Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Augusta fires & fire departments – Part 1

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The 9-ton steam powered fire engine was a revolution in its day, they were built by the Amoskeag Steam Fire Engine Company, of New Hampshire, late 18th century, and cost $7,000.

by Mary Grow

A consequence of building buildings, like those described in Augusta’s downtown historic district (see the February 2021 issues of The Town Line) and the ones described recently in Waterville’s downtown historic district (see the August and September 2022 issues, ignoring the two irrelevant articles) is that they catch fire.

The next three articles in this series will talk about fires and the development of fire-fighting in Augusta. See also the issue of Aug. 27, 2020, where fires in China, Fairfield and Palermo were described; and the issue of Feb. 4, 2021, for Augusta’s great fire of September 1865.

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James North’s year by year history of Augusta, published in 1870, records several fires before the 1865 disaster. The first he knew of was in 1785 (when Augusta was still the northern part of Hallowell): “Elias Craig’s Hatter’s shop” burned on Dec. 1.

Craig (Sept. 27, 1756 – May 6, 1837) had been an army private during the Revolution; he was 23 years old when he moved from Massachusetts to Fort Western in 1779. North called him “the first hatter in this region of country.”

His house and shop were on the west side of the Kennebec at the intersection of Bridge and Water streets. Charles Nash, in his 1904 history of Augusta, listed the places Hallowell town meetings were held between 1771 and 1792. The majority were at Fort Western in 1771 and 1772 and in the town meeting house after 1783; in between, voters assembled in three different inns, a barn and several houses, including in 1782 three times in Elias Craig’s house.

The house was of so little value that the assessors did not count it in 1784, North wrote. Indeed, he said, they counted only 38 “dwelling houses” for a population of 682 white people and 10 black people. Realizing the disparity, they explained that many families still lived in the “log cabins or camps which they first built,” which weren’t worth listing as taxable.

The 1784 assessors’ report listed 21 varied commercial holdings. Craig’s was one of five shops, and his stock in trade was valued at 50 pounds.

Craig rebuilt the shop after the fire, and enlarged the house at intervals. When that corner was rebuilt as a commercial block, the house was moved to Jefferson Street.

North wrote that Craig “possessed the confidence of the settlers, many of whom were welcomed to his house upon their arrival” before they moved to their new homes.

In 1792 one of his house guests was James Johnson. On May 31, he and his brother Samuel were firing celebratory cannons “probably on account of some recent news from France,” and one cannon exploded, injuring the two men. They were brought to Craig’s house, where midwife Martha Ballard attended to them. Apparently both survived.

Craig’s first wife was Hannah McKecknie (Sept. 28, 1766 – April 12, 1790), daughter of an early settler, Dr. John McKecknie. They were married in December 1788, and had a daughter, also named Hannah. On November 28, 1793, Craig married again, to Olive Hamlin or Hamlen (Nov. 2, 1770 – Sept. 25, 1848); they had three or four children.

Craig was a selectman in Hallowell, first elected in March 1795. He was among the 161 residents petitioning the Massachusetts legislature to create the separate town of Augusta in May 1791. The request was approved in February 1797, and a town named Harrington was organized; in June of the year, its name became Augusta.

Criag was elected selectman again at the first meeting in Harrington, in April 1797, and later was an Augusta selectman. North wrote that he served a total of seven years in the three successive towns. In 1806 he was the local coroner, according to Nash’s history. He moved to Fayette before his death on May 6 or May 7, 1837.

Leathern fire bucket.

North recorded the earliest fire department in the central Kennebec Valley, a “private fire company” formed in the 1790s in Augusta (then still Hallowell). The “principal citizens” who started the company wrote a charter requiring each to have on hand “two leathern fire buckets, and a canvas bag for the removal of goods at fire.” An on-line fire department history says insurance companies formed such associations to protect their members’ property.

The buckets, North explained, had been in use in the American colonies since the 1600s. They were oblong with leather handles, “very durable and convenient to pass water.” Association members put their names on their buckets.

On March 11, 1799, North wrote, two years after Augusta separated from Hallowell, town meeting voters appointed six fire wardens (Elias Craig was one of them). Later in the year town officials bought a fire engine and appointed firefighters (North said 13, Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history names 12, the online site names 14). The firefighters were called “engine men”; they were instructed to create an organization and make regulations “not repugnant to the constitution of the Commonwealth [of Massachusetts]).”

North did not mention the firefighters when he reported briefly on the Feb. 11, 1804, fire that burned a building whose tenants included Peter Edes’ printing office, where the Kennebec Gazette was published (the paper resumed publication March 23).

