Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Churches – Part 2

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The Fuller-Weston House in Augusta.

by Mary Grow

In the June 10 issue of The Town Line, readers learned about three of the four Augusta church buildings that have gained recognition on the National Register of Historic Places. The fourth, and an associated building, are described herein.

The building that used to be St. Mark’s Church, at 9 Summer Street, in Augusta, was built in 1886 and, Kingsbury wrote in his Kennebec County history, consecrated Feb. 2, 1887. It was the second home for an Episcopal congregation organized in 1840; the first was a small wooden church Wikipedia says was a little north of Lithgow Library. Kingsbury said the first building was consecrated July 20, 1842, and “greatly enlarged” in 1858.

St. Mark’s Episcopal Church postcard in 1900.

The 1886 Summer Street church cost $40,000, according to Kingsbury. The old one was sold to John W. Fogler, who in turn sold it to Dr. George W. Martin, who built “a fine residence” on the lot in 1891.

Rev. Walker Gwynne was St. Mark’s rector from Jan. 17, 1884, to at least 1892, when Kingsbury’s history was published. He was the author of a Manual of Christian Instruction, According to the Church Catechism, Adapted to the Christian Year, and in Four Uniform Grades. The Manual was published in London and reprinted in New York. It has an introduction by the Very Rev. R. W. Church, M.A., D.C.L., Dean of St. Paul’s, London; and an endorsement by John Fredericton, Metropolitan of Canada.

Architect Richard Michell Upjohn designed St. Mark’s granite Gothic Revival building with its slate roofs. The main section, with a steep gable roof topped with crosses, has a large window, in 10 sections, under a pointed arch in the east end.

Near the east end, an almost-square lower annex with another steeply-pitched roof has a round window above three arched ones in its south face. A brick chimney rising well above the roofline marks its western junction with the center of the main building, by the main entrance.

Near the west end, a tall square tower with what look like louvers in its upper level rises to a four-sided roof with a cross atop its peak. Wikipedia says the belfry is in the tower.

Richard Michell Upjohn (1828-1903) was the son of a British emigree architect, Richard Upjohn. The son joined his father’s firm in New York in 1853 and later became his father’s partner.

St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in 2013.

Wikipedia says his earliest commission was probably New York City’s 1853-1854 Madison Square Presbyterian Church. He designed many other churches, working mostly on the east coast but doing an Episcopal church in La Grange, Texas, in 1855. Other buildings he designed included the First National Bank, in Salt Lake City, Utah (1871), and the Connecticut State Capitol, in Hartford, Connecticut (1871-1878).

Maine Historic Preservation Commission architects Frank A. Beard (who also did the South Parish application in 1980; see the June 10 issue of The Town Line) and Roger G. Reed wrote the May 1984 application for National Register status for St. Mark’s. They wrote that as of that spring, the church interior was “unaltered since its construction.”

With evident pleasure, they described particularly striking aspects. “Large marble columns with stone palm leaf capitals support lancet arched arcading flanking the nave. …The pulpit is panelled wood with a hand-wrought copper railing shaped in a floral motif. The ceiling of the chancel is painted with original stenciling.”

They also mentioned the “screens carved with openwork Gothic tracery” and the stained-glass window brought from the earlier church and placed above the choir.

The building deserved historic listing because it was an outstanding example of Gothic architecture, the two historians wrote. “No other church in the area conveys a similar rusticity and none has a more carefully worked interior.”

Wikipedia says the Saint Mark’s congregation supported community services, like groups supplying food and clothing, and musical events. The latter included an annual organ concert that from 2010 was named the Marilyn Tedesco Memorial Concert, to honor a former organist and music director.

In January 2015, the St. Mark’s congregation began worshiping in Prince of Peace Lutheran Church, because they could no longer afford to maintain their own building. They put St. Mark’s church on the market in 2016. Social services continued to operate from the 1908 parish house, according to a Dec. 22, 2014, Central Maine newspapers story by Craig Crosby.

The former St. Mark’s Church was added to the National Register on July 19, 1984. The parish house was not included in the application.

However, the building at 11 Summer Street that served as the rectory for St. Mark’s Church has a separate listing as the Fuller-Weston House. Historians Beard and Reed filled out its application in January 1984 and it was added to the National Register on March 22, 1984.

The two-story wooden house with a Federal-style door in the center of its south-facing, five-bay front is just west of the former church. Built in 1818, it is recognized not only for its architecture, but also for three early owners.

The first owner was Connecticut-born lawyer and judge Henry Weld Fuller (1784-1841) who, Wikipedia says, bought most of the land that is now downtown Augusta. He married Esther Gould (1785-1866) in 1806, and they had nine children, including Henry Weld Fuller, Jr. (1810-1889), who in turn begat Henry Weld Fuller III (1839-1863).

The senior Fuller became a wealthy man as the value of his land increased. Beard and Reed wrote that he represented the Plymouth Proprietors (the British-chartered landholders who owned part of Maine) as a lawyer, served in “the General Court” (presumably the Massachusetts General Court before 1820) and was a Maine Militia Colonel and “eventually” a Kennebec County judge of probate.

In 1826 or 1827, Fuller sold the house to Nathan Weston, Jr. (1782-1872). Weston was one of the original (1820) associate justices on the Maine Supreme Judicial Court and in 1834 became Chief Justice, serving until 1841.

Weston and his wife, Paulina Bass (Cony) (1787-1857) had four sons and four daughters. Fuller’s son Frederic married Weston’s daughter Catherine, and in 1833 Catherine bore a son, Melville Weston Fuller (1833-1910).

Frederic and Catherine divorced shortly afterwards, and Melville Fuller lived with his grandfather Weston in the Fuller-Weston house until he left for Bowdoin College, from which he graduated in 1853. Two years later he graduated from Harvard Law School; in 1888, President Grover Cleveland appointed him Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

The controversy over Fuller’s statue, 2013-2021

Fuller statue

In their application for inclusion of the Fuller-Weston house on the National Register of Historic Places, historians Frank A. Beard and Roger G. Reed wrote that Supreme Court Chief Justice Melville Weston Fuller was “highly respected as a jurist.” They mentioned several important issues that came to the Supreme Court during Fuller’s tenure, including income taxes and immigration.

They did not mention “Plessy v. Ferguson”, the 1896 case that created what became known as the “separate but equal” doctrine for United States white and colored citizens. In 1954, the “Brown v. Board of Education” ruling overturned “Plessy”.

Fuller was part of the seven-man Court majority. (Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent contained the statement that “the Constitution is color-blind.”)

In Augusta 2013, a bronze statue of Fuller was erected in front of the historic Kennebec County Courthouse, on State Street, in Augusta.

Commissioned and funded by Robert Fuller, Jr., an indirect descendant of the former Chief Justice, and approved by the Kennebec County Commissioners a year and a half earlier, the statue was sculpted by Forest Hart, of Monroe. Tony Masciadri of S. Masciadri & Sons, in Hallowell, provided the granite base.

Kennebec Journal reporter Betty Adams attended the installation. The statue shows Fuller “seated and robed and looking much like Mark Twain” on the “front lawn of the Kennebec County Courthouse, welcoming all,” she wrote for the Aug. 14 issue of the newspaper.

Among those at the ceremony were Maine Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Leigh Saufley (who retired in 2020) and Daniel Wathen, Chief Justice before Saufley. Adams quoted from Saufley’s speech, which did refer to “Plessy”.

After calling Fuller ” ‘an Augusta boy [who] made good,’ ” Saufley “praised his administrative skills and emphasis on collegiality” among his Supreme Court colleagues. She then called “Plessy” “one of the [Supreme Court’s] most reviled decisions.”

Fuller’s joining the majority in the case “is a good reminder that respected, capable people can do something that is so flatly wrong,” Adams quoted Saufley as saying.

By the summer of 2020, the statue became controversial. A series of Kennebec Journal reports by Rob Montana and Jessica Lowell followed developments.

The Maine Judicial Branch, in an Aug. 5 letter signed by Maine Supreme Judicial Court Acting Chief Justice Andrew Mead (Saufley’s interim successor), asked Kennebec County Commissioners to consider removing the statue. Mead wrote that the “Plessy” decision was not consistent with state values, and that it was inappropriate for the Fuller statue to be “the monument that members of the public see as they approach the courthouse.”

Kennebec County Commissioners held a hearing on the future of the statue in December 2020. In February 2021, they voted to have it removed, and created an advisory commission to suggest where it might go.

On April 20, the Commissioners made the advisory commission’s role superfluous by voting unanimously to accept Robert Fuller’s offer to take back his gift. Commissioners “sold” it to him for $1 and gave him 12 months to remove and rehome it, at his expense.

Reporter Lowell wrote that advisory committee members hoped the statue would be placed where its “educational value” would be preserved. They had suggested giving it to the Maine State Museum, but Lowell said Museum Director Bernard Fishman said the museum had no money to buy it or to store it while renovations to the museum building are finished.

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Websites, miscellaneous

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Goodwill-Hinckley – Part 2

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Moody Chapel

by Mary Grow

Averill school, Prescott admin, Kent woodworking, Carnegie library

The Goodwill-Hinckley campus has more buildings of historic interest than there was space to describe in the May 20 The Town Line article, including a third school included in the boundaries of the National Register area.

The Averill School, later Averill High School and now Averill/Alfond School, dates from 1930. Originally a two-story Georgian Revival brick building, with chimneys on either end, it acquired two wings and more chimneys on its new ends.

After listening to school founder George W. Hinckley’s requests for a new school nearer the center of campus, Keyes Fibre executive Dr. George C. Averill (1869-1954) and his second wife, Frances Mosher Averill (1873-1962), provided money for the school, and remained important supporters of Goodwill-Hinckley for years. (Averill also bought, in 1944, the Great Pond property for the Boy Scouts to build Camp Bomazeen, in Belgrade.)

Later, Maine philanthropists Harold and Bibby Alfond supported redoing the Averill School interior and adding a middle school; the building was rededicated in September 2000. The school’s online information says it is coed, serving students in grades six through 12, with a 4:1 student:teacher ratio.

The Averill family also provided Averill Cottage. An on-line photo caption relates its story: on Jan. 2, 1927, during a service in Moody Chapel, Hinckley announced a gift of $20,000 to build another girls’ home and name it in honor of Leah S. Averill, George Averill’s mother. The donor was identified as Averill’s second wife, Frances B. Mosher, of Bangor. Maintenance Superintendent James Tuttle built the two-and-a-half-story wooden Colonial Revival residence with its spacious porch; it was dedicated Sept. 18, 1927.

Frances Moody, of Bath, mentioned in the May 20 article as the funder of the Moody School building, made the donation that led to construction of Moody Memorial Chapel. The stone chapel was built in 1897 and expanded in 1927, after the congregation outgrew the original space.

The architect was Wilfred Mansur (1855-1921), described as the most prominent architect in Bangor in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Most of his work was done in Bangor, including the Penobscot County courthouse, the Mount Hope Chapel and Office in Mount Hope Cemetery and several buildings in Bangor’s historic district.

Moody Chapel is in Romanesque style, which Mansur used on other buildings as well. It features arched windows and a square bell tower. Two stained-glass windows honoring Frances and Mary Moody face east and west, one showing flowers and the other fruit.

