Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Courts – Eleazer Ripley

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by Mary Grow

Eleazer Wheelock Ripley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * *

Marker is in Versailles, Indiana, in Ripley County.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * *

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

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

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

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

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).

Websites, miscellaneous.

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

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

by Mary Grow

Chapter One: the Building’s Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Two: Norman Elvin’s story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Young Norman delivered newspapers, shoveled snow and mowed lawns.

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

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

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

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

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

He explained three reasons for his initial reaction.

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

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

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

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

Chapter Three: Michelle Bourque’s story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Four: Grace Academy’s new mission

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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1880 Central Fire Station

by Scott Holst

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

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

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

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

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

1910 Firemen’s Parade

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

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

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

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

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

1910 Hose Company #1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1855 Firemen’s Muster

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Small town lawyers

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Kennebec County Courthouse

by Mary Grow

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * *

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

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

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

* * * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Courts – Part 4

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

by Mary Grow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Judge William Penn Whitehouse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Historian Hatch was again elated, writing:

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

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

Hatch summed up Whitehouse’s tenure:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Burns case

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Courts – Part 3

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by Mary Grow

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

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

Nathan Weston

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * *

Judge William Penn Whitehouse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Richard Drury Rice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Artemas Libby

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Lower courts & Augusta Courthouse

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by Mary Grow

Judge William Penn Whitehouse

Last week’s article summarized part of the origin of Maine’s court system, including the 1820 creation of the state Supreme Court. The next level below the Supreme Court, according to William Penn Whitehouse’s information in Henry Kingsbury’s 1892 Kennebec County history, was the court of common pleas.

As related last week, courts of common pleas were abolished in 1872. In 1878, some of this court’s functions were taken over in Kennebec County by the county superior court.

Whitehouse summarized the types of cases the superior court was authorized to decide. Through successive legislative acts, he wrote, the court’s jurisdiction came to include “all civil matters, except real actions, complaints for flowage, and proceedings in equity, including libels for divorce….”

Here is a definition of “real action” from the web: “a local legal action founded on seisin [another word for possession] or possession in which title is placed in issue and which aims at establishing title to a particular piece or part of real estate and at recovering the piece or part of real estate.”

“Flowage” is defined as “an overflowing onto adjacent land,” or “a body of water formed by overflowing or damming.”

“Proceeding in equity” means “a civil suit that seeks an equitable remedy, such as an injunction or specific performance, rather than a legal remedy, such as monetary damages.”

The superior court, Whitehouse wrote, also had “exclusive original and appellate jurisdiction of all criminal matters, including capital cases.” It was authorized to hear appeals from “municipal and police courts and trial justices in civil and criminal cases.”

An 1891 law, he said, limited the superior court’s jurisdiction to cases where requested damages were under $500. It also provided that in a murder trial, “one of the judges of the supreme court must preside.”

The next level of courts Whitehouse described he called the court of sessions. Inherited from Massachusetts, this court consisted of justices of the peace, at first however many there were in a jurisdiction, after 1807 a fixed number.

Kennebec County Courthouse

In Kennebec County (which had been separated from Lincoln County in February 1799), Whitehouse said this court had six justices plus a chief justice until 1819, when it was reduced to two justices plus a chief justice.

In 1831, the court of sessions was replaced by a court of county commissioners. This court still existed in 1892; it consisted of “three persons elected by the people.”

(Whether Whitehouse meant these “persons” were commissioners is unclear. However, the current Kennebec County website suggests they might have been. This site says the three Kennebec County commissioners, each representing a district in the county, have responsibility for policies and budgets; and “Additional duties include municipal tax abatement appeals and hearings on maintenance of town roads.”)

Yet another type of court Whitehouse said Maine inherited from Massachusetts is the probate court. A Maine Probate Court website explains: “Probate Courts handle the estates of deceased and missing persons, guardianship of incapacitated adults and minor children, trusts, legal name changes of adults and minors, adoption matters as well as other family matters.”

In 1784, Whitehouse wrote, the Massachusetts legislature created county probate courts, each consisting of one “able and learned person” as judge. The Maine legislature, in 1821, continued the system; in 1853, county probate judges and registers of probate (the person who manages and administers the court) were made elective officials, serving four-year terms.

Elizabeth “Libby” Mitchell, of Vassalboro, has been Kennebec County probate judge since 2016; she was re-elected in November 2024. Her husband, James “Jim” Mitchell, had held the position for 37 years before his death in September 2016.

The register is Ronda Snyder, of Sidney, serving her first term.

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In addition to state and county courts, Whitehouse listed municipal courts. In Kennebec County, they were established in Hallowell in 1835; in Gardiner in 1849 or 1850; in Augusta in 1850; and in Waterville in 1880 (called the police court).

Judges were elected until 1876. Thereafter, Whitehouse said, they were appointed by the governor and council for four-year terms.

These courts generally took over the powers that had been held by justices of the peace. In 1891, Whitehouse wrote, the legislature expanded the Waterville court’s jurisdiction over both criminal matters and minor civil actions. He did not explain why.

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According to James North in his 1870 history of Augusta, when Augusta and Hallowell separated in February 1797, the courts remained in what became briefly Harrington and on June 9 Augusta.

