Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Courts – Part 4

/0 Comments/in , , /by

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

by Mary Grow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * *

Judge William Penn Whitehouse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Historian Hatch was again elated, writing:

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

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

Hatch summed up Whitehouse’s tenure:

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

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

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

* * * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Burns case

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Courts – Part 3

/0 Comments/in , , /by
by Mary Grow

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

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

Nathan Weston

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

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

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

* * * * * *

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

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

* * * * * *

Judge William Penn Whitehouse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * *

Richard Drury Rice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * *

Artemas Libby

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.

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

/0 Comments/in , , , /by
by Mary Grow

Judge William Penn Whitehouse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kennebec County Courthouse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * *

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

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

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

* * * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Courts

/0 Comments/in , , , , /by
by Mary Grow

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

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

* * * * * *

Judge William Penn Whitehouse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * *

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

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

Judge Daniel Cony

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * *

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

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

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

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

Whitehouse spelled out this court’s jurisdiction and duties.

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

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

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

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

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

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.

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

/0 Comments/in , , /by

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

by Mary Grow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Captain John Getchell Sr.

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

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

FamilySearch has little information about William.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Main sources:

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

Websites, miscellaneous.

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

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Windsor High Schools

/0 Comments/in , , /by
by Mary Grow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rev. Job Chadwick

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

Summary of Rev. Job Chadwick’s life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Windsor Primary Schools

/0 Comments/in , , /by
by Mary Grow

Note: part of this article was first published in the Oct. 28, 2021, issue of The Town Line.

This subseries on central Kennebec Valley towns’ early schools still has one town to cover: Windsor, a few miles off the river, east of Augusta and south of Vassalboro and China.

The area was first settled in the 1780s, mostly by people moving inland from Bristol and Damariscotta via the Sheepscot River. Organized around 1790 as New Waterford Plantation, it became Malta on March 3, 1809, Gerry in 1820 and Windsor in 1822.

Henry Kingsbury, in his 1892 Kennebec County history, commented that the town grew fast. He wrote that “a continual influx of population…augmented by the development of a new generation” meant that within 30 years after the first land claims, “nearly all the valuable lands [were] in the hands of permanent proprietors.”

Kingsbury noted how many of the first settlers’ families stayed in Windsor. His chapter on the town is full of references to their children and grandchildren (mostly the sons) still living there in 1892.

Windsor residents are fortunate: Kingsbury’s book is supplemented and updated by a well-researched town history by Linwood H. Lowden, published in 1993. It includes an equally well-researched chapter on schools by C. Arlene Barton Gilbert.

Gilbert wrote that Rev. Job Chadwick taught the first recorded school in Windsor, in 1804, for two months, with average attendance 15 to 20 students.

Chadwick’s school was funded by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, not by taxpayers. Gilbert commented that other religious organizations sometimes funded early education.

The earliest record of a Windsor – Malta, at the time – town meeting that Lowden found was on April 3, 1809, at Rev. Chadwick’s house. Gilbert said voters elected a four-man school committee, John Arnold, John Bughee (Bugbee?), Walter Dockendorff and Thomas LeBallister, and approved a $50 appropriation for education.

Voters also appropriated $700 “to be wrought upon the road or highways.” The latter was supplemented by approval of paying $1 a day for a man’s work on the roads and 66 cents a day for oxen, Lowden reported.

A year later, voters approved five school districts and appropriated $150. Gilbert copied from the town records: “this money for schooling be paid in lumber and produce.” In April 1811, she wrote, they appropriated $200 – and “were already rearranging school districts which they had established two years earlier.”

Kingsbury agreed about the five Malta school districts in 1810, taking information from “[t]he earliest authentic record which has been preserved.” He added, though, that talking with older residents led him to “infer” an earlier division into two or three districts.

One of the first districts, Kingsbury said, covered the entire area east of the West Branch of the Sheepscot River (somewhat less than half the town), and was later (in 1810?) divided into three districts. That district had a schoolhouse “built of logs” close to Charles Mason’s 1892 house.

Voters on April 16, 1812, elected seven school agents (including LeBallister), which Gilbert took to mean there were by then seven school districts. In 1813, she said, no education money was appropriated; but in 1814, one meeting raised $150 and a later one $200. Voters at the second meeting elected eight committee members (including Dockendorff), implying eight districts.

On April 6, 1818, another assemblage of voters approved $500 for education and elected 18 committee members (again including Dockendorff).

As in other towns, a school did not necessarily mean a schoolhouse. Neither Gilbert nor Kingsbury is clear about what Windsor school buildings were where at what time.

Gilbert quoted from a letter an early resident named John Linn wrote in March 1807 to a Boston resident saying he and friends had accumulated supplies to build “a small meeting house and to keep school, but all lies dead now.” What went wrong, and what Linn hoped his Boston friend could do about it, remained unexplained.

Lowden said Linn and his wife Rebecca (Anderson) came to Windsor in 1801 to settle on a lot he bought from his brother-in-law the previous autumn. With them were their 10 children, several of the boys “close to adulthood” (no wonder Linn was interested in a school). The family sailed from Boston to Bristol and “walked most of the way from Bristol to Windsor” (36 miles by 21st century roads).

The log schoolhouse in one of Kingsbury’s inferred pre-1810 school districts was not the first Windsor schoolhouse, he said; the first one was built at Windsor Corner (the present junction of Routes 32 and 105) “about where the town house now stands.” He gave no construction date, but said it burned in February 1832.

