EVENTS – Step Back in Time: Historic Walking Tour of South China Village

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Site of original F. W. Hawes and the Spearin’s Store

The China Historical Society invites the community to explore the rich history of downtown South China during a special walking tour this Sunday, June 22nd, at 5:00 p.m. Participants will meet in the South China Community Church parking lot, located across from the old South China Library, for an engaging journey through the village’s past.

Local historians Barbara Poulin, Neil Farrington, and Joann Austin – all longtime South China residents – will serve as guides, sharing fascinating stories about the historic places that once defined downtown South China during their childhoods and earlier eras. The Historical Society will provide handouts containing valuable historical information about South China Village, offering attendees a lasting reference of the area’s heritage.

The tour, lasting approximately one hour, will feature an open discussion format where participants are encouraged to ask questions and share their own memories of the community. All are welcome to attend this free event. Those interested can find more information and sign up through the Facebook event posted on the China Historical Society’s Facebook page. Come discover the stories that shaped South China Village and connect with fellow community members who share a passion for local history!

Hawes, Woods, Carl’s, and Reeds Stores, now apartments

Dowes Diner – moved to new Route 3, now Greg’s Diner

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Waterville City Hall

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Waterville City Hall and Opera House.

by Mary Grow

This article will return to the history of a series of buildings, more cheerful than the Augusta jail(s) described in the June 5 story: Waterville’s town hall that became a city hall that was – and still is – combined with a large gathering space called an opera house.

As with the public buildings in Augusta, there are gaps and inconsistencies in the information. A small part of the problem is nomenclature. Winslow and its meeting places were on the east bank of the Kennebec; on the west bank after 1802, Waterville had two meeting houses, the one near the river called the Ticonic or east meeting house and the one farther inland called the west meeting house.

Readers may remember that Waterville became a separate town from Winslow, divided physically by the Kennebec River and legally by the Massachusetts legislature, on June 23, 1802. According to both Henry Kingsbury, in his 1892 Kennebec County history, and Rev. Edwin Carey Whittemore, in his 1902 Waterville centennial history, the earliest meeting house on the west (future Waterville) shore predated the division.

Whittemore found the first reference to a Winslow meeting house in records of a Feb. 10, 1794, town meeting, held in a private home. Voters approved building a meeting house, for both religious and secular purposes, on land on the east (Winslow) bank of the Kennebec that Arthur Lithgow would donate; and raised 100 pounds to build it.

Later in 1794, Winslow voters invited a minister to town. Rev. Joshua Cushman, a Revolutionary War veteran and Harvard graduate, came and stayed 20 years.

He apparently didn’t have a building for the first couple years. Whittemore said on March 7 and 8, 1796, voters first authorized building a meeting house “on the hill near or in Ticonic village,” on the west bank; and then “voted to build another on the Lithgow lot in Winslow, the previous vote concerning it having been reconsidered.”

A five-man “committee for the west side” reported on March 16, 1796, recommending putting up the west (future Waterville) building and selling pews. “Such was the beginning of the meeting house which is now a part of the old city hall,” Whittemore wrote in 1902.

Once the meeting house was approved, Whittemore said, Dr. Obadiah Williams “offered…the present city hall park” for that building and also a schoolhouse or courthouse. A petition from the town’s western residents for a more central location was denied.

Waterville’s present city hall faces south across Castonguay Square. The square is on the north side of Common Street, which runs east-west for the block between Main and Front streets.

On-line information says the land was deeded to Waterville in 1840 and known as The Commons until 1921, when it was renamed to honor Arthur L. Castonguay, the first Waterville soldier killed in action during World War I.

Although the meeting house wasn’t finished for years, Whittemore said the first west side (of the Kennebec) town meeting was held there June 25, 1798. Kingsbury wrote, “The town meeting house on the west side was built in 1797, and first used March 5, 1798.”

Having an unbridged river dividing the body politic was an obvious inconvenience to voters on both sides trying to exercise their democratic rights. On Dec. 28, 1801, Winslow voters petitioned the Massachusetts legislature to create a new town on the west side of the river; and on June 23, 1802, Waterville was incorporated.

