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Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Agriculture – Part 2

January 21, 2026/0 Comments/in Local History, Sidney, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley/by Mary Grow

The apple harvest.

by Mary Grow

Sidney

Last week’s article discussed the beginnings of European settlers’ agriculture in central Kennebec County, drawing heavily from Samuel L. Boardman’s chapter in Henry Kingsbury’s 1892 county history.

(Your writer has discussed agriculture twice before, in the spring of 2021 (issues for March 11 through May 13) and in the fall of 2023 (issues for Sept. 7 through Oct. 19). Each time she takes a different approach, requiring different information and different connections. Readers wishing to see how often she contradicts herself are encouraged to check back issues, available on line.)

Boardman named about two dozen prominent early agriculturalists. Most lived in the southern and western parts of the county, outside the central Kennebec Valley where this history series is centered. Among those Boardman featured were Sanford Howard and brothers Benjamin and Charles Vaughn in Hallowell; Dr. Ezekiel Holmes and brothers Samuel and Elijah Wood in Winthrop; and Revolutionary General Henry Dearborn, later President Jefferson’s Secretary of War, in Monmouth.

In the towns upon which your writer has focused, Boardman mentioned three agriculturalists he considered important: Rev. W. A. P. (William Addison Pitt) Dillingham, of Sidney (see box); R. (Reuben) H. Greene (or Green), of Winslow; and Jesse Robinson, of Waterville.

He cited many others for specific achievements, like breeding cattle, sheep and horses and planting orchards, mostly but not entirely apples.

Boardman’s lists of notable producers of agricultural goods are almost entirely men’s names, or initials that turn out to be men’s, like Dillingham and Greene above. “Miss L. L. Taylor, [of] Belgrade” is a conspicuous exception, in his list of “most intelligent, progressive fruit growers in the county” and owners of the largest orchards, as of 1892.

* * * * * *

Alice Hammond expanded and rearranged Boardman’s information for the chapter on agriculture in her 1992 history of Sidney.

She repeated his praise of the town as one of Kennebec County’s “garden towns,” and observed that Sidney farmers raised the hay, apples, potatoes and corn that Boardman named as typical.

Hammond began with field crops: “Early Sidney farmers raised some wheat, buckwheat, oats, and other grains, but hay was and still is the most important staple crop raised in the town.”

Hay was one of Maine’s larger exports when cities relied on horse-drawn transportation, Hammond wrote. That period began in the 1830s and ran into the20th century; from about 1860 to the end of the century, horses were the moving power for people and goods. Motorized vehicles began appearing early in the 20th century and took over in the 1920s.

Hammond cited a farm census that showed Sidney producing “more than 5,700 tons of hay in 1850.” As late as 1925, the town’s hay production was 5,610 tons.

After hay, Hammond wrote, apples were for many years the town’s second largest crop. Early in the 1800s, farmers focused on hayfields and planted their apples along the edges or on rougher land that was unsuitable for hay-growing.

Without giving dates, Hammond described maintaining an orchard: pruning the trees in February, spraying from late spring until early fall, harvesting through October and selling the rest of the year.

“In earlier years,” (unspecified), Hammond wrote that Sidney orchardists stored their apples in bins in their cellars and bought wagon-loads of apple barrels from Somerville. Each barrel held 11 pecks of apples (there are four pecks in a bushel, so a barrel was one peck less than three bushels).

Taking in the hay.

As the harvest ended, Hammond wrote, apple packers would come to town, by around 1900 usually in six-man crews hired by agents of wholesale companies based in Boston or Providence. These agents would contract with the orchard-owners; the packers would stay on the farm as long as necessary.

“They would spend all day in the cellar, working under a large kerosene lamp, sorting the apples and packing them into barrels,” Hammond wrote.

She said the barrels were packed so full that the tops had to be screwed down. After railroads reached the area in the 1850s, the crop was shipped out by rail. Hammond described multiple routes, again without providing dates.

One orchard owner, on Bartlett Road on the east side of Messalonskee Lake, sent his crop either on horse-drawn sleds across the frozen lake to Belgrade Depot, at the lake’s southwest end; or to the Oakland station, northwest of Sidney.

Others closer to the Kennebec River that is Sidney’s eastern boundary used the two ferries, at Riverside and at Vassalboro (Getchell’s Corner) to send apples to the Vassalboro railroad stations. Hammond wrote that when the river froze, “they risked their lives, teams, and loads” to cross on the ice.

“Many stories have been told of the close calls they had and of the not-so-fortunate who went through the ice.”

Not all apples were sold and exported. Early in the 1800s, Hammond wrote, cider mills “were scattered through town”; orchardists brought their “lesser grades of apples” to be made into vinegar or cider (including hard cider; Hammond wrote that as the temperance movement gained popularity in the 1850s, the number of mills decreased).

Hammond mentioned sweet corn as a third important crop on Sidney farms, but gave no statistics or details. Maine corn was canned and shipped to other states and to Europe, she wrote. Production probably started before the Civil War.

Boardman, writing about Kennebec County, called corn a “specialty” crop, and listed canning plants in several towns close to Sidney, including Oakland, Belgrade and Vassalboro.

In 1892, he wrote, “The crop yields about $50 per acre, leaving the stalks for winter fodder.” Hammond expanded on its utility: indeed, a cash crop and producer of forage for the cattle, and sweet corn also used the farm’s manure and the farm family’s labor.

Sidney seems to have been less important than other area towns in breeding cattle, horses and sheep. Hammond barely mentioned them, beyond observing that a self-sufficient farm would probably have some.

She did refer back to Boardman, who named Luther and Bradford Sawtelle as important cattle breeders in the 1830s and 1840s, and Dillingham and C. K. Sawtelle as “sheep farmers of note.”

Boardman summarized the introduction of Shorthorn cattle in Kennebec County in the 1820s and 1830s, and the decline of interest in careful breeding between 1835 and 1850. The early breeders had died or retired, and no one took over. Only when “deterioration became evident in the leading herds” did a new generation assume “the responsibility of obtaining high price registered stock from abroad, or improving the best of that which remained.”

The American Shorthorn Association website says the breed, also called Shorthorn Durham, originated in northeastern England. The first Shorthorn Durhams were brought to Virginia in 1783. The website continues:

“Shorthorns were popular with America’s early settlers. They valued this breed for meat and milk and found Shorthorns a willing power for the wagon and plow.”

Among 19 men Boardman credited for reviving Shorthorns were Luther and Bradford Sawtell (no final e), of Sidney. Unfortunately, he gave no information beyond their names.

Other sources says Luther Sawtelle was born Aug. 7, 1800, and died June 25, 1872; his younger brother, Bradford Jorel Sawtelle was born May 18, 1811, and died Nov. 12, 1897.

Boardman repeated, from a book about American privateers, that in 1812 the privateer “Teaser,” from New York, captured a British brig with a cargo worth $100,000 that included “a bull and a cow of the Holderness breed.”

Descendants “soon found their way to Sidney and Vassalboro,” Boardman wrote. They were known as the Prize stock. He gave no details about what Sidney famer(s) had some.

Holderness cattle, Wikipedia says, started as a Dutch breed of dairy cow imported into the Holderness region of Britain before 1840. The Wikipedia article, which warns readers in a note dated 2023 that some of its information is disputed, suggests that the breed is ancestral of Holsteins and no longer exists.

Sidney had at least one sheep farm before the Civil War: Boardman credited Dillingham with bringing in two breeds, Oxford Downs and Southdowns, in 1858. (H. C. Burleigh introduced Southdowns in Waterville that year, too, Boardman said.)

The American Southdown Breeders’ Association webpage says the Southdown is one of the oldest purebred sheep in the world, originating more than 250 years ago in the part of Sussex, England, known as the Downs. Southdowns might have been brought to America in the 1640s.

The Oxford Down Sheep Breeders Association website says this breed is also of British origin, but much newer. The Oxford Down was developed in the 1830s by “crossing Cotswold rams with Hampshire Down and Southdown ewes.” The main breeding place was in Oxfordshire, so the breed was named Oxford Down.

William Addison Pitt Dillingham

William Addison Pitt Dillingham was born Sept. 4, 1824, in Hallowell. His mother died in 1828 and his father in 1830; he was raised by an uncle in Augusta.

After a semester at Waterville (later Colby) College, he enrolled in the divinity school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was ordained in a Universalist minister in 1847, and, according to the “Universalist Register,” served first in Augusta and then in other Maine towns. Different sources list Sidney, where he bought a farm, Augusta, Dover, Norridgewock and Waterville.

Dillingham married Caroline Price Townsend, of Sidney, born in 1816 or May 25, 1817 (the latter, from the Find a Grave website, is more probably accurate). FamilySearch says they had five children: Mary Elizabeth, born in 1848 and died in 1854; Thomas Manley (1850 -1925); Pitt (1852 -1926), also a minister who lived most of his life in Massachusetts; and twins, Mary Wilhelmina (1861-1894) and Mabel Wilhelmina (1861 – 1898).

Boardman, in Kingsbury’s history, listed Dillingham among area farmers who “contributed largely to the success of the fairs” sponsored by the North Kennebec Agricultural Society, which was organized in 1847.

In 1864 and 1865 Dillingham was Waterville’s representative in the Maine House, serving as Speaker in 1865. An on-line list of House speakers describes him as a 40-year-old Republican.

His obituary in Maine’s Piscataquis Observer, found on the Find a Grave website, says he was a “Special Agent of the Treasury in Mississippi, about a year under Prest. Johnson, and one of the Trustees of the Agricultural College.” (Andrew Johnson served as president from 1865 to 1869.)

In 1867 Dillingham converted from the Universalists to the Swedenborgians, for whom he preached in Chicago before rejoining the Universalists there in 1870. In 1871, the “Register” says, he had just come back to his Sidney farm and arranged to preach in Sidney when he died suddenly of pneumonia on April 22, 1871.

Dillingham is buried in Augusta’s Forest Grove Cemetery, with his wife, Caroline, who died Sept. 23, 1870, in Sidney; daughters Mary Elizabeth and Mabel Wilhelmina; both sons, Pitt and Thomas; Pitt’s widow, Florence Batchelder Bell Dillingham (August 1865 – 1928); and one more Dillingham, for whom Find a Grave provides no first name, who died in 1857.

Main sources:

Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992)
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Agriculture – Intro to a new subtopic

January 14, 2026/0 Comments/in Central ME, Kennebec County, Local History, Palermo, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley/by Mary Grow

by Mary Grow

In Henry Kingsbury’s 1892 history of Kennebec County, Samuel L. Boardman (see box) wrote the chapter on agriculture and livestock, from the first European farmers to the 1890s. He began with one of the flourishes that help make Kingsbury’s work vivid and entertaining, calling the agricultural history “one of incident, importance and influence” and explaining:

“Of incident, because of that romance which attaches to the occupation of a new country by sturdy pioneers who hew out farms and build homes in the primitive wilderness; importance, when viewed in the light of modern achievements and the position of its agriculture today in one of the best agricultural states in the Union; and influence, when is taken into account the part which the historic agriculture of Kennebec has had in the larger history of the agricultural development and progress of the nation.”

Kennebec County is well situated for agriculture, in Boardman’s view: far enough from the ocean to escape its “saline winds and fogs” and from the mountains to avoid “suffering from their cold summits.” It is also “one of the best watered sections of Maine,” its rivers, streams, ponds and lakes important for soil health and air quality as well as natural beauty.

Soils are varied, Boardman wrote, with areas he described as “ledgy” and “very rocky.” Overall, the county is “a rich grazing section, excellent for the production of grass, the hill farms among the best orchard lands in the state, the lands in the river valleys and in the lower portions between the hills and ridges, splendid for cultivation.”

Typical 19th century farm. (Internet photo)

The earliest agricultural ventures Boardman described as a period of self-dependence, when settlers shared the area with wild animals, “[t]he land supplied everything, and the farm was a small empire.”

Farmers needed “a hardy race of cattle” to help clear the land and provide milk that housewives made into butter and cheese, he wrote. Wool from sheep and home-grown flax provided materials for clothing – “and the domestic manufacture of cloth was an art understood in every farm house.” Cows, sheep, pigs and hens provided meat.

