Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Albion schools

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Besse High School 1913

by Mary Grow

Note: some of the following information was previously published in The Town Line on September 30, 2021.

The Town of Albion, north of China and east of Winslow, had half a dozen European families by 1790, according to Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history. The area, including until 1818 the north end of present-day China, was organized as Freetown Plantation in 1802.

On March 9, 1804, the Massachusetts legislature incorporated it as the Town of Fairfax. Fairfax became Lygonia (or Lagonia) on March 10, 1821, and Albion on Feb. 25, 1824.

Ruby Crosby Wiggin wrote in her 1964 Albion history that the first plantation meeting was held at 10 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 30, 1802. Voters chose major local officials.

At a second meeting, on Monday, March 8, 1803, there were more elections and the first appropriations. Voters authorized spending $50 for “plantation charges”; paying the three assessors $1 per day; and paying the meeting moderator $1.

There were more meetings in April and October 1803 and March 1804. Wiggin found the first reference to education at the April 16, 1804, meeting (after Freetown Plantation became the Town of Fairfax): voters approved $200 “for schooling” (and $1,200 for roads, payable in money or equivalent).

At an Aug. 25, 1804, meeting, Wiggin wrote, voters created five school districts; elected a three-man committee to run each district; and elected “a committee for the purpose of building schoolhouses.”

School money was allocated according to the number of “scholars,” defined as residents between three and 21 years old, in each district. District committees hired teachers and oversaw building maintenance; students provided their own textbooks.

As in other Kennebec Valley towns, early school districts were described by town lines and lot lines. The description Wiggin quoted for District 1, for example, said it covered the area “from the north line of H. Miller’s to N. Wiggin’s at the town line, then east to the eastern line of the Williams lot, then running [is a direction omitted here?] until it intersects the Heywood lot.”

District 1 was in southwestern Albion; two of its first three committeemen were Nathaniel Wiggin and Japheth Washburn, settlers in China in 1803 and 1804. Ruby Crosby Wiggin commented on how District 1 appeared and disappeared in town records.

She found that much of its territory, maybe including the schoolhouse, became part of China in 1818. In November 1821, Albion’s District 1 reappeared, with 24 students. On Oct. 25, 1823, voters abolished it, though 31 students were listed. It reappeared in 1838, and was listed until 1846, when it apparently was permanently eliminated.

Voters approved seven districts in March, 1805, and nine, with a total of 316 students, in May, 1805, Wiggin said.

She did not record how many schoolhouses were built, but apparently not enough. Voters in 1809 approved taxing non-residents, defined as “Winthrop and Lloyd, Nathan Winslow and the Plymouth Company,” specifically to raise money to build schoolhouses.

(The Plymouth Company, the Boston-based group also called Kennebec Proprietors and other names as it changed corporate structure, hired Falmouth surveyor Nathan Winslow to lay out lots on several of its Kennebec Valley tracts; Kingsbury said Winslow was assigned land in Fairfax. Wiggin wrote that in 1809 the company still owned 9,498 acres in Fairfax. Your writer could not identify Winthrop and Lloyd.)

In 1814, Wiggin wrote, voters created a tenth school district.

By 1816, she said, town meetings were being held in the District 7 schoolhouse (which she was unable to locate precisely), while voters argued about building a town house. The town house finally came into use in late 1817 or early 1818, also in District 7. But, Wiggin wrote, a January, 1823, town meeting was in the District 7 schoolhouse.

(The 1856 map of Albion in the Kennebec County atlas shows a town house south of Albion Corner [approximately the current business district on Route 202], on a road running west from the stream crossing formerly called Puddledock.)

From 1830 to 1842, Wiggin found, voters approved about $500 a year for schools. In 1843 they raised the amount to $686 annually, and kept it there for a decade.

The 1856 atlas shows 10 Albion schoolhouses. Three were in the southern part of town. One of the southern schoolhouses was named first Shaw and later Davis, Wiggin said, giving no dates. It was near a store run by a man named Shaw, a blacksmith shop and an inn.

The 1879 Albion map shows C. H. Shaw’s house and a blacksmith shop between South Albion and the Quaker Hill Road schoolhouse in eastern Albion.

Another schoolhouse was on South Freedom Road, near Puddledock (called in the 1879 atlas South Albion).

Two western schoolhouses were on Back Pond Road (aka Clark Road), west of Lovejoy Pond. (The southern of these, Wiggin said, had become District 1 by 1858.) Three more were in northern Albion.

The schoolhouse closest to present-day downtown Albion was a little south of the business area, on the west side of what looks like present-day Route 202, almost due east of the northern tip of Lovejoy Pond.

Wiggin gave interesting details about some of Albion’s district schools, but unfortunately she located them mostly by reference to 1960s property-owners. For example, she quoted a resident whose father said District 4, at some point, had a brick schoolhouse with a clock on the outside whose hands pointed permanently to 8:45.

She did locate one controversial school building: in the 1860s, she said voters argued for six years over replacing the District 8 schoolhouse, with the dispute including a lawsuit. In 1868 a new schoolhouse went up on the Main Street lot where the Besse building, home of the town office, now stands.

Ernest C. Marriner, in his Kennebec Yesterdays, dipped into the report of Albion’s school committee for 1861. (The 1861 date might mean the report was published in the spring of 1861 and covered the previous year, since early 1860; or the report was for the year 1861.)

Marriner said the committee found that schools were “flourishing,” in spite of a diphtheria epidemic that killed 17 students (in 1860 or 1861, presumably). But Wiggin quoted from a town report saying 17 students died of diphtheria “during the school year of 1862-3.”

Marriner and Wiggin agreed that Albion had 14 school districts in 1861 – Wiggin listed them by number and name, not by location. By then a single agent was in charge of each district, with the town committee (Marriner) or town school supervisor (Wiggin) overseeing all.

The report Marriner cited criticized individual teachers who failed to maintain discipline, and singled out the District 5 (Quaker Hill, per Wiggin) schoolhouse that was poorly maintained.

Limited success in District 3 – the Crosby Neighborhood school, in southeastern Albion, Wiggin said – was not the teacher’s fault. Marriner quoted: “with so much ice, the fondness for skating rather than for school, and the parents seemingly willing to have it thus, the term was not very profitable.”

By 1862, Wiggin said, “all legal residents” of each district could participate in district meetings at which they voted on “the upkeep of the school property, board of the teacher, wood [firewood for heating] and other matters pertaining to the school.” The district school agent apparently hired the teacher.

In 1879, Wiggin reported, Albion’s summer schools cost $343.61, with the average term eight weeks plus four to six days. Winter schools cost $738.65, and the average term was 11 weeks plus one to three days. She did not say whether all 14 schools operated both terms.

Women teachers were paid, on average, $3.15 a week; men earned, on average, $28 a month.

In March, 1890, Wiggin wrote, there were 323 students, and voters appropriated $951 for “school expenses.” (By this time, the State of Maine also supported schools, so the total school budget was higher.)

Kingsbury said by 1892 a decreasing population led officials to cut the number of districts to 11, serving about 250 students. The town was providing uniform textbooks, and “school property is valued at about $3,000, and is kept in good repair,” he wrote.

Wiggin wrote that the town report for April 1893 to March 1894 said District 6 had been eliminated. By 1896, she said, Albion had so few students that five district schools had been closed, with their students “sent to other schools.”

The first mention of “conveying scholars” Wiggin found in the school report for 1897. Half a dozen men were paid from $1 to $3 per week. Her book includes an undated photograph labeled “Albion’s first ‘school bus,’ horse drawn,” showing a group of students and a boxy vehicle in front of the Besse Building (built in 1913).

* * * * * *

Wiggin wrote that “subscription high schools” were taught in Albion in 1860. One shared the District 3 schoolhouse in southern Albion.

In April 1873, she said, a group of residents organized a stock company to provide a public high school. Group leaders quickly sold 90 shares, at $10 a share, and appointed a three-man building committee.

Wiggin said Albion’s first free high school opened in 1874 or 1875; Kingsbury said 1876. After “several years” (Kingsbury), or around 1880 (Wiggin), voters stopped appropriating money for it, Wiggin said due to lack of interest. In 1881, the trustees began the process of conveying the building to the local Grange; by 1892, it was the Grange Hall.

The free high school reopened, either in 1884 (Kingsbury) or about 10 years after it was closed (Wiggin). Wiggin wrote that into the 1890s, fall terms – 10 weeks in 1891 – met in District 8, in the Albion Village schoolhouse, and spring terms – in 1892 also 10 weeks – met in District 9, in the McDonald schoolhouse.

The fall term had 87 students and cost $214, the spring term 33 students at a cost of $82. The state and town split the cost, $147 each, she wrote.

Kingsbury again offered slightly different information. As of 1892, he wrote, the fall high school term was held in the Number 10 schoolhouse in the Shorey District, and the spring term in the Number 8 schoolhouse in the village.

He wrote that the high school “has since [it reopened] received cordial support.” This support waned, Wiggin wrote, “until in 1898 the average attendance at the village was only 18, and the high school at McDonald was discontinued entirely.”