Another early schoolhouse Kingsbury called the Center schoolhouse. This building, he said, was used for the annual town meeting in 1819, for the first time.

Lowden said the first proposal to build a town house, where town meetings could be held, was in the spring of 1811; voters rejected it. Until 1819, per Kingsbury, meetings had been in private houses; for five years after 1819, the Center school and the Methodist church shared the duty.

(After that, Kingsbury said, voters assembled in barns. On May 15, 1845, he and Lowden wrote, voters approved building a town house, to be ready by June 1846; they started using it May 21, 1846 [Lowden] or in 1847 [Kingsbury].)

Gilbert wrote that once there were school buildings, annual town meetings – but, she implied, not necessarily special meetings – were “usually” held in them. One exception was on April 2, 1821, when voters met in the District 1 (Windsor Corner) schoolhouse. They raised $100 for education (and $1,200 for roads) and elected a four-man committee “for the inspection of teachers and schools.”

Gilbert summarized the next couple decades, as voters elected town school committees plus a changing number of (unpaid, she said) district agents. Annual education appropriations slowly increased, from $400 to $500 in the 1820s, to $600 in the 1830s and to $700 in 1841.

Kingsbury and Gilbert agreed that Windsor’s first annual school report was printed in 1851. Voters directed town officials to have 350 copies of the report “distributed two days before the annual meeting.” Gilbert did not know of any surviving in 1993.

Windsor’s 15 districts in 1866-67 Gilbert called the largest number simultaneously operating in the town’s history. She quoted at length from the school committee’s district-by-district report (omitting Districts 11, 12, and 15).

On April 1, 1866, the report said, Windsor had 478 students. Two dozen school terms were taught (two terms a year in all but Districts 5 and 6, which had no summer term), by 19 women and five men, funded by $1,161 in town money and $37.86 from the State of Maine.

Committee members (Orren Tyler, C. A. Pierce and Horace Colburn) praised most of the teachers. In District 13, though, it took a while to find the right one. Adelia Cunningham started, but residents were displeased because she wasn’t qualified to teach algebra, and she left after a week. Dolly Hilt, from China, took over; she got homesick and left after five days. Jennie Maxwell was then hired and did a good job.

The 1866 Windsor school committee members were very unhappy with the condition of the school buildings.

“Three-fifths of our school houses are not fit places for schools,” they wrote. Pig-pens or hen-houses, maybe; they refused to label them stables, calling them “miserable huts” and claiming parents who sent their children into them wouldn’t consider housing their horses or oxen so badly over the winter.

One consequence, the school committee members said, was that competent teachers refused to teach in Windsor, and the town had to hire inferior ones.

Their proposed remedy was consolidation, among small districts or between a large and a small, to provide resources to build decent buildings. It would be better, they said, for children who wanted an education to travel a mile and a half to a school “that will fully repay them for their labor” than to go half a mile “and attend a nuisance.”

In 1878/79, school supervisor J. H. Barton was still advocating consolidation, on the ground that “it is hardly economy to employ a teacher for only ten or twelve scholars” in a small district. His main gripes were not buildings, but lack of parental interest – children study harder if their parents reward with “love and approval,” he said – and too few or too varied textbooks.

For 1881, supervisor W. E. Gorham, M.D., wrote a long, erudite and occasionally blunt report that included references to the Prussian education system two centuries earlier, the Bible and Athenian law-giver Solon (630 – 560 BCE). Gorham called for eliminating at least two districts, unless the entire “bungling” district system was abolished; and complained about inadequate school furnishings.

School libraries, maps and globes, proper blackboard erasers and a chair for the teacher – some schools provided not even a milking stool, he claimed – were among Gorham’s recommendations.

He, too, stressed the parents’ role. Their influence, he wrote, “dates from remote pre-natal conditions, little understood by people generally.” He recommended more study of “inherited tendencies,” and suggested penalties for parents who did not send their children to school.

Gilbert provided locations for some of Windsor’s 16 school districts, and Kingsbury added information on a few of the schoolhouses. When the consolidated school opened in 1951, town officials sold remaining five rural school buildings, Gilbert wrote.

She said the early Windsor Corner building that Kingsbury said burned in 1832 was probably on the east side of current Route 32, and after the fire was rebuilt on the west side, roughly across the road from the town hall. It survived, with frequent repairs, until 1951.

Electricity was not installed until 1836, Gilbert said. School days ran from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.; kerosene lights made late-afternoon classes challenging on sunless winter days.

Gilbert said in 1951, town officials leased the school building for 99 years, for $1, to the “newly organized Windsor Volunteer Fire Department.” Firefighters were authorized to remodel it.

District 2, in South Windsor, had at least three consecutive buildings in slightly different places, the first two burning down. The final one lasted until 1951, when town officials sold it for $803; it became a house, still occupied in 1993. The North Windsor (District 3) building on Route 32 also closed in 1951 and was converted to a house, Gilbert wrote.

Kingsbury said the original building in Barton District (District 4, in western Windsor, where Dr. Stephen Barton and his family settled in 1803) was moved from its first site closer to the center of the district around 1850. It burned about 1889 and there was a new one on the old foundation by 1892.

Gilbert wrote that her father went to the Barton School. Around 1889, she said, most students were understood to be Stephen Barton’s descendants. In 1912, students were transferred to North Windsor and in 1913 town officials sold the building for $30.

