Around the Kennebec Valley: Augusta education – Part 1

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Cony Female Academy

by Mary Grow

The town – now city – of Augusta was created on Feb. 20, 1797, when the Massachusetts legislature, responding to a local petition, divided the town of Hallowell.

The downriver third remained Hallowell. The upriver two-thirds became Harrington, renamed Augusta on June 9, 1797.

Harrington lasted long enough for voters to hold their first town meeting on April 3, where they raised $400 for education (and $1,250 for highways and another $300 for all other responsibilities).

In that first year, Captain Charles Nash wrote in his chapters on Augusta in Kingsbury’s 1892 Kennebec County history, Augusta officials re-created the eight school districts they inherited from Hallowell. Reflecting the current population distribution, numbers 1 and 2 were on the east side of the Kennebec and the other six across the river.

The traditional three-man district school committees continued, and in addition, Nash said, members of a seven-man town committee were expected “to visit schools,” presumably as overseers.

“This action was twenty-seven years in advance of statute legislation, and nearly a quarter of a century before Maine became a state and required it by law,” Nash commented.

A ninth school district was created in 1803.

James North wrote in his 1870 history of Augusta that 1803 was also the year that an “association of citizens” banded together to start the first post-primary school in town, buying shares to fund a brick grammar school building in the northwest corner of the intersection of Bridge and State streets, on the west side of the Kennebec.

(Bridge Street goes up the hill from the west end of the Calumet Bridge and intersects State Street at a right angle several blocks north of the state capitol complex. State Street roughly parallels the river.)

The building was finished in 1804, North said, and the association hired a Mr. Cheney (not further identified) as “preceptor” for a year, at a salary of $450. Courses included what Nash labeled “dead languages” (Greek and Latin).

Students were shareholders’ children, or children to whose parents a shareholder had “let” a share. Each share admitted one student.

North wrote that the school “flourished” until the building burned on March 16, 1807.

(Disastrous fires were not uncommon; in the next few pages North mentioned the Feb. 11, 1804, burning of a large Augusta building in which an early newspaper, the Kennebec Gazette was printed; the Jan. 29, 1805 (Nash said 1804), burning of the building that housed Hallowell Academy; the Jan. 8, 1808, burning of two adjacent blacksmith shops on Water Street; and the March 16, 1808, burning of the jail [a fire set by an inmate].)

By 1810, North wrote, Augusta was thriving; population and wealth had increased, and $1,000 was raised for schools (also $1,500 for roads and another $1,500 for “Poor and other necessary charges”).

Two years later, due to the War of 1812 with Great Britain, the Kennebec Valley economy was in distress. North talked about prices rising and stores closing, but he said nothing about the effect on education or other tax-dependent activities.

* * * * * *

North’s next educational reference was to 1815, when Judge Daniel Cony (see box) started building what looked like a house – but, North said, people asked why he wanted another house there? – at the intersection of Bangor and Cony streets on the east side of the Kennebec.

Adding a tower to the structure led to surmise that it was intended as a meeting-house for worship – and why did the Judge want a meeting-house?

When “seats and desks began to go in,” people concluded the building was a school. They were right; Judge Cony announced it would house Cony Female Academy. On Christmas Day, 1815, the Judge gave the building and lot to five men he had chosen as trustees; they organized themselves as a board on Jan. 5, 1816, and opened the school that spring.

A picture of the building on line (at stcroixarchitecture.com) shows a three-story main block with a steeply pitched roof that provided space for a fourth floor. ­­­On each front corner was a two-story ell with third-story windows under its pitched roof.

The center of the front was a square tower topped with two levels of lattice-work under another steep roof two stories above the main roof. On the front of the base of the tower, a single-story entrance had another peaked roof, an arched door and two side windows.

The roofs were a medium blue, a contrast to the pale beige bricks. Medium-brown chimneys rose higher than the rooftops on the back of the main building and the side of each ell; the color matched the trim on the gables.

As Cony directed, his Academy offered free education to “worthy” orphans and other girls younger than 16. It also accepted tuition-paying students. North wrote that income soon covered expenses, and by 1820 Cony Female Academy “had a sum of money on hand in excess of expenses.”

Meanwhile, on Feb. 10, 1818, the Massachusetts legislature approved a charter for the Academy. In June of that year, North wrote, Cony gave the trustees a bell for the building; “maps and charts” for classes; and 10 shares in the Augusta Bank. He directed them to use five-sixths of the income from the bank shares to educate orphans and the remainder to buy prizes – medals or books – for “meritorious pupils.”

Kingbury wrote that 50 girls were Academy students in 1825. Their tuition was $20 a year; board was $1.25 a week.

In February 1827, North said, the by-then-Maine legislature gave the Academy a half township farther north in Maine (after an 1826 charter amendment gave the legislature a role in adding to or limiting the trustees’ powers). In February 1832 the trustees sold the land for $6,000.

In 1827, a Bostonian named Benjamin Bussey donated land in Sidney, which the trustees sold for $500. That year, too, the trustees oversaw construction of a brick dormitory at the intersection of Bangor and Myrtle streets, two blocks north of the main building, which was still standing in 1870.

Another on-line site quoted an 1828 advertisement that listed courses offered: “orthography, reading and writing, arithmetic, grammar, rhetoric and composition, geography, History and Chronology, Natural History, Natural Philosophy and Astronomy, use of the globes, Drawing Maps, and also Drawing, penciling, and painting, and a variety of needlework.”

The school’s library, which in 1829 had 1,200 volumes, was “considered by some historians to be the best in the area at the time,” the stcroixarchitecture.com writer said.

The Academy’s second classroom building, after the school outgrew the original one, was the nearby former Bethlehem church at the intersection of Cony and Stone streets (built in the summer of 1827). The Academy trustees voted to buy it in November 1844 for $765; it, too was still standing in 1870. (They sold the original Academy building for $500, to Rev. John H. Ingraham, who made it into a house.)

North listed the Academy’s preceptresses and preceptors (teachers), usually one but occasionally two, over the years, starting with Hannah Aldrich in 1816 and ending with Mrs. Arthur Berry in 1857, the last year of operation. A minority were men.

Daniel Cony

(See also the Feb. 23, 2023, issue of The Town Line.)

Daniel Cony

Daniel Cony (Aug. 3, 1752 – Jan. 21, 1842) was born in Stoughton, Massachusetts, south of Boston. He studied medicine in Marlboro, west of Boston, under Dr. Samuel Curtis.

When the British marched from Boston to Lexington on April 19, 1775, Cony was practicing medicine in Tewksbury, north of Boston (Find a Grave says Shutesbury, half-way across the state and therefore likely an error), and was a lieutenant in the local company of Minutemen. North reported that he was awakened at 2 a.m. by a knock on his door and the shouted message “Ameri­can blood has been spilled and the country must rally.”

Cony and the rest of the company were on the way to Cambridge by sunrise; North did not say what they did there.

Later in the war, Cony served as adjutant in an infantry regiment (the 6th New Hampshire, according to Find a Grave) under General Horatio Gates, at Saratoga, New York, where, North wrote, he once led soldiers through an area commanded by a British battery to assist another company. He was present when British General John Burgoyne surrendered his army to Gates on Oct. 17, 1777.

Meanwhile, on Nov. 14, 1776, Cony had married Dr. Curtis’s niece, Susanna Curtis (May 4, 1752 – Oct. 25, 1733), in Sharon, Massachusetts. He left the army and in 1778 he and Susanna and their first daughter, Nancy (born in 1777), came to Hallowell, where his father, Deacon Samuel Cony, had moved the previous year and where Nancy died the year they arrived.

The couple had four more daughters (no sons): Susan (1781 -1851), Sarah (1784 – 1867), Paulina (1787 -1857) and Abigail (1791 -1875). All married local men.

Historians generally agree that Judge Cony created the Academy in appreciation of his own daughters and, since by 1816 all four were past school age, as a charitable exercise.

The family lived on the east side of the Kennebec. North said their second house, downhill from “the hospital” (the insane asylum) was still standing in 1870. Their third one, built around 1797 on Cony Street, burned in 1834 and was succeeded by “the present brick edifice on the same lot,” where Cony lived the rest of his life.

Cony practiced medicine in the area, was a member of the Massachusetts Medical Society and corresponded with other doctors, North said. In 1825-26, he was one of the founders of Augusta’s Unitarian Church.

He served as “representative, senator, and counsellor [member of the executive council]” in the Massachusetts legislature. Before 1820, he held judgeships in Kennebec County, Massachusetts. He was one of Augusta’s three delegates to the October 1819 Maine constitutional convention, and after statehood, was a Maine Judge of Probate until 1823, when he “resigned by reason of age.”

North wrote that until 1806, Cony frequently moderated Hallowell and Augusta town meetings. In 1830, after some years of not even attending them, he showed up – and was immediately and unanimously elected moderator. The meeting record showed a vote of thanks for “the able, impartial, and dignified manner in which he discharged the arduous duties of this day as moderator” at the age of 77 years and seven months.

In addition to creating Cony Female Academy, North wrote that Cony was “instrumental” in getting legislative charters for Hallowell Academy in 1791 and Bowdoin College in 1794. He was a trustee of Hallowell Academy and a Bowdoin overseer. He supported public education “by the exercise of a constant and healthful influence in its favor.”

Find a Grave displays Cony’s short death notice in the Augusta Age, published the day after his death. It mentions his Revolutionary service and goes on to describe him as a man who had “discharged various and important civil trusts, and was long and honorably connected with the settlement and growth of this section of the State.”

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.

Around the Kennebec Valley: Education in 18th & 19th centuries, Part III

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Hallowell Academy

by Mary Grow

Hallowell & Supply Belcher

The local responsibility for public education made it one of the first topics for voters in each newly-organized 18th and 19th century Maine town. Frequently, historians wrote, it was not easy for people in a low-cash economy to raise money to pay a teacher, provide instructional materials and maintain a building.

(Nor to fund other civic duties. For example, James North wrote in his 1870 history of Augusta that residents of Hallowell [from which Augusta separated in February 1797] sent no representative to the Massachusetts Great and General Court from 1775 until May 1783. The reason, he said, was probably the cost, which the town had to bear; and the incentive in 1783 was a newly- created system of fining unrepresented towns.

(Similarly, North said, taxes Maine towns owed to the Massachusetts government frequently went unpaid in whole or in part. In November 1784, the legislature authorized payment in commodities – beef, pork, wheat, oats, Indian corn, butter, cordwood, boards and tow cloth. Kennebec Valley goods were to be delivered at Bath.)

This and following articles will provide town-by-town information about Kennebec Valley voters’ early steps in creating local education systems, and about the systems they created, which differed considerably from contemporary public schooling.

One major difference, for most of the 19th century, was that towns were divided into school districts (which were frequently reorganized). Many town histories include lists of districts as of various dates, with their boundaries as presented at town meetings.

Most of the time, each district had its own one-room, or occasionally two-room, school building for primary-school students. Grammar schools, the equivalent of a modern high school, were less common.

