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

by Mary Grow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.

by Mary Grow

The lawyers discussed in this series earlier this spring were undoubtedly important in the lives of European settlers in the central Kennebec Valley. Before the lawyers, and equally if not more important, were another group of professional men: the surveyors.

Several surveyors’ names appear in 18th-century records, usually because the men were hired by the Plymouth Company/Kennebec Proprietors, the Boston-based companies with deeds to large parts of the area. Those most often mentioned include, in birth order, Ephraim Ballard (May 6 or May 17, 1725 – Jan. 7, 1821), John McKechnie (about 1730/1732 -– 1782), John Jones (c. 1743 – Aug. 16, 1823) and Nathan Winslow (April 1, 1743 — ? [after January 1807]).

Ballard is named as the surveyor of part of Albion, an area Henry Kingsbury, in his 1892 Kennebec County history, said the proprietors had given to Nathan Winslow; and part of Palermo. He was the husband of Martha Ballard, whose diary was made famous by Laurel Thacher Ulrich’s 1990 book titled A Midwife’s Tale.

McKechnie also surveyed part of Albion, in 1769; and the Town of Winslow.

Jones surveyed the west side of Sidney, beyond Winslow’s riverfront lots, in 1774; the area east of Vassalboro, including what became China, in the fall of 1773 and spring of 1774, with Abraham Burrell or Burrill (who became one of the first settlers around China Lake).

Nathan Winslow laid out lots in Vassalboro, including the part on the west side of the river that became Sidney, in 1761.

Among other surveyors mentioned less often in histories of the settlement of the central Kennebec valley are Paul Chadwick, General Joseph Chandler, Isaac Davis, Charles Hayden, John Howe, Josiah Jones, Bradstreet Wiggin or Wiggins and Dr. Obadiah Williams.

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Alice Hammond included in her history of Sidney a summary history of land titles in the area that became Maine, and more specifically in the valley of the Kennebec River. A summary of her summary might help readers sort out who owned what when.

The Augusta lawyer named Wendall Titcomb who wrote the chapter on Sources of Land Titles for Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history said that “…the Crown of England is the source to which trace all lines of title to lands within the county of Kennebec.” Hammond agreed.

She started with King James I’s 1606 grant giving the London Company the southern part and the Plymouth Company the northern part of North America between latitude 34 degrees and latitude 45 degrees.

The 45-degree line runs east-west through Maine north of present-day Skowhegan and Bangor. The 34-degree line runs through the southern United States, including Georgia, South Carolina and extreme southeastern North Carolina.

While the London Company settled Jamestown, Virginia, Plymouth Company representatives began trading with Natives and establishing fishing ports, but made no permanent settlements.

In 1620, Hammond wrote, a British stock company named the Council for New England, “successor to the Plymouth Company,” got a grant covering the territory between 40 and 48 degrees. Titcomb gave the full title: “The Council Established at Plymouth in the County of Devon for the planting, ruling and governing New England in America.” This company sponsored the 1620 Pilgrim settlement at Plymouth, Massachusetts.

One of the colonists, William Bradford, served as the colony’s governor for part of the time. He petitioned the Council for more land to support the colony’s growing population, and on Jan. 13, 1629, got the Kennebec or Plymouth Patent.

This grant covered 15 miles on both sides of the Kennebec River from the coast inland beyond present-day Skowhegan, about 1.5 million acres. It included the right to establish three trading stations, the one farthest upriver at Cushnoc (later Augusta).

Profits from the Kennebec trade declined over the years. On Oct. 17, 1661, Titcomb said, Boston businessmen Antipas Boyes (Boyce, Boies), Thomas Brattle, Edward Tyng and John Winslow bought the land along the Kennebec, for 400 pounds. These men organized themselves as the Kennebec Proprietors.

(Kingsbury added a footnote: the deed for the 1661 transaction was executed on Oct. 15, 1665, and “recorded in the York County registry in 1719.”)

Mostly because of wars with the Natives and their French allies who helped them from farther north, the so-called French and Indian Wars (1688 to 1763), the Proprietors did not develop their holdings. Over almost a century, their shares in the organization were divided among heirs, some ending up with 1/192 of a share, Hammond wrote.

The first of four separate French and Indian wars historians call King William’s War; it began in 1688 and was formally ended by the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick. The second war, known as Queen Anne’s War, or Dummer’s War, started in 1702 and ended with the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht.

James North, in his history of Augusta, wrote that the group he called the Pejepscot Proprietors took advantage of the post-1713 peaceful interlude to hire Joseph Heath to survey 111 miles of the Kennebec, as far inland as Norridgewock. Heath’s plan is dated May 16, 1719, North said.

(Joseph Heath, sometimes called Captain or Colonel, worked as a surveyor in several parts of Maine early in the 1700s, before the British settlements in the central Kennebec Valley. On-line documents refer to his plans for part of Brunswick [1717]; the Plymouth Patent [1719]; and a 1719 map and description of Norridgewock. North said Heath was “probably” the first commander at Fort Richmond, built in 1719 on the Kennebec below Gardiner.)

