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

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Rev. Jeremiah Chaplin

by Mary Grow

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

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

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

* * * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.

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

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by Mary Grow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * *

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

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

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

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

* * * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * *

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

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

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

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

* * * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * ** * *

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

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

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

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous

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

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Sand Hill School, in Winslow.

by Mary Grow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Second Fort School, Lithgow St.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wyman wrote nothing about what this committee did.

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

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

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

Myrtle Street School

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

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

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

North Grammar School, in Waterville.

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

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

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

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.

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

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by Mary Grow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Main sources:

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

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Education in 18th & 19th centuries

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by Mary Grow

Introduction and Massachusetts law

One of the many questions your writer has not yet answered – and may never – is why, in the 1700s, people left comparatively comfortable homes in Massachusetts and similar places to come to the Kennebec Valley, on the Massachusetts frontier.

They got free or low-cost land, to be sure. But they had to turn a forest into a farm, and they had to bring with them or recreate everything they needed for daily living.

Their needs included, obviously, material things: food they had to kill or grow; water and things in which to carry, heat and store it; shelter; clothing; tools, household utensils and furniture; perhaps a horse, a cow, some chickens and shelter and food for them; and many more necessities and conveniences.

Many of the (few) surviving early diaries and letters describe the lack of such basic goods. James North commented in his well-researched history of Augusta, published in 1870, “It is difficult to conceive at this day how the settlers at this early period provided for their wants, which must have been few and scantily supplied.”

In the 1760s, he wrote, most families lived in log houses. There were no roads; people traveled on foot or horseback following marked trails through the woods.

Alice Hammond, in her 1992 Sidney history, painted a slightly different picture. She said by 1765, enough water-powered mills were operating on brooks running into the Kennebec so that some trails had been widened “to allow pack horses and even carts and sleds in season.” Nonetheless, she mentioned a man reported to have carried “a sack of corn on his back to a grist mill nine miles from his home.”

North said Samuel and William Howard, the first traders at the Cushnoc trading post (later the site of Fort Western, on the east bank of the Kennebec River in Augusta), “rendered them [the settlers] valuable services in exchanging their few commodities, which consisted of the products of the waters and the forest, for the necessaries of life.”

The settlers offered wood (including shingles), fish, moose hides and furs. The Howards provided “pork, corn, flour, shoes,” molasses, a spelling book and many other such items, “with a liberal quantity of liquors which were freely used at that day.”

Hammond added ashes to the list of settlers’ products; traders converted them to potash that was shipped to Europe. Potash had many uses, including as fertilizer and in making textiles, glass and soap.

As late as 1784, North wrote that Hallowell assessors felt a need to explain the difference between the town’s population – 682 white, 10 blacks – and the number of “dwelling houses:” 38. The assessors wrote that most families were still living in their original log cabins, which were not worth assessing for taxes.

“At most there are not above twenty houses in the town that are any ways comfortable or convenient,” in these men’s opinion.

There was also a need for the amenities of society, which settlers translated into religion, government and – in New England, not necessarily in other colonies – education.

Referring to Massachusetts and Maine, most historians call the lowest-level schools primary, elementary or petty schools. They educated students through eighth grade or age 14 (though older students, especially boys, are frequently mentioned), teaching reading, writing and basic mathematics, with Puritanism as a basis.

The next level, Latin or grammar schools, added subjects like Latin, Greek and advanced mathematics, initially to prepare boys for college.

Several local historians have commented on the importance of education to Kennebec Valley settlers.

One was Elwood T. Wyman, Waterville’s Superintendent of Schools in 1902, who was assigned the chapter on education in Rev. Edwin Carey Whittemore’s centennial history. Wyman commented that seeking information about early Waterville schools “is largely groping in the dark,” because records were scarce and memories didn’t go back far enough.

But, he said, he found enough information to show that Waterville’s early residents brought from Massachusetts “the same high regard for education that made and has kept for that commonwealth the foremost place in the Union.”

He continued, “The mother state gave to her daughter Maine no more precious heritage than this strong desire and determination to offer youth as much of elementary learning as limited resources could provide.”

North specifically credited the leaders of the Plymouth Company who oversaw the land grants in the Kennebec valley, calling them “men of elevated character, enlightened views, and of a liberal spirit.” They protected those who settled their land grants from hostile Native Americans and their French backers; and they included in their grants “provisions for the maintenance” of education and religion.

In following articles in this series, your writer plans to share information about education in the central Kennebec Valley, beginning in the late 1700s. A summary description of the legal and regulatory framework will provide background for information on schooling in individual towns.

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Education in Maine was based on Massachusetts law, because from 1677 to 1820 Maine was part of Massachusetts. Louis Hatch devoted the first chapter of his 1919 history of Maine to early landowners, exploration and settlement, beginning with organizations and individuals who received grants from the British crown.

One landowner was Sir Ferdinando Gorges (1565 or thereabouts – May 1647), described as a British “naval and military commander” who was instrumental in promoting settlement in and trade with North America, especially the part that became Maine.

By Hatch’s account, the Province of Massachusetts first acquired coastal towns in what had been Gorges’ territory in southern Maine in the 1650s. There was opposition, from Gorges’ grandson, also Ferdinando Gorges (1630 – 1718), the British monarchy and Maine residents; but in 1668, the Massachusetts Great and General Court (the legislature) sent commissioners, with a military escort, to reaffirm Massachusetts’ claim.

Massachusetts control became final in 1677, Hatch said, when the second Ferdinando Gorges sold his Maine rights to “an agent of Massachusetts for 1,250 British pounds.” In a footnote, Hatch said the agent “acted without authority but the colony after a little hesitation accepted the arrangement.”

The Province of Maine at that time “extended only to the Kennebec,” Hatch wrote. (Your writer finds this description annoyingly vague – the west bank of the Kennebec, which would exclude the river itself as well as the east bank; or the middle of the waterway; or the whole Kennebec Valley?)

Hammond wrote in her history of Sidney (on the west bank) that until 1677, there was little government, religion or education for the settlers, who were occupied with “making a living…[and] warring with the French, the Indians, and each other.” Education, she said, was “almost strictly a family function.”

In 1677, the 1647 Massachusetts education law took effect in the part of Maine that included Sidney. This law, known today as the Old Deluder Satan Law, incorporated the General School Law of 1642. Wikipedia reproduces and summarizes both.

The 1642 law, the Wikipedia writer explains, made a radical change by shifting responsibility for educating children and apprentices from clergymen to “ye chosen men appointed for managing the prudentiall affajres” of the town (the selectmen).

This law aimed to have children able to “read & understand the principles of religion & the capitall lawes of this country.” It applied to both sexes: a provision required that “boyes and girles be not suffered to converse together, so as may occasion any wanton, dishonest, or immodest behavior….”

The selectmen were empowered to fine people who refused to tell them how they were carrying out their educational responsibilities. With approval of a court or magistrate, they could take improperly schooled children from their homes and make them apprentices elsewhere. They themselves could be fined by a grand jury or a court for neglect of these duties.

The Wikipedia writer surmised the law was not well enforced, leading the Massachusetts General Court to pass the 1647 law. This law, reproduced on Wikipedia, begins “It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures…” – thus its unofficial title.

The 1647 law says when a town has 50 households, voters or officials must appoint someone “to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and read.” The majority of “those that order the prudentials of the town” shall decide whether the teacher is paid by the students’ “parents or masters” or by the townspeople as a group, with the proviso that parents must not pay “much more” than they would in another town.

When a town has 100 “families or householders, they shall set up a grammar school, the master thereof being able to instruct youth so far as they may be fitted for the university.” (The university intended was Harvard.) This requirement carried a penalty for non-fulfillment: any qualifying town that has no grammar school for more than a year “shall pay 5 pounds to the next school till they shall perform this order.”

A 1648 law, Wikipedia says, required parents and masters to teach their children and apprentices “reading, the public laws, the catechism and ‘some honest lawful calling, labour or employment.'” Selectmen were supervisors, “conducting examinations and if necessary fining parents or placing the young with other masters if their education was neglected.”

