Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Augusta fires, fire departments, Part 3

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Augusta Great Fire of 1865.

by Mary Grow

Your writer hopes her readers are not tired of fires and firefighting, because there will be one more article on the theme after this one. As usual, the topic has expanded because of more information than expected from easily available sources.

One invaluable source is the University of Maine’s on-line DigitalCommons collection. It includes various City of Augusta reports for many years.

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After the April 12, 1861, southern attack on Fort Sumter started the Civil War, James North’s Augusta history focused on the local contribution to and effects of the war. He did not neglect other events, however, including fires and firefighting. Early on, he combined the two topics, describing the patriotic parade on Thursday, April 18, 1861, that was led by the Augusta Band, with the Pacific Fire Engine Company next in line.

The first fire North mentioned during the Civil War years was the February 1862 destruction of the Phenix Block on Water Street. Daniel Williams built these three connected three-story stores in 1839; North called them “superior in finish to any yet erected.”

The initial tenants included the post office, with Reuel Williams’ law office above it (Daniel and Reuel Williams were brothers; the family was prominent in Augusta’s history); a shoe store; and H. A. Kittredge’s store selling “West India goods and groceries.” The printing shop for The Age newspaper had the whole third floor.

By February 1862, a hardware store had replaced the grocery; the shoe shop had a different owner; and in the basement below the post office were the press rooms for both The Age and the Kennebec Journal, with The Age print shop still filling the top floor.

On the cold Saturday evening of Feb. 22, a fire started in the shoe store, under the stairs. A fire engine responded, hose was run up the stairs and the fire “nearly extinguished” – when the water stopped running.

The problem was a broken joint (in the hose, or on the engine? North did not specify). While it was being replaced, the fire flared up; but renewed water quickly had it “nearly extinguished” – when the water stopped running again.

This time, the hose had been cut. North wrote that the suspects were “some unruly soldiers of the Fifteenth Regiment,” but nothing was proved.

While the hose was being repaired (and placed under guard), a valve on the fire engine froze. By the time the valve was thawed with hot water, the fire was out of control. Residents who had gone home after responding to the initial alarm were called back, and Hallowell sent two additional engines. No other buildings were affected, but the Phenix Block was gone.

Another major fire began Monday evening, March 31, 1862. Starting in a wharf storehouse, it spread to a second storehouse and then inland to burn down four wooden buildings on the river side of Water Street. North identified them as a store, a carpenter’s shop, Pumpkin Tavern (“a dwelling occupied by a number of families”) and the pre-1800 building known as the Titcomb house, after an early settler named Samuel Titcomb.

North commented that the burned buildings were “of little value,” and losing them was a step toward widening Water Street, accomplished in 1867. (The remaining east-side wooden buildings were moved back.)

A third major fire in 1862 started in the Kennebec Hotel’s stable about 10 p.m. Monday, Oct. 13. Flammable hay spread the fire through the stable and to the hotel; both buildings, two adjoining stores and a brick house were destroyed and a brick store damaged. Two horses were lost.

Augusta firefighters got help from Hallowell’s Torrent engine, which arrived about 11:30 “and did good service.” Residents salvaged hotel furnishings. This third substantial fire within a year led “thoughtful men” to recommend city officials buy a steam fire engine, North said.

The next fire North noted was the burning of the South Parish Congregational Church, which he called the South Parish meeting-house, the night of Monday, July 11, 1864. The church, dedicated on Sept. 20, 1809, was a large, two-story building with a steeple that was 125 feet tall, counting the weathervane.

During a bad thunderstorm, lightning struck the steeple and set the building alight “instantaneously, from top to bottom.” It burned completely in an hour; “only the curtains behind the pulpit, the communion service and bible with a few cushions were saved.”

North wrote that the steeple had always had a protective lightning rod. This time, he said, the “volume of the electric fluid was too great for the rod to carry, and it passed into the building.”

He emphasized the sense of loss, using phrases like “time-honored edifice,” “hallowed associations” and “landmark.” And, he wrote, parishioners met the next evening and decided to rebuild. The cornerstone of a new church, built of granite, was laid on May 26, 1865, and the church “was dedicated Thursday evening, July 5, 1866.”

Another fire in 1864 burned down the Portland and Kennebec Railroad’s depot on Christmas Eve. A strong north wind spread the fire quickly from the northeast corner throughout the building, but snow on the ground and on nearby roofs protected the neighborhood.

Lost were a freight train headed for Skowhegan, stopped by snow-covered tracks, and “the dummy engine and car, and six passenger cars.”

Augusta Cushnoc Hose Company.

On Aug. 24, 1865, North reported a celebration in honor of Augusta’s new steam fire engine Cushnoc. It had its first test in the great downtown fire that was reported about 5 a.m. on Sunday, Sept. 17, 1865 (and was described in the Feb. 4, 2021, issue of The Town Line).

North wrote that the Cushnoc was placed on a wharf right behind the new block of wooden buildings on Water Street, where the fire started, “in full confidence that, with its powerful aid, the fire would be easily subdued.”

The combination of wooden buildings, wooden sidewalks and a “hot and dry” southeast wind was too much. The Cushnoc was almost lost as the wooden wharf and the lumber piled on it caught fire. Eri Wills, the chief engineer, saved it by cutting the hose and turning the engine’s water on itself.

Another engine on another wharf contained the fire headed south for Winthrop Street. With Augusta’s Pacific, Hallowell’s Tiger, the “United States Arsenal steamer,” the rescued Cushnoc and, North wrote, Wills’ ingenuity, firefighters finally controlled the fire.

What Wills did, North said, was remember a particularly strong wall that might be a firebreak. To protect it, he broke through an attic roof so that a hose could be run from the Cushnoc 60 feet up to drench the fire from above. North gave a dramatic description, apparently as an observer, of the men’s danger, as buildings collapsed around them and the street side of the one they were standing on repeatedly caught fire.

By 11 a.m. the worst seemed over. Around noon “a train despatched for assistance” brought two Gardiner fire engines and one from Pittston, which helped finish the job. North’s history includes a list and map of 81 buildings lost; damage amounted to $500,000. There is no record that any lives were lost.

(A Sept. 14, 2015, Kennebec Journal article announcing the observance of the 150th anniversary of the Great Fire reported that Augusta’s Atlantic and Pacific and Hallowell’s Tiger would be on display. Reporter Craig Crosby wrote that Hallowell still owned the Tiger, the Town of Oakland owned the Atlantic, and the Pacific was privately owned.)

The next major fire North described cost one life. It was at what was in 1868 the Eastern Branch of the National Military Asylum, precursor of today’s Togus VA Medical Center, in Chelsea, about four miles east of Augusta.

The asylum opened in the fall of 1866 on property that included a mineral spring (supposed to promote health) and a hotel and associated buildings. North wrote that the military added a 5,000-square-foot brick hospital.

On Sunday, Jan. 7, 1868, a cold, windy night, a fire that started about 9:30 p.m. in the heating system burned most of the old buildings. The 270 inmates were forced “into the open air of a severe winter’s night”; those too sick to move “were brought out on mattresses and laid, for want of shelter, upon the snow.”

To add to the disaster, North wrote, “the soldiers” – presumably he meant men responsible for the patients – broached a barrel of medicinal whiskey and got drunk. “Disgusting scenes of disorder and violence ensued.”

Augusta firefighters and ordinary citizens brought the patients to safety, the sick in private homes and the rest in municipal buildings. One man, “weak from disease, and suffering from exposure,” did not survive.

North wrote that the fire consumed almost everyone’s personal belongings. The new hospital was damaged; the steam fire engine named General Butler saved it from destruction.

In the aftermath, some patients were transferred to other branch asylums and some accommodated in surviving buildings. After hesitation, the “board of managers” decided to rebuild more appropriately. North wrote that in the spring of 1868, “four large brick buildings were commenced, each one hundred feet long by fifty feet wide [the dimensions of the brick hospital], placed in the form of a square with a courtyard in the center.”

Fire department expenses

The report of Augusta’s 1858 Committee of Finance for the fiscal year that ended March 19, 1859 (a DigitalCommons document), said that Eri Wills was the “chief engineer” (apparently the equivalent of a modern fire chief) in 1858 and was paid $50. The annual appropriation for the fire department was $700; almost $800 was “undrawn” from the prior year.

The committee listed the value of Augusta’s fire apparatus as follows: Atlantic and Pacific fire engines, $2,000 plus $1,500 for “Engine house and lot”; the Deluge engine “and apparatus,” $400 plus $50 for its engine house; and another $50 worth of “[h]ooks, ladders and carriages.”

