Up and Down the Kennebec Valley Archives - Page 5 of 10

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: Sebasticook dams & Josiah Hayden

December 13, 2023/0 Comments/in Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley/by Mary Grow

Davis Sawmill and Grist Mill, in Vassalboro, in 19th century.

by Mary Grow

An on-line map of Winslow, Maine (which readers might find helpful), shows the Kennebec River, running roughly north-south, as the town’s western boundary. The Sebasticook River joins the Kennebec from the east about halfway between the town’s north and south lines.

Outlet Stream flows north across Winslow’s south boundary from Vassalboro and joins the Sebasticook a little east of the Sebasticook-Kennebec junction. The Nov. 30 issue of The Town Line described some of the dams on Vassalboro’s section of the stream. The 1869 inventory of dams and dam sites that was a main source for the Vassalboro list continued with another four dams and three dam sites in Winslow.

Henry Kingsbury, in his 1892 Kennebec County history, also listed dams along “this stream.” The similarity of owners’ names on the two lists convinced your writer that “this stream” was Outlet Stream.

To make correlating the two sources interesting, the 1869 inventory listed the dams going downstream; Kingsbury listed them going upstream. Your writer chose to continue downstream (north), starting with the dam closest to the Winslow-Vassalboro town line.

This was the seventh dam on the 1869 list, another 260 rods (a bit over eight-tenths of a mile) downstream from the last one in Vassalboro. Here T. S. and J. A. Lang, from Vassalboro, made knit goods and C. A. Priest made shoe pegs (the wooden pegs that attached shoe soles to the rest of the shoe).

(T. S. was Thomas Stackpole Lang, profiled in the Oct. 19 issue of The Town Line; he was born June 16, 1826, in North Berwick, and died June 18, 1895, in The Dalles, Oregon. J. A. Lang was his younger brother, John Alton Lang, born Jan. 27, 1840, in Berwick, and died Jan. 8, 1919, in Waterville.)

Kingsbury wrote that this dam initially powered a sawmill started by John Getchell in 1791 on the west bank, “where the woolen mill now [1892] is.” In the 1820s, Joseph Southwick and three Haydens, Howland, Pruden and Moses, organized a company that built a hemp mill on the east bank to provide local farmers with seed.

Hemp was used for fiber, especially to make sails and cordage for ships, and also bags, rope, clothing and similar items. Lesser uses included medicinal products and oil.

On-line sources list George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as hemp farmers. Principal production was in the southern states.

Hemp was not profitable in Maine in the 1820s, and Kingsbury wrote that around 1830, “Church and William Bassett, from Bridgewater, Mass., bought the property.” They “made shingles and barrel staves and put in carding machines.”

(A genealogy found on line says William Basset [March 27, 1777- Dec. 20, 1843] and his wife Abiah Williams [July 14, 1782-May 14, 1860] named their first two sons William Church Bassett and Williams Bassett. William C. was born April 4, 1803, in Bridgewater and died June 17, 1873, in Illinois; Williams was born April 1, 1806, and died Sept. 24, 1877, in Winslow, Maine.)

Kingsbury continued, “Church bought his brother out and started a woolen mill.” He sold part of the water rights to a man named Wilber, who made shingles. Bassett and Wilber each had a threshing machine, “and competition was brisk.”

In 1846, the sawmill burned, Kingsbury said. Five years later, Edmund Getchell and sons Ira and Leonard bought a quarter of the water rights on the west shore and “built a shop” where for 15 years they made shingles and did other wood-working, including “making large lots of spade handles for gold diggers’ use in California.”

John D. Lang (Thomas Lang’s father) and three Priest brothers, Henry W., Theodore W. and Charles A, bought the east side rights in 1857, Kingsbury said. They added a grist mill and converted the Bassett woolen mill into the shoe peg factory listed in 1869.

Kingsbury wrote that Charles A. Priest took over the latter, “inventing a machine for cutting shoe pegs that made him independent of a patent that had monopolized the cutting of these wooden nails for years.” He sold pegs as far away as Liverpool, England, “where one firm took 1,000 barrels of pegs a year at sixty cents a bushel.”

Outlet Stream, in Vassalboro.

The mills on the east side of this Outlet Stream dam burned in 1865. The Priests sold the grist mill rights to John D. Lang, who rebuilt the mill. Kingsbury wrote that around 1880, Charles Priest and Charles A. Drummond bought it from Lang. (Lang died in 1879; perhaps Kingsbury meant from his estate.) It was still running in 1892.

Charles Priest rebuilt his shoe peg factory, but demand dwindled; by 1892 he was using the building for unspecified wood and iron work. In 1892, Kingsbury added, the shoddy mill Albert Cook built around 1880 was still in business, run by Cook & Jepson. (A shoddy mill reprocesses woolen rags into new cloth.)

On the 1869 list, the Langs owned the eighth dam, 60 rods (less than two-tenths of a mile) farther downstream, and in 1869 were planning to use it – a company had been chartered, with $100,000 capital. Kingsbury made no mention of development here, nor at what the list described as undeveloped sites for ninth and tenth dams.

Kingsbury discussed at some length the next site on the list, two miles downstream, where in 1869 T. J. Hayden ran a sawmill, threshing machine and other equipment on the 11th dam.

T. J. was Thomas Jefferson Hayden (Dec. 3, 1803-March 11, 1886), and Kingsbury said his mill was on the dam that his father, Major Josiah Hayden, built “nearly one hundred years ago,” or around 1792.

Your writer suspects “Major” is an error and the 1790s mill builder was young Josiah Hayden, Jr. There were two Josiah Haydens, father, born in 1734 and a Revolutionary veteran, and son, born in 1772 (see box). The son, Thomas Jefferson Hayden’s father, had no military record.

Josiah Hayden, Jr., started with a sawmill and in 1822 bought John Drummond’s grist mill (originally with two sets of millstones, but one was removed) and relocated it beside the sawmill.

After Thomas J. Hayden inherited the mills (his father died in 1827), he added a “grain thresher and separator” on the upper floor, which by 1892 had been replaced by newer ones. By then, Kingsbury said, the property had passed to W. Vinal Hayden (Aug. 22, 1839- 1916; son of Thomas and his wife, Clarissa [Houston] Hayden [Nov. 9, 1810-June 28, 1861]).

The Hayden dam backed up Outlet Stream to form Hayden mill pond, and Kingsbury wrote that the clay beside the pond was excellent for pottery. In the 1810s, he said, a potter named William Hussey and his partner, Ambrose Bruce, started a pottery on the dam that supplied earthenware to local households; Hussey’s milk pans were especially popular. (See the article on natural resources in the July 14, 2022, issue of The Town Line.)

According to the 1869 list, just below Hayden’s premises was a site for a 12th dam, where the river fell nine feet “with precipitous banks.”

The list says the 13th dam was another 120 rods, or a bit over a third of a mile, downstream, but Kingsbury’s next site was three-quarters of a mile distant. According to Kingsbury, this dam and mill were “probably” built by a family named Norcross before 1819.

Thomas Hayden’s brother, Franklin, owned the mill by 1840. He was trying to move it upstream on Election Day that year, and planning to get married that evening, when he fell and was killed.

In 1869, this dam was occupied by a sawmill and other facilities owned by Flye & Hayden – probably Thomas Hayden, as Kingsbury wrote that he succeeded his brother, and perhaps a descendant of an early settler named John Flye. The mill ran until around 1880. The compiler of the dam inventory commented, “Can take logs from the Sebasticook, which is but 40 rods [about an eighth of a mile] below.”

Kingsbury believed this Norcross/Hayden dam was neither the lowest nor oldest on Outlet Steam: here, as in Vassalboro, the Plymouth Company provided a sawmill and grist mill before 1770, to encourage settlement in the area.

Kingsbury wrote that a Revolutionary War veteran from Pownalboro, Benjamin Runnels, built the dam. In 1778, he moved to Winslow, where he was “a farmer, trader, lumberman and speculator, and a representative to the general court [the Massachusetts legislature].”

