Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Wars – Part 5

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by Mary Grow

Left, In 1780, at the age of 15, Samuel Downing joined the Continental Army. He served with the 2nd New Hamp­shire Regiment guarding forts on the New York frontier. Center, Lemuel Cook enlisted in 1781 when he was 16 years old. He served at the Battle of Brandy­wine, was present at the Surrender at York­town and was selected by Baron von Steuben to join the New York City campaign. Right, Born in Geneva, Switzerland, Albert Gallatin served as a volunteer under Col. John Allan, commander of the fort of Machias in Maine, according to his obituary. He later served three terms in the Pennsylvania House of Repre­sentatives. He also became the Secre­tary of the Treasury, served as the U.S. Minister to France and helped to established New York University.

The Revolutionary War ended in 1783 and photography was invented in the 1820s and 1830s, so most of the veterans of the war didn’t live long enough to have their portraits made. A handful of them did. In 1864, 81 years after the war, Rev. E. B. Hillard and two photographers embarked on a trip through New England to visit, photograph, and interview the six known surviving veterans, all of whom were over 100 years old. The glass plate photos were printed into a book titled The Last Men of the Revolution.

These are three of the Revolutionary War veterans who were over 100 years old when photographed.

Palermo, Sidney, Vassalboro

Palermo, Sidney and Vassalboro, like the central Kennebec cities and towns in the previous two articles in this series, had Revolutionary War veterans among their early settlers.

The grave of Isaac Worthen.

In Milton Dowe’s Palermo history, he identified Isaac Worthen (March 4, 1762 – March 1, 1841; later the name became Worthing), one of two brothers who moved to Palermo (then Great Pond Settlement) from New Hampshire, as a “hero of the Revolution.” An on-line search suggests he took the phrase from an article about Worthen, written by Samuel Copp Worthen (probably a descendant), in the Sprague Journal of Maine History, Vol. XII, No. 1, January-Mach 1924.

According to the article, Isaac’s father, Major Jacob Worthen, was a lieutenant in Captain Titus Salter’s company at Fort Washington, on Pierce Island at the mouth of the Piscataquis River, at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The fort was designed by Capt. Ezekiel Worthen, Jacob’s father and Isaac’s grandfather.

Isaac Worthen was in Salter’s company by May 1777, when he was 15. The history article says he wanted a berth on the USS Raleigh, which was going to France to buy ammunition. Turned down as too young, he jumped aboard as the ship sailed; the captain let him stay and made him a marine effective Aug. 1, 1777.

Worthen served for the duration of the war in different companies. Millard Howard added in his town history that Worthen was a corporal in a militia unit before his 17th birthday; Dowe wrote that one of his posts was West Point, in 1780.

In 1782, he married Judith Currier and they came to Palermo, where, an on-line genealogy says, their son Jonathan was born in 1785. An on-line photo of Worthen’s gravestone in Palermo’s Old Greeley Corner Cemetery shows his name; the words “Marine Continental Marines Rev War” on four lines; and his dates of birth and death.

Howard identified another Revolutionary veteran, Sir John Bradstreet, who was “nearly 40 years old when he came to Palermo with his family in 1786” and settled at the north end of Sheepscot Pond. His descendants included Clair Bradstreet, who chaired the town select board for more than 40 years in the 20th century. Bradstreet and his wife Freda (Worthing) Bradstreet lived in the Worthing House, on North Palermo Road, now owned by the Palermo Historical Society.

Thaddeus Bailey (1759 – 1849) is identified in a genealogy found on line as a Revolutionary War veteran who lived in Palermo, Albion and Palermo again. Born in Newbury, Massachusetts, he enlisted at 18 as a private in the Massachusetts militia company that spent three days at Pownalborough in September 1777 “in the defense and retaking of a mastship in the Sheepscot River.”

In 1778, he was in a unit that enlisted from Lincoln County and served in Providence, Rhode Island. From June 30 to Sept. 25, 1779, he was a private in Colonel (later Brigadier General) Samuel Rogers McCobb’s Lincoln County militia regiment and participated in the unsuccessful attempt to oust the British from Fort George, in Penobscot Bay.

(General McCobb [Nov. 20, 1744 – July 30, 1791] was born and died in Georgetown, Province of Maine. He served throughout the Revolution, at least part of the time with the Lincoln County Militia. He was a captain at Bunker Hill, a colonel on Benedict Arnold’s expedition to Québec and in charge at Penobscot after the British finally left in 1784.)

After the war, Bailey returned to Pownalborough until 1795, when he bought 100 acres for $110 in Sheepscot Great Pond (now Palermo). He and his wife Mary, whom he married in 1783 and who died before 1810, had 11 children. Census records from 1810 through 1840 show him living in Albion; a record of Revolutionary War pensioners lists him in Palermo in 1841. His pension, which started May 3, 1831, was $30.65 a year, according to the genealogy.

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Alice Hammond claimed to have found another Isaac (besides Isaac Worthen) who enlisted as a teenager: in her history of Sidney, she said of Isaac I. Cowan (March 14, 1758 – July 19, 1828): “At age fourteen he went into the Revolutionary War and served three years.” However, by this writer’s reckoning Cowan would have turned 15 in March 1773, two years before the fighting at Lexington and Concord.

An on-line site lists yet another young volunteer who ended up in Sidney: Massachusetts-born Jabez Rollins or Rollings (about 1767 – Oct. 4, 1842, or Oct. 28, 1847 [sources differ]) joined the New Hampshire Line in 1782, when he was 15. After the Revolution, he was in a Massachusetts regiment from February through June 1787 and helped suppress Shay’s Rebellion, the website continues; but since Shay’s Rebellion, an uprising by farmers protesting economic hardship in western Massachusetts, was suppressed by February, his role must have been limited.

On July 15, 1792, Rollings married Lydia Haskell (or Harskell) in Bradford, Massachusets. By 1795, they were in Mercer, Maine; by 1780, in New Sharon; and from 1810 on in Sidney. They had at least five children.

Capt. Abiel Lovejoy

Captain Abiel (or Abial) Lovejoy (Dec. 16, 1731 – July 4 [probably], 1811) was one of Sidney’s best-known veterans; Hammond referred to him as “Squire Lovejoy, the old slaveholder.” Born in Andover, Massachusetts, he married Mary Brown, in Charlestown, in December 1758. He was part-owner of trading ships, and later owner and captain of a small fleet based in Charleston. Hammond wrote that his ventures extended north to “the Bay of Fundy and south to the West Indies,” and that Mary sometimes sailed with him.

In 1760, Hammond said, he bought land in Pownalborough; in 1761, he and Mary and their first two children moved to what became Dresden, where he was a merchant, a ferry owner, a shipbuilder and “involved in public office and in land transactions.” In June 1763, Hammond wrote, he was one of the first three men to receive land in Sidney (then Vassalboro) from the Kennebec Proprietors.

In 1764 Lovejoy, in partnership with Mary’s father Nathaniel Brown, bought “half a saw mill and adjoining land and a half interest in a dam” on what was later Hastings Brook. In 1776, the Lovejoys moved to a farm in Sidney overlooking the river.

Hammond wrote that Lovejoy was in the Massachusetts militia from 1755, and from 1758 to 1771 his assignment was in Lincoln County, in what is now Maine – hence, presumably, his interest in acquiring land there. She added, “He also served in the American Revolutionary War.”

But she gave no details of his Revolutionary service, instead listing wartime activities in Sidney: in 1777 petitioning for an extension of the postal service and in 1778 serving on a committee to choose the post rider; in 1781 becoming Justice of the Peace; and “between 1776 and 1798” holding many other local offices.

A detailed on-line source adds that in 1776 he was a member of the pro-Revolutionary Committee of Safety and Correspondence, and in 1779 on “a committee to settle with the women on account of supplies ordered to the soldiers [sic] families by the General Court.” He was also highway surveyor in 1776 and 1777; selectman in 1779 and 1780; in 1780 town meeting moderator in 1780; and town treasurer and a county convention delegate in 1781.

Apparently he was a delegate to the Massachusetts General Court during the Revolutionary years, too, because the on-line sources says he “had been elected year after year” before he was challenged in 1781 and 1782, partly on the ground that he was not a supporter of independence.

The unnamed author of the on-line piece disagrees, calling Lovejoy “a fiery American patriot.” Evidence cited includes Tory Parson Jacob Bailey (mentioned in the history article in the Jan. 13 of The Town Line) naming him an instigator of mobs that attacked Bailey and other Loyalists, and Lovejoy’s willingness to give officers and soldiers in Benedict Arnold’s 1775 army hard money in return for their already-depreciating paper currency.

“Captain Abiel Lovejoy lost some $30,000 this way and afterwards papered a room in the Lovejoy homestead with this ‘worthless money,'” the on-line account says.

The Lovejoys had eight children before they moved to Sidney, and Hammond wrote six more were born there. The family lived in an elaborate house and owned several slaves, three of whom were buried in the small family cemetery on their farm, which Hammond called the “oldest cemetery in Sidney.”

Hammond also wrote about the Reynolds family. Nathaniel Reynolds IV, Esquire, settled in 1779 on the south end of West River Road in what was then Vassalboro, with his family. He served in the Revolutionary Army and “loaned money to the government for the cause”; and five sons “were all Revolutionary soldiers,” Hammond said.

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One of Vassalboro’s pre-war settlers and veterans was Charles B. Webber (January 1741 – Nov. 20, 1819). Born in Old York, Maine, he fought in the French and Indian Wars in 1757 and 1759. During the Revolution, an on-line genealogy says he is recorded as serving as second lieutenant in the Second Lincoln County Regiment of the Massachusetts militia, which was organized in 1776 and sent to Riverton, Rhode Island, in 1777.

Webber married his first wife, Hannah Call, in 1761 in Dresden. In 1765 they moved to Vassalboro, settling in the Riverside area. The on-line genealogy says their second child, a daughter named Sarah, was the first white child born in the town.

The same website says Webber was Vassalboro’s first treasurer, in 1771, and served again in 1776, when he was also the third town clerk; in 1773 and from 1792 to 1796 was a selectman and in 1790 was one of the committee that laid out Vassalboro’s first nine school districts.

A search for Webber’s name in Vassalboro’s extremely valuable on-line cemetery database confirmed his burial site in the Webber Family Cemetery at Riverside.

One of Webber’s company commanders was Dennis Getchell (1723 or 1724 – early January 1792), who bought land in the Riverside area of Vassalboro in August 1770.

Getchell was born in Berwick and is identified first as a major, perhaps from service in the French and Indian Wars. He must have moved to Vassalboro as soon as he bought his land, because the website says he was elected selectman at the first town meeting, April 26, 1771, and many times thereafter.

On July 23, 1776, he was commissioned a captain in the Second Lincoln County Regiment, and led his 50-man company at Riverton in 1777. In 1786, he was elected a member of the Massachusetts General Court.

Amos Childs (July 5, 1764 – Feb. 19, 1847) was a Massachusetts native who spent at least part of his time in the Revolutionary force as a drummer. He served three years and was honorably discharged in 1783. On Nov. 1, 1801, he married Hannah Webber (born in 1780 in Vassalboro, Charles and Hannah [Call] Webber’s daughter) in Vassalboro; they had “at least two children,” an on-line source says.

Hannah died Feb. 14, 1860; she and Amos are buried side by side in the North Vassalboro Village Cemetery.

Main sources

Dowe, Milton E., History Town of Palermo Incorporated 1884 (1954).
Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992).
Howard, Millard, An Introduction to the Early History of Palermo, Maine (second edition, December 2015).
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Wars – Part 4

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The frigate Warren.

by Mary Grow

Revolutionary War veterans from Albion, China, Clinton, Fairfield

Note One: this article and next week’s will be about a few of the Revolutionary War veterans who lived in the central Kennebec Valley. Selection is based on two criteria: how much information your writer could find easily, and how interesting she thought the information would be to readers. There is no intent to disparage veterans who are omitted.

Note Two: Alert readers will have noticed in last week’s piece that artist Gilbert Stuart was misnamed Stuart Gilbert. Your writer accepts blame for carelessness; she also assigns blame to Mr. and Mrs. Stuart, for giving their son two last names, or two first names, depending on your perspective.