The “village school” was apparently the 1868 one on Main Street, where the Besse Building now stands. It was revived as a high school after 1898 and served until 1913, with the roof raised twice to accommodate more classrooms.

Wiggin wrote, “From this school came the first pupil to graduate from Albion High School with a diploma.” His name was Dwight Chalmers, his graduation year 1909.

Wiggin said the old high school building was moved to a new site and in 1964 was a private home.

The Besse Building was a gift of Albion native, later Clinton resident, Frank Leslie Besse. Designed by Miller and Mayo, of Portland, and built by Horace Purington, of Waterville, it was dedicated as Besse High School on Sept. 20, 1913.

* * * * * *

Benton, Clinton and Fairfield combined as Maine School Administrative District (MSAD) #49, now Regional School Unit (RSU) #49, in January 1966. Albion joined in September of the same year. In 2025, Fairfield’s Lawrence High School serves all four towns.

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Marriner, Ernest, Kennebec Yesterdays (1954).
Wiggin, Ruby Crosby, Albion on the Narrow Gauge (1964).

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: China high schools – part 2

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Erskine Academy

by Mary Grow

Note: part of this article, like part of last week’s, was first written in September 2021.

Yet another private high school in China, Erskine Academy, opened in September 1883 and is thriving today. The China bicentennial history gives a detailed account of its origins: it became a private academy because China voters at the beginning of the 1880s refused to accept donated money for a public high school.

As the history tells the story, Mary Erskine inherited her husband Sullivan’s considerable wealth when he died in 1880. She consulted John K. Erskine, Sullivan’s nephew and executor, about ways to use the money. (The history says she had no children; on-line sources say Mary and Sullivan had a son, born in 1832 – perhaps died or estranged by 1880? – and a daughter, by 1880 married with three children.)

John Erskine, who regretted his own lack of educational opportunity, suggested endowing a high school in the Chadwick Hill school district, south of South China Village. Mary Erskine agreed, and at a Nov. 13, 1880, special town meeting, voters accepted a $1,500 trust fund for a free high school.

At the annual meeting in March, 1881, voters reversed the decision and told the town treasurer to return the money. In March 1882, school supporters presented an article again offering the $1,500 and “specifying that the town would not pay for providing the school building.” Voters passed over it (did not act).

A month later, a group of supporters asked the Erskines to let them establish a private high school. Mary Erskine approved and helped organize a board of trustees headed by renowned Quaker, Eli Jones.

John K. Erskine was the trustees’ vice-president, Dana C. Hanson secretary and Samuel C. Starrett treasurer. Hanson and Starrett were China selectmen in 1876 and 1877 and again, significantly, in 1881 and 1882.

The trustees “bought the seven-acre Chadwick common from A. F. Trask for $100.” (Wikipedia says the campus is now about 25 acres.) Mary Erskine donated $500 for a building.

Starrett encouraged the owners of a disused Methodist church on the common to sell it at auction. They did, and he bought it for $50.

The trustees had the building moved to the center of the lot and turned into a schoolhouse. “A bell tower and other necessary buildings” were added, and Mary Erskine donated a bell and furnishings in the spring of 1883.

The trustees organized a “tree-planting picnic:” area residents were invited to bring a picnic dinner and a tree. The China history says the grounds gained about 250 trees. A “very happy” Mary Erskine attended Erskine High School’s opening day in September 1883.

Erskine started with two teachers, one also the principal, and “more than 50 students.” The teachers were Colby College graduate, Julia E. Winslow, and Castine Normal School graduate, William J. Thompson.

As Henry Kingsbury finished his Kennebec County history in 1892, he wrote that at “the Erskine School” “under the principalship of William J. Thompson, many young people are receiving a serviceable article of real learning.”

Thompson, Kingsbury said, was born in Knox County and taught in South Thomaston and Searsport before becoming Erskine’s first principal in 1883. The school “has flourished under his management,” Kingsbury wrote.

The China history says in 1885, Carrie E. Hall, from East Madison, succeeded Winslow. In May 1887, Thompson and Hall married; both taught at Erskine until Carrie died “in the spring of 1900.”

Her widower stayed as principal until 1902, and lived until 1949. Find a Grave says both were born in 1860, and both are buried in Chadwick Hill cemetery, near Erskine Academy.

The school initially ran two 11-week terms a year, and in some years “a shorter summer term.” The history lists 16 courses: “reading, grammar, elocution, arithmetic, algebra, history, geography, natural philosophy, bookkeeping, ancient languages (Latin and Greek), botany, geology, astronomy, and anatomy and physiology.”

By 1887, increased enrollment required a third teacher, not named in the China history. The building “was raised ten feet to make room for more classrooms underneath.”

Students from Chadwick Hill and other school districts came and went by the term, not the year. Therefore, the history says, it was not until 1892 “that four students finished four years apiece so that the first formal graduation could be held.”

Trustees had a dormitory for girls built in 1900 and “later” (the history gives no date) one for boys. Students who roomed on campus “brought their own food and fuel from home and prepared their own meals,” the history says.

In 1901 the Maine legislature incorporated the school as Erskine Academy and approved an annual $300 appropriation.

The China history says after 1904, Erskine Academy and China Academy, in China Village (see last week’s article), became China’s town-supported high schools. Town Superintendent Gustavus J. Nelson (1896 and 1897, 1899 to 1901 and 1903 through 1907) came to a financial agreement with the Erskine trustees, and “the trustees accepted Dr. Nelson’s ideas about such matters as curriculum and entrance examinations.”

In the fall of 1904, the history says, “three local students passed the superintendent’s entrance examination, and ten more were admitted conditionally.”

China Academy closed in 1909, leaving Erskine China’s only high school. For reasons the bicentennial history does not explore, Erskine’s enrollment went down so dramatically in early 1913 that the State of Maine downgraded it to a Class B school (two instead of four years, a single teacher instead of two or more).

In the fall of 1913 Erskine had 16 students. The history says enrollment doubled to 32 by February 1914, “and the one teacher was overworked.” The state restored a Class A rating in 1915, and enrollment continued to climb: 46 students in the fall of 1916, 50 in 1919, with a record entering class of 26 and three teachers “for the first time in many years.”

More students needed more space; the history credits relatives of the Erskines, Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Ford, from Whitefield, with buying a nearby house and turning it into a boys’ dormitory, named Ford Cottage. Another house became the Erskine Cottage Annex, housing “four girls and a teacher.”

A fire destroyed Erskine’s original school building on Nov. 5, 1926. Fortunately, Ford gymnasium had opened in November 1925; the bicentennial history says classes were held there until a new classroom building was ready in 1936.

The history also says Mary Erskine’s bell was saved from the fire and “mounted on campus.” In the fall of 1971, someone stole it.

Erskine Academy’s website says the school has been a nonprofit organization since 1974. It explains that tuition paid by the eight towns from which most of its students come does not cover costs, so tax-deductible donations are welcome.

The eight towns are listed as Chelsea, China, Jefferson, Palermo, Somerville, Vassalboro, Whitefield and Windsor. Erskine also accepts privately-paid students and, the website says, international students.

China school students who became college presidents

Kingsbury named two men who attended China schools (at least elementary schools) and later became college presidents: Stephen A. Jones and George F. Mosher.

Stephen A. Jones was the second president of what Kingsbury called Nevada State College (later University of Nevada at Reno, according to on-line information) from 1889 to 1894.

During his tenure, the “faculty increased to 15 members… and enrollment grew to 179 in his final year as president.” He oversaw the school’s first graduation, in 1891.

The Jones genealogy in the China bicentennial history includes Stephen Alfred Jones, oldest son of Alfred H. Jones and Mary Randall (Jones) Jones (they were second cousins), of China. Alfred Jones taught in freedmen’s schools in Virginia and North Carolina.

Stephen went to the Providence, Rhode Island, Friends School and then to Dartmouth, from which he graduated in 1872, “receiving both MA and PhD from that institution.”

Married to Louise Coffin, he taught Latin and Greek at William Penn College in Iowa, where their older son was born; and then studied in Bonn, Germany, where their younger son was born. After heading the University of Nevada, the genealogy says, he retired to San Jose, California, returning at intervals to visit China relatives.

The genealogy calls Stephen “a good teacher,” with “excellent literary qualifications” who had “excellent results” when he taught in Branch Mills in 1865. It quotes a biographical cyclopedia saying his “large stature and commanding presence, pleasant but firm,…won the respect and confidence of his students and had a strong influence over them.”

 * * * * *

George F. Mosher was the seventh president of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, from September 1886 to 1901. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Bowdoin, he was a nurse during the Civil War, and served “in a German consulate” before coming to Hillsdale.

An on-line list of Hillsdale presidents says “Mosher’s years as president were a period of particularly high academic achievement. Hillsdale was widely known as one of the strongest small colleges in the Midwest.”

*****

A digression: Hillsdale’s first president, Daniel McBride Graham (1817-1888), was an Oberlin College graduate who served Hillsdale, then Michigan Central College in Spring Arbor, from its opening in 1844 to 1848. It started with “only five students in a small, deserted, two-room store.”

