by Mary Grow

As noted last week, this biographical sketch of Professor William Mathews, LL.D. (Doctor of Laws), is another follow-up to an earlier account, the Nov. 21 article on Waterville residents Jeremiah Chaplin and James Hobbs Hanson. Mathews was mentioned as a critic of Rev. Chaplin’s preaching. He also wrote the chapter in Edwin Carey Whittemore’s 1902 Waterville history on Waterville in the 1820s through 1840s, when he was young there.

Turns out Mathews lived a life your writer thought might interest readers, especially those who marvel at how widely 19th-century central Mainers traveled.

As usual, your writer found discrepancies in others’ accounts of his life. She has made her preferred source the biography in Arthur J. Roberts’ chapter on teachers in Whittemore’s history, believing Mathews probably proofread the section about himself.

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An on-line biography of Mathews calls him “an author, editor and sometime college professor.” Henry Kingsbury, in his Kennebec County history, called him a newspaper man. Roberts chose “teacher and author.”

Mathews was born in Waterville, July 28, 1818 (a little over a month after Professor Chaplin came to town). His parents were Simeon and Clymena (Esty) Mathews.

Simeon was born in Gray, Maine, on June 8, 1785, and came to Winslow in 1794 with his father. He became a successful businessman; his son mentioned his boat Eagle that brought supplies up the Kennebec for his stores in “Waterville, Fairfield, Skowhegan, China, and East Vassalborough.” Simeon died in Waterville on Dec. 24, 1841.

Clymena was born in New Hampshire in 1798, FamilySearch says. She and Simeon were married Sept. 30, 1817, in Winslow; she died in Waterville in 1867. William was the oldest and longest-lived of their five sons and one daughter, according to FamilySearch.

Roberts said from the age of nine to the age of 13, William Mathews prepared for college “at the Maine Wesleyan Seminary [founded in 1824 in Kents Hill; now Kents Hill School], and China, Monmouth, Bloomfield [in what is now Skowhegan], and Waterville academies.”

When he was 13, he entered Waterville College, graduating in 1835 at the age of 17.

Henry Prince, in his chapter on the press in Whittemore’s history, wrote that Mathews’ newspaper career began in 1832, when he and Daniel Wing published eight issues of a four-page newspaper called The Watervillonian.

In 1834, Mathews and F. R. Wells edited and Wing printed the North American Galaxy, or Watervillonian Revived. Whittemore, in his summary history of Waterville’s first century, quoted the description: “A semi-monthly journal devoted to Tales, Essays, Music, Biography, Poetry, Anecdotes, etc., besides a great many things that it ain’t devoted to at all.” It ran for four issues.

For the next four years, in Roberts’ version, Mathews studied law “alternately” in Timothy Boutelle’s Waterville office and at Harvard Law School. During this period, Whittemore wrote, he was the “secretary and moving spirit” when the Waterville Lyceum (the town’s second debating society) was organized in 1837. In 1839, he got an LL.B. (Bachelor of Laws) from Harvard College, Roberts said.

During the year 1839-1840, Roberts wrote, Mathews was “in Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington,” and taught at Amelia Court-house, Virginia. (The present Amelia Court House is about 150 miles from Washington, almost 200 miles from Baltimore and almost 300 miles from Philadelphia.)

Mathews was admitted to the Kennebec Bar in 1840 (or 1838; sources differ) and practiced in Waterville and Benton from the spring of 1841 to 1843. On May 29, 1841, he and Wing began publishing a family newspaper again named The Watervillonian. An on-line source says the paper covered “literature, morals, agriculture, news, etc.”

In 1842 the paper was renamed the Yankee Blade, with Mathews sole proprietor. Lack of support in Waterville led to a move to Gardiner in 1843 and to Boston in 1847.

Prince quoted from a letter Matthews sent him in which Mathews claimed that in 1841, the paper started with 400 subscribers, but “by filling its columns to a large extent with elegant extracts from old and modern English writers, from Chaucer to Carlyle,” he reduced the list to 250 within a year. The first year’s profit was $600.

Mathews sold the paper in 1856 and moved to Chicago (no one explained why). There, an on-line source says, he first edited “a financial weekly” while also “running a department at the Chicago Daily Tribune, contributing to other newspapers and lecturing (topics unspecified).

In 1859 he became the Chicago YMCA librarian. More than one source says he was invited to chair the Department of English and Rhetoric at the University of Chicago, though none explains why. He taught there from 1862 to 1875.

Colby University awarded him his honorary LL.D. in 1868.

In 1873 he published a collection of his Chicago Tribune essays he titled Getting on in the World. This book and its 1874 successor, The Great Conversers and Other Essays, sold so well that he retired from teaching to became a full-time writer, translator and editor. Roberts listed nine of his books.

