Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Wars – Part 9

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Gen. Isaac Sparrow Bangs

by Mary Grow

War of 1812 veterans

In the course of reading about the War of 1812, your writer found information on Maine soldiers of less exalted rank than brigadier general, which she hopes readers, too, will find interesting.

Colonel Elnathan Sherwin (born in 1759 from his cemetery record, or 1762 or 1763, from on-line genealogies; died Sept. 10, 1822), from Waterville, has been mentioned more than once.

William Bacon Sherwin, one of the sons of Elnathan and Abigail Bacon Sherwin.

A Massachusetts native, he was in the Kennebec Valley by 1788, because on Dec. 28 that year he became the second husband of Abigail “Nabby” Bacon (Aug. 23, 1770 – March 23, 1831) of Vassalboro. Abigail was the daughter of Ebenezer Bacon and Abigail Farwell; her first husband was Winthrop Robinson.

(But Winthrop Robinson’s on-line genealogical record says he married Abigail Bacon in 1786 and lived until 1807, and he and Abigail had at least five sons and two daughters. Perhaps this genealogist partially combined Abigail’s two families?)

By 1794, the Sherwins were living on the west side of the Kennebec in the part of Winslow that became Waterville in 1802. Sherwin had a brickyard at the east end of Sherwin Street, which connects Water and Silver streets; the street is probably named after him. The couple had at least five and maybe seven children (sources differ), born in Waterville between 1794 and 1811.

In his history of Waterville, Edwin Carey Whittemore wrote that the Sherwin house was the site for “town meetings and religious services” until residents built a meeting house in 1798. Voters at the June 25, 1798, town meeting gave Sherwin a $30 reimbursement.

Whittemore lists Sherwin as a Winslow/Waterville member of the Massachusetts legislature for all but two years from 1799 through 1815. In 1810 and 1811, he was replaced by Eleazer W. Ripley (later Brigadier General Ripley – see the Feb. 24 The Town Line.)

In 1801, Sherwin was one of the men who helped pay for books for Waterville’s first library, started by Reuben Kidder (see the Dec. 23, 2021, issue of The Town Line.)

On-line genealogies say the Sherwins’ first child, Josiah, was born in 1788 (after their marriage?) and their second, Sophia, was born in or about 1794. If these birthdates are accurate, it is confusing to find him planning to send two children to elementary school early in 1797.

Elwood T. Wyman, writer of the chapter on schools in Whittemore’s history, found that Sherwin was one of eight men who, at the end of December 1796, signed a promise to pay Abijah Smith for three months’ teaching. Wyman wrote that school age was defined as between five and 21 years; each man listed the number of students to be enrolled at his expense.

Each promised Smith a proportionate share of his $20 a month pay, two dollars to be paid weekly for board (spelled “bord”) and the remainder due at the end of term. They further agreed to deliver firewood to the schoolroom.

In 1808, Sherwin was listed as a parent in Waterville’s school district number eight (this list did not include the number of students per family). Wyman wrote this district, with 145 students, probably contained most of the town’s population.

The students, he wrote, “came from Main, Silver, Mill, College, Water and lower Front streets, as these rough roads were called, leading through an area still largely covered with woods, and used mostly for pasturage.”

In the War of 1812, Sherwin had the rank of lieutenant colonel and led the First Regiment, Second Brigade, Eighth Division of militia.

General Isaac Sparrow Bangs, who wrote the chapter on military history in Whittemore’s book, found records showing the regiment was activated Sept 14, 1814, and started for the coast, but was held in Augusta until Sept. 24. Then some of the men, including Sherwin, were drafted to fill vacancies in Lieutenant-Colonel Ellis Sweet’s regiment in Bath. They stayed at Edgecomb and Wiscasset until Nov. 10, seeing no action (see The Town Line, Feb. 17).

Sherwin died Sept. 10, 1822, in Point Pleasant, Clermont County, Ohio; his widow died February 23, 1831, in Point Franklin. Point Pleasant has three cemeteries: Fee, Point Pleasant and Sherwin. In 1959, an on-line source says, members of the Daughters of the American Revolution found “two old monuments” to Elnathan and Abigail in the Sherwin Cemetery.

* * * * * *

Like Sherwin, Captain Moses Burleigh (occasionally spelled Burley; March 25, 1781 – Feb. 13, 1860), of Palermo, has appeared previously in this series as a militia captain, some of whose troops went to the coast in September 1814 (see The Town Line, Feb. 17). He commanded a company in Colonel John Commings’ regiment, which served in Belfast from Sept. 13 to Sept. 24, 1814, according to Millard Howard’s Palermo history.

Howard wrote that Burleigh was born in Sandwich, New Hampshire, and came with his father to Palermo in 1800. An on-line genealogy, quoting from the family history, says of Burleigh: “[H]is neighbors[,] inspired with confidence in his ability and integrity, repeatedly elected him to fill important offices in the town,” including captain of a militia company. In 1816 he was made a lieutenant colonel.

Peacetime positions the two sources list include “selectman, justice of the peace and deputy sheriff”; representing Palermo in the Massachusetts General Court and later in the Maine legislature; and being a delegate to the 1816 convention in Brunswick that anticipated Maine statehood.

Burleigh was a member of the first Maine legislative session in 1820, held in the state house on Congress Street, in Portland. That first session apparently lasted 71 days, and an on-line attendance list shows that Burleigh was present for 70 of them. In attendance for 71 days were Joel Wellington, from Fairfax (see below), Robert Fletcher, from China, Peaslee Morrill, Jr., from Dearborn (readers who have forgotten Dearborn are referred to the Feb. 17 issue of The Town Line), Joseph Stewart, from Harlem, and Samuel Redington, from Vassalboro. Herbert Moore, from Clinton, was there for 67 days; Ambrose Howard, Sidney, 61 days; Baxter Crowell, Waterville, 58 days; Ebenezer Lawrence, Fairfield, 50 days; and Robert C. Vose, Augusta, 46 days. Windsor is not listed.

Burleigh was the first man to drive the mail carriage from Augusta to Bangor, when carriages replaced horseback riders.

In 1830, Burleigh moved to Linneus (then in Washington County, now in Aroostook) and, Howard wrote, “continued to hold important positions in state, county and the militia.” He was put in charge of the census in the northern part of the county, where, the online genealogy says, he continued to argue with the Brits. A Canadian warden claimed he was outside the United States boundary and “pursued with authority to arrest him; he eluded all pursuit and accomplished his work.”

The next year he “was appointed assistant land agent to guard that section of the public lands, and in that capacity succeeded in breaking up various parties of trespassers, compelling them to return to the British Provinces.”

Burleigh was Linneus’ postmaster for some years. The genealogical writer again praises him: he “was a man of activity, energy, and probity of character; his hospitality was particularly marked, the hungry were fed and the weary found rest beneath his roof….”

Edwin Chick Burleigh

His grandson, Edwin Chick Burleigh, from Linneus, was elected Governor of Maine in 1889, a member of the United States House of Representatives in 1897 and a United States Senator in 1913.

* * * * * *

Another War of 1812 veteran, whose life shows interesting parallels with Burleigh’s, was Captain Joel Wellington (1782 – July 12, 1865), from Fairfax (as it was named in 1804; it became Albion in 1824). Two on-line sources call him General Wellington, but neither explains when or how he (allegedly) got the title.

Born in Acton, Massachusetts, Wellington was in Fairfax by 1810, because an online genealogy says he married Clarissa Blake (1785-1868) there on Nov. 24. The couple had at least eight children, born between 1811 and 1827.

Wellington was an important citizen in Fairfax, as Burleigh was in Palermo. An on-line summary of the 1819 constitutional convention includes short biographies. Wellington is described as a selectman for 11 years, beginning in 1812; town clerk in 1817; state representative in 1820, 1821, 1828, 1831 and 1833; and a member of the governor’s council in 1826 and 1827.

Wiggin recorded that the June 25, 1814, town vote to rebuild the bridge at the head of China Lake appointed him to the three-man supervisory committee. (The contract went to Sylvanus Harlow for $325, “to be paid in corn and grain at the market price February 1, 1816.”)

In October 1819, Wiggin wrote, voters sent Wellington to the Portland convention that drew up a constitution for the planned new state, and in Fairfax’s “first state election” on April 3, 1820, Wellington outpolled two other men to become a representative to the new Maine legislature.

An online record of the 1820 census lists Wellington as the enumerator for Fairfax, which had 1,204 residents. In 1822, voters appointed him to a five-man committee to draft a petition to the legislature to change the town’s name from Lagonia (also spelled Lygonia and Ligonia, adopted in 1821) to Richmond (never adopted).

Wellington was postmaster in Fairfax in 1820 (and perhaps earlier), according to the 1820 Maine Register (found online). In March 1825 he became Albion’s first postmaster, serving until 1831.

(The 1820 Register adds that Fairfax was 82 miles from Portland, and postage between the two points was 12 cents. In adjacent China, Japheth Washburn was postmaster, the distance from Portland was 73 miles, postage was only 10 cents; in Clinton [which then included Benton], Gershom Flagg was postmaster, distance was 81 miles, postage 12 cents; Winslow, 77 miles, postmaster Frederick R. Paine, postage 10 cents.)

Kingsbury wrote that Wellington owned a public house in Fairfax by 1817, and later he and his brother John ran a carding mill. Wiggin said the mill was originally on Fifteen Mile Steam near Route 202, and the Wellingtons moved it to the outlet of Lovejoy Pond. It burned in the early 1850s, she wrote.

Meanwhile, in 1829, according to a Maine Writers Research Club book titled Just Maine Folks (found online), Wellington bought from the state of Maine, for $3,000, 23,000 acres on the north branch of the Meduxnekeag River, in what became in 1839 Aroostook County. The first settlers on his property arrived in 1830; Wellington moved there himself with his family (after a stay in Bangor in 1840, according to the online genealogy), and built a sawmill and a brickyard to accommodate local needs.

Originally called Wellington Plantation, the Town of Monticello was incorporated July 29, 1846. Wellington changed the name to honor Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia estate. He lived there until his death and is buried there.

Monticello Grange #388 was organized in 1899; members promptly built a Grange Hall. It burned in 1921 and was replaced in 1922 by a typical two-story wooden building that has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 2000.

Other on-line sources mention the Wellington House, in Monticello, built in 1846. The present owners are publishing a blog on Facebook as they rehab it, enumerating their discoveries (copper, not tin, ceilings, in five rooms) and their dilemmas. They say the large two-story clapboarded building is on the site of the cabin Wellington built when he first came to his town.

Monticello is a little more than 20 miles north of Linneus. Given that Wellington and Moses Burleigh were a year apart in age, given that they might have met in September 1814 and must have met in the Maine legislature, in Portland, in 1820, your writer wonders whether there is a connection between Wellington’s 1829 land purchase and Burleigh’s move north in 1830.

Main sources

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).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).
Wiggin, Ruby Crosby, Albion on the Narrow Gauge (1964).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Wars – Part 8

/0 Comments/in , /by

Camp Ripley, today in Minnesota

by Mary Grow

Generals Chandler and Ripley

Two national military leaders in the War of 1812, Brigadier General John Chandler and Brigadier General Eleazer (or Eleazar – sources differ) Wheelock Ripley, were from Maine, according to Louis Hatch’s state history. Both had connections with the central Kennebec Valley: Chandler lived most of his life in Monmouth, and Ripley practiced law in Waterville for a short time.

Brigadier General John Chandler

John Chandler (Feb. 1, 1762 – Sept. 25, 1841), born in Epping, New Hampshire, served in the Revolutionary War (see the Jan. 20 issue of The Town Line) and after the war settled in Monmouth, with a loan from General Henry Dearborn.

(Kingsbury says in his Kennebec County history that Monmouth was incorporated in 1792, named in honor of Dearborn’s “brilliant and daring conduct at the battle of Monmouth, N. J.” on June 28, 1778.)

Chandler was Monmouth’s first town clerk, in 1792; was elected selectman in 1792 and served two years; was elected again in 1795 and served nine years, according to Kingsbury. Wikipedia adds that he was in the Massachusetts Senate from 1803 to 1805, and in the United States House of Representatives from March 1805 to March 1809. He became Kennebec County sheriff in 1809.