The windows were created by Cyrus Hamlin Farley (1839-1934), of Portland. A web page from Church on the Cape UMC, a Cape Porpoise church with six Farley windows, says Farley began a career making nautical instruments; switched to eyeglasses; and then switched again to windows, ornamental and ordinary.

Goodwill School closed in 1909 after the Maine attorney general found its effort to become a college preparatory school violated its charter and state funds were withdrawn. Leaders reorganized and raised money and the school reopened.

After the reorganization, a 2011 Harold Alfond Foundation gift made it possible for Kennebec Valley Community College to acquire part of the Goodwill-Hinckley campus, including Moody Chapel. The college, the foundation and “a team of preservation professionals” went to work to restore the building.

As with the Moody School, extensive reconstruction was needed, including “reattachment of veneer stones to the wall core,” rebuilding “the two buttresses at the front of the building,” and restoring the bell tower from lobby to roof.

Carnegie Library

Goodwill-Hinckley’s Carnegie Library was designed by Albert Randolph Ross (1868-1948), built in 1906 and 1907 and dedicated May 29, 1907, according to Wikipedia’s list of Ross’s works. The Carnegie Corporation of New York donated $15,000 in 1905 for the building.

The brick and granite building is in Classical style. Photos on line show tall pillars flanking a central entrance, with a large dome over the center section and a chimney at the end of each wing. There are basement windows below tall main-floor windows.

An on-line site explains that Hinckley always realized that his school needed a library. As soon as he started it in 1889 he began soliciting books, and within a few years had 150.

By 1904 the library had grown to 5,000 volumes. The on-line site says on New Year’s Eve 1904 the original Moody School (built in 1895; see the May 20 issue of The Town Line, which did not include this recently-discovered information) burned down and the books were lost.

When Hinckley started rebuilding in the summer of 1905, he sought funding from Andrew Carnegie, leading to the grant that allowed construction of the Carnegie Library.

Architect Ross was born in Connecticut, son of architect John Wesley Ross (1830-1914), he practiced in Buffalo and New York City before moving in 1901 to what Wikipedia calls Negro Island off Boothbay Harbor. Some of his many other works include the Pittsfield Public Library (on the National Register of Historic Places) and the Old Town Public Library, both dated 1904.

(A July 27, 2020, letter to the editor of the Boothbay Register, signed by six couples who made up the Negro Island Property Owners Association, announced the island’s name had been changed, by unanimous vote, to Oak Island. The original name dated to the mid-1700s, the letter said, and had been making the island’s residents “increasingly uncomfortable.” The new name was chosen because of numerous oak trees and as a symbol of “strength, endurance and serenity.”)

The first Goodwill-Hinckley librarian was Hinckley’s sister, Jane E. Hinckley. (She was also the first Matron, the first office employee, and the organizer and first director of the boys’ choir, among other roles.) The on-line site mentioned above as a source of the library’s history says the library’s collection had expanded to 12,000 volumes by the time she died in February 1914.

The Goodwill-Hinckley Library closed in 2008. Recently, it has reopened with grants and donations paying for renovations and updates. Like other contemporary libraries, Goodwill-Hinckley’s now offers high-speed internet service, a 3D printer and other contemporary technological features.

The Prescott Memorial Administration Building was designed by New York architect Edgar A. Josselyn and built in 1916. The application to add the campus to the National Register of Historic Places gives the additional dates 1921 and 1922, and one on-line source says the original building burned.

The two-story brick building is in Georgian Renaissance style. On-line photos dated 1916 and 1926 each show a square three-story central tower with an arched window above the entrance and above that level an impressive wooden cupola. The square bottom of the cupola has four clock faces; above them, two receding round towers with windows are topped by a small golden dome and a weathervane.

An on-line slideshow says Portland-based landscape architect Carl Rust Parker (1882-1966) laid out Prescott Drive, a main road through the campus, and sited the Prescott building. He explained to Hinckley that the building should be “in a commanding position, and be easily accessible from the railroad, highway and the rest of the campus.”

Building and (presumably) roadway were named in honor of Amos L. Prescott (1853-1926). Born in South Berwick and later moving to Passaic, New Jersey, Prescott was a successful manufacturer of stove polish. He served on the board of Good Will Homes and donated money for the building.

The single-story brick Kent Woodworking Shop named in the 1986 application for Historic Register listing is another of Josselyn’s Georgian Renaissance buildings, built in 1919. On-line information is lacking.

The woodworking shop might have been successor to the 1903 Quincy Manual Training Building, where students from Goodwill and from outside, mostly boys, learned “carpentry, drafting, printing, and metal work.” The building now houses the L. C. Bates Museum (see the May 20 issue of The Town Line).

George Walter Hinckley

George Walter Hinckley

George Walter Hinckley (1853-1950), a Connecticut native trained as a minister and a teacher, wanted to help underprivileged and troubled youngsters. An on-line history describes his seeing another child arrested for trying to steal from a lunch pail because he was starving. As a teen-ager, Hinckley persuaded his parents to take in an orphan boy.

By 1889 Hinckley was in Maine, “doing fieldwork for the American Sunday School Union of Philadelphia.” He bought the 125-acre Isaac Chase farm, in Fairfield, owned by former Senator Margaret Chase Smith’s grandparents. The farm became the basis of Goodwill-Hinckley, and Hinckley devoted most of the rest of his life to raising money to support and expand it.

In addition to his sister, Jane Hinckley, filling many roles, Hinckley’s older son, Walter Palmer (1885-1963) succeeded his father as manager in 1919; and his younger daughter, Faith Jayne (1891- 1987) worked at the school.

Walter’s daughter Harriet married Donald Price, whose parents had been school employees, and the younger couple also worked there.

The present campus offers a variety of walking trails, a bird sanctuary, an arboretum, an artificial pond, a picnic area and gardening and farming spaces, including greenhouses. Located on the campus are:

  • The Maine Academy of Natural Sciences, Maine’s first charter high school, emphasizing agriculture, forestry and environmental science, some of whose students live in on-campus housing;
  • The Glenn Stratton Learning Center, a day school for students in kindergarten through 12th grade whose “significant social, emotional and behavioral problems” make public school difficult for them;
  • The Roundel Residential Center, providing “safe and supportive housing with specialized support services” for people in need aged from 12 to 21; and
  • The College Step-Up Program, providing housing and support for high-school graduates or GED (General Education Diploma) holders as they work toward a community college degree or certification.

The Goodwill-Hinckley website, provides a telephone number – 207-238-4000 – and an email address –info@gwh.org. It shows a map of trails and monuments on campus and invites people to schedule a visit. The name Goodwill-Hinckley refers to an organization as well as the physical property; donations are welcome.

Carnegie Libraries

Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) was born in Scotland, emigrated to the United States when he was 12, invested wisely and became for a time the richest man in America, even richer than John D. Rockefeller. He was noted for giving away almost all of his fortune through foundations and organizations that supported the arts, science, education, world peace and other causes.

A “Carnegie library” is a library built with financial assistance from a Carnegie fund. Wikipedia says between 1883 and 1929 Carnegie money helped build 2,509 libraries world-wide, including 1,689 in the United States. Others were in places as distant as South Africa, New Zealand, Mauritius and Fiji.

Maine’s 20 Carnegie libraries were funded between 1901 and 1912, with the exception of $2,500 awarded in 1897 to finish the Gardiner Library. The most common grant in Maine was $10,000; the most generous was Lewiston’s $60,000 in 1901. The state’s total came to $311,450.

Of the 20 libraries, 18 were or are public; Goodwill-Hinckley’s and the University of Maine at Orono’s are categorized as academic. Eighteen of the 20 are still libraries, including Goodwill-Hinckley, Waterville, Oakland and Pittsfield.

Freeport’s Main Street library was replaced in 1997 and is now home to a private business. UMO’s Carnegie Hall houses the Virtual Environment and Multimodal Interaction (VEMI) Laboratory.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Granges – Part 7

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Charles Moody School.

by Mary Grow

Hinckley Grange

Last week’s article was on the two Fairfield Grange organizations, still-active Victor Grange, in Fairfield Center, and no-longer-active Hinckley Grange, with its Hall across the Kennebec River from Fairfield, in Clinton. There is one more connection between the Grange and the town of Fairfield, a connection that brings us back to the National Register of Historic Places.

Maine State Grange voted at its 22nd meeting, held in Bangor in 1895, to raise money to build and equip a “cottage” for the new “Girls’ Farm” at what was then Good Will Homes, in Hinckley, one of Fairfield’s original seven villages.

Good Will Homes, for a while Goodwill Home-School-Farm and now Goodwill-Hinckley, is a charitable organization dedicated to helping orphaned and at-risk children and young adults. Its multi-building campus stretches along about two miles of Route 201 between Nye’s Corner to the south and Pishon’s or Pishons Ferry to the north.

Connecticut native George Walter Hinckley (1853-1950) founded the institution in 1889 as a home for boys, with the girls’ division added not long afterward. By the time Hinckley died, Wikipedia says, the school owned 3,000 acres, had 45 buildings and was serving thousands of young people.

Grange Cottage, 1911.

The original Grange Cottage was dedicated on Dec. 20, 1897, according to an on-line source. The building burned in 1912 and was promptly replaced. On-line photos on the mainememory site, from the L. C. Bates Museum collection, include a 1908 photo of the first cottage and a 1912 photo of the second cottage.

Both buildings were two full stories high with third-floor windows in front and side gables. Each had an open front porch and appeared to have a basement, though in the 1912 photo the foundation is hidden by the snow around the building.

The 1912 building was designed by Augusta architect, Charles Fletcher. It was larger than the first one, and the larger third-floor windows imply more usable space in the gables. The front porch wrapped around part of one side.

(Charles Fletcher also designed the 1890 Doughty Block, at 265 Water Street, in Augusta. See the Feb. 10 issue of The Town Line.)

The second Grange Cottage burned in 1987 and was replaced by a third building.

According to the 2009 Journal of Proceedings of the One Hundred Thirty Sixth Annual Convention of the Maine State Grange, Goodwill-Hinckley had just discontinued its residential program and the use of Grange Cottage. The state Grange’s Committee on Women’s Activities was holding money intended for the building, which Goodwill-Hinckley owned; the meeting report says the money would be “redirected if the program does not start up again.”

Good Will Cottage, 1940.

Grange Cottage is in the section of the Goodwill-Hinckley campus described in the application for National Register listing (completed in November 1986; the property was added Jan. 9, 1987). The area designated as historic includes 33 buildings (two are complexes of buildings), “the original historic core” of the Hinckley Home-School-Farm, on about 525 acres.

Martin Stream, a major tributary that drains northern Fairfield into the Kennebec, divides the historically significant area. The application says the main campus, including the first cottages for boys, is south of the stream; the area where the first girls’ cottages were built is north of it.

Historian Frank Beard, writing the application for the Maine Historic Preservation Commis­sion, explained the significance of Goodwill-Hinckley in two ways. Socially, he wrote, it was “an early home,” perhaps the first in the United States, for “indigent and homeless children.” Arch­i­tecturally, its buildings, constructed between 1889 and 1930, “represent an important concentration of period buildings.”

The description of Grange Cottage in the application is of the 1913 building, the one that burned soon after the campus was added to the National Register.

Another among the 33 buildings is on the National Register of Historic Places separately, the L. C. Bates Museum, listed Oct. 4, 1978 (see below).

Carnegie Library.

