A history of Palermo’s Smith Cemetery 1825-2025

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An annual fundraising picnic.

by Andrew Pottle

2025 marks the bicentennial anniversary of Smith Cemetery on Level Hill Road in North Palermo.

Among the last of the major cemeteries in the area still operated by a cemetery association rather than the town itself, it has had an interesting history over its 200 years.

In 1807, the Town of Palermo, then just four years old, purchased its first two cemeteries: one at Greeley’s Corner for the lower half of town, and one on Dennis Hill for the upper half. By 1825, the population had grown from around 500 to almost 1,200, and the cemeteries were filling up. In 1825 the town purchased half an acre of land on what is now known as Level Hill Road for $5.50. The land was laid out in eight grave lots and sold to townspeople.

From the 1830s through the 1850s, Isaac Smith, pastor of the First Baptist Church at Carr’s Corner, lived adjacent to the cemetery. After his death in 1857, when he was buried there, it became known as Smith Cemetery.

THEN

At the end of the 1800s, the Ladies’ Improvement Society of North Palermo was formed. This group was active and successful in raising money and improving the community, with a particular focus on Smith Cemetery. In 1900, working closely with the Ladies’ Improvement Society, the Smith Cemetery Association was established. The Society sponsored many events to raise funds for the cemetery, including suppers at various homes, ice cream socials, and most notably, their highly successful annual Old Home picnic at Prescott’s Grove, located at Prescott Pond, behind the cemetery.

The Old Home Picnic was a great success, running for nearly 20 years. Hundreds of people attended each year, traveling not only from neighboring towns but also from out of state, some from as far away as New Jersey and Chicago. According to a 1910 newspaper clipping, “fully a thousand” people were in attendance that year.

A dinner was served at the picnic for those who didn’t bring their own baskets, along with a confectionery table run by Wilder Young and an ice cream table operated by Percy Turner. Anna Clark and Abbie Arnold presided over the “fancy article” table, raising funds by selling postcards of the Methodist Church, First Baptist Church, and other places of interest, as well as souvenir dishes featuring the First Baptist Church.

Manie Greeley, Mary Norton, and other women from town donated quilts and sofa pillows to be raffled off, sold, or awarded to those who correctly guessed the number of buttons in a jar.

There was music and country dancing, with some of the recorded groups including The Eureka Brass Band of Liberty, Tozier’s Orchestra of Albion, and the fiddler Charlie Overlock, of Washington.

NOW

After the first picnic in 1900, the Smith Cemetery Association was able to expand and buy land from Joel Bailey for $30. Between 1904 and 1907, $900 was raised at the picnic for the iron fence that still stands around the cemetery. Other improvements include maple trees planted in front of the fence in 1905 that lasted just over 100 years, and stone hitching posts that are still there today.

In the early years of the Association, Sanford and Manie Greeley were very active as officers of the Association, with Sanford being president for many years. They had no children of their own, but took in Kenneth Black, orphaned at eight years old, and raised him as their son until his death from tuberculosis at eighteen. When Manie died in 1940, she willed the remainder of their estate to the Cemetery Association, creating a fund of several thousand dollars for maintaining the cemetery.

In the 1940s the upkeep of the cemetery was primarily done by communal work days by lot owners. Some names of the people leading the work days include Norman Belden, Ray Nutter, Forest and Maurice Howard, and Thomas Bruso.

In 1950, M. Dewey Saban began taking on much of the responsibility for the cemetery’s care. Praised for his frugal management of the resources, including payment from families for annual care and reselling unused grave sites donated back to the Association. In 1984 a bronze plaque was placed on his cemetery lot to permanently recognize his contributions. Recently Norma Swift headed the association, until her passing in 2022, when Jamie Haskell-Spencer took over.

Most of this knowledge is owed to Palermo historian Millard Howard, who, along with nearly every name mentioned in this article, now rests at Smith Cemetery.

Sources:

Smith Cemetery Association, Milliard Howard 2013;
Newspaper archives;
Sixty-Six Years A Country Fiddler, E. Burnell Overlock 1984.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Women’s role – Part 1

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by Mary Grow

After weeks of articles about men, your writer is ready to start trying to answer a reader’s occasional question: how did women in the Kennebec Valley in the 1700s and 1800s manage, with the large families many had and without modern conveniences and social services?

Answers are not easy (except in fiction), because, as professional historians realize, information comes from written records, and written records are mostly by and about men – primarily men who were leaders, making their actions seem important and allowing them to keep records or employ others to keep records.

The late British-American historian Bernard Lewis summarized the issue in his 1995 The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years. Historians, he wrote, may claim to write the history of a country; actually they write about “a few thousand privileged persons…disregarding the great mass of the people.”

Mostly true, he admitted, but not the historians’ fault: they are “limited by the evidence.” For most of the past, this evidence has been written by people with “power, wealth and learning” consequently, they have provided most of the information historians use.

Occasionally, however, a woman gets a chance to speak up about women’s lives. One example in the Kennebec Valley was midwife Martha Ballard, who has been cited before in this series.

Palermo historian Milton Dowe found another, the unknown (but probably female) author of the undated poem he included in his 1997 Palermo Maine Things That I Remember in 1996.

The poem, reproduced here by permission of the Palermo Historical Society, is titled Mama’s Mama. It reads:

Mama’s Mama, on a winter day
Milked the cows and fed them hay.
Slopped the hogs, saddled the mule
And got the children off to school.
Did a washing, mopped the floors,
Washed the windows and did some chores,
Cooked a dish of home-dried fruit
Pressed her husband’s Sunday suit.
Swept the parlor, made the bed,
Baked a dozen loaves of bread.
Split some wood and lugged it in,
Enough to fill the kitchen bin,
Cleaned the lamps and put in oil,
Stewed some apples she thought might spoil,
Churned the butter, baked a cake,
Then exclaimed, “For goodness sake!
The calves have got out of the pen!”
Went out and chased them in again.
Gathered the eggs and locked the stable,
Returned to the house and set the table.
Cooked a supper that was delicious,
And afterward washed all the dishes,
Fed the cat, sprinkled the clothes,
Mended a basket full of hose.
Then opened the organ and began to play,
“When you come to the end of a perfect day.”

(A version of the poem posted on line by a female blogger changes a few words, including specifying seven children who were gotten off to school.)

* * * * * *

Martha Ballard

Martha (Moore) Ballard was born in 1735 in Oxford, Massachusetts, and died in late May 1812, in Augusta, Maine. For most of her adult life she served as a midwife in the central Kennebec Valley, delivering more than 800 babies. Between January, 1785, and May, 1812, she kept a diary describing her daily life.

At least two Augusta historians were aware of her diary. James W. North occasionally quoted from it in his 1870 history. Charles E. Nash reprinted extensive, edited samples in his 1904 history.

Neither man thought its contents important. North’s verdict was “not of general interest,” Nash’s “trivial and unimportant.”

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Contemporary American historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich disagreed. Seeing it as an unusually comprehensive description of social and economic life, she quoted from and expanded on the diary in her 1990 history, A Midwife’s Tale. Fellow historians thought her effort worthwhile; the book received numerous prestigious awards and prizes.

In her introduction, Ulrich wrote that in New England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, there were two forms of day-to-day record-keeping “the daybook and the interleaved almanac.”

The former was primarily a business journal, sometimes with added information on family life, kept primarily by “farmers, craftsmen, shopkeepers, ship’s captains, and perhaps a very few housewives.” The latter involved people using blank pages of printed almanacs to add notes about the weather, the gardens, the neighborhood and public events.

Some of Martha Moore’s family were educated, Ulrich found: her Uncle Abijah graduated from Yale in 1726, and her younger brother Jonathan from Harvard in 1761. Martha’s grandmother could sign her name; her mother “signed with a mark.”

Ulrich did not know how or why Martha learned to write. She surmised that “someone in Oxford in the 1740s was interested in educating girls.”

Martha married surveyor Ephraim Ballard (1725 – 1821) on Dec. 19, 1754, in Oxford. They had nine children; three of their first four daughters died in a diphtheria epidemic in the early summer of 1769, aged eight, four and two years.

Sons Cyrus, born Sept. 11, 1756, and Jonathan, born March 4, 1763, and daughter Lucy, born August 28, 1758, survived; and on Aug. 6, 1769, daughter Hannah was born. Daughter Dorothy (Dolly) was born September 2, 1772, youngest son Ephraim, Jr., not until March 30, 1779 (the only child born in Maine).

Ephraim Ballard first explored moving to the Kennebec Valley in the spring of 1775 – bad timing, Ulrich pointed out, because most of his new neighbors were revolutionary sympathizers and he was not. Martha (and presumably the children) joined him in October 1777. In addition to surveying, Ballard owned and ran mills; the family ended up in the northern part of Hallowell, which became Augusta in 1797.

Martha made her first diary entry on Jan. 1, 1785. By then, Ulrich wrote, oldest daughter Lucy was married and living in Winslow. Martha and Ephraim had five children at home: Cyrus, 28 (Ulrich wrote that he never married, and wondered if he “was impaired in some way”); Jonathan, almost 22 (a short-tempered trouble-maker); Hannah, 15 and a half; Dolly, who would turn 13 in September; and Ephraim, three months short of his sixth birthday.

Their house at that time had two rooms downstairs, the east and the west room in Martha’s words; two unfinished rooms upstairs; a barn and a cellar. Ephraim’s sawmill and gristmill were nearby, plainly audible.

Ephraim Sr., was frequently away for days or weeks on his surveying work, and sometimes one or more of the children would stay elsewhere. In return, Martha often had one or two unrelated young women as household help, especially after her daughters married and moved out.

The earliest continuous diary excerpts Ulrich copied were from early August 1787, and the last series from May 1809. She used random individual entries to support her comments and analysis.

Judging by the diary excerpts, the bulk of Martha’s household work fell roughly into four categories: washing and cleaning; working with cloth; cooking; and farm work, tending animals and gardening. Other things to do included caring for her children until they left home (and sometimes when they came back for a while, or during her daughters’ pregnancies), helping her husband (and vice versa) and other miscellaneous chores.

* * * * * *

Ulrich wrote that Martha disliked washing and whenever possible delegated it, first to her daughters and then to other young women who became her household helpers. She quotes a Jan. 4, 1793, entry, after both daughter Hannah and a neighbor’s girl had moved to their new husbands’ homes: “I have washt the first washing I have done without help this several years.”

Nonetheless, the word “washt” – Martha’s spelling of “washed” – appears intermittently in the diary. Sometimes she washt; sometimes “the girls” washt. These references seem to have been to washing clothes; occasionally she specified what else was washt.