Hammond said the District Act of 1787 established school districts in towns. Most districts, most of the time, had a schoolhouse, making it possible for students from all parts of town to walk to and from primary school.

And North described a 1789 law “providing for the instruction of youth” that required each “town or district” with more than 50 families to provide a “schoolmaster of good morals” for at least six months every year. He was to teach reading, writing, English, spelling, arithmetic “and decent behavior.”

The length of the schoolmaster’s work was to increase proportionally as population grew, up to 200 householders. A town that large was required to provide 12 months of primary school plus another 12 months of the services of a grammar school teacher capable of teaching English, Greek and Latin.

Teachers were required to be citizens, by “naturalization or otherwise.” They were directed to instruct their students in a range of personal and civic virtues: piety, justice, regard for truth, universal benevolence, sobriety, chastity, moderation, love of country and the like; and to show them, in age-appropriate ways, how these virtues would help “to preserve and perfect a republican constitution, and to secure the blessing of liberty as well as to promote their future happiness.”

The effect of these Massachusetts laws was to emphasize the importance of education for everyone, not just the wealthy, and to define it as a public responsibility, carried out at the local level with local money and supervision.

(The 1789 legislative session whose members approved this school law also passed a law to encourage “the manufacture and consumption of strong beer, ale and other malt Liquors” by a five-year tax exemption for manufacturers. It was presented as promoting the local economy. North disapproved.)

Main sources

Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992)
Hatch, Louis Clinton, ed., Maine: A History 1919 ((facsimile, 1974)
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 Sidney Settlers

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by Mary Grow

Conclusion

Researching former Sidney residents on line, your writer has repeatedly come across a colorful small book entitled Early Sidney, by Chloe B., with a photo of the historic Levi Powers house on the front. The site is bookcreator.com.

Chloe B. mentioned three early settlers she believed gave names to features in the landscape: Samuel Goff (Goff Brook); Philip Snow (Snow Pond, aka Messalonskee Lake); and Samuel Ward, husband of Lois Clark, from Vassalboro (Ward Pond).

Philip Snow and the town of Belgrade

Text and photo courtesy of the Belgrade HIstorical Society.

The beginning of the known history of Belgrade began in 1774, when a man named Philip Snow decided to look for new hunting grounds beyond the familiar lands in Sidney. He crossed the lake to the west and built a log cabin about two miles north of what is now Belgrade Depot. After six years of using this as a base for hunting trips, Snow sold his cabin to Joseph Greely. He returned at a later date to settle on the west side of the lake with his wife and nine children. Snow Pond (now Messalonskee Lake) and Mt. Philip (just north of Belgrade Lakes) were both named in his honor.

To finish this longer-than-planned subseries on Sidney’s early residents, your writer will share information about these families, and one more.

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As mentioned in past articles, your writer believes the stream running through Reyolds Forest and into the Kennebec was called first Bog Brook and then Hastings Brook.

Bog Brook could be taken as descriptive. Hastings Brook probably recognizes an early Sidney family whose first members settled on the river road.

Alice Hammond’s history of Sidney has multiple references to Sidney’s Hastings family. They were of British descent; Hammond wrote an ancestor was named John Seaborn Hastings because he was born (in 1732) on ship on the way to Massachusetts.

The first Hastings in Vassalboro, Hammond said, were Mathew (1718-1791), his wife Mary Battle (1720 – 1804), their son Moses (1743-1838) and their eight daughters. About 1770, Mathew bought land “on the north end of the West River Road” from an advertisement in a Boston newspaper.

Henry Kingsbury’s list of early Vassalboro officials, in his Kennebec County history, listed Matthew (with two ts) Hastings as one of the first three selectmen, elected in 1771 and serving 10 years, and as town clerk in 1782 and 1783. When Sidney separated in 1792, Moses Hastings served as a Sidney selectman for the first two years.

Moses was the one who married John Marsh’s daughter Hannah in 1772 and inherited the property that is now the Reynolds Forest Preserve, mentioned last week. According to familysearch, Moses and Hannah had four sons and five daughters between 1774 and 1796, including another Moses (1774 – 1812) and General Mathew (1796 – 1878, grandson of the first Mathew).

Hammond said Moses (1743) succeeded John Marsh as owner of grist mills and sawmills on Hastings Brook. Mathew (1796) was born in Sidney and lived in Calais, Maine, familysearch says. He had 16 children by two marriages.

A comprehensive book on early Calais families by Thelma Eye Brooks (copyright 2002), found on line, says Mathew Hastings served as a Massachusetts militia private in the War of 1812, from Sept. 24 to Nov. 10, 1814. Later he was active in the Maine militia for years, becoming a brigadier general by 1841 – hence his title.

Brooks wrote that General Mathew’s second son by his first wife and first son by his second wife each served in the Civil War and later lived in Sidney. (Other sources provide differing information.)

Gorham Kimball Hastings, born in Calais Feb. 7, 1830, and died in Sidney March 18, 1921, was a second lieutenant in the 26th Maine Infantry and a seaman in the Civil War. In 1880 he represented Sidney in the Maine House of Representatives as a member of the Greenback Party. In 1889, copying his grandfather Moses (1743), he was a Sidney selectman for a year.

Simon Cutter Hastings, born in Calais May 5, 1843, was a corporal in the 21st Maine Infantry. On Sept. 30, 1873, he married Ellen Faught (1845 – 1912, daughter of Athony Faught and Olive Hamlin – see the Aug. 15 article on Sidney’s Faught family).

Simon Hastings served as a Sidney selectman for five years. He died in Portland (where he had been living with his sister, Jennie Tyler) on July 15, 1938, and was buried in the Sibley cemetery with his wife.

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Your writer merely surmises Hastings Brook underwent a name change and became Goff Brook; she has found no proof. She has learned that the Goffs did not come to Sidney until 1829, and that they were mill-owners, two pieces of information supporting the idea the brook was renamed.

Chloe B. wrote that Goff Brook was “likely named for Samuel Goff.”

According to Hammond, the first Goffs in Sidney were two sons of William Francis and Rebecca (Bates) Goff, from Windsor. The older was William Francis Goff, Jr., born in 1805; his brother, Samuel Wesley Goff (1806 – 1871), bought the first family property on Nov. 17, 1829, on Goff Road.

Contemporary maps show Goff Road running north off Dinsmore Road, roughly parallel to West River Road, and dead-ending before it reaches Goff Brook.

Hammond generalized that Goff men tended to earn their livings as “lumbermen, farmers and blacksmiths”; the women she described as homemakers or teachers. She and Kingsbury said that William, Jr., built a shingle mill on the homestead in 1850, “about the last” 19th-century mill built in the town. Kingsbury said it ran for around 20 years; Le Roy Goff owned the property in 1892.

Find a Grave says Samuel married Olive P. Chadbourne (1814 – 1878), in Sidney, on Nov. 10, 1835. They had 12 children, of whom William (born in 1835) and Leroy Sylvester (1850 – 1906; perhaps Kingsbury’s Le Roy?) stayed in Sidney, with Leroy inheriting the family home.

Leroy married Cora Sibley (1864 – 1934), from Passadumkeag, Maine, in Bangor, on Nov. 6, 1886. One source says they had three daughters and five sons, born in Sidney between 1884 and 1903; at least two of their grandsons are listed as keeping the Goff name in Sidney into the 20th century.

One of Sidney’s cemeteries is named Clark/Goff; it has the grave of the senior William Francis Goff, 1782 – 1845 (but not his wife, Rebecca). William Francis, Jr., is not listed as buried there. His brother and sister-in-law, Samuel and Olive, are.

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Philip Snow was probably in what is now Sidney before 1774, but to call him a settler might be misleading. Accounts your writer found describe him as a wandering hunter, who sometimes joined his wife and children living in Sidney.

Snow was born Feb. 18, 1748, most likely in Dunstable, Massachusetts (one source suggests Dunstable, New Hampshire). On June 13, 1772, he married Abigail or Abagail Townsend (born Apr. 17, 1754, in Hopkinton, Massachusetts) in Hallowell.