Nor did he describe any suppression efforts when the Hallowell Academy building burned on Jan. 29, 1805. Opened in 1795, it was in the area that remained Hallowell after the 1797 division. (See the Sept. 16, 2021, issue of The Town Line for more information on the two Hallowell academies.)

More than once North credited Hallowell with helping put out Augusta fires. He wrote that on Jan. 8, 1808, an old and a new blacksmith shop on Water Street burned down, and Nathan Weston’s old building beside them was “pulled down to prevent the flames from spreading.”

He continued, “The Hallowell engine arrived early and afforded great assistance in subduing the fire.” Total damage was $900; residents contributed $600 “to the relief of the sufferers.”

Hallowell came to the rescue again during a more serious incident a little more than three months later. The spring of 1808 was the period of the uprising of squatters against local government sometimes called the Malta War (Malta was an early name for Windsor, Maine). Public officials were attacked, and there was concern that public buildings, like the Kennebec County jail in Augusta, would be next.

A chaotic scene in early America when a house caught on fire. Bucket brigades were usually the main method of fighting fires. The whole community would pitch in, or risk the spread of fire.

Around sunset on March 16, 1808, North wrote, “a sudden alarm was given that the jail was on fire. The fire was discovered in the upper story. It rapidly spread, enveloping the building.”

The jailhouse was destroyed. The prisoners were evacuated, and North recorded that because of the unstable times, the jailer had already moved out essential records.

North wrote and quoted (probably from the March 18, 1808, issue of the Kennebec Gazette): “The citizens of Hallowell attended in great numbers ‘with both their engines,’ and were entitled to ‘much credit’ for their ‘prompt and spirited exertions.'”

The same evening, incendiary devices started a fire upstairs in the courthouse, but it was noticed in time to be put out before there was much damage. At 10 p.m., two local judges asked Major-General Henry Sewall to call out the militia, and Sewall immediately ordered the Augusta Light Infantry to guard the courthouse and the prisoners’ temporary accommodation.

Later, it was determined that the jailhouse fire was started by one of the prisoners, a tavern-keeper named Edward Jones, jailed for stealing. The courthouse fire probably was set by some of the rebellious settlers; North gave no names.

Jones, according to the Oct. 21, 1808, Kennebec Gazette (cited by North), was sent to the state prison to serve two months in solitary followed by nine years’ hard labor for arson. He was also convicted of stealing; that sentence (whether concurrent, North did not say) was 15 days’ solitary confinement and a year at hard labor.

And what, readers may wonder, did Kennebec County do with no jail? The answer is that county officials had a new one built; and North recorded its progress.

Right after the fire, he wrote, the county sheriff had a temporary wooden building put up near the county courthouse, and in April 1808 the Court of Sessions accepted it.

Court officials appointed a local man as superintendent of the interim jail and also charged him with cleaning up the old site, where they directed a new stone jail be built as soon as possible. Meanwhile, they paid good money to keep prisoners guarded in the “insecure” temporary quarters.

The court levied an $8,000 county tax for the new jail. North wrote that Massachusetts legislators cut it to $5,000; and in April 1809, they added back $3,000 to finish paying for the work. The building was in use by December 1808.

North described the new jail as a two-story building with walls of “large blocks of rough hammered stone fastened together with iron dowels.” Each floor had two blocks of cells separated by a central hall.

The ground-floor cells were for “the worst criminals,” and “were lighted and ventilated by openings in the walls six inches wide and two feet long.” The second-floor cells were for debtors and minor criminals; each cell had a grated window.

North wrote that the new jail “was much in advance of the prison accommodations of that day, and was considered a very expensive and secure structure.”

However, by 1857 the county commissioners were ready to replace it. North quoted their justification: the building was “wholly unfit for the purposes for which it was intended and used; more especially on account of the want of sufficient warmth, light, ventilation and cleanliness; it was inhuman, dangerous to life, and detrimental to health and good morals to imprison persons therein.”

The new Kennebec jail was built close to the courthouse and the old jail, at a cost of about $60,000, with preliminary study beginning in the spring of 1857 and the building ready for a well-attended public inspection on Feb. 1, 1859. A four-story stone and brick building, it had 54 regular cells and eight “privilege rooms.”

The regular cells were eight feet square, except for a dozen tiny ones, three feet 10 inches wide, on the second floor. The privilege rooms, which North also classed as cells, were eight feet by 19 feet.