District boundaries mostly ran from one landowner’s lot line to another’s, making it difficult for modern readers to locate a district. Sometimes there was a more helpful reference to a town line.

Another feature of these early schools that has changed markedly was the length of time students spent in them. Until late in the 19th century, there was no standardized school year; local voters and officials set their own school terms.

One on-line source pointed out that the school day was shorter, too, because students needed time to walk from home and back. This source said school might run only from about 9 a.m. to about 2 p.m.; and “homework,” despite its name, was done in school.

Textbooks were not standardized between towns or even within a town; they were not even available all the time.

Especially in the early years, teachers were likely to be young men – or, increasingly, women – who finished district school and came back to share their learning with younger children, without further training.

* * * * * *

Three of the towns covered in this series were incorporated on April 26, 1771: Augusta (as part of Hallowell), Vassalboro (including Sidney) and Winslow (including Waterville and Oakland).

North wrote that Hallowell’s first town meeting, held May 22, 1771, was primarily to elect town officials. Meeting again July 1, voters raised 16 pounds for “schooling” (and 36 pounds for laying out the first roads).

Captain Charles Nash wrote, in his Augusta chapters in Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history, that “the prompt provision for schools attests the loyalty of the settlers to the policy of their Puritan forefathers, who ordained (in 1647) that every town of fifty houses should provide for the instruction of its youth.”

At the 1772 annual meeting, voters defined “schooling and preaching” as necessities, and appropriated 15 pounds for both, Nash said (his sentence makes it impossible to tell whether he meant “both” or “each”).

Where the money came from is unclear; he wrote that 96 “persons who were assessed for taxes” paid almost 14 pounds. His examples suggested the local tax base in 1772 was similar to 2024’s: a merchant was assessed for his stock of goods, a landowner for his real estate.

(North thought it worth mentioning that as early as these 1772 meetings, inhabitants were charged a Massachusetts provincial tax, apportioned according to the value of each householder’s real and personal property.)

In 1773, North wrote, voters at the March annual meeting directed their selectmen to procure two months’ preaching plus as much more as they had money for, and only as much schooling as they had money for. They showed the same priority in 1774, appropriating 20 pounds for preaching, half that amount for schooling.

The Revolutionary War was hard on Hallowell, disrupting civil proceedings (North’s emphasis) and the economy (Nash’s). Many able-bodied men were off fighting, or had been killed or wounded. The currency depreciated drastically; military demands for men, money and supplies were onerous; state taxation increased. And the winter of 1780 was exceptionally long and cold.

In 1776, North said, Hallowell voters held only one town meeting, at which they elected town and county officials – “no money [was] raised for any purpose.” Not until the spring of 1778 did a Hallowell town meeting again raise money for education (and preaching and other necessary purposes).

In 1780, Hallowell voters held 10 meetings, North said. At the annual meeting in March, they raised 200 pounds for education (and the same for preaching), and in May added another 100 pounds.

The next year they repented: North quoted a March 12, 1781, vote saying “That the town if it think proper may raise money for preaching and schooling at some after meeting.” On July 10, voters approved 50 pounds for preaching; if they funded education in 1781, North failed to mention it.

Nash found that Hallowell created eight school districts in 1787, four on each side of the river, and divided 80 pounds equally among them for a year’s expenditures. Each district had its three-man school committee, charged to “provide schooling, and see that the money is prudently laid out.”

The east-side districts ran from the north boundary downriver into what is now the separate town of Chelsea. Three west-side districts ran from the Vassalboro (later Sidney) line downriver to take in present-day Gardiner; the fourth included the area west of those districts.

Nash commented that the districts were created two years before they were legally required. “Thus promptly the founders of the town lined off the yet untamed wilderness into educational preserves, for the benefit of their youth.”

In 1790, North wrote, town meeting voters were feeling so poor they raised no money for preaching; but they appropriated 100 pounds for education (and thrice that amount for roads).

* * * * * *

Hallowell had what Nash labeled “the first incorporated institution of learning in the district of Maine.” Hallowell Academy was chartered by the Massachusetts legislature in 1791 and opened May 5, 1795. (William B. Lapham, who wrote the Hallowell chapter in Kingsbury’s history, said Berwick Academy was chartered on the same day in 1791; an on-line source says the Governor of Massachusetts signed Hallowell Academy’s charter on Aug. 31, 1791.)

The legislature gave the Academy a land grant its 20 trustees could sell – Lapham said the area became Harmony, a Somerset County town northwest of Skowhegan.

The Academy’s first building burned in 1804. A new one opened in 1805, and in 1807 the trustees bought a Paul Revere bell for it, for $78, Nash wrote. This building was succeeded in 1839 by a brick one.

The Academy served area students. After Augusta separated from Hallowell, it had its own post-primary school from to 1804 to 1807 and again after 1836; in the interval, Nash wrote, “the Hallowell Academy, then in its full vigor, offered the youth of Augusta ample facilities for obtaining a good education.”

Lapham said after town high schools began to proliferate, the Academy lost students. It survived through the Civil War, and in 1873 became Hallowell Classical Institute, “a Congregational school and a feeder for Bowdoin College.”

An on-line Hallowell history site dates the Classical Institute to 1872 and says it offered a high school education for both sexes, with boarding and day students, until it closed in June 1888.

Hallowell’s early music composer: Supply Belcher

Supply Belcher

One of Hallowell’s 1787 district school committeemen was Supply Belcher, a man whose name historians of music will recognize as an early composer, choir director, singer, violinist and compiler of books of psalms.

Born in Stoughton, Massachusetts, on March 29, 1751, Belcher served in the Revolutionary War, marching to Cambridge with the Stoughton Minutemen to meet the British on April 19, 1775, and later becoming an army captain

After the war, he opened Belcher’s Tavern, in Canton, Massachusetts, where he hosted local musicians for informal concerts. In 1785, he and his family moved to Hallowell (why? your writer asks in vain); in 1791, they moved to Farmington, where he lived out his life.

Historians agree that he was popular and respected as a musician and as a local civic leader.

Wikipedia says Belcher “apparently led Farmington’s first choir,” which was well reviewed. A local newspaper nicknamed him “The Handel of Maine” after a 1796 concert featuring his Ordination Anthem, which the Wikipedia writer says partly resembled sections of Handel’s famous Messiah.

Another source, however, says, “Handel” was more likely used as a generic term to denote a well-known composer, not necessarily because Belcher’s and Handel’s music were similar.

In Farmington, Belcher taught school; served as selectman in 1796 and 1797, town clerk and tax assessor; was a justice of the peace and a magistrate; and represented the town in the Massachusetts General Court in 1798, 1799, 1801 and 1802.

Belcher married Margaret More in May 1775. One on-line source says they were married for 60 years and had 10 children; Find a Grave lists three sons and three daughters, born between 1780 and 1814.

According to this source, their first son, Samuel, died Oct. 27, 1814, at the age of 34. When they had another son on Dec. 8, 1814, they named him Samuel. The second Samuel lived until May 22, 1886.

Youngest daughter, Eliza, born in 1787, died when she was seven. The inscription on her gravestone reads: “My little mates when you come near / Look at my grave and drop a tear.”

Middle son, Hiram, born in 1790, went to Hallowell Academy, got a law degree and began practicing in Farmington in 1812. He was Farmington’s town clerk from 1814 to 1819, the town’s Maine state representative in 1822, 1829 and 1832 and its state senator in 1838 and 1839. From 1847 to 1849, he served in the U. S. House of Representatives as a member of the Whig party.

Belcher’s first published piece was in 1788; by 1819, he had published more than 70 works, mostly in the typical tunebook of the time that contained works by multiple composers. His only collection of his own works is titled The Harmony of Maine: An Original Composition of Psalm and Hymn Tunes (Boston, 1794). One critic referred to his “original and creative spirit in psalmody.”

Belcher died June 9, 1836, in Farmington. His widow died May 14, 1839.

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

EVENTS: Explore China’s transportation history at upcoming presentation

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Railroad owner Carson Peck and his party, on an inspection trip, around 1910 or so, in Windsor. (courtesy of the WW&F Museum)

by Eric W. Austin

The China Historical Society is pleased to invite the public to an engaging presentation on the history of the Wiscasset, Waterville & Farmington (WW&F) narrow gauge railway. This event, featuring local experts Bob Wallace and Phil Dow, from the Albion Historical Society, will take place next Thursday, October 17, at 7 p.m., at the China Baptist Church.

The presentation will offer a unique opportunity to explore the history of the narrow gauge railway that once played a vital role in connecting China to other towns in the region. Wallace will provide an in-depth look at the railway’s development and its significance to local communities, particularly the Weeks Mills station. In addition to the talk, attendees will be treated to a slideshow of historical photographs, offering a glimpse into the past and showcasing the railway’s impact on the area.

The WW&F railway, launched in the 1890s, was an essential transportation route for residents and businesses, ferrying people, produce, and goods between towns from Wiscasset to Windsor.

However, as automobiles and gasoline-powered trucks became more widespread in the mid-20th century, the narrow gauge railway could no longer compete, and it eventually ceased operations. While the tracks are no longer in use, the history of the railway continues to be an important part of the town’s heritage, offering a window into a time when the railroad was the lifeblood of rural Maine.

In addition to the historical insights provided by Bob Wallace, attendees will have the opportunity to see rare, archival photographs that capture the daily workings of the railway, including images of the Weeks Mills station and the railway’s trains.

The event is free and open to the public, although the China Historical Society encourages donations to support its ongoing work in preserving local history, and attendees are invited to consider joining the society as members. Annual membership dues are a modest $10, and these contributions help ensure that important stories like that of the WW&F railway continue to be shared with future generations.

The China Historical Society’s Narrow Gauge Railway Presentation will be held on Thursday, October 17, at 7 p.m., at the China Baptist Church, at the north end of the lake. Whether you’re a history enthusiast or simply curious about the role the railway played in shaping the town’s development, this event promises to be an informative and engaging look into a fascinating chapter in China’s past.

Attend the presentation to meet other members of the community who are passionate about preserving and sharing China’s rich heritage, and for more information about upcoming events, follow the China Historical Society Facebook page.

Around the Kennebec Valley: Education in 18th & 19th centuries

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by Mary Grow

Part 2
Maine Law

(Read Part 1 here.)

Massachusetts residents who moved to Maine brought with them the Massachusetts enthusiasm for education, as noted last week. Alma Pierce Robbins, in her 1971 Vassalboro history, quoted from a report coming, ironically, from an October 1785 Portland convention called to discuss separating Maine from Massachusetts.

The excerpt on education that Robbins chose said: “A general diffusion of the advantages of Education being essential to the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people; to promote this important objective the Legislatures are authorized, and it shall be their duty to require, the several Towns to make suitable provisions, at their own expense, for the support and maintenance of public schools.”

The report further called on legislatures (why the term is plural is not explained) to “encourage and suitably endow” more advanced educational institutions, “academies, colleges and seminaries of learning.”

