Up and down the Kennebec Valley: French-Canadians – Part 1

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St. Augustine Church in Augusta (photo by Eric Austin)

by Mary Grow

Augusta

Two distinctly non-British peoples who came to live mainly in Augusta and Waterville, the largest manufacturing centers in the central Kennebec Valley in the 19th and early 20th centuries, were French-Canadians who came south from Canada’s Québec Province, and Middle Easterners, especially Lebanese and Syrians.

This article will talk about French-Canadians in the Kennebec Valley and specifically in Augusta. The next article in the series will be about French-Canadians in Waterville and Fairfield and, if space permits, Middle Eastern immigrants.

* * * * * *

Wikipedia says the first European to visit what is now the Canadian Province of Québec was the Italian Giovanni da Verrazzano, whose expedition in 1522 or 1523 was authorized by King Francis I, of France. Successive French explorers followed, and in 1608 Samuel de Champlain founded Québec City.

The area was a French colony from then until the British conquered it, a victory recognized by the 1764 Treaty of Paris. The province has been under British rule ever since, in varying forms.

However, relations with the British government and with the rest of British Canada have been stormy at times. The Catholic Church has been important in the province, and French remains the official language. French-Canadians brought a distinctive culture and formed separate communities when they came to Maine.

Le Club Calumet’s on-line history (see box #1) says there have been French-Canadians in the area that is now Maine since 1611. Around 1830, improvements to the route called the Kennebec Road or the Canada Road facilitated north-south movement.

An on-line genealogy of a family whose ancestors followed the Kennebec Road describes it thus: “The road begins in Beauce, Québec, then in Maine in the Jackman area and follows the Kennebec River through Skowhegan, Waterville, southeast to Phippsburg, Maine.”

Another on-line source calls it “a system of water and portage routes linking the Chaudiere River in Québec to the Kennebec River in Maine” and says it “served as the primary transportation corridor between Canada and Maine until the construction of the Grand Trunk Railway in 1853.” Used for thousands of years by Native Americans and since the 17th century by European missionaries, traders and other wanderers (and occasionally soldiers), it remained in primitive condition until the 1830s.

By then the Kennebec Road was used mostly by “drovers taking livestock to the market in Québec City,” the source says. A few people lived along the route, though, and as they became more numerous they got the clout to demand improvements, especially after Maine became a separate state in 1820.

Between 1828 and 1835, the source continues, Maine state officials added “a customs house, postal service, a stage line and roadhouses. A ten-dollar ticket would buy a two-day stage coach ride from Québec City to Skowhegan.

“Construction of the state capital (1829) and the Kennebec dam (1834) in Augusta drew French Canadian workers with their families to Maine. A cholera epidemic in 1832 and the depression, famine and rebellion of 1837 [against British monarchical rule] hastened this migration.”

Urban jobs were not the only attraction for French-Canadians. Robert P. Tristram Coffin, in Kennebec Cradle of Americans, described 19th-century Maine loggers:

“Yellow and brown mustaches and many more black ones, for a great many of the men were ones who had stemmed from ‘P.Q.,’—the Province of Québec, – who had followed the Maine rivers down from the forests of the St. Lawrence, who spoke Canuck, and who handled their slim symphonies of curving wood and steel, their axes, as if they were attractive and tender young women.”

In a later chapter titled Yankees from the Province of Québec, Coffin described French-Canadian mill workers. From the early 1800s, and especially from the 1860s, large mills making cloth, paper and other products were powered by the Kennebec and needed workers, and many of those workers came from Québec.

In mill towns and cities, Coffin saw the French immigrants as a separate group in the second half of the 19th century. He imaginatively described the original Yankee home-owners moving uphill away from the river as French families settled near the mills – and moving farther as the French multiplied and prospered and they, too, claimed more living space.

Each riverside town and city had its Frenchtown, he wrote. “Two nations keeping apart, eating their different foods, having their own ways, their own schools, their own barbers and bakers.”

The Yankees considered the French-Canadians foreigners, Coffin wrote, even though they had been on the continent longer than most of their detractors. He praised them as holding onto the values of the “most civilized of all the Europeans,” describing them as family-loving, religious and hard-working.

* * * * * *

Thomas J. Lynch, contributing to Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history, traced the first French Catholic influence in the Augusta area to September 1646, when Father Gabriel Druillettes, a Jesuit, opened a mission to the Abenakis. The Mission of the Assumption was in a log cabin on the east side of the Kennebec, about three miles north of the Cushnoc trading post.

Lynch saw Augusta’s St. Mary’s Catholic Church as the successor to the Mission of the Assumption, even though by the time the Kennebec County history was finished in 1892, it was “restricted to the English-speaking Catholics of the city” and there was a second Catholic church for the French-speakers.

In the 1880s, French immigrants found jobs in the Edwards Manufacturing Company’s cotton mill at the river end of Northern Avenue. The Franco-American community formed near the mill in the north end of the city, an area variously called Sand Hill, Cushnoc, Cushnoc Heights or simply “the hill.”

The mill owners provided housing for some of their employees, and in 1887, in response to French-speakers who wanted services in their own language, provided space for a French Catholic church on Washington Street, which runs north off Northern Avenue part way up Sand Hill. The company sold one lot for $600 and donated a second lot.

St. Augustine Church’s website says most of the parishioners in the late 19th century were from rural parts of Québec and New Brunswick. Whole families worked in the mill, including “children as young as ten years old.”

Working hours were long, and non-French neighbors were often unfriendly. To the French-speaking families, “Sunday was a day to worship God and rest, beginning with attending Mass, followed by getting together with friends and relatives, as well as getting ready for next week’s labor.”

Bishop James Augustine Healy

Bishop James Augustine Healy, who served in Portland from 1885 to 1900, came to Augusta to bless the cornerstone for the new church on Aug. 28, 1888, and it was built that year. Kingsbury called the wooden building “second to none in the city in the beauty and richness of its interior decorations.”

“Folklore has it that the parish was named after Bishop Healy,” the website says. The parish at that time consisted of 160 families.

The church was accompanied by a school, taught from 1892 by the Ursuline Sisters and from 1904 by the Sisters of the Presentation of Mary. Rev. Telesphore Plante served as pastor from October 1887 until he retired Nov. 27, 1889. His successor was Rev. Arthur Hamel, who serve until he moved to Lewiston in 1907.

Under Rev. Hamel’s guidance, the website says, the construction debt was reduced; the church’s interior was redecorated; and the parish cemetery was opened in 1894, “with a solemn blessing by Bishop Lafleche of Trois-Rivières [Québec] with permission extended by Bishop Healy.”

The parish women’s organization, “Les Dames de Sainte Anne,” was organized in 1897. The website credits its members with raising thousands of dollars for “the betterment of the parish” and for “scholarships and other school-related activities.”

Construction of the present granite church building began in 1913, on land donated by Edwards Manufacturing. By then, the website says, the parish included 2,783 people from 553 families. The first service in the new church was the December 1916 Christmas Mass.

Le Club Calumet, Augusta

Le Club Calumet

On Sept.21, 1922, two dozen members of Augusta’s Franco-American community met “in the basement of Morin’s Shoe Store, on Water Street,” and organized Le Club Calumet, called on its website, calumetclub.com, “one of the foremost of Augusta’s civic organizations.” Its motto is “Unis pour toujours” (United forever); its headquarters is at 334 West River Road (Route 104), in Augusta.

The organizers’ goal was to give the Franco-American community more of a voice in city affairs. The website quotes: “The purpose of Le Club Calumet shall be for the propagation of the French language and intellectual development, by means of music, literature, education, and anything else the club shall judge beneficial to the interest of Franco-Americans.”

The club sponsors multiple activities open to the public, including at 8 p.m., on May 21, Comedy Night with The River Comics (ticket information is on the website). A Hundredth Anniversary Dance was held May 7, and a hundredth anniversary celebration is scheduled for Sept. 22 through 25.

Club members have always supported education for local Franco-American youngsters. In 1922, the club’s Calumet Educational & Literary Foundation website (calumeteducationfoundation.org) says, the club “appointed a committee to encourage students to continue their education by enrolling at Cony High School.” Now scholarships and grants are offered for education beyond high school; the website does not say whether aid is still limited to students of Franco-American heritage.

Since 1957, part of the scholarship money has come from the club’s “birthday dollar program,” started at the suggestion of Irenee Pelletier: club members pay one dollar into the education fund on their birthdays. The calumeteducationfoundation.org website has information on making tax-deductible donations. The website says for 2020-21, the foundation provided 20 scholarships with a total value of $107,000.

Augusta’s historic Colonial Theater, revisited

Colonial Theater

In the Feb. 4, 2021, issue of The Town Line, the Colonial Theater on Water Street, in Augusta, was described as an individually-listed historic building within the downtown Augusta historic district. Built in 1913, after a fire destroyed its predecessor, and rebuilt again after another fire in 1926, its style was described as “Beaux Arts and Georgian Revival…[with] Art Deco features.”

The 2014 historic register listing called it “an eclectic example of early 20th century design by a noted architect.” The architect was Harry S. Coombs (1878 – 1939), based in Lewiston.

The 2021 The Town Line article drew on Keith Edwards’ article in the Dec. 2, 2019, Kennebec Journal describing work to restore the historic building. Edwards’ follow-up article in the May 5, 2022, Kennebec Journal was headlined “Colonial Theater to host its first show in 53 years in downtown Augusta.”

Edwards described the theater as “in the midst of a major renovation project to bring it back to life.” For the May 6 show by Las Vegas magician and mind reader Kent Axell (a Manchester, Maine native, Edwards wrote), seating capacity was 300; Edwards quoted executive director Kathi Wall as aiming for 1,000 seats.

The theater website, colonialtheater.org, says more than $3 million of the estimated $8.5 million cost has been raised so far. In April 2022 the National Park Service awarded the theater $160,229 that will be used to restore windows and exterior doors.

The website has information and illustrations about the theater’s history and the restoration plans, as well as an on-line donation button and contact information.

Main sources

Coffin, Robert P. Tristram, Kennebec Cradle of Americans 1937.
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).

Websites, miscellaneous.

EVENTS: Open house to be held at Nathaniel Hawthorne home

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Hawthorne House

Kicking-off with a celebratory open house on Saturday, May 7, from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.—to which the public is cordially invited—the boyhood home of the legendary author of The Scarlet Letter, in Raymond (40 Hawthorne Road) will be transformed into a cozy, inviting events center available for everything from meetings to receptions to small weddings to crafts fairs to birthday parties and more, from May through September each year.

The free open house on May 7 will feature refreshments, hors d’oeuvres , and live music from popular singer-guitarist Gary Wittner from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. The occasion will mark the successful completion of Phase 1 of The Hawthorne Community Association’s three-year-long effort to raise $75,000 to make urgent structural repairs to the building affectionately referred to as “the Hawthorne House.” Those funds enabled essential repair of the building’s foundation and other critical elements of its structure, as well as an attractive makeover of the interior into a cozy, welcoming meeting place. Phase 2 of the fundraising campaign will seek to raise an additional $30,000 to cover the costs of a new roof and new siding and painting.

Event rentals at the Hawthorne House will help fund Phase 2 of the fundraising campaign. Rates are $25 per hour for nonprofits and Hawthorne Community Association members, and $50 per hour for nonmembers (minimum of two hours).

To donate to Phase 2 of the effort to fully repair Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Boyhood Home, please consider a much-appreciated check payable to “Hawthorne Community Association” / PO Box 185 / South Casco, ME 04077. PayPal donations may be made online at: https://www.hawthorneassoc.com.

For more information, please contact Abel Bates at (207) 318-7131 or jbates4@maine.rr.com.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Blacks in Maine – Part 4

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by Mary Grow

Waterville, Winslow, Windsor

The Samuel Osbornes discussed in last week’s article were not the only Black family in 19th-century Waterville. Various sources mention several others, though details are often scanty and/or confusing.