An on-line introduction to an edition of his Hours with Men and Books claims his fame was undeserved. It begins:

“A wildly popular author, an ivy-league attorney, a university professor and a plagiarist: Mathews made his mark in American literary fame in the late 1800’s because his literary larceny was never discovered. From his training it is no surprise. He was smart and had friends in high places.”

Whittemore contributors said Mathews was back in Waterville in July 1879 for the semi-centennial graduation exercises at Waterville Academy, during which he shared a paper he wrote on the early history of the school.

Both on-line biographies say he moved to Boston in 1880 and continued writing. One adds that between 1880 and 1888 he spent almost three years traveling in Europe.

In addition to contributing a chapter to the 1902 Waterville history, Mathews – described as “of Boston” – is listed as a participant in the 1902 celebration. Whittemore praised his books and wrote, “We hail him as our literary Nestor and are glad that his presence graces this occasion.”

(Nestor was a character in Homer’s Iliad, an elderly warrior who advised the younger men. The Encyclopedia Britannica calls him “sage and pious.” Wikipedia says his advice was respected, though it was not always sound and was accompanied by boasting.)

Roberts said Mathews married three times, listing his wives as in 1845, Mary Elizabeth Dingley, of Winslow; in 1850, Isabella (Isabelle, Isabel) Marshall, of China; and in 1865, Harriet Griggs, of Chicago. No source mentions any children.

On-line sources say Mary Elizabeth was born Oct. 16, 1827, in Winslow. She died in Winslow or Waterville Jan. 28, 1848, “after a lingering illness,” and is buried in Waterville’s Pine Grove cemetery.

Isabella was Isabelle Isaphene Marshall, daughter of prominent China businessman and politician Alfred Marshall and his wife, Lydia Brackett. Isabelle was born March 9, 1826; she and Mathews were married June 15, 1850, and she went to Chicago with him, where she died Oct. 9, 1863, aged 37.

Harriet was born Nov. 9, 1833, in Chicago, died Oct. 6, 1920, in Brookline, Massachusetts, and is buried in Pine Grove Cemetery, according to the website watervillegenealogy.com.

Another on-line source says Mathews was injured in a fall in 1907 and for the last two years of his life “continued his literary work by dictation.” He died Feb. 14, 1909, in Boston. One source says he, too, is buried in Pine Grove Cemetery; Find a Grave lists his parents, Simeon and Clymena, and other family members, but not William.

More on Winslow’s Brick School

Cushman Rd. school, south side. (photo by Roland D. Hallee)

One more bit of information about the Brick School, on Cushman Road, in Winslow, from a reader. She said a family named Britton owned the land on which the schoolhouse stands before the Giddings acquired it. They built the still-standing house next door in 1794.

Her great-grandmother on her father’s side was a Britton, and her father called the building the Britton schoolhouse.

Two Isaac Brittons are buried in the North Vassalboro Village Cemetery, she said. Find a Grave lists four Brittons there: Isaac (May 9, 1790 – Nov. 1, 1859); his wife, Emily Britton (Aug. 9, 1793 – Sept. 10, 1864) (her maiden name is not given); their son, Isaac Wilson Britton (March 12, 1816 – March 31, 1898), born in Attleboro, Massachusetts, and died in Winslow: and their daughter-in-law, Abigail or Abby (Garland) Britton (March 14, 1822 – Dec. 20, 1906).

Contributors to Find a Grave wrote that Isaac W. and Abby had one daughter, Abbie (1854 -1928), who was born in Winslow and married in 1881 Charles Fletcher Johnson (Feb. 14, 1859 – Feb. 15, 1930), also a Winslow native.

Johnson attended Waterville Classical Institute and graduated from Bowdoin in 1879. Before and/or after serving as Machias High School principal from 1881 to 1886, he studied law, learning enough to be admitted to the bar and to set up a law practice in Waterville in 1886, which lasted until 1911.

He was mayor of Waterville in 1893; unsuccessful Democratic gubernatorial candidate in 1892 and 1894 (Republicans held the Maine governorship from 1882 to 1912); member of the Maine House of Representatives, 1905 to 1907; and United States Senator, 1911 to 1917 (losing a bid for re-election in 1916 to Republican Frederick Hale, who served until he retired at the end of his fourth term, in 1940).

On Oct. 1, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson nominated former senator Johnson as Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the 1st District. Wikipedia says the Senate confirmed him the same day; he served from 1917 until he assumed senior status (semi-retirement) on April 30, 1929.

Abbie and Charles had a son who died at 11 years old, and a daughter, Emma L. (Johnson) Abbott (1886 – 1963). Emma and her husband, Dr. Henry Wilson Abbott (1884-1957) were the paternal grandparents of the reader who initiated this quest.

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.