Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Fairfield high schools

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by Mary Grow

This article continues the history of schooling in Fairfield with information on the town’s high schools. It begins with conflicting information about where the first high school classes were held.

One candidate is the former North Grammar School, at the intersection of Main Street and Western Avenue, near the Kennebec River, at the north end of the business district. The other is the former South Grammar School, on Burrill Street (which runs east-west perpendicular to the Kennebec at the south end of the business district). The South Grammar building is three blocks from the river.

In 1873, the Fairfield bicentennial history says, some of the rooms in a grammar school “at the corner of Main Street and Western Avenue” housed Fairfield’s first public high school, “with $500 raised for its support.” If this building is the one that became North Grammar School, that school dates from before 1873 – how much before, your writer has been unable to determine.

The Fairfield history says after the high school classes had taken over part of the Main Street grammar school, voters at the 1873 town meeting passed over (did not act on, thereby rejecting) an article to build a separate high school.

A document in the Fairfield Historical Society files says the first high school in 1873 was in the South Grammar building on Burrill Street. Yet another source says North Grammar hosted the high school until more space was needed and South Grammar was built (no date given). This source adds that in 1874, voters appropriated $500 for a free high school.

The chronology in the history says in 1890-91, voters finally agreed to provide Fairfield’s first high school building, on Burrill Street, for $5,000. Was this Burrill Street building (at least 20 years newer than the Main Street building) the one that became South Grammar School?

The 1904 Fairfield Register, found on line, alleges that the education offered in the 1873 high school’s early days “was hardly more than that received in the regular schools by the more advanced pupils.” The purpose of high school classes “was to offer to the older and more advanced pupils a chance to attend school during the winter months.”

The Register writer said voters appropriated $400 annually for the high school, “which gradually but surely raised its standard of scholarship,” until by 1904, graduates were ready for college. In the 1904 writer’s opinion, the school was “not provided with a suitable building,” but he hoped one would soon be constructed.

His hope was realized when Lawrence High School opened on Sept. 21, 1907.

A Puzzlement

On sale on line is a copy of the program for the Lawrence High School graduation held Friday, June 27, 1890, and identified as the 39th anniversary graduation. Your writer lacks the mathematical skill to make a high school that Fairfield sources say opened in 1907 have a 39th graduation in 1890.

Although the sale listing says the program is from Lawrence High School, Fairfield, Maine, nowhere on the document is a town named. Your writer looked on line, without success, for people prominent in the graduation ceremony – two ministers, the chairman of the high school committee who awarded diplomas, the graduating seniors who wrote the words and music for the closing hymn.

The senior class is listed on the fourth page of the program, first the girls and then the boys, each in alphabetical order. There were 17 girls and 12 boys in the class; the valedictorian was Ernest Clarence Jewell, who also wrote the music for the final hymn, and the salutatorian was Mildred Withington.

Lawrence High School’s name honors Edward Jones Lawrence (Jan. 1, 1833 – Nov. 27, 1918), who paid more than $60,000 for the high school building. In 1901, he had financed Lawrence Public Library.

The bicentennial history says Lawrence himself had only a grammar-school education. He made money in lumbering, street railroads, ship-building and other ventures, and supported local entrepreneurs Alvin Lombard (inventor of the Lombard hauler) and Martin Keyes (founder of Keyes Fibre).

After his first wife died in 1865, Lawrence married Hannah Shaw, of Carmel, by whom he had three daughters. The history says it was to further their education that he moved to Fairfield in 1884 from Shawmut, which had “only a grammar school.”

The first Lawrence High School was on the west side of High Street, not far from the Lawrences’ house. Photos show an elegant brick building with a windowed basement, two main floors and a roof with three more windows. Three arches decorate the ground-floor front, with the entrance door in the center; the second floor, too, has three decorated sections, and two-story arches rise on each side of these central adornments.

This building was “gutted by fire” on Feb. 15, 1925, the bicentennial history says. Classes were held in other buildings, including the 1888 Fairfield Opera House, while the High Street school was rebuilt; it “reopened in the spring of 1926.”

From the 1950s, Fairfield’s schools began moving to the present high school site on the west side of town. The High Street building remained educational, but grade levels there changed repeatedly; it is now Fairfield Primary School.

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Nineteenth-century Fairfield had a private college preparatory high school, known as Bunker’s or Bunker Academy, or Bunker Seminary. It was named for its founder and teacher, Naomi Bunker.

The bicentennial history writers took much of their information on this school from the School Houses writer. He found that Bunker had been a public school teacher (where or for how long, he did not say) when she decided to teach “practice school” in Bunker’s Hall (wherever that was) before opening her seminary.

This school was established about 1857 in the large brick house mill-owner William Kendall built in the 1790s at the corner of Lawrence Avenue and Newhall Street, a block west of Main Street. It was a college preparatory boarding school, and seemed to have three divisions in connected buildings: schoolrooms, a boarding house on the west and a gymnasium.

In addition to college preparatory classes, Bunker hired “competent teachers” for music and painting. “Many pupils were fitted for college at this school,” according to the School Houses writer.

He did not record when Bunker Seminary closed. After the closing, he wrote, “the building used for the school rooms” (apparently not the brick house) was moved to Elm Street, which parallels Lawrence Avenue a block north, and remodeled into a house.

Naomi Bunker’s name appears in two documents found on line.

In a 1923 booklet prepared for the centennial of Anson Academy, in North Anson, she is listed as a student there in 1844. (Other Bunkers named include five more who were students in 1844 and three graduates from the 1880s, one of whom, Fred W., Class of 1885, was a school trustee in 1923. Samuel Bunker was also a trustee, but apparently not a graduate.)

In the catalogue of the 1859 Somerset County teachers’ convention, held in North Anson from Aug. 22 through Aug. 26, Naomi Bunker is listed as a teacher from Kendall’s Mills (downtown Fairfield’s name until 1872) and a member of the six-person committee on resolutions.

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The two-story wooden grammar schools that might have hosted Fairfield’s first high-school classes, North Grammar and South Grammar, got attention from school Superintendent Will O. Hersey in the Fairfield town report for the year ending Feb. 10, 1915.

Hersey, in his seventh annual report to the town, mentioned the sudden death of South Grammar School Principal Katherine Kidder the previous fall. He said of her:

“As a teacher she was thorough, earnest and sympathetic. Although firm in the discharge of her duties she was respected and beloved by all, and her influence will long be felt in the school where she labored so faithfully.”

(Katherine H. [Merrill] Kidder was born in 1871 in Harmony, Maine. On Sept. 2, 1903, she married a dentist, Dr. Charles Fuller Kidder (1874 – 1932); Find a Grave records no children. She died Nov. 13, 1914. The Kidders are buried in Fairfield’s Maplewood Cemetery.)

Kidder’s successor as South Grammar principal was Emma Coombs, identified as a Castine Normal School graduate with several years’ experience.

At North Grammar School, Hersey’s topic was the repairs that were made in the summer and fall of 1914, with a special $1,200 appropriation at the 1914 town meeting. The goal was to deal with unsanitary toilets and a worn-out heating system.

The superintendent described the new heating system, which included a new boiler and, in classrooms, radiators instead of “the old steam pipes which were around the walls of the rooms.” Two radiators were added in the lower entry, welcome “especially in stormy weather when the children come in with wet clothing.”

The winter of 1914-15 had been less severe than the previous one, Hersey said, but a few days had tested the new system, “and we are pleased to say that the building was warmed to the satisfaction and comfort of all.”

For the toilets, Hersey explained that pipes were installed, “the cellar was dug out and leveled, and a concrete floor was made, so that now good accommodations are provided for a winter and rainy day playroom.” Then the money ran out, and work stopped.

School board members intended to ask 1915 town meeting voters to fund installing new toilets. But, Hersey, wrote, “Near the latter part of the fall term the need of the new toilets became absolutely necessary so that the board unanimously decided to have the work completed.”

The superintendent did not explain how or when the toilets were paid for.

The wooden North Grammar and South Grammar schools are similar in size and design. Both have two main floors and a basement with windows (in North Grammar in the 1950s, the toilets were in the basement; perhaps the ones installed in 1914?).

The buildings still stand in 2024, painted a bright red with white trim. North Grammar is commercial, South Grammar is an apartment building.

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Also in Fairfield is the Goodwill-Hinckley School, founded in 1889 by George Walter Hinckley (1853 – 1950). Readers are referred to its website, www.gwh.org, and to the May 20 and June 3, 2021, issues of The Town Line.

Main sources

Fairfield Historical Society Fairfield, Maine 1788-1988 (1988)
Fairfield Historical Society, records and files

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Education in Fairfield

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Charles E. Moody School at Goodwill-Hinckley School, in Hinckley.

by Mary Grow

After multiple postponements, this article really is about the history of education – elementary education; high schools next week – in Fairfield, the town next upstream from Waterville on the west bank of the Kennebec River. Your writer thanks the Fairfield Historical Society for generously sharing material on the topic.

The present downtown Fairfield is located on the river, near the southern border with Waterville. It was known as Kendall’s Mills until 1872.

The town had in the past six other villages that were business, manufacturing and/or social centers, still named on many maps. Along the river, running upstream, were Philbrook’s, Lyon’s, then Somerset Mills (now Shawmut); Nye’s Corner; and East Fairfield (now Hinckley). Inland, running roughly along roads connecting Oakland (south of Fairfield) to Norridgewock (north), were Fairfield Center; Quakertown, later Black’s Mills (now North Fairfield); and Larone.

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The 1988 Fairfield bicentennial history says the area was settled around 1771 and became a plantation in 1774. The Town of Fairfield was incorporated June 18, 1788. Its first town meeting was Aug. 19 of that year.

Not until 1793, however, according to the history, did voters support education. The measure that was passed is quoted: “to raise twenty five pounds to be paid in produce, corn and grain to be paid into the town treasurer for the use of the schools.”

