Up and Down the Kennebec Valley Archives

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Doctors Pulsifer

July 30, 2025/0 Comments/in Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley, Waterville/by Mary Grow

by Mary Grow

While wondering what new subject might keep readers – and writer — interested, your writer glanced at random pages in randomly-chosen history books. A warning: what she found does not remain in the central Kennebec Valley.

Her eyes fell on Dr. Nathan Goldsmith Howard Pulsifer.

Who could resist a name like that?

The man was a Waterville medical practitioner in the second half of the 19th century. As an added attraction, Dr. N. G. H. Pulsifer (as some historians call him) was the son of a doctor; brother of (at least) two doctors; and father of two more doctors.

FamilySearch’s analysis found that “Nathan” is a Biblical name, which in Hebrew means “God has given.”

“Goldsmith” is English and means a person who works in/with gold.

“Howard” is an English last – not first – name. FamilySearch says it was first spelled Haward, suggesting it was originally two Scandinavian words that meant “high guardian.”

“Pulsifer” is English, perhaps a variant of “Percival.”

An on-line genealogy says Pulsifer (Pulsever, Pulcifer, and other spellings) is a French Protestant name.

This source identifies the first Pulsifer in North America as John, who came to Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1680. John’s great-grandson, David, moved to Poland, Maine (southwest of Lewiston), and fathered Jonathan Pulsifer, born about 1770. Jonathan and his wife, Polly Rust, were parents of Dr. Moses Rust Pulsifer, who was the father of Dr. Nathan Goldsmith Howard Pulsifer.

Moses Pulsifer was born in Poland, on Sept. 10, 1799. He attended district schools and studied medicine (no details). Another on-line source says, without explaining why, that he and his family moved to Mt. Desert Island in 1823. There, according to the on-line genealogy, he practiced in Eden (renamed Bar Harbor in March 1918) and the mainland towns of Sullivan and Ellsworth.

In 1819, Pulsifer married Mary Strout Dunn, born May 30, 1801, in Poland. She was the oldest of 13 children (of whom one died in infancy and two in their teens). Mary and Moses had three daughters (Find a Grave) or six daughters (FamilySearch) and seven sons, born between 1820 and 1842.

Mary died March 11, 1850. Her widower, the genealogy says, remarried and had two more children, a daughter who married a doctor in Old Town, Maine, and a son who became a farmer in Corinna, Maine.

Moses died in Ellsworth, on Jan. 27, 1877, of pneumonia. He and his wife are buried in Auburn’s Oak Hill cemetery (Auburn is about 10 miles from their birthplace in Poland, about 130 miles from Ellsworth).

Find a Grave lists 24 Pulsifers in Oak Hill cemetery, including Moses and Mary and their son (N. G. H.’s brother) Dr. Horatio Brigham Pulsifer (of whom more later). Death dates range from 1848 to 1961.

* * * * * *

N. G. H. Pulsifer was Mary and Moses’ second son, born Jan. 24, 1824, in Eden. The genealogy says he was “educated in the common schools of Eden and Minot.” Henry Kingsbury wrote in his Kennebec County history that he was educated in “district schools and Gorham Academy” (Minot, near Lewiston, is about 160 miles southwest of Bar Harbor; Gorham, near Portland, is about another 40 miles south) “and graduated from Dartmouth Medical School in 1848.” (Frederick Charles Thayer, in his chapter on the medical profession in Whittemore’s history, dated his graduation 1847, as does the on-line genealogy.)

After briefly studying and working with his father and another doctor named N. C. Harris, N. G. H. established a practice at Fox Island, Maine (Vinalhaven and North Haven, in Penobscot Bay), the genealogy says.

In 1849, N. G. H. and his older brother, Major J. D. Pulsifer, caught gold fever. N. G. H.’s obituary says they joined a company that bought a sailing ship (other sources specify a barkentine named “Belgrade”) and made a stormy six-month trip around Cape Horn to California, with N. G. H. serving as ship’s doctor. Their search for gold brought “fair success.”

FamilySearch found (presumably from census records) that N. G. H. was living in Sutter, California, in 1850.

He came back to Ellsworth in 1851 and practiced homeopathy with his father; studied in New York and at Philadelphia’s Homeopathic Medical College, aka Hahnemann Medical College; and returned to Waterville in January 1852.

(Wikipedia terms homeopathy “a pseudoscientific system of alternative medicine,” based on German doctor Samuel Hahnemann’s 1796 theory. Practitioners “believe that a substance that causes symptoms of a disease in healthy people can cure similar symptoms in sick people.” “All relevant scientific knowledge about physics, chemistry, biochemistry and biology contradicts homeopathy,” Wikipedia says.)

(Hahnemann Medical College was founded in 1848 by three homeopathic doctors, per Wikipedia. By the late 1920s, the school had “dropped its homeopathic focus.”)

N. G. H. was a member of the American Homeopathic Society, the genealogy says (and a Republican and a Unitarian).

Thayer wrote that in Waterville, N. G. H. “at once built up a large practice.” The genealogy writer says he “ranked among the leaders in his profession for many years. He was held in the highest esteem by his fellow practitioners as well as by the families whom he served.”

The writer of his obituary praised his “fidelity to his patients and painstaking thoroughness as a physician” and “his sterling worth and strict integrity as a man.”

On Oct. 24, 1855, in Waterville, N. G. H. and Ann Cornelia Moor were married. They had two sons and two daughters: Nora Nellie Pulsifer (1856 – 1936); Cornelia Ann Pulsifer (1860 -1951); Dr. William Moor Pulsifer (Aug. 18, 1863 – Nov. 14, 1915) and Dr. Ralph Howard Pulsifer (Aug. 19, 1865 – 1926).

N. G. H. was not only a doctor. Kingsbury wrote, in 1892, that “Dr. [N. G. H.] Pulsifer has been devoting his attention to real estate operations and banking for the past twenty years.” Thayer praised N. G. H.’s financial judgment.

Horatio Bates’ chapter on Waterville banks lists, among others, People’s National Bank, which received a federal charter on March 15, 1865. N. G. H. was a director and vice-president and then its second president, serving from 1882 until he died in 1893.

N. G. H. is also listed among the 26 charter members of Waterville Savings Bank (1869). The genealogy mentions investments in real estate.

He was a member of the five-man building committee that oversaw construction of Waterville’s “beautiful north grammar school building,” dedicated Feb. 28, 1888. On-line photos show a two-story brick building on a basement, with large rectangular windows and arched doorways. An old map shows a schoolhouse in the southeast corner of the intersection of Pleasant and North streets.

N. G. H. died on December 3, 1893, in Waterville, at the age of 69. Ann died July 5, 1919, also in Waterville. Both are buried in the city’s Pine Grove cemetery.

* * * * * *

N. G. H. and Ann’s older son, William Moor Pulsifer (born Aug. 18, 1863), graduated from Coburn in 1878 and Colby in 1882, Thayer said. He earned one M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1887 and a second from Hahnemann in 1888 (or, the on-line genealogy says, took a post-graduate course there in 1890). He promptly established a practice in Skowhegan; returned to Waterville in 1892; and went back to Skowhegan in 1900. On Oct. 2, 1896, he married Helen G. Libby. He died in November, 1915, in Skowhegan.

His younger brother, Ralph Howard Pulsifer (born Aug. 19, 1865), followed the family tradition, graduating from Coburn in 1882 and Colby in 1886. His first medical degree was from Boston University, in 1880 (genealogy) or 1889 (Thayer), and he, too, earned a second M. D. from Hahnemann, in 1890.

This Dr. Pulsifer opened a practice in Waterville in November 1890 and after two years moved to Skowhegan. He married Grace Yeaton on Feb. 23, 1893; they had one son as of 1902. The Pulsifers moved back to Waterville in 1897, and in 1902, Thayer said, they lived in Vassalboro. Pulsifer died in 1926, in Belgrade or Waterville (sources disagree).

* * * * * *

Find a Grave identifies one other doctor in N. G. H.’s generation, his younger brother, Horatio Brigham (or Bridgham, Geni says) Pulsifer, born in Minot, Dec. 28, 1835, and died in Auburn April 7 or June 10, 1929, aged 93.

On Nov. 1, 1861, in Auburn, he married Augusta Ellen Roak, born in Auburn Jan. 21, 1838. They had three sons (plus three who died in infancy, according to FamilySearch) and a daughter; on-line sources identify none as a doctor. Augusta died in Auburn April 20, 1933, according to Find a Grave.

Geni gives N. G. H. a second doctor/brother, Thomas Pulsifer, born to Moses and Mary Pulsifer on April 2, 1842, in Poland. The website cites other sources that say Thomas Pulsifer entered Waterville (Colby) College in 1859, but left in 1861 and on Oct. 1 enlisted in the First Maine Cavalry.

During his military service, Pulsifer was taken prisoner in June 1863. Exchanged the next month, he remained in the army and was badly wounded on Aug. 6, 1864. He was discharged Nov. 25, 1864.

After studying medicine with his father for an unspecified time, in 1872 Thomas Pulsifer graduated from Hahnemann. The next year he opened a practice in Yarmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod (“because Yarmouth was in need of a doctor,” an on-line site says).

On June 1, 1880, he married Annie Gorham (born Sept. 3, 1859, the same autumn her husband started college), in Yarmouth. Between April 1881 and April 1887, the couple had two daughters, Caroline and her sister who died in infancy, and one son.

Dr. Thomas Pulsifer died in 1912, aged 70, Geni says.

* * * * * *

The Historical Society of Old Yarmouth (Massachusetts) has on its website an illustrated memoir by Caroline (Pulsifer) Siebens (1881-1970), one of the society’s founders and the daughter of “town doctor Thomas B. Pulsifer.” The essay is titled “Horses and Buggies and a Donkey – oh my!”

Siebens talked about several family horses, starting with Lightfoot, “named for my father’s favorite mount in the Civil War. She was raised in Maine by my uncle, Dr Horatio Pulsifer, of Auburn.”

Lightfoot’s offspring included Brandywine and Marguerite. Siebens said people wondered why “a temperance advocate” would name a horse after two alcoholic drinks.

A friend of her father’s called Marguerite the “wild horse you keep in your barn.” A black and white photo of Siebens on Marguerite’s back, taken about 1896, shows an all-over dark brown horse.

Marguerite, and others, drew or carried Dr. Pulsifer on his rounds. Siebens said he usually used the family buggy; but sometimes, “to spare the horse but not himself,” he drove a light, two-wheeled gig that provided no support for his back.

On windy winter days, Siebens wrote, the doctor used, apparently in the buggy, what she called a cage, “a square coach-like affair that shut up tight but was unsuited to rapid transit. What one gained in protection from the cold was lost by the slow travel that kept one out in the severe weather for a much longer time.”

The doctor had a sleigh for travel over snow. Siebens wrote that “Sometimes in the worst weather Father rode horseback.”

Since his horses usually knew where they were going, the doctor could take a nap, she claimed – until his horse, too, “drowsed off” and wakened him by stopping.

On Sunday afternoons, Siebens and her brother enjoyed going on rounds with the doctor, “although it did involve a good deal of waiting while he visited patients.” Their very religious neighbors condoned the doctor doing errands of mercy on the Sabbath, but called the accompanying pleasure-riders Sabbath-breakers who would come to a bad end.

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Early surveyors – John Jones

July 23, 2025/0 Comments/in China, Local History, Sidney, Unity, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley, Vassalboro/by Mary Grow

Map of central Maine 1799. Note Harlem (before it was China) at right; Winslow on both sides of the Kennebec River; Vassalboro and Sidney on either side of the river; Fairfield at the top.

by Mary Grow

Yet one more important early surveyor in the central Kennebec Valley was John Jones (c. 1743 – Aug. 16, 1823), known as “Black” Jones because of his dark complexion, and later because of his unpopular politics.

Capt. Charles E. Nash, author of the Augusta chapters in Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history, and others said Jones was short and compactly built. Nash added “lithe of limb, flippant of speech.”

Nash claimed that, “This [Kingsbury’s] history will mention no personage with a career more unique and replete with sensation and romance than that of ‘Black’ Jones, the incorrigible and dauntless tory of Fort Western in primitive Augusta.”

An on-line source says Jones lived in Concord, Massachusetts, as a young man. The Plymouth/Kennebec Company/Proprietors apparently helped him learn the surveyor’s trade and sent him to the Kennebec Valley, specifically Hallowell, early in 1771, when he was 28 years old.

Judging by the number of times his name appears in local histories just in the central Kennebec Valley, Jones lotted out large areas for his employers.