On Feb. 27, 1812, Chandler “became major general of the Massachusetts Militia,” Wikipedia says. After President James Madison declared war on June 18, he appointed Chandler commander of the 17th Division, United States Volunteers. An on-line writer on a War of 1812 reenactment (the page is identified as the U. S. 23rd Infantry Regiment’s product) says he led them in a “disastrous thrust” into Canada.

In July 1812, Chandler resigned as a militia officer and was made a United States brigadier general, commanding one of three brigades of the army fighting in northern New York and southern Canada. Here, too, his success was limited.

A Canadian source describes the June 6, 1813, Battle of Stoney Creek, near Hamilton, Ontario (on the west end of Lake Ontario, northwest of Niagara Falls). A British force of about 700 men under Brigadier General John Vincent was retreating north, followed by Chandler’s army of more than 3,000 men, with artillery and cavalry.

Chandler went into camp at Stoney Creek on June 5. The outnumbered British expected his invasion to continue, costing them more territory; but two people saved them.

The first, according to the Canadian history, was a Lieutenant Fitzgibbon in Vincent’s army, who entered the American camp pretending to be a farmer selling butter and noted that troops were so spread out they would have problems coordinating if they were attacked.

The second person is identified as “Billy Green.” Green had a brother-in-law who had been captured and released by the Americans, and while with them had gotten their password from a “gullible U. S. soldier.”

Both pieces of information went to Vincent and persuaded him to attack the American camp. Starting around 11 at night, British troops led by Lieutenant-Colonel John Harvey (later Sir John Harvey) moved in, bayoneted American pickets and attacked the sleeping troops.

In the confusion, Chandler and Brigadier General William Winder from Maryland were captured – Wikipedia says, “when they wandered into the British line, thinking it was their own.” With no leaders and no idea how many troops the British had, the Americans headed back toward Fort George, on the Niagara River, where, the Canadian source says, they remained without further offensive action for the rest of the war.

Another on-line source says 23 British soldiers were killed in the battle, 136 were wounded and 55 went missing. On the American side, the figures were 17 men killed, 38 wounded and 99 missing. The surprise attack could have been disastrous for the Americans, this writer says, had not a few early shots given them a little warning and had the troops not been “sleeping in formation” (even if spread out).

Chandler was exchanged in 1814. Your writer has found no reference to where he was held or under what conditions. However, an on-line source summarizes the November 1812 agreement between Britain and the United States, which said, among other things:

  • All prisoners “shall be treated with humanity conformable to the usage and practice of the most civilized nations during war,” (officers were treated much better than privates, several sources agree) and shall be exchanged as soon as possible.
  • An officer would be exchanged for “officers of equal rank” or for a specified number of privates. A general was worth 60 men; a brigadier general like Chandler was worth 20 men.
  • The two places on the American continent where prisoners could be held until exchanged were Québec and Halifax. The United States and British governments were each entitled to appoint an agent who would live nearby and keep an eye on prison conditions.

After returning to the United States Army, Chandler spent the rest of the war on the Maine and New Hampshire coasts, Wikipedia says, “coordinating efforts between the local militia and federal units.” The writer of the reenactment piece mentioned above was not impressed by his actions on the coast, either, writing: “Considering that the British occupied about a third of Maine, it could be reasonably suggested that Chandler was unsuccessful here as well.”

Hatch, summing up Chandler’s military history, called him “a brave officer” who “did little to distinguish himself.”

After the war ended Chandler returned to politics, serving in the Massachusetts General Court in 1819 and the Maine Constitutional Convention in October 1819. He was the first president of the brand-new Maine Senate, serving from March 15 to June 19, 1820, when he resigned to take his seat as a United States Senator.

He served in the Senate until March 3, 1829. In the 18th, 19th and 20th Congresses, he chaired the committee on militia and, Wikipedia says, “played a key role in establishing the arsenal at Augusta, as well as the construction of the military road from Bangor to Houlton.”

Chandler retired from the Senate to become Collector of Customs, in Portland, until 1837. He was a Bowdoin College trustee from 1821 to 1838. He died in Augusta and is buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery.

* * * * * *

Brigadier General Eleazer Wheelock Ripley

Wikipedia and the on-line Maine an Encyclopedia say Brigadier General Eleazer Wheelock Ripley (April 15, 1782 – March 2, 1839) was born in Hanover, New Hampshire, and educated at Dartmouth College, graduating in 1800.

Wikipedia says Ripley’s grandfather, Eleazar Wheelock, founded Dartmouth, and his father, Sylvanus Ripley, was a professor there in the 1780s.

Ripley studied law under Timothy Boutelle, in Waterville, and opened his law practice there in the early 1800s. In 1809, Whittemore wrote in his history of the city, Ripley was one of Waterville’s first fire wardens. (Another was Elnathan Sherwin, mentioned last week.)

Ripley was elected to the Massachusetts General Court for two terms (sources differ on dates; one year was almost certainly 1811). One source says he was speaker in his second term, another that he became a senator; and he either resigned when the war broke out, or in 1812 moved to Portland and from there served as a Massachusetts senator.

In the War of 1812 Ripley organized and was made lieutenant colonel of the 21st United States Infantry Regiment, composed primarily of Massachusetts (including District of Maine) soldiers. The 21st fought in several major battles in upstate New York and adjacent Canada.

Hatch wrote that Ripley “won a national reputation” for himself and his brigade in the fighting at Lundy’s Lane and Fort Erie. Whittemore added that he took command of the American forces at Lundy’s Lane after Major General Jacob Brown was wounded.

By war’s end, Ripley was a major general.

“By a resolution of Congress dated November 3, 1814, Eleazar Ripley was presented a gold medal in honor of his military service,” the on-line encyclopedia says. Wikipedia adds that the medal “was the precursor to the Medal of Honor.”

Leaving the army in February 1820, Ripley returned to the law in Jackson, Louisiana, near Baton Rouge. Continuing his Maine pattern, he was elected to the Louisiana state senate and in 1834 to the United States Congress, where he served until his death.

Ripley died in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, and is buried in Locust Grove Cemetery, in St. Francisville.

The on-line encyclopedia writer adds that the Somerset County town of Ripley, Maine, is named after General Ripley, “though he never lived there.” Other sources add counties and towns in other states named after him, as well as Fort Ripley, a fort on the upper Mississippi River, in Minnesota.

Fort Ripley was first manned in April 1849, because a native tribe had been displaced to a nearby reservation and needed a government presence for protection and, an on-line site explains, to hand out annuity payments. After brief stints as Fort Marcy and Fort Gaines, in 1850 it was renamed again to honor Ripley.

The fort was active during the early 1860s, because of the Civil War and in local fighting as United States citizens continued moving into native American territory. After a January 1877 fire burned three buildings, the government abandoned the fort; by 1910, only the concrete powder magazine remained.

When the state of Minnesota bought land for a National Guard training area in 1929, the Fort Ripley site was included. The National Guard facility, in operation today, was therefore named Camp Ripley.

Main sources

Hatch, Louis Clinton, ed., Maine: A History 1919 ((facsimile, 1974).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Wars – Part 7

/0 Comments/in , , , , /by

USS Adams, as a 28-gun frigate. Below, rebuilt as a sloop of war.

by Mary Grow

War of 1812
Hampden and Wiscasset

Two events in September 1814 involved central Kennebec Valley residents directly in the war against the British, fortunately without recorded casualties.

The first and less significant began in Hampden, where British forces sailed up the Penobscot River to capture the USS Adams. The Adams began life in June 1799 as a 28-gun frigate; after service against the French in the West Indies and the Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean, she was mostly inactive from 1803 to 1812, ending up in 1811 as a receiving ship (where new sailors live before they’re assigned to their ships) at the Washington, D.C., Navy yard.

In June 1812, Wikipedia says, the Adams was “cut in half amidships and lengthened 15 feet in the course of being completely rebuilt as a sloop of war.” After adventures on both sides of the Atlantic, on Aug. 17, 1814, she ran aground at Isle au Haut, off Stonington.

“Skillful seamanship aided by a rising tide managed to refloat the ship,” Wikipedia says. Leaking badly, she got up the Penobscot to Hampden and was being repaired when a British expedition followed upriver to seize her.

USS Adams rebuilt as a sloop of war.

On Sept. 3, her commander, Captain Charles Morris, chose to sink and burn her to keep her from the British. Morris and his crew headed through the wilderness from the Penobscot toward the Kennebec. Henry Kingsbury, in his Kennebec County history, gave a lively account of their adventures in his section on the Town of Clinton, though he misdated the episode as 1812.

The sailors got to the Sebasticook, found some bateaux and started downriver toward civilization, he wrote. The Clinton area was already buzzing with rumors of Indian attacks, so when one early afternoon Jerusha Doe and Polly Richardson saw boats with unknown armed men, they ran to the nearest house screaming, “The Indians are coming!”

Word spread, and residents headed for Winslow, seeking protection in what was left of Fort Halifax. It took until evening to identify the intruders as friends and welcome them, Kingsbury wrote, and a lame man who couldn’t escape fast enough “lay hidden all night in a potato trench on his father’s farm.”

The Adams crewmen left their boats at Clinton Village, walked to Noble’s Ferry opposite Nye’s Corner, in Fairfield, crossed the Kennebec and got a ride to Waterville from a man named Isaac Chase, whose son still talked about the event in the 1890s, Kingsbury said. (Other sources give other accounts of their cross-country hike.)

Wikipedia says Morris and most of the crew got back to their Portsmouth, New Hampshire, base by Sept. 9. Within another week the entire crew was present, “a source of great satisfaction for Morris.”

The British forces, meanwhile, killed a few local people and did a great deal of damage in Hampden, Bangor and other Penobscot River towns. An on-line source says the memory of Hampden led local residents to support Maine’s separation from Massachusetts, which had not protected them, and to continue opposition to the British, evidenced in the Aroostook War.

According to another on-line source, the Adams sat at the bottom of the Penobscot until 1870, when she was raised, repaired in Boston and began a new career “as a Navy sailing trainer ship, sailing all over the world before being retired in 1920.”

Other British ships hovered threateningly off the coast around Wiscasset. In the history of Fairfield, the writers named five residents who, “realizing the hazard to the Town if the British had control of the Kennebec,” joined the defense at Wiscasset: Samuel Bates, James Lander, Henry Lawrence, James Lawrence and William Lawrence.

The implication is that they went as individuals. If they did, they soon enlisted. Military records in the Maine genealogy archives show Samuel Bates at Wiscasset in Captain James Child’s Winslow militia company (part of Colonel Herbert Moore’s regiment) from Sept. 12 to Sept. 27, and in Joel Wellington’s Albion company, Colonel Elnathan Sherwin’s regiment, from Sept. 24 to Nov. 10.

James Lander and Henry Lawrence served in Sergeant Ansel Tobey’s detached company from Sidney, also under Sherwin’s command, at Augusta from Sept. 13 to Sept. 24. Lander and all three Lawrences are listed in another of Sherwin’s units, Captain Stephen Lovejoy’s Sidney-based company that served at Wiscasset from Sept. 24 to Nov. 10.

It could well have been the presence of the British navy that led to the Sunday, Sept. 10, special town meeting in Augusta. Historian James North wrote that voters unanimously authorized selectmen to buy powder, tent material, “camp kettles and small arms”; they approved a “special tax” to raise $500 for the supplies.

Their apprehension was justified the next day. On Sunday, Sept 11, North wrote, the Wiscasset Committee of Safety sent an urgent message upriver asking for troops to repel an expected British landing.

Augusta’s General Henry Sewall sent Colonel John Stone’s and Colonel Ellis Sweet’s militia regiments and the Hallowell Artillery to Wiscasset post haste – the first men arrived Monday morning. After ordering four more regiments to stand by along the river, Sewall joined the Wiscasset group, in camp at Edgecomb.

Colonel Stone was from Gardiner, and nine of the 13 large companies he led came from Augusta, Hallowell or Gardiner, with inland companies from Winthrop and Litchfield and two down-river ones from Pittstown. This regiment was sent home Sept. 25, after two weeks’ service.

Colonel Sweet was in charge of two regiments. One, of seven companies, came from Readfield, Farmington and Wilton and served at Bath through the second week in November. The other consisted of 11 companies with soldiers from Fayette, Lewiston, Mount Vernon, New Vineyard, Readfield, Wayne and Winthrop. These men were released in late September; most companies were sent to Wiscasset, but one stayed in Monmouth.