The first Waterville town meeting was in the Ticonic or east meeting house on Monday, July 26, 1802. The main business was electing town officials.

Winslow, from 1771, and Waterville, in 1802, included most of what is now Oakland, known after 1802 as West Waterville. Kingsbury wrote that before 1802, a second meeting house was being planned in that area (again, no location is specified).

The legislative act that created Waterville provided that money “assessed for building a meeting house in the West Pond settlement shall be paid and exclusively appropriated to that purpose”; Winslow was not to have any of it.

The west meeting house must have been finished, or almost, by August 1802, because Whittemore said Waterville’s second town meeting was held there on Aug. 9, 1802; and Kingsbury said voters that month approved holding future meetings alternately between the two.

In 1807 or 1808, as war with Great Britain appeared a possibility, Whittemore wrote that voters approved building a “powder magazine in the loft of the meeting house, probably as the driest place available.” Presumably he meant the east meeting house. That the building was also a church is shown by his reference to a preacher’s salary in the same sentence.

Whittemore mentioned the meeting hall again when part of the July 4, 1826, celebration was held there. Then, without explanation, he wrote that in 1842, “the old east meeting house was moved back and fitted up for a town hall.”

The “town hall” was the site of a June 3, 1854, anti-slavery meeting and of at least two gatherings in response to the Civil War.

On April 20, 1861, Whittemore wrote, a large meeting to respond to the April 12 attack on Fort Sumter was held in “the old town hall.” It led immediately to the organization of companies of volunteers.

On March 14, 1864, the “old town hall” was the site of a concert to start raising money for a monument honoring Civil War soldiers. Martin Milmore’s bronze statue of the “Citizen Soldier” was dedicated in Monument Park on May 30, 1876.

The western part of Waterville, with its meeting house, separated on Feb. 26, 1873. The new town was West Waterville for a decade before becoming Oakland.

In his chapter on Oakland, Kingsbury wrote that the “town meeting house” built by Winslow officials “about 1800” “was used for religious and other public gatherings and for town meetings till 1841, when it was taken down.” In 1892, the town hall was Memorial Hall, an 1870 brick and stone building on Church Street that honors Oakland’s Civil War soldiers.

Waterville’s 1874 Indepen­dence Day celebration in­cluded “a grand dinner in the town hall.” In 1875, Whittemore wrote “a new town hall was proposed”; he did not say by whom, or why. Instead, town officials spent $5,000 to add 33 feet to the existing building.

After rejecting a city charter approved by the Maine legislature in 1884, on Jan. 23, 1888, Waterville voters adopted an amended charter, by a vote of 543 in favor to 432 opposed. The town became a city, with the same municipal building.

In the spring of 1896, Whittemore wrote, an undetermined number of unidentified voters asked for a May 18 meeting, apparently to debate a single question that he quoted as: “to see if the voters of the city will instruct the city council to build a city hall and opera house this season.”

Whittemore thought the idea reasonable. By then, the “old city hall, the east meetinghouse of 1796, with sundry remodellings, was no longer on a plane with the dignity or the demands of the city,” in his opinion.

He did not explain why petitioners included an opera house.

A “largely attended” public meeting was held on May 18, 1896, to ask if voters wanted the city council to build “a city hall and opera house.” A majority said yes, please, estimating the cost at $75,000.

On May 4, 1897, there was another vote: 526 voters approved creating a City Building Commission, while 404 dissented. Consequently, Whittemore wrote, “Plans were accepted, the old hall was moved back, contracts were signed and the foundation of the new hall was partly laid.”

Then the “conservative or as some said reactionary” faction got an injunction that stopped work.

Nothing more was done until early 1901, when more public meetings led the city council to order work resumed, to be financed through taxes over following years, with the cost estimated at $70,000.