Kingsbury said the Windsor Neck (District 7) schoolhouse in the northeast was in 1892 on the same spot as an earlier one “which was torn away nearly fifty years ago.” Gilbert found evidence in town reports that a third one was built in 1896; it was used until 1951.

In 1892, Kingsbury said, there were five original schoolhouses still standing, a 70-year-old one in the Pierce or Hallowell District (which is not on Gilbert’s list) and others in Districts 6 (Erskine, to Gilbert), 8, 10 (Coleman, on Legion Park Road, closed about 1926) and 16.

Main sources

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

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Palermo residents – Part 2

/0 Comments/in , , /by
by Mary Grow

In case readers have not had enough genealogical confusion, this article continues with information about Palermo’s first three school committee members, elected in January 1805, and their families. Christopher Erskine, Stephen Marden and Samuel (or Samual) Longfellow were leaders among Palermo’s early settlers.

Millard Howard wrote that Erskine was in Palermo by 1788. In 1803, he owned 200 acres, when most landowners who had dealt with the Kennebec Proprietors (including Longfellow and Marden) had 100 acres.

Howard called Erskine “one of the most prominent citizens.” His Turner Ridge lot included some of the town’s “best farm land”; by 1801, he “was running a tavern” there. Erskine was the man charged with convening the Jan. 9, 1805, town meeting at Robert Foye’s house. He was elected town treasurer, as well as a school committee member.

This Erskine was most likely the one named on line as Christopher Erskine III, born Feb. 27, 1761, in Alna (Find a Grave), or Feb. 27, 1763, in Pownalborough (FamilySearch).

Find a Grave says his first wife, married Jan. 2, 1789, in Wiscasset, was Sarah Elizabeth Dickey (born Aug. 12, 1766, in Palermo). They had five sons and one daughter (Find a Grave) or five sons and four daughters (FamilySearch).

Find a Grave says the last child was Abiel Wood Erskine, born in 1806. FamilySearch calls Abiel, born May 9, 1806, the youngest son and says the last child was Cynthia, born on Nov. 3, 1808. She married, had at least seven children and died in February 1894.

Sarah Dickey Erskine died Nov. 10, 1818, in Palermo.

According to Find a Grave, on June 20, 1806, Christopher took as his second wife Ruth (Cox) Erskine, widow of William Erskine (1752 – 1800), of Bristol. (Neither William nor Christopher is listed as the other’s brother in any source your writer found.)

Where did Sarah go? And what about Cynthia, allegedly born to Christopher and Sarah two years after Christopher married Ruth?

Ruth Cox was born July 21, 1757, according to WikiTree. She married first husband William in 1776. Between 1777 and 1798, they had two daughters and five (Find a Grave), eight (WikiTree) or nine sons (FamilySearch).

When Christopher married Ruth on June 20, 1806, WikiTree says four of her sons were young enough to be at home. William, born in 1792 (no month given), would have been about 14; Robert, born Jan. 3, 1795, was almost 11 and a half; and twins Jonas and James, born June 27, 1798, were eight.

On Christopher’s side, FamilySearch says seven of his children by Sarah were under 15 on June 20, 1806. John was born Jan. 31, 1792; Sarah, Feb. 19, 1794; Elizabeth, Nov. 3, 1795; Henry, Aug. 28, 1798 (making him two months younger than his twin step-brothers); Alexander, Feb. 7, 1801; Rebecca, April 18, 1803; and Abiel, May 9, 1806, six weeks before his father’s remarriage.

Did Ruth’s children come with her? Or had she, widowed, given them up to someone better able to care for them?

Did Christopher’s children stay with him and their stepmother? Or did some or all go with Sarah, wherever she went?

How did the 11 children and two adults blend, if they did?

* * * * * *

Also on that 1805 Palermo school committee was Stephen Marden, probably the Stephen Marden (or Stephen Marden, Jr.), born Sept. 13, 1771, in Chester, New Hampshire, son of a Stephen Marden born in 1736.

Howard quoted at length from an account by Stephen’s younger brother, John (born Feb. 15, 1779), which was reprinted in Alan Goodwin’s earlier Palermo history. John wrote that in 1781, in New Hampshire, his father was killed by a falling tree, leaving a widow and eight children; a ninth child was born in September.

John came to Great Pond Settlement in the District of Maine in January 1793, when he was 14. He worked with Stephen until he was 22, when he bought his own farm.

Milton Dowe, in his Palermo history, added a third brother, Benjamin (the one born Sept. 29, 1781, WikiTree says). Dowe wrote that about 1800, the “iron parts of a water wheel” were sent from New Hampshire to Augusta, whence the three brothers brought them to Palermo to power a saw and a machine to build hand rakes (which they sold for 25 cents each).

If dates are accurate, Stephen Marden came with his new bride: WikiTree says he married Abigail Black (born Oct. 29, 1768) in Chester on Jan. 1, 1793.

One WikiTree page lists two children of the marriage, a daughter named Mary, born Sept. 19, 1795, and a son named Albra, born about 1812. Both died in Palermo, Albra on Nov. 16, 1877, and Mary (by then the widow of John Spiller, by whom she had had nine children) on Sept. 3, 1878.

Find a Grave says Stephen and Abigail’s children were Benjamin, born Oct. 26, 1798, and Albra, born April 12, 1812. This site has photos of Benjamin and Albra’s gravestones in Palermo’s Smith cemetery.

Another WikiTree page says Stephen and Abigail had 11 children, starting with a son named Stephen.

