Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Augusta’s civic meeting houses

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Fort Western, in August

by Mary Grow

Enough, for now, of genealogies (although two boxes about people accompany this article). This week, your writer provides summary histories of more of Augusta’s 18th and 19th century public buildings.

Settled in the 1760s as part of Hallowell, Augusta became a separate town in 1797; became the shire town of Kennebec County in 1799 and the capital of the State Maine in 1827; and was incorporated as a city in 1849.

The first public building seems to have been a meeting house that served for civic and religious gatherings, its origin described in James North’s 1870 history of Augusta. (North used the name “meeting house” for buildings for civic gatherings and buildings for worship; quite often the same building served both purposes.)

Next came a series of courthouses – 1790, 1801-02 and 1829-30 – described in the April 3 issue in this series (related to the legal men who frequented them).

After the first courthouse, Henry Kingsbury said in his Kennebec County history, came the first jail, built in 1793 (Augusta jails will be the topic of a future article in this series).

* * * * * *

North named many early (1762-1771) settlers in the part of the Kennebec Valley that became Augusta, who got their land from the company known at different times as the Plymouth Proprietors, Plymouth Company, Kennebec Proprietors and by other names.

He said nothing about any public building except Fort Western (built in 1754 as part of British defense against the French) before Hallowell (then including Augusta) was incorporated in 1771.

Fort Western, on the east bank of the Kennebec, was the center of the settlement, which started there and expanded on both sides of the river. North described early town meetings at the fort in May and July 1771.

Voters at the May meeting raised money for roads and schooling, and told their selectmen to petition the Plymouth Proprietors to designate lots for a church and for “a meeting-house and burying place and training field.”

At a September, 1773, town meeting, voters approved building a meeting house, on the east bank of the Kennebec. The Revolution intervened, and North did not revert to the topic until the fall of 1777, when voters repeated the decision.

By then, according to Captain Charles Nash’s chapters on Augusta in Kingsbury’s history, the west side of the river was becoming as settled as the east. This time, North wrote, voters agreed to draw lots to decide which side of the Kennebec the meeting house should be on. The east side won, and voters created a committee to find a lot and assemble materials so the meeting house could go up on May 15, 1778.

West-side residents objected, and again the deadline slipped. In the spring of 1779, North wrote, after discussion at two consecutive meetings, voters finally decided to build the meeting house on the west side of the river, near what became Augusta’s Market Square – but not that year.

As best your writer can determine, Market Square was on the west bank of the Kennebec where Winthrop Street comes downhill and crosses Water Street, about in the middle of today’s Water Street business district.

Voters at a 1781 meeting voted to build the meeting house in 1782, chose a building committee and raised 150 pounds, payable “in lumber or the products of the land.” North wrote work started in 1782.

In one chapter he said the April 1783 annual town meeting was convened there and “immediately adjourned to Fort Western.” In another chapter, he said perhaps the first voters’ meeting there was on May 5, 1783.

The building was not finished immediately – floors, exterior and windows were left undone, and it could be used “only in warm weather.” In 1792, North wrote, three prominent men were chosen to plan finishing it; in 1793, money was raised by the sale of pews, and on Oct. 9, 1795, Henry Sewall (see box) wrote in his diary that he had helped plaster it.

A picture in North’s history shows a rectangular two-story wooden building (36-by-50-feet, North and Nash wrote), with a two-story porch that sheltered the entrance and contained stairs to the gallery.

By the spring of 1810, North wrote, town meetings had been moved to the courthouse, and the meeting house was abandoned and in disrepair. It stood partly in Winthrop Street, which had been laid out after the building was up.

In March 1810, the building was taken down and the materials sold to Lewis Hamlen, from whom “the town” bought them back and used them to build a new meeting house at the intersection of Winthrop and Elm streets, three blocks west of State Street.

This building was also two stories, North said, with town meetings held upstairs. The porch with stairs was on the back this time. The first town meeting there was a special meeting on Dec. 25, 1811.

(New England, with its Puritan heritage, did not generally observe Christmas until the latter half of the 19th century. It became an official United States holiday in 1870.)

The meeting house was used “for town meetings and school purposes” until 1848. By then, North wrote, it was “dilapidated,” and people thought the lot could be better used.

Efforts to rebuild or repair failed, and on April 10, 1848, voters told the selectmen to sell the building. North wrote that a man named Ai Staples bought it, for $105; moved it to a nearby lot; added 20 feet on the rear; and converted the second floor into a 50-by-60-foot hall with a 12-foot ceiling, named Winthrop Hall.

(Ai Staples [1806 -1880] was a Gorham native who moved to Augusta in 1838 with his wife, Ann Cascoline Merrill, and “worked in grocery, shipping and real estate businesses,” the Maine Memory Network says. Its website has a c. 1840 picture of him, donated by the Maine Historical Society.)

Augusta became a city in 1849, by legislative act, followed by local voters’ approval. A mayor, city council and other officials were chosen in the spring of 1850. An effort to go back to town government was defeated in July of 1853.

Wikipedia says the first city offices were in the Augusta Opera House, and “meetings were held in Winthrop Hall.” The hall was used for municipal and public gatherings of many sorts. In 1854, another 30 feet was added on the rear, making the space 50-by-90-feet, and the ceiling was raised to 20 feet.

The federal government took over Winthrop Hall in the fall of 1861 for a military hospital, North wrote. It was one of at least three in the city during the Civil War.

After the war, Winthrop Hall was again renovated and renamed Waverly Hall.

According to Wikipedia, the first Augusta City Hall, a two-story brick building on the east bank of the Kennebec at 1 Cony Street, on the north side of the street that crosses the river on the lower bridge, was built in 1895-96 and served until 1987. The second floor was used for public events (John Philip Sousa played there in 1897, Wikipedia says). The building is on the National Register of Historic Places, and is now an assisted living facility.

Augusta’s current city hall is also on the east side of the river, at 16 Cony Street, on the south side of the street near old Fort Western.

Henry Sewall

Henry Sewall

Henry Sewall was born October 24, 1752, in York, Maine, and spent his youth helping on his father’s farm and learning to be a mason like his father. He served in the Revolutionary army from May 1775 through the end of the war, and first came to Hallowell in September 1783.

After an unsuccessful business venture in New York, he returned to Hallowell around 1790. He soon became town clerk and held the post for 35 years, in Hallowell and then Augusta; was clerk of the Maine District Court from 1789 to 1818 and county register of deeds from 1799 to 1817; and rose to the rank of major-general in the state militia.

He also kept a diary, from which North drew information for his history.

The general married three times, on Feb. 9, 1786, to a cousin named Tabitha Sewall, on June 3, 1811, to another cousin, Rachel Crosby; and on Sept. 9, 1833 (shortly before his 81st birthday) to Elizabeth Lowell, from Boston. He and Tabitha had two sons and five daughters.

North told this story about General Sewall.

“When [the Marquis de] Lafayette, the nation’s guest, reached Portland in 1825, Gen. Sewall, who was well acquainted with him in the army, went on to see him, and warily approached in the crowd not intending at first to make himself known, but Lafayette saw and recognized him and perceiving his design exclaimed, ‘Ah! Henry Sewall you can’t cheat me.’ They embraced, and the aged soldiers wept.”

James W. North Jr.

James W. North, who wrote the book on which most of this week’s article is based, was born Feb. 12, 1810, in Clinton, according to WikiTree.

In his Augusta chapter in Kingsbury’s history, Capt. Charles E. Nash wrote of him, “Augusta never had a nobler citizen, nor one more loyal to its every interest, or who will be longer remembered, than James W. North.”

North’s parents died when he was two, Nash wrote. He provided no information on who took over the boy’s care, going on to his career: he studied at the Gardiner Lyceum (just downriver from Hallowell), read law with a Gardiner lawyer and was admitted to the bar in 1831. His first law office was in Augusta, in the fall of 1831; in the spring of 1832, he moved back to the part of Clinton that became Sebasticook in 1842 and Benton in 1850.

During 14 years there, he dammed the Sebasticook and used the water power for grist mills and sawmills, including “manufacturing lumber from his own timber lands.”

Then, Nash said, “his ancestral ties” brought him back to Augusta, where he owned “parcels of inherited land, that had originally belonged to his great-grandfather, Gershom Flagg.” Flagg (1705 – 1771) was a surveyor and one of the Plymouth proprietors.

On these lots, Nash said, North built North’s Block (your writer guesses a commercial building or buildings) and the 1856 Meonian building, using wood cut from his land in Benton, sawed at his mill on the Sebasticook and floated down to Augusta.

The Meonian Building stood between Fore and Water streets, six stories tall on Fore Street and four stories on Water Street. North said lower-floor stores and offices were topped by a two-story, 50-by-75-foor public hall 27 feet high, “with galleries hung on two sides and one end.”

The building’s name “is derived from Maeonia, a county of Asia Minor,” North wrote. He did not say why he chose it. (“County” is his word; on-line sources mostly say “region,” though some say “city” and one says Maeonia was briefly an independent kingdom. It was in Lydia, which is now part of Turkey.)

The 1856 building burned in Augusta’s downtown fire on Sept. 17, 1865, and was rebuilt in 1866, the same dimensions and with improvements, North wrote.

On another of his lots, he built Hotel North in 1877.

Augusta voters elected North to the legislature in 1849 and again in 1853, and he was Augusta’s mayor from 1857 through 1860. He was a “leading promoter” of gas lights, installed in Augusta in 1853, and “clerk and treasurer” of the city gas company until 1881, when his oldest son, Dr. James W. North, took over. The older North was also president of one Augusta bank and a director of another.

North died June 7, 1882. He and his wife, Phebe (Upton) (1810 – Sept. 11 or Sept. 13, 1876), whom he married Sept. 23, 1834, are buried in Augusta’s Forest grove cemetery, with all but the youngest of their four sons.

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: Fletcher family

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A. B. Fletcher’s daughter’s home where Abisha Benson Fletcher died.

by Mary Grow

First, here is an update on last week’s article about lawyer Sanford A. Kingsbury, who supposedly practiced in China. Readers may remember that in 1835, he was opening mills on Kingsbury Pond, in the plantation named after him, some 50 miles from Waterville (and another five miles or so from China).

Apparently he remained involved in China, despite the distance.

The China bicentennial history says a steam mill near China Village, at the head of China Lake, started grinding corn in 1835 and received a legislative charter in 1836 (allowing its owners to grind grain of all kinds; saw lumber; and make things of “iron, steel, cotton or wool”). Kingsbury is listed among the company’s shareholders.

In 1837, Kingsbury and five other men “were incorporated as the China Manufacturing Company, with the right to manufacture leather, cotton, wool, or paper; apparently this corporation remained on paper only,” the history says.

(Your writer excuses herself for not finding this information a week ago: as she said then, Sanford Kingsbury is not listed in the index to the China history, and only by happenstance did she find his name in the text.)

* * * * * *

An alert reader commented on last week’s article mentioning a lawyer named Abisha Benson and, later, lawyer Alfred Fletcher’s brother named Abisha Benson Fletcher.

Your writer’s surmise (based on no evidence) is that Abisha Fletcher’s parents named their son in honor of the lawyer. The timing works: Abisha Benson was practicing in China in the 1820s, and Abisha Benson Fletcher was born in China in 1822.

A summary check on Abisha Fletcher’s parents, Colonel Robert and Nancy (Sprague) Fletcher, identified Robert as a prominent China citizen, who might well have been friends with, and perhaps wished to show respect for, a local lawyer.

Following is some information on Robert Fletcher and his immediate family (none of whom seem to have been lawyers).

* * * * * *

Robert Fletcher

Robert Fletcher was born Aug. 31, 1786, in Temple, New Hampshire, Find a Grave says. His father, also Robert Fletcher was born in Massachusetts; served in the French and Indian and Revolutionary wars; and moved first to Hallowell and later to Skowhegan, where he died in 1838, at the age of 93.