The first courthouse had been built in Market Square near Dickman Lane (now Dickman Street, in downtown Augusta?) in 1790. Money was raised by subscription, North said, with Henry Sewall (1752 – 1845, one of numerous Sewalls important in Augusta history) subscribing $10 in “labor and materials.” He and his brother, Jonathan Sewall, did most of the work.

By December 1790 the project was out of money, and the building wasn’t finished. The subscribers decided to make one room fit for the Court of Common Pleas’ January 1791 session. North wrote that the room was adequate, though it was “neither plastered nor lathed” until December 1791.

In June 1801, North wrote, Kennebec County officials decided it was time for a new courthouse. They chose a site on State Street (then named Court Street; what is now Court Street did not exist until 1803, and then only its east end, between Water and State streets) “on the site of the present [1870] new jail.”

This courthouse was usable by the winter of 1801-1802 – North wrote that religious services were occasionally held in it. It was officially finished March 16, 1802, and the Court of Common Pleas moved in.

“It was a commodious building for that day, and served the county for nearly thirty years,” North wrote. After that it became the State Street Chapel, home of the Second Baptist Church; then the Concert Hall; and when the new jail claimed the lot under it, it was moved and in 1870 was still the Concert Hall.

When the Kennebec County Court of Sessions met for its December 1827 term, some Kennebec Bar members asked for a new courthouse. The judges decided there was indeed a need for “better accommodation of the county and public offices” and appointed a six-man committee to design a new building and provide a cost estimate.

The committee reported in February 1828, proposing a 50-by-60-foot granite building 30 feet high. The court agreed and appointed James Cochran architect and Robert C. Vose builder. In January, 1829, they paid $1,000 for a lot (now 95 State Street).

General Joseph Chandler laid the cornerstone for the courthouse on May 29, 1829. North does not further identify him nor say why he was chosen; he does say there was a “brief ceremony, in presence of the workmen and a few spectators.”

Under the cornerstone, he said, were placed an engraved plate with the date; the governor’s name (Enoch Lincoln, who became governor on Jan. 3, 1827, and died in office Oct. 8, 1829, in Augusta, three days after a public speech at Cony Female Academy); lists of judges of the Supreme Court and the Court of Sessions; and the name of “Mr. Berry, the master builder.” Two “recent newspapers” were added.

North wrote that the outside of the building was finished in August, the inside in December. The Supreme Court was the first to use it, opening a session on June 1, 1830.

Maine’s first chief justice, Prentiss Mellen from Portland, who served from July 1, 1820, until he retired on Oct. 11, 1834 (the year he turned 70), praised the new courthouse as the best in the state. The state Supreme Court continued to hold its Augusta sessions in the building until 1970.

The courthouse is an early example of Greek Revival style in Maine, with Doric columns across the front on both levels. It now has a wooden belfry on top; but North wrote that originally the courthouse bell was hung in a small separate tower “in the rear of the county offices at the southwest corner of the lot.”

This configuration, he wrote, gave rise to jokes about “a church having sunk, leaving its steeple above ground.”

The belfry was moved to its proper location “within a few years,” Maine historian Earle G. Shettleworth Jr., surmised when he prepared the application for National Register listing in December, 1973.

The original courthouse has been enlarged twice, Shettleworth wrote. In 1851, it was expanded to the rear; in 1907, a new probate wing was added. Both additions were made “with granite in sympathy with style, scale, and texture of the original structure.” The inside has been repeatedly renovated.

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Your writer failed to find information on any early courthouse in Waterville.

Looking up “courthouse history Waterville Maine” on line brought an AI response (your writer regards AI with caution and doubt) saying Waterville’s courthouse is the 1829 Kennebec County courthouse, in Augusta.

Other on-line sources consider the contemporary Waterville courthouse the modern brick building on Colby Street, north of the business district. It houses the district court.

The Maine Judicial Branch website offers this information on contemporary district courts:

“As of July 1, 2024 the District Court has 44 judges and a number of Active Retired Judges who hold court in eight regions at many locations throughout Maine. The District Court hears civil, criminal and family matters and always sits without a jury.”

Augusta’s District Court is housed in a modern building at 1 Court Street. Another website says the Kennebec County Superior Court also holds sessions there.

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: Courts

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by Mary Grow

One of the chapters in Henry Kingsbury’s 1892 Kennebec County history is about the courts. The next chapter is titled The Kennebec Bar and names members of the Kennebec Bar who practiced as lawyers and/or held judgeships or other legal positions.

The following articles in this subseries will talk about the legal structure from the 1600s, when Maine was a province of Massachusetts and both were under British rule, through the 1800s; and about some of the prominent men – there was an absence of women in the profession in those days – who made the law work.

* * * * * *

Judge William Penn Whitehouse

The chapter on courts in Kingsbury’s history was written by Vassalboro native William Penn Whitehouse, at the time serving on Maine’s Supreme Judicial Court (more about Whitehouse later in the subseries). He began by defining the role of the judiciary.

“The judiciary,” he wrote, “is the conservative force that maintains a just and stable relation between other branches of the government. It is the indispensable balance-wheel of every enduring political system.”

Whitehouse did not talk about the Massachusetts judicial system being derived from the British, perhaps because he assumed everybody knew that. He began by pointing out the mingling of Maine’s system with Massachusetts’ after Massachusetts bought southern Maine in 1677 from the grandson of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who had ruled it from 1622 to his death in 1647.

