Around the Kennebec Valley: Education in Augusta – Part 2

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by Mary Grow

By 1820, James North wrote in his 1870 history of Augusta, the town was again thriving after the economic downturn caused by the War of 1812. The bridge across the Kennebec River had been rebuilt; a dam was proposed to promote water-powered industry (finally built in 1837); stagecoaches and steamboats provided connections to the rest of the state, country and world; population and wealth had increased; there was talk of moving the state capital from Portland (done in 1832).

In 1820, voters raised $1,200 for education (and $1,500 for supporting the poor and other expenses and $2,000 for roads), North said. After that, he seemed to lose intereste in local primary education. Nash, in his Augusta chapters in Henry Kingsbury’s 1892 Kennebec County history, continued the story, writing that school districts were “divided and subdivided” as Augusta grew, until there were 27.

After 1815, voters chose a single agent for each district, plus a five-man town school committee, Nash said. An 1833 state law allowed modifications (see below).

A second quasi-public secondary school, succeeding the o  ne that burned in 1807 (see last week’s story) was organized in 1835. On Feb. 19, 1835, the Maine legislature chartered the Augusta Classical School Association, with a seven-man board of directors.

North wrote that its founders’ goals were “promoting the cause of education in the higher branches, and establishing a school in Augusta to prepare young men for a collegiate course.” (The nearest high school at the time was Hallowell Academy, which had opened in 1795; see the Oct. 10 article in this subseries.)

School Association members sold shares to raise money, bought the “spacious” (North’s word) former grammar school lot at Bridge and State streets and oversaw construction of a 50-by-65-foot, two-story brick building at a cost of $7,000, furnishings included.

North described the interior: “two large school rooms, recitation rooms and a laboratory containing philosophical apparatus.” (“Philosophical apparatus” is the early term for equipment used in scientific studies.)

The school opened April 18, 1836, headed by Professor William H. Allen, from the Methodist seminary at Cazenovia, New York (later president of Girard College, in Philadelphia), assisted by his sister, Miss R. Clifford Allen and, according to Nash, by another man and woman. Tuition was $6 a term (neither Nash nor North said how many terms in a year), expected to cover expenses.

The school was not a success. North implied that Allen’s (undated) departure was one blow. Nash wrote, “after a few years of indifferent financial success, its worthy promoters suffered its doors to be finally closed.”

* * * * * *

Meanwhile, Nash wrote, the Maine legislature passed, on Feb. 27, 1833, an act specifically applicable to Augusta’s elementary and high-school students that, as he explained it, had two parts. First, it authorized any school district to elect a seven-man committee (the number was later reduced to three or five) that would have full authority over the district’s school(s); and second, it authorized districts to consolidate.

Supporters found the act hard to implement, Nash said – not enough people were ready for “the proposed innovation.” At last, in early 1842, school districts number 3 and number 9 united as the Village School District. From locations of school buildings Nash and North provided, this district covered most of present-day Augusta on the west side of the Kennebec.

The seven directors elected at an April 6, 1842, meeting found they had 974 students and two buildings, the “wooden, old-fashioned” Piper School, on Laurel Street, and an unnamed two-room brick building, at the intersection of Grove Street and Western Avenue.

The directors determined they needed six primary schools, one (Nash) or two (North) grammar school(s) and one high school. They built two new “frame houses” (Nash’s description), raising $850 from district taxes to buy lots and put up the buildings (according to North).

(As reported previously, after the Maine legislature ordered every town to raise school money, district taxes were no longer the only source of funding. Apparently they required legislative approval; in 1849, North said, the Village District requested and received legislative permission for a district tax, not to exceed 20 cents per resident, to support education.)

At the end of 1842, North wrote, the directors were pleased with the quality of education they’d provided. They’d spent $2,401.51 – $1,212 for teachers, the rest for acquiring and maintaining buildings and for firewood and other miscellaneous items. There had been 33 weeks of teaching in nine schools.

Not all district residents were as pleased. Some, North said, disagreed with the assignment of their children to a specific school; more were unhappy about the high school. The latter group included some whose children were deemed not qualified to attend, some who thought it too expensive and some who feared foreign languages were stealing money and attention from English.

North detailed several years of contentious meetings, with frequent changes of elected directors. At an April 19, 1843, meeting (the second that month), two motions to make students studying Latin or Greek pay tuition were defeated; but voters approved a motion to “discontinue the present system of high school instruction.”

Instead, they approved a proposal to have six primary schools and three grammar schools, boys’, girls’ and co-ed.

This system was not universally popular, either. Voters at an April 20, 1844, meeting re-elected five of the seven 1843 directors and replaced two (North did not say whether the two resigned or were rejected). They postponed indefinitely (in effect, voted down) a motion to divide the Village District into three districts, which North said would have been a retreat to the old system.