(Perhaps a generational mix-up? Find a Grave says Stephen and Abigail’s son Albra and his wife Hannah had eight sons and three daughters, born between 1838 and 1859. The fourth son, born in 1847, was named Stephen.)

Howard wrote that when the Massachusetts legislature, in February 1802, approved a plan to reconcile the Palermo settlers with the Kennebec Proprietors who sold the settlers their land, Stephen Marden was one of three Palermo commissioners chosen to determine how much the settlers owed.

Voters at the Jan. 9, 1805, town meeting elected Marden a school committee member, constable and tax collector. In his discussion of the meeting, Howard called Marden “one of the most prominent resistance leaders,” apparently meaning resistant to the Proprietors and supportive of the settlers.

Marden died on Feb. 2 or Feb. 7, 1825, and his widow, Abigail, on Sept. 26, 1834, both in Palermo. They, and John and his wife Eunice, are buried in Palermo’s Dennis Hill Cemetery (Find a Grave lists no Benjamin there).

Find a Grave says Stephen and Abigail’s son Benjamin bought John Spiller’s farm on Marden Hill. (By combining lists from two sources, an imaginative reader can make John Spiller Benjamin’s brother-in-law, husband of Mary.)

This site says the younger Benjamin was a farmer, a blacksmith and a “practical wheelwright” (builder of wooden wheels). It calls him “a man of more than usual intelligence and looked up to by his neighbors, who bore for him the highest respect.”

Find a Grave credits this Benjamin Marden with an interest in town affairs and an active role in organizing the town’s first library, “the Palermo and China Social Library.” Howard called the library organizer Benjamin Marden, 2nd, and said the library, opened “around mid-century,” was “apparently at his home on Marden Hill.”

* * * * * *

At that Jan. 9, 1805, town meeting that made Samuel Longfellow a school committee member, he was also elected meeting moderator and one of Palermo’s first three selectmen.

Longfellow was born in Hampton, New Hampshire, in 1756. He and his younger brother, Stephen, born in 1760, came to Palermo in 1788, Howard said.

Find a Grave says they were second cousins, twice removed, of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Feb. 27, 1807 – March 24, 1882). Samuel served in the Revolutionary War from 1775 to 1779.

He married Mary Perkins (born July 5, 1759, in Kensington, New Hampshire) on March 28, 1779, in Kensington. Find a Grave names four children.

First was Mary “Polly,” born in 1781. In 1799 she married Samuel Fuller (1775 – 1853), by whom she had four daughters and a son between 1799 and 1820.

Second was Green, born Jan. 18, 1786, in Palermo. In 1805, Green married Sarah Jane Foy (1787 – 1848), with whom he had four sons and two daughters between 1809 and 1826 (Find a Grave) or eight sons and three daughters between 1806 and 1832 (Ancestry).

Find a Grave says Green had a second wife, Melinda Foster Fisher Palmer, born in Alna, Nov. 7, 1793. (Foster and Fisher were maiden names; her first husband had been John Palmer.) Melinda gave birth to a son and two daughters between 1826 and 1831; Find a Grave lists their last names as Palmer, not Longfellow (their names do not match the last three of Sarah’s children on the Ancestry list).

Find a Grave gives no marriage date for Green and Melinda, nor does it explain what happened to Sarah.

Howard wrote that in 1835, Green (maybe Green, Jr., born in 1811?) built Palermo’s District 2 schoolhouse, for $110. In March (1836?), district voters paid him $2 “for furnishing the room to keep school in the past winter.”

In 1847, two Longfellows, Green (probably Green, Jr.) and Dearborn (Green, Jr.’s brother, born in 1809), each had three students in the District 2 school.

Samuel and Mary’s third child was Jonathan Perkins Longfellow, born Dec. 15, 1795, in Palermo. Jonathan married Betsy Edwards (1799 – 1882); they had four sons (including another Samuel) between 1818 and 1837.

Fourth was Olive B., born in 1798. Find a Grave says she married twice. If dates are correct, her first husband, whom she married in 1841, was the Samuel Fuller who was her older sister Mary’s former husband. WikiTree says Mary died May 25, 1837.

Samuel died Jan. 3, 1853, and Olive married Capt. Edward Lawry, born in 1799. The Isleboro Historical Society’s on-line information says they married Dec. 2, 1853, in Searsmont.

Olive was Lawry’s second wife; his first was Pamelia W. Arnold (1804 – 1852), with whom he had two daughters and three sons in the 1830s and 1840s. The youngest son, Andrew, was listed in the 1870 census as a farmer in Searsmont, age 24 or 25, living with his father and stepmother.

* * * * * *

Two of Samuel and Mary’s granddaughters, Mary (Long­fellow) Fuller’s daughters, married back into the Longfellow family. The second Fuller daughter, Louisa (born July 6, 1807), married Dearborn Longfellow, son of Green Longfellow and Sarah Jane Foy, in 1834 (according to FamilySearch, which gives her name as Leorina Louise Fuller).

Her older sister, Mary Louise (born Nov. 30, 1799), on May 15, 1823, married Nathan Longfellow, son of Samuel Longfellow’s brother and sister-in-law Stephen and Abigail.

Stephen Longfellow was born in 1760 in Hampton, New Hampshire. He and Abigail (born in 1766) were married May 3, 1785, in Newcastle; they had four sons and eight daughters, starting with Mary, born Aug. 10, 1785. (Mary was the Longfellow readers met briefly last week, who married John Cain.)