The other buildings include three schools, (Charles E.) Moody (built in 1905-1906), Edwin Gould (built in 1926-27) and (George C.) Averill (built in 1930); Moody Memorial Chapel (built in 1897 and enlarged in 1927); Carnegie Library (built in 1906-1907); Prescott Memorial Administration Building (built in 1916 and substantially remodeled in 1921-22); Kent Woodworking Shop (built in 1919); and residential buildings.

The earliest residential building is Golden Rule Cottage, designed by architect Henry Dexter, of Dexter, and built in 1891. Beard described it as a two-and-a-half-story Queen Anne style wood-frame building with a “veranda” and a “rear porch with fan-shaped brackets.”

The newest residence on the list, Pike Cottage, dates from 1935 (and is the only building in the historic area constructed after 1930). Colonial Revival style, wooden, two and a half stories, it has a gable roof and an east-side veranda.

Beard called three cottages, Gifford House, Hinckley House and Price House, part of “teachers’ row.” They were all built in 1904, presumably as faculty housing.

Also in the historic area are Easler Cottage and a cluster of buildings identified as Easler Farm. The late-19th-century Easler Farm includes two wooden barns, a metal-sided animal barn and a garage.

Beard described Easler Cottage, built in 1900, as Queen Anne style, two-and-a-half stories, with a “pedimented veranda supported on turned posts with corner brackets and spindle work.” He listed with the cottage a story-and-a-half barn with a gable roof and a cupola.

Raising the bell to the tower of Prescott Building in 1915.

The sole nameless building listed in the application is a story-and-a-half mid-19th-century wood frame “house.”

The L. C. Bates Museum is in the 1903 Quincey Building, designed by Lewiston architect William Robinson Miller (1866-1929). The brick building is an example of the elaborate Romanesque architecture in which he specialized.

The application for National Register listing mentions the building’s “hipped roof, dormers, recessed round-arched entry, [and] symmetrical round stairwell towers on principal (east) elevation.” A Wikipedia article adds its “distinctive terracotta egg and dart ornamentation, and arched windows.

Inside, the museum has 32 Maine dioramas painted by American Impressionist Charles Daniel Hubbard (1876-1951); impressive natural history collections, from mammals to minerals; and Native American baskets, archaeological artifacts and other Maine historical items.

The Moody School, architect Miller’s earlier building on the campus, honors Charles Eckley Moody, of Bath. A Goodwill-Hinckley web page says Hinckley visited Moody’s two sisters, Mary and Frances, in 1894, a year after Moody died. The visit reminded them that their late brother had favored Hinckley’s project, so they donated $25,000 to build the school. Dedicated Jan. 1, 1896, it was the first brick building on campus.

(The Rev. Albert Teele Dunn, D. D., is quoted as calling the dedication “one of the proudest, happiest days” in Hinckley’s life. Dunn later was honored in Portland by naming Dunn Memorial Church after him, because he organized its congregation shortly before he died in 1904. The church later became Central Square Baptist Church and is now Deering Center Community Church.)

Beard described the two-story Moody School building as Renaissance style, “with hipped roof,…central pavilion with arcaded recessed entry, square-headed and round-arched windows.”

The Edwin Gould School was added in 1926-1927 with funds donated by railroad and Wall Street tycoon Edwin Gould (1866-1933), after he read of the need for a girls’ school on the Goodwill campus. According to on-line sources, the name honors his son, Edwin Gould, Jr., who died in 1917 in a hunting accident.

The building was designed by the Portland architectural firm of Miller, Mayo & Beal, whose members were William Miller, doing his third Goodwill-Hinckley project; Miller’s former head draftsman, Raymond J. Mayo; and Miller and Mayo’s former head draftsman, Lester I. Beal. The firm specialized in school buildings.

An on-line photo from the L. C. Bates Museum’s collection and historian Beard’s description of the Gould School depict a two-story brick Georgian Revival building with chimneys on each end. The building had two entries, one near each end, “sheltered by Doric porticos,” and a wooden cupola atop the middle.

On-line information about the Gould School says it closed in 2009 and stood vacant or was used for storage for four decades. In 2012, officials decided to reopen the building.

By then, there were holes in the roof “leading to severe water damage and rot.” The need for taller rooms on the ground floor required excavation and control of water under the building. Original masonry and interior and exterior trim were restored.

(Gould Academy, in Bethel, originally organized by local citizens as Bethel Academy, was renamed after Rev. Daniel Gould willed it $842 in 1843. Gould Academy’s website says annual tuition is currently $38,650 for commuting students and $62,700 for boarders. This information has nothing to do with Goodwill-Hinckley.)

Colonial Theater update

The restored decorative element, now completed, on top of the Augusta Colonial Theater. Caught at a moment by Dave Dostie – 2021. May.

In the May 14 Central Maine newspapers, the Kennebec Journal and The Morning Sentinel, reporter Keith Edwards continued his description of the reconstruction of the Colonial Theater in Augusta, specifically the elaborate decorations on the front (see The Town Line, Feb. 4).

The Water Street theater has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1914. Edwards wrote that the façade work is part of a restoration project started “several years ago,” after the building had been vacant since 1969. Organizers turned to Maine artisans who had the skills to replicate work originally done in the 1920s.

Total cost of the restoration is estimated at up to $8.5 million. Donations are welcome; they may be made via the website, augustacolonial.org, or by mail to Augusta Colonial Theater Offices, 70 State Street, Augusta, Maine 04330.

People wanting to read Edwards’ article in the Central Maine newspapers should look for the headline “Augusta’s Colonial Theater topped by work of artisans.”

Main sources

Websites, miscellaneous.

Next week: more Goodwill-Hinckley buildings.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Granges – Part 6

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Victor Grange,

by Mary Grow

Victor and Hinckley

The members of the next Grange to be discussed should be proud to belong to one of the earliest Grange organizations in the central Kennebec Valley area, and one that is still active in its 147th year.

Victor Grange #49 was organized on October 29, 1874, when, the Fairfield bicentennial history says, “a group of men and women met at the home of Mr. James Porter at the top of what is known as ‘Fuller Hill’ in Fairfield Center.” The Grange was incorporated in 1888.

The new Grange started with 29 charter members, 11 of them women. As with the Albion Grange profiled in the April 8 issue of “The Town Line”, at first only farmers could join. By the 1988 publication of the Fairfield history, membership was open to “those interested in farming and in the welfare of others.”

Barbara Bailey, of Larone (northernmost of Fairfield’s seven villages), is Victor Grange’s lecturer. (Maine State Grange Communications Director Walter Boomsma says the title “lecturer” now means program director.) Bailey has been reading Victor Grange’s records (as of early May, she reported she was up to 1914).

The bicentennial history identifies the first Victor Grange Master as Olando A. Bowman. Bailey said his name was Orlando Bowman, with the last name sometimes spelled Bowerman, and the following dates are written under his picture in the Hall: “1874- 75-76-77-78 1881.”

Inside dining hall of Victor Grange.

In their first three meetings, Bailey wrote, Victor Grange members agreed to repair the Town Hall, which they had rented for five years as their meeting house. The 200 feet of spruce joists they ordered were presumably for that project.

They further voted to buy Grange regalia for 30 Brothers and 20 Sisters, one dozen fifth-edition Grange manuals and 100 letterheads. They ordered a cord of wood, and voted to pay M. D. Emery 25 cents a night “to build fires, fill oil lamps and trim wicks.”

Another early vote, Bailey wrote, was “to change the design of the seal to a Lady holding the Sickle,” instead of a man. Other early Grange seals featured a sickle; most contemporary ones show a sheaf of wheat. In 1967, the U. S. Postal Service issued a five-cent stamp showing a straw-hatted farmer holding his scythe, to honor the 100th anniversary of the National Grange.

(Sickles and scythes are both harvesting tools, hence Grange symbols. A sickle, also called a reaping hook or bagging hook, has a C-shaped blade about a foot long and a handle about six inches long; one harvesting with a sickle bends down, gathers an armful of grass or grain and cuts it a few inches above the ground. A scythe blade is only slightly curved, often over six feet long, attached to a six-foot handle with two handholds; one harvesting with a scythe stands erect and sweeps the blade along the ground, laying the grass or crop in rows. George Stubbs’ painting Reapers shows two men with sickles; Jean-Francois Millais’ painting The Reaper shows a man with a scythe.)

In January 1875, Victor Grange members started buying in bulk to sell to members cheaply: half a carload of flour; a “hogshead barreller of Puerto Rican Molasses and ½ chest of Japanese tea” (Bailey says a “hogshead barrel” was 33-1/3 gallons); and that month and in March spices, including cream of tartar. They appointed Watson Jones their agent to “sell wool for the farmers” and report at the next meeting.

They were also furnishing the Hall, buying four stands and two lamps in January and 25 chairs and a second-hand cookstove in March. In March, too, members voted to “Frame the Grange Charter in a suitable manner” and rent a “suitable instrument” (first an organ, later a piano, Bailey said).

By the first anniversary meeting, Bailey wrote, Victor Grange had 94 members. They voted to pay E. C. Jones 50 cents for stabling their horses during the anniversary celebration; and they voted to buy more regalia, three wall lamps, a hand lamp, window-curtains and “bleached cloth for tablecloths.”

They also voted to have an oyster supper and pastry at their next meeting and to buy “a suitable number” of plates, bowls, mugs and spoons.

In 1878, Bailey said, they spent $300 to buy a nearby store, which they used as a members’ co-op and, the Fairfield history says “the Grange home.”

The Hall standing today was planned and built in 1902 and 1903, and the former store was attached. The Fairfield history says Maine State Grange Master Obadiah Gardiner dedicated the new building on Oct. 1, 1903.

Bailey wrote that the fourth Victor Grange Master was Orlando Bowman’s grandson, George Tibbetts. Dates under his picture are 1883-84, 1885-1889, 1901-1902 and 1905, making him the Master under whom the organization was incorporated and construction of the new Hall started.

Another piece of Victor Grange’s history is a wooden chair, with the inscription on the bottom of the seat, “March 28,”87″ [1887] Geo Tibbetts Wedding.”

On Dec. 27, 1979, Ray W. Tobey wrote Grange members a thank-you letter for the Christmas food basket they left at his house. Thinking back over the 77 years to the rainy night when he took his first two degrees as a Grange member, he wrote that “the new hall was in process of construction and the Grange was meeting in the old Town Hall just north of the present building.”

Grange women used to prepare meals for students in the one-room schoolhouse across the street. After the building was no longer used as a school, Grangers bought it and turned it into a stable.

Tobey referred to the stable as the “building in which my father went to school when he was a boy.”

The Grange Hall stands in the south angle of the intersection of Routes 104 and 139 with Route 23, facing west on Route 23 (Oakland Road). The vacant lot just south of the building is being filled for a parking lot.

The large two-story building (plus basement and attic) has one section that is almost square and one – the former store – rectangular, with the main entrance with an open porch where the buildings join. A brick chimney rises from the roof near the junction.

Bailey said the former store houses the entryway, stairs, kitchen and bathrooms. The second floor is the junior room. Junior Grangers are aged from five to 13, she said; from age 14, members are treated as adults entitled to vote in Grange business.

The 1903 Grange Hall, the square section, has the dining room on the ground floor and a meeting room on the second floor, with a stage and a painted stage curtain.

