Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Revolution effects: Augusta from 1778

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by Mary Grow

This article continues the history of the American Revolution’s effects on Hallowell (later Augusta), on the Kennebec River, beginning in the year 1778.

* * * * * *

James North, in his history of Augusta, mentioned only one Hallowell town meeting during the year 1777. There were at least two in 1778, mostly dealing with local finances. The town’s population was about 100 families in those years.

In 1778, a new law (probably Massachusetts, not national, though North did not specify) confiscated properties of Tories who had abandoned them (or had been exiled by the September “Banishment Act of the State of Massachusetts”). The law named names; North said the Kennebec Valley list included former Kennebec Proprietors and kin Sylvester Gardiner, Benjamin and Robert Hallowell and William and John Vassall.

Because of the war, North wrote, the export of large trees suitable for ships’ masts, which had stopped when residents opposed helping the British Navy, resumed, for the American Navy. Captain Samuel Howard sold 48 masts, 27 anchor stocks (the wooden arm on the top of an anchor that forces the fluke on the bottom to dig into the seabed or lakebed), 14 bowsprits and 4,299 inches of “spars [wooden poles that support a ship’s rigging] of various sizes.”

Some of the masts were too big to fit on the ship delivering them to Boston and had to be towed behind it, North wrote.

The revived mast business was about the only good economic news. By 1779, North wrote, state taxes “were very heavy upon the town.” He listed three separate bills; the first two, in March and July, were in British pounds, the third, in December, was in American dollars.

In addition, he wrote, “the selectmen were required, under a heavy penalty, to furnish the families of non-commissioned officers and soldiers who had enlisted in the Continental army from the town with necessaries, in conformity with a resolve passed by the [Massachusetts] General Court for that purpose.”

On June 26, 1779, militia Captain Daniel Savage was ordered to send 13 Hallowell men, either including (North’s copy of the order) or supplemented by (Kingsbury’s version) a sergeant, a corporal and himself, on the Bagaduce (Castine, Penobscot) expedition (see Box 1).

Captain Savage ended up commanding 50 men from four companies. After British reinforcements compelled an American retreat, North said some men went to Camden. Others “suffered much from hunger and fatigue” as they followed Indian guides to Fort Halifax on the Kennebec.

Neither North nor Kingsbury said how many Hallowell men returned safely. Savage did; North wrote that he was born in 1729; married twice and fathered 10 children between 1757 and 1774; and died Jan. 1, 1795, at the age of 66.

The national debt (and taxes) “hung with a two-fold weight upon the people,” North said, because of the “deranged state of the currency” and because so many men were in the military. He illustrated his point with examples of currency depreciation and related price increases from 1780 and 1781 accounts.

Food and other necessities were scarce as well as expensive. North quoted contemporary references to people short of food and clothing, living on “a little coffee” (no tea, and no sugar for the coffee) and alewives and clams.

North called the winter of 1779-1780 unusually hard, with the Kennebec frozen well downstream of Hallowell – teams hauled masts on the ice – and “uncommonly deep” snow that lasted into April. There were 10 town meetings that year, he said, and 110 families in town.

Despite the town’s small and impoverished population, North wrote of continuing high taxation – bills were presented in May, July and October, although he said the taxes were not actually assessed until January 1781. The July payment was required in “gold and silver,” not paper currency.

North recorded that a May 1780 meeting approved paying men who enlisted in pine boards and keeping the less valuable state or national “bounty and wages” for the town. He copied a long report from a committee appointed in the fall recommending the amounts to recompense soldiers, listed individually, for the Bagaduce and other expeditions.

At the end of November 1780, Hallowell was required to send six more men for three years’ military service. In addition, North said, that year the national government started requisitioning supplies, instead of increasingly worthless currency. Hallowell was required to provide 3,260 pounds of beef in September (voters appropriated 5,000 British pounds to obtain it) and another 6,261 pounds on Dec. 4.

North said several times that Hallowell voters did their best to contribute to the war effort. Early in 1781, he described a failure.

On Jan. 7, North said, a Massachusetts legislative resolve said Hallowell needed to send another half-dozen volunteers from Captain Savage’s company to the continental army. Should the captain not get them, the resolve said he should ask the selectmen to call a town meeting.

He didn’t, the selectmen did and a Jan. 19 town meeting at Fort Western directed selectmen and militia officers to find the volunteers and authorized borrowing money to provide a ninety-guinea bounty (per man, evidently). The meeting reconvened Jan. 27 and added 15 guineas per man to the bounty.

That inducement still failed. Meanwhile, apparently the first of three “beef taxes” had been imposed. On Feb. 12, North wrote, voters chose Captain Savage, Ephraim Ballard (Martha Ballard’s surveyor husband; see the July 10 issue of The Town Line and Captain James Cocks (see Box 2) a committee “to petition the [Massachusetts] General Court for ‘relief of the beef tax and our quota of soldiers.'”

There were more taxes, and soldiers needing back pay, and the currency became less and less valuable. Both Kingsbury and North specifically mentioned the federal government’s June 22, 1781, demand for “2,580 pounds of beef, 11 shirts, 11 pairs of shoes and stockings, and 5 blankets, for the continental army.”

When Hallowell was unable to meet the requisitions completely and immediately, the Massachusetts General Court demanded a monetary equivalent, in silver, not paper, and threatened to fine the town. North said the required 770 pounds in silver equaled $200,000 in currency – way beyond Hallowell’s resources.

Another town meeting, on Dec. 19 (at Capt. Savage’s house, North said), did not even try to find the money. Voters appointed another committee to find soldiers, and told the selectmen to petition the General Court for relief.

Fortunately, Kingsbury wrote, British General Charles Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown on Oct. 19, 1781, and “liberated the town from the pending exactions.”

North wrote that after Cornwallis’ surrender, the ocean off Maine “continued to be infested with the enemy’s cruisers,” which interfered with commerce. Inland, he summarized conditions at the end of 1783, after the Sept. 3 Treaty of Paris formally ended the war.

The war, he said, had “left the country prostrate in its industrial pursuits; commerce…had nearly died out; manufactures originating in the necessities of the times were new and unskilled, and agriculture had made but little advance.”

Hallowell voters nonetheless embarked on development. Voters at 1783 town meetings authorized building a meeting house (which wasn’t immediately finished) and extending roads, for example.

By 1784, North had no more to say about the war. Hallowell’s widows, orphans, wounded veterans and new settlers from farther south must have often remembered it.

The Bagaduce expedition, July and August 1779

According to several websites, the Bagaduce, Penobscot or Castine expedition was an American response to the British occupation of today’s Castine, a town on the east bank of the Penobscot River just above the junction of the Bagaduce River. The Penobscot roughly parallels the Kennebec, flowing from northern Maine into the Atlantic.

In June 1779, British forces established Fort George, on the Majabigwaduce Peninsula. Their goal was to organize a Loyalist colony, New Ireland.

Massachusetts sent more than 1,000 soldiers, in 19 warships and 25 smaller vessels, to drive the British away. The army included a 100-man artillery unit commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Paul Revere. The expedition’s commander was Commodore Dudley Saltonstall; Brigadier General Solomon Lovell was in charge of the land forces.

The Americans left Boston on July 19, reached Castine before the end of the month and shut the British into their fort. On July 28, some American troops landed and began their own fortifications; Americans and British exchanged intermittent raids and gunfire.

The Americans made no more progress. On Aug. 13, a British relief expedition – six large warships, with longer-range guns and better gun crews than the Americans had – drove them away.

The American fleet went up the Penobscot, where crews abandoned and often set fire to their ships. The men walked through the wilderness to safety, some getting to Camden and others making a weary, hungry hike to Fort Halifax.

A Revolutionary War website calls the Penobscot expedition one of Britain’s greatest victories of the war, and “the United States’ worst naval defeat until Pearl Harbor in 1941.”

This site’s writer, and other historians, blame the American failure on disagreements between Lovell and Saltonstall, putting most of the onus on Saltonstall, whom the website writer calls “ultra-cautious” and “timid.” Lovell wanted the American fleet to attack the ships that brought the British soldiers to Castine, so their guns couldn’t be used against American land attacks; Saltonstall said no, too risky.

At a September court-martial, Saltonstall was “declared to be primarily responsible for the debacle, found guilty, and dismissed from military service.” Revere was accused of “disobedience and cowardice” and “dismissed from the militia”; later, he was cleared.

The expedition cost the Americans an estimated 474 men killed, wounded, taken prisoner or missing. British casualties the website estimates at 25 killed, another 35 wounded and 26 taken prisoner, out of a force of about 600.

Captain James Cocks

North’s history of Augusta included a summary of Captain James Cocks’ life, with a footnote saying the captain’s descendants spelled the name Cox.

North said Cocks was 28 when he came from Boston to the Kennebec around 1762 (that year he was granted a lot in contemporary Chelsea, on the east side of the Kennebec just south of Augusta) with his wife, Nancy Beveridge, of Boston, and their two oldest (of 10) children.

FamilySearch says Cocks was born Sept. 18, 1733, in Boston. This source gives him two similar but different wives, the one closer to matching North’s story being Nancy Ann Babbidge, born in Boston Nov. 11, 1733. They were married in 1756 in Massachusetts, FamilySearch says.

North said Cocks was a nephew of Kennebec Proprietor Gershom Flagg. He described him as “a cheerful man, of pleasant countenance,” who was allegedly rejected by the army, “which he was desirous to enter,” because he was too short. An on-line genealogy says in August 1776, Cocks was captain of the first company, second regiment, Massachusetts militia.

According to North, Cocks so seldom attended church that once when he was angrily threatening another man, the victim’s friends advised him to escape to the meeting-house, where Cocks would never follow.

North wrote that Cocks was moderator of numerous town meetings, a selectman and “one of the captains of the town.” The on-line genealogy says he earned his living as a farmer, housewright and glazier.

FamilySearch says he died Sept. 3, 1809, in Hallowell. Nancy died in 1817, back in Boston, according to this source.

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892)
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Revolution effects

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Boston Massacre

by Mary Grow

The American colonies’ war for independence from Great Britain had only limited effects in the central Kennebec Valley. With one important exception (to be described in September), no Revolutionary “event” occurred in this part of Maine. No battles between armies were fought here, although there were some between neighbors and, most likely, among family members.

Many men (your writer found no recorded women) enlisted or were drafted, leaving wives and children to run a farm or business. The war’s economic effects, like taxes, high prices and shortages, percolated this far north, though probably they were less damaging in a mainly agricultural area than in coastal Maine.

One major consequence, however, was the effective elimination of the Kennebec or Plymouth Proprietors. That Boston-based group of British-descended, and often British-leaning, businessmen lost most of its influence in the Kennebec Valley by the end of the war, as Gordon Kershaw explained in his 1975 history, The Kennebeck Proprietors 1749-1775.