The voters divided the town into five “classes” (apparently school districts), with five men appointed as overseers, each of the “class” he was in. These men were Elihu Boweman (Bowerman, who settled North Fairfield), Nymphus (Nymphas) Bodfish, Deacon John Tozer (Tozier), Joshua Blackwell and Captain William Kendil (Kendall, early Fairfield mill-owner).

A document in the Historical Society’s files says Josiah Burgess and Daniel Shepherd were the 1793 district-makers who drew the boundaries of each district. Three were inland, two on the Kennebec. In 1794, this source says, voters raised 60 pounds for education.

The Historical Society files include a paper titled School Houses. The author is not named and there is no date; it was written after 1892, because events that year are mentioned.

The author began: “It is certain that school houses had been built in several sections of the town prior to the year 1800.” He listed possible locations of four early buildings, all abandoned and some “taken down.” They might have been:

— On Norridgewock Road (now also Route 139), in North Fairfield, “north of the present residence of H. T. Choate”;
— On the road between Fairfield Center and East Fairfield, “near the cemetery”;
— On Ohio Hill, near Joshua Freeman’s farm (the present Ohio Hill Road runs from Fairfield Center to Nye’s Corner); and
— “[A]t or near the Center” – presumably Fairfield Center.

In 1803, the bicentennial history says, Fairfield was re-divided into 11 school districts. That and other sources continue: in 1826, there were 15 districts; in 1875, James Plummer was Fairfield’s first school supervisor; in 1879, there were 18 districts; in 1886, only 13 school buildings were “in good condition.”

A Dec. 7, 1842, clipping from the North American newspaper in Philadelphia described the fate of Fairfield’s Coval (Covell) schoolhouse: it burned down the evening of Nov. 23, 1842. Quoting another newspaper called The Clarion (an on-line source says a paper with that name was published in Skowhegan in the 1800s), the Philadelphia reporter said arson was the cause: “The Millerites had been holding a meeting in it, and it is supposed to have been set on fire by some opposed to such meetings.”

(Millerites were followers of William Miller, who believed that Christ’s Second Coming would occur in 1843 or 1844.)

School districts were abolished in 1893. In 1904, the bicentennial history says, there were 25 schools: “ten village [another source defines village as Fairfield, the business center on the Kennebec], thirteen rural, and two at Shawmut.”

The School Houses writer said that “probably one hundred years ago,” the North Grammar School lot, at the corner of Main Street and Western Avenue was home to “a small low building erected for school purposes and used for many years being the only school building in the village.”

About the time the Boston Company arrived (the Boston Company briefly owned mills in 1842), the writer said, the building was moved across the road and converted to a house. Later it was moved again, west on Western Avenue, and whenever the writer was writing, “still stands as one of the comfortable dwellings of that vicinity.”

The writer continued by mentioning “the first school in this section of town” in an Upper Main Street house (Main Street, also Route 201, is called Upper Main Street in more than one source). He listed two schools between 1845 and 1865, one in Mrs. Millie Philbrook’s house “where the Express Office now stands” and another in the old Bowling Alley, probably built in 1842.

The South Main Street schoolhouse was built about 1850. The writer said boys from the north and south schools fought each other at every opportunity. He added, “Some such feeling existed between the boys of Fairfield and Waterville and ‘sling shots’ and ‘iron knuckles’ made up a part of every boy’s armaments.”

School Houses includes a story the writer used to illustrate how discipline had changed. He claimed that a teacher, identified as the “wife of one of our present venerable citizens” had made a disobedient boy lie on the floor with his head toward the classroom door. When another boy “who had previously been sent from the room” opened the door to return, the door hit the troublemaker on the head

This penalty “was considered a just punishment for slight mischievousness,” the writer said. For more serious offenses, “justice was administered in larger doses of raw hide and feminine muscle.”

When the classroom was peaceful, the writer added, this teacher would frequently “have a French lad sing a French song” to keep things harmonious.

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Random references to school buildings are scattered through the bicentennial history.

An 1878 map of Fairfield Center shows a schoolhouse on the west side of the road leading south to Oakland. The accompanying text says the village had “the original Fairfield post office,” from 1807 until 1872, and was the town’s first business section.

The map shows the post office in a store south of the school and across the road, with a blacksmith shop and an unidentified “Shop” nearby. C. E. Hawes’ car (carriage?) shop is on the lot south of the schoolhouse. Farther north across the road are H. C. Burleigh’s store and the town house.

The town house began life as a union meeting house, until the Methodist Church was built on the north side of the intersection. The map shows the church at the intersection, and its parsonage a couple buildings north of the schoolhouse.

An on-line Fairfield history says the union meeting house was built in 1793-94, and in 1802, “the first permanent meeting house was established there” and served “as the town hall until 1875.” The still-standing church, identified on a contemporary on-line map as Fairfield Center United Methodist Church, was probably built in 1846.

An undated (probably also 1878) map of Shawmut, then called Somerset Mills, shows three rectangular buildings labeled “school houses.” They form three sides of a square facing south onto Main Street, which runs from what appears to be an earlier version of present Route 201 (Skowhegan Road) to the Kennebec River. The school buildings are at the intersection with the (unnamed) road.

The School Houses paper says two (not three) “old buildings near the county road” were “abandoned” after “the school building at Shawmut” was put up in 1892 (another source says 1898).

The village of Larone was in the north end of town, almost on the Norridgewock town line. The authors of the bicentennial history cited information – without dates – from an earlier Larone history by Will Winslow.

The Larone schoolhouse was “at what was called Whiting’s” (perhaps near Martin Stream, because a Whiting family had mills on the stream). It doubled as “a place of worship for all country gatherings.”

Winslow said the schoolroom was divided, with “the boys on one side and the girls on the other.” Its heating came first from a fireplace and later from “an old fashioned box stove.” He described the “high straight back seats” as narrow, hinged and designed for torture.

North Fairfield, the village between Fairfield Center and Larone that was first settled by Quakers in 1782, had its own post office until 1908, the bicentennial history says. A 1913 photograph labeled North Fairfield shows a group of buildings by a stream, including a corn shop, a blacksmith shop and a store; and atop a hill several hundred yards away, a white building identified as a schoolhouse.

This schoolhouse appears to be a one-story wooden building with a peaked roof, quite close to the road that disappears over the hill.

Main sources

Fairfield Historical Society Fairfield, Maine 1788-1988 (1988)
Fairfield Historical Society, records and files

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: William Mathews of Waterville

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William Mathews

by Mary Grow

As noted last week, this biographical sketch of Professor William Mathews, LL.D. (Doctor of Laws), is another follow-up to an earlier account, the Nov. 21 article on Waterville residents Jeremiah Chaplin and James Hobbs Hanson. Mathews was mentioned as a critic of Rev. Chaplin’s preaching. He also wrote the chapter in Edwin Carey Whittemore’s 1902 Waterville history on Waterville in the 1820s through 1840s, when he was young there.

Turns out Mathews lived a life your writer thought might interest readers, especially those who marvel at how widely 19th-century central Mainers traveled.

As usual, your writer found discrepancies in others’ accounts of his life. She has made her preferred source the biography in Arthur J. Roberts’ chapter on teachers in Whittemore’s history, believing Mathews probably proofread the section about himself.

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An on-line biography of Mathews calls him “an author, editor and sometime college professor.” Henry Kingsbury, in his Kennebec County history, called him a newspaper man. Roberts chose “teacher and author.”

Mathews was born in Waterville, July 28, 1818 (a little over a month after Professor Chaplin came to town). His parents were Simeon and Clymena (Esty) Mathews.

Simeon was born in Gray, Maine, on June 8, 1785, and came to Winslow in 1794 with his father. He became a successful businessman; his son mentioned his boat Eagle that brought supplies up the Kennebec for his stores in “Waterville, Fairfield, Skowhegan, China, and East Vassalborough.” Simeon died in Waterville on Dec. 24, 1841.

Clymena was born in New Hampshire in 1798, FamilySearch says. She and Simeon were married Sept. 30, 1817, in Winslow; she died in Waterville in 1867. William was the oldest and longest-lived of their five sons and one daughter, according to FamilySearch.

Roberts said from the age of nine to the age of 13, William Mathews prepared for college “at the Maine Wesleyan Seminary [founded in 1824 in Kents Hill; now Kents Hill School], and China, Monmouth, Bloomfield [in what is now Skowhegan], and Waterville academies.”

When he was 13, he entered Waterville College, graduating in 1835 at the age of 17.

Henry Prince, in his chapter on the press in Whittemore’s history, wrote that Mathews’ newspaper career began in 1832, when he and Daniel Wing published eight issues of a four-page newspaper called The Watervillonian.

In 1834, Mathews and F. R. Wells edited and Wing printed the North American Galaxy, or Watervillonian Revived. Whittemore, in his summary history of Waterville’s first century, quoted the description: “A semi-monthly journal devoted to Tales, Essays, Music, Biography, Poetry, Anecdotes, etc., besides a great many things that it ain’t devoted to at all.” It ran for four issues.

For the next four years, in Roberts’ version, Mathews studied law “alternately” in Timothy Boutelle’s Waterville office and at Harvard Law School. During this period, Whittemore wrote, he was the “secretary and moving spirit” when the Waterville Lyceum (the town’s second debating society) was organized in 1837. In 1839, he got an LL.B. (Bachelor of Laws) from Harvard College, Roberts said.

During the year 1839-1840, Roberts wrote, Mathews was “in Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington,” and taught at Amelia Court-house, Virginia. (The present Amelia Court House is about 150 miles from Washington, almost 200 miles from Baltimore and almost 300 miles from Philadelphia.)

Mathews was admitted to the Kennebec Bar in 1840 (or 1838; sources differ) and practiced in Waterville and Benton from the spring of 1841 to 1843. On May 29, 1841, he and Wing began publishing a family newspaper again named The Watervillonian. An on-line source says the paper covered “literature, morals, agriculture, news, etc.”

In 1842 the paper was renamed the Yankee Blade, with Mathews sole proprietor. Lack of support in Waterville led to a move to Gardiner in 1843 and to Boston in 1847.