In August 1749, after the third of the four wars (King George’s War, or the War of Jenkins’ Ear) had ended with the October 1748 Treaty of Aix la Chapelle, some of the hereditary proprietors met and re-organized themselves as, Hammond wrote, “The Proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase from the late colony of New Plymouth,” aka either the Kennebec(k) Company/Proprietors or the Plymouth Company.

(This organization is the subject of a scholarly 1975 book by Gordon E. Kershaw titled The Kennebeck Proprietors 1749-1775. Kershaw focused on the group’s financial and legal interactions with the British government, in Massachusetts and in London.)

These men thought permanent settlements on the Kennebec River would be the way to profit from their holdings. North wrote that an early step was to get an exact understanding of what they owned. They hired their first surveyor pursuant to a December 1749, vote; and a surveyor named John North (later identified as Capt. John North) in October 1750.

North was again hired in 1751, and in that year and the next made a plan of the river and its tributaries and laid out at least some lots to be sold, from the ocean to Cushnoc (that is, inland as far as southern Augusta).

North mentioned repeatedly that the native inhabitants of the Kennebec Valley, egged on by the French from the north, tried to deter the expanding British settlements. The Proprietors and the Massachusetts authorities cooperated to build two forts on the east bank of the river in 1754.

Fort Halifax, built by British troops under General John Winslow (see box) was at the mouth of the Sebasticook, near the native village called Ticonic. Fort Western at Cushnoc served as a supply depot for and link to the upriver fort.

The fourth and final of the French and Indian Wars (the French and Indian War [singular], or the Seven Years’ War) broke out in 1754. Fighting in North America was over by 1760, although the formal peace treaty between Great Britain and France was not signed until Feb. 10, 1763 (Treaty of Paris).

With the Kennebec valley at peace, more people were willing to move there, and skilled surveyors able to establish precise lot lines became even more important.

A man named Winslow who was not a surveyor

The Town of Winslow was named after British General John Winslow (May 10, 1703 – April 17, 1774), not surveyor Nathan Winslow. Your writer found no evidence the two were related.

General Winslow, according to Barry M. Moody’s article in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (found on line), was a member of a prominent New England family, descendant of two former governors of the Plymouth Colony (Edward and Josiah Winslow).

Winslow was born May 10, 1703, in Marshfield, Massachusetts. In February, 1725, he married Mary Little, born in Marshfield in September 1704 (according to Wikipedia). They had three sons, Josiah, Pelham and Isaac. (Moody said only two sons; and added that Winslow took a second wife, Bethiah [Barker] Johnson [no date] – possible, since, according to Wikipedia, Mary died in 1772.)

Winslow’s first military experience was on an unsuccessful 1740 British expedition to Cuba, as a captain in a provincial militia company. He then joined the regular British army, serving in eastern Canada.

Moody said he briefly abandoned the army and returned to Massachusetts, where he represented Marshfield in the state legislature in 1752-53.

In 1754, Massachusetts Governor William Shirley made Winslow a major-general in charge of the 800-man force sent to the Kennebec to combat French and Native opposition to British settlements. There he oversaw construction of Fort Halifax.

Rev. Edwin Whittemore, in his 1902 Waterville centennial history, said Winslow left 300 men to build the fort and led the other 500 upriver as far as Norridgewock. In late summer, after the fort’s stockade and first buildings were finished, Whittemore wrote that Governor Shirley came north to inspect it “and highly commended Gen. Winslow and his men.”

(In a later chapter in Whittemore’s history, Aaron Appleton Plaisted commented on the varied spellings of “Ticonic.” Among them he listed Governor Shirley’s “Taconett” and General Winslow’s “Ticonnett.”)

The 1754 project in the Kennebec Valley “added greatly to his [Winslow’s] popularity, and he was thus a natural choice as the lieutenant-colonel of a provincial regiment raised by Shirley in 1755 to aid Lieutenant Governor Charles Lawrence of Nova Scotia in his attempts to sweep French influence from the province,” Moody wrote.

Winslow spent the spring and summer of 1755 in New Brunswick, Canada, where reducing French influence included heading the expulsion of the French Acadian settlers. Moody quoted from Winslow’s diary that the work did not please him; but “he carried out his orders with care, military precision, and as much compassion as circumstances allowed.”

Winslow returned to Massachusetts in November 1755. The next year, he “reached the high point of his military career” when Governor Shirley sent him to upstate New York to fight the French there.

On both expeditions, Winslow quarreled with his superior officers. Moody suggested both sides were to blame.

Back in Massachusetts by 1757, Winslow left the army. He again represented Marshfield in the Massachusetts legislature in 1757-58 and from 1761 to 1765.

Around 1766 Winslow moved about 15 miles to Hingham, Massachusetts. He died there in 1774.

Main sources

Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).

Websites, miscellaneous.