The building evidently accommodated jail staff, as North listed eight “sleeping rooms,” a kitchen, eating and bathing rooms and “a parlor, sitting-room and office.”

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Nash, Charles Elventon, The History of Augusta (1904).
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870)

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Waterville historic district – Part 8

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North Grammar School, that was located on the corner of Pleasant and North streets, which later was the site of the YMCA, and now is an apartment complex.

by Mary Grow

Haines Redington Whittemore

This concluding article on prominent Waterville residents features William Thomas Haines, mentioned briefly in several August and September articles and last week; Frank Redington, mentioned almost weekly; and a minister, none other than Rev. Edwin Carey Whittemore, chief editor of the 1902 Waterville centennial history. All were born in the 1850s and lived into the 20th century.

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William Thomas Haines

William Thomas Haines (Aug. 7, 1854 – June 4, 1919) is mentioned frequently in Whittemore’s chapters, and more information is available on line. Born in Levant, he graduated from the University of Maine as valedictorian, class of 1876, and earned an LL.B (bachelor of law) from Albany Law School in 1878. After less than two years in Oakland, he moved his law practice to Waterville in 1880.

Haines was mentioned last week as an incorporator of the Oakland Water Company in 1889. He was associated with several Waterville financial institutions.

Various sources list him as a long-time trustee for the institution that became the University of Maine; on the building committee for Waterville’s “beautiful” 1888 North Grammar School; one of the first trustees of Coburn Classical Institute in 1901; a principal donor of “both time and money” to the public library, located in the Haines building from 1898 or 1899 until after 1902; and one of the 1899 incorporators of the group that supported Waterville’s R. B. Hall Band.

He was Kennebec County Attorney from 1882 to 1887; state senator from 1888 to 1892; state representative in 1895; state attorney general from 1896 to 1901; member of the Governor’s Council from 1901 to 1905; and governor of Maine from 1913 to 1915.

An on-line site quotes from Haines’ Jan. 2, 1913, inaugural speech: “The introduction of the automobile, or the carriage moved by the power of gasoline, has made the question of highways of still more importance to the people of the State.” Wikipedia says during his two-year term the Maine legislature approved a bond issue for road improvements.

Haines and his wife, Edith S. Hemenway (Nov. 9, 1858 – Nov. 17, 1935) are buried in Waterville’s Pine Grove Cemetery.

Hains building

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Frank Redington

Frank Redington (Dec. 11 or Dec. 19, 1858 – Feb. 4, 1923) has been mentioned repeatedly in this series as author of the chapter on businesses in Whittemore’s history. His wife, Carrie Mae Foster, and in-laws were featured in the Sept. 15 issue of The Town Line. Both Whittemore and Henry Kingsbury, in his Kennebec County history, considered him worthy of attention.

Kingsbury started with Frank’s great-grandfather, Asa Redington (Dec. 22, 1761 — March 31, 1845). Aaron Appleton Plaisted, in his chapter on Waterville’s early settlers, profiled Asa Redington; he and Kingsbury disagreed on several points.

Both said Asa Redington was a Revolutionary soldier – he joined a New Hampshire regiment in 1778, wintered at Valley Forge and was at Yorktown, Plaisted added. He came to Maine in 1784 with his brother Thomas (according to Plaisted) or Samuel (Kingsbury). Kingsbury wrote that Samuel settled in Vassalboro and Asa in Waterville; Plaisted put both Redingtons in Vassalboro until Asa moved to Winslow in 1792.

Plaisted had Redington married on Sept. 2, 1787, to Mary Getchell, daughter of his Vassalboro landlord, Captain Nehemiah Getchell, with whom he partnered in a company that helped build a 1787 dam close to the later Lockwood dam and “a large double saw mill” on the dam. After the partnership dissolved in 1799, Redington stayed in the lumber and sawmill business until 1830.

In Kingsbury’s version, in Waterville “a Miss Getchell” became Redington’s second wife.

Kingsbury, writing in 1892, listed five sons and three daughters. Plaisted, in 1902, listed six sons and three daughters, with the order differing.

Both historians said the two oldest sons were Asa Jr., and Samuel. Kingsbury listed Emily first of the three daughters, implying she was the oldest; Plaisted listed her last of all the children.

Emily, Plaisted added, married Solymon Heath, the banker, and one of their daughters was Mrs. A. A. Plaisted. (The daughter’s name was also Emily; see last week’s article on Aaron Appleton Plaisted.)