Local historians did not consistently state the race or nationality of people they wrote about. For example, the index to Whittemore’s history of Waterville lists Samuel Osborne on three pages; on only one is he described as “colored.” There is no indication of the race of other Osbornes (and Osborns) mentioned in the history.

At the end of his chapter on early settlers in Whittemore’s history of Waterville, Aaron Plaisted wrote that for many years, Waterville’s population was “entirely American.” Your writer assumes he meant British, because he goes on to differentiate French Canadians (who will be discussed in the next article in this series) and Irish (whom your writer combines with the British, and who were numerous in other towns, sometimes specifically mentioned as Irish [in Lowden’s Windsor history, for example]).

Plaisted wrote that there was a colored Seco family in Waterville in the 1820s (see the April 14 issue of The Town Line for China Secos, and below for a few more). And “the first barber in town, George Boardman, was a colored man, very much of a dandy and more elegant in his dress and manners than many of his white fellow citizens.”

Prince Henry lived with his wife Venus on the small farm he owned on the west side of Waterville, on what Isaac Bangs, in his chapter in Whittemore’s history, called the second rangeway. Bangs wrote that Prince Henry must have died before 1825, because Venus was a widow by 1826.

According to Bangs, Venus Henry’s second husband was a free Black Revolutionary War veteran named Sampson Freeman. On-line information about Sampson Freeman is confusing.

Bangs wrote that Freeman lived in Salem, Massachusetts, when he enlisted in the Continental Army from the first Essex County regiment. He is recorded as a private who served from Feb. 1, 1777, to Feb. 5, 1780, including a stint at Valley Forge in 1778.

This information is challenged by an on-line list of early Waterville families, which says Henry (died about 1841) and Venus Freeman were the parents of Sampson Freeman, born about 1765 in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Ipswich and Salem are about 10 miles apart, north of Boston; a man born about 1765 would have been very young to be a soldier before and during the Revolution.

The soldier Sampson Freeman whom Bangs described came to Peru, Maine, and from there to Waterville in 1835, where he married Venus Henry “after a brief acquaintance.” (The on-line Sampson Freeman would have been close to 70 by 1835, and Bangs’ Sampson Freeman likely even older.)

The Freemans lived on the farm Venus had inherited until her death six years later (about 1842?), Bangs continued. Sampson Freeman died in 1843.

The Sampson Freeman listed in the genealogy on line married Catherine “Cata” Coburn on Oct. 6, 1788, in Dracut, Massachusetts.

Sampson and Catherine Freeman had three daughters, Peggy, Jane and Rhody (b. 1806), and one son, Jefferson (born 1809). A search for Jefferson Freeman gave no additional information; but a source cited on-line for him and his sister Rhody was a history of Peru, Maine.

On June 7, 1835, the Sampson Freeman described on line and Mary Foye filed marriage intentions in Waterville.

Mary Foye was “of Augusta” in 1835 and was the widow of Hosea Foye, identified on line as “a black barber in Augusta.” She died before 1843. (Perhaps the marriage intentions were not carried out, and Sampson Freeman married Venus Henry instead?)

One point of agreement between Bangs and the on-line genealogist is that Sampson Freeman died in 1843 – March 28, according to the on-line source – and was buried in Waterville’s Monument Park – near Venus’s grave, according to Bangs.

Kingsbury wrote in his Kennebec County history that the bodies buried in Monument Park were moved south to Pine Grove Cemetery, on Grove Street, after that graveyard was dedicated in May 1850.

The Find a Grave website inventory of Pine Grove Cemetery gives Sampson Freeman’s birth year as 1765, says he was born in Ipswich, was a Revolutionary War veteran and was 77 or 78 years old when he died March 28, 1843. Find a Grave lists no other person whose last name is Freeman known to buried in Pine Grove Cemetery.

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Linwood Lowden said in his 1993 history of Windsor that that town’s early settlers included one Black family, who apparently did not stay long. William Swain, from Pittston, acquired a lot in the south part of town in 1803, although Lowden wrote that he had settled there before the area was surveyed in 1802.

The lot was on Hunts Meadow Road, which runs southwest from the intersection of Routes 17 and 32. Lowden wrote that a hill on the road “where Dan Wilson built his home (and lived until recently) was once known as Swain Hill.”

On Aug. 7, 1799, Swain and Mehitable “Hitty” Griffin filed marriage intentions in Hallowell; Lowden assumed they followed through. Swain sold his lot on Feb. 27, 1804, and “apparently returned to Pittston,” Lowden wrote.

Kingsbury, in his chapter on Windsor, wrote that “the first negro who came into the town” was named George Brown. He worked for James Wingate, who came from the Bath area and established a farm in South Windsor, where in 1892 his grandson, also James Wingate, lived.

Brown evidently died in Windsor, because Kingsbury wrote, “His body lies under the pines on land owned by Mrs. Townsend.”

Unfortunately (and not untypically), Kingsbury gave no dates, though the context suggests Brown came to Windsor before 1820; nor did he say whether Brown came with Wingate or went into Wingate’s service after each arrived separately.

• • • • • •

The Seco family, some of whose members in China were mentioned in the April 14 issue of The Town Line, scattered into many other Maine towns, reportedly including Vassalboro, Windsor, Winslow and Palmyra, and some moved out of state.

Price and Talbot cite Vassalboro librarian and historian Elizabeth “Betty” Taylor’s story with additional information about William and Almira Seco’s son, Charles L. (March 18, 1830 – about July 12, 1916), when he lived in Winslow.

He was a “respected lumberman and river driver,” who helped build a bridge that he predicted would fall down. It did; and “the engineer who had ignored Seco’s warning asked to have Seco fired. The construction boss refused and said, ‘I don’t see how I can; he is one of my best men.'”

Charles L., according to an on-line genealogy, was born in Fairfield. The 1850 census listed him in Kingfield, Maine. His first wife, Eliza Sewall, was born in China about 1829; the genealogy says they were married in Boston, Massachusetts, on Sept, 19, 1852.

Their only child is listed as John T. Seco, born about 1857 in an unspecified Maine town. He apparently spent his adult life in New Haven, Connecticut.

Eliza died Dec. 13, 1863, and on Jan. 14, 1865, Charles L. married his second wife, Olive Williams (born about 1836), in Winslow. Their children were Eliza May (born in Maine in 1867) who had moved to Massachusetts by 1891, and Charles E. (born in Maine about 1871, died Dec. 20, 1919, in Augusta).

Eliza May was in Chelsea, Massachusetts, when she married for the first time, on Nov. 25, 1891, to John Eatman from New Brunswick. On June 27, 1900, she married again, to Edward William Boston from the British West Indies.

On June 26, 1899, Charles E. married a French-Canadian woman from Nova Scotia or New Brunswick, Harriett “Hattie” Huding Luddlen, in Chelsea, Massachusetts. (Did he meet her through his sister’s first husband?) By the 1900 census, the couple were in Winslow; Charles E. was described as a boilermaker.

Hattie Seco died May 20, 1909, in Winslow; her widower died Dec. 20, 1919, in Augusta.

According to a comment historian Taylor made years ago to this writer, there was a Samuel Seco in Vassalboro, known as Sammy. Residents had a saying, “As black as Sammy Seco.”

In Palmyra, the 1820 census lists a widow named Rachel Seco, and the 1870 census lists Eliza Seco. Palmyra is in Somerset County, north and east of Pittsfield, connected to the Kennebec River Valley by Interstate 95 and the Sheepscot River.

More about Samuel Osborne

Samuel Osborne

Since writing about Osborne for the April 21 issue of The Town Line, your writer has found that he was mentioned several times in the Waterville Mail, Waterville’s weekly newspaper from 1863 to 1906.

Three short articles appeared early in 1896. The first, in the Jan. 10 issue, read: “Sam Osborne of Colby University is wearing a Good Templars’ badge, a very pretty affair made of gold and handsomely engraved. Sam is very proud of it but doesn’t know whom he has to thank for it. All that he knows about it is that it came from a member of the class of ’92 at Colby.”

The second, in the Jan. 31 issue, announced that Osborne was about to get a uniform; he had already been measured for it. The writer commented, “This move, while it is a source of pleasure to all interested in the college, is only in keeping with the example set by other institutions of the kind, in this and in other states. Nearly all have their janitors in uniform.”

Two weeks later, Feb. 14, 1896, the Mail announced: “Janitor Sam Osborne of Colby University appeared this morning in his new uniform, and never looked more happy and contented. The uniform is of dark blue cloth trimmed with silver buttons The coat is a straight front sack, similar in style to the Pullman car porter’s coat. The head-gear is a square-topped, low cap with a straight visor, over which are the words ‘Janitor Colby Univ.’ in silver letters. Altogether it is a neat uniform and is admired by the faculty and students as much as by Sam himself.”

An article in the May 30, 1900, issue commemorated his 35 years as the janitor at Colby. The headline called him “Genial Sam Osborne,” and the writer said that, “Thirty-five years is a long time for a man to work for one concern and give entire satisfaction to all, but Sam has done that for Colby and has won besides, the esteem and regard of more Colby students probably than any one man living.”

After Osborne’s death, the July 6, 1904, issue of The Mail ran a two-column obituary prominently on the left side of the front page.

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Lowden, Linwood H., good Land & fine Contrey but Poor roads a history of Windsor, Maine (1993).
Price, H. H., and Talbot, Gerald E. Maine’s Visible Black History: The First Chronicle of Its People 2006.
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Blacks in Maine – Part 3

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(Luther Jotham: A Journey for Country and Community) An excerpt from the paper: On paper, Luther Jotham’s Revolutionary War service record reads like a typical service record of a Minute Man from rural Massachusetts in 1775. Volunteering to serve at a minute’s notice in case of an emergency, Jotham trained weekly with his neighbors in battle tactics. On April 19, 1775, when the alarm sounded at Lexington and Concord, Jotham joined his company of Bridgewater Minute Men in defense of their community.
Luther Jotham, however, differed from most Minute Men. As a free man of color, Massachusetts law excluded men like Jotham from participating in militia training days in peacetime. Yet in the midst of a looming emergency, he volunteered to protect his neighbors. Following the April 19 alarm, Jotham ultimately signed up to serve on four different occasions during the Revolutionary War. (photo courtesy of National Park Seervice)

by Mary Grow

Vassalboro

Records tell of a Kennebec Valley slave-owner, Captain Abiel or Abial Lovejoy (Dec. 15, 1731 – July 4, 1811), who lived in Vassalboro from 1776 and in Sidney after the west side of the Kennebec River became a separate town in 1792 (see the Feb. 3 issue of The Town Line). He was a native of Andover, Massachusetts, who came to the lower Kennebec Valley as a Massachusetts soldier (rising to the rank of captain) in the 1750s.

An on-line source says when Lovejoy and his wife Mary (Brown) married in 1758, they were given their first two slaves, a man named Boston and an unnamed woman who became Boston’s wife. After they moved to Dresden in 1761, Mary’s father gave them two more slaves, Salem and Venus.

In 1776 the household moved to a farm on the west side of the Kennebec, where Lovejoy became a leading Vassalboro citizen. Henry Kingsbury, in his 1892 Kennebec County history, listed him as a selectman from 1779 through 1784, apparently doubling as town treasurer in 1780. The on-line source tells two stories from those days.

Capt. Abiel Lovejoy

One is Lovejoy’s reaction when told Massachusetts ordered slaves freed, in 1788: he summoned “Salem and Venus, and offered them their liberty. They refused to leave and Salem’s answer to the Squire was, ‘You’ve had all de meat, now pick de bones.'”