Whitehouse found records of a 1636 court in Saco, said to have been the first legally created legal tribunal in Maine. After 1639, Gorges’ executive council acted as a court, Whitehouse said.

Gorges’ part of Maine also had “an inferior court in each section of the province”; and “commissioners corresponding to the modern trial justices were appointed in each town for the trial of small cases, with jurisdiction limited to forty shillings.”

Gorges’ jurisdiction did not include the sparsely-populated Kennebec Valley, Whitehouse wrote. This area belonged to the Plymouth Colony from 1640 until the Duke of York took it over in the early 1660s. In 1686, after the Duke became King James II (who reigned from Feb. 6, 1685, until he was overthrown effective Feb. 12, 1689), he transferred “the port and county of Pemaquid” (and presumably its upriver inland territory) to Massachusetts, Whitehouse said.

In 1691, Massachusetts got a new royal charter that united the various parts of Maine. The Massachusetts legislature promptly enacted its own Charter of 1691, setting out British-based legal principles and establishing four levels of courts that Whitehouse said remained virtually unchanged for 50 years.

The superior court for Maine cases was held in Massachusetts until 1699, Whitehouse wrote. From 1699 to 1760, one annual term was held in Maine – he did not say where.

In 1760, Maine was divided into Cumberland and Lincoln counties, with Lincoln including what became Kennebec in February 1799. In 1761, the Kennebec proprietors, successors to the Plymouth Colony, built what is now the historic Pownalborough Courthouse on the east bank of the Kennebec River, in present-day Dresden.

Whitehouse said Lincoln County’s first superior court meeting was not until 1786. The first term at Hallowell began July 8, 1794, before Augusta separated from its southern neighbor in February 1797.

Court was held “in a church prepared for the occasion,” Whitehouse wrote: the 1790 courthouse in Market Square, near the Kennebec, was too small. The three judges “were attended by three sheriffs wearing cocked hats and carrying swords, each with his long white staff of office.” The officials attracted a large audience as they marched to the church to the beat of a drum, followed by members of the bar.

In 1799, Augusta became Kennebec County’s shire town and hosted an annual term of the Massachusetts Superior Court, apparently until Maine became a state in 1820. Depending on the nature of the trial, sometimes all three judges presided, sometimes only one.

Before 1792, Whitehouse wrote, they “appeared on the bench in robes and wigs, the robes being of black silk in the summer and of scarlet cloth in the winter.”

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Both William D. Williamson, in his 1832 Maine history, and Louis Hatch, in his 1919 Maine history, listed the courts being headquartered in Boston as one cause of the movement for separation from Massachusetts. Both cited a January 1786 list of “evils and grievances” from the second convention called to discuss separation (the first, in October 1785, attracted representatives from so few towns that delegates called a better-publicized second gathering).

The fourth problem on the convention’s list was that the Supreme Judicial Court could not administer justice in Maine as promptly as required. With the clerk’s office and court records in Boston, “legal process and lawsuits must be attended with additional costs, perplexities and delays of justice,” Williamson wrote.

He added a footnote: “This evil continued till the year 1798.”

Although no action resulted from the 1786 convention, it was a step in the movement that resulted in Maine statehood in March 1820. More immediately, Williamson and Hatch said, it led Massachusetts authorities to revamp some of the laws to which Maine people objected; to build two new major roads; and to begin holding court sessions in the province.

In 1786, Hatch wrote, the Massachusetts Supreme Court held its first term in Pownalborough, plus an additional term of the lower court of Common Pleas and Sessions (see below). Beginning in March 1787, “the lower courts” also held one term annually in Hallowell (and one in Waldoborough); and the Massachusetts secretary of state was ordered to publish Massachusetts laws in the Falmouth Gazette, Maine’s first newspaper (founded in 1784).

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By 1819, Maine residents were so strongly (though never unanimously) in favor of independence that the Massachusetts legislature passed a bill authorizing a Maine vote on separation. The vote was duly held on the fourth Monday in July, 1819 (July 26). On the fourth Monday in August (Aug. 23), Massachusetts Governor John Brooks announced separation had been approved, 17,091 votes in favor to 7,132 against.

Once Maine became a state, the next step was to organize its government. A constitutional convention met Oct. 11, 1819, in Portland.

Judge Daniel Cony

Hatch said, “By unanimous consent, Judge Daniel Cony, of Augusta, was requested to take the chair” for preliminary steps, though he was quickly replaced by William King, of Bath, as chair of the body.

(King later became Maine’s first governor. More on Judge Cony later in this subseries.)

Williamson wrote that a 33-man subcommittee drafted a constitution based on Massachusetts’. The convention approved it, called for town meetings to approve or reject it on the first Monday in December (Dec. 6); and adjourned Oct. 29, Williamson said. A majority of towns approved.

The constitution described the state government, citizens’ rights and other typical topics.

The section on the judiciary in Maine’s current constitution says: “The judicial power of this State shall be vested in a Supreme Judicial Court, and such other courts as the Legislature shall from time to time establish.” The 1820 state constitution differed by one word, according to Whitehouse: it began “The judicial power of the state….”