John and Mary’s son Page Cain/Kane, born Jan. 21, 1834, married Martha Longfellow on March 2, 1861. Martha was another of Samuel and Mary (Perkins) Longfellow’s granddaughters, son of Jonathan, born in Palermo in 1795, and his wife Betsy (Edwards).

Stephen Longfellow died Jan. 31, 1834, and his brother, Samuel Longfellow, died Feb. 3, 1834. Stephen’s widow, Abigail, died May 13, 1843; Samuel’s widow, Mary, died April 6, 1849.

Samuel and Mary are buried under the same stone in Palermo’s Old Greeley Corner Cemetery, which also has graves of several descendants. Your writer did not find a burial location for Stephen or Abigail.

Main sources

Dowe, Milton E., History Town of Palermo Incorporated 1804 (1954).
Howard, Millard, An Introduction to the Early History of Palermo, Maine (second edition, December 2015).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Palermo early settlers

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Dennis Hill Cemetery

by Mary Grow

As a break from trying to figure out which schoolhouse was in which end of town, your writer decided to profile some of the people mentioned in last week’s article about Palermo schools, starting with a sampling of the town’s first residents.

The result is the following tantalizing tangle of contradictions and unanswered questions.

* * * * * *

Milton Dowe, in his 1954 Palermo history, identified Stephen Belden, Sr., as the first settler, around 1778, and his son, Stephen, Jr., born in 1779, and daughter, Sally, born in 1780, as the first male and female children born in what became Palermo

Millard Howard, in his 2015 history, cited the “legend” Dowe repeated, including the 1778 approximate date. This “legend,” from an earlier history, says Belden came on horseback with a Bible under his arm.

But, Howard said, more likely Belden arrived in 1769, with his wife, Abigail (Godfrey) Belden and son Aaron. The couple had a second son, Stephen, Jr. (Howard calls him the first white child born in Palermo, in 1770) and four daughters.

The Find a Grave website says the Stephen Belden who settled in Palermo was born Feb. 14, 1745, in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, and died in Palermo June 15, 1822. Abigail was born in 1751 and died in 1820.

WikiTree offers significantly different information. This source lists Abigail as Abigail (Ramsdell) Belding, mother, rather than wife, of the Stephen Belding, or Belden or Beldon, born May 14, 1745, in Northfield in Hampshire Province, Massachusetts.

Wikitree says the 1745 Stephen who came to Palermo had two wives, Mary Mitchell (no information but the name) and Priscilla Oliver (born around 1745), whom he married May 19, 1768, in Georgetown. Priscilla bore him four children: Stephen V (implying the 1745 Stephen was Stephen IV, not Stephen, Sr.), Aaron, Priscilla and Abigail.

Wikitree says Stephen V (aka Stephen, Jr.) was born in 1769 in Lincoln, Massachusetts (perhaps Lincoln County in the Province of Maine, which then included Palermo?). Aaron was born in Lincoln on Feb. 23, 1770 (instead of before 1769). Priscilla was born about 1785 in Fairfax (Maine? but Albion did not become Fairfax until 1804); a note on the website says her information might not be correct. Abigail was born May 27, 1786, in Gardiner.

FamilySearch adds to WikiTree’s list three more Belden daughters: Sarah, born in 1775; Betsey, born April 4, 1776; and Susannah, born May 27, 1785, in Gardiner. This site agrees Priscilla was born in 1785 (no month or day listed), allegedly in Albion. Stephen IV, age 40, and Priscilla, age 34, are named as the parents of Priscilla and Susannah. (Twins plus wrong information would be one explanation.)

Howard said Betsy married surveyor Paul Chadwick, shot by an irate resident on Sept. 8, 1809, as he tried to survey for the Kennebec Proprietors during the so-called Malta War (see the March 7, 2024, issue of The Town Line). FamilySearch says her husband was Lot Chadwick, whom she married in Vassalboro Sept. 25, 1795, and by whom she had at least five sons and three daughters.

Howard wrote that Stephen, Sr., did not choose his Palermo homestead on the shore of Sheepscot Great Pond, as many others did, perhaps because he was a squatter and didn’t want the Kennebec Proprietors’ agents to find him. Instead, he built a log cabin “where Robert and Susie Potter raised their family in the later twentieth century.”

In 1794, Howard said, he relocated to near Belden Pond, in the eastern part of town. Aaron lived nearby for a while after his father moved; he moved again within Palermo in 1801 and in 1816 went to Ohio and became a minister.

Howard wrote that Stephen Belden – probably Stephen, Jr. or V, not first settler Stephen born in 1745 – was a private in Captain Moses Burleigh’s militia company, which spent a week in Belfast in September, 1814, in case the British attacked. There was no attack, but, Howard wrote, by making the march the man qualified as “veterans of the War of 1812.”

In 1835, Stephen, Jr., was on the District 6 school building committee; in 1847, that district’s school enrollment included 10 young Beldens, children of James, John and Stephen, Jr. (Were James and John Stephen, Jr.’s otherwise-unmentioned brothers? Or cousins?)

Enough other Beldens stayed in the area so that Howard wrote many 21st-century Palermo residents could trace their families back to Stephen and Abigail.

Palermo officials established the town’s first two cemeteries, Greeley’s Corner and Dennis Hill, in 1807, Howard said. By 1904, he said, the Dennis Hill cemetery was so badly maintained that a centennial speaker named D. W. Abbott complained, and reminded his audience that Stephen Belden was buried there, “in an unmarked grave.”