In 1848, Graham resigned “to become a pastor in Saco, Maine.” In 1855, the school moved about 25 miles to Hillsdale and changed its name.

Graham returned to become the school’s fourth president from 1871–1874. The list of presidents says: “Facing almost total destruction of the campus by fire, Graham led the rebuilding of the campus during the 1873 financial panic.”

Spring Arbor is now home to a private Free Methodist university described on line as “the second-largest evangelical Christian university in Michigan.”

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)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: China High Schools – part 1

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Japheth Washburn grave in China Village Cemetery

by Mary Grow

The Town of China had five high schools at various times in the 19th century. The one in China Village lasted into the 20th century; Erskine Academy in South China (next week’s topic) was founded in 1883 and is thriving in 2025.

Your writer summarized histories of these schools in a Sept. 23, 2021, article in this series. Much of the following is reprinted from that issue of “The Town Line,” with additions.

* * * * * *

The earliest high school was China Academy in China Village, in the north end of town, chartered by the Massachusetts legislature in June 1818. Charter language quoted in the China bicentennial history says the school’s purposes were to promote “piety, and virtue,” and to provide instruction “in such languages and in such of the liberal arts and sciences” as the trustees prescribed.

The school initially had five trustees, four China Village residents and Rev. Daniel Lovejoy, from Albion.

(Daniel Lovejoy, one of Albion’s earliest settlers, was the father of abolitionists Elijah Parish Lovejoy, killed by a mob in Alton, Illinois, on Nov. 7, 1837, and Owen Lovejoy, member of the house of Representatives from Illinois from 1857 until his death in March 1864. Elijah and Owen attended China Academy, and Elijah taught there in 1827, after he graduated from Waterville [later Colby] College.)

In 1819, the Academy charter was changed to allow 15 trustees.

The first China Academy building was on the shore of China Lake, in what is now Church Park, across from the China Baptist Church (built in 1814, relocated in 1822). John Brackett donated the land, “in consideration of the love and good will” he had for the trustees; the only condition was that they keep the fence around the lot in repair.

Henry Kingsbury, in his Kennebec County history, credited Japheth C. Washburn, a member of the Massachusetts legislature, with getting China Academy chartered. He added that Washburn “with his own hands felled and prepared for hewing the first stick of timber for the building” that the trustees approved.

The bicentennial history says classes began in or before September 1823. The first two principals were Colby graduates.

In 1825 the Maine legislature approved a land grant for China Academy; Kingsbury valued it at $10,000. In November 1829, the trustees sold the lot in what is now Carroll Plantation (on Route 6, in Penobscot County, east of Lincoln and Lee) for $3,400 (about 30 cents an acre, the bicentennial history says).

With legislative support and “an encouraging student enrollment,” the trustees put up what Kingsbury called a “new and spacious” two-story brick building on the east side of Main Street, in China Village. (Neither the bicentennial history nor the county history dates either the first or second Academy building.)

This building stood across from the Federal-style house, dating from around 1827, that has housed the Albert Church Brown Memorial Library since 1941. The first classes there were in November 1828, with 89 students, the bicentennial history says.

The trustees gave the wooden building by the lake to the Town of China, to be used as a district school.

From 1835 to 1844 China Academy did well, under “able and experienced” Principal Henry Paine. There were 221 students in 1835 and again in 1844, most from China but some from other Maine towns. Teachers, in addition to Paine, included a Colby senior, a Colby graduate and at least one woman, Sarah A. Shearman, in charge of “instruction in the ornamental branches.”

School was held for four 12-week terms, beginning “the first Mondays of March, June, September, and December.” The history quotes advertisements in the weekly China Orb newspaper that said quarterly tuition was $3 for basic English reading and writing; $4 for advanced English courses; and $5 for “Latin, Greek, and French.”

The Academy had no dormitory. The history says it (trustees, teachers or both?) helped students find nearby places to board, at rates ranging from $1.33 to $1.50 a week.

After Waterville Academy was chartered in 1842 and organized successfully by James Hanson (graduate of China Academy and Colby College, profiled in the Nov. 21, 2024, issue of “The Town Line”) and Paine left China in 1844, China Academy’s enrollment dropped. By 1850, average enrollment was around 50 students. The Civil War caused a temporary closure.

After the war, the Academy reopened and, the history says, in 1872, “had a staff of five who were teaching 40 to 60 students a term.” Terms were “shortened to ten weeks,” and tuition increased to $3.50 a term for basic English, $4.50 for advanced English and $5.50 for foreign languages or bookkeeping. Music was added, 20 lessons for $10; the history does not specify vocal, instrumental or both.

The history says that students’ records “included the number of words misspelled, the number of times tardy, and the number of days they were caught whispering in class.”

As previously mentioned, in 1873 the Maine legislature required towns to provide high schools. According to the bicentennial history, after 1880 amendments to the law China Academy apparently became a hybrid – the brick Academy building was used to teach free high school classes, but “This institution still called itself China Academy and was supervised by a board of trustees.”

Kingsbury wrote that the group he called “stockholders” “held their annual elections and meetings until 1887.”

Enrollment rose – “54 students in the spring of 1883, 70 in the fall of 1884, and 88 in the spring of 1885,” the history says. More girls than boys enrolled in each of those terms, after years when male students had been more numerous.

The history lists courses offered, in a “four-year course sequence” in 1884-85: “English, math, geography, history, bookkeeping, sciences, and philosophy,” plus Greek and Latin “if requested.” There were two or three terms a year, and financial support came from the local school district, other nearby China districts and one district in Albion.

In 1887 the brick building was deemed unsafe and was blown up, scattering fragments of brick onto adjoining properties. The trustees sold the lot to the local school district.

The history says that “Willis R. Ward built a wooden schoolhouse at a cost of $1,000 which served as both high school and elementary school from 1888 to 1909.”

In 1897, China voters appropriated no money for high schools. The history says China Village residents funded one anyway, with state aid. By 1899 village residents also relied on “contributions and subscriptions” to keep high school classes going.

Courses included “advanced English, mathematics,…science… and a five-student Latin class.”

The China Village free high school gradually lost students early in the 20th century and closed in 1908. Many students transferred to China’s other private high school, Erskine Academy.

The wooden building remained an elementary school until the consolidated China Elementary School opened in 1949. It was sold and became a two-story chicken house. The building was demolished in 1969 and replaced by a house.

A China Village high school was re-established from the fall of 1914 through the spring of 1916 – the bicentennial history gives no reason. Classes met in the second floor of a no-longer-existing wooden building (later the American Legion Hall) on the southeast corner of the intersection of Main Street, Neck Road.

* * * * * *

The China bicentennial history provides partial information on three other nineteenth-century China high schools, in Branch Mills Village, in South China Village and at Dirigo.

The earliest, the East China high school in Branch Mills, “was established about 1851 in a building constructed for that purpose by Mr. Barzillai Harrington.” The building was on the south side of the village main street, west of the bridge across the West Branch of the Sheepscot River. It appears as a large rectangle on the town map in the 1856 Maine atlas, labeled “B. H. Academy.”

In 1852, the history says, elementary classes met in “Mr. Harrington’s high school building” because the district schoolhouse was “in such poor condition.”

An 1856 advertisement for the school listed Claudius B. Grant as the principal for an 11-week term beginning Sept. 1. Tuition was $3 per term for basic English, $3.50 for advanced English and $4 for “languages,” unspecified.

The bicentennial history cites China town reports saying high school classes were provided in Branch Mills in 1857 for one term; in 1865 for one term, taught by Stephen A. Jones, of China; in 1882, for two terms, taught by Thomas W. Bridgham, of Palermo; and in 1883 for one term, taught by J. A. Jones. The writer found no evidence of continuous classes, and locations were not specified.

Though classes were listed in 1882 and 1883, the Branch Mills map in the 1879 Maine atlas identifies the building by a name, indicating it was a private home. The China history says the Academy building was sold in the 1880s. Kingsbury’s history says it was in 1892 the Good Templars Hall.

A footnote in the bicentennial history adds: “In 1894 the school committee recommended a term of high school at Branch Mills, but the town records provide no evidence that it was held.”

The high school in South China Village started in the 1860s and ran at least intermittently through the spring of 1881, according to the bicentennial history.

In 1865, former primary school teacher T. W. Bridgham taught a spring high school term. In 1877-78, A. W. Warren was teacher for a seven-week term. F. E. Jones taught 51 students in the fall of 1880. The next spring, J. E. Jones taught what was apparently the final term, “with the expenses being borne by three adjacent school districts.”

The writer of the bicentennial history found only a single reference to the high school at Dirigo (or Dirigo Corner), where Alder Park Road and Dirigo Road intersect what is now Route 3 (Belfast Road). In 1877 and 1878, the town report described two China free high schools, South China “and a 20-week term at Dirigo.”

Fred D. Jones was the teacher at Dirigo, “and the supervisor of schools commended the residents of this quite small school district for supporting so long a term.”

(Attentive readers will have noticed numerous teachers named Jones. They were probably related, at least distantly, and were probably members of the Society of Friends. The genealogical section of the China history has 25 pages of Joneses, several identified as teachers. One of them will receive more attention next week.)