Whitehouse cited a June 24, 1820, law establishing a three-justice supreme judicial court and defining its powers. In following years, the legislature required the court to meet at least once a year in most of Maine’s counties, with Kennebec County’s term scheduled in May, in Augusta.

From 1820 to 1839, Wikipedia says, Maine justices were appointed for life, with a mandatory retirement age of 70. Whitehouse said the number of justices was increased to four in 1847 and seven in 1852.

By 1892, Whitehouse wrote, the court consisted of a chief justice and seven associate justices, appointed by the governor for seven-year terms. (Currently, the court consists of a chief justice and six associate justices.)

The Wikipedia writer commented that unlike most other states’ top courts, the Maine court was and is not headquartered in the state capital. The reason is partly that the 1829 Kennebec County courthouse lacked a large enough courtroom. Nonetheless, the writer said, the court met there from 1830 to 1970, when it moved permanently to the Cumberland County courthouse, in Portland.

Whitehouse listed four 19th-century Maine Supreme Court justices who came from Augusta:

— Nathan Weston, appointed an associate justice July 1, 1820, and chief justice from Oct. 22, 1834 to Oct. 21, 1841;
— Richard Drury Rice, associate justice from May 11, 1852 to his resignation Dec. 1, 1863;
— Artemas Libbey or Libby, appointed from April 24, 1875, to April 24, 1882; reappointed Jan. 11, 1883, and Jan. 10, 1890; served until his death March 15, 1894; and
— William Penn Whitehouse, appointed associate justice April 15, 1890; reappointed April 24, 1897, April 5, 1904 and April 13, 1911; appointed chief justice July 26, 1911; resigned April 8, 1913.

Another important state court official, Whitehouse wrote, was the Reporter of Decisions, the person responsible for compiling the annual decisions of the court when it is sitting as the Maine Law Court (appellate court). Reporters from Kennebec County to 1892 were Asa Redington, from Augusta (1850-1854) and Solymon Heath, from Waterville (1854-1856).

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Below the provincial and later state supreme court was the court of common pleas. Whitehouse wrote that such a court was “organized for each county under the province charter of 1692.”

(Wikipedia says the court of common pleas was an early British form of lower court for hearing cases that did not involve the king. These courts are mostly obsolete, though four U.S. states still have trial courts so titled, with varying functions.)

In 18th and early 19th century Maine, Whitehouse said, these courts consisted of four justices at first, three from 1804 to 1811. The justices “were to be substantial persons,” but not necessarily lawyers; Whitehouse found no evidence that “any member of this court in Maine was an educated lawyer” before 1800.

In 1811, a new “circuit court of common pleas” replaced the standing courts. In 1822, after Maine and Massachusetts separated, a statewide standing court was created. In 1839 another change created a three-judge district court for Kennebec, Lincoln and Somerset counties, with three terms a year in each county.

Whitehouse spelled out this court’s jurisdiction and duties.

“It had original and exclusive jurisdiction of all civil actions where the debt or damage demanded did not exceed two hundred dollars, and concurrent jurisdiction above that sum. It had also jurisdiction of all crimes and misdemeanors previously cognizable by the court of common pleas,” he wrote.

Losers could appeal to the state supreme court, and, Whitehouse wrote, they did, so habitually that almost everybody got two trials. This “inefficient” system was abolished in 1852 and the lower court’s “duties and powers, including appeals from justices of the peace,” were given to the supreme court (and its membership increased from four to seven justices).

Naturally, the result was an overloaded supreme court and long delays in getting suits settled. In 1878, Whitehouse wrote, a Kennebec County Superior Court was created. It first met only in Augusta, but in 1889 a provision requiring two terms a year in Waterville was added.

The first Kennebec County Superior Court Judge was William Penn Whitehouse, appointed for seven years in February, 1878. He was reappointed until he resigned April 15, 1890, to accept a position on the Maine Supreme Court.

Next week: more on Kennebec Valley courts, courthouses, judges and the like.

Main sources

Hatch, Louis Clinton, ed., Maine: A History 1919 (facsimile, 1974).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Williamson, William D., The History of the State of Maine from its First Discovery, A.D. 1602, to the Separation, A.D. 1820, Inclusive (1832).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Vassalboro Ctr. / Getchell’s Corner

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Getchell’s Corner church (Photo by Roland D. Hallee)

by Mary Grow

When Henry Kingsbury started his detailed description of the Town of Vassalboro in his 1892 Kennebec County history, he named six “post hamlets” and five “prominent localities.” Each post village was also a “manufacturing and mercantile” center, he said.

The first village he named was then called Vassalboro, or Vassalboro Corners, and had been first known as Getchell’s Corner or Corners, recognizing early settler John Getchell Sr., and his sons. Alternate spellings of Getchell include Getchel, Gatchell and Gatchel.

Kingsbury wrote that John Getchell bought the area where in 1892 the stores stood, and his sons “were scattered above and below, along the river road.”

(The river road was what is now a section of old Route 201, called Dunham Road, along the Kennebec. Current Route 201 is farther from the river; the old road roughly parallels it for about a mile. Dunham Road forms a four-way intersection with Station Hill Road, which ends at the river, and a short connector between old and new roads named Alpine Street.