The Augusta-area regiments were joined by other militiamen from the Kennebec Valley. Many local histories, on line and in book form, list regiments, companies and often privates in each company by name.

Most regiments had two or three officers, four corporals, four sergeants, one or two musicians and between 30 and 50 privates (one had only five; others had 60 or more). Some had waiters.

(An on-line article from the Journal of the American Revolution explains that waiters, also called “servants, batmen or ‘bowman,'” were officers’ personal servants. At least in the Revolutionary army, they could not be boys or old men, and they were expected to accompany their officer wherever he went. In May 1779, General George Washington ordered that the waiters drill with the fighting men; but by the end of May, the article says, he changed his mind and said they should not be armed.)

Colonel Moore, from Winslow, led 11 companies raised in Fairfax (Albion), Harlem (China), Clinton, Vassalboro and Winslow. The majority of these companies served at Wiscasset from Sept. 12 to Sept. 27.

An on-line Maine genealogy source lists Colonel Moore’s companies, naming officers and men, as follows.

Lieutenant Benjamin J. Radcliffe’s company, no home town given, was one of the largest: ranks included an ensign, four corporals, four sergeants, two musicians and 57 privates.

Captain Daniel Wyman, no home town (another on-line source says he commanded one of Vassalborough’s four companies), had a lieutenant and an ensign under him, four corporals and four sergeants but only one musician for his smaller company.

Captain James Wing’s company and Captain Jeremiah Farwell’s companies were raised in Vassalborough.

Captain Joel Wellington’s company came from Fairfax (later Albion). Six Strattons were in this company: Ensign Ebenezer, Sergeant Charles, privates Austin, James and Paul and waiter Ness.

Captain Benjamin Robinson’s company was also from Fairfax. One of the smallest companies, with about two dozen privates, it had a full complement of officers and NCOs and two musicians.

Captain John Moore’s company came from Clinton, as did Captain Irial Hall’s company. This writer has not been able to find out whether Captain Moore was related to Colonel Moore.

Captain Robert Fletcher’s company, another large one, was raised in Harlem (later China). These men stayed at Wiscasset until Oct. 1, 1814. The company included Jacob, Joseph, Thomas and Zachariah Norton and Daniel, Jonathan, Nathaniel and Samuel Gray.

Captain Daniel Crowell’s company was also from Harlem. Jabish Crowell was a sergeant; David and John, Jr., were privates.

Captain James L. Child’s company was from Winslow.

The town of Palermo sent two militia companies to Belfast from Sept. 13 to Sept. 24. Millard Howard listed the men involved — some apparently from nearby towns — in his Palermo history: Colonel John Commings’ regiment included companies headed by Captain Moses Burley (or Burleigh), whose men were mostly from North Palermo, and Captain Job Lord.

The Palermo militiaman had been on standby since June. When finally called to action, they considered the government pay – about $10.50 a month, Howard said – not enough to risk their lives for and asked town officials to raise more. Town officials refused.

Colonel Sherwin was in charge of eight large companies of “drafted militia” (the term is not explained) from a wider geographic range – Starks, Bingham and Canaan, as well as Wellington’s Albion company; Lovejoy’s and Amasa Lesley’s Sidney companies; and Jeremiah Farwell’s Vassalboro company. Most of these companies had 60 or more privates plus the usual complement of officers.

Wellington’s was the largest, with 75 privates. There were five Hawes, David, Ebenezer, Isaiah, James and Seth, all privates; and six Richardsons, ensign Israel, sergeant Robert and privates Andrew, Ebenezer, Seth and Seth, 2nd.

Captain Tobey from Sidney was assisted only by Sergeant Elias Burgess and Corporal Joseph Nye, and had 13 privates. Notes after six of the names, including Burgess and Nye, say the men were credited with either eight or 11 days of service.

These companies went to Wiscasset and Edgecomb Sept. 24 and stayed until Nov. 10.

Another regiment under Colonel Sherwin was moved to Augusta to replace the local troops sent to the coast. The colonel and six of his nine officers were from Waterville (the other three are listed as residents of Fairfield, Sidney and Winslow); the 10 companies of enlisted men came from Belgrade, Dearborn, Fairfield, Sidney and Waterville. (Dearborn was a town from 1812 until 1843, gradually being divided among Waterville, Belgrade and Smithfield.)

In their coastal positions, North wrote, the Augusta-area regiments made camp at Edgecomb, across the Sheepscot River from Wiscasset. On Sept. 23, a sentry rode into camp with the news that “an English man-of-war was in the river evidently preparing to land troops.”

Units from Gardiner, Hallowell, Augusta and Winslow, commanded by Major Samuel Howard, hurried the six or eight miles to the expected landing point, “slept on their arms at night” and when no enemy appeared the next morning, went back to Edgecomb.

The whole affair turned out to be a false alarm. Most of the militia units returned to their home towns before the end of September; Sewall’s and one other division spent 40 days on the coast.

Counting the companies and averaging the number of officers and men per company leads to the conclusion that about 3,000 armed men should have converged on the area around Wiscasset and Edgecomb. The 1810 census listed Wiscasset’s year-round population as 2,083 and Edgecomb’s as 205.

How many men actually went, and how many decided they could not leave their farms in mid-September for an indefinite period? How many teen-aged boys joined them, and how many stayed with the women and younger children? How many wives encouraged, or perhaps joined, their husbands, and how many begged them not to go? These are the sorts of questions only the most diligent – or luckiest — historian can sometimes answer.

Main sources

Fairfield Historical Society, Fairfield, Maine 1788-1988 (1988).
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).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Wars – Part 6

/0 Comments/in , , , , /by

The Block House at Fort Kent, on the Canadian border, in 1839, at the time of the Aroostook War.

by Mary Grow

War of 1812

The end of the American Revolution did not end enmity between Britain and its former colonies. They fought one more war, the War of 1812 (June 18, 1812 – Feb. 18, 1815).

Even after that war, the border between the United States and British Canada remained partly unsettled until the Oregon Treaty of June 15, 1846. In the interim, one eastern border disagreement reached the point where it, too, is called (or miscalled; some historians insist it was a mere incident) a war, the Aroostook War (1839-1840).

The next articles in this series will talk about the War of 1812 and the Aroostook War.

From 1806 on, relations among the United States, Britain and other European belligerents, and within the United States between the pro-British Federalist party and the pro-French Democratic Party, became increasingly unfriendly. The United States banned imports in British ships; the British retaliated by attacks on American shipping.

Louis Hatch’s 1919 Maine history includes an interesting summary of the War of 1812. He discussed both the anti-war sentiment that was significant in all of New England and the ways many Maine people supported the war.

Although anti-war Federalists dominated in Augusta in the years before 1812, they were a minority in Kennebec County, the District of Maine and the United States, James North wrote in his Augusta history. He said Maine reportedly furnished more enlisted soldiers in proportion to population than any other state, and patriotically paid war taxes Congress required.

Casual students of Maine history probably think the war’s effects were limited to coastal and Downeast Maine – the British seized Castine and Machias and went up the Penobscot as far as present-day Bangor.

For some local historians, that view seemed accurate. For example, Vassalboro historian Alma Pierce Robbins gave the War of 1812 one sentence, saying it was unimportant to Vassalboro officials, perhaps because it wasn’t really a war. (Hatch, however, listed Vassalborough and Waterville as towns whose voters rejected proposals to petition the federal government to repeal the embargo on international trade.)

Similarly, in the town of Harlem, now China, the 1974 town history says that “There are no records of war casualties. The Harlem town records show no extraordinary political or financial effects.”

Others, notably Augusta historians North and Charles Elventen Nash, found that the War of 1812 had major and lamentable economic, personal and political effects. Nash and North wrote at length about the war, because both were detail-oriented and, perhaps, because Augusta was then the largest town in the area.

In his 1870 history, North wrote that as early as 1806, the war between Britain and France made Maine settlers fear the United States government would be forced to abandon the policy of neutrality that was commercially beneficial. Anticipating trouble, he said, Kennebec Valley people began thinking in military terms – hence, for example, the 1806 organization of Augusta’s first military company, the Augusta Light Infantry.

North called the Light Infantry Augusta’s “first independent company.” His account of the ladies of Augusta presenting a company standard on Sept. 11, 1806, says the cavalry and artillery units were waiting when the uniformed infantrymen arrived to receive a white silk standard with “Victory or Death” inscribed in red.

In December 1807 Congress passed the Embargo Act prohibiting United States exports to Europe. The act was a disaster for businessmen trading overseas, including many Kennebec Valley merchants and ship-builders; stopping trade stopped their livelihoods.

“[T]heir ships instead of making profitable voyages lay decaying at the wharves, and financial distress and in many cases bankruptcy followed,” Nash wrote.

On Aug. 20, 1808, voters at a special Augusta town meeting petitioned President Thomas Jefferson to repeal the embargo. Debate was spirited, North wrote; when the vote was taken, only seven men dissented.

A nine-man committee drafted a petition that was approved and forwarded to Washington. North quoted President Jefferson’s Sept. 10 reply defending the embargo and reminding Augusta residents that only Congress could repeal it unless the European powers first abandoned their anti-trade edicts and actions.

On Jan. 16, 1809, Augusta voters acted on a broader resolution condemning the embargo, a war with Britain and creation of a standing army. The vote was 85 in favor to 23 opposed, North wrote.

Nathan Weston

In 1810, North wrote, the Federalists and the Democrats held separate Fourth of July celebrations. The Democrats met in front of a Grove Street house to hear Nathan Weston’s speech; the Federalists, with the Augusta Light Infantry, paraded around the city, including past the Democratic gathering, “courteously suspending their music as they passed.”

(Nathan Weston was then a district judge; he was later an Associate Justice and Chief Justice of the Maine Sup­reme Judicial Court. See The Town Line, Dec. 10, 2020.)

The Feder­alists’ parade was followed by a banquet at a Hallowell tavern, in a room decorated with 17 wreaths for the 17 United States. North wrote that Virginia’s wreath included a hornet’s nest, “representing the stinging nature of her democracy.” A candle set the nest on fire and freed the hornets.

President James Madison continued the embargo and on June 18, 1812, signed the Congressionally-approved declaration of war with Great Britain.

The news reached Augusta around the beginning of July. Local Federalist party leaders and press denounced the declaration – North quoted the words “iniquitous, ruinous and not to be tolerated.” President Madison was hanged in effigy, and a fast in protest was held July 23.

Historian Henry Kingsbury added that federal troops stationed in Augusta were ready to counter the local reaction, “and but for the action of the civil authorities the episode must have closed with bloodshed.”

War worsened an already-bad economic situation in the Kennebec Valley. In Augusta, North summarized:

“The streams of prosperity were dried at their source, and in the general depression which followed Augusta had her full measure of distress; her wheels of industry in a measure stopped, her navigation dwindled, and her trade nearly ceased; and for many years her prosperity and growth were greatly retarded.”

Nash agreed, describing a “steady, visible decline” in business from 1807 to 1814.

Both historians saw 1813 as the low point. That year, Nash said, no new ships and very few new houses were built in town.

“Large and numerous piles of manufactured lumber ready for shipment cumbered the banks of the river, and there gradually deteriorated into a condition of little value,” Nash wrote. North added that downtown Augusta was ruined. By 1813, he wrote, “The town presented…a desolate appearance.”

Five major stores in brick buildings had closed, he said; only one store was still in business, Nash added. North wrote that the downtown buildings were owned by out-of-towners, some from the area, one from Massachusetts, one from Maryland.

On June 8, 1813, an Augusta-owned ship with an Augusta cargo was seized by a British ship. Captain and crew were promptly released, but the ship and cargo went to Nova Scotia.

Nash found that in 1808, 1809 and 1810, Augusta businessmen owned more than 1,000 tons of shipping. By 1817, three years after the war ended, the figure was less than 100 tons.

The war caused inflation. North offered sample retail price comparisons between 1811/12 and May 1813, including corn rising from a maximum of $1.28 to $1.70 and flour from $11 to $17 (he gave no measurements; corn per bushel and flour per barrel seem probable).

The beginning of 1814, he wrote, “was gloomy in the extreme; all imported articles continued extravagantly high. Breadstuffs were scarce and difficult to obtain, and a spirit of speculation was rife, induced by exorbitant and fluctuating prices.” There was considerable smuggling; the few remaining Augusta merchants were occasional participants.