In 1865, according to the March 17, 1866, end of fiscal year report of the finance committee and the treasurer, Augusta appropriated $8,000 for the fire department. Wills was still paid $50; he had two assistant engineers, paid $25 apiece.

Expenses totaled $10,731.64, including $4,325 for the “new Steam Fire Engine,” $2,700 for 1,500 feet of new hose and $1,457.36 for “sundry bills on account of new Engine House.” Firefighters balanced the budget by selling the Deluge engine for $66, charging (other towns, presumably) $16.50 for “use of Steamer” and taking more than $1,300 for their contingency account.

China man arrested for Augusta fires

A China resident named George W. Jones was arrested, tried and convicted for setting Augusta’s 1865 Great Fire, and was in the state prison when North finished his history in 1870.

As North tells it, Jones had a lobster business in Portland and sold lobsters from a “cart” in Augusta. Over the summer, soldiers had taken lobsters without paying. City police had not responded to Jones’ satisfaction and he had “threatened vengeance upon the city.”

Saturday night Jones was in China, and a barn “belonging to a person he had an antipathy against” burned. Sunday morning he walked to Augusta, arriving before 4 a.m., and stayed during the fire. Monday he took the train to Portland. Tuesday as he sold lobsters there his cart was “run against and damaged” and the offender refused to pay.

That night a woman saw a man setting fire to shavings outside the offender’s house. She called in an alarm, the fire was put out and examination showed the knife that made the shavings had “two gaps in the blade.” Jones was arrested in a neighboring town; the knife in his pocket had matching gaps in its blade.

Main sources

North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Augusta fires & fire departments – Part 2

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The Hydraulion suction fire engines, produced by Sellers & Pennock, of Philadelphia, in 1822. With the introduction of suctions, the general efficiency of the engines was greatly increased.

by Mary Grow

Another fire Augusta historian James North described was the one that destroyed Augusta’s bridge across the Kennebec River the night of April 2, 1827. (See the July 28, 2022, issue of The Town Line.) It was spotted a little after 11 p.m. and spread so fast that the “citizens [who] rushed to the scene of conflagration with fire engine and buckets” could do nothing. The building still called the Craig store (see last week’s article) at the northwest end of the bridge was destroyed and other buildings damaged.

Hallowell firefighters responded “with two engines, one of them ‘a new hydraulion, with suction hose’ [apparently a quotation from the April 7, 1827, Kennebec Journal].” But, North wrote, the roads were so bad that they were too late to be much help.

(Wikipedia explains that the earliest engines were the hand tubs, with water dumped by a bucket brigade into a cistern and pumped out. In 1822 a Philadelphia fire engine maker invented a machine, named the Hydraulion, that could suck water from a source, eliminating the hand-filling.)

Henry Kingsbury, in his Kennebec County history, wrote that an early step toward changing Augusta from a town to a city (accomplished in 1849) was the Maine legislature’s March 1835 authorization for the Augusta village corporation “to raise money to maintain a fire department.” The corporation governed an area a mile wide on each side of the Kennebec from the Hallowell line north (presumably to the Vassalboro line).

The first “board of officers” included seven fire wardens. Kingsbury included a long list of men who made up the “engine company” appointed by the selectmen in January 1836.

The early 1850s saw numerous fires in Augusta. Early in his record of the year 1850, North mentioned, without much detail, the “disastrous conflagration at the dam,” which destroyed half a dozen sawmills, a flouring mill and other businesses and damaged the dam itself.

Another fire burned a row of wooden stores on March 9, 1850. Starting about 10 p.m. in a tailor’s shop, it burned out another tailor, a barbershop, a confectionery, a grocery and an unspecified “store.” To limit the fire’s spread, one adjoining building was “pulled down” and two others “damaged by an attempt to pull them down.”

Five fire engines fought this fire, two “old fashioned” Augusta ones, two from Hallowell and “Uncle Sam” from the Kennebec Arsenal, brought across the Kennebec on the ice by First Lieutenant R. A. Wainwright (see box two).

On Wednesday, Dec. 4, 1850, a disastrous fire burned part of Augusta’s insane asylum (opened in October 1840) and killed 28 people. North gave a dramatic (and unsourced) description.

The asylum consisted of a main building, a north wing, an old three-story south wing and a new south wing, according to North. The fire started in the old south wing and destroyed or damaged both south wings and the main building. The north wing, where the women were housed, escaped, and the women were unhurt.

By North’s account, an attendant in the old south wing, then housing 42 male patients, spotted smoke in the hot air flues about 3 a.m. and found a fire in the basement. When he and the doctor on duty couldn’t put it out with buckets of water, they began rescuing patients, who were in danger of suffocating as heavy smoke spread.

Staff first moved patients into the new south wing, though, North wrote, some were too excited or confused to stay there. Ladders were raised to the old wing’s third floor, barred windows broken and frightened patients evacuated. Then the new wing, too, filled with smoke and flames; 27 patients and one attendant died, and others were hurt.

The first fire engine on the scene was “Uncle Sam” from the nearby Arsenal. Augusta’s engine was out of order. Hallowell sent its “Tiger” and “Lion.”

“Uncle Sam” quickly emptied a cistern in the new south wing and the well outside, and the fire blocked access to another cistern. The remaining water source was the Kennebec River, 1,500 feet away and 70 feet below the burning building.

Quick-thinking firefighters parked the “Tiger” on the river bank with 700 feet of hose running uphill to the “Lion.” From the “Lion,” another 600 feet connected to “Uncle Sam.” From “Uncle Sam,” water could reach the top of the building: “the flames were checked, and the north wing and a part of the main building were saved.”

A Dec. 5 inquest found that the fire was caused by an incorrectly reconstructed heating system (dating from the summer of 1849), which put a hot furnace pipe too close to wooden timbers.

The trustees arranged temporary quarters for the patients and repairs to the building; the north wing was open again by the end of December, North wrote. The whole complex was rebuilt, with improvements, by late November 1852.

Yet another fire that North described as “more destructive than any that had occurred before” was spotted about 2 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 3, 1853, in the basement of a spool factory at the west end of a dam across the Kennebec. It destroyed most of the mills rebuilt after the 1850 fire – six sawmills, a flouring mill, and others – plus “a large dwelling-house.”

Augusta’s “Atlantic” and “Pacific” fire engines fought the fire from the nearby bridge until the heat drove them off. The “Pacific” ended up on the south end of the fire, joined by the Arsenal’s “Uncle Sam” and the “Deluge” (whose home town North did not name); they saved several buildings. On the north end, the “Atlantic” extinguished repeated fires on the roof of the Williams sawmill.

North described the building in which the fire started – and which was leveled – as a three-story wooden structure 160-by-60-feet, divided into a dozen “tenements” (apparently shops and businesses, not dwellings). The total loss he put at $75,000, mostly uninsured; 200 men lost their jobs, and most lost their tools as well.

Again, rebuilding was fast, partly because the Williams sawmill was still operating. North said a new machine shop was finished in December, this time with a stone foundation and “brick partitions dividing the tenements passing from the foundation through the roof.” Replacement sawmills went up the next summer.

Inmate blamed for jail fire

When the Kennebec County jail burned on March 16, 1808 (see last week’s issue), one of the inmates was a man named Henry McCausland. His story is told in James North’s 1870 history of Augusta and in Charles Nash’s footnotes to the excerpts from Martha Ballard’s diary included in his 1904 Augusta history.

North wrote that McCausland was the youngest son of another Henry McCausland, who came to the Kennebec Valley in 1760. The younger Henry was born in 1759, “served three years in the army, during the revolution; married in 1783, and had five children.”

“In 1793,” North continued, “he became insane on religious subjects, and imagined that his sins could only be pardoned by a burnt offering and human sacrifice, which he fancied the Lord had directed him to make.”

Nash wrote that the designated “burnt offering” was the then-unfinished Episcopal Church, in Gardiner, and the “human sacrifice” its pastor, Rev. Joseph Warren.

On Aug. 22, 1793, McCausland “filled a child’s shoe with live coals from his own fire-place” and carried the shoe to Gardiner. After leaving the coals in heaped shavings hidden under a door, “he took the pulpit Bible and carefully carried it into the woods and laid it tenderly on a stump.” The church was destroyed.

McCausland couldn’t find Rev. Warren, so he decided anyone named Warren would do. On Oct. 18, 1794, he found his victim: Mrs. Pelatiah (Abigail Tibbetts) Warren came home to be with her sick mother. McCausland came into the sickroom, talked for a bit with the two women and suddenly grabbed a butcher knife and killed Abigail.

Soon after, Nash said, McCausland “appeared voluntarily at a public meeting” and confessed. Arrested and brought to court, he insisted on pleading guilty to murder, claiming he was telling the truth.