Boardman mentioned oxen, but not horses. Other historians made it clear that settlers had horses. Milton Dowe, in his 1954 history of Palermo, repeated the story that the area’s first settler, Stephen Belden, “rode through the wilderness on horseback with his Bible under his arm.”

Early houses were log cabins, which Dowe said were windowless. Early beds, Dowe wrote, were bunks attached to the walls or mattresses, stuffed with corn-husks or hay, on the loft floor.

Housewives had brooms of “cedar, hemlock or birch twigs” to sweep their wide-board floors. They bathed and washed clothes in wooden tubs, and cooked in an open fireplace or a brick oven. Fires might provide light, too, if the family neither made nor could buy tallow candles.

(Wikipedia says tallow candles are made from beef or mutton fat and were invented before the Christian era.)

Churning butter. (Internet photo)

Some farmers planted orchards, Boardman wrote. He did not specify the kinds of fruit, except applies, writing that fruit “contributed to the luxury of living,” and every neighborhood had a cider mill. Dowe mentioned the vegetable gardens that gave the family “corn, wheat, potatoes, onions and beets.”

Both Boardman and Dowe thought life in these small farming settlements idyllic.

Of the period after fruit was available and log cabins were succeeded by big frame houses, Boardman wrote: “the domestic life of the early farmers, although books were few and there were no newspapers, was full of a quiet contentment, a high self-independence, little idleness and a large amount of domestic thrift.”

Dowe said that settlers in Palermo in the last quarter of the 18th century were “all very poor but happy and friendly, borrowing and exchanging among themselves and doing what they could to help each other.”

Boardman’s summary continued with occupations moving from homestead to mill and factory (many local histories of the area date the first mills, some for turning trees into boards, others for producing woolen and cloth goods, from the late 1700s). Farmers and their families could get better equipment; transportation and communications improved.

“The mowing machine upon the farm, the sewing machine and organ in the house, the diffusion of special intelligence for farmers through the agricultural press, wrought a complete revolution,” Boardman wrote.

In the 1890s, Kennebec County was still one of Maine’s leading agricultural areas. Boardman said it had “less waste, unproductive and unimproved land than any other section of equal extent in the state.”

He commended the rich soil in the Kennebec and Sebasticook valleys in Winslow; called Albion, Benton, Clinton and Windsor “excellent grazing towns”; and listed China, Sidney and Vassalboro among the “garden towns of the county.”

Agriculture was more specialized in the 1890s: county farmers might focus on their orchard, their dairy cattle, their hayfields or their special breed of horse, and buy other agricultural products they needed.

A newer specialty was truck farming: raising food for those who lived and worked in manufacturing towns and cities. Boardman said that a farmer in the 1890s could make more money from “a few acres of early potatoes put into our manufacturing towns on the first of July” than he could have earned from everything he grew and sold 20 years earlier.

Samuel Lane Boardman

Samuel Lane Boardman was born March 30, 1836, in Bloomfield (later incorporated into Skowhegan).

According to an undated (an on-line source gives an 1876 publication date) and uncompleted family memorial he wrote, the Boardmans (the name was also spelled Bordman and Boreman) came from England to New Hampshire, and in 1816 an earlier Samuel L. Boardman came from New Hampshire to Maine. He chose Bloomfield because his wife’s brother, Amos Hill, had settled in Skowhegan earlier.

This Samuel Boardman was a shoemaker when he came to Maine. The family memorial explains, “as was the custom in those days, he went from house to house doing the work in his like for all the members of the family.”

He also lived on farms (as a tenant?) before buying one, with a log cabin, in 1823. In 1835, he became the tollkeeper at the Skowhegan bridge and moved into the keeper’s house, where he and his family lived until he retired Oct. 1, 1848.

Our Samuel Boardman wrote that his grandfather Samuel Boardman was “genial and social” and made many friends. Most of the time he lived in Skowhegan he was secretary of the Bloomfield Academy board of trustees, and was able to educate his younger children there.

A few years before he retired from the tollkeeping job, Boardman bought a farm in Norridgewock, where he lived from 1848 until shortly before his death in 1857.

This Samuel Boardman’s oldest son was Charles Franklin Boardman, born in 1806. He married a Bloomfield woman named Philenia Sawyer Russell on Oct. 31, 1833; their second child and first son was Samuel Lane Boardman, born March 30, 1836.

The couple lived on the Bloomfield farm until 1846 and then moved to Norridgewock. Charles Boardman died there on Jan. 14, 1870; his widow died in Augusta on Nov. 8, 1870.

Your writer found no reliable information on Samuel Lane Boardman’s childhood education. He received an honorary Master of Science from the University of Maine in 1899. One on-line site calls him a journalist; others list his multiple roles as a leader and chronicler of local agricultural activities.

In 1859, he became assistant editor of Country Gentleman, published in Albany, New York. He was also a contributor to other agricultural journals, unnamed, in the 1850s (when he would have been in his late teens and early 20s).

In 1861, Boardman became assistant editor of The Maine Farmer. Established in 1833 in Augusta by Ezekiel Holmes, often called the father of Maine agriculture, its full title was The Maine Farmer and Journal of the Useful Arts.

When Holmes died in 1865, Boardman, age 29, became editor, a post he held until 1878. In 1878 and 1879, he edited American Cultivator, published in Boston, and from 1880 to 1888, The Home Farm, published in Augusta.

(Henry C. Prince, in his chapter on newspapers in Rev. Edwin Carey Whittemore’s Waterville history, says that in 1887 “the Home Farm establishment” moved from Augusta to Waterville and the paper became The Eastern Farmer. It was an eight-page, six-column agricultural monthly that “lost money steadily” and sold its subscription list in April 1888, after 30 issues.

(Whittemore quoted from S. L. Boardman’s History of Kennebec County. An on-line catalog gives its full title as The agriculture and industry of the County of Kennebec, Maine: with notes upon its history and natural history. This source says it was printed in 1867 at the Kennebec Journal office.)

Boardman was agricultural editor for Augusta’s daily newspaper, the Kennebec Journal, from 1889 to 1892, and in 1895 became editor of the Bangor Daily Commercial (published from 1872 to 1949).

Here is Boardman’s description of his editing and writing career up to 1876, from the family memorial:

“Besides editing the Maine Farmer for a period of sixteen years, he has published five volumes on the Agriculture of Maine; a volume of 200 pages on the History and Industry of Kennebec County, 1867; a History of the Newspapers of Somerset County, 1872, and various essays, lectures and papers on agricultural, scientific and industrial subjects.”

A later project was writing the chapter on Kennebec County agriculture for Kingsbury’s 1892 history.

In addition to his writing, Boardman was active in agriculture-related organizations. In 1865, he was elected Holmes’ successor as secretary of the State Agricultural Society. He resigned that position after being elected secretary of the State Board of Agriculture in 1873.

Another on-line source says he remained in the latter post until 1879, simultaneously being a “trustee of State college.” He was a member of the Maine Experiment Station’s board of managers from 1885 to 1887.

(The Maine legislature established the Maine State Fertilizer Control and Agricultural Experiment Station in the spring of 1885, “to inspect and analize [sic] fertilizers and to progresss [sic] agricultural investigation.” In 1887, it became the Maine State College Agricultural Experiment Station.)

In his family memorial, Boardman listed affiliations as of 1876:

“He is a Trustee of the State College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts; a member of the Maine Historical, New England Historic-Genealogical and Maine Genealogical and Biographical Societies; corresponding member of the Vermont and Wisconsin Historical Societies, and of the American Entomological Society, and also a member of various local agricultural and other societies.”

Another source says he was secretary of the Maine State Pomological Society in 1885-86.

In 1875, 1876 and 1877 Boardman served in Augusta city government, becoming president of the city council in 1877 (his mentioning this position in the family memoir makes your writer wonder about the 1876 publication date).

As he wrote, he said, he was living “in a quiet corner of the city of Augusta, at a little place called “Oak Terrace,” surrounded by foliage and good air, where he has a few books, some friends, and less money; and has spent his leisure moments in compiling this “Family Memorial.”

On June 12, 1860, Boardman married Temperance Ann Bates (also called Ann Bates), of Norridgewock, born Jan. 11, 1838. They had a daughter, Annie Isabell, born Dec. 18, 1861, and two sons, John Russell, born Sept. 15, 1866, and Henry Lane, born Feb. 5, 1870, and died July 22, 1870.

Ann died in 1894. Boardman’s second wife was Alma Staples, whom he married in Bangor on April 19, 1900. She was 68 when she died Jan. 5, 1920, in Boston.

Samuel Lane Boardman died in Augusta on Oct. 15, 1914, aged 78.

Main sources

Dowe, Milton E., History Town of Palermo Incorporated 1804 (1954)
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892)
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Care, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: China town reports – Part 4

January 7, 2026/0 Comments/in China, Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley/by Mary Grow

by Mary Grow

Just one more article from those old China town reports before your writer forwards them toward a permanent home. It’s about time other towns had a few paragraphs, don’t you think?

* * * * * *

The warrant for the March 19, 1900, China town meeting, printed at the end of the 1899-1900 town report, had 27 articles. The first 14 were elections of town officials (done in a single article in March 1897, readers may remember from last week). Selectmen, town clerk, treasurer and others were unquestioned, but voters decided whether to elect a superintendent of schools or a road commissioner before choosing someone for either position. One or both of these positions remained optional for a few more years.

Another half-dozen articles began “To see what sum of money” voters would raise and appropriate for town functions, like road and bridge maintenance, support of the poor and schools. (This wording, in 2025, gives voters total freedom to raise any amount a majority agrees on.)

In a copy of the town report for the year ending Feb. 20, 1906, someone had penciled in amounts raised under appropriations articles. He wrote: $2,500, for road repairs and “breaking down of snow”; another $400 for state roads, with the state to refund half; $500 to support the poor; $700 for miscellaneous expenses.

There is no amount written for support of schools. In four subsequent articles, the anonymous recorder said voters approved $250 for “maintaining a free High School” (same amount as in the just-ended 1905-1906 year, when the state matched it); $150 to buy textbooks (in 1905-1906, a $200 appropriation was overdrawn by $126.02); $150 to repair school buildings (1905-1906’s $50 had not covered either that year’s expenditures or a prior deficit, and the account was overdrawn by $159.06, or more than the appropriation); and $25 for “writing books and other necessary school supplies” (1905-1906’s $25 was overspent by $14.87).

* * * * * *

Back to the March 19, 1900, warrant: the last article asked if voters would accept a $500 gift from Thomas Dinsmore, “the interest of said fund to be used yearly for the benefit of deserving poor.” There is no evidence of the fund in the town report for the 1900-1901 fiscal year.

However, in the report for the year ending Feb. 27, 1911, China’s resources include $500 in the Dinsmore Fund for Indigent Persons. This fund, at $500 or more, appears in reports your writer has through 1941.

(Thomas Dinsmore [1824 – 1916] was a leading citizen of Branch Mills [the village divided between eastern China and western Palermo], a noted philanthropist, founder of Palermo’s Dinsmore Library, donor of small bank accounts to local babies. See below for another gift.)

* * * * * *

By March 17, 1902, voters were presented with 30 articles. The first 14 let them choose town officers, starting with the meeting moderator; others asked for money for town functions.

Art. 25 asked if voters would give each of China’s G.A.R. (Grand Army of the Republic) posts $10, “to help pay memorial expenses.” The China bicentennial history says the posts were James P. Jones, No. 106, in South China, and Amos J. Billings, No. 112, in China Village.

The China town report for the 1905-1906 year has two new headings in the financial section. The first is labeled “G.A.R.,” and represents a town appropriation of $25 (an amount that remained unchanged into at least the 1920s), divided equally between the two posts.

The second new 1905-06 financial account is for the Dinsmore Norton Cemetery Fund, showing a $91 bank deposit, to which was added $1.59 in interest on Jan. 6, 1906, and from which was subtracted a $1.50 payment to E. W. Haskell (no reason given).

The selectmen’s report for the previous year, ending March 10, 1905, said, “The Thomas Dinsmore ‘Norton Cemetery Fund’ has been received by the town and a small percent. expended, the remainder placed on interest.”

This fund started with voters’ approval at the March 14, 1904, annual town meeting of an article asking them to accept $100 from Dinsmore; for the selectmen to spend half of it “in repairing the burying ground on the margin of China Lake at Norton’s Corner, so-called, the coming season”; and for the rest to remain in a fund to be used to repair the cemetery “at the end of each succeeding decade.”

