest of the seven villages that made up the Town of Fairfield for part of the 19th century, the history says, “Larone furnished her full quota of ‘boys in blue’. These averaged one for every family, three-fifths were destined never to see their homes again.”

Millard Howard, in his Palermo history, wrote that “The Civil War was by far the most traumatic experience this town ever experienced.” Of an 1860 population of 1,372, 46 men, “or one out of every 30 inhabitants,” died between 1861 and 1865.

Looking back from the year 2015, Howard wrote somberly, “No other war can remotely compare with it.”

He listed the names of the dead, with ages and causes of death where known. The youngest were 18, the oldest 44. More than half, 26, died of disease rather than wounds; Augustus Worthing, age 31, starved to death in Salisbury prison, in North Carolina.

Sidney voters spent a lot of town meetings in the 1860s talking about the war, according to Alice Hammond’s town history. As early as 1861, they approved abating taxes for volunteers.

As the war went on, voters authorized aid for volunteers’ families and monetary inducements to enlist for residents and non-residents, with preference given to residents. At an 1863 special meeting, they authorized selectmen to borrow money as needed “to aid families of volunteers.”

Hammond noted that Sidney was debt-free before the war, “but in 1865 it issued bonds for $24,000, a debt from which it recovered very slowly.”

Alma Pierce Robbins found from military records that 410 men from Vassalboro enlisted for Civil War service. From census records, she listed the 1860 population as 3,181.

As in other municipalities, voters approved wartime expenses. Robbins wrote that $7,900 was appropriated for bounties and aid to soldiers’ families in 1861. The comparable 1863 figure was $16,900. Perhaps for contrast, she added the 1864 cost of the new bridge at North Vassalboro (presumably over Outlet Stream): $1,057.82 (plus an 1867 appropriation of $418.62).

In Waterville, General Isaac Sparrow Bangs wrote in his chapter on military history in Reverend Edwin Carey Whittemore’s 1902 centennial history, recruiting offices opened soon after the news of Fort Sumter. A Waterville College student named Charles A. Henrickson was the first to enroll, and, Bangs wrote, his example “proved so irresistibly contagious at the college that the classes and recitations were broken up” and the college temporarily closed.

Henrickson was captured at the Battle of Bull Run, July 21, 1861. He survived the war; later in the Waterville history, Chas. A. Henrickson is listed among charter members of the Waterville Savings Bank, organized in 1869.

These Waterville soldiers became companies G and H in the 3rd Maine Infantry, Bangs wrote. After drilling in Waterville, they went to Augusta and were put under the command of regimental Colonel Oliver O. Howard. On June 5, Howard was ordered to Washington, “carrying with him, as Waterville’s first contingent, seventy-four of her boys into the maelstrom of war.”

Bangs spent years verifying the names of 421 men who either enlisted from Waterville or were Waterville natives who enlisted elsewhere. The names are included in Whittemore’s history.

Bangs added that the Maine Adjutant-General’s report says Waterville provided 525 soldiers. He offered several explanations for the discrepancy, pointing out the difficulties of accurate record-keeping.

Waterville paid $67,715 in enlistment bounties, Bangs wrote. Henry Kingsbury, in his history of Kennebec County, put the figure at $68,016 and said the state reimbursement was $19,888.33.

Linwood Lowden wrote in the history of Windsor that more than one-third of Windsor men aged 17 to 50 fought in the Civil War, most of them in the19th and 21st Maine infantry regiments.

Like other towns, Windsor paid bonuses to enlistees and, Lowden wrote, $2,663.87 “in aid to soldiers’ families…from 1862 through 1866.” He added that Windsor first went into debt during these years.

Camp Keyes, Augusta

A history of Camp Keyes found on-line says that the 70-acre site on top of Winthrop Hill, on the west side of Augusta, had been used as, and called, “the muster field” since before Maine became a state in 1820. It was still available, although the militia had become less significant, when the Civil War broke out.

On Aug. 20, 1862, Maine Adjutant General John L. Hodsdon designated the field one of Maine’s three official “rendezvous areas” for militia and volunteers and named it Camp E. D. Keyes, in honor of Major-General Erasmus D. Keyes, a Massachusetts native who moved to Kennebec County (town unspecified on line) as a young man. He graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1832 and fought in the Civil War until 1863, when a superior removed him from command, claiming he lacked aggressiveness.

(The other two Maine rendezvous areas were Camp Abraham Lincoln, in Portland, and Camp John Pope [honoring General John Pope from Kentucky], in Bangor.)

Thousands of Civil War soldiers from Maine passed through Camp Keyes. It also housed Maine’s only federal military hospital, named Cony Hospital in honor of Governor Samuel Cony.

After the war, the site remained a militia training ground. The State of Maine bought it in 1888. In 1893 the militia became the National Guard and continued to use the training ground, with Guard headquarters in the Capitol building until 1938.

The on-line site gives an undated description: “Small buildings were constructed of plywood for mess halls, kitchens, latrines, store houses, and lodging for senior military officers. Companies pitched their tents on pads that had been built.”

Main sources

Fairfield Historical Society Fairfield, Maine 1788-1988 (1988).
Grow, Mary M., China Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984).
Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992).
Howard, Millard, An Introduction to the Early History of Palermo, Maine (second edition, December 2015).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Lowden, Linwood H., good Land & fine Contrey but Poor roads a history of Windsor, Maine (1993).
Marriner, Ernest, Kennebec Yesterdays (1954).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870).
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).
Wiggin, Ruby Crosby, Albion on the Narrow Gauge (1964).

Websites, miscellaneous.

The tale of the Frozen Appalachian Trail Leprechaun

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by Jim Metcalf

“If you want huge togue and no fishermen head over to Nahmakanta” volunteered the old logger.

Mitchell replied,” Nahmakanta is on the other side of the Appalachian Trail and the snow is pretty deep this time of year.”

“No problem,” said the logger. “There’s a skidder trail from the Golden Road to the ridge of the Appalachian Trail then an easy downhill to a flat 10-foot-wide groomed trail to the lake and out to the Golden Road near Baxter.”

It was March and the fishing was slow on Chesuncook, so we talked ourselves in to chasing this pot of gold described by the old logger. He and his wife live year-round on Chesuncook, and he certainly knows the country. He also said that he and his wife would lead the trip. What could be better than that. Brian Mitchell, from Freedom, Norman Leeman, from Palermo, and I were staying in Mitchell’s camp on Chesuncook Lake for a couple of weeks to ice fish some of the ponds and lakes in the area.

We usually fished Chamberlain and Eagle in February while staying in a tent at the Crow’s Nest canoe camp site across from the tramway. Our trips were for a couple of weeks at a time and we hauled in enough gear to last all winter. We always found enough dry dead cedar on the cutting side of the waterway boundary to keep the tent stove glowing. But there were problems that always had us thinking about a nice warm cabin with big bunks and soft chairs.

Tenting at the Crow’s Nest meant we had to haul loaded sleds from the last plowed road to the Lock Dam then up and across Chamberlain to the Crow’s Nest canoe camp site. If the snow was deep, we had to pack down a trail before hauling the sleds full of gear. Once at the camp site we needed to dig out 4 – 5 feet of snow to set the tent down on fir branches. Moles, mice and other woods creatures lived happily under the snow, so they were thrilled to meet under our tent for warmth and chattering conversations which kept us awake until we stuffed our ears with cotton from the aspirin bottles.

This camp site had a fine State of Maine built privy to which we cleared a path. The only problem was those below zero mornings when we stood around drinking coffee and prolonging conversation until someone would yell, “Damn it, someone has to go sit in the privy to take the frost off the seat and it isn’t me because my turn was yesterday.” The two of us remaining would try to see which could outlast the other with the loser running up the path yelling bad descriptions of the one who did not have to sit on the frosty seat that morning

This year we left the tent home to stay at Mitchell’s camp on Chesuncook Lake. We had room to move around, no animal chatter under the floor, a shed full of dry wood, a reasonably warm privy without frost. And it was March with the sun higher and warmer. The only bad news was that the snow was deeper and could slush up on warm days with water coming up on the ice. Nevertheless, we were happy and looked forward to celebrating St Patrick’s day with a good catch of fish.