The architect for the building was George D. Adams, from Lawrence, Massachusetts. The new city hall was dedicated during the centennial celebration, on the morning of June 23, 1902, “the city’s birthday.” William Abbott Smith’s description of the ceremony in Whittemore’s history referred to “expressions of satisfaction which came from the vast throng that visited every corner of the new building.”

The ceremony, held in the new Opera House, included music, speeches and a presentation of the keys to the building by contractor Horace Purinton to Mayor Martin Blaisdell.

Purinton commented on the range of sources for building materials: stone from northern New York and Michigan, terra cotta from New Jersey clay, brick from local clay, wood from Maine, Georgia and Indiana.

Whittemore’s account praised Purinton and Blaisdell. Abbott added words of appreciation for former Waterville Board of Trade president Frank Redington, who presided over the dedication ceremony.

In his opening remarks, Redington called the new building “a suitable home for our city officials,” and its “convention hall” a meeting place for public discussion, “the old town house remodelled, enlarged, beautified, adorned, and fulfilled.”

He continued: “Some of you are perhaps thinking of the entertainment element which is introduced, for the human mind is so constructed that it needs entertainment as much as the body needs nourishment.”

Whittemore concluded his account of the building: “Waterville at last has a city hall of which she may well be proud.”

Waterville City Hall has been on the National Register of Historic Places since Jan. 1, 1976. In their October 1975 application for a listing, Earle G. Shettleworth Jr., and Frank A. Beard, of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, described the building as “a good representative example of the multi-purpose civic buildings erected in Maine at the turn of the century.”

It stands three stories tall, with a stone foundation and basement and the upper stories “brick with wood and stone trim.” The main entrance to the city offices is in the center of the south façade; stone steps lead up to both sides of a recessed doorway under an arch, with arched windows on either side.

Above the entrance, three more arched windows are separated by white columns, with elaborate brickwork across the whole front. Top-floor windows are very small. Shettleworth and Beard wrote that the top of the front of the building “is completed by an elaborate wooden cornice composed of a dentil molding, a series of modillions and an ornamental crest at the center bearing the inscription ‘City Hall’.”

The entrance to the opera house/auditorium is on the west side, which Shettleworth and Beard described as handsomely decorated.

Inside, city offices occupy the basement and first floor. The top of the building is taken up by the auditorium, its lobby and backstage area.

Shettleworth and Beard found that the auditorium was called “Assembly Rooms”; “one of its earliest uses was for a dairyman’s exhibition.” It hosted varied touring entertainments, including, the historians said, Australian actress Judith Anderson; American singer Rudy Vallee; American opera singer and civil rights leader Marian Anderson; and early American Western movie actor Tom Mix, whose horse had “to be hauled up the outside of the building” to join him on stage.

After World War II the auditorium was used as a movie theater. It has always provided a venue for local entertainments.

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: More China lawyers

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by Mary Grow

On May 15, this series profiled three 19th-century China lawyers, Abisha Benson (practiced in China Village in the 1820s); Alfred Fletcher (born in 1817 or 1818, practiced in China, probably China Village, died in 1868); and Sanford Kingsbury (born in 1782, probably practiced in the southern part of China [given connections with Gardiner], died in 1849).

This article will introduce eight more men who practiced law in or around the town of China in the 19th century.

* * * * * *

The Greeleys or Greelys were early settlers in Branch Mills, the village on the west branch of the Sheepscot River shared between China and its eastern neighbor, Palermo. The China bicentennial history says Jacob Greely was a Revolutionary War veteran who moved to China after 1782.

Millard Howard, in his extensively researched 2015 history of Palermo, wrote that the China history probably referred to Jacob Greeley, Sr. (1739 -1820). Howard found that in 1777 Jacob Greeley Jr. (Aug. 22, 1762 – Aug. 3, 1838, according to WikiTree) settled near Beech Pond (a small pond northwest of Sheepscot Lake, on the north side of Route 3).

But, Howard wrote, Jacob Jr. was too young to own property legally. Howard surmised that Jacob Sr., whom he described as active in the Revolutionary movement in Newcastle, put the land in his son’s name to provide a safe inland refuge in case the British won.