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)

Websites, miscellaneous

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: China schools (Continued into the 20th century)

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by Mary Grow

As mentioned in previous articles about 19th-century Maine elementary schools, in 1894 the state legislature passed a law that began, “The school districts in all towns in this state are hereby abolished.”

The law further directed towns to take over “all school-houses, lands, apparatus and other property owed and used by the school districts hereby abolished.” The property thus taken was to be appraised and district taxpayers reimbursed.

No school was closed by the new law. But in the future, town meeting voters, on the superintending school committee’s recommendation, could close or relocate schools.

The law further required each town to provide at least 20 weeks of schooling a year, and to raise at least 80 cents per inhabitant in local school money, or lose its state funding.

Textbooks continued to be a town responsibility. If a student lost, destroyed or damaged a book, the parent or guardian was expected to recompense the town. If the parent or guardian did not comply, the cost would be added to his next tax bill.

The 1975 China bicentennial history says the main goal of the 1894 law was “to improve primary education by making possible larger consolidated schools which could readily be graded.” In addition to fewer school buildings with more students, other hoped-for effects were standardized school years and school sizes.

A side effect was the need to provide transportation for students who no longer had a schoolhouse within walking distance. The China history named the cost of transportation as a reason “voters were not particularly happy” with the new law.

The history says an immediate effect of the law was to close five schools, supposedly permanently (including China Neck Road with its dilapidated building, mentioned last week; your writer guesses those students went to nearby China Neck school), and six more for “part of the year.” The following sentence says in 1894 15 schools operated “at least part of the year,” only three fewer than in 1893.

The history also summarizes China’s 1894 education budget. The $3,502.39 for “school-houses and furniture” probably included paying districts for their buildings. Voters appropriated $128.80 for textbooks and $90.50 for repairs.

Another $2,604.86 to support schools included “$2,227.85 for teachers’ salaries, $237.80 for transportation, and $139.21 for ‘wood and incidentals.'”

In 1895, voters discontinued five more schools and ordered the selectmen to “dispose of” three of the buildings. They then reversed course and re-established one school whose building they’d just voted to get rid of, plus one discontinued in 1894. The result was 13 schools in 1895.

That year, teachers’ salaries cost $1,808.45, and transportation only $131.50. The history comments that school officials failed to explain to voters how they had reduced “both the number of schools and the transportation costs,” an achievement they were unable to repeat in future years.

Over the next two decades, the history describes repeated rearrangements, including building new school buildings. The result was a gradual reduction in the number of operating schools in town: 12 in 1903; between eight and 10 from 1910 through 1925, as some were closed and others reopened; seven in 1927; six in 1930; and five from 1936 to 1949.

These last five were the four village schools, in China Village, South China, Weeks Mills and Branch Mills, and the (Pigeon) Plains schoolhouse in southeastern China, on Dirigo Road north of Weeks Mills Village.

School consolidation was “difficult to achieve in China,” the history says. “Some of the small rural schools could not be closed without incurring high transportation costs and parental wrath.”

The Hanson District school, in the east-central part of town, was one example.

The history says this school was closed in 1894. At the March 1900 town meeting, voters authorized buying a lot and building a new schoolhouse, “at a cost of almost $400.” The building was not finished until October; school reopened on Oct. 29, and the so-called fall term ran until March 1901.

In 1906, “new seats were installed” – and attendance fell below eight students, the minimum prescribed by state law. For the next three years, 1907, 1908 and 1909, school officials recommended keeping the school open, and voters approved, because of the new building and the “great distance” to any other school.

The Hanson school apparently continued, with “a bare minimum attendance” through the spring of 1913, when it was finally closed, “and the students transported to Branch Mills,” the village in extreme eastern China shared with Palermo.

Not even the four village schools had consistent high enrollments. Branch Mills, especially, the history says, tended to attract few students. In 1901 and 1902, its average enrollment was 12, compared to around 45 in the China Village School at the north end of town.

By 1901, the history says, the China Village school was “divided into…a primary school and a grammar school,” the earliest example mentioned of a graded school. By 1915, all China schools were graded.

The history suggests that transferring school management from districts to the town did little to alleviate three other problems mentioned repeatedly in discussions of Maine education in the 19th and early 20th century: truancy, poorly maintained buildings and undertrained teachers.

The history quotes school superintendents’ complaints about truancy in 1913, when George Paine “calculated that out of the 145 day school year, the average attendance was only 47 days”; and in 1928, when Carl B. Lord’s annual report reminded parents that children aged from seven to 16 “must be in school, unless they are ill or excused from attendance by the State Department of Education.”

By the 20th century, superintendents complained less often about unsafe and drafty buildings and more about inadequate flooring, furnishings, lighting and sanitary facilities. Despite annual expenditures on buildings running around $500, “there was always more work than money.”

In 1912, for instance, the history says every classroom still had double desks, “although the teachers thought single desks would be more conducive to quiet study.”

And, a footnote says, “At least, there were desks; in 1906 superintendent [Gustavus] Nelson had reported that some of the students in the China Village primary school had been sitting on dry goods boxes.”

In 1922, the Weeks Mills schoolhouse got “new desks purchased by the community” – whether double or single, the history does not say. That same year, three schools “were screened by the efforts of the teachers and pupils.”

The Vassalboro bicentennial history cites a 1922 state law that required schools to eliminate “those little buildings out back:” privies. China apparently complied gradually. The history mentions (but fails to describe) “approved toilets” added in South China in 1924. In 1926, Superintendent Lord said the Lakeside and Chadwick Hill schools needed toilets connected.

Electricity was added in China’s five remaining schoolhouses in 1937 and 1938. In 1938, Superintendent Lord wrote that three of the five had lighting that was nearly up to state standards, three had “satisfactory school desks,” one had running water and “none has sanitary toilets.”

State laws required increased teacher training, and China teachers’ qualifications increased accordingly. So did salaries, though the history comments that “school superintendents seldom thought them high enough.” Until at least the early 1930s, teachers were paid only for the weeks they actually spent in a schoolroom.

As mentioned above, transporting students became increasingly expensive as the number of schools decreased. In 1899, the China history says, the legislature required towns to provide transportation, authorizing each town’s school committee “to decide which students should be transported.”

This unfunded mandate – to use a modern term – meant that in 1899, “China spent $328.80 for transportation and therefore could afford to provide only twenty-four weeks of school.” The history quotes the school committee’s report: committee members tried to balance transportation and schooling, and “We have not responded to all the calls for transportation; we could not.”

Transportation contracts went to the lowest bidders, the history says, and “drivers supplied their own vehicles.” The earliest conveyances were open pungs (one-horse sleighs). In 1904, China’s school committee required “all permanent transportation supported by the town” to use covered vehicles.

In the 1920s, “cars or converted trucks” began to replace horses.

The China history gives Superintendent Lord credit for starting the movement toward a single consolidated China Elementary School in 1931, when he recommended starting a building fund. The Depression postponed his plan, but he continued to argue for it from 1936 on.

Voters rejected the idea for years. Not until March 1946 did they make the first appropriation, against the town budget committee’s advice.

China Elementary School on Lakeview Drive opened in April 1949, and the remaining five primary schools were closed.

Carl Burton Lord

Carl Burton Lord served as school superintendent in China from 1924 to 1953 (according to the China bicentennial history) and in Vassalboro from 1924 to 1955 (according to the Vassalboro bicentennial history). The Carl B. Lord Elementary School, in North Vassalboro, which opened in 1962, was named in his honor.

(Your writer does not know why the two towns shared a superintendent for almost three decades. The Vassalboro history says by 1935, Vassalboro, China and Winslow had formed a school union; Wikipedia says School Union #52 was dissolved in 2009, when the legislature mandated a statewide reorganization.)

Despite Lord’s importance in these two towns, on-line information is scarce. Sources say he was born May 13, 1894, in either Liberty or Kennebunk. His parents were William A. Lord (1867 – 1945) and Sarah Jane or Sadie J. (Weagle) Lord (1871 – 1936). They died in Vassalboro and are buried in Nichols Cemetery.

Carl Lord was the oldest of William and Sadie’s three children. He graduated from Colby College, Class of 1915.

He married Mildred Bessie Clarke, of Washington, D. C., on Tuesday, June 10, 1919. She was born in June, 1899, in Washington and died May 22, 1992, in Waterville.

Carl and Mildred had two children, Bernice Mae (or May) (Lord) Peterson, born May 9, 1920, and died Aug. 15, 2021, and John William Lord, born in 1922, Colby Class of 1948, died Oct. 4, 2006.

Carl Burton Lord died in North Vassalboro in July 1969. He is buried in the North Vassalboro Village Cemetery, as are his widow, his younger brother Maurice and members of Maurice’s family.

Main sources

Grow, Mary M., China Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984)
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: China elementary schools

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Dr. Daniel Adams

by Mary Grow

What is now the Town of China was settled in 1774, starting on the shores of China Lake, and promptly incorporated as Jones Plantation.

On Feb. 8, 1796, the Massachusetts legislature made it a town named Harlem. On Feb. 5, 1818, the legislature incorporated southern Albion and northern Harlem into a town named China. In January 1822, after much local debate, the Maine legislature added the rest of Harlem to China.