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Ruby Crosby Wiggin wrote that town and state records and cemetery headstones identify more than a dozen Albion residents who were Revolutionary War veterans. Two, Francis Lovejoy and John Leonard, were among early settlers.

Rev. Francis Lovejoy, grandfather of Elijah Parish Lovejoy, was in Albion by 1790. Wiggin found that he served initially in “Colonel Baldwin’s regiment” and later re-enlisted to fill the quota from his then home town, Amherst, Massachusetts.

(Colonel Baldwin was probably Loammi Baldwin [Jan. 10, 1744 – Oct. 20, 1807], who fought at Lexington and Concord in the Woburn [Massachusetts] militia. He later enlisted in the 26th Continental Regiment, quickly became its colonel and commanded it around Boston and New York City until health issues forced him to resign in 1777. Wikipedia identifies him as the “Father of American Civil Engineering” and the man for whom the Baldwin apple is named.)

Wiggin gave no information on John Leonard’s military service. By Oct. 30, 1802, he owned the house in which Albion (then Freetown) voters held their first town meeting. Wiggin wrote that he held several town offices between then and 1811, when his name disappeared from town records.

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A veteran who settled in what is now China, and whose story has been increasingly revealed in recent years, was Abraham Talbot (May 27, 1756 – June 11, 1840). In various on-line sources, his first name is also spelled Abram, and his last name Talbart, Tallbet, Tarbett, Tolbot and other variations.

Talbot was a free black man. He was an ancestor of Gerald Talbot, the first black man elected to the Maine legislature. Gerald Talbot’s daughter, Rachel Talbot Ross, is assistant majority leader in the current Maine House of Representatives.

Born in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, to Toby (or Tobey) Talbot, also a Revolutionary War veteran, Abraham Talbot enlisted in the Massachusetts Line in July 1778 and served his nine months’ term at Fishkill and West Point, New York, until March 1779. He married Mary Dunbar in his home town on Sept. 3, 1787.

When he applied for his pension in 1818, he owned an acre of land in China with a small house on it. He and Mary were the only ones living there, although they had had eight children, born between December 21, 1787, and Feb. 16, 1805, in Freetown (now Albion).

William Farris (1755 – Oct. 19, 1841) was another veteran who in 1832 applied for his pension from China, having previously lived in Vassalboro from either 1796 or 1802 (sources differ). He was a native of Yarmouth, Massachusetts, and on Oct. 5 1775, married Elizabeth Burgess of that town.

An on-line history says he enlisted three times in three regiments: Nov. 1, 1775, for two months in Colonel Putnam’s regiment; February 1775 (a misprint for 1776, as the writer says he enlisted “again”) for two months in Colonel Carey’s regiment; and April or May 1776 for four months in Colonel Berckiah Bassett’s regiment.

His first terms were spent building fortifications in Cambridge and Dorchester, outside Boston. His third enlistment ended in the fall of 1776 on Martha’s Vineyard, “guarding the shore.”

Col. Rufus Putnam

(Colonel Putnam was probably Rufus Putnam [later a Brigadier General], a French and Indian War veteran who was instrumental in building the fortifications that forced British troops to evacuate Boston in mid-March 1776. Colonel Carey was probably Colonel Simeon Cary, commander of “the Plymouth and Barnstable County regiment of the Massachusetts militia,” which was at the siege of Boston. This writer failed to find Colonel Bassett on line.)

William and Elizabeth Farris had “at least eight children.” After she died around 1805, on March 18, 1806, he married a 22-year-old Vassalboro woman, Martha “Patty” Long. He bought a piece of land in Vassalboro in 1816, but was a China resident by 1832. His annual pension amounted to $33.33.

The China bicentennial history lists seven other early residents who were Revolutionary War veterans, including Joseph Evans. Evans, for whom Evans Pond is named, arrived in 1773 or 1774 and left his wife and children in the wilderness when he enlisted.

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Michael McNally (about 1752 – 1848), sometimes spelled McNully, was a veteran who ended his life in Clinton. He served in the Pennsylvania Line up to 1781. An 1896 on-line source says his descendants claimed that his role was driving the horses that pulled cannons.

Family stories reproduced on line give two accounts of his arrival in Pennsylvania: one says he was born as his family emigrated from Ireland, the other that as a youngster he ran away from home and crossed the Atlantic alone. He settled in Clinton around 1785 and “raised a large family.”

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The Fairfield Historical Society writers who produced the town’s bicentennial history in 1988 listed four early settlers who served in the Revolutionary army and 10 veterans who moved in after the war (eight from Massachusetts, one from New Hampshire and one from Georgetown, Maine).

The most prominent was William Kendall (1759 – 1827), referred to in one section as General William Kendall. The history says he enlisted from Winslow in March 1777 and obtained an honorable discharge in 1780. An on-line source says he was a drummer “in various New England regiments.”

Having bought most of the area that is now downtown Fairfield, including an unfinished dam and mill building, Kendall completed that project and added saw and grist mills in 1781. The village center was called Kendall’s Mills until 1872.

On Christmas Day 1782, Kendall paddled up the Kennebec to Noble’s Ferry (Hinckley) in his birchbark canoe and came back with his new wife, Abigail Chase. The couple lived first in a log house by the river at the foot of present Western Avenue, then in Fairfield’s first frame house and later in a large brick house at the corner of Newhall Street and Lawrence Avenue. The last housed Bunker’s Seminary (briefly mentioned in the Oct. 21, 2021, issue of The Town Line); it was torn down in the 1890s.

The Fairfield history says Kendall served eight years as a selectman. An on-line source adds that he was Kendall’s Mills postmaster in 1816, Somerset County Sheriff and a member of the first Maine Senate. He and Abigail had eight sons and three daughters. Kendall is buried in Fairfield’s Emery Hill Cemetery.

The cemetery, on the river side of Route 201 at the foot of Emery Hill, is near the site of the log house built by Jonathan Emery in 1771 that is called the first house built in Fairfield. Jonathan’s son David (born in Massachusetts Sept. 24, 1754) was one of the four Revolutionary soldiers who enlisted from Fairfield. The historians doubt the story that he enlisted in September 1775, inspired by Colonel Benedict Arnold’s troops marching up the Kennebec on the way to Québec, because dates don’t match.

They did find records showing that David Emery joined the Second Lincoln County Regiment on Mach 12, 1777. On Feb. 2, 1778, he transferred to the Continental Army, where he became part of General George Washington’s personal guard. After being mustered out Jan. 23, 1779, he came back to Fairfield and on April 5, 1782, married Abigail Goodwin. He died in Fairfield; one on-line source gives his date of death as Nov. 18, 1830, another as Nov. 18, 1834.

The other three early settlers who fought in the war were Josiah Burgess (1736 – 1828), a lieutenant from March 1776 to March 1779 in the First Barnstable Company from his home town of Sandwich, Massachusetts; his younger brother Thomas (1741 – 1820), who served in Josiah’s company for a week; and Daniel Wyman (1752 – 1829), who moved up the river from Dresden to Fairfield in 1774 and served three years in the Second Massachusetts Line. After independence, each Burgess brother served as a Fairfield selectman and Thomas was town treasurer for two years.

Jonathan Nye (November 1757 – September 1854) was born in Sandwich, Massachusetts, and is identified on line as serving as a private in 1775 and 1776 at Elizabeth Islands, first in Captain John Grannis’s company and later in Captain Elisha Nye’s company.

(The Elizabeth Islands are an island chain south of Cape Cod and west of Martha’s Vineyard; they compose the town of Gosnold, Massachusetts, named after the British explorer Bartholomew Gosnold, the first European to visit them, in 1602.

(John Grannis was a captain of marines, identified in several on-line sources as spokesman for America’s first whistle-blowers. In February 1777, nine shipmates aboard the frigate “Warren” chose him to jump ship and carry to the government in Philadelphia their charge that Esek Hopkins, in charge of the Continental Navy, was “unfit to lead.” The Continental Congress fired Hopkins.)

The Fairfield history says after Nye’s first one-year enlistment, he enlisted again from Sandwich in the spring of 1777. He was at Saratoga when Burgoyne surrendered and at Valley Forge during the winter of 1778. At some point he became a sergeant. He was honorably discharged at West Point March 7, 1780. After that, the history says, he enlisted yet again for short terms and served on privateers.

The on-line source names his first wife as Mercy Ellis from Sandwich. The bicentennial history calls her Mary Ellis, and says Nye married her “soon after his discharge [in the early1780s, then] and settled in Fairfield.” The history also says that in the spring of 1835, when Nye applied for one of the land grants Congress had just authorized, he said he had lived in Fairfield for 35 years, indicating he moved there in 1800. And in an account of the Nye family in another section of the book, Jonathan Nye is said to have moved from Sandwich to Fairfield in 1788, with his cousins Bartlett (August 1759 – 1822), Bryant and Elisha (Nov. 2, 1757 – 1845) Nye.

On March 18, 1820, Jonathan Nye married again, to Abigail Fish, who died in 1850. When he applied for a military pension in 1820, he said she was not strong enough to help with their farm, and he could not do much because of “blindness caused by small pox while in the army and a lameness in both knees.”

Col. Nathaniell Freeman

Jonathan Nye’s cousins Bartlett and Elisha were also Revolutionary veterans. Bartlett Nye, according to an on-line family history, served from July 2 to Dec. 12, 1777, in Rhode Island and Massachusetts and again for four days, Sept. 11 through Sept. 14, 1779, as a corporal in Colonel Freeman’s regiment responding to “an alarm at Falmouth [Massachusetts].”

(Colonel Freeman was probably Nathaniel Freeman (March 28, 1741 – Sept. 20, 1827) from Sandwich. He had a medical practice, became active in the Revolutionary movement as early as 1773, was a militia colonel from 1775 and a militia brigadier general from 1781 to 1791.)

Elisha Nye was also in Colonel Freeman’s regiment. He is listed on line as serving for several very brief periods in 1778 and 1779.

After the war, each of the brothers held political office. In 1812, Bartlett Nye was in the Massachusetts General Court, where he supported making Maine a separate state; his term had ended before the decision was taken in June 1819. Elisha, the Fairfield history says, “served as Representative from the County” in 1816, presumably also to the Massachusetts General Court.

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).
Wiggin, Ruby Crosby, Albion on the Narrow Gauge (1964).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Wars – Part 3

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John Chandler

by Mary Grow

Veterans of Waterville and Augusta

After the Revolutionary War, the demobilization of the army increased the population of the Kennebec Valley. This article and the following will describe some of the Revolutionary veterans who became part of local history, chosen more or less randomly. A visit to old cemeteries in area towns would undoubtedly add more names.

In her history of the South Solon meeting house, Mildred Cummings explained that many demobilized soldiers from southern New England came to the District of Maine for its inexpensive land. Such a move would be especially appealing to younger sons who, until after the new United States government and laws took effect, could expect the family farm to be inherited by their oldest brother.

(Solon is farther up the Kennebec River, outside the area of this study, but friends have assured this writer its meeting house is worth a visit.)

The number of central Kennebec Valley settlers, veterans and others, who came from New Hampshire and Massachusetts substantiates Cummings’ explanation.

Kingsbury added, in his Kennebec County history, that survivors of Benedict Arnold’s 1775 march to Québec remembered the Kennebec Valley as a beautiful place with land and timber resources, and some brought their families to live there.

One such was Colonel Jabez Mathews (1743-1828), according to the Waterville centennial history. Mathews went up the Kennebec with Arnold’s expedition, returned to his home town of Gray and in 1794 brought his two young sons with him to Waterville, where he was a tavern-keeper.

The Waterville history includes a chapter on military history written by Brevet Brigadier General Isaac Sparrow Bangs. After much research, he and collaborators came up with a list of more than two dozen Revolutionary War veterans with a connection to Waterville, the majority men who settled there after the war.

Ernest Marriner wrote a brief piece (reproduced on line) in which he said only two men enlisted from the small Waterville/Winslow settlement, John Cool from the Waterville side of the Kennebec and Simeon Simpson from the Winslow side.

With his essay is a photo of the memorial tablet in the Waterville Public Library listing 24 Revolutionary veterans in Waterville, most, obviously, men who came after the war. His list and Bangs’ list are similar but not identical.