North wrote that because he was insane, McCausland was not formally sentenced, but stayed in jail for 36 years. He attempted at least one more sacrifice; North wrote that he became friends with the nine-year-old daughter of a jailer, until without warning he almost killed her.

A big man with a “grave and thoughtful manner” and a long white beard, McCausland became a public attraction; “he was visited by thousands, from whom he collected a small fee” for describing his crimes.

During the 1808 fire, North wrote, McCausland not only “made no attempt to escape, but assisted in preventing the escape of others.”

McCausland got a pension as a Revolutionary veteran; county officials kept part of it to pay for his room and board. North wrote that in his old age he learned to read from a jailer’s family and “became a diligent reader of the Bible.” He died Aug. 24, 1829, aged 70, and was buried in Gardiner.

Kennebec Arsenal commander Robert Moncrief Auchmuty Wainwright

Kennebec Arsenal commander Robert Moncrief Auchmuty Wainwright was born in Newport, Rhode Island, on June 19, 1815, the oldest of eight children of Robert Dewar Wainwright and Maria Montresor Auchmuty (1789-1861), according to an online site.

(The Find a Grave site says Robert Dewar Wainwright, born June 14, 1781, in Charleston, South Carolina, was a colonel in the U. S. Marines; took as his first wife Juliana B. Scott, daughter of Gustavus Scott of Maryland; was married to Maria Auchmuty when he died; and is buried in the Congressional Cemetery, in Washington, D.C. However, this site says he died Oct. 5, 1811, and shows an inscribed gravestone to prove it.

(Another source says Colonel Robert D. Wainwright died in the fall of 1841, and cites as evidence an article on consequent Marine Corps promotions, effective Oct. 6, 1841, from the Oct. 16, 1841, issue of the New-York tribune.)

An online military history site says Robert Moncrief Auchmuty Wainwright graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (opened in 1802) in the Class of 1835 and joined the Army as a brevet second lieutenant. He served in multiple posts, mostly at arsenals, including the Kennebec Arsenal from 1842 to 1847 and from 1848 to 1851, with service in Mexico intervening.

(Wikipedia explains that brevet means a higher title given “as a reward for gallantry or meritorious conduct but [which] may not confer the authority, precedence, or pay of real rank.”)

North wrote that Wainwright was commander at the Kennebec Arsenal from May 1841 until December 1846. He served in the Mexican War until December 1848, when he again took charge of the Arsenal until Sept. 5, 1851.

Either set of dates matches online information that Wainwright married Ann Eliza Child (1825-1897) on Aug. 6, 1843, in Augusta. The couple had at least one son, another Robert Dewar Wainwright (1849-1920), and one daughter, Isabella Montresor Wainwright (1850-1871).

Wainwright was Chief of Ordnance in the Department of New Mexico when the Civil War broke out in the spring of 1861. He was promoted to major early in the war and ended as a brevet colonel. Service included “arming the fortifications at New York harbor” from August 1861 to October 1862 and commanding the New York Ordnance Depot through the end of March 1864.

After the war, Wainwright commanded Benicia Arsenal, in California, until Dec. 2, 1866; he died there Dec. 22, 1866, and is buried in the Congressional Cemetery.

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Nash, Charles Elventon, The History of Augusta (1904).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Augusta fires & fire departments – Part 1

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The 9-ton steam powered fire engine was a revolution in its day, they were built by the Amoskeag Steam Fire Engine Company, of New Hampshire, late 18th century, and cost $7,000.

by Mary Grow

A consequence of building buildings, like those described in Augusta’s downtown historic district (see the February 2021 issues of The Town Line) and the ones described recently in Waterville’s downtown historic district (see the August and September 2022 issues, ignoring the two irrelevant articles) is that they catch fire.

The next three articles in this series will talk about fires and the development of fire-fighting in Augusta. See also the issue of Aug. 27, 2020, where fires in China, Fairfield and Palermo were described; and the issue of Feb. 4, 2021, for Augusta’s great fire of September 1865.

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James North’s year by year history of Augusta, published in 1870, records several fires before the 1865 disaster. The first he knew of was in 1785 (when Augusta was still the northern part of Hallowell): “Elias Craig’s Hatter’s shop” burned on Dec. 1.

Craig (Sept. 27, 1756 – May 6, 1837) had been an army private during the Revolution; he was 23 years old when he moved from Massachusetts to Fort Western in 1779. North called him “the first hatter in this region of country.”

His house and shop were on the west side of the Kennebec at the intersection of Bridge and Water streets. Charles Nash, in his 1904 history of Augusta, listed the places Hallowell town meetings were held between 1771 and 1792. The majority were at Fort Western in 1771 and 1772 and in the town meeting house after 1783; in between, voters assembled in three different inns, a barn and several houses, including in 1782 three times in Elias Craig’s house.

The house was of so little value that the assessors did not count it in 1784, North wrote. Indeed, he said, they counted only 38 “dwelling houses” for a population of 682 white people and 10 black people. Realizing the disparity, they explained that many families still lived in the “log cabins or camps which they first built,” which weren’t worth listing as taxable.

The 1784 assessors’ report listed 21 varied commercial holdings. Craig’s was one of five shops, and his stock in trade was valued at 50 pounds.

Craig rebuilt the shop after the fire, and enlarged the house at intervals. When that corner was rebuilt as a commercial block, the house was moved to Jefferson Street.

North wrote that Craig “possessed the confidence of the settlers, many of whom were welcomed to his house upon their arrival” before they moved to their new homes.

In 1792 one of his house guests was James Johnson. On May 31, he and his brother Samuel were firing celebratory cannons “probably on account of some recent news from France,” and one cannon exploded, injuring the two men. They were brought to Craig’s house, where midwife Martha Ballard attended to them. Apparently both survived.

Craig’s first wife was Hannah McKecknie (Sept. 28, 1766 – April 12, 1790), daughter of an early settler, Dr. John McKecknie. They were married in December 1788, and had a daughter, also named Hannah. On November 28, 1793, Craig married again, to Olive Hamlin or Hamlen (Nov. 2, 1770 – Sept. 25, 1848); they had three or four children.

Craig was a selectman in Hallowell, first elected in March 1795. He was among the 161 residents petitioning the Massachusetts legislature to create the separate town of Augusta in May 1791. The request was approved in February 1797, and a town named Harrington was organized; in June of the year, its name became Augusta.

Criag was elected selectman again at the first meeting in Harrington, in April 1797, and later was an Augusta selectman. North wrote that he served a total of seven years in the three successive towns. In 1806 he was the local coroner, according to Nash’s history. He moved to Fayette before his death on May 6 or May 7, 1837.

Leathern fire bucket.

North recorded the earliest fire department in the central Kennebec Valley, a “private fire company” formed in the 1790s in Augusta (then still Hallowell). The “principal citizens” who started the company wrote a charter requiring each to have on hand “two leathern fire buckets, and a canvas bag for the removal of goods at fire.” An on-line fire department history says insurance companies formed such associations to protect their members’ property.

The buckets, North explained, had been in use in the American colonies since the 1600s. They were oblong with leather handles, “very durable and convenient to pass water.” Association members put their names on their buckets.

On March 11, 1799, North wrote, two years after Augusta separated from Hallowell, town meeting voters appointed six fire wardens (Elias Craig was one of them). Later in the year town officials bought a fire engine and appointed firefighters (North said 13, Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history names 12, the online site names 14). The firefighters were called “engine men”; they were instructed to create an organization and make regulations “not repugnant to the constitution of the Commonwealth [of Massachusetts]).”

North did not mention the firefighters when he reported briefly on the Feb. 11, 1804, fire that burned a building whose tenants included Peter Edes’ printing office, where the Kennebec Gazette was published (the paper resumed publication March 23).

Nor did he describe any suppression efforts when the Hallowell Academy building burned on Jan. 29, 1805. Opened in 1795, it was in the area that remained Hallowell after the 1797 division. (See the Sept. 16, 2021, issue of The Town Line for more information on the two Hallowell academies.)

More than once North credited Hallowell with helping put out Augusta fires. He wrote that on Jan. 8, 1808, an old and a new blacksmith shop on Water Street burned down, and Nathan Weston’s old building beside them was “pulled down to prevent the flames from spreading.”

He continued, “The Hallowell engine arrived early and afforded great assistance in subduing the fire.” Total damage was $900; residents contributed $600 “to the relief of the sufferers.”

Hallowell came to the rescue again during a more serious incident a little more than three months later. The spring of 1808 was the period of the uprising of squatters against local government sometimes called the Malta War (Malta was an early name for Windsor, Maine). Public officials were attacked, and there was concern that public buildings, like the Kennebec County jail in Augusta, would be next.