A man named David Garland who worked in the Norcross/Hayden mills in 1819 told Kingsbury there were “ruins of a double mill a few rods below.” Kingsbury concluded these were the remains of the Plymouth Company mills.

Benjamin Runnels has three on-line genealogies, none totally agreeing with any other.

He was born March 31, 1748 or 1749. He married at least once, to Hepzibah or Hepzinah Ayer or Bradley; one website adds Mary Demoranville as a second wife. He almost certainly had a son named John, perhaps born in 1771 in Pownalboro; there might have been another son, David, or daughters Rachel Emery and Mary Whitten.

Benjamin died June 22, 1802 or 1803, in Winslow.

Josiah Hayden Sr.

Different sources give Josiah Hayden, Sr., the title of captain, major or colonel, derived from his service in the America Revolution and, according to one source, the Winslow, Maine, local militia.

The on-line Find a Grave website says Hayden was born May 15, 1734, in Braintree, Massachusetts. In 1756 (Kingsbury says 1762), he married Silence Howard (Nov. 1, 1741 – Aug. 9, 1803), from Brockton.

When the Revolution started, he became a captain in the Braintree Minute Men; he served at Lexington in 1775. In the Sept. 16, 1776, Battle of Harlem Heights, he was the major commanding the 25th Massachusetts Regiment.

The Haydens had three sons, Charles (1764-1862), Josiah, Jr. (1772-1827), and Daniel (1782-1865) and four daughters, according to Find a Grave.

Kingsbury wrote that the Haydens moved to Winslow in 1789. However, Find a Grave says their youngest daughter, Mary, was born Oct. 22, 1780, in Bridgewater and youngest son, Daniel, was born in Winslow, suggesting the move north was in 1781 or 1782. (For reference, Winslow’s Fort Halifax dates from 1752, and the town, until 1802 including Waterville, was incorporated in 1771.)

In Winslow, Edwin Carey Whittemore’s history of Waterville includes records showing Hayden’s involvement with the land-owning Plymouth Company. He moderated an Oct. 10, 1787, meeting at which some of the company’s lots were distributed, and when company meetings moved to Winslow in 1803, Hayden became company clerk and treasurer, apparently until its final meeting in August 1806.

According to Kingsbury, Hayden was first elected Winslow selectman in 1791 and served for 10 years. He was town clerk from 1792 through 1795 and again in 1797.

Whittemore listed him as one of a seven-man committee appointed in February 1794 to oversee building a meeting house. In 1801, he served on the five-man committee that successfully petitioned the Massachusetts legislature to separate Winslow and Waterville. As the only selectman living on the east – Winslow – side of the Kennebec, he was authorized to call the first meeting in the truncated town.

Find a Grave says Hayden represented Winslow in the Massachusetts legislature; no date is given. He died in Winslow Sept. 2, 1818.

Josiah, Sr., and Silence, their three sons and younger daughters Elizabeth (1777-1860) and Mary (1780-1867) are buried in Winslow’s Howard cemetery. Oldest daughter Tiley (1766-1845) became Mrs. Jonathan Cary or Carey and is buried in Brockton, Massachusetts. Her next younger sister, Mehitable (1769-1829), became Mrs. Thomas Vose and is buried in Robbinston, Maine.

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: Dams and Mills

December 6, 2023/0 Comments/in Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley, Vassalboro, Winslow/by Mary Grow

Building Two of the Olde Mill on Main Street in Vassalboro. (photo by Sandy Isaac)

by Mary Grow

The list of old dams on China Lake’s Outlet Stream started last week with dams in Vassalboro, as far downstream as the North Vassalboro dams described below.

In following weeks, your writer plans to finish summarizing the usefulness of Outlet Stream with descriptions of dams and mills in Winslow, between the Vassalboro line and the Sebasticook River; discuss two larger mills on the Kennebec, in Winslow; share rather scanty information about dams and mills on lesser streams and brooks in Winslow; and describe some of the industries supported by Seven Mile Stream, a/k/a Seven Mile Brook, in southern Vassalboro.

Readers who are tired of dams and mills might want to ignore these history articles until 2024.

* * * * * *

In his Kennebec County history, Henry Kingsbury started the North Vassalboro mill story with the arrival of Dr. Edward Southwick, who came from Danvers, Massachusetts, early in the 1800s, bought water rights from John Getchell and by 1820 was running “the largest tannery in New England.” The sheds to store the tree bark used in tanning covered over an acre, Kingsbury said, and “His business was the life of North Vassalboro.”

In her Vassalboro history, Alma Pierce Robbins quoted George Varney’s Gazeteer of the State of Maine as the source for naming Jacob Southwick, not Edward Southwick, as the tannery owner. Kingsbury said Edward and Jacob were brothers, and Jacob had a tannery at Getchell’s Corners (which was one of Vassalboro’s commercial and industrial centers for most of the 19th century).

Peter Morrill Stackpole and his son-in-law, Alton Pope, started their “wool carding and cloth dressing mill” (Kingsbury) on Outlet Stream in 1836 (Robbins).

John D. Lang (1799-1879) was brother-in-law to Stackpole (Kingsbury; Lang’s wife was Anna Elmira Stackpole [1800-1879]), and “an experienced mill executive” (Robbins), who came from Rhode Island and invested capital. Lang, Stackpole and Pope created, by 1836, the woolen mill that Kingsbury called North Vassalboro’s “chief industrial pursuit” for the rest of the century.

They also had a sawmill, which burned in 1848. Peter Stackpole was killed that November during the rebuilding.

(See the Oct. 19 issue of The Town Line for the Lang family’s agricultural contributions.)

Lang bought the Southwick tannery around 1850, and the next year built the first brick mill building on the site. According to Kingsbury, “A brick kiln was built, and after the brick were burned the walls of the mill were built around it.” The remains of the tannery were burned.

This mill was on the west side of Main Street, between the street and Outlet Stream, on the north side of Oak Grove Road, which runs west off Main Street and across the stream.

Kingsbury and Robbins wrote that the mill’s moment of international fame was in 1851, when one of its products was awarded a gold medal at the London World’s Fair.

Robbins said the prize was for “finest Broadcloth or Cassimere in the World.” The fabric was a “beautiful blue color,” mixed by brothers George and Jonathan Nowell.

(The senior George Nowell [1777-1868] moved to Vassalboro in 1806 and later to Winslow, where he farmed. He and his wife, Winifred [Parker] Nowell, had 10 children, according to Kingsbury, including sons George [1818-1904] and Jonathan [1820-1897].)

Jonathan Nowell worked at the mill for 40 years. Robbins called him “a dye mixer,” and Kingsbury said he was “boss of the dyeing works.”

The old Stackpole and Pope mill building on the dam, Kingsbury said, was moved to Main Street, where it served first as a “dry house,” then as a boarding house and by 1892 as a “dwelling and a hall.” (“Dry house,” in this context, might mean the building was used to dry materials used in the woolen mill. It was probably neither a saloon without liquor nor a recovery house for addicts.)

In a major renovation in 1861, Kingsbury said, a 47-by-200-foot building was added to the 1851 one, so close he referred to the two buildings as “practically one.” The result was “the largest woolen mill in New England,” in 1861 and still in 1892.

In the second half of the 19th century, the North Vassalboro mill had several different owners and names. Kingsbury said Lang and Boston partners organized the North Vassalboro Woolen Manufacturing Company before 1856. By 1892, he said, “Boston people” were the only owners. Robbins called the business the Vassalboro Manufacturing Company, until the mill was sold to American Woolen Company in 1899.

To Robbins, one of the significances of the mill was its effect on the population of North Vassalboro. In the 1850s, she wrote, Vassalboro Manufacturing Company began advertising for workers in newspapers in England and Ireland.

“Thus the family names in Vassalboro began to change. Nearly every other family had one or more ‘foreigners’ boarding with them,” she wrote. Immigrants from Canada joined those from England and Ireland.

The contribution to North Vassalboro’s economy was significant. When architectural historian Michael Goebel-Bain, of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, wrote the application for listing on the National Register of Historic Places in March 2020, he included census figures. They showed the mill had 180 employees in 1860; 263 in 1870; 300 in 1883 and “close to 600” before it closed in 1955.