Waterville residents, too, reacted to the 1807 embargo, historian Edwin Carey Whittemore wrote. They called a town meeting (no date is given) that was intended to approve a petition to the federal government to rescind the embargo and allow trade; “but the spirit of patriotism prevailed and the town authorized a resolution approving the Embargo” and appointed a committee to write and send it.

Soon afterwards, Whittemore wrote, another meeting authorized a powder magazine in the meeting-house loft, “probably as the driest place available.”

Otherwise, Whittemore ignored the war and skipped to 1814, when, he wrote, one of the Waterville shipyards launched “the largest ship ever built here,” the 290-ton “Francis and Sarah”. After the war, Waterville became a hub of water-borne trade on the Kennebec.

The war ended with the Treaty of Ghent on Dec. 24, 1814. North wrote the news reached Augusta Feb. 11, 1815, where it ignited “the liveliest demonstrations of joy. Bells were rung and bonfires kindled….” There was another celebration Feb. 14, a religious service of thanksgiving Feb. 22 and on April 13 a “national thanksgiving.”

In the next months, he wrote, commerce revived, but taxes to cover war costs continued: “a direct tax on lands and dwelling-houses, and specific taxes on household furniture, watches and stamps, on retailers, manufacturers and carriages.”

Augusta got a belated bonus from the War of 1812: the federal government built the Kennebec Arsenal between 1828 and 1838, as the disputed Maine-Canada boundary kept relations with Britain uneasy.

A 1997 article by Maine historians Marius B. Peladeau and Roger G. Reed (found on line) explains that the events of 1812-1814 showed how easily a naval power like Britain could disrupt water transport of war supplies to the Maine frontier from the nearest arsenal, in Watertown, Massachusetts.

Therefore, on March 3, 1827 (10 days after Governor Enoch Lincoln approved the state law making Augusta Maine’s capital, Peladeau and Reed commented), President John Quincy Adams signed a law ordering the Secretary of the Army to site and build an arsenal at Augusta.

An Army engineer chose a 40-acre lot on the east bank of the Kennebec. The plan expanded from a “depot” for supplies from Massachusetts to “an arsenal complex large enough to fabricate military supplies and be semi-independent” if communication with Massachusetts were interrupted.

Congress tripled the initial $15,000 appropriation to $45,000, and, Peladeau and Reed wrote, the cornerstone for the first of 15 buildings was laid June 14, 1828. Ten of the buildings were of “unhammered granite, laid in ashlar courses, from the already famous nearby Hallowell quarry.” The rest were wooden.

“As is so often the case when the government is involved,” the authors observed, there were cost overruns. On March 27, 1829, Congress added another $45,000 to the arsenal budget.

Peladeau and Reed described the main building as 100 by 30 feet, three stories high with a “spacious basement.” It had room for 142,760 muskets. Nearby were two powder magazines, officers’ quarters, barracks, a guard house, a stable and “shops for the blacksmiths, armorers and wheelwrights.”

An eight-foot-high iron fence on a granite foundation surrounded the entire lot. There was a granite retaining wall along the river and, not finished until 1833 or later, a granite wharf “at which vessels drawing ten feet of water could dock even when the river experienced its lowest level during a summer’s drought.”

The Arsenal’s second commander, James W. Ripley (who took over May 31, 1833), persuaded the government to add another 20 acres and extend the fence around the new area. Ripley oversaw construction of a “spring-fed reservoir” near the commander’s quarters, with a large enough pool so trout and salmon could swim in it. “Whether these delicacies were for the sole enjoyment of the commander and his officers, or whether they were shared with the enlisted men, is left to the imagination of the reader,” Peladeau and Reed wrote.

The Arsenal was a military facility until the early 1900s, when the federal government gave it to the state. It was part of the Augusta Mental Health Institute until the late 1900s.

In 2000, the Arsenal was designated a National Historic Landmark District. The on-line list of Maine’s historic places calls it “a good example of a nearly intact early 19th-century munitions storage facility.”

Peladeau and Reed’s piece was intended to help historic preservation groups decide what to do with the eight granite buildings remaining in 1997. “All in a chaste and simple style, they stand today as among the best surviving examples of the military architecture of the period,” the historians wrote.

Main sources

Hatch, Louis Clinton, ed., Maine: A History 1919 (facsimile, 1974).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Nash, Charles Elventon, The History of Augusta (1904).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Wars – Part 5

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

Left, In 1780, at the age of 15, Samuel Downing joined the Continental Army. He served with the 2nd New Hamp­shire Regiment guarding forts on the New York frontier. Center, Lemuel Cook enlisted in 1781 when he was 16 years old. He served at the Battle of Brandy­wine, was present at the Surrender at York­town and was selected by Baron von Steuben to join the New York City campaign. Right, Born in Geneva, Switzerland, Albert Gallatin served as a volunteer under Col. John Allan, commander of the fort of Machias in Maine, according to his obituary. He later served three terms in the Pennsylvania House of Repre­sentatives. He also became the Secre­tary of the Treasury, served as the U.S. Minister to France and helped to established New York University.

The Revolutionary War ended in 1783 and photography was invented in the 1820s and 1830s, so most of the veterans of the war didn’t live long enough to have their portraits made. A handful of them did. In 1864, 81 years after the war, Rev. E. B. Hillard and two photographers embarked on a trip through New England to visit, photograph, and interview the six known surviving veterans, all of whom were over 100 years old. The glass plate photos were printed into a book titled The Last Men of the Revolution.

These are three of the Revolutionary War veterans who were over 100 years old when photographed.

Palermo, Sidney, Vassalboro

Palermo, Sidney and Vassalboro, like the central Kennebec cities and towns in the previous two articles in this series, had Revolutionary War veterans among their early settlers.

The grave of Isaac Worthen.

In Milton Dowe’s Palermo history, he identified Isaac Worthen (March 4, 1762 – March 1, 1841; later the name became Worthing), one of two brothers who moved to Palermo (then Great Pond Settlement) from New Hampshire, as a “hero of the Revolution.” An on-line search suggests he took the phrase from an article about Worthen, written by Samuel Copp Worthen (probably a descendant), in the Sprague Journal of Maine History, Vol. XII, No. 1, January-Mach 1924.

According to the article, Isaac’s father, Major Jacob Worthen, was a lieutenant in Captain Titus Salter’s company at Fort Washington, on Pierce Island at the mouth of the Piscataquis River, at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The fort was designed by Capt. Ezekiel Worthen, Jacob’s father and Isaac’s grandfather.

Isaac Worthen was in Salter’s company by May 1777, when he was 15. The history article says he wanted a berth on the USS Raleigh, which was going to France to buy ammunition. Turned down as too young, he jumped aboard as the ship sailed; the captain let him stay and made him a marine effective Aug. 1, 1777.

Worthen served for the duration of the war in different companies. Millard Howard added in his town history that Worthen was a corporal in a militia unit before his 17th birthday; Dowe wrote that one of his posts was West Point, in 1780.

In 1782, he married Judith Currier and they came to Palermo, where, an on-line genealogy says, their son Jonathan was born in 1785. An on-line photo of Worthen’s gravestone in Palermo’s Old Greeley Corner Cemetery shows his name; the words “Marine Continental Marines Rev War” on four lines; and his dates of birth and death.

Howard identified another Revolutionary veteran, Sir John Bradstreet, who was “nearly 40 years old when he came to Palermo with his family in 1786” and settled at the north end of Sheepscot Pond. His descendants included Clair Bradstreet, who chaired the town select board for more than 40 years in the 20th century. Bradstreet and his wife Freda (Worthing) Bradstreet lived in the Worthing House, on North Palermo Road, now owned by the Palermo Historical Society.

Thaddeus Bailey (1759 – 1849) is identified in a genealogy found on line as a Revolutionary War veteran who lived in Palermo, Albion and Palermo again. Born in Newbury, Massachusetts, he enlisted at 18 as a private in the Massachusetts militia company that spent three days at Pownalborough in September 1777 “in the defense and retaking of a mastship in the Sheepscot River.”

In 1778, he was in a unit that enlisted from Lincoln County and served in Providence, Rhode Island. From June 30 to Sept. 25, 1779, he was a private in Colonel (later Brigadier General) Samuel Rogers McCobb’s Lincoln County militia regiment and participated in the unsuccessful attempt to oust the British from Fort George, in Penobscot Bay.

(General McCobb [Nov. 20, 1744 – July 30, 1791] was born and died in Georgetown, Province of Maine. He served throughout the Revolution, at least part of the time with the Lincoln County Militia. He was a captain at Bunker Hill, a colonel on Benedict Arnold’s expedition to Québec and in charge at Penobscot after the British finally left in 1784.)

After the war, Bailey returned to Pownalborough until 1795, when he bought 100 acres for $110 in Sheepscot Great Pond (now Palermo). He and his wife Mary, whom he married in 1783 and who died before 1810, had 11 children. Census records from 1810 through 1840 show him living in Albion; a record of Revolutionary War pensioners lists him in Palermo in 1841. His pension, which started May 3, 1831, was $30.65 a year, according to the genealogy.

* * * * * *

Alice Hammond claimed to have found another Isaac (besides Isaac Worthen) who enlisted as a teenager: in her history of Sidney, she said of Isaac I. Cowan (March 14, 1758 – July 19, 1828): “At age fourteen he went into the Revolutionary War and served three years.” However, by this writer’s reckoning Cowan would have turned 15 in March 1773, two years before the fighting at Lexington and Concord.

An on-line site lists yet another young volunteer who ended up in Sidney: Massachusetts-born Jabez Rollins or Rollings (about 1767 – Oct. 4, 1842, or Oct. 28, 1847 [sources differ]) joined the New Hampshire Line in 1782, when he was 15. After the Revolution, he was in a Massachusetts regiment from February through June 1787 and helped suppress Shay’s Rebellion, the website continues; but since Shay’s Rebellion, an uprising by farmers protesting economic hardship in western Massachusetts, was suppressed by February, his role must have been limited.

On July 15, 1792, Rollings married Lydia Haskell (or Harskell) in Bradford, Massachusets. By 1795, they were in Mercer, Maine; by 1780, in New Sharon; and from 1810 on in Sidney. They had at least five children.

Capt. Abiel Lovejoy

Captain Abiel (or Abial) Lovejoy (Dec. 16, 1731 – July 4 [probably], 1811) was one of Sidney’s best-known veterans; Hammond referred to him as “Squire Lovejoy, the old slaveholder.” Born in Andover, Massachusetts, he married Mary Brown, in Charlestown, in December 1758. He was part-owner of trading ships, and later owner and captain of a small fleet based in Charleston. Hammond wrote that his ventures extended north to “the Bay of Fundy and south to the West Indies,” and that Mary sometimes sailed with him.

In 1760, Hammond said, he bought land in Pownalborough; in 1761, he and Mary and their first two children moved to what became Dresden, where he was a merchant, a ferry owner, a shipbuilder and “involved in public office and in land transactions.” In June 1763, Hammond wrote, he was one of the first three men to receive land in Sidney (then Vassalboro) from the Kennebec Proprietors.

In 1764 Lovejoy, in partnership with Mary’s father Nathaniel Brown, bought “half a saw mill and adjoining land and a half interest in a dam” on what was later Hastings Brook. In 1776, the Lovejoys moved to a farm in Sidney overlooking the river.

Hammond wrote that Lovejoy was in the Massachusetts militia from 1755, and from 1758 to 1771 his assignment was in Lincoln County, in what is now Maine – hence, presumably, his interest in acquiring land there. She added, “He also served in the American Revolutionary War.”

But she gave no details of his Revolutionary service, instead listing wartime activities in Sidney: in 1777 petitioning for an extension of the postal service and in 1778 serving on a committee to choose the post rider; in 1781 becoming Justice of the Peace; and “between 1776 and 1798” holding many other local offices.

A detailed on-line source adds that in 1776 he was a member of the pro-Revolutionary Committee of Safety and Correspondence, and in 1779 on “a committee to settle with the women on account of supplies ordered to the soldiers [sic] families by the General Court.” He was also highway surveyor in 1776 and 1777; selectman in 1779 and 1780; in 1780 town meeting moderator in 1780; and town treasurer and a county convention delegate in 1781.