Each of us had jobs to do and if anyone complained about another’s work, they would absorb that job in addition to their own. I had cooking duty so on St Patrick’s day I made a huge batch of bacon and scrambled eggs covered with green food dye I had packed in. Mitchell and Norman sat looking at their Kelly-green scrambled eggs.

Finally, Mitchell hollered out, “Damn Jim, you #@%$**#, these eggs are sickly green,” then he paused and with a smile said, “But aren’t they good.”

The next morning, we planned on making the trip to Nahmakanta Lake with the old logger and his wife in the lead on their huge Evinrude machine with reverse that the old man said would back the machine out of any trouble. It was bitter cold with a wind as we followed them across Chesuncook to a cove near the Golden Road. As we came into the cove that big Evinrude sled disappeared into the snow with just the rear end pointing straight into the air. The old couple came crawling up out of the hole yelling something about snow covered dry-ki and the fact that we should have set over more to the right to avoid this cove full of stumps, limbs, and other assorted driftwood which the wind had pushed into this cove during the summer. We must have spent an hour lifting, pulling and dragging that damn heavy Evinrude with its useless reverse out of the dry-ki. When we got them upright on the ice, the logger said they were tired and had to head back to camp to rest. But they added, “The skidder trail is just across the Golden Road and you boys will be at the lake in no time. We may even catch up after we rest.” We probably should have taken this as a bad omen, but what could go wrong on a skidder trail.

We had some difficulty crossing the Golden Road as the heater banks were high, but luckily moose had crossed here so there were small breaks in the snowbanks. We were now in an empty log yard and could see the skidder trail ahead. No one had travelled on this trail, so we had to break it out with our sleds. The first section of the trail was in the open and OK to ride, but as we entered the woods things got a little more difficult. Norman led on his wide track with Mitchell following and me in the rear. In the summer a skidder trail looks like the bottom of a H with a crown in the middle and tire trenches on each side, but in the winter, snow fills the trail making it nearly impossible to stay in the middle of the trail up on the crown. As the third in line, I had a decent path to follow, but it was so cold that my breath iced up my glasses making it very hard to stay out of the tire ruts. If I slipped off the crown, I could usually gun the sled to jump back on. When that did not work, I had to jump off and pick up the sled back on to the crown.

This lifting of the sled every 100 yards or so was exhausting, causing more heated perspiration and thicker ice glazing of my glasses. On one slip off the crown into the tire rut I got snagged by a logging cable left on the side of the trail. It caught me around my neck pulling me off the sled and breaking the windshield. I was very fortunate as I had on heavy clothes with extra scarfs around my neck. Norman and Mitchell couldn’t turn around in this narrow trail, so they walked back to help me get untangled and back on the crown. We were now heading more uphill leading us to believe that we should be crossing the Appalachian Trail soon. The trail would be the welcoming sign that an easy downhill run to the flat 10-foot-wide groomed trail by Nahmakanta Lake was at hand. I didn’t notice how sweaty and tired I was getting until I caught up with Norman and Mitchell where the Appalachian Trail crossed. Mitchell with the smallest sled decided to travel down the hill to find the groomed trail. Norman and I sat on our sleds just resting after the skidder trail ordeal.

I was so exhausted and wet with sweat that, when Norman walked partially down the hill to help Mitchell back up, I decided to open up my snowmobile suit to cool off and take a nap in the snow. I think that I got to sleep but was rudely awaken by my two friends slapping me around. I tried to fight them begging for just a quick nap, but they would not let me fall into hypothermia.

Mitchell yelled at me, “listen you @%$#&, if you freeze to death, I’m going to cover your body with your damn green food coloring and tell everyone we found the Appalachian Trail Leprechaun, then put you on display in a glass box in Baxter. I woke up laughing as they zipped up my suit and sat ne up on my sled followed by a good talking to.

Mitchell found there was no 10-foot-wide groomed trail at the bottom of the hill, only more deep snow. We decided the advice from the logger was bogus, and we could have fallen into even more serious trouble if we continued. Our decision was to head back to our camp on the now reopened skidder trail. We made it back to the lake close to dark and saw the big blue Evinrude with reverse gear as we passed the logger’s camp. When we got to our camp, I was physically ill and couldn’t fix a meal or eat. I cannot ever remember being this tired. But I’ll never forget how grateful I am for two friends who saved me from freezing to death. Good old Brian Mitchell is gone now, but we will always remember him for almost putting me on exhibit as the Frozen Appalachian Trail Leprechaun.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Wars – Part 11

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Sir John Harvey

by Mary Grow

Aroostook War

Many historians don’t take the Aroostook War seriously. Several sources call it the Pork and Beans War; Wikipedia says the nickname is based on either the local lumbermen’s or the British soldiers’ staple food.

Some of the local histories cited earlier in this series don’t even mention the war. Alma Pierce Robbins gave it one dismissive sentence in her history of Vassalboro: “The ‘Aroostook War’ of 1839 made no impression upon official Vassalboro, perhaps because it proved to be ‘no war’.”

At the time, though, according to other historians, like James North and Louis Hatch, it was taken seriously by prominent people on both sides, discussed in the United States Congress and the British Parliament. Hatch wrote indignantly that the men who thought they would have to fight deserve recognition:

“Patriotic sons of the Pine Tree State left their homes and firesides in the most inclement season known to our rigorous climate and marched through the deep snows of a wilderness, two hundred miles, to defend our frontier from foreign invasion, when the Federal government was needlessly procrastinating and turning a deaf ear to the cries of suffering and oppressed pioneers in the upper St. John valley.”

The Aroostook War was a step in the boundary dispute between the northeastern United States and eastern Canada that was summarized in The Town Line, March 10, 2022, issue. At issue were about 12,000 sparsely-inhabited square miles claimed by both countries. After years of diplomatic disagreement and competing claims on the ground, both sides sent armed forces to the St. John Valley.

North and Hatch said one early precipitating action was the June 1837 arrest of Mada­waska census-taker Ebe­nezer S. Gree­l­ey, who was acting under authority of the Penob­scot County Com­mis­sioners, by New Bruns­wick Gover­nor Sir John Harvey.

In August, recently-elected President Martin Van Buren obtained Greeley’s release. Greeley finished the census.

However, Canadian loggers continued to cut timber in American-claimed woods. An on-line DownEast magazine article by Will Grunewald lists two other of the region’s assets: the Aroostook River basin had valuable minerals and good farmland the Americans could use, and the British wanted to maintain a land connection between Halifax on the coast and Québec.

On Jan. 24, 1839, North wrote, the Maine legislature ordered 200 men under Penobscot County Sheriff Hastings Strickland to go north to “arrest the depredators and secure the cut timber.” Hatch added that the legislature allocated $10,000 for the expedition.

Some of the group were arrested and jailed in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Hatch continued. Later in the month, he wrote, Americans arrested two Canadians and brought them to Bangor, where they were not sent to jail but “held in custody in the Bangor House and fared sumptuously.”

The trespassers had prepared themselves with “arms forcibly taken from the government stores in Woodstock,” North said. But Strickland’s troops brought a brass six-pound cannon that outgunned them in an initial encounter.

An on-line New England Historical Society article gives a livelier account, crediting the Canadians’ defeat to an attack by a black bear. The Cana­dians shot the bear – another on-line site calls it the only combat fatality in the whole war. The gunshots sent the two sets of armed men fleeing in opposite directions.

The Canadians recovered, and on Feb. 12 again captured some Americans. After an impressive two days of hard riding, Strickland reported to Augusta.

Gov. John Fairfield

Maine Governor John Fairfield asked New Brunswick officials if they supported the locals. Harvey ordered the trespassers to put back the arms they’d stolen; but he also promised to resist “any hostile invasion” and put his militia on stand-by.

Harvey’s claim of territorial jurisdiction and the Americans’ arrest of a British official led to further troop mobilizations on both sides. The Maine legislature promptly appropriated $800,000 and drafted 10,343 Maine militia.