Goebel-Bain pointed out that expansion of the mill was often in response to wartime demand for cloth. He cited new buildings in 1861 and 1863 and expansions in 1917 and 1943.

The historian pointed out that there were also contractions as demand dropped. In November 1888, he wrote, the mill closed briefly, because its owners owed $90,000 to a “Boston cotton mill owner” named T. W. Walker. Walker put up another $75,000 and bought and reopened the mill.

And, Goebel-Bain added, if there were a major drought, Outlet Stream might drop too low to provide power, forcing a – usually short – halt to production.

* * * * * *

Goebel-Bain’s application was for a Vassalboro mill historic district. He described nine separate buildings and one “structure” that were worthy of preservation, plus two related but non-historic buildings on the 6.8-acre parcel.

Parts of the 1851 building survived, Goebel-Bain wrote, but they were “indistinguishable as an entity” because of the many changes and additions between 1861 and 1943. He listed the period of historic significance as 1861 to 1955.

Goebel-Bain divided the buildings into categories, describing the single-story brick office building; a 444-foot section of mill with towers and many original windows; other mill sections; and the single-story Dye House, first built in 1894 and completed between 1903 and 1911. The 444-foot section, he observed, has the same roof height from one end to the other, but “due to the sloping lot two stories are visible at the east and four stories at the west end.”

The contributing structure is described as a 90-foot tall smokestack, built around 1894 of “hollow, glazed structural tile.” Goebel-Bain added, “The associated boiler house and boilers were removed in 1981.”

The application described some of the many physical changes during the life of the woolen mill. Goebel-Bain wrote that a canal from a dam “800 feet north” used to run “directly under several mill buildings and ended as an exposed tail race.” Many of the walkways between buildings “by enclosed corridors and in many cases more substantial connector buildings” had been demolished.

Additions were made at intervals in the 19th and 20th centuries. Goebel-Bain found that one building started out as brick, two stories high, built between 1861 and 1863; acquired a third story, also brick, in 1894; and by 1906 had a wooden fourth floor.

Despite the changes, Goebel-Bain found the mill complex historically valuable. He wrote, “The common characteristics typical of mill construction include brick walls, large window openings, open floor space, heavy wood framing, exterior stair towers, and flat roofs. All or many of these features exist across the major buildings.”

He saw the Vassalboro buildings as an example of “slow-burning construction,” common in mills: construction methods that would hinder spread of fires in buildings with mainly wooden interiors.

Goebel-Bain concluded: “The largest and most significant buildings remain and collectively form a district that has integrity to reflect is [sic] industrial development from 1861 to 1955.”

The Vassalboro mill was added to the National Register of Historic Places on Oct. 5, 2020.

Lombard log hauler exhibit locations

The Lombard log hauler, one of only six remaining, at its home at the Redington Museum, in Waterville. (photo by Roland Hallee)

Local readers who would like to see a Lombard log hauler (introduced in the Oct. 26 issue of The Town Line) will have two local opportunities.

The Fall 2023 issue of the Maine State Museum’s Broadside newsletter reports that when the museum reopens in 2025, a new exhibit will showcase its Lombard log hauler. Museum officials are also helping the Waterville Historical Society upgrade its Lombard log hauler display.

The projects are funded by a grant from the Bill & Joan Alfond Foundation.

Readers might also want to visit the Maine Forest and Logging Museum, in Bradley, northeast of Bangor (website maineforestandloggingmuseum.org), or the Maine Forestry Museum, in Dallas Plantation, with a mailing address in Rangeley (website maineforestrymuseum.org). The Forest and Logging Museum’s website advertises its Lombard log hauler; the Forestry Museum’s says it has a variety of equipment and tools.

Both websites list 2024 event schedules.

The Forestry Museum is closed for the winter, reopening in June 2024. The Forest and Logging Museum is hosting Santa Claus on Dec. 9.

Tannery owner Jacob Southwick

Tannery owner Jacob Southwick was involved in other businesses in the village near the Kennebec that began as Getchell’s Corners, was called Vassalboro in Kingsbury’s time and is now Getchell Corner. Kingsbury wrote that he had a pail factory an “ashery” and a plaster mill on a brook there.

(Wikipedia says an ashery made hardwood ashes into lye, potash or pearlash. Lye was an ingredient in soap; pearlash, made by kiln-baking potash, was often exported to Britain to be used in making glass and ceramic materials.)

Around 1825, Jacob, his father, Dr. Edward Southwick, and others started Negeumkeag Bank at Getchell’s Corners, with $50,000 capital; it lasted about 15 years. After it closed, Kingsbury said, the “queer old strap, wrought iron safe” went to another tannery the Southwicks owned in Burnham.

By 1836, Kingsbury said, one of the places for posting notices of town meetings was the Jacob Southwick and Company store.

Jacob was a selectman for two years in the 1820s. In 1843, he was innocently involved in what appears to have been election fraud. Whether deliberate or accidental is unclear.

The story is told in an 1843 report of the Maine legislature’s Committee on Elections, reviewing returns from the newly-created Fourth Senatorial District. The district included Augusta and eight nearby towns.

Votes were cast for a total of 11 men, plus “all others.” Four men got more than 3,300 votes each. Three more were closely grouped in the 2,600s. Jacob Southwick was one of four men who each got fewer than 550 votes.

However, the committee found that many voters had marked four names on the ballot, when the instructions said to vote for no more than three. This conduct they condemned as illegal, disorderly and corrupt.

The report concluded, “That a great evil would result from permitting the voter to determine, not only for whom he may vote, but for how many, must be obvious to all.”

The committee therefore rejected numerous ballots, including 323 from Vassalboro – one of the higher numbers, exceeded only by Augusta and Hallowell – and declared the new senators to be none of the four top vote-getters, but the three in the second tier, John Hubbard, Jacob Main and John Stanley.

John Hubbard was Dr. John Hubbard, of Hallowell, later governor of Maine. Jacob Main was from Belgrade; David Stanley was from Winthrop.

Main sources

Goebel-Bain, Michael National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, Vassalboro Mill (March 24, 2020), supplied by the Maine Historic Preservation Commission.
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971).

Websites, miscellaneous.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Vassalboro dams

November 29, 2023/0 Comments/in Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley, Vassalboro/by Mary Grow

by Mary Grow

As last week’s article on the Masse family suggested, from the late 1700s through the 1800s central Kennebec Valley entrepreneurs dammed streams and rivers to provide water power for industry.

Local histories have long lists of dams on streams tributary to the Kennebec River, before people got up the courage to try to control the river itself. Falling water managed by dams and waterwheels provided power, especially for sawmills to convert trees into lumber and grist mills to grind grain into flour.

One website dates grist mills to the first century B. C. Here is an explanation of an American grist mill, mostly from a Texas website:

The mill workings consist of two large stones, one atop the other. One source said four feet in diameter was a common size. The bottom stone, or bed stone, is fixed; the top stone, or runner stone, “rotates on top of the bed stone.” The runner stone has a hole in the top where grain is poured in to be “ground between the two stones.”

Wikipedia says the Romans built water-powered sawmills in the third century A.D. In the Nov. 2 issue of The Town Line, readers learned about the transition in Kennebec Valley sawmills from early up-and-down saws to the more efficient circular saw that William Kendall, Jr., of Fairfield, invented around 1827.

Outlet Stream, which runs from China Lake to the Sebasticook River (which flows into the Kennebec River in Winslow), was an example of a power source. The villages at East Vassalboro and North Vassalboro were established primarily because water power was available.

Your writer found no date for the China Lake Outlet Dam, in East Vassalboro. Henry Kingsbury, in his Kennebec County history, described it as a manufacturing hub. John Mower had an (undated) bark mill on the east end; his father, Nathan Mower, and another man named Thomas Sewall ran nearby tanneries; and on the west bank was “Thomas Greenlow’s shop, with its four forges and trip-hammers run by water.”