China’s Robert was the oldest of Massachusetts Robert’s three children by Sarah (Foster) Fletcher, who was born in 1746. They married in March, 1771, Find a Grave says. (The site does not explain why their first child was not born until 15 years after the marriage.)

The younger Robert came to China in the early 1800s – different sources say 1807 and 1810. When the War of 1812 started in June, China raised two militia companies, the China bicentennial history says. Fletcher, then in his twenties, was the captain in command of the larger one, with 50 privates.

In September 1814 Fletcher’s company was ordered to Wiscasset to repel an expected British landing (that did not happen). By then it was part of the Third Regiment, Second Brigade, in the Maine militia.

The China history says Fletcher was still in the Third Regiment in 1820, as lieutenant-colonel. In 1821 he is listed as its colonel.

Fletcher built the second general store in China Village (Japheth Washburn built the first one, in 1804, and rebuilt it after it burned in 1806). The history says Fletcher’s store was “noted especially for the night the heavy stock of rum broke through the floor and fell into the cellar.” Like many other men of his time, he was also a farmer, according to the history.

Fletcher was involved in town affairs at intervals. The China history lists him as a Harlem selectman in 1815. After northern Harlem and China merged in February, 1818, he was one of the first three China selectmen elected, and was simultaneously surveyor of highways, fence viewer, field driver and hogreeve.

(The surveyor of highways was responsible for inspecting roads, seeing that obstructions were cleared and necessary repairs done.

(A fence viewer’s job included approving the location and condition of fences, essential to keep livestock from damaging neighbors’ property. Title 30-A, Maine Revised Statutes, still lists the position.

(The field driver was supposed to round up and deliver to the town pound domestic animals that had escaped their fences and were roaming at large. An excerpt from Massachusetts law found on line lists them as “horses, mules, asses, neat cattle, sheep, goats or swine going at large in the public ways, or on common and unimproved land within his [the field driver’s] town and not under the care of a keeper.”

(Apparently Massachusetts field drivers had Sundays off, for the law further says that on Sundays, “any other inhabitant of the town” can capture wayward animals and get the same fee as the field driver got.

(A hogreeve, Wikipedia says, was a specialized field driver, responsible for catching loose swine and appraising the damage they had done. Every hog was supposed to have a nose-ring; if one did not, the hogreeve could add a ring and bill the owner.)

In April 1823, China voters chose Robert Fletcher to serve on a five-man committee to organize building a bridge over the brook flowing into the head of China Lake (the same bridge that took up Abisha Benson’s time two years earlier and Robert’s son Alfred Fletcher’s time a decade later, as reported in last week’s article).

Fletcher, like Benson, was a Mason. The China history says when Central Lodge, No. 45, was organized in China Village in December, 1823, with Benson as its first Master, Robert Fletcher was the first junior warden.

A comment by a Fletcher descendant on a Find a Grave site says Robert Fletcher built, in 1827, the Fletcher-Main house on Main Street in the village, now home of the Albert Church Brown Memorial Library and part of the China Village Historic District.

Records suggest Fletcher was a Methodist: the China history lists him as a member of the building committee for a Methodist church organized in China Village in the early 1840s.

Find a Grave says Fletcher and his first wife, Nancy (Sprague) Fletcher (1788-1853), whom he married in Sidney in 1805 (when he was 18 and she was 16, Find a Grave says), had either nine or 10 children (both numbers are on her page), as follows:

— Sarah “Sally” (Fletcher) Russ, born Dec. 20, 1806 (or 1805 – Find a Grave has both dates on her page), in Sidney; married a Weeks Mills (Weeks Mills is one of China’s four villages) businessman named Charles Austin Russ in December 1830; died in China March 22, 1858, and is buried in Weeks Mills cemetery.
— Dr. Franklin Parker Fletcher (May 15, 1808 – Oct. 5, 1896), born and died in China and buried in Weeks Mills cemetery.
— Mary Ann (Fletcher) Russ, born June 20, 1810, in China; married her older sister’s husband’s younger brother, Francis Anderson Russ (no date given); and died June 18, 1900, in Belfast. One of their children was named Robert Fletcher Russ (1841 -1934).
— Julia E. Fletcher (July 1813 – Nov. 29, 1833), born and died in China and buried in China Village cemetery.
— Sophia (Fletcher) Maxwell, born in 1814, second of three wives of Robert Maxwell; she died Jan. 14, 1853, and the unnamed infant listed as their only child died Jan. 31, 1853, less than a month old. Mother and child are buried in the Weeks Mills cemetery.
— Captain and lawyer Alfred A. Fletcher (Aug. 31, 1817, or 1818 – Aug. 18, 1858), to whom readers were introduced last week.
— Elizabeth S. (Fletcher) Giddings, born in China in 1821 and died there Sept. 9, 1872. She and her husband, Job Giddings, are buried in Weeks Mills cemetery.
— Sergeant Abisha Benson Fletcher, born in China April 18, 1822, and died there June 21, 1906 (see below).
— In a Find a Grave paragraph naming Robert and Nancy Sprague Fletcher’s children, the next name is Martha J. Fletcher, born in 1826. The list of their children lower on the page, and the corresponding list on Robert Fletcher’s Find a Grave page, omit Martha.
— Susan (Fletcher) Weeks, born in China in 1828; married Albion Weeks on June 6, 1859, in China; died in China Feb. 9, 1881, and is buried in Weeks Mills cemetery.

Robert Fletcher’s second wife, Find a Grave says, was a widow from Gorham named Ruth Woodman Hanscom or Hanscome, born May 2, 1802. They were married in 1855.

Robert died Jan. 30, 1865, and is buried in China Village cemetery. Ruth died Dec. 16, 1893, in La Crosse, Wisconsin, where she is buried.

* * * * * *

Continuing with Robert and Nancy Fletcher’s youngest son, Abisha Benson Fletcher, Find a Grave has a copy of his obituary from the June 26, 1906, issue of the Kennebec Journal.

It begins by calling him “one of China’s old and most honored citizens.” He died June 21, 1906, aged 84, in the “old farmhouse” where his daughter, Marion Main, then lived and where he died.

The obituary says Abisha Fletcher lived in Weeks Mills when a young man, and “was engaged in the boot, shoe and tannery business.” Henry Kingsbury added, in his 1892 Kennebec County history, that Fletcher, his brother-in-law Charles A. Russ and John Reed bought an existing tannery (no purchase date) “and ran it until about 1870.” They also operated, in a separate building, a shoe factory that employed 80 workers; it burned in 1862.

Fletcher spent a year in the army, the obituary says. Kingsbury listed Abisha B. as one of the six Fletchers enlisted during the Civil War. Neither source has dates.

The obituary says he returned to the farm, and then moved to China Village and ran a general store (still operating in 1892, Kingsbury wrote).

(If he lived in the house his father built, his home was less than a block [if Main Street were divided into blocks] north of the former business center where his store was. The Methodist church – see below – was a short distance farther north.)

Abisha Benson Fletcher

A summary of Abisha Fletcher’s civic activities includes serving as a China selectman (for three terms, 1868, 1869 and 1870, the China history says); member of the Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.), including a term as commander of the Amos J. Billings Post, in China Village, founded in June 1884; one of the local Methodist church’s “strongest and most loyal supporters” for over 60 years; a Republican, a temperance advocate and a supporter of education.

The China history lists Abisha Fletcher as one of a seven-man committee chosen at a March 1886 town meeting to study whether China should consolidate or maybe abolish school districts. Committee members were all “prominent men with much experience in local school administration,” the history says.

Kingsbury added that Fletcher served at one time as president of the China Cemetery Association, organized in 1865 to maintain the China Village cemetery.

Abisha Fletcher married Mariam Clark Spratt (Dec. 26, 1824 – Nov. 23, 1899), and they had nine children between 1845 and 1862. Find a Grave says Abisha and Mariam are buried in China Village cemetery, with six of their nine children.

The obituary describes Fletcher as having a “genial, social nature,” with a “cheerful optimism, a kindly looking for and appreciating the best in his fellowmen and in all of life as it came to him.”

Kennebec Journal, Thursday, 26 Jun 1906

Mrs. Marion Norton accompanied by her son Harold and little daughter Audrey, are at Charles Main’s. Mrs. Norton was called here by the death of her father.

The death of A. B. Fletcher, one of China’s old and most honored citizens, occurred at the home of his daughter, Mrs. Charles Main, Thursday, June 21. His age was 84 years.

It commends his generosity, adding “One of the oldest and truest standbys of the town of China has gone and many mourn his loss.”

Fletcher’s funeral was held in his farmhouse. The obituary ends: “As the casket was carried from the house, the old Methodist bell to which his ears had never before been dulled and where his willing feet had always hastened, sadly and solemnly tolled a last ‘Goodbye.'”

Main sources

Grow, Mary M., China Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Lincoln County Historical Society opens season (2025)

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Colonial Maine Living History Association reenactors honor veterans on Memorial Day, at the Pownalborough Court House, in Dresden. The event begins at 11 a.m., on Monday, May 26. (photo courtesy of Bob Bond)

The Lincoln County Historical Association (LCHA) is kicking off its 2025 season with a range of engaging events that invite the public to experience history in different ways. Highlights include a Memorial Day ceremony, a visit from historical archaeologist Tim Dinsmore, new hands-on experiences at the Old Jail, and Community Day offering free admission to three historic sites on Sunday, June 1.

Seasonal programming begins on Monday, May 26, at 11 a.m., with a Memorial Day observance at the Pownalborough Court House, in Dresden, where visitors can join historical reenactors in honoring nine veterans of three different wars buried in the Old Court House Cemetery. The event will include flower placements on graves, a brief prayer, and a ceremonial flag-raising, followed by guided tours of the 1761 Pownalborough Court House.

On Saturday, May 31, historical archaeologist Tim Dinsmore will be at the Chapman-Hall House, in Damariscotta, from 12:30 to 4:00 p.m., to talk with visitors about his archaeological work at the site. This informal opportunity gives guests the chance to learn about the goals and findings of the excavation, and ask questions about historical archaeology.

Sunday, June 1, marks LCHA’s annual Community Day, with free admission to all three historic sites: Pownalborough Court House (1761) in Dresden, Chapman-Hall House (1754), in Damariscotta, and the Lincoln County Museum & Old Jail (1811), in Wiscasset.

At the Old Jail Museum, families can engage in new hands-on activities that bring 19th-century daily life to life for younger visitors. Children will explore what it was like for the jailer’s family in the early 1800s, making for an interactive and educational experience.

Seasonal hours begin after these special events, and all sites will be open during weekends through the summer. Pownalborough Court House will be open Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. through Indigenous Peoples Day. Chapman-Hall House will be open Saturdays and Sundays from noon to 4 p.m. through October 12, and the Old Jail Museum will be open Saturdays and Sundays from noon to 4 p.m. through September 28.

For more details, including event information and seasonal programming, visit www.lincolncountyhistory.org or follow LCHA on social media. Facebook: Lincoln County Historical Association (Maine) and Pownalborough Court House Museum, instagram: @historicallincolncounty.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: 19th century lawyers

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Kennebec County Courthouse

by Mary Grow

Winslow wasn’t the only small town in this section of the Kennebec River valley with its own 19th-century lawyer(s), though no other seems to have been as conspicuous as Eleazer Ripley (see The Town Line, May 8, 2025, page 10).

Or maybe many were, and appear less known and important now only because of lack of information. A legal case that in 1825 enthralled an entire town and determined the futures of a dozen people might be completely forgotten by 2025.

Several local lawyers practiced in more than one town; and often, a lawyer who started in a small town would gravitate to Waterville or Augusta (or a more distant city). Your writer is reminded, again, that in the 1800s a trip from Sidney or China to a courthouse in Augusta or Waterville was not the casual undertaking that it is today.