A chaotic scene in early America when a house caught on fire. Bucket brigades were usually the main method of fighting fires. The whole community would pitch in, or risk the spread of fire.

Around sunset on March 16, 1808, North wrote, “a sudden alarm was given that the jail was on fire. The fire was discovered in the upper story. It rapidly spread, enveloping the building.”

The jailhouse was destroyed. The prisoners were evacuated, and North recorded that because of the unstable times, the jailer had already moved out essential records.

North wrote and quoted (probably from the March 18, 1808, issue of the Kennebec Gazette): “The citizens of Hallowell attended in great numbers ‘with both their engines,’ and were entitled to ‘much credit’ for their ‘prompt and spirited exertions.'”

The same evening, incendiary devices started a fire upstairs in the courthouse, but it was noticed in time to be put out before there was much damage. At 10 p.m., two local judges asked Major-General Henry Sewall to call out the militia, and Sewall immediately ordered the Augusta Light Infantry to guard the courthouse and the prisoners’ temporary accommodation.

Later, it was determined that the jailhouse fire was started by one of the prisoners, a tavern-keeper named Edward Jones, jailed for stealing. The courthouse fire probably was set by some of the rebellious settlers; North gave no names.

Jones, according to the Oct. 21, 1808, Kennebec Gazette (cited by North), was sent to the state prison to serve two months in solitary followed by nine years’ hard labor for arson. He was also convicted of stealing; that sentence (whether concurrent, North did not say) was 15 days’ solitary confinement and a year at hard labor.

And what, readers may wonder, did Kennebec County do with no jail? The answer is that county officials had a new one built; and North recorded its progress.

Right after the fire, he wrote, the county sheriff had a temporary wooden building put up near the county courthouse, and in April 1808 the Court of Sessions accepted it.

Court officials appointed a local man as superintendent of the interim jail and also charged him with cleaning up the old site, where they directed a new stone jail be built as soon as possible. Meanwhile, they paid good money to keep prisoners guarded in the “insecure” temporary quarters.

The court levied an $8,000 county tax for the new jail. North wrote that Massachusetts legislators cut it to $5,000; and in April 1809, they added back $3,000 to finish paying for the work. The building was in use by December 1808.

North described the new jail as a two-story building with walls of “large blocks of rough hammered stone fastened together with iron dowels.” Each floor had two blocks of cells separated by a central hall.

The ground-floor cells were for “the worst criminals,” and “were lighted and ventilated by openings in the walls six inches wide and two feet long.” The second-floor cells were for debtors and minor criminals; each cell had a grated window.

North wrote that the new jail “was much in advance of the prison accommodations of that day, and was considered a very expensive and secure structure.”

However, by 1857 the county commissioners were ready to replace it. North quoted their justification: the building was “wholly unfit for the purposes for which it was intended and used; more especially on account of the want of sufficient warmth, light, ventilation and cleanliness; it was inhuman, dangerous to life, and detrimental to health and good morals to imprison persons therein.”

The new Kennebec jail was built close to the courthouse and the old jail, at a cost of about $60,000, with preliminary study beginning in the spring of 1857 and the building ready for a well-attended public inspection on Feb. 1, 1859. A four-story stone and brick building, it had 54 regular cells and eight “privilege rooms.”

The regular cells were eight feet square, except for a dozen tiny ones, three feet 10 inches wide, on the second floor. The privilege rooms, which North also classed as cells, were eight feet by 19 feet.

The building evidently accommodated jail staff, as North listed eight “sleeping rooms,” a kitchen, eating and bathing rooms and “a parlor, sitting-room and office.”

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Nash, Charles Elventon, The History of Augusta (1904).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870)

Websites, miscellaneous.

China Historical Society to meet

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Location of the China Historical Society, next to the China town office and above The Town Line.

by Bob Bennett

The China Historical Society will be meeting on Saturday, October 29, at 10 a.m., in the portable building at the China Town Office. At their September get-together, it was decided that they definitely need to continue and move forward while attempting to recruit new members and build greater interest in China’s unique and valuable history among residents and visitors of all ages and backgrounds. While there will be no set agenda, there will likely be discussion of the society’s bylaws, its tax exempt status, collections and any other topics and/or questions that come up.

September’s meeting was, for me, a true eye-opener as far as the knowledge of, and interest in, our town’s past as reflected in the comments of the attendees. Hopefully this “excitement” will be continued and we will welcome a larger turnout at the upcoming meeting. I hope to see many of you there.

LIFE ON THE PLAINS: Pictorial stroll along the east side of Water St., Part 5

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by Roland D. Hallee
Photos courtesy of E. Roger Hallee

Part of a row of tenement buildings (top and below) between 30 – 44 Water St., which sat on the east side of Water St., overlooking the Kennebec River.

All of these apartment buildings, and many others, were torn down in the 1960s. These (below) were located on the side where a guardrail now exists, and the lots overgrown with vegetation. You can see parts of the buildings that extended down to the river.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Waterville historic district – Part 8

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North Grammar School, that was located on the corner of Pleasant and North streets, which later was the site of the YMCA, and now is an apartment complex.

by Mary Grow

Haines Redington Whittemore

This concluding article on prominent Waterville residents features William Thomas Haines, mentioned briefly in several August and September articles and last week; Frank Redington, mentioned almost weekly; and a minister, none other than Rev. Edwin Carey Whittemore, chief editor of the 1902 Waterville centennial history. All were born in the 1850s and lived into the 20th century.

* * * * * *

William Thomas Haines

William Thomas Haines (Aug. 7, 1854 – June 4, 1919) is mentioned frequently in Whittemore’s chapters, and more information is available on line. Born in Levant, he graduated from the University of Maine as valedictorian, class of 1876, and earned an LL.B (bachelor of law) from Albany Law School in 1878. After less than two years in Oakland, he moved his law practice to Waterville in 1880.

Haines was mentioned last week as an incorporator of the Oakland Water Company in 1889. He was associated with several Waterville financial institutions.

Various sources list him as a long-time trustee for the institution that became the University of Maine; on the building committee for Waterville’s “beautiful” 1888 North Grammar School; one of the first trustees of Coburn Classical Institute in 1901; a principal donor of “both time and money” to the public library, located in the Haines building from 1898 or 1899 until after 1902; and one of the 1899 incorporators of the group that supported Waterville’s R. B. Hall Band.

He was Kennebec County Attorney from 1882 to 1887; state senator from 1888 to 1892; state representative in 1895; state attorney general from 1896 to 1901; member of the Governor’s Council from 1901 to 1905; and governor of Maine from 1913 to 1915.

An on-line site quotes from Haines’ Jan. 2, 1913, inaugural speech: “The introduction of the automobile, or the carriage moved by the power of gasoline, has made the question of highways of still more importance to the people of the State.” Wikipedia says during his two-year term the Maine legislature approved a bond issue for road improvements.

Haines and his wife, Edith S. Hemenway (Nov. 9, 1858 – Nov. 17, 1935) are buried in Waterville’s Pine Grove Cemetery.

Hains building

* * * * * *

Frank Redington

Frank Redington (Dec. 11 or Dec. 19, 1858 – Feb. 4, 1923) has been mentioned repeatedly in this series as author of the chapter on businesses in Whittemore’s history. His wife, Carrie Mae Foster, and in-laws were featured in the Sept. 15 issue of The Town Line. Both Whittemore and Henry Kingsbury, in his Kennebec County history, considered him worthy of attention.

Kingsbury started with Frank’s great-grandfather, Asa Redington (Dec. 22, 1761 — March 31, 1845). Aaron Appleton Plaisted, in his chapter on Waterville’s early settlers, profiled Asa Redington; he and Kingsbury disagreed on several points.

Both said Asa Redington was a Revolutionary soldier – he joined a New Hampshire regiment in 1778, wintered at Valley Forge and was at Yorktown, Plaisted added. He came to Maine in 1784 with his brother Thomas (according to Plaisted) or Samuel (Kingsbury). Kingsbury wrote that Samuel settled in Vassalboro and Asa in Waterville; Plaisted put both Redingtons in Vassalboro until Asa moved to Winslow in 1792.

Plaisted had Redington married on Sept. 2, 1787, to Mary Getchell, daughter of his Vassalboro landlord, Captain Nehemiah Getchell, with whom he partnered in a company that helped build a 1787 dam close to the later Lockwood dam and “a large double saw mill” on the dam. After the partnership dissolved in 1799, Redington stayed in the lumber and sawmill business until 1830.

In Kingsbury’s version, in Waterville “a Miss Getchell” became Redington’s second wife.

Kingsbury, writing in 1892, listed five sons and three daughters. Plaisted, in 1902, listed six sons and three daughters, with the order differing.

