Up and Down the Kennebec Valley Archives - Page 4 of 10

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Malta War, 1809

March 6, 2024/0 Comments/in Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley, Windsor/by Mary Grow

Lendall Titcomb

by Mary Grow

There are still some left-over ponds and related information to continue the previous subseries, but your writer is ready to take – and to give her readers – a break from maps, water bodies and genealogies.

Instead, she will present the story of an often-mentioned, but in detail long avoided, historical event, the Malta War. (From 1809 to 1820, the present Town of Windsor was named Malta.)

The origins of this conflict go back to pre-settlement land titles, a complex topic; and the “war” itself has many surviving original documents that a serious historian would consult when attempting to describe it.

Fortunately, this series is not serious history, but history lite, or second-hand history, and earlier writers have done the research that will be summarized below.

* * * * * *

The chapter on Sources of Land Titles in Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County History was written by Lendall Titcomb, Esquire. This man was probably the Lendall Titcomb who graduated from Harvard in 1871, was a lawyer like his father and was mayor of Augusta in 1901 and 1902.

Titcomb discussed two types of titles. Some 17th-century settlers obtained deeds from the indigenous inhabitants, who, Titcomb said, occupied and used the land as tenants in common – all were part owners of an undivided tract – and assumed they were merely adding more owners. They therefore saw no problem selling the same piece of land to more than one person.

These deeds and resulting occupation and use of North American land Titcomb considered legally inferior to a title or license from the British monarchy. He did not mention, though other historians did, that the British land titles were created with completely unrealistic boundaries, because nobody in London knew the area they were describing.

After a summary of competing French, Spanish and British claims to North America, Titcomb talked about the 1606 Virginia charter and the 1620 New England Charter, both granted by James I (who ruled England from 1603 to 1625).

The New England Charter covered all the North American territory not “actually possessed” by another European power between the 40th and 48th parallels of latitude – that is, between the latitude of Philadelphia and the latitude of Gander, Newfoundland, north of the United States.

James I awarded the 1620 charter to the 40-man Council of Plymouth. This Council, in 1629, granted what Titcomb said was the “Kennebeck or Plymouth Patent” to “the Pilgrim colony.”

The 1.5 million acres covered 15 miles on each side of the Kennebec River from the north boundaries of Topsham and Woolwich upriver to the junction with the Wesserunsett, close to Skowhegan.

In October 1661, Titcomb wrote, the Plymouth Council sold the whole parcel to four men from Boston. These new owners paid little attention to their holdings; not until August 1749 did interest revive.

By then, Titcomb pointed out, inheritances had added many new owners who “were widely scattered, and knew very little of the extent or value of their lands.” After a series of meetings, in June 1753, the owners formed a new Boston-based corporation that was formally “The Proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase from the late Colony of New Plymouth,” or informally either “the Kennebec Company” or “the Plymouth Company.”

In 1761, this corporation hired a surveyor named Nathan Winslow to divide into lots the land on both sides of the Kennebec River between (current) Chelsea and Vassalboro.

An on-line Winslow genealogy says Nathan was born April 1, 1713, in Freetown, Massachusetts, and died Nov. 22, 1772, in Falmouth, Maine. His parents were James and Elizabeth (Carpenter) Winslow, married in 1708. The family were Quakers, and James was the first of the family to move to Maine, getting a land grant and building a mill in Falmouth.

The lots Winslow created had very little river frontage compared to their depth – modern records would call them “spaghetti lots.” Alma Pierce Robbins, in her Vassalboro history, said the Proprietors had voted to have them 50 rods (about 825 feet, or one-fifteenth of a mile) wide and a mile deep.

Beyond the riverfront lots, Winslow laid out a rangeway eight rods wide; then a second tier of long narrow lots; another rangeway; and a third tier of lots. Some lots the Proprietors reserved for themselves; the majority they sold to people wanting to settle in the Kennebec Valley.

By 1766, Titcomb wrote, most of the lots were sold. Because the terms of sale required each new resident to build a house and start farming within three years and stay – or will or sell to a successor – another seven years, they were occupied as well.

In January 1816, Titcomb said, the current Proprietors sold all the unsold bits and pieces, like gores (triangular bits of land where survey lines didn’t quite match) and islands, to a man named Thomas L. Winthrop. He later sold to residents.

This description sounds like a logical plan to create an inhabited region. In practice, though, large areas were left vacant, and people without legally recognized titles began to fill them.

Linwood Lowden, in his Windsor history, said settlers who were unaware of, or deliberately ignored, the Proprietors’ rights began moving into the Windsor area before the Revolution. More came after the war, “settling for the most part wherever their fancy struck.”

A resident named Ebenezer Grover had surveyor Josiah Jones lot out 6,000 acres in Windsor in 1797, Lowden wrote. Grover and others sold lots, many to speculators who resold them. Grover had no legal title to the land he sold, and he knew it: Lowden wrote that some deeds said explicitly the sellers would not defend buyers against claims by the Proprietors.

The Proprietors did make claims, filing lawsuits to evict the squatters. They also recruited agents among the settlers to keep them informed of sales. From 1802 on, they hired surveyors to resurvey parts of Windsor and offered to sell the new lots to the people already living on them.

The squatters, who had paid for their land and were mostly cash-poor as they tried to make a living from it, felt they were being unfairly made to pay again. And, Lowden wrote, when they were hauled into court, they found the judges were often Proprietors or their agents.

Young men in Windsor organized to harass and intimidate the surveyors. Two of the group were Elijah Barton, mentioned last week, and – probably – Paul Chadwick. They drove at least one of the Proprietors’ spies out of town (Lowden quoted his appeal for help to the Massachusetts General Court).

On Sept. 8, 1809, according to Lowden’s description, Isaac Davis was surveying on Windsor Neck, the northeastern part of town, for a resident named Aaron Choate, who planned to re-buy his property from the Proprietors. Davis’s chain men were two settlers’ sons, Jones or Jonas Pratt and Paul Chadwick.

Lowden surmised that the anti-Proprietors saw Chadwick as a turncoat. Nine of them disguised and armed themselves and went after Davis and his team, especially naming Chadwick.

Lowden said some were wrapped in blankets like Indians, and all wore caps and masks, or “veils.” James North, in his Augusta history, described the “conelike” multi-colored peaked caps, from which the veils fell over the men’s faces, with holes for eyes and mouth.

At least three men had guns, specified as pistols in North’s telling. The rest were armed with what Lowden called “the pointed ends of old scythes fastened into pine handles.”

The “Indians” found Choate first. They waited until the surveyors came out of the woods to join him, Chadwick leading. One (Lowden) or several simultaneously (North) shot Chadwick, who died two days later.

The suspects were identified, some by Choate and the dying Chadwick, and arrested. Brought before a magistrate on Sept. 15, they admitted they were there when Chadwick was shot. They were jailed in Augusta to await indictment and trial.

In the interval, as described by Lowden and in more detail by North, their supporters began to fear harsh penalties and to plan a rescue. Word reached the authorities in Augusta of armed men preparing to free the prisoners, “burn the county buildings” and destroy Proprietors’ and agents’ houses.

During the earlier years of unrest, Augusta resident had organized the “Augusta Patrol,” described by North as a 28-man group who took turns patrolling the town overnight. Now, precautions increased.

Augusta officials put a cannon on the west end of the Kennebec bridge and enlarged the nightly patrols. The night of Sept. 29, North wrote, there was a false alarm that kept everyone up all night. Around midnight on Oct. 3, some 70 men actually did approach the bridge and get into a fight with its defenders (apparently without casualties).

“Alarm guns were fired, the court house bell was rung, the Light Infantry turned out, the streets were filled with people and a general uproar ensured,” North said.

In the next few hours, Augusta officials called several hundred armed men (these were organized military companies; North does not use the word “militia”) from neighboring towns to defend the jail and repel the expected attack. A field piece was borrowed from the Hallowell artillery unit, and sentinels were posted throughout Augusta.

In following days, temporary barracks were built to accommodate the out-of-town regiments, and sentry boxes for the sentries. Augusta “assumed the appearance of a military post during actual war,” North wrote.

The Supreme Court’s October term began Oct. 3. The grand jury indicted the nine men for murder and set their trial for Nov. 16. In the intervening weeks, the number of armed companies was reduced to two, with nearby towns contributing in weekly rotation.

North described the well-attended eight-day trial in some detail. Four judges presided, and, in North’s opinion, Judge Isaac Parker’s summing-up “apparently left no escape for the prisoners.”

But, North wrote, the long trial and masses of information and argument “were too much for the feebly discriminating powers of a jury formed after challenging peremptorily the most intelligent men who were called.” (The challenges he referred to were by the defense.)

After their first long deliberation, jurors asked whether they could give verdicts on some but not all of the defendants. When the judges said no, jurors deliberated another two days before acquitting everyone.

* * * * * *

Lowden listed several consequences of the “Malta War.”

One was an 1810 Massachusetts law specifically applying to anyone who disguised himself as an Indian, “or in any other manner,” with the intent of obstructing people, including surveyors, as they were carrying out laws. Such offenders “shall be liable to indictment in the Supreme Judicial Court” and, if convicted, fined and jailed.

Another consequence was the Proprietors’ February 1811 grant of a lot on the west side of the Sheepscot River to Lois Chadwick, “an infant child,” daughter of Paul Chadwick and his (unnamed) widow, because her mother and grandparents were poor and her father died in the Proprietors’ service.

In 1813, Lowden wrote, a Massachusetts commission recommended, and the General Court approved, a deal under which settlers were given “all disputed lands” in the Kennebec Proprietors’ grant, and the Proprietors were given “the township of Saboomook” instead.

(Saboomook was probably what is now the unorganized territory of Seboomook Lake in Somerset County. Wikipedia says its area is 1,435 square miles; its population in 2020 was 23.)

Main sources

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)
North, James W., The History of Augusta (1870)

Websites, miscellaneous

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Windsor brooks named after people

February 28, 2024/1 Comment/in Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley, Windsor/by Website Editor

by Mary Grow

Barton Brook

Barton Brook, in northwestern Windsor, was almost certainly named after Dr. Stephen Barton, Sr. (June 10, 1740- Oct. 21, 1804), or his family.

The brook connects the north end of Mud Pond with the south end of Threemile Pond (which is mostly in China and Vassalboro). In his history of Windsor, Linwood Lowden wrote that in 1799, the stream was named Wonnamdogus, a Native name that is now Warromantogus.

Part of the stream goes through the lot on which Dr. Barton settled in 1803, Lowden said.

Find a Grave says Barton was born in Sutton, Massachusetts. On May 28, 1765, he married Dorothy Learned Moore, who was born April 12, 1747, in Oxford, Massachusetts, and died there Nov. 11, 1838.

The FamilySearch website says the couple had at least seven sons and seven daughters, born between 1765 and 1791. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, in “A Midwife’s Tale” (based on the diary of Dorothy’s sister, midwife Martha Ballard), said they had 13 children, and Dorothy “was almost five months pregnant” when they married.

Not all the Barton children lived to adulthood. Find a Grave says at least their first three sons died in infancy or early childhood, and another site says they lost at least one young daughter.

The sons named as adults are Stephen, Jr. (Aug. 18, 1774-March 21, 1862, born in Oxford, died and buried in Oxford and called Capt. on his gravestone because he was a captain in the militia); Elijah Moore (Aug. 10, 1784-Feb. 22, 1849, born in Vassalboro, Maine); Gideon (June 14, 1786-May 30, 1878, also born in Vassalboro) and Luke N. (Sept. 3, 1791-1837, born in Oxford).

Henry Kingsbury, in the chapter in his Kennebec County history titled The Medical Profession, wrote that Barton came from Oxford in 1774 and practiced in Vassalboro until 1778, when he went back to Oxford temporarily. Lowden said Barton and “three of his brothers” settled in Vassalboro in 1776.

Lowden found Dr. Barton’s “ledger book,” in which the doctor recorded details of his medical practice. In Vassalboro, main activities included “pulling teeth, applying dressings, bleeding patients, inducing vomiting, dispensing pills and elixirs, applying plasters and opening abscesses,” Lowden wrote.

Among common prescriptions were myrrh and aloes (which would have worked as painkillers and antiseptics); “Mugs of Toddy and cider” (Lowden did not guess why); and “Pill chochia,” which Lowden translated as “red pill.”

The Bartons went back to Oxford in 1790 (or 1788 – see box) and stayed until 1800. Returning to Maine, they spent two years in Augusta and another in Vassalboro before moving to Windsor.

Ulrich quoted an Oct. 14, 1802, letter Dr. Barton wrote to oldest son Stephen, still in Oxford, inviting him to move to Maine. The doctor said the family was “getting some land” where the only neighbors for a mile around would be owls, and “the boys” – Elijah and Gideon, aged 18 and 16, Ulrich said – could make a farm “if they will work.”