The China bicentennial history says Harlem’s first school opened in 1795, before the town existed officially. It was on the east side of China Lake, either in a house or in a log cabin built especially for a school; Rev. Job Chadwick was the teacher.

Orrin Sproul, who wrote a section on China’s schools in Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history, said Chadwick taught for several successive terms.

At the second Harlem town meeting, in June 1796, voters raised $200 for schools (and $300 for roads) and instructed the selectmen and constable to allocate the money. As in other towns, school districts were created, and frequently rearranged. The bicentennial history says there were eight by 1807, when town meeting voters added a ninth on China Neck, the area bordering Vassalboro that lies west of the north end of China Lake’s east basin. In 1814, Harlem had 16 school districts.

These districts were run by school committees elected by district residents. The committees were empowered to buy land, build schoolhouses, hire teachers, decide how long school terms were and spend the budget. The history says the first “town-wide supervising school committee was apparently elected in 1802.”

Daniel Adams, identified as an M.D., first published his Adams’s New Arithmetic, which has a very long subtitle, in 1810. The subtitle reads Arithmetic, in Which the Principles of Operating by Numbers Are Analytically Explained, and Synthetically Applied.

School funding was approved annually, the history says, but sometimes not spent and reallocated. Two examples from Kingsbury’s summary of early town meeting actions: voters at a March 12, 1798, town meeting approved a motion “to pay for the town’s stock of powder out of last year’s school money”; and at a March 7, 1800, meeting, voters agreed “to pay for running out town line, out of last year’s school money.”

According to the China history, Jonathan Dow hosted a February 1803 town meeting at which voters were asked to use the 1801 school budget to build a schoolhouse. Instead, they raised $50 to buy Dow’s house (the history does not say where it was) and used the 1801 money to convert it to a schoolhouse.

Finally, Kingsbury quoted from town records, on May 21, 1804, voters agreed “to take school money for the year to build school houses.” In districts lacking a building, schools “were taught in rooms fitted up” in private houses.

As in other towns, students provided their own textbooks, (“a financial burden on the family,” the history comments). Rev. Chadwick had three main texts: “Noah Webster’s spelling book, the Psalter, and Adams Arithmetic.”

(Wikipedia says the Psalter is “a volume containing the Book of Psalms, often with other devotional material bound in as well, such as a liturgical calendar and litany of the Saints.” Psalters date from the Middle Ages, and “were commonly used for learning to read.”

(The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History website says Noah Webster first published his American Spelling Book, commonly called “the blue backed speller” for its blue cover, in 1783. His goal was to “divorce the American educational system from its British roots” by legitimizing American spellings.

(Daniel Adams, identified as an M.D., first published his Adams’s New Arithmetic, which has a very long subtitle, in 1810.)

* * * * * *

The new Town of China that was created in February 1818 included some of Harlem’s school districts – the rest were added four years later – plus either one or two from southern Albion.

Voters at China’s first town meeting on March 2, 1818, elected a three-man “select school committee” to redraw district lines, and nine school agents. The select committee obligingly recommended nine districts, and voters at an April 6 meeting approved.

As in other towns’ records, district boundaries were defined by property lines – District 8, for example, included “all the lands and inhabitants North of John Sewalls and Samuel Strongs south lines,” the history says.

A list and a map of districts make District 8 the Parmenter (Parmeter) Hill District. The schoolhouse was in the southeast corner of the intersection of Pleasant View Ridge and Mann roads, in the lowland north of Parmenter Hill, near China’s eastern border with Palermo.

The April 6, 1818, voters also appropriated $400 for schools. Two years later, voters combined two districts, reducing the total to eight, each with a three-man committee. On March 5, 1821, they replaced the district committees with district agents; increased the town school committee to seven members; and appropriated $150 to be divided among districts according to student population.

The 1821 meeting also voted “to set off the people of colour” in a separate school district. A footnote in the history says in 1820, Harlem and China had 24 colored people in a total population of 894. The colored families lived in the northeastern part of town; the history says “There are no further references to a colored school district.”

Adding the rest of Harlem to China in January 1822 “more than doubled” the number of school districts, and set off 30 years of rearranging that the history summarizes, with the number of districts varying from 17 to 26. An 1852 reorganization left the town with 22 districts, a number the history says remained stable until an 1894 Maine law eliminated the district system in favor of town schools.

Among the rearrangements was one in March 1835 allowing China Friends (Quakers) to have their own school district, at their own expense. In March 1836, voters sent them back to their previous district, whether at the Friends’ request the history does not say.

In two cases, children were allowed to attend school not merely in a different district, but in a different town, apparently by redefining school district boundaries across town lines. In 1848, a family in China’s District 15, in the southwestern part of town, was allowed to use Vassalboro’s District 14 school. In 1857, China voters accepted Albion voters’ decision to send children of an Albion family to China’s northeastern District 7 school that was closer to their house than the Albion one.

As in other towns, the length of time schools were open varied widely, depending mostly, the history says, on how much money voters approved. Summer terms might be five weeks or 12 weeks, sometimes with a July vacation; winter terms could run from nine to 20 weeks. Summer school attracted mostly the youngest students, because those old enough to help on the farm did so.

The 1872-73 town supervisor, A. T. Brown, commented in his annual report that short terms and long breaks meant “long and wearisome” review as each term started, so that students did the same lessons over and over. His suggested remedy: have parents help children go over their lessons during vacations.

The bicentennial history says some terms in some schools had more than 100 students, often in one room with one teacher. The village school in Weeks Mills, in southeastern China, had 162 students enrolled for the 1857-58 winter term.

In 1858-59, “the winter term teacher was allowed an assistant”; but the school committee report found the building overcrowded and under-ventilated. A new room was added in the summer of 1860, to accommodate 125 enrolled students “(average attendance 100).”

In the 1860-61 winter term, Weeks Mills students were divided into a lower and an upper school, with two teachers. For more than 25 years, the school was divided a lot of the time; sometimes, parsimony prevailed, and a single teacher was responsible for 50 or 75 students.

The 1860 Weeks Mills schoolhouse still stands, owned by the Town of China and restored in 2010.

The bicentennial history notes that truancy was a common problem. In many cases, parents encouraged children to stay home. In District 16 (in southwestern China, north of District 15, between the southern end of China Lake’s east basin and the Vassalboro town line), supervisor Charles Dutton found three students when he visited the school in the fall of 1879.

Parents told him that “they simply were not ready to have their children gone for five or six hours a day.” Dutton ordered the school to remain open, at district residents’ expense, and “the students soon appeared.”

Town reports show truant officers were elected for the first time at the 1888 town meeting, the history says.

Teachers’ experience and ability varied widely, the history says. “Probably the majority…were young men and women barely out of district schools themselves.” But there were also teachers with years of experience, if no formal credentials; and the history mentions graduates of the normal schools (early teachers’ colleges) at Farmington and Castine, and Colby College students.

Occasionally a local school offered advanced subjects that reflected teachers’ abilities and interests. Latin and algebra were taught at intervals in several schools in the 1860s and 1870s; the Colby College sophomore who taught the winter 1878-79 term in the China Village school offered algebra and trigonometry.

Teachers commonly moved from school to school, although, the history says, some stayed in the same school for many years. As in other towns, they were not well paid, “and the discrimination [in pay] against women was flagrant.”

Men were usually paid by the month, women by the week. The history cites 1850-51 salaries: nine men were paid, on average, $17.68 a month, while 25 women (“two designated as Mrs., the rest as Miss”) averaged 1.68 a week.

Town school committees’ and supervisors’ reports in China (again, as in other towns) frequently criticized maintenance of school buildings, referring especially to winter cold. The history quotes supervisor Dana Hanson on the China Neck Road (District 3) schoolhouse in 1857: “The plastering having fallen from the ceiling, permitted the heat to take an aerial flight, while Boreas [the Greek god of the north wind], from without, forcing his way inward through numerous horizontal and perpendicular openings, prevented a vacuum.”

The same winter, the history notes, the China Neck district (District 2) farther south on the dead-end road had a brand-new “neat and commodious” building. The building Hanson criticized was apparently the one that burned in 1863, requiring a new one in 1864.

The China history goes into more detail than other sources about the response to Maine’s August 1890 state law that required towns to provide free textbooks. In preparation, China’s March 1889 town meeting appointed a committee whose members made recommendations about continuing or changing books then in use in 10 required subjects: “algebra, United States history, geography, hygienic physiology [a state requirement since 1885],…penmanship,” reading, spelling, arithmetic, grammar and bookkeeping.

The committee also recommended the town buy books for these 10 subjects and lend them to students. Students who wanted different books, or books on other subjects, provided them at their own expense.

After the March 1890 town meeting approved the committee report, local officials arranged with textbook publishers to trade in old books for credit on new ones, sometimes breaking even, sometimes paying “only a few cents per book.”

“The prices of the new textbooks ranged from 21 to 75 cents each,” the history says. In 1890, China spent “a little over $500” on textbooks; in 1891, the cost was $862, including a new “intermediate physiology text”; “by the end of 1892 China owned 1,730 texts.”