Both historians said the two oldest sons were Asa Jr., and Samuel. Kingsbury listed Emily first of the three daughters, implying she was the oldest; Plaisted listed her last of all the children.

Emily, Plaisted added, married Solymon Heath, the banker, and one of their daughters was Mrs. A. A. Plaisted. (The daughter’s name was also Emily; see last week’s article on Aaron Appleton Plaisted.)

Asa Redington’s second son, Samuel, was also “in the lumber business until about 1850,” Kingsbury wrote. He married Nancy Parker; their only son, Charles Harris Redington, was born in 1838 (Kingsbury) or Jan. 21 or 24, 1830 (Plaisted, on-line sources) and died in 1906.

Charles Harris Redington married Saphronia (Kingsbury) or Sophronia (Plaisted, on-line genealogy) Day in December 1854. She was born Sept. 1, 1831, and died Oct. 8, 1912.

Plaisted wrote that Charles Harris Redington’s businesses included groceries, furniture and undertaking, with various partners. He served in local government before and after Waterville became a city in 1888, including being mayor for a year around 1897.

The second (or third) of Charles and Sophronia’s six (or seven) children was Frank Redington, who was born in 1858, attended Waterville Academy (by 1902 Coburn Institute) and married M. C. Foster’s daughter Carrie Mae (1862 – 1953) in 1890.

In 1875, Frank started clerking in Charles Redington’s furniture store. In 1880 he and a partner bought the business; a year later he bought out the partner, and by 1902, Plaisted wrote, Redington and Company was “one of the largest in its line in the State.”

The business was in a “fine block” Redington built in 1893 on Silver Street, and by 1902 had “overflowed into an adjoining block.”

Redington home on Silver St., now the Redington Museum.

Like his father, Frank Redington was active in civic affairs. Plaisted wrote that he headed the Waterville Board of Trade from 1895 to 1901; on-line sources say he was mayor of Waterville in 1909.

William Abbott Smith described the centennial celebration for Whittemore’s history, including the June 23, 1902, dedication of the new city hall, at which Redington presided. He wrote: “Probably no man in Waterville has been more industrious and influential in arousing the citizens to the need and advantages of a new City Hall than Mr. Frank Redington, ex-president of the Waterville Board of Trade, and every one recognized the appropriateness of the selection of him as presiding officer at the dedication of the building which he had labored so faithfully to procure.”

Plaisted credited Redington with a role in the “building of the Waterville, Wiscasset and Farmington Railroad” (in 1895; or its extension northwest to Winslow in 1898 or 1899?) He was the WW&F’s president for two years, Plaisted wrote.

(See the Sept. 17, 2020, issue of The Town Line and the WW&F museum’s website, wwfry.org, for more information on the railroad, though not on Redington’s alleged connection with it.)

Wikipedia says Redington was instrumental in construction of two other major buildings, the federal post office at Main and Elm streets in 1911 and Gilman Street high school in 1912.

He was also a public library trustee; vice-president of the corporation organized in 1899 to support the R. B. Hall Band; and, Plaisted wrote, after 1885 on the committee that managed Pine Grove Cemetery. He is buried there with his parents, his widow and her parents and other Redington family members.

According to Wikipedia, Frank Redington was in poor health for a long time before he was found dead in his Silver Street furniture store on Feb. 14, 1923, “by a gun wound to his head, reported as self-inflicted.”

* * * * * *

And finally a few words about Rev. Edwin Carey Whittemore (April 29, 1858 – Nov. 1, 1932), chairman of the editorial board of the Waterville history. Rev. George Dana Boardman Pepper’s chapter on “The pulpit of Waterville” – a chapter Whittemore must surely have proofread and approved – says he was born in Dexter, son of Isaac and Elizabeth (Hatch) Whittemore.

Pepper wrote that Whittemore went from Dexter High School to Coburn Classical Institute, in Waterville, graduating in 1875; to Colby College, class of 1879; and to Newton Theological Institution in Massachusetts, graduating in 1882. He served in Baptist churches in New Boston, New Hampshire, and Auburn and Damariscotta, Maine, before coming to Waterville’s First Baptist Church in 1899.

On July 25, 1879, Whittemore and Ida Macomber, born May 14, 1856, in Abbott, Maine, were married.

On an on-line list of Waterville Baptist pastors, Whittemore is the only one between 1829 and 1920 for whom the list does not give the date he left the pulpit. His predecessor, Isaac B. LeClaire, served from 1887 to 1892, leaving a seven-year gap (with no permanent pastor?) before Whittemore took over in 1899; his successor, Frank Sherman Hartley, served from 1909 to 1912.

In addition to editing the Waterville bicentennial history, Whittemore wrote books on the history of Maine Baptists (at both state and local levels), Coburn Classical Institute and Colby College. From 1905 through 1909, he was on the executive committee of the Interdenominational Commission of Maine (created in 1890 and made a permanent organization in 1892).

The 1919 American Baptist Year-Book lists E. C. Whittemore, of Waterville, as the education secretary for the United Baptist Convention of Maine. For his ability in the pulpit and his activities at the state level, Pepper called him “among the foremost Baptist ministers of Maine.”

A 1929 newspaper clipping describes Skowhegan Baptist pastor Dr. George Merriam being honored for 25 years of service at Bethany Baptist Church. One of the speakers paying tribute was Dr. E. C. Whittemore of Waterville, identified as “a college class-mate at Colby and a friend of more than 50 years standing.”

An on-line family history says Edwin Whittemore died Nov. 1, 1932, probably in Waterville, and Ida died Sept. 14, 1946, also probably in Waterville.

Their daughter, Bertha Carey Whittemore, born in April 1882 in Newton Center, Massachusetts, graduated from Colby with the class of 1904. She married New Sharon native Earle Ovando Whittier, born about 1891, on Aug. 25, 1913, in Dexter. She died in 1963, and he died in Boston Sept. 30, 1970; both are buried in Farmington.

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Waterville historic district – Part 7

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Postcard of “new” Thayer Hospital, circa 1950.

by Mary Grow

The subseries on 19th-century Waterville businessmen continues in this article, beginning with Aaron Plaisted, born in 1831, and his family, and ending with Luther Soper, born in 1852. For variety, your writer added a medical professional (who was also a businessman).

* * * * * *

Aaron Appleton Plaisted (March 25, 1831 – Nov. 27, 1908) was a third-generation Watervillian. His mother’s father was Dr. Moses Appleton (1783 – 1849), who moved to Waterville (then Winslow) in 1796, where he practiced medicine for years and opened the first drug store. Dr. Appleton’s daughter, Mary Jane, married Dr. Samuel Plaisted. Aaron was the older of their two sons; they had one daughter.

Aaron Plaisted was educated at Waterville Academy and Waterville College (Class of 1851, member of Phi Beta Kappa). He taught for a couple years, then went to Harvard Law School and practiced briefly in Portland and from 1856 to 1858 in Dubuque, Iowa.

On Sept. 23, 1856, he married Emily Carlton (or Carleton) Heath (Nov. 15, 1835 – June 19, 1916), daughter of Waterville banker Solymon Heath. The first of their three sons and two daughters, Appleton Heath Plaisted, was born Oct. 10, 1857.

Returning to Waterville, Aaron Plaisted served as cashier of Ticonic Bank and its successor, Ticonic National Bank, for 38 years, from 1858 to June 1896. During most of that time, according to Bates’ chapter in Edwin Carey Whittemore’s 1902 Waterville history, “he performed all the duties of cashier without help and had no vacations.” His successor until the end of 1900 was his oldest son, Appleton Heath Plaisted (who did have an assistant from early 1898, Hascall S. Hall).

Plaisted’s grandfather, the physician Moses Appleton, was among the Ticonic Bank’s founders in 1831. His father-in-law, Solymon Heath, became its president in 1865, after the bank converted from a state to a national bank, and served until 1875.

In addition to his banking career, Plaisted was involved, with Dennis Milliken (profiled last week) and others, in early water-power development in Waterville. He was an assistant internal revenue collector during part of the Civil War and served on various Waterville/Colby College boards.

Whittemore identified him as one of the two men – the other was Baptist pastor Henry S. Burrage – who “organized the Waterville Public Library Association” and opened the library in 1873. Estelle Foster Eaton wrote in her chapter on the library in Whittemore’s book that Solymon Heath was the first president, and the Ticonic Bank housed the library for 26 years, “during which time Mr. A. A. Plaisted acted as librarian and secretary.” Daughters Helen and Emily were among his assistants. (See the Dec. 23, 2021, issue of The Town Line for more on the Waterville Library Association).

Plaisted was on the Committee of One Hundred that planned the 1902 centennial celebration, and also on its invitation subcommittee. He wrote the chapter on early settlers in Whittemore’s history; Whittemore said his long acquaintance with Waterville’s old families made him a source of “very valuable aid to the editors of this volume.”