No Norton Cemetery is listed in the China bicentennial history index, or in either China or Palermo on relevant websites. Gregory Parker, of Albion-based Set in Stone, maintains many of Palermo’s cemeteries, and Palermo Historical Society President Will Armstrong asked him about it.

Parker found early 1800s Norton headstones in China’s Lakeshore Cemetery, which is between Lakeview Drive and the east shore of China Lake, almost opposite the west end of Alder Park Road. Moreover, he found a reference to the Alder Park Road intersection with Lakeview Drive being called Norton’s Corner.

The China bicentennial history lists Norton family members in Lakeshore Cemetery and confirms Dinsmore’s connection, without mentioning a name change or explaining why Dinsmore was interested. It adds: “Years ago cows grazed among the graves and kept the bushes down, but people thought this was disrespectful and the cemetery was fenced.”

The cemetery fund stood at $186.17 on Feb. 14, 1931, and was down to $57.81 by Feb. 16, 1932, after the decennial maintenance work was done.

* * * * * *

For years, town reports’ highway accounts listed by name people paid for work, supplies or both. For example, in 1883-84 the selectmen named 22 men paid for road work and/or supplies, some for building bridges and causeways, one for “blasting powder,” one for “breaking snow winter 1882-83” ($49.42).

The 31 men named in the 1886-1887 list each had his contribution described: “labor with road machine,” “rebuilding bridge,” “bridge plank,” “snow scraper” (three men earned a total of $6.86) and, most commonly, “labor on road.”

The report for the year ending March 7, 1901, had a total bill of $1,950.34 for road work and supplies in the summer of 1900, distributed among nine pages of payees’ names, totaling about 300 (with duplicates).

The names are not in alphabetical order; some seem to be grouped together in families. The lowest payments were 50 cents, and at least three-quarters were under $10. The highest was $81.30 to E. A. Dudley, for an unspecified contribution.

Frank Sproul got $22.98 for “plank and material” and another $30, unspecified; Leon Herbert received $52.62 for “plank.” Two men provided a “watering place”; A. R. Ward’s cost the town $1.50, H. L. Pinkham’s $3.

By the summer of 1903, the number of names was down to seven pages, around 235 names. The 1905-1906 report listed only about 85 names, covering three pages. The lowest payments were 35 cents to W. F. Hawes, for freight, and 60 cents to Arnold Small, reason unspecified.

In 1910-1911, the list was again seven pages, and the smallest payments were still under a dollar.

Some of the people paid for road work were women. None of their contributions was described. In 1899-1900, Lora E. Kellar was paid $1.55 and Mrs. Farnsworth $3.50; in 1900-1901, Eula Worthing got two separate payments of 50 cents each and Sarah Cotton was paid $2.00; in 1904-1905, Mrs. F. D. Robbins earned $1.25 and Mrs. E. M. Dowe $10.12.

A $400 state contribution to road work was mentioned for the first time in the report for the year ending March 4, 1904. The selectmen used it for “permanent roads,” apparently for short major reconstruction projects. The work needed to be approved by the county commissioners.

In 1903-1904 the selectmen described four projects in detail, starting with “The hill at Reed Farris’ on the Lake road was opened and filled with rock, a distance of thirty rods [less than one-tenth of a mile] long with a broad stone culvert at the foot….” By Feb. 20, 1906, the report was more summary: 55 rods [less than two-tenths of a mile] in northern China and 80 rods [a quarter-mile] in southern China had been treated similarly.

For a couple years early in the 20th century, weather was hard on roads, and on the road budget.

In March, 1903, the selectmen said a freshet in December, 1901, damaged hills and bridges, including destroying the Weeks Mills bridge; it had been rebuilt the summer of 1902. Other bridges needed work that the selectmen couldn’t order done “owing to our appropriation.”

The selectmen’s report for the year ending March 4, 1904, explained that the road appropriation was overspent because of “high water in the spring” (presumably the spring of 1903). “The bridge at China village was rebuilt new; the two bridges at Branch Mills replanked and railed, and the bridge at Sproul’s Mill repaired.”

* * * * * *

A question not explored last week was who funded China’s town government. Local taxpayers, of course; and state contributions to schools appear in the 1860s town reports and thereafter. There are occasionally interesting other contributors, mostly minor.

In the 1860-61 report, the list of resources includes “Cash of J. McCorrison,” in the amount of $198.40. The selectmen noted they had filed suit against him and his bondsmen.

The China bicentennial history expands on the story, starting with the selectmen’s concern about unpaid bills, some dating back a decade; and unpaid taxes; and especially about former tax collector Joseph McCorrison, who owed $2,792.41 in taxes collected and not turned over to the town.

Hence the lawsuit. By the spring of 1862, the amount was down to $2,594.01; March 1862 town meeting voters agreed to accept $1,200, plus interest, to be paid by September, 1863.

The 1863-1864 report says McCorrison had paid $250 in cash and he and his bondsmen owed $1,130. By March 10, 1865, he had paid another $617, and owed $333. The March 8, 1866, list of resources includes “Cash in hand of J. McCorrison, 333.00.”

Also on the list of China’s 1860-1861 resources was $70 from “Profits on Liquor.” A similar item in the 1862-1863 accounts read $47 from “Profits on liquors sold by Agent.” Liquor sales provided $40 in 1863-1864; after that, they are not listed in the town’s resources.

China collected fees for dog licenses, in the incomplete series of reports your writer has, in 1877-1878: $69.00, with no record of what the fee was or how many dogs were licensed. The item disappeared for some years; in the 1899-1900 report, however, “Refunded dog licenses” brought in $43.44, again without explanation. Dog license refunds continued to be recorded as income in future reports.

The selectmen’s report for 1882 lists $2 from John Taylor “for license,” unspecified. In 1884, D. (Dana) C. Hanson (a selectman in 1881 and 1882) paid the same amount for another “license.”

A “Telegraph tax” is listed in 1887’s resources. It brought in $3.65 that year; in 1890, $2.48.

Selectmen sometimes sold old schoolhouses. In 1900 or early 1901, Levi Hallowell bought one for $8, and D. (David?) LeMere bought another for $12.

In School Superintendent Gustavus J. Nelson’s March 6, 1901, report, he called for school consolidation in response to a steady decline in the number of students. (The topic of China’s 18th and early 19th century schools deserves further exploration.)

In 1904-1905, the town got $25 for the Dutton schoolhouse and $30 for the Chadwick Hill building.

The first recorded payment from the State of Maine for “damage to sheep” is in the 1901-1902 report – the town got $20. The next year, it was $74; in 1903-1904, $91; in 1904-1905, only $20; no record for the year that ended Feb. 20, 1906. The item reappears in the 1911 report, $5 from 1909.

The state porcupine bounty brought in $14 in 1904 (recorded in the 1905-1906 report).

Neither sheep nor porcupines appear in the lists of town resources in the next few years. But the report for 1907-1908 records $31 from the state for “damage by dogs” and the next year shows $252.60 “Received from State dog damage” – before that item disappears.

John Libbey

In the Dec. 18, 2025, article in this series, your writer noted that three China selectmen elected in March, 1864, did not list their names in the town report for the year 1864-1865. She found information elsewhere on Ambrose Abbott and Nathan Redlon, but none on John Libbey or Libby, and so reported.

Fortunately, Joyce and Maurice Anderson, from Oakland, saw the incomplete story and realized they, as descendants of the Libby/Libbey family, had records that helped fill the gap. In their collection is an 1882 book by Charles T. Libby, titled “The Libby Family In America (1602 – 1881)”; and from it, they copied:

“John Libby, born in Albion, 17 Sept. 1806; married 26 Nov. 1835 Hannah Libby…. He was a farmer and lumberman. Immediately after his marriage he moved to Houlton, where he lived until March 1849, when he moved back to Albion and after seven years settled in China Me. In March 1865 he sold his farm there and bought the Capt. John Winslow farm, in Albion, where he now resides.”

The Andersons concluded that this John Libby lived on a China farm from 1856 to 1865, and could plausibly have been elected a selectman in 1864.

The Find a Grave website provides additional information about the John Libbey (this source shows grave markers with the Libbey spelling, in Albion’s Maple Grove cemetery) who was born in 1806 in Albion. It says he was the son of Ebenezer Libby Libbey (1779 – 1857) and Hannah Stevens Smiley Libby (1784 – 1863); names his five brothers and three sisters, born between 1805 and 1830 (the youngest sister was named Hannah); lists the three sons and three daughters he and his wife Hannah had between 1838 and 1849; and says he died March 10, 1883, and his widow, who was born Dec. 26, 1817, died July 7, 1889.

Main sources

China town reports
Grow, Mary M., China Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984)

Websites, miscellaneous.

EVENTS: Vassalboro Historical Society wants your recollections

January 7, 2026/0 Comments/in Community, Events, Local History, Vassalboro/by Website Editor

Vassalboro Historical Society

The Vassalboro Historical Society invites you and a friend (if you want) to join us on a Tuesday afternoon to be recorded as you chat about your memories of Vassalboro. We would love to have your recollections of life and times in Vassalboro. If you have a fun or interesting story to share, we want to hear it! Did you ever attend a barn dance at Winston Bradley’s? Did you pick blueberries on Taber Hill? Did one of your parents work at the Mill? Did you go haying? Please call Jan or Susan at (207) 923-3505 to schedule a Tuesday to visit.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: China town reports – 1854 – 1906 (Part 3)

December 30, 2025/0 Comments/in China, Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley/by Mary Grow

by Mary Grow

Following are more excerpts from an incomplete collection of China’s town reports, dating from the mid-1850s through most of the 20th century. This week’s selections will illustrate more of the changes in the 1800s and early 1900s.

Thanks to John Glowa, of China, and Phil Dow, of Albion, for providing these sources of information.

* * * * * *

A separate account for “Militia” appears in the financial sections of the 1863 and 1864 town reports. The cost reported March 10, 1863, was $14,556.64, almost twice the town’s available resources. The selectmen borrowed money.

As of March, 1864, the selectmen had borrowed more money to fill China’s volunteer quota per President Abraham Lincoln’s Oct. 17, 1863, call, a total of $11, 252.57.

Most of this money, the bicentennial history says, paid bounties to men who enlisted. Voters at several special town meetings argued over details. Ultimately, the history says, China paid $47,735.34 “to provide Civil War soldiers.” After the state began repaying towns in 1868, China got $12,708.33 back.

The militia account disappeared as of the 1864-1865 report. As summarized previously (see the Dec. 11 issue of “The Town Line”), the debt did not disappear for more than a decade.

* * * * * *

China’s Board of Health appears in the 1889-1890 report, costing $25.25 for Chairman E. M. Dowe, Secretary G. J. (Dr. Gustavus Judson) Nelson and member C. E. Dunton. The board’s report is on the very last page of the town report, dated – your writer hopes misdated – Feb. 27, 1880 (not 1890).

The China bicentennial history says the board was created two years earlier (see box). The 1890 report is identified as the third annual, and reports the greatest “prevalence of infectious diseases” since the board was organized. Turns out there were two diseases: the diphtheria at the Maine Insane Hospital in Augusta never spread into China, but a Branch Mills family had two cases of typhoid fever and early in February (1890, presumably, since it was on-going when the report was written) another family had at least one case of scarlet fever.

The report explained that since typhoid fever isn’t air-borne, that house was not quarantined. The other house was, and the school in that district was closed.

The report ended optimistically: medicine was progressing, and “it does not seem impossible to conceive that the time may come when the cause of every contagious disease may be known, and with this knowledge may come absolute protection from every infectious disease.”

Nelson’s report for 1894-1895, submitted March 2, 1895, describes a year with four “outbreaks of infectious diseases,” each “confined to the house in which it originated.” None was fatal.

The first was in mid-June, 1894, scarlet fever (“one of the most dangerous and one of the most contagious” diseases with which the board dealt) on Stanley Hill, in northwestern China. The house was immediately quarantined, and no one else was infected.

In October, in Dr. Nelson’s practice (probably in the China Village area in northern China), two people in one household got diphtheria. In November, there was another case in Dr. B. N. Johnstone’s practice, in extreme southern China.