On Jan. 1, 1796, Martha wrote that she “washt and washt my kitchen.” On Jan. 5, she “washt the west room.”

On the 6th, four visitors came for tea and interrupted her: “I laid my Washing aside when my Company Came and finisht it after they went away Except rinsing.” Then she was called away to pregnant patients; it was not until Jan. 9 that she recorded, “I finisht my washing and did my other work.”

Later that year, Ephraim was away surveying from Sept. 5 to Oct. 14. Martha, coming home after spending the night delivering a baby, was pleased to find her husband home and well, but dismayed by the filthy “clothes, bags and blankets” he brought with him. Ulrich said it took three days to wash them.

Ulrich quoted another entry, from 1795: “My Girls have made me 2 Barrils of Soap this weak.”

Otherwise, neither Martha, at least in entries Ulrich chose, nor Ulrich herself talked about the work underlying that word “washt.”

The water would come by the heavy wooden pailful from the well or spring. It would be heated on the wood stove – welcome in winter, less so in summer – and poured into some sort of washtub. Clothing was washed by hand; floors and furnishings presumably with cloths or brushes or both.

Drying laundry could be a problem, too. Ulrich quoted an early (probably 1785) diary entry in which Martha wrote that Hannah hung a newly washed blanket on a fence outdoors and “our swine tore it into strips.”

The reference above to two barrels of home-made soap conceals more work

An on-line summary (by a contemporary soap company) explains that families like the Ballards would save wood ashes (for potash) and tallow from butchering and cooking grease (for animal fat).

The wood ash was collected in a barrel or trough lined with hay. Pouring water through the ashes leached out the potash. After reducing the water enough, the fat was melted and added. Mixing potash and fat thoroughly produced soap, the on-line site says.

* * * * * *

Here is Ulrich’s summary of how the Ballard women got a piece of cloth, based on the diary.

Ephraim planted flax seed in their garden; Martha and her daughters weeded and harvested it. Harvesting required pulling it by the roots. In August 1787, Martha recorded that she pulled flax on Aug. 3, until noon Aug. 4; and again, after several days tending sick neighbors, the morning of Aug. 15.

Male helpers then “turned and broke it.” Female neighbors helped “with the combing, spinning, reeling, boiling, spooling, warping, quilling, weaving, bucking, and bleaching that transformed the ripe plant into finished cloth.”

Combing the flax was an early-fall activity in 1789; on Oct. 5 and 6, while rain fell, Martha was at home combing flax. The first day she did seven pounds for herself and four for Cyrus; the next day, she didn’t record the output. She finished the job on Oct. 7, though it was a clear day (and “My girls washt.”).

Turning flax into cloth required a flax wheel – Ulrich wrote that by 1785, “Hannah and Dolly already knew how to operate the great woolen wheel and the smaller flax wheel that the family owned.” They produced “hundreds of skeins of cotton, wool, linen and tow thread, most of which their mother carried to others to weave.”

In the spring of 1787, Ulrich said, the menfolk put together a loom so the women could do their own weaving. Two neighbors helped set it up and showed Hannah how to use it; Hannah produced forty yards of cloth on July 4.

Thereafter, the women produced most of their needs, from sheets and blankets to handkerchiefs. Sometimes, Martha recorded, other women came and used their loom.

Martha’s diary sometimes mentions her knitting. One instance: she spent the first five days of December 1791, waiting for a Mrs. Parker to give birth, and while she was there knitted “2 pair gloves and 5 pair & ½ mitts.” (The Parkers’ daughter was born Dec. 7.)

To be continued.

Main sources

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, A Midwife’s Tale The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 1990

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Revolutionary War Veterans Windsor, Palermo, China

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Gen. Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga, October 1777.

by Mary Grow

This article is the last – for now – about the Revolutionary War’s effects on central Kennebec Valley towns. It again covers towns not on the river.

As previously mentioned, one effect was a post-war population increase throughout the valley, including veterans, most with families. Some of these men and their descendants became prominent in their new towns, shaping growth and development.

Missing from the historical record, at least as your writer has found so far, is all but bits and pieces of information on how the war affected its veterans. Occasionally there is a reference to a physical disability that could have been war-related.

Surely men in the 1780s suffered the equivalent of PTSD; how was it manifested, and what if anything was done about it?

When a group of veterans gathered on the porch of the general store on a warm summer day, did they one-up each other with war stories? Or was the subject forbidden?

Did a Maine veteran enjoy hunting, because he’d become an expert shot? Or was firing a gun to be avoided, because it brought back unpleasant memories?

* * * * * *

Revolutionary veteran William Halloway or Holloway is buried in Windsor, where he lived for at least some of his last 40-plus years. He was born June 18, 1747, in Bridgewater, Massachusetts; there he married Mary Molly Trask (born May 1, 1756) on June 23, 1773.

An on-line Daughters of the American Revolution site says in 1775, he bought land on a lake in Hallowell, “perhaps intending to trade in furs and timber.”

The DAR writer surmised that he changed his plans in reaction to the beginning of the war in April 1775. Another site says he enlisted in Bridgewater; the DAR writer said he sold his Hallowell land “in January 1777, while on furlough from the army.”

The website shows his hand-written pension application, in which he says he enlisted in the Massachusetts line as a private for a year in January 1776, and again for three years in the Continental service beginning in January 1777. The DAR record says he was promoted to corporal and sergeant in the Massachusetts line.

Just before his second term ended, Halloway enlisted yet again for the duration of the war. In 1782, he fell ill and was hospitalized for almost a year; then he was furloughed and sent home.

Halloway wrote that he served in “the taking of Burgoyne” at Saratoga, New York, in October 1777, and in the Battle of Monmouth, New Jersey, in June 1778, and wintered at Valley Forge.

The application is undated, but Halloway wrote that he was 71 years old, making it around 1818. He was then living in Malta, Windsor’s name from 1809 to 1820.

The DAR site says the Halloways had four sons and three daughters. The writer added that oldest son, Seth, was born “the year he left for war” (another site says 1773) and the second son, John, seven years later (Oct. 1, 1780), “bespeaking the long absence he endured from his wife and home.”

Three of the last four children were reportedly born in Maine, two in Hallowell and the last-born, Lydia, in Windsor in 1789.

Halloway died April 17, 1831, and Mary died August 11, 1844, both in Windsor.

* * * * * *

Oliver Pullen, born Oct. 17, 1759, in Attleborough, Massachusetts, was living in Palermo in 1836 (or 1835; the documents on line seem inconsistent, with a decision dated before the application was filed), when he applied for a land grant under the 1835 state law intended to benefit Revolutionary War veterans.

In his application, he said he enlisted from Attleborough in January, 1776, in a Rhode Island regiment in the continental army. He was honorably discharged in Fishkill, New York, at the end of December 1776.

In June 1777, he said, he re-enlisted as a private in the same regiment, for three years. Again, he wrote, he served the full term and took his “final and honorable discharge” July 24, 1780, near Morristown, New Jersey.

Summarizing his military service, Pullen wrote that he “was at the retreat under General [John] Sullivan from Long Island and at the battles at Long Island [August 1776] and White Plains [October 1776].” The inscription on his gravestone in Palermo’s Greeley Corner Cemetery Old says he served in Colonel Henry Sherman’s regiment.

(Palermo has two Greeley Corner cemeteries close together on Route 3, opposite the Second Baptist Church, where on-line maps show the intersection of Route 3 and Sidney Road. Find a Grave calls them “Old” and “New” with the adjective at the end of the name.

(Millard Howard wrote in his Palermo history that the town bought the land for the first cemetery in 1807. An on-line photo of its sign dates New Greeley Cemetery 1901.)

Pullen’s petition was rejected. A note says he “Did not serve three years”: under it is another note, “35 m 20 d.”

FamilySearch says Pullen married Abigail Page (born in 1761, per WikiTree, or 1767, per FamilySearch) in July 1782, in Vassalboro. They had at least four sons, this source says.

Sargent Sr., was born Jan. 9, 1784, in Winthrop, when – by FamilySearch’s dates and math – his father was 24 and his mother was 17. Gilbert was also born in 1784, apparently later, as his father’s age is listed as 25 and his mother’s as 17; his birthplace was Palermo. Stephen Sr., was born in 1786, in Palermo. Montgomery A. was born in 1794, no birthplace given.

Howard listed Gilbert Pullen as one of the privates in the Palermo militia unit that marched to Belfast in September 1814 to meet a threatened British attack during the War of 1812.

FamilySearch says Oliver Pullen was in Winslow in 1800 and in Waterville in 1810 (the part of Winslow that was on the west bank of the Kennebec River became Waterville in June 1802, so he probably changed towns without moving).

Abigail Pullen died in 1803, aged 36, FamilySearch says; WikiTree says she lived until Jan. 2, 1857, and died in Attleboro, Massachusetts. FamilySearch’s report that she is buried in Readfield, Maine, almost certainly confuses her with another woman.

Oliver Pullen died Dec. 8, 1840, according to his gravestone. Abigail is not among the 10 other Pullens buried in Palermo’s Greeley Corner Cemetery Old. Gilbert and his wife, Nancy (Worthing) Pullen seem to be the only members of the second generation.

* * * * * *

In addition to Abraham Talbot, profiled last week, two more black Revolutionary veterans are reportedly buried in China, Luther Jotham and his younger brother, Calvin Jotham.

An interesting on-line National Park Service article, in the form of a story map titled “Luther Jotham: A Journey for Country and Community” summarizes Luther’s life, including his Revolutionary service. The author began by saying that his record sounds like that of a typical Massachusetts militia man, who trained regularly to be ready for an emergency – except that before the Revolution, Massachusetts law prohibited Blacks from training in peacetime.

The writer said Jotham was born about 1759, in Middleborough, Massachusetts. His parents moved the family to Bridgewater, Massachusetts, before the Revolution, perhaps for better job opportunities.

After the December 1773 Boston Tea Party and the British occupation of the city, Bridgewater, like many other towns, organized a volunteer Minute Man company. Free Blacks were allowed to join, and Jotham did.

The writer pointed out that his motives might have included the stipend (one shilling for each half day of training) or the hope of improving his “social standing” in the mostly-white town.

The Bridgewater troops’ first quasi-military experience was in April 1775, when British forces moved from Boston to Lexington and Concord and met American resistance. The writer explained that in January 1775, British General Thomas Gage had sent troops to Marshfield, a Loyalist town about 30 miles southeast of Boston and about 20 miles northeast of Bridgewater. Militia units, including Bridgewater’s, marched to Marshfield, but did not attack.