Or, as Ernest Marriner developed the theme in his 1954 Kennebec Yesterdays, people living in scattered log cabins might not be immediately concerned about a schoolhouse; but the “inherent concern for education which has so long characterized New England people” led them to provide teachers – “[i]tinerant schoolmasters and itinerant preachers, sometimes in the same person” – for their children “even before they incorporated their towns.”

The 1820 Constitution of the new State of Maine recognized the importance of education in Article 8, and provided a minor state role, according to a summary by Richard R. Wescott and Edward O. Schriver in Judd, Churchill and Eastman’s Maine history.

Article 8 is titled Literature. It begins: “A general diffusion of the advantages of education being essential to the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people; to promote this important object, the Legislature are authorised, and it shall be their duty to require, the several towns to make suitable provision, at their own expense, for the support and maintenance of public schools.”

The state had a further duty to support higher education, by encouraging and “occasionally” endowing “academies, colleges, and seminaries of learning.” The legislature could regulate any college it supported financially.

Marriner said the first Maine legislature after separation from Massachusetts, in 1820, passed a law requiring every town, “regardless of size,” to raise 40 cents per resident and distribute the money among the school districts in town. (Massachusetts law, summarized last week, applied only to towns with at least 50 households.)

(Alice Hammond, in her history of Sidney, and Wilmot Brookings Mitchell, in his chapter on education in Louis Hatch’s Maine history, date this law to 1821 – perhaps they were thinking of the year it took effect?)

Forty cents per resident did not raise a lot of money, Marriner commented. In 1825, he wrote (quoting Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history), the state-wide average was $47.75 for each school district. “No wonder a whole year sometimes meant only eight or ten weeks,” he added.

Outside and inside a 19th century schoolhouse.

Hammond said the required minimum amount increased to 75 cents in 1833 and to $1 in 1868, but was reduced to 80 cents in 1872 and so remained for almost a century.

The 1821 law also provided for teacher certification, Mitchell said, with “special stress upon sound moral character.” As in Massachusetts, he wrote, the spelling book and the Bible went together; Maine legislators demanded, in addition to “reading, writing and arithmetic,” “piety and justice, sobriety and regard for truth.”

Mitchell said from the 1820s on, the town and each school district in it shared educational responsibility. Hammond implied that until the 1870s, the district was the main actor.

In Mitchell’s summary, districts, overseen by each district’s agent (or, Marriner said, sometimes a group of agents, a mini-committee, for larger districts), had multiple duties: siting, building and maintaining school buildings, providing supplies, choosing teachers, determining the length of school terms and the age at which the district students could start school.

Marriner leaned toward Hammond’s view that the district was the boss. “In the earlier days [of the 19th century] the districts were completely independent in operation and management,” he wrote.

Marriner said each district’s supervisor remained “responsible to no one except the residents of his district.” His list of district duties and responsibilities added one more to Mitchell’s: deciding “what text books should be used.”

After the 1820 state law, each district no longer had to raise district taxes. Instead, each got its share of the money town voters raised annually (not all towns’ voters consistently felt they could afford to obey the 40-cents-per-resident law).

Each district’s share was based on its population of four- to 21-year-olds. In 1829, Robbins said, state legislators added a requirement to send the state “a census of all persons between the ages of four and twenty-one years.”

Voters also elected a town school committee, not more than three nor more than seven men, Mitchell wrote.

This committee’s duties, he said, were to “examine and certificate the teachers, visit and inspect the schools, inquire into the discipline and proficiency of the pupils, choose the text-books, dismiss incapable teachers when they saw fit, and use their influence and best endeavor to secure good attendance.”

Marriner seemed to consider the town committee an exception. “The complete independence of the school districts, while common along the river, was not universal in the early years of the century,” he wrote.

The example of an exception he gave was Waterville, which he said in 1821 elected a superintending school committee “to which the district supervisors were partially responsible.”

Robbins referred to committees in Vassalboro in 1789, one for the east side of the Kennebec and one for the west side, that recommended to town meeting voters the number and boundaries of districts. She did not say whether these were standing or temporary committees.

By 1820, however, Vassalboro had what Robbins called a School Committee, with five members. She referred to school committee reports at town meetings in the 1820s.

Joyce Butler, in a later chapter in Hatch’s history, commented on the variety of local educational facilities under the district system’s “administrative fragmentation” and concluded, “In most cases schooling involved simple curriculums, imperfectly taught by ill-prepared teachers.”

(Future articles in this series will provide additional contradictory information about who was really in charge of town schools in Kennebec Valley towns in the 19th century.)

On textbooks, Marriner wrote that while the school district determined “what text books should be used,” it did not provide them: each student brought his or her own. Consequently, a teacher might teach a subject to students who were using different textbooks.

In the classroom, Marriner wrote, “There was no grading, and perhaps gifted pupils made faster progress than they do today. Practical economy forced the teacher to group the pupils into instructional classes, usually defined as primer, first reader, second reader, etc.”

In addition to the educational three Rs – reading, ‘riting and ‘rithemetic – Marriner said geography “was taught in every Maine school before 1825.” He offered a summary description of a popular textbook, Malte-Brun School Geography, whose editors, he said, thought the solar system too overwhelming for “the feeble intellect of childhood” and instead expanded from New England towns to the rest of the world. He quoted misinformation the book presented about other countries.

* * * * * *

State aid for education began in 1828, according to Butler. Mitchell said the 1828 law allocated money from sales of specified public lands to a permanent (state) school fund.

Mitchell and Hammond each mentioned an 1833 law setting aside a portion of a state tax on banks for education. They agreed that funding was consistently inadequate and teachers poorly paid.

The first attempt at state coordination Mitchell dated to 1843, an unsuccessful attempt to establish an appointed state “board of school commissioners,” one from each county. In 1846 a board was established; but it was, in Mitchell’s view, much weakened by an 1852 revision (because, he said, the 1846 board was too independent of politicians).

The legislature in 1854 created the position of state superintendent of schools, appointed by the governor and his council. Under a series of competent men, educational administration at the county and state level made progress in the 1860s and 1870s, in Mitchell’s view.

One example he gave, during the superintendency of Warren Johnson, of Topsham, was a late-1860s law setting up a system of county supervisors, empowered to inspect schools and record defects and to advise teachers and school officials. The supervisors and the state superintendent made up a State Board of Education.

The system helped “to eliminate inefficient teachers, to increase attendance, and to lengthen the school year,” Mitchell wrote. Also, he said, “It revealed too many shortcomings to satisfy some of the local school officials, and too many relatives of members of school boards had to step down from the teacher’s desk which they had failed to enoble if not to adorn.”

The legislature abolished the county system in 1873.

Another superintendent whom Mitchell commended was Nelson A. Luce, from Vassalboro. Mitchell said he was appointed Dec. 31, 1878; replaced in May, 1879, “for purely partisan reasons”; reappointed in February, 1880, and served through 1894.

Mitchell called Luce “quiet, tactful…a cogent reasoner and clear writer.” He included a list of reforms legislators approved under his guidance, beginning in 1881 when women were, for the first time, allowed to serve on school boards and as supervisors.

In 1887, new laws made children aged eight to 15 attend school at least 16 weeks a year (Butler said an 1875 law had required 12 weeks for nine- to 15-year-olds), and forbade anyone under 15 from working in a factory, except during school vacation, “unless he had attended school sixteen weeks the previous year.”

An 1885 law required adding to the curriculum “instruction in physiology and hygiene, with special reference to the effects of alcoholic drink.” An 1891 law made all public school teachers spend at least 10 minutes a week “teaching the principles of kindness to birds and other animals.”

An 1889 law required towns to provide textbooks. And in 1894, the legislature approved what Mitchell called Luce’s “most important work:” it abolished the “wasteful, inefficient district system [against which] for years he had argued long and hard.”

* * * * * *

Your writer had little luck finding a history of the Maine Department of Education on line, in either state or national sources. Wikipedia has two sentences; the first is, “From 1854-1913 the Department was mostly a one-person operation,” and the second refers to 1949.

Main sources

Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992)
Hatch, Louis Clinton, ed., Maine: A History (1919; facsimile, 1974)
Judd, Richard W., Churchill, Edwin A. and Eastman, Joel W., edd., Maine The Pine Tree State from Prehistory to the Present (1995)
Marriner, Ernest, Kennebec Yesterdays (1954)
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971)

Websites, miscellaneous

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Education in 18th & 19th centuries

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by Mary Grow

Introduction and Massachusetts law

One of the many questions your writer has not yet answered – and may never – is why, in the 1700s, people left comparatively comfortable homes in Massachusetts and similar places to come to the Kennebec Valley, on the Massachusetts frontier.

They got free or low-cost land, to be sure. But they had to turn a forest into a farm, and they had to bring with them or recreate everything they needed for daily living.

Their needs included, obviously, material things: food they had to kill or grow; water and things in which to carry, heat and store it; shelter; clothing; tools, household utensils and furniture; perhaps a horse, a cow, some chickens and shelter and food for them; and many more necessities and conveniences.

Many of the (few) surviving early diaries and letters describe the lack of such basic goods. James North commented in his well-researched history of Augusta, published in 1870, “It is difficult to conceive at this day how the settlers at this early period provided for their wants, which must have been few and scantily supplied.”

In the 1760s, he wrote, most families lived in log houses. There were no roads; people traveled on foot or horseback following marked trails through the woods.

Alice Hammond, in her 1992 Sidney history, painted a slightly different picture. She said by 1765, enough water-powered mills were operating on brooks running into the Kennebec so that some trails had been widened “to allow pack horses and even carts and sleds in season.” Nonetheless, she mentioned a man reported to have carried “a sack of corn on his back to a grist mill nine miles from his home.”

North said Samuel and William Howard, the first traders at the Cushnoc trading post (later the site of Fort Western, on the east bank of the Kennebec River in Augusta), “rendered them [the settlers] valuable services in exchanging their few commodities, which consisted of the products of the waters and the forest, for the necessaries of life.”

The settlers offered wood (including shingles), fish, moose hides and furs. The Howards provided “pork, corn, flour, shoes,” molasses, a spelling book and many other such items, “with a liberal quantity of liquors which were freely used at that day.”

Hammond added ashes to the list of settlers’ products; traders converted them to potash that was shipped to Europe. Potash had many uses, including as fertilizer and in making textiles, glass and soap.

As late as 1784, North wrote that Hallowell assessors felt a need to explain the difference between the town’s population – 682 white, 10 blacks – and the number of “dwelling houses:” 38. The assessors wrote that most families were still living in their original log cabins, which were not worth assessing for taxes.

“At most there are not above twenty houses in the town that are any ways comfortable or convenient,” in these men’s opinion.

There was also a need for the amenities of society, which settlers translated into religion, government and – in New England, not necessarily in other colonies – education.