His first survey, James North said in his Augusta history, was of “a part of Pondtown and Hallowell”; the resulting plan was dated April 7, 1771. (Wikipedia’s history of Winthrop, Maine [west of Manchester, which is west of Hallowell], says Winthrop was named Pondtown “for its lakes and ponds” before being incorporated as Winthrop on April 26, 1771.)

In 1772, North said, Jones surveyed lots east of the Sheepscot River (in and around the area that is now Montville) and drew up a plan. In 1773, he did the same in Canaan, north of present-day Clinton.

Jones started work in 1774 in Vassalboro and Sidney, North wrote, moving to Unity and China. (See the July 10 history article for Nathan Winslow’s 1771 surveys of Vassalboro and Sidney.)

Alma Pierce Robbins said, in her Vassalboro history, that Jones laid out two more tiers of lots east of the three tiers Winslow mapped in 1771, with a “gore” – an irregular north-south strip – between the third and fourth tiers. This addition brought Vassalboro approximately to its present eastern boundary with China, encompassing the outlet of China Lake (then Twelve Mile Pond).

In Sidney, according to Alice Hammond’s history, Jones did the same thing. Winslow had surveyed the first three miles into Sidney from the Kennebec River, and Jones did the next two miles, extending the surveyed area to Messalonskee Lake.

Here, too, there was a gore between the two sets of lots, Hammond said. She explained it as “caused by the curve of the earth and the fact that the land could not be measured in even miles in depth.”

According to the China bicentennial history, the Kennebec Proprietors hired Jones and Abraham Burrell (or Burrill) in the fall of 1773 to survey about 32,000 acres inland from Vassalboro, around what became China Lake. The men began work that fall and resumed in the spring of 1774.

Jones spent the winter in Gardiner, where he met some of the Clark family, from Nantucket, who came back with him in March 1774 and became China’s first settlers. Burrell also settled near the lake in 1774 or 1775.

Nash wrote that in 1773, Jones built a sawmill on the west bank of the Kennebec, in the northern part of Hallowell. He described the site: “at the lower fall of the then wild and picturesque little river that has since been metamorphosed into the now shrunken and jaded stream called Bond’s brook (from Thomas Bond – died 1815 – who built the large brick house at the foot of Gas-house hill – the first brick house in Augusta).”

Jones’ mill saved builders on the west bank the need to cross the river to get lumber, Nash observed.

When the American Revolution began, Jones openly sided with the British. Nash called him “saucy, active, and exasperating.” At first he was not unpopular, and used his influence “to disturb town meetings and bother the popular party generally.”

As the revolutionary movement gained, Jones fell out of favor, until a Hallowell town meeting declared him a traitor – no date given. North said he escaped conviction because the law under which he was tried expired; Nash said Jones went to Boston, where he was jailed (no date nor length of incarceration given).

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich wrote that before Jones left Hallowell, he deeded his mills and other property to his wife’s family. Thus Ephraim Ballard was able to lease them in 1776 or 1777 (see the July 10 article on Ballard).

One of Ulrich’s footnotes quotes information that before his exile, Jones served the Kennebec Proprietors by “certifying land petitions from prospective settlers” between 1773 and June 1776, suggesting he left town that month.

Ulrich said Jones owned two different parcels, a “landing” on the east side of the Kennebec in Hallowell and mills on Bowman’s Brook (later Bond or Bond’s Brook), on the west shore and farther north, in what became Augusta in 1797.

When Martha Ballard started her diary in August 1787, she, Ephraim and five children were living in Jones’ Bowman’s Brook house. She described it as having two rooms downstairs, “east” and “west,” and above two unfinished rooms “unusable in winter.” The property included a cellar, barn and gardens.

Jones escaped from Boston, and on Aug. 29, 1779, made it to Québec, where he enlisted in the British Army with the rank of captain. From a British base at Castine, he made enough successful raids against Revolutionary forces to make himself “very obnoxious” (North’s phrase) to his former neighbors.

One instance, mentioned in more than one history, involved a night raid on Pownalborough. Jones captured General Charles Cushing, barefoot and in his nightclothes, and delivered him to the British at Castine – “marched him through the wilderness,” Nash wrote. (Pownalborough and Castine are about 90 miles apart, by contemporary reckoning.)

An on-line source says Jones helped the British establish a safe haven for Loyalists on the Penobscot River, presumably using his surveying skills. After the 1783 peace treaty established the St. Croix River as the boundary between the new United States and Nova Scotia, he surveyed what became the town of St. Andrews, New Brunswick, on the tip of the Canadian peninsula across the bay from Robbinston, Maine.

From the summer of 1783 into 1785, Jones worked “virtually single-handed” in New Brunswick, in what the on-line source described as a fairly hostile environment. Settlers were pressing for lots to be assigned in a hurry, and an American, Colonel John Allan, tried to block his work.

Allan, “the American superintendent of eastern Indians,” argued that Jones was surveying the wrong river and was really on United States land. In the fall of 1783, he arrested Jones, but the surveyor escaped (again).

The on-line source says Jones “acquired” property in and near St. Andrews, including a mill privilege (no information that he developed it), and on Grand Manan Island (off the coast from Lubec, Maine, on the Canadian side of the international boundary).

Martha Ballard wrote that on April 12, 1791, the Ballards turned over the Jones house to Peter Jones, John’s brother, and moved to the Howard farm a short distance south.

Ballard recorded John Jones as visiting at her house on Nov. 8 and Nov. 11, 1792. She gave no explanation, though she mentioned he collected some money that Ephraim Ballard owned him.

Jones returned to the Kennebec Valley for good, “perhaps as early as 1793, when he compiled a map for the Plymouth Company,” the on-line source says. Nash wrote that apparently he and his former townspeople became “tolerably reconciled.”

North wrote that Jones moved back to Hallowell (giving no date); Nash said he came back to what became Augusta in February 1797. Both said that he built a house where he lived the rest of his life. Nash located it on the north bank of Bond Brook, between his mill and the Kennebec (which would have been in Augusta after 1797).

Jones married Ruth Lee, “originally of Concord” (according to the on-line source) and sister of “Judge Lee of Wiscasset” (according to North). Neither writer dated the marriage, though it must have been before the mid-1770s. When his wife left Maine no one mentioned; North said she was with him in St. Andrews in April 1784. Both historians said the couple had no children.

North described Mrs. Jones as “tall, of good appearance, well educated for the times, and…much esteemed by her intimate friends.” Many of them wondered “how she could marry Black Jones.”

In later years, North wrote, Mrs. Jones became secretive about her age. When her friend, Judge Daniel Cony, tried to surprise her into a revelation with an unexpected direct question, “She drew up her tall form with an air of offended dignity, raised her half-closed hand towards the Judge, extending her little finger, and replied quickly, ‘Just as old, Judge Cony, as my little finger.'”

John Jones died Aug. 16, 1823, at the age of 80. Ruth Jones died Oct. 7, 1835, North said. He guessed her age then at about 90, though it was reported in the Kennebec Journal as 84.

Nash wrote that both were buried in what he called in 1892 “unmarked and forgotten graves in Mt. Vernon Cemetery.” Find a Grave currently lists seven Joneses in this cemetery, including Peter (perhaps John’s brother?), who died March 9, 1796, but no John or Ruth.

Main sources:

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892)
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870)
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, A Midwife’s Tale The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 1990

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Early surveyors – John McKechnie

July 16, 2025/0 Comments/in Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley/by Mary Grow

Manuscript map 41, which is a copy of a plan of “Great Lotts in the fifth division along the Kennebec River” from the Plymouth Company collection, was taken from surveys made by John McKechnie and John Jones.
Contributed to Maine Memory Network by Maine Historical Society Date: March 1771

by Mary Grow

Another Kennebec Valley surveyor who worked for the Kennebec/Plymouth Proprietors/Company was Dr. John McKechnie (1730 or 1732 – April 14, 1782).

Ernest Marriner, in his Kennebec Yesterdays, called McKechnie “one of those men of varied talents who meant so much to many pioneer communities” – “an educated physician, a civil engineer, a land surveyor, and a shrewd business entrepreneur.”

McKechnie was a Scotsman who came to America in 1755 and to Winslow in 1771. On July 26, 1755, as he left Scotland for Boston, he started a diary that became the source for at least two biographical sketches, one by Aaron Plaisted in his chapter on early settlers in Edwin Carey Whittemore’s history of Waterville and one in a medical directory found on line.

The latter, an article in the May, 1917, issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, says McKechnie was born about 1730 and got a medical degree or license in 1752 from either Edinburgh or Aberdeen. After three years’ practicing in his native land, apparently without marked success, he left Greenock, Scotland, by ship at 4 p.m., July 26, 1755, and landed on Boston’s Long Wharf at 7 p.m., September 12, 1755.

In the Boston area, he tried practicing medicine, and teaching (unspecified). On May 15, 1760, he “became an official of the Plymouth Land Company with the rank of Lieutenant and the position of a land surveyor.” The medical journal article says he stayed with the company for four years, surveying in the Kennebec and Penobscot river valleys.

By 1760, McKechnie was teaching in Pemaquid, Maine, where he met and married Mary North (1742 -1816), daughter of the Captain North who was in charge of the fort at Pemaquid. Plaisted dated their wedding Jan. 1.

The medical journal’s biography says Captain North “officiated at the wedding, although he is said not to have favored the match, either because Dr. McKechnie was too old, or had no settled profession.”

(If this “Captain North” is the Captain John North who is listed on FamilySearch as Mary North’s father, he was born in 1698 and married either Elizabeth Lewis, born in 1714, or Elisabeth Pitson, born in 1719. FamilySearch names each on different pages, plus a “Miss Burton” whom John North supposedly married in 1720.)

The medical biography mentions McKechnie practicing medicine in Pownalborough; treating a smallpox case on Swan’s Island; and from 1764 to 1771 practicing in Bowdoinham. Marriner found him named as a Bowdoinham selectman in 1764.

In 1771 the family moved to Winslow, and in 1775, they moved across the river, to what became Waterville in June 1802. Plaisted and Henry Kingsbury, in his 1892 Kennebec County history, said McKechnie was a Winslow selectman from 1774 through 1777.

Plaisted said when McKechnie moved to the west side of the Kennebec, he settled on Messalonskee Stream “near the Crommett bridge” at the place still known in 1902 as Crommett’s Mills. He built a log cabin and the first dam and sawmill on the stream; Kingsbury said he also had a grist mill.

(Crommett’s Mills was the part of Waterville where Messalonskee Stream, running south on its way to the Kennebec, loops northeast before returning to its original direction. Western Avenue now runs east-west across the top of the loop; Crommett Street is one of the streets intersecting Western Avenue from the north.)

The medical biography added that in his cabin, McKechnie “partitioned off a room for a dispensary of the drugs which were so extensively dealt out to sick people in that era.” This source says his medical practice “increased with considerable rapidity”; other historians say it was less important than his surveying.

The medical biography says he invested some of his income in timberlands to feed his sawmill. In 1779, he built a new and larger house, perhaps the one Marriner said was the first two-story house in Waterville, “near the present corner of Main and Silver streets.” (Since Waterville’s Concourse was created in the 1970s, these streets no longer intersect.)

Plaisted said of him, “Not one of the early settlers was more active and useful and entitled to respectful memory than Dr. John McKechnie.”

Frederick Thayer, in his chapter on doctors in Whittemore’s history, wrote that “Besides attending to his medical duties he was an active civil engineer and business man. Many of his original surveys are still [1902] extant.”

The sawmill was the only specific business interest mentioned. The medical biography called McKechnie “a man of means” who was able to lend other man $1,000.

This source says during the Revolution, McKechnie was known to lack sympathy for the rebels and was watched by the local Sons of Liberty. Despite his wealth, he was not asked to contribute to a fund to provide ammunition for local volunteers.

However, Marriner and others say he treated members of Benedict Arnold’s 1775 expedition to Québec via the Kennebec. And Marriner quoted McKechnie’s advice to neighbors about selling supplies to Arnold’s expedition: give them “enough, but not too much.”

* * * * * *

Gordon Kershaw, in his book on the Kennebec Proprietors, identified McKechnie as the Proprietors’ surveyor in his chapter on the dispute over “Masts for the King’s Navy.” These were the enormous white pines that provided masts for British ships.

Kershaw explained that John Wentworth, Governor of New Hampshire from the summer of 1766 until the American Revolution, was also Surveyor-General of the King’s Woods, a job that he believed included protecting the valuable trees.

When the Kennebec Proprietors began cutting white pines on their land, they started a long dispute with the governor that involved multiple lawsuits. It was never resolved, but was ended in 1775: as the Revolution began, local committees of safety made it clear that no more trees would be sent to the Royal Navy.