On Aug. 1, 1775, Jotham enlisted in the Plymouth County militia and served for five months, stationed in Roxbury, Massachusetts, near Boston. He enlisted again as a militia man in January 1776; came home briefly in April; and re-enlisted in the summer of 1776.

During this period, he was for the first time involved in fighting. The website writer said his unit was in the Battle of Harlem Heights in September and the Battle of White Plains in October. When his enlistment expired Dec. 1, 1776, he again returned to Bridgewater.

Jotham enlisted for the fourth and apparently last time in October 1777. He served only briefly, because, the writer said, militia units were sent home after General Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga on October 17.

Back in Bridgewater, Jotham married for what the writer said was the first time and WikiTree says was the second time. WikiTree names his first wife as Elizabeth Cordner, whom he married Sept. 24, 1774, and who died in or around 1777.

The sources agree he married Mary Mitchel, born about 1755; WikiTree says the wedding was April 8, 1778, in Brockton. According to the National Park Service writer, the couple had three children, Lorania, Lucy, and Nathan.

In January 1779, this source says, Jotham bought 15 acres of land, thereby changing his status (in town records, apparently) from “labourer” to “yeoman,” that is, a “man who farmed his own land” instead of working for other people.

The writer found that Jotham’s life was not easy, at least partly because of his race. In November 1789, he and his family, and his brother Calvin, were among “scores of… working class families” whom the town selectmen ordered to leave town – a practice called “warning out,” used to get rid of residents seen as likely to become paupers in need of town support.

In the early 1800s, Jotham did leave town, moving his family to Vassalboro, Maine, for unknown reasons. There he bought 20 acres of land.

By 1818, when he applied for a pension as a Revolutionary veteran, his resources had dwindled. He wrote that his possessions included “a house, small hut, a few tools and household items.” He had “one cow, three sheep, and one pig.”

He claimed an annual income of less than five dollars, and added: “I am by occupation a labouring man but from age and infirmity unable to do but little.” An annual pension of $96 was approved in 1820.

The National Park Service writer said that Jotham’s wife Mary and all three children died in Vassalboro. In 1816, he married Reliance Squibbs (his second wife in this account, not mentioned by WikiTree), by whom he had two more children, Mary Anne and Orlando. Reliance died before Jotham got his pension in May 1820, and a witness to his application said the two children had also died.

On Dec. 20, 1821, in Vassalboro, Jotham married a woman named Rhoda Parker. Rhoda, listed as a mulatto in the 1850 census, was born in 1787 in Georgetown.

Find a Grave says she and Jotham had at least one son, born in Vassalboro in 1829 and named Calvin (after his uncle). The Park Service writer said there were at least three children of this marriage.

(The younger Calvin Jotham died Dec. 17, 1883, in Sherbrooke, Québec, where he and his white wife had a daughter and three sons between 1863 and 1880.)

By August 1827, Jotham was considered to need a guardian to manage his affairs, and a man named Abijah Newhall was appointed. Not long afterwards, the family moved to China, where Jotham died June 2, 1832, aged 81.

Rhoda applied for a widow’s pension in 1860. She died in October 1869, in China. Find a Grave says by then her last name was Watson; apparently she remarried after Jotham’s death.

Your writer found much less information about Luther Jotham’s brother, Calvin, and no details about his military service.

Find a Grave says he was born in 1759 in Middleborough, Massachusetts. He died in March 1841 in China and is buried in the town’s Talbot Cemetery. This site says he fathered a daughter and a child who died in infancy, both in Brockton, Massachusetts; it names no wife.

Main sources

Howard, Millard, An Introduction to the Early History of Palermo, Maine (second edition, December 2015)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Area Revolutionary War veterans

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by Mary Grow

This sub-series started out to explore the effects of the American Revolution on Kennebec Valley towns, and turned into short biographies of some of the veterans who moved to the area after the war. In other words, one effect was an increase in population.

Not every veteran got his name in the history books for services to the town in which he settled, but some did. Returning to Major Carleton Edward Fisher’s history of Clinton, below are two examples of men he identified as Revolutionary War veterans who both held town offices and – with their wives’ indispensable help – contributed to population growth.

Unfortunately, historians almost never explored why men, and especially men with families, chose to leave more settled states and establish new lives in what was in the 1780s largely a forested wilderness. Even explaining that one family came to join a related family (as with several examples below) fails to explain what moved the first family.

* * * * * *

Timothy Hudson, born in 1747, came to the Kennebec around 1783 and lived in Clinton and Fairfield. On Sept. 20, 1781, he married Jane Brown, youngest sister of Ezekiel Brown, Jr., another veteran (see the Oct 2 issue, of The Town Line, p. 10). Ezekiel, Jr., and his wife, Mary Barron, had 10 children; the Hudsons had four daughters and four sons, born between 1784 and about 1803, at least three of whom married locally.

Like his brother-in-law, Ezekiel Jr., Hudson “held several town offices, including selectman, and six times was elected tithingman,” Fisher wrote. He was the town’s first treasurer, in 1790.

* * * * * *

Veteran Andrew Richardson, born in August 1760, came to Clinton in 1786 (his older brother, William, came in 1782, and later moved to Winslow). Fisher wrote that he captained Clinton’s first militia company and was elected its first selectman and tax collector in 1795.

Richardson served as one of the three selectmen in 1800, 1801, 1804, 1805, 1811 and 1812, according to Fisher’s list. He was tax collector in 1795; town clerk in 1798; town treasurer in 1797, 1803 and 1806-07; and in 1810 represented the town in the Massachusetts legislature.

Richardson married Hannah Grant on Aug. 15, 1782, Fisher said (probably citing a “family historian”). Between Dec. 3 of that year and 1804 or thereabouts, they had eight sons and two daughters (fifth son Hobart was also a Clinton selectman, for two years in the 1820s); two sons died in childhood.

* * * * * *

Fisher noted another veteran of importance to the town: Michael McNelly or McInelly. Born in Pennsylvania in 1755, McNelly served in both the Revolution and the War of 1812, Fisher said. He was in Fairfield by 1790, Clinton until the 1840s.

McNelly had two wives by whom he fathered four sons and five daughters between 1788 and 1807. Fisher wrote in 1970: “This family has the distinction of being one of the earliest settlers whose descendants still live here.”

* * * * * *

One more Revolutionary veteran from Albion: Rev. Francis Lovejoy, grandfather of famous abolitionist Elijah Parish Lovejoy and his brother, Illinois Congressman Owen Lovejoy. Ruby Crosby Wiggin, in her Albion history, named Francis Lovejoy as one of Albion’s first settlers, arriving before 1790.

Lovejoy was born Oct. 30, 1734, in Andover, Massachusetts. On Jan. 24, 1765, he married Mary Bancroft (born Aug. 2, 1742), from Reading, Massachusetts.

Wiggin said they soon moved to Amherst, New Hampshire, whence Lovejoy enlisted twice, first in “Colonel Baldwin’s regiment” and again “to fill a quota of 3 year men from Amherst.” FamilySearch dates the first enlistment 1776.

(When writing about Lovejoy’s war service for a January 2022 article, your writer tentatively identified “Colonel Baldwin” with Loammi Baldwin, born Jan. 10, 1744, who was at Lexington and Concord with the Woburn, Massachusetts, militia. She continued:

(“He later enlisted in the 26th Continental Regiment, quickly became its colonel and commanded it around Boston and New York City until health issues forced him to resign in 1777. Wikipedia identifies him as the ‘Father of American Civil Engineering’ and the man for whom the Baldwin apple is named.” Baldwin died Oct. 20, 1807.)

An essay on the Find a Grave website dates Lovejoy’s military interest to 1757, when he was a member of the Andover militia and served in the 1759 Canada Expedition (during the Seven Years War that ended with the British capture of Québec from the French).

This source says Lovejoy first enlisted in the Revolutionary army in September, 1776; his regiment was in the Battle of White Plains, New York (Oct. 28, 1776). It dates Lovejoy’s second enlistment March 5, 1781, and provides no date of discharge.

Between 1765 and 1783 or 1785, the Lovejoys had six or eight sons and three daughters (sources differ), four born during the war years. Two boys FamilySearch says died in infancy; it gives no death dates for four others.

Wiggin wrote that the family came to the Kennebec Valley in 1790, to the home of Francis’s brother, Abiel or Abial Lovejoy, in the west part of Vassalboro that became Sidney in 1792. Mary and some of the four boys and three girls (called by one source the surviving children, implying that several had died by then) stayed in Vassalboro while Francis cleared a space for a cabin on the west shore of Fifteen-Mile Pond (later renamed Lovejoy Pond).

The Daniel Lovejoy whom Kingsbury listed as Albion’s town clerk and town treasurer in 1802 was most likely Francis and Mary’s fourth (of eight, according to FamilySearch) sons, born in 1776 in Amherst, New Hampshire, married on April 20, 1802, in Clinton, Maine.

Mary Lovejoy died May 8, 1792, before her 50th birthday. Francis died Oct. 11 or Oct. 12, 1818, just before his 84th birthday. Both are buried in Albion’s Lovejoy Cemetery.

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John Linn (later the name became Lynn) was one of Windsor’s early settlers, arriving around 1809. WikiTree and FamilySearch say he was born in Boston on Aug. 17, 1754.

During the Revolution, Linn served in Massachusetts militia units. In his 1993 Windsor history, Linwood H. Lowden wrote that Linn was a prisoner of war during part of his service.

On May 13, 1779, Linn married Rebecca “Babra” Anderson, in Shelburne, Massachusetts. She was born Sept. 3, 1759, Find a Grave says.

Meanwhile, Linn’s sister, Polly, and her husband, George Russell, moved to Bristol, Maine, and before 1800 George bought 100 acres “in a wilderness area north of Bristol that would eventually become Windsor, Maine.” On Nov. 8, 1800, Linn bought his brother-in-law’s land.

When the Linns moved to their Windsor land is unclear in Lowden’s account. Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history says they “brought eleven children to Windsor,” and settled in 1803.

Lowden wrote that the family’s 10 children included several sons who were “close to adulthood.” They came from Boston to Bristol by ship and “walked most of the way from Bristol to Windsor,” he said.

FamilySearch lists four daughters and eight sons, of whom (at least) one son died in infancy. The first daughter was born in 1779, the last son in 1800, all apparently in Massachusetts.