Prince quoted from a letter Matthews sent him in which Mathews claimed that in 1841, the paper started with 400 subscribers, but “by filling its columns to a large extent with elegant extracts from old and modern English writers, from Chaucer to Carlyle,” he reduced the list to 250 within a year. The first year’s profit was $600.

Mathews sold the paper in 1856 and moved to Chicago (no one explained why). There, an on-line source says, he first edited “a financial weekly” while also “running a department at the Chicago Daily Tribune, contributing to other newspapers and lecturing (topics unspecified).

In 1859 he became the Chicago YMCA librarian. More than one source says he was invited to chair the Department of English and Rhetoric at the University of Chicago, though none explains why. He taught there from 1862 to 1875.

Colby University awarded him his honorary LL.D. in 1868.

In 1873 he published a collection of his Chicago Tribune essays he titled Getting on in the World. This book and its 1874 successor, The Great Conversers and Other Essays, sold so well that he retired from teaching to became a full-time writer, translator and editor. Roberts listed nine of his books.

An on-line introduction to an edition of his Hours with Men and Books claims his fame was undeserved. It begins:

“A wildly popular author, an ivy-league attorney, a university professor and a plagiarist: Mathews made his mark in American literary fame in the late 1800’s because his literary larceny was never discovered. From his training it is no surprise. He was smart and had friends in high places.”

Whittemore contributors said Mathews was back in Waterville in July 1879 for the semi-centennial graduation exercises at Waterville Academy, during which he shared a paper he wrote on the early history of the school.

Both on-line biographies say he moved to Boston in 1880 and continued writing. One adds that between 1880 and 1888 he spent almost three years traveling in Europe.

In addition to contributing a chapter to the 1902 Waterville history, Mathews – described as “of Boston” – is listed as a participant in the 1902 celebration. Whittemore praised his books and wrote, “We hail him as our literary Nestor and are glad that his presence graces this occasion.”

(Nestor was a character in Homer’s Iliad, an elderly warrior who advised the younger men. The Encyclopedia Britannica calls him “sage and pious.” Wikipedia says his advice was respected, though it was not always sound and was accompanied by boasting.)

Roberts said Mathews married three times, listing his wives as in 1845, Mary Elizabeth Dingley, of Winslow; in 1850, Isabella (Isabelle, Isabel) Marshall, of China; and in 1865, Harriet Griggs, of Chicago. No source mentions any children.

On-line sources say Mary Elizabeth was born Oct. 16, 1827, in Winslow. She died in Winslow or Waterville Jan. 28, 1848, “after a lingering illness,” and is buried in Waterville’s Pine Grove cemetery.

Isabella was Isabelle Isaphene Marshall, daughter of prominent China businessman and politician Alfred Marshall and his wife, Lydia Brackett. Isabelle was born March 9, 1826; she and Mathews were married June 15, 1850, and she went to Chicago with him, where she died Oct. 9, 1863, aged 37.

Harriet was born Nov. 9, 1833, in Chicago, died Oct. 6, 1920, in Brookline, Massachusetts, and is buried in Pine Grove Cemetery, according to the website watervillegenealogy.com.

Another on-line source says Mathews was injured in a fall in 1907 and for the last two years of his life “continued his literary work by dictation.” He died Feb. 14, 1909, in Boston. One source says he, too, is buried in Pine Grove Cemetery; Find a Grave lists his parents, Simeon and Clymena, and other family members, but not William.

More on Winslow’s Brick School

Cushman Rd. school, south side. (photo by Roland D. Hallee)

One more bit of information about the Brick School, on Cushman Road, in Winslow, from a reader. She said a family named Britton owned the land on which the schoolhouse stands before the Giddings acquired it. They built the still-standing house next door in 1794.

Her great-grandmother on her father’s side was a Britton, and her father called the building the Britton schoolhouse.

Two Isaac Brittons are buried in the North Vassalboro Village Cemetery, she said. Find a Grave lists four Brittons there: Isaac (May 9, 1790 – Nov. 1, 1859); his wife, Emily Britton (Aug. 9, 1793 – Sept. 10, 1864) (her maiden name is not given); their son, Isaac Wilson Britton (March 12, 1816 – March 31, 1898), born in Attleboro, Massachusetts, and died in Winslow: and their daughter-in-law, Abigail or Abby (Garland) Britton (March 14, 1822 – Dec. 20, 1906).

Contributors to Find a Grave wrote that Isaac W. and Abby had one daughter, Abbie (1854 -1928), who was born in Winslow and married in 1881 Charles Fletcher Johnson (Feb. 14, 1859 – Feb. 15, 1930), also a Winslow native.

Johnson attended Waterville Classical Institute and graduated from Bowdoin in 1879. Before and/or after serving as Machias High School principal from 1881 to 1886, he studied law, learning enough to be admitted to the bar and to set up a law practice in Waterville in 1886, which lasted until 1911.

He was mayor of Waterville in 1893; unsuccessful Democratic gubernatorial candidate in 1892 and 1894 (Republicans held the Maine governorship from 1882 to 1912); member of the Maine House of Representatives, 1905 to 1907; and United States Senator, 1911 to 1917 (losing a bid for re-election in 1916 to Republican Frederick Hale, who served until he retired at the end of his fourth term, in 1940).

On Oct. 1, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson nominated former senator Johnson as Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the 1st District. Wikipedia says the Senate confirmed him the same day; he served from 1917 until he assumed senior status (semi-retirement) on April 30, 1929.

Abbie and Charles had a son who died at 11 years old, and a daughter, Emma L. (Johnson) Abbott (1886 – 1963). Emma and her husband, Dr. Henry Wilson Abbott (1884-1957) were the paternal grandparents of the reader who initiated this quest.

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Education in Winslow Schools – Continued

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Cushman Rd. school, north side. (photo by Roland D. Hallee)

by Mary Grow

This week’s article was to be a discussion of early schools in Fairfield, continuing the subseries on early education, but again your writer has been distracted. The first diversion, this week, is back to Winslow elementary schools, about which summary information was provided in the Nov. 7 issue.

Next week, yet another diversion will talk about a Waterville native who was an educator, among other careers. After that, Fairfield – maybe.

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Your writer is indebted to Tony Waraskevich, of Waterville, for reminding her about the Brick School, the Winslow schoolhouse still standing on the east side of Cushman Road (Route 32). It has been on the National Register of Historic Places since April 18, 1977.

A sign on the building dates it to 1806. The application for listing on the National Register says it was built between 1800 and 1820, listing as evidence:

— The lack of mention of the building in town records before a “hiatus” in record retention beginning in 1799; and
— An April 24, 1820, deed to the surrounding land that excludes “the ground on which the brick school house on the lot now stands, with the door yard.” This area “is hereby reserved for the use and occupation of School District No. 5 so long as said District shall keep the present brick school house in repair suitable to hold a school in and no longer.”

In a Dec. 9, 2014, Central Maine Newspapers article (found on line), staff writer Evan Belanger, citing “an architect,” narrowed the time to between 1800 and 1810. Belanger wrote that building a schoolhouse was a condition the State of Massachusetts imposed on settlers in Winslow under its Kennebec Valley Land Trust program for Revolutionary War veterans.

The building is a single story, nearly square, with a peaked shingled roof (Waraskevich says the shingles are cedar) and a shingled triangular wall under the roof on the east and west ends.

The Town Line editor Roland Hallee added that the bricks are made from mud from “a bog on what is now the Patterson Rd., off the China Rd.” A contemporary on-line map shows this dead-end road running south off China Road (Route 137) west of and across Outlet Stream from Cushman Road; the two are roughly parallel.

Henry Kingsbury commented in his Kennebec County history that “Good clay for making brick may be found in many places in Winslow.” As was his habit, he identified several of the places by 1892 landowners: Ira Getchell’s farm, Stephen Abbott’s house, the Hampden Keith place. Some were “near the river”: one was “near North Vassalboro.”

The brick schoolhouse stands on rough granite blocks barely visible above the sod. There are no windows on the west (road) side. On the north side are two rectangular windows; on the east side, two more plus a smaller one in the gable; on the south side, two more, with a narrow wooden door at the eastern end.

Cushman Rd. school, south side. (photo by Roland D. Hallee)

The door does not open directly into the schoolroom, but into a narrow entry, described as a coatroom in the application for historic listing, between the outer west wall and the rear wall of the classroom. The middle of the interior wall is occupied by a large open fireplace; its squat brick chimney rises above the ridgepole near the west end of the roof.

Frank Beard and Stephen Kaplan, in their application for historic listing, commented that “The woodwork around the fireplace reflects in a very restrained manner, the delicacy and low relief typical of Federal treatment.”

Later in the application, they wrote, “The Brick School testifies to early determination to provide public education and its staunch construction betokens a permanency which suggests that its builders contemplated a continuing commitment to this goal.”

The building is now owned by the Town of Winslow and managed by its Historical Preservation Committee. An early classroom is recreated inside.

Eight rows of double wooden desks face east, four on each side of a center aisle. The front of each desk, except those in the two front rows, forms the back of the seats in the row ahead.

Each seat is easily wide enough for two children, and should there be more than 16 students, a third could probably squeeze in.

At the east end of the room, the taller teacher’s desk faces the rows of student desks. There is a small table beside it.

Multiple sources say the building stopped being used as a schoolhouse in or before 1865. Its history is unknown for more than a century; it reportedly stood empty part of the time and was used for storage at other times.

In 1972, the Winslow Historical Society acquired it, and in the 1990s invested more than $20,000 in rehabilitation.

Belanger wrote that Francis Giddings owned the brick school for many years. When the Historical Society disbanded late in the 1990s, his grandchildren became owners of the building.

They offered it to the town, instead of paying around $200 in back taxes. At that time, the schoolhouse was estimated to need up to $13,500 in immediate masonry work “using historically accurate methods” (the cost would be considerably less with modern methods). In addition, Belanger said, Councilor Raymond Caron, who had been a Historical Society member, recommended setting aside another $1,000 to $2,000 for ongoing maintenance.