Jacob Jr.’s, son, Jose (1798 – 1884), was a Branch Mills businessman. FamilySearch says Jose and his wife, Anna (Hacker), had three daughters and a son they named Josiah Hacker (May 23, 1826 – March 12, 1896. James W. Bradbury, in his chapter on lawyers in Henry Kingsbury’s 1892 Kennebec County history, wrote that in 1856, Josiah H. “was admitted to the bar at St. Paul, Minnesota.”

Bradbury also said that Josiah H. “was admitted to practice in Kennebec county” in 1867. The China history and Milton E. Dowe’s 1954 Palermo history suggest he was back in Branch Mills before then: both cite an 1859 Palermo business directory with listings including four Greelys (spelled without the second e).

J. and J. H. (presumably Jose and Josiah H.) were “Manufacturers of Lumber, Flour and Millowiers.” (Any reader who knows what a millowier is or was is invited to contact The Town Line. The reference is a copy of a copy, so a typographical error is possible.)

J. H. was listed separately as “Counsellor and Attorney at Law.”

And Jonathan Greely was listed as “Counsellor and Attorney at Law, Dealer in Stock.” (Your writer suspects livestock, not financial instruments, although the New York Stock Exchange originated in May, 1792, Wikipedia says.) Howard identifies Jonathan as Jacob Jr.’s, brother and says he worked with the Kennebec Proprietors in 1802 and 1809, sorting out land claims. Your writer found no more information about this lawyer.

Josiah Greely (no e) is listed as a China selectman in 1857 and from 1858 through 1861, according to the China history. Bradbury added that he was a state representative in 1861.

As with most of the lawyers your writer has been describing, information about Greely’s practice is non-existent. The China history tells a story from his days as a selectman, however.

In 1861, for the first time, the annual China town report listed delinquent taxpayers, as of 1859, by name and amount owed. The lowest amount that earned dishonorable mention was $1.98, the highest $11.88.

The man who owed $11.88 on his farm did not pay up. On April 27, 1861, the history says, selectman Greely bought the property “‘for the inhabitants of the town of China” for $15.88, the amount due for back taxes and the expenses of the auction.”

* * * * * *

Washburns were numerous among early settlers in China Village, while the area was still part of Albion. Bradbury listed one them, Zebah (sometime Zeba), “a son of Zalmunah,” as a lawyer.

The China history says Japheth Washburn and his son, Japheth Coombs Washburn, arrived in 1804. The Washburn genealogy included in the history shows a Zalmuna (September 11, 1772 – Sept. 7, 1844), older brother of Japheth Coombs (Jan. 20, 1780 – Aug. 29, 1850).

When the Town of China was organized in February 1818, Japheth C. was elected the first town clerk, and his brother, Zalmunna/Zalmuna, was the first treasurer/tax collector and one of the first nine school agents.

This Zalmuna married Deborah Benson. The oldest of their eight children was Zebah, born Jan. 26, 1797, in Wayne; died April 12, 1888, in China; buried in China Village cemetery.

Bradbury said Zebah Washburn “practiced law until he was seventy years old.” The China history says he also served as cashier of the China Bank, in China Village (1853 – 1855) and the Canton Bank, in South China (1855 – 1856).

(The history says the China Bank attracted only $300 in local deposits, so the state banking commission advised liquidating it “even though it was in good financial condition.” Its successor is described as “spectacularly unsuccessful.”)

Your writer has failed to find details about Zebah Washburn’s legal practice. She deduces it did not provide him enough income, because Ruby Crosby Wiggin’s 1964 history of Albion lists Zeba(h) Washburn as getting a liquor license for his store annually from 1821 to 1824; and as owning a potash factory (undated) with his brother, Zalmunnah, at Puddle Dock, the nineteenth-century industrial center southeast of the present-day village.

* * * * * *

Jacob Smith is named in the China bicentennial history as a 19th-century China Village lawyer. Bradbury said Smith sent him (Bradbury) his first client, around 1830; and “later” (unspecified) was a municipal court judge in Bath.