Embarrassed listeners promptly raised $100 and pledged another $100 for improvements.

Find a Grave lists two Beldens in Palermo’s Dennis Hill cemetery: Stephen, Sr. (Feb. 14, 1745 – June 15, 1822) and Abigail (Godfrey) (1751 – 1820). The website has photos of Stephen and Abigail’s gravestones.

And Priscilla?

* * * * * *

John Cain, listed by Dowe as an early settler who fathered 18 children, was born Feb. 15, 1764, in Augusta, son of Walter Cain and “Mrs. W. Cain” (FamilySearch); or April 15, 1765 (Find a Grave). On August 10, 1809, in Montville, he married Mary Longfellow, born in Palermo Aug. 10, 1785.

Mary was the daughter of Stephen (1760-1844) and Abigail (Greely) Longfellow (1766 – 1843). The Ancestry website offers Kane as an alternate spelling of her married name.

FamilySearch and Ancestry say Cain was Mary’s second husband. The first was Daniel Keaton (1755 – 1815, per Ancestry, or 1780 -1809, per FamilySearch; which says on a different page that he died “before 1809”).

FamilySearch offers Keaten or Caton as alternative names, the latter from the 1850 census, which said he lived in Augusta. This site says he and Mary were married about 1803 and had at least one daughter (Mary, 1804 – 1878) and one son (Miles, 1807 – 1865).

The Ancestry website lists three of John and Mary Cain’s children, Jacob, Sr. (1809 – 1897); Jonathan L. (1819 – 1897; Jonathan Sam, to FamilySearch); and Martha G. (1826 – 1880)

FamilySearch lists six sons and four daughters, all apparently born in Palermo. The first was Jacob L. Cain, Sr., born Nov. 5, 1809. This birth was less than three months after the wedding; if Daniel Keaton died in, rather than before, 1809, Jacob could have been his son, not John Cain’s.

John and Mary’s last son, FamilySearch says, was Page, born in 1824. Daughter Martha was born in 1826, and the couple’s last child, Eunice L., on Oct. 3, 1828 (when her father was 64 and her mother 43, FamilySearch says).

Your writer found no list with 18 children.

(Then there is the Geni website, which says Daniel Keaton married Mary Keaton-Cain. It lists six stepsons, four with the last name Cain and two Kanes, and four stepdaughters by their married last names. All were born after 1809.)

John Cain died Feb. 13, 1838, and Mary died Feb. 25, 1865, FamilySearch says. Both are buried in Palermo’s Cain Cemetery.

Find a Grave lists 17 Cains buried in this graveyard.

Cain Cemetery

* * * * * *

Another early settler with a large family, according to Dowe, was Amasa Soule, who he said fathered 13 sons and daughters.

Howard said Soule arrived from Duxbury, Massachusetts, in 1784, by way of Alna.

The website Geni offers Amasa A. Soule, youngest son of Capt. Ezekiel and Hannah (Delano) Soule. This source says Amasa A. was born “before August 15, 1748” in Duxbury and died in Palermo Aug. 30, 1852 (soon after his 104th birthday). There is no information about a wife or child.

Other websites offer Amasa Soule, born Nov. 2, 1761, in Duxbury, Massachusetts, or Woolwich, Maine, and died Aug. 30, 1852 or 1853, in Palermo.

This Amasa Soule married Susannah (or Susanna, on FamilySearch) Holbrook on Sept. 27 or Oct. 15, 1783, in Wiscasset. Susannah was born Nov. 17, 1759, in Pownal, and died in an unspecified Maine location in 1860.

FamilySearch lists 13 children; Find a Grave lists eight; WikiTree lists four. Here is the grand total:

— Ezekiel, born April 9, 1784, in Palermo (FamilySearch only)
— Daughter Abiah or Abial, born Oct. 8, 1785, in Woolwich (Find a Grave) or Palermo (FamilySearch).
— Joseph, born May 20, 1787, in Woolwich (Find a Grave) or Palermo (FamilySearch).
— Susan, born in 1789, FamilySearch says in Palermo.
— Hannah, born in Palermo March 14, 1791, and died there in November 1871, according to all three sites.
— Lucy, born Oct. 18 or 28, 1794.
— Nancy, Lucy’s twin by birthdate.
— William, born June 25, 1799; WikiTree says he was born in Winslow, Find a Grave says he was born in Palermo (and his wife’s parents were Winslow residents). FamilySearch says he was born in Massachusetts (perhaps confusing Lincoln County, Province of Maine, with Lincoln, Massachusetts).
— Samuel Riley, according to all three sites born Feb. 27, 1800, in Palermo, and died there Aug. 31, 1864.
— Richard (FamilySearch only), born Dec. 31, 1803.
— John (FamilySearch only), born about 1805, FamilySearch says in England, while listing his parents as Amasa and Susanna Soule.
— Eliza, according to WikiTree and FamilySearch, born in Palermo Sept. 28, 1805; or Ezekiel, according to Find a Grave, birth date unknown, died Jan. 5, 1866.

WikiTree says Eliza was born a Soule, on Sept. 28, 1805, and died in 1880. FamilySearch agrees and says she is buried in Palermo’s Smith Cemetery.

Find a Grave lists 15 Soules in that cemetery, including Amasa and Susannah; and Eliza Marden Soule, born Sept. 28, 1802, died Aug. 24, 1880; widow of Amasa and Susannah’s son, Samuel Riley.