Bailey said the meeting room has a rainbow-shaped tin ceiling that is 15 ½ feet long. Records show the Grange ordered it in 1899 from Pennsylvania, paying $357. It came by boat from Pennsylvania to Boston, by train from Boston to Hoxie Siding, in North Fairfield, and by horse and buggy to Victor Grange Hall.

In the 1990s, Bailey said, the state relocated Route 23 in front of the Grange Hall, moving it so much closer that vibrations from heavy trucks damaged the building. Window panes cracked and even the granite foundation crumbled.

The Fairfield history calls the Grange Hall “the social gathering place for Fairfield Center” for many years. Bailey found records of oyster stew suppers followed by a play presented in the second-floor room; admission was 25 cents, and up to 200 people would attend.

The Grange used to meet twice a month. Programs included assigned readings, which Bailey interpreted as reading local news reports for the benefit of farmers whose spare time and reading skills were limited.

Debates were another feature. Two three-person teams would present opposite sides of an issue, without a decision whether either side won. Bailey sees this activity as educational and a chance for members to hone public speaking skills.

When a Grange member died, the Charter was draped in black for 30 days and a small group, usually three other members, prepared a Resolution of Respect. The resolutions mourned the lost members, often mentioning a specific contribution that would be missed – the delicious biscuits, the work caring for the Hall, the floral arrangements.

Bailey said Victor Grange almost collapsed in the 1990s, as interest waned nationwide and local leaders aged and fell ill. She credits former Waterville dentist Steve Kierstead (Jan. 5, 1921 – Feb. 4, 2006), whose grandfather had been an early Master, with sparking a renewal of interest.

A neighborhood canvas led to the monthly senior citizen meals that continue today. At first, short programs focused on useful information about local politics, social services and the like.

One day a member brought in a scrapbook that contained newspaper clippings and other items, to show another member how he had learned her date of birth. His action led other members to do the same, to copy and to exchange clippings and to reminisce – “some of the most fun things we’ve ever done,” Bailey said.

In recent years Victor Grange has hosted annual sessions with Window Dressers, the nonprofit group that helps people build and install energy-efficient window coverings in their houses.

Bailey said the Hall has a new furnace and is handicapped-accessible, including the restrooms and a stairlift to the second floor. She expects more programs for senior citizens, to save them the drive to Waterville’s Muskie Center or other senior centers.

Currently, Victor Grange members are raising funds for insulation and other energy-efficiency improvements for the Grange Hall.

Bailey said Fairfield had another Grange organization, Hinckley Grange. Its Hall in Clinton is still standing on the east side of River Road, a short distance north of Pishon or Pishon’s Ferry, where Route 23 crosses the Kennebec River from Fairfield.

Hinckley Grange Hall is smaller than the other Grange Halls discussed, but is a typical rectangular wooden building, two stories tall with a peaked roof allowing space for one third-floor front window.

This writer has found one on-line reference to Hinckley Grange #539, in the obituary of former member Martha May Stokes (Sept. 17, 1922 – Sept. 23, 2012), who died in Kansas. The obituary says she was a Good Will High School graduate who “worked as a nutritionist for several hospitals.”

The number assigned to this Grange says it was founded in the 20th century, and Bailey reported that the collage of pictures of Hinckley Grange Masters, now part of Victor Grange’s collection of historical materials, begins in 1920 and ends in 1956.

Victor Grange schedule

Victor Grange meetings are held the second Monday of the month, with a 5 p.m. potluck supper followed by the meeting at 6. The next meeting is scheduled for June 14, the final meeting of the year for Dec. 13.

The Senor Circle meets at 11 a.m. the third Friday of the month. The next Senior Circle meeting is on May 21, and the final one for the year will be Dec. 17.

Public suppers are scheduled for 5 p.m. the fourth Saturday of each month through October. The next supper will be May 22, and the final 2021 supper will be Oct. 23.

Three special events are scheduled in the remaining months of 2021.

On Saturday, July 10, and Sunday, July 11, the Grange will host the Fairfield Historical Society’s quilt show. The show runs from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days; admission is $5. Grange members will provide lunches and snacks.

The Grange’s annual fund-raising tollbooth will be held in July. Readers ungenerous enough to want to know which day to avoid which road will need to consult the web.

The annual Fall Festival is scheduled for Saturday, Nov. 13.

The Fairfield Historical Society holds a barn sale from 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, May 15, and Sunday, May 16, at the History House, 42 High Street, Fairfield. Items offered include furniture, glassware, jewelry, antiques, books, collectibles and more.

The Society’s website says that people attending this and other Historical Society events should wear masks and observe social distancing and other relevant Covid requirements.

Main sources

Boomsma, Walter, Exploring Traditions – Celebrating the Grange Way of Life (2018).
Fairfield Historical Society, Fairfield, Maine 1788-1988 (1988).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Personal conversations, Barbara Bailey.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Granges – Part 5

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The curtain on the stage of the Windsor Grange. (contributed photo)

North Vassalboro, Cushnoc, Windsor, Winslow

by Mary Grow

In addition to the East Vassalboro Grange discussed last week, Vassalboro had two other Grange organizations. According to Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history, the earliest of the three was Oak Grove Grange #167, organized in North Vassalboro on May 11, 1875.

In 1883, Alma Pierce Robbins wrote, Oak Grove Grange was “reorganized” at Getchell’s Corner, then an important village. Kingsbury located the Getchell’s Corner Grange Hall a little south of the Congregational Chapel.

Oak Grove Grangers opened a store in 1889, Kingsbury wrote; Robbins said Isaiah Gifford was store manager.

It is possible that Oak Grove Grange was discontinued before or about 1900. It is not listed in available on-line state Grange documents from 1902.

In the south end of town, 39 charter members organized Cushnoc Grange #204 at Riverside (occasionally called Riverside Grange) on Jan. 13, 1876. Kingsbury wrote there were 115 members in 1892; on-line records show 130 members in 1902, but Robbins said there were 150.

Kingsbury wrote that Cushnoc Grange members built their hall in 1879, naming it Liberty Hall. It burned in May 1885.

In 1886, Robbins wrote, Howard H. Snell and Hartwell Getchell, “Directors of the Cushnoc Grange Corporation,” paid James Robbins $175.74 for the building that had been a broom factory, a multi-family tenement, the post office (until 1856) and Benjamin Brown’s store. The building stood on a half-acre lot on the east side of “the County Road from Augusta to Vassalboro” and the north side of Cross Hill Road.

Robbins wrote that the deed of sale gave the new Grange Hall the “the right to take water from two wells described in the deed of Malina S. Kimball to Nathan Coombs.”

Grangers enlarged the building and, Kingsbury wrote, opened a store on the ground floor in August 1887. Robbins quoted a source describing a store-keeper in business in the Grange Hall from about 1884 until 1905. At some point the former schoolhouse “across the road” was moved beside the Grange Hall for a horse shed.

A Friday, Jan. 19, 1894, Kennebec Journal article found on line describes the Wednesday, Jan. 17, installation of Cushnoc Grange’s new officers (not named), attended by representatives of the state Grange.

After the installation, attendees “repaired to the large dining room connected with the grange hall where a bounteous array of good things had been provided by the ladies of the grange and which received ample justice at the hands of all.”

The writer of the article concluded that in 1894, Cushnoc Grange “has one of the finest grange halls in the State, is prosperous and best of all deserves to be.”

For some years around 1900, Robbins wrote in a 1974 essay republished in the 2017 Anthology of Vassalboro Tales, Cushnoc Grange and Riverside Church each put on a Christmas celebration. In bad weather, she commented, “the long cold drive to the Grange Hall with horse and pung was more hazard than happy,” especially for families with small children. (A pung is a small, box-like sleigh drawn by a single horse.)

Cushnoc Grange hosted fairs with livestock, farm produce and handiwork; oyster stew suppers; and baked bean dinners where neighbors shared “great jars of home made pickles and dozens of apple pies.” The Grange folded in 1967, Robbins wrote. Possessions included “dishes to serve more than one hundred” that were given to Riverside Church. The hall was demolished and a house built on the lot.

The University of Maine’s Raymond H. Fogler Library’s special collections has boxes of Grange documents. According to the on-line catalog, contents include Cushnoc Grange secretary’s records from 1876 to 1914 and from 1926 to 1966.

Moving to another town south and east, Windsor Grange #284 was organized June 2, 1886. Kingsbury lists the first Grange Masters, until he completed his Kennebec County history in 1892, as C. F. Donnell (1886), Frank Colburn (1888), George R. Pierce (1890) and John H. Barton (1891).

Colburn and Barton received individual mention in Kingsbury’s history. Frank Colburn was a “farmer and school teacher”; he started teaching winters when he was 18, and was Windsor’s supervisor of schools in 1888 and 1889.

Barton was the great-grandson of Dr. Stephen Barton, who came to Vassalboro in 1774 and moved to Windsor in 1803 to join one of his sons there. John Barton was another schoolteacher; he married Ellen Goddard, of China. Their daughter was a teacher, and their son, who died in 1890 at the age of 27, had headed the commercial department at Kents Hill School.

Windsor Grange had 105 members in 1902, according to Maine State Grange records. Records at the Fogler Library are dated from 1888 to 1995.

Although Linwood Lowden’s Windsor history refers to agriculture in its title, good Land & fine Contrey but poor Roads, he gives the Grange a single paragraph. The Grange “has always rented space in the town hall,” he wrote, paying $125 for the year in 1923, “when the present hall was new.” Another $30 a year went for “space in the G. A. R. Hall.”

Like many other local Granges, Windsor Grange used a large meeting room with a stage, and the stage had a handsomely decorated curtain. Barbara Bailey, from Fairfield Center’s Victor Grange, said when the Windsor town office took over the Grange quarters, the stage curtain was refurbished and remains in the town office.

Winslow, north and west of Windsor, had a 19th-century Grange organization, Winslow Grange #320, which left almost no records to which this writer has access. According to lists of documents stored at the Fogler Library, the collection includes secretary’s records from 1894 to 1972; the earliest account books that have been preserved there date from 1896.

In 1902 Kennebec County Deputy M. F. Norcross of the state Grange wrote that Winslow Grangers “built the fine hall this year, which shows that they are prosperous and progressive.” At that time the Grange had 221 members.

Readers looking for more information on Winslow Grange might try to reach the Winslow Historical Preservation Committee, the town committee that succeeded Winslow Historical Society. The committee’s website is https://winslowhistory.weebly.com, and it has a Facebook page.

A second Grange in Winslow, Progressive Grange #523, was chartered as a Maine non-profit corporation on Oct, 2, 1914. Clyde G. Berry, at 5 Mar Val Terrace, was listed as the corporation’s registered agent.

MaineCorporations records on line skip from the 1914 filing to July 3, 1979, when a registered agent and address (not given) were filed. In 1981, the organization was sent a notice for failing to file its annual report.

The next record is dated March 22, 1991, when a change of agent and office were submitted. Annual reports were filed in March from 1993 through 2002; after a change of agent in 2002, the filing date moved to April and in 2007 to May.

In March 2009 a report was filed by a new agent and the corporation was reinstated, after having failed to file a 2008 report. In September 2010 it was again dissolved for another failure; a new agent got it reinstated in December 2010.

He (or she) was equally lax, however, because Progressive Grange was administratively dissolved in August 2011, reinstated in 2012, and dissolved for the final time in August 2013.