James North, in his history of Augusta, mentioned McKechnie’s November 1762, survey of “back land” lots, 10 miles in one dimension and varying in the other, that was the basis of grants to Proprietors. North quoted that the land was given to these men “in consideration of their great trouble and expense in bringing forward settlements on Kennebec River.”

Kingsbury wrote that McKechnie did the first survey of the area that became the Town of Winslow, after the Kennebec Proprietors granted the entire township, on March 12, 1766, to “Gamaliel Bradford, of Duxborough, James Otis, of Barnstable, John Winslow, of Marshfield, Daniel Howard, of Bridgewater, James Warren, of Plymouth, and William Taylor, of Boston Esquires, and to their heirs and assigns forever.”

An undated (maybe 1766?) plan in Kingsbury’s history, labeled Survey by John McKechnie, shows a standard layout along the east bank of the Kennebec south of the junction with the Sebasticook River.

Fifteen narrow (100-rod by one mile?) lots are laid out along the river, all but one with a settler’s name. Inland, south of Pattee Pond, are six much larger lots, both wider and longer, each with the name of one of the grantees. Additionally, on the southeast shore of the pond Winslow has 209 acres; Otis has 168 acres; and Warren has 81 acres.

A rectangular area farther inland has three rows of lots along the tract’s eastern border, numbered from 1 (on the northeast corner, northern lot in the easternmost row) to 95 (on the southwest corner, western lot on the south line). Each lot appears smaller than Warren’s 81 acres.

North of the Sebasticook’s junction with the Kennebec and east of Pattee Pond, McKechnie laid out lots only along part of the east bank of the Sebasticook, to the north boundary. The area between the two rivers, now the center of Winslow, is blank.

Whittemore’s collection of historic documents includes a 1771 deed to land in Waterville that references an October 1770 plan McKechnie made on the west side of the river.

About this plan, Marriner wrote: “Although Dr. McKechnie ran surveys as far down the river as Merrymeeting Bay and as far up as Skowhegan, it was his detailed and carefully mapped survey of both sides of Kennebec for some distance both north and south of Ticonic Falls [between Waterville and Winslow] that makes his name memorable in any consideration of the land titles.”

McKechnie’s 1770 plan has been affirmed in multiple court decisions, Marriner said. He cited one dispute, in an unnamed town in the 1860s and 1870s, in which a landowner spent more than $15,000 and lost six court cases in a failed effort to get one of his McKechnie-drawn boundary lines moved.

Whittemore described another McKechnie project in Winslow. On March 2, 1772, he wrote, Winslow officials “employed” McKechnie to ask Sylvester Gardiner (a Kennebec Proprietor) for land for a cemetery and a road.

The cemetery became “the old cemetery on Fort Hill” on Winslow’s Halifax Street (see Kit Alexander’s story in the Jan. 20, 2022, issue of The Town Line for a modern account of this historic graveyard). The road became Main Street and College Avenue, main arteries on the west (Waterville) bank.

* * * * * *

Plaisted said John and Mary McKechnie had 13 children. FamilySearch lists eight daughters and six sons, the first 13 born between 1760 and 1781 and a daughter born in 1796, named Lydia. Other sources say Lydia was born in 1777.

Kingsbury wrote that three of the McKechnie children were born in the family’s first Waterville house and one more, whom he called the last, in 1781 in the 1779 house.

Among descendants in the area in 1902, Plaisted said a grandson named Erastus McKechnie was living on a farm “on the road to Oakland” that the family had owned since 1801.

Whittemore told this story: “Early in 1773 the authorities of Hallowell (Augusta) sent five men in a boat to Boothbay to carry to the town the Rev. John Murray who was the first minister to be hired by that town. He proceeded to Winslow and Waterville and July 3, 1773, baptised three children of Dr. John McKechnie. This is the first baptism in town of which we have record.”

McKechnie died in 1782, Kingsbury said in his 1779 house. He was buried, with more than three dozen other early residents (including his son, Obadiah, according to Thayer; Kingsbury listed Obadiah as Simon Tozer’s son), in a no-longer existing cemetery on the south side of Western Avenue “on the rising ground a little east of the bridge over the Messalonskee.”

Kingsbury wrote that after McKechnie died, Mary married David Pattee, identified by Plaisted as builder of the second mill at Crommett’s Mills. Mary died July 21, 1816, according to FamilySearch; Kingsbury said she, too, was buried in the old cemetery.

Roland Hallee, editor of The Town Line, says Waterville used to have “a cemetery south of Western Ave., east of Messalonskee Stream, on South St., at the end of the street where the water district used to be. There also was a mill near there (only the foundation remains).”

Main sources

Kershaw, Gordon E., The Kennebeck Proprietors 1749-1775 (1975)
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892)
Marriner, Ernest, Kennebec Yesterdays (1954)
North James W, The History of Augusta (1870)
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Early surveyors

July 9, 2025/0 Comments/in Central ME, Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley/by Mary Grow

by Mary Grow

As promised, the next articles in this series will introduce some of the important surveyors in the central Kennebec Valley as Massachusetts proprietors sold lots – mostly pieces of land they had never seen – to settlers, and other people began lumbering, trapping and farming without the formality of buying a lot.

Readers should remember that Kennebec Company, Kennebec Proprietors, Plymouth Company and Plymouth Proprietors all mean the same organization of Massachusetts businessmen who owned most of the Kennebec Valley. Different local historians preferred different names.

* * * * * *

European settlers had moved into the lower Kennebec Valley in the first half of the 18th century. Once the threat from the Natives and their French supporters ended in the 1760s, interest in upriver lands increased. The Kennebec Proprietors hired Nathan Winslow to survey both sides of the river from Chelsea, south of Augusta, to the north line of present-day Vassalboro, dividing the land for three miles inland into lots.

Multiple historians wrote that Winslow was hired in 1761 and dated his completed survey June 17, 1761. Your writer found in the on-line Maine Memory Network a statement that Winslow covered Pittston, Hallowell, Vassalboro (then including Sidney) and “Some in Winslow town and finished his Survey and made his plan and dated it the 17th of June 1761.”

This statement continued: “all those Surveys was made for the Kennebeck proprietors hath been made from may 1750 & Continually one after another: in Succession as of oft as they Could be.” If this information is accurate, the implication is that Winslow’s work took 11 seasons (but see below for his contradictory birthdate).

In their town histories, Alice Hammond and James North each reproduced the parts of the survey that became Sidney and Augusta, respectively. Winslow laid out three tiers or ranges of lots, each a mile deep, with an eight-rod (132-foot) space for roads between the each tier.

(Winslow’s range roads or rangeways were laid out as straight lines, but might in practice vary with the terrain. Some Kennebec Valley deeds still refer to them; and Waterville has streets named First Rangeway, roughly parallel to the Kennebec, and Second Rangeway, farther west.)

The 100-acre lots with river frontage were 50 rods (825 feet) wide. (At least one source says each lot was 125 acres; the math disagrees.) The maps show Range 2 lots as three times the width (150 rods, or 2,475 feet); and Range 3 lots 75 rods (1,237.5 feet) wide.

Along the river, one of every three lots was reserved for the Proprietors and marked with a P on the plans. Settlers’ lots were marked S. All of the big Range 2 lots were for Proprietors and all of Range 3 for settlers.

Winslow numbered the lots from south to north: in Augusta, on the east side of the river the lots run from 1 to 50, but on the west side, where the survey starts farther upriver, the northernmost lot is 34.

Vassalboro historian Alma Pierce Robbins’ account of Winslow’s survey on the east bank of the river was less detailed, but comparable. She, too, wrote of three tiers of lots, adding that Vassalboro included riverside lots 51 to 102 on the east bank and 35 to 82 on the west (later Sidney) bank. Most of Seven Mile Pond (now Webber Pond in Vassalboro) was in the third tier.

Rev. Edwin Carey Whittemore, in his history of Waterville, said that a March 12, 1766, grant from the Plymouth Company gave six named men 18,600 acres “covering the present Winslow,” with conditions.

Within four years, the new landowners were to have 50 settlers, at least 25 of them with their families, and 50 houses “not less than twenty feet square and seven feet studd [high?] each.” Each settler was to have cleared and ready for mowing at least five acres adjoining his house.

Robbins said the Proprietors gave settlers three years to clear five acres and build a 20-by-20-foot house, and required the settler or his heirs to occupy the house for another seven years. In addition, for 10 years each settler was to work two days a year on town roads and another two days for the church or the minister’s house.

These requirements were common for Kennebec Valley land grants. Their effects seem to have varied.

Whittemore claimed that the plan for (future) Winslow “was the only one to succeed of many similar propositions.” However, the 1761 plan in North’s Augusta history has owners’ names, rather than numbers, on most lots; and the China bicentennial history says that “between 1762 and 1766 most of these riverside lots [none in China, which is inland from the river] were taken up.”

For the April 2011 issue of the Sidney Historical Society’s newsletter, Polly Furber wrote an article on some of the early deeds in the town, based on Nathan Winslow’s 1761 survey. Having done that research, she decided to find out more about the surveyor, commenting that “I have never seen his name mentioned in any local history.”

Furber found that Winslow was the son of Nathan and Charity (Hall) Winslow, born April 1, 1743, in Falmouth – therefore, she pointed out, only 18 in 1761. He lived all or most of his life in Falmouth; Furber found a Quaker document recording the births of his five sons and five daughters there, between 1765 and 1785.

He married in 1764, probably to Jane Crane (according to multiple sites, including the list of his children in Quaker records; Furber called her Judith). FamilySearch says she died in 1805. In 1807, Furber found, he married again, a woman name Mary Vinal from Dresden.

FamilySearch adds that Winslow “registered for military service in 1778.” He was still actively surveying into the 1800s. FamilySearch dates his death Nov. 7, 1820, aged 77.

An on-line genealogy of a remotely-related family named Nagel says Winslow died Nov 7, 1826 (not 1820), in Falmouth. This source says his wife, Jane Crane, was born Nov. 12, 1742, in Sagadahoc (in the lower Kennebec Valley) and died March 30, 1805, in Windham.

* * * * * *

Surveyor Ephraim Ballard is mentioned in several early accounts. He was born May 6 or May 17, 1725, in Oxford, Massachusetts (or in Billerica and moved with his parents to Oxford in 1726). On Dec. 19, 1754, in Oxford, he married Martha Moore (born Feb. 9, 1735), author of the well-known diary of life as a midwife in the central Kennebec Valley from 1785 to 1812.

In 1775, Ephraim (and presumably his family) came to Fort Halifax. James North wrote in his 1870 Augusta history that on Oct. 15, 1777 (another source says 1776), Ballard moved into surveyor John Jones’ former house in Augusta (then Hallowell) and took over Jones’ mills, which Jones had abandoned because of his Loyalist sympathies.

Most sources wonder if Ballard, too, was a Loyalist. North thought not, citing 200 British pounds given him from the town “for his contribution to the revolutionary cause” in 1780, as well as his election to town offices.

He was a Hallowell selectman from 1784 through 1787. Later, he was the town’s tax collector, imprisoned in 1804 for failing to collect all the taxes he should have. Maine An Encyclopedia calls him a “prominent local resident” and says he is “frequently mentioned in the town’s records.”

This source calls Ballard one of the Proprietors’ “principal surveyors” and says, “His name appears on hundreds of maps in the area, and of such far-flung locations as Canaan, Lincoln Plantation, Bangor, Magalloway Plantation, Eustis, and Dover-Foxcroft.”

One such map, found on line, is dated 1794 and shows “the few county roads and three church parishes of early Hallowell,” before the two northern parishes became a separate town – eventually the City of Augusta — in 1797. A recent comment on the map says, “Mr. Ballard drew this map on the same kind of paper that Martha Ballard cut and folded to make her diary.”

Ballard is named as the surveyor of part of Albion, an area Kingsbury said the Kennebec Proprietors had given to Nathan Winslow. North wrote that while Ballard was surveying in Balltown (the area that later became Jefferson and Whitefield), armed men (perhaps settlers without deeds?) stole his surveying instruments and papers and drove him away.

One survey North described was in 1796, for the Plymouth Company, tracing a stream that flows into the Kennebec in Gardiner. In June, Ballard reported he had “ascertained the general course of the Kennebec from ‘Cobbossee stream’ down to the ‘chops'”; had found “the utmost limits of Cobbosseecontee towards the western ocean”; and had run a line from that point east-southeast to the Kennebec.

The “utmost limits” of the stream Ballard defined as the most southern point at which water was running into it. North said he was paid seven pounds, 10 shillings for this job.

Also in 1796, North wrote, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts hired Ballard to survey potential settlements on the Penobscot, in what became Hampden and Bangor.