Getchell sons Kingsbury named were Abial (or Abiel), who settled south of the blacksmith named Stephen Hanson, and John Jr., on the east bank of Southwick Brook. (Contemporary maps name neither of the small brooks that flow into the Kennebec north and south of the four corners.)

Kingsbury also mentioned a brook “back of Isaiah Gifford’s residence” that might have been Southwick Brook. He wrote that there was “evidence” the brook had been dammed and “tradition” telling of a pail factory and an ashery that Jacob Southwick had run.

(An ashery, Wikipedia says, “converts hardwood ashes into lye, potash, or pearlash,” all ingredients in soap-making.)

These factories must have been well above the Kennebec, because Kingsbury said Southwick ran a plaster mill downstream from them on the east – inland – side of the river road.

At the mouth of the brook, Kingsbury wrote, John Getchell’s sawmill had “gone into decay” before 1816. In 1816, Southwick and Prince Hopkins built a large tannery near the remains of the mill that apparently ran until Southwick died in 1855.

(Jacob Southwick’s brother, Dr. Edward Southwick, built a tannery in North Vassalboro that was in 1820 the largest in New England, according to both Kingsbury and Alma Pierce Robbins, in her 1971 Vassalboro history.)

There were two other tanneries at Getchell’s Corner, Thomas Frye’s “near Philip Hanson’s barn, in the rear of the hotel” and Thomas or Ebenezer Frye’s in an old currier’s shop on what was in 1892 George S. Smiley’s lot.

FamilySearch says Thomas and Ebenezer Frye or Fry were brothers, two of Joshua and Mary (Jones) Frye’s eight children born in Vassalboro between 1790 and 1806.

The Corner area hosted at least four 19th-century boot and shoe factories, Kingsbury said. Franklin D. Dunham started the biggest one about 1835, in a building that used to be in front of his 1892 house; when it burned, he moved into a building south of the post office, where the business ran until 1879 or 1880.

Dunham sometimes had as many as 100 people working in his factory. “He turned the business into the manufacture of brogans prior to and during the civil war,” Kingsbury wrote.

(Wikipedia defines a brogan as a heavy, ankle-high boot and says brogans or something similar were common military footwear, including for both Civil War armies.)

Getchell’s Corner Grange (Photo by Roland D. Hallee)

The other boot and/or shoe factories were owned by Joseph Estes, in the building that was in 1892 the Grange Hall, contemporaneously with Dunham and sometimes employing 50 hands; by Caleb Nichols, above his store; and by William Tarbell, in a building “on the green next north of the Congregational chapel” that had been moved and converted to a stable by 1892.

There were also at least two hat shops and one clock-maker (Oliver Brackett) at Getchell’s Corner.

By 1892, the major industry was the Portland Canning Company’s 1882 factory that processed primarily corn and apples – in 1890, “over 6,000 one-gallon cans of apples,” Kingsbury wrote.

Kingsbury did not date the first store in the settlement, which he said John Getchell Sr., ran. A “corner store” still operating in 1892 was built “early in the century as a double store,” shared by Joseph R. Abbott and Daniel Marshall. It went through a succession of owners, including Southwick and Hopkins, and Nichols in partnership with one of the Prescotts, Josiah or E. W.

The hotel mentioned above Kingsbury said was Vassalboro’s first. Daniel Marshall opened the building that became the hotel as a tavern “soon after the war of 1812,” and it went through a series of owners and was still open in 1892.

When daily stagecoaches between Augusta and Bangor ran through Vassalboro, the hotel was a stop where horses were changed, Kingsbury said.

“Tradition” said there was another hotel in a house that burned in 1830, “probably the house in which John Getchell had the first store.”

So many businesses required a local bank, Kingsbury wrote, and in the 1820s the Southwicks organized Negeumkeag Bank, which ran until around 1840, with Dr. Edward Southwick (Jacob’s brother, Kingsbury said) president. Kingsbury said the bank was capitalized at $50,000, and quoted a Jan. 1, 1829, state report that “showed its bills in circulation to be $51, 615.”

After the bank closed, Kingsbury said, the Southwicks moved “the queer old strap, wrought iron safe” to Burnham, where they ran a tannery.

The Getchell’s Corner post office opened April 1, 1796, Kingsbury said. The first postmaster was Jeremiah Fairfield; his successors to 1892 included Abial Getchell (March 25, 1818 – Jan. 14, 1826) and his son, Goodloe H. Getchell (Sept. 23, 1845 – March 2, 1852). Thomas Frye served as postmaster for two short periods in the early 1840s and early 1850s.

Writing in 1971, Robbins said there had been “many changes in both buildings and location,” but there was still a post office at Vassalboro “now more familiarly called Getchell’s Corner,” as there is in March 2025.

Robbins wrote that Miss A. Howard founded Vassalboro Academy, a school for young ladies, at “Vassalboro Corner” in April 1837. Kingsbury said the school building was “used for religious as well as secular instruction.” The Methodists bought it in 1868, after meeting there for several years, and made it into a Methodist church. Robbins said it remained in use “until the fire in 1886 [probably an error for 1896; see below].”

The first Vassalboro Masonic Lodge was organized at Getchell’s Corner in June 1827; it moved to North Vassalboro in 1870. After the Civil War, Kingsbury described a second Masonic Lodge, Negeumkeag, established in 1872, which in 1892 “owns its hall and numbers forty-six members.”