Kingsbury lists John Lynn, Jr. (the oldest son, born in 17810, as a Windsor selectman, elected in 1812 and serving for five years, and as town clerk in 1812 and 1814 and town treasurer in 1813. The James Lynn who became treasurer in 1832 and apparently served for 15 years might have been another of John and Rebecca’s sons, born in 1790.

John Linn died April 28, 1834, and Rebecca died Dec. 20, 1834, in Windsor. They are buried in the town’s Resthaven Cemetery.

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One of China’s Revolutionary veterans was a black man named Abraham Talbot (the last name is spelled in many ways, including Tarbot, Tarbet, Talbart, Talbett, Turbut), described in the China bicentennial history as an ex-slave.

Find a Grave says he “was probably born enslaved,” because his mother was “probably” a slave in North Bridgewater (now Brockton), Massachusetts. This source calls him Private Abraham Talbot Sr., says he was born in 1757 and both he and his father, Toby Talbot, were Revolutionary soldiers.

An on-line genealogical site says Talbot was born May 27, 1756. On Sept. 3, 1787, still in Bridgewater, he married Mary (or Molley) Dunbar (born Feb. 22, 1758, in Braintree, Massachusetts). Her father, Sampson Dunbar, was also a Revolutionary soldier.

The genealogical website uses information from Talbot’s April 28, 1818, pension application for information about his military service. He wrote that he enlisted for nine months in May, 1778, and on July 10, 1778, at Fishkill, New York, joined a company in the Massachusetts Line (identified elsewhere as the 9th Massachusetts Regiment). He served until discharged in March, 1779, at least part of the time at West Point, New York.

In 1818, he wrote, his discharge papers had been destroyed when his house burned seven years earlier. He said he was “in reduced circumstances” and in need of support.

The application was accompanied by a declaration of his property, dated (the website says without explanation) May 25, 1820. Talbot wrote that he owned an acre of land and a “small hut,” with a combined value of $30; a “swine” worth five dollars; and another seven dollars’ worth of household goods and farm tools.

He also owned “10,000 ‘poor bricks in a kiln’ valued at $25.” The China history records, without specific dates, that Talbot owned a brickyard east of the head of China Lake, outside China Village.

In 1820, Talbot was about $100 in debt, and had maybe $10 of collectible debts owed to him.

He gave his occupation as “laborer” and wrote that he could not work much, “the flesh of my left leg being withered and perished.” He was living with his wife, Mary, who was 62 years old and unwell.

His pension application was approved.

The Talbots must have moved from Massachusetts to Maine right after they married, because the genealogical website lists all eight of their children – five sons, three daughters – as born in Fairfax (which later became Albion; parts of northern China and southern Albion swapped towns at intervals in the early 1800s). Oldest son, Ezekiel, was born Dec. 21, 1787; youngest daughter and last child, Roanna, was born Feb. 16, 1805. (Find a Grave says Ezekiel was born in Massachusetts.)

The website says when the 1800 census was taken, the Talbot household consisted of six people. Since six of the children were born before 1800, the website writer infers two children died in infancy.

Abraham Talbot died in Augusta or China (sources differ) on June 11, 1840. His widow died June 1, 1850.

Another on-line source describes the first Maine Colored Convention, held in Portland in October 1841. Among the delegates was Abraham Talbot Jr., described as “a window washer from Portland.”

This man was Abraham and Mary’s third son, born Feb. 28, 1792. The website reminds readers that the tradition of political involvement continues: among descendants of the older Abraham Talbot are Gerald Talbot, and his daughter, Rachel Talbot Ross.

Gerald Talbot, born in 1931, is the first black man to serve in the Maine House of Representatives. Talbot Ross, born in 1961, is Maine’s first black female legislator, elected to the House of Representatives in 2016. In December 2022, she “became the highest-ranking African American politician in Maine history” when she was elected speaker of the House, a position she held until December 2024. She is now a state Senator.

Main sources

Fisher, Major General Carleton Edward, History of Clinton, Maine (1970)
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)
Wiggin, Ruby Crosby, Albion on the Narrow Gauge (1964)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Albion Revolutionary veterans

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by Mary Grow

Other towns included in this series that are in the Kennebec Valley, but lack direct access to the Kennebec River, are Albion, China, Palermo and Windsor. These towns’ earliest known settlers came later than the first settlers along the Kennebec.

As a result, few if any men already living in these towns enlisted during the Revolutionary War; they had too much else to do. However, all four towns’ histories (and other sources) mention veterans who moved into town after the war.

In Albion, for example, Ruby Crosby Wiggin, in her 1964 Albion history, said the town’s first settlers probably arrived after a fall 1773 survey. In a subchapter titled “War Records,” she wrote that the town was “not…even partly settled” until after the Revolution, “thus all Albion Revolutionary War soldiers enlisted from some other town.”

She named 13 Revolutionary veterans who became residents after the war and/or are buried in town. Your writer found another half-dozen on the town’s list of people buried in Albion cemeteries. Other sources added more names.

Beyond their names and their identification as Revolutionary veterans, your writer had difficulty finding information on these men. What she did find is full of gaps and inconsistencies.

Following are profiles of a few of these men, chosen on the basis of the amount of available and interesting information.

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An on-line site called Our Family History says Revolutionary veteran John Leonard was born about 1770 (no birthplace listed). This site says he married Abigail Phillips, also born about 1770, in the fall of 1789 (their marriage intentions were filed in Winslow on Sept. 27).

The Family History site and Wiggin agree that Leonard (and presumably his family) came to Albion about 1795. The Family History also says their five daughters and two sons were all born in Albion, two daughters before 1795, the third on Feb. 27, 1795 (and the second son and last child in January 1807).

Wiggin wrote that Albion’s first town meeting, on Oct. 30, 1802 (Albion was then Freetown, its name from 1802 to March 9, 1804), was held at 10 a.m. at the “dwellinghouse of John Leonard, in said Freetown, Inn-holder.”

In 1964, she said, no one knew exactly where the house and inn were, but an October 1797, deed description locates the Leonards’ land on the west side of current Route 202, “just south of the Unity-Albion town line.”

The buildings on the property “burned in the early 1900s,” leaving only a shed – and lilacs that, Wiggin wrote, every spring helped “to give us a mental picture of the old Inn as it may have looked.”

Wiggin wondered why the first town meeting was held so far from the center of town. She suggested it was because Leonard and Asa Phillips, who was authorized to call the meeting and was elected moderator, had been neighbors in Winslow and appreciated the value of an organized government; so Leonard volunteered a meeting place.

(Leonard’s wife, Abigail, was almost certainly Asa Phillips’ daughter.)

Until about 1811, Wiggin wrote, Leonard “seems to have taken an active part in town affairs.” Positions he held included fence viewer and school committee member in 1805; surveyor of highways and member of a three-man committee that marked “the town line” (which one?) in 1806; and later one of a seven-member committee that chose and bought a site for a town common.

The Family History site includes no death date; it and Wiggin say Leonard is buried in Unity’s Fowler Cemetery. Find a Grave does not list his name there.

Find a Grave does list Abigail Leonard in Fowler Cemetery, with a photo of her gravestone. She died Dec. 16, 1871, aged 101 years, three months and an illegible number of days.

Wiggin wrote that after Abigail was widowed, presumably around 1811, she lived with her older son and later with a grandson. She celebrated her 100th birthday by walking from the house where she was living to another grandson’s house “about half a mile away.”

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For Benjamin Libby, identified as Deacon Benjamin Libby, Wiggin found a bit of wartime history. She wrote that he was born in Berwick; during the war, was imprisoned in Charlestown, South Carolina; and after he was released, walked home to Berwick (something over 1,000 miles).

This story is also on line on the Geni website. A Daughters of the American Revolution website says Libby served as a marine, including on the sloop of war “Ranger.”

Geni says Libby was born Jan. 18, 1758, and married Polly Hearl, born June 8, 1759. They had six sons and five daughters between 1784 and 1800; most whose birthplaces are listed were born in Lebanon (northwest of Berwick on the New Hampshire border), where Libby had a farm and was a Baptist Church deacon.

The senior Libbys apparently moved to Albion before 1820. Wiggin wrote that Libby was a deacon for 40 years, “sixteen of them in the Baptist Church on Besse Ridge near his home.” Albion’s Libby Hill is named after him, she said.

Benjamin Libby died May 23, 1834, and Polly died July 19, 1845, both in Albion, where they are buried in Libby Hill cemetery.

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According to three different websites (Our Family History, FamilySearch, Find a Grave), two generations of Lincoln men who served in the Revolution are buried together in Albion’s Lincoln Cemetery.

George Lincoln was born about 1728 or about 1732 (sources differ), perhaps in Taunton, Massachusetts. On April 3, 1755, in the First Congregational Church in Rochester, Massachusetts, he married Keziah (or Kezia) Sherman, born in Rochester on Oct. 28, 1728. (Rochester is about 30 miles southeast of Taunton.)

They had at least two children, a daughter they named Keziah, born April 1, 1756, and a son they named Sherman, born in 1762 or 1763 (Find a Grave says both men’s birth dates are estimates; WikiTree takes 1762 from the younger Lincoln’s pension application).

Your writer found no information on George Lincoln’s service during the Revolution. His son, Sherman, was a private, WikiTree says; in the pension application he filed in July, 1832, he wrote that he was living in Rochester during his (unspecified) service.

The younger Lincoln married Chloe Blackwell (born July 28, 1765) on Nov. 2, 1797, in Sandwich, Massachusetts. WikiTree says their marriage was recorded in Rochester. (Sandwich is near the coast, about 25 miles east of Rochester.)

The pension application says Lincoln left Rochester in/around 1822, presumably with his wife and, WikiTree guesses, his father.

The China bicentennial history lists Sherman Lincoln “of Ligonia” (another of Albion’s former names) as buying pew number nine in China’s Baptist meeting house on June 20, 1823, for $25. Lincoln was still in China in 1840 (according to FamilySearch) and 1841 (according to Our Family History).

George Lincoln died in 1824, aged 96. Chloe died in August, 1841, and Sherman died Feb. 14, 1842, in Albion.

Find a Grave has a photo of a monument in Albion’s Lincoln Cemetery with George, Sherman and Chloe’s names, death dates and ages. WikiTree doesn’t guarantee George is actually buried there; the site says “(or at least his name is on the monument there with his son).”

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Samuel Moore (or Mooers) was born in March, 1748, in Candia, New Hampshire, (according to Our Family History). The source cites Albion town records saying he enlisted June 10, 1775, from Chester, Massachusetts, and his gravestone describes him as “A soldier in the Revolutionary war.”