The first man Bangs mentioned (he is not on the memorial tablet) was Captain Dean Bangs (May 31, 1756 – Dec. 6, 1845), a Massachusetts native who was a mariner before the war, a privateer in 1775 and for two years beginning in 1776, a soldier in Abijah Bangs’ company in Colonel Dike’s regiment (probably Colonel Nicholas Dike, of the Massachusetts militia).

In 1802 Bangs bought “a large tract of land” in Sidney, part of it overlooking the Kennebec River, where he farmed and “reared a large family.” Waterville was his “mercantile home.”

Elkanah Bangs

As of the 1902 history’s publication, he and some of his family were buried in a private cemetery on his land. A memorial in the cemetery said that Dean Bangs’ father, Elkanah Bangs, was a privateer in the Revolution who was captured and died “on the Jersey prison ship at Wallabout Bay, New York, in July 1777, aged 44 years.”

(Since the memorial was erected by Dean Bangs’ grandson Isaac Sparrow, this writer concludes that the Isaac Sparrow Bangs who wrote the chapter is related to Elkanah and Dean Bangs.)

John Cool, for whom, according to Bangs and Marriner, Waterville’s Cool Street is named, enlisted in the Continental Army from Winslow on March 12, 1777, and was discharged March 12, 1780. In 1835, “on a paper” (perhaps concerning a pension?) he said he was 78 years old and had lived in by-then-Waterville for 70 years. He lived on Cool Street another 10 years, dying Oct. 5, 1845, six months after he turned 89.

Sampson Freeman, “a free man of color,” was another Continental Army veteran who served his three years, from Feb. 1, 1777, to Feb. 5, 1780, including service at Valley Forge dated June 1778 (the month the army moved out of that encampment). Freeman enlisted from Salem, Massachusetts; after the war he lived in Peru, Maine, before moving to Waterville in 1835, where he died in 1843.

Asa Redington

Asa Redington (Dec. 22, 1761 – March 31, 1845), according to records Bangs and colleagues found, enlisted from New Hampshire in June 1778 and was discharged in December; in June 1779 re-enlisted for a year; in March 1781 enlisted for the third time.

He served in New England the first two terms, and after March 1781 went with the army to Yorktown. After Cornwallis surrendered, Bangs wrote, Redington came back north with the army to West Point, where on Dec. 23, 1783, he was discharged “without pay, and left to travel 300 miles to his home, carrying the musket he had borne during his long service.”

Redington moved to Vassalboro in 1784, married into the Getchell family, and in 1792 moved to Waterville for the rest of his life. The musket, Bangs wrote, remained in the family for years, until Redington’s oldest son gave it to the State of Maine.

Marriner added that Redington, with his father-in-law, Nehemiah Getchell, built the first dam at Ticonic Falls. Redington became a mill owner, added “a shipyard and store, and accumulated more land.”

He was the Justice of the Peace who convened Waterville’s first town meeting, held on July 26, 1802. The Redington Museum is in the Silver Street house that he built in 1814 for one of his sons.

Another prominent Waterville veteran was Dr. Obadiah Williams (March 21, 1752 – June 1799). The second of Waterville’s early physicians, he enlisted from Epping, New Hampshire, and was at Bunker Hill as a surgeon in Major General John Stark’s regiment in the Continental Army. He served for the duration of the war and came to Winslow in 1792. Several sources say he built the first frame house on the west (later Waterville) side of the Kennebec.

Daniel Cony

Augusta also had Revolutionary veterans among its early settlers. One of the most prominent was Daniel Cony (Aug. 3, 1752 – Jan. 21, 1842). He has been mentioned in several previous articles, notably as the founder of Cony Female Academy, opened in 1816 and closed in 1857 (see The Town Line, Sept. 2, 2021, for a summary history of the Academy and a brief biography of Daniel Cony).

A Massachusetts native, Cony was a physician practicing in Shutesbury when the Revolutionary fighting began at Lexington and Concord. North wrote in his history of Augusta that Cony enrolled in the Massachusetts militia in the fall of 1776 and joined General Horatio Gates’ army at Saratoga, New York.

North tells the story of an early adventure: a leader was needed to cross an area exposed to fire from a British battery, and he volunteered. “[T]he young adjutant at the head of his men by his wary approach drew the enemy’s fire, felt the wind of their balls, then dashed forward with his command unharmed.”

Cony and his family came to Augusta (then Hallowell) in 1778. His many public positions after the war included town clerk and selectman in Hallowell; member in both houses of the Massachusetts General Court; member of the Massachusetts electoral college when George Washington was elected to his second term as president of the United States; delegate to Maine’s 1819 Constitutional Convention; member of the new Maine legislature and of the Maine executive council; and Kennebec County probate judge.

Consistent with his enthusiasm for education, after the Massachusetts legislature chartered Hallowell Academy in 1791 (during one of his terms as a legislator), he became a member of the first board of trustees; and he was an overseer of Bowdoin College, founded in 1794, for its first three years.

On Oct, 17, 1797, in honor of the anniversary of Burgoyne’s surrender, he began building a new house. That house burned June 13, 1834. The same year he built a new one, described on a Museum in the Streets plaque as “a double brick visible on the hill behind the fort,” where he died.

In 1815, renowned portrait painter Gilbert Stuart did portraits of Cony and his wife, Susanna Curtis Cony, according to an on-line Central Maine newspapers report dated May 1918. In 1917, the Cony Alumni Association obtained permission to replicate Cony’s portrait (the original belongs to the Minneapolis Institute of Art). The resulting canvas print, framed, was hung in the Cony High School library in August 2017, according to the report.

Seth Pitts, Jr. (1754 – Aug. 22, 1846), and his younger brother, Shubael Pitts (1766-1849), were born in Taunton, Massachusetts, and both served in the Revolution. Their parents moved to Hallowell before 1781.

Seth married Elizabeth Lewis from Canton, Massachusetts. Shubael married twice, each time to one of midwife Martha Ballard’s assistants. His first wife was Parthenia Barton (1772- Sept. 4, 1794), from Vassalboro; an on-line history says Martha Ballard was “in attendance” at her death. On July 28, 1796, Shubael Pitts married Sally Cox or Cocks (born 1770).

Shubael made his living as a blacksmith, with his shop on the east side of Water Street, in Augusta. Sally “operated a boarding home for debtors in the same area,” the on-line history says.

When Augusta’s first militia company was established in 1796, Shubael Pitts was one of four captains, according to Kingsbury. (Another was Thomas Pitts, who was born too late to fight in the Revolution but was active in the War of 1812.)

The on-line history says Shubael and Sally are buried in Augusta’s Kling Cemetery (also called the Reed-Cony Cemetery, on the east side of West River Road [Route 104]). Parthenia is buried in Mount Vernon Cemetery (identified as “the old section” of Mount Hope Cemetery).

One of the veterans who spent his last years in Augusta had an unusual service record. Ephraim Leighton (January 1763 – March 15, 1851) first visited the area with his father, Benjamin Leighton, “when there were but three houses in Augusta,” according to Kingsbury. Coming from Edgecomb, they went on to Mount Vernon “by blazed trees” and settled there, Kingsbury wrote.

By May 1776, according to an on-line source, Ephraim was back in Edgecomb, because it was from there that, at the age of 11 (according to the source; 13, by this writer’s math), he enlisted in Captain Henry Tibbetts’ company in a Massachusetts regiment “and served as a waiter to Capt. Tibbetts.” He was discharged in November 1776, but despite his brief and not very military service he was later awarded a pension.

Leighton married Esther Tibbetts on Nov, 23, 1789, in Rome. He was a farmer in Rome and Mount Vernon, moved as far north as Parkman and after about 1813 lived in Augusta. He is buried in the city’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery.

John Chandler (Feb. 1, 1762 – Sept. 24 or 25, 1841) was another Revolutionary War veteran who came to Augusta late in life. Born in Epping, New Hampshire, third son of a blacksmith who died in 1776, in 1777, at age 15, he joined the Continental Army. He was captured by the British, escaped, was captured again in May 1779 and escaped in September. Returning to Epping, he promptly re-enlisted.

At some point he served at Fort Detroit, in what is now Detroit, Michigan, under future Secretary of War (in Thomas Jefferson’s administration) Henry Dearborn. Dearborn thought enough of the illiterate youngster to lend him money to buy a farm in Monmouth in the District of Maine, where Chandler and his wife Mary settled in 1784.

Wikipedia says “a local schoolmaster” educated Chandler. He became a successful blacksmith and prominent enough in town to be elected to the Massachusetts Senate (1803-1805) and the United States House of Representatives (March 1805 to March 1809).

Declining renomination, he became Kennebec County Sheriff in 1808 and in 1812 a major general in the Massachusetts militia. His story will continue with the history of the War of 1812.

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Nash, Charles Elventon, The History of Augusta (1904).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).

Websites, miscellaneous.

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this article, artist Gilbert Stuart was misnamed Stuart Gilbert.

Stories from Fort Hill Cemetery

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Fort Hill Cemetery, in Winslow

by Kit Alexander

As anyone who has lived in Winslow for any length of time can tell you, Fort Halifax was built by the English in the middle of the 18th century on the point of land where the Sebasticook and Kennebec Rivers meet. All that is left of it today is the solitary block house on the southeast corner where the fort had stood. The block house floated down the Kennebec River in the flood of 1987 and returned in pieces to be reassembled by local citizens. It now stands as our town’s symbol, incorporated into stationary, logos, websites and other town-related items.

The fort served as a base to protect the interests of the English in the area, and to deal with any French incursions into the territory claimed by the British. It also existed as a base for further exploration of the area, and to identify and exploit other resources.

The fort grew, diminished, and grew again to where it had, at one time or another, covered most of what is now Winslow’s Fort Halifax Park. The park has suffered through floods and mini-tornados, endured many ownership changes, and hosted several commercial enterprises, including lumber businesses and a used car lot in the 1950s. Now it is Winslow’s premiere park, a place for family recreation, weddings, parties, and, more recently, outside meetings with members sitting in a circle, spaced six feet apart.

Early in the fort’s history, two smaller block houses known as redoubts, connected by a palisade walkway, were built on the top of Fort Hill, presumably to maintain an elevation for monitoring the traffic going up and down the Kennebec or Sebasticook.

What some people do not realize, however, is that a portion of what had been the fort became what we know today as the Fort Hill Cemetery. In 1772, a committee was appointed by town officials to obtain a plot of land on the hill to hold the first public burial ground in Winslow. Three acres or so were donated by Dr. Sylvester Gardiner, a physician and land developer.

While the cemetery was established in 1772, the first burial was not recorded until 1789 when Timothy Heald, a Captain in the Revolutionary War, was interred there. During those intervening 17 years, many residents of Winslow and surrounding towns may well have been buried in the cemetery. They may not, however, have been listed in the town’s vital records beginning in 1771 when Winslow became a town. The earliest residents may have simply been buried in the southern part of the cemetery, without any record of their passing or grave stone to mark their resting place. Others may have had a simple, unadorned field stone or an engraved marker which has either disintegrated or fallen and been overgrown by grass and other plant material. Family genealogists scattered all over the country may be the only people who know about these early residents and their place of burial.

Today, approximately 450 people are buried in the cemetery, only a few of them without a marker. During the past year, members of the Winslow Cemetery Committee along with local volunteers have lifted or uncovered about 50 stones, some completely buried from view and others partially covered with grass and dirt. Members of the Fort Halifax Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution have also helped by repairing and cleaning the grave stones of veterans of the American Revolution.

Buried tombstone of Augus Woodman. “Aet” is Latin abbreviation for “age”. “A” is no longer visible.

While using a leaf blower, a volunteer accidentally uncovered a small area of stone about three inches square. After carefully exposing the entire stone using plastic scrapers, trowels, wooden popsicle sticks and, of course, fingers, the head stone of …ugus (possibly Augusta or Augustus) Woodman, came into view. The top of the stone had broken off prior to the 1930s and the rest of it was badly deteriorated so that identifying its possible owner involved a fair amount of detective work and creative eye squinting.

The lettering on many of the stones in Fort Hill is badly degraded, while other stones are covered with a black, tar-like substance, probably from paper mill pollution and exhaust from trucks climbing the hill. Others have been broken into pieces by frost and possible vandalism. The lichen is easily scraped off, but most stones have required scrubbing with water and biological solutions in order to read just the names and dates of death. A few stones have been completely cleaned and restored to their former beauty, but more work is needed.