One of Ballard’s surveys created the Ballard Line. As Millard Howard explained in his 2015 Palermo history, in the area that became Palermo the Kennebec Proprietors’ claim overlapped with a separate land grant called the Waldo Patent, owned in 1795 by General Henry Knox.

In June 1795, Knox and the Proprietors agreed on a division and hired Ballard to implement it on the ground. The Ballard Line is close to the eastern border of Palermo, Howard wrote, “leaving most of the town to the Kennebec Proprietors.”

Martha Ballard

Martha Ballard’s diary recorded some of her husband’s work. (Excerpts were included in a Feb. 16, 2023, article in this series in The Town Line.)

On Aug. 23, 1796, she said, a committee (unspecified) hired him to go to Dresden “to lay out a road to the point.” After preparations that included bringing “two birch cannoes [her spelling] to our shore,” he left at 10 a.m. Sept. 5; he came home Oct. 13.

Martha’s diary shows him actively surveying in following years, for the Proprietors, for individual settlers and sometimes laying out new roads for a town.

In mid-April, 1801, she recorded that he was dividing 2,000 acres somewhere between the Kennebec and the Penobscot. In late June that year he had a job in Bowdoinham. In September, he was working in Readfield, and in November, in Fairfield. December 22 he spent running the Sidney-Augusta town line.

In 1803, Martha wrote that he “sett [her spelling] out to go to Davis Town” on July 26; he returned on Sept. 27. (The length of time he was away suggests he could have been working in Maine’s current Davis Town, in Franklin County north of Rangeley and Mooselookmeguntick lakes, almost 100 miles from Augusta.)

Besides being a surveyor, Ballard ran the Jones mills he took over during the Revolution, North says until the fall of 1791. Other sources mention his working as a builder and a farmer.

The Ballards had three sons and two, three or four daughters (sources disagree), born between 1756 and 1779. At least one daughter, maybe two or three, died in childhood in a June 1769 diphtheria epidemic in Oxford.

On Nov. 1, 1799, North said, Ephraim and Martha moved to their son Jonathan’s riverside farm about a mile north of Augusta’s center.

Most sources say Martha Ballard died in May 1812, but North quoted an Aug. 7 1812, diary entry and wrote that she died within the next three weeks. Ephraim died January 7, 1821. Find a Grave says they “were buried in Augusta in a small family burial ground on…[their] son Jonathan’s property. The cemetery was later plowed up to plant crops.”

Main sources

Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992).
Howard, Millard, An Introduction to the Early History of Palermo, Maine (second edition, December 2015).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870).
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971).
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, A Midwife’s Tale The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (1990).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Early land titles

June 25, 2025/0 Comments/in Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley/by Mary Grow

by Mary Grow

The lawyers discussed in this series earlier this spring were undoubtedly important in the lives of European settlers in the central Kennebec Valley. Before the lawyers, and equally if not more important, were another group of professional men: the surveyors.

Several surveyors’ names appear in 18th-century records, usually because the men were hired by the Plymouth Company/Kennebec Proprietors, the Boston-based companies with deeds to large parts of the area. Those most often mentioned include, in birth order, Ephraim Ballard (May 6 or May 17, 1725 – Jan. 7, 1821), John McKechnie (about 1730/1732 -– 1782), John Jones (c. 1743 – Aug. 16, 1823) and Nathan Winslow (April 1, 1743 — ? [after January 1807]).

Ballard is named as the surveyor of part of Albion, an area Henry Kingsbury, in his 1892 Kennebec County history, said the proprietors had given to Nathan Winslow; and part of Palermo. He was the husband of Martha Ballard, whose diary was made famous by Laurel Thacher Ulrich’s 1990 book titled A Midwife’s Tale.

McKechnie also surveyed part of Albion, in 1769; and the Town of Winslow.

Jones surveyed the west side of Sidney, beyond Winslow’s riverfront lots, in 1774; the area east of Vassalboro, including what became China, in the fall of 1773 and spring of 1774, with Abraham Burrell or Burrill (who became one of the first settlers around China Lake).

Nathan Winslow laid out lots in Vassalboro, including the part on the west side of the river that became Sidney, in 1761.

Among other surveyors mentioned less often in histories of the settlement of the central Kennebec valley are Paul Chadwick, General Joseph Chandler, Isaac Davis, Charles Hayden, John Howe, Josiah Jones, Bradstreet Wiggin or Wiggins and Dr. Obadiah Williams.

* * * * * *

Alice Hammond included in her history of Sidney a summary history of land titles in the area that became Maine, and more specifically in the valley of the Kennebec River. A summary of her summary might help readers sort out who owned what when.

The Augusta lawyer named Wendall Titcomb who wrote the chapter on Sources of Land Titles for Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history said that “…the Crown of England is the source to which trace all lines of title to lands within the county of Kennebec.” Hammond agreed.

She started with King James I’s 1606 grant giving the London Company the southern part and the Plymouth Company the northern part of North America between latitude 34 degrees and latitude 45 degrees.

The 45-degree line runs east-west through Maine north of present-day Skowhegan and Bangor. The 34-degree line runs through the southern United States, including Georgia, South Carolina and extreme southeastern North Carolina.

While the London Company settled Jamestown, Virginia, Plymouth Company representatives began trading with Natives and establishing fishing ports, but made no permanent settlements.

In 1620, Hammond wrote, a British stock company named the Council for New England, “successor to the Plymouth Company,” got a grant covering the territory between 40 and 48 degrees. Titcomb gave the full title: “The Council Established at Plymouth in the County of Devon for the planting, ruling and governing New England in America.” This company sponsored the 1620 Pilgrim settlement at Plymouth, Massachusetts.

One of the colonists, William Bradford, served as the colony’s governor for part of the time. He petitioned the Council for more land to support the colony’s growing population, and on Jan. 13, 1629, got the Kennebec or Plymouth Patent.

This grant covered 15 miles on both sides of the Kennebec River from the coast inland beyond present-day Skowhegan, about 1.5 million acres. It included the right to establish three trading stations, the one farthest upriver at Cushnoc (later Augusta).

Profits from the Kennebec trade declined over the years. On Oct. 17, 1661, Titcomb said, Boston businessmen Antipas Boyes (Boyce, Boies), Thomas Brattle, Edward Tyng and John Winslow bought the land along the Kennebec, for 400 pounds. These men organized themselves as the Kennebec Proprietors.

(Kingsbury added a footnote: the deed for the 1661 transaction was executed on Oct. 15, 1665, and “recorded in the York County registry in 1719.”)

Mostly because of wars with the Natives and their French allies who helped them from farther north, the so-called French and Indian Wars (1688 to 1763), the Proprietors did not develop their holdings. Over almost a century, their shares in the organization were divided among heirs, some ending up with 1/192 of a share, Hammond wrote.

The first of four separate French and Indian wars historians call King William’s War; it began in 1688 and was formally ended by the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick. The second war, known as Queen Anne’s War, or Dummer’s War, started in 1702 and ended with the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht.

James North, in his history of Augusta, wrote that the group he called the Pejepscot Proprietors took advantage of the post-1713 peaceful interlude to hire Joseph Heath to survey 111 miles of the Kennebec, as far inland as Norridgewock. Heath’s plan is dated May 16, 1719, North said.

(Joseph Heath, sometimes called Captain or Colonel, worked as a surveyor in several parts of Maine early in the 1700s, before the British settlements in the central Kennebec Valley. On-line documents refer to his plans for part of Brunswick [1717]; the Plymouth Patent [1719]; and a 1719 map and description of Norridgewock. North said Heath was “probably” the first commander at Fort Richmond, built in 1719 on the Kennebec below Gardiner.)

In August 1749, after the third of the four wars (King George’s War, or the War of Jenkins’ Ear) had ended with the October 1748 Treaty of Aix la Chapelle, some of the hereditary proprietors met and re-organized themselves as, Hammond wrote, “The Proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase from the late colony of New Plymouth,” aka either the Kennebec(k) Company/Proprietors or the Plymouth Company.

(This organization is the subject of a scholarly 1975 book by Gordon E. Kershaw titled The Kennebeck Proprietors 1749-1775. Kershaw focused on the group’s financial and legal interactions with the British government, in Massachusetts and in London.)

These men thought permanent settlements on the Kennebec River would be the way to profit from their holdings. North wrote that an early step was to get an exact understanding of what they owned. They hired their first surveyor pursuant to a December 1749, vote; and a surveyor named John North (later identified as Capt. John North) in October 1750.

North was again hired in 1751, and in that year and the next made a plan of the river and its tributaries and laid out at least some lots to be sold, from the ocean to Cushnoc (that is, inland as far as southern Augusta).

North mentioned repeatedly that the native inhabitants of the Kennebec Valley, egged on by the French from the north, tried to deter the expanding British settlements. The Proprietors and the Massachusetts authorities cooperated to build two forts on the east bank of the river in 1754.

Fort Halifax, built by British troops under General John Winslow (see box) was at the mouth of the Sebasticook, near the native village called Ticonic. Fort Western at Cushnoc served as a supply depot for and link to the upriver fort.

The fourth and final of the French and Indian Wars (the French and Indian War [singular], or the Seven Years’ War) broke out in 1754. Fighting in North America was over by 1760, although the formal peace treaty between Great Britain and France was not signed until Feb. 10, 1763 (Treaty of Paris).

With the Kennebec valley at peace, more people were willing to move there, and skilled surveyors able to establish precise lot lines became even more important.

A man named Winslow who was not a surveyor

The Town of Winslow was named after British General John Winslow (May 10, 1703 – April 17, 1774), not surveyor Nathan Winslow. Your writer found no evidence the two were related.

General Winslow, according to Barry M. Moody’s article in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (found on line), was a member of a prominent New England family, descendant of two former governors of the Plymouth Colony (Edward and Josiah Winslow).

Winslow was born May 10, 1703, in Marshfield, Massachusetts. In February, 1725, he married Mary Little, born in Marshfield in September 1704 (according to Wikipedia). They had three sons, Josiah, Pelham and Isaac. (Moody said only two sons; and added that Winslow took a second wife, Bethiah [Barker] Johnson [no date] – possible, since, according to Wikipedia, Mary died in 1772.)

Winslow’s first military experience was on an unsuccessful 1740 British expedition to Cuba, as a captain in a provincial militia company. He then joined the regular British army, serving in eastern Canada.

Moody said he briefly abandoned the army and returned to Massachusetts, where he represented Marshfield in the state legislature in 1752-53.

In 1754, Massachusetts Governor William Shirley made Winslow a major-general in charge of the 800-man force sent to the Kennebec to combat French and Native opposition to British settlements. There he oversaw construction of Fort Halifax.

Rev. Edwin Whittemore, in his 1902 Waterville centennial history, said Winslow left 300 men to build the fort and led the other 500 upriver as far as Norridgewock. In late summer, after the fort’s stockade and first buildings were finished, Whittemore wrote that Governor Shirley came north to inspect it “and highly commended Gen. Winslow and his men.”

(In a later chapter in Whittemore’s history, Aaron Appleton Plaisted commented on the varied spellings of “Ticonic.” Among them he listed Governor Shirley’s “Taconett” and General Winslow’s “Ticonnett.”)

The 1754 project in the Kennebec Valley “added greatly to his [Winslow’s] popularity, and he was thus a natural choice as the lieutenant-colonel of a provincial regiment raised by Shirley in 1755 to aid Lieutenant Governor Charles Lawrence of Nova Scotia in his attempts to sweep French influence from the province,” Moody wrote.

Winslow spent the spring and summer of 1755 in New Brunswick, Canada, where reducing French influence included heading the expulsion of the French Acadian settlers. Moody quoted from Winslow’s diary that the work did not please him; but “he carried out his orders with care, military precision, and as much compassion as circumstances allowed.”

Winslow returned to Massachusetts in November 1755. The next year, he “reached the high point of his military career” when Governor Shirley sent him to upstate New York to fight the French there.

On both expeditions, Winslow quarreled with his superior officers. Moody suggested both sides were to blame.

Back in Massachusetts by 1757, Winslow left the army. He again represented Marshfield in the Massachusetts legislature in 1757-58 and from 1761 to 1765.

Around 1766 Winslow moved about 15 miles to Hingham, Massachusetts. He died there in 1774.

Main sources

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).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Waterville City Hall

June 18, 2025/0 Comments/in Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley, Waterville/by Mary Grow

Waterville City Hall and Opera House.

by Mary Grow

This article will return to the history of a series of buildings, more cheerful than the Augusta jail(s) described in the June 5 story: Waterville’s town hall that became a city hall that was – and still is – combined with a large gathering space called an opera house.

As with the public buildings in Augusta, there are gaps and inconsistencies in the information. A small part of the problem is nomenclature. Winslow and its meeting places were on the east bank of the Kennebec; on the west bank after 1802, Waterville had two meeting houses, the one near the river called the Ticonic or east meeting house and the one farther inland called the west meeting house.