Find a Grave says Ezekiel was the last Soule child, and Eliza was his wife. There are gravestones for each in Palermo’s Perkins cemetery; Eliza’s stone identifies her as Ezekiel’s wife.

FamilySearch adds a thirteenth child and seventh daughter:

— Mattie, born in 1807 (no additional information).

There is almost no information on line except dates of birth and death, marriages and children – nothing about occupations, for example. FamilySearch says Amasa Soule “registered for military service in 1779,” and was living in Lincoln in 1820. The latter information probably comes from a census record; your writer suspects the word means Lincoln County, not the town of Lincoln.

In 1847, Howard wrote in his Palermo history, Joseph Soule had six children attending Palermo’s Foye school on Level Hill Road, and Ezekiel had one child enrolled. That year, too, eight of Samuel’s children were on the Carr’s Corner school roster.

Howard listed Ezekiel, John and Joseph Soule among the militiamen who qualified as veterans of the War of 1812 by marching to Wiscasset and back in September 1814.

Main sources

Dowe, Milton E., History Town of Palermo Incorporated 1804 (1954).
Howard, Millard, An Introduction to the Early History of Palermo, Maine (second edition, December 2015).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Palermo elementary schools

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Foye School House, in North Palermo

by Mary Grow

Note: parts of this article were previously published in the Oct. 7, 2021, issue of The Town Line.

The Town of Palermo’s first settlers arrived around 1776 or 1777. By 1778 the area was called Great Pond Settlement, because, Milton Dowe explained in his 1954 history, it was “near the Sheepscot Great Pond,” now 1,193-acre Sheepscot Lake (the third largest in Waldo County, according to state data last reviewed in 1992).

Dowe and Millard Howard, in his 2015 history, each named some of Palermo’s early settlers, starting with Stephen Belden.

Many early settlers had large families, Dowe said (implying a need for schooling). He wrote that John Cain had 18 children (FamilySearch says he and Mary [Longfellow] Cain had at least six sons and four daughters); Amasa Soule, 13 (Find a Grave lists eight born to Susannah [Holbrook] Soule); Jacob Worthing, 12 (FamilySearch agrees, listing nine sons and three daughters of Jacob and Elizabeth [Healey] Worthing).

Howard named Jacob as one of three Worthings who settled in Palermo in the 1780s. Jacob chose what is now the Branch Mills area; Howard wrote that he had so many descendants that in the 19th and 20th centuries Branch Mills Village, both Palermo and China sides, was full of Worthings.

Dowe mentioned plantation meetings beginning in 1801, but said nothing about appropriations. The Massachusetts legislature incorporated the Town of Palermo on June 23, 1804; the first town meeting was not held until Jan. 9, 1805, in Robert Foye’s house.

Town officials elected at that 1805 meeting included a three-man school committee: Christopher Erskine Sr., Samuel Longfellow and Stephen Marden.

Neither voters nor the committee did anything about providing school buildings right away. Until 1811, Dowe wrote, schools “were kept in dwelling houses and such places as were available.”

In 1811, Palermo voters created seven school districts. Dowe and Howard wrote six schoolhouses were built by 1812, District 7’s in 1822 (in a “more recently settled area” in East Palermo, Howard explained).

The Center school (District 3) was at the intersection of Nelson Lane and Marden Hill Road (north of Route 3, on a contemporary on-line map the intersection of Nelson Lane with Marden Hill, Belden Woods and Parmenter roads). This building was the only more-than-one-room school in Palermo until 1953, Howard said; Dowe said it had “two rooms with fireplaces.”

The town rented one room, for three dollars a year, and town meetings were held there.

Howard wrote that by 1843, residents of District 3 were tired of hosting town meetings. The 14-article warrant for their April 15 district meeting included articles about either repairing the schoolhouse or building a new one (and if a new one, what kind and other details).

Art. 8 asked if district voters would tell their agent to tell the selectmen “that we forbid them notifying any more Town meetings to be held at the center school house.”

“The eviction passed,” Howard reported. Voters funded Palermo’s first town house in 1844.

District 7, in southeastern Palermo, Howard said, was named Glidden; two of James L. Glidden’s children were enrolled in 1847. In 1857, Glidden was the district agent. Later District 7 agents included Asa Boynton, who could not write his own name; he signed documents with an X.

District 7 had several schoolhouses in different locations, Howard said. On Nov. 2, 1832, district voters raised $157.06 to build one of them. (Dowe wrote that the first District 7 schoolhouse was built in 1822; either it was a temporary building, or there was a fire or other calamity, or one of the dates is wrong.) District 7 apparently closed down in 1891.

In 1829, a major reorganizations added Districts 9, 10 and 11. Districts 9 and 10 were near Branch Mills; District 11 was in southwestern Palermo.

District 12, created in the early 1830s, was in North Palermo near the Freedom town line. Howard said it was small – 12 students in 1847 – and its leaders “probably rented space in a dwelling house” rather than building a schoolhouse. In 1860, families were “set off” to Freedom and the district abolished.

By the spring of 1837 there was a District 13, with a schoolhouse at Carr’s Corner, on North Palermo Road. Howard said it was “carved out” of earlier districts 3 and 4.

Dowe quoted from records of a March 22 district meeting, at which voters agreed to hire a schoolmaster instead of a schoolmistress; authorized Eli Carr to board him for a dollar a week (with the provision that if the schoolmaster didn’t want to stay at Carr’s, he could “take the money and board where he pleases”); and awarded the bid for 2.5 cords of firewood to Sumner Carr “at $2.17.”