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)

Websites, miscellaneous.

EVENTS: January history talk at Waterville Historical Society on Fort Halifax

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Fort Halifax, in Winslow.

Friends of Fort Halifax President, Ray Caron, is back by popular demand for the Saturday, January 11, history talk. When one thinks of Winslow and its defining history, few would not mention Fort Halifax. But what do we know about its history? The blockhouse is the oldest in the United States and the site is a National Historic Landmark. Ray is going to get into the details and tell us much more we may not know about this iconic structure and the larger fort which once existed. Passionate about area history, Ray will also cover topics about the lands at the confluence of the Sebasticook and Kennebec rivers, the Native Americans, early settlers, Benedict Arnold, and more.

Joining Ray, to add additional perspectives to his presentation, will be Peter Tompkins who has an extensive postcard and memorabilia collection about Fort Halifax; Mickey Pouliot, a Winslow contractor, who has worked on most structures at the park and has helped with the challenges of rebuilding the blockhouse; Fort Halifax Chapter, DAR members will speak about their previous ownership of the blockhouse for many decades; and Mike Heavener, former town manager, of Winslow, who was responsible for the successful grant award to transform the park to what it is today.

Share this announcement; bring a friend! The door opens at 2 p.m., for light refreshments, viewing of postcards and memorabilia, and socializing. Our presentation begins at 2:30 p.m. Admission is free. Snow date is January 18, same time and place, Marriner Hall at Redington Museum, 62 Silver Street, Waterville. For more information, please call 207-872-9439.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Clinton and Benton School

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Clinton Academy, in 1942, was one of four elementary schools in town; they consolidated in 1957, and the next year the town sold the District #5 building to the Benton Falls Congregational Church, pictured here, for one dollar.

by Mary Grow

This subseries on education is organized by the dates the central Kennebec Valley towns were incorporated, and Clinton, in 1795, was next after Fairfield, in 1788. Therefore the history of education in Clinton, on the east side of the Kennebec River, opposite the northern part of Fairfield, follows the December 2024 articles on Fairfield.

However, until 1842, the southern part of Clinton – approximately half the town, and the first-settled part – was what became by a March 16, 1842, legislative act the separate town of Sebasticook, renamed Benton as of June 19, 1850. The early history of Clinton schools is therefore the early history of Benton schools as well.

* * * * * *

Clinton’s European settlement was shaped by the Kennebec River on its western boundary, and by the Sebasticook River, which maps show making a wiggly W shape in southeastern Clinton before flowing southish through present Benton into the east side of the Kennebec at Winslow.

Europeans made their way up both rivers. In his 1970 Clinton history, Major General Carleton Edward Fisher wrote that waterfalls and rapids made navigation challenging on parts of both. One of the easier stretches on the Sebasticook was between Winslow and the southern part of Clinton, up to the village now named Benton Falls.

Additionally, because the Sebasticook was the smaller river, it was easier to dam to provide water power, Fisher said. Consequently, the majority of early Clinton settlers stopped in the area that became Benton.

Fisher found it impossible to date the first settlement precisely, but he believed several families had arrived by the early 1770s. In Clinton, as in other central Kennebec valley towns, providing schools was not settlers’ top priority; Fisher mentioned 1790 and 1794 town meeting appropriations, with no record that any money was for schools.

Only after Clinton was incorporated in 1795, Fisher said, did voters specifically fund education. At a town meeting that year, they raised 20 pounds, then added 30 pounds more.

In March 1797, he wrote, town meeting voters provided $300 for teaching and $350 to build schoolhouses – and in April reconsidered and defeated the building money. In 1798, they allowed $150 for education, in 1799 and 1800, $200 each year. In 1800, they approved a separate $500 for school buildings.

Meanwhile, another 1797 vote empowered the selectmen to create school districts. In each district, voters elected a man to be “head of class.” Fisher’s description of the 1800 districts shows three on the Kennebec, numbered First, Second and Third, with three men in charge of six classes (one had one, one two and one three); and four more districts on the Sebasticook, two on the east side and two on the west, with more than nine classes (incomplete records left the total undetermined).

Students, defined as children aged four to 21, numbered 102 in the three Kennebec districts in 1800. Fisher found figures for only two of the four Sebasticook districts; they totaled 65. By 1803, he wrote, Clinton had more than 260 students.

As in other towns, district boundaries changed frequently, and so did methods of running the districts. Sometimes district residents chose their leaders, sometimes town meeting voters made the choices.

The first school committee was elected in 1821, Fisher wrote; this method continued until 1854, when voters instead elected a single school supervisor. They went back and forth between the two types of leadership until 1895.

Clinton had 13 school districts in 1820, Fisher said, increased to 15 in 1821 when the town school committee was created. That year, records showed 633 students; four districts had 60 or more, and the smallest had 13. By 1841, there were 21 districts.

At no point did Fisher identify the southern districts that were to become Sebasticook’s in 1842. His descriptions of historic boundaries, though meaningful to residents at the time, provide few clues in the 21st century.

After the 1842 division, 12 of the 21 districts remained Clinton’s and nine went to the new town. Clinton still had 12 in 1856, Fisher wrote. Number 12 was in Clinton Village; because of population growth there, it was divided and District 13 created in 1860, but in 1867 the two were reunited.

Fisher wrote that the buildings funded in 1800 didn’t get built, so in 1803 voters instructed each district to build its own. Because district records were not necessarily included in the town records, he found it hard to figure out what buildings were built when, though he cited examples from 1821 to 1839.

Schoolhouses were built near populous areas, obviously – Clinton Village on the Sebasticook, Pishon’s Ferry and Noble’s Ferry on the Kennebec, Morrison Corner and Town House Hill in mid-town.

The Morrison Corner schoolhouse was the earliest Fisher listed; voters in 1821 raised $166.51 for it. It appears on the 1856 and 1879 maps of Clinton as the second building north on the east side of the four-way intersection.

In 1895, Fisher said, voters approved a replacement building, apparently on a nearby lot, that was completed in August 1896. It served until 1963; in 1970, the building was a house.

A photo Fisher took in 1975 and included in his history shows a main building on a (not necessarily original) windowed basement, with a small single-story addition on one end. There are two second-floor windows above the addition, under the roof-peak, and no windows on the side of the main building.

Fisher dated the nearby Town House Hill school to 1826. He said it operated until 1932, and the 1826 building was a residence in 1970. His 1975 photo of this former schoolhouse shows a rectangular, single-story peaked-roofed building.

Like other historians, Fisher noted that from the 1700s into the early 1900s, most teachers doubled as janitors, responsible for cleaning, simple maintenance and building the fires in fireplaces or stoves all winter. They were not highly paid – he mentioned one woman earning $7 a week in the early 20th century.

Fisher identified discipline as a problem, giving several examples of teen-aged students, mostly but not all boys, testing teachers by giving them a hard time. He cited a teacher’s diary from 1861 describing misbehavior that ended with a hole in the floor. After some of the students responsible were made to pay to fix the floor, they apparently settled down.

* * * * * *

Fisher wrote that in the fall of 1831, a group of residents planned to open a high school for girls, to be named Clinton Female Academy – an unusual proposition for the time. Resident Asher Hinds deeded an eight-by-nine rod (132-by-148.5 foot) lot in what is now Benton Falls. (Fisher did not say whether it was a gift, or the school trustees paid for it.)

Hinds was a major landowner whose 300 acres included almost 100 acres in Benton Falls. He and his wife, Rebecca (Crosby) Hinds, had nine children, born between 1789 and 1809, of whom three daughters (and four sons) lived to maturity.

The girls’ school trustees ran out of money, Fisher said, and Clinton Academy became a coed school run by the Methodist Society. An on-line Benton history says the Academy building was put up in 1831, beside the Benton Falls meeting house.

The earliest school catalogue Fisher found was for 1845: of 83 students, six were from Clinton, as were two members of the board of trustees. (The rest were presumably residents of Sebasticook, soon to become Benton.)

In 1845, he wrote, the school met for two 11-week terms, the fall one starting in September and the spring one in March. Tuition for a term depended on what the student studied: $4 for languages, $3.50 for natural sciences, $3 for the basic course (defined in a 1918 textbook, found on line, as including reading, writing, history, geography, civics, arithmetic, physiology and hygiene).

The on-line history says the town library, organized in 1849, was headquartered in the Academy building.

The Academy closed in 1858, and the on-line history says the building later became the District 5 schoolhouse. It burned in 1870, and “the library was lost.”

In 1871, the history continues, the schoolhouse was rebuilt, though its “upstairs hall” wasn’t finished until 1883. In 1942, it was one of four elementary schools in town; they were consolidated in 1957, and the next year the town sold the District 5 building to the Benton Falls Congregational Church, for a dollar.

(Meanwhile, the library had reopened in 1900, in a storehouse that had been Asher Hinds’ when he ran a store at Benton Falls. That building burned in 1914. An on-line search for Benton library yields a reference to the Brown Memorial Library, in Clinton [see Clinton’s website and the Dec. 2, 2021, issue of The Town Line for more information on this library].)