In January, 1895, there was a third diphtheria outbreak in Dr. D. A. Ridley’s practice in Branch Mills, in eastern China. Nelson reported the disease took hold “in a large family in indigent circumstances,” and since segregating the sick people was impossible, nine people caught it; only two “nursing infants” didn’t.

Nelson called diphtheria “one of the most dreaded diseases of modern times.” He commented that although it is transmitted directly between people and can be carried on infected clothing, it also is generated by “refuse matter, damp, foul air and decaying vegetable and animal matter.”

(Contemporary on-line sources primarily discuss transmission from an infected person to others, and emphasize that diphtheria is almost non-existent in countries where vaccination is common. Your writer found one implied reference to Nelson’s list of causes: the Cleveland Clinic’s website says: “Diphtheria is very rare in the U.S. because of widespread use of the diphtheria (Tdap) vaccine and cleaner living conditions.”)

In 1899-1900, the board’s three members – Nelson, J. E. Crossman and C. J. Lincoln – were paid only $20.25, but expenses for vaccinations brought the total cost to $115.25.

In 1900-1901, the Board of Health cost China $151.70, after Palermo reimbursed the town $136.62 for one family (including medical attendance, supplies and digging a grave and burying a child; it sounds as though some of these expenses could have been listed under care of the poor).

The selectmen explained that the increased cost was due to a diphtheria epidemic, adding, “we have to rejoice that the results have not been more fatal than they were.”

There was a separate two-item Town Physician Account: China received $79.50 “from other towns for med. att.” and paid town physician C. J. Lincoln $50 for services to April 5, 1901.

The March 4, 1901, Board of Health report said the diphtheria epidemic started in May, 1900, and made that year the most demanding board members had experienced. The first case was a Windsor girl who attended Erskine Academy and boarded in South China. The second was a girl in the Hanson neighborhood, who died; she had attended Erskine and then the Lakeside school (other Erskine students had moved to other town schools by May, the report says).

Ultimately there were 22 cases in the spring outbreak and two more, unrelated, later in the year. Five were fatal. Nelson’s report said he and another doctor used Mulford’s glycerinated antitoxin “with excellent success”; whenever it “was used in the first stages of the disease,” the patient survived.

Nelson was also the 1900-1901 school superintendent. He reported that he promptly closed the first two schools where diphtheria cases were reported. Soon, nine of the 13 schools holding spring sessions were either ordered suspended or suspended themselves “from the attendant fright.”

At a special meeting May 26, the school committee closed all but the four operating schools until fall, canceling any planned summer sessions. Classes resumed the last Monday in August.

The next year’s reports from health and school officials indicated a normal 1901-1902 year. Nelson left the board of health that year, but he continued to earn town payments for “reporting births and deaths” and other medical activities through 1914.

(Nelson was on the school committee in 1912-1913, 1913-1914 and 1914-1915. Only the other two members signed the committee’s Feb. 13, 1915, report. Nelson died Feb. 17, 1915, aged 68 years, eight months and four days. He is buried in the China Village cemetery, with other family members.)

In their March 2, 1903, report, board of health members said the town had experienced three cases of typhoid fever, with no deaths; a fatal case of tuberculosis; one case of measles; and 22 cases of whooping cough. The board’s secretary added a rebuke: “I find physicians and householders in the east and southeast parts of the town have failed to report many cases of whooping cough as the law requires them to do.”

For the year that ended March 10, 1905, Board of Health expenses totaled $28.98, paid to the three members: one earned $15.48, the second $11.00, the third $2.50. In 1905-1906, members earned $30.35 and others were paid $73.35 for caring for two families; listed expenditures included $4.10 for “pillows and blankets” for one of the families.

* * * * * *

The initial collection of town reports that started this series has a gap from the year ending March 7, 1890, to the year ending March 10, 1900. Phil Dow’s contributions included 1894-1895 and 1896-1897. (The missing issues are no doubt available elsewhere; but when your writer started these history pages, at the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, her rule was to work from home.)

By the 1894-1895 issue, and in the ones that follow, pages of vital statistics were added. By 1897 and in following years, the reports ended with the annual town meeting warrants.

The 1894-1895 issue lists the numbers of marriage intentions (20) and marriages (24), the number of births (27) and the number of deaths (also 27). It records names of residents who died between March 7, 1894, and Feb. 15, 1895, and (where information is available) adds age, marital status, place of birth, place of death and place of burial. The following years’ reports use the same format, of course with varying numbers.

Beginning with the report for 1901-1902, names of couples marrying and of babies born were also printed. Babies’ names were not always available; between March 27, 1901, and Feb. 5, 1902, for instance, 24 births were recorded, but only 19 names.

* * * * * *

The Monday, March 15, 1897, town meeting was summoned for 9 a.m. at the town house The selectmen were to be there at 8 a.m. to make any needed corrections to voter lists.

The warrant has only 11 articles. The first is to elect a moderator, the second to “choose all necessary town officers for the ensuing year.”

Art. 3 asks to raise funds – no figures are included – for supporting the poor, schools, road and bridge maintenance and “all other necessary town charges.”

Arts. 4, 5 and 6 ask voters’ decisions on how to maintain roads and bridges and “break down the snow”; to work the road machine; and to collect taxes. Presumably, the selectmen and other town officials proposed methods.

Art. 7 asks for money to buy town bonds or establish a sinking fund to liquidate them, “and if any, how much.” Again, there is no suggested amount in writing.

Art. 8 asks for $100 to repair a schoolhouse. (Under current town meeting rules, when an amount is in the article, voters may approve it or any lesser amount, but not a higher amount.)

Art. 9 asks if voters want to buy a lot and build a schoolhouse “on the pond road,” and if so, how much they’ll appropriate. Art. 10 requests another $100 to repair another existing schoolhouse.

Art. 11 asks voters to accept a relocated road through Weeks Mills “laid out by the selectmen” and to appropriate money to pay for the change.

The China Board of Health

The China bicentennial history says before China had a board of health, town officials sometimes dealt with severe and contagious diseases. The book cites two examples of instances in which residents apparently thought their elected leaders acted unwisely.

In March 1848, town meeting voters told selectmen “to pay Ambrose Sewall, a reasonable compensation for Furniture burnt, in consequence of being infected with the Small Pox – also to pay the expense of cleansing his house &c….”

Voters at the March 1851, meeting told those selectmen to “settle with” William Fairbrother for housing smallpox patients in his house. At a special meeting in May, they raised $25 to pay Fairbrother “for loss sustained by the burning of his house” (because it was infected?).

(No one on the 1848 select board was still serving in 1851, but the change was gradual. Voters were not upset enough to throw out either board wholesale.)

The first China Board of Health was appointed in 1887, as required by a new state law. Its members created bylaws and rules for dealing with contagious diseases and adopted them on Aug. 26, 1887. The history says they were “approved by a justice of the supreme judicial court” and published in the Waterville “Sentinel,” and an attested copy went into town records.

“The regulations prescribed measures to prevent the spread of scarlet fever, typhoid fever, smallpox, cholera, typhus, and diphtheria, including detailed instructions for disinfecting clothing, bedding, blankets, and mattresses and for fumigating rooms,” the history says. Fumigating a room required setting on fire sulfur (three pounds for each thousand cubic feet) in an iron kettle and keeping the room closed for 24 hours before airing it for several days.

Main sources

China town reports
Grow, Mary M., China Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: China town reports – 1861-1906 (Part 2)

December 17, 2025/0 Comments/in China, Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley/by Mary Grow

by Mary Grow

Care of Paupers

The China reports between 1861 and 1906 that John Glowa donated and that started this subseries include more than the selectmen’s financial summaries described last week. There is also financial and other information from and about the town poor farm and other town boards.

After the first article based on these reports ran in the Dec. 11 issue of The Town Line, Albion historian Phil Dow was inspired to donate his collection, which starts in 1855, fills in some of the gaps in the earlier donation and continues through much more of the 20th century. Many thanks, Phil!

Since more information is available, this subseries will be extended. Your writer hopes readers will be as intrigued by these historical records as she is.

* * * * * *

Financial transactions concerning indigents in China’s town reports included supporting the poor farm; supporting paupers off the farm; and paying or receiving payment from other towns as people moved.

After two decades of discussion, in 1845 China voters bought a farm on the east shore of China Lake where some paupers lived, with a resident couple superintending. It was known as the town farm, poor farm or almshouse. The China bicentennial history summarizes its use until March 1911, when voters gave selectmen discretion to close it and they chose to do so.

In the year 1854-1855 (now the earliest report your writer has), the selectmen divided the cost of caring for the poor into four sections, totaling $462.13. About half, $231.54, was for supporting paupers on the town farm, including the superintendent’s (unspecified) pay and $20 for two men for “medical attendance.” In addition, the selectmen spent $78.27 to buy the farm a cow ($20), a cart and wheels ($18), a plow ($8) and materials for a hog-house ($32.27).

Another $118.50 was paid to the towns of Rockland, Richmond and Pittston as reimbursement for their support of paupers who were legally China residents.

The costs incurred under “support of poor in town off farm” included supplies for named recipients, two coffins and the cost of digging a grave (apparently $1.25, because one coffin cost $4 and the coffin plus grave-digging cost $5.25).

In their report, the three selectmen wrote that the number of poor on the farm (not given) and the cost were about the same as in past years, “notwithstanding the high price of provisions.” They commended Superintendent Parmeter and his wife for their management.

In 1860, supporting paupers cost taxpayers $729.36. The average population on the poor farm was “about” 16, “most of them old and decrepid [sic] and not able to render any service on the farm.”

The selectmen valued the farm’s “stock, hay and provisions,” as of March 1, 1861, at $736.57. Fifteen tons of hay were worth $216; six cows were valued at $140 and two oxen at $80. The least valuable item they noted was 25 pounds of candles, worth $3.

In 1862-1863, farm costs totaled $796.46, including three funerals and two coffins (selectman Thomas B. Lincoln charged $11 for the coffins). The farm inventory as of Feb. 28, 1863, was worth $740.88, including 17 tons of hay valued at only $170. Candles were not mentioned.

The next year, paupers on the farm cost $306.93, out of $882.26 pauper expenses. That year, 17 tons of hay were worth $289, and the selectmen valued the total inventory (again without counting candles) at $1,031.12. They added that “there is a large amount of provisions on hand,” which they hoped would “lessen the expenses for the family on the farm” for the 1864-1865 year.

In 1864-1865, the farm expenses were up slightly, at $317.85, while the total for caring for the poor was down significantly, at $728.75. In March 1864 China voters had elected three new selectmen, who are not named in the list of town officials receiving reimbursements, wrote no summary and did not sign their financial report; so there is no explanation of anything.

The China bicentennial history names these selectmen as Ambrose H. Abbot (or Abbott), Nathan Redlon and John Libbey (see box). In the report copy your writer has are the three men’s faded signatures, in ink. They did get paid for serving: “First Selectman, Assessor and Highway Surveyor, $100.00″; Second Selectman, for same, $78.50”: “Third Selectman, for same, $55.”

None of the three had previously been a selectman. Abbott and Libbey did not serve again after the one year; Redlon stayed on the board for two more years.

The reports your writer has through the rest of the 19th century show expenses for the poor staying under $1,000 most years, and varying numbers of paupers living on the farm. The selectmen write favorable comments on the management of the farm by a series of superintendents.

In the 1869-1870 report, farm superintendent Henry C. Hamilton’s annual salary was listed as $250. In 1874-1875, J. F. Plummer got $325; in 1879-1880, L. A. Jackson $300.

In 1880-1881, the Jacksons retired and were replaced by Mr. and Mrs. H. H. Freeman. They earned only $200 – and praise in the selectmen’s report.

“We think Mr. Freeman has cared well for the farm, and that the poor have been kindly treated by him. We wish to give special recommendation to Mrs. Freeman. Although occupying one of the most difficult and arduous positions, she has filled it to our entire satisfaction, her management has been firm, her treatment kind and she has left nothing undone which could secure comfort and peace among her unfortunate charges.”

By the early 1870s, expenses off the farm began including payments to the “insane hospital” in Augusta. They continued to be listed in future reports, often running over $200 annually.