Kennebec Lodge, I.O.O.F. (International Order of Odd Fellows) started in December 1889, using the Masonic Hall.

Oak Grove Grange, founded in North Vassalboro in May 1875, moved to Getchell’s Corner (date unspecified) and in 1892 had its hall “a few rods south of the Congregational chapel,” with a store the Grangers had opened in November, 1889.

Houses mingled with the other buildings, and farms surrounded the business and residential center. The 1856 map of Vassalboro shows more than three dozen buildings at Getchell’s Corner; by 1879, there were fewer, but the area was still designated Vassalboro Corner.

In 1850, Robbins said, the railroad was run along the east side of the Kennebec from Augusta to Winslow, mostly at first to serve John D. Lang’s woolen mill, in North Vassalboro. By 1861, passengers as well as freight were important; Robbins wrote of residents in horse-drawn buggies meeting summer people arriving at the Riverside and Vassalboro (Getchell’s Corner) stations.

According to Robbins, the railroad may have been the village’s undoing. “It was never proved without a doubt that the sparks from the Maine Central engines set the fire that burned nearly the whole little village of Getchell’s Corner,” she wrote.

This event was in 1896 – Robbins gave no exact date. Losses included the hotel and post office, businesses and stores and about 30 houses. Getchell’s Corner never recovered.

Captain John Getchell Sr.

The FamilySearch website says Capt. John Getchell, Sr., was born in South Berwick on Feb. 23, 1747 (Ancestry says around 1741). On Nov. 21, 1766, he married Sarah Cloutman (1745 or 1746 – 1835) in Kennebec (County?); the couple had at least four sons and a daughter. He died Oct. 14, 1818, in Vassalboro.

The sons, according to this source, were William (1773 – ?); John Jr. (1777 – 1853); Abiel J. (1779 – 1855); and Josiah (1796 – 1896). Daughter Susan was born in 1782 and died in 1815.

FamilySearch has little information about William.

John Jr. was born in Vassalboro; he married Elizabeth Bunker on April 5, 1795, in Vassalboro, and they had at least five daughters between 1797 and 1814. He is buried in Vassalboro.

Abiel married Letitia Harwood on Jan. 20, 1802. Three of their eight children, Captain John and Sarah’s grandchildren, stayed in Vassalboro, to wit:

— Goodloe Howard Getchell, born Nov. 23, 1802, in Vassalboro and died there in 1875.
— Mary Ann, born in Vassalboro July 3, 1804, married Samuel Gibson and died in Vassalboro, aged 99.
— Abiel John, born in Wiscasset in 1814, but lived in Vassalboro in 1850 and was buried there after his death in 1861 (as was his widow, the former Ann Plummer, who died Jan. 23, 1906).

Of Abiel and Letitia’s other children, Horatio was born April 22, 1807, and died July 24 the same year; Lucretia Harwood, married in 1841, was in Iowa in 1870 and died in 1888 in Arkansas; Alexander Hamilton lived in Wales, Monmouth and Greene; Hiram was born in Monmouth and later lived (and died) in Brownfield; and Hannah Margarete Cochran was born in Sebec and died there in 1861.

Josiah Getchell, Captain John and Sarah’s youngest son, was born in Brunswick, FamilySearch says, and seems to have had no Vassalboro connection.

WikiTree offers a completely different John Getchell, also called Gatchell and Getceell, born in Scarboro April 25, 1719. On Nov. 7, 1742, this John Getchell married Mary Barbour, of Brunswick. He served in the Revolutionary War.

John and Mary’s two daughters and four sons (Dorcas, Samuel, John, Mary, Hugh and Robert) were born between February 1743 and September 1754. WikiTree gives no birthplaces.

It does, however, say that on June 23, 1768, Getchell bought from the Kennebec Proprietors land on the east side of the Kennebec (“in what is now known as Sidney” – an error, the Sidney that separated from Vassalboro on Jan. 30, 1792, was and is on the west side).

WikiTree continues about this John Getchell: “He held many important town offices in Vassalboro, being the largest land-owner there, and residing at what is still known as Getchell’s Corner.”

To add to the confusion, some maps locate Getchell’s Corner farther south in Vassalboro, near Taber Hill; and on-line sources offer an Elihu or Eliha Getchell, Sr. (1766 -1838), who (according to FamilySearch) was born in Berwick; married Mary Savage in 1787, in Hallowell, and had at least four sons and four daughters; lived in Vassalboro “for about 30 years”; and died in Medford. The Ancestry website connects this Getchell family with Tabor (Ancestry’s spelling) Hill in Vassalboro.

Main sources:

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971)

Websites, miscellaneous.

CORRECTION: This article has corrected a reference (third paragraph) from the print edition which referred to Route 202 when it should have referred to Route 201 instead. Thank you to the reader who caught the error.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Windsor High Schools

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by Mary Grow

Last week’s story covered primary schooling in the Town of Windsor, south of China and Vassalboro and east of Augusta in the Kennebec Valley. This week’s article will add a bit of information on Windsor high schools, plus a biographical sketch of an early area settler who was Windsor’s first primary-school teacher.