Clinton officials obeyed state law and opened a free high school in 1873, with voters appropriating $300 for it, Fisher wrote. Henry Kingsbury, in his 1892 Kennebec County history, said it started in 1874 with a $500 appropriation.

As in other towns, high school classes initially met in district schools for a single term (seven to 10 weeks in Clinton). Fisher, like the Fairfield Register writer cited on Fairfield high school two weeks ago, commented that courses offered were at first barely above eighth-grade level.

By 1892, Kingsbury said, there were spring and fall terms each year, taught in district schools and well attended.

In 1898, according to Fisher, high school classes moved to the village school. The first graduating class, of five students, was in 1902. The first high school building in Clinton opened in 1903 (all 12 grades held classes there until about 1940).

A 1969 photo credited to Paul W. Bailey shows a three-story wooden building with basement windows, by then Clinton’s Baker Street School for elementary students. Historical information on the town website says the building was 68-by-40 feet and had three classrooms on each of the first two floors and one on the top floor. The privy was in a separate building behind the school.

After creation of Maine School Administrative District (MSAD) #49 in 1966, high school students went to Fairfield. The Clinton building burned – probably by arson — on July 25, 1975.

* * * * * *

Kingsbury wrote that when Benton became a separate town in March 1842, it included nine of Clinton’s school districts, and by 1892 a tenth had been added. As of 1892, he wrote, each district had “a comfortable and well-appointed school house, uniform text books are used, and the entire school property is valued at about $3,500.”

Up to 1892, Benton had a high school in the Benton Falls schoolhouse, in District 5, Kingsbury said. He did not say when it opened; presumably in 1873. In 1892 voters appropriated no money to continue it, “the proximity of Waterville offering advantages in higher education with which it was useless for Benton to compete.”

Main sources

Fisher, Major General Carleton Edward, History of Clinton, Maine (1970)
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Fairfield high schools

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by Mary Grow

This article continues the history of schooling in Fairfield with information on the town’s high schools. It begins with conflicting information about where the first high school classes were held.

One candidate is the former North Grammar School, at the intersection of Main Street and Western Avenue, near the Kennebec River, at the north end of the business district. The other is the former South Grammar School, on Burrill Street (which runs east-west perpendicular to the Kennebec at the south end of the business district). The South Grammar building is three blocks from the river.

In 1873, the Fairfield bicentennial history says, some of the rooms in a grammar school “at the corner of Main Street and Western Avenue” housed Fairfield’s first public high school, “with $500 raised for its support.” If this building is the one that became North Grammar School, that school dates from before 1873 – how much before, your writer has been unable to determine.

The Fairfield history says after the high school classes had taken over part of the Main Street grammar school, voters at the 1873 town meeting passed over (did not act on, thereby rejecting) an article to build a separate high school.

A document in the Fairfield Historical Society files says the first high school in 1873 was in the South Grammar building on Burrill Street. Yet another source says North Grammar hosted the high school until more space was needed and South Grammar was built (no date given). This source adds that in 1874, voters appropriated $500 for a free high school.

The chronology in the history says in 1890-91, voters finally agreed to provide Fairfield’s first high school building, on Burrill Street, for $5,000. Was this Burrill Street building (at least 20 years newer than the Main Street building) the one that became South Grammar School?

The 1904 Fairfield Register, found on line, alleges that the education offered in the 1873 high school’s early days “was hardly more than that received in the regular schools by the more advanced pupils.” The purpose of high school classes “was to offer to the older and more advanced pupils a chance to attend school during the winter months.”

The Register writer said voters appropriated $400 annually for the high school, “which gradually but surely raised its standard of scholarship,” until by 1904, graduates were ready for college. In the 1904 writer’s opinion, the school was “not provided with a suitable building,” but he hoped one would soon be constructed.

His hope was realized when Lawrence High School opened on Sept. 21, 1907.

A Puzzlement

On sale on line is a copy of the program for the Lawrence High School graduation held Friday, June 27, 1890, and identified as the 39th anniversary graduation. Your writer lacks the mathematical skill to make a high school that Fairfield sources say opened in 1907 have a 39th graduation in 1890.

Although the sale listing says the program is from Lawrence High School, Fairfield, Maine, nowhere on the document is a town named. Your writer looked on line, without success, for people prominent in the graduation ceremony – two ministers, the chairman of the high school committee who awarded diplomas, the graduating seniors who wrote the words and music for the closing hymn.

The senior class is listed on the fourth page of the program, first the girls and then the boys, each in alphabetical order. There were 17 girls and 12 boys in the class; the valedictorian was Ernest Clarence Jewell, who also wrote the music for the final hymn, and the salutatorian was Mildred Withington.

Lawrence High School’s name honors Edward Jones Lawrence (Jan. 1, 1833 – Nov. 27, 1918), who paid more than $60,000 for the high school building. In 1901, he had financed Lawrence Public Library.

The bicentennial history says Lawrence himself had only a grammar-school education. He made money in lumbering, street railroads, ship-building and other ventures, and supported local entrepreneurs Alvin Lombard (inventor of the Lombard hauler) and Martin Keyes (founder of Keyes Fibre).

After his first wife died in 1865, Lawrence married Hannah Shaw, of Carmel, by whom he had three daughters. The history says it was to further their education that he moved to Fairfield in 1884 from Shawmut, which had “only a grammar school.”

The first Lawrence High School was on the west side of High Street, not far from the Lawrences’ house. Photos show an elegant brick building with a windowed basement, two main floors and a roof with three more windows. Three arches decorate the ground-floor front, with the entrance door in the center; the second floor, too, has three decorated sections, and two-story arches rise on each side of these central adornments.

This building was “gutted by fire” on Feb. 15, 1925, the bicentennial history says. Classes were held in other buildings, including the 1888 Fairfield Opera House, while the High Street school was rebuilt; it “reopened in the spring of 1926.”

From the 1950s, Fairfield’s schools began moving to the present high school site on the west side of town. The High Street building remained educational, but grade levels there changed repeatedly; it is now Fairfield Primary School.

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Nineteenth-century Fairfield had a private college preparatory high school, known as Bunker’s or Bunker Academy, or Bunker Seminary. It was named for its founder and teacher, Naomi Bunker.

The bicentennial history writers took much of their information on this school from the School Houses writer. He found that Bunker had been a public school teacher (where or for how long, he did not say) when she decided to teach “practice school” in Bunker’s Hall (wherever that was) before opening her seminary.

This school was established about 1857 in the large brick house mill-owner William Kendall built in the 1790s at the corner of Lawrence Avenue and Newhall Street, a block west of Main Street. It was a college preparatory boarding school, and seemed to have three divisions in connected buildings: schoolrooms, a boarding house on the west and a gymnasium.

In addition to college preparatory classes, Bunker hired “competent teachers” for music and painting. “Many pupils were fitted for college at this school,” according to the School Houses writer.

He did not record when Bunker Seminary closed. After the closing, he wrote, “the building used for the school rooms” (apparently not the brick house) was moved to Elm Street, which parallels Lawrence Avenue a block north, and remodeled into a house.

Naomi Bunker’s name appears in two documents found on line.

In a 1923 booklet prepared for the centennial of Anson Academy, in North Anson, she is listed as a student there in 1844. (Other Bunkers named include five more who were students in 1844 and three graduates from the 1880s, one of whom, Fred W., Class of 1885, was a school trustee in 1923. Samuel Bunker was also a trustee, but apparently not a graduate.)

In the catalogue of the 1859 Somerset County teachers’ convention, held in North Anson from Aug. 22 through Aug. 26, Naomi Bunker is listed as a teacher from Kendall’s Mills (downtown Fairfield’s name until 1872) and a member of the six-person committee on resolutions.

* * * * * *

The two-story wooden grammar schools that might have hosted Fairfield’s first high-school classes, North Grammar and South Grammar, got attention from school Superintendent Will O. Hersey in the Fairfield town report for the year ending Feb. 10, 1915.

Hersey, in his seventh annual report to the town, mentioned the sudden death of South Grammar School Principal Katherine Kidder the previous fall. He said of her:

“As a teacher she was thorough, earnest and sympathetic. Although firm in the discharge of her duties she was respected and beloved by all, and her influence will long be felt in the school where she labored so faithfully.”

(Katherine H. [Merrill] Kidder was born in 1871 in Harmony, Maine. On Sept. 2, 1903, she married a dentist, Dr. Charles Fuller Kidder (1874 – 1932); Find a Grave records no children. She died Nov. 13, 1914. The Kidders are buried in Fairfield’s Maplewood Cemetery.)

Kidder’s successor as South Grammar principal was Emma Coombs, identified as a Castine Normal School graduate with several years’ experience.

At North Grammar School, Hersey’s topic was the repairs that were made in the summer and fall of 1914, with a special $1,200 appropriation at the 1914 town meeting. The goal was to deal with unsanitary toilets and a worn-out heating system.

The superintendent described the new heating system, which included a new boiler and, in classrooms, radiators instead of “the old steam pipes which were around the walls of the rooms.” Two radiators were added in the lower entry, welcome “especially in stormy weather when the children come in with wet clothing.”