In his Windsor chapter, Kingsbury said Barton built his log cabin in 1803 “on the meadow in the western part of the town.” Lowden said the family lived “many years in a log cabin.”

Dr. Barton was not with his family in the log cabin for long. He died of consumption two years after they arrived, Kingsbury said (Oct. 21, 1804, Lowden wrote), and is buried where “he and his sons [Elijah and Gideon, according to Lowden] bivouacked the night they entered the woods.”

Find a Grave calls the site “the Barton farm.” A monument – a granite stone, according to Find a Grave – marked the grave in 1892, but Find a Grave says it is no longer there.

Kingsbury said Elijah and Gideon and grandson J. H. Barton settled near Barton’s cabin. Gideon married Sarah Pierce (Nov. 27, 1787-Oct. 9, 1834), of Windsor (Kingsbury) or Vassalboro (FamilySearch). They had at least eight sons and five (FamilySearch) or six (Kingsbury) daughters.

In Lowden’s list of Windsor men who served briefly in the War of 1812, Gideon Barton is named as commander of the company in which Clement and John Moody and Rufus Choate (named in previous articles in this series) served.

Lowden called Gideon Barton one of the first storekeepers in Windsor. He did not know when Barton opened the store in West Windsor, but he apparently found an account book from 1814.

The historian listed more than two dozen types of goods in the inventory – shoes and clothing; pipes, tobacco and pen knives; “powder, flints and shot”; scythes and seed corn; yokes and bows (for draft animals); pickled herring and other foods, including of course rum and molasses; and “itch ointment.”

Lowden said Elijah and Gideon were two of the four owners of a sawmill built on Barton Brook sometime after April 1816, on Gideon’s land. The historian recorded ownership changes up to 1832; he did not know when the mill stopped running.

Kingsbury listed Gideon Barton as a selectman in Malta and Windsor, first elected in 1814 and serving for 15 years. Other Bartons served as selectmen, town clerk and town treasurer in the 19th century.

The circa 1834 petition for a dam across the Kennebec that Henry and Dudley Dearborn signed (see last week’s article) was also signed by four Bartons, E. M. (Elijah Moore), Gideon, Luke M. and Samuel W.

There was a Barton school district, Kingsbury wrote, “near R[ufus]. P. Barton’s.” The schoolhouse there was moved closer to the middle of the district around 1850 and rebuilt; it burned around 1889.

The West Windsor post office, Kingsbury said, opened Sept. 8, 1873, “at the residence of Ira D. Barton, the appointee.” Find a Grave says Ira was Elijah’s son (Dr. Stephen’s grandson), born in 1820 and died in 1898.

The 1869 atlas shows five Bartons – G., J. D., R. P., T., and W. C. – plus a schoolhouse and the West Windsor post office, clustered south of the end of Threemile Pond, near what is now the intersection of Weeks Mills and Barton roads.

G. was probably Dr. Barton’s son, Gideon, Sr. R. P. was almost certainly the doctor’s grandson, Gideon and Sarah’s son, a farmer named Rufus P. (1816-1896). T. could have been Rufus’s younger brother, Theodore (1824-1901).

W. C. must have been William Collins Barton (1808-1889), Elijah’s older son. Elijah’s wife was Sally Fairfield; your writer found no other information about her, and also failed to find a J. D. Barton on the various family trees on line.

One more family distinction: Dr. Stephen Barton was the grandfather of Civil War nurse and Red Cross founder Clarissa “Clara” Harlowe Barton (Dec. 25, 1821-Apr. 12, 1912). Clara was the youngest daughter of Stephen, Jr., and his wife, Sarah “Sally” (Stone) Barton (Nov. 13, 1783-July 18, 1851).

Dorothy Barton younger sister of Martha Ballard

Dorothy Learned (Moore) Barton (April 12, 1747-Nov. 11, 1838) was a younger sister of midwife Martha (Moore) Ballard (1735-1812). Martha’s husband, Ephraim, first came to Fort Western to do surveying work in 1775, and he and Martha moved to Augusta in 1777.

Martha’s diary and related documents on which Laurel Thacher Ulrich drew in writing A Midwife’s Tale give more information about the Bartons.

Martha Ballard

Ulrich told a story from Dorothy and Martha’s childhood in Oxford, Massachusetts, before the Revolution, when American colonists were boycotting British imports, including tea (hence the Dec. 16, 1773, Boston Tea Party).

Dr. Barton, Ulrich said, was a member of the local committee formed to keep tea out of town. But when he was out of the house, his wife and sister-in-law were likely to provide “a cup of tea in the cellar for some sick mother in the neighborhood.”

Or, in the version Clara Barton shared as part of her family history, the sisters held tea parties in the cellar, hanging blankets across the door to keep the odor from the rest of the house.

Ulrich agreed with Lowden and Kingsbury that the Bartons moved several times before settling in Windsor. She said their return to Oxford in 1788 was from economic necessity: Dr. Barton was unsuccessful at “establishing a farm in Maine.” She surmised part of the problem might have been that their first six children (or, per Familysearch, six of the first seven who survived to adulthood) were daughters, unsuited for fieldwork.

The Bartons named two of their daughters Pamela and Clarissa. Ulrich said they were named after heroines of English author Samuel Richardson’s novels with those titles, published in 1740 and 1748, and concluded that Dorothy read the novels. Other daughters’ names she mentioned were Parthenia and Hannah; FamilySearch adds Dorothy and Mary.

When the older Bartons moved back to Oxford for a decade, Pamela, Clarissa and Parthenia stayed in Maine with the Ballards, Ulrich said. Parthenia moved into their household late in May 1788 and lived with her aunt and uncle most of the time until she married in November 1792.

By 1800, Martha Ballard’s health was failing. Ulrich wrote that one of her pleasures was her sister and brother-in-law’s move back to Maine.

Ulrich quoted passages from Martha’s diary about their return in May 1801 and her Sept. 1 visit to them, probably at “Mr. Crages Shop” where they lived first (or possibly in Vassalboro, where they moved later).

Stephen and Dorothy Barton’s son, Elijah, was involved in what historians call the Malta War, the multi-year dispute between proprietors, who claimed land titles from the British, and settlers, who might have alternative legal documents or might claim ownership on the basis of possession and improvement.

Windsor was a major battleground in this “war,” which culminated in a group of settlers shooting and killing a surveyor named Paul Chadwick on Sept. 8, 1809.

Elijah Barton was one of the eight men promptly arrested and jailed for the Chadwick murder. During the months before the mid-November trial, Ulrich wrote that the Ballards and Bartons spent time together, including, she said, an October night when the two sisters worked together to deliver a set of twins.

Ulrich wrote that jury selection for the trial of the alleged murderers began Nov. 16. The trial lasted about two weeks; the jurors acquitted the accused.

And, Ulrich wrote, on Dec. 3, Dorothy Barton and her four sons (Stephen, who was in Maine for the trial, Gideon, Elijah and Luke,) had supper at the Ballards’ and Elijah stayed overnight. “To all appearances, he was just another relative, just another visitor.”

Main sources

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).
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, A Midwife’s Tale The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (1990).

Websites, miscellaneous.

CORRECTION: In the February 29, 2024, issue of The Town Line, the wrong photo of Martha Ballard was published. The correct photo has been added to this online version. It was an editing error.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Windsor brooks named for early settlers

February 21, 2024/0 Comments/in Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley, Windsor/by Mary Grow

map of Windsor, Maine

by Mary Grow

Last week’s article was about ponds in Windsor that were named after people who settled or lived near them. According to Henry Kingsbury’s 1892 Kennebec County history and Linwood Lowden’s 1993 Windsor history, several streams or brooks were also named in recognition of early residents.

Dearborn Brook is the newer name of what Lowden said was the Moody Pond outlet, called in an 1800 deed “Grover’s upper meadow brook on the east side of Oak Hill.”

Dearborn Brook has its origin in southwestern Windsor, near the Windsor-Whitefield town line. It wanders north and east most of the length of the town, with Moody Pond and two other widenings in southern Windsor.

The brook passes west of Windsor’s four corners (the intersection of north-south Route 32 and east-west Route 105); passes under Route 32; and joins the West Branch of the Sheepscot River in northern Windsor.

Besides Grover’s Brook, Lowden said this stream was also called Oak Hill Stream, Meadow Stream, Chases Brook and Colburn Stream or Colburn Brook.

Grover referred to Ebenezer Grover. Lowden identified him as the first man to settle in Windsor, choosing a piece of meadowland in the southeastern area called Pinhook (because of a U-shaped bend in the west branch of the Sheepscot).

Lowden found that Grover was born in York in 1724. He married Martha Grant of Berwick in August 1745; they lived in Georgetown and then in Whitefield on the way to what became Windsor.

Grover “laid claim to, and began to improve” the meadowland in 1781 (when he was 57, Lowden pointed out). He probably moved to Windsor permanently before 1786.

In 1797, Grover, his son Thomas, son-in-law Thomas Day and a neighbor named Abijah Grant had the area surveyed, trying to establish a claim that would compete with the British-based proprietors. Lowden devoted several pages of his history to accounts of Grover’s land dealings.

The historian wrote that Grover’s first home was evidently a house rather than a log cabin. He referenced a Sept. 2, 1797, plan by surveyor Josiah Jones showing “a small building with a glazed window.” It was on the west side of the Sheepscot and a little north of what is now Route 17, Lowden said.

The Grovers probably had three sons and four daughters. Lowden found evidence suggesting Martha Grover died before 1785, and Ebenezer lived with a son-in-law named Joseph Trask, Jr.

Lowden called Grover a man overlooked by historians, who should have credit for his role in Windsor’s early development. Specifically, he deserved recognition for the “first serious mapping” of the town, and for “his significant influence in attracting settlers to this area through his many land transactions.”

* * * * * *

Lowden’s lists of early Windsor settlers include no Dearborns, but the name appears in his history. Your writer has found no evidence explicitly linking the Dearborn family to Dearborn Brook, and no explanation for the stream’s name.

Henry Dearborn, of Pittston, bought half a grist mill at what became Maxcy’s Mills, southeast of the four corners, on May 6, 1823.

In or a bit before 1834, two Dearborns, Henry W. and Dudley T., were among Windsor residents signing a petition to the Maine legislature to dam the Kennebec River at Augusta.

In April 1847, after more than 30 years of declining to build a town house, Windsor voters decided they needed one. They appointed a three-man committee to draft plans and find a site, and on May 15, 1845, they bought William Haskell’s lot for $30.

The deed was signed July 10, 1845; and a second committee, consisting of Haskell, William Hilton and Henry Dearborn, was directed to hire a contractor, plan the building, oversee construction and “accept…the building on completion.”

The voters said work should be done by March 1, 1846, except the plastering – that deadline was June 1, 1846. The first town meeting in the new building started at 1 p.m. May 21, 1846, Lowden wrote.

Lowden quoted an additional provision that allowed “individuals” to add a second floor, providing they paid for it. Evidently they did, because he said this “upper story was used as a school” at first and later as a meeting room for town organizations.

In March 1921, Lowden said, voters decided to replace rather than try to repair the 1846 building.

The on-line site FamilySearch says Henry Wood Dearborn was born in Monmouth Aug. 2, 1798, older son of Dudley (1770-1848) and Keziah (Wood) (1765-1834) Dearborn. The younger son, Columbus, lived only from Sept. 13, 1802, to April 7, 1810. Two daughters lived to adulthood.

On Oct. 20, 1836, Henry married Judith Batchelder (1799-1888); they had “at least one son,” William H.

William H. Dearborn, according to FamilySearch, was born Oct. 13, 1840, in Windsor. In 1862, he enlisted for Civil War service, becoming a member of the 21st Maine Infantry regiment.

This regiment spent two months, from March 21 to May 21, 1863, encamped outside Baton Rouge, Louisiana. There must have been skirmishes with the Confederates, because on May 8, 1863, Lowden said, Dearborn was killed in action – one of at least five Windsor men from the regiment killed in that area that spring.

* * * * * *

Choate Brook was mentioned in the Feb. 15 article as the connection between Savade Pond, in northeastern Windsor, and the west branch of the Sheepscot River. This brook goes southwest under Greeley and Sampson roads and enters the Sheepscot a little west of Sampson Road and north of Route 105.

Lowden named two Choate brothers who were early settlers in Windsor Neck, the northeastern part of the town. They were Aaron Choate and Rufus Lathrop Choate, sons of Abraham Choate, Sr. (March 14 or 24, 1732-April 23, 1800), and his wife, Sarah (Potter) (died in 1811).