The second story is about the time Lovejoy brought a jug of liquor to the field where a mixed group of slaves and hired hands was cutting hay, not to his satisfaction. When he demanded to know who did the poor job, the hands blamed Boston. Lovejoy said since Boston did all the work, “he shall have all the grog.”

The Lovejoys, their child who was born and died in 1784 and Boston, Venus and Salem were all buried in a family cemetery on the Sidney farm. The on-line source says, “As similar stones marked the burial place of the negroes, it is impossible to know which are the graves of the master and mistress and which are the graves of their servants.”

Remington Hobby (also Hobbey or Hobbie) was another Vassalboro slave-owner, briefly. Kingsbury called him a prominent Vassalboro citizen, listing him as town meeting moderator in 1774, selectman in 1777 and treasurer in 1778.

One on-line genealogy says Hobby was born in 1746 and was a Harvard College graduate. Converted to Quakerism, he became a “powerful” preacher, and died in Winslow in 1839. Different sources list his wife’s name was Anstrus or Anstress. The genealogy writer just cited said he married her about 1837, pointed out that by then he was in his 90s and wondered if there were a father and son of the same name and it was the son who got married in 1837.

The story in the Vassalboro Historical Society records (in the form of a letter in the Feb. 12, 1910, “Kennebec Journal”, reprinted in the Feb. 2, 1997, issue of what was by then the Central Maine Newspapers) says that a Boston merchant who owed Hobby money gave him as part payment an enslaved Black man from Guinea named Denmark. Hobby gave Denmark his freedom and sent him to join the Black “colony” in northeastern China.

Denmark soon returned to Vassalboro, claiming his new neighbors had robbed him, the story continues. After Hobby’s death, Hobby’s son John and John’s brother-in-law, Steven Jenkins from China, took care of Denmark. When he died, they arranged his burial in the Friends Cemetery on the east (lake) side of Neck Road in China.

Kingsbury’s history talks about a Black section of a cemetery in East Vassalboro in the early 1800s. He wrote that the cemetery was beside the First Baptist Church building on Elm Street.

(The1856 map of East Vassalboro shows the south end of present-day Main Street, from the four corners south, as Elm Street; north of the four corners is Water Street. Kingsbury wrote in 1892 that John Greenlowe was “well remembered” by East Vassalboro residents for the iron plows he patented and manufactured at the dam and for planting “most of the trees that so beautifully shade the streets of the village.”)

The First Baptist Church was organized June 3, 1788, and prospered for about a decade. In the 19th century membership declined, and about 1832 the building was sold for $43 to Ezeziel or Ezekiel Small, who let it deteriorate until it was removed.

This church building was “north of the old grave yard and south of the outlet landing,” Kingsbury wrote. The cemetery had not been maintained, and after the church was torn down, it was ignored, “except that the portion next to the mill [one of several owned by members of the Butterfield family] has been used by the colored people.”

By 1892, Kingsbury wrote, the area north of the mill was “an enclosure called the Baptist burying ground,” without headstones or grave mounds, shaded by tall elms along the street. The site of the former church had become “John Warren Butterfield’s garden.”

In her Vassalboro history, Alma Pierce Robbins gave the First Baptist Church a few paragraphs, including a reference to “the Baptist Burying Yard at the outlet of 12 Mile Pond [China Lake].”

At the Vassalboro Historical Society, the following Black families are listed from the 1810 census: James Bennett, with a three-person household; Prince Brown, 10 people; John Foy, six people; Luther Jotham, seven people.

In 1820, census-taker Abijah Smith listed Jotham with two others in his household, an adult woman and a male child. In 1830, he was living with two adult women and two male children. Smith also listed Bennett, but not Brown nor Foy.

Your writer has found information on only one of these families, the Jothams.

The author of an on-line paper by the Boston National Historical Park (hereafter BNHP), titled Luther Jotham: A Journey for Country and Community, used military, census and other records to find details about Jotham’s life.

The BNHP writer said Jotham was born a free Black in Middleborough, Massachusetts, about 1751. Sometime before 1775 the family moved to Bridgewater, Massachusetts. As tension with Great Britain increased, rules were changed to allowed Colored men to join the militia; when the Revolution began April 19, 1775, Jotham was a member of the Bridgewater Minute Men.

The essayist surmised he might have joined for the shilling he earned for every half day of training, or because “For men of color, joining a military community helped forge a more equal status with their white counterparts.”

After this first stint, Jotham enlisted in militia units three more times. On Aug. 1, 1775, he began five months’ service as a private “in Josiah Hayden’s company in the Plymouth County regiment of militia, stationed in Roxbury.” From January to March 21, 1776, he was again in Roxbury as a member of “Captain Mitchell’s company in Colonel Simeon Cary’s regiment,” identified in another on-line source as the Plymouth and Barnstable County Regiment (Cary was also from Bridgewater, which is in Plymouth County).

In September 1776 Jotham re-enlisted in Cary’s regiment. The regiment was ordered to New York City, then partly under British control.

On Sept. 16, British forces attacked near Harlem Heights, and General George Washington ordered several regiments, including Cary’s, to counter-attack. This was Jotham’s first experience of battle, the BNHP writer said; it was soon followed by another at White Plains. Jotham then “faithfully completed his term of service on December 1, 1776 and returned home to Bridgewater.”

Jotham’s fourth enlistment, in October 1777, put him in “Captain Nathan Snow’s company, in Colonel [Cyprian] Hawes’ regiment,” which was sent to Rhode Island in an unsuccessful effort to chase the British out of Newport. The American success at Saratoga, New York, on Oct.17, 1777, took enough pressure off New England that militia units were sent home that fall.

The BNHP writer found that Jotham and Mary Dunbar were married soon after he came home. In January 1779, he wrote, Jotham paid 320 pounds for “about 15 acres of land.” He thereby elevated his status from “labourer” (who worked for someone else) to “yeoman” (who “farmed his own land”) in relevant documents.

The couple had three children, Loriana, Lucy and Nathan.

The BNHP writer found records that Bridgewater officials “warned out” Jotham – and many others – in November 1789. Such a warning, the writer explained, was a notice to anyone who might become a town charge that he or she was not eligible for town support, and a demand for evidence of self-sufficiency. Since Jotham was a landowner, the writer surmised that his getting such a notice might be evidence of racial discrimination.

Jotham apparently satisfied the selectmen, because the 1790 and 1800 censuses showed his family in Bridgewater.

Sometime in the early 1800s, the Jothams moved to Vassalboro, where he bought 20 acres and presumably continued farming. The BNHP writer did not know why he moved to Maine, nor why he chose Vassalboro.

Mary Jotham died before 1816, and all three children by 1820. On May 25, 1816, Jotham married his second wife, Reliance Squibbs; they had two more children, Mary Anne and Orlando. Rachel and both her children had also died by May 1820, when Jotham applied for one of the veterans’ pensions the U. S. Congress approved in 1818.

(Robbins said that the 1818 federal law set pension payments for anyone who had served at least nine months during the Revolution and was in “reduced circumstances:” privates got eight dollars a month, officers twenty dollars a month.)

The BNHP writer found Jotham’s application, in which he wrote that his property consisted of “a house, small hut, a few tools and household items, and several animals, including one cow, three sheep, and one pig.” He said his annual income was $5; at age 69, he was unable to work much.

“Jotham seemed well connected to other Black families living in Vassalboro and the surrounding area. His pension application includes many testimonies from friends and acquaintances who vouched for his military service,” the BNHP writer said.

Jotham was awarded an annual pension of $96.

On Dec. 20, 1821, Jotham (by then about 70 years old) married for the third time, to a woman information at the Vassalboro Historical Society identifies as Rhoda Parker or Rhoda Dunbar. The BNHP writer did not list a last name for Rhoda; he said the couple had “at least” three children.

The next set of documents the writer found date from August 1827, when a Vassalboro overseer of the poor found that Jotham was mentally incompetent and arranged for a man named Abijah Newhall to be his legal guardian. Sometime after the 1830 census, the Jothams moved to China, where Luther died on June 22, 1832, aged 81, and, the writer said, was buried in the Talbot Cemetery.

Rhoda applied for a widow’s pension in 1860, when she was 73. The BNHP writer did not say whether her application was successful.

The writer concluded with a summary that applied to many Black veterans.

“Jotham attempted to build a better life for himself in the new nation he helped fight for. Though respected for his service by those who knew him personally, his honorable status as a Revolutionary War veteran did not make him invulnerable to the “colorphobia” that plagued many in his community.”

The writer continued by pointing out that many veterans, regardless of their race, eventually had to go through the humiliating process of demonstrating that they were so poor they needed a federal pension.

“Luther Jotham’s story is just one of many post-war experiences of ordinary soldiers who later struggled to support themselves, despite the valiant sacrifices they made while serving this country in its fight for liberty and democracy.”

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Blacks in Maine – Part 2

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by Mary Grow

Black Kennebec Valley residents

The first two Black men recorded in Augusta, according to Anthony Douin, one of the contributors to H. H. Price and Gerald Talbot’s Maine’s Visible Black History, were “York Bunker and Cuff.” They were in the garrison at Fort Western, built in 1754, “listed as servants and paid as privates.”

As the area near the fort was settled, Douin found limited evidence of Black residents, and no evidence of Black slaves.

He wrote that at the 1776 town meeting, voters approved taxing “Negroes and Mulatto servants at the same rate as apprentices and minors.” And he referred to several Black families mentioned in Hallowell midwife Martha Ballard’s diary; she delivered at least two of their babies.

After Augusta separated from Hallowell in February 1797, Douin wrote that small numbers of Black residents (five in the 1800 Augusta census) worked in “the few occupations opened to Blacks in the nineteenth century – laborer, barber, house servant, waiter, and hostler.”

By 1850, 55 of Augusta’s about 8,000 people were identified as Black, Douin wrote. One was a mill worker, originally from Tennessee, who had married a Maine woman; others were sailors.

(Douin said that Black sailors “played a role in the rich maritime history of the Kennebec River.” Price and Talbot added that in the 1850 census, Maine’s “maritime industries were combined under stevedores, fisherman, stewards, and shipwrights, which represented more than 50 percent of the black population.” The examples they gave suggest that most lived along the coast, from Portland to Machias.)

Maine Supreme Court Chief Justice Nathan Weston, Jr. (1782-1872; see the Dec. 10, 2020, The Town Line article on chief justices from Augusta) had a Black servant named Lucretia Crossman from 1820 on. “When she died in 1859, she was buried in the Weston Family Tomb at Cony Cemetery,” Douin wrote.

Three Black men left public records that Douin drew on for profiles.

John D. Carter was an outspoken opponent of slavery whose views were radical enough to split the Augusta Baptists into two churches in the spring of 1844. First Baptist parishioners considered slavery a sin and a violation of human rights. Carter and the rest of the Second Baptists went farther, holding that slave-holders could not be church members or ministers. Carter died July 17, 1844; the churches did not “reconcile” until 1849.

(In his 1870 history of Augusta, James North recorded the schism; he named the radical as J. T. Carter and did not mention his race.)

John Eason (May 14, 1776 – 1879) was a Free Will Baptist who helped build the Augusta church building and preached there when there was no regular preacher. Douin wrote that though “unlettered,” he had an excellent memory; he was called “Parson Eason” because of his sermons.

Levi Foye (May 29, 1799 – 1870) owned “one of the most popular restaurants in Augusta,” his Water Street oyster bar, opened around 1830.

A Massachusetts native whose father brought the family to Vassalboro, Foye’s first profession was as a sailor; during the War of 1812, he was a British prisoner in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His restaurant was successful enough that he was able to buy his family a Western Avenue house.

Among Augusta residents Foye was “well respected,” Douin said; but some of the troops who mustered in Augusta during the Civil War were so disrespectful that Foye closed the restaurant.