The winter of 1914-15 had been less severe than the previous one, Hersey said, but a few days had tested the new system, “and we are pleased to say that the building was warmed to the satisfaction and comfort of all.”

For the toilets, Hersey explained that pipes were installed, “the cellar was dug out and leveled, and a concrete floor was made, so that now good accommodations are provided for a winter and rainy day playroom.” Then the money ran out, and work stopped.

School board members intended to ask 1915 town meeting voters to fund installing new toilets. But, Hersey, wrote, “Near the latter part of the fall term the need of the new toilets became absolutely necessary so that the board unanimously decided to have the work completed.”

The superintendent did not explain how or when the toilets were paid for.

The wooden North Grammar and South Grammar schools are similar in size and design. Both have two main floors and a basement with windows (in North Grammar in the 1950s, the toilets were in the basement; perhaps the ones installed in 1914?).

The buildings still stand in 2024, painted a bright red with white trim. North Grammar is commercial, South Grammar is an apartment building.

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Also in Fairfield is the Goodwill-Hinckley School, founded in 1889 by George Walter Hinckley (1853 – 1950). Readers are referred to its website, www.gwh.org, and to the May 20 and June 3, 2021, issues of The Town Line.

Main sources

Fairfield Historical Society Fairfield, Maine 1788-1988 (1988)
Fairfield Historical Society, records and files

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Education in Fairfield

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Charles E. Moody School at Goodwill-Hinckley School, in Hinckley.

by Mary Grow

After multiple postponements, this article really is about the history of education – elementary education; high schools next week – in Fairfield, the town next upstream from Waterville on the west bank of the Kennebec River. Your writer thanks the Fairfield Historical Society for generously sharing material on the topic.

The present downtown Fairfield is located on the river, near the southern border with Waterville. It was known as Kendall’s Mills until 1872.

The town had in the past six other villages that were business, manufacturing and/or social centers, still named on many maps. Along the river, running upstream, were Philbrook’s, Lyon’s, then Somerset Mills (now Shawmut); Nye’s Corner; and East Fairfield (now Hinckley). Inland, running roughly along roads connecting Oakland (south of Fairfield) to Norridgewock (north), were Fairfield Center; Quakertown, later Black’s Mills (now North Fairfield); and Larone.

* * * * * *

The 1988 Fairfield bicentennial history says the area was settled around 1771 and became a plantation in 1774. The Town of Fairfield was incorporated June 18, 1788. Its first town meeting was Aug. 19 of that year.

Not until 1793, however, according to the history, did voters support education. The measure that was passed is quoted: “to raise twenty five pounds to be paid in produce, corn and grain to be paid into the town treasurer for the use of the schools.”

The voters divided the town into five “classes” (apparently school districts), with five men appointed as overseers, each of the “class” he was in. These men were Elihu Boweman (Bowerman, who settled North Fairfield), Nymphus (Nymphas) Bodfish, Deacon John Tozer (Tozier), Joshua Blackwell and Captain William Kendil (Kendall, early Fairfield mill-owner).

A document in the Historical Society’s files says Josiah Burgess and Daniel Shepherd were the 1793 district-makers who drew the boundaries of each district. Three were inland, two on the Kennebec. In 1794, this source says, voters raised 60 pounds for education.

The Historical Society files include a paper titled School Houses. The author is not named and there is no date; it was written after 1892, because events that year are mentioned.

The author began: “It is certain that school houses had been built in several sections of the town prior to the year 1800.” He listed possible locations of four early buildings, all abandoned and some “taken down.” They might have been:

— On Norridgewock Road (now also Route 139), in North Fairfield, “north of the present residence of H. T. Choate”;
— On the road between Fairfield Center and East Fairfield, “near the cemetery”;
— On Ohio Hill, near Joshua Freeman’s farm (the present Ohio Hill Road runs from Fairfield Center to Nye’s Corner); and
— “[A]t or near the Center” – presumably Fairfield Center.

In 1803, the bicentennial history says, Fairfield was re-divided into 11 school districts. That and other sources continue: in 1826, there were 15 districts; in 1875, James Plummer was Fairfield’s first school supervisor; in 1879, there were 18 districts; in 1886, only 13 school buildings were “in good condition.”

A Dec. 7, 1842, clipping from the North American newspaper in Philadelphia described the fate of Fairfield’s Coval (Covell) schoolhouse: it burned down the evening of Nov. 23, 1842. Quoting another newspaper called The Clarion (an on-line source says a paper with that name was published in Skowhegan in the 1800s), the Philadelphia reporter said arson was the cause: “The Millerites had been holding a meeting in it, and it is supposed to have been set on fire by some opposed to such meetings.”

(Millerites were followers of William Miller, who believed that Christ’s Second Coming would occur in 1843 or 1844.)

School districts were abolished in 1893. In 1904, the bicentennial history says, there were 25 schools: “ten village [another source defines village as Fairfield, the business center on the Kennebec], thirteen rural, and two at Shawmut.”

The School Houses writer said that “probably one hundred years ago,” the North Grammar School lot, at the corner of Main Street and Western Avenue was home to “a small low building erected for school purposes and used for many years being the only school building in the village.”

About the time the Boston Company arrived (the Boston Company briefly owned mills in 1842), the writer said, the building was moved across the road and converted to a house. Later it was moved again, west on Western Avenue, and whenever the writer was writing, “still stands as one of the comfortable dwellings of that vicinity.”

The writer continued by mentioning “the first school in this section of town” in an Upper Main Street house (Main Street, also Route 201, is called Upper Main Street in more than one source). He listed two schools between 1845 and 1865, one in Mrs. Millie Philbrook’s house “where the Express Office now stands” and another in the old Bowling Alley, probably built in 1842.

The South Main Street schoolhouse was built about 1850. The writer said boys from the north and south schools fought each other at every opportunity. He added, “Some such feeling existed between the boys of Fairfield and Waterville and ‘sling shots’ and ‘iron knuckles’ made up a part of every boy’s armaments.”

School Houses includes a story the writer used to illustrate how discipline had changed. He claimed that a teacher, identified as the “wife of one of our present venerable citizens” had made a disobedient boy lie on the floor with his head toward the classroom door. When another boy “who had previously been sent from the room” opened the door to return, the door hit the troublemaker on the head

This penalty “was considered a just punishment for slight mischievousness,” the writer said. For more serious offenses, “justice was administered in larger doses of raw hide and feminine muscle.”

When the classroom was peaceful, the writer added, this teacher would frequently “have a French lad sing a French song” to keep things harmonious.

* * * * * *

Random references to school buildings are scattered through the bicentennial history.

An 1878 map of Fairfield Center shows a schoolhouse on the west side of the road leading south to Oakland. The accompanying text says the village had “the original Fairfield post office,” from 1807 until 1872, and was the town’s first business section.

The map shows the post office in a store south of the school and across the road, with a blacksmith shop and an unidentified “Shop” nearby. C. E. Hawes’ car (carriage?) shop is on the lot south of the schoolhouse. Farther north across the road are H. C. Burleigh’s store and the town house.

The town house began life as a union meeting house, until the Methodist Church was built on the north side of the intersection. The map shows the church at the intersection, and its parsonage a couple buildings north of the schoolhouse.

An on-line Fairfield history says the union meeting house was built in 1793-94, and in 1802, “the first permanent meeting house was established there” and served “as the town hall until 1875.” The still-standing church, identified on a contemporary on-line map as Fairfield Center United Methodist Church, was probably built in 1846.

An undated (probably also 1878) map of Shawmut, then called Somerset Mills, shows three rectangular buildings labeled “school houses.” They form three sides of a square facing south onto Main Street, which runs from what appears to be an earlier version of present Route 201 (Skowhegan Road) to the Kennebec River. The school buildings are at the intersection with the (unnamed) road.

The School Houses paper says two (not three) “old buildings near the county road” were “abandoned” after “the school building at Shawmut” was put up in 1892 (another source says 1898).

The village of Larone was in the north end of town, almost on the Norridgewock town line. The authors of the bicentennial history cited information – without dates – from an earlier Larone history by Will Winslow.

The Larone schoolhouse was “at what was called Whiting’s” (perhaps near Martin Stream, because a Whiting family had mills on the stream). It doubled as “a place of worship for all country gatherings.”

Winslow said the schoolroom was divided, with “the boys on one side and the girls on the other.” Its heating came first from a fireplace and later from “an old fashioned box stove.” He described the “high straight back seats” as narrow, hinged and designed for torture.

North Fairfield, the village between Fairfield Center and Larone that was first settled by Quakers in 1782, had its own post office until 1908, the bicentennial history says. A 1913 photograph labeled North Fairfield shows a group of buildings by a stream, including a corn shop, a blacksmith shop and a store; and atop a hill several hundred yards away, a white building identified as a schoolhouse.

This schoolhouse appears to be a one-story wooden building with a peaked roof, quite close to the road that disappears over the hill.

Main sources

Fairfield Historical Society Fairfield, Maine 1788-1988 (1988)
Fairfield Historical Society, records and files

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: William Mathews of Waterville

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William Mathews

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.