Evidently the family home was in Sidney, because two sources describe Snow moving, alone, across the big lake in west Sidney to build a log cabin as a hunting base, and thus founding the Town of Belgrade.

One source says Snow was one of several central Maine men who served as guides for Benedict Arnold’s 1775 expedition to Québec.

He sold the cabin after six years and, one source says, “probably” returned to his wife. He spent enough time with her so that when the family later (no specific date) came back to the west – Belgrade – side of the lake, he and Abigail had eight or nine children.

The online source rootsweb lists eight children: Hannah, born March 21, 1773, in Hallowell; Sarah, born Feb. 12, 1774; Abigail, born in 1777; Stephen, born in 1779; Moses, born in 1781; Betsy; Jonathan; and Philip, born in 1787.

Sarah and her younger brothers Stephen, Moses and Philip moved north, with Milo and Charleston (northwest of Bangor) named as destinations. Both parents died in Charleston, Philip in 1850 and, according to one source, Abigail the same year at the age of 102 (your writer found no other source giving her death date).

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An article back in March was partly about Ward Pond, in southern Sidney on the northeast side of Route 27. Your writer surmised the pond was named after one or more of Sidney’s Ward families, but could not – and still cannot — figure out why Chloe B. gave the honor to Samuel who married Lois Clark.

The Sidney map in the 1856 Kennebec County atlas shows several Ward houses southeast, west and northwest of the pond. The 1879 map reproduced in Hammond’s history shows what might be the southeast house still there, with a blacksmith shop beside it, and another Ward dwelling farther north, on the east side of Quaker Road (which runs northish off Route 27, on the east side of the pond).

John Ward owned land in Sidney by 1794. When the first 10 school districts were laid out that year, some of the boundaries Hammond quoted referenced his land, which was evidently several miles from the Kennebec.

John Ward might be the John Ward, Sr., (born in 1733; or June 23, 1735, in Newton, Massachusetts) Kingsbury listed among early settlers in western Sidney, with his son, Deacon William Ward. Find a Grave says in 1757 John Ward, Sr., married Mary Clapp, born Jan. 23, 1738, in Dorchester, Massachusetts, by whom he had four children (but familysearch lists more; see below).

Find a Grave says the couple’s first daughter lived only a year or so. The second daughter, born in 1761, died in 1840 in Ohio. The third daughter, Anna, born in Dorchester in 1769, died in Sidney in 1841, widow of Eleazer Cummings (whose information on line is extraordinarily contradictory; your writer found no reference to Sidney).

John and Mary’s fourth child, according to Find a Grave, was Deacon William Ward (1769 – 1844). Ancestry.com says in 1796, he married Elizabeth Godfrey (1778 – 1868), from Nova Scotia.

None of these Wards was the Samuel mentioned in Chloe B.’s book. He appears on the familysearch website as John and Mary’s seventh child in a list that reads as follows: Clap (1755 – 1755), Mary (1758 -1759), Elizabeth (1760 – Deceased), Mindwell (1761 – 1840), Mindwell (1761 – Deceased), Sarah (1762 – 1806), Samuel (1764 – 1809), Elder William (1768 – 1804), Ann (1769 – 1841) and John, Jr. (1775 – 1823).

Familysearch says Samuel Ward did indeed marry Lois Clark (1769 – 1857), on July 27, 1787 (Chloe B. said 1786). Between 1788 and 1808 they had four daughters and four sons.

Familysearch says their first son, Thomas (1790 – 1867) was born in Vassalboro (because Sidney did not exist until 1792). The other children were born in Sidney. Second son, Samuel, Jr. (1797 – 1882) was blind, familysearch says; he seems not to have married.

BRCA/Seven Lakes Mount Phillip trail

Mt. Phillip Trail Loop, Rome, Maine. (photo by Laura G.)

A second landmark honoring Philip Snow is a mountain that has been variously called Mount Philip, Mount Phillips and now Mount Phillip.

Kingsbury wrote that Mount Philip was in the Town of Belgrade, west of Sidney, near the village of Belgrade Mills (now Belgrade Lakes), and that the name honored Snow’s “famous hunting exploits in its vicinity.”

This location has been contradicted repeatedly by newer sources: Mount Philip is not near Belgrade Lakes, in west central Belgrade, but about seven miles north, in the adjoining town of Rome.

According to the Belgrade-based conservation organization the 7 Lakes Alliance, in 2004 the Alliance, “in collaboration with” Great Pond’s Pine Island Camp, acquired 207 acres, including a 1.4-mile loop trail and the mountain’s 755-foot summit.

The website alltrails.com calls the Mount Phillip Loop Trail a “moderately-challenging” 45-minute hike. This and other on-line trail sites recommend it for hiking, birding, views and snowshoeing. Trailhead parking is on the north side of Route 225, a mile and a half east of the junction with Route 27.

(Your writer cannot resist quoting from the first paragraph of Kingsbury’s 1892 chapter on the Town of Rome. He wrote that Rome “is situated twenty miles northwest from Augusta, with which it is connected by a daily stage running to New Sharon. It has seven times as many hills as the eternal city whose name it bears, and granite enough to rebuild the old Roman capital.”)

Main sources:

Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Sidney settlers: Lovejoys & Marshes

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by Mary Grow

Part III

(See Part I here, and Part II here.)

Previous articles in this series have mentioned two other early Sidney families who intermarried with Bacons and Faughts, the Lovejoys and Marshes. This article will provide more information about both.

The first Lovejoy in Sidney is named Abial (in the on-line source Find a Grave and in Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history) or Abiel (in the on-line source minerdescent and in Alice Hammond’s 1992 bicentennial history of Sidney), and is known as Captain Lovejoy and Squire Lovejoy. His second son and namesake also gets both spellings, more commonly Abial. Your writer will try to minimize confusion by using the senior Lovejoy’s titles.

Lovejoy was called “Captain” based on his Massachusetts military service. Minerdescent says he acquired the title “Esquire” when he was appointed a Justice of the Peace in 1781.

Kingsbury listed Esquire Abial Lovejoy and John Marsh as two other 1763 grantees of land from the Kennebec Proprietors (with Levi Powers, whose house on the National Register of Historic Places was described last week).

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Hammond’s history includes a 1991 summary Lovejoy family history that she credits to descendants Betty Bennett and Anita Lovejoy. It also includes the 1892 Kennebec Journal article (referenced in previous articles in this series) that mentions the Lovejoys.

The newspaper writer included two generations, “old Squire Lovejoy, the old slave holder” (Dec. 16, 1731 – July 4, 1811); and “probably his son,” Abial Lovejoy (Feb. 8, 1764 – Nov. 3, 1858).

Captain Lovejoy was born in Andover, Massachusetts, and married Mary Brown on Dec. 14, 1758, in Charlestown, Massachusetts (which one source says was her birthplace).

Mary Brown was born March 29, 1734 (Minerdescent), or July 19, 1741 (most sources), and died Jan. 19, 1812. She and her husband had two, seven, eight or 14 children, depending on the source.

Minerdescent lists seven sons and seven daughters, born between Aug. 8, 1759, and Oct. 1, 1785. The two oldest, Nathaniel (named after his maternal grandfather, Nathaniel Brown) and Polly, were born in Charlestown; the next 11 (including Abial, Jr.) in Pownalborough, Maine; and the youngest, Phebe, who married Ebenezer Morse (mentioned in the Aug. 8 article on the Bacon family), in the western part of Vassalboro that became Sidney.

(Find a Grave, usually a reliable source, names seven children born between Aug. 8, 1759, and Oct. 31, 1780, and lists birthplaces, after the first two in Charlestown, in Vassalboro, Waterville or Sidney – no mention of Pownalborough. The names and dates duplicate the longer minerdescent list.)

Minerdescent, citing older sources, describes Captain Lovejoy’s career in Pownalborough (now Dresden), a town farther down the Kennebec River that was incorporated in 1760.

This source says he first came to Maine, specifically Fort Halifax, with British troops from Massachusetts in 1755. By 1758 he was a captain, headquartered at Pownalborough. Hammond wrote that he served with the British in Maine from 1758 to 1771, and later in the Americans’ Revolutionary Army.