This week’s article will offer information on three lawyers who, James W. Bradbury wrote in Henry Kingsbury’s 1892 Kennebec County history, practiced in the small town of China. The first two lived in China Village, in the north end of town.

* * * * * *

Chronologically as well as alphabetically, lawyer Abisha Benson comes first. He arrived in China in or before 1817, the China bicentennial history says (it does not say where he came from). Bradbury said he was practicing in China Village in the 1820s; two nephews, brothers Samuel Page Benson and Gustavus Benson, studied with him after Samuel graduated from Bowdoin College in 1825.

(Samuel and Gustavus were sons of a pre-1810 settler in Winthrop, a doctor named Peleg Benson. Bradbury wrote that Samuel opened his law practice in Winthrop in 1829 and was Maine’s secretary of state in 1838 and 1841 and a two-term Congressman in 1853 and 1855. He said nothing more about Gustavus.)

Of Benson’s law cases, your writer found no record. He left traces in town records as an apparently trusted and useful citizen.

Between 1819 and 1824 one of the topics at China town meetings (then held up to five times a year) was maintenance of the bridge across the stream feeding into China Lake’s east basin, just east of China Village. The history says an April 3, 1820, town meeting authorized paying Jacob McLaughlin $10 for a year’s repairs; a Nov. 6 meeting awarded a 10-year repair contract to low bidder, Benjamin Lewis, for $178.

On June 18, 1821, voters decided to review the Lewis contract and appointed lawyer Benson and two other men “to ‘examine’ the bridge and the contract.” In September, Lewis accepted a replacement seven-year contract. After more discussion, in which Benson’s participation is not recorded, in March, 1824, voters appropriated $694 for a new bridge.

In 1825, Benson was chosen a member of a larger committee to investigate whether China should create a poor farm to house paupers. The committee’s report, if any, is not recorded, the bicentennial history says; not until 1845 did China establish its poor farm.

The China history identifies Benson as a Mason, the first Master of Central Lodge, No. 45, in China Village. The Lodge’s charter was requested at a Dec. 27, 1823, meeting, and was approved April 8, 1824; Benson is listed as master from December, 1823, to June, 1826.

In March, 1827, Central Lodge members voted gifts of money to four members, including G. A. Benson (probably Abisha’s nephew) and J. H. Benson, “in consequence of their loss in the late fire.” The bicentennial history offers no additional information.

* * * * * *

Lawyer Alfred Fletcher, according to Bradbury’s summary, was a China native, born in 1818 (according to Find a Grave, Aug. 31, 1817). He was a Bowdoin College graduate. He read law with Sandford (elsewhere Sanford) A. Kingsbury “and practiced in China all his life.”

Fletcher first appears in the China bicentennial history in 1850, after almost 20 years of renewed public discussion of that bridge at the head of China Lake’s east basin that had taken some of Abisha Benson’s time in 1821.

The series of events Fletcher got involved in started with a special town meeting in the spring of 1831, at which voters appointed a bridge committee (unnamed in the history); recessed for 20 minutes while members reached a recommendation; and approved spending $800 to elevate their almost-new bridge by two feet.

The reason, as rediscussed at a Sept. 12, 1831, meeting, was that the Vassalboro mill owners who owned the China Lake outlet dam in East Vassalboro were keeping the lake’s water level so high as to repeatedly damage the bridge. The controversy continued through the summer of 1834, then disappeared from town records until May 19, 1843.

That day, town meeting voters appointed S. A. Kingsbery (probably lawyer Sanford Kingsbury) as one of two “agents” to either sue or make an agreement with the Vassalboro mill owners, and appropriated $149.50 for repairs. Discussions were suspended that fall, because, according to a resolution adopted at a September town meeting, there wasn’t much damage the previous spring; and “it is uncertain whether property can be found to respond [to] any verdict for damages that might be obtained.”

A June 1850 town meeting discussion led to the appointment of the committee Fletcher served on. Its assignment was to consider options: sue Vassalboro millowners, negotiate with Vassalboro millowners, repair the bridge and road. The history says the committee report does not appear in town records; but the bridge was repaired in 1851 and 1852.

The China history lists Fletcher as a selectman from 1851 through 1856; says he served on China’s town school committee in 1856-57; and lists him as selectman for another two years in 1865 and 1866.

Bradbury wrote that Fletcher “served two years in the state senate.” Legislative records found on line show he served in the House in 1857 and in the Senate in 1858 and 1859.

The legislators’ payroll for the legislature’s 36th session, a term from Jan. 7 to April 17, 1857, lists Fletcher as the representative from China and says he attended 101 days (as did the majority of legislators). His travel distance was 25 miles (one way, undoubtedly) and he was paid $207 for his service.

(Also on the payroll were three Aroostook County legislators who also attended 101 days, and obviously did not travel back and forth very often. The one who was only 195 miles from his home in Linneus got $241; the one from No. 11 [probably now Ashland], 250 miles from Augusta, got $252; Madawaska’s representative, 300 miles from home, got $262.)

A payroll for the Senate of the 37th legislature, for a term from Jan. 6 to March 29, 1858, names Alfred Fletcher as one of three members from the fourth (Senate) district. This document lists his travel distance as 50 miles (round trip); he was paid $171 for attending 83 days (the standard for that term).

During the Civil War, Find a Grave says, Fletcher enlisted Sept. 10, 1862; was mustered in a month later in Augusta; and was a captain in the 24th Infantry, Company G. The site describes him as “dark complexion, blue eyes, blk hair, 5′ 10 and ½ [inches].”

He left the army Jan. 10, 1863, short of his nine-months’ enlistment period. Find a Grave gives no explanation; it says simply “Resigned and discharged.”

Kingsbury’s chapter on military history lists six Fletchers from China who enlisted after the 1861 rush of Union volunteers subsided and state governments began offering bounties and other inducements. They included Abisha B. Fletcher and Capt. Alfred Fletcher. Abisha B. (for Benson) was Alfred’s younger brother, born in 1822; Find a Grave says he was a sergeant.

Alfred Fletcher married Elizabeth P. Larrabee on Dec. 12, 1841, in Vassalboro (according to FamilySearch). Elizabeth was born Aug. 22, 1821, or 1822, in Unity (then in Hancock County, after 1827 in Waldo County) or in Kennebec County (no town named).

The Fletchers had three sons, Find a Grave says: Eben L, born Oct. 11, 1842, moved to Belfast as a young man and died there June 1, 1920; George A., born in China July 9, 1845, and died there Sept. 8, 1848; and a second George A., born April 11, 1852, and died in Maine Sept. 22, 1907 (Find a Grave says he is buried in Dixfield).

Alfred Fletcher was 50 when he died Aug. 18, 1868, in China, according to his gravestone in the China Village cemetery. Family members buried there include his parents, Col. Robert and Nancy (Sprague) Fletcher; his widow, Elizabeth, who died Feb. 2, 1875; their second son, George, who lived only three years; and Alfred’s brother, Abisha Benson Fletcher, who died in June 1906.

* * * * * *

Then there is attorney Kingsbury, mentioned above as Alfred Fletcher’s law teacher (probably in the 1840s) and the town’s agent in 1843. Bradbury wrote one sentence about him: “Sandford A. Kingsbury practiced law in China as early as 1824.”

FamilySearch says Kingsbury was born July 31, 1782, in Claremont, New Hampshire. Your writer found two Sanford A. Kingsburys, father and son, listed in the on-line “Ledger,” self-described as “A Database of Students of the Litchfield Law School and the Litchfield Female Academy.” This law school was established in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1774, and closed in 1833, after educating more than 1,100 students.

The Ledger says the younger Sanford Kingsbury attended the law school in 1801. He graduated from Dartmouth College the same year, and got a master’s degree from Dartmouth “between 1807 and 1828.”

According to this source, Kingsbury moved to Maine and began to practice law in Gardiner.

FamilySearch adds that on Sept. 29, 1807 (or in October, according to the Ledger), in Hallowell, Kingsbury married Hannah Nye Agry. They had three children, listed as Rev. Sanford Agry Kingsbury (born Feb. 19, 1809, in Gardiner, became a Baptist minister, died Jan. 28, 1895, in Alton, Illinois); Caroline Hannah Kingsbury (1812 – Jan. 12, 1813, born, died and buried in Gardiner); and George Henry Kingsbury (born Oct. 6, 1817, in Gardiner, died Nov. 21, 1895, in Galesburg, Illinois).

FamilySearch says Kingsbury lived in Gardiner “about 10 years.” It lists him in East Windsor, Connecticut, in 1860 – before adding that he died in March, 1849, aged 66, and is buried in Gardiner.

The Ledger partly fills the gap after 1807. It says that in 1834, Kingsbury (and family?) moved to Kingsbury, Maine, “a new town…that had been named for him.”

(Kingsbury, Maine, Wikipedia says, is now Kingsbury Plantation, about 50 miles north of Waterville, in southwestern Piscataquis County. “Judge Kingsbury” paid $4,000 for it in 1833. He built two mills on Kingsbury Pond in 1835, sparking enough growth that the Town of Kingsbury was incorporated March 22, 1836. It was unincorporated in 1886 and “reorganized as a plantation in 1887.” Its 2020 population was 28.)

The Ledger lists among Kingsbury’s accomplishments working as a banker, helping incorporate the Maine Historical Society and serving as a Maine state senator from 1828 to 1830. The legislature’s database lists him as a senator from Kennebec County in the 9th, 10th and 11th sessions (1829 through 1831).

FamilySearch says Kingsbury and his widow, who died January 25, 1860, are buried in Gardiner’s Oak Grove cemetery. Find a Grave lists only two Kingsburys in that cemetery, Hannah and her daughter Caroline.

There is one Kingsbury in the index to the China bicentennial history. His name was William, known as Bill; he was a tavern-keeper in South China who continued to sell liquor after Maine outlawed sales. When members of a nearby Baptist church objected, he hired a neighbor, “for a barrel of flour and a barrel of pork,” to burn down the church. Bill was sentenced to two years in prison.

Main sources

Grow, Mary M., China Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Courts – Eleazer Ripley

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by Mary Grow

Eleazer Wheelock Ripley

In his Kennebec County history, Henry Kingsbury wrote that Winslow lawyer Lemuel Paine once had a partner whom Kingsbury called “General Ripley, the hero of the battle of Lundy’s Lane, Canada.”

This man was Brigadier General Eleazer (sometimes Eleazar) Wheelock Ripley, and he deserves recognition in two spheres, as a useful citizen and as a soldier.

Ripley was born April 15, 1782, in Hanover, New Hampshire, second of (at least) four children.

His grandfather, Eleazar Wheelock, founded Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1769 and served as its first president until his death in 1779. Ripley’s father, Sylvanus Ripley (Sept. 29, 1749 – Feb. 5, 1787), was one of Dartmouth’s first four graduates; he married Eleazar Wheelock’s daughter, Abigail (Dec. 21, 1751 – April 9, 1818) and was a Dartmouth professor and trustee.

Sylvanus and Abigail Ripley had two sons and two daughters, according to Find a Grave, which also lists (on the same page) one more son and one more daughter.

Find a Grave says Sylvanus, who died at age 37, is buried in Hanover. His widow, Abigail, is buried in Fryeburg, Maine (near the New Hampshire border, about 100 miles east of Hanover), with two of her children, Elizabeth Abigail (Ripley) Dana and James Wheelock Ripley.

They, like Eleazer, were born in Hanover, Elizabeth on April 19, 1784, and James on March 12, 1786. Elizabeth died Nov. 15, 1819, aged 35. Her widower was a Vermont native and Dartmouth graduate who opened a law practice in Fryeburg in or soon after 1798.