Clyde G. Berry was also the first agent for Pleiades Grange #355, organized in Augusta on August 28, 1987. Berry’s address was then given as an Augusta post office box.

Pleiades Grange went through a series of suspensions and reinstatements until it was suspended for good in July 1999.

Clyde G. Berry

Clyde “Sonny” G. Berry (Dec. 28, 1946 – May 5, 2018) lived an interesting and varied life, according to his obituary that ran in at least two Maine newspapers.

He was born in Glenburn, attended Bangor High School, graduated from Higgins Classical Institute (a boarding school in Charleston) and attended Husson College and the University of Maine. The obituary says he “worked for several banks before his retirement.”

The Grange was important in Berry’s life. In 1961 he joined Glenburn’s Pleaides Grange, of which he was Master for some years. He later joined and held offices in Mt. Phillip Grange, in Rome. He held offices in three Pomona (county) granges, Penobscot, Sagadahoc and Lincoln.

In the Maine State Grange, Berry was on the Youth Committee, and was Lecturer from 1981 to 1987, Overseer from 1987 to 1989 and Master from 1989 to 1997. Later, he was elected Chaplain in 2011 and Assistant Steward in 2015.

In the national Grange, Berry was a member of the Assembly of Demeter, held the positions of Steward in 1991 and Lecturer in 1997 and worked for the organization as program resource director.

At some time he lived in Vermont, where the obituary says “he was a charter member and Past Master of Upper Valley Community Grange and a charter member and First master of Heart of Vermont Pomona.” He was also a trustee of the village library in Hartford, Vermont, and a “lister” for the town.

In addition to Grange activities, Berry held memberships and offices in historical societies in Hartford, Vermont, and Somerville, Maine; genealogical societies; the Maine Old Cemetery Association; Civil War veterans’ groups; and Sons of the American Revolution.

He served a term on the Glenburn School Board and was for “many years” on the Cemetery Committee; and he co-chaired the 1972 sesquicentennial celebration and co-authored the 1972 sesquicentennial town history.

He died in Bangor at the age of 71, is buried in Glenburn and requested memorial donations to Taconnett Falls Genealogical Society in Winslow.

Main sources

Bernhardt, Esther, and Vicki Schad, compilers/editors, Anthology of Vassalboro Tales (2017).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Lowden, Linwood H., good Land & fine Contrey but Poor roads a history of Windsor, Maine (1993).
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Vassalboro holds 250th anniversary commemoration and Civil War monument re-dedication

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Featured speakers, from left, Selectboard chairman John Melrose, local historian Lauchlin Titus, and Vassalboro Historical Society President Janice Clowes. (photos by Eric W. Austin)

by Eric W. Austin

On a blustery Monday morning, April 26, around 50 people gathered in Vassalboro’s Monument Park to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the town’s founding and rededication of its Civil War memorial.

The event was organized and emceed by John Melrose, chairman of the Vassalboro selectboard.

“On behalf of the Vassalboro selectboard,” Melrose said to open the ceremony, “I join you today in commemorating the 250th anniversary of our town, as we also recognize three years of work at Monument Park to celebrate this event.”

There have been numerous improvements made to the park over the past several years, including a clean-up along the shoreline, installation of paving stones surrounding the Civil War memorial, the planting of trees, decorative bushes and other landscaping improvements, and a newly-installed granite plaque dedicating the park for the town’s 250th anniversary.

Vassalboro Boy Scout Troop #410 led the gathering by presenting the colors and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. (photo by Eric W. Austin)

Vassalboro Boy Scout troop #410 then performed a presentation of the flags and led the gathered group in a recital of the Pledge of Allegiance.

After a prayer and invocation from American Legion chaplain Pearley Lachance, the first presentation of the morning was given by Patsy Crockett, president of the Kennebec Historical Society and member of the Kennebec County Commissioners. She stated, in part, “April 26, 1771 is the date that the Massachusetts’ colonial government incorporated four area communities as municipalities: the city of Hallowell, the towns of Vassalboro, Winslow and Winthrop. They remained part of Massachusetts until Maine achieved statehood in 1820.”

Crockett continued: “Beyond sharing the same date of incorporation, the four communities have at least one other thing in common: they all originally covered a larger territory than they do today. In fact, combined, they occupied nearly half of what is now Kennebec County.”

Vassalboro was named after the Vassal family, she said, and was originally spelled “Vassalborough,” although the shorter version of the name became standard by 1818.

In 1845, the town voted to prevent the “immoral and unlicensed” sale of liquor. By 1860, the town had a population of 3,180 and in 1893 there were recorded 21 births, 32 deaths and 22 marriages.

At the end of her speech, Patsy Crockett presented the town’s selectboard with a resolution from the Kennebec County Commissioners in recognition of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the town of Vassalboro.

The next presenter was Janice Clowes, president of the Vassalboro Historical Society, who spoke about the history of the site. In part, she said, “Today we stand in Monument Park, a focal point for our community. For hundreds of years, this site and its immediate surroundings was a meeting place for those who inhabited what became Vassalboro. From our exhibits at the Vassalboro Historical Society you can come to realize how important this land at the outlet of China Lake was to the Native Americans. Later, with colonization, we know of the importance of the alewife runs at this location and downstream and how the stream powered our development in commercial enterprises.”

Lauchlin Titus, a local historian who has also served on Vassalboro’s school board, budget committee and on the selectboard, was the last presenter of the morning. He spoke about the history of the names that are listed on the Civil War memorial. Much of his talk was included in a front page article he authored that was published in The Town Line issue for April 22, 2021.

Repairs are also planned for the Civil War statue. “It was commissioned in 1905 and dedicated in 1907,” Janice Clowes explained. “[Based on] design number 407, ‘Parade Rest,’ [it] was carved by William Tregembo, of Hallowell, for the sum of $1,275, with $300 as a deposit and the remainder when the monument was completed. The base of the monument is made from Hallowell granite, while the soldier is made of Westerly granite from Rhode Island. As you may know, plans are underway to have the nose and two places on the cape repaired. The additional repair to the rifle is estimated to be more than $20,000, therefore only the other repairs will be completed.”

A video stream of the event, uploaded by David Trask, is available on Youtube at the following link: https://youtu.be/7MpFPMCFcBg.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Granges – Part 4

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East Vassalboro Grange

by Mary Grow and Bernie Welch

East Vassalboro Grange

Historical records show the Town of Vassalboro has had three separate Grange organizations, of which the newest, East Vassalboro, is still active in its 126th year.

East Vassalboro Grange #332 was organized in 1895. On-line Grange records show 171 members in 1902. It was incorporated as a nonprofit organization on Oct. 3, 1910, according to on-line state records.

The Anthology of Vassalboro Tales includes an October 1938 report from an unnamed newspaper describing that month’s East Vassalboro Grange Fair, organized by Lena Kyle, Arthur Mason and Frank Rand and a “dinner committee” consisting of “lady officers” Annie Adams, Edith Canham and Nina Mason. Almost 250 people shared the chicken pie dinner, and about half as many the baked bean supper.

More than 40 pounds of candy made by “Grange ladies and their daughters” were sold. After the baked goods entered in competition had been judged, they also were sold.

Prizes were awarded for fancy work, dairy products, canned goods and vegetables. The list of the latter included popcorn (Frank Bragg’s), dynamite popcorn (Alfred Taylor’s), citrons (Ernest Taylor’s) and mangles (Frank Rand’s).

At that fair, Annie M. Cates was in charge of the candy. Special prizes were awarded to two lots of vegetables: Dr. Sam Cates took first place and Herbert and Paul Cates took second place.

Sam Cates’ cream earned a first prize for dairy products, and Mae Cates’ quilt in the fancy work category. In canned goods competition, Annabelle Cates won first prizes for mincemeat, mustard pickles and squash; and Mrs. Samuel Cates placed first for cauliflower, corn, corn on the cob, cranberries, peaches and pumpkin.

East Vassalboro Grange first floor

These competent Cates were ancestors, direct and indirect, of Paul Cates, who with his wife Elisabeth founded Cates Family Farm, in East Vassalboro, in 1970. Originally producing only gladiolus, the farm website now advertises heirloom gladiolus bulbs, other annual and perennial flowers, beef cattle, hay and lumber.

Twenty-four babies were in the 1938 baby show, winning prizes for eye color, hair (or lack of hair), youngest (a four-week-old girl) and “from the largest family” (a boy with seven older siblings).

East Vassalboro students from first through eighth grade presented their school exhibit. After supper, a cast of 12 performed Henry Rowland’s Aunt Minnie from Minnesota, described as a “farce play,” followed by dancing “until a late hour with music by the Mosher orchestra from China.”

Alma Pierce Robbins, publishing her Vassalboro history in 1971, was pessimistic about East Vassalboro Grange. Meetings and suppers continued, she wrote, “but with a lessening of interest as the younger generations search for new ways to bring about modern changes.”

Fifty years later, Bernie Welch, of Full Circle Farm, in East Vassalboro, takes up the story of East Vassalboro Grange.

At 10 a.m. on the 4th of July 1976, it was pouring a cold rain in Vassalboro. Despite the deluge, the parade started on time in North Vassalboro, heading toward the East Vassalboro Grange to celebrate the 200th birthday of our country.

16-year-old Miss Vassalboro Grange, before the rain.

There weren’t enough umbrellas to go around on the tractor-drawn, hay-baled Grange float that proceeded slowly down Main Street (Route 32). A 16-year-old Miss Vassalboro Grange sat soaking atop a bale in the fine dress made by her mother Marj. That evening she came down with pneumonia that made her miss a week of work at her father Ron’s store, Lalime’s Drug Store, in Waterville.

For the privilege of riding on that wet bale that day, she had to write an essay describing how the Grange supported her community and interview Malvena Robbins, her grandmother, who was Grange treasurer for 35 years. For her it was worth it then, and for us it is worth it now, because our Vassalboro Grange has been supporting the greater Vassalboro community all along and intends to do so well into the future.

The East Vassalboro Grange hosts numerous suppers to support fuel funds and other community programs, Grange activities and Grange Hall maintenance. Vassalboro Community School students learn how to serve a meal under the guidance of Jobs for Maine Graduates Master Specialist Victor Esposito, with David Dutton, Lauchlin Titus, Richard Lemieux and others contributing to the meals.

East Vassalboro Grange and Vassalboro Historical Society members occasionally unite to sponsor potluck suppers.

Students and community members enjoy talent shows and open mike, beginning at 7 p.m., the second Saturday of the month at the Coffee House run by Stuart Corson, Holly Weidner and Mathew Freitag. The stage comes alive with music, dance and song, not to mention the coffee, tea and desserts. Fifth Saturday Contra Dances are another Grange calendar feature.

In recent years East Vassalboro Grange has sponsored varied events to entertain and educate area residents and to benefit local causes. Prominent among them have been plays written by Paul Cates (and others), produced and performed by talented community members and using the Grange Hall’s elegant scenery.

Past productions of Cates’ plays have included Great East Vassalboro Swindle, Poor People, Romeo and Juliet Solve a Mystery and Senator Mitchell’s Sidney Farmer Goes to Washington.

On Friday, Sept. 10, 2021, Linda Titus hopes to produce Cates’ Lillie’s Apple Pie as part of Vassalboro’s 250th anniversary celebration, with an apple pie contest at intermission.