The historian summarized two changes wrought by the war and American independence. First, he said, the Proprietors became divided, with many putting other interests ahead of the company’s.

Among the Proprietors were several whose names are familiar today. One who decided to join the rebellion was James Bowdoin, II, the man for whom Maine’s Bowdoin College was named in 1794.

Dr. Sylvester (Silvester) Gardiner, Benjamin Hallowell (and family) and William Vassall all had riverine towns named in their honor. They chose the British side in the 1770s, Kershaw said, as did most family members (except Briggs Hallowell, one of Benjamin’s sons whom Kershaw called “a maverick Whig in a family of Tories”).

Kershaw wrote that several Proprietors, including Bowdoin, Gardiner and Vassall, continued to meet until March 1775. Gardiner and Hallowell holed up in Boston and left for Halifax, Nova Scotia, when the British evacuated the city on March 17, 1776. An on-line source says Vassall went to Nantucket in April 1775 and in August to London, where he spent the rest of his life.

The second change, Kershaw wrote, was that the settlers on the Kennebec took advantage of American independence to ditch not only British control, but control by the Proprietors.

During the Revolution, he said, a group led by Bowdoin and others tried to meet 25 times. Fourteen meetings failed to muster a quorum, and at the other 11, “no important business was transacted.” But after the 1783 Treaty of Paris ended hostilities, the Whig members reactivated the company.

By then, two developments in the Kennebec valley challenged long-distance control. The first local governments had been established, Hallowell, Vassalboro and Winslow (and Winthrop) in 1771, and local leaders and voters were making more and more decisions, especially imposing property taxes to support development. The taxes fell most heavily on the largest landowners, often the Proprietors.

The second development was that during and especially after the war, new settlers, including veterans, moved into the area.

“They sought out the land they wanted, and occupied it. Later, many dickered with the Company for titles,” Kershaw wrote. Others rejected Company claims.

The Kennebec Proprietors continued to make land grants after the Revolution, including in Whitefield, Winthrop and Vassalboro in 1777. They continued to try to deal with settlers who did not have, and often did not want, titles from them. Violence sometimes resulted, including the “Malta War” in 1808.

A few years later, Kershaw wrote, a Massachusetts commission reviewed disputed properties between the Proprietors and the settlers. Its report, approved by the legislature on February 23, 1813, gave the settlers all their land; and in compensation, gave the Proprietors Soboomook (Sebomook) township, north of Moosehead Lake.

Kershaw saw this decision as fair to the settlers, many of whom had made major improvements on their land and who, had the Proprietors gotten it, would have had to pay more money than backwoods people were likely to have.

It was less fair to the Proprietors, he thought: developing their new property would have been expensive and probably unprofitable. The main thing they gained was “the satisfaction of knowing that a festering disagreement had been settled at last.”

Kershaw surmised that the 1813 ruling was the final straw that led the Kennebec Proprietors to disband. In June 1815, he wrote, they voted to sell their remaining land at auction on Jan. 22, 1816 – including lots in Augusta, Waterville, Albion, China, Palermo and Windsor.

The sale was duly held, bringing in more than $40,000. Other business was completed in following years; and on April 26, 1822, “the books of the Kennebec Purchase Company were closed forever.”

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Local historians paid varying amounts of attention to the Revolutionary War’s effects on their towns and cities. James North, in his 1870 history of Augusta, devoted about 45 pages to the years between 1774 and 1783, writing partly about the Revolution and partly about local developments.

North was an unabashed supporter of the Revolution. By the spring of 1776, he wrote, the British colonies’ residents “had attained to that state of feeling which precluded all hope of reconciliation, and made exemption from colonial servitude a primary law of political existence.”

“Unequal as the contest for independence was seen to be, the great body of the people readily committed themselves to it, with full determination to undergo its sufferings and brave its dangers.”

The Tory minority, whom North described as “connected with the long established order of affairs,” soon realized they were witnessing “the efforts of a great people struggling with hardy enterprise, under unparalleled difficulties, of individual freedom and national existence.”

Henry Kingsbury, in his Kennebec County history, was also on the revolutionaries’ side. He mentioned the March 5, 1770, Boston Massacre (when seven British soldiers, facing angry Bostonians, fatally shot five of them and wounded others) as the first event that “sent a thrill of horror up the Kennebec,” despite the miles of wilderness between Boston and the river settlers.

Boston Tea Party

North’s account of Revolutionary events began with the Boston Tea Party on Dec. 16, 1773, and the British retaliatory measures in the spring of 1774, which led to first steps toward creating local Massachusetts authorities to replace the British government.

“These ominous events aroused the sturdy yeomen of ancient Hallowell to patriotic action,” Kingsbury wrote. But he and North agreed that a strong Tory presence – mostly from the Plymouth Company, in Kingsbury’s view – frustrated early reactions.

At a Provincial Congress in Massachusetts that assembled Oct. 7, 1774, and adjourned Dec. 10, North wrote that Gardinerstown Plantation, Winthrop and Vassalboro were represented (the last by a leading citizen named Remington Hobby or Hobbie). No one went from Hallowell, North said, “probably through tory influence which may have paralyzed action.”

Hallowell residents began redeeming themselves early in 1775. In response to a Provincial Congress call to organize for defense, they held a town meeting at 9 a.m., Wednesday, Jan. 25, “to choose officers and to form ourselves in some posture of defence with arms and ammunition, agreeable to the direction of congress” (North’s quotation from the warrant calling the meeting).

North noted that this meeting, for the first time, was not called in the name of His Majesty, the King of Britain.

North said no records of the meeting have been preserved, perhaps because of Tory influence. That influence was also shown at the annual town meeting later in the spring, when voters elected surveyor and Loyalist John “Black” Jones as constable (see the July 24 issue of The Town Line for more on Jones). They promptly rescinded the vote – and then elected him again.

A month later, North reported, Jones had hired a replacement, confirmed at another town meeting. But this same meeting’s voters chose him as a member of a five-man committee, one of whom was to represent Hallowell at a “revolutionary convention” scheduled in Falmouth.

Kingsbury wrote that early 1775 actions included forming a military company and a safety committee. The latter consisted of “principal citizens” and was given “charge of all matters connected with the public disorder, including correspondence with the revolutionary leaders.”

In Kingsbury’s view, “A town of so few inhabitants, however willing, could not give much aid to the continental cause, and its part in the war was necessarily small and inconspicuous.” (Later, he wrote that in 1777 or 1778 Hallowell had only about 100 heads of families listed on its voting rolls.)

North’s account of the early days of the Revolution focused on local issues. Beyond the Kennebec Valley area, Massachusetts organized three provincial congresses in the Boston area: the first from Oct. 7 to Dec, 10, 1774; the second from Feb. 1 to May 29, 1775; and the third from May 31 to July 19 (“a month after the battle of Bunker Hill”). North wrote that Hallowell voted not to send a representative to the third congress; he was silent on participation in the first two.

However, when Massachusetts officials decided to re-establish their legislature, the Great and General Court, and hold a July 19, 1775, session, Hallowell voters elected Captain William Howard their representative.

North said local and provincial government had been pretty much suspended. The new Massachusetts legislature effectively recreated it, including organizing the militia and issuing paper money.

The Continental Congress was doing the same for a national government. Its achievements included renewing mail delivery “from Georgia to Maine” – but only as far as Falmouth, Maine.

Hallowell people got their “letters and news” by ship as long as the river was ice-free. In the winter, North wrote (quoting Ephraim Ballard, who quoted his mother’s account), for several years residents near Fort Western got mail brought “from Falmouth by Ezekiel and Amos Page, who alternately brought it once a month on snow shoes through the woods.”

(North earlier named Ezekiel Page and his 17-year-old son Ezekiel as moving from Haverhill, Massachusetts, to Cushnoc in 1762; the family took two lots on the east bank of the Kennebec. WikiTree says the senior Ezekiel was born in May 1717 and died about March 1799; he and his wife, Anne Jewett [born in October 1725] had five sons, including Ezekiel [born April 30, 1746, in Haverhill; died May 10, 1830, in Sidney, Maine] and Amos [born July 13, 1755, in Hallowell; died Dec. 26, 1836, in Belgrade, Maine] and four daughters.)

The major events of 1776, in North’s view, were the British evacuation of Boston in March, “to the great joy of the eastern people,” and the signing of the Declaration of Independence in July. The Massachusetts government had copies of the Declaration sent to every minister in the state and required each to read it to his congregation the first Sunday he received it.

Kingsbury put more emphasis than did North on how hard the war was on Hallowell. He said that “its growth was retarded and well-nigh suspended,” as the wealthy proprietors abandoned their holdings. His major piece of evidence:

“So great was the depression that even the Fourth of July Declaration was not publicly read to the people.”

By 1776, North said, other instructions from Massachusetts officials made service in the militia compulsory for all able-bodied men between 16 and 60. Anyone who refused to serve was fined, and if he did not pay promptly, jailed.

Lincoln County raised two regiments whose companies drilled regularly. North wrote that some of the enlistees were on an “alarm list,” “minute men” who could assemble “on occasions of sudden alarm.”

North summarized the 1777 equipment of one 26-man company based on the west bank of the Kennebec: it included 15 guns, five pounds of powder and 107 bullets. The bullets were shared among seven people — but some of the seven had neither guns nor powder.

To be continued next week

Main sources:

Kershaw, Gordon E., The Kennebeck Proprietors 1749-1775 (1975)
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892)
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Amy Morris Bradley

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by Mary Grow

Amy Morris Bradley

In her Vassalboro history, Alma Pierce Robbins introduced her readers to one of the town’s nationally-known residents, Amy Morris Bradley. Robbins’ focus was on Bradley’s role in nursing during the Civil War; other sources add information about her career in public education.

Bradley was born in East Vassalboro on Sept. 12, 1823, daughter of a cobbler named Abiud (or Abired) Bradley I (1773 – January, or June 11, 1858) and Jane Baxter Bradley (Aug. 27, 1779 – June 23, 1830) and granddaughter of Revolutionary War veteran Asa Bradley (1746 – 1780).

Find a Grave lists her as the youngest of four boys and two girls; her oldest brother, Asa, was 22 years older than she. The older children were born in Yarmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. Only the last two, Albert Morris (1818 -1897) and Amy Morris, were born in Vassalboro.

(Your writer found no explanation for “Morris” as the middle name of the last two Bradley children.)

The Find a Grave page says of Bradley:

“She was an exceptional child, wanting to learn and was always asking questions. The more she grew and the more she learn [sic] about society, she felt that women were not getting treated fairly in America.”