Referring to Massachusetts and Maine, most historians call the lowest-level schools primary, elementary or petty schools. They educated students through eighth grade or age 14 (though older students, especially boys, are frequently mentioned), teaching reading, writing and basic mathematics, with Puritanism as a basis.

The next level, Latin or grammar schools, added subjects like Latin, Greek and advanced mathematics, initially to prepare boys for college.

Several local historians have commented on the importance of education to Kennebec Valley settlers.

One was Elwood T. Wyman, Waterville’s Superintendent of Schools in 1902, who was assigned the chapter on education in Rev. Edwin Carey Whittemore’s centennial history. Wyman commented that seeking information about early Waterville schools “is largely groping in the dark,” because records were scarce and memories didn’t go back far enough.

But, he said, he found enough information to show that Waterville’s early residents brought from Massachusetts “the same high regard for education that made and has kept for that commonwealth the foremost place in the Union.”

He continued, “The mother state gave to her daughter Maine no more precious heritage than this strong desire and determination to offer youth as much of elementary learning as limited resources could provide.”

North specifically credited the leaders of the Plymouth Company who oversaw the land grants in the Kennebec valley, calling them “men of elevated character, enlightened views, and of a liberal spirit.” They protected those who settled their land grants from hostile Native Americans and their French backers; and they included in their grants “provisions for the maintenance” of education and religion.

In following articles in this series, your writer plans to share information about education in the central Kennebec Valley, beginning in the late 1700s. A summary description of the legal and regulatory framework will provide background for information on schooling in individual towns.

* * * * * *

Education in Maine was based on Massachusetts law, because from 1677 to 1820 Maine was part of Massachusetts. Louis Hatch devoted the first chapter of his 1919 history of Maine to early landowners, exploration and settlement, beginning with organizations and individuals who received grants from the British crown.

One landowner was Sir Ferdinando Gorges (1565 or thereabouts – May 1647), described as a British “naval and military commander” who was instrumental in promoting settlement in and trade with North America, especially the part that became Maine.

By Hatch’s account, the Province of Massachusetts first acquired coastal towns in what had been Gorges’ territory in southern Maine in the 1650s. There was opposition, from Gorges’ grandson, also Ferdinando Gorges (1630 – 1718), the British monarchy and Maine residents; but in 1668, the Massachusetts Great and General Court (the legislature) sent commissioners, with a military escort, to reaffirm Massachusetts’ claim.

Massachusetts control became final in 1677, Hatch said, when the second Ferdinando Gorges sold his Maine rights to “an agent of Massachusetts for 1,250 British pounds.” In a footnote, Hatch said the agent “acted without authority but the colony after a little hesitation accepted the arrangement.”

The Province of Maine at that time “extended only to the Kennebec,” Hatch wrote. (Your writer finds this description annoyingly vague – the west bank of the Kennebec, which would exclude the river itself as well as the east bank; or the middle of the waterway; or the whole Kennebec Valley?)

Hammond wrote in her history of Sidney (on the west bank) that until 1677, there was little government, religion or education for the settlers, who were occupied with “making a living…[and] warring with the French, the Indians, and each other.” Education, she said, was “almost strictly a family function.”

In 1677, the 1647 Massachusetts education law took effect in the part of Maine that included Sidney. This law, known today as the Old Deluder Satan Law, incorporated the General School Law of 1642. Wikipedia reproduces and summarizes both.

The 1642 law, the Wikipedia writer explains, made a radical change by shifting responsibility for educating children and apprentices from clergymen to “ye chosen men appointed for managing the prudentiall affajres” of the town (the selectmen).

This law aimed to have children able to “read & understand the principles of religion & the capitall lawes of this country.” It applied to both sexes: a provision required that “boyes and girles be not suffered to converse together, so as may occasion any wanton, dishonest, or immodest behavior….”

The selectmen were empowered to fine people who refused to tell them how they were carrying out their educational responsibilities. With approval of a court or magistrate, they could take improperly schooled children from their homes and make them apprentices elsewhere. They themselves could be fined by a grand jury or a court for neglect of these duties.

The Wikipedia writer surmised the law was not well enforced, leading the Massachusetts General Court to pass the 1647 law. This law, reproduced on Wikipedia, begins “It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures…” – thus its unofficial title.

The 1647 law says when a town has 50 households, voters or officials must appoint someone “to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and read.” The majority of “those that order the prudentials of the town” shall decide whether the teacher is paid by the students’ “parents or masters” or by the townspeople as a group, with the proviso that parents must not pay “much more” than they would in another town.

When a town has 100 “families or householders, they shall set up a grammar school, the master thereof being able to instruct youth so far as they may be fitted for the university.” (The university intended was Harvard.) This requirement carried a penalty for non-fulfillment: any qualifying town that has no grammar school for more than a year “shall pay 5 pounds to the next school till they shall perform this order.”

A 1648 law, Wikipedia says, required parents and masters to teach their children and apprentices “reading, the public laws, the catechism and ‘some honest lawful calling, labour or employment.'” Selectmen were supervisors, “conducting examinations and if necessary fining parents or placing the young with other masters if their education was neglected.”

Hammond said the District Act of 1787 established school districts in towns. Most districts, most of the time, had a schoolhouse, making it possible for students from all parts of town to walk to and from primary school.

And North described a 1789 law “providing for the instruction of youth” that required each “town or district” with more than 50 families to provide a “schoolmaster of good morals” for at least six months every year. He was to teach reading, writing, English, spelling, arithmetic “and decent behavior.”

The length of the schoolmaster’s work was to increase proportionally as population grew, up to 200 householders. A town that large was required to provide 12 months of primary school plus another 12 months of the services of a grammar school teacher capable of teaching English, Greek and Latin.

Teachers were required to be citizens, by “naturalization or otherwise.” They were directed to instruct their students in a range of personal and civic virtues: piety, justice, regard for truth, universal benevolence, sobriety, chastity, moderation, love of country and the like; and to show them, in age-appropriate ways, how these virtues would help “to preserve and perfect a republican constitution, and to secure the blessing of liberty as well as to promote their future happiness.”

The effect of these Massachusetts laws was to emphasize the importance of education for everyone, not just the wealthy, and to define it as a public responsibility, carried out at the local level with local money and supervision.

(The 1789 legislative session whose members approved this school law also passed a law to encourage “the manufacture and consumption of strong beer, ale and other malt Liquors” by a five-year tax exemption for manufacturers. It was presented as promoting the local economy. North disapproved.)

Main sources

Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992)
Hatch, Louis Clinton, ed., Maine: A History 1919 ((facsimile, 1974)
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870)
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902)

Websites, miscellaneous

Around the Kennebec Valley: A history of Ford’s Corner, Part II

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Ford’s Corner today. (Google Earth photo)

by Andy Pottle

(Read Part I here.)

In Part 1, we explored the lives of three key families at Ford’s Corner around the turn of the 20th century: Frank & Addie Wood, Daniel & Nettie Batchelder, and Leander & Alice Bowler, all active members of the church at the corner of Chisholm Pond Road and Arnold Lane. Part 2 will explore the history of that church building and what Ford’s Corner is today.

In Lee Bowler’s obituary, it was said he was “instrumental in building the Methodist church,” but the history of the church on the corner starts about a decade and a half before he moved there.

According to Allen Goodwin’s A History of the Early Settlement of Palermo, Maine, Methodists had been meeting in North Palermo since 1830. Initially gathering at Dr. Eli Ayers’ Grove, where Level Hill Road meets North Palermo Road, and later at the “Clifford School House”, most likely somewhere around where Chisholm Pond Road meets the Hostile Valley Road.

In 1859, the congregation purchased a house, raised it off the ground, and rotated it so that the end faced the road. Once enough pledges were secured, Reverend C. E. Springer led the effort, alongside other church members, to raise the roof by 11 feet, and then ventured into the woods to cut rafters for the new roof. The interior of the newly expanded chapel was then plastered by Jason Wood, the great-uncle of Frank Wood (see part 1).

The Methodist Church, circa 1900.

By 1891, the building had deteriorated to the point of being described as “decayed and dilapidated,” and “thoroughly uncomfortable and unsuitable for use,” according to an issue of Zion’s Herald, a Methodist newspaper.

At that time, the reverend was George J. Palmer, a carpenter and architect. Palmer “knew just what needed to be done with the old structure, and the most economical way to do it.” and got to work planning the renovation.

After several church fundraisers, donations, and a loan from Lee Bowler, Palmer got to work, doing much of the renovation himself. The structure was expanded, the belfry was built with a bell installed, and the church was neatly finished and painted white.

Thanks to the efforts of Bowler, Palmer, and others, this community had a meeting place for regular Sunday services, weddings, and funerals for years to come. It also hosted various events, such as Christmas concerts and talks by traveling speakers.

In 1948, the people of the community and other towns came together again to keep the old building alive. By this time, the church grounds included a second building, the Ladies Aid building, where a supper was served to raise money for repairs to the steeple and for painting the church. Paul Wellman and Arthur Hurd donated lumber and shingles, respectively. By this time the community in North Palermo was made up of both old and new families, and some of the families documented to have helped in some way with this renovation include Besse, Brown, Bryant, Bukner, Coffin, Davis, Dowe, Dyer, Glidden, Howell, Hurd, Nelson, Norton, Palmer, Pottle, Sabin, Soule, Wellman, Willoughby, and Young.

The building mid-transformation, circa 1980.

Ten years later, in 1958, the church buildings were purchased by the North Palermo Baptist Fellowship after the First Baptist Church down the road at Carr’s Corner had been torn down a few years earlier. In an effort to revive rural churches that had fallen by the wayside, the Waldo Larger Parish assigned Miss Barbara Rozelle as pastor. She split her duties between the newly established North Palermo Baptist Church and the Second Baptist Church in East Palermo until she was succeeded by Eric Wiggin Jr. in the mid 1960s. Eric Wiggin Jr., the great-grandson of the aforementioned Frank Wood, never knew that the brother of his great-great-great-grandfather had plastered the walls of this very church over 100 years earlier when it was first converted into a chapel.

In 1968, some members of the North Palermo Baptist Church joined with members of the East Palermo Baptist and Branch Mills Union Churches to form the Palermo Christian Church. By 1969, under the leadership of Pastor Fred Williams, it became clear that the original church building was no longer adequate for the growing congregation. According to the history of the Palermo Christian Church, “about 75 Sunday School students were crowded into four classes, one of which met in the Ladies Aid House, while the other three gathered in separate corners of the small sanctuary.” The lack of running water and modern restroom facilities also contributed to the decision to construct a new church building. The new church was built on Branch Mills Road near Route 3, where the congregation continues to meet to this day.

Pastor Fred Williams recalled the challenging process of removing the old bell from the tower. Fred, along with Church members Neal Pottle and Colin Dyer had tied a rope around the heavy bell and began lowering it down the building. Halfway down, the rope snapped, causing the bell to crash down and embed itself a few inches deep into the ground below. Despite this setback, they managed to retrieve the bell and move it to the new church building, where it still resides.