James went to Fryeburg Academy, studied law and practiced in Fryeburg; he served in the War of 1812, and after the war had a political career that included terms in the Massachusetts House of Representatives (1814-1819) and the U. S. House of Representatives (1826-1830). He died June 17, 1835.

Why did Elizabeth and James move to Fryeburg, and when? If James, born in 1786, attended Fryeburg Academy, he must have been there by around 1800.

Eleazer’s older sister, Mary, born Nov, 4, 1778, married another Dartmouth graduate, Nicholas Baylies. Find a Grave says he practiced law for many years (perhaps in Woodstock, Vermont, where their two children were born in 1804 and 1809) and was a Vermont Supreme Court justice from 1831 to 1834.

Your writer found one online source, called Louisiana Notables, that says Eleazer Ripley married, in Massachusetts, a woman named Love Allen, with whom he had a son and a daughter. Potential confirmation is in the Forbes Library, in Northampton, Massachusetts: an on-line list says the Allen Family papers include, on reel number 186, “Papers of Jonathan Allen, William Breck, Clarissa Allen Breck, Thomas Allen, William Allen, John Codman, Love Allen Ripley and Eleazar Wheelock Ripley; Original manuscripts in Hampshire Room [the library’s local history room].”

Eleazer Ripley graduated from Dartmouth in 1800. Like his siblings, he moved out of state, to Waterville, Maine, for unknown reasons and at an unspecified date. What information your writer found on his days there does not mention a wife or children.

Whittemore wrote in his Waterville centennial history that Ripley studied law with Timothy Boutelle, who opened his Waterville practice in 1804. In his chapter on the military in Whittemore’s history, Isaac Bangs said in 1809, $2 of Ripley’s assessed tax “was tax on his income as a lawyer.”

When the Waterville fire department was organized in 1809, Ripley was one of the first five fire wardens. By 1810, Whittemore said, he “had become prominent in town affairs.” Bangs listed his service as “town agent” in 1809 and 1810 and wrote that he was on a committee (no date given) to petition the Massachusetts legislature “to annex Waterville to Somerset county.”

In 1810, he was elected to the Massachusetts legislature; he was re-elected the next year. (Wikipedia confirms these two years of legislative service; Find a Grave’s report that he served from 1807 to 1809 is probably wrong.)

William Mathews, in his chapter in Whittemore’s book, claimed Ripley was speaker in the Massachusetts House. This honor seems unlikely for a novice representative from a distant district, and is contradicted by an on-line list of speakers.

Whittemore wrote that after service in the Massachusetts legislature, Ripley “became a State Senator but resigned to enter the army.”

* * * * * *

Eleazer Ripley was 30 years old when the United States declared war on Great Britain on June 18, 1812, officially starting the conflict now named the War of 1812. Bangs called Ripley “Waterville’s most eminent soldier in the War of 1812.”

The Louisiana Notables website says that although a war with Great Britain was unpopular with many New Englanders, Ripley supported the idea.

In August 1812, Wikipedia says, Ripley organized the 21st U. S. Infantry Regiment, whose members were mostly from Maine and Massachusetts.

President James Madison appointed him a lieutenant colonel (no date given) in the U.S. army. He initially earned a reputation by leading his troops 400 miles to Plattsburgh, New York, on the west shore of Lake Champlain (where they started is not explained.)

Later, Ripley was stationed 170 or so miles west, at Sackett’s Harbor, New York, on the east shore of Lake Ontario. At Sackett’s Harbor, he was promoted to colonel and, in the spring of 1813, was injured in an explosion.

The rest of 1813 Ripley spent recovering from his injuries and, Louisiana Notables says, “recruiting for the army.” On April 15, 1814, he became a brigadier general, Wikipedia says.

In July 1814, Ripley was commanding a U. S. Army brigade under Major General Jacob Brown “in the Niagara region.” Louisiana Notables says he and Brown disagreed over Brown’s plan to invade Canada: “he [Ripley] thought the force was too small to make any lasting impact on Canadian soil.”

Brown invaded anyway, leading to the Battle of Lundy’s Lane on July 25, 1814, between Brown’s forces and British defenders. Wikipedia explains that Lundy’s Lane ran along the Niagara River where it leaves Lake Ontario, close to the U.S.-Canada border, on its way to Niagara Falls and Lake Erie. The Fort George National Historic Site in Ontario marks the battle area.

Louisiana Notables says that “Ripley performed valiantly at Lundy’s Lane, where his men came to the rescue of Winfield Scott’s battered troops. At this time, his troops also captured several pieces of British artillery from a hill near the battlefield.”

Whittemore claimed, apparently in error, that Brown was killed at Lundy’s Lane and Ripley took over command. Wikipedia says Brown was wounded twice (so Ripley could have assumed command), but was not killed – this source says Brown was back in action by September and lived until February 1828.

Wikipedia describes the Lundy’s Lane battle as “one of the bloodiest battles of the war, and one of the deadliest battles fought in Canada, with approximately 1,720 casualties including 258 killed.” Neither side won control of the battlefield, but U. S. casualties were heavy enough to make the invaders withdraw.

An American Battlefield Trust on-line summary history awards the title “hero of Lundy’s Lane” not to Ripley, but to Lieutenant Colonel James Miller, according to Wikipedia a subordinate to Ripley. Ordered by General Brown to take a British battery on a hilltop, “Miller famously replied, ‘I’ll try, Sir.'”

He succeeded, leading his troops “to within yards of the British guns,…[where they] unleashed a devastating volley, followed by a bayonet charge” that captured the British artillery and killed, wounded or drove away the gunners.

Louisiana Notables comments that “Ripley received little recognition for his efforts” immediately. Wikipedia dates his commission as a major general to July 25, 1814, the date of the battle. A November 1, 1814, Congressional resolution awarded him a gold medal for his military service.

Wikipedia says Ripley stayed in the army until 1820. Your writer found no information on where or in what capacity he served after the summer of 1814 (but see Henry D. Ripley, below).

* * * * * *

Marker is in Versailles, Indiana, in Ripley County.

Sometime – your writer found no date, nor reason – Ripley moved to Louisiana (no town given), where he became a “prominent lawyer and planter.” Wikipedia says he was a member of the Louisiana Senate in 1832. Find a Grave says he represented that state’s Second District in the U. S. House from March 1835 until his death March 29, 1839, in West Feliciana Parish.

Various sources say Ripley married a Mississippian named Aurelia Smith Davis (born in 1801 or May 22, 1802) – WikiTree says her home town was named Hurricane, and dates her marriage to Ripley “about 1830” in one section of a website and July 28, 1830, in another.

Aurelia’s first husband, Dr. Benjamin Davis from Georgia, had died in October 1827. After Eleazer’s death in 1839, she married for the third time, Thomas Bell Smith from Louisiana (March 22, 1817 – Aug. 8, 1851); a comment on his Find a Grave page says he was murdered. WikiTree adds a fourth husband, John Smith Woodward, whom she married on May 3, 1854.

According to Find a Grave, Aurelia’s daughter by her first husband lived only three years. Several sources agree she and Eleazer had a daughter they named Aurelia Wheelock Ripley, born July 28, 1833, and died July 28, 1834.

Aurelia died Oct. 9, 1866, WikiTree says, and is buried in Locust Grove Cemetery, Saint Francisville, West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana. Nearby (and shown on several websites) is the grave of her husband, Gen’l Eleazer W. Ripley, died March 29, 1839, aged 54 years.

With them is buried their daughter Aurelia Wheelock Ripley, with her birth and death dates a year apart and below them these lines:

Stranger, If ever these Lines are Read
Mourn for the living not the dead.

* * * * * *

Find a Grave names Henry D. Ripley, born in Texas Nov. 10, 1816, as Eleazer Wheelock Ripley’s son, with, on Henry’s separate page, no mother’s name listed. (In 1816, Ripley’s wife-to-be, Aurelia, would have been 15 or 16.) Henry’s only sibling is named as Aurelia Wheelock Ripley, 1833 – 1834.

No source your writer found mentioned Eleazer Ripley being stationed in Texas before he left the army in 1820.

Henry Ripley died when he was 19. His name is listed, with many others, on a monument to victims of a March 27, 1836, massacre in Goliad, Texas, where, the website says, “Over 500 were shot point blank.”

Wikipedia offers a long and bloody description of this event, which occurred during the Texas revolution (Oct. 2, 1835 – April 21, 1836) that led to Texas’ period as an independent country (before joining the United States in 1845). Ripley and his companions were members of a Texian army who were captured, imprisoned and executed by units of the Mexican army.

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.

The history and the fate of the building at 363 Route 3

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363 Route 3. (The Town Line file photo by Roland D. Hallee)

by Mary Grow

Chapter One: the Building’s Story

Historical information on the wooden building at 363 Route 3, in China, comes from a combination of town records, provided by China Town Manager Rebecca Hapgood and Codes Enforcement Officer Nicholas French, and local people’s memories.

These sources say that Richard and Rita Hussey had the building constructed in 1990, on the lot they bought in August 1989. Over the years, it went through physical changes and changes of use, as businesses came and went.

A tax record says it started as a one-story building with a basement and an unfinished attic. The second floor got finished, and once served as an apartment. Sometimes the building had a deck, sometimes a drive-up window.

Its first tenant was a Cannon Towel outlet. Beale’s Video rented it, either before or after it was home to Thomas Holyoke’s Top Ten Donuts and More, in 2003.

Around 2004 and/or 2005, Colleen Smith’s South China Coffee Shop was the tenant. In 2007, a second-floor apartment was added above the driving school then using the main floor.

In 2011, Norman Elvin, an Augusta businessman doing business as G & E Realty, bought the building. He converted it to a restaurant with take-out that he named Norm’s Chicken and Seafood, opened in 2012.

In September 2016, G & E Realty gave the building to Grace Academy, a non-profit organization founded by Michelle Bourque in 2009, as a home for her private school, Grace Academy. She and staff taught there until the school closed in June 2022.

On June 2, 2021, by a deed signed by Grace Academy’s vice-president, Lisa Durant, the non-profit sold the property to Joseph Bourque, Michelle Bourque’s husband, to repay loans he had made to Grace Academy.

On Aug. 22, 2024, Bourque sold to Calito Development Group, of Torrington, Connecticut. Calito, represented by Skowhegan engineer, Steven Govoni, applied to the China Planning board for a permit to build a single-story, 9,100-square-foot steel building on the lot, a project that would require removing or demolishing the existing building.

Planning board members reviewed the application according to China’s ordinance standards, found that all requirements were met and approved the permit at their Jan. 4, 2025, meeting.

Govoni did not name the store that would inhabit the new building. On-line records about Calito Development Group link it to Dollar General stores. The company got approval for a “generalized retail store”, in Fairfield, in December 2024, according to a Morning Sentinel article.

Codes officer French pointed out that the China Planning Board’s decision-making on Calito’s application included a public hearing that was publicized four times, instead of the usual two. It was first announced for Dec. 10, 2024, and after that meeting was canceled due to a snowstorm, twice more for the Jan. 4, 2025, meeting. No one commented on the application.

As usual, the board chairman announced a 30-day appeal period after the decision. No appeal was filed.

In April 2025, Calito had the Grace Academy building demolished.

Hapgood and French said they tried, without success, to find a new home for the building, limiting their search to lots not too far away due to moving costs.

Chapter Two: Norman Elvin’s story

Norman Elvin, founder and president of G & E Roofing, in Augusta, bought the building at 363 Route 3 in 2011.

He had taken a break from roofing (his sister ran the business, he said, and he kept in close touch) to run the China Dine-ah on Lakeview Drive, in China. This business was a sit-down restaurant; and, Elvin said, he also wanted to try a partly take-out model.

Why a restaurant at all? Because, he said, he’d read that new restaurants have the highest failure rate of any type of business. He thought a main reason was that restaurants are started by chefs, who may lack business experience and access to capital; a restaurant started by a businessman should succeed.