The Vassalboro Woolen Company, owner of North Vassalboro’s major mill, bought the outlet dam in 1872, so it could control the flow of water to accommodate its mills. The company donated it to the Town of Vassalboro in 1961, according to Herman Masse’s 1977 History of the Old Water Power Grist and Saw Mill.

The Masse mills in East Vassalboro, introduced last week, were not the first on the stream: Kingsbury said East Vassalboro village had a water-powered sawmill before its first houses. He wrote that the original landowners, the Kennebec Proprietors, “probably were instrumental in the erection of the first saw mill here, a few rods below the village bridge, before this portion of their territory was settled.”

Vassalboro was settled around 1760, and Masse’s history says the town had 10 families in 1768, so this first mill must have been in operation before the American Revolution.

Here a succession of owners cut boards for settlers’ houses and to ship down the Kennebec to sell, according to Kingsbury. Later a tannery (for making animal hides into leather) succeeded the sawmill, operating into the 1870s.

Downstream from this mill, Kingsbury wrote, were another sawmill, still operating in 1892, and a grist mill with a stone bottom story (these were the mills the Masse family acquired); and farther downstream, “but within East Vassalboro,” another grist mill.

The East Vassalboro Grist and Saw mill, a/k/a the Masse mill, was owned by Herman Masse when it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in January 1982. The Maine State Historic Preservation Commission’s October 1980 application was prepared by historian Frank A. Beard and architectural historian Robert L. Bradley.

They wrote, “The East Vassalboro Grist and Saw mill may well be the oldest mill site in Maine continuously operating in its original buildings and still using water power exclusively for the generation of energy.”

The property consisted of two buildings on either side of a dam across Outlet Stream, on the east side of Route 32 toward the north end of East Vassalboro. Outlet Stream runs generally north-south; but just upstream of the Masse dam site it turns sharp left (west), so it runs briefly from east to west. Masse’s two mills were on the north and south banks, the grist mill on the north and the sawmill on the south.

The application provided historical information, most taken from Herman Masse’s 1977 history. Additionally, Stephen Robbins shared with your writer a history of the mill as described by his cousin, Donald Robbins, in a 2015 presentation to the Vassalboro Historical Society.

Donald Robbins said that in 1797, John Getchell deeded half the water rights and 1.5 acres of land to Nathan Breed for a sawmill. Herman Masse added that Getchell reserved the right to build a grist mill and specified that his mill would have preference over Breed’s mill for water rights.

The Historic Preservation application credits Getchell with building the sawmill in 1798, “about 300 yards above its present location,” or, Masse wrote, about where the East Vassalboro Grange Hall now stands. It was described as a story and a half post and beam building, with a gable roof and attached sheds on the east and north.

Both sources say Jabez Dow built the grist mill, in or maybe after 1805. Beard and Bradley wrote that the sawmill was moved to face it across the stream.

The grist mill was also post and beam, story and a half, gable roofed, with one attached shed. The state historians wrote: “The most distinctive feature of the grist mill is its cut granite foundation walls which on the rear (west side) of the building are exposed and fitted with a door and four windows.”

The grist mill was “owned by retired ship captains” – Herman Masse’s history said several from Nantucket moved to Vassalboro in 1827 — and “operated, but not owned” by Zachariah Butterfield after 1812. Jacob Butterfield ran the sawmill, and handed it down to his son, Henry Rice Butterfield. The state preservationists could not determine how these two Butterfields were related to Zachariah.

In her 1971 Vassalboro history, Alma Pierce Robbins listed a dozen Nantucketers, most of them Quakers, who settled in Vassalboro. They came, she explained, because they knew the area from trips to the Kennebec to buy lumber to build their houses on Nantucket. Some planned to continue “shipping and shipbuilding” on the river; others were ready to try farming.

The Vassalboro Woolen Company bought both these mills and all water rights in 1872 “in order to control the flowage.” Warren Seward or Seaward leased the sawmill from 1872 to 1890.

The 1879 map of the village, reproduced as part of Donald Robbins’ presentation, shows a large mill pond along the east side of East Vassalboro, behind the houses lining Main Street.

In 1890, Robbins said, Seward bought his mill and half the water rights from Vassalboro Woolen, and Josiah Evans bought the grist mill and the other half of the water rights. After arguing over who should contribute what to dam maintenance, in 1912 they both sold to Louis Masse. From Louis Masse the properties went to his son Herman in the 1920s and then to Herman’s son Kenneth.

In the 1920s, Herman Masse wrote, lumbermen dumped logs into China Lake, where they were gathered inside a chain boom and towed to the Outlet Dam and thence into the mill pond on their way to the mill. It took about two days to bring a boom from South China to East Vassalboro, he said.

After describing some of the 20th-century improvements and updates the Masses made, Donald Robbins’ presentation ends, sadly, with photos from 2010, 2011 and 2015 showing crumbling stone, rotting wood and other deterioration. He mentioned a granite wall that partly collapsed in 2009-2010, damaging a water company pipe, and a floor that rotted out and fell into Outlet Stream in 2015.

In 2016 the buildings and the dam were removed as part of the program to restore alewives to China Lake, and also to protect the water company (see the article by Landis Hudson of American Rivers in the July 14, 2016, issue of The Town Line, available on line).

* * * * * *

Stephen Robbins directed your writer to an on-line copy of the 1869 water sites report, which describes 13 dams and dam sites for the lower part of Outlet Stream, from East Vassalboro through Winslow to the Sebasticook River.

Information was based on a report by Ira E. Getchell, Esquire, of Winslow, and “the Statement of the Selectmen.” Since the dams are listed under Vassalboro, though some are in Winslow, your writer assumes the Vassalboro selectmen made the statement.

Lombard dam

The first dam was 120 rods (one rod is 1/320 of a mile, so 120 rods is a bit over a third of a mile) below Outlet Dam, owned by Vassalboro Mills Company and powering a woollen (the report’s spelling) and grist mill “when in operation.” H. R. Butterfield was using surplus water for a sawmill and “shovel handle factory.” He apparently inherited the latter, at least, from his father, because the 1850 census copied in Alma Robbins’ Vassalboro history lists Jacob Butterfield as a maker of shovel handles.

(When Alma Robbins wrote, “In 1833 the shovel handle factory burned,” she must have been referring to an earlier shovel handle factory; where it was, she gave no clue.)

Dam number two, another 120 rods downstream, powered Butterfield’s grist mill. (This was probably what was in the 21st century the Morneau dam, or a predecessor nearby.)

Number three, 200 rods (a little over 0.6 miles) downstream, powered a “shingle mill, wood and iron machine shop” owned by Charles Davies. (Probably the Lombard dam.)

The Ladd Dam in North Vassalboro. (Photo by Roland D. Hallee)

The fourth dam site, immediately below the Davies’ dam, was undeveloped.

Another 440 rods (more than a mile and third) downstream were the dam and canal where the Vassalboro Mills Company made woolen goods and had a wood and iron machine shop and other facilities. This dam, in North Vassalboro, seems to have generated the most power of any on Outlet Stream.

(The history of the North Vassalboro mills is too long to compress into this week’s remaining space. Please see next week’s issue.)

Number six on the 1869 list was “an unoccupied stone dam” beside the canal. (Modern names for North Vassalboro’s dams were Box Mills and Ladd.)

The dams along this stretch of stream were untypical, in that they survived – not all intact and functioning, but visible and with names – into the 21st century.

Box Mill Dam.

In the last decade, the Masse, Morneau and Lombard dams have been removed. At Box Mills, Ladd and Outlet dams, fish ladders have been installed to allow migratory fish to reach China Lake from the Atlantic Ocean, via the Kennebec and Sebasticook rivers.

Main sources

Beard, Frank A., and Robert L. Bradley, National Register of Historic Places Inventory – Nomination Form, East Vassalboro Grist and Saw Mill (October 1980).
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Masse, Herman C., History of the old water power grist and saw mill at East Vassalboro, Maine, 1797-1971 : owned and operated by the Masse family since 1912 (1977).
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971).
Robbins, Stephen, Personal correspondence.

Websites, miscellaneous.