In the 1970s, the building was sold and briefly owned by the Palermo American Legion. Due to its poor condition, the steeple was removed, along with most of the belfry.

View of the old church building and Christmas tree farm at Ford’s Corner from Chisholm Pond Road, 2024.

In 1979, Neal Pottle purchased the building and undertook a major overhaul to transform it into what it is today. With the help of family and friends, the building was once again lifted off the ground, this time to pour a concrete foundation, replacing the old, dilapidated wooden floor. A garage door was installed in the front wall of the sanctuary, which was repurposed as Neal’s garage. The Ladies Aid building, which had sunk into the mud over the years, was lifted, moved next to the main building, and attached as a machinist shop, equipped with a metal lathe, drill presses, and a Bridgeport mill, among other tools. The siding was replaced with wooden shingles and painted a classic barn red. The cupola and light on top of the building wouldn’t be added until 2008.

In 1985, Neal’s son Ken Pottle started a printing company in the building. A door was added to the top of what remained of the old bell tower, and the space above the former sanctuary was converted into a working print shop. A panel was cut out of the front of the building, allowing printing presses to be moved in using a hydraulic wood loader.

Pottle’s Printing, and later Archer and Pottle’s Printing after Jeff Archer joined as a partner, served local businesses by printing flyers, business cards, and other paper goods. The company also printed the town reports for Palermo from 1985 to 1988 and launched a short-lived community newspaper in 1986, predating The Town Line by three years!

After the print shop moved in 1990, Ken and Neal repurposed the space into a woodworking shop, which has been enjoyed by the Pottle family and their friends ever since. When Neal passed away in November 2023, his casket was built in the woodshop at the top of the old church. He was laid to rest in Smith Cemetery, alongside Leander and Alice Bowler, Frank and Addie Wood, Daniel and Nettie Batchelder, and many others who had lived in North Palermo and spent their time at Ford’s Corner.

Today, the only buildings still standing at the corner are the old Wood residence and the former Methodist Church. The Bowler home, and outbuildings were lost to a fire in 1932, with the Bowler Barn surviving until the ‘60s.

In 2007, Doug Wellman built North Palermo Self Storage on the back corner of what was once the Bowler farm, using lumber milled on-site where the Bowler house had once stood.

In 2022, Randy Pottle planted a Christmas tree farm with 200 trees on the site of the former house and general store, extending behind it. He plans to use the proceeds from the tree sales to buy his grandchildren, Ava and Norman, their first vehicles, by the time the trees (and the grandchildren) are big enough in 2032, 100 years after the house burned down!

The old Batchelder house, which later was home to Neal Pottle’s parents until his mother’s death in 1989, remained at the corner until 2008 when both Neal’s father and the house were lost to a fire.

In the back field behind the property there is an airstrip built by the late Gerald Pottle, brother of Neal, when he purchased his yellow Citabria airplane in 1977.

At the site where the Batchelders once held meetings for the annual Palermo Picnic a century ago, another event now brings hundreds to North Palermo each August from across Maine and beyond.

Neal and Theresa Pottle started the Family and Friends Bluegrass Festival in 2008 to showcase local talent from the Bluegrass Jam hosted at their house every Friday night. The Festival has grown over the past 17 years into a three-day event that has featured music, workshops, contra dances, kids’ activities, food trucks, and more. On the third weekend of each August, the field between the runway and the now-red Methodist church fills with campers and tents from as far away as Georgia and South Carolina.

With the sounds of Bluegrass jams coming from the campsites and laughter from the children’s area beside the old church building, Ford’s Corner once again feels like the center of a community in North Palermo, if only for one weekend a year.

Sources:

Newspaper archives of Kennebec Journal, Morning Sentinel, Belfast Republican Journal, Lewiston Evening Journal
Conversations with Eric Wiggin Jr., Fred Williams, Neal Pottle, Ken Pottle, Ed Hatch, Lindsey Pottle
A History of the Early Settlement of Palermo, Maine, by Allen Goodwin
Zions Herald, September 2 1891

Around the Kennebec Valley: A history of Ford’s Corner

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Ford’s Corner, Palermo.

by Andy Pottle

Part I

Andy Pottle is a resident of Palermo and writes articles about the town’s history.

In North Palermo, where Arnold Lane and Chisholm Pond Road meet, the North Palermo Road just before Wilder Young Hill goes down into Freedom, is a place once known as Ford’s Corner. You wouldn’t know it today, but over a century ago this quiet corner was the center of a bustling community in North Palermo.

The general store/post office, home, and barn of the Bowlers circa 1908. all lost to a fire in 1932.

Ford’s Corner once hosted a general store, a post office, a boarding house, and a Methodist church.

The corner was also home to many of the local residents who managed committees, organized events, and oversaw the church.

Frank Wood, 1862-1909. (photo courtesy of Pat Wiggin)

Addie Robinson Wood, 1871-1948. (photo courtesy of Pat Wiggin)

Frank and Addie Wood lived in the white house that still stands on the northwestern corner of the intersection at Ford’s Corner. It was written in the newspapers at the time that the Wood’s “kept quite a dairy” and held ice cream fundraisers to benefit the church, where they were described as “active, devoted, and industrious members”. Frank was also a beloved stagecoach driver and mail carrier from 1885 to 1904. When Frank passed away in 1909 it was written in his obituary that there was “Not a home for miles around that [could] not testify to some act of kindness from him”. Frank Wood was the son of Frank Wood Sr., a member of the 19th Maine Regiment who was tragically killed in the Civil War in 1863 when Frank Jr. was only a year old.

Daniel and Nettie (Carr) Batchelder* lived in the house that formerly stood on the southwestern corner of the intersection. Nettie was a member of the Ladies Improvement Society, which organized the annual Palermo Picnic and held its planning meetings at their home. The picnic, held every August at Prescott Pond behind Smith Cemetery on the Level Hill Road, attracted hundreds of attendees and continued for about 20 years, starting in 1900.

Pre-1870, members of the Batchelder family owned and operated a general store located across the street from Daniel and Nettie. A map of Palermo in 1859 shows the store being run by Daniel’s uncle, Cyrus Batchelder. In 1869 it was re-established as “A. & D. Batchelders” before burning down the next year.

Daniel served in the 19th Maine Regiment in the Civil War, alongside Frank Wood Sr.

Homes of the Batchelders (left) and Woods (right) circa 1907.

Leander Bowler, 1840-1923. (photo courtesy of Bill Kahrmann)

Alice (Hibbert) Bowler 1847-1927. (photo courtesy of Bill Kahrmann)

Leander and Alice Bowler, most notable among the residents of Ford’s Corner were Leander “Lee” Bowler and his wife, Alice (Hibbert) Bowler. Born in Palermo in 1840, Leander was described as “one of its most influential citizens.” He married Alice Hibbert, of Washington, the granddaughter of the namesake of Hibberts Gore, in 1870. By 1873, the couple had moved to the southeast corner of the intersection at Ford’s Corner, where the old Batchelder store once stood and had apparently been rebuilt. That same year, Leander was appointed Postmaster of North Palermo, a position he would hold for nearly 40 years. Lee was a very successful merchant, farmer, and businessman, for the next 60 years.

Lee made a comfortable living from his store, and employed several traveling salesmen with peddler’s carts that “sold goods near and far”. In addition to his success as a merchant, he was a prosperous farmer with multiple farms around Palermo. In 1897, it was reported that he exported 23,000 dozen eggs that year. Lee also held a U.S. patent for an “egg preserver” invented by himself and J. P. French, of Palermo, that could hold 2,500 dozen eggs and rotated on an axle, supposedly keeping them fresh by preventing the yolks from settling too long on the inside of the shell.

After a fire destroyed their home in 1886, Leander built the “Bowler Mansion” as it is known to some, which was described in the newspaper as “one of the finest places in town”. It was a very big home that also served as a boarding house where traveling salesman “found good meals and clean, comfortable beds in large, airy rooms”, as well as a special room reserved for any traveling ministers that were visiting the Methodist church across the street.

One of the ministers that passed through was Frank Kingdon, who arrived in the United States from London in 1913 and lived with the Bowlers while serving as the pastor of the Methodist church for the first year he was in America. Kingdon would later become (among other things) a journalist, civil rights activist, and the first chairman of the Emergency Rescue Committee, which famously saved around 2,000 people from the Holocaust during the Nazi occupation of France.

In his memoir, reflecting on his life, Kingdon had kind words for Leander and Alice.

“The presiding genius of the mansion was [Alice] “Ma” Bowler, an old and wrinkled housekeeping Fury who hated dirt as she hated the Devil, and to whom both were equally tangible. She stomped through the rooms on a crutch, her restless eye never missing any hidden speck of dust. … she was equally uncompromising in her goodness. No one ever went empty away from her door. She was first friend and confidante to the whole countryside. Boisterous, untamed of tongue, she would exchange greetings and repartee at any level with anyone who came to the store. She spared nobody from her scolding if she thought him foolish. She did not spare herself if she thought anybody in need. … She was as twisted and gnarled as an apple tree, but life was in her and many drew strength from her generous heart.”

“[Leander] had a genius for human relationships. He was a small, wiry man of some seventy years who salted all his dealings with a sprightly humor. He made a comfortable living out of the store, carried most of his neighbors on his books, and held mortgages on many of their homes. Yet he was the most honored and best beloved man in the whole section. He was the leader of the church, and also its janitor. He did not sit in a regular pew, but occupied a chair tipped against a wall up front. Here he sat and chewed tobacco religiously … By his single determination he kept the little church alive. More than in any other situation I have ever seen, this whole scattered community was held together by one man’s personality. He was the very picture of the good citizen in a democratic community, winning his undisputed place on grounds no more visible and no less irresistible than the quality of his strong character.”

(Read Part 2 of this article here.)

Sources:

Newspaper archives of Kennebec Journal, Morning Sentinel, Belfast Republican Journal, Lewiston Evening Journal.
Conversations with Pat Wiggin, Tony Tuttle, Bill Kahrmann
1859 map of Waldo County
Batchelder Genealogy 1898
Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office 1874
Jacob’s Ladder: The Days Of My Youth. Frank Kingdon 1943

*Different members of the Batchelder family at different times spelled their name as Batchelder, Bachelder and Bachelor, for clarity it is written here only as Batchelder.

The Town Line welcomes submissions from other writers of town history from the area.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Early Sidney Settlers

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by Mary Grow

Conclusion

Researching former Sidney residents on line, your writer has repeatedly come across a colorful small book entitled Early Sidney, by Chloe B., with a photo of the historic Levi Powers house on the front. The site is bookcreator.com.

Chloe B. mentioned three early settlers she believed gave names to features in the landscape: Samuel Goff (Goff Brook); Philip Snow (Snow Pond, aka Messalonskee Lake); and Samuel Ward, husband of Lois Clark, from Vassalboro (Ward Pond).

Philip Snow and the town of Belgrade

Text and photo courtesy of the Belgrade HIstorical Society.