The new venture he named Norm’s Seafood and Chicken. He put in many hours there, while still running the China Dine-ah.

Elvin enjoyed the work; he appreciated his staff and made new friends among the customers. But after more than two years, he realized enough was enough: “I didn’t have any nights, weekends or holidays.”

He transferred ownership of the China Dine-ah in the spring of 2014, and was ready to get out of the restaurant business completely.

Elvin and Michelle Bourque, a South China resident who founded Grace Academy, a private Christian school, in 2009, had known each other casually for years. Bourque was looking for a permanent home for Grace Academy, and she and Elvin began talking about her acquiring his building.

Elvin liked the idea, and, more important to him, he thought his deceased parents, Leslie and Betty Elvin, would have liked it, too.

Leslie Elvin was a mailman, with an RFD route that started early in the morning, six days a week, and brought him home to watch his children’s after-school sports. Betty Elvin, her son says, was a stay-at-home mom.

The household didn’t have much money, but Elvin remembers “tons of love and a really good work ethic.” They modeled generosity; Leslie Elvin volunteered at what was then the Augusta Mental Health Institute, walking with patients, and both assisted at the Augusta food bank.

And they modeled hard work. Elvin remembers his father, every fall, using his two weeks’ vacation from the post office to pick apples in a Monmouth orchard to earn the extra money for the property taxes.

Young Norman delivered newspapers, shoveled snow and mowed lawns.

His parents “taught me to work, love and share,” he summarized. He has done those things, earning a reputation as a philanthropist.

So he donated his building to the non-profit organization named Grace Academy as a home for the school of the same name. His parents’ names were on the school’s sign.

For the first couple years, Elvin said, he was among the school’s financial supporters. Even then, he wondered how profitable it was or would be.

Fast forward to April 2025, when Elvin learned the property had been sold and the building was being demolished.

Elvin was distressed, hurt and increasingly angry, to the point where he was losing sleep. Other community members were also upset, and perplexed; he tried to correct some of the misinformation on social media.

He explained three reasons for his initial reaction.

Had he known years ago that Grace Academy was going to have to close, he could and would have stepped in with more support, before the financial situation became unmanageable.

He considered the loss of the school and the building a disservice to “the future children that would have benefited from that building,” and to the community as a whole.

He believed the Bourques should have seen to it that once debts were paid, money from the sale came back to him, so he could invest in a new project to honor Leslie and Betty Elvin.

During April and into May, Elvin and the Bourques continued to talk at intervals. By early May, Elvin was more resigned. He recognized that the Bourques, too, were hurting, and said he felt more confident that any remaining money would be put to a good use.

Chapter Three: Michelle Bourque’s story

Michelle Bourque has always been pro-education. She has fond memories of some of her teachers; has a teaching certificate and a degree in school counseling; and has been and currently is a public-school teacher.

She married into a home-schooling family, she said, and home-schooled her own four children. In 2009, her older son, Matt, was in seventh grade when he said to her one day, “I’m lonely.”

Bourque has always been a problem-solver, too. She remembers in fifth grade organizing school events to benefit a teacher who had cancer.

Realizing that many home-schooled children miss the company of their peers, she took on the problem. She had a start: in 2008, the Palermo library hosted meetings of home-schooling families, and the families stayed in touch.

In the summer of 2009, Bourque created a non-profit organization named Grace Academy and assembled a board of directors, home-schooling parents, to create a cooperative home-schoolers’ program.

Crown Regional Christian School was then closing. This private school had been operating in what South China residents still call the old Farrington’s building, southeast of the four corners in South China Village. Palermo resident Dennis Keller owned the building.

Keller accepted Bourque’s request to move her school into the building – and, she said, he warned her “education is a money pit.” The Grace Academy “cottage school” hosted six families, with about two dozen children, four days a week. The fifth day, they welcomed another half-dozen families, with about the same number of children, who did not want all-week classes together.

Bourque was chairman of the Grace Academy board, executive director and fifth-and sixth-grade teacher. Her long-time friend Lisa Durant was board vice-president, academic director and third- and fourth-grade teacher.

Keller sold the building after two years, displacing the school. Grace Academy began moving from one space to another, usually in area churches and libraries. Sometimes the space was free, sometimes there was a fee; sometimes the deal included the Bourques doing the cleaning.

By 2014, the group had 26 families and more than 100 students, meeting in the Church of the Nazarene, on Route 3.

Then came the opportunity to move to Elvin’s building. Bourque led directors and volunteers in converting the building from restaurant to schoolhouse, bringing in desks and chairs, creating classroom space and providing an organized, 6,000-volume library and other resources for home-schoolers.

Grace Academy operated through Covid. In 2020, the board tried to expand by adding a pre-school, hoping to gain enough younger students paying market rate to help with finances. Lack of personnel doomed the experiment.

The “cottage school” was earning too little from “very low” tuition, donations and other sources to begin to cover expenses, which included building improvements, like adding basement and second-floor heat pumps to supplement the ground-floor one; building and grounds maintenance; teaching supplies, like books, paper and chalk, and services, like photocopying; food; and other essentials.

“Instead of being led by our vision, we were being led by bills,” Bourque said.

She personally did all she could, from organizing and teaching to cleaning, maintenance and repairs and grounds work. She sometimes stayed overnight on a snowy winter night to shovel the deck in the morning.

By early 2022, the building belonged to Joseph Bourque, and the Grace Academy directors were discussing closing the school. They did – and accepted a new mission.

In her June 18, 2022, final message, Bourque wrote, “THANK YOU to everyone who supported Grace Academy over the years in one way or another. We did a lot of good and are so grateful to have served our community in this way.”

Bourque sought other tenants for the building, unsuccessfully. When her husband got an unexpected letter from a realty company offering to buy the property, they felt they had no choice but to sell.

Like town officials Hapgood and French, Bourque tried and failed to find a new location for the building, asking other organizations and offering to cover moving costs.

Like Elvin, Bourque is sorry that the building in which she invested nine years of her life is gone. She felt “sick to my stomach” when she heard.

“It was a dream that I worked very, very hard for,” she said.

As of early May, Bourque expects to continue talking with Elvin. “Norm and I are at a good place now,” she said, but “we’re not done yet.”

Chapter Four: Grace Academy’s new mission

Since 2012, the Grace Academy board of directors has been supporting a new initiative for the non-profit organization called Sweet Dreams Bags. Michelle Bourque introduced it, inspired by two national programs.

The 1987 McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance act is a federal law that authorizes federal assistance for homeless children and youth.

The Pajama Program is a national non-profit, with at least one chapter in each state, that “promotes equitable access to healthy sleep so all children can thrive.” It trains “sleep educators” who work with parents in shelters to explain the value of a nighttime routine, a child’s need for sleep and appropriate conditions (silence, darkness).

Grace Academy’s Sweet Dreams Bag is a gift to a homeless child: a sturdy bag with a name tag for the child’s name, containing a pair of pajamas, an age-appropriate book, a security blanket and a “huggable” stuffed animal, and sometimes other useful items, like a hygiene pack.

The purpose is to help children in the unfamiliar environment of a homeless shelter get the good night’s sleep needed for physical and emotional well-being.

In 2012, as Bourque realized that Grace Academy’s school was floundering financially, she talked again with her Palermo friend, Dennis Keller. He encouraged her not to abandon the non-profit, and to go ahead with her Sweet Dreams Bags.

Recently, Bourque described the program to Rachel Kilbride and the Sew for a Cause group Kilbride organized years ago at St. Bridget Center, in North Vassalboro. By the time she was ready to leave, she said, the group had one bag ready; they’ve been supporters ever since.

Sweet Dreams Bags was based in the former Grace Academy school building. Now that the building is gone, Bourque has rented storage space.

She and the rest of the board hope to expand the program to other children facing adversity – those staying at a cancer center, or facing nights in a hospital, for example.

Sweet Dreams Bags, the Pajama Program and the McKinney-Vento Act all have websites for those seeking more information.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Waterville F.D. history

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1880 Central Fire Station

by Scott Holst

As the Village of Waterville grew into a dense town where a single fire could threaten the lives of thousands, the village lacked the types of institutions that would fight these fires. In other parts of the country, firefighters were organized as volunteers or were paid for by insurance companies to combat the threat of fire.

The first response for Waterville was what would later be called a “bucket brigade.” Neighbors from all around the town would run to help or at least toss their buckets into the street for volunteers to fill with water and pass forward to be dumped on the fire.

Villages, Towns, and some Cities would appoint citizens to be fire wardens, and they were empowered to inspect all chimneys and to fine any violators of the fire rules enacted in their town. These men would make sure when the village was called upon, the fire was handled in a proper systematic fashion. Besides, getting the manpower to run the bucket brigades was not an easy task. Waterville’s first recorded fire wardens were established in 1802.

As firefighting equipment evolved from buckets to engines, the need for special training and tools emerged. Enter the creation of the fire companies. Waterville would form four fire companies, and each company would have a section of the town to protect, or assist the other companies.

Organized as a Village on July 23, 1802, Waterville did not begin to form any fire companies until 1809. The inhabitants of Waterville felt they needed something more substantial to protect against conflagrations, so in early 1810 an organization known as “Ticonic Village Corporation” was formed and this organization would become a separate entity removed from the Village of Waterville. They would run as a private organization, forming companies, installing cisterns throughout the Village and creating fire-related rules and regulations governing the fire department and the Village. The Corporation would work off tax money charged to the Village and loans from banks. Their first order of business was to purchase a fire engine and form a company. A hand tub was purchased in 1810, and a group of men were assigned to it and the Corporation was off and running.

1910 Firemen’s Parade

They would also purchase new apparatus, fire equipment and hoses whenever they were needed. All the cisterns throughout Waterville in the 1800s and the installation of fire hydrants brought into service, were paid for and placed in by the Corporation. The Corporation would also purchase the first fire houses around Waterville. The fire house would generally be regular homes that were built and turned into firehouses, except for the Silver Street station, which the Corporation would purchase the land and build the station. The Corporation would vote at each yearly meeting for a Chief Engineer and two Assistants. The engine and hose company officers would be voted in from among their respected companies.

In last ten years of the Corporations life, it started to find itself in financial troubles. Organized in 1810 and which had no doubt done a great service to the citizens of Waterville, the Ticonic Village Corporation relinquished its charter on August 2, 1878. A hearing of the Legislature in the State Capital granted the closing of the Corporations charter, and the Town of Waterville officially took control over the fire department.

In the early history of fire engines, all fire apparatus of the era were pulled to fires by the people of the Village. This took many men, usually a dozen or more, to get the engine from the fire house to the scene of the fire. As the hand tubs and newly-developed steam engines, which were gaining popularity, grew in size and weight, horses were placed into service to pull these apparatuses.

Not every horse could serve as a fire horse. The animals needed to be strong, swift, agile, obedient and fearless. At the scene, they needed to stand patiently while embers and flames surrounded them. They needed to remain calm while the firefighters fought the blaze, and this was the case in all weather conditions and in the midst of a multitude of distractions.

It was a sad day at the fire station when a horse was declared unfit for duty. Many retired fire horses continued to work for the city in less strenuous positions, withering on the city farm or street department and some would be put out to pasture. Occasionally the noble beasts were put up for public auction but would at times become a fight between the town fathers and the firefighters. Horses became family and the firefighters did not want their noble horses to be miss cared for, so they would fight the sale of their horses. The gallant steeds might be purchased by junk drivers and delivery men. At times, the fire horses would forget their new roles and charge down the streets hauling a wagon after hearing a fire gong.