* * * * * *

CORRECTION

In the November 23, 2023, issue, Kennebec Valley History, on page 10, in the third column, sixth paragraph, it should have read: “Robbins dates the mill complex to 1797.”

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Louis Masse

November 21, 2023/0 Comments/in China, Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley, Vassalboro/by Mary Grow

The Masse Sawmill site on Rte. 32, in East Vassalboro. (contributed photo)

by Mary Grow

When Louis Masse’s name appeared in last week’s article on the Starrett family of China, knowledgeable Vassalboro residents might have been surprised. They thought he was theirs, founder of the family that owned and ran the Masse mill on the Masse dam, in East Vassalboro.

Same man. First he lived and worked in China, building barns and houses and a water company; then he moved to East Vassalboro.

The Find a Grave website and a genealogy Vassalboro Historical Society president Jan Clowes shared both say Louis Zephirin Masse was born Feb. 18, 1876, in Becancour, Québec. The genealogy adds that his parents were born there, too, and he was baptized there on Feb. 20, 1876. Becancour is a town on the south bank of the St. Lawrence River, about halfway between Montreal and Québec City.

(The 1940 census says he was born in Maine. Masse most likely gave that information to the census-taker himself, in a face-to-face interview.)

In reply to an inquiry from Clowes, Stephen Robbins (Louis Masse’s great-grandson) shared and added to a high-school essay written by Masse’s granddaughter, Marion, in 1950. According to these two Masses, Louis, known as ‘Phirin, began working very young, cooking in a logging camp when he was 11 and taking jobs with neighboring farmers and maple sugar producers and in a cheese factory. One summer, he drove a neighbor’s cattle a mile to and from their pasture daily – “for two cents a week.”

Masse got some basic education as a child, Robbins wrote. It was in French, of course; when he moved to the United States, learning English was his first challenge.

Louis Masse followed his half-brothers south across the border when he was 16, Marion Masse said. He joined one half-brother in a mill in Vermont (probably in Newport, Vermont, on the Canadian border, Robbins added), and then another in Fairfield, Maine, where he worked in Totman’s and Nye’s mills.

After the mills burned (they burned several times; this reference is probably to the Aug. 21, 1895, fire described in the Fairfield bicentennial history), Marion Masse wrote that her grandfather went to a mill in Coopers Mills, in the town of Whitefield. By now, Robbins said he was calling himself Louis, not Zephirin.

Soon Van Renssalaer “Rance” Turner hired him to work on his farm on Turner Ridge, in Palermo, and encouraged him to get an education. When he was 19 or 20, Louis started school in Palermo, with much younger local children as classmates.

In the spring of 1897 he entered Erskine Academy, in South China, as a freshman. Within six months, he was in the senior class.

For part of his time at Erskine, Masse boarded with Samuel Starrett, thus meeting Samuel’s daughter, Edith Emily Starrett (niece of Laroy Sunderland Starrett; born Jan. 29, 1880, according to Robbins and Find a Grave, or Jan. 30, 1881, according to an on-line article). The China history describes her as “a lovely young lady of eighteen.”

Masse became a United States citizen on Dec. 31, 1897, and he and Edith were married July 16, 1898. Masse worked as a carpenter in China and Windsor, the China history says.

Robbins wrote that the Masses lived with Edith’s family for a while. In 1903, Louis built the first home for his family, on Windsor Road not far from the Starretts.

The 1940 census says Edith, like her husband, had four years of high school. An on-line article based on her diaries says she taught at Erskine before she met her husband, but gives no dates.

The Vassalboro Historical Society’s on-line collection has a photograph of a China cabinet, or hutch, Masse built. It has two sections, the bottom with vertically-paneled solid doors and the top with three shelves visible behind the glass doors.

The description says it is seven and a half feet tall, a little over four feet wide and 22 inches deep. On it, Masse wrote: “Married July 16, 1898, Made August 11, 1898.”

In 1905 Masse bought the sawmill (which dated from the early 1800s) on the West Branch of the Sheepscot River, in Weeks Mills. In 1907, according to Robbins, he built his family’s second home, in Weeks Mills village.

In September 1916, Masse organized what became the Weeks Mills Water Company, the only village water system in the Town of China.

Masse’s main goal, the China history says, was to improve fire protection (the village had had major fires in 1901 and 1904). He started “by pumping water from the river to about twenty subscribers, each of whom paid $50 to join the system and was responsible for digging from the central water main to his own house; there were also three hydrants in the village.”

The river water wasn’t satisfactory, so Masse “dug out and lined with cement a spring on the east side of the village,” whence water was pumped to a hilltop reservoir and flowed downhill to subscribers. A windmill was the first power source, succeeded by gasoline and then electric pumps.

When the China history was published in 1975, the company had “about fifteen customers, whose bills are based on the number of faucets in the house.”

Weeks Mills Water System is listed on the Maine state government’s Sept. 1, 2023, list of public water systems in China. It is described as a community system, with water coming from a 12-foot spring that produces 25 gallons per minute.

After the Masses moved to Vassalboro, the China history says, he continued area construction projects. Several sources credit him as head builder of China’s first consolidated elementary school. The five-classroom building on Lakeview Drive opened in early 1949 and is still part of China Middle School.

Masse bought an existing mill in East Vassalboro in 1912, according to Robbins (the on-line diary-based article says 1914), to expand his lumber business. Robbins wrote that he paid Warren Seaward $1,800 for it, and his family soon moved to the third house he built for them, on the west side of Route 32 across from the mill complex.

According to Henry Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history, the Masse mill was the second one on Outlet Stream in East Vassalboro village. There were two mill buildings, he wrote, a sawmill, still operating in 1892, and a grist mill with a stone bottom story.

Robbins dates this mill complex to 1797. He wrote that after buying the sawmill, Masse bought the grist mill across the stream, thus acquiring full “water rights and dam privileges.”

Robbins wrote that Masse “built a new dam” and replaced old-fashioned machinery. He started with eight men, Robbins said, paying them $10 a week apiece. In Weeks Mills, he worked alongside his crew when an extra hand was needed; whether he did the same in East Vassalboro, Robbins did not say.

Masse founded the East Vassalboro Water Company in 1914. Robbins wrote that it started with eight customers; installing lines to serve their houses took only four months. By 1950, the company served 55 houses.

An on-line source says in the 21st century, the company owns over 13 acres in three lots; its properties include springs and a 650-foot well.

Another source of information about Louis Masse is Alma Pierce Robbins’ 1971 history of Vassalboro’s first 200 years. One of the people she thanked in her introduction was “my grandnephew, the sixth generations of the Robbins family, Stephen Robbins.”

Alma Robbins traced the Robbins family history back through Stephen’s father, Gerald (see below), Maurice, Ira James and Heman, Jr., to Heman, Sr., the first Robbins in Vassalboro. An on-line genealogy says Heman Robbins Sr., was born in 1735 or 1736 in Harwich, Massachusetts, and died about 1817 in Vassalboro.

Alma Robbins’ first mention of Louis Masse in her Vassalboro history is in 1916, when he “installed hydrants and water mains at East Vassalboro.” In 1935, she said, he added seven more hydrants.

The on-line family history says the China Lake outlet dam was built in the 1930s. “Louis Z. directed the project and the W.P.A. [federal Works Progress Administration] provided six workmen.”

In 1940, the census-taker recorded that Masse was 64 years old, still working as a millwright, putting in 26 weeks in 1940. He shared a home in East Vassalboro with his wife, Edith S., aged 60.

Masse sold the water system in October 1943 to his son Herman, from whom it passed to his grandson, Kenneth Masse. Currently, Donald Robbins is listed on line as co-owner and designated operator, and the company is described as an investor-owned public water utility.

Stephen Robbins told your writer that Donald is his first cousin, son of his father’s brother Wallace.

Louis Masse died Nov. 14, 1959, in Waterville, and Edith died Sept. 17, 1960, also in Waterville. Both are buried in Chadwick Hill cemetery, on Windsor Road, in China.