On-line records include two documents, from February 1838 and August 1839, naming a Jacob Smith (not proven to be the same man) as the court clerk in Wiscasset; and a March 13, 1868, petition “recommending the reappointment of Jacob Smith to be the judge of the Municipal Court in the City of Bath.”

(The 1838 document, which Smith attested in his capacity as clerk, was a petition to the county commissioners to make Roland Fisher the new ferryman “due to a change in ownership of the property in Georgetown where the ferry’s run originated”; and to lower the ferry rates. There were 20 signatories.

(A ferry from Georgetown currently runs to McMahan Island in July and August, “for islanders and their renters/visitors only,” according to the island’s website.)

* * * * * *

Bradbury’s list of area lawyers included three related Warrens. He wrote that George was the son of “General Warren and the celebrated Mercy Warren, daughter of James Otis, of Barnstable”; Samuel S., who practiced briefly in China, was “a nephew of General Warren, of Bunker Hill fame”; and Ebenezer T. was Samuel’s brother.

Bradbury was apparently talking about two different General Warrens. The one who married Mercy Otis was James (Sept. 28, 1726 – Nov. 28, 1808); he was paymaster in the Continental Army and later a Massachusetts politician. Wikipedia names George (1766–1800) as the youngest of their five sons.

The Bunker Hill General Warren was Joseph (June 11, 1741 – June 17, 1775). He was a doctor and a major-general in the Massachusetts militia; volunteering to fight at Bunker Hill, he was killed in action.

General Joseph Warren had three brothers, Samuel, Ebenezer and John. WikiTree says Ebenezer’s sons – the General’s nephews — included Ebenezer Tucker Warren (born in Hallowell Sept. 11, 1779; died about Sept. 1, 1830) and Samuel Stephens (or Stevens) Warren (born April 14, 1793, in Foxborough, Massachusetts; died Sept. 26, 1881, in Wrentham, Massachusetts).

Bradbury called George Warren “one of the lesser lights of the Kennebec bar,” a man who “possessed fine natural talents, but led a dissipated life, dying in Augusta in penury.” He practiced in Winslow before Waterville became a separate town in June 1802.

Rev. Edwin Carey Whittemore, in his centennial history of Waterville, said George Warren was “Winslow’s first lawyer,” in practice by 1791, and the town’s representative to the Massachusetts legislature in 1791 and 1792.

Bradbury wrote that Samuel S. Warren began his law practice in Hallowell before 1825. About 1835 he moved to China, from there to Albion and about 1844 to Massachusetts.

An on-line source names one of his law students in China as a 17-year-old from Albion named Artemas Libby, who later studied with “Z. Washburne”; was admitted to the Kennebec bar at 21 in 1844; and served as associate justice of the Maine Supreme Court from April 23, 1875, until he died Aug. 15, 1894.

Kingsbury lists S. S. Warren as a China selectman in 1832. Warren is not on the list of selectmen in the bicentennial history.

Samuel’s brother Ebenezer, Bradbury said, had a law practice in Hallowell around 1824 and later was president of a Hallowell bank.

A Vaughan family papers website says Ebenezer Warren was born in Foxborough, Massachusetts, in 1779. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard in 1800 and a master’s in 1803, and lived in Hallowell from the time he married Abiah Morse. The wedding date is not specified, but the couple had a daughter born in 1810 and a son born in 1816.

Warren “was a lawyer, federal county attorney for Kennebec County, a justice of the peace, and a Massachusetts senator in 1816,” the website says. He was also president of two banks and from 1821 to 1830 an overseer of Bowdoin College.

He died suddenly in 1830, in Quincey, Illinois, while he was “inspecting soldiers’ land claims,” the Vaughan papers say.

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Newell Washburn Brainerd grew up in China, one of two sons and two or three daughters of a China Village merchant named Fredus Oldridge Brainerd (Dec. 15, 1831 -May 9, 1900) and his wife Maria (Washburn) (Jan. 26, 1832 – March 31, 1895), attorney Zeba/Zebah Washburn’s daughter.