1910 Hose Company #1

The first recorded use of fire horses in the Village of Waterville came with the Hook & Ladder carriage that the Ticonic Village Corporation had in 1855. This apparatus was too heavy to be pulled by the firemen, so it needed to be pulled by horses, so the Corporation would appropriate funding in the fire department to pay the local stables for the uses of their horses. The department’s three hand tubs would soon follow suit and become retrofitted to be pulled by horses.

On July 25, 1928, the last Fire Horse would be removed from service and turned over the Street Department as the fire department would become fully motorized.

The history of water supply for fighting fire in Waterville was first recorded in the history books of the area when the first settlers came and settled on the edge of the Kennebec River and surrounding streams. Taking water from the river and streams was the means of cooking, drinking, bathing, washing clothes and firefighting. During a fire the settlers would take their buckets and form a chain from the river or stream to the fire. As time went on and the town would grow outward, so were new ways of getting water to fire.

The Kennebec River, Messalonskee Stream and Hayden Brook were the major water ways the Corporation would use to supply their fire department with the water in order to fight fire.

They would build “Cisterns also known as Reservoirs” throughout Waterville in the most populated areas. A cistern was an underground tank that holds water, and these tanks were built in different sizes depending on how much water was to be held. Throughout the Corporations’ existence, many cisterns were built all around Waterville.

In the 1870s, fire hydrants were becoming a source of fire protection that would be widely sought after and Waterville would jump on the band wagon and had hydrants installed throughout the city, even to this day.

In early 1892 the city would place a purchase for a Gamewell fire alarm system and the system would be installed and running by September 1892, at a cost of $2,300. The alarm would use bells in the fire houses and the St. Francis de Sales bell on Elm Street. When a fire alarm box was pulled, the church bell would tap out the number for all to hear.

Gamewell fire alarm boxes would be placed throughout the city and more would be added when the city started growing outward.

Today the city still uses the Gamewell fire alarm systems in schools and local businesses. This new system would be wireless and would be tied directly into the Waterville Communications Center and the fire station, where it is monitored around the clock.

In 1884, when the city hired its first full-time firefighter, this would create a two-tier system within the department, career and call. Career firefighters would be paid at a rate of pay different from a call firefighter as they were to remain in the firehouse for the ready at all times, where a call firefighters would be considered a part-time employee and would respond to alarms whenever an alarm was struck.

Waterville never had a true volunteer fire fighting force as each company in the department would receive money for their services and that money would be split and handed down to each member of the company. It would not be until the early 1900s that the city would pay their call firefighters a set rate for each hour that the firefighter would put it responding to calls or going to training.

Throughout its existence, the Waterville Fire Department has grown and adopted its way of taking care of its citizens and those who work or visit the city, in the utmost high quality of service. An extensive history book has been written that highlights every aspect of the life of the cities fire department and can be purchased at Waterville Central Fire station for your reading enjoyment.

1855 Firemen’s Muster

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Small town lawyers

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Kennebec County Courthouse

by Mary Grow

While looking for information for the previous articles on Maine’s legal and court systems and people who made them work, your writer came across related information that falls under two headings, people and buildings.

The limited research this series rests on found bits and pieces of information about some items. Others remain obscure; any reader who can contribute is invited to email The Town Line, townline@townline.org.

This article will share your writer’s findings about a few people, specifically lawyers, hoping readers find them interesting.

William Mathews, author in 1885 of one of the articles cited, called medicine and the law two professions that are “indispensable to society,” and also the two that are most frequently ridiculed.

The law, he claimed, has one “advantage over all other business callings: that eminence in it is always a test of ability and acquirement.”

Any other professional can fake it, he opined, and gain “wealth and honor” by “quackery and pretension.” A lawyer earns a reputation only by “rare natural powers aided by profound learning and varied experience in trying causes,” because both fellow lawyers and judges are constantly alert for any shortcut, omission, misstatement or other error, purposeful or accidental.

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James Bradbury’s history of the Kennebec bar, in Henry Kingsbury’s 1892 Kennebec County history, named many Augusta and Waterville lawyers and a few from smaller towns. The latter group included from Winslow, James Child and Thomas Rice; Lemuel Paine (and Bradbury mentioned Lemuel’s son Henry Paine, who was a lawyer, but not in Winslow); and George Warren.

In his chapter on Winslow in the history, Kingsbury named Rice and the Paines. He added Paine’s partner, “General Ripley, afterward the hero of the battle of Lundy’s Lane, Canada.”

Bradbury said Thomas Rice was the first lawyer in Winslow, settling there in 1795. Kingsbury said Winslow’s first lawyer was George Warren, “who came before 1791.” Rev. Edwin Whittemore, in his 1902 Waterville centennial history, agreed with Kingsbury (or perhaps just took Kingsbury’s word as truth).

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Thomas Rice was born in Pownalborough (according to Wikipedia), on March 30, 1763, Bradbury wrote; most other sources say March 30, 1768. Kingsbury listed “Esquire Thomas Rice” among early settlers along the Kennebec south of the mouth of the Sebasticook.

Bradbury said Rice graduated from Harvard in 1791 and read law under Timothy Bigelow (no dates or location provided; probably in Massachusetts, because Wikipedia says he was admitted to the bar in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, in 1794; and another Wikipedia article [on General Eleazer Wheelock Ripley], names Timothy Bigelow as Massachusetts House speaker in 1813). Rice opened his Winslow, Maine, practice in 1795.

According to Aaron Plaisted’s chapter on Waterville’s early settlers in Whittemore’s history, the first lawyer in that town (now city) was Reuben Kidder, who arrived in the spring of 1775. “He arrived four days before Thomas Rice, who, disappointed in having been anticipated, went to the east [Winslow] side of the river where he passed a long and useful life.”

Find a Grave says Rice married Sarah Swan (born May 6, 1777) on Oct. 22, 1796.

Rice had made a name for himself by 1801, when, on Dec. 18, he was elected one of five commissioners to petition the Massachusetts legislature to set off the west side of the Kennebec as a separate town (the legislature approved on June 23, 1802). Kingsbury said he served his adopted town as a selectman in 1802, and as treasurer in 1803, from 1810 through 1812 and again in 1830.

In 1807, Wikipedia says, the (District of) Maine supreme court appointed Rice one of Kennebec County’s examiners of counselors and attorneys. In 1814, he was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives; from 1815 to early 1819, he served in the U.S. House of Representatives. Failing to win a third term in the fall of 1818, he went back to practicing law.

Rice was one of the area lawyers Bradbury met after he opened his Augusta office in 1830.

Sarah died Sept. 26, 1840. On Feb. 16, 1841, in Winslow, Rice married Susanna (Susannah, Susan) Greene. They had one son, Thomas III, born in 1843 or March 4, 1844 (sources differ).

Rice died on Aug. 25, 1854, in Winslow, and is buried in Waterville’s Pine Grove cemetery, with first wife Sarah; second wife Susanna, who died Dec. 1, 1879; and son Thomas III, identified as Lieutenant Thomas Green Rice.

Thomas III enlisted for Civil War service in November 1863, Find a Grave says, joining the 2nd Maine Cavalry, Company B. He was a second lieutenant in Company D, 4th United States Colored Cavalry, when he died of a fever on Oct. 4, 1865, in Vidalia, Mississippi (according to Find a Grave; your writer finds no contemporary town named Vidalia in Mississippi, though there is one in Louisiana and one in Georgia).

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George Warren, according to Bradbury, was a son of General James and Mercy (Otis) Warren, leading Massachusetts patriots before and during the Revolution. James Warren, Wikipedia says, earned his title both as Paymaster-General of the Continental Army (July 27, 1775, to April 19, 1776) and as a major-general of the Massachusetts militia.

George was the youngest of the five Warren sons. The Geni website says he was born Sept. 20, 1766, in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

Whittemore cited Warren opening his legal business by 1791 as an example of Winslow’s development, along with population growth, mills, fisheries and productive farms.

Bradbury called Warren “one of the lesser lights of the Kennebec bar, which was extinguished before the opening of the present [19th] century.” He credited Warren with “fine natural talents,” but said he “led a dissipated life, dying at Augusta in penury” after practicing briefly in Winslow.

Bradbury gave no dates. Geni says he died in 1800 (February 1800, according to another website) in Maine.

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James Loring Child, Bradbury wrote, was born May 31, 1792, in Augusta. He attended Hallowell Academy, studied law with two different two-man firms and was admitted to the bar in 1813. His first four years in practice were in Winslow in partnership with Rice, who was his senior by more than a generation.

Child had an Augusta practice from 1818 to 1822 and lived there for 30 years. He died in 1862.

The FamilySearch website summarizes the life of James Loring Child, born May 31, 1792, in Lincoln, Maine, and died on Aug. 10, 1862, in Augusta. He married Jane Hale (born Jan. 12, 1804, in Bradford, Massachusetts) on Nov. 10, 1822, in Portland; and was an Alna resident in 1830 (before returning to Augusta?). He and Jane had five sons and five daughters between Oct. 27, 1823 (when oldest son, Daniel Carleton, was born in Alna), and Jan. 15, 1846 (when youngest son, Robert Wainwright, was born in Augusta).

In Whittemore’s Waterville history, James L. Child, from Winslow, is listed as captain of a militia company that served briefly during the War of 1812.

None of these sources, except Bradbury, says anything about Child’s profession.

James Loring Child died Aug. 10, 1862; Jane died Dec. 14, 1873. Both are buried in Augusta’s Forest Grove cemetery, with all five of their sons and the two daughters who died in infancy (and three generations of other Childs).

In the Maine state archives index on line, under Executive Council papers, are references from the spring of 1822 to James L. Child’s role as Secretary of the Board of Commissioners Under the Act of Separation. Intermixed are references to James A. Child, including in titles of documents listed under James L. Child, leaving your writer more confused than usual.

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Lemuel Paine (often called Jr.), was born Dec. 2, 1758, Find a Grave says, supported by the barely readable photo of his tombstone on the website. FamilySearch lists his birthdate, probably erroneously or conflated with another Lemuel Paine, as Dec. 2, 1777.

His birthplace is given as Foxborough, Massachusetts, where, on Sept. 30, 1805, he married Jane Thompson (or Thomson) Warren, born Aug. 20, 1778. WikiTree agrees with this information in its Paine biography; on another page, the site dates the marriage Nov. 28, 1805, and says it was in Winslow.

The WikiTree biography says Paine graduated from Brown University in 1803, studied law with David Gilbert in Mansfield (Massachusetts, about seven miles from Foxborough), and “was admitted to the bar in due course.” He and Jane moved to Winslow (no reason or date given).

WikiTree says Paine was in the Massachusetts legislature in 1810. He was apparently not representing Winslow; the list of Winslow and Waterville representatives Whittemore included says in 1810 and 1811 the representative was Eleazer W. Ripley.

Kingsbury listed Paine as Winslow treasurer in 1814 and 1815. Wikipedia says in 1829 he served on Maine’s Executive Council.

WikiTree calls Paine “a firm and active supporter of all educational causes within his reach,” including Waterville College. An article by William Mathews, LLD, in the November 1885 issue of The Bay State Monthly adds that Paine’s poor health made him give up his law practice “for other pursuits,” and continues:

“He was familiar with the representative English authors, and specially fond of the Greek language and literature, which he cultivated during his life. He had a tenacious memory, and could quote [Greek poet] Homer by the page.”

(William Mathews [1818 – 1909] was a Waterville native; your writer profiled him in the Dec. 5, 2024, issue of The Town Line.)

The Wikipedia biography says Paine died in Winslow in 1852, age 93 (supporting the 1758 birth-date), and is buried in Howard cemetery. “It is said he was found lying upon a bed of hay with a rake by his side when he died, as if asleep.”

Jane died April 19, 1860, in Winslow, Find a Grave says.

Henry Warren Paine (or, Mathews and the Wikipedia biography say, Henry William) was the second of Lemuel and Jane’s three (Mathews) or four (FamilySearch) sons. His older brother was Ebenezer Warren, born in 1808; younger brothers were Frederick Augustus, born about 1812 (WikiTree lists him as unverified pending more research), and Edward Augustus, born in 1816.