On July 20, 1779, still in Candia, he married a woman named Sally (your writer found no further information).

Sources then skip to his last years. Our Family History says, “He is age 104 in home of Arba and Mary Shorey in 1850 census of Albion.” (Both Shoreys were Albion natives, Arba born in 1815 and Mary in 1818.)

Find a Grave quotes a newspaper article originally published in the Piscataquis Observer on Feb. 28, 1850, describing Moore, then a 105-year-old Revolutionary pensioner, at the Hatch House, where “He walks with as much agility as do most men of 60 years. He is desirous of getting married, provided he can find a young and virtuous lady of his years.”

(Your writer could not find information on the Hatch House.)

Moore died June 30, 1854, at the age of 106 years and three months. He is buried in Albion’s #4 Cemetery.

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William Morrison was born in Wells, Maine, on April 1, 1759. Find A Grave says he was at British General John Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga, New York, on Oct. 17, 1777 (when he was about 18 and a half years old).

On Feb. 17 or 18, 1783, still in Wells, Morrison married Kezia Gowen, born in 1761. Between 1785 and 1799, they had four sons and one daughter. Kezia died in 1835; her widower died Dec. 2 or Dec. 26, 1842. Find a Grave quotes from his Libby Hill Cemetery gravestone, which also describes him as “A soldier of the Revolution:”

My deathless spirit when I die
Shall on the wings of angels fly
To mansions in the sky

In 1950, Howard Schofield Morrison, in Albany, Oregon, published a 16-page paperback booklet titled “Some descendants of William Morrison, Revolutionary soldier of Wells, Lebanon and Albion, Maine.”

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FamilySearch’s summary of Barton Pollard, Jr.’s, life says he was born in Plaistow, New Hampshire, May 22, 1756; lived in Hancock (Maine) in 1790 and Clinton in 1800; registered for military service in 1838; died Sept. 10, 1828, in Albion.

Of Mary Phillips, who married Pollard in Vassalboro around 1788, the same source says she was born Aug. 22, 1772, in Vassalboro; lived in Brooks in 1838; registered for military service in 1836; died Aug. 18, 1845, in Bangor.

Wiggin wrote that Pollard enlisted from Raymond, New Hampshire. Given his birthdate, the year could have been any time after the Revolution began in April 1775 – but not 10 years after he died. Your writer doubts that Mary ever registered.

Major General Carleton Edward Fisher, in his Clinton history, wrote that the family “slipped back and forth between Clinton and Winslow” for some years: Winslow in 1789, Clinton in 1790, Winslow in 1793, Clinton in 1794 (Pollard bought an interest in a mill, and in 1796 was elected tax collector and constable), “gone again” by 1810.

RootsWeb on-line says they lived in Vassalboro from 1801 to about 1813, and then in Albion. However, FamilySearch says the last five of their 11 children (six sons and five daughters) were born in Albion, between 1801 and 1816.

The Pollards named their oldest son Henry Dearborn Pollard, presumably after Henry Dearborn, Revolutionary military leader who was an officer on Benedict Arnold’s 1775 expedition to Québec and later attained the rank of colonel.

(Wikipedia says Dearborn was discharged from the army in June 1783, and promptly settled in Gardiner. He became a major-general in the Maine militia; was appointed Marshal of the District of Maine by President Washington; and represented Maine in the United States House of Representatives from 1793 to 1797.)

Henry Dearborn Pollard’s next-younger brother, born in 1795, was named Marcus Quintus Cincinnatus Pollard.

(Wikipedia lists no such person. It does have information on Roman statesman Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus [c. 519 B.C. to c. 430 B.C].

(Revolutionary General Henry Knox, the country’s first Secretary of War, founded the Society of the Cincinnati in 1783, Wikipedia says. Its original goals were “to assist the officers of the Continental Army and Navy and their families, to preserve the ideals of the American Revolution, and to maintain the union of the former colonies.”

(Wikipedia says Henry Dearborn was “an original member of the New Hampshire Society of the Cincinnati.”)

Main sources

Wiggin, Ruby Crosby, Albion on the Narrow Gauge (1964)

Websites, miscellaneous.

The first Methodist foreign missionary was a son of Central Maine

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In 1833, Rev. Melville Cox (1799-1833) of Hallowell, was the first to serve as a Methodist foreign missionary. A historical marker, in Hallowell, tells of the short but successful career of Rev. Melville B. Cox.

by Dale Potter-Clark

In October, 1793 the Methodist itinerant minister, Jesse Lee from Virginia first preached in Hallowell and a Methodist Society was formed. Capt. Charles Cox and his wife Martha, of Hallowell, were the first two converts to Methodism in that town. In 1799 Martha gave birth to twins, Melville and Gershom and when a revival was held there in 1800 the couple had their sons baptized. Both of the boys grew up to become Methodist ministers.

At age 18, Melville Cox felt called to the ministry while on a walk alone in the woods near his home, and he began preaching by age twenty. He became licensed to preach by the Kennebec District Conference, in March, 1821 and in 1822, received his first appointment as an itinerant preacher. In 1823 he served the Exeter, New Hampshire, circuit and in 1824 he was assigned to Buxton. Preaching on Methodist circuits was a tough existence in those days when itinerants often slept on the cold ground at night on their travels between towns, and during the winter months they sometimes awoke covered in snow. That life took its toll on Rev. Cox who became stricken with tuberculosis and he was forced to return home in 1825.

In 1827-28 Rev. Cox served in a supervisory position for the Kennebec circuit and during that time the Methodists decided they should build a church in Hallowell. Rev. Cox was chosen to find and secure land where a new structure would be raised, and on February 8, 1826 the Methodist trustees paid $325.00 to Samuel & Martha Prescott of Hallowell for a parcel on 5th Street. The church was later dedicated as “Cox Memorial” in honor of Rev. Cox.

His next assignment was in Virginia in 1828, the same year he married Ellen Cromwell, of Baltimore, Maryland, and their daughter was born. Still in ill health, he gave up the ministry and worked as the editor of biweekly The Itinerant, also known as Wesleyan Methodist Visitor and published in Baltimore 1830-31. Then tragedy struck in 1830 when both his wife and daughter died during a cholera epidemic and he soon after followed his calling back to the ministry. His brother, Gershom became a Methodist minister about 1827 and for 40 years served churches throughout Maine and New Hampshire. Melville’s Methodist tentacles reached far beyond those of his brother, for in spite of his grief and ill health he became interested in foreign missions.

The Methodist Episcopal Church had formed a Missionary Society in 1819, but a suitable foreign missionary had not yet been found – until 1832 when Rev. Melville Cox agreed to a serve a colony for freed American slaves in Monrovia, Liberia, Africa, making him the first ever overseas Methodist missionary. He boarded the ship Jupiter, on November 6, 1832, bound for West Africa. Having already made plans for what he hoped to accomplish in Liberia, he wrote in his journal on the voyage, “In making up my mind and in searching for a passage to go out, I have followed the best light I could obtain. I now leave it all with God…”

Rev. Melville Cox arrived in Liberia on March 9, 1833, but given his already weakened condition from tuberculosis he soon succumbed to malaria fever and died that July. In those five months Rev. Cox had organized the Methodist Episcopal Church, in Liberia, and founded the College of West Africa which he modeled after the Maine Wesleyan Seminary (Kents Hill School), in Readfield, where his brother was a Trustee.

A historical marker sits on the banks of the Kennebec River, in Hallowell, that tells of the short but successful career of Rev. Melville B. Cox. In 1835 Rev. Gershom Cox wrote a 240-page biography about his brother titled, Remains of Melville B. Cox, Late Missionary to Liberia: With a Memoir.

Vassalboro’s historic Leach-Overlock House endangered

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Vassalboro’s historic Leach-Overlock House

by Mary Grow

Vassalboro’s Leach, or Leach-Overlock, House is on Maine Preservation’s 2025 list of most endangered historic properties.

The house is on Bog Road, the next building west of the Vassalboro Public Library. It was built around 1805, has been on the National Register of Historic Places since Oct. 20, 1983, and was owned by artist Trudy Overlock until her death in July 2023.

The Maine Preservation notice says the Federal style Cape was built for “local lawyer and postmaster Philip Leach.” It used to have a porch (removed in 1953) and a longer ell connecting a barn; the barn burned in 1960, the notice says.

The Leach house’s outstanding feature is its stenciled interior walls and painted parlor floor, said to have been done by “itinerant folk art stenciler Moses Eaton Jr., of New Hampshire.”

Eaton was born Aug. 3, 1796, in Hancock, New Hampshire, and died Nov 16, 1886, in Dublin, New Hampshire. Trained by his father and later working on his own, he decorated buildings in New Hampshire and Maine in the 1820s and 1830s.

Maine Preservation’s writer described the Leach House work: “The stenciling was completed in bright primary green, red, and yellow, with recurring motifs of a pineapple, a maple leaf within a wreath, a red starburst, and a red bird on a willow. Above the mantlepiece is a unique motif of a yellow bird on a basket of flowers.”

The writer says Overlock bought the house in 1983 and started remodeling. After taking off five layers of wallpaper in the parlor, she found – and appreciated – the stencil work.

“She painstakingly unveiled the stenciling throughout the entire parlor then successfully nominated the house to the National Register of Historic Places,” the notice says.

When she died, Overlock left neither siblings nor children, and no “transition plan” for the house. A family member notified Maine Preservation, whose officials realized they could arrange for the building’s future only by having a personal representative appointed. This person “would need to coordinate all 19 potential heirs from across the country, in addition to addressing outstanding medical debts, back taxes, and a house in worsening condition.”

Maine Preservation hopes to be appointed personal representative. The organization would make repairs and sell the house for a residence, with a “preservation easement” in the deed protecting the stencils.

Meanwhile, the house continues to deteriorate. Maine Preservation officials worry about damage to exterior details, the aging roof and especially effects of cold winters and dampness on the stencils.

The notice thanks the Vassalboro Historical Society and the Center for Painted Wall Preservation for research, and the 1772 Foundation for a grant. It concludes with an appeal for funds, because “resolving this legal matter will continue to require significant staff hours and expensive counsel.”

Donations may be sent to https://www.mainepreservation.org/donate.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Revolution affects Clinton residents

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by Mary Grow

As promised, this article will start with information on Samuel Varnum and Solomon Whidden (or Whitten), Revolutionary War veterans named in Major General Carleton Edward Fisher’s 1970 history of Clinton, Maine. Their (incomplete, as usual) stories will be followed by information on three more veterans, Elnathan Sherwin, Isaiah Brown and Benoni Burrill.