A history of American women found on line offers a similar comment, saying that Bradley “abhorred the limitations placed on women in the 19th century.”

An on-line encyclopedia adds that Bradley was “a frail child given to bronchial attacks.”

Bradley’s mother died when Bradley was six years old. The on-line encyclopedia says she lived with older married sisters until she was 15.

Robbins’ information on Bradley’s early life came from books on Maine women and women in the Civil War. By the time she was 16, Robbins found, Bradley was teaching school while she attended Vassalboro Academy, “working in private families for her board.”

(Vassalboro Academy was the town’s first high school, founded in 1835 at Getchell’s Corner.)

When she was 21, Bradley was principal of an academy in Gardiner. In 1846 or 1847, she was in Charlestown, Massachusetts, either teaching in Winthrop grammar school, principal of a grammar school or head of an academy (sources differ).

In the fall of 1849, pneumonia, tuberculosis or bronchitis (sources differ) sent her first to a brother’s home in South Carolina and then back to Maine in 1851 and 1852. Her Maine doctor recommended a warmer climate.

Robbins said a cousin who had three foreign students living with him suggested Costa Rica, and in 1853 (Wikipedia’s date) she moved to San Jose, the inland capital city of the Central American country. She promptly opened “the first English school in central America” where she taught until the summer of 1857.

That summer she came back to Maine to be with her ailing father, who died in January 1858 (Wikipedia; Find a Grave gives the June 11 date cited above).

Wikipedia says someone at the New England Glass Company, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who needed letters translated from Spanish, somehow learned that a woman in East Vassalboro, Maine, was fluent in the language and hired her. Bradley was living in Cambridge when the Civil War started in April 1861.

After the first Battle of Bull Run in July, Wikipedia says, she volunteered as an army nurse. (How she qualified as a nurse, no source explains.)

Her obituary says her first assignment was the Third Maine Regiment hospital near Alexandria, Virginia. She soon transferred to the Fifth Maine Infantry. Robbins commented that many of those soldiers had been her students in Gardiner.

During the first winter of the war, her obituary says, she was matron of the 17th Brigade Hospital. She was again transferred – Robbins wrote on May 7, 1862 – to a hospital ship named “Ocean Queen,” on the James River in Virginia.

WikiTree says Bradley was the ship’s “lady superintendent,” overseeing 1,000 patients who were on their way to New York to recover, and their nurses. Bradley served on this and two other hospital ships until the summer of 1862.

Robbins said she took part in prisoner exchanges. She quoted from the Civil War book that Bradley’s kindness to Rebels “persuaded many to change their loyalty to the Union.”

From the ships, Bradley moved to a soldiers’ home in Washington, D.C., from which she began working for the United States Sanitary Commission.

Wikipedia explains the sanitary commission was “a private relief agency created by federal legislation on June 18, 1861, to support sick and wounded soldiers of the… Union Army.” It raised money, collected in-kind contributions and “enlisted thousands of volunteers” in the North, increasing the number and especially the quality of hospitals for soldiers.

Wikipedia lists most of the leaders of this group as men. Its article mentions a dozen women, including novelist Louisa May Alcott – but not including Bradley.

The on-line women’s history says Bradley became a Special Relief Agent for the Commission. “In that capacity she transformed makeshift army hospitals from unsanitary camps into clean, efficiently-run hospitals.” Other sources name some of the hospitals where she worked, and describe the deplorable conditions she corrected.

The history article says more than 20,000 women worked with the army in the Civil War. They were not well treated; the writer said they “had to deal with the intoxication of surgeons, the contempt of generals and the challenge of dealing with filth, lack of supplies, mosquitoes and bad weather.”

He or she added, “Bradley’s success earned her the respect of influential military and political leaders.”

On Feb. 16, 1864, Bradley began publishing the weekly Soldiers Journal, a collection of poetry (some of which she wrote), soldiers’ letters and military-related news. Publication continued until June 1865; President Abraham Lincoln was among the 20,000 subscribers. Profits from the journal went to soldiers’ orphaned children.

The Civil War ended with General Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865. That year, the women’s history says, Unitarians in Boston created the Soldiers’ Memorial Society, an organization to “establish free schools for poor children in the city of Wilmington, North Carolina.”

Bradley joined the Society and became its agent in Wilmington. She reached the city, by train, on Dec. 20, 1866. Not everyone welcomed her. The women’s history site said:

“Bradley soon became a familiar Wilmington figure as she went from house to house to drum up interest in her proposed school. Though some women pulled their skirts aside when she passed, or spat upon her, she held her head high and continued her rounds.”

It also quoted an article from the newspaper the Wilmington Dispatch that called Yankee teachers “obnoxious and pernicious.” The writer accused them of alienating Southern children from their roots and introducing the “puritanical schisms and isms of New England.”

Bradley was given the key to a disused schoolhouse, where she welcomed three students in January 1867. By spring, she wrote, “I have a day school of seventy-pupils thoroughly organized and classified; an industrial-school of thirty-three, and a Sunday school.”

Thirty-four “gentlemen of this city” gave almost $100 to her Union school. She used the money to buy books for every student and a “magnetic globe,” and for classroom improvements.

By the summer of 1867, Wilmington residents had contributed $1,000 to buy land for a second school, and two groups contributed a building fund and $1,500 for teachers’ salaries.

According to the on-line history, the Union school reopened early in November 1868 (presumably it also ran during the winter of 1867-1868), with 223 students and three teachers. The new Hemenway school (its name honored Mary Porter Tileston Hemenway, who had given $1,000 – see box) opened on Dec. 1, 1868, with 157 students. A third school under Bradley’s auspices, the Pioneer school in Masonboro Sound, opened on Jan. 1, 1869, with 45 students.

(Masonboro Sound is now a historic district near Wilmington, Wikipedia says.)

An on-line encyclopedia article says Bradley was made superintendent of Wilmington’s school system in 1869. In 1872, this source says, again with financial support from Mary Hemenway, Bradley “opened Tileston Normal School in Wilmington to train local women for teaching positions.”

Failing health led her to resign from the normal school in 1891. Wikipedia says the school closed that year.

Amy Morris Bradley died on Jan. 15, 1904, in “a little brown cottage on the school grounds,” and is buried in Wilmington’s Oakdale Cemetery.

WikiTree quotes from a 1904 letter by the then editor of the Wilmington Dispatch: “She was one of Wilmington’s foremost citizens, and the magnitude of her work stands out today as an everlasting monument. Miss Bradley was the mother of public school education in Wilmington.”

Her tombstone calls her “Our School Mother.”

Mary Porter Tileston Hemenway

Mary Porter Hemenway

Wikipedia calls Mary Porter Tileston Hemenway a philanthropist who “funded Civil War hospitals, numerous educational institutions from the Reconstruction era until the late 1880s, founded a physical education teacher training program for women, and funded research for the preservation of culturally valuable historical sites.”

She was born Dec. 20, 1820, daughter of a wealthy New York City “shipping merchant” and his wife. In 1840, she married Edward Augustus Holyoke Hemenway, a multi-millionaire “Boston sea merchant” 17 years her senior. They had four daughters and one son.

When her husband died in 1876, Wikipedia says his widow “apparently inherited $15,000,000.”

She had been giving away his money before then. Wikipedia credits her with contributions to the Sanitary Commission (perhaps her first connection with Amy Morris Bradley?); Washington University, founded in 1864 in St. Louis, Missouri; Bradley’s first two schools in Wilmington, and Bradley’s salary; the Tileston Normal School in Wilmington; and in 1868 the school in Hampton, Virginia, founded to teach literacy and job skills to former slaves, that became Hampton Institute and is now Hampton University.

After 1876, her gifts continued. Wikipedia says in 1885, “to help develop industrial skills for girls, Hemenway funded a two year training program for sewing and cooking classes in Boston. She financed the first kitchen in a public school in the United States, known as the Boston School Kitchen.”

This was followed in 1887 by “the Boston Normal School of Cookery…to train teachers. She bore all the expenses until the school was fully functioning before turning it over to the Boston School Committee.”

Two years later, Hemenway organized an international physical education conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that led to adding exercise programs for Boston school children. The same year, she founded the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics, which trained women to teach the Swedish physical education system in schools, including colleges, “at a time when very few women had positions in higher education.”

Wikipedia says BNSG became part of Wellesley College in 1906, and Wellesley’s new gymnasium was named Mary Hemenway Hall. (A Wellesley website says the Hall was demolished in the 1980s and replaced by the Keohane Sports Center.)

Another area that benefited from Hemenway’s interest and donations was southwestern archaeology. Wikipedia says in the 1880s and 1890s she supported studies of Hopi and Zuni history, language and culture, and was instrumental in persuading Congress to protect the Hohokam Casa Grande ruins in Coolidge, Arizona, as a national monument (established by President Woodrow Wilson on Aug. 3, 1918).

Hemenway died March 6, 1894, at her home on Beacon Hill. Appropriately, her memorial service was held in Boston’s Old South Meeting House.

The building started as a Puritan meeting house in 1729. After its congregation moved elsewhere in 1872, it was sold and scheduled to be demolished, but a group of Boston women, including Hemenway, who donated $100,000, raised money to buy and preserve it. Since 1877, an on-line history says, it has been a public “museum and meeting place.”

Main sources

Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Women doctors in central Kennebec Valley

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Gertrude Emma Heath’s home, in Farmingdale, circa 1850.

by Mary Grow

In the course of collecting information on the doctors included in last week’s article about the central Kennebec Valley (and other places), your writer reviewed lists in Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history and Rev. Edwin Carey Whittemore’s Waterville history.

Each book has a chapter on the medical profession in the 19th century. Kingsbury’s includes a list of 200 or more doctors, Whittemore’s almost 50 (with duplicates, of course). All the Waterville doctors named were men.

Kingsbury listed four women (in alphabetical order; your writer has used the same arrangement). Two were from Gardiner, one was from China and one was from Randolph, across the Kennebec from Gardiner. He did not include Martha Ballard, so he was not talking about midwives, though he identified two of his subjects as both midwives and doctors.

Your writer was intrigued enough to seek more information on these women. She succeeded, at least partly, with three of the four, thanks to the resources of the internet, and now shares her findings.

Only Gertrude Heath was identified as a doctor by any source other than Kingsbury. As with last week’s topics, these stories wander outside the central Kennebec Valley. Again, homeopathic medicine is mentioned.

* * * * * *

Gertrude Emma Heath’s information comes from multiple on-line sources, including a genealogy, dated 1909, and a website called buildings of New England, which has an undated photograph of her 1850 Gothic Revival house in Farmingdale.

The writer of the latter site commented: “It is amazing learning stories about such strong women, when at the time, women medical practitioners were almost unheard of and women were decades away from earning the right to vote.”