* * * * * *

Dr. Frederick Charles Thayer (Sept. 30, 1844 – Sept. 26, 1926) headed the Committee of One Hundred. Whittemore credited much of the success of the centennial celebration “to his faithful attention and to his efficient generalship.”

Thayer was a Waterville native, the third generation of his family in the area. His parents were Charles Hamilton Thayer and Susan E. (Tobey) Thayer, both from Fairfield. Charles Thayer was a businessman; his father, Stephen (1783 -1852), and his older brother, Albert (1808 -1833), Frederick’s grandfather and uncle, respectively, were doctors.

Frederick Thayer’s educational background was varied, according to Whittemore and to Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history. (Thayer wrote the chapter on Waterville medical people in Whittemore’s history, but a footnote says Whittemore wrote the “sketch of Dr. Thayer.”)

Thayer attended Waterville Academy and “Franklin Family School,” a boys’ school in Topsham, and Waterville (aka Colby) College for two years. An on-line list of Waterville families says he graduated from Colby in 1865; Kingsbury wrote that he was a member of Colby’s class of 1865 “but did not graduate.”

After 18 months at Union College, in Schenectady, New York, in 1865 and 1866, Thayer studied medicine with a doctor in Albany, New York, and went to lectures at Albany Medical College. In 1867 he graduated from the Medical School of Maine, established in 1820 on the Bowdoin College campus.

Colby gave him an honorary master’s degree in 1884. In 1884-85 he was a trustee of the Bowdoin-based medical school.

On-line sources say Thayer practiced medicine and ran a hospital at his 214 Main Street home from 1867 until his death in 1926. After he died, the house continued to be Thayer Hospital for another two decades. The present Thayer, at 149 North Street, opened in 1951.

Kingsbury, writing in 1892, said since 1867 Thayer had “risen to a celebrity unconfined by local bounds.” He continued: “He has been a pioneer in this community in difficult surgical operations, calling for cool, conservative judgment, and requiring at the same time the most delicate touch; yet has for the most part been content to follow cautiously where the world’s most eminent surgeons have successfully led, and in consequence his consultation practice has grown to extensive proportions.”

Whittemore, 20 years later, agreed, writing: “By his skill and success in capital surgical cases Dr. Thayer early gained an eminent position in his profession, which position he has ever since maintained.”

On Dec. 2, 1871, Thayer married Leonora L. Snell (1852 – July 27, 1930), of Washington, D.C., in Waterville. She was the daughter of William Bradford Snell, a distinguished jurist born in Winthrop, Maine, and in 1870 appointed by President Ulysses Grant as the District of Columbia’s first police court judge.

Thayer held many offices in local and state medical groups. In addition, Whittemore wrote, he was in the Maine militia, starting as assistant surgeon and later surgeon in the second regiment. He became “medical director of the 1st Brigade” and then Maine’s surgeon-general under Governor Henry Bradstreet Cleaves (whose term ran from January 1893 to January 1897).

Thayer “has been prominently identified with all movements of the development and progress of the city for many years,” Whittemore said. He represented Waterville in the Maine legislature in 1885-86 and was a Waterville alderman in 1889.

Whittemore wrote that he was the first president of Waterville Trust Company. In 1902 he was a director of that bank, “president of the Sawyer Publishing Company and the Riverview Worsted Mills and a director” of the Wiscasset, Waterville and Farmington Railroad.

* * * * * *

The important men in the Gallert family were brothers Mark and David. David (mentioned in the Sept. 22 article on the Main Street Historic District) came to Waterville first; Mark (born Oct. 27, 1847) came from Prussia in 1862. Kingsbury’s history says he was David’s partner until 1870, and after the “business was divided” ran a shoe business. Whittemore’s history says Mark “entered” his brother’s store in 1872.

David is described in a sentence as “for many years…a prominent and much respected merchant of this city.”

Colby’s 2011 Jewish history project, in an on-line document, provides an excerpt from the 1890 census. It said David Gallert was 49 years old and living on Pleasant Street, with “Mrs. Rosalia,” age 46, and Solomon, 22; Sigismond, 20; Fannie, 18; Benno, 16; Minnie, 13; Ernest, 10; and Daisy, 7.

Mark Gallert was 42 and living on Silver Street, in the “fine residence” Whittemore’s contributors said he built in 1883. His family consisted of Rebecca (Jacob Peavey’s daughter, whom Mark married on his 25th birthday), age 35; Jacob, 17; Sigbert, 15; Miriam, 13; and Aimee, 10. Kingsbury’s 1892 history named the children “Jacie D., Sidney, Miriam, Amy and Gordon.” Whittemore’s chapter listed the children in 1902 as “D. J., Sidney M., Miriam F., Aimer P., and Gordon.”

In the census, a marginal note beside each Gallert says there is “no independent evidence” they were Jewish.

Whittemore’s contributors wrote of Mark that he had been in the “boot and shoe business” since 1872, successfully “as in other business ventures.” He was a Waterville selectman in 1877, and in 1902″ has large holdings in city real estate.”

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The Soper Building, on Main St., with current ground floor occupant Carbon Copy.

Luther H. Soper, also mentioned in the Sept. 22 article, was born May 25, 1852, in Old Town. A cemetery record found on line might indicate that he lost his father early: Luther H. Soper, born in 1823, died in 1854 at the age of 31 and is buried in Forest Hill Cemetery, in Old Town.

Waterville’s Luther H. Soper attended an unnamed “commercial college”; married Carrie Ellen Wiggin (born in Milton, New Hampshire, in 1858) on Sept. 26, 1887, and as of 1902 was the father of four daughters.

Kingsbury wrote that he clerked in a dry goods store from the age of 16 until he moved to Waterville in 1877. Waterville was lucky to have enterprising merchants whose stocks were larger and more varied than in other municipalities, Kingsbury commented; and “in the various departments of a dry goods store L. H. Soper & Co. enjoy the distinction of having the largest and most complete establishment in the city.”

Soper built the 1890 Soper Block because his business urgently needed more space, Kingsbury said. It cost $26,000, of which $12,000 was for the lot on Main Street. Between 1890 and 1902, according to Whittemore’s history, the business “has steadily increased to its present large proportions.” Soper also had “a large branch house” in Madison.

Soper’s other business interests included lumbering and banking. He was on the board of directors and vice-president of Merchants’ Bank. A Feb. 10, 1889, legislative act found on line incorporated the Oakland Water Company, listing its corporate members as “George H. Bryant, Frank E. Dustin, W. T. Haines and Luther H. Soper, their associates, successors and assigns.”

The company’s purpose was to supply Oakland with water “for industrial, manufacturing, domestic, sanitary and municipal purposes, including the extinguishment of fires and the sprinkling of streets.”

In the lead-up to Waterville’s 1902 centennial observance, Soper was a member of the Committee of One Hundred and the trades display committee.

Luther Soper died in 1914; Carrie died in 1939.

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed. Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).

Websites, miscellaneous.

LIFE ON THE PLAINS: Pictorial stroll on east side of Water St. – Part 4

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A Lockwood-Duchess warehouse which ran along Water St., about where the entrance to the Hathaway Center parking lot is now.

Roland D. Halleeby Roland D. Hallee

This week we will begin our stroll on the east side of Water St.

Photos courtesy of E. Roger Hallee

A Gulf gas station, which was located where Prsicilla’s Shop is today.

The first of a long row of tenement buildings which ran along the east side of Water St., many hanging over the banking. We will take a look at more of them next week.

This miniscule storefront was the original location of Scotty’s Pizza, which was established in 1962. This building was right across from where Scotty’s Pizza now sits on the corner of Water and Sherwin streets.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Waterville historic district – Part 6

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Reuben B. Dunn, center, and family.

by Mary Grow

Subpart one
– biographies one –

Dunns, Milliken

This article is planned as the first of a three-part subseries in which your writer introduces readers to some of the businessmen (and other people) mentioned in the previous weeks’ descriptions of Waterville’s Main Street Historic District, and sometimes to members of their families.

The arbitrarily-chosen subjects are arranged by birth order, oldest first. This week, please meet two men born early in the 1800s: Reuben B. Dunn, and several family members; and Dennis Milliken, with a bit about his son-in-law.

* * * * * *

Reuben Barnes Dunn (Dec 23, 1802 – Sept 9, 1889) was the man after whom the R. B. Dunn Block at the south end of the east side of Main Street, mentioned in the Aug. 25 article, was named. Two sons, Willard Morse Dunn and Reuben Wesley Dunn, were also well-known Waterville residents.