As described in previous stories in this subseries on education, the State of Maine’s 1873 Free High School Act required towns to provide high-school education. Some towns, including Windsor, did not wait for a state law.

Henry Kingsbury and C. Arlene Barton Gilbert both say Windsor’s first free high school started in 1867 in school District 1, in the municipal building at Windsor Corner (now the intersection of Routes 32 and 105).

Kingsbury’s version, in his 1892 Kennebec County history, is that town officials bought “seats and desks” for the second floor of the town house to open the school, with Horace Colburn the first teacher. Two high-school terms a year were held for about five years, he wrote (and Gilbert repeated, in her chapter on schools in Linwood H. Lowden’s 1993 Windsor history).

At a March 3, 1873, town meeting, Gilbert wrote, voters raised $200 for the high school; but they met again April 28 and rescinded the vote. To Gilbert, this sudden change of mind indicated “some dissatisfaction with the school.”

The problem was apparently resolved, because by 1877, voters were again supporting high school classes.

Gilbert quoted from Supervisor of Schools Joseph Colburn’s 1877 annual report saying District 1 had hosted two free high school terms, eight weeks in the spring, taught by Hattie King, from Whitefield, and 10 weeks in the fall, taught by Lizzie S. Milliken, from Augusta.

Colburn called the high school “very profitable to the district and vicinity, giving the scholars who attended an opportunity for improvement that they could not otherwise have had.” How many high-schoolers he did not say; the total in 13 Windsor schools that year was 400 students.

Gilbert then quoted from the 1878 report submitted by Supervisor George J. Moody, which covered only the fall term, beginning Sept. 4 and running 10 weeks. The teacher was Harry R. Thurston, of Belfast; there were 34 “scholars” (out of 376 in town), “most of them being well advanced and quite a good number having had experience as teachers.”

Moody listed 1878 high school courses as “reading, arithmetic, grammar, geography, composition, history, physiology, geometry and algebra.” He praised students and teacher; wrote that the “closing examination showed that the term had been both pleasant and profitable”; and expressed the hope “that the district will again avail itself of this opportunity.”

(Kingsbury said that Horace Colburn or Coburn [1812-1885] had three sons. Two of them taught school, starting in their teens; each of those two served as Windsor’s supervisor of schools, Joseph from 1871 to 1886 [with Moody interrupting?] and Frank in 1888 and 1889.

(For more on Windsor’s Colburn family, see the June 8, 2023, issue of The Town Line.)

Gilbert wrote that Windsor continued to support a free high school until “about 1902,” not always in District 1. In 1902, she said, there was a spring term; but by then, the town was paying tuition to a four-year out-of-town high school, which she did not name.

(The two most likely high schools were in Augusta and South China. Augusta’s Cony High School was operating well before 1902. Erskine Academy, in South China, opened in September 1883, and the Maine legislature incorporated it in 1901.)

Windsor is currently a member of Regional School Unit #12 (Sheepscot Valley). The town has its own elementary school for students in pre-kindergarten through eighth grade and continues to tuition out its high-school students.

The Rev. Job Chadwick

As mentioned last week, Windsor’s first elementary-school teacher was Rev. Job Chadwick. He was also the first teacher in what became China and for many years the townspeople’s “only spiritual guide” who lived in town, according to a 1931 family history compiled by Lillian Rich (McLaughlin) Gilligan, found on line.

Summary of Rev. Job Chadwick’s life

When Rev. Job Chadwick was born on 4 December 1756, in Falmouth, Barnstable, Massachusetts, United States, his father, James Chadwick, was 31 and his mother, Ruth Hatch, was 27. He married Mercy Weeks on 13 September 1784, in Harlem, Kennebec, Maine, United States. They were the parents of at least 3 sons and 1 daughter. He lived in Windsor, Kennebec, Maine, United States in 1810 and Gouldsboro, Hancock, Maine, United States in 1820. He died in January 1832, in Maine, United States, at the age of 75, and was buried in Chadwick Hill Cemetery, China, Kennebec, Maine, United States.

Gilligan began with the settlement of Jones Plantation (later China) in 1774. In the spring of 1782, she wrote, James and Ruth Chadwick came from southern Massachusetts with unmarried children Job, Ichabod, Elizabeth and Judah. They were followed in 1783 by married sons John and James, with their families and youngest son Lot, who’d been considered too young to move to the wilderness the previous year.

Gilligan guessed the Chadwicks came up the Kennebec to get to their new home, and mentioned a family tradition that they stopped first in Getchell’s Corner, in Vassalboro, not far from the river, before moving inland. Their China farms were in South China, including the area known as Chadwick’s Corner on what is now Route 32, leading from South China Village south into Windsor.

Gilligan said Job and his three older brothers were all born in Falmouth, Massachusetts. Gear or Gayer (who never came to Maine – he went to Philadelphia about 1774 and then to Beaufort, North Carolina, for the rest of his life) and John were born in the late 1740s, James, Jr. in the early 1750s and Job on Dec. 4, 1756 (making him 25 in the spring of 1782).

(Henry Kingsbury’s version of the family’s arrival is that Ichabod Chadwick, with his sons Job, Judah and James, settled Chadwick’s Corner before 1797. The website WikiTree names James, Jr., Judah, Ichabod and Asa as Job’s half-brothers.)