The genealogy says Heath was the granddaughter of a doctor named Asa Heath. Her father, Alvan M. C. Heath (born in 1828), was “a printer by trade and newspaper editor by principal occupation.”

In the Civil War, Alvan Heath was a corporal in the 16th Maine Infantry. He was killed December 16, 1862, during the battle of Fredericksburg, “leaving his widow Sarah to run the family affairs.” Sarah was the former Sarah H. Philbrook (July 23, 1831 – Aug. 7, 1915).

Alvan and Sarah had three sons and one daughter: Herbert M., born Aug. 27, 1853, a prominent Augusta lawyer and politician; Willis K., born Feb. 12, 1855; Dr. Frederick C., born in 1857 and in 1909 practicing medicine in Indianapolis, Indiana; and Dr. Gertrude E., born Jan. 20, 1859, in Gardiner (or, according to Find a Grave, in Windsor).

Gertrude Heath attended local schools, where she reportedly did well, and, the New England buildings site says, went to Hahnemann Medical College – not in Philadelphia, where so many of the Pulsifers discussed last week were trained in homeopathic medicine, but in Chicago.

(There was indeed another Hahnemann Medical College, in Chicago. It was chartered in 1855, opened in 1860, and began admitting women in 1871. Its website says in 1872, six of 76 students were women; by 1889, 51 women were among 312 students. The college closed around 1921.)

Heath took “special courses” at Hahnemann and got her M. D. degree in 1883 (Kingsbury specified in March) or 1884 (Find a Grave). She started practice in Chicago in 1884, returned to Gardiner the same year, and not long afterwards “accepted a position at the Maine State Hospital, at Augusta, where she specialized in eye and ear conditions.”

(The Maine State Hospital was one of several successive names for the insane asylum on the east bank of the Kennebec River.)

Find a Grave calls Heath the State Hospital’s second assistant physician for seven years. This site says she was also a staff doctor at the Gardiner hospital and for four years Gardiner’s school physician.

Several sources say she continued her private practice while doing her public jobs. In 1892, Kingsbury wrote, she was in practice in Gardiner, with a partner named Huldah Potter (of whom more later).

Another website says Heath headed the local Red Cross branch in the 1910s (“during World War I,” according to Find a Grave). This writer described her as a “respected senior doctor,” who was listed in a 1928 book on important Maine people as widely honored and beloved.

Find a Grave calls her “an active member of the Maine Homeopathic Society.”

Heath’s other career was as a poet, primarily a writer of children’s poems. The Maine State Library held an exhibit of her poetry in the 1920s, “describing her work ‘of special value to Maine people.'”

Titles of Heath’s poetry collections include Rhymes and Jingles for a Good Child (1897) and Sing, Little Birdie and When All the Birds Begin to Sing (both published in 1928). In 1918, Forgotten Books republished her book titled The Madonna and the Christ-Child: Legends and Lyrics, a “collection of poetry and songs” first published in the “late nineteenth century.”

She also edited and arranged what appears to be an autobiography by her older brother, Herbert, titled A Son of Maine: Herbert Milton Heath, published in Augusta in 1916. Herbert died Aug. 18, 1912.

Gertrude Heath died in Gardiner on Nov. 23, 1935, aged 76. She is buried in Gardiner’s Oak Grove cemetery. The eight other Heaths there include her father, her mother and her brother, Willis, who died Oct. 10, 1927, in Farmingdale.

* * * * * *

Dr. Huldah M. Potter, Dr. Heath’s partner for several years, has much less information on line. Find a Grave offers the most your writer found. It does not identify her as a doctor, and, oddly, it lacks information on where she is buried.

Find a Grave says she was born Huldah McArthur in March 1838, in Parsonsfield, in York County. Her parents were John and Huldah (Dalton) McArthur. Educational records are in Augusta, then at Congregational Academy (wherever that was) and Gorham Academy.

The McArthur family might have been in Augusta by 1850. In 1868, Find a Grave says, Huldah McArthur married Charles F. Potter; he left her a widow in less than a year.

A brief genealogical entry in James North’s Augusta history says Charles Fox Potter was born Jan. 29, 1821 (Find a Grave says Jan. 25, 1821). North wrote that he was an Augusta druggist and for some years a “Pension Agent.”

(A pension agent was probably a local representative of the federal Bureau of Pensions, created in 1832, first as part of the War Department and after 1849 as part of the Department of the Interior. Its responsibilities were to determine veterans’ eligibility for pensions and to distribute them.

(Wikipedia says, “In 1896, pensions accounted for 40% of all federal spending as the Bureau of Pensions provided monthly funds that averaged $12 to 750,000 veterans, and 222,000 dependents, especially widows.” As Civil War veterans died in the 20th century, the bureau became smaller. In 1930, President Herbert Hoover integrated it into the Veterans Administration.)

Charles E. Nash, in his chapters on Augusta in Kingsbury’s history, named Charles F. Potter as the fifth proprietor of the Craig drug store, founded in January 1828, on Augusta’s Market Square. In May 1865, Nash said, a former clerk bought part of Potter’s interest; “shortly before the fire of 1865,” he bought the rest.

(The fire, on Sept. 17, 1865, destroyed about 100 buildings, wiping out most of downtown.)

Also, North said, Fox was the “first subscriber in Augusta to the first seven-thirty loan of the government.”

(The federal 7-30 loan program was a bond sale in 1864 and 1865, to raise funds to continue the Civil War. An on-line summary of a promotion for the bonds cites their interest rate, tax-exempt status and support for Union soldiers as reasons patriotic Northerners should buy them.)

According to North, Charles and Huldah married in 1867 (not 1868) and Charles died March 23 of that year (as previous research has shown, a year’s discrepancy in dates is not unusual).

Charles is buried in Augusta’s Forest Grove cemetery. Find a Grave lists his parents and siblings, but no spouse.

Kingsbury’s brief account of Dr. Huldah Potter’s life says she got her medical degree from Boston University in 1877 and was back in Gardiner by 1879, where she partnered with Heath, perhaps for the rest of the century.

An on-line photo of selected pages from an undated history of homeopathy (apparently related to Boston University, since it identifies subjects by graduation year) lists Huldah McArthur Potter’s death date as Oct. 16, 1904. Find a Grave says she died of diabetes.

* * * * * *

The third female doctor on Kingsbury’s list was “Mrs. Ward.” He identified her as a midwife and physician in China, Maine, before 1808, when, he said, the first (male) doctor settled in the town.

Numerous men and women named Ward lived in China in the 19th century. A review of the Ward genealogy in the China history found no woman identified as a medical practitioner of any sort.

* * * * * *

Anna (Huston) Winslow (Mrs. James Winslow), of Randolph, was a very early “physician and midwife,” according to Kingsbury, who wrote that the family settled there in 1763. (Randolph was part of Pittston until March 1887.)

“She was widely known as ‘Granny Winslow,’ and practiced from Bath to Augusta” Kingsbury said. As with Huldah Potter, your writer found no other source that called Winslow a doctor.

FamilySearch provides a summary of the life of Anna McCausland Huston, daughter of James and Mary McCausland, born in 1734 in Falmouth (near Portland). An on-line genealogy explains “Huston”; she was first married to, and left a widow, by a man named Isaac Huston.

Ancestry.com lists Isaac Huston, born in 1730, in Falmouth, whose wife was Anna McCausland Huston (1734 – 1827). Isaac Huston died in Falmouth, Oct. 26, 1756, according to this source.

FamilySearch says it was on July 5, 1753 (another not unusual discrepancy in dates), that Anna McCausland Huston married James Winslow (born Aug. 6, 1725, in Freetown, Massachusetts), in Falmouth. The couple had at least six sons and three daughters between 1754 and 1785.

This source says the couple’s first two children were born in Broadbay (or Broad Bay), Maine (an old name for Waldoboro, which is about 25 miles east of Pittston), in 1754 (twins?).

The genealogy says “Indian troubles” led the Winslows to move to Pittston in the fall of 1760. They were among the earliest settlers: “Anna and daughter Sarah were the first white females in Pittston,” and son Jonathan, born March 23, 1761, was the first white child born in the town.

Jonathan was the first of six children born between 1761 and 1774 in Pittston, according to FamilySearch. The youngest son was born in Kingfield (about 70 miles north of Pittston), around 1785 (his mother was 52 and his father 61, FamilySearch says).

FamilySearch says Anna died in Farmington (about 20 miles south of Kingfield) on Feb. 15, 1827, aged 93. Her husband had died Nov. 16, 1802, also in Farmington.

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Doctors Pulsifer

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by Mary Grow

While wondering what new subject might keep readers – and writer — interested, your writer glanced at random pages in randomly-chosen history books. A warning: what she found does not remain in the central Kennebec Valley.

Her eyes fell on Dr. Nathan Goldsmith Howard Pulsifer.

Who could resist a name like that?

The man was a Waterville medical practitioner in the second half of the 19th century. As an added attraction, Dr. N. G. H. Pulsifer (as some historians call him) was the son of a doctor; brother of (at least) two doctors; and father of two more doctors.

FamilySearch’s analysis found that “Nathan” is a Biblical name, which in Hebrew means “God has given.”

“Goldsmith” is English and means a person who works in/with gold.

“Howard” is an English last – not first – name. FamilySearch says it was first spelled Haward, suggesting it was originally two Scandinavian words that meant “high guardian.”

“Pulsifer” is English, perhaps a variant of “Percival.”

An on-line genealogy says Pulsifer (Pulsever, Pulcifer, and other spellings) is a French Protestant name.

This source identifies the first Pulsifer in North America as John, who came to Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1680. John’s great-grandson, David, moved to Poland, Maine (southwest of Lewiston), and fathered Jonathan Pulsifer, born about 1770. Jonathan and his wife, Polly Rust, were parents of Dr. Moses Rust Pulsifer, who was the father of Dr. Nathan Goldsmith Howard Pulsifer.

Moses Pulsifer was born in Poland, on Sept. 10, 1799. He attended district schools and studied medicine (no details). Another on-line source says, without explaining why, that he and his family moved to Mt. Desert Island in 1823. There, according to the on-line genealogy, he practiced in Eden (renamed Bar Harbor in March 1918) and the mainland towns of Sullivan and Ellsworth.

In 1819, Pulsifer married Mary Strout Dunn, born May 30, 1801, in Poland. She was the oldest of 13 children (of whom one died in infancy and two in their teens). Mary and Moses had three daughters (Find a Grave) or six daughters (FamilySearch) and seven sons, born between 1820 and 1842.

Mary died March 11, 1850. Her widower, the genealogy says, remarried and had two more children, a daughter who married a doctor in Old Town, Maine, and a son who became a farmer in Corinna, Maine.