Historian Ernest Marriner wrote in Remembered Maine that the draft “was scarcely necessary because volunteers poured in from all the towns.”

North wrote that one 50-man company “marched all the way from Augusta to the Aroostook, with the exception of a short ride from Bangor to Oldtown over the railroad.”

More than 2,000 Maine troops went to Aroostook, North wrote, and “The bustle of arrival, equipment and departure of troops, at Augusta, wore a decidedly warlike aspect.” General Isaac Bangs, in Edwin Carey Whitte­more’s Water­ville history, implied that all 10,000 men went north for three months, and emphasized the snow they encountered. Several sources commented on the inadequacy of the uniforms given them.

Gen. Isaac Bangs

Public opinion was strongly with the troops. Bangs called the populace “aroused” and the legislature “indignant.” The outrage, the New England Hist­orical So­ci­­ety site says, was “led, as usual, by the press.” The writer quoted from a belligerent editorial and said war correspondents accompanied the militiamen.

On the national level, Congress appropriated $10 million and authorized 50,000 soldiers. The New England Historical Society article says both sides built frontier forts, “sometimes within sight of each other.”

United States Secretary of State, John Forsyth, and British Minister in Washington, Henry Stephen Fox, proposed a mutual stand-down, North wrote. Harvey was willing, Fairfield and the Maine legislature were not. About the same time, however, prisoners were paroled on both sides.

On March 5 or 6, 1839 (sources differ), Major-General Winfield Scott, United States Army, and his entourage arrived in Augusta. Their assignment, quoted by several writers, was “maintaining the peace and safety of the entire northern and eastern frontiers.”

Scott asked Harvey, a friend since 1812, to guarantee no more use of military force against Americans in the area, and Fairfield to guarantee the same in regard to Canadians. Harvey agreed again on March 23. Fairfield, whether tired of quarreling or overawed by Scott (one source says the general stood six and a half feet tall), accepted on March 25. The Maine troops went home, except for a few allowed to remain to repel trespassers.

The New England Historical Society article lists two human casualties of the war, neither on the battlefield. A farmer was accidentally shot during militia firing practice, and a soldier died of measles.

This section of the border between the United States and Canada was settled by the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, negotiated by Secretary of State Daniel Webster and British Envoy Alexander Baring, the first Lord Ashburton. It was signed August 9, 1842, and after exchange of ratifications took effect Nov. 10, 1842.

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Ruby Crosby Wiggin named two Albion men who participated in the Aroostook War in her history of that town.

One was Rev. Joseph Cammet Lovejoy (1805 – 1871), brother of abolitionist Elijah Parish Lovejoy. A document titled “Historical Sketch and Roster of the Aristook [sic] War” said that he served as a chaplain from Feb. 23 to April 25, 1839, enrolling in Augusta and being discharged in Bangor.

Wiggin’s other story (previously summarized in the Sept. 30, 2021, issue of The Town Line) is that of Wayne (Maine) native J. Belden Besse, born Oct. 15, 1820. Wiggin said by 1839 he was “a soldier stationed in that [Aroostook] County).”

Besse caught typhoid and after he recovered came back south alone, on foot. He stopped in Albion and later married tanner Lewis Hopkins’ daughter Isabelle and founded a locally-influential family.

A Fairfield Historical Society list found on line names 17 men from Fairfield, and a possible eighteenth, who served in the Aroostook War. One was Colonel Nathan Fowler, described in the Fairfield bicentennial history as owner of the 19th-century hotel at Nye’s Corner, which was also the stage stop and home of the post office.

Bangs’ chapter in the Waterville history similarly lists 60 men from Waterville and Fairfield who went north in Captain Samuel Burrill’s company, serving from Feb. 25 to April 19, 1839.

Waterville historian and Colby College Dean Ernest C. Marriner seems to have first met the Aroostook War through the diary of William Bryant, who came to the Nye’s Corner village, in Fairfield, in 1817. In his 1954 Kennebec Yesterdays, Marriner wrote that like many other diarists, Bryant focused on family and local events, but he paid brief attention to the northern boundary in February 1839.

Marriner said Bryant wrote of 200 men already gone north “to fight off trespassers,” another 1,500 started on the way and 8,000 more to be drafted to follow.

The diarist then reported that his wife was mending their oldest son Cyrus’s stockings “and washing them with tears. But Cyrus has returned home and got clear of the draft this time.”

This account seems to have piqued Marriner’s interest, because his 1957 Remembered Maine gives the Aroostook War a full chapter. He began semi-seriously:

“Maine once fought a war in which no one was killed and no battery fired a shot, although snipers took pot shots at the enemy without inflicting serious damage. Today it seems unthinkable that a single state of the Federal Union should make war against a foreign nation, but that is just what the State of Maine did….”

After recapping the history of the events in northern Maine, Marriner turned to General Scott’s initial discussion with Governor Fairfield. According to Marriner, Scott assured Fairfield that if he wanted a war, Maine people would give him one “fast and hot enough”; if Fairfield wanted peace, Scott would try, with “no assurance of success.”

Fairfield opted for “peace with honor” or “peace without dishonor.” In Marriner’s opinion, Scott got it for him.

Marriner then asked whether Fairfield’s political opponents, who blamed the governor for the war and labeled it “Fairfield’s Farce,” had a valid point. In hindsight, he concluded, they did not. He quoted another Maine historian who credited Fairfield with “forethought,” “wisdom” and “statesmanship.”

General Winfield Scott

Winfield Scott (June 13, 1786 – May 29, 1866) was born on a plantation near Petersburg, Virginia, and began a career as a lawyer. By 1807, he was a cavalry corporal in the Virginia militia. When President Thomas Jefferson expanded the national army, Scott used a friend’s influence to become a light artillery captain in May 1808.

Gen. Winfield Scott

Wikipedia describes his first four years as rocky, to say the least. He quarreled with his commander, was court-martialed for that and for a discrepancy in his recruiting allowance (blamed on careless record-keeping, not theft) and in 1810 was suspended for a year and fought a duel.

He used his suspension to practice law and study “military tactics and strategy,” and rejoined the army in time to become lieutenant-colonel of an artillery unit sent to Canada in the War of 1812.

Briefly a British prisoner in the fall of 1812 (when he and then Colonel John Harvey became friends), Scott served with distinction through the rest of the war. He was promoted to major general and awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor.

After varied assignments, including the 1839 peace-making mission to Maine, in 1841 Scott was made a major general and commander-in-chief of the United States Army. He led the successful invasion of Mexico in the Mexican-American War.

By the time Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated March 4, 1861, several Southern states had already seceded from the United States. Lincoln sent a messenger to ask if the Virginia-born general would ensure his safety during the inauguration.

Wikipedia quotes Scott’s reply proposing to put cannons at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue if necessary and “if any of the Maryland or Virginia gentlemen who have become so threatening and troublesome show their heads or even venture to raise a finger, I shall blow them to hell.”

Scott was by then in his seventies, too old for active command, and Lincoln did not always heed his advice. He resigned his command in October 1861 and died four and a half years later in West Point, New York, where he is buried.

Main sources

Fairfield Historical Society, Fairfield, Maine 1788-1988 (1988).
Hatch, Louis Clinton, ed., Maine: A History 1919 ((facsimile, 1974).
Marriner, Ernest, Kennebec Yesterdays (1954).
Marriner, Ernest, Remembered Maine (1957).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870).
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).
Wiggin, Ruby Crosby, Albion on the Narrow Gauge (1964).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Wars – Part 10

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Brigadier General John Chandler

by Mary Grow

Brigadier General John Chandler, profiled in the February 24 issue of The Town Line, was not the only area resident to have served in the Revolutionary army and again in 1812. Nor were these two wars the end of disagreements between the United States, and specifically the State of Maine, and Britain and British-controlled Canada.

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According to an on-line genealogy, Thaddeus Bailey (Nov. 28, 1759 – March 4, 1849) was born in Newbury, Massachusetts, served in the Revolutionary War from Lincoln County, lived in Palermo for some years and served in the War of 1812 while living in Albion.