He was also a ship captain out of Charlestown. Various sources say he went to Nova Scotia and the West Indies, and Mary sometimes sailed with him.

On Sept. 29, 1760, Captain Lovejoy bought 35 acres in Pownalborough, and in 1761 he, Mary and their first two children moved there. He became a prominent citizen, owning an inn, building an elaborate house, running a ferry, building ships, buying and selling land and serving as selectman in 1762 and 1764.

Minerdescent calls Mary “handsome” and “cultural,” and says the Lovejoy house was famous for its hospitality. The June 19, 1766, Pownalborough census said Captain Lovejoy “owned a two-story house with 152 squares of glass, one chimney, three rooms with fire places, supported seven persons under sixteen years, and ten persons above sixteen years and he owned one other house one story high with 44 squares of glass and two fireplaces.”

Goff Brook, in Sidney.

According to minerdescent, on Nov. 12, 1764, Captain Lovejoy and his father-in-law, Nathaniel Brown, “purchased half of a saw mill and adjoining land and a half interest in a dam on a small stream eight miles above Fort Western.” Your writer believes this stream was originally Bog Brook; by 1764 Hastings Brook; and today Goff Brook.

In Vassalboro, too, Captain Lovejoy ran a ferry. Lovejoy’s Ferry, operating in the early 1800s at Riverside, was the southern and earlier of two Kennebec ferries connecting Sidney and Vassalboro (the other was at Getchell’s Corner) that operated into the 20th century.

On-line sources say the oldest Lovejoy son, Nathaniel, born Aug. 8, 1759, took over the ferry, and later Nathaniel’s son Hiram, born Jan. 8, 1805, ran it for a while before moving to Massachusetts.

Minerdescent says the Lovejoys moved to Vassalboro in 1776. The account says they brought their household goods on “flat boats and scows which were towed by row boats”; the boat carrying their best furniture sank in a bad storm.

Their riverside farm remained in the family for several generations. Minerdescent has a long list of Captain Lovejoy’s positions in first Vassalboro and then Sidney, including being elected a selectman in each town. In 1777 he was involved in getting the Massachusetts legislature to expand postal service in Maine.

Captain Lovejoy’s son Abial was the constable who convened Sidney’s first town meeting after Sidney became a separate town on Jan. 30, 1792, Hammond said. In May of that year, Captain Lovejoy was one of the four-man committee chosen to settle accounts with Vassalboro. Later he served on Sidney’s fish committee for more than one term; on the committee that planned the town pound; and in 1798 on the school committee.

Captain Lovejoy served in the Massachusetts legislature for many years, minerdescent says. Your writer found no dates except the early 1780s, when some of his constituents questioned his support of the American cause against Britain.

Minerdescent presented evidence Captain Lovejoy was a staunch patriot. He stirred up opposition to local Tories, and lost $30,000 by giving members of Benedict Arnold’s 1775 expedition to Québec (including Arnold himself) hard money in exchange for paper Continental currency. The currency became worth so little that Captain Lovejoy reportedly wallpapered a room with it.

Captain Lovejoy and Mary died in Sidney in 1811 and 1812. Most sources agree they are buried on the Lovejoy farm, on a slope toward the Kennebec; some call this family graveyard Plain or Old Plain cemetery.

Minerdescent says an infant son or daughter, born and died in 1784, and at least three of the family’s black slaves are also buried there, with all graves marked alike by fieldstones. (When Massachusetts abolished slavery in 1783, Lovejoy offered his slaves their freedom.)

Henry Kingsbury wrote in his Kennebec County history that Old Plain was the oldest cemetery in Sidney and “is thought to hold the remains of over one hundred pioneers.” In 1892, he wrote, “That part of it that has not been plowed shows plainly the forms of many graves and has one shattered slate-stone slab, inscribed ‘Elizabeth Milliner —1785.'” Elizabeth Milliner was the Lovejoys’ housekeeper, minerdescent says, and Lovejoy had her gravestone put up.

Hammond also described the Old Plain cemetery, saying it was on River Road about a quarter mile south of Hastings Brook, “high above the river on a plain that was part of Abiel Lovejoy’s grant.” She, too, estimated 100 people were buried there.

“After many years the land was cultivated so that there are no signs of a cemetery now,” she wrote a century after Kingsbury’s account. But, she said, in 1908 a monument to early settlers was installed.

In another chapter, Hammond wrote that Captain Lovejoy donated land to the town for the Lovejoy cemetery on Densmore (now Dinsmore) road, “in which approximately a hundred of the earliest settlers are buried.” This cemetery is the one your writer visited on July 29; it is not on the bank of the Kennebec.

Kingsbury, minerdescent and other sources tell many stories about Captain Lovejoy and his household. Here is one of your writer’s favorites, paraphrased:

Squire Lovejoy went to the field where some of his farm help, free and slave, had been mowing, bringing them a jug of liquor (he himself was a heavy drinker, even for colonial days, minerdescent says). Dissatisfied with the work, he demanded to know who did it.

The other hands one by one blamed Boston, a slave who had been with the family since Lovejoy bought him in 1758. Well then, said Lovejoy, if Boston did all the work, he can have all the liquor.

Boston is named as one of the slaves buried in the Old Plain cemetery with Squire and Mary Lovejoy.

Minerdescent gives summary information on all 14 Lovejoy children. All married at least once (son Abial, Jr., and daughter Sarah each lost a first spouse and married again), and several spent their entire lives in Sidney.

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John Marsh was another man to whom the Kennebec Proprietors granted land in Sidney in 1763. By Hammond’s account, he was the great-grandson of a John Marsh who emigrated to Salem, Massachusetts, from England around 1634; he and his wife Susannah had six sons, including Samuel (1651 – 1693).

Samuel and his wife Priscilla had a son John (1681 -1727, called John, Sr., in some sources). He and his wife Abigail were parents of six children, including John, Jr. (born Oct. 8, 1718; or 1723). In 1763, John, Jr., came to Sidney with his wife Elizabeth (a widow; maiden name Caryl or Carryl, previous husband Cornelius Claflin, born in 1712, 1716, 1723 or 1725).

Of John Jr., and Elizabeth’s five children, born in Mendon, Massachusetts, one died young and four came to Maine. Two married Sidney men: Abigail (1747) married Dr. James Bacon (as reported two weeks ago), and Hannah (1755 – 1840) married Moses Hastings.

Hammond said the Hastings family owned an adjoining property, and Moses and Hannah inherited the Marsh farm. In 1892, Kingsbury wrote, John’s great-grandson, Lieutenant Gorham K. Hastings, owned the farm, “that has never been out of the possession of the family.”

He added, “The outlines of a block house and stockade are still on the bluff a few feet south” of the Hastings house. Settlers sometimes “took refuge” there fearing attach by Natives, he said.

Hammond wrote that Hastings descendants owned the farm “until Sarah Park Hastings [1857 – 1946] married William Lester Reynolds [1853 – 1926)].” Reynolds descendants owned the property until 2004. (See box.)

John Jr., and Elizabeth’s only son, also John (born in 1751), ended up in the Bangor area. Youngest daughter Mary (born in 1774; this birth date makes her mother’s earlier birth dates unlikely) lived in Paris, Maine.

Hammond wrote that John Marsh Jr., bought his 250 acres on June 8, 1763. He also bought a sawmill on Hastings Brook, which was his south boundary; had a grist mill close to River Road; and was involved with area mill projects.

Several sources say Elizabeth Marsh died June 19 and her widower died Aug. 19, both in 1802, both in Sidney.

Sidney’s Reynolds Forest

Part of John Marsh’s 1763 land grant is now Sidney’s Reynolds Forest, on the west side of West River Road near the Dinsmore Road intersection. This Kennebec Land Trust preserve is recommended for birding, wildflowers and hiking trails along what is now Goff Brook.

Visitors can see the waterfalls that powered the early mills, mill foundations and a cellar-hole in the woods. KLT warns of poison ivy near West River Road.