Apparently he was a delegate to the Massachusetts General Court during the Revolutionary years, too, because the on-line sources says he “had been elected year after year” before he was challenged in 1781 and 1782, partly on the ground that he was not a supporter of independence.

The unnamed author of the on-line piece disagrees, calling Lovejoy “a fiery American patriot.” Evidence cited includes Tory Parson Jacob Bailey (mentioned in the history article in the Jan. 13 of The Town Line) naming him an instigator of mobs that attacked Bailey and other Loyalists, and Lovejoy’s willingness to give officers and soldiers in Benedict Arnold’s 1775 army hard money in return for their already-depreciating paper currency.

“Captain Abiel Lovejoy lost some $30,000 this way and afterwards papered a room in the Lovejoy homestead with this ‘worthless money,'” the on-line account says.

The Lovejoys had eight children before they moved to Sidney, and Hammond wrote six more were born there. The family lived in an elaborate house and owned several slaves, three of whom were buried in the small family cemetery on their farm, which Hammond called the “oldest cemetery in Sidney.”

Hammond also wrote about the Reynolds family. Nathaniel Reynolds IV, Esquire, settled in 1779 on the south end of West River Road in what was then Vassalboro, with his family. He served in the Revolutionary Army and “loaned money to the government for the cause”; and five sons “were all Revolutionary soldiers,” Hammond said.

* * * * * *

One of Vassalboro’s pre-war settlers and veterans was Charles B. Webber (January 1741 – Nov. 20, 1819). Born in Old York, Maine, he fought in the French and Indian Wars in 1757 and 1759. During the Revolution, an on-line genealogy says he is recorded as serving as second lieutenant in the Second Lincoln County Regiment of the Massachusetts militia, which was organized in 1776 and sent to Riverton, Rhode Island, in 1777.

Webber married his first wife, Hannah Call, in 1761 in Dresden. In 1765 they moved to Vassalboro, settling in the Riverside area. The on-line genealogy says their second child, a daughter named Sarah, was the first white child born in the town.

The same website says Webber was Vassalboro’s first treasurer, in 1771, and served again in 1776, when he was also the third town clerk; in 1773 and from 1792 to 1796 was a selectman and in 1790 was one of the committee that laid out Vassalboro’s first nine school districts.

A search for Webber’s name in Vassalboro’s extremely valuable on-line cemetery database confirmed his burial site in the Webber Family Cemetery at Riverside.

One of Webber’s company commanders was Dennis Getchell (1723 or 1724 – early January 1792), who bought land in the Riverside area of Vassalboro in August 1770.

Getchell was born in Berwick and is identified first as a major, perhaps from service in the French and Indian Wars. He must have moved to Vassalboro as soon as he bought his land, because the website says he was elected selectman at the first town meeting, April 26, 1771, and many times thereafter.

On July 23, 1776, he was commissioned a captain in the Second Lincoln County Regiment, and led his 50-man company at Riverton in 1777. In 1786, he was elected a member of the Massachusetts General Court.

Amos Childs (July 5, 1764 – Feb. 19, 1847) was a Massachusetts native who spent at least part of his time in the Revolutionary force as a drummer. He served three years and was honorably discharged in 1783. On Nov. 1, 1801, he married Hannah Webber (born in 1780 in Vassalboro, Charles and Hannah [Call] Webber’s daughter) in Vassalboro; they had “at least two children,” an on-line source says.

Hannah died Feb. 14, 1860; she and Amos are buried side by side in the North Vassalboro Village Cemetery.

Main sources

Dowe, Milton E., History Town of Palermo Incorporated 1884 (1954).
Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992).
Howard, Millard, An Introduction to the Early History of Palermo, Maine (second edition, December 2015).
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Wars – Part 4

/0 Comments/in , , , , , /by

The frigate Warren.

by Mary Grow

Revolutionary War veterans from Albion, China, Clinton, Fairfield

Note One: this article and next week’s will be about a few of the Revolutionary War veterans who lived in the central Kennebec Valley. Selection is based on two criteria: how much information your writer could find easily, and how interesting she thought the information would be to readers. There is no intent to disparage veterans who are omitted.

Note Two: Alert readers will have noticed in last week’s piece that artist Gilbert Stuart was misnamed Stuart Gilbert. Your writer accepts blame for carelessness; she also assigns blame to Mr. and Mrs. Stuart, for giving their son two last names, or two first names, depending on your perspective.

* * * * * *

Ruby Crosby Wiggin wrote that town and state records and cemetery headstones identify more than a dozen Albion residents who were Revolutionary War veterans. Two, Francis Lovejoy and John Leonard, were among early settlers.

Rev. Francis Lovejoy, grandfather of Elijah Parish Lovejoy, was in Albion by 1790. Wiggin found that he served initially in “Colonel Baldwin’s regiment” and later re-enlisted to fill the quota from his then home town, Amherst, Massachusetts.

(Colonel Baldwin was probably Loammi Baldwin [Jan. 10, 1744 – Oct. 20, 1807], who fought at Lexington and Concord in the Woburn [Massachusetts] militia. He later enlisted in the 26th Continental Regiment, quickly became its colonel and commanded it around Boston and New York City until health issues forced him to resign in 1777. Wikipedia identifies him as the “Father of American Civil Engineering” and the man for whom the Baldwin apple is named.)

Wiggin gave no information on John Leonard’s military service. By Oct. 30, 1802, he owned the house in which Albion (then Freetown) voters held their first town meeting. Wiggin wrote that he held several town offices between then and 1811, when his name disappeared from town records.

* * * * * *

A veteran who settled in what is now China, and whose story has been increasingly revealed in recent years, was Abraham Talbot (May 27, 1756 – June 11, 1840). In various on-line sources, his first name is also spelled Abram, and his last name Talbart, Tallbet, Tarbett, Tolbot and other variations.

Talbot was a free black man. He was an ancestor of Gerald Talbot, the first black man elected to the Maine legislature. Gerald Talbot’s daughter, Rachel Talbot Ross, is assistant majority leader in the current Maine House of Representatives.

Born in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, to Toby (or Tobey) Talbot, also a Revolutionary War veteran, Abraham Talbot enlisted in the Massachusetts Line in July 1778 and served his nine months’ term at Fishkill and West Point, New York, until March 1779. He married Mary Dunbar in his home town on Sept. 3, 1787.

When he applied for his pension in 1818, he owned an acre of land in China with a small house on it. He and Mary were the only ones living there, although they had had eight children, born between December 21, 1787, and Feb. 16, 1805, in Freetown (now Albion).

William Farris (1755 – Oct. 19, 1841) was another veteran who in 1832 applied for his pension from China, having previously lived in Vassalboro from either 1796 or 1802 (sources differ). He was a native of Yarmouth, Massachusetts, and on Oct. 5 1775, married Elizabeth Burgess of that town.

An on-line history says he enlisted three times in three regiments: Nov. 1, 1775, for two months in Colonel Putnam’s regiment; February 1775 (a misprint for 1776, as the writer says he enlisted “again”) for two months in Colonel Carey’s regiment; and April or May 1776 for four months in Colonel Berckiah Bassett’s regiment.

His first terms were spent building fortifications in Cambridge and Dorchester, outside Boston. His third enlistment ended in the fall of 1776 on Martha’s Vineyard, “guarding the shore.”

Col. Rufus Putnam

(Colonel Putnam was probably Rufus Putnam [later a Brigadier General], a French and Indian War veteran who was instrumental in building the fortifications that forced British troops to evacuate Boston in mid-March 1776. Colonel Carey was probably Colonel Simeon Cary, commander of “the Plymouth and Barnstable County regiment of the Massachusetts militia,” which was at the siege of Boston. This writer failed to find Colonel Bassett on line.)

William and Elizabeth Farris had “at least eight children.” After she died around 1805, on March 18, 1806, he married a 22-year-old Vassalboro woman, Martha “Patty” Long. He bought a piece of land in Vassalboro in 1816, but was a China resident by 1832. His annual pension amounted to $33.33.

The China bicentennial history lists seven other early residents who were Revolutionary War veterans, including Joseph Evans. Evans, for whom Evans Pond is named, arrived in 1773 or 1774 and left his wife and children in the wilderness when he enlisted.

* * * * * *

Michael McNally (about 1752 – 1848), sometimes spelled McNully, was a veteran who ended his life in Clinton. He served in the Pennsylvania Line up to 1781. An 1896 on-line source says his descendants claimed that his role was driving the horses that pulled cannons.

Family stories reproduced on line give two accounts of his arrival in Pennsylvania: one says he was born as his family emigrated from Ireland, the other that as a youngster he ran away from home and crossed the Atlantic alone. He settled in Clinton around 1785 and “raised a large family.”

* * * * * *

The Fairfield Historical Society writers who produced the town’s bicentennial history in 1988 listed four early settlers who served in the Revolutionary army and 10 veterans who moved in after the war (eight from Massachusetts, one from New Hampshire and one from Georgetown, Maine).

The most prominent was William Kendall (1759 – 1827), referred to in one section as General William Kendall. The history says he enlisted from Winslow in March 1777 and obtained an honorable discharge in 1780. An on-line source says he was a drummer “in various New England regiments.”

Having bought most of the area that is now downtown Fairfield, including an unfinished dam and mill building, Kendall completed that project and added saw and grist mills in 1781. The village center was called Kendall’s Mills until 1872.

On Christmas Day 1782, Kendall paddled up the Kennebec to Noble’s Ferry (Hinckley) in his birchbark canoe and came back with his new wife, Abigail Chase. The couple lived first in a log house by the river at the foot of present Western Avenue, then in Fairfield’s first frame house and later in a large brick house at the corner of Newhall Street and Lawrence Avenue. The last housed Bunker’s Seminary (briefly mentioned in the Oct. 21, 2021, issue of The Town Line); it was torn down in the 1890s.

The Fairfield history says Kendall served eight years as a selectman. An on-line source adds that he was Kendall’s Mills postmaster in 1816, Somerset County Sheriff and a member of the first Maine Senate. He and Abigail had eight sons and three daughters. Kendall is buried in Fairfield’s Emery Hill Cemetery.

The cemetery, on the river side of Route 201 at the foot of Emery Hill, is near the site of the log house built by Jonathan Emery in 1771 that is called the first house built in Fairfield. Jonathan’s son David (born in Massachusetts Sept. 24, 1754) was one of the four Revolutionary soldiers who enlisted from Fairfield. The historians doubt the story that he enlisted in September 1775, inspired by Colonel Benedict Arnold’s troops marching up the Kennebec on the way to Québec, because dates don’t match.

They did find records showing that David Emery joined the Second Lincoln County Regiment on Mach 12, 1777. On Feb. 2, 1778, he transferred to the Continental Army, where he became part of General George Washington’s personal guard. After being mustered out Jan. 23, 1779, he came back to Fairfield and on April 5, 1782, married Abigail Goodwin. He died in Fairfield; one on-line source gives his date of death as Nov. 18, 1830, another as Nov. 18, 1834.

The other three early settlers who fought in the war were Josiah Burgess (1736 – 1828), a lieutenant from March 1776 to March 1779 in the First Barnstable Company from his home town of Sandwich, Massachusetts; his younger brother Thomas (1741 – 1820), who served in Josiah’s company for a week; and Daniel Wyman (1752 – 1829), who moved up the river from Dresden to Fairfield in 1774 and served three years in the Second Massachusetts Line. After independence, each Burgess brother served as a Fairfield selectman and Thomas was town treasurer for two years.

Jonathan Nye (November 1757 – September 1854) was born in Sandwich, Massachusetts, and is identified on line as serving as a private in 1775 and 1776 at Elizabeth Islands, first in Captain John Grannis’s company and later in Captain Elisha Nye’s company.

(The Elizabeth Islands are an island chain south of Cape Cod and west of Martha’s Vineyard; they compose the town of Gosnold, Massachusetts, named after the British explorer Bartholomew Gosnold, the first European to visit them, in 1602.

(John Grannis was a captain of marines, identified in several on-line sources as spokesman for America’s first whistle-blowers. In February 1777, nine shipmates aboard the frigate “Warren” chose him to jump ship and carry to the government in Philadelphia their charge that Esek Hopkins, in charge of the Continental Navy, was “unfit to lead.” The Continental Congress fired Hopkins.)