In 1778, he was part of a Lincoln County troop sent to Providence. On June 30, 1779, he officially enlisted as a private in Capt. Timothy Heald’s company, Col. Samuel McCobb’s regiment.

(McCobb [Nov. 20, 1744 – July 30, 1791], who later became a brigadier general, was born and died in Georgetown. He had served at Bunker Hill, and led the Lincoln County militia in the unsuccessful July-August 1779 Penobscot expedition, in which Bailey participated for two months and 27 days, according to the on-line source.)

Bailey was discharged Sept. 25, 1779. The genealogy says he received a Revolutionary veteran’s pension in the amount of $30.65 annually, starting May 3, 1831.

In 1783, Bailey married Mary Knowlton, of Wiscasset. The couple moved inland to the north part of Pownalbourough, which an on-line source says is now Alna, where the first three of their 11 children were born.

In 1795 they moved inland again; Millard Howard’s Palermo history cites an 1809 record confirming on-line reports that Bailey bought (for $110) 100 acres in Sheepscot Great Pond Settlement, now Palermo.

In 1801, Bailey was among a large number of residents who signed a two-part petition to the Massachusetts General Court. The petition asked to have the settlement incorporated as a town to be named Lisbon, bounded by Harlem (later China), the Sheepscot River and Davistown (later Montville, from which Liberty was separated in 1827).

Further, the petitioners wrote, “from the new and unsettled state of their country they have a great proportion of roads to make and maintain within their aforesaid bounds and also at least ten miles of road to maintain outside of their aforesaid limits which road leads to the head of navigation on Sheepscot river, their nearest market. Wherefore, your petitioners pray that they may be exempted from paying State taxes during the term of five years next ensuing….”

(Howard went on to explain that while the Massachusetts legislators considered the request, another Maine town was incorporated as Lisbon. Sheepscot Great Pond’s clerk was Dr. Enoch Palermo Huntoon; and given the popularity of using famous cities’ names – like Lisbon — for new Maine towns, the petitioners chose Palermo as the fall-back name.

Palermo was incorporated June 23, 1804. Howard did not say how the tax exemption request was received.)

Mary Bailey’s on-line genealogy says the Baileys “were early members of the Baptist Church of Palermo, founded in 1804.”

The family soon moved again, and again inland. Census records from 1810 and 1820 show Bailey living in Fairfax (Mary died in January 1816).

Bailey served briefly and uneventfully in the War of 1812, going to Belfast Sept. 3, 1814, and coming back Sept. 14. Howard listed him among the privates in the Palermo militia (apparently he enrolled or re-enrolled there rather than in Fairfax). By then he would have been coming up on his 55th birthday.

In the 1830 and 1840 censuses, Bailey is still in the town that had become Albion in 1824. The Roll of Pensioners mentioned on line says in 1841, he was 80 years old and had returned to Palermo.

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Dean Bangs’ (May 31, 1756 – Dec. 6, 1845) Revolutionary service was summarized in the Jan. 20 issue of The Town Line. By 1812, Bangs was living in Sidney and doing business in Waterville.

In Whittemore’s history of Waterville, Bangs’ grandson, Isaac Sparrow Bangs, wrote in the military chapter that in the War of 1812 Bangs raised a company of men from Waterville and Vassalboro to serve in Major Joseph Chandler’s Artillery Company. The company was held at Augusta from Sept. 12 to Sept. 24, 1814, the period during which other Kennebec Valley units went to the coast to meet a British landing that never occurred.

(Your writer has spent a great deal of time trying to find the relationship, if any, between General John [Feb. 1, 1762 – Sept. 25, 1841] and Major Joseph Chandler. One of several on-line Chandler genealogies lists the 12 children of Joseph Chandler III and Lydia [Eastman] Chandler as including Joseph IV [1755-1785] and John [1762 – 1840]; and 1840 is as close as genealogies sometimes get to the 1841 found in on-line sources. However, if this Joseph Chandler died young in 1785, he cannot have led an artillery unit in the War of 1812.)

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Michael McNally (about 1752 – July 16, 1848) must have been among the oldest Revolutionary War veterans to fight in the War of 1812. An on-line family history calls him “a man of superior education and strong intellectual powers.”

The history says he was born in Ireland and emigrated with his parents to Pennsylvania, where his father was wealthy enough to provide for his son’s education. On May 13, 1777, he is recorded as enlisting as a gunner in the state’s artillery regiment.

On Jan. 1, 1781, McNally received “depreciation pay,” described online as negotiable, interest-bearing certificates given to military personnel to compensate for the decreased value of United States currency during their wartime service. Family stories say he left the army and served on some kind of armed ship, “whether a man-of-war or a privateer is unknown.” Later, he received a pension as a Revolutionary veteran.

Around 1784, he moved to the Kennebec Valley. In 1785, he married his first wife, Susan Pushaw (1768-1811), of Fairfield. The couple settled in the part of Winslow that became Clinton in 1795; McNally built a log cabin on the Sebasticook, the family history says.

The McNallys had nine children between 1786 and 1809. Susan Pushaw’s on-line genealogy spells her father’s name Pochard and says he was born in France. Michael and Susan’s children’s names are variously spelled Mcnally, Mcnelly, Mcnellie and Mcknelly).

Despite being a single father, when the War of 1812 was declared, the family history says: “Michael’s martial spirit was aroused, and although a man of sixty years he enlisted at Clinton, May 17, 1813, in Capt. Crossman’s company of the Thirty-fourth Regiment, U.S. Infantry, and marched to the frontier. He received a severe wound in the collarbone at Armstrong, Lower Canada, in Sept., 1813, while serving in detachment under the command of Lieut.-Col. Storrs. He was mustered out in July, 1815. For this service he received a pension.”

McNally married for the second time about 1830, to a Pittsfield widow, Jane Varnum Harriman. Her death date is unknown, but the family history says McNally spent his last years with his sons Arthur (1796-1879) and William (1798 or 1799-1886).

William McNally was a farmer in Benton. His wife, Martha Roundy (Sept 13, 1803 – summer of 1903) was the daughter of Job and Elizabeth or Betsey (Pushaw or Pushard) Roundy and the source of much of the information in the family history.

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Louis Hatch’s 1919 history of Maine includes a summary of the final settlement of the boundary between the eastern United States and adjoining Canadian provinces, an issue that troubled relations between the two countries from 1783 until 1842.

The St. Croix River had been defined as the boundary line by the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolution. But the St, Croix has three branches, and the two countries disagreed over which was the “real” St. Croix.

The Jay Treaty of 1794 (properly, the Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation, Between His Britannic Majesty and the United States of America) created a three-man commission whose members unanimously and permanently defined the St. Croix River boundary on Oct. 25, 1798, Hatch wrote.

The boundary north and west from the head of the St. Croix still remained undefined. The United States claimed an area reaching north almost to the St. Lawrence River; Britain, on behalf of Canada, claimed a good part of what is now northern Maine.

The Dec. 24, 1814, Treaty of Ghent that ended the War of 1812 included a clause establishing a commission to define this part of the boundary, from the source of the St. Croix River around the “northwest angle of Nova Scotia,” and south and west along the highlands that separated the watersheds of the St. Lawrence from the watersheds of rivers that ran into the Atlantic, all the way to the headwaters of the Connecticut River.

The treaty further provided that if the two commissioners disagreed or failed to act, the boundary question should be submitted to “a friendly sovereign or State.”

The commission was activated in the spring of 1816. Hatch wrote that after five years, its members had not even agreed on a map showing what areas each country claimed. The commission dissolved.

On Sept. 29, 1827, the United States and Great Britain agreed to submit the dispute to the King William I of the Netherlands. Hatch summarized the king’s responsibility: to interpret the 1783 treaty provisions by fitting them to the geography. The king needed to locate for the disputants the headwaters of the St. Croix, the “northwest angle of Nova Scotia,” the significant highlands and the “Northwesternmost head of the Connecticut River.”