After a couple months’ discussion among town and school officials, the town council voted unanimously to accept the former school, and the Historical Preservation Committee became its guardian.

Despite the reflection in the window of the house next door, a period replica of the school room can be seen. (photo by Roland D. Hallee)

* * * * * *

Waraskevich listed three more former brick elementary schoolhouses in Winslow, all now demolished:

— A one-story building that stood “[b]etween the now closed Junior High School (original Winslow High School built in 1928) and the active Winslow High School/ Junior High School on Danielson Street.” Its site is now a parking lot.
— A two-story building, the Boston Avenue School, “[n]ear the present elementary school, north of the High School.”
— Another two-story building “[o]n Halifax Street, diagonally across the street from Monument Park…called the Halifax Street School.” Waraskevich said he did not know whether this school was built in 1915 after the “wooden 3-story high school building near there burned in 1914.” The site of the Halifax Street School is now “a playground for kids in the neighborhood.”

Waraskevich also mentioned St. John Regional Catholic School, which your writer ignored because it was “too modern” – early 20th century almost to the present. The school opened in 1927 in St. John the Baptist Church, on Monument Street, in Winslow; moved into a separate school building on South Garand Street in 1960; and closed at the end of the 2019-2020 school year.

An article in the Jan. 23, 2020, issue of The Town Line quoted Marianne Pelletier, then the superintendent of Maine Catholic Schools: “The sad truth is that rising costs, a decline in school-aged children in the Waterville/Winslow area, and an increased demand for financial assistance made it unfeasible to keep the school open.”

An on-line source says Pelletier retired at the end of the 2023-24 school year, after five years as superintendent. Her successor, Shelly Wheeler, was “raised in Vassalboro,” and her career in education included teaching math in Winslow.

Main sources

Beard, Frank A., and Stephen Kaplan, National Register of Historic Places Inventory – Nomination Form, The Brick School, Oct. 22, 1976
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed. Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892)
Waraskevich, Tony, emails

Websites, miscellaneous

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Jeremiah Chaplin & James Hanson

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Rev. Jeremiah Chaplin

by Mary Grow

Instead of moving to the next town, this article will provide abbreviated biographies of two men mentioned in last week’s story of educational development in Waterville.

Jeremiah Chaplin (Jan. 2, 1776 – May 7, 1841) was primarily a Baptist minister. Born in the section of Rowley, Massachusetts, that separated in 1838 to become Georgetown, he took his first position as a minister in 1802. He preached in Massachusetts, New York, Maine (including while he was college president in Waterville) and Connecticut.

James Hobbs Hanson (June 26, 1816 – April 21, 1894) was primarily an educator. Born in China, Maine, he began teaching when he was 19 and continued until a few days before his death.

* * * * * *

The Massachusetts legislature chartered the Maine Literary and Theological Institution in 1813, at the request of the Baptist church leaders in the District of Maine. Waterville was picked as its site, and in 1818 Rev. Jeremiah Chaplin was appointed professor of theology.

The institution became Waterville College in 1821; recognized donor Gardner Colby by becoming Colby University in 1867; and in 1899 became Colby College.

This work by James Hobbs Hanson, has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.

Chaplin’s family was Baptist, Wikipedia says. He graduated in 1799 from Brown University, “a school with an historical Baptist affiliation,” as class valedictorian, with a B.A. He tutored at Brown for a year (or two or three; sources differ) and then studied for the ministry under Thomas Baldwin at Boston’s Second Baptist Church.

His first position was in Danvers, Massachusetts, in 1802, where he preached (except for a brief period at New York City’s First Baptist Church) until called to Waterville in February 1818. On April 16, 1806, he married Marcia Scott O’Brien (born March 6, 1784), of Newburyport, Massachusetts.

Edward W. Hall, in his chapter on Colby in Rev. Edwin Carey Whittemore’s Waterville history, wrote that in Danvers, Chaplin “had charge of the theological students of the Massachusetts Baptist Education Society,” perhaps explaining why he was chosen for the Waterville job.

Arthur Roberts, in his chapter on Waterville teachers in the same book, said Chaplin first intended to refuse the position, but changed his mind “after a night of prayer and what he regarded as a special revelation of the will of God.”

According to FamilySearch, by the time the Chaplins came to Waterville on June 25, 1818, the family included John, 11; Hannah, nine; Jeremiah, four; Marcia, three; Adoniram, two; and Annie, who had been born in January 1818. Three more daughters and (maybe; evidence is inconclusive) a son were born in Waterville.

Your writer assumed the children came to Waterville with their parents. However, Hall wrote that the Chaplins came with two children and “several of his pupils” (seven, George Dana Boardman Pepper suggested, in his chapter on churches in Whittemore’s history).

Several sources summarized the journey, quoting Mrs. Chaplin’s letters and diary. The family sailed up the Kennebec to Augusta on a sloop named “Hero.” From Augusta to Waterville they were in a longboat with sails; when the wind died, “the young men of the party landed and dragged the boat by a rope.”

Mrs. Chaplin was pleased to meet friendly neighbors whom she described as not “such ignorant, uncultivated beings as some have imagined,” but “people of education and refinement.”

The Chaplins’ house, at the north end of the present downtown, was also the Institution’s first instructional building. Henry Kingsbury wrote in his Kennebec County history that Chaplin taught there from 1818 until 1821, when South Hall was finished.

Three more buildings went up in the 1820s and 1830s, and the campus moved a few blocks north on College Avenue. Its buildings dominated that part of Waterville until 1931, when Colby College relocated to Mayflower Hill, on the west side of the city.

Pepper called Waterville’s First Baptist Church “in a sense, a child of the college.” He wrote that when Chaplin arrived in Waterville, he was promptly invited to preach on Sundays. On Aug. 27, a group of 20 men and women, seven (include both adult Chaplins) connected with the Institution and 13 former members of the Sidney Baptist Church, met at the Chaplin house and organized the First Baptist Church of Waterville.

Pepper said Chaplin’s sermons drew large and attentive audiences. Adjectives he quoted to describe his style included “clear” and “cogent” from one source; from another “chaste, simple, suited to the subject” and “enlivened with striking illustrations.”

Professor William Mathews, author of the chapter on Waterville in The Olden Time in Whittemore’s history, gave a different view.

Mathews wrote that until the Baptist church was dedicated in 1826, Waterville’s only religious meeting house was “an unpainted building resting on blocks, afterwards converted, with some changes, into a town hall” on the common, facing south (downriver). This hall was used by multiple denominations, but mostly by the Baptists, led by Chaplin.

Mathews wrote: “He was a tall, spare man, very grave in look and utterance; and well do I remember how weary at the age of six or seven I used to be, when, to my inexpressible relief, he finished his sixthly, or seventhly, or eighthly, and closed the big quarto Bible, and – as it seemed to me – his protracted and ponderous discourse.”

Mathews also gave Chaplin credit for an occasional “dry and pungent witticism.” The example he gave was Chaplin’s announcement that a Unitarian minister was going to preach in the church building that afternoon, while the Gospel – emphasized – would be preached at the same time in the nearby schoolhouse (by Chaplin).

Chaplin was made the college’s first president in 1821, a position he held until he resigned in 1833. According to Pepper, he continued as the Baptists’ minister, for free, until the church hired its first pastor in October 1829 (or, Kingsbury said, co-pastors in 1823).

After leaving Waterville in 1833, Chaplin preached in Rowley, Massachusetts, and Wilmington, Connecticut, before moving to Hamilton, New York, where he died in 1841.

Chaplin’s books included biographies of Henry Dunster, Harvard College’s first president; Charles Sumner; Benjamin Franklin; and Ulysses Grant. He also published, in 1881, “Chips from the White House; or, Selections from the speeches, conversations, diaries, letters, and other writings, of all the presidents of the United States.”

Chaplin helped raise money for a building for Waterville Academy, the college’s preparatory school, in 1829. More significant was his help to Gardner Colby (1810 – 1879) and his family after Colby’s father died in 1814. By the 1860s, Colby was a wealthy Boston businessman, and Waterville College was struggling; Colby’s generous donations saved – and renamed – it.

* * * * * *

After James Hobbs Hanson’s death in 1894, the Colby University trustees published a 42-page booklet of prose and verse tributes “in memory of an honored and beloved associate.” The first essay, by W. H. Spencer, D.D., began with biographical information that supplemented Kingsbury’s brief account.

Both writers were clear that Hanson came from a farming family.

Kingsbury wrote that when Hanson was 18, he “left the farm” in China to go to China Academy, in China Village, “where he was fitted for college.”

Spencer said “before he left the farm” he had a life-changing religious conversion under China Baptist Church pastor Daniel Bartlett. Bartlett baptized Hanson in China Lake on March 26, 1835, “the ice being cut for the purpose.”

His first teaching position was in 1835, in Penobscot County, Spencer said (no town named). Next he taught two terms on Vinalhaven Island, then a term in “a village school in Searsmont.”

Earlier, Hanson’s mother had persuaded him to try singing school, where he displayed unexpected talent. In Searsmont, Spencer said, he taught a singing school; finding it paid better than ordinary schools, he taught three more singing schools “the next winter.”

These teaching jobs paid his tuition at China Academy and at Waterville College, from which he graduated in1842.

After graduation, Kingsbury said, he taught continuously, and in the five decades to 1892 “he has not been absent from the school room for a week altogether for any cause.”

His first job, Spencer wrote, was in Hampden, Maine, for three terms. He applied to be principal of Hampden Academy, did not get the job and “was obliged to return to his old home on the farm in China.”

Spencer credited this disappointment to Providence, because, he said, it led Hanson to the principalship of Waterville Academy, where he found “the real work of his life” and “his destined career.”

(As summarized last week, Waterville Academy, founded in 1829, was renamed Waterville Classical Institute in 1865 and Coburn Classical Institute in 1882.)