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Samuel Varnum (born Feb. 17, 1747 [Fisher] or 1746 [WikiTree, whose writer adds a Jr. after his name]) in Dracut, Massachusetts, did not move to Clinton until after his Revolutionary service, Fisher wrote. He enlisted for a year in the spring of 1776, and later in 1776 for three years.

A Varnum genealogy, digitized and on line, says Varnum first enlisted as a private in a company commanded by his brother, Capt. Joseph Bradley Varnum. He and many other men from Dracut transferred to the Continental Army; Varnum joined the Ninth Continental Infantry, in a regiment the genealogist wrote was mostly Rhode Islanders and was “formerly commanded by his brother, afterwards Brigadier-General James Mitchell Varnum.”

Fisher and the genealogist listed three New York battles in which Varnum’s unit was involved: Long Island (Aug. 27, 1776), King’s Bridge (aka Kip’s Bay, Sept. 15, 1776) and Harlem Heights (Sept. 16, 1776). WikiTree references his presence in Rhode Island in May and October, 1778.

Wikipedia calls the Battle of Long Island (aka Battle of Brooklyn, Battle of Brooklyn Heights) the first major battle after the Declaration of Independence and “the largest battle of the Revolutionary War in terms of both troop deployment and combat.” The British won and thereby “gained access to the strategically important Port of New York, which they held for the rest of the war.”

Less than a month later, the British extended their territory with an amphibious attack at Kip’s Bay. Wikipedia describes 500 Connecticut militia, armed with “homemade pikes constructed of scythe blades attached to poles” instead of muskets, facing an hour’s cannonading from five British warships, followed by a British landing force of 4,000 men (and later another 9,000). Despite General George Washington’s attempts to rally them, the Americans fled.

Kip’s Bay was close to Harlem Heights, in the northwestern part of Manhattan Island. Here Washington’s forces defended their position against British troops led by Major General Henry Clinton. Wikipedia says, “The battle helped restore the confidence of the Continental Army after suffering several defeats. It was Washington’s first battlefield success of the war.”

Fisher said Varnum moved to Clinton by 1781, and might have spent most of the rest of his life there. An on-line source puts him on the Kennebec, in the area that soon became Pishon’s Ferry, in 1789 or 1790. (Pishon’s Ferry was almost opposite Hinckley, in northern Fairfield, where Route 23 now crosses the river.)

WikiTree says Varnum was in Canaan in 1790 and 1800, in Clinton in 1810 and 1820.

Fisher wrote that Varnum married Mary Parker. The genealogy says they had three daughters between Feb. 11, 1789, and July 10, 1793, and on March 4, 1795, a son, Samuel, Jr. Two of the daughters married Vassalboro men.

After 1818, Varnum received a pension. The genealogy says it was $96 annually; by the time he died in January 1828, his pension income totaled $933. 06.

This source says Mary was still living in 1820, aged 71.

* * * * * *

Solomon Whidden or Whitten, Fisher said, was born June 1, 1754. WikiTree names his birthplace as Swan Island, York County (probably the Swan Island in the Kennebec, now in Sagadahoc County).

In May, 1777, from Bath, he enlisted for three years. WikiTree lists him as a private in two Massachusetts regiments and as a Massachusetts militiaman.

Whidden’s 1835 application for a veteran’s land grant, reproduced on line, is hard to read, because of the handwriting and because he ran short of space to describe his military career and overlapped some lines. It appears to say that he was present at General John Burgoyne’s surrender (at Saratoga, New York, on Oct. 17, 1777) and was discharged at West Point, New York, after serving his full three years.

He must have come to Clinton (or thereabouts) promptly, Fisher said, because when, on Sept. 26, 1781, his marriage intentions were filed, both he and his intended, Esther Goodwin (born in Castine in 1762, WikiTree says), were listed as from Kennebec (often used to mean Kennebec County; but Kennebec County was not created until Feb. 20, 1799, so in this case probably the Kennebec Valley). WikiTree says the marriage was in Canaan.

WikiTree lists four sons and three daughters, born in Canaan between 1782 and 1799. Fisher wrote that Esther died in 1814 (April 8, 1814, WikiTree says), and Whidden later married Sarah Boyton (born about 1756), for whom your writer found no more information.

In the 1780s and 1790s, Whidden lived mostly in Canaan. Fisher found that he “built the first sawmill on what is now the Carrabassett Stream [which flows into the Kennebec at Pishon’s Ferry] sometime before 1795,” when he sold it.

When he applied for a military pension in 1820, he was in Clermont County, Ohio, Fisher said.

Fisher wrote, “In August 1826 he returned to Maine to spend the remainder of his days with his children….” In his May, 1835, land grant application, Whidden said he lived in Milburn and had been a Maine resident for more than 54 years.

Whidden died in Skowhegan on Oct. 4, 1841, aged 87.

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Fisher said Elnathan Sherwin was “definitely known to have served” during the Revolution, but gave no details (nor did your writer find any on line). Fisher also wrote that later, Sherwin “was a lieutenant in Clinton’s first militia company, commissioned in 1787.”

Elnathan Sherwin was born in 1737 – March 9, online sources say – in Boxford, Massachusetts. His wife was Eunice Brown, (born in Holden, Massachusetts, in 1740, or February of either 1741 or 1742), oldest daughter of Ezekiel Brown, Sr. (making Sherwin brother-in-law of Ezekiel Brown, Jr., whose life was summarized in last week’s article).

FamilySearch says the wedding was Jan. 22, 1761, in Dunstable, in northern Massachusetts. FamilySearch and Find a Grave say their first son, Elnathan, Jr., was born in 1759, in Maine or in Dunstable. Geni says Elnathan, Jr., was born in October, 1762; WikiTree says 1762, in Dunstable; Ancestry says 1763.

FamilySearch and Ancestry.com list Elnathan, Jr, as the oldest of five children, naming three daughters and a second son born between 1765 or 1766 and 1778. Birthplaces, when supplied, mention Maine (not any town) and Massachusetts.

The senior Elnathan Sherwin was approved for a lot in Clinton in December, 1772, having been clearing it since the summer.

Daughter Mary was born in 1773, Ancestry says in Concord, Massachusetts. Fisher said she married (no date) John Whidden (born on Swan Island 1771), and their three sons and one daughter (named Triphena) were born between 1799 and 1806.

WikiTree names Solomon Whidden’s youngest brother as John, born on Swan Island March 10, 1771. This source lists John and Mary Whidden’s five children, three sons (the oldest was John, Jr., born July 13, 1799) and two daughters, Triphena (born July 23, 1801) and Mary Elizabeth (born March 2, 1812).

Fisher found that when Clinton organized an infantry company in October 1787, as part of the Lincoln County militia, Sherwin was the first man to serve as lieutenant, from Oct. 25, 1787, until he “moved prior to Sept. 1791.”

The Sherwins left Clinton in 1791 and returned by 1810, Fisher said. In 1810 (probably according to the 1810 census), the family included a teen-age girl named Cleopatra, whom Fisher identified as the Sherwins’ daughter Mary’s illegitimate daughter.

By 1814, the Sherwins were in Waterville, Fisher wrote. Find a Grave says Elnathan died in March 1815, in Clinton and Eunice died Oct. 30, 1829, in Holden; both are buried in Nashua, New Hampshire.

The Waterville centennial history has many references to Elnathan Sherwin, including his service in the War of 1812 and in the Massachusetts legislature for all but two years from 1799 through 1815: this man must have been Elnathan Sherwin Jr.

* * * * * *

Another Revolutionary veteran connected with Clinton was Isaiah Brown. Your writer hopes he was not closely related to the Ezekiel Brown Jr., who was profiled last week, because Fisher said Ezekiel’s sister, Abigail, was Isaiah’s second wife.

Isaiah Brown was born June 10, 1745, in Holden, Massachusetts (per WikiTree) or June 21, 1745, in Clinton, Massachusetts (per FamilySearch). (The two towns, north of Worcester, are about 13 miles apart.) In Holden, on Nov. 8, 1770, he married Phebe Howe, born in Rutland, Massachusetts, in 1749 (WikiTree). They had one child, a daughter named Dorothy, born Sept. 2, 1773.

Phebe died July 6, 1775, and both websites say on Dec. 27, 1775, Brown married Abigail (Nabby) Brown (born in 1751 [WikiTree] or 1753 [FamilySearch and Fisher]), in her home town of Concord, Massachusetts (well east of his former home).

Brown was a minuteman in Holden; his regiment responded to the events of April 19, 1775. At some point, he became a lieutenant in the Continental Army’s 18th Massachusetts Bay Provincial Regiment.

Wikipedia says this regiment was among those in the siege of Boston, until it was disbanded “at the end of 1775.” (The British did not evacuate Boston until mid-March 1776.)

Assuming accuracy of sources, the Browns soon left Massachusetts for Clinton. Their first son, Thomas, was born there Sept. 28, 1776, WikiTree and FamilySearch say (Find a Grave says Sept. 19, 1776).

FamilySearch (but not WikiTree) says Isaiah and Abigial had eight more children, five girls (the oldest was named Phebe) and three boys, born between 1778 and 1796. The site claims two girls, Sarah (1782) and Polly (1784), were born in Clinton, the rest in Holden.

Fisher wrote that Brown opened what might have been Clinton’s first tavern around 1800 at current Benton Station, and had a store there in 1807. He served briefly as a selectman in 1803.

Brown died in November 1815, and, FamilySearch says, is buried in Ames Cemetery, in Benton (formerly part of Clinton). Abigail died in Clinton in September, 1832.

Find a Grave says 84 Browns (from at least two families) are buried in Ames Cemetery. They include Isaiah and Abigail and their youngest son, Luke (Jan. 24, 1795 – October 28, 1890), and his wife, Mary “Polly” (Gilman) Brown (Jan. 21, 1795 – Jan. 18, 1866).

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Benoni Burrill was born Sept. 7, 1756, in Abington, Massachusetts, son of Thomas and Grace (Garnett) Burrill. (He was probably related to the Nathaniel Burrell profiled last week; your writer hasn’t the patience to untangle the genealogy.)

WikiTree’s biography says Burrill’s first military service was for three days in April 1775, when he was a private in a company that responded on April 20 to the April 19 events at Lexington and Concord. WikiTree does not explain why the company marched east toward Marshfield instead of heading north toward the Boston area.

On May 1, 1775, Burrill enlisted and served for three months plus eight days. On May 15, 1777, when he was 21 years old, he joined the Continental Army from a North Abington company, enlisting for three years or the duration of the war and serving as a fifer and a drummer.