Abraham and Sarah were from Ipswich, Massachusetts. Lowden said Abraham came to Whitefield by way of Wiscasset, and owned an interest in a large sawmill at Kings Mills, on the Great Falls in the Sheepscot. An on-line history of Kings Mills says Choate acquired part of the mill and associated rights in 1779.

The genealogy lists Abraham and Sarah’s 14 children: Nehemiah (1757-1775, died on a privateer during the Revolution); Abraham, Jr. (1759-1837); Sally (1761-1837); John (1763-1800); Francis (1764-1799); Aaron (Feb. 7, 1766-March 18, 1853); Moses (1767-1851); the first Rufus Lathrop (1769-1769; lived for less than four months); the second Rufus Lathrop (1770-1771, lived about eight months); Rufus Lathrop (Feb. 28, 1772-Oct. 17, 1836); the first Hannah ( 1774-1774; lived three months); Hannah (1777-1873); Polly (1779-1859); and Ebenezer (1783-1876)

Abraham, Jr., was born in Ipswich in 1759; married Abigail Norris, of Whitefield; and died April 12, 1837. Lowden called him “a prominent citizen of Whitefield.”

According to the on-line genealogy, Aaron was born in Ipswich. On Dec. 20, 1788, in Pownal, he married Elizabeth Acorn of Waldoborough (born about 1770, died in 1844). Before moving to Windsor, they lived in Whitefield, where Lowden said Choate ran the mill his father bought into.

They must have moved while Windsor was still Waterford Plantation, because Aaron Choate is one of those who petitioned to have it incorporated as a town in January 1808.

(Lowden pointed out that the petitioners clearly asked the Massachusetts legislature to name their town Alpha, but the legislation that was approved called it Malta. He explained the change as “the slip of a clerk’s pen.”)

Aaron and Elizabeth had five sons and five daughters, born between 1789 and 1807 (or later), the genealogy says. According to both the genealogy (whose writer used the phrase “It is said”) and Lowden, it was Aaron Choate’s land that Paul Chadwick was surveying when he was murdered by settlers on Sept. 8, 1809, and Choate witnessed the murder.

Elizabeth reportedly died in Windsor, Aaron, in China.

Lowden listed their second son, Aaron, Jr. (May 17, 1792- June 21, 1874), among 13 men who bought pews when the Congregationalists and the Freewill Baptists built the Union Church (aka the North Meetinghouse) in 1827 on Windsor Neck.

Abraham, Jr., and Aaron’s younger brother, Rufus Lathrop, spent “part of his youth” with his uncle in Norwich, Connecticut, Lowden wrote. Kingsbury said he moved to Windsor Neck about 1812.

In Connecticut, he married Elizabeth “Betsey” Maynard. Find a Grave shows their double headstone in the Hallowell Village cemetery; the website says she was born in 1785 and died March 18, 1863, and gives his birthdate as Feb. 18, not Feb. 28, 1772.

Lowden’s list of Windsor men who served briefly in the War of 1812 (mentioned last week) includes private Rufus Choate.

In the mid-1830s, Washington Choate and Thomas Choate (Lowden did not explain where they fit into the family – Aaron’s nephews, perhaps?) were briefly part-owners of a mill on a dam across the west branch of the Sheepscot near the confluence with Dearborn Brook. The dam caused the river and brook to back up onto land owned by 20 people Lowden listed, including Aaron Choate.

Lowden called the Choates one of Windsor’s “five basic families” (the others were the Hallowells, Merrills, Pierces and Sprouls), who were the ancestors of “almost all native residents” when he wrote his history in 1993. In addition to the family members mentioned above, readers may remember from previous articles in this series that he often cited the diary of Orren Choate (June 20, 1868-1948).

Sheepscot River

A 2018 article on the history of the Sheepscot River by Arlene Cole, Newcastle historian and weather recorder, includes a description of its course to the Atlantic Ocean.

Cole wrote that the western branch begins in a swamp in southern Albion and goes through Palermo, where the dam at Branch Mills backs up its flow to form Branch Pond; China, including Weeks Mills Village; Windsor; and Whitefield.

The eastern branch, which Cole called Turner Brook, starts in Palermo, she wrote; the deLorme atlas shows branches from Palermo and Liberty joining, detouring into Montville and returning to Palermo. Trending southwest through Sheepscot Pond, this stream passes through Somerville and joins the west branch south of the village of Coopers Mills in Whitefield.

Cole said this junction marks the beginning of the true Sheepscot River. Above, she wrote, the west branch is 21 miles long and the east branch 14.5 miles long. Below, the river runs another 34 miles to the Atlantic.

Your writer found on line three explanations for the name that has become “Sheepscot.”

One was proposed in 1869 by Rev. Edward Ballard, of Brunswick (then secretary of the Maine Historical Society), as part of a list of Geographical Names on the Maine Coast reprinted in the appendix to an undated national coast survey.

Ballard divided the name into three parts from the Etchemnin (or Etchemin, a subdivision of Algonquian) language: “seep,” which he said means a bird; “sis,” meaning little; and “cot,” meaning place or location. He combined them to mean “Little-bird-place,” and wrote that each year “at the proper season” Maine Natives harvested young ducks on the river.

Cole said the name was Abnaki (Abenaki), another branch of Algonquian. Originally it was Pahsheapsakook, she wrote. She quoted Fanny Hardy Eckstorm’s division – “pahshe” means divided; “apak” means rocks; “ook” means water place or channels – and concluded the name means the place where “the river is split up into many rocky channels.”

A third source, Alfred L. Meister, in the introduction to an undated report on Atlantic salmon in the river, said James Davis of the Popham Colony (1607-1608 in what is now Phippsburg) called the river the Pashipakokee, and other early historians (whom Meister did not name) called it the Aponey or Aponeag. Meister said early fisheries included alewives, salmon and shad.

Main sources

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).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: People for whom ponds are named, part 4

February 14, 2024/0 Comments/in Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley, Windsor/by Mary Grow

by Mary Grow

A suggestion to readers: this story will be easier to follow if you have a map of Windsor, Maine. Do not believe everything you see, however; your writer noted discrepancies between on-line maps and official tax maps of Windsor and its neighboring towns. Two Kennebec County atlases, published in 1856 and 1879, offer other variations.

Windsor is the southeasternmost of the dozen municipalities this series has included in the central Kennebec Valley. Henry Kingsbury called its shape unique in Kennebec County, with “four equal sides and four right angles.”

Windsor covers 36 square miles, Kingsbury wrote. Starting as New Waterford Plantation, it was incorporated as Malta in 1809, became Gerry in 1820 and Windsor in 1822.

It is bordered by Vassalboro and China on the north, Augusta on the west, Somerville on the east and Whitefield on the south. Only Vassalboro and Augusta have frontage on the Kennebec River.

Kingsbury counted “seven distinct bodies of water” partly or wholly in Windsor. Windsor’s tax maps show five named ponds (plus others that are nameless, and numerous wetland/swamp areas) entirely within town boundaries. Four more ponds – Wellman and Given in the south, Threemile (or Three-mile, to Kingsbury) in the northwest, Long in the northeast – are shared with neighbors.

Some of these ponds derived their names from early settlers, according to Kingsbury and Windsor historian Linwood Lowden.

* * * * * *

map of Windsor, Maine

WELLMAN POND

Starting, arbitrarily, in the southwestern corner of Windsor, on the border with the City of Augusta, the Windsor tax map shows that Windsor includes a small part of the east shore of Wellman Pond. (An on-line map shows this pond entirely in Augusta.) This pond might well have been named after a Wellman family, but your writer was unable to find evidence.

The Lakes of Maine website says this pond has an area of 12 acres. It gives no depth.

The Windsor tax map shows the State of Maine owning the land around the Windsor end of the pond, and a large surrounding area that includes Baker Bog a short distance northeast.

East of Wellman Pond and a short distance south of Route 17, Windsor tax maps show the northern tip of Given (or Given’s; formerly, as on the 1856 and 1879 maps, Longfellow) Pond inside the Windsor town line. Three-fourths of the pond is in Whitefield, Kingsbury said.

The Maine Inland Fisheries and Wildlife (IF&W) website says this pond covers 20 acres; Lakes of Maine says 23 acres. Both give its maximum depth as 20 feet.

Kingsbury wrote that Longfellow Pond “probably” took that name “from an early settler,” and was definitely renamed Given’s Pond to honor “another family living on contiguous land.”

Lowden said David Given, born in Newcastle Sept. 4, 1779, and married to Mary Marson there on Dec. 1, 1803, came to Windsor in or after the spring of 1808. He “settled to the east of Given Pond.”

In Kingsbury’s version, David Given arrived in 1810 with his son James (1792-1881). The 1856 and 1879 maps both show J. Given living northeast of Given Pond.

James and his wife, Elizabeth “Betsey” (Johnson) Given (Feb. 27, 1797-March 6, 1888), had three sons (one named David, who was, in 1892, living on what had been his grandfather’s farm, Kingsbury said).

They also had a daughter named Annie (1821-September 1822), who was the first or one of the first people to be buried in the Oak Hill (or Colburn or Coburn) cemetery. The Find a Grave website shows a gravestone Annie shares with Elizabeth J. Given, born in 1830 and died June 17, 1888, at the age of 58.

Family members listed on the Given monument, also pictured on Find a Grave, include an earlier David, born in 1745 and died Jan. 8, 1825, and his wife, Ann, born in 1749 and died Oct. 5, 1832; James’ widow, Betsey (whose birth year is listed as 1795); and David (probably James and Betsey’s son), born in 1837, married Sylvia Le Ballister (1848-1930), and died in 1921.

The youngest David was a teacher as well as a farmer, and served the town as a selectman for eight years and supervisor of schools for three years, Kingsbury said.

* * * * * *

East and north of Wellman and Given ponds, close enough to Wellman so the State of Maine owns its western shore, is long, narrow Moody Pond, the southernmost widening of Dearborn Brook.

According to Kingsbury, Moody’s Pond, near Given’s Pond, “received its designation in a similar manner” to Given’s. Lowden found that Windsor attracted several families named Moody, one (or more) of whom might have lived close to Moody’s Pond.

Deacon Clement Moody, Lowden wrote, was born in Nobleboro c. 1746; an on-line source corrects the date to 1776, which fits better with his history. He died May 5, 1863.

Lowden said Clement and Mary (Moody) filed marriage intentions April 4, 1796, in Nobleboro; presumably they married soon afterward. Mary Moody Moody was born Dec. 10, 1772. She died Dec. 10, 1856, according to an on-line genealogy, or Dec. 10, 1865, according to Lowden.

Lowden wrote that the Moodys came to Windsor in the summer of 1801. Clement served as deacon of the Whitefield Baptist Church, and in 1820 helped organize the North Windsor Baptist Church.

Clement’s land was on the Windsor-Whitefield line in southern Windsor. Lowden wrote that he sold his property to his nephew, Clement Moody II, Richard’s son.

Your writer worked hard to unscramble the Moody genealogy. She concluded that Richard Moody, another early settler Kingsbury named, was Deacon Clement’s brother.

An on-line source says Richard was born in Nobleboro in 1762 and died in Windsor in 1839. This source lists only one (the oldest?) son in each succeeding generation.

Richard, if your writer interpreted different incomplete sources correctly, had (at least) three sons.

John was born Dec. 4, 1789. Lowden’s list of early Windsor residents says he owned land on Windsor Neck in the northern part of town.

Richard II was born in 1793 in Nobleboro and died in 1876 in Windsor. The on-line source lists the younger Richard’s son as Clement F., born in 1823 in Windsor and died there in 1888; and Clement F.’s son as John H. (1868-1952).

Richard I’s son Clement was born in 1800 and died in 1858. Clement’s son Miles was living when Kingsbury finished his history; Kingsbury said he had moved in 1888 from “the old homestead where his father died” to South Windsor to take care of his in-laws.

Lowden’s list of Windsor men who served briefly in the War of 1812 (they spent less than three weeks in Belfast after the British had occupied it, he wrote) includes Sergeant Clement Moody and private John Moody (uncle, in his mid-30s, and nephew, aged 22, if your writer’s genealogical conclusions are correct).

The 1866 Windsor school committee report included in Lowden’s history lists Miles Moody as District 2 school agent and yet another Clement Moody as District 7 agent.

* * * * * *

Less than a mile south of Windsor’s four corners (the intersection of Route 32 and Route 105), on the east side of Route 32, is a small round pond ignored by IF&W and Lakes of Maine, but mentioned by Lowden and Kingsbury. It is nameless on contemporary tax maps; the historians said its names have included Dorr’s Pond, Donnell Pond (on the 1856 and 1879 maps) and Grant Pond (to Kingsbury in 1892).