The selectmen’s report of March 14, 1879, recommended the town “dispose of” the poor farm and buy another, more suitable one. The next year, two of the same board members and one new one wrote that it was their policy to “bring all paupers belonging to the town to the town farm,” so there was a need for “larger and better accommodations.”

In that year’s report, the average number of paupers on the farm was 18. Six people supported off the farm were named. China paid the cities of Augusta and Bangor and the towns of Athens, Clinton, Lexington and Palermo for others (including moving costs paid to Lexington [$23.99] and Athens [for a family, $8.01]; each town is about 50 miles from China).

In the 1881-1882 year, the cost of caring for the poor rose to almost $1,600, one of several accounts overexpended that year — unavoidably, selectmen D. (Dana) C. Hanson, F. (Freeman) H. Crowell and S. (Samuel) C. Starrett wrote. Two major expenditures were to Augusta for the Moor family ($154.03) and for G. W. or J. W. Lord ($165.87; Lord’s first initial is different on two different pages), for “long and severe” sicknesses.

Two years later, the 1883-1884 report calculated the cost at a little over $730. Three of 10 resident paupers had died, leaving seven as the fiscal year closed March 5, 1884. The selectmen commented that the farm had “contributed largely towards the support of the poor,” and the superintendent had been thrifty but had provided all necessities.

In the 1886-1887 report, $251.97 for expenses for the insane, plus other expenses on and off the farm, minus payments from Fairfield and Vassalboro for support of the York family, brought the year’s total to $712.10. One of the seven people on the farm died during the year.

In 1894-1895, farm superintendent John N. Hall was paid $225 for his services, plus $160 for a horse (your writer assumes a horse the town bought for him, but perhaps it was a horse the town bought from him). The selectmen wrote (March 9, 1895) that he and his wife had “performed their duties in a very satisfactory manner.” A coffin cost $6.50 that year; the bill for caring for two insane people was $212.02.

In 1897, Hall’s annual salary was up to $250. As of March 6, 1897, there were six “inmates.” But, the selectmen added, during the year almost 100 tramps had been given supper, a night’s lodging and breakfast, “adding materially to the expense and labor of the farm.”

By March 7, 1901, only five people lived on China’s poor farm. Pauper expenses, on and off the farm, for 1900-1901, totaled about $1,540, an amount that included repairing the barn.

(The selectmen named Mr. and Mrs. E. W. Haskell as the poor farm’s live-in superintendent and wife that year. The men paid for labor on the barn were Everett J. Haskell, $5; H. B. Haskell, $5; and J. H. Haskell, $4.)

The report for the year ending Feb. 20, 1906, showed four paupers living on the farm, up from three at the end of the prior year (which started with six; three died during the year). Superintendent Wilbur H. Taylor and his wife were paid $225. The farm’s stock and produce were valued at $681.65, including 20 tons of hay worth $140, a $100 horse, $1.25 worth of baskets and a chain and an iron bar valued at $1 each.

Those bashful 1864-1865 selectmen

Ambrose H. Abbott or Abbot (1813 – March 9, 1882) was a respected resident of South China. A footnote in the China bicentennial history says his name is spelled Abbott in town records, but when he was town clerk and record-keeper, “he spelled his name Abbot.”

Abbott served as selectman only the one year, but held other local, state and federal offices. From Jan. 22, 1842, to June 21, 1853, he was South China’s postmaster. He was China town clerk from 1851 through 1864, and town treasurer for four years (1866, 1868 through 1870). Wikipedia says he was a member of the Maine Governor’s Council in 1870 and 1873 and a state senator in the spring of 1874.

The history says he served for 30 years as South China’s second librarian, starting in 1836 (the library was founded in 1830). The library was on the second floor of Abbott’s grocery store in April 1872, when most of the village burned down; it reopened in 1873, housed in Abbott’s and other people’s homes until a new building was provided in 1900.

*****

Nathan Redlon’s on-line information is confusing. Find a Grave says Redlon was born in 1812 (FamilySearch says Jan. 3, 1813), died Aug. 10, 1892 (FamilySearch agrees and adds “in Vassalboro”) and is buried in China’s Dudley Cemetery.

Also in that cemetery is Mary Redlon, whose gravestone says she was born in 1778 and died Aug. 5, 1866, aged 88. Find a Grave says this Mary was Nathan Redlon’s wife, and gave birth to his son George in 1863 (when she was 85). Your writer was highly skeptical, and was relieved to learn from FamilySearch that Nathan Redlon’s mother was named Mary (Hall) Redlon, born Dec. 12, 1777, in Waldoboro.

Mary Hall married John Redlon (1772 – 1854) on Nov. 14, 1791, in Newcastle. FamilySearch lists six sons and five daughters born between 1795 and 1815; Nathan was the next youngest. Mary (Hall) Redlon lived in China in 1860, FamilySearch says.

Find a Grave gives Nathan Redlon one daughter, Frances, and one son, George. Daughter Frances A. was born in 1841; the photo of her gravestone in Dudley Cemetery says her parents were Nathan and Elizabeth Redlon, and she died April 10, 1870, aged 29.

FamilySearch says Redlon married Elizabeth Brown about 1836, and they had at least three sons and two daughters. However, the site gives no information about Elizabeth or their children, skipping instead to what appears to be Redlon’s second family by his second wife, Mary Eleanor Martin.

She was born Nov. 25, 1831, in Thomaston; married Nathan Redlon on Sept. 7, 1851, in Union; lived in China for about 20 years; and died in Bath on Aug. 26, 1921.

FamilySearch names Nathan and Mary’s seven sons and four daughters, born between 1852 (a son who died within a year) and 1882 (when Nathan was 70). George M. is listed as the third son and sixth child of this marriage: born Oct. 31 (or Nov. 1), 1863, in China, died Dec. 2, 1882, aged 19. He, too, is buried in Dudley Cemetery.

* * * * * *

Your writer failed to find any information about China’s third selectman in 1864, John Libbey. (Information about John Libbey can be found in Part 4 of this series, available here.)

Main sources

China town reports
Grow, Mary M., China Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: China town reports – 1861 – 1906 (Part 1)

December 10, 2025/0 Comments/in China, Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley/by Mary Grow

by Mary Grow

A China resident bought a bundle of old China town reports, which have fallen into your writer’s hands for her – and your – information and entertainment. Thank you, John Glowa!

The earliest of the 21 reports (plus two duplicates) is for the municipal year 1860-1861, which ran from mid-March 1860, to mid-March 1861. It is incomplete; there are seven pages of information from the selectmen, but the supervisor of schools’ report promised on the front page is missing.

The latest report in the collection is for the year ending Feb. 20, 1906. Because the fiscal year had just changed, this report covers the 11-month period from March 10, 1905.

The reports are printed on old-fashioned paper that feels soft to contemporary fingers, and they’re smaller than today’s. The samples from the 1860s are 5.5-by-9.5 inches, and 16 pages. The 1872-1873 report (for the year that ended March 18, 1873) is another 16-pager, but the pages are only 5.25-by-7 inches.

From the 1880s into the 1900s, pages are 8.75-by-5.5 or 8.75-by-5.75 inches. In the first decade of the 20th century, the reports ran 36 or 38 pages (44 pages in 1905).

Earlier reports in this collection have no covers, later ones soft covers. The only colors are on some of the later (1884 and after) covers, and they are muted – beige, medium green, reddish-orange. The contents are entirely words and figures, without illustrations.

In contrast, the China town report for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2024, has stiff covers with color photos front and back, outside and inside. Its 100 8.5-by-11 pages have numerous black and white photos, charts and graphs. Most of the pages are white; the last four sheets of paper, with the warrant for the June, 2025, annual town meeting, are yellow.

The report title changed over the years. In 1861 and 1863, it was the report of the selectmen and supervisor of schools, in 1864, 1865 and 1866, the selectmen and superintending school committee.

In 1873, 1877 and 1878, the annual report was from selectmen, assessors, overseers of the poor (the same three men held all three titles) and supervisor of schools. In 1879 and 1880, only the selectmen and supervisor of schools were listed.

Selectmen changed to municipal officials from 1882 through at least 1890. In 1890, the board of health was also on the cover, and the supervisor of schools.

In 1900, 1901 and 1902, the annual report was “of the Town of China.” In 1903 through 1906, it was “of the Municipal Officers of the Town of China.”

The municipal officers worked with multiple printers. The Maine Farmer Office in Augusta did the 1860s issues your writer has. The small-size 1873 report was done by Homan and Badger, Augusta; the 1877 report by Maxham and Wing, Mail Office, Waterville, for $21; the 1878 report by the Kennebec Journal office in Augusta.

Despite the report for 1878 plainly saying the printer was the Kennebec Journal office, the report for 1879 – printed by E. F. Pillsbury & Co., Augusta – reported $21 paid in 1878 to Sprague, Owen and Nash for “printing reports.” The 1879 expenditure list, in the 1880 report, said 1879 “printing reports” cost $18; it did not name the payee.

The 1881-82 report was printed at the Sentinel office in Waterville; 1883-84 in Waterville by The ‘Sentinel’ Steam Print; 1886-87, “Printed at the Sentinel Office.”

The collection has a gap until the report for the year ending March 7, 1890 (for the 1889-1890 year); it was printed at the Journal Printing Office, in Fairfield. (The newspaper The Fairfield Journal was published from July 2, 1879, to June, 1925, according to the Fairfield bicentennial history.) The cost for the prior year was $15.

Hallowell printer Charles A. Prescott did (at least) two reports in a row, 1900-1901 and 1901-1902. The bill for the latter was $34.40, paid to C. A. Prescott. The 1902-03 report was printed by E. C. Bowler, in Bethel; it included in miscellaneous expenditures $28 to E. C. Bowler for printing town reports.

That payment suggests E. C. Bowler was paid for the 1902-03 report before it was published. But the 1903-1904 report, published in March 1904, says it was printed by News Publishing Co., in Bethel; and includes a $31 payment to E. C. Bowler for “printing town reports and Com. blanks [whatever they were].”

News Publishing also did the 1904-05 report, which included an expenditure of $29.40 for printing town reports (no payee named). In the 1905-06 report, printed by Herald Job Print, in Damariscotta, the cost for printing the previous year’s town report was $33.60.

No report said how many copies the town ordered.

The town report for the year that ended June 30, 2024, does not list town report printing specifically. Town Clerk Angela Nelson found in the records that on May 23, 2024, the town paid Bromar, Inc. (Bromar Printing Solutions, in Skowhegan) $2,579.00 to print 600 town reports.

* * * * * *

China had three selectmen for each of the years included in this collection. The selectmen’s reports always started with a financial report, with the format varying slightly over the years.

Here are a few financial highlights from the report that covered the period from March 19, 1860, to March 19, 1861. The report was “respectfully submitted” and signed by Thomas B. Lincoln, J. (Josiah) H. Greely and Eli H. Webber.

As of March 19, 1860, the treasurer and tax collector, between them, had $3,585.80. However, China owed $3,848.17, mostly due from before March 22, 1859; leaving a negative balance as of March 19, 1860, that the report calculated as $262.39 (your writer’s math disagrees; she cannot explain the discrepancy).

By March 9, 1861, the town had paid $54.51 worth of bills due before March 13, 1860. The largest payment was $22.21 to Homan & Manley for printing reports; the smallest was $2, to J. R. Crossman for “stone for bridge.” Another payment listed was $9.85 to Crommet & Sprowl, “for bridge, by vote of the town.”

The 1860-1861 miscellaneous bills paid totaled $4,663.29, including $618.66 for “Orders given previous to March 22, 1859” and interest thereon. To this figure were added $729.36 for caring for paupers, on and off the town poor farm, and $214.64 for six town officers.

Selectmen earned three different amounts: $34.50 for Greely, $43.50 for Lincoln and $44.25 for Webber. Each got an allowance for “Horse, carriage and expenses” (Greely $9.75, Lincoln $14.50 and Webber $10.14). School supervisor G. (George) E. Brickett (see box) was paid $40, treasurer Thomas Dinsmore Jr., $10 and town clerk A. (Ambrose) Abbott $8.

The result the selectmen summarized was that as of March 9, 1861, the town had $2,975.11 in “resources brought down”; and it owed $3,073.96 (of which $2,948.69 was, again, from before March 22, 1859), leaving a “Balance against the town” of $98.85.