Asa Redington’s second son, Samuel, was also “in the lumber business until about 1850,” Kingsbury wrote. He married Nancy Parker; their only son, Charles Harris Redington, was born in 1838 (Kingsbury) or Jan. 21 or 24, 1830 (Plaisted, on-line sources) and died in 1906.

Charles Harris Redington married Saphronia (Kingsbury) or Sophronia (Plaisted, on-line genealogy) Day in December 1854. She was born Sept. 1, 1831, and died Oct. 8, 1912.

Plaisted wrote that Charles Harris Redington’s businesses included groceries, furniture and undertaking, with various partners. He served in local government before and after Waterville became a city in 1888, including being mayor for a year around 1897.

The second (or third) of Charles and Sophronia’s six (or seven) children was Frank Redington, who was born in 1858, attended Waterville Academy (by 1902 Coburn Institute) and married M. C. Foster’s daughter Carrie Mae (1862 – 1953) in 1890.

In 1875, Frank started clerking in Charles Redington’s furniture store. In 1880 he and a partner bought the business; a year later he bought out the partner, and by 1902, Plaisted wrote, Redington and Company was “one of the largest in its line in the State.”

The business was in a “fine block” Redington built in 1893 on Silver Street, and by 1902 had “overflowed into an adjoining block.”

Redington home on Silver St., now the Redington Museum.

Like his father, Frank Redington was active in civic affairs. Plaisted wrote that he headed the Waterville Board of Trade from 1895 to 1901; on-line sources say he was mayor of Waterville in 1909.

William Abbott Smith described the centennial celebration for Whittemore’s history, including the June 23, 1902, dedication of the new city hall, at which Redington presided. He wrote: “Probably no man in Waterville has been more industrious and influential in arousing the citizens to the need and advantages of a new City Hall than Mr. Frank Redington, ex-president of the Waterville Board of Trade, and every one recognized the appropriateness of the selection of him as presiding officer at the dedication of the building which he had labored so faithfully to procure.”

Plaisted credited Redington with a role in the “building of the Waterville, Wiscasset and Farmington Railroad” (in 1895; or its extension northwest to Winslow in 1898 or 1899?) He was the WW&F’s president for two years, Plaisted wrote.

(See the Sept. 17, 2020, issue of The Town Line and the WW&F museum’s website, wwfry.org, for more information on the railroad, though not on Redington’s alleged connection with it.)

Wikipedia says Redington was instrumental in construction of two other major buildings, the federal post office at Main and Elm streets in 1911 and Gilman Street high school in 1912.

He was also a public library trustee; vice-president of the corporation organized in 1899 to support the R. B. Hall Band; and, Plaisted wrote, after 1885 on the committee that managed Pine Grove Cemetery. He is buried there with his parents, his widow and her parents and other Redington family members.

According to Wikipedia, Frank Redington was in poor health for a long time before he was found dead in his Silver Street furniture store on Feb. 14, 1923, “by a gun wound to his head, reported as self-inflicted.”

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And finally a few words about Rev. Edwin Carey Whittemore (April 29, 1858 – Nov. 1, 1932), chairman of the editorial board of the Waterville history. Rev. George Dana Boardman Pepper’s chapter on “The pulpit of Waterville” – a chapter Whittemore must surely have proofread and approved – says he was born in Dexter, son of Isaac and Elizabeth (Hatch) Whittemore.

Pepper wrote that Whittemore went from Dexter High School to Coburn Classical Institute, in Waterville, graduating in 1875; to Colby College, class of 1879; and to Newton Theological Institution in Massachusetts, graduating in 1882. He served in Baptist churches in New Boston, New Hampshire, and Auburn and Damariscotta, Maine, before coming to Waterville’s First Baptist Church in 1899.

On July 25, 1879, Whittemore and Ida Macomber, born May 14, 1856, in Abbott, Maine, were married.

On an on-line list of Waterville Baptist pastors, Whittemore is the only one between 1829 and 1920 for whom the list does not give the date he left the pulpit. His predecessor, Isaac B. LeClaire, served from 1887 to 1892, leaving a seven-year gap (with no permanent pastor?) before Whittemore took over in 1899; his successor, Frank Sherman Hartley, served from 1909 to 1912.

In addition to editing the Waterville bicentennial history, Whittemore wrote books on the history of Maine Baptists (at both state and local levels), Coburn Classical Institute and Colby College. From 1905 through 1909, he was on the executive committee of the Interdenominational Commission of Maine (created in 1890 and made a permanent organization in 1892).

The 1919 American Baptist Year-Book lists E. C. Whittemore, of Waterville, as the education secretary for the United Baptist Convention of Maine. For his ability in the pulpit and his activities at the state level, Pepper called him “among the foremost Baptist ministers of Maine.”