King William issued his judgment on Jan. 10, 1831. Hatch called it “a compromise, pure and simple.”

Between the 1816 commission’s creation and King William’s 1831 report, Maine had become a state, with its own legislature and representation in the United States Congress. An increasing number of United States citizens were expanding settlements in Maine, as far north as the St. John River valley.

The 1831 Maine legislature established a committee to review King William’s judgment; the ensuing resolutions strongly condemned it. In June 1832, the United States Senate refused to ratify it.

The 1831 Maine legislature also incorporated the Town of Madawaska on the St. John River, including, Hatch wrote, the present Madawaska south of the river and some land north of the river. The area north of the river is now Upper Madawaska, New Brunswick, he said.

Hatch quoted part of Governor Samuel Smith’s 1832 annual message summarizing what happened next. The governor said Madawaska residents had organized their town, apparently acting before the state’s approval, and had elected town officials and a legislative representative. New Brunswick officials, “accompanied with a military force,” had arrested and imprisoned many residents.

Smith had appealed to the United States government. Though neither he nor federal authorities were sure the Madawaska residents had acted legally, President Andrew Jackson promptly intervened, and the prisoners were freed.

In following years, Maine governors and legislatures continued to push for a resolution of the boundary issue that would get the British out of the state. Hatch quotes from an 1837 Maine legislative resolution that referred to “British usurpations and encroachments” and said:

“Resolved, that [British] pretensions so groundless and extravagant indicate a spirit of hostility which we had no reason to expect from a nation with whom we are at peace.”

How that peace turned into a war, or at least a pseudo war, will be next week’s topic.

Main sources

Hatch, Louis Clinton, ed., Maine: A History 1919 (facsimile, 1974).
Howard, Millard, An Introduction to the Early History of Palermo, Maine (second edition, December 2015).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902)

Website, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Wars – Part 9

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Gen. Isaac Sparrow Bangs

by Mary Grow

War of 1812 veterans

In the course of reading about the War of 1812, your writer found information on Maine soldiers of less exalted rank than brigadier general, which she hopes readers, too, will find interesting.

Colonel Elnathan Sherwin (born in 1759 from his cemetery record, or 1762 or 1763, from on-line genealogies; died Sept. 10, 1822), from Waterville, has been mentioned more than once.

William Bacon Sherwin, one of the sons of Elnathan and Abigail Bacon Sherwin.

A Massachusetts native, he was in the Kennebec Valley by 1788, because on Dec. 28 that year he became the second husband of Abigail “Nabby” Bacon (Aug. 23, 1770 – March 23, 1831) of Vassalboro. Abigail was the daughter of Ebenezer Bacon and Abigail Farwell; her first husband was Winthrop Robinson.

(But Winthrop Robinson’s on-line genealogical record says he married Abigail Bacon in 1786 and lived until 1807, and he and Abigail had at least five sons and two daughters. Perhaps this genealogist partially combined Abigail’s two families?)

By 1794, the Sherwins were living on the west side of the Kennebec in the part of Winslow that became Waterville in 1802. Sherwin had a brickyard at the east end of Sherwin Street, which connects Water and Silver streets; the street is probably named after him. The couple had at least five and maybe seven children (sources differ), born in Waterville between 1794 and 1811.

In his history of Waterville, Edwin Carey Whittemore wrote that the Sherwin house was the site for “town meetings and religious services” until residents built a meeting house in 1798. Voters at the June 25, 1798, town meeting gave Sherwin a $30 reimbursement.

Whittemore lists Sherwin as a Winslow/Waterville member of the Massachusetts legislature for all but two years from 1799 through 1815. In 1810 and 1811, he was replaced by Eleazer W. Ripley (later Brigadier General Ripley – see the Feb. 24 The Town Line.)

In 1801, Sherwin was one of the men who helped pay for books for Waterville’s first library, started by Reuben Kidder (see the Dec. 23, 2021, issue of The Town Line.)

On-line genealogies say the Sherwins’ first child, Josiah, was born in 1788 (after their marriage?) and their second, Sophia, was born in or about 1794. If these birthdates are accurate, it is confusing to find him planning to send two children to elementary school early in 1797.

Elwood T. Wyman, writer of the chapter on schools in Whittemore’s history, found that Sherwin was one of eight men who, at the end of December 1796, signed a promise to pay Abijah Smith for three months’ teaching. Wyman wrote that school age was defined as between five and 21 years; each man listed the number of students to be enrolled at his expense.

Each promised Smith a proportionate share of his $20 a month pay, two dollars to be paid weekly for board (spelled “bord”) and the remainder due at the end of term. They further agreed to deliver firewood to the schoolroom.

In 1808, Sherwin was listed as a parent in Waterville’s school district number eight (this list did not include the number of students per family). Wyman wrote this district, with 145 students, probably contained most of the town’s population.

The students, he wrote, “came from Main, Silver, Mill, College, Water and lower Front streets, as these rough roads were called, leading through an area still largely covered with woods, and used mostly for pasturage.”

In the War of 1812, Sherwin had the rank of lieutenant colonel and led the First Regiment, Second Brigade, Eighth Division of militia.

General Isaac Sparrow Bangs, who wrote the chapter on military history in Whittemore’s book, found records showing the regiment was activated Sept 14, 1814, and started for the coast, but was held in Augusta until Sept. 24. Then some of the men, including Sherwin, were drafted to fill vacancies in Lieutenant-Colonel Ellis Sweet’s regiment in Bath. They stayed at Edgecomb and Wiscasset until Nov. 10, seeing no action (see The Town Line, Feb. 17).

Sherwin died Sept. 10, 1822, in Point Pleasant, Clermont County, Ohio; his widow died February 23, 1831, in Point Franklin. Point Pleasant has three cemeteries: Fee, Point Pleasant and Sherwin. In 1959, an on-line source says, members of the Daughters of the American Revolution found “two old monuments” to Elnathan and Abigail in the Sherwin Cemetery.

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Like Sherwin, Captain Moses Burleigh (occasionally spelled Burley; March 25, 1781 – Feb. 13, 1860), of Palermo, has appeared previously in this series as a militia captain, some of whose troops went to the coast in September 1814 (see The Town Line, Feb. 17). He commanded a company in Colonel John Commings’ regiment, which served in Belfast from Sept. 13 to Sept. 24, 1814, according to Millard Howard’s Palermo history.

Howard wrote that Burleigh was born in Sandwich, New Hampshire, and came with his father to Palermo in 1800. An on-line genealogy, quoting from the family history, says of Burleigh: “[H]is neighbors[,] inspired with confidence in his ability and integrity, repeatedly elected him to fill important offices in the town,” including captain of a militia company. In 1816 he was made a lieutenant colonel.

Peacetime positions the two sources list include “selectman, justice of the peace and deputy sheriff”; representing Palermo in the Massachusetts General Court and later in the Maine legislature; and being a delegate to the 1816 convention in Brunswick that anticipated Maine statehood.

Burleigh was a member of the first Maine legislative session in 1820, held in the state house on Congress Street, in Portland. That first session apparently lasted 71 days, and an on-line attendance list shows that Burleigh was present for 70 of them. In attendance for 71 days were Joel Wellington, from Fairfax (see below), Robert Fletcher, from China, Peaslee Morrill, Jr., from Dearborn (readers who have forgotten Dearborn are referred to the Feb. 17 issue of The Town Line), Joseph Stewart, from Harlem, and Samuel Redington, from Vassalboro. Herbert Moore, from Clinton, was there for 67 days; Ambrose Howard, Sidney, 61 days; Baxter Crowell, Waterville, 58 days; Ebenezer Lawrence, Fairfield, 50 days; and Robert C. Vose, Augusta, 46 days. Windsor is not listed.

Burleigh was the first man to drive the mail carriage from Augusta to Bangor, when carriages replaced horseback riders.

In 1830, Burleigh moved to Linneus (then in Washington County, now in Aroostook) and, Howard wrote, “continued to hold important positions in state, county and the militia.” He was put in charge of the census in the northern part of the county, where, the online genealogy says, he continued to argue with the Brits. A Canadian warden claimed he was outside the United States boundary and “pursued with authority to arrest him; he eluded all pursuit and accomplished his work.”