Local historical programs have been presented by residents Kent London, Alma Robbins and Vicki Schad. In August 2017 Vassalboro hosted an afternoon of Jane Austen events, presented by a California entrepreneur called Malvena Pearl’s Emporium. Participants could attend workshops on novelist Austen’s late 18th and early 19th century writing implements, her novels, farming in her era and art and sewing; and could enjoy baked goods and beverages and live music and dancing.

East Vassalboro Grange second floor.

The Grange has hosted the Vassalboro Library Book sale for nearly 60 years, the first weekend after Labor Day.

Since May 2009, the Grange has sponsored indoor-outdoor farmers’ markets through September. At first at the Grange Hall, these events are now held Sunday afternoons at the North Vassalboro mill.

In the recent past the Vassalboro Grange has supported Spring Fever Day, presenting a variety of things to make the garden grow; and The Spirit of Christmas, a craft fair Elisabeth Cates inspires with tremendous support from the Vassalboro Friends and local craft vendors.

There was even socially distance badminton in the Hall during Covid.

The upkeep of the Hall began with Grange Master John Melrose, who made sure the building was painted and kept in top-notch shape. Guy Higgins put in the new windows and ceiling, and Linda and Lauchlin Titus established cleaning protocols and got Ray Breton’s crew to upgrade our kitchen so that it is modern and certified.

Erskine Day of Caring students, Kelly Clark, Steve Jones, of Fieldstone Gardens, Boy Scout Eagle projects, Samantha Lessard and Steve Asante have made tremendous efforts over the years to keep up the building, support Grange-sponsored efforts and keep the gardens tidy.

Many outside families and organizations have used the Grange for birthdays and other celebrations; school programs; dance programs; and town, political, conservation or community action meetings. We would love to know how many of you readers were married or celebrated anniversaries or births at our Grange.

The future of the Vassalboro Grange is the future of our community. It is a place that welcomes all who would like to join others to learn, have fun or create together in a well-maintained building. It even has excellent internet.

Our Grange membership is open to new ideas and uses for the Grange. Grange meetings, open to all, are held the last Friday of each month. We look forward to hearing from you with ideas. Contact us at http://www.vassalboro.net/grange.html or 207 649 2765.

That girl on the float, the one in the rain? She is Jody Lalime Welch, the Grange master and my wife. The Vassalboro Grange has been a powerful, positive and profound influence on our families’ lives for almost 111 years now. What does a little rain matter, anyway.

(Bernie Welch holds the office of Lecturer in East Vassalboro Grange, but he is content to be called the Grange Master’s husband.)

Main sources:

Bernhardt, Esther, and Vicki Schad, compilers/editors Anthology of Vassalboro Tales (2017).
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771-1971, n.d. (1971).
Welch, Bernie, personal information.

Websites, various.

Photos courtesy of East Vassalboro Grange.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Granges – Part 3

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Sidney Grange #194. (photo by Roland D. Hallee)

by Mary Grow

Palermo & Sidney

Palermo had two Granges for which multiple records exist, and Milton Dowe found an earlier third one in his research for his 1954 History Town of Palermo.

Dowe gives one paragraph to “Recreation Grange” – the quotation marks are his, and he did not add a number – in North Palermo, organized in 1875 and therefore among Maine’s first Granges. Dowe wrote that Leander Bowler owned the building where the Grange met, and that, “This grange did not exist many years.”

This writer has searched unsuccessfully on line for another reference to Recreation Grange.

Branch Mills Grange #336 started Jan. 1, 1897, and is included in the China bicentennial history (among other sources), though it has been headquartered in the Palermo side of Branch Mills Village most of its life. Sheepscot Lake Grange #445 was organized in 1905, in East Palermo.

The China history says Branch Mills Grange started with 20 charter members. Virginia Dowe, in a 1948 summary history included in Milton Dowe’s 1997 reminiscence, Palermo, Maine Things That I Remember in 1996, said there were 29 and named them. John Henry Barton, of Windsor, started the organization, at what the China history called the Good Templars Hall and Dowe called the “old Academy Hall.”

(Milton Edwin Dowe [Feb. 19, 1912 – Aug. 7, 2001] and Virginia Wescott Dowe [March 12, 1916 – Nov. 20, 2012] married April 29, 1939. They ran the Real Maine Country Store at the intersection of Branch Mills and North Palermo roads from the mid-1940s until 1981 or 1982. Among their many roles in the town, Milton Dowe helped organize the volunteer fire department and was its chief for 18 years, and Virginia Dowe was Palermo Town Clerk for 47 years.)

Kingsbury’s history says the first Good Templars group organized in Branch Mills lasted from December 1865 to sometime in 1869. In April 1874 it was succeeded by Lodge #349, which was still active in 1892. The Good Templars owned the building that Barzillai (or Brazillai) Harrington built for an academy in the mid-1800s.

Branch Mills Grange #336. (photo courtesy of the Kennebec Journal)

Early 20th century records included two references to J. H. Barton, resident of West Windsor: he was a Windsor selectman in 1902, and he commented on the condition of orchards in a 1903 State Pomological Society publication.

The China history says that during its first year, Branch Mills Grange gained only 17 members, so in 1898 they organized a contest (unspecified) that brought 90 more people to join them. The larger group began planning to buy or build a Grange Hall.

By 1900, the China history says, they owned a former shoe shop in Branch Mills, on the west (China) side of the Sheepscot River. They enlarged and remodeled the building and held a dedication on March 13, 1902. That year, state Grange records say, there were 108 members.

The Grange Hall burned in the June 26, 1908, fire that destroyed almost every building in the village. The China history describes what happened next, under the auspices of Eleon Shuman, at 18 “probably the youngest Grange Master in Maine,” and in 1975 a source of information for the history.

The Grangers sold their lot for $100, and for $300 bought a two-acre lot on the east (Palermo) side of the river from the Shuman family. They borrowed $4,000 and hired Fred Jordan as contractor.

Jordan in turn hired Shuman, who had been working as a painter for a man in China, and asked Shuman to do carpentry until it was time to paint. So Shuman “bought a saw and hammer and became a carpenter.”

Two jobs he remembered: nailing the rafters to the ridgepole, because “no one else wanted to climb that high”; and making the wooden figures 1909 and nailing them on the building’s face.

As in other towns, the Grange Hall served as a community center. For instance, Milton Dowe wrote in his 1954 history that when electricity reached Branch Mills in the summer of 1928, the lights were turned on on Aug. 8, and the Aug. 10 celebration was held in the Grange Hall.

The hall served as a meeting place for other town organizations. It hosted town meetings and other official public events. It was available for public entertainment, like dances, movies and plays; and for residents’ celebrations of weddings and the like.

Virginia Dowe wrote that during World War II Branch Mills Grange spent more than $500 helping and honoring soldiers. The Grange paid soldiers’ dues and sent Christmas gifts; and as veterans came home, Grange members gave each $25 and an honorary banquet.

In January 1947, Virginia Dowe continued, Grange members celebrated the organization’s 50th anniversary with “a tea, oyster stew supper and an old-fashioned dance,” with older members telling stories.

In the 1940s, she wrote, weekly dances in the winter provided funds for a furnace, installed in 1948.

Also in 1948, Milton Dowe wrote, Branch Mills Juvenile Grange #162 was established.

Grange-sponsored dances, “dramas” and other events benefited the volunteer fire department; Grangers donated $50 and let firefighters use the Grange Hall basement as a firehouse. The Grange Hall’s west wall was on the China-Palermo line and the basement door was on the west, so the fire trucks crossed into China as they left the building.

In 1949, Virginia Dowe wrote, Branch Mills Grange had 131 members and “a substantial fund in the treasury.” In 1975, according to the China history, the firefighters still occupied the basement and the Palermo town office was on the ground floor, leaving the second-floor meeting room for town meetings and Grange and other events.

Since 1975, a new town office and a new fire station have been built on North Palermo Road.

Branch Mills Grange was active in 2015 and is still listed as active by the Maine State Grange. The person listed on the state Grange website for information did not return a telephone call.

Sheepscot Lake Grange #445, in East Palermo, was organized Oct. 10, 1905, according to Milton Dowe’s history. Dowe wrote that its initial meetings were in the East Palermo schoolhouse, built by Paul Ames (who was related to novelist Ben Ames Williams).

Later, meetings moved to the second floor of Carroll Turner’s store. In 1907, Grange members bought a piece of land; in July 1907 the Grange was incorporated; and in the fall of 1908, members built a stable for their horses, presumably on the land they owned.

In 1907, Violet Lenfest reported to the state Department of Agriculture on behalf of Sheepscot Lake Grange. It was a bad year for insect pests. There were only a few “red-humped and yellow-necked apple worms,” fall webworms and grasshoppers; but cutworms, tent caterpillars, potato beetles, rose chafer beetles, “codling moths, cabbage worms, currant worms, railroad worms, horn flies and mosquitoes” were numerous.

Construction of the Sheepscot Lake Grange Hall started in the spring of 1910, and the building was finished in October. The first Sheepscot Lake Grange fair was held in the hall in September 1913; the fairs were still annual events when Dowe wrote in 1954.

Sheepscot Lake Juvenile Grange #106 “was chartered Feb. 15, 1941,” Dowe wrote.

In 1982, Sheepscot Lake Grange honored Walter Banton (Feb. 4, 1918 – Sept. 19, 2007), a World War II veteran active in town affairs, with its outstanding citizen award.

On the west side of the Kennebec, Sidney Grange #194 was organized Nov. 24, 1875, with 25 charter members. One of the members’ first actions, Alice Hammond wrote in her Sidney history, was to borrow $200 “to buy groceries to be sold to members at cost.” In 1876, they got a license to sell tobacco.

In 1885 Sidney Grange members started the Sidney Agricultural Fair, and from 1887 they invited non-members to bring entries. The fair was held annually at the town house on Middle Road. Kingsbury wrote that the Fair’s best displays were fruit and working cattle: “seventy-five yoke of the latter, driven in one continuous line, were shown one year.”

Brothers George and Frank Bowman had the largest tree nursery in Kennebec County, Kingsbury wrote. George Bowman was president of the Fair from 1887 until at least 1892 and was one of the early Grange Masters.

Hammond wrote that Grange members held their early meetings on the second floor of a store building on River Road. When they started considering building or buying a permanent home, enough Middle Road farmers were members that the group asked to share the town house for a year.

As the arrangement continued, the Grangers added a second story to the town house. The town office, a kitchen and a meeting room/dining room were on the first floor; the Grange used the upper floor for meetings and social events.

An old photo in Hammond’s history shows the front of the “town and grange hall,” an unadorned wooden rectangle with a generous front entrance and a ground-floor window on at least one side of the entrance (the photo is unclear). There are three windows on the second floor and two more above them under the sloping roof.

When Kings­bury’s history was published in 1892, Sidney Grange had 160 members and owned a “capacious hall.” In 1894, Grangers reached agreement with the congregation of the neighboring Uni­ver­salist Church to build a horse shed on the church’s land, to be owned by the church and used by both groups.

State Grange records show 310 members in 1902 and 282 in 1906. The state records include a report from the Grange’s Deputy of West Kennebec County on his Oct. 30, 1902, inspection of Sidney Grange. He recorded 307 members with more applications coming in while he was there.

He commented: “Books well kept and dues well paid up. Young Master well qualified for his work.