The Fairfield history says after Nye’s first one-year enlistment, he enlisted again from Sandwich in the spring of 1777. He was at Saratoga when Burgoyne surrendered and at Valley Forge during the winter of 1778. At some point he became a sergeant. He was honorably discharged at West Point March 7, 1780. After that, the history says, he enlisted yet again for short terms and served on privateers.

The on-line source names his first wife as Mercy Ellis from Sandwich. The bicentennial history calls her Mary Ellis, and says Nye married her “soon after his discharge [in the early1780s, then] and settled in Fairfield.” The history also says that in the spring of 1835, when Nye applied for one of the land grants Congress had just authorized, he said he had lived in Fairfield for 35 years, indicating he moved there in 1800. And in an account of the Nye family in another section of the book, Jonathan Nye is said to have moved from Sandwich to Fairfield in 1788, with his cousins Bartlett (August 1759 – 1822), Bryant and Elisha (Nov. 2, 1757 – 1845) Nye.

On March 18, 1820, Jonathan Nye married again, to Abigail Fish, who died in 1850. When he applied for a military pension in 1820, he said she was not strong enough to help with their farm, and he could not do much because of “blindness caused by small pox while in the army and a lameness in both knees.”

Col. Nathaniell Freeman

Jonathan Nye’s cousins Bartlett and Elisha were also Revolutionary veterans. Bartlett Nye, according to an on-line family history, served from July 2 to Dec. 12, 1777, in Rhode Island and Massachusetts and again for four days, Sept. 11 through Sept. 14, 1779, as a corporal in Colonel Freeman’s regiment responding to “an alarm at Falmouth [Massachusetts].”

(Colonel Freeman was probably Nathaniel Freeman (March 28, 1741 – Sept. 20, 1827) from Sandwich. He had a medical practice, became active in the Revolutionary movement as early as 1773, was a militia colonel from 1775 and a militia brigadier general from 1781 to 1791.)

Elisha Nye was also in Colonel Freeman’s regiment. He is listed on line as serving for several very brief periods in 1778 and 1779.

After the war, each of the brothers held political office. In 1812, Bartlett Nye was in the Massachusetts General Court, where he supported making Maine a separate state; his term had ended before the decision was taken in June 1819. Elisha, the Fairfield history says, “served as Representative from the County” in 1816, presumably also to the Massachusetts General Court.

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).
Wiggin, Ruby Crosby, Albion on the Narrow Gauge (1964).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Wars – Part 3

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

John Chandler

by Mary Grow

Veterans of Waterville and Augusta

After the Revolutionary War, the demobilization of the army increased the population of the Kennebec Valley. This article and the following will describe some of the Revolutionary veterans who became part of local history, chosen more or less randomly. A visit to old cemeteries in area towns would undoubtedly add more names.

In her history of the South Solon meeting house, Mildred Cummings explained that many demobilized soldiers from southern New England came to the District of Maine for its inexpensive land. Such a move would be especially appealing to younger sons who, until after the new United States government and laws took effect, could expect the family farm to be inherited by their oldest brother.

(Solon is farther up the Kennebec River, outside the area of this study, but friends have assured this writer its meeting house is worth a visit.)

The number of central Kennebec Valley settlers, veterans and others, who came from New Hampshire and Massachusetts substantiates Cummings’ explanation.

Kingsbury added, in his Kennebec County history, that survivors of Benedict Arnold’s 1775 march to Québec remembered the Kennebec Valley as a beautiful place with land and timber resources, and some brought their families to live there.

One such was Colonel Jabez Mathews (1743-1828), according to the Waterville centennial history. Mathews went up the Kennebec with Arnold’s expedition, returned to his home town of Gray and in 1794 brought his two young sons with him to Waterville, where he was a tavern-keeper.

The Waterville history includes a chapter on military history written by Brevet Brigadier General Isaac Sparrow Bangs. After much research, he and collaborators came up with a list of more than two dozen Revolutionary War veterans with a connection to Waterville, the majority men who settled there after the war.

Ernest Marriner wrote a brief piece (reproduced on line) in which he said only two men enlisted from the small Waterville/Winslow settlement, John Cool from the Waterville side of the Kennebec and Simeon Simpson from the Winslow side.

With his essay is a photo of the memorial tablet in the Waterville Public Library listing 24 Revolutionary veterans in Waterville, most, obviously, men who came after the war. His list and Bangs’ list are similar but not identical.

The first man Bangs mentioned (he is not on the memorial tablet) was Captain Dean Bangs (May 31, 1756 – Dec. 6, 1845), a Massachusetts native who was a mariner before the war, a privateer in 1775 and for two years beginning in 1776, a soldier in Abijah Bangs’ company in Colonel Dike’s regiment (probably Colonel Nicholas Dike, of the Massachusetts militia).

In 1802 Bangs bought “a large tract of land” in Sidney, part of it overlooking the Kennebec River, where he farmed and “reared a large family.” Waterville was his “mercantile home.”

Elkanah Bangs

As of the 1902 history’s publication, he and some of his family were buried in a private cemetery on his land. A memorial in the cemetery said that Dean Bangs’ father, Elkanah Bangs, was a privateer in the Revolution who was captured and died “on the Jersey prison ship at Wallabout Bay, New York, in July 1777, aged 44 years.”

(Since the memorial was erected by Dean Bangs’ grandson Isaac Sparrow, this writer concludes that the Isaac Sparrow Bangs who wrote the chapter is related to Elkanah and Dean Bangs.)

John Cool, for whom, according to Bangs and Marriner, Waterville’s Cool Street is named, enlisted in the Continental Army from Winslow on March 12, 1777, and was discharged March 12, 1780. In 1835, “on a paper” (perhaps concerning a pension?) he said he was 78 years old and had lived in by-then-Waterville for 70 years. He lived on Cool Street another 10 years, dying Oct. 5, 1845, six months after he turned 89.

Sampson Freeman, “a free man of color,” was another Continental Army veteran who served his three years, from Feb. 1, 1777, to Feb. 5, 1780, including service at Valley Forge dated June 1778 (the month the army moved out of that encampment). Freeman enlisted from Salem, Massachusetts; after the war he lived in Peru, Maine, before moving to Waterville in 1835, where he died in 1843.

Asa Redington

Asa Redington (Dec. 22, 1761 – March 31, 1845), according to records Bangs and colleagues found, enlisted from New Hampshire in June 1778 and was discharged in December; in June 1779 re-enlisted for a year; in March 1781 enlisted for the third time.

He served in New England the first two terms, and after March 1781 went with the army to Yorktown. After Cornwallis surrendered, Bangs wrote, Redington came back north with the army to West Point, where on Dec. 23, 1783, he was discharged “without pay, and left to travel 300 miles to his home, carrying the musket he had borne during his long service.”

Redington moved to Vassalboro in 1784, married into the Getchell family, and in 1792 moved to Waterville for the rest of his life. The musket, Bangs wrote, remained in the family for years, until Redington’s oldest son gave it to the State of Maine.

Marriner added that Redington, with his father-in-law, Nehemiah Getchell, built the first dam at Ticonic Falls. Redington became a mill owner, added “a shipyard and store, and accumulated more land.”

He was the Justice of the Peace who convened Waterville’s first town meeting, held on July 26, 1802. The Redington Museum is in the Silver Street house that he built in 1814 for one of his sons.

Another prominent Waterville veteran was Dr. Obadiah Williams (March 21, 1752 – June 1799). The second of Waterville’s early physicians, he enlisted from Epping, New Hampshire, and was at Bunker Hill as a surgeon in Major General John Stark’s regiment in the Continental Army. He served for the duration of the war and came to Winslow in 1792. Several sources say he built the first frame house on the west (later Waterville) side of the Kennebec.

Daniel Cony

Augusta also had Revolutionary veterans among its early settlers. One of the most prominent was Daniel Cony (Aug. 3, 1752 – Jan. 21, 1842). He has been mentioned in several previous articles, notably as the founder of Cony Female Academy, opened in 1816 and closed in 1857 (see The Town Line, Sept. 2, 2021, for a summary history of the Academy and a brief biography of Daniel Cony).

A Massachusetts native, Cony was a physician practicing in Shutesbury when the Revolutionary fighting began at Lexington and Concord. North wrote in his history of Augusta that Cony enrolled in the Massachusetts militia in the fall of 1776 and joined General Horatio Gates’ army at Saratoga, New York.

North tells the story of an early adventure: a leader was needed to cross an area exposed to fire from a British battery, and he volunteered. “[T]he young adjutant at the head of his men by his wary approach drew the enemy’s fire, felt the wind of their balls, then dashed forward with his command unharmed.”

Cony and his family came to Augusta (then Hallowell) in 1778. His many public positions after the war included town clerk and selectman in Hallowell; member in both houses of the Massachusetts General Court; member of the Massachusetts electoral college when George Washington was elected to his second term as president of the United States; delegate to Maine’s 1819 Constitutional Convention; member of the new Maine legislature and of the Maine executive council; and Kennebec County probate judge.

Consistent with his enthusiasm for education, after the Massachusetts legislature chartered Hallowell Academy in 1791 (during one of his terms as a legislator), he became a member of the first board of trustees; and he was an overseer of Bowdoin College, founded in 1794, for its first three years.

On Oct, 17, 1797, in honor of the anniversary of Burgoyne’s surrender, he began building a new house. That house burned June 13, 1834. The same year he built a new one, described on a Museum in the Streets plaque as “a double brick visible on the hill behind the fort,” where he died.

In 1815, renowned portrait painter Gilbert Stuart did portraits of Cony and his wife, Susanna Curtis Cony, according to an on-line Central Maine newspapers report dated May 1918. In 1917, the Cony Alumni Association obtained permission to replicate Cony’s portrait (the original belongs to the Minneapolis Institute of Art). The resulting canvas print, framed, was hung in the Cony High School library in August 2017, according to the report.

Seth Pitts, Jr. (1754 – Aug. 22, 1846), and his younger brother, Shubael Pitts (1766-1849), were born in Taunton, Massachusetts, and both served in the Revolution. Their parents moved to Hallowell before 1781.

Seth married Elizabeth Lewis from Canton, Massachusetts. Shubael married twice, each time to one of midwife Martha Ballard’s assistants. His first wife was Parthenia Barton (1772- Sept. 4, 1794), from Vassalboro; an on-line history says Martha Ballard was “in attendance” at her death. On July 28, 1796, Shubael Pitts married Sally Cox or Cocks (born 1770).

Shubael made his living as a blacksmith, with his shop on the east side of Water Street, in Augusta. Sally “operated a boarding home for debtors in the same area,” the on-line history says.

When Augusta’s first militia company was established in 1796, Shubael Pitts was one of four captains, according to Kingsbury. (Another was Thomas Pitts, who was born too late to fight in the Revolution but was active in the War of 1812.)

The on-line history says Shubael and Sally are buried in Augusta’s Kling Cemetery (also called the Reed-Cony Cemetery, on the east side of West River Road [Route 104]). Parthenia is buried in Mount Vernon Cemetery (identified as “the old section” of Mount Hope Cemetery).

One of the veterans who spent his last years in Augusta had an unusual service record. Ephraim Leighton (January 1763 – March 15, 1851) first visited the area with his father, Benjamin Leighton, “when there were but three houses in Augusta,” according to Kingsbury. Coming from Edgecomb, they went on to Mount Vernon “by blazed trees” and settled there, Kingsbury wrote.

By May 1776, according to an on-line source, Ephraim was back in Edgecomb, because it was from there that, at the age of 11 (according to the source; 13, by this writer’s math), he enlisted in Captain Henry Tibbetts’ company in a Massachusetts regiment “and served as a waiter to Capt. Tibbetts.” He was discharged in November 1776, but despite his brief and not very military service he was later awarded a pension.

Leighton married Esther Tibbetts on Nov, 23, 1789, in Rome. He was a farmer in Rome and Mount Vernon, moved as far north as Parkman and after about 1813 lived in Augusta. He is buried in the city’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery.

John Chandler (Feb. 1, 1762 – Sept. 24 or 25, 1841) was another Revolutionary War veteran who came to Augusta late in life. Born in Epping, New Hampshire, third son of a blacksmith who died in 1776, in 1777, at age 15, he joined the Continental Army. He was captured by the British, escaped, was captured again in May 1779 and escaped in September. Returning to Epping, he promptly re-enlisted.