Henry was born Aug. 30, 1810. Mathew called him “one of the most eminent lawyers of New England, whose career may be regarded as signally worthy of imitation.”

Mathews agreed with other sources that Henry Paine graduated from Waterville College, studied law with his uncle, Samuel S. Warren, in China, and attended Harvard Law School in 1832-33, gaining admission to the Kennebec bar in 1834.

His law practice was in Hallowell, starting around 1834, until he moved to Cambridge and opened a Boston practice in the summer of 1854. Mathews wrote that he had not moved sooner because he had promised to stay in Maine during his father’s lifetime.

The list of Paine graves in Winslow’s Howard cemetery on the Find a Grave website includes Lemuel, 1758-1852; his widow, Jane Thompson Warren, 1778-1860; and their oldest son, Ebenezer Warren, 1808-1830, and youngest son, Edward A., 1816-1884.

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For lack of space, information on Brigadier General Eleazer or Eleazar Wheelock Ripley is postponed to next week.

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: Courts – Part 4

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Whitehouse Cemetery, on Whitehouse Rd., in Vassalboro. (photo by Roland D. Hallee)

by Mary Grow

William Penn Whitehouse has been mentioned in each of the three articles about Maine courts so far in this subseries; it’s time he got a page of his own (after a digression).

The first mention, March 27, identified Whitehouse as the author of the chapter on the history of Maine courts in Henry Kingsbury’s 1892 Kennebec County history.

By then, Whitehouse was 50. He was married, and he and his wife had had three children and lost two of them. After a dozen years as a Kennebec County judge, in 1892 Whitehouse was in his second year as an associate justice on the state supreme court. He and his wife were living in Augusta, in an 1851 Greek Revival house he bought in 1869.

That this distinguished and busy man made time to research and write a chapter for Henry Kingsbury is a tribute to both of them.

Your writer has failed to find biographical information on Henry Kingsbury or his co-editor, Simeon L. Deyo. On-line booksellers list Deyo as editor of History of Barnstable County, Massachusetts, 1620-1637-1686-1890, and suggest it was originally published in 1890.

The book that Kingsbury and Deyo put together has about 1,300 pages (some page numbers are duplicated and one triplicated, 564, 564b and 564d [before and after 564b are unnumbered full-page illustrations]). The pages measure 7.5 by 10.5 inches; the print is fairly small. There are more than 200 illustrations, many full-page.

A few chapters are credited to Kingsbury; more than a dozen to other authors, like Whitehouse; none to Deyo. Twenty-five of the 47 chapters have no author’s name.

In his December 1892 introduction, Kingsbury (the only signatory, without Deyo) thanks “the twenty writers whose names these chapters bear” and “more than twenty hundred” people with whom “we” (including Deyo?) corresponded or spoke.

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Judge William Penn Whitehouse

William Penn Whitehouse was born April 9, 1842 (FamilySearch and other sources), or April 9, 1843 (Find a Grave), in Vassalboro. His parents, also Vassalboro natives (per FamilySearch) were John Roberts Whitehouse (1807 – April 16, 1887) and Hannah B. (Percival) Whitehouse (1808 -Nov. 29, 1876).

FamilySearch says John and Hannah were married “about 22 July 1827.” William was the youngest of their four sons and three daughters born between 1830 and 1842. Find a Grave lists the three older brothers but only one older sister.

The Find a Grave website has a long excerpt credited to Louis Hatch, author of a 1919 Maine history, but not from that book. Hatch said the Whitehouse family in America “has produced eminent churchmen, distinguished jurists and men of affairs and philanthropists that have had a national reputation, but none among them have more worthily borne the name and upheld the tradition than has William Penn Whitehouse….”

Writing when Whitehouse was in his late 70s, Hatch continued: “A man of the widest and most generous culture, his legal acumen and his fair mindedness together with a sense of duty which has a certain Roman quality have eminently fitted him for his lifework of the law. He unites a wide outlook and a scholarly culture with a keen and ready mind that has never lost its cutting edge. His gracious and urbane manners appear the natural fruit, as indeed they are, of his character and attainments.”

Hatch said Whitehouse began China Academy’s college preparatory course in February 1858, when he was 16 and still working on the family farm in Vassalboro, and learned so fast that he entered Colby College in September 1858. (China Academy was in China Village; chartered in 1818 by the Massachusetts legislature, it transformed into a free high school in 1880.)

James Bradbury, in his chapter on the Kennebec bar in Kingsbury’s history, agreed that Whitehouse went from the district school to “the China high school,” but wrote that the “scantiness of the knowledge there acquired” led him to enroll in Waterville Academy in February 1859 and enter Colby (for which Waterville Academy was a preparatory school) in September 1859.

Both sources agree Whitehouse graduated with honors in Colby’s Class of 1863 (making the 1859 entrance date more likely), and earned a master’s degree in 1866. Hatch said he taught for a while; both wrote that in 1863-64 he was principal of Vassalboro Academy (the girls’ school at Getchell’s Corner founded in 1837).

Deciding on the legal profession, Whitehouse studied law with area attorneys and in October (Hatch) or December (Bradbury) 1865 was admitted to the Kennebec Bar. He practiced briefly with other lawyers before opening his own practice in Augusta.

Hatch wrote that he was Augusta city solicitor for four years (Bradbury said he was elected in 1868) and Kennebec County attorney for seven years (or more, Bradbury said, appointed after his predecessor died and then twice elected because of his “efficient and impartial administration”).

In 1878, Bradbury wrote, Kennebec County Superior Court was created “as a county court auxiliary to the supreme judicial court” and Whitehouse was appointed the judge, a position he held until his 1890 appointment to the state Supreme Court.

Bradbury, like Hatch, had high praise for Whitehouse. Referring to his years as a lawyer, he wrote:

“Reared on a farm, and possessing the plain, practical directness which such a life inculcates, combined with the discriminating tastes of the scholar, and the keen analytical methods of a mind trained to an exacting profession, Judge Whitehouse speedily won an enviable standing as a man and a lawyer, and became a prominent figure in the public life of his adopted city.”

Later, he commented that Whitehouse’s habit of “taking cognizance of both sides” of an issue at first discouraged clients seeking a lawyer’s support, but later brought friends, clients and professional success, and was an important qualification for his future judicial roles.

Community activities Hatch and Bradbury mentioned included chairing an 1873 commission considering a new “insane hospital,” and in 1875 and later advocating for abolishing the death penalty.

The Kennebec County court was known unofficially as “Judge Whitehouse’s court,” Bradbury said. He called it “a very useful and important branch of the state’s judiciary.”

He named only one of Whitehouse’s superior court decisions: “the celebrated Burns ‘original package’ case,” which he called “the corner stone upon which rests [in 1892] the entire fabric of prohibition in Maine.” (See box)

Gov. Edwin C. Burleigh appointed Whitehouse an associate justice on the state supreme court on April 15, 1890. Bradbury observed that Whitehouse’s “splendid record” on the Kennebec County court was “his best recommendation” for the new position.

Whitehouse was reappointed by three later governors, Llewellyn Powers, on April 24, 1897; John Fremont Hill, on April 5, 1904; and Frederick Plaisted, on April 13, 1911. Plaisted appointed him Chief Justice on July 26, 1911, after Lucilius Emery, from Ellsworth, resigned.

Historian Hatch was again elated, writing:

“A profound knowledge of the law, a ripe and scholarly culture and trenchant mind were in him associated with a balance and sanity of temperament and a judicial habit of weighing evidence in its minutest detail. No man who has occupied the Supreme bench of the State of Maine, rich as has been its history, has by character of [or?] attainments more nobly carried out its highest traditions.”

Whitehouse resigned the position on April 8, 1913. He was succeeded by Albert R. Savage, from Auburn, who held the post until his death in June 1917.

Hatch summed up Whitehouse’s tenure:

“A profound knowledge of the law, a ripe and scholarly culture and trenchant mind were in him associated with a balance and sanity of temperament and a judicial habit of weighing evidence in its minutest detail. No man who has occupied the Supreme bench of the State of Maine, rich as has been its history, has by character of [or?] attainments more nobly carried out its highest traditions.”

He said nothing about why Whitehouse resigned. Apparently not due to illness or disillusionment, however, because Hatch said he re-opened his law firm and as of 1919 “commands an important and distinguished practice.”

In addition to his work for the new Augusta insane hospital, Whitehouse was a bank trustee, Hatch said. His “services to the State and to the legal profession” were recognized by honorary doctorates from Colby in 1896 and from Bowdoin in 1912.

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In politics, Whitehouse was a Republican (Hatch and Bradbury); in religion, a Unitarian (Bradbury, though his father was a Quaker and his mother a Methodist).

On June 18 (FamilySearch) or June 24 (Find a Grave and Bradbury), 1869, Whitehouse married Evelyn Marie or Maria Treat, born in Frankfort on June 4, 1836. The couple had three children: Robert Treat, born March 27, 1870; William Penn, Jr., born May 12, 1873, and died June 5, 1874; and Minnie Drew, born Oct. 13, 1875, and died Jan. 10, 1877.

William Penn Whitehouse died Oct. 10 or Oct. 22, 1922, in the Augusta house he bought in 1869. His widow lived until 1925 (your writer found no exact death date).

William and Evelyn’s son who lived to adulthood, Robert Treat Whitehouse, married Florence Brooks in 1894 in Augusta, according to FamilySearch. They had at least three sons, whom they named William Penn Whitehouse (1895 – 1976), Robert Treat Whitehouse, Jr. (1897 – 1965) and Brooks Whitehouse (1904 -1969).

The sons were born in Portland, where Robert practiced law. He died there in 1924; his widow died in Portland on Jan. 23, 1945.

Augusta’s Forest Grove cemetery contains the graves of 32 people named Whitehouse, including, according to Find a Grave, William Penn and Evelyn; their son Robert Treat and daughter-in-law Florence; their children who died as infants, William Penn, Jr., and Minnie; and their grandsons William Penn II, Robert Treat, Jr., and Brooks.

William Penn’s parents, John Roberts and Hannah (Percival) Whitehouse, and his brother Oliver (1839 – Oct. 31, 1869) are buried in Vassalboro’s Whitehouse cemetery, on Whitehouse Road, a former section of Routes 202 and 3 in southeastern Vassalboro.

The Burns case

An on-line search for the Burns original package case led your writer to a 1911 legislative resolve in favor of an Augusta businessman named Michael Burns.

The resolve was to reimburse Burns $3,132.86 “for his expenses incurred in defense of prosecutions instituted against him, without warrant of law under the specific order of the governor, and for loss of property and injury to his business.”

The document explained that in 1887, Burns was selling “original, unbroken, imported packages of alcoholic liquors.” He was complying with federal law, and both state law and three Maine Supreme Court decisions said his business was legitimate (despite Maine being a famously “dry” state in those days).

The Kennebec County sheriff and county attorney, the municipal judge, the attorney general, “the legal profession and all well-informed citizens” knew that it was legal to sell alcohol in Maine in these “original, imported, unbroken packages.”

Nonetheless, in June, 1887, the governor issued a proclamation directing the attorney general and the Kennebec County attorney to prosecute Burns for illegal liquor sales. (In June 1887, Maine’s governor was a Republican named Joseph R. Bodwell; he was elected in 1886, took office Jan. 6, 1887, and died in office Dec. 15, 1887.)

Obeying the governor, the county attorney had the sheriff, a man named McFadden, seize 56 cases of rum and 13 cases of whiskey, with a market value of $483. (The Waterville centennial history says Charles McFadden, a Vassalboro native who moved to Waterville, held various official positions, including Kennebec County Sheriff from 1884 to 1888.)