“An embarrassed Augusta community hosted a farewell party and presented Foye and his family with a very nice silver service,” Douin wrote.

After the war, Foye reopened the restaurant and ran it until his death.

Douin names two Black men from Augusta who served in the Civil War. Jackson Phillips (born in 1842; later in the book called Phillip Jackson) was a cook on the USS Tallapoosa, launched Feb. 17, 1863, a wooden steamer equipped with heavy guns and howitzers for stopping blockade runners and bombarding shore installations.

Adarastus Brown was in the 14th Rhode Island Heavy Artillery, a Black unit that “did garrison duty in Louisiana late in the war.”

William Lewis

The later list of Black Civil War veterans in Maine adds two more Navy men, William H. Lewis and William H. Manuel.

Lewis, according to an online source, served on two ships in the Union’s North Atlantic Blockading Squadron. Through September 1863 he was on the USS Commodore Perry, a former sidewheel ferry. She patrolled the North Carolina and Virginia coasts from January 1862 to the end of the war, helping capture Confederate ships and coastal towns and cities.

From December 31, 1863, through March 31, 1865, Lewis was on the USS Whitehead, a screw steamer built in 1861 that also patrolled off North Carolina.

Manuel first served in 1863, briefly, in USS Sabine, also in the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron. The Sabine was an 1855 sailing frigate that had seen service off Paraguay before becoming one of the first ships to serve in the Civil war, watching the Florida coast.

By Nov. 18, 1863, Manuel had transferred to the USS Niagara, where he stayed until April 1, 1864.

USS Sabine

The Civil War Niagara was the second of that name, built for the Navy in 1855. She had already helped lay the first transatlantic cable in 1857 and 1858; returned Africans rescued from a slave ship to Liberia in 1858; and carried the first Japanese diplomatic delegation to Washington back to Japan in 1860 and 1861. In April 1861 she joined the East Gulf Blockading Squadron off Alabama and Florida.

When northern soldiers came home after the war, Douin wrote that freed slaves who had joined the army sometimes came with them. In Augusta, he said, more than a dozen Black families settled in the area that is now Ganneston Drive (running south off Capitol Street, west of the State House complex); the area was called Nigger Hill.

Douin wrote that their dwellings “were described as log cabins. By 1896 the colony had disappeared, leaving old cellar holes and broken stone fences to mark its existence.”

One former slave, Frederick Brown (1835 – 1919), connected with the 15th Maine when Union forces captured New Orleans. Coming to Maine with a captain from Bath, Brown moved to Augusta and got a job with Governor Samuel Cony’s son-in-law, Joseph H. Manley.

Manley was a close friend of James G. Blaine (see the Aug. 20, 2020, issue of The Town Line for a profile of one of Maine’s most famous politicians), and Brown found a new position as Blaine’s coachman, Douin wrote. Through these connections, he became the Augusta post office janitor when Manley was postmaster and later the State House night watchman, serving for 26 years.

Peter Samuel from Virginia was another former slave, who helped guide fellow slaves into Union-held areas before taking himself to safety. Douin wrote that in Augusta, Samuel married a French-Canadian – his first wife had been sold away from him before the war — and converted to Catholicism. He died June 1, 1904, aged 100, “and is buried in a segregated part of Old St. Mary’s Cemetery.”

The website Find a Grave identifies this cemetery as St. Mary of the Assumption Cemetery on the south side of Winthrop Street. Your writer found the “segregated part” is a strip about 12 feet wide on the extreme eastern edge of the cemetery, between the east fence and a one-lane paved road; the Samuels graves are in a north-south line between two large trees.

Many of the inscriptions have become less legible with time. Most of the dates below are from Find a Grave, which lists seven Samuels/Samuells.

The northernmost marker is a small stone for Anna Samuel, 1885-1886 (not listed by Find a Grave). There is a gap; then a twin headstone for Martha (June 14 – Aug. 17, 1893) and Mara (? 1891 – Aug. 16, 1891); a small stone for Rosie Samuell (1887-1896); another gap; a twin stone for Annie (Aug. 18, 1888 – June 1889) and Edie E. (May 20, 1891 – June 22, 1892); and Peter Samuel’s larger stone.

Find a Grave lists a headstone for Henry Samuell (1885-1886) that your writer did not see. South of Peter Samuel’s stone is one marking the grave of Fred, son of Fred? and Sadie Barton, who died July 27, 1911, aged three months and ? days. Find a Grave lists no Bartons in St. Mary’s Cemetery.

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Samuel Osborne

One of Waterville’s best-known Black residents was Samuel Osborne (1833 – July 1, 1904), janitor at Colby College from 1867 until 1903. Known as “Janitor Sam” and as “Professor” because of his appreciation for education and knowledge of the Colby campus, he has been the subject of many articles and a book, Samuel Osborne, Janitor, by Frederick Padelford (Colby 1896).

An on-line People’s History of Colby College says Osborne was born in slavery on a Virginia plantation. He married a fellow slave, Maria Iverson, before the Civil War. In May 1865, Colonel Stephen Fletcher, Colby 1859 and captain of the 7th Maine, helped him come to Waterville, and Colby President James Champlin helped him get a job in the Maine Central Railroad shops.

Two daughters came with Osborne, and in October 1865 Waterville Baptists raised money for him to return to Virginia for his wife, a third daughter and his father, “who had been a slave for seventy-two years.” The father promptly got the janitor’s job at Colby; when he died in 1867, his son quit the railroad and took over at the college.

The Osbornes had one son and seven daughters. Their son Edward “Eddie” Samuel Osborne entered Colby with the class of 1897, but dropped out and went to work for the railroad.

Price and Talbot wrote that Eddie Osborne was a messenger for 56 years for “what became the Railway Express Agency,…logging a million or more miles.” In 1944 he received the Agency’s first “diamond-studded pin” recognizing 50 years of service.

Samuel and Maria’s daughter, Marion Thompson Osborne (later Matheson), born about 1879, was Colby’s first female Black graduate, Class of 1900. (The first male Black graduate was Adam S. Green, Class of 1887.)

In addition to his extensive Colby responsibilities – “everything from keeping fires burning in all fireplaces to delivering the mail” – Osborne was active in the Waterville Baptist Church and in the Waterville Lodge of Good Templars, the national temperance organization.

Marion Matheson’s 1950 tribute to her father, excerpted in Price and Talbot’s book, includes anecdotes from her father’s life. One is a summary of his 1902 trip to Stockholm, Sweden, as a Good Templars delegate to an international convention. On the voyage over and back, he ate at the ship captain’s table; in Stockholm he was granted permission to sit on the royal throne; and he took a side trip to Scotland to visit former Waterville residents.

When he fell ill, Matheson wrote, college President Charles Lincoln White in his 1904 Baccalaureate address called him, “the Head Janitor whom all had learned to love and respect for his faithfulness and devotion to the interest of the college, of his gentle, warm and confiding nature because he cared for the sick, chided and erring and encouraged all by his simple, pure, and unaffected Christian life.”

The day of his death was “an incredibly sorrowful day for Colby,” the People’s History says. President White was at his bedside until the end. The college bell tolled 71 times. Matheson wrote that his funeral was the first one “held in the Chapel in Memorial Hall, as was his wish.”

An article in the 2018 issue of the Colby Echo, found on line, says Osborne was the subject of “vicious and despicable racism” and was not paid enough to support his family. The author is Alison Levitt, identified on line as the college’s Online & Social Media Editor.

The People’s History does not totally contradict Levitt’s portrait. The author wrote that Osborne “tirelessly endured their [students’] pranks and assaults on his intelligence” – and stood up for them when they got in trouble with faculty or administration members and joined Maria in inviting them for Thanksgiving dinners.

The author agreed that Osborne was not paid generously. In 1896, after 29 years on the job, he earned $480. Meanwhile, the college had grown from three buildings in 1867 to (by 1903 when he retired) seven buildings.

(These buildings were on the old campus by the Kennebec River; the college did not begin the move to Mayflower Hill until the 1930s. The People’s History writer said Colby had only one full-time janitor for “several decades” after Osborne’s retirement.)

Samuel and Maria Osborne and some of their children are buried in the family plot in Waterville’s Pine Grove Cemetery.

Main sources

Price, H. H., and Talbot, Gerald E., Maine’s Visible Black History: The First Chronicle of Its People (2006)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Blacks in Maine – Part 1

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Headstone of Eliza Talbot and Sarah Freeman, in Talbot cemetery, in China.

by Mary Grow

So far, people in this history series have been almost entirely the group that is still Maine’s majority population: white people descended mostly from inhabitants of the British Isles, plus representatives of other northern and western European countries.

For example, Millard Howard wrote in his Palermo history that early settlers in that town came mostly from Massachusetts or New Hampshire, sometimes via coastal Maine. These settlers’ ancestors, he wrote, had usually been religious dissidents (Puritans especially) who emigrated from Great Britain in the 1630s.

This picture is incomplete. In addition to the Native Americans, who lived here for generations before Europeans arrived, the central Kennebec Valley has had a small Black population for almost as long as the Europeans have been here, and since the 19th century people from the Middle East and French Canada have created distinct minority cultures.

Readily available sources tend to provide only scanty information on these groups, and as readers will soon learn, what information is available is sometimes inconsistent.

An invaluable source on Blacks in Maine is H. H. Price and Gerald E. Talbot’s Maine’s Visible Black History: The First Chronicle of Its People, published in 2006.

(Gerald Talbot is a descendant of the Talbots who lived in the Town of China in the 19th century. He was the first Black member of the Maine legislature, and is the father of current House assistant majority leader Rachel Talbot Ross, of Portland.)

The book lists the following Black families among early China settlers: Brackley, Foy (also Foye or Fay), Freeman, Jenkins, Jotham, Seco, Sewall (also Sewell) and Talbot (also Talbert, Talbet, Tallbet, Tarbet or Tarbot).

Price and Talbot found that China had 24 Black residents in 1820 (of a total population of 894); 15 were men and nine women. In 1830 there were six Black families (headed by Peter Freeman, Enock Jenkins, Calvin Jotham, Ambrose Sewall, John Sewall and Ezekiel Talbot), totaling 29 people.

Other records showed that Abram Talbot and Ezekiel Talbot lived in Gardiner before they moved to China “by the 1840s.” If Abram and Abraham are the same man (as seems likely, but not certain; records show Abraham Talbots in multiple generations in the family), he was born in 1756 and died in 1850.

Abraham Talbot is described as “a former slave who owned a brickyard on the east side of China Lake.”

One man named Ezekiel Talbot was born in 1760, according to Price and Talbot. An on-line genealogy lists an Ezekiel Talbot who was born in Brockton, Massachusetts, on Dec. 21, 1787, and died in China, Maine, in 1879.

His parents are identified in this and other sources as Abraham Talbot (May 27, 1756 – June 11, 1840) and Molley or Mary Dunbar (1758-1850); they married in Bridgewater, now part of Brockton, in September 1787. An on-line site says the couple appears to have moved to China before 1800, “as he is enumerated in a collective district for the 1800 federal census which included Three Mile Pond, areas east of Winslow, and Freetown Plantation [later Albion].”

This Abraham Talbot was a Revolutionary War veteran, and he was living in China when he applied for his veterans’ pension on April 18, 1818.

Abraham and Mary Talbot had eight children, according to an on-line family history. Their births are recorded in Fairfax (now Albion), indicating that they lived in the area that was added to the north end of present-day China in 1816 and 1818.

The reference to the 1800 census cited above says: “Due to his status as a free black, the census record only gives the number of persons in Abraham’s household, which totaled 6 persons. As the couple had six children born by 1799, it would appear that two of their children died at an early age.”