This “aqueous lilliputian” covers a little more of an acre, but is worth notice because, Kingsbury wrote, “it has no perceptible outlet, and, as near as can be ascertained by soundings, no bottom.”

Your writer found no relevant Dorrs or Grants. The name Donnell Pond recognizes Methodist preacher, Rev. Moses Donnell, Jr.

Donnell was born in Wiscasset Aug. 25, 1789, and came to Windsor in March, 1818. He kept detailed records, from which Lowden took information about his strenuous life and how much – or little – money he earned. Lowden listed different houses Donnell probably owned at different times and wrote that he preached in Windsor in 1822 and again from 1832 until his death.

After 1838, he was appointed to different circuits, preaching in multiple towns and traveling thousands of miles. His home base was Windsor; Lowden said he moved back for good on Dec. 3, 1839, taking over the “circuit house” that stood between Donnell Pond and the road that is now Route 32.

The Find a Grave website says in 1817, Donnell married Martha Cunningham, born in 1793. The couple named their children Mary (1819-1876), Jeremiah (1821-1906), John Wesley (1826-1869) and Moses (1833-1904).

Rev. Donnell died on October 2, 1861, and Martha sometime in 1868. Find a Grave has a photo of the family monument in Windsor’s Resthaven Cemetery, which is on Route 32 a short distance south of his former house.

* * * * * *

MUD POND

Other ponds in or partly in Windsor are not named for people.

Going back west to the Augusta line, north of Route 105, is Mud Pond (and on the tax map another unnamed pond north of it). It covers either 52 acres (IF&W) or 65 acres (Lakes of Maine) and has a maximum depth of 12 feet. Located below Porcupine Hill, Mud Pond is accessible by “an old woods road and trail,” the state says.

Barton Brook connects Mud Pond with the south end of Threemile Pond, which is mostly in Windsor’s northern neighbors, China and Vassalboro.

THREE MILE POND

Threemile Pond is the largest of the named lakes – 1,162 acres, according to IF&W, or 1,174 acres according to Lakes of Maine. Its maximum depth is 37 feet; it has shore frontage in Vassalboro on the northwest and China on the northeast. Public access is via the state-owned boat landing on Route 3, in Vassalboro.

The on-line Google map shows town lines following the shoreline to leave the pond entirely in China & Vassalboro. All three towns’ tax maps show straight lines, putting the triangular southern end of the pond, and one of its four small islands, in Windsor.

To Kingsbury, this pond’s name “requires no elucidation.” Wikipedia relates the name to its size, saying that “Despite the name,” the pond is 2.71 miles long.

Jumping to northeastern Windsor, near the Somerville town line, on-line maps show four more ponds; the tax map shows two and some swampland. The smaller northeastern pond is named Fox Pond. The tax map shows a brook – one-eighth of a mile long, Kingsbury wrote — connecting it with larger Savade Pond.

Savade Pond’s outlet flows a short distance west into the intersection of Bull Brook and Choate Brook. Choate Brook flows into the west branch of the Sheepscot River. The State of Maine has a Savade Pond boat landing on a 14.1-acre parcel on Greeley Road.

Kingsbury said Fox Pond was “a favorite resort” of wild foxes. Savade he equated with “surveyed.”

South of Route 105 on Windsor’s eastern boundary, Long Pond is a wide place in the west branch of the Sheepscot River, on the Somerville town line. This pond covers 523 acres (IF&W) or 504 acres (Lakes of Maine), and is only 16 feet deep at its deepest.

Main sources

Kingsbury Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Lowden Lowden, Linwood H., good Land & fine Contrey but Poor roads a history of Windsor, Maine (1993).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: People for whom ponds are named, Part 3

February 7, 2024/0 Comments/in Albion, China, Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley/by Mary Grow

by Mary Grow

Dutton Pond

A small pond shared between Albion and its southern neighbor, China, has been known as Dutton Pond for as long as your writer has lived in China. But the map of China in the 1856 and 1879 atlases of Kennebec County names it Pickerel Pond.

Pickerel/Dutton Pond is on the north side of Dutton Road. Dutton Road branches off from Pleasant View Ridge Road, which goes east from Route 202 at the four corners southeast of China Village, on the northeast corner of China Lake’s east basin. At the top of a hill, Pleasant View Ridge Road turns sharp right (south); Dutton Road plunges down the other side of the hill, still heading east, passes the south end of Dutton Pond and crosses into southern Albion, where it becomes Libby Hill Road.

On the 1856 and 1879 maps, C. E. Dutton owned the house on the north side of the corner where Dutton and Pleasant View Ridge roads diverge. Diagonally across Dutton Road, in the southeast corner of the T intersection, was a schoolhouse.

Charles E. Dutton was neither an early settler in China nor a native of the town; he probably arrived in 1851 as a teenager (see below).

According to the Find a Grave website, Dutton was born Dec. 8, 1839. Henry Kingsbury, in his Kennebec County history, wrote that Charles was the son of Coffran Dutton and grandson of Jonathan Dutton, “who moved from Montville to Vassalboro, and in 1839 lived where Melvin Applegate now resides.” If Jonathan brought his family, Charles was born in Vassalboro.

Kingsbury continued, “In 1851 they [three generations again?] moved to China.” He next wrote that Charles Dutton married Annis W. Barlow, who was born in Freedom, Maine, Sept. 6, 1846 (or 1847, according to an on-line genealogy).

The China bicentennial history portrays Dutton as an educator first and foremost. Kingsbury listed him as a China selectman, elected in 1873 and serving seven terms, four of them as board chairman.

School District 7, in northern China, was named the Dutton district. The 1856 and 1879 maps each show a schoolhouse (the history says there were three consecutively), and apparently another was built for the 1886 school year. The Dutton district school was closed in 1902.

Each China school district had a school agent, usually elected by town meeting voters, whose responsibilities included allocating funds and recommending how many school terms to have for how long each year and what teacher(s) to hire. School agents were responsible to the town’s school committee (until 1857 and from 1863 to 1870) or to the school supervisor.

(China had a maximum of 22 school districts, rearranged repeatedly. School was usually held two terms a year, a shorter one [between a month and three months] in summer and a longer [two to four months] winter term. Dates were not standardized; and a district might skip or shorten a term, especially if money were tight.)

The China history includes Charles Dutton on a list of people who taught many terms, “usually with favorable comments.” Kingsbury wrote that he taught 27 terms, “nearly all in the town of China.” One term mentioned in the history was in the winter of 1872-1873: Dutton taught algebra in the China Village school, close to his home.

Dutton must have been China’s supervisor of schools in 1878, because he reported in 1879 that there were too many different textbooks in use – 20 geography texts, for example, some “so old that they listed only the first thirty-three states in the United States.” (The 34th state, Kansas, was admitted Jan. 29, 1861; it was followed by West Virginia in 1863, Nevada in 1864, Nebraska in 1867 and Colorado in 1876, for a total of 38 states by the end of 1878.)

At the March 1879 town meeting, voters accepted Dutton’s recommendation to appoint a five-man committee to look into consolidating school districts and standardizing textbooks. He and four other distinguished residents reported to a special meeting held May 5, 1879.

The history says nothing about districts, but it says voters approved the committee’s recommended textbooks and voted “to sustain” Dutton as he introduced them and disallowed all others. Dutton bought the books and, the history says, donated his commission to the students, who had to buy them in turn.

(Alas, by 1886 a new supervisor was again deploring the variety of texts; he recommended the town start buying and owning books for students. In August 1890, a state law “requiring towns to provide free textbooks” became effective. China spent $862 for textbooks in 1891and by the beginning of 1893 owned 1,730.)

In 1879-1880, Dutton was again supervisor of schools. The history related his dealings with a Colby College student whom he hired without examination, assuming him qualified, for another northern China district.

There were soon complaints that the young man “could not do arithmetic and was generally incompetent.” Dutton found the complaints valid and fired the teacher; district parents “relented and petitioned that he be reinstated.”

He came back, “but remained incompetent, and Mr. Dutton felt that the students’ time had been wasted.”

In the fall of 1879, supervisor Dutton visited the District 16 school in western China, where he found three students. The China history says he “promptly went to see some of the district parents, who told him they simply were not ready to have their children gone for five or six hours a day.” (Whether the children were too young, or were old enough so they were needed to help with fall work, the history does not say.)

Dutton unsympathetically ordered the school to stay open. The parents’ money therefore continued to be spent; and, the history says, “the students soon appeared.”

Dutton was a Mason. Kingsbury listed him as master of Central Lodge in China Village in 1864 and 1869, and of the village’s second Masonic organization, Dunlap Chapter, in 1875 and 1886.

He was active in the China Cemetery Association, organized in 1865 to manage the large China Village cemetery at the head of the lake (and since the 1940s the extension cemetery on Neck Road). The bicentennial history says he was president of the organization in the 19th century (citing Kingsbury, so before 1892) and from 1911 to 1921.

A list of members of Maine’s 17th legislature, in 1911, includes Charles E. Dutton from China.

Charles and Annis Dutton had four children. Find a Grave lists a daughter, Idella, born in 1869; twins, Arthur J. and Fannie A., born July 18, 1874; and a younger son, Everett E., born Jan. 26, 1887. All lived past 1950.

Idella married Fred H. Lewis (1860-1933), of China, and is buried with him in the China Village cemetery.

Charles Dutton died in China Sept. 5, 1922; Annis died in China April 5, 1926. Both are buried in the China Village cemetery; the same gravestone names them and their other three children.

Dutton Pond, shared between China and Albion, has an area of 57 acres and a maximum depth of 33 feet, according to the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife and to Lake Stewards of Maine.

* * * * * *

Evans Pond

China’s Evans Pond is south of Dutton Pond and entirely within the town. It lies on the east side of Hanson Road; Hanson Road runs roughly north-south east of China Lake, approximately half-way between Lakeview Drive along the lake and Pleasant View Ridge Road farther east.

The pond was named for an early settler – before the Revolution, Kingsbury wrote, and “contemporary with the pioneers” (the Clark brothers, who came in 1774) – named Joseph Evans.

An on-line source calls him Joseph Evans, Sr., born Nov. 23, 1740, in Dorchester, Massachusetts, to Richard and Zipporah (Blake) Evans. On April 28, 1766, he married Ame (also Ama, Amey, Ann or Anna) Payson, in Sharon, Massachusetts. She was born before July 22, 1750.

This source says Joseph “registered for military service” in 1777, but does not say from where – if Kingsbury is correct, from what is now China (which was Jones Plantation until 1796 and Harlem until 1818).

Kingsbury said he left his wife and children in the wilderness by Evans Pond while he served in the Revolution. (The first four of the Evans’ four sons and three daughters were born before 1775, this source says; another on-line site lists only one son.)

The seven-child on-line source says the Evans’ youngest daughter, Zipporah, was born in Vassalboro in 1781; married in China in 1802; and died in Houlton in 1854. Their youngest son, Nathaniel, Jr., was born in 1788 in China and died there in 1861.

This source puts Evans in Lincoln, Maine, in 1790. If so, he was back in China by 1797; the bicentennial history names Joseph and Nathaniel Evans among founding members of the First Baptist Church of Harlem, organized that year.

Nathaniel Evans could have been Joseph’s younger brother, born in Dorchester April 5, 1745; married in Vassalboro in November 1772; “registered for military service in 1777 [with his brother?]”; and died June 14, 1819, in Searsmont.

The China history says Joseph Evans was in Harlem in 1801 and 1802, and in 1801 a comparatively well-off resident: town meeting voters entrusted a pauper named Jack to his care. Evans was to receive “thirty dollars and the use of a cow” in return, prorated if Jack stayed less than a year with him.

In 1802, town meeting voters were asked to accept as a town road “the road between Joseph Evans’ dwelling and the lake [China Lake, presumably].”

The on-line source says Joseph died in mid-April 1826 and Ame sometime after 1830, both in China.

Kingsbury gave a paragraph to one of Joseph and Ame’s grandsons, Cyrenus Kelley Evans (May 13, 1816-Dec. 4, 1891). Find a Grave’s website has a photo of his gravestone in the South China Village cemetery that says his name was Cyrenius.

This Evans married Ephraim Clark’s granddaughter Asenath Clark (May 24, 1820-Oct. 9, 1911), thereby uniting two of China’s early families.

Kingsbury wrote that Evans “filled important positions in China and was twenty-one years justice of the peace.” The Find a Grave website says, “Mr. Evans filled important positions in China, and was twenty-one years of age when justice of the peace.”

A June 1870 on-line list of Maine magistrates says Evans was appointed a justice of the peace March 4, 1868, but does not specify whether that was his first appointment.