An online source says in 2004, Sidney resident Bea Reynolds donated the 35-acre Walter W. and Alice B. Reynolds Forest to KLT to honor her parents. In July 2003, a former resident named Leann Diehl added seven adjoining acres of hayfield.

Reynolds Forest, in Sidney.

Main sources

Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Sidney early settlers: the Faught family

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by Mary Grow

Sidney, 1879

The Faughts were another early Sidney family. The first Faught your writer came across was Marlborough Packard Faught, a name that sounded refreshingly unusual; but she soon found that the Faughts, like the Bacons, enjoyed repeating more common names – Frederick, Jacob, Samuel – through generations.

Alice Hammond wrote in her history of Sidney that the Faughts “were active in community affairs on both sides of the Kennebec River [in Vassalboro and Sidney].”

She gave no details from early history, nor did Alma Pierce Robbins, in her Vassalboro history (Sidney was part of Vassalboro until it became a separate town on Jan. 30, 1792). Henry Kingsbury, in his history of Kennebec County, included no Faughts on his lists of town officials.

(Hammond mentioned two 1915 events: George Faught, a Boston tailor, died that year and left money to the town “for the benefit of the school at or near Bacon’s Corner”; and on July 31, Florence Faught was chosen first Grand Matron of White Rose Chapter, No. 174, of the Order of the Eastern Star.

(Hammond said in 1992 the school fund had $3,000, from which interest could be used for students at Sidney’s only elementary school, James H. Bean School, on Middle Road. White Rose Chapter is no longer on the Maine list of Eastern Star chapters.)

Kingsbury named three Faughts, Anthony, Frederick and Jacob, as early settlers.

If your writer has found the right family, these were sons of a German named Philip Faught and his unidentified wife. Kingsbury wrote that Philip emigrated to Boston in 1751 and moved to Dresden, on the Kennebec below Augusta, in 1756.

Philip Faught’s sons are listed on Familysearch as Philip (1744 – 1772 or later); Frederick (1746 – 1814); Jacob (1750 – 1830) and Anthony (1752 – 1830). This site says all four Faught boys were born in Germany, despite Anthony’s birthdate the year after the family supposedly came to America.

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Philip, born in 1744, married a woman named Hannah and was identified as “of Vassalboro” at his death sometime after 1772. Your writer found no other information.

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Frederick, born around 1746, “came to America with the family and settled on the Kennebec in Sidney, where he spent the rest of his life,” Kingsbury wrote. (Presumably Frederick moved to Sidney later in his life, not in 1751 when he was about five years old.) He died April 1, 1814, and is one of many Faughts buried in Sidney’s Sibley cemetery, on West River Road, near the Augusta line.

On Oct. 31, 1775, Frederick married Thankful Durant (1751 – 1834), in Hallowell. Between 1779 and 1793, Familysearch says, Frederick and Thankful had at least four sons, Philip (again), Frederick (again), Jacob (again) and Samuel, and three daughters.

At least one early Faught settled toward the south end of the river road. Another settled on the middle road (west of and paralleling the river road) a mile south of Bacon’s Corner. Kingsbury mentioned two Faught farms, and said one was among several in Sidney with clay suitable for brick-making.

Frederick and Thankful’s four sons spent their lives in Sidney, continuing the family name. Philip (Nov. 7, 1783 – Dec. 31, 1855) married Anna Pinkham (born in 1788) on December 3, 1812, in Sidney; the couple had at least one son, whom they named Theodore (1818 – 1861), and one daughter, Mary Ann (1819 – 1910).

The second Frederick (Feb. 17, 1786 – April 16, 1861) married Susanna Packard (1796 – 1879), in Sidney. She was the daughter of Marlborough Packard, of Union, Massachusetts. Their six sons and two daughters, born between 1818 and 1836 and representing the third generation, in Sidney, started with Marlboro Packard Faught (1818 – April 17, 1890), named after his maternal grandfather.

The next boy, born in 1821, was Frederic (without the final k, apparently), named for his father and paternal grandfather. The other children were named Caroline P. (1825), Luther R. (1828), Lemuel Porter (1830), Albert (1832), George N. (1834) and Frances Ann (1836).

Frederick and Thankful’s third son, Jacob (May 12, 1788 – Nov. 9, 1828), is listed as born in Augusta, but he and Sarah Reynolds (1795 – 1871) were marred July 9, 1818, in Sidney; their daughters Nancy, Lithia and Bethia or Bethiah and sons Jacob and Samuel, Jr., were born in Sidney between 1819 and 1826; and Jacob and Sarah both died in Sidney and are buried in the Sibley cemetery.

The youngest of this generation of Faughts, Samuel, is also listed as born in Augusta, on April 13 or 14, 1793 (Familysearch and Find a Grave disagree by a day). He married Susan M. Boyd, born in 1796 or 1797. They had two or three children, more third-generation Sidney Faughts.

The two sources agree their oldest was Tryphosa French, born in 1823. She married her cousin, Frederick and Susanna’s son Marlboro Packard Faught (1818 – 1890). Find a Grave records no children of this marriage; Familysearch lists, without details, sons Freddy B., born in 1855, and Henry M., born in 1857.

Tryphosa’s younger brother, Jacob Henry Faught, was born Nov. 11, 1829, in Sidney. He married another Sidney resident, Jane F. Reynolds (born April 11, 1835) on Jan. 9, 1861, Familysearch says in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. This site says Jane was living in Sidney in 1850, 1860 and 1880; she died in Middlesex, Massachusetts, May 26, 1923, and is buried in Sibley cemetery with her husband, who died June 25, 1882.

Find a Grave says Jacob and Jane had a daughter, born Oct. 4, 1861, whom they named L’Orient Bemis Faught. L’Orient married a man named Thayer; she died in 1939, and she and her husband are buried in Connecticut. Familysearch adds two more daughters, Nellie A., born in 1868, and Jennie H., born in 1873.

Samuel and Susan had a third child, a son they named Samuel Faught, Jr, according to Find a Grave. His birthdate and history are unknown; he died Sept. 11, 1851 (probably in his 20s), and is buried in Sibley cemetery.

Susan Boyd Faught died Sept. 7, 1877; Samuel died Nov. 26, 1889, age 96. Find a Grave says both are buried in Sibley cemetery.

Thankful (Mrs. Frederick) Faught, mother or grandmother of the numerous Faughts just listed, is the only Faught Kingsbury named as involved in a community activity. When Sidney’s second Baptist church was organized Feb. 7, 1806, he wrote, the 17 initial members included Thankful Faught.

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Jacob, German emigrant Philip and his unknown wife’s third son, born about 1750, was a Vassalboro resident from the 1790 through 1830 censuses, Familysearch says. The website says he married Hannah Sedgley, born, in Bowdoinham, in 1752, on June 9, 1772, and between 1773 and 1796 the couple had two sons and 10 daughters. Burials that Find a Grave lists in Vassalboro’s Faught cemetery include Jacob and Hannah, without dates.

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Philip’s youngest son, Anthony, was born about 1752 (a conflict with the 1751 emigration date). Kingsbury posed another puzzle when he referred to him first in 1791 and wrote that he left Germany “to avoid service in the army,” which would not have been a problem for an infant. (Either your writer is conflating two Anthony Faughts, or this Anthony did not join his brothers in America until he was a young man.)

Familysearch says Anthony married Hannah Durant (or Durent; born in 1755), in Vassalboro, in April or May 1778. They had at least three sons and two daughters between 1780 and 1797. The website says Hannah was the younger sister of Anthony’s older brother Frederick’s wife Thankful.

Familysearch says Anthony lived in Vassalboro “for about 12 years and Sidney…for about 10 years.” He died in Sidney sometime after 1830.

Hammond and Kingsbury agreed that in 1791, Anthony Faught became the third owner of a lot granted in 1763 to Levi Powers, on the west side of the river road, not far north of the Augusta line. (See box.)

The Faughts and the Levi Powers House

The important point about Anthony Faught buying the land originally granted to Levi Powers, according to Alice Hammond and to Frank Beard and Robert Bradley, of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, is that the Faught family thereby acquired, and held onto until the late 1920s, the Levi Powers House.