Abraham and Mary’s oldest son was Ezekiel (also called Eschiel Tarbet), who was born Dec. 21, 1787 (in Massachusetts, or Maine?), and died in China in 1879. The third son was Abraham, born Feb. 28, 1792; the website says he married Edith Griffin Freeman, in Gardiner, in 1818. He was buying land in Portland in the spring of 1847, in partnership with William Jones; the two are called “mariners.” There is no evidence that he returned to China; he “was buried on 25 January 1862, in Portland.”

The Ezekiel Talbot who was born in 1787 married Eliza or Elizabeth Seco (see below for more about the Seco family). He was a farmer and a landowner; on-line sources list records of land transfers.

One source says Ezekiel and Eliza had three sons (Abraham and Mary’s grandsons), all born in China: Charles C., born in 1814; Alvin Austin, born in 1836; and Henry H., born in 1839. Another source adds a daughter named Sarah, and a son William appears in the 1850 census.

A 1984 Waterville Sentinel article says Ezekiel Talbot was a China resident in the 1830, 1840 and 1850 federal censuses. In 1850, the household was listed. Ezekiel was 65 years old and Eliza was 64. Alvin A. and William C., aged 19 and 17, were farmers; Henry H. was 10 years old; Sarah D. Augustine was 28, a sailor named Homan L. Augustine (Sarah’s husband) was 24 and Eliza J. Augustine was four years old.

On Nov. 5, 1852, the family history compiler found that Ezekiel sold a 50-acre lot bounded on one side by the Palermo town line to his son Alvin, for $200.

Charles C. married Margaret Crossman and moved to Aroostook County.

Alvin Austin, born about 1831 and in China in 1850, married Lucy Peters, in Boston, Massachusetts, in March 1855. The writer of the on-line family history surmises she must have died almost immediately, because the 1860 census listed Alvin as a laborer again living with his parents, in China.

Alvin also moved to Aroostook County, where he married his second wife, Georgia Ann Cornelison, from New Brunswick. He worked as a barber in Houlton and Bangor; the couple moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he died Dec, 22, 1901.

Henry H., born in or around 1840 (according to the on-line family history), spent his life as a farmer in China, never married and died of liver cancer Oct. 2, 1915.

Enough Talbots died in China so there is a Talbot cemetery, a small graveyard east of Yorktown Road on the China-Palermo boundary, just south of China’s Thurston Park. A legible stone marks the graves of Eliza Talbot and Sarah A. Freeman – although the dates do not match exactly, they are probably Ezekiel’s wife Eliza and her daughter Sarah (Augustine) Freeman. There are remains of three other stones in the same row, and two others separately (that might be footstones). Henry H. Talbot was reportedly buried “in a private cemetery,” perhaps the Talbot cemetery.

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Another Black cemetery is on the east side of China’s Pleasant View Ridge Road, west of the Talbot cemetery. This one holds graves of the Sewall and Seco families.

Among those buried there are Ambrose Sewall (1787 – Jan. 22, 1851) and his wife Mary (Shay) Sewall (died in 1849). Nearby is the grave of Griffin Sewall, son of Ambrose and Mary Sewall, who died Nov. 29, 1818, at the age of 17. (Another source gives Griffin Sewall’s dates as 1831 to 1848.) There are at least three more stones that appear to be from the same family.

Ambrose Sewall was a son of Elias and Amee Dunbar Sewall. Elias, born Aug. 1, 1751, in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, was a Revolutionary War veteran; an on-line source says he was listed in Harlem (now China) census records in 1800 and 1810, and died in China, date unknown.

Sharing the graveyard are at least seven stones that probably mark the graves of members of the Seco family. Between the two areas, the Waterville newspaper article says, in 1964 there appeared to be remnants of one or two more rows of graves.

According to the article, the Secos seem to have come to China in the 1850s (but Eliza Seco must have connected with Ezekiel Talbot earlier than that). Various other sources, including the 1860 census, describe two Seco families in China. One consisted of William, age 67 (born about 1793, in New Hampshire, and by 1860 blind), his wife Almira (Sewell), age 50 (born about 1809 or 1810, in Maine; one on-line source says she was the daughter of Ambrose and Mary Sewall) and seven children.

The other family included William Seco, Jr., age 30, his wife Elizabeth, age 27, and living with them seven-year-old Anna Talbot.

William, Sr., and Almira were married in December 1825 or thereabouts. An on-line source says he died Sept. 5, 1866, and she died March 23, 1879; both are buried in the Seco cemetery.

Fifteen Seco children are listed, born between about 1827 and 1850. William W. (the one who was still in China in 1860) was the third child/second son, born about 1830, in Waterville, died after 1879 in Michigan.

The oldest son was Charles L., born March 18, 1830, in Fairfield, and died about July 12, 1916, in Winslow; his grave is in Winslow’s Fort Hill cemetery. His first wife was Eliza Sewall, whom he married in Boston in 1852; his second wife was Olive E. Williams, whom he married in 1865 in Winslow.

Hiram was William and Almira’s fifth son, born about 1838. A 2015 story from the Bangor Daily News, found on line, says Hiram was described as a blacksmith in the 1850 census (though if the birthdate is anywhere near right, he would have been a very young blacksmith). Most of the other adult males were listed as farmers, the article says.

On March 29, 1863, Hiram Seco and Lydia Perkins were married in Gardiner. Lydia was born, in Brunswick, on March 18, 1838. The couple had five children, born between about 1865 and 1873; they named their sons Hiram, William and George and their daughters Lydia and Mary, in honor of older family members.

Lydia Seco (the mother) died Oct. 24, 1901, and is buried in Brunswick. Hiram died sometime after 1910, probably in Brunswick, and is the only one of William and Almira’s children specifically listed as buried in the Seco cemetery.

George W., William and Almira’s sixth son, was born, in Waterville, in May 1841. He apparently spent his life in China, because the newspaper article quotes a China town report: George Seco, widower, age 67, died Feb. 17, 1909, “and was buried in a private cemetery in the town.” Also buried in a private cemetery was four-month-old Alton W. Seco, who died Aug. 2, 1904. This “private cemetery” might well have been the Seco cemetery.

Ellis Island and Castle Island

April 17 has been designated National Ellis Island Family History Day. The web explains that the designation “encourages families to explore their ancestry and discover family who immigrated through Ellis Island,” which was the busiest point of entry into the United States from 1892 until 1924.

During those years, the website says, about 12 million immigrants came into the country through Ellis Island. One million arrived in 1907 alone; on April 17, 1907, the center processed 11,747 people, the busiest day on record.

After the first world war, the web says, the United States established consulates all over the world. One of their functions was to process immigrants, so Ellis Island was no longer essential. After 1924, the web says, the facility became a detention center for illegal immigrants, then a World War II military hospital and a later a training center for the Coast Guard.

Apparently there was a residual immigration center there, too, because the web says the last immigrant was processed on Nov. 12, 1954, the day the federal government closed Ellis Island. He is identified as “a Norwegian merchant seaman named Arne Peterssen.”

New York’s first immigration processing center was Castle Island, which was jointly run by New York City and New York State from August 3, 1855, to April 18, 1890. Some 11 million immigrants are recorded as coming through Castle Island.

When the federal government took control of immigration in 1890, Castle Island center closed. The web says a temporary site at the U. S. Barge Office “on the eastern edge of The Battery waterfront” was used while the federal Office of Immigration built the Ellis Island center.

The web lists castlegarden.org and ellisisland.org as on-line resources for lists of names and other information from each center.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Wars – Part 14

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The battleship USS Maine.

by Mary Grow

Mexican & Spanish-American

The wars on which this series has provided information so far began with fighting against the European power that once claimed the United States and continued with the 1861-1865 war between two parts of the United States.

Ongoing were a third category, wars the United States’ founders fought to establish and expand its land area. From their first arrival in the 1600s, Europeans pushed aside the Native Americans, from the eastern seaboard first and the rest of the continent later.

(Consequences of those years persist as Natives reclaim parts of their historic home. See, for example, here in Maine the restoration to the Passamaquoddy tribe of 140 acres of the 150-acre Kuwesuwi Monihq, Pine Island [or White’s Island], in Big Lake.)

Starting with 13 states facing the Atlantic Ocean, the country reached to the Pacific with the 1850 admission of California. Adding Utah in 1896 brought the number of states in the continental United States to 45 by the end of the 19th century. Oklahoma was added in 1907, Arizona and New Mexico in 1912.

Alaska went from a territory to state in January 1959. Hawaii became the 50th state in August of the same year.

Two formally declared wars were part of 19th century growth, one with Mexico (April 25, 1846 – February 2, 1848) that added land in the southwest and one with Spain (April 21 – December 10, 1898) that gave the United States its first overseas territories.

(Liberia, in west Africa, was settled beginning in 1820 by former slaves from the United States, under the auspices of the American Colonization Society [ACS]. The historical consensus is that it was never a United States colony or possession; in fact, Wikipedia says, “The United States government declined to act upon requests from the ACS to make Liberia an American colony or to establish a formal protectorate over Liberia, but it did exercise a ‘moral protectorate’ over Liberia, intervening when threats manifested towards Liberian territorial expansion or sovereignty.” Liberia became an independent country on July 26, 1847.)

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Wikipedia explains that the prelude to the war between the United States and Mexico was the declaration of independence by residents of part of northern Mexico in 1836. The Battle of the Alamo in late February and early March 1836 was part of that struggle.

Mexico did not recognize Texas as an independent republic. The United States (and Britain and France) did. Most Texans, Wikipedia says, were willing to join the United States, and after political maneuvering, Texas became a state on Dec. 29, 1845.

In the spring of 1846, President James Polk sent United States military forces into the new state. Mexican forces resisted, leading to battles in April and May followed by a May 13 United States declaration of war.

A series of battles stretching as far west as present-day California led to United States occupation of major Mexican cities, including in September 1847 Mexico City. The war was officially ended by the Feb. 2, 1848, Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Mexico gave up the area that, Wikipedia says, became “the present-day states of California, Nevada, and Utah, most of New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming.”

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The proximate case of the Spanish-American War was the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor on Feb. 15, 1898. Built at the navy yard in Brooklyn, at a cost of almost $4.7 million, and commissioned Sept. 17, 1895, she was the first ship named in honor of the State of Maine.

Wikipedia says the Maine had been sent to protect United States interests as Cubans fought for independence from Spain. Later in 1898, a naval inquiry concluded a bomb had been the cause; but, Wikipedia says, some naval officers suggested instead an internal explosion in a coal bunker. A 1974 re-investigation supported their theory. Wikipedia says the cause of the sinking “remains a subject of debate.”

Meanwhile, however, United States opinion had settled immediately on Spain as the villain. With “Remember the Maine!” as its battle cry, Congress approved a declaration of war on April 21, 1898. Fighting in Cuba and in the Spanish possessions of Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines was over by August. On Dec. 10, 1898, the Treaty of Paris ended the war and gave the United States the former Spanish territories.

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The effects of the Mexican War and the Spanish-American War in Maine were slight. Exceptions would be the few families with members who served, who had connections with the affected areas or were otherwise involved on a personal level.

In his history of the State of Maine, Louis Hatch didn’t mention the Mexican War. About the Spanish-American War, he wrote that in response to President William McKinley’s call for volunteers, Maine sent “one regiment of infantry, four batteries of heavy artillery and a signal corps, amounting in all to 1,717 non-commissioned officers and men.”

Other Maine men volunteered, and Portland’s and Bath’s “volunteer naval reserve associations” were “mustered into United States service,” Hatch wrote. The troops assembled in Augusta. He said nothing about casualties.

The 1898 Maine Adjutant General’s report, found on line, has long lists of Kennebec Valley volunteers.