Evans Pond has an area of 19 acres and a maximum depth of only 14 feet, according to the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife (as of 2000). Lake Stewards of Maine gives the size as 29 acres and agrees on the depth.

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: People for whom ponds are named – Part 2

January 31, 2024/0 Comments/in Albion, Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley/by Mary Grow

An 1837 engraving of the assault on Elijah Lovejoy’s printing company, in Alton, Illinois, where he was murdered for his anti-slavery beliefs.

by Mary Grow

Moving east from Winslow to Albion, that town has Lovejoy Pond, named after an early family who settled beside it.

Which family member came first is debated. Henry Kingsbury, in his Kennebec County history, named Rev. Daniel Lovejoy. Ruby Crosby Wiggin, in her history of Albion, said no, Daniel’s father, Francis Lovejoy, came first.

Francis Lovejoy was born in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1734. Wiggin wrote that he, his wife Mary (Bancroft), born in 1742, and their children came to Maine in 1790.

Lovejoy Pond

Francis left some of the family with his brother Abiel “on the Kennebec,” Wiggin said, while he cleared land for a cabin on the west shore of Fifteen-Mile Pond (Lovejoy Pond’s first name, reportedly because it was 15 miles from Fort Western).

Kingsbury included in his history an undated sketch map of the town of Fairfax (later Albion) showing “Rev D Lovejoy” – Francis and Mary’s son (see below) — owner of a rectangular lot on the west shore of the pond, near the south end.

(Your writer is sure the brother “on the Kennebec” was Captain Abiel Lovejoy, born Dec. 16, 1731, in Andover, and died July 4, 1811, in Sidney, Maine, according to Find a Grave. Alice Hammond’s 1992 history of Sidney includes an interesting summary of his life written by a descendant.)

Albion did not become Albion until February 1824. It started as Freetown Plantation in 1802, was renamed Fairfax in March 1804 and Lagonia (or Lygonia or other spellings) in March 1821.

Daniel Lovejoy was born March 31, 1776, in Amherst, New Hampshire, and died Aug. 11, or possibly Oct. 11, 1833. Wiggin said he was the youngest son of Francis and Mary’s four boys and three girls.

Daniel Lovejoy was a farmer and a Congregational minister. Wiggin listed him as one of three founders of the Congregational church in Albion in 1803.

When the Maine Missionary Society was founded in Hallowell in June 1807, Lovejoy was elected as one of its 52 new members, Wiggin said. He was also part of the Massachusetts Society for Propagating the Gospel.

Wiggin summarized a January 1808 trip for one – or both – of these groups that took him to Freedom, Unity, Burnham, Palmyra, Pittsfield and Vassalboro, among other places. She found that he was “licensed to preach” and later “ordained an evangelist” (no dates given).

From at least 1813, Lovejoy was clerk of the Albion church. In June 1829, Wiggin wrote, he “was installed as pastor” of four area churches, in Albion, Unity, Washington and Windsor. The Albion congregation built its first church in 1831-1832, meeting there for the first time Nov. 12, 1832. That meeting, Wiggin commented, was the last one that Lovejoy reported as clerk before he died.

He served in several town offices. Wiggin and Kingsbury said he was elected town clerk and town treasurer at Freetown Plantation’s first town meeting, held Saturday, Oct. 30, 1802, beginning at 10 a.m. They disagreed on how long he held each office – two or three terms as clerk and one or two as treasurer.

At a Monday, March 28, 1803, meeting, voters approved petitioning the Massachusetts General Court to incorporate “this plantation” with its current boundaries. They appointed Lovejoy to act as their agent in sending the petition.

In 1804, he was one of the three men on Fairfax’s first school board.

In January 1823 a Lagonia special town meeting appointed a five-man committee to petition the legislature – by then the Maine legislature in Portland – to rename the town Richmond. Daniel Lovejoy was on this committee, as was Joseph Cammet (see below), who, like Lovejoy, had been active in town affairs for years.

(The Town of Richmond, on the west bank of the Kennebec River south of Gardiner, was incorporated Feb. 10, 1823, and was named for Fort Richmond, built in 1719. Was Lagonia’s petition too late?)

On Sept. 20, 1801, in Albion, Daniel Lovejoy married Elizabeth Gordon Pattee, born Feb. 8, 1772, in Georgetown. This Elizabeth Pattee was not Ezekiel’s daughter Elizabeth, mentioned last week, who was born in 1777 and married Edmund Freeman. This one was a cousin of the younger one, daughter of Ezekiel’s youngest brother, Ebenezer (1739 or 1740-1825).

Daniel and Elizabeth Lovejoy had two daughters – they named the one born in 1815 Elizabeth Gordon – and either five or, probably, seven sons (sources disagree). Wiggin wrote that one son “died soon after birth,” one when three years old and one “as a very young man.”

Kingsbury wrote that Rev. Daniel Lovejoy “caused the greatest sensation the quiet community had ever known by hanging himself in his barn” in June 1833. Wiggin did not repeat this story.

Elijah Lovejoy

Daniel and Elizabeth’s most famous son was anti-slavery activist Elijah Parish Lovejoy (1802-1837). He was profiled in this series in the Aug. 13, 2020, issue of The Town Line.

Joseph Cammett Lovejoy (1805-1871; did Daniel choose the name to honor his local colleague? The revised spelling, Cammett instead of Cammet, is from Wikipedia) is summarized on Wikipedia as “clergyman, activist, and author.” Wiggin called him Reverend.

Wiggin wrote that Joseph graduated from Bowdoin College, Class of 1829. On Oct. 6, 1830, he married Sarah Elizabeth Moody (1806-1887 or 1888; sources differ), of Hallowell, at her family home in Hallowell.

An on-line source lists their 10 children, born between 1831 and 1852. The first four were born in Bangor and Orono, where an on-line report says Lovejoy was working with the Penobscots on Indian Island and may have started a school for them.

Wiggin found records of his service as a military chaplain for two months in the spring of 1839, during the 1838-1839 Aroostook War (see the March 17, 2022, issue of The Town Line).

His activism included abolitionism. He was a contributor to The Emancipator, started in 1833 by the American Anti-Slavery Society; and on-line sources list him as publisher of or contributor to the Hallowell-based anti-slavery paper Liberty Standard (1841-1848).

One of Joseph and Elizabeth’s sons was born in 1841 in Hallowell. Their last five children were born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Wiggin said Lovejoy was a pastor from 1843 to 1853. He was later a civil servant in Boston.

After the family moved to Massachusetts, Lovejoy became what Kingsbury called “an anti-prohibitionist,” as the temperance movement changed from moderation to prohibition (Maine’s prohibition law passed in 1851). Two of his pamphlets, found on line, are titled Prohibition Ground to Powder! (1869) and The Errors and Crimes of Prohibition (1871).

Lovejoy introduced the first pamphlet by saying that he had predicted the fiery debates over prohibition in a sermon 17 years earlier. Now, he wrote, he had “stood in that fire for seventeen years,…a long time to endure privation and abuse.”

He remained steadfast, he wrote, because “I told the truth in vindication of God’s word and Christ’s example; and in defence of the personal rights of every human being.”

Lovejoy began the 1871 pamphlet with a history of drinking, from the Assyrians (who, Lovejoy said, welcomed guests and honored their gods with wine) to Christ’s endorsement of wine. From this background, Lovejoy argued that the prohibitionists’ claim that alcohol was poison “is a broad and palpable falsehood.”

Prohibition was “founded on falsehood” and impossible to enforce, he continued. He called prohibitionists “guilty of great immorality”; and he said the execution of prohibition laws was “immoral and criminal.”

Wikipedia lists two biographies Lovejoy wrote. He and his younger brother Owen co-wrote and published in 1838 their Memoir of the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy; Who Was Murdered in Defense of the Liberty of the Press, at Alton, Illinois, Nov. 7, 1837.

Joseph’s second book, Wikipedia says, was titled Memoir of Rev. Charles T. Torrey, Who Died in the Penitentiary of Maryland, Where He Was Confined for Showing Mercy to the Poor, published in Boston in 1847. Other sources say Torrey wrote it and call Lovejoy the editor or a contributor.

Joseph Lovejoy died in Cambridge in 1871; Sarah died in Boston in 1887 or 1888; both are buried in Cambridge.

Owen Lovejoy (1811-1864) worked on the family’s farm until he was 18 and then, with the family’s encouragement, spent three years (1830-1833) at Bowdoin College, though Wiggin said he did not graduate. He joined older brother Elijah, in Alton, Illinois, and was present when a pro-slavery mob killed Elijah and destroyed his printing press the night of Nov. 7, 1837.

Wiggin wrote that Owen Lovejoy studied theology in Alton and was a pastor in Princeton, Illinois, from 1838 to 1854. (Princeton is about 175 miles north of Alton and about 100 miles southwest of Chicago.)

Owen was an abolitionist and an Underground Railroad conductor in Illinois. He was elected a state legislator in 1854, and worked with his friend, Abraham Lincoln, to form the Illinois Republican Party. Elected to the U.S. Congress in the fall of 1856, he continued to represent Illinois from 1857 until his death.

Elijah’s youngest brother, John Ellingwood Lovejoy (1817-1891), was appointed by President Lincoln as U.S. consul in Peru; Wiggin said he served three and a half years. He moved to Iowa before 1843, if Find a Grave is correct in saying his four children were born there. Wiggin wrote that he “retired as a farmer.”

Find a Grave lists four family members buried in Albion’s Lovejoy cemetery; there are also unmarked fieldstones, the Town of Albion on-line site says. Marked graves are of Rev. Francis Lovejoy (Oct. 30, 1734-Oct. 12, 1818); his wife, Mary Bancroft Lovejoy (Aug. 2, 1742-May 8, 1792); Francis and Mary’s son, Rev. Daniel Lovejoy (March 31, 1776-Aug. 11, 1833); and Daniel and Elizabeth’s son, the first Owen Lovejoy (July 9, 1807-1810).

Several sources say this cemetery is on the west shore of Lovejoy Pond overlooking the water. A photograph on Find a Grave’s list of a dozen cemeteries in Albion confirms this information, showing a sign, gravestones and a pond; and your writer has driven past the cemetery sign on Pond Road.

The Town of Albion information on Lovejoy cemetery adds the cemetery is on South Vigue Shore Road. The map accompanying the information shows no cemetery near Lovejoy Pond.

By the time Wiggin finished her history in 1964, Albion had put up a monument marking Elijah Lovejoy’s birthplace. Colby College, from which he graduated in 1826, had established the annual Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award (in 1952) and named a new building in his honor (in 1959). The college also maintains Albion’s Lovejoy cemetery.

(The June 11, 2020, issue of The Town Line has more information on this family and other early Albion residents, and – returning to a recent theme – a partial list of early dams and mills on Albion’s principal stream.)

Lovejoy Pond, in Albion, the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife says, covers 324 acres and has a maximum depth of 32 feet (as of 1997). The Lake Stewards of Maine site agrees on the depth and, as with Pattee Pond, reduces the size, to 279 acres.

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Wiggin, Ruby Crosby, Albion on the Narrow Gauge (1964).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: People for whom ponds are named

January 24, 2024/0 Comments/in Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley, Waterville, Winslow/by Mary Grow

by Mary Grow

Previous articles have mentioned ponds and lakes in central Kennebec Valley towns with people’s names, like Pattee or Pattee’s Pond, in Winslow. Some of these water bodies are named for early settlers. Your writer intends for the next few weeks to match ponds and people, to the extent permitted by available resources

According to one on-line source, Pattee Pond honors early Winslow resident Ezekiel Pattee (or Paty), born Sept. 3, 1732, in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Your writer found no evidence that Pattee owned land on or near the pond; nor did she find any other explanation for the pond’s name.

Ezekiel Pattee’s grave marker at Howard Cemetery, on Rte. 201, in Winslow.

Ezekiel’s parents were Benjamin Pattee, Sr. (1696-1787), from Haverhill, Massachusetts, and Patience (Collins) Pattee (1700-1784), from Gloucester. Find a Grave says they married in 1718 or 1720 and had either three sons and three daughters or seven sons and four daughters (two Find a Grave pages differ).

An on-line genealogy says Benjamin was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, in 1687 (not1696), making him 100 when he died. This source says he and Patience died in Georgetown, Maine. If they moved there before 1760, their relocation might explain why Ezekiel married there, on May 24, 1760.

Ezekiel’s wife was Margaret Howard (1740-May 21, 1821), daughter of Lieutenant Samuel Howard and Margaret Lithgow (though the on-line genealogy erroneously gives her name as Margaret Harward, it adds “OF Fort Halifax, Kennebec, Maine”).