Discharged Aug. 9, 1780, he re-enlisted and served in 1783 and 1784 (British commander Charles Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown on Oct. 19, 1781) at Castle Island and Governor’s Island, in Boston Harbor. FamilySearch says he was promoted to corporal during this time.

FamilySearch says Burrill was always a musician. The site describes Fisher’s statement that he was “promoted to quarter gunner” as a mistake, due to a mistranscription of a hand-written record, which also changed his first name from Benoni to Benjamin.

Burrill and Lydia Ripley (born Feb. 26, 1761, in Weymouth, Massachusetts, about eight miles north of Abington) were married in Abington on May 26 or May 27, 1779. FamilySearch says they had six sons (including Benoni, Jr.) and five daughters between 1782 and 1803, all born in Abington.

Burrill died April 9, 1814, in either Clinton (Fisher and WkiTree) or Corinna (FamilySearch). His widow died June 12, 1852, in Corinna, where both are buried.

Main sources

Fisher, Major General Carleton Edward, History of Clinton, Maine (1970)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Revolution affects Clinton

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by Mary Grow

Major General Carleton Edward Fisher’s 1970 history of Clinton includes a chapter on settlers who moved into the territory that became the town before 1782. He identified 10 of the men he named as Revolutionary veterans: Ezekiel Brown, Jr.; Nathaniel Burrell; Ezekiel Chase, Sr., and three of his six sons, Roger, Ezekiel, Jr. and Jonathan; Fred Jackins; John Spearin, Jr.; Samuel Varnum; and Solomon Whidden or Whitten.

In a later chapter on the military, Fisher named more Revolutionary soldiers, identifying seven who “were proved beyond a doubt to have lived in town during the war and then went into service from here.” They were Ezekiel Brown, Jr., the four Chases, John Spearin, Jr., and William Kendall; the latter’s service was described last week in the article on Fairfield. Still later, in an appendix, Fisher added information on another 16 Revolutionary veterans who died in Clinton.

Due to space limits, this week’s article cannot talk about all these men. Readers tired of the Revolutionary War may skip next week’s installment.

Your writer, after years of dealing with endless contradictions among and within historical sources, commends Fisher’s work highly. He obviously did a great deal of research from many sources on a wide variety of topics and produced a readable and informative book that has the additional virtue of being well indexed.

* * * * * *

Ezekiel Brown Jr., was born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1743, or on March 8, 1745 (Fisher gave two different dates in two different chapters; Find a Grave says 1745). On Feb. 28, 1770, Brown married Mary Barron (born Jan. 20, 1752, in Concord). They probably moved to Clinton in 1772.

In May 1774, when Ezekiel and Mary’s second child (of 10) and oldest son, Ezekiel, 3rd, was born, the family was back in Concord. Fisher surmised Ezekiel, Jr., might have been studying medicine there, because on June 7, 1776, he “was commissioned a surgeon’s mate in Col. Jonathan Reed’s regiment,” and on Jan. 1, 1777, a surgeon in Col. Brook’s regiment.

Fisher wrote that Brown’s service involved participation in battles leading to British General John Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga, New York, on Oct. 17, 1777; and with General Sullivan’s Indian Expedition, the June through October, 1779, American attack led by Major General John Sullivan against upstate New York Iroquois tribes siding with the British.

Brown was discharged Jan. 1, 1781. Fisher wrote that the family returned to Clinton sometime between 1788 and 1790, and Brown became the town’s first doctor. He was also the first town meeting moderator, and served repeatedly; a selectman “almost continuously from 1797 to 1818”; town clerk for four years, tax collector for three years.

In 1818, Fisher wrote, Brown stated in his pension application that he was “unable to do much in his profession” because of age and the loss of “use of his left arm six years before.” The pension was granted.

Brown died in Clinton June 30, 1824; his widow died May 6, 1832. They are buried in Benton’s Ames Cemetery, as are at least four of their sons (among the 85 Browns buried there, according to Find a Grave) and one daughter, Elizabeth (Brown) Gray.

* * * * * *

Fisher listed Nathaniel Burrell (or Burrill) as one of the four sons of John Burrell, Sr., and his wife, Anne (Vinton) (or Anna Vinton, per WikiTree), who came from Massachusetts to Clinton sometime before October, 1781. John, Jr. (born in 1753), Bela (born May 20, 1756), Ziba (born in 1765) and Nathaniel (no birth date given), “who served in the Revolutionary War,” joined the parents.

Nathaniel Burrell is not listed in Fisher’s chapter on the military; nor in his appendix listing Revolutionary War veterans who died in Clinton; nor on any on-line source your writer found. Websites WikiTree and Geni name only John, Jr., Bela and Ziba as John and Anna’s sons.

Geni says John, Jr., was born Oct. 5, 1763 (a decade later than Fisher cited from the 1799 Clinton records), and was a private and a “Rev. War gunner.” Fisher wrote that John Burrell, Jr., had an inn near Pishon’s Ferry on the Kennebec (opposite Hinckley, in northern Fairfield, where state route 23 now crosses the river) in 1810; he was tax collector that year “and held other town offices.” Geni says he died Sept. 1, 1842, in East Sangerville, in Piscataquis County, Maine.

* * * * * *

Fisher identified Ezekiel Chase Sr., as “probably” Clinton’s first settler, referencing a 1771 petition for a land grant from the Kennebec Proprietors in which Chase claimed to have lived on the east side of the Kennebec for 10 years, with a “son that is 18 years old” living on an adjacent lot.

WikiTree says Chase was born May 24, 1728 (FamilySearch says May 28), in Newbury, Massachusetts. He married Anna Spaulding, born in 1731, in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, in Hallowell (or in Fairfield, as his second wife, WikiTree says) in 1747.

Fisher listed one daughter and six sons with birth dates between 1748 (daughter Eleanor) and 1775.

If the family was in Clinton in the 1760s, Fisher dismissed as obviously in error a genealogy that says all the Fisher children were born in Hallowell (although he said Roger [1749] and Ezekiel, Jr., [1761] were, as he named Revolutionary veterans in a later chapter). Other sources offer other birthplaces.

Ezekiel and Anna’s oldest son, Roger, was born Sept. 5, 1749, and in 1771 would have been in his early twenties. Fisher identified him as “without a doubt” the one referenced in his father’s petition. (Perhaps the father meant a son who was over 18?)

Fisher wrote that the Chases went to Hallowell when the Revolution started. Roger was still or again in Clinton in the fall of 1776, when he married a widow named Mary (Smith) Spear there; Fisher surmised he was managing the family’s property.

Ezekiel, Sr., enlisted in a light infantry company from Rowley, Massachusetts, Fisher wrote. (Newbury, his birthplace, and Rowley are north of Boston, about six miles apart.) Fisher said he was paid for service from July 18 to Dec. 31, 1780; but FamilySearch says he “registered for military service in 1781.”

FamilySearch says Ezekiel, Sr., died Jan. 1, 1808, in Fairfield.

Roger enlisted June 1, 1775, “and served …for two months and five days,” Fisher said. He was in Colonel John Nixon’s regiment. Your writer found no other record of his military service. On-line sources say he died Nov. 25, 1819, or June 25, 1822, in Concord, Maine.

Ezekiel, Jr., born June 4, 1761 (in Hallowell, per Fisher, or in Plymouth, Massachusetts, per WikiTree), enlisted from Milton, Massachusetts (about 35 miles from Plymouth; both towns are south of Boston), beginning his service May 18, 1778, apparently for nine months. On Jan. 7, 1781, he re-enlisted, Fisher said.

WikiTree says Ezekiel, Jr., served in 1777 with the Ninth Massachusetts Regiment of the Continental Army.

A descendant posted on the Maine Secretary of State website that Ezekiel Jr., was 16 when he joined the Continental Army. He served in Rhode Island, and was at the 1780 Battle of Springfield, in New Jersey. That same year, “he was captured by the British and imprisoned in the prison ship Jersey in New York harbor for 2 years.”

The account continued: “After the peace was signed, he struggled to get back to Maine, traveling in a cart because he could not walk.” In Maine, his descendant said, he was the second white settler in future Piscataquis County.

WikiTree says Ezekiel, Jr. died Sept. 14, 1843, in Sebec, a southern Piscataquis County town. The descendant gave his home town as Milo, about six miles from Sebec.

The descendant’s account adds that Roger Chase lost two brothers in the war, “one at sea, and Jonathan Chase at the siege of Yorktown in 1781.”

Fisher listed Ezekiel and Anna’s second son, who would have been born between 1750 and 1760, as “Jacob, went to sea and never heard from.” He gave no dates nor other details.

Jonathan, born in 1767 (one on-line source says July, 1767), was drafted Feb. 2, 1778 (according to Fisher; he would have been 10 years old, if all dates are correct), and according to the descendant quoted above and other sources was killed on or about October 19, 1781, during the Battle of Yorktown. Fisher’s two reports on his death, unlike the descendant’s, are worded uncertainly: “is said to have died” and “was reported deceased.”

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Frederick Jackins (or Jacquins, Jackings, many other spellings) was mentioned in the Sept. 11 article in this series as carrying a letter to Québec for Colonel Benedict Arnold as Arnold’s 1775 expedition passed through Clinton on its way up the Kennebec.

WikiTree says Jackins was born in Clinton in 1750, son of Christopher Jackins, who was born somewhere in Maine in 1729 and died in Clinton Village in December 1828, and an unknown mother. This source and Ancestry identify Frederick’s wife as Elizabeth (Jeakins) Jackins (1752 – 1800); both sources claim Frederick and Elizabeth were born in Clinton (a decade or so before the first settlers arrived?).

Your writer found no reference to Jackins’ military service elsewhere in Fisher’s history, nor in any on-line source. He and Elizabeth had three daughters, according to WikiTree, born in 1770, 1775 and 1778. Fisher listed Jackins as a town tax collector in 1797; WikiTree says he died in 1820, in Clinton.

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John Spearin Jr., Fisher said, was born March 4, 1764, in Pownalborough, according to a 1799 town record; but his 1818 application for a pension gave his birth date as March 3, 1765.

His parents, John Spearin Sr. (born July 20, 1720, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire; died in 1790 in Clinton) and Sarah (Call) Spearin (born Sept. 8, 1740, in Amesbury, Massachusetts; died about 1790 in Portsmouth) were married in 1740 and moved to Clinton around 1770.