The beginning of the known history of Belgrade began in 1774, when a man named Philip Snow decided to look for new hunting grounds beyond the familiar lands in Sidney. He crossed the lake to the west and built a log cabin about two miles north of what is now Belgrade Depot. After six years of using this as a base for hunting trips, Snow sold his cabin to Joseph Greely. He returned at a later date to settle on the west side of the lake with his wife and nine children. Snow Pond (now Messalonskee Lake) and Mt. Philip (just north of Belgrade Lakes) were both named in his honor.

To finish this longer-than-planned subseries on Sidney’s early residents, your writer will share information about these families, and one more.

* * * * * *

As mentioned in past articles, your writer believes the stream running through Reyolds Forest and into the Kennebec was called first Bog Brook and then Hastings Brook.

Bog Brook could be taken as descriptive. Hastings Brook probably recognizes an early Sidney family whose first members settled on the river road.

Alice Hammond’s history of Sidney has multiple references to Sidney’s Hastings family. They were of British descent; Hammond wrote an ancestor was named John Seaborn Hastings because he was born (in 1732) on ship on the way to Massachusetts.

The first Hastings in Vassalboro, Hammond said, were Mathew (1718-1791), his wife Mary Battle (1720 – 1804), their son Moses (1743-1838) and their eight daughters. About 1770, Mathew bought land “on the north end of the West River Road” from an advertisement in a Boston newspaper.

Henry Kingsbury’s list of early Vassalboro officials, in his Kennebec County history, listed Matthew (with two ts) Hastings as one of the first three selectmen, elected in 1771 and serving 10 years, and as town clerk in 1782 and 1783. When Sidney separated in 1792, Moses Hastings served as a Sidney selectman for the first two years.

Moses was the one who married John Marsh’s daughter Hannah in 1772 and inherited the property that is now the Reynolds Forest Preserve, mentioned last week. According to familysearch, Moses and Hannah had four sons and five daughters between 1774 and 1796, including another Moses (1774 – 1812) and General Mathew (1796 – 1878, grandson of the first Mathew).

Hammond said Moses (1743) succeeded John Marsh as owner of grist mills and sawmills on Hastings Brook. Mathew (1796) was born in Sidney and lived in Calais, Maine, familysearch says. He had 16 children by two marriages.

A comprehensive book on early Calais families by Thelma Eye Brooks (copyright 2002), found on line, says Mathew Hastings served as a Massachusetts militia private in the War of 1812, from Sept. 24 to Nov. 10, 1814. Later he was active in the Maine militia for years, becoming a brigadier general by 1841 – hence his title.

Brooks wrote that General Mathew’s second son by his first wife and first son by his second wife each served in the Civil War and later lived in Sidney. (Other sources provide differing information.)

Gorham Kimball Hastings, born in Calais Feb. 7, 1830, and died in Sidney March 18, 1921, was a second lieutenant in the 26th Maine Infantry and a seaman in the Civil War. In 1880 he represented Sidney in the Maine House of Representatives as a member of the Greenback Party. In 1889, copying his grandfather Moses (1743), he was a Sidney selectman for a year.

Simon Cutter Hastings, born in Calais May 5, 1843, was a corporal in the 21st Maine Infantry. On Sept. 30, 1873, he married Ellen Faught (1845 – 1912, daughter of Athony Faught and Olive Hamlin – see the Aug. 15 article on Sidney’s Faught family).

Simon Hastings served as a Sidney selectman for five years. He died in Portland (where he had been living with his sister, Jennie Tyler) on July 15, 1938, and was buried in the Sibley cemetery with his wife.

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Your writer merely surmises Hastings Brook underwent a name change and became Goff Brook; she has found no proof. She has learned that the Goffs did not come to Sidney until 1829, and that they were mill-owners, two pieces of information supporting the idea the brook was renamed.

Chloe B. wrote that Goff Brook was “likely named for Samuel Goff.”

According to Hammond, the first Goffs in Sidney were two sons of William Francis and Rebecca (Bates) Goff, from Windsor. The older was William Francis Goff, Jr., born in 1805; his brother, Samuel Wesley Goff (1806 – 1871), bought the first family property on Nov. 17, 1829, on Goff Road.

Contemporary maps show Goff Road running north off Dinsmore Road, roughly parallel to West River Road, and dead-ending before it reaches Goff Brook.

Hammond generalized that Goff men tended to earn their livings as “lumbermen, farmers and blacksmiths”; the women she described as homemakers or teachers. She and Kingsbury said that William, Jr., built a shingle mill on the homestead in 1850, “about the last” 19th-century mill built in the town. Kingsbury said it ran for around 20 years; Le Roy Goff owned the property in 1892.

Find a Grave says Samuel married Olive P. Chadbourne (1814 – 1878), in Sidney, on Nov. 10, 1835. They had 12 children, of whom William (born in 1835) and Leroy Sylvester (1850 – 1906; perhaps Kingsbury’s Le Roy?) stayed in Sidney, with Leroy inheriting the family home.

Leroy married Cora Sibley (1864 – 1934), from Passadumkeag, Maine, in Bangor, on Nov. 6, 1886. One source says they had three daughters and five sons, born in Sidney between 1884 and 1903; at least two of their grandsons are listed as keeping the Goff name in Sidney into the 20th century.

One of Sidney’s cemeteries is named Clark/Goff; it has the grave of the senior William Francis Goff, 1782 – 1845 (but not his wife, Rebecca). William Francis, Jr., is not listed as buried there. His brother and sister-in-law, Samuel and Olive, are.

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Philip Snow was probably in what is now Sidney before 1774, but to call him a settler might be misleading. Accounts your writer found describe him as a wandering hunter, who sometimes joined his wife and children living in Sidney.

Snow was born Feb. 18, 1748, most likely in Dunstable, Massachusetts (one source suggests Dunstable, New Hampshire). On June 13, 1772, he married Abigail or Abagail Townsend (born Apr. 17, 1754, in Hopkinton, Massachusetts) in Hallowell.

Evidently the family home was in Sidney, because two sources describe Snow moving, alone, across the big lake in west Sidney to build a log cabin as a hunting base, and thus founding the Town of Belgrade.

One source says Snow was one of several central Maine men who served as guides for Benedict Arnold’s 1775 expedition to Québec.

He sold the cabin after six years and, one source says, “probably” returned to his wife. He spent enough time with her so that when the family later (no specific date) came back to the west – Belgrade – side of the lake, he and Abigail had eight or nine children.

The online source rootsweb lists eight children: Hannah, born March 21, 1773, in Hallowell; Sarah, born Feb. 12, 1774; Abigail, born in 1777; Stephen, born in 1779; Moses, born in 1781; Betsy; Jonathan; and Philip, born in 1787.

Sarah and her younger brothers Stephen, Moses and Philip moved north, with Milo and Charleston (northwest of Bangor) named as destinations. Both parents died in Charleston, Philip in 1850 and, according to one source, Abigail the same year at the age of 102 (your writer found no other source giving her death date).

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An article back in March was partly about Ward Pond, in southern Sidney on the northeast side of Route 27. Your writer surmised the pond was named after one or more of Sidney’s Ward families, but could not – and still cannot — figure out why Chloe B. gave the honor to Samuel who married Lois Clark.

The Sidney map in the 1856 Kennebec County atlas shows several Ward houses southeast, west and northwest of the pond. The 1879 map reproduced in Hammond’s history shows what might be the southeast house still there, with a blacksmith shop beside it, and another Ward dwelling farther north, on the east side of Quaker Road (which runs northish off Route 27, on the east side of the pond).

John Ward owned land in Sidney by 1794. When the first 10 school districts were laid out that year, some of the boundaries Hammond quoted referenced his land, which was evidently several miles from the Kennebec.

John Ward might be the John Ward, Sr., (born in 1733; or June 23, 1735, in Newton, Massachusetts) Kingsbury listed among early settlers in western Sidney, with his son, Deacon William Ward. Find a Grave says in 1757 John Ward, Sr., married Mary Clapp, born Jan. 23, 1738, in Dorchester, Massachusetts, by whom he had four children (but familysearch lists more; see below).

Find a Grave says the couple’s first daughter lived only a year or so. The second daughter, born in 1761, died in 1840 in Ohio. The third daughter, Anna, born in Dorchester in 1769, died in Sidney in 1841, widow of Eleazer Cummings (whose information on line is extraordinarily contradictory; your writer found no reference to Sidney).

John and Mary’s fourth child, according to Find a Grave, was Deacon William Ward (1769 – 1844). Ancestry.com says in 1796, he married Elizabeth Godfrey (1778 – 1868), from Nova Scotia.

None of these Wards was the Samuel mentioned in Chloe B.’s book. He appears on the familysearch website as John and Mary’s seventh child in a list that reads as follows: Clap (1755 – 1755), Mary (1758 -1759), Elizabeth (1760 – Deceased), Mindwell (1761 – 1840), Mindwell (1761 – Deceased), Sarah (1762 – 1806), Samuel (1764 – 1809), Elder William (1768 – 1804), Ann (1769 – 1841) and John, Jr. (1775 – 1823).

Familysearch says Samuel Ward did indeed marry Lois Clark (1769 – 1857), on July 27, 1787 (Chloe B. said 1786). Between 1788 and 1808 they had four daughters and four sons.

Familysearch says their first son, Thomas (1790 – 1867) was born in Vassalboro (because Sidney did not exist until 1792). The other children were born in Sidney. Second son, Samuel, Jr. (1797 – 1882) was blind, familysearch says; he seems not to have married.

BRCA/Seven Lakes Mount Phillip trail

Mt. Phillip Trail Loop, Rome, Maine. (photo by Laura G.)

A second landmark honoring Philip Snow is a mountain that has been variously called Mount Philip, Mount Phillips and now Mount Phillip.

Kingsbury wrote that Mount Philip was in the Town of Belgrade, west of Sidney, near the village of Belgrade Mills (now Belgrade Lakes), and that the name honored Snow’s “famous hunting exploits in its vicinity.”

This location has been contradicted repeatedly by newer sources: Mount Philip is not near Belgrade Lakes, in west central Belgrade, but about seven miles north, in the adjoining town of Rome.

According to the Belgrade-based conservation organization the 7 Lakes Alliance, in 2004 the Alliance, “in collaboration with” Great Pond’s Pine Island Camp, acquired 207 acres, including a 1.4-mile loop trail and the mountain’s 755-foot summit.

The website alltrails.com calls the Mount Phillip Loop Trail a “moderately-challenging” 45-minute hike. This and other on-line trail sites recommend it for hiking, birding, views and snowshoeing. Trailhead parking is on the north side of Route 225, a mile and a half east of the junction with Route 27.

(Your writer cannot resist quoting from the first paragraph of Kingsbury’s 1892 chapter on the Town of Rome. He wrote that Rome “is situated twenty miles northwest from Augusta, with which it is connected by a daily stage running to New Sharon. It has seven times as many hills as the eternal city whose name it bears, and granite enough to rebuild the old Roman capital.”)