Moses died in Ellsworth, on Jan. 27, 1877, of pneumonia. He and his wife are buried in Auburn’s Oak Hill cemetery (Auburn is about 10 miles from their birthplace in Poland, about 130 miles from Ellsworth).

Find a Grave lists 24 Pulsifers in Oak Hill cemetery, including Moses and Mary and their son (N. G. H.’s brother) Dr. Horatio Brigham Pulsifer (of whom more later). Death dates range from 1848 to 1961.

* * * * * *

N. G. H. Pulsifer was Mary and Moses’ second son, born Jan. 24, 1824, in Eden. The genealogy says he was “educated in the common schools of Eden and Minot.” Henry Kingsbury wrote in his Kennebec County history that he was educated in “district schools and Gorham Academy” (Minot, near Lewiston, is about 160 miles southwest of Bar Harbor; Gorham, near Portland, is about another 40 miles south) “and graduated from Dartmouth Medical School in 1848.” (Frederick Charles Thayer, in his chapter on the medical profession in Whittemore’s history, dated his graduation 1847, as does the on-line genealogy.)

After briefly studying and working with his father and another doctor named N. C. Harris, N. G. H. established a practice at Fox Island, Maine (Vinalhaven and North Haven, in Penobscot Bay), the genealogy says.

In 1849, N. G. H. and his older brother, Major J. D. Pulsifer, caught gold fever. N. G. H.’s obituary says they joined a company that bought a sailing ship (other sources specify a barkentine named “Belgrade”) and made a stormy six-month trip around Cape Horn to California, with N. G. H. serving as ship’s doctor. Their search for gold brought “fair success.”

FamilySearch found (presumably from census records) that N. G. H. was living in Sutter, California, in 1850.

He came back to Ellsworth in 1851 and practiced homeopathy with his father; studied in New York and at Philadelphia’s Homeopathic Medical College, aka Hahnemann Medical College; and returned to Waterville in January 1852.

(Wikipedia terms homeopathy “a pseudoscientific system of alternative medicine,” based on German doctor Samuel Hahnemann’s 1796 theory. Practitioners “believe that a substance that causes symptoms of a disease in healthy people can cure similar symptoms in sick people.” “All relevant scientific knowledge about physics, chemistry, biochemistry and biology contradicts homeopathy,” Wikipedia says.)

(Hahnemann Medical College was founded in 1848 by three homeopathic doctors, per Wikipedia. By the late 1920s, the school had “dropped its homeopathic focus.”)

N. G. H. was a member of the American Homeopathic Society, the genealogy says (and a Republican and a Unitarian).

Thayer wrote that in Waterville, N. G. H. “at once built up a large practice.” The genealogy writer says he “ranked among the leaders in his profession for many years. He was held in the highest esteem by his fellow practitioners as well as by the families whom he served.”

The writer of his obituary praised his “fidelity to his patients and painstaking thoroughness as a physician” and “his sterling worth and strict integrity as a man.”

On Oct. 24, 1855, in Waterville, N. G. H. and Ann Cornelia Moor were married. They had two sons and two daughters: Nora Nellie Pulsifer (1856 – 1936); Cornelia Ann Pulsifer (1860 -1951); Dr. William Moor Pulsifer (Aug. 18, 1863 – Nov. 14, 1915) and Dr. Ralph Howard Pulsifer (Aug. 19, 1865 – 1926).

N. G. H. was not only a doctor. Kingsbury wrote, in 1892, that “Dr. [N. G. H.] Pulsifer has been devoting his attention to real estate operations and banking for the past twenty years.” Thayer praised N. G. H.’s financial judgment.

Horatio Bates’ chapter on Waterville banks lists, among others, People’s National Bank, which received a federal charter on March 15, 1865. N. G. H. was a director and vice-president and then its second president, serving from 1882 until he died in 1893.

N. G. H. is also listed among the 26 charter members of Waterville Savings Bank (1869). The genealogy mentions investments in real estate.

He was a member of the five-man building committee that oversaw construction of Waterville’s “beautiful north grammar school building,” dedicated Feb. 28, 1888. On-line photos show a two-story brick building on a basement, with large rectangular windows and arched doorways. An old map shows a schoolhouse in the southeast corner of the intersection of Pleasant and North streets.

N. G. H. died on December 3, 1893, in Waterville, at the age of 69. Ann died July 5, 1919, also in Waterville. Both are buried in the city’s Pine Grove cemetery.

* * * * * *

N. G. H. and Ann’s older son, William Moor Pulsifer (born Aug. 18, 1863), graduated from Coburn in 1878 and Colby in 1882, Thayer said. He earned one M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1887 and a second from Hahnemann in 1888 (or, the on-line genealogy says, took a post-graduate course there in 1890). He promptly established a practice in Skowhegan; returned to Waterville in 1892; and went back to Skowhegan in 1900. On Oct. 2, 1896, he married Helen G. Libby. He died in November, 1915, in Skowhegan.

His younger brother, Ralph Howard Pulsifer (born Aug. 19, 1865), followed the family tradition, graduating from Coburn in 1882 and Colby in 1886. His first medical degree was from Boston University, in 1880 (genealogy) or 1889 (Thayer), and he, too, earned a second M. D. from Hahnemann, in 1890.

This Dr. Pulsifer opened a practice in Waterville in November 1890 and after two years moved to Skowhegan. He married Grace Yeaton on Feb. 23, 1893; they had one son as of 1902. The Pulsifers moved back to Waterville in 1897, and in 1902, Thayer said, they lived in Vassalboro. Pulsifer died in 1926, in Belgrade or Waterville (sources disagree).

* * * * * *

Find a Grave identifies one other doctor in N. G. H.’s generation, his younger brother, Horatio Brigham (or Bridgham, Geni says) Pulsifer, born in Minot, Dec. 28, 1835, and died in Auburn April 7 or June 10, 1929, aged 93.

On Nov. 1, 1861, in Auburn, he married Augusta Ellen Roak, born in Auburn Jan. 21, 1838. They had three sons (plus three who died in infancy, according to FamilySearch) and a daughter; on-line sources identify none as a doctor. Augusta died in Auburn April 20, 1933, according to Find a Grave.

Geni gives N. G. H. a second doctor/brother, Thomas Pulsifer, born to Moses and Mary Pulsifer on April 2, 1842, in Poland. The website cites other sources that say Thomas Pulsifer entered Waterville (Colby) College in 1859, but left in 1861 and on Oct. 1 enlisted in the First Maine Cavalry.

During his military service, Pulsifer was taken prisoner in June 1863. Exchanged the next month, he remained in the army and was badly wounded on Aug. 6, 1864. He was discharged Nov. 25, 1864.

After studying medicine with his father for an unspecified time, in 1872 Thomas Pulsifer graduated from Hahnemann. The next year he opened a practice in Yarmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod (“because Yarmouth was in need of a doctor,” an on-line site says).

On June 1, 1880, he married Annie Gorham (born Sept. 3, 1859, the same autumn her husband started college), in Yarmouth. Between April 1881 and April 1887, the couple had two daughters, Caroline and her sister who died in infancy, and one son.

Dr. Thomas Pulsifer died in 1912, aged 70, Geni says.

* * * * * *

The Historical Society of Old Yarmouth (Massachusetts) has on its website an illustrated memoir by Caroline (Pulsifer) Siebens (1881-1970), one of the society’s founders and the daughter of “town doctor Thomas B. Pulsifer.” The essay is titled “Horses and Buggies and a Donkey – oh my!”

Siebens talked about several family horses, starting with Lightfoot, “named for my father’s favorite mount in the Civil War. She was raised in Maine by my uncle, Dr Horatio Pulsifer, of Auburn.”

Lightfoot’s offspring included Brandywine and Marguerite. Siebens said people wondered why “a temperance advocate” would name a horse after two alcoholic drinks.

A friend of her father’s called Marguerite the “wild horse you keep in your barn.” A black and white photo of Siebens on Marguerite’s back, taken about 1896, shows an all-over dark brown horse.

Marguerite, and others, drew or carried Dr. Pulsifer on his rounds. Siebens said he usually used the family buggy; but sometimes, “to spare the horse but not himself,” he drove a light, two-wheeled gig that provided no support for his back.

On windy winter days, Siebens wrote, the doctor used, apparently in the buggy, what she called a cage, “a square coach-like affair that shut up tight but was unsuited to rapid transit. What one gained in protection from the cold was lost by the slow travel that kept one out in the severe weather for a much longer time.”

The doctor had a sleigh for travel over snow. Siebens wrote that “Sometimes in the worst weather Father rode horseback.”

Since his horses usually knew where they were going, the doctor could take a nap, she claimed – until his horse, too, “drowsed off” and wakened him by stopping.

On Sunday afternoons, Siebens and her brother enjoyed going on rounds with the doctor, “although it did involve a good deal of waiting while he visited patients.” Their very religious neighbors condoned the doctor doing errands of mercy on the Sabbath, but called the accompanying pleasure-riders Sabbath-breakers who would come to a bad end.

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.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Early surveyors – John Jones

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Map of central Maine 1799. Note Harlem (before it was China) at right; Winslow on both sides of the Kennebec River; Vassalboro and Sidney on either side of the river; Fairfield at the top.

by Mary Grow

Yet one more important early surveyor in the central Kennebec Valley was John Jones (c. 1743 – Aug. 16, 1823), known as “Black” Jones because of his dark complexion, and later because of his unpopular politics.

Capt. Charles E. Nash, author of the Augusta chapters in Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history, and others said Jones was short and compactly built. Nash added “lithe of limb, flippant of speech.”

Nash claimed that, “This [Kingsbury’s] history will mention no personage with a career more unique and replete with sensation and romance than that of ‘Black’ Jones, the incorrigible and dauntless tory of Fort Western in primitive Augusta.”

An on-line source says Jones lived in Concord, Massachusetts, as a young man. The Plymouth/Kennebec Company/Proprietors apparently helped him learn the surveyor’s trade and sent him to the Kennebec Valley, specifically Hallowell, early in 1771, when he was 28 years old.

Judging by the number of times his name appears in local histories just in the central Kennebec Valley, Jones lotted out large areas for his employers.

His first survey, James North said in his Augusta history, was of “a part of Pondtown and Hallowell”; the resulting plan was dated April 7, 1771. (Wikipedia’s history of Winthrop, Maine [west of Manchester, which is west of Hallowell], says Winthrop was named Pondtown “for its lakes and ponds” before being incorporated as Winthrop on April 26, 1771.)

In 1772, North said, Jones surveyed lots east of the Sheepscot River (in and around the area that is now Montville) and drew up a plan. In 1773, he did the same in Canaan, north of present-day Clinton.