Dissension continued through 1845 and 1846. Meanwhile, North said, town meetings had increased funding for schools, from $1,600 in 1840 to $3,000 in 1846, making residents feel less oppressed by the district school tax and reviving the belief that education was essential to good government.

Consequently, the second of two March and April 1847 meetings approved a wordy resolution that called for “suitable schoolhouses…conveniently located” for the “small children”; at least two grammar schools; and a high school. North added that 1847 town meetings appropriated $4,000 for education.

Nash offered summary descriptions of new grammar schools built in the district in 1848, 1850, 1853 and 1855. The last four, two in 1850 and one each in 1853 and 1855, were brick.

North said the four two-story brick buildings cost a total of about $12,000 and were considered among the best in Maine “for interior arrangement and finish.” Writing in 1870, he regretted that the “exteriors were not made more attractive” and that the buildings were not made larger to accommodate more classes.

Nash listed another school, built in 1890, that became the Cushnoc Heights Grammar School. (An on-line source says the modern name of Cushnoc Heights is Sand Hill, the hill on the west side of the Kennebec just north of downtown Augusta.)

As of April 1892, Nash said the Village District student enrollment was 2,052, “about two thirds of the whole number in the city.” In 1892, Charles E. Nash was one of the three Village School District directors, and a man named Gustavus A. Robertson had been principal of the Village District schools since 1868.

* * * * * *

For a Village District high school, Nash and North said, the directors first rented the Classical School Association’s old building. In June, 1848, they bought it from the remaining shareholders, for $3,000. North called this purchase an important step in reducing opposition to the high school, as well as a good deal financially.

In 1869, Nash said, the former Classical Association’s high school building was “superseded by the present spacious edifice,” which was dedicated Aug. 26, 1870. The new building, at the intersection of Bridge and State streets, a couple blocks uphill from the Kennebec, was almost finished when North completed his history in 1870. He said it cost about $25,000, for which the District issued bonds.

North approved of the two-story brick cruciform building building’s “pleasing appearance.” Inside, he wrote, it was “conveniently arranged to accommodate two schools of two hundred students each in single seats.”

Each floor, he said, had five rooms: a 52-by-54-foot “schoolroom,” two 22-by-30-foot “recitation rooms” and two 15-foot-square “clothes rooms.” The ground-floor rooms had 14-foot ceilings, the second-floor rooms 16-foot ceilings.

The third floor “formed by the mansard roof” was to be used as “a hall for school exercises and exhibitions.”

The Village District high school closed in 1881, when Cony Free High School opened. The building continued in use for younger students, and in 1891 was named the William R. Smith School, honoring a just-retired “steadfast friend and able promoter of the public schools” who had been connected with the district since it was formed almost 50 years earlier.

Your writer found on line postcards showing Augusta’s William R. Smith Grammar School, one dated 1909. These postcards show a large three-story brick building on a stone foundation, with elaborate window trim, different on each level, and a mansard roof. (North had described the windows: “large, circular headed, giving abundance of light.”)

* * * * * *

Nash wrote that in 1882 – 49 years after the legislature authorized districts to consolidate – three on the east side of the Kennebec merged to become the Williams School District. The new district’s directors divided students into primary, intermediate and grammar-school levels.

As of 1892, there were 581 students, and the directors had just opened a new four-room school house, costing $13,000, on Wedge Hill, on Bangor Street. (Bangor Street runs north along the east side of the Kennebec from the Cony Street intersection, becoming Riverside Drive, in Vassalboro. (Rte. 201.)

Nash also wrote that in 1887, the City of Augusta abolished “all the suburban districts” and “adopted a town system for them.” (As reported previously, the Maine legislature abolished school districts state-wide seven years later.)

In 1892, he said, there were 17 “suburban schools,” with names instead of numbers. Your writer found on line two Kennebec Journal clippings about one of them, Hewins School (location unknown).

On Friday, March 23, 1917, the school presented an “entertainment and pie social,” with music and recitations, to raise money to pay for the “Grafonia” or “Grafonola” (an early Columbia phonograph).

Hewins School closed at the beginning of 1948 and its 11 students, seven of them in second grade or below, were bussed to Williams School.

Williams School is not on Nash’s 1892 list by that name. An on-line source says it closed in June 1980 after 89 years; the story is illustrated with a photo of fourth- and fifth-graders carrying desks to the Hussey School. (Augusta still has a Lillian Parks Hussey Elementary School, built in 1954 on Gedney Street, on the east side of the river a block east of Bangor Street.)

Augusta also had a Nash School, built in 1897 and named in honor of the Charles E. Nash whose chapters in Kingsbury’s history your writer has been citing. The former school building at the intersection of State and Capitol streets is part of Augusta’s Capitol Complex Historic District.

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: 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

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

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.