Main sources:

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

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Sidney settlers: Lovejoys & Marshes

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by Mary Grow

Part III

(See Part I here, and Part II here.)

Previous articles in this series have mentioned two other early Sidney families who intermarried with Bacons and Faughts, the Lovejoys and Marshes. This article will provide more information about both.

The first Lovejoy in Sidney is named Abial (in the on-line source Find a Grave and in Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history) or Abiel (in the on-line source minerdescent and in Alice Hammond’s 1992 bicentennial history of Sidney), and is known as Captain Lovejoy and Squire Lovejoy. His second son and namesake also gets both spellings, more commonly Abial. Your writer will try to minimize confusion by using the senior Lovejoy’s titles.

Lovejoy was called “Captain” based on his Massachusetts military service. Minerdescent says he acquired the title “Esquire” when he was appointed a Justice of the Peace in 1781.

Kingsbury listed Esquire Abial Lovejoy and John Marsh as two other 1763 grantees of land from the Kennebec Proprietors (with Levi Powers, whose house on the National Register of Historic Places was described last week).

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Hammond’s history includes a 1991 summary Lovejoy family history that she credits to descendants Betty Bennett and Anita Lovejoy. It also includes the 1892 Kennebec Journal article (referenced in previous articles in this series) that mentions the Lovejoys.

The newspaper writer included two generations, “old Squire Lovejoy, the old slave holder” (Dec. 16, 1731 – July 4, 1811); and “probably his son,” Abial Lovejoy (Feb. 8, 1764 – Nov. 3, 1858).

Captain Lovejoy was born in Andover, Massachusetts, and married Mary Brown on Dec. 14, 1758, in Charlestown, Massachusetts (which one source says was her birthplace).

Mary Brown was born March 29, 1734 (Minerdescent), or July 19, 1741 (most sources), and died Jan. 19, 1812. She and her husband had two, seven, eight or 14 children, depending on the source.

Minerdescent lists seven sons and seven daughters, born between Aug. 8, 1759, and Oct. 1, 1785. The two oldest, Nathaniel (named after his maternal grandfather, Nathaniel Brown) and Polly, were born in Charlestown; the next 11 (including Abial, Jr.) in Pownalborough, Maine; and the youngest, Phebe, who married Ebenezer Morse (mentioned in the Aug. 8 article on the Bacon family), in the western part of Vassalboro that became Sidney.

(Find a Grave, usually a reliable source, names seven children born between Aug. 8, 1759, and Oct. 31, 1780, and lists birthplaces, after the first two in Charlestown, in Vassalboro, Waterville or Sidney – no mention of Pownalborough. The names and dates duplicate the longer minerdescent list.)

Minerdescent, citing older sources, describes Captain Lovejoy’s career in Pownalborough (now Dresden), a town farther down the Kennebec River that was incorporated in 1760.

This source says he first came to Maine, specifically Fort Halifax, with British troops from Massachusetts in 1755. By 1758 he was a captain, headquartered at Pownalborough. Hammond wrote that he served with the British in Maine from 1758 to 1771, and later in the Americans’ Revolutionary Army.

He was also a ship captain out of Charlestown. Various sources say he went to Nova Scotia and the West Indies, and Mary sometimes sailed with him.

On Sept. 29, 1760, Captain Lovejoy bought 35 acres in Pownalborough, and in 1761 he, Mary and their first two children moved there. He became a prominent citizen, owning an inn, building an elaborate house, running a ferry, building ships, buying and selling land and serving as selectman in 1762 and 1764.

Minerdescent calls Mary “handsome” and “cultural,” and says the Lovejoy house was famous for its hospitality. The June 19, 1766, Pownalborough census said Captain Lovejoy “owned a two-story house with 152 squares of glass, one chimney, three rooms with fire places, supported seven persons under sixteen years, and ten persons above sixteen years and he owned one other house one story high with 44 squares of glass and two fireplaces.”

Goff Brook, in Sidney.

According to minerdescent, on Nov. 12, 1764, Captain Lovejoy and his father-in-law, Nathaniel Brown, “purchased half of a saw mill and adjoining land and a half interest in a dam on a small stream eight miles above Fort Western.” Your writer believes this stream was originally Bog Brook; by 1764 Hastings Brook; and today Goff Brook.

In Vassalboro, too, Captain Lovejoy ran a ferry. Lovejoy’s Ferry, operating in the early 1800s at Riverside, was the southern and earlier of two Kennebec ferries connecting Sidney and Vassalboro (the other was at Getchell’s Corner) that operated into the 20th century.

On-line sources say the oldest Lovejoy son, Nathaniel, born Aug. 8, 1759, took over the ferry, and later Nathaniel’s son Hiram, born Jan. 8, 1805, ran it for a while before moving to Massachusetts.

Minerdescent says the Lovejoys moved to Vassalboro in 1776. The account says they brought their household goods on “flat boats and scows which were towed by row boats”; the boat carrying their best furniture sank in a bad storm.

Their riverside farm remained in the family for several generations. Minerdescent has a long list of Captain Lovejoy’s positions in first Vassalboro and then Sidney, including being elected a selectman in each town. In 1777 he was involved in getting the Massachusetts legislature to expand postal service in Maine.

Captain Lovejoy’s son Abial was the constable who convened Sidney’s first town meeting after Sidney became a separate town on Jan. 30, 1792, Hammond said. In May of that year, Captain Lovejoy was one of the four-man committee chosen to settle accounts with Vassalboro. Later he served on Sidney’s fish committee for more than one term; on the committee that planned the town pound; and in 1798 on the school committee.

Captain Lovejoy served in the Massachusetts legislature for many years, minerdescent says. Your writer found no dates except the early 1780s, when some of his constituents questioned his support of the American cause against Britain.

Minerdescent presented evidence Captain Lovejoy was a staunch patriot. He stirred up opposition to local Tories, and lost $30,000 by giving members of Benedict Arnold’s 1775 expedition to Québec (including Arnold himself) hard money in exchange for paper Continental currency. The currency became worth so little that Captain Lovejoy reportedly wallpapered a room with it.

Captain Lovejoy and Mary died in Sidney in 1811 and 1812. Most sources agree they are buried on the Lovejoy farm, on a slope toward the Kennebec; some call this family graveyard Plain or Old Plain cemetery.

Minerdescent says an infant son or daughter, born and died in 1784, and at least three of the family’s black slaves are also buried there, with all graves marked alike by fieldstones. (When Massachusetts abolished slavery in 1783, Lovejoy offered his slaves their freedom.)

Henry Kingsbury wrote in his Kennebec County history that Old Plain was the oldest cemetery in Sidney and “is thought to hold the remains of over one hundred pioneers.” In 1892, he wrote, “That part of it that has not been plowed shows plainly the forms of many graves and has one shattered slate-stone slab, inscribed ‘Elizabeth Milliner —1785.'” Elizabeth Milliner was the Lovejoys’ housekeeper, minerdescent says, and Lovejoy had her gravestone put up.

Hammond also described the Old Plain cemetery, saying it was on River Road about a quarter mile south of Hastings Brook, “high above the river on a plain that was part of Abiel Lovejoy’s grant.” She, too, estimated 100 people were buried there.

“After many years the land was cultivated so that there are no signs of a cemetery now,” she wrote a century after Kingsbury’s account. But, she said, in 1908 a monument to early settlers was installed.

In another chapter, Hammond wrote that Captain Lovejoy donated land to the town for the Lovejoy cemetery on Densmore (now Dinsmore) road, “in which approximately a hundred of the earliest settlers are buried.” This cemetery is the one your writer visited on July 29; it is not on the bank of the Kennebec.

Kingsbury, minerdescent and other sources tell many stories about Captain Lovejoy and his household. Here is one of your writer’s favorites, paraphrased:

Squire Lovejoy went to the field where some of his farm help, free and slave, had been mowing, bringing them a jug of liquor (he himself was a heavy drinker, even for colonial days, minerdescent says). Dissatisfied with the work, he demanded to know who did it.

The other hands one by one blamed Boston, a slave who had been with the family since Lovejoy bought him in 1758. Well then, said Lovejoy, if Boston did all the work, he can have all the liquor.

Boston is named as one of the slaves buried in the Old Plain cemetery with Squire and Mary Lovejoy.

Minerdescent gives summary information on all 14 Lovejoy children. All married at least once (son Abial, Jr., and daughter Sarah each lost a first spouse and married again), and several spent their entire lives in Sidney.

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John Marsh was another man to whom the Kennebec Proprietors granted land in Sidney in 1763. By Hammond’s account, he was the great-grandson of a John Marsh who emigrated to Salem, Massachusetts, from England around 1634; he and his wife Susannah had six sons, including Samuel (1651 – 1693).

Samuel and his wife Priscilla had a son John (1681 -1727, called John, Sr., in some sources). He and his wife Abigail were parents of six children, including John, Jr. (born Oct. 8, 1718; or 1723). In 1763, John, Jr., came to Sidney with his wife Elizabeth (a widow; maiden name Caryl or Carryl, previous husband Cornelius Claflin, born in 1712, 1716, 1723 or 1725).

Of John Jr., and Elizabeth’s five children, born in Mendon, Massachusetts, one died young and four came to Maine. Two married Sidney men: Abigail (1747) married Dr. James Bacon (as reported two weeks ago), and Hannah (1755 – 1840) married Moses Hastings.

Hammond said the Hastings family owned an adjoining property, and Moses and Hannah inherited the Marsh farm. In 1892, Kingsbury wrote, John’s great-grandson, Lieutenant Gorham K. Hastings, owned the farm, “that has never been out of the possession of the family.”

He added, “The outlines of a block house and stockade are still on the bluff a few feet south” of the Hastings house. Settlers sometimes “took refuge” there fearing attach by Natives, he said.

Hammond wrote that Hastings descendants owned the farm “until Sarah Park Hastings [1857 – 1946] married William Lester Reynolds [1853 – 1926)].” Reynolds descendants owned the property until 2004. (See box.)

John Jr., and Elizabeth’s only son, also John (born in 1751), ended up in the Bangor area. Youngest daughter Mary (born in 1774; this birth date makes her mother’s earlier birth dates unlikely) lived in Paris, Maine.

Hammond wrote that John Marsh Jr., bought his 250 acres on June 8, 1763. He also bought a sawmill on Hastings Brook, which was his south boundary; had a grist mill close to River Road; and was involved with area mill projects.

Several sources say Elizabeth Marsh died June 19 and her widower died Aug. 19, both in 1802, both in Sidney.

Sidney’s Reynolds Forest

Part of John Marsh’s 1763 land grant is now Sidney’s Reynolds Forest, on the west side of West River Road near the Dinsmore Road intersection. This Kennebec Land Trust preserve is recommended for birding, wildflowers and hiking trails along what is now Goff Brook.

Visitors can see the waterfalls that powered the early mills, mill foundations and a cellar-hole in the woods. KLT warns of poison ivy near West River Road.