Readers may remember that Waterville became a separate town from Winslow, divided physically by the Kennebec River and legally by the Massachusetts legislature, on June 23, 1802. According to both Henry Kingsbury, in his 1892 Kennebec County history, and Rev. Edwin Carey Whittemore, in his 1902 Waterville centennial history, the earliest meeting house on the west (future Waterville) shore predated the division.

Whittemore found the first reference to a Winslow meeting house in records of a Feb. 10, 1794, town meeting, held in a private home. Voters approved building a meeting house, for both religious and secular purposes, on land on the east (Winslow) bank of the Kennebec that Arthur Lithgow would donate; and raised 100 pounds to build it.

Later in 1794, Winslow voters invited a minister to town. Rev. Joshua Cushman, a Revolutionary War veteran and Harvard graduate, came and stayed 20 years.

He apparently didn’t have a building for the first couple years. Whittemore said on March 7 and 8, 1796, voters first authorized building a meeting house “on the hill near or in Ticonic village,” on the west bank; and then “voted to build another on the Lithgow lot in Winslow, the previous vote concerning it having been reconsidered.”

A five-man “committee for the west side” reported on March 16, 1796, recommending putting up the west (future Waterville) building and selling pews. “Such was the beginning of the meeting house which is now a part of the old city hall,” Whittemore wrote in 1902.

Once the meeting house was approved, Whittemore said, Dr. Obadiah Williams “offered…the present city hall park” for that building and also a schoolhouse or courthouse. A petition from the town’s western residents for a more central location was denied.

Waterville’s present city hall faces south across Castonguay Square. The square is on the north side of Common Street, which runs east-west for the block between Main and Front streets.

On-line information says the land was deeded to Waterville in 1840 and known as The Commons until 1921, when it was renamed to honor Arthur L. Castonguay, the first Waterville soldier killed in action during World War I.

Although the meeting house wasn’t finished for years, Whittemore said the first west side (of the Kennebec) town meeting was held there June 25, 1798. Kingsbury wrote, “The town meeting house on the west side was built in 1797, and first used March 5, 1798.”

Having an unbridged river dividing the body politic was an obvious inconvenience to voters on both sides trying to exercise their democratic rights. On Dec. 28, 1801, Winslow voters petitioned the Massachusetts legislature to create a new town on the west side of the river; and on June 23, 1802, Waterville was incorporated.

The first Waterville town meeting was in the Ticonic or east meeting house on Monday, July 26, 1802. The main business was electing town officials.

Winslow, from 1771, and Waterville, in 1802, included most of what is now Oakland, known after 1802 as West Waterville. Kingsbury wrote that before 1802, a second meeting house was being planned in that area (again, no location is specified).

The legislative act that created Waterville provided that money “assessed for building a meeting house in the West Pond settlement shall be paid and exclusively appropriated to that purpose”; Winslow was not to have any of it.

The west meeting house must have been finished, or almost, by August 1802, because Whittemore said Waterville’s second town meeting was held there on Aug. 9, 1802; and Kingsbury said voters that month approved holding future meetings alternately between the two.

In 1807 or 1808, as war with Great Britain appeared a possibility, Whittemore wrote that voters approved building a “powder magazine in the loft of the meeting house, probably as the driest place available.” Presumably he meant the east meeting house. That the building was also a church is shown by his reference to a preacher’s salary in the same sentence.

Whittemore mentioned the meeting hall again when part of the July 4, 1826, celebration was held there. Then, without explanation, he wrote that in 1842, “the old east meeting house was moved back and fitted up for a town hall.”

The “town hall” was the site of a June 3, 1854, anti-slavery meeting and of at least two gatherings in response to the Civil War.

On April 20, 1861, Whittemore wrote, a large meeting to respond to the April 12 attack on Fort Sumter was held in “the old town hall.” It led immediately to the organization of companies of volunteers.

On March 14, 1864, the “old town hall” was the site of a concert to start raising money for a monument honoring Civil War soldiers. Martin Milmore’s bronze statue of the “Citizen Soldier” was dedicated in Monument Park on May 30, 1876.

The western part of Waterville, with its meeting house, separated on Feb. 26, 1873. The new town was West Waterville for a decade before becoming Oakland.

In his chapter on Oakland, Kingsbury wrote that the “town meeting house” built by Winslow officials “about 1800” “was used for religious and other public gatherings and for town meetings till 1841, when it was taken down.” In 1892, the town hall was Memorial Hall, an 1870 brick and stone building on Church Street that honors Oakland’s Civil War soldiers.

Waterville’s 1874 Independence Day celebration included “a grand dinner in the town hall.” In 1875, Whittemore wrote “a new town hall was proposed”; he did not say by whom, or why. Instead, town officials spent $5,000 to add 33 feet to the existing building.

After rejecting a city charter approved by the Maine legislature in 1884, on Jan. 23, 1888, Waterville voters adopted an amended charter, by a vote of 543 in favor to 432 opposed. The town became a city, with the same municipal building.

In the spring of 1896, Whittemore wrote, an undetermined number of unidentified voters asked for a May 18 meeting, apparently to debate a single question that he quoted as: “to see if the voters of the city will instruct the city council to build a city hall and opera house this season.”

Whittemore thought the idea reasonable. By then, the “old city hall, the east meetinghouse of 1796, with sundry remodellings, was no longer on a plane with the dignity or the demands of the city,” in his opinion.

He did not explain why petitioners included an opera house.

A “largely attended” public meeting was held on May 18, 1896, to ask if voters wanted the city council to build “a city hall and opera house.” A majority said yes, please, estimating the cost at $75,000.

On May 4, 1897, there was another vote: 526 voters approved creating a City Building Commission, while 404 dissented. Consequently, Whittemore wrote, “Plans were accepted, the old hall was moved back, contracts were signed and the foundation of the new hall was partly laid.”

Then the “conservative or as some said reactionary” faction got an injunction that stopped work.

Nothing more was done until early 1901, when more public meetings led the city council to order work resumed, to be financed through taxes over following years, with the cost estimated at $70,000.

The architect for the building was George D. Adams, from Lawrence, Massachusetts. The new city hall was dedicated during the centennial celebration, on the morning of June 23, 1902, “the city’s birthday.” William Abbott Smith’s description of the ceremony in Whittemore’s history referred to “expressions of satisfaction which came from the vast throng that visited every corner of the new building.”

The ceremony, held in the new Opera House, included music, speeches and a presentation of the keys to the building by contractor Horace Purinton to Mayor Martin Blaisdell.

Purinton commented on the range of sources for building materials: stone from northern New York and Michigan, terra cotta from New Jersey clay, brick from local clay, wood from Maine, Georgia and Indiana.

Whittemore’s account praised Purinton and Blaisdell. Abbott added words of appreciation for former Waterville Board of Trade president Frank Redington, who presided over the dedication ceremony.

In his opening remarks, Redington called the new building “a suitable home for our city officials,” and its “convention hall” a meeting place for public discussion, “the old town house remodelled, enlarged, beautified, adorned, and fulfilled.”

He continued: “Some of you are perhaps thinking of the entertainment element which is introduced, for the human mind is so constructed that it needs entertainment as much as the body needs nourishment.”

Whittemore concluded his account of the building: “Waterville at last has a city hall of which she may well be proud.”

Waterville City Hall has been on the National Register of Historic Places since Jan. 1, 1976. In their October 1975 application for a listing, Earle G. Shettleworth Jr., and Frank A. Beard, of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, described the building as “a good representative example of the multi-purpose civic buildings erected in Maine at the turn of the century.”

It stands three stories tall, with a stone foundation and basement and the upper stories “brick with wood and stone trim.” The main entrance to the city offices is in the center of the south façade; stone steps lead up to both sides of a recessed doorway under an arch, with arched windows on either side.

Above the entrance, three more arched windows are separated by white columns, with elaborate brickwork across the whole front. Top-floor windows are very small. Shettleworth and Beard wrote that the top of the front of the building “is completed by an elaborate wooden cornice composed of a dentil molding, a series of modillions and an ornamental crest at the center bearing the inscription ‘City Hall’.”

The entrance to the opera house/auditorium is on the west side, which Shettleworth and Beard described as handsomely decorated.

Inside, city offices occupy the basement and first floor. The top of the building is taken up by the auditorium, its lobby and backstage area.

Shettleworth and Beard found that the auditorium was called “Assembly Rooms”; “one of its earliest uses was for a dairyman’s exhibition.” It hosted varied touring entertainments, including, the historians said, Australian actress Judith Anderson; American singer Rudy Vallee; American opera singer and civil rights leader Marian Anderson; and early American Western movie actor Tom Mix, whose horse had “to be hauled up the outside of the building” to join him on stage.

After World War II the auditorium was used as a movie theater. It has always provided a venue for local entertainments.

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: More China lawyers

June 11, 2025/0 Comments/in China, Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley/by Mary Grow

by Mary Grow

On May 15, this series profiled three 19th-century China lawyers, Abisha Benson (practiced in China Village in the 1820s); Alfred Fletcher (born in 1817 or 1818, practiced in China, probably China Village, died in 1868); and Sanford Kingsbury (born in 1782, probably practiced in the southern part of China [given connections with Gardiner], died in 1849).

This article will introduce eight more men who practiced law in or around the town of China in the 19th century.

* * * * * *

The Greeleys or Greelys were early settlers in Branch Mills, the village on the west branch of the Sheepscot River shared between China and its eastern neighbor, Palermo. The China bicentennial history says Jacob Greely was a Revolutionary War veteran who moved to China after 1782.

Millard Howard, in his extensively researched 2015 history of Palermo, wrote that the China history probably referred to Jacob Greeley, Sr. (1739 -1820). Howard found that in 1777 Jacob Greeley Jr. (Aug. 22, 1762 – Aug. 3, 1838, according to WikiTree) settled near Beech Pond (a small pond northwest of Sheepscot Lake, on the north side of Route 3).

But, Howard wrote, Jacob Jr. was too young to own property legally. Howard surmised that Jacob Sr., whom he described as active in the Revolutionary movement in Newcastle, put the land in his son’s name to provide a safe inland refuge in case the British won.

Jacob Jr.’s, son, Jose (1798 – 1884), was a Branch Mills businessman. FamilySearch says Jose and his wife, Anna (Hacker), had three daughters and a son they named Josiah Hacker (May 23, 1826 – March 12, 1896. James W. Bradbury, in his chapter on lawyers in Henry Kingsbury’s 1892 Kennebec County history, wrote that in 1856, Josiah H. “was admitted to the bar at St. Paul, Minnesota.”

Bradbury also said that Josiah H. “was admitted to practice in Kennebec county” in 1867. The China history and Milton E. Dowe’s 1954 Palermo history suggest he was back in Branch Mills before then: both cite an 1859 Palermo business directory with listings including four Greelys (spelled without the second e).

J. and J. H. (presumably Jose and Josiah H.) were “Manufacturers of Lumber, Flour and Millowiers.” (Any reader who knows what a millowier is or was is invited to contact The Town Line. The reference is a copy of a copy, so a typographical error is possible.)

J. H. was listed separately as “Counsellor and Attorney at Law.”

And Jonathan Greely was listed as “Counsellor and Attorney at Law, Dealer in Stock.” (Your writer suspects livestock, not financial instruments, although the New York Stock Exchange originated in May, 1792, Wikipedia says.) Howard identifies Jonathan as Jacob Jr.’s, brother and says he worked with the Kennebec Proprietors in 1802 and 1809, sorting out land claims. Your writer found no more information about this lawyer.

Josiah Greely (no e) is listed as a China selectman in 1857 and from 1858 through 1861, according to the China history. Bradbury added that he was a state representative in 1861.

As with most of the lawyers your writer has been describing, information about Greely’s practice is non-existent. The China history tells a story from his days as a selectman, however.

In 1861, for the first time, the annual China town report listed delinquent taxpayers, as of 1859, by name and amount owed. The lowest amount that earned dishonorable mention was $1.98, the highest $11.88.

The man who owed $11.88 on his farm did not pay up. On April 27, 1861, the history says, selectman Greely bought the property “‘for the inhabitants of the town of China” for $15.88, the amount due for back taxes and the expenses of the auction.”

* * * * * *

Washburns were numerous among early settlers in China Village, while the area was still part of Albion. Bradbury listed one them, Zebah (sometime Zeba), “a son of Zalmunah,” as a lawyer.

The China history says Japheth Washburn and his son, Japheth Coombs Washburn, arrived in 1804. The Washburn genealogy included in the history shows a Zalmuna (September 11, 1772 – Sept. 7, 1844), older brother of Japheth Coombs (Jan. 20, 1780 – Aug. 29, 1850).