The 1861-1862 report is not included in the collection your writer has. By March 11, 1863, China’s financial condition was worse. Selectmen Lincoln, Dinsmore (former treasurer) and Daniel Webber reported resources totaling $6,760.18 and expenditures of $14,556.64, more than half for Civil War payments to volunteers and their families. The result was a negative balance of $7,796.46.

In addition, the next page showed China was in debt to the tune of $10,366.21. In a brief summary report, the selectmen explained that loan repayments were due in “one, two, three and five years, interest annually.” They expected about $1,100 due from the state “soon.”

China (like other Maine towns) continued to pay off war-related debt for years. In March 1876, in what the China bicentennial history calls “a small revolution in China’s town government,” voters elected three new selectmen, Dana C. Hanson, Samuel C. Starrett and Freeman H. Crowell, who intended a financial turnaround.

The history says voters also appropriated funds to pay interest, but not to pay off debts, and authorized selectmen to continue borrowing.

When the threesome took office, China’s debt was $18,241.30. Income from property taxes in 1876 was $10,341.57.

At the March 1877 town meeting, the selectmen were re-elected, and voters authorized raising enough money to pay off the debt. At a May 1877, special meeting, those attending were asked to rescind that vote; they refused.

A year later, as of March 20, 1878, the town report showed the “Balance in favor of the town” was $1,173.16; and local taxes collected in 1877 had amounted to $29,791.98.

(Town officials did not save money by rejecting reimbursement. The 1877 payments for Hanson, Starrett and Crowell, and five other town officers, totaled $541.82, including horses, carriages and out of town cash expenses for the selectmen and the treasurer. The auditor and the town meeting moderator earned $2 apiece.)

In their long summary report, the selectmen praised voters at the 1877 annual meeting for their “bold step” to pay off the town debt, calling it a “hard lift” but a “wise policy.” Neighboring towns considered the action “a wild experiment, which they dare not try.”

They also praised tax collector E. (probably Elijah) D. Jepson and recommended voters re-elect him. The last sentence of the selectmen’s report reads: “Having aimed to do our whole duty, we now retire, and hope we are wiser if not better.”

E. D. Jepson is named as tax collector in each of the (incomplete) collection of town reports available to your writer from 1877 through 1886-1887. The selectmen’s report written March 8, 1887, mentioned his long illness over the winter; with help from friends, enough taxes were collected to pay state and county taxes and “every order drawn the past year.”

Although China’s 1886-1887 “running expenses” were covered, selectmen C. (Charles) E. Dutton, Theron E. Doe and H. (Henry) B. Reed wrote, there was not enough money to pay “interest bearing orders which have been so many years standing against the town,” and had cost $304 in interest in 1886. What to do about them? They answered, “resolve to pay your taxes within the year, and do it.”

Between the end of the Civil War and the 1905-1906 fiscal year, parts of China’s finances changed surprisingly little. In the 1865-1866 report, the town’s total resources were $24,770.66; in 1905-1906, they were $17,736.43.

Schools cost $2,445.12 in 1865. In 1905, five school accounts totaled $3,311.55, including $500 for a high school. Half the $500 went to Erskine Academy (founded in 1883), the other half to J. (Joseph) W. Leighton, teacher in the China Village high school (which ran from 1897 through 1908).

Highway costs increased substantially, however. They were only $18.70 in 1865, including reimbursements for damages to three wagons and one horse. By 1905, the highways and bridges account was $4,778.84, largest item in a list of miscellaneous expenditures that totaled $15,440.14.

For the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2024, the town report summary of governmental activities shows education expenditures of $5,220,626, and public works expenditures of $1,562,017, out of “total expenses” of $9,928,474.

Next week: more highlights from China’s town reports from 1861 to 1906

Dr. George E. Brickett

In the Civil War, Dr. George E. Brickett served as a surgeon in Maine’s 3rd infantry regiment, according to the China bicentennial history. He enlisted in the spring of 1861 and “resigned or was discharged in late August.” At a Sept.9, 1861, town meeting, voters chose G. B. [almost certainly Gustavus Benson] Chadwick his successor because Brickett had been appointed an assistant surgeon in the army.

In the summer of 1862 Brickett enlisted in the newly-raised 21st infantry. He survived the war; a footnote in the history says an 1884 Maine atlas listed him as practicing medicine in Augusta.

The China town report for 1862-1863 lists under town officer expenses $12 paid to Brickett as school supervisor for “part of 1861” and $52 paid to G. B. Chadwick for “same office” in 1862.

Main sources

China town reports
Grow, Mary M., China Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Last three Ballard children

December 3, 2025/1 Comment/in Central ME, Local History, Maine History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley/by Mary Grow

by Mary Grow

Last week’s article ended without finishing the story of Martha and Ephraim Ballard’s second son, Jonathan. When interrupted, he was living on his farm in the northern part of Augusta, on the road to Sidney, with his wife, Sarah “Sally” (Pierce), and an increasing number of children.

In December 1799, Martha and Ephraim moved into a new house on Jonathan’s farm. In February 1804, while Ephraim Sr, was in jail for debt, youngest son Ephraim Jr., married (see below) Mary Farwell. After the couple “went to housekeeping” in July and moved out of either parent’s home, Mary’s widowed mother, called in the diary “Sister Farewell,” and younger sister Sally moved in with Martha.

On Oct. 25, 1804, Martha wrote, Sally Farwell brought a message from Jonathan: he was going to take over Martha’s house in two weeks. Martha, he said, could “tarrie here [with them] or go and liv in their house and see how good it was to bring water from this wel.”

Ulrich said that in addition to having an inadequate well, Jonathan’s house was older and lacked “a bake oven.” Though Martha thought his demand another example of “his impetuous and irrational behavior,” it might have seemed reasonable to him: better living quarters for his growing family and, if Martha chose to stay with them, help for her.

Martha shared what had been her house with Jonathan, Sally and children until Sept. 14, 1805. Over the winter of 1804-05, she spent time with daughter Dolly Lambard and her family (see below) and with Ephraim, Jr. During the summer of 1805, Ulrich wrote, she stayed with Jonathan and Sally, helping with gardening and other chores, including taking case of the many grandchildren who lived and visited there.

A dozen people lived in the house in the spring of 1805, Ulrich wrote, and 21 other people visited for a meal or overnight in one month. Most were much younger than Martha (who was born in February 1735). Ulrich quoted an April 14, 1805, entry: “I have felt very unwell but have had the nois of Children out of 5 famelys to Bear….Some fighting, some playing and not a little profanity has been performd.”

Five days later, on April 19, 1805, Ulrich noted, “Sally gave birth to her sixth son and ninth child.” (This boy was Samuel Adams Ballard; he died Nov. 27, 1806.)

Ephraim Sr., was freed from jail on May 29, 1805, but his return to the family made no difference. On June 7, Martha wrote that Sally told her she would not get her house to herself that summer.

Ulrich quoted diary references to Sally’s “tantrums”; to her calling Martha a liar; and to Martha describing Sally as “inconsiderate” and “very impudent.” Sally, too, was overworked and unhappy.

Although Martha never “developed an intense and daily intimacy with Jonathan and Sally,” Ulrich wrote that she came to appreciate “the small gifts of love and care they were able to offer”; and Sally’s “immense” burdens became less as her children got old enough to help.

In late August, 1805, relying on the diary, Ulrich reported the start of a new house for Jonathan’s family. On Sept. 14, Martha wrote that they had moved back to their old one, leaving Martha and Ephraim in theirs.

FamilySearch and WikiTree say Jonathan Ballard died in Augusta on June 7, 1838. Sally was living with daughter Hannah and family in 1850; she died on July 1, 1858.

* * * * * *

Martha and Ephraim’s daughter Hannah was born Aug. 6, 1769, in Oxford. On Oct. 28, 1792, in Augusta, she married Moses Pollard (the couple became “daughter Pollard” and “son Pollard” in Martha’s diary).

WikiTree lists nine Pollard children, “although records are scant and there may be other children.” Ulrich also said nine, though she pointed out that Hannah and Moses could have had more after Martha’s diary ended in May, 1812 (when Hannah was almost 43).

According to the diary excerpts, Hannah’s first child was born in July 1794. WikiTree names this child as daughter Rhoda, who married James Black in Sidney on June 30, 1816.

Ulrich said after the second child was born in October 1795, Hannah was so sick as to be delirious, and could not join the family for meals for six weeks. WikiTree says this child was daughter Hannah (Oct. 18, 1795 — May 14, 1863).

WikiTree then lists 3) Sally, born in 1797, and 4) Harry, born in 1799 and died March 5, 1800, in Augusta.

Martha said Hannah had another child just after midnight on Jan. 11, 1801. WikiTree names a son 5) Samuel (1801 — Feb. 22, 1870).

WikiTree then lists 6) Dorothy, aka Dolly (1803 — Feb. 1, 1881); 7) Thomas L. (born in 1804, in 1849 married Mary R. McIntire, widow of his first cousin, James S. Ballard); and 8) Martha Moore (1807 — Sept. 11, 1880).

WikiTree says Hannah and Moses’ ninth child, Catherine Nason, was born in 1809 and died in Augusta, May 1, 1882. On May 28, 1809, Martha wrote that “son Pollard” called her at 2:30 a.m., and at 6 a.m. Hannah gave birth to her sixth daughter and ninth child.

Hannah died May 25, 1863, according to FamilySearch, in Augusta; she is buried in Slowhegan, where she had been living in 1850 (when the town was named Bloomfield).

* * * * * *

Ephraim and Martha’s fifth child, Dorothy (Dolly), was born, according to FamilySearch, on Sept. 2, 1772, in Oxford. On May 14, 1795, in Hallowell, she married Barnabas Lambard, born Sept. 1, 1772.

On April 3, 1797, after Hallowell’s northern part became the new town of Harrington (changed to Augusta on June 9), voters at the first town meeting elected Barnabas Lambard a fence-viewer and a surveyor of lumber, according to Captain Charles Nash’s chapter in Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history. In 1799 he was a member of the town’s first “company of firemen.”

FamilySearch says the Lambards had at least 12 children, six sons and six daughters, between 1796 and 1816. Ulrich and Augusta historian James North (in a brief biography of Barnabas Lambard) say 11.

According to FamilySearch’s list, the first child was a son, Allen, born July 22, 1796, died Sept. 5, 1877. He was followed by 2) Dorothy, born Nov. 11, 1797, death date unknown; 3) Thomas, born Aug. 10, 1799, died Oct. 12, 1804, aged five; 4) Barnabas, Jr., born April 17, 1801, died Sept. 25, 1814, aged 14; 5) Lucy L., born Jan. 31, 1803, married in 1822 Asaph R. Nichols, with whom she had at least nine children, died Oct. 17, 1884, in Boston (she had been in Augusta in 1880); 6) William, born Nov. 21, 1804, died Feb. 15 or 19, 1839; 7) Henry Augustus, born Dec. 26, 1806, died March 27, 1821, aged 14; 8) Sarah Farwell, born June 25, 1809, lived in Augusta until at least 1880, apparently unmarried, died in 1896 in Natick, Massachusetts; 9) Martha Town, born April 4, 1811, died July 27, 1823, aged 12; 10) Thomas, born June 29, 1813, married, lived in Augusta at least until 1870 and died in Boston Sept. 28, 1892; 11) Hannah Pollard, born March 29, 1816, married Rev. John A. Henry in September, 1842 (and after his death, Edward Walcott of Natick, Massachusetts, in 1850, North wrote), died Aug. 12, 1896, in Natick; and 12), according to FamilySearch, another Hannah, also born in 1816, who married David Waire or Wire, had at least eight children, died May 19, 1895.

(FamilySearch says when the first Hannah was born in March 1816, her parents were both 43 years old, and when the second was born the same year, they were 44. Making the two births chronologically possible does not explain the duplicate names.)

Dolly Lambard died March 14, 1861, in Augusta; her husband had died Oct. 10, 1860, FamilySearch says.

* * * * * *

Ephraim Ballard Jr., according to an unusually complete biography on Wikipedia, was born in Augusta on March 30, 1779. Wikipedia calls him “an engineer and a builder,” descriptions compatible with things Ulrich wrote about him.