A 1929 newspaper clipping describes Skowhegan Baptist pastor Dr. George Merriam being honored for 25 years of service at Bethany Baptist Church. One of the speakers paying tribute was Dr. E. C. Whittemore of Waterville, identified as “a college class-mate at Colby and a friend of more than 50 years standing.”

An on-line family history says Edwin Whittemore died Nov. 1, 1932, probably in Waterville, and Ida died Sept. 14, 1946, also probably in Waterville.

Their daughter, Bertha Carey Whittemore, born in April 1882 in Newton Center, Massachusetts, graduated from Colby with the class of 1904. She married New Sharon native Earle Ovando Whittier, born about 1891, on Aug. 25, 1913, in Dexter. She died in 1963, and he died in Boston Sept. 30, 1970; both are buried in Farmington.

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: Waterville historic district – Part 7

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Postcard of “new” Thayer Hospital, circa 1950.

by Mary Grow

The subseries on 19th-century Waterville businessmen continues in this article, beginning with Aaron Plaisted, born in 1831, and his family, and ending with Luther Soper, born in 1852. For variety, your writer added a medical professional (who was also a businessman).

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Aaron Appleton Plaisted (March 25, 1831 – Nov. 27, 1908) was a third-generation Watervillian. His mother’s father was Dr. Moses Appleton (1783 – 1849), who moved to Waterville (then Winslow) in 1796, where he practiced medicine for years and opened the first drug store. Dr. Appleton’s daughter, Mary Jane, married Dr. Samuel Plaisted. Aaron was the older of their two sons; they had one daughter.

Aaron Plaisted was educated at Waterville Academy and Waterville College (Class of 1851, member of Phi Beta Kappa). He taught for a couple years, then went to Harvard Law School and practiced briefly in Portland and from 1856 to 1858 in Dubuque, Iowa.

On Sept. 23, 1856, he married Emily Carlton (or Carleton) Heath (Nov. 15, 1835 – June 19, 1916), daughter of Waterville banker Solymon Heath. The first of their three sons and two daughters, Appleton Heath Plaisted, was born Oct. 10, 1857.

Returning to Waterville, Aaron Plaisted served as cashier of Ticonic Bank and its successor, Ticonic National Bank, for 38 years, from 1858 to June 1896. During most of that time, according to Bates’ chapter in Edwin Carey Whittemore’s 1902 Waterville history, “he performed all the duties of cashier without help and had no vacations.” His successor until the end of 1900 was his oldest son, Appleton Heath Plaisted (who did have an assistant from early 1898, Hascall S. Hall).

Plaisted’s grandfather, the physician Moses Appleton, was among the Ticonic Bank’s founders in 1831. His father-in-law, Solymon Heath, became its president in 1865, after the bank converted from a state to a national bank, and served until 1875.

In addition to his banking career, Plaisted was involved, with Dennis Milliken (profiled last week) and others, in early water-power development in Waterville. He was an assistant internal revenue collector during part of the Civil War and served on various Waterville/Colby College boards.

Whittemore identified him as one of the two men – the other was Baptist pastor Henry S. Burrage – who “organized the Waterville Public Library Association” and opened the library in 1873. Estelle Foster Eaton wrote in her chapter on the library in Whittemore’s book that Solymon Heath was the first president, and the Ticonic Bank housed the library for 26 years, “during which time Mr. A. A. Plaisted acted as librarian and secretary.” Daughters Helen and Emily were among his assistants. (See the Dec. 23, 2021, issue of The Town Line for more on the Waterville Library Association).

Plaisted was on the Committee of One Hundred that planned the 1902 centennial celebration, and also on its invitation subcommittee. He wrote the chapter on early settlers in Whittemore’s history; Whittemore said his long acquaintance with Waterville’s old families made him a source of “very valuable aid to the editors of this volume.”

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Dr. Frederick Charles Thayer (Sept. 30, 1844 – Sept. 26, 1926) headed the Committee of One Hundred. Whittemore credited much of the success of the centennial celebration “to his faithful attention and to his efficient generalship.”

Thayer was a Waterville native, the third generation of his family in the area. His parents were Charles Hamilton Thayer and Susan E. (Tobey) Thayer, both from Fairfield. Charles Thayer was a businessman; his father, Stephen (1783 -1852), and his older brother, Albert (1808 -1833), Frederick’s grandfather and uncle, respectively, were doctors.