Searches have been made in the Town of Winslow Vital Records, Ancestry.com, and FindAGrave.com, along with records of the Maine Old Cemetery Association (MOCA), hoping to identify folks buried in Fort Hill. This work has also involved identifying those who are not interred there, and moving them, figuratively, to other burial grounds in the area as recorded by MOCA or FindAGrave.

On a beautiful, clear autumn day, one can stand behind the graves of Nelson and Carrie McCrillis, and, looking west across the whole of the cemetery, see the Kennebec as it flows by Winslow’s park. Or standing in front of the back fence behind the stone of Capt. Timothy Heald, and his wife, Abigail, one can look toward the south east to the Sebasticook River as it makes its way toward its junction with the Kennebec. And if one were to squint his or her eyes in just the right light, they might even see a pair of Abenaki Native Americans paddling silently down the river, on their way home from a long day of hunting.

View from behind tombstone of Capt. Timothy Heald, looking southeast toward the Sebasticook River.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Wars – Part 2

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by Mary Grow

As readers know, major wars have major effects, beginning before the battles, continuing for the duration and lasting years afterwards. Early historians tended to focus on economics and politics: whether development was slowed or speeded or both, who replaced whom in leadership. Later came interest in social effects, especially significant in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Individual psychological effects of war, now commonly labeled PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), have been recognized for centuries, but did not receive a lot of attention until the present century. A 2017 Smithsonian magazine article found on line discusses psychological effects suffered by Civil War soldiers, though not under the modern name.

Some of these young men, far from home and family and witnessing the horrors of face-to-face war, developed “what Civil War doctors called ‘nostalgia,’ a centuries-old term for despair and homesickness so severe that soldiers became listless and emaciated and sometimes died,” according to the article. Others had physical symptoms, like “soldier’s heart” (chest pain, difficult breathing, palpitations), or mental breakdowns.

After World War I, PTSD was called “shell shock.” “Combat fatigue” was the best-known of several terms used after World War II.

It is unlikely that 18th and 19th century soldiers from the Kennebec Valley avoided psychological stress, but finding records demonstrating the condition would be even more unlikely. There are, however, numerous reports on and analyses of economic consequences, and social and political consequences are sometimes obvious.

Many of the central Kennebec Valley towns, especially the larger ones, suffered economic distress during the Revolution. The level of distress in Augusta (then Hallowell) is recorded by historians Henry Kingsbury and Charles Nash.

Kingsbury summarized: “A town of so few inhabitants, however willing, could not give much aid to the continental cause, and its part in the war was necessarily small and inconspicuous. It suffered much during the period of the revolution – its growth was retarded and well-nigh suspended….So great was the depression that even the Fourth of July Declaration [of Independence] was not publicly read to the people.”

Nash wrote that by 1777, British warships so “infested” the Maine coast as to practically stop overseas trade, a blow to the shipbuilders and shipmasters of Hallowell (and downriver towns). A year later, though, he wrote that a Hallowell shipbuilder sold the government hundreds of pounds worth of ships’ masts, spars and bowsprits for the budding Continental navy.

According to Kingsbury, only about 100 heads of families lived in Hallowell in 1779, presumably after many Tories had left. When the new national government started assessing towns individually for soldiers and supplies, townspeople could not easily meet the demands.

By the 1780s, according to information Nash compiled from town meeting records, Hallowell voters were raising money to pay soldiers. In October, for example, they raised 12,000 pounds to pay $500 each to soldiers who served eight months in Camden. Many were paid in lumber or shingles instead of money.

Another series of votes in January 1781 raised 90 guineas (Wikipedia says a guinea was about the same value as a pound) for six men to “go into the service of Massachusetts” (Kingsbury added that they were required to enlist for three years); directed that “the selectmen and commissioned officers shall do their endeavors to procure said men”; and for that purpose directed them to “hire money upon the town’s credit.”

That the effort was not fully successful can be inferred from the February vote to “petition the General Court [of Massachusetts] for relief of the beef tax, and our quota of soldiers sent for from this town.”

In March, annual meeting voters gave town leaders “discretionary power to get the continental men in the best way and manner they can be procured.”

Nash found a September 6, 1781, vote (three weeks before Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown) that sounded even more desperate. Voters directed selectmen to “endeavor to procure this town’s quota of shirts, stockings and shoes and blankets required of this town, upon the town’s credit if they can be procured.” Kingsbury detailed the requisition: “2,580 pounds of beef, 11 shirts, 11 pairs of shoes and stockings, and 5 blankets,” and said the Massachusetts legislature threatened to fine the town if it did not produce.

From what little Whittemore wrote in his history of Waterville, the townspeople in what was until 1802 Winslow on both sides of the Kennebec also had trouble meeting quotas. Town officials had neither money for supplies nor willing volunteers for soldiers. The price of beef rose to five dollars a pound, indicating, Whittemore said wryly, “either a depreciated currency or that some primordial beef trust already had taken possession of the country.”

He was serious about the depreciated currency. Nash gave examples through the 1770s of a steady decline in the value of the paper money issued by the new government.

By 1781, he wrote, currency was worth so little that the government made a “new emission.” Defined as legal tender and valid for paying taxes, Nash wrote that it held its value briefly, but within a few months it lost almost half its value, a dollar becoming the equivalent of a half-dollar in silver.

Ernest Marriner picked up the theme in his Kennebec Yesterdays. Money, either paper currency or coins, was scarce in the valley anyway, he wrote; people often paid for things they could not make at home with things they could, especially crops, like wheat, corn, peas, potatoes and apples, and also butter, cheese, wool, flax and similar products.

The naval supplies Nash described were paid for partly in dollars (presumably Continental paper currency), with 100 dollars equal to 30 pounds, but also in corn, “New England rum,” sugar and glass.

Marriner found that by 1789, a Continental paper dollar was worth one-fortieth of a silver coin. By then, he wrote, hay, previously costing a maximum of $10 a ton, was $200 a ton. Butter cost $1.50 a pound; by 1802, it was down to 15 cents a pound.

Many Kennebec Valley families were left in precarious circumstances by the combination of limited access to outside supplies; heavy taxes to support local, Massachusetts and federal military and civilian needs; depreciated currency; and breadwinners off fighting, home recovering, in a British military prison or dead.

Rev. Jacob Bailey

Nash quoted from the journals and letters of Rev. Jacob Bailey, a Tory who lived in Pownalborough (now Dresden) for most of the war years. Bailey referred to “nakedness and famine” among his neighbors.

Some had no bread for months, he wrote. It was impossible to find grain, potatoes or other vegetables; meat, butter or milk; tea, sugar or molasses. People lived on “a little coffee, with boiled alewives or a repast of clams,” and not enough of that diet to forestall hunger, Bailey wrote.

* * * * * *

Tories, especially outspoken ones like Bailey, were a minority in the Kennebec Valley, and became a smaller minority as the war went on. When it became clear that the rebellion was succeeding, fence-sitters joined the winning side; opponents of independence went away, usually to eastern Canada.

In the Hallowell area, many of the big landowners, like the Gardiner, Hallowell and Vassall families for whom towns were named, were British sympathizers. During or after the war, they emigrated to Canada or Britain; post-war local governments confiscated their lands.

A notorious Tory in the Augusta area was John “Black” Jones (c. 1743 – Aug. 18, 1823).

Nash wrote a great deal about “Black” Jones in his Augusta history, distinguishing him from three other men named John Jones who were in the area earlier or simultaneously. The Tory Jones’ primary work was surveying for the Plymouth Proprietors, laying out lots on both sides of the Kennebec River, including the future towns of Hallowell/Augusta, Vassalboro, China, Unity and Skowhegan. Kingsbury added that he built the first mill on the west side of the Kennebec at Hallowell.

“Black” is said to have referred to his dark complexion, not his character. Indeed, Nash wrote that he was “a skillful surveyor and a man of good character,” who was repeatedly elected to local office in 1773 and 1775, despite being stubbornly pro-British in a divided community.

In April 1777, Nash found, town meeting voters chose Lieutenant John Shaw “the man to inspect the tories, and make information thereof.” At another meeting in July, they implemented a Massachusetts law intended to protect the country from “internal enemies” by instructing Shaw to collect evidence against Jones, “who they suppose to be of a disposition inimical to the liberties and privileges of the said States.” In Oct. 1777 they again voted Jones “inimical to the liberties and privileges of the United States.”

After a brief imprisonment in Boston, Jones escaped and went to Canada, where he enlisted on the British side. Assigned to Fort George, in Castine, he led a band of soldiers who raided local rebel towns. An on-line Canadian biography says he worked as a surveyor in New Brunswick, Canada, after the war.

Returning to Hallowell, according to Nash as early as November 1785, Jones was met by antagonists who escorted him out of town. He came back, and, Nash wrote, “by his many good qualities and an exemplary life he largely overcame, long before his death, the bitter prejudice which his attitude and acts during the revolution had aroused in his fellow-citizens.” Kingsbury wrote that in 1794 it was Jones who surveyed the division of Hallowell into three parishes.

Another mention of Tory sentiment is in Alma Pierce Robbins’ history of Vassalboro. She gave the Revolutionary War only a few sentences, mostly focused on Congress’s approval of aid and pensions to soldiers and their dependents.

Robbins said records indicated that Vassalboro residents were “somewhat lukewarm” patriots who “did their share in a dilatory manner.”

She added, however, that town officials fined “those who spoke too openly against the Revolution,” that the town’s beef quota was “finally” paid “under strong pressure” and that “many” did fight on the Revolutionary side.

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Marriner, Ernest, Kennebec Yesterdays (1954).
Nash, Charles Elventon, The History of Augusta (1904).
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).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Wars – Part I

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Fort Western in 1754.

by Mary Grow

For the next however many weeks, this series will discuss 19th-century wars that affected central Kennebec Valley residents. After the British gained legal control of the region by the 1763 Treat of Paris, the valley was mostly peaceful, but military actions elsewhere had local effects.

Your writer will start with the American Revolution (1775-1783), and go on to summarize some of the local connections with two more wars that finally ended quarrels over Britain’s interest in this side of the American continent, the War of 1812 (1812-1815) and the Aroostook War (1838-1839).

Next will come a very incomplete story of the all-encompassing Civil War (1861-1865). Many men and some women from the central Kennebec Valley were actively involved.

This part of the series will conclude with the Mexican War (1846-1848) and the Spanish-American War (1898). Though Kennebec Valley residents were aware of these geographically distant events, local effects were limited, with the important exception of families whose menfolk fought, and sometimes died, on the fields or seas of battle.

* * * * * *

The United States in the 19th century had two forms of military organization, the national army and the local militia units.

The U. S. Army, the oldest branch of the national military service, is a direct successor of the Continental Army, organized June 14, 1775. After the Revolution, mistrust of a “standing army” in the newly independent country led to temporary abandonment of a national force.

Soon, however, frontier wars made an organized armed force necessary. Wikipedia says Congress created the Legion of the United States in 1791 and in 1796 renamed it the United States Army. The United States has had a national military ever since, though a small one until the 20th century.

Wikipedia says local militias date from Sept. 16, 1565, when Spanish Admiral Pedro Menendez de Aviles organized the first unit in St. Augustine, Florida, leaving the men to guard supplies while he led his army to attack a French fort.

When English settlers arrived four decades later, they brought with them a tradition of organized militia units. Wikipedia says the Jamestown and Plymouth colonies (established in 1607 and 1620, respectively) started by enrolling every able-bodied man as a militia member.

“By the mid-1600s every town had at least one militia company (usually commanded by an officer with the rank of captain) and the militia companies of a county formed a regiment (usually commanded by an officer with the rank of major in the 1600s or a colonel in the 1700s),” Wikipedia summarizes.

After independence, colonies’ militia units became state militia units. Wikipedia says the federal government first began regulating them in 1792, and until the early 20th century relied on them “to supply the majority of its troops.” The militia became the National Guard in 1903.

Augusta historian Charles Nash included a chapter on the militia in his 1904 history. He described a typical local unit as enrolling able-bodied “citizens” (this writer is quite sure he meant male citizens) between 18 and 40 years old each spring.