Hammond wrote that Grange meetings were held every Thursday evening until 1946, when they decreased to two Thursdays a month.

The Grange was a source of information for farmers and a community center for everyone, Hammond wrote. Grange gatherings often featured meals; she wrote of “bills for eight gallons of oysters for a stew” and coffee brewed in a “copper wash boiler with a spigot soldered near the bottom.”

On May 6, 1937, after a Grange meeting, the building caught fire. Because of fog, the fire wasn’t spotted promptly; and the Oakland fire truck got stuck in Middle Road mud. The hall, the horse shed and the church all burned; firefighters were able to pour enough water on the safe to keep town records from being destroyed.

Voters at a special town meeting agreed to rebuild their town hall at about the same place and again with the Grangers, Hammond said. Waterville Savings Bank donated land southwest of the former building site; town and Grange committees worked together to assemble a building crew; and money was accumulated from insurance and multiple other sources to provide the $9,533.15 needed “without an appropriation from the town.”

Hammond wrote that Grange members and town voters approved in 1937 and 1938 an agreement for the “use, care and renting” of the building that was still in effect when her history was published in 1992. By then, Sidney Grange had fewer than 50 members.

The 2003 town comprehensive plan says Sidney owned its separate town office building and had a half interest in the Grange Hall, splitting expenses with the Grange.

Currently the Grange Hall and the single-story town office building just north of it share a lot at 2986 Middle Road. The Grange Hall is a wood-shingled building atop a basement that rises above ground level. Across the center of the front, tall pillars support a pediment the height of the peaked roof, with a single window on each side on the basement and upper levels.

The Sidney Historical Society headquarters are in the basement. When this writer visited the hall recently, a sign on Middle Road advertised Young Americans Dance Center. A lady arriving with several young (elementary-school age) Americans said she believed dance classes were offered several days a week. YADC websites say the organization is based at Waterville’s Alfond Youth Center with a “secondary campus” in Sidney.

Main sources

Dowe, Milton E., History Town of Palermo Incorporated 1884 (1954).
Dowe, Milton E., Palermo, Maine Things That I Remember in 1996 (1997).
Grow, Mary M., China Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984).
Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Granges – Part 2 (Benton, China and Clinton)

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Benton Grange.

by Mary Grow

Benton, China and Clinton

The 1915 hall that serves Benton Grange No. 458 is one of 16 Maine Grange halls listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and one of two individually listed in Kennebec County. It was added to the register April 28, 2004.

Starling Grange, now town-owned Starling Hall, in Fayette.

(The other Kennebec County Grange Hall on the register is the former Starling Grange, now town-owned Starling Hall, in Fayette. Friends of Starling Hall have a website and a Facebook page and welcome donations for preservation work.)

Located on a 1.7-acre lot at the intersection of River Road and School Drive, south of Route 100, Benton Grange Hall is a wooden building two stories high with a basement. The south-facing front of the building has a wide center doorway and large open porch. There are three front windows on the second floor; above them a hip-roofed dormer holds a sign, in need of repainting, identifying the building.

Architectural historian Christi A. Mitchell, of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, prepared the nomination form for the National Register (as she did for two farms described in the March 10 issue of The Town Line). She calls the Grange building’s architectural style “essentially Colonial Revival,” and the more elaborate porch “Queen Anne-esque.”

Inside, the lower floor has a dining room beyond the entrance-way. Most of the second floor is a large open room for meetings and community activities, like the Saturday-night public dances the Grange sponsored in the 1950s.

Benton Grange was organized in 1906. Mitchell found that many of the charter members switched from Clinton Grange, established in 1887 or 1888, to the new one, probably because Benton was their home town.

In 1909, she wrote, town records showed that 94 out of 298 heads of household in Benton “(including retirees and widows)” gave their occupation as “farmer.”

Members met at the Benton Station school for the first years. By 1910, with close to 200 members, they decided to build their own Grange hall.

The decision was implemented five years later. Fairfield architect Frank M. Gifford designed the building; it was completed in mid-October 1915, in time to host that fall’s Grange fair.

Mitchell quoted a description of the Dec. 3, 1915, dedication of the building from the Dec. 4 Waterville Morning Sentinel. Speaker W. J. Thompson commented that the new building was one of the most expensive Grange Halls in Maine. Building it, he said, was a credit to Grange members and to the community.

Benton Grange, like many others, declined with the decline in agriculture. Mitchell wrote that the fairs ended in the 1940s. However, she wrote, Benton town meetings were held in the Grange Hall from 1915 to 1990, and as she wrote in the spring of 2004 Grangers hoped to make the second-floor space handicapped-accessible so town meetings could again convene there.

According to its Facebook pages, Benton Grange is still active, is seeking new members and as of March 2021 resumed renting the Grange Hall for private and public events (no alcohol allowed).

The deteriorating Silver Lake Grange, in China Village, in 2021. (photo by Roland Hallee)

The first of China’s three local Granges was China Grange #295, organized in South China on Dec. 29, 1887. Henry Kingsbury, in his Kennebec County history published in 1892, called it “flourishing.” Members met the first and third Wednesday evenings of the month in the Ancient Order of United Workmen’s South China hall.

(Wikipedia says the A.O.U.W. was another post-Civil War fraternal organization, created in Pennsylvania in the late 1860s with the primary aim of providing insurance for working men. The Harlem chapter, #39, of the A.O.U.W. was organized Aug. 27, 1885, with 13 charter members, Kingsbury wrote. Their name, Harlem, was the Town of China’s name from 1796 to 1818.)

By 1902, according to the Maine State Grange “Proceedings” of that year, China Grange had 111 members.

There is no record of a South China Grange Hall. The China bicentennial history says when the consolidated school on Lakeview Drive (now China Middle School) opened in 1949, town voters let the Grange rent the no-longer-needed South China schoolhouse on the south side of Route 3, just west of the Route 32 North intersection.

The China history says the China Grange remained active “until about World War II [until at least 1949, apparently], when it merged with Silver Lake Grange in China Village.”

Silver Lake Grange #327 was founded between 1892 and 1902, according to the China history. Looking at the numbers assigned to nearby Granges founded earlier (East Vassalboro Grange #322, in 1895) and later (Branch Mills Grange #336, Jan. 1, 1897) narrows the interval to 1895, after East Vassalboro, or 1896.

(Contradictorily, the China history references a February 19, 1876, diary entry saying a Grange had been organized that afternoon at China Academy, the high school on Main Street in China Village. Kingsbury, finishing his history in 1892, made no mention of a Grange in China Village, and the number 327 would not have been assigned in 1876.)

The inventory of the Maine Historical Society’s collection of Grange documents lists under “China” an 1894 “receipt” and “receipt books” for most of the years between 1935 and 1953.

Silver Lake Grange Hall, still standing on the west side of Main Street in China Village, was designed and built in 1908 by local builder Fred S. Wallace. The China history quotes from an account in the March 4 issue of the Bangor Commercial Farmer and Villager describing the Feb. 24, 1909, dedication and praising the new building.

Silver Lake Grange Hall is a two-story, hip-roofed wooden building with an open front porch, a ground-floor dining room and kitchen and a second-floor meeting room. It has no basement.

The Commercial Farmer and Villager writer mentioned the “pleasant, sunny room for a gentlemen’s dressing room” near the entrance and the “ladies’ dressing room…, commodious and convenient” behind the dining room. Neither included toilet facilities.

The “well attended” 1909 dedication began with a 10:30 a.m. ceremony at which the State Grange Master spoke. After lunch in the new dining room, an afternoon program offered speeches and instrumental and vocal music.

A lengthy evening program included more music, recitations, a farce and two “scenic readings,” one of which had a dog in the list of participants.

Silver Lake Grange had a stable in 1909, because the China history says the local Masons appropriated $91.67 for one-third of it, probably for rental, not purchase. (In 1824 the two Masonic Chapters built their own stable beside the Masonic Hall, which was at the south end of Main Street.)

Silver Lake Grange “dissolved in the late 1960s,” according to the China history.

China’s short-lived third Grange, called China Grange #578 (or occasionally China Lake Grange, depending on the source), was organized in the fall of 1974 and took over the Silver Lake Grange Hall. Dennis Harding was the first Master.

The new organization lasted two years or less. The China history quotes Harding as saying one reason for its failure to take hold was that “the young people did not like to use the outhouse.”

Sometime after 1977, ownership of the hall reverted to the Maine State Grange. (The 1977 application for the China Village Historic District lists the China Grange as the owner.) The state organization sold it in the fall of 1983 to two local residents who hoped to create senior citizen apartments.

Their plan was never realized. The present owner of Silver Lake Grange Hall has had it on the market for several years.

Clinton Grange #287 was established in March 1888, according to Kingsbury, although its number implies it was founded in the last half of 1886 or in 1887. Kingsbury wrote there were 70 charter members, and by 1892 about 100 members. The Maine State Grange records show 231 members in 1902.

Kingsbury says in 1890, the Grange bought Centennial Hall, on Church Street, in Clinton. In 1892, he wrote, the second floor was for exhibitions and the organization used the ground floor for its other activities.

(John P. Billings built Centennial Hall in 1876, Kingsbury wrote. Billings was a Clinton native, born in 1828. In 1843, Kingsbury says, he was learning to make edge tools – knives, hatchets and the like – in Waterville.

In 1851 Billings joined the California Gold Rush that had started in 1848 and, Wikipedia says, attracted 300,000 hopeful gold-seekers by the mid-1850s. After 14 years as a miner, Billings returned to Clinton in 1865, apparently wealthy enough to build the hall, and resumed the “manufacture of edge and stone tools.”)

Maine State Grange records include a receipt book from Clinton Grange for the years 1933 through 1935.

One of a set of antique postcards on line shows an undated photo of a Clinton Grange hall, set on flat land, with newly-planted trees beside the building and across the street. The building is a three-story wooden rectangle with a high peaked roof and a flat-roofed open porch across the entire front.

The double front door has a window on each side, three windows above it and one more full-sized window under the roof. On the visible side of the building there are five windows on the ground floor (perhaps because the stairs go up the inside wall where the front one would otherwise be) and six on the second floor.

The building is painted white. The shutters on the second- and third-story front windows appear to be a yellow-green (probably because the postcard is discolored by time).

This writer does not know whether the building on the postcard is Centennial Hall or a later replacement.
Clinton’s 2006 town comprehensive plan lists the Grange hall as one of the town’s significant buildings, and says the Historical Society’s records are kept at the Brown Memorial Library (the library is the only Clinton building that is on the National Register of Historic Places).

A long-time resident says the former Grange Hall is now an apartment building.

The second Clinton Grange #287, according to state corporate records, was organized July 15, 1949, and dissolved Sept. 6, 2006, for failure to file state-required annual reports. An on-line history refers to a Grange and 4-H exhibition hall built in 1994, giving no details.

Main sources

Grow, Mary M., China, Maine, Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).

Web sites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: The Grange – Part 1

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Vassalboro Grange (photo: vassalboro.net)

by Mary Grow

The mother and father of all United States agricultural organization is the Grange, formally known as the Order of Patrons of Husbandry. The national Grange was organized in Washington, D. C., on Dec. 2, 1867, by a seven-person group headed by Oliver Hudson Kelley (1826 – 1913), a Bostonian who moved to Minnesota in 1849 to become a farmer.