Newell Brainerd’s November, 1900, obituary, pasted on his Find a Grave page (not including the name or location of the newspaper in which it was published; content suggests the paper covered Skowhegan), says he was born Aug. 20, 1860, in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, whence his parents moved to China “in his early childhood.” FamilySearch says he was born in 1860 in Milburn, Maine (now Skowhegan).

Both agree he attended China Academy in the early 1870s; the obituary on Find a Grave says he graduated. In February 1883 he was its principal, with his sister Estelle or Estella, four years his senior, as his assistant, the China history says.

Brainerd’s obituary adds a second graduation, from Oak Grove Seminary, in Vassalboro. The obituary and Bradbury agree that Brainerd studied law under E. F. Webb, in Waterville; gained admittance to the bar in 1886; and began practice in Fairfield that year, soon adding a Clinton office.

In November 1890, Bradbury said, Brainerd moved to Skowhegan. The obituary explains that he was elected Somerset County clerk of courts, a position he held for 10 years with success enough to be re-elected in September 1900.

On Jan. 15, 1887, FamilySearch says, Brainerd married Flora T. Brown (born in Fairfield April 13, 1860; or April 13, 1859). His obituary calls her Flora T. Lawrence and refers to her son Fred Lawrence; her obituary, on a separate FamilySearch page, says her first husband, Charles P. Lawrence, died in 1881.

The Brainerds had two (Find a Grave) or three (FamilySearch) daughters, Marion, born April 19, 1888, and twins Edith and Ethel born Jan. 11, 1890. Marion, listed on FamilySearch but not on Find a Grave, died in 1967 in Gardiner.

Edith died in September 1890; Ethel died Jan. 26, 1935, in Cincinnati, Ohio.

The obituary says nothing about Brainerd as a lawyer, but reports he was “for many years a trial justice.” He was active in the Methodist Church, helping with Sunday school and serving on the board of Island Avenue Methodist Church.

“He was an obliging and very competent official, a Christian gentleman, a respected and honored citizen. He has many sincere and warm friends, particularly in Somerset county, where he served the public so faithfully,” the obituary writer summarized.

This source said Brainerd had been in ill health for five years, and died in Massachusetts General Hospital at 5 a.m. Friday, Nov. 9, 1900, aged 40. He had had a necessary operation a few days earlier and failed to recover.

His body was returned to Skowhegan, where, after a well-attended service, he was buried in Southside cemetery. His widow, Flora, died Oct. 19, 1847, and is buried with her husband and daughters Ethel and Edith.

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.

CORRECTION: The photo in last week’s issue was not the Augusta, Maine, jail. It was an editing error.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Augusta jail

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by Mary Grow

Before proceeding to the history of the Augusta jail, your writer wants to clarify a sentence from last week’s article. It referenced Wikipedia’s statement that after Augusta became a city (instead of a town) in 1849, “Its early city offices were in the Opera House, and meetings took place in Winthrop Hall.”

Apparently “early” doesn’t mean from the beginning. The history of the Augusta Opera House, from James North’s 1870 history and other sources, was part of the Nov. 17, 2022, article in this series (about the Augusta fire department). It does not jibe with housing city offices in 1849.

The public buildings described in the 2022 article were at 296 Water Street. According to the article, citing North’s history, in the summer of 1865 (almost certainly a typographical error for 1866, after the great fire of Sept. 17, 1865), the Granite Block was built there.

This building had stores on the street level, offices on the second floor and on the third floor the public area named Granite Hall (not called an opera house). Granite Hall, North said, was 104-by-62-feet, 27 feet high, with galleries on three sides and a 62-by-24-foot stage.

Granite Hall was totally destroyed when Granite Block burned in the winter of 1890, the 2022 “Town Line” article continues. It then cites a July 4, 1896, Bangor newspaper article saying in 1891, the “first Opera House” was built on the same lot. It burned the night of July 3-4, 1896.