“The organization of the militia consisted of companies of infantry in citizen’s dress (better known as ‘string-beaners’), light infantry in uniform, cavalry, artillery, and riflemen; these were organized into regiments, brigades, and divisions,” Nash wrote. Each infantry regiment normally had a company of cavalry and another of riflemen with it.

Uniformed infantry wore blue coats, artillery men “the revolutionary color [dark blue, according to Wikipedia] faced with red” and riflemen green, the better to hide in ambush in the woods. Infantry and rifle companies included fifers and drummers; the cavalry and artillery units had buglers.

Officers, Nash wrote, rode horseback. They wore the “wind-cutting” three-pointed, round-crowned black hat associated with Napoleon Bonaparte, “surmounted by lofty plumes,” and on their shoulders “glittering epaulettes.”

After organizing in May, militias drilled during the summer and in the fall held local musters that were the year’s main attraction for people of all classes, Nash said. Augusta’s muster ground for many years, well into the 1800s, was an area between Augusta and Hallowell named Hinkley’s Plains, after an early settler.

Nash described a typical muster, with demonstrations of military maneuvers, music and a final review before the mounted commander. Outside the muster area “tradesmen and peddlers and hucksters” assembled as for a fair; a great deal of liquor was consumed, inside and outside. In a footnote, Nash wrote that in 1844 the Maine Legislature banned musters because of the “gross intemperance practices.”

The 1817 muster at Hinkley’s Plains was special, Nash wrote, because Massachusetts Governor John Brooks came north to review the troops, only the second time a Massachusetts governor had visited the Kennebec Valley.

Governor Brooks had been a lieutenant colonel in the Revolutionary army and afterwards a major-general in the militia, and was known for his military appearance and skilled, graceful horsemanship. Local soldiers were eager to make their appearance before him, and, Nash wrote, people from 50 miles around made plans to attend.

Alas, early morning clouds and fog turned into a “cold and pitiless northeast rain storm.” The audience stayed home. The troops mustered anyway, with “drooping plumes, soiled uniforms and muddy boots and ruined gaiters.”

Brooks reviewed them from the back of “a fine dapple-gray clad in rich equestrian trappings.” The governor wore “a revolutionary three-cornered hat, with a large cockade on its left point, and a short black plume on its crown;…a blue military cloak, the cape of which was deeply bordered with red silk velvet, and its front and sides trimmed with gold lace; his breeches were buff and his high swarrow boots of shiny black polish, displayed silken tassels below the knees; a gold-hilted sword and gilded scabbard hung by his side.”

[“Swarrow,” or Suwarrow or Suarrow, boots are mentioned in the Askin Papers, documents relating to John Askin’s life in the northwestern United States, written between 1747 and 1820. Howard Franklin Shout, who wrote a thesis translating the papers into modern English for his Michigan State College Master of Arts degree in the 1920s, confessed that he was “not able to identify” the word.]

As Brooks and his staff began the review, Nash wrote, the governor took off his hat, “and while the merciless rain poured upon his whitened locks which fell upon his shoulders, he rode slowly before the line looking upon every soldier in it.”

Smaller towns, too, had their local militias. Ruby Crosby Wiggin, in her history of Albion, mentioned an 1808 town meeting vote to buy 32 pounds of powder. Other area towns had organized militia units and were stocking up on powder around that time, she wrote, adding, “Troops practiced on the town commons and were quite well organized when the War of 1812 called them to active duty.”

Her research in town records found local expenditures for the town militia, and supplementary payments from the State of Maine, part of the time (depending on successive town treasurers’ degree of detail) from 1839 until the Civil War.

Palermo had two muster fields, Milton Dowe wrote in his 1954 history. One was at Longfellow Corner, “where the Second Baptist Church was built in 1827”; the other was on Marden Hill.

* * * * * *

Six of the 12 central Kennebec Valley towns covered in these articles had legal European settlers by the spring of 1775 (Vassalboro, including Sidney, and Winslow, including Waterville, were incorporated on April 26, 1771), and four more by the time the Revolution ended in 1783. The exceptions were the off-the-river towns of Albion and Windsor, where the first settlements date from the 1880s. Your writer thinks it highly probable, however, that trappers, hunters, fugitives, hermits and other solitary types had homes in the region before record-keeping started.

Fort Halifax.

According to local histories, Augusta and Winslow were occupied first. Augusta was the site of the Cushnoc trading post, which dated from the 1620s, and then of Fort Western, built in 1758. Fort Halifax, in Winslow, was built in 1754-55.

Europeans mostly moved from the coast up the Kennebec, settling the east shore at Vassalboro around 1760 and around 1763 the west shore that later separated from Vassalboro as Sidney. Winslow settlers had spilled across the river into what became Waterville before Fairfield was settled in 1771.

By April 1775 Fairfield had nine families, according to the writers of the bicentennial history. The writers surmised that it took months for news of Lexington and Concord to reach them, and that between their immediate needs and the protection of nearby Fort Halifax, they felt little personal concern.

Clinton’s and Benton’s early arrivals date from around 1775. By then people were moving inland; China’s first family arrived in 1773, Palermo’s around 1776 or 1777.

Kingsbury, considering the whole of Kennebec County, did not share the later Fairfield historians’ opinion about the lack of local reaction. He wrote that news of the fighting at Lexington and Concord led to “bands of scantly equipped men and boys…pushing their way through the forests” to the nearest place where they could enlist.

“Many farms were abandoned or left to the care of women and minors,” Kingsbury continued, and not all the minors were content to remain behind (as examples in a following article will show).

In Augusta (then Hallowell), he said, a group of patriots organized themselves in January 1775 (before Lexington and Concord). In following months they formed a pro-Revolutionary military company and a public safety committee whose responsibilities included corresponding with Revolutionary leaders around Boston.

Winslow, similarly, had a three-man committee of correspondence, created in 1776 to keep town officials in touch with other pro-independence groups, Kingsbury wrote.

The specific event during the Revolutionary War that directly involved the Kennebec Valley was the expeditionary force sent in September 1775 to capture Québec from the British. Led by Colonel Benedict Arnold, about 1,100 men left Newburyport, Massachusetts, by ship on Sept. 17, or Sept. 19 (or thereabouts; exact dates differ from one to another of the many accounts of the expedition). They began landing at Major Reuben Colburn’s shipyard in Gardinerston (now Pittston) a few days later.

Colburn, a supporter of the Revolution, had collected information and built bateaux, flat-bottomed boats the army needed to navigate the river. The boats were built of green wood and therefore heavy and leaky; food, gunpowder and soldiers’ feet were wet most of the time.

After several days of transferring supplies to the bateaux, the expedition moved upriver. Stops along the Arnold Trail to Québec, as it is named on the National Register of Historic Places, included Fort Western, in Augusta; Fort Halifax, in Winslow; and Fairfield, where the 1988 bicentennial history says an early settler named Jonathan Emery repaired some of the bateaux, and a memorial stone marks the route.

By 1775 Fort Halifax had been out of service since the peace of 1763. Much of it had been torn down, and the central building had become a tavern, according to the centennial history of Waterville. Two area residents had explored up the river to provide advance information; another went with the expedition as a guide.

Disease and accidents, and in at least one case deliberate murder, claimed soldiers’ lives as the expedition moved on. Ernest Marriner wrote that Dr. John McKechnie (1732-1782), who had surveyed Waterville in 1762 and moved there in 1771, treated sick and injured men. Others are said to have been buried in the Emery Hill Cemetery, in Fairfield.

The murder, Kingsbury wrote, occurred as a result of a quarrel between two soldiers during several days the army spent at Fort Western. The shooter was court-martialed and sentenced to hang, but Arnold stayed the execution and forwarded the case to General Washington. The victim was buried “near the Fort burying ground”; later, Kingsbury wrote, Willow Street covered his “unheeded grave.”

Main sources

Dowe, Milton E., History Town of Palermo Incorporated 1884 (1954).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed. Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Marriner, Ernest Kennebec Yesterdays (1954).
Nash, Charles Elventon, The History of Augusta (1904).
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: Library series conclusion

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Old Winslow Library

by Mary Grow

Vassalboro, Waterville, Winslow

There is no evidence that the Town of Vassalboro had a public library before 1909, when the ancestor of the present lively institution was founded.

The 1909 association’s bylaws give it two names, the Free Public Library Association of Vassalboro, d/b/a Vassalboro Library Association. The library has always been in East Vassalboro, and the bylaws say it must remain there.

According to an essay by Elizabeth “Betty” Taylor in Bernhardt and Schad’s Vassalboro anthology, Eloise A. Hafford organized Vassalboro’s Library Association, getting advice from the Maine State Library and providing the association’s constitution.

Then, Taylor wrote, “she disappeared from the records.” Her name was crossed off the list of members in 1910.

Intrigued, Taylor did research that identified Hafford, born Sept. 30, 1860, in Massachusetts, as an early pastor at the East Vassalboro Friends Church. She was a high-school and university teacher for many years, and by 1930 was in California doing public health work, at one time serving as executive secretary of the Southern California Society for Control of Syphilis. She died in 1938.

The first Vassalboro library building was a converted summer cottage on South Stanley Hill Road, on a small lot donated by George Cates, south of the Friends Meeting House. The cottage was a gift of the Kennebec Water District and in 1914 was hauled across China Lake “on skids by four teams of horses,” according to a Jan. 25, 1971, newspaper article at the Vassalboro Historical Society.

The single-story building was about 500 feet square, according to another source. Everett Coombs built bookshelves early in 1915. Madeline Cates was Vassalboro librarian from 1910 to 1948. When the Library Association was inactive during the Depression, she continued to open it one day a week without pay, and her husband Percy provided fuel without charge.

In the 1950s, Taylor and Mildred Harris took the lead in reviving the library.

The wooden building and the book collection burned in 1979. Taylor, who was librarian for more than three decades, was again a leader in obtaining replacement books after the fire.

Vassalboro Public Library (photo: vassalboro.net)

In 1980, the library reopened in its current home, a single-story brick building at 930 Bog Road, on the west side of the village. An addition in 2000 on the back (north side) doubled the size of the building.

The Vassalboro Library receives significant town funding every year, but donations are always welcome, and are tax-deductible.

Vassalboro has at least one of the libraries in boxes described in last week’s essay. It is on the south side of the Olde Mill complex in North Vassalboro, facing Oak Grove Road, identified by the word “BOOKS” across the top.

In Waterville, the first library was started before Waterville became a town, never mind a city, according to Estelle Foster Eaton’s chapter in Whittemore’s 1902 history.

Waterville was separated from Winslow on June 23, 1802. Eaton wrote that eight months earlier, Reuben Kidder (a member of the 1801 committee chosen to petition the legislature to make Waterville a separate town) had bought 117 books from Boston bookseller Caleb Bingham, for $162.65 (with a 10 percent discount).

Waterville Public Library

(Caleb Bingham [April 15, 1757-April 6, 1817] was an educator, textbook writer and publisher as well as a bookseller. An on-line article by Encyclopedia Britannica editors says he directed Boston’s public library for two years without pay; donated many books to the library in his home town of Salisbury; and helped other New England town libraries. His bookstore was a gathering place for Boston teachers and liberal Jeffersonian politicians and “a focal point of agitation for free public schools.”)

The books were mostly non-fiction, Eaton wrote. Exceptions she listed were The Beggar Girl and A Fool of Quality, each in three volumes. (Welsh novelist Anna or Agnes Maria Bennett’s The Beggar Girl and Her Benefactors was published in 1797; Irish writer Henry Brooke’s The Fool of Quality was published between 1765 and 1779, originally in five volumes.)

The books reached Waterville Nov. 18, 1801. Although Kidder had ordered them in the name of the “Winslow Library,” they were labeled as belonging to “The Waterville Social Library.”

Eaton could not determine how long the library lasted, but the books ended up with Abijah Smith, one of the people who signed a note to help Kidder pay for them. Smith let the Sons of Temperance use them when that organization started a short-lived library (Eaton gave no dates).

Kingsbury wrote in his 1892 Kennebec County history that the Waterville division of the Sons of Temperance was organized Nov. 27, 1845, reorganized in 1858 and still flourishing in 1892.