Starting in 1843 with five students (two of them girls, Kingsbury said), Hanson brought the Academy to a peak enrollment of 308 and led to its informal name, “Dr. Hanson’s school,” before he resigned in 1854.

Invited to become principal of Eastport High School, he worked there from 1854 to 1857. Next, he became principal of Portland Boys High School, “which he brought up from a state of lax discipline to excellent efficiency.”

He stayed in Portland eight years, 1857 to 1865, the last two “in charge of a private school,” Spencer said. In 1865, Waterville College President James Tift Champlin brought him back to Waterville Classical Institute. There he stayed until the week he died, when he “turned over his classes to the substitute teachers” and went home.

Writing in 1892, Kingsbury called Hanson “an untiring and energetic principal.” Spencer summarized: “It was duty before pleasure with him, and the habit of a lifetime brought him his pleasure in duty.”

Speaking at Hanson’s funeral, Rev. A. L. Lane talked about the many hours Hanson spent helping students, not only in class but outside when they needed extra tutoring or to make up work after an absence.

He also mentioned the debt Waterville’s public high schools owed to Hanson and the Institute: the Institute was the only high school from 1864 to 1876, and since 1876, he said, “every high school principal” and many teachers had been institute graduates.

Colby University President Beniah Longley Whitman called Hanson “An untiring student, a great teacher, a consecrated Christian, a faithful friend,” and praised the quality of the students his school sent to Colby. Hanson was a Colby trustee from 1862 until he died.

The alumni tribute, prepared by Rev. C. V. Hanson, summarized Hanson’s personal life. (Rev. Charles Veranus Hanson [Aug. 30, 1844 – November 1899] was not closely related to James Hobbs Hanson.)

Hanson’s first wife was Sarah Boardman Marston, of Waterville; they were married in 1845, and she died in 1853. On Sept. 16, 1854, he married Mary E. Field, from Sidney. They had three children, a daughter who died in infancy, a second daughter who graduated from Colby in 1881 and a son who graduated from Colby in 1883.

The daughter, Sophie May, married a man named Pierce and lived in Waterville in 1894. Her brother, Frank Herbert Hanson, was in 1892 general secretary of the Zanesville, Ohio, Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) (Kingsbury), and by 1894 principal of the Washington School, in New Jersey (C. V. Hanson).

Mary Hanson “was for many years the principal of the primary department in the Institute.” She was also the first president of the Waterville branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, organized in 1878. In 1902, she wrote the chapter on the Waterville Woman’s Association in Whittemore’s history of Waterville.

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Education: Waterville, Winslow high schools

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by Mary Grow

Before moving on to 19th-century Winslow and Waterville high schools, your writer will share one more item about Waterville grammar schools. With its ramifications, it was too long for last week’s article.

Readers learned last week that Waterville school authorities once created two classrooms in the town hall. Following is another example of improvised classroom space, from Henry Kingsbury’s 1892 Kennebec County history.

Kingsbury quoted a resident’s article in the April 21, 1882, “Waterville Mail” remembering when George Dana Boardman taught in “Lemuel Dunbar’s carpenter shop,” because there was no schoolhouse in his newly-created district.

Your writer thought it appropriate to add that Boardman (Feb. 8, 1801 – Feb. 11, 1831) was an internationally known missionary, and Dunbar (May 3, 1781 – c. Aug. 6, 1865) did important work in Waterville.

Boardman, a native of Livermore, Maine, was half the graduating class at the Aug. 1, 1822, first commencement at Waterville College (now Colby College).

He taught at least one term of school in Dunbar’s shop in 1820, while still a student, according to Aaron Appleton Plaisted’s chapter on early settlers in Rev. Edwin Carey Whittemore’s 1902 Waterville history. On July 16 of that year, Kingsbury said, Baptist minister Rev. Jeremiah Chaplin baptized Boardman.

After graduation, according to Wikipedia, Boardman was a Waterville College tutor in 1822-1823, before he went to Andover (Massachusetts) Theological Seminary. When he was ordained a Baptist minister in West Yarmouth, Maine, on Feb. 16, 1825, Wikipedia says Chaplin, by then Waterville College’s President, was a speaker.

On July 4, 1825, Boardman married Sarah Hall (Nov. 4, 1803 – Sept. 1, 1845), from Alstead, New Hampshire. On July 16, they sailed for Calcutta, on their way to Burma (now Myanmar), where they spent their lives as missionaries.

The couple lost at least two sons in infancy; the survivor they named George Dana Boardman (frequently called “the Younger,” Wikipedia says). After Boardman’s early death from consumption (tuberculosis) in Burma, Sarah married another missionary and associate, Adoniram Judson.

* * * * * *

The other half of Boardman’s class was Ephraim Tripp (c. 1799 – April 7, 1871). After graduation, according to on-line information about Waterville/Colby graduates, he served as principal of Hebron Academy in 1822-1823. Then he, too, became a tutor at his alma mater, from 1823 to 1827.

During these years, according to the chapter in Whittemore’s history on Waterville churches, Tripp was one of the three-man building committee for the First Baptist Church, planned in 1824 and dedicated Dec 6, 1826. The dedication ceremony included “a sermon by Dr. Chaplin.”

Later in his life, Tripp was a teacher in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and in Mississippi, and was Clerk of Courts in Carroll County, Mississippi. He died in Winona, Mississippi (now the Montgomery County seat), at the age of 72.

(The author of the chapter on churches in the Waterville history is “George Dana Boardman Pepper, D.D., LL.D., Lately President of Colby College.”

(Pepper [Feb. 5, 1833 – Jan. 30, 1913] was the fourth and last child of John and Eunice [Hutchinson] Pepper. Born in Ware, Massachusetts, he attended two seminaries and Amherst College. From 1860 to 1865, he was pastor of Waterville’s First Baptist Church. Changing to education, he taught religious subjects before and after serving as Colby College’s ninth president from 1882 to 1889. Religion ran in the family; Find a Grave identifies his father as Deacon and one of his older brothers as Rev.)

* * * * * *

Lemuel Dunbar was born in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, and married Cordana Fobes there on June 23, 1806, according to Find a Grave. This source says he bought land in Waterville Oct. 1, 1805; Plaisted said he moved to Waterville around 1808. They agree he built his house and shop at the corner of Main and North streets, at the north end of the present downtown.

Sources disagree on how many children Dunbar had. One implies that Cordana died and he remarried; Find a Grave says Cordana lived until 1869.

Their oldest son was Otis Holmes Dunbar (May 22, 1807 – Sept. 30, 1892), like his father a carpenter. Find a Grave says he was born in Penobscot, Maine; married Mary Talbot in Winslow, Maine, in 1836; worked in Maine and “the Boston area”; and by June 1860 was living in Princeton, Illinois, where he died. His body was returned to Waterville for burial in Pine Grove Cemetery with family members.

Find a Grave says the Dunbars had nine children, born between 1807 and 1826, and lists three daughters and three sons buried in Pine Grove Cemetery. Youngest son Lemuel was the only one still alive in 1902, Plaisted wrote.

Chaplin taught the first Waterville College classes in July 1818 in a house not far from Dunbar’s shop, according to Edward W. Hall’s chapter on Colby in Whittemore’s history.

Hall continued, “In 1821 the South College was built and eighteen rooms finished besides fitting up a part of the building for a chapel. The second dormitory, known as the North College…was built in 1822.” Dunbar was the carpenter for both buildings, he said.

By 1902, Plaisted said, Dunbar’s original house had been removed and replaced, and the shop had been converted to a house “now occupied by Mr. A. M. Dunbar” (the first Lemuel’s grandson?).

* * * * * *

Your writer’s next topics are Winslow and Waterville high schools, about which she has found little second-hand information. Long-time readers will remember that second-hand information is important: original research, in enclosed spaces among unknown people, has been forbidden since this series started early in the Covid epidemic.

The earliest information your writer found about Winslow high schools was from Kingsbury. He said in 1892, Winslow appropriated $250 to support two free high schools. One, he said, was in “the village of Winslow” and the other “in the eastern part of the town near the Baptist church.” That year they had 80 students between them.

Two on-line sites provide tantalizing bits of information from the first half of the 20th century. One says a wooden, three-story high school building on Halifax Street (which was then Getchell Stret) burned in 1914 and was rebuilt on the same lot in 1915. Halifax Street, also Route 100, runs east from the Kennebec at Fort Halifax.

Another site says the new high school that opened on Danielson Street in 1929 replaced the previous schools, plural. The Danielson Street school started out housing grades seven through 12, but seventh grade was soon moved elsewhere. Danielson Street, site of the current Winslow High School, is several blocks north of Halifax Street.

* * * * * *

Your writer’s short part-article on Waterville’s high schools in the Sept. 9, 2021, issue of “The Town Line” is unsatisfactory, in spite of editor Roland Hallee’s attractive illustrations. The following paragraphs will expand it a bit:

Elwood T. Wyman, in his chapter on public schools in Whittemore’s history, listed the “masters” of Waterville’s public high school “since its permanent organization in 1876.” There were nine of them up to 1902, and Richard W. Sprague, Colby Class of 1901, was about to become the tenth. Wyman commented that “every one of the masters in the list quoted has been a Colby graduate.”

This permanently organized school was not Waterville’s first high school, but information on previous ones is scanty. From what Wyman wrote, it appears that by the 1830s, some, at least, of the district schools provided some high-school-level courses. Wyman mentioned that in 1855, “Latin and French were authorized as studies in the high school.”
Education Winslow and Waterville high schools number 224 for Nov 14 2024

Before moving on to 19th-century Winslow and Waterville high schools, your writer will share one more item about Waterville grammar schools. With its ramifications, it was too long for last week’s article.

Readers learned last week that Waterville school authorities once created two classrooms in the town hall. Following is another example of improvised classroom space, from Henry Kingsbury’s 1892 Kennebec County history.