When the Town of China was organized in February 1818, Japheth C. was elected the first town clerk, and his brother, Zalmunna/Zalmuna, was the first treasurer/tax collector and one of the first nine school agents.

This Zalmuna married Deborah Benson. The oldest of their eight children was Zebah, born Jan. 26, 1797, in Wayne; died April 12, 1888, in China; buried in China Village cemetery.

Bradbury said Zebah Washburn “practiced law until he was seventy years old.” The China history says he also served as cashier of the China Bank, in China Village (1853 – 1855) and the Canton Bank, in South China (1855 – 1856).

(The history says the China Bank attracted only $300 in local deposits, so the state banking commission advised liquidating it “even though it was in good financial condition.” Its successor is described as “spectacularly unsuccessful.”)

Your writer has failed to find details about Zebah Washburn’s legal practice. She deduces it did not provide him enough income, because Ruby Crosby Wiggin’s 1964 history of Albion lists Zeba(h) Washburn as getting a liquor license for his store annually from 1821 to 1824; and as owning a potash factory (undated) with his brother, Zalmunnah, at Puddle Dock, the nineteenth-century industrial center southeast of the present-day village.

* * * * * *

Jacob Smith is named in the China bicentennial history as a 19th-century China Village lawyer. Bradbury said Smith sent him (Bradbury) his first client, around 1830; and “later” (unspecified) was a municipal court judge in Bath.

On-line records include two documents, from February 1838 and August 1839, naming a Jacob Smith (not proven to be the same man) as the court clerk in Wiscasset; and a March 13, 1868, petition “recommending the reappointment of Jacob Smith to be the judge of the Municipal Court in the City of Bath.”

(The 1838 document, which Smith attested in his capacity as clerk, was a petition to the county commissioners to make Roland Fisher the new ferryman “due to a change in ownership of the property in Georgetown where the ferry’s run originated”; and to lower the ferry rates. There were 20 signatories.

(A ferry from Georgetown currently runs to McMahan Island in July and August, “for islanders and their renters/visitors only,” according to the island’s website.)

* * * * * *

Bradbury’s list of area lawyers included three related Warrens. He wrote that George was the son of “General Warren and the celebrated Mercy Warren, daughter of James Otis, of Barnstable”; Samuel S., who practiced briefly in China, was “a nephew of General Warren, of Bunker Hill fame”; and Ebenezer T. was Samuel’s brother.

Bradbury was apparently talking about two different General Warrens. The one who married Mercy Otis was James (Sept. 28, 1726 – Nov. 28, 1808); he was paymaster in the Continental Army and later a Massachusetts politician. Wikipedia names George (1766–1800) as the youngest of their five sons.

The Bunker Hill General Warren was Joseph (June 11, 1741 – June 17, 1775). He was a doctor and a major-general in the Massachusetts militia; volunteering to fight at Bunker Hill, he was killed in action.

General Joseph Warren had three brothers, Samuel, Ebenezer and John. WikiTree says Ebenezer’s sons – the General’s nephews — included Ebenezer Tucker Warren (born in Hallowell Sept. 11, 1779; died about Sept. 1, 1830) and Samuel Stephens (or Stevens) Warren (born April 14, 1793, in Foxborough, Massachusetts; died Sept. 26, 1881, in Wrentham, Massachusetts).

Bradbury called George Warren “one of the lesser lights of the Kennebec bar,” a man who “possessed fine natural talents, but led a dissipated life, dying in Augusta in penury.” He practiced in Winslow before Waterville became a separate town in June 1802.

Rev. Edwin Carey Whittemore, in his centennial history of Waterville, said George Warren was “Winslow’s first lawyer,” in practice by 1791, and the town’s representative to the Massachusetts legislature in 1791 and 1792.

Bradbury wrote that Samuel S. Warren began his law practice in Hallowell before 1825. About 1835 he moved to China, from there to Albion and about 1844 to Massachusetts.

An on-line source names one of his law students in China as a 17-year-old from Albion named Artemas Libby, who later studied with “Z. Washburne”; was admitted to the Kennebec bar at 21 in 1844; and served as associate justice of the Maine Supreme Court from April 23, 1875, until he died Aug. 15, 1894.

Kingsbury lists S. S. Warren as a China selectman in 1832. Warren is not on the list of selectmen in the bicentennial history.

Samuel’s brother Ebenezer, Bradbury said, had a law practice in Hallowell around 1824 and later was president of a Hallowell bank.

A Vaughan family papers website says Ebenezer Warren was born in Foxborough, Massachusetts, in 1779. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard in 1800 and a master’s in 1803, and lived in Hallowell from the time he married Abiah Morse. The wedding date is not specified, but the couple had a daughter born in 1810 and a son born in 1816.

Warren “was a lawyer, federal county attorney for Kennebec County, a justice of the peace, and a Massachusetts senator in 1816,” the website says. He was also president of two banks and from 1821 to 1830 an overseer of Bowdoin College.

He died suddenly in 1830, in Quincey, Illinois, while he was “inspecting soldiers’ land claims,” the Vaughan papers say.

* * * * * *

Newell Washburn Brainerd grew up in China, one of two sons and two or three daughters of a China Village merchant named Fredus Oldridge Brainerd (Dec. 15, 1831 -May 9, 1900) and his wife Maria (Washburn) (Jan. 26, 1832 – March 31, 1895), attorney Zeba/Zebah Washburn’s daughter.

Newell Brainerd’s November, 1900, obituary, pasted on his Find a Grave page (not including the name or location of the newspaper in which it was published; content suggests the paper covered Skowhegan), says he was born Aug. 20, 1860, in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, whence his parents moved to China “in his early childhood.” FamilySearch says he was born in 1860 in Milburn, Maine (now Skowhegan).

Both agree he attended China Academy in the early 1870s; the obituary on Find a Grave says he graduated. In February 1883 he was its principal, with his sister Estelle or Estella, four years his senior, as his assistant, the China history says.

Brainerd’s obituary adds a second graduation, from Oak Grove Seminary, in Vassalboro. The obituary and Bradbury agree that Brainerd studied law under E. F. Webb, in Waterville; gained admittance to the bar in 1886; and began practice in Fairfield that year, soon adding a Clinton office.

In November 1890, Bradbury said, Brainerd moved to Skowhegan. The obituary explains that he was elected Somerset County clerk of courts, a position he held for 10 years with success enough to be re-elected in September 1900.

On Jan. 15, 1887, FamilySearch says, Brainerd married Flora T. Brown (born in Fairfield April 13, 1860; or April 13, 1859). His obituary calls her Flora T. Lawrence and refers to her son Fred Lawrence; her obituary, on a separate FamilySearch page, says her first husband, Charles P. Lawrence, died in 1881.

The Brainerds had two (Find a Grave) or three (FamilySearch) daughters, Marion, born April 19, 1888, and twins Edith and Ethel born Jan. 11, 1890. Marion, listed on FamilySearch but not on Find a Grave, died in 1967 in Gardiner.

Edith died in September 1890; Ethel died Jan. 26, 1935, in Cincinnati, Ohio.

The obituary says nothing about Brainerd as a lawyer, but reports he was “for many years a trial justice.” He was active in the Methodist Church, helping with Sunday school and serving on the board of Island Avenue Methodist Church.

“He was an obliging and very competent official, a Christian gentleman, a respected and honored citizen. He has many sincere and warm friends, particularly in Somerset county, where he served the public so faithfully,” the obituary writer summarized.

This source said Brainerd had been in ill health for five years, and died in Massachusetts General Hospital at 5 a.m. Friday, Nov. 9, 1900, aged 40. He had had a necessary operation a few days earlier and failed to recover.

His body was returned to Skowhegan, where, after a well-attended service, he was buried in Southside cemetery. His widow, Flora, died Oct. 19, 1847, and is buried with her husband and daughters Ethel and Edith.

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).

Websites, miscellaneous.

CORRECTION: The photo in last week’s issue was not the Augusta, Maine, jail. It was an editing error.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Augusta jail

June 4, 2025/2 Comments/in Augusta, Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley/by Mary Grow

by Mary Grow

Before proceeding to the history of the Augusta jail, your writer wants to clarify a sentence from last week’s article. It referenced Wikipedia’s statement that after Augusta became a city (instead of a town) in 1849, “Its early city offices were in the Opera House, and meetings took place in Winthrop Hall.”

Apparently “early” doesn’t mean from the beginning. The history of the Augusta Opera House, from James North’s 1870 history and other sources, was part of the Nov. 17, 2022, article in this series (about the Augusta fire department). It does not jibe with housing city offices in 1849.

The public buildings described in the 2022 article were at 296 Water Street. According to the article, citing North’s history, in the summer of 1865 (almost certainly a typographical error for 1866, after the great fire of Sept. 17, 1865), the Granite Block was built there.

This building had stores on the street level, offices on the second floor and on the third floor the public area named Granite Hall (not called an opera house). Granite Hall, North said, was 104-by-62-feet, 27 feet high, with galleries on three sides and a 62-by-24-foot stage.

Granite Hall was totally destroyed when Granite Block burned in the winter of 1890, the 2022 “Town Line” article continues. It then cites a July 4, 1896, Bangor newspaper article saying in 1891, the “first Opera House” was built on the same lot. It burned the night of July 3-4, 1896.

By then, the newspaper article said, the building’s second floor (between ground-floor stores and a third-floor opera house) housed “city government and city treasurer’s rooms and offices.” Also by then, according to Wikipedia (cited last week) the brick Augusta city hall at 1 Cony Street was under construction.

Observant readers will have noted that according to these sources, the first named Opera House was built in 1891; Granite Hall, which could have been used for operas, was built in 1865 or 1866. Neither existed in 1849.

When North wrote about choosing a mayor and getting the city council organized in February and March, 1850, the only meeting place he mentioned was Winthrop Hall.

* * * * * *

Kennebec County jail, in Augusta. Date unknown.

Fort Western and plans for the meeting house (built in 1782-83; see last week’s article in this series) were the only Hallowell public buildings North discussed in the 1760s and 1770s. The courthouse and the jail were then farther down the Kennebec, in the town that was incorporated in 1752 as Frankfort and became Pownalborough in 1760 and Dresden in 1784. (Dresden today is the town in which the historic Pownalborough Courthouse, built in 1760, stands.)

Capt. Charles Nash (author of the chapters on Augusta in Kingsbury’s 1892 Kennebec County history) and North, between them, presented a history of 18th-cenury public punishment in Hallowell/ Augusta. Nash explained that (Massachusetts) state law required towns to have public stocks and a whipping post, and fined those that failed to provide these “terrors to evil doers.”

Nash said public stocks were first ordered in 1775, without saying where they were (presumably in a public place; part of the point of forcing offenders to sit with their ankles through holes in a heavy wooden frame was to expose them to ridicule and torment). North mentioned that voters at the spring 1785 annual meeting voted “to build stocks.”

Both historians referenced a whipping post put up in 1786 (April, North said). Nash located it on Winthrop Street. North said a thief was whipped that month and three other men (two horse thieves and a counterfeiter) “as late as 1796” (Nash said the stocks and whipping post “fell into disuse” after the jail was built nearby in 1793).

In February, 1793, North said, a county committee accepted proposals for materials and labor to build a Hallowell jail. It went up the same year, a two-story building “with walls of hewn timber,” “small apertures…in the walls to admit light and air to the cells.”

Kingsbury located the jail at the intersection of State and Winthrop streets, “opposite the present court house.”

This first jail was “not very secure,” North wrote. He gave an example of a man who used his jackknife to enlarge a window, took off his clothes and squeezed through to freedom.

Nonetheless, the wooden jail lasted until March 16, 1808. That night, during the violence over land rights that convulsed the area now included in Windsor (the “Malta War” and the murder of surveyor Paul Chadwick), someone set what was by then the Augusta (no longer Hallowell) jail on fire. It burned to the ground.

There was an attempt to burn the courthouse, too, North wrote. A second-floor incendiary device there was discovered in time and extinguished.

Residents and officials at first assumed the arsonists were some of the squatters who had been resisting demands to either pay for or give up their land. Squatters may well have been responsible for the attempt at the courthouse, North said, but people decided the jail fire was most likely set by an inmate, Captain Edward Jones.

The jailer, Pitt Dillingham, had already moved records out of the building “in anticipation of such an event,” North wrote (without explaining whether Dillingham was wary of Jones, or of the general unrest). The prisoners were taken to a nearby house, under guard; none escaped, Kingsbury said.

The county sheriff promptly had a temporary jail built near the courthouse; the Court of Sessions approved it in April 1808. The court also ordered a new stone jail to be built immediately; appointed a building committee; and imposed an $8,000 county tax for the work.