An online source says in 2004, Sidney resident Bea Reynolds donated the 35-acre Walter W. and Alice B. Reynolds Forest to KLT to honor her parents. In July 2003, a former resident named Leann Diehl added seven adjoining acres of hayfield.

Reynolds Forest, in Sidney.

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Sidney early settlers: the Faught family

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by Mary Grow

Sidney, 1879

The Faughts were another early Sidney family. The first Faught your writer came across was Marlborough Packard Faught, a name that sounded refreshingly unusual; but she soon found that the Faughts, like the Bacons, enjoyed repeating more common names – Frederick, Jacob, Samuel – through generations.

Alice Hammond wrote in her history of Sidney that the Faughts “were active in community affairs on both sides of the Kennebec River [in Vassalboro and Sidney].”

She gave no details from early history, nor did Alma Pierce Robbins, in her Vassalboro history (Sidney was part of Vassalboro until it became a separate town on Jan. 30, 1792). Henry Kingsbury, in his history of Kennebec County, included no Faughts on his lists of town officials.

(Hammond mentioned two 1915 events: George Faught, a Boston tailor, died that year and left money to the town “for the benefit of the school at or near Bacon’s Corner”; and on July 31, Florence Faught was chosen first Grand Matron of White Rose Chapter, No. 174, of the Order of the Eastern Star.

(Hammond said in 1992 the school fund had $3,000, from which interest could be used for students at Sidney’s only elementary school, James H. Bean School, on Middle Road. White Rose Chapter is no longer on the Maine list of Eastern Star chapters.)

Kingsbury named three Faughts, Anthony, Frederick and Jacob, as early settlers.

If your writer has found the right family, these were sons of a German named Philip Faught and his unidentified wife. Kingsbury wrote that Philip emigrated to Boston in 1751 and moved to Dresden, on the Kennebec below Augusta, in 1756.

Philip Faught’s sons are listed on Familysearch as Philip (1744 – 1772 or later); Frederick (1746 – 1814); Jacob (1750 – 1830) and Anthony (1752 – 1830). This site says all four Faught boys were born in Germany, despite Anthony’s birthdate the year after the family supposedly came to America.

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Philip, born in 1744, married a woman named Hannah and was identified as “of Vassalboro” at his death sometime after 1772. Your writer found no other information.

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Frederick, born around 1746, “came to America with the family and settled on the Kennebec in Sidney, where he spent the rest of his life,” Kingsbury wrote. (Presumably Frederick moved to Sidney later in his life, not in 1751 when he was about five years old.) He died April 1, 1814, and is one of many Faughts buried in Sidney’s Sibley cemetery, on West River Road, near the Augusta line.

On Oct. 31, 1775, Frederick married Thankful Durant (1751 – 1834), in Hallowell. Between 1779 and 1793, Familysearch says, Frederick and Thankful had at least four sons, Philip (again), Frederick (again), Jacob (again) and Samuel, and three daughters.

At least one early Faught settled toward the south end of the river road. Another settled on the middle road (west of and paralleling the river road) a mile south of Bacon’s Corner. Kingsbury mentioned two Faught farms, and said one was among several in Sidney with clay suitable for brick-making.

Frederick and Thankful’s four sons spent their lives in Sidney, continuing the family name. Philip (Nov. 7, 1783 – Dec. 31, 1855) married Anna Pinkham (born in 1788) on December 3, 1812, in Sidney; the couple had at least one son, whom they named Theodore (1818 – 1861), and one daughter, Mary Ann (1819 – 1910).

The second Frederick (Feb. 17, 1786 – April 16, 1861) married Susanna Packard (1796 – 1879), in Sidney. She was the daughter of Marlborough Packard, of Union, Massachusetts. Their six sons and two daughters, born between 1818 and 1836 and representing the third generation, in Sidney, started with Marlboro Packard Faught (1818 – April 17, 1890), named after his maternal grandfather.

The next boy, born in 1821, was Frederic (without the final k, apparently), named for his father and paternal grandfather. The other children were named Caroline P. (1825), Luther R. (1828), Lemuel Porter (1830), Albert (1832), George N. (1834) and Frances Ann (1836).

Frederick and Thankful’s third son, Jacob (May 12, 1788 – Nov. 9, 1828), is listed as born in Augusta, but he and Sarah Reynolds (1795 – 1871) were marred July 9, 1818, in Sidney; their daughters Nancy, Lithia and Bethia or Bethiah and sons Jacob and Samuel, Jr., were born in Sidney between 1819 and 1826; and Jacob and Sarah both died in Sidney and are buried in the Sibley cemetery.

The youngest of this generation of Faughts, Samuel, is also listed as born in Augusta, on April 13 or 14, 1793 (Familysearch and Find a Grave disagree by a day). He married Susan M. Boyd, born in 1796 or 1797. They had two or three children, more third-generation Sidney Faughts.

The two sources agree their oldest was Tryphosa French, born in 1823. She married her cousin, Frederick and Susanna’s son Marlboro Packard Faught (1818 – 1890). Find a Grave records no children of this marriage; Familysearch lists, without details, sons Freddy B., born in 1855, and Henry M., born in 1857.

Tryphosa’s younger brother, Jacob Henry Faught, was born Nov. 11, 1829, in Sidney. He married another Sidney resident, Jane F. Reynolds (born April 11, 1835) on Jan. 9, 1861, Familysearch says in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. This site says Jane was living in Sidney in 1850, 1860 and 1880; she died in Middlesex, Massachusetts, May 26, 1923, and is buried in Sibley cemetery with her husband, who died June 25, 1882.

Find a Grave says Jacob and Jane had a daughter, born Oct. 4, 1861, whom they named L’Orient Bemis Faught. L’Orient married a man named Thayer; she died in 1939, and she and her husband are buried in Connecticut. Familysearch adds two more daughters, Nellie A., born in 1868, and Jennie H., born in 1873.

Samuel and Susan had a third child, a son they named Samuel Faught, Jr, according to Find a Grave. His birthdate and history are unknown; he died Sept. 11, 1851 (probably in his 20s), and is buried in Sibley cemetery.

Susan Boyd Faught died Sept. 7, 1877; Samuel died Nov. 26, 1889, age 96. Find a Grave says both are buried in Sibley cemetery.

Thankful (Mrs. Frederick) Faught, mother or grandmother of the numerous Faughts just listed, is the only Faught Kingsbury named as involved in a community activity. When Sidney’s second Baptist church was organized Feb. 7, 1806, he wrote, the 17 initial members included Thankful Faught.

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Jacob, German emigrant Philip and his unknown wife’s third son, born about 1750, was a Vassalboro resident from the 1790 through 1830 censuses, Familysearch says. The website says he married Hannah Sedgley, born, in Bowdoinham, in 1752, on June 9, 1772, and between 1773 and 1796 the couple had two sons and 10 daughters. Burials that Find a Grave lists in Vassalboro’s Faught cemetery include Jacob and Hannah, without dates.

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Philip’s youngest son, Anthony, was born about 1752 (a conflict with the 1751 emigration date). Kingsbury posed another puzzle when he referred to him first in 1791 and wrote that he left Germany “to avoid service in the army,” which would not have been a problem for an infant. (Either your writer is conflating two Anthony Faughts, or this Anthony did not join his brothers in America until he was a young man.)

Familysearch says Anthony married Hannah Durant (or Durent; born in 1755), in Vassalboro, in April or May 1778. They had at least three sons and two daughters between 1780 and 1797. The website says Hannah was the younger sister of Anthony’s older brother Frederick’s wife Thankful.

Familysearch says Anthony lived in Vassalboro “for about 12 years and Sidney…for about 10 years.” He died in Sidney sometime after 1830.

Hammond and Kingsbury agreed that in 1791, Anthony Faught became the third owner of a lot granted in 1763 to Levi Powers, on the west side of the river road, not far north of the Augusta line. (See box.)

The Faughts and the Levi Powers House

The important point about Anthony Faught buying the land originally granted to Levi Powers, according to Alice Hammond and to Frank Beard and Robert Bradley, of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, is that the Faught family thereby acquired, and held onto until the late 1920s, the Levi Powers House.

Levi Powers House, in Sidney.

This house is now on the Register of Historic Places in Maine, one of two historic properties in Sidney. (The other is Tiffany Hill Chapel, which your writer described in the Aug. 19, 2021, issue of The Town Line.)

Hammond wrote that staying in the same family for so long “may help to explain why the home retains so many of its original features and why the original grant and the deed showing Anthony Faught’s purchase of lot 37 remain in the home.”

In their 1979 application for historic register listing, Beard and Bradley called the building a “remarkably preserved Colonial house [that] is of particular importance because of size and fineness of proportion in the context of a newly settled area. It remains little changed either externally or internally and better than most conveys an accurate impression of its time and place.”

Levi Powers got his grant from the Kennebec Proprietors in 1763, Hammond wrote. He acquired “a little over 100 acres on the [Kennebec] river and about 150 acres in the third tier of land,” a couple miles farther west.

Beard and Bradley assumed he had to clear a lot of forested land before he could build his “large and substantial” house. They date the house from around 1700.

The Powers house is a two-story post-and-beam building, facing east, with a fieldstone foundation and internal chimneys near the north and south ends. The main entrance in the middle of the front façade opens into the central hall; the front is five bays wide, the north and south sides three bays. There is a one-story ell on the south side.

Inside, the historians commented on “common pineapple stencilling in deteriorated condition in the front hall,” probably from the 1830s, and the “extensive and finely detailed wood graining in the kitchen and dining room.” Hammond attributed the stencils to Moses Eaton (Moses Eaton and his son, Moses Eaton, Jr., were famous New Hampshire-based folk artists in the early 1800s).

Beard and Bradley wrote: “It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Powers may well have been influenced in designing the house by the nearby Pownalboro Court House…, so similar are the proportions, roof pitch and framing of the two buildings.”

Hammond said Powers sold his house on Oct. 31, 1778, to Jethro Gardner, who on Dec. 23, 1782, sold it to Anthony Faught for 800 pounds.

On July 15, 1818, Hammond found, Anthony sold the house to John and Elijah Faught (presumably his youngest sons), for $2,000. (An online source says the United States dollar replaced the British pound and other currencies in 1792.)

Hammond continued to track sales within the Faught family until 1928, when “the farm” went to Civil War veteran Simon C. Hastings (1843 – 1948), who was probably the widower of Ellen Hannah Faught (1845 -1912) (two more Faughts who are buried in Sidney’s Sibley cemetery).

Hammond wrote that Hastings auctioned off the house contents and burned the unsold furniture. He sold the house in 1929; it passed through several owners before William and Charlotte Sawtelle acquired it in 1977. Hammond wrote that in 1992, the Sawtelles were still “working to preserve the historical integrity of the house.”

Main sources

Beard, Frank A., and Robert L. Bradley, National Register of Historic Places Inventory – Nomination Form, Powers House July 1979.
Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).