Kingsbury quoted a resident’s article in the April 21, 1882, “Waterville Mail” remembering when George Dana Boardman taught in “Lemuel Dunbar’s carpenter shop,” because there was no schoolhouse in his newly-created district.

Your writer thought it appropriate to add that Boardman (Feb. 8, 1801 – Feb. 11, 1831) was an internationally known missionary, and Dunbar (May 3, 1781 – c. Aug. 6, 1865) did important work in Waterville.

Boardman, a native of Livermore, Maine, was half the graduating class at the Aug. 1, 1822, first commencement at Waterville College (now Colby College).

He taught at least one term of school in Dunbar’s shop in 1820, while still a student, according to Aaron Appleton Plaisted’s chapter on early settlers in Rev. Edwin Carey Whittemore’s 1902 Waterville history. On July 16 of that year, Kingsbury said, Baptist minister Rev. Jeremiah Chaplin baptized Boardman.

After graduation, according to Wikipedia, Boardman was a Waterville College tutor in 1822-1823, before he went to Andover (Massachusetts) Theological Seminary. When he was ordained a Baptist minister in West Yarmouth, Maine, on Feb. 16, 1825, Wikipedia says Chaplin, by then Waterville College’s President, was a speaker.

On July 4, 1825, Boardman married Sarah Hall (Nov. 4, 1803 – Sept. 1, 1845), from Alstead, New Hampshire. On July 16, they sailed for Calcutta, on their way to Burma (now Myanmar), where they spent their lives as missionaries.

The couple lost at least two sons in infancy; the survivor they named George Dana Boardman (frequently called “the Younger,” Wikipedia says). After Boardman’s early death from consumption (tuberculosis) in Burma, Sarah married another missionary and associate, Adoniram Judson.

* * * * * *

The other half of Boardman’s class was Ephraim Tripp (c. 1799 – April 7, 1871). After graduation, according to on-line information about Waterville/Colby graduates, he served as principal of Hebron Academy in 1822-1823. Then he, too, became a tutor at his alma mater, from 1823 to 1827.

During these years, according to the chapter in Whittemore’s history on Waterville churches, Tripp was one of the three-man building committee for the First Baptist Church, planned in 1824 and dedicated Dec 6, 1826. The dedication ceremony included “a sermon by Dr. Chaplin.”

Later in his life, Tripp was a teacher in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and in Mississippi, and was Clerk of Courts in Carroll County, Mississippi. He died in Winona, Mississippi (now the Montgomery County seat), at the age of 72.

(The author of the chapter on churches in the Waterville history is “George Dana Boardman Pepper, D.D., LL.D., Lately President of Colby College.”

(Pepper [Feb. 5, 1833 – Jan. 30, 1913] was the fourth and last child of John and Eunice [Hutchinson] Pepper. Born in Ware, Massachusetts, he attended two seminaries and Amherst College. From 1860 to 1865, he was pastor of Waterville’s First Baptist Church. Changing to education, he taught religious subjects before and after serving as Colby College’s ninth president from 1882 to 1889. Religion ran in the family; Find a Grave identifies his father as Deacon and one of his older brothers as Rev.)

* * * * * *

Lemuel Dunbar was born in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, and married Cordana Fobes there on June 23, 1806, according to Find a Grave. This source says he bought land in Waterville Oct. 1, 1805; Plaisted said he moved to Waterville around 1808. They agree he built his house and shop at the corner of Main and North streets, at the north end of the present downtown.

Sources disagree on how many children Dunbar had. One implies that Cordana died and he remarried; Find a Grave says Cordana lived until 1869.

Their oldest son was Otis Holmes Dunbar (May 22, 1807 – Sept. 30, 1892), like his father a carpenter. Find a Grave says he was born in Penobscot, Maine; married Mary Talbot in Winslow, Maine, in 1836; worked in Maine and “the Boston area”; and by June 1860 was living in Princeton, Illinois, where he died. His body was returned to Waterville for burial in Pine Grove Cemetery with family members.

Find a Grave says the Dunbars had nine children, born between 1807 and 1826, and lists three daughters and three sons buried in Pine Grove Cemetery. Youngest son Lemuel was the only one still alive in 1902, Plaisted wrote.

Chaplin taught the first Waterville College classes in July 1818 in a house not far from Dunbar’s shop, according to Edward W. Hall’s chapter on Colby in Whittemore’s history.

Hall continued, “In 1821 the South College was built and eighteen rooms finished besides fitting up a part of the building for a chapel. The second dormitory, known as the North College…was built in 1822.” Dunbar was the carpenter for both buildings, he said.

By 1902, Plaisted said, Dunbar’s original house had been removed and replaced, and the shop had been converted to a house “now occupied by Mr. A. M. Dunbar” (the first Lemuel’s grandson?).

* * * * * *

Your writer’s next topics are Winslow and Waterville high schools, about which she has found little second-hand information. Long-time readers will remember that second-hand information is important: original research, in enclosed spaces among unknown people, has been forbidden since this series started early in the Covid epidemic.

The earliest information your writer found about Winslow high schools was from Kingsbury. He said in 1892, Winslow appropriated $250 to support two free high schools. One, he said, was in “the village of Winslow” and the other “in the eastern part of the town near the Baptist church.” That year they had 80 students between them.

Two on-line sites provide tantalizing bits of information from the first half of the 20th century. One says a wooden, three-story high school building on Halifax Street (which was then Getchell Stret) burned in 1914 and was rebuilt on the same lot in 1915. Halifax Street, also Route 100, runs east from the Kennebec at Fort Halifax.

Another site says the new high school that opened on Danielson Street in 1929 replaced the previous schools, plural. The Danielson Street school started out housing grades seven through 12, but seventh grade was soon moved elsewhere. Danielson Street, site of the current Winslow High School, is several blocks north of Halifax Street.

* * * * * *

Your writer’s short part-article on Waterville’s high schools in the Sept. 9, 2021, issue of The Town Line is unsatisfactory, in spite of editor Roland Hallee’s attractive illustrations. The following paragraphs will expand it a bit:

Elwood T. Wyman, in his chapter on public schools in Whittemore’s history, listed the “masters” of Waterville’s public high school “since its permanent organization in 1876.” There were nine of them up to 1902, and Richard W. Sprague, Colby Class of 1901, was about to become the tenth. Wyman commented that “every one of the masters in the list quoted has been a Colby graduate.”

This permanently organized school was not Waterville’s first high school, but information on previous ones is scanty. From what Wyman wrote, it appears that by the 1830s, some, at least, of the district schools provided some high-school-level courses. Wyman mentioned that in 1855, “Latin and French were authorized as studies in the high school.”

After 1846, some students qualified for high-school level studies attended one of two private high schools, Waterville Academy (later Coburn Classical Institute) or Waterville Liberal Institute. After the Civil War, Waterville temporarily abandoned its public high school(s).

Wyman wrote: “In 1864 pupils of high school rank were sent to Waterville Academy where Dr. [James] Hanson received $4.50 a term for their tuition. This arrangement was continued until the establishment of an independent high school in 1876.”

(Hanson was then starting his second term as Academy principal; he served from 1843 to 1854 and again from 1865 to his death in 1894.)

Skipping to 1902, Wyman wrote that the southern of the two brick primary schools built in or soon after 1853 was by then “the main part of the present high school building.” But he did not describe how it attained that role, or where high school classes were held before the mid-1850s or after 1876.

* * * * * *

Waterville Academy was established in 1829 as a preparatory school for Colby College, Waterville Liberal Institute in 1835 as a Universalist high school. (See the Oct. 21, 2021, issue of The Town Line.)

Waterville Academy boys initially took classes at the college. In 1828, college trustees decided on a physically, but not yet legally, separate school.

Timothy Boutelle, a prominent Waterville lawyer, donated land, Wikipedia says, and President Chaplin raised the funds for “a small brick building” where classes started in the fall of 1829, with 61 students. The first head of the academy was Colby senior Henry W. Paine, assisted by a classmate; Kingsbury wrote that Paine returned in August 1831 for another five years.

The Academy closed in 1839 and 1840, because, according to Waterville historian Ernest Marriner, Waterville Liberal Institute took too many of the eligible students. It reopened in 1841 and a year later separated legally from the college.

Kingsbury wrote that in the fall of 1843, when Hanson became principal for the first time, the Academy had five students. By 1853, there were 308 students, and Hanson got an assistant, George B. Gow, who became principal when Hanson left in 1854.

Female students were admitted beginning in 1845. Kingsbury wrote that “another room was fitted up and Miss Roxana F. Hanscom was employed to teach a department for girls.”

In 1865, according to the Wikipedia writer, the Academy was renamed Waterville Classical Institute. In 1882, it was renamed again, Coburn Classical Institute, in honor of benefactor Abner Coburn. In 1970, Coburn merged with Oak Grove School; the combined school closed in 1989.

* * ** * *

Waterville Liberal Institute was chartered by the Maine legislature Feb. 28, 1835, and opened Dec. 12, 1836. The first principal was Nathaniel M. Whitmore, Kingsbury said, and the school started with 54 students.

A “female department” opened in 1850. In 1851, according to that year’s catalog, the Institute had 174 students, 91 boys and 83 girls. Most were from Waterville, but other Maine towns, Massachusetts and New Brunswick were represented.

The Institute closed in 1857, when, Kingsbury wrote, “the growth of Westbrook Seminary sufficiently filled the field.”

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Education in Winslow & Waterville

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Sand Hill School, in Winslow.

by Mary Grow

The northernmost of three area towns incorporated on April 26, 1771, was Winslow, on the east bank of the Kennebec River, then including Waterville and Oakland on the west bank.

As discussed in earlier articles, Teconnet or Ticonic, later Winslow, was one of the earliest European-settled areas on this part of the river, with a British trading post in the 1650s and a British fort in 1754. Henry Kingsbury wrote in his Kennebec County history that Winslow’s first town meeting was held Thursday, May 23, 1771.