Margaret Lithgow was a sister of Colonel William Lithgow, first commander of Fort Halifax in 1754. Samuel Howard was a brother of Captain James Howard, first commander of Fort Western, in Augusta, in 1754; Samuel served at Fort Halifax as one of Lithgow’s subordinates.

The on-line genealogy lists only two children, Ezekiel and Elizabeth, born to Ezekiel and Margaret. Find a Grave says these were the seventh and eighth of their 11 children, born between 1761 and 1783.

Ezekiel and Margaret named their first son, born in 1761, Samuel (in honor of Samuel Howard?). He died in 1783; and they named their eighth son, born that year, Samuel again.

The second Samuel’s next older brother, born in 1781, they named Lithgow Pattee. Your writer assumes the name honored Colonel William Lithgow.

Ezekiel Pattee’s gravestone identifies him as a Revolutionary War veteran and calls him General. A post-war (1792) report in the Maine States archives says he was a regimental colonel in the 8th Division Militia.

Pattee Pond

Henry Kingsbury, in his Kennebec County history, and Edwin Carey Whittemore, in his Waterville centennial history, listed some of Pattee’s contributions to Winslow from the town’s incorporation in 1771.

The warrant for Winslow’s first town meeting, held at Fort Halifax at 8 a.m. on May 23 (a Thursday), 1771, was addressed to “Mr. Ezekiel Pattee, the Freeholders and other inhabitants of Winslow qualified to vote in town affairs,” Whittemore wrote. At the meeting, voters elected Pattee town clerk, town treasurer and one of the three selectmen.

Kingsbury said Pattee served as a selectman for 19 years and as treasurer from 1771 to 1794, except when Zimri Haywood held the post for a year in 1781. He might have been town clerk until 1780, because the next man listed is Haywood, in 1781. Pattee was elected town clerk again in 1782, maybe for three years, and in 1788, maybe for four years.

Under Lithgow’s command, the main part of Fort Halifax was guarded by two blockhouses on the heights to the east, built in the fall of 1754 and the spring of 1755. Pattee owned and lived in one of these blockhouses, and in 1775 at least one town meeting was held there. Later, Kingsbury said, Pattee moved the blockhouse “to his farm down the river.”

Pattee was trading out of the former Fort Halifax longhouse, called the Fort house, “before the revolution,” Kingsbury said. Kingsbury listed his merchandise as including nails, blankets and the rum and molasses so ubiquitous in early mercantile accounts.

Whittemore called Pattee Winslow’s “pioneer innkeeper.” Pattee’s youngest daughter, Elizabeth (1777-1866), told Kingsbury that Pattee also ran a tavern in the old fort, entertaining many guests from Boston and at one time, Aaron Burr.

(Burr, now best remembered as Thomas Jefferson’s first-term vice-president [1801-1805] and as the man who killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel on July 11, 1804, was also a Revolutionary War soldier. His first assignment was with Arnold’s Québec expedition; whether this was the occasion Elizabeth Pattee meant or whether he came back to the Kennebec later, your writer does not venture to guess.)

Returns of the Fifth Regiment of the First Brigade, in 1792, commanded by Colonel Ezekiel Pattee.

By the time the July 8, 1776, town meeting convened, Winslow’s treasury was empty, and the Massachusetts government was requiring every town to collect ammunition and, evidently, to build a place to store it safely. Voters decided to borrow shingles and clapboards from half a dozen residents, with Pattee’s loan of 100,000 shingles the most generous.

Pattee was not on Winslow’s first Committee of Safety in 1776, but Whittemore wrote that he was among those who served on later “Committees of Correspondence, Inspection and Safety.”

(After British rule collapsed, leading citizens in most towns formed these committees to fill the vacuum. Duties included communicating and cooperating with other towns; supporting the war effort and suppressing Tories; and creating and enforcing local regulations and ordinances and doing other necessary tasks to keep town government running.)

When wandering groups of impoverished native Americans showed up in Winslow, it was “Squire Pattee” who fed them. At one point, Whittemore said, the town voted to pay him $5 a pound for 1,000 pounds of beef for this purpose.

In 1783, Pattee was chosen Winslow’s second representative to the Massachusetts legislature (Zimri Haywood was the first, in May 1782). Whittemore’s list of representatives says Pattee served in 1783 and 1784 and in 1786 and 1787; the town had no representative in Boston in 1785.

In 1787, Kingsbury said, Winslow chose Pattee and James Stackpole to join Capt. Denes (or Dennis) Getchell, of Vassalboro, to survey and mark the boundary line between the two towns.

When the first town church committee was elected at a Feb. 10, 1794, town meeting, Pattee was on it. Sources differ on the size and assignment of this committee. It and/or a separate committee had at least two responsibilities: to oversee building a meeting house, started in 1795 and finished in 1797; and to organize the June 10, 1795, ordination of Winslow’s first resident minister, Rev. Joshua Cushman.

Kingsbury wrote that Pattee “gave the burying ground on the river road, in which his body now lies.” He died Nov. 24, 1813, aged 81, and is buried in Winslow’s Howard cemetery.

Nearby are the graves of his wife Margaret and nine other Pattees. They include first son, Samuel, who died in 1783; second son, Lieutenant Benjamin (1762-1830), and Benjamin’s wife, Huldah (Dawes) (1766-1832); third son, William (1765-1795) and his wife, Sybil (Parker) (1772-1861), whom he married the year he died; oldest daughter Sarah (1767-1772); a daughter named Margaret W., who died July 29, 1807, at the age of nine years and whose name is not on other Find a Grave lists; and a granddaughter (?), Mary E., (1804-1901).

Also buried in the Howard cemetery is Colonel Josiah Hayden (see the Jan. 11, 2024, issue of The Town Line).

The Howard Cemetery is on the west side of Route 201 (Augusta Road), on the east side of the Kennebec River, about 0.6 miles south of the Carter Memorial Drive intersection and about 0.2 miles south of Drummond cemetery, on the west side of the road (mentioned in the Jan. 4, 2024, issue of The Town Line).

Pattee Pond in Winslow has an area of 712 acres and a maximum depth of 27 feet, according to a state Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife website (last updated in 2000). The Lake Stewards of Maine website agrees on the maximum depth, but reduces the size to 523 acres.

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: Diary-keeping, Ballard & Bryant

January 17, 2024/0 Comments/in Central ME, Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley/by Mary Grow

Bryant served on the “USS Constitution” on her maiden voyage in 1797.

by Mary Grow

Temporarily distracted from the Kennebec Valley, your writer recently read Richard Beeman’s Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (2009).

Beeman described the 1787 convention in Philadelphia at which men from 12 of the 13 original states (Rhode Island refused to play) wrote what became the Constitution of the United States, succeeding the 1777 Articles of Confederation.

After four months of discussion and debate, on Saturday, Sept. 15, 1787, the delegates agreed on a document. They then went to their various lodging places to relax for the rest of the weekend.

The man who got no weekend off, Beeman wrote, was Jacob Shallus, the Pennsylvania legislature’s assistant clerk. He was directed to make a copy of the final document, to be ready for signing Monday.

Wikipedia and other sources say the Constitution was on four sheets of parchment, “made from treated animal skins (either calf, goat, or sheep).”

Shallus almost certainly used goose quill pens. The primary feathers – the first five flight feathers – from a goose (or swan) make the best pens, websites say. The point is shaped with a sharp knife, and the hollow shaft acts as an ink reservoir.

Wikipedia says the brownish-black or purplish-black ink Shallus used would have been made from “iron filings in oak gall.” (Galls are abnormal tissue growths on plants or animals; an oak gall, or oak apple, is caused by chemicals injected by wasp larvae.) The ink was a mix of fermented fluid from galls, known as tannic acid, and iron salts, with gum Arabic or some other binder added.

Wikipedia says this oak gall ink (which had other names) was Europe’s standard ink from the fifth through the 19th centuries and was brought to America. It “remained in widespread use well into the 20th century, and is still sold today.” The web has ads for goose quill pens.

Jacob Shallus was the son of German immigrants, born in Pennsylvania about 1750 and a Revolutionary War veteran. Wikipedia does not say how he got his job with the Pennsylvania legislature or how long he had been there when he was assigned to make the final copy of the Constitution. He died April 18, 1796.

Of course, the delegates had other documents in Philadelphia in 1787, like drafts of the Constitution with notes, and many wrote lots of letters (though, Beeman stressed, no one violated the rule of secrecy about the convention proceedings).

Your writer thought of the diary-writers in the much less civilized Kennebec Valley not many years after the Philadelphia convention. Martha Ballard, in Hallowell, and William Bryant, in Fairfield, are two your writer has already introduced in previous articles.

How did they find the materials – and the time, and the light – to do what they did? Records give only scant answers to such questions about daily life.

* * * * * *

Martha Ballard, nurse & mid-wife

According to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s introduction to A Midwife’s Tale, an edited version of Martha Ballard’s diary, its predecessors were “two workaday forms of record-keeping, the daybook and the interleaved almanac.”

A typical daybook would be kept by a man engaged in commerce, who would record economic data and maybe add notes about his family or his job. Printed almanacs in the 18th century had blank pages on which owners could add information – Ulrich suggested “gardening, visits to and from neighbors, or public occurrences.”

Wikipedia says almanacs were popular in the American colonies, “offering a mixture of seasonal weather forecasts, practical household hints, puzzles, and other amusements.” Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack (1732-1758) was among the best known.

* * * * * *

Martha (Moore) Ballard (February 1735-May 1812) began her diary on Jan. 1, 1785, Ulrich wrote, and continued it for 9,965 days, over 27 years. The last entry was written May 7, 1812, about three weeks before Ballard died, Ulrich said.

For the – contested – date of Ballard’s death, she cited another local diarist, Henry Sewall (1752-1845), who wrote that Ballard’s funeral was on May 31. (Henry Sewall was profiled in the March 2 and March 9, 2023, articles in this series.)

By the beginning of 1785, Martha, her husband Ephraim (profiled in the Feb. 16, 2023, article in this series) and their children had been living on the Kennebec since October 1777, and she had been delivering babies there since 1778.

Ulrich’s book includes a photograph of two pages of Ballard’s diary, April 7 through 23, 1789. At the top of each page, starting in 1789, Ballard wrote the month and year. She ruled off a narrow left-hand margin for the date and for birth records. From 1788, she summarized the day’s events in a wider right-hand margin, often starting with the word “at” and naming the house where she visited or attended a birth, or a public event (or sometimes writing “at home”).

Horizontal lines separate the days. Two entries Ulrich showed are only two words each; others have up to 10 lines. An entry sometimes begins with a few words on the day’s weather.

Ballard’s handwriting was cursive, not printing. Her spelling and punctuation do not conform to modern standards; spelling is often phonetic and not always consistent.

But, Ulrich pointed out, in the 1780s few backwoods women could write at all. She found one document signed by Ballard’s grandmother, Hannah Learned; but Ballard’s mother, Dorothy Moore, couldn’t even write her name.

Some of the men in the family were educated, Ulrich found, including Ballard’s brother, a Harvard graduate. Ulrich surmised that Ulrich had received some basic education in her home town, Oxford, Massachusetts.

Ulrich observed that the diary contained information on a wide variety of subjects, from routines of daily life to medical practices to public events. Birth records included the family name, the baby’s sex, whether Ballard collected her fee and often other details.

Information with the online replica of the diary (see below) says Martha usually wrote at home after the rest of her family were in bed, quoting a 1797 comment as evidence. This source describes the diaries as hand-sewn booklets, small enough so Martha could put them in a bag or pocket.

Ulrich said the midwife sometimes carried diary pages with her on her medical errands, leaving the reader to imagine Ballard sitting by a fire in someone’s cabin or house writing, while waiting for sounds of progress from the expectant mother and her companions in the next room.

The on-line informant says Ballard wrote with a quill pen (probably taking the quills from her own geese) and home-made ink. Evidence for the ink is a quotation from Sept. 6, 1789; Martha wrote that she “made” the ink she was using that day from “Cake ink which mr Ballard Sent to Boston for.”

In the epilogue to A Midwife’s Tale, Ulrich wrote that after Ballard’s death, her diary descended through the family as a collection of loose pages. In 1884, a great-great-granddaughter named Mary Forrester Hobart, a medical school graduate, inherited it.

A cousin of Hobart’s arranged the pages in order and created a two-volume book. In 1930, Hobart donated it to the Maine State Library.

Meanwhile, Augusta historian Charles Elventon Nash had excerpted many entries to include in his history of Augusta. He finished the first volume just before his death in February 1904.

Nash’s manuscript was stored, unpublished, until the fall of 1958, when Nash’s son’s widow asked if the state library would take it. Edith L. Hary, then the state librarian, urged acceptance.