Louis and Edith had three children Their son, Herman Charles, was born in China Oct. 29, 1904, according to an obituary found in on-line Masonic records. Herman Masse ran Masse Lumber Company in East Vassalboro from 1927 to 1969, and the East Vassalboro water system from 1950 to 1982. He died Feb. 2, 1990.

Louis and Edith’s younger daughter, Agnes Masse Plummer, died in 1989.

Their older daughter, Malvena Pearl Masse, was born July 8, 1899, in South China; graduated from Oak Grove Academy, Class of 1917; and died March 3, 1993, in Vassalboro. On Oct. 15, 1921, she married Maurice Smiley Robbins, who was born in Vassalboro Aug. 22, 1893, and died in Waterville Feb. 6, 1970.

Malvena and Maurice Robbins had three sons and a daughter between 1922 and 1932. Their second son, Gerald Laroy Robbins (Stephen Robbins’ father), was by your writer’s calculation, the great grand-nephew of inventor Laroy Sunderland Starrett, whose work was summarized in the Nov. 2 issue of The Town Line. (Stephen Robbins calls him “2nd-great-nephew”). Gerald’s grandmother was Starrett’s niece, Edith Emily (Starrett) Masse.

Gerald Laroy Robbins was born in Waterville Oct. 13, 1925. He interrupted his high schooling to join the Navy in 1944 and came home to earn a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Maine at Orono in 1951.

After a brief stint in New York, Robbins came back to Maine and took a job with Keyes Fibre, in Waterville (the company founded by Martin Keyes, profiled in the Nov. 9 issue of The Town Line).

According to his obituary, he worked at Keyes for 34 years, until he retired in 1988. He died June 5, 2013. The obituary says, “While at Keyes Fibre, he developed a number of improvements for the company’s production machinery and products, and earned two U.S. patents for his designs.”

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).
Robbins, Alma Pierce, History of Vassalborough Maine 1771 1971 n.d. (1971).
Robbins, Stephen correspondence.

Websites, miscellaneous.

CORRECTION: This article previously said the mill complex was dated to 1897. It should have said instead 1797. This has been corrected. We apologize for the error.

Up and down the Kennebec Valley: Starrett family of China

November 15, 2023/0 Comments/in China, Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley/by Mary Grow

There are 20 Starretts and three women whose maiden name was Starrett buried in Chadwick Cemetery, in China.

by Mary Grow

Two weeks ago, this series featured China-born inventor Laroy Sunderland Starrett. As suggested in that story, he was a member of a large family with generations of China connections.

This article will provide information about Laroy Starrett’s family. A warning to readers: there is a fair amount of genealogy, which your writer realizes some people find uninteresting, and a fair amount of contradiction and frustration. The latter are due to lack of information, or at least available and consistent information, about long-dead people who were mostly just ordinary, though of great importance to their families and friends.

Your writer found three sources that should be accurate: a genealogy (spelling Laroy’s name Leroy) included in the China bicentennial history, an on-line transcript of information from the Starrett family Bible and copies of gravestone inscriptions. They do not always agree.

In addition to consistent records, your writer would like more personal information. What did Laroy think of his South China relatives, and vice versa? Did his Massachusetts-born children spend time with their Maine grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins? How did so many 19th-century Starretts get from China to Illinois?

* * * * * *

According to the genealogy in the China history, Abner Starrett and his family were the first Starretts in China.

Abner was born September 28, 1776, in Francestown, New Hampshire. Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history says his father’s name was William, and his grandfather was Hugh Starrett, “who came from Scotland to Dedham.” (Your writer assumes Dedham, Massachusetts. She did not find a Dedham in New Hampshire; Dedham, Maine, was settled in 1810 and incorporated in 1837.)

On September 22, 1800, Abner Starrett married Elizabeth Dane (born in New Hampshire Jan. 23, 1779, the Starrett family Bible transcript says, or July 21, 1779, according to China cemetery records). The couple had four sons and three daughters, born between October 1801 and December 1813. They moved to China in 1814 (Kingsbury’s date).

Abner, Elizabeth and children settled in the area called Chadwick’s Corner on what is now Route 32 South (Windsor Road). Chadwick’s Corner was named for Ichabod Chadwick, who was there by 1797.

Abner Starrett died in China on Aug. 14, 1819, when he was 43 years old. His widow lived until July 21, 1865. Abner and Elizabeth are the earliest of 23 family members buried in Chadwick Hill cemetery, 20 Starretts and three women whose maiden name was Starrett.

* * * * * *

Abner and Elizabeth’s children were the second generation of Starretts in China, born in the first two decades of the 1800s. The four sons were another Abner (your writer will imitate some, but not all, sources and call him Abner, Jr.), Daniel Dane (Laroy’s father), William and David. All four sons married; at least had three large families, many of whom stayed in China.

Abner, Jr., was born Aug. 14 or Oct. 14, 1801 (the genealogy and the Bible record differ). On Sept. 4, 1823, in China, he married Mary C. Weeks (born March 24, 1802). Mary’s parents – his in-laws – were Abner and Lydia (Clark) Weeks.

Jonathan Clark, Jr., one of the brothers who first settled around China Lake in 1775, and his wife Susanna had a daughter named Lydia (Nov. 4, 1769 – April 8, 1853). An on-line genealogy says Lydia Clark married Abner Weeks (1766 -1846) and had by him two children, Mary Clark Weeks (1802-1889) and Solomon Weeks (1810-1824).

In other words, Abner, Jr., connected himself by marriage to China’s founding family.

Abner, Jr., and Mary had nine daughters and two sons, including two more Marys, Mary Emily and Mary Ann; another Elizabeth; and another Abner. These were the elders of the third generation, born between the 1820s and 1860s; they were Laroy Starrett’s first cousins.

The Bible transcription says Abner, Jr., died in June 1857.

* * * * * *

The first Abner’s second son, Laroy Starrett’s father, was Daniel Dane Starrett, born Nov. 25, 1802 (genealogy) or Feb. 9, 1803 (China cemetery records). On Sept. 25, 1825, he married Anna Crummett or Crummet, born to Joshua and Sarah Crummet(t) of China on Jan. 27 (genealogy) or March 3 (China cemetery records), 1803.

The Starrett genealogy says Daniel and Anna had five sons and seven daughters between Dec. 17, 1826, and Dec. 27, 1848. The Find a Grave website lists only six children, three sons and three daughters. Both include Laroy, born in 1836.

The genealogy says four daughters married men from China and two married men from neighboring Vassalboro. One died before her second birthday.

According to the genealogy and the China history, the only son who definitely remained in China was Laroy’s younger brother, Samuel C. Starrett. Born April 30, 1844, he served in the Civil War and came home to marry Charles Mosher’s daughter, Emily, on Feb. 26, 1869.

Samuel and Emily had five sons and two daughters, the genealogy says. They named their youngest son, born in 1887, Leroy S., presumably after his uncle.

Samuel served as a China selectman from March 1876 to March 1878 and again from March 1881 to March 1883. (His father, Daniel, had been a selectman in 1840.) In 1882 and 1883 he was among the founders of Erskine Academy, South China’s private high school near Chadwick’s Corner, and served as the school’s first treasurer.

Kingsbury wrote that Samuel Starrett was the second commander of South China’s James P. Jones G.A.R. (Grand Army of the Republic) Post, organized in April 1884. In the summer of 1885, he helped organize the South China lodge of the Ancient Order of United Workmen, serving as its first “master workman.”

In April 1890, Samuel and Daniel Starrett were among seven men – two others were Chadwicks –the China history lists as founders of the Chadwick Hill cemetery association, created to care for the cemetery. The only Daniel in the genealogy is Laroy and Samuel’s father, Daniel Dane; in 1890, he would have been in his late 80s.

About 1900, the China history says, Samuel Starrett and Louis Masse built “a store with an apartment above it” on the north side of South China’s Main Street (then the Augusta to Belfast highway), near the church. The first man to live in the apartment and run the store was Samuel and Emily’s son, George (Laroy’s nephew), born Jan. 7, 1882.