Most local historians omit any mention of either war. Two exceptions are Alma Pierce Robbins, in her Vassalboro history, and General Isaac Bangs, in the military history chapter of Edwin Whittemore’s Waterville history.

Robbins wrote that when the “off and on” Mexican border dispute led to the United States declaration of war in 1846, not many people in Vassalboro cared. “Those who had gone west and those who were ‘tired of farming’ did go,” she wrote.

In the 1890s, as tension with Spain mounted preceding the Spanish-American War, Vassalboro was involved in national military exercises.

“Encampments and ‘war games’ were encouraged everywhere,” Robbins wrote. Massachusetts troops came “to compete with Maine men to demonstrate proficiencies in military techniques, with official sanction.”

Some of the encampments were on Horace Sturgis’ River Road farm. Robbins’ history includes a photograph of then-Colonel Theodore Roosevelt’s mounted Rough Riders in front of Sam Mitchell’s house on the River Road at Riverside in 1897, as they recruited area volunteers.

About the actual war Robbins was silent. But, she said, names of Vassal­boro residents who died in the Spanish-American War and World War I share a bronze plaque on the bridge at North Vassalboro.

The plaque has been moved since Robbins’ history was published in 1971 and is now on the larger of the two stones in the memorial on Main Street, in North Vassalboro. The memorial sits in front of the large building that used to be the North Vassalboro schoolhouse, then the town office and later a health clinic.

The names from 1898 are Prince Bessey, John O. Brown, Alton M. Lord, Andrew Peterson, Agra Pooler (state military re­cords list his name as Ogra), Fred Pooler, Bert J. Priest, Charles H. Priest, Charles H. Simpson, David Simpson and William J. Surman.

Prince Manter Bessey

Robbins erred when she wrote that all these men died in the Spanish-American war; your writer has found post-war information about several of them.

On-line sources say Prince M. Bessey was born Sept. 14, 1879, in China, Maine. On May 17, 1898, he enlisted from Augusta as a private in Battery A, Maine Volunteer Artillery Battalion; he was discharged May 31, 1899, in Savannah, Georgia.

After the war Bessey lived in North Vassalboro from 1907 to 1911. He worked as a salesman in several places, including Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he met and married Nora Smith in 1920. After he retired from Gimbel’s Depart­ment Store in 1948, the couple moved to Nora’s home town, Ceredo, West Virginia, where he died.

Charles Henry Priest was born July 12, 1881, in East Vassalboro, and died June 27, 1960. He is buried in Priest Hill Cemetery.

Peterson and Fred Pooler were privates in Battery A; each was 19 when he enlisted. Both Poolers were reportedly born in Waterville. Ogra or Agra Pooler, who enlisted at 21, was a North Vassalboro resident.

David Simpson, a Waterville native, was 24 when he enlisted. Surman was 27; his birthplace is listed as Dover, England.

Most Battery A men were from Lewiston or Auburn. In addition to those from Vassalboro, an on-line list includes First Lieutenant and Assistant Surgeon Robert J. Martin and Privates Harvey J. Libby, Nathan T. Shaw, of Augusta. Bangs’ chapter in Whittemore’s history gives names of a dozen privates from Waterville in Battery A, including Joseph Butler, who enlisted May 17, 1898, and deserted at Fort Popham July 16, and another deserter named Edward Lessor.

Battery C included 21 more Waterville men and smaller numbers from Augusta and Fairfield.

Bangs added a list of a dozen Waterville men who served in the First Maine Infantry in the Spanish-American War. William J. Surman is one of them. In the Maine Adjutant-General’s Report for the year 1901, Ogra Pooler, Charles H. Priest and William J. Surman are listed among Company D men who received $22 each in “Extra Pay of Maine Volunteers.”

The war with Spain continued until 1902 in what some historians call the Philippine-American War, as the United States consolidated its power over those islands. It was an appropriate introduction to the 20th – and 21st – centuries, as one country or ideology after another used – and uses – force against others.

Update from Brown Memorial Library in Clinton

The Dec. 2, 2021, article in this series talked about the Brown Memorial Library in Clinton, named in honor of William Wentworth Brown (April 19, 1821 – Oct. 22, 1911). The article said that Brown gave the library a portrait of himself by Frederic (or Frederick) Porter Vinton (Jan. 29, 1846 – May 19, 1911); in November 2021, the portrait had been sent away for cleaning.

William Wentworth Brown

It is now back on the wall, and assistant library director Cindy Lowell says she and Director Cheryl Dickey-Whitish are very pleased. Mr. Brown is “holding a pair of red gloves you couldn’t even see before,” she said. The head of his cane is visible and his hair and beard have turned from salt-and-pepper to almost pure white.

The following information is copied from the March-April 2022 issue of the Clinton Community Newsletter.

“The Trustees of the Brown Memorial Library recently had Mr. Brown’s very large 100-year-old portrait sent to a professional art restoration company for cleaning. Last week the portrait was returned to its place of honor displaying new details that were previously hidden by layers of coal dust!”

The newsletter has a color picture of the portrait and invites area residents to stop in to see it, an invitation Lowell seconds.

Brown Memorial Library is at 53 Railroad Street, in Clinton, on the east side of the street a block north of Main Street (Route 100).

Main sources

Hatch, Louis Clinton, ed., Maine: A History 1919 ((facsimile, 1974)
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971)
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902)

Websites, miscellaneous

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Wars – Part 13

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Capt. James Parnell Jones (left), Capt. Charles W. Billings (right)

by Mary Grow

Civil War

Henry Kingsbury lists four men who served in “the late war” in the personal paragraphs in his chapter on Benton in the 1892 Kennebec County history.

Stephen H. Abbott enlisted from Winslow and served six months with the 19th Maine; he moved to Benton in 1872 and served as postmaster from 1890 and for three years as a selectman.

Gershom Tarbell was in the 19th Maine for three years. Albion native Augustine Crosby was in the 3rd Maine, credited to Benton. Hiram B. Robinson was in Pennsylvania when the war started and enlisted from there not once but twice; he fought in 37 battles and returned to Benton in 1865.

Kingsbury does not mention Benton-born Frank H. Haskell (1843-1903), described in on-line sources as enlisting in Waterville June 4, 1861, when he was 18. Sergeant-Major Haskell was promoted to first lieutenant in the 3rd Maine Infantry after being cited for heroism during the June 1, 1862, Battle of Fair Oaks (also called the Battle of Seven Pines) in Virginia. His action, for which he received a Medal of Honor, is summarized as taking command of part of his regiment after all senior officers were killed or wounded and leading it “gallantly” in a significant stream crossing.

Another Civil War soldier from the central Kennebec Valley who was awarded the Medal of Honor was Private John F. Chase, from Chelsea, who enlisted in Augusta and served in the 5th Battery, Maine Light Artillery. As the May 3, 1863, battle at Chancellorsville, Virginia, wound down, Chase and one other survivor continued firing their gun after other batteries stopped and, since the horses were dead, dragged the gun away by themselves to keep it from the Confederates.

Grave of Horatio Farrington

At least 40 China residents died of wounds or disease, including, the China bicentennial history says, the five oldest of Mary and Ezekiel Farrington’s seven sons. Horatio, age 27, Charles, 25, Reuben, 20, Byron, 19 and Gustavus, 18, died between June 1, 1861, and Oct. 30, 1864.

Records do not show how many Civil War veterans were permanently disabled, the author commented. She retold the story told to her by Eleon M. Shuman of Weeks Mills about Jesse Hatch, from Deer Hill in southeastern China, who (for an unknown reason) fought for the South and came home so disfigured from a powder magazine explosion “that his appearance frightened the neighborhood children, but his friendly words and gifts of apples made him less terrifying.”

One of China’s best-known Civil War soldiers was Eli and Sybil Jones’ oldest son, Captain James Parnell Jones. As the author of the China history pointed out, pacificism is a central Quaker tenet, but in 1861 some Quakers decided ending slavery and maintaining the Union outweighed religious upbringing.

She quoted from the Jones genealogy an account of James Jones (who was 23, married with one son) and his 18-year-old unmarried brother Richard at a troop-raising event.

“Richard immediately raised his hand when the call came but James walked over to his brother, pulled down the raised arm and slowly raised his own. ‘Thee’s too young, Richard.’ ”

Jones was in the 7th Maine, first a company captain and from December 1863 a regimental major, as the troops fought in Virginia and at Gettysburg. In 1864, in the Battle of the Wilderness, he allegedly replied to a demand to surrender his embattled regiment with, “All others may go back, but the Seventh Maine, never!”

Jones was killed in the fighting around Fort Stevens July 11 and 12, 1864, as the 7th Maine helped defend Washington.

From Clinton, Kingsbury listed Daniel B. Abbott, born in Winslow, who served in the 19th Maine until June 1865 and after the war bought a farm in Clinton and became commander and grand master of Billings Post, G.A.R. (Grand Army of the Republic, the Civil War veterans’ organization that was disbanded in 1956 after the last member died).

The post was named to honor Captain Charles Wheeler Billings (Dec. 13, 1824 – July 15, 1863), Company C, 20th Maine, who was wounded in the left knee July 2, 1863, at the Battle of Little Round Top and died in a field hospital.

Clinton’s Brown Memorial Library website and a “Central Maine Morning Sentinel” article found on line describe the June 6, 2015, rededication of Clinton’s Civil War monument and the monument at Billings’ gravesite in Riverview Cemetery. The newspaper quotes speaker Bruce Keezer, then President of the Friends of Brown Memorial Library, as saying Clinton had a total population of 1,600 in the early 1860s; 252 men enlisted and 32 died.

The website says Billings was the highest-ranking 20th Maine officer to die at Little Round Top.

Billings left a widow, Ellen (Hunter) Billings, whose 30th birthday was July 1, 1863, and two daughters: Isadore Margaret, born in 1850, and Elizabeth W., or Lizzie, born in 1860. Another daughter, Alice, born in 1856, had died in 1860; and Elizabeth died Dec. 7, 1863. Isadore died in 1897, the day after her 47th birthday. Ellen lived until 1924.

Also from Clinton, according to Kingsbury, were Isaac Bingham, Rev. Francis P. Furber, Joseph Frank Rolfe and Laforest Prescott True.

Bingham had gone to California in 1852; he came home in 1861 and served two years with the 1st Maine Cavalry. After the war he moved back and forth between his Clinton farm and California.

Furber, a Winslow native who moved to Clinton in 1845, served in the 19th Maine for three years. A wound received May 6, 1864, “destroyed the use of one arm,” Kingsbury wrote. He was ordained a Freewill Baptist minister Sept. 27, 1885, after serving as a minister in Clinton and nearby towns since 1875.

Rolfe, born in Fairfield of parents who moved to Clinton when he was about three, served in the 2nd Maine Cavalry from 1863 to the end of the war. True was in the 20th Maine from 1862 to 1865 and was wounded twice.

Fairfield’s Civil War monument is one of the oldest in Maine, according to the town’s bicentennial history. The writers noted that its dedication day, July 4, 1868, was a scorching Saturday: the temperature reached 105 degrees in the shade.

Soldiers came from all over Maine. Ceremonies included a parade; cannon salutes; speeches, including one by Governor (former General) Joshua Chamberlain; dinner prepared by townswomen and served “in the old freight depot”; and a baseball game with a final score of 60 to 40 (the history does not record the names of the teams).

“The day was not without its tragedy,” the history says. A veteran named William Ricker, who had survived the war unscathed, lost a hand when one of the cannons went off too soon. Chamberlain promptly canceled the remaining salutes.

Kingsbury found that one of Sidney’s soldiers, Mulford Baker Reynolds (Aug. 5, 1843 – Aug. 3, 1937) served in Company C of the 1st Maine Cavalry from August 1862 to July 1865, “and spent about six months in Andersonville prison” in Georgia.