Frederick Thayer’s educational background was varied, according to Whittemore and to Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history. (Thayer wrote the chapter on Waterville medical people in Whittemore’s history, but a footnote says Whittemore wrote the “sketch of Dr. Thayer.”)

Thayer attended Waterville Academy and “Franklin Family School,” a boys’ school in Topsham, and Waterville (aka Colby) College for two years. An on-line list of Waterville families says he graduated from Colby in 1865; Kingsbury wrote that he was a member of Colby’s class of 1865 “but did not graduate.”

After 18 months at Union College, in Schenectady, New York, in 1865 and 1866, Thayer studied medicine with a doctor in Albany, New York, and went to lectures at Albany Medical College. In 1867 he graduated from the Medical School of Maine, established in 1820 on the Bowdoin College campus.

Colby gave him an honorary master’s degree in 1884. In 1884-85 he was a trustee of the Bowdoin-based medical school.

On-line sources say Thayer practiced medicine and ran a hospital at his 214 Main Street home from 1867 until his death in 1926. After he died, the house continued to be Thayer Hospital for another two decades. The present Thayer, at 149 North Street, opened in 1951.

Kingsbury, writing in 1892, said since 1867 Thayer had “risen to a celebrity unconfined by local bounds.” He continued: “He has been a pioneer in this community in difficult surgical operations, calling for cool, conservative judgment, and requiring at the same time the most delicate touch; yet has for the most part been content to follow cautiously where the world’s most eminent surgeons have successfully led, and in consequence his consultation practice has grown to extensive proportions.”

Whittemore, 20 years later, agreed, writing: “By his skill and success in capital surgical cases Dr. Thayer early gained an eminent position in his profession, which position he has ever since maintained.”

On Dec. 2, 1871, Thayer married Leonora L. Snell (1852 – July 27, 1930), of Washington, D.C., in Waterville. She was the daughter of William Bradford Snell, a distinguished jurist born in Winthrop, Maine, and in 1870 appointed by President Ulysses Grant as the District of Columbia’s first police court judge.

Thayer held many offices in local and state medical groups. In addition, Whittemore wrote, he was in the Maine militia, starting as assistant surgeon and later surgeon in the second regiment. He became “medical director of the 1st Brigade” and then Maine’s surgeon-general under Governor Henry Bradstreet Cleaves (whose term ran from January 1893 to January 1897).

Thayer “has been prominently identified with all movements of the development and progress of the city for many years,” Whittemore said. He represented Waterville in the Maine legislature in 1885-86 and was a Waterville alderman in 1889.

Whittemore wrote that he was the first president of Waterville Trust Company. In 1902 he was a director of that bank, “president of the Sawyer Publishing Company and the Riverview Worsted Mills and a director” of the Wiscasset, Waterville and Farmington Railroad.

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The important men in the Gallert family were brothers Mark and David. David (mentioned in the Sept. 22 article on the Main Street Historic District) came to Waterville first; Mark (born Oct. 27, 1847) came from Prussia in 1862. Kingsbury’s history says he was David’s partner until 1870, and after the “business was divided” ran a shoe business. Whittemore’s history says Mark “entered” his brother’s store in 1872.

David is described in a sentence as “for many years…a prominent and much respected merchant of this city.”

Colby’s 2011 Jewish history project, in an on-line document, provides an excerpt from the 1890 census. It said David Gallert was 49 years old and living on Pleasant Street, with “Mrs. Rosalia,” age 46, and Solomon, 22; Sigismond, 20; Fannie, 18; Benno, 16; Minnie, 13; Ernest, 10; and Daisy, 7.

Mark Gallert was 42 and living on Silver Street, in the “fine residence” Whittemore’s contributors said he built in 1883. His family consisted of Rebecca (Jacob Peavey’s daughter, whom Mark married on his 25th birthday), age 35; Jacob, 17; Sigbert, 15; Miriam, 13; and Aimee, 10. Kingsbury’s 1892 history named the children “Jacie D., Sidney, Miriam, Amy and Gordon.” Whittemore’s chapter listed the children in 1902 as “D. J., Sidney M., Miriam F., Aimer P., and Gordon.”

In the census, a marginal note beside each Gallert says there is “no independent evidence” they were Jewish.

Whittemore’s contributors wrote of Mark that he had been in the “boot and shoe business” since 1872, successfully “as in other business ventures.” He was a Waterville selectman in 1877, and in 1902″ has large holdings in city real estate.”

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The Soper Building, on Main St., with current ground floor occupant Carbon Copy.