Your writer has found little information on 18th century schooling in Winslow and less on the 19th century. Elwood T. Wyman, in his chapter on education in Whittemore’s 1902 history of Waterville, commented that early residents on the Winslow side of the Kennebec could not always afford an education appropriation.

In 1778, town meeting voters agreed to pay a preacher but not a teacher, he said. In 1780, 1788, 1789 and 1790, they funded neither.

In 1791, they appropriated 50 pounds for schooling and nothing for preaching. In March 1796, voters – still representing both sides of the river – approved $250 for education, by now switching to dollars.

Wyman wrote that in addition to the struggling public schools, some wealthier residents supported private schools. He gave as an example a Dec. 28, 1796, agreement (signed Feb. 7, 1797) between nine residents (from both sides of the river) and Abijah Smith (later Waterville’s town clerk) for Smith to run a school in Ticonic Village (on the Winslow side) for three months.

Smith was to find his own room and board and a schoolroom (whether the living and teaching quarters were separate is unspecified). He was to be paid a total of $60, $2 a month for board and the remainder at the end of the term; and his sponsors would deliver firewood for the school.

Wyman switched his focus from Winslow to Waterville in 1802, when the two towns separated. Kingsbury provided no historical details on education in the Winslow chapter in his history. Again (as with Sidney), he described Winslow education only in 1892, the year his book was published.

Notes by Winslow historian Jack Nivison on the Winslow Historical Society’s website describe two 19th-century school buildings depicted there: the 1819 Fort School on the west side of Lithgow Street, near the Kennebec; and the 1887-88 Sand Hill School, at the corner of Monument and Bellevue streets, well uphill from the river.

Second Fort School, Lithgow St.

The original Fort school was one room. Nivison said it might have been Winslow’s earliest public – he emphasized “public” – school.

An on-line site says it was used until 1909, when increasing enrollment required the new, larger Fort School, built in 1910. This two-room Fort School was on the east side of Lithgow Street, three lots south of the first one.

The original Fort School was reused for a year or two after a high school burned down in 1914, the on-line site says. In 1976, the building became the Winslow Historical Society’s museum. It was destroyed in the Flood of 1987.

The Sand Hill School was the largest in town when it was built, Nivison wrote. The accompanying photograph, taken after a 1909 addition, shows a tall, two-story, L-shaped building. Sand Hill School was “always an elementary school,” though with “different grades at different times.” It closed after the 1929-30 school year.

Kingsbury, describing Winslow education in 1891-92, said there were 16 school districts, 15 schoolhouses “and eleven schools that were taught in 1892,” attended by 247 students.

Funding, he summarized, consisted of $1,400 “in public money” (state funds?), $1,500 from town taxes and another $250 “for the support of free high schools.”

* * * * * *

In the 1902 Waterville history, Wyman summarized education-related actions at early town meetings after Waterville was incorporated as a separate town on June 23, 1802.

At the first meeting on July 26, voters elected 10 men as school agents. At an Aug. 9 meeting, they raised $300 for education. In March, 1803, they approved another $400; and on May 2, 1803, they accepted a report from the selectmen establishing 10 school districts.

Eight districts were named after residents; the “village district,” No. 1, was Ticonic and the third was Ten-lot. Names had changed to numbers by around 1808. But, Wyman said, in 1902 some districts’ residents were still using the family names.

The selectmen also recommended, and voters approved, having annual town meeting voters choose school agents and letting each district’s residents contract with their teachers, within legal limits. Selectmen were authorized to aid small districts (financially? with supplies? with expertise?), and “Rose’s district was advised to join with neighboring families in Fairfield in support of a union school.”

(Elsewhere, Whittemore’s history lists a George Rose from Water­ville who served during the winter of 1839 in a militia unit raised in Fairfield and Waterville for the Aroostook War.)

By 1806, Wyman wrote, the education appropriation was increased to $600. That year, too, voters elected a five-man committee to inspect Waterville’s schools during the following year. Wyman commented that two members, Dr. Moses Appleton and Hon. Timothy Boutelle, were Harvard graduates; other sources say Appleton graduated from Dartmouth College, Class of 1791.

Wyman (like Kingsbury) listed family names of the 145 students in District 1 in 1808. He said they came from “Main, Silver, Mill, College, Water and lower Front streets.” Except for Mill Street, these are current names of major streets in downtown Waterville.

In 1808, Wyman said, the streets were “rough roads,” running through “an area still largely covered with woods, and used mostly for pasturage.” He listed two schoolhouses, “the little old yellow one close by the town hall, and the brick one on College street,” farther north along the Kennebec.

Voters at an 1812 town meeting made a decision that Wyman said recognized “the importance to public schools of official inspection.” They chose Appleton and Daniel Cook “visiting inspectors,” directed to visit every public school at least once in the winter term, and in the summer “if they thought proper,” and to tell each schoolmaster “the most proper mode of instruction.”

Appleton and Boutelle were two of the five 1821 school committee members Wyman named. Appleton was elected again in 1826, when, Wyman said, the committee had three members.

By then voters had approved paying school committee members “a reasonable sum” for their work, and in 1827 Appleton got $6. That year, too, voters approved a long motion by Boutelle that considerably expanded the men’s responsibilities.

Committee members were now required to prepare a detailed annual report. It was to cover how much each district spent and what for (specifically, expenditures for schoolmasters, for schoolmistresses and for wood); teachers’ names, wages and lengths of service; the number of students, what kinds of textbooks they had and what subjects they studied; the committee’s opinions on the quality of each school; and anything else committee members thought useful or interesting.

Wyman surmised it was because of the reporting requirement that committee members’ annual stipends went up to eight dollars in 1828.

In 1828, too, he wrote, the boundaries of Waterville’s 13 school districts were described in such detail as to take up three pages in town records. For years thereafter, he said, almost every town meeting included a vote on “setting off certain persons from one [school] district to another. This business and the laying out or discontinuance of roads furnished a never-failing subject for discussion and action.”

The comprehensive reports gave historian Wyman a surplus of material to choose from. His reports for the rest of the century are fragmentary, based apparently on his estimates of importance and interest.

In 1829, Wyman found, voters approved $900 for schools for the year, higher by $200 than any prior appropriation.

The 1834 school committee consisted of three ministers, Rev. Calvin Gardner (Universalist, who served his church from September 1833 to January 1853), Rev. Samuel F. Smith (Baptist, author of America, who served in Waterville from Jan. 1, 1834 to early 1841) and Rev. Jonathan C. Morrill (whose name is listed nowhere else in the Waterville history index and whom your writer could not find elsewhere).

Wyman wrote nothing about what this committee did.

By 1836 Waterville had 1,049 students in 14 school districts, and 26 teachers for the year. District 1 was the most populous, with “212 scholars on its census roll” – and an average attendance of 50.

In that district, one of the men was paid $26 a month for 18 weeks, and one of the women $14 a month for 23 weeks. Her pay, Wyman commented, “was more than was paid to some of the male teachers.” Six other districts paid female teachers $4 a month.

The most common school term was 22 weeks, longer in “the village schools” and somewhat shorter in “the smaller districts,” one of which had only 14 pupils.

Myrtle Street School

Wyman summarized several years of arguments over whether and where to build new school buildings. A long-debated schoolhouse on the Plains, the area along Water Street south of the Kennebec River bridge, was authorized in 1846 “at a cost of $250”; and voters further agreed “to furnish two school rooms in the town hall.”

Some of the disputes were between residents of Waterville’s north and south ends. In 1853, Wyman wrote, a four-man committee created a 10-man committee that proposed a brick schoolhouse in each end; the idea was accepted.

The southern building was near the site of the present Albert S. Hall school, at 27 Pleasant Street, two blocks inland from the Kennebec.

North Grammar School, in Waterville.

The northern schoolhouse was on the lot that by 1902 was occupied by North Grammar School, opened Feb. 28, 1888. The 1853 building had been moved to College Avenue and was described as “a brick tenement.” After being relocated, it had been used as a school until the Myrtle Street School opened in 1897.

Wyman called the Myrtle Street School “in most respects the best school building in the city” in 1902.

A Dec. 4, 1981, report on the Waterville Fire and Rescue website locates the Myrtle Street School at the end of Myrtle Street, which dead-ends westward off College Avenue. The report is of a suspicious two-alarm fire; it says the three-story brick building, by then a warehouse for used tires, was gutted and one firefighter was slightly injured.

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Education in Vassalboro & Sidney

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by Mary Grow

Another Kennebec Valley town incorporated April 26, 1771, simultaneously with Hallowell (then including Augusta), was Vassalboro, then including Sidney. Vassalboro’s and Sidney’s early educational systems will therefore be examined next.

According to Alma Pierce Robbins’ 1971 history of Vassalboro, voters did not discuss education at their first town meeting, held May 22, 1771. At a Sept. 9 meeting, they approved money to support a minister, but not a schoolmaster.

The next education discussion Robbins reported (but not its outcome) was in 1785, after the October report of the Portland convention discussing separation from Massachusetts had called on towns to fund public schools. At town meetings thereafter, no matter how frequent, she said “much discussion was devoted to ‘Schooling.'”

Until the separation of Sidney in 1792, Vassalboro voters needed to educate students in both parts of a town divided by the unbridged Kennebec River running through the middle.

Robbins reported a committee set up 13 school districts in 1787. In 1788, voters appropriated 70 pounds for schools. At a 1789 town meeting, District 5 was created on the west side of the river. There was also a District 5 on the east side, according to Robbins and to Henry Kingsbury, in his 1892 Kennebec County history.

Kingsbury apparently overlooked the early records Robbins found. He said about Vassalboro schools, “The first record of anything pertaining to this important element of civilization was made in annual meeting of March 1790, when the town east of the river was divided into districts, and an earnest support of the public schools commenced.”

He and Robbins said districts one through five went north to south on the east side of the Kennebec, including the first and second miles from the river and, for districts two and three, part or all of the third mile. Districts six through nine ran to the east town line, with districts six and seven including the fourth and fifth miles and eight and nine the third, fourth and fifth miles.