Reuben B. was born in Poland, Maine, and married his successive wives there: Emeline Davis in 1827; after her death in 1833, her sister, Eliza, in 1834; and after Eliza’s death in 1837, in December 1838 Lydia Richardson Ayer (Aug. 11, 1815 – April 5, 1900). Lydia was the mother of Willard and Reuben W.

Edwin Carey Whittemore’s Waterville history says Reuben B. was a country schoolteacher in 1820; a country storekeeper in 1821; a buyer and seller of timberland, lumber, clocks, threshing machines, hardware; a manufacturer of “scythes, axes and other agricultural tools” from 1841 until his death; railroad promoter in the 1840s and Maine Central Railroad president until he retired in 1870.

Reuben B. and Lydia moved from Poland to Readfield in 1841 and to Waterville in August 1850. Willard M. and Reuben W. were born in Fayette, the history says.

An on-line site says R. B. Dunn founded the Dunn Edge Tool Company in January 1840. It produced “scythe blades and edge tools.” Incorporated in 1856, it was sold in 1921 to Seymour Manufacturing Company; Seymour sold it two years later to North Wayne Tool Company. It closed in 1967.

By 1892, according to Reuben W. Dunn’s (perhaps self-interested?) chapter on Waterville manufacturing in Whittemore’s history, the Dunn Edge Tool Company’s scythe plant “is said to be the best and most conveniently arranged in America,” and the “axe shop is not excelled in convenience or efficiency by any of its size.” The company could produce annually 15,000 dozen scythes (180,000) and 6,000 dozen (72,000) axes, sold all over the United States and Canada. Reuben W. was the company’s “treasurer and manager”; his brother Willard was president.

The Dunn company was one of many early manufactories in the western part of Waterville, which became the separate town of West Waterville in February 1873 and was renamed Oakland in 1883. Manufacturers used water power from Messalonskee Stream, a smaller, more manageable source than the Kennebec River.

Whittemore suggested that Reuben B. Dunn and/or his sons were involved in other West Waterville businesses; and multiple sources credited them with bringing Amos Lockwood to Waterville to build the Lockwood Mill complex (see the Aug. 25 issue of The Town Line). Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history identifies Dunn as the financier behind Mill Number 1 and the first president of the Lockwood Company.

In 1869, Whittemore wrote, Dunn donated $15,000 of the $18,000 needed to build the Methodist Church. Kingsbury says Dunn’s gift was $14,000 of $16,000.

Reuben B.’s older son, Willard Morse Dunn (May 11, 1845 – March 23, 1917), went to Maine Wesleyan Seminary, in Kents Hill, and started his business career in 1866 as a salesman in a Boston “cloth store.” In 1869 he moved to Auburn and joined a shoe manufacturing company. From 1873 he was active in organizing the Lockwood Company; he was still a company director in 1902, and was “interested in” other mills as well as president of Dunn Edge Tool Company.

Willard Dunn served as Waterville postmaster from 1879 to 1885 under Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes; he was replaced during Democrat Grover Cleveland’s first term and reappointed in 1889 by Republican Benjamin Harrison (this position was mentioned in the Sept. 29 history article).

Dunn was still postmaster in 1902. Redington called him “one of the most efficient postmasters the city has ever had,” and wrote that both he and assistant postmaster J. F. Larrabee were highly regarded by the residents they served.

On Dec. 31, 1873, Willard Dunn married Alma Burbank Lowell (Oct. 4, 1851 – March 25, 1936) in Waterville. Willard and Alma had one daughter, Mabel Esther (Nov. 24, 1882 – March 4, 1980), Reuben B.’s granddaughter.

Mabel Dunn married Burnham native Herbert Carlyle Libby (1878 – 1965), who graduated from Colby, Class of 1902, and wrote Colby Stories As Told by Colby Men of the Classes, 1832 to 1902 (1900) and Yarns for Boys (1908).

Reuben B.’s younger son (Mabel Libby’s uncle), Reuben Wesley Dunn (Feb. 8, 1847 – Nov. 11, 1927), attended Maine Wesleyan Seminary (and became a trustee in 1877) and graduated from Colby University (as it was briefly titled) in 1868. He was teacher/principal at Corinth Academy for two years before going into business.

Like his father’s, Reuben W.’s business career was varied. An on-line site and Whittemore’s collaborators list: cotton mill agent in 1880; “visomess agent” (any reader who know what this title means, please contact The Town Line), 1870-1886; “in the department store business” with Lorin A. Presby, 1884-1891; “connected with the Lockwood Company” and other mills, including president of Madison Woolen Company from 1894 to1898; president of the Somerset Railroad, 1897-1907; treasurer and manager of Dunn Edge Tool Company after 1897.

Reuben W. married Martha S. “Mattie” Baker (Jan. 21, 1848 – July 22, 1915) on Aug. 19 or Sept. 2, 1873 (sources differ).

Martha Baker Dunn was a novelist and a contributor to “leading literary magazines.” Her two novels are Memory Street: A Story of Life (1900) and ‘Lias’s Wife: An Island Story (1901); an on-line site adds a book titled Cicero in Maine: And Other Essays (1905).

Whoever described her in Whittemore’s book praised her “depth of insight, clearness in portraiture and true feeling, sometimes veiled in humor,” and wrote that readings of her unpublished stories were “a delightful feature” of the Women’s Association and Women’s Literary Club programs.

As mentioned above, Reuben W. wrote the chapter on manufacturing in Whittemore’s history. Martha wrote the chapter on social life.

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The Milliken Building, at the corner of Main and Silver streets, now occupied by the Silver Street Tavern.

Dennis Libby Milliken (Feb. 1 or 4, 1804 – Oct. 28 or Nov. 2, 1879) was identified in the Sept. 15 article in this series as the prominent banker in whose honor the 1877 Milliken Block on the south corner of Silver and Main streets was named. A Scarborough native, he married Jane Larrabee (born about 1804, and died after her husband) in that town on May 7, 1829. The couple had two sons and two daughters.

In 1830, at the age of 26, Milliken joined Jacob Southwick, of Vassalboro, in the lumber business. When the family moved to Waterville is unclear.

Whittemore’s history says Milliken served in the Maine House of Representatives and the Maine Senate, but does not say when, nor what town he represented. That information precedes the information that he was a member of the Governor’s Council under Democratic Governors John Fairfield (who served non-consecutive partial terms, 1839-1841 and 1842-March 1843) and Edward Kavanagh (Fairfield’s successor for the rest of 1843) and Republican Governor Lot M. Morrill (1858-1861).

In 1856, Milliken became president of Waterville National Bank, chartered in 1850 and first located in the second story of the north end of the Ticonic Block (Ticonic Row), described Sept. 15. He remained in charge, overseeing the building of the new brick bank that became the Milliken Block, until the bank closed in 1879.

Horatio Bates, who wrote the chapter on banking in Whittemore’s history, said Waterville National Bank “was well managed and paid good dividends.” When it closed, stockholders got the full value of their stock and a 20% dividend.

By the 1860s Milliken was prominent in Waterville affairs. Whittemore listed him among those chosen to address an April 20, 1861, public meeting called “to take action concerning the rebellion” in the southern states. He was a non-combatant in the Civil War; General Isaac Bangs listed him (and R. B. Dunn) among Waterville’s “prominent older men” who supported the Union cause whole-heartedly.

Bangs (March 17, 1831 – May 30, 1903) was a Civil War veteran and businessman who wrote the military chapter in Whittemore’s history. He married Dennis and Jane Milliken’s older daughter, Hadassah Jane, on Oct. 20, 1857.

(Why the name Hadassah? No explanation. Her brothers were George and Edward; her sister was Mary; and her father is listed among organizers of Waterville’s first Unitarian Society in 1863.)

Bangs became Waterville National Bank’s cashier in 1861 and resigned in 1862 to join the army; he was on the bank’s board in 1879. In addition to banking, he was in the granite business and had interests in mills.

After the war, Milliken invested in building the first dam across the Kennebec and developing water-powered mills. His 1868 grist mill was one of the first two industries using the Lockwood Dam. His business career included an undated stint as president of the Androscoggin and Kennebec Railroad.

He served as a trustee of Waterville, later Colby, College from 1859 until his death.

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902. (1902).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Waterville historic district – Part 5

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Old Waterville Post Office located at the junction of Main and Elm streets, and College Avenue.

by Mary Grow

Final two Main Street Historic District buildings Old Post Office & Seton Hospital

Returning to the 2016 enlargement of Waterville’s Main Street Historic District, the final two buildings included are the four-story Cyr Building/Professional Building, on the northeast corner of Main and Appleton streets at 177-179 Main Street (see its photo in the Sept. 15 issue of The Town Line); and the Elks Club, on the north side of Appleton Street.