Luther H. Soper, also mentioned in the Sept. 22 article, was born May 25, 1852, in Old Town. A cemetery record found on line might indicate that he lost his father early: Luther H. Soper, born in 1823, died in 1854 at the age of 31 and is buried in Forest Hill Cemetery, in Old Town.

Waterville’s Luther H. Soper attended an unnamed “commercial college”; married Carrie Ellen Wiggin (born in Milton, New Hampshire, in 1858) on Sept. 26, 1887, and as of 1902 was the father of four daughters.

Kingsbury wrote that he clerked in a dry goods store from the age of 16 until he moved to Waterville in 1877. Waterville was lucky to have enterprising merchants whose stocks were larger and more varied than in other municipalities, Kingsbury commented; and “in the various departments of a dry goods store L. H. Soper & Co. enjoy the distinction of having the largest and most complete establishment in the city.”

Soper built the 1890 Soper Block because his business urgently needed more space, Kingsbury said. It cost $26,000, of which $12,000 was for the lot on Main Street. Between 1890 and 1902, according to Whittemore’s history, the business “has steadily increased to its present large proportions.” Soper also had “a large branch house” in Madison.

Soper’s other business interests included lumbering and banking. He was on the board of directors and vice-president of Merchants’ Bank. A Feb. 10, 1889, legislative act found on line incorporated the Oakland Water Company, listing its corporate members as “George H. Bryant, Frank E. Dustin, W. T. Haines and Luther H. Soper, their associates, successors and assigns.”

The company’s purpose was to supply Oakland with water “for industrial, manufacturing, domestic, sanitary and municipal purposes, including the extinguishment of fires and the sprinkling of streets.”

In the lead-up to Waterville’s 1902 centennial observance, Soper was a member of the Committee of One Hundred and the trades display committee.

Luther Soper died in 1914; Carrie died in 1939.

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: Fairfield

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by Mary Grow

Fairfield, the southernmost town in Somerset County, differs from Augusta, Vassalboro/Sidney, and Winslow/Waterville in being surveyed and settled only on the west bank of the Kennebec. However, the Charles Hayden survey map copied pursuant to a Feb. 4, 1813, vote of the Kennebec Proprietors and published in the Fairfield Historical Society’s Fairfield, Maine 1788-1988 shows a pattern similar to the towns farther down-river: smaller rectangular riverside lots and wider, much longer (some extending from the river to the 15-mile boundary) lots between and behind them.

The history says the first recorded house in town was built in 1771 by Jonathan Emery on Emery Hill. His son Samuel, born in 1773, is believed to be the first white child born in town. The house stood until 1982.

Early homestead on Emery Hill, in Fairfield. (Internet photo)

Emery Hill rises from the Kennebec between the river and Route 201 north of downtown Fairfield, opposite the foot of Mountain Avenue. The Emery Hill Cemetery is said to contain graves of some of the men who began the march to Québec with General Benedict Arnold in 1775. When this writer knew it in the 1950s, it also contained a good crop of poison ivy.

More families must have quickly followed the Emerys, because the bicentennial history reports the settlement was organized as a plantation in 1774. Ava H. Chadbourne’s Maine Place Names says the plantation was named Fairfield because of its natural beauty, and the name was carried over when the plantation became an incorporated town on June 18, 1788.

In 1774, according to the bicentennial history, a man named Pushard built a log cabin on the north side of what is now Western Avenue where Hillman’s Bakery was established in 1960.

In 1778, the history continues, Jonas Dutton built a dam between the west shore and Mill Island, the westernmost of the two islands – the other is Bunker’s or Bunker Island – between Fairfield and Benton. Dutton planned to use waterpower for mills, he did not get them built before General William Kendall bought him out in 1780. Kendall also bought adjacent land, making Kendall’s Mills an early name for Fairfield Village. Ernest Marriner says in Kennebec Yesterdays there were 11 sawmills at Kendall’s Mills in 1870.

According to the web, Kendall was born in Georgetown, November 19, 1759, married Abigail Chase on Dec. 25, 1782, died Aug. 11, 1827, and is buried in Emery Hill Cemetery with his wife and other family members. The bicentennial history adds that the Kendalls lived first in a log cabin near the present intersection of Main Street and Western Avenue. Before 1800 they had a large brick house at the intersection of Lawrence Avenue and Newhall Street, which stood until the 1890s.