At some point he served at Fort Detroit, in what is now Detroit, Michigan, under future Secretary of War (in Thomas Jefferson’s administration) Henry Dearborn. Dearborn thought enough of the illiterate youngster to lend him money to buy a farm in Monmouth in the District of Maine, where Chandler and his wife Mary settled in 1784.

Wikipedia says “a local schoolmaster” educated Chandler. He became a successful blacksmith and prominent enough in town to be elected to the Massachusetts Senate (1803-1805) and the United States House of Representatives (March 1805 to March 1809).

Declining renomination, he became Kennebec County Sheriff in 1808 and in 1812 a major general in the Massachusetts militia. His story will continue with the history of the War of 1812.

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Nash, Charles Elventon, The History of Augusta (1904).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).

Websites, miscellaneous.

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this article, artist Gilbert Stuart was misnamed Stuart Gilbert.

Stories from Fort Hill Cemetery

/1 Comment/in , , , /by

Fort Hill Cemetery, in Winslow

by Kit Alexander

As anyone who has lived in Winslow for any length of time can tell you, Fort Halifax was built by the English in the middle of the 18th century on the point of land where the Sebasticook and Kennebec Rivers meet. All that is left of it today is the solitary block house on the southeast corner where the fort had stood. The block house floated down the Kennebec River in the flood of 1987 and returned in pieces to be reassembled by local citizens. It now stands as our town’s symbol, incorporated into stationary, logos, websites and other town-related items.

The fort served as a base to protect the interests of the English in the area, and to deal with any French incursions into the territory claimed by the British. It also existed as a base for further exploration of the area, and to identify and exploit other resources.

The fort grew, diminished, and grew again to where it had, at one time or another, covered most of what is now Winslow’s Fort Halifax Park. The park has suffered through floods and mini-tornados, endured many ownership changes, and hosted several commercial enterprises, including lumber businesses and a used car lot in the 1950s. Now it is Winslow’s premiere park, a place for family recreation, weddings, parties, and, more recently, outside meetings with members sitting in a circle, spaced six feet apart.

Early in the fort’s history, two smaller block houses known as redoubts, connected by a palisade walkway, were built on the top of Fort Hill, presumably to maintain an elevation for monitoring the traffic going up and down the Kennebec or Sebasticook.

What some people do not realize, however, is that a portion of what had been the fort became what we know today as the Fort Hill Cemetery. In 1772, a committee was appointed by town officials to obtain a plot of land on the hill to hold the first public burial ground in Winslow. Three acres or so were donated by Dr. Sylvester Gardiner, a physician and land developer.

While the cemetery was established in 1772, the first burial was not recorded until 1789 when Timothy Heald, a Captain in the Revolutionary War, was interred there. During those intervening 17 years, many residents of Winslow and surrounding towns may well have been buried in the cemetery. They may not, however, have been listed in the town’s vital records beginning in 1771 when Winslow became a town. The earliest residents may have simply been buried in the southern part of the cemetery, without any record of their passing or grave stone to mark their resting place. Others may have had a simple, unadorned field stone or an engraved marker which has either disintegrated or fallen and been overgrown by grass and other plant material. Family genealogists scattered all over the country may be the only people who know about these early residents and their place of burial.

Today, approximately 450 people are buried in the cemetery, only a few of them without a marker. During the past year, members of the Winslow Cemetery Committee along with local volunteers have lifted or uncovered about 50 stones, some completely buried from view and others partially covered with grass and dirt. Members of the Fort Halifax Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution have also helped by repairing and cleaning the grave stones of veterans of the American Revolution.

Buried tombstone of Augus Woodman. “Aet” is Latin abbreviation for “age”. “A” is no longer visible.

While using a leaf blower, a volunteer accidentally uncovered a small area of stone about three inches square. After carefully exposing the entire stone using plastic scrapers, trowels, wooden popsicle sticks and, of course, fingers, the head stone of …ugus (possibly Augusta or Augustus) Woodman, came into view. The top of the stone had broken off prior to the 1930s and the rest of it was badly deteriorated so that identifying its possible owner involved a fair amount of detective work and creative eye squinting.

The lettering on many of the stones in Fort Hill is badly degraded, while other stones are covered with a black, tar-like substance, probably from paper mill pollution and exhaust from trucks climbing the hill. Others have been broken into pieces by frost and possible vandalism. The lichen is easily scraped off, but most stones have required scrubbing with water and biological solutions in order to read just the names and dates of death. A few stones have been completely cleaned and restored to their former beauty, but more work is needed.

Searches have been made in the Town of Winslow Vital Records, Ancestry.com, and FindAGrave.com, along with records of the Maine Old Cemetery Association (MOCA), hoping to identify folks buried in Fort Hill. This work has also involved identifying those who are not interred there, and moving them, figuratively, to other burial grounds in the area as recorded by MOCA or FindAGrave.

On a beautiful, clear autumn day, one can stand behind the graves of Nelson and Carrie McCrillis, and, looking west across the whole of the cemetery, see the Kennebec as it flows by Winslow’s park. Or standing in front of the back fence behind the stone of Capt. Timothy Heald, and his wife, Abigail, one can look toward the south east to the Sebasticook River as it makes its way toward its junction with the Kennebec. And if one were to squint his or her eyes in just the right light, they might even see a pair of Abenaki Native Americans paddling silently down the river, on their way home from a long day of hunting.

View from behind tombstone of Capt. Timothy Heald, looking southeast toward the Sebasticook River.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Wars – Part 2

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

As readers know, major wars have major effects, beginning before the battles, continuing for the duration and lasting years afterwards. Early historians tended to focus on economics and politics: whether development was slowed or speeded or both, who replaced whom in leadership. Later came interest in social effects, especially significant in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Individual psychological effects of war, now commonly labeled PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), have been recognized for centuries, but did not receive a lot of attention until the present century. A 2017 Smithsonian magazine article found on line discusses psychological effects suffered by Civil War soldiers, though not under the modern name.

Some of these young men, far from home and family and witnessing the horrors of face-to-face war, developed “what Civil War doctors called ‘nostalgia,’ a centuries-old term for despair and homesickness so severe that soldiers became listless and emaciated and sometimes died,” according to the article. Others had physical symptoms, like “soldier’s heart” (chest pain, difficult breathing, palpitations), or mental breakdowns.

After World War I, PTSD was called “shell shock.” “Combat fatigue” was the best-known of several terms used after World War II.

It is unlikely that 18th and 19th century soldiers from the Kennebec Valley avoided psychological stress, but finding records demonstrating the condition would be even more unlikely. There are, however, numerous reports on and analyses of economic consequences, and social and political consequences are sometimes obvious.

Many of the central Kennebec Valley towns, especially the larger ones, suffered economic distress during the Revolution. The level of distress in Augusta (then Hallowell) is recorded by historians Henry Kingsbury and Charles Nash.

Kingsbury summarized: “A town of so few inhabitants, however willing, could not give much aid to the continental cause, and its part in the war was necessarily small and inconspicuous. It suffered much during the period of the revolution – its growth was retarded and well-nigh suspended….So great was the depression that even the Fourth of July Declaration [of Independence] was not publicly read to the people.”

Nash wrote that by 1777, British warships so “infested” the Maine coast as to practically stop overseas trade, a blow to the shipbuilders and shipmasters of Hallowell (and downriver towns). A year later, though, he wrote that a Hallowell shipbuilder sold the government hundreds of pounds worth of ships’ masts, spars and bowsprits for the budding Continental navy.

According to Kingsbury, only about 100 heads of families lived in Hallowell in 1779, presumably after many Tories had left. When the new national government started assessing towns individually for soldiers and supplies, townspeople could not easily meet the demands.

By the 1780s, according to information Nash compiled from town meeting records, Hallowell voters were raising money to pay soldiers. In October, for example, they raised 12,000 pounds to pay $500 each to soldiers who served eight months in Camden. Many were paid in lumber or shingles instead of money.

Another series of votes in January 1781 raised 90 guineas (Wikipedia says a guinea was about the same value as a pound) for six men to “go into the service of Massachusetts” (Kingsbury added that they were required to enlist for three years); directed that “the selectmen and commissioned officers shall do their endeavors to procure said men”; and for that purpose directed them to “hire money upon the town’s credit.”

That the effort was not fully successful can be inferred from the February vote to “petition the General Court [of Massachusetts] for relief of the beef tax, and our quota of soldiers sent for from this town.”

In March, annual meeting voters gave town leaders “discretionary power to get the continental men in the best way and manner they can be procured.”

Nash found a September 6, 1781, vote (three weeks before Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown) that sounded even more desperate. Voters directed selectmen to “endeavor to procure this town’s quota of shirts, stockings and shoes and blankets required of this town, upon the town’s credit if they can be procured.” Kingsbury detailed the requisition: “2,580 pounds of beef, 11 shirts, 11 pairs of shoes and stockings, and 5 blankets,” and said the Massachusetts legislature threatened to fine the town if it did not produce.

From what little Whittemore wrote in his history of Waterville, the townspeople in what was until 1802 Winslow on both sides of the Kennebec also had trouble meeting quotas. Town officials had neither money for supplies nor willing volunteers for soldiers. The price of beef rose to five dollars a pound, indicating, Whittemore said wryly, “either a depreciated currency or that some primordial beef trust already had taken possession of the country.”

He was serious about the depreciated currency. Nash gave examples through the 1770s of a steady decline in the value of the paper money issued by the new government.

By 1781, he wrote, currency was worth so little that the government made a “new emission.” Defined as legal tender and valid for paying taxes, Nash wrote that it held its value briefly, but within a few months it lost almost half its value, a dollar becoming the equivalent of a half-dollar in silver.

Ernest Marriner picked up the theme in his Kennebec Yesterdays. Money, either paper currency or coins, was scarce in the valley anyway, he wrote; people often paid for things they could not make at home with things they could, especially crops, like wheat, corn, peas, potatoes and apples, and also butter, cheese, wool, flax and similar products.

The naval supplies Nash described were paid for partly in dollars (presumably Continental paper currency), with 100 dollars equal to 30 pounds, but also in corn, “New England rum,” sugar and glass.

Marriner found that by 1789, a Continental paper dollar was worth one-fortieth of a silver coin. By then, he wrote, hay, previously costing a maximum of $10 a ton, was $200 a ton. Butter cost $1.50 a pound; by 1802, it was down to 15 cents a pound.

Many Kennebec Valley families were left in precarious circumstances by the combination of limited access to outside supplies; heavy taxes to support local, Massachusetts and federal military and civilian needs; depreciated currency; and breadwinners off fighting, home recovering, in a British military prison or dead.

Rev. Jacob Bailey

Nash quoted from the journals and letters of Rev. Jacob Bailey, a Tory who lived in Pownalborough (now Dresden) for most of the war years. Bailey referred to “nakedness and famine” among his neighbors.

Some had no bread for months, he wrote. It was impossible to find grain, potatoes or other vegetables; meat, butter or milk; tea, sugar or molasses. People lived on “a little coffee, with boiled alewives or a repast of clams,” and not enough of that diet to forestall hunger, Bailey wrote.

* * * * * *

Tories, especially outspoken ones like Bailey, were a minority in the Kennebec Valley, and became a smaller minority as the war went on. When it became clear that the rebellion was succeeding, fence-sitters joined the winning side; opponents of independence went away, usually to eastern Canada.

In the Hallowell area, many of the big landowners, like the Gardiner, Hallowell and Vassall families for whom towns were named, were British sympathizers. During or after the war, they emigrated to Canada or Britain; post-war local governments confiscated their lands.

A notorious Tory in the Augusta area was John “Black” Jones (c. 1743 – Aug. 18, 1823).

Nash wrote a great deal about “Black” Jones in his Augusta history, distinguishing him from three other men named John Jones who were in the area earlier or simultaneously. The Tory Jones’ primary work was surveying for the Plymouth Proprietors, laying out lots on both sides of the Kennebec River, including the future towns of Hallowell/Augusta, Vassalboro, China, Unity and Skowhegan. Kingsbury added that he built the first mill on the west side of the Kennebec at Hallowell.

“Black” is said to have referred to his dark complexion, not his character. Indeed, Nash wrote that he was “a skillful surveyor and a man of good character,” who was repeatedly elected to local office in 1773 and 1775, despite being stubbornly pro-British in a divided community.