By then, the newspaper article said, the building’s second floor (between ground-floor stores and a third-floor opera house) housed “city government and city treasurer’s rooms and offices.” Also by then, according to Wikipedia (cited last week) the brick Augusta city hall at 1 Cony Street was under construction.

Observant readers will have noted that according to these sources, the first named Opera House was built in 1891; Granite Hall, which could have been used for operas, was built in 1865 or 1866. Neither existed in 1849.

When North wrote about choosing a mayor and getting the city council organized in February and March, 1850, the only meeting place he mentioned was Winthrop Hall.

* * * * * *

Kennebec County jail, in Augusta. Date unknown.

Fort Western and plans for the meeting house (built in 1782-83; see last week’s article in this series) were the only Hallowell public buildings North discussed in the 1760s and 1770s. The courthouse and the jail were then farther down the Kennebec, in the town that was incorporated in 1752 as Frankfort and became Pownalborough in 1760 and Dresden in 1784. (Dresden today is the town in which the historic Pownalborough Courthouse, built in 1760, stands.)

Capt. Charles Nash (author of the chapters on Augusta in Kingsbury’s 1892 Kennebec County history) and North, between them, presented a history of 18th-cenury public punishment in Hallowell/ Augusta. Nash explained that (Massachusetts) state law required towns to have public stocks and a whipping post, and fined those that failed to provide these “terrors to evil doers.”

Nash said public stocks were first ordered in 1775, without saying where they were (presumably in a public place; part of the point of forcing offenders to sit with their ankles through holes in a heavy wooden frame was to expose them to ridicule and torment). North mentioned that voters at the spring 1785 annual meeting voted “to build stocks.”

Both historians referenced a whipping post put up in 1786 (April, North said). Nash located it on Winthrop Street. North said a thief was whipped that month and three other men (two horse thieves and a counterfeiter) “as late as 1796” (Nash said the stocks and whipping post “fell into disuse” after the jail was built nearby in 1793).

In February, 1793, North said, a county committee accepted proposals for materials and labor to build a Hallowell jail. It went up the same year, a two-story building “with walls of hewn timber,” “small apertures…in the walls to admit light and air to the cells.”

Kingsbury located the jail at the intersection of State and Winthrop streets, “opposite the present court house.”

This first jail was “not very secure,” North wrote. He gave an example of a man who used his jackknife to enlarge a window, took off his clothes and squeezed through to freedom.

Nonetheless, the wooden jail lasted until March 16, 1808. That night, during the violence over land rights that convulsed the area now included in Windsor (the “Malta War” and the murder of surveyor Paul Chadwick), someone set what was by then the Augusta (no longer Hallowell) jail on fire. It burned to the ground.

There was an attempt to burn the courthouse, too, North wrote. A second-floor incendiary device there was discovered in time and extinguished.

Residents and officials at first assumed the arsonists were some of the squatters who had been resisting demands to either pay for or give up their land. Squatters may well have been responsible for the attempt at the courthouse, North said, but people decided the jail fire was most likely set by an inmate, Captain Edward Jones.

The jailer, Pitt Dillingham, had already moved records out of the building “in anticipation of such an event,” North wrote (without explaining whether Dillingham was wary of Jones, or of the general unrest). The prisoners were taken to a nearby house, under guard; none escaped, Kingsbury said.

The county sheriff promptly had a temporary jail built near the courthouse; the Court of Sessions approved it in April 1808. The court also ordered a new stone jail to be built immediately; appointed a building committee; and imposed an $8,000 county tax for the work.

But, North wrote, the legislature approved only $5,000. Construction went ahead anyway, partly because the county was spending a lot of money to guard prisoners in the insecure temporary jail.

The first prisoners were transferred to the new jail in December, before the work was completely finished, North said. In April 1809, another $3,000 county tax was levied.

This two-story jail was made from blocks of stone held together by iron dowels. It was “much in advance of the prison accommodations of that day,” North wrote, and was “considered a very expensive and secure structure.”

He described an alley-way separating rows of cells with “heavy iron doors” on each floor. The ground-floor cells, for “the worst criminals,” got light and air through six-by-24-inch openings in the stone walls. On the second floor, where debtors and people whose crimes were less serious were housed, each cell had a grated window.

