by Mary Grow

And the year without a summer

Before this series moves on to describe the year without a summer, one more flood needs mention and another a description.

The Fairfield Historical Society’s bicentennial history says a March 2, 1896, freshet took out the last remaining of the three 1848 covered bridges between Fairfield and Benton, the easternmost one between Bunker Island and Benton.

Edwin Whittemore made no reference to an 1896 flood in his Waterville history, perhaps because other events that year were more significant. Discussion of a public library got serious at a February 29 public meeting and the library opened Aug. 22 (see The Town Line, Dec. 23, 2021); and another public meeting on May 18 started the process that led to the 1902 city hall and opera house building (see The Town Line, Aug. 18, 2022).

Returning to the definition of a “freshet” as a flood connected with the spring thaw, readers have no doubt noticed that freshets worth historians’ notice occurred in January, February, March, April, May, June and October. The final one to be described was in December of the year 1901 (mentioned in passing two weeks ago). Whittemore gave it a paragraph; Ernest Marriner, in his Kennebec Yesterdays, used more than two pages for his colorful account.

Marriner wrote that in 1901, there was a lot of snow after Thanksgiving. Dec. 13 (“a fateful Friday the thirteenth”) was warm enough to start melting it; a 48-hour “drenching downpour” that began Saturday evening made the Kennebec rise “suddenly and rapidly.”

The Ticonic footbridge connecting Waterville and Winslow had been in use only a few days, Whittemore said, and had already “proved itself a great convenience.” The river took it out the night of Dec. 15, Marriner wrote.

The toll house on the Waterville shore survived the night, but started downriver the next morning. It floated right side up “in a dignified manner” as far as the railroad bridge, which removed its roof and left the wreckage continuing toward Augusta.

The railroad bridge apparently stood, but there was extensive damage along the shores of the Kennebec, the Sebasticook and Messalonskee Stream (and other Maine rivers).

Marriner said the Hollingsworth and Whitney paper mill was so saturated that work couldn’t resume for two weeks. The Lockwood cotton mill shut down because the dam that diverted the river into its canal was damaged. Three hundred thousand feet of lumber washed out of the Reynolds sawmill yard in Winslow.

He mentioned a photograph of a building “near the junction of the Sebasticook and Kennebec with only the roof out of water,” and quoted the Dec. 16 Waterville Mail that said the residents of Head of Falls, the former riverside slum in Waterville, were having a worse time than usual.

Most of the tenements had two or three feet of water in the ground floors, the unnamed reporter said. One house, standing in three-foot-deep water, was roped to a tree, equally waterlogged, 25 or 30 feet up the bank.

The Dec. 16 Mail, Marriner wrote, was not the usual eight or 12 full-size pages, but four eight-and-a-half-by-11 pages of flood news. The editors apologized to the advertisers; explained that with the electric company “practically dead to the world,” staffers had converted a press to footpower; and said they hoped for, but did not promise, “a regular edition tomorrow.”

According to Marriner, the piece of low ground between Waterville’s Pleasant and Burleigh streets was, centuries ago, the bed of the Kennebec River. In December 1901, the river tried to reclaim it. Buildings flooded and intersections washed out. “Water rose far up the banks, even in the steepest sections.”

Whittemore wrote that miles of railroad track were undermined; Marriner said Waterville had no train service for three days. Roads washed out; because power plants were flooded, the electric streetcars stopped. Marriner wrote that Waterville “had no telephone connection with outside communities” for a week.

As central Kennebec Valley residents no doubt remember, there have been freshets since December 1901; your writer considers them too recent to belong in this series. And so, at last, to the Year Without a Summer.

* * * * * *

1816 was the year without a summer over most of the northern hemisphere, though the effects were especially harsh in New England, eastern Canada and parts of Europe. The main cause was a tremendous eruption of a volcano named Tambora, on what is now the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, beginning on April 5, 1815, and continuing for more than a week.

Wikipedia says the planet was then coming out of a cooler period called the Little Ice Age. There was already more dust than usual in the air from volcanic eruptions in the Caribbean and the Dutch East Indies in 1812, in Japan in 1813 and in the Philippines in 1814.

Tambora’s eruption, sources agree, was the largest and most damaging in centuries. An estimated 10,000 or more local people were killed immediately by ash heavy enough to knock down buildings, by molten lava spreading over the island and by tsunamis and other area effects.

Adding Tambora’s ash thickened atmospheric dust enough to weaken the sunlight that reached the ground, lowering the temperature world-wide. Modern estimates put the average decrease at about one degree Celsius, but parts of the British Isles, France and Spain saw an average decrease of two or three degrees.

Most of the local historians whose research has contributed so much to this series mentioned 1816. James North’s Augusta history has the most information on local effects.