Jones started work in 1774 in Vassalboro and Sidney, North wrote, moving to Unity and China. (See the July 10 history article for Nathan Winslow’s 1771 surveys of Vassalboro and Sidney.)

Alma Pierce Robbins said, in her Vassalboro history, that Jones laid out two more tiers of lots east of the three tiers Winslow mapped in 1771, with a “gore” – an irregular north-south strip – between the third and fourth tiers. This addition brought Vassalboro approximately to its present eastern boundary with China, encompassing the outlet of China Lake (then Twelve Mile Pond).

In Sidney, according to Alice Hammond’s history, Jones did the same thing. Winslow had surveyed the first three miles into Sidney from the Kennebec River, and Jones did the next two miles, extending the surveyed area to Messalonskee Lake.

Here, too, there was a gore between the two sets of lots, Hammond said. She explained it as “caused by the curve of the earth and the fact that the land could not be measured in even miles in depth.”

According to the China bicentennial history, the Kennebec Proprietors hired Jones and Abraham Burrell (or Burrill) in the fall of 1773 to survey about 32,000 acres inland from Vassalboro, around what became China Lake. The men began work that fall and resumed in the spring of 1774.

Jones spent the winter in Gardiner, where he met some of the Clark family, from Nantucket, who came back with him in March 1774 and became China’s first settlers. Burrell also settled near the lake in 1774 or 1775.

Nash wrote that in 1773, Jones built a sawmill on the west bank of the Kennebec, in the northern part of Hallowell. He described the site: “at the lower fall of the then wild and picturesque little river that has since been metamorphosed into the now shrunken and jaded stream called Bond’s brook (from Thomas Bond – died 1815 – who built the large brick house at the foot of Gas-house hill – the first brick house in Augusta).”

Jones’ mill saved builders on the west bank the need to cross the river to get lumber, Nash observed.

When the American Revolution began, Jones openly sided with the British. Nash called him “saucy, active, and exasperating.” At first he was not unpopular, and used his influence “to disturb town meetings and bother the popular party generally.”

As the revolutionary movement gained, Jones fell out of favor, until a Hallowell town meeting declared him a traitor – no date given. North said he escaped conviction because the law under which he was tried expired; Nash said Jones went to Boston, where he was jailed (no date nor length of incarceration given).

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich wrote that before Jones left Hallowell, he deeded his mills and other property to his wife’s family. Thus Ephraim Ballard was able to lease them in 1776 or 1777 (see the July 10 article on Ballard).

One of Ulrich’s footnotes quotes information that before his exile, Jones served the Kennebec Proprietors by “certifying land petitions from prospective settlers” between 1773 and June 1776, suggesting he left town that month.

Ulrich said Jones owned two different parcels, a “landing” on the east side of the Kennebec in Hallowell and mills on Bowman’s Brook (later Bond or Bond’s Brook), on the west shore and farther north, in what became Augusta in 1797.

When Martha Ballard started her diary in August 1787, she, Ephraim and five children were living in Jones’ Bowman’s Brook house. She described it as having two rooms downstairs, “east” and “west,” and above two unfinished rooms “unusable in winter.” The property included a cellar, barn and gardens.

Jones escaped from Boston, and on Aug. 29, 1779, made it to Québec, where he enlisted in the British Army with the rank of captain. From a British base at Castine, he made enough successful raids against Revolutionary forces to make himself “very obnoxious” (North’s phrase) to his former neighbors.

One instance, mentioned in more than one history, involved a night raid on Pownalborough. Jones captured General Charles Cushing, barefoot and in his nightclothes, and delivered him to the British at Castine – “marched him through the wilderness,” Nash wrote. (Pownalborough and Castine are about 90 miles apart, by contemporary reckoning.)

An on-line source says Jones helped the British establish a safe haven for Loyalists on the Penobscot River, presumably using his surveying skills. After the 1783 peace treaty established the St. Croix River as the boundary between the new United States and Nova Scotia, he surveyed what became the town of St. Andrews, New Brunswick, on the tip of the Canadian peninsula across the bay from Robbinston, Maine.

From the summer of 1783 into 1785, Jones worked “virtually single-handed” in New Brunswick, in what the on-line source described as a fairly hostile environment. Settlers were pressing for lots to be assigned in a hurry, and an American, Colonel John Allan, tried to block his work.

Allan, “the American superintendent of eastern Indians,” argued that Jones was surveying the wrong river and was really on United States land. In the fall of 1783, he arrested Jones, but the surveyor escaped (again).

The on-line source says Jones “acquired” property in and near St. Andrews, including a mill privilege (no information that he developed it), and on Grand Manan Island (off the coast from Lubec, Maine, on the Canadian side of the international boundary).

Martha Ballard wrote that on April 12, 1791, the Ballards turned over the Jones house to Peter Jones, John’s brother, and moved to the Howard farm a short distance south.

Ballard recorded John Jones as visiting at her house on Nov. 8 and Nov. 11, 1792. She gave no explanation, though she mentioned he collected some money that Ephraim Ballard owned him.

Jones returned to the Kennebec Valley for good, “perhaps as early as 1793, when he compiled a map for the Plymouth Company,” the on-line source says. Nash wrote that apparently he and his former townspeople became “tolerably reconciled.”

North wrote that Jones moved back to Hallowell (giving no date); Nash said he came back to what became Augusta in February 1797. Both said that he built a house where he lived the rest of his life. Nash located it on the north bank of Bond Brook, between his mill and the Kennebec (which would have been in Augusta after 1797).

Jones married Ruth Lee, “originally of Concord” (according to the on-line source) and sister of “Judge Lee of Wiscasset” (according to North). Neither writer dated the marriage, though it must have been before the mid-1770s. When his wife left Maine no one mentioned; North said she was with him in St. Andrews in April 1784. Both historians said the couple had no children.

North described Mrs. Jones as “tall, of good appearance, well educated for the times, and…much esteemed by her intimate friends.” Many of them wondered “how she could marry Black Jones.”

In later years, North wrote, Mrs. Jones became secretive about her age. When her friend, Judge Daniel Cony, tried to surprise her into a revelation with an unexpected direct question, “She drew up her tall form with an air of offended dignity, raised her half-closed hand towards the Judge, extending her little finger, and replied quickly, ‘Just as old, Judge Cony, as my little finger.'”

John Jones died Aug. 16, 1823, at the age of 80. Ruth Jones died Oct. 7, 1835, North said. He guessed her age then at about 90, though it was reported in the Kennebec Journal as 84.

Nash wrote that both were buried in what he called in 1892 “unmarked and forgotten graves in Mt. Vernon Cemetery.” Find a Grave currently lists seven Joneses in this cemetery, including Peter (perhaps John’s brother?), who died March 9, 1796, but no John or Ruth.

Main sources:

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892)
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870)
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, A Midwife’s Tale The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 1990

Websites, miscellaneous.

Caron presentation at Vassalboro Historical Society

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Ray Caron

by Mary Grow

Historian Ray Caron’s illustrated talk on China Lake at the Vassalboro Historical Society Sunday afternoon, July 20, had his audience questioning, commenting and chuckling.

Caron, from Winslow, covered pieces of the history of the lake and its surroundings, including Winslow, from before the first Europeans arrived until the mid-20th century.

Caron said he has memories of China Lake from childhood, when his family visited his aunt and uncle on the northeast side of the east basin. He would sit on the dock and look across the water at “the scenic church,” China Baptist Church at the head of the east basin.

Long before Caron’s childhood, Native America tribes were familiar with China Lake. One of the assumed reminders of their visits is Indian Heart rock, on the southwest shore of the east basin, believed to be a Native carving.

Vassalboro Historical Society President Jan Clowes mentioned another rock on which the date 1850 is carved.

When Europeans settled this area in the second half of the 1600s, Caron said, streams, including China Lake’s Outlet Stream (then called Mile or Miles Brook), were vital sources of power for mills to grind grain and saw lumber. He showed a map of early Winslow mills on the brook.

Between 1675 and 1763, a series of wars between English settlers coming inland from the coast and would-be French influence from Canada decimated the Native Americans, Caron said. He cited one estimate that their numbers dropped from around 15,000 to around 4,000, mostly due to smallpox and other diseases the Europeans introduced.

Skipping to the years around 1900, Caron shared a variety of newspaper articles and other documents he had collected about China Lake and people who lived around it, including photographs of ice-cutting; information on the electric trolleys that brought visitors from Waterville and Augusta; and a reference to a boat trip to Abenaki Park, which neither he nor audience members could locate.

He also had information on proposed state water quality legislation, about 1909. John Woodsum, head of the China Lake Improvement Association, testified vehemently against it, on the ground that local people could protect their own water.

Vassalboro’s Albert Morris Bradley and his son, William Stickney Bradley, were credited with developing recreational facilities – dining room, bowling alley and dance hall – on Bradley’s Island, in the lake’s west basin, which they bought in 1876. Caron said they owned boats, including a 100-passenger sloop, to transport patrons to the island. He and audience members wondered which part(s) of the shore the boats lived on, and what passengers did during the ride to the island.

Bradley’s Island now belongs to the Town of China. Caron believes it was acquired for unpaid taxes.

The Bradleys also owned the Revere House, in East Vassalboro. Caron had photographs of A. M. Bradly, in his 90s, in the building. Clowes said a new owner is currently refurbishing the Revere House to eliminate lead.

The final stage in China Lake’s history that Caron covered was its use as Kennebec Water District’s water source for its customers in Waterville and surrounding towns.

Waterville’s drinking water used to come from Messalonskee Stream. That water was blamed for a 1906 typhoid epidemic that killed 40 people, leading to a search for a new source.

Messalonskee Lake might have been suitable, Caron said. He surmised China Lake was chosen because it is about 100 feet higher than Waterville, allowing gravity flow instead of pumping.

He showed numerous pictures of the job of laying miles of pipes in the early 1900s to bring the lake’s water north. Hundreds of Italian laborers from Massachusetts worked on the project. They were housed in 500-man camps; one photo caption referred to a “middle camp” in North Vassalboro and another to be built in East Vassalboro.

Caron currently heads the Friends of Fort Halifax, in Winslow. He showed pictures of the near-replica of one of Benedict Arnold’s bateaux the group has built in preparation for the 250th anniversary of Arnold’s expedition up the Kennebec to Québec, in September 1775.

Recently, he said, an excavation for a new stage in Fort Halifax Park unearthed what were determined to be Native American teeth. After identification and consultation with current Maine Native Americans, reburying them was found to be appropriate and was done.