District 15 was another small one near Freedom, organized in the late 1830s. Howard doubted there was ever a schoolhouse. There were five students in 1847, four in 1849; in 1860 this district’s families, like District 12’s, were transferred to Freedom.

The District 17 schoolhouse, in East Palermo, was the last to be built, after, Howard said, families in the northern part of District 7 couldn’t persuade the rest of district voters to “locate the school nearer to them” and got a separate district approved.

Paul Ames built this schoolhouse. Howard said the building was planned at a May 18, 1857, meeting in Ames’ cooper’s shop, and he was paid $177.50. Additionally, Edward Bradstreet earned $6.50 “for building little house.” This was one of three schools still in operation when Palermo Consolidated School opened in 1953.

The District 17 building served for years as “a sort of community house,” Dowe said. It hosted prayer meetings; the Young People’s Christian Endeavor group; funerals; singing, writing and spelling schools; and various entertainments, including listening to early phonographs (for an admission fee). Sheepscot Lake Grange was organized there (on-line sources say in 1905).

* * * * * *

Palermo schoolhouses, like other towns’, tended to be in local population centers. Dowe wrote No. that by 1859 there was a school at the southern end of Sheepscot Lake, on or near Turner Ridge Road, in what he described as a settlement with numerous houses, a store, at least three mills and a shop that made plow beams. (An on-line source describes a plow beam as the wooden or metal connector between a plow and the harnesses of the oxen or horses pulling the plow.)

In 1860, Howard said, Greeley’s Corner, a/k/a Center Palermo (on what is now Route 3 a short distance west of the head of Sheepscot Lake), and Carr’s Corner (the intersection of North Palermo and Marden Hill roads, in the northern part of town) each had a schoolhouse, a church and at least one store.

Dowe quoted from the 1896 town report a total of $587.70 for two new buildings, at Carrs (Carr’s) Corner and Western Ridge. The first cost $250, the second $245, plus seats, freight, “transportation and setting up.”

“Stove and funnel for new houses” was a separate item, $14.10. Voters also approved $5 for “Repairs on house at Center.”

Howard explained that “Palermo never had 17 districts operating simultaneously”; nor did every district open its school every term.

Instead, some districts’ leaders and residents did what Howard called “moving school:” two districts would agree to alternate school terms, with as many students as possible in the non-operating district getting to the other district’s school. In practice, Howard said, the older students were the ones likely to walk the greater distance; and they seldom attended a summer term, because they were needed on the farm.

The practice of sending students to out-of-district schools crossed town lines. Howard said Palermo students in Districts 10 and 11, adjoining China, sometimes went to the closest China schoolhouse.

Like other central Kennebec Valley historians, Howard commented on inadequate building maintenance, untrained teachers and the multiplicity of textbooks. He wrote that each district teacher “had an average of 15-20 students, probably no two of whom were at the same level in the same book in any subject.”

Nevertheless, he said, for the students who attended regularly “the most important basic literacy goals were achieved.”

In his memoir, Palermo Things That I Remember in 1996, Dowe located one schoolhouse beside “an old chestnut tree” on property once owned by a Loder family, opposite where John Scates lived in the 1990s. There was a small granite quarry nearby, Dowe said.

In this book, Dowe, born in 1912, wrote that when he was in school, each student had to provide a “tablet” (paper, not a 21st-century electronic device) and pencils. The tablet cost five cents; a pencil cost a penny without an eraser, two cents with an eraser.

Dowe’s memoir mentions school transportation, again without a date, but obviously in pre-automobile times. (Dowe wrote that he saw his first automobile around 1916.) He named two men who ran “school teams.”

Ed Thurston used “a double-seated wagon” when roads were bare and “a pung with sleds” when roads were snowy. (A pung is a sleigh with a box-shaped body.) George Freeman “had the same equipment but it was covered and had curtains on the sides that could be rolled up.”

Dowe’s account is confusing, because the three roads he named as served by these drivers are in China, not in Palermo.

Dowe added that some Palermo students drove their own teams to school; the horses spent the days in a nearby barn. Transportation was not provided for students within a mile of a schoolhouse.

* * * * * *

Maine’s 1873 Free High School Act apparently was not implemented immediately in Palermo. Howard wrote that the first high-school courses were offered in 1882; by 1888, eight Palermo school districts offered them. He explained, “This meant that these districts were occasionally providing a ten-week high school term. There was no fixed course of study.”

Howard found an 1893 Kennebec Journal reference to a free high school at Carr’s Corner (District 13, on North Palermo Road) ending a term at the end of April.

Dowe mentioned the Academy Hall, on the China side of Branch Mills Village, described in the Jan. 23 account of China high schools as Barzillai Harrington’s high school. (For more information on Mr. Harrington, please see the Oct. 7, 2021, issue of The Town Line.)

Andrew Pottle, Palermo historian whose articles appeared in the Sept. 12 and Sept. 19, 2024, issues of The Town Line, told your writer that two of the high school principals were Charles Erskine and Lydia Kitchin.

Main sources

Dowe, Milton E., History Town of Palermo Incorporated 1804 (1954).
Dowe, Milton E. Palermo, Maine Things That I Remember in 1996 (1997).
Howard, Millard, An Introduction to the Early History of Palermo, Maine (second edition, December 2015).

Websites, miscellaneous.