Divisions between districts were by lot lines. District one went from the north town boundary south to Jacob Taber’s lot; district two from Taber’s south to Jonathan Low’s; and so on.

Kingsbury named the six men on the 1790 committee that determined the district lines and continued, “Teachers were hired and the schools of the town commenced.”

District boundaries were redrawn “as the convenience of the inhabitants demanded,” Kingsbury said. Any west of the Kennebec disappeared after Sidney became a separate town on Jan. 30, 1792.

In 1795, Kingsbury wrote, another southern Vassalboro district was formed, and “a committee was chosen in open town meeting to obtain teachers for all districts and pay out the moneys according to the number of pupils in each.”

In 1797, he said, “the number of schools [and presumably of districts] was reduced to seven,” and Vassalboro selectmen paid out the $700 voters appropriated and hired the teachers. That was the year Robbins said voters authorized “the school in the middle west section of town” to hold classes in the town house, suggesting not every district had a schoolhouse.

Kingsbury said districts were redivided in 1798. In 1799, voters raised $1,000 “to build ten school houses.” Robbins said there were 10 districts in 1798, 11 in 1800.

By 1806, there were enough members of the Society of Friends, or Quakers, in Vassalboro so their students in District 7 were separated into their own district (as had been done in Sidney in 1799 – see below). Robbins quoted an 1809 town meeting vote: “there shall be two schools kept by a woman in summer and the Friends shall have the privilege of choosing one mistress, and there shall be a master in winter.”

In 1816 and for some time afterwards, Kingsbury wrote, a town-appointed committee reviewed the then-17 schools, a system that produced “beneficial results.” After 1810 and 1823 rearrangements, in 1839 Vassalboro was divided into the 22 school districts that he said remained “substantially the same” in 1892.

Robbins disagreed. She wrote that the school committee’s 1839 22-district plan “was of little value,” because the next year there was a rearrangement and creation of a 23rd district. Vassalboro had 23 districts “much of the time” until state law eliminated district schools, she said.

Administration was also changed; Kingsbury gave no dates. The (1816?) town committee that inspected schools and hired teachers was replaced by “a proper person” in each district, and in “later years” – and still in 1892 – by an elected town superintendent.

Robbins cited deficiencies listed in school reports and town meeting minutes. Students were truant; parents lacked interest; poorly paid teachers were expected not only to teach, but to keep the woodstove going and the classroom clean and, under a late-1840s regulation “to look after the scholars while in school and on the way home.”

Around 1850, teachers were paid $2 a week, Robbins wrote. She added, “Little wonder that several schools ‘closed suddenly’.”

Buildings were often badly maintained. An 1865 school committee report described students “shivering with the cold, their heads in close contact with the stove funnel, inhaling death with every inspiration.” An 1870 report referred to “the miserable affairs called school houses.”

As of 1870, Robbins said, state law defined school terms: the summer term was 9 and 3/17 weeks, the winter term was 10 and 13/14 weeks. (She did not explain how weeks were divided into 14ths and 17ths.)

Robbins found that Vassalboro had 1,200 school-age children in 1850. In 1892-1893, the number was down to 636; 20 schools were open, most with fewer than 20 students, one with six.

* * * * * *

The earliest Vassalboro high school was Vassalboro (or Vassalborough) Academy at Getchell’s Corner, in northwestern Vassalboro, opened in 1835, closed before 1868. Miss Howard’s School for Young Ladies opened in 1837 at Getchell’s Corner. Robbins cited no evidence of a long life for that institution.

Oak Grove Seminary, on Riverside Drive at the Oak Grove Road intersection, was started by area Quakers in 1848 or 1850. (For more information on Vassalboro high schools, see the July 22, 2021, and Oct. 14, 2021, issues of “The Town Line”.)

In 1873, Robbins said, state law required high schools. Vassalboro opened one in East Vassalboro and one at Riverside, and North Vassalboro residents “after a few sharp discussions erected a new and commodious house at a trifle over six thousand dollars.”

Kingsbury said voters appropriated $500 for the East Vassalboro high school, in a building on the west side of Main Street nearly opposite the Vassalboro Grange Hall. By 1892, he wrote, “the continued success of Oak Grove Seminary has superseded the necessity for the high school.”

In 1892, Vassalboro’s schoolhouses were “in good condition,” Kingsbury said, with the 1872 North Vassalboro building the best. It had “three departments, and a large public hall on the second floor.” (This building still stands, privately owned in 2024.)

* * * * * *

Alice Hammond wrote in her 1992 history of Sidney that in April 1792, less than three months after Sidney became a separate town, voters at a “school meeting” defined 10 school districts and named 10 “school collectors” (she did not describe their duties).

Voters also appropriated 100 pounds for “annual support of the schools.” A January 1794 special town meeting rescinded the appropriation; voters at the 1794 annual town meeting approved 50 pounds, and raised it to 60 pounds before the meeting ended.

Sidney’s school districts one through four ran south to north along the Kennebec, including the first and second miles from the river. District 1 went from the boundary with Augusta to Daniel Townsend’s south line; District 2 went upriver to Elihu Getchell’s lot; District 3 upriver to Hezekiah Hoxie’s north line; and District 4 upriver to the north boundary with Waterville (then still Winslow).

District five began at the northern end of “the Pond” (Messalonskee Lake); five through eight ran to the south town line, encompassing the third and fourth ranges, except for district seven.

District seven was in only the fourth range. District nine seems to have covered the third range in that area, as well as specifically “including Matthew Lincoln and Jethro Weeks in said district.”

District ten encompassed “all the inhabitants and land belonging to the said town on the west side of the aforesaid pond.” Belgrade annexed District 10 in 1799.

Also in 1799, Hammond wrote, voters gave Sidney’s Society of Friends in District 9, and nearby residents who were not Friends, their own district, number 11; and gave them their share of school funds to “lay…out in the manner they see fit.”

She added that a resident named Silas Hoxie (Hoxie was a common Quaker name) “requested unsuccessfully that he be given his share of the school money to ‘spend as he saw fit.'”

Hammond said Sidney had 19 school districts in 1848; but population declined thereafter. Kingsbury wrote that by 1891, districts had been reduced to 14, because there were fewer students – that year, he said, 333 students “drew public money.”

Hammond gave a financial example from District 9 (Bacon’s Corner) in 1843-44: total expenditure, $76.50, of which $24 went to a “Female teacher for 16 weeks of summer school” and $31.50 to a “Male teacher for seven weeks of winter school.” Seth Robinson contributed summer board; winter board cost $9.31.

The rest of the money went for building maintenance and supplies (including eight cents for a broom). Hammond added, “Having raised $77.50, the district ended the school year with a balance of $1.00.”

Referring to state laws requiring towns to raise a specified amount per inhabitant for school costs, Hammond said not until 1867 did Sidney voters agree “to raise what is required by law.” The requirement was 75 cents per resident that year; in 1868 the legislature raised it to one dollar.

Even after direct state aid started, Hammond said, “funding was inadequate and teachers’ wages were low.” In the later 1880s, she wrote, per-student expenditure was $5.63 annually. Summer term teachers averaged $3.59 a week; winter term teachers got $4.68 a week plus $1.46 a week for board.

Hammond wrote that in the 1870s, “responsibility for governing the school began to move from the individual district to the town.” Town school committees were elected and charged with hiring teachers, and “some level of standardization began to exist,” like common schedules and textbooks.

Kingsbury, in his chapter on Sidney, for an unexplained reason began discussion of education with the fiscal year ending Feb. 10, 1892. For that year, he said, town voters appropriated $1,500 for schools (plus $2,000 for roads; $1,200 “to defray town charges”; $25 for Memorial Day; and another $25 for “town fair” [the annual Agricultural Fair, started by Grange members in 1785]).

In 1892, Kingsbury wrote, “The town voted to change from the district to the town system” for managing schools; Hammond wrote that the Sidney school committee was made responsible “for all the schools in the town.” She added that the school term was set town-wide at 21 weeks that year (increased to 25 weeks a year in less than a decade), and the first school superintendent was hired.

Town-wide organization promoted school consolidation, and fewer schools created a need for transportation. Hammond wrote that “many” educators thought it was good for students to walk four or five miles to school; but many parents thought any child living more than a mile and a half from a school should have transportation, “and this was the [undated] decision of the [Sidney] school committee.”

* * * * * *

Your writer has found no information on a 19th-century high school in Sidney.

Main sources:

Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992)
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892)
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Central Maine historical societies gather

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Vassalboro Historical Society

by Eric W. Austin

On Saturday, October 26, representatives from historical societies across Central Maine met at the Vassalboro Historical Society, united by a shared goal: to preserve and celebrate Maine’s rich history. About two dozen history enthusiasts and society members gathered to share updates, discuss challenges, and brainstorm solutions to common issues.

Each society had a unique story to tell, with updates ranging from the restoration of historic buildings to engaging community programs. For example, the China Historical Society spoke about their recent presentation on the town’s almost forgotten narrow gauge railway system.

Despite the successes, the societies also discussed a variety of shared challenges, such as the need to grow their membership, the constant problem of limited funds, not enough volunteer support, and the often-daunting task of digitizing historic records.

“We’re constantly juggling the need to catalog items and preserve them while also making history accessible to the community,” said one attendee, a sentiment that was echoed by others.

Many societies expressed hope in drawing younger members to the cause, with some already seeing promising signs of interest from new generations. The Vassalboro Historical Society even mentioned their new TikTok channel, where short, engaging clips are helping to spark interest among younger audiences.

Each historical society had a wish list that included more storage space, financial support, or equipment like climate-controlled rooms and scanners. As one attendee put it, “We may be small, but we’re doing everything we can to preserve our local history for future generations.”

Residents interested in history and community service are encouraged to get involved with their nearest historical society. Whether you have time, expertise, or just a love for the past, there’s a way for you to contribute!

Around the Kennebec Valley: Education in Augusta – Part 2

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by Mary Grow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.