Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Slave trade in Vassalboro

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Captives being brought on board a slave ship on the west coast of Africa, circa 1850.

by Mary Grow

The story of Ebenezer Farwell

Maine, including to some extent small inland towns like Vassalboro, was more heavily involved in the international slave trade than many residents realize, both before and after slave-trading was made illegal in the United States in 1808.

Dr. Kate McMahon, Museum Specialist at the Center for the Study of Global Slavery, in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, gave more than four dozen local residents a history lesson Aug. 13 at the Vassalboro Historical Society’s museum in East Vassalboro.

Slavery has existed for centuries, McMahon said. In the 15th century, two developments converged to create a new, primarily race-based system: bigger ships and better navigational tools let European sailors reach Africa, and Europeans began colonizing the Americas.

In the Americas, first south and then north, indigenous inhabitants were eliminated and Europeans began plantation economies that needed labor. From the 1600s on, McMahon said, an estimated 12.5 million Africans, two-thirds of them men, were loaded onto slave ships for the Middle Passage, the voyage to the Americas. An estimated 10.7 million survived the trip.

Maine’s share in the slave trade McMahon described as small, but as brutal as anywhere else in the United States. It was concentrated in the earliest-settled areas, southern coastal Maine and Portland.

A painting of a Liverpool based ship believed to be involved in the slave trade. It bears strong similarities to the same artist’s image, ‘Liverpool Slave Ship’, painted circa 1780, and now at the Merseyside Maritime Museum. There are a number of figures visible on deck, some are thought to be slaves and others slave masters and sailors. The precise circumstances of this painting are not clear, and it may have been commissioned for the Liverpool offices of a bank or merchant involved in slavery to present an acceptable view of the trade. This coincides with the moment when the abolitionist movement was beginning to pose a serious threat to such traffic.

There is little information about the topic, because, McMahon said, there has not been a lot of interest in research; and many records, like ships’ logs, remain hidden in local museums and other repositories. There is also a misbelief that a merchant ship and a slave ship were two different vessels. McMahon said often the same ship would carry merchandise and slaves.

In 1787 and 1788, within half a decade after the United States became independent, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut banned slave-trading. Because different state regulations led to confusion, their officials pushed for a national law. In 1808 Congress made slave-trading illegal nationally.

McMahon explained that the ban applied to transporting slaves among countries abroad and into the United States. The internal slave trade remained legal until the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.

In 1820, the ban was strengthened by defining transporting slaves as piracy, punishable by hanging. McMahon said alleged slave-traders were seldom punished. (An on-line source says in 74 trials between 1837 and 1860, there were many acquittals and some light sentences. One man was sentenced to death; he was pardoned by President James Buchanan in 1857).

The only man hanged for slave-trading, McMahon said, was Nathaniel Gordon, of Portland, Maine, in 1862. She said President Abraham Lincoln, fighting the Civil War and preparing for the Emancipation Proclamation, was “grandstanding” when he refused to pardon Gordon.

After 1807, fewer slaves were brought to the United States, but many United States citizens continued to transport slaves from Africa to other places in the Americas, like Cuba. One such ship captain was Ebenezer Farwell, of Vassalboro.

This Ebenezer Farwell was one of four sons of Ebenezer Farwell (1740 – 1807) and Jane Howard Farwell (1742 – 1806), according to an on-line source that lists the three youngest by date of birth – 1783, 1785 and 1787 – but does not include their first names.

McMahon did not give Ebenezer’s dates. She said in 1838, he was captain of the ship Transit, and in it picked up four male Africans from a place near the border between Liberia and Cote D’Ivoire (Ivory Coast). Three he brought to New York; one he brought home to Vassalboro and left with his father at their River House as an indentured servant.

New York abolitionists got on Farwell’s case. Farwell was not punished, but a judge ordered the Africans, including the young man in Vassalboro, be sent home to Africa.

Dr. Sylvester Gardiner, of Pittston, was a wealthy Maine slave owner.

By now, McMahon said, Farwell was wealthy enough to start building the Riverside Drive house known as the Farwell Mansion. When funds ran out, he went back to the same part of Africa, this time in a schooner named the Mary Carver.

What happened next is unclear, McMahon said, but Farwell and his crew were killed by Africans. She believes it was “a slave-trading deal gone bad.”

The United States government retaliated by sending the sloop of war USS Saratoga, under Commodore Matthew Perry, for what McMahon called “swift and brutal retribution.” United States sailors razed between 50 and 100 villages and killed King Ben Krako, who may have been responsible for Farwell’s death.

McMahon said Farwell’s wife and sons never lived in the mansion. She and audience members talked about the local story that the house became a stop on the underground railroad that helped escaped Southern slaves to freedom before the Civil War.

On-line sites repeat the story, crediting a man named Israel Weeks.

The USS Saratoga was built at the Portsmouth shipyard in 1842, McMahon said, the first of a number of government ships built specifically to look for slave traders. Because of their illegal business, the traders had fast ships; the Navy needed to match them.

Maine, with its good wood supply and its well-developed techniques, built some of the fastest ships available. Between 1850 and 1865, McMahon said, Maine ships brought some 25,000 slaves from Africa to sell them in Cuba.

Profits were immense; and often owners and captains could increase them by bringing Cuban products, like sugar and mahogany, to the United States.

To maximize profits, McMahon added, these later slave ships were often even more overcrowded than earlier, legal ones, and mortality rates were higher.

Because so many Maine-built ships and Maine captains were involved, the state’s economy was tied to the illegal slave trade. McMahon cited two figures: in 1852 (according to state records), the timber industry was worth $2.5 million; that same year (according to an 1857 New York Times report), the slave ship fleet brought in $11 million.

Mike Lokuta, current owner of the Farwell Mansion, told Sunday’s gathering he is restoring the house. He started by replacing footings under the tall columns across the front; four are done and the fifth soon will be.

Twentieth-century renovations he is undoing include removing two layers of sheetrock.

In a later email, Lokuta said the Farwell Mansion is not the same as Seven Oaks, an earlier Farwell house that Lokuta understands burned in the 1790s.

(In her 1971 Vassalboro history, Alma Pierce Robbins wrote that Isaac Farwell built Seven Oaks for his son Eben (1740 -1807), and said, apparently in error, that it was the columned house still standing.)

Lokuta said Seven Oaks’ foundation and a nearby well casing remain behind the mansion. They might have given rise to the story, which Lokuta says is untrue, that in Underground Railroad times a tunnel ran from the Kennebec River to the house. Many sources mention a tunnel into the cellar of the house, without further explanation.

Maine native Dr. Kate McMahon

Dr. Kate McMahon

Dr. Kate McMahon is a Maine native who earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Southern Maine and her doctorate in history from Howard University, in Washington, D.C. Her field of concentration is slavery in the United States and related topics.

Some years before her Aug. 13 presentation, she had visited the Vassalboro Historical Society museum to look for information on Farwell, where she met members Simone Antworth, who introduced her to Sunday’s audience, and Russell Smith. That visit led to Sunday’s talk.

Asked if the VHS records had been helpful, McMahon said yes, and added that she is likely to return for more research as she works on a book.

For those interested in more information on New England’s role in the global slave trade, she mentioned two websites, atlanticblackbox.com and slavevoyages.org

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Music in the Kennebec Valley – Part 3

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Typical 19th century brass band.

by Mary Grow

Band music

Another type of music in the central Kennebec Valley from early days of European settlement was band music. It was often, but especially in later years not inevitably, associated with military organizations; and like other forms of music, got limited attention in most local histories.

* * * * * *

James North, in his Augusta history, sometimes mentioned parade music, presumably provided by a band, as in his description of former president George Washington’s funeral procession in Augusta on Feb. 22, 1800.

North wrote that the procession was headed by a military escort. It included an infantry company, followed by musicians with “drums muffled, instruments in mourning,” followed by an artillery company.

By 1805, North wrote, Augusta had two military companies, and a group of young men persuaded the legislature (still in 1805 the Massachusetts General Court) to authorize a light infantry company.

The Augusta Light Infantry, which appears frequently in North’s history, was organized in the spring of 1806. North listed its officers and its musicians: fifer Stephen Jewett (the same Stephen Jewett who played the bass viol in church beginning in 1802? – see the July 27 issue of The Town Line) and drummer Lorain Judkins.

Some of the women connected with infantry members created and presented a company standard, with the motto “Victory or Death.” North described the Sept. 11, 1806, presentation as followed by a parade and a ball (presumably at least the ball and probably the parade included musicians).

By the time the Light Infantry was part of the local Federalist party’s July 4 parade in 1810, there was definitely a band. North wrote that its members politely stopped playing as the parade passed the house where Judge Nathan Weston was addressing the rival Democratic party celebration.

Another association between music and the military is the lists of men who fought in the War of 1812. Kennebec County historian Henry Kingsbury and many local historians listed soldiers (in 1812 and later wars) by name and rank, including musicians.

Most 1812 companies had either two or three musicians, though Kingsbury listed only one apiece for two of Vassalboro’s companies. The majority are described unspecifically as “musicians,” but Kingsbury mentioned a drum major and a fife major from Augusta.

By July 4, 1832, North again described two separate parades by two political parties, with multiple bands and military units. The National Republicans’ parade included “the Hallowell Artillery and Sidney Rifles, each with a band of music,” and the Hallowell and Augusta band, which he said was “one of the best in the State.” The Democrats’ parade included some of the Augusta Light Infantry and a band from Waterville.

There was an Augusta band in 1854, when Augusta city officials (the town became a city in 1849) decided the annual July 4 celebration should include recognition of the 100th anniversary of the building of Fort Western. Events included an extremely elaborate parade, with the Augusta Band providing the music.

And on April 18, 1861, as the Civil War began, North wrote that “the Augusta Band, playing patriotic airs” (including Yankee Doodle), led Augusta’s Pacific Fire Engine Company as members marched to the homes of leading citizens to ask their reactions to the rebellion.

(Their visits started with Governor Israel Washburn, Jr., and included his predecessor, former Governor Lot M. Morrill. North commented that Republicans and Democrats alike expressed support for the federal government.)

By August 1863, either there was another band or the Augusta Band had a second name. North described the return of two volunteer regiments whose members’ nine-months enlistments were up.

The 24th Regiment got to Augusta at 10:30 p.m. Aug. 6, by train; a large number of dignitaries and ordinary citizens and the Citizens’ Band escorted the soldiers to the State House for a welcome and a banquet (after which they slept on the State House floor, too exhausted to continue to Camp Keyes). The 28th arrived around noon Aug. 18; their welcoming parade included the Citizens’ Band and the Gardiner Brass Band, and their refreshments were served on the lawn south of the State House.

In 1864, according to North, it was the Augusta Band that on June 3 escorted the first trainload of wounded men to the new military hospital at Camp Keyes, in Augusta.

* * * * * *

In the village of Weeks Mills, in the southern part of the town of China, there was in the latter half of the 19th century an all-male brass band that the China history says “was more a marching band than a dance band,” because its concerts were mostly outdoors.

Sometimes there were concerts in “a town public hall” that was the second floor of a building on the east side of the Sheepscot, north of Main Street (which is called Tyler Road on the contemporary Google map). There was also a bandstand, “with a flagpole,” that band members built at the junction of North Road (now Dirigo Road, perhaps?).

Quoting a former resident named Eleon Shuman, some of whose family were in the band, the history adds, “Few of the band members could read music, and the band director transcribed their pieces into a simpler notation called the tonic sol fa method which they could follow.”

Oakland also had a town band by the late 1880s. In her history of Sidney, Alice Hammond wrote that the organizers of the 1890 Sidney fair spent most of their money to hire the Oakland Band.

She explained that in the absence of television and Walkmans (never mind smartphones), “To hear the band playing as you strolled around the fair grounds, or went into the hall and sat down to take a break was a treat.”

There were also dances some afternoons – “Anyone who wished to dance paid for one dance at a time.” In 1890, the fair was not lighted, so there was no evening music or dancing.

Hammond’s history included reproductions of two posters.

One advertised a Feb. 5, 1892, exhibition of “The marvels of the modern phonograph,” which would “Talk, Laugh, Sing, Whistle, Play on all sorts Instruments including Full Brass Band.” After Professor R. B. Capen, of Augusta, finished his demonstration, there would be a Grand Ball, with music by Dennis’ Orchestra, Augusta, for dancing until 2 a.m.

The second poster announced an Aug. 15, 1898, Grand Concert by the Sidney Minstrels. The program included vocal and instrumental (guitar, banjo and tamborine solos); it was followed by a “social dance” with music by Crowell’s Orchestra.

John Philip Sousa’s inaugural playing of The Stars and Stripes Forever, in Augusta

John Philip Sousa

An on-line site called Military Music says John Philip Sousa’s The Stars and Stripes Forever was played for the very first time by Sousa’s Band in the new (opened in 1896) city hall, in Augusta, Maine, on May 1, 1897. Because at that time the march had no title, some historians inaccurately date the first performance to a May 14 concert in Philadelphia.

Contributor Jack Kop­stein wrote that Sousa composed the march as he was returning from Europe late in 1896. His original version called for “Piccolo in D-flat, Two Oboes, Two Bassoons, Clarinet in E-flat, Two Clarinets in B-flat (1-2), Alto saxophone, Tenor Saxophone, Baritone Saxophone, Three Cornets (1-3), 4 Horns in E-flat (1-4), Three Trombones (1-3), Euphonium, Tuba, Percussion.”

Augusta’s Museum in the Streets (on line) says by May 1, 1897, Sousa’s Band was “the most famous in the land,” and Sousa was “America’s ‘March King.'” The afternoon concert presented some of his earlier compositions; “Sousa’s band enthralled the Augusta audience with spirited music, and his first encore was a new untitled march” – the one that became The Stars and Stripes Forever.

On-line sites give different versions of the words for the march. The one attributed to Sousa begins, “Let martial note in triumph float / And liberty extend its mighty hand….”

Your writer’s personal favorite begins “Be kind to your web-footed friends / For a duck may be somebody’s mother.” (The web attributes these words to radio comedian Fred Allen [1894-1956].)

Augusta’s 1896 city hall was designed by John Calvin Spofford (Nov. 25, 1854 – Aug. 19, 1936), a Maine-born, Boston-based architect well-known for designing public buildings in New England. In addition to municipal offices, the building included a city auditorium.

Kopstein, writing in 2011, said the building served its municipal function until 1987; it then became an assisted living facility. An on-line description of the Inn at City Hall says it now has “31 apartments with its historic decor preserved throughout the complex.”

Main sources

Grow, Mary M., China Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984)
Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992)
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892)
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Music in the Kennebec Valley – Part 2

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This photo was generated by AI as a representation of dancing in the 1800s.

by Mary Grow

Composers, dancing

In his Music and Musicians of Maine, George Thornton Edwards’ list of “principal musical centers in Maine” in the late 18th and early 19th centuries included the Augusta-Hallowell-Gardiner complex, China and “some of the towns in the Kennebec Valley,” in addition to Portland and other, mostly coastal or more southern, towns.

One name frequently mentioned in Maine music histories is composer and hymnologist Japheth Coombs Washburn (Jan. 20, 1780 – Aug. 22 or Aug. 29, 1850), of China Village.

The China bicentennial history says he came to China with his father in 1804, when the north part of the town was still Albion (then Fairfax).

In 1804, Washburn opened the first store in what is now China Village; he opened the first tavern there about 1812. It was he, as a member of the Massachusetts legislature in early 1818, who chose the name “China” – the title of a hymn he liked — for the new town, after “Bloomville” was opposed by the representative from Bloomfield (now part of Skowhegan) as likely to cause misdelivered mail.

When China Village got its first post office in June 1818, it was in Washburn’s store, and he was the first postmaster. He was the first town clerk, serving from 1818 through 1821 and again from 1830 through 1836.

Linda Davenport wrote in her 1996 book Divine Song on the Northeast Frontier that Washburn was a justice of the peace early in the 19th century. He published the town’s first weekly newspaper, the Orb, from Dec. 5, 1833, through November 1836. After China Academy was founded in 1818, Washburn was a member of its second board of trustees starting in 1819.

Washburn married twice, fathered 10 children and founded a family famous for public service in China. Being town clerk was a specialty. Japheth’s oldest son, Oliver Wendell Washburn (Oct. 17, 1804 – Sept. 18, 1885), was clerk from 1840 through 1850; his oldest son, Willis Wendell (March 18, 1856 – June 22, 1942), from 1872 through 1877 and from 1888 until his death. Willis Wendell was succeeded in July 1842 by the youngest of his six children, Mary Alida Washburn ((July 25, 1893 – July 5, 1971), who served through 1970.

The China bicentennial history says nothing about Washburn and music. But Frances Turgeon Wiggin, in her Maine Composers and Their Music, credited him with two collections of hymns and similar music: Parish Harmony, published in 1813, and Temple Harmony, published in 1818. Davenport added collaboration with an older Maine composer, Abraham Maxim (Jan. 3, 1773 – March 28, 1829) of Turner, on the 1816 edition of Maxim’s collection, titled Northern Harmony.

Edwards provided a longer title for Washburn’s 1813 collection: The Parish Harmony or Fairfax Collection of Sacred Music. It was printed in Exeter, New Hampshire, he said, and described (he appeared to be quoting from the introduction) as including “a concise introduction to the grounds of music” and numerous “tunes” suitable for worship services.

Temple Harmony, Edwards wrote, was co-published by Washburn and Hallowell publisher E. Goodale.

Davenport’s book includes a 14-page chapter on Maxim and a 24-page chapter on Washburn’s life and music. She described Washburn as a composer of dozens of pieces of sacred music, as well as a compiler of other people’s music.

* * * * * *

Wiggin listed one other 19th-century composer from the central Kennebec Valley, Emily Peace Meader (Feb. 5, 1858 – Sept. 4, 1914). Known as Peace to some of her friends, she was a Waterville native and the only female graduate in Colby College’s Class of 1878.

Her parents were Edward Gove Meader, originally from New Hampshire, and Helen A. (Smith) Meader, of Anson or North Anson, Maine. She had an older and a young brother and a younger sister. There is no record that she married.

Nor are there many records, period. The closest to an account of her role in music history is a few lines in Wiggin’s Maine Composers.

Wiggin described her as a pianist and an accompanist who studied with organist, choir director and composer Homer Norris (Oct. 4, 1860 – Aug. 14, 1920), born in Wayne. Norris, in turn, Wiggin called “One of our earliest composers of importance to follow the French school of music.”

Wiggin included titles of three of Meader’s songs, from a collection published in 1918, and noted that “Miss Meader wrote her own texts.”

Meader was a cousin of Elizabeth Gorham Hoag, one of the four Colby women who founded Sigma Kappa sorority, and was in the sorority’s first group of initiates on Feb. 17, 1875. Wikipedia says Meader composed most of the original music used during the ceremony. A Colby presentation found on line gives her two short paragraphs, including a note that the college has “copies of her sheet music.”

Edwin Whittemore’s Waterville centennial history mentions Meader once, in a list of businessman Edward Meader’s four children; it says nothing about her as a musician. Edwards named her among lesser Maine composers in his chapter on the period between 1857 and 1896.

Edwards included in a list of post-Civil War composers Nathaniel Butler, of Waterville, born in 1824. Whittemore’s history introduces two men of that name, father and son. Franklin W. Johnson’s chapter on Waterville Academy says the senior Nathaniel Butler was that school’s principal for one year, starting in late 1842. Various sources say the junior, son of Rev. Nathaniel and Jeanne Emery Butler, was born in Eastport in May 1853 and was president of Colby College from 1895 to June 1901.

Given the 1824 birth date, the Waterville composer must have been the Rev. Butler, if he was either of these two men. Could he have been Waterville Academy principal in 1842? Conceivably; other educated 18-year-olds assumed similar responsibilities.

Was he the Rev. Nathaniel Butler from Eastport who was a member of the Yarmouth Baptist Church sometime before 1855? Who came from Camden to fill in at the Baptist Church in Ellsworth in December 1866 and January 1867? Who was chaplain of the Maine Senate in 1881-82?

The relevant point for this essay is that none of the references providing these possibilities say anything about their Nathaniel Butler having musical ability or interest.

Edwards also wrote that Maine composer George W. Marston (May 23, 1840 – Feb. 2, 1901), who spent much of his life in Portland where he composed songs and taught “piano, organ and harmony,” “taught piano and played the organ at the First Baptist Church” in Waterville for a year right after he finished high school.

The China bicentennial history adds one more minor association between music and education (otherwise, the book says nothing of significance about music). In 1872, the history says, students at China Academy, in China Village, could sign up for 20 music lessons for $10. For comparison, the fee for “common English” for the 10-week term was $3.50, for “higher English” $4.50 and for “languages or bookkeeping” $5.50.

* * * * * *

Several local histories include references to dancing, which implies music. James North, in his history of Augusta, gave an example from 1788.

That was the year surveyor Ephraim Ballard rebuilt his sawmill on Bond’s Brook that had burned in August 1787. The mill-raising was July 7; after the day’s work, North wrote, “the young folks…had a dance” at Ballard’s that lasted until midnight.

Years later, in 1838, North described resolutions approved by Augusta’s conservative East Parish Unitarians “on the subject of ‘public balls and the amusement of dancing,’ in which the inconsistency of professing Christians in attending the former was declared and their duty to refrain from the latter asserted.”

Not all church members complied, North said. In 1840, a committee reiterated the resolutions; after discussion, church members endorsed them on a 25-1 vote and had them printed and distributed in February. Disobedience continued, leading to arguments about the church’s right to discipline its members and in the summer of 1840 the withdrawal of “the offending members.”

In his chapter of recollections from the 1820s through 1850s in Whittemore’s Waterville history, William Mathews mentioned a “dancing-hall” in one of the town’s three hotels. There and elsewhere in town, “Tea parties, dance parties, and balls were frequent,” he wrote.

In the same history, novelist Martha Baker Dunn contributed a chapter on social life in Waterville. She, too, talked about dancing parties, in private homes and public spaces.

In his history of Windsor, Linwood Lowden named common 19th-century social activities. Some were work-related, like husking bees and sewing bees. He also listed horse trots, turkey shoots, croquet parties, community picnics and Sunday afternoon rides in a horse-drawn buggy.

“Community dances were especially popular. These were held in barns, in mills, in halls, and in private homes,” Lowden wrote.

A dance was a common finale to a community event like “an all day picnic,” he added. His discussion was without dates, but the context suggests he was talking about the second half of the 19th century.

And remember teen-ager Orren Choate, who celebrated Independence Day in 1885 by going from his Windsor home to a dance in Weeks Mills and didn’t get home until midnight (see the June 29 issue of The Town Line)?

It seems to have been Choate’s diary that gave Lowden his description of the Grand Army of the Republic’s fair at the end of September 1885. Events included a Wednesday performance by the Hallowell Cornet Band and a Friday evening dance.

On Christmas Day, 1885, young Choate decided against going to a dance in South Windsor because the weather was too cold. Lowden added that the dance “would have been held in Wingate Hall – now [1993] Shirley Varney’s apartments.”

What kind(s) of dance music and whether it was provided by a solitary fiddler or half a dozen people playing varied instruments – local historians provided only occasional sketchy information.

For example, Mathews wrote that summer vacations were not common in the1820s and 1830s, but occasionally a group of Waterville residents would go by boat to the mouth of the Kennebec for a week’s recreation. “Usually they took a fiddler with them,” he wrote, to accompany them in whatever dance was popular at the time.

Lowden described an expedition from Windsor in July 1886, quoting from Choate’s dairy. On Wednesday, July 28, Choate and three friends made a 40-mile, 12-hour journey to Pemaquid (Pemequid, in Choate’s spelling) Point. They stayed until the following Monday morning, hunting, fishing, lobstering and collecting shells; and on Saturday Choate wrote, “There is going to be a dance near our tent tonight.”

Several smaller towns had dance pavilions. Milton E. Dowe’s history of Palermo locates a 19th-century one in the field behind the present Branch Mills Grange Hall; he wrote that “it was demolished about 1900.”

The China bicentennial history says there were three in South China, one probably open in the 1890s and two more early in the 1900s.

Main sources

Davenport, Linda, Divine Song on the Northeast Frontier Maine’s Sacred Tunebooks, 1800-1830 (1996).
Dowe, Milton E., History Town of Palermo Incorporated 1884 (1954).
Edwards, George Thornton, Music and musicians of Maine: being a history of the progress of music in the territory which has come to be known as the State of Maine, from 1604 to 1928 (1970 reprint).
Grow, Mary M., China Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984).
Lowden, Linwood H., good Land & fine Contrey but Poor roads a history of Windsor, Maine (1993).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902)
Wiggin, Frances Turgeon, Maine Composers and Their Music (1959).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Music in the central Kennebec Valley

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The 1866 Hook organ at the South Parish Congregational Church, in Augusta.

by Mary Grow

After the frustration of finding only scanty and random information from local historians on how central Kennebec Valley residents cared for their destitute neighbors, your writer decided to continue frustrating herself on a more cheerful topic: music.

There were music and musicians in central Maine before the Europeans’ arrival. Music historian George Thornton Edwards provided a bit of information on native American music in his Music and Musicians of Maine.

The early European settlers, too, enjoyed and appreciated music, Edwards wrote. At first it was mostly sacred and mostly vocal.

An 18th century Viol.

The usual accompaniment to a church choir was a bass viol. Portland’s Second Parish Church seems to have been a leader in expanding use of instruments. Edwards wrote that the cornet and clarinet (or clarionet) had supplemented the viol before 1798, when the church acquired the first church organ in the city.

Augusta wasn’t far behind. In 1802, according to Edwards and to James North’s Augusta history, residents of the North Parish raised $35 to buy a bass viol and build a box for it. Stephen Jewett played the viol; Edwards commented that “ultra conservative” residents no doubt disapproved.

North included a reference from 1796, when Hallowell Academy, opened May 5, 1795, celebrated the end of its first year with public student recitations. North quoted from the May 10, 1796, issue of the Tocsin (Hallowell’s second newspaper): the public presentation included “vocal and instrumental music, under the direction of Mr. Belcher the ‘Handel‘ of Maine.”

(“Mr. Belcher” was Supply Belcher [March 29, 1751 – June 9, 1836]. Born in Massachusetts, he fought in the Revolution; moved to Hallowell in 1785; and in 1791 settled in Farmington for the rest of his life. He published in 1794 a collection of his sacred compositions called The Harmony of Maine.)

North borrowed from Edwards’ history a description of another series of musical events that started in early 1822, when a group of musically-inclined South Parish Congregational Church parishioners brought to the town “Mr. Holland,” a professor of music from New Bedford, Massachusetts. (Your writer has failed to find Mr. Holland’s first name or dates.)

Holland began a new method of teaching “psalmody” (the singing of sacred music, especially in church services) and gave piano lessons. His singers joined the church choir, and the ensuing interest led to raising money to buy a $550 British-made organ, the first organ in Augusta. It was installed on Sept. 4, North said.

The next Sunday, “Mrs. Ostinelli,” Sophia Henrietta Emma Hewitt Ostinelli (May 23, 1799 – Aug. 31, 1845), played the organ. She was the daughter of Boston composer, conductor and music publisher James Hewitt, and the new wife of Italian-born violinist and conductor Paul Louis Antonio Ostinelli (1795 – 184?). An on-line source calls her “pianist, organist, singer, and music teacher.”

Edwards wrote that her husband was described as a violinist “without a peer in America at that time.” He was also an orchestra conductor.

On Sept. 19 and again on Sept. 25, Holland directed “an oratorio of sacred music,” held, Linda Davenport wrote in her Divine Song on the Northeast Frontier, at the church. The concerts were benefits, the first for Holland and the second for the Ostinellis.

Music was provided by church members – the church did not seem to have its own “ongoing musical society,” Davenport wrote – plus choir members from Hallowell’s Congregational and Baptist societies. At one of these concerts, maybe both, Ostinelli played violin solos.

Davenport reprinted the program of the Sept. 19 concert. Each of the two parts began with an organ voluntary, followed by vocal music, both chorus and solo. Seven of the 15 pieces performed were by George Frideric Handel; one was by Franz Joseph Haydn.

North wrote the Holland concerts were the last time such “first class concerts” were presented in Augusta until June 1859, when Ostinelli’s daughter Elise, Madame Biscaccianti, sang.

Holland moved back to New Bedford in September 1823, Edwards wrote. “It is said that his influence on the musical life in Augusta is felt to this day (1928).”

The same year Cyril Searle was “temporarily located in Augusta and he continued the excellent work which had been started by Mr. Holland.”

North devoted three pages to Searle – not to his musical career, but to a description of the sketch he did of Augusta, probably in 1823 (definitely after Maine and Massachusetts separated in 1820, and before a building he included burned on Nov. 8, 1823).

When Augusta’s first Unitarian church, called Bethlehem Church, was built in 1827, it had an organ, North wrote. This church, according to Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history, was on the east bank of the Kennebec, where the Cony Flatiron Building (formerly Cony High School) stands today. Since most of the Augusta Unitarians lived on the west side of the river, a new church was built only six years later on State Street, about a block north of the present Lithgow Library.

In later descriptions of new church buildings, North occasionally mentioned an organ; apparently by the 1830s, they were common enough not to be worth noting.

An event he described that will remind readers of the old saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” and in which music played a minor role, occurred in 1832.

By then Maine’s capital had moved to Augusta. The legislature, meeting in secret session, discussed a controversial proposal to cede land to Great Britain to resolve the conflict over the Maine-Canada boundary (a conflict that led to the Aroostook War of 1839 – see the March 17, 2022, issue of The Town Line).

An anonymous source sent information on the secret deliberations to Luther Severance, publisher of an Augusta newspaper, who printed it. Legislators demanded to know the source. Severance refused to answer committee questions and was threatened with a contempt citation, but was apparently never prosecuted.

Enough of Augusta’s elite sympathized with Severance to organize a dinner in his honor, at which speakers denounced legislators, praised the free press and, North quoted from Severance’s newspaper, enjoyed “an excellent dinner, moistened with the best old Madeira, and accompanied by fine music.”

* * * * * *

There were also privately run singing schools, Edwards wrote. Millard Howard wrote in his Palermo history that schoolhouses were one place singing schools met. He added that by the late 1800s, schoolhouses were also sites for “some rowdy dances with frequent fights.”

Edwards’ history includes names of people, mostly men but some women, who ran singing schools. One was Coker Marble, whose singing school in Vassalboro operated for more than 20 years in the period from 1836 through 1856.

An on-line Marble genealogy provides limited information on not one but two men named Coker Marble. The genealogy starts with Samuel Marble (Oct. 23, 1728 -?) and Sarah Coker (June 21, 1735 -?), who married in 1754 in New Hampshire. They had at least three children: Hannah and John, both born in 1755, and Coker Marble Sr. (Sept. 28, 1765 – Aug. 30, 1823).

Coker Marble Sr., married twice, according to the on-line genealogy. He and his first wife, Polly Mason, whom he married about 1796, had at least one daughter.

On Jan. 1, 1801, in New Hampshire, he married Rhoda Judkins (1776 -1864). The oldest of their six children was Coker Marble Jr. (Feb. 8, 1802 – Sept. 10, 1882), who was born in Vassalboro.

In his chapter on Vassalboro in the Kennebec County history, Kingsbury named Rev. Coker Marble as pastor – presumably the first pastor – of the Second Baptist Church, organized at Cross Hill in 1808 with 37 members but, Kingsbury said, “probably…no church property.” From the dates in the genealogical information, this pastor must have been the senior Coker Marble, who would have been in his mid-40s in 1808.

Grave marker for Elder Coker Marble Sr., left, and his wife, Rhoda, on right., at the Cross Hill Cemetery, in Vassalboro.

Vassalboro cemetery records show that Coker Marble Sr., named as Elder Coker Marble, and Rhoda are buried in Vassalboro’s Cross Hill cemetery, with the two youngest of their four daughters.

(Your writer also found on line a biography of a Massachusetts doctor named John Oliver Marble. The biography specifies that he was the son of John and Emeline [Prescott] Marble and the grandson of Rev. Coker Marble. Dr. Marble was born April 26, 1839, in Vassalboro. He graduated from Colby in 1863 and received his medical degree from Georgetown in 1868.)

Coker Marble Jr., married Marcia Lewis (March 19, 1806 – Dec. 17, 1881) on Aug. 31 or Oct. 20, 1824, in Whitefield. Between 1825 and 1853 Marcia bore seven daughters and three sons. The sons were named Arthur, Edwin and Henry.

From the birth and death dates, your writer concludes that it was Coker Marble Jr., who ran the Vassalboro singing school, probably beginning when he was in his early 30s. The genealogy lists two of his and Marcia’s children as born in Vassalboro, in 1837 and 1841, and two others in Hallowell, in 1839 and 1845.

The on-line site says the younger Coker Marble lived in Pittston in 1870 and Skowhegan in 1880; Marcia is listed in Pittston in 1870 and in Milburn in 1880 (Milburn might then have been part of Skowhegan). Both died in Bath (another site says Coker Marble died in either Bath or China) and are buried in Bath’s Maple Grove Cemetery.

Main sources

Davenport, Linda, Divine Song on the Northeast Frontier Maine’s Sacred Tunebooks, 1800-1830 (1996).
Edwards, George Thornton, Music and musicians of Maine: being a history of the progress of music in the territory which has come to be known as the State of Maine, from 1604 to 1928 (1970 reprint).
Howard, Millard, An Introduction to the Early History of Palermo, Maine (second edition, December 2015).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
North, James W. , The History of Augusta (1870).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: How towns cared for their poor (conclusion)

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In many areas, poor families were auctioned off to the lowest bidder.

by Mary Grow

Benton, Clinton, Fairfield, Waterville, Winslow

This fourth and final article on the ways central Kennebec Valley towns carried out their responsibility to care for their poorest residents will provide bits of information about half a dozen towns not already discussed.

* * * * * *

For Benton (which was part of Clinton until March 16, 1842, when it became a new town named Sebasticook, changed to Benton on March 4, 1850), Henry Kingsbury had only one sentence about paupers: “The poor of the town have never been numerous, and are cared for [in 1892] by individual contract.”

In his Kennebec County history, he related an informal example. In the early 1800s, he wrote, a family named Piper proposed moving from Anson, Maine, to Ohio. As they were canoeing down the Kennebec, the canoe upset at Ticonic Falls, in Waterville, and the father drowned.

A second-generation Benton resident named Isaac Spencer rescued the Piper son, Joseph, “snugly wrapped in a blanket,” and brought him to his house. Joseph’s mother also survived, but she could not support her son, so he stayed with Spencer.

Kingsbury wrote that Joseph Piper “became a successful farmer.” He died in the 1850s, leaving a large estate on part of which a grandson named Charles was living in 1892.

* * * * * *

Kingsbury wrote that Clinton’s first poor farm, which existed before Benton and Clinton were separated in 1842, was “about half a mile west of Morrison’s Corner.”

Morrison’s Corner was, and as Morrison Corner still is, the four corners where Hinckley Road, running roughly north to south, meets Battle Ridge Road, which runs northeast to connect to Upper Bellsqueeze Road, and Ferry Road, which runs southwest to the former Noble’s Ferry on the Kennebec River.

By 1879, according to that year’s Kennebec County atlas, Clinton had a new town farm east of the original one, on the east side of Hill Road (which runs north-northwest out of downtown Clinton toward Canaan).

* * * * * *

Crossing back to the west side of the Kennebec, the 1988 Fairfield bicentennial history has no reference to a town farm, poor house or almshouse or any other town-funded method of caring for paupers. The first town meeting after the town was incorporated was on Aug. 19, 1788; the first reference to appropriations says that in 1793 “The Town first raised money for schools,” but lists no amount and mentions no other expenditures.

The history gives a short paragraph to what became the Goodwill-Hinckley School (described in the May 20 and June 3, 2021, issues of The Town Line). Rev. George W. Hinckley founded what started as Good Will Farm in June 1889, in the part of Fairfield now called Hinckley, “as a home for boys.”

In November 1889, the history continues, “the Good Will Home Association was organized as a home for needy boys with funds Rev. Hinckley had been collecting for some time.” The writers go on to describe 20th-century changes.

At the end of the bicentennial history is a reproduction of a 1909 map of Fairfield that shows a building labeled “Town Farm.” It is on the south side of a road running east from Green Road to Nye’s Corner, which is south – downriver, toward the Fairfield business district – of the Goodwill School.

A map from the mid-1980s shows the former road as a trail. It does not appear in any form on a contemporary on-line map.

(According to the 1909 map, the town farm was a short distance east of a four-way intersection where at least two families named Green lived. There was a schoolhouse on the east side of the intersection.)

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Waterville was part of Winslow from 1771 to 1802, and Oakland was part of Waterville until 1873, when it became a separate town called West Waterville (changed to Oakland in 1883).

Kingsbury explained that the growth of water-powered manufacturing on Messalonskee Stream, the outlet of Messalonskee Lake, led to the development of an industrial center separate from Waterville’s, which was based on and near the Kennebec.

Kingsbury’s accounts of poor farms in Winslow, Waterville and Oakland are frustratingly incomplete. As he often did, he assumed future readers would have access to the same documents he had, and would recognize the names of families, roads and localities that were part of his daily experience in the 1890s.

In his chapter on Winslow, he wrote that until 1859, paupers were bid off. That year, “the town voted $3,200, and bought the Blanchard farm.”

If the former Blanchard farm was still the town farm when the 1879 Kennebec County atlas was created, it was in a part of town more settled than officials usually chose for an almshouse.

The map shows the Town Farm on the west side of what is now Clinton Avenue (Route 100) running northeast along the Sebasticook River to Benton. The farm is marked about halfway between the top of the hill in Winslow and the Hayward Road intersection. Along this stretch, the map shows a dozen houses (occupied by, among others, several Getchell and Fuller families and two whose last name was Town) and a schoolhouse diagonally north of the town farm.

Kingsbury was slightly more informative on Waterville (unlike the Waterville centennial history; the summary of the 100 years from 1802 to 1902 doesn’t mention the poor, and since the book has a names-only index, finding any other reference is time-consuming).

In Waterville, Kingsbury found, the poor were bid off from 1811 (or earlier) until about 1842. In 1811, five paupers cost the town from 35 to 65 cents a week, for a weekly total of $2.59. In 1812, the town supported a dozen people and the cost went up to $3.48 a week.

(Ruby Crosby Wiggin’s comments about doctors’ fees, cited in last week’s article, suggest there might have been occasional additional charges.)

From 1837 records Kingsbury quoted a decision that the poor as a group “be sold at auction for one year.” Samuel H. Batchelder was the successful bidder, charging $865.

Around 1842, Waterville officials bought from Joseph Mitchell and George Bessey a 90-acre farm to use as a town farm. At an unspecified later date, the town also acquired a woodlot in Sidney, apparently intended to complement the farm.

The 1879 Kennebec County map shows Waterville’s town farm a short distance south of downtown, on the south side of Webb Road. It was just west of the intersection with Mitchell Road, which current maps show coming south from the back of LaFleur Airport to Webb Road.

In March 1890 the house on the town farm burned down. Officials then bought seven acres from George Boutelle and “built the present excellent city alms house at a total expense at $6,444.”

(George Keely Boutelle was a prominent Waterville lawyer and businessman who helped organize and lead several banks and was active in civic organizations.)

By 1892, Waterville’s “poor department” was costing more than $9,000 a year, Kingsbury added.

The 1873 separation of West Waterville (which became Oakland) from Waterville would have required the new town to assume the care of its indigent residents. The 1879 map of the new town shows a town farm not far west of downtown, on the north side of what is now High Street (Route 137 heading west toward Smithfield). Comparison with a contemporary on-line map puts the farm site about half-way between the Oak Street intersection and the Gage Road intersection.

Kingsbury provided evidence that in the early 1890s Oakland was both running a town farm and caring for paupers off the farm. Appropriations listed in a town report for the fiscal year that ended Feb. 28, 1892, included “support of poor,” $1,100 and “town farm,” $500.

A current on-line map labels the road along the east shore of McGrath Pond that connects Route 137 with Route 11 (the Oakland-Belgrade road) as Town Farm Road. A town farm on this road, if there were one, would have been west of the one in use in 1879.

Story of the Bray sisters

Did local methods of caring for the poor lead to those who were bid off to local families being turned into unpaid and mistreated farm and household help? Linwood Lowden said “without doubt” the system led to abuses; an on-line source says there is no evidence of abuse.

Your writer found one piece of writing that looks at bidding out from the paupers’ viewpoint: a short story by Sarah Orne Jewett called The Town Poor.

Two prosperous women in a small Maine town detour on their way home from a church event to visit two elderly sisters, Ann and Mandana Bray, who ran out of money and saw their house and possessions sold at auction and themselves bid out.

They live in a dingy upstairs room in a shabby farmhouse on a run-down farm. The couple with whom they live, named Janes, are not their social equals, and the complaining wife is not enthusiastic about sharing her house with two more adults. The sisters admit to their friends that they haven’t been to meeting because they lack outdoor shoes that their caretakers never remember to buy for them, nor do they have enough stovewood to keep their room warm.

But they bring out the four china teacups saved from the auction, the last of the homemade peach jam from the peaches that grew by their former house, tea and cheese and crackers. The friends have a warm reunion; and Ann says next time, she’ll invite Mrs. Janes, too; the woman means well and deserves cheering up, because she has a hard life and none of the happy memories the Bray sisters have.

See part 1 here.
See part 2 here.
See part 3 here.

Main sources

Fairfield Historical Society, Fairfield, Maine 1788-1988 (1988).
Halfpenny, H. E., Atlas of Kennebec County Maine 1879 (1879).
Jewett, Sarah Orne, A White Heron and Other Stories (1999 edition).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: How towns cared for the poor

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Many poor houses were designed to punish the poor for their poverty.

by Mary Grow

China concluded and Albion

This article is the third of four that will talk about how central Kennebec Valley towns took care of their destitute residents, when welfare was a local responsibility.

Last week’s piece summarized actions in China from the 1820s into the 1870s, when the poor farm on the east shore of China Lake housed many of the town’s paupers (some were still bid out or assisted as they lived with family members). In the 1870s, the China bicentennial history says, there were often 20 or more people living on the farm, “many of them too old or too ill to help with the work.”

The farm superintendent was usually paid $300 (in 1874, $325) annually. Building maintenance was, or should have been, an ongoing expense. The history quotes from the March 1873 report of selectmen Alexander Chadwick, John Hamilton and Caleb Jones: they called the farm’s house “wholly unfit,” as it was “very cold and void of nearly every convenience which the wants of the inmates and those who have charge of them demand.”

The farm itself was “very much run out,” so that crops were small and income inadequate, they wrote.

They concluded: “The poor are a class of unfortunate beings who are entitled to our warmest sympathies, and demand from us all respect and kindness, and we believe it is a duty which we owe to them and to God, to provide them with comfortable homes and render them as happy as we possibly can.”

Unmoved, voters at the March 1873 town meeting rejected an appropriation to work on the buildings. In 1876, the history says, town records show $161.87 spent on repairs; but in 1877 voters refused to allocate more money to finish the work.

Through the rest of the century the farm hung on, with fewer residents – only half a dozen for much of the 1890s. The superintendent’s pay went down to $200 a year in 1880 and 1890.

The history lists minor upgrades, like a new cookstove in 1887, and building repairs in 1895 and 1900. In 1908, “a well was sunk at the south end of the barn, finally providing an abundant water supply.”

Town reports indicated that the farm also provided overnight lodging and meals for tramps passing through China.

The China history documents an incident that appears to indicate that not all poor China residents wanted to live on the town farm. Voters at the town meeting in March 1881 agreed to reimburse selectmen Elihu Hanson and Francis Jones for their expenses “defending themselves against an assault and battery charge brought by a town pauper, Mary Coro, ‘while in the discharge of their official duties as Overseers of the Poor in removing her to the poor house.'”

For much of the early 20th century China officials rented out the poor farm, at least part of the time with the understanding that if a pauper needed to live there, the tenant would take care of him or her.

A February 1911 report listed “$482.75 worth of livestock, supplies and equipment on the farm.” But, selectmen said, two of the three residents in 1909 had died and the third had left Maine, and no one had moved in during 1910. They suggested town meeting voters consider a change.

At the March 1920 town meeting, voters finally approved selling the farm. Carrol Jones bought it for $2,000 in April.

Associated with the town farm was a cemetery, which the bicentennial history says was “(probably) always a town-owned burying ground.” In the cemetery, in 1975, were the headstone of John Chase, who died June 19, 1839, at the age of 38, “an initialed footstone, and many fieldstones.”

In the 1890s, China’s town farm superintendent “acquired a new responsibility,” the bicentennial history says. The March 1891 town meeting authorized selectmen to buy a town hearse and to build a hearse house, giving them $700 for the project.

Selectmen decided to put the town farm superintendent in charge of the hearse, and they had the hearse house built on the farm. The hearse cost $500, the building $170.39, according to the history.

In 1892, the town earned $15 “for letting the China hearse be used out of town.” What became of the hearse is unstated; the building was part of the farm when Carrol Jones bought it in 1920.

Jones stored his farm machinery in the building for a while before he gave it to “his daughter and son-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. William Nye, who turned it into a summer cottage.” The cottage was still in use when the history was published in 1975.

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In many areas, poor families were auctioned off to the lowest bidder.

Moving north to Albion, Ruby Crosby Wiggin found that in 1804, voters appropriated $1,200 for roads, $200 for schools and an amount she did not list for “the support of the poor and other town charges.” (If this sentence sounds familiar, it might be because Augusta voters took similar action at a 1797 town meeting, as was reported in the first article in this series.)

Albion voters began bidding out the poor in 1810, Wiggin wrote, during a period of hard times, when newly-built roads were discontinued and produce instead of money was accepted in payment of taxes. In one case, a man agreed to take care of a widow “for $8.00 and the use of her cow for one year.”

Wiggin did not mention paupers again until she excerpted from the 1868 town report. It included, she said, a report that “doctoring the town poor” for a year had cost voters $3.25.

She continued: “Either they were a healthy lot or the Doctor didn’t receive much for each call. We might conclude that there weren’t many poor people, but since the town had maintained a town farm for several years, there must have been a few of them.”

Wiggin gave no more information about the town farm, but Henry Kingsbury devoted a paragraph to it in his 1892 Kennebec County history. He wrote that about 1858, after the poor had been “cared for by individual contract” (presumably since soon after the town was incorporated as Fairfax in 1804), town officials bought a farm “on the Bessey road, three miles south of the Corner.”

The farm had been settled by Solomon Bessey around 1810 and by the 1850s belonged to his nephew, William Bessey. Kingsbury wrote that the initial purchase was 160 acres; later sales and acquisitions made it about 170 acres by 1892.

Bessey Road, now called Bessey Ridge Road, runs south from Routes 202 and 137 to Libby Hill Road, in the southern part of town. An 1879 map of Albion, in the atlas of Kennebec County, shows the town farm on the east side of the road about half-way along. On the same side of the road, C. H. Chalmers lived north of the town farm and H. B. Bessey south; A. Bessey’s property was on the west side about half-way between the town farm and H. B. Bessey.

Albion went through at least two town hearses, according to Wiggin’s history. The earlier was “simply a wooden box on wheels” that was allowed to rot “out back of the hearse house” (wherever that was). Blacksmith Benjamin Abbott bought the “wheels, axletree and tongue” in February 1886 for $16.

By then, Albion had a new hearse, thanks to an 1884 spending spree: in that one year, town officials bought a $200 road machine and a $450 hearse. The hearse, made by Cooper Brothers in Searsmont, was “a beautiful thing,” Wiggin wrote, with shiny black paint, nickel trim and tasseled window curtains.

Its custodian, Bert Skillins, drove “a pair of dapple gray horses that were as spic and span and tasseled as the hearse itself.”

According to Wiggin, as residents admired the new hearse, one commented that “he hoped no one would kill himself just for the sake of riding in it.” Yes, Wiggin wrote: “The first occupant was a suicide victim.”

Main sources

Grow, Mary M., China Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984).
Halfpenny, H. E., Atlas of Kennebec County Maine 1879 (1879).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Wiggin, Ruby Crosby, Albion on the Narrow Gauge (1964).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Caring for the poor – Part 2

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Augusta city farm, circa 1932.

by Mary Grow

How towns cared for their poor

This article will continue the theme started June 14, how central Kennebec Valley towns took care of their poor residents, jumping across the Kennebec River from Augusta and Sidney to Vassalboro, Windsor, Palermo and China. The focus will remain – mostly – on the 19th century.

The excerpts about caring for the poor that Alma Pierce Robbins chose to quote from official records in her Vassalboro history are tantalizing. Although the first selectmen were elected May 22, 1771, it was not until 1793, the year after Sidney became a separate town from Vassalboro, that the selectmen were also titled overseers, presumably overseers of the poor.

The first mention of a “work house” Robbins found in town records was a discussion at a meeting sometime between 1807 and 1810. In 1811, she wrote, a blacksmith named John Roberts bid $140 to care for Vassalboro’s poor families – she did not say how many families or people.

In 1812, Robbins found, voters agreed to “hire a house for the Poor,” and the next year they paid Roberts $200 for a specified two acres plus “the premises now occupied as a Poor House.”

By 1829, Vassalboro’s paupers were again being bid off. That year, Robbins wrote, Alexander Gardner was the successful bidder, asking for $669.

In 1831, voters went back to providing a poor house. The Roberts farm having been sold, the town paid $1,371.50 to the heirs of Elihu Getchell, Jr., for a property that was designated the new “Town Farm.”

This building was called the Town House by 1845, when voters directed selectmen to buy “a stove and funnell [sic] to warm the Town House.”

In 1852, it was the town farm: town officials spent $2,282.27 for “a new ‘set of buildings.'” In 1867, records said Thomas S. Lang donated $150 of the $230.89 spent for repairs to the town house; and Robbins found another $100 appropriated in 1888.

An 1886 action that Robbins reported suggests where this poor house or farm was located. That year, she found, officials planned to lay out a road from Foster’s mill to the farm “on the west side of the Pond.”

Foster’s mill, according to Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec Country history, was on Seven Mile Stream, the farthest upstream of several mills using the stream’s water power. Since Seven Mile Stream runs from Webber Pond to the Kennebec River, it seems probable that the town farm was on the west side of Webber Pond.

The farm was still operating in 1931, when Harold Taylor, of East Vassalboro (many residents will remember his daughter, Elizabeth “Betty” Taylor, and a few might remember him), repaired its windmill. It was sold in 1945, for $9,805.88, Robbins found.

* * * * * *

Linwood Lowden included a section on care of the destitute in his Windsor history. Examples he selected from the first half of the 19th century indicate that Windsor (the town that was named Malta from 1809 to 1820, Gerry for two years, and Windsor after 1822) alternated between providing a poor house or farm and bidding off paupers, with other measures taken intermittently.

The first report he cited was from a March 1813 town report at which voters were asked if they wanted to build a work house or choose another method. On April 5, they voted to turn the house described as “Joseph Linscotts Meiggs house at his mills” into a “work house for the poor,” with Linscott the overseer. Lowden believed the house was at Maxcy’s Mills on the west branch of the Sheepscot River, in the southeastern part of town.

On Aug. 3, 1815, town meeting voters moved the poor house to a house Joseph Norris owned near his “dwelling house” on the east side of the Sheepscot. Lowden located this house on the Cooper’s Mills Road, a little south of Maxcy’s Mills.

On April 1, 1822, voters moved the poor again, to “John Cottle’s old house,” with Cottle the overseer. Lowden located this house only by original and 1993 owners (Jabez Meiggs and Bernard Dow).

Another house that Lowden called “Linscotts Chadwick house” often housed paupers. In 1816, for example, voters said David Linn’s wife and children could live on the porch and their cow could graze on the Chadwick land, with the selectmen to determine how much to pay Linscott.

(Lowden did not explain, and your writer declines to guess, why the two houses had double names.)

Other town meeting decisions in 1816 and following years:

  • A widow named Betsey Trask and another woman named Molly Proctor were to be given half a bushel of corn every Monday.
  • Three of Molly Proctor’s sons were bid off, two to their uncle Jonas Proctor and the third to Robert Hutchinson.
  • In 1818, the Kennebec County Probate Court granted Calvin McCurda guardianship over five younger brothers and sisters. Lowden explained that their father died in the War of 1812 and “there were pension funds to provide a financial base for the family.”

On April 4, 1837, Lowden wrote, Windsor voters decided to buy a poor farm. They appointed a three-man committee, who bought Thomas J. Pierce’s 90-acre farm.

(Editor’s note:) The possible location of the town farm in Vassalboro, on the west side of Webber Pond. The large island is referred to as Town Farm Island, in an area that was farm land before the dam was installed to form the lake as it is today. The rock lined road to the farm still exists under water.

The farm, Lowden said, was on both side of Route 2 north of the Windsor four corners, partly on the south side of Choate Road, which intersects Route 32 from the east. The farm buildings were on the west side of Route 32.

Lowden surmised that the vote was hotly debated and close. At another meeting a month later, he wrote, voters approved selling the farm and contents; in November 1837, George Briggs of Augusta bought it for $135.

In following years, Lowden wrote, voters went back to bidding off the poor, apparently as a group. In 1848, he wrote, Richard Moody offered to assume the responsibility for $425. Part of the job was to send pauper children to school and provide their school books.

* * * * * *

In Palermo, according to Millard Howard’s history, there was a poor farm for many years, operated as “a private enterprise” rather than owned by the town. Other paupers were bid out; or a relative was compensated for providing room and board.

In 1846, Howard wrote, James A. Huntoon, who was supporting Malvina Huntoon at town expense, “received payment for large quantities of port wine and brandy (medicinal, I assume).”

Howard described the indenture system that Palermo, and other towns, provided for minors who fell into poverty. He gave an 1848 example: after Elvira Brown became a town charge, the Palermo overseers of the poor bound out her son Arthur as an apprentice to a farmer named Charles Hathorn. Brown was to work for Hathorn from March 8, 1848, to Oct. 13, 1865, when he turned 21.

(Your writer notes that these dates say that Brown was not yet four years old when he was apprenticed.)

In return for Brown’s labor, Hathorn agreed to train him as a farmer; to teach him to “read, write and cypher”; and to provide “sufficient clothing food and necessaries both in sickness and health.”

Another issue that Howard discussed at more length than other historians was disputes among towns as to which one was responsible for a pauper who moved around. The rule was that wherever the pauper established “settlement,” that town was responsible. Such disputes seemed especially numerous in the 1840s, he commented.

For instance, in 1843, Howard said, Palermo went to court against Clinton, claiming a family named Chamberlain was not Palermo’s responsibility. Alas for Palermo, the court found that in 1823, Palermo had assisted the Chamberlains, thus assuming responsibility. The case cost Palermo $149.24 in damages paid to Clinton and another $50.26 in legal expenses.

On the other hand, Howard found an instance of cooperation between two towns’ officials: in March 1857, Freedom overseers warned Palermo officials not to be generous if a “smart, healthy young woman in her teens” who “seems very willing, if not desirous, to be a town pauper” showed up on Palermo’s side of the town line.

* * * * * *

China, like neighboring towns, vacillated among methods of providing for paupers, according to the bicentennial history. From the 1820s, they were usually bid off, sometimes individually and sometimes with one bidder assuming responsibility for all the town’s poor.

After decades of discussion and brief ownership of a farm in 1838, a March 31, 1845, town meeting appointed a five-man committee to find a suitable farm and report back in a week. Committee members examined, they reported, between 20 and 30 farms and recommended paying $2,000 for the farm owned by Seth Brown, which the town had owned in 1838.

There were cheaper farms available, the committeemen added, but it would cost more to adapt them.

The history says the farm was on the east shore of China Lake a little north of Clark Brook “and was considered one of the best-situated farms in town.” Between September 1846 and Mach 1849, voters appropriated about $2,800 to pay for the farm (with interest); to provide livestock and equipment; and to pay a superintendent. In March 1850 another $200 was appropriated “to enlarge the farmhouse.”

The history describes the farm as having “a large house and several barns and sheds.” In the 1850s, there were usually 15 or 16 paupers, “most of them old and infirm.” The superintendent and his wife, the able-bodied poor and when necessary hired hands tried to keep the farm at least partly self-sustaining.

A March 1859 inventory listed “two oxen, six cows, sixteen sheep, three swine,” plus supplies of “hay, corn, oats, wheat, vegetables, beef, and pork.” Hens were added in 1867.

Other paupers were living off the farm by the 1860s; in 1868, taxpayers spent more on the farm – over $540 –than on off-farm support – about $400. The farm had sold animals and crops, but had failed to cover expenses; and, the selectmen commented, all of the buildings leaked.

Due to space limits, the story of China’s poor farm will be continued next week.

Main sources

Grow, Mary M. , China Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984).
Howard, Millard , An Intro­duction to the Early History of Palermo, Maine (second edition, December 2015).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Lowden, Linwood H., good Land & fine Contrey but Poor roads a history of Windsor, Maine (1993).
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: The story of Independence Day

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by Mary Grow

Local historians make some references to Independence Day celebrations

According to Wikipedia, celebrating Independence Day on July 4 each year is most likely an error.

The writer of the on-line site’s article on this national holiday says that the Second Continental Congress, meeting in a closed session, approved Virginia representative Richard Henry Lee’s resolution declaring the United States independent of Great Britain on July 2, 1776.

Knowing the decision was coming, a five-man committee headed by Thomas Jefferson spent much of June drafting the formal declaration that would justify the dramatic action. After debating and amending the draft, Congress approved the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 – having approved the act of independence two days earlier.

Wikipedia further says that although some Congressmen later said they signed the declaration on July 4, “[m]ost historians” think the signing was really not until Aug. 2, 1776.

The article includes a quotation from a July 3, 1776, letter from John Adams, of Massachusetts, to his wife, Abigail. Adams wrote that “[t]he second day of July 1776…will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival.”

Adams recommended the day “be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.”

And so it has been – two days late.

Wikipedia says July 4 celebrations began in 1777, in Philadelphia, where the observance included an “official dinner” for members of the Continental Congress, and in Bristol, Rhode Island. The Massachusetts General Court was the first state legislature to make July 4 a state holiday, in 1781, while Maine was part of Massachusetts.

Windsor historian Linwood Lowden mentioned the importance of the local Liberty Pole as part of Independence Day observances. Liberty Poles, he explained were put up after the Declaration of Independence as symbols of freedom. Many later became town flagpoles; Windsor’s, at South Windsor Corner (the current junction of routes 32 and 17), was still called a Liberty Pole in 1873.

The central Kennebec Valley towns covered in this history series have quite probably celebrated the holiday annually, or almost annually, since each was organized. As with other topics, local historians’ interest, and the amount of available information, vary from town to town.

James North’s history of Augusta is again a valuable resource. He described Independence Day celebrations repeatedly, beginning with 1804 (it was in 1797 that Augusta separated from Hallowell and, after less than four months as Harrington, became Augusta).

In 1804, North describes two celebrations, divided by politics. The Democrats, or Democratic-Republicans (the party of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and others) gathered at the courthouse, where Rev. Thurston Whiting addressed them.

(Whiting is listed in on-line sources as a Congregationalist. He preached in Newcastle, Warren and before 1776 in Winthrop, where he “was invited to settle but declined,” according to a church history excerpted on line. He preached in Hallowell in 1775 [then described as “a young man”], and in 1791 is listed in Hallowell records as solemnizing the marriage of two members of prominent Augusta families, James Howard, Esquire, and Susanna Cony.)

The Federalists (the party of Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and others) began celebrating at dawn with “a discharge of cannon,” North wrote. They organized a parade at the courthouse that went across the Kennebec and back to the meeting house where an aspiring young lawyer, Henry Weld Fuller, gave a speech. The day ended with a banquet at the Kennebec House (a local hotel that often hosted such events), during which participants “drank seventeen regular toasts highly seasoned with federalism.”

(Hon. Henry Weld Fuller [1784-Jan. 29, 1841], born in Connecticut, graduated from Dartmouth in 1801, studied law and came to Augusta in 1803. He married Ester or Esther Gould [1785-1866], on Dec. 21, 1805, or Jan. 7, 1806 [sources differ]. They had seven children, including Henry Weld Fuller II [1810-1889], who in turn fathered Henry Weld Fuller III [1839-1863], who died without issue. North wrote that the senior Fuller served in the Massachusetts legislature in 1812 and 1816 and in the Maine legislature in 1837. He was appointed Kennebec County attorney in 1826 and was a Judge of Probate from 1828 until he died. His grandson, Henry III’s brother Melville Weston Fuller, was Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.)

By the summer of 1807, the Democratic Republicans had elected one of their number, James Sullivan, as governor of Massachusetts, and the Maine party members “were in high spirits,” North wrote. On July 4, they heard an oration by Rev. Joshua Cushman, of Winslow, and partook of a dinner for 150 people in lavishly decorated courthouse.

Cushman’s speech was published; North wrote that “it attacked federalism with more vigor of denunciation than truthfulness or discretion.”

(Wikipedia says Rev. Joshua Cushman [April 11, 1761 – Jan. 27, 1834] was a Revolutionary War veteran who graduated from Harvard in 1787 and became a minister, serving Winslow’s Congregational Church for almost two decades. He was a member of the United States House of Representatives representing Massachusetts from 1819 to 1821, and with Maine statehood continued as a Maine member until 1825. He had just been elected to the Maine House of Representatives when he died. Wikipedia says “He was interred in a tomb on the State grounds in Augusta.”)

By July 4, 1810, the Augusta Light Infantry had been organized and paraded as part of the Federalist celebration, which North believed was held in Hallowell. He listed a parade including the Light Infantry as part of the 1810 and 1812 celebrations as well.

Because 1826 was the 50th anniversary of independence, Augusta officials organized an all-day celebration, North wrote. It began with a “discharge of cannon and ringing of bells” at dawn and continued with a parade, a ceremony, another parade, a dinner and fireworks set off on both sides of the Kennebec.

One of Augusta’s most prominent residents, Hon. Daniel Cony (Aug. 3, 1752 – Jan 21, 1842), presided at the banquet. Attendees included General John Chandler (Feb. 1, 1762 – Sept. 25, 1841), then in his second term as a United States Senator; Peleg Sprague (April 27, 1793 – Oct. 13, 1880), then a member of the United States House of Representatives and later a U.S. Senator; and “some officers of the army and navy who were engaged in the survey of the Kennebec.”

Also present, North wrote, was Hon. Nathan Weston (March 17, 1740 – Nov. 17, 1832), whom Cony introduced as the “venerable gentleman” who served in the Revolutionary army and fought at Saratoga with him. North wrote that Weston “briefly review[ed]…the events which preceded and led to the war of the revolution, noticing the severity of the struggle and the spirit which brought triumphant success, gave the following toast: ‘The spirit of ’76 ­ – alive and unspent after fifty years.'”

(North’s history includes two biographical sections on this Nathan Weston, whom he usually called Capt., and his son, also Nathan Weston, who was a judge and whom North usually called Hon. North did not write anything about Capt. Weston’s military service after the French and Indian wars. However, the younger Nathan Weston was born in 1782 and could not have fought in the Revolution.)

By July 4, 1829, Augusta had been designated Maine’s new state capital (succeeding Portland), and Independence Day was chosen as the day to lay the cornerstone of the State House, leading to “unusual ceremonies and festivity,” North wrote.

The celebration began, as usual, with bells and a 24-gun salute at dawn; continued with a parade featuring the Augusta Light Infantry, many speeches and a banquet; and was climaxed by fireworks set off on both sides of the Kennebec.

One more Independence Day celebration North thought worth describing was the 1832 observance. That year, he wrote, for the first time since 1811, the two political parties – by then the National Republicans and the Democrats – “each had separate processions, addresses and dinners.”

The Democrats got “part of” the Augusta Light Infantry and a band from Waterville for their parade and held their dinner in the State House. The Republicans’ parade incorporated “the Hallowell Artillery and Sidney Rifles, each with a band of music, and the Hallowell and Augusta band.” Their dinner was in the Augusta House.

The local Republican newspaper, identified by North as the Journal, claimed 2,000 people in the Republican parade. The Democratic Age estimated only 700 in the Democrats’ parade, but claimed 1,000 at the State House meal, versus only 400 or 500 at the Republican dinner.

North wrote that the Journal admitted the Democrats fed a larger crowd, but, North quoted, said snidely, “probably half of them dined at free cost.”

Windsor historian Lowden was another who described an occasional Fourth of July celebration, quoting from diaries kept in the 1870s and 1880s by residents Roger Reeves and Orren Choate.

In 1874, Reeves described “Bells, cannon guns, pistols, rockets, bomb shells, fire crackers” on Water Street, but “very little rum” and “no rows.” (Windsor no longer has a Water Street, and your writer failed to find an old map with street names.)

Two years later, Reeves’ family went to the Togus veterans’ home “to see the greased pig caught,” while Reeves himself intended “to celebrate in the hay field.” And in 1878 Reeves again worked all day, earning “a dollar and a pair of slippers” for whitewashing a barn. In the evening he went “up on the hill and played croquet by lamp light.”

Choate went to Weeks Mills for the 1885 Independence Day celebration (he was 17 that year, Lowden said), and wrote that it included races and a dance and he didn’t get home until midnight.

The next year, 1886, July 4 was a Sunday, so the celebration was on Monday. Choate got up at 2 a.m. to join relatives and friends for a trip to Augusta’s celebration, from which they got home at 3 the following morning. “We had a good time,” he wrote, without providing details.

Other local historians made occasional comments about Independence Day celebrations – for example, the Fairfield bicentennial history says that Fairfield’s Civil War monument was dedicated on July 4, 1868.

Your writer hopes that readers remember enjoyable, perhaps moving, ceremonies from years past and will have a safe and fun holiday this year.

Main sources

Fairfield Historical Society, Fairfield, Maine 1788-1988 (1988).
Lowden, Linwood H., good Land & fine Contrey but Poor roads a history of Windsor, Maine (1993).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870).

Websites, miscellaneous.

An evening of fascinating history with China Historical Society

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Members of the China Historical Society. (photo by Roberta Barnes)

by Roberta Barnes

Today is important, but have you ever wondered about the path that led to today? What challenges did those in the area face, and how did they deal with those challenges? How did China get its name? What were those amazing things done in the past that have been filed away in a diary? As you learn about the past of a community you can begin to feel the oneness of the community that blends yesterday with today.

The meetings of the China historical society, which wrote its bylaws in 1974, had stopped for numerous reasons. In October 2022 the China historical society began meeting again with the focus being on the oneness of the community. In April 2023 the society received its 501c3 non-profit status from the United States IRS.

During the colder months of the year the historical society members met in the accessible portable building behind the town office, but this last meeting was held in the unheated China Museum. Many things were discussed, including the July 13 meeting that will flow into elders of China telling interesting and fun details about the town’s history.

This July 13th meeting is open to everyone, so mark your calendar for 6 p.m.

Being at this evening meeting held in the China Baptist Church you might imagine yourself sitting around a campfire listening to elders of the community revealing forgotten details about those stories of the past that you have only heard bits and pieces.

A handmade wooden wheelchair. (photo by Roberta Barnes)

You might think the China museum as just having a lot of old stuff. Much of that old stuff comes with intriguing stories. One of the things in the China museum comes with a story that shows the creative initiative actions of people in China’s past to take on challenges. A hundred years prior to ADA people still had physical limitations, buying needed adaptive equipment such as wheelchairs on eBay or Amazon was not an option. One person, recognizing the challenges that faced her grandfather, built a wheelchair completely out of wood.

Many other things in the museum show the nature and actions of the people in past decades that formed the beauty we see in China today.

One of the challenges the China historical society faces today is finding what can best be described as a vault in which to store relics of China’s past in a way that can stop deterioration. Another challenge is deciding on the historical relevance of various building within China.

As one of the members described to me, China covers a wide area that includes China Village, South China, Branch Mills, and Weeks Mills. All these areas together can provide fascinating history, which everyone is invited to hear on Thursday July 13.

Elders from all this area will be present at the China Baptist Church Thursday July 13 2023. The society’s brief initial meeting at 6 p.m., will naturally flow into these elders revealing and explaining to all those attending much of China’s intriguing history.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Society of Friends in Vassalboro

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The Abel Jones House, on Jones Road, in South China Village, dates from 1815.

by Mary Grow

An address at the Vassalboro Historical Society

On Sunday afternoon, June 18, Joann Clark Austin, of South China, a semi-retired lawyer and self-described “fifth-generation China Quaker,” spoke on the local history of Quakerism at the Vassalboro Historical Society.

An Englishman named George Fox (July 1624 – Jan. 13, 1691) founded what became known as the Society of Friends, or Quakers, Austin said. Growing up in a multi-denominational society, Fox constantly questioned religious leaders, seeking a faith that was honest, non-commercial and peaceful.

He realized that the Bible, only recently available in English (the King James Bible was published in 1611), presented an image of Jesus as the exemplar of love, forgiveness, equality, cooperation and other traits he searched for. He felt Jesus talking directly to him, and “developed a personal relationship with a living, loving Jesus.”

Fox’s insight became the basis of the Society of Friends. He felt called to spread the news; Austin said his travels included visits to Rhode Island and Boston, where he confronted the Puritans.

Quakers were often persecuted, but persecution only made them more aggressive about preaching their doctrines, Austin said.

Their religious observances took the form of sitting together quietly, waiting to hear the inner voice. Sometimes, an on-line source says, “some participants would feel the presence of the Lord so strongly that they would begin to shake, or ‘quake'” – hence the name Quaker. It was intended as an insult, but Friends proudly claimed it.

Austin said that “Quakerism had a huge impact in Vassalboro and China,” more than in other parts of Maine. She explained that in 1771, British landowners, notably the Vassall family, had a surveyor named John Jones lay out lots in the wilderness that became Vassalboro.

Despite the difficulties of traveling to and in what was then a wilderness, and the further difficulties of clearing space to build a house, grow food crops and graze livestock, the lots sold, and there were Friends among the buyers.

Vassalboro and China Friends connected with Friends elsewhere. Doing title research for the Bristol Historical Society, Austin was amazed to find that a cemetery in Bristol with unmarked graves (typical of early Friends graveyards) had been deeded to Vassalboro Friends meeting.

By the 1750s and 1760s, Austin said, Friends were numerous enough in the American colonies to control governments in Rhode Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania (founded as a haven for the group) and North Carolina.

The Revolution was not a good time for them, however, because one of their beliefs is that war is not a solution to problems. Many were pacifists and therefore were accused of Tory sympathies; and many left colonies like Massachusetts for the Maine frontier.

One Friend who came to Maine in 1777 was a New Yorker named David Sands, Austin said. Reaching Vassalboro, he and his companion were invited to the spacious home of a magistrate named Remington Hobby (some sources spell the name Hobbie).

Hobby welcomed them in his warm kitchen, where, in Quaker fashion, they sat in silence. Thinking his informality had offended his guests, Hobby had a fire built in the best parlor – where again they sat silently.

As Hobby began to wonder if these men were trying to make a fool of him, Sands broke his silence. “Art thou willing to be a fool?” he asked. “Art thou willing to be a fool for Christ?”

Sands converted Hobby, and on future visits helped Hobby increase the number of Friends in Vassalboro.

Austin diverted from history to explain how someone like Sands would decide to travel. The person – not necessarily a man – would feel a call from that internal voice, she said, and would tell the other members of his or her local meeting about it.

Members would decide whether the call was genuine and should be approved. They could, and often did, appoint a second member to accompany the traveler.

Local meetings were held weekly in a member’s house, until the group became too large and built a meeting house. There were also quarterly (four times a year) meetings that brought together regional groups, and yearly meetings with an even wider geographic spread.

Meeting houses were simple and unornamented. If a Friends group outgrew a meeting house and built a larger one, the first one would likely become some family’s home.

A feature of Friends meeting houses was a panel that dropped from the ceiling to divide the room in two, women on one side and men on the other. Each group would discuss the day’s issues and come to its own conclusion, with the women not being overborne by the men.

The process of reaching a decision at such a business meeting Austin called getting “the sense of the meeting.” It is not consensus, and not compromise, but hearing and attempting to answer each person’s concerns. If after discussion one member still disagrees, there is no decision.

Holly Weidner, a Vassalboro Friend, explained from the audience that since everyone in the meeting has within him or her the same divine spark, the clerk of the meeting, who is leading the discussion, has to find the place where everyone is satisfied.

Austin mentioned another Vassalboro Friend, John Damon Lang (May 14, 1799 – 1879), a mill-owner who was appointed and sent West by President Ulysses Grant in 1870 as one of nine Indian commissioners. The commissioners’ mission, according to their report, was to “civilize, educate and provide moral training to the original inhabitants.”

A handout Austin had prepared included photos of three China friends known internationally, Eli Jones (1807-1890), his wife Sybil (1808-1873) and their nephew Rufus (Jan. 25, 1863 -June 16, 1948). In her talk she mentioned Eli’s sister, Rufus’ Aunt Peace (1815 – 1907).

“Her name was Peace?” an audience member asked.

Yes, and the Jones genealogy in the China bicentennial history records women named Comfort, Grace, Mercy and Thankful.

Quakers in central Kennebec Valley

Friends, or Quakers, are important enough in the history of the central Kennebec Valley and surrounding region to merit a separate chapter in Henry Kingsbury’s 1892 county history, a chapter written for the book by Rufus Jones, of China.

China’s first settlers, in the summer of 1774, were a family named Clark: Jonathan, Sr., and Miriam and their four sons. Jones wrote that Miriam and two of the sons, Andrew and Ephraim, were Friends; Jonathan and the other two sons were not.

In addition to books written by and about noted China Quakers and other documents, tangible reminders of their presence include five buildings listed on the National Register of Historic Places and seven Friends cemeteries.

Friends Meeting House, in Vassalboro.

Three of the buildings have long been private homes, and two still are. In the order in which they were built, they are:

  • The Abel Jones House, on Jones Road in South China Village, dates from 1815 and is one of several Federal-style houses still standing in town. Rufus Jones was born and spent his early childhood there. The South China Library Association now owns the building, barn and land.
  • The Eli and Sybil Jones House on the northwest side of the intersection of Dirigo Road and Route 3 (Augusta Road), dates from 1833 and was the home of the famous missionaries.
  • Pendle Hill, off the west side of Route 202 (Lakeview Drive) was built in 1916 and was Rufus Jones’ summer home until his death in 1948.

The older of the public buildings is the Pond Meeting House on the east side of Lakeview Drive. It dates from 1807 and was used for worship for years; it is now part of the Friends Camp,

The South China Community Church, built in 1884, began as a Friends meeting house, succeeding the Pond Meeting House. It is still a house of worship, now non-denominational.

According to the China bicentennial history, there are seven Friends cemeteries in China. The oldest is behind the Pond Meeting house; here is the grave of Jerusha Fish, daughter of Jonathan and Miriam Clark. Jerusha married George Fish, a British Friend who was lost at sea.

The next oldest China Friends cemetery is on the east side of Neck Road, near the site of a former meeting house. The earliest date in that cemetery is on the grave of Isaac and Nancy Jones’ son Isaiah, who died Aug. 27, 1836, aged eight months. Also buried here is Denmark Hobby, identified in the China history as “a former slave of the Vassalboro Quaker Remington Hobby.”

Two more Friends cemeteries are close together on the east side of Dirigo Road not far south of Route 3, again, the history says, near a former meeting house.

The other three are scattered around town. Jones Cemetery is just south of South China Village, on former Route 3 that runs south parallel to contemporary Route 3. Hussey Cemetery is on the east side of Pleasant View Ridge Road, north of the Bog Brook Road intersection. Lakeview Cemetery is on an eminence on the west side of Lakeview Drive, north of Friends Camp and the Pond Meeting House.

In Vassalboro, according to Alma Pierce Robbins’ history, a Friends meeting house for the “River Meeting” was built in 1786 overlooking the Kennebec River, where the Oak Grove chapel now stands. There is a Friends’ cemetery behind the chapel.

The second Vassalboro meeting house was built in 1798, for the group initially called the “12 Mile Pond” and then the “East Pond” meeting. (China Lake was originally known as Twelve-Mile Pond because it is 12 miles from Fort Western in what is now Augusta.) This meeting house on South Stanley Hill Road is still in active use; there is an adjacent cemetery.

Earlier articles in this series have focused on some of the people and places mentioned today, including stories about Rufus Jones (July 30 and Aug. 6, 2020, issues) and about historic buildings (July 1, July 8, July 15 and July 22, 2021).

Main sources

Austin, Joann Clark, Presentation at Vassalboro Historical Society, June 18, 2023.
Grow, Mary M. China, Maine Bicentennial History including 1984 revisions (1984).
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.