According to the genealogy (but not to any other source your writer could find), Laroy and Samuel’s youngest sister, Mary (born in China Dec. 27, 1848), was a doctor, who married another doctor, Dr. Horace W. Sibley, of Vassalboro, on Jan. 27, 1870. (See box.)

Laroy’s mother, Anna, died March 3, 1875, the genealogy says. Daniel died Feb. 9, 1896, aged 93 (genealogy) or February 1897, aged 94 (Bible).

By March 1875, Laroy’s meat chopper had become popular. He was either still in Newburyport, or had moved to Athol, where his wife Lydia died in February 1878, leaving him with a teen-age son and three younger daughters.

Laroy founded L. S. Starrett in 1880; various sources say the company expanded quickly. By the time his father died in the 1890s, Laroy must have been fairly well-known as a Massachusetts businessman.

The genealogy in the China history says four of Samuel’s sons (Laroy’s nephews) moved to Athol to work in the factory. Ernest (born Nov. 30, 1876) spent more than 50 years there before coming back to South China, where he and his wife Aurie (Austin) lived in “the brick house” until their deaths in the 1960s.

* * * * * *

The first Abner’s third son was named William. The printed genealogy and the China cemetery records agree on William’s dates (Sept. 28, 1804 – March 29, 1841) and his wife’s name and dates (Mary Ann Calder, March 20, 1805 – Dec. 21, 1890).

The Bible record says William died April 29, 1841. An on-line genealogy gives his wife’s name as Mary Ann Thurlow and says they married on April 21, 1827. This source says they had at least three sons and a daughter – more of Laroy’s cousins.

* * * * * *

After William, Abner and Elizabeth had three daughters, Elizabeth (June 6, 1807), Lucinda (Jan. 28, 1809) and Sarah (Aug. 28, 1810). Elizabeth married a South China Chadwick; Lucinda married Thomas Giddings, almost certainly from Weeks Mills village in China; and Sarah married Edward Emerson, whom your writer has been unable to trace.

* * * * * *

Abner and Elizabeth’s fourth son, David (born Dec. 1, 1813), married on Sept. 23, 1838, Sarah D. Chadwick (born Aug. 6, 1820). David and Sarah had seven sons, born between 1840 and 1864 – more (younger) cousins for Laroy.

According to the genealogy, the oldest boy, born July 16, 1840, was named David. The Find a Grave website calls him Pvt. David Chadwick Starrett and says in the Civil War he served as a private in the 67th Illinois Volunteer Infantry.

An on-line genealogy calls him Pvt. David Chedwick Starrett. He lived in Orono in 1850 and Alna in 1860, this source says, citing census figures; he “registered for military service in 1862.”

This genealogy does not say where he was in 1862. Its earliest mention of Chicago is his marriage there, on Oct. 24, 1895 (when he was 55); and it says he died and is buried in Chicago.

David and Sarah’s second son died when he was 14, in November 1861. The next boy, Edwin Burnham Starrett, lived to be 90, residing in Massachusetts, Missouri and Wisconsin and dying in Elgin, Illinois.

Son number four, Adrian Frank Starrett, born in 1851, married a girl from Vassalboro, and lived for a while in Alna, but he, too, went to Chicago, where he died May 29, 1931.

David and Sarah’s next two children both died before their second birthdays. Moody Thurston Starrett was born in the fall of 1856 and died in the summer of 1858 (exact dates differ). His sibling, born in April 1860 and died in June 1861, was either a son named Winfield Scott Starrett (genealogy) or a daughter named Winnie Starrett (China cemetery records).

The youngest son, Dr. Carlton Elmer Starrett, was born May 15, 1864, in Alna, and died May 1, 1908, in Chicago. His gravestone in Bluff City cemetery in Elgin, Illinois, says he was a major and a surgeon in the Illinois National Guard’s Third Infantry and was a veteran of the Spanish-American War (1898).

Back to Laroy’s uncle and aunt, David and Sarah Starrett: the China bicentennial history uses them to show how bad China roads were in the 1830s. The history cites town records reporting a July 8, 1834, meeting at which voters recommended giving the couple $125 “for damages by them sustained in consequence of a bridge being out of repair (as they say).”

The vote needed endorsement by the spring 1835 town meeting. On March 23, 1835, voters created a committee to review and settle the Starretts’ claim. The history says town records do not include the outcome.

Attentive readers will have noted that the China history dates this episode about four years before the genealogy in the same book says David and Sarah got married. Your writer can offer no explanation.

The on-line genealogy says David (and presumably Sarah) lived in Alna for about 10 years and in Chicago for about 20 years; another on-line source says Sarah was in Illinois in 1900.

Sarah Chadwick Starrett died Aug. 25, 1903, and David Starrett died either Jan. 13 or Aug. 13, 1907, both by then back in Maine, according to on-line sources. They are among the family members buried in Chadwick Hill cemetery.

The Wall Cemetery

Speaking of the frustrations of limited research:

A long Sibley genealogy found on line says Horace W. Sibley (perhaps Laroy Starrett’s brother-in-law) was born in Augusta in 1845, son of William H. Sibley (Oct. 29, 1818 – Dec. 8, 1901) and his first wife, Judith W. Lowell (Sept. 5, 1809 – Sept. 1, 1878). It says nothing about Horace’s wife.

The genealogy lists William as a farmer in Vassalboro in 1850 and an Albion resident in 1860. It says he and Judith are buried in the Wall cemetery, in Vassalboro.

The comprehensive section on cemeteries on the Vassalboro website does not list a Wall cemetery.

In the Wall cemetery on the west side of Riverside Drive, in Augusta, about three miles south of the Augusta-Vassalboro line, Find a Grave lists seven Sibleys, including William (1815 – Dec. 8, 1901) and Judith Lowell (1811 – Sept. 1, 1878), but no Horace.

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: Inventors – Part 3

November 8, 2023/0 Comments/in Central ME, Fairfield, Local History, Up and Down the Kennebec Valley, Waterville/by Mary Grow

by Mary Grow

Martin Keyes

Here is Earl H. Smith’s introduction to Martin Keyes in Smith’s Downeast Genius, beginning with a comparison to the inventor profiled in this series two weeks ago.

“Like Alvin Lombard, Martin Keyes (1850–1914) was blessed with an inquisitive and clever mind, but unlike his burly tractor-making neighbor, Keyes was a diminutive and fastidious man. He kept a diary every day, and it was his thorough way that led him to claim an invention that established one of Maine’s most successful international industries.”

Keyes’ profile in the Paper Industry International Hall of Fame, in Appleton, Wisconsin, says he was born Feb. 19, 1850, in Lempster, New Hampshire. Smith wrote that he first worked in his father’s sawmill, then established his own business making “sleighs and carriages.”

The Hall of Fame and other sites credit young Keyes with designing a furniture line (called “exquisite”) and “a new type of fishing reel” that he used the rest of his life. An on-line site says he kept a pad and pencil by his bed in case he thought of an invention during the night.

Smith and the Hall of Fame disagree on where Keyes got the inspiration for his major invention, and neither provides a date. Smith wrote that while working at “a veneer mill in upstate New York,” he saw workmen eating lunches off thin scraps of veneer and came up with the idea of making disposable plates out of molded pulp.

His first efforts using veneer failed, Smith wrote. Later, Keyes became superintendent at Indurated Fiber Company, in North Gorham, Maine; it was there, the Hall of Fame writer said, that he got the idea of making the plates from molded pulp.

Both sources agree he began figuring out how to manufacture his disposable plates at Indurated, “with the support of his employer,” Smith added. After “several years of experimenting,” he designed a machine that would make the plates.

The section on the Keyes Fibre Company in the Fairfield history offers a third version of the story. According to that writer, Keyes became Indurated’s superintendent in 1884, and the North Gorham company already made “tubs, pails, and small pressed pulp ware.” When the North Gorham mill burned, Keyes transferred to another Indurated facility in northern New York, which was where he saw workmen eating off veneer chips from nearby plants.

The former Keyes Fibre Co., in Waterville/Fairfield, now Huhtamaki.