Levi Powers House, in Sidney.

This house is now on the Register of Historic Places in Maine, one of two historic properties in Sidney. (The other is Tiffany Hill Chapel, which your writer described in the Aug. 19, 2021, issue of The Town Line.)

Hammond wrote that staying in the same family for so long “may help to explain why the home retains so many of its original features and why the original grant and the deed showing Anthony Faught’s purchase of lot 37 remain in the home.”

In their 1979 application for historic register listing, Beard and Bradley called the building a “remarkably preserved Colonial house [that] is of particular importance because of size and fineness of proportion in the context of a newly settled area. It remains little changed either externally or internally and better than most conveys an accurate impression of its time and place.”

Levi Powers got his grant from the Kennebec Proprietors in 1763, Hammond wrote. He acquired “a little over 100 acres on the [Kennebec] river and about 150 acres in the third tier of land,” a couple miles farther west.

Beard and Bradley assumed he had to clear a lot of forested land before he could build his “large and substantial” house. They date the house from around 1700.

The Powers house is a two-story post-and-beam building, facing east, with a fieldstone foundation and internal chimneys near the north and south ends. The main entrance in the middle of the front façade opens into the central hall; the front is five bays wide, the north and south sides three bays. There is a one-story ell on the south side.

Inside, the historians commented on “common pineapple stencilling in deteriorated condition in the front hall,” probably from the 1830s, and the “extensive and finely detailed wood graining in the kitchen and dining room.” Hammond attributed the stencils to Moses Eaton (Moses Eaton and his son, Moses Eaton, Jr., were famous New Hampshire-based folk artists in the early 1800s).

Beard and Bradley wrote: “It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Powers may well have been influenced in designing the house by the nearby Pownalboro Court House…, so similar are the proportions, roof pitch and framing of the two buildings.”

Hammond said Powers sold his house on Oct. 31, 1778, to Jethro Gardner, who on Dec. 23, 1782, sold it to Anthony Faught for 800 pounds.

On July 15, 1818, Hammond found, Anthony sold the house to John and Elijah Faught (presumably his youngest sons), for $2,000. (An online source says the United States dollar replaced the British pound and other currencies in 1792.)

Hammond continued to track sales within the Faught family until 1928, when “the farm” went to Civil War veteran Simon C. Hastings (1843 – 1948), who was probably the widower of Ellen Hannah Faught (1845 -1912) (two more Faughts who are buried in Sidney’s Sibley cemetery).

Hammond wrote that Hastings auctioned off the house contents and burned the unsold furniture. He sold the house in 1929; it passed through several owners before William and Charlotte Sawtelle acquired it in 1977. Hammond wrote that in 1992, the Sawtelles were still “working to preserve the historical integrity of the house.”

Main sources

Beard, Frank A., and Robert L. Bradley, National Register of Historic Places Inventory – Nomination Form, Powers House July 1979.
Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Bacon families: Sidney early settlers

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by Mary Grow

Among early settlers in Sidney against whose lives your writer brushed while trying unsuccessfully to learn why someone chose to name the town after a long-dead Englishman were the Bacon, Faught, Lovejoy, Marsh and Snow families.

Now she presents more information about the Bacons, with a double warning: readers uninterested in genealogy should skip this article, and those who read it and are not confused by the end haven’t been paying attention.

The Sidney Bacons started with three brothers, the third, sixth and seventh of 11 children (eight sons, three daughters) of Josiah Bacon II and Sarah (Davis) Bacon. Why these three moved to Maine while their siblings stayed in Massachusetts, who knows?

* * * * * *

The oldest brother (who was not mentioned last week) was David, born Aug. 30, 1730, in Bedford, Massachusetts, and died in 1819 in Sidney, according to the on-line website Familysearch. Michael Denis listed him in his admirably comprehensive Bacon genealogy, found on line.

Beyond these sources, your writer has found no other information about David Bacon.

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Ebenezer Bacon plan for land, 1773. (Courtesy of Maine Memory Network)

Ebenezer Bacon was born in Bedford Sept. 15, 1736. In 1762, in Boston, he married Abigail Farwell (1734 -1817), widow of Levi Richardson (whom she had married in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1753). These two are the first of many Ebenezer and Abigail Bacons to live in Sidney.

Denis found in an earlier Bacon genealogy that Ebenezer came to Maine in 1755, as part of the British garrison at Fort Halifax, in what became Winslow. His name is in records of fort expenditures and activities until 1759; he was involved in repairing boats, hauling hay and providing 30 gallons of rum.

After the war, this source says, he settled in Vassalboro, where he got a land grant in 1763 or 1773 (sources differ) and bought land from younger brother James in 1769. James’ lot is specifically identified as on the west – Sidney – side of the Kennebec; the writer added that when Ebenezer sold it in 1772, he said it was in Vassalboro (Sidney not yet existing, why not?).

(Is this the same Ebenezer Bacon who had a large farm in the north end of Waterville by 1770? Quite probably, but your writer cannot prove or disprove it.)

This early source says Ebenezer Bacon was a constable in Sidney in 1775, a tithing man in 1777 and a surveyor of highways in 1778.

Bacon died in 1798; he had made his will Feb. 12, 1798, and it was probated Aug. 2. His widow, Abigail Farwell Bacon, died in Waterville in September 1817.

Ebenezer Bacon’s genealogy, as found on two different websites, is a masterpiece of confusing names.

To begin with, Ebenezer (1736) and Abigail Farwell named their children Frances (born in 1763), Ebenezer, Jr. (1765; he was executor of his father’s will), William (1768) and Abigail (born Aug. 23, 1770, in Sidney).

Ebenezer Jr., married Hannah Lovejoy on Nov. 28, 1793, in Vassalboro.

Hannah Lovejoy was born in Sidney Nov. 19, 1773, daughter of Captain Abiel Lovejoy, Sr. (1731- 1811) who married Mary Brown (1741 – 1812), “the belle of Charlestown [Massachusetts],” on Dec. 14, 1758. (There will be more about the Sidney Lovejoys in a later article in this series.)

Ebenezer, Jr., and Hannah had at least seven children, as follows: Columbus Clark (1794), Ebenezer Farwell (1796), Evelina (1800), Julia Ann (1803), Elizabeth (1806), John Hancock (1808, labeled a twin but no other name is listed) and Samuel Adams (1812).

Separation record, 1816. (courtesy of Maine Memory Network)

Only the two oldest were born in Sidney. Later births in Waterville make it seem likely that Ebenezer Jr., was the Ebenezer Bacon who was elected one of Waterville’s three selectmen at the July 26, 1802, town meeting, the first after Waterville separated from Winslow.

The moderator for that meeting was Elnathan Sherwin, born in 1762, in Dunstable, Massachusetts. This prominent citizen represented Waterville in the Massachusetts legislature from 1799 through 1809 and again from 1812 through 1815; in September 1814, he was a lieutenant colonel in the Augusta-based militia.

Sherwin’s wife was Abigail Bacon, born Aug. 23, 1770, daughter of Ebenezer (1736) and Abigail. The Sherwins had four daughters and two sons; the older son they named William Bacon Sherwin, after his uncle William (1768).

One Lovejoy genealogy says Capt. Abiel and Mary (Brown) Lovejoy had two other daughters besides Hannah who married Ebenezer Bacon, Jr. The oldest Lovejoy girl was Abigail, born Jan. 1, 1770, in Pownalborough; on Dec. 1, 1794, she married William Bacon (1768; Ebenezer Jr.’s, younger brother), in Vassalboro.

The genealogy where your writer found this information lists no children from this marriage.

The Bacons did not have a monopoly on Ebenezers. The genealogy just mentioned says Captain Abiel and Mary Lovejoy’s youngest daughter, Phebe (born Oct. 1, 1785, in Vassalboro), married Ebenezer Morse (born in 1787 on Cape Cod), on Sept. 12, 1803, in Vassalboro.

Between 1805 and 1828 Phebe gave birth to seven sons and three daughters, all born in Vassalboro or Sidney. Of course, one son was named Ebenezer (Morse, not Bacon).