North, quoting from an unnamed source, called 1816 the “coldest and ‘most disastrous [year] on record.’ Frosts occurred in every month in the year.”

An April 12 snowstorm “made sleighing for a number of days.” On May 24, “rain froze on the fruit trees then nearly ready to blossom.”

June 5 and 6 featured a northwest wind with snow and hail. “The ground froze, corn and potatoes were cut down, and workmen put on their coats and mittens. This weather continued for some days.”

North quoted from a June 8 letter that Kennebec County Sheriff Samuel Howard wrote to Henry W. Fuller, representative to the Massachusetts General Court, in Boston, saying that in Augusta it was snowing and “so cold that a large fire has been kept up in court all day.” Birds were freezing, he reported.

On July 8 and 9, North reported, “as corn was being hoed for the first time it was again cut down by a frost.”

General Henry Sewall’s diary said that Sept. 19 was a fast day, partly on account of “the decay of religion,” but also because of “the extraordinary cold and dry season.”

The same source recorded snow on Oct. 7.

North quoted Sewall’s end-of-year summary: “The year past has been remarkable – the season of vegetation was uncommonly dry and cold, not a single month without frost!” The Indian corn crop was “almost entirely cut off”; the hay crop was down by one-half; grain, especially rye, was “very considerably diminished.”

Accompanying the cold weather was a “severe drought,” leading to woods fires in the fall that caused fatalities and property loss in Maine and Canada. “In this region so severe was the drought that water is said to have been carried three miles from the river to extinguish fires,” North wrote, citing Augusta lawyer Reuel Williams.

The woodsmoke was so thick, especially when combined with morning fog, that a ferry operator got turned around and landed Williams and a visiting judge on the same side of the Kennebec they’d left, North said.

The unusual weather was accompanied by an unusual display of sunspots, especially in April, May and July. North quoted from the Portsmouth Journal: “Some of them suddenly burst forth in clusters, and appeared for a day or two and then as quickly disappeared. On the 29th of May there were six spots of magnificent proportion, varying by estimate from ten to fifteen thousand miles in diameter.”

(Most on-line sources your writer found doubt that sunspots cause short-term cooler temperatures on earth.)

North wrote that the unusual weather continued into 1817: “It was generally believed that Friday, February 14th, 1817, was ‘the coldest day ever known in this region of country.'” The cold extended as far south as Maryland and Georgia, he said.

The St. Lawrence River was frozen wide and deep, and harbors from Halifax to New York were iced-choked, except Portsmouth and Newport. There were more large sunspots.

By the spring of 1817, grain was so scarce farmers couldn’t get seed. Augusta’s May town meeting appropriated $200 for selectmen to give farmers seed, conditional on promises to plant it and to make repayment after harvest.

The plan worked; North wrote there was a good harvest in the fall of 1817. He quoted crop prices as evidence: in May in Boston, beans were $4.00 to $4.50 a bushel and corn $1.80 to 1.85, but by December, in Augusta, beans were $1.25 to 1.50 a bushel & corn $1.00.

North continued his weather record into the winter of 1819, which, he wrote, “was as remarkably warm at the north, as that of 1817 had been cold.” The high temperature in January and February was 54 degrees on Feb. 9, and there was almost no snow.

The period after the War of 1812 (which was discussed in five previous articles in this series published between February 10 and March 10, 2022) was characterized by “Ohio fever,” an emigration to the Midwest to escape the post-war economic depression and Maine winters. North wrote that Augusta was a gathering point for families heading west, to the benefit of the local economy; people bought supplies and exchanged paper money for silver “at a profitable premium.”

He repeated the estimate that Maine “lost from fifteen thousand to twenty thousand inhabitants by this exodus.” Some returned disappointed; their tales, plus warmer weather, slowed the exodus.

Ruby Crosby Wiggin, in her history of the Town of Albion, also connected the weather in 1816 and the economy.

In Albion, Wiggin said, the town saw hard economic times for several years beginning in 1810, worsened by the War of 1812. Wiggin mentioned a petition to the (Massachusetts) legislature protesting land valuations as too high; roads being discontinued; and for three years, produce allowed for tax payments if the taxpayer were short of cash.

Albion voters nonetheless voted in March 1815 to build a town house. The builder who put up and roofed the frame was to be paid partly in stock (livestock?) that a resident owed. Two later contractors finished the outside and inside, each being asked to wait until the following January for his pay.

The year without a summer contributed to the financial problem. “It would seem that residents of the town were not able to pay their taxes that year even in produce because of the scarcity of produce raised,” Wiggin commented.

She wrote that there was frost every month. One June day, children who went to school barefoot walked home in snow, unless their parents could come for them with “ox-team and sled.”

(Your writer assumed that snowy day to have been June 8 or 9, per North; but those dates were a weekend, so it must have been the beginning of the next week, when, North and other sources said, snow continued.)