In April 1777, Nash found, town meeting voters chose Lieutenant John Shaw “the man to inspect the tories, and make information thereof.” At another meeting in July, they implemented a Massachusetts law intended to protect the country from “internal enemies” by instructing Shaw to collect evidence against Jones, “who they suppose to be of a disposition inimical to the liberties and privileges of the said States.” In Oct. 1777 they again voted Jones “inimical to the liberties and privileges of the United States.”

After a brief imprisonment in Boston, Jones escaped and went to Canada, where he enlisted on the British side. Assigned to Fort George, in Castine, he led a band of soldiers who raided local rebel towns. An on-line Canadian biography says he worked as a surveyor in New Brunswick, Canada, after the war.

Returning to Hallowell, according to Nash as early as November 1785, Jones was met by antagonists who escorted him out of town. He came back, and, Nash wrote, “by his many good qualities and an exemplary life he largely overcame, long before his death, the bitter prejudice which his attitude and acts during the revolution had aroused in his fellow-citizens.” Kingsbury wrote that in 1794 it was Jones who surveyed the division of Hallowell into three parishes.

Another mention of Tory sentiment is in Alma Pierce Robbins’ history of Vassalboro. She gave the Revolutionary War only a few sentences, mostly focused on Congress’s approval of aid and pensions to soldiers and their dependents.

Robbins said records indicated that Vassalboro residents were “somewhat lukewarm” patriots who “did their share in a dilatory manner.”

She added, however, that town officials fined “those who spoke too openly against the Revolution,” that the town’s beef quota was “finally” paid “under strong pressure” and that “many” did fight on the Revolutionary side.

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Marriner, Ernest, Kennebec Yesterdays (1954).
Nash, Charles Elventon, The History of Augusta (1904).
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).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Wars – Part I

/0 Comments/in , , , , , /by

Fort Western in 1754.

by Mary Grow

For the next however many weeks, this series will discuss 19th-century wars that affected central Kennebec Valley residents. After the British gained legal control of the region by the 1763 Treat of Paris, the valley was mostly peaceful, but military actions elsewhere had local effects.

Your writer will start with the American Revolution (1775-1783), and go on to summarize some of the local connections with two more wars that finally ended quarrels over Britain’s interest in this side of the American continent, the War of 1812 (1812-1815) and the Aroostook War (1838-1839).

Next will come a very incomplete story of the all-encompassing Civil War (1861-1865). Many men and some women from the central Kennebec Valley were actively involved.

This part of the series will conclude with the Mexican War (1846-1848) and the Spanish-American War (1898). Though Kennebec Valley residents were aware of these geographically distant events, local effects were limited, with the important exception of families whose menfolk fought, and sometimes died, on the fields or seas of battle.

* * * * * *

The United States in the 19th century had two forms of military organization, the national army and the local militia units.

The U. S. Army, the oldest branch of the national military service, is a direct successor of the Continental Army, organized June 14, 1775. After the Revolution, mistrust of a “standing army” in the newly independent country led to temporary abandonment of a national force.

Soon, however, frontier wars made an organized armed force necessary. Wikipedia says Congress created the Legion of the United States in 1791 and in 1796 renamed it the United States Army. The United States has had a national military ever since, though a small one until the 20th century.

Wikipedia says local militias date from Sept. 16, 1565, when Spanish Admiral Pedro Menendez de Aviles organized the first unit in St. Augustine, Florida, leaving the men to guard supplies while he led his army to attack a French fort.

When English settlers arrived four decades later, they brought with them a tradition of organized militia units. Wikipedia says the Jamestown and Plymouth colonies (established in 1607 and 1620, respectively) started by enrolling every able-bodied man as a militia member.

“By the mid-1600s every town had at least one militia company (usually commanded by an officer with the rank of captain) and the militia companies of a county formed a regiment (usually commanded by an officer with the rank of major in the 1600s or a colonel in the 1700s),” Wikipedia summarizes.

After independence, colonies’ militia units became state militia units. Wikipedia says the federal government first began regulating them in 1792, and until the early 20th century relied on them “to supply the majority of its troops.” The militia became the National Guard in 1903.

Augusta historian Charles Nash included a chapter on the militia in his 1904 history. He described a typical local unit as enrolling able-bodied “citizens” (this writer is quite sure he meant male citizens) between 18 and 40 years old each spring.

“The organization of the militia consisted of companies of infantry in citizen’s dress (better known as ‘string-beaners’), light infantry in uniform, cavalry, artillery, and riflemen; these were organized into regiments, brigades, and divisions,” Nash wrote. Each infantry regiment normally had a company of cavalry and another of riflemen with it.

Uniformed infantry wore blue coats, artillery men “the revolutionary color [dark blue, according to Wikipedia] faced with red” and riflemen green, the better to hide in ambush in the woods. Infantry and rifle companies included fifers and drummers; the cavalry and artillery units had buglers.

Officers, Nash wrote, rode horseback. They wore the “wind-cutting” three-pointed, round-crowned black hat associated with Napoleon Bonaparte, “surmounted by lofty plumes,” and on their shoulders “glittering epaulettes.”

After organizing in May, militias drilled during the summer and in the fall held local musters that were the year’s main attraction for people of all classes, Nash said. Augusta’s muster ground for many years, well into the 1800s, was an area between Augusta and Hallowell named Hinkley’s Plains, after an early settler.

Nash described a typical muster, with demonstrations of military maneuvers, music and a final review before the mounted commander. Outside the muster area “tradesmen and peddlers and hucksters” assembled as for a fair; a great deal of liquor was consumed, inside and outside. In a footnote, Nash wrote that in 1844 the Maine Legislature banned musters because of the “gross intemperance practices.”

The 1817 muster at Hinkley’s Plains was special, Nash wrote, because Massachusetts Governor John Brooks came north to review the troops, only the second time a Massachusetts governor had visited the Kennebec Valley.

Governor Brooks had been a lieutenant colonel in the Revolutionary army and afterwards a major-general in the militia, and was known for his military appearance and skilled, graceful horsemanship. Local soldiers were eager to make their appearance before him, and, Nash wrote, people from 50 miles around made plans to attend.

Alas, early morning clouds and fog turned into a “cold and pitiless northeast rain storm.” The audience stayed home. The troops mustered anyway, with “drooping plumes, soiled uniforms and muddy boots and ruined gaiters.”

Brooks reviewed them from the back of “a fine dapple-gray clad in rich equestrian trappings.” The governor wore “a revolutionary three-cornered hat, with a large cockade on its left point, and a short black plume on its crown;…a blue military cloak, the cape of which was deeply bordered with red silk velvet, and its front and sides trimmed with gold lace; his breeches were buff and his high swarrow boots of shiny black polish, displayed silken tassels below the knees; a gold-hilted sword and gilded scabbard hung by his side.”

[“Swarrow,” or Suwarrow or Suarrow, boots are mentioned in the Askin Papers, documents relating to John Askin’s life in the northwestern United States, written between 1747 and 1820. Howard Franklin Shout, who wrote a thesis translating the papers into modern English for his Michigan State College Master of Arts degree in the 1920s, confessed that he was “not able to identify” the word.]

As Brooks and his staff began the review, Nash wrote, the governor took off his hat, “and while the merciless rain poured upon his whitened locks which fell upon his shoulders, he rode slowly before the line looking upon every soldier in it.”

Smaller towns, too, had their local militias. Ruby Crosby Wiggin, in her history of Albion, mentioned an 1808 town meeting vote to buy 32 pounds of powder. Other area towns had organized militia units and were stocking up on powder around that time, she wrote, adding, “Troops practiced on the town commons and were quite well organized when the War of 1812 called them to active duty.”

Her research in town records found local expenditures for the town militia, and supplementary payments from the State of Maine, part of the time (depending on successive town treasurers’ degree of detail) from 1839 until the Civil War.

Palermo had two muster fields, Milton Dowe wrote in his 1954 history. One was at Longfellow Corner, “where the Second Baptist Church was built in 1827”; the other was on Marden Hill.

* * * * * *

Six of the 12 central Kennebec Valley towns covered in these articles had legal European settlers by the spring of 1775 (Vassalboro, including Sidney, and Winslow, including Waterville, were incorporated on April 26, 1771), and four more by the time the Revolution ended in 1783. The exceptions were the off-the-river towns of Albion and Windsor, where the first settlements date from the 1880s. Your writer thinks it highly probable, however, that trappers, hunters, fugitives, hermits and other solitary types had homes in the region before record-keeping started.

Fort Halifax.

According to local histories, Augusta and Winslow were occupied first. Augusta was the site of the Cushnoc trading post, which dated from the 1620s, and then of Fort Western, built in 1758. Fort Halifax, in Winslow, was built in 1754-55.

Europeans mostly moved from the coast up the Kennebec, settling the east shore at Vassalboro around 1760 and around 1763 the west shore that later separated from Vassalboro as Sidney. Winslow settlers had spilled across the river into what became Waterville before Fairfield was settled in 1771.

By April 1775 Fairfield had nine families, according to the writers of the bicentennial history. The writers surmised that it took months for news of Lexington and Concord to reach them, and that between their immediate needs and the protection of nearby Fort Halifax, they felt little personal concern.

Clinton’s and Benton’s early arrivals date from around 1775. By then people were moving inland; China’s first family arrived in 1773, Palermo’s around 1776 or 1777.

Kingsbury, considering the whole of Kennebec County, did not share the later Fairfield historians’ opinion about the lack of local reaction. He wrote that news of the fighting at Lexington and Concord led to “bands of scantly equipped men and boys…pushing their way through the forests” to the nearest place where they could enlist.

“Many farms were abandoned or left to the care of women and minors,” Kingsbury continued, and not all the minors were content to remain behind (as examples in a following article will show).

In Augusta (then Hallowell), he said, a group of patriots organized themselves in January 1775 (before Lexington and Concord). In following months they formed a pro-Revolutionary military company and a public safety committee whose responsibilities included corresponding with Revolutionary leaders around Boston.

Winslow, similarly, had a three-man committee of correspondence, created in 1776 to keep town officials in touch with other pro-independence groups, Kingsbury wrote.

The specific event during the Revolutionary War that directly involved the Kennebec Valley was the expeditionary force sent in September 1775 to capture Québec from the British. Led by Colonel Benedict Arnold, about 1,100 men left Newburyport, Massachusetts, by ship on Sept. 17, or Sept. 19 (or thereabouts; exact dates differ from one to another of the many accounts of the expedition). They began landing at Major Reuben Colburn’s shipyard in Gardinerston (now Pittston) a few days later.

Colburn, a supporter of the Revolution, had collected information and built bateaux, flat-bottomed boats the army needed to navigate the river. The boats were built of green wood and therefore heavy and leaky; food, gunpowder and soldiers’ feet were wet most of the time.

After several days of transferring supplies to the bateaux, the expedition moved upriver. Stops along the Arnold Trail to Québec, as it is named on the National Register of Historic Places, included Fort Western, in Augusta; Fort Halifax, in Winslow; and Fairfield, where the 1988 bicentennial history says an early settler named Jonathan Emery repaired some of the bateaux, and a memorial stone marks the route.

By 1775 Fort Halifax had been out of service since the peace of 1763. Much of it had been torn down, and the central building had become a tavern, according to the centennial history of Waterville. Two area residents had explored up the river to provide advance information; another went with the expedition as a guide.

Disease and accidents, and in at least one case deliberate murder, claimed soldiers’ lives as the expedition moved on. Ernest Marriner wrote that Dr. John McKechnie (1732-1782), who had surveyed Waterville in 1762 and moved there in 1771, treated sick and injured men. Others are said to have been buried in the Emery Hill Cemetery, in Fairfield.

The murder, Kingsbury wrote, occurred as a result of a quarrel between two soldiers during several days the army spent at Fort Western. The shooter was court-martialed and sentenced to hang, but Arnold stayed the execution and forwarded the case to General Washington. The victim was buried “near the Fort burying ground”; later, Kingsbury wrote, Willow Street covered his “unheeded grave.”

Main sources

Dowe, Milton E., History Town of Palermo Incorporated 1884 (1954).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed. Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Marriner, Ernest Kennebec Yesterdays (1954).
Nash, Charles Elventon, The History of Augusta (1904).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).
Wiggin, Ruby Crosby, Albion on the Narrow Gauge (1964).

Websites, miscellaneous.