Chadbourne and the bicentennial history list other centers of settlement inside the town boundary as Shawmut (earlier Philbrooks Mills, Lyons Mills, Somerset Mills; settled in 1835) and Hinckley (East Fairfield, Pichon’s Ferry), three miles and eight miles, respectively, north of Fairfield on the river; Fairfield Center, three miles west of the present town center; North Fairfield (also known as Black’s Mills, Blacknell’s Mills and Quakertown, according to the bicentennial history), north of Fairfield Center; and Larone (formerly Winslow’s Mills) on what is now Route 139 almost at the Norridgewock town line.

The bicentennial history calls Fairfield Center the first town center, despite its distance from the river, because, the authors say, it was on the road from Waterville to Skowhegan.

The early years of Keyes Fibre Co. (Internet photo)

Chadbourne fails to mention Fairfield Corner (now Nye’s Corner), on the river about half-way between Shawmut and Hinckley. No date of settlement is given; the bicentennial history says it was named for multiple Nye families and was a commercial center in the 1820s and 1830s.

In Kennebec Yesterdays, Marriner draws from the 1848 reminiscences of Elihu Bowerman, who came north from Massachusetts in 1780, at the age of 18, looking for available land. He stayed with John Taber, in Vassalboro, and joined the Quaker meeting there.

Marriner says Taber and other Vassalboro Quakers helped Bowerman find his land. Early in 1782, newly married, he, his wife and two younger brothers came to stay. Leaving Mrs. Bowerman in rented rooms in what became Waterville, the three young men staked a claim along Martin Stream, in the area known later as North Fairfield. They built first a lean-to and then a log cabin roofed and floored with bark, to which Mrs. Bowerman came in the fall.

One of Elihu’s brothers went back to Massachusetts for the winter of 1782-83. Marriner suggests the remaining three people might have starved had not a Winslow man given them corn on credit to supplement a bit of pork and smoked herring and the (frozen in an early cold spell) potatoes they had raised on Remington Hobby’s Vassalboro farm. The corn they carried 17 miles, on foot, to be ground at the closest gristmill, Marriner says.

During the winter, too, the two men hauled 700 feet of boards “several miles” from a sawmill so they could provide a better roof and floor for the cabin.

The next summer they bought two cows to provide milk and butter and planted crops to feed them through the following winter. It was probably that summer that Elihu’s mother came from Massachusetts to join them. By 1785, Marriner says, the older Mrs. Bowerman and eight of her nine children – one daughter had died –were living in the area.

Marriner credits the Bowermans with establishing the Friends meeting in North Fairfield. At first it was affiliated with the Vassalboro Friends, and Elihu Bowerman remembered the 14-mile walk to and from meeting before roads were fit for horses and later for carriages. The trip required fording or rafting across the Sebasticook and the Kennebec rivers.

After the June 1788 incorporation of the town of Fairfield, the bicentennial history says the first town meeting was held Aug. 19 in Samuel Fuller’s house. Elihu Bowerman was elected selectman, with Josiah Burgess and Joseph Town; Samuel Tobey became town clerk and treasurer.

Fairfield’s first elementary schools and the first two churches, a Quaker Meeting House in North Fairfield built in 1784 and a Methodist church in Fairfield Center built in 1793 and 1794, were in use before 1800. The bicentennial history says Jesse Lee preached the first sermon in the Methodist church on March 5, 1794.

Jesse Lee’s marker in Norwalk, Connecticut, marking the spot of his first speech.

Jesse Lee, sometimes called the Apostle of Methodism, was a Methodist Episcopal preacher who traveled northern New England in the 1790s. Born March 12, 1758, in Virginia, he became a preacher in 1783. After his travels in New England, he was chaplain of the United States House of Representatives, starting in 1809 and serving at least three terms, and in 1814 began a year as chaplain of the United States Senate. He died Sept. 12, 1816, in Baltimore, Maryland.

The Jesse Lee Church, in Readfield, built in 1794, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984. Kents Hill resident Les Priest said Lee preached at the dedication of the church on June 24, 1794, with close to 2,000 people from all around the area attending.

The church is still used seasonally; the web has information on the April 12 Easter Sunday service. Members of the Readfield United Methodist Church had the historic building reroofed five or six years ago, Priest said. They are now raising money to redo the exterior. Donations are welcome; checks may be made out to RUMC and mailed to PO Box 286, Kents Hill, Maine 04349.

MAIN SOURCES:

Chadbourne, Ava Harriet, Maine Place Names and the Peopling of Its Towns (1955)
Fairfield Historical Society, Fairfield, Maine 1788-1988 (1988)
Marriner, Ernest, Kennebec Yesterdays (1954)
Personal interviews

Web sites, miscellaneous