John, Jr. was a Clinton resident in March 1781, when he went to Beverly, Massachusetts, and enlisted. Fisher commented that John Jr., “is one of the few men who can be proved was living in town and went to that war from here.”

Spearin served in two Massachusetts and one New Hampshire regiment; was at “the capture of Cornwallis [Oct. 19, 1781] and other skirmishes”; and was discharged Dec. 31, 1783.

He came back to Clinton and on Nov. 9, 1784, married Mary Kendall, of Fairfield, sister of William Kendall (see last week’s article). Fisher noted that her birth date was listed as 1765 in the 1799 town record and 1767 in the 1818 document. WikiTree says April 15, 1764: FamilySearch says April 18, 1764.

Fisher said the Spearins had six daughters and four sons between 1786 and 1808, born in Fairfield, Clinton and other towns as the family moved around.

Fisher wrote that Spearin died Nov. 9, 1831, in Hartland. Mary’s death date is given on line as Feb. 20, 1852.

Main sources

Fisher, Major General Carleton Edward, History of Clinton, Maine (1970)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Revolution affects Fairfield – Continued

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by Mary Grow

(See part 1 of this series here.)

This article will continue the story of Fairfield men who fought in the Revolutionary War, beginning – after a digression – with one important man mentioned last week, William Kendall.

* * * * * *

Photos of the memorial in Fairfield’s Emery Hill Cemetery that the Silence Howard Hayden Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution, put up in 1911, show General William Kendall’s as the second name. After him come Daniel Page (miscarved as Daniel Pace), David Emery and George Parkhurst, all profiled in last week’s article.

Above these names, in a different script, is the name George Hobbs. A copy of the 1878 map of Shawmut shows a house owned by R. T. Hobbs; otherwise, neither George nor any other Hobbs is mentioned in the Fairfield history.

Fairfield Historical Society member Barbara Gunvaldsen has George Hobbs’ name, and the names of his commanding officers, on her list of Fairfield men who served in the Revolution. FamilySearch’s biography does not identify him as a Revolutionary War veteran.

FamilySearch says George Hobbs was born April 7, 1764, in Berwick, and died Sept. 1, 1853, in Fairfield. (Other men who fought in the Revolution were born as late as 1764.) Your writer found no other record on line, and nothing about R. T. Hobbs.

Compared to Hobbs, William Kendall is famous, although details of his military service are available only in specialized war-related records.

Kendall was born in Georgetown, Maine, on Sept. 1, 1759, according to Major General Carleton Edward Fisher’s 1970 Clinton history; Fisher claimed him as an early – before 1777 – Clinton settler. Find a Grave says he was born Nov. 19, 1759, son of Uzziah and Elizabeth (Pierce) Kendall.

The 1988 Fairfield history says he enlisted in Winslow (Gunvaldsen says in Clinton, as does Fisher, quoting his widow’s claim for a state bounty) in March 1777, as a private, and was “honorably discharged in 1780.” (Your writer surmises that his military titles came from later service in the state militia.)

Kendall promptly came to Fairfield. The town history says in 1780, he “took over” unfinished saw and grist mills atop a two-year-old dam Jonas Dutton built between the west shore of the Kennebec and the closest island, now named Mill Island.

These mills remained in the Kendall family until 1835, the history says, run by Kendall, a brother and an unspecified number of sons. Other men started mills, “but during this era the Kendall Mills were dominant.”

Kendall also bought most of the land that is now downtown Fairfield, with the result that the area was called Kendall’s Mills from 1780 until the post office there was renamed Fairfield in 1872.

Several sources tell the story of Kendall marrying Abigail Chase (born in Augusta, or Clinton, Feb. 2, 1765) on Christmas Day, 1782, and paddling with her in his canoe down the river from Hinckley, in northern Fairfield, to his property. One source questions this account, pointing out that the Kennebec was probably frozen on Dec. 25 and that a sleigh would be more appropriate for a newly-wed couple anyway.

The Fairfield history says the Kendalls lived first in a log house at the foot (riverside end) of present-day Western Avenue. Before 1800, they moved a short distance uphill into a big brick house “on the northwest corner of the intersection of Western Avenue and Newhall Street.”

The history quotes a traveling Congregational minister named Paul Coffin, who visited Fairfield in (or before) the 1790s. Coffin recorded that on a Sunday, he preached all day at “Major Kendall’s” and “Spent a pleasant evening with the Major and his comely and sweet tempered wife.”

Another quotation in the history is from an unnamed 1824 traveler who came south from Emery Hill, past the Emery, Park and Kendall houses. The Kendall house “then stood in the center of a large field extending to the road. Upon the bank of the river and nearly opposite the house stood General Kendall’s store, a small structure….Just below the store stood the saw and grist mills of Gen. Kendall, the only mills in the place.” One more house farther south completed the 1824 inventory.

Included in the history is an undated – probably 1890s – photo of the Kendall house. It was square, with a good-sized rectangular ell on the west, both two stories, and a slightly sloped roof. What looks like the main entrance faced south, on Lawrence Avenue, with a square portico.

On the east side was another large door, from which a sidewalk led to the Newhall Street sidewalk. The sidewalks look smoother than the unpaved streets.

Each visible second-floor wall had five windows, the center one above the first-floor door. Five tall chimneys rose from each corner of the square and the far end of the ell.

In addition to his manufacturing interests, the history says Kendall ran the store “on the site of the present [1988] post office building” until his death. He was a Fairfield selectman for eight terms.

An on-line genealogy adds that Kendall served as Somerset County sheriff (no date) and as a member of Maine’s first legislature (in 1820), and was Kendall’s Mills postmaster in 1816.

Find a Grave lists the first names – no dates or other information – of William and Abigail’s eight sons and three daughters. The oldest son was named William. The Fairfield history called him William Jr., and said that in 1827 he invented the “circular log saw,” which replaced the up-and-down saws previously used and “revolutionized the lumber industry because of its superior speed and control.”

William Kendall died Aug. 11, 1827, according to Find a Grave. The history writer regretted that he did not live long enough “to see the success of his son’s invention.”

Find a Grave quotes the inscription on Kendall’s gravestone:

Rest in peace, departed spirit
Husband, Sire, and friend is gone
All thy honor fame and merit
Pass away virtue still thy name shall own.

The writer surmised that Kendall left Abigail well off: under the March 1835 state law (see box), she applied for and received a 200-acre land grant, which she promptly sold for $70.

The on-line genealogy says Abigail died Oct. 14, 1855. The inscription on her gravestone in Emery Hill Cemetery reads:

Mother thou art gone to rest
Thy toils and cares are o’er
And sorrow, pain, and suffering now,
Shall ne’er distress thee more.

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The Fairfield history lists Reuben Wyman as another Revolutionary veteran, probably not related to the Daniel Wyman profiled last week.

Reuben Wyman was born in 1764 in Worcester, Massachusetts, the history says (an on-line genealogy says Lunenberg, a town in Worcester County; an on-line Wyman genealogy says 1762, in Fairfield [presumably Maine]).

When Wyman was 15, according to the history, he became a fifer in a regiment that went to Springfield. Afterwards, “he served continuously from 1781 until his discharge in November 1783, sometimes as a private and sometimes as a fifer.”

The genealogy says around 1785, he married Jonathan and Jerusha Emery’s daughter, Hannah (born about 1764), and they had at least two sons and two daughters between 1786 and 1793. The history says he married Olive Hunt, at an unknown date.

The Wyman genealogy confirms both accounts, with differing dates. This source says in 1778, in Dracut, Massachusetts, Wyman married Hannah Emery, born in 1758 in Dracut. They had two sons and three daughters by 1786; the first daughter’s date and place of birth are unknown, the oldest son, another Reuben Wyman, was born in Damariscotta and the last three children were born in Dracut. Hannah died March 25, 1816 (place of death not listed).

On April 3, 1823, in Clinton, Wyman married Olive Hunt, born in 1770. They had a son, born in Fairfield about 1825.

Wyman was a Fairfield selectman in 1791, the town history says. He was a Clinton resident when he “applied for recompense for his military services” in September 1818, but had returned to Fairfield by 1837 and, an on-line source says, lived there in 1840.

Several sources agree that Wyman died May 16, 1841.

The Fairfield history continues with a list of 10 Revolutionary veterans who moved to Fairfield, including those readers met last week and this week (see the Jan. 27, 2022, article in The Town Line history series for summary information on others).

Gunvaldsen’s list of Fairfield men who served in the Revolution contains 40 names, including all of those discussed in this and the preceding article.

* * * * * *

Across the Kennebec from Fairfield in the 1770s was what became the Town of Clinton, organized first around 1790 as Hancock Plantation and in 1795 as Clinton. Until March 1842, this town included what is now the separate Town of Benton, giving it more frontage on the east bank of the Kennebec River than it has had since Benton became a separate town (then named Sebasticook).

The Sebasticook River runs southwest through Clinton and Benton on its way to join the Kennebec in Winslow, creating a second water access for early settlers.

Henry Kingsbury’s 1892 Kennebec County history says this area was barely settled by 1775.

However, Fisher’s 1970 Clinton history names about 20 men, many with families, who were probably in Clinton by 1775. An on-line town website says there was a dam (with “a gap for fish”) across the Sebasticook River at present-day Benton Falls in or soon after 1769, and a sawmill on the Sebasticook built in 1773.

Fisher described the early Clinton settlers as mostly poor, “industrious, daring, even courageous,” as shown by their leaving “the relative comfort of well-established towns” for “a wild, untamed wilderness.”

They were starting their lives over, beginning by cutting enough trees to clear space for a house, garden and farm while using natural resources to stay fed and protected from the weather. The area beyond Fort Halifax was still Native American country; Fisher wrote that it was only after the War of 1812 that settlers felt completely safe from attack.

Fisher summarized the effects of the Revolution on the future town of Clinton primarily in terms of population change. Some of the first settlers moved southward during the war. After the war, some returned; and Fisher identified many families in the second wave of settlement, after 1782, as headed by Revolutionary veterans.

Information on several of these men will be shared in next week’s article in this series.

Land grants

In 1835, the Maine legislature approved a “Resolve in favor of certain Officers and Soldiers of the Revolutionary War, and the widows of the deceased Officers and Soldiers.” This action gave 200 acres of land to anyone who had served at least three years while a resident of Massachusetts, including the District of Maine. The land was in parts of Penobscot and Washington counties.

Main sources

Fairfield Historical Society Fairfield, Maine 1788-1988 (1988)
Fisher, Major General Carleton Edward History of Clinton, Maine (1970)
Fairfield Historical Society files

Websites, miscellaneous.