Two historians again offer conflicting views of what happened when Keyes tried to patent his machine. In the version in the Fairfield history, a “large paper manufacturer in eastern New York” offered him $100,000 to build a machine to make plates from pulp.

In 1902, Smith said, Keyes had the first machine manufactured, at Portland Iron Works (in Gorham, he had worked with a man associated with the company). Smith described it: “With flailing arms that hissed and groaned as they rotated through a process of dipping, drying, ejecting, and packaging, the finished apparatus resembled the complicated contrivances of the cartoonist Rube Goldberg.” (See box.)

The Fairfield history say the upstate New York paper company “tried to claim the patent.” Smith’s version is that when Keyes applied for a patent, he learned that another worker had “stolen his idea” and already patented it.

The two versions reach the same conclusion: Keyes went to court and, after extended litigation, won. In Smith’s book and in an undated on-line history of the Keyes Fibre Company, written by the eminent local historian Dean C. Marriner, Keyes’ daily diary provided the evidence to convince a jury that he had done the work to design the machine and therefore earned the patent.

His next problem, the Fairfield historians wrote, was to find capital to start a factory. Eventually he connected with a Fairfield company, Lawrence, Newhall and Page, which ran lumber mills. This company had at Shawmut “one grinder installed already for the production of mechanical pulp.”

Keyes built “a small shack” on the side of the grinder building and built one experimental machine (Smith wrote that he rented space in the Shawmut plant). On Nov. 2, 1903, the Fairfield history says, the company he named Keyes Fibre started production, with that single machine.

The Hall of Fame writer said the first shipment of “pulp molded pie plates” went out in 1904 (other writers add that this sale led local residents to call the manufactory “the pie plate”).

Multiple sources credit a local man named Bert Williamson with helping Keyes get his plant up and running. Marriner wrote, “Williamson was at the inventor’s side when the first shipment of a carload of molded pulp pie plates, for the use of bakers, left the Shawmut plant on June 24, 1904.” Williamson remained with the company for two decades after Keyes’ death.

In 1905, the Fairfield history says, Keyes built “a small plant” with four machines. Smith wrote that early production was 50,000 plates daily, without explaining whether he was talking about one machine or four.

However, the Hall of Fame site says, Keyes’ plates were priced higher than competing products, described on-line as “stamped paper plates.” In early 1905, Keyes closed his plant for several months.

He acquired new investors, including his landlords, Lawrence, Newhall and Page, added more of his own money and reduced prices to restart production. After the April 18, 1906, San Franciso earthquake and fire, demand increased – one buyer ordered an entire carload of plates.

But then, Marriner wrote, Lawrence, Newhall and Page sold the pulp mill. The new owners let Smith continue to use their facility, but they sold within a year to another company not interested in wood products, forcing Keyes to relocate.

Keyes considered sites in Maine and elsewhere. Marriner said he and Williamson checked out possibilities in upstate New York over the 1907 Labor Day weekend, attending a parade in which many of the marchers were drunk.

Keyes, a Prohibitionist, reportedly said to Williamson, “Bert, you and I could never use that kind of labor.” (Smith located this incident in Portland, writing that when Keyes visited the city, “he was dismayed to find many drunken workers.”)

Keyes moved to Waterville, buying “a site immediately north of Lombard’s tractor factory” (per Smith) on the east side of what is now College Avenue.

Here he built what Marriner called “a modest brick building, which turned out its first plates on Sept. 20, 1908, and is still the nucleus of the giant plant that now stretches half a mile along the roadway,” partly in Waterville and partly in Fairfield. The plant, since 1999 owned by and called Huhtamaki, produces “a variety of pulp-molded products.”

Keyes died Nov. 18, 1914, in Fairfield. By that time, according to a Dec. 2, 1914, obituary in a New York weekly journal of the pulp and paper industry called simply Paper (found on line), Keyes Fibre could produce almost two million pie plates every 24 hours, providing an estimated “four-fifths of all the pie plates used in the United States and Canada.”

Your writer was unable to find personal information about Keyes except in the obituary. It recapped his career and said that survivors included his mother, Mrs. L. A. Gilmore, of Holyoke, Massachusetts; his widow, Jennie C. Keyes; two brothers, in Minnesota and New York; a sister in Holyoke; and a daughter, Mrs. George G. Averill.

Another source says Mrs. Averill’s first name was Mabel. Keyes’ son-in-law, Dr. George Goodwin Averill (1869 – 1954), took over the management of the company.

Keyes is recognized by Keyes Memorial Field (now Keyes Memorial Athletic Fields), on West Street, in Fairfield. The Fairfield history says his widow gave it to the town on Oct. 1, 1938.

* * * * * *

If Frank Bunker Gilbreth’s name sounds familiar, it might be because two of his 12 children, Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Jr., and Ernestine Moller (Gilbreth) Carey, wrote a “semi-autobiographical novel” titled Cheaper by the Dozen, published in 1948. Cheaper by the Dozen was made into a movie in 1950 and has been variously adapted since.

The real Frank Bunker Gilbreth was born July 7, 1868, in Fairfield. He was the son of John Hiram Gilbreth (born in Augusta in 1833, died in Fairfield in 1871) and Martha (Bunker) Gilbreth (born in Maine about 1834, died in Montclair, New Jersey, about 1920), and the brother of Mary Elizabeth Gilbreth, born in Fairfield in 1864 and died in Brookline, Massachusetts, Aug. 8, 1894.

His main claim as an inventor, in Smith’s view, was as an efficiency expert. An on-line site called him “The Father of Management Engineering.”

Gilbreth started, Smith wrote, by graduating from Boston English High School and declining to attend Massachusetts Institute of Technology in favor of becoming a bricklayer’s apprentice.

After 1895, Smith wrote, Gilbreth was “a self-employed general contractor” who built “mills, dams and power plants” in the United States and Europe. “Along the way, he invented a number of building tools and machines including a safety scaffold for bricklayers, conveyors, and an improved concrete mixer.”

Managing so many projects “led him to formulate the first cost-plus-fixed sum contract and to develop a number of systems to reduce waste, monitor work progress, and improve the productivity of his workers.”

In 1904, Gilbreth married a psychologist, Lillian Evelyn (Moller) Gilbreth (1878 – 1972). She worked with her husband on time and motion studies; the two “built a reputation as efficiency experts.”

Gilbreth died June 14, 1924, in Montclair, New Jersey. His body was cremated and the ashes scattered over the Atlantic.

A gravestone in Fairfield’s Maplewood cemetery has his and Lillian’s names and dates. His parents and sister are also buried there.

Rube Goldberg machine

The expression “Rube Goldberg machine” means a very complicated way of doing a simple task. It recognizes the inventiveness of cartoonist, engineer and movie-maker Reuben Garrett Lucius Goldberg.

Born in San Francisco July 4, 1883, Goldberg earned an engineering degree at University of California, Berkeley, Class of 1904. He began his career as a sports cartoonist in California and moved to New York City in 1907, where he earned fame as a cartoonist for various newspapers and other publications.

Goldberg and his wife, Irma Seeman (married in 1916) had two sons, Thomas and George (who both changed their last names to George). Goldberg died Dec. 7, 1970.

Goldberg’s cartoons won several awards, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1948. Wikipedia says he was one of the founders and the first president of the National Cartoonists Society (1946), whose annual award is named the Reuben Award.

On-line sites say the 2023 Reuben Award winner is Bill Griffith (full name William Henry Jackson Griffith), of New York City, best known as the creator of the “Zippy” comic strip.

Main sources

Fairfield Historical Society Fairfield, Maine 1788-1988 (1988).
Smith, Earl H., Downeast Genius: From Earmuffs to Motor Cars Maine Inventors Who Changed the World (2021).

Websites, miscellaneous.

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And Seven Mile Stream

Generations of Timothy and Ebenezer Healds

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Josiah Hayden Sr.

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Lombard log hauler exhibit locations

Tannery owner Jacob Southwick

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CORRECTION

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CORRECTION: This article previously said the mill complex was dated to 1897. It should have said instead 1797. This has been corrected. We apologize for the error.

The Wall Cemetery

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Rube Goldberg machine

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