According to Wikipedia, Ballard and Benjamin Brown built Augusta’s second Kennebec River bridge in 1818; and after it burned on April 2, 1827, Ballard was hired to replace it. North wrote that the work was “pushed forward with unexampled dispatch for this region”; the new bridge opened for foot traffic on Aug. 3 and for carriages on August 18.

In 1829, Wikipedia says, Ballard was chosen to build “the Mattanawcook road.” (Mattanawcook was the Town of Lincoln’s name until the Maine legislature changed it, in 1829). He “was between Augusta and Mattanawcook when he contracted typhoid fever and died at Bangor,” on Nov. 5, 1829.

Ballard’s first wife was Mary Farwell (born June 21, 1785), whom he married in Augusta on Feb. 5, 1804. Their first daughter, whom they named Mary, was born four months after the wedding, and died when she was three months old.

WikiTree lists the rest of Mary and Ephraim Ballard Jr.’s children as: 2) Sophia, born Nov. 3, 1805, married Charles Keene, died Dec. 24, 1847); 3) Theodore Sedgwick, born Nov. 3, 1805, died March 1839; 4) Amelia, born and died in 1808; 5) an unnamed daughter, born June 25, 1809; 6) Edward, born June 4, 1814, died in Chicago, May 31, 1871; and 7) Charles Henry, born about 1815, died Nov. 11, 1841.

As usual, other websites give different information.

Mary Farwell Ballard died March 13, 1819, aged 33. On Jan. 7, 1822, in Augusta, Ballard married Paulina Palmer, who was born about 1795.

Paulina might have given him more children. After Ephraim’s death in 1829, Wikipedia cites the 1830 census that lists Paulina’s Augusta household as including “one female 30 to 39 [Paulina], one male under 5, one male 5 to 9, one male 10 to 14, one male 15 to 19, one male 20 to 29, one male 70 to 79, one female under 5, and two females 5 to 9.”

Paulina remarried in December 1833; her second husband was named Jonah Dunn.

* * * * * *

As previously written, Martha Moore Ballard died in late May 1812, aged 77. Her widower, Ephraim Sr., died in 1821, aged 96.

Readers of this and the preceding article will have noticed what different historical records the Ballard children and their spouses left. The men owned land and buildings, farmed, practiced professions and held town offices. The women bore children.

This subseries began on Nov. 6 with two themes: women in the late 1700s and early 1800s worked as hard and as long as men, but their work left no historical record. Martha Ballard’s diary was a rare exception.

Ulrich pointed out that except for the diary, “Martha has no history….no independent record of her work survives.” She is not listed in financial records, or as a church member, or in legal records.

“Without the diary, even her name would be uncertain,” Ulrich wrote. Once Martha married, her name became “Mrs. Ballard.” Minister Benjamin Tappin, who brought her comfort in the last weeks of her life, thought her first name was Dorothy; historian North called her Hannah in his genealogy.

“Fortunately, she had the good sense to write firmly at the end of one of her homemade booklets, Martha Ballard Her Diary, Ulrich said.

The other theme in the Nov. 6 article was that women’s work is never done. Martha, too, noticed that.

Ulrich quoted a diary excerpt, written as midnight approached on Nov. 26, 1795, in which 60-year-old Martha summarized her day doing housework, nursing a cow and keeping up with two paid helpers and various family members.

Martha said, “A womans work is never Done as the Song says and happy shee whos strength holds out to the End of the rais.”

Main sources

North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870)
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: Martha’s children

November 25, 2025/0 Comments/in Central ME, Hallowell, Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley/by Mary Grow

by Mary Grow

This article continuing the Ballard family history will summarize information about three of Martha and Ephraim’s six children who lived to adulthood – space limits postpone the other three, and the end of Jonathan’s story, to next week. As related previously, three Ballard children died young, in a 1769 diphtheria epidemic in Oxford, Massachusetts.

The surviving children, in order of birth, were Cyrus, Lucy, Jonathan, Hannah, Dorothy (Dolly) and Ephraim, Jr. The first five were born in Oxford between 1756 and 1772; Ephraim, Jr., was born in 1779, after the family moved to Hallowell.

All but Lucy outlived their mother. The excerpts from Martha’s diary that Laurel Thatcher Ulrich included in “A Midwife’s Tale” show that Lucy had frequent health issues; there are several references to her being ill after the birth of one of the children (see below for varied numbers) she had by her husband, Ephraim Towne.

For example, in May, 1789, Ulrich wrote (using Martha’s diary as her source) that Lucy “fell ill of a fever” a week after giving birth (to the second daughter named Hannah, if WikiTree’s list below is accurate; Ulrich gave the child neither name nor sex). Because, Ulrich claimed, separating a newborn from his or her mother was a last resort, Lucy continued to try to nurse the baby; only after 10 days, when the child “seemed to be suffering,” did neighbors with babies assist.

* * * * * *

Cyrus Ballard was born Sept. 11, 1756, in Oxford. He never married. Ulrich described him as a “peripatetic [wandering] miller,” working in the family mill and living at home for a while, then taking a job at another mill, perhaps in Waterville or Pittston, at least once as far away as Lincolnville (almost 50 miles from Hallowell).

In November 1792, for example, Martha recorded that he came home after working in “Mr Hollowells” grist mill for 14 months, and two days later “went to Pittston and brot his chest & things home.”

When he was home, Cyrus ran errands for his mother, worked in his father’s mill, helped with gardening and other chores and was generally useful. Martha was seldom sentimental about him – or anyone else – in the entries Ulrich chose to copy; but she seemed to prefer his company to his absence.

In the fall of 1804, when Ephraim had been in jail since early January for failure to pay debts and Cyrus left home to “tend mill for Mr. Pullin at Watervil,” Martha wrote, “I wish him health and prosperity but alas how shall I do without him.” (The next day, she wrote, 13-year-old grandson Jack, Jonathan’s oldest son, brought water and cut wood for her.)

Neither Ulrich nor any other source your writer found said when or where Cyrus died.

* * * * * *

Lucy Ballard was born Aug. 28, 1758, in Oxford. On Feb. 4, 1778, in Hallowell, she married her first cousin, Ephraim Towne or Town (his mother, Hannah [Ballard] Towne, was Ephraim Ballard’s younger sister).

The couple moved to Winslow in 1784.

Ulrich’s choices from Martha’s diary show that she was the attending midwife when at least two of Lucy’s children were born (and probably all). Find a Grave says the Townes had nine children; Ulrich said 11.

WikiTree lists 10: 1) Ezra, born September 8, 1778, died November 14, 1811, in Farmington; 2) John, born February 4, 1780, died April 10, 1785; 3) Mary “Polly” (Towne) Smith, born November 5, 1781, died Nov. 27, 1871; 4) Martha “Patty,” born August 13, 1783, died June 29, 1820; 5) Lucy, born July 23, 1785, died April 24, 1802; 6) Hannah, born November 14, 1787, died February 8, 1788; 7) a second Hannah, born May 4, 1789, died July 10, 1793; 8) Dolly, born November 24, 1791, never married, died August 9, 1858; 9) John, born October 3, 1793, died in Madison, March 29, 1885; and 10) Betsey (Towne) Tilton, born April 13, 1797, died February 20, 1895, in East Livermore.

Ulrich, based on Martha’s writing, added to WikiTree’s list a daughter born in September, 1795, who lived only two hours, due to “an obstruction of breath at the Nostrils.”

First son Ezra was born seven months after Lucy married. Ulrich said Lucy’s, Jonathan’s and Ephraim, Jr.’s first children were all conceived before marriage, as were many others in those days.

Lucy Ballard Towne died Nov. 8, 1798, with her mother among those who attended her in her final illness. Ulrich did not supply details. WikiTree says Ephraim Towne later married Eunice Stackpole, by whom he had three more children.

* * * * * *

Jonathan Ballard was born in Oxford March 4, 1763. Ulrich, comparing him to Cyrus, called him the “flamboyant and rebellious younger brother.” Later she mentioned his “vandalism, fighting, and drinking.”

Jonathan’s “temperament” was a recurring theme in his mother’s diary.

In the summer of 1791, after Martha and Ephraim settled in their second home (see references to their moving and starting a new garden in the Nov. 13 issue of “The Town Line”), she wrote that Cyrus brought Jonathan’s “things” and his sow to the new house.

Ulrich thought Jonathan might have spent the early summer working for Peter Jones, owner of the house the Ballards had left. She quoted a Nov. 22 diary entry: the “gentlemen” chosen to decide the dispute between Peter Jones and Jonathan had awarded damages and court costs to Jones.

“I would wish my son might learn to govern his temper for the futer [future],” Martha wrote.

He didn’t. Martha’s March 17, 1804, unusually long diary entry described the “scean” that evening, after a young hired man named Lemuel Witham took “Son Lambard’s” (son-in-law Barnabas Lambard, Dolly’s husband) horse and sleigh to a tavern to bring Jonathan home, found him not ready and brought the horse and sleigh back.

Jonathan therefore had to walk home. He “Came here without his hat, took him [Lemuel] from his supper, push him out a dors, Drove him home to his house, damning and pushing him down and struck him. Shaw and Burr [neighbors] went on after to prevent his being diprived of life.”

Martha followed, “falling as I went,” and Dolly and others joined in. Jonathan was still “Cursing and Swearing he would go and giv him a hard whipping.” The men were separated for the night; Lambard brought Martha home; and she concluded her entry, “O that the God of all Mercy would forgiv him [Jonathan] this and all other misconduct.”

A few pages later, Ulrich revealed she had found a similar diary entry from two years earlier, when Jonathan’s wife Sally and their children were having supper at Martha’s and Jonathan came in “in a great passion about his white Mare being hurt.”

“It overcame me so much I was not able to sett up,” Martha wrote. Ulrich commented that this first outburst left Martha “immobilized, psychologically struck down.” In the second incident, however, “fear for Lemuel Witham’s safety propelled her into the middle of the fray, delaying her own collapse.”

Although Dolly and her husband helped Martha on March 17, Ulrich wrote that when Dolly and her sister Hannah visited March 18, they apparently were less helpful as they discussed what had happened. On March 20, Martha wrote that Jonathan “spake very indecently” to his mother; but the diary rebuked “all who do injure my feelings” and hoped “May they consider they may be old and receiv like Treatment.” (Martha was born in February 1735, so in March 1804 she would have been just past her 69th birthday.)

Ulrich also quoted an October 1804 diary entry in which Martha complained that Jonathan “treated me very unbecomingly indead. O that God would Chang his stubborn heart and Cause him to behave in a Cristion like manner to parents and all others.”

Ulrich found other information sources that led her to comment that “Of all the Ballards, Jonathan appears most frequently in county court records, both as a plaintiff and as a defendant.”

Between 1797 and 1803, she wrote, Jonathan Ballard was involved in 29 cases before the Kennebec County Court of Common Pleas, 19 he brought and 10 brought against him. He won 15 cases, Ulrich said.

Five cases involving Jonathan were appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court, Ulrich found. He won one, getting $3.33.5 for reporting a man for selling liquor without a license.

Jonathan was sometimes in debt; Ulrich mentioned at least three brief imprisonments. His family found money to free him at least once. In May of 1809, six of his oxen were seized to pay a creditor.

In another comment on Jonathan, however, Ulrich wrote that he “was impulsive and perhaps given to hard drinking, but he was no ne’er-do-well.” Starting in 1787, he acquired a 200-acre farm on the north edge of Augusta, and by 1800 he owned a total of 348 acres in the town.

Jonathan married Sarah “Sally” Pierce on Feb. 23, 1792, in Hallowell — “reluctantly” Ulrich wrote, and only because she “had initiated a paternity suit against him.”

Elsewhere, Ulrich recorded that on Oct. 23, 1791, in the snow, Martha went to Sally Pierce’s to deliver the unwed mother of “a fine son.”

As Massachusetts law then required, she asked Sally who the father was; and Sally “declared that my son Jonathan was the father of her child.” Ulrich explained the law determined who should pay child support, and was based on the theory that a woman in the middle of giving birth wouldn’t lie.

Sally named her son Jonathan; he was known as Jack from infancy.

Neither Martha nor Ephraim went to Jonathan’s wedding, Ulrich said. Martha wrote that Jonathan first brought Sally and their son to visit her at the end of February, 1792. By March 2, Martha wrote that she “Helpt Sally nurs her Babe.” As was the custom, Jonathan and Sally lived alternately with his parents and hers for a month, settling into their own place (“went to housekeeping”) on April 4, 1792.