The next year he “was appointed assistant land agent to guard that section of the public lands, and in that capacity succeeded in breaking up various parties of trespassers, compelling them to return to the British Provinces.”

Burleigh was Linneus’ postmaster for some years. The genealogical writer again praises him: he “was a man of activity, energy, and probity of character; his hospitality was particularly marked, the hungry were fed and the weary found rest beneath his roof….”

Edwin Chick Burleigh

His grandson, Edwin Chick Burleigh, from Linneus, was elected Governor of Maine in 1889, a member of the United States House of Representatives in 1897 and a United States Senator in 1913.

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Another War of 1812 veteran, whose life shows interesting parallels with Burleigh’s, was Captain Joel Wellington (1782 – July 12, 1865), from Fairfax (as it was named in 1804; it became Albion in 1824). Two on-line sources call him General Wellington, but neither explains when or how he (allegedly) got the title.

Born in Acton, Massachusetts, Wellington was in Fairfax by 1810, because an online genealogy says he married Clarissa Blake (1785-1868) there on Nov. 24. The couple had at least eight children, born between 1811 and 1827.

Wellington was an important citizen in Fairfax, as Burleigh was in Palermo. An on-line summary of the 1819 constitutional convention includes short biographies. Wellington is described as a selectman for 11 years, beginning in 1812; town clerk in 1817; state representative in 1820, 1821, 1828, 1831 and 1833; and a member of the governor’s council in 1826 and 1827.

Wiggin recorded that the June 25, 1814, town vote to rebuild the bridge at the head of China Lake appointed him to the three-man supervisory committee. (The contract went to Sylvanus Harlow for $325, “to be paid in corn and grain at the market price February 1, 1816.”)

In October 1819, Wiggin wrote, voters sent Wellington to the Portland convention that drew up a constitution for the planned new state, and in Fairfax’s “first state election” on April 3, 1820, Wellington outpolled two other men to become a representative to the new Maine legislature.

An online record of the 1820 census lists Wellington as the enumerator for Fairfax, which had 1,204 residents. In 1822, voters appointed him to a five-man committee to draft a petition to the legislature to change the town’s name from Lagonia (also spelled Lygonia and Ligonia, adopted in 1821) to Richmond (never adopted).

Wellington was postmaster in Fairfax in 1820 (and perhaps earlier), according to the 1820 Maine Register (found online). In March 1825 he became Albion’s first postmaster, serving until 1831.

(The 1820 Register adds that Fairfax was 82 miles from Portland, and postage between the two points was 12 cents. In adjacent China, Japheth Washburn was postmaster, the distance from Portland was 73 miles, postage was only 10 cents; in Clinton [which then included Benton], Gershom Flagg was postmaster, distance was 81 miles, postage 12 cents; Winslow, 77 miles, postmaster Frederick R. Paine, postage 10 cents.)

Kingsbury wrote that Wellington owned a public house in Fairfax by 1817, and later he and his brother John ran a carding mill. Wiggin said the mill was originally on Fifteen Mile Steam near Route 202, and the Wellingtons moved it to the outlet of Lovejoy Pond. It burned in the early 1850s, she wrote.

Meanwhile, in 1829, according to a Maine Writers Research Club book titled Just Maine Folks (found online), Wellington bought from the state of Maine, for $3,000, 23,000 acres on the north branch of the Meduxnekeag River, in what became in 1839 Aroostook County. The first settlers on his property arrived in 1830; Wellington moved there himself with his family (after a stay in Bangor in 1840, according to the online genealogy), and built a sawmill and a brickyard to accommodate local needs.

Originally called Wellington Plantation, the Town of Monticello was incorporated July 29, 1846. Wellington changed the name to honor Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia estate. He lived there until his death and is buried there.

Monticello Grange #388 was organized in 1899; members promptly built a Grange Hall. It burned in 1921 and was replaced in 1922 by a typical two-story wooden building that has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 2000.

Other on-line sources mention the Wellington House, in Monticello, built in 1846. The present owners are publishing a blog on Facebook as they rehab it, enumerating their discoveries (copper, not tin, ceilings, in five rooms) and their dilemmas. They say the large two-story clapboarded building is on the site of the cabin Wellington built when he first came to his town.

Monticello is a little more than 20 miles north of Linneus. Given that Wellington and Moses Burleigh were a year apart in age, given that they might have met in September 1814 and must have met in the Maine legislature, in Portland, in 1820, your writer wonders whether there is a connection between Wellington’s 1829 land purchase and Burleigh’s move north in 1830.

Main sources

Howard, Millard, An Introduction to the Early History of Palermo, Maine (second edition, December 2015).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).
Wiggin, Ruby Crosby, Albion on the Narrow Gauge (1964).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Wars – Part 8

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Camp Ripley, today in Minnesota

by Mary Grow

Generals Chandler and Ripley

Two national military leaders in the War of 1812, Brigadier General John Chandler and Brigadier General Eleazer (or Eleazar – sources differ) Wheelock Ripley, were from Maine, according to Louis Hatch’s state history. Both had connections with the central Kennebec Valley: Chandler lived most of his life in Monmouth, and Ripley practiced law in Waterville for a short time.

Brigadier General John Chandler

John Chandler (Feb. 1, 1762 – Sept. 25, 1841), born in Epping, New Hampshire, served in the Revolutionary War (see the Jan. 20 issue of The Town Line) and after the war settled in Monmouth, with a loan from General Henry Dearborn.

(Kingsbury says in his Kennebec County history that Monmouth was incorporated in 1792, named in honor of Dearborn’s “brilliant and daring conduct at the battle of Monmouth, N. J.” on June 28, 1778.)

Chandler was Monmouth’s first town clerk, in 1792; was elected selectman in 1792 and served two years; was elected again in 1795 and served nine years, according to Kingsbury. Wikipedia adds that he was in the Massachusetts Senate from 1803 to 1805, and in the United States House of Representatives from March 1805 to March 1809. He became Kennebec County sheriff in 1809.

On Feb. 27, 1812, Chandler “became major general of the Massachusetts Militia,” Wikipedia says. After President James Madison declared war on June 18, he appointed Chandler commander of the 17th Division, United States Volunteers. An on-line writer on a War of 1812 reenactment (the page is identified as the U. S. 23rd Infantry Regiment’s product) says he led them in a “disastrous thrust” into Canada.

In July 1812, Chandler resigned as a militia officer and was made a United States brigadier general, commanding one of three brigades of the army fighting in northern New York and southern Canada. Here, too, his success was limited.

A Canadian source describes the June 6, 1813, Battle of Stoney Creek, near Hamilton, Ontario (on the west end of Lake Ontario, northwest of Niagara Falls). A British force of about 700 men under Brigadier General John Vincent was retreating north, followed by Chandler’s army of more than 3,000 men, with artillery and cavalry.

Chandler went into camp at Stoney Creek on June 5. The outnumbered British expected his invasion to continue, costing them more territory; but two people saved them.

The first, according to the Canadian history, was a Lieutenant Fitzgibbon in Vincent’s army, who entered the American camp pretending to be a farmer selling butter and noted that troops were so spread out they would have problems coordinating if they were attacked.

The second person is identified as “Billy Green.” Green had a brother-in-law who had been captured and released by the Americans, and while with them had gotten their password from a “gullible U. S. soldier.”

Both pieces of information went to Vincent and persuaded him to attack the American camp. Starting around 11 at night, British troops led by Lieutenant-Colonel John Harvey (later Sir John Harvey) moved in, bayoneted American pickets and attacked the sleeping troops.

In the confusion, Chandler and Brigadier General William Winder from Maryland were captured – Wikipedia says, “when they wandered into the British line, thinking it was their own.” With no leaders and no idea how many troops the British had, the Americans headed back toward Fort George, on the Niagara River, where, the Canadian source says, they remained without further offensive action for the rest of the war.