EVENTS: “People of China, Maine” – China Historical Society annual meeting

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Boats on China Lake, Maine

Join us for an evening celebrating the rich history of China, Maine! The China Historical Society’s 2025 Annual Meeting will be held on Thursday, July 24th at 6:00 PM in the historic Old Town Hall (next to the China town office).

This year’s program, “People of China, Maine,” will feature local speakers sharing fascinating stories about the town’s early settlers and the communities they built. Presenters include Rev. Ron Morrell on the Baptists, Joanne Clark Austin on the Quakers, Tim Hatch on Thurston Park, and Scott McCormac on the people of South China Inn.

Whether you’re a lifelong resident or new to town, this is a wonderful opportunity to connect with neighbors, learn more about China’s history, and support the work of preserving our shared heritage.

We’d love to see you there—bring a friend and help us keep our local history alive!

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Early surveyors – John McKechnie

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Manuscript map 41, which is a copy of a plan of “Great Lotts in the fifth division along the Kennebec River” from the Plymouth Company collection, was taken from surveys made by John McKechnie and John Jones.
Contributed to Maine Memory Network by Maine Historical Society Date: March 1771

by Mary Grow

Another Kennebec Valley surveyor who worked for the Kennebec/Plymouth Proprietors/Company was Dr. John McKechnie (1730 or 1732 – April 14, 1782).

Ernest Marriner, in his Kennebec Yesterdays, called McKechnie “one of those men of varied talents who meant so much to many pioneer communities” – “an educated physician, a civil engineer, a land surveyor, and a shrewd business entrepreneur.”

McKechnie was a Scotsman who came to America in 1755 and to Winslow in 1771. On July 26, 1755, as he left Scotland for Boston, he started a diary that became the source for at least two biographical sketches, one by Aaron Plaisted in his chapter on early settlers in Edwin Carey Whittemore’s history of Waterville and one in a medical directory found on line.

The latter, an article in the May, 1917, issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, says McKechnie was born about 1730 and got a medical degree or license in 1752 from either Edinburgh or Aberdeen. After three years’ practicing in his native land, apparently without marked success, he left Greenock, Scotland, by ship at 4 p.m., July 26, 1755, and landed on Boston’s Long Wharf at 7 p.m., September 12, 1755.

In the Boston area, he tried practicing medicine, and teaching (unspecified). On May 15, 1760, he “became an official of the Plymouth Land Company with the rank of Lieutenant and the position of a land surveyor.” The medical journal article says he stayed with the company for four years, surveying in the Kennebec and Penobscot river valleys.

By 1760, McKechnie was teaching in Pemaquid, Maine, where he met and married Mary North (1742 -1816), daughter of the Captain North who was in charge of the fort at Pemaquid. Plaisted dated their wedding Jan. 1.

The medical journal’s biography says Captain North “officiated at the wedding, although he is said not to have favored the match, either because Dr. McKechnie was too old, or had no settled profession.”

(If this “Captain North” is the Captain John North who is listed on FamilySearch as Mary North’s father, he was born in 1698 and married either Elizabeth Lewis, born in 1714, or Elisabeth Pitson, born in 1719. FamilySearch names each on different pages, plus a “Miss Burton” whom John North supposedly married in 1720.)

The medical biography mentions McKechnie practicing medicine in Pownalborough; treating a smallpox case on Swan’s Island; and from 1764 to 1771 practicing in Bowdoinham. Marriner found him named as a Bowdoinham selectman in 1764.

In 1771 the family moved to Winslow, and in 1775, they moved across the river, to what became Waterville in June 1802. Plaisted and Henry Kingsbury, in his 1892 Kennebec County history, said McKechnie was a Winslow selectman from 1774 through 1777.

Plaisted said when McKechnie moved to the west side of the Kennebec, he settled on Messalonskee Stream “near the Crommett bridge” at the place still known in 1902 as Crommett’s Mills. He built a log cabin and the first dam and sawmill on the stream; Kingsbury said he also had a grist mill.

(Crommett’s Mills was the part of Waterville where Messalonskee Stream, running south on its way to the Kennebec, loops northeast before returning to its original direction. Western Avenue now runs east-west across the top of the loop; Crommett Street is one of the streets intersecting Western Avenue from the north.)

The medical biography added that in his cabin, McKechnie “partitioned off a room for a dispensary of the drugs which were so extensively dealt out to sick people in that era.” This source says his medical practice “increased with considerable rapidity”; other historians say it was less important than his surveying.

The medical biography says he invested some of his income in timberlands to feed his sawmill. In 1779, he built a new and larger house, perhaps the one Marriner said was the first two-story house in Waterville, “near the present corner of Main and Silver streets.” (Since Waterville’s Concourse was created in the 1970s, these streets no longer intersect.)

Plaisted said of him, “Not one of the early settlers was more active and useful and entitled to respectful memory than Dr. John McKechnie.”

Frederick Thayer, in his chapter on doctors in Whittemore’s history, wrote that “Besides attending to his medical duties he was an active civil engineer and business man. Many of his original surveys are still [1902] extant.”

The sawmill was the only specific business interest mentioned. The medical biography called McKechnie “a man of means” who was able to lend other man $1,000.

This source says during the Revolution, McKechnie was known to lack sympathy for the rebels and was watched by the local Sons of Liberty. Despite his wealth, he was not asked to contribute to a fund to provide ammunition for local volunteers.

However, Marriner and others say he treated members of Benedict Arnold’s 1775 expedition to Québec via the Kennebec. And Marriner quoted McKechnie’s advice to neighbors about selling supplies to Arnold’s expedition: give them “enough, but not too much.”

* * * * * *

Gordon Kershaw, in his book on the Kennebec Proprietors, identified McKechnie as the Proprietors’ surveyor in his chapter on the dispute over “Masts for the King’s Navy.” These were the enormous white pines that provided masts for British ships.

Kershaw explained that John Wentworth, Governor of New Hampshire from the summer of 1766 until the American Revolution, was also Surveyor-General of the King’s Woods, a job that he believed included protecting the valuable trees.

When the Kennebec Proprietors began cutting white pines on their land, they started a long dispute with the governor that involved multiple lawsuits. It was never resolved, but was ended in 1775: as the Revolution began, local committees of safety made it clear that no more trees would be sent to the Royal Navy.

James North, in his history of Augusta, mentioned McKechnie’s November 1762, survey of “back land” lots, 10 miles in one dimension and varying in the other, that was the basis of grants to Proprietors. North quoted that the land was given to these men “in consideration of their great trouble and expense in bringing forward settlements on Kennebec River.”

Kingsbury wrote that McKechnie did the first survey of the area that became the Town of Winslow, after the Kennebec Proprietors granted the entire township, on March 12, 1766, to “Gamaliel Bradford, of Duxborough, James Otis, of Barnstable, John Winslow, of Marshfield, Daniel Howard, of Bridgewater, James Warren, of Plymouth, and William Taylor, of Boston Esquires, and to their heirs and assigns forever.”

An undated (maybe 1766?) plan in Kingsbury’s history, labeled Survey by John McKechnie, shows a standard layout along the east bank of the Kennebec south of the junction with the Sebasticook River.

Fifteen narrow (100-rod by one mile?) lots are laid out along the river, all but one with a settler’s name. Inland, south of Pattee Pond, are six much larger lots, both wider and longer, each with the name of one of the grantees. Additionally, on the southeast shore of the pond Winslow has 209 acres; Otis has 168 acres; and Warren has 81 acres.

A rectangular area farther inland has three rows of lots along the tract’s eastern border, numbered from 1 (on the northeast corner, northern lot in the easternmost row) to 95 (on the southwest corner, western lot on the south line). Each lot appears smaller than Warren’s 81 acres.

North of the Sebasticook’s junction with the Kennebec and east of Pattee Pond, McKechnie laid out lots only along part of the east bank of the Sebasticook, to the north boundary. The area between the two rivers, now the center of Winslow, is blank.

Whittemore’s collection of historic documents includes a 1771 deed to land in Waterville that references an October 1770 plan McKechnie made on the west side of the river.

About this plan, Marriner wrote: “Although Dr. McKechnie ran surveys as far down the river as Merrymeeting Bay and as far up as Skowhegan, it was his detailed and carefully mapped survey of both sides of Kennebec for some distance both north and south of Ticonic Falls [between Waterville and Winslow] that makes his name memorable in any consideration of the land titles.”

McKechnie’s 1770 plan has been affirmed in multiple court decisions, Marriner said. He cited one dispute, in an unnamed town in the 1860s and 1870s, in which a landowner spent more than $15,000 and lost six court cases in a failed effort to get one of his McKechnie-drawn boundary lines moved.

Whittemore described another McKechnie project in Winslow. On March 2, 1772, he wrote, Winslow officials “employed” McKechnie to ask Sylvester Gardiner (a Kennebec Proprietor) for land for a cemetery and a road.

The cemetery became “the old cemetery on Fort Hill” on Winslow’s Halifax Street (see Kit Alexander’s story in the Jan. 20, 2022, issue of The Town Line for a modern account of this historic graveyard). The road became Main Street and College Avenue, main arteries on the west (Waterville) bank.

* * * * * *

Plaisted said John and Mary McKechnie had 13 children. FamilySearch lists eight daughters and six sons, the first 13 born between 1760 and 1781 and a daughter born in 1796, named Lydia. Other sources say Lydia was born in 1777.

Kingsbury wrote that three of the McKechnie children were born in the family’s first Waterville house and one more, whom he called the last, in 1781 in the 1779 house.

Among descendants in the area in 1902, Plaisted said a grandson named Erastus McKechnie was living on a farm “on the road to Oakland” that the family had owned since 1801.

Whittemore told this story: “Early in 1773 the authorities of Hallowell (Augusta) sent five men in a boat to Boothbay to carry to the town the Rev. John Murray who was the first minister to be hired by that town. He proceeded to Winslow and Waterville and July 3, 1773, baptised three children of Dr. John McKechnie. This is the first baptism in town of which we have record.”

McKechnie died in 1782, Kingsbury said in his 1779 house. He was buried, with more than three dozen other early residents (including his son, Obadiah, according to Thayer; Kingsbury listed Obadiah as Simon Tozer’s son), in a no-longer existing cemetery on the south side of Western Avenue “on the rising ground a little east of the bridge over the Messalonskee.”

Kingsbury wrote that after McKechnie died, Mary married David Pattee, identified by Plaisted as builder of the second mill at Crommett’s Mills. Mary died July 21, 1816, according to FamilySearch; Kingsbury said she, too, was buried in the old cemetery.

Roland Hallee, editor of The Town Line, says Waterville used to have “a cemetery south of Western Ave., east of Messalonskee Stream, on South St., at the end of the street where the water district used to be. There also was a mill near there (only the foundation remains).”