As she explained in the foreword to Nash’s history, finally published in 1961, the manuscript was moved to the library, as her responsibility. She found it worth publishing not only for Nash’s sake, but because it included so much of the unpublished Ballard diary.

As of the end of 2023, there is a replica of the diary available on line, credited to Robert R. and Cynthia MacAlman McCausland (search for Martha Ballard’s diary). Accompanying information says there is a hardbound copy available through Picton Press; when your writer looked up Picton Press, she found the sad messages that the press is permanently closed and for sale.

* * * * * *

William Bryant (Jan. 5, 1781 – June 15, 1867) is identified in the Fairfield bicentennial history as “the diarist.” The Fairfield Historical Society’s collection of documents includes typed transcriptions from his diary, which he evidently started in 1822 and kept at least sporadically until Feb. 6, 1867, when he made his last entry.

The historical society files include related documents, like newspaper clippings about commemorations of his birthday. Nothing casts any light on materials he used to write the diary, and several historical society members could provide no information.

Bryant served on the “USS Constitution” on her maiden voyage in 1797, when he would have been 16 years old. One story is that he was a cabin boy, whose duties would have included waiting on officers and crew and perhaps helping the cook. Another version is that he was a powder monkey, one who brought gunpowder from the hold to the cannon during battles.

He was almost certainly born Jan. 5, 1781, because in his diary he wrote that he was 60 years old on Jan. 5, 1861. However, the genealogy WikiTree, found on line, gives his birthdate as Jan. 5, 1783, in Sandwich, Massachusetts Bay.

Bryant’s diary says his father was Matt Bryant (September 1749–April 1810) and his mother was Abigail, born in Sandwich July 1755 and died April 20, 1842; he recorded her death in his diary. WikiTree gives Abigail’s maiden name as Nye and her dates as July 27, 1755 to Sept. 22, 1841, the latter undoubtedly an error. The same source called his father Moto or Motto Bryant or Briant.

William Bryant married Lydia Haley. He wrote in his diary that their wedding was April 4, 1805, in Wickford Village, part of North Kingston, Rhode Island.

On Jan. 31, 1854, he wrote that Lydia was 75 years old, which would make her birthday Jan. 31, 1779. WikiTree says she was born Jan. 31, 1781, in Thompson, Connecticut, and died May 22, 1858, in Fairfield, Maine.

Bryant wrote that Lydia fell ill in May 1858 and died peacefully at 8 p.m., Saturday, May 22.

WikiTree names two Bryant daughters, Mary E. (Bryant) Connor (1810-1897), mother of Maine Governor Seldon Connor, and Harriet Hinds (Bryant) Drew. The same source lists, from the 1850 census of Benton, Maine, William and Lydia, each age 69, and in the same household 26-year-old Samuel H.

Another source says the Bryants had five children between 1810 and 1823. The Fairfield bicentennial history says daughter Susan became Mrs. Nahum Totman.

Information from the historical society’s collection says Bryant was in Waterville, Maine, in 1809, in Rhode Island in 1813 and in Fairfield, working as a hatter, by 1817. In a Nov. 19, 1827, diary entry, he wrote that “Bugden” a clockmaker from Augusta, visited and apparently brought him one or more clocks, because “I paid him $14 in hats.”

Bryant was elected a representative to the Massachusetts General Court in 1819 and 1820, and later served two terms in the Maine legislature.

In November 1831 he bought a farm at Nye’s Corner, and moved there, he wrote, on June 4, 1832. Many diary entries discuss farming and weather.

Apparently Bryant skipped the March 1838 town meeting, because he wrote that he was informed he had been elected to no local office “except the Committee on Accounts.”

This news hurt. He wrote that up to then, he had been 10 years a selectman (the bicentennial history says he served a total of 19 terms as a selectman) and overseer of the poor and 11 years an assessor; and he was further “informed that it was generally agreed that I performed the duties of the offices faithfully and correct”; and that he did not “seek office for the honor.”

Main sources

Beeman, Richard, Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (2009).
Fairfield Historical Society, for Bryant diary.
Fairfield Historical Society Fairfield, Maine 1788-1988 (1988).
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, A Midwife’s Tale The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 1990.

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Streams of northern Winslow

January 10, 2024/0 Comments/in Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley, Winslow/by Mary Grow

Vassalboro resident Nate Gray, of the Maine Department of Marine Resources, at the Webber Pond Dam, the beginning of Seven Mile Stream. (The Town Line file photo)

by Mary Grow

And Seven Mile Stream

As promised last year, this article finishes the story of mills and dams in 19th-century Winslow, or as much of the story as your writer has found, before moving south to Vassalboro’s Seven Mile Stream.

The previous account left off before describing the Pattee Pond outlet stream in Winslow, which runs north from the pond to join the Sebasticook River. A short distance after the stream leaves the pond, Wilson Brook (Wilson Stream to Henry Kingsbury, in his Kennebec County history) crosses under Albion Road to join from the east.

On Wilson Stream, Kingsbury wrote, “three miles from the river,” Ezra Crosby built a sawmill in 1807. He sold it to Ephraim Wilson, who 30 years later sold it to Amos Foss. The 1856 Kennebec County map shows a sawmill on Wilson Brook and three Wilson houses in the area, but no Foss property.

a water-powered grist mill

Where Pattee Stream joins the Sebasticook, Kingsbury described a series of mills over more than a century. Stephen Crosby started in 1780 with a sawmill and a grist mill, “worn out before 1830.” Joel Larned ran a successor sawmill for 25 years.

Zimri Haywood’s plaster mill ran from about 1845, “grinding Nova Scotia stone brought up the river on the old fashioned long boats,” to about 1870. Abijah Crosby next built a shingle mill. Fred Lancaster and Charles Drake bought from Crosby “and put a circular saw in the mill, which is one of the few now [1892] running in town.”

Like many other area towns, Winslow had in 1892 a Bog Brook, which was probably the Pattee Pond outlet stream, or perhaps one of its tributaries. Bog Brook ran through Ebenezer Heald’s 300 acres, which Kingsbury said – probably incorrectly –were granted in 1790. Heald used Bog Brook water power to run a sawmill and a grist mill that “served their day and generation and peacefully passed away before 1810.”

Jefferson Hines built another grist mill on Heald’s site, and John Nelson added a shingle machine. Not far upstream, Asher Hines and Thomas Smiley had a double sawmill. That, too, wore out, and the mill their sons built to replace it was aging by 1832, when, Kingsbury wrote, a flood destroyed both these mill complexes.

Edwin Carey Whittemore’s history of Waterville includes excerpts from a report on the Plymouth Company’s grant to Heald (also called Ebenezer Hale), of Ipswich, New Hampshire.

This document says Heald’s 300-acre grant was approved April 16, 1767. It had the “usual conditions:” the grantee was to build a house and clear at least five acres for agriculture within in a year.

In addition, Heald was directed to build, on the brook that ran through his new property from “Petises [Pattee] Pond” to the Sebasticook (here is the evidence that Bog Brook was the pond’s outlet stream) “a good and sufficient saw mill” by Dec. 25, 1767; and within three years to add a grist mill on the same brook.

Each mill dam was to have a fishway. Fish were to be available free to the Plymouth Company and to local residents.

In October 1766, the Plymouth Company had given Timothy Heald (or Hale), of Ipswich, New Hampshire, four lots northwest of the Sebasticook and two lots on the south, “reserving all mill privileges.” In June 1767, they hired Timothy Heald to lay out 54 50-acre lots, all or most presumably in what is now Winslow.

July 7, 1768, they authorized Ezekiel Paty (Pattee) to “take up” two 50-acre lots; and further authorized him and Timothy Heald to manage the settlers’ affairs and to prevent trespasses.

* * * * * *

Water powered paper mill

Returning to Vassalboro, the 1869 list of dams and dam sites first cited in the Nov. 30 article in this series says there were six in a mile and a half stretch on Webber Pond’s outlet stream. “These are now nearly all lying idle.” Two “drove paper mills, and one a sash and blind factory.”

The 1869 report did not enumerate these dams. Kingsbury did, and Alma Pierce Robbins talked about some of them in her Vassalboro history.

The outlet stream is called Seven Mile Stream or Seven Mile Brook. It winds from the southwest side of Webber Pond, where the outlet dam and boat ramp are located, to the Kennebec River, turning south and then north and joined by several tributaries.

The stream was “from the first a useful water power,” Kingsbury said. He and the 1904 Vassalboro Register (found on line) so often duplicate each other word for word that your writer does not presume to say who plagiarized whom or whether each plagiarized the same source; both cite an Oct. 20, 1766, petition to the “honorable Committee of the Kennebec Company in Boston.”

This petition, signed by 55 men, asked the company to build them a grist mill, or give them permission to build one, near the mouth of Seven Mile Brook, so they would not have to carry their grain to Cobboseecontee to be ground. The Register writer believed this mill was built, the earliest grist mill in Vassalboro.

Robbins quotes from a 1790 land transfer agreement with references to a mill (grist mill? — not specified), a dam, a sawmill and an iron works “that belong to the sawmill.”

Kingsbury wrote that James Bowdoin – not a signatory to the 1766 petition — “built a grist mill west of the road” (“the road” was probably Riverside Drive, now Route 201) before 1812, when he sold it to Joseph Stuart.

This mill was the biggest between Augusta and Waterville, Kingsbury said, with three runs of stones; it often operated “day and night.”

Subsequent owners were Thomas Carlton, Hiram Lovejoy and from 1827 Ephraim Jones – under his management, “wood carving was also done here.” (So wrote Kingsbury in 1892. The Register says “wood sawing.”)

After 1829, Abiel Fallonsbee (Kingsbury) or Fallowsbee (the Register) owned the mill for nine years. Then George W. Hall bought a quarter share and “Augusta parties” the rest, until Thaddeus Snell bought the whole.

“The stream now flows unhindered through its ruins,” Kingsbury concluded. “Down the stream was the old Sturgis grist mill, silent and dismantled long ago.”

Seven Mile Stream powered sawmills as well as grist mills. In 1799, Robbins said, Paul Brown built a sawmill at the mouth of the brook, to which his son William succeeded. She wrote that this mill became “Baker’s mill,” run by Eugene Baker in the 1800s.

Kingsbury was probably describing Baker’s mill when he listed a sawmill built on the site of the early mill at the mouth of Seven Mile Stream around 1871 by “A. S. Bigelow and others.” A. L. Baker took over in 1887, and in 1892 it was the only mill operating on the stream.

Area residents Ira Daggett Sturgis and Joseph Southwick were involved in lumbering in the upper Kennebec Valley and the lumber business in Vassalboro and Augusta. An on-line site calls Sturgis “a Vassalboro farmer turned lumber baron” and says in 1847 he and his half-brother, John, bought and started “manufacturing” in Southwick’s old sawmill on Seven Mile Brook.

The 1904 Register and Kingsbury listed a sawmill farther upstream that was started in or before the 1820s by Benjamin Brown, Captain William Farwell and John Howard (the Register) or John Homans (Kingsbury). Brothers James and George Robbins bought it in the late 1820s; James sold it in or soon after 1841. The 1830 John Gardner tannery was near this mill.

Still farther upstream, close to Webber Pond, was a sawmill run first by Coleman and later by Foster.

Seven Mill Brook powered two paper mills, Kingsbury said. George Cox and “Mr. Talpy” built one well downstream that burned in 1841; they then bought the Robbins sawmill and made it the second paper mill. George Tower and Daniel Stanwood ran it until about 1870, when it closed. Kingsbury said the ruins were visible in 1892.

After the 1841 fire, “Bridge and Sturgis” built on the paper mill site a “three-story machine shop.” Here “sash, blinds and doors were made for a time.” Charles Webber took it over (no date given), and in 1892 the building was standing, but Kingsbury said nothing about its being in use.

Generations of Timothy and Ebenezer Healds

Timothy Heald is buried in Fort Hill Cemetery, on Halifax St., in Winslow

There were, of course, generations of Timothy and Ebenezer Healds. Here are genealogical summaries from the on-line sites WikiTree and Find a Grave, complete with contradictions.

Timothy Heald #1 was born June 7, 1696, in Concord, Massachusetts, and died there March 28, 1736. He married Hannah Wobby in 1721. He was a blacksmith, who died young “from hot metal in his eye,” according to Find a Grave.

Timothy #1 and Hannah had either four or six sons and maybe one daughter. Their oldest son they named Timothy (#2).

WikiTree says their youngest son was Ebenezer #1, born in 1736 in Concord, after his father’s death. Find a Grave lists four sons (no daughters) born to Timothy #1 and Hannah between 1723 and 1732. None is named Ebenezer.