Another on-line source says 23 British soldiers were killed in the battle, 136 were wounded and 55 went missing. On the American side, the figures were 17 men killed, 38 wounded and 99 missing. The surprise attack could have been disastrous for the Americans, this writer says, had not a few early shots given them a little warning and had the troops not been “sleeping in formation” (even if spread out).

Chandler was exchanged in 1814. Your writer has found no reference to where he was held or under what conditions. However, an on-line source summarizes the November 1812 agreement between Britain and the United States, which said, among other things:

  • All prisoners “shall be treated with humanity conformable to the usage and practice of the most civilized nations during war,” (officers were treated much better than privates, several sources agree) and shall be exchanged as soon as possible.
  • An officer would be exchanged for “officers of equal rank” or for a specified number of privates. A general was worth 60 men; a brigadier general like Chandler was worth 20 men.
  • The two places on the American continent where prisoners could be held until exchanged were Québec and Halifax. The United States and British governments were each entitled to appoint an agent who would live nearby and keep an eye on prison conditions.

After returning to the United States Army, Chandler spent the rest of the war on the Maine and New Hampshire coasts, Wikipedia says, “coordinating efforts between the local militia and federal units.” The writer of the reenactment piece mentioned above was not impressed by his actions on the coast, either, writing: “Considering that the British occupied about a third of Maine, it could be reasonably suggested that Chandler was unsuccessful here as well.”

Hatch, summing up Chandler’s military history, called him “a brave officer” who “did little to distinguish himself.”

After the war ended Chandler returned to politics, serving in the Massachusetts General Court in 1819 and the Maine Constitutional Convention in October 1819. He was the first president of the brand-new Maine Senate, serving from March 15 to June 19, 1820, when he resigned to take his seat as a United States Senator.

He served in the Senate until March 3, 1829. In the 18th, 19th and 20th Congresses, he chaired the committee on militia and, Wikipedia says, “played a key role in establishing the arsenal at Augusta, as well as the construction of the military road from Bangor to Houlton.”

Chandler retired from the Senate to become Collector of Customs, in Portland, until 1837. He was a Bowdoin College trustee from 1821 to 1838. He died in Augusta and is buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery.

* * * * * *

Brigadier General Eleazer Wheelock Ripley

Wikipedia and the on-line Maine an Encyclopedia say Brigadier General Eleazer Wheelock Ripley (April 15, 1782 – March 2, 1839) was born in Hanover, New Hampshire, and educated at Dartmouth College, graduating in 1800.

Wikipedia says Ripley’s grandfather, Eleazar Wheelock, founded Dartmouth, and his father, Sylvanus Ripley, was a professor there in the 1780s.

Ripley studied law under Timothy Boutelle, in Waterville, and opened his law practice there in the early 1800s. In 1809, Whittemore wrote in his history of the city, Ripley was one of Waterville’s first fire wardens. (Another was Elnathan Sherwin, mentioned last week.)

Ripley was elected to the Massachusetts General Court for two terms (sources differ on dates; one year was almost certainly 1811). One source says he was speaker in his second term, another that he became a senator; and he either resigned when the war broke out, or in 1812 moved to Portland and from there served as a Massachusetts senator.

In the War of 1812 Ripley organized and was made lieutenant colonel of the 21st United States Infantry Regiment, composed primarily of Massachusetts (including District of Maine) soldiers. The 21st fought in several major battles in upstate New York and adjacent Canada.

Hatch wrote that Ripley “won a national reputation” for himself and his brigade in the fighting at Lundy’s Lane and Fort Erie. Whittemore added that he took command of the American forces at Lundy’s Lane after Major General Jacob Brown was wounded.

By war’s end, Ripley was a major general.

“By a resolution of Congress dated November 3, 1814, Eleazar Ripley was presented a gold medal in honor of his military service,” the on-line encyclopedia says. Wikipedia adds that the medal “was the precursor to the Medal of Honor.”

Leaving the army in February 1820, Ripley returned to the law in Jackson, Louisiana, near Baton Rouge. Continuing his Maine pattern, he was elected to the Louisiana state senate and in 1834 to the United States Congress, where he served until his death.

Ripley died in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, and is buried in Locust Grove Cemetery, in St. Francisville.

The on-line encyclopedia writer adds that the Somerset County town of Ripley, Maine, is named after General Ripley, “though he never lived there.” Other sources add counties and towns in other states named after him, as well as Fort Ripley, a fort on the upper Mississippi River, in Minnesota.

Fort Ripley was first manned in April 1849, because a native tribe had been displaced to a nearby reservation and needed a government presence for protection and, an on-line site explains, to hand out annuity payments. After brief stints as Fort Marcy and Fort Gaines, in 1850 it was renamed again to honor Ripley.

The fort was active during the early 1860s, because of the Civil War and in local fighting as United States citizens continued moving into native American territory. After a January 1877 fire burned three buildings, the government abandoned the fort; by 1910, only the concrete powder magazine remained.

When the state of Minnesota bought land for a National Guard training area in 1929, the Fort Ripley site was included. The National Guard facility, in operation today, was therefore named Camp Ripley.

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).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Wars – Part 7

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USS Adams, as a 28-gun frigate. Below, rebuilt as a sloop of war.

by Mary Grow

War of 1812
Hampden and Wiscasset

Two events in September 1814 involved central Kennebec Valley residents directly in the war against the British, fortunately without recorded casualties.

The first and less significant began in Hampden, where British forces sailed up the Penobscot River to capture the USS Adams. The Adams began life in June 1799 as a 28-gun frigate; after service against the French in the West Indies and the Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean, she was mostly inactive from 1803 to 1812, ending up in 1811 as a receiving ship (where new sailors live before they’re assigned to their ships) at the Washington, D.C., Navy yard.

In June 1812, Wikipedia says, the Adams was “cut in half amidships and lengthened 15 feet in the course of being completely rebuilt as a sloop of war.” After adventures on both sides of the Atlantic, on Aug. 17, 1814, she ran aground at Isle au Haut, off Stonington.

“Skillful seamanship aided by a rising tide managed to refloat the ship,” Wikipedia says. Leaking badly, she got up the Penobscot to Hampden and was being repaired when a British expedition followed upriver to seize her.

USS Adams rebuilt as a sloop of war.

On Sept. 3, her commander, Captain Charles Morris, chose to sink and burn her to keep her from the British. Morris and his crew headed through the wilderness from the Penobscot toward the Kennebec. Henry Kingsbury, in his Kennebec County history, gave a lively account of their adventures in his section on the Town of Clinton, though he misdated the episode as 1812.

The sailors got to the Sebasticook, found some bateaux and started downriver toward civilization, he wrote. The Clinton area was already buzzing with rumors of Indian attacks, so when one early afternoon Jerusha Doe and Polly Richardson saw boats with unknown armed men, they ran to the nearest house screaming, “The Indians are coming!”

Word spread, and residents headed for Winslow, seeking protection in what was left of Fort Halifax. It took until evening to identify the intruders as friends and welcome them, Kingsbury wrote, and a lame man who couldn’t escape fast enough “lay hidden all night in a potato trench on his father’s farm.”

The Adams crewmen left their boats at Clinton Village, walked to Noble’s Ferry opposite Nye’s Corner, in Fairfield, crossed the Kennebec and got a ride to Waterville from a man named Isaac Chase, whose son still talked about the event in the 1890s, Kingsbury said. (Other sources give other accounts of their cross-country hike.)

Wikipedia says Morris and most of the crew got back to their Portsmouth, New Hampshire, base by Sept. 9. Within another week the entire crew was present, “a source of great satisfaction for Morris.”

The British forces, meanwhile, killed a few local people and did a great deal of damage in Hampden, Bangor and other Penobscot River towns. An on-line source says the memory of Hampden led local residents to support Maine’s separation from Massachusetts, which had not protected them, and to continue opposition to the British, evidenced in the Aroostook War.

According to another on-line source, the Adams sat at the bottom of the Penobscot until 1870, when she was raised, repaired in Boston and began a new career “as a Navy sailing trainer ship, sailing all over the world before being retired in 1920.”