In 1902, Eaton wrote, a Smith descendant owned relevant documents and, apparently, books; she wrote that when the new public library building was completed, he wanted the remainder of the Waterville Social Library to “find [a] fitting home within its walls.”

The present library organization dates from 1896, the present building from 1902.

According to Eaton and Kingsbury, there were other predecessors besides the Waterville Social Library.

Eaton lists two bookstore-based “circulating libraries.” William Hastings, who was a printer and the publisher of the Waterville Intelligencer newspaper (see The Town Line, Nov. 26, 2020) as well as a bookseller, offered “well-selected books” from 1826 to 1828. Around 1840 Edward Mathews started lending books from his bookstore; he sold the library to Charles K. Mathews, who continued it until 1874.

The Waterville Woman’s Association, founded in 1887, by 1892 had a library of 400 volumes, Kingsbury wrote, “from which 100 books are taken weekly.” (The Woman’s Association was mentioned in the Nov. 11 The Town Line.)

Eaton made the Waterville Library Association, founded in March 1873, sound like the most important predecessor of the present library. She listed the founders by initials only, except for President Solyman Heath; apparently they were all men, although Kingsbury mentioned “the cooperation of a few spirited ladies.” Association membership was $3 a year; dues were used to buy books.

The directors of the Ticonic Bank gave the library space in the bank building for 26 years, and the library was nicknamed the Bank Library, according to Eaton. A. A. Plaisted (the Waterville history’s index lists many entries for A. A. Plaisted, Aaron Plaisted and Aaron Appleton Plaisted) was librarian, “assisted within the last few years by the Misses Helen and Emily Plaisted, Miss Helen Meader and Miss Elden, now Mrs. Mathews.”

In 1892, Kingsbury wrote, the library had 1,500 books and about 30 members.

Meanwhile, a movement for a free public library began. In 1883, Eaton wrote, former resident William H. Arnold willed to the town (Waterville did not become a city until January 23, 1888) $5,000 for a public library, conditional on the town matching the gift. The town did not, and Arnold’s heirs got the $5,000.

In 1896, Lillian Hallock Campbell spent early February visiting more than 50 women to ask them to help start a free public library. On Feb. 13, the Waterville Library Association organized, with an all-female list of officers, though some men were interested in Campbell’s project.

(The first president was Mrs. Willard B. Arnold, sister-in-law of the late William H. Arnold. Her husband, the first of five generations of Willard Bailey Arnolds, founded the W. B. Arnold Company, a Waterville hardware store that closed in the 1960s.)

“Public interest was aroused,” Eaton wrote, and business leaders, including W. B. Arnold, donated generously. On March 25, another meeting organized the Waterville Free Library Association, with Mayor Edmund F. Webb president, ex officio, and a mainly male group of officers and trustees (though Lillian Campbell, Mrs. Arnold and Annie Pepper were among the dozen trustees, as was Colby College professor and future president Arthur J. Roberts).

Library supporters began collecting books and money immediately; an April 7, 1896, public notice requested donations. Books were first circulated out of Harvey Doane Eaton’s law office (he was the husband of Estelle Foster Eaton who wrote the library chapter). A five-member book selection committee recommended initial purchases.

The library formally opened Aug. 22, 1896, in a room “in the Plaisted Block.” It moved to the Haines Building in 1898. Agnes M. Johnson was the first librarian.

Eaton wrote that by May 1902 the original 433 books had become 3,088. Circulation for the year ending May 16 was 20,692. Fiction circulation had declined, but “reference work in connection with the schools” was increasing.

Funds came from individual donations; from the City of Waterville, which increased its $500 a year to $1,000 in 1902; and from the State of Maine, whose annual $50 was “supposed to cover the running expenses; although as a matter of fact it has not,” Eaton said.

After the free library opened, interest in the membership-supported Waterville Library Association declined. Eaton wrote that its 1,500 books were donated to the Woman’s Association in 1900.

The earlier reference to a pending new building foreshadowed the 1902 construction of the main part of the present Elm Street building, with a $20,000 Carnegie Foundation grant. The library’s website describes the building’s architectural style as Richardson Romanesque, similar to other area libraries in Augusta, Clinton and Fairfield. The architect was William R. Miller of Lewiston, who also designed Fairfield’s Lawrence Library (see The Town Line, Nov. 11).

The building is of brick with granite trim. The original entrance on Elm Street is approached by wide granite steps leading to three arches, and the typical tower rises beside the entrance, with a tall triple window below nine small square windows.

The original building has been renovated and expanded several times. A banner on the side of the building proclaims Waterville Public Library a “2017 Winner National Medal for Museum and Library Service.”

New Winslow Library

This writer has failed to find a comprehensive history of Winslow’s public library, located since the late 1980s in a handsomely-converted former roller-skating rink at 136 Halifax Street. The town web page identifies the current library as a department of the town, with a board of trustees.

For at least part of the time between 1905 and 1927, the library was on the east side of Lithgow Street, in the north end of a single-story clapboard building it shared with the town office. Historian Jack Nivison wrote that the building was between the 1926 library and the Congregational Church, set farther back from the street than they are.

A photograph shows a single-story building with a peaked roof. Above what looks like a paneled front door is a three-section semi-circular window, and above it, under the peak of the roof, a second similar one. Windows on either side have decorative shutters and window boxes.

A side door has a small rectangular window beside it. This door and two larger windows on the south side are topped with arched semicircles of what looks like stained glass.

The first librarian, Jennie Howard, served from 1905 to 1933 and was paid $52 a year. Nivison wrote that Howard was also a teacher and superintendent of schools.

The second recorded Winslow library building was built in 1926-27 on an adjoining lot donated by George Bassett, at a cost of $30,000 (the on-line source that says $3,000 must have dropped a zero).

The 1926-27 library is a two-story, flat-roofed brick building. A semi-circular columned portico the height of the building shelters an arched, glass-paneled front door. Above the columns are the words “Winslow Public Library.”

Two tall windows on the front have decorative medallions above them; the window on the south side is topped by a smaller arched window. The library now houses the Taconnett Falls Genealogy Library; its sign says it is open from 1 to 4, Wednesdays and Saturdays.

After the 1987 Kennebec River flood, the library moved to its Halifax Street home.

Nivison adds a second Winslow library with a limited clientele. He wrote that “there was a Library in the Taconnet Clubhouse, built in 1901-02. This library was open to all families who worked at H & W.”

H & W was the Hollingsworth & Whitney Paper Company mill, which operated from 1892 until, after two changes of ownership, 1997. The H & W Clubhouse also offered its employees use of pool tables, a bowling alley and a swimming pool, according to Wikipedia.

Main sources

Bernhardt, Esther, and Vicki Schad, compilers/editors, Anthology of Vassalboro Tales (2017).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).

Personal conversations.
Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Palermo & Little Free Libraries

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The Branch Mills Public Library, with what could possibly be Thomas Dinsmore Jr., founder, sitting on the porch.

by Mary Grow

Palermo residents are currently enjoying at least the third library in the town’s history.

The earliest, according to Millard Howard’s history of Palermo, was started by Benjamin Marden 2nd, “around mid-century [1850], apparently at his home on Marden Hill,” and was called the Palermo and China Social Library. Marden Hill is in northeastern Palermo; several Mardens from New Hampshire started farms there in the 1790s.

On-line genealogies list a Benjamin Marden who died, in Palermo, June 5, 1854, aged 21.

Another Benjamin Marden was born in New Hampshire Sept. 29, 1781, and died, in Palermo, March 3, 1859, aged 77. The genealogies name his wife, Catherine (Spiller), and indicate they had no children.

A third Benjamin Marden was born Oct. 26, 1798, on Marden Hil,l in Palermo, and died in Palermo June 2, 1863, at the age of 64, according to other genealogical sites. He and his wife Hannah (Carr) had two children.

The genealogies do not show relationships, if any, among the three, nor give details about their lives or interests.

The best-known Palermo library before the present one was Dinsmore Public Library, founded in 1905 by Thomas Dinsmore, Jr. It was on a hill in Branch Mills Village, east of the Sheepscot River and south of Main Street.

Dinsmore bought an acre-and-a-half lot with a house, landscaped the grounds and turned the house into a library, which served Palermo residents until at least the mid-1950s.

An on-line edition of the Maine (State) Library Bulletin has a short article on the Dinsmore Library, written in 1916 or 1917. (The on-line book is Volumes 4-7; Vol. IV, No. 1, is dated July 1914; but there are so few annual dates in the following pages that it is difficult to know what year events occurred. This writer assumed Vol. VII covers 1917.)

The writer called the Dinsmore Library “One of the most interesting libraries in the county.” (The county referred is Waldo, not Kennebec; the state considered the library to be in Palermo.)

Palermo historians Millard Howard and Milton Dowe wrote that the building Dinsmore bought was built around 1800. Previous owners had included Ralph Turner, Francis Moody (who ran his cobbler’s shop there) and the Bragg family.

By 1916, the Library Bulletin said, the small building was “surrounded by an attractive park with flowering plants and shrubs and a tall flagstaff from which the national colors are daily flung to the breeze.”

The China bicentennial history describes Dinsmore’s method of obtaining books for his library: he wrote to publishers and asked for them. Donations included “dictionaries, encyclopedias, a complete set of Shakespeare’s works, and other valuable volumes.”

He also asked owners of a newspaper in Massachusetts to which he subscribed to sell him the books serialized in the paper – and received them as gifts.

Dinsmore’s initial 1,700 books soon became 2,500. The China history quoted from a 1910 Kennebec Journal article celebrating addition of another 100 books and saying Dinsmore Library served Albion, China, Palermo and Windsor.

“Usually,” the reporter said, library hours were 2 to 4 p.m. (Dinsmore was the only librarian, so the hours might occasionally have been interrupted by other obligations).

The Library Bulletin writer described with obvious approval Dinsmore’s “unique” way of lending books. There was no charge to borrow, and anyone was eligible “if he was satisfied that such person would take good care of the book.” He almost never lost a book, the writer said.

The Kennebec Journal reporter added that the loan period was 30 days, “to accommodate those from a distance.”

Dowe’s Palermo history says Dinsmore was born in China in 1824. He died May 2, 1916, aged 92

The China bicentennial history called him Branch Mills’ “leading philanthropist.” Various sources describe his generosity: his Branch Mills land included a children’s playground; he opened $5 bank accounts for babies born in Palermo; at least once he gave high-school graduates $1 bank accounts; in 1903 he built a monument “to the memory of the lives of the early pioneers of the Town of China and Palermo.”

The Library Bulletin writer called Dinsmore “a gentleman of the old school, courteous and gentle and the children loved him,” and “a picturesque figure,” with “his shawl and cane.” The writer said his recent death “was a cause of real grief” in the community, and predicted that “The Dinsmore Library will live on, however, and many will continue to bless his name.”

After Dinsmore died, the library went to the Branch Mills Improvement Society. Dinsmore left a trust fund, with the interest to be used for maintenance.

His son, James Roscoe Bowler Dinsmore, did work on the building that included a new ceiling and floors, more windows, more bookshelves and “the rooms rearranged for greater convenience,” according to another state report.

H. L. Pinkham kept the library’s books at his store during the renovations, the state report said. By December 1917, the books had been rearranged on the new shelves.

The state report said James Dinsmore chose four librarians for the next year: “Mrs. Lucia Pinkham, Mrs. Alice Parmenter, Mrs. Harriet Estes and Mrs. Winifred Dinsmore.”

Local residents raised money to help provide books (Dowe wrote there were about 3,000 in 1954), and the library thrived “for many years,” but the state bookmobile had replaced it before the China history was published in 1984.

The 1914-1917 state report has one more reference to Palermo, in its section on traveling libraries. A traveling library was a collection of 50 books, 30 fiction and the rest “juvenile, travel, biography, poetry, etc.” A community could borrow a box for six months for $2.50, with the state paying transportation charges.

There were also half-size, half-price special collections “for the use of schools and study clubs.”

The report lists one of the borrowers as a regular library, the Sheepscot Lake Grange.

The present Palermo Community Library is at 2789 Route 3. It was designated a non-profit organization in 1998 and is run on an all-volunteer basis, supervised by a Board of Trustees. Its website is Palermo.lib.me.us.