The Professional Building, built in 1923, was designed in Art Deco style by the Portland firm of William Miller and Raymond Mayo. (The Aug. 25 The Town Line article described Main Street’s other Art Deco building, the 1936 Federal Trust Company Bank.) It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on Feb. 19, 1982.

The application, prepared in July 1981 by Frank A. Beard and Robert L. Bradley of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, said “the local press” of 1923 called the building “the finest of the Waterville office buildings.” Beard and Bradley did not disagree, writing that both in 1923 and in 1981 it was “an outstanding structure in the downtown area.”

They called the Professional Building “a comparatively rare example for Maine of a very early Art Deco impulse in architecture with some features of the earlier Chicago commercial styles.” With 42 “office suites” in 30,875 square feet of floor space, it was “by far the largest such structure in the city” in 1923.

Beard and Bradley wrote that the building’s two facades, on Main and on Appleton streets, each had a street-level entrance “surmounted by low arches with elaborate low reliefs and shields.” There were five bays of large windows on the Main Street side and six on the Appleton Street side; the end bays thrust outward, “creating the effect of corner towers.”

In their 2016 application for the expanded Main Street district, Scott Hanson and Kendal Anderson described the steel and concrete frame of the building and the exterior “cast stone first story with buff tapestry brick on the upper stories of the south and west elevations, red brick on the south elevation, and modern metal cladding on the north elevation.”

The northeasternmost building in the expanded historic district is the Colonial Revival style Elks Club, at 13 Appleton Street, another Miller and Mayo design. Built in 1913/1914, the two-and-a-half story brick building sits on a raised basement concrete foundation, with stairs leading up to a projecting entrance.

The Elks Club has cast stone decorations and at the attic level, “four historic diamond paned windows.” Each window has “four panes of colored glass forming a larger diamond at the center,” and is set in “a projecting brick surround with a cast stone square at each corner.”

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Two other historic buildings in Waterville are outside the Main Street district, but since each gained historic recognition as a public building, your writer thinks it appropriate to describe them now.

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The older of the two is the former Waterville post office in the south angle of the five-way intersection of Main Street, Elm Street, Center Street, Upper Main Street and College Avenue. Mainely Brews now occupies its former basement, with a Main Street entrance.

Kingsbury wrote that Waterville’s first post office was established Oct. 3, 1796, with Asa Redington the first postmaster. He went on to list the successive postmasters, ending with Willard M. Dunn, appointed in 1889 for the second time (his first term was 1879 to 1885).

Kingsbury did not talk about post office buildings. Whittemore’s contributors suggested that the office moved from one rented space to another during the 19th century.

In his chapter on the early settlers, Aaron Plaisted mentioned the “little postoffice on the west edge of the Common,” where Abijah Smith was postmaster from 1832 (Kingsbury said 1833) to 1841. In 1902, according to Redington, the post office was in the ground floor of the W. T. Haines block, on the south side of Common Street (briefly mentioned in the Aug. 25 issue of The Town Line).

At that time, Redington wrote, the postmaster and his assistant supervised “seven clerks, five carriers and one substitute. The post office did $40,000 worth of business annually, and Redington predicted it would soon “be numbered among the first-class offices.”

The historic Old Post Office was built in 1911 – a Waterville timeline found on line says it opened in 1913 – and was added to the National Register of Historic Places April 18, 1977.

When Maine Historic Preservation Commission historian Frank A. Beard and graduate assistant Stephen Kaplan prepared the application for historic listing in October 1976, they wrote that the building was owned by the U. S. Postal Service and was unoccupied. Waterville’s College Avenue post office and federal building opened in 1976, according to the on-line timeline.

U.S. Treasury Department Architect James Knox Taylor designed the 1911 building. Taylor (October 11, 1857 – August 27, 1929) was the Treasury Department’s Supervising Architect from 1897 to 1912, and is credited with a long list of federal buildings.

Beard and Kaplan wrote that Waterville’s post office typified the early 20th century use of Greek Revival style for government buildings “and survives as perhaps the best of only a few such examples in Maine.”

They described the combination of a square block and a circular front that made the single-story stone building impressive, with on its front a “Corinthian colonnade of refined proportions and handsome detail. Similarly designed pilasters appear at the front corners of the block structure, symbolically unifying the block to the curve.”

The structure atop the flat roof is described as “a tall Corinthian cylindrical lantern, based in shape and character on the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens.” (Wikipedia has an illustrated article on this monument, built in 335/334 BCE in Athens and “reproduced widely in modern monuments and building elements.”)

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The former Elizabeth Ann Seton Hospital, on Chase Ave., now being converted into housing.

The Elizabeth Ann Seton Hospital at 30 Chase Avenue, on the west side of Waterville, was designed in 1963; its construction was finished in mid-1965. On July 11, 2016, it was approved for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

The application for national listing was prepared by Matthew Corbett, Scott Hanson and Kendal Anderson, of Sutherland Conservation and Consulting, of Augusta, (all three had previously worked on parts of the applications for Waterville’s Main Street Historic District). They listed the building’s significance as architectural and its period of significance as 1965.

The architectural firm was James H. Ritchie and Associates, of Boston. The Sutherland group found that different members of the firm had initialed different parts of the 1963 plan, and that Ritchie had died in 1964.

The application explains that the building was “a good example of the Miesian school of Modernist architecture, applied to a health care facility in Maine.”

The “general characteristics of the Miesian style” that Ritchie and Associates used included “a recessed ground floor, use of concrete panels to express the building’s framing on the exterior, and the use of aluminum windows and a flat roof,” the application says.

The Miesian architectural style was a variant within the Modernist school that characterized skyscrapers and other large public buildings after World War II. It is named after Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), a German architect who began his career in Germany and emigrated to the United States after Hitler rose to power.

After the war, a source cited in the application says, the United States government financed a large number of new hospitals. Hospital designers adopted the Modernist style because they found it functional and affordable.

When Seton Hospital opened, the Sutherland team wrote, it offered “over 150 beds…and the latest in medical technologies.” They quoted from a July 27, 1965, Waterville Morning Sentinel article that began, “All patients’ rooms are quiet, comfortable, pleasing to the eye, and designed to give an excellent view of the surrounding landscape.”

The article went on to talk about air conditioning in some areas (not the patients’ rooms); four modern elevators with telephones; the “spacious lobby” with a “modern coffee shop” and a “gift and stationery shop” nearby; and the “soft-lighted and beautifully designed” chapel, with seats for over 80 people. The laboratory was “ultra-modern,” the X-ray department had “the most modern equipment.”

The old Sisters Hospital, on College Ave., now Mount St. Joseph nursing home.

The second floor was for obstetrics, and was partly air-conditioned. Other patients had the third, fourth and fifth floors. The sixth floor at first provided living space for members of the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, the organization that ran Seton Hospital, and later became additional patient space.

The Sisters’ quarters included 15 bedrooms; a kitchen and a laundry room; “a sewing room, guest room and parlor”; a dining room and community room separated by a folding panel, so they could be combined for a large group; “an office for the superior”; and the Sisters’ private chapel.

The Sisters of Charity came to Waterville in 1913, the Sutherland team explained, and in April took over the I. C. Libby Memorial Hospital, changing its name to Sisters Hospital. In 1923, they built a larger Sisters Hospital, on College Avenue. By 1963, that hospital had “an 86 percent occupancy on a year-round basis, and 107 percent occupancy at the height of occupancy,” necessitating the larger Chase Avenue building.

Dr. Frederick Charles Thayer served on the Sisters Hospital board until 1931, when he set up Thayer Hospital, first in his house on Main Street and later on North Main Street. Thayer and Seton merged in 1975 to become Mid-Maine Medical Center; in 1997 the Mid-Maine and Kennebec Valley health systems merged to form MaineGeneral.

The 2016 application describes the Seton Hospital building as “vacant.” Articles in the Central Maine Morning Sentinel in August 2022 described plans to convert most of the building to apartments, with leased storage space in the basement. Reporter Amy Calder wrote that because the former hospital is on the National Register of Historic Places, “construction must preserve the historic nature of the building.”

Main sources

Beard, Frank A., and Robert L. Bradley, National Register of Historic Places.
Inventory—Nomination Form Professional Building July 1981.
Beard, Frank A., and Stephen Kaplan, National Register of Historic Places Inventory – Nomination Form Waterville Post Office, October 1976.
Corbett, Matthew, Scott Hanson and Kendal Anderson, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, Elizabeth Ann Seton Hospital, Jan. 18, 2016.
Hanson, Scott, and Kendal Anderson National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, Waterville Main Street Historic District (Boundary Increase), June 3, 2016.
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).

Websites, miscellaneous.