Other British ships hovered threateningly off the coast around Wiscasset. In the history of Fairfield, the writers named five residents who, “realizing the hazard to the Town if the British had control of the Kennebec,” joined the defense at Wiscasset: Samuel Bates, James Lander, Henry Lawrence, James Lawrence and William Lawrence.

The implication is that they went as individuals. If they did, they soon enlisted. Military records in the Maine genealogy archives show Samuel Bates at Wiscasset in Captain James Child’s Winslow militia company (part of Colonel Herbert Moore’s regiment) from Sept. 12 to Sept. 27, and in Joel Wellington’s Albion company, Colonel Elnathan Sherwin’s regiment, from Sept. 24 to Nov. 10.

James Lander and Henry Lawrence served in Sergeant Ansel Tobey’s detached company from Sidney, also under Sherwin’s command, at Augusta from Sept. 13 to Sept. 24. Lander and all three Lawrences are listed in another of Sherwin’s units, Captain Stephen Lovejoy’s Sidney-based company that served at Wiscasset from Sept. 24 to Nov. 10.

It could well have been the presence of the British navy that led to the Sunday, Sept. 10, special town meeting in Augusta. Historian James North wrote that voters unanimously authorized selectmen to buy powder, tent material, “camp kettles and small arms”; they approved a “special tax” to raise $500 for the supplies.

Their apprehension was justified the next day. On Sunday, Sept 11, North wrote, the Wiscasset Committee of Safety sent an urgent message upriver asking for troops to repel an expected British landing.

Augusta’s General Henry Sewall sent Colonel John Stone’s and Colonel Ellis Sweet’s militia regiments and the Hallowell Artillery to Wiscasset post haste – the first men arrived Monday morning. After ordering four more regiments to stand by along the river, Sewall joined the Wiscasset group, in camp at Edgecomb.

Colonel Stone was from Gardiner, and nine of the 13 large companies he led came from Augusta, Hallowell or Gardiner, with inland companies from Winthrop and Litchfield and two down-river ones from Pittstown. This regiment was sent home Sept. 25, after two weeks’ service.

Colonel Sweet was in charge of two regiments. One, of seven companies, came from Readfield, Farmington and Wilton and served at Bath through the second week in November. The other consisted of 11 companies with soldiers from Fayette, Lewiston, Mount Vernon, New Vineyard, Readfield, Wayne and Winthrop. These men were released in late September; most companies were sent to Wiscasset, but one stayed in Monmouth.

The Augusta-area regiments were joined by other militiamen from the Kennebec Valley. Many local histories, on line and in book form, list regiments, companies and often privates in each company by name.

Most regiments had two or three officers, four corporals, four sergeants, one or two musicians and between 30 and 50 privates (one had only five; others had 60 or more). Some had waiters.

(An on-line article from the Journal of the American Revolution explains that waiters, also called “servants, batmen or ‘bowman,'” were officers’ personal servants. At least in the Revolutionary army, they could not be boys or old men, and they were expected to accompany their officer wherever he went. In May 1779, General George Washington ordered that the waiters drill with the fighting men; but by the end of May, the article says, he changed his mind and said they should not be armed.)

Colonel Moore, from Winslow, led 11 companies raised in Fairfax (Albion), Harlem (China), Clinton, Vassalboro and Winslow. The majority of these companies served at Wiscasset from Sept. 12 to Sept. 27.

An on-line Maine genealogy source lists Colonel Moore’s companies, naming officers and men, as follows.

Lieutenant Benjamin J. Radcliffe’s company, no home town given, was one of the largest: ranks included an ensign, four corporals, four sergeants, two musicians and 57 privates.

Captain Daniel Wyman, no home town (another on-line source says he commanded one of Vassalborough’s four companies), had a lieutenant and an ensign under him, four corporals and four sergeants but only one musician for his smaller company.

Captain James Wing’s company and Captain Jeremiah Farwell’s companies were raised in Vassalborough.

Captain Joel Wellington’s company came from Fairfax (later Albion). Six Strattons were in this company: Ensign Ebenezer, Sergeant Charles, privates Austin, James and Paul and waiter Ness.

Captain Benjamin Robinson’s company was also from Fairfax. One of the smallest companies, with about two dozen privates, it had a full complement of officers and NCOs and two musicians.

Captain John Moore’s company came from Clinton, as did Captain Irial Hall’s company. This writer has not been able to find out whether Captain Moore was related to Colonel Moore.

Captain Robert Fletcher’s company, another large one, was raised in Harlem (later China). These men stayed at Wiscasset until Oct. 1, 1814. The company included Jacob, Joseph, Thomas and Zachariah Norton and Daniel, Jonathan, Nathaniel and Samuel Gray.

Captain Daniel Crowell’s company was also from Harlem. Jabish Crowell was a sergeant; David and John, Jr., were privates.

Captain James L. Child’s company was from Winslow.

The town of Palermo sent two militia companies to Belfast from Sept. 13 to Sept. 24. Millard Howard listed the men involved — some apparently from nearby towns — in his Palermo history: Colonel John Commings’ regiment included companies headed by Captain Moses Burley (or Burleigh), whose men were mostly from North Palermo, and Captain Job Lord.

The Palermo militiaman had been on standby since June. When finally called to action, they considered the government pay – about $10.50 a month, Howard said – not enough to risk their lives for and asked town officials to raise more. Town officials refused.

Colonel Sherwin was in charge of eight large companies of “drafted militia” (the term is not explained) from a wider geographic range – Starks, Bingham and Canaan, as well as Wellington’s Albion company; Lovejoy’s and Amasa Lesley’s Sidney companies; and Jeremiah Farwell’s Vassalboro company. Most of these companies had 60 or more privates plus the usual complement of officers.

Wellington’s was the largest, with 75 privates. There were five Hawes, David, Ebenezer, Isaiah, James and Seth, all privates; and six Richardsons, ensign Israel, sergeant Robert and privates Andrew, Ebenezer, Seth and Seth, 2nd.

Captain Tobey from Sidney was assisted only by Sergeant Elias Burgess and Corporal Joseph Nye, and had 13 privates. Notes after six of the names, including Burgess and Nye, say the men were credited with either eight or 11 days of service.

These companies went to Wiscasset and Edgecomb Sept. 24 and stayed until Nov. 10.

Another regiment under Colonel Sherwin was moved to Augusta to replace the local troops sent to the coast. The colonel and six of his nine officers were from Waterville (the other three are listed as residents of Fairfield, Sidney and Winslow); the 10 companies of enlisted men came from Belgrade, Dearborn, Fairfield, Sidney and Waterville. (Dearborn was a town from 1812 until 1843, gradually being divided among Waterville, Belgrade and Smithfield.)

In their coastal positions, North wrote, the Augusta-area regiments made camp at Edgecomb, across the Sheepscot River from Wiscasset. On Sept. 23, a sentry rode into camp with the news that “an English man-of-war was in the river evidently preparing to land troops.”

Units from Gardiner, Hallowell, Augusta and Winslow, commanded by Major Samuel Howard, hurried the six or eight miles to the expected landing point, “slept on their arms at night” and when no enemy appeared the next morning, went back to Edgecomb.

The whole affair turned out to be a false alarm. Most of the militia units returned to their home towns before the end of September; Sewall’s and one other division spent 40 days on the coast.

Counting the companies and averaging the number of officers and men per company leads to the conclusion that about 3,000 armed men should have converged on the area around Wiscasset and Edgecomb. The 1810 census listed Wiscasset’s year-round population as 2,083 and Edgecomb’s as 205.

How many men actually went, and how many decided they could not leave their farms in mid-September for an indefinite period? How many teen-aged boys joined them, and how many stayed with the women and younger children? How many wives encouraged, or perhaps joined, their husbands, and how many begged them not to go? These are the sorts of questions only the most diligent – or luckiest — historian can sometimes answer.

Main sources

Fairfield Historical Society, Fairfield, Maine 1788-1988 (1988).
Howard, Millard, An Introduction to the Early History of Palermo, Maine (second edition, December 2015).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870).

Websites, miscellaneous.