Main sources

Fairfield Historical Society Fairfield, Maine 1788-1988 (1988).
Marriner, Ernest, Kennebec Yesterdays (1954).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).
Wiggin, Ruby Crosby, Albion on the Narrow Gauge (1964).

Websites, miscellaneous.

by Mary Grow

This year’s Nov. 6 time change, with darkness falling an hour earlier, led your writer to think about how central Kennebec Valley families passed long winter evenings 200 or 250 years ago – a research challenge, as few historians devoted pen and ink to such mundane events.

Readers who have answers to the many questions this article raises are invited to email The Town Line editor Roland Hallee (townline@townline.org) to propose their follow-up paragraphs or pages.

Your writer was amused to find that Waterville novelist Martha Baker Dunn also got frustrated by limited information as she wrote the chapter on Social Life in Waterville for Edwin Carey Whittemore’s centennial history. The example she gave was an early diarist in Winslow (before Waterville became a separate town in 1802) whose daily notes about “weather, crops and traffic” were varied by “August 15th Sarah Johnson went away.”

Dunn complained there was no explanation and no follow-up, leaving her wondering who Sarah Johnson was, where she went and why, why her departure mattered to the diarist and whether she ever came back.

Your writer encountered similar incomplete stories as she reviewed local town histories and other readily available sources, like the diary kept by Hallowell midwife Martha Ballard from 1785 to 1812.

(A series of fortunate events led to the preservation of Ballard’s diary, used by Augusta historian James North, who excerpted sections for his 1870 history, and by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, whose mixture of quotation and commentary was published in 1990 as A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812.)

For this and following articles, two points were established as preliminaries. The first is that before, on and after Dec. 21 in this part of central Maine, there are about 15 hours of darkness and semi-darkness each day. The sun rises a few minutes after 7 a.m. and sets about 4 p.m., by our contemporary clocks.

The second point is that when the central Kennebec Valley was settled, people kept track of time for everyday purposes much as 21st-century residents do. Town meetings and other public events, church services and private gatherings were scheduled for specific times, and people knew how long they stayed and how late they went to bed.

There were public timepieces, in places like church and town hall towers, and private ones in at least wealthier homes. In his thorough research for his history of Windsor, Linwood Lowden found lists of household items; in an 1814 inventory, one family’s “personal items” included a watch (and “a fan and a needlecase”).

Midwife Ballard habitually recorded the time when someone came to request her help (often in the middle of the night) and the time a baby was born.

Vassalboro historian Alma Pierce Robbins found in the town records that a Quaker clock maker named James Brackett came to Getchell’s Corner in 1794. She added that as of 1971, St. Marks Home, in Augusta, had one of Brackett’s clocks.

In Albion, historian Ruby Crosby Wiggin found a storekeeper who had, sometime after 1845, 52 clocks of six different kinds in stock, priced between $10 and $20, with a total value of $620. She remarked that he had a lot of clocks for a small store in a small town.

Exchanging visits with neighbors, friends and family members was a popular way to spend time year-round. Ballard constantly had relatives and neighbors in her house, often staying overnight. It is easy to picture the women sitting talking after the sun went down, probably sewing or knitting – the diary often refers to both activities. Were husbands and sons with them, or in another room, or out in the barn?

In Windsor, historian Lowden wrote, even the earliest settlers “naturally sought and found pleasurable and worthwhile social activities,” especially exchanging visits. Such visits often meant “staying for a meal or even overnight.”

Wiggin commented that despite much hard work, Albion’s first settlers “were a sociable lot and many traveled some distance to spend an evening with friends or relatives.”

An example comes from the Fairfield bicentennial history. Elihu Bannerman (mentioned in the April 16, 2020, issue of The Town Line as the first inhabitant of North Fairfield) kept a record of daily occurrences. Bowerman described the log house he built in 1783 as having a bark roof, a bark floor that couldn’t be nailed down and was “very uneven and tottering,” no glass in the windows and apparently no chimney for the first winter.

The compilers of the history found that after six months of isolation with Elihu and his brother Zaccheus, Mrs. Bowerman paid a winter visit to another woman who had emigrated from Massachusetts and lived “over a mile away. She put on snowshoes and went for a six hour visit.”

Ballard’s diary said nothing about organized social activities in the late 1700s and early 1800s in the Hallowell area. Martha’s husband, surveyor Ephraim Ballard, went to town meetings and other public events in which women were not included.

Ulrich cited one series of entries referring to events in the fall of 1790 and the fall of 1791, while the Ballards’ daughter Hannah was engaged to be married. Hannah, her sisters and their friends got together for quilting bees; the women spent the day at their needlework, and in the evening young men joined them for tea and dancing.