Find a Grave says Ebenezer #1 was born June 26, 1767, in New Ipswich, New Hampshire, son of Timothy #2. WikiTree has no Ebenezer among Timothy #2 and Elizabeth’s children. Yet another source, time.graphics, says explicitly Lieutenant Timothy, Jr., and Elizabeth did not have a son named Ebenezer.

WikiTree and Find a Grave both say Ebenezer #1 died in March 1818 in Winslow. He married Elizabeth Heywood (born May 20, 1764, died in 1816) on Oct. 15, 1782. The oldest of their six sons and two daughters was Ebenezer #2.

Ebenezer Heald is buried in Barton-Hinds Cemetery, also in Winslow.

Timothy #2, known as Lieutenant Timothy Heald, was born was Oct. 14, 1723, in Concord, and died Aug. 18, 1785, in Winslow, Maine. He married Elizabeth Stevens in 1748.

Timothy #2 and Elizabeth had two sons and a daughter; they named their older son Timothy (#3; one source calls him Captain) and their younger son Josiah, according to WikiTree.

Timothy #3 (son of Timothy #2 and Elizabeth) was born May 24, 1749, in New Ipswich, New Hampshire, or May 20, 1749, in Townsend, Massachusetts. He died May 11 or May 17, 1817, in Winslow.

Timothy #3 married Abigail Cragin on Feb. 16, 1779, in Winslow. They named the first of their 17 children Timothy (#4; born in 1779 and died in 1810). Abigail died July 18, 1857, at the age of 95; husband and wife are buried in Winslow’s Fort Hill cemetery, according to Find a Grave.

WikiTree says Ebenezer #2 (Ebenezer #1 and Elizabeth [Heywood]’s oldest son), was born in Clinton Oct. 14, 1783, married Lucy Warren in Clinton on Oct. 3, 1806, and died Nov. 1, 1860, in Marshalltown, Iowa. Ebenezer #2 and Lucy named none of their six or seven sons either Timothy or Ebenezer.

Find a Grave says Lieutenant Timothy Heald (#2), born in 1723, came to Winslow and is buried in Fort Hill cemetery. Wikitree says the Ebenezer who was born in 1736 (Ebenezer #1, Lieutenant Timothy’s younger brother) was the one who came to Winslow in the mid-1760s.

Ebenezer in Winslow was a farmer, a lieutenant in the militia and holder of several positions in Clinton: first treasurer in 1795, the year the town was incorporated, and town clerk from 1809 to 1812 and in 1816.

This source says he is buried in the Barton Hinds cemetery, aka the Crosby Farm cemetery, on Eames Road in Winslow.

Main sources

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

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Winslow, Hollingsworth & Whitney

January 3, 2024/0 Comments/in China, Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley, Vassalboro, Waterville, Winslow/by Mary Grow

Hollingsworth & Whitney paper mill, in Winslow.

by Mary Grow

In addition to the historic mills on Outlet Stream and smaller flowages in Winslow, Kingsbury mentioned two larger mills on the east bank of the Kennebec in the 1890s.

One he described as a new “large steam saw mill…on the historic grounds of Fort Point,” covering most of the “palisade enclosure of old Fort Halifax.”

Fort Halifax in 1754.

Old Fort Halifax was built in 1754 to deter the French and their Indian allies from attacking British settlements along the Kennebec River. After the ouster of the French from the area in 1763, the fort’s buildings were dismantled or allowed to fall down, until only one blockhouse survives, now the centerpiece of Winslow’s Fort Halifax Park. (See the Jan. 28, 2021, issue of The Town Line for more on this historic site.)

A deteriorating blockhouse at Fort Halifax, in Winslow, after the ouster of the French from the area in 1763.

The grounds went through a succession of owners and uses. The Maine Memory Network’s on-line site includes an item donated by the Winslow Historical Preservation Committee with an excerpt from the April 18, 1873, Waterville Mail commending an effort to preserve the remaining blockhouse, after “many years of talk and neglect.”

The Ticonic Water Power Co. then owned the buildings and had leased them to “Dr. Crosby” of Waterville and “J.W. Bassett and A.T. Shurtleff, of Winslow, for the purpose of preservation.”

Another on-line source says the Ticonic Water Power and Manufacturing Company was incorporated in 1868 and “acquired the water rights and property adjacent to the Ticonic Falls.” In 1874, the Ticonic Power Company “became the Lockwood Company.”

The Lockwood Company is primarily associated with the mills in Waterville, just south of Ticonic Bridge. However, an on-line history of these mills says that in 1865, Waterville resident George Alfred “achieved the complex task of assembling water and property rights on both sides of the Kennebec River” in Winslow and Waterville.

Ownership of water rights let Alfred build a dam at Ticonic Falls, finished in 1869, the site says. It goes on to discuss the Waterville mills, built by Amos D. Lockwood, an engineer from Boston and Providence, who was familiar with water power.

On the Winslow side of the river, Kingsbury wrote that Edward Ware leased the land on Fort Point from the Lockwood Company and built a lumber mill in 1890. The building was more than 300 feet long, equipped with “all modern appliances for cutting lumber,” Kingsbury wrote. Logs came down the Kennebec from up-river timber operations and were made into lumber, shingles and lath, mostly shipped to Boston.

Your writer found the beginning (only) of a New York Times article on line, headlined “Lumber Ordered for Gray Gables,” with the dateline Boston, Sept. 30 (no year given). The first sentence reads: “Twenty-five thousand feet of spruce lumber has been ordered to be shipped from the sawmill of Edward Ware, at Winslow, Me.”

Gray Gables, Wikipedia says, was an elaborate house in Bourne, Massachusetts, built in 1880 and in 1890 bought by past and future president Grover Cleveland. He named it Gray Gables and used it as the summer White House during his second term, 1893-1896.

* * * * * *

The second large Winslow mill was under construction as Kingsbury finished his history in 1892. He wrote that Hollingsworth and Whitney was building Kennebec County’s “largest pulp and paper mill…on the east bank of the Kennebec, at a cost of three quarters of a million dollars.”

The University of Maine’s on-line Digital Commons provides a history of Hollingsworth and Whitney, written in October 1954 by company president James Lester Madden as the company merged into Scott Paper Company.

Madden wrote that the first Hollingsworth in the paper business was Mark Hollingsworth, from Delaware, who started in 1798 as a foreman in a Massachusetts mill.

In 1835, Hollingsworth bought a Revere Copper mill in South Braintree, Massachusetts, and converted it to a paper mill that was run until 1852 by his sons, John and Lyman. In 1852, another son, Ellis, came home after three years in California and took over the South Braintree mill.

In 1862, Ellis Hollingsworth formed a partnership with Leonard A. Whitney, Jr., owner of a “paper mill and bag factory” in Watertown. Whitney’s factory, Madden said, “produced the first machine-made paper bags in this country.”

Hollingsworth and Whitney’s first Maine venture was the purchase of a mill in Gardiner in 1876. Ellis’s son Sumner Hollingsworth was in charge.

In 1875 the company hired a “dynamic” sales manager named Charles Dean. After both founders died in 1881, Dean “was instrumental in incorporating the present [1954] company in 1882.” Sumner Hollingsworth was its president until his death in 1899, when Dean succeeded him and headed the company until he retired in 1911.

Hollingsworth and Dean had the Winslow mill built between 1891 and 1893, Madden wrote. He commented, “To move from Massachusetts to the wilds of Maine for a woodpulp and paper mill was a daring move in the 1890s.”

The original estimated cost turned out to be half the actual cost of $800,000, he said (see Kingsbury’s figure above). Because the 1893 financial panic made banks hesitant to lend, even to a company with a good record, Dean financed part of the building himself. The Winslow mill was “a high quality, very low cost producer,” and he was soon repaid from profits.

The mill had two paper machines and a pulp mill; its daily capacity was 30 tons of groundwood pulp and 20 tons of paper. Madden said the initial 150 employees worked 11- and 13-hour days for an average hourly wage of less than 15 cents.

“Under Mr. Dean’s leadership,” Hollingsworth and Whitney was the first paper company to go from two to three shifts, a change that was considered “very radical,” Madden wrote.

To guarantee a supply of wood, the company began buying forest land in 1895. By 1954, Madden said, it owned 550,000 acres in the Kennebec watershed.

He described additions and improvements at the Winslow mill in the first two decades of the 20th century (the last two paper machines were added in 1913 and 1916) and the building of a pulp mill in Madison, and praised the company’s products and reputation.

Madden said nothing about World War I. By World War II, he wrote, the Winslow mill was the only supplier of “Tabulating Cardstock” in the country. Production was quadrupled to meet the military’s need for “cards to operate tabulating machines.”

After Scott Paper sold to Kimberly-Clark, the Winslow mill was closed in 1997.

* * * * * *

Kingsbury listed another 10 mills on lesser streams and brooks in Winslow before 1892.

Again, a map of Winslow is helpful. As explained last week, the town is bounded on the west by the Kennebec River. On the south it is bordered by Vassalboro, on the east by China.

There are two ponds in Winslow. The smaller, Mud Pond, is in the southeastern corner of town, with its eastern shore in China (according to China tax maps and most others found on line; one on-line map shows the boundary deviating from a straight line to follow the shoreline, putting the whole pond in Winslow).

A connecting stream runs northwest from Mud Pond to larger Pattee (or Pattees or Pattee’s) Pond, which lies east of the Sebasticook River. The Pattee Pond outlet stream, and streams that join it from the east, drain northwest into the Sebasticook.

In addition to the streams associated with these two water bodies, contemporary maps show one stream, Chaffee Brook, flowing west into the Kennebec. Chaffee Brook passes under Route 201 a short distance south of the Carter Memorial Drive intersection.

The first dam Kingsbury mentioned was on the brook named for John Drummond “near the river road” (Route 201).

Your writer found no Drummond Brook in contemporary Winslow; she guesses Drummond Brook is now Chaffee Brook. Just north of Chaffee Brook, Chaffee Brook Road goes west off Route 201 to the bank of the Kennebec. On the south side of Chaffee Brook Road sits Drummond cemetery.

(Chaffee Brook Road leads to the Kennebec Water District’s Chaffee Brook pumping station, which is being upgraded. Area residents who have seen the crane on the river bank and the platforms in the water are looking at the project.)

Drummond built a grist mill with two runs of stones, Kingsbury said. In 1822 he sold it to Josiah Hayden (probably the younger of the two Josiah Haydens in last week’s article) and built a sawmill (presumably sharing the grist mill’s water power). Kingsbury said as forests were cleared, the flow in this brook diminished until it could not provide adequate power after about 1840.

Of the next mill he described, Kingsbury wrote: “Frederick Paine had a plaster mill on Clover brook that did business from 1820 to 1870.” (On-line sources say plaster mills ground lime and gypsum into powder for building materials, including plaster and cement.)

Your writer suggests Clover Brook might be the 19th-century name for Bellows Stream, which flows north into Pattee Pond roughly parallel to the Kennebec and about midway between Winslow’s east and west boundaries.

The apparently nameless stream between Mud Pond and Pattee Pond, eastward of Bellows Stream, powered two mills, presumably on dams, by the first half of the 1800s. This stream flows north and then northwest from the north end of Mud Pond, under Route 137 (China Road) into the east side of Pattee Pond

The upstream mill was John Getchell’s sawmill, operating by 1795. It later became Isaac Dow’s shingle mill.

Half a mile downstream, a man named Alden had a sawmill that “ran down and was rebuilt by Esquire Brackett, who lost his life in it in 1840, by a blow from the saw frame.” Later, Jacob Brimner ran the sawmill (the 1856 map of Kennebec County shows a sawmill on this stream and a Brimner house not far upstream). Later still, a shingle mill ran until around 1870, Kingsbury said.

The Pattee Pond outlet, Pattee Stream, flows from the north end of the pond into the Sebasticook. For lack of space, your writer postpones a description of mills in this northern and northwestern part of Winslow to next week.

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Malta War, 1809

by Mary Grow

Main sources

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Windsor brooks named after people

by Mary Grow

Barton Brook

Dorothy Barton younger sister of Martha Ballard

Main sources

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Windsor brooks named for early settlers

by Mary Grow

Sheepscot River

Main sources

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: People for whom ponds are named, part 4

by Mary Grow

Main sources

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: People for whom ponds are named, Part 3

by Mary Grow

Main sources

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: People for whom ponds are named – Part 2

by Mary Grow

Main sources

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: People for whom ponds are named

by Mary Grow

Main sources

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Diary-keeping, Ballard & Bryant

by Mary Grow

Main sources

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Streams of northern Winslow

by Mary Grow

And Seven Mile Stream

Generations of Timothy and Ebenezer Healds

Main sources

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Winslow, Hollingsworth & Whitney

by Mary Grow

Main sources

Interesting links

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