Main sources

Kershaw, Gordon E., The Kennebeck Proprietors 1749-1775 (1975)
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892)
Marriner, Ernest, Kennebec Yesterdays (1954)
North James W, The History of Augusta (1870)
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Early surveyors

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by Mary Grow

As promised, the next articles in this series will introduce some of the important surveyors in the central Kennebec Valley as Massachusetts proprietors sold lots – mostly pieces of land they had never seen – to settlers, and other people began lumbering, trapping and farming without the formality of buying a lot.

Readers should remember that Kennebec Company, Kennebec Proprietors, Plymouth Company and Plymouth Proprietors all mean the same organization of Massachusetts businessmen who owned most of the Kennebec Valley. Different local historians preferred different names.

* * * * * *

European settlers had moved into the lower Kennebec Valley in the first half of the 18th century. Once the threat from the Natives and their French supporters ended in the 1760s, interest in upriver lands increased. The Kennebec Proprietors hired Nathan Winslow to survey both sides of the river from Chelsea, south of Augusta, to the north line of present-day Vassalboro, dividing the land for three miles inland into lots.

Multiple historians wrote that Winslow was hired in 1761 and dated his completed survey June 17, 1761. Your writer found in the on-line Maine Memory Network a statement that Winslow covered Pittston, Hallowell, Vassalboro (then including Sidney) and “Some in Winslow town and finished his Survey and made his plan and dated it the 17th of June 1761.”

This statement continued: “all those Surveys was made for the Kennebeck proprietors hath been made from may 1750 & Continually one after another: in Succession as of oft as they Could be.” If this information is accurate, the implication is that Winslow’s work took 11 seasons (but see below for his contradictory birthdate).

In their town histories, Alice Hammond and James North each reproduced the parts of the survey that became Sidney and Augusta, respectively. Winslow laid out three tiers or ranges of lots, each a mile deep, with an eight-rod (132-foot) space for roads between the each tier.

(Winslow’s range roads or rangeways were laid out as straight lines, but might in practice vary with the terrain. Some Kennebec Valley deeds still refer to them; and Waterville has streets named First Rangeway, roughly parallel to the Kennebec, and Second Rangeway, farther west.)

The 100-acre lots with river frontage were 50 rods (825 feet) wide. (At least one source says each lot was 125 acres; the math disagrees.) The maps show Range 2 lots as three times the width (150 rods, or 2,475 feet); and Range 3 lots 75 rods (1,237.5 feet) wide.

Along the river, one of every three lots was reserved for the Proprietors and marked with a P on the plans. Settlers’ lots were marked S. All of the big Range 2 lots were for Proprietors and all of Range 3 for settlers.

Winslow numbered the lots from south to north: in Augusta, on the east side of the river the lots run from 1 to 50, but on the west side, where the survey starts farther upriver, the northernmost lot is 34.

Vassalboro historian Alma Pierce Robbins’ account of Winslow’s survey on the east bank of the river was less detailed, but comparable. She, too, wrote of three tiers of lots, adding that Vassalboro included riverside lots 51 to 102 on the east bank and 35 to 82 on the west (later Sidney) bank. Most of Seven Mile Pond (now Webber Pond in Vassalboro) was in the third tier.

Rev. Edwin Carey Whittemore, in his history of Waterville, said that a March 12, 1766, grant from the Plymouth Company gave six named men 18,600 acres “covering the present Winslow,” with conditions.

Within four years, the new landowners were to have 50 settlers, at least 25 of them with their families, and 50 houses “not less than twenty feet square and seven feet studd [high?] each.” Each settler was to have cleared and ready for mowing at least five acres adjoining his house.

Robbins said the Proprietors gave settlers three years to clear five acres and build a 20-by-20-foot house, and required the settler or his heirs to occupy the house for another seven years. In addition, for 10 years each settler was to work two days a year on town roads and another two days for the church or the minister’s house.

These requirements were common for Kennebec Valley land grants. Their effects seem to have varied.

Whittemore claimed that the plan for (future) Winslow “was the only one to succeed of many similar propositions.” However, the 1761 plan in North’s Augusta history has owners’ names, rather than numbers, on most lots; and the China bicentennial history says that “between 1762 and 1766 most of these riverside lots [none in China, which is inland from the river] were taken up.”

For the April 2011 issue of the Sidney Historical Society’s newsletter, Polly Furber wrote an article on some of the early deeds in the town, based on Nathan Winslow’s 1761 survey. Having done that research, she decided to find out more about the surveyor, commenting that “I have never seen his name mentioned in any local history.”

Furber found that Winslow was the son of Nathan and Charity (Hall) Winslow, born April 1, 1743, in Falmouth – therefore, she pointed out, only 18 in 1761. He lived all or most of his life in Falmouth; Furber found a Quaker document recording the births of his five sons and five daughters there, between 1765 and 1785.

He married in 1764, probably to Jane Crane (according to multiple sites, including the list of his children in Quaker records; Furber called her Judith). FamilySearch says she died in 1805. In 1807, Furber found, he married again, a woman name Mary Vinal from Dresden.

FamilySearch adds that Winslow “registered for military service in 1778.” He was still actively surveying into the 1800s. FamilySearch dates his death Nov. 7, 1820, aged 77.

An on-line genealogy of a remotely-related family named Nagel says Winslow died Nov 7, 1826 (not 1820), in Falmouth. This source says his wife, Jane Crane, was born Nov. 12, 1742, in Sagadahoc (in the lower Kennebec Valley) and died March 30, 1805, in Windham.

* * * * * *

Surveyor Ephraim Ballard is mentioned in several early accounts. He was born May 6 or May 17, 1725, in Oxford, Massachusetts (or in Billerica and moved with his parents to Oxford in 1726). On Dec. 19, 1754, in Oxford, he married Martha Moore (born Feb. 9, 1735), author of the well-known diary of life as a midwife in the central Kennebec Valley from 1785 to 1812.

In 1775, Ephraim (and presumably his family) came to Fort Halifax. James North wrote in his 1870 Augusta history that on Oct. 15, 1777 (another source says 1776), Ballard moved into surveyor John Jones’ former house in Augusta (then Hallowell) and took over Jones’ mills, which Jones had abandoned because of his Loyalist sympathies.

Most sources wonder if Ballard, too, was a Loyalist. North thought not, citing 200 British pounds given him from the town “for his contribution to the revolutionary cause” in 1780, as well as his election to town offices.

He was a Hallowell selectman from 1784 through 1787. Later, he was the town’s tax collector, imprisoned in 1804 for failing to collect all the taxes he should have. Maine An Encyclopedia calls him a “prominent local resident” and says he is “frequently mentioned in the town’s records.”

This source calls Ballard one of the Proprietors’ “principal surveyors” and says, “His name appears on hundreds of maps in the area, and of such far-flung locations as Canaan, Lincoln Plantation, Bangor, Magalloway Plantation, Eustis, and Dover-Foxcroft.”

One such map, found on line, is dated 1794 and shows “the few county roads and three church parishes of early Hallowell,” before the two northern parishes became a separate town – eventually the City of Augusta — in 1797. A recent comment on the map says, “Mr. Ballard drew this map on the same kind of paper that Martha Ballard cut and folded to make her diary.”

Ballard is named as the surveyor of part of Albion, an area Kingsbury said the Kennebec Proprietors had given to Nathan Winslow. North wrote that while Ballard was surveying in Balltown (the area that later became Jefferson and Whitefield), armed men (perhaps settlers without deeds?) stole his surveying instruments and papers and drove him away.

One survey North described was in 1796, for the Plymouth Company, tracing a stream that flows into the Kennebec in Gardiner. In June, Ballard reported he had “ascertained the general course of the Kennebec from ‘Cobbossee stream’ down to the ‘chops'”; had found “the utmost limits of Cobbosseecontee towards the western ocean”; and had run a line from that point east-southeast to the Kennebec.

The “utmost limits” of the stream Ballard defined as the most southern point at which water was running into it. North said he was paid seven pounds, 10 shillings for this job.

Also in 1796, North wrote, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts hired Ballard to survey potential settlements on the Penobscot, in what became Hampden and Bangor.

One of Ballard’s surveys created the Ballard Line. As Millard Howard explained in his 2015 Palermo history, in the area that became Palermo the Kennebec Proprietors’ claim overlapped with a separate land grant called the Waldo Patent, owned in 1795 by General Henry Knox.

In June 1795, Knox and the Proprietors agreed on a division and hired Ballard to implement it on the ground. The Ballard Line is close to the eastern border of Palermo, Howard wrote, “leaving most of the town to the Kennebec Proprietors.”

Martha Ballard

Martha Ballard’s diary recorded some of her husband’s work. (Excerpts were included in a Feb. 16, 2023, article in this series in The Town Line.)

On Aug. 23, 1796, she said, a committee (unspecified) hired him to go to Dresden “to lay out a road to the point.” After preparations that included bringing “two birch cannoes [her spelling] to our shore,” he left at 10 a.m. Sept. 5; he came home Oct. 13.

Martha’s diary shows him actively surveying in following years, for the Proprietors, for individual settlers and sometimes laying out new roads for a town.

In mid-April, 1801, she recorded that he was dividing 2,000 acres somewhere between the Kennebec and the Penobscot. In late June that year he had a job in Bowdoinham. In September, he was working in Readfield, and in November, in Fairfield. December 22 he spent running the Sidney-Augusta town line.

In 1803, Martha wrote that he “sett [her spelling] out to go to Davis Town” on July 26; he returned on Sept. 27. (The length of time he was away suggests he could have been working in Maine’s current Davis Town, in Franklin County north of Rangeley and Mooselookmeguntick lakes, almost 100 miles from Augusta.)

Besides being a surveyor, Ballard ran the Jones mills he took over during the Revolution, North says until the fall of 1791. Other sources mention his working as a builder and a farmer.

The Ballards had three sons and two, three or four daughters (sources disagree), born between 1756 and 1779. At least one daughter, maybe two or three, died in childhood in a June 1769 diphtheria epidemic in Oxford.

On Nov. 1, 1799, North said, Ephraim and Martha moved to their son Jonathan’s riverside farm about a mile north of Augusta’s center.

Most sources say Martha Ballard died in May 1812, but North quoted an Aug. 7 1812, diary entry and wrote that she died within the next three weeks. Ephraim died January 7, 1821. Find a Grave says they “were buried in Augusta in a small family burial ground on…[their] son Jonathan’s property. The cemetery was later plowed up to plant crops.”

Main sources

Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992).
Howard, Millard, An Introduction to the Early History of Palermo, Maine (second edition, December 2015).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870).
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971).
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, A Midwife’s Tale The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (1990).

Websites, miscellaneous.