One evening after a bee at Ballards’, Martha was pleased that everyone was back home by 11 p.m. Other social events kept her children out later, and she made one reference to a sleighing party that didn’t get home until 12:30 a.m.

Dunn found similar references to late 18th and early 19th century social activities. She mentioned a 1784 sleighing party recorded in a diary, and “spinning bees and wool-breakings,” the two steps in the process of making wool into usable thread. The activities sound like women’s, but there were men around, as at the Ballards’, because Dunn wrote that, “These gatherings not infrequently ended in a dance.”

In Windsor, too, Lowden wrote, “many social activities were organized around work.” He listed, for men, mowing bees and chopping bees, when neighbors helped someone who had fallen behind in haying or putting up a woodpile; and husking bees, a gathering in a barn to husk corn. For women, Lowden mentioned “sewing and quilting parties.”

He quoted a description of a chopping bee written in a North Blue Hill woman’s letter in March 1864, surmising Windsor might have had similar events. The writer and “Nellie” spent three days cooking for 47 people, of both sexes; the men “chopped wood in the afternoon,” and the evening party required “five large loaves of frosted mountain cake” (almost certainly a layer cake, probably three layers, judging from on-line information about White Mountain Cake).

Roger Reeves, a farmer and carpenter from whose diary Lowden often quoted, wrote that on Feb. 1, 1876, he “carried Julia [his wife?]…to a sewing party,” whence he went on to another house where he “blacksmithed” and had dinner.

In the fall of 1878 Reeves attended an “apple bee” (defined on-line as like other agricultural bees, a group assembled to pick or process apples, specifically to prepare them for drying. Milton Dowe described the latter in his 1954 history of Palermo: “apples were peeled, cored and sliced, then strung on twine and hung up to dry.”).

In Waterville, Dunn wrote, two loosely defined, sometimes overlapping social classes developed early in the 19th century: mill workers and storekeepers on one level, and an upper echelon of professional men and their families. The latter included officers and faculty of the Maine Literary and Theological Institute, founded in 1813 (renamed Waterville College in 1821, Colby University in 1867 and Colby College in 1899).

It was almost certainly the wives of doctors, lawyers, bankers, professors and building- and land-owners at the “oldfashioned tea parties” that “a venerable relative who participated in them” described to Dunn. These were mostly winter activities. The ladies arrived about 3 p.m. with their sewing and knitting; the gentlemen came for supper and the evening.

There were also card parties and dances in private houses, Dunn wrote. She quoted from an invitation to a Feb. 26, 1819, ball, starting at 5 p.m. (and commented that a majority of the five leading citizens who signed the invitation were middle-aged or older).

One of Dunn’s reports, probably referring to the period before the Civil War though dated only as showing the “superior courtesy of former times,” answered one 21st-century question: “when a young lady was invited to a ball or large party it always meant that a carriage would be provided for her.”

The Fairfield history includes an excerpt from an 1896 memoir by Martha Sturtevant Coolidge (born Jan. 26, 1822, according to an on-line genealogy, and raised in West Waterville, now Oakland). Activities she described in her youth were “berrying in the summer,” “apple parings in the fall” and “occasional sleigh rides and parties in the winter.”

These activities and quilting parties, “singing schools and spelling matches gave us plenty of society,” she wrote.

In Windsor, community picnics, Sunday afternoon buggy rides and croquet were popular warm-weather activities, Lowden wrote. He added, “Many long winter evenings were passed at cards – some of the neighbors having dropped in for just that purpose.”

(By 1892, according to Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history, William Lamb had opened a factory to make croquet sets in Clinton.)

Alice Hammond recorded a significant winter social event in Sidney: a Jan. 3, 1897, gathering of about 150 people at the home of Phoebe (or Phebe, on her gravestone, Hammond said) Sawtelle Ellis to celebrate Ellis’s 100th birthday.

Citing an article by “a Journal [presumably the Kennebec Journal] reporter, who traveled by horseback to Sidney from Augusta,” Hammond wrote that the single-story Pond Road house, built in 1787, had a display of family heirlooms, including “a flax spinning wheel” Ellis’s father gave her as wedding gift and “a churn which had been in use of 102 years.”

Ellis had made brown bread as part of the supper prepared for her guests, who also enjoyed “a short entertainment”; and each got a souvenir birthday card.

Main sources

Dowe, Milton E., History Town of Palermo Incorporated 1884 (1954).
Fairfield Historical Society, Fairfield, Maine 1788-1988 (1988).
Hammond, Alice, History of Sidney Maine 1792-1992 (1992).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Lowden, Linwood H., good Land & fine Contrey but Poor roads a history of Windsor, Maine (1993).
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971).
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, A Midwife’s Tale The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (1990).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).
Wiggin, Ruby Crosby, Albion on the Narrow Gauge (1964).

Websites, miscellaneous.