At Hallowell’s June town meeting, Ulrich wrote, Jonathan and half a dozen other newly married men were elected hog reeves (town officials responsible for rounding up roaming pigs and assessing any damage done), “a humorous acknowledgment by the town fathers that another roving stag had been yoked.”

On May 9, 1809, Martha recorded that Jack Ballard came to tell his grandparents he was leaving for Liverpool, and on May 10 “sett out for sea.” But he came back home May 15: “Could not get a Chance to go to sea.”

FamilySearch says Sally and Jonathan had 10 children; Find a Grave says 12; WikiTree says 13. Here is WikiTree’s list, longest but not necessarily most accurate.

1) Jonathan, born Oct. 24, 1791; 2) DeLafayette, born Feb. 4, 1793, died Oct. 9, 1833; 3) Hannah Kidder (Ballard) Pinkham, born Feb. 1, 1795, died May 21, 1886, in Massachusetts (FamilySearch says she died in 1818); 4) Ephraim, born Feb. 17, 1797, died Dec. 16, 1868; 5) William Y., born in 1799 (Find a Grave says 1795), died Jan. 29, 1896; 6) Sarah (Ballard) Pillsbury, born Jan. 11, 1801, died May 15, 1880, in Massachusetts; 7) Martha M. (Ballard) Barton, born Nov. 22, 1802, died in Clinton around 1845; 8) a son who was born and died April 3, 1804; 9) Samuel Adams, born April 19, 1805, died Nov. 27, 1806, aged one; 10) James Sullivan, born April 23, 1807, died Oct. 11, 1847; 11) Elizabeth Augusta, born April 3, 1809, died July 19, 1818, aged nine; 12) and 13), unnamed twin sons, born March 17, 1812, and died within days.

Ulrich wrote that after Sarah was born on Jan. 11, 1801, Sally was “burdened…with a new baby, a houseful of children, a temperamental husband, and a younger sister who needed constant attention.” The younger sister was Hitty Pierce, unmarried but not childless; the children (earlier, Ulrich said there were five; it is not clear how many were Sally’s and how many Hitty’s) included Hitty’s dying son, John, who had been badly burned in December, 1800.

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: Women – Part 3

November 19, 2025/0 Comments/in Hallowell, Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley, Vassalboro/by Mary Grow

by Mary Grow

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale focused on women’s lives in the Kennebec Valley around 1800, using midwife Martha Ballard’s diary (from 1785 to 1812) as a main source of information. A consistent emphasis was women banding together to help each other, within families and within the community.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

For example, in her description of the Ballard women and girls making cloth (see the Nov. 6 article in this subseries), Ulrich frequently noted how many people were involved. Describing the household in 1788, she mentioned Martha and Ephraim’s two youngest daughters, Hannah and Dolly, still living at home (Hannah was born in August 1769 and married in October 1792; Dolly was born in September 1772 and married in May 1795); nieces, Pamela and Parthenia Barton; and “a succession of hired helpers,” young women from the neighborhood.

Other married women came by to help, and might in return receive some of the products from the Ballard loom. Ulrich added that Martha traded with neighbors for cotton and, when the family had no sheep, wool. “The production of cloth wove a social web.”

Or, as Ulrich later expanded, women were in a “complex web of social and economic exchange” that connected households, creating a “community life” parallel to their menfolks’ political life. Women’s life was based on “a gender division of labor that gave them responsibility for particular tasks, products, and forms of trade.”

At one point, Ulrich compared the women’s textile production and their medical cooperation. She wrote:

“Spinning, like nursing, was a universal female occupation, a ‘domestic’ duty, integrated into a complex system of neighborly exchange. In both realms, training was communal and cumulative, work was cooperative, even though performed in private households, and the products remained in the local economy.”

Martha’s diary gives frequent illustrations of shared nursing, during illness and during childbirth, in the form of references to the presence of other women, relatives or friends or both.

Ulrich analyzed the role of women in healing in an early chapter in A Midwife’s Tale, based on diary entries from the summer of 1787. A “canker rash epidemic” was spreading in the central Kennebec Valley, causing many illnesses and a significant number of deaths, mostly among children. Ulrich said Martha reported five deaths, 15 percent of her cases.

(Canker rash was the name for what Ulrich said now would be called “strep,” or a streptococcal infection; the 1787 epidemic, she said, was scarlet fever.)

In her diary, Martha named four women who were with her and some of her patients. Each, in Ulrich’s analysis, had different skills and a different role.

Hannah Cool was a single woman, apparently an adult, who was living at Martha’s that summer and spent some time at a sick woman’s house, doing unskilled nursing or housework or both. Ulrich surmised her tasks would have included “brewing tea, spooning gruel, and emptying chamber pots.”

Sally Patten Ulrich called “a watcher.” Her main job was to sit with the patient, “offering comfort or conversation” and watching for any changes, especially anything that might indicate a need for treatment.

Tabitha Sewall was the wife of Captain Henry Sewall. They had lost their son to the epidemic earlier, and, Ulrich said, Tabitha was returning the help they had received, not specifically to any current patient, “but to the common fund of neighborliness that sustained families in illness.”

Merriam Pollard, mother of at least seven mostly grown-up children, represented “a group of perhaps ten women who served as general care-givers to the town. A frequent watcher at bedsides and attendant at deliveries, she was particularly skilled in laying out the dead.”

Pollard could do basic medical tasks, and, Ulrich wrote, had once handled a birth when Martha was not available in time.

Ulrich saw these women as examples of the female nursing community, whose members worked together and learned from each other.

Martha’s records of childbirths sometimes include names of other women present. She often called these attendants “her women,” meaning the mother-to-be’s women. Some were family members, some neighbors.

For example, on Oct. 3, 1789, at 11:30 a.m., Mrs. Goff had a daughter (apparently her first, as Martha wrote that the baby was Mr. Goff’s first grandchild). “Her marm [her mother-in-law, “Old Mrs. Goff,” who had come back from Boston the day before?], Mrs Bullin, Mrs Ney were my assistants,” and “Mrs. Jackson,” who had gone home earlier, came back at 1 p.m.

On Oct. 8, Martha stayed with Mrs. Daw or Daws from soon after 8 a.m. until evening, when “shee had her women” and Martha went home for the night. Mrs. Daw’s 11-pound son was born at 6 the next morning, with Martha in attendance.

On Nov. 18, 1793, Martha found Captain Meloy’s “Lady” in labor and had her women called, despite a rainstorm that ended in snow. When a baby girl arrived that evening, “Her attendants were Mrss Cleark, Duttun, Sewall, & myself.” (This was the delivery followed by the “Elligant supper” that was mentioned last week.)

* * * * * *

Over the years, family, temporary help, daytime and overnight visitors came and went in Martha’s house. Martha appreciated household helpers, her own daughters or other young women.

Ulrich saw a “secure supply of household help” (along with being past the age of childbearing herself) as essential for Martha’s career. The more hands at home, the freer she was to spend days and nights away.

Skills like weaving also benefited the younger women, helping them contribute to their present and future families. An alternative to teaching at home, Ulrich wrote, was to send daughters in their teens and early twenties into other households, as Martha’s sister, Dorothy (Moore) Barton did. Martha’s nieces, Clarissa, Pamela and Parthenia, often lived at Martha’s.

A propos of the Bartons, Ulrich mentioned in passing the significance of the sexes of a family’s children. Martha and her husband Stephen, she said, had six daughters “before a son survived”; this imbalance, she wrote, might help explain why they had “difficulty…establishing a farm in Maine.”

The Bartons went back to Oxford, Massachusetts, the family birthplace, in 1788, leaving three daughters in Maine, at least part of the time with Martha. Ulrich wrote that Parthenia (born Aug. 13, 1773) joined Martha’s household on May 26, 1788, and stayed, “with occasional periods away working for other families,” until she married on Nov. 18, 1792, at Martha’s house.

Even after they married and moved to their own homes, daughters might be called on to play a role in the family’s network. A specific example Ulrich mentioned involved Martha and Ephraim’s oldest daughter, Lucy Towne: when she had problems after her fifth child was born, her mother sent her younger sister, Dolly, to Lucy’s Winslow home.

During another period of ill health after a birth, Ulrich said, Martha had Parthenia Barton spend over a month helping at Lucy’s. And when Hannah Pollard, Lucy’s younger (and Dolly’s older) sister gave birth for the first time (probably in October, 1795), “Lucy sent her current helper (her sister-in-law Betsy Barton) to nurse her.”

Men were essential to these female networks: they performed a multitude of tasks, like providing transportation and ploughing gardens, without which their wives and daughters could not do their jobs. Similarly, women provided the meals and clean houses the men needed.

Given the number of children in many marriages, each also answered the other’s physical needs. (Ulrich never mentioned an unwanted baby, even when the mother was unmarried, and no matter how poor the family or how many other children. Without more information, it is impossible to decide whether every child was welcome; or Martha was tactful; or Ulrich chose not to raise the issue.)

Ulrich’s point was that although men’s work has gotten most of the publicity throughout history, women’s work was also vital, and also a group effort.

* * * * * *

Ulrich did not know why Martha Ballard started keeping a daily diary on Jan. 1, 1785. She offered three surmises: “a sense of history or a craving for stability, perhaps only a practical need to keep birth records.”

Whatever the diary’s value to Martha, she kept it faithfully, carrying pages with her when she expected to be gone from home for a few days. Ulrich said there are 9,965 daily entries, over more than 27 years.

Another question is how the diary survived after Martha died in late May 1812.

Ulrich wrote that the diary “probably” was passed to daughter Dolly Lambard’s family, first to Dolly and after she died in 1861 to her daughters, Sarah and Hannah. Sarah Lambard and Hannah (Lambard) Walcott gave the diary to their great-niece, Mary Forrester Hobart (1851 – March 21, 1940), in 1884.

Mary Hobart was 33 and an 1884 graduate of the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary when she received the diary, then “a hopeless pile of loose unconsecutive pages.” Ulrich explained the difficulties women had in entering the medical profession in the 1880s, and the appropriateness of a midwife’s diary coming to a female doctor.

Hobart’s cousin, Lucy Lambard Fessenden, organized the loose pages and “bound them in homemade linen covers” in two volumes, and Hobart “had a mahogany box made” to store them. She “cherished” the diary, which she, her family and her colleagues found worth reading.

In 1930, Hobart, by then almost 80, donated the diary to the Maine State Library. Ulrich gave two motives: a desire to make it more accessible to historians, and concern for its safety “in her wooden house.”

The library promised Hobart a transcript of the diary, but never delivered it. She did eventually receive a copy of Charles Nash’s excerpts, collected for his proposed 1904 history of Augusta (which was finally published in 1961; Ulrich gives credit to Maine State Librarian Edith Hary [1922 – 2013]).

The Maine State Library’s website says Martha Ballard’s diary is in its Special Collections. “Although the original handwritten diaries are extremely fragile and not available for public use, print and microfilm facsimiles can be viewed.”

* * * * * *

The exact date of Martha Ballard’s death is unknown. Her last delivery was at 4:30 a.m., on April 26, 1812; she and “Mrs. Heath” had been waiting since early on April 24.

Martha was not feeling well those days; one or another of her married daughters and daughters-in-law was usually with her. The last diary entry, on May 7, recorded visits by “Daughter Ballard [either Jonathan or Cyrus’s wife] and a Number of her Children,” two other women and Reverend Mr. (Benjamin) Tappin, who “Converst sweetly and mad a prayer adapted to my Case.”

The next relevant diary entry Ulrich found was not by Martha, but by a local male diarist, Henry Sewall. On May 31, he wrote, “Funeral of Mrs. Ballard at Augusta.”

Ulrich found another piece of evidence in the June 6 transfer of responsibility for a cow Ephraim and Martha had been renting (after the one they owned went to pay their taxes in February 1810) from Ephraim to daughter Dolly Lambard’s husband, Barnabas.

The only obituary was apparently a single sentence in the June 9, 1812, issue of The American Advocate: “Died in Augusta, Mrs. Martha, consort of Mr. Ephraim Ballard, aged 77 years.”

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.