On Dec. 13, 1784, in Harlem, Job Chadwick married Mercy Weeks, born in Falmouth Dec. 5, 1757. Gilligan said the couple settled “near the present town house” (on what is now Lakeview Drive) and had four children: Abigail, born Nov. 30, 1785, married Joseph Linn; Paul, born May 30, 1787, married Hanna or Hannah Leeman; Abraham, born May 27, 1790, never married; and Lot, 2nd (or Lott), born Sept. 24, 1792, married Sally Linn.

The FamilySearch website agrees with the information above and adds that Job Chadwick lived in Windsor in 1810 and Gouldsboro (Maine) in 1820.

Your writer found no source that explained where or when Chadwick got his religious education, if he had one. In his Windsor history, Linwood Lowden wrote that “according to his own testimony, by the year 1804, Chadwick had already spent fourteen years in the ministry.”

A summary biography in Rev. Joshua Millet’s 1845 The History of the Baptists in Maine, says Chadwick was “ord[ained] an evan[gelist] at Vassalborough, 1796.” (The entire book has been digitized and is available on line.)

Millet wrote that Vassalboro’s first Baptist church was organized around 1790. Some of its members lived in adjoining Harlem, and in 1796 a separate church was organized in southern Harlem, named the Second Baptist Church, with Chadwick its pastor from 1797 to 1805.

Millet called Chadwick and the Vassalboro pastor, Nehemiah Gould, “men…who were experienced in all the peculiarities of a new country, and therefore qualified to lead the flock of God in such times.”

(Kingsbury said the First Baptist Church of Harlem was organized in 1797, with Chadwick the first preacher; he “supplied the church for eight years, and occasionally for several years afterward.” After China was made a separate town in 1818 and reunited with Harlem in 1822, the Harlem First Baptist Church became the China Second Baptist Church.)

How Chadwick qualified as a teacher is another unknown, but he definitely served as one, first in China and then in Windsor.

The China bicentennial history says Harlem residents established their first school in 1795, on Michael Norton’s land midway of the east shore of China Lake. Classes met either in a house or in a log cabin built for a schoolhouse, and the teacher was Rev. Job Chadwick.

Kingsbury surmised Chadwick must have run a successful school, because “he continued to wield the ‘birch’ several terms in succession here.”

Lowden wrote that Windsor’s first teacher (and first resident preacher) was Rev. Job Chadwick, who had previously taught in China. In 1804, Lowden wrote, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel sought a teacher for two small settlements, Hunts Meadow (later included in Whitefield) and Pinhook (in the southern part of what became Windsor).

Lowden quoted at length from a July 18, 1804, letter from a Wiscasset minister named Alexander McLean recommending Chadwick. McLean wrote that Chadwick planned to move his family from Harlem to Windsor; called him “well qualified to instruct children’; and added that he “has for some years been employed in the instruction of children.”

McLean explained that a recent “variety of misfortunes” had “stripped [Chadwick] of all his worldly property,” so he could probably be hired to teach “at as easy a rate as any.” He recommended a month-long term at Hunts Meadow and two months at Pinhook, if the Society could afford that much, to “moralize and civilize” the settlements, pointing out that Chadwick could double as the Sabbath preacher.

Chadwick got the job. In her chapter on education in Lowden’s history, C. Arlene Barton Gilbert wrote that his first term of school in 1804 was two month long, with an average attendance of 15 to 20 youngsters.

Chadwick was still in Windsor in the spring of 1809, Gilbert said: at an April 3 town meeting at his house, voters raised $50 for education and chose a four-man school committee.

Disagreeing with Lowden’s and Gilbert’s information, Millet, in his religious history, implied that after Chadwick finished his ministry in Harlem in 1805, he promptly became a missionary in what a reviewer of Millet’s work called “the destitute regions of Maine and on Cape Cod, Mass.”

He then became a pastor in Gouldsborough, from 1816 to 1831. He returned to Windsor, where he died Dec. 25, 1831 (according to Millet), or in January 1832 (according to other sources). The latter sources say Mercy Chadwick had died in China in 1826.

FamilySearch says Job Chadwick is buried in China’s Chadwick Hill Cemetery. Find a Grave lists 52 Chadwicks in this cemetery, none named Job or Mercy.

Family members buried here include Job’s father, James (July 5, 1725 – Sept. 6, 1786); his mother, Ruth (Hatch) (Aug. 15, 1729 – Jan. 15, 1786); two of his brothers, James, Jr. (Feb. 25, 1753 – Oct. 25, 1826) and Judah (Dec. 9, 1765 – Aug. 9, 1816); James, Jr.’s widow, Rhoda (Weeks) (1756 – Jan. 30, 1831); and Judah’s widow, Sarah “Sally” (Webber) (1766 – Feb. 25, 1854).

Also buried in Chadwick Hill Cemetery, according to Find a Grave, is Job and Mercy’s son Paul, the surveyor who worked for the Kennebec Proprietors and was killed by squatters as he worked in Malta (later Windsor) in September 1809 (see the March 7, 2024, issue of The Town Line for a summary history of the so-called Malta War).

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Lowden, Linwood H., good Land & fine Contrey but Poor roads a history of Windsor, Maine (1993).

Websites, miscellaneous.