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Backing up to the first generation of central Maine Bacons, the youngest was David and Ebenezer’s kid brother James H., born in Massachusetts in 1737 (according to Alice Hammond’s history of Sidney) or on June 30, 1738 (Denis). He married Abigail Marsh, born in 1747.

Hammond wrote that James H. “was educated as a physician,” without further details. He served in the British forces (location unspecified) in 1758; got a land grant in Sidney in 1763, was involved in numerous land deals and ran the tavern where the first Vassalboro town meeting was held in 1771.

Denis, again citing the earlier genealogy, wrote that James H. and Abigail had at least three sons, whom they named James (no birth date, but he was old enough to marry in June 1791), William Marsh (born in 1782) and – of course — Ebenezer (born in 1788).

A newspaper article that Hammond quoted said William Marsh Bacon married Polly, born March 9, 1783, and “probably a sister to Abial Lovejoy.” Familysearch, however, says William Bacon married Polly Densmore on Jan. 1, 1806, in Sidney.

This source says Polly Densmore was born March 9, 1788 (not 1783), in Vassalboro, daughter of Samuel and Mary Polly (Lovejoy) Densmore. Find a Grave identifies her as Polly Mary Densmore Bacon, and shows a photo of the gravestone of “Mary wife of Wm. Bacon.”

One source says Mary Polly Lovejoy was the daughter of Capt. Abiel Lovejoy, Sr., and sister to Abiel Lovejoy, Jr. (1764 – 1858). Her daughter Polly (Densmore) Bacon, by this account, was the granddaughter of one Abiel Lovejoy and the niece of another, but sister to neither.

Find a Grave says Mary Polly (Lovejoy) Densmore was born April 30, 1761, in Charlestown, Massachusetts, and died in Sidney Nov. 19, 1789, when she was 28 and her daughter Polly was a child (whichever of Polly’s birth dates is correct).

The newspaper article and Familysearch disagree on how many children William and Polly Bacon had. Here is a combined list of these alleged grandchildren of James and Abigail Bacon, listed in birth order.

The oldest was Polenah, or Paulina, or both in either order, born in 1805 (when her mother was 17 years old) or, according to her gravestone, June 25, 1806, and died on April 12, 1879, in Sidney. On Feb. 9, 1824, Paulina married William Hamlin or Hamlen (1801 or 1802 – 1879), born in Augusta. Sources say they had 13 or 14 children, several of whom died young.

(Namsor.app, a web name checker, says Polenah is a female name, perhaps of eastern African/Kenyan or Israeli origin. Abial is also east African, farther north, perhaps Ethiopian.)

Next came a son Familysearch says was named Polemah or Pliney, born in 1806. The lack of additional information suggests he died in childhood.

Abial Densmore Bacon was born Jan. 12, 1807. He married Almira Faught (born about 1813, or 1816) in Hallowell on Dec. 26, 1847; they had three daughters before she died March 7 or 8, 1859. He died Dec. 3, 1878, and is buried in Sidney’s Reynolds cemetery with his wife and other Bacons.

Familysearch next lists two daughters, Abegail Densmore (born Jan. 12, 1807, so presumably Abial’s twin) and Abibail Dinsmore (born June 12, 1808). The similarity of names (or are they the same name, carelessly copied?) and, again, the lack of more information suggest neither girl lived past infancy.

The next son listed was a second William Marsh (though he is not called Jr. in any source your writer found), born April 21, 1810. He married Sarah Hamlen (or Hamlin; born 1810?) on Nov. 14, 1832, in Sidney; she was probably the sister or half-sister of his sister Paulina’s husband (sources disagree on dates and on Sarah’s middle initial). William and Sarah had a son, Oliver William Bacon, born Dec. 6, 1833, in Augusta.

William and Polly’s next son was Alfred A., born July 17, 1813 (Familysearch) or 1814 (Find a Grave), husband of Parthenia F. Thayer (1821 – Oct. 16, 1893) and father of James A. Bacon (1845-1919, bearing his great-grandfather’s first name) and Clara Elizabeth Bacon (1851 – ?).

Alfred, Parthenia and son James A. are buried in Reynolds Cemetery. Clara married Horace A. Reynolds on April 6, 1872, in Sidney and lived there for “about fifty years.” According to Find a Grave, neither Clara nor Horace is buried in Reynolds cemetery, despite the matching names.

William and Polly’s daughter, Harriet Thomas, was born July 5, 1815, married John Ham and died in Norridgewock, Jan. 15, 1875.

Nancy Densmore was born May 9, 1818. She married John Brackett on Dec. 23, 1838; there is no record of children.

William and Polly’s last child was a son they named Artemas Kimball (June 21, 1820 – Sept. 27, 1870). He married Esther E. Young, in Hallowell, on July 30, 1848; their son, Edwin K. Bacon, carried on the family name from 1849 to 1913.

Artemas was the only child his grandfather James could not have known – James died in 1819. His widow, Abigail, lived until 1834, and could have met some of her great-grandchildren.

* * * * * *

In one final confusion, your writer searched for the gravesites of James H. Bacon family members buried in Sidney, having found references to burials in the Lovejoy cemetery and a cemetery called first Densmore and now Dinsmore.

The list of Sidney cemeteries on the Find a Grave website includes Lovejoy, but not Densmore or Dinsmore. Sidney’s Dinsmore cemetery was found on a town website related to the cemetery committee, with a note saying it is also called the Bacon’s Corner cemetery.

In the Lovejoy cemetery, Find a Grave lists James H. Bacon; Abigail; their son William, who died Oct. 15, 1852; and William’s widow, Mary Polly Densmore Bacon. In the Dinsmore cemetery, Sidney’s municipal list has the same four names.

Hammond, describing Sidney cemeteries in 1992, wrote this paragraph:

“On the Densmore Road near Bacon’s Corner is an old burial ground which at one time had a tomb with the name ‘Lovejoy’ carved on a granite block over the door. The land was sold by Densmore to a group of neighbors. It has no visible means of support. Since it borders a public road no right of way was necessary.”

On July 29, 2024, your writer found, on the north side of Dinsmore Road a short distance east of Bacon’s Corner, a plainly labeled Lovejoy Cemetery. Marked graves include those of the four Bacons listed above, and William and Paulina (Bacon) Hamlin and three of their children.

Main sources

Denis, Michael J., Families of Oakland, Maine December 2023 found on line.
Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Sidney

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by Mary Grow

The town on the west bank of the Kennebec River south of Waterville that is now Sidney began as part of Vassalboro, the town on the east bank.

There seems to be unanimous agreement among historians that Sidney was incorporated as a separate town on Jan. 30, 1792, and that it was named after the British courtier, man of letters and soldier Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586). (See box.)

The historians your writer found are equally unanimous in their silence on two topics: why Sidney separated from Vassalboro, and why the new town was named in honor of a 200-years-dead Englishman.

Two important sources your writer consulted are Alma Pierce Robbins’ 1971 history of Vassalboro and Alice Hammond’s 1992 history of Sidney. Both wrote about the Native Americans who lived along that stretch of the Kennebec and the Europeans who supplanted them.

Hammond, focused on the west bank of the river, repeated two legends about the Natives, one that indicated that swimming across Messalonskee Lake was a test of hardihood for young Natives, boys and girls alike.

Messalonskee Lake, aka Snow Pond, was once entirely in western Sidney and is now shared by Sidney and Belgrade, the next town west. It is more than eight miles long and makes up about the northern two-thirds of Sidney’s west boundary.

Hammond, again quoting the collector of legends, wrote that the name Messalonskee came from the Native word “muskalog,” or giant pike (still known as a muskellunge or muskie). Wikipedia says the alternate name Snow Pond recognizes Philip Snow, a settler there in 1774.

(Another important wet area is the Great Sidney Bog, in the southern end of town. In William D. Williamson’s 1832 History of the District of Maine, he wrote that Sidney covered 20,000 acres, “of which 1,000 is a bog.”