The Town of Sidney has apparently never had an organized public library, but in the 21st century at least two public-spirited local people have made arrangements for sharing books.

One is Kimberly Spears, who earned her Girl Scout Silver Award in 2018 by organizing the Sidney Free Library, a lending library based at the town office. The Regional School Unit #18 blog has a September 2018 article explaining how she involved other community members as she designed the weatherproof library box and led story hours for children.

Photos on the library’s Facebook page show a painted box on a sturdy pole with two shelves filled with books. Town office Executive Secretary Mary Blaschke said the library gets “a fair amount of traffic” as residents borrow and donate books.

The other volunteer library is the Prescott Road Little Free Library at 1004 Prescott Road. The homeowners have a box stocked with a variety of adult and children’s books and occasional magazines, according to Facebook posts and photos.

Photos show novels by popular contemporary writers like David Baldacci, Joy Fielding, Tess Gerritsen, Kristin Hannah, Stephen King, Liane Moriarty, James Patterson, Jodi Picoult, Nora Roberts and John Sandford. Donations are welcome.

Windsor is another area town with no record of a public library. Here, too, a family has opened a Little Free Library, #54683, located at 36 Greeley Road.

Little Free Library

Wikipedia says Todd Herbert Bol (Jan. 2, 1956 – Oct. 18, 2018) created the first little free library in 2009 in Hudson, Wisconsin. He used the remains of a garage door to build a box, described as a library on a stick, and filled it with books for others to borrow.

The first library was designed “to look like a one-room schoolhouse,” Wikipedia says. Bol’s obituary says he started the project to honor his late mother, “who was always welcoming kids to their Stillwater [Minnesota] kitchen table for a sandwich or help with homework.”

When neighbors admired his library, he built more, and soon he and a partner were setting up libraries in boxes all over the Midwest. In 2012, Little Free Library was incorporated and accepted by the Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

Bol’s initial goal was 2,510 libraries, to beat Andrew Carnegie’s total number of library buildings. The goal was met in 2012, and there are now more than 90,000 Little Free Libraries in more than 90 countries.

Little Free Library
located at 97 Water St., in Waterville.

The concept is that an individual, family or organization builds a box big enough to hold several dozen books; puts it on a stand or pole in a visible location; and invites others to borrow books and either return them or replace them with other books. Most of the boxes shown on line have two shelves and a glass front that opens; details like roof style and paint color(s) vary.

Bol was born in North St. Paul, Minnesota, and taught school in Circle Pines and Cambridge before moving to Wisconsin. He also started Global Scholarship Alliance, an organization that “provides nursing scholarships for advanced nursing,” and two businesses.

The Little Free Library organization continues since his death, headquartered in Hudson.

In addition to the Sidney and Windsor libraries briefly described above, your writer found seven others in the central Kennebec Valley area, and there are probably more. Some are registered and numbered; some are shown on the Little Free Library website’s world map.

Augusta has three. The earliest, Charter #60592 at 44 Westwood Road, was started by University of Maine at Farmington professor Jim Melcher, a long-time “voracious reader” who became acquainted with them in his home state of Wisconsin.

His slant-roofed, two-level box is trimmed in orange, according to a June 2021 photograph in The Kennebec Journal.

Charter #129678, Little Library at Blaisdell, at 2 Blaisdell Street, seems to have only a single level. The unnumbered library at 81 Glenridge Drive is named the Adele Cox Little Free Library, honoring the grandmother of the Flanagan children, “who taught them, and their mother, to love stories.”

The June Kennebec Journal article said the Maine Department of Education had set up five boxes and planned to add three more to encourage summer reading for children (and adults). Staff in the department’s Literacy for Me program are in charge of taking care of the boxes and removing them in the fall, to be put back in late spring.

Waterville has four registered Little Free Libraries.

  • Charter #26496 is at 97 Water Street, at the Kennebec Valley Community Action Program office next to the South End Teen Center. Waterville Rotarians organized it.
  • Charter #44041 is at the beginning of Inland Hospital’s community trails, at 200 Kennedy Memorial Drive. Retired surgeon Rob Hottentot designed the library’s peaked-roof box.
  • Charter #49456 is at 132 North Street and has an email link to Kennebec Behavioral Health.
  • Charter #113015 is the ShineOnCass Lending Library, honoring the late Cassidy Jean Charette, and is in the form of a circular sun instead of the usual box. It is in the YMCA/Boys and Girls Club at the Alfond Youth and Community Center, 126 North Street.

The Little Free Library website advises people thinking of starting one that many local ordinances define the free-standing boxes as structures needing approval by the municipal Codes Enforcement Officer.

Lithgow Library celebration, Dec. 18

The Lithgow Library at 45 Winthrop St., in Augusta, welcomes area residents to its 125th anniversary celebration, scheduled for 10 to 11:30 a.m. Saturday, Dec. 18. The program includes music by local classical violinist Abreal Whitman, a photo exhibition, a scavenger hunt and “goodie bags” as guests leave. More information is available by calling 207-626-2415 and on the library’s website, lithgowlibrary.org.

For historical information on Lithgow Library and its founder, Llewelyn Lithgow, see The Town Line, Nov. 18.

Main sources

Dowe, Milton E., History Town of Palermo Incorporated 1884 (1954).
Grow, Mary M., China Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984).
Howard, Millard, An Introduction to the Early History of Palermo, Maine (second edition, December 2015).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Albion, South China libraries

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Albion Public Library

by Mary Grow

The majority of the central Maine towns and cities this series is covering have public libraries. Previous articles have talked about the three whose buildings are on the National Register of Historic Places – Lawrence Library, in Fairfield (the Nov. 11 issue of The Town Line), Lithgow Library, in Augusta (Nov. 18) and Brown Memorial Library, in Clinton (Dec. 2).

This piece will describe other local libraries your writer finds interesting, mostly arranged alphabetically by town.

A digression is in order here to explain different concepts of “public library.”

The clearest version of “public” is a library that is owned by the municipality, run by a staff who are municipal employees and funded (mostly) by taxpayers. Augusta’s Lithgow Library is in this category; its website calls it “A Bureau of the City of Augusta, Maine.”

Lawrence Library, in Fairfield, is similarly described as “a department of the town of Fairfield.” It has a five-person advisory board (if the website is up to date, there are two vacancies).

Clinton’s Brown Memorial Library is one of the departments listed on the town website. The website lists three trustees.

Each of these libraries has a separate Friends group whose mission is to seek donations.

Another type of “public” library is a library that lets everyone borrow its books and other resources, free of charge, and is owned and run by a private association, normally headed by a board of trustees or other similarly-named group. The Albert Church Brown Memorial Library, in China Village, and the South China Public Library are examples of this organizational type.

Little Free Library is a 21st-century organizational form that will be described in the next article in this series, with local examples.

Albion, the town immediately north of China, seems to have used two other forms of library organization for two successive institutions, one started in 1864 and the other in 1981.

Albion’s 19th-century library represented the type of library that is not truly public, but is at least partly financed by, and its services offered only to, dues-paying members. For the Albion Division Library, organized April 19, 1864, the dues were nominal; some member-supported libraries have charged significant fees.

Ruby Crosby Wiggin wrote in her Albion town history that a share in Library of Albion Div. 55 cost a man 50 cents a year, and required him to sign the library’s constitution and bylaws. Women, identified as “Lady Visitors” rather than members, also had to sign the documents, Wiggin wrote; they were charged 10 cents every three months.

The Division apparently met at least monthly, because Wiggin wrote that books “could be taken out or returned only at regular meetings.” Rules limited each member to one book at a time, with a four-week maximum borrowing time before a fine was incurred. But, she wrote, books could be renewed, and librarians’ records showed members keeping a book “for nearly a year by returning it each month and then taking it out again.”

Wiggin’s history includes the names of the first 17 men who joined the library in 1864 and 1865, and the five women who took out books at the first Division meeting. She also listed the 46 books in the original collection, a mixture of fiction and non-fiction that included a few names familiar to 21st-century readers, like Longfellow’s Tales of a Wayside Inn, Robert Burns’ poems, Francis Bacon’s Essays and George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss.

The library’s non-fiction collection included travel books by Peter Sutherland and Bayard Taylor; both volumes of Joel Tyler Headley’s 1847 Washington and His Generals; and a three-volume history of Turkey. Fiction included Ten Nights in a Bar Room and What I Saw There and several other novels by Timothy Shay Arthur.

Wiggin talked about the library’s first two years, but said nothing about when or why it closed.

The present Albion Public Library, dating from 1981, is an organizational hybrid. The town website says it is “a 501 (c) (3) charitable organization, an Agency of the Town of Albion, Maine.”

Organization Treasurer Richard “Rick” Lawrence explained that Flora Wing Champlin created the public library in 1981 in a corner of the Albion School library, with permission from the School Administrative District #49 directors. What was initially “a brave band of informal trustees” organized in 2001 as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit trust.

Between August 2001 and February 2002, Lawrence said, the trustees raised money to build a single-story library building at 18 Main Street (Routes 202 and 9), on a lot “cheerfully” donated by Roddy and Hattie Robinson. They then signed an agreement with town officials giving the Town of Albion ownership of the land and building, with the trustees to run the library.

In the last two years the trustees have expanded the library by adding a connector building between the main library and a storage room to the south. Lawrence said the project cost about $234,000, of which less than 10 percent came from town meeting voters’ approval of special requests.

The Town of Benton currently has no public library, and neither on-line sources nor Kingsbury’s 1892 Kennebec County history record one in the past. Kingsbury, however, would not take this lack as a criticism of the town. He wrote, “The intellectual status of a community may be generally premised from its educational facilities, and in this respect Benton compares favorably with her sister towns.”

Benton Elementary School library has its own cheerful website. Town residents are eligible for the Maine State Library’s Books by Mail program.

The Town of China has two libraries. The story of the South China library follows; the Albert Church Brown Memorial Library, in China Village, was described in the Dec. 2 issue of The Town Line.

photo courtesy of South China Library

The South China Library, founded in 1830, justifiably calls itself “Maine’s oldest continuously operating public library.” It was mentioned in the July 1 issue of The Town Line for its 20th-century connection with Rufus Jones.

According to the China bicentennial history, a group of South China men met in January 1830 “at the Chadwick schoolhouse” (near the present Erskine Academy, south of South China Village) and created the South China Social Library Society. (Kingsbury gives the year as 1832.)

The history quotes the organization’s goals: “improving our leisure hours to advantage; cultivating science in the community at large; and encouraging the present and rising generation in the same worthy pursuits.” Membership was sold in shares at a dollar each, and more shares could be “bought” by donating books. Borrowers were limited to one book at a time, unless they owned more than one share.

The bylaws allowed members to gather whenever they chose to discuss literature “not inconsistent with virtue and decorum.” For at least the first four decades the library reportedly accepted only non-fiction; the history mentions a paper presented to an 1870 meeting “commenting on the increasing public taste for ‘worthless’ fiction.”

Kingsbury wrote that the library did well. A $96 25th-anniversary gift from “Samuel Gurney, of London” (Kingsbury did not explain how a Londoner knew there was a library in South China, Maine), “gave fresh impetus,” he wrote.

(Wikipedia profiles a British philanthropist named Samuel Gurney [1786-1856] and mentions his son, also Samuel Gurney [1816-1882], but does not associate either with libraries or Maine. The younger Samuel Gurney, also a philanthropist, was co-founder of the Metropolitan Free Drinking Fountain Association, created in 1859 to give London people free, safe drinking water. In 1867 it was extended to animals and renamed the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association.)

The South China library’s books were housed in second-floor rooms above Ambrose H. Abbott’s store (he was the second librarian, from 1836 to 1866, succeeding Constant R. Abbott [almost certainly a relation, but on-line genealogies were not helpful]). In April 1872 a major fire destroyed most of South China Village, including Abbott’s store and the library’s 500 or so “choice” (Kingsbury’s word) books.

When the library reopened the next year, the China history says Eli Jones was president of the association. The library re-started with 80 books “and $6.58 in the treasury.”

Kingsbury wrote that the reopened library was free to all, supported by “subscriptions and donations.” In 1892, it was housed in the South China Friends’ meeting house and open on Sundays and Thursdays.