But, North wrote, the legislature approved only $5,000. Construction went ahead anyway, partly because the county was spending a lot of money to guard prisoners in the insecure temporary jail.

The first prisoners were transferred to the new jail in December, before the work was completely finished, North said. In April 1809, another $3,000 county tax was levied.

This two-story jail was made from blocks of stone held together by iron dowels. It was “much in advance of the prison accommodations of that day,” North wrote, and was “considered a very expensive and secure structure.”

He described an alley-way separating rows of cells with “heavy iron doors” on each floor. The ground-floor cells, for “the worst criminals,” got light and air through six-by-24-inch openings in the stone walls. On the second floor, where debtors and people whose crimes were less serious were housed, each cell had a grated window.

The new jail was “connected, by a brick ell, to a two story square brick jail house” at the intersection of State and Winthrop streets, North said.

Kingsbury added a separate brick “keeper’s house,” still standing in 1892.

North, and an anonymous historian who put a history of the Hallowell jail and related issues on line, mentioned one incident in connection with the jail: Joseph Sager’s Jan. 2, 1835, hanging, after he was convicted of murdering his wife (with arsenic, in “some wine…in which was an egg with white sugar”) in October, 1834.

Sager claimed innocence, but failed to convince a jury, or the public. His mother’s last-minute effort to get the governor and council to intervene failed.

North wrote that the gallows was on Winthrop Street, “near the southwest corner of the jail” where Sager had been held. Despite a “cold and stormy” day, an estimated 8,000 to 12,000 people gathered.

Kennebec County Sheriff George W. Stanley was the official who executed Sager. His body hung for 20 minutes before he was pronounced dead. Afterwards, North reported, he was allegedly “buried with great secrecy on an island in a pond in Winthrop.”

North mentioned that the county attorney who prosecuted Sager was James W, Bradbury — the man your writer has cited frequently as author of the chapter on Kennebec County lawyers in Kingsbury’s history. He began his legal practice in Augusta in 1830, and Wikipedia says he was the county’s prosecuting attorney from 1834 to 1838.

The on-line historian says Sager’s was “the last execution carried out in the county.”

By the spring of 1857, North wrote, the county commissioners considered the 1808 jail unfit for use. He quoted from an unidentified source: it lacked “sufficient warmth, light, ventilation and cleanliness; it was inhuman, dangerous to life, and detrimental to health and good morals to imprison persons therein.”

The commissioners, North wrote, inspected the new Auburn jail and hired its designer, an important Boston architect named Gridley James Fox Bryant, to design one for them.

(The on-line historian says Bryant was educated at Maine’s Gardiner Lyceum and returned to the state to “design at least twenty buildings.” Listed as still standing in 2024 were the Knox and Penobscot County courthouses in Rockland and Bangor, respectively, and the Washington County jail in Machias. The Knox County courthouse and Washington County jail are on the National Register of Historic places.)

The commissioners then selected a nearby lot “where the courthouse used to stand” (on-line historian) and added abutting land to it; decided on a stone building (though the cost estimate for a brick one was $6,000 less); and on Sept. 16, 1857, opened nine bids to put up the building.

They awarded the contract to low bidder Charles Webb, from Bath, for $52, 287, North wrote. The total cost of land and building was around $60,000, funded by county bonds.

Webb’s crew started the foundation that fall; bad weather stopped work until the spring of 1858, when it was continued “with commendable dispatch.” Webb himself was on site; the on-line historian referenced an April “Kennebec Journal” account of Webb being knocked cold “by the recoil of a stone cart.”

Local and state authorities and the public were invited to tour the new jail on Feb. 1, 1859. North described it in detail, with dimensions (112-by-58-feet, 39.5 feet above the ground). An accompanying picture shows the three-story stone and brick building, topped with a cupola and weathervane.

The front and middle sections housed staff. North listed “eating, store and bathing rooms and store closet” in the front basement, with a “parlor, sitting-room and office” on the second floor and eight bedrooms in the third story and attic.

The kitchen was in the basement of the middle section. Above it was a 33-foot high “guard and inspection room.”

In the back section were 54 cells and eight larger “privilege rooms, or cells” (North did not explain them). Cells were mostly eight feet square, privilege rooms 19-by-8-feet. Doors, windows, and in each cell a bedstead and table were all made of iron.

Neither North nor the on-line historian said when the first prisoners arrived.

North, writing his history in 1870, had nothing more to say about the jail. The on-line historian concluded his 2024 account: “During the next 160 years, it was expanded in proportion and purpose to become today’s Kennebec County Corrections [Correctional] Facility,” at 115 State Street.

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Augusta’s civic meeting houses

May 28, 2025/0 Comments/in Augusta, Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley/by Mary Grow

Fort Western, in August

by Mary Grow

Enough, for now, of genealogies (although two boxes about people accompany this article). This week, your writer provides summary histories of more of Augusta’s 18th and 19th century public buildings.

Settled in the 1760s as part of Hallowell, Augusta became a separate town in 1797; became the shire town of Kennebec County in 1799 and the capital of the State Maine in 1827; and was incorporated as a city in 1849.

The first public building seems to have been a meeting house that served for civic and religious gatherings, its origin described in James North’s 1870 history of Augusta. (North used the name “meeting house” for buildings for civic gatherings and buildings for worship; quite often the same building served both purposes.)

Next came a series of courthouses – 1790, 1801-02 and 1829-30 – described in the April 3 issue in this series (related to the legal men who frequented them).

After the first courthouse, Henry Kingsbury said in his Kennebec County history, came the first jail, built in 1793 (Augusta jails will be the topic of a future article in this series).

* * * * * *

North named many early (1762-1771) settlers in the part of the Kennebec Valley that became Augusta, who got their land from the company known at different times as the Plymouth Proprietors, Plymouth Company, Kennebec Proprietors and by other names.

He said nothing about any public building except Fort Western (built in 1754 as part of British defense against the French) before Hallowell (then including Augusta) was incorporated in 1771.

Fort Western, on the east bank of the Kennebec, was the center of the settlement, which started there and expanded on both sides of the river. North described early town meetings at the fort in May and July 1771.

Voters at the May meeting raised money for roads and schooling, and told their selectmen to petition the Plymouth Proprietors to designate lots for a church and for “a meeting-house and burying place and training field.”

At a September, 1773, town meeting, voters approved building a meeting house, on the east bank of the Kennebec. The Revolution intervened, and North did not revert to the topic until the fall of 1777, when voters repeated the decision.

By then, according to Captain Charles Nash’s chapters on Augusta in Kingsbury’s history, the west side of the river was becoming as settled as the east. This time, North wrote, voters agreed to draw lots to decide which side of the Kennebec the meeting house should be on. The east side won, and voters created a committee to find a lot and assemble materials so the meeting house could go up on May 15, 1778.

West-side residents objected, and again the deadline slipped. In the spring of 1779, North wrote, after discussion at two consecutive meetings, voters finally decided to build the meeting house on the west side of the river, near what became Augusta’s Market Square – but not that year.

As best your writer can determine, Market Square was on the west bank of the Kennebec where Winthrop Street comes downhill and crosses Water Street, about in the middle of today’s Water Street business district.

Voters at a 1781 meeting voted to build the meeting house in 1782, chose a building committee and raised 150 pounds, payable “in lumber or the products of the land.” North wrote work started in 1782.

In one chapter he said the April 1783 annual town meeting was convened there and “immediately adjourned to Fort Western.” In another chapter, he said perhaps the first voters’ meeting there was on May 5, 1783.

The building was not finished immediately – floors, exterior and windows were left undone, and it could be used “only in warm weather.” In 1792, North wrote, three prominent men were chosen to plan finishing it; in 1793, money was raised by the sale of pews, and on Oct. 9, 1795, Henry Sewall (see box) wrote in his diary that he had helped plaster it.

A picture in North’s history shows a rectangular two-story wooden building (36-by-50-feet, North and Nash wrote), with a two-story porch that sheltered the entrance and contained stairs to the gallery.

By the spring of 1810, North wrote, town meetings had been moved to the courthouse, and the meeting house was abandoned and in disrepair. It stood partly in Winthrop Street, which had been laid out after the building was up.

In March 1810, the building was taken down and the materials sold to Lewis Hamlen, from whom “the town” bought them back and used them to build a new meeting house at the intersection of Winthrop and Elm streets, three blocks west of State Street.

This building was also two stories, North said, with town meetings held upstairs. The porch with stairs was on the back this time. The first town meeting there was a special meeting on Dec. 25, 1811.

(New England, with its Puritan heritage, did not generally observe Christmas until the latter half of the 19th century. It became an official United States holiday in 1870.)

The meeting house was used “for town meetings and school purposes” until 1848. By then, North wrote, it was “dilapidated,” and people thought the lot could be better used.

Efforts to rebuild or repair failed, and on April 10, 1848, voters told the selectmen to sell the building. North wrote that a man named Ai Staples bought it, for $105; moved it to a nearby lot; added 20 feet on the rear; and converted the second floor into a 50-by-60-foot hall with a 12-foot ceiling, named Winthrop Hall.

(Ai Staples [1806 -1880] was a Gorham native who moved to Augusta in 1838 with his wife, Ann Cascoline Merrill, and “worked in grocery, shipping and real estate businesses,” the Maine Memory Network says. Its website has a c. 1840 picture of him, donated by the Maine Historical Society.)

Augusta became a city in 1849, by legislative act, followed by local voters’ approval. A mayor, city council and other officials were chosen in the spring of 1850. An effort to go back to town government was defeated in July of 1853.

Wikipedia says the first city offices were in the Augusta Opera House, and “meetings were held in Winthrop Hall.” The hall was used for municipal and public gatherings of many sorts. In 1854, another 30 feet was added on the rear, making the space 50-by-90-feet, and the ceiling was raised to 20 feet.

The federal government took over Winthrop Hall in the fall of 1861 for a military hospital, North wrote. It was one of at least three in the city during the Civil War.

After the war, Winthrop Hall was again renovated and renamed Waverly Hall.

According to Wikipedia, the first Augusta City Hall, a two-story brick building on the east bank of the Kennebec at 1 Cony Street, on the north side of the street that crosses the river on the lower bridge, was built in 1895-96 and served until 1987. The second floor was used for public events (John Philip Sousa played there in 1897, Wikipedia says). The building is on the National Register of Historic Places, and is now an assisted living facility.

Augusta’s current city hall is also on the east side of the river, at 16 Cony Street, on the south side of the street near old Fort Western.

Henry Sewall

Henry Sewall

Henry Sewall was born October 24, 1752, in York, Maine, and spent his youth helping on his father’s farm and learning to be a mason like his father. He served in the Revolutionary army from May 1775 through the end of the war, and first came to Hallowell in September 1783.

After an unsuccessful business venture in New York, he returned to Hallowell around 1790. He soon became town clerk and held the post for 35 years, in Hallowell and then Augusta; was clerk of the Maine District Court from 1789 to 1818 and county register of deeds from 1799 to 1817; and rose to the rank of major-general in the state militia.

He also kept a diary, from which North drew information for his history.

The general married three times, on Feb. 9, 1786, to a cousin named Tabitha Sewall, on June 3, 1811, to another cousin, Rachel Crosby; and on Sept. 9, 1833 (shortly before his 81st birthday) to Elizabeth Lowell, from Boston. He and Tabitha had two sons and five daughters.

North told this story about General Sewall.

“When [the Marquis de] Lafayette, the nation’s guest, reached Portland in 1825, Gen. Sewall, who was well acquainted with him in the army, went on to see him, and warily approached in the crowd not intending at first to make himself known, but Lafayette saw and recognized him and perceiving his design exclaimed, ‘Ah! Henry Sewall you can’t cheat me.’ They embraced, and the aged soldiers wept.”

James W. North Jr.

James W. North, who wrote the book on which most of this week’s article is based, was born Feb. 12, 1810, in Clinton, according to WikiTree.

In his Augusta chapter in Kingsbury’s history, Capt. Charles E. Nash wrote of him, “Augusta never had a nobler citizen, nor one more loyal to its every interest, or who will be longer remembered, than James W. North.”

North’s parents died when he was two, Nash wrote. He provided no information on who took over the boy’s care, going on to his career: he studied at the Gardiner Lyceum (just downriver from Hallowell), read law with a Gardiner lawyer and was admitted to the bar in 1831. His first law office was in Augusta, in the fall of 1831; in the spring of 1832, he moved back to the part of Clinton that became Sebasticook in 1842 and Benton in 1850.

During 14 years there, he dammed the Sebasticook and used the water power for grist mills and sawmills, including “manufacturing lumber from his own timber lands.”