(Hammond, in 1992, said the bog covered 640 acres, two-thirds in Sidney and the rest in Augusta. An on-line State of Maine website calls the bog an area of statewide ecological significance, a 605-acre example of a Raised Level Bog.)

In her Vassalboro history, Robbins gave the 1761 survey by Nathan Winslow as the Kennebec Proprietors’ action that spurred settlement on the Vassalboro section of the Kennebec. Early family names she mentioned include Bacon, Faught, Lovejoy and Marsh.

“The land transactions in Vassalboro were in the beginning more active on the west side of the river,” Robbins wrote. One reason she gave was the streams that flowed into the Kennebec from the west and were dammed to provide water power for sawmills and grist mills.

Henry Kingsbury, in his Kennebec County history, gave a second reason, Sidney’s “superior attractions for settlement.”

“After inspecting the adjacent sections on either side, an observer must have been agreeably impressed, then as now, with its comparatively level surface and the infrequency of rugged hills and still more rugged rocks,” he wrote.

For the prospective farmer, he continued, “The soil on the eastern half, that borders the river, is very favorable for cultivation and the production of grain and grass, but not as well adapted to fruit trees as the western half, in which apples are a staple crop.”

He also praised the “variety and enormous growth” of the forests, which kept mills busy “for more than half a century”; and recognized the value of the river as a transportation artery for farm and forest products.

After Vassalboro was incorporated on April 26, 1771, Robbins wrote that the first town meeting was held May 22, 1771, at James Bacon’s. She described him as “physician and innkeeper.” He is referred to in various sources as Dr. James Bacon and as James H. Bacon; your writer thinks these references are all to the same man.

Robbins did not say on which side of the Kennebec James Bacon had his tavern. Michael Denis, in his extensive Bacon genealogy, says it was on the west – Sidney – side; and your writer has found supporting evidence.

Dr. James Bacon was born June 30, 1738, in Billerica, Massachusetts. On Sept. 23, 1764, in Hallowell, he married Abigail Marsh, born in Menden, Massachusetts, Nov. 24, 1747. Her father, John Marsh, had come to what would become Sidney in 1760; in 1763, Denis wrote, Bacon received a land grant in future Sidney.

Between 1767 and 1790, Familysearch says, the James Bacons had seven daughters and three sons (other sources list fewer children). They named their oldest daughter, who was born in 1767 and died in 1812, Abigail. Her birthplace is given as Kennebec, Maine, and she married a Vassalboro man in 1786.

The oldest son was James Josiah Bacon, born in 1770 and died in 1834. Familysearch says he was born in Vassalboro and married a Vassalboro woman in 1791.

At least four of James and Abigail’s children were born in Sidney, according to Familysearch. They were Sarah B., born in 1775 (and died in Sidney); Lydia, born in 1781 (and died in Sidney); William Marsh, born Sept. 22, 1782 (and was married and died in Sidney); and Ebenezer, born in 1788. Hannah, born in Maine about 1778, died in Sidney (Find a Grave has a photo of her gravestone in Sidney’s Field Cemetery; it says she died June 11, 1867, age 89).

James Bacon’s older brother, Ebenezer Bacon, was definitely a Sidney resident. Robbins cited a July 14, 1773, deed to him from the Kennebec Proprietors for 500 acres “lying on the West side of the Kennebec River.”

Ebenezer Bacon was born in Bedford, Massachusetts, on Sept. 15, 1736, and married Abigail Farwell (1734-1817), in Boston, in 1762. She was the widow of Levi Richardson, whom she had married in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1753.

Ebenezer and Abigail had at least two daughters and two sons, born between Jan. 1, 1763 and Aug. 23, 1770; Familysearch says all four were born in Sidney. The older boy was Ebenezer Bacon Jr., born in 1765; the younger girl, born in 1770, was Abigail.

The senior Ebenezer died Feb. 12, 1798, in Sidney. Abigail died in Vassalboro in September 1817.

Robbins summarized what she considered major actions at that first Vassalboro town meeting in 1771, and at following ones. Among decisions pertinent to Sidney were a spring 1773 vote to provide “a burying ground on each side of the river”; and a November 1773 decision to build a meeting house on the “west side of the river.”

In 1786, she wrote, without further explanation: “Talk of separating the Town by the river began, the east side to keep the incorporation.” A few paragraphs later, Robbins wrote, “In 1793 the accounts between the Towns of Sidney and Vassalborough were adjusted, and Vassalborough became the east side of the Kennebec River.”

When Alice Hammond took up the story of Sidney as a separate town, she described the 1761 survey by Nathan Winslow that laid out three tiers of lots on either shore of the Kennebec. In 1774, she continued, John Jones surveyed two more tiers west of the original three, “completing the survey from the Kennebec River west to Lake Messalonskee.”

Between the two surveys was a narrow strip, called a gore (many Maine towns had gores). The gore, too, was divided into lots. Hammond wrote that one of its six sections, including five of its 56 lots, was named the Bacon Tract .

Hammond found copies of land deeds from the 1770s at the Kennebec Registry of Deeds in Augusta. She listed some of the early Sidney landowners as Dr. James Bacon, Ebenezer Bacon, Abiel (alternately spelled Abial in the early documents she cited) Lovejoy, and John Marsh.

She then reprinted a Feb. 26, 1892, Kennebec Journal article listing early Sidney settlers, in recognition of the town’s 100th anniversary.

This list includes William Bacon (Sept. 22, 1782 – Oct. 15, 1852), James and Abigail’s son. The newspaper writer said:

“Mr. Bacon kept a tavern in the house that sits where Carlos Hammond now [1892] lives and it is said used to dispense ‘New England rum’ at a ‘four pence ha’penny’ a glass. It was from him that Bacon’s Corner takes its name.”

An on-line map shows Bacon’s Corner in south central Sidney, west of Interstate 95, the four-way intersection of Dinsmore and Shepherd roads with Middle Road.

Sidney’s first town meeting, Hammond said, was called by Abial Lovejoy, constable, at David Smiley’s. Smiley she described as an “inn keeper on the River Road,” the closest to the Kennebec of several north-south roads through Sidney.

Hammond did not date the first meeting, but it was early in 1792, because the second one was in May of that year, she said. Voters at that meeting chose a four-man committee to settle accounts with Vassalboro.

Hammond said nothing more about the committee, but apparently its work succeeded, since Robbins was able to report that the towns’ accounts were settled in 1793.

Sir Philip Sidney

Sir Philip Sidney

Wikipedia’s long article on Sir Philip Sidney calls him a “poet, courtier, scholar and soldier who is remembered as one of the most prominent figures of the Elizabethan age.”

He was born Nov. 30, 1554, at Penshurst Place, a still-standing medieval castle 32 miles southwest of London. The house, built in 1341, had been in the family since 1552, when King Edward VI granted it to Sidney’s grandfather.

Sidney was the oldest of at least three children. Educated at Christ Church, part of Oxford University, he went on his first diplomatic mission at age 18, one of a delegation that failed to arrange a marriage between Queen Elizabeth and a son of the French King Henry II.

(Readers may remember that Elizabeth I, who reigned from 1558 to 1603, was known as “the virgin queen” – she never did marry.)

After three years in Europe, Sidney returned to England where, Wikipedia says, he occupied himself with “politics and art,” including terms in Parliament in the 1580s. Simultaneously he was active in the military, fighting for the Protestant cause in Ireland in 1575 and 1576 and in the Netherlands in 1585 and 1586.

His literary works included a collection of poems, a romance and a critical work on poetry. The Wikipedia writer considered the last two influential in the subsequent development of English literature.

Queen Elizabeth knighted Sidney in 1583. The same year, he married Frances Walshingham, 16-year-old daughter of the Queen’s principal secretary; they named their daughter, born in 1585, Elizabeth.

On Sept. 22, 1586, Sidney was wounded at the Battle of Zutphen in the Netherlands, where English troops were supporting Dutch Protestants against Spanish Catholics. He died of gangrene on Oct. 17, aged 31.

Main sources

Denis, Michael J., Families of Oakland, Maine December 2023 found on line.
Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971).

Websites, miscellaneous.