In 1900 Wilmot R. Jones donated the small lot on the south side of Main Street where the library has lived since, and the association had the building put up. Wilmot Jones was library association president from 1899 to 1919, and Rufus Jones from 1919 to 1948, according to the China history.

In the summer of 2016, library trustees bought the 1815 Abel Jones house on Jones Road, within half a mile of the original library building. The house has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1983 (see The Town Line, July 8).

The Jones lot is large enough to accommodate a new library building, now under construction.

The China bicentennial history counts the former Dinsmore Library, in Branch Mills Village, as a third library in China. Geographically it is on the China side of the town (and county) line that runs through the village. Nonetheless, in this series it will be treated as a Palermo library, and will be described in the next article.

Other Maine towns with two separate libraries

A superficial on-line search has found China is not the only Maine town with two separate libraries.

The Town of Harrison has the Harrison Village Library and the Bolsters Mills Village Library; the latter also serves Otisfield. The Harrison Village Library opened in 1908 in a stone building partly funded by Daniel H. Caswell, Sr.; it was renamed after Caswell in 1947. In 2004, the library moved into the former town office and resumed its first name. The stone building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2005.

The Town of Kennebunkport has the Cape Porpoise Library and the Louis T. Graves Memorial Public Library (originally the Kennebunkport Library, renamed to honor donors in 1921). The Graves library’s two-story brick Federal-style building dates from 1813; it was the United States Customhouse from 1831 into the 20th century, with the town library on the second floor after 1898, and has been on the National Register since 1974.

The Town of Standish has the Richville Library and the Steep Falls Library. The latter, opened in 1917, was for many years the Pierce Memorial Library, in honor of donor Henry Pierce. Its brick Colonial Revival building, designed by Edward F. Fassett (son of Francis H. Fassett; see The Town Line, Feb. 4), has been on the National Register since 2004.

Main sources

Grow, Mary M., China Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Wiggin, Ruby Crosby, Albion on the Narrow Gauge (1964).

Personal interview.
Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Clinton, China Libraries

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Albert Church Brown Memorial Library

by Mary Grow

Clinton’s Brown Memorial Library
China’s Albert Church Brown Memorial Library

Brown Memorial Library, in Clinton, is the third of the local libraries on the National Register of Historic Places. Built in 1899-1900, it was added to the Register on April 28, 1975.

In their application for the listing, Earle Shettleworth, Jr., and Frank A. Beard, of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, compared the Brown Memorial Library to Fairfield’s Lawrence Library (see The Town Line, Nov. 11) and Augusta’s Lithgow Library (see The Town Line, Nov. 18).

Architecturally, all three buildings are variations on the style of Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-1886). Shettleworth and Beard called Clinton’s library “a purer example of the Richardsonian ideal with an exterior exhibiting warm hues and contrasting colors in stone walls and trim, as opposed to the almost monochromatic use of granite and slate,” in Fairfield and Augusta.

Also, they wrote, “The Clinton Library, though symmetry is implied, is basically an asymmetrical composition, truer to Richardson’s buildings of the same type than either the Lithgow or Lawrence libraries, which reflect contemporary Beaux Arts symmetry clothed in a Richardson-derived exterior.”

They concluded, “The Clinton Library is the most exemplary structure of its kind in Maine and is an unusually large and elegant library for a small, rural community.”

John Calvin Stevens

Portland architect John Calvin Stevens (1855-1940) designed Brown Memorial Library. He has been mentioned before as the architect chosen to remodel Augusta’s Blaine House in 1920. Other Maine libraries he designed include Rumford Public Library, built in 1903 and added to the National Register in 1989; and Cary Public Library, in Houlton, opened in 1904 and added to the National Register in 1987.

Clinton’s library is on Railroad Street just north of the Winn Avenue intersection. Shettleworth and Beard described a single-story stone building on a partly raised basement (with windows), with a hipped roof. Reddish sandstone trim contrasts with greyish granite walls and a grey slate roof.

The building’s rectangular shape is broken by three “projections,” small ones on the back and south side and, on the front, to the right (south) of the main entrance, “a large five-bay projection trimmed in sandstone and capped with a semi-detached conical roof.” This projection features tall windows with narrow stone dividers between them.

The entrance is approached by granite steps and recessed under an arch. Above the arch is a “dormer:” a rectangular panel with the words “Brown Memorial Library”; above it, two small rectangular windows; and above them “a steep triangular pediment topped with a ball finial.”

Entry is through two doors with glass panels topped by “a colored glass transom,” Shettleworth and Beard wrote. The “small porch” inside the arch “is floored with a marble mosaic pattern.”

The north side of the front wall has two tall windows, narrower than the ones in the south tower.

The historians noted the origin of the various building materials. The rough granite for the walls is from Conway, New Hampshire; the sandstone for trim is from Longmeadow, Massachusetts; and the slate for the roof “was quarried nearby on the banks of the Sebasticook River.”

An on-line Town of Clinton history adds that the “ledge for the foundation” came from Clinton farmer J. T. Ward’s land.

Inside, the “vestibule,” “entrance hall” and original librarian’s room were straight ahead (by 1975, Shettleworth and Beard wrote, the librarian’s room was a children’s room). The room to the left was the stacks.

The reading room on the right is “the largest room in the building.” Lighted by the bow windows on the front and a smaller one on the side, the room has “a large fireplace flanked with built-in seats” on the back wall (the library’s “Cozy Nook”) and a pine ceiling “patterned with trusses and panels.”

“The interior plan, like the exterior, exhibits Steven’s faithfulness to Richardsonian principals [sic], being designed with a logical, functional simplicity,” Shettleworth and Beard wrote.

Clinton had no public library until William Wentworth Brown (April 19, 1821 – Oct. 22, 1911), born in Clinton but by 1899 living in Portland, bought the land, paid for the building and provided a $5,000 endowment (earning an annual income of $350, according to the 1901 annual report of the state librarian). The town history article says Horace Purinton, of Waterville, was the contractor for the building.

Shettleworth and Beard wrote that Brown presided at the Aug. 29, 1899, ground-breaking. The cornerstone was laid Sept. 25, “amid elaborate ceremonies.” The building opened to the public on July 21, 1900, and was formally dedicated on Aug. 15, when Brown presented it to the residents of Clinton.

The town history article identifies the first librarian as Grace Weymouth, “a descendant of Jonathan Brown [William Brown’s father].” One of William Brown’s four older sisters is listed on line as Eliza Ann Brown Weymouth.

Shettleworth and Beard wrote that Brown also provided many of the “books, furnishings and pictures.” The state librarian wrote that the library started with 2,500 books and had space for 10,000.

In 1902, Shettleworth and Beard said, Orrin Learned added “100 volumes of the official records of the Union and Confederate armies.” Library Assistant Director Cindy Lowell says they are still stored in the building.

(Orrin Learned [June 16, 1822 – July 2, 1903] was a Burnham native who moved to Clinton in 1900. He attended Benton Academy and, like his father Joel, made his living farming and lumbering in Burnham. He served on the select board and school committee and was a state representative in 1863 and 1873 and a state senator in 1877 and 1878.

The on-line biography of Learned says nothing about military service, Civil War or other, except that he was the great-grandson of Revolutionary War General Ebenezer Learned, who was Brigadier-General under Horatio Gates at the October 1877 Battle of Saratoga, where British General John Burgoyne was defeated.)

Clinton officials dedicated the June 2012 town report to the library. They explained that the 1899 trust specified that part of the trust fund interest would be used for “maintaining the building and library,” and that the operating budget would come from local taxes.

One of Brown’s gifts was Vinton’s portrait of him, Shettleworth and Beard wrote.

(An on-line search found Frederic (or Frederick) Porter Vinton [Jan. 29, 1846 – May 19, 1911], a Bangor native who lived in Chicago and later Boston, where he studied art at the Lowell Institute and in 1878 opened his portrait studio. Vinton began painting landscapes in the 1880s, but is known primarily as a portrait painter.)

Lowell said in late November 2021 that the huge painting had been sent away to be cleaned and restored. The restorers had uncovered a fur collar that had been completely obscured over the years, she said.

Brown said at the library dedication that it was a memorial to “my dear parents who were my ideal of all that is best and purest in life….” He expressed the hope that “the good to be derived from this gift may go on forever.”

* * * * * *

The Albert Church Brown Memorial Library, on Main Street, in China Village, less than 15 road miles south of Brown Memorial Library, in Clinton, has been in existence only since 1936, and in its present building since Jan. 1, 1941. Its name honors Albert Church Brown, whose widow donated money to buy and renovate a house dating from around 1827.

Albert Church Brown (no known relation to the Clinton Browns) was born in Winslow in 1843. He grew up in China; the China bicentennial history says he left when he was 16.

After service in the Civil War, Brown prospered as a businessman in Malden, Massachusetts. He died in 1922, leaving his widow, whose family connections with former China residents led to her interest in the library.

The two-story Federal building was formerly known as the Fletcher-Main House, after the two intermarried families who owned it. The building is in the China Village Historic District, a group of mostly residential buildings added to the National Register of Historic Places on Nov. 23, 1977 (see The Town Line, July 8, 2021).

The two Brown libraries share an interesting reputation: people who worked or work in each repeat the superstition that the buildings are haunted.

In Clinton, Assistant Director Cindy Lowell said the ghost is taken to be William Wentworth Brown himself, or “WW,” as she and colleagues call him. She cited two examples of “WW is up to something again.”

Once, she said, the library director’s eyeglasses vanished. Staff and patrons searched the building in vain. Days later, a fuse blew; Lowell went to the basement to replace it, and the missing eyeglasses were on the basement floor.

Another time, Lowell had just come to work, alone, when she heard a very loud slam in the basement. She waited until a patron came in before she went down to investigate – and found no explanation, nothing out of place.

Your writer is the former librarian at China’s Brown Memorial library. Several people familiar with the building assured her there was a ghost, though no one knew who it was. More than once she heard noises as though someone were moving upstairs when she was sure no living person was there; and if the sounds were made by mice, they left no other sign of their presence.

William Wentworth Brown

Various on-line sources say that William Wentworth Brown was born in Clinton on April 19, 1821, sixth of the seven children of Jonathan Brown (1776 – 1861) and Elizabeth “Betsy (or Betsey)” Michales (or Michaels) Brown (1784-1850). His parents and sister, Eliza Ann, are buried in Clinton’s Riverview Cemetery.

William Wentworth Brown

Jonathan and Elizabeth Brown were donors of Clinton’s Brown Memorial Church, now Brown Memorial United Methodist Church, according to Brown Memorial Library Assistant Director Cindy Lowell.

William Brown lived in Clinton until he was 21, when he moved to Bangor to work in his brother’s grocery business (probably his older brother, Warren, born in 1811).

In 1845, Brown started making timbers, decking and other essential pieces of wooden ships. In 1857, he moved the successful business to Portland.

Brown took note of the use of ironclads in the Civil War (the battle between the “Merrimack” and the “Monitor” was on March 9, 1862), and when in 1868 he and Lewis T. Brown (no relation?) were offered a chance to buy a sawmill in Berlin, New Hampshire, he changed businesses.

The two Browns enlarged the sawmill. In the 1880s William Brown bought out Lewis Brown and became sole owner of the Berlin Mills Company, as it was known until it became the Brown Company in 1917. This mill was one of several pulp and paper mills in Berlin.

Lowell quoted a report on the History Channel saying that Brown’s home in Berlin is now a museum.

On Feb. 6, 1861, Brown married his first wife, Emily Hart (Jenkins) Brown (Jan. 23, 1836 – Apr. 4, 1879), from Falmouth, Massachusetts. His second wife was Lucy Elizabeth (Montague) Brown (Jan. 16, 1845 – May 16, 1927); no marriage date is given. Genealogical records contradict each other on how many children he and his successive wives had.

This writer has found no information about William Brown’s career after the 1880s. She assumes it was profitable. Nor has she found any explanation for his decision that a library was the appropriate memorial for his parents.

William Brown died Oct. 27, 1911. He is buried with both wives and five children in a family plot in Portland’s Evergreen Cemetery.

Main sources

Grow, Mary M., China Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984).

Shettleworth, Earle G., Jr., and Frank A. Beard, National Register of Historic Places Inventory – Nomination Form, Brown Memorial Library, April 4, 1975.

Personal interview.

Websites, miscellaneous.