The new jail was “connected, by a brick ell, to a two story square brick jail house” at the intersection of State and Winthrop streets, North said.

Kingsbury added a separate brick “keeper’s house,” still standing in 1892.

North, and an anonymous historian who put a history of the Hallowell jail and related issues on line, mentioned one incident in connection with the jail: Joseph Sager’s Jan. 2, 1835, hanging, after he was convicted of murdering his wife (with arsenic, in “some wine…in which was an egg with white sugar”) in October, 1834.

Sager claimed innocence, but failed to convince a jury, or the public. His mother’s last-minute effort to get the governor and council to intervene failed.

North wrote that the gallows was on Winthrop Street, “near the southwest corner of the jail” where Sager had been held. Despite a “cold and stormy” day, an estimated 8,000 to 12,000 people gathered.

Kennebec County Sheriff George W. Stanley was the official who executed Sager. His body hung for 20 minutes before he was pronounced dead. Afterwards, North reported, he was allegedly “buried with great secrecy on an island in a pond in Winthrop.”

North mentioned that the county attorney who prosecuted Sager was James W, Bradbury — the man your writer has cited frequently as author of the chapter on Kennebec County lawyers in Kingsbury’s history. He began his legal practice in Augusta in 1830, and Wikipedia says he was the county’s prosecuting attorney from 1834 to 1838.

The on-line historian says Sager’s was “the last execution carried out in the county.”

By the spring of 1857, North wrote, the county commissioners considered the 1808 jail unfit for use. He quoted from an unidentified source: it lacked “sufficient warmth, light, ventilation and cleanliness; it was inhuman, dangerous to life, and detrimental to health and good morals to imprison persons therein.”

The commissioners, North wrote, inspected the new Auburn jail and hired its designer, an important Boston architect named Gridley James Fox Bryant, to design one for them.

(The on-line historian says Bryant was educated at Maine’s Gardiner Lyceum and returned to the state to “design at least twenty buildings.” Listed as still standing in 2024 were the Knox and Penobscot County courthouses in Rockland and Bangor, respectively, and the Washington County jail in Machias. The Knox County courthouse and Washington County jail are on the National Register of Historic places.)

The commissioners then selected a nearby lot “where the courthouse used to stand” (on-line historian) and added abutting land to it; decided on a stone building (though the cost estimate for a brick one was $6,000 less); and on Sept. 16, 1857, opened nine bids to put up the building.

They awarded the contract to low bidder Charles Webb, from Bath, for $52, 287, North wrote. The total cost of land and building was around $60,000, funded by county bonds.

Webb’s crew started the foundation that fall; bad weather stopped work until the spring of 1858, when it was continued “with commendable dispatch.” Webb himself was on site; the on-line historian referenced an April “Kennebec Journal” account of Webb being knocked cold “by the recoil of a stone cart.”

Local and state authorities and the public were invited to tour the new jail on Feb. 1, 1859. North described it in detail, with dimensions (112-by-58-feet, 39.5 feet above the ground). An accompanying picture shows the three-story stone and brick building, topped with a cupola and weathervane.

The front and middle sections housed staff. North listed “eating, store and bathing rooms and store closet” in the front basement, with a “parlor, sitting-room and office” on the second floor and eight bedrooms in the third story and attic.

The kitchen was in the basement of the middle section. Above it was a 33-foot high “guard and inspection room.”

In the back section were 54 cells and eight larger “privilege rooms, or cells” (North did not explain them). Cells were mostly eight feet square, privilege rooms 19-by-8-feet. Doors, windows, and in each cell a bedstead and table were all made of iron.

Neither North nor the on-line historian said when the first prisoners arrived.

North, writing his history in 1870, had nothing more to say about the jail. The on-line historian concluded his 2024 account: “During the next 160 years, it was expanded in proportion and purpose to become today’s Kennebec County Corrections [Correctional] Facility,” at 115 State Street.

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: 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.