Burns hired a lawyer, and his case dragged on for three years. On May 29, 1890, the law court (i.e., the state supreme court acting as a court of appeals) agreed that Burns’ business was legal. In its September 1890 term, the “presiding judge” (unnamed) of the Kennebec County Superior Court ordered the cases of liquor returned to Burns.

(Whitehouse having been appointed to the Maine Supreme Court in April of that year, Bradbury’s report of his involvement puzzled your writer.)

Meanwhile, however, the legislative resolve says, on Aug. 8, 1890, a federal law had redefined the packaged liquor as contraband in Maine, and it had been sold in Boston, at a $300 loss.

The legislative resolve listed a total of $1,299.94 in losses and expenses Burns had incurred. It then added $1,832.92 for 23 and a half years’ interest to order the $3,132.86 reimbursement (and mentioned other losses for which it could have required reimbursement, but didn’t).

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Courts – Part 3

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by Mary Grow

Remembering that Maine’s early population centers were along the coast, and mostly from Portland south, it is not surprising that three of Maine’s first four state Supreme Court chief justices came from that area.

The first (mentioned last week) was Prentiss Mellen, from Portland, who served from July 1, 1820, to Oct. 11, 1834, when he reached mandatory retirement age.

Nathan Weston

He was succeeded by Augusta’s Nathan Weston, serving from Oct. 22, 1834, to Oct. 22, 1841 (see below). Ezekiel Whitman, from Portland, took office Dec. 10, 1841, and resigned Oct. 23, 1848. Ether Shepley, from Saco (south of Portland) took office on Oct. 23, 1848, and served until Oct. 22, 1855.

Shepley was succeeded on Oct. 23, 1855, by the first chief justice from farther inland, John S. Tenney, from Norridgewock. Since then, chief justices have come from various parts of the Maine, including Houlton, in Aroostook County, and Calais, in Washington County on the Canadian border.

In the 19th century, Augusta was the only one of the dozen central Kennebec Valley municipalities these history articles have covered to provide justices to the state Supreme Court. In the 20th century, Waterville joined the list, starting with Warren C. Philbrook, associate justice from April 9, 1913, to Nov. 29, 1928.

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As listed in the March 27 story in this series, the four 19th-century Augusta judges appointed to the Maine Supreme Court were:

— Nathan Weston, appointed an associate justice July 1, 1820, and served as chief justice from Oct. 22, 1834 to Oct. 21, 1841;
— Richard Drury Rice, associate justice from May 11, 1852 to his resignation Dec. 1, 1863;
— Artemas Libbey (or Libby), appointed from April 24, 1875, to April 24, 1882; reappointed Jan. 11, 1883, and served until his death March 15, 1894; and
— William Penn Whitehouse, appointed associate justice April 15, 1890, and chief justice July 26, 1911; resigned April 8, 1913.

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Judge William Penn Whitehouse

Nathan Weston, often called Hon. Nathan Weston, was the oldest son of Capt. Nathan Weston and his third wife, a widow from Salem, Massachusetts, named Elizabeth Cheever. Capt. Weston came to Hallowell in 1778 and in 1781 moved north to what became Augusta, where he was a businessman; representative to the Massachusetts legislature (1799 and 1801) and later the Maine Senate; and in 1803 a selectman.

Hon. Nathan Weston was born July 27, 1782. According to the biography in James North’s 1870 history of Augusta, he attended Hallowell Academy and graduated from Dartmouth College in 1803. He studied law in Boston and was admitted to the bar in 1806; practiced briefly in Augusta, then moved to New Gloucester. From there, North said, he was elected to the Massachusetts legislature in 1808.

He and Paulina Bass Cony were married on May 13 or June 4, 1809, in New Gloucester or Augusta (sources differ). She was Augusta Judge Daniel Cony’s daughter, born Aug. 23 or Aug. 27, 1787. The Westons had four sons and two, three or four daughters between 1813 and 1823.

In March 1810 the Westons returned to Augusta. North surmised that marrying Paulina “probably induced his change of residence.”

In 1811, as summarized in the March 27 issue in this series, the court of common pleas was changed into a circuit court, and Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry needed to choose three judges for the second circuit (Kennebec, Lincoln & Somerset counties).

North explained that the governor was expected to appoint Weston as one of the two associate judges. However, his candidate for chief justice got so many critical comments that Gerry discarded him entirely, and chose the younger of the two associate nominees, Weston, as the chief justice.

North described Weston as an acquaintance of the governor (from his legislative service, presumably), “a young man of twenty-nine years of age, of respectable connections, pleasing address and good conversational powers, with a legal reputation for more than ordinary ability for one of his years.”

Weston held the circuit court position until Maine’s first governor, William King, appointed him an associate justice of the Maine Supreme Court in 1820, the year the state came into existence. From Oct. 22, 1834, 1834, to Oct. 22, 1841, he served as the state supreme court’s second chief justice; North wrote that he retired when his term ended.

In 1825, North said, Weston was nominated for the Maine governorship. He “declined the honor.”

North’s writing suggests that he knew both Westons personally, but he said nothing about what the judge did after 1841. Earlier, he had written that the 1811 appointment was the beginning of a 30-year uninterrupted judicial career, implying that after 1841, Weston accepted no other judgeship.

North presented one evidence that Weston continued to be a respected citizen. He wrote that “the venerable Nathan Weston” was a speaker at a Monday, April 22, 1861, public meeting, part of Maine’s response to the beginning of the Civil War. Other speakers included Lot M. Morrill, former three-term governor and in 1861 United States Senator; and James G. Blaine, then a member of the state House of Representatives and chairman of the state Republican Committee (later a national legislator, secretary of state and presidential candidate).

In his judicial opinions, North wrote, Weston displayed “classic and judicial learning.” He wrote with “clearness and purity of diction.” He was an entertaining and informative conversationalist, and remained in good health into his late 80s.

Paulina Weston died “greatly beloved” on Sept. 11, 1857, North said. Her widower died June 4, 1872, shortly before his 90th birthday.

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Richard Drury Rice

Richard Drury Rice was born in Union, Maine (then Union, Lincoln County, Massachusetts), on April 10, 1810, the on-line Cleaves Law Library says; his father was Hon. Nathan D. Rice.

North said Rice apprenticed in the printing business in Thomaston and elsewhere and worked as a printer “for several years.” Then he enrolled at China Academy, in “classical studies.”

Moving next to Hallowell, he was “proprietor and editor” of an anti-Masonic newspaper called the “Maine Free Press.” By 1836, he owned a bookstore in Augusta.

He sold the bookstore in 1839 and read law in James W. Bradbury’s Augusta office. Admitted to the Kennebec County bar in 1840, he practiced with Bradbury.

(Bradbury was an Augusta lawyer and from 1846 to 1853 a United States Senator. His chapter on the Kennebec Bar in Henry Kingsbury’s 1892 Kennebec County history begins: “My acquaintance with the Kennebec Bar commenced sixty-one years ago. In April, 1830, I opened my office in Augusta. The new granite courthouse had just been completed, and the May term of the law court was held in it by Chief Justice Mellen and his two associate justices, Weston and Parris [Albion Parris, from Portland].”)

From August 1844 to May 1848, North wrote, Rice also owned and edited the Augusta newspaper “The Age”, which had been founded in December 1831 in response to the legislature’s move from Portland to Augusta.

(This newspaper had many owners; North listed them, ending with “Gilman Smith, in whose hands it died during the great rebellion.”)

In 1848, Maine Governor John W. Dana appointed Rice a district court judge. On May 11, 1852, Governor John Hubbard appointed him an associate justice of the state Supreme Court.

Rice apparently maintained his connections with Bradbury, for North described another pre-Civil War event on April 18, 1861. A parade, led by the Pacific Fire Engine Company and featuring the Augusta band, went to Governor Israel Washburn, Jr.’s, quarters for a speech, then to Bradbury’s house for another.

Bradbury told them it was “the duty of every patriot to sustain the government and defend the flag of the country.” Then “Judge Rice, who happened to be at Mr. Bradbury’s, was called out, and expressed equally sound and patriotic sentiments.”

Rice resigned his judgeship on Dec. 1, 1863, to become president of the Portland and Kennebec Railroad Company, a position North said he still held in 1870. Of this change, North observed, “This is one of the instances, in our day, in which the judicial ermine has been laid aside, not, as sometimes, for the inviting garb of commerce, but for the comfortable cloak of transit and travel, owing to the brief tenure of judicial office, and the inadequate pay accorded to legal ability.”

(The “judicial ermine” is a reference to British formal judicial robes, which were lined with ermine, “emblematic of purity and honor without stain.”)

Rice married twice, North said. His first wife was Anne R. Smith, from Hallowell, whom he married April 10 or 12, 1836. They had a son, Albert Smith Rice, born April 4, 1837.

Anne died June 15, 1838. On Nov. 18, 1840, Rice married a widow named Almira (Emery) (Robinson), born in 1813, by whom he had a daughter, Abby Emery Rice, born May 8 or May 18, 1842, and according to FamilySearch, a son, Howard, born March 9, 1853.

Rice died in Augusta on May 27, 1882, aged 72. FamilySearch says he is buried in Augusta’s Forest Grove cemetery; Find a Grave finds no one named Rice there.

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Artemas Libby

Artemas Libbey (sometimes Libby) was born in Freedom, Maine, on Jan. 8, 1823. When he was about two, his family moved to Albion, where, Cleaves Law Library says, he “attended local schools.”

The Cleaves Law Library site (which spells his name Libby) says he studied law first under Samuel S. Warren, in Albion, and then under Z. (Zebah) Washburn, in China.

Find a Grave, quoting an unnamed source, says Libbey met Warren in 1840. Warren’s son, about two years younger than Libbey, was studying law with his father, and Warren persuaded Libbey to join the boy.

Find a Grave continues, “In the next winter he [Libbey] taught a town school, and then returned to Mr. Warren’s office, and began in the summer to read law, keeping up his other studies. He continued to study and read law there, except a few months in the winter occupied in teaching, until the summer of 1844, when Mr. Warren removed to Massachusetts.”

Libbey must have been well advanced in his studies when he came under Washburn’s tutelage, because he was admitted to the bar in the fall of 1844, at the age of 21. He opened his first office in Albion.

(Warren, according Bradbury’s chapter on the Kennebec bar in Kingsbury’s history, practiced law in Hallowell from before 1825 to around 1835, then in China, then in Albion, until he moved to Massachusetts about 1844. Zebah Washburn, born in Wayne in 1797, practiced law in China “until he was seventy years old.”)

The Cleaves site says Libbey practiced in Albion for 11 years, and moved to Augusta in 1858. But it also says he was elected an Augusta representative to the state legislature in 1852, and in 1856 was on Governor Samuel Wells’ executive council.

On April 23, 1875, Governor Nelson Dingley, Jr., appointed Libbey an associate justice of the Maine Supreme Court; he served until April 23 or April 24, 1882. On Jan. 11, 1883, Governor Frederick Robie appointed him again; and he must have been reappointed early in 1890, because the Cleaves site says he served until his death on March 15 or Aug. 15, 1894.

Libbey married Louisa H. Snow (March 1, 1825 – Nov. 17, 1895). Find a Grave says their only son, Albert, was born and died in the spring of 1852; Bradbury wrote in Kingsbury’s history that their son Arthur was admitted [to the bar?] in 1877.

FamilySearch helps reconcile these accounts: it dates the marriage Oct. 27, 1847, and says the couple had four children: Emma L. (1850-1883); Albert (born and died in 1852); Arthur (1854 -1882); and George W. (1864 – 1938).

Augusta’s Forest Grove Cemetery contains gravestones for Artemas, Louisa and son Arthur. Find a Grave says Arthur, born Feb. 2, 1854, died June 3, 1882, of typhoid fever.

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.