A Grange historian quoted in Ruby Crosby Wiggin’s Albion history wrote that the organization was a response to the “depressed condition” of agriculture after the Civil War. The 1873 financial panic hastened its growth.

In 1864, Kelley, working for the national Bureau of Agriculture, inspected post-war farming conditions in the southern states. He realized the need to help farmers earn their living from their land, found like-minded friends and created the Grange.

Kelley intended the organization as “an agricultural fraternal order,” not unlike Masonry, with rituals, named offices, degrees and an aura of secrecy, Maine Grange historian Stanley R. Howe wrote in a 2010 article reproduced on line.

“Fraternal” was never accurate, however; Howe credited Kelley’s niece, feminist Caroline A. Hall, with gaining women near-equality in the Grange. They had voting rights from the beginning and four of the 16 elected offices in each Grange are exclusively for women.

(Online information says in 1893 the Minnesota Grange elected a woman named Sarah Baird as the first female state Grange President [Master] in the United States. Minnesota’s current state Grange president is a woman, and so is the president of the national Grange, for the first time: Betsy Huber, of Pennsylvania, a Granger since she joined a Junior Grange at age five, has been national president since 2015.)

The name Grange comes from Great Britain, where the part of an estate used for agriculture was called the grange, Howe explained.

As the organization developed and spread, four main purposes emerged.

Economic improvement remained central. Means included cooperative stores, where the organization bought in bulk and sold to members at cost; discounts on things like life and health insurance; and spreading information about improved agricultural techniques, new machinery or seeds and other benefits to farmers.

Education, agricultural and general, was important. Granges published reports, newspapers and bulletins; many Grange halls had libraries; most Granges sponsored educational presentations on topics important to local farmers and the community; many hosted classes and workshops.

Having an organization that operated locally, state-wide and nationally gave Grangers political clout. One of the first national efforts was to pressure Congress to lower railroads’ shipping rates so that farm products could be sent to market more cheaply. Grangers also wanted grain elevators’ charges controlled.

The Grange lobbied for the postal service’s Rural Free Delivery system, so that isolated farmers would not have to choose between driving miles to the post office or paying a commercial carrier to pick up their mail. Grangers supported a variety of national cooperative farmers’ institutions; one source says they were instrumental in making the head of the United States Department of Agriculture a member of the President’s Cabinet in 1889.

Grange members lobbied for the Prohibition movement (implemented by the 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution, in effect Jan. 16, 1919, and repealed by the 21st Amendment, in effect Dec. 5, 1933). They helped implement progressive political ideas, like direct election of Senators (the 17th Amendment, in effect April 8, 1913) and voting rights for women (the 19th Amendment, in effect Aug. 18, 1920). Current national President Huber advocates expanding access to broadband service, especially in rural areas.

Complementing these economic, educational and political goals, at the local level the Grange became the social center for rural towns across the country, providing a community meeting hall and sponsoring suppers, dances and local and imported entertainments. One historian called this function especially important to rural women, who were more isolated than the men.

The Maine State Grange was organized in Lewiston on April 21, 1874, a year after the first Grange in the state was established in Hampden. Grange and state websites say there were 64 Maine Granges with about 2,000 members by the end of 1874; within two years, 228 Granges and 12,000 members; in 1907, 419 Granges and more than 55,000 members; and in 1918, 450 Granges and 60,000 members. Membership peaked at around 62,000 in the 1950s and has declined in recent years.

In 1918, according to that year’s Maine Register, W. J. Thompson, of South China, was Master of the state Grange. His wife held the position of Flora (one of three ritual stations, with Ceres and Pomona, Howe explained) and D. E. Foster, of Augusta, was Steward.

(Wikipedia says Ceres was “the Roman goddess of agriculture”; Flora was “the Roman goddess of flowers” and of spring; and Pomona was “the Roman goddess of fruit and nut trees.”)

Political positions the Maine State Grange took included supporting funding for local schools and the University of Maine and opposing the repeated efforts to move the state capital from Augusta. Augusta’s Maine Farmer newspaper, published from 1823 to at least 1900 (see The Town Line, Nov. 26, 2020), was a Grange publication.

The organization promoted causes that benefited not only farmers, but other segments of society. Howe mentioned sending care packages to soldiers overseas during World War II and building and supporting Grange Cottage to house orphans at Goodwill-Hinckley School, in Fairfield.

Since 1945, the Maine State Grange has been headquartered on State Street, in Augusta.

In the 1880s the state organization added county Granges, called Pomonas. Juvenile Granges started in 1944; Palermo’s Sheepscot Lake Juvenile Grange #106 and Augusta’s Capital Junior Grange #274 were active in the 1950s and 1960s.

A current on-line list from the Maine State Grange says there are 103 active Granges in Maine, counting both local and county Granges. Local ones listed are Benton Grange, Fairfield Center’s Victor Grange and Branch Mills Grange, in Palermo; Vassalboro Grange, in East Vassalboro, should also be on the list, according to its Facebook page.

Albion Grange #181 was one of the earlier local Granges, past and present. Maine State Grange Master Nelson Ham oversaw its organizational meeting on July 6, 1875, historian Ruby Crosby Wiggin wrote. There were 36 charter members: 34 couples, the son of one couple and an unmarried woman.

Wiggin said in 1875, only farmers and their families were eligible to join the Grange. Doctors, storekeepers and all other non-farmers were excluded.

In 1873, Albion residents had organized a local stock company to build a community hall. The hall was finished in 1874, and the first Grange meeting was held there.

Until January 1881 Grangers rented the hall only for meetings. In January 1881, the Stock Company leased it to the Grange at $35 a year, and in 1886 the Grange bought the building.

Beginning in October 1875 Grangers ran a cooperative store, buying a variety of items – coffee, salted fish, cloth, raisins, rock salt, cheese, sugar, chewing tobacco, grass seed – in bulk and selling them to members. Meetings included panel discussions, suppers and other forms of entertainment.

On Oct. 4, 1879, Albion Grange held its first fair, in conjunction with Freedom Grange. Independent Albion Grange fairs were held annually into the early 1950s, Wiggin wrote.

By 1892, Henry Kingsbury wrote in his Kennebec County history, Albion Grange had 150 members. In 1902, the Maine State Grange Proceedings says there were 252 members.

In 1903 Grangers added a dining room to their building, which they still used when Wiggin published her Albion history in 1964. On-line sources suggest the Grange had been re-established in 1957, probably after an interval of inactivity.

In Augusta, records show two Granges. The earlier, Capital Grange #248, was organized April 7, 1883, according to Capt. Charles E. Nash’s chapter on Augusta in Kingsbury’s history. The second Capital Grange Master was Samuel L. Boardman, who wrote the chapter on agriculture in the same book.

On Nov. 12, 1901, according to records of the national Grange, Brother Obadiah Gardner carried an invitation to those attending the national convention to visit Augusta on Nov. 19, traveling by train. The flowery letter was signed by Capital Grange Master G. M. Twitchell and Augusta Board of Trade President C. B. Burleigh.

Attractions included touring the city and the State House; meeting Governor Hill and his wife at “the mansion of the late Hon. J. G. Blaine, which remains as it was when he did his great work”; and visiting “the national home at Togus,” then caring for 2,600 Civil War veterans.

The Grange records say that Brother W. K. Thompson, of South Carolina, moved to accept the invitation. Discussion was postponed from the morning to the afternoon session, when Brother Thompson’s motion was “considered at considerable length and unanimously adopted.”

(Obadiah Gardner [1852-1938], a Michigan native who moved to Maine in 1864, graduated from Coburn Classical Institute, in Waterville, and farmed in the Rockland area, was Master of the Maine Grange from 1897 to 1907. He ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1908; was appointed to the United States Senate in September 1911, after William P. Frye died in office; and lost his re-election bid in 1912, leaving the Senate March 3, 1913. He was then appointed to the International Joint Commission to deal with boundary-water issues between the United States and Canada, on which he served until 1923.)

In 1902, M. F. Norcross, the Deputy of West Kennebec County, reported on his Nov. 21 visit to Capital Grange, which then had 60 members. He found there were “[n]ew rituals and badges,” and the members were much interested in “working the third and fourth degrees” under a capable Master. “Bound to succeed,” he summarized.

Later references to Capital Grange are hard to find. The on-line index to the University of Maine’s Raymond L. Fogler special collections library says the library has 110 years of Capital Grange treasurers’ records, from 1883 to 1993.

Capital Junior Grange seems to have been created in or before 1955 and to have lasted until at least 1961.

North Augusta Grange #348 was founded in or before 1899 and existed until at least 1973. In the 1902 Proceedings of the Maine State Grange, Norcross, reporting as Deputy for Kennebec County, said North Augusta Grange had 126 members and a Degree Team and appeared to be doing well.

Nineteen pages later in the same book, Norcross, listing himself as Deputy for West Kennebec County, reported on his Nov. 4 visit to the North Augusta Grange. The Master told him meetings had been suspended temporarily “on account of a drama.” Norcross gave no details, but commented, “It is hoped that the work that the Grange is designed to do is not made a secondary matter.”

19 Granges in the central Kennebec River valley, in the order in which they were founded (as nearly as this writer can determine)

Victor Grange #49, Fairfield Center; established 1874, still active.

Oak Grove Grange #167, North Vassalboro; May 11, 1875.

Albion Grange #181; July 6, 1875.

Albion Grange #181, Oct. 28, 1957; suspended Aug. 26, 1998, for failure to file state corporate reports (according to an on-line source).

Sidney Grange #194; November 24, 1875.

Cushnoc Grange #204, Riverside (Vassalboro); January 13, 1876.

Capital Grange #248, Augusta; Apr. 7, 1883.

Windsor Grange #284; June 2, 1886.

China Grange #295, South China; December 29, 1887.

Clinton Grange #287; March 1888 (according to Kingsbury; this date is out of sequence).

Clinton Grange #287, July 15, 1949; dissolved Sept. 6, 2006, for failure to file state corporate reports (according to an on-line source).

Winslow Grange #320; in existence by 1894.

East Vassalboro Grange #322, 1895; still active.

Silver Lake Grange #327, China Village; 1895 or 1896.

Branch Mills Grange #336, Jan. 1, 1897 (organized in China, most of its life in Palermo); still active.

North Augusta Grange #348, in existence by 1899.

Sheepscot Lake Grange #445, in existence by 1905.

Benton Grange #458, 1906; still active.

China Lake Grange #578, also called China Grange; fall 1974-1976?, China Village.

19 Granges in the central Kennebec River valley, alphabetical by municipality

Albion (two) Albion Grange #181, 1875; Albion Grange #181, 1957.

Augusta (two) Capital Grange #248; North Augusta Grange #348.

Benton Grange #458.

China (three) China Grange #295; Silver Lake Grange #327; China (Lake) Grange #578.

Clinton (two) Clinton Grange #287, 1888; Clinton Grange #287, 1949.

Fairfield Center Victor Grange #49.

Palermo (two) Branch Mills Grange #336; Sheepscot Lake Grange #445.

Sidney Grange #194.

Vassalboro (three) Oak Grove Grange #167; Cushnoc Grange #204; East Vassalboro Grange #322.

Waterville had none, apparently.

Windsor Grange #284.

Winslow Grange #320.

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Wiggin, Ruby Crosby, Albion on the Narrow Gauge (1964).

Websites, miscellaneous.