Reynolds married Ella F. Leighton on Nov. 23, 1881, according to an on-line source. Kingsbury wrote that in 1892 Reynolds was farming his family place in Sidney and he and Ella had four children.

Among the many Vassalboro men whose personal paragraphs in Kingsbury’s history list Civil War service is Edwin C. Barrows (April 2, 1842 – April 20, 1918). Educated at Waterville and Bowdoin colleges, he enlisted Nov. 19, 1863, in the 2nd Maine Cavalry.

Transferred in June 1865, he became second lieutenant (but acted as adjutant, the officer who assists the commander with administration, Kingsbury wrote) of the 86th U.S.C.T. (United States Colored Troops), serving until he was discharged April 10, 1866.

After the war, Barrows got a law degree from Albany Law School in January 1867 and practiced four years in Nebraska City, Nebraska. He married Laura Alden (Sept. 5, 1842 – Dec. 19, 1909) and returned to Vassalboro in 1872. By 1892, he had been a supervisor of schools in 1882 and 1883 and since then a selectman, “being chairman since 1887.”

Edwin and Laura Barrows are buried under a single headstone in Vassalboro’s Nichols Cemetery.

Vassalboro’s G.A.R. Post was named in honor of Richard W. Mullen of the 14th Maine, one of 410 Vassalboro Civil War soldiers, Alma Pierce Robbins wrote in her town history. After the war, town meeting voters appropriated money to the G.A.R.’s Women’s Relief Corps for Memorial Day services and veterans’ grave markers. The Post disbanded in 1942 and the appropriation was transferred to Vassalboro’s American Legion Post and Auxiliary.

The Waterville G.A.R. Post, chartered Dec. 29, 1874, was named in honor of William S. Heath, who was killed in action at Gaines Mill, Virginia, on June 27, 1862. The first post commander was General Francis E. Heath, the second General I. S. Bangs. Francis Heath was almost certainly William Heath’s brother (variously identified as Frank Edw. and Francis E.; died in Waterville in December 1897), I. S. Bangs the author of the military history chapter in Edwin Whittemore’s Waterville history.

Ernest Marriner added information on William Heath’s life in “Kennebec Yesterdays”. In 1849, he wrote, Heath was 15 and “somewhat tubercular”; his father, Solyman, thought a trip to the goldfields in California would be good for him.

Young Heath “did survive the rigors of the terrible trip across plains and mountains, worked a while in a San Francisco store, then shipped off to China, from which distant land the anxious father soon had him returned through the intercession of the United States government.”

Back in Waterville, Heath graduated from Waterville College in 1853. When the 3rd Maine’s Company H was formed in Waterville in April 1861, Heath was captain and his brother Francis/Frank was first lieutenant. By the time of his death, William Heath was a lieutenant colonel in the 5th Maine Infantry, Marriner wrote. Francis ended the war as a colonel in the 19th Maine, according to Bangs.

Linwood Lowden, in his Windsor history, wrote that Charles J. Carrol, one of seven Windsor men who fought in the Battle of Gettysburg July 2-4, 1863, was mortally wounded. Three more Windsor men, George H. B. Barton, George W. Chapman and George W. Merrill, were killed May 6, 1864, in the Battle of the Wilderness.

Windsor’s Vining G.A.R. Post, organized June 2, 1884, was named to honor Marcellus Vining. Post members met every Saturday night in the G.A. R. Hall, which was the upper story of the town house, Lowden said.

At an 1886, meeting, “a Mr. Bangs presented a picture of Marcellus Vining” to the organization. Kingsbury added that the Vining family donated Marcellus Vining’s army sword, “his life-size portrait and an elegant flag.”

Lowden believed Vining Post continued “well into the twentieth century.” Windsor voters helped fund the G.A.R., usually at $15 a year, he wrote. In 1929, however, “$30.00 was appropriated for G.A.R. Memorial and paid to the Sons of Veterans.”

Kingsbury wrote that Vining was born on the family homestead on May 2, 1842, third child and oldest son of Daniel Vining by his first wife, Sarah Esterbrooks of Oldtown (Daniel and Sarah had three daughters and three sons; after Sarah’s death, Daniel married Eliza Choat, and they had six more daughters).

On Jan. 25, 1862, Marcellus Vining became a private in the 7th Maine. He served for two years, during which his “ability and courage” (Kingsbury) earned him two promotions. On Jan. 4, 1864, he re-enlisted in a reorganized 7th Maine. On March 9 he was made second lieutenant of Company A, and on April 21 made first lieutenant. On May 12 he was wounded at Spottsylvania, Virginia; he died a week later.

“A captain’s commission was on its way from Washington to him, but too late to give to the brave soldier his richly earned promotion,” Kingsbury wrote.

He continued with a paraphrase from a letter Vining, knowing he was dying, wrote to his father, saying it was better “to die in the defense of his country’s flag than live to see it disgraced.”

Kingsbury concluded: “Thus the oft-repeated tale—a bright, promising man with the blush of youth still on his cheek, willingly laid down his life to preserve that of his country.”

Main sources

Fairfield Historical Society, Fairfield, Maine 1788-1988 (1988)
Grow, Mary M., China Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984)
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892)
Lowden, Linwood H., good Land & fine Contrey but Poor roads a history of Windsor, Maine (1993)
Marriner, Ernest, Kennebec Yesterdays (1954)
Robbins, Alma, Pierce History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971)
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902)

Websites, miscellaneous

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Wars – Part 12

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The Civil War left China, like Albion and other towns, deeply in debt, paying to outfit the soldiers and compensate their families.

by Mary Grow

Civil War

The United States Civil War, which began when the Confederates shelled Fort Sumter, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861, and ended with General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Virginia, on April 9, 1865, had the most impact on Maine, including the central Kennebec Valley, of any 17th or 18th century war.

Nonetheless, your writer’s original plan was to write only a single article about the Civil War. As usual, she found an oversupply of material that she hopes will interest readers as it interested her; but she still limits coverage to two articles, for three reasons.

The first and most important reason to downplay Civil War history is that unlike, say, the War of 1812, the Civil War is already familiar. Citizens who know nothing about the Sept. 13, 1814, bombardment of Fort McHenry (which inspired Francis Scott Key to write the poem that became the national anthem) recognize at least the names of battles like Bull Run and Gettysburg. Many people can name at least one Civil War general; few can name one from the War of 1812.

A second point is that numerous excellent histories of the Civil War are readily available, including books specifically about Maine’s role.

And the third reason is that this war is recent enough that some readers undoubtedly have memories of their grandparents telling stories of the generation before them who fought in the Civil War.

Any reader who would like to share a family Civil War story is invited to write it, attach photographs if available and email to townline@townline.org., Att. Roland Hallee. Maximum length is 1,000 words. Submissions will be printed as space permits; the editor reserves the right to reject any article and/or photograph.

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Maine historians agree that the majority of state residents supported President Abraham Lincoln’s decision to fight to preserve the Union. Those who initially disagreed, James W. North wrote in his history of Augusta, found themselves a small enough minority so they either changed their views or moderated their expression.

By 1860, the telegraph was widely used. News of Fort Sumter reached Augusta the same day, followed two days later by Lincoln’s call for 75,000 three-months volunteers, including one regiment from Maine.

On April 22, North wrote, the Maine legislature, in a hastily-called special session, approved enrolling 10,000 soldiers in ten regiments for three years, plus “a State loan of one million dollars.”

Augusta had filled two companies by the end of April. Other Kennebec Valley companies joined them; they camped and drilled on the State House lawn. The Third Regiment started south June 5, 1861; those soldiers were promptly replaced by others from other parts of Maine, volunteers succeeded by men paid bounties and in 1863 by draftees.

North wrote that the first draft in Augusta was held July 14 through 21, 1863, starting two days after the New York City draft riots began, with news arriving hourly. In Augusta’s Meonian Hall, eligible men’s names were drawn from a wheel by a blindfolded man named James M. Meserve, “a democrat of known integrity and fairness, who possessed the general confidence.”

The process began with selection of 40 men from Albion. Augusta followed, and, North wrote, the initial nervousness gave way to “a general feeling of merriment,” with draftees being applauded and congratulated.

Being drafted did not mean serving, North pointed out. Physical standards were strict; out of 3,540 draftees, 1,050 were “rejected by surgeon for physical disability or defects.” It was also legal to pay a substitute or to pay the government to be let off.

Augusta remained a military hub and a supply depot through the war, centered around the State House and Camp Keyes, on Winthrop Hill, at the top of Winthrop Street. There were large hospital buildings on Western Avenue, North wrote, which were so crowded by 1863 that the Camp Keyes barracks were also fitted up as hospital wards. The trotting park between the State House and the river was named Camp Coburn and hosted infantry and cavalry barracks and enlarged stables.

North described the celebratory homecomings for soldiers returning to Augusta when their enlistments were up, like the one in August 1863 for the 24th Regiment. The “bronzed and war-worn” men had come from Port Hudson, Louisiana, up the Mississippi to Cairo and by train to Augusta, a two-week trip. Greeted by cannon-fire, bells, torch-carrying fire companies, a band, state and city officials and “a multitude” of cheering citizens, they marched straight to the State House, enjoyed a meal in the rotunda and “dropped to sleep on the floor around the tables, being too weary to proceed to Camp Keyes.”

Historians describing the effects of the Civil War on smaller Kennebec Valley towns tend to emphasize two points: the human cost and the financial cost.

Ruby Crosby Wiggin found as she researched the history of Albion a record saying that “out of 100 men who went to war from the town of Albion, 45 didn’t come back.” She listed the names of more than 150 Albion soldiers, six identified as lieutenants.

By 1862, Wiggin wrote, the state and many towns offered enlistment bonuses. In addition, towns paid to equip each soldier. Total Albion expenditures, she wrote, were $21,265; the state reimbursed the town $8,033.33.

Wiggin concluded, “No wonder the town was heavily in debt at the close of the Civil War.”

The China bicentennial history says almost 300 men from that town served in Civil War units. The author quoted from the 1863 school report that said attendance in one district school was unusually low, “the large boys having gone to the war.”

The Civil War left China, like Albion and other towns, deeply in debt. The China history says when the State of Maine began tallying municipal costs and offering compensation in 1868, China had paid $47,735.34 to provide soldiers. The state repayment was $12,708.33, and town meetings were still dealing with interest payments and debt repayments into the latter half of the 1870s.

China town meetings during the war were mostly about meeting enlistment quotas, and, the history writer implied, by 1864 voters were tired of the topic. In July and again in December 1864, they delegated filling the quota to their select board.

When the late-1864 quota had not been filled by February 1865, voters were explicit; the history writer said they agreed to “sustain the Selectmen in any measures they may take in filling the quota of this town.”

The Fairfield historians who wrote the town’s 1988 bicentennial history found the list of Civil War soldiers too long to include in their book and noted that the names are on the monument in the Veterans Memorial Park and in the Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.) record books in the public library across Lawrence Avenue from the park.

Of Larone, the northernmost and likely the smallest of the seven villages that made up the Town of Fairfield for part of the 19th century, the history says, “Larone furnished her full quota of ‘boys in blue’. These averaged one for every family, three-fifths were destined never to see their homes again.”

Millard Howard, in his Palermo history, wrote that “The Civil War was by far the most traumatic experience this town ever experienced.” Of an 1860 population of 1,372, 46 men, “or one out of every 30 inhabitants,” died between 1861 and 1865.

Looking back from the year 2015, Howard wrote somberly, “No other war can remotely compare with it.”

He listed the names of the dead, with ages and causes of death where known. The youngest were 18, the oldest 44. More than half, 26, died of disease rather than wounds; Augustus Worthing, age 31, starved to death in Salisbury prison, in North Carolina.

Sidney voters spent a lot of town meetings in the 1860s talking about the war, according to Alice Hammond’s town history. As early as 1861, they approved abating taxes for volunteers.

As the war went on, voters authorized aid for volunteers’ families and monetary inducements to enlist for residents and non-residents, with preference given to residents. At an 1863 special meeting, they authorized selectmen to borrow money as needed “to aid families of volunteers.”

Hammond noted that Sidney was debt-free before the war, “but in 1865 it issued bonds for $24,000, a debt from which it recovered very slowly.”

Alma Pierce Robbins found from military records that 410 men from Vassalboro enlisted for Civil War service. From census records, she listed the 1860 population as 3,181.

As in other municipalities, voters approved wartime expenses. Robbins wrote that $7,900 was appropriated for bounties and aid to soldiers’ families in 1861. The comparable 1863 figure was $16,900. Perhaps for contrast, she added the 1864 cost of the new bridge at North Vassalboro (presumably over Outlet Stream): $1,057.82 (plus an 1867 appropriation of $418.62).

In Waterville, General Isaac Sparrow Bangs wrote in his chapter on military history in Reverend Edwin Carey Whittemore’s 1902 centennial history, recruiting offices opened soon after the news of Fort Sumter. A Waterville College student named Charles A. Henrickson was the first to enroll, and, Bangs wrote, his example “proved so irresistibly contagious at the college that the classes and recitations were broken up” and the college temporarily closed.

Henrickson was captured at the Battle of Bull Run, July 21, 1861. He survived the war; later in the Waterville history, Chas. A. Henrickson is listed among charter members of the Waterville Savings Bank, organized in 1869.

These Waterville soldiers became companies G and H in the 3rd Maine Infantry, Bangs wrote. After drilling in Waterville, they went to Augusta and were put under the command of regimental Colonel Oliver O. Howard. On June 5, Howard was ordered to Washington, “carrying with him, as Waterville’s first contingent, seventy-four of her boys into the maelstrom of war.”

Bangs spent years verifying the names of 421 men who either enlisted from Waterville or were Waterville natives who enlisted elsewhere. The names are included in Whittemore’s history.

Bangs added that the Maine Adjutant-General’s report says Waterville provided 525 soldiers. He offered several explanations for the discrepancy, pointing out the difficulties of accurate record-keeping.

Waterville paid $67,715 in enlistment bounties, Bangs wrote. Henry Kingsbury, in his history of Kennebec County, put the figure at $68,016 and said the state reimbursement was $19,888.33.

Linwood Lowden wrote in the history of Windsor that more than one-third of Windsor men aged 17 to 50 fought in the Civil War, most of them in the19th and 21st Maine infantry regiments.

Like other towns, Windsor paid bonuses to enlistees and, Lowden wrote, $2,663.87 “in aid to soldiers’ families…from 1862 through 1866.” He added that Windsor first went into debt during these years.

Camp Keyes, Augusta

A history of Camp Keyes found on-line says that the 70-acre site on top of Winthrop Hill, on the west side of Augusta, had been used as, and called, “the muster field” since before Maine became a state in 1820. It was still available, although the militia had become less significant, when the Civil War broke out.

On Aug. 20, 1862, Maine Adjutant General John L. Hodsdon designated the field one of Maine’s three official “rendezvous areas” for militia and volunteers and named it Camp E. D. Keyes, in honor of Major-General Erasmus D. Keyes, a Massachusetts native who moved to Kennebec County (town unspecified on line) as a young man. He graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1832 and fought in the Civil War until 1863, when a superior removed him from command, claiming he lacked aggressiveness.

(The other two Maine rendezvous areas were Camp Abraham Lincoln, in Portland, and Camp John Pope [honoring General John Pope from Kentucky], in Bangor.)

Thousands of Civil War soldiers from Maine passed through Camp Keyes. It also housed Maine’s only federal military hospital, named Cony Hospital in honor of Governor Samuel Cony.

After the war, the site remained a militia training ground. The State of Maine bought it in 1888. In 1893 the militia became the National Guard and continued to use the training ground, with Guard headquarters in the Capitol building until 1938.

The on-line site gives an undated description: “Small buildings were constructed of plywood for mess halls, kitchens, latrines, store houses, and lodging for senior military officers. Companies pitched their tents on pads that had been built.”

Main sources

Fairfield Historical Society Fairfield, Maine 1788-1988 (1988).
Grow, Mary M., China Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984).
Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992).
Howard, Millard, An Introduction to the Early History of Palermo, Maine (second edition, December 2015).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Lowden, Linwood H., good Land & fine Contrey but Poor roads a history of Windsor, Maine (1993).
Marriner, Ernest, Kennebec Yesterdays (1954).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870).
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).
Wiggin, Ruby Crosby, Albion on the Narrow Gauge (1964).

Websites, miscellaneous.

The tale of the Frozen Appalachian Trail Leprechaun

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by Jim Metcalf

“If you want huge togue and no fishermen head over to Nahmakanta” volunteered the old logger.

Mitchell replied,” Nahmakanta is on the other side of the Appalachian Trail and the snow is pretty deep this time of year.”

“No problem,” said the logger. “There’s a skidder trail from the Golden Road to the ridge of the Appalachian Trail then an easy downhill to a flat 10-foot-wide groomed trail to the lake and out to the Golden Road near Baxter.”

It was March and the fishing was slow on Chesuncook, so we talked ourselves in to chasing this pot of gold described by the old logger. He and his wife live year-round on Chesuncook, and he certainly knows the country. He also said that he and his wife would lead the trip. What could be better than that. Brian Mitchell, from Freedom, Norman Leeman, from Palermo, and I were staying in Mitchell’s camp on Chesuncook Lake for a couple of weeks to ice fish some of the ponds and lakes in the area.

We usually fished Chamberlain and Eagle in February while staying in a tent at the Crow’s Nest canoe camp site across from the tramway. Our trips were for a couple of weeks at a time and we hauled in enough gear to last all winter. We always found enough dry dead cedar on the cutting side of the waterway boundary to keep the tent stove glowing. But there were problems that always had us thinking about a nice warm cabin with big bunks and soft chairs.

Tenting at the Crow’s Nest meant we had to haul loaded sleds from the last plowed road to the Lock Dam then up and across Chamberlain to the Crow’s Nest canoe camp site. If the snow was deep, we had to pack down a trail before hauling the sleds full of gear. Once at the camp site we needed to dig out 4 – 5 feet of snow to set the tent down on fir branches. Moles, mice and other woods creatures lived happily under the snow, so they were thrilled to meet under our tent for warmth and chattering conversations which kept us awake until we stuffed our ears with cotton from the aspirin bottles.

This camp site had a fine State of Maine built privy to which we cleared a path. The only problem was those below zero mornings when we stood around drinking coffee and prolonging conversation until someone would yell, “Damn it, someone has to go sit in the privy to take the frost off the seat and it isn’t me because my turn was yesterday.” The two of us remaining would try to see which could outlast the other with the loser running up the path yelling bad descriptions of the one who did not have to sit on the frosty seat that morning

This year we left the tent home to stay at Mitchell’s camp on Chesuncook Lake. We had room to move around, no animal chatter under the floor, a shed full of dry wood, a reasonably warm privy without frost. And it was March with the sun higher and warmer. The only bad news was that the snow was deeper and could slush up on warm days with water coming up on the ice. Nevertheless, we were happy and looked forward to celebrating St Patrick’s day with a good catch of fish.

Each of us had jobs to do and if anyone complained about another’s work, they would absorb that job in addition to their own. I had cooking duty so on St Patrick’s day I made a huge batch of bacon and scrambled eggs covered with green food dye I had packed in. Mitchell and Norman sat looking at their Kelly-green scrambled eggs.

Finally, Mitchell hollered out, “Damn Jim, you #@%$**#, these eggs are sickly green,” then he paused and with a smile said, “But aren’t they good.”

The next morning, we planned on making the trip to Nahmakanta Lake with the old logger and his wife in the lead on their huge Evinrude machine with reverse that the old man said would back the machine out of any trouble. It was bitter cold with a wind as we followed them across Chesuncook to a cove near the Golden Road. As we came into the cove that big Evinrude sled disappeared into the snow with just the rear end pointing straight into the air. The old couple came crawling up out of the hole yelling something about snow covered dry-ki and the fact that we should have set over more to the right to avoid this cove full of stumps, limbs, and other assorted driftwood which the wind had pushed into this cove during the summer. We must have spent an hour lifting, pulling and dragging that damn heavy Evinrude with its useless reverse out of the dry-ki. When we got them upright on the ice, the logger said they were tired and had to head back to camp to rest. But they added, “The skidder trail is just across the Golden Road and you boys will be at the lake in no time. We may even catch up after we rest.” We probably should have taken this as a bad omen, but what could go wrong on a skidder trail.

We had some difficulty crossing the Golden Road as the heater banks were high, but luckily moose had crossed here so there were small breaks in the snowbanks. We were now in an empty log yard and could see the skidder trail ahead. No one had travelled on this trail, so we had to break it out with our sleds. The first section of the trail was in the open and OK to ride, but as we entered the woods things got a little more difficult. Norman led on his wide track with Mitchell following and me in the rear. In the summer a skidder trail looks like the bottom of a H with a crown in the middle and tire trenches on each side, but in the winter, snow fills the trail making it nearly impossible to stay in the middle of the trail up on the crown. As the third in line, I had a decent path to follow, but it was so cold that my breath iced up my glasses making it very hard to stay out of the tire ruts. If I slipped off the crown, I could usually gun the sled to jump back on. When that did not work, I had to jump off and pick up the sled back on to the crown.

This lifting of the sled every 100 yards or so was exhausting, causing more heated perspiration and thicker ice glazing of my glasses. On one slip off the crown into the tire rut I got snagged by a logging cable left on the side of the trail. It caught me around my neck pulling me off the sled and breaking the windshield. I was very fortunate as I had on heavy clothes with extra scarfs around my neck. Norman and Mitchell couldn’t turn around in this narrow trail, so they walked back to help me get untangled and back on the crown. We were now heading more uphill leading us to believe that we should be crossing the Appalachian Trail soon. The trail would be the welcoming sign that an easy downhill run to the flat 10-foot-wide groomed trail by Nahmakanta Lake was at hand. I didn’t notice how sweaty and tired I was getting until I caught up with Norman and Mitchell where the Appalachian Trail crossed. Mitchell with the smallest sled decided to travel down the hill to find the groomed trail. Norman and I sat on our sleds just resting after the skidder trail ordeal.

I was so exhausted and wet with sweat that, when Norman walked partially down the hill to help Mitchell back up, I decided to open up my snowmobile suit to cool off and take a nap in the snow. I think that I got to sleep but was rudely awaken by my two friends slapping me around. I tried to fight them begging for just a quick nap, but they would not let me fall into hypothermia.

Mitchell yelled at me, “listen you @%$#&, if you freeze to death, I’m going to cover your body with your damn green food coloring and tell everyone we found the Appalachian Trail Leprechaun, then put you on display in a glass box in Baxter. I woke up laughing as they zipped up my suit and sat ne up on my sled followed by a good talking to.

Mitchell found there was no 10-foot-wide groomed trail at the bottom of the hill, only more deep snow. We decided the advice from the logger was bogus, and we could have fallen into even more serious trouble if we continued. Our decision was to head back to our camp on the now reopened skidder trail. We made it back to the lake close to dark and saw the big blue Evinrude with reverse gear as we passed the logger’s camp. When we got to our camp, I was physically ill and couldn’t fix a meal or eat. I cannot ever remember being this tired. But I’ll never forget how grateful I am for two friends who saved me from freezing to death. Good old Brian Mitchell is gone now, but we will always remember him for almost putting me on exhibit as the Frozen Appalachian Trail Leprechaun.