Then, Nash said, “his ancestral ties” brought him back to Augusta, where he owned “parcels of inherited land, that had originally belonged to his great-grandfather, Gershom Flagg.” Flagg (1705 – 1771) was a surveyor and one of the Plymouth proprietors.

On these lots, Nash said, North built North’s Block (your writer guesses a commercial building or buildings) and the 1856 Meonian building, using wood cut from his land in Benton, sawed at his mill on the Sebasticook and floated down to Augusta.

The Meonian Building stood between Fore and Water streets, six stories tall on Fore Street and four stories on Water Street. North said lower-floor stores and offices were topped by a two-story, 50-by-75-foor public hall 27 feet high, “with galleries hung on two sides and one end.”

The building’s name “is derived from Maeonia, a county of Asia Minor,” North wrote. He did not say why he chose it. (“County” is his word; on-line sources mostly say “region,” though some say “city” and one says Maeonia was briefly an independent kingdom. It was in Lydia, which is now part of Turkey.)

The 1856 building burned in Augusta’s downtown fire on Sept. 17, 1865, and was rebuilt in 1866, the same dimensions and with improvements, North wrote.

On another of his lots, he built Hotel North in 1877.

Augusta voters elected North to the legislature in 1849 and again in 1853, and he was Augusta’s mayor from 1857 through 1860. He was a “leading promoter” of gas lights, installed in Augusta in 1853, and “clerk and treasurer” of the city gas company until 1881, when his oldest son, Dr. James W. North, took over. The older North was also president of one Augusta bank and a director of another.

North died June 7, 1882. He and his wife, Phebe (Upton) (1810 – Sept. 11 or Sept. 13, 1876), whom he married Sept. 23, 1834, are buried in Augusta’s Forest grove cemetery, with all but the youngest of their four sons.

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and Down the Kennebec Valley: Fletcher family

May 20, 2025/0 Comments/in Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley/by Mary Grow

A. B. Fletcher’s daughter’s home where Abisha Benson Fletcher died.

by Mary Grow

First, here is an update on last week’s article about lawyer Sanford A. Kingsbury, who supposedly practiced in China. Readers may remember that in 1835, he was opening mills on Kingsbury Pond, in the plantation named after him, some 50 miles from Waterville (and another five miles or so from China).

Apparently he remained involved in China, despite the distance.

The China bicentennial history says a steam mill near China Village, at the head of China Lake, started grinding corn in 1835 and received a legislative charter in 1836 (allowing its owners to grind grain of all kinds; saw lumber; and make things of “iron, steel, cotton or wool”). Kingsbury is listed among the company’s shareholders.

In 1837, Kingsbury and five other men “were incorporated as the China Manufacturing Company, with the right to manufacture leather, cotton, wool, or paper; apparently this corporation remained on paper only,” the history says.

(Your writer excuses herself for not finding this information a week ago: as she said then, Sanford Kingsbury is not listed in the index to the China history, and only by happenstance did she find his name in the text.)

* * * * * *

An alert reader commented on last week’s article mentioning a lawyer named Abisha Benson and, later, lawyer Alfred Fletcher’s brother named Abisha Benson Fletcher.

Your writer’s surmise (based on no evidence) is that Abisha Fletcher’s parents named their son in honor of the lawyer. The timing works: Abisha Benson was practicing in China in the 1820s, and Abisha Benson Fletcher was born in China in 1822.

A summary check on Abisha Fletcher’s parents, Colonel Robert and Nancy (Sprague) Fletcher, identified Robert as a prominent China citizen, who might well have been friends with, and perhaps wished to show respect for, a local lawyer.

Following is some information on Robert Fletcher and his immediate family (none of whom seem to have been lawyers).

* * * * * *

Robert Fletcher

Robert Fletcher was born Aug. 31, 1786, in Temple, New Hampshire, Find a Grave says. His father, also Robert Fletcher was born in Massachusetts; served in the French and Indian and Revolutionary wars; and moved first to Hallowell and later to Skowhegan, where he died in 1838, at the age of 93.

China’s Robert was the oldest of Massachusetts Robert’s three children by Sarah (Foster) Fletcher, who was born in 1746. They married in March, 1771, Find a Grave says. (The site does not explain why their first child was not born until 15 years after the marriage.)

The younger Robert came to China in the early 1800s – different sources say 1807 and 1810. When the War of 1812 started in June, China raised two militia companies, the China bicentennial history says. Fletcher, then in his twenties, was the captain in command of the larger one, with 50 privates.

In September 1814 Fletcher’s company was ordered to Wiscasset to repel an expected British landing (that did not happen). By then it was part of the Third Regiment, Second Brigade, in the Maine militia.

The China history says Fletcher was still in the Third Regiment in 1820, as lieutenant-colonel. In 1821 he is listed as its colonel.

Fletcher built the second general store in China Village (Japheth Washburn built the first one, in 1804, and rebuilt it after it burned in 1806). The history says Fletcher’s store was “noted especially for the night the heavy stock of rum broke through the floor and fell into the cellar.” Like many other men of his time, he was also a farmer, according to the history.

Fletcher was involved in town affairs at intervals. The China history lists him as a Harlem selectman in 1815. After northern Harlem and China merged in February, 1818, he was one of the first three China selectmen elected, and was simultaneously surveyor of highways, fence viewer, field driver and hogreeve.

(The surveyor of highways was responsible for inspecting roads, seeing that obstructions were cleared and necessary repairs done.

(A fence viewer’s job included approving the location and condition of fences, essential to keep livestock from damaging neighbors’ property. Title 30-A, Maine Revised Statutes, still lists the position.

(The field driver was supposed to round up and deliver to the town pound domestic animals that had escaped their fences and were roaming at large. An excerpt from Massachusetts law found on line lists them as “horses, mules, asses, neat cattle, sheep, goats or swine going at large in the public ways, or on common and unimproved land within his [the field driver’s] town and not under the care of a keeper.”

(Apparently Massachusetts field drivers had Sundays off, for the law further says that on Sundays, “any other inhabitant of the town” can capture wayward animals and get the same fee as the field driver got.

(A hogreeve, Wikipedia says, was a specialized field driver, responsible for catching loose swine and appraising the damage they had done. Every hog was supposed to have a nose-ring; if one did not, the hogreeve could add a ring and bill the owner.)

In April 1823, China voters chose Robert Fletcher to serve on a five-man committee to organize building a bridge over the brook flowing into the head of China Lake (the same bridge that took up Abisha Benson’s time two years earlier and Robert’s son Alfred Fletcher’s time a decade later, as reported in last week’s article).

Fletcher, like Benson, was a Mason. The China history says when Central Lodge, No. 45, was organized in China Village in December, 1823, with Benson as its first Master, Robert Fletcher was the first junior warden.

A comment by a Fletcher descendant on a Find a Grave site says Robert Fletcher built, in 1827, the Fletcher-Main house on Main Street in the village, now home of the Albert Church Brown Memorial Library and part of the China Village Historic District.

Records suggest Fletcher was a Methodist: the China history lists him as a member of the building committee for a Methodist church organized in China Village in the early 1840s.

Find a Grave says Fletcher and his first wife, Nancy (Sprague) Fletcher (1788-1853), whom he married in Sidney in 1805 (when he was 18 and she was 16, Find a Grave says), had either nine or 10 children (both numbers are on her page), as follows:

— Sarah “Sally” (Fletcher) Russ, born Dec. 20, 1806 (or 1805 – Find a Grave has both dates on her page), in Sidney; married a Weeks Mills (Weeks Mills is one of China’s four villages) businessman named Charles Austin Russ in December 1830; died in China March 22, 1858, and is buried in Weeks Mills cemetery.
— Dr. Franklin Parker Fletcher (May 15, 1808 – Oct. 5, 1896), born and died in China and buried in Weeks Mills cemetery.
— Mary Ann (Fletcher) Russ, born June 20, 1810, in China; married her older sister’s husband’s younger brother, Francis Anderson Russ (no date given); and died June 18, 1900, in Belfast. One of their children was named Robert Fletcher Russ (1841 -1934).
— Julia E. Fletcher (July 1813 – Nov. 29, 1833), born and died in China and buried in China Village cemetery.
— Sophia (Fletcher) Maxwell, born in 1814, second of three wives of Robert Maxwell; she died Jan. 14, 1853, and the unnamed infant listed as their only child died Jan. 31, 1853, less than a month old. Mother and child are buried in the Weeks Mills cemetery.
— Captain and lawyer Alfred A. Fletcher (Aug. 31, 1817, or 1818 – Aug. 18, 1858), to whom readers were introduced last week.
— Elizabeth S. (Fletcher) Giddings, born in China in 1821 and died there Sept. 9, 1872. She and her husband, Job Giddings, are buried in Weeks Mills cemetery.
— Sergeant Abisha Benson Fletcher, born in China April 18, 1822, and died there June 21, 1906 (see below).
— In a Find a Grave paragraph naming Robert and Nancy Sprague Fletcher’s children, the next name is Martha J. Fletcher, born in 1826. The list of their children lower on the page, and the corresponding list on Robert Fletcher’s Find a Grave page, omit Martha.
— Susan (Fletcher) Weeks, born in China in 1828; married Albion Weeks on June 6, 1859, in China; died in China Feb. 9, 1881, and is buried in Weeks Mills cemetery.

Robert Fletcher’s second wife, Find a Grave says, was a widow from Gorham named Ruth Woodman Hanscom or Hanscome, born May 2, 1802. They were married in 1855.

Robert died Jan. 30, 1865, and is buried in China Village cemetery. Ruth died Dec. 16, 1893, in La Crosse, Wisconsin, where she is buried.

* * * * * *

Continuing with Robert and Nancy Fletcher’s youngest son, Abisha Benson Fletcher, Find a Grave has a copy of his obituary from the June 26, 1906, issue of the Kennebec Journal.

It begins by calling him “one of China’s old and most honored citizens.” He died June 21, 1906, aged 84, in the “old farmhouse” where his daughter, Marion Main, then lived and where he died.

The obituary says Abisha Fletcher lived in Weeks Mills when a young man, and “was engaged in the boot, shoe and tannery business.” Henry Kingsbury added, in his 1892 Kennebec County history, that Fletcher, his brother-in-law Charles A. Russ and John Reed bought an existing tannery (no purchase date) “and ran it until about 1870.” They also operated, in a separate building, a shoe factory that employed 80 workers; it burned in 1862.

Fletcher spent a year in the army, the obituary says. Kingsbury listed Abisha B. as one of the six Fletchers enlisted during the Civil War. Neither source has dates.

The obituary says he returned to the farm, and then moved to China Village and ran a general store (still operating in 1892, Kingsbury wrote).

(If he lived in the house his father built, his home was less than a block [if Main Street were divided into blocks] north of the former business center where his store was. The Methodist church – see below – was a short distance farther north.)

Abisha Benson Fletcher

A summary of Abisha Fletcher’s civic activities includes serving as a China selectman (for three terms, 1868, 1869 and 1870, the China history says); member of the Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.), including a term as commander of the Amos J. Billings Post, in China Village, founded in June 1884; one of the local Methodist church’s “strongest and most loyal supporters” for over 60 years; a Republican, a temperance advocate and a supporter of education.

The China history lists Abisha Fletcher as one of a seven-man committee chosen at a March 1886 town meeting to study whether China should consolidate or maybe abolish school districts. Committee members were all “prominent men with much experience in local school administration,” the history says.

Kingsbury added that Fletcher served at one time as president of the China Cemetery Association, organized in 1865 to maintain the China Village cemetery.

Abisha Fletcher married Mariam Clark Spratt (Dec. 26, 1824 – Nov. 23, 1899), and they had nine children between 1845 and 1862. Find a Grave says Abisha and Mariam are buried in China Village cemetery, with six of their nine children.

The obituary describes Fletcher as having a “genial, social nature,” with a “cheerful optimism, a kindly looking for and appreciating the best in his fellowmen and in all of life as it came to him.”

Kennebec Journal, Thursday, 26 Jun 1906

Mrs. Marion Norton accompanied by her son Harold and little daughter Audrey, are at Charles Main’s. Mrs. Norton was called here by the death of her father.

The death of A. B. Fletcher, one of China’s old and most honored citizens, occurred at the home of his daughter, Mrs. Charles Main, Thursday, June 21. His age was 84 years.

It commends his generosity, adding “One of the oldest and truest standbys of the town of China has gone and many mourn his loss.”

Fletcher’s funeral was held in his farmhouse. The obituary ends: “As the casket was carried from the house, the old Methodist bell to which his ears had never before been dulled and where his willing feet had always hastened, sadly and